African Renaissance Statue

How did you feel personally your identity of African, intellectual and statesman, and what is Africa´s role in today´s global world, according to your “Weltanschauung”?

Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu: Africa is the continent that is morally positioned to take over the role that the US has erroneously ascribed to itself over the past centuries. Africa is first of all the father and mother of Humanity in the sense that it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubts by scientific and historical facts and finds that the entire Mankind started in black Africa. Secondly, civilization started in Africa, and in other words Black Africa taught Humanity all it knows. Thirdly, no people have suffered as much as Black African did in the hands of other races on earth, and in this sense, Black Africa is the conscience of the world. All these elements make of Black Africa the natural candidate to assume the role of the policeman of the world.

I look forward to the emergence of a self-sufficient, self-reliant Africa that will be in a position to grant aids to other parts of the world. I want to see the rise of an Africa that is industrialized enough to manufacture all her needs; I believe in an Africa normally and naturally looked upon by the rest of mankind as able to settle all global issues.

The European Renaissance was a result of a resurgence of new ideas from European students of primo, the African old school of Egypt, such as Pythagoras, Plato and Socrates, and secondo, the Zoroastrian Magi of the Middle East.

What is your evaluation of the existing borderlines in Africa, and to what extent do they represent an imperative reality or a righteous situation for you?

Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu: The realities of the Berlin Conferences of 1883 - 1885 and the grave distortions these conferences brought about in the lives of the peoples of Africa are no secrets to anyone. The present borderlines of the African nations are due to the partitioning of Africa in the Berlin Conferences, and were occasioned by the economic and political interests of the colonial powers. These borderlines were arbitrarily drawn, without any recourse to the cultural and historical affinities of the diverse peoples of Africa. The borderlines are indeed the main responsible for the incessant crises that have bedeviled the African continent. So, to answer your question directly, my evaluation of the existing borderlines in Africa is that they are criminally, wickedly, selfishly and atrociously instituted, and that they must be redressed.

Would you briefly describe the political ideology and the principal political targets of your party?

Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu: According to Nelson Mandela, Africa has gone beyond bemoaning the past for its problems. The task of undoing that past is ours, with the support of those willing to join us in a continental renewal. We, the Africans, must take responsibility for our own destiny, if we really want to uplift ourselves by our own efforts in partnership with those non Africans who wish us well.

Africa cannot possibly renew herself within an ugly context in which all the upper echelons are mere parasites on the rest of society in every African country, enjoying a self-endowed mandate to use their political power in a way to ensure that our poverty-stricken and underdeveloped continent reproduces itself as the periphery of the world economy, being always incapable of development.

The African Renaissance demands that we purge ourselves of these parasites and maintain a permanent vigilance against the danger of this rapacious stratum being entrenched in the African society; its debased social morality brings about an unacceptable situation according to which everything in the society must be organized materially to benefit the few.

The African Renewal demands that African intelligentsia carried out the gigantic task to end the poverty, the ignorance, the disease and the backwardness; the African intelligentsia must be inspired by the fact that the Africans of Egypt were in some instances two thousand years ahead of the Europeans in the mastery of such subjects as geometry, trigonometry, algebra, chemistry, astronomy, medicine and natural sciences.

The beginning of the African Rebirth throughout the continent must be our own rediscovery; we must find again our soul, which was immortalized since the Dawn of the Mankind in the great monuments that encapsulated knowledge and wisdom altogether, nanely the pyramids and sphinxes of Egypt and Ethiopia, i.e. Ancient Sudan, the Steles (hawalti) of Axum, the ruins of Carthage and Zimbabwe, the rock inscriptions of Somalia, the drawings of Tassili in the Atlas region, the paintings of the San, the Benin bronzes and the African masks, the carvings of the Makonde, and the stone sculptures of the Shona.

The Rebirth of Africa will not occur overnight. It will naturally take some time. The African intelligentsia, wherever they may reside and originate from, must undertake the systematic re-establishment of the History of Africa as an unbiased discipline of Humanities, purified from all the Western fallacies, schemes and preconceived racist concepts. They must reinterpret the African Past, implement their conclusions at the levels of the African Primary and Secondary Education, publications, and average culture, and ultimately enable all the Africans to better understand how and why we fell and we came to be where we are right now. Their task is therefore not a merely academic
responsibility but a social mission of awareness raising and resource mobilization so that a greater number of African, if possible all, participate in and contribute to the African regeneration process.

The African Renaissance entails Heritage reclamation for the people of the African continent, whether at home or in the Diaspora. The African Renaissance is the only possible means to trigger socio-economic and political renewal of Africa. This is our vision, the program of the African Renaissance Party (ARP).

We, at the African Renaissance Party, believe that all the systems of governmental practice currently undertaken in Africa are fundamentally defective and constitute basic reasons for holding the existing potentials in bondage. Our party aspires to institute a mass participatory system of government that will bring about efficient, responsive and responsible governments that will subsequently unleash the creative and productive potentials of the people, thus catapulting Africa to where our continent belonged already at the Dawn of the Mankind.

