It is open season on the obvious failings of Africa, Africans, and the black race. So established is the cottage industry of Africa-bashing that some Africans have giddily gotten in on the act, spewing self-immolating theories that only serve to deepen the stereotypes of the degenerate and inferior black man.

None of these purveyors of self-demeaning clichés has stirred as much outrage as Idang Alibi, who writes a regular column for Nigerian daily, Daily Trust. I recently stumbled on one of his columns titled “I have a Tribe and am Proud of it.” It was a response to a piece crafted by Farooq Kperogi and published in the paper and on Nigeriavillagesquare.com, a major internet discursive destination for Nigerians.

Kperogi had deconstructed the sinister, racist underpinnings and connotations of the word “tribe,” contending persuasively that not only is the word a bequest of past hegemonic oppressions—of which Africans were victims—but that it is implicated even in today’s effort by Western hegemons to emphasize Africans’ supposed congenital  (as opposed to material) backwardness. Kperogi’s argument is simple: the etymology of the word renders it unusable for today’s sociological descriptions because, for good or ill, the word is now a stand-in for immutable inferiority, genetic predisposition to backwardness, and providential consignment to low status. Moreover, tribe is a term of power that worked and continues to work insidiously to reinforce the dubious narratives of European superiority while constituting its starkest opposite—the myth of the brute, rustic, tribal African. 

It is easy to sit in Abuja and pontificate about tribal virtue and about the insignificance of fighting against dirty words like tribe when you are insulated from its quotidian psychological injuries. For those of us who teach Africa to Westerners for a living and routinely encounter the most offensive deployments and usages of the “T” word, Kperogi’s intervention was a soothing balm, a welcome music of enlightenment deserving wide dissemination among Africans who rarely question the word or reject it from their conversational lexicons.

For Idang Alibi, however, Kperogi’s piece disturbed a settled personal narrative of Africa’s inferiority and European superiority. Hence his shocking appropriation and glorification of “tribe” in all its insulting flavor.

To be sure, Alibi is not the only African to have wondered aloud if Africans were not created inferior to Europeans. In off-handed conversational outbursts borne out of the daily existential grind of African life, some Africans have called attention to the many material failings of the black man, invoking comparisons between that and the material achievements of the Caucasian zone. This can be excused as outgrowths of fleeting existential frustrations. Suffering and stress inspire irrational self-examination that, in retrospect and in moments of rational calm, appears foolish and shallow.

Alibi’s Afropessimist self-labeling is of a different variety. It depends for its nourishment on the appropriation of the vilest strains of racist discourses recycled from different moments and systems of racist oppression—eugenics, colonialism, Apartheid. His proud embrace of “tribe” and its associative connotations—inferiority, inadequacy, and evolutionary puniness—is encased not in momentary frustration but in the internalization of the most reprehensible racist tropes. For him, Africa’s observable material backwardness—the source of most rational Afropessimists’ cynical self-deprecation—is actually coterminous with a preexisting natural disposition to idiocy, unintelligence, and backwardness. For Alibi, Africans are trapped in a preordained backwardness, whose most familiar signifier—tribe—they must accept. It is no use rejecting who—and what—you are. And will always be.

Rejecting the word tribe is, according to Alibi, rejecting who you have been destined to be. This tragic thinking is, as anyone can see, a disgusting reclamation of nineteenth century eugenicist racist science. It also echoes the religious racist rationalizations of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) variety—the ideological progenitor of Apartheid in South Africa. God—or providence—has decreed that Africans live in backward, unorganized, and uncivilized tribes and that Europeans associate in sophisticated, civilized nations.

The DRC and the political architects of Apartheid took this racist contraption to its logical programmatic conclusion, decreeing that it was God’s divine plan for the tribal (inferior) Africans to serve their superior European nationalist conquerors and for the civilized European settlers to superintend Africans.

The small distinction between colonialists and the guardians of Apartheid was that colonial racism cleared a small space and allowed a small chance in some distant future for Africans to progress from grunting tribes to responsible nations—with the help of European tutelage, of course. Like Idang Alibi, the ideologues of Apartheid admitted no such possibility, positing that Africans are meant to be tribes, Europeans to be civilized nations, and that each should be happy with its location on the evolutionary rung erected by providence.

