African Voices: In Search of a Decolonial Turn 9780798305372

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Foreword
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1 An Argument for Revisiting African Voices in Search of a Decolonial Turn
Chapter 2 Mahmood Mamdani’s Contribution to Rethinking Thinking on Africa
Chapter 3 From North Africa to Europe
Chapter 4 ‘The Camel Can Never See Its Own Hump’ Metahumanism in the Fiction of Ibrahim al-Koni
Chapter 5 A Dialogue of Civilisations
Chapter 6 On African-American Consciousness of Africa
Chapter 7 African Self-Reliance, Self-Determination, Unity and Repatriation
Chapter 8 Africanity as Self-Assertion, Self-Affirmation and Self-Determination The Legacy of Archie Mafeje
Chapter 9 (Re)Visiting Molefi Kete Asante’s Theory of Afrocentricity
Chapter 10 Ad Fontes
Chapter 11 Wangari Maathai’s Afrocentric Decolonial Environmentalist Struggle
Chapter 12 Claude Ake’s Critical Thinking about African Democracy
Chapter 13 Daring African Resolutions to African Problems
Chapter 14 The Manichean Structure and Frantz Fanon in Post-1994 South Africa
Chapter 15 The Weapon of Theory
Chapter 16 Isaac Bangani Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle
Chapter 17 Adebayo Adedeji on Africa’s Regional Integration and Self-Reliance
Index

Citation preview

African Voices In Search of a Decolonial Turn Siphamandla Zondi (ed)

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African Voices In Search of a Decolonial Turn First Published in 2021 by the Africa Institute of South Africa Private Bag X41 Pretoria 0001 South Africa ISBN: 978-0-7983-0531-0 © Copyright Human Sciences Research Council 2021 This publication was made possible through a grant received from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission from the copyright owner. To copy any part of this publication, you may contact DALRO for information and copyright clearance. Any unauthorised copying could lead to civil liability and/or criminal sanctions.

Telephone: 086 12 DALRO (from within South Africa); +27 (0)11 712-8000 Telefax: +27 (0)11 403-9094 Postal Address: P O Box 31627, Braamfontein, 2017, South Africa www.dalro.co.za. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at in this book are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Africa Institute of South Africa. Project Manager: Mmakwena Chipu and Danoline Hanyane Editing: BLC Language Services Proofreading: Write Skills and Simone Chiara van der Merwe Design and Layout: Full Circle Advertising and Graphic Design Cover Design: Dudu Coelho Printing: The HSRC is committed to cutting-edge research that supports development nationally, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and in Africa. Our commitment to the dissemination of that research demonstrates the remarkable and measurable impact of our work. For more information, contact the Human Sciences Research Council at Private Bag X41, Pretoria 0001, South Africa; Email [email protected]; or visit our website at http://www.hsrc.ac.za

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Table of Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x Notes on Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Chapter 1

An Argument for Revisiting African Voices in Search of a Decolonial Turn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Siphamandla Zondi Chapter 2

Mahmood Mamdani’s Contribution to Rethinking Thinking on Africa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni Chapter 3

From North Africa to Europe Almohadism, Ibn Rushd and Rationalising Reform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Ayesha Omar Chapter 4

‘The Camel Can Never See Its Own Hump’ Metahumanism in the Fiction of Ibrahim al-Koni. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 F Fiona Moolla Chapter 5

A Dialogue of Civilisations A Decolonial Reading of Chinua Achebe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 William Mpofu Chapter 6

On African-American Consciousness of Africa Reading Bernard Magubane’s The Ties That Bind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Bongani Nyoka Chapter 7

African Self-Reliance, Self-Determination, Unity and Repatriation Reflections on Marcus Garvey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Philani Mthembu

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Chapter 8

Africanity as Self-Assertion, Self-Affirmation and Self-Determination The Legacy of Archie Mafeje . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Teboho J Lebakeng Chapter 9

(Re)Visiting Molefi Kete Asante’s Theory of Afrocentricity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 Lebogang T Legodi and Kgothatso B Shai Chapter 10

Ad Fontes The Divergent African Political Aesthetics of Steve Biko, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Taha Hussein. . . . . 169 Ramy Magdy Ahmed Chapter 11

Wangari Maathai’s Afrocentric Decolonial Environmentalist Struggle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Faith Mabera Chapter 12

Claude Ake’s Critical Thinking about African Democracy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Kealeboga J Maphunye Chapter 13

Daring African Resolutions to African Problems Insight from Ali Mazrui. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Everisto Benyera Chapter 14

The Manichean Structure and Frantz Fanon in Post-1994 South Africa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .251 Tendayi Sithole Chapter 15

The Weapon of Theory Some Cabralian Theses on the African Political Predicament . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272 Siphamandla Zondi Chapter 16

Isaac Bangani Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Hashi Kenneth Tafira Chapter 17

Adebayo Adedeji on Africa’s Regional Integration and Self-Reliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Foreword: African Voices and Pan-African Contributions This book is about what African scholars and activists in the struggle for intellectual decolonisation have written and said over the past few decades. It comes at a time when there are growing calls for decolonisation and Africanisation of knowledge and education in Africa. These are coming from young people protesting in the streets, as well as revolutionaries in the academy who are concerned about the continued colonial traditions in education and knowledge production. The book follows in the tradition of many African scholars who, over decades, have sought to remind us that this task of decolonisation is incomplete. The works of such greats as Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o and Chinweizu – though not covered in this book – have called for decolonisation of the mind. The likes of Ali Mazrui, Amílcar Cabral, Wangari Maathai, Chinua Achebe, Adebayo Adedeji and others covered in this book join a long list of African thinkers who have not stopped making this call for decolonisation and the Africanisation of knowledge and education. This book is therefore best understood in the context of the long road toward the decolonisation and Africanisation of Africa, which has gained momentum over time. It is best placed in the long span of the birth of a new Africa, which will remain incomplete until the ways we work on knowledge and education are freed from the shackles of cultural imperialism and coloniality. The search for a decolonial turn is sorely needed to anchor the African journey entirely on a decolonial foundation. This will make all Africans acknowledge that they have spiritual, philosophical, epistemological and struggle heritages that can save not only Africans, but the entire universe. Among South Africans are found several of the early creators of PanAfricanism, as the first 1900 Pan-African Conference was not organised by Henry Sylvester Williams alone, but also by a South African female Pan-African activist, Anne Victoria Kinloch. Together with Sylvester Williams, she was co-founder of the African Association that organised the conference in 1900, but she is not included in all the narratives and she is hardly known. We also know that Pixley ka Isaka Seme from South Africa instigated the African Renaissance by making a case for the ‘regeneration of Africa’ in his memorable speech at Columbia University, in 1906. He was also one of the earliest Africans to complete a degree at an Ivy League university in – Columbia University in New York City – and he contributed to inspiring v

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Foreword: African Voices and Pan-African Contributions

Africans in the USA, where I also completed my initial university education before going to the UK. At the momentous launch of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, host Emperor Haile Selassie reminded delegates gathered in Addis Ababa that Africa stood midway between the Africa of yesterday and the Africa of tomorrow.1 He suggested that a new Africa was being born – one that the likes of Seme dreamed of in 1906 when he exclaimed, ‘The giant is awakening! ... The brighter day is rising upon Africa … A regeneration of Africa.’2 Seme went on: Yes, the regeneration of Africa belongs to this new and powerful period! By this term regeneration, I wish to be understood to mean the entrance into a new life, embracing the diverse phases of a higher, complex existence. The basic factor which assures [Africans’] regeneration resides in the awakened race-consciousness. This gives them a clear perception of their elemental needs and of their undeveloped powers. It therefore must lead them to the attainment of that higher and advanced standard of life … The regeneration of Africa means that a new and unique civilisation is soon to be added to the world. The African is not a proletarian in the world of science and art. He has precious creations of his own, of ivory, of copper and of gold, fine, plated willowware and weapons of superior workmanship.3

Seme therefore recognised the intellectual, creative and scientific endeavours needed in this regeneration process. Selassie foretold the same: ‘Africa has been reborn as a free continent and Africans have been reborn as free men ... We look to the vision of an Africa not merely free but united.’4 Like Seme, he argued that this was a civilisational change that was not limited to renewal in political and economic terms, but extended to renewal in spirit, consciousness, knowledge and science: A massive effort must be launched in the educational and cultural field which will not only raise the level of literacy and provide the cadres of skilled and trained technicians requisite to our growth and development but, as well, acquaint us one with another.5 

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Selassie stressed the need for the establishment of African educational institutions, including Pan-African universities, that would not only expose the new African to the best knowledge and science in the world, but also do so in ‘an atmosphere of continental brotherhood’.6 Pan-African education

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We have entered a period wherein we talk in clearer ways about the contribution of intellectual tools, and the generation of radical ideas, in advancing Africa to the next phase of decolonisation and Africanisation. We have come to a point where, more than ever before, books must be written to recover from obscurity the works of African intellectuals and activists who have long made points about knotty issues we are currently debating again. It is time for Africans to write books that harness lingering ideas about giving birth to a new Africa and a new African civilisation – to save the world from its own imperialism. We cannot have enough of work that revisits the thinking of Kwame Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, Paulin Hountondji, Walter Rodney, Marcus Garvey and many others who have spoken before us. We need such books in school curricula and university syllabi. We need them in written and audio formats to answer the question: Where are alternative African educational materials? This timely and inspiring book should be embedded in curricula to enable all Africans to evolve Pan-African perspectives, thus removing the colonial technology of dismemberment. It is a book that will contribute to eradicating the colonially induced African fracture and to promoting a liberated African revival and renewal. Work of this nature pays homage to the legacy of the likes of Emperor Selassie, who is honoured through an unprecedented set of two statues in Tshwane/Pretoria, the capital city of the southern tip of Africa, South Africa. I commend these African brothers and sisters who responded to the call for writings on African voices and who have been pushing for full

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would not merely train workers and professionals, but create future leaders committed to the birth of a new Africa, versed in ‘supranational aspects of African life … directed toward the ultimate goal of complete African unity’.7 Such education and knowledge would help Africa become an ‘influential force in the conduct of world affairs’ and ‘contribute to the successful settlement of pressing and critical world issues’.8 Indeed, the Cultural Charter for Africa,9  adopted by the OAU in 1976, stressed that the knowledge and education systems Africa needed would be designed to reverse the effects of cultural domination, which falsified triumphant African histories, systematically disparaged African values of human life, isolated African elites from African masses, and alienated Africans in general from their historical agency and traditions. Through the Charter, Africa hoped to embed educational systems that would recentre the values of African civilisations, root Africans in their cultures and traditions and ‘mobilise social forces in the context of permanent education’.10

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decolonisation. I know that much more needs to be done besides the inclusion of 15 thinkers in this book: there are more than a hundred whom we still have to write about. So, I say: A luta continua; vitória é certa.

Professor Mammo Muchie 2 April 2020  DST/NRF Research Chair on Innovation Tshwane University of Technology (www.sarchi.org)

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Selassie, H., 1963. (1963) Haile Selassie, ‘Towards African unity’, BlackPast, 7 August 2009. Available at https://www.blackpast.org/african-americanhistory/1963-haile-selassie-towards-african-unity/ [Accessed 20 March 2020].

2

Seme, P. ka I., 1906. The regeneration of Africa – speech by Pixley Seme 5 April 1906. South African History Online. Available at https://www.sahistory. org.za/archive/regeneration-africa-speech-pixley-seme-5-april-1906.[Accessed 7 December 2020].

3

Ibid

4

Selassie, Towards African unity. Op. cit.

5 Ibid. 6

Ibid.

7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9

Organization of African Unity, 1976. Cultural Charter for Africa. Available at https://au.int/sites/default/files/treaties/7769-treaty-0008_-_cultural_charter_ for_africa_e.pdf [Accessed 20 March 2020].

10 Ibid.

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Dedication This book is dedicated to Hashi Kenneth Tafira, a contributor who passed on during the preparation of this manuscript. May his revolutionary soul, which was committed to true African and black liberation, rest in power.

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Acknowledgements This book was born of discussions in the African Decolonial Research Network (ADERN), which consists of established and emerging African scholars who are dedicated to discussing ideas related to the decolonisation of knowledge. The discussions led us to debates about how African voices have contributed to this longstanding search for a decolonial turn across the world. We are grateful to the members of this network, some of whom are authors in this volume, for their views and guidance. We would also like to thank those who attended the Decoloniality Summer School, held at Unisa in 2016 and 2017, for engaging with ideas that formed the elements of a book concept, especially the idea of Africans in search of a decolonial turn since the 1960s. They are too many to mention and come from various disciplines, sometimes straddling the social and natural sciences. Appreciation also needs to be expressed to all the authors, who had to work under considerable pressure during the drafting and revision stages. They took this in their stride. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their critical and useful comments on the book, which helped us strengthen the manuscript. Professors Eghosa Osaghae, Catherine A Odora Hoppers and Alinah Kelo Segyobe offered much appreciated endorsements for the book. Professor Mammo Muchie wrote an insightful foreword, urging us to press on with the efforts to recentre Africa in discourses about Africa. We thank him most heartily. We also give credit to the sterling work of the publications team at the Africa Institute of South Africa of the Human Sciences Research Council. Thanks go to my employers at the University of Pretoria, the Faculty of Humanities under the deanship of Professor Vasu Reddy, who generously offered me some time off in order to complete work on this book and on other manuscripts. This book is the product of a number of excellent people, but all errors and omissions are the responsibility of the authors and the editor. Siphamandla Zondi March 2020

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Notes on Contributors ■ 

Ayesha Omar lectures Political Theory at the University of the Witwaterstrand. She works in the area of comparative political theory, non-Western traditions of political theory, and South African black intellectual history. She is currently working on a book manuscript, which is a comparative account of political authority in the writings of two medieval philosophers, Ibn Rushd (twelfth century) and Marsilius of Padua (fourteenth century). ■ Bongani Nyoka is a lecturer in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University. He is the author of The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje (Wits University Press, 2020) and Archie Mafeje: Voices of Liberation (HSRC Press, 2019). His research interests include the works of Archie Mafeje and Bernard Magubane, and South African historiography.

■ Everisto

Benyera is associate professor in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, South Africa. He holds a PhD in African Politics from the same university. His research as a decolonial scholar is in the field of transitional justice, focusing on traditional and non-state reconciliation, peace building and the healing process. He has published one book and edited four, published 18 book chapters, and 13 peer-reviewed journal articles. His books include Africa and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Curse or Cure? (Springer, upcoming edited). (2), The Fourth Industrial Revolution and (Re)colonisation of Africa: Coloniality of Data. (Routledge, 2021). (3), (edited). Breaking the Colonial “Contract”: From Oppression to Autonomous Decolonial Futures. (Lexington, 2020). (4), (edited). Reimagining Justice, Human Rights and Leadership in Africa Challenging Discourse and Searching for Alternative Paths. (Springer, 2020). (5), (edited). Indigenous, Traditional, and Non-State Transitional Justice in Southern Africa: Namibia and Zimbabwe. (Lexington, 2019). ■ F

Fiona Moolla is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape. She is the author of Reading Nuruddin Farah: The individual, the novel & the idea of home (James Currey, 2014), and the editor of Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and animal studies in contemporary cultural forms (WITS University Press, 2016), among other academic and non-academic publications. She currently heads a project on romantic love in African literature and culture.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

■  Faith

Mabera is a senior researcher at the Institute for Global Dialogue, which is associated with the University of South Africa. Her research interests include: the responsibility to protect; African diplomacy; African foreign policies; African peace and security issues; and global governance. She recently published an article on ‘Kenya’s foreign policy in context (1963–2015)’ in the South African Journal of International Affairs. ■ 

Hashi Kenneth Tafira was at time of writing a researcher with the Archie Mafeje Research Institute for Social Policy, College of Graduate Studies, University of South Africa. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, the late Dr Tafira held a doctorate in anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand. His major research interests included politics, colonial discourse, coloniality, post-colonialism, youth, migration, social and critical theory, sexuality, social movements, health and medicine, ethnicity, nationalism. He was also a poet, actor and writer. He authored Xenophobia in South Africa: A history in 2015 and Black Nationalist Thought in South Africa: The Persistence of an Idea of Liberation in 2016, both published by Palgrave MacMillan. ■ 

Kealeboga J Maphunye is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of Political Sciences, College of Human Sciences, at the University of South Africa (Unisa). Previously, he was the inaugural Research Professor of the WIPHOLD-Brigalia Bam Chair in Electoral Democracy at Unisa. His research interests include African politics, democracy, governance and elections and their role in democratic systems. His recent publications include: “Comparative electoral and democratization challenges in the Horn of Africa: Ethiopia and Eritrea,” in A Glass Half Full or Half Empty? The Challenges of Political Succession and Elections in Africa, Rupiya, M.R., Teffo, L., Gutto, S. and Gray, R., 2019. (eds.), Ssali Publishing House: Cape Town. Ch.10; and “Are Electronic Voting Technologies Feasible and Constitutional? Observations from a few African case examples”, Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, 15 (1) 2019, pp.1-11. ■ Kgothatso B Shai is associate professor and head of the Department of Cultural and Political Studies at the University of Limpopo. He does research on subjects like political organisations and parties; comparative politics and elections; public opinion; and voting behaviour. Among his recent publications is an article on ‘Financial imperatives and constraints towards funding the SADC standby force’.

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T Legodi is a lecturer as well as a PhD candidate in International Politics at the University of Limpopo. She holds an MA in International Politics (2019) from the University of Limpopo and a BA Honours in Political Science (2016) from the same institution. Legodi also obtained a Bachelor of Social Science in Political Science and International Relations (2015) from the North-West University. She has presented papers at both national and international conferences and has published scientific papers in numerous accredited and non-accredited journals. She remains interested in the decolonisation and Africanisation of education at South African universities.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

■  Lebogang

■ Philani Mthembu is Executive Director at the Institute for Global Dialogue, associated with UNISA. Prior to joining the IGD, he pursued a joint doctoral programme (Dr. rer. pol.) with the Graduate School of Global Politics, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), and the School of International Studies at Renmin University, Beijing (China). The focus of his dissertation was on the rise of emerging powers as sources of development cooperation in Africa, for which he was awarded Magna Cum Laude. He co-founded the Berlin Forum on Global Politics (BFoGP), a non-profit organisation dedicated to the promotion of academic, expert and public understanding of global politics. His recent publications include a single authored book titled China and India’s Development Cooperation in Africa: The Rise of Southern Powers (Palgrave McMillan, 2018), a co-edited book titled From MDGs to Sustainable Development Goals: The Travails of International Development (HSRC Press, 2017), and a co-edited book titled Africa and the World: Navigating Shifting Geopolitics (Mistra, 2020) and a co-edited book entitled, Africa-China Cooperation: Towards an African Policy on China? (Palgrave McMillan, 2020).

■  Ramy

Magdy Ahmed is an assistant lecturer of Political Science at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University, Egypt. His main research areas are: political theory; African political thought; African ethnophilosoph(ies); history of Western political philosophy and mythology studies. His recent publications include: ‘Politics lost in translation: the African concept of time as a method to understand African conflicts’, in Review of Economics and Political Science; and ‘Mythos Politicus: A Theoretical Framework for the Study of Political Myths’ in Athens Journal For Mediterranean Studies. His MSc thesis was on African political philosophy: a comparative ethnophilosophical study on the concept of justice (in Arabic) at Cairo University in 2017. He is currently working on a PhD thesis tackling the politics of time.

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■  Sabelo

J Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a historian and decolonial theorist. He is currently Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa at the University of Bayreuth in Germany; member of African Studies Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth; Professor Extraordinarius in the Department of Leadership and Transformation (DLT) at the University of South Africa (UNISA); Professor Extraordinarius at the Centre for Gender and African Studies at the University of Free State (UFS) in South Africa; Honorary Professor in the School of Education (Education & Development Studies) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa; Visiting Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in South Africa; Research Associate at the Department of Political Science at the University of Pretoria (UP) in South Africa; and Research Associate at The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at The Open University in the United Kingdom. Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni previously worked as Research Professor and Director of Scholarship in the Department of Leadership and Transformation (DLT) at the University of South Africa (UNISA). He is founding Head of Archie Mafeje Research Institute for Applied Social Policy (AMRI) (2012-2015). He is also the founder of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN) and is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). His field of work comprises the decolonial/postcolonial theory, empire & colonialism, politics of knowledge & decolonization of higher education, Black radical tradition/Black Marxism, African history, African development & African political economy, Nguni history (Ndebele), and has fieldwork and archival experience in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Professor NdlovuGatsheni has published over a hundred publications and his major book publications His latest books include Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa: Turning Over A New Leaf (Routledge, 2020); The Dynamics of Higher Education in the Global South (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), co-edited with Busani Mpofu; The History and Political Transition of Zimbabwe: From Robert Mugabe to Mnangagwa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); and Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century: Living Theories and True Ideas (Routledge, July 2021). ■ Samuel

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Ojo Oloruntoba is an Associate Professor at the Thabo Mbeki School of Public and International Affairs University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Oloruntoba.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

He is the author of Regionalism and integration in Africa: EU-ACP economic partnership agreements and Euro- Nigeria relations (2016), and the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook on African Political Economy - both published by Palgrave Macmillan (2020). His research focuses on: African political economy; global governance of trade and finance; democracy; and EuroAfrica relations. Oloruntoba was the recipient of the 2016 Wangari Maathai Award for Innovative Research Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, United States of America and he is a rated researcher by the National Research Foundation of South Africa, US. ■  Siphamandla Zondi lectures in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg. He previously worked for the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria and, prior to that, the Institute for Global Dialogue at UNISA. He writes on decolonisation of knowledge and practice across a range of subjects including political movements, pan-African integration and Africa’s international relations, and global South agency in the world. Zondi is a member of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN).

■ Teboho J Lebakeng is currently a research associate at the University of Limpopo. His areas of research interest include decolonisation of universities in Africa, and the quest to reverse epistemicide in the social sciences and humanities. Dr Lebakeng has published extensively, including more recently Black perspectives on tertiary institutional transformation: Contexts, reflections and the way forward. In: Seepe, S. (ed.). Tertiary Institutional Transformation in South Africa Revisited. Africa ACE Press (2020); The legislature and the challenges of re-imagining South Africa. Strategic Review for Southern Africa (2020 with Matebese-Notshulwana, K.M.) and Decolonising the humanities in Africa: The search for reason, meaning and relevance. Presence Africaine, (2018).

■ 

Tendayi Sithole is associate professor in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa. Sithole is the author of Steve Biko: decolonial meditations of black consciousness, published by Lexington Books in 2016, and Zimontology: The Life and Music of Zim Ngqawana published by Poetry Printery in 2018. His most recent book, The Black Register, was published in 2020 by Polity Press. Sithole is a founding member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN).

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

■  William

Mpofu is a researcher at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies. His research interests include the philosophy of liberation; semiotic reason; critical diversity literacy; and decoloniality at large. His recent books include the sole-authored, Robert Mugabe: the Will to Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and a co-edited volume, Decolonising the Human: Reflections from Africa on difference and oppression (Wits University Press) published in February 2021. Mpofu is a founding member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN).

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An Argument for Revisiting African Voices in Search of a Decolonial Turn Siphamandla Zondi Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria, South Africa

ABSTRACT We need to understand how African thinkers and thinking have long been contributing to what is today called the decolonial turn in knowledge. Discussions about decolonisation and Africanisation have emerged alongside calls to unmask Eurocentric negations, reverse the erasure and silencing of African voices, and undo the distortion of African realities. These calls arise because of a realisation that Africans have been decentred by Eurocentric rationality, which is experienced by Africans as a form of dismemberment.1 The calls to recentre Africa and the African amount to decentring Eurocentric perspectives, but they also imply breaking out of the silence and liberating African discourse from the traps of Eurocentric epistemology and the tropes of the colonial library.2 In this context, where are the African voices? Among the many questions that have arisen are the following: What have African voices contributed to breaking out of this silence? And on what issues have they spoken? This book is a modest contribution to these questions: it provides a platform for current African scholars to break the proverbial bread with African voices that have spoken over the past decades. This chapter frames the discussion by locating the voices in the context of debates about decolonisation and the Africanisation of knowledge, and by outlining the broad argument that joins the distinct chapters together.

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THE HAUNTING WITCHCRAFT OF COLONIALITY AND EPISTEMIC IMPLICATIONS This book is located in multifarious, diverse and planetary epistemic struggles that have been waged for a long time by peoples of the Global South, including Africa. In recent years, these struggles have become a call for the decolonisation, Africanisation and fundamental transformation of the university, its knowledge and disciplines. Even young students at universities in South Africa and other parts of the world decry being haunted by the ghosts of the empire.3 Students talk as if troubled by the ‘curse of Berlin’, which continues to haunt Africa to this day.4 Racism is a serious system of power relations based on calling into question the humanity of black people5; it is thus fundamentally anti-black. This book departs from the premise, long recognised by radical African thought, that Africa’s challenges and aspirations are haunted – and its liberation limited – by a globally present colonial-neocolonial model of power. This is what Anibal Quijano calls ‘coloniality’, a model of power introduced to the world as a dark underside of Euromodernity, and one that Eurocentrism wants to hide under the guise of objectivity.6 Coloniality is a model of power, and colonialism is its manifestation in the form of the conquest of the territories, economies and destinies of others. Coloniality is the underlying logic of power relations, and colonialism is its manifestation in unequal relations between the coloniser and the colonised, the colonising empires and colonies, during and after colonial rule. Coloniality is the virus manifest in the symptoms of institutionalised racism, superexploitation and subordination of the colonised. Coloniality is the system of power, thought and being that is manifest in the colonisation of politics, knowledge and humans. For Ramón Grosfoguel,7 coloniality is manifest in several entangled and intersecting global hierarchies, which combined to create systematically unequal relations between the conquerors and the conquered during and after colonial rule. These hierarchies included a global class formation organised by capital. Coloniality is evident also in an international division of labour between core economies and economies on the periphery. An interstate system endows former colonial empires with greater decision-making power than former colonies, even though the latter outnumber the former. A global racial/ethnic hierarchy remains intact to this day. A global gender hierarchy also places the European man at the helm, a sexual hierarchy privileges heterosexual males, a spiritual hierarchy privileges Christianity, a linguistic hierarchy perpetuates the dominance of European languages,

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and an epistemic hierarchy privileges Western rationality at the expense of other ways of knowing. Notions of power, being and knowledge within coloniality/modernity are built on violence – in the form of both genocide and epistemicide. ‘Epistemicide’ is a term coined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos8 that means the wanton and continuous destruction of non-Western forms of knowing. Grosfoguel9 identified four major genocides/epistemicides that shaped the early period of modernity/coloniality, laying the basis for the structuring of the global system that affects us today. The first of these was committed against Arabs/Muslims during the white man’s conquest of Al-Andulus in the fifteenth century, conducted in the name of purity of blood, a form of ethnic cleansing and epistemicide targeting Muslims, Jews and blacks. The second genocide/epistemicide happened when the white man, led by Christopher Columbus, sought to wipe out the indigenous inhabitants of a land the white man renamed the Americas. This also opened the way for the enslavement of Africans. Like the indigenous people, Africans were considered to have no soul, no history, no knowledge and no civilisation. The third genocide/epistemicide was committed against Indo-European women in the sixteenth century in Europe, by annihilating those women who were carriers and transmitters of knowledge that the white man considered to be witchcraft because it had been born outside the new, modern patriarchal rationality.10 This witch-hunt expanded over time, from targeting the ‘witch’ to targeting women healers, heretics, midwives, disobedient wives, unmarried mothers, the obeah (a woman who poisoned the master and inspired slaves to rebel), blacks, rebels, and so forth.11 These epistemicides helped shift the centre of reason to Europe and its diaspora in the USA and Oceania, thus decentring all other knowledges. It helped shape a geography of reason12 that rendered Africa and the black world mere consumers of the knowledge produced elsewhere. ‘Such people ,’ argues Lewis Gordon,‘are treated by dominant organisations of knowledge as problems instead of people who face problems. Their problem status is a function of the presupposed legitimacy of the systems that generate them’.13 Central to the Eurocentric master narrative of domination, which underpins European history and Europe’s history of the world, are the actions of warriors and conquerors, a war paradigm that inspires, legitimises and justifies racist policies, imperialist projects and wars of invasion and domination throughout the Global South.14  The processes by which this came about include colonisation, Westernisation, ‘civilisation’, modernisation, and other forms of violence against diversity, shared humanity and plurality of thought. This justifies calls for

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decolonisation as a planetary, intersectional, multi-level and multifarious endeavour towards freedom and justice for all. This thinking is influenced by African/black thought, from Frantz Fanon to Steve Biko. It is about scholarship as a liberatory and redemptive enterprise. African voices have for some time sought to negate this negation and to combat it, even after the end of formal juridical-administrative colonialism.15 Thus, the current calls for decolonisation of knowledge in Africa are neither new nor simply imported from the Americas, as is sometimes assumed. Thinkers from Africa have insisted for some time on seeing continuities between colonial pasts and neo-colonial presents, as a context in which even the agency of Africa and Africans needs to be understood. Their epistemic attitude has been to point to underlying and deep-seated conditions that accompanied colonialism and made it so enduring that even after colonial rule we still speak of the ghosts and residues of the empire,16 new imperialism17 and colonial matrices of power.18 This historical, systemic condition – associated with Euromodern colonialism and its aftermath – perpetuates syndromes,19 negations,20 deferred dreams and shattered aspirations.21 In saying these things, African thinkers have borrowed from an array of radical thought traditions, including African Marxism, dependência (usually called dependency theory, a theory that analyses why former colonies remain dependent on former colonial empires) and feminism. The concept of coloniality clearly explains what Kwame Nkrumah meant by neo-colonialism.22  The abysmal knowledge produced by epistemicides excludes the other and erases their ways of knowing. It produces distorted knowledges by fragmenting realities into disciplines and sciences. This, according to Gordon,23 forms part of the effort to colonise reason. It engenders disciplinary decadence, ‘the phenomenon of turning away from living thought, which engages reality and recognises its own limitations, to a deontologised or absolute conception of disciplinary life’.24

FINDING THE AFRICAN VOICE: A COMBATIVE AGENCY In a keynote address entitled ‘Banishing silences: Towards the globalisation of African history’, Tiyambe Zeleza points out: African history continues to be enveloped in the Eurocentric shadows of silence and subjugation that seek to hide … the horrendous pain and costs

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of Europe’s barbarities from the slave trade to colonialism, neocolonialism

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renewal embedded in those memories and in reconstructed pasts and futures imagined outside of European time, of Europe’s usurpation of world history.25

Zeleza underlines the urgent imperative to rediscover African self-fashioning and self-representation, that is, African historical agency in a world marked by the powerful dictates, demands, destructions, and discourses of imperialism that have mutated from colonialism to neocolonialism and now globalisation.26

He calls this a process of decentring the extraverted perspective in order to regain cognitive and epistemic justice. Decentring entails questioning Eurocentrism’s claim to be a free-floating, unsituated, unlocated, disembodied signifier. It is about challenging Eurocentric claims to objectivity, a sort of a God’s-eye view.27 Decentring also dispels what Santiago Castro-Gomez calls the ‘hubris’ of a point-zero location in thinking.28  Decentring is to reveal Eurocentrism as a vantage point that is European, male, Christian, rationalist, colonial, capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal and heterosexual, among other features. To decentre is to reject the notion of a thinker without a point of origin, without a history, without an ideological position, and without interest in the outcomes of the conversation. It is to undermine Eurocentrism’s claim to being ‘the only one capable of achieving a universal consciousness’.29  Zeleza  calls for ‘stripping this tradition of its universalistic pretensions and universalising propensities’.30 This must also entail a combative insistence on speaking from the position of Africanity, which is both an ontological and an epistemological strategy. This, he explained, involves insisting on freedom (political, economic, cultural, epistemic), proclaiming our Africanity as a legitimate ontological position from which to think, taking the attitude of rebellion, claiming the sovereignty of African voices over matters of African concern and interest, doing what is relevant to our humanity, and reclaiming control over our destiny. 31 It is about taking Mother Africa seriously as a site of unthinking, rethinking and thinking anew about subjects of interest to her. It is to foreground Africa’s interests, and to celebrate and pay homage to its heritage and propensities. This is what some African voices have been doing as their contribution to decolonising knowledge – long before the recent calls for decolonisation and Africanisation of knowledge, the university and its disciplines.

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to globalisation, and … the memories of resistance and the possibilities of

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AFRICAN VOICES This book showcases selected African voices that, for decades now, have attempted to recentre Africa, helping to contribute to an Afro-decolonial turn in scholarship. The option of structuring chapters in a consistent way, using pre-selected themes, while making the conversation more predictable and structured, risks robbing the voices being discussed of the autonomy to ‘speak what they like’, as Biko would say.32 Authors were encouraged to identify with the subjects of their writing – to the extent that they wished – because of our commitment to get closer to scholarship the African way. We wished authors had stepped out of the zones of rationality and objectivity a bit more. We had hoped that they would celebrate a little more freely the willingness of the voices they write about to rebel and disrupt extraverted discourses. They could also have lamented more where they ought to have done so. The plan was to have a lot more meditational reflection, and a lot more combative and subjective writing in this book, than what has resulted. But we accept that the process of coming out, of rebellion or epistemic disobedience, is a protracted process. Some concepts and ideas that are discussed in this book, such as Almohadism, and the politics of African aesthetics, have not received attention in mainstream literature on African conditions. They represent good examples of what the local in this African decolonial turn entails. Themes like liberation politics, African regional integration, African nationalism, democracy and governance in Africa have been used frequently, but often with little connection to the faces behind these ideas. Efforts at theorising about Africa’s complex issues have not been reflected upon in a focused way. The chapters in this book address all these different purposes, using different thinkers and thoughts to do so. The book also aimed to grant space to reflection on the criticality of some of the thoughts chosen. The aim was to showcase the questioning attitude and scepticism they display in relation to subjects that we have thus far discussed via Eurocentric rationality. Authors were not asked to be critical or celebratory of the voices that they discuss, because this is not in line with the overall purpose of the book. There is scope for books that either critique or celebrate African voices – but this is not that book. The third objective is related to the hope that this book will cause others to also reflect on these and many other African voices not included in this collection, including Ifi Amadiume, the Baobab Tree, Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Leo Africanus, Ubuntu, Wole Soyinka, Aboul-Qacem Echebbi, Paulin Hountondji, Peter Ekeh, Ujama, Osmane Sembène, Driss Chrïbi and

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Bessie Head. Such reflections would argue the case – even stronger than we do in this book – for recentring Africa in the pursuit of the ‘knowledgeotherwise’, while urging activists to pursue a new Africa in the search for a ‘world-otherwise’.33 Another objective was to re-engage familiar African voices while also giving attention to more obscure African voices, including the African drum. Some chapters are explicitly combative, as is evident in the chapters on Archie Mafeje; Wangari Maathai; Steve Biko; Léopold Sédar Senghor and Taha Hussein; and Ibn Raushd. Most chapters focus on understanding the chosen African voice or idea, in order to explain them. Some chapters, such as those on Amílcar Cabral, Mahmood Mamdani, Isaac Bangani Tabata and Adebayo Adedeji, combine the two approaches of speaking back to Eurocentrism and making room for the African voice to speak authentically. Some, such as those on Cabral, Maathai and Mamdani, explicitly employ a rebellious theoretical frame to explain the recentring that the chosen African voices represent. What may broadly be called a decolonial lens is employed in these cases. So diverse are the ways in which this book presents shifts in thinking about African issues, that each chapter can be read individually. And yet some chapters can be read together, and the book as a whole can be read with this idea of recentring Africa in mind. The book is not tailored around a narrow golden thread, but instead allows for diverse ways of discussing the African archive, converging around the argument for decentring the colonial perspective and recentring Africa’s own interests in discussions about Africa. In their chapters, Ayesha Omar and F Fiona Moolla focus on the intellectual contributions of Ibrahim Al-Koni and Ibn Rushd. The aim is to understand the frontiers of contact and transcendence between humans and animals, in the case of al-Koni, and political theory and reformist theology in the case of Ibn Rushd. These ways of thinking about the world challenge Cartesian, Eurocentric rationality, both about being/doing human (connecting what people do with their duty to be human towards others) and about doing thought (turning thought into action, living the thoughts we create and being accountable for thoughts we spread). These interventions help unmask the limitations of modern/colonial thought for understanding frontiers of contact and transcendence. The implications of these contributions, which are located in broad intellectual traditions that have remained marginal as a result of the dominance of Eurocentrism, are many and complex, not least of which is the traversing of the disciplinary boundaries and binary lines of modern thought.

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The discussions on Cabral, Tabata and Fanon’s Manichean structure relate to theorising about the liberation moment and efforts to deal with the national question after independence. The decentring here, in the case of Tabata, relates to the failure of the liberation movement to think carefully about the agrarian question as a key component of the national question. The chapter on Cabral deals with his explanation of the liberation movement’s weaknesses and the implications for its ability to lead society along the difficult path from mere independence to liberation. Finally, the Fanonian concepts of Manichean structure and existential phenomenology present a way of understanding and unpacking the long legacy of black subjugation after independence. The chapters on Bernard Magubane and Marcus Garvey reflect on how these African voices understood radical African thought, philosophy and agency in black communities across the Atlantic as a result of slavery, and how this interfaced with continental thought and action. Magubane linked the intellectual legacy of the black USA to the intellectual traditions of Africa during the same period, especially in terms of identity and consciousness as key motivations for black agency. in the realm of consciousness and thought, he found ties between Africans on the continent and Africans in the diaspora across the Atlantic Ocean. Garvey understood the consciousness of and commitment to African renewal through building a united Africa and global African solidarity. The importance of thinking about beauty as a contested terrain of thought is the subject of the chapter by Ramy Magdy Ahmed. The discussion nuances how various African intellectual traditions converge around beauty and looks at the extent to which non-black notions of beauty are included. The Black Consciousness tradition, represented by Steve Biko; Negritude, represented by Léopold Sédar Senghor; and Métissage, epitomised by Taha Hussein , are the focus of the meditations in this chapter. This discussion has implications for our understanding of the African self as a contested terrain of thought when viewed from outside Eurocentric paradigms of aesthetics. The chapter on Molefi Kete Asante’s idea of Afrocentricity as a philosophy and theory of Africa-centredness contains another conceptually focused discussion of an idea – a theory. The chapter outlines the theory’s pillars and key messages, and it shows how the theory situates Africa at the centre of discussions about the continent. It demonstrates a coherent, radical, Africa-centred initiative for cultivating alternative theories for interpreting African realities.

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The chapters on Mahmood Mamdani, Archie Mafeje, Ali Mazrui and Adebayo Adedeji meditate on how these four African voices contribute to theorising Africa. They consider internal historical dynamics that pose challenges to modern Africans, including their state of being, as Mamdani is shown to have done. This extends to privileging Africanity as a combative ontological position in order to decentre Eurocentrism and recentre Africa as a foundation of knowledges, experiences, records and ontologies, as Mafeje is said to have done. To this, Mazrui adds deep meditations on what it means for Africa to achieve complete self-reliance, and how this is enabled by Pax Africana as a prism of thought that has Africa at the centre. For Adedeji, this centring of the African prism is best done through a six-pillar paradigm and process of regional integration – drawn from the continent’s unique mix of history and everyday opportunities – a paradigm that uses context and history to Africa’s advantage in a highly competitive world. Wangari Maathai and Claude Ake are joined together by a commitment to appropriating modern ideas related to environmental justice and democracy and giving them new definitions on the basis of foregrounding the African experience. Maathai is shown to have blended a variety of endogenous philosophies of life in order to produce what is akin to a combination of critical ecological justice with dimensions of critical feminist and decolonial thought and action. She is shown to have demonstrated, through her activism and thoughts, how the human–nature equation can be re-thought in the manner Al-Koni thought of meta-humanism. Ake sought to rescue the idea of democracy from the clutches of Western liberalism and to locate it within endogenous political traditions of African communalism; consensual and collective democratic participation; as well as norms of collective will, reciprocity, collective mutual reliance, and so forth.

CONCLUSION This book is intended as a modest contribution to discussions about what it would entail to decolonise knowledge and thinking about African situations, past and present, in order to enable epistemic justice while advancing the transformation of the post-colonial/neo-colonial world. It accepts the argument that fundamental to the making of what JM Blaut34 terms the coloniser’s version of the world, was a deadly epistemic strategy that sought to mute, silence, erase and distort the African voice in knowledge. It demonstrates, however, that African voices could not be fully silenced, erased, ignored, denigrated and submerged: they have spoken back in the

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form of combative and non-combative agency through a variety of themes and tones. This book responds to the conspiracy of silence by joining the call for epistemic rebellion and disobedience, and by echoing the claim that African voices do speak, even in deliberate obscurity. Given that ours is the struggle just to breathe in the face of the suffocating omnipresence of Eurocentric negations, this book attempts to let African voices breathe simple and basic ideas that have huge implications for how we think about Africa today. The hope is that the book will contribute to further forcing open the space for African ideas in the form of concepts and theories that speak to the African predicament in the past, today and in the future. By showcasing the value of voices that were meant to be silenced and submerged, it also shows how they help us to understand and solve the problems of Africa and the world today. The contributions are varied in focus and scope, but all seek to achieve one goal: to give voice to voices from Africa and about Africa.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2009. Something torn and new: an African renaissance. New York: Basic Books.

2

Zeleza, P.T., 2013. Banishing the silences: towards the globalization of African history. Available at http://erepo.usiu.ac.ke/handle/11732/1163;jsessionid=3A BA93A71BF16D65A7A6DE7275327ACD [Accessed 11 February 2021].

3

Kwarteng, K., 2012. Ghosts of empire. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

4

Mazrui, A., 2010. Preface: Black Berlin and the curse of fragmentation: From Bismarck to Barack. In Adebajo, A. (ed.), The curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, pp.1–11.

5

Gordon, L.R., 1999. Bad faith and anti-black racism. Amherst: Prometheus Books.

6

Quijano, A., 2000. Coloniality of power, eurocentrism and Latin America. Nepantla Views from South, 1(3), pp.533–580.

7

Grosfoguel, R., 2009. A decolonial approach to political-economy: transmodernity, border thinking and global coloniality. Kult – Special Issue: Epistemological Transformation, Fall, pp.10–37.

8

Sousa Santos, B. de, 2010. Epistemologies of the South: justice against epistemicide. Oxon: Routledge.

9

Grosfoguel, R., 2013. The structure of knowledge in Westernized universities: epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge,

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9, pp.73–90.

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11 Federici, S., 2004. Caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. 12 Gordon, L.R., 2011. Shifting the geography of reason in an age of disciplinary decadence. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2), Fall, pp.96–103. 13 Ibid., p.97. 14 Maldonado-Torres, N., 2008. Against war: views from the underside of modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. 15 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S., 2013. Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: myths of decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA. 16 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, N., 1981. Writers in politics. London: Heinemann. 17 Amin, S., 2004. The liberal virus: permanent war and the Americanization of the world. New York: Monthly Review Press. 18 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2013. Op. cit. 19 Depelchin, Jacques., 2005. Silences in African History: Between the Syndromes of Discovery and Abolition. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers.

An Argument for Revisiting African Voices in Search of a Decolonial Turn

10 Ibid.

20 Mafeje, A., 2000. Africanity: A Combative Ontology. CODESRIA Bulletin, 2, pp.66–71. 21 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power. Op. cit. 22 Nkrumah, K., 1965. Neocolonialism: the last stage of imperialism. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd. 23 Gordon, Shifting the geography of reason. Op. cit., p.98. 24 Ibid. 25 Zeleza, Banishing the silences. Op. cit., p.1. 26 Ibid., p.2. 27 Grosfoguel, A decolonial approach to political-economy. Op. cit., p.15; Mafeje, Africanity: a combative ontology. Op. cit., p.67. 28 Quoted in Mignolo, W., 2009. Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture and Society, 26, pp.1–23, p.3. 29 Grosfoguel, A decolonial approach to political-economy. Op. cit., p.15. 30 Zeleza, Banishing the silences. Op. cit., p.3. 31 Ibid. 32 Biko, S., 1978. I Write What I Like, edited by A. Stubbs. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers. 33 King, T.L., Navarro, J. and Smith, A., eds., 2020. Otherwise worlds: against settler colonialism and anti-blackness. Durham: Duke University Press. 34 Blaut, J.M., 1993. The colonizer’s model of the world: geographical and eurocentric history. New York: The Guilford Press.

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Mahmood Mamdani’s Contribution to Rethinking Thinking on Africa Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni Department of Leadership and Transformation, University of South Africa, South Africa

ABSTRACT Rethinking thinking on Africa is an epistemological project aimed at shifting the intellectual lens from ‘Africa defined from outside’ to ‘Africa defined from inside’. In Mahmood Mamdani’s terms,1 this entails establishing ‘the historical legitimacy of Africa as a unit of analysis’, and transcending the colonial historiographical practice of writing African history ‘by analogy’. This chapter highlights five of Mamdani’s contributions to rethinking thinking on Africa. The first is his decolonial approach to the study of Africa, which privileges internal historical dynamics. The second is his analysis of how colonial power worked, and how it impinged on African resistance and generated post-colonial dilemmas. The third is his thesis on colonial manufacturing of political identities and how these continue to haunt contemporary Africa. The fourth is his concept of ‘actually existing civil society, which is opposed to the abstract/programmatic conceptions of civil society in Africa. The fifth is his re-articulation of transitional justice beyond the traditional post-1945 Nuremberg template. The significance of Mamdani’s academic and intellectual interventions is that they speak directly and consistently to the long-standing question of the locus of historicisation and theorisation of Africa, so as to liberate knowledge from the snares of extroversion and coloniality.

INTRODUCTION

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Rethinking thinking on Africa entails changing the geography of knowledge and casting light directly on Africa as a legitimate unit of analysis. It is

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an intellectual and academic rebellion against the imperial and colonial historiographical tradition of privileging European and North American historical experiences as the ‘touchstone’ and ‘the historical expression of the universal’ against which African historical realities have to be benchmarked or compared.2 Cathrine Odora Hoppers and Howard Richards describe the value of rethinking thinking: ‘The casting of light at last onto subjugated peoples, knowledges, histories, and ways of living unsettles the toxic pond and transforms passive analysis into a generative force that valorises and recreates life for those previously museumised.’3 They further argue that rethinking thinking ‘is a process of engaging with colonialism in a manner that produces a programme for its dislocation’.4 Mahmood Mamdani is among those African scholars who have consistently emphasised the importance of a methodological approach that avoids lifting African historical experiences out of their historical context. If there is a single attribute that distinguishes Mamdani’s academic and intellectual interventions on Africa, it is his fidelity to thorough historicisation and sophisticated and original theorisation of complex issues. Beginning with his analysis of colonial power architecture and configuration, Mamdani not only expands understanding of the relationship between contemporary politics and colonial pasts, but also, more importantly, enables the thinkability of post-colonial predicaments and dilemmas, including even the horrors of genocides. This chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive study of Mamdani’s expansive archive; rather, it is focused on five selected contributions. The first is Mamdani’s decolonial approach that privileges the legitimacy of Africa as a unit of analysis. The second is his analysis of how colonial power worked and how it impinged on African resistance and the African present. The third is his articulation of how colonialism invented politicised identities and how these subjectivities continue to haunt contemporary Africa. The fourth is his examination of ‘actually existing civil society’ in his advancement of knowledge on contemporary Africa. The fifth is his re-articulation of transitional justice beyond the traditional post-1945 Nuremberg framework that privileged criminal prosecutions as a resolution to conflict and violence.

RETHINKING THINKING ON AFRICA Conceptually and methodologically speaking, Mamdani has been concerned about what he termed ‘a paralysis of perspective’ as constitutive of the ‘impasse in Africa’, which visibly manifested itself ‘at the level of practical

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politics’.5 At the centre of this crisis of ideas are the entrenched positions of modernists, communitarians, Eurocentrists and Africanists, which Mamdani neatly summarised as follows: Modernists take inspiration from East European uprisings of the late eighties. Communitarians decry liberal or left Eurocentrism and call for a return to the source. For modernists, the problem is that civil society is an embryonic and marginal construct in Africa. For communitarians, the real flesh-andblood communities that comprise Africa are marginalised from public life as so many ‘tribes’. The liberal solution is to locate politics in civil society, and the Africanist solution is to put Africa’s old-age communities at the centre of African politics.6

Mamdani’s work, particularly his Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism,7 did not venture into easy dismissal of these problematic positions. Instead, he suggested that ‘one needs to problematise each [so as] to arrive at a creative synthesis transcending both positions’.8 But how do we move beyond this crisis of perspective? Mamdani suggests: ‘The way forward lies in sublating both, through a double move that simultaneously critiques and affirms’.9 Mamdani has also been critical of ‘area studies’, which for him are underpinned by two problematic methodological claims: The first sees state boundaries as boundaries of knowledge, thereby turning political into epistemological boundaries ... The second methodological claim is that knowledge is about the production of facts. This view translates into stubborn resistance to theory in the name of valorising the fact. From this point of view, the claim is that theory is deadening: instead of illuminating, it manipulates the fact. The assumption is that facts speak for themselves. But facts need to be put in context, and interpreted; neither is possible without a theoretical illumination.10 

Having critiqued the methodological limits of area studies, Mamdani broke the ‘rules of areas studies where every “expert” must cultivate his or her own “local” patch, where geography is forever fixed by contemporary political boundaries’.11 Mamdani termed this intellectual habit of conflating state boundaries with epistemological boundaries ‘intellectual claustrophobia’, which involved linking ‘local outcomes to colonialism historically, but not to broader regional developments’.12  14

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Mahmood Mamdani’s Contribution to Rethinking Thinking on Africa

Mamdani broke with area-studies tradition in two ways in his book When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda,13 in which he sought to make the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 thinkable. At the first level, he historicised geography, in the process challenging the processes of naturalising the political identities of the Hutu and Tutsi. Through this approach, Mamdani revealed the poverty of existing scholarship on the 1959 revolution in Rwanda, which failed to problematise ‘the ways in which the postcolonial state reproduced and reinforced colonially produced political identities in the name of justice’, in the process ‘treating these identities as if they were natural constructs’.14 At the second level, Mamdani broke with the ‘“antitheoretical thrust” through rethinking “existing facts in light of rethought contexts, thereby to illuminate old facts and core realities in new light”’.15 In this way, Mamdani managed to transcend clichés of horror and produced a scholarly work that took historical, regional, theoretical, and moral perspectives seriously enough to enable a deeper understanding of how social dynamics made the genocide possible. Mamdani emphasised three important issues. The first is ‘In pursuit of knowledge, we knew no boundaries.’16 The second is ‘We looked at the world from within Africa’ (the emphasis is reproduced from the original text).17 The third is ‘Decolonisation in one sphere of life does not necessarily and automatically lead to decolonisation in other spheres.’18 In the case of Rwanda, politicised identities were never decolonised. The three concerns address Mamdani’s broader approach to the study of Africa, which underscores the specificity of Africa and seeks to transcend the colonial historiographical habit of writing African history by analogy. Broadly, Mamdani openly rebelled – conceptually and methodologically – against the traditional intellectual and academic habit of making European historical experience the template of all other historical experiences. In Mamdani, we therefore read Africa as not at all lifted out of its context and process; nor is it written by analogy. In his interpretation of the subject of colonialism, Mamdani becomes part of the epic school, rather than the episodic school. The episodic school, as represented by the Nigerian historian Jacob Ade Ajayi of the Ibadan nationalist school, understood colonialism as a mere episode in African history. This school of thought frantically fought to counter colonial historiography that denied African agency in history.19 Mamdani’s critique of those who laboured to restore historicity and agency to the subject is this: while structuralism tended to straitjacket agency within iron laws of history, a strong tendency in post-structuralism is to diminish the significance of historical constraint in the name of salvaging agency.20 

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If one reads Mamdani’s seminal works closely, beginning with Citizen and Subject, it becomes clear that his understanding of colonialism is closer to the epic school, which captures, for instance, the epic, if not revolutionary, impact of colonialism on Africa’s conceptions of power and identity. The epic school embraces Aimé Césaire, who posed the question: What is colonialism, fundamentally?21 Frantz Fanon posited that colonialism works on the history of the oppressed people, distorting, disfiguring, and ultimately destroying it.22  Peter Ekeh defined colonialism as a ‘social movement of epochal dimensions whose enduring significance [is] beyond the lifespan of the colonial situation’.23 Ali Mazrui understood colonialism as a ‘revolution of epic proportions’.24 And Ngugi wa Thiong’o emphasised how colonialism invaded the mental universe of Africa as it colonised the mind of Africans.25 Mamdani’s analysis is permeated by a sophisticated linking of historicisation and theorisation to explain the ‘regime of differentiation (institutional segregation) as fashioned in colonial Africa – and reformed after independence – and the nature of the resistance it bred’.26 In Mamdani’s interventions, one learns how Europe ruled Africa and shaped the way Africans responded to it, as well as how present structures of power in contemporary Africa reflect their colonial precedents. In his latest book, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity,27 Mamdani made two profound interventions. The first is, ‘Colonial empires were the first political fundamentalists of the modern period.’28 The second is, ‘The native is the creation of the colonial state: colonised, the native is pinned down, localised, thrown out of civilisation as an outcast, confined to custom, and then defined as its product.’29 These two interventions speak to what Valentin Y Mudimbe termed ‘the paradigm of difference’, which produced what Boaventura de Sousa Santos described as ‘abyssal thinking’ and the ‘impossibility of co-presence’.30 For Africa and Africans, the colonial fundamentalism that was deployed in the invention of ‘natives’ as peculiar human beings defined by geography rather than history, and ruled by custom, resulted in the dismemberment of Africans from the human race.31  In another profound way, Mamdani revealed the dangers of importing theoretical frameworks and solutions from outside Africa in the belief that they would work wonders on Africa. He boldly stated: For a curious feature of current African politics is to draw prescriptions from a context other than the one that gave rise to its problems. Whereas the source of demands is the existing African context, the framework for solutions is generally a received theory of democracy which has little to do with

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contemporary realities in Africa.32 

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The framework of received theory is a set of assumptions which do not always reflect realities on the continent. The clash between assumptions and realities can either lead to sterile attempts to enforce textbook solutions or be a rich source of creative reflection.34 

Mahmood Mamdani’s Contribution to Rethinking Thinking on Africa

Building on this argument, Mamdani makes a number of useful interventions. The first is that internal reform or even revolutionary movements from Africa are commonly read as influenced by external developments, such as the infiltration of Communists, the fall of the Soviet Union, or the influence of East European pro-democracy movements. Such an approach makes it difficult for analysts to understand continuities in African history from armed liberation movements to social movements, from rural to urban protest movements, and from peasant society (‘the people’) to civil society (‘the citizens’).33  His second intervention is as follows:

Mamdani traces the problems of the narrow understanding of pluralism in post-colonial Africa to the post-World War II colonial reform that informed most of Africa’s transition from colonialism to ‘independence’ in the 1960s. This is how he understands the problem: It is an understanding which equated pluralism with only its political dimension; as a result, the same reform which recognised the existence of political movements undermined the autonomy of social movements. By cultivating the former but suffocating the latter, the reform drove a wedge between political and social movements, and created a post-independence environment for the emergence of state-parties, at first several, and then one. I shall argue that it is this highly restricted notion of pluralism which prepared the soil for single-party dictatorships in a growing number of African countries.35 

This analysis explains why democracy became reducible to multi-partyism, a problem which continues to produce pseudo-democracies on the continent. Mamdani also critiques the received liberal theory as it pertains to rights and citizenship in Africa. He poses the fundamental question: ‘Who are the legitimate bearers of rights in Africa?’ His response is: I shall argue that notions received from Euro-American liberalism – that the bearer of the ‘right to self-determination’ is the nation, and that of ‘human rights’ is the citizen – are so restrictive that they have the unfortunate result

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of disenfranchising an increasing number of groups and individuals under present conditions in Africa.36 

Mamdani problematises the idea of the ‘nation’ as the bearer of the ‘right to self-determination’ as influenced by European ideas, and the ‘citizens’ as the bearer of ‘human rights’ as informed by US constitutional thought.37 Mamdani posited, ‘One needs to begin with an understanding of what is unique about the African context to arrive at a notion of rights adequate to it.’38 He elaborated: In Africa more than in any part of the world, there is little coincidence between the history of nation formation and that of state formation, between social history and political history. Many state boundaries date, not even from the Berlin Conference of the 1880s, but from the decade of independence of the 1960s. More than the outcome of internal social histories, they reflect the exigencies of external geopolitics.39 

Mamdani notes that, in Africa, there are two issues to consider. The first is that of ‘tribes’ that aspire to form independent states; the second is the reality of migrant labour that ruptures the idea of one’s land of birth as the determinant of citizenship. Taking into account these realities, Mamdani concluded: The African context is one where the liberal notion of rights as an attribute of citizenship, has increasingly anti-democratic consequences. To change this situation requires rescuing rights from the narrow shell of citizenship, and linking it to the more universal fact of labour (residence).40

But to gain a deeper appreciation of Mamdani’s historicisation and theorisation as a form of rethinking thinking on Africa, one has to start with how he understands colonial governmentality and its long-term consequences for Africa.

COLONIAL GOVERNMENTALITY AND AFRICAN RESPONSES TO COLONIAL POWER

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How power is organised – and how it has fragmented resistance in contemporary Africa – is one of Mamdani’s major departure points in understanding colonial institutional legacy, which continues to be reproduced through ‘the dialectic of state reform and popular resistance’.41 He posed the question of

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Mahmood Mamdani’s Contribution to Rethinking Thinking on Africa

how Europe ruled Africa, which translates to the problematic of how alien rule was introduced and stabilised in Africa. This fundamental question led Mamdani to transcend the political-economy perspective which privileged the labour question. Mamdani’s enquiry is into how a minority of foreign invaders dealt with a majority of indigenous people and how ‘the subject population [was] incorporated into – and not excluded from – the arena of colonial power’.42 This approach led him to engage with the ‘native question’ rather than the ‘labour question’. Mamdani posited that the ‘native question [was] a dilemma that confronted every colonial power and a riddle that preoccupied the best of its minds’.43 As a fundamental colonial challenge, the ‘native question’ preoccupied such imperial/colonial ideologues as: Sir Henry Maine in the colonisation of India, Edmund Spencer in the colonisation of the Irish, Cecil John Rhodes in southern Africa, Lord Lugard in the colonisation of Nigeria and Uganda, Lord Macaulay in India, General Jan Smuts in his delivery of the prestigious Rhodes Memorial Lectures at Oxford University in 1929, and Hendrik Verwoerd in his formulation of apartheid and its institutionalisation in South Africa in 1948. At the centre of the ‘native question’ has been a foundational paradigm of difference dating back to the dawn of Euro-North-American-centric modernity. It is informed by racial hierarchisation and the social classification of the human species in accordance with invented and constructed differential, ontological densities.44 This imperial reason amounted to what Nelson Maldonado-Torres termed ‘coloniality of being’ and what Mamdani described as a process of the defining of and the ruling over the ‘natives’.45 In short, the ‘native question’ is informed by questioning the very humanity of the colonised people. In response to the ‘native question’, colonial power evolved two forms of colonial governmentality: direct rule and indirect rule. Under direct rule, ‘native’ institutions were to be destroyed and replaced by a single Eurocentric legal order. This was the form of governmentality that Europeans experimented with in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Direct rule was also predicated on a civilising standard. This entailed the deliberate creation of ‘a native elite’ that would have assimilated colonial culture to the extent of being eligible to be ‘granted a modicum of civilised rights’ by the colonial state.46 The African native elite was expected to be carefully reproduced through education in such a way that they would be African in blood and colour but colonial in opinions, morals, and intellect. They would thus be able to effectively play the role of intermediaries between colonisers and the bulk of the ‘uneducated’ colonised peoples. However,

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resistance by the colonised in India and Africa provoked a shift from direct rule to indirect rule. This form of colonial reform of governance consisted in ruling indirectly through native authorities and recognise native tradition and customs. However, Mamdani is quick to posit that ‘indirect rule never entirely displaced direct rule’; rather, ‘the two coexisted as two faces of power, direct rule a regime guaranteeing rights to racialised citizenry and indirect rule a regime enforcing culture on an ethnicised peasantry’. He goes further to highlight that even under indirect rule, colonial powers sought to shape the world of the conquered through inventing a particular form of native authority and a reconstruction of tradition and cultures to suit colonial purposes.47  The thesis of ‘invention of tradition’ was initially posited by Terence Ranger.48 The colonial logic was simply to ‘recognise the historicity of the colony and the agency of the colonised’, as well as to confront native ‘custom analytically, rather than to dismiss it dogmatically’.49 What emerged from this colonial exercise of power was a ‘bifurcated state’ mediated by race as reified identity. Consequently, the colonised were united citizens on the one hand, while on the other hand the colonised people were fragmented into various unrelated tribes by way of an equally reified ethnic identity. Mamdani elaborated: Unlike dependency theory, whose focus was on the dependent economy created in the course of colonialism, I argue that the African colonial experience came to be crystallised in the nature of the state forged through that encounter. Organised differently in rural and urban areas, that state was Janus-faced, bifurcated. It contained a duality: two forms of power under singular authority. Urban power spoke the language of civil society and civil rights, rural power of community and culture. Civil power claimed to protect rights, customary power to enforce tradition.50 

This architecture of colonial power had far-reaching consequences for Africa. Here was invented the identity of ethnicised tribes, enveloped by an ossified shell of tradition and custom that had to be adhered to rather than questioned, and overseen by equally invented authoritarian, masculine and patriarchal ‘administrative’ rural authorities masquerading as embodiments of traditional African chiefs. Mamdani warned us not to be ‘misled by the nomenclature to think of this as a handover from [the] pre-colonial era’, because these so-called chiefs were ‘appointed, promoted, and dismissed by the colonial power’.51  20

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THE PROBLEM OF INVENTED AND POLITICISED IDENTITIES IN AFRICA One of the major challenges in post-colonial Africa has been how to move forward beyond ‘settler’ and ‘native’ political identities into a new humanity in which race dies as an organising principle. Mamdani confronted this challenge directly, posing the difficult question, ‘When does a settler become a native?’, in his AC Jordan professorial inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town in 1998. He posited:

Mahmood Mamdani’s Contribution to Rethinking Thinking on Africa

The second consequence was that the form of colonial rule shaped the form of anti-colonial resistance in such a way that ‘anti-colonial struggle was first and foremost a struggle against the hierarchy of the local state, the ethnically-organised native authority that claimed ethnic legitimacy’.52 At the same time, colonial racial exclusion shaped the development of a racial consciousness among those who fought against colonialism. The third consequence was the creation of a rural–urban dichotomy that continues to characterise contemporary Africa. As will be demonstrated later, these issues had implications for post-colonial reform, governance, citizenship, belonging and development.

In the context of a former settler colony, a single citizenship for settlers and natives can only be the result of an overall metamorphosis whereby erstwhile colonisers and colonised are politically reborn as equal members of a single political community. The word reconciliation cannot capture this metamorphosis ... This is about establishing for the first time, a political order based on consent and not conquest. It is about establishing a political community of equal and consenting citizens.53

Mamdani’s robust interventions on the topical question of identities shifted the lens from class (a market-determined identity) and ethnicity (a culturally determined identity) to political identity (the product of state formation, crafted in law, determined by race and institutionalised by the state) within a colonial context. Within this colonial context, ‘only the natives were said to belong to ethnic groups; non-natives had no ethnicity. Non-natives were identified racially, not ethnically.’54 In the case of Rwanda, for example, among the races were Europeans (citizens) at the top, followed by subject races such as Asians, Coloureds (mixed-race), Arabs and Hamites (Tutsi). And these were considered to be civilised compared to natives, as ethnicities 21

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that were said to be desperately in need of being civilised.55 Mamdani summarised how political identities were constructed in this manner: The colonial state divided the population into two: races and ethnicities. Each lived in a different legal universe. Races were governed through civil law. They were considered as members, actually or potentially, of civil society. Civil society excluded ethnicities ... Ethnicities were governed through customary laws. While civil law spoke the language of rights, customary law spoke the language of tradition, of authenticity ... Colonial law made a fundamental distinction between two types of person: those indigenous and those not indigenous; in a word, natives and non-natives. My first observation ... is that rights belonged to non-natives, not to natives. Natives had to live according to custom.56 

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This politicisation of identity had a direct implication for the formation of African national consciousness and nationalism itself. Mamdani correctly noted: ‘Nationalism was a struggle of natives to be recognised as a transethnic identity, as a race, as “Africans”, and thus – as a race – to gain admission to the world of rights, to civil society, which was a short form of civilised society.’57  How has post-colonial Africa attempted to dismantle what was created through indirect rule? Mamdani posits that post-colonial reform took two problematic forms: conservative and radical. The former simply inherited the local state apparatus (from chiefs to headmen) while trying to deracialise the central state. The latter tried to destroy the local state as imagined and constructed by colonialists and imposed a singular customary law transcending ethnic boundaries: chiefs were replaced with cadres and tradition/ custom was replaced with ideas of revolution and development. The consequences were the same: the peasants remained captured, the rural-urban dichotomy was not broken, and the rural sector was not democratised. However, in Define and Rule, Mamdani gives the example of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere as one post-colonial African leader who ‘successfully implemented an alternative form of statecraft’ that dismantled ‘the structures of indirect rule through sustained but peaceful reform.’ Nyerere’s success is attributed to correct diagnosis of where the legacy of colonial state lay – not in the army and police, but in its legal and administrative apparatus. This correct identification of the problem enabled Nyerere to establish ‘a singular and unified law-enforcing machinery’, which ‘meant that every citizen in mainland Tanzania was governed on the basis of the same set of rules, enforced by a single court system’.58 Nyerere’s achievement was therefore

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the creation of an inclusive citizenship and a cohesive nation-state. This success was due to Nyerere’s commitment, from 1962, to building a united nation that was underpinned by human equality and dignity and which transcended race and ethnicity. Nyerere’s first move was to abolish all racebased distinctions in civil law and ethnic-based distinctions enshrined in customary law. What must be emphasised is that Mamdani’s historicisation and theorisation of politicised identities emanated from his concern with post-colonial challenges. This is how he expressed his concern: ‘How does this institutional inheritance, with its legacy-enforced distinctions between races and ethnicities, civil law and customary law, rights and custom, subject races and subject ethnicities, play out after colonialism?’59  We will deal with these implications in the concluding section of this chapter. For now, let’s turn to how colonial power architecture shaped the formation of ‘indigenous’ civil society.

