THE POWER OF QUESTIONS

THE POWER OF QUESTIONS

        

by

Anthony Onu  

A unique social experiment was done and an amazing finding was realized. “if you place an infant mammal in one end of a large sized room and keep a warm fire place in the other end, once it’s another specie of mammal, it will find its way to the fire place by constant struggles and crawling to get the warmth and avoid dying.  But if it’s a human infant, it can’t. It will stay there and die even though warmth is within reach. That tells you of how vulnerable we are as human beings. So until a particular age of reason and individual choices, we are a vulnerable extension of where we came from.

So when you look at the beauty and diversity of Africa, you are looking at the spirits of some men that lived a long time ago. When you also look at her ills; corruption, poverty, uncivilization and ignorance, you are also seeing an extension of that spirit. At the same time, when you look at the western man ; his life, his choices, his civilization, his progress and also his failures. They are a direct extension of his history. So there must have been something about the historical transcendence of these two races of people and why they are so different.

As the story goes, one day in 1665, a young man was sitting under a tree when all of a sudden, he saw an apple fall from above the tree. And with the fall of that apple, Isaac Newton revolutionized our picture of the universe. He started asking the ridiculous but big questions, and as a result, he revealed; the nature of light; enabling us to explore more of the universe. His discoveries enabled us to calculate motion and predict change. He distilled the force that united the whole universe to a precise mathematical formula; the universal law of gravity. Newton is celebrated as the rational genius that propelled mankind out of medieval darkness and into the enlightenment.

This age of enlightenment released the genie out of the bottle and revealed the limitless power of asking questions. Men started rising up to question everything and bring about radical reformations with new ideas. That was when Adam smith published his “wealth of nations” ; that revolutionized world economics and released us from the chains of mercantilism into capitalism. Our modern democratic ideas evolved from the ideas of John Locke on social contract and Thomas Hobbes leviathan and liberal thought and released men from the chains of monarchy. These and many more intellectual foundational framework led to the industrial revolution. This was when we transitioned from hand production to machines; new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the invention of steam power, the development of machine tools and rise of the factory system.

The industrial revolution was a major turning point in history. It officially marked the birth of modern civilization. It affected almost every aspect of daily life. For the first time, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented and sustained growth. The standard of living for the average man significantly got better for the first time.

So civilization as we know it today; which characterizes progress, advancement in science and technology, abundance, social equity, justice and liberal rights of individuals exists today because some men dared to ask the BIG QUESTIONS and harness the boundless creativity of the human mind by asking WHY! .Therefore, rationally on the other hand, uncivilization, ignorance, darkness, poverty and suffering as we see it today in Africa exists because men have refused to harness this divine creative instinct of the human mind by daring to ask WHY!!

Imagine for a second that your name mungo park; The Scottish Explorer, and in your numerous voyages, you landed on a shore in mandinka  country; Descendents of the Mali empire, part of Sub-Saharan Africa in the 17^th Century.  Presuppose that you have no prior knowledge that such a place and people existed there before, you are being just adventurous. You come down from your harbour, dressed in your vest or waist coat, a clover, a wig and breeches that gathers around the knee with all other clothing accessories that accompanies the classical 17^th and 18^th century English Fashion. With your well constructed large wooden Ships that was built from hardwood and softwood, with the huge sails and impressive structure. Guns and ammunitions that use gun powder; an explosive made from sulphur and potassium nitrate for your protection and security. Properly stored food and drinks made from assorted and exotic food sources. Then you come down and meet these black coloured people that looks exactly like you, Except that they are scantly clothed with animal skin and leaves , Humming and carrying bows to hunt down wild reserves, None of the houses they built is more than one floor. They are clay moulded and has thatched roofing.        They stare at you with utter amazement like you were some ‘Alien’  that just landed from outer space. Without sentiment in retrospect, ‘what would be your first thought? It will seem to me that these people has been frozen in time or i just did a time travel to the past or that they are a late arrival of the order of creation.                     

The Question is WHY?  What really happened? Is there any biological reason to explain why the mind of the black man was not operating in the same frequency as his western counterpart.  Is there any historical reason to explain his sociological defectiveness? Of all human races, why has she been the most affected by slavery. The white man hardly raided slaves. He mostly waited at the shore while the black man raided his brother and brought him to the white man, and he gave him mundane things like mirror and sack clothes he has never seen before, and he walked away happy. Imagine such a gap?? A lot of people are unaware that slavery was more than 150 years ago, which is not more than 3 generations. But the transatlantic slavery started in the 1400s. It was legally ended at 1868 in the US. That is over two hundred years of social engineering, brainwashing, and terror that the black man have endured.

