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The Distorted Images Of African Continent: A Heideggerian Interpretation
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 3]
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GENERAL INTRODUCTION
What do you expect would come to the minds of many, assuming you stand on Mountain Everest and shout the word “Africa†to the hearing of all mankind? Arguably, many (especially Westerners) would immediately succumb to the idea that Africa is a place of tribal slaughters, massacres, urban slums, skeletal children, people infested with AIDS; a place where the earth is dry and cracked, a place of endless stream of refugees without a place to call home, without clothing, medicine, food or water, plus other images of savagery, inferiority complex and hunger. According to Ezine Newsletter:
Those are the only images we see in C.N.N during the nightly news, during times of crisis and then there is nothing until the next war, skirmish or famine. Limited, selective images that make a continent look like it is always in upheaval.1
But these images about Africa are not only associated with the C.N.N. nightly news, they have permeated for hundreds of years in the West’s perception of Africa. Lending weight to this, the same Ezine Newsletter (African insight) on African images, opines:
For hundreds of years, Africa was a blank spot on Western maps, a place that did not exist and then during the Middle Ages it became a dark spot. It was referred to as the “dark continentâ€, where primitive people without history and civilization dwelled. Where chaos was the norm, even the capacity for an African to love was questioned since a savage being was not capable of love or Christian charity2.
In concrete, Africans, especially Blacks, having been besmirched with these subhuman statuses, it was as easy as rolling off a log to take this Dark continent filled with savages and ship them to ends of the earth as slaves. This explains the 16th Century African Slave trade, when Bartoleme de Las Casas (Bishop of Chiapas) threw off Christian anthropology aboard and made a clarion call for African slaves, who would replace the emaciated Indians in Hispaniola, Spain, 1517. It was also easy to plunder the riches of Africa, its people and resources, and to colonize them under the guise of bringing civilization and Christianity. No wonder, Jomo Kenyatta opined in his book, ‘Facing Mount Kenya’:
The missionaries came with the Bible in their hand and we had the land. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed, and then when we opened them we had the Bible in our hand, and they had the land.3
But a critical mind would ask, why was it Europe, rather than Africa that conquered and plundered? This, I shall briefly explain in chapter three of this project, while focusing on the main point of my project.
Today, we could see the same tune played and danced according to the old methods. We could see veiled distorted images of African continent and “neo-asphyxiating colonialismâ€4 in the relations of Africa with the West. These we see in most actions of U.N, G-8 club, C.N.N news and other Western means.
Thus, in chapter one of this project, I will expose the views or distorted images about Africans starting from the Ancient to the Contemporary period. Chapter two of this project will navigate on Martin Heidegger’s task in his “Being and Timeâ€, his idea of the fundamental ontology and his concept of phenomenology, which I will use to interpret these African experiences. Chapter three will dwell on African distorted images vis-à -vis the causes of African predicament. Later, I will use Martin Heidegger’s concept of phenomenology to interpret these distorted images. Chapter four will be on critical evaluation and conclusion.
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 3]
Page 1 of 3
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