Imperialism never begins with weapons. It begins with the mind. Cheikh Anta Diop demonstrated this rigorously: before physically killing a people, one kills them culturally. Their past is denied, their history falsified, the continuity of their memory destroyed. This mental murder prepares all forms of domination. He writes: “Imperialism first kills the being spiritually and culturally before seeking to eliminate it physically.” Thus was constructed in Europe a negative imaginary of the Black person, designed to justify slavery, colonization, and later neocolonialism. This is not an accident of history; it is a rational enterprise of domination.

Contrary to the lie taught for centuries, Africa is not a late appendage to human history. It is its point of origin. Modern sciences confirm what Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile Obenga established: humanity was born in Africa; the first civilizations, sciences, philosophies, and organized religions emerged there; Pharaonic Egypt is a Negro-African civilization, the matrix of learned humanity. “The ancestors of Black people created the arts, sciences, philosophy, and religion at a time when the rest of the world was steeped in barbarism,” writes Cheikh Anta Diop. Ignoring this is not neutral: it is to accept inferiority, to psychologically disarm African peoples.

The slave trade and colonization produced a lasting effect: collective historical amnesia. Théophile Obenga writes: “The accidents of history have rendered the African people amnesiac.” A people without memory is a manipulable people. A people who doubt their own worth accept currencies they do not control, artificial borders, foreign educational models, and criteria of success defined elsewhere. The Franc Zone, the prolonged colonial school system, and the extraverted economy are direct products of this organized amnesia.

Aimé Césaire said it plainly: Western civilization is incapable of resolving its own contradictions. “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it has created is a decadent civilization.” Social crisis, moral crisis, ecological crisis, political crisis: the West is no longer a universal model, but a system at the end of its cycle. Yet it continues to impose its norms, narratives, and values on an Africa it refuses to see rise again.

Pan-Africanism: A Historical Necessity

In the face of this, there is no serious alternative outside a conscious and organized Pan-Africanism. Marcus Garvey understood this clearly: “Our union must know no boundaries.” Molefi Kete Asante extended this vision: Africa cannot rebuild itself without its dispersed children. The African from Dakar, Port-au-Prince, Salvador de Bahia, Kingston, or Chicago belongs to the same historical project.

Malcolm X warned us: one never wins a fight when the enemy sets the rules. “We do not need anyone to set the rules of the battles we are going to fight.” This implies intellectual autonomy (producing our own knowledge), an educational revolution (rethinking curricula), cultural reappropriation (languages, philosophies, spiritualities), and an African political strategy conceived by and for Africans.

Africa does not need pity. It needs consciousness, organization, and courage. As Achille Mbembe stated: “Africa will save itself by its own forces, or it will perish.” The African awakening will be neither given, nor offered, nor negotiated.

It will be seized—through knowledge, memory, unity, and willpower. The African Associative League stands within this struggle: restoring consciousness, breaking alienation, and preparing the African renaissance. For a people who know themselves can no longer be dominated.