By Austin Kaluba –

The western media is often criticised for only reporting on the negatives of Africa usually focusing on poverty, famine, war and corruption.
While we can rightly blame the media for being biased, we have to realise that it is a true reflection of what is happening on the ground.
Some of the images highlighted by the western media is what we live up to, while shouting blue murder at our critics.
Many African intellectuals who are usually in league with white liberals love to stifle debate and defensively lash out at critics like a hen whose chicks are being attacked by a bird of prey.
As I have noted above, white liberals and their African sidekicks are wary of any racist book about Africa without debating the accusation.
Books by writers like VS Naipaul who recently wrote a book Masque of Africa are rarely debated but dismissed as racist and a misrepresentation of the continent.
The late scholar Edward Saïd described Naipaul as peddling “colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies” while Paul Theroux, his one-time acolyte, said Naipaul had “race on the brain.”
The Masque of Africa , an account of Naipaul’s travels in various African countries, in pursuit of an understanding of “African belief”is highly judgemental and dismissive of Africans he meets in his odyssey.
There are the glib dismissals of various peoples: the rural poor of Ivory Coast who are “not yet a peasantry”; in Ghana the “idle fellows” surviving by selling bush meat by the roadside; in Gabon a passing reference to Chinese logging companies as expressing “the Chinese hatred for the earth”.
And while I agree that almost every book written about Africa today is awash in the red ink of racism, bigotry and prejudice, I would love the apologists to debate the accusations at length.
We need to understand that it is not only white critics who take a swipe at Africa but Africans themselves who write about the continent as if they are snooty expatriates from on high.
Usually they paint subconsciously the continent as a hopeless one filled with filth, savagery and broken people pretending to be humans. I know this because at one time I wrote for the BBC and I know what stories my editors liked.
When it comes to matters African, we are unfortunate as a continent to have a record number of avuncular white liberals who tend to cry louder than the bereaved.
My message to this arrogant and misguided ilk who have influenced African intellectuals (since they quote them at length)  is that we ought to move past being an over-defensive lot and debate issues unflinchingly.
To do this we need to ask hard questions like why are things the way they are? Our African intellectuals like the late Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thion’go have on several occasions played the role of being apologists by playing the same old refrain of: “Can’t you see, we are human beings like you?”
I am afraid this high priests of apologists  have stifled debate and are scared of lashing out at those that ask questions about our humanity and our competence in the global world.
Some other once wretched souls like Hispanics, Asians who were not long ago lumped with us have shaken the negative images and are now in the race with the West.
Instead of accusing our critics of racism, we should start asking hard questions about ourselves and hold our looter-leaders accountable? Yelling racism keeps at bay the answers to our issues. It drives away accountability of ourselves.
It also diverts attention from the myriad of problems that beset our continent, a number of them homegrown.
I have no kind words for our leaders and intellectuals who are a product of western education that has created the worst caliber of leaders that has ever ruled much of Black Africa.
It has taught them the key tenets of selfishness since many lack compassion and understanding of their societies which they erroneously interpret through the western paradigm.
This brigade keeps on harping on the white man’s contribution to our plight oblivious to the cruel truth that this role has been historically well documented.
How can the white man become a convenient foil for the greed, ineptitude and evil of our leaders when most African countries are half a century old as sovereign states!
Baying at the white man as our intellectuals and their white liberals have been doing is stupid when we know that that our academic Pharisees and leaders are singularly responsible for genetically coding in our leaders a lack of introspection, an allergy to accepting responsibility and a disdain for the word, credibility.
Democracy has combined with the new Christianity to become a force more deadly than AIDS in oppressing our people.
African intellectuals are at war with the West. They are human beings and they are not going to stop telling white folks that. They write obsessively about the otherness that is Africa.
It is tempting to romanticize Africa as our writers have done and turn a blind eye to black-made squalor that is there for the whole world to see.
Many African writers have written for dictators, and continue to share wine and break bread with thieves mimicking democracy. When it suits their purposes, they ignore, with powerful words, atrocities committed by their friends and relatives.
What our people hanker for is the simple pleasures of clean water, good roads and safe communities.
You don’t need to deafen our ears by baying at our former colonial masters who left our countries many years ago.
It is time we started looking inwardly to find solutions to our accursed lot. China and Japan have done it.