EXISTING/INDIGENOUS CIVIL SOCIETY IN AFRICA Mamdani has done insightful work on the emergence of ‘actually existing civil society in Africa’, as opposed to the programmatic, ideological, abstract, sponsored civil society described by Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Talcott Parsons, Jurgen Habermas and others, who draw from the European and North American experience. Again, Mamdani underscores how a historical understanding of ‘how the subject population was incorporated into – and not excluded from – the arena of colonial power’ enables a better comprehension of the formation and character of ‘indigenous civil society’.60  Mamdani’s first point is that the ‘exclusion that defined the specificity of civil society under colonial rule was that of race’.61 The second is that citizenship was ‘a privilege of the civilised; the uncivilised would be subject to an all-round tutelage’.62 The third is that ‘a propertied franchise separated the civilised from the uncivilised’, making it impossible for those considered uncivilised to enjoy civil and political rights.63 As noted above, the consequence of all this was the construction of a bifurcated colonial state characterised by ‘two forms of power under a single hegemonic authority’, with: ‘urban power [speaking] the language of civil society and civil rights’ (direct rule through the use of protected civil rights), and ‘rural power’ speaking that of ‘community and culture’ (indirect rule enforced by tradition).64  23

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What is interesting is how Mamdani established historical connections between civil society and nationalism, which is often missing in ‘post-colonial’ situations, where nationalism has mutated into state ideology opposed to civil society. The colonial practice was to racially sanitise civil society as the sole preserve of the citizens and to exclude the colonised (subjects) from civil society – even the educated and urbanised ‘natives … who were exempt from the lash of customary law [and who] languished in a juridical limbo’.65 This practice inevitably shapes the anti-colonial, national-consciousness formation process into a struggle for access to civil society, a reality which has deep implications for the character of anti-colonial, nationalist liberation struggles. Inevitably, the struggles of the colonised subjects became ranged against both ‘customary authorities in the local state and against racial barriers in civil society’.66 Mamdani identified four moments in the production of ‘actually existing civil society’. The first is the moment of racially sanitised civil society that excluded all those considered to be uncivilised. The second moment in the development of civil society is that of the anti-colonial struggle, ‘for the anti-colonial struggle was at the same time a struggle for embryonic middle class and working classes, the native strata in limbo, for entry into civil society’.67 The anti-colonial struggle was, in a way, the struggle of those deemed to be uncivilised for inclusion into a civil society that was ringfenced by race and privilege. One can argue that an ‘indigenous civil society’ emerged within the context of anti-colonial and anti-racial struggles. These struggles could not be achieved without the decolonisation, deracialisation and democratisation of the state. The third moment in the development of civil society was that of political independence, which produced a deracialised state without a deracialised civil society that continued to protect colonially accumulated privileges. In the struggle to deracialise state and civil society, ‘state-civil society antagonism diminished’.68 The state pushed the agenda of deracialisation of civil society through initiatives such as Africanisation, affirmative action and indigenisation projects. This agenda united ‘the victims of colonial racism’.69 As stated by Mamdani: ‘To the victims of racism the vocabulary of rights rang hollow, a lullaby for perpetuating racial privilege’.70  The rupture between state and civil society came about during the fourth moment of redistribution of resources, which became imbricated in regional, partisan, class, ethnic, gender and even familial cleavages. Mamdani argues that the fourth moment, namely the actually existing civil society became ‘the moment of the collapse of an embryonic indigenous society, of

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It is the moment of the marriage between technism and nationalism, of the proliferation of state nationalism in a context where the claims of the state – both developmentalist and equalising – had a powerful resonance, particularly for the fast-expanding educated strata. It is the time when civil society-based social movements became demobilised and political movements statised.71

The fourth moment also witnessed the activities of those who had benefited from the colonial order in fighting to defend racial privileges within a postcolonial context. Thus, while Mamdani’s analysis of the four moments of the development of actually existing civil society are useful in deepening the understanding of contemporary African realities, he tended to ignore the debilitating hegemonic character of African nationalism – even during the course of the anti-colonial, nationalist-led liberation struggle – before it assumed the status of state ideology. This nationalism unfolded through subordination of all social movements, be they labour or church, to its imperative, as it did not tolerate any form of dissent from within its own ranks. But what is important about Mamdani’s analysis is that it underscores how colonial power configurations created ‘post-colonial’ difficulties concerning reforming the state and civil society. As he puts it:

Mahmood Mamdani’s Contribution to Rethinking Thinking on Africa

trade unions and autonomous civil organisations, and its absorption into political society’. He elaborates as follows:

To understand the limits of deracialisation of civil society, one needs to grasp the specificity of the local state, which was organised not as a racial power denying rights to urbanised subjects, but as an ethnic power enforcing custom on tribespeople.72 

Besides deracialisation as a reform process, there is a need for detribalisation. Following his insightful analysis of decolonisation, deracialisation, detribalisation and democratisation, Mamdani has recently turned his attention to the equally important challenge of transitional justice in Africa.

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN AFRICA In his recent interventions on transitional justice, Mamdani poses two fundamental questions: ‘How shall we think of extreme violence, of mass violence: as criminal or political? How shall we define responsibility for large scale violence: as criminal or political?’73 His response to these two questions is that we need to move beyond, at one level, confusing political

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violence with criminal violence, and at another level, a focus on perpetrators at the expense of the complex issues that drive violence. It would seem that initiatives aimed at achieving transitional justice are hostage to the post1945 Nuremberg paradigm, which continues to define justice as criminal justice. This ideologised paradigm also informs the work of the International Criminal Court (ICC). To Mamdani, the best way to move beyond Nuremberg is to consider lessons from the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), which privileged political justice and replaced punishment with forgiveness – producing what he specifically terms ‘survivor’s justice’, as opposed to ‘victor’s justice’.74 Mamdani is very critical of the use of courtroom solutions to violence and conflict, as advocated by human rights activists and advocates, because these solutions are informed by a narrow understanding of conflict and violence. He posits that it was easy to apply the Nuremberg solution to the crimes committed by Nazis against the Jews, because the perpetrators and the victims were to be separated: the perpetrators would remain in Germany and the victims would depart for another homeland. Yesterday’s perpetrators and victims would not have to live together, for there would be a separate state for survivors – Israel.75  What about ‘post-colonial’ Africa, where perpetrators and victims have to live together? This is where CODESA comes in as an innovative transitional justice mechanism – albeit a problematic one too, because it privileged forgiveness and reconciliation at the expense of justice itself. Mamdani argues that what was important in the South African transition was that amnesty was not exchanged for truth, but for willingness to reform. He elaborates: Rather than put justice in the back seat, CODESA presents a radically new way of thinking about justice. It presents a double breakthrough. To begin with, CODESA distinguished between different forms of justice – criminal, political and social. It prioritised political justice, the reform of the political system, over the other two. The difference between political and criminal justice is twofold. One, political justice affects groups, whereas criminal justice targets individuals. Two, the object of criminal justice is punishment; that of political justice is political reform. A shift of logic from the criminal to political led to decriminalising and legitimising both sides to the conflict.76

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Using this line of thinking, the way forward for initiatives aimed at achieving transitional justice is to move beyond naming and shaming. Instead, the aim must be to focus on the context within which the conflict and violence emerged, in trying to locate the motivation for violence not in

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CONCLUSION While Mamdani’s contribution to transitional justice highlights that we must rethink the relationship between law and politics, so as to break out of the old Nuremberg template of justice, his other interventions on the architecture and configuration of colonial power enable a historically informed and theoretically enriching understanding of post-colonial conditions and the dilemmas with reforming institutions, practices and power itself. Throughout Mamdani’s works, there are clear methodological suggestions, including taking Africa as a legitimate epistemic unit of analysis, avoiding the pitfalls of simply importing theories from elsewhere that tend to run roughshod over the internal realities on the continent, seeking ‘actually existing civil society’ rather than programmatic civil society drawn from external thinkers, and placing emphasis on seeking solutions to African conflict and violence by looking inside rather than outside the problem for solutions. Theoretically, Mamdani provides historically informed insight into current struggles over belonging, citizenship, entitlements and rights. These contestations were shaped by the colonial legacy, which made it difficult for the post-colonial state to ensure genuine decolonisation, detribalisation, deracialisation and democratisation. Mamdani insisted that Africa must formulate its own conceptions of belonging and citizenship that take into account its particular trajectories of state formation, colonial experience and political economy, which provoked migration. This makes a lot of sense on a continent where struggles over resources have assumed ethnic and communal forms. Mamdani’s warning is that the time has passed when those who were branded foreigners ‘would leave, their belongings on their heads, and run in the direction of home. Now, the tendency is for them to fight it out’.79 Today, those who are excluded from citizenship, belonging, entitlements and rights arm themselves in self-defence, hence ‘the proliferation of armed militias in the context of ethnically driven clashes around land and other rights’.80 

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individual psychology or a culture of a group. Mamdani suggests: ‘To break out of the cycle of violence we need to displace the victim narrative with that of the survivor. A survivor narrative is less perpetrator-driven, more issue-driven.’77 Methodologically, Mamdani suggests the need ‘to look for solution within the problem and not outside it’, and in terms of the purpose of transitional justice, his view is: ‘The point of it all was not to avenge the dead, but to give the living a second chance’.78 

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Mamdani has also enabled us to move beyond the traditional Marxist and liberal understanding of identities as either market-based or cultural; he introduced political identities as distinct from economic or cultural identities. Mamdani has contributed immensely to what his student Suren Pillay termed ‘the contemporary predicament of decolonising citizenship’.81

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Mamdani, M., 1996. Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p.9.

2

Ibid., pp.11–12.

3

Hoppers, C. and Richards, H., 2012. Rethinking thinking: modernity’s ‘Other’ and the transformation of the university. Pretoria: Unisa Press, p.8.

4 Ibid. 5 Mamdani, Citizen and subject. Op. cit., p.1. 6

Ibid., p.1.

7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9

Ibid., p.1.

10 Ibid., pp.12–13. 11 Ibid., p.13. 12 Ibid. 13 Mamdani, M., 2001. When victims become killers: colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda. Oxford: James Currey. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p.14. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ajayi, J., 1969. Colonialism: an episode in African history. In Gann, L.H. and Duignan, P. (eds.), Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960: Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.497–509. 20 Mamdani, Citizen and subject. Op. cit., p.10. 21 Cesaire, A., 1955. Discourse on colonialism. Translated by Pinkham, J. New York: Monthly Review Press. 22 Fanon, F., 1968. The wretched of the earth. Translated by Farrington, C. New York: Grove Press, p.210. 23 Ekeh, P., 1983. Colonialism and social structure: University of Ibadan inaugural lecture, 1980. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, p.5.

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24 Mazrui, A., 1986. The Africans: a triple heritage. London: BBC Publications, p.12.

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African literature. Oxford: James Currey. 26 Mamdani, M., 1996. Op. cit., p.7. 27 Mamdani, M., 2013. Define and rule: native as political identity. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 28 Ibid., p.50. 29 Ibid., pp.2–3. 30 Mudimbe, V., 1994. The idea of Africa. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indian University Press; Sousa Santos, B. de, 2007. Beyond abyssal thinking: from global lines to ecologies of knowledge. Review, 30(1), pp.45–89. 30 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2009. Something torn and new: an African renaissance. New York: Basic Civitas Books; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2009. Re-membering Africa. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers Ltd. 31 Mamdani, M., 1992. Africa: democratic theory and democratic struggles. Economic and Political Weekly, 27(41), pp.2228–2232, p.2228. 32 Ibid.

Mahmood Mamdani’s Contribution to Rethinking Thinking on Africa

25 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1986. Decolonising the mind: the politics of language in

33 Ibid., p.2228. 34 Ibid., p.2228. 35 Ibid., p.2229. 36 Ibid., p.2230. 37 Ibid., pp.2230–2231. 38 Ibid., p.2231. 39 Ibid., p.2232. 40 Mamdani, Citizen and subject. Op. cit., p.1. 41 Ibid., p.15. 42 Ibid. 43 Du Bois, W.E.B., 1903. The souls of black folk. New York: Dover Publications; Quijano, A., 2000. The coloniality of power and social classification. Journal of World Systems Analysis, 6(2) (Summer–Fall), pp.342–386; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S., 2013. Empire, global coloniality and African subjectivity. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. 44 Maldonado-Torres, N., 2007. On coloniality of being: contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3). pp.240–270; Mamdani, Define and rule. Op. cit. 45 Mamdani, M., 1999. Historicizing power and responses to power: indirect rule and its reform. Social Research, 66(3), Fall, pp.859–886, p.862. 46 Ibid., p.865. 47 Ranger, T., 1983. The invention of tradition in colonial Africa. In Hobsbawn, E., and Ranger, T.O. (eds.), The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.3–17.

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48 Mamdani, Historicizing power. Op. cit., p.865. 49 Ibid., p.866. 50 Ibid., p.874. 51 Ibid., p.875. 52 Mamdani, M. 1998. When does a settler become a native? Reflections on the roots of citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa. Inaugural lecture delivered as AC Jordan Professor of African Studies, University of Cape Town, May 13. 53 Mamdani, When victims become killers. Op. cit., p.264. 54 Ibid., p.654. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Mamdani, Define and rule. Op. cit., p.107. 57 Ibid., p.108. 58 Ibid., p.657. 59 Mamdani, Citizen and subject. Op. cit., p.15. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., p.17. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., p.18. 64 Ibid., p.19. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., p.20. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., pp.20–21. 70 Ibid., p.21. 71 Ibid. 72 Mamdani, M., 2015. Beyond Nuremberg: the historical significance of the postapartheid transition in South Africa. Politics and Society, 43(1), p.61–88, p.63. 73 Ibid., p.63. 74 Ibid., p.66. 75 Ibid., p.67. 76 Ibid., p.81. 77 Ibid., p.82. 79 Mamdani, M., 2001. Beyond settler and native as political identities: overcoming the political legacy of colonialism. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43(4), October, pp.651–664, p.659. 78 Ibid. 80 Pillay, S., 2013. Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the

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refugee camp. Social Dynamics. 39(1), pp.75–91, p. 75.

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From North Africa to Europe Almohadism, Ibn Rushd and Rationalising Reform Ayesha Omar Department of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

ABSTRACT The Almohad period brought a reversal in attitudes towards intellectual and philosophical ideas. Indeed, there was a vigorous revival of intellectual activity under the Almohad Caliphate, engendered in part by the rationalising reform advocated by its earliest founder, Ibn Tumart. Ibn Rushd (Averroës), the twelfth-century Muslim philosopher, was not a marginal member of Almohad society, but the grand judge of Seville, the advisor to the Caliph, and a fully integrated member of the Almohad community, who was actively involved in its affairs. Fundamentally, these legal and political roles, and the patronage that Ibn Rushd received, shaped the form and content of his intellectual activities during this period. In particular, Ibn Rushd’s philosophical project was undeniably strengthened by the reformist nature of the Almohad Caliphate that ruled over Muslim Spain during his time, as these philosophical and political ideas formed part of the wider discourse of rationalising reform, which was promoted by the Almohad movement. Understanding and situating Ibn Rushd’s work in its historical context is important in order to gain a greater understanding of his ideas.

INTRODUCTION In his seminal work entitled Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the French scholar Dominique Urvoy implores the reader to consider an important question that is not only directly relevant to the subject of this chapter, but perhaps more significant to an understanding of this study as a whole, and to our ideas of political thought in general. The question concerns why we

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should read a twelfth-century writer known primarily as a ‘commentator’ on Aristotle.1 This question, which prima facie involves a Eurocentrist bias, raises more questions than it does answers, as it serves to open up a plethora of deeper and more fundamental questions about contemporary studies of Ibn Rushd. Urvoy asks whether there may be a discursive reason, ‘other than pure academic interest’, which necessitates the study of Ibn Rushd.2 Perhaps, argues Urvoy, the reason is a fascination with Ibn Rushd as a distinguished figure in the history of Arab culture, where he stands out as an avowed Aristotelian and inheritor of the Greeks. Or perhaps our attention is aroused by his influence on Latin scholasticism, which invigorated intellectual development in the West, as even Thomas Aquinas only came to know of Aristotle the Philosopher through Averroes the Commentator. For whatever reason, and from whatever perspective we might choose to study and draw attention to Ibn Rushd and his writings on politics, logic, metaphysics, law or theology, I argue that two fundamental and interrelated issues are central to any reading of his ideas. These form the basis of this discussion. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a proper understanding of the historical nature of Ibn Rushd’s work. The chapter undertakes to examine how the development of Ibn Rushd’s intellectual ideas was influenced by the social and historical conditions that were evident at the time. Firstly, it is prompted by the judgement that any attempt to locate Ibn Rushd’s political or philosophical ideas must begin with a discussion of the historical context that precipitated these ideas. The systematic exploration of the history of the Almohads in Spain, and the place of Ibn Rushd in this context, enables us to locate the intricacies of the shifting conception of rationality in Islamic philosophy and its impact on Western philosophy. Secondly, and following from this, is an awareness that much of what has been written about Ibn Rushd has already been interpreted along specific lines of enquiry and through various approaches in Western scholarship, which reveal a particular reading of his work, and a clear research agenda.3 The first, the orientalist approach, has undoubtedly had ‘pernicious effects’ for the study of Ibn Rushd’s philosophy and Islamic philosophy in general.4 For example, one group of orientalists view the work of Ibn Rushd and that of other Islamic philosophers simply as ‘an intermediary between Greek and medieval Latin philosophy’ and tend to discount the work of Islamic philosophy as not constituting substantive scholarship – and therefore as philosophically insignificant in itself.5 In a similar vein, other orientalist scholars claim that all of Islamic philosophy is concerned with religion and is thus largely unimaginative, and they contend that many of

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Ibn Rushd’s philosophical texts would essentially fall into this category. Many orientalists also hold the view that Arabic philosophy ends with Ibn Rushd, arguing that his was the last major theoretical effort from the Muslim world to have influenced medieval Western thought.6 These orientalist misperceptions and ideas have consolidated views on the nature and role of Islamic philosophy and, consequently, political thought. Another important academic approach to Islamic political philosophy and the work of Ibn Rushd stems from the Straussian approach, a methodological approach that was developed by Leo Strauss and his followers.7 The ‘Straussian position’ assumes that because much of Islamic philosophy is fundamentally a conflict between religion and philosophy, the main way to understand this work is through the realm of politics. Although I am aware of the criticisms of the Straussian approach, I believe that they have contributed significantly to mainstream literature on the subject of Islamic philosophy, and on Ibn Rushd’s work in particular. I argue that it would be foolish to discard their work based on their particular methodology. Furthermore, I maintain that their treatment of Ibn Rushd and other Islamic philosophical and political thinkers has at least attempted to raise many profound and interesting questions, which have, by and large, resuscitated a dormant field of enquiry. This chapter aims to set aside many misrepresentations of his ideas, which have arisen largely due to a lack of historical understanding and proper engagement with his thinking. Thus, foremost in this discussion is an attempt to explore Ibn Rushd’s ideas in the context of the historical and cultural background of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). My aim here is not to inundate the reader with a detailed historical account, but rather to create some sense of the background against which some key events, both prior to and during the time of Ibn Rushd, unfolded. Moreover, my aim is to assess the historical trajectory of Muslim rule in Spain, prior to and until the time of Almohad rule, which forms the historical and political backdrop to Ibn Rushd’s ideas. As I argue below, the particular type of reformist ideology posited by Ibn Tumart, the founder of the North African movement of Almohadism, created an environment that enabled the study of philosophy and rational thought during Ibn Rushd’s time. The reformist vision that Ibn Tumart espoused enabled him to claim political authority during this period, which became a defining feature of the Almohad political programme. All of the Almohad caliphs who succeeded Ibn Tumart were committed to his reformist vision and persisted in propagating its ideals. Equally, as a highranking state official of Almohad society, Ibn Rushd became an important figure in transmitting these views.

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I argue that the reasons for the patronage of philosophy that Ibn Rushd received from the Almohad ruler are not coincidental, but can be traced back to the reformist ideology of the founder of the Almohad movement, whose views were sympathetic to the study of philosophy. As I outline, Ibn Tumart’s philosophy has a certain theological ambiguity, especially with regard to his belief in the importance of rationalism as one of the foundations for his theological doctrine on the unity of God. The possibility of rationally arguing towards an understanding of God has its origins in Ibn Tumart’s teaching and is something that Ibn Rushd made central to his philosophical project later on. Ibn Tumart’s religious approach of valuing reason and rationality in the context of the Divine thus facilitated a particular space for the patronage of philosophy by Almohad caliphs, which did not exist in other courts at the time. As I argue, this link between Almohadism and Ibn Rushd’s philosophical enterprise is vital. With regard to the importance of the changing historical context of the time, I also argue that political changes in Muslim Spain opened up new avenues of thought. Ibn Rushd was born into a society where considerable intellectual development was taking place. The period of the twelfth century was significant, as it witnessed the development of intellectual scholarship in the Muslim West, which, until that time, had been on the periphery of intellectual growth in the Muslim world and had, to a large extent, borrowed ideas from the Muslim East.

MUSLIM RULE IN SPAIN PRIOR TO THE TWELFTH CENTURY

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The Muslim presence in Spain spanned almost eight centuries, from 711 to 1492. General Tariq Ibn-Ziyaad, a Moor from North Africa, led a historic invasion of the area when he crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and defeated the army of the Duke of Baetica. This conquest was crucial in the establishment of the Muslim presence in Spain and, after a period of about three years, led to the consolidation of a state that would add to the rapidly expanding territory of Muslim imperial rule. The most fractured and disorganised period in the history of Muslim Spain commenced in the middle of the eleventh century, when the region descended into a state of collapse and political disintegration. This period, which has been described by historians as the period of ‘petty states and party kings’, extended from 1031 to about 1091. What this fragmentation meant in practical terms was that Muslim Spain was divided into thirty or more smaller states of different sizes. Perhaps the key event signalling the political ramifications is the moment when the

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Kingdom of Toledo fell into the hands of Christian rulers for the first time since the Muslim conquest. Historians identify the fall of Toledo, which was of major geographic importance to the Muslims, as a major setback to Muslim power and rule.8 This left the party kings in an unenviable position. To avoid Muslim Spain falling into the hands of Christian forces, the leaders of the party kings appealed for help to a Muslim army elsewhere. The Almoravids, which were ruling North Africa at the time, were summoned to help Muslim Spain counter the Christian front. The Almoravids were a well-established religious polity, influenced by traditional teaching and Islamic practice. They had propagated a religiously austere, spiritual reform movement that aimed to indoctrinate its members with an intense religious consciousness and fervour. This movement turned political in the middle of the eleventh century, when some of its leaders embarked on a mission to spread its message to other Berber tribes. As these missionary activities became more successful, the Almoravids appointed more leaders to control different areas, and they began to assume a more political role. In 1074, the Almoravid leader Yusuf ibn Tashfin took the title of Commander of the Muslims and was said to have an empire stretching from present-day Algiers to Senegal. The military support of the Almoravids in Muslim Spain proved invaluable. In 1086, the Almoravids were able to inflict a crushing defeat on Alfonso VI’s army. By 1110, all of al-Andalus was safely back in Muslims hands, and the Almoravids then established the region of southern Spain as an important province within their empire. The Almoravid presence had wider ramifications for intellectual thought in Spain at the time. Their strict and literalist interpretation of jurisprudence and scripture meant that they made little room for the flourishing of philosophy or Sufi ideas. For example, the ulema (religious scholars) of the regime ordered the burning of the famous book of Al-Ghazali, Ihya úlum ul-din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences). In the course of only one generation, the Almoravids lost legitimacy and fell prey to the forces of their fellow Berber kinsmen.9 This group, which came about in 1121, were referred to as the Almohads (Al-Muwahhid).

THE ALMOHADS (1121–1269) The Almohads were a politico-religious movement, with a mission of propagating a new reformist version of Islam. Their founder, Muhammad Ibn Tumart, had begun to wield enormous influence amongst the Berber

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population in North Africa. The role of the Almohads in the history of medieval Islam, and especially of Muslim Spain, has largely been neglected within the broader realm of historical scholarship. As Allen Fromherz correctly points out, much of the literature has concentrated ‘almost exclusively on the Abbasids in the East or the Ummayads in Andalusia’, in effect completely neglecting the history of the Almohads.10 The Almohads undeniably play a very important role within the historical narrative, not only because their territorial expansion was far superior to any other Spanish Muslim regime, but also owing to the immense influence they exercised during the twelfth century. Almohad rule also deserves special attention in the context of unpacking Ibn Rushd’s ideas, for several important reasons. Firstly, Ibn Rushd was born in the twelfth century, during the rule of the Almohads, and he rose to great prominence. This was partly the result of the inherited intellectual legacy of his family, who had all occupied important positions in the regime, but it was also a direct consequence of him receiving patronage from the Almohad caliph. Secondly, and related to this, as a result of the specific intellectual, social and economic conditions produced by the politics of Almohad leadership, a figure such as Ibn Rushd was able to actively pursue philosophy, despite the challenges of Maliki traditionalism, which was a major issue at the time. Thirdly, as Urvoy has suggested, the failure to situate Ibn Rushd’s work in the context of the rationalising reform of the Almohads is really to deny its essence, ‘reducing it to a collection of slogans’.11 Urvoy’s suggestion that Ibn Rushd’s philosophical and religious ideas are in keeping with the principles of the Almohad reformist project is significant if we want to understand Ibn Rushd’s political ideas properly.12 From the standpoint of methodology, it would be a serious conceptual mistake to read Ibn Rushd without a proper understanding of the movement of Almohadism and the manner in which it facilitated the development of his thought. Thus, in the discussion below, I focus on the Almohad legacy from a historical point of view, but I also trace the religious and political ideology of Almohadism, which originated in the early doctrinal teachings of its founder, Ibn Tumart. The rise and progress of the Almohads in the twelfth century resembled that of their predecessors, the Almoravids, a century earlier. Both originated in the Berber tribal areas, and both were movements that began with a quest to unify the area of Maghrib (North Africa) under the banner of a powerful Islamic reformist movement. As Bernard Reilly points out, the Almohads symbolised a ubiquitous phenomenon in the Muslim world, namely ‘fundamentalist religious reform embodied in another tribal confederation’.13 

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Historical information on the Almohads is found in the works of four key writers and historians during that period, who not only depicted the rise of the Almohad movement, but also supplied an interesting account of the myths and traditions associated with Almohad rule. These writers are Al-Baydhaq, who compiled the first biography of Ibn Tumart; Al-Marrakushi, a historian during the time; Abu Hasan ibn Al-Qattan, a writer who documented the Almohad hierarchical system; and the anonymous writer who wrote Kitab al-Ansab, which examines the Almohad power structures in detail.14 These sources are particularly significant, as they provide the foundational background of the origins of the Almohads, and especially of the social context in which the empire evolved. The birth of the Almohad movement had its beginnings in the journey of one man, a Berber called Muhammad Ibn Tumart, who was born between the years 1078 and 1081. Ibn Tumart belonged to a tribe that hailed from a village near the valley of Sus, south of the High Atlas Mountains. During his youth, and after receiving a rudimentary village education, Ibn Tumart set out on a spiritual quest to travel for the sake of religious knowledge. His journey from the Maghrib region to the East began in about 1106, and is reported to have taken him first to Cordoba, where he spent a short time. However, he felt persuaded to leave Cordoba after witnessing events around him, such as the burning of Al-Ghazali’s works, as well as the broader decay of Muslim values. Ibn Tumart became disillusioned with the state of Almoravid religious orthodoxy and the messy state of affairs of the Muslims. Ibn Tumart’s stay in the East lasted ten years, and was critical in shaping his world view, as he was able to establish a distinctive Islamic doctrinal narrative. In his view, this narrative would restore and promote righteousness and moral rectitude.15  In about 1116, he embarked on a journey to return to North Africa, filled with religious zeal and great expectations of change in his homeland. He passed through Alexandria, Tripoli, Tunis, Fez and Marrakesh, and in each of these places, he preached openly about returning to the fundamentals of Islamic theology and abrogating immoral practices. All this had popular appeal amongst the tribal people of North Africa, who were inspired by such a noble vision. Whilst travelling and propagating his message to the people, Ibn Tumart also began to acquire a significant following. These were disciples who aligned themselves to him, and who would later become active proponents of the Almohad movement. In about 1121, after having gained the loyal support of many tribes and followers, Ibn Tumart then invoked the Islamic eschatological idea of Mahdism, and declared himself to be the infallible Mahdi al-Ma’sum (Guided One).16 Amongst the Berbers and other Muslims

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at the time, the notion of a Mahdi was widely held in their belief systems, and the idea of a leader chosen by God – and promised to the Muslims by the Prophet Muhammad – appealed to their popular belief. Ibn Tumart began to describe his supporters as the Al-Muwahhideen, or the ‘Monotheists’. His movement became more organised as he formed groupings such as the Ahl Al-Asha’ra (Council of Ten), which consisted of his ten closest advisors and ministers, and the Ahl Al-Khamsin (Council of Fifty People), a consultative assembly of different tribes. This was in effect a quasi-government, which debated issues together. All serious matters eventually led to a decision made by the Council of Ten. It is important to note that the movement of Almohadism was structured in a particularly hierarchical way. The hierarchy consisted of the elite Council of Ten, which would debate and discuss issues of major theological importance. They considered themselves superior because of their ability to engage in rational, theological discourse, which the masses did not understand. At the next level, the Council of Fifty People were given a more diluted form of this knowledge. The various levels thereafter would eventually trickle down to the masses, who would gain access to a more simplified version of religious tenets. The specificity of this particular interpretation of Islam, which was inherently hierarchical, is very interesting in my view, as this kind of orientation would come to support Ibn Rushd’s philosophical project. As I have argued, Almohadism, as advocated by Ibn Tumart, emphasised a very complicated, rational profession of faith, which only the inner circle of the Almohads could understand. Within traditional Islamic society, there existed the concept of division between the amma (common people) and the khaasa (elite). In broader society and intellectual life respectively, these terms usually took on very different meanings in political life. But this division was instructive to political discourse insofar as it was appropriated by scholars. Ibn Rushd in particular invoked this distinction to denote the difference between common people who could not understand philosophical truths and common people who could only understand truth presented as revelation through a revealed text. The fact that this complicated hierarchy – and the intellectual distinction between the elite few and the common man – existed in Almohadism (from the period of the leadership of its founder, Ibn Tumart) is significant, as it meant that Ibn Rushd’s project, which makes similar distinctions, would be likely to find support in a society constructed to use such distinctions. Ibn Tumart published his basic theological principles in a book entitled Al-Murshida (The Spiritual Guide), which was a simple and straightforward introduction to his reformist ideas, aimed at the general masses. His more

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advanced doctrinal ideas on faith (aqidah) were reserved for his more learned followers. We also find many of these concepts discussed in a book called Aázz Ma Yutlab (The Greatest Thing That One Seeks), which was compiled by Abd al-Mu’min between 1182 and 1183. For purposes of this discussion, I think it is important to shed some light on some of the key principles of Ibn Tumart’s reformist doctrine, as these ideas undoubtedly influenced the political ideology of the ruling Almohad dynasty during the time of Ibn Rushd. Furthermore, as I will explore below, Ibn Tumart’s intellectual doctrine contained many rationalising elements, which would later affect the Almohad approach to philosophy and religion. Ibn Tumart’s doctrine was not a strictly orthodox Sunni position, but instead combined elements of the Sunni, Shi’i and Mu’tazalite schools. One of the fundamental premises of his theology was the concept of Tawhid (monotheism), which stressed the absolute oneness of God. He declared the unity and purity of God in statements such as: ‘One must not allow any comparison or association with the Creator, all ideas of imperfection, diminution, limitation, direction, he is not situated in a place or a direction.’17 Ibn Tumart used these easily understandable descriptions of the perfection and oneness of God in his teachings. He claimed that this notion of Tawhid, as expressed by him, the Mahdi, was the only true way in which a believer could affirm his faith. He categorically condemned other descriptions of God, especially those of the Almoravids, which he considered as disbelief, achieving a very ‘practical political objective’ of authority and legitimacy.18 It was, in fact, monotheism which offered a spiritual conception of God that became one of the ‘provoking slogans’ of his movement.19 The second foundational principle of Ibn Tumart’s doctrine related to the juridical component of his thought. Here, he made an important distinction between the original sources of Islamic law – al-usul (the roots) – and the al-furu (the branches).20 Ibn Tumart argued strongly in favour of al-usul as the methodology of jurisprudence, and called for the exclusive utilisation of the revealed scripture, the Qu’ran; the sayings of Muhammad; the Hadith; and his personal insight as the Mahdi. He called for restoring the fundamentals of Islam and severely downplayed Qiyaas (speculative theology), which was an established form of juristic practice. According to Ibn Tumart, analogical reasoning in solving new problems would lead to narrow interpretations, and an approach that would deal with individual cases. He criticised Almoravid and other Maliki jurists, who adopted this approach; he considered individual reasoning as an ineffective method of establishing laws.21 He instead favoured Ijtihaad (individual interpretation) by scholars and men of understanding, who could apply reason and knowledge to the

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revealed sources. Ibn Tumart undermined the Almoravid jurists by deeming their methods ignorant, and by arguing that they were narrow-minded and closed off to the masses. The tribal people, whom the Almoravids had always referred to as ignorant, found this message to be powerful. Ibn Tumart’s intellectual doctrine attempted to accommodate reason and rationality. By advocating the importance of studying the original sources in theology, he was also able to renounce taqlid, namely the blind and uncritical acceptance of inherited ideas. Instead, his intellectual doctrine advocated the use of rational methods of understanding holy texts, such as the Qur’an, through tawil (allegorical interpretation).22 His belief was that the Qur’an cannot always be read literally, as some verses hold allegorical or figurative meaning, which requires interpretation by ‘men of understanding’. As I shall explore later, these views, which had much political currency in Almohad political society, created an environment accommodating of philosophy. In fact, many of Ibn Rushd’s original ideas expressed in the Fasl al-Maqal (The Decisive Treatise) deal with the supremacy of human reason, the problematic nature of blind faith, and the need for allegorical interpretation, which he reserved for the philosopher class. These ideas of Ibn Rushd are not coincidental to his work; as many recent scholars point out, they are consistent with the doctrine of Almohad reform, which attempts to uphold a place for reason and rationality.23 This illustrates that any treatment of Ibn Rushd’s ideas that is abstracted from the historical framework of the collective reformist ideology of Almohadism has major intellectual shortcomings. Ibn Tumart’s intellectual doctrine also extended to his condemnation of anthropomorphism – that is, the practice of attributing human characteristics to God. He harshly criticised the Almoravid jurists for undermining God’s perfection by reading the Qur’an in a limited and narrow sense, which leads to anthropomorphic interpretation. By employing literalist understandings in their scholarship, he argued, the Almoravid jurists saw God as acting in a ‘human form’. In Ibn Tumart’s view, this converted the perfect unity of God into a mere ‘physical idol’.24 According to him, this limited the scope and nature of God’s divine being and was tantamount to the worst kind of ignorance and disbelief. Again, by labelling the Almoravids as disbelieving anthropomorphists who were misguided on basic doctrinal ideas, Ibn Tumart was able to rally the Berber tribes further against the ruling regime. All of the key doctrinal ideas underpinning Ibn Tumart’s reformist ideology served the same end politically. They were used as forms of propaganda, which conveyed Almohad superiority over Almoravid ignorance.25 By claiming to be the infallible Mahdi, Ibn Tumart was able to allege that he was the sole authority on theological issues, which the mountainous tribal Berbers

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could not dispute due to their own lack of education. His followers displayed complete submission, to the extent that they silenced anyone who dared disagree with his views, even through acts of bloodshed.26  Ibn Tumart faced direct attack from the Almoravid leader Ali Ibn Tashfin, who attempted to crush his attempts at staging a fully fledged revolt. In 1130, Ibn Tumart instructed Abd Al-Mu’min Ali, his second-in-command, and an army of his supporters, to march towards the capital city, Marrakesh, to depose the Almoravid regime.27 The Almohad army suffered a major defeat against its stronger and more established military opponent. Following this defeat, Ibn Tumart summoned his close councils and appointed a successor. He died later that year, leaving behind his theological legacy in the Book of Guidance. The new reigning commander-in-chief of the Almohads was Abd alMu’min, who consolidated the support of the Berbers by remaining deeply faithful to Ibn Tumart’s ideology. He also kept the tribes united with the revolutionary goal of creating a true Muslim empire. Thanks to his increasingly powerful military army, and the dwindling power of the Almoravids, he finally captured the capital city of Marrakesh in 1147, which symbolised the beginning of Almohad rule in North Africa and ushered in a new era of Berber domination. Following the fall of the Almoravids in North Africa, Muslim Spain was racked with discord and revolts. Without functional leadership, the region had once again been divided into smaller petty states, which were forced to contend with an even stronger crusading Christian front. Abd al-Mu’min realised that Muslim Spain was of major geopolitical importance, and that ignoring the crusader mentality of the Christian powers would eventually undermine Almohad stability.28 In 1145, Abd al-Mu’min dispatched an army to al-Andalus, with the intention of seizing control of the cities under Almoravid rule. For the next five years, tense and bitter fighting ensued between the Almohads and various remaining Almoravid factions, who did not want to relinquish power. In addition, cities like Cordoba were difficult to conquer because of the Christian advance. It was only in about 1157 that the entire region fell into Almohad hands.29

THE BIRTH OF IBN RUSHD AND HIS EARLY LIFE Ibn Rushd was born against this backdrop of war between the Almoravids and the Almohads. According to Arab biographies, and the famous histories of Muhammad al-Makkari and Abd al-Wahid al-Marrakushi, Ibn Rushd

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was born into a noble family of judges in Cordoba, in 1126.30 During the early part of his life, the Almoravids collapsed, after struggling with political instability and internal revolt. For the first twenty years of his life, the Almohads were led by Abd al-Mu’min and they transformed the political arrangements in North Africa and al-Andalus, which would ultimately affect the course of Ibn Rushd’s life. Most sources note that in his early years, Ibn Rushd was an astute and highly intelligent student. The early period of his life was dedicated to the study of ‘jurisprudence Arabic, linguistics, theology, philosophy and medicine’.31  It is argued that many early biographers of Ibn Rushd spoke less of his education and training in science and philosophy (something which gained him prominence in the West) and instead emphasised his ability as a jurist. Ibn Rushd belonged to a very prominent legal family, as his grandfather, Abdul-Walid Muhammad (d. 1126), was a specialist in legal methodology, and was appointed chief judge of Cordoba under the Almoravid dynasty. Ibn Rushd’s father, Abdul-Qasim Ahmad, held the same position, until the Almoravids were ousted by the Almohads in 1146. Ibn Rushd’s medical education was provided under the direction of Abu Jafar ibn Harun of Trujillo. His fascination with and understanding of medicine was noted by his contemporaries, and can be seen in his major enduring work Kitab al-Kulyat fi al-Tibb (The General Principles of Medicine). This celebrated medical encyclopaedia, known in Latin as the Colliget, served as one of the main medical textbooks for physicians in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim worlds for many centuries. There is not much information about Ibn Rushd’s political activities until he was about thirty years old, when, in 1153, Abd al-Mu’min, the new ruler of the Almohad dynasty, commissioned Ibn Rushd in Marrakesh to lead the ‘building of schools and literary institutions’.32 

THE RULE OF ABD AL-MU’MIN (1131–1163)

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During the early years of the caliphate, the Almohad rulership concentrated on expanding their North African empire by fortifying the city of Rabat and extending their rule in Algeria. With the expanding territory of the Almohad empire, Abd al-Mu’min realised that he needed loyal and trustworthy governors who would render effective political control over the various principalities that extended into Muslim Spain. The ‘hierarchy of command’, which Ibn Tumart had established with his various councils, had proved to be a very effective tool in uniting the divided Berber tribes, but divisions began to reappear in the second half of the twelfth century.33 Abd al-Mu’min

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therefore undertook a project of major political restructuring in 1155, which effectively put his family and fourteen sons in control of the entire empire. This undoubtedly had major political ramifications for the Almohad movement. On the one hand, it signalled the consolidation of Almohad power and set up a more stable system of government. On the other hand, it was heavily criticised as the abandonment of Ibn Tumart’s ideals of establishing rulership based on godliness and not kinship. However, many of the sons of the members of the Council of Ten and the Council of Fifty People were honoured, and formed part of the hereditary Almohad ruling elite, which also controlled the army. Although this model of ruling-class politics allowed for greater cohesion and less unrest, it can be seen to have simultaneously led to the end of competent leadership.34

THE SECOND ALMOHAD CALIPH: ABU YA‘QUB YUSUF (1163–1184) In about 1163, Abu Ya’qub Yusuf was formally declared the Commander of the Faithful (Amir-ul-Muslimeen) – the coveted title given to a Muslim ruler. Abu Ya‘qub Yusuf, who had previously been the governor of Seville, began now to manage the affairs of the large Almohad empire. His ability to rule effectively was often criticised due to a lack of ‘political experience’, and it is said that his ‘indecisive’ nature at many crucial moments led to disastrous consequences.35 He was, however, noted as an exceptional scholar with a keen interest in literature, theology, science, medicine and philosophy. He was also an accomplished bibliophile, and constructed a major library in Spain that rivalled that of Ummayad caliph Al-Hakam II. Abu Ya’qub Yusuf surrounded himself with eminent scholars and philosophers, such as Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd. As such, his time in power is of particular interest to this project, for several reasons. Firstly, it was not uncommon at that time for philosophers to receive patronage from the ruling caliph, and Ibn Rushd was no exception when he became the personal physician to Abu Ya’qub Yusuf in 1182. Second, as a result of this close relationship, Ibn Rushd’s famed career as a philosopher received the official endorsement of the Almohad ruler, who viewed philosophy in a positive light in what was a generally hostile environment; this patronage also facilitated the writing of Ibn Rushd’s numerous commentaries. It was in fact Abu Ya’qub Yusuf who personally instructed Ibn Rushd to comment on the vast extant material by the Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plato, so as to make philosophy simpler and more accessible. The so-called ‘revival of philosophy’ in Muslim Spain

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during this time was therefore not coincidental, as the open-minded Almohad rulers sought to accommodate this type of study. Furthermore, as I argued earlier, Ibn Tumart favoured the role of human reason in discovering the existence and unity of God, and rejected the uncritical acceptance of inherited views of religion. Ibn Rushd built upon Ibn Tumart’s reformist tradition and constructed his own politico-religious ideology for the Almohads. However, as John Marenbon argues, Ibn Tumart probably never anticipated the way in which his ideology would later be interpreted, as Ibn Rushd wrote a polemical treatise that endorsed the study of philosophy and, in particular, the work of Aristotle as not just legitimate but ‘obligatory in the Islamic state’.36 Almohad rulers such as Abu Ya’qub Yusuf thus saw a place for philosophy in the Muslim world, despite the backlash from many Maliki traditionalists. Ibn Rushd became acquainted with the philosopher Ibn Tufayl, who was the official physician and counsellor to the Caliph Abu Ya’qub Yusuf at this time. In 1169, Ibn Tufayl arranged for the caliph to meet Ibn Rushd, of whom he spoke highly ‘for his acumen, his sound instinct and his attachment to the art [of philosophy]’.37 The historian Al-Marrakushi documents this meeting between the Almohad leader and Ibn Rushd, which has particular historical significance.38 Abu-Bakr [Ibn Tufayl] continued to draw men of learning to the prince from every country, bringing them to his attention and inciting him to honour and praise them. It was he who brought Abul-Walid Muhammed ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd to the prince’s attention. The prince complained of the difficulty of expression of Aristotle and his translators, and mentioned the obscurity of his aims, saying: If someone would tackle these books, summarise them and expound their aims, after understanding them thoroughly, it would be easier for people to grasp them. So if you have in you abundant strength for the task, perform it. I expect you will be equal to it, from what I know of the excellence of your mind, the purity of your nature, and the intensity of your application to science... Abul-Walid Ibn Rushd said: ‘This was what led me to summarise the books of the philosopher Aristotle’.39 

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It is evident that the encouragement Ibn Rushd received from his Almohad patron had significant implications for his philosophical career, as Ibn Rushd was uncertain and fearful about Abu Ya’qub Yusuf’s reaction to his

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knowledge of philosophy. It can be argued that Ibn Rushd’s legacy as the commentator of Aristotle was in part due to the caliph’s instruction to Ibn Rushd to make the Greek philosopher’s texts more accessible by commenting on them.40 At a time when books on philosophy were not widely accepted – and in many cases destroyed – Muslim scholars were hesitant to engage in philosophical debates openly. However, the endorsement of the ruler meant that Ibn Rushd could share his philosophical insight publicly. The meeting provides historical context for the vast number of commentaries on Aristotle that Ibn Rushd published with fervour after 1169. In addition, as a result of this meeting, the caliph was so impressed by the young philosopher that he appointed him first as the chief judge of Cordoba and Seville and later as his court physician. Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on Aristotle (and Plato) range in scope and have been categorised as the jawami (short commentaries), talkhis (middle commentaries) and sharh (long commentaries), the last of which contains his mature thought. These works were published in thirty-eight separate philosophical titles during the Almohad period. Ibn Rushd then proceeded to compile three critical works that contain his views of the importance of philosophical study for Muslims. Thus, between 1179 and 1180 he wrote three of his most famous treatises outlining the relationship between philosophy and religion, namely Fasl al-Maqal (The Decisive Treatise), Kashf al-Manahij (The Explanation of Proofs in the Doctrines of Religion), and Tahafut al-Tahafut (Incoherence of the Incoherence). It is important to acknowledge the timing of these works in the context of the Almohad political situation. With the political backing of the rulers, Ibn Rushd was able to formulate his own politico-religious ideas with a distinct Almohad flavour. Thirdly, Ibn Rushd was also considered an important member of the Almohad ruling elite, and as such followed in the footsteps of his distinguished father and grandfather when he was elected as the qadi (chief judge) of Cordoba and Seville between 1169 and 1184. Whilst Ibn Rushd’s prestige as a Muslim philosopher is well known, it is also worth noting his status as jurist and legal theoretician. The prestigious position of his family impacted on the initial positive intellectual reception of his writings in Almohad society. This, combined with the patronage he received from a ruler who valued knowledge and learning, meant that members of the Almohad elite did not marginalise his work.41 It is reasonable to suggest that a less accommodating Muslim caliph, along with a traditionalist ruling elite, would have produced a very different outcome for the work of Ibn Rushd.

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THE THIRD ALMOHAD CALIPH: ABU YUSUF YA‘QUB AL-MANSUR (AL-MANSUR THE VICTORIOUS) The death of the Almohad Caliph Abu Ya’qub Yusuf in 1184 saw the appointment of the caliph’s son, Abu Yusuf Ya’qub al-Mansur, who was given the title Al-Mansur the Victorious. The new ruler was determined to politically rehabilitate a weakened Almohad regime.42 The construction of public works also occupied much of his time, and he proceeded with building a large and stately mosque in Rabat and expanding of the Almohad palaces. The precarious political situation in Muslim Spain led Al-Mansur to declare jihad (holy war) against the Christians in 1189. Accompanied by a large army, Al-Mansur led an expedition to Cordoba in 1191, where his army made significant progress in gaining back territory from the Christians. When the Almohads laid siege to the city of Toledo in 1196, the assumption was that their military strength would put them in a position to regain all of their lost territory.43 This was an important historical moment for the Muslims in Spain, as their dignity had thereby been restored. But like all empires, the success of this campaign was short-lived, and when Al-Mansur returned to Marrakesh in 1198, he was unable to secure lasting peace for al-Andalus before he died the following year. It is necessary to likewise explore the change in Almohad political strategy towards the end of the life of Al-Mansur, and the manner in which this impacted on the life of Ibn Rushd. Amongst the issues that Al-Mansur contended with in his latter days was a strong opposition by the religious orthodoxy to the dangers of ‘free thinking’.44 Practices like philosophy were severely condemned by many traditionalists, who saw this type of thinking as detrimental to the preservation of the Islamic order. Unlike his predecessors, Al-Mansur was not able to appease the religious scholars, and he acquiesced to their demands by commissioning the burning of books of philosophy and other texts that were deemed heretical. Furthermore, notable scholars like Ibn Rushd were banished and exiled for their devotion to Greek philosophy. It is not entirely clear why Al-Mansur chose such a harsh ‘rebuke’ for Ibn Rushd, who was his close advisor and friend.45 It does, however, further emphasise the historical link between the Falsafa (Muslim philosophers) and the manner in which the changing political context at the time impacted on their reception.46 As Urvoy cogently points out, in the case of Ibn Rushd’s philosophical career, this link must not be underestimated: it is clearly evident that once the movement of Almohadism began to suffer a reversal in terms of its political control and influence, Ibn Rushd’s audience too began

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to diminish accordingly.47 Moreover, as Ernest Renan argues, the persecution of philosophers was a widespread phenomenon in the Muslim world at the time,48 which once again signals the role of the Almohad reformist project in reviving intellectual life in Muslim Spain. The Almohad leaders were unique in their encouragement of philosophical scholarship, and Ibn Rushd had operated most of his life in an environment that supported his endeavours. Al-Mansur was indeed the last of the great Almohad leaders, and although he was succeeded by his son Muhammad, it would take just twenty-three years for the dynasty to suffer the same fate as many unsuccessful Muslim empires. The tenuous rule of the Almohads meant that the dynasty had completely collapsed by 1269, in some way marking the bitter end for the grand reformist vision that Ibn Tumart had mapped out a century earlier. Indeed, what started out as the lofty ideals of a local Berber man to recreate a true Islamic state had disintegrated into something quite different, both politically and religiously. This said, one cannot ignore the many contributions of the Almohads to Muslim medieval civilisation.

INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT: PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT PRIOR TO IBN RUSHD The tradition of Greek philosophy had a major impact on Islamic thought, which was based on revealed religious ideas. It allowed for much rethinking, and for many original ideas to develop in the realm of Muslim scholarship. The field of Islamic philosophy was not simply a reiteration of Greek ideas. As Richard Walzer explains, the Muslim philosophers must be ‘understood and appreciated in their own settings and according to their own intentions’, as they represented a distinct tradition, which tried to reconcile Greek philosophical ideas with Islam.49 At the same time, there was much disagreement from the traditionalists and religious scholars as to what place Greek philosophy ought to have in the broader framework of Islamic revealed scripture, and whether it could genuinely contribute to matters of faith and belief. These scholars described it as the knowledge from polluted springs, and warned harshly of the dangers of philosophy. On the other hand, Muslim philosophers defended philosophy with some vigour, claiming that the truths within it were undeniable, and that there ought to be no shame in acknowledging this, even in the case of foreign origins. Although Islamic philosophy of the classical period – from the time of Al-Kindi in the seventh century to the time of Ibn Rushd in the twelfth

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century – is generally regarded as a period of high learning in the Muslim world, it is important to note that most of the philosophers prior to Ibn Rushd faced significant challenges in their intellectual communities. They were often derided for aspiring to create a philosophical world view that was religious in nature. Al-Ghazali, one of the greatest scholars the Muslim world has ever produced, further intensified the marginalisation of philosophers in the tenth century with his detailed and thorough discussion of the logical failings of certain principles of Muslim philosophers, in a work entitled Tahafut al Falsafah (The Incoherence of the Philosophers). He singled out two Muslim philosophers, Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, as propagators of ‘heresy’, ‘disbelief’ and contradictory ideas that he argued were irreconcilable with Islamic doctrine. Al-Ghazali was especially perturbed by the way in which philosophers were overly impressed by ‘high-sounding names such as Socrates, Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle’ and sought to merely ‘imitate’ the Greek philosophers and their followers, without a proper understanding of their thought. Although Al-Ghazali was later taken to task by Ibn Rushd, who wrote a critique of Al-Ghazali’s charges against philosophy, the Tahafut had ‘put Islamic philosophy on the defensive in a way it had never been before’, and the image of philosophy in the Muslim world was thereafter forever tainted.50 This is not to say that philosophy had come to some sort of abrupt end, but rather to acknowledge that its reputation was affected. It is important at this stage to place the work of Ibn Rushd within the broader context of the Muslim intellectual and philosophical tradition. The object of this is threefold. The first aim is to establish how Islamic political thought prior to Ibn Rushd may have dealt with the subject of political theory and, through this, to gain some insight into the manner in which the subject of politics was approached and understood in a purely Muslim setting. The second aim is to observe the extent to which Islamic philosophers might have operated within the framework of Islamic theological discourse, and what this meant for Islamic political thought in general. The third objective is to identify how Greek philosophy influenced the Islamic position and how politics was recognised by Muslim philosophers as a natural development of their thought. This approach to politics and government developed by Muslim philosophers originated around the time of Al-Farabi, and so, from about the eighth to the eleventh centuries scholarly discussion of politics was most widespread, as this period coincided with the classical period of Islam, when Greek philosophy was at its peak.51  The writers of the Muslim philosophical tradition were not only deeply committed to the tradition of Greek philosophy; they also appropriated its

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fundamental ideas through various means and methods, so as to give political thought new light in the context of Islam. However, as Antony Black points out, the fact that they saw their role as restating and interpreting Greek texts for the benefit of those who would come after them sometimes limited their contribution to political thought as a whole.52 Philosophy as a discipline was not held in such high esteem as its theological counterpart, and thus the impact of political thought as part of the philosophical project was marginal. Nonetheless, the use of Greek texts in formulating a kind of Islamic political theory heralded interesting and innovative results. The interest of Muslim philosophers in politics stemmed from their veneration of a subject that the Greeks had viewed as highly significant to social organisation. Muslim philosophers clearly selected arguments that would help them find political solutions for the Islamic problems of their day, and this needs to be acknowledged.53 

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have drawn the link between Ibn Tumart’s explicitly rational theology – disseminated as part of the Almohad reformist programme – and Ibn Rushd’s work. I argued that Ibn Rushd’s philosophical and political ideas form part of the wider discourse of rationalising reform that was promoted by the Almohad movement. I assessed the foundational principles of Ibn Tumart’s theological doctrine, and argued that the most important aspect of this doctrine, which would later find resonance in the work of Ibn Rushd, is Ibn Tumart’s conviction that human reason and rationality can be positively appropriated in determining aspects of faith. I thus argued that the hierarchical division drawn by Ibn Tumart between the elite and common members of society fitted into Ibn Rushd’s philosophical project, especially insofar as Ibn Rushd attempted to emphasise this distinction in his philosophical and political project. In addition, Ibn Tumart’s doctrine emphasised a specifically positive kind of juridical reform that favoured personal judgement and analogical reasoning in the interpretation of revelation. The fact that Ibn Tumart refocused his attention on the revelation itself, as opposed to the ‘ancient authorities’ that set the norms, gave Ibn Rushd a certain intellectual leeway, in which he was to formulate his own philosophical approach to matters concerning the text. The movement of Almohadism must therefore be recognised as a vital framework for understanding his ideas. Finally, I also attempted to situate Ibn Rushd’s intellectual project within the broader Muslim philosophical tradition. I thus

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briefly explored how Al-Ghazali’s attack on the philosophical tradition has had lasting consequences for philosophical study in the Muslim world as a whole, and the generally derisive attitude towards philosophy as an activity in the Muslim world. Having drawn from Ibn Tumart’s reformist vision, Ibn Rushd was able to create his own politico-religious reformist ideology.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Urvoy, D., 1991. Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Translated by Stewart, O. London: Routledge.

2 Ibid. 3

Gutas, D., 2002. The study of Arabic philosophy in the twentieth century: an essay on the historiography of Arabic philosophy. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 29(1), pp.5–25.

4

Ibid., p.8.

5

Boer, T.J., 1903. The history of philosophy in Islam. Translated by Jones, E.R. London: Luzac & Co.

6

Fakhry, M., 2001. Averroes (Ibn Rushd): his life, works and influence. Oxford:

7

Butterworth, C., 1975. New light on the political philosophy of Averroës. In

Oneworld Publications, pp.129–164. Hourani, G.H. (ed.), Essays on Islamic philosophy and science. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp.118–127; Leaman, O., 1985. An introduction to medieval Islamic philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Hourani, A., 1991. A history of the Arab peoples. London: Faber & Faber; Mahdi, M., 1988. Averroes and the transition from the Almoravids to the Almohads in Spain. Unpublished lecture delivered at Oxford University; Rosenthal, E.I.J., 1958. Political thought in medieval Islam: an introductory outline. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 8

Dozy, R., 1974. The history of the Almohades. Leiden: Brill; Hitti, P., 1970. A history of the Arabs. London: Macmillan Publishers; Reilly, B.F., 1993. The medieval Spains. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Makki, M., 1992. The political history of al-Andalus. In Jayussi, S.K. (ed.), The legacy of Muslim Spain. Leiden: Brill, pp.3–87; Chejne, A., 1974. Muslim Spain: its history and culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

9 Hitti, A history of the Arabs. Op. cit., p.546. 10 Fromherz, A.J., 2010. The Almohads: the rise of an Islamic empire. London: I.B. Tauris & Co, p.5. 11 Urvoy, Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Op. cit., p.1.

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historical and philosophical introduction. New York: Routledge. 13 Reilly, The medieval Spains. Op. cit., p.129. 14 Fromherz, The Almohads. Op. cit.. Fromherz provides one of the most thorough and exhaustive accounts of Almohad history, by directly examining medieval sources. 15 Ibid., p.26.

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12 A similar view is put forward in Marenbon, J., 2007. Medieval philosophy: an

16 Al-Sharif, W., 2010. The dearest quest: a biography of Ibn Tumart. Scotland: Jerusalem Academic Publications, p.89. 17 Fromherz, The Almohads. Op. cit., p.159. 18 Ibid., p.161. 19 Al-Sharif, The dearest quest. Op. cit., p.122. 20 Fromherz, The Almohads. Op. cit., p.163; Urvoy, Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Op. cit., pp.12–13. 21 Urvoy, Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Op. cit., p.14. 22 Ibid., pp.16–17. 23 Urvoy, Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Op. cit.; Fletcher, M., 1992. Al-Andalus and North Africa in the Almohad ideology. In Jayussi, S., (ed.), The legacy of Muslim Spain, Leiden: E.J. Brill, pp.235–258; Marenbon, J., 2010. Ernest Renan and Averroism: The story of a misinterpretation. In Akasoy, A. and Giglioni, G. (eds), Renaissance Averroism and its aftermath: Arabic philosophy in early modern Europe. New York: Springer, pp.273–283. 24 Fromherz, The Almohads. Op. cit., p.162. 25 Urvoy, Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Op. cit., pp.14–15. 26 Chejne, Muslim Spain. Op. cit., p.81; Al-Sharif, The dearest quest. Op. cit., p.134. 27 Makki, The political history of al-Andalus. Op. cit., p.70. 28 Kennedy, H., 1996. Muslim Spain and Portugal: political history of al-Andalus. New York: Routledge, p.204. 29 Hitti, A history of the Arabs. Op. cit., p.548. 30 Cited in Butterworth, New light. Op. cit. 31 Fakhry, Averroes (Ibn Rushd). Op. cit., p.1. 32 Ibid., p.xiv. 33 Fletcher, Al-Andalus and North Africa. Op. cit., p.238. 34 Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal. Op. cit., p.206. 35 Ibid., p.217. 36 Marenbon, Medieval philosophy. Op. cit., p.188. 37 Cited in Fakhry, Averroes (Ibn Rushd). Op. cit., p.2. 38 For the full version of Al-Marrakushi’s account, see Hourani, A history of the Arab peoples. Op. cit., pp.12–13.

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39 Cited in Hourani, A history of the Arab peoples. Op. cit., p.13. 40 Butterworth, New light. Op. cit., p.199. 41 Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal. Op. cit., p.220. 42 Chejne, Muslim Spain. Op. cit., p.86. 43 Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal. Op. cit., p.247. 44 Chejne, Muslim Spain. Op. cit., p.88. 45 Butterworth, C., 2001. Averroës: the book of decisive treatise. Utah: Brigham University Press. 46 Urvoy, Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Op. cit., p.20. 47 Ibid., p.2. 48 Renan, E., 1949. Averroes et l’Averroisme. Paris: Calmann-Levy, p.29. 49 Walzer, R., 1962. Greek into Arabic: essays on Islamic philosophy. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, p.1. 50 Leaman, An introduction to medieval Islamic philosophy. Op. cit., p.7. 51 Black, A., 2001. The history of Islamic political thought: from the Prophet to the present. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p.58. 52 Ibid., p.60. 53 Walzer, Greek into Arabic. Op. cit., p.19.

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‘The Camel Can Never See Its Own Hump’ Metahumanism in the Fiction of Ibrahim al-Koni F Fiona Moolla English Department, University of the Western Cape, South Africa

ABSTRACT The fiction of renowned Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Koni is being introduced into the English literary world through the translation of an ever-increasing number of novels. In English translations, ecological and animal-studies perspectives on the author are being foregrounded. This essay highlights the relationship between human beings and animals in the novels. The analysis introduces the idea of a ‘metahumanism’ that points to the ways that the novels incorporate human and animal existence into a broader transcendental cosmic scheme, which guarantees consideration for both. In this respect, Al-Koni’s ‘desert ethic’, in which the Sahara connects rather than divides Africa, fuses the animist, pantheist and monotheist mythologies of continental Africa. In these mythological approaches, the human and nonhuman worlds are interconnected in various ways, the precise configuration of which is determined by the different cosmologies and cosmogonies that constitute them. This essay argues that Al-Koni’s metahumanism presents a critical, decolonial departure from explorations of human and animal lives in posthumanist debates, which remain internal to the humanism they seek to challenge.

TRANSLATING WORLDS: IBRAHIM AL-KONI, ENVIRONMENT AND ANIMALS Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Koni, a formerly nomadic Tamasheq-speaking Tuareg, probably needs no introduction in the world of Arabic letters, where his reputation is firmly established as a prize-winning writer who

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has published in various literary genres during a career that has spanned about five decades. In contemporary English fiction, Al-Koni has only recently become known, with the 2002 translation of the novel The Bleeding of the Stone. Since the publication of the first English translation of his work, seven other novels have become available in English. These are Anubis (2005), Gold Dust (2008), The Seven Veils of Seth (2008), The Puppet (2010), New Waw: Saharan Oasis (2014), The Scarecrow (2015) and The Fetishists (2018).1  With the translation of his work into English, Al-Koni has been catapulted into international literary and intellectual contexts, as his ideas reach a wider audience. Significantly, as a consequence of translation into English, Al-Koni is also being alternatively framed as an African writer, indexed by his invitation as keynote speaker to the 2012 Time of the Writer conference in Durban, South Africa, followed by press reviews and literary website features in a wider African context. The African continental perspective is not fortuitous, since African connections are a constitutive part of Al-Koni’s vision. Both Al-Koni’s long and short fiction reconstruct the Sahara as a dynamic cultural bridge between the Mediterranean networks of coastal North Africa and the grasslands of the African Sahel, the transcontinental belt that borders the southern reaches of the Sahara.2 In his fiction, the Sahara becomes a terrain of contact rather than an empty space between mutually exclusive worlds. The Sahara as bridge in Al-Koni’s oeuvre strategically positions him as an African writer whose literary modes and cultural concerns may be compared very productively with other African authors like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who roughly form part of the same generation of writers. In the case of Somali writer the Nuruddin Farah, the similarities are even more striking, since Farah’s early novels, set in the Horn of Africa, represent the engagement of a nomadic pastoral people with modernity and globalisation, as do Al-Koni’s novels, albeit in a Saharan setting. Notably, Al-Koni was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, an award he did not ultimately win, in part due to the ways in which his work challenges dominant conceptualisations of fiction. More apposite in the context of this essay, however, are the ways in which, with translation into English, Al-Koni is increasingly being constituted as a world literature author of importance in the related fields of ecocriticism and animal studies. Environmental and animal-studies perspectives on Al-Koni are evident in many of the reviews of his novels, and in interviews and general articles on literary websites and blogs. A number of scholarly articles have also addressed the ecocritical and animal-studies dimensions of Al-Koni’s work, including articles by Susan McHugh,3 Sharif

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DESERT CREATURES The focus in this essay falls on the ways in which animals are treated in Al-Koni’s novels, both as living creatures with whom we share the earth, and in the sense of their literary representation in the works. To understand Al-Koni’s conception of human–animal relations, however, one needs to understand the broader non-sentient world within which Al-Koni’s sentient beings are placed. One needs to understand the Sahara as a dynamic, living landscape within which the Tuareg have existed in an ecologically sustainable, non-destructive way for centuries. One also needs to understand the desert as a symbol of Al-Koni’s all-encompassing conception of the world. Al-Koni has remarked that his love for the desert ‘is not simply a love of nature, but rather a love of creation’s homeland, which carries within it as such the secret of creation’.8 The brilliance of the desert sun awakens awe in the desert dweller as the creative source of existence, and it is an inescapable reminder of the eternal life of the spirit and its collective expression in religion. The harsh exigencies of the desert impress upon its denizens their essential unity with and dependence on others, both human and nonhuman. It is a call to an ethical orientation, a reminder of connections and how one ought to conduct oneself in relation to all others. Thus, the emptiness of the desert is inscribed in the fiction as a complex, evanescent mirage that nevertheless holds open the possibility of ethical fullness. It reminds one of how one ought to live. The desert in Al-Koni’s fiction is a spirituality, a religion and an ethics. Al-Koni’s desert world finds ritual expression in both Tuareg animism and the monotheisms of Christianity and Islam. In most cases, desert life for both humans and animals is necessarily nomadic. In Al-Koni’s fiction, the literal nomadism of the ‘blue men of the desert’, as the Tuareg are popularly identified, is shot through with a metaphysical charge. The nomad is closer to the eternal truths of birth, life, death and resurrection, since the nomad lives life lightly, unencumbered by the baggage of accumulation that is the downfall of the city-dweller. The nomad is the fitting inhabitant of the desert, Al-Koni’s ‘paradise of non-existence’.9 However, nomadism also acquires a personal dimension through the author’s own international travel.

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S Elmusa,4 and Jehan Farouk Fouad and Saeed Alwakeel.5 The sacred dimensions of Al-Koni’s environmentalism have been highlighted in the works of Meg Furniss Weisberg6 and F Fiona Moolla.7

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Al-Koni studied in Russia and currently lives in Switzerland. His cultural influences are similarly nomadic, including Tuareg mythology and the oral traditions of the Sahel, classical and modern Arabic literature; Russian realism, European existentialism, German romanticism, and American transcendentalism, among other literary and cultural wellsprings.10  Al-Koni produces a dense prose that seems, kaleidoscopically and enigmatically, to address profound philosophical questions; to push at boundaries of literary genre and mode; and to address contemporary questions of Libyan politics, capitalist consumption and ecological threat. Al-Koni’s work thus presents a veritable oasis of ideas, but what will be focused on here is the way in which the fictions endorse, but also unsettle, current debates on the question of animals within the broader framework of posthumanism.