The African Renaissance brings forth a genuine effort to address the need of people for identity, integrity, and self-knowledge; making of our lost literatures and scriptures from all over the continent the focal point of tomorrow’s African average education and culture means that we guarantee for our children a bright future and that we make sure that they will not be another wasted generation. Everything we have so far studied tells us that we, Africans, are meant to be teachers of the rest of the world and leader of the Mankind in the path toward true Knowledge and Wisdom.

Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe tells us in his books the Renascent Africa will “educate the Renascent African to be a Man. Tell him that he has made definite contributions to history. Educate him to appreciate the fact that iron was discovered by Africans; that the conception of one God was initiated by Africans; that Africans ruled the world from 763 to 713 B.C.; that while Europe slumbered during the dark ages, a great civilization flourished on the banks of the Niger, extending from the salt mines of Taghaza in Morocco, to Lake Chad right to the Atlantic; Narrate to him the lore of Ethiopia, Ghana, Melle, Mellestine and Songhay.

Let him realize with the rest of the world that while Oxford and Cambridge were in their inchoate stages, the university of Sankore in Timbuktu welcomed scholars and learned men from all over the Moslem world.”

Mass Participatory Government

“Only through the direct and continuous participation of all citizens in political life can the state be bound to the common good or general will.”

In a paper presented at the occasion of the Badagry Folk Festival, last August, you stipulated a Cultural Renaissance is a ´priority challenge´ for Africa in the 21st century. Why so?

Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu: According to an old saying, "there is nothing new under the sun." That being so, I may bold to say that the true solutions to all the problems confronting the peoples of Black Africa today can be found in the cultures and traditions of ancient Africa.

The African Cultural Renaissance today will signal the reintroduction of African solutions to African problems; and this is of the utmost importance. The African Union in its wisdom has seen it fit to dedicate this year and next year to African Cultural Renaissance because that august body has come to recognize in our ancient and surviving cultural treasures the wisdom that our African forebears left for their descendants.

“Needless to say, there is an urgent need to redefine the parameters of scholarship. Everything we have learned will have to be unlearned. By the time the timeless knowledge encoded in the Arts and Culture (symbolism, dance, masquerades, masks, body paintings, textile designs, wall paintings, architecture, folklore, sacred ceremonies, and especially the monoliths) of Africa and other aboriginal peoples of the world are decoded and deciphered, History itself would have to be rewritten, and science would turn its attention to the study of culture and cultural phenomenon, which would then appropriately become the subject matter of Quantum physics.

To Africans, Blacks and all deprived peoples all over the world, we say, culture is everything! Those who took your cultures from you took everything from you. Your culture is your life, your past, your present, your science, your religion, your closest link to the One True God. You are your culture, and your culture is all you have. It is your link to all knowledge available in the Universal Mind of the Creator. Your culture is you. It is your Archetypal image as conceived in the mind of the creator who made you in his image. Thus, your culture is your expression of the image of God, the universal Archetype." Prof. Catherine Achaolonu-Olumba.

We must divorce our minds from understanding the word ‘development’ as related to high elevation buildings and automobiles. True development is the maintenance of a divine state of order, equity, justice and contentment in a given environment or among the members of a social group. It is a society characterized by harmony and order between Heaven and Earth, and among the various sections of that society. Judging by these standards our modern societies, we safely conclude that they do not qualify to be called developed.

Tyranny, unrepresentative regimes imposed on subjugated nations, starvation, widespread lethal diseases, lack of medical infrastructure, minimal access to 12-year education, intellectual drainage, dependence on the west European colonial power, technological divide, a great number of impoverished populations, and tribal wars; although the aforementioned scourges are almost omnipresent in Africa, why do you focus so much on the cultural Renaissance of Africa?

Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu: Most of the problems confronting Africans are traceable to inappropriate governance systems. The Western World led by the United States has been forcing electocracy down the throat of Africans, claiming that it is “democracy,” while in fact the United States does not experience and has never experienced true democracy.

If there is one thing that Africa has an abundance of; that thing is natural resources. The problems of Africa are manmade, and when we reintroduce genuinely African cultural concepts and methods like the mass participatory system of governance that assures the greatest assemblage and synergizing of intellectual capital, we come to notice that 90% of Africa´s problems disappear, and the continent lives in peace and prosperity.

Serious troubles for Africa, like starvation, do not have any natural place in Africa as proper governance alone is able to fully demonstrate that Africa is poised to be the world´s food basket.

Where does African Renaissance party stand with respect to the former colonial powers and the demanded reparations for Africa? What do you expect in this regard?

Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu: First of all, in 2003, the African Renaissance Party tried all within its powers to convene a World Summit on Reparations for Africa which was scheduled to take place at Kinston, Jamaica. The event could not take place as planned and the party had to settle with sponsoring an African Reparations Bill at the National Assembly of Nigeria.

The Bill was used to direct Nigeria and Africa to refocus on the unfinished business of forcing the Western colonial nations to pay reparations for social dislocations, forcible enslavement, looting of treasures and artifacts, destruction and desecration of cities, empires, and civilizations – or to put it in two words for centuries of rapacious economic exploitation of Black African people.

The poverty inhibiting Black and African economies is traceable to the atrocities occurred to them during the processes of colonization and imperialism. In acknowledgement of the fact that if no extra and considerable funds are injected into these economies, such countries shall remain impoverished and beggarly for the foreseeable future, the reparations demanded offer a minimal expression of regret for the tremendous damages caused. It is therefore imperative that a practical and pragmatic initiative be put in place to address the historically bestowed legacy of structural impoverishment.

Second, to be honest with you, we expect diverse responses to the demand for reparations, oscillating from apologies to financial recompense, return of artifacts, subsidies for reconstruction works, and redress of colonial historiography, which means a complete and unbiased re-writing of African History.

Where do you stand as regards African conflicts, notably Eritrea vs. Ethiopia, Western Sahara and Uganda vs. Congo?

Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu: I believe that the African Diaspora should intervene and come up with constructive suggestions able to offer an exit to those conflicts. The acrimonious relationship between Eritrea and Ethiopia is both, old and new. Resentful ethnic stereotypes run deep, but more recent political events have added a toxic element of embitterment. Whipped into this unstable mix is the fact that the Horn of Africa is a region at the cross roads of Europe, Asia and Africa, where the ambitions of the world’s greatest powers have colluded with local populations, religions and political formations for the last centuries.

What is your position about national liberation fronts and autonomy movements, notably Ogaden, Oromo and Kabylia?

Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu: I and the African Renaissance Party are irrevocably committed to the convocation of a sovereign national conference of all ethnic nationalities of Nigeria for the direct purpose of the renegotiation of Nigeria in order to offer an amicable coexistence formula to all the peoples of Nigeria.

The lessons taken from the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970, the incessant interethnic unrests that have befallen on our the nation ever since, as well as the ongoing unrests pertaining to the Niger Delta region of our country, to the extent that active military operation is going on there right now, are more than an eloquent testimony to the fact that the component units of any nation should not be bound by force but by unmitigated free will. I therefore support freedom for the peoples of my country, and I do support freedom for all the peoples of Africa, for all the ethno-religious groups wherever they may happen to be located.

One of greatest obstacles in the path the African Unification is that efforts to unify Africa have hitherto deployed to implement the unification project with the grossly defective ‘blocks’ formed out of the colonially and arbitrary contrived boundaries. These states are subjects of serious and at times bloody contentions throughout the length and breadth of the continent.

Liberation fronts are fighting for the liberation of their various peoples and deserve the support of all right thinking human beings. When all African peoples are liberated, then the objective of African unification can be commenced in earnest.

All liberation movements in Africa should be supported by all and sundry, as it is diversionary, unnecessary, and wicked for governments to seek to control peoples against their own free will. In every instance, a system must be introduced to determine the true feelings of the people; wherever it is established that they wish to be independent, the proper modalities should be worked out to enable and implement the independence process.

However, I must make the point that there is a political solution to internal strife issues, and this unfortunately has not yet been thorough explored in most of the needy African nations. This solution is: True Federalism. This implies running real, functioning and fair, federal governments.

Faced with corruption and stalled development, Africa is seeking a fresh path to good governance; federalism is the Black Continent’s watch word in this search.

The Fifth International Conference on Federalism, the bi-yearly gathering of the forum of federations, and the Global Network on Federalism, which opened in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa on December 13th 2010, has offered African leaders the opportunity to review the benefits that would accrue to the nations that embrace federalism. The theme of this year´s conference was “Equity and Unity in Diversity for Development.”

I want to underscore the fact that it is the first time the conference is being held in Africa since its initiation in 1999 in Mt. Tremblant, Canada.

Orientalist, Historian, Political Scientist, Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis, 54, is the author of 12 books, dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of encyclopedia entries, and thousands of articles. He speaks, reads and writes more than 15, modern and ancient, languages. He refuted Greek nationalism, supported Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, and rejected the Greco-Romano-centric version of History. He pleaded for the European History by J. B. Duroselle, and defended the rights of the Turkish, Pomak, Macedonian, Vlachian, Arvanitic, Latin Catholic, and Jewish minorities of Greece.

He defends the Human and Civil Rights of Yazidis, Aramaeans, Turkmen, Oromos, Ogadenis, Sidamas, Berbers, Afars, Anuak, Furis (Darfur), Bejas, Balochs, Tibetans, and their Right to National Independence, demands international recognition for Kosovo, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and Transnistria, calls for National Unity in Somalia, and denounces Islamic Terrorism.