By: Mawuna KOUTONIN of SiliconAfrica.com
Femi Akomolafe is a computer engineer with a successful movie production studio in Accra. He is also a well known essayist and writer, passionate panafricanist, who recently published two books, which compile the best of his thoughts and articles published over the recents years about the struggle of the African people to free themselves from europeans violence. The two books are: Africa – It Shall Be Well and Africa: Destroyed By The Gods.
It’s a tremendous pleasure to speak with Femi. He has a wealth of knowledge and insights he generously share with his followers and the public.
In this interview Femi shed more light on his upbringing and background, and gave us numerous practical steps and ideas which would instill optimism and hope into anyone, include those who have lost hope about Africa.
SiliconAfrica: Good Morning Femi. I’ve spent days trying to figure who you are and what motivates you, but unsuccessfully. Like a chameleon, you move swiftly from prolific essayist to IT & computer consultant; from film producer to business and economics analyst. What is your story?
Femi Akomolafe: My story is simple. I am a very simple bloke, who is passionately curious about the world in which he lives. I am like a child – I found almost everything in life fascinating, and I want to know more and more.
As a child, books have always held special attraction for me. I am an introvert, so I have no problem losing myself in books. It is a habit I have not manage to shed. Books remain the only thing I still collect insatiably.
I like to write because I get easily irritated by lots of human follies. I cannot stand injustice of any description, and from any quarter. Since I am not inclined to engaging in physical violence, I find it easier to do my battles with words.
Writing is for me therapeutic, a catharsis that allows me to release my tensions. If I get irritated by something, I write either a polemic or a satire to get it off my mind and move on.
I bought my first computer, a Sinclair Spectrum 48K (K is for Kilobyte, mind you) sometime in 1985, and have fallen in love with computers ever since. From programming to networking to almost everything else in between, I have done it all. I ran the first African Bulletin Board System in the Netherlands – AFRO BBS. It was fun.
Producing videos is also very exciting. It gives you awesome power to conceive a story, write script, shoot, edit and produce ideas into video forms. It is like creating life. Video editing allows you to run riot with your imaginations. With video production, you make things happen.
I read somewhere that the most intelligent human beings use only about one percent of their brain power. I am very curious to know why we have such huge unused capacity. I hate to be ignorant on any subject; so I keep on reading and learning.
My motivation comes from the deep passion I have for our beautiful and hugely blessed continent. It pains to see that, despite all our vast mineral wealth, we still remain the world’s favorite whipping boy.
Given the huge talent and enterprise I see around Africa, I know we can do a lot better.
The urge to contribute my quota is primarily what motivates and drives me. African problem was not caused by politicians alone, and we all should be responsible for trying to solve them. That, for me, is enough motivation.
SiliconAfrica: You live in Ghana, and from the many articles I’ve read about you, it seems like you have fallen into the Panafricanism soup from birth. What is your version of Panafricanism, and what is the current fate of Panafricanism in Africa?
Femi Akomolafe: I live in Ghana. Yes, I am a committed and deeply passionate Pan-Africanist.
Pan-Africanism is not for me some fanciful slogan to be bandied about. It means the very survival of the African people. Sadly, many of us fail to recognise that we in Africa face an existential struggle.
There are forces that simply do not wish us well, and continue to do their best to destroy us. We can take a look at this quote form Time magazine, “The objective of the war is not to make UNITA win a war, but to devastate Angola and make the people lead wretched lives.” (TIME, August 10, 1987. p.33).
I also ask people to read the ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman.’ No, it is not conspiracy theory, it is just recognizing and facing the stark reality of the life in which we live.
It is only those of us in Africa that naively believe that things just happen. President Truman once famously said: “Whatever happens in politics is planned.”
We are about the only people on earth that do not know that economics underpins racism. People are not racist because they want or choose to; their economic well-being and survival depends on the racist structures they have constructed. European racism is validated only by the inferiority of Africans, and the current mess in Africa only serve to further reinforce this.
It is in the West’s best interests to maintain the status quo. It is time we recognise this and shorn it of all pretenses. It does not mean hating or disliking anyone; it just mean that we Africans should learn to take care of our own interests, like other people are doing.
Europeans, whatever their pretensions, recognise the truth that without Africans and African resources to exploit, Europe would have gone down ages ago. Where would Europe be without our Coffee, Cocoa, Tobacco, Cotton, Oil and Gas without which a meaningful life cannot be imagined?
How RICH would Europe continue to be if we can compelled Europeans to pay fair prices for these products? It was former French President Mitterrand who admitted what we all knew all along, that it was only Africa that still makes France relevant today.