BECOMING HUMAN Animals figure in all Al-Koni’s novels in English translation, with varying degrees of prominence. This essay will place a literary analysis of the inclusion of animals in Al-Koni’s fictional world within the broader frame of posthumanism, thus opening the discussion to wider metaphysics. The essay suggests that, superficially, Al-Koni’s representation of human–animal relations resembles the approach of some trends in posthumanism. This is apparent from the debates into which Al-Koni is drawn in the article by McHugh, mentioned above, where, for example, human–animal relations and animal metamorphoses are connected with the concept of hybridity as it occurs in posthumanist approaches, and nomadism is presented through the theoretical lens of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Nomadology.11 In posthumanist debates, the clear boundaries of the self – established by European Enlightenment humanism – are shown to be vague, and are seen to create fluid connections with other life forms and, less relevant in the context of this essay, connections with technology in the form of cyberworlds. In terms of these approaches, existence takes the form of dynamic self-constituting networks. What this essay proposes, by contrast, is that Al-Koni’s incorporation of animals in the human world takes the form of what will be termed ‘metahumanism’. The term ‘metahumanism’ is used to emphasise the ways that the human is always inserted into a larger, transcendentally constituted cosmic paradigm of which the animal is also part. Metahumanism, as opposed to 56

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posthumanism, represents the way in which Al-Koni shifts the geography of reason to acknowledge epistemologically alternative knowings of the world. In order to draw the distinction between posthumanism and what is referred to in this essay as Al-Koni’s metahumanism, the history of the common denominator ‘humanism’ needs to be traced briefly. To understand posthumanism, one needs to understand humanism. Humanism shares significant areas of semantic overlap with two other concepts, namely anthropocentrism and individualism. Like anthropocentrism, humanism locates the human being at the centre of systems of moral and philosophical significance. But while humanism, as a concept forged in the European Renaissance, looks back to the glories of classical antiquity for models of human flourishing through reason, will and the beauties of art,12 anthropocentrism tends to have a more universal application, as it refers to any schema that places the interests of human beings above that of the natural world and animals.13 Humanism shares with the concept of individualism the focus on the single and singular human being whose universal, procedurally rational autonomy apparently allows the constitution of an objective account of the natural order.14 Humanism, more broadly in feminist, ecological and animal rights parlance, has come to be associated with not only the centrality but also the assumed superiority of the usually male human being over other subjects in the natural world.15 Humanism has been subjected to critique that reveals the human being as less a stable centre than a dependent component integrated into networks that include inanimate objects, machines or technology,16 as well as animals17 and the natural world. These types of critique have been termed posthumanist, but also, less frequently, metahumanist – a concept introduced by John Sanbonmatsu.18 This essay uses Al-Koni’s fiction as a case in point to draw a distinction between posthumanism and metahumanism, which have hitherto been used as approximate synonyms of each other.19  Posthumanist lines of enquiry are represented by Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others.20 For Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida, human autonomy would appear to be not given, but constituted out of dynamic interplay in a network or assemblage that depends upon the subordination of animals in the network. These posthumanist approaches suggest that, when analysed closely, the borders between the human and the animal are fluid and unstable. Emerging out of such posthumanist critiques, which simultaneously undermine the idea of science as purely objective study, various attempts arise (such as those of Bruno Latour) at recognising non-human

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subjects as participants in an alternately constituted collective. In other words, posthumanism has, in various ways, endeavoured to grant subjectivity – and hence moral consideration – to non-human forms of existence, and of particular relevance in this context are animal beings. Al-Koni’s fiction is fascinating since, in some ways, it parallels posthumanist critique from a position that may be described as metahumanist, in a use distinguished from that of Sanbonmatsu above. The outlines of AlKoni’s metahumanism will become clearer through analysis of the novels and will be fully contrasted with posthumanism at the end of the essay. But an initial difference is evident in the approach to technology. Unlike the trend in posthumanism, wherein human boundaries are elided and the line between technology and the human becomes blurred, generating a liberatory politics, the machine in Al-Koni’s desert garden is almost invariably the serpent that threatens the destruction of paradise rather than securing its regain. Thus, unlike some trends in contemporary posthumanism, Al-Koni’s fiction precludes the possibility of utopian resolution through science and technology. By contrast, the erasure of the human–animal border is foregrounded and privileged as an ethical concern in both posthumanism and Al-Koni’s metahumanism. But, as we shall see, the cultural sources that influence the two lines of enquiry, both of which oblige recognition of animals, are different. Animals are never in the shadows in Al-Koni’s world, but are, instead, significant actors in a teeming pluriverse. This may be the unconscious influence of the mythological world of the Tuareg that shapes Al-Koni’s fiction; however, Tuareg culture cannot be teased apart from Arab culture and Islamic spirituality. Richard C Foltz observes that – based on scriptural sources, though not always in practice – the Islamic ethical system extends greater moral consideration to animals than the monotheisms from which it derives, and certainly more than secular Enlightenment, which has classified animals as part of the object world.21 But, as in the other monotheisms, human beings exist at the apex of a hierarchy, which in Islam is justified ultimately by ethics. The Qur’an suggests that all animals, like human beings, are created in communities, and that all animals are instinctively theocentric. Only human beings enjoy a limited free will – that is, only human beings are free to choose to live by the precepts of revealed ethics. There exists also a fairly large corpus of tales about animals in Arab and Islamic tradition. However, and perhaps explaining the striking significance of animals in AlKoni’s fictional world, of all the Muslim cultural traditions it is the orature

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of Berber-Tuareg North Africa that can be singled out for its plethora of animal tales.22  Animals are thus deeply foundational in Tuareg culture, as they are in sub-Saharan African culture more generally, forming part of an ‘invisible backdrop’ that is consciously acknowledged and ecocritically articulated only when that matrix is threatened by global warming, oil extraction and deforestation, among other twentieth-century impacts.23 Of Al-Koni’s novels in English translation, human relations with the animal world are most intimately considered in Anubis, The Seven Veils of Seth, Gold Dust and The Bleeding of the Stone.

HUMAN–ANIMAL RELATIONS AND METAMORPHOSIS This section of the essay analyses different aspects of human relationships with animals and human–animal transmogrification in four novels where animals predominate. The novels will be considered not in chronological order of publication, either in Arabic or in English, but in terms of a paradoxical historical progression through mythological time, which itself is not teleological. Anubis is a novel that seems to gather up time and space going back to the point of mythological beginnings. It concerns both the origins of Tuareg culture and human origins more generally. Through the hero, Anubi, this novel dramatises what Derrida, in ‘The animal that therefore I am’, refers to as the ‘abyssal rupture’ that allows human beings to constitute an anthropocentric identity.24 The next novel considered, The Seven Veils of Seth, reveals some of the densely allusive significance of Al-Koni’s desert as a symbol of the ironies, the mysteries, the hardships and the bounties of human existence – but also animal existence. Seven Veils highlights the multiple bridges that connect species in the potential for metamorphosis, which exists as a reality rather than as a metaphor in Tuareg-Islamic and Arab culture. The novel Gold Dust takes up a similar theme in configuring the intense relationship between a Tuareg man and his camel as a relationship wherein highly porous, mystically charged borderlines allow a slipping between species boundaries. The final novel to be considered is The Bleeding of the Stone, which deals with carnivorous and vegetarian cultures, as well as species extinction in the context of the incursion of modern technologies and modern outlooks. What is remarkable about all of the novels is that one is hard-pressed to identify a presiding or overriding concern. In each case, Al-Koni appears

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not to have set out to write an ecological or an animal-centred narrative. By contrast, the narratives present an all-encompassing view that is Al-Koni’s apprehension of the world formed by the cultures in which he was cradled. Thus, animals are not the deliberate focus of any of the novels. Animals are just one figure on a broader canvas of destiny and ultimate truth that also includes human beings, lived and living environments, and spirit worlds. These forms of creation and the relationships among them are explored against the ominous backdrop of the threat embodied by trade or commerce, which is often symbolised by the sinister symbol of gold dust.

ANUBIS Anubis is the story of a quest at multiple levels. It is the story of the search by an ordinary Tuareg man, Anubi, for his father in the desert. It is also the story of the search by the mythical Anubis for his father, who is a god, and it is the story of the metaphysical quest of everyman for the meaning of life. Anubis is the ancient Egyptian, jackal-headed funerary deity who is incorporated into Tuareg mythology, where he comes to epitomise the search of the son for the lost father. Implicit in Al-Koni’s frequent allusions to the pantheon of the ancient Egyptians is the idea that the swathe of deserts that geographically connect North Africa with the Middle East form a common cultural cradle for a significant portion of contemporary human cultures. Anubi, the character in the novel rather than the ancient Egyptian god, defies his mother and the voice of popular opinion when he wanders out into the desert to search for his father, driven by the ‘malady’ of ‘anxiety’.25 The lost law of the Tuareg predicts that despair and destruction await the one who sets out to find the father. Ironically, however, the perils of the quest are the precondition for finding the hidden treasure of the truth or the divine, which, in a double irony, lies ultimately within oneself. Anubi is led off a desert path by a hare, which, it appears, embodies a jinn or wicked spirit; to lost and thirsty in the wilderness, he almost succumbs to death. However, Anubi drinks gazelle urine and survives. Gazelle urine is also the catalyst that transforms Anubi into a theriomorphic creature with the head of a man and the body of a gazelle. In this instance, and in a number of others across the range of novels being studied, animal metamorphosis precipitates the experience of a primal reconnection or mythical unity with

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the animal other. In this case, Anubi finds within [himself] the ability to

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ciled [his] tongue with the gazelle’s, united [his] destiny with the gazelle’s, and created from [his] spirit and the gazelle’s a single spirit.26 

The gazelle in Al-Koni’s fiction, and in Tuareg culture generally, is a creature with great mythological significance that is explored in more detail in a number of the other novels. The gazelle, which embodies the spirit of the sandy desert,27 is always gendered female and symbolises the figure of the mother. Here, the gazelle is the mother who delivers her son, Anubi, from death into a second birth, which erases the line between man and animal, in a hybrid human-animal that has the head of a man and the body of a gazelle. The element of the preternatural in Al-Koni’s work has frequently been unsatisfactorily associated with magic realism, among others by Stefan Sperl and Ewa Machut-Mendecka.28 While the magic in magic realism emerges when the procedurally rational focus on reality is so intense that the real becomes distorted, Al-Koni’s magic stems from a world view in which ‘magic’ is the real. Incidents of animal metamorphoses in the narratives originate not out of the warping of the narrative mode of realism or out of the modes of fantasy and illusion, but out of the cultural perspective of the Tuareg, whose orature is replete with stories of human–animal transformations that derive from the alembic of Tuareg-Islamic and Arab cultures. A few examples of these are cited by HT Norris in Saharan Myth and Saga.29 Metamorphosis in Al-Koni’s fiction only ever occurs from the human to the animal or from the human into a human–animal hybrid, but never the other way around. Metamorphosis, furthermore, is also never permanent, but represents a liminal state from which the transition back into the human is certain. Thus, metamorphosis is always only temporary, and Anubi’s metamorphosis back into the human is thus virtually guaranteed. Anubi is restored to human shape by a priest/shaman, who informs him that his human mother took her own life by jumping down a well on discovering that her son had taken the fateful journey into the (metaphysical) desert to search for the father. Anubi’s guilt turns into rage when he is told by a neighbour’s daughter that, in fact, the priest killed his mother in order to redeem Anubi from his hybrid state. Furious at his betrayal, Anubi kills the priest, only for it to be revealed by the slippery and mysterious young girl that, in stabbing the priest, he has killed the father for whom he searched, and that the mother’s self-sacrifice was the price to be paid for his rebirth into the human.

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understand, the ability to comprehend the forgotten language, which recon-

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This psychic blow drives Anubi to flee into the desert. Again, a process of transformation begins, which sees him gradually adopting a hybrid form, but this time an animal–animal hybrid, paradoxically affirming and breaking down species and gender boundaries within the animal world also. Anubi is now identified with the Barbary ram, an embodiment of the spirit of the mountainous desert,30 and an animal that is always gendered male by Al-Koni. When Anubi transforms into a creature with the head of a Barbary ram and the body of a gazelle, the desert becomes a lush paradise. We see a shift into the time of origins, indexed by the reference to the ‘timeless quiet’ of the Edenic space, where even the vegetation acquires a subjectivity that grants it agency. In this primal chronotope, Anubi notices a strange Barbary ram–gazelle hybrid, in whose limpid and prophetic eyes he sees himself in reflection. He attaches himself to this gender- and species-fluid creature – who is both the human mother and father – in a rapture of bounty, joy and freedom. In his wanderings through Eden, he comes across ancient rock paintings. These paintings depict species composites and ancient hunts, and self-reflexively tell Anubi’s tale in pictures, reflecting the trans-historical iterations of the interconnections of human–animal origins. Paradise is lost, however, when Anubi is overcome by an uncontrollable fever and consumes the cooked flesh of the mother/father after she/he is struck by lightning. Thereafter begins the process of disconnection from the worlds of both flora and fauna. Anubi is now alienated from the gazelles and the Barbary sheep, which flee him as though he were a stranger. Pursuing a pregnant Barbary ewe, Anubi conjoins with her and rolls down the side of a hill, allowing a brief species reconnection.31 But the desire for flesh proves overwhelming. Anubi thus contrives to trap an animal to consume. He traps a gazelle that he slaughters and eats, but in whose eyes he again recognises the mother who repeatedly sacrifices herself to save him. In the creation accounts on which Al-Koni draws, sacrifice of the animal is not the command of a cruel God or gods; it is rather the willing relinquishing of one life for another, where both kinship across species and separation of species are acknowledged. This fine and dynamic balance is destroyed only by ‘gluttony’, the greed for flesh in this context, and the greed for money (symbolised by gold dust) in others. Metamorphosis in Anubis thus engages contemporary posthumanist debates and animal-rights discourses in interesting ways. Al-Koni’s treatment of the species border is significantly different from the direction being taken in contemporary posthumanist discourse. Posthumanism moves towards a complete erasure of the line between humans and animals, indexed by

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the portmanteau neologism ‘natures-cultures’, which signifies the complete ontological indistinguishability of human existence from animals and the environment. Al-Koni, whose inspiration comes from the non-modern Arab and African currents that inform Tuareg culture, indexes vital species differences. Paradoxically, these differences are both elided and explained in the charged times of primal origins, and are elided again at times of ‘extreme duress’, as McHugh notes.32 However, species borders are confirmed by transformation back into the original form. Species borders also confirm the roles played in a larger cosmic scheme into which different species fit, in much the same way that relationships of complementarity are determined between the genders in terms of the same all-encompassing and coherent mythological order. Human consumption of animal flesh is both that which precipitates the fall from paradise and the supreme sacrifice of the animal subject that shares the same mythological orientation as the human subject. By contrast, the rights discourse that demands consideration for animal life needs to locate in animals that which entitles human beings to consideration. These arguments variously need to show animal intelligence and sentience and the ability of animals to communicate through diverse languages, among other evidence of subjectivity. When sidestepping questions of rational and emotional animal individualism, some demands for ethical concern proceed through constituting animals as social linguistic beings. Alasdair MacIntyre has shown that animals are worthy of human consideration, since the argument suggests that, like humans, many animals are constituted as social ‘dependent rational animals’, out of networks of loving relationships.33 By contrast, in terms of the framework Al-Koni’s fiction proposes, the human being is bound to the animal subject by a debt of gratitude for its sacrifice. In this scheme, both human and non-human subjects are subordinated to an all-encompassing order that is their immediate apprehension of the world from which they cannot step out, and which is liberatory when its precepts are fully embodied and lived.

THE SEVEN VEILS OF SETH In The Seven Veils of Seth, Al-Koni’s desert philosophy, which was alluded to above, is brought sharply under the spotlight. The eponymous Seth, the trickster god of the ancient Egyptians, who also forms part of Tuareg mythology, is the god of the desert and of storms. This composite theriomorphic deity is presented as part jackal, ass, camel and aardvark, among

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other animals, or as combinations of these animals. The ambiguity of the figure of Seth is captured in his creative–destructive potential, which is exemplified in detail in the novel. Seth holds out the promise of turning the desert into an oasis; however, ironically, he is also the cause of mankind’s loss of Eden, when man violates the law by cannibalising his animal kin. Seth is the god of storms who controls the lightning. Read alongside Anubis, Seth thus kills and cooks the flesh of the creature that makes Anubi a carnivore, causing him to lose paradise. Seth therefore holds the potential for paradise and is the cause of the loss of paradise. Seven Veils relates the story of Isan/Seth, who mysteriously appears in an unnamed oasis and heads immediately for a spring in which he bathes. He is observed by a ‘covey of six beauties’, who see him without his turban and veil – a shameful nakedness which no Tuareg male could endure – and notice his donkey ears and tail.34 The imagery and allusions in the dialogue between the women and the stranger suggest an Adamic encounter with multiple Eves. The fates of these ‘she-jinni’, as they are referred to in the novel, are revealed to be intertwined with Seth’s, since he holds the key to their fertility. Isan/Seth then takes up abode in the city wall, which is revealed to be a charnel house where sedimented layer upon layer of bones and human debris testify to generations of human arrogance and folly. In a complicated plot, the trickster Seth/Isan exposes the corruption and destruction inherent in the settled life of cultivation of the oasis, as opposed to the nomadic desert life that observes the lost law of the Tuareg and exists in a dynamic, stable balance with the earth and the cosmos. This novel, as with most of Al-Koni’s other novels, must be read allegorically for the principles of existence being suggested, rather than polemically as a treatise advocating nomadic Tuareg desert life for all people. The desert metaphysics and spirituality that inspire The Seven Veils of Seth seem to be intimately connected with animal life. The desert god hero is a composite creature – part man, part donkey – and he enters the oasis on the back of a donkey. Indeed, one of the names by which he is known in the novel is ‘the jenny master’ or the ‘master’ of the female donkey, an appellation that, however, describes a relationship of companionship rather than hierarchy. Although Isan/Seth is a god, he is a trickster god – an embodiment of ambivalence, paradox and irony. Thus, he takes as his companion animal not the camel, the ‘aristocrat’ animal of the Bedouin,35 but rather the low donkey, which is associated with inferiority. The novel explains how Isan/Seth came to identify with and be identified by his donkey. He had been given a camel in repayment of a loan, but this camel appears to have been possessed by a demon that led it to attack him, tear off his headgear

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and pursue him turbanless across the desert – the ultimate ignominy for a Tuareg man. Isan/Seth owes his life to the grey donkey that saves him from the vengeful camel. The interplay between camel and donkey forms part of a greater dynamic, wherein the camel and the donkey are represented in the novel with lives, characters, histories and hardships of their own. But Isan/Seth finally comes to be identified with the donkey in the context of the greater symbolic contrast between the two species. The novel draws on the general Bedouin characterisation of the camel’s nobility and pedigree, contrasted with the humility represented by the donkey. Humility is part of a broader philosophical and spiritual contemplation in the novel, which draws on Qur’anic precedent. Humility is contrasted with the heedlessness of those human beings who walk the earth in arrogance. The novel suggests ‘Arrogance and haughtiness are a curse that befalls those who choose to ride a mahari [a prized breed of camel].’ By contrast, ‘desert tribes have never observed a single presumptuous person feel haughty while mounted on a donkey’.36  Another consideration is that of gender. The camel in question is male and the donkey to whose back Isan/Seth comes to be ‘melded’ is female.37 Just as Isan/Seth is both human and animal, he also is both male and female. In the closing scenes of the novel, a jealous lover stabs Isan/Seth who, in his ‘death’ throes, transforms from man to serpent to the female beloved, described in a language allusive of the drama of the fall from grace in the garden of Eden to a life of struggle in the desert of the world. Al-Koni’s hero, Isan/Seth, thus resembles Donna Haraway’s ‘cyborg’, who collapses the significance of the individual in the context of a system within which the nodal points are a human-animal-male-female-organic-inorganic mix.38 However, while posthumanism remains tied to the humanism it critiques through unreflexively accepting the myth of an impervious immanentism, Al-Koni’s metahumanism proceeds from a panoramic, cosmic canvas where mythic thinking does not deny itself.

GOLD DUST Although the haughtiness of the camel is spurned for the humility of the donkey in Seven Veils, the ‘ship of the desert’ is redeemed in the novel Gold Dust. Here a piebald ‘Mahri’, or thoroughbred, becomes the dual protagonist in a narrative of passion and spiritual quest. The novel tells of the love of the man for his camel, the love of the camel for the man, the love of the camel for a she-camel, and the love of a man for a woman. The journeys of

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self-realisation in this novel are undertaken by both the man and the camel. Gold Dust recreates the world wherein humans and animals were mutually dependent in a landscape that bore their marks, but in which human beings had not yet developed the capacity to alter the natural world in a geophysical sense. Elliott Colla’s description of Al-Koni’s fictional world is informed by a sophisticated breadth of historical, social, cultural, literary and philosophical analysis, belied by the simple clarity of its formulation. Colla notes the fact that Al-Koni restores a focus on nomadic life that is largely absent from contemporary Arabic fiction: The historical rise of the novel as an art form is directly linked with the marginalisation of nomadic pastoralism as a key component of Arab civilisation. The very industrial era that enabled the one made the other obsolete. With labour performed by ever increasing masses of men interacting with ever more powerful machines, human reliance on labouring beasts dwindled. In many parts of the world, nomadic pastoralists – such as the Tuareg of the Sahara or the Bedouin of Arabia – were the ones who used to supply sedentary societies with the animal-power that made things run. The plowing of fields, the milling of grain, the shipping of goods across vast continents – these were all ventures undertaken by men and animals labouring together. With the rise of the factory – and with it, the tractor, the train, and the car – men abandoned the society of animals for engines of their own making, and the age-old need for pastoralists came to an end. Ever since, we have only continued to cut our ties with the world of herdsmen. In the process, we have cut ourselves off from what they knew, and their recognition that animals are more than just objects to be looked at, shorn, and eaten. Gold Dust appears in this light as a protest against the modern abandonment and objectification of animals, and an affirmation of the relationship between man and beast as one of interdependence, mutual recognition, and soul.39 

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Ukhayyad, the human hero of the novel, is a young man who receives a camel colt as a gift, and immediately the camel becomes his constant distraction and obsession. In a period of famine attendant upon the extended and repeated droughts of the twentieth century, he sneaks food for the camel while his clan starves. One might almost say he loses his self to the camel. Indeed, their relationship bears testimony to the wisdom of the ‘old tribes’ that the camel ‘is the mirror of his rider’, and that if one wants to know ‘what lies hidden within [the rider], look to his mount, his thoroughbred’.40 The animal has a beauty and grace that suggests that he is a gazelle in the form of a camel.

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As with other nomadic pastoralist peoples, camels are central to the economic, social and personal lives of herdsmen – so much so that they are the subject of their art. So taken is Ukhayyad by the excellent features of the camel that he approaches ‘a famous poetess of the Kel Abada tribes … to compose a poem glorifying the Mahri’s innate qualities and extolling his talents’.41 Among the Tuareg, the camel is an essential part of the rites of passage leading to manhood and is integral to the ideals of masculinity. Central to these conventions are the dances performed by man and animal. The reputed predilection of the camel for music and verse, is foregrounded in Gold Dust, in the apparent mutual aesthetic captivation of rider and mount by song. Ukhayyad intuits that, when hearing the siren song of the women’s singing circle, the camel also flies ‘on wings in the air’ and feels his heart ‘nearly bursting from the enchantment, anxiety, and hidden joy of the moment’. Both rider and mount appear to be ‘possessed by the music’ and are both ‘hostage to the dance, [with] its passion and mysterious longing’.42  The love between the man and his mount carries the overtones of a romantic relationship. Inter-species eros is finally revealed to be a mutual spiritual quest, since both the man and the camel enter into intimacies with females of their own species. The erotic dalliances of the man and the beast are presented with equivalence in a dual-narrative focalisation that levels their romantic escapades. Their amours with females prove their undoing. In particular, the camel is punished, since he contracts life-threatening mange from the she-camel he mounts. Ukhayyad tries to save his companion by the only known, but highly dangerous, cure. In the crazed and violent purging of his disease, the camel breaks free. Ukhayyad hangs onto the tail of the camel and is dragged behind the animal in the creature’s mad dash across the desert until he is semi-conscious. Saving the camel becomes a personal rite of passage and a spiritual quest in which the man and animal achieve a spiritual and bodily unity with each other, and mystical annihilation in God. Ukhayyad finally mounts the camel. Because his skin is flayed, his flesh becomes one with the flesh of the camel, whose skin has been eaten away by disease. Trying to get water from a well, Ukhayyad slips and almost drowns in the depths, and is saved only when the camel draws him up by the rope tied to his waist. The journey and plunge into the abyss acquire the allegorical suggestion of Sufi interpretations of spiritual quest and divine self-realisation. The bond between man and animal is so strong that even marriage does not break it. Ukhayyad’s wife protests that she is the junior wife to the camel. Ukhayyad finally ‘swaps’ his wife for the camel, manipulated and tricked by a romantic rival for his wife’s affections, whom he later kills.

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Ukhayyad is thereafter pursued by bounty-hunters, who use the camel to lure him out. Ironically, he is killed by being ‘racked’ between two camels. Al-Koni’s metahumanism, as expressed in Gold Dust, thus bears testimony to the ways in which both animals and human beings are inserted into a panoramic social, natural and metaphysical order that is symbolically captured in the topos of the desert. Both humans and animals have souls and lives shaped, in part, by forces outside of themselves; one might call these forces fate. Both Ukhayyad and his camel are subject to tragic destinies.

THE BLEEDING OF THE STONE

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Metamorphosis, animal kinship, animal sacrifice, carnivorous culture and consumer society are brought together in the final novel discussed, The Bleeding of the Stone. This novel also layers and intertwines ancient Egyptian and Tuareg mythology, Arab orature and literature, and the mythical worlds of Christianity and Islam. The Bleeding draws on the story of Cain and Abel in the monotheisms to contrast two fundamentally different ways of life. Cain, the agriculturalist, kills his brother Abel, the nomadic pastoralist. Unlike Derrida’s appropriation of this story in ‘The animal that therefore I am’,43 in terms of Al-Koni’s desert ethic, Cain the cultivator is the villain. The story of Cain and Abel is also an echo of the pantheist myth of the desert god, Seth (discussed above), who kills his brother, the god of cultivation, Osiris. For Al-Koni, the violation of the earth through agriculture is a worse infringement than the nomadic pastoralist’s occasional sacrifice of the animal. Agriculture leads to settlement and accumulation, and finally to modes of living that are destructive to animals. In The Bleeding, the herd boy Asouf represents Abel. He is the only son of a father who shuns human company and sings for Asouf the elegiac litanies of the Sufi sheikhs, and tells him the myths of the ancients. Of special significance is the story of how the spirit of the sandy desert came to be embodied in the gazelle and the spirit of the mountainous desert in the waddan – also known as the moufflon, or Barbary ram, mentioned earlier. The father occasionally hunts both the gazelle and the waddan, circumscribed by the codes of both Tuareg custom and Islamic law. But he stops hunting the waddan when his life is saved by the very creature he was trying to kill. However, when his family is starving, he is forced to break his oath. On a particular occasion, in violation of the codes and the personal experience that govern his hunting, he takes out his rifle to kill a waddan that seems

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to be possessed; the animal then ends its life by leaping off a cliffside. Although the father eschews waddan thereafter, the spirit of this waddan comes back and appears to force the father to plunge to his death. Possessed by an uncontrollable force, some time after his father’s death, Asouf is driven to stalk a waddan that mingles with his herd of goats. The waddan drives him off a cliffside, where he hangs for an eternity – again, a spiritual journey that takes him along the stations familiar to Sufi mystics, as in the test in Gold Dust. He is finally saved by his father, who comes to him in the form of a waddan. After this experience, Asouf adopts a vegetarian diet that, paradoxically, is made possible only by the cultivation and commerce that the desert ethic condemns. He survives on barley and wheat that he barters for goats with passing caravans, and tinned foods – the product of the canning industry – which he receives from tourists who come to see the ancient rock paintings over which the Italian colonial officials have made him guardian. Paradoxically, vegetarianism as a universal principle seems possible only in the paradise that is lost, the paradise that is non-existent. When drought kills his herd, Asouf is forced into the town, where he is confined in an Italian camp to be used as a soldier in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. In a story that later becomes part of local Tuareg legend in the novel, Asouf escapes the camp by metamorphosing into a waddan. But the more catastrophic transformation – a transformation that affects human–animal–environmental symbioses that have existed for generations – is precipitated by Asouf’s encounter with his alter ego, Cain Adam. Cain symbolises the way in which an occasionally carnivorous culture is transformed when gluttony (read an ethic of unlimited consumption) is combined with the techniques of slaughter of modern technology. Cain brings with him the rapid firing gun and the automobile that sound the death knell of the gazelle and the waddan, as well as the way of life of the nomads. Cain’s betrayal of the ancient and prophetic laws is all the more shameful since he owes his life to the gazelle (detailed in a backstory), which he is now able to hunt to extinction. The novel seems to suggest that Cain’s unlimited consumption can be foreclosed only when he cannibalises his own species. The novel ends with the strongly Christian symbolism of Asouf ‘crucified’ against the mountainside by Cain as retribution, since he will not divulge to Cain the refuge of the last waddan, for whose flesh Cain cannot control his appetite. Closure also suggests the fulfillment of the prediction of the Kano soothsayer, whose secret knowledge is enlisted to cure Cain of his gluttony. The soothsayer prophesies: ‘The one weaned on gazelle’s blood will never know the straight path until,

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as a man, he has his fill of the flesh of Adam’.44 The novel ends without disclosing whether or not Cain consumes the flesh of his brother Asouf/ Abel. Cannibalism, or consuming the flesh of kin, seems to symbolise the apocalyptic destruction of humankind, driven by unlimited consumption by humankind itself. The novel suggests that the cannibalistic self-destruction of human beings seems to be the apocalyptic event that will restore the desert ethic of mutual and multiple concern for all forms of creation.

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Al-Koni’s fiction brings the life of animals and consideration for animal well-being into focus, drawing on wellsprings that ‘ensoul’ both humans and animals in a broader transcendental scheme. Furthermore, Al-Koni’s metahumanism relativises humanism and the posthumanism that succeeds it, granting animals and humans the potential for an existence wherein neither is an earthly parasite. Al-Koni’s fiction is interesting in relation to questions of human–animal relations, since it provides a highly individual expression of the connections and differences between species established by a collective transcendental mythology. His fiction reminds us that the natural world and animals cannot represent themselves and must be represented through the cosmologies within which human beings are also constituted. Al-Koni thus shifts the geography of reason to map a spirituality for both humans and animals. Posthumanism, and the nominal anti-anthropocentrism that it claims, assumes the immanent framework of humanism, but seeks to show that the human is dynamically created from networks composed variously of animal, natural and technological others. But posthumanism retains the primal myth of immanent constitution, while maintaining its distinction from the mythmaking of other cultures. In some ways, humanism and the posthumanism that succeeds are like the camel in the proverb in the title of this essay, which claims, paradoxically, to see its own hump. The contradictions inherent in immanent, individual, autonomous subject formation are hidden from view in posthumanism, and then projected onto the non-human world. The moral urgency of consideration for animals emerges precisely from the massive and unprecedented violations of animals, which humanist immanentism has made possible. Al-Koni’s fiction, which foregrounds cosmology, is a useful reminder of the ways in which the relations of humans with the non-human world are inescapably a product of the social mythologies of different cultures,

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of which posthumanism is one mythology. It might pay to heed the transcendental injunction emphasised in Al-Koni’s work that the sons of Adam should walk the earth in humility rather than arrogance. Al-Koni’s ‘metahumanism’ resonates in many ways. It reminds us that in all mythologies – except the myth of modernity wherein man is the centre – creation comes into being literally ‘about’ or around the human. The human is only one small element in a bigger scheme of truth. It also reminds us that relations between humans and the non-human world are always determined by human apprehensions of the world through their stories of creation. They are, in that sense, also ‘about’ the human. Al-Koni’s project is thus a deeply decolonial project that moves beyond the constraints of post-colonialism.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Al-Koni, I., 2002. The bleeding of the stone. Translated by Jayyusi, M. and Tingley, C. New York: Interlink; Al-Koni, I., 2005. Anubis: a desert novel. Translated by Hutchins, W.M. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press; Al-Koni, I., 2008. Gold dust. Translated by Cola, E. London: I. B. Tauris; Al-Koni, I., 2008. The seven veils of Seth: a modern Arabic novel from Libya. Translated by Hutchins, W.M. Reading: Garnet. Al-Koni, I., 2010. The puppet: a novel. Translated by Hutchins, W.M. Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas; Al-Koni, I., 2014. New Waw: Saharan oasis. Translated by Hutchins, W.M. Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas; AlKoni, I., 2015. The scarecrow. Translated by Hutchins, W.M. Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas; Al-Koni, I., 2018. The fetishists: The Tuareg epic. Translated by Hutchins, W.M. Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas.

2

Colla, E., 2009. Ibrahim al-Koni’s atlas of the Sahara. In Ahmida, A.A., ed., Bridges across the Sahara: social, economic and cultural impact of the trans-Sahara trade during the 19th and 20th centuries. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, pp.187–196.

3

McHugh, S., 2012. Hyrid species and literatures: Ibrahim al-Koni’s ‘composite apparition’. Comparative Critical Studies, 9(3), pp.285–302.

4

Elmusa, S.S., 2013. The ecological Bedouin: toward environmental principles for the Arab region. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 33, pp.9–20.

5

Fouad, J.F. and Alwakeel, S., 2013. Representations of the desert in Silko’s Ceremony and Al-Koni’s The bleeding of the stone. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 33, pp.36–48.

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6

Weisberg, M.F., 2015. Spiritual symbolism in the Sahara: Ibrahim al-Koni’s Nazīf al-Hajar. Research in African Literatures, 46(3), pp.46–67.

7 Moolla, F.F., 2015. Desert ethics, myths of nature and novel form in the narratives of Ibrahim al-Koni. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, 52(2), pp.176–196. 8

Al-Koni, I., 2012. Ibrahim al-Koni. Interview with Hartmut Fähndrich. Translated by Newman, R. Swissworld, Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.

9 Al-Koni, Anubis. Op. cit., p.172. 10 Colla, Ibrahim al-Koni’s atlas of the Sahara. Op. cit. 11 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1986. Nomadology: the war machine. Translated by Massumi, B. Los Angeles: Semitiotext(e). 12 Fiero, G.K., 1997. Faith, reason, and power in the early modern world. St Louis: William C.; Kelley, D.R., 1991. Renaissance humanism. Woodbridge: Twayne; Kristeller, P.O., 1990. Renaissance thought and the arts: collected essays. Expanded ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Nauert, C.G., 2006. Humanism and the culture of renaissance Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Thompson, B., 1996. Humanists and reformers: a history of the Renaissance reformation. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.; Schiffman, Z.S., 2001. Humanism and the renaissance. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 13 Wollock, N., 2007. Subjugated animals: animals and anthropocentrism in early modern European culture. New York: Humanity Books; Steiner, G., 2005. Anthropocentrism and its discontents: the moral status of animals in Western philosophy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 14 Taylor, C., 1989. Sources of the self: the making of the modern identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 15 Plumwood, V., 1993. Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge. 16 Haraway, D.J., 1991. Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books. 17 Haraway, D.J., 2003. The companion species manifesto: dogs, people and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press; Haraway, D.J., 2008. When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Wolfe, C., 2010. What is posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 18 Sanbonmatsu, J., 2003. The postmodern prince: critical theory, left strategy, and the making of a new political subject. New York: New York University Press, p.207. 19 Preece, R., 2011. Animal sensibility and inclusive justice in the age of Bernard Shaw. Vancouver: UBC Press, p.271; Barad, K., 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, p.428.

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21 Foltz, Richard C., 2006. Animals in Islamic tradition and Muslim cultures. Oxford: Oneworld. 22 Sourdel-Thomine, J., 1971. Hayawān. In The encyclopaedia of Islam. Vol III. Leiden: Brill. pp.304–311. 23 Moolla, F.F., 2016. Introduction. In Moolla, F.F. (ed.), Natures of Africa: ecocriticism and animal studies in contemporary cultural forms. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp.1–26. 24 Derrida, J., 2002. The animal that therefore I am (and more to follow). Translated by Wills, D. Critical Inquiry., 28(2), Winter, pp.369–418, p.399.

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20 Wolfe, What is posthumanism? Op. cit.

25 Al-Koni, Anubis. Op. cit., p.11. 26 Ibid., p.21. 27 Al-Koni, The bleeding of the stone. Op. cit., pp.20–21. 28 Machut-Mendecka, E., 2002. Witchcraft and sorcery in the prose of Ibrâhîm al-Kûnî. In Leder, S. (ed.),Studies in Arabic and Islam: Proceedings of the 19th Congress. Halle, 1998. Leuven: Peeters Publishers, pp.235–242; Sperl, S., 2005. Empire and magic in a Tuareg novel: Ibrâhîm al-Kawnî’s al-Khusûf (The Lunar Eclipse). In Hart, S. and Ouyang, W. (eds), A companion to magical realism. Woodbridge: Tamesis, pp.237–247. 29 Norris, H.T., 1972. Saharan myth and saga. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 30 Al-Koni, The bleeding of the stone. Op. cit. 31 Al-Koni, Anubis. Op. cit., p.65. 32 McHugh, Hyrid species and literatures. Op. cit., p.285. 33 MacIntyre, A.,1999. Dependent rational animals: why human beings need the virtues. London: Duckworth. 34 Al-Koni, The seven veils of Seth. Op. cit., p.9. 35 Kurpershoek, P., 1999. Oral poetry and narratives from Central Arabia. Leiden: Brill. 36 Al-Koni, The seven veils of Seth. Op. cit., p.142. 37 Ibid., p.132. 38 Haraway, D.J., 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books. 39 Al-Koni, Gold dust. Op. cit., pp.166–167. 40 Ibid., p.15. 41 Ibid., p.6. 42 Ibid., p.10. 43 40 Derrida, The animal that therefore I am. Op. cit. 44 Al-Koni, The bleeding of the stone. Op. cit., p.82.

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A Dialogue of Civilisations A Decolonial Reading of Chinua Achebe William Mpofu Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

ABSTRACT Influentially, the modern world has been described as necessarily a site for a clash of civilisations. Chinua Achebe has, rebelliously, erected an alternative vision of a world that must be characterised as a dialogue of civilisation and culture. Together with Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Achebe’s literature has been described as African political philosophy, in so far as it emphatically gestures towards a world that is free from the present imbrications of coloniality and domination of Africa by the imperial Euro-American Empire. Achebe’s gesture of ‘dialogue’ between North and South underlines his political philosophy. This chapter argues that Achebe, as read in his novel Things Fall Apart and his essays, participates in epistemic disobedience and gestures to a pluriversal world, where Africa becomes a world among other worlds, and not a site of misery, lack and inhumanity. Away from the trappings of Eurocentrism and Afro-radicalism, Achebe installs an imagination of a world that has not one knowledge but an ‘ecology of knowledges’.

INTRODUCTION

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That the relationship between Africa and Europe became a tragic misalliance of the conqueror and the conquered was not a natural order of things, but an unfortunate and violent crime of conquest, colonialism and domination. The natural order of things was that of economic and cultural exchange between the people of the West and the rest, including Africa. The conquest of the rest by the West – and the introduction of racist and colonial relations – was therefore a violation of the nature of things. In this

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chapter, I examine Chinua Achebe’s decolonial defiance in insisting on the proposition of a dialogue between the African civilisation and the EuroAmerican civilisation after a long history of coloniality. Achebe’s decolonial gesture flies against influential American scholarly voices, such as that of Samuel Huntington,1 who has described the present modern world order as defined by a ‘clash of civilisations’, in which cultures must necessarily gravitate towards conflict and the West must emerge the winner Achebe has, rather stubbornly, erected a decolonial vision of the world in which civilisations and cultures must initiate dialogue. For Achebe, the dialogue, rather than the clash of civilisations, must be the natural order of things. In the compelling essay ‘Impediments to dialogue between north and south’, Achebe spells out the political and philosophical need for a dialogue between the West and the rest to restore a natural order of things in the world, by liberating both the conquered and the conqueror from relations of domination.2 Conquest not only produced the identities of the conqueror and the conquered, but also normalised a monologue whereby the West must think and speak on behalf of the rest, and structure the world after its political imagination and economic interests. In once again imagining a world of dialogue, in which Africa and Europe could not only exchange goods and services but also engage in dialogue and cultural trade, Achebe indulged in a philosophy of liberation that aspires to negate and undo conquest itself. In making the argument that ‘African literature’ is ‘political philosophy’, MSC Okolo convincingly presents Achebe and Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, in particular, as African political philosophers.3 Through a reading of some of Achebe’s essays and the classic novel Things Fall Apart,4 this chapter seeks to locate Achebe as an African philosopher of liberation who demands dialogue where clashes and war have been normalised and naturalised. In that philosophical commitment to dialogue, Achebe practices the decolonial habit that Walter Mignolo called ‘epistemic disobedience’.5 Epistemic disobedience defines the philosophical attitude of refusing to consume the imposed messages and meanings of the world that are presented by the imperial West for purposes of its continued domination of the world. In other words, Achebe pits himself against hegemonic Americanist and Eurocentric voices that seek to perpetuate coloniality. In his challenge to the Eurocentric imagination of Africa as a ‘heart of darkness’ and a site of inhumanity, Achebe installs a ‘pluriversal’ image of the world where there is no one monopolistic understanding of life.6  In presenting an Africa that has its humanity, that possesses certain gifts and some foibles, Achebe proposes a conversation of civilisations and a dialogue of worlds wherein Africa is another of the worlds – and not a

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vacant space that invites colonial invasion – or intervention, of late.7 The Euro-American conquest of Africa has come about not only through the violence of slavery and colonialism, but also through the pretences to humanitarian interventions and missions that are much like the new white man’s burden and civilising mission. The chapter explores Achebe’s decolonial politics and philosophy in pursuit of the recovery of the image of Africa – and the Global South – from colonial invention and distortion, and also the liberation of the world and humanity itself from the enduring coloniality that arose from conquest. In the imperial effort to turn itself from a province of the world into its centre, Europe naturalised war and normalised monologues that have made the world a bloody and also a very dark place. The world of the conqueror and the conquered that Europe created – and which the Euro-American Empire maintains – is an asymmetrical world that Albert Memmi describes as a toxic universe of the coloniser and the colonised, where domination, imposition and exploitation are made into common sense.8 It is a world where colonial and imperial masters dictate the very direction of life and the world, using not only the tools of war such as guns, but also the cultural arsenal, which includes knowledges, histories and languages. The EuroAmerican Empire uses not only NATO to dominate the world, but also the Hollywood movie octopus, the global media and the international academy that perpetuates coloniality and the othering of Africans, Asians and other places and peoples of the Global South.

ACHEBE AND THE MASTER’S TOOL Where the culture of the conqueror, and especially the linguistic part of it, became weaponised for imperialism and domination of the conquered people of Africa, it became paradoxical for African writers and philosophers of liberation, such as Achebe in particular, to use the English language. Colonial languages and cultures of the imperialists at large had become the Master’s tools that could not be handy in the project of demolishing the Master’s abode. But in his faith in the dialogue of civilisations as a means to liberation, Achebe found justification for the use of the English language in the historical project of liberation. Achebe gave a decolonial justification: ‘I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit new African surroundings’.9 The 76

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decolonial radicalism of Achebe allowed the appropriation and even the weaponisation of the coloniser’s language for use in the project of decolonisation – and changing the order of things – in a world that is presently enveloped in coloniality. Achebe engages in the epistemic disobedience of appropriating the Master’s tool, aware that he is demonstrating how adoption of the colonial language can decentre Empire and centre Africa. He suggests the utility of the culture and language of the coloniser in compromising and undermining colonialism and coloniality itself. Though educated to be a ‘British protected child’, Achebe displays the creative radicalism of adopting that which was originally imposed on him and using it for liberation.10 In rebelling against that colonial and colonising education and training, Achebe creatively domesticates the English language and culture, fuses it with Igbo proverbs and idioms, and deploys it as a cultural arsenal with which to rebuke Eurocentrism and imperialism. In other words, Achebe refused to be used by the culture of the coloniser; instead, he resolved to use that culture for liberation. Away from the trappings of ‘Afro-radicalism’11 and ‘third-world fundamentalism’,12 Achebe uses English to rebuke the English that colonised Nigeria, while he also rebukes some aspects of African culture that he found dehumanising and oppressive. He describes ‘gory practices’, such as the murder of powerless captives like Ikemefuna in the novel Things Fall Apart. Achebe resists the temptation to romanticise Africa. He even disagreed with the suggestion by Ng˜ ug˜ı that African authors jettison the English language of imperialism and use mother tongues, preferring to advance the Afrocentric project using English.13 Using a colonial language to fight for decolonisation is a weighty matter of political strategy – rather than a sell-out or compromise with the coloniser. The English that Achebe deploys against Empire is now another English, loaded with African decolonial sensibility to African dialogues with Europe. The clash of civilisations is reduced to a dialogue of cultures. Appropriation of the English language as part of the cultural equipment used to rebuke imperialism makes a stubborn statement on the futility of imperialism, as its tools of domination become the seeds of its defeat.14 In challenging Eurocentrism, and in using the cultural heritage of the English language to do so, Achebe sustains the gesture of a dialogue, rather than the clash of civilisations and cultures that is imagined by Huntington.

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ACHEBE’S THE LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL FORMATION Achebe is first to announce that he was a British protected child, immersed from an early age in British culture and sensibility through colonial education. That immersion in British culture and sensibility did not insulate Achebe from the violence of racism. When, as a British protected and produced child, Achebe engrossed himself in the enjoyment of English literature, he encountered the violent way in which it represented Africa and Africans. As a result, he became known for his confrontation with the racism projected in Joseph Conrad’s depiction of Africa as a ‘heart of darkness’ and a site of hopeless barbarism.15 For Achebe, the colonial distortion of ‘the image of Africa’ and the racist portrait of Africans as lesser beings became a reason to confront the Eurocentric vision of the world. For that reason, storytelling did not become an article of entertainment and leisure for Achebe, but a political vocation. His literature and art are divorced from the literary tradition that emphasises the entertainment value of literature instead of its philosophical and political import. It was in his use of literature as a tool of decolonisation that Achebe, as a lecturer, could ‘sometime ago, in a very testy mood’ begin a ‘lecture with these words: “Art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorised dog shit”’.16 Colonialism and the racism that went with it had made life so gloomy – and political activism so urgent – that time for literature as entertainment was no longer available. To indulge in literature as a luxury became, for Achebe, a game that the political exigencies of Africa could not permit. Colonialism itself – and its racism – formed Achebe into a philosopher of liberation who had no time for literature as a luxury, and who used it as a weapon in the decolonial struggle for liberation. Achebe always encountered British culture and English sensibility as a reminder that he should stand up for being black and African in an antiblack and anti-African world. Reminiscent of claims that non-Europeans do not think,17  Achebe describes how, in 1974, a white European fellow lecturer at the University of Massachusetts doubted if Africa had any literature or history that could be taught at a modern university.18 This Eurocentric tradition of imagining that only Europe and the Western world have literature, history and other knowledges, is described by Lewis R Gordon as the colonisation of knowledge by reducing the many knowledges of the world into one imperial knowledge.19 Eurocentric thinkers, in their bias and blindness, assume that the only history, knowledge and culture that truly exist in the world are European.

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Eurocentric thinkers, including such English writers as Conrad, contemptuously believed that Africans and blacks had neither history or knowledge, nor humanity itself. Eurocentric thinking, history and knowledge was haughtily imposed all over as that of the world and all humanity, in the process erasing and silencing other civilisations, and squeezing them out of the world conversation. Restoring African epistemologies into world conversations is the fruit of Achebe’s decolonial activism. Achebe came face to face with all other knowledges of the world collapsing into nothing, and the privileging of Eurocentrism as the knowledge of the whole world. This marginalisation of other knowledges by the Eurocentric centre of knowing is characterised by Boaventura de Sousa Santos as the European ‘lazy reason’ for believing that ‘there is no knowledge’ in other corners of the world: there are beliefs, opinions, intuitions and subjective understandings that, at most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific inquiry.20 Just as, in economic terms, Africa remains a source of cheap raw materials for industries and factories in Europe, in the sphere of knowledge, Africa is marked as the source of raw and cheap information that can only be turned into knowledge in the European academy. For Achebe, this became a politicising encounter. He felt the urge to stand up and defend the cultural wealth and humanity of Africa. He argued that Africa had people and a history, and that is why Europeans could not leave the continent and its resources alone. Europe was irreparably drawn to Africa. Similarly, Sousa Santos advances the argument for a focus on ‘epistemologies of the South’ as a recognition of the truth that not only do Africans think, they also have a lot to teach the world.21  Achebe understands that the enslaving and colonising Eurocentric spirit relies first and foremost on doubting the historicity of Africa and the humanity of Africans – in what is described as ‘misanthropic skepticism’ by Nelson Maldonado-Torres.22 The conqueror and coloniser invent a comforting myth of the conquered as a sub-human object whose oppression is not such a sin. The colonised were educated by the coloniser into a belief about themselves as ignorant, primitive and dependent on the coloniser for their lives and progress. Illuminatingly, Frantz Fanon describes how ‘colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content’; instead, ‘by a kind of a perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it’.23  Conquest and colonisation, just like slavery, had an investment in silencing and erasing the cultures, histories and knowledges of the conquered and colonised peoples. The destruction of local knowledges by

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conquering colonialists and empire builders has been defined by decolonial philosophers such as Sousa Santos as ‘epistemicides’ that normally accompany genocides and massacres of conquest, where the bodies of the conquered are destroyed.24 Anibal Quijano compares this to a fraudulent mirror that distorts what it reflects and projects a disfigured image of the colonised and racialised peoples.25 In the classic Orientalism, Edward Said describes how the Eurocentric worldview misrepresents and disfigures the cultural image of other peoples and the communities of the East.26 The misrepresentation and distortion of the image of the Other is part and stock of the project of conquest and Empire. In his rigorous study of the coloniser and the colonised, Memmi argues that in order for their conquest to make sense, conquerors necessarily have to invent and fabricate a fitting image of the conquered that justifies the project of domination.27 As a literate native who could talk to other natives and also communicate with the coloniser, Achebe found himself charged with the responsibility of challenging colonial myths and stereotypes. Achebe made it his philosophical vocation to defend the image of Africa from Eurocentric assault. It is the true stuff of deep decoloniality to look Empire in the face and assert the humanity and the dignity of the oppressed. In ‘Impediments to dialogue between north and south’, Achebe describes how he was taken aback by ‘a British governor of Rhodesia in the 1950s’ who described ‘the partnership between black and white in his territory’ of the then Rhodesia, ‘apparently without intending any sarcasm, as the partnership between horse and its rider’.28 That British governor expressed the true way in which Empire saw the natives of Africa under colonialism. While the coloniser is elevated to the status of a human being, the colonised is diminished to the status of a beast of burden. The experience of marginality and peripheralisation in the world imprinted in Achebe the urge to write back to Empire. Just as Frederick Douglass was provoked into writing and speaking against slavery by the dehumanising and ‘soul killing’ experience of slavery,29 in similar fashion, Achebe was incited to decoloniality by the experience and conditions of coloniality and racism. As a wounded African thinker, who experienced racialisation directly, Achebe believed that ‘no African can escape the pain of the wound in our soul’ he therefore believed that as a writer, he must help African society ‘regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement’.30 In directly bearing the wounds of his people, Achebe fits the definition of those writers and thinkers of Africa that Ng˜ug˜ı described as ‘writers in politics’, who think, write and fight by ‘the side of the people’.31 Enrique Dussel describes such thinkers and writers as brave

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‘philosophers of liberation’, who take politics and philosophy not as a profession, but as a life-and-death vocation.32 In talking and writing about colonialism and racism, Achebe himself declared rather gravely, ‘I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question.’33 This is a life-and-death issue for African philosophers of liberation – as it was for guerrillas and soldiers who took up arms to confront colonial armies.  For Achebe, the vocation of challenging the colonial denigration of Africa and Africans is not a profession, but a struggle that must be marked by the same ‘gravitas’ that marked colonisation itself. Colonisers and Empire builders did not conquer and colonise Africa with a smile, but with gravitas. In pursuing the mission of conquest and colonisation, the colonist intended to overturn and change the world of the colonised. For that reason, decolonisation and decoloniality cannot be approached with any less seriousness. Achebe noted: The missionary who left the comforts of Europe to wander through my primeval forest was extremely earnest. He had to be; he came to change my world. The builders of empire who turned me into ‘a British protected person’ knew the importance of being earnest; they had the quality of mind which imperial Rome before them understood so well: Gravitas. Now it seems to me pretty obvious that if I desire to change the role and identity fashioned for me by those earnest agents of colonialism, I will need to borrow some of their resolve. Certainly I could not hope to do it through self-indulgent levity.34

The literary and philosophical responsibility of confronting coloniality became a mission for Achebe. Decolonising knowledge, history and literature – together with recovering the distorted image of Africa – cannot be a luxury, but must be a vision of the same intensity and purpose as colonialism and imperialism. The damage that colonialism did to Africa, and the harm done to African knowledge and history through conquest and colonialism, cannot be undone with charity and play, but only with struggle. In the narrative of the importance of a ‘philosophy of liberation’, Dussel compares the relationship of the conqueror and the conquered in the struggle to that of a cat and a rat:35 the cat can afford to play in its pursuit of the rat – it just stands to lose its dinner; however, if the rat plays in its escape from the cat, it stands to lose its life. The struggle against conquest and coloniality is a life struggle – even at the literary and philosophical level where Achebe and others are located. Philosophical and political gravitas is one resource that the decoloniser can adopt from the coloniser and the

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conqueror. The struggle for liberation can, in its radical decoloniality, learn from the energy of conquest itself. The understandable temptation of anti-colonialists has been to seek to confront colonial racism with the poetic and mystical romanticisation of the precolonial land, history and culture of the colonised. Achebe resists that temptation: he is prepared to describe and acknowledge the foibles of ancestral Africa. Africans must indeed blame the conquerors and the colonialists for the evils of conquest and racism, but must also look inside themselves for answers to the questions of their destiny. Above all else, they must not accept racial inferiority: Needless to say, we do have our own sins and blasphemies recorded against our name. If I were God I would regard as the very worst our acceptance – for whatever reason – of racial inferiority. It is too late in the day to get worked up about or blame others, much as they may deserve such blame and condemnation. What we need to do is to look back and try and find where we went wrong, where the rain began to beat us.36

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In full awareness of the crimes of slavery, colonialism and imperialism in Africa, from the conquest to date, Africans need to remain proud of their humanity, but not get bogged down in blame. There is a need for Africa, in the gesture of Achebe, to pick up its pieces and imagine a future that learns from and is empowered by its painful past. In Achebe’s view, acceptance of racial inferiority is the first sin that must be avoided by all means, lest Africans wallow in defeating self-pity or humiliating and blind imitation of their conquerors. Pride in being human and African must be accompanied by full knowledge of the imperfections of past and present African communities. It is for that reason that Achebe has been a vigorous critic of Nigerian and African governments – in such books as The Trouble with Nigeria 37 – as much as he has been a critic of the conquering, enslaving and colonising Euro-American global establishment. In his novels and essays, Achebe has critiqued the tyranny of African despots and the corruption of the political and economic elite in post-colonial Africa. The enslavement of Africans and the colonisation of their countries must not be forgotten, but African political, intellectual and economic elites should not be allowed to use victimhood to escape accountability for their corruption, greed, despotism and crimes against humanity. Notably, when Achebe treats the subject of Africa and Africans and the need for a recovery from a history of humiliation, he begins from his

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personal experience and example as an ordinary African. In Achebe, there is no tendency to install himself on an elitist pedestal that would remove him from the condition and responsibility of the common African. The philosopher of liberation is one with his people and speaks as one of them who cannot be excused from the struggle: I for one would not wish to be excused. I would be quite satisfied if my novels, especially the ones set in the past, did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.38

Achebe took seriously the role of the African writer as a teacher. The essay ‘The novelist as a teacher’ clarifies Achebe’s experience and understanding of himself as one with his people, but also their teacher – one who is charged with the responsibility to alert them to some truths, past, present and future.39 One such truth is the racist way in which the colonisers and enslavers falsified the history of the colonised. Eric Williams noted with clarity that there was a kin wish among enslavers and colonisers to have the conquered believe that slavery and colonialism were blessings that brought them the greatest gift of life: God and salvation.40 For that reason, thinkers and writers of Africa have a duty to explode the myth that the African past was a sordid nightmare from which kindly Europeans woke them up to a day of light and hope. African historians like Bethwell Ogot have insisted that Africans need to ‘give credit to their past’ and take pride in the truth that their ancestors were human beings and not the savages that colonialist historiography is wont to portray them as.41 Achebe felt the urge to join African historians, educators and other philosophers of liberation in awakening Africans to some crimes against their history and humanity. He also took responsibility for reminding Africans that there is a future ahead, beyond colonial injuries. So far, this chapter has explored the experience and conditions of racialisation and marginality that formed Achebe into a decolonial thinker. For Achebe, the experience of having one’s humanity questioned, along with the historicity of Africa, became a decolonising and politicising encounter that made him see his confrontation of Eurocentric racism and coloniality as a mission – and not a simple literary profession. From here, the chapter will examine the decolonial theoretical and philosophical perspective from which the decoloniality of Achebe, and his vision of a dialogue of civilisations in the world, is read. 83

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THE DECOLONIAL PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE That Achebe became a compelling African philosopher is competently pressed home by Okolo.42 What Okolo does not illuminate is what kind of philosopher Achebe became. My take in this chapter is that Achebe became a philosopher of liberation who did not have time to delve into the disciplinarity of philosophy, but who pondered liberation as a vocation. The philosophy of those who experience the world from the aftermath of slavery and colonialism cannot just be the proverbial love for wisdom, or philosophy for philosophy’s sake in search of the true, the beautiful and the good: it has to ponder domination and imagine liberation. Achebe became that kind of philosopher, who thought from the colonial wound, and spoke about healing and recovery. The philosophy of liberation is even more urgent in an Africa where colonialism seems to be refusing to die and be buried, even after colonial anthems are silenced, colonial flags have been lowered and colonial administrators are gone. Long after the dethronement of administrative colonialism in Africa, Ng˜ug˜ı insisted on the need for Africans to decolonise their minds, because there was something about colonialism that remained in the minds and lives of the formly colonised – even after formal colonialism itself had collapsed. Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist and philosopher, described this remnant of colonialism and the endurance of the colonial conditions and relations as ‘coloniality’.43 In our case, coloniality refers to the way colonialism and its effects remain an economic, political and cultural reality after the political independence of African countries. Mignolo, an Argentinean semiotician and philosopher, has also argued that coloniality is ingrained in the very substance of Western modernity, with Western life, history and knowledge paraded as the only life, history and knowledge under the sun.44 To Mignolo, all other peoples of the world, who live under conditions of the conquered and the marginalised, are experiencing the ‘darker side of Western modernity’ as peripherised and dispensable lives.45 After all, ‘1492  gave the world a centre and a periphery’, and ‘the basic reason why we have accepted the idea of European historical superiority is Eurocentric diffusionism’, which is ‘a matter of methodology, ideology, and implicit theory, not empirical evidence’.46 In other words, the superiority of Europe is a construction, and so is the inferiority of other peoples and other parts of the world. For this reason, Europe and the Euro-American Empire at large have subjected the rest of the world to violent impositions and dominations.47 Slavery, colonialism and imperialism have all been justified on the grounds that the enslaved and the colonised peoples of the world

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are inferior and lesser beings compared to those of the imperial centre. The inferiorisation of Africa and its people, tellingly, became one of the capital provocations to Achebe’s philosophy of liberation. In its insistence that coloniality survives colonialism, the decolonial philosophical perspective –helps us understand philosophers of liberation such as Achebe, who had to ponder how racism, colonial stereotypes and the inferiorisation of Africans continued after the political independence of African countries. Achebe can be understood as epistemically disobedient in the way he made it his mission to expose racist myths about Africa in English literature. Comfortable in his use of English cultural tools while negating coloniality and its racism, Achebe adopted a more liberating political attitude than that of Third-World fundamentalists. In effect, Achebe embodied what Dussel, another philosopher of liberation, called transmodernity – a decolonial attitude of scholars and activists of the Global South who not only negate coloniality but also claim their share of life, culture, knowledge and resources in the modern world.48  By translating Igbo proverbs into English and domesticating the English language in Africa, Achebe made Igbo and African knowledge part of what Sousa Santos called the ‘ecology of knowledges’ of the world.49 Getting the Igbo and African proverbial sensibility to dialogue with Eurocentrism in his literature has been part of Achebe’s decolonial achievement, whereby he has managed to erect Igbo and African cosmology as one amongst other cosmologies in the world – and not the universe of superstitions and barbarisms that the colonialists alleged.

ACHEBE’S DECOLONIAL POLITICS OF IN THINGS FALL APART Achebe’s collection of essays, which contains his important essay ‘Impediments to dialogue between north and south’, was published in 1989. This essay is central to the argument of the present chapter. The essay summarises Achebe’s attitude to politics, philosophy and life in postcolonial Africa. In contrast to the arguments of such influential thinkers and writers as Huntington about the import of a clash of civilisations in the world, Achebe proposes dialogue and conversation instead of war and the clash of cultures. The privileging of a dialogue of humanities and cultures in the world places Achebe in the realm of decolonial and transmodernity philosophers who argue for a ‘philosophy of liberation’ that is opposed to war and inclined to human conversations that sustain rather than threaten life. The privileging of the ‘will to life’, by

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Dussel and others, directly confronts the paradigm of war that is extolled by such Eurocentric philosophers as Friedrich Nietzsche in his thesis on the ‘will to power’ and the nihilistic appreciation of war, violence and destruction in the world. Such critics of African literature as Emmanuel Obiechina have argued that the greatness and beauty of Achebe’s writing is in the ‘integrative technique in which background and atmosphere are interlaced with the action of the narrative’. Things Fall Apart is a pulsating classic of beauty and power.50 Abiola Irele has also influentially argued that in this novel, ‘cultural reference governs not merely the constitution of the novel’s fictional universe’, but also the ‘language appropriate to its setting’.51  While such readings of Achebe are important, they suffer the fault of concentrating on the bewitching impact of storytelling techniques and the descriptive drama at the expense of the meaning and philosophy of Achebe’s writing, which Okolo has so ably described. It is one of the arguments of the present chapter that the beautiful form and picturesque descriptions of Achebe’s works have stolen many a literary critic’s attention, at dear expense to his deep political and philosophical messages. Most of Achebe’s readers are carried away by the poetry, and leave unappreciated the philosophy of his literature and the power of his intellection. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe not only demonstrates how colonialism tore Africa apart, but also gestures to how the world can come together through the alternative dialogue of civilisations. By revealing the divisive evil of colonialism that tore societies apart, Achebe makes the necessity of dialogue important and visible. This chapter seeks to contribute to the recovery of Achebe’s political and philosophical message, which is summarised in his keen gesture on the dialogue of civilisations and culture in the world. Ali Mazrui also emphatically argued for what he ably called a ‘concord of civilisations’, where dialogue helps to get people of different religions, cultures and civilisations to be alive to each other’s humanity and place under the sun.52 For the weighty messages that they have advanced in describing the human condition in Africa and emphatically shaping world views,Okolo has argued that Achebe and Ng˜ ug˜ı belong among African political philosophers.53 Things Fall Apart – a novel that perhaps takes a front seat in Achebe’s body of fiction – describes the disruptive arrival of colonialism and colonists in the precolonial village of Umuofia in Nigeria. African village life is described in terms of the values of hard work, courage and patriotism. The hero of the novel, Okonkwo, rises from the ashes of poverty and his father’s laziness to become a titled man, a wrestler, a warrior and a farmer. The novel is set during the time of colonial invasions in Africa,

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and begins with an arresting description of the self-building of Okonkwo, who became ‘well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond’.54  William Mpofu describes this as follows:

Okonkwo became ‘impatient with less successful men’. Frequently he got into trouble with village laws as he bites his wife during the ‘week of peace’ and accidentally kills another person, earning himself seven years of exile to his mother’s homeland as punishment. Chief among the many misfortunes that befall Okonkwo is the speedy conversion of his first born son Nwoye into the new religion of the invading white settlers, who admit him into their school and name him Isaac after the biblical son of Abraham. [It is] as if success paves the road that leads Okonkwo back to the lowly destiny of his father, after killing a colonial messenger and committing suicide.55

In Okonkwo, Achebe portrays a hero who builds himself into a role model and a setter of standards for success – before it was redefined by the invading colonists, who brought in a new religion and a new education system that imparted importance to otherwise untitled men and women, including Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, who became the first convert to the new religion and was renamed Isaac after the biblical son of Abraham. Colonialism perpetrates violence on this society as it turns the tables and introduces previously unknown values. The naming of Okonkwo’s son after a biblical patriarch is a direct confrontation of the world represented by Okonkwo, who was a patriarch in his own right in his own space, and who had a sacred religious role among the ‘egwugwu’ spiritual guardians of the land. On the politics of language and language as politics, Achebe gestures towards a typical decolonial transmodernity by asking: Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It  looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given a language and I intend to use it … I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit new African surroundings.56

To discipline the received English language, hammering and chiselling at it to obey African expression, is an act of epistemic disobedience to English culture and sensibility. The colonial language is turned into ‘a new English’

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that is used by a decolonial African thinker to sustain a dialogue and ‘communion’ of cultures and civilisations in the world. To boycott the language would be to shy away from a global dialogue. Further, appropriation of the colonial language helps Africans of different languages to converse, and also to write and speak truth to Empire in the language of Empire. This is actually rebellious decoloniality, ‘and let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English’, because ‘we intend to do unheard of things’ with it.57  The unheard of-things include walloping Empire, using its grammar, which has been decolonised and weaponised, against it. To Achebe and other decolonial thinkers, that which has purchase – and carries political and philosophical import – is not the English language as a vehicle of messages and meaning, like any other language, but the decolonial philosophy and attitude that it transports and distributes, even in the service of rebuking the Empire to which it belongs. In demonstrating Achebe’s transmodern decolonial attitude, the title of the novel Things Fall Apart is derived from a poem by the British poet William Butler Yeats, ‘The second coming’. Achebe delinks from the original sentiment of the poem by Yeats and uses the poetic line to debunk the vandalising nature of conquest and colonialism that dismembered and tore apart African traditional communities, polities and economies. Delinking is the decolonial political and philosophical habit of resisting imposed meanings and constructing messages and meanings from local experience. True to delinking, Achebe argues that ‘every literature must seek the things that belong unto its peace’, and if it is good literature, it must ‘speak of a particular place, evolve out of the necessities of its history, past and current’ and, fundamentally, it must reflect the ‘aspirations and destiny of its people’.58 A poetic line by Yeats is used to frame a story that unmasks the criminality of the culture and history that Yeats represents. In that way, Achebe engages in the dialogue of cultures and histories with English sensibility. While Achebe privileges a dialogue of civilisations at a global level, he does not uproot himself from the local experience, history and sensibility. Located in the South, in Africa, and debating the North, Achebe gets Africa involved in a world conversation as an authentic and proud interlocutor who will not be silenced. Achebe is arguing for a decolonial ‘ecology of knowledges’, which Arturo Escobar says is ‘knowledges and worlds otherwise’, where all different ‘knowledges’ can co-exist without violence to each other.59 Achebe’s crowning argument is as follows: I should like to see the word ‘universal’ banned altogether from discussions

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of African literature until such a time as people cease to use it as a synonym

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extends to include all the world.60

The horizons of modernity and knowledge must be expanded beyond the European and the Eurocentric view of life and the world. Achebe defends this transmodernity and pluriversality of thought when he argues, ‘Americans have their vision;we have ours.’61 He insists that ‘we do not claim that ours is superior, we only ask to keep it, for as our forefathers said, in their wisdom: The firewood which a people have is adequate for the kind of cooking they do’.62 Achebe not only challenges the imposition of thinking and knowledge from Europe, but insists that European thinking and knowledge must converse, dialogue and co-exist with local knowledges, in what Sousa Santos calls the ‘ecologies of knowledges’.63 Achebe successfully enforces dialogue and exchange on an Empire that, otherwise, rules through monologue and imposition on the oppressed others. It is easy to mistake Achebe’s decolonial transmodernity, delinking and pluriversality for nativism and essentialised particularism of the local at the expense of the global and the universal. However, the argument of the present article is that Achebe extols a universalism that is enriched by particularism, as eloquently described by Aimé Césaire: ‘Provincialism? Absolutely not.’ Instead: ‘I’m not going to confine myself to some narrow particularism. But nor do I intend to lose myself in a disembodied universalism.’ Césaire prefers an ‘idea of the universal’ and ‘a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all particulars, the deepening and coexistence of all particulars’.64 Only universality that respects localities and particularities can enable the civilisations and cultures of the world to have a planetary conversation that makes Huntington’s clash of civilisations unnecessary. Achebe has erected an emphatic concern with ‘the image of Africa’ and how it has been distorted and disfigured by Eurocentric thinkers and writers.65 The concern of Achebe with the ‘image of Africa’ is comparable to the dedication to the image of Asia and the Eastern world that Said explained in his classic, Orientalism. The Congolese philosopher Valentine Mudimbe, similar to Achebe, has also dedicated passionate effort to examining ‘the invention of Africa’ by Europeans and Africans themselves.66 In Mudimbe’s argument, Africa has been subject to contesting imaginations and fabrications; hence the need for a decolonisation by Africans of how Africa is thought of and written about. In time and in place, Africa, like any other continent of the world, still remains an idea. The important decision is whose idea of Africa Africans should adopt: theirs or those of

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for the narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe, until their horizon

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the imperialists and colonialists? In the view of the writer of the present chapter, Achebe locates himself among the philosophers of the world who have concerned themselves with the decolonisation of knowledge, and the defence of the being and image of the colonised. In the league of Said and Mudimbe, Achebe has invested in encouraging a dialogue rather than a clash of civilisations in the world. In a novel way, Things Fall Apart is not so much about the falling apart of the order of things, but how the falling apart must lead to a coming together through dialogue of civilisations, after a long and dark history of conquest and coloniality. The tragic way in which the novel ends – with the suicide of Okonkwo after he kills a black colonial messenger – symbolises the self-crucifixion of a warrior of liberation who dies with coloniality and whose death portends a resurrection in liberation. Okonkwo’s death is a text within the dialogue of civilisations. The suicide of Okonkwo symbolises the self-sacrifice of the oppressed, whose death signifies the death of coloniality that must usher in a decolonial, pluriversal and transmodern era and order of things.

