A four parts essay on Africans self hatred and behavior)

    Last year, 2005, after years of absence from African affairs, I wrote a friend and sought information on certain events taking place in Nigeria. She said that she could not help me but referred me to sources that she felt might have answers for me. One of the sources was an outfit called Naijapolitics, an Internet forum where Diasporan Nigerians make commentaries on what is going on in their country. I wrote this outfit and, without knowing what I was getting into, became a member. Daily, my email address was inundated with letters written by members of the forum; letters expressing their opinions on the issues of the day in Nigeria.  On a typical day, I receive over one hundred and fifty such letters.

      I read some of these letters. What struck me was the tone of the discourse. They lacked civility. In fact, it seemed that the writers enjoyed verbally abusing each other. A fellow expressed an opinion, others viciously attacked. He would be called every derogatory name under the sun, all in the name of expressing views on Nigerian politics! 

       One would think that those so desecrated would feel offended, but, no, the Nigerians on this particular forum took turns savaging each other’s characters. It was as if these people alternated the roles of sadists and masochists; they, apparently, enjoyed being attacked, enjoyed pain (masochists) and enjoyed inflicting pain on other people (sadists). The hostility and fear folks directed at one another were beyond belief.

     In civilized discourse, gentlemen have unwritten sense of boundaries; they do not bring each other’s family members into their public discourse.  But these Nigerians have no sense of boundaries; they not only attacked themselves but each others family members, members that are not part of their apparent sadomasochistic club.  They called each others families every derogatory name that they could think of, such as “your father is a thief, your wife is a whore, your child is a blockhead etc”. Indeed, some of the more voyeuristic members investigated each others backgrounds and should they find what, to them, seemed negative would publish it all over the Internet for the entire world to read. This obvious primitive behavior would not be countenanced in American middle class discourse.

       After one year of exposing myself to these folks mutual verbal abuses, I decided that it were better that I did not participate in the forum. I do not need to be exposed to those whose reason for being is to put each other down.  Moreover, I have heard what these folk have to say; they proffer the same opinions, over and over, again; each of them offering predictable opinions, none changing his opinions with no one influencing others. Not one of these fellows gets others to change their set views; it is as if each of them is speaking to himself and listening to his own echoes!

         Apart from the madding crowd: I ask: why do these people attack each other; how come they do not respect each other; should public discourse be couched in insulting language? Could what is going on here be self hatred and hatred of black folk?

     SELF ESTEEM

         The self we know is conceptual, a mental construct (ala George Kelly), and could be positive or negative. If you subject it to merciless attacks you might damage it. So, why are these Nigerians always attacking each other’s conceptual selves?

        Given black folk’s tendency to score low on IQ tests, their sociopolitical backwardness, all things being constant, the average black person probably doubts his self worth? 

        Given that the rest of the world has little or no regard for black folk, sane black folk would do everything in their power to help each other develop positive self esteem. But no, I see Nigerians verbally abusing each other and contributing to each others low self regard. They give their brothers gifts of thorns!

       These folk’s behavior is like what transpires in North America’s inner cities: self hating blacks kill other black persons.

               During elections in Nigeria’s election, some politicians hire thugs to kill their opponents.  Moreover, Nigerian criminals find it rather easy to liquidate their fellow Nigerians. To steal a few dollars from you, a Nigerian criminal could kill you and feel no remorse, no sense of doing wrong; it is as if he killed a valueless rat! Indeed, many of these amoral criminals seem to enjoy killing people; apparently, they seem to derive a sense of power and importance from killing human beings.

             South Africa currently has one of the highest homicide rates in the world; there, African criminals kill Africans as if Africans lives have no worth. 

           Why do Africans find it easy to derogate, harm, or kill each other? In an effort to answer this question I revisited the literature on black self hatred.

        Do Africans find it easy to kill each other, as their ancestors found it easy to sell each other into slavery, because they hate themselves?  Do Africans find it easy to humiliate each other, as Nigerian Internet sadistic prowlers do, because they hate themselves? 

       (If you are not familiar with the literature on black folk’s self esteem, please review these seminal studies. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, also his “The Wretched of the Earth”; Dr Fanon utilized Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology to explore Diasporan black folk’s apparent self rejection and admiration for everything white. Karon, Negro Personality; Pettigrew, A Profile of the Negro American; Kardinar and Ovesey, the Mark of Oppression; Frazier, Negro Middle Class, O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban, the Psychology of Colonization Persons, Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma,  and, of course, Kenneth Clark’s study on why black children prefer white to black dolls.)

            A NOTE OF WARNING: Psychology is not a hard science. Much of it tends to be reductive, that is, reduce complex issues to whatever methodological approach the dominant figures in the field currently embrace. For example, when Sigmund Freud’s dominant personality was current, his psychoanalytic paradigm of reality (that behavior is influenced by unconscious factors) was used to explain everything human beings do; psychoanalysis turned out to be fairy tales. The psychoanalysts were replaced by the behaviorists. Watson, Pavlov, Skinner, Bandura, Milgram, Zimbardo, Seligman and other behaviorists made so much noise that for a while folk believed that human beings could be explained by stimulus-response behavioral methodology. It turned out that behaviorism is, at best, a useful tool for teaching children socially appropriate behaviors. We can arrange contingencies in such a manner that positively reinforced behaviors are repeated but that does not explain complex human behaviors, such as thinking. Behavior modification technology had little effect on changing the behaviors of criminals. So, out the window went behaviorism. Currently, we are undergoing what is called neuroscience revolution. Just about every human malady is purportedly explained by the behavior of neurotransmitters and electrical ions in the brain. Today, folk who have mental disorders are filled with psychotropic medications, medications that have adverse side effects.

      Obviously, we need to understand the biochemistry of the brain, but, in the final analysis, neuroscience will not explain human thinking. There will always be an unknown element in the creature called man.

     Psychology, even at its best, tends to be speculative.  Worse, sometimes, it makes global generalizations that do not apply to all people. 

      The following essay is conjectural; its conclusions cannot be verified as scientific facts. Its causal explanation: that self hatred leads to blacks killing their people, may not be correlated.   

       Given the limitations of psychology, my modest goal is for the reader to see my causal analysis as heuristic rather than conclusive.

             This essay amounts to showing what is wrong with Africans. We know that certain individuals enjoy pointing out what is wrong with other people; doing so, apparently, makes them feel superior to those they are criticizing.

      As Karen Horney pointed out, Neurotics identify with their mentally invented ego ideals and from their ideal standpoint see other people’s mistakes; they compare real people to imaginary  perfect behavior and necessarily perceive their inability to live up to those impossible perfect ideals.

       The advice to remove the plank in ones own eyes before seeing the speck of dust in others eyes is a sound one. One first must eradicate ones own self hatred before one can help other people heal their hatred; no projection allowed. 

        Africans, like all people, have specks of dust in their eyes; they have egos, whereas some, those who pursue ego ideals have planks in their eyes. One must remove the greater self hatred one has, if any, to be able to help others remove their minor self hatred.

     Finally, science assumes chance and accident as causal factors; it does not recognize planning and determinism. In that light, it is not necessary to engage in elaborate psychobabble to explain why people do what they do. They do what they do as a result of randomness.   In which case, it is not self hatred that makes people kill other people; it is just that they do so; chance explains their killing. To add insult to injury, Psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies and their incessant examinations of the mind do not seem to stop people from killing each other.  Empirically, it can be pointed out that what stops people from harming other people are the law, and the punishment of lawbreakers.

     If you embrace the scientific explanation of phenomena and its belief in chance and eschew attribution of unverified causal factors in human behaviors, you are free to ignore my thesis that self hatred is probably what makes Africans harm each other.

        SELF CONCEPT/SELF IMAGE

        Who is man?  Ultimately, we do not know who man is. What we do know for sure is that upon birth, the human child inherits a nervous system, a brain that enables him to perceive his environment, think about it and adapt to it. The human child’s biological constitution equips him to construct an idea of who he thinks that he is and use that self construct to cope with the exigencies of his world.

      Right from the moment of birth, the human child begins to experience his world. His biological constitution interacts with his social and physical world and he develops an idea of who he thinks that he is. By age six, the human child has some idea of who he thinks that he is; by age thirteen, adolescence, he has developed a self concept, an opinion of who he thinks that he is.

       From adolescence to the end of his life, the individual’s self concept tends to remain constant and stable.  Conversion to religion, trauma to the brain and, sometimes, psychotherapy, may alter the self concept but otherwise the individual at thirteen is the same individual at eighty.

     As George Kelly sees it (to make this essay flow, I will not brake my chain of thought with citations; if you are interested in references, please see further reading), the child uses his inherited biological datum and social experiences to construct a self concept.  The self concept is subsequently translated into a mental image, a picture of who the individual thinks that he is.