Sadly, it is only those of us in Africa who fail to grasp the start reality that confront us. It is only we in Africa that still take solace in the wretched hypocritical smiles of our historic oppressors. It is only those of us in Africa that still seek friendship, rather than pursue our national interests with the same cold, calculating logic that other people bring to the table.
Whichever way we throw it around, the only future for Africa is through Pan-Africanism of one sort or the other. To begin with, outside of Africa, the only identity you have is your African identity. Any African who have spent any time in the Diaspora can relate to this.
It is equally important to know that when we discuss our oppression and exploitation, we ought to be cognizant of the fact that we are not exploited as Togolese or Senegalese or Angolans. We are exploited as Africans.
The external forces we deal with are organised into strong blocs. Good example is the European Union.
Those that tell us that they are against Pan-Africanism should tell us how they think that an African country (even powerful ones like Nigeria and South Africa) can have meaningful negotiation with the EU that is made up of 28 countries and still counting. It is simply ridiculous for one African nation to go and face an EU delegation.
On the economic level, it is only by one form of unity or the other that Africa can begin to utilise her vast mineral resources for the benefits of her own people.
Today, we are exploited simply because we are fragmented into unviable colonial garrisons we call countries. This makes it easy for the stronger blocs to continue to railroad us into easy submission and imposed on us unfair trade regimes.
There are very good examples we can cite. One is the ridiculous situation in Niger where France derives 50% of her electricity from Nigerienne Uranium and continue to pay pittance for it. Whereas most of Niger lives in darkness, electricity is abundant in France and it is also relatively cheap.
Another example are the countries of Ghana and La Cote d’ Ivoire, which together produce more than half of the world’s cocoa. Divided these countries remain beggars when they can easily combine forces to form a Cocoa Cartel, and start to dictate the prices of their produce. That alone will solve some major problems for them.
No, contrary to what some say, Pan-Africanism is not a romantic notion of Gambians loving Kenyans or Namibians falling in love with Nigerians. We talk here of Africans combining their forces to face a very hostile and inhumane world that is bent on exploiting her riches, and is unwilling to pay fair prices for them.
Why do we not ask ourselves why it is more expensive to call Togo from Ghana than say Australia? Why do we not ask ourselves why Europe makes money whenever Africans trade among themselves? For example, a Malian that want to buy something from Kenya must first purchase dollars or Euros, which means that Westerners get a cut of the deal without doing anything.
A Ghanaian entrepreneur told me the unbelievable story of how his shipments to Liberia is routed through Spain, because there is no direct link between Ghana and Liberia, with only one country between them.
These are what we meant when we talk Pan-Africanism. It is being misconstrued as some romantic nonsense. Then, they say that we are dreamers. We should remember the saying the future belongs to those that believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Those that talk about poverty in Africa often disingenuously omit the fact that they dictate the prices they pay for what Africa produce. How do we expect Africa to make progress when foreigners dictate the prices they pay for what we produce. These are uncomfortable questions, people are unwilling to discuss; it is far easier to blame the victim.
These are some of questions to which only a united Africa can successfully address and conquer.
SiliconAfrica: In the introduction to your recent book “AFRICA – IT SHALL BE WELL“, you wrote “It is said that it is the sad duty of a writer to chronicle the ills of his society.” I can feel a lot of pain and frustration in your writing. How do you deal with that pain of seeing Africa so crushed and in the same staying so optimistic? Are you optimistic about Africa?
Femi Akomolafe: It is quite sad to see our beloved continent reduced to its current state.
It is especially sad for those of us who lived through the sixties and the seventies, when there was so much hope. Crushed? No, we are not crushed. We are beaten, definitely, but not conquered.
Am I optimistic about the future of Africa?
You bet that I am. I won’t live anywhere else. Our African cosmogony thrives on unbridled optimism; we are the eternal optimists.
In 1994, I wrote an article which was published in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. Let me quote from it: “If slavery and colonialism did not destroy us, no force on earth can annihilate us. We shall continue to face the morrow with hope and confidence and cheerfulness.”
If slavery and colonialism did not destroy us as the Europeans planned, there is no reason for us to become pessimistic. We have our beautiful continent with its fantastic weather and climate and rich soil. We have a very youthful population. We have mineral resources that others salivate over.
Where then is the point for becoming pessimistic?
I would be more pessimistic were I to be a citizen of Europe which today, in the words of Frantz Fanon, sway between spiritual and atomic disintegration.
Europe has got little to recommend it except unbridled violence, and once we develop strategy to successfully counter them like the Asians did, let us see where they will run to.
The trick is for us to get our acts together, recognise where we went wrong and make amends. Start to do the correct thing and we shall be unbeatable.