CONCLUSION In summation, this chapter has argued, contrary to the influential argument that the world’s cultures and civilisations necessarily gravitate towards conflict and war, that Achebe has installed a compelling argument for a dialogue of civilisations and cultures. The philosophical and political thought of Achebe, read from a decolonial critical perspective, appears to privilege decolonial transmodernity and epistemic disobedience, and is trained towards sustaining an ecology of knowledges in the world. Chinua Achebe’s vivid argument for ‘a dialogue between North and South’ in the world belongs to a philosophical tradition that privileges conversations as opposed to war and nihilism. In the fashion of philosophers such as Dussel, who has argued for a philosophy of liberation and a will for life, Achebe privileges the liberation and humanisation of all citizens of the world, in a new pluriversal world that would be free of coloniality.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

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1

Huntington, S.P., 1993. The clash of civilisations? Foreign Affairs, 73(3), pp.22–49.

2

Achebe, C., 1989. Impediments to dialogue between north and south. In Hopes and impediments: selected essays. London: Doubleday Books, pp.21–29.

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Okolo, M.S.C., 2007. African literature as political philosophy. Dakar: CODESRIA.

4

Achebe, C., 1958. Things fall apart. Oxford: Heinemann Publishers.

5

Mignolo, W.D., 2009. Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture and Society, 26(7–8), pp.1–2.

6

Achebe, C., 1989. Hopes and impediments: selected essays. London: Doubleday Books, p.1.

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3

Mpofu, W., 2014. A decolonial ‘African mode of self-writing’: the case of Chinua Achebe in Things fall apart. New Contree, 69, pp.1–25.

8

Memmi, A., 1974. The coloniser and the colonised. New York: Earthscan.

9

Achebe, C., 1964. The African writer and the English language. In Morning yet on creation day: essays. London: Heineman, p.47–59.

10 Achebe. C., 2009. The education of a British protected child. London: Penguin Books. 11 Mbembe, A., 2002. On the power of the false. Public Culture, 14–3, pp.629–641, p.629. 12 Grosfoguel, R., 2008. Transmodernity, border thinking, and global coloniality: decolonising political economy and postcolonial studies. Available at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-07-04-grosfoguel-en.html [Accessed 15 May 2019]. 13 Ng˜ ug˜ı wa, 2009. Remembering Africa. Dar es Salaam: Basic Civitas Books, p.73. 14 Mpofu, A decolonial ‘African mode of self-writing’. Op. cit., p.4. 15 Achebe, Things fall apart. Op. cit., p.2. 16 Achebe, C., 1977. An image of Africa and the trouble with Nigeria. Johannesburg: Penguin Books, p.29. 17 Dabash, H., 2015. Can non-Europeans think? London: Zed Books. 18 Achebe, An image of Africa. Op. cit. 19 Gordon, L.R., 2011. Shifting the geography of reason in an age of disciplinary decadence. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1(2), 95–103. 20 Sousa Santos, B.de, 2014. Epistemologies of the South: justice against epistemicides. London: Paradigm Publishers, p.120. 21 Ibid. 22 Maldonado-Torres, N., 2007. On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21(2), pp.240–270. 23 Fanon, F., 1967. The wretched of the earth. Translated by Farrington, C. New York: Grove Press, p.169. 24 Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South. Op. cit. 25 Quijano, A., 2000. Coloniality of power, Eurocentricism and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), pp.533–580, p.556.

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26 Said, E., 1978. Orientalism. London: Penguin Classics. 27 Memmi, The coloniser and the colonised. Op. cit., p.123. 28 Achebe, Impediments to dialogue between north and south. Op. cit., p.26. 29 Douglass, F., 1983. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. New York: Penguin Books, p.57. 30 Achebe, Hopes and impediments. Op. cit., p.44. 31 Ng˜ ug˜ı wa, 1997. Writers in politics: A re-engagement with issues of literature and society. Nairobi: Heinemann, p.67. 32 Dussel, E., 1985. Philosophy of liberation. New York: Orbis Books. 33 Achebe, Hopes and impediments. Op. cit., p.15. 34 Ibid., p.84. 35 Dussel, Philosophy of liberation. Op. cit. 36 Ibid., p.43. 37 Achebe, C., 1984. The trouble with Nigeria. Oxford: Heinemann. 38 Achebe, Hopes and impediments. Op. cit., p.45. 39 Ibid., p.40. 40 Williams, E., 1964. Capitalism and slavery. London: Andre Deutsch. 41 Ogot, B., 1999. Building on the indigenous: selected essays. Nairobi: Regal Press, p.114. 42 Okolo, African literature as political philosophy. Op. cit. 43 Quijano, Coloniality of power, Op. cit., p.567. 44 Mignolo, D.W., 2011. The darker side of Western modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, p.2. 45 Mignolo, Epistemic disobedience. Op. cit. 46 Blaut, J.M., 1993. The colonizer’s model of the world. New York: The Guilford Press, p.2, p.4. 47 Grosfoguel, R., 2012. Decolonising Western universalism: decolonial pluriversalism from Aime Cesaire to the Zapatistas. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(3), pp.87–104. 48 Dussel, E., 2002. World-system and ‘trans’-modernity. Nepantla: Views from South, 3(2): 221–242, p.233. 49 Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South. Op. cit., p.28. 50 Obiechina, E., 1975. Culture, society and the West African novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.142. 51 Irele, A., 1981. The African experience in literature and ideology. Bloomington: Indiana Press. 52 Mazrui, A., 2007. Islam between clash and concord of civilisations: changing relations between the Muslim world and the United States. Independent Thinking on Foreign Affairs, 1, pp.1–16.

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54 Achebe, Things fall apart. Op. cit., p.1. 55 Mpofu, A decolonial ‘African mode of self-writing’. Op. cit., p.19. 56 Achebe, The African writer and the English language. Op. cit., p.47. 57 Achebe, The trouble with Nigeria. Op. cit., p.74. 58 Achebe, Hopes and impediments. Op. cit., p.74.

A Dialogue of Civilisations

53 Okolo, African literature as political philosophy. Op. cit.

59 Escobar, A., 2007. Worlds and knowledges otherwise. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), pp.179–210, p.179. 60 Achebe, Hopes and impediments. Op. cit., p.76. 61 Ibid., p.88. 62 Mpofu, A decolonial ‘African mode of self-writing’. Op. cit., p.23. 63 Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South. Op. cit. 64 Césaire, A., 1972. Discourse on colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, p.26. 65 Achebe, An image of Africa. Op. cit. 66 Mudimbe, V.Y., 1988. The invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge. London: Indiana University Press.

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On African-American Consciousness of Africa Reading Bernard Magubane’s The Ties That Bind Bongani Nyoka The Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education Studies and the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

ABSTRACT This chapter is based on Bernard Magubane’s book The Ties That Bind: African-American Consciousness of Africa. and, specifically, seeks to understand Magubane’s thought in his study of African-American consciousness of Africa. Generally, the chapter revisits the objectives of black radical thought. In so doing, the chapter attempts to highlight the fact that such objectives were never quite achieved, and that the problems confronting Africans and African-Americans today require that the objectives of the black radical tradition be revisited. Finally, the chapter concludes with some methodological and epistemological lessons to be drawn from Magubane’s work.

INTRODUCTION Bernard Magubane is much better known amongst South African intellectuals for his essays in which he: (1) critiques alterity in the discipline of anthropology and (2) criticises the illegitimate regime of apartheid South Africa. In terms of his books, Magubane’s South African audience know him for his seminal text The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa.1 This partial or otherwise limited awareness of his work is due, in part, to the ‘intellectual erasure and elective amnesia with which the works of scholars like Bernard Magubane are met in the mainstream South African social science’.2 The second reason is that Magubane spent the best part of his academic career as an exiled intellectual living in the USA. It is partly 94

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for these two reasons that Magubane’s oeuvre is not fully appreciated in the South African academy. This chapter focuses on one of the underappreciated aspects of Magubane’s work, viz. The Ties That Bind: African-American Consciousness of Africa.3 In his study, Magubane pursues, inter alia, the following themes: (1) ideological issues involved in the distorted portrayal of Africa; (2) an analysis of the stereotypes about Africa; (3) the ideology of racism and how it equates supposed black inferiority with the putative backwardness of the African continent; (4) the genealogy of Africanism among AfricanAmericans; (5) Garveyism and its ‘Back to Africa’ movement; and (6) the related idea of Pan-Africanism, which gave material expression to the movement of Marcus Garvey. This chapter deals with each of these issues in its proper course.

THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND THE IMAGE OF AFRICA IN HISTORY In The Ties That Bind, Magubane sets out to understand ‘the historical significance of the relationship of black Americans to Africa’.4 However, it is important to note that, in doing so, he does not necessarily attempt to present a history of African-American opinions about Africa. Rather, the point of conducting the study in the first instance was to ‘interpret’ for the reader certain ideas held by African-Americans about Africa. Thus, Magubane confesses, the theme of this study, the Afro-American consciousness of Africa, is nothing but the interpretation of the black man’s responses to certain cultural and historical premises, established by his captors, and upon which black selfcontempt was built.5 

Yet before anything at all can be said about the African-American consciousness of Africa, one ought to understand the image of Africa bequeathed to African-Americans by their captors. In doing so, one is able to appreciate the root causes of black people’s inferiority complex and self-hatred. Despite the ‘black man’s self-contempt’, Magubane still insists that African-Americans did not eschew their African background: instead, they rejected the images assigned to Africa by their captors. Magubane argues that the question of the importance of Africa to African-Americans remained unsettled for some time. Apart from the lack of a ‘consensual view’ on how precisely the African background of

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African-Americans affects their identity crisis, there was no consensus on whether Africa had anything whatever to do with African-Americans’ selfconception and how they are conceived by the white world. For Magubane, there existed a perception in the Western world that Africa was the land of primitive people. Such a view was surely likely to affect the way black people thought of the African continent. In cases where African-Americans were considered inferior, their inferiority was typically associated with Africa and her people. The assumption had been that African-Americans inherited their inferiority complex from Africa and that the said inferiority could be used to explain ‘certain genetic defects’ that black people in the USA inherited from their kith and kin in Africa. This negative view of Africa was not only limited to how African-Americans were treated, but also found expression in imperialist interests of the West and ‘the rationalisations of slavery and oppression of descendants of Africa in their lands of captivity’.6 In this regard, African-American concerns about Africa and its redemption bear testimony to the view that African-Americans had no hope in America. Nor was it possible for African-Americans to love America and love their African forefathers at the same time. Before anything at all can be said about the connection between AfricanAmericans and the African continent, several issues ought to be mentioned: (1) the enslavement of black people and the pillage of the African continent were carried out through ersatz philosophical, sociological and psychological theories, which attributed notions of inferiority to Africa and her people; (2) the said theories and the actions of the white captors and colonisers were such that African-Americans were ambivalent in their consciousness of Africa; and (3) understood in its historical perspective, the assumptions of white colonisers about Africa go some way toward explaining the genesis and continuity of feelings of self-contempt, inferiority and estrangement from Africa on the part of African-Americans. For Magubane, this also explains the continued self-discovery on the part of African-Americans – from coloured to Negro, and Afro-American to black and African-American. Further, the lack of autonomy and control over historical and cultural destiny on the part of African-Americans can be explained, in part, by their lack of political and economic clout, because of slavery and adverse inclusion in the capitalist world order. Their persecution was not only physical, but also ideological. This meant that they negated their own civilisation. To understand this point, one must recall that the point of racism in the first instance is to infuse in the recipient a sense of self-contempt. Herein lies the problem of identity on the part of African-Americans.

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To the extent that white people enjoyed general hegemony over the world, black people were denied the opportunity to cultivate an identity within themselves. Thus, the African-American’s ambivalence towards Africa ought to be understood historically and sociologically. The violent way the identity of African-Americans was constituted meant that they could not create proper ties with Africans on the continent, but only with their captors, something which led to further alienation. The more severe effects of this scenario led ‘to the rejection of the African past, even to the name Afro-American’.7 The acceptance of what Magubane calls ‘compulsory deculturation’ (e.g. the label ‘Negro’) meant that African-Americans assumed an identity estranged from Africa. As such, the main thrust of Magubane’s study is to interpret and analyse what he calls the ‘ambivalence’ in the African-American consciousness of Africa. According to him, ‘black nationalism’ has always been an important source of inspiration in the efforts of African-Americans to attain full citizenship in American society. Yet for most African-Americans, ‘black nationalism’ remains both inconceivable as well as unrealisable. Paradoxically, instead of giving hope to African-Americans, it subverted their hopes and led them to despair. It came across as a kind of truth that was ‘too terrible to be believed’.8 Moreover, Magubane argues, the fact that black nationalism lacks a territorial base is a further complication, because the American black has no felt relationship to Western history, though he has been part of it for over three centuries. His nationalism springs from a never-never land, according to its critics, and leads nowhere.9 

Magubane argues that to validate his ‘black nationalism’, in the absence of a ‘territorial base’, the African-American invokes the ‘African past’. This presents another paradox, in that the very idea of black inferiority is linked to the same African past invoked by the ‘black nationalist’. To invoke past achievements and African civilisation is of little relevance when everything associated with it in the present is said to be inferior and backward. Further, Magubane observes that the history of Africa was not readily accessible to African-Americans without ‘extensive learning’. Nor does it form part of the African-American everyday folklore. Instead, when the African-American child encounters African history, he or she does so at school and only encounters its negative aspects. Nor does the rest of the African-American community find comfort in the negative African history so portrayed. The immediate reaction, therefore, is to dissociate with Africa and her past. For Magubane, this means that the African-American ‘has a

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perpetual question about who he is’.10 This must be so, because not only was African-Americans’ history denied by American society; they were also denied the opportunity to immerse themselves organically and naturally in the said society. This alienated African-Americans from themselves, but also alienated them from society at large – hence the constant search for the self. Although ‘black nationalists’ were supposed to be conscious of Africa, they were nevertheless ambivalent about it. For Magubane, to acknowledge this point is not enough, because it leaves a crucial question unanswered: ‘Is black nationalism legitimate in a nation which is described as a melting pot?’11 Surely the answer to this question ought to be in the affirmative, because although African-Americans were granted formal freedom more than a century ago, this did not necessarily lead to social integration, but rather to ‘social rejection’, as Magubane puts it.12 Where African-Americans were included, they were included only in abject terms. Although they gained freedom, they were left grappling with the question of belonging. They were legally free, but their views and opinions were insignificant and their actions ineffective. In American society, African-Americans ‘are the one group that has suffered total social rejection, except in formal constitutional terms’.13 The fact that African-Americans were denied social equality meant that their social status in the American society was comparable to that of Africans on the continent. The post-independence African state and its diplomatic missions in the USA refocused the question of abject inclusion of African-Americans. In doing so, it rekindled the ties that bind Africans and African-Americans. What makes these ties much stronger is the position occupied by both the African and the African-American in the global political economy. In this system, their position is that of an ‘exploited class’ that is denied ‘social acceptance’. Magubane argues that, in theory, black people were part of the global working class just insofar as they served as a source of cheap exploited labour; in practice, however, the global working class did not fully recognise the black worker. Instead, black workers ‘became the source of superprofits, the victims of physical oppression, social ostracism, economic exclusion, and personal hatred’.14 In The Making of a Racist State, Magubane argues that forced black labour in the USA took place right after the abolition of slavery. 15 The way in which African-Americans have been portrayed in history and, in turn, their attitude towards Africa, need to be understood in conjunction with the general Western portrayal of Africa and the attitudes towards her.

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Thus, the alienation of African-Americans in American society ought to be understood as being directly linked to Anglo-Saxon race theories, which stated that black people could not be considered socially equal to white people. This meant that black people were to occupy the position of secondclass citizens. On the one hand, black people not only came to reject their past, but also rejected their blackness. They ‘tried to be more white than the whites themselves’.16 This goes to the roots of the psychological dimensions of racial oppression. On the other hand, however:

inferiority and specifically against the image of the depravity of Africa and its people. The historical development of its struggle in the era of universal prejudice against Africa and its people is one of the greatest human efforts of all time.17 

At the level of epistemology, Magubane invokes the sociology of knowledge and argues that, in order to understand the identity crisis and ambivalence of African-Americans, one must study the societal conditions that inform their world views. Sociologically, what gives people a sense of who they are is their history. Individuals acquire their identities in relation to the broader society. This involves both social and psychological factors, which are, in turn, reflective of structural influences. Moreover, included in the sociological and psychological factors just mentioned are philosophical questions relating to people’s existential outlook on the world. It should be noted that all these factors tend to change as the situation of black people changes. In this regard, to get a richer understanding of black people, one ought to study how the ‘redemption’ of African people has been linked to the liberation of black people in the diaspora historically. The argument has always been that once Africa regains her dignity, AfricanAmericans will regain theirs. Magubane calls this a dialectical relationship between African-Americans and Africans in their quest for identity. For Magubane, the ever-present dialectic of ‘black nationalism’ and consciousness of Africa on the part of African-Americans is not an aberration that can be easily dismissed. Indeed, the recurrence of the said dialectic is at odds with the view that the only connections between African-Americans and Africans are physical phenotypes. Incidentally, Magubane’s contemporary, Archie Mafeje, endorses the latter position by arguing that historically, culturally and socially, African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean people can no longer be considered Africans.18  99

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There is no gainsaying the fact that African-Americans are Americans. The point, however, seems to turn on the question of history. For example, Magubane accepts as ‘self-evident the fact that the American black is an American’.19  Yet for African-Americans to realise their American-ness, they ought to realise certain economic and social ‘truths’. The fact that African-Americans are alienated from themselves and the rest of American society is a result of economic exploitation and years of dehumanisation. So, the yearning to reconnect with the African past ought to be viewed in this context. Significantly, the oppression of black people is not something that can be understood purely in psychological terms. It has historical roots dating back to the point of encounter between black people and white people. This, Magubane argues, requires that historical, objective and subjective factors be studied and understood concomitantly. He states that ‘black nationalism’ became one of the most important political forces to come out of AfricanAmerican society.20 What makes it important is not whether it succeeded or failed, or whether it was embraced or not, but rather that ‘it corresponds with the objective and subjective conditions of the times it was born’.21 Over and above that, its importance lies in the fact that it views the liberation of African-Americans as intrinsically linked to the liberation of Africans and other oppressed peoples of the world. Whether negative or positive, ‘black nationalism’ and African consciousness have direct relevance to the identity of African-Americans and their objective conditions in the West. In this regard, to study ‘black nationalism’ is also to study portraits of black people constructed by the white world in the imperial period. The portrayal of the African continent during that period prevented AfricanAmericans from having a positive image of the continent, or a positive image of themselves. Thus, ‘an historical understanding of white assumptions clarifies the birth, continuity, and meaning of self-hatred and lowered self-esteem’.22 Magubane argues that ‘black nationalism’ found a receptive audience among ‘lower-class blacks’. This enabled them to see the plight of black people as interconnected with the exploitation and oppression of all colonised people. The rise of black nationalism or Pan-Africanism/Garveyism in America and the Caribbean is a working example. The negative images of black people were such that ‘the Afro-American was never made to appear either in fiction or in the science of white writers (with a few exceptions) as a human being reacting to human situations and problems’.23 Lewis R Gordon makes a similar observation and argues that the unfortunate practice in the literature is to study black people not as people who face problems in their lives, but rather as problems in and

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of themselves.24 Magubane argues that in countries with enslaved people, there was always an attempt to make the world believe that the enslaved were sub-human. This was an attempt to not only justify and rationalise slavery, but also to make enslaved people accept the view that they are inferior. This view was enforced in various ways, either through religion or psychological violence. Magubane argues that the question of social order is at the centre of one’s identity. This social order is important in the sense of both one’s identity (i.e. the cognitive/substantive) and the evaluative. The former refers to who and what a person is, while the latter concerns questions of self-esteem and external recognition. One’s self-esteem is partly rooted in one’s place in the world and one’s role in it. Magubane argues that African-Americans have always had ‘a marginal and tenuous relationship’ with the American social structure – from the time they were uprooted from Africa to the time when they were treated as second-class citizens.25 This notwithstanding, identity is not static, but dynamic, and it changes and develops as individuals interact with the world. The ability to do so is as dependent on the individual as it is on the world. However, African-Americans, as a group, have lived in a society in which their efforts to develop and improve have always been thwarted and forestalled. The negative images that African-Americans came to hold about themselves induced negative images about Africa and her people. It is perhaps for this reason that Mafeje argues that African-Americans who visit Africa are both condescending to Africans and also find the latter ‘a bit strange’. According to Mafeje, ‘This is not simply a problem of false consciousness, as some idealist Pan-Africanists would like us to believe. Over time, the two cousins have grown apart and, in reality, their common identity cannot be assumed’.26  Mafeje’s frustrations are understandable. Yet they would appear to some readers to be as invidious as they are ahistorical. The problem of condescension on the part of African-Americans can only be intelligible when understood from the point of view of historical sociology. For Magubane, the view that African-Americans are better than Africans is traceable to the ‘moralistic rationale’ that ‘has become an ideology of absolution and a classical, psychological bulwark against the pangs of conscience which might have resulted from the betrayal and ill-treatment of blacks over the years’.27 The rejection of Africa by African-Americans ought to be understood in this context. Moreover, the oppression of black people in America coincided with the domination of Africa by Europe. For Magubane, this contributed to ‘moral and psychological despondency’ on the part of African-Americans.

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Significantly, the views held by white people about African-Americans and Africa go some way towards explaining African-Americans’ alienation from and ambivalence towards their African cultural roots. The dominance of white people’s ideas was so well established that it went unquestioned – so much so that all that was needed was to assimilate other groups into accepting such ideas. This is hardly surprising, given the enormity of the Atlantic slave trade, which lasted for about 250 years and involved about 40 million enslaved Africans. It is for this reason that Magubane says, ‘The legacy of slavery and degradation of Africa weighs like a curse on America.’28 Throughout the 250 years of the Atlantic slave trade, Africa was depicted as a place of savages, so that from the moment enslaved Africans arrived in the New World, their status as human beings was, in Magubane’s parlance, ‘probationary’. The African ‘was told that he was enslaved because he was less than human: inherently inferior, mentally primitive and emotionally underdeveloped’.29  Such views were put forward as though slavery was a favour granted to enslaved black people. Yet the woes of black people were a direct outcome of the Euro-American slave trade and racist American society. This meant that Europeans refused to question their own actions and therefore presented their history as the ‘history of self-praise’ and ‘adulation’. To engage in this practice was to justify white dominance. Slavery had been presented as something of a humanitarian and philanthropic intervention that rescued Africans from their supposed savagery. Colonialism and imperialism, too, were presented in similar ‘soothing terms’ and touted as the ‘white man’s burden’. This change took shape in earnest by the 1880s, following the Berlin Conference of 1884. This new arrangement was no mere coincidence. It took place right at the time when slavery had been abolished for moral, economic and technological reasons. This was a time when social Darwinism was ‘being misread and widely misapplied’ for political and economic reasons. The moralistic arguments presented for the abolition of slavery – in recognition of the dignity of black people – were countered with ‘a new system of cruelty to man: imperialism’.30 Imperialism drowned moralistic and humanitarian arguments with cold and selfish calculation. As a result, the period from 1880 to 1890 can be described as a scramble for Africa, as well as what Magubane calls ‘collective colonialism’. The term is quite appropriate when one considers the collective decision of the Berlin Conference of 1884, which set out to partition Africa for the benefit of European countries.

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Significant developments marked the latter half of the nineteenth century in the USA. The years between 1868  and 1876  saw a period of reconstruction, during which attempts were made to integrate black people into American society. This came hot on the heels of the Civil War of 1861 to 1865 and the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress in 1865, was part of an attempt to make black people fully fledged American citizens. The bureau’s task was to provide material and economic aid to black people. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1875, declaring that ‘all persons born in the United States, except untaxed Indians, were entitled to equality of treatment before the law, any “statute to the contrary notwithstanding”’.31 The most salient features of this Act stemmed from the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted citizenship to persons who were born or otherwise naturalised in the USA. No state was to violate the rights protected by this section of the Act. The Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 declared that neither the USA nor any one state could deny or abridge the right to vote on the grounds of skin colour. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 declared that no individual was to discriminate against black people in public spaces or in public carriers. The Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877  was signed against this background. This compromise provided for the withdrawal of Federal troops from Southern states. Despite the state of black people’s legal emancipation, the compromise meant that, in the succeeding years, black people were reduced to second-class citizens. By the turn of the century, this ‘was accepted by the presidency, the Supreme Court, Congress, and all other major institutions of the nation’.32 Thus, the period between 1877 and 1901 can be described as the lowest point in the African-American’s quest for equal rights. America’s attempt to integrate African-Americans into American society is an important historical episode. The attempt failed and the failure coincided with the period of imperialism. Along with WEB Du Bois, Magubane argues that the last two decades of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century can be summed up in one word – Empire. This period saw the domination of Africa and Asia by Europe, as well as industrialism expelling African-Americans from the American democracy. Outside the US borders, American imperialism extended to the Pacific and the Caribbean. Effectively, this meant that some eight million people in these regions were under USA jurisdiction. This was the ‘totality’ of the black condition in the era of imperialism. Magubane notes, for example, that knowledge produced about Africa in Europe in the late nineteenth and

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early twentieth century went far beyond what any European colonial power could have thought. It not only influenced white people in America, but also shaped relations between black and white people more generally. Black people in the USA came to hold the same views about Africa as those held by white people. This suited the white establishment in the period of imperialism. The rise of Anglo-Saxon expansionism and chauvinism in the 1800s, both in England and in the US, justified and rationalised the domination of blacks by whites. When properly understood, this means that ‘the tragedy of emancipation was not that it was immature, but that it was premature’.33 

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It is in light of these events, ideas and prejudices against black people that ‘the phenomenon of Garvey’ must be understood. Indeed, it can be said without exaggeration that what became known as Garveyism acted as a kind of deus ex machina. Millions of black people responded positively to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Its newspaper, The Negro World, was widely read. The reach of the UNIA went beyond the borders of the USA. Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and president of Ghana, acknowledged Garvey, as much as he acknowledged Du Bois, for having awakened him politically. In South Africa, Clements Kadalie, the founding leader of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, credits Garvey and the UNIA with having influenced him. Magubane argues that neither during the Civil War nor during the Reconstruction period were African-Americans emancipated. As such, the Garvey movement sought to remedy these deficiencies. African-Americans’ plight, as referred to by Magubane, was so severe that, as late as the 1960s, this group was still fighting for the right to vote and other basic civil rights. The structural position of black people in America was such that ‘it induce[d] and fostered a kind of black consciousness’.34 Garvey was not only a product of the hegemonic white society that he critiqued so mercilessly; he also became its antithesis. Garvey became a nuisance, not only to whites, but also to the black middle class. What made matters worse for the latter was that they were largely composed of mixed-race people, or the ‘mulatto’ in Magubane’s parlance, and they considered Garvey a ‘hater’. During Garvey’s time, to be mixed-race was better than being considered ‘pure black’. Yet, despite Garvey’s views on mixed-race people, he was nevertheless anti-imperialist and emphasised racial pride. The view that he was racist must be understood as an outcome

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of the society in which he lived. Garveyism was ab initio a movement of the proletariat. Awakening human hope and triumph was the movement’s raison d’être. For Magubane, this movement reawakened African-Americans’ sense of history, nationality and origin. Magubane argues that these sentiments and emotions ‘cannot be explained by the personality of the leader’.35  What matters is the type of actions they produced. Generally, Magubane attempted to construct a social history from the standpoint of oppressed black people. Garveyism became a powerful ideology and political weapon for African-Americans. It re-emphasised the oppression and exploitation of black people by white people in the New World, Europe and Africa. It called into question America’s narcissistic notion of being the ‘foremost Western democracy’ and her supposed mission to uplift poverty-stricken Africans. Black people outside the USA felt American imperialism as acutely as those inside the country. Jim Crow laws in the South were such that they ‘squeezed’ black people ‘out of electoral politics in order to force them back into peonage on the plantation’.36 In the North, which was considered to be comparatively better than the South, black people lived in ‘atrocious slums’.37 Lynch mobs (the Ku Klux Klan) set out to crush the movement and diminish its importance. Proof of the American government’s hypocrisy and narcissism is its involvement in World War I to ‘save democracy’; 38 yet in its own backyard, African-Americans were widely oppressed and denied the same democratic ideals the American government claimed to defend. To add insult to injury, African-Americans were enlisted in the US army and shipped to Europe as ‘cannon fodder’. Although they diligently and heroically fought for the rights of others in World War I, they returned to the USA to face the worst atrocities perpetrated against them. World War I not only served as a wake-up call to black people; it also entrenched their social and political alienation. For Magubane, the foregoing discussion of the African-American, before and after World War I, is crucial for understanding the context that led to the rise of the Garvey movement. The empty promises made by the US ruling class served only to strengthen the resolve of black people. The black working class and their middle-class counterparts spoke with one voice against ‘colonial structures of oppression and dehumanisation’.39 All these factors combined to strengthen and spread the anti-imperialism of the Garvey movement. Although the Garvey movement had grown exponentially, it was, as Magubane would have it, ‘a financial disaster’. This led to Garvey associating with the Ku Klux Klan, something that most black people and intellectuals could not fathom or countenance. However, if one considers the dehumanisation of blacks in America during Garvey’s time,

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the history of slavery and the subsequent atrocities, and the negative portrayal of Africa by the white man, one begins to appreciate the significance of the Garvey movement in restoring the dignity of black people. Garvey’s ideas and philosophy shaped African-American nationalist and cultural aspirations. Of course, there are other black historical figures, such as Du Bois, George Padmore, Bishop Turner, Carter G Woodson, and Aimé Césaire. To extol the virtues of the Garvey movement is not to deny the importance and the role played by other black resistance movements. The point is that Garveyism ‘introduced qualitative changes’. For Magubane [It is] important sociologically to establish a point at which the structure of a particular society makes it imperative that a people have a messiah, who transforms situationally transcendent ideas into a force leading to the transformation of the existing order.40

As noted above, there were many black leaders besides Garvey. Magubane singles out Du Bois and Booker T Washington as two leaders who exemplified ‘the era of unchallenged white supremacy’. The latter was a moderate: [He] became the first southern-based black person to be nationally accepted and projected by a fraction of the white bourgeoisie … His famous Atlanta speech of 18 September 1895, established an entente between ‘moderate’ blacks and the ‘better element of the whites’.41 

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The former, on the other hand, ‘established an entente between militant blacks and liberal whites’.42 Du Bois believed not only that Washington denigrated the capacity of black people, but that he relegated them to ‘perpetual purgatory’. Du Bois thought that the black liberation struggle would depend on exceptional men who were knowledgeable and trained in the knowledge of the world, men whom he called the ‘Talented Tenth’. Magubane argued that although Du Bois was ‘militant’, he was at the same time conservative. Although his speeches were fiery, his actions were conciliatory. So what ‘was common both to Du Bois and Washington was not only the unwillingness to act, but the unwillingness to involve the masses in the act of their own liberation’.43 This tendency was exemplified by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). The ‘NAACP was formed and organised largely by white folk who were both intellectual and biological heirs of the antebellum white abolitionists’.44 From 1910 onwards, Du Bois worked for more than 20 years for

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the NAACP as editor of its flagship organ, Crisis. Unlike Garvey, both Du Bois and Washington were at a ‘social distance’ from the masses, for whom they often spoke. Magubane attributes this partly to the relationship that both men had with various groups in the white bourgeoisie. Garvey did not suffer from the social disconnect that characterised Du Bois and Washington. Indeed, his movement represented both ‘messianic’ and ‘utopian qualities’ for the proletariat. Although the Garvey movement was messianic, Magubane argues that it was not like other messianic movements. This was not only because it was a specific socio-historical phenomenon, but because it also possessed ‘significant distinctive features’.45 One wonders, however, whether the same does not hold for other messianic movements. At any rate, Magubane goes on to argue that messianic movements usually originate in peasant settings as a ‘form of political protest’. What seems to distinguish Garveyism in this respect is that although it was messianic it nonetheless originated in urban and proletarian settings. Although Garvey had his follies, and although he may not have succeeded in solving black people’s problems, he nonetheless posed a significant threat to the status quo. He managed to generate a ‘durable consciousness’ among black people – something that he linked to the struggle on the African continent. In the American context, Garvey encouraged black people to be selfreliant, so that they would not look to their oppressors for goodwill. For Magubane, studying the psychological aspects of oppression was as important as studying its socio-political and economic aspects. He pointed out that although a society may be oppressed, it may not always understand the source of its psychological torments. This usually induces the oppressed to long for a hero or a saviour. It is not surprising that oppressed people tend to be very religious, as was the case with oppressed African-Americans. Garvey filled the void of longing for a hero. Not only that, his philosophy ‘was able to bridge that critical gap between the intellectuals and the masses’ in ways that Du Bois and Washington could not do.46  The point of having a leader such as Garvey is to channel the consciousness of the people to ‘politically significant goals’. On this score, Magubane thought it important to point out that ‘Garvey can be accused [of] having misdirected the popular radicalism which he was able to arouse, by directing it to the chimera goal of Back to Africa’.47  Yet, if one is to study the impact of his ideas, particularly on subsequent generations, they take on a new meaning. Unlike his progenitors, Garvey went beyond religious and humanitarian teachings and pointed, instead, to economic plunder in Africa, as well as the socio-economic and cultural oppression of black people

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in America. The problem with religious and humanitarian arguments is that they reconcile the masses to the current state of social, economic and political distribution. ‘This rhetoric flows freely because it costs nothing and is readily accepted by the rulers’.48 Although Garveyism represents an important part of black history, the movement suffered from weak leadership and strategy. Garvey himself was convicted of forgery, and unfortunately he died without setting foot on African soil. For Magubane, the real tragedy in the life of Garvey is not that he insulted light-skinned black people, or the fact that he eventually worked with the Ku Klux Klan, or his abortive business ventures. The real tragedy was his misunderstanding of the forces that kept Africa dismembered. Magubane argues that Garvey spoke about ‘a free Africa at a time when this was impossible’.49 As a consequence, he suffered, as do all visionaries. This, however, cannot form a valid argument against Garvey. If anything, the fact that he was able to call for a free Africa, at a time when it was not only impossible but also unfashionable to do, bears testimony to Garvey’s prowess. That he was able to do this means that he had a good understanding of the forces that kept Africa in bondage. Where he failed, one could argue, was at the level of strategy and tactics. Few people would be justified in critiquing him for having misunderstood imperialism. The rise and fall of Garvey was followed by an equally important development in the life of African-Americans: the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural revival and emancipation of black people. For Magubane, the Garvey movement and the Harlem Renaissance represent different strands of ‘black nationalism’. Magubane goes on to analyse what he terms the ‘international meaning of Garveyism’. Although early on he argues that Garvey misunderstood the forces that kept Africa dismembered, Magubane concedes that Garvey was ‘quite cognisant of what was happening in the rest of the world’.50 The fact of the matter is that the forces that kept Africa dismembered were primarily exogenous, especially at the height of imperialism. During this period, Garvey’s was a household name throughout the black world. In the face of Garveyism, the likes of Du Bois and Washington were considered ‘weakkneed’. Garveyism sought to ‘create a hegemonic force’ throughout the black world. His commitment to the struggle was not limited to slogans and fiery speeches. In 1921 he had begun to mobilise an armed force whose purpose was to liberate Africa from white rule. In addition to that, Garvey’s scheme was to regenerate Africa through sending educational and technical assistance. Around 1920, he ‘launched a drive for a US$2 million construction programme in Liberia aimed at rehabilitating that country’.51 So through its Back-to-Africa philosophy, Garveyism was something of a ‘Black Zionism’.

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[the] doctrine of nationalism as propounded by Garvey, particularly if taken in its entirety, left ample room for the most diverse and corrupt manipulations. In the name of black nationalism charlatans could mislead poor people and inveigle them from their meagre resources.52 

Although in the eyes of white people Garvey displayed wishful thinking, to Africans and African-Americans he represented their hopes and dreams. This is so to the point that over two million Africans who belonged to the Garvey movement truly believed that he would go to Africa and ‘expel’ white people from southern Africa. Garvey’s ideas may have embarrassed educated blacks, but the latter found it difficult to condemn such ideas, because they appealed to dispossessed black people. Magubane observes that the genius of Garvey, ultimately, lay in his ability to dramatise and give a greater sense of urgency to the significant mission of liberating Africa and her people. Having discussed Garveyism at some length, Magubane turns his attention to the Pan-African movement. As intimated earlier on, Garveyism was by and large a proletarian movement whose call was mostly spiritual and psychological. Magubane argues that these were the dimensions of the black condition that Garveyism sought to address, in the face of ‘pervasive racism’, rather than the actual act of migrating to Africa. The Pan-African movement, on the other hand, appealed to certain black intellectuals, many of whom, Magubane posits, can be described as ‘farsighted fighters for black emancipation’.53 While a good number of Pan-African movement adherents were not always clear on the nature of their struggle, they were well aware of the ‘worldwide domination of white supremacy’.54 As such, this movement was a challenge to white supremacy globally. Thus, the idea of ‘Back to Africa’ did not develop in a vacuum. There were sociological grounds for it. Pan-Africanism managed to connect people who otherwise would not have been connected, in different places. This was due to their lived experiences and socio-historical processes. For Magubane, the historical connection between blackness and Africa lay at the centre of Pan-Africanism. The cruelty of the ideology of racism visited on black people in Africa and elsewhere gave rise to Pan-African consciousness. Pan-Africanism attempted to give grammar to black people to articulate their oppression and exploitation. Quite rightly, Magubane argues that Pan-African consciousness cannot be determined through ‘statistical correlations’ or with ‘representative samples’ to see which segment or strata of society endorses it. It is a consciousness which arose at ‘different times, in different places and

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Yet it is important to note, as does Magubane, that:

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manipulated itself in different ways’.55 Post-1900 Pan-African consciousness can be understood in at least two ways. Firstly, oppressed people of diverse nationalities were conscious of their shared interests in the face of white hegemony and dehumanisation. The 1955 Bandung Conference gave ‘organisational expression’ to these sentiments. Secondly, Pan-African consciousness was a bit narrower in that it focused on the interests of Africa and the African diaspora. In the last resort, however, this consciousness centred the experience and role of black people. Magubane argues that the peculiar feature of black political development is that instead of black middle-class intellectuals leading the struggle – with the masses behind them – it has always been the masses who led the struggle or took the initiative, while the middle class followed suit. It is questionable whether this claim is true everywhere. For example, the oldest and largest movement in South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC), was founded by educated black intellectual elites – with backing from the masses. This is true of several movements in other contexts. Magubane concedes that in Africa, initially, consciousness was confined to ‘a relatively small section of the black intelligentsia’.56 Yet the Pan-Africanism of Du Bois had elitist tendencies and took it for granted that the black educated class would constitute the vanguard. In Magubane’s assessment, the early Pan-African movement sought admittance to the white world. Such an approach would have had disastrous effects for the black masses. For Magubane, Pan-African intellectuals were preoccupied with ‘how best to condition the whites to accept the genuine grievances of the blacks’.57  In spite of these problems, Du Bois’ thinking evolved together with the evolution of Pan-Africanism, so that in the 1940s it was able to merge with the best of Garvey’s ideas. The meaning and significance of ideas usually change with new or emerging ideas and socio-historical factors. They also change according to time, place and circumstance. It is in this context that Pan-Africanism must be understood. Pan-Africanism is, according to Magubane, ‘a living activity and not a fossilised doctrine’.58 Important to note is that the weaknesses of Pan-Africanism have little to do with its assumptions, but a lot to do with the time in which it was formulated. By the time Du Bois passed away, Pan-Africanism had reached a climax on the African continent. For Magubane, the significance of an idea must be measured by its lasting influence. Although Du Bois is widely accepted as one of the chief exponents of Pan-Africanism, Magubane traces the genealogy of this philosophy to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He mentions some of the ‘creators’ of Pan-Africanist thought, such as Ottobah Cugoano, who published,

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as early as 1787, in London a book titled Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Cugoano demanded freedom for slaves and projected calamity for those countries that benefited from slavery. In the US context, Magubane mentions David Walker as having been one of the first exponents of PanAfricanist thought. In 1829, Walker published a pamphlet titled ‘Walker’s appeal’ … to the colored citizens of the world but in particular and very expressly to those of the United States of America. Walker’s sentiments were similar to Cugoano’s. Other progenitors of Pan-African thought include Martin Delany and Edward Blyden. It is just as important to mention that there were ‘divergences between African-American and West Indian Pan-Africanists and their West African counterparts’.59  Characteristically, the tie that binds proto-Pan-Africanists is that they saw the struggle of Africans in the diaspora as intrinsically linked to the liberation of Africans on the continent. It is this aspect of PanAfricanism that gave it international appeal rather than physical residence in a specific continent. The independence movement in Africa not only rekindled awareness of Africa on the part of African-Americans, but also concretised previously dismissed ‘utopian’ ideas. It is not surprising, then, that African-Americans went out of their way to campaign for the liberation of black people in South Africa, for the ‘capitalist foundations of the US and South Africa rested on super-exploited black labour’.60 It is of interest, too, to note that the independence of Ghana in 1957 – and her entry into world politics – intensified the poor relations between blacks and whites in America. History compelled America for the first time to deal with black people ‘on the basis of full equality’.61

CONCLUDING REMARKS: SOME LESSONS FROM MAGUBANE Methodologically and epistemologically, Magubane’s analysis takes seriously the sociology of knowledge and dissociates itself from positivistic notions of ‘neutrality’ and ‘value-free’ ideas. For example, he argues that ‘Pan-Africanism as an idea links the black’s intellectual and emotional interest to Africa bindingly’.62 No intellectual ever works in a social vacuum. This is an important sociological insight, which gives meaning to the importance of Magubane’s ideas. Politically, it is important to note that Pan-Africanism is not the inverse of oppressive discourses. Pan-Africanism does not aim at external conquest and suppression of other peoples. In this sense it is essentially progressive and humane in its objective, as Magubane understood.

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It should be noted, however, that in his sociological analysis of the ties that bind African-Americans and Africans on the continent, Magubane is not romanticising this relationship. He acknowledges that, after all, the American black is an American. However, despite his sophisticated discussion of ‘black nationalism’, Garveyism and Pan-Africanism in the context of the African diaspora, one wishes that Magubane could have struck the same conciliatory tone in his critique of Pan-Africanists of the South African variety – the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). In his discussion of the ideas of the PAC, such as it appears in his books The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa and My Life and Times, Magubane erects what can only be characterised as straw-man arguments.63 One of his suggestions is that the PAC was not only anti-communist, but also anti-white. Yet the bone of contention between the PAC and the Communists/ANC was the question of land. To understand Magubane’s harsh and uncharitable critique of the PAC, however, one has to read him outside of the text, and take seriously the fact that he had aligned himself to the ANC in the South African liberation struggle. This may explain his political axe-grinding. It needs to be said, however, that when one engages in political axe-grinding, the demarcation between fact and aspiration often becomes very blurred. Although Magubane was a self-declared Marxist and Pan-Africanist, he nevertheless avoided being dogmatic about his Marxism.64 For example, although his Marxist contemporaries in South Africa often spoke about ‘class’ as being the primary contradiction in South African liberation struggles, Magubane sought to demonstrate that South Africa cannot be understood without taking seriously the concept of race. He sought to demonstrate that racism was the primary contradiction in South African liberation struggles. Significantly, although he recentred the concept of race, he did not discard the class category, but pointed out that the two are mutually reinforcing. Epistemologically, Magubane was refusing to be tyrannised by concepts with universalistic pretensions. This was his attempt to show that taking seriously one’s existential position may yield deeper insights than merely superimposing theory on societal problems. South African feminists and gender activists have since added the gender dimension to our liberation struggles and asked us to take seriously the oppression of women and the violence meted out to them. From an ontological as well as historical point of view, Magubane sought to demonstrate, that the 1910 settlement of the Union of South Africa was not the starting point of South African history, but fundamentally a catastrophe for the indigenous populations. He made this point insistently and

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

On African-American Consciousness of Africa

argued that to understand South Africa, we need to go beyond the ‘colonial encounter’, because Africans are a people with histories, philosophies and knowledge systems that existed long before colonialism. Ultimately, Magubane’s oeuvre drew inspiration from the ordinary people whose knowledge systems he sought to explicate. In learning from the insights of ordinary people, Magubane was able to interrogate the universalistic tendencies of the dominant theories of his time. It can be said that in his own way Magubane set out to shift the geography of reason.

Magubane, B., 1979. The political economy of race and class in South Africa. New York: Monthly Review Press.

2

Adesina, J., 2013. Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane (1930–2013): an intellectual appreciation. South African Review of Sociology, 44(3), pp.83–90, p.89.

3

Magubane, B., 1987. The ties that bind: African-American consciousness of Africa. Trenton: Africa World Press.

4

Ibid., p.7.

5 Ibid. 6

Ibid., p.8.

7

Ibid., p.10.

8

Ibid., p.1.

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p.10 11 Ibid., p.3. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p.4. 14 Ibid., p.5. 15 Magubane, B., 1996. The making of a racist state: British imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875–1910. Trenton: Africa World Press. 16 Magubane, The ties that bind. Op. cit., p.6. 17 Ibid. 18 Mafeje, A., 2000. Africanity: a combative ontology. CODESRIA Bulletin, 1, pp.66–71. 19 Magubane, The ties that bind. Op. cit., p9. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p.10. 22 Ibid., p.11. 23 Ibid., p.16.

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24 Gordon, L.R., 2000. Existentia Africana: understanding Africana existential thought. New York: Routledge. 25 Magubane, The ties that bind. Op. cit., p.16. 26 Mafeje, Africanity. Op. cit., p.68. 27 Magubane, The ties that bind. Op. cit., p.20. 27 Ibid., p.22. 29 Ibid., p.23. 30 Ibid., p.29. 31 Ibid., p.30. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p.33. 34 Ibid., p.92. 35 Ibid., p.93. 36 Ibid., p.94. 37 Ibid., p.94. 38 Ibid., p.94. 39 Ibid., p.96. 40 Ibid., p.99. 41 Ibid., p.100. 42 Ibid., p.101. 43 Ibid., p.102. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p.103. 45 Ibid., p.107. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 48 Ibid., p.108. 50 Ibid., p.111. 51 Ibid., p.118. 52 Ibid., p.120. 53 Ibid., p.127. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., p.128. 56 Ibid., p.130. 57 Ibid., p.132. 58 Ibid., p.134. 59 Taiwo, O., 1995. Appropriating Africa: An essay on New Africanist schools. Issue: A Journal of Opinion, 23(1), pp.39–45, p.44. 60 Magubane, The ties that bind. Op. cit., p.216.

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62 Ibid. 63 Magubane, B., 2010. My life and times. Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press. 64 Magubane, My life and times. Op. cit.

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61 Ibid., p.197.

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CHAPTER 7

African Self-Reliance, Self-Determination, Unity and Repatriation Reflections on Marcus Garvey Philani Mthembu Institute for Global Dialogue, associated with the University of South Africa, South Africa

ABSTRACT

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In the early part of the twentieth century, an idea and slogan emerged that would impact the black world for decades: Africa for Africans. This represented a shift in thinking about the global struggle for Africa’s selfdetermination and liberation – one that would link people of African descent everywhere in political campaigns, song, poetry and writing that asserted their claim to self-affirmation and self-government. A young, visionary and confident man named Marcus Mosiah Garvey, born on a small island in the Caribbean, strode onto the international scene with his call of ‘Africa for Africans’, addressing it to those at home on the continent and in the diaspora abroad. This chapter suggests that his idea represented a major shift in thinking about African identity and the black struggle globally. Garvey linked this epistemic struggle in words and thought to political struggles against racism and colonialism on its home ground in the Americas and Europe. He did so with a confidence rarely seen amongst Africans, who had been weighed down, generation after generation, by the brutality and ubiquity of anti-black racism everywhere. In Garvey, the thinker and the activist, the thought and the personality, the epistemic and the political are joined together in ways that are remarkable to observe. This chapter focuses on the ideas and ideals of African unity and self-reliance, a unified African state and repatriation, and it shows how Garvey embodied these. In line with the purpose of the book, Garveyism is therefore shown to be the epitome of epistemic struggles that affirmed the African at the centre of the African story and as the driver of his or her own destiny in a world that

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INTRODUCTION This chapter is about the thought and ideals embodied in Marcus Mosiah Garvey. This is well captured in the slogan ‘Africa for Africans’, which is closely tied to the construction of a new self in contraposition to the colonial self imposed on black people – a process in which the reggae music that popularised Garvey’s slogan in the twenty-first century was central.1 Embodiment means the representation or expression of something invisible, like an idea or ideal, in a tangible or visible form through the action of a person. Embodiment entails personifying and manifesting a feeling, idea or ideal in reality. This chapter presents Garvey as an embodiment, not a personality. He is the representation of an epistemic and political struggle. In this sense, we state upfront that this chapter enmeshes the ideals of African unity, self-reliance, a united African state, and repatriation politics, with the personal struggles of the man Marcus Garvey. In doing so, we demonstrate the recentring of Africa and Africans in the story of Africa, which is what this book is about.2  The chapter demonstrates the links between the political and the personal in this pursuit of African-centred subjectivity: it locates Garvey in this tradition of epistemic and political struggle to place the African in the driving seat of his or her destiny. The chapter is, therefore, as much about the ideals and ideas that Garvey stood for as it is about Garvey’s actions and efforts in practice. The chapter is thus not biographical: it is about the embodiment of the ideals and actions in Garveyism. While many Africans in the diaspora have embodied the evolution of radical political thought in Africa, few have done so with the worldwide ramifications personified by Marcus Mosiah Garvey. He is often referred to as one of the three prophets of Saint Ann’s Bay (Jamaica), the other two being Bob Marley and Burning Spear, who were two leading protagonists in the evolution and growth of reggae as a musical genre. Indeed, the title of this chapter is derived from the Burning Spear music album titled Garvey’s Ghost.3 In that album, released in 1976 by Island Records, Burning Spear touches on some of the leading themes contained in the teachings and philosophy of Garvey, namely repatriation, the call for African unity, and the principle of self-reliance for Africans at home and abroad. This chapter explores these themes in some detail. The chapter also demonstrates that

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sought to objectify and marginalise Africans. This chapter argues that the ideals Garvey articulated continue to resonate long after his time.

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the ghost of Garvey continues to linger in African political thought, inspiring new generations that are facing different socio-political struggles. The chapter argues that the ideals and ideas that Garvey articulated represented a major development in rethinking Africa as a site of struggle for selfdetermination and self-affirmation. Indeed, the Pan-African philosophy of the founders of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) drew inspiration from their African counterparts in the diaspora, who included the likes of Garvey, Henry Sylvester Williams, George Padmore and the vast majority of people of African descent who stood behind them and their ideas. The combined efforts of Africans at home and abroad thus created a vision for development and self-actualisation that gave impetus to the struggle for independence and the eventual formation of the OAU in 1963.4 While not all the ideals of Pan-African philosophy have been achieved by the OAU and the African Union (AU), they are platforms where the idea of African unity remains central. African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, who drew directly from Garvey’s ideas, advocated the immediate creation of an African state or models that provided for faster integration towards an eventual African state. Other African leaders advocated more gradual processes of regional integration. The African literature remains inspired by these ideals to discuss African agency in world affairs, African unity with the diaspora and the integration process, subjects that remain prominent in scholarly literature.5  This discussion expressly confirms the critical importance of PanAfrican traditions of thought and political action that can be traced back to the diaspora in the early twenty-first century.6 More significantly, the role of the African diaspora is now recognised within the framework of the AU, the successor organisation of the OAU. The African diaspora has been recognised as the sixth region of Africa, through an amendment to the Constitutive Act of the AU. The issue of the African diaspora was given momentum at the Extraordinary Summit of the Assembly of the AU held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 3  February 2003, to deliberate on proposed amendments to the Constitutive Act. At an meeting of the executive council preceding the summit, Senegal proposed an amendment to integrate the diaspora in the policy framework of the AU.7 The proposed amendment was then refined and adopted by the summit in a new article of the executive council’s diaspora document – article 3(q) – that ‘invites and encourages the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union’. 8 This amendment constitutes a key milestone in the bid to incorporate the diaspora into the formal processes of the AU.9 It is also a formal acknowledgement of the role of the

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African diaspora in shaping the evolution of political thought across the African continent. While much of the focus on the African diaspora has centred on the contributions of the Caribbean island nations and the African diaspora of the USA, it is important to take note of the wide reach of the global family of African descendants. Inclusion of the diaspora also opens up opportunities to further explore the realities, experiences and ideas of people of African descent in Latin America, who continue to pass on their African heritage in various ways. The amendment to the Constitutive Act of the AU thus opens up an opportunity for further research and dialogue on the global African family, which spans the world. It also opens up further avenues to deepen relations beyond state-to-state ties, which supports the ideal of building people-to-people solidarity rather than that of nation-states alone.

As shown in Chapter 6, on Bernard Magubane, Garvey was inspired by an awareness that exogenous forces kept Africa dismantled, and that the impact was real for all black people. So, the Pan-African thought espoused by Garvey did not seek a gradual unification of Africans through regional integration, but instead sought the immediate realisation of an independent, unified African state that would restore the pride and dignity of millions of Africans across the world. This idea would take hold in the mind of independent Ghana’s founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, as he sought the creation of a unified African state upon independence. Indeed, in the absence of such a powerful, prosperous and respected state, Garvey felt that Africans would continue to be treated as second-class citizens wherever they were. Drawing from ancient African history, he dreamed of an African empire: ‘What we want is an independent African nationality.’10 In effect, Garvey called for a single African nationality and the emergence of a new Africa that transcended existing notions of identity: The masses of Negroes in America, the West Indies, South and Central America are in sympathetic accord with the aspirations of the native Africans. We desire to help them build up Africa as a Negro Empire, where every black man, whether he was born in Africa or in the Western world, will have the opportunity to develop on his own lines under the protection of the most favorable democratic institutions.11

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He would argue fiercely for self-reliance and agency: ‘[C]hance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people. Action, self-reliance, the vision of self and the future have been the only means by which the oppressed have seen and realised the light of their own freedom.’12 This spoke to Garvey’s uncompromising belief in the notion of self-reliance and agency. Only through self-reliance and the creation of a strong and respected African state, which would represent the dreams and aspirations of the global African family, would Africans gain recognition and respect. Any attempt to rely on the goodwill and sympathy of others was seen by Garvey as a road to failure. Living in times when race was an important point of reference, with the lynching of black people in the USA a common feature of daily life and the oppression of Africans on their continent widespread, Garvey was a firm believer in the acquisition of material power as necessary to restore the dignity of Africans. ‘[A] race without authority and power, is a race without respect,’ he argued. 13 In his efforts to awaken the consciousness of Africans who had grown used to being looked down on and disrespected as sub-human, he would shout, ‘[W]ake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations.’14 A reading of Garvey makes it clear that what he envisioned was not a unity based on nation-states, but a unity of African peoples across the world, represented by a single, democratic African government. Uazuva Kaumbi mentions that, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the figure of Garvey loomed large in the evolution of Pan-African thinking.15 With his ‘Back to Africa’ slogan, Garvey inspired millions of followers in his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to take pride in their African heritage and to contest the notion of white domination. This was a major area of success for Garvey and the UNIA. At a time when the lives of Africans looked bleak, Garvey’s ideas inspired a movement of millions of Africans from across the world. This showed the power of demonstration. Garvey was not content with inspiration through words alone. He advocated the industry of Africans in order to gain respect, and he took it upon himself to build new entrepreneurial endeavours. He advocated the unity of African people, and he built an organisation that united millions of Africans across the world under a banner that was red, black and green – the colours of the movement’s flag. He did not wait for others to implement his ideas, but dedicated most of his time to operationalising his ideas on the world stage.

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In Namibia, when the UNIA of Marcus Garvey was launched in Luderitz in 1921, the San, Ovaherero, Damara and Nama people, as well as the Ovambo living in central Namibia, united for the first time in an anti-imperialist struggle through the political ideals of Garvey’s UNIA.16 This struggle culminated in the attainment of independence in 1990, demonstrating the ripple effect of the actions of one man from a small Caribbean island who dared to envision a different existence for Africans throughout the world. In the Caribbean, the phenomenon of Pan-Africanism was given the clearest and loudest expression by Garvey, who is described by his biographer, Edmund D Cronan, as a ‘largely self-educated but supremely confident black man’. 17 Garvey stated: ‘[I]f you have no confidence in self you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started’.18  Garvey was born on 17 August 1887, to Marcus and Sarah Garvey, in the little town of Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Garvey’s father is said to have been a descendent of the Maroons – Africans who fled to the hills to establish free communities after the English had captured Jamaica from the Spaniards in 1655. The Maroons successfully repulsed several British military assaults. In 1739, the Maroons gained local autonomy from the white rulers of Jamaica. After traveling through South America as a printer and being exposed to the inhumane treatment of Africans, Garvey went to London in 1912 to learn what he could about the condition of Africans throughout the British Empire. There, he met Duse Mohammed, the publisher of the African Times and Orient Review in London and later the Comet in Lagos. Through association with this ardent Pan-African nationalist and contacts with African and West Indian nationalists, students and seamen, Garvey became deeply agitated by the colonial question, especially as it affected his African ‘fatherland’. In  addition, he read extensively on Africa’s ancient empires, which were consistently referred to in his writings and speeches, as he sought to debunk the widely held myth that Africa had no history worthy of being mentioned. Garvey’s father was known to keep a vast library and was passionate about reading, something which he passed on to the younger Garvey.19  In London, Garvey also developed a keen interest in the racial problems of the USA. Influenced by Booker T Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, Garvey was traumatised by the deterioration of African people throughout the world. Garvey’s economic programme included the establishment of the Black Star Steamship Company (consisting of four ships) and the Negro Factory Corporation. These served the purpose of demonstrating

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his ideal of self-reliance amongst Africans, as part of a programme that drew inspiration from the earlier efforts of Washington to educate AfricanAmericans and impart skills that could be applied to building African-owned industries. Commenting on Washington’s programme, Garvey stated: Things have changed wonderfully since Washington came on the scene. His vision was industrial opportunity for the Negro, but the Sage of Tuskegee has passed off the stage of life and left behind a new problem – a problem that must be solved, not by the industrial leader only, but by the political and military leaders as well. If Washington had lived he would have had to change his programme. No leader can successfully lead this race of ours without giving an interpretation of the awakened spirit of the New Negro, who does not seek industrial opportunity alone, but a political voice. The world is amazed at the desire of the New Negro, for with his strong voice he is demanding a place in the affairs of the world.20 

Washington had been a staunch advocate of the principle of self-reliance and of building up an educated black industrial class to finance its own ideas. Garvey’s programme would continue to emphasise the importance of industry, but it also moved into the political realm, even advocating the creation of an African state. Almost ecstatically, Garvey asked: Where is the black man’s government? Where is his king and kingdom? Where is his president, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared, I will help to make them.’21 

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Garvey’s resolution is best understood in its context: virtually the whole of the African continent had been colonised and was under foreign rule. Ethiopia was then the only country in Africa that had not been colonised, having stood firm over time as a proud African kingdom with its own indigenous and ancient alphabet, numerical system, calendar, laws, lawmakers and priests, and its own monarchy. This country had been a source of inspiration for Africans throughout the world, not only through its long history and traditions, but also through its ability to resist foreign invasions in the late nineteenth century, when the Italians tried to invade the country and were defeated in the Battle of Adwa.22 Garvey left England in the summer of 1914, inspired by the idea of uniting all Africans at home and abroad under the banner of the UNIA and advocating the unity of African people across the world. He envisaged the

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coming of a new world of confident, independent Africans, who would no longer be bound by foreign rule and ideas. He envisioned Africa as master of its own affairs and commanding the respect of other nations. Five days after his arrival in Jamaica, he established the UNIA and the African Communities League, and invited all people of African parentage to join him in the crusade to restore the dignity of Africans.23 Given the racial tension and actual oppression experienced by people of African descent all over the world, his message had wide and lasting appeal, as Africans imagined a different world – one in which they commanded equal respect amongst the community of nations. Garvey established a branch of the UNIA in Harlem in 1917. At a time when ‘white America’ was feeling increasingly emboldened in their attitudes of racial superiority, and with the USA in ascendance in global politics following the devastation of World War I, Harlem had become a site of struggle, renaissance, black pride and resistance. It had thus become the epicentre of many discussions about the role and future of people of African descent in the USA. The Harlem Renaissance began in the same year that Garvey established his Harlem branch of the UNIA, which lends further credence to the view of the fertility of Harlem as a melting pot for new ideas, ideologies and theories about African-Americans and the broader global African family.24 In two months, Garvey had built up an organisation of about 1 500 members. Five years later, the membership was said to have increased to several million in the USA, the West Indies, Latin America and Africa. Garvey himself suggested that membership was six million,25 revealing the rapid spread of his movement. ‘Africa for Africans’ – both those at home in Africa and those abroad – was his rallying cry, and he would prove to be uncompromising in his ideas of self-reliance and the establishment of an African state as part of the effort to restore the dignity of Africans across the world. His followers would be referred to as Garveyites. The creation of a mass movement in a relatively short space of time was one of Garvey’s greatest achievements and showed the popularity of his ideas. At this very time, the civil rights struggle for equality gained momentum, following the World War I between 1914 and 1918. Many Africans had gone to fight, with the promise that their contribution would be rewarded. Instead, they came back to humiliation at home – at the very moment when critical black leaders were making their way onto national and international stages. The seeds of a better Africa had been sown in the minds of Africans throughout the world, prompting efforts towards liberation and self-determination under unfavourable and hostile circumstances. Garvey

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had ignited and catalysed a mass movement that would continue to raise the African banner of unity well beyond his own lifetime.26 Undoubtedly, his basic commitment and dedication was to the total liberation of Africa from foreign rule, and the eventual establishment of a united, virile and powerful African state. He tended to analogise, and not without some justification, the problem of Africans in the diaspora with colonialism. After all, Africans in the diaspora, as well as those in Africa, were subjected to comparable economic exploitation and social discrimination by white rulers. He firmly believed that until Africa was liberated, there would be no real hopes for African people elsewhere, and his ideas continued to resonate in Africa and beyond. The former King of Swaziland was reported to have told Mrs Amy Garvey that he knew the names of only two black men in the Western world: Jack Johnson, the boxer who defeated his white opponent Jim Jeffries, and Marcus Garvey. Former Ghanaian President Nkrumah, one of Africa’s most ardent Pan-Africanists, acknowledged Garvey’s influence as most important during his years as a student in the USA. In his autobiography, he stated, ‘I think that of all the literature that I studied, the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was the Philosophy and opinions of Marcus Garvey.’27 Indeed, independent Ghana would adopt the black star for its national flag, and refer to its own fleet as the Black Star Line, borrowing from Garvey and the UNIA. To this very day, the national soccer team of Ghana is referred to as the Black Stars. Garvey’s call for a united, strong and prosperous African state would also be wholeheartedly adopted by Nkrumah in his brand of Pan-Africanism, which pursued the immediate establishment of a political union in Africa with greater urgency. This idea has continued to impact on debates and strategies across the continent, with some calling for greater urgency while others adopt a more gradualist approach towards African unity. Apart from reaching his followers through the Negro World and other publications, which were often banned but still widely circulated, Garvey brought together delegates from local branches of the UNIA at an annual convention to propagate his ideas, rejuvenate the Garveyites, and present the programme of the UNIA to his followers and detractors. Having worked in the printing and publishing industry, Garvey was able to use his skills as editor and founder of the Negro World, which proved to be one of the most important vehicles for communicating his ideas. At its peak, circulation was estimated at between 60 000 and 200 000 copies per annum. Its global circulation would eventually lead to Negro World being banned by various colonial administrations, showing that they feared its impact on

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Ethiopia thou land of our fathers, Thou land where the gods loved to be, As storm cloud at night suddenly gathers Our armies come rushing to thee.

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their colonial subjects.28 This was again a demonstration of Garvey as an action-oriented leader. He sought to persuade not only through words, but also through organisation and action. The first convention of the UNIA was held in New York, on 1  August 1920. It was attended by delegates from 25 countries, including countries in the West Indies, Central and South America, and Africa. An estimated 25 000 people, including delegates, assembled at Madison Square Garden on 2 August to hear Garvey deliver the keynote address to the convention. The ceremony opened with the Universal Ethiopian Anthem, sung spiritedly by the delegates. The lyrics of the first verse and chorus read as follows:

We must in the fight be victorious When swords are thrust outward to gleam: For us will the vict’ry be glorious, When led by the Red, Black and Green. Advance, advance to victory, Let Africa be free; Advance to meet the foe With the might Of the Red, the Black and the Green.29

Garvey used his annual international conventions to rally the downtrodden, as forums for venting African grievances, and for the adoption of what he considered to be practical policies for achieving his goal of African unity in the African homeland. The conventions were also platforms for warning the colonial powers and America about the consequences of their actions in Africa. Secondly, his political programme was linked with the establishment of business enterprises, including the shipping line known as the Black Star Line.

THE DEMAND FOR REPATRIATION Having highlighted Garvey’s ideas of self-reliance and the establishment of a united, strong and prosperous African state, the following section focuses on the question of repatriation – one of the focal areas of the work of Garvey.