       Each human being has a self concept and a self image; each human being also has concepts and images of other human beings and everything in his world.

       If these concepts are “true”, relative to the social environment, the individual is normal. “Reality” is largely a social construct, therefore, what is normal is what the generality of the people in a group says is so; however, what the group construes as real  may turn out to be wrong; ultimately, we do not know what is real.  Scientific “facts” are also not the “truth”, but are what scientists currently have consensus on, which may change tomorrow.   

       The self concept and self image is the same as personality.  Personality is derived from Latin, persona, a mask worn by actors to disguise their true identity. The idea is that the individual’s personality, his self concept, his self image, may not be his true identity.  Beneath the mask (self concept, personality) may be another self?

        Most religions and Carl Jung believe that beneath the mask of the separated ego self concept/personality is a spiritual self.

       What is self evident is that the human child has an inherited capacity to construct a self concept/personality for himself. Through trials and errors, the human child adapts to the exigencies of his social and physical environment. In the process, he constructs a self concept and translates it to a self image; he develops a personality.

PERSONALITY

          Personality is the individual’s habitual pattern of responding to stimuli emanating from his environment.

       Generally speaking, most people have normal personalities; but about ten percent of the population has problematic personalities, personality disorders; that is, their manner of relating to their environment generates conflict between them and other people.

       (We shall not explore abnormal psychology in this essay; you can find out about your personality by taking personality tests, such as the MMPI; you could also take IQ tests, such as WAIS; they can tell you whether you are normal or abnormal. There are psychotics and there are neurotics. Psychotics, that is, schizophrenics, the deluded, bipolar etc tend to lose touch with “reality” and take their wishes as reality, and they tend to hallucinate. Neurotics, that is, those with the ten known personality disorders: paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive and passive aggressive tend to be normal in every respect except that they want to distort “reality” and make it what they want it to become, but, by and large, know what reality is.  A person with personality disorder could be a medical doctor, engineer or his country’s head of state; consider the man who wants to seem superior to other people and seeks it in a compulsive manner but still knows that he is not his wishes.)

   All human beings, in childhood (which ends at age twelve) construct self concepts.  Subsequent to the construction of the self concept, they see their world from the prism of their self concepts. If their self concepts, personalities, are disordered they see the world in a disordered manner.

     Human beings tend to believe that they are the concepts, ideas and images of themselves that they have in their minds and defend those with the various ego defense mechanisms that Anna Freud enumerated in her book by that title: repression, suppression, denial, dissociation, displacement, projection, compensation, restitution, rationalization, fantasy, reaction-formation, sublimation, avoidance, justification, minimizing, anger, fear, shame, guilt, and so on.

     If, for example, you do things to seem superior to other people, you are using compensation, you are acting as if you are your wished ideal, important self; you are not important. The neurotic is not his pretense; you ought to accept that you are like all of us; if you let go of your ego defenses, become defenseless, you feel peaceful and happy; on the other hand, if you are extremely defended, you feel tense and anxious.

          The self concept is an individual and social construct; the individual, building on his inherited biological datum and social experiences constructs a self concept. Society and inherited body always influence the manner the self concept is constructed. We are all living in a General Systems environment where everything affects everything else; other people affect you and you affect other people; no one is an island. We are always adjusting to what other parts of the system do, as they are always adjusting to our behaviors. Your parents, siblings, peers, teachers (Harry Stack Sullivan called those your significant others) affect your behavior, as you affect theirs.

        Consider a child socialized in a conditionally accepting family. Say, the parents insist that the child must be outstanding at school and or sports before they accept him. The child senses that he is not accepted as he is (this is called conditional acceptance ala Carl Rogers), that his significant others expect him to be a perfect self before they accept him.

       Every child knows that he needs his significant others support if he is to survive. Without adults feeding them, children would die. Fearing abandonment and death, the child struggles to be as his primary care givers expect of him. If he inherited a relatively healthy body, he is able to meet most of the demands of his conditionally accepting society and develops a normal self (with minor neurotic fear of failure), but if he inherited a sensitive body, he develops tremendous fear of rejection (avoidant personality). To avoid rejection, he uses his mind to construct a false perfect self concept and self image that he thinks would be up to the standards approved by his primary care providers and identifies with it and struggles to become it (he is now a neurotic child and knows no somatic or psychic peace).

        In such a child’s mind are now two selves: his real self, whom he associates with failure and inferiority, and an ideal self, which he associates with success, superiority and social acceptance. He rejects the real self and aspires after the fictional imaginary ideal self. (See Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Albert Ellis and R.D. Laing.)

     Such a child has developed neurosis and experiences neurotic anxiety; that is, the two self concepts in his mind conflict with each other and he is perpetually anxious.  At school he may struggle to be an “A” student, for if he is such a student his parents and society accept him; if he is not an ideal student he feels that his parents and society would reject him. 

       Not all those who wish to be outstanding students are so, for intelligence is probably contributed to by inheritance? If the child is above average in intelligence (IQ over 120) he may, in fact, become an excellent student.  Alas, only the truly gifted, IQ over 132, can be mostly A students throughout their schooling career. Most students are average in intelligence, IQ 85-115, and are likely to make Cs and occasional B grades.

      Most achievers in society tend to be normal-neurotic persons. (We say normal neurotic for even the most normal person has neurotic traits.  Neurosis is a continuum, from mild to severe. When Africans hear the term neurotic they see it as others unaware that it applies to them. Most of the giants of psychology had neurosis. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis was an obsessive-compulsive neurotic; Carl Jung had two distinct personalities, one secular and the other religious, Alfred Adler had inferiority complex.) Achievers tend to pay a psychological price: they tend to have higher than normal levels of anxiety and tension hence easily succumb to drugs and alcohol abuse; they use these mood altering agents to reduce their somatic tension.

   I approach people from Alfred Adler and Karen Horney’s psychological systems (and aspects of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Behavior therapy). In this light, human beings begin out feeling inferior and compensate with false superiority. They act “as if” they are the important, ideal selves that they wish to be but are not. They postulate ideal self concepts and pursue them. Much of their behaviors are motivated by their desire to attain the standards of their false ideal selves.  Much of the evils they do are rooted in their pursuit of the fictional ideal, superior self.

        Psychotherapy aims at getting people to let go of their pursuit of false ideal selves and accept their real selves; therapy aims at shrinking peoples swollen egos to normal proportions, hence therapists are called shrinks, they shrink peoples heads. Alas, people like to like their false big selves. (Elsewhere, I tried to shrink Igbos swollen egos and they got angry at me; they ought to be grateful to me, for, in their grandiose neurotic self concepts they are conflicted and tense; if they return to their small real self, they would be at peace and happy.)     

        The question is:  what is the real self.  My premise is that the real self is the person as he knows himself to be, his body included. However, ultimately, the real self includes an unknown aspect of us that religions call spirit.

       A healthy person thinks and behaves through his real self, whereas a neurotic person tries to think and act through his false ideal self and a psychotic person thinks that he is already his imaginary ideal self. To the extent that a person tries to be a false, superior, ideal self, he feels anxious and is unhappy. 

THE ORIGIN OF BLACK SELF HATRED

       Black people, be they Africans or African Americans, live in a world where in all indices of development they are backward. They have contributed little or nothing to the world of science and technology. Their societies are poor and pathetic. In the extant world, other races do not admire black folk. In fact, many non-Africans see Africans as helpless persons who cannot take good care of themselves hence to be helped with economic aid. 

        All things being equal, black people, unless they are into heavy denial (that is, over utilize the ego defense mechanism of denial) may suspect that they are not be as good as other people?

       In America, until the 1970s, white folk actually saw black folk as less than their pets! Black folk could not eat in the same restaurants with white folk or use the same restrooms with whites; black folk were not considered good enough for cerebral jobs. It was extraordinarily humiliating to be a black man in America. Considering that human beings are proud animals, animals that want their fellow animals to appreciate their worth, it was devastating to black folk’s pride to be treated as if they were worthless.

             Unless a black man is living on a different planet he understands how white folk controlled world sees him.  If a black man is on planet earth, the chances are that he may develop low self esteem; that is, have low estimation of which he is, evaluate himself as not as good as other people etc. (His low self esteem, apparently, contributes to his tendency to perform very poorly at American schools.)

       Low self esteem not withstanding, I see black folk who pretend to like themselves and laugh like their lives are peaches and roses.  Pretended positive self esteem is not the same thing as positive self esteem.

       Positive self esteem is characterized by love for ones self and love for other people, and by respect for ones self and respect for other people.

      Now, revisit the Nigerians on Naijapolitics forum.  Are their constant attacks on each other, their constant efforts to denigrate each other characteristic of love and respect for each other? 

       Of course not; they probably have some self-hate and project their self hatred to hating other black persons; as long as they hate other black persons, by belittling them, they hide their self hatred from their awareness. (All things being equal, some Africans like themselves; I am, therefore, generalizing; I generalize to make my point very poignantly. If you are the exception, the African with positive self esteem, good for you.)

