With a provocative title, "Intellectually Bankrupt and Decrepit",
Chika Onyeani replies to  postings Nos. 793, 796 and 798

It would seem that I have been AWOL to the different postings about the speech I delivered at Morgan State University. First of all, we have
to remember that we were celebrating Fathers, and I happen to be one.  I very much loved the pampering, antithetical to Reuben Abati's fathers in Nigeria.  However, the better reason I seem to have been AWOL was the low-blow delivered by the good erudite Dr. Folabo Ajayi, when he compared me to Justice Clarance Thomas.  It was a well measured blow, delivered at the right angle at the right target where it would do the greatest damage.  You don't wince with that kind of a blow, you collapse, and it takes days to recover from a swollen groin.

Well, I am glad to be back in action.  I want to join others in expressing my appreciation to the founder of this discussion group, which affords us the kind of opportunity, as I said in my speech, to seize the debate
about the Black Race, rather than in our usual lazy manner to leave to whites.

But, one thing I have to say here to the three comments by the erudite Professors, is that they should remember the saying that "nice guys always finish last because ....  well, because they always allow others to go first."  This is the problem with the Black Race.  We think being nice is an virtue rather than a detriment to our progress in life.

As I wrote in "Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success," "Blacks have
conditioned themselves to the status of economic slaves and
illiterates.  We lack understanding of economic history or business techniques.  We are like magnets attracted to our oppressors.  The more we are oppressed, the more we gravitate to that individual(s), group(s) doing the oppressing. We play the victim game, always the victim and never the oppressor.  From the time the Caucasian came to Africa in the 1600s till now, we are always the group to offer hospitality to our conquerors.  And even at this late hour, we seem to lack the intelligence necessary to examine the ramifications of our actions since then.  We are rooted to our basic victim instinct: accept the oppressor in your midst, make him extremely comfortable, give him all your respect and all your possessions, create an aura of invincibility around him, accept his mistreatments, disrespects, looting of your possessions, disrespect of your women, but then turn around to complain about his unfairness."  Yes, my brothers, nice guys always finish last because they allow others to go first.

The idea that I was myopic and one-sided in my analysis, or that I was
blaming the victim, is rather disingenuous.  Unlike others, I don't
wear blinkers, neither am I going to be looking at what I am wearing on my wrist with a mirror because I know I am going to have a distorted view of reality.  As I said earlier, I don't wear blinkers.  I am totally aware of my surroundings, where we have been, where we are, but the question is where are we going?  Have we as people ever analysed the root cause of how the Black Race came to be the most despised and ignored human being on this earth?  Rather than making all these claims about our inventions, of course I am well aware of the inventions by Blacks, but the question is what have we done with them?

"With the new millennium barely upons us," as I wrote in Capitalist Nigger,"the whole of Africa is literally still a colonized continent.  Black people all over the world still live under occupied territories.  I have said it repeatedly in this book: Blacks all over the world are still slaves.
There is the perception that just because the British, French, Spaniards, Portuguese or the other Europeans don't directly send their government agents to live amongst us, that Africa is independent.  Of the 53 African countries which make up the African continent, only four can claim to be independent either through their own actions or actions imposed on them by world bodies.  Independence means being capable of effectively defending yourself, militarily, economically,
socially and culturally.

"I can say it with certainly that the whole of Africa is incapable of
defending itself on its own without outside aids, if one of the European powers decided to attack the continent.  The reality of the situation is that Africa cannot defend itself, right now or in the near future.  None of the weapons of war, either old or new warfare, is produced in Africa.  None of the 53 countries, maybe with the exception of Egypt and South Africa, have war manufacturing capabilities: no gun factories, no ammunition factories, no bomb-making factories, no airplane making factories for fighter- and/or bombing-jets, no helmet making factories for our soldiers to wear, no binoculars to spy on our enemies, no walky-talkies to communicate with our own people, no water/food producing factories to produce the containers to carry foods/water for our soldiers, no factories to produce the clothing for our soldiers, no factories to produce the medicine, the bandages, the syringes or any of the first-aid materials to treat our wounded soldiers; no factories to produce motorized ambulance equipment, or the army helicopters to carry our injured to safety.

"If there were a continental war, Africa would come to a screeching halt today if Europeans decided to withdraw all their services from
Africa.  We would not be able to communicate with one another because our telephone systems are maintained for us by our former colonial masters."

That is the reality.  We are doing ourselves great disservice if we are not
brutally honest with ourselves to articulate these concerns because of what white people would say, or as one of the comments implied that I was doing this to gain something from white people.  That's really a very sad comment on a very serious concern for the Black Race.  As Dean Burney J. Hollis rightly urged, I will continue to issue this "stentorian call for Black people to rise above being dependent and complacent consumers and become independent, reformed producers - of culture, language, food, clothing, values and econies."  I will continue to cry for Black people around the world to wake up to the reality of our enormous potential and become economic warriors of the world.

Those who don't see the need to be brutally honest in this 21st century are doing a great disservice to the Black Race.  Let's pat ourselves on the back about our accomplishments, but let's measure our accomplishments to where others have been, where they are and where they are going.  As I said on page 20 of"Capitalist Nigger," "It is better to die in the sustained effort to reach your goals, than to die from fear of not even venturing.

We as black people need to remove the blinkers we are wearing.  We need to acknowledge what slavery, colonialism and racism have done to us and still doing to us.  We need to analyse these hydraheaded monsters and see whether we have ever learned any lessons from our experiences.  We need to stop using them as body armors for our continuing ineptitudes and failures.

And so I end it here with a paragraph from "Capitalist Nigger," - "Africans are not a forceful people, neither are they aggressive to the point of a fight to the finish.  We are not resolute in our commitment to a goal and lack the devil-may-care doggedness needed to scale a Mount Everest or the Himalayas.  We are easily influenced and distracted in pursuit of a quest to reach a set goal and to be the best that are destined for us.  Intellectually, we are bankrupt and decrepit.  We have a very short attention span, and have a very short burst of energy which easily extinguishes in the face of impediment.  We prefer to be parasites of a culture which we had no hand in creating, a Caucasian culture which took them years to perfect, and which we cannot easily emulate in its basis tenets -  a predisposition to make wars not only on themselves but more so on others for intimidation and supremacy.  Unlike his Caucasian counterpart, the African is a compassionate fool, easily infleunced to hospitality of known enemies because of their acts of deceitful intentions."