Red Pill Truths About Africa: A Prelude
Throughout this series of pieces, I will deconstruct and debunk a number of widely accepted “truths” about the African continent.
I have titled it Red Pill Truths about Africa because the assertions challenged have gone on to be uncritically accepted by most of the global African and black Diaspora, along with the African intellectual class. Indeed, increasingly more elements of Western society have moved in a similar direction.
But, the truth has to rein free, irrespective of whether or not it’s popular at the time.
So what is the Red pill?
You might be familiar with the terms red pill and blue pill as a result of their prominent usage in Manosphere circles. Well known social media influencers and YouTubers like Andrew Tate, Better Bachelor, Kevin Samuels, and Rollo Tommasi and their followers use this phraseology to refer to and define what they believe represents successful, masculine males, as well as those perceived as “beta” and “weak” in the modern age.
However, its origins stretch further back and speak more to a philosophy than a given archetype.
In the year of 1999, a sci-fi film called The Matrix was released. It’s responsible for introducing the concepts of the red pill and the blue pill. At the time, the planet was on the verge of ushering in a new millennium. The final century of this millennium - the 20th Century - marked the beginning of the modern world as we know it. The nation-state, the widespread phenomenon of urbanization, air travel, the modern automobile, assembly line manufacturing, space exploration, computer technology and information communication technology, life-saving medicines and vaccines, the Green Revolution, all came of age in the 1900s.
By the end of it, our world had become one, interconnected on a scale and complexity that’s still difficult for a lot of us to comprehend. A person living in 1900 might not have been aware of what lay before them hundreds of miles beyond where they lived, and may have had no discernable way of accessing the kind of information needed to shed light on this glaring blind spot. By the time 1999 came along, children and adults alike virtually everywhere developed an understanding, awareness and connection of the world around them that is now irreversible. Televisions, telephones, radios, computers and the internet enabled instantaneous access, conceiving a new global citizen.
Consequently, such changes pulled more and more of us into a kind of shared reality. The flipside of this evolution is that this new, globally felt reality, its memes, myths, values and customs, have been shaped by a smaller number of centralized entities and institutions.
The influence of Hollywood and pop music, the consolidation of language, the spread of and strengthening of multilateral organizations like the United Nations, the end of the Cold War, the rise of the internet, and the emergence of the modern multinational corporation now means that so many of us - consciously or unconsciously - are reading from the same script. We are as close to belonging to a proverbial Tower of Babel than we ever have been - universality serves as the overarching backdrop of whatever the zeitgeist of the day might be.
In the Matrix film, the red and blue pills both serve as tools and an allegory for the harsh, yet liberating truths of this world (the red pill), as well as the propaganda and constructed half truths that mask what is and manipulate many of us into conformity in one way or another (the blue pill). The movie’s protagonist (Neo), steps into the role as “The One” who has to fight to defend the survival of the red pill world and freedom itself.
The Matrix posits that the overwhelming majority of us have taken the blue pill, opting to participate in one big simulation built and monitored by the technological, cultural and economic forces responsible for centralizing and carving out the new shared reality that we have all absorbed to some degree or another.
Essentially, what you experience, see, hear, touch, taste, smell and feel today is reality but that doesn’t make it real and spontaneous. Advertising and multi-billion dollar marketing campaigns, media, formal schooling and the modern nation-state are steered by a small number of powerful interest groups to manipulate you into believing that what you came to be: when it comes to how you dress, how you speak, what you eat, how you define your dreams, even how you discovered this article of mine that you’re reading right now, were of your own free will.
The Matrix narrative that defines modern African relations
Since then, the red pill and blue pill has gone on to be used as a narrative articulating competing visions and views of a lot of different elements of life and society. In the world of Africana and all things African and Afro-descended, this writer is opening your eyes to the red and blue pills encompassing it.
On one side there is the blue pill: black people, and non-white people in general, have been, and continue to be, subjected to racial and cultural discrimination and oppression. The powers that be operate under an ideology of white supremacy and use it as an instrument to manipulate and control everyone within a racial hierarchy. Colonialism, neocolonialism and racial subjugation are part of an intentional and concerted effort to maintain dominance. Non-white people therefore can expect to lead their life at a disadvantage when compared with white people.
On the other side there is the red pill: what has been categorized and explained as racism and oppression has been misconstrued and sensationalized with the help of the film industry, academia, global organizations and different governments. The motivations behind this lie in a black elite and their partners in crime, who leverage this worldview as a means to controlling and stringing along your actions and thoughts in ways that enrich them, in terms of money, status and power.
By having you buy the okey doke that you as an African or Afro-descended person, are a victim of others, you are in need of their leadership and assistance to make you whole. Instead, you become a mental slave, trapped by the invisible chains of your own mind, not realizing that freedom isn’t free of charge, and that it’s less about the outcome than it is the ability, driven by your liberty.
The blue pill keeps you distracted from and numb to your own individual and collective agency for effecting change. It lulls you into the false belief that the grand solution to your problems lie in the delivery of recompense and atonement by the West. The idea that this mysterious other will deliver this vague “correction” is mere superstition dressed up in intellectual pretense, ultimately, no different than farmers praying to the Gods for rain to help alleviate their hardship instead of looking inward for practical solutions within one’s control.
By tying our fate to the actions of external players we unknowingly create new markets for them by way of outsourcing the work that’s attached to our own efforts. By externalizing the problem, you unwittingly externalize the solution.
The red pill is the acceptance and embrace of liberty, and the responsibilities that come with it. By recognizing that you have been the answer to your questions all along, you illuminate the corresponding clues to unlocking transformation. You can wait to obtain value or you can generate value now, bit by bit, patch by patch.
Do you choose to gather fruits from the forest like our ancestors did tens of thousands of years ago, or do choose to utilize your mind to harness the seeds and land before you to produce for self?
Throughout the following days, months and weeks, I will publish a collection of red pill truths about Africa that will demonstrably shift the way you look at our predicament. You will come face to face with some uncomfortable truths, as well as deep opportunities for growth.
If you choose to take the red pill, you will never look at life in the same way again. The blue pill is predictable, comforting and conventional, but the facts on the ground show us that it’s a dead-end. Taking the red pill is undergoing the painful task of breaking out of your shell to lead your life as an emancipated and sovereign individual.
Which leads me to my next question: are you ready to take the red pill?