Becoming Victims of a Single Fictional Narrative (part 2)

Ethiopians as well as other African countries have numerous genuine but untold stories of the past that emanate from their historical roots and values - rich cultures, different languages, vast local wisdoms, close upbringings and unity, pride in their black color, great flavors, the fertile lands and other natural resources. These are great blessings to us and are very proud of them. Well, we cannot finish retelling them here in this short article. But these stories were not properly passed on to the generations in their original forms. Not because they were vast, but because they were meant to tie Africans with one another and become difficult to exploit their resources by westerners if presented in a genuine way.

So sad that these stories were untold to the present youth in their upbringing as children (at least in their original versions) that all conflicts we are seeing now became the results of them. These youth (I'm referring to) comprises 70% of the current African population with the age limit between 20-35. They were deliberately made alien to these genuine stories of the past. Yet, nobody seems to read or believe the ones written or retold by the true story tellers –our forefathers and African historians. The political pundits, who in one way or the other, benefited from the westerners, gave these true local story-tellers negative names, which were later became outcast from the entire historical and cultural dialogue.

To this day, rather than seeing the many diversities of culture, language, food, environments, clothes, colors as beauties & flavors that surround our big nations (Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, etc.), the demagogue (who’re the puppets of the foreign forces and whose intention is to dismantle this beautiful historic continent) disseminated western distorted version of history to us. Gradually, African history becomes blurred and the youth were obliged to learn the fake one. They started teaching the youth that they don’t belong to the other half of their population because they were told that the other half came to exploit their resources from their birthplace. Instead of appreciating the other half of them, they started seeing them as enemies who came to loot and oppress.

To this end, the propagators of this bare lie have been telling the present youth that all belong in their respective races/tribes, and that they will be safer if they are surrounded by sameness. This is because the westerners understand how collective sentiments work to divide the youth easily and rule them for as long as they like.

As a result, multiplicity or variety in any form was no more tolerated anywhere by the youth, just as their teachers - the demagogues. For instance, in our country you would sound odd by the youth if you say, ‘I am Oromo and Ethiopian’, or I’m Amhara or Tigre and Ethiopian at the same time. Just as one could say, ‘I am both Mombasan and Kenyan’, or ‘I am Hutu and Rwandan’ or’ I’m Tutsi and Rwandan’. But you can hear without any surprises when someone says ‘I’m Bostonian and American’, or ‘I’m a Londoner and British’.

The African youth has learned to see (or obliged to picture) its birth place and his particular race independently from his/her country, rather than one being part of the other as in other countries. In other words, slowly and systemically, they stole our belongingness to both our birth place and our race. We are being denied the right to be multiple, as if that’s the right given only to the westerners. That's the single fictional narrative which has aimed and actually succeeded in dismantling Africa.

Let me give you another instance: if you have seen one horrible terror attack after another in different locations and when you express your sorrow, and when you react against the cruelty, you get all kinds of reactions, messages on social media. But one of them is quite worrying, only because it's so widespread. They say, "Why do you feel sorry for them?” Sorry to say, but the youth don't seem to understand that we don't have to pick one pain and one location over all others. But I think this is what racism does to us. It diminishes our minds, for sure, but it also shrinks our hearts, to such an extent that we become indifferent to the suffering of other people.

The sad truth is, we weren't always like this as a nation. We had so many great true histories of love and compassion. Our love and compassion to one another has always been contagious and that’s why we have remained intermingled to one another; have produced children who cannot be identified as one or the other race in all African countries. Even with the systemic government dismantling of one race from the other through its single fake narrative and a strategy of pushing out the “defacto race”, Africans, especially Ethiopians, have rejected to comply with this single rhetoric. Instead, they loved one another, bore children from one another and lived together in spite of being pigeonholed and persecuted for so many years.

Let alone to our people, Ethiopians (as many other African nations) reached out to other country people without any differences. You may not believe this but Ethiopia sent emergency coffee supplies to Britain in 1953 ‘to ameliorate the suffering’ of people affected by that year's floods, according to papers released at the Public Record Office (The Daily Telegraph). Ethiopia also showed her sympathy by sending thousands of soldiers, called the ‘Kagnew’ battalions, supporting South Korea against the communist North. Even in recent years, Ethiopia extended her hands to help neighboring countries in taking part in UN military missions. But the single bogus account that has dominated the continent is that "Africans are poor, hungry, barbaric and uncivilized", and “one race suppressed the other in such a way that each of them should see one another as adversaries”. There might be instances here and there where people from one location of the country had grudges and disagreed on issues over the decades. However, these don’t inevitably oblige one to wage war holding arms against his fellow people. Conflicts should be resolved through dialogue and many African ways of settlement.

One does not necessarily need to be a historian to witness facts these days, you know. There are historical books written by Africans about Africa which demonstrate the genuine facts. Although it’s deliberately hidden from the Google, or any other search engines, (which by the way is another strategy used by the westerners to hide evidences) one will find all proofs out there for him/her to see and witness if they really want to. It just needs to read the right books and ask the true historians and our forefathers.

While technology has greatly helped mankind in alleviating problems in various fields, such as agriculture, medicine, and telecommunication, etc., social media war has been the modern-day enemy of the people as mostly used for the wrong purposes, such as the one I mentioned above. The mainstream media themselves, miserably, seem to follow social media framework, instead of verifying the news by the former and disseminating truth to their people. They have just forgotten their professional duties of conducting investigative journalism and fallen in the simple trap of the lay person reporting of the social media. At times the social media uses slacktivism or an ‘armchair activism’ as it is effortless and often damaging – a tool the modern-day demagogue utilize as one of the best strategies to reach out many to disseminate fictional narrative. (to be continued)