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It thus demonstrates that the teachings of Garvey continue to reverberate in Africa and its diaspora, often forcing uneasy conversations amongst Africans and their former colonial masters. It also demonstrates that Africans continue to reinterpret Garvey in their own contemporary struggles and contexts. Repatriation was one of the central pillars of Garvey’s programme. He made it clear that the establishment of an African state would be for all Africans, and that Africans in the UNIA would have to upgrade their skills in order to be able to go back to Africa to contribute towards building and ensuring prosperity for the African state. Garvey’s ‘Back to Africa’ movement went further than any other movement, in actually laying out a practical programme for repatriation through the Black Star Line shipping company and various skills development programmes run by the UNIA. It is therefore important to show how these ideas have inspired members of the Rastafari community in the diaspora in particular to continue Garvey’s vision. Many of the early members of the Rastafari community considered themselves Garveyites and many continue to propagate ideas to this very day. With his ‘Back to Africa’ movement, Garvey emphatically pronounced that Africans in the diaspora needed to labour constantly for a united and independent African state that commanded the respect of fellow nationstates. His call for repatriation was not a symbolic appeal to the cultural heritage of people of African descent: he meant the physical return of skilled Africans in the diaspora for the purpose of assisting in the creation of a strong and respected African state. Speaking about the role of Africans in the West Indies and the USA, he stated: It is hoped that when the time comes for American and West Indian Negroes to settle in Africa, they will realise their responsibility and their duty. It will not be to go to Africa for the purpose of exercising an overlordship over the natives, but it shall be the purpose of the Universal Negro Improvement Association to have established in Africa that brotherly co-operation: which will make the interests of the African native and the American and West Indian Negro one and the same, that is to say, we shall enter into a common partnership to build up Africa in the interests of our race.30 

He also stated: It further strikes me that with all the civilisation this western hemisphere affords, Negroes ought to take better advantage of the cause of higher educa-

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tion. We could make of ourselves better mechanics and scientists, and in

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edge we possess, it would be but our duty. If Africa is to be redeemed the Western Negro will have to make a valuable contribution along technical and scientific lines.31

Garvey’s strategy included the resettlement of parts of Africa by pioneering members of his organisation: technicians, educators and others equipped with the means to help with the reconstruction of Africa. His opponents generally seized on this aspect of his programme and maliciously charged him with proposing a mass exodus of new world negroes back to Africa.32  Garvey sent a commercial and industrial mission of technicians to the Republic of Liberia to establish a settlement there. However, his attempt to find a foothold for the UNIA in this African republic was foiled, partly by pressure put on the Liberian president by the British, French and Americans to repudiate the agreement between his government and the UNIA.33 Perhaps the most visible, ardent and vocal people advocating repatriation have been members of the Rastafari community. Their insistence on the right to repatriate – under a programme partly financed by former colonial powers – has been both constant and tenacious, and reflects the continuity of the historic aspirations of many new world Africans from the sixteenth century onward.34 Despite the continuous and public nature of this proclamation, many contemporary scholars choose to ignore or dismiss the issue of actual repatriation. Most limit the concept to the reclamation of an African identity or cultural heritage in the diaspora.35 However, while repatriation has also been about reclaiming aspects of African culture amongst Africans in the diaspora, it has remained a literal aspiration amongst some in the diaspora, and it remains an important theme amongst the Rastafari community, in keeping with Garvey’s programme. In a letter addressed to the then Chairperson of the AU, Mr Thabo Mbeki, Ras Nathaniel, the Coordinator of the Issembly for Rastafari Iniversal Education (IRIE) mentioned that long before the OAU was established by Haile Selassie I and other African nationalists in Addis Ababa in 1963, the people called by his name – the Rastafari – cried out for repatriation that would return the descendants of Africa who were taken in captivity to the West. Land in Shashamane, Ethiopia, was even granted to African people from the West as early as 1931, and many people, mostly members of the Rastafari and Jamaican communities, began to settle there.36 Before the OAU was formed, the African diaspora, including three members of the Rastafari community and a delegate of the Ethiopian World Federation (EWF), sent a fact-finding mission to several African nations in

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cases where we can help our brothers in Africa by making use of the knowl-

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1961 to discuss repatriation. The mission was sponsored by the Jamaican government and was met and welcomed by His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, Governor General Nnamdi Azikiwi of Nigeria, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, President William Tubman of Liberia and Prime Minister Milton Margai of Sierra Leone. Several official and unofficial reports with recommendations were finalised at that time. It is thus clear that the issue of repatriation was of concern for both the African diaspora and leading governments in Africa that formed the OAU two years later.37  The fact-finding mission was preceded by an atmosphere of instability in Jamaica, leading to the destruction of many Rastafari settlements by various institutions of the state. This prompted the University of the West Indies to write a report on the Rastafari and to recommend sending a mission to Africa. Therefore, the issue of reparation also comes from a context of ill-treatment of Africans in the diaspora. Ras Mortimo Planno, who was part of the fact-finding mission to Africa, wrote a letter in 1962 to the editor of the Jamaican daily newspaper The Gleaner. In the letter, which was published under the title ‘Back to Ethiopia’, he pleaded with the Jamaican authorities to make preparations for their repatriation back to Africa.38 With the Rastafari demands for repatriation continuing unabated, the newly independent government invited Emperor Haile Selassie I to visit Jamaica. Douglas Mack, a Rastafari member of the Mission to Africa, claims that the delegation initiated this chain of events by inviting Selassie to visit Jamaica during their audience in the palace. This legendary visit, the first to Jamaica by an African monarch, took place in April 1966, just a little more than a month after Queen Elizabeth II had made a tour to Jamaica. The welcome by the masses was tumultuous: never had there been such a turnout for any visiting head of state. In fact, because of the storming of the Ethiopian emperor’s plane by the Rastafari, and the unexpected failure of protocol at the airport, Ras Planno was called upon by authorities to restore order.37 Moreover, according to Nettleford, the visit by Selassie legitimised the Rastafari dynamic in Jamaica to some extent: ’Subsequently, the two Jamaican political parties realised that they would have to develop more – not fewer–connections with Africa, if they wished to court approval from the black-conscious masses in Jamaica.’ And this they did, in 1969, with the leaders of the two parties actually visiting the Back-to-Africa settlement in Shashamane, Ethiopia, which included Rastafari among its settlers.40 The EWF, which had been established by Selassie through his personal physician in 1937 in New York, played an important role in directing the collection of contributions to the cause of Ethiopia following the invasion

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by Mussolini.41 The need for this organisation arose from the Italian fascist regime’s invasion of Ethiopia and the subsequent exile of the Emperor in Bath, England.42  It was the assumption of both the Emperor and the concerned officials of the country that such an organisation would be of great importance in the collection of material and financial assistance in Western countries for Ethiopia’s cause. Similarly, the 1955 land grant near Shashamane was for all African people in the diaspora who wanted to be repatriated to their homeland.43 In 1938, the EWF was established in Jamaica, leading to the expansion of the organisation – and knowledge of the land grant – throughout the Caribbean. After the fascists were ousted from Ethiopia and Selassie was restored to his throne, the EWF became a solid organisation for all African people in the diaspora who wished to repatriate to Africa. The EWF’s motto came to be ‘Repatriation is a must and it is anytime now!’ Those repatriated to Ethiopia faced the problems immigrants in other circumstances might normally expect, such as a lack of means, few employment opportunities, little access to land or other resources, and cultural problems such as little knowledge of the local languages (or even the local history and practices). All these considerations need to be kept in mind when comparing the more recent experiences of those repatriated to Africa in the twenty-first century. Shashamane can be seen as a microcosm of the larger picture of repatriation, in that the kinds of problems experienced by those who were repatriated over the years still need to be addressed in any African repatriation agenda in the twenty-first century.44 The passage of Ghana’s House Bill 573, which ensures the ‘right of abode’ to descendents of African slaves in the West, is but one example of the continuing relevance of the idea of repatriation.45 Various groups in the Caribbean, the UK and North America have already organised support for settler communities in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi and South Africa. These include the EWF, the Ethiopian African Black International Congress, the International Rastafari for Inity Embassy, the Rastafari Centenary Committee, the Caribbean Legal Council of Rastafari, and Africa Hall. Some of these, like Africa Hall (a Barbados-based international Rastafari NGO), have lobbied the UN to gain consultative status for the international Rastafari community and continue to work with the UN, the AU and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to influence government policies and to develop support for repatriation.46 The call for reparation has not stopped, as reflected in 2014 when leaders from CARICOM accepted a 10-point plan for negotiations with European nations that had planned, executed and profited from the transatlantic

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slave trade. The 15 members of CARICOM also sought an official apology, debt forgiveness and increased aid in various sectors of importance to the Caribbean nations. Interestingly, the leaders also called for the creation of a repatriation programme to resettle members of the Rastafari community, but this call has been consistently rejected by the British government. Besides Britain, some of the other nations at the receiving end of these calls are France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. All were involved to varying degrees in the slave trade between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. While insisting this would be a non-confrontational process, the region has not ruled out the possibility of litigation under international law should diplomacy fail.

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The ideals and ideas that Garvey embodied are a crucial starting point in African scholars’ efforts to decolonise and Africanise thought. The paradigm shift needed in order to recentre the African perspective will benefit from engagement, not just with what Garvey embodied, but also with how he did so, thus challenging scholars to link radical thought to radical action in ways epitomised by Garvey. Garvey is a metaphor for rethinking the idea of Africa as not bounded by geography – or the many other cleavages that exist – but as a unifying idea that connects black struggles everywhere. His is also an effort that emphasises the historic ties between Africa and its diaspora, stressing the need to ensure stronger efforts at unity, self-reliance and self-government within the vast global family of peoples of African descent. This includes opening up space for informal relations to form at the non-governmental level. Indeed, for many years, some of the strongest interactions between these regions have been at the informal level between the peoples of Africa and the diaspora. This process is important, as it allows Africans to interpret and navigate the world of political thought from their own vantage point, whether in Africa or its diaspora. Having focused on the role of Garvey in the evolution of African political thought, this chapter has demonstrated the enduring legacy of his ideas, which advocated a policy of self-reliance for Africans at home and abroad. These ideas have had a wide-ranging impact on the politics of post-colonial Africa and its diaspora, with new generations still discovering his works and reinterpreting them within their own contemporary contexts. The ideas of Garvey have gone on to impact contemporary debates on reparations for the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade and on the repatriation

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of Africans in the diaspora back to their home continent. They also shape discussions on the speed and depth of the envisioned African unity. Garvey’s philosophy and opinions have had a lasting impact on the brand of Pan-Africanism advocated by the likes of Nkrumah, and they continue to reverberate throughout contemporary Africa as the continent seeks further regional integration. It thus remains important to ensure that as the debates continue, scholars take a step back and trace the genealogy of ideas debated in contemporary times, in order to ensure that those leading the debates understand their roots and their applicability to the contemporary African context. Enhancing relations at the second track of diplomacy is also important, as this would facilitate efforts to realise Garvey’s dream of building solidarity for African people throughout the world. Sixteen years after his death, the Council of the City of Kingston, Jamaica, honoured Garvey by erecting a memorial bust in King George VI Park. This monument was unveiled in 1956 in an impressive ceremony attended by thousands of people from all walks of life.47 Speaking at Garvey’s shrine in Kingston during his visit in June 1965, Dr Martin Luther King Jr said that Garvey was ‘the first man of colour in the history of the United States, on a mass scale and level, to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny and make the Negro feel he was somebody’.48 This contribution will remain important at a time when Africans across the world yearn for greater recognition amongst their peers in the greater human family. Indeed, Garvey embodied the spirit of centring African identity, interests and values in a world haunted by the ghosts of racism and imperialism.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Arbino, D., 2017. Reggae as subaltern knowledge:  representations of Christopher Columbus as a construction of  alternative historical memory. MESTER, 45(1), pp.153–170.

2

Minda, A., 2004. Rastafari in the promised land. Africa Insight, 34(4), pp.31–39.

3

Burning, S., 1976. Garvey’s Ghost. Jamaica: Island Records; Bonacci, G., 2016. The universal Ethiopian anthem and the ford family. The Afrikan Heritage Foundation, 25 January 2016. Available at http://www.afrikanheritage.com/theuniversal-ethiopian-anthem-and-the-ford-family/ [Accessed 22 August 2017].

4

AU Executive Council, 2003. The development of the diaspora initiative within the framework of the OAU/AU. Third Extraordinary Session, 21–25  May, Sun City, South Africa.

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5

Chirisa, I.E., Mumba, A. and Dirwai, S.O., 2014. A review of the evolution and trajectory of the African Union as an instrument of regional integration. Springerplus, 19(3), pp.101–110; Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, 2005. Europhone or African memory: the challenge of the Pan-Africanist intellectual in the era of globalization. In Mkandawire, T. (ed.), African iIntellectuals: rethinking politics, language, gender and development. Pretoria: Unisa Press, pp.155–164.

6

Okhonmina, S., 2009. The African Union: Pan-Africanist aspirations and the challenge of African unity. Journal of Pan-African Studies, 3(4), pp.85–100.

7

Ibid., p.86.

8

AU Executive Council, The development of the diaspora initiative. Op. cit.

9

Okhonmina, The African Union. Op. cit.

10 Garvey, A.J., 1967 (1923). Philosophy and opinions of Marcus Garvey or Africa for the Africans. London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, p.44. 11 Ibid., p.45. 12 Ibid., p.4. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p.6. 15 Kaumbi, U., 2000. The African diaspora, Pan-Africanism and African integration. Paper presented at the Southern African Regional Institute For Policy Studies (SARIPS) Annual Colloquium: Regional Integration in Southern Africa: Past, Present and Future, Harare, Zimbabwe, 24–27 September 2000. 16 Ibid. 17 Cronan, E.D., 1965. Black Moses: the story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, p.4. 18 Garvey, Philosophy and opinions. Op. cit., p.10. 19 Cronan, Black Moses. Op. cit. 20 Garvey, Philosophy and opinions. Op. cit., p.35. 21 Cronan, Black Moses. Op. cit., p.16. 22 Giorgis, H., 2015. Post-colonial postscript: if we want to understand African history, we need to understand the Battle of Adwa. Quartz Media, 11 March 2015. Available at https://qz.com/359857/ethiopias-battle-of-adwa-is-a-powerful-symbol-of-black-resistance/ [Accessed 29 March 2018]. 23 Cronan, Black Moses. Op. cit., p.14. 24 Notre Dame High School, 2013. Harlem renaissance: the blossoming of African American culture in the 1920s. Issues and Controversies in American History. Available at https://www.infobase.com/press_releases/issues-controversies-in-american-history-this-month-in-history-february-2019-harlem-renaissance/  [Accessed 22 August 2017].

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25 Cronan, Black Moses. Op. cit., p.14.

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27 Nkrumah, K., 1957. Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. Accra: Thomas Nelson and Sons, p.45. 28 Ibid., pp.45–46. 29 Cronan, Black Moses. Op. cit., p.168. 30 Garvey, Philosophy and opinions. Op. cit., p.44. 31 Ibid., p.37. 32 Cronan, Black Moses. Op. cit., pp.74–75. 33 Ibid., p.18. 34 Homiak, J.P., 2001. Never trade a continent for an island: Rastafari diasporic practice, globalisation, and the African Renaissance. In Maloka, E. (ed.), A United States of Africa? Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, p.186 –233. 35 Campbell, H., 1987. Rasta and resistance: from Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. Trenton: Africa World Press, pp.211–231. 36 Ras, N., 2003. Rastafari shouts on the African Union: letter to the African Union.

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26 Ibid.

Available at http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/articles/09042003.html [Acessed 31 July 2017]. 37 Ibid. 38 McPerson, E.S., 1991. Rastafari and politics: sixty years of a developing cultural ideology. Frankfield: International Iyabhingi Press, p.231. 39 Yawney, C., 2001. Exodus: Rastafari, repatriation, and the African Renaissance. In Maloka, E. (ed.), A United States of Africa? Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, pp.132–185, p.152. 40 Ibid., p.153. 41 Lewis, R., 1998. Marcus Garvey and the early Rastafarians: continuity and discontinuity. In Murrell, N.S. and Mcfarlane, A.A. (eds), Chanting down Babylon: the Rastafari reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp.146–158. 42 Van Dijk, F., 1998. Chanting down Babylon outernational: the rise of Rastafari in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. In Murrell, N.S. and Mcfarlane, A.A. (eds), Chanting down Babylon: the Rastafari reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp.180–201. 43 Ibid. 44 Yawney, Exodus. Op. cit., p.156. 45 Homiak, Never trade a continent for an island. Op. cit., p.190. 46 Ibid. 47 Garvey, Philosophy and opinions. Op. cit., p.26. 48 Ibid.

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Africanity as Self-Assertion, Self-Affirmation and Self-Determination The Legacy of Archie Mafeje Teboho J Lebakeng School of Social Sciences, University of Limpopo, South Africa

ABSTRACT It is a truism that, historically, the modern world system resulted from the European colonial penetration of and expansion into the rest of the world through unjust conquest. A major part of this expansion was effected through epistemicide–that is, the destruction of knowledge systems of indigenous peoples of the world. Flowing from this ‘right of conquest’ as the core characteristic of the relations between conqueror and conquered, African scholarship, intellectual representations and philosophical pronouncements were anchored in and informed by dominant Western perspectives that denied and negated the existential realities of Africa and Africans. This chapter is an analysis of the contribution of Professor Archie Boyce Monwabisi Mafeje to the decentring of the epistemology of alterity, while recentring efforts towards intellectual self-determination among Africans via Africanity as a combative ontology. In this way, self-assertion, self-affirmation and self-determination point to the search for the sovereignty of African scholarship. Thus, this chapter argues that Mafeje’s analytical, methodological and philosophical tools come together in his use of the concept of Africanity to imply an insistence that Africans should, of necessity, think, speak and do things for themselves in the first place. In this sense, he left behind an activist scholarship and rich legacy for following generations. By engaging with Mafeje’s legacy, scholars who participate in the struggle for epistemic decolonisation can identify and appreciate their ontological status.

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In line with the claims of this book, this chapter departs from the premise that Archie Mafeje embodied thinking that sought to shift the epistemologies of alterity, in order to enable the pursuit of endogeneity and intellectual self-determination through Africanity. This entails Africans constituting themselves by taking Africa as a starting point, epistemologically and ontologically. We argue that this is evident in both his words and actions, which were shaped by the intellectual context that produced him. As Mafeje himself said of the context and the intellectual, ‘Nobody can think and act outside historically determined circumstances and still hope to be a social signifier of any kind.’ Further, he said, ‘It is the historical juncture which defines us socially and intellectually.’1 By his own account, Mafeje traces his scepticism of colonial anthropological categorisations to his fieldwork in urban and rural South Africa in the mid-sixties. During this essentially ethnographic work, he came to the realisation that representations of African communities and African people bore little, if any, resemblance to their social, economic, historical, cultural and aesthetic existential reality – and that studies conducted by colonial-apartheid scholars were actually a deprecating onslaught on the ontological status of Africans.2  Most scholarship and intellectual representations fundamentally denied and negated the humanity of Africans as historical, social, political and philosophical beings. For instance, liberal observers, including Mafeje’s master’s degree supervisor, Professor Monica Wilson, posited that Africans in towns were detribalising towards the image of ‘Western civilisation’ and discarding their habits and despicable tendencies, which were akin to primitivity. For Mafeje, the interpretation of his extensive fieldwork by Wilson was not consistent with the raw data he had collected. However, according to John Sharp, Wilson’s interpretation of what was happening in Langa was not a departure from the core of liberalist interpretations: that these formed the necessary steps and the inevitable, logical sequence by which the urban encounter was ‘schooling’ indigenous South Africans in Christian values and morals, in particular, and ‘civilisation in general’.3 For strategic reasons, Mafeje did not raise violent objections to this interpretation, especially with regard to the write-up of his extensive fieldwork, which germinated in a co-published book with Wilson titled Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township.4 Such misrepresentations were not lost on him, however. Even at that tender age, Mafeje was well aware of the power relations between him and his erstwhile mentor. Moreover, he had an appreciation of the concept of consequences and did not want to take up a

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INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT

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fight that would jeopardise his future. More critically, Mafeje was convinced that he had actually prevailed over his co-writer. The discipline Mafeje was majoring in, namely anthropology, had largely begun as a practice of explorers, travellers and officials who were in the service of the European colonial powers. The practice subsequently became institutionalised as a university discipline.5 Its intellectual history has always been connected with the political context of domination and the historical moment of colonisation. At the most basic level, the historical expansion of the modern world system involved the European encounter with and usually conquest of the peoples of the rest of the world. In particular, people who were organised in social structures that Europeans classed as small, without written records and not part of geographically wide-ranging religious systems, were classed as ‘tribes’. They became the domain of anthropology. Dialectically speaking, the same could be said of all other social sciences and humanities (a distinction Mafeje considers arbitrary), as they were midwifed by the ‘Enlightenment’ and colonisation. As such, they were critical to the process of Western rebirth and imperial expansion to other territories.6 Along with scientific invention and discoveries, Western social disciplines were developed and employed to diagnose and, if possible, to treat the problems of Western societies arising out of attempts to adjust to, and take advantage of, the impact of advancing technology.7 It is noteworthy that although they were ideographic disciplines, they jealously emulated the Newtonian, Cartesian model of science to gain credence and accreditation as scientific disciplines.8 Science, as understood, engaged in the pursuit of universal laws, which would hold true irrespective of time and space. Pursuant to this scientific status, the social sciences and humanities were to be underpinned by universal social, political, economic and historical laws. In this regard, what were areas of scholarly enquiry responding to specifically Western problems, challenges, concerns and sensibilities over time laid claim to universality?.9 The implications of this claim to universality resulted in scientism. Eurocentrism was to be understood as the implicit view that European knowledge and the cultural values of European elites constitute the ‘natural’, normative paradigm to be imposed on the colonies – and subsequently for post-colonial Africa to emulate. This universalising and homogenising argument subsequently informed the core of modernisation theory after African countries gained their independence. In Africa, colonialists and neo-colonialists were thus obliged to crusade for these values, and they used whatever arsenal was at their disposal to further ensure epistemicide,

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valuecide and linguicide. In effect, colonialism rendered traditional structures, indigenous institutions and value systems redundant, and subjected them to the economic and political needs of the imperial powers.10 Neocolonialism sought to retain such subservience on the part of former colonies. Mafeje observed that modern Western civilisation is historically the first civilisation to attempt the homogenisation of cultures. He found this both impoverishing and counter to African organic development, in that it denied various vistas of possibilities for Africa and African people.11 Clearly the social sciences and humanities, which originated and received their inspiration in the West, are essentially indigenous to it, given their provisional horizons. As such, they cannot be universal to the rest, including Africa. Having impressed Wilson with his intellectual prowess and his ability to immerse himself during his fieldwork, Mafeje was recommended for doctoral studies and he went to Cambridge University, graduating in 1968.12 A completely different scenario played itself out in England, as Mafeje’s doctoral mentor at Cambridge University, Dr Audrey Richards, had low regard for his intellectual and scholarship abilities, especially with regard to his predisposition towards reading and analysing complex texts and handling profound theoretical issues. It could be argued that the real reason had to do with Dr Richards being uncomfortable with the intellectually maturing Mafeje, who occasionally hinted that modern Western civilisation was impoverishing the rest of the world, especially Africa, through its homogenising proclivities. According to Mafeje, his theatrical renunciation of Richards’ intellectual maternalism was telling. As he pointed out, ‘I was gatvol with her because she behaved like I was an intellectual nonentity without historical groundedness.’13 Clearly this was not an infantile rejection, but a need for self-affirmation and self-assertion in the light of his humiliation. Again, by Mafeje’s own account, it was not until he went to Uganda to do field research between 1965  and 1967, and to Tanzania between 1969 and 1971, that he discovered that the ideology of tribalism was commonplace and prevalent in both colonial Africa and post-independence Africa. It is noteworthy that by the time Mafeje took a post as head of the Department of Sociology on ‘The Hill’ – as the University of Dar es Salaam is fondly called due to its location in scenic hills – his work had clearly become more consciously thematic, deconstructionist and less ethnographic. In pursuit of his deconstructionist critique and trenchant attack on European ethnocentrism, he wrote an influential article entitled ‘The ideology of “tribalism ”’.14 Apart from its deconstructionist approach, the article was pari passu a call for social-scientific concepts to be indigenised – so that

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their intuitive tendency to paralyse analysis could be addressed through conscious research for alternative forms of knowledge.15 Subsequently, Mafeje undertook a sustained deconstructionist journey with respect to colonial anthropology – a discipline that he majored in until he completed his doctorate. His main thesis was that anthropology was instrumental in the suppression and domination of Third World peoples and that it was distinctly premised on alterity. In other words, it was based on the epistemology of the duality of subjects and objects. Against this background, anthropology was destined to be cast into a deep crisis by contemporary social struggles against colonialism. As viewed by Mafeje, the problem of Anthropology, from a historical perspective, lay in the fact that it is dissimilar to the other disciplines, as it was created specifically for the colonised ‘others’ – who were not permitted to understand themselves except through the eye of the coloniser. Mafeje was uncompromising: he objected to this kind of anthropology because it was the discipline he knew best, having read its classical works and having interacted with its key interlocutors. In fact, as alluded to earlier, although he was deeply scathing of anthropology, it was clear for Mafeje that the social sciences and humanities were a social product, as well as a reflexive instance of society. Hence they were the products of industrialisation and colonisation and, as such, he found their epistemological premises objectionable. As Mafeje continued his deconstruction of colonial anthropology, he seemed to be slowly but broadly identifying with the field of sociology, although he relied on various other disciplines. It could be argued that this is because sociology can be understood as a reflexive discipline that focuses on understanding transformation brought about by new forms of economic, political and social relations, including democracy, industrialism and urbanisation. At this point, Mafeje was grappling methodologically and epistemologically with issues of inter-disciplinarity and non-disciplinarity, especially because the University of Dar es Salaam, where he was lecturing, had a propensity for inter-disciplinarity. The impact of grappling with these issues can be discerned in his work: although it had a common strand, it sometimes tended to be self-contradictory. Tragic circumstances involving a car accident forced Mafeje to return to the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague. From 1973 onwards, following his return as professor of anthropology and sociology of development, he focused on African systems of land tenure and on agricultural and rural development. This steady work evolved into the agrarian question in Africa. He also made deliberate intellectual detours as he ventured into a range of theoretical and methodological fields, including state capitalism and

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primitive accumulation, science and ideology, student politics, technology and development, sociology of South African anthropology, sociology of sociology, and African historiography. Other areas to which he gave a passing gaze were the sociology of African literature, philosophical representations and demography and economy in Africa.16 Despite some of these being mere intellectual explorations that were not sustained,17 they remain insightful and informative to scholars. Such exploratory endeavours predisposed Mafeje to various disciplines: he could move with ease from political science (a discipline he had very low regard for) to sociology, history and economics. In his article ‘On the articulation of modes of production’, he reviews separate chapters by Harold Wolpe and Michael Morris, which appeared in a book edited by the former.18 Mafeje skirts the essays on Marxist theory, and focuses his criticisms on Wolpe and Morris, by stating that their theories on the articulation of modes of production in South Africa are based on ‘texts which are largely divorced from context’, in that they superimposed Marxian categories on South Africa.19 It should be noted that, for Mafeje, there can be no text without context, lest everything is contrived and concepts are treated as applicable across space and time. Mafeje was sceptical of both Wolpe and Morris: he considered their representations and pronouncements as barely anchored in ‘idiographic knowledge through field work’, andargued that they ‘relied on work done by liberals, anthropologists, linguists, economists and historians, whose empiricism is a guarantee for doing field work’.20 In this regard, he was always critical of endeavours in political analysis to distance theory from the existential and historical context and vice versa – hence the relationship he drew between idiographic and nomothetic enquiries. In ‘South Africa: the dynamics of a beleaguered state’, Mafeje further demonstrates what he observes as serious shortcomings and problems with Marxism in South Africa. He observes that there has been a noticeable trend towards Marxist theory among African social scientists (and others), since the beginning of the 1970s. It was difficult for Mafeje to appreciate Marxism’s universalistic pretensions and impulses, given that it was founded on European history at a particular juncture.21 Despite his inclination towards Marxist thought categories, Mafeje asked critical questions that are fascinating to those interested in the indigenisation of the social sciences and humanities. For instance, he enquired: If Marxism is a universal scientific theory, how does it overcome its own syntactical and semantic limitations? In other words, methodologically, how does it relate to vernacular languages, in the analytical, political sense.?22 

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Mafeje’s position on Marxism is consistent with his inclination to ideographic knowledge, his emphasis of the need for text to be embedded in a context, and his view of self-knowledge and self-affirmation as central to combating alterity. That Mafeje was not necessarily averse to Marxism became obvious to me in 1985, when I was asked to enquire from him (it was never made clear to me whether it was as a fellow South African or in my capacity as the deputy president of an African student association) why the School of Humanities and Social Sciences had invited Claude Meillasoux to give a guest lecture to students. His response was that they had ‘invited his politics and not his colour’. At the time, Meillasoux (a French neo-Marxist and economic anthropologist) was struggling with the issue of reconciling the nomothetic nature of Marxism with the vernacular categories in pre-capitalist societies. Of course, Meillasoux did not disappoint the community of the American University in Cairo, as he advanced his thesis, entitled: ‘From reproduction to production: A Marxist approach to economic anthropology’. Jimi Adesina poignantly points out that Mafeje’s search for ‘endogeneity’ was not a mere academic rebellion, but a political affirmation.23 The context in which Mafeje engaged in deconstruction in the late 1960s was characterised by a general disillusionment with colonial anthropology. Small wonder that this disillusionment germinated into fertile ground for rebellion in the 1970s, by a younger generation of anthropologists. But it was also a period of continuing political emancipation for African countries. In this respect, his attempt in this direction was not single-handed: he was one among many scholars and intellectuals who defended Africa’s civilisational achievements and succeeded in asserting and defending the African identity.

AFRICANITY AS THE POINT OF DEPARTURE Although Africanity would have been taken for granted by Africans as the core of their agency, Mafeje clearly points out that the colonial encounter, and the attendant negation of the humanity of Africans, constituted the reality that prompted it to be proclaimed.24 In light of the demonstrated and perverted universalism characteristic of Western scientism – which clearly distorted and misrepresented Africans – Mafeje made Africanity his point of departure. For Mafeje, given the state of coloniality, Africanity was essentially an assertion of an independent identity.25 This state of affairs constituted determinate conditions for such an assertion and determination 140

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of Africanity as a combative ontology, with profound political, ideological, cosmological and intellectual implications.26 This precision is illustrated by Mogobe Ramose, who points out that, depending on one’s perspective, it does make a difference whether one construes ontology as either the philosophy of being or be-ing. The former speaks to being as a totality: it emphasises the question: What is being? The latter conceives of be-ing as a wholeness: the suffix –ing speaks to the recognition that motion is the principle of be-ing. When understood dynamically, both perspectives converge on the point that ontology is meaningful only if it acknowledges that, in the realm of existence, there is a being who posits the question of being or be-ing. Based on this reasoning, ontology is necessarily complemented by epistemology. Given the variety and multiplicity of experience, the question, What is being?, is not the only one that can be posited. Proceeding from the perspective of be-ing, it is highly conceivable that the basic question could be posited as: Who is being? There are two sides to this question: in the one case it refers to the encounter with other human beings particularly; and in the other it relates to all other beings as manifestations of be-ing as a wholeness. In either case, the question, Who is being?, is fundamentally an ethical question. As an ethical question, it has the discernment to distinguish between justice and injustice in given existential conditions. Where there is no justice, the ethical resistance to that condition may be described correctly as a combative ontology.27 Although Africanity, as a concept, was used etymologically as far back as the early 1960s, Mafeje popularised it by treating it not as an idea but as the quality or state of being African. Although there have been moot arguments that the articulation of Africanity is probably the least forceful of Mafeje’s contributions, it has to be appreciated that this position is not in contradiction to his deconstructionist approach and advancement of indigenisation, but rather supplements them. Thus, for him, Africanity is about recognising the humanity of Africans. It connotes a sense of recognition that the essence of being an African results from mental decolonisation. As such, Africanity is an imperative in contesting the epistemology of alterity in the search for the reaffirmation, rediscovery and renaissance of Africa. In this respect, Africanity speaks to the vital issue of Africans determining their future in the first place. Premised on the above, it is clear that Africanity is a way of thinking, analysis and writing that takes as its point of departure the privileging of Africa. Although self-asserting and self-affirming, it has to deconstruct and negate Eurocentrism. Although combative towards the

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demeaning tendency of Othering, which is central to the epistemology of alterity, it is not a reactive discourse. Although Africanity informed struggles for self-determination over the years, Mafeje points out that its resurgence among radical African scholars can be traced to critical developments in recent African history. These are: (1) the imposition of structural adjustment programmes by the World Bank; (2) the fierce intellectual negation of African studies; (3) the collapse of apartheid in South Africa as the last signpost of Western colonisation in Africa;28 and (4) the post-modernist cosmopolitanism reflected in deriding those who take Africa as their point of departure, by accusing them of history-worshipping and reflecting an incapacity to read the signs of the times. The last point is critical, as it points to the fact that Mafeje was not naïve and did not take it for granted that all Africans embrace their Africanity. This is because instances of Africans spurning Africanity – and attitudes that dismiss the need for authentic representations by Africans to define and assert themselves – are commonplace. For Achille Mbembe, the production of the dominant meanings in African representations and self-writing was colonised by two ideological currents of thought. The first likes to present itself as radical and progressive by using Marxist and nationalist categories to develop an imaginaire of culture and politics, in which a manipulation of the rhetoric of autonomy, resistance and emancipation serves as the sole criterion for determining the legitimacy of an authentic African discourse. He categorised scholars in this mould as Afro-radicals. The second developed out of an emphasis on difference and the native condition. It is constituted by nativists who promote the idea of a unique African identity, whose foundation is membership in the black race. As Mbembe argues in a series of articles, the effort to determine the conditions under which the African subject could attain full selfhood, become self-conscious, and be answerable to no one else, soon encountered historicist thinking in the form of both currents of thought, and these led such efforts to a dead end.29 Clearly Mbembe, as a chief detractor, considers the two main narratives about Africa as fake philosophies and representations.30 In this respect, it is clear that the concept of Africanity arose not just as a response to various attempts on the part of the West and its academic institutions to belittle and deny the contributions of Africa to world civilisation and to demean the continent’s historically great institutions. It was also a response to African scholars who had been captured by Eurocentrism. Hence Mafeje affirms, ‘Africanity could not possibly mean the same thing to succeeding generations of African intellectuals.’31 For Mafeje, what

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emerges from all this is a new awakening in Africa that seeks alternative ways and a different point of departure, born of disillusionment and resentment of intellectual, political and economic domination.32 Thus Mafeje took Africanity to be a combative ontology that can change the geopolitics of knowledge production and recalibrate its point of reference in the social sciences and humanities. In essence, Africanity emphasises and constitutes the need for an intellectual standpoint derived from a rootedness in African conditions – a centring of commonly focused but disaggregated African ontological discourses and experiences to undergird African intellectual work. Mafeje was always concerned with the ease with which Europeans became spokespersons for Africans and claimed the unilateral position of being experts on African experiences. Hence his outspokenness and activism was purposefully aimed at correcting and reversing the fact that for centuries, discourses on Africa have been dominated by non-Africans. This domination denied the cultivation of authenticity and specificity, which is what enables an intellectual community to make a lasting contribution to knowledge and to put itself on the universal map as a growth centre.33 This does not imply unwillingness to learn from others, but a refusal to be hegemonised and spoken for by others. In this regard, those who exercise undue anxiety about being ‘cosmopolitan’ or universalist fail to grasp this about much of what is considered nomothetic in the dominant strands of Western ‘theories’. Mafeje highlights his appreciation of the nature and limits of knowledge: ‘All knowledge is first local; and “universal knowledge” can only exist in contradiction.’34  Western scholars such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber spoke distinctly to the European context of their time, as Michel Foucault did for his, and it is precisely this authenticity that guaranteed the efficacy and endurance of their discourses. It is the relevance of their scholarship that positioned their work. Hence as Africans we can state, ‘If what we say and do has relevance for our humanity, its international relevance is guaranteed.’35  For this reason, Mafeje’s thesis was that the social sciences are essentially ideographic, rather than nomothetic. As such, he found the assertion of extra scietiam nulla salus (there is no knowledge outside science) as another attempt at epistemicide. Anchoring his deconstructive critique on Africanity required that Mafeje ‘speak truth to power’. In pursuit of this he wrote with his trademark fluency and drive, supported by his mastery of the art of elegant but hard and uncompromising intellectual argumentation. In the process of correcting the negative images produced and reproduced about Africa, he crossed swords with a range of scholars, notably Ali Mazrui and Sally Moore, and he took

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the likes of Mbembe to task. Mafeje thrived on debate. On many occasions he was bruised as much as he bruised others, due to his confrontational style of rhetoric and polemics. We  should be grateful to the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) for recording these debates for future generations, because they contain intellectual gems. For a compilation of these – in homage to Mafeje following his passing – one need only go through the pages of the CODESRIA Bulletin. Fred Hendricks points out that what made Mafeje such an outstanding intellectual was the combination of his normative concern for what is good for Africa and his sharp analytical mind.36 Mafeje contends that Africans, by consistently and ferociously insisting on Africanity, will stake their claim, under present determinate conditions, to assert an identity that has been denied, negated and marginalised through external imposition. Despite being thoroughly trained in anthropology, Mafeje’s deconstructive critique and intellectual discourse became increasingly ‘non-disciplinary’. His work drew from the insights of researchers in the different social sciences and humanities in Africa, specifically sociologists, economists, historians, political scientists, social geographers, lawyers, philosophers and literary critics. It should be recalled that his exploratory works straddle all these fields. According to Mafeje this allowed him to learn from others without being bogged down in intractable methodological problems, supposedly due to professional jealousies among disciplines. To avoid all this, he simply used the discursive method. This ensured that he was not held to rigid strictures. This has always been a confounding area for me, because one can be non-disciplinary but still remain methodological. As is clear from his work, Mafeje moved from using anthropology to sourcing from various disciplines. He recommended the reading of Paul Feyerabend, who held that science is essentially an anarchistic enterprise and not a nomic (customary) one.37 In other words, it is not a sacrosanct or neutral structure containing positive knowledge that is independent of culture, ideology and prejudice. I find the similarities in methodology very striking. According to Feyerabend, precisely because all methodological approaches are noted for their shortcomings, the only rule that persists and sustains is that ‘anything goes’. I am tempted to assert that far from being non-disciplinary, Mafeje demonstrated fecundity for multi-disciplinarity. After all, Mafeje held that each discipline has its advantages, and harnessing those advantages makes for stronger and solid representations.

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His point of departure – Africanity as a combative ontology (whose quest is for African scholars to be rooted in something) – crystallises in the two write-ups.38  His ‘non-disciplinary’ approach, his ability to speak truth to power, and his instruction that African scholarship should engage in a research agenda that truly represents and advances authentic African representations, have positioned Mafeje’s scholarship as an immense contribution to the search by African peoples for self-identity, self-determination, self-understanding and political emancipation – as they struggle against alienation and misrepresentation. In posing more general questions that challenge the universality of Western ontology, destabilising conventional epistemologies and disturbing the comforts of the taken-for-granted methodologies and ontologies, Mafeje was well aware that the time had come to experiment with new models without appealing to the usual prejudices of the West.

LEGACY AND PERSONAL CONTRIBUTION TO SCHOLARSHIP By the time Mafeje departed this world, he had written a testimony to his intellectual legacy and what he considered to be his contribution to the social sciences and humanities. Mafeje is the first to admit that without first affirming and thus immersing himself in anthropology, he would not have been able to perform a sublime and stellar work at deconstructing the discipline and negating its core characteristic, namely the epistemology of alterity (particularly in anthropology) and negation (predominant in the social sciences broadly). As deployed by Mafeje, the concept of negation had a double meaning, as it referred to (1) the undoing or critique of the said misrepresentations (deconstruction) and (2) the Othering and misrepresentation of Africans in social-scientific writings (epistemology of alterity). Thus, his relentless contestation of the epistemology of alterity was meant to pursue indigenisation, search for lasting meaning and relevance, and assert the sovereignty of African scholarship. The range of issues Mafeje was able to address with intellectual sharpness – as demonstrated by his archival material – points to an individual who worked very hard to ground himself and develop his skill and abilities. Over time he developed and refined a conceptual orientation that was profoundly rooted. One has to concur with the conclusions reached by Sharp that Mafeje’s intellectual journey reveals to us some key pointers. For instance, (1) it is quite clear that speaking truth to power convincingly is not a trait developed overnight but has to be nurtured over time; (2) while

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speaking truth to power calls for hard and uncompromising intellectual argument, disrespect towards those with whom one comes to argue is not a necessary factor; and (3) it is crucial, especially for an anthropologist, to be well grounded in ethnographic understanding to be effective in speaking truth to power.39 By all accounts, Mafeje was a vigorous and rigorous interlocutor who carried the aura of an accomplished scholar. As an academic and thought leader he did an excellent job through relentless critique, and he left an intellectual and scholarly heritage for posterity. As a tenacious debater and stirring orator, he demonstrated no hesitancy in staking out contentious positions and promoting them fearlessly in any setting or against any adversary, as seen in a number of his brutal intellectual exchanges. In this way he was able to debunk a variety of political myths and colonial assumptions about Africa and Africans. During his long-standing association with CODESRIA, Mafeje devoted most of his life to mentoring a generation of African scholars based on the African continent. He also sought to ensure that his work was available to a broad African readership by deliberately publishing in journals located in Africa. He sought to develop a questioning mind and the ability for combative argumentation anchored in uncompromising observation. His approach to teaching was transformative in a broad sense: he ensured that students moved from passivity towards active engagement with the subject matter. Through his piercingly uncomfortable questions and awkward assertions he opened up, rather than shut down, the space for empowering engagement. He sought to instigate intellectual insurrection by inspiring students to pursue independent and critical approaches to knowledge production, so as to contribute to Africa’s renewal agenda. In working with students he always made them conscious of the legacy of colonialism across the continent and that of colonial apartheid in South Africa. His critical purpose was to ensure that students understood colonialism in order to critique it properly and to develop suitable solutions for the continent. Mafeje’s works entailed the reversal of epistemicide and the affirmation of indigenisation, which essentially is a scholarship grounded in and driven by the affirmation of African experiences and ontological accounting for the self. If his work included ‘protest’ elements, these did not serve to label it as mere protest scholarship. Deconstruction inevitably involves contestations and protests as key elements. Over the years, he taught many students, and the relationships he formed with many of them deeply affected both the students and himself. Frail as he was, on his return from exile and during his time in South Africa, Mafeje addressed universities and think tanks

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and thereby inspired scholars to rigorously pursue independent knowledge production, including indigenous knowledge systems. Few would agree with Andrew Bank that Mafeje is guilty of contributing to ‘myths’ about the importance of his own critique of anthropology and for ‘reinventing’ his life history.40 Rather, through his scholarly work on the continent (and beyond), Mafeje influenced generations of African scholars who crossed paths with him via different routes.41 These encounters resulted in the development of courageous scholars prepared to withstand both the discomfort of Western intellectualism through racism and the unwillingness to accept alternative forms of knowledge, methods and research. My personal experience with Mafeje – as his student in sociology at the American University in Cairo – was that he invested a great deal in his students to ensure that they pushed back or even destroyed the stifling intellectual boundaries that manifested in cognitive injustice. Mafeje was aware that representations seeking to uplift Africans to speak for themselves – and provide a deconstructive critique of Eurocentrism – would not be credited by those who uphold the status quo of Western domination. Precisely because of this, Mafeje wished Africans could learn from lethal black mambas on the continent, because ‘perhaps, in the circumstances their continent would cease to be a playground for knowers of absolute knowledge and they in turn would lose their absolute alterity’.42  Mafeje’s works were galvanising and liberating. For instance, it is not contested that the critique of the Western idea of tribalism and the use of the concept of tribes had been on the table for at least a decade before Mafeje wrote his article ‘The ideology of “tribalism”’.43 However, what is important is that his work was singularly inspiring, as this article had an insurrectional and instigating impact on generations of African scholars, both emerging and established. It set new terms of engagement and provided new perspectives, it started long-lasting debates that critiqued anthropological concepts of dual economy, and it challenged the alleged static nature of African societies that was inherently implied by both concepts of tribe and tribalism. This was crucial in light of the fact that rather than being static, African societies were intricately dynamic and radically evolving. Although other scholars had written about these distortions and misrepresentations, they did not do so in Mafeje’s unique way: through direct and conscious exposition that focused on internal contradictions within such a concept. His was a self-conscious critique of the continued use of these concepts, despite the fact that African society was no longer isolated but part of the emergent ‘modern’ system. Given its wide citation and broad influence, ‘The ideology of “tribalism”’ is often considered to

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have revealed Mafeje as a profound scholar. However, his attack on alterity actually preceded that short but highly influential piece. In fact, the drive for the centring of African ‘self-knowing’ – and a mode of writing anchored in the subject’s perspective – is evident but not pronounced in his earlier writings in the sixties as a graduate student. Rather than the beginning, ‘The ideology of “tribalism”’ crystallised Mafeje’s Afrocentric writings of earlier years. It merely announced the significance of his contribution regarding ideographic enquiry yielding deeper insight than monothetic enquiry.44  In recent times we have witnessed a posthumous and belated recognition of Mafeje’s legacies and personal contributions to knowledge and scholarship – from the deconstruction of Eurocentrism to the (re)construction of indigenous knowledge, and his role in blazing a new trail for younger and future African social scientists.45 I would argue, however, that a poignant tribute would expose African students to his work, especially in South Africa. The failure to introduce students to Mafeje’s intellectual legacy and wide-ranging contributions to African scholarship is to deny them what Adesina refers to as lessons of Mafeje’s scholarship. These are (1) the importance of immersion into and familiarisation with the literature so as to understand the subject at hand; (2) a highly skilled approach to field data and writing; (3) deeply theoretical rigour; and (4) a strong, unshakeable commitment to Africa.46 

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Mafeje has enriched South Africa, Africa and the world by addressing various key scholarly topics. In particular, he has laid the groundwork for emerging African scholars to be at the forefront of the quest for African regeneration and the struggle for reason and justice. More importantly, he left behind generations of African scholars, whom he had taken pride in developing by grappling with various scholarly issues in a unique and refreshing manner. In the pursuit of these objectives, he was well aware – and he acknowledged as much – that intellectual communities take a long time to form, and they usually result from particular traditions that have persisted over time. Although one concurs with Hendricks that Mafeje was a fierce fighter, it is inconceivable that he would conclude that Mafeje was merely an angry and disappointed person.47 Mafeje was a great scholar, profound thinker and revolutionary activist.48 As a signifier of the African predicament, Mafeje formed part of the broader social struggles, which included many stellar intellectual performers in the quest for reversing epistemicide and affirming the humanity of Africans. These scholars include the likes of

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Mafeje, A., 2000. Africanity: a combative ontology. CODESRIA Bulletin, 2(1 & 2), pp.66–71, pp.66–67.

2

Mafeje, A., 2001. Africanity: a commentary by way of conclusion. CODESRIA Bulletin, 3 & 4, pp.14–16.

3

Sharp, J., 2008. Mafeje and Langa: the start of an intellectual journey. Africa Development, 33(4), pp.153–167.

4

Wilson, M. and Mafeje, A., 1963. Langa: a study of social groups in an African township. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.

5

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Bernard Magubane, Es’kia Mphahlele and Mogobe Ramose in South Africa, and Claude Ake, Paulin Hountondji and Dani Wadada Nabudere (whose name has a place of honour in Africa’s social sciences and humanities) on the rest of the continent.

Gulbenkian Commission on the restructuring of the social sciences, 1996. The historical construction of the social sciences, from the eighteenth century to 1945. In Open the social sciences: report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the restructuring of the social sciences. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.1–32.

6

Mafeje, A., 1976. The problem of anthropology in historical perspective: an inquiry into the growth of the social sciences. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 10(2), pp.307–333.

7

Wirth, L., 1947. Responsibility of social science. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 249, pp.143–151.

8

Lebakeng, T.J., 2000. Africanisation of the social sciences and humanities in South Africa: an African intellectual challenge. In Kasanga, L.A. (ed.), Changes and challenges at historically disadvantaged universities. Sovenga: The University of the North Press, pp.93–109.

9

Lebakeng, T.J., 2001. Africanise rather than sacrifice the social sciences and humanities: a challenge for educational transformation at South African universities. Paper presented at the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies, Centurion Lake Hotel, Centurion, Pretoria. Available at https://studylib.net/ doc/5853011/africanisatise-rather-than-sacrifice-the-social-sciences- [Accessed 2 March 2017].

10 Baah, A., 2003. History of African development initiatives. Paper presented at a workshop of the Africa Labour Research Network, 22–23 May 2003, Johannesburg, South Africa. 11 Mafeje, A., 1988. Culture and development in Africa: the missing link, CODESRIA Bulletin, 1, pp.7–8.

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12 Nyoka, B., 2017. Archie Mafeje: an intellectual biography. PhD dissertation, University of South Africa, Pretoria. 13 Lebakeng, T.J., 2007. Personal conversations with Professor Archibald Boyce Mafeje, 26 January 2007, Pretoria. 14 Mafeje, A., 1971. The ideology of ‘tribalism’. Journal of Modern African Studies, 9(2), pp.253–261. 15 Adesina, J.O., 2008. Against alterity – the pursuit of endogeneity: breaking bread with Archie Mafeje. CODESRIA Bulletin, 3 & 4, pp.21–29. 16 Lebakeng, T.J., 2007. Archibald Boyce Mafeje: a tribute to excellent scholarship. Tribute, February; Nyoka, Archie Mafeje. Op. cit. 17 Mafeje, Africanity: a commentary by way of conclusion. Op. cit.. 18 Mafeje, A., 1981. On the articulation of modes of production: review article. Journal of Southern African Studies, 8(1), pp.123–138. The book in question is Wolpe, H. (ed.), 1980. The articulation of modes of production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 19 Mafeje, On the articulation of modes of production. Op. cit., 137. 20 Ibid., pp.137–138. 21 Mafeje, A., 1986. South Africa: the dynamics of a beleaguered state. Africa Journal of Political Economy/Revue Africaine D’Economie Politique, 1(1), pp.95–119. 22 Mafeje, A., 1985. The development of the African social science community and the state of the arts. Paper presented at the CODESRIA Evaluative Conference of Social Science in Africa, 22–27 April 1985. Dakar, Senegal. 23 Adesina, J.O., 2008. Archie Mafeje and the pursuit of endogeny: against alterity and extroversion. Africa Development, 33(4), pp.133–152. 24 Mafeje, Africanity: a combative ontology. Op. cit. 25 Mafeje, Africanity: a commentary by way of conclusion. Op. cit. 26 Mafeje, Africanity: a combative ontology. Op. cit. 27 Lebakeng, T.J., 2018. Personal conversation with Professor Mogobe Ramose, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. 28 Mafeje, Africanity: a commentary by way of conclusion. Op. cit. 29 Mbembe, A., 2000. African modes of self-writing. CODESRIA Bulletin, 2(1 & 2), pp.4–19; Mbembe, A., 2001. African modes of self-writing. Identity, Culture and Politics, 2(1), pp.1–34; Mbembe, A., 2002. African modes of self-writing. Public Culture, 14(1), pp.239–273. 30 Mafeje, A., 2000. Apropos ‘African modes of self-writing’: adieu Mbembe. Southern Africa Political & Economic Monthly, 13(12), pp.33–36. 31 Mafeje, Africanity: a combative ontology. Op. cit., p.67. 32 Mafeje, A., 1992. In search of an alternative: a collection of essays on revolutionary theory. Harare: SAPES Books.

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33 Mafeje, The development of the African social science community. Op. cit.

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35 Ibid. 36 Hendricks, F., 2008. Crossing swords and drawing blood: Archie Mafeje – a warrior in a double battle. CODESRIA Bulletin, 3 & 4, pp.45–48. 37 Feyerabend, P., 1975. Against method: Outline of an anarchist theory. London, Ontario: Humanities Press. 38 Mafeje, Africanity: a combative ontology. Op. cit.; Mafeje, Africanity: a commentary by way of conclusion. Op. cit. 39 Sharp, Mafeje and Langa. Op. cit. 40 Nyoka, Archie Mafeje. Op. cit. 41 Adesina, Against alterity. Op. cit. 42 Mafeje, A., 1997. Who are the makers and objects of anthropology? A critical comment on Sally Falk Moore’s anthropology and Africa. African Sociological Review, 1(1), pp.1–15, p.14. 43 Mafeje, The ideology of ‘tribalism’. Op. cit. 44 Mafeje, On the articulation of modes of production. Op. cit.

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34 Mafeje, Africanity: a combative ontology. Op. cit., p.67.

45 Lebakeng, T.J., 2013. Rediscovering Archie Mafeje and how South Africa is coming to terms with its ignored intellectual icon: a rejoinder. CODESRIA Bulletin, 1 & 2, pp.32–35. 46 Adesina, Against alterity. Op. cit. 47 Hendricks, Crossing swords and drawing blood. Op. cit. 48 Nabudere, D.W., 2011. Archie Mafeje: scholar, activist and thinker. Pretoria: AISA; Nyoka, B., 2019. Archie Mafeje as revolutionary sociologist. Theoria, 66 (158), p.158, pp.1–26.

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(Re)Visiting Molefi Kete Asante’s Theory of Afrocentricity Lebogang T Legodi and Kgothatso B Shai University of Limpopo, South Africa

ABSTRACT Since its inception as a coherent theory, much of the work on Afrocentricity has focused more on its application in the analysis of phenomena than on untangling it as an idea. The theory is used this way in social science disciplines such as linguistics, social work, sociology and philosophy, and this usage is emerging in indigenous knowledge systems and political science, to mention but a few. Given that Afrocentricity is currently one of the most citied, critiqued and employed theoretical frameworks, the authors find it imperative to explore the theory in terms of what it is conceptually and how it contributes to recentring the African perspective on Africa and the world. As the theory is about to enter its fourth decade since Molefi Kete Asante first proposed it, a systematic exploration of its meaning and essence, is called for. This is also necessary because the theory is so highly contested among its proponents – and worse still among those who reject it. It is for this reason that this chapter seeks to dissect Afrocentricity as a theory of social change. This is done by reviewing the existing literature by Asante and other scholars who have contributed to the development of the theory in their distinct disciplines.

INTRODUCTION

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This chapter seeks to explore Molefi Kete Asante’s theory of Afrocentricity.1 This is done by exploring the genesis of the theory and paradigm, as derived from its conceptualisation by Asante and various other scholars who have contributed to the theory and what it is today. The chapter then

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WHAT IS AFROCENTRICITY? EXPLORING THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA BY ASANTE

[Re]Visiting Molefe Kete Asante’s Theory of Afrocentricity

explores what constitutes the Afrocentric idea, its constructive critiques, and deconstruction theory as an idea and practice associated with the epistemic domination of Africa. It dissects the theory by posing questions related to its central messages, such as: Which Africa?. Whose centre is the theory of Afrocentricity referring to? Drawing from the critiques, the chapter questions whether Afrocentricity is an antithesis to Eurocentrism or its synthesis. The authors then apply the theory to their own location to explore its relevance to knowledge production in South Africa. We also unapologetically assert the future of the theory of Afrocentricity – or what can be termed ‘Afro-futurism’ – as critical in this age of decolonisation and Africanisation of thought and practice.

The concept of Afrocentricity is currently one of the terms most cited and debated by scholars and the public at large. But it is also a volatile concept that has been well received by some scholars and ridiculed by others. Formally postulated by Asante in his book Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change,2 the theory of Afrocentricity has evolved into a paradigm and movement. This statement makes sense when contextualised in the logical connection between idea, theory, paradigm and movement. Such an argument is also hinged on the mutual link between philosophy, theory and ideology.3 Although Asante was the first to institutionalise the theory, he states in an interview that the term ‘Afrocentricity’ emerged in the 1960s from the works of Kwame Nkrumah, who called for Afrocentric knowledge at the University of Ghana, Legon.4  The term also emerged because of the failure to detect and diagnose the challenges facing African people the world over. Asante argued that the history and civilisation of African people were interrupted by the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, which robbed Africans not only of their history and culture, but also of their sense of agency and centredness. He was echoed by scholars such as Maulana, Karenga, Ruth Reviere, Danjuma, Modupe and Ama Mazama,5 who argued that there was a decentring of Africa from its history and civilisation. This necessitated efforts to recentre Africa and initiate an African-centred analysis. Most of these scholars were based at Temple University in the USA, where Asante is also based. The theory was institutionalised at this university as a central philosophical framework 153

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and paradigm that guides the curriculum and research on Africology and African-American studies. Having been the first to formally postulate the theory of Afrocentricity, Asante acknowledges that the term can be traced back to scholars and activists such as Booker T Washington, Martin Luther King Jr, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and WEB Du Bois.6 Because of the geographical location of these thinkers and activists, the theory is dismissed by some as a USA idea rather than an African one. Some argue that the theory is more relevant to the Africans in the diaspora, and those in the US specifically, than to Africans on the continent. However, this argument erroneously ties the theory rather rigidly to the geographical location of its thinkers in the Atlantic world and ignores their epistemic location – global Africa – which links continental Africa with its diaspora into a single epistemic world view.7 It also neglects the fact that the theory is inspired by the thinking of scholars in Africa as well – such as Chinua Achebe, Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah and Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o – and that it is inspired by African history and African interests. Asante defines the theory as follows: Afrocentricity is a mode of thought and action in which the centrality of African interests, values, and perspectives predominate. In regard to theory, it is the placing of African people in the centre of any analysis of African phenomena …In terms of action and behaviour, it is a devotion to the idea that is in the best interest of Africa consciousness and is at the heart of ethical behaviour.8

This underlines the intention to recentre Africans, their interests and perspectives in the analysis of African phenomena – a major departure from Eurocentric tendencies in African studies that centre Europe’s questions, interests and voices. Ayele Bekerie stresses that Afrocentricity acknowledges the necessity for Africans to prioritise their own interests without using terms from somewhere else. Afrocentricity is about being centred and using one’s own terms instead of those of others.9 Some refer to this as ‘Africentricity’. What emerges strongly from the foregoing definitions is that Afrocentricity is aligned to the centredness of Africa, Africans and their practices in any discourse. Such a positioning of Afrocentricity as a theory naturally presents it as being against the marginality of African people and African value systems.10 It serves to guide Africans toward selfdetermination, in both the political and the intellectual sense. 154

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•

[Re]Visiting Molefe Kete Asante’s Theory of Afrocentricity

Ana Monteiro-Ferreira says that Afrocentricity established itself in a manner that distinguished it from post-colonial theory and critical race theory – both of which were spreading fast in the 1990s – while sharing with these theories the intention to reorganise the existing political, economic and cultural orders that pretend to be universal and are regarded as the norm.11 Afrocentricity did not radically shift away from critical race theory and post-colonial theory, but it occupied a specific and distinct niche in the family of ideas seeking to decentre the European perspective of the world from its claim to the universal and common-sense position. In this way, while sharing the commitment to epistemic rebellion against Eurocentrism, these theories continued to advance this struggle in ways that are distinct from each other. Afrocentricity established its niche based on the anchoring of Africans’ lived experiences.12 In distinguishing itself, Afrocentricity rejects the idea of using race or colonialism as a point of departure for understanding Africa’s history and politics. On that basis, it also seeks to escape the trap of inherited identity politics by arguing that one does not have to be black/African to qualify as ‘Afrocentric’. So, any idea that is premised upon the liberation of Africans from the shackles of poverty to meaningful development qualifies as Afrocentric.13 The mere formulation of post-colonial theory is problematic, because it assumes that colonialism has ended, when the truth is that Africa is still trapped in the matrices of coloniality decades after winning independence. Afrocentricity also seeks to shift Africans from the vantage point of being victims and objects to being agents and motive forces for achieving the total liberation of Africa.14 This rejects both the colonial and post-colonial narratives, which position Africans as objects – and according to Africans see themselves as victims. It repositions the African in the driving seat of the long duration of history, an agent of change and continuities into the present. Africans are placed in the position of inventors and innovators, of fighters and builders, and of those who create a space for themselves against the odds. For Modupe, the Afrocentric framework of analysis uses three basic analytical elements, namely grounding, orientation and perspective.These are also called pyramidal elements, and are defined as follows: Grounding has to do with how knowledge is attained, primarily by descendents of African people on the continent and in the diaspora, taking into consideration their experience, history and culture. This militates against Eurocentrism’s commitment to the history and the

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story of peoples of European descent in its discussions of the world and Africa. •

Orientation is the pursuit of intellectual interest in Africans and the establishment of psychological identity towards the benefit of Africa. This contrasts with colonial and neocolonial traditions of thought, where Africa is an object of pity, shame and application of external knowledge, instead of being an object of genuine intellectual interest.

•

Perspective has to do with self-consciousness and how one responds to the world in Africa’s interest in a qualitative way, which also adds to grounding and orientation.15

The three elements of Afrocentricity assign Africans the responsibility to reverse their eradication from history and bring about knowledge of themselves by themselves, using their own terms, instead of adopting distorted history that claims to be about them – from the outside. Employing the theory of Afrocentricity is like correcting ongoing epistemic injustice, as it amounts to unmuting the silenced voices of Africans and Afrocentric scholars.16

WHICH AFRICA? WHOSE CENTRE?

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The theory of Afrocentricity responds to the questions: Which Africa is being referred to? When does it start: prior to colonialism or after gaining political independence? These questions arise because Afrocentricity insists on having Africa at the centre and Africans as agents and central participants in their history. When dissecting the concept of Afrocentricity, Bekerie submits that Afrocentricity is composed of both ‘Africa’ and ’the centre’. He states that the meaning of Africa is the centre of concern, interest, aspiration, epistemic principles and tools of analysis.17  Geographical Africa makes up the actual physical land of African peoples, whose interests form the subject of Afrocentric philosophical perspectives. The actual, physical land is principal to African people’s perception of identity and cultural uniqueness, which is a central concern of Afrocentric thinkers. The theory addresses the current lived experience, challenges and historical antecedents of Africans born and based on the African continent. For Africans in the diaspora, those of African descent, and those who ridentify with African challenges, the theory assists in scrutinising the challenges they face in outlandish places that have become home. While critics question ‘which Africa’ is referred to in defining Afrocentricity – or whose

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centre – Mogobe Ramose states that the geographic meaning of Africa is presumed without thorough engagement.18  Because of the foregoing, this is more than an etymological enquiry: it probes human relations throughout history.19 Mogobe says that ‘Africa’ at its inception is somewhat foreign to the people of the continent, as it is a product of the West, which created the term based on its experience with African people and the continent itself. For this reason, Afrocentricity regards Africa as having been a place of creation and invention, and innovation and advances, well before contact with the West. The idea epitomises the African or black experience prior to and subsequent to colonialism and slavery. Moving on to the question of location or ‘centredness’, Afrocentricity accepts Kariamu Welsh-Asante’s idea of polycentres of culture and history.20 Unlike Eurocentricity, which argues that there should be one centre of knowledge and one universal perspective, Afrocentricity argues that there is no one centre: instead, there are many centres, from which different peoples perceive and speak of the world. There is thus a space for Africans to speak, based on their experiences, histories, cultures, socio-economic conditions and philosophical choices. It should be noted that centredness is not aimed at blending African cultural representation into one. Neither does it seek the dominance of African cultures over others. Culture evolves with time, within itself and when it makes contact with others from the outside. So, in addressing the ‘location’ of Afrocentricity, we cannot arrive at one centre. Neither can we have one centre at the expense of other centres, because to achieve this end would require systematic injustice. Knowledge is rooted in experience; therefore the availability of one among many centres is imperative for the creation, organisation and use of knowledge. Mazama further stipulates, concerning location, that identity stems from the history and culture of an individual.21 Thus, this locatedness is also important for linking the ontological and epistemological imperatives of Afrocentric knowledge pursuits. The African, Africa and African knowledge/perspectives are conjoined in this search for epistemic freedom.

