React to this!

At the 17th International African Writers’ Day Celebration on Nov 5, 2009, Professor Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Literature laureate, said Africa’s inability to progress beyond liberation from colonialism was due to the lingering slave mentality of its leaders and intellectuals.

Prof. Soyinka said African writers and intellectuals had a duty to move away from what had held Africans bound and to focus on how the peoples of the continent could harness their rich resources for the their progress. He said there was a limit to what extent Africans could blame the colonialist and neo-colonialists for the woes of the continent and that African leaders were as guilty as the colonialists for the current state of the continent.

The Nobel Laureate said the “we and they syndrome” had assumed a new characteristic, saying, it was not just about Africans and the west but also more so about Africans and their own leaders. “We can blame the west for a lot of things but we can’t blame them for what is happening in Zimbabwe right now – neither can we blame them for one man’s attempt to truncate rule of law in Nigeria and stay in power for a third term,” he said.