       The individual who constantly puts other people down, and finds faults with others, as Nigerians on Naijapolitics forum do, so as to make him seem perfect, is an individual, Alfred Adler tells us, who feels inferior and wants to seem superior.

       An individual may hate himself, dissociates from his self hatred and project it to other people. (In projection defense, the individual sees something in him, what he does not like, dissociates from it, denies it, and projects it out to others; he now sees in others what he sees in himself; of course, what he sees in others may also be in them, after all, as Harry Stack Sullivan tells us, human beings are more alike than unlike; it is the case of not seeing the plank in ones own eyes while seeing the speck of dust in other peoples eyes; first remove the plank in your eyes so that you may see clearly and be able to help other people; denying ones inferiority does not make it go away!)

      I want you, if you are an African, to look into your mind and ascertain whether you have positive or negative self esteem. Please try to be honest and do not hide what you see in you. There is nothing wrong in feeling inferior, as long as you understand the psychodynamics at work and change it. That is what psychotherapy does; it helps people to understand their thinking processes, their self concepts and behaviors, and where deficits exist in them correct them. Denying the truth does not make it go away. 

HYPOTHESIS

       Here is my hypothesis: most university educated Africans, especially those who have lived in white folk controlled environments, hence experienced white negative perception of blacks, tend to have some low self esteem and self hatred.

        (Crossing European borders and been put through the humiliating searches we are put through is enough to make one doubt ones worth; it takes conscious effort not to succumb to low self esteem.) 

      My thesis is that most Diasporan blacks have some self hatred, albeit hidden from their immediate conscious minds; perhaps, hidden in what Freud called the unconscious mind.  Hidden, it still influences folk’s behaviors.  (Sigmund Freud believes that what is repressed into the unconscious tends to manifest in an irrational manner. For example, most men have desire to have sex with the beautiful women in their world, not just with one woman; they Christian upbringing tells them to repress/sublimate that desire, and, as a result, Freud thinks, act irrationally, such as go to wars and kill themselves; give them a little sexual freedom, Wilhelm Reich thinks, and they stop killing themselves in pursuit of non-existent powerful selves. Hence the 1960s Hippie slogan: make love not war.)

       Consider Nigerians taking bribes, a very irrational behavior. It is the height of self degradation to stoop so low as to take bribe from another person. But Nigerians who have hidden their low self esteem in their unconscious and pretend to have high self esteem may not know how belittling it is to take bribes.  Indeed, it might even make them feel powerful to take bribes, just as it makes antisocial personality disordered persons feel powerful to hurt other people.

         What makes a healthy human being feel alive and happy is helping other people become their best.

                 Are most Africans laboring under low self esteem and self hatred?  Do you think that I am talking about myself and projecting what I see in me to other Africans?  Are you one of those glib Africans who deny the obvious?   Do you have insight to why you do what you do?  Are you the proverbial extraverted, laughing African who does not like to look into his soul and know who he is?  Plato reminds us that an unexamined life is not worth living!

      In developmental psychology (see Kohlberg, Kohut, Masterson, Alice Miller, Piaget, Erickson, White, Kegan etc) it is said that there are stages of moral development and that some persons are stuck at lower stages of it. Children grow from not having social conscience to developing one. A properly growing child internalizes the norms of his society (hence is said to be normal). If properly socialized, and a child does what his group disapproves of, he feels guilty; that noxious affect makes him change his behaviors.  Such children are said to have strong superegos.

       Some children, for some reasons, do not develop social conscience; such children do not feel guilty and remorseful when they engage in antisocial behaviors. Indeed, they may even enjoy hurting other people. 

         Those without much social conscience are said to be underdeveloped. In psychoanalytic terms, they have strong Id and weak superego. Such persons are like savages and need re-socialization to check their Id, animal instincts, and strengthen their superego, introjected social norms. (The ego is the agent that mediates between the demands of the id and superego, primitive desires and civilizations requirements from us.)

       There are morally underdeveloped persons all over the world. If five percent of the population is prone to stealing, perhaps, are criminals, society can handle them by recruiting police, judges and building prisons to house them. But if the majority of the people are thieves how is society going to be able to get a handle on them?  If many Nigerian leaders are criminals, who is going to engender pro-social behavior in the people?

       There are white racists who believe that black folk have a biologically disposed propensity to criminal behavior and do not feel surprised that most Nigerian leaders are thieves; they expect it!

       (Years ago, as a student, I visited America’s national monuments, including where her founding fathers lived: Washington’s Mount Vernon, Jefferson’s Monticello, and Madison/Monroe’s Montpellier etc. While visiting Thomas Jefferson’s house, we were shown where he and his family members were buried. Since we were also told that he had over 600 African slaves, I asked the tour guide where the slaves were buried. In a very cavalier manner, as if the question was unimportant, he pointed to the five thousand acres wooded area surrounding the house and said that slaves were buried anywhere therein, in unmarked graves!  Africans did not even have the honor of marked graves?  What a depressing reality. If you are a black person and are exposed to such negative feedback on your race and you do not feel low self esteem, you must, indeed, be from another planet.)

CONCLUSION

        I think that Africans tendency to kill each other and their politicians’ tendency to kill their opponents is rooted in their disregard for themselves. This disregard may be hidden in their ego unconscious, and projected out, as disrespect for their fellow blacks.

        I think that Africans find it easy to enslave, insult or kill each other because they do not love each other, and have no regard for their fellow black persons.

        A people, who, for a thousand years, 900-1900AD, sold each other into slavery, first to Arabs and later to Europeans are a people who do not like and respect each other.

       I believe that Africans have deep seated self hatred. This self hatred probably underlies their present inability to do the right thing by their fellow Africans and accounts for their corrupt governments. Until they learn to respect and love their fellow Africans, I do not believe that Africans can govern themselves well.

Part 11

  AFRICAN POLITICIANS KILL EACH OTHER

       Nigeria is entering another one of her sham election cycles. As usual, the killing of aspirants to public office has begun.  Funsho Williams, Daramola and many others have already been killed. By the time the election is finally rigged and another set of scoundrels ascend political office, hundreds, if not thousands, of Nigerians would have been killed.

        I submit that Nigerian politicians kill their opponents because they have little or no regard for their lives.

       I believe that Africans do not love each other, do not respect each other, do not care for each other and given the opportunity would apprehend and sell each other into slavery and or kill each other. Contemporary Africans are like their ancestors who sold their people into slavery; nothing has changed in their character structures.

      If this assessment of Africans seems hash and overstated then let us look at Africans behaviors in the past one thousand years and see if it shows anything but mutual disregard.

     SLAVERY

       History books tell us that around 900 AD, Arab Muslims reached West and East Africa and began buying African slaves. Africans easily obliged Arab wishes for African slaves. The few African potentates who converted to Islam and went on pilgrimage to Mecca went with thousands of slaves that they sold to the Arabs.

       (In secondary school, I read about African Muslim kings like Mansa Musa, Askia Mohammed etc, and how they sold thousands of slaves to Arabs.  Apparently, the folk who wrote those so-called West African history books, to replace European history books that were used by Nigerian colonial era history teachers, wanted to show the world that Africans, too, had history and had important historical figures. Empires and historical figures whose fame rested on selling their own people? I was disgusted by the history of so-called ancient Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Bornu, all slave empires!)

        Those who loved their people did not sell them into slavery. Africans did not love their people hence sold them into slavery.

       In the 1460s, the Portuguese reached West Africa and by the 1480s had reached the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa). In 1492 the Spanish (Christopher Columbus) reached the Americas. 

        Subsequent to the discovery of the Americas, Europeans needed slaves to work the new land for them and Africans obliged them with slaves. African tribes went to war with each other with the specific goal of capturing slaves and selling them to Europeans.

      In my part of Africa, Alaigbo, in the 1600s, a particularly vicious and amoral group, Aro, who lived at the boundary between Igbos and Efiks, entered into an unholy alliance with Efiks, who lived at the Atlantic coast hence directly traded with Europeans, to capture their fellow Igbos and sell them into slavery. These benighted people hired other groups, such as the Abam, as their mercenaries, to roam Igbo land, kidnapping slaves and bringing them to Arochukwu, to be sold into transatlantic slavery.

       Trafficking in iniquity not been enough, the Aro presented themselves as priests/judges and had Igbos bring their cases to them and those they judged guilty were sent to jail.  You guessed it, jail was been sold into slavery! 

      The Aro were ingenuous in figuring out ways to be evil rather than good. These evil souls stationed themselves in practically every Igbo town as priests/judges and used their Machiavellian scheme to acquire and sell their fellow Igbos into slavery.

