Valentine’s Day Celebrations: Another Opportunity for the Sons and Daughters of Africa to Remain Poor

Dear Sons and Daughters of Africa Today is 14th February, 2022, and so many among us are excited about celebrating a European festival whose history they do not even know - St. Valentine’s Day. Like them, I have not done my utmost best to find out its history until a few moments ago, when I have consulted an online encyclopedia – Encyclopedia.com, which says: According to tradition, St. Valentine is the patron saint of courtship, travelers, and young people. One story says that he was a Roman priest who became a martyr because he helped persecuted Christians around a.d. 270. Sent to prison, he restored the sight of a blind girl, who fell in love with him. According to another tale, Valentine was a young man awaiting execution. He loved the jailer's daughter and signed a farewell message to her "From your Valentine." What is clear from the above exerpt is that the origin of the day is not really known. Nevertheless, there is considerable information on how it has developed to what it is now. The Encyclopedia.com Goes on to note: Early celebrations in honor of St. Valentine took place in the middle of February, around the time of an ancient Roman pagan festival known as the Lupercalia. It was customary for men to draw the name of a young girl from a box and celebrate the festival with her. The Christian church substituted names of saints for the women, and individuals who picked them were supposed to draw inspiration from the lives of the saints. During the Middle Ages, St. Valentine's feast day on February 14 became known as a day for lovers. The custom of sending valentines to a loved one on St. Valentine's Day may have come from the belief that birds begin to choose their mates on that day. What is most worrying about the excitement with European festivals is that it is a symptom of deep-seated mental colonization. In The Invention of Africa, the celebrated Congolese philosopher, V.Y. Mudimbe, memorably wrote: “colonialism and colonization basically mean organization, arrangement. The two words derive from the latin word colére, meaning to cultivate or to design.” Mudimbe goes on to point out that the colonists (those settling a region), as well as the colonialists (those exploiting a territory by dominating a local majority) have all tended to organize and transform non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs. This is evident in many facets of our lives, not least the numerous European festivals that many of us celebrate - Christmas, Boxing Day, St. Valentine’s Day, Easter (not Passover), Fathers’ Days and Mothers’ Days (there seems to be two of each), and even Halloween. My brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of Africa, what many of you have not realized is that capitalists passionately love the way you celebrate these European holidays because they are opportunities for transferring cash from your bank accounts to theirs. Thus although you have hardly recovered from your unwise spending decisions just two months ago during the Christmas season, you are again splashing today, and will be splashing yet again over easter - less than two months from now. Yet this kind of reckless spending is part of why you remain poor, for expenditure on luxury items rather than on ventures that multiply your cash will never help to build up your financial resources. A Jewish wise man made this point thus: “He that loveth pleasure shall be a poor man: he that loveth wine and oil shall not be rich” (Proverbs 21:17). The worst form of colonisation is that of the mind, because whoever is colonized that way does not have what it takes to resist the one putting him/her down. As Steve Biko correctly observed, the most powerful weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. Thus to borrow Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s famous saying, we need to decolonize the mind.