I’m A White Man’s Burden By Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo

“Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.”
                                    - Rudyard Kipling, White Man’s Burden

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I’m a white man’s burden. And I’m proud to say so.
 
Don’t even tell me about history. How the white man wrecked havoc in my village many years before I was born. How they sowed the seed of the troubles of today. I know they killed Patrice Lumumba. And they ran Kwame Nkrumah out of town. But hey, who did they use? And what did we do about it? We let the saboteurs win. We let them take over.
 
My friend, the history that I’m interested in is the one that I have lived through. And it is not a pretty history. I was born many years after the white man left. I opened my eyes and the people that ran things were my own people. My teachers taught with the white man’s book. Our police killed with white man’s gun. The preacher flaunted the white man’s God. The politicians lived the white man’s lifestyle.
 
I grew up living through one crisis after another. War. Genocide. Riot. Brutality. Crime. Famine. Disease. Disaster. Deaths.
 
Don’t even tell me that the white man’s hand was in all of them. Who let the white man’s hand into the soup? Didn’t our ancestors warn that we should remove the monkey’s hand from the soup before it becomes a man’s hand?
 
Congo can feed Africa. Benue can feed Nigeria. But that’s not when we do nothing about it. Oh, I forgot, the white man is stopping us from doing something about it. And we know it. And we cannot do anything to change the situation. The world is rigged against us.
 
I’m a white man’s burden. That’s what I am.
 
I studied in the white man’s language. I studied the white man’s history before I knew we had ours. I studied math with white man’s flavor, hanging with Pythagoras, going from quadratic to integration and differentiation. Though I never saw a train or a plane, I cracked physics problems of trains going from Bristol to London and airplanes flying from Boston to Los Angeles. I studied the biology of living organism that wouldn’t survive a day in tropical Africa. I balanced equations of chemicals my nose never smelled.
 
And I turned out alright. I became an Engineer. I designed machines. Like the one that threshes melon. It was supposed to save our women from spending hours using their fingers to take out the chaff. Our water hyacinth harvester built by my class and once deployed on rivers of Ondo State has since rusted at the storage room of my Engineering department. You need to visit there before you call me a lazy African intellectual scum. Engineers before me left their marks there. And those after me are doing the same. The storage is a grave yard of knowledge and innovation. There our ingenuity rusts.
 
I’m a white man’s burden. If it makes you puke, find a toilet bowl.
 
I grew up watching the military boys plunder our commonwealth. I did not join them like some young men of my time. I quickly figured that though we may need more machines we must first change the way we think. I joined those who tell our stories. I was eager to “repaint the picture of things and change the minds of men”. Naïve me! The Babangidas of Africa did not want our real story told. So they ran me out of town.
 
I admit I was a coward. I saw what they did to people who insisted on standing in front of them to count their fingers. Some disappeared on their way home. Some were killed with letter bombs. Some were found in the boot of their cars. I could have stayed until they got me. Or I could have transfigured into a praise singer. In which case, I would have been a senator in Abuja or a Governor in Anambra State. But I chose to save my soul by opting to be a white man’s burden.
 
I’m a white man’s burden. I wear the badge with honor.
 
If you want a debate, come to my house let us jaw jaw. (Ok, I still live in the government subsidized high rise but I plan to leave this dump as soon as some white people donate to my new NGO that plans to save poor children in Africa from lead poisoning by white mining company.) But my point is that when you come to my apartment, you will see that it wasn’t the way it used to be. My bookshelves no longer have blasphemous books like Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa or ancient books like Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. No more Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat or Amadiume’s Male Daughters, Female Husband: Gender and Sex in an African Society or Ba’s So Long a Letter or Soyinka’s Ake: The Years of Childhood or Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. My shelves are now adorned with book like Kayosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Trump’s How to Get Rich, Ponder’s The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity, Butterworth’s Spiritual Economics: Principles and Process of True Prosperity and others. On my coffee table are 20 years subscription to Prosperity magazine of Reverends Creflo Dollars, Benny Hinn, Joyce Meyer, Billy Graham, Charles Stanley, Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson.
 
In my apartment, you will notice that my Phoenix University PhD academic gown that used to be at the corner of my living room has been taken down. In its place is my regalia as Knight of St. Christopher. (Though my friend, who is now a pastor at Redeem, is promising to make me a minister if I switch) My point is that I have changed.
 
When you come, after I make you grey poupon, La tache Romanee and we drink Cristal rose magnum, then we can talk about it all.  We can talk about it in French or Spanish. You can present your facts in a power point. And I will present my figures in a spreadsheet. From one ipad to another, from one Kindle to another, we will move in search of references. No moonlight stories, please.
 
I’m a white man’s burden. And I will be one for a long time to come.
 
I recently wanted to tell our stories again. And I actually wrote one. I have been looking for an agent ever since. Those I have reached out to liked my story. But they do not like the structure. They are worried about my platform and my audience. They want me to restructure the story. They want a white man at the center of it. They want him to be the one that went into Africa and saved the day. In my story, they want him to be the one who wrote the story of the primitive people of Sub-saharan Africa.
 
I’m still saying no. And I know what my no means. It means that you will never see my name in the light. I may live and die as the man who posted his rants on the internet. I’m thinking of getting The African History Society to publish my book but they have no distribution outlets and no promotional department. So nobody will pay any mind to the book, including my own people who will ignore it because it is not backed by a white man. 
 
I’m a white man’s burden. And I don’t give a damn.
 
Call me Uncle Tom. Call me the one who is lost. If you’re not lost, please answer these questions for me: If the white man broke it, do they own it? If they own it, do we exist? If we exist, are we free? If we are free, do we know it?
 
My friend, I take my white man’s medicine. I strip down for my white doctors. Privileges that I know you love when you go abroad for your annual check up. Unlike you, everyday, I’m a white man’s patient. But for you, the white doctor is the last person you see before you die.
 
I’m a white man’s burden. And it’s going to stay that way for a while.
 
For those of you praying that I come back home quick, spare your breath. Get your chaplet off the water. Those who pay the voodoo man to use telepathy to bring me home, that picture you have is the best of me that you will get. You want me to come and compete with you over whose SUV is bigger than a house? You want me to come and battle with you over who will build a mansion with the largest number of rooms? You want me to come and participate in the contest over whose cell phone cost more than the monthly pay of all the teachers in a primary school? You want me to come and vie for a place in the ranking of whose children are schooling in the most expensive universities in the world?
 
Stop prodding me to come home because you got a good job for me - one that pays in dollars, that comes with two drivers, a cook, a butler, someone to polish my shoes every morning, a big mansion in one of the government reserved areas (with separate police post, electric generator, water hole, clinic, church and mortuary), a secretary who has a secretary, a first class ticket on British airways to London each quarter etc etc. I’m doing very well here living a life as a white man’s caricature. I don’t need to come home to replicate it.
 
I’m a white man’s burden. If you don’t like it, I say, in the finest of the white man’s language, forget you.
 
 

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