Alibi’s happy appropriation of “tribe” and its associations reflects his willingness, as an African, to reconcile himself—pragmatically, he would argue—with his inferior position in the world. He knows his place in the world and is happy to dwell there, even if that happy tribal place was invented for Africans by conceited Europeans. For him therefore Kperogi is being an unrealistic idealist, rejecting the natural order of things that assigned an inferior tribal status to Africans and a superior national one to Europeans.

Many long-discredited racial arts and sciences are wrapped up in Alibi’s naïve defense of the descriptive and analytical utility of the word tribe and its denigrating associations. Some of them are more racist than others. One of the milder ones, which I suspect is the precursor to Alibi’s theories of tribal virtue, is negritude, which, like Alibi’s treatise, naively and unwittingly concedes and appropriates the white man’s taxonomy of racio-evolutionary hierarchy. Like Alibi, the negritude thinkers were Africans who accepted the white man’s self-interested designation of Africa as a land of congenital irrationality, superstition, emotionalism, and rustic oneness with nature. They also accepted without question the opposite side of the binary, also invented by Europeans for self-serving hegemonic purposes: the myth of European genetic disposition to rationality, sophistication, and civilization.

It has long become passé to repeat that negritude nonsense. And perceptive intellectual contemporaries of the negritudists like Wole Soyinka as well as other perceptive African evaluators of negritude writings have since called attention to their inadvertent and naïve appropriation of the most damaging, most fundamental racist assumptions in the European hegemonic toolkit.

The negritude thinkers thought they could take a negative, European hegemonic invention of African inferiority, empty it of all negative connotations, and fill it up with positive contents. If they accepted that Africans were not rational but emotional creatures—as had been theorized by Eurocentric racists—but glorified this emotionalism as a site for the production of art, music, poetry, and other intangible “civilizational” virtues, they would defeat the racism that inspired the theories of Africa’s exotic eccentricity. They failed woefully.

Instead of inverting the racist discourses they were trying to undo, they reinforced them. They left unchallenged the untenable, racist premise from which the rationality-emotionalism divide between Europe and Africa was invented. In fact, the negritude thinkers only succeeded in emboldening the connoisseurs of racist exoticizing of Africa. The tribalization of Africa only proliferated.

It seems like where the negritude thinkers failed, Alibi is determined to succeed. Let’s hear him. Alibi says he would be violating God’s divine plan and would be questioning the Almighty’s wisdom if he rejected his “tribe” just because God had not deposited him in “some powerful ‘nation’ in Europe or the Americas.” But this proposition is at best a straw man, since men—hegemonic European men—and not God authored the descriptive category of tribe and invented for Europeans its paradigmatic senior—nation.

God did not put Alibi or any other African in a tribe or Europeans in a nation. European people seeking to both Orientalize and dominate Africans did. So, to reject the European imposition of that label is to reject European hegemony in a significant symbolic territory. It is not to reject the sociological design of God as Alibi tragically assumes.

The two categories of tribe and nation that have now come to stand for civilized and uncivilized, intelligent and stupid are products of European sociolinguistic imaginations. Europeans have also been responsible for investing the two terms with connotative hegemonic meanings and for their incremental morphing into racist, evolutionary descriptors.

The smug theory of divine preordination that Alibi espouses is dangerous for Africans because it leaves intact the external classifications through which Europe understands Africa and Africans, while pretending to promote African pride. The truth is that there are many independent platforms for asserting African pride that do not pander to or appropriate the “nativist” fantasies and hegemonic inventions of Europe. Tribe is one of the most insidious of such inventions. Nor is it true that you can simply decolonize the word and put it into a new, proud use. Let Alibi ask the negritude thinkers about that.

Alibi argues that “if others [Europeans] say we behave like cannibals and savages and so call us ‘tribesmen’….., the right response….is not to fight with words. The correct thing to do is to examine ourselves and see whether what they are saying about us is true or not.” The shock and horror of this postulation is such that one’s outrage can blur the window that it provides into the pathological malaise of self-hate that afflicts its author.

