White people demean Africans to mask their own past inadequacies

Recent utterances by leading Euro-American celebrities on the inferiority of the Africans when compared to people of white colour are not new.

Barack Obama, said Joe Biden in 2007, was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean", and thus implied that the rest are incoherent, idiotic, and filthy.

Former US President Donald Trump called African countries 'shitholes'. Josep Borrell, European Union Minister for Foreign Affairs, considers Europe a pristine 'garden' to be defended from 'jungle' invaders and suggested invading the 'jungle' itself.

These is part of the evidence of Euro desperation to feel superior and to ignore shortcomings. It, in the process creates a hierarchy of snobbery of race and class with the emphasis being on race over class.

Tampered by geopolitical power rivalry, it involves guilt transfer and blame shifting often from the offense perpetrator to the intended victim. It started with the creation of the myth of European Renaissance which promoted concocted amnesia and tried to make ignorance a virtue.

From the 15th Century CE, people in Europe liberated themselves from Muslim domination in three ways, then embarked on identity recreation based on concocted amnesia of their inglorious past. In hindsight, the three liberation strategies were intellectual, territorial, and commercial and each succeeded by 1500 CE.

To feel superior, they needed to ignore the 1000 years record between the fall of Rome in the Fifth Century and the emergence of Portugal and Spain, as sanctioned by Pope Alexander VI, as European global power competitors.

They therefore hankered back to Rome and Athens as the mythical source of their origins. They called this hankering 'Renaissance' or rebirth of learning as if there had been no learning in-between by peoples other than the Romans and the Greeks. Emphasis on the Greeks and Romans meant either pirating or ignoring knowledge that other people produced.

All they wanted was to find Homer, around 800 BCE, and his Iliad and Odyssey poems reciting Greek oral traditions. Playing ignorance to the fact that Greeks trooped to Memphis to partake of Egyptian knowledge, emerging to claim rebirth of knowledge for Europeans.

European renaissance, therefore, was ignorance creation by forcing two tiered amnesia. First was imposing forgetfulness among the Europeans to make them feel superior to other humans. Second was to dehumanise and impose ignorance on those the Europeans conquered to believe they were inferior. For instance, leaders of Euro-enlightenment saw no contradiction in being slave dealers as they talked about the natural rights of 'man' as including 'liberty'.

They subscribed to the belief propounded by Emmanuel Kant, advocate of 'perpetual peace' in Europe, that Africans were naturally inferior, stupid, and without values because they were black, and in need of 'thrashing' into separation.

They 'thrashed' Africans in territorial colonisation and creation of colonial states through which they tried to obliterate the humanity in the African by imposing the myth of the renaissance, which made Europe the beginning of everything.

Subsequent, Euro-colonisation was thus a racially based enterprise of making Africans poor both materially and mentally. Among the successes of the colonial enterprises was forcing Africans to accept the myth of the Renaissance as the foundation of knowledge and humanity. "When a Mzungu praises you a lot," Tom Mboya reportedly told Joe Kadhi, "find out what you are doing wrong against your people".

Many do not bother to find out that they have been colonially conditioned to believe that ignorance of African things, values, and interests is a virtue. This conditioning success is visible in 'leaders' who crave for Euro-approvals while mistreating people even when they are treated, as President William Ruto once remarked, like little kids.

Willingness to obey 'orders' from Euro-based organs to pulverise and destroy ability to provide services is evidence of the success of the myth of Euro-Renaissance that promotes ignorance in Africa as a 'virtue'.