The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
As the 25 May Africa Day Celebrations draw nearer, we must reflect on the core role of pan-Africanism as a counter-hegemonic response to the functions of imperialism in placing our ambitions of freedom at the periphery of the global political economy. We cannot afford to ignore the priority of unity in building Africa following the colossal dismemberment effects of slavery and colonialism. Pan-Africanism and all its intellectual, cultural, political and economic reinforcement of the global synergy of Africans is the bedrock of the continent’s future. Pan-Africanism is even instructive of the clarion call for Africans to taking charge of their destiny. Against the backdrop of dehumanisation and dehumanisation of Africans, Pan-Africanism is a logical alternative to finding a new humanism.
Pan-Africanism as a redemptive reordering of power is an ongoing revolt against the ill-disposed dimensions of racial monopolies which have served as intergenerational enablers of Anglo-American values of repression.
Like other 25 May celebrations, this is yet another opportunity for liberation movements across the continent to remember that they grew out of the support they received from the oppressed men, women and children of the African continent. Nationalist political parties from Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), South-Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) and Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF must celebrate Africa Day in full acknowledgement of the existential values they draw from the people of Africa and the shared destiny founded on principles of unity, peace and development.
These ideological values play a significant role in filtering logic(s) that are disengaged from the perennial aspirations of our people as predetermined by their past and philosophies of freedom that binds them. In this case, Africa’s interaction with the colonial empire becomes a driver of forceful self-determination and preservation of territorial integrity, national liberation and sovereignty.
This further evokes the firm conviction of this analytical locus that foreign policy design in Africa should emanate from political negotiation which is predicated on the unifying aspirations of the masses. The entrusted status of liberation movements to govern and make policies — in this case, foreign policy is historically and morally defined by principles which when compromised in favour of expedience threaten enduring national interest and the enabling tenets of the longevity of those in power.
Since the generation of Nkrumah, Nyerere and our very own Robert Mugabe there has been an increasing conspiring tradition by the oppressed to delink from the colonial system which has long-entrenched itself in Africa.
Consequently, there has been an unremitting dialogue in the ‘global rights revolution’ exploring the conflict intrinsic need for self-determination and breaking the global division of the developed and the under-developed. This continued call for self-determination and decolonisation represents the broader frame of political negotiation which transcends the localised reconfiguration of power in terms of democracy, good governance and human rights prescriptions from the liberal world. The call for decolonisation as a foundational framework for rethinking the notion of power epitomises the philosophical and legal regimes which reinstate the anti-imperial tradition which gave political independence to Africa. Liberation movements in Africa — Zanu-PF included, represent a fight against the misplaced priorities and moralities of neo-colonialism in Africa. As such, liberation movements must recreate themselves to refuse the authoritarian politics of neo-liberalism at all costs.
In asserting the centuries of defeat our political theory from Garveyism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, Nationalism, Decolonisation, African Renaissance and now Decoloniality are committed projects of rethinking the West and its plunder to the Black race. At the same time, African politicians and intellectuals are products of Western pedagogy.
Cognitively, they are at the crossroads between Western epistemological proclivities and African resistance alternative predispositions. Many times, the resistance of alternative thought is denied existence in African politics and socio-economic strata. Progressive African rationality is replaced by nativist essentialism which in essence is colonially manufactured. One then wonders, how then does Africa think of a liberating trajectory outside imperial-genetic terms? The anti-imperialist ideological revulsions continue to be threatened by neo-colonially manufactured secession and tribalism agendas, global market induced racism and xenophobia, genocides, neo-liberal lootings of Africa’s economies and political entanglements.
To the credit of African intelligentsia namely academics and creatives, there have been significant attempts to challenge the uneven global order. Through the committed efforts of thinkers like Ali Muzrai, Chinua Achebe, Dambudzo Marechera, Steve Bantu Biko, Achile Mbembe, Walter Rodney there has been a massive attempt to construct, reconstruct, contest, appropriate and reject the intellectual vestiges of colonialism. Through this anti-imperial battlefront, the idea has always been to reposition Africa ontologically and epistemologically, hence seeking the edification of the African soul.
The process of decolonisation and its cross-cutting values of protecting and promoting the post-colonial trinity of national liberation, national sovereignty and the national economy have benchmarked political negotiation and its relation to foreign policy construction. This is further emphasised by Mignolo (2007) positing that decolonisation should politically ‘negotiate’ its interests in full acknowledgement of the permanent designs of imperial entanglement Africa finds itself in currently. A clear understanding of Africa’s historical marginality and dependence inclined foreign policymaking calls for a decolonial turn to reassert the continent’s future. Nationalist movements remain at the centre of this process of political negotiation.
In one of his profound reflections, Archie Mafeje argues that: . . . we would not talk of freedom, if there was no prior condition in which this was denied; we would not be anti-racism if we had not been its victims; we would not proclaim Africanity, if it had not been denied or degraded; and we would not insist on Afrocentrism, if it had not been for Eurocentric negations . . . Of necessity, under the determinate global conditions, an African renaissance must entail a rebellion — a conscious rejection of past transgressions, a determined negation of negations. (Mafeje 2011: 31–32)
Prof Mafeje’s contribution constantly reminds us of the overarching fundamental and collective need for Africans home and abroad to reject all the manifest logic(s) of imperialism. Mafeje’s call is that of a radicalised re-membering of the unrelenting effects of racism — its “epistemicides” and “memoricides”. As Africa Day is upon us (on Tuesday) we must recollect our dignity and identity which imperialism has denigrated. This is an opportunity to reconcile once more with our denied African knowledge systems and celebrate them as alternatives to the limited options to worldviews which colonialism and slavery have imposed on us over the years.
Long Live Pan-Africanism
Long Live Uhuru na Ujamaa
-Richard Runyararo Mahomva (BSc-MSU, MSc-AU, MSc-UZ) is a Political-Scientist with an avid interest in political theory, liberation memory and architecture of governance in Africa. He is also a creative literature aficionado. Feedback: Twitter: @VaMahomva, Email [email protected]
