When the late Bob Marley sang his famous lines ‘Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, one would think the warning only appeals to the unschooled.
Unfortunately among this group of hapless victims of mental slavery are African intellectuals who should know better of the white man’s scheming than those who are not educated.
It is these African intellectuals who are steeped in Eurocentric values since they have spent a lengthy period of time gobbling western ideals through studies in universities.
As one wag once put it when you have a PhD you have a permanent head damage, this clique of ‘intellectuals’ constitute the hopelessly brainwashed group who pride themselves for being closer to whites than their lesser educated mortals.
Unlike their western counterparts, this group insists on being addressed as ‘Dr’ or ‘Professor’ despite being mimicry men devoid of originality.
It is not surprising therefore to note that it is usually this coterie of intellectuals that the west tends to look to for judgments (mostly negative) about Africa.
These academic ‘Uncle Toms’ and ‘Home niggers’ never fail to supply the master with stereotypes that over the years have calcified as truths.
This inner circle of academic high priests is readily available and accessible than writers at home who are comparatively knowledgeable about the continent despite being less aloof than Diasporans.
The West has made stars out of these Diaspora writers who include Wole Soyinka, Ali Kwei Armah and Nurrudin Farrah who have been bestowed with the unofficial title of Africa’s voices.
While it is true that critics like me are not specialists since art is not science with everything being subjective I am just disappointed that a bulk of African intellectuals who have written books which the misguided Africans use are merely regurgitating the white man’s thought.
Isn’t it surprising that with the coming of internet, the revered positions intellectuals especially writers have enjoyed is over with their role morphing from the hallowed sage on the stage to a gentle guide by the side of the reader.
I have hailed the internet which has diluted sometimes even made the role of intellectuals irrelevant since everybody is now expressing himself on the  e-playground.
So enough of this brainwashed group lording it down on us lesser mortals who are considered academically diseased for not earning academic titles.
I also deplore the mimicry and follow fashion monkey stance that the intellectuals peddle before us.
As early as the 50’s, Franz Fanon noted in his celebrated book Peau Noire, Masques Blancs translated into the English as Black Skin, White Masks that the feeling of dependency and inadequacy that black people experience in a White-dominated world are culturally devastating.
Fanon acutely noted that the inferiority complex usually results in the black subject of colonisation to imitate the cultural code of the coloniser, a behaviour that is more evident in upwardly mobile and educated black people who consider their education as acceptance in the revered white society.
Despite being written in the 50’s, Fanon’s sharp insights of the paralysing effect of western culture is still relevant today and is evident in many societies where the all pervasive white culture meets indigenous cultures of once colonised people.
Trinidadian-born Nobel Prize winner in literature, the Asian writer VS Naipaul noted in his book Middle Passage that blacks and Indians in Trinidad, a former British colony would do anything to pass as white.
Naipaul satirizes this “pseudo-whiteness” of blacks and Indians who try hard to adopt a white man’s perspective towards their people and also the other minorities.
He observes that these copycats of western culture usually behave as if they belong to the superior race.
Black intellectuals in black Africa and their counterparts in Europe are guiltier than their less educated brothers and sisters since they have fallen prey to this pseudo whiteness syndrome.
They might wear dashikis, African tunics or even drop their western names in preference to African ones but the syndrome manifests in other areas especially in mimicking their masters and quoting western scholars without coming up with home-grown ideas.
Apart from being over-defensive of Africa’s myriad of problems and pitifully failing to pinpoint what is wrong with the continent, these men of letters and a cabal of intellectuals have subconsciously become self-appointed patronising experts on what direction we should take.
In short, these intellectuals have replaced the white experts they condemn by wearing the mantles of the all-knowing high priests who know Africa’s problems and solutions.
They have taken this revered position by spending too much time in the white man’s institution of learning earning ‘enviable’ western titles like ‘Dr’ ‘Professor’ or ‘Men of letters.’
Despite being more divorced from the continent’s problem like the white analysts who have written countless books on Africa, these intellectuals some of them who teach in European universities have the audacity to guide lesser mortals with little or no Muzungu education.
In his celebrated book The Trouble With Nigeria, published in 1983, the late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe who had spent a significant number of years abroad offers the solution of quality leadership as the sole answer to the woes of the populous country that mocks the independence it attained from colonial masters.
Achebe’s ambitious book fails to pin-point what is wrong with Nigeria with the writer addressing symptoms of Nigeria’s disease without diagnosing the ailment of the directionless country.
Achebe is not alone in diagnosing the trouble of Nigeria or Africa. He is among several African intellectuals who like the fabled blind men tried to understand how an elephant looked like with each one coming with a partial picture of the animal.
Other intellectuals have attempted to explain the problems of Africa chief among the usual suspects have been, “tribalism,” corruption, and bad leadership.
Like top Nigerian scholar Chinweizu noted in his paper, Lugardism, UN Imperialism and the Prospect of African Power these are symptoms, not the underlying causes; the fevers, not the malaria or typhoid parasites.
Achebe’s contemporary the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, an avowed Marxist is allergic to capitalism and feels the peasants should control Kenya instead of the wabenzis –the elite who have replaced white colonial masters.
If this wabenzis are victims of the white man’s material trappings then Wa Thiong’o is also a hapless victims of western education.
The writer has gone through several transitions from changing his colonial name James to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, to writing in his mother tongue Gikuyu instead of English which he claims is the language of the colonialists.
African scholars like the late Ali Mazrui rightly accused wa Thiong’o of being a tribalist since the writer ignored the more widely-spoken ki-Swahili in favour of Gikuyu.
It is interesting though to note that despite Wa Thiong’o writing in Gikuyu, the English-allergic writer uses more western literary forms than African ones in his celebrated works like Devil On The Cross and Wizard of The Crow.
Africans who have faith in the white man’s education have been disappointed by the so-called African intellectuals who have lamentably failed to come up with solutions to the cocktail of problems affecting Africa.
Instead of coming up with home-grown solution, this group of intellectual Pharisees is outdoing western scholars in being more western speaking with Oxford accents and propounding western values to anyone who would bother to listen.
This reminds me of a caricature of western education, the pipe-smoking Professor Paul Mwaipaya, a former UNZA don who was the high priest of charlatans and impostors both visibly and in his beliefs that lauded the West and despised almost everything African.
The University of Zambia still has a record number of intellectual fakes who should look inwardly for original solutions instead of parroting western thinkers for woes that affect our societies.
These copycats who have been Uncle-Tomming the white man by drinking from the fountains of his wisdom should learn how to come out of the western cocoon by offering Afro-centric solutions that are relevant to Africa.
I do not shy away from unmasking this group of pretenders who have enjoyed undeserved fawning and praise.
I am sick of copycats because I know that what the continents desperately needs are vibrant original thinkers to come up with afro centric solutions and not remedies copied from abroad and transplanted here.