We hear tales of our ancestors mining gold, piling it high, becoming so wealthy that one man, Mansa Musa of Mali remains the richest human being ever to walk the earth. But how did they do it? They dug deep, yes. They washed riverbeds, smelted rock with fire, traded across deserts. But the real gold wasn’t only in the ground. It was in their systems: how they worshipped, how they learned, how they healed, how they governed.
Our ancestors did not worship with a single book, but with the living world: ancestors, rivers, skies, spirits. Religion was not separate from life; it was life’s breath. They passed on knowledge through griots, elders, storytelling, initiation rites. Every drumbeat, every proverb, every masquerade carried lessons. Education was not a building; it was a fire kept burning from one generation to the next.
They treated their health? With herbs, bonesetters, midwives, and a deep understanding that body and spirit are one. Before colonial clinics, there were healers who set fractures and cured fevers. They govern through councils of elders, kings with checks, village assemblies. Not perfect, no human system is, but functional, legitimate, and theirs.
Then came the Bible. Then the Qur’an. And suddenly, writing became the measure of truth. We forgot that the West gathered knowledge from everywhere and made it their own. The Romans took the messages of the early followers of Jesus Christ, structured them, and created the Roman Catholic Church. Jesus was not a Roman, but they made it their own. It is called the Roman Catholic Church, now sold to the rest of the world. The Pope is now resident in Rome.
In engineering, we are taught that most developed nations today learned from, and stole from, others. The West stole or learned from Africa, from Arabia, from India, from the Greeks, and yes, from Africa too. They wrote it down, preserved it, built libraries, printing presses. So there is nothing wrong with embracing what they have saved for the world. Documentation is perhaps the most important thing a man can leave behind. The Bible became the most read book on earth because someone wrote it, copied it, spread it. The Qur’an, the same.
Here is the downside: not just that we lost wars or were colonised, but that we began to believe we are worthless. Not that we lacked knowledge, but that we stopped interrogating our own past. We traded self-examination for self-rejection. We saw the West’s light and blew out our own candle.
As I walked through Central London a few days ago, I saw a Chinese Medical Centre. The Chinese, Asians, Russians have their own systems of government. America did not embrace the British Monarchical Parliamentary system; they came up with federalism and a constitutional democracy suitable for themselves. The King of Jordan said that democracy will mean different things to different people. Look at Nigeria: we have more kingdoms with kings than local government areas with chairmen. Guess what? The kingdoms are redrawn into local government, and our Western-educated kings are now jobless, paid, yes, but jobless. I once interrogated why we need local government if we have kingdoms and kings. The same applies to our education system and curriculum. CNN documented that the Alaba Apprentice Scheme is the world’s largest incubator of small businesses. Is it part of our curriculum today? Guess what? Our universities still have more courses in theatre arts than in film productions, even when we have limited theatres, and we are now the highest producers of movies worldwide. This feature is not enough to analyse everything, but just take your time to look at any sector, and you will see why we are failing.
Until we look carefully at this, really look, we remain lost. Our ancestors did great things. They built kingdoms, healed bodies, worshipped with integrity, and educated without classrooms. The West gave us documentation, global networks, modern medicine, and constitutional ideas. Take them. Use them. Integrate them into what we have and make them our own. Do not confuse borrowed tools with ancestral emptiness.
We are not worthless. We are unfinished. And the gold we most need to mine now is not under riverbeds, it is buried in our memory, waiting for us to dig again, this time with both hands and an open mind.
Daddy Kris
