Are Africans ready to emancipate themselves from mental shackles?

Editor, RE: “No amount of manipulation will make Rwanda bend” (The New Times, August 12). Even more hilarious, it seems the self-acclaimed ‘masters of the universe’ geniuses never seem to get it, inspite of coming a cropper for their nth time: The moment they attack our President for imagined faults — and through him all of us Rwandans — the even closer and more united around him we become. It seems they are so clueless they can never understand the unbreakable bond we, the people of Rwanda, have with our President and our hero, Paul Kagame, to whom we owe our very survival as a people, when all these pretentious lesson-givers and their governments had forsaken us as not being worthy to save from genocide one of theirs was actively abetting. Let them give us peace. Their lectures simply grate on our nerves. Mwene Kalinda The western media is all about the dollar. Nice stories don’t grab headlines or sell. A journalist, even the locals, looks for a juicy story. Other than that, there is nothing much else to report about from our shores. However, it serves no purpose to constantly lash out at ‘western enemies’. To know you have someone’s attention is how they react. The best thing is to ignore them. And I am not sure they are serving ‘their masters’ either. They are simply outdoing each other for ratings, influence and ultimately the revenues. Davy They will never tire from twisting facts around Africa’s socio-economic-political scene to suit their little plunder schemes. They fear their Pavlovian conditioning of African societies, a conditioning augmented by their biased western media houses, is wearing thin (and pretty fast). Mwene Kalinda, I admire your unrelenting fight for the Rwandan man and woman on the street, and by extension, Africa as a whole. Your Afro-centric drive is so pure and unadulterated; no falsified facts; no media spin in your commentary. Just pure facts of our mostly untold African story/history. Most of us would do well to keep tabs on your postings from which so much good wisdom and insight into our African standing could be gleaned from. You come strongly recommended. Keep it up. Ggwanga Mujje Thank you, good friend. My fervent hope is that more and more Africans free themselves from the hold of what seems like a malefic spell in which they are their own exploiters’ best instrument in their own despoliation. We all need to keep up our efforts to awaken fellow Africans to the fact all too many of us are complicit in our own persistent subjugation, even if some may not realise how their self-alienation plays in their enemies’ hands. Simply stated, we need to build up a critical mass of self-aware fellow Africans of all ages across our region, ready to carry the message Africans need to free themselves completely from mental slavery. As I look around our continent and beyond and see a growing number of mainly young Africans who clearly understand the situation and what needs to be done to undo it, the more optimistic I am about the future. But there is still absolutely no room for any complacency, for without Africans’ self-emancipation from our invisible mental shackles, there can be no freeing ourselves from the more material domination under which we continue to labour. A lot remains to be done. But it is within our power to free ourselves. Mwene Kalinda

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Are Africans ready to emancipate themselves from mental shackles?