The year 2002 signs the first contacts between the International Ontopsychology Association and Africa.
An AIO delegation was invited to hold some conferences by an important NGO, in January and July. Africa is not an easy country. War still goes on, even if its end was officially declared in 1999, with an international agreement signed in Lukasa.
Apparently, it is a war between different races, concentrated in the Northeast area of the country, the so-called region of the lakes.
The ethnic conflict between Hema and Lendu is strictly connected to the African rebellion. These two races have been fighting each other since 1999 in the region of Ituri, an area under the control of the rebels, named Movement of Liberation (RCD-ML), blacked up by Uganda.
It is accused to cause ethnic rebellions, by making tactical agreements with the political side of Hema, giving them soldiers and weapons to fight against the Lendu and using the local economy, buying concession for gold mining and to get precious wood.
Maybe this is not the real situation, because even if these are different races, they are always accepted.
Bantu people say that sometimes the tongue and the teeth fight against the mouth, but this does not impede them to stay together.
The truth is that races are nothing but an instrument used by the multinational that work with wood, and the many gold, diamonds, uranium and coltan mines to lay their hands on the local round.
If well managed according to the rules of a rightful state, such resources would be spring of well-being and development for all the countries of the Great Lakes, if not for Africa in general.
“Western countries are in good part the accomplices, if not the primary responsible, for such situation”.
This is what the bishop of Kisangani said in the symposium held in Butembo last year. The UN commission for Human Rights confirms such viewpoint.
The consequence of this is that the richest country on earth has the poorest population, where the so-called “African World War” sees the regular armies of six countries fighting on African ground.
So, peaceful actions promoted by industrialised countries start to appear. Press conferences are organised to sensibilise people on the fact that, only in Kivu, two and a half millions people have been killed since 1998, most of which were civilians.
There is a strong proliferation of missionary expeditions and of important delegates of associations for human rights.
The meme of welfare information and Third World is being well fed in order to assure new markets.
The African identity is disappearing in the huge cloud of dust moved by the wheels of Western machine.
Young president Joseph Kabila, who was elected two weeks after the assassination of his father Kabila, intends to work in promoting peace – unlike his father – and respecting the agreements made in Lukasa.
During an interview at the UN radio in January 2001, professor Antonio Meneghetti was asked an opinion about the problematic situation of Africa.
This was his answer: “First of all, I’d like to verify whether the presidents are free men inside.
If they are so, I’d tell them to teach his compatriots those things that keep African people as united a possible. War and division weaken people in front of others. As a practical peace of advice, I’d tell them to search for the root of the interests that causes such conflicts. Usually, these come from outside the country, because people who undergo a war are always used by other invisible people”.
In truth, Africa is not so poor as everyone claims. Or better, this is not the only aspect obsessively highlighted by Western mass media and religious institutions.
We understand that the task of the latter is to assist people, but Africa is a completely different thing. It is not even the so-called Africa syndrome that cinema and literature have expressed so much. Or, at least, this is not all.
We have been to Africa, and this veil of poverty and violence that everyone is trying to tech us hides the precise identity of an intelligence that is about to make the mistake of accepting the meme proposed by the Western world.
In its racial specificity, Africa is a fundamental part of the integral and global development of all humanism.
Life has provided all races with an exclusive and functional thing that no other race possesses, so that everyone can seek the other for an evolving dialectic of growth. Africa has lost the identity of this racial specificity, and it will not recover it through revenge on white people. Nature has not foreseen revenge, it is too stupid and anti-economic. If you delve into the ground of the hidden semantic codes, you find out that there is a latent aggressiveness that invades all kinds of social relationships with white people.
This is specially manifested in an extenuating search of contradiction in thee stereotypes of our civilisation.
What Professor Antonio Meneghetti had anticipated, about the deadly image of the crocodile was verified by us in many occasions.
Africa will not recover its specificity through racist attitude and the authorisation to search for revenge on what Africans have apparently undergone, but that was in truth moved by them.
It will not recover it specificity through the artificial superiority of forgiveness for what undergone.
Forgiveness does not exist, given certain premises we have some consequences, that no forgiveness can eliminate, change or alter.
So much so for the consequences voluntarily induced by an apparent self-destruction.
