Hon Chairperson, let me invite the hon members to listen to these few lines from a poem written by an anonymous African poet and writer. The title is "Let me be me."
Let me be me I am not you! Yet you cannot let me Be me. For God's sake Let me be me!
This stanza summarises the whole tragedy of the African story, the tragedy of being denied the chance to define ourselves in our own African terms. We are today celebrating the hallowed values of the struggle, handed down from one generation to another. These values of unity and co-operation are embodied in the African philosophy of ubuntu-botho [human dignity].
But it is this very same African philosophy that was vehemently attacked by Western usurpers who argued that Africans had no philosophy at all and, by definition, that Africans did not have a way of their own to live life itself. This represented the first step of this tragedy, because this was followed by Africans rejecting their own. We rejected our own languages, because we were told that our languages resembled that of a bat who, in any way, would have liked to be a bat.
We rejected our customs, because missionaries had argued that it was "better to be a slave in a white Christian society than to be free in African savagery". There you are. The whole process of dehumanisation followed. We have been dehumanised. We have been turned into the status of a victim, because a victim will always whine and whinge. A victim will always imitate the master inside him. In other words, our minds have been colonised.
What must be done? First, some aspects of our culture may have become archaic. Some thought patterns may have become old-fashioned and must be discarded, but the whole of the society cannot be discarded. It must be transformed instead. Let us open a dialogue amongst ourselves because, I argue, playing pseudo-intellectual games amongst ourselves won't help our cause at all.
Therefore, our first responsibility is to reclaim what we lost. We must rehabilitate our languages; even our eating habits, as many health professionals have observed that many Africans have acquired certain chronic diseases like diabetes due to dietary practices.