       (Good folk establish religions to enlighten their people, Aro criminals established a devious and specious religion to enslave their people! They are beneath contempt. Aro must apologize to all Igbo for their crime. If white slave buyers must pay reparations so must Africans; both must apologize for their crime against humanity.)

       Slave trading in Africa, in one form or another, lasted into the early 1900s. In 1902, for example, the British (Lugard’s West African Frontier Army) stormed Arochukwu and their so-called Long Juju and finally dispersed the slave selling criminals.

        Much of the history of the British in Nigeria during the late nineteenth century was centered on trying to prevent Nigerians from selling each other into slavery. They had to remove Oba Kosoko of Lagos for he insisted on selling his people into slavery; they had to exile Jaja of Opobo for he specialized in selling Igbo slaves.  The Royal Niger Company (later called the United African Company, UTC) sought ways to replace selling of people with other commodities, such as palm produce, rubber and cocoa.

        For our present purposes, Nigerians and other Africans engaged in selling their people and did so with gusto and in fact resisted stopping slave trade.  They engaged in this heinous crime for at least a thousand years, 900-1900 AD.  I believe that this selling of their people showed that Africans did not love each other. I believe that Africans had no regard for the value of their fellow Africans.  I believe that Africans hated other Africans.

       I believe that this historical disregard for one another is carried over into contemporary Africa. African politicians, in the main, do not consider political offices as from which they served their people. Like their slave selling ancestors, contemporary Africans seek political offices to gratify their narcissistic and antisocial desires. Their ancestors sold their people and used the money they obtained to buy European wines and African titles. In Alaigbo, they sold their people to buy the title of Ozo, and that made their warped minds seem like very important men. Today, Africans seek political office to seem like very important men, not to serve their people. As a matter of fact, they see political office as from which to steal their people’s money and use it for their own good. I am yet to see a Nigeria who sought political office because he actually has an agenda of what he wants to do for his people.

        Those who love their people do not steal from them, do they?  I submit that Africans do not love their people, and that, in fact, they actively hate their people!

       (The hatred I saw Nigerians shower each other on Naijapolitics forum was enough proof that these people are haters rather than lovers. In the one year that I participated in that forum, not one of them attempted to know who I am as a person. Their primary goal was to attack you; they are not actuated by love but hate. They seek ways to hurt each other. A healthy mind asks: how can I help you, not how can I hurt you. These people are sick minds! They need healing; love is what heals us; they need to be taught to love one another.)

      The political season is about to begin in Nigeria and criminals masquerading as politicians aspire to gain political offices, not to serve their people, but to gratify their infantile vanity and steal from the national treasury. I submit that these people kill each other because they hate each other. I believe that Nigerians and Africans in general have tremendous self hatred and that this accounts for their tendency to kill each other.

      Psychoanalysis helps us understand that self hatred can be denied and projected out. It goes like this. People, in this case, Africans, hate themselves; at the conscious level, they deny that they hate themselves; they then project their self hatred to hatred for those who remind them of their hated selves, Africans. To get rid of their self hatred, they attack and or kill other Africans.

      Africans hostility towards their fellow Africans is incredible. In fact, you can relate to these people and not experience any act of love from them. All they do is seek ways to use you, exploit you, steal from you, desecrate you and ultimately kill you. Contemporary Africans are still slave sellers; they are evil beyond belief. 

         It is time we called a spade a spade and stopped beating about the bush; Africans are an unloving people.

       (If you want to keep your sanity, you must keep some emotional distance from Africans; and, hopefully, from that space teach them the meaning of love.)

       Between now and May, 2007 when the current thugs at Abuja, hopefully, hands the government over to successors, those they rigged the election for, Nigerians would have killed many of their people. I expect this killing to take place. Those who hate themselves kill each other.

        Any one who wants to stop the political killing going on in Nigeria must first teach Nigerians how to love themselves. I believe that Africans thousand years history of slavery has made self hatred all they know! Africans now need to be taught how to love themselves.  (Europeans also participated in slavery hence do not like themselves. See, white Americans are increasingly destroying themselves with drugs and homosexuality; these people also need to be taught love; that is not the subject of this essay.)

       To tell someone that he hates himself is to say something negative about him.  Human beings would rather you said positive things about them.  Therefore, if you said something negative about them they would feel offended by you.  Understandably, some of them would try to show that you are wrong and that they are right. 

       One, therefore, expects some Africans to profess that they do not hate themselves and that my thesis is wrong. They said the same thing in response to Kenneth Clark’s studies showing that black Americans preferred white to black dolls.  Despite their denials, we still see black Americans who prefer everything white and yet tell us that they love everything black!

       We see Nigerians who would die to live in the white man’s land and yet tell us how proud they are as Nigerians! They are so proud of their country that they are fleeing from it, trying to smuggle into Europe and North America! In North America they perform menial jobs and are essentially modern slaves. In America, self hating Nigerians hate black Americans, whom they call Ndiakata (those who fight a lot, troubled people). If you are with Nigerians all you hear is their derogatory talk about black Americans. Black Americans do the same to them, for the black man, worldwide, does not like his people; both Africans and African Americans admire white folk.

     One expects folks who feel that their self worth has been attacked to fight back and show that they do not hate themselves. However, while they are at it, may one remind them that the sign of self love is love of ones neighbors? Let us see Nigerians who love their neighbors and show that love by serving their needs rather than stealing from them.

       In America, we hear a lot of talk about black pride and love for everything black. But these very black Americans sell drugs to each other; drugs with which they destroy their lives.  These “I am black and proud’ crowd mug each other and, indeed, kill each other like they are flies. Homicide in black neighborhoods is highest in America. Washington DC, a virtually black town, is the murder capital of America. These people drive by and kill innocent fellow blacks and apparently do not loose sleep over their actions. It is as if they see each other as nothing important and their death does not matter.

      Instead of trying to deal with the root cause of black on black crime, many scholars engage in elaborate sociological studies, showing the social-economic roots of the perceived problems in the black community.

       Black folk live in a racist society, they are the last hired and first fired, they are relegated to performing menial jobs and are generally poor; they are not well educated and live in the culture of the underclass. They are a frustrated bunch. They seek ways to ameliorate their unenviable lives by taking recourse to promiscuity (and contract sexually transmitted Diseases at a high rate, including HIV that kill them), alcoholism, and drugs.

        Every woe that befalls mankind is magnified in the American ghetto.  All these are explained from a sociological perspective, that is, they are seen as caused by the racist American system that black folk live in.

      Obviously, we live in an interdependent and interconnected world where every individual’s actions impact other individuals. Each of us is always adjusting our thinking and behaviors to what other people do. On the whole, the idea is that black self hatred is induced by the external racist environment.

         Regardless of what caused it, it is when the individual hates himself and hates those who are like him that he is likely to kill people like him. This behavior, however, is odd, for common sense would suggest that oppressed persons would kill their oppressors, not their fellow victims. One would understand it if oppressed blacks killed their white oppressors, but, instead, they tend to kill their fellow blacks and seldom harm white persons. Apparently, they are cowards and kill those white society judge unimportant, blacks, and leave alone those white society judges as important, white folk.

      Moreover, if black folk killed white folk, white folk would hunt them down, apprehend and jail them.  To avoid white retribution, cowardly black folk limit their killing to their fellow blacks. Kill a nigger and since he has no worth the judicial system would not bother hunting you down, unless they do not have to expend too much effort and resources in doing so, but kill a white person and the whole weight of the judicial system is thrown at you! Kill a nigger and you could stay alive, but kill a white person and the chances are that you would be killed. Therefore, desiring to live, black sociopaths satisfy their craving to kill somebody by killing their fellow black persons.

       Another mystery that needs some explanation is the low incidence of suicide in the black community. Common sense would suggest that the oppressed would become depressed and commit suicide at a higher rate. 

        Conscious attempts to kill themselves are not high in the black community, but unconscious attempts to kill themselves are high. What is overeating, smoking, alcoholism, drinking coffee, doing drugs and not taking proper care of ones body but unconscious effort to destroy ones self? .

       The explanation given for low suicidality among African Americans is how they process information. If one sees ones fate as determined by other people one is likely to blame them. Now, it is others fault that one is who one is. This way, one retains a fragile sense of perfection and self acceptance by seeing other people as the cause of ones problems.

        Those who blame other persons for their fate are less likely to kill themselves. On the other hand, those who blame themselves for their fate are likely to see themselves as defective and contemplate suicide. 

       Those who blame other people for their problems tend to develop paranoia, whereas those who blame themselves for their problems tend to develop depression.

       The paranoid person who blames other people for his bad fate is likely to attack other people, commit homicide.

      The depressed person who blames himself for his fate is likely to kill himself hence suicide rate is high among depressed persons. 

       A black person is likely to become paranoid and hence homicidal rather than depressed and suicidal.  