AFROCENTRICITY AS A SYNTHESIS ‘While Eurocentrism imposes itself as universal,’ Asante argues, ‘Afrocentrism demonstrates that it is only one way to view the world.’22 Afrocentricity moves from the premise that there are – and should be – many centres from which knowledge is cultivated and used. Critics like Patricia Collins,23 Russell Adams24 and Linda Chavez25 have claimed that while Afrocentricity does

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not seek hegemony in knowledge and scholarship, it is merely an antithesis of Eurocentrism, and therefore inherits the centrism of Eurocentrism with slightly new coordinates. They argue that it is an Afrocentrism that seeks to establish the dominance of Africa as the new centre of knowledge. This is, of course, not true. Asante states that his theory is not in any way the opposite of Eurocentrism: it does not seek to universalise itself or become a counter-hegemon to Eurocentric hegemony.26 Afrocentricity is not in any way a mirror image of Eurocentrism with Africa as its centre. Scholars like Ali Mazrui27 and Midas Chawane28 argue that Afrocentricity is the antithesis to Eurocentrism, which is regarded as the thesis. In striving to correct this misconception, Toni Morrison, as cited by George Jerry Sefa Dei, states that the theory of Afrocentricity seeks not ‘to alter one hierarchy in order to institute another. It is true that I do not want to encourage those totalising approaches … which have no drive other than exchange of dominations’.29 Dei goes on: [Afrocentricity is] an alternative, non-exclusionary, and non-hegemonic system of knowledge informed by African peoples’ history and experiences. Afrocentricity is about the investigation and understanding of phenomena from a perspective grounded in African-centred values. It is about the validation of African experiences and histories, as well as a critique of the continued exclusion and marginalisation of African knowledge systems from educational texts, mainstream academic knowledge, and scholarship.30

Both Asante and Siphamandla Zondi contend that there is nothing wrong with Europe and Europeans telling their own story; however, when Europeans assert that their story is factual and is the one absolute reality, which ridicules other peoples’ stories, therein lies the problem.31 Zondi says that if the story of Europeans is allowed to be universalised, as it has been in the past, other peoples’ stories and knowledges are bound to become irrelevant and bound to die.32 Such an attitude would lead to epistemicides, or the death of other forms of knowing. Because of Eurocentrism and the practice of epistemicides, the theory of Afrocentricity enables Africans to partake in protest and liberatory knowledge/science for their own good.33

SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

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The authors now turn to South African historiography to reveal what Afrocentricity shows about colonial knowledge production. All four main schools

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of historical thought in this historiography are implicated in the production of extraverted discourses about South Africa, namely the Dutch and British imperialist schools, the settler school, the Afrikaner nationalist school, and the currently dominant liberal and Marxist schools of thought.34 South African history has been a story of those with power to publish on behalf of the rest – regardless of what the rest of society may think are the true facts of history. Africans have been sidelined in the production of knowledge about South African history – they have been ‘left in the margin’, to use Asante’s words. The Euro-American has positioned her or his knowledge as the absolute and universal knowledge, and assumes the African will unconsciously adopt it as such. For that reason, Asante advocated the recentring of African people. Mazama states that African people unconsciously adopt the views, knowledge and perspectives of Europeans simply because of historic European control of societies where Africans lived. Eurocentric knowledge became part of who Africans are and how Africans define themselves.35  Due to the manner in which knowledge was cultivated through the colonial/neo-colonial education system – and other instruments of cultural production – what is presented to us as being good is not critiqued enough: we fail to see that we are just bystanders and not active participants in the story of our lives and life’s decisions. To quote Mazama: ‘[W]illingly or unwillingly, we have agreed to footnote status in the white man’s book. We thus find ourselves relegated to the periphery, the margin, of the European experience.’36 It is for the above reasons that black people should make use of the theory of Afrocentricity to recentre their selves and contribute to knowledge production by narrating the African experience of African people, contributing to the ecologies of knowledges, and shifting from one knowledge to many knowledges.37 In a debate between three key historiographers, Merle Lipton, Christopher Saunders and Jeff Peires,38 it emerged that British imperial history established one of the biggest myths of South African history, namely that it begins in 1652  and that 1806  is a significant expansion of this history.39 The year 1652 is the date of the arrival of Dutch colonial conquerors on the shores of the southern Cape. They engineered one of the worst forms of genocide against indigenous people, involving physical violence in the form of armed invasion, cultural violence in the form of imposed culture and knowledge, and biological violence through introducing smallpox and other diseases that decimated society. The year 1806 marks the colonisation of the Cape by the British, who took over from the Dutch, both constituting what is called the empire. It marked the intensification and expansion of

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the colonial project northwards across Musi oa Thunya, which was renamed Victoria Falls. This history celebrates these events as the arrival of civilisation, modernity, culture, Christianity, knowledge and technology.40 The narration of that history by early historians like GM Theal shows a fascination with the lives, thoughts and circumstances of the European invaders, while their victims appear mostly in passing reference, as if they were mere objects. This school of history, like the Afrikaner nationalist school, assumes the goodness of Western civilisation, while hiding what we now know as the dark underbelly experienced by Africans. This school celebrates whiteness, while it either neglects or denigrates blackness, with both being invented identities that it manufactured for purposes of creating false dichotomies of good and bad, advanced and backward, civilised and barbaric, and progress and regress. As Paul Maylam shows, these two periods constituted a major evolution of a racial and racist order in South Africa, concealed in glowing terms such as the expansion of trade, agriculture and mining; the consolidation of government and order; or the extension of the education system and religion.41 Meanwhile, the terrible practice of slavery took place with the official stamp of approval of both colonial authorities; indigenous economies and cultures were destroyed in wars and cultural onslaughts; indigenous people were dispossessed of their land and property through systematic and often violent colonial actions; and indigenous people were denigrated and dominated for purposes of providing cheap labour to the new colonial economy. All this was obscured by fascination with the imperial purview of the period.42 The enchantment with the missionary, the mission station and the civilising mission of the settler helped filter African agency through the civilised versus barbaric or Christian versus heathen-African lens of analysis, so that Africans appear in the story on the terms set by the European purview of history.43  As Maylam shows, the racial order reached its zenith in the 1960s. Yet the settler and nationalist schools of thought discuss the transitions of the early to mid twentieth century in terms that place at the centre internal wrangles within white political society and contestation of ideologies among white political parties. The result is that pre-eminence is given to settlers’ political and economic interests,44 and Africans are consigned to the margins, The liberal and Marxist schools give serious consideration to the rise of new forms of resistance to colonial and apartheid expansion, epitomised by the birth of the South African National Native Congress

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(SANNC) in 1912, which became the African National Congress (ANC) about a decade later. In this period and well into the 1990s, there are major contestations in historiography involving Afrikaner nationalists, liberals and so-called Marxist revisionists over a number of questions, at the centre of which are race, racialism and racism. This raging debate is the subject of a number of books that argue back and forth, published especially in the 1970s and 1980s, with participants in the debate coming almost exclusively from the white community in South Africa, Britain and the USA. This is comprehensively discussed in Lipton’s book Liberals, Marxists, and Nationalists, which sparked a major contestation, as different schools sought to defend themselves, their versions of South African history and the implications for the post-apartheid project – mainly in the pages of the journal Historia.45 In this context, groundbreaking work was done on the problematic colonial political economy and its implications for poverty and inequality. The deleterious effects of segregation before apartheid, as well as the racist and class-oriented spatial planning under apartheid, also came under the spotlight. From the 1970s onwards, there was massive growth in works that sought to understand the African situation, and responses to the colonial and apartheid situation. This was largely driven by the work of Marxist social historians and critical liberal historians with an interest in understanding the violation of rights and freedoms under apartheid. The story of the African peasant and proletariat received a lot more attention, and the living conditions of Africans generally and blacks broadly also became a focus of research. Yet, in the main, this remained a conversation among different schools of historians of European descent. It remained framed in patterns set in the writing of history in the UK and the USA. Eurocentric patterns of thinking continued to pervade the story-making and storytelling. South African historiography remains trapped in its position as an extension of historiography from the empire. It remained a conversation among – and a contestation of ideas between – liberals, Marxists and nationalists. Work has emerged that seeks to understand South African history from outside these Eurocentric ‘family squabbles’ between nationalists, liberals and Marxists. Such work is sometimes informed by post-colonial, feminist, black consciousness and Afrocentric considerations.46 The long history dominated by Euro-American hegemony has since been confronted by the theory of Afrocentricity, not as counter-knowledge, but as an alternative view to the existing knowledge. Terry Kershaw refers to it as protest knowledge or emancipatory knowledge, as it seeks to address

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Euro-American knowledge, which presents itself as universal.47 The dominant Euro-American knowledge universalises itself to the point of believing that its perspective of reality is the only actuality, to the detriment of the perspectives of the marginalised.48 One culture’s meaning of reality cannot be the only meaning for all. The same applies to African people, among whom there are differences in terms of class, ethnicity and gender. In this context, Asante cautions us as Africans: if we are to be the victors or determiners of our own destiny, we should not allow our white counterparts to box us into their own concepts.49 For the purposes of this chapter, ‘white ’ is not employed in its narrow sense of race, but denotes the category of members of our society who ascribe to a belief in the exclusive rights of people of European descent, or what can be termed ‘white supremacy’. In the context of South African historiography, a need has emerged to foreground views that have been sidelined. Afrocentricity, as a theory, introduces an alternative and innovative way of studying events from within. The narration of African stories from an Afrocentric perspective is long overdue. An alternative school of thought has made itself available. South African universities are battling to respond meaningfully to recent calls by students and scholars for a change in curricula. The importance of Afrocentricity as a theory and paradigm cannot be overstated as a means to assist universities in their response to calls for decolonisation and the Africanisation of curricula.50 

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Modupe and Mazama assert that Afrocentricity is an intellectual theory that seeks to study ideas and events from an African standpoint, across and beyond disciplines.51 Although Afrocentricity has received attention in disciplines such as philosophy, literary studies, psychology, indigenous knowledge systems, social work and linguistics, it is a theory that heralds an impending ‘discipline suicide’, as predicted by Mazama.52 This takes the form of a revolt by scholars, particularly Afrocentric thinkers, against their own disciplines, as they prefer to centre themselves in their African cultural value systems, which provide them with a better understanding of African problems. This concern on the part of Mazama is not misplaced. This observation is aligned to recent calls for inter/transdisciplinary knowledge, as the ultimate scholarship of consequence – the complexity of contemporary societal problems – cannot be adequately addressed through linear and narrow disciplinary perspectives. This observation does not, however, in any way

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downplay the importance of a disciplinary base in our quest to eliminate boundaries from knowledge generation, management and dissemination. In bringing the African purview back to the centre, Archie Mafeje advocated African scholars studying their societies from inside, instead of seeking to be objective in a way that results in African scholars being participants in a foreign intellectual discourse.53 It is only when African scholars become ‘centred’ and speak for themselves, Mafeje states, that the world listens and the experiences of Africans can be interpreted authentically by themselves – instead of being distorted and left to the West to be interpreted on behalf of Africans. Jimi Adesina states that Mafeje’s thinking was shaped by a commitment to ‘endogeneity’,54  an observation based on the belief that one cannot think outside of one’s history and society. Those who endorse the applicability of universal knowledge fail to acknowledge that all knowledge is first local knowledge. All theories are the by-products of values that are practised and dearly cherished by a particular society. As such, concepts such as theory, philosophy, knowledge and science are not as innocent/ genuine as they are purported to be in certain circles. Thus, the truthfulness of any theory or knowledge is context-bound. Asante extends this narrative by arguing that Afrocentricity is our truth, and their truth is not our truth.55 In discarding his discipline, Mafeje questions the education that was taken in by Africans during colonial times and the apartheid era.56 He states that this education was designed to socialise Africans to their location within the European scheme of things. Even knowledge was not meant for their benefit, Mafeje states, but was designed to perpetuate self-hate and division of Africans among themselves. Afrocentric thinkers are aware of Western disciplines that obscure African realities, and that South African education was not meant for the betterment of black South Africans. Afrocentric scholars do not conform to their designated disciplines, but combat the ‘othering’ of any knowledge that differs from the Euro-American way. They recognise that disciplines are invented to distort realities rather than to restore them. The idea of disciplines as boxes – and sites of egotistical contestation about which discipline is best – is what Caribbean scholar Lewis R Gordon calls ‘disciplinary decadence’.57 Disciplined knowledge fitted well with the colonial, ontological, political and economic project, as it facilitated knowledge that would treat the dominated people as problems instead of as people who face problems. ‘Their problem status,’ Gordon explains, ‘is a function of the presupposed legitimacy of the systems that generate them.’58  Elsewhere, Gordon draws from Frantz Fanon to explain this way of making others into problems: in the zone of non-beings is found a ‘people hidden in plain sight’, consisting of people who are submerged

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and, as a consequence, supposedly ‘do not exist’.59 They can be ignored as if they do not exist, their voices muted and their presence transparent to the point of being invisible. This makes the shifting of the geography of reason central to the project of political and economic liberation of oppressed blacks. This shifting must decentre the unjust epistemology and recentre perspectives based on African interests in discussions about Africa. In addressing African challenges, Afrocentrists should look within, dismantling any form of discipline that limits their search for finding solutions to African challenges and that binds them to a certain standpoint.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF AFROCENTRICITY? Afrocentricity attempts to analyse and synthesise the experience of African peoples and to anchor the results on their own stage, in their own just place, and in their own broad space.60 Until the definition of knowledge acknowledges that there is no one knowledge, but many knowledges, and until the Euro-American world view is provincialised back from its universalistic claims, the relevance of the theory of Afrocentricity will grow. Afrocentricity does not require one to be born on the African continent or to be black in pigmentation; instead, it embraces Steve Bantu Biko’s thought: ‘Being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.’61  Bekerie argues that, for one to be Afrocentric, one must embark on a rigorous intellectual exercise based on commitment to African history, Africa’s interests, epistemic pluralism and making Africans the centrepiece of discourses on Africa.62 Afrocentricity demands that Africans locate themselves in the quest of finding solutions to their problems within; this is to be done using their own standards and addressing their own limitations. In doing so, the genuine view of Africans will emerge and be used to voice their challenges and aspirations. The Euro-American posture of knowledge will find no relevance and will thus be consigned largely to its specific province – Europe. Africa and Africans will thus take their rightful place in knowledge production in a global village that appreciates the diversity of worlds and world views. This is what Ng˜ug˜ı calls moving the centre in order to make possible a globalectic world – one in which various universes co-exist and mutually enrich each other in horizontal and equal relationships.62 Just like any other theory, Afrocentricity has its flaws, but unlike Eurocentric theory, it is selfcritical and open to learning from others in the process of centring Africa and her people. 164

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This chapter suggests that Afrocentricity, as a theory of change, holds much promise for the practical pursuit of the Africanisation of knowledge during the process of epistemic decolonisation addressed elsewhere in this book. The basis for this argument is that Afrocentricity is born outside of, and as a rebellion against, Eurocentric schools of thought that are implicated in the coloniality of knowledge. It is not only produced outside Eurocentrism, which claims to be the centre of a universal world of knowledge, but also born to make possible the multiplicity of world-knowledge centres, including the African one. It is thus a perspective born within the realm of epistemic liberation from coloniality, one that is designed to analyse and synthesise the life experiences of African peoples by placing them centre stage and in their own broad space. In displaying the significance of the theory, the authors have showcased how the theory of Afrocentricity is a beacon of hope to Africa and her people – a way of finding solutions and correcting the epistemic injustice that is still prevalent today. Lastly, the refusal of Eurocentrists to open a safe space for Afrocentricity to engage in dialogue with its North[ern] angled concepts is deliberate. It is aimed at maintaining white supremacy in the knowledge structure of the global political economy, which is potentially poised to spill into other structures of this system. This does not come as a surprise to us, because it is in the nature and tradition of Europeans to sustain their value systems through the perpetuation of competition – a practice that is completely divorced from Afrocentric value systems and practices such as cooperation, interdependence and peace.

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CONCLUSION

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Asante, M.K., 2003 (1980). Afrocentricity: The theory of social change. Chicago: African American Images.

2 Asante, Afrocentricity. Op. cit. 3

Azibo, D.A., 2011. Understanding essentialism as fundamental: the centred African perspective on the nature of prototypical human nature – cosmological ka (spirit). The Western Journal of Black Studies, 35(2), pp.77–91; Shai, K.B., 2019. The death of scientific knowledge in [South] Africa: an Afrocentric response to M.P. Sebola. Journal of Public Affairs, 20(1), e1975. Available at https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1975 [Accessed 23 March 2018].

4 Asante, Afrocentricity. Op. cit.

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5

Karenga, M., 1988. Black studies and the problematic paradigm. Journal of Black Studies, 18(4), pp.395–414; Reviere, R., 2001. Toward an Afrocentric research methodology. Journal of Black Studies, 31(6), pp.709–728; Modupe, D.S., 2003. The Afrocentric philosophical perspective: narrative outline. In Mazama, A. (ed.), The Afrocentric paradigm. Trenton: Africa World Press, pp.55–72.

6

Asante, Afrocentricity. Op. cit., pp.13–27.

7

Carruthers, J.H., 1999. Intellectual warfare. Chicago: Third World Press.

8 Asante, Afrocentricity. Op. cit., p.2. 9

Bekerie, A., 1994. The four corners of a circle: Afrocentricity as a model of synthesis. Journal of Black Studies, 25(2), pp.131–149, p.131.

10 Azibo, Understanding essentialism as fundamental. Op. cit. 11 Monteiro-Ferreira, A., 2009. Afrocentricity and the Western paradigm. Journal of Black Studies, 40(2), 327–336, p.328. 12 Shai, The death of scientific knowledge. Op. cit. 13 Asante, Afrocentricity. Op. cit. 14 Ibid., pp.4–5. 15 Modupe, The Afrocentric philosophical perspective. Op. cit. p.57. 16 Shai, K.B., 2016. An Afrocentric critique of the United States of America’s foreign policy towards Africa: the case studies of Ghana and Tanzania, 1990–2014. PhD Thesis. Sovenga: University of Limpopo. 17 Bekerie, The four corners of a circle. Op. cit. 18 Ramose, M., 2003. I doubt, therefore African philosophy exists. South African Journal of Philosophy, 22(2), pp.113–127. 19 Ibid. 20 Welsh-Asante, K., 1985. Commonalities in African dance: an aesthetic foundation. In Asante, M.K. and Welsh-Asante, K. (eds.), African culture: the rhythms of unity. Westport, Greenwood, pp.71–82. 21 Mazama, A., 2001. The Afrocentric paradigm: contours and definitions. Journal of Black Studies, 31(4), pp.387–405, p.397. 22 Asante, M.K., 1988. Afrocentricity. Trenton: Africa World Press, pp.87, 89. 23 Collins, P.H., 1991. Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge. 24 Adams, R., 1993. African-American studies and the state of the art. In Azevedo, M. (ed.), Africana studies: a survey of Africa and the African diaspora. North Carolina: American Press, pp.33–50. 25 Chaves, L. (ed.), 1994. Alternatives to Afrocentrism. New York: Manhattan Institute. 26 Asante, Afrocentricity. Op. cit. 27 Mazrui, A., 1993. Viewing the world through African eyes. Woodward Review, pp.15–17.

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Yesterday & Today, 1(16), pp.78–99. 29 Dei, G.J.S., 1994. Afrocentricity: a cornerstone of pedagogy. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 25(1), pp.3–25, p.6. 30 Ibid. 31 Zondi, S., 2018. Decolonising international relations and its theory: a critical conceptual meditation. Politikon, 45(1), pp.16–31. 32 Ibid., p.21. 33 Maserumule, M.H., 2015. Engaged scholarship and liberatory science: a professoriate, Mount Grace, and SAAPAM in the decoloniality mix. Journal of Public Administration, 50(2), pp.200–222. 34 Dladla, N., 2012. Here is a table: a philosophical essay on the history of race in South Africa. Pretoria: Bantu Logic Publishing.

[Re]Visiting Molefe Kete Asante’s Theory of Afrocentricity

28 Chawane, M., 2016. The development of Afrocentricity: a historical survey.

35 Mazama, The Afrocentric paradigm. Op. cit. 36 Ibid., p.387. 37 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2018. The dynamics of epistemological freedom. Strategic Review of Southern Africa, 40(1), pp.16–45; Zondi, Decolonising international relations and its theory. Op. cit. 38 Lipton, M., 2009. Liberals, Marxists, and nationalists. Competing interpretations of South African history: a rejoinder to my reviewers. Historia, 54(1), pp.306–313. 39 Giliomee, H. and Mbenga, B., 2007. New history of South Africa. Cape Town: Tafelberg. 40 Adhikari, M., 2010. A total extinction confidently hoped for: the destruction of Cape San society under Dutch colonial rule, 1700–1795. Journal of Genocide Research, 12(1&2), pp.19–44. 41 Maylam, P., 2001. South Africa’s racial past: the history and historiography of racism, segregation and apartheid. Aldershot: Ashgate. 42 Adhikari, A total extinction confidently hoped for. Op. cit. 43 Ross, A., 1986. John Philip, 1775–1851: missions, race, and politics in South Africa. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. 44 Maylam, PSouth Africa’s racial past. Op. cit. 45 Lipton, M. 2007. Liberals, Marxists and nationalists: Competing interpretations of South African history. New York, Palgrave Macmillan; Lipton, Liberals, Marxists and nationalists: A rejoinder to my reviewers. Op. cit. 46 SADET (South African Democracy Education Trust), 2004. The road to democracy in South Africa. Cape Town: Zebra Press. 47 Kershaw, T., 1992. Afrocentrism and the Afrocentric method. The Western Journal of Black Studies, 16(3), pp.160–168. 48 Hunter, D.A., 1983. The rhetorical challenge of Afrocentricity. Western Journal of Black Studies, 7(4), pp.239–243.

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49 Asante, Afrocentricity. Op. cit. 50 Shai, K.B. and Molapo, R.R., 2017. The ‘decriminalisation’ of the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa: an Asantean perspective. Commonwealth Youth and Development, 15(1), pp.1–16; Ray, M., 2016. Free fall: why South African universities are in a race against time. Johannesburg: Bookstorm. 51 Mazama, The Afrocentric paradigm. Op. cit.;

Modupe, The Afrocentric

philosophical perspective. Op. cit. 52 Mazama, The Afrocentric paradigm. Op. cit. 53 Mafeje, A., 2000. Africanity: a combative ontology. CODESRIA Bulletin, 1(1), pp.66–67. 54 Adesina, J.O., 2008. Archie Mafeje and the pursuit of endogeny: against alterity and extroversion. Africa Development, 33(4), pp.133–152. 55 Asante, Afrocentricity. Op. cit. 56 Mafeje, A., 2011. Africanity: a combative ontology. In Devisch, R. and Nyamnjoh, F.B. (ed.s), The postcolonial turn: re-imagining anthropology and Africa. Cameroon: Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group, pp.31–44. 57 Gordon, L.R., 2011. Shifting the geography of reason in an age of disciplinary decadence. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1, pp.96–103. 58 Ibid., p.97. 59 Gordon, L.R., 2007. Through the hellish zone of non-being: thinking through Fanon, disaster and the damned of the earth. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 5, pp.2–12, p.7. 60 Bekerie, The four corners of a circle. Op. cit. 61 Biko, S., 1978. I write what I like. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.48. 62 Bekerie, The four corners of a circle. Op. cit., p.143. 63 Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, 2012. Globalectics: theory and the politics of knowing. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Ad Fontes The Divergent African Political Aesthetics of Steve Biko, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Taha Hussein Ramy Magdy Ahmed Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University, Egypt

ABSTRACT Does one need to be Western in order to be beautiful? This question is posed alongside those concerning feelings and taste. These aesthetic questions, though not always formulated as ‘aesthetic’, parallel questions about what it means to be liberated, and what nations must become after independence from colonial rule, among other issues. Varying political stances in Africa on the question of beauty are parts of a continuum that ranges from a radical rupture with Western political aesthetics, epitomised by Steve Biko’s concept of black beauty, to the middle position of Senghor’s Negritude and Métissage, and Taha Hussein’s argument for appropriating the West as a category. The three represent an attempt to move African perspectives to the centre without losing the diversity of views on identity, post-coloniality and aesthetics. In this chapter, the writer discusses how the concept of the beautiful – as formulated from three different African modes of thinking – demonstrates the different ways in which the African-centred perspective on the beautiful is manifested.

POLITICAL ACTION AND THE QUESTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL The question of ‘the beautiful’ is crucial for our discussion due to the manner in which such a question was posed in the political settings of Africa, as tied to questions about ontological density of the Other. Colonialism as a mode of authority was based on a ‘racism’ that sought to justify the

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subjugation of the colonised to the coloniser, the black to the white, and the ways of the Other to the European ways. Such ‘race-thinking’ implies the assigning of social and political meanings to human differences in order to justify the coloniality of power and its resultant status quo.1 This not only makes politics a question of aesthetics, but also makes aesthetics an expressively controversial topic. Aesthetics in general – and racist colonial aesthetics in particular – entail meaning assignment as a practice of hierarchised power. In addition, aesthetic judgements and aesthetic practices serve as resources for political work, models and metaphors for politics, and stages for political contestation.2 This was the case with the colonial setting. The method of colonialism and the struggles against its racism, which are discussed briefly in this chapter, provide obvious examples of how aesthetic judgements can be crucial elements in political contestations. Questions of colour, taste and feelings come up quite often in political discussions about the colonial frontier. In resistance against colonial rule and in discussions about the post-colonial, beauty emerges as another critical element in the African quest for emancipation from the West. Colonialism in Africa sought to influence and distort the idea of the beautiful and the standards for being beautiful. Colonial masters tried to communicate to Africans – through education, religion and colonial practices – that in order to be beautiful, one had to look like the Europeans/ whites or adopt their ways, from dress code to imagery. The others were to consider themselves ugly and in real need of change, from whitening their skin to whitening the measurement of beauty among them. This aesthetic hierarchy was employed to entice the subjugated into willing obedience to the colonial order of things and to lessen the cost of coercion. This is not accidental, as it has been shown that a hierarchy of beings, of power and of knowledge is an important aspect of colonialism, and that coloniality is, by nature, an intersection of hierarchies reinforcing each other. Notions of beauty were thus also imbricated in this colonial logic of hierarchy and binaries. Colonialism guided the fate of African communities towards more Europeanisation, more negation of one’s identity, and more rejection of oneself.3 It is this negation of diversity in ways of beauty that made necessary the demand by others to take back control over their aesthetics. It is this hierarchy of aesthetics that led to the need to rethink beauty. This duel over ‘the beautiful’ from a political point of view within African and black contexts was also the core theme of a whole ‘tradition’ and ‘art movement’ called Black Aesthetics. Although Black Aesthetics as a black American art movement took shape against the backdrop of Black Power activism in the 1960s – at the hands of pioneering figures like Amiri Baraka,

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Addison Gayle and Larry Neal – black aesthetics as a way of thinking anew about beauty and taste in ‘black’ life worlds has been present since the earliest encounters with the non-black or the anti-black other.4 Paul Taylor’s work offers a rich map for the ‘assembly’ of ideas called Black Aesthetics and how it was employed in different black/African political struggles.5  In this chapter, we focus on three different African liberation thinkers (and not necessarily Africanist thinkers) who sought to respond to how the question of the beautiful was of significance to their political struggles. These thinkers are the South African leader and philosopher Steve Biko (1946–1977), the Egyptian intellectual Taha Hussein (1889–1973) and the Senegalese philosopher, poet and former president Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001). They responded politically to the question of the beautiful in different ways, representing a continuum of diverse stances on the shared concern about what it means to be beautiful to us, as Africans emerging from colonial subjugation. It is not only the differences among the three thinkers from an African perspective that justify in their inclusion in this chapter, but also the fact that they come from regions with different colonial traditions Southern Africa experienced settler capitalism, the part of West Africa that Senghor came from experienced assimilation strategies, and North Africa experienced direct and indirect rule. Biko, encouraged a complete rupture with ‘whiteness’ and called instead for embracing the idea of ‘black is beautiful’ – an idea previously used by the black American poet Langston Hughes (1902–1967), before Biko adopted it for political activism. Biko argued that any aspiration to be like the whites implies an inferiority complex that manipulates the consciousness and the self-image of blacks. At the other extreme of the continuum stands Hussein, who argued that the independence and the renaissance of Egypt had to pass through two stages: first, defeating feelings of inferiority and, second, adopting modern European standards of social organisation, taste and feelings in order to prove to the European colonialists that they are no longer superior. A middle position was taken by Senghor through his concepts of Negritude and Métissage: he called for the assertion of NegroAfrican uniqueness, while also insisting on the need for Africa and the West to influence each other, in order to bring about racially and culturally mixed ways of being and living. Below, we discuss these legitimate African standpoints that reject the colonial, racist cultural project, while advocating different ways of responding to it, ranging from rebellion to strategic appropriation of Western ways.

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BIKO: ‘BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL’ A series of questions arise when approaching Stephen Bantu Biko’s (1946– 1977) black political aesthetics: What made blacks feel ugly? Who was behind that feeling? What were the means used to inculcate that feeling? How were blacks to combat it and restore their confidence in their standards of beauty? These questions arise in the context of Biko’s positionality in the struggle. This anti-apartheid activist, leader of the black consciousness movement and honorary president of the Black People’s Convention, dealt with the question of the beautiful in political terms. He answered the question with the slogan ‘Black is beautiful’. Biko’s political struggle was mainly concerned with restoring the self-confidence of black people and their pride in their own standards and culture. He was writing and acting against the backdrop of the pernicious economic, political and psychological predicament of blacks in South Africa – one that amounted to the systematic exploitation, subordination and violation of blacks and their culture. He had come to notice that a crucial part of this system was the onslaught on blackness, which was aimed at robbing it of redemptive power. This, according to Biko, led blacks to suffer from an inferiority complex that led them to glorify things related to whiteness and to despise anything black. Biko found this process unjustifiable. He considered that the process was employed by the white apartheid system in the various spheres of life in order to justify the subjugation of blacks – and for this reason Biko resisted apartheid and fought to liberate the black nation. Biko noticed that, in the apartheid system, the black person became ‘a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own miseries, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity’.6 The black man, affected by white mechanisms of racism and oppression, totally rejected and hated himself and aspired to be white. He was emptied of all his pride of blackness and he became ‘a shell’. Why would the white masters of the apartheid system do that to blacks? The economic privileges of whites were a major factor. The apartheid system rested on a colonial capitalist system which had been built on the continuous exploitation of the poor, who were mostly black, by the rich, who were mostly white. Like any capitalist system of exploitation, white capitalism had to create its own ideology to justify such a mode of production and invent its own superstructure to protect it. The ideology and superstructure were racism and the apartheid system: ‘The leaders of the white community had to create some kind of barrier between blacks and whites so the whites

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could enjoy privileges at the expense of blacks and still feel free to give a moral justification of it.’7 Biko argues that, in one way or another, racism is a late stage of capitalism. But how does such a state of self-hatred work in the minds of blacks? Biko argued that, in the apartheid system, blacks suffered from ‘an inferiority complex – a result of 300  years of deliberate oppression, denigration, and derision’.8 That complex was a composite of two streams of alienation and a feeling of self-censure. The first of the two streams stemmed from exploitation, as blacks felt alienated from the fruits of their labour. The other stream was constructed through political oppression and psycho-cultural negation, which made black people feel that they were an aberration from normal, white people.9 The black state of alienation extends to aesthetics: ‘[The black] attaches the meaning white to all that is good and beautiful and equates good with white all his life since his childhood. He tends to feel that there is something incomplete in his humanity and that completeness goes with whiteness.’10 Such alienation makes the black feel ugly and inferior to the extent that some blacks feel comfortable drinking tea with whites who seem to treat them as equals: ‘This boosts their ego and makes them feel slightly superior to other blacks who do not get similar treatment from whites.’11 This alienation is tied to a feeling of self-censure. Whites, with their control over meaningfulness and completeness, had monopolised the definition of beauty. The white, therefore, became the only beautiful, and the black became only the ugly. Under these conditions, a black should aspire to be white if he wanted to be more beautiful or be satisfied with himself. Such a feeling of self-censure was a consequence of the imposed white language, the introduced religion and the manipulated culture. The settlers’ language and religion associated whiteness with angels, God and beauty, while blackness was associated with black magic, the black market and the negative, dark aspects of things. The white man became ‘some kind of god’ whose word ‘cannot be doubted’.12  In addition, the ability of white culture to solve many problems, for example in spheres such as medicine, made blacks despise themselves and regard whites as belonging to a superior culture.13 The final outcome of these processes of inferiority, alienation and self-censure was that the black developed a ‘double consciousness’, for ‘he tends to find solace only in close identification with white society’ and looks at himself or herself through the eyes of whites.14 Biko found it necessary to look into the matter of consciousness and pride among oppressed blacks and to postulate his antithesis: ‘Black is beautiful’.

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Before explaining how Biko tried to revive the consciousness of the blacks, it is important to show how he explained the means used by whites to implant feelings of inferiority. Biko claims that whites used their power to manipulate certain aspects of life, in order to construct their narrative of supremacy and establish black inferiority. These means were education, history narration, culture, missionary Christianity, and language. Education, or mis-education as Biko labelled it, played a terrible role in constructing both the superiority of the white and the inferiority of the black: ‘The black kids since their childhood are educated in school to hate their heritage.’15 They were ‘educated to believe that there is a real difference between black man and white man, between a coloured girl and a white girl’,16 and they ‘were taught under the pretext of hygiene, good manners and other such vague concepts to despise their modes of upbringing at home and to question the values and customs of their society’.17 The outcome was that children and parents saw life differently, which made the former lose respect for the latter. This corrupted the African life system, stigmatised it, and sowed the seeds of white superiority, which grew into a feeling of black inferiority and glorification of all things white.18 Through miseducation, two other aspects of life were distorted in the consciousness of blacks: history narration and culture. History was terribly distorted, to the extent that, according to Biko, ‘strangely enough everybody has come to accept that the history of South Africa starts in 1652’.19 In this manner, history starts with the arrival of the whites. The story of black life without whites is not recognised as a true time or memory. Like days in infinite oblivion, or ‘days of tribal battles and internecine wars, people were simply escaping from one tyrant to another, the tyrant who wanted to defeat the tribe for no other reason but to wipe it out from existence’.20 In the white narration of black history, the heroes of black nations were depicted in an ignoble way: real revolutionaries, like the Xhosa warrior-prophet Makana, became troublemakers; nation builders like Shaka became tyrants; and glorious tribes became greedy thieves.21 In one way or another, there was nothing good to remember before the whites – there was nothing beautiful in being black. The culture of blacks was also distorted and was negatively depicted as ‘barbarism’. White culture – armed with weapons, a complicated religious system and a fully fledged system of education – managed to manipulate the image of African culture to depict it as a barbaric, vicious lifestyle.22 Whites ‘arrested the African culture and communicated a myth that African peoples were near cannibals, had no real ambitions in life, and were preoccupied with sex and drink’.23 For these reasons, such vicious barbaric culture was

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– according to whites – in need of civilisation and enlightenment. Education played half the role, religion and language the other. The arrival of Christian religious missions and the introduction of Christianity were additional devastating events in the lives of African communities. These events displaced and murdered indigenous ways of knowing and worshipping by describing them as mere pagan ways.24 The white missionaries described blacks as thieves, lazy and sex-hungry. They equated all valuable things with whiteness, in order to justify white conquests, claiming that their mission was to civilise the ugly pagans by force and by way of a cruel religion that was irrelevant to the African way of life. Through these means, the whites and their missionaries subjugated blacks and made them hate their religion, their appearance and their lives. If these were the colonial means, what were the means that Biko employed to combat inferiority and restore blacks’ confidence in their own beauty? Biko outlined a two-phased strategy for liberation. The first phase aims to liberate black consciousness from inferiority psychologically and to restore Africans’ pride in their blackness. After achieving the goals of the first phase, the psychologically liberated subject would seek the physical liberation of the second phase. In this phase, Africans would strive to change the material arrangements of the racist, exploitative system on the ground, in order to attain total liberation. Yet in order to take such a strategy to its conclusion, Biko considered it necessary to do three things. Firstly, he had to accurately define the agent of liberation whom he was addressing. Secondly, he had to change the liberation agent’s psychological state of mind and his practices. Finally, he had to guide this agent towards a physical change in the system. Before taking the first step, Biko defined the agent he was addressing as ‘black’, which leads to the rest of the politico-aesthetic element of Biko’s project. He argued that blackness was not merely a matter of pigmentation or colour – it was a socio-political situation and a consequent mental attitude that needed a liberating response. Of course, colour was an important element in drawing the lines between the oppressors and the oppressed; yet beneath these classifications lay unjust socio-political arrangements that employed colour to privilege the whites and exploit the blacks.25 Biko thought that if the black subject understood this definition of his situation and described himself within it as the ‘black’, he would start his emancipation from the forces that used his blackness as a means to subjugate him.26 ‘Black’ for Biko is more of a socio-political category, including those ‘who are by law or tradition politically and socially discriminated against as a group in the South African society and identifying themselves as a unit in

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the struggle towards the realisation of their aspiration’.27 This might include black, Indian or coloured (mixed-race) people in general, who suffer from this situation and struggle for its removal. On the other hand, ‘the whites’ are those whose skin colour is their passport to privilege in this exploitative, oppressive situation. Whites form the oppressor camp by virtue of their colour, whether they accept racism or condemn it, as long as they benefit from the sustained inequality of the system.28 Biko had a further qualifying requirement for the black agent, since some people who are not white are still not socio-politically ‘black’, because they are not black in attitude. They are defined instead as ‘non-white’: ‘Nonwhites do exist and will exist for a long time.’29 They are those who aspire to be white, but their colour makes such attainment impossible. They are those in the police force, or security branch, who call the whites their ‘baas’ (their master). They feel comforted if the white treats them as equals for some time and, as a consequence, they feel themselves to be better than their black peers.30  For Biko, these ‘non-whites’ pose a danger to their communities. They feel no need for real change to society – mere superficial change would suffice for them, since they would then keep their privileges relative to their black peers. Biko did not count on non-whites in his struggle, nor did he trust them. Instead, he focused all his efforts on the ‘black’ agent. Here one can see clearly how aesthetic categories of colour, beauty and taste were at the heart of colonial struggles. For Biko, black consciousness is awakened through an inward-looking process by which black people rethink their situation, realise their complicity in surrender and resolve not to allow themselves to be exploited again.31 Through taking these steps, real blacks are encouraged to raise their heads again and to rethink their situation.32 This would pump them back to life and fill them with pride. Through such awakening of consciousness, the Black Consciousness Movement is supposed to contribute through practical efforts that help black people eradicate their sense of incompleteness. These practical efforts include community projects to restore common pride and collective action, ideological efforts to revive consciousness, and the re-evaluation of traditions to restore dignity and pride in blacks’ way of life and history.33 This awakening would guide liberated black subjects beyond mere resistance to racism. Racism was primarily just a ploy that disguised a deeper aim: economic exploitation. (Later in the chapter, we will see how Senghor depicts the fight against racism as the ultimate end of liberation.) Only after changing the unjust economic structure, and its consequent socio-political arrangements, can blacks achieve real physical liberation

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HUSSEIN: ‘FEEL LIKE A EUROPEAN!’ Taha Hussein (1889–1973), the great Egyptian intellectual, was known in the Egyptian and Arab culture as ‘the dean of Arabic literature’. He grappled with the question of being beautiful in a totally different manner and as a counter to Western categories. First of all, Hussein – the Egyptian thinker – does not consider Egypt, the African/Arab nation, as African or pure Arab or even oriental. For Hussein, Egypt is a Mediterranean society that contributed to the culture of the Occident. Egypt is Western, and for such an intriguing conclusion he developed a uniquely designed argument against the special context in which he was living. Hussein’s famous book The future of culture in Egypt was published in 1937, but was written during a transitional period in Egypt’s political history.36 Transitional periods usually impose a mood of ambivalence on thinkers, who are not quite certain which parts of their reality to abandon and which to keep. Hussein wrote his book after the 1936 treaty was signed between Egypt and Great Britain. In that treaty, Egypt was granted nominal independence from Britain, but specific qualifications allowed a British military presence in vital regions and during certain periods. The treaty filled Egyptian society with hope for a new future in a free country that Egyptians would shape through their own will and efforts – and Hussein was greatly influenced by this mood. He felt the need to create a vision to guide Egypt, believing that an independent nation that was without a vision might fall back into enslavement. But, at the same time, Hussein had confidence in the Egyptian will

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from the forces of exploitation. For this reason, Biko called for African socialism as an important route for blacks in their fight against exploitation.34 Only after taking these steps can it be said that physical liberation has been achieved and true freedom attained.35 In conclusion, Biko maintained that the black need not be white in order to be beautiful in the sense of inner and outer aesthetics, and in relation to how they are seen from the outside and how they understand themselves from the inside. Black is beautiful. Actually, aspiring to be white amounts to complicity against the black community, since white beauty is used to justify the underlying structures of exploitation, as well as ongoing processes of violence and oppression. Biko therefore advocates blacks asserting their beauty as being attached to being black. He thus calls for a rebellion against the white as the only way of being beautiful.

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to liberate, and bore in mind that colonialism was not simply the political experience of conquering territories, but a psychological experience as well. Hussein prioritised the need to eradicate the colonised’s feelings of inferiority towards the coloniser, which prevented the emancipation of the colonised. Yet, he was caught between hope and fear: hope for a new future and fear of a devastating inferiority. These two factors shaped his approach to the question of beauty in relation to Western categories and, consequently, influenced his political vision. Hussein argued that contemplating the glory of independence and freedom was not enough, and considered it necessary to have a vision to guide the actions of the independent nation into the future.37 Such a vision had to respect the nation’s past and its near present and not rupture them. Ruptures lead to miscalculation, illusion and drastic mistakes.38 This prompted Hussein to define the character of ‘the past of the nation’ and its ‘near present’ in a way that would inspire the vision of the rising nation and guide its choices. Like every thinker reshaping history in a nation at a crossroads, Hussein asked a radical question, with two parts: ‘Who are we, and what do we want?’ He dealt with each part of the question in a manner that reflected the ambivalence of transitional periods. The first part, ‘Who are we?’, was configured by Hussein in a cultural/nationalistic sense. He asked: ‘Is Egypt part of the Orient or the Occident?’39 And: ‘Is the Egyptian reason oriental in imagination, perception, comprehension, and judgment, or occidental?’ Or, simply: ‘Which is easier for the Egyptian reason, to understand the ChineseJapanese man or the English-French man?’40  For Hussein, the Orient is not the Near East of Muslim Arab countries in the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant; the Orient is the Far East of the Indian, Chinese and Japanese civilisations.41 The Occident, on the other hand, has at its core the Greek civilisation and what unfolded from such civilisation later on, starting with the Roman Empire and ending with modern Europe.42 In a clear and distinct manner, Hussein argued that it is ‘ridiculous’ and ‘drastically mistaken’ to consider Egypt as part of the Orient, since it never had any intimate or deep cultural ties with that part of the world. Furthermore, that part of the Orient closest to Egypt (the Persian civilisation) was an enemy of Egypt – and not only in cultural terms. Egypt contributed to, and was considered a part of, the Occidental civilisation that was born in the Aegean islands and then spread around the Mediterranean.43 In addition, the everyday life experiences of Egyptians reflected how much the mentality and mood of Europeans and Egyptians were in accord, since most of Egyptian society – its education, lifestyle, politics and

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army – was modelled on the Western style.44 For Hussein, this meant that Egyptian and European tastes were, to a great extent, the same, since they were both part of the same reason and culture. Hussein inferred that Egypt had always formed part of Europe in its reason, culture and lifestyle. Therefore, Egyptians did not need to be Western in order to be beautiful: they were already Western and just needed to understand their Western-ness. Unlike Biko, who found a need for the African consciousness to understand and distinguish its unique blackness, Hussein found that part of Africa, ‘Egypt’, needed to understand its European/Occidental character. Yet the question remains: Why would an independent nation need to understand that it is part of the culture of its past colonisers? Here comes the second part of the radical question: What do we want? This is the apex of the transitional ambivalence in the Husseinian argument. Hussein understood that colonised nations suffer from an inferiority complex. Their people feel that the coloniser is superior in culture and mentality. And like every thinker writing on intellectual liberation, like Biko, he found the need to go back to the sources of his original culture, the markers of his identity, and resuscitate awareness of this culture. Ad fontes (back to the sources), as the Latin expression goes. Going back to the sources would serve to restore national confidence and enlighten the future. A paradox emerged when Hussein became trapped in an ambivalent circle that he drew for himself. That circle goes as follows: Egypt is colonised by the West; Egypt has to be liberated from the West by going back to its original culture, but the original Egyptian culture is Western in origin; this entails that Egypt’s liberation from the West is in being Westernised too! But Hussein might not consider this a paradox or a transitional ambivalence. And here lies the brilliance of the Husseinian argument. Hussein believed that feelings of inferiority within the colonised subject would disappear if the colonised managed to master the way of life and culture of the coloniser – and attain the same level of excellence. If the colonised managed to master a modern life, a modern education, a modern political system and a modern army, he or she would no longer feel that the coloniser was better than her or him. In turn, the coloniser would feel no excellence, and there would no longer be any basis for subjugation. So, Hussein claimed that if Egyptians wanted a true scientific, artistic and literary independence: Egypt has to make the foreigner (Western/European) feel that we are his peers, to make the European feel that we talk the language he understands, see things the way he sees them, evaluate things the way he evaluates them,

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judge them the way he judges them, wish the way he wishes, and reject the way he rejects. Egyptians have to make the European feel that we want to be a partner with him in life, not a servant or a means.45 

In addition, if Egyptians want rational and psychological independence, this will happen only after achieving scientific, artistic and literary independence: ‘Egyptians have to educate their kids like the Europeans, in order to feel like a European, judge like a European, lead life the way the European leads it’ (my own emphasis).46 For Hussein, to be free is to be free like your coloniser so that he can no longer subjugate you. In this manner, for political reasons, Hussein adopted the categories of feeling, taste and judgement of the Occident in a wholesale adoption of Western aesthetic categories. In this way Hussein went deeper into the aesthetic experience than merely focusing on colour and appearance. This Husseinian vision could be criticised by WEB Du Bois and Biko alike as suffering from a ‘double consciousness’, defined as seeing oneself through the eyes of someone else. But this may not apply to Hussein, who did not argue that Egyptians should merely mimic Western men or women, but that they should claim sovereignty over the Western as a category of being. Biko and others criticised the copying of white ways by those who were not white, an attitude Biko called ‘non-white’. The core of the Husseinian argument should be understood with reference to Hussein’s conception of modernity as a culturally neutral project. It represents the highest level of ‘human’ excellence, and does not in any way entail dependence on the European or any cultural assimilation. Modernity is a ‘human’ achievement, not a ‘Western’ achievement. Europeans had reached modernity, so why should Egyptians not reach it too – in order to be equal to Europeans and to nullify their superiority.47 So Hussein undermines European claims by decentring them from the story of human progress, making it possible for many to claim a portion of the story, something akin to the vision of a globalectic world propounded by Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o.48  Besides this, Hussein did not feel any sensitivity or reservation in adopting the Western path to modernity, for two reasons. First, Egypt would not lose itself or become alienated if it became Western, since Egypt already formed part of the Western identity. Second, unique markers of Egyptian culture, like the Arabic language, Islam, its heritage and its history, could not be erased because Egypt had managed historically to combat and resist all endeavours to erase its identity, no matter how long the endeavour.49 Hussein mentions that he ‘does not want Egyptians to be copies of the Europeans but to take the same reasons/means of civilisation Europe had

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SENGHOR: ‘BLACK WOMAN. IN THE HEART OF MIDI, I DISCOVER YOU.’51 Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), poet, philosopher and former president of Senegal, contributed to the African liberation movement and the building of the post-independence state. Yet, Senghor’s ‘political’ position on the question of African beauty is not straightforward. Senghor’s main concern was not simply the liberation of Africa from colonialism, but also the end of racism among nations as the construct behind any form of colonialism. Racism for Senghor is based on something essential to the concept of race – that every human race has a definite and distinct character. This essentialism assumes that a particular race could be better or worse in comparison to another depending on its essentialised features and moral/ practical significations.52 For Senghor, since its advent colonialism had been based on racial essentialism. In order to fight colonialism in Africa one should not draw a line between black and white, like Biko, or between the Orient and the Occident, like Hussein. On the contrary, to fight colonialism one had to reveal the absurdity of its underlying assumption, ‘the essentialism of races’, and prove to human groups their interconnectedness in different times and places. This dissolves any racial differentiation among human groups through the use of alleged, essential features.53 Yet this, for Senghor, did not entail the total rejection of each human group’s uniqueness. There are unique features for every human group, but such uniqueness is not essential; it is a product of the interaction of that group with historical, cultural and geographical settings, and it is a result of the group’s relations with other groups. If there is any African identity it is only in relation to its unique history and in relation to other civilisations,

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taken’,50 and this proves Hussein’s vision of modernity as a neutral human concept, common to all cultures. Therefore, Hussein’s ends–means matrix finds that independence lies in parity with the coloniser. Such parity would happen by achieving modernity – the neutral human excellence – through taking the ‘Western’ path. And in order to make this true, an adoption of European tastes is a must. In this sense, Hussein insists on being Western, claiming the heritage that Egypt has by virtue of ancient history and colonialism (i.e., being part of Western identity in reality). Secondly, he argues for parity and thus the end of the idea that the West implies European success and dominance. Hussein’s is a subversive posture when seen against the West as a European construction of white dominance and superiority.

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including the Western civilisation.54 African beauty is thus to be seen in the interface between and co-existence of cultures and civilisations, rather than in the hierarchy of civilisations or the domination of one by another. Again, like Biko and Hussein, Senghor undermines the fundamental message of Western modernity: that the superiority of some races bestows on them the need to save other races, giving rise to the responsibility of Western civilisation to give life to, redeem and rescue others. So, for Senghor the African is beautiful only in interaction with others, including the West, where from a distance one can recognise one’s difference and define oneself according to one’s accumulated experiences.55  This was demonstrated by Senghor in his famous poem ‘Femme Noire’ (Black Woman): Nude Woman, Black woman Clothed in your colour which is life, your form which is beauty, I grew in your shadow, the sweetness of your hands bandaged my eyes And here in the heart of Summer and of Midi (High Noon), I discover you, Promised Land, from the height of a burnt mountain And your beauty strikes my heart, like the lightning of an eagle.56

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Senghor asserts that black is beautiful, but to know and discover the beauty of blackness one has to perceive it from a distance, ‘from the height of a burnt mountain’, in interaction with another civilisation, France of the West, ‘in Summer and at Midi’. Senghor witnessed the beauty of Africa from the West,57 thus forcing upon the West the recognition of African beauty, something the colonial West is loath to do. But for Senghor to unfold such an argument, his intellectual project and political struggle made him develop a set of concepts to justify the interconnectedness of races, the mutuality of human cultures and the absurdity of race essentialism. Senghor developed a concept of time in terms of which neither past alone, nor present, should dictate the content of culture or the state of identity, because time is flowing and evolving. He also developed a concept of space that is borderless, and a concept of Métissage that encourages the mixing of races/peoples previously separated, in complete contrast to the idea of apartheid, which entails the separation of races/peoples. Time for Senghor is always moving, ‘en movement’. Past, present and future cannot be separated. Time is always evolving; an the past continues through the present, and both will continue into the future. And since past and present cannot be separated, memory cannot be lost or erased by any new radical event. Time is an evolution that bears the memory of all its

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stages and never reaches an end. In consequence of that, each previous state of our life and history has an inerasable input in our present self, in our identity and in our culture. For instance, African culture cannot be restricted to the pre-colonial past, because the very introduction of Western culture by colonialism into African settings made it become a part of African culture, as long as it played a part in the lives and experience of Africans.58 Onto this concept of time Senghor built another concept, that of space. The space of a nation, according to Senghor, is borderless, since the nation is a linkage through culture, history and socio-political interest, rather than merely belonging to an actual territory. Africa could be on the continent, in Europe and in France according to the evolution of African culture and its movement and interaction in the spaces of other nations. African culture before colonialism was never basically in Africa alone. There was a continuing Métissage (mixing), culturally and biologically, with other races and cultures. With the establishment of colonialism and its influence on African culture, African culture and identity absorbed Western elements – and the African space extended to include Africa and the West. The same applies for the West: the spaces that influenced and crossbred with it can become part of its culture and an element in its identity and space.59 Senghor asserted this, describing ‘Europe in which we are bound by the navel’ as a symbol of biological relations among nations.60 These concepts of unlimited time and space are only an introduction to Senghor’s concept of races and cultures, which is termed Métissage, or ‘mixing’. Métissage is a concept that calls for openness, mutual respect and mutual recognition.61 ‘Chacun doit être metis’ (everyone should be of mixedrace), Senghor asserts.62 It is therefore impossible to separate a culture from other cultures, since there is continuous crossbreeding and interaction among races. As long as there is interaction among races, there is cultural crossbreeding, and culture itself is evolving. Culture is never finished; it is always in the making, always to come, and always mixed. Senghor maintains, ‘The African man, not to mention that of Southern Europe, and above all the Middle Eastern, is so often mixed, whether biologically or culturally.’63  This is similar to Hussein’s idea of the Mediterranean as a point of interface of cultures. Senghor also used many biological studies to justify such a mix, from the early history of meetings between members of Homo sapiens. The discoveries of then contemporary scientists such as Paul Rivet, René Verneau, Henri Breuil and Marcelin Boule enabled Senghor to ascertain that the Negroids met with the Cro Magnon, the only white species discovered in prehistory, during the superior Paleolithic era. As Senghor (cited by Thiam) avers, ‘Since the superior Paleolithic, and this is one of the

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characteristics of the Homo sapiens, when two people meet they often fight, but they always mix.’64 For these reasons, the essence of culture does not lie in a specific and rigid set of elements. Since cultures are in continuous evolution, the essence of every culture is in its relations with other cultures. It is in its ‘attitude’ in the Métissage; it is in the way it performs in the mix with others. To quote Senghor: The black Africans, like all other ethnicities of the earth, have a specific set of qualities, whose spirit of culture, in a given situation, produced an original civilisation, unique, irreplaceable. Without doubt some of these qualities one could meet among other nations, but certainly not all.65

But one has to bear in mind that racial and cultural Métissage does not ignore the uniqueness of each human culture. For this Senghor argues: While opening up to other cultures, we must be rooted in our own culture ... We do not feel like [the] white. We do not think like the white. We do not laugh as whites. We do not rejoice as whites. We took some of the spirit of white organisation and methods, of course who are surprised today to see the Senegalese mathematicians, but white has also taken some of our pace.66

Of course, this pronouncement by Senghor’s argument here is in complete disagreement with Hussein’s ‘Feel like a European’ argument, presented earlier, and tends more towards Biko’s ruptures. Yet Senghor represents a middle position by arguing that while cultures and races are in a Métissage, they also have some uniqueness. His concepts of subjective and objective Negritude clarify how cultures could be mixed yet still remain unique. Subjective Negritude is the unique African world view and way of perception that emerged from evolution and the interaction of the Negro-African nation with other nations and with the environment. Objective Negritude is ‘the sum total values and experiences of the black world civilisation’.67 Objective Negritude is the total experiences of the culture and its evolution, while subjective Negritude is the unique mentality/subjectivity/taste that the African managed to construct through that evolution. Subjective Negritude is ‘the active manner by which each black person in the world embodies and asserts these cultural values [of objective Negritude]’.68 Subjective Negritude is the subjectivity, the attitude in the mix, the taste and the style in the evolution of a continuously evolving and mixing culture. 184

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However, that unique African way (subjective Negritude) is not ‘essential’ in the African. It is ‘constructed’ through the history of the sum total of values and experiences of the black world civilisation. In other words, the experiences of the Negro-African nation (objective Negritude) through history constructed its unique subjectivity. And since such character is influenced by the experiences the civilisation has of other civilisations, one could be unique and mixed at the same time, because one’s own unique taste is made from experiences of interactions with other nations through time and space. In this sense Negritude and Métissage are not separate. What Senghor wanted to communicate with his concept of Negritude is that, although cultures are mixed, each culture is a unique state of mind, expressing an attitude in the mix; such attitude is its subjectivity. But such a state of mind is not an essence that every African is born with, as racist theories claim. Such a state of mind is ‘constructed’ through the historical experiences of the Negro-African civilisation and its interactive mixing with other civilisations. In other words, the essence of every culture is that ‘it is in relations’ with other cultures, not closed and pure. In this manner, Senghor decentred the age-old Western theories of pure race essentialism and uncovered the absurdity of racism and its consequent colonialism. These ideas inspired Senghor’s political struggle to underscore Negro/ African uniqueness and, at the same time, his call for openness towards France, Europe and the West – yet without abandoning this uniqueness. For Senghor, the colonial experience marks a period of cohabitation, mixture and self-reinvention for both Negro and Albo-European cultures. Senghor encouraged policies of openness, such as Eurafrique, as a form of cultural continuum between Africa and Europe – a form of cooperation based on mutual recognition between Europe and a strong united Africa.69 Senghor also re-used the French language to speak for the colonised, while stressing the beauty of such a language. He described the relations among cultures as a ‘symbiosis’ of mutual acceptance, cooperation and cross-influencing.70 The brilliance of Senghor’s argument is that it contributed to the outlining of the African subject and his image of himself without getting trapped in racial essentialism. Instead, he considered racism as his target enemy and uncovered its absurd basis. Senghor, unlike Biko and Hussein, argued that one asserts ‘oneself’ by recognising ‘the Other’. He defined the self through that ‘Other’, which is not exclusive as in the case of Biko and Hussein’s ‘Othering’. For Senghor the Other is a part of oneself and is influenced by oneself. Senghor’s middle position lies in his rejection of a rupture with the West, as advocated by Biko, since Senghor claimed the impossibility of forgetting the colonial experience and its cultural influences. Senghor’s

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recognition of Western influence did not, however, make him consider himself wholeheartedly part of the West, like Hussein. Senghor, instead, was ambitious for an open world, where mutual respect for cultural uniqueness exists and where the mixing happening among nations, shaping their unique subjectivities, is recognised. In addition, Senghor might be considered as being too lenient towards the process of neo-colonial cultural hegemony practised by the West against its former colonies. But, like Hussein, he was not afraid of such encounters, because cultural meanings cannot be erased by force – and cultural memory cannot be forgotten. For him, each cultural encounter represents a cross-breeding of some sort. In such a process no culture would remain pure. There is thus no need to fear cultural encounters with the Other, as no erasure will happen, and nothing justifies any cultural paranoia. However, one can criticise Senghor for more than leniency. Senghor considered racism to be an attitude and as such not a ploy supporting unjust structures lying beyond racism. Maybe Senghor’s interest in co-existence with the West made him turn a blind eye towards that which is beyond racism.

CONCLUSION Biko’s, Senghor’s and Hussein’s contributions to their nations’ independence of thought and practice illustrate that aesthetic concepts of beauty and taste play an important role in the struggle against Western dominance. Biko found that liberation from the white colonisers required an assertion of blackness and an Othering of whiteness. Hussein, by way of contrast, found that such liberation could be achieved by developing the same taste and excellence as the Occidental Other. Senghor struck a balance by arguing that both the concepts of the self and the Other are historically constructed and continually mixing, and no one can draw clear lines between identities. He stressed that one’s beauty and uniqueness can be recognised only through one’s contextual others. The discussion in this chapter illustrates that the concept of political aesthetics can never be detached from aesthetic judgements and configurations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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The author acknowledges the crucial role of Dr Mohammed Soffar, professor of political theory and political science at Cairo University, Egypt, for

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Taylor, P., 2016. Black is beautiful: a philosophy of black aesthetics. Chichester:

2

Ibid., p.83.

Wiley Blackwell, p.9. 3

Biko, S.B., 2005 (1978). I write what I like. Cambridge: ProQuest LLC; Fanon, F., 2008 (1952). Black skin, white masks. Translated by Markmann, C.L. London: Pluto Press; p’Bitek, O., 1984. Song of Lawino and song of Ocol. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers; Wa Wamwere, K., 2011. I refuse to die: my journey for freedom. New York, Seven Stories Press.

4

Edmondson, B., 1992. Black aesthetics, feminist aesthetics, and the problems of oppositional discourse. Cultural Critique, 22, pp.75–98; Taylor, Black is beautiful. Op. cit., p.6.

5 Taylor, Black is beautiful. Op. cit.; Taylor, P., 2010. Black aesthetics. Philosophy Compass, 5(1), pp.1–15. 6

Biko, I write what I like. Op. cit., p.29.

7

Ibid., p.88.

8

Ibid., p.21.

9

Ibid., p.49.

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his illuminating remarks on power and its influence on the imagination of oneself and one’s beauty – and for introducing the author to Steve Biko and Taha Hussein on this subject.

10 Ibid., p.101. 11 Ibid., p.23. 12 Ibid., p.69. 13 Ibid., p.102. 14 Kaindl, S., 2013. Bantu Stephen Biko and black consciousness: the struggle for equality in a racist South Africa. Master’s thesis. Vienna: University of Vienna, p.67. 15 Lotter, H., 2012. The intellectual legacy of Stephen Bantu Biko (1946–1977). Acta Academica, 24(3), pp.1–13, p.6. 16 Kaindl, Bantu Stephen Biko and black consciousness. Op. cit., p.62. 17 Biko, I write what I like. Op. cit., p.94. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p.70. 20 Ibid., p.20. 21 Ibid., p.95. 22 Ibid., p.70.

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23 Ibid., p.70. 24 Ibid., pp.31, 97. 25 Ibid., p.48. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p.23. 29 Ibid., p.48. 30 Ibid., p.23. 31 Ibid., p.29. 32 Ibid., p.40. 33 Ibid., p.30; Lotter, The intellectual legacy of Stephen Bantu Biko. Op. cit., p.1. 34 Kaindl, Bantu Stephen Biko and black consciousness. Op. cit., p. 49. 35 Ibid., p.83. 36 Hussein, T., 1996 (1937). Mostaqbal al-thaqaafati fi misr (The future of culture in Egypt). Cairo: Dar Al Maaref. 37 Ibid. p.10. 38 Ibid., p.18. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p.19. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p.20. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., pp.31, 33, 35. 45 Ibid., p.41. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., p.44. 48 Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, N., 2012. Globalectics: theory and politics of knowing. New York: Columbia University Press. 49 Hussein, Mostaqbal al-thaqaafati fi misr. Op. cit., p.49. 50 Ibid., p.44. 51 Thiam, C.A.B., 2007. A philosophy at the crossroads: the shifting concept of Negritude in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s oeuvre. PhD thesis. New York: State University of New York. 52 Ibid., p.77. 53 Howell, E.C.T., 2012. Re-envisioning Negritude: historical and cultural contexts for Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Master’s thesis. Greensboro: The University of North Carolina, p.97. 54 Williams, A.N., 2009. Assimilation and otherness: the theological significance of Negritude. International Journal of Systematic Theology, 11(3), pp.248–270,

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p.250.

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56 Ibid., p.100. 57 Ibid., p.103. 58 Ibid., p.45. 59 Howell, Re-envisioning Negritude. Op. cit., p.97. 60 Ibid., p.99. 61 Ibid., p.101. 62 Williams, Assimilation and otherness. Op. cit., p.255. 63 Thiam, A philosophy at the crossroads. Op. cit., p.94. 64 Ibid., p.14. 65 Senghor, L.S., 1967. Qu’est-ce que la négritude? Études Françaises, 3(1), pp.3–20, p.3. 66 Howell, Re-envisioning Negritude. Op. cit., p.101. 67 Senghor, Qu’est-ce que la négritude?. Op. cit., p.4. 68 Trimier, J., 2003. The myth of authenticity: personhood, traditional culture and African philosophy. In Higgins, K.M. and Solomon, R.C. Africa to Zen: An invitation to world philosophy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp.173–199.. 69 Howell, Re-envisioning Negritude. Op. cit., pp.97–98. 70 Senghor, Qu’est-ce que la négritude?. Op. cit., p.4.

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55 Thiam, A philosophy at the crossroads. Op. cit., p.103.

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Wangari Maathai’s Afrocentric Decolonial Environmentalist Struggle Faith Mabera Institute for Global Dialogue, associated with the University of South Africa, South Africa

ABSTRACT

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Wangari Maathai is often lauded as the epitome of environmental activism, and is fondly remembered as the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, for her intellectual and political activism and for championing ecological and human justice in Kenya, Africa and the rest of the world. Maathai called for peaceful co-existence between humans and the natural environment against the background of environmental degradation, the commodification of natural sources and climate change, and the devastating effects on present and future generations. Her arguments expand our understanding of both humanism and environmental justice in ways that make the co-existence between humans and nature more fathomable and possible today. Maathai also expounded on the links between the environment, democracy and peace – which are closely linked to the issue of environmental sustainability – and highlighted the imperative dynamic between an accountable and democratic government and an empowered and enlightened citizenry, in upholding both environmental and social justice. Maathai’s engagement with local communities, through the Green Belt Movement, not only resonated with ecofeminism, but also encouraged discursive reflection on the relationship between humanity and Mother Earth from outlier perspectives that are separate from dominant colonial narratives. Accordingly, the author of this chapter seeks to illuminate Maathai’s vision, ideologies and philosophy as vehicles for bringing in the ‘environment at the margins’, while articulating the interaction between the local and the global. By interrogating African and indigenous understandings of place, culture and identity in the context of environmentalism, it can be argued that Maathai’s thinking and praxis constitute an environment-sensitive

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INTRODUCTION The importance of place cannot be overstated: ‘There never was an is without a where.’1 Place continues to be an important source of culture and identity, and the interaction between different places is reflective of a range of dynamics, including difference or similarity and connectedness or separation. The growing trend towards ‘thinking geographically’ has gained prominence alongside the prevalent inclination to focus on historical lenses and other conceptual frameworks of gender, class, economy and politics. This is also part of what can be called thinking otherwise, or rethinking human relations with the rest of the ecosystem. This is a development that constitutes the African contribution to a discourse that has gained momentum in indigenous platforms the world over. From an African viewpoint, the central questions of an environmental discourse cannot be extricated from the ‘geographies that enable or constrain them, spatialities that are multiple, shifting and operating at different scales and in different configurations simultaneously’.2 In other words, an appreciation of place as ‘a meeting place’ is central to unravelling the complex relations of power, knowledge and being, and the resultant engendering of difference and connections across the local and the global.3 As Lawrence Buell asserts, the challenge of contemporary environmentalists is one of decolonisation – how to look past the nature–culture dualism, while being part of a system embedded in colonial understandings of the environment and rooted in visions of an exterior ‘green world concept’.4 In order to focus on decolonisation, environmental scholarship and movements must move beyond narrow conceptions of environmentalism and embrace broader meanings of the term ‘environment’, which project it as complex, interlinked ecological systems and not merely ‘enclosed surroundings’.5  Accordingly, alternative environmental imaginaries have a place-based (rather than place-bound) dimension, in the sense that ‘place’ can be taken as a site of revalued politics, given that our history, identity, culture, nature, politics and economy are bound up in a sense of place.6 Such a reading of place is central to the decolonial project, as place-based reconfigurations of identity, nature, gender and economy enable us to recognise place as the ‘site of the subaltern par excellence, the excluded dimension of modernity’s concern with space, universality, movement and the like’.7 The alternative

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humanist epistemology with distinctively African underpinnings. She thus joins the indigenous turn experienced the world over.

