I thought to share this folks.......Niamorkono.


 Science for the `Re-Africanization' of Africa
>
> Africa is perhaps the most culturally imaginative and creative region in
the world. It is extremely diversified, rich in talents and ingenuity with
unlimited resources and potential. It has colonized the planet and it
enriches humanity through inimitable arts. Yet, one African out of two lives
in dismal human conditions. And despite spectacular progress here and there,
it also remains profoundly socially and culturally conditioned, corrupted,
domesticated and debased by two self-inflicted intellectual and ritual
servitudes koranic and evangelical - and overwhelmingly regimented,
disciplined and deceived by a host of indigenous erroneous beliefs, faulty
dogmas, half-truths, intoxicating mythologies, life-denying superstitions,
theological entrappings, mystifying fictions, unknown foundational
assumptions, pipe-dreams, fantasies, charlatanisms, junk science and a flood
of nonsense. In this regard African policy-makers should recall the ideals
of the French Revolution: down with paternalistic, autocratic and despotic
kings and fear-mongering, deceitful and fraudulent merchant-priests.
Translated into this region at the present time - obscured and disfigured by
foreign metaphysical symbols - on top of the African agenda freedom
thinkers, lovers and fighters should put (1) `deprivatizing, defragmenting
and civilizing African states' and (2) `desacralizing, secularizing and
decolonizing African cultures', for a less totemic, more cosmopolitan,
non-Abrahamic, truly enlightened, scientifically-informed and much less
patriarchal self-determined and self-empowered post-colony, in search of the
superior genuine and purified meta-African, achieving the highest human
possibilities.
>
> Science, which should neither be demonized, idolized or worshiped, has
never been the forte of the spiritually contaminated African human animal
and can never be under current pre-modern overreligious knowledge systems,
particularly science as a way of thinking and as a method of evidence and
reasoning, that, if allowed to run free, would certainly transform the very
cultural underpinning and identity of the continent. The modernization of
these old-fashioned systems, as the backbones of any mode of modernity,
requires in priority the modernization of our mental and intellectual
costumes. This process is essentially the passage from closed,
self-confirming, faith-based, customary, totalizing or terrorizing knowledge
systems propagated by bigoted and barbarous ecclesiasts and mysterious
`witch-doctors' - to essentially liberal, falsifiable, facts-based,
scientifically-established, technically-proven and innovative knowledge
systems (not a single new god in the last 1000 years!!). In these
uninhibited systems scientific knowledge can be construed as a theory of the
real and as a technology of truth and understood as the epistemological
foundation of any form of Afro-modernity. It is also the passage from the
`Book of Scripture' to the `Book of Nature' and from the submission to the
white man's colonizing gods to the more authentic African stuffs.
>
> The key to an African revival or Renaissance is the breaking of the
reigning hegemonic order, basically regulated and sustained by Islam and
Christianity two medieval phallocratic backward solitudes and perverted
obscurantist establishments living in the secluded past, thriving on holy
lies, absurd fabrications, fears, mirages, delusions, false hopes and
subservient obedience and, genealogically, on the non-African narcotics,
values and moralities of ancient middle Eastern `slave' mindsets and
worldviews.
>
> Historically, science has proven to be too toxic, troubling, unsettling or
destructive for a region whose knowledge systems are plagued with spirituo-,
mystico-, magico-, abrahamo-, euro- and phallo-centricity, that excessively
seeks comfort in historical debris, bogus revelations, pseudo prophecies,
imaginary deities, ancestors' spirits, phony limbos, made-up angels,
mind-boggling miracles, wonderful heavens, amazing demons, implausible
resurrections and other strange and unconscious chimeras, taboos and biases,
providing ample material for Freudian theses. It is a region that fell prey
to a gigantic fraud and misfortune and that babbles abusively in the
invention of hypothetic other-worlds and after-lives, which confines the
minds, poisons or vampirizes life, drags Africans outside nature and denies
or weakens this worldly existence. It also wears down the natural self,
consumes time and precious resources, drains valuable energies, devalues the
body, camouflages the discovery of the earth, lessens control over natural
environments and erects interreligious barriers, which split communities and
undermines Pan-African solidarity. Uncovering an original Afro-modernity,
distinct from the North-Atlantic style, requires liberating and supporting
the few progressive, autonomous, scientific, secular and free thinkers on
the continent, which entails unashamedly blaspheming in every meeting, on
every wall, on every CoP, network and blogging site, with an unorthodox
radical neo-narrative.