       William Meissner pointed out that those who tend to be prone to paranoia tend to be less emotionally mature than those who tend to be depressed. The depressed person takes responsibility for his actions and fate, whereas the paranoid person does not take responsibility for his actions and fate. Paranoid Adolf Hitler blamed other people, groups and nations for his/Germans problems and set out to destroy them. In killing “them” he thought that he would become perfect and that all his troubles would be over. Alas, his troubles were only beginning, for the problem could only be solved inside him, not outside him.

       The paranoid person posits an ideal self concept/image and wants to become it and blames other people to the extent that he does not become his fictional ideal self. The paranoid person has external locus of control.

       The depressed person also posits an ideal self and wants to become it but blames himself if he does not become it. The depressed person tends to have internal locus of authority.

        This paper is not aimed at mental health professionals but at the average reader; therefore,   what we need to stress is that paranoid and antisocial persons posse more danger to society for since they blame other people, society, for their problems, they are likely to act out, attack and kill people. Africans tend to blame other people for their fate and kill other people when their fate seems rotten.

        The thesis of this paper is that beginning from their slave selling era, Africans developed low self esteem and have little or no regard for one another. Because they essentially hate themselves, they find it easy to destroy their fellow Africans. They generally do not attack white persons for they place white persons on a pedestal and think that somehow white persons have a more worthwhile life. Indeed, some Africans so admire whites that they bleach their skins to make them look white like. President Olusagun Obasanjo’s late wife, Stella, (thou should not malign the dead) bleached her black skin to white.

       My thesis is probably going to be unacceptable to proud Africans. Some of them probably will say that they love being black. We have heard that one before. Michael Jackson so loves his black body that he bleached it white, so loves his black nose that he cut it to make it look like white folk’s noses, so loves his black wooly hair that he straightens it to make it look like white folk’s hair, so loves blacks that he married a white woman to have fair complexioned children. Michael Jackson having behaviorally attempted to be white looks a reporter in the face and tells him that he is proud of his blackness. That man has so told himself lies that he is not only living a lie but is a lie!

        The same goes for Africans who tell you how proud they are of being black while doing everything they could to seem white like, including abandoning Africa to live in the White man’s land, hoping that the alleged goodness in whites would rob off on them via their proximity to whites. (In the Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport talked about blacks wanting to be close to whites hoping that proximity to whites would elevate their status to white level.)

       Africans live lies and are deceiving no one but themselves. These lying Africans will be the most vocal ones telling us that they do not hate themselves. You do not hate yourself indeed when at every opportunity you kill your fellow Africans and take joy in desecrating other Africans as the self hating neurotics do on naijapolitics forum. You do not hate Africans and you try to kill the messenger of light telling you to heal your neurosis. You do not hate Africans and you attack any one telling you to give up your neurotic effort to seem superior to other people and accept our mutual sameness and equality. These African neurotics even resort to typical paranoid behavior of seeing the person who tells them to heal their mental disorders as the sick one. Hitler saw himself as healthy and saw other people as sick. Of course all of us have our neuroses; a realistic person accepts his own neurosis and seeks healing for it, rather than denies it and sees other people as the sick ones.

       (Every psychotherapist must undergo therapy. To become a healed healer one must know what the sickness to be healed is. Every human being has some neurosis; it is those who understand this fact and heal their own neurosis that can help others heal theirs. An unhealed healer who denies his illness cannot heal any one. That is why religions ministers, mostly unhealed healers, cannot heal their flock’s own illnesses.)

      I am not going to pussy foot about it; I believe that Africans hate themselves, mask their self hatred and project it to hatred for other Africans.

        Let me show you how self hatred works. When I was a college student, I had contempt for African adults. I used to see them as cowards for allowing the white man to screw them. I thought that if black folk had balls that they would have stood up and fought the white man rather than permit him to enslave them. I saw adult Africans as folks who accommodated white abuse of black folks and therefore lacked courage. As I saw it, it was better that one fought for freedom and, if necessary, died rather than live as a slave or second class citizens.

       My obvious contempt for adult Africans exhibited my self hatred. I projected my self hatred to hatred to adult Africans. (With adult experience, I learned that all human beings are cowardly.  White slave masters were cowardly for if they were courageous they would love rather than enslave others. Whites are so fearful that they tolerate their essentially terrorist governments; Western governments intimidate their people with guns and make them obey unjust laws. If human beings were not fearful they would not live on planet earth, for it is fear that enables them take measures to protect them. If you totally give up the fear that enslaves you to the ego and its body, as Jesus did, you would not defend your ego and body when it is attacked, and would die and return to wherever folk came from. Fear is what maintains this world.)

        (In Soul on Ice, Eldridge Clever, made observations regarding young blacks not respecting older blacks; in Black Power, Stockley Carmichael alluded to the same phenomenon: young black Americans hating adult blacks for betraying the race by accommodating white racism.)

       I believe that young black men’s lack of respect for their elders play a role in black on black homicide. Whereas I was the ultimate pro-social Catholic boy, and would rather die than commit a crime, still, I did not particularly care for the life of adult black persons.  To me, adult blacks seemed like so much garbage. 

       Extrapolating from my youthful mental status, I can see how a radical black youth can kill older black folks and not feel anything for, to him, he is removing worthless refuse. In the case of Nigeria, adult politicians do not care to provide Nigerian youths with employment. Youth unemployment is over 70 percent in Nigeria. If adults do not provide young college graduates with jobs, and generally do not care for them, why should the youths care for them?  I can see young Nigerians killing adult Nigerians without moral qualms. Actually, such behavior seems the most natural thing to do and the mystery is why it is not more rampant. 

       You must care for people if you want them to care for you; other people do not exist to sing praises to your inflated ego, your infantile vanity, as Nigerian big men think is the case. These coxcombs think that other people live to see them as very important persons, very important garbage (VIG).  A human being is important to other people if he serves their needs.  If you are not serving social interest you are not important. In my estimation, few Nigerian politicians are important; most of them are garbage to be scooped to the garbage dump.

      In conclusion, I think that African politicians and Africans in general hate themselves and that contributes to their homicidal behaviors towards one another. 

         It is when Africans examine their minds and appreciate the self hatred hidden in the inner recesses of their minds, if you like, in their unconscious minds, cathected and replaced it with love for all human beings, that they would begin serving their fellow Africans good.

       So, how do we go about replacing self hate with self love? Before we explore that let us briefly explore some philosophical issues.

 Part 111

THE EXISTENTIAL ROOTS OF MAN’S SELF HATRED

     In our world folks are over specialized and each specialist tends to look at the world from the parameters of his specialty. Building on his specialty he reaches conclusions about the nature of phenomena. The problem is that the conclusions he reaches are at best partial answers and not the whole answer.

       Looking at the world from only one angle is like the tale of three blind men and an elephant, each blind man touching the elephant and from where he touches it concludes about the nature of elephants!

       The universe is a whole; a whole is composed of parts. You cannot understand the whole by dwelling on some parts and not others.

         Human beings are a whole; you cannot understand them by looking at them from the limited scope of each academic discipline. You can look at man from psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, physics, and so on but each of these specialties is only going to tell you a little bit about him but not all about him.

        You must look at man as a holistic creature if you want to understand him.  But since each of us is trained only in a specialty, how are we ever going to understand all of man?  I do not think that we can understand all of man. All we can do is understand how our disciplines view man and know that that is not enough and proceed to have some tentative holistic view of him.

         I approach human behavior from biochemical and psychological perspectives.  But these offer us only partial understanding of man.

       Man is more than his body and his ego based thinking. One must also have philosophical and religious understanding of man.  I will try to provide us with some religious understanding of man, knowing full well that religion is not science or philosophy.

        Philosophy deals with what makes sense to the five senses; but what makes sense may not be verified in the empirical world.

        Science, on the other hand, deals with what can be verified and falsified in the empirical world. Science is inductive whereas philosophy includes deductive logic.

        According to Karl Popper, a scientific idea must be verifiable and falsifiable, whereas a philosophical idea only has to seem rational even though no one can verify its truth in the objective world.

       Neuroscience, the study of the nervous system is a science.  Neuroscience shows us what happens when we transmit messages from one neuron to another. We know that messages are exchanged at the nerve’s synapse and that they are transmitted through complex electrical and biochemical activity.

      Something stimulates the nerve and it fires its electrical potential (calcium ion, magnesium ion, sodium ion, magnesium ion etc) and certain neurotransmitters (such as dopamine, serotonin, GABA, acetylcholine etc). The synapse opens and a message passes from one nerve to another, and from thereon to other nerves. Without bothering you with the details of this mechanism, the salient point is that thinking is mediated through the auspices of electricity and neurotransmitters. If you interfere with this activity you affect thinking. If, for example, you have less calcium ion in your brain, your thinking may become excited and erratic; if you have the right level of calcium in your brain, your thinking becomes ordered. Simply stated, thinking has a lot to do with chemical balance in our brain. (To what extent is Africans low performance on Intelligence tests a function of their poor nutrition hence compromised brain chemistry?)

