No civilisation abruptly ends simply because of a natural disaster or the ravages of war. Their absolute erasure occurs through “absence.” Absence here refers to the loss of identity, memory and soul that makes rebuilding impossible. When civilisational thinking ceases, a people lapse into this absence. More than a millennium of slavery, colonialism and neocolonial occupation has induced this deep forgetting. Entrapped by borrowed modernity, many of Africa’s intellectual elites suffer from cognitive dissonance and the outsourcing of thinking. A people may continue to exist physically without a true historical presence when they fail to accumulate wisdom into power.
The consequences are institutional, psychological and metaphysical. Africans still occupy space and time, producing, dreaming and relating, but much of the civilisational essence that once defined them has faded. Slavery was not merely the merchandizing of a people; it was the systematic disruption of collective wisdom and the evacuation of Africa’s
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