 What is about African’s history that leads to endless violence , famine ,poverty and corruption? These has always been a characteristic of the pre and post history of Africa. Why is Africa the most divided people in the world? we have such a high number of divisions along political entities, race, ethnicity ,religion ,family ,clans, kingdom, territoriality and all sort of subtle differences .Why has she been and still is the most diseased and suffering continent with the largest number of sympathizers and empathizers? Why has such a big-wave of protests ,anger and frustration ,swept and still sweeping through Africa, arising from a combination of financial crises, rising costs of living and high unemployment? Why has she always been the landmine and deposit site for all kinds of deadly diseases and epidemic outbreaks? Why has leadership in Africa been the most thwarted and misaligned administration in the world? Why hasn’t the black-man successfully birthed a Modern and civilized country from the scratch? Why is mother Africa still crying??

         

There has been so many proposed reasons, philosophical theories, pre-supposed causes and distorted historical expositions. But anyone that would like it find out a real and universal truth has to go back to the beginning. But from Beginning, all men were created equal by God. So that means something happened along the road, still in the beginning.   

Our African Journey in the last 500 years; her historical and present experiences, Her roots, her earthed and unearthed perceived and real realities and character, Her intrinsic African spirit and her relics, customs traditions and identity has served as our detective clues to the genesis of the “African dehydration and misery”. The BIG-BANG of our problems can be summarized in the phase “ BAD HERITAGE”. We inherited a Bad legacy. A conceptual exposition of that is expanded in my book. For now, let’s focus on the present and how to make progress.

AFRICA IS THE FUTURE   

What does this even mean?? Is it about wearing “AFRICA IS THE FUTURE T-SHIRT”?

No. It means we are actualizers, finishers and unifiers. Nothing ever gets completed and successful in the world without Africa. The western man discovered the industrial revolution, but needed to import energy and manpower from Africa to build and power that civilization. Even after the end of slavery, the bulk of the power and raw-materials that built the western world came and is still coming from Africa. We have a unique and powerful destiny. History is about to repeat itself again, but in more positive light now. To help the world maintain causality ensure that we avoid the catastrophe of over-extending “The age of Reason” and subjective rationality that is currently the superintendent in the west. Africa is destined to birth the new age; “THE AGE OF VALIDATION AND FALLIBILITY”, its properly expounded in my book, but which is simply the unification of Religion and secularism. Using subjective rationality or secularism to prove our objective precedence conviction and Religion. The fallibility is in the recognition of our mortal limits in achieving and reaching the infinity of our divine convictions but understanding that those shortcomings physically translates to a geometrical advancement in our humanity, intellect and civilization.

Our strong foothold on religion gives us this unique advantage. Our religious objective perception of providence can only be realized through a subjective procedural rationality. Its a matter of laziness and a waste of our African-ness to consume the default position of religious scepticism of the modern western man. We have consumed almost everything for centuries. It time we evolve our own unique way of thinking. Why is there so much poverty, lack, hate, disease, violence, corruption, ignorance and darkness in Africa? Please don’t think you know the answer. The problem starts with the assumption of we thinking we already know the answer. we have some invariants to start with. Invariants like “All men were potentially made equal by God, that all men, irregardless of age, race, color or sex has an enormous creative ability. That we have the ability to birth the next civilization. So the real question is “How come we experience only the opposite of these?” .

Our unwillingness to breakdown some of our extreme assumptive objective rigidity is actually the true sign of our godlessness. The quest to ask questions is actually the quest for God. Whom the holy book says dwells in the light and is always calling people to come and learn of him. Real faith is not an irrational assumption. To the man watching from outside, maybe it is. But to the man that has it, it’s reasonable. It’s a subjective rationality of an objective perception. This is the new age.

When we start daring to ask WHY?, you will find only one answer, “WHY NOT” this is the power of questions. Why is Africa the way it is? Before you answer, don’t forget that Africa is nobody but YOU!..

I know you can hear the still though still small voice telling you “WHY NOT”!! YES we can stop fighting and segregating each other. YES we can build the most developed economies where hunger and poverty does not exist. YES our democracy can become a model for the rest of the world to follow. YES we can send a man to the moon from Africa and back and also to Europa ( One of the moons of Jupiter). YES we can invent the greatest energy innovation in history. YES we can build the greatest companies on earth. YES we can unite the laws of physics in a simple equation. YES we can find a cure to aids and cancer from here. YES we can!!

#theblackscientists #africa #kulenga #civilization #thenewage