     Neuroscience teaches us what happens in our brains as we think and also helps us to understand what goes on in mental illness. For example, we now know that in depression the brain is not storing enough serotonin at the relevant neuro-receptors. Giving depressed persons’ serotonin reuptake blockers, such as Paxil, Prozac, and Zoloft etc, has done wonders in alleviating their depression. We now know that in schizophrenia that the brain is storing too much dopamine at certain neuro-receptors; the neuroleptic medications have done wonders in reducing the schizophrenic’s hallucinations and delusions. We now know that mania has something to do with elevated norepinephrine and anti mania medications like Lithium and Depakote have done wonders in calming the excited, euphoric manic. We now know that in paranoia, the nervous system is excited, meaning that certain excitatory neurotransmitters are released and those get the individual to think very fearfully.  Medications that calm the brain’s activity tend to be therapeutic in treating paranoia.

       Neuroscience is revolutionalizing our understanding and treatment of mental disorders. But does this mean that we have understood human thinking?  Of course not.  We may understand how messages are transferred from one nerve to another but that does not mean that we have understood complex thinking.

       For example, what motivates me to provide you with this free information?  How do you explain it: the dance of neurotransmitters in my brain, the desire for attention from you, the desire to help you appreciate your neurosis and do something about it so that Africa can begin to be well governed, for as long as neurotics govern Africa, nothing good will come out of her?  Is it one or all the above? 

        (I am painfully aware that psychology is not many Africans cup of tea; in fact, many Africans that I know of find no use for psychology! I suspect that they perceive psychology as an enemy because they think that it would make them look into their unconscious minds and find an evil that they would rather not see. Africans sold their people into slavery and that heinous crime is repressed into their unconscious mind and they would rather not look at it, for doing so could make them feel depressed. Instead, they would rather be their usual superficial happy selves and blame other people for all their problems without recognizing that if you point two accusatory fingers at other people that three point right back at you, asking you to take ownership for your behaviors. Every behavior has consequences. Our past evil gave us our present poverty.  Some of my friends say that when Africans finally take responsibility for their ancestors’ sin that they would experience mass depression and that many of them could commit suicide; that given their fragile egos' weak compensations that it is probably better not to decompensate them since we do not have the therapeutic means enable them recompensate. As they see it, ignorance is bliss!)

       Since scientists cannot tell us anything that really matters about human nature, we are left no option but to take from philosophy and religion what seems to make sense to us, knowing that in the past mankind has been deceived and misled by what seems to make sense.

        Not all that makes sense is useful; sometimes what does not make sense is very useful. Quantum mechanics, for example, does not make sense, yet it is very useful.

       In my view, human beings interpretation of their biosocial experiences (phenomenology) is mediated by a non-material force, which, for lack of a better name, I call spirit. .

      Different persons interpret the same event differently. If they were pure stimulus response organism, as Watson, Pavlov and Skinner and their behaviorism taught us, all of them would respond similarly.

         Animals like rats respond to the same stimuli in the same manner, as their instinct predispose them to respond.  If you surprise an animal, it feels fear and fear makes it run away to go protect its life; sometimes, in self defense the scared animal may attack you (fear is characterized by flight or fight response).  The animal’s response to fear is built into its body and certain chemicals are associated with it. If an animal is scared its body releases adrenalin, which stimulates its nervous system and makes it do what it has to do to protect itself (flee from you or fight you).

      Whereas human beings also respond as animals do, they have the capacity to choose to respond differently?  For example, an individual can recognize that anger response is not the powerful response it, at first, seems, but is a sign of weakness and give up being angry! Initially, anger response makes the individual feel powerful, for in anger his body mobilizes certain energies to enable him to attack whatever triggered his anger. In anger, folk can kill other folk hence anger makes them feel strong and powerful. But if they are thoughtful and learn that they are more than their bodies and that to love is better than to attack, that love is power and anger is weakness, they can learn not to exhibit anger response. That is to say that they would use their mind to over rule the response that biology suggests that they would: fight whatever obstructs the achievement of their goals with the aim of using force to remove the obstacle.

         Neuroscience tells us that human beings run from danger so as to defend their biological organism. But how do you explain the terrorist who straps a bomb on his body and go blow himself to smithereens?  How do you explain the effect of religion and ideology on folks?  Is the terrorist depressed and suicidal and seized on an opportunity to obtain martyrdom to destroy his life?  Or is the terrorist motivated by a higher cause that he thinks that he could sacrifice his life to?  Is he motivated by desire to go to heaven and be rewarded with seventy-two virgins?

      Whatever responses you give to the above questions are your opinions and not true. (Some psychoanalysts, cavalier as usual, see terrorists as depressed, antisocial persons. These bourgeois psychoanalysts so over value their physical lives that they think that all people do so and therefore cannot understand how a person could sacrifice his life for a cause he deems greater than his physical life. White Americans over value their bodies and do not understand how Arab terrorists do not value their lives to the point of killing themselves for their cause. This inability to appreciate the higher levels of human motivation is what would bring narcissistic American civilization to its knees.)

       Without pretending to know anything for sure, here is the little that I know, make of it what you like. If you take it seriously, perhaps, you, an African, will, for the first time in your life, become a creature that transcends his individual existence and works for the collective good of mankind. 

         Animals only live for the self, true human beings live for all people. Human happiness lies in working for the collective good, not just for our bellies (which are food for worms, anyway). 

       Love God, Love your neighbor and love yourself.  As long as you do not love the whole (God) and its parts (other people) you cannot love yourself, for the whole is the part and the part is in the whole.    You cannot love God and hate his son (people), nor can you love God’s son (part) and hate his father (whole). 

       God is love; only those who love know him.

      Our topic is self hatred.  How come Africans, indeed, all human beings have self hatred?  Sociologists have danced their dance and told us that self hatred is induced in us when other people do not love us, thus that blacks hate themselves because whites hate them.  Oh, really?  

       We were selling our people before white folk came into contact with us in the 1400s, so did we like ourselves before that date?  Did we love ourselves when we sold our people to Arabs?

         Walter Rodney tells us how others, Europeans, underdeveloped us; he sees us as innocent victims unto whom others do bad things; he does not see the bad things we do to ourselves!

      If you see only what others do to you and not what you do to you, you have depowered yourself; therefore, beware of victim psychology, which is what social science teaches; it makes folk powerless and unable to govern themselves, as, apparently, Africans are unable to do!

     (As an introspective thinker, I read philosophy, not what tells me that I am a victim of other people. I suggest that you read whatever you can lay your hands on by Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Berkeley, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer (my beloved mentor), Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, William James, Bergson, Sartre, Camus, Jasper,  Heidegger, and others.) 

MY MYTH OF CREATION

       I believe that there is only one force in the universe, God. God is spirit. God extended himself to all of us. In our essence we are spirit. (Spirit is able to unify, whereas matter cannot unify; matter, space and time separates.)

    God is love. God’s children, in their essence, are love. When we are healthy we love.  Any person that does not love is not healthy.

       We are love and chose to experience the opposite of love. We are unified and chose to experience the opposite of union.  We chose to experience hate and separation.

       Heaven is unified, the opposite of union is separation; heaven is love, the earth is hate. We who are on earth, who chose separation, chose hate.

       On earth, we hate our true self, which is love; on earth we hate love. Love is union, we hate union; we prefer separation, which is hate. 

      On earth, each of us hates our creator, hates other people and hates himself. 

      On earth each of us looks after his self interests and could care less for other people’s self interests.

        On earth each of us fancies himself superior to other people. (In spirit we are the same and equal and unified.)

  The earth is a place of mutual self hate.  We have self hate, not just because of what other people did to us but because the earth is a place those who seek hatred come to experience it.

       The task before us is to learn that our true self is love/union, and, therefore, relinquish our hate/separation and return to love/union. While on earth each of us must learn to love God, love other people and love our selves (unify with our higher self). 

       God’s will is love/union. To love is to obey the will of God. Separation is disobedience of God’s will.

      Other people do harmful things to us; we do harmful things to other people. Therefore, we all have grievances against one another. We all have reasons to hate other people. If we hate other people we hate ourselves.

       Forgiveness enables us to let go of our grievances. When we forgive each other we remove the veil across the face of love (Christ) and recognize the love that is always there but we do not see it!

         We live in God, love, but do not know it; we do not know it because we chose hate/separation. When we forgive we recognize that all there is is love/union. Forgive and know love. Forgive and live in peace and happiness.

        I have covered this subject elsewhere. I do not need to repeat it here. The only point that I want to emphasize is that man is not only the product of his body and social experiences but is also spirit. As spirit, we are a choice making agent. If we choose forgiveness we return to the condition that our creator created us as, love, hence feel loved and happy and peaceful. 

