The Sunday News
Just how Africa turned from the birth place of humanity to a huge cemetery of mankind is not difficult to understand, what is difficult to imagine is how to repair the damage. Even the name Africa is not African, it is a nickname given to the continent by its enemies. Africa is the place of heat and darkness — it is the allegation that has been swallowed and believed even by Africans themselves.
Economically and politically, Africa has been a place that is understood, known and defined not by its owners and friends but its exploiters and enemies. The human resources, the minerals, forests and wildlife, and the natural beauty that Africa has do not define the continent. Famine, disease, war, pestilence and poverty are privileged as the true definitions of the reality of Africa
. Gifted Congolese novelist and philosopher Valentin Mudimbe has called this misfortune “the invention of Africa” where the continent is conveniently named and defined by its invaders and exploiters to suit their intentions. Africa is not only poor and diseased, the narrative goes, it is also peopled by corrupt and violent people and for that reason nothing good will come from Africa. As a result of the invention and the imagination of Africa as a dark and terrible place where everything is wrong, despicable things have been done to the continent in the name of civilising and developing it, first by the enslavers and the colonists and next by Africans themselves.
After internalising the image and the imagination of the continent that was invented by the enemy, Africans have become the enemies of themselves and their continent. Afro-pessimism, the lack of confidence in ourselves, the belief that by nature we cannot do anything right and the deep wish that we were white have probably done more damage to Africa than the direct handiwork of its known invaders and exploiters. The image and imagination of ourselves that the conqueror has forced upon us has become the death that we carry wherever we go.
Triple heritage or triple curse?
Probably out of his own well-meaning Afro-optimism, the late Kenyan historian and political scientist Ali Mazrui understood and taught about Africa as having a triple heritage. In the creative and rich observation of Mazrui Africa became the meeting point of three civilisations.
The European Christian civilisation, the Arabic Islamic civilisation and Africa’s own rich precolonial civilisation converged to produce the Africa that we have today. In the imagination of Ali Mazrui and many other Afro-optimists this triple heritage makes Africa the home of the whole of humanity where Americans, Europeans, Arabs and Indians cannot only feel at home but can also claim the roots of their own ancestries in Africa as the birth place of the entirety of humankind.
The triple heritage thesis about Africa has led to so many other imaginations of nationalism and nationhood in Africa. South Africa has imagined itself as a beautiful rainbow nation that belongs to all who live in it for instance. Confident Afrikaner right wingers have used this thesis to claim that they did not steal any land from Africans as most of the spaces their ancestors occupied were empty lands and vacant spaces.
The right wingers have even made claims to be authentic Africans in their own right and dismissed the accusations of being settler colonialists as a fabrication. On the other hand, black Americans, the descendants of African slaves are reminded every day in America that they are African Americans with emphasis on African. Everywhere in Africa white Europeans and Americans are found who call themselves Africans.
Africa is open to the whole world and closed to itself. It is so easy for Europeans and Americans to be Africans, and not so easy for Africans to be European and American. In a strong way, the encounter between the African and other civilisations has not been a heritage that Ali Mazrui and other African thinkers wish to celebrate.
The meeting of Africa with other civilisations of the world has largely been a curse. Instead of a dialogue of civilisations it became a crushing clash that left Africa the poorer for it. Conquest and colonial encounters were violent, way too violent to create partners and friends, it produced conquerors and the conquered, victimisers and victims, and these asymmetrical relations that are tilted against Africa and Africans, inspite of all pretences, are still alive today.
Thanks to the crushing curse, Africa has no history of its own except that which is punctuated with misfortune. We have pre-colonial Africa that we will never know, colonial Africa from whose wounds we still bleed and postcolonial Africa which is an unending attempt to recover from the debilitating hangover of slavery and colonialism. Proverbially, Walter Rodney, has taught us that the history of Africa is exactly that, a history of “how Europe underdeveloped Africa.”
Remembering Africa
Africans have tried to recover themselves and their continent from the triple curse. Joseph Mobutu of Zaire tried to lead by the philosophy of “authenticity” where Africans seek a return to precolonial Africa. Authenticity ended in disaster as it became personalised Mobutuism. Kenneth Kaunda preached African humanism; this also did not help as being humane in a violent and greedy world makes Africans victims of their own generosity.
Julius Nyerere advanced Ujamaa or African socialism, which also ended in grief as the capitalist world system punished Tanzania and Julius Nyerere for the attempt, up to today the country is still bleeding from the wounds of the experiment that went too wrong.
In South Africa Ubuntu has also been advanced as an attempt by black Africans to humanise the world, and disastrously Afrikaners have not reciprocated the gesture making South Africa the land of blacks who are victims of their own wisdom as they remain drowning in poverty while a minority of whites swims in obscene wealth. Attempts to put Africa right have severally ended in ways that almost justify the thinking that Africa is damaged beyond repair. Everything that Africa has from its natural resources to the intelligence and generosity of its people turns around to be used against it.
The enriching Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiongo has recently argued that the African Renaissance as the act of recovering and repairing Africa should be designed as remembering Africa in two important ways. The first act of remembering Africa is based on that slavery and colonialism dismembered Africa by dividing it physically and culturally.
For that reason, Africans should invest political and economic effort in uniting and therefore remembering Africa, bringing together again the broken pieces, undoing the Berlin effort. The second act of remembering Africa is based on memory, Africans should, in the captivating view of Ngugi, remember who they are, where they are coming from and where they wish to go.
Because of the punitive triple curse, being an African in the world has not been easy. While the rest of the world gets shocked by occasional explosions of violence and pain of wars and terrorists attacks, the African experience in the world has been that long and painful experience of permanent pain and death.
In imagining the political and economic effort of developing Africa as remembering Ngugi wa Thiongo is really not doing anything fundamentally new, but he is pandering on the old but important thinking that Africans, more than any other people in the world, should pay attention to self-knowledge and the understanding of how exactly the world works.
Educating and socialising young Africans should always involve the cultivation of a consciousness of how the world has treated Africa and how the Africans should own the Davidic strength and Solomonic wisdom to know themselves and understand the cruel world around them. It is also for that reason that while the natural sciences are important for the economic development of Africa, the humanities remain even more important as the disciplines that provide the imagination and the languages of liberation.
- Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a South Africa-based Zimbabwean academic: mailto:[email protected].