>
> Science in Africa has to become defiantly offensive and utterly heretical
and sacrilegious to be effective and win over the two great non-African
pathetic phallocracies that deplete the African spirit and vitality and
dampen African innovation, as the current state of a self-alienated region
amply demonstrates. Muslim and Christian cosmic visions and phantasms,
masquerading as divine revelations, are not helpful and absolutely not
needed in Africa, as the degree of human development of Finland, Japan and
Singapore, for example, abundantly demonstrates, for they constitute
insidious obstacles to cognitive development and to the emergence of
scientific ways of constructing and ordering realities. These anachronistic
vestigial phallocracies, oppressive machineries of churches and mosques and
institutionalized captive systems of mental cruelty, where escape is nearly
impossible or statistically insignificant, flourishing on selling the
shameless notion of personal immortality, impact sublimely and negatively on
all aspects of African life, including in unsuspected places, such as in
agriculture where repeated long periods of fasting, numerous religious
holidays, prayers for rain, faith in providence, belief in humans as
supernatural beings, women's banned inheritance and ownership of land, fear
of ungodly bio-engineering, dismissal of scientific facts and rejection of
common-sense truths, etc. are contributing to hunger, poverty and
underdevelopment. They also impact positively in many respects as they fill
a basic human need and provide some soothing intelligibility to a
fundamentally incomprehensible tragic world.
>
> Part of the solution, in addition to economics and politics, for going
beyond the trivial, superficial realities, entrenched mental habits,
close-mindedness, demagogueries, populist pomposity, stubborn views, narrow
provincialism, conventional system of thought, confounding appearances,
mythical taming canons, self-deceptions, self-flagellation, wishful
thinking, intellectual torpor, inflationary rhetoric, circular or
tautological arguments, feel-good meetings and ceremonial entertainment, is
to become compassionately disrespectful of long-established authorities,
roll Imperial-Doctrinaire-Contemptuous Islam and
Hebraic-Pauline-Constantinian-Roman Christianity out of Africa two
proselytizing religions of decadence - and battle magical witchcraft and
mystical shamanism, which would open the way to superior insight,
understanding and awareness and to a distinctive version of Afro-modernity,
honoring unbelievers and infidels. This paradigmatic shift toward modern
ways of knowing and acting requires championing the scientific method, the
rule of technique and innovation as well as promoting decisive scientific
arbitrations, increased technical mediations and a redefinition of STI's
relationships with religious, cultural, social and economic life. For this
shift to occur there is a need to better appreciate modern science, not as a
Christian crime, but as a method of both calculative and subversive thinking
and as a means of achieving the systematic unmasking and renovation of
conventional / medieval / pre-modern realities. This call for
re-cosmologizing, re-mythologizing, `re-prophetizing', re-charlatanizing and
re-directing the evolution of a mutilated empirical reality toward a truly
`African' future, emancipated from the sacred relics of a convoluted
history.
>
> African science policy makers have to design sustainable visions,
strategies and policies to let the scientific spirit out of the bottle,
fight medievalism, drive a new relationship between Africa and the emerging
modern cosmos, forge a new engagement with the naked world, de-technocratize
the mostly empty development discourse in science and practice the science
of the `hammer'.
>
> Jacques L Hamel
> Scientific Affairs Officer
> UNECA
> Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jacqueshamel
> [log in to unmask]
>

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