I am not a believer in conspiracy theories. Nor do I subscribe to the view of those philosophers of history who believe nothing significant happens in our world without some conspirators lurking behind it. I’m also not among those who blame foreign imperialism for all of Africa’s problems. I believe that we Africans are ultimately the architects of our own misfortunes.
This is not to say that conspiracies don’t exist. I have studied enough political theory from Polybius and Thucydides to Talleyrand and Kissinger to know that conspiracies abound. What the philosopher Isaiah Berlin terms “the crooked timber of humanity” still defines the character of our sinful world.
When I was a teenage undergraduate, I stumbled upon a slim little booklet titled, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document purportedly crafted in pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia as a Jewish plot to enslave the world. In reality, it was a forgery designed to prepare the grounds for the mass pogroms that was later to be visited upon the Jewish people in what has been termed ‘our bloody twentieth century’.
But global conspiracies do exist. Perhaps the leading theorist in this field is the American historian and political philosopher Carroll Quigley (1910-1977). Quigley graduated in physics at Harvard before switching to history where he eventually earned a doctorate. He was a pioneer of the “scientific method” in the historical sciences. He became a professor at Georgetown University where he taught the young Bill Clinton who later became president of the United States.
Quigley wrote The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (G.S.G. & Associates, 1981), a history of the elite trans-Atlantic secret society that was to shape Anglo-American relations for the better part of a century. He showed that there exists a global network of secret societies that ultimately call the shots as far as human affairs are concerned. We are led to believe that, to a large extent, the entire system of western power is shaped by these shadowy groups. Among them we have the fearsome Illuminati; International Freemasonry; the Mont Pelerin Society; the Club of Rome; the Bilderberg Group; the Trilateral Commission; and the Council on Foreign Relations. Some of them, like the Illuminati, are so secretive that anyone who claims to know its members must be a liar.
What sets these groups apart is the fact that Africans and black people are rarely ever recruited to their ranks. Barak Obama and Condoleeza Rice are the exceptions to the rule. Many of our leaders in Africa belong to the confraternity of global freemasonry, even if as subalterns. Their primary mandate is to enslave the African people and to bring them under the dominion of Informal Empire on behalf of our Roman conquerors.
Nigeria has been under the searchlight of the globalist conspirators for several decades now. I believe there is a grand design to destroy our country and to keep our continent as a vast reserve for production of raw materials, cheap labour and nothing else.
Everybody knows that our glorious continent has been the playing field of Empires since the sixteenth century. It began with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in which more than 20 million black souls perished. When slave outlived its commercial usefulness it was replaced by what they called “legitimate commerce”. This was to be followed by gunboat diplomacy, colonial expropriation, rapine and conquest by force of arms. In King Leopold’s Congo Free State alone, some 7 million Africans perished as a result of forced labour, genocide and the most brutal abuses known in the annals of human infamy. The Hottentots, a race of beautiful Africans in the Cape of Good Hope, disappeared as a consequence of genocide by the Dutch. The same fate befell the Herero of South West Africa (Namibia) under the Germans in a manner too horrendous for polite historians to recount.
After most of our countries received “flag independence” in 1960, the great pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah warned against the spectre of ‘neo-colonialism’ which he defined as the next stage of capitalism. Neo-colonialism works through a network of informal empire, economic exploitation, economic hit men, financial scams, debt peonage and special military and intelligence operations to destroy economies, undermine national cohesion and topple legitimately elected governments.
Some of the leaders who fell victim to imperialist complot include: Sylvanius Olympio of Togo; Patrice Lumumba of the Congo; Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana; Felix Moumie of Cameroon; Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco; Eduardo Mondlane of Mozambique; Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde; Modibo Keita of Mali; Hamani Diori of Niger; and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso.
The enemies of our people deploy mass media manipulation and intellectual racism with subliminal messages to spread the evil gospel of Africans’ innate inferiority. The Nobel laureate James Watson has been among those in the global scientific community spreading the evil propaganda that Africans collectively have a sub-normal IQ. There is a global conspiracy in Western academia to ensure that Egypt, the cradle of our great African civilisations, is hiked off from the mainstream of our continent. It is a conspiracy that coincides with the historical narrative of the Arabs whose racism against Africans is even worse than that of the Europeans. And I am told that the Chinese character depicting Africa in mandarin Chinese is Feizhou; meaning “the wrong continent” – a jungle where nothing good happens.
There is a grand strategy is position our continent at the bottom of the global hierarchy of nations; a people without a past and without a future – an invisible people. Through the machinations of Global Apartheid, we remain excluded from the main currents of world civilisation. Africa has only 3% of the voting rights in the IMF and the World Bank. We are not represented among the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council. All of our ‘Franco-phoney’ countries remain virtual colonies of France. None would survive if they decided to chart an independent course. France controls their money and their foreign reserves. French companies monopolise their public utilities and have first right of refusal for all mining concessions. The French foreign legion and the Quai d’Orsay call the final shots.
We Africans have been too trusting of foreigners; believing in their innate goodwill, when, in fact, there is no evidence of such goodwill whatsoever. Most of what they call aid is a gigantic scam that ensures that more capital flows out of our continent than flows in. All the best talents of our continent that we have invested in are migrating to the West. We have mortgaged the future of our youths. Our confidence has been broken. We look to others to validate who are. Does it then surprise us when the first incidence of Ebola broke out in the Congo forest not far from a secret research outstation controlled by a foreign power? Does it surprise us that the outbreak of Ebola in Liberia began not far from a centre for disease control operated by a foreign power? What other viral diseases will they not come up with in future?
We are not trying to preach the gospel of xenophobia or racial hatred. I myself have more personal white friends than black ones. I understand half a dozen European languages. I have spent time in several global cities either as a student, a visiting academic or as a consultant: Paris, Singapore, Tokyo, Brussels, Maastricht, Uppsala, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Bergen, Berlin, Bonn, London, Oxford, Washington DC, Boston, Ottawa, Montreal and New York. I am a cosmopolitan intellectual who shares the ideals of the Socialist International. But I am not afraid to speak of what I know and believe.
All these lamentations will come to nought if we do not put our house in order. Unless we become an inner-directed vortex geared towards rejuvenating African culture, technology, military power, industry and civilisation, we are doomed. And I humbly submit that the African Renaissance of our dream will ultimately depend on what happens in Nigeria. It is for us that the bells of the millennium have tolled!
Obadiah Mailafia
