The Sunday News
LOOKING at Africa from the perspective of the world is one thing and looking at the world from the perspective of Africa is quite another thing. And looking at the world political and economic system, the world order, and judging it from the African experience is not just politics but it is the politics of politics itself.
Decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation, as meta-reflection on conquest and domination, and how to undo the same demands that we do not only think but that we also think about thinking itself.
It was my submission in the previous instalment that African academics and political activists have largely not grasped the systemic and structural nature of colonialism hence the failure to understand decolonisation and what it means, and what it takes.
The baptismal truth is that, in Africa, the end of juridical colonialism and the retreat of colonial administrations did not end colonialism and did not even come close to challenging coloniality.
The absence of colonial administrators and settler colonialists gives an illusion that colonialism is a thing of the past when in fact it is a crime against humanity that is going on right now.
That paradox where colonialism continues and coloniality progresses in the absence of colonisers demands that we engage not in the politics of decolonisation but in the politics of the politics of decolonisation in Africa.
How is it to be a Problem?
In his treatise of 1903, The Souls of Black Folk, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois asked of African-Americans the question; “how does it feel to be a problem?” the millions of black descendants of African slaves had become a problem for America.
Their very existence had become evidence of a crime against humanity. Their misery and strivings had become another form of slaving, there was no going back to Africa on the one hand and there was no full belonging to America on the other hand.
Being black and being American had become a presence that was also an absence and a truth that was also a falsehood. Thinking philosophically and sociologically about being African, black, and an American, Du Bois observed the “double consciousness.” It was a black consciousness of being American but not belonging to America.
Double consciousness, I observe, assails Africans in Africa too. We suffer the consciousness of being free but not liberated. The afterlives of Western imperialism, and the slavery and colonialism that it gave birth to are still with us. Being an African in an Africa that is still defined by Western imperiality and coloniality is an identity crisis of a deep existential kind.
That is exactly why some philosophers believe that we should call ourselves Africans only under protest, only for the sake of progress, and not in the veracity that we are indeed Africans.
Making matters worse is that there are even enlightened and brilliant Africans that believe that the big problem about Africa is Africans.
In other words, there are Africans that advance the thinking that Africans are a problem for themselves hence the problem with the African economic and political condition.
Titanic thinkers and eloquent speakers such as Professor Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba, the Kenyan lawyer and academic, passionately believe it and say it that Africans are a problem to themselves, and that being a problem creates problems for the continent.
Nothing is enchanting as Prof Lumumba when he lambasts Africans for their laziness, corruption, tyranny, ignorance and incompetence. Not that a critique of Africans is wrong but to entirely blame Africans for what Africa has become is to exonerate the way the world has conditioned and produced Africa through imperialism, slavery and colonialism.
Some of what are easily called African problems that require African solutions are not African problems at all but problems that the world has created for Africa and in Africa.
Africans have their sins. Some of them that have been entrusted with power have stolen public money and led their people with despotism and much violence. Others have conspired with forces from the West and the East to continue siphoning the resources of Africa to other continents.
These are sins that cannot be denied or forgiven. What should at least be understood is that these sinning leaders are not sinning because they are Africans but because they are sinners. Some have not just been corrupted by power, but they have corrupted power themselves.
The sins of Africans against Africa do not even come near to erase the evil of coloniality that the world has visited Africa with. Coloniality as I have noted before operates truly like witchcraft, invisible but powerful, and much denied by those that perpetrate and benefit from it.
The Politics of the Politics of Decolonisation
Like other people of other continents Africans have their own problems. What adds to their troubles is that Africans have additional problems caused for them by forces from other continents, and that is the black man and the black woman’s burden.
Not fully understanding the systemic and structural nature of that burden has thrown us into a true vertigo, and we are lost as to what it is to decolonise ourselves and the continent. Some of us believe we should go back to our pre-colonial past when there is no paradisal past to return to.
Others believe that to decolonise is to hate everything European, American and white, and to seek revenge. The opposite of this is those Africans that believe in imitating the culture of the colonisers. Inflicted by an inferiority complex this kind of African thinks to decolonise means parroting whiteness and regretting being black.
Closer to this African is some that act as if to decolonise is to be a coloniser in the way they exercise power and wield privilege over others. These are Africans that have taken the place of colonial settlers and reduced other natives to objects that can be exploited and disposed of.
An African with a coloniser’s consciousness and sensibility hidden under his black skin is a terrible phenomenon to reckon with. So lost is that African in his power and privilege that he cannot see that except for his black skin and African nativity he has become a coloniser.
To truly decolonise is to indulge in the politics of politics in that it entails the death of the colonisers and their colonised and the birth of what Frantz Fanon called the “new man” that is neither colonised nor is a coloniser.
To decolonise is the monumental task of those that seek to challenge systems and structures of power, whether they are embodied in Africans or Europeans and Americans. It is in that way that to decolonise is to search for another world that has new people that will not take being dominated as much as they will not take dominating others, a new species of people for a new order of the world.
These are the true revolutionary thinkers and actors that are ready to kill the enemy within themselves and in others, the practitioners of the politics of politics. And there is a lot to defeat inside ourselves before we even confront the enemy out there.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