        It is not enough to catalogue what others did to you…doing so leads to anger and hostility…we must forgive them.

    Empiricism shows us that white folks screwed us. Now, we must forgive them.  We must forgive the past so as to see the present with clarity.

      The present is only love.  This may not seem true to you but try to work for social interest, serve all people, forgive all people and see what happens. Wake up tomorrow and dedicate your life to serving all human beings and think less about what is in things for you.

         Africans need to let go of their living for only their ego selves and live for all people. Christ is love for all creation; to live through Christ is to love all creation and its creator.

          What is germane in all these is that our self hatred is rooted in deeper sources than social studies teach us.  It is not enough to teach us what other people did to us; we must be taught what we did to us.

       By separating from our source, we attacked us and hate us.  We must learn to forgive, for therein lies our peace and happiness. (Religion is derived from Latin, religio, to reconnect to our source.)

      This is not to tell you that you should not study the social sciences and other bifurcated disciplines. I synthesize science and religion in my presentations; that is my gift from God. What is your own gift from God? Use your gift to bless all humanity and in so doing experience the peace of God, that, as Paul rightly observed, is beyond human (ego) understanding.

       In conclusion, my observation is that Africans do not love themselves.  Because they do not love themselves they sold themselves into slavery and currently do not work for each others welfare.

       If you hate other people you must hate you. What you give to other people you give to you. Giving is receiving; give love and receive love, give hate and receive hate.

     What is love?  Love is dedicating ones life to serving all human beings.  This is not just fancy, idle talk, for it is only when we serve all people that we feel connected to all people and in that sense of union feels at home. (Union is our home; separation is alien to us.)

 Part IV

 LOVE AS SERVICE TO ALL PEOPLE

      When people see themselves as separated from other people, that they are not the same and equal with all people, that they have different interests from other people, that their gain are other people’s loss and that what happens to other people does not happen to them, they behave in a self centered manner.  Because they have these beliefs and behaviors predicated on them they have self hatred and suffer. As long as people have these beliefs and corresponding behaviors, they are in hell, although they may not know it. They live in a world of bondage; bondage of their own making!

        There is a way out of this slavery.  It is to see all people as one, as unified and forgive them whatever they did to harm one in the past and serve them in the present.

         You have probably heard so much talk on loving people that you are nauseated and do not want to hear one more word about it. Talk about love is cheap; it is practicing love that is difficult.

        True love is shown by the spirit of service. To love other people you must serve them.  A life dedicated to serving society is a life committed to love.

      What does it mean to be service oriented?  It means recognizing that each of us is given a talent(s) by our creator.  Remember the parable of talents in the Bible? We are supposed to put our talents to use doing that which serves public good. If we do not put our gifts to public good society does not benefit. Africans do not put their gifts to public good and Africa suffers.

         We must figure out what our individual talents are.  There are many tests that help individuals figure out their aptitudes and interests. When our gifts are ascertained, we have to develop them. Thereafter, we must use them to work for social welfare.

         Figure out what your aptitudes and interests are and train in a profession that requires your aptitude/interest and then do work that puts them to use serving people.  When you do so, you attain peace and happiness.

       A life of service to society is really not a choice but a duty.  It is the will of God for us.  God wants us to love each other and love is shown by caring for one another.

        The Christian missionaries, who left the luxury of Europe to come live in the jungles of Africa, providing Africans with education, lived a life of service. Their reward was peace and happiness.

     Many Africans think that it is up to them to decide whether to serve society or not. That is why they go into politics with the specific intention of stealing from the public and doing all the stupid things that they. They think that if they give themselves bogus titles and masquerade as professor, Dr, Alhaji, Chief Do-Nothing that they are glorified. They are glorified monkeys, indeed. Notice that when African leaders die nobody misses them; indeed, folk break out in joy!

       When Sani Abacha died, Nigerians rejoiced. When Joseph Desire Mobutu, the great thief of the Congo, died his people felt great relief; it is good riddance of the pestilence that corrupted the Congo body politics for too long.

        Compare and contrast to what happened when John F. Kennedy died: the entire American nation went depressed. That is correct, both Democrats and Republicans felt great loss at the leader who told them not to ask for what their country can do for them but what they can do for their country, a leader who set their eyes on the moon, to get there by the end of the (1960s) decade, mobilized resources to attain that goal and it was attained.

       When a leader who devotes himself to serving his people dies, he is mourned, whereas when African thievish leaders die the people feel happy riddance.  It is really sad that Africans are so morally bankrupt that they do not care for their legacy.

    President Bill Clinton created jobs for his people and left the white House without having owned a house in his entire life. He dedicated his life to serving his people and could care less for personal luxury. Eventually, friends pooled money to buy for him a modest house at Chappaqua, New York. Out of office, Clinton is making money the old fashioned way: earning it through giving inspirational speeches, writing and selling books.

       Nigerian heads of states steal so much money from the national treasury that they leave office as fabulously rich folk. Indeed, when they leave office they do nothing to serve the people.

       President Jimmy Carter is working to give Nigerians worm free water while Babangida and the other things who had ruled Nigeria do not think that it is their duty to make sure that all Nigerians have worm free water!

        How dare you eat while your brothers are starving?  How dare you fly in presidential planes when the average Nigerian makes a dollar a day?  My God, where did they pick up these things that call themselves Nigerian leaders? I say throw them into the garbage dump, for that is where they belong. They are beneath contempt; they are despicable and it were better that they had not passed through this planet. (The individual ought to leave good marks to be remembered for when he passes away from this world.)

     God is love. His children, when sane, are love. God’s will is love. Love is the union of all creation. 

        God asks his children to obey his will (which is also our will). His will, our true will, is love. To obey the will of God, to obey our real self’s will, is to love God, love each other and love our selves.

       Any act that does not love does not obey the will of God.

      Of course, no one has the power to disobey the will of God; but we can juxtapose our own wishes and live according to them.

        We are like the prodigal son who left his father and went on a journey to a distant place. He could not go on a journey apart from God, for God is everywhere and wherever he goes he goes in God. Nevertheless, in his delusion of separation, he can believe that he left the presence of God; he could not. But as long as he wishes to be apart from God, even though he is really not apart from him, he would, in his awareness, seem apart from him. When he comes back to his senses, recognizes that he made a mistake, accepts that no one can leave that which is every where, he returns to God, to where he belongs.

      This parable teaches that we are in God but imagine ourselves apart from him and while seeming apart we suffer. When we recognize and accept our eternal union with God, and do what that requires, love all creation and its creator, we end our suffering.

     We live in abundance (God, love) while feeling like we live in scarcity.  Africans are the most suffering human beings on earth; this is because they are self centered creatures.

        To be self centered is to disobey the will of God.  God wills service for all his children. Because Africans disobey the will of God, do not serve all, they suffer.

    Africans will continue to live in poverty and suffer until they obey the will of God, which is to love every creation, in practical terms, to serve all human beings. 

       Fools think that they can break the law of God, not love one another, and live in abundance!  God is not a lawbreaker and does not sanction lawbreakers. God lives by his law, his contract with his children that each must love the other.  His law is love. He loves himself and loves all his children.  When his children decide to go on a journey without a distance, being merciful, he patiently waits for them to return home, to forgive one another hence feel love. In the meantime, they take the consequences of living outside his law, of not loving and serving one another.

       There is a cause and effect in the universe. All our behaviors have consequences. We individually and collectively take the consequences of our behaviors.  We are unified and take the consequences of all people’s behaviors. There is no such thing as separation from the whole and not taking the consequences of our mutual behaviors.

      Some Africans mess up and all Africans take the consequences of their mess up.

     It is because we all take the consequences of every person’s behaviors that we all must be concerned about those who mess up.  A few Nigerian leaders mess up and all Nigerians take the consequences of their self centered behaviors. By the same token, if Nigerian leaders are social serving, all Nigerians will take the beneficial consequences of their good behavior.

       This world is a global village, a space ship, and what each member of it does affects all members of it. Therefore, we can not sit idly bye while a few crooks make away with our heritage.

     I do not know which planet many Africans drop down from. What I know is that if they are members of the planet that I live on, it would be self evident to them that we are meant to serve each other. Social service is as true as night follows day, and I do not understand why Africans do not understand this fact.

       If you are a human being, you are meant to serve your neighbor.  Recall the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man was on a journey (near Jericho) and thieves descended on him, waylaid him and stole his money.  He lay on the side of the street in pain. Folk walked by him: Pharisees (the rich), Levis (priests) etc and did nothing about his suffering. Finally, a Samaritan (a non Jew, strictly, a mix of Jew and Gentile, new man, a service oriented man, a Christian) came along and took care of him.

        Who was the man’s neighbor, who loved the man?  It was the man who served his need that loved him. The point is that love is shown in service to the people around one. Love is not shown by merely talking about how much one loves ones neighbor (as Pharisees do, as rich Nigerians do) but by how much service one renders ones neighbors (as the Samaritan did).