I think every other people recognise our potential strength except us. We don’t have a problem a good Afrocentric education cannot solve. We need to change the stupid mindsets colonialism and its inferior education has instilled in us.
That is all. We shall be unbeatable once we grasp the promethean heights.
SiliconAfrica: In the Chapter 11 of “AFRICA – IT SHALL BE WELL“, you passionately argue that it is time for Africa to abandon all the orthodoxies and chart a new course. What are these orthodoxies we should abandon?
Femi Akomolafe: Without a doubt we do little except to engage in stupid mimicries in Africa.
We do little but copy every ideas from Europe and hope, or rather pray, that they will work for us.
The political system we operate is Western. Our constitutions are nothing more than copy and paste jobs from Western constitutions. We use the same dog-eat-dog capitalist economic system of the Western world. Even when all the evidences we have point to the utter failure of these systems in their home regions, we continue to latch onto them.
Today, fewer and fewer Westerners bother to go out and vote, because they are wise up to the fact that the system is nothing but a con-game – aptly defined by Kwame Nkrumah as the “competition between oligarchists.”
Today, only the supremely delusional still believe that capitalism can be saved. Yet, we continue to operate these failing systems and, bafflingly, we pretend not to understand why everything went awry with us. Not only did we borrow these systems, we appear to badly understand them and the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
We borrowed foreign ideas that we barely understood, and in our attempt to make it work, we become laughable caricatures. People laugh at us when they see the mess we made of, say, the so-called democracy we practice. They laugh at us because we have turned Christianity into religious madness.
In Africa, we have manage to turn the simple affairs of electing officials into do-or-die major productions.
Election times in Africa have become occasions for national stress, violence and mayhem. We operate a capitalist system but we lack the discipline to defer our propensity for primitive acquisition. For us, at least for our elite, it is all about consumption with no production. What I argued for in my book is the total re-orientation of our thinking department. First, we must recognise and admit that we are in an emergency situation. Emergencies are saved only by unusual measures.
I gave example of the current political system which only generate tension every four years, with the same set of elite engaging in a game of revolving musical chair, and take us for smooth rides to nowhereland.
Let us start by having Emergency Government where every political party that win about ten percent of popular votes form the government. This should be for ten to twenty years during which time we forget all about partisan politics. With the tension of useless politicking reduced, all hands should be mobilised for economic development.
Femi Akomolafe is a computer engineer with a successful movie production studio in Accra. He is also a well known essayist and writer, passionate panafricanist, who recently published two books, which compile the best of his thoughts and articles published over the recents years about the struggle of the African people to free themselves from europeans violence. The two books are: Africa – It Shall Be Well and Africa: Destroyed By The Gods.
It’s a tremendous pleasure to speak with Femi. He has a wealth of knowledge and insights he generously share with his followers and the public.
In this interview Femi shed more light on his upbringing and background, and gave us numerous practical steps and ideas which would instill optimism and hope into anyone, include those who have lost hope about Africa.
SiliconAfrica: Good Morning Femi. I’ve spent days trying to figure who you are and what motivates you, but unsuccessfully. Like a chameleon, you move swiftly from prolific essayist to IT & computer consultant; from film producer to business and economics analyst. What is your story?
Femi Akomolafe: My story is simple. I am a very simple bloke, who is passionately curious about the world in which he lives. I am like a child – I found almost everything in life fascinating, and I want to know more and more.
As a child, books have always held special attraction for me. I am an introvert, so I have no problem losing myself in books. It is a habit I have not manage to shed. Books remain the only thing I still collect insatiably.
I like to write because I get easily irritated by lots of human follies. I cannot stand injustice of any description, and from any quarter. Since I am not inclined to engaging in physical violence, I find it easier to do my battles with words.
Writing is for me therapeutic, a catharsis that allows me to release my tensions. If I get irritated by something, I write either a polemic or a satire to get it off my mind and move on.
I bought my first computer, a Sinclair Spectrum 48K (K is for Kilobyte, mind you) sometime in 1985, and have fallen in love with computers ever since. From programming to networking to almost everything else in between, I have done it all. I ran the first African Bulletin Board System in the Netherlands – AFRO BBS. It was fun.
Producing videos is also very exciting. It gives you awesome power to conceive a story, write script, shoot, edit and produce ideas into video forms. It is like creating life. Video editing allows you to run riot with your imaginations. With video production, you make things happen.
I read somewhere that the most intelligent human beings use only about one percent of their brain power. I am very curious to know why we have such huge unused capacity. I hate to be ignorant on any subject; so I keep on reading and learning.
