The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
It was on a particularly rainy day in 1906, 5 April, that Pixley ka Isaka Seme the man who founded the African National Congress, gave an epochal speech.
That speech became the first recorded call for an African awakening. The speech, titled: The Regeneration of Africa, was telling in its recognition that Africa had been degenerated hence the need for “regeneration” and an awakening of a kind. Africa had to awaken from a kind of historical slumber and regenerate itself from a kind of decay and collapse.
All great awakenings begin, perhaps, with an honest recognition of the slumber and the decay that must be survived and overcome by a determined people. Seme was speaking exactly 70 years after the influential German philosopher George Hegel, in his treatise on The Philosophy of History in 1830, had dismissed Africa and Africans as hopeless: “At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again.
For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit…What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.” Hegel expelled Africa and Africans from world history.
To claim a regeneration or awakening of Africa as Seme did, therefore, was remarkably courageous and radical in a racist, colonial and imperialist world order that was determined to do Africa down by all means necessary, politically, intellectually and economically.
To see hope in Africa and a future for Africans was by all accounts to be prophetic because there was no single sign in the firmament that Africa was going to survive slavery, colonialism and imperialism.
Many Africans and Africanists associate the stubborn assertion of Africanness with Thabo Mbeki who delivered the now famous “I am an African” speech, an oration that Mahmood Mamdani has called the “speech of the century.”
But in actuality, the “I am an African” assertion is a simple quotation from Seme who rememberably boasted that: “I have chosen to speak to you on this occasion upon The Regeneration of Africa, I am an African, and I set my pride in my race against a hostile public opinion.”
Acutely aware was Seme of the fact that to boast of being an African was outlandish at a time when the continent and its people were a true metaphor of darkness and degeneration. It was an act of intellectual and political stubbornness too when in 1937, the first black president of Nigeria Nnamdi Azikiwe published a classic on: Renascent Africa. The book led to a description of what was called “zikism” as a philosophy of African re-birth and regeneration. Largely, it was a wishful if not purely dreamy book that fantasised of a great and regenerated African continent. It can be radicalism to fantasise and dream Africa out of the nightmare of coloniality, and Ziks, as Azikiwe was fondly called, did exactly that.
The Painful Interregnum
Many decades after Azikiwe and more than a century after Seme, Africa still seems to be caught in a dream and fantasy about regeneration and awakening. Thabo Mbeki was called a lonely dreamer when he themed his presidency of South Africa with the mantra of the African Renaissance. Some mean critics shouted Mbeki down as a copy-cat and secret admirer of Europe for imposing a European historical idea on African history.
The Renaissance is originally that European cultural, artistic, political and economic age of rebirth after the Middle Ages that saw Europe spring to prosperity in all its affairs. Africa has been waiting for such a spring and Mbeki was laughed at for ever dreaming about it. Just like Seme and Ziks before him, Mbeki was considered a dreamy prophet for ever imagining that Africa could be re-born and that her himalayan political and economic crises could be survived and overcome.
The promise that Seme gave in the claim that in Africa “ the giant is awakening, from the four corners of the earth Africa’s sons, who have been proved through fire and sword, are marching to the future golden door bearing the records of deeds of valour done,” has proven to be a difficult promise or a failed dream.
The hope that Seme had when he imagined that “the regeneration of Africa means that a new and unique civilisation is soon to be added to the world” has clearly become a false hope in Africa.
The dark philosophies and prophecies of such racists as Hegel seem to be coming true in Africa. European historians and philosophers wrote as if to curse or cast a spell on Africa and Africans.
One Hugh Trevor-Roper, a British historian, opined about Africa thus: “Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach.
But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.”
The present condition of Africa tragically seems to confirm darkness as the history of Africa. European philosophers and historians seem to have told the truth on Africa while African prophets and politicians now appear like true merchants of falsehoods. Present Africa seems to be trapped in some form of cruel interregnum.
What Antoni Gramsci called an interregnum is a painful juncture in history where the old and the bad is not dying fast enough and where the young and good is also not getting born well enough. An interregnum is a time of morbid symptoms and strange appearances in any society.
Colonialism by all other names does not seem to be dying fast enough in Africa. Equally, liberation does not seem to be getting born fast and well enough. An interregnum is upon us and the morbid Gramscian symptoms are at large in the land.
African titans such as Kwame Nkrumah and Muammar Gaddaffi seem to have died with their dream of a United States of Africa. Africa has never been more divided and restless. African polities and economies have never been more troubled and troubling in their goings and comings.
African states are either failing, failed or captured by dark foreign capitalist Mafioso forces that are more powerful than governments. The history of Africa seems to be the history of other people and other places in the African continent, not a history of Africa and Africans in Africa. Instead of being itself or anything, our continent has become a true stadium of world problems and problems of the world that daily play themselves out. Instead of acting on its future the continent is perpetually acted upon by other states and forces.
Where is our Genius?
As if he understood that the regeneration of Africa would take much more than prophetic optimism, Seme noted thus: “In all races, genius is like a spark, which, concealed in the bosom of a flint, bursts forth at the summoning stroke, it may arise anywhere and in any race.” Far from being a true heart of darkness, Africa is actually awaiting its genius and its spark. Seme was a youthful lad when he imagined the regeneration of Africa and so was Azikiwe when he prophesied of a renascent Africa that was to come one day.
The youths of African have a monumental burden to imagine another Africa that has other political and economic possibilities. It was an epochal stroke of genius for black Africans to imagine independence from colonialism and to have acted on the imagination by fighting settler colonialism.
It will be a stroke of genius when Africans of the here and there now begin to imagine liberation from enduring coloniality with its durable morbid symptoms. Throughout the Global South, youths are beginning to use decoloniality to see beyond the limits of African independence and to demand liberation.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of the Witwatersrand: [email protected].