That is why, notwithstanding the degradation that one may find, one feels no mercy, because that is as if one unconsciously understood that they avoid the cause that eliminates that poverty.
It will not recover it through the interested welfare attitude of the Western world. A saying by the Batake tribe goes: “Those who advice you to build a hut will not give you any straw to cover it”. But “Those who sell straw will tell you to build huts only, because they want to sell it” (prof. Antonio Meneghetti).
It will not recover it through the imitation of American or European models and status symbols, continuously proposed by the mass media, especially television.
CNN is the first channel that you see when you see do a channel search at the Grand Hotel, and the feeling is that the programming foreseen for the African countries is different than programmes broadcast in other countries.
Even when they appear to be well dressed like businessman, after a quick look it is clear that this is just a set-up: they fake and show off, but they do not do anything. Africans imitate the models of white people, with no productivity at all.
The soul of African people seems to suffer from a wanted and clear disease.
Our stereotypes do not pollute them, they choose our stereotypes.
Africa will not recover its specificity through the instinctual exasperation of dance and sex as a reference of values and as a reaction to the Western rationality.
If it does not find a logical, historical and rational structure, human instinct turns into animal instinct.
It will not recover it if Africans do not fight against their laziness, which feeds a confidence of intelligence without any real ground, and whose aim is to live day by day, trying to cheat on others.
It is a laziness that dazzles reason, even in the simplest chores.
The strength and nobility that we have perceived in some African people is always too depredated by an extremely lazy dominating psychology.
This is easily understandable in the total incapacity to face problems or simple requests.
Such situations totally block the operative system which gives them a role in interplanetary history.
But Ontopsychology can de-programme the stereotypes that cover this identity. A Bantu saying goes: When a free man is tied with a rope, he breaks it.
So, this rope must be broken. And here the study of Ontopsychology is important, as this is an elementary knowledge that exists before the civilisations that we know.
Ontopsychology, in fact, has reset a critical system to organise rationality for a functional and efficient result for the humanistic project, regardless of races.
In order to understand the human being, it is necessary to know the elementary principle that constitutes the human nature.
This is not an abstract criterion, having a practical root and a concrete principle that allows people to understand how to lead life, meant as the mediation between man and environment, before all cultures. Even if surrounded by an environment with the least hygienic conditions, we happened to experience something that we may define as spiritual. For a few moments, before an audience of black youngsters, pupils of arts institute, we saw wonderful visions of an uncontaminated nature and primeval powerful strength.
We have seen the pride of these people in many young and noble faces. We have seen it in that country that some say is one of the most devastated and problematic of the whole planet.
We have heard the warm and ambitious voice of a boy, proud of his race. An African saying goes: High grass may hide a guinea-hen, but not its singing.
We have seen bodies dance to the rhythm of drums, with grace and harmony, with no trace of the famous primitive spirit.
We have seen interested people who have listened to our conferences with respect and a level of civilisation such as we have seen at the Expo Palace in Rome, and with a profound and sincere cultural background that we have not seen in Sao Paulo.
These people took part in the conference with comments, questions and opinions, expressed with politeness and decision, even if with disagreements sometimes.
They clapped their hands when we said that we do not approve the welfare attitude that is the brand of Africa. The impact with the African continent was, as in many other cases, very violent.
Notwithstanding all, we cannot help hoping that the human being, beyond all racial stereotypes, can evolve everywhere, and loosen all the complexual knots that, since birth, impede his existential success.
The reality of racism comes from the masochistic drives of a race of people who, putting itself in a position of fake inferiority, undergoes a constant need of revenge against a more structured civilisation.
Such need for revenge manifests itself with aggressiveness and physical violence.
Submission is the historical alibi to activate a karmatic psychology that does not allow any kind of humanistic evolution.
Being asked why we were in Africa, we sincerely answered that if these people decide to change, we will have an extraordinary company in the journey towards a radical humanism, before races and cultures.
And from Africa we heard the most intelligent question about Ontopsychology ever asked so far.
During a press conference, someone asked: “If Ontopsychology defines itself as a science, can you please tell me what is its object of study, the method used and the aim that it achieves?”
It was nice to answer such a refined provocation, which highlights the noble level of cultural training, for many people above suspicion, that we witnessed as the efficient alternative to the memic image that we have always been taught on this race.