The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
When Peter Tosh sang that “so don’t care where you come from as long as you’re a black man, you’re an African” he sang for some and not all the thinkers and commentators on Africanity as an identity in the world. There is a multitude of thinkers and activists who believe that the black skin is the first condition of being an African in the world.
Another multitude of thinkers exists that believes that there is more to being African than the black skin. As the continent of Africa passes through another month of May when Africa is commemorated and celebrated, it is important to ponder on what exactly it is to be African and who in actuality is an African under the sun. The thesis that Africa is the Cradle of Humankind, where the human race was born, also advances another understanding of every human being in the world as originally being an African. The bleeding history, however, of the enslavement of Africans, Euro-American imperialism, the colonisation of Africa and apartheid has complicated Africanity and separated Africans, together with other peoples of the Global South, into a people whose identity is defined by how they have been treated in the modern world system.
The common familyhood of humanity has, over years, been ruptured by the slavish, colonial, racist and apartheid classification of human beings according to race. The inferiorisation of Africans on the basis of their black skins has called into question the idea that any white person can truly claim, without long explanations, to be an African. For that reason, scholars have tended to comfort themselves with the conclusion that there is no one group of people that can be called Africans anymore, but there are many types of Africans in Africa and in the world at large.
The many Africans
Scholars are far from consensus on who exactly can be called a true African in the world. Ali Mazrui, who dedicated a long part of his intellectual life in studying and nuancing Africa and its heritage, was accused, especially for his Africa as a triple heritage argument, of being partial to Islam mainly because of his religious beliefs and Arab blood. Mazrui denied the charge but Wole Soyinka and others insisted that Mazrui himself was not African enough. Another gifted African who has spent years pushing the envelope of African studies and scholarship is Mahmood Mamdani. For ever arguing that “an African can be anyone who is prepared to do serious business within Africa” Mamdani has also not been spared criticism. Scholars such as Kwesi Prah have noted that Mahmood Mamdani’s Indian blood and Islamic faith tend to limit his understanding of things African.
In arguing that the black skin, whether one likes or not, makes one an African, Peter Tosh was lambasting celebrities such as Michael Jackson and others who aspired to distance themselves from the black skin and Africa. Tosh like many other Rastafarians and Ethiopianists believed that all black people in the continent and the wide diaspora were one family of Africans.
The philosophy of Gurveyism as adumbrated by Marcus Gurvey urged all black peoples to physically and spiritually return to Africa as they would not know any peace elsewhere in the world. In the 1930s, the spectre of Negritude also captured the imagination of the world about Africa and Africans. Led by Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon Damas, the Negritude Movement asked blacks throughout the world to be proud and to unite against all forms of oppression and imperialism.
Blackness and black pride were the rallying cry of Negritude. After the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 in South Africa and the banning of political parties, a thought movement that became the Black Consciousness Movement arose to fill the political gap. The Black Consciousness Movement believed that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the” apartheid “oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” black people who needed to be “conscious” and knowledgeable about their condition in the world.
The Black Consciousness Movement was fundamentally suspicious of the peoples of the white skin, liberals who claimed sympathy and solidarity with the oppressed black people of South Africa. In the view of Black Consciousness as projected by its founder, Steve Biko, those whites who sympathised with the oppressed black were better off talking to other whites and convincing them to abandon apartheid and racism than attending black rallies, getting banned and jailed for black struggles.
One white person, in a rally of ten thousand black protesters, Steve Biko feared, had the effect of fooling blacks into believing that not all whites are racist when in fact, all whites liberal or not were beneficiaries of apartheid.
Popularised earlier in the 1850s by Edward Blyden and later in the 1960s by Kwame Nkrumah was the concept of the “African personality.” The understanding of the “African personality” suggested that Africans have a distinctive mentality of their own that separates them from other peoples of the world, and “Africa” was “for the Africans.” African people had a common destiny and Nkrumah added that no one country in Africa can be truly free if there still remains any country in Africa that is under colonialism or apartheid.
The African personality thesis was important in the development of Pan-Africanism and African nationalism. Of these different understandings of Africa and the African in the world, a group of people is difficult to ignore. These people are what has been called the “orphans of Empire,” white people that have been born in African countries and have not known any other country as their own.
These are tricky people to understand because they obviously benefit from the worldwide privilege of the white skin but are able to claim being Africans by birth and destiny. Close to this group, and equally tricky are the Africans by legality, those white people who have benefitted from laws and regulations in African countries that have allowed them to naturalise themselves into being Africans.
South Africa has been said to “belong to all who live in it” not in reference, mainly, to Africans from other countries who live in South Africa, but in accommodation of whites who claim to be Africans. Still, South Africa is not called Azania but the South of Africa to project it as a part of Europe in Africa in respect of the whites from Europe who claim it, also, as their own country. As a result of this complication, some black South Africans, even in the political leadership, still smitten with apartheid induced homeland mentality, find it easy to refer to other countries of Africa as Africa and South Africa as another exceptional place, not really European and not exactly African.
Africa as an experience
By a historical misfortune, the geography and cartography of Africa are all colonially defined. The maps and borders that shape Africa are products of the colonial encounters. The black skin also appears not enough to distinguish one as African except in terms of blackness as used by colonialists and enslavers as a mark of inferiority.
Being physically born in Africa is also not enough to describe an African, after all many black people in the world, including descendants of former slaves have been born in other continents but still regard themselves as African this and African that and they daily suffer the costs of being black in the world.
Nigerian literary critic and philosopher, Abiola Irele has persuasively argued about what he calls “the African experience.” In this understanding of Africa as experiential, being an African is more of a historical experience than a simple identity.
A true African therefore cannot just claim or volunteer to be African without feeling or experiencing the condition of being African in the world. Part of being African is the feeling that one has about Africa from an experience of the world, and for that reason being African may also be highly spiritual business.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa: [email protected]