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environmental imaginary embraces both the local and the global, and aims to rethink the environment from the perspective of difference. Hence, by underscoring the politics of place, one can link transformative decolonial projects of gender, economy and ecology in ‘asserting a logic of difference and possibility against the homogenising tendencies of globalisation and political economy’.8

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The history of Africa’s situatedness is one of exclusion, disconnection and marginalisation in the imaginative and material constructions of place and time. Hence, geospatial considerations are central to both environmental issues and questions of identity, culture, language, knowledge production, economics and politics. From a Eurocentric perspective, Africa exists as a ‘place-in-the-world’, where, place, refers to both geographical location and rank in a hierarchical system, and ‘world’ refers to an ‘encompassing categorical system’ in which Africa continues to be projected as marginal, under-developed and ‘dark’ against the whiteness of the modern/colonial world.9 As such, the complexities of Africa’s geographies constitute a study of its ‘uneven entrance’ into globalisation and the effects of colonialism, modernisation and their attendant structures on the places and peoples of the continent.10 Furthermore, questions of environmental knowledge and the dynamics between nature and society have not been excluded from the broader matrix of coloniality that has relegated African environmental philosophy and praxis to the margins. Coloniality denotes an enduring power structure that thrives beyond colonialism and continues to frame culture, labour, identity and knowledge production based on political, social, ideological, economic and epistemological domination of the non-Western world.11 Coloniality pervades hierarchies of race, gender, sex, religion, labour and knowledge, which propagated Eurocentric paradigms and systems as universal, immutable and superior to those of the non-Western world. Walter Mignolo portrays coloniality as the ‘darker side’ of modernity, with its rhetoric of ‘salvation, newness, progress and development’ hinged upon the core pillars of Western civilisation – the double colonisation of space and time.12  The concept of coloniality can be understood as comprising three facets: the coloniality of power, the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being. The coloniality of power has manifested itself in the subjugation of African economies, land and natural resources; the restructuring of African

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(i) separation into hierarchies with non-moderns at the bottom of the scale; (ii) essentialised views of nature and the environment as exterior to the human domain; (iii) the subjugation of body and nature to logocentricism and phallogocentricism; (iv) commodification of the environment and natural resources in service of labour and capital-oriented market economies; (v) positioning of certain natures (colonial and third world environments,

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political and societal systems; and even the imposition of Western conceptualisations of sexuality and gender. The second component, the coloniality of knowledge, has resulted in the domination of African modes of knowledge production and epistemologies by Eurocentric epistemologies and cosmologies. Lastly, the coloniality of being has to do with the deracination of colonised people and their subsequent confinement to the underside of the modern colonial world.13  Nature and the environment are also subject to the logic of coloniality. The coloniality of nature has several key features, which include:

women’s bodies, dark bodies) in the exteriority of the modern/colonial world; and (vi) the subalternisation of other ecological cultures and knowledges particularly those that uphold a continuity between the natural, human and supernatural worlds or between being, knowing and doing.14

For Africa, where neo-colonialism continues to thrive, and where alliances between capitalism and imperialism despoil and commodify local environments and societies, different ways of thinking about geography and the environment are imperative. Environmental and social justice advocacy has to pay critical attention to the points of connection between colonial understandings of nature and the environment and to the influence of these narratives on mainstream environmentalist discourses. In the Eurocentric imagination, Africa continues to be seen as a homogeneity that is characterised by the absence of time, civilisation and history – a conjecture that has underpinned the exploitation and appropriation of the continent’s peoples and places.15  The notion of place becomes even more pronounced when one considers the ‘struggles, networking and connections around place at the local, national and global levels’.16 A large proportion of the environmental problems faced by Africans, such as global warming, pollution, drought and famine, arises from global factors, yet their devastating effects manifest at the local level. The different understandings of place at the local and global levels have also fed into narratives on environmental conservation. For instance, mainstream environmental conservation discourses, which have ideological

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and practical underpinnings from the Global North, often emphasise the enclosing of spaces and pristine wilderness for the enjoyment of tourists, while ignoring local ecologies and the needs of the local poor, whose livelihoods are at the mercy of the privatisation and industrialisation forces of a capital-centric elite. In contrast, the environmental conservation discourses of the Global South are more attuned to the concepts of environmental justice and a sense of connection between humans and the environment.17 The chasm between mainstream environmentalism on the one hand, and subaltern environmentalism that is cognisant of the interdependence between the human, natural and supernatural dimensions, on the other, has led to the formation of belligerent margins. According to Byron Caminero-Santangelo and Garth Myers, these margins can be viewed as the ‘interstitial spaces created by hierarchical dichotomies that divide the human and the animal, spaces of home and waste, city and country, nature and culture, and wilderness and history’.18 If we are to move beyond the environmental thinking held captive by the coloniality of power, knowledge and being, we have to question colonial conceptions of African places, and take note of the perspectives, philosophies and practices of ‘environmentat-the-margins’ as meaningful and long-term contributions towards the redress of environmental concerns in the local and global spheres.19

THE INDIGENE NARRATIVE AS A CRITIQUE OF THE COLONIALITY OF NATURE The Eurocentric paradigm relates colonisation and modernity to the advent of development, progress and civilisation. Contrary to this supposition, contemporary environmental crises can be perceived as a crisis of modernity to the extent that modernity has failed to uphold sustainable worlds.20 As Mignolo points out, the initial point of the coloniality of nature was the separation of nature and culture, with the promotion of the Western concept of not existing in nature, but of existing separate from it. He avers: [N]ature became a repository of objectified, neutralised and largely inert materiality that existed for the fulfilment of the economic goals of the ‘masters’ of the materials. The legacy of this transformation lives today in our assumption that ‘nature’ is the provider of ‘natural resources’ for daily survival: water as a bottled commodity.21

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The commodification of the environment and natural resources has been a core project of modernity and it illustrates the way in which the coloniality of nature has sown the seeds of the environmental crisis and its various forms. The process of uprooting local understandings of the relationship between humanity and the environment occurred at two levels. The first level involved the suppression and exclusion of subordinated cultures and knowledges, particularly those that upheld a continuity and connectedness across the natural, human and supernatural worlds. Consequently, these knowledges were replaced with the colonial/modern conception of nature, with a labour-based capitalist economy as its lifeline. The second level entailed the process of categorising and positioning certain natures (colonial, dark bodies) in the exteriority to modernity.22 Pertinent to the environment, the questioning of modernity and the logic of coloniality begins with privileging and articulating subaltern knowledges about environmentalism and ecology. A key figure who ably demonstrated environmentalism from the perspective of indigenous knowledge is Wangari Maathai, who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her environmental activism. During the award ceremony, the chair of the Nobel Peace Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjøs, described Maathai’s efforts by noting: Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment. Maathai stands at the front of the fight to promote ecologically viable social, economic and cultural development in Kenya and in Africa. She has taken a holistic approach to sustainable development that embraces democracy, human rights and women’s rights in particular. She thinks globally and acts locally.23

Wangari Muta Maathai was born in 1940  in Nyeri, in the Mount Kenya region of Kenya. Maathai later became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD, which she obtained in 1971 following an academic career in the USA, Germany and Nairobi. The Green Belt Movement (GBM) was founded by Maathai in 1977, as part of the project work of the National Council of Women of Kenya. She received in response to the needs of rural women, who highlighted the challenges they faced in the form of water scarcity, food insecurity, poverty, unemployment and deforestation. The GBM grew into a nationwide grassroots initiative that linked environmental conservation to the fight for democracy, human rights and social justice. Maathai’s advocacy through the GBM led to the planting of over 40 million trees in Kenya, and international recognition for her transformative role in the empowerment and mobilisation of citizen action for social

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and environmental justice, which was anchored in environmental conservation through tree planting and poverty eradication.24 In addition to her famous activism through the community-oriented strategies of the GBM, whose origins serendipitously concurred with the UN Decade for Women (1976–1985), Maathai made use of international forums to build international networks. She addressed the UN on several occasions and served on the Commission for Global Governance and the Commission on the Future. Maathai served as a member of parliament (MP) in Kenya and as Assistant Minister for Environmental and Natural Resources (2002–2007). She was also active in the diplomatic sphere, when she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador to the Congo Basin Forest in 2005, and then elected as the first president of the African Union’s (AU) Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC), from 2005 to 2008. At the AU, Maathai pushed for the prioritisation of climate change on the institution’s agenda, and called on African heads of state to adopt policies that would reduce the vulnerability of their citizens to the adverse effects of climate change and promote sustainable energy.25 In her capacity as a leader, Maathai’s core philosophies were to emphasise individual empowerment and agency, value-based actions, the centrality of ethics and inter-generational and intercultural collaboration. She espoused values such as integrity, accountability, responsibility, gratitude, honesty, volunteerism and self-empowerment. As she garnered increasing recognition and fame internationally, Maathai did not waver from her commitments: she remained engaged at the grassroots level and in tune with the needs of communities. As a decolonial thinker, Maathai embraced indigenous forms of knowledge that drew on cultural experiences and a reawakened self-awareness and self-identity. This integrative thinking not only acknowledged the wealth of indigenous forms of knowledge, but also integrated them with new literacy and new forms of learning and understanding. In this way, she was able to link action at the grassroots level, such as tree planting, with larger systemic concepts, such as democracy and governance.26 In her autobiography, Unbowed: A Memoir, Maathai begins her environmental enunciation with a description of the harmonious relationship between humans and the natural environment in the precolonial period. Explaining the Gikuyu culture of welcoming newborn babies, she narrates: ‘Even before breast milk, I would have swallowed the juice of green bananas, blue purple sugarcane, sweet potatoes and a fattened lamb, all fruits of the local land.’27 This points to the values of oneness and wholeness, held in high regard by her native Gikuyu community, with respect

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The missionaries were followed by traders and administrators who introduced new methods of exploiting our rich natural resources: logging, clear-cutting native forests, establishing plantations of imported trees, hunting wildlife and undertaking expansive commercial agriculture. Hallowed landscapes lost their sacredness and were exploited as the local people became insensitive to the destruction, accepting it as a sign of progress.28 

In elaborating her standpoint, Maathai avoids using the notion of pastoral essence, and therefore its pigeonholing of African environmental philosophy and practice as a simplistic alternative to colonial visions of environmentalism.29 She makes use of an ecological discourse which draws heavily on culture, identity and reverence for the interrelationship between precolonial agro-ecosystems, local biodiversity and the wholesomeness of human communities. For instance, Maathai recounts her mother’s admonitions not to interfere with the fig tree whenever she was out fetching firewood. The fig tree was considered sacred by the Gikuyu community, and its root system, as she later learned, was essential to the underground water reservoirs and a variety of fauna in its proximity: ‘In such ways, without conscious or deliberate effort, these cultural and spiritual practices contributed to the conservation of biodiversity.’30 By establishing the GBM, Maathai’s critique of the coloniality of nature went further than merely presenting an indigene narrative, as it instituted a ‘politics of difference’ at three levels: environmental, cultural and economic.31 To ground the politics of difference, it is necessary to first look at colonial difference, which is defined by Mignolo as:

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to their surroundings – the central highlands of Kenya. Maathai goes to great lengths to explain the links between the human, the natural and the supernatural, drawing on the Gikuyu myth of origin, which emphasised the sacred nature of the fig tree (mũgumo) and the mountain (Mt Kenya). She repeats this pastoral narrative to underscore the ruin of a harmonious precolonial ecosystem by the advent of colonisation in Kenya at the end of the nineteenth century. She adds:

the space where coloniality of power is enacted … where the restitution of subaltern knowledges is taking place and where border thinking is emerging … the physical as well as imaginary location where the coloniality of power is at work in the confrontation of two kinds of local histories displayed in different spaces and times across the planet.32

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Put differently, the colonial difference is the geospatial manifestation of a counter-hegemonic process to the matrix of coloniality. If coloniality and modernity are two sides of the same coin,33 then, by extension, the delocalisation and marginalisation of places are derivatives of the globalisation project of the modern/colonial world system, which effectively situates EuroAmerica as the immutable and total centre of a global network.34 Moreover, theories of globalisation have tended to privilege the positionality of the global over the local. The site for emancipatory thinking, apart and away from the hegemony of Eurocentrism, originates from acknowledging the colonial difference and its cultural, ecological and economic dimensions. The economic dimension of the colonial difference is concerned with the capitalisation and commodification of local economies and their moulding into market-driven economies. The second dimension – ecological difference – deals with the separation of nature and culture on the basis of modern colonial rationality. The third dimension – cultural difference – focuses on subalternised knowledges and cultures exterior to a Eurocentric world.35 We identify with the argument that the crisis of modernity can also be perceived as a crisis of thought. Given the failure of modernity to promote environmental sustainability, what is needed is the transformation of economy in society, ecosystems and culture, by embracing the struggles within ecological, economic and cultural differences. This involves prioritising the different epistemologies and exigencies of diverse indigenous, ethnic and subaltern groups in their efforts to formulate transformed environmental imaginaries.36

MAATHAI’S PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICE THROUGH THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE Maathai embraced the pursuit of a new environmental rationality through the politics of difference by employing strategies such as forming the GBM. Desertification and deforestation have environmental implications because of rivers drying up, the erosion of top-soil and a shortage of firewood and food, which all feed into a vicious cycle of malnutrition, poverty and food insecurity.37 The GBM was guided in terms of its functioning by four core values: ‘love for the environment, gratitude and respect for Earth’s resources, self-empowerment and self-betterment, and the spirit of service and volunteerism.’ The GBM facilitated civic and environmental education by hosting seminars that enlightened participants about environmental 198

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degradation and the crucial role of good governance in fostering sound environmental practice.38 According to Eileen Schell, the rhetoric and practices of the GBM, including grassroots mobilisation and the publication of books, documentaries and training videos, typified a broader trend in transnational collective action and its processes of diffusion, domestication, externalisation and collective action.39 Tree planting was a key strategy of the GBM; however, it was not only a rhetorical strategy and sustainability concept, but also a potent demonstration of ‘ecological literacy’. David Orr defines ecological literacy as ‘the ability to develop an insightful understanding of nature and the earth’s physical system, developing a sense of place and possessing a quality of mind that seeks out connections’.40 The GBM’s strategy of community-based tree planting privileged women’s everyday embodied experiences rather than emphasising formal training and education. In this way, the GBM promoted a hands-on, practical ecological activism as a form of literacy working ‘with’ the women, while connecting cultural diversity, linguistic diversity and biodiversity.41 At a broader level, by grounding its activism in indigenous, situated knowledge, the GBM promoted a model of participatory governance that highlighted the sense of a shared humanity across diverse experiences. It therefore stressed the collective stake in transnational environmental challenges.42 By empowering citizens to be more active participants in addressing environmental problems, the GBM drew on the powerful metaphor of the tree, seen as not only a source of food, medicine and timber, but also an avenue for ‘healing, consolation and connection with other human beings and with the divine’.43 Maathai compares the reverence for the fig tree among the Gikuyu with similar practices in different cultures, such as the people of northern Ghana, who viewed the baobab as the pathway between earth and heaven; the Mayan civilisation, which revered the ceiba (Yaxche) as the tree of life; and the Zoroastrian culture from Persia, which held that the saena is the tree of healing.44 The common thread running through these different traditions is an acknowledgement of the connection between nature and culture, the oneness between human and non-human life within an ecosystem, and a cosmology underpinned by sufficiency and sustainability. The symbolism of the tree extended to the political realm, where the GBM was active in planting ‘trees of peace’ at a time when Kenya’s political scene was marked by authoritarian leanings and the mismanagement of natural resources and land by a corrupt government with neo-colonial patronage inclinations. For instance, in 1989, Maathai and a group of women who

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were affiliated to the GBM intervened when they learnt that the government was planning to build a skyscraper in Uhuru Park in the heart of Nairobi. Maathai wrote letters to the press and to various civil society groups to raise public awareness about the implications for the people of the government’s plan to encroach on space meant for public and recreational use. She highlighted that ‘[e]ven though the immediate struggle was over the park and the right of everyone to enjoy green space, the effort was also about getting Kenyans to raise their voice’.45 At the heart of the issue was the fight for democracy and upholding rights and liberties under the repressive government of President Daniel arap Moi. Maathai’s rhetoric and activism for the preservation of Uhuru Park highlighted the burgeoning movement for change among the Kenyan public, who received massive support from foreign donor agencies and international organisations in pressuring the government to halt its plans.46 As aptly summed up by Rob Nixon, the activities of the GBM and Maathai ensured greater visibility of the environmentalism of the poor, which, in turn, led to the development of rhetorical alliances that opened up connective avenues between environmental justice and other rights discourses – women’s rights, property rights, the right to freedom of speech and assembly, and the right to enhanced self-sufficiency.47

During the early years of multi-party politics in Kenya in the 1990s, land was an inflammatory issue that was linked to ethnicity. This led some politicians to stir up tribal clashes in 1993. Maathai visited some of the hotspots of the violence and urged communities to come together to plant trees of peace, particularly on land over which they were fighting. Just as the seedlings would thrive and mature into trees, Maathai hoped that the performative act of planting trees together would appeal to the communities’ need for peace and healing, while healing the land at the same time.48 Maathai’s practical approach to environmental issues drew on the significant local history of environmental conflicts, connecting societal injustices and inequalities to the glaring shortfalls in good governance and accountability. By linking issues, her environmental philosophy also represented alternative paths to democracy and good governance, effectively demonstrating that environmental protection was an avenue to peace-building. She proved instrumental in elevating environmental issues on the global sustainable development agenda, by highlighting the conservation of biodiversity, the sustainable and responsible use of the 200

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environment, and distributive justice. Maathai’s enterprise was not merely tree planting – she was the embodiment of an agent of change who used her advocacy for citizen empowerment and enlightenment, and her campaign for change at the local level to influence the global.49 Dovetailing with Inderpal Grewal’s concept of the ‘transnational connectivities’ of subjects, technologies and ethical practices, Maathai’s rhetoric of connectivity was central to her philosophy, which saw African women as ‘subjects’ practising subsistence farming, their farming practices as ‘technologies’, and their social/environmental positionality as their ‘ethical practices’.50 By telling stories about the dilemmas of the everyday African, Maathai was able to connect with the ordinary citizen and encourage listeners to absorb important lessons vis-à-vis their role in environmental justice. For instance, Maathai narrated the story of the dilemma of the ‘woman of Yaoundé’ – a farmer whom she had observed outside her hotel window when she attended an international policy meeting in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 2007.51 Maathai was serving as the Goodwill Ambassador of the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem at the time, and she observed that the farmers were carving out furrows that ran down the hill rather than against the gradient, thereby guaranteeing erosion of the soil when the rains fell. Maathai uses the story of the ‘woman of Yaoundé, to show the links between global policies (in this instance, the policy meeting of the Commission of Central African Forests, COMIFAC) and the local realities of the subsistence farmers whose farming practices worked contrary to sustainable soil management practices. Maathai argued that in order to address the woman of Yaoundé’s needs, policymakers and governments need to acquire ecological literacies that will enable them to identify the challenges faced by subsistence farmers, invest in extension services and implement policies that will promote sustainable farming.52 Maathai’s exposition on environmental protection and her call for transformed praxis through cultural reclamation apply to the entire African continent and beyond. She maintains: It is my search into this heritage I have in common with millions of others in Africa, and elsewhere, that convinces me that the tenets of modernity – with its belief that material goods, greater technology and innovation at any cost will solve all our problems and meet all our needs – are insufficient to provide an ethical direction for our lives.53 

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According to her, many of Africa’s environmental woes stem from a lack of knowledge, which is a product of colonisation of the mind: It is as if they have looked at themselves through another person’s mirror – whether that of a colonial administrator, a missionary, a teacher, a collaborator, or a political leader – and seen their own cracked reflections or distorted images, if they have seen themselves at all.54 

Consequently, the GBM’s conceptualisation of environmental protection was expanded to include an emphasis on culture and identity as pathways towards the reclamation of self and knowledge, premised on a contiguous dynamic between nature and culture.55 Overall, the activities of the GBM are hinged on what Arturo Escobar has termed ‘cultural politics’: ‘the deployment of alternative conceptions of woman, nature, development, economy and democracy that challenge dominant cultural meanings.’56

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Maathai’s philosophical and practical approach to issues of the environment, democracy, social justice and development is imbued with ‘the grammar of decoloniality’, with a strong emphasis on disengagement and delinking from Western epistemology.57 This perspective is aligned with political and epistemic disobedience in the face of the snare of imperial knowledge, unfurling the regional underpinnings of the universal claim to truth and the multiple categories of thought and logic that sustain Eurocentric hegemony.58 Maathai’s philosophies on environmentalism illustrated broader connections to issues of epistemology and ontology. Her corpus of work promoted a decolonial approach to environmental pedagogy, anchored in changing approaches to African-oriented epistemology and ontology. For instance, her civic education programme through the GBM prioritised interactive exercises and experiential learning based on educational resources which targeted a wide audience, from high school and community college instructors to community-based organisations. The content is divided into subject-specific segments that correspond to lesson plans, with educational and curricular activities designed with contextual educational standards in mind.59 In addition to educational resources, the GBM also made use of folklore, such as ‘The Story of the Hummingbird’, and the use of metaphors

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At both the top and the bottom, all Africans must change the mind-set that affects many colonized peoples everywhere. They must believe in themselves again; that they are capable of clearing their own path and forging their own identity; that they have a right to be governed with justice, accountability and transparency; that they can honour and practice their cultures and make them relevant to today’s needs; and that they no longer need to be indebted – financially, intellectually and spiritually – to those who once governed them.

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to link everyday items to the environmental lessons. One example is the metaphor of the African three-legged stool, which shows how the three legs represent the fundamentals of sustainable development – peace, democracy and environmental stewardship.60 As the first woman in Africa to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Maathai serves as a source of inspiration for women to empower themselves and embrace their agency for change. Maathai advances a perspective on the environment that questions the rhetoric of modernity. She asserts:

They must rise up and walk.61

Maathai is calling for a delinking from the universalistic and paternalistic tropes presented by the logic of coloniality and the rhetoric of modernity and their crippling effect on the imaginations of those located on the underside of modernity. She thus addresses the coloniality of nature as a sphere of the colonial matrix of globalised power.62 The gist of Maathai’s construct is to reclaim indigenous cultures and knowledges in ways that challenge the imposed project of modernity–coloniality. It is about advancing ‘the environmentalism of the poor’, premised on the intersection of environmental injustice and social injustice, the unequal distribution of ecological benefits and costs, and the establishment of nodes of resistance against the misuse of the environment and natural resources by the rich and powerful.63 The values and modus operandi of the GBM resonate with this questioning of the mainstream universalistic rhetoric of eco-efficiency, of ecological modernisation and the notion of an untouched wilderness, enclosed and apart from human influence.64 It also resonates with the idea of learning from indigenous and local knowledges, using a range of tools in their praxis that draw on indigenous repertoires of insights and experiences, including the use of metaphors, idioms and allegories to relay arguments and philosophies to their audience.65 The GBM uses the metaphor of the ‘Wrong Bus Syndrome’ in its messaging, activism and training manuals. The GBM engages participants in a discussion on the various reasons a traveller would board the wrong bus.

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After the discussion, the participants are asked to identify the problems in their local communities. The link is then made with the allegory of the traveller and the bus. Often, the unanimous conclusion of the participants is that they (and their communities) are on the ‘wrong bus’ and are headed in the wrong direction for various reasons – ignorance, limited information or mis-information, incapacitation, and fear or a lack of self-assurance.66 At the societal level, through a shift in consciousness, participants come to the realisation that they may have failed to invoke their agency as citizens by not calling their leaders to account, by failing to take responsibility for their woes or by trivialising their potential for transformation.67 In this context, Maathai’s pedagogy in civic and environmental education dovetails with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s proposition that self-knowing, self-articulation, self-definition, self-understanding, self-regeneration and self-rule are fundamental if African epistemology, ontology and pedagogy are to be freed from the snare of the matrix of coloniality.68 If we are to take Maathai’s ideals, visions and social action as defiance towards the modern/colonial vision of the environment, then we accept that her contention was an effort to ‘shift the locus of enunciation’69 to the Global South in general and to Africa in particular. The locus of enunciation is the ‘geopolitical and body-political location of the subject that speaks’.70 In order to call into question the myth of a universal knowledge (the hegemonic Eurocentric cosmology and philosophy), it is imperative to change the terms (and not merely the content) of the conversation, to focus on the knower rather than the known and to challenge the presumed neutrality and objectivity of the geopolitics and theo-politics of imperial knowledge.71 In hindsight, the sustenance of the modern/colonial world system was hinged on the projection of the ‘hubris of the zero point’ as described by Santiago Castro-Gómez.72 It is this zero point, that has enabled the hegemony of Eurocentric paradigms to dismiss non-Western knowledges as particularistic and inferior, hide the location of the subject of enunciation and cast itself as universal and holding a ‘god’s-eye view’.73 Accordingly, the shift of the locus of enunciation from the Eurocentric paradigm to the paradigm of the local or indigenous man or woman entails ‘a shift in the geography of reason’ and the return to enunciation from the vantage point of his or her epistemic location.74  Shifting the locus of enunciation is closely linked to the concept of border thinking: ‘the epistemology of the exteriority, of the outside created from the inside.’75 To engage in border thinking is to move beyond the categories enacted by Western epistemology, not to reproduce fundamentalist or essentialist alternatives, but to ‘engage the colonialism of Western epistemology

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(from the left and from the right) from the perspective of subaltern forms of knowledges’, 76 which are hybrid and transcultural knowledges at ‘the intersection of the traditional and the modern’.77 The outcome of border thinking is ‘pluritopic hermeneutics’: the prospect of thinking from the different spaces and standpoints which finally result in displacement, double critique and transformative alternative futures.78 Additionally, border thinking is decolonial, diverse and transmodern. As unpacked by Enrique Dussel, transmodernity is a project for overcoming modernity which moves beyond Eurocentrism and fundamentalism by embracing the multiple and diverse critiques of Eurocentred modernity from subaltern cultures, knowledges and counter-discourses at the margins.79 Another characteristic of Maathai’s environmental philosophy is the centrality of culture, and the need to reclaim the self-knowledge and self-identity lost in the cultural dis-inheritance of African peoples.80 The denigration of cultures as a result of the imposed logic of coloniality affected both the rich and the poor and resulted in the loss of ‘their knowledge of who they were and what their destiny should be’.81 Maathai makes references to her Gikuyu culture, which upheld a precolonial ecology premised on sustainability, sufficiency and wellness, measured by peaceful co-existence between humans and the natural environment.82 This synergy between nature and culture fostered a strong sense of kwimenya (self-knowledge and self-identity), which in turn led to the recognition of responsibility and accountability for the protection of the environment.83 For Maathai, the ‘rediscovery of culture was not something simply personal but a political and social necessity’, an assertion that strikes at the nature–culture binary inherent in imperial environmental projects.84  Furthermore, Maathai’s articulation and strategies under the GBM are tantamount to the enactment of a ‘cultural politics’ aimed at a cultural re-appropriation of concepts such as nature, woman, development, economy or citizenship.85 The primacy of culture is further underlined when weighed against the fact that Maathai was Western-educated and hence inculcated in the perspectives and purposes of colonial knowledge and rationality. Maathai is cognisant of this fact, but maintains that even when under tutelage in Western locations, her upbringing and childhood, which was enriched with Gikuyu cultural heritage, was instructive in bolstering her perspective of self-identity and self-knowing and, consequently, her vision and life path.86 Maathai’s environmental paradigm also illustrates the embrace of the concept of pluriversality. Pluriversality embodies the principle of multiple, intersecting and interacting knowledges, subjectivities and visions entangled through and by the colonial matrix.87 Pluriversality denotes a rejection

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of the idea of abstract universal knowledge and instead upholds the notion of co-existing, diverse knowledges.88 Maathai highlights the notion of the pluriverse and the value of drawing from various cultures and value systems in establishing a well-rounded environmental philosophy. For instance, she expounds on the Japanese concept of mottanai (do not waste), which encapsulates the gratitude we ought to feel for what the earth gives us, respect for the resources we have and respectful co-existence with the natural world.89 Similarly, Maathai also embraces the Jewish principle of tikkun olam (repair the world), which draws on human responsibility for the environment by participating in tzedakah (justice and righteousness) and g’milut hasadim (acts of lovingkindness) through acts of philanthropy.90 Tikkun olam amounts to ecological restoration through a partnership with God, premised on a God-given human mandate for environmental care and a sense of community with the rest of creation.91 Mottanai and tikkun olam, and a range of other concepts, have been widely incorporated into the core value system of the GBM.92 As previously discussed, the GBM was established in response to the exigencies of rural women in the face of the enduring effects of environmental degradation. Maathai further adds that it was not coincidental that the GBM was formed during the UN Decade for Women, 1976–1985.93 The participation of women in planting trees not only empowered them as transformative agents in their societies, but also generated an awareness premised on ecofeminism. Ecofeminist praxis emphasises the inextricability of theory and practice and the connectedness of environmental justice, human justice and interspecies justice. For instance, an ecofeminist perspective on climate change highlights the gendered and interconnected elements of the discourse. It aims to show not only that human health and industrial– animal–agricultural aspects are linked within the climate change story, but also that women are most affected by climate change and its effects, owing to their gender roles, discrimination and poverty. Ecofeminist ethical narratives highlight the intersection of social and environmental perspectives, policies, economics and decision making. As a result, ecofeminists call for broad-based, interconnected policy responses to social, economic and ecological crises.94 What makes the GBM’s methodology ecofeminist is the intersectional approach to environmental, women’s and human rights.95 Maathai was never ‘a single-issue environmentalist’;96 she linked environmental, political and social issues from the outset. For instance, in 1992, Maathai joined a group of women campaigning for the release of political prisoners held by the government under President Moi. The Release Political Prisoners campaign

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added to the widespread initiatives aimed at the expansion of democratic space and the introduction of multi-party politics in Kenya. Maathai was also part of the 2000 Jubilee crusade, initiated by various social movements and civil society organisations calling for debt cancellation in Third World countries. In Kenya, the Kenyan Debt Relief Network (KENDREN) was made up of the GBM, the Kenya Human Rights Commission, church bodies and a range of other civil society groups.97  Through the GBM’s model of transnational ecological activism and ecological literacy pedagogy, Maathai was able to highlight the interconnectedness between the political and the personal spheres in the context of environmental justice. She used intersectionality as a pathway to move beyond the essentialism inherent in global environmental discourses. An examination of these environmental engagement narratives reveals the reification of historical power dynamics that underpin the very causes of environmental injustices. For instance, stories of the lived experiences of women from the developing world have been co-opted as a selling point by environmental NGOs, implicitly promoting the view of women as ‘sustainability saviours’ or ‘environmental heroines’. The negative effect of such stereotypical constructions is the entrenchment of gender inequalities and women’s caregiving role, without the delivery of benefits and rights.98 Maathai’s approach, premised on an intersectional view of justice, power and ecology, critically engages with the narratives of those most affected by environmental crises. By activating local voices while acknowledging the complexity of power and gender relations, Maathai offers an avenue for addressing environmental injustices without portraying the people and places at the centre of the issues as ‘agency-less victims waiting to be empowered’.99 Maathai builds on this gendered perspective by relating her struggle and vilification by a patriarchal society with preconceived notions of ‘how a proper woman should act in the African tradition’.100 When filing for divorce in 1979, Maathai’s husband Mwangi was quoted as stating that he wanted a divorce because Maathai was ‘too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control’.101 Of course, this stemmed from the societal attitude towards women that saw them as dependent, submissive and domestic. Subsequently, as a result of her advocacy, Maathai was often humiliated and castigated as the epitome of a ‘bad’ woman. One such an instance was the derogation of Maathai in a parliamentary session following her lobbying to prevent encroachment One such public space by corrupt developers. For a good 45 minutes, MPs launched a tirade of abuse against Maathai, with some citing her divorce and defiant behaviour as ‘shameful

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for all women’. In response to the diatribe, Maathai penned a letter to her constituency MP and Assistant Minister for the Environment, asserting that her gender and marital status were irrelevant to the issue at hand, which instead required the use of ‘the anatomy of whatever lies above the neck!’.102 In countering the capitalist and patriarchal mindset of the Kenyan government in the face of arrests, defamation and ostracisation, Maathai’s resilient spirit served to illuminate the gaping invisibility of the latent agency of women as change agents and the plight of women (alongside men) as victims of the devastating effects of environmental degradation.103 Another distinct marker of Maathai’s philosophical approach towards the environment is her break from the romanticism of the past and precolonial imaginary. Hers is an environmental articulation looking to invest in the future and in the advancement of intergenerational justice. Her work left no room for complacency, but pressed for constant reimagination and growth, once again invoking the symbolism of the tree: ‘like a seedling, the roots of our future will bury themselves in the ground and a canopy of hope will reach into the sky.’104 For Maathai, an alternative environmental paradigm is a journey rather than a destination, a relentless striving towards ‘a parallel road to knowing, sensing, believing and living’ apart from the layers, hierarchies and categories perpetuated by the matrix of coloniality.105 Ultimately, embedding the decolonial option within environmentalism is contingent on epistemic delinking and epistemic disobedience. Delinking can be understood as a decolonial and epistemic shift leading to pluriversality, questioning the assumptions and tenets of the logic of coloniality. Moreover, delinking means changing the terms of the conversation and denaturalising the epistemological and ideological foundations of mainstream environmentalism. Delinking goes hand in hand with epistemic disobedience, which translates into disengagement from disciplinary or interdisciplinary management and the antithetical interpretations advanced by imperial knowledge.106 Although Maathai faced vehement opposition from the Kenyan government and was often portrayed as a troublemaker, her efforts and rhetoric were instrumental in bolstering civic agency and responsibility and in reformulating thinking around the environment, with particular attention given to the formative dynamics of culture, identity and place.

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If we are in agreement that the task of decoloniality is ‘to unlearn in order to relearn on other than modern/colonial ground’,107 then Wangari Maathai’s vision of environmentalism presents a decolonial alternative to mainstream, Eurocentric environmentalism. Maathai speaks and writes from an Afrocentric locus of enunciation, and her explications can be evoked not only to speak truth to empire, but also to press for the crafting of global futures focused on the intersectional wholeness of life rather than on consumerism and individualism at the expense of the planet and fellow human beings. Her expositions on the interrelationship between human beings and the environment inject the grammar of coloniality into environmental thinking, offering a shift from environmental understandings that are replete with the canons of global coloniality and the rhetoric of modernity. The environmental pedagogy and epistemology advanced by Maathai are distinctively premised on African self-knowledge, rhetorical connectivity, cultural re-appropriation, pluriversality and the politics of difference. Furthermore, Maathai’s indigene narrative and her rich application of symbolism and metaphors transcend romanticism of the past and look to the future, emphasising human agency and responsibility in the conservation and protection of the environment. As such, Maathai’s environmental philosophy shares many elements with the decolonial project, and her elucidation echoes a number of concepts from the broad decolonial library, such as border thinking, transmodernity, pluritopic hermeneutics and epistemic delinking. In summation, Maathai brings a unique perspective to environmental thinking and practice – thinking for Africa and the Global South from Africa, underscoring the centrality of place-based enunciation as the site for interconnected and transformative projects in relation to the environment, gender, economy and politics. Four words aptly capture this perspective: think globally, act locally.

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CONCLUSION

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Buell, L., as cited in Crowley, D., 2015. Africa’s narrative geographies: charting the intersections of geocriticism and postcolonial studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p.2.

2

Crowley, Africa’s narrative geographies. Op. cit., p.2.

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3

Harcourt, W., 2016. Place. In Adamson, J., Gleason, W.A. and Pellow, D.N. (eds), Keywords for environmental studies. New York: New York University Press, pp.161–163.

4

Buell, L., 1995. The environmental imagination: Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

5

Alston, V.R., 2016. Environment. In Adamson, J., Gleason, W.A. and Pellow, D.N. (eds), Keywords for environmental studies. New York: New York University Press, pp.93–96.

6

Harcourt, Place. Op. cit., p.161.

7

Escobar, A., 2010. Worlds and knowledges otherwise: the Latin American modernity/ coloniality research program. In Mignolo, W.D. and Escobar, A. (eds), Globalization and the decolonial option. New York: Routledge, pp.33–64, p.56.

8

Ibid., p.57.

9

Ferguson, J., 2006. Global shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durham: Duke University Press, p.6; Mbembe, A., 2001. On the postcolony. California: University of California Press, p.242.

10 Crowley, Africa’s narrative geographies. Op. cit., p.2. 11 Maldonado-Torres, N., 2007. On the coloniality of being: contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), pp.240–270, p.243. 12 Mignolo, W.D., 2011. The darker side of Western modernity: global futures, decolonial options. Durham: Duke University Press, p.6. 13 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2013. Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: myths of decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA, pp.7–8. 14 Escobar, A., 2008. Territories of difference: place, movements, life, redes. Durham: Duke University Press, p.121. 15 Caminero-Santangelo, B. and Myers, G. (ed.), 2011. Environment at the margins: literary and environmental studies in Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, p.8. 16 Harcourt,Place. Op. cit., p.161. 17 Alston, Environment. Op. cit., p.93. 18 Caminero-Santangelo and Myers, Environment at the margins. Op. cit., p.9. 19 Ibid., p.2. 20 Figueroa Helland, L.E. and Lindgren, T., 2016. What goes around comes around: from the coloniality of power to the crisis of civilization. Journal of WorldSystems Research, 22(2), pp.430–462, p.438. 21 Mignolo, The darker side of western modernity. Op. cit., pp.12–13. 22 Escobar, Worlds and knowledges otherwise,. Op. cit.,p.54. 23 Mjøs, O.D., 2004. Presentation speech by Professor Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Oslo, December 10, 2004. Available at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2004/ceremony-speech/[Accessed

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5 February 2017].

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http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/wangari-maathai [Accessed 6 February 2017]. 25 Ibid. 26 The Green Belt Movement (GBM). 2017. The Wangari Muta Maathai House – a legacy project. Available at http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/node/714 [Accessed 6 February 2017]. 27 Maathai, W.M., 2008. Unbowed: a memoir. London: Arrow Books, p.4. 28 Ibid., p.6. 29 Buell, The environmental imagination. Op. cit., p.55. 30 Maathai, Unbowed. Op. cit., p.44. pp.44–5. 31 Escobar, Worlds and knowledges otherwise. Op. cit., p.55. 32 Mignolo, W. D., 2000. Local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges and border thinking. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p.25. 33 Mignolo, The darker side of Western modernity. Op. cit., p.2. 34 Escobar, Worlds and knowledges otherwise. Op. cit., p.36. 35 Ibid., p.55.

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24 The Green Belt Movement (GBM), 2017. Wangari Maathai. Available at

36 Ibid., p.56. 37 Maathai, Unbowed. Op. cit., p.125. 38 Maathai, W.M., 2010. Replenishing the earth: spiritual values for healing ourselves and the world. New York: DoubleDay, p.28. 39 Schell, E.E., 2013. Transnational environmental justice rhetorics and the Green Belt Movement: Wangari Muta Maathai’s ecological rhetorics and literacies. JAC, 3(3 and 4), pp.585–613, p.588. 40 Orr, D.W., 1992. Ecological literacy: education and the transition to a postmodern world. Albany: State University of New York Press, p.92. 41 Schell, Transnational environmental justice rhetorics. Op. cit., p.600. 42 Amster, R. and Kato, Y., 2018. Engaging narratives: environmental essentialism and intersectional justice. Undergraduate Journal of Global Citizenship, 2(3), pp.1–23, p.20. 43 Maathai, Replenishing the earth. Op. cit., p.79. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p.195. 46 Ibid., p.205. 47 Nixon, R., 2006. Slow violence, gender, and the environmentalism of the poor. Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 13(2)–14(1): 14–37, p.23. 48 Maathai, Unbowed. Op. cit., p.239. 49 Golding, J., 2016. Wangari Maathai and peace on earth. Available at https://www.zedbooks.net/blog/posts/wangari-maathi-and-peace-on-awarming-earth/ [Accessed 7 February 2017].

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50 Grewal, I., 2005. Transnational America: feminisms, diasporas, neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, p.32. 51 Maathai, W.M., 2010. The challenge for Africa. London: Arrow Books, p.11. 52 Ibid., p.15. 53 Ibid., p.162. 54 Ibid., p.34. 55 Ibid., p.167. 56 Escobar, A., 1998. Whose knowledge, whose nature? Biodiversity, conservation, and the political ecology of social movements. Journal of Political Ecology, 5(1), pp.53–82, p.64. 57 Mignolo, W.D., 2010. Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of decoloniality. In Mignolo, W.D. and Escobar, A. (eds), Globalization and the decolonial option. New York: Routledge, pp.303–368, p.340. 58 Mignolo, The darker side of Western modernity. Op. cit., p.116. 59 Merton, L. and Dater, A., 2008. Taking root: the vision of Wangari Maathai. Available

at

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/takingroot/classroom.html

[Accessed 10 February 2017]. 60 See The Wangari Muta Maathai House – a legacy project. Available at http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/node/714 [Accessed 11 August 2018]. 61 Maathai, The challenge for Africa. Op. cit.,p.10. 62 Ibid., p.162. 63 Environmental Justice, Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT), 2012. Glossary: environmentalism of the poor. Available at http://www.ejolt.org/2012/12/ environmentalism-of-the-poor/ [Accessed 20 July 2016]. 64 Caminero-Santangelo and Myers, Environment at the margins. Op. cit., p.18. 65 Martínez-Alier, J., 2002. The environmentalism of the poor: a study of ecological conflicts and valuation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, p.41. 66 Maathai, The challenge for Africa. Op. cit., p.168. 67 Ibid., p.169. 68 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit., p.54. 69 Grosfoguel, R., 2011. Decolonizing post-colonial studies and paradigms of political economy: transmodernity, decolonial thinking, and global coloniality. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1), pp.1–38, p.5. 70 Ibid., p.5  71 Mignolo, W.D., 2009. Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and de-colonial freedom, Theory, Culture and Society, 26(7–8), pp.1–23. 72 Quoted in Grosfoguel, Decolonizing post-colonial studies. Op. cit., p.6.

212

73 Ibid.

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75 Mignolo, W.D. and Tlostanova, M.V., 2006. Theorizing from the borders: shifting to geo- and body-politics of knowledge. European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), pp. 205–221, p.206. 76 Elena Delgado. L. and Romero, R.J., 2001. Local histories and global designs: an interview with Walter Mignolo. Discourse, 22(3), pp.7–33, p.11. 77 Grosfoguel, Decolonizing post-colonial studies. Op. cit.,p.24. 78 Mignolo, Local histories/global designs. Op. cit., p.308. 79 Dussel, E., 1996. The underside of modernity. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, p.14. 80 Maathai, The challenge for Africa. Op. cit., p.166. 81 Ibid., p.167. 82 Ibid., p.166. 83 Ibid., p.170. 84 Ibid., p.165. 85 Escobar, Territories of difference. Op. cit., p.64; Rocheleau, D. and Nimal, P.,

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74 Ibid., p.8.

2016. Culture. In J. Adamson, W.A. Gleason and D.N. Pellow (eds.). Keywords for environmental studies. New York: New York University Press, pp.50–54. 86 Maathai, The challenge for Africa. Op. cit., p.164; Maathai, Unbowed. Op. cit., p.97. 87 Mignolo, W.D., 2013. On pluriversality. Available at http://waltermignolo.com/ on-pluriversality/ [Accessed 15 June 2016]. 88 Tlostanova, M., 2014. Post-Soviet imaginary and global coloniality: a gendered perspective. Interview with Madina Tlostanova. Available at http://www.kronotop.org/ftexts/inter view-with-madina-tlostanova/ [Accessed 4 June 2016]. 89 Maathai, Unbowed. Op. cit., p.106. 90 Noparstak, J., 2016. Tikkun Olam. Available at https://www.learningtogive.org/ resources/tikkun-olam [Accessed 29 August 2016]. 91 Troster, L., 2008. Tikkun Olam and environmental restoration: a Jewish ecotheology of redemption. Jewish Education News, Fall 2008. Available at https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/tikk/Tikkun%20Olam%20and%20 Environmental%20Restoration.pdf [Accessed 15 August 2016]. 92 Maathai, The challenge for Africa. Op. cit., p.120. 93 Maathai, Unbowed. Op. cit., p.125. 94 Gaard, G., 2016. Ecofeminism. In Adamson, J., Gleason, W.A. and Pellow, D.N. (eds), Keywords for environmental studies. New York: New York University Press, pp.68–71. 95 Ibid., p.69. 96 Nixon, R., 2006. Slow violence. Op. cit., p.23.

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97 Maathai, Unbowed. Op. cit., pp. 227, 278. 98 UN Women, 2014. World survey on the role of women in development: gender equality and sustainable development. New York: United Nations, p.24. 99 Dickinson, E., 2012. Addressing environmental racism through storytelling: toward an environmental justice narrative framework. Communication, Culture and Critique, 5(1), pp.57–74, p.57. 100 Maathai, Unbowed. Op. cit., p.196. 101 Ibid., p.146. 102 Ibid., p.192. 103 Muthuki, J., 2006. Challenging patriarchal structures: Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. Agenda, 20(69), pp.83–91. 104 Maathai, Replenishing the earth. Op. cit., p.289. 105 Mignolo, The darker side of Western modernity. Op. cit., p.161. 106 Ibid., p.122. 107 Tlostanova, Post-Soviet imaginary and global coloniality. Op. cit.

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Claude Ake’s Critical Thinking about African Democracy Kealeboga J Maphunye Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa, South Africa

ABSTRACT Before his passing in 1996, Claude Ake hypothesised the uniqueness of Africa’s democracy, articulating distinct thoughts about how development in Africa could benefit the continent and its people, and drawing a clear distinction between these and the claims of Western canons. Yet there has been insufficient critical reflection on his contribution to scholarship. Two decades later, recent continental attempts to revive alternative, Africacentred ideas on democracy and development suggest that the ideas of this neglected intellectual giant in the field of African political science deserve careful consideration. Ake sought to demystify the ‘superiority’ and universalism of Western liberal democracy in two important ways: by arguing in favour of African communalism and consensual and collective democratic participation, and, inevitably, by challenging Western orthodoxies – the very orthodoxies that ironically explain the subsequent marginalisation of his ideas in political science. Thus, the author of this chapter reflects on three aspects of the influence, strength and limitations of Ake’s ideas. Firstly, the author discusses the key contentions in some of Ake’s publications, specifically their relevance to contemporary arguments on Africa’s democratisation. Secondly, he considers Ake’s ideas on Africa’s development; and, thirdly, he comments on Ake’s contribution to African political science and intellectual discourse overall. What is new about Ake is the relevance of his ideas to contemporary intellectual discourses in Africa on the need for decoloniality, Africanisation and Afrocentric approaches to Africa’s dilemmas. The chapter concludes with the author’s perspectives on enhancing Ake’s ideas, especially in terms of elections and democracy in Africa. 215

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INTRODUCTION In his book Democracy and Development in Africa, Claude Ake remarks: ‘The problem is not so much that development has failed as that it was never on the agenda in the first place.’1 He calls into question several decades of major externally framed discourse and political action, backed by billions of US dollars in investment, which were supposed to ‘bring’ development to Africa. This questioning underscores Ake’s efforts to combat the power of those who dictate development agendas globally and in Africa. Rather than ask what it means to enhance development and build democracy in Africa, Ake asked what kind of democracy and development was most suited to the conditions prevailing in Africa. By asking this question at a time when major efforts were being made to implement development and democracy, Ake was disrupting the manufactured consensus and invented paradigms, and subverting the policy actions designed by those who dictated the development agenda. The art of asking another question in the midst of consensus is to turn the fig inside out; it is to deconstruct and to disrupt in order to cause a rethinking and re-learning. This is what is called epistemic disobedience, which Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni describes as ‘the African search for self-knowing … complete African selfrule, self-regeneration, self-understanding, self-definition, self-knowing, and self-articulation of African issues after centuries of domination and de-oracization/ silencing’.2  It is a shifting of the paradigm that is also associated with discussions on Africanisation of thought.3  Ake was described as ‘one of the most influential voices in African political thought’,4 and wrote extensively about changing Africa from his perspective as political scientist and development economist. Ake was born in Nigeria on 18  February 1939  and died in 1996  after a tragic air crash near Lagos, Nigeria, before reaching the age of sixty – he would have been 81 in 2020. His intellectual archive clearly shows him to have been critical of African dictators who ignored the ordinary people and pursued elitist agendas; however, he was also critical of imperial designs, both those that were openly nefarious and those that masqueraded as benign. Thus, far from merely contributing to contrasting African thought with Western or colonial thought, his approach was a radical departure that gave impetus to some of the current thoughts on repositioning Africa in the global arena. His work on democracy, development, globalisation, human rights, ethics, continental integration and the state in Africa was a striving for what is now called epistemological freedom, the recentring of Africa in the story about Africa. However, the focus of this chapter is limited to his contribution

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to the debate about democracy and development in Africa, which has been discussed in other scholarly works such as those of George Kieh and Guy Martin.5  We move from the premise that the epistemological implications of his thinking on these subjects, which would become a major obsession of African leaders and scholars after his passing, have been under-valued or neglected by the dominant voices on Africa’s democratisation.6  We argue that ‘breaking bread’ with Ake is critical to our search for answers to questions such as: What does it mean to build democracy in Africa? What kind of development manifests itself in Africa? What type of state promotes meaningful democracy and development in Africa? These questions are posed in the context of the search for alternative paradigms through which African situations may be understood, explained and resolved. This chapter therefore places Ake within the context of contentions, in Africa, about whether democracy is African or European and whether liberal democracy is the appropriate option for Africa, given the nature of its society and statehood. I understand Ake’s argument to mean that democracy, broadly defined, existed long before European colonialism, and therefore the term cannot be said to be foreign to Africa, although he nonetheless accepts that current forms of African democracy have been contaminated by colonial, neo-colonial, capitalist and/or imperialist influences. The discussion is also located in the debates about the nature of development in the post-colonial state and whether democracy leads to or promotes development.7  Ake tackles these questions from a certain historical and intellectual perspective and his work is therefore a product of a specific historical period, which is both African and international. Crucial to the struggle for epistemological freedom is an attempt to step out from the shadow of Eurocentric hegemony. Ake does exactly this in his attempts to rethink democracy and development in Africa. The paradox of contemporary scholarship in and on Africa is that ‘international’ writers ignore the enormous intellectual contribution of scholars like Claude Ake in discussions to which these scholars have much to contribute. This contribution is clear in Ake’s intention to disrupt, dislocate and call into question the dominant and orthodox paradigms adopted on various issues in African politics.

AKE AND AFRICAN-CENTRED SCHOLARSHIP Ake’s scholarship is even more relevant given the problems and contradictions emerging in many African societies. One such problem relates to

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Africa’s priorities. Ake tackled what he termed the ‘old argument’ and the ‘old question’ of Africa’s key challenges.The ‘old question’ was ‘whether democratisation is relevant to African conditions of endemic high poverty and illiteracy and the struggle for subsistence’.8 This question remains critical, given the failure of democracy to bring an end to endemic poverty, illiteracy and the struggle for subsistence by ordinary Africans. The challenges of independence have not ended, but they have been complicated by the failure of nation-building since Ake’s time. Ake was participating in discussions at a time when democracy was assumed to be a ‘luxury’ or an unnecessary condition for people mired in poverty and illiteracy. For instance, Mario de Andrade reflects on what he thought was a key question posed by Amílcar Cabral: Can people eat values and principles of freedom and how might the African continent drive a societal transformation that meets the needs of the people, rather than simply delivering values?9 Nonetheless, such concepts can co-exist, and it could probably be argued that the one (democracy) is the indispensable condition for addressing the other two (poverty and illiteracy). These arguments underscore the newness of Ake’s ideas and therefore represent an attempt to shift the paradigm of thought in ways that seek to think outside the epistemic vestiges of the colonial, Western library and scholarship. Ake argued that the old argument, namely that what Africa needs is political stability and development, reflected a binary view that erroneously prioritised stability and development over other issues, such as equality, basic rights and freedoms and meaningful participation by people in determining their own destinies.10 For Ake, in reality, such rights could not be separated as rigidly and pedantically as the ‘old argument’ suggested. Undoubtedly, political stability is critical for democracy and development, just as the latter is crucial for the former in a dialectical relationship that makes prosperity possible. Ake was concerned about finding a comprehensive and holistic approach to Africa’s development or the pursuit of a particularly African democracy. He was interested in pursuing development and democracy that were Pan-African in outlook rather than nationalistic.11 His concerns set him apart from the dominant obsession with imported philosophies of development and democracy for Africa. During Ake’s lifetime, this argument and its related questions generated serious intellectual debates, prompting him to challenge orthodoxy in the dominant scholarship of the time. Ake also distinguished himself from mainstream scholarship by positioning himself as an ‘organic intellectual’ who was committed to radical political thinking that would find alternative solutions to African challenges.12 The context in which Ake lived and wrote was a vibrant era during which

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equally critical African scholars, political leaders and intellectuals also spoke out. Archie Mafeje (see Chapter 8) has long made the point that scholars are a product of their political, economic, social and epistemic contexts, and that they exercise their agency in relation to this context, which gives rise to specific kinds of questions. This means that African scholars have a meaningful contribution to make when they speak directly to their context and make the idea of objective rationality – a sort of God’s-eye view – a problematic locus of enunciation for African scholars. Ake demonstrates his awareness of other voices, such as those of Mahmood Mamdani, Issa Shivji, Frantz Fanon, Masipula Sithole, Kwesi Prah, Steve Biko, Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Sobukwe and Thomas Sankara. Like him, these intellectuals and political luminaries were also shaped by their terrible encounters with the ghosts and legacies of slavery, colonialism, cultural domination, imperialism and neo-colonialism – massive hurdles that threatened to destroy Africa’s civilisations. Their African-centredness is what distinguishes them in global debates that are largely dominated by North American and European contexts, where the questions posed are somewhat different from those posed in Africa. This led to calls for non-Western democracy and for the unmaking of development as a dominant Western narrative.13 Ake’s era was dominated by Western scholarship, which undermined Africa’s intellectual contribution to global civilisations, because Eurocentrism does not compete for meaning and space, but displaces that which comes from outside it, engendering epistemicides in its quest for universal relevance and dominance. This was the reason that Ake and others had to ‘fight back’ and engage in what Tiyambe Zeleza calls recentring the African historical perspective,14 because, as Mafeje has argued, negation creates the condition for the negation of negations.15 Ake had innovative ideas and he shared them with his peers and students in the USA and in several African countries, including his native Nigeria.  Ake’s impact on the thinking of others who were looking for alternative epistemological angles on African issues is on record. Many remain so fascinated by his ideas that they continually review, criticise, refine and praise his publications.16 His ideas on development studies, political economy and political theory exposed concerns from below, and posed important questions about the post-independence era and its implications for the states that emerged after colonisation. It has been said that, ‘[w]ithout question, Claude Ake is one of the most influential voices in African political thought’.17  He was Africa’s foremost political economist and social scientist [who] dedicated his intellectual work and life to the social

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emancipation and empowerment of African people, by theorizing an African social science paradigm which emphasized the primacy of African thinking for democracy and development in the continent.18

According to Kwesi Kwah Prah, Ake’s thinking was shaped by the catastrophic imposition on Africa of the versions of democracy and development that major lenders, development aid providers and former colonial empires preferred for Africa, especially from the 1970s to the 1990s.19 At that time, Africans were hopeful about independence, but their hopes and dreams were dashed as the post-colonial elites shifted from democratic governance to various forms of dictatorship, with the support of external actors. Ake’s earlier works elaborated most of his arguments and contentions on the state, democracy and democratisation, development, governance and other concepts of interest to him. In an apparent acknowledgement of Ake’s outstanding contribution to the role of intellectuals in Africa, those who knew him well attest that, ‘[s]ince the commencement of the era of independence in Africa, academics and development thinkers have created various formulae for Africa’s economic, social and political advancement’.20 Ake was one such thinker, whose ideas permeated public policy, public administration, economics, development studies and other disciplines – thus helping to conceptualise Africa’s dilemmas, such as poverty and under-development. The argumentation outlined in this chapter rests on the extant literature by Ake and on what others have written about him posthumously. The qualitative techniques, method and approach used rely extensively on Ake’s writings, the publications of those who knew him or sought to appraise his ideas, and on information available on this scholar. The adoption of a qualitative method and approach enabled the author to explore Ake’s thought processes and his theses and ideas on democracy and development in Africa, which are the focus of this chapter. Ake wrote widely on many topics related to Africa, making it difficult at times to follow his thought processes and fully understand all the issues that attracted his inquisitive mind. The breadth of his writing demonstrates the complexity and depth of his ideas.

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Like other scholars of his time, Ake was meticulous in scrutinising social and other phenomena related to Africa, and his observations were accompanied by fierce criticism of that which he believed to be incongruent in his subject matter. As one observer laments, ‘[t]he African post-colonial elites

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have consistently failed to provide the sort of leadership which is needed to improve the quality of life of the masses who reside in the urban and rural areas of each country’.21 Ake tackled this issue and sought to close the gap by offering thinking that would contribute to realising the dreams of liberation struggles. Ake criticised colonial and Western countries for their failure to embrace classical or Greek democracy, arguing that the French feared the ‘radical egalitarianism’ of the French Revolution and resented popular democracy so much that they imagined liberal democracy was a suitable version.22 Liberal democracy developed from the ideas of modern Western thinkers after Thomas Hobbes, who attempted to balance might and right, power and law, duties and rights. They developed the idea of representative democracy, with the aim of keeping the state under the watchful eye of the electorate, in the hope that the state would do what was best in the general or public interest.23 It also derives from the idea of constitutional government based upon individual rights … [which] incorporates ideas such as government based on the consent of the governed, the constitution as a government of laws not [people] … and the entrenchment of individual rights in the constitution. 24 

Notably, Ake also criticised the contemporary situation, wherein the African masses are confronted daily by countless laws that deny them democracy and justice, given that such laws largely emanated from colonialism. He argued: [I]n a zeal to spread democracy at the end of the Cold War, democracy has been reduced to the crude simplicity of multiparty elections to the benefit of some of the world’s most notorious autocrats such as [Daniel Arap] Moi of Kenya and Paul Biya of Cameroon and [Blaise] Compaore of Burkina Faso who are now able to parade democratic credentials without reforming their repressive regimes.25

His scathing criticism of liberal democracy was not anti-democratic or aimed at multi-party democracy and elections per se, but at the politics that underpinned its imposition, the motivations for this imposition and the conduct of African autocratic rulers who masqueraded as democrats to win international legitimacy. His hypothesis was that, as liberal democracy increasingly spread across many countries, including those in Africa, some of the notorious authoritarian and autocratic rulers would no longer be able to hide behind their undemocratic powers, which lacked legitimacy, and

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that they would resort to alternative methods to enhance their legitimacy or perpetuate their rule. He stated that property owners in the system feared democracy’s mass appeal and therefore preferred ‘representative democracy’, which, in his view, ‘renounced the care value of popular power’.26 Ake pointed to the epistemological influences that reinforce the aforementioned ideological designs. In his view, the scholarship on democracy in Africa sought to adulterate democracy. Ake thought that the imperialism of social science was evident in the blatant lack of acknowledgement of the imposition of liberal democracy, and the echoing of hegemonic and extraverted discourses on democracy, state and politics, with little or no attention given to the context, history and local conditions in Africa. Ake questioned the fetish for multi-party democracy and the obsession with multi-partyism and multi-party elections. He argued that such prescriptions and easy solutions neglected the underlying factors behind the failure of states, politics and political behaviour in Africa. As a result, the multi-party democracy that was promoted after the end of the Cold War enabled autocrats in Kenya, Cameroon and Burkina Faso to retain their political control under multi-party conditions.27 Ake questioned how the addition of many parties to a political system with fundamental flaws could possibly produce a democratic experience for the majority of people. If the state and political institutions (like political parties) had not been democratised, adding multi-partyism would not be a solution. Ake was pointing to the fundamental failure to transform the state; adding democracy to the mix would simply reproduce the ills of an untransformed state. Ake did not consider it wise to associate democratic consolidation with holding regular elections in an African country, especially as elections involving many political parties simply meant that parties opposed each other at a rather superficial level. For him, a political system founded on autocracy or authoritarianism would not be made more democratic merely by establishing the procedure for regular multi-party elections. Indeed, recent research shows ‘how nondemocratic leaders perpetuate their rule not despite, but thanks to multiparty elections’.28 Ake’s thinking on democracy (as on other issues) is located within the broader community of critical, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-apartheid and pro-liberation scholars of the South.29 This epistemological outlook allowed Ake to borrow from a vast archive of thinking, including Marxist, black, Africanist, post-colonial and dependency. Such thinking shared his concern about the relationship between the nature of global problems and the nature of problems experienced on the African continent, and his

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concern with finding solutions that were appropriate to the shared interests in the Global South.30  In terms of epistemic location, Ake situates his thoughts on democracy against the backdrop of Pan-African debates, thus establishing the importance of understanding the situation in individual democracies within the geopolitics of Africa and the African diaspora more broadly. He enriched the work of many scholars through his interest in defining, analysing and transforming Africa’s present and future. Ake was unapologetically African in his thinking and this, together with his love for Africa, grounded his thinking, criticism and suggestions regarding democracy in Africa.31 For him, the failure of both the analysis and practices of democracy was related to the failure to appreciate the broader African predicament, which included the failure to transform the inherited neo-colonial states.

AKE AND THE ‘UNIQUE CASE OF DEMOCRACY IN AFRICA’ Ake sought to make a case for democracy in Africa, but not the democracy that was being promoted through the structures of Western domination, which were not genuinely concerned with entrenching home-grown democracy. In his article ‘The unique case of African democracy’, Ake reflected on the nature of democracy in Africa, its limitations and what should be done about them.32 These reflections have subsequently influenced many of the discussions on democracy in Africa.  Ake was clearly aware of Western voices speaking over and into Africa. Although these voices recognised the contested nature of the concept of democracy, they still did not reflect this in their attitude to the ideas emerging from the margins to contest the dominant narratives on democracy.33 They also did not sufficiently understand the link between incomplete decolonisation on the continent during the 1950s and 1960s, and the democratisation that preceded Samuel Huntington’s ‘third wave’. Of course, Huntington had liberal democracy in mind when he wrote about the waves of democratisation, and he therefore glossed over and neglected all democratic forms that fell outside of it, in order to create a clean linear sequence of waves to mirror some form of triumphant march to Western dominance in the post-Cold War era.34 His approach fails to understand many critical moments in the Global South, including the Haitian Revolution, which placed questions of political rights at the centre of the world stage before the French Revolution. Ake does not dismiss, in its entirety, Huntington’s observation that there was a gathering of momentum in support of democratic governance in

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Africa in the 1990s. In his 1997 paper ‘Dangerous liaisons: the interface of globalization and democracy’, Ake wrote that‘ democracy seems triumphal and unassailable, its universalisation only a matter of time’.35 Yet, Ake took issue with the universalising tendencies in this dominant narrative about democratic waves. He argued: But if democracy is being universalised, it is only because it has been trivialised to the point that it is no longer threatening to the power elites around the world who may now enjoy democratic legitimacy without the notorious inconveniences of practicing democracy.36 

He thus invites his interlocutors to enter into a conversation about the nature and type of democracy that was being universalised, and how it was experienced by people on the ground. If it was a trivialised, superficial and even authoritarian democracy, then the celebration was premature. In a sense, Ake is inviting us to think not just about democracy as a form of politics, but about its content and the popular experience of it. For Ake, democracy is popular: it is ‘government of the people, by the people for the people’.37 In Africa, that was not the democracy that was spreading fast, in waves, in the 1990s. It was not democracy for Africa’s toiling masses, to whom politicians made endless promises without delivering on them after elections. He argued that the democracy heralded by donors and NGOs in the 1990s was not the democracy promoted by the ancient Greeks,38 and he criticised the failure to follow the principles on which this version of democracy was built.39 Ake was asking us to consider the kind of democracy that was spreading in African states – a democracy that was not anchored in popular ownership of sovereignty or in strong and resilient institutions that support democratisation. Such institutions include the media, judiciary, civil society organisations, policy think-tanks and independent election management bodies. While the existence of such institutions might help to check the abuse of power, it would depend on the extent to which these institutions had the legitimacy, capacity and leadership to enable them to play their full role. For Ake, democracy meant that ‘the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them’.40 The notion of having the opportunity to accept or refuse who rules the people implies popular ownership of the political project and control of leaders and governments. While such a notion is easily associated with elections and the notion of party contestations for political office, Ake was concerned about the very 224

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constitution of a democracy, its value system, its practices and its entrenched popular ownership. Elections are only a small part of this – hence his worry that elections were being paraded as evidence of people’s ability to accept and refuse who might govern them. Simply holding regular multi-party elections would not resolve more deeply seated deficits at the foundation of the post-colonial state and its governance systems.41 The crisis of the post-colonial state was deeper than the regular manifestation of disasters, calamities and other emergencies that caught the media’s attention. Ake understood that the African state, as an inherited invention, or what Ali Mazrui calls the ‘curse of Berlin’, faced a fundamental crisis of legitimacy and capability that rendered it ill-suited to deliver on the promises of liberation.42 Ake too thought that it was from the ‘crisis of politics’ that ‘the economic crisis derives’.43 His contention that democracy ‘is clearly not thriving and it is by no means clear whether we should be celebrating the triumph of democracy or lamenting its demise’44 introduced another theme, namely whether Africans needed to celebrate or lament the waves of democracy. In other words, he questioned whether they should view the waves as representing the flourishing of democracy as an opportunity to accept or as a threat to reject. The manner in which liberal democracy was imposed created a cost straightjacket at times, and suggested that the context of the African countries that were affected was not understood by those championing the importation of a particular type of democracy. Ake referred to the ‘onerous judiciary’ and ‘alien culture’ surrounding it, citing the prohibitive cost of justice in Africa and the over-reliance on foreign legal traditions that essentially disempowered local citizens.45 Identifying what he termed the ‘impediments to democratisation’, he argued that these included the ‘foreign colonial language which alienated disadvantaged sectors of the society, which did not understand or were not fluent in such languages’.46 The foreignness of the democracy imposed meant that it was divorced from the democracy that Africans needed. The democracy imposed foregrounded liberal and Western interests over the needs and conditions of Africans. Ake concluded that democracy was possible in Africa, but clearly not the Western-centric or European version of liberal democracy, which he criticised for its limitations and irrelevance to Africa. Moreover, while lauding Africa’s march towards democracy, yet criticising the inclination of that democratic movement towards liberal democracy, Ake’s emphasis was on the quality of such democracy47 – a point that escapes many post-colonial African states in whose systems such quality is usually compromised or

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absent. Some admire Ake’s clever linkage of democracy and development issues, a conceptual contribution which is to be discussed next.

THE POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT AND DEMOCRACY Ake sought to understand how this crisis of the post-colonial state was linked to questions of economic and social development. Ake said, ‘To me it is not so much that development has failed in Africa but that development has not started at all. It is not a matter of explaining the failure of a process but one of considering the possibilities of the initiation of a process.’48 For him, development faced a fundamental crisis – one of definition, of conceptualisation and of paradigm. Hence, he argued that independent Africa had not seen the initiation of development, which has aggravated the crisis of the post-colonial state and societies that we referred to above.49 Thus, according to him, to speak of the failure of development was to accept that it had happened in the first place; however, he was of the view that, in fact, it had not even started. For him, development is ‘affected by cultural [and] political factors as well as the interests of the political class’.50 Thus, his concept of development was not development as defined by mainstream Western thinking of the time. The notion of development that was imposed conformed to a certain mode of thinking about social and economic life in developing countries, the anchoring of this mode of development in an externally defined set of practices thought to constitute development practice, and the enacting of this mode of thinking in institutional practices designed from outside.51 Ake also links this failure to initiate development, which results in underdevelopment, to the failure to democratise. While seeing no need to distinguish between development and democracy, he linked under-development to the crisis of democracy in Africa. Interestingly, Ake links under-development to the ‘rising tide of statism, proliferating bureaucratic apparatuses, large numbers of inefficient parastatals and a parasitic class feeding off a meagre surplus’.52  Evidently, Ake was referring mainly to the endogenous or internal dynamics of African states, but, as his work shows, exogenous factors also undermined development in Africa and other countries. These factors included global capitalism, which posed a threat to development.

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Ake’s scholarship helps contemporary scholars to question orthodox assumptions about democracy and development, and also gives future scholars, researchers, policy-makers and others sufficient ammunition to address Africa’s challenges, which he identified accurately and expressed articulately. As an intellectual giant who led from the front, Ake carried the baton for budding and future scholars, while giving vital direction to his peers on the issues that he wrote about so passionately. Four main lessons can be learned from Ake’s scholarship. Firstly, he was an intellectual with a strong commitment to Pan-African ideas and ideals, which he believed could enhance Africa’s position internally and in its dealings with the international community. Secondly, his ideas on development and democracy challenged the status quo and orthodoxy at a time when it was anathema or very risky to criticise Western scholarship, authorities and the emerging crop of African leaders and elites, many of whom were beginning to abuse the resources at their disposal and their newfound power and influence. Thirdly, his Afro-centred, Pan-Africanist ideas significantly enhanced research, empirical analysis, critique and scholarship in a manner that was sharpened by later postulations and paradigms on democracy and development. Fourthly, for policy-makers, who did not always have the time and energy to challenge orthodox Western and other ideas, Ake’s articulate response to dominant views on the issues he wrote about enabled Africans to formulate uniquely African policy responses to Western thought, enhancing the status of African diplomats continentally and internationally. His publications are increasingly used to challenge conventional ideas and the status quo in Africa and the African diaspora, which makes his philosophy even more relevant today. His paradigms represent a fundamental break with colonial and neo-colonial thinking. His ideas help to sharpen contemporary questions on the nature of African democracy and development and subsequent attempts to answer them. In this sense, Ake’s views remain a reliable conceptual arsenal for those who challenge conventional wisdom and Western intellectual assumptions and their implications for Africa’s future. Some argue that Ake’s scholarship was ‘incorrigibly Afro-pessimist’53 and unapologetically African, notwithstanding his acknowledgement of Africa’s limitations or shortcomings. Others argue:

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF AKE’S INTELLECTUAL LEGACY

[I]f Africa’s past is any guide, democracy’s road will be long and painful. Although there is room for cautious optimism, the realities of Africa’s political

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conundrum and economic plight, coupled with foreign powers’ interests on the continent, might undermine democratic efforts in Africa.54

Ake’s ideas on democracy deserve serious attention and scrutiny, as they have implications for current ideas and continental initiatives such as Agenda 2063 of the African Union (AU), the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), which was once strongly advocated by the likes of South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki and Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo. In fact, although some may find this difficult to acknowledge, the AU’s current ideas and plans for development, democracy, the state and other issues of national and continental significance can be traced back to the ideas of scholars such as Ake, who was keen to share and disseminate his ideas on Africa widely across different platforms. Thus, even the AU’s Afrocentric approaches to the African Renaissance and continental government largely benefited from Ake’s earlier reflections and those of his intellectual contemporaries.

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Claude Ake’s contribution to Africa’s intellectual and scholarly heritage is immeasurable, as this chapter has attempted to demonstrate. By analysing the intellectual and scholarly jigsaw puzzle of Ake’s contributions to rethinking democracy, we are in a position to understand the implications of his ideas for Africa and the world. His Africa-centred ideas on democracy in Africa, espoused from a forceful Pan-African perspective, undergirded by an anti-colonial/anti-imperialist outlook and epistemically located within the broader epistemic struggles of scholars of the South, challenge Eurocentric discourse on democracy in Africa. This includes challenging the place given to Africa in American discourse on waves of democratisation, which Ake saw as imposing on Africa the narrative of those committed to one narrowly defined form of liberal democracy. It also includes challenging the celebration of multi-party democracy and regular elections, which he believed obscured a deep-seated crisis of democracy that the regular opportunity to vote in elections would not resolve. Ake also took issue with the extent to which democracy could be imported without due regard for historical and current African contexts. He argued in favour of a popular democracy that was based on popular sovereignty. He also rejected the binaries that saw development and democracy as two different narratives of post-colonial Africa, one of which narrated the victories of the democratic

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wave and the other the failure of development. He argued that there was no failure of development, but a failure to initiate development, which led to under-development and the accentuation of the crisis of democracy, the state and society. Ake’s ideas present scholars – and African scholars in particular – with two dilemmas. The first is whether to follow an Africa-centred, Pan-Africanist and possibly radical scholarship that continually challenges the status quo, as he demonstrated. The second is whether to regurgitate and reproduce the hackneyed Western ideas that have been imposed on the continent through liberalism and liberal democracy. The former seems preferable for a continent that now has to define its destiny free of the trappings of colonial or external influences on its democratic and development trajectories.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the critical but constructive input of three anonymous reviewers, who are colleagues in the Department of Political Sciences at Unisa, as well as Dr Guy Martin and Dr Mueni wa Muiu, both of Winston-Salem State University, North Carolina. Any errors or omissions in the chapter are mine.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Ake, C., 1996. Democracy and development in Africa. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, p.1.

