THE United Kingdom reggae band UB 40 once sang a song ‘Sing Our Own Song’ emphasising the need for black South Africans to build their own societies.
This is understandable since the blackman’s desperate dependence on a white man and western institutions has been a contentious issue since the two races came into contact.
We should note that even now when South African blacks are free, their dependence on former tormentors has continued as is the case in the so called independent African countries that got independence earlier.
For blacks who live in white-dominated countries like the United States of America, the position is even more complex birthing movements like black separatism a political lobby group that seeks separate economic and cultural development for those of African descent.
Black separatism is a sub-category of Black Nationalism that stems from the idea of racial solidarity, and implies that blacks should organise themselves on the basis of their common experience of oppression as a result of their blackness, culture, and African heritage.
Some blacks in Jamaica and the USA are even physically relocating to Africa just to escape the paralysing influence of the white man and his institutions.
A classic example of this is the repatriation of Jamaican Rastafarians and non-Rastafarians to Ethiopia which they consider as their spiritual home.
The town of Shashamane in southern Ethiopia is a place of pilgrimage for Rastafarians who want to escape the white world they call Babylon.
The nearly 800 Rastafarians who live in Shashamane say they are fulfilling a prophecy that descendants of slaves will return to Africa.
However, they also face considerable challenges since they have few legal rights, their passports having expired a long time ago.
They have no Ethiopian IDs, which means they cannot work legally and worse still the local development has shrunk the land they currently live on to an area of around 5square hectares.
Escaping one form of ‘Babylon’ has exposed them to another type of segregation from their own black brothers who look down on them.
Why are blacks living in white dominated countries seeking solace elsewhere instead of continuing to be second class citizens in the lands of their birth?
The answer lies in being subjected to racism perennially and being treated as inferior beings.
For countries that ‘freed’ themselves from the shackles of colonial rule, the situation is no different since the so called independent countries continue being yoked to their former colonial masters through trade, governance, academic institutions and religion.
For any black man in this century, he has to grapple with the ever present white supremacy, a belief that the white race is dominant and inherently superior to all other races.
It’s an ideology and a system that is pervasive in academia, politics, religion and history.
In this ideology, the white race is not only dominant physically, intellectually, but culturally as well explaining why blacks are taught to revere everything white and detest most things that link them to their race.
In the process of deeming themselves superior over those they oppressed, these Euro-ethnic conquerors indoctrinated the history, science and religious books with their presence.
They revered rogues and villains peddling them as heroes when in actual sense a number of them were just pirates or privateers, the latter referring to licensed pirates who looted for their kings or queens.
Any great philosophy that originated from anywhere else in the world, was now found to have its roots in Greece, where it was now discovered to be the birth of mathematics, writing, map making, science, and of course philosophy.
Even Egypt, which is actually in Africa, became a European nation.
As blacks, we should note that race is a creation of science which also birthed white supremacy. In 1735, Swedish Botanist Carolus Linnaeus, in his book System of Nature, separated man, whom he referred to as the Genus Homo sapiens, into four categories and assigned each group characteristics:
1. Homo sapiens Americanus: Black hair and sparse beards, stubborn, prone to anger, free, governed by traditions.
2.  Homo sapiens Asiaticus: Yellowish, melancholy, endowed with black hair and brown eyes, severe, conceited, stingy, governed by opinion.
3.  Homo sapiens Afer: Black, slow, foolish, relaxed, crafty, indolent, negligent.
4.  Homo sapiens Europeaus. White, optimistic and muscular, gentile, active, very smart, inventive.
These classifications, erroneous and laughable as they are influenced several other important writers on race and largely contributed to racism that was to follow.
From this single reference, Eurocentric scientists, religionists and politicians from all over Europe and the Americas, began publishing scientific works that categorized the newly formed races of men by similar, if not identical characteristics, using every possible means of justification.
Colonised peoples like Africans, Innuits, Australian Aborigines, Native Americans and Asians were judged by these racist classification birthing types of racial segregation like colour bar and apartheid.
It is a system that led to the victims either coping up or finding escape routes
However, the escape routes were few since the colonised peoples were already influenced by western norms which continued manifesting even when they were perceived weaned from this dependence making them lamentably fail to build their own societies.