I rail against three phenomena that are gaining some traction on African ideas: (1) I despise universal or compulsory education or day care, (2) I despise universal healthcare or compulsory healthcare insurance (3) And lastly that children, or human offspring, belong, not to the state or government, but to the parents first, and then to the family, the clan, and the ethnic grouping from which the parents have come.
It is important to appreciate human autonomy and national sovereignty and how they guide against these seemingly disparate concepts, but which ideas are fast creeping into African acceptance without the proper scrutiny. I rail against them because they undermine African sovereignty. The entire European colonization of Africa proceeded in significant parts with the alienation of the African child, the offspring, from the parents, the home and from the entire family. This alienation enforced the usurpation of control of the father or the uncle in the home. The father or uncle—whether the inheritance system was patrilineal or matrilineal—was replaced with the European Priest at Church, the European Principal at the missionary colonial school, or the European manager at the colonial office or factory.
Defeat occurs in different forms and the African defeat that led to the colonization of the continent may look different things to different people. Complete subjugation occurs, when one loses control over reproductive rights. That is when one no longer controls their own reproduction. Reproduction entails not only the conception of the baby, or only the maturation of the fetus to term, or only the birth of the baby. Reproduction involves the full replacement of the generation prior. Therefore, in African tradition, before the European terrorists arrived to it, reproduction entailed a full spectrum replacement of the old, a continuity of social, religious and cultural agenda and the replacement of elders by a newer generation.
By losing children to the colonial Church, to the colonial missionary school (which also renamed African children as their own) and by allowing the Church to take over even the burial ceremonies of African peoples, African men, in addition to having lost ground battles to European terrorists, finally and summarily lost control of their homes, their families, their cultures, religions, social clubs and customs. That control was assumed by the European colonial masters and all their myriad colonial enterprises. That loss of control culminated in the control of African children by Europeans.
Post-colonial discourses, however, have since led to some détente especially during a period when Europeans have been largely, still not completely, booted out of Africa. Though European men have physically left, their influence and control over African men and their children persist. The colonial Church has not collapsed. The colonial missionary school rages on with ever demanding schedules for African children, spiriting them away from their homes, from their family enterprises where they were assets to their families, into classrooms designed to train them for fixing local economies that are based on exporting raw materials to European men in European countries and thus become liabilities to the African home and their families. African men in post-colonial Africa have still not been able to wrest away the control of their own children from these colonial enterprises. Their reproductive rights remain subjugated and intact on the neocolonial plantation—the landmark of postcolonial Africa.
Yet, Africa faces a more pernicious modern challenge of control over her children way beyond the colonial universal education and universal day care. Not only has Africa lost their children to European tutelage, but Africa stands to lose the God-given health and care of her children to European universal healthcare take-over. Through the Pharmaceutical industrial complex, owned and operated by colonialists, and its subsidiary healthcare providers in Africa, a push for a universal healthcare or yet a compulsory healthcare system has emerged. Like the colonial Church of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the European healthcare provider or hospital is another yoke in the control of the reproduction of African youth.
Worse, the digitization of children’s educational records, school records, and medical records, and invariably the inclusion of the digitized records concerning the genetic materials of their parents, families, clans and ethnic groups, without even the courtesy of consent, poses a threat to the sovereignty and self-autonomy of all Africans, not only children. Through the collection of biometric information of African children by European firms and technologies, children’s bio-data will flow straight through the pipelines to the centers of European power from where African colonialism is administered out of sight.
For instance, Ghana, which seemingly cannot keep its own Independence Square space—right dab in the middle of its capital Accra—clean from open urination, clean from open and filthy gutters and which can barely be expected to manage its own currency in a matured way, a country that cannot even treat sewage in its capital city, let alone upgrade drinking water pumping stations since its independence from the British, is seeking to digitize the biometric information of every citizen, including children as young as six years old and to issue identification cards to that effect.
Why is this dangerous? Why is this more pernicious to our sovereignty? This biometric information, paired with the school records of children, and paired with their medical records collected at schools and at hospitals makes complete the colonization of African children out of sight, and through the age-old colonial proxies of schools, hospitals, clinics, technological companies and the law. Nothing can be quite as colonial or even tyrannical as that. Ghana’s digital tyranny—biometric passports and biometric identification cards, even for children—for example, smells of the necessary steps that centers of European power on African colonization are taking to ensure the complete subjugation of the continent and its reproductive rights.
The loss of control over reproduction is a loss of sovereignty, and the loss of a future. Nothing can be worse.