2

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2013. Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: myths of decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA, p.55.

3

Sithole, T., 2013. Fanon on the pitfalls of the African national project. In Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. and Ndhlovu, F. (eds). Nationalism and national projects in southern Africa: new critical reflections. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, pp.84–95.

4

Arowosegbe, J.O., 2011. Claude Ake: political integration and the challenges of nationhood in Africa. Development and Change, 42(1), pp.349–365, p.349.

5 Kieh, G.K., 2009. Reconstituting the neo-colonial state in Africa. Journal of Third World Studies,  26(1), pp.41–55; Martin, G., 2011. The state of Africa 2010/11: parameters and legacies of governance and issue areas. Africa Today, 57(3), pp.96–100.

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6

Diamond, L., 1999. Developing democracy: towards consolidation. Baltimore: John Hopkins.

7

Muiu, M., 2010. Colonial and post-colonial state and development in Africa. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 7(4), pp.1211–1338.

8

Ake, C., 1994. Democratization of disempowerment in Africa. Lagos: Malthouse Press, p.4.

9

De Andrade, M., 1979. Biographical notes. In Cabral, A.(ed.), Unity and struggle: speeches and writings. New York: Monthly Review, pp.x–xviii.

10 Ibid. 11 Ake, C., 1965. Pan-Africanism and African governments. The Review of Politics, 27(4), pp.532–542. 12 Arowosegbe, J.O., 2012. The making of an organic intellectual: Claude Ake, bibliographical and theoretical orientations. African and Asian Studies, 11(1/2), pp.123–143. 13 Keane, J., 2009. The life and death of democracy. New York: W.W. Norton; Escobar, A., 1995. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 14 Zeleza, P.T., 2005. Banishing the silences: towards the globalization of African history.

Available

at

http://erepo.usiu.ac.ke/bitstream/handle/11732/1163/

zeleza [Accessed 12 March 2018]. 15 Mafeje, A., 2011. A combative ontology. In Postcolonial turn: imagining anthropology and Africa, edited by Devisch, R. and Nyamnjoh, F.B., 31–41, Bamenda and Leiden: Langaa. 16 Agozino, B., 2009. Democracy and imperialism in Africa: reflections on the work of Claude Ake. Critical Sociology, 35(4), pp.565–572; Harris, K., 2005. Still relevant: Claude Ake’s challenge to mainstream discourse on Africa. Journal of Third World Studies, 22(2), pp.73–88; Klaas, B., 2008. From miracle to nightmare: an institutional analysis of development failures in Côte d’Ivoire. Africa Today, 55(91), pp.108–126; Martin, G., 1998. Reflections on democracy and development: the intellectual legacy of Claude Ake. Ufahamu, 26(1), pp.102–109; Murunga, G., 2000. Democracy and development in Africa by Claude Ake. Journal of Third World Studies, 17(1), pp.242–247; Okoth, P.G., 1998. Democracy and development in Africa. Journal of Third World Studies, 15(1), pp.261–267; Shepherd, G.W., 1997. Claude Ake: remembered colleague. Africa Today, 44(1), p.1. 17 Arowosegbe, The making of an organic intellectual. Op. cit., p.123. 18 Nordic Africa Institute, 2016. Claude Ake (February 18, 1939–November 7, 1996). Available at http://www.nai.uu.se/about/partner/claude_ake/ [Accessed 20 August 2016].

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Africa. In Ukaga, O. and Afoaku, O.G. (eds). Sustainable development in Africa: a multifaceted challenge. Trenton: Africa World Press, pp.7–21. 20 Ibid., p.9. 21 Ibid., p.13. 22 Ake, C., 1997. Why humanitarian emergencies occur. insights from the interface of state, democracy and civil society, Research Paper 31, World Institute for Development Economics Research, United Nations University. 23 Held, D. (ed.), 1993. Prospects for democracy. California: Stanford University, p.18. 24 Tansey, S.D., 1995. Politics: the basics. London: Routledge, pp.92–93. 25 Ake, C., 1997. Dangerous liaisons: the interface of globalization and democracy. In Hadenius, A. (ed.), Democracy’s victory and crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge

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19 Prah, K.K., 2005. Catch as catch can: obstacles to sustainable development in

University Press, pp. 282–296, p.284. 26 Ibid., p.283. 27 Ibid. 28 Bogaards, M., 2013. Re-examining African elections. Journal of Democracy, 24(4), pp.151–160, p.151. 29 Arowosegbe, The making of an organic intellectual. Op. cit. 30 Ibid., p.125. 31 Ake, Democratization of disempowerment in Africa. Op. cit. 32 Ake, C., 1993. The unique case of African democracy. International Affairs, 69(2), pp.239–245; Harris, Still relevant. Op. cit. 33 Ake, Democracy and development in Africa. Op. cit. 34 Huntington, S.P., 1991. Democracy’s third wave. Journal of Democracy, 2(2), pp.12–34. 35 Ake, Dangerous liaisons. Op. cit., p.284. 36 Ibid., p.288. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Cited in Tiky, L.M., 2014. Democracy and democratization in Africa. Illinois: Common Ground Publishing, p.67. 40 Kennett, D. and Lumumba-Kasongo, T. (eds.), 1992. Structural adjustment and the crisis in Africa: economic and political perspectives. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. 41 Mazrui, A., 2010. Preface: black Berlin and the curse of fragmentation: from Bismarck to Barack. In Adebajo, A. (ed.), The curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, pp.1–11. 42 Ake, Democratization of disempowerment in Africa. Op. cit., p.72. 43 Ake, Dangerous liaisons. Op. cit., p.284.

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44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ake, Democratization of disempowerment in Africa. Op. cit. p.78. 47 Ake, C., 1992. The New World Order: a view from the South. Lagos: Centre for Advanced Social Science, p.29. 48 Klaas, From miracle to nightmare, an Op. cit.p.108. 49 Ake, Democratization of disempowerment in Africa. Op. cit. p.72. 50 Escobar, Encountering development. Op. cit. 51 Ake, Democratization of disempowerment in Africa. Op. cit., p.4. 52 Southall, R., 2003. Democracy in Africa: moving beyond a difficult legacy. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, p.55. 53 Houngnikpo, M.C., 2006. Democracy’s travails in Africa. In  Houngnikpo, M.C. (ed.) Africa’s elusive quest for development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.35–56, p.35.

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Daring African Resolutions to African Problems Insight from Ali Mazrui Everisto Benyera Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa, South Africa

ABSTRACT Africa’s governance and security challenges, and the various concomitant mitigatory endeavours, have long been addressed from a nationalistic and regional perspective, but rarely from a continental standpoint. I argue in this chapter that Mazruian thought shows that the crisis of the postcolonial African state cannot be understood without also recognising that the state in Africa is a colonial product – one manufactured to meet colonial needs rather than to achieve post-colonial aspirations. As such, basing Africa’s responses to its governance and security challenges on state-centric solutions is not only futile, but also misplaced. This is because challenges facing Africa are rarely nationalistic in nature, but rather largely continental, in the context of which the African state is an artificial construct and Africa is real. However, a shift away from state-centric solutions in Africa is not because of concerns about the power, dominance and disruptive ability of the state when it comes to development, but because the state per se is problematic on account of its foundational logic. Therefore, we should not mimic prevailing reasoning, which is born out of the experiences of functional, legitimate and dominant states. Echoing the views of the late Ali Al’amin Mazrui, the central argument of the chapter is that Africa can only achieve sustainable peace and security through what he termed Pax Africana – peace-building – which is to transcend the nation-state and move towards regional mechanisms. Pax Africana needs little or no outside (read Western) help (read interference). The conclusion drawn in the chapter is that Africa needs to revisit Mazrui’s seminal views on how Africa can achieve sustainable positive peace, so that external ‘assistance’ from the likes of the International Criminal Court will be unnecessary.

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INTRODUCTION The inflictions and afflictions bedevilling Africa have long been treated from a nationalistic perspective and rarely from a continental one. I argue in this chapter, on the basis of insight obtained from Ali Al’amin Mazrui, that the nation in Africa is a colonial product that was manufactured to meet colonial demands. Valentin Mudimbe calls this phenomenon the invention of Africa.1  As such, basing Africa’s response to its plethora of challenges on nationalistic solutions is not only futile, but misplaced, because such challenges are mostly continental in nature. In the continental context, the African state is counterfeit and the continent more authentic. Basing my argument on Mazrui’s 1967 seminal work Towards a Pax Africana: a study of ideology and ambition,2 I argue that African nationalism is counter to Pan-Africanism, as it seeks localised solutions for what it wrongly perceives as localised problems. Yet the problems of Africa, especially regarding the perennial challenge of governance, conflict prevention and conflict resolution, need concerted continental solutions. Although many have attempted to theorise on African conflict resolution from an African perspective,3 governance and conflict resolution scholarship seldom take cognisance of the views of African thinkers on how to solve African problems. In this chapter, the views of Mazrui are unpacked, by expounding what he postulated were possible solutions that Africa could adopt to resolve its own governance and conflict resolution problems with little or no outside (read Western) help (read interference). Mazrui was one of the earliest African scholars to offer a detailed analysis of the African problem and he complemented his analysis with possible solutions. What is termed today ‘African solutions to African problems’ is part of the broader Pax Africana framework.4 

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Conflict resolution is a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary field that is also referred to as conflict management or, more recently, conflict transformation. Conflict resolution  can be defined as the various methods, processes and mechanisms involved in facilitating a peaceful end to conflict and retribution.5 Conflict resolution mechanisms and processes include negotiation, meditation and diplomacy, mediation-arbitration, peace-building, peace-making and peace-keeping. I am cognisant of the distinction between conflict management, conflict resolution and conflict transformation.

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Whereas conflict resolution aims at changing the outlook of conflict from violence to a peaceful outcome, conflict transformation is a prescriptive that is based on the assumption that the destructive elements of a conflict can be modified or transformed.6 It aims at transforming conflict in four dimensions: the personal dimension, the relational dimensions, the structural dimension and the cultural dimensions. The main difference between conflict resolution and conflict management is that conflict resolution requires that the causal factors behind the conflict and the ways of dealing with these be identified,7 while, conflict management involves the control, but not the resolution, of a long-term or deep-rooted conflict, and it is usually preferred when conflict resolution has failed and there is seemingly no other viable option. Mazrui was not interested in managing or transforming conflict in Africa: he wanted African conflict to be resolved – hence the title of this chapter: ‘Daring African resolutions to African problems’. One of the key components in the resolution of African conflict is the governance of post-colonial Africa, which Mazrui also touched on. Governance will enable Africa to have full control of its ‘politics, culture, geography and economics’.8  The present contribution is motivated by the need to publicise African views on African conflict resolution and the concomitant governance problematic as a way of countering the prioritisation of Western initiatives as – if Africans have nothing to offer in the understanding and resolution of Africa’s conflict and governance problems. One such initiative that is used mainly for Africa and sometimes to dislocate African agency is the International Criminal Court (ICC). To date, the ICC has predominantly focused its attention on Africa, a phenomenon which is the subject of much debate, with some holding the view that the ICC is targeting Africa unfairly.9 Others believe that the perceived targeting of Africa is in fact a good thing, as Africa is being ‘prioritised’ in the fight against the four crimes that fall under the jurisdiction of the ICC.10  A third group views the ICC as an imperfect organisation that is doing a good job, albeit with much room for improvement.11  By exploring Mazrui’s propositions, the chapter makes a decolonial contribution to both the study and practice of governance and conflict resolution. The central Pax Africana argument is that Africa must establish its peace, and it must protect it and maintain it.12  Numerous attempts have been made to account for the failures of postcolonial African states in solving their conflict resolution challenges.13 A question often asked is: What is the African problem? Or is the African problem an African problem? I argue in this chapter that the African problem, especially in relation to conflict, is not an African problem, but

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a colonially inherited one. By this I mean that the persistent African problems are predominantly a direct result of the nature of the African state established under colonialism, which continues to this day. The modern African state is a colonial state, created by the colonial system to serve colonial desires.14 Consequently, Africa continues to consist of various mercantile, extroverted states that still serve the needs of those who created them. I further submit that it is foolhardy to expect the colonial state to serve the post-colonial needs of the African people without fundamental transformation, because the African state was not created for that purpose. In fact, the state in Africa is a long-term colonial project – one meant to perpetuate colonial interests, especially after decolonisation. Hence, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni theorises about the myth of decolonisation in Africa and, by extension, the reality of coloniality.15 Commenting on the myth of decolonisation, Mazrui argued: The question that has arisen lately, however, is whether real decolonization is not the winning of formal independence, not the changing of the guard on Independence Day, the raising of new flags, or the singing of new national anthems, but the collapse of the colonial state itself, the cruel and bloody disintegration of colonial structures. Liberation and decolonization can no longer be equated.16 

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The phenomenon alluded to by Mazrui is termed ‘coloniality’, which denotes the continued existence of the colonial matrix of power and power relations long after the official end of colonialism. In this context, the chapter borrows from the centre–periphery notion to interpret longstanding coloniser/ colonised relations.17 It is important to note that the decolonial turn invites us to revisit a range of radical ideas from the South, in search of fundamental answers to our questions. The core–periphery model is a spatial model that is useful in explaining ‘the structural relationship between the advanced or metropolitan “centre” and a less developed “periphery”’.18 In this relationship, Africa is the periphery, whereas the former colonising nations in Europe and North America are the centre. The coloniser is at the centre of everything: health, education, justice, development, banking, food security, law, and so forth. The periphery lacks most of these. The task of this chapter is to unpack Mazrui’s notion of Pax Africana as a paradigm of conflict resolution. Apart from the ICC and its numerous challenges, Africa has a rich archive of conflict resolution mechanisms and capabilities that were discussed by Mazrui and which, when implemented, will see Africa needing the ICC infrequently.

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Mazrui characterised African states, and by extension Africa, as a collection of refugee states.19 The metaphor of African states as refugee states is an apt description of African states both individually and collectively because, since the end of the Cold War, the African state has increasingly lost its relevance in global power politics and has been pushed into what Mazrui termed the ghetto of the world system.20 The question is: How can Africa extricate itself from this status of refugee continent? Mazrui posited a raft of ways of resolving governance and conflict problems that Africa could use in order to change its status of, inter alia, dependency on Western states and institutions to solve its problems. This dependency also manifests in Africa’s reliance on multilateral institutions such as the ICC to solve its human rights challenges – a subject of much recent debate. Whether Africa uses the ICC willingly or unwillingly is beside the point. The fact remains that, as at July 2018, the ICC has predominantly occupied itself with prosecuting African suspects. According to Mazrui, if Africa ‘put its house in order’ by implementing some of his suggestions, the time would come when Africa no longer needed the ICC. The solutions postulated by Mazrui are unilateral intervention by a single neighbouring power; intervention by a single neighbouring power with the authority of a regional organisation; self-recolonisation; regional integration; the establishment of an African Union (AU) Security Council; the establishment of a Pan-African emergency force; the establishment of a high commission for refugees; mediation; re-traditionalisation (clanocracy); power-sharing deals (unity governments); the creation of a Pan-African council of elders; and the creation of a pool of statesmen-mediators.21 Most of Mazrui’s suggestions have been actualised, especially with the transformation from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to the AU. More specifically, the AU’s establishment of the Solemn Declaration on a Common African Defence and Security Policy, the African Peace and Security Architecture Panel of the Wise, the Continental Early Warning System, the African Standby Force (ASF) and a Special Fund can all be traced back to the Mazruian Pax Africana. These AU initiatives are not part of the present discussion, the focus of which is on presenting Mazrui’s original 11 proposals for Africa’s governance and conflict problematique. These are discussed in greater detail in the following sections, with particular attention being paid to what problems can be resolved by each intervention suggested by Mazrui.

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MILITARY INTERVENTION Mazrui subscribed to the notion of military intervention by one African country in another. He believed that, before allowing humanitarian situations to get out of hand, neighbouring countries had a moral responsibility to unilaterally intervene in an effort to restore order. This can be argued to be part of the Ubuntu principle of good neighbourliness, in that such interventions would stop a neighbouring country from deteriorating further into chaos. He gave the example of Tanzania, which intervened in Uganda in 1979.  This resulted in Tanzania putting Uganda under what Mazrui termed a virtual military occupation that lasted for several years.22 By unilaterally intervening in Uganda without waiting for the then OAU to give it a mandate, Tanzania curtailed a potentially catastrophic situation that could have had dire humanitarian consequences for both countries. Hence it can be argued that by ‘invading’ Uganda in 1979, Tanzania saved both Uganda and itself. The term ‘unilateral invasion’ is used in this chapter to denote the purposeful violation of one country’s sovereignty by another, but not the abolition or imposition of the government or monarchy without the consent of the country’s citizens. The second and related mechanism that Mazrui proposed is an intervention by a single African power with the blessing of a regional organisation.23 Such an intervention would be for purposes of restoring central control in a country and preventing it from sliding closer to being a failed state. The motivation of the intervenor would be, inter alia, to avoid having a failed state as a neighbour, which could fuel a refugee crisis and an influx of refugees. Mazrui gave the example of Syria’s intervention in the Lebanese civil war of 1976, which was supported by the League of Arab States, also known as the Arab League.24 

INTRA-AFRICAN COLONISATION The third and final type of intervention that Mazrui suggested is what he termed inter-African colonisation and annexation. As a concept, self-recolonisation implies the process of African countries ‘colonising’ one another. It is distinguishable from imperial recolonisation as undertaken by China and other Western countries, especially in Africa. Mazrui justified his suggestion for Africa to self-recolonise as follows: While Africans have been quite successful in uniting to achieve national

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freedom, we have utterly failed to unite for economic development and

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many Africans. As a result, external recolonization under the banner of humanitarianism is entirely conceivable. I have argued this before in exactly the same words. We need to heed the message.25

For Mazrui, it was logical that once political freedom was attained, countries had to move rapidly towards sustainable and equitable economic development, which would, in turn, ensure political stability and curtail the many wars and changes in governance and development that Africa is dealing with. After gaining political independence, most African countries – especially those plagued by recurrent violence, war and civil unrest – did not proceed to the next step – that is, they did not use their newly acquired political power for economic development. Mazrui gave the example of the annexation of Zanzibar by Tanzania in 1964.26 On 12 January 1964, Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah was deposed and lost sovereignty over the last of his dominions, Zanzibar, in a revolution that was widely believed to have been planned and headed by the Afro Shiraz Party leader, Abeid Amani Karume.27 Today, Zanzibar is part of a bigger, politically viable and democratically sustainable Tanzania. In Mazrui’s words, ‘Surely, it is time for Africans to exert more pressure on each other, including through benevolent intervention, to achieve a kind of Pax Africana based on regional integration or unification of smaller states.’28

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political stability. War, famine and ruin are the postcolonial legacy for too

REGIONAL INTEGRATION Mazrui argued that one of the reasons Africa has faced so many challenges is because of its incomplete regional integration.29 With full regional integration, regional blocs would operate in such a way as to ensure harmony between states and would be able to call member states to order if they threatened to destabilise a region. Basing his argument on European, North American and East African case studies, Mazrui argued that regional integration promoted political stability and economic growth, which, in turn, led to peace.30 This proposition is similar to the democratic peace principle pushed by liberal capitalists, namely that peace is only attainable through democratisation, because democracies do not fight each other. For Mazrui, effective regional integration would reduce Africa’s then 43  individual states to about six regional blocs. The process of integration postulated by Mazrui starts at the local level and cascades to the national level. He identified four distinct stages in the

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integration process: bare co-existence, contact, compromise and coalescence.31 Moving from the assumption that the countries to be integrated consisted of belligerent communities, Mazrui argued that communities and countries progressed from a stage where they barely co-existed to one where they had some form of contact. The relationship then developed into one in which both sides made some compromises, and finally, coalescence into a peaceful community occurred. Where countries failed to coalesce into viable and sustainable democracies, the next option would be to have the unstable state integrated into the stable neighbouring state. According to him, the Hutu–Tutsi problem could be resolved by integrating Rwanda and Burundi, not into a ‘sick’ neighbour like the DRC, but into a plural and vibrant democratic neighbour such as Tanzania.32 Once they became part of a larger democracy, Mazrui argued, Hutus and Tutsis would compete for resources with other Tanzanians and, in the process, stop focusing on their ethnic rivalry. At a continental level, Mazrui desired a federal Africa with five or six regions that report to a continental government. If Africa pooled its resources, the continent would have the ability to deal with political hotspots more rapidly, effectively and efficiently. His ideas on regional integration were influenced by what he perceived as the success of regional integration elsewhere in the world and its failure in Africa. He noted: Regional integration is the order of the day in Europe, in North America, in East Asia and even, tentatively, of course, in the Middle East. If Africa, too, does not follow this path, the lack of stability and economic growth will push the entire continent further into the desperate margins of global security.33

Put simply, the regional integration proposed by Mazrui starts at community level and rolls up to the country level, at which point troubled countries can be integrated into their viable, sustainable and democratic neighbours. The process would create peace enclaves with a propensity to come together to form a politically and militarily united Africa. Mazrui reasoned that, with political and military unity, economic integration would be achievable.

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The instrumentalisation of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in Africa needs to be unpacked, especially from the perspective of those who created it and benefit from it – in other words, the five permanent members

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of the Council, which includes the victors of the World War II. Mazrui argued that the model of a UNSC needs to be adopted and adapted for use in Africa, through the creation of what he would have termed an African Union Security Council (AUSC), with four permanent members.34 Mazrui’s permanent members would be selected according to a combination of regional spread, population size and economic size. The logic was to ensure representativeness, inclusiveness and regional balance. He suggested that the permanent members of the proposed council would be Egypt, representing North Africa; Nigeria for West Africa; Ethiopia for East Africa; and South Africa for southern Africa.35 Mazrui further suggested that the four permanent members be joined by three to five nonpermanent members. Unlike the UNSC model, Mazrui’s model of an AU SC allows for review of the Council every generation. Thus, after 30 years, he argued, it might be necessary to add another permanent member, depending on how African economies had grown in influence and stature over the 30 years under review. This generational self-review would be undertaken in order to keep the AUSC relevant. Operationally, the model would avert a crisis by ensuring an urgent meeting at the head-of-state level, with binding and enforceable decisions being taken, like those currently taken by the UNSC. Each permanent member would thus act as a de facto prefect in its region. Mazrui left the issue of veto-wielding members and further development of the model for others to debate. If Mazrui’s proposition is read in the spirit in which he made it, the notion of veto-wielding members would not be ideal for the proposed AUSC, because, unlike the UNSC permanent members, AUSC permanent members would not be given this position because they had won a war, but because of their regional stature and representativeness.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A PAN-AFRICAN EMERGENCY FORCE Mazrui contended that Africa needed to establish what he termed a PanAfrican Emergency Force ‘[to put] out fires from one collapsed state or civil war, and teach Africans the art of Pax Africana’.36 This proposal was made because the West was increasingly unwilling to send troops to ‘die in Africa’.37 When agreeing with Mazrui’s proposal, former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali noted that Africa’s Pax Africana was no longer a choice, but a necessity. In this regard, Africa’s regional organisations need to play a more prominent role in maintaining continental peace.38  241

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In terms of operationalising his idea of a Pan-African Emergency Force, Mazrui argued for careful analysis of the Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), which was deployed in Liberia, and which he believed could be instructive in perfecting the system. ECOMOG is a West African peacekeeping force that began with approximately 12 000 troops, the vast majority being Nigerians. Other force-contributing countries are the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Mali. With little or no hope of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the UN providing assistance, ECOMOG arrived in Monrovia in August 1990, with a mandate to separate the warring factions and stop the bloodshed. ECOWAS justified its intervention on the grounds that the Liberian conflict was no longer an internal conflict, but a regional one, since thousands of ECOWAS nationals were trapped in Liberia and tens of thousands of refugees had fled to neighbouring countries. The ECOMOG mandate was to impose a ceasefire, help form an interim government and hold elections within 12 months.39  Mazrui argued that Africa needed to draw lessons from this mission in order to inform a number of decisions. These decisions included whether the Pan-African Emergency Force should be recruited independently and trained in a specialised manner, or whether it should be drawn from the forces of member countries, with the training, funding and deployment modalities of the force also coming from these member countries.40 

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The idea of an African Commissioner for Refugees and Displaced Africans was an admission by Mazrui that refugees were and remain a perennial challenge facing Africa. For Mazrui, the refugee problem in Africa was an indication of an unpeaceful and unsettled Africa. In explaining the idea, Mazrui noted that ‘[s]ince Africa has become the biggest concentration of displaced persons in the world, it is increasingly imperative that Africans should assume responsibility for at least some of the functions of refugee relief’.41 The refugee crisis is a microcosm of the macrocosm termed coloniality. Indeed, Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that the myth of decolonisation is the root cause of Africa’s problems.42  Mazrui’s proposal for the establishment of the African Commissioner for Refugees and Displaced Africans represents a third type of intervention, the first two focusing on the continent and its structures and the third type focusing on the people. Mazrui also contended that the Commissioner

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MEDIATION The use of mediation and the search for solutions as opposed to the use of force was also proposed by Mazrui. By definition, mediation is a conflict resolution process involving a third party, who is perceived to be neutral, as the mediator. The mediator has the task of assisting the disputants to resolve their conflict. Mazrui’s proposal for the use of mediation differs from his proposal for the use of force by the Pan-African Emergency Force. What was not clear in Mazrui’s proposal was when to use force and when to use mediation. These are some of the areas which need to be developed by African leadership in order to operationalise Mazrui’s proposals. For Mazrui, mediation constituted an ad hoc mechanism, which could be deployed from crisis to crisis.

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should be tasked with the coordination of all refugee-related matters in Africa, together with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The solution to the refugee crisis in Africa was therefore seen a two-stage process, the first involving the participation of Africa in refugee relief as an immediate priority and the second the establishment of leadership to manage the situation in such a way that the refugee challenge would no longer arise.

RE-TRADITIONALISATION (CLANOCRACY) Drawing on the lessons learned from the Somali breakaway region of the Republic of Somaliland, Mazrui proposed what he termed the re-traditionalisation of Africa.He defined this as ‘a partial revival of forms of governance more in keeping with Africa’s cultural past’.43 The Republic of Somaliland’s clan-based consensus is by far the best example of this form of governance and conflict resolution, which Mazrui characterised as clanocracy. It is a blend of the Somali clan-based political system and modern democratic practices. The only difference is that the clan, and not the individual, is the political decision-making unit. This renders clanocracy a form of collective democracy in which the rights of the collective supersede those of the individual. Mazrui suggested that the extension of clanocracy to the rest of Somalia would be one way of resolving the Somali political crisis which had ravaged that country for decades. For him, this form of ‘ordered anarchy’ would constitute a ‘partial retreat of the state’, which was seen as too weak to maintain law and order in the country.44 

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THE SHARING OF POLITICAL POWER Mazrui argued for the sharing of power in a bid to balance the excesses of the state, to curtail tyranny and avoid failed states. He suggested that most African governments were caught between too little or too much government, which meant that the choice between anarchy and tyranny was the most tempting. The challenge confronting Mazrui was to ensure the right mix of barracks and parliament. He believed that the two needed to complement each other, rather than the military playing a supportive role to politicians. According to this view, Africa’s nascent states need the backing of the barracks to defend and consolidate their independence. Key to the success of this military–parliament power sharing is achieving the right balance, in which neither dominates the other. Besides averting military coup d’états, involving the military in the government of a country in a power-sharing arrangement with civilian politicians avoids what Mazrui termed ‘too much government’, which is a product of the political party system.45 He took issue with both too much and too little government, arguing that too much government led to oneparty states, whereas too little government led to multi-party systems which tended to degenerate into ethnic or sectarian rivalries. Zimbabwe is a typical example of too much government, leading to the dominance of one political party; on the other hand, ‘Ghana under Hilla Limann, Nigeria under Shehu Shagari and the Sudan under Sadiq El-Mahdi in the 1980s are examples of too little government, resulting in loss of control by the state.46 Too much military power is also not desirable, as in the case of Egypt, where the military, led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, deposed the democratically elected government of Mohammed Morsi on 3  July 2013. On the other hand, in Turkey on 15 July 2016, coup plotters were confronted by and surrendered to civilians at the Bosphorus Bridge, which averted a military coup. This is close to what Mazrui was advocating as a delicate balance between civilian power and military power. For Mazrui, a balanced civil–military alliance was necessary to run a country and, most importantly, to maintain peace and security and resolve conflicts. Mazrui stated: Military rule almost always leads to too much government. On the other hand, civilian rule, as in Nigeria and Sudan, with politicians squabbling among themselves and sometimes plundering the nation’s resources, has sometimes meant too little government.47 

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Mazrui then borrowed from Nigeria’s first post-independence president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, ‘who once proposed a constitutional sharing of power between the military and civilians’.48 Needless to say, in 1972 Azikiwe was severely criticised for this suggestion, yet what Mazrui termed ‘the dilemma of how to bridge the gap between the ethic of representative government and the power of the military still haunts Africa to this day’.48  Equally problematic for Mazrui was the issue of party-based politics. For him, the situations created by party-based politics and by the multi-party system were both untenable, because they created conditions that were likely to lead to conflicts too complicated to resolve. How then do we solve the dilemma of multi-party anarchy versus oneparty tyranny? Mazrui presented a number of possible solutions, the first being government power-sharing between the military and civilians, as suggested by Azikiwe.50 Mazrui termed this a diarchy, implying government based on dual sovereignty between the military and civilians. The second solution was to have a no-party presidency with a multiparty parliament, and the third was to have ‘a strong executive with extensive constitutional powers, one who is elected in a contest between individuals rather than between party candidates’.51 In the latter case, Mazrui was proposing contestation for public office based on non-group identities. The effect would be to reduce the stakes of political parties contesting elections and having hundreds or thousands of candidates vying for municipal, parliamentary and national office. The strength of the suggestion lay in drawing attention away from a few central players (political parties) to many players (the candidates).

THE CREATION OF A PAN-AFRICAN COUNCIL OF ELDERS Mazrui proposed the formation of a Pan-African Council of Elders, with slight differences from the Panel of the Wise. The council, he argued, would be a senate-type institution from where former African heads of state would contribute to Africa’s peace and security. These former of heads of state would be available to work with political parties and governments alike in preventing and managing conflicts. Only former heads of state who voluntarily and legally vacated office would be eligible for selection to the Pan-African Council of Elders. Such statesmen-mediators would be tasked with formulating yardsticks and consensus values against which to measure the performance of African states. Such criteria, when developed, would leave no room for speculation. For example, in the case of the 1994

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Rwandan genocide, it would have been clear when the ASF had to intervene in the conflict, in a context of worsening continental conflict and at a time when the AU and other regional structures were busy with consultations and trying to set operational modalities. The suggestion of a council stemmed from what Mazrui termed Africa’s rich cultural resources.52 To ensure that it commanded societal respect, Mazrui suggested invoking Africa’s ecumenical spirit by including religious leaders in the Pan-African Council of Elders, just as senior Anglican bishops are part of the British House of Lords. In the African context, the good offices of such religious leaders could be called upon to mediate and perform various peace-building, peace-making and conflict resolution duties. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu would be one candidate for Mazrui’s proposed Pan-African Council of Elders.

THE NATIONALIST AS A POISON TO PAN-AFRICANISM The contestation between nationalism and Pan-Africanism is part of the African problem. The relationship between nationalism and Pan-Africanism can be characterised as one of mutual accommodation, with nationalism emerging dominant. Nationalism, which Africa uses as the base from which to respond to national challenges, is fake and cancerous. As alluded to earlier, African nationalism is a dangerous form of nationalism, as it localises what is continental and refuses to submit to the greater good of the continent by operating at the ‘village level’.

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A peaceful, secure and conflict-free Africa was one of Mazrui’s dreams, and he worked towards its realisation. For Africa to be prosperous, secure and peaceful, Mazrui argued that Africa needed to move away from exclusively outsourcing its governance and conflict resolution, especially to the ‘benevolent’ West. Africa furthermore needed to move away from its excessive bias towards the state and political leadership and embrace other forms of leadership, such as clanocracy. Mazrui’s views on Pax Africana were premised mainly on the formation of an AAUSC modelled on the UNSC model. Although the UNSC had its challenges, as Mazrui acknowledged, he still believed that such a model, imperfect as it was, was better than the status quo.

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In this chapter we have explored the notion of Pax Africana and presented Mazrui’s 11 proposals on how to operationalise them. It is important to remember that in setting out his views, Mazrui acknowledged their preliminary nature and that they needed to be perfected before the institutionalisation of an AUSC. The example set by ECOWAS in dealing with Yahya Jammeh shows that Africa is on the right path and one day will no longer need the ICC, as it will have developed mechanisms and institutions of its own to deal with its challenges and conflicts. In closing, we argue that Mazrui’s propositions need to be afforded greater consideration, refined and implemented. In this chapter we have explored Mazrui’s views on governance, peace and security in Africa, specifically how these can be achieved by Africans using what he termed Pax Africana. It was argued that the inflictions and afflictions bedevilling Africa have for a long period been treated from a nationalistic perspective and rarely from a continental one. The chapter’s central argument is that the African nation is a colonial product, manufactured to meet colonial demands. As such, basing Africa’s responses to its many challenges on nationalistic ideas is not only futile, but also misplaced, as such challenges are rarely nationalist in nature; but instead, they are usually largely continental. Mazrui, one of the foremost African scholars to articulate the African problem, proposed the Pax Africana as a solution to these problems. Pax Africana articulates the need for Africans to take on the responsibility of policing their own continent, without waiting on its former colonisers for assistance. The continuation of conflicts in Africa attests to the need for Mazrui’s Pax Africana to be considered as pressing today as it was when it was proposed in 1967. It constitutes a major contribution to the efforts to develop Africancentred approaches in relation to African problems. Mazrui was unorthodox in advocating for the contravention of Western norms, standards and principles which continued to police and enslave Africans after the end of official colonialism. As such, he was against the Western model of the state which, in his view, was the source of Africa’s major conflicts and problems. Mazrui also contradicted mainstream discourses on Pan-African integration as being critical to conflict resolution and as a process that can be achieved from the top down. The idea of recolonisation is as unconventional as it is controversial, forcing Africans to rethink the conditions of statehood that are taken for granted. The idea that the effects of external colonisation could be remedied by colonisation from within is in keeping with the principles of self-control, self-determination and self-rule advanced by radical scholars.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Mudimbe, V.Y., 1994. The idea of Africa. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

2

Mazrui, A., 1967. Towards a Pax Africana: a study of ideology and ambition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

3

Zartman, I.W., 1989. Ripe for resolution: conflict and intervention in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press on Demand; Murithi, T., 2009. An African perspective on peace education: ubuntu lessons in reconciliation. International Review of Education, 55(2–3), pp.221–233; Humphreys, M., 2005. Natural resources, conflict, and conflict resolution: uncovering the mechanisms. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49(4), pp.508–537.

4

Dersso, S., 2012. The quest for Pax Africana: the case of the African Union’s peace and security regime. African Journal on Conflict Resolution, 12(2), pp.11–47.

5 Forsyth, D.R., 2009. Group dynamics. 5th ed. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. 6

Gready, P. and Robins, S., 2014. From transitional to transformative justice: a new agenda for practice. The International Journal of Transitional Justice, (8), pp.339–361.

7 Lederach, J.P., 1995. Preparing for peace: conflict transformation across cultures. New York: Syracuse University Press, pp.16–17. 8

Dersso, The quest for Pax Africana. Op. cit., p.12.

9

Benyera, E., 2018. Is the international criminal court unfairly targeting Africa? Lessons for Latin America and the Caribbean States. Politeia, 37(1), pp.1–30.

10 Okafor, O.C. and Ngwaba, U., 2015. The International Criminal Court as a ‘transitional justice’ mechanism in Africa: some critical reflections. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 9(1), pp.90–108. 11 Gegout, C., 2013. The International Criminal Court: limits, potential and conditions for the promotion of justice and peace. Third World Quarterly, 34(5), pp.800–818. 12 Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana. Op. cit. 13 Muzodidya, J. and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S., 2007. ‘Echoing silences’: ethnicity in post-colonial Zimbabwe, 1980–2007. African Journal on Conflict Resolution, 7(2), pp.275–297; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2013. The entrapment of Africa within the global colonial matrices of power: eurocentrism, coloniality, and deimperialization in the twenty-first century. Journal of Developing Societies, 29(4), pp.331–353.

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peripheral capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press; Rodney, W., 1973. How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Dar-es-Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House. 15 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2013. Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: myth of decolonisation. Dakar: CODESRIA. 16 Mazrui, A., 1995. The blood of experience: the failed state and political collapse in Africa. World Policy Journal, 12(1), pp.28–34, p.28. 17 Amin, Unequal development. Op. cit. 18 Simon, W.O., 2011. Centre-periphery relationship in the understanding of development of internal colonies. International Journal of Economic Development Research and Investment, 2(1), pp.147–156, p.147.

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14 Amin, S., 1976. Unequal development: an essay on the social formations of

19 Mazrui, The blood of experience. Op. cit. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p.34. 23 Mazrui, A., 1995. The African state as a political refugee. In David Smock and Chester Crocker (eds), African conflict resolution: the US role in peacemaking. Washington DC: The United States Institute for Peace Press, pp.9–26. 24 Mazrui, The blood of experience. Op. cit. 25 Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana. Op. cit., p.36. 26 Mazrui, The blood of experience. Op. cit., p.29. 27 Machaqueiro, M., 2012. The Islamic policy of Portuguese colonial Mozambique: 1960–1973. The Historical Journal, 55(4), pp.1097–1116. 28 Mazrui, A., 1995. Pan-Africanism: from poetry to power. A Journal of Opinion, 23(1), pp. 35–38, p.37. 29 Mazrui, The African state as a political refugee. Op. cit. 30 Mazrui, Pan-Africanism: from poetry to power. Op. cit., p.37. 31 Mazrui, A., 1971. The contemporary case for violence. The Adelphi Papers, 11(82), pp.17–27, pp.22–23. 32 Mazrui, A., 2008. Conflict in Africa: an overview. In Alfred Nhema and Paul Tiyambe Zelela (eds), The roots of African conflicts: the causes and costs. Addis Ababa: OSSREA, pp.36–50. 33 Mazrui, Pan-Africanism: from poetry to power. Op. cit., p.37. 34 Mazrui, The African state as a political refugee Op. cit. 35 Ibid., p.22. 36 Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana, Op. cit., p.23. 37 Adebajo, A. and Landsberg, C., 2000. Pax Africana in the age of extremes. South African Journal of International Affairs, 7(1), pp.11–26, p.14. 38 Ibid., p. 15.

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39 Funmi, O., 1996. UN co-operation with regional organizations in peacekeeping: the experience of ECOMOG and UNOMIL in Liberia. International Peacekeeping, 3(3), pp.33–51; Tuck, C., 2000. Every car or moving object gone: The ECOMOG intervention in Liberia. African Studies Quarterly, 4(1), pp.1–16. 40 Mazrui, The African state as a political refugee,. Op. cit., p.23. 41 Mazrui, TConflict in Africa: an overview. Op. cit., p.36. 42 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa, Op. cit. 43 Mazrui, The African state as a political refugee,. Op. cit., p.24. 44 Ibid., p.25. 45 Mazrui, The African state as a political refugee. Op. cit., p.26. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Mazrui, A., 2005. Africa and the world: towards post-colonial pacification Africa between war and peace. African Renaissance, 2(1), pp.65–74, p.68. 49 Ibid., pp.67–68. 50 Mazrui, The blood of experience. Op. cit. 51 Mazrui, Africa and the world, Op. cit., p.68. 52 Mazrui, A., 1994. Comment: Africa: in search of self-pacification. African Affairs, 93(370), 39–42, p.41.

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The Manichean Structure and Frantz Fanon in Post-1994 South Africa Tendayi Sithole Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa, South Africa

ABSTRACT The thoughts of Frantz Fanon are key to current discourses about decolonisation in South Africa, particularly in the post-1994 era, in that his critique resonates with this era. Not enough has been done to reflect on specific concepts that he put forward to interpret African realities and imagine alternative futures. This chapter is a critique informed by the lived experience of blackness, and it is fundamental to unmasking the narrative that race does not matter. The chapter argues that the post-1994 dispensation is an elite project rather than a people-driven political project and, for that that reason, it will remain a contradiction that attributes the term ‘liberation’ to something that is stillborn. Fanon’s concept of the Manichean structure is useful in making this argument. It is used here in order to reveal the continued legacy of black subjugation after ‘liberation’ through the continued presence of coloniality. We will use Fanon’s concept as a basis to theorise and philosophise further in our search for meaning in post-colonial society.

INTRODUCTION It is necessary to interrogate the complex politico-existential matrix of post1994 South Africa, particularly the unfolding of its political discourse. Since South Africa is described as ‘post-apartheid’, this is key to an interrogation of the black experience, while, at the same time, imagining the making and sociality of contemporary South Africa. Post-1994 South Africa is regarded as the creation of a new society, but it will be argued that a ‘new being’ has not been created. For this to materialise, there has to be a re-imagining. The

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black condition – which is the hellish existence of blackness as a result of the dispossession of land, labour and being – should cease. A new being should not be a contraction of society, but its embodiment. In other words, the possibility of liberation – aimed at resolving the black experience – should be consistent with the spoils that come with liberation, the post-1994 South African state being the case in point here. If this does not happen, the post-1994 political era will remain a contradiction that attributes the term ‘liberation’ to something that is stillborn. Indeed, post1994 South Africa is experiencing the problematic of emancipation rather than liberation. It is therefore necessary to engage in an alternative reading of post1994  South Africa. This will take the form of applying Frantz Fanon’s existential phenomenology, revealed in the concept of the Manichean structure, to our understanding of the political discourse on the black condition after 1994. This will shed light on the way in which existing social relations are explained away or rationalised, as well as on the power networks that exist beneath the mask of validity, facts and objectivity. These power networks are epistemic weapons that seek to historicise and silence the oppositional narratives coming from the black condition. The black condition simply refers to the black life, which is a disaster created by colonial situations and perpetuated by the black government in post-1994 South Africa. While the context of Fanon’s thinking was different from the one discussed here, his views (encapsulated in his works) have proven to be prophetic. It is clear that some of the warnings and diagnoses Fanon made more than 50 years ago find relevance in post-1994 South Africa.

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As a project of the elite, the national liberation struggle underwent what is called embourgeoisement and systematic liberal disciplining, which culminated in a negotiated settlement. Post 1994, democratisation has consisted of black depoliticisation and pacification, both of which made way for the illusion of liberation that featured formalistic bourgeois freedoms such as the Bill of Rights, a multi-racial electoral process, a black political administration and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (with no reparations). These are some of the things that inform the success of the post-1994 era. The negotiated settlement focused on how to move from apartheid to democracy, but this movement failed to depart from the apartheid legacy, which is found in structures such as the economy, land and the country’s spatial

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arrangement – all of which reflect the power of white capital. In the words of Nelson Maldonado-Torres,post-1994 South Africa ‘gives expression to a fundamental contradiction between the existence of the world at large and one’s own existence.’1 Our argument is that post-1994 South Africa was not about liberation, but transition – which is always incomplete – and as far as the black condition is concerned, no existential freedoms exist. Being in solidarity with the masses and betraying capitalism was not something that was on the agenda of the transition referred to above. The black psyche has not been liberated, and the governing African National Congress (ANC) manifests the colonial mentality of reproducing an imagination of freedom that is trapped within coloniality and its illusions of rights and freedoms vis-à-vis a radical resolution of the black condition. Fanon put it this way: ‘The political party may well speak in moving terms of the nation, but what it is concerned with is that the people who are listening understand the need to take part in the fight if, quite simply, they wish to continue to exist.’2  Declaring apartheid unlawful and unconstitutional does not mean that the racially marked infrastructure and entrenched technologies of racism have ended now that a black political administration (the ANC) has assumed power. Fanon was correct: ‘The native bourgeoisie is ignorant as to the economy of the country.’3 According to Mike Hill, apartheid is structured and elaborated by racism.4 Hill adds that, in this situation, the dominance of white oppression and the exploitation of blacks created a situation in which the oppressor had the luxury of choice, while the oppressed were severely restricted. As such, apartheid was ‘the mission of domination, exploitation, and self-aggrandisement.’5  The imagination of Fanon focused on, among other things, freeing the black body from the yoke of oppression and from its inferiority complex. According to Pal Ahluwalia and Abebe Zegeye, Fanon struggled for black liberation because he was deeply opposed to the condition in which black people lived in bondage.This is because the ‘coloniser distorts the colonial subject’s (or object’s) psyche’.6 The work of Fanon, primarily Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth,7 provide a relevant prophecy and critique of the post-1994 era in South Africa, which, in some ways, is identical to other post-colonial registers. To amplify, Maldonado-Torres is of the view that Fanon’s analysis of the social dialectic penetrates deeper into lived experience, and this is why Fanon’s thought is of relevance to post-1994 South Africa.8

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THE MANICHEAN STRUCTURE Following Homi Bhabha, it can be said that South Africa, and its transition, constitute hybridity, in which the binary division is replaced and complicated by a form of intimacy.9 The transition of space and time results in complexities of criss-crossing which, in effect, undermine the Manichean structure. Hybridity refers to cultural forms that emerge from cross-cultural relations. Such cross-crossing occurs at the level of ‘difference and identity, past and present, inclusion and exclusion’.10 In this form there exists an intersubjective negotiation of the collective experiences of a nation, community, interest and cultural value. The notion of the rainbow nation can be regarded as a mythology of the post-1994 era. According to Bhabha, the post-1994 era can be regarded as a society in hybridity. A society is in hybridity when it is double-edged in the process of iteration and differentiation. According to Bhabha, hybridity ‘informs the political space of its enunciation’.11 This is not meant to contradict itself, since it is about the ‘in-between’. Abdul JanMohamed avers that Bhabha understates the conditions in which the coloniser and the colonised operate – the Manichean condition.12 He further states that Bhabha reduces the discourse on the colonial to something that occurs in a vacuum. Fanon argues that, in the Manichean order of things, the ‘belly of the coloniser is always full.’13  In articulating the post-1994 era, Sarah Nuttall formulates the notion of entanglement: social relationships are complicated in the sense that humanity exists in an enfolded state.14 Nuttall uses the idea of ‘racial entanglement’ in relation to race, and links it to modes of being, a way of identity-making and material life circumstances. Like Bhabha, Nuttall states that entanglement unravels binaries such as the coloniser and colonised, black and white, and declares these binaries to be simplistic. Nuttall further argues that thinkers who operate within these binaries mainly focus on ‘conflict, violence, social hierarchy, and inequality’.15 She avers that as racial boundaries intensify, the search for transcendence must also intensify. Like Bhabha, Nuttall considers race a burden if it is allowed to dominate the discourse.16 They therefore call for its erasure, while diluting it, when in fact this reality remains concrete in the case of the black condition. They both call for co-existence through difference, with a view to producing or searching for sameness. Nuttall goes further and argues that the social is mutually entangled, and it is in the social’s constant search for meaning that sameness and difference become entwined, even though entanglement

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is ‘becoming something you were not in the beginning’.17 It will be argued here that copulation with blackness does not translate to all racial formations becoming equal and the same, since such copulation happens outside the black condition. What Bhabha calls the in-between is the ‘liminal space’ and ‘symbolic interaction’ that causes the quality of change to remain a contested terrain.18 The in-between is a site for evolving strategies of singular and communal selfhood ‘that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself’.19 The argument echoes JanMohamed’s view that Bhabha indeed plays in the in-between – an ambivalent basis of the discourse that fails to take into account the lived experience of blacks.20  Fanon’s Manichean allegory is a diverse binary rather than a fixed binary, since the opposition of black and white, good and evil, civilised and savage, and so forth, is interchangeable. According to JanMohamed, the Manichean allegory ‘functions as the currency, the medium of exchange, for the entire colonialist discursive system’.21  Maldonado-Torres writes: ‘The Manichean logic of the colonial system operates in favour of the truncation of the possibility of generous interhuman contact.’22 Such a structure is informed by, and is a process of, the coloniality of power. The coloniality of power means that the long-standing patterns of power that undergirded colonialism and social, political, cultural and economic conditions are defined by the legacy of colonial power that persists long after colonial rule has ended.23 The Manichean structure thus informs coloniality and creates complexity at the site where power is located and exercised. Capitalism dictates the social, the political, the cultural and the economic spheres of existence, and also directs and allocates the systems of domination and subordination. That is why liberation, especially in post-1994 South Africa, finds itself ‘in-between’ in relation to the perpetuation of the black condition. The black condition is characterised by landlessness, exploitation, exclusion, and loss of African humanity – that is, the modalities of dispossession.24 This is the condition that exists, but its existence lacks ontological presence. Fanon puts it thus: ‘The colonial economy is not integrated to that of the nation as a whole.’25 In other words, at independence, there is only superficial deracialisation of the visible upper echelons of the economy, as white managers and executives give way to black ones: however, the underlying structures of ownership and value allocation remain unchanged. This suggests that South Africa, like other post-colonial situations Fanon thought about, has been, and remains, pregnant with possibility, but does

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not give birth to such possibility. Fanon’s radical thought is provocative in that it allows for engaging issues in the discourses, and one such issue in particular is the power matrix of coloniality and the Manichean structure. This issue also points to the locus of power, which needs to be explored in order to unravel the complexities and dynamics embedded in it. Fanon’s thought is phenomenological in that it takes seriously the lived experiences of the oppressed, particularly in relation to the black condition. This is necessary if we are to understand the influence of the power matrix of coloniality and the Manichean structure. In articulating the Manichean structure, Fanon writes: ‘The colonial world is a world divided into compartments.’26 The discourses of post-1994 South Africa are often caught in a situation in which Manicheanism is not taken into account. Manichean hierarchies are created and sustained by the racial imperial enterprise, the condition in which blackness is the antithesis of being. Sabelo NdlovuGatsheni states that the coloniality of being is both the depersonalisation of black people under colonialism, and the constitution of Africans as racialised subjects who are stripped of their humanity.27 This creates and perpetuates the absence of humanity: the black condition reflects a pathology that negates agency and even ontology. Hussein Bulhan argues that ‘oppression pervades more aspects of life the longer it prevails’.28 The capacity of the oppressed to attain genuine freedom and to take control of their lives is undermined. The prolonged social existence of the black condition is rewarded with deadly, institutionalised and normalised combat that can only operate via the mechanics of suppression. This is a form of depersonalisation and desocialisation (social death), where the affected being exhibits morbidity and mortality while alive. In this context, blacks do not possess a human life, but a black life – which is already figuratively dead. Blacks die because they lived.29  Bulhan argues: ‘The Manichean psychology is hard to counteract once it takes root in people, the environment, and the culture.’30 Those immersed in it rely on it and benefit from it, while its results are found in the destruction and dehumanisation of others. Nigel Gibson posits that ‘colonial society appears as the Manichean one, whose superstructure is its structure.’31 Manicheanism is widespread and found in all forms and spheres of life. The forms of life that Manicheanism assumes are what Fanon calls the zone of being and the zone of non-being; ‘These zones are totally separate.’32 The spheres of life are political, social, cultural and economic. They are also epistemic spheres that lead to the questioned legitimacy of some voices in intellectual spaces. Manicheanism cannot be avoided, since one’s race determines one’s place in society. The negation of earlier Manicheanism

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and the articulation of the new – or the creation of the new forms of life – involve breaking the negation of both colonialism and decolonisation. The latter becomes clear to itself in order to avoid the reproduction of oppression by those who wear black faces.33  Fanon unmasks Manicheanism at both the psychological and social level, where human oppression is pervasive. The black condition is found to be that of a troubled and tormented psyche. Bulhan insists that the black condition should be eliminated because it consists of an inferiority complex and the loss of identity, whereas identity is something that should be retained.34 He also makes the point that blacks who endure the yoke of the black condition should be liberated from bondage. The hegemonic discourses in post-1994 South Africa downplay race as a key factor of transition in the ‘quick chase’ for non-racialism, as if there are no problems confronting blacks who were – and are – trapped in the black condition and excluded from white systems and spaces. At present, South Africa is trying to move beyond apartheid, but there is a resurgence of racism, xenophobia, tribalism and ethnicity – as key reminders of the haunting presence of coloniality.35 To study the black condition is to examine the ways in which blackness is interlocked and confused in the power matrix of coloniality and the Manichean structure. The black condition is the result of exclusion from, and subjugation by, the power system that determines what form of life is assumed. The subject position of blackness is that of being restricted, excluded, dehumanised and, to a lesser extent, acted upon. In short, blackness has been, and still is, that which is objectified. Ndlovu-Gatsheni clearly indicates that coloniality is embedded in colonialism, but is also distinct from it.36 To amplify, Maldonado-Torres argues that coloniality consists of the ‘long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, and continues to define social, economic and cultural conditions in absence of colonial administration’.37 In addition, Ndlovu-Gatsheni states that coloniality also defines labour relations and knowledge production.38 This means that the content and form of the colonial matrices of power are identical to colonial administration, but operate in implicit ways that make subjugation normal. The Manichean structure thus operates as a dividing line of patterns of power, signifying and representing that of the colonial order, even if this structure can put a black face in the office of the administration of power. In fact, the black is always at the bottom of the hierarchy of power and is therefore likely to mimic the colonial order of things. It is clear from the above that the continuation of colonialism through its effects in the aftermath of the colonial administration means that coloniality

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applies to a situation where the black face will occupy the power structure (as with the ANC), but not be in absolute control of it. This is evident in the so-called post-1994 gains, which are still a complete loss when it comes to land ownership, economic ownership, geographic spatialisation, health care and the education system (to name but a few). Coloniality survived colonialism and apartheid in the case of post-1994 South Africa, in that capitalism is the system of domination and subordination. Gibson argues that the problems faced by South Africans are far from inevitable: the transition was an ideological terrain that promoted globalisation and silenced alternative paradigms.39 The transition’s concern was to end apartheid, but the inheritance of apartheid’s economic inequalities that we observe today suggest little change was achieved. All that has changed is that the black elite is now in charge of the bandwagon.

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What takes centre stage, as far as the black condition is concerned, is the self-destruction that seems to be the nature of black existence. ‘There is no open conflict between white and black,’ but there is a systematic denigration of blacks.40 Negation of beingness in aspects of the native life breeds aggressiveness in the native, among other conditions.41 ‘The colonisation of the mind is manifested in the manner in which a people’s history is denied and they are made to feel inferior and incapable of challenging the colonial order.’42 This breeds self-hate and promotes anti-blackness, and the ‘Afrophobic’ (popularly known as xenophobic) attacks that occurred in May 2008 and July/August 2019 serve as testimony to this. Fanon argues, ‘Since in all periods the Negro has been an inferior, he attempts to react with a superior complex.’ Blackness is something that is fled from, and accommodation is sought in whiteness.43 Bulhan argues that the fact of historical scandal always comes to the fore when one seriously considers Fanonian thought.44 He argues that Fanon always claimed that the oppressor dehumanises the oppressed in order to gain and maintain power and privilege. As a result of this, the oppressed forfeit their humanity and are afraid to fight and confront the institutionalised and systematic violence that typifies their existence. This means that the black condition remains intact, even in the post-liberation phase. The violence that is meted out against the black body is exercised by another form of violence, which is, in fact, practised on another black body. This is because Manicheanism can be a polarisation of a bifurcated society,

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and may manifest itself either covertly or overtly.45 The black condition is perpetuated by the unchanged social scripting – that is, being born, bred and socialised in the Manichean world that creates victims and perpetrators. The dominant perspectives in the post-1994 political discourse assume that the 1994 settlement in South Africa was the realisation of liberation. The point here is that this was not the case: it should be clearly stated that contemporary South Africa is the result of a negotiated settlement. NdlovuGatsheni reveals the myths and illusion of ‘juridical freedom’, which is the bottlenecked freedom that does not translate into the liberation of the people.46 In other words, juridical freedom leaves the black condition the way it is, while the colonialist elites, with their native assistants, will obviously perpetuate this condition. Those native assistants, the post-colonial elites, are infamous for their willingness to engage in primitive accumulation of wealth to the exclusion of the black majority: in short, they are perfectly willing to follow in the footsteps of their colonial masters. Ndlovu-Gatsheni points put out that this accumulation of wealth is regarded as freedom by the black elites themselves; however, this freedom is, in fact, an illusion. People are fighting for genuine freedom, and they are launching their attacks against the black elite and the ruling class – the ANC. However, it needs to be pointed out that such agitation against the ANC is weak: the ANC enjoys legitimacy and the support of the excluded majority of black citizens. Fanon states clearly that national liberation is realisable only when those who are oppressed undergo conscientisation through political education.47  Here Fanon’s work dovetails with that of Paulo Freire. According to Freire, the notion of pedagogy of the oppressed is both humanist and liberationist.48 There are two stages of pedagogy: firstly, the oppressed unveil the world through praxis and commit themselves to transformation. Secondly, it follows that it is only in the process of permanent liberation that pedagogy will belong to all and not just the oppressed. In articulating the voice of the oppressed, Freire argues: ‘They are contradictory, divided beings, shaped by and existing in a concrete situation of oppression and violence.’49  Further still, the illusion of post-1994 liberation is a ‘plague’, since it has muddied the core ethos of liberation, simply because the post-1994 South African state is a reformist rather than a revolutionary initiative.50 As such, it is clear that the deracialisation of the economy took precedence over the total recreation of the South African being in pursuit of resolving the black condition. Emancipation is a child of European modernity, not African liberation, and is only about the attainment of civil, political rights. It does not make clear how the black condition will be obliterated: it only presents a

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set of rights. These are rights that are born out of the bourgeois revolution, and the only result is reformism; however, reformism does not liberate the black condition. This has a bearing on class interests rather than black oppression. This is why the black condition is either given scant attention or totally ignored. The first priority of liberation movements is to give back to all citizens their dignity, and this act creates possibilities for a new society.51 For this society to emerge, black subjects must live new forms of life, and these new forms of life need a liberation project that is managed by the people themselves – one designed to realise justice and achieve reparation. For such a liberation, ‘the social revolution must distribute the fruits of national liberation struggle to the nation’.52 The post-1994 transition launched an elitist project of emancipation that was incapable of transforming the black condition. Post-1994 South Africa was produced by the anti-apartheid struggle – a discourse that turned out to be emancipatory rather than liberatory, since the end was to reform apartheid. Slaves, serfs and other oppressed sectors in various parts of the world have achieved emancipation only, since the structures that kept them in bondage remain intact, and change has been cosmetic only. Liberation revolves around fundamental questions such as social and economic justice in the resolution of the black condition. It is multifarious and tackles issues such as the return of the land and psychological liberation. As Fanon states: Day after day, the native who is taking part in the struggle and the people who ought to go on giving him [or her] their help must not waver. They must not imagine that the end is already won. When the real objectives of the fight are shown to them, they must not think that they are impossible to attain. Once again, things must be explained to them; the people must see where they are going, and how they are to get there.53 

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The bourgeois-imagined liberation lacks the capacity to imagine the total overhaul of anti-black structures that prolong the black condition. This is what makes liberation an illusion, since it is designed only to reform the colonial architecture and systems rather than to dismantle them completely. This signals the betrayal of liberation, a betrayal that is managed by the black comprador bourgeois who holds state power, while failing fundamentally to transform it in line with the wishes of the oppressed. In this kind of liberation, the oppressor retains the honour of being seen to have emancipated the oppressed, for liberation is considered too radical if it brings about the total collapse of the colonial infrastructure. True

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liberation is the creation of the new self out of the black condition – thus ending this condition. Post-1994 South Africa has not yet produced a new being; instead, the damned, the excluded and the oppressed continue to exist. The existence of blackness in liberation is not one that should be given life by whiteness, for liberation should not amount to an act of charity by the oppressor. The act of conferring liberation on the oppressed is, in Fanon’s terms, treason in the eyes of the architects of global colonialists and their local representatives. As Fanon states, ‘The treason is not national, but social.’54 In the post-1994 South African state, blacks form the numerical majority, although, in economic terms, they are in a condition of marginality, despite having elected the government to power. If post-1994 South Africa is haunted by the black condition, this means that post-apartheid is a pseudo-liberation. Post-1994 South Africa is a creation of reform, as genuine liberation is not the focus. It is Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’,55 which is the belief that there is no alternative to the neoliberal, emancipatory pretensions embodied in the 1994 victory. It is this victory that fails to respond to the dreams and ideas of liberation, since it is merely about reforming apartheid infrastructure. Fanon states, ‘The liberation of the individual does not follow national liberation. An authentic national liberation exists only to the precise degree to which the individual has irreversibly begun his own liberation.’56 The black condition begs the question of how to create new forms of life through the dialectic of reordering society.57 By way of contrast, the post-1994 era is a reformist project that offers some liberation for the few, while excluding the black majority. The post-1994 era is fraught with the black condition, which is its predicament, and which is something inherited from the legacy of apartheid. The post-1994 South African state is posited on the romantic view that diverse peoples are united in a project of creating a rainbow nation. This view is but a passing shade in the face of the persistent black condition, which mirrors conditions under apartheid and colonialism. For the rainbow to transform, there needs to be an incentive to think in radical terms. The black condition cannot merely be ameliorated symbolically: it must be obliterated in real terms. Reparation, economic freedom and justice must ensure that the goods produced by the people benefit everybody – not only the black elite. There must be a total end to the black condition. In short, blacks must become their own liberators, because the liberation that is given is not genuine. The last apartheid president, Frederik Willem de Klerk, told Nelson Mandela, ‘You are now free.’ Fanon articulates the very same words to describe freedom as a mere gift being conferred upon

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a slave by a master. Fanon refers to this as ‘flag freedom’, because it is symbolic and does not change the structures of oppression.58 Political action and agency should inform liberation. As Gibson argues, there is a need to deepen the dialectic, even when liberation is attained. That is, there is a need to explore uncertainties and to understand the complexities resulting from the liberation project.59  The logic of repetition without difference, which means that those who lead liberation become oppressors, has been a major pitfall in most postliberation eras. This tendency to regress or to move from better to worse, while enriching the few and leaving many in a perpetual state of suffering, is in effect the black condition. The post-1994 South African state is devoid of true liberation and has failed to create a new being out of the ashes of the black condition. As Lewis R Gordon notes, the implications and the possibility of studying the black condition should be framed so that black subjects can question their ways of being.60 The black condition is often framed in such a way that blacks cannot claim dignity and their humanity back anymore. The black condition is a condition of continual suffering – a life of crisis in a hellish zone. To counter this black condition, a clear understanding is needed of the structures of oppression.61 The only way to unmask these structures of oppression is to obtain ‘new self-invention and alternative habits of being’.62 Gibson, on the other hand, argues that, in its fragmentation, the subject constitutes a dialectic that is dynamic rather than static.63  Subject is the becoming of new being, since it was a thing – the object – under colonial conditions. Subjectivity becomes objectivity through revolutionary praxis. On this basis, we can argue that the ANC lacks the vision and audacity to lead fundamental transformation of its inherited conditions, or to stretch its political imagination beyond the negotiated, elite settlement. It is not willing or capable to undo the Manichean structure and its ramifications for society. Instead, as Fanon would argue, it is clouded with fear, and this makes political imagination a mere plateau. The elite take over without having to be productive or innovative; as a result, exploitation is exacerbated. Fanon also warned that exploitation can wear a black face, and this can be compared to mimicking the master.64 In reference to the political leader who fails to lead the masses, Fanon has this to say: ‘The leader, because he refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie, asks the people to fall back into the past and to become drunk on remembrance of the epoch which led up to independence.’65 Fanon then continues:

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ised them a forward march, heroic and unmitigated. Today, he uses every means to put them to sleep, and three or four times a year asks them to remember the colonial period and to look back on the long way they have come since then.66 

The ANC is asking people to celebrate freedom every year on 27 April, although freedom has not yet arrived, thus helping the Manichean structure to persist and deepen under the veneer of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. If this logic is applied to the ANC, it can be argued that the masses are represented as people whom the ANC needed in order to exist; however, once in power the ANC leadership abandoned them. In the case of South Africa, the ANC knows that it negotiated the liberation; therefore, it will be extremely difficult for other political parties to displace the ANC, since the masses continue to support it. In relation to their black condition in the post-1994 era, blacks who are dispossessed and excluded often ask peripheral questions. These have to do with neoliberal notions of service delivery, human rights and wages (among others). These blacks are not encouraged to articulate questions in relation to their condition and then to demand answers.67 There are different attitudes of blacks in relation to their condition, including the domination of black subjects. Firstly, the black subject comes to see his or her black condition as normal, not as related to structures that seek to dehumanise him or her. Secondly, there will be blacks who pursue assimilation and who are uncomfortable with other blacks who point to racism or other forms of discrimination. In this sense, racism should not be mentioned. Thirdly, revolutionary blacks affirm the value of blackness in categorical terms. There will also be blacks who use the seductive language of race to gain inclusion in the white economy, at the expense of the black majority. Accommodationists tend to occupy a contradictory position that haunts them, but they suppress it – in a form of sadism.68  Liberation means that the violence that was designed and rationalised in order to harm the black body is done away with. Otherwise, freedom and liberty are not achievable. Freire contends that the precondition for liberation is that the oppressed must confront their reality by objectifying it and acting upon it.69 This implies that the oppressed mobilise for genuine liberation, which is the opposite of the black condition. This means that the oppressed should be part of the process of liberation, which should not be something that is mediated on their behalf. Exclusion means that blacks are acted upon. As a result of this state of affairs, they will be

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During the struggle for liberation the leader awakened the people and prom-

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led into ‘the populist pitfall’ and transformed ‘into masses which can be manipulated’.70 Jemadari Kamara and Tony van Van der Meer argue that ‘once the slave resists or refuses to accept his (or her) condition the relationship is forever transformed’.71  Although South Africa is in the phase of liberation – and celebrating its post-1994 freedoms – its history is still closed, and this history is bound with colonialism, racial segregation and apartheid.72 Furthermore, the problematic post-1994 liberation is a plague, since the myth of emancipation muddied the idealist ethos of liberation.73 As such, it is clear that the power matrix of coloniality and the Manichean structure have never been taken into account by the ANC. This is why deracialisation of the economy was central, instead of the total recreation of a new being that would thwart the black condition.

STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND THE ‘OTHERING’ OF THE BLACK BODY The political reform of post-1994 South Africa involved a transition from apartheid to liberal constitutional democracy, which leaves the question of structural violence unaddressed. Johan Galtung coined and popularised the notion of structural violence – a form of violence that has a huge impact on human beings, since it is a condition of social injustice.74 Galtung states that ‘structural violence is silent, it does not show – it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters’.75 This view suggests that structural violence is rigid and systematic. Structural violence refers to the ‘violence that occurs in the context of establishing, maintaining, extending, or reducing hierarchical relations between categories of people within a society’.76 The national project is often evoked in the post-1994 political discourse, but little is done to trace and understand it within the context of structural violence – that is, the violence that needs to be dealt with to ensure that the national project is addressed. Colonial structures and systems lose many lives to structural violence, and limiting the national project to one form of violence or a mere social deficit is to defeat the purpose of seeking to address such violence. The point here is that the target of structural violence is the black body in general, but a black body in the black condition in particular: this is the body that is objectified because it constitutes an absence of ontology. The black body exists in the anti-black world, and it is in this world that complaints against structural violence will not be recognised, but instead 264

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ridiculed as mere victimhood or obscene claims, by other blacks who are not part of the lived experience of the black condition. Being in the anti-black world suggests being encircled with structural violence. In other words, the black body is the target that cannot be seen when hit or influenced by such forms of violence. According to Bulhan, apartheid was a form of structural violence.77 The same can be said about the post-1994 era, wherein structural violence continues to be directed at the black body; however, now such violence cannot be accounted for, since a