One of the illusions I had was that people, in this case, Africans, want to understand themselves. I thought that they want to look into themselves and understand why they do what they do, and having done so correct some of their untoward behaviors.

To me, in many areas, African behaviors seem weird. First, they have a history of selling their people into slavery; for over a thousand years they sold their people to Arabs and Europeans.  As far as I know, very few of them fought to stop slavery. It took external others, mostly Europeans, to understand that selling human beings into slavery is wrong and fight to stop it. These foreigners, actually, had to come to Africa and fight Africans to prevent them from selling their people. In West Africa they had to figure out a replacement trade (palm oil, palm kennel etc) and encourage Africans to embrace the new trade before Africans stopped capturing and selling their people.

Africans did not show shame and guilt from selling their people. Conscience tells me that they ought to be walking around with their heads hung low, but, instead, they seem a happy people.

In some parts of Africa there is still slavery. There is slavery in Sudan, Mauritania, and Niger etc. In those countries, black Africans who have embraced Arab culture call themselves Arabs and call other Africans, those who have not embraced Arab culture, Africans. These so-called Arabs who in North America would be called Negroes and enslaved by white folk hunt down other Africans, like animals, capture and enslave them. In Northern Sudan men who look as black as charcoal ride their horses into Southern Sudan, kill adult Africans and enslave the women and children.

This is an especially cruel behavior.Only in Africa is such cruelty still taking place, and Africans do not rise in mass and fight to stop it; they wait for their white fathers to complain about such odious behaviors and come to stop them.

 In my own Alaigbo ( Nigeria) remnants from slavery times are quartered in what amounts to slave quarters and are discriminated against; they are not allowed to socialize with so-called free men or to intermarry with them. The Osu in Alaigbo is treated worse than slaves were treated in antebellum Southern USA. Yet few Igbos complain about this matter.

I am an Igbo from the best of Igbo families; in fact, I come from the first family of the land, the producers of the people’s Amadioha high priests, the leaders of Igbo religion. I am a diala, a freeman.

I complained about the treatment of osu folk in our land. Instead of seeing my behavior as noble many Igbos were angry at me. Indeed, some of them write that only an osu could complain about the plight of osus hence I must be an osu. They publicly called me an Osu.

Suppose I was an osu should they not be ashamed calling me osu? These people are savages, I tell you; their civilization is skin deep. They are rustic villagers in business suits, monkey suits!

Even though the term osu means slave certain Igbo clans in the Owerri area employ it as a term of endearment. If a person is totally dedicated to what he is doing he is called an Osu, as in saying about a hard worker: he works like an osu, like a slave. If a person is completely dedicated to serving God he is often called Osuji, osuchukwu or Njoku (God’s servant), none of which means that the person is a slave. Indeed, the war leader of the people is generally called osuagha, literally, war slave but metaphorically general.

The fact that so-called educated Igbos actually called me an osu, to humiliate me and get me to shut up and not talk about the osuphenomenon in Igbo land, no doubt, goes to show you how unrepentant these people are. I believe that if white men had not fought to stop slavery in Africa that many Africans would still be practicing slavery with gusto and show no guilt from that dastardly behavior. They call themselves Christians but behave as savages of the first order.

I doubt that many of them even know what is right from what is wrong; if they did how come just about all their politicians are thieves?What seems to matter to them is pretending that they are very important persons, VIP. They are so narcissistic that they make you want to laugh at the childish extent they go to seem pretended important persons.

It seems that their entire behavior is motivated by doing what they fancy would make them seem very important in other people’s eyes. Though they have contributed little of significance to science, technology and government yet they masquerade as special people.

The Igbos pretend that they are superior to other African tribes and, worse, want you to collude with their grandiosity and tell them that they are a superior people.

If you are rational you ask: in what field of human endeavor have they shown superiority? In making contribution to science and technology? In self governance? Before the white man came to their world, their governance level was rudimentary; they were a stateless people with only village level social organization.

All human beings are the same, equal and one. Pretending to be superior to other human beings is insane behavior. So, you tell them to stop pretending superiority and accept our inherent equality and they resent you for asking them to see all Nigerian tribes as equal. Instead, they want you to collude with their insanity and tell them that they are superior to their Nigerian fellows.  They see you as their public enemy and do whatever their underdeveloped minds deem necessary to bring you down. You shake your head at such daftness.

These people refuse to own up what is shameful in their behavior but present a false, sham appearance of who they want to be seen as to the world to accept and refuse to look into their souls and see what is wrong in them and change them.They are mostly narcissistic and paranoid in personality make up.

