The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
The month of May has achieved acceptance as the month of Africa throughout the continent.
The 25th of May in particular is a day that is celebrated and also commemorated as the birthday of the political covenant of African unity that was sealed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, some 56 years ago. On that day the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was formed.
The OAU became an attempt if not a historical and political experiment to actualise Pan-Africanism and institutionalise the unity of African countries and oneness of African peoples wherever they are found.
Unity as an ideal is about the foremost political current that Africa has experimented with as part of decolonisation, democratisation and development of the continent. Yet, some 62 years after the independence of Ghana and a full 25 years after juridical apartheid was dethroned in South Africa, some Africans are still searching for liberation. The dream of liberation that enchanted Africans and led to the formation of the OAU has largely evaporated into a nightmare for most Africans. Poverty, disease and ignorance have enveloped the larger parts of the continents in an overwhelming manner that has naturalised suffering and misery.
As a result, some of Africa’s bright minds among scholars have turned pessimism into a political ideology and intellectual theoretical framework.
The Afro-pessimists claim to be honest about Africa being a dark hole where misery and suffering for the populations is not only real but has become naturalised. The starting point of thinking about Africa, they say, is being true to the darkness and pain that has become the identity of some parts of the continent. In a way, colonialism, imperialism and tyranny are the stubborn historical corpses that insist on waking up every time they are buried in Africa.
Julius Nyerere, one of the founding fathers of Africa and prophets of African unity became a kind of Afro-pessimist at some point. After his brilliant and ambitious Ujamaa economic and political experiment failed and caused more poverty in Tanzania Nyerere believed that nothing works in cursed Africa. In anger Nyerere opined that the Devil’s headquarters are located somewhere in Africa, hence the darkness and misery in the continent.
About the OAU itself, Nyerere complained that the organisation had become a club of tyrants, heads of states that regularly met to plan how to protect themselves from their angry people, and how to suppress the will and freedom of their populations.
Nyerere, one of the Fathers of Africa had given up on Africa and feared that the continent had been colonised by many evils including the Prince of Darkness himself, Lucifer.
What Nyerere believed to be a curse in Africa that made anything good impossible was infact coloniality, a coalition of invisible but powerful forces, systems and structures within the world systems and its orders that kept the Third World a poor and dark world, economically, politically and otherwise.
Coloniality unites white and black individuals and forces that continue to milk Africa. As Africa commemorates another month of May and another birthday of the OAU that is now called the African Union (AU) the true meaning of liberation in Africa is still not known, I argue, and must be pursued.
Taking Some Liberties in Africa
There is no doubting that such founding fathers of Africa as Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah had Africa and Africans at heart. That they sacrificed a lot to bring about the emancipation of the continent is a truism that can only be ignored at the dear price of deception.
Colonialism and imperialism are stubborn systems and structures of power that cannot be evaporated easily or can they be wished away.
The courage and good intentions of leaders are not enough to exhaust the impact of a modern colonial world system that has put the economies and polities of all countries under its hegemonic control. With their colonial and western education our founding fathers were also carrying coloniality in their heads. Their dark bodies were the visible African hardware but their western educated minds were the Eurocentric software that did not allow them to imagine another Africa besides the one that the colonisers had designed. Colonial borders and maps, states and systems of government that the colonialists had built remained intact in Africa. With African leaders experimenting with socialism here and capitalism there, African countries remained trapped in Eurocentric ideologies and practices that were not going to deliver liberation.
African populations began to protest in unhappiness. The liberation that they dreamt of was not arriving and the leaders began to be loathed as pretenders and false prophets. In turn the leaders turned to the strong arm and ruled their people with coercion. For instance, early in Ghana’s Independence, the legendary Kwame Nkrumah introduced the Preventive Detention Act of 1958. Under that Act, Nkrumah jailed thousands of Ghanaians that opposed his life presidency.
Those that protested against his one-party state rule were also clobbered and incarcerated. At the height of it all Nkrumah had more political prisoners than apartheid South Africa, and some Ghanaians openly wished British colonialism would return to Ghana. The people’s liberator had become something else, in other words. On the other hand the people’s liberator saw his people as traitors, rebels and ingrates that, for their own good, needed to be clobbered. It is possible that having grown and suffered under colonialism African leaders did not know any other form of rule except colonial rule whose violence they imitated and reproduced on their own people.
Their alienating western education made these leaders confuse their opinions for political and economic philosophies; they rejected advice and ruled through tyrannical whim. In Ghana Nkrumah’s political and economic opinions were treated as prophecies, as oracles that are beyond question.
While Nkrumah and Nyerere in particular did not create a reputation for looting public money and personal enrichment some African leaders of the time did. Behind the dogmatic ideology of “African authenticity” Joseph Mobbutu Sese Seko is known to have become richer than Zaire, and had the privilege, once in a while to loan the country some money.
Through corruption and other forms of cozenage some African leaders ate the freedom of their countries and took liberties with the resources of their nations as their people sank deeper into poverty and miseries. In Malawi, Kamuzu Banda became famous for being the infamous tyrant that threw his political opponents into a “crocodile infested river” taking liberties with the lives of his people. Other African countries degenerated into civil wars in which Africans, for political power and the control of scarce resources, finished each other off in the streets and bushes of Africa.
From white settler colonialism, it seems, at independence African countries moved to black and native colonialism of the rich and violent despots. But there was no such movement, in actuality, black political and intellectual elites were just continuing from where white settler colonialists left. Dominating the people and looting economies. The unity of Euro-American elites and African elites that dominated polities and looted economies of Africa replaced African Unity and became an alliance of black and white colonialists.
From Liberties to Liberation
It is John Stuart Mill, in the main, who fleshed out Eurocentric ideals of liberty. In his utilitarian and liberal philosophy Mills preached individual freedom, happiness and pleasure as the highest goal of life. When the individual was happy, had maximum pleasure, then society itself would eventually be happy. In politics and elsewhere, Mill preached, the individual must put individual interests first and maximise pleasure and happiness. In reality, when individuals put themselves first, inequalities become gross. One individual may monopolise the entire economy of a country for his enrichment and pleasure.
Public coffers may be clean out for the personal enrichment of the political and economic elite. African political and economic elites that have naturalised corruption seem to have learnt too well from the Eurocentric colonialists and their libertarian ideology of empowering the self at the expense of the rest, I argue.
The spirit of hoarding resources and monopolising opportunities is a colonial spirit and imperial practice that was impressed upon some African elites.
The communitarianism of old Africa is the decolonial ideology and spirit that young Africans, in commemorating Africa day and celebrating Africa Month, should deeply reflect upon.
Once again, in Africa, communal happiness should take a front seat ahead of liberal and neo-liberal individualism that has seen individuals put themselves ahead of nations.
– Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria, South Africa: [email protected]
