The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindaba Mabhena
Just like its close cousin, western modernity, Coloniality will always be with us. Coloniality and western modernity might actually be twins and not cousins. What we have to do, it seems, is to negotiate our liberation by navigating our way away from the trappings of western domination without throwing ourselves out of modernity. Tragically, some Pan-Africanists and some enthusiasts of Decoloniality still suffer the misery of nativist imagination.
Nativist imagination still holds that dream where one day we will collectively march out of modernity and trek back to some pristine and paradisal pre-colonial Africa, a land of cultural milk and political honey. That African pre-colonial Eden unfortunately does not exist and actually never existed except in our nativist imagination. There was an Africa order of things before colonialism but it was not a stagnant paradise to which people can one day return.
The violent Nativism of African Nationalism
The ultimate utopia of Pan-Africanism was a paradisal United States of Africa under one government made out of governors of individual states. The Pan-African dream of a USA collapsed to a nightmare as the nationalism of individual African heads of states and their governments could not surrender their power to an African government.
In that way, a tragic way, nationalism resisted and defeated Pan-Africanism that has, at a continental scale, been reduced to a tired slogan and a negligible political ideology and not a living philosophy. Some interlocutors argue that what defeated Pan-Africanism is not African nationalism but western and colonial divide and rule political stratagems that kept African nations divided and jostling for prominence and dominance.
That is partly true. The colonialists, in their own interests, created colonial borders that divided African nations. In their own interests founding African leaders did not undo the colonial borders but kept them and used them to maintain national divisions in the continent.
Today African leaders and their countries jealously guard colonial borders that were imposed on them by colonialists and imperialists. African nationalist preservation of colonial borders is one of the tragic paradoxes and dilemmas of Pan-Africanist liberation and its dreams. Preserving colonial borders has been a political choice for African governments and their nations, a costly political choice for that matter.
What has really not been a choice, perhaps, is the preservation of colonial languages in Africa. Radical Pan-Africanist leaders from across the length and the breath of the continent had no choice but to use French and English languages in their Pan-African congresses and conferences. Without the use of colonial languages the leaders from different African countries could not have a conversation, English and French became the unifying languages for African leaders, paradoxically.
The two languages of western modernity and coloniality have paradoxically become the languages of Pan-Africanism through which different Africans from diverse nations can hold conversations and find unity in speech and text.
It is a telling paradox and troubling dilemma that languages that are objects of western modernity and coloniality would be the actual instruments of Pan-Africanism and its liberatory potentials and dreams.
Perhaps it is true that Pan-Africanism and African liberation have to have the creativity and inventiveness to appropriate colonial tools and use them for decolonial purposes. The master’s tools, in that case, can be deployed in demolishing the master’s abode.
The true fake news
A curious and also troubling story recently circulated in the social media streets and avenues. The headline of the news story was: “Magufuli chases another Zambian ambassador over funny names.” It is narrated in the story that Zambian diplomat named Musenge Mukuma has been expelled from his diplomatic posting in Tanzania because of his Zambian names that are insulting in Swahili. Apparently in Swahili the name Musenge means homosexual and the surname Mukuma makes a direct reference to female private parts.
This story sparked heated debate at Eastwoods Tavern where diplomats and academics from different African countries gather to share beverages and some hot news from different countries. Concerning the story of the expulsion of a diplomat the Tanzanians have emphatically denied expelling the diplomat from the country and truth has emerged that the said diplomat is on post in a European country.
The story was fake news manufactured by some bored social media artist. What is not fake news is that African languages as much as they rhyme here and there they also come into violent conflict. What is a greeting in one nation can be a curse in another, and what is a salutation somewhere can be an insult in another corner of Africa.
In Zambia, apparently the name Musenge refers to a wise advisor that reconciles feuding people with his counsel and wisdom. African languages that come from pre-colonial Africa can be divisive to African communities, nations and countries. The objects of our own historical identity can tear us apart.
The Gikuyu Experiment
Not only African political leaders had to endure the use of colonial languages in regional and international conferences. African creative and scholarly writers too had to use colonial languages to communicate with each other. One day Ngugi wa Thiongo got tired of it all and decided that he would write in Gikuyu only. Soon enough he was called a Gikuyu tribal supremacists that wanted to reduce the whole of Africa into his tribe.
The sales of his books also dropped and he had to slowly start translating his books from Gikuyu to English to expand his market. Ngugi suffered the same condemnation that Kwame Nkrumah suffered over his proposition of a United States of Africa. Nkrumah was called an ambitious tyrant that wanted to be the president of Africa for life by some critics. Nationalism came before Pan-Africanism even to some legendary Pan-Africanist heroes. Pan-Africanist liberation faces some paradoxes and dilemmas that are western and colonial, and also African in nature and effect.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Mabusabesala village in Siyabuswa, Mpumalanga in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
