The Sunday News
SOCIETIES that have survived administrative and juridical colonialism and are enduring coloniality face several questions and dilemmas, including the question of existence itself.
Conquest in shape of colonialism did not only invade geographic locations but it invented and constructed the conquered peoples after the image and the interests of Empire. Of the native Americans, Hellen Olif has asked the question “do Indians exists?” after all the years of defeat, dispossession and displacement in their own land. Bothered by the troubling and troubled national question in Zimbabwe in 2009, historian and decolonial theorist Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni asked in a book “Do the Zimbabweans Exist?”
The cracking ideology of rainbowism in South Africa similarly forced political scientist Ivor Chipkin to ask the question in another book “Do South Africans exist?” In the entire Global South the dethronement of formal colonialism ushered in the epoch of coloniality that politically and economically maintain colonial and imperial conditions beyond the life of colonialism.
Socially and culturally the peoples of the former colonies remain spiritually hostage and even beholden to their colonisers and to Empire.
What is called the national question, a question of identity and belonging of a people to a nation and a geographic location, is accompanied by the deeper philosophical question of existence itself. In the case of Africa as a continent and a part of the Global South the question of existence of Africa and of Africans is troubled and destabilised by the historical fact that even the name of Africa was given to the continent by its conquerors as first a nickname and later an exoticising label that described the continent as a far, dark and very hot place.
The burden of this short article is after long years of colonialism, during this endurance of imperialism and the rage of coloniality, is there a place to go back to called Africa, and are there people to encounter that can be called Africans?
This question is central in the present where economically and politically Africa and Africans seem to be that troubling presence that is absent in the world. Politicians are variously sold to causes of party and power politics to the negligence of the national and continental questions that remain unanswered even if party A wins over party B.
Even more neglected are planetary questions of existence, questions that Africa should have a say in answering.
Nationalism’s unfinished Assignment
Scholars, especially the big ones can get away with many things, even the petty theft of ideas. As a philosopher par excellence himself, in 1963 Kwame Nkrumah published a philosophical treatise of “philosophy and ideology of decolonisation” in Africa, he titled the book: Consciencism.
In this important book Nkrumah among many other ideas agonised with what was to be left of Africa and the Africans after the slavish and colonial encounter with the Christian West and Islamic Asia. It is in that philosophical agony that Nkrumah stumbled on the idea of Africa as benefiting from a “triple heritage,” a continent whose future was to be formed of the encounter of three world civilisations, Euro-America, Asia and Africa itself.
In the philosophical imagination of Nkrumah, Africa was to strengthen itself using the benefit of being a child of three strong parents, it was to be a new and better continent with fortified political, spiritual, cultural and economic genes. Intelligently and powerfully, Mzee Ali Mazrui took Nkrumah’s idea and gave it the famous “Mazruiana” touch, poeticised it and polished it into his now famous “The Africans: Triple Heritage” book and documentary. Mazrui magnified and amplified Nkrumah’s nuances and musings about the future Africa as the continent that had the opportunity to be strengthened by the civilisations that colonised and enslaved it.
Under the well-meaning but careless watch of Kwame Nkrumah and other founding fathers of African decolonisation Africa lost the “triple heritage” opportunity and harvested instead a “triple dilemma” that defines the present ideological confusion or complication in Africa.
African nationalism as an ideology of decolonisation, a patriotic passion that arose to confront colonial racism did not, somehow manage to escape infection by the racism of colonialism and the tendency to discriminate and “other” the other.
Soon enough African nations began producing and reproducing other nations and sub-nations within one country.
The national question arose as a result of the failure of nation building projects in Africa, tribes and clans turned themselves into nations and political parties throughout Africa were taken over by clans until Africa was a collection of countries that did not have nations in them but feuding tribes and clans claiming to be nations.
It was to be Mazrui again in 1982 who in the article: Africa Between Nationalism and Nationhood; a Political Survey, noted how African nationalism failed to actualise nations in Africa but created a dangerous situation in Africa where tribes had to die ideologically and otherwise in order for the nations to survive.
Pan-Africanism as an ideology of African unity was made to retreat as nationalism continued with its pitfalls, dividing nations and the continent into smaller and even smaller groups.
That, in short is the national question in Africa where nationalism as an ideology of decolonisation did not manage to build but divided nations, throwing African countries into troubles of citizenship, identity, belonging and distributive justice.
The tragic 1994 genocide of Rwanda, as studied by scholars such as Mahmood Mamdani, is traceable to the challenge of the national question where the Hutu imagined the Tutsi to be settlers that must be removed from Rwanda.
The imagination of nationhood and belonging in Africa is still infected with the colonial binaries of natives and settlers, nativism, tribalism and xenophobia. Africa and its many countries as a creative and powerful heritage of co-existing identities, civilisations and heritages is still a dream to come.
Marxism and the Colonial Problem
Besides nationalism, the other ideology that fired decolonisation in Africa was Marxism with its political visions of Communism and Socialism. Marxism created a “spectre” that did not only haunt Europe but shook the entire planet by proposing an alternative world to that ruled by capitalist economic logic. The only problem with Marxism was that it was another European philosophy that was blind to the colonial problem and the problem of white supremacy. It is for that reason that Karl Marx himself celebrated colonialism as a means of civilising backward peoples and preparing them for communism and socialism. In 1955, Aime Cesaire, one of the founders of the Negritude Movement, had to resign from the French Communist Party in disgust that Marxism was blind to the “colonial problem” and the “black problem” in the world. Like nationalism, Marxism did not escape racism and discrimination of the peoples by identity in the world, it became another colonial ideology covered under such enchantments and slogans like “workers of the world unite” when workers are not the same in the modern world.
Can Decoloniality Save Africa
In Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiongo, a fiery fighter against colonialism and imperialism found himself in conflict with the post-independence government.
He was seen at home as an agent of imperialism who hated the nationalist government, abroad Ngugi was seen by European and American scholars as a bitter African that did not want to let go the memory of colonialism. Ngugi wa Thiongo became an Africa that did not belong in Africa and that could also not belong in Europe except by exile.
In his thought and philosophy Ngugi combined aspects of African communalism, nationalism, Marxism and the humanism of thinkers like Edward Said.
In Latin America scholars such as Enrique Dussel, like Ngugi found themselves exiled to Europe because of their critique of political establishments in their countries and radical opposition to imperialism.
The answer to Africa’s future, its existence and the existence of its people seems to be concealed in scholars and political leaders that are able to see clearly the challenges of imperialism and those of postcoloniality in the continent. Decoloniality as the family of philosophies of liberation that uses such theoretical political concepts as transmodernity, border thinking and planetarity has the potential to powerfully return Africa to its true triple heritage. Decoloniality can bring Africa and Africans into existence.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected].