Alibi is suggesting that if white racists call Africans monkeys and baboons and question the very essence of our humanity, the appropriate response is to dignify such drivel with an examination of our anatomical, psychological, and cognitive markers to ascertain the descriptive truthfulness of such racist depictions. Wow! Is this fellow for real? Can he possibly be arguing that the best answer to racist insults (even those disguised as scientific theories) is self-examination on the basis of those same insults? Is he arguing that those who hawk racist lies and inventions deserve the added satisfaction of having their fabrications glorified into a scientifically testable hypothesis about the black man’s innate biological or psychological deficits? It's no wonder that when Dr. James Watson courted notoriety by questioning the intelligence of Africans, Idang Alibi wrote a self-violating piece identifying with Watson's racist sentiments and proudly displaying his uncritical acceptance of the myths of white superiority and African degeneracy. 

Well, I tell him this: not only is it the right strategy to use words (packaged in harsh polemical prose) to fight against such racist insults, it is pertinent to go further and reject and unpack the labels, concepts, and words whose hegemonic history and usage elicit such sheepish accommodation of racist stereotyping from Alibi. It is necessary to also inform Africans like Alibi that, whether they are conscious of it or not, they are deeply implicated in the embattled concepts they are rehabilitating, that they are in fact victims of and proof that these hegemonic linguistic deployments are powerful instruments of mental cooptation.

Alibi also declared that, “if you do not like something about your person or the tribe, ethnic group or national or supra-nation (sic) group you come from, do something urgently to change things. Do not spend precious time disputing mere words and symbols.” So, again, Alibi’s answer to the devaluation of African collectivities through the use of the word tribe is to prescribe that those forced into this disempowering sociolinguistic conundrum change their ways to escape the insulting declarations of their insulters. How ingenious!

Once again, he prescribes a formula by which the African or group of Africans put down by racist constructs internalizes the insult, accepts blame for provoking it, and obsequiously changes their ways to exit the cloud of insult imposed on them. Unmentioned—and unindicted—in this self-defeatist narrative is the big elephant in the room: white racism and its socio-linguistic techniques of vilification and devaluation.

To cap his tragic position, Alibi says “tribe” and its linguistic relatives that serve to put down Africans and to elevate and secure the primacy of European hegemony are “mere words and symbols” that are undeserving of serious attention.

The naivety of this pronouncement is galling beyond belief. Every project of domination in human history and especially on the African continent (slavery, colonialism, Apartheid, neocolonialism) has been prefaced and accompanied by the strategic deployment of benign-sounding words and symbols that perform two related functions: deceive the victims into accepting or tolerating their fate and demarcate the artificial evolutional hierarchies that sustain oppression and domination.

Clearly, Alibi is not familiar with the symbolic subtleties and stealthy linguistic technologies of domination, oppression, and exploitation. These are not mere words. They are instruments that facilitate more brutally physical forms of oppression. To this day, these words and symbols perform this sinister role and victimize unsuspecting and self-immolating Africans like Idang Alibi.

Robot  # 1 | 24.03.2009 11:04

It is open season on the obvious failings of Africa, Africans, and the black race. So established is the cottage industry of Africa-bashing that some Africans have giddily gotten in on the act, spewing self-immolating theories that only serve to deepen the stereotypes of the degenerate and inferior black man. None of these purveyors of self-demeaning clichés has stirred as much outrage as Idang Alibi, who writes a regular column for Nigerian daily, Daily Trust. I recently stumbled on one of his columns titled “I have a Tribe and am Proud of it.” It was a response to a piece crafted by Farooq Kperogi and published in the paper and on Nigeriavillagesquare.com, a major internet discursive destination for Nigerians. Kperogi had deconstructed the sinister, racist underpinnings and connotations of the word “tribe,” contending persuasively that not only is the word a bequest of past hegemonic oppressions—of which Africans were victims— i...Read the full article.

sangodarekakanfo  # 2 | 24.03.2009 15:49

I surpposed Alibi do not know the meaning of the word,'TRIBE'. He would need to check it out in the Advanced Dictionary. However, 'cause this langguage is not his own, it could be that is why he could not fit it into his wordmeanings.

f.scorpion  # 3 | 24.03.2009 18:38

Alibi is suggesting that if white racists call Africans monkeys and baboons and question the very essence of our humanity, the appropriate response is to dignify such drivel with an examination of our anatomical, psychological, and cognitive markers to ascertain the descriptive truthfulness of such racist depictions. Having read Alibi's piece, I must say this example in not the spirit in which Alibi was discussing self examination. As I read it, he was against a whitewashing that changes lingo without dealing with the underlying reason for certain perceptions. Calling ourselves nations does not change the election violence in Kenya for example, and what it did to reinforce stereotypes. As a Diasporan myself, I understand where this article is coming from. I wonder though, if we are not a tad too euro-centric. Even from this article, it is obvious we are probably more in tune with european opinions than we should be. I think we should focus more on changing actual reality on the ground, and worry less about what some euro-intellectual who has probably never lived outside of europe thinks. To paraphrase, in a sense, Alibi's example of the Japanese, you can't argue with success. Heck, if we right our ship and become the economic power we can be, tribe may even become a term of praise. The victor makes the rules.

Ebe  # 4 | 24.03.2009 21:00

Having read Alibi's piece, I must say this example in not the spirit in which Alibi was discussing self examination. As I read it, he was against a whitewashing that changes lingo without dealing with the underlying reason for certain perceptions. F. Scorpion, But if someone invents a racist lie about you (like: Africans are unintelligent--remember Dr. Watson), what is the underlying reason that needs to be addressed or acknowledged--that Africans have smaller brains or were created with smaller cognitive capacities? Don't you dignify the lie by acknowledging that there is indeed a basis for it? Aren't you repeating the lie and engaging in self-insult when you acknowledge that Africans are unintelligent or that there is a rational basis for such a racist put down? Are Africans unintelligent? Calling ourselves nations does not change the election violence in Kenya for example, and what it did to reinforce stereotypes. Yes, but what's the correlation between violent behavior/election violence and "tribe"? Are the so-called nations not more violent than the "tribes"? I mean, look at what happened and continues to happen in the former Yugoslavia, where you supposedly have nations and not "tribes." Yet no one accuses them of being tribal brutes. The opinion is that these are nations that hate one another and are incompetition over regional resources and political power. Were such a thing to happen in Africa, it would be explained as the tribal warfare of uncivilized, rustic Africans. The election violence in Kenya and other violent conflagrations on the continent do not validate the racist meanings inherent in the word tribe. Why is "nation" not similarly associated with violence since history has more examples of "nations" perpetrating more violence within and without themselves? As a Diasporan myself, I understand where this article is coming from. I wonder though, if we are not a tad too euro-centric. Even from this article, it is obvious we are probably more in tune with european opinions than we should be. I think we should focus more on changing actual reality on the ground, and worry less about what some euro-intellectual who has probably never lived outside of europe thinks. To paraphrase, in a sense, Alibi's example of the Japanese, you can't argue with success. But why can't we chew and walk at the same time? Why can't we solve our problems and reject European racist put downs of Africa with words and symbols all at the same time? We can do both simultaneously. Must we gladly suffer through European racist insults while we fix our broken home? The Japanese didn't happily appropriate the racist insults directed at them. They fought back with words, symbols, and polemics while working hard to develop their country. They carried out the two struggles simultaneously. By the way, don't forget that the Japanese case is not comparable to Africa's, since they were, prior to World War II, a great colonial power in their right and were in fact more racist and arrogant than Europeans, considering Europeans and other non-Japanese peoples as vermins. Even during World War II, before their defeat, they were more guilty of racist denigration than the Europeans and Americans who would later defeat them. Heck, if we right our ship and become the economic power we can be, tribe may even become a term of praise. The victor makes the rules. The problem with this approach is that it assumes that racism flows solely from underachievement or that racist perceptions are engendered by material backwardness. That's not the case. During the civil rights movement in the US, many uppity blacks made the same erroneous assumption, believing that if they worked their way up, they would be spared white racism. They were not. Racism invokes and depends on beliefs about innate, immutable characteristics, not social status. It emphasis nature, not nurture. So, yes, achievement may bring more recognition and respect to Africa. But it won't divest dirty, racist words like tribe of their negative content. The racists won't simply change their views of Africans as a people of a lower race if we start doing better for ourselves. It may even intensify subtle racism and xenophobia against Africans from arrogant Europeans who believe that they alone are allowed to achieve and dominate. The Jews suffer from some of this racist resentment today. Ask the Jews why they are still the object of much white supremacist hate despite their excellence and achievements in many fields. The Jews know a thing or two about the need to attack symbols and constructs that insult you, while you simultaneously reinvent yourself for the better. They are probably the most vocal protesters of racist discourses directed at them. They don't let any racist insult go unchallenged. But that has not distracted them from doing what they need to do to improve their lot.

Veros  # 5 | 24.03.2009 21:21

I agree with you, Scorpion. I think Idang Alibi's piece has been misunderstood by Moses Ebe Ochonu. He certainly did not write his piece in the context described here by Moses. Africans should do a lot more than challenging words, we need to deal with "meatier" issues like leadership or lack of it, hunger, accountability in office etc. I'm sure that if we had functional societies devoid of the common ills that plague us, and compete with the "west" in terms of science and technology etc. the term tribe may even assume a different meaning, who knows?

Veros  # 6 | 24.03.2009 21:43

Ebe, do I assume that you and "Moses Ebe Ochonu" are one and the same person? You may be able to clarify a few things if you are. But why can't we chew and walk at the same time? Why can't we solve our problems and reject European racist put downs of Africa with words and symbols all at the same time? We can do both simultaneously. Of course we can walk and chew at the same as long as we recognise that one may be more important and therefore channel more energy to it. Ask the Jews why they are still the object of much white supremacist hate despite their excellence and achievements in many fields. The Jews know a thing or two about attacking symbols and constructs that insult you while simultaneously reinventing yourself for the better. They are probably the most vocal protesters of racist discourses directed at them. They don't let any racist insult go unchallenged. But that has not distracted them from doing what they need to do to improve their lot. I'm sure you will also agree that the state of Israel cannot be compared with any sub-Saharan African country in terms of GDP or development (terms you may argue are constructs of the "west"). Therefore it is easier for them to "attack symbols and constructs that insult" them, having conquered the basic organisation of society and developing the necessary machinery to attack such insults. The issue is not whether the term "tribe" has racial connotations, we need to set ourselves on the right path to development and the defence of our dignity will be a lot easier.

f.scorpion  # 7 | 24.03.2009 21:49

But if someone invents a racist lie about you (like: Africans are unintelligent--remember Dr. Watson), what is the underlying reason that needs to be addressed or acknowledged--that Africans have smaller brains or were created with smaller cognitive capacities? Don't you dignify the lie by acknowledging that there is indeed a basis for it? Aren't you repeating the lie and engaging in self-insult when you acknowledge that Africans are unintelligent or that there is a rational basis for such a racist put down? Are Africans unintelligent? You are right. Such as you described above does not call for self examination and needs to be fought aggresively as the author has suggested. However, like I alluded to earlier, this is not what Alibi was referring to. It was obvious, from his article, that he was more concerned with other issues. For example, to the west, tribe is supposed to connote barbaric, warring, even nomadic peoples. Alibi's contention, I said, suggested we deal with the inter-ethnic bloodbaths we frequently have, which tend to reinforce these ideas in the west. At this point, such connotations of tribe, while mischievous, have a painful truth behind them. What happens, if we are accused untruthfully as you mention above? That brings me to another part of your post. The racists won't simply change their views of Africans as a people of a lower race if we start doing better for ourselves. It may even intensify subtle racism and xenophobia against Africans from arrogant Europeans who believe that they alone are allowed to achieve and dominate. I agree. As you said, these racist views don't really flow from our underachievement. They are deeper, as you exemplified with Jews (I would add Asians too). My point is this: So what? Some people will never change their minds about Africans, just as they wont about Asians or Jews. Nothing we do, short of subservience will ever be good enough. I have no problems with educating the west on these issues, "chew and walk" as you suggested. That is great. BUT, we need to to have pride in ourselves, a compass from within to right the glaring wrongs that WE see. If we succeed, and some people are not pleased, that is their own palaver. The Chinese and Japanese dollar reserves are the only thing between a worldwide recession turning into a depression. Call them all the names you want, they rest easy knowing their position enables them to call the shots. Our achievements will argue for us in front of any racist.