     The will of God is that his children serve each other. Do we serve each other in Nigeria?  If not how come we claim to be religious persons?  Folk go to church and sing idle songs to God and pray that God meet their needs when clearly he has told them the conditions under which their needs would be met by him. Love God, love your neighbor, love yourself, serve your neighbor, and forgive your neighbor and yourself. 

        Unless you meet these conditions: forgiveness and service, you are barking after the wrong tree and your prayers will not be answered. (Actually, they have all been answered by God, but to receive the answers that he has already given to you, you must obey his will.)

       We can study all the sociology we want and see ourselves as the victims of other people’s cruelty, but until we do what is expected of us, we shall not have things work out well for us.

      Sociology, that bane of black folk, tells them what other people did to make them poor. What it forgets to tell them is what they do to make themselves poor.

       You cannot refuse to serve your people, worse, sell them into slavery, do not care whether they lived well or not and expect to have things work out well for you.

       You say, what a naïve observation; you steal and you are materially rich, so things are working out well for you. Is that right? 

       Revisit the parable of the rich man who felt complacent because he had all his needs met and did not care to extend a helping hand to the needy around him.  Then the thief of the night visited him and he died. He died and since his wealth was laid in the ground where mot eats it, it is gone. But if he had laid his wealth in love he would have resurrected from death and lived everlasting life in God.

       If we do the right thing, when we physically die we live on in spirit. If we refuse to serve our neighbors, when we die, we return to this world and keep trying to get it right, for a lesson un-learned is repeated until learned and when it is learned is no longer repeated.

        Folk come here and suffer, over and over, until they learn what Jesus Christ learned:  that a life of forgiveness and service is the only life that leads to salvation, redemption and deliverance.

        Salvation is not obtained by making noises that one is praying to God but by loving God and all his creation, by service to all of them and by forgiving those who wronged us.

       What is sickness? What is healing? Sickness is separation from God; sickness is not serving all God’s children. Healing is awareness that one is eternally joined to God and all his creation, love for them all and service for them all. When we affirm our oneness and love and serve all people we are healed from our separation and the pain that goes with it. When we are healed, connected to all, we feel peaceful and happy.

    The only thing that makes human beings not to hate themselves and not to hate their neighbors is love. Love God and his creation and you cannot hate yourself. But do not love God and his creation and you hate yourself.

       You may mask your self hatred by projecting it to other people and hating other people, the fact is that you still hate yourself. Look at Africa’s fallen house and see what hate has made.

       Those who love themselves necessarily love and serve all human beings.  And by their fruit we shall know them. If you love you, love all people, you work for the good of all people.

CONCLUSION

     I have been there and done that; I know that it is a lie for psychotherapists to tell folks that they can heal their self hatred if they do not love and serve their neighbors.

        You can blame other people for all your problems, believe that you were abused and are a victim of your parents and everybody else, but none of those would heal you. 

        The only thing that would heal and empower you is forgiveness and love. Forgiveness is the healer. Forgive and you are healed of whatever malady you have (and this includes physical and mental illnesses).

       All mental illnesses are caused by the absence of love flowing from the individual to other people. When one does not love other people one has separated from them and separation is what insanity is all about.

       On the other hand, when one loves all people, one has joined them and in union one is sane. Sanity lies in union with all, which means love for all; insanity lies in separation from other people and from God.

       Forgiveness is the healer of physical ailments. If you are suffering from physical ailments, the chances are that you have unloving thoughts towards yourself and your neighbors. Change that to loving thoughts to all creation, no exception permitted, and your physical illness is healed. Thoughts must be acted on, work for all people if you want to heal your illnesses and end your poverty

      This does not mean that you should not take your medicines. By all means take your medication (and eat your food, wear clothes and live in shelter).  As long as we believe that we are bodies, we need material things. But when we recognize that we are spirit dreaming that we are bodies, we no longer need the material things that prop up the fiction of body.

       For now, it is enough to tell us to serve our neighbors, if we want to be healed and live peaceful, happy lives. Those who serve the public have their needs met and are rich in spirit.

       What needs to be done to correct Africa’s fallen house?  Teach Africans love and social service. For too long, Africans have denied love and preoccupied their selves with loveless existence. Their lovelessness is shown by their selling of their people into slavery and by their stealing from the public rather than serving the public. It is now time for these benighted folk to learn that true living means serving our brothers. 

       There is no other way known to make our human lives more abundant than through love and social service. You cannot continue being a lawbreaker, breaking the law of God, breaking God’s law that you should love your neighbor and expect to receive the blessings of God.

        All these sound religious but really are not religion but common sense. You do not need to belong to any religion to recognize that love and service are the highest good we can do in this world.  Although it helps to belong to a good religion, such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, but in the final analysis you do not need to perform the rituals of religion to live the truth.

       What is the truth? Love/union is the truth. Love all, serve all, and forgive all.  Do this and know that we can have abundance in Africa.

        By way of criticism the reader may ask why I made much ado about Africans’ slave past and not Europeans’ slave past. Europeans bought and used Africans and that showed self centeredness. Their selfish problem is informing their extant society, a society that is breaking down, more so than folk realize it. Nevertheless, this is not the place and time to talk about the effect of slavery on white folk.

     Finally, I do not wish to engage in one-on-one psychotherapy with the reader; we, in Africa, do not have the luxury to engage in free association, transference relationships, analysis of oedipal complex and the other issues addressed in psychotherapy. We shall leave that to those with the resource to explore their psyche’s unconscious with paid therapists

       As far as I am concerned, therapy ends when the individual accepts his or her real self without hankering after imaginary ideal selves. Look at yourself in the mirror and accept what you see in an unconditional positive manner; do not tell you that you should accept you only when you meet certain criteria, ideal self that is outside you. Accept your real self and do not apologize to any one else for being who you are. You do not need to meet any other person’s conditions before you accept you. You are unique and no one else in the entire universe is like you. You cannot be replaced by anybody else. Total unconditional positive self acceptance is the basis of mental health. It helps to also believe in a higher power, provided one does not project ones views of who he  is to him; one, a part, cannot fully understand the whole (God).

        Accept and celebrate your African self, and our human self; therein is mental health.  Self rejection and pursuit of a fictional ideal alternative self is the root of all mental disorders.

       Many contemporary Africans reject their true self and pursue White folk mediated ideal self and to the extent that they do so they are mentally unhealthy. Unhealthy Africans hate and kill each other and cannot govern themselves well.

         Africans who accept their Africanness and humanness, do not disrespect other Africans, do not kill other Africans and devote themselves to working for the well being of all Africans and all humanity are mentally healthy, live in peace, joy and abundance.

FOR FURTHER READING

Adler, Alfred (1999) The Neurotic Constitution. New York: International Library of Psychology, Routledge.

Allport, Gordon. (1961) Pattern and Growth in Personality.  New York: Harcourt College Publishers.

                            (1954)  The Nature of Prejudice.  New York: Perseus Books.

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, (1994) Washington, DC. American Psychiatric Press.

Ansbacher, H.L.  (1956) The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler.  New York: Harper and Row.

Ayer, A.J. (1968) The Origins of Pragmatism.  London: Macmillan.

Bandura, Albert.  (1977) Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bateson, Gregory (1972). Steps to Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beck, Aaron. (1990) Cognitive Therapy for Personality Disorders. New York: Guilford Press.

Camus, Albert. (2003) The Stranger. New York: Sparks Publishing Group.

Cesaire, Aime. (1950)  Discourse on Colonialism.

Clark, Kenneth.  (1955) Prejudice and Your Child.

                            (1965) Dark Ghetto.

Ellis, Albert. (2004) Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. New York:  Prometheus Book Publishers.

Eriksson, Erik.  (1993) Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton.

Eysenck, Hans. (1953) Uses and Abuses of Psychology.

Fanon, Franz. (1951) Black Skin, White Mask.  Barnes and Noble.com

                       (1961) The Wretched of the Earth. Barnes and Noble.com

Frazier, Franklin.  (1957) The Negro Middle Class. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Freud, Anna. (1936) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.

Freud, Sigmund. (1961) The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed Ernest Jones. New York: Lionel Trilling and Steven.

Fromm, Eric. (1947) Escape from Freedom.  New York: Routledge.

Horney, Karen. (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth.  New York: W.W. Norton.

Jung, Carl G.  Basic Writings of C.G. Jung.  Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kardiner, Abram and Ovesey, Lionel. (1951)  The Mark of Oppression.  New York: W.W. Norton.

Karon, Bertram P. (1958) The Negro Personality.  New York: Springer Pub. Co.

Kegan, Jerome. (1985) The Nature of the Child. New York: Harper and Row.

Kelly, George.  (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs.  New York: W.W. Norton.<