My motivation comes from the deep passion I have for our beautiful and hugely blessed continent. It pains to see that, despite all our vast mineral wealth, we still remain the world’s favorite whipping boy.
Given the huge talent and enterprise I see around Africa, I know we can do a lot better.
The urge to contribute my quota is primarily what motivates and drives me. African problem was not caused by politicians alone, and we all should be responsible for trying to solve them. That, for me, is enough motivation.
SiliconAfrica: You live in Ghana, and from the many articles I’ve read about you, it seems like you have fallen into the Panafricanism soup from birth. What is your version of Panafricanism, and what is the current fate of Panafricanism in Africa?
Femi Akomolafe: I live in Ghana. Yes, I am a committed and deeply passionate Pan-Africanist.
Pan-Africanism is not for me some fanciful slogan to be bandied about. It means the very survival of the African people. Sadly, many of us fail to recognise that we in Africa face an existential struggle.
There are forces that simply do not wish us well, and continue to do their best to destroy us. We can take a look at this quote form Time magazine, “The objective of the war is not to make UNITA win a war, but to devastate Angola and make the people lead wretched lives.” (TIME, August 10, 1987. p.33).
I also ask people to read the ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman.’ No, it is not conspiracy theory, it is just recognizing and facing the stark reality of the life in which we live.
It is only those of us in Africa that naively believe that things just happen. President Truman once famously said: “Whatever happens in politics is planned.”
We are about the only people on earth that do not know that economics underpins racism. People are not racist because they want or choose to; their economic well-being and survival depends on the racist structures they have constructed. European racism is validated only by the inferiority of Africans, and the current mess in Africa only serve to further reinforce this.
It is in the West’s best interests to maintain the status quo. It is time we recognise this and shorn it of all pretenses. It does not mean hating or disliking anyone; it just mean that we Africans should learn to take care of our own interests, like other people are doing.
Europeans, whatever their pretensions, recognise the truth that without Africans and African resources to exploit, Europe would have gone down ages ago. Where would Europe be without our Coffee, Cocoa, Tobacco, Cotton, Oil and Gas without which a meaningful life cannot be imagined?
How RICH would Europe continue to be if we can compelled Europeans to pay fair prices for these products? It was former French President Mitterrand who admitted what we all knew all along, that it was only Africa that still makes France relevant today.
Sadly, it is only those of us in Africa who fail to grasp the start reality that confront us. It is only we in Africa that still take solace in the wretched hypocritical smiles of our historic oppressors. It is only those of us in Africa that still seek friendship, rather than pursue our national interests with the same cold, calculating logic that other people bring to the table.
Whichever way we throw it around, the only future for Africa is through Pan-Africanism of one sort or the other. To begin with, outside of Africa, the only identity you have is your African identity. Any African who have spent any time in the Diaspora can relate to this.
It is equally important to know that when we discuss our oppression and exploitation, we ought to be cognizant of the fact that we are not exploited as Togolese or Senegalese or Angolans. We are exploited as Africans.
The external forces we deal with are organised into strong blocs. Good example is the European Union.
Those that tell us that they are against Pan-Africanism should tell us how they think that an African country (even powerful ones like Nigeria and South Africa) can have meaningful negotiation with the EU that is made up of 28 countries and still counting. It is simply ridiculous for one African nation to go and face an EU delegation.
On the economic level, it is only by one form of unity or the other that Africa can begin to utilise her vast mineral resources for the benefits of her own people.
Today, we are exploited simply because we are fragmented into unviable colonial garrisons we call countries. This makes it easy for the stronger blocs to continue to railroad us into easy submission and imposed on us unfair trade regimes.
There are very good examples we can cite. One is the ridiculous situation in Niger where France derives 50% of her electricity from Nigerienne Uranium and continue to pay pittance for it. Whereas most of Niger lives in darkness, electricity is abundant in France and it is also relatively cheap.
Another example are the countries of Ghana and La Cote d’ Ivoire, which together produce more than half of the world’s cocoa. Divided these countries remain beggars when they can easily combine forces to form a Cocoa Cartel, and start to dictate the prices of their produce. That alone will solve some major problems for them.
No, contrary to what some say, Pan-Africanism is not a romantic notion of Gambians loving Kenyans or Namibians falling in love with Nigerians. We talk here of Africans combining their forces to face a very hostile and inhumane world that is bent on exploiting her riches, and is unwilling to pay fair prices for them.
Why do we not ask ourselves why it is more expensive to call Togo from Ghana than say Australia? Why do we not ask ourselves why Europe makes money whenever Africans trade among themselves? For example, a Malian that want to buy something from Kenya must first purchase dollars or Euros, which means that Westerners get a cut of the deal without doing anything.
A Ghanaian entrepreneur told me the unbelievable story of how his shipments to Liberia is routed through Spain, because there is no direct link between Ghana and Liberia, with only one country between them.
These are what we meant when we talk Pan-Africanism. It is being misconstrued as some romantic nonsense. Then, they say that we are dreamers. We should remember the saying the future belongs to those that believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Those that talk about poverty in Africa often disingenuously omit the fact that they dictate the prices they pay for what Africa produce. How do we expect Africa to make progress when foreigners dictate the prices they pay for what we produce. These are uncomfortable questions, people are unwilling to discuss; it is far easier to blame the victim.
These are some of questions to which only a united Africa can successfully address and conquer.
SiliconAfrica: In the introduction to your recent book “AFRICA – IT SHALL BE WELL“, you wrote “It is said that it is the sad duty of a writer to chronicle the ills of his society.” I can feel a lot of pain and frustration in your writing. How do you deal with that pain of seeing Africa so crushed and in the same staying so optimistic? Are you optimistic about Africa?
Femi Akomolafe: It is quite sad to see our beloved continent reduced to its current state.
It is especially sad for those of us who lived through the sixties and the seventies, when there was so much hope. Crushed? No, we are not crushed. We are beaten, definitely, but not conquered.
Am I optimistic about the future of Africa?
You bet that I am. I won’t live anywhere else. Our African cosmogony thrives on unbridled optimism; we are the eternal optimists.
In 1994, I wrote an article which was published in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. Let me quote from it: “If slavery and colonialism did not destroy us, no force on earth can annihilate us. We shall continue to face the morrow with hope and confidence and cheerfulness.”
If slavery and colonialism did not destroy us as the Europeans planned, there is no reason for us to become pessimistic. We have our beautiful continent with its fantastic weather and climate and rich soil. We have a very youthful population. We have mineral resources that others salivate over.
Where then is the point for becoming pessimistic?
I would be more pessimistic were I to be a citizen of Europe which today, in the words of Frantz Fanon, sway between spiritual and atomic disintegration.
Europe has got little to recommend it except unbridled violence, and once we develop strategy to successfully counter them like the Asians did, let us see where they will run to.
The trick is for us to get our acts together, recognise where we went wrong and make amends. Start to do the correct thing and we shall be unbeatable.
I think every other people recognise our potential strength except us. We don’t have a problem a good Afrocentric education cannot solve. We need to change the stupid mindsets colonialism and its inferior education has instilled in us.
That is all. We shall be unbeatable once we grasp the promethean heights.
SiliconAfrica: In the Chapter 11 of “AFRICA – IT SHALL BE WELL“, you passionately argue that it is time for Africa to abandon all the orthodoxies and chart a new course. What are these orthodoxies we should abandon?
Femi Akomolafe: Without a doubt we do little except to engage in stupid mimicries in Africa.
We do little but copy every ideas from Europe and hope, or rather pray, that they will work for us.
The political system we operate is Western. Our constitutions are nothing more than copy and paste jobs from Western constitutions. We use the same dog-eat-dog capitalist economic system of the Western world. Even when all the evidences we have point to the utter failure of these systems in their home regions, we continue to latch onto them.
Today, fewer and fewer Westerners bother to go out and vote, because they are wise up to the fact that the system is nothing but a con-game – aptly defined by Kwame Nkrumah as the “competition between oligarchists.”
Today, only the supremely delusional still believe that capitalism can be saved. Yet, we continue to operate these failing systems and, bafflingly, we pretend not to understand why everything went awry with us. Not only did we borrow these systems, we appear to badly understand them and the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
We borrowed foreign ideas that we barely understood, and in our attempt to make it work, we become laughable caricatures. People laugh at us when they see the mess we made of, say, the so-called democracy we practice. They laugh at us because we have turned Christianity into religious madness.
In Africa, we have manage to turn the simple affairs of electing officials into do-or-die major productions.
Election times in Africa have become occasions for national stress, violence and mayhem. We operate a capitalist system but we lack the discipline to defer our propensity for primitive acquisition. For us, at least for our elite, it is all about consumption with no production. What I argued for in my book is the total re-orientation of our thinking department. First, we must recognise and admit that we are in an emergency situation. Emergencies are saved only by unusual measures.
I gave example of the current political system which only generate tension every four years, with the same set of elite engaging in a game of revolving musical chair, and take us for smooth rides to nowhereland.
Let us start by having Emergency Government where every political party that win about ten percent of popular votes form the government. This should be for ten to twenty years during which time we forget all about partisan politics. With the tension of useless politicking reduced, all hands should be mobilised for economic development.
