What is the Pathé Diagne Initiative?
The unification of Africa is still a pipe dream. The new idea of Pan-African political parties as a vehicle to unity is failing to gain sufficient traction. It doesn't look good given the odds that keep piling up against our prospects as a continent.
But there is a way to set Africa free from its neo-colonial shackles that's not been tried yet, a non-roundabout manner of achieving all that's required, and more, that is arguably the only fail-safe method of inevitably enabling this vast and wealthy continent to take control of its own destiny.
This method is what the Pathe Diagne initiative is, and it is named after the man who showed the way first.
Incidentally, Pathe Diagne was a contemporary of Cheikh Anta Diop, the man called "The Father of African History", who also came from the same country. In his last days, Diop himself compiled a dictionary in his mother tongue, clearly an indication that the two men were in agreement on the issue of the importance of the need to do away with the official status of foreign, European languages in crucial walks of African lives.
And it stands to reason that, once the initiative is followed through, it should definitively mark the beginning of the journey of us African people reconnecting to our essence, to our ancestral brilliance, creativity, productivity, and genius. This should be the beginning of the process of reclaiming our true place among the nations of man.
This initiative recognizes the fact the African has what it takes. He has the potential to excel and prosper but is inhibited in this, and the removal of this inhibition is the solution. The initiative provides the simple key that unlocks this potential, allowing the African to soar.
The success of this initiative will be when we start meeting them all, neo-coloniser or non, on equal terms, as it is supposed to be.
The initiative's objective is to make schooling in Africa effective by using our own languages for tuition, using dictionaries that we compile ourselves based on a correct understanding of our languages.
Research done in Africa half a century ago by Pathe Diagne has already shown that using a mother tongue to educate African children results in a 60% increase in pass rates in school, which translates into a significant increase in the mean IQ.
What this means is that our mean IQ in Africa could potentially be better than that of the Chinese. We could potentially become cleverer than this nation, which would make us the cleverest people on earth. Dreaming aside, what the initiative aims to accomplish is the making of clever Africans. "Make them clever" is in fact our motto.
It is simple enough and may sound too good to be true but, in many ways, the envisioned methodology of this initiative represents a revolution even for countries that are already using African tongues for tuition, such as Tanzania.
They have a lot to learn from us.
The catalyst in the method lies in the forging of languages from dialects, which is what should have been done at the very beginning of the so called independence era in Africa, and for a good reason. Our inspiration includes the likes of Ludovitch Stur, the man behind the creation of Slovencina, the official language of Slovakia. The slavs of slovakia would never have amounted to anything had this man not graced their history.
What he did for his people is what we intend to do for Africans ... and even better because we have the benefit of hindsight.