In contemporary African politics, it seems that folk go into politics to figure out ways to steal from the public treasury. Just about all African politicians are corrupt, are thieves.

If they are not stealing from their people they are seeking their people’s attention as special folk. Though in physical appearance the African politician eats until he gets grossly fat and grosses you out, they fancy themselves special and worthy of admiration.These are folk who look like they are nine months pregnant, who cannot exercise without risking heart attack; who do not run, swim and play tennis etc so as to stay in good shape.

It seems that all that these folk know how to do is eat food; they live to eat, not eat to live. Their over eating and lack of exercise makes them physically repulsive yet they somehow fancy themselves attractive and want you to see them as ideal persons and respect them!

I have had occasion to run into some African heads of states; they generally looked like over fed, bloated pigs. I must confess that I had no respect for these creatures. In general, I have not found African leaders (except Nelson Mandela) whose conduct in office and personal life makes them seem respect worthy. I certainly do not want to be like any of them. If imitation is the highest compliment I do not imitate these thieves and gluttons.

Do non-Africans admire Africans? I doubt it. That just about says it all, does it not? At best folk pity and sympathize with Africans perpetual suffering, their disease ridden lives and give them monetary aid (money that their leaders would quickly redirect to their personal pockets) but do not want to be like them.

As an axiom, human beings want to be like those achieving something in the world of science and technology, and in other fields of human endeavors. Human beings do not want to be like those who seem to live to do what guarantees their peoples eternal poverty, those stealing their people’s money and not working for their people’s welfare.

Sometimes I ask: are Africans human beings? Are they, may be, some kind of apes and we take them as human beings?

Having avoided Africans for a long time, almost three years ago, I rejoined them and undertook to share insights into why human beings do what they do.

I was very much aware that no ego analysis is free of ones own ego. If you analyze other egos you do so with your own ego hence is biased and not necessarily objective. Novice analysts may see something in them, dissociate from it, deny it and project it to other people (this is called transference issue in psychoanalysis). Therefore, an analyst must first analyze himself, better still, have another analyst analyze him; he must ascertain that he is not projecting whenever he thinks that he sees something in other people, for what we see in other persons is generally what we see in ourselves. Some projection is inevitable in analyzing people.

Since none of us knows what other persons are thinking the only way we can say something about their thoughts is through “projective identification”.  In this light, some of that I said about Africans is projection.

Let it be noted, however, that before I said any thing about Africans, I did first ask: “is what I am saying about Africans in me; am I projecting out what I see in me to them?” Where the answer is yes I accept my projection.

How do we know that our perception is true? As far as I know perception is deemed accurate if it is shared by other people. If what you see is what other people see then you are relatively seeing clearly. Ultimately, we do not know what reality is but in society reality is what society says that it is; reality is what many people see as real; reality is the consensus of many people; reality is a social construct.

 To make sure that I was not engaged in excessive projection, I asked other folk about their perception of Africans and in the main they saw what I saw. I presume that my perception of Africans is relatively correct. I stand to be corrected if my perception is faulty.

What struck me as I tried to share insights into why human beings (in this case, Africans) do what they do is how the majority of my African readers resented what I was doing. If I were to say anything that put them in a negative light they vociferously resented it.

As it were, Africans wanted me to do what liberal white scholars do: tell them that nothing is ever their fault, that everything that is wrong in their lives is the fault of white folk and blame whites for them but never blame Africans.

If Africans in government are mostly thieves instead of calling them criminals liberal sociologists study what social forces made them criminals? They tell us what white men, colonialism and neocolonialism did to make Africans not develop honesty and integrity. Oh, you know, slavery makes slaves not own anything and resent their masters; stealing from their master, whites, is seen as fighting back. Africans learned to steal from their white masters. Now that white men are no longer ruling them, they still associate their governments as white men’s governments, as others instrument of political control, and steal from them and in their eyes feel like they are doing the right thing.

This and similar garbage is given as explanation of why most African politicians are criminals. Well, I am not a white liberal approaching Africans as if they are children to be understood, as patronizing and condescending white liberal scholars often do.

I am an African who sees African leaders as adult human beings and, as such, ought to take responsibility for their good or bad behaviors.

Where I see Africans do bad things I call them on it. I am not interested in rationalizing Africans evil behaviors. I am not motivated to explain away Africans corruption. I call African leaders who steal from their people thieves; I call them slavers if they enslaved their people.I would not hesitate in pumping bullets into the heads of the rulers of Sudan and Mauritania for not putting a stop to the nonsense of slavery.

Because I undertook to say it as I see it I became the sworn enemy of certain Africans. Instead of gratitude for what I said they wanted to redirect the conversation to me. They wanted to make me the issue, to place me in a negative light. The thinking is that if they could make me look bad what I said would not be listened to. Thus, they concentrated on what seemed to me trivia. They asked whether I have the degree they were of the impression that I have, doctorate. They investigated my background no end, trying to see if there is something that they could unearth to humiliate me with.

 I ask: what has having a doctorate (though I have one) got to do with anything. Can’t a person state the truth even if he had only elementary or no education?Apparently, these people are still suffering from colonial mentality and what a person says is only important if he attended white men’s schools. As it were, white institutions have to legitimize an African as an intellectual before Africans accepted him as such. If it could be shown that one is not legitimized by white folk then what one says is not acceptable to Africans. This is childish behavior of the first order.

Having satisfied themselves that I did go to certain universities they then wondered where I am working. If I am not attached to a white institution I must not be good enough.

Let it be said that I left my professorial job and voluntarily went into the wilderness. In white academia one is essentially a controlled rat and must say what ones white masters deem acceptable for one to be rewarded with positive reinforcers, such as job promotion and money. No African can be truthful to himself in a white academic milieu. I went to the desert searching for water. Like Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces I went on a hero’s journey in search of authentic knowledge. The hero leaves the known world and goes into an unknown world to search for the truth, and when he has found it, returns to his world to share what he found.

I was not attached to white institutions. Because of this fact, some Africans were saying: see, I told you he could not obtain a job in papa white man’s universities etc therefore he is not good enough.

These Africans, I tell you, are dense. It is actually insulting working for white institutions but they do not know it.At any rate, their goal was to make me the issue rather than pay attention to what I was saying.

 Indeed, some of them called me a quack. A quack from America’s top ten universities? A quack that was sought after by many universities, including Ivy League ones?

The person who calls you a quack does so for many reasons including the fact that he feels that he is a quack. He denies his negative self assessment and projects it to you. He sees in you what he sees in his self.

 Is he a quack? Not necessarily. He just feels that he is one. What a man feels that he is and what he is are different things. Seeing himself as a quack may only mean that he has lost confidence in himself.

Moreover, by calling you a quack he plays a trick on his mind: he dismisses what you said about him that he does not want to hear. He resumes living his life as he has always lived it, doing the same old things, making the same old mistakes.

In chemical dependency treatment, they say that insanity is doing the same things (taking drug, such as nicotine, caffeine, heroine, cocaine etc that destroy the human body), over and over again, and expecting different results (healthy body). Africans steal from their people and are, by and large, self-centered but want to be developed! Development requires a change in their behaviors, becoming social centered, (sociocentric) having social interests and working for the people’s common good.

Calling a person who calls them thieves quack is an ego defense mechanism that enables them not to look into their souls and see the dreadful things they are doing and change them. Africans, apparently, have infinite ways of deceiving themselves thus making it inevitable for them to remain backward.

I believe that many Africans were afraid of the fact that I was trying to look into their souls and tell them what is in it. They would rather present the superficial appearance of goodness they present to the white world to relate to.

 I think that Africans are afraid of looking into their souls because they believe that in there are evil so dark that any one beholding it would recoil and look away.

The evil is Africans selling their people into slavery. Until the white men came to some parts of Africa, Africans used to bury life slaves with their so-called dead chiefs. Some Africans, Igbos for example, used to throw twin babies into what they called the evil forest (Mkporo, Ajo Ohia…a white Roman Catholic Sister, Mary Salesie? worked to stop that particular evil).

Africans, in my judgment, had heinous social practices that they are ashamed of but instead of looking them in the face and accepting them as mistakes and resolving to change them would rather hide them and pretend that no body sees them.

Africans think that they have fooled the world by presenting a seeming good face to the public. Alas, no one is fooled but the pretender. The world sees you as you are, for as you are are manifested in your current behaviors.

If you are a thief you would steal.  Since, by and large, they do not like to work hard and would rather white men worked hard and accumulated wealth and they relieved them of it through crooked ways, they resort to such thievery as 419 advance fee scams.

No one is deceived but the person who believes that he is deceiving people. In reality, Africans are folk who seem unable to govern themselves despite white liberals telling them that white men made them unable to do so. It is Africans that live in terrible poverty, not whites, not Asians. (We must banish the writings of white liberals from Africans; they baby Africans instead of talking to them like adult men. Steve Biko, my student days' hero, used to rail against white liberals’ role in perpetuating apartheid in South Africa.)