The Sunday News
I remember having a casual conversation with Dr. Samukele Hadebe someday on Africa’s ideological dysfunction. Dr. Hadebe made it clear that the African scholar has a moral burden to challenge the hegemony of the West by all means.
The justification for his submission was that our continent and its peoples depend on borrowed intellectual capital. As such, there is limited value placed on African reason which encapsulates African solutions for African problems.
This explains the depth of hate and hesitancy we have about our being. As such the course of our becoming is that which is guided by externalised conceptions of being. We seem not to be guided from within on what should become of us a race.
We are clouded by pretentious intellectualism to be detached from the African reality in defining the African experience and its interface with other civilisations and world-views. We seem to be misled by superficial prima facie displays of globalisation to dismantle our African particularism.
Thus making mention of race in the scheme of things is criminalised –especially if it’s on matters affecting African people and their particular experiences. To make matters worse, the whole issue of race established its existence in Africa as a result of Western and Arab slave trade.
In other words, we are forced to comply with dictates of global homogeneity at the expense of our particular world-views. This is because in some cases our particularism as a dismembered race exposes the immorality of the principals of our dismemberment. The mention of African particularism exposes the grotesque virtues of the Western hemisphere and how the ‘globalisation’ espoused nexus of the peoples of the world is just but a normative hyperbole of the broader political, economic and social trajectory perpetuating the peripheralisation of Africa from the rest of the world.
This aptly Dr Hadebe’s proposition on the need for African intellectual militancy. This is because in as much as “Black Lives Matter”, “Black Ideas Also Matter”.
However, as we strive to be particular we need to be cognisant of the fact that to be particular is essential as long it is not detrimental to the essential. This comes against a background of glorifying nostalgic experiences of the African past at the expense of moving ahead with time and space.
Of late I have realised that what is sometimes believed to be the body of African traditional values or simply African culture are the odds and ends of a colonial travesty, a colonial typecast, a colonial bogeyman, jointly created by a trinity of colonial institutions for the benefit of the imperialist and the white settler.
The trinity entailed of the proselytiser church frequently abetted by anthropologists, the colonial and imperial conservatoire led by anthropologists and the colonial state using its native commissioners.
This bogeyman called ‘African tradition’ was the combined creation of belligerent demonisation by the three white forces or institutions and it served a crucial part in justifying slavery, colonialism and imperialism.
Today’s remnants of the African customary law is the product of the successful demonisation and epistemic disparagement of the African. According to Mahmood Mamdani ‘The history of civil society in colonial Africa is laced with racism’.
Prof Mamdani further submits that such racism was entrenched with the introduction of (so-called African) ‘customary law’ where black Africans were set apart and given a different set of ‘laws’ for their customary practices from ‘civilised society’.
What we refer to today as ‘Customary law,’ was the making of the colonial state. In fact, it was the colonial government that superintended the local or customary authorities.
This preordained all elements branded, selected and construed as customary law and African tradition were those that were viewed not to threaten white domination. The same customary law and tradition became a medium for augmenting white supremacy by making it seem natural, unavoidable, acceptable and beneficial to ‘natives’.
To this day, so many years after independence, the idea of African tradition is based on the following assumptions which many Africans themselves have come to accept without any interrogation or critical appreciation.
For this reason, African indigenous knowledge, astuteness and ingenuity are all ‘traditional,’ narrowly signifying that they are illiberal, parochial, primordial and oppressive while Western values, and knowledge(s) are perceived as modern and progressive.
To this effect, it has become a common misguided notion to think that African ideas lack vitality, credit and contextual symbiotic links problem-solution gaps.
This explains the awash interest in promoting a donor hand-out development paradigm. This mode of reason feeds into the conveyer-belt of myth branding Africa a space in desperate need external intervention for them to ‘change’.According to this view, all African reason is made obsolete. According to Pathisa Nyathi religion became a medium of eradicating the premise of our spirituality:
After all, that was the missionaries’ idea of ensuring that the gullible Christian converts did not turn into sliders. The songs implored us to do away with our ancestral spirits,
Lahl’ idlozi lahl’ inyoka;
Lahla amanyala wonke;
Woza kuMsindisi manje . . .
The brass band was impressive and all this succeeded in erasing some African impressions made earlier on.
Beyond the xenophobia of African ideas
This is the reason why African revolutionary processes are continuously condemned and in most instances the African scholar is not always near real African issues. Of note is that, Africa is going through salient ideological reinventions which are defying the seemingly formidable hegemony by the centre (Wa Thiongo 1986). This is being substantially canonised radical departures from landmark centralities of colonialism to anti-colonial decentralizations of power. At the same time this is raising new questions on pedagogy and being.
As such there is a rise in ‘disordering the order’ of colonial heritage. With more than a jubilee of buoying physical anti-colonialism; towards a more pronounced metaphysical overhaul of imperialism. Africa is going through ideological transformation founded on revisiting her founding ideologies namely nationalism and pan-Africanism.
What is emerging clearly from this search for ideological relocation is the need to forego the dominance of systems which justify the residues of colonial hegemony.
At the same time, the same ideologies which gave birth to African freedom have been used to interrogation the ineptitude of the nation-state.
In the Zimbabwean context this was broadly articulated through the land reform programme which erupted at the dawn of the millennium around 1997.
The key aim of the land reform programme was to challenge White capitalist land ownership following a history of deliberate marginalization of the Black majority. In 2015, South-Africa followed the same route of tempering with the egos of imperial knowledge capture and epistemic linearization. This manifested through the widespread of the seemingly radical lobby to reposition universities in South-Africa.
Repositioning thinking in Africa.
For that reason, it is clear that post-independent Africa is going through a phase of self discovery. Zimbabwe’s interest in shifting land ownership from the minority to the majority further buttresses this view. South-Africa has advanced the agenda to decolonise/reposition the university/achieve.
This amply indicates the continent’s shift from neo-colonial stagnation towards broadening the idea of freedom. While, there is din about state oppression and suppression citizen freedoms, the questions of freedom in Africa have been limited to democracy and human rights advocates –problematized for promoting pro-Western regime change projects in Africa.
This democracy and human rights advocacy has been characterised by standardisation and linearisation of knowledge, being and power. The same democracy and human rights discourse has been manipulated as a high vocal cord for anti-establishment narratives of sovereignty and nationhood in Zimbabwe.
In some circles of the academia, the democracy and human rights exposition has been exploited as a benchmark legitimacy and delegitimise political actors and the academia.
The democracy and human rights discourse which ensued the land reform programme has been mainly justified its existence on the need to challenge narrow Zimbabwean nationhood hierarchised into ‘patriots’ and ‘sell-outs’.
This trajectory has also served a key role in polarising nationhood along nationalist movements and proponents of ‘decolonising the mind’ endure vilification of pro-Western thinking.
This misleadingly validates the view that all liberation legacy epistemologies are primordial and repressive to the African citizenry. Against this background, this submission posits that literary depictions of nationhood and sovereignty which have been hijacked by anti-establishment notions in a manner which irrationally denigrates the establishment and its ideological values namely nationalism and pan-Africanism.
As a means of intervention, this study re-contextualizes the linear and standard polarization of the academia on the Zimbabwe crisis discourse.
