Mr. Ceesay was speaking recently at the Africa Liberation Day celebration organised by the UTG Social Sciences and Humanities Students Association and the Platform for Awareness and Development held at Nusrat Senior Secondary School in Bundung.
He said:“Today is not a day to celebrate, it is a day to sit and reflect and take stock of our achievement from when we started the liberation struggle. What liberation are we celebrating because we are not liberated from poverty, not from hunger, not from disease and not from imperialism? Liberation is a process which we need to pass on to our generations.
Over fifty years of flat independence, African countries cannot provide universal education and medicine to their own people and children especially; we cannot even provide electricity to our citizens. We cannot even feed our people or even provide the minimum of life requirements for our people. As a result, most of our people; the young people in particular, are taking the risk of going through the high seas to become voluntary slaves in Europe. This back way phenomena is in fulfillment of the grand strategy that the white man has designed to conquer Africa.
“This is what I call the ‘third wave’ of the scramble for Africa. In the first wave, they came and took our people as slaves; in the second wave, they came and took our land; now they are taking our resources both human and natural resources. If we Africans sit and allow this to happen, this would work negatively for the development of the continent. However, the events of liberation in Africa did not start in the 1950s and ’60s. The process started against Arab and Europe aggression many centuries ago. Today is the day to remind ourselves of the struggle against European slave market on the Atlantic coastal areas of Africa, to remind ourselves of Samori Toure of the Mandingo Empire’s eight-year campaign of remarkable tenacity and military skills against the French, a day to remind ourselves of the defeat of the Italians in the battle of Adowa in 1895 by the Ethiopians under Menelik II.”
To rectify the mistake done by the independence leaders and carve a way forward, Ceesay called for the recommitment of the African people to the total liberation of the African countries and by extension the continent as a whole. He equally called for unity, solidarity, constant dialogue with the African culture, creativity and as well as the instilling of discipline and self-control in the young people of Africa for the total emancipation and development of Africa as a continent.
Other speakers at the occasion included Ms Alili Afili, a psychology lecturer at the UTG and Gibairu Janneh, the executive director of the Gambia Press Union who both called for reaffirming of the commitment to the total unfettering of the continent from the bondage of neo-colonialism and imperialism.
By Essa Njie
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