The Berlin Decision And The Stupid African

File photo: European leaders seated during the Berlin Conference in 1884

By Alpha Amadu Jalloh | Special to Africa Publicity

 

Africa’s wounds are not accidental. They are engineered through betrayal. Betrayal from outside by imperial masters and betrayal from within by our own leaders. If this continent, so blessed with mineral wealth, fertile land, youthful energy and divine diversity, is still crawling in shame and poverty, it is because of two things. The Berlin Decision and the Stupid African who endorsed it, protected it and still obeys its orders in 2025.

 

In 1884 and 1885, European powers met in Berlin to decide the fate of a continent none of them truly understood. No African was invited. No African culture was respected. They partitioned Africa like meat in a butcher’s shop. They drew lines that separated kingdoms, ethnic groups and languages. What followed was systematic plunder. But even worse, after independence, our own leaders refused to erase those lines. They reinforced them. They wore colonial clothes, spoke colonial languages, enacted colonial constitutions and danced in European palaces while their people begged in the streets.

 

From Nkrumah to Lumumba, we had giants with vision. But after their assassinations and removals, many assisted by our own, we replaced visionaries with opportunists. From the 1960s through the 1980s, many African leaders turned national treasuries into private vaults. They crushed dissent. They nationalised failure. They privatised power. In the 1990s, we saw the rise of democracy only in name. Rigged elections. One-party dominance. Fake constitutions. The Stupid African no longer wore chains. He wore a suit, flew business class and smiled for donors while his people drowned trying to reach Europe.

 

From independence to now, what has truly changed?

 

We are still defined by what the Berlin Decision created. But worse, we are governed by what the Stupid African continues to enable.

 

In my book, Monopoly of Happiness: Unveiling Sierra Leone’s Social Imbalance, I wrote,

“The African elite is a construction site for borrowed identity. They speak for Africa in foreign tongues and legislate suffering in native lands.”

 

We have universities but no critical thinking. We have ministries of youth but abandoned generations. We have mines producing gold, bauxite, diamonds and oil, but our people fetch water in buckets and pray their children do not die from curable diseases.

 

Our leaders are not victims. They are accomplices.

 

As I warned in Monopoly of Happiness,

“Africa is not poor. It is poorly managed. And no amount of foreign aid can fix what bad leadership has deliberately broken.”

 

From Mobutu in Zaire to Taylor in Liberia. From the despotism in Côte d’Ivoire to the dynasties in Cameroon and Uganda. From the sham elections in Zimbabwe to the generational plunder in Sierra Leone. These are not exceptions. They are evidence that African leadership, in many cases, has been a sustained betrayal of the masses.

 

In my chapter titled “Inherited Poverty, Manufactured Inequality,” I wrote,

“The African child is born into a lottery rigged by the state. Whether he succeeds depends not on potential but on the incompetence of those who run his country.”

 

Ahmed Sékou Touré said, “We prefer poverty in liberty to riches in slavery.” But today’s African leaders prefer riches in slavery and pretend they are still fighting colonialism while selling the continent to the highest bidder. They ride in convoys while people die in clinics. They sign billion-dollar deals in Dubai while teachers strike for unpaid salaries.

 

Nelson Mandela said, “It is in your hands.” But what have we done with those hands? We applauded thieves. We re-elected failures. We ignored justice. We allowed the stupid among us to represent the brave, the corrupt to speak for the honest and the violent to masquerade as protectors.

 

We blamed religion. But the truth is, Christianity and Islam were here before colonialism. Timbuktu was an Islamic learning center while most of Europe was in darkness. Ethiopia was Christian before much of Europe. Our African traditional religions taught morality and justice. Religion is not our enemy. Leadership failure is.

 

As I observed in Monopoly of Happiness,

“The tragedy of African politics is not that we were colonised. It is that our leaders continue to govern like colonial masters long after independence.”

 

We have regional blocs that do nothing. An African Union that watches genocides. A judiciary that dances for the executive. Parliaments full of praise singers. And citizens who are afraid to speak because power has been weaponised against truth.

 

Gamal Abdel Nasser believed that Africans could build their own future. We proved him wrong. We begged the IMF to tell us how to spend our own money. We asked France to train our armies. We asked the United States to fix our economies. We now ask China to build our bridges.

 

As I warned in the final chapter of Monopoly of Happiness,

“The African future will not be written in Chinese factories, European embassies or American boardrooms. It will be written in our schools, our courts, our ballots and our hearts. Or it will not be written at all.”

 

We have no excuse left.

 

Africa is bleeding. Not because we are cursed. But because we are led by men and women who made stupidity fashionable. Who turned governance into exploitation. Who inherited nations but ruled like landlords. Who forgot that leadership is not power. It is responsibility.

 

The Berlin Decision may have divided us. But the Stupid African is the one who kept us apart.

The Berlin Decision gave us borders. But the Stupid African turned them into battlefields.

The Berlin Decision took our land. But the Stupid African sold our souls.

 

This is not history. This is today.

 

But it does not have to be tomorrow.

 

Let us rise with clarity. Let us shame the betrayers. Let us educate our children on the real causes of their pain. Let us build the Africa we were meant to be.

 

The Berlin Decision was their plan.

The Stupid African made it work.

But we still have the power to end it.

 

If we wake up.

If we rise.

If we say boldly and finally, enough.