The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
Two prominent discourses accompany most serious discussions of the history and politics of Africa in the present. The first one is the euphoric discourse that is embodied in the mantra of “Africa rising.”
This discourse is intoxicated with excitement about Africa’s economic development and democratisation. According to this discourse, the future of Africa is bright like the rising sun.
Such slogans as “Africa is the future” and “the future is African” are part of the flourish of the Africa rising narrative. The second discourse is contained in the narrative of “Afro-pessimism.”
This discourse holds a grim view that the news is bad about Africa.
That things were bad before in Africa; they are still bad and will continue to be bad is considered the starting point of thinking about Africa in politics and in the academy.
In short there are two prominent intellectual and political currents about Africa, the optimism and the pessimism current. I think both the pessimists and the optimists about Africa are wrong.
The difference and the tension between them is a true pseudo-struggle; they are two sides of one rusty coin.
Africa does not need optimism nor does it need pessimism.
What the continent and its people need is a brave, strong and hard look at the nature of its political problem. Africa’s political problem is the challenge that has given birth to other problems of an economic, social, cultural and spiritual nature.
The poverty in Africa, underdevelopment, large scale corruption, democratic failure and crises, political violence and hopelessness need an honest look, not celebration or mourning.
The question that a twelve-year-old African should be asking all Africans and the sane world is: How did the political independence of Africa, starting with Ghana in 1957 and ending with South African in 1994, fail to deliver true and full liberation of Africa?
It is a haunting question how the overthrow of colonial regimes failed to translate to the liberation and prosperity of the continent and its people.
In this short article I intend to contribute to the political and philosophical debate on why Africa is still not decolonised some many decades after colonial regimes and their administrations were supposedly dethroned.
I attempt to give part of the observation and explanation of how exactly coloniality remained intact when colonialism ended, and why it still haunts Africa and the entire Global South.
In doing that I hope to avoid the post-political trappings of both Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism, which I describe above as a waste of everybody’s time, and dangerous.
From colonialism to coloniality
To theoretically foreground my observation and argument on this ticklish subject I must stand on the shoulders of some giants in political philosophy, and indeed in the philosophy of liberation.
I start with the philosopher of politics and history, Peter Ekeh who made the observation in 1975 that colonialism became “an epochal” historical occurrence that eventually became a “social system” on its own.
Colonialism did not only change the world in Africa but it also changed the people and produced new identities out of them.
In that way, even those people that stood up to fight colonialism had become part of the colonial problem. Anti-colonialism came to have a colonial problem of its own, and I will develop this point in due course.
In his mediation of coloniality and the paradigm of war in Africa, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni noted that anti-colonialism in African failed to become decoloniality. It remained entrapped in the colonial world.
Initially, Gatsheni argues, those among the educated elite in Africa who stood up to fight colonialism started by demanding to be included as participants in colonial rule and did not seek to overthrow the system, they wanted inclusion.
Only when colonialists, because of their racism, refused to recognise the black educated class as human beings and capable leaders that they could work with, did the angry black elite seek to overthrow the system but keep its benefits and pleasures.
Their aim was now to expel whites but keep the system and structure of power, deracialisation but not decolonisation.
Ekeh and Gatsheni concur that the class of educated persons that fought the white colonial class in Africa had long become some kinds of colonisers in their own right.
They were removed from the masses of their own black people and considered themselves some black whites with rare abilities and rights.
At this stage we can erect the observation and argument that colonialism in Africa produced anti-colonialism in its own image.
That exactly was the beginning of our many problems in Africa. Those that were tasked to lead the fight against colonial witchcraft had become some kinds of witches and wizards themselves.
The life of coloniality after what was supposed to be decolonisation was guaranteed.
Anti-Colonialism became colonial
Friedrich Nietzsche put it better: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Those that fought against colonialism in Africa badly needed this advice.
In the bitter fight against the monstrosity of colonialism some African leaders became colonial monsters that were not going to become good leaders of their people.
They gazed too intensely into the colonial abyss and the abyss gazed into them, swallowing them, becoming them and them becoming part of the abyss.
As their fight against colonialism grew on the land, colonialism itself was born and grew inside them. In reacting to colonialism anti-colonialism became exactly that, reactionary and colonial in essence.
How do those that battle witchcraft avoid getting involved in witchcraft to the extent of becoming its practitioners is a question to ask.
Jean-Paul Sartre famously explained how colonialists created an educated class of political elites in Africa.
They chose gifted adolescents, educated them in Africa and overseas, so that these colonially indoctrinated black “walking lies” will manage the colonial system in Africa when whites have been removed from power.
So our anti-colonialists had already been colonially indoctrinated when independence finally came.
They had intellectually been recruited and co-opted into being accessories and functionaries of the modern colonial world system that they were supposed to be fighting.
They began to fight colonialism using its language, deploying its manners and employing its logic. Colonialism taught them how they should fight colonialism and how they should not fight it.
In that way colonialism won the fight because no person loses a fight whose rules and regulations they have designed.
No person loses a debate whose terms of engagement they have crafted and predetermined. Colonialism created the terms of engagement and ethics of the conversation on decolonisation and so was our big fight lost.
n To be continued next week