Ebe  # 8 | 24.03.2009 22:26

Ebe, do I assume that you and "Moses Ebe Ochonu" are one and the same person? You may be able to clarify a few things if you are. Veros, Yes, everyone except JJCs:hail: knows that Ebe is Moses Ebe ochonu. Of course we can walk and chew at the same as long as we recognise that one may be more important and therefore channel more energy to it. You missed my overarching point. Don't for one second believe that racial insults and put downs have no bearing on your ability or capacity to achieve or perform to the best of your optimum potential. The two are intricately and causally connected. I would even argue that that is precisely the goal of racial put downs--to make sure that Africans and other objects of such racist constructs never develop the self-esteem and confidence necessary for ambitious excellence, so that white hegemony can endure. So, assuming that one is more important than or separate from the other misses this symbiotic relationship between the ideological realm of concepts, symbols, and words and the material world of technological achievement and economic development. I'm sure you will also agree that the state of Israel cannot be compared with any sub-Saharan African country in terms of GDP or development (terms you may argue are constructs of the "west"). Therefore it is easier for them to "attack symbols and constructs that insult" them, having conquered the basic organisation of society and developing the necessary machinery to attack such insults. Actually, you got the order/sequence wrong. Coming out of World War II, Jews had to fight off the stigmas and racist insults that clouded their lives before they built their state and achieved all that they've achieved. In fact they had to overcome and challenge such racist constructs before their demand for a homeland was taken seriously. It was not the other way round. Reclaiming your humanity is not a luxury; ask the civil rights activists. Fighting off racist interpellations is central to whether you can fulfill your potential as a people, especially when you are Africans and, unlike any other people, have been semantically located for centuries, and for no fault of your own, on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. The issue is not whether the term "tribe" has racial connotations, we need to set ourselves on the right path to development and the defence of our dignity will be a lot easier. I don't doubt that getting our act together will enhance our status in the world, but if you believe for one moment that that alone will save or shield us from racist insults (of diverse varieties), then you are not familiar with the history of Africa's emergence as a barbaric, supertitious, tribal, exotic place. And, again, I say challenging racist myths and drivel about us is not mutually exclusive of our quest for development. In fact it is central to it. That's my argument.

Agidimolaja  # 9 | 25.03.2009 01:59

In this case,I stand with Idang Alibi. I have a tribe - YORUBA. I'm so proud of being a Yoruba and I owe no one any apology for being a Yoruba person. When you liars finished your blatant lies,pls tell me. You say you have no tribe?You are a liar. As a matter of fact,that was one of the reasons why white folks are still laughing at you,because you are trying to cover what actually cannot be covered. Europeans etc may not use the word "tribe" for themselves,yet they have their own tribes. English is tribe,Irish is tribe,Scot is tribe,German is tribe,Sweedish is tribe,Hindi is tribe,Kurdish is tribe,Arab is tribe,Serb is tribe,Dutch is tribe etc. Why are you all running away from facts that cannot be denied? Did we bring ourselves into existence? Then what is our annoyance having been called tribes? I'm a Yoruba; and so what? Obafemi Awolowo was of Yoruba tribe yet Harold Wilson acknowledged that Obafemi Awolowo was intelligent enough to be a British Prime Minister. Can the same be said about many of us today even while speaking English language more fluently than people of England? How many of us today are using our brains in the way Obafemi Awolowo used his brain? People may write excellent essays,and speak grammar best of all and live in any of Western countries of the world, but Africa man,look at where you came out from. Look at the areas around your villages,then ask yourselves,who did such evils to you and your people.It has nothing to do with the word "tribe". It has to do with people not using their brains as brains ought to be used. We can write essays,we can speak good english, yet,nearly 50 yrs of self govering we know not how to do anything good for ourselves,neither can we even maintain those that we invited white folks to come and do for us. Nearly 50 yrs of self govering, we failed woefully to provide ourselves with running water,paved roads or any basic amenity. Are we then not what the white folks called us - PRIMITIVES? I have no problem with the word "tribe". My problem is with us as a people not using our brains to full extent, hence we remained so backward and undeveloped just as white folks rightly say of us. If the word tribe is a description of undeveloped and primitive people,then we fit perfectly into that group and white folks cannot be blamed for whatever they called us.

finklestein  # 10 | 25.03.2009 07:26

Caucasian discrimination against Jews dates back hundreds of years, beyond when they began to achieve anything in any modern sense of the word - in technology, science, arts. Animosities against Jews rose from the Roman-Empire-inspired campaign of calumny against them - the story was orchestrated that Jews killed Jesus Christ whom the Emperor Constantine had appropriated as his god. Constantine replaced Christian-persecution with Jew-hatred. Ebe and co, try to read your history between the lines. More than anything, Africans are viewed as inferior because they are a showcase for existential underachievement. Despite what people like Moses Ebechonu might say, Africa is a sad case. Agidimolaja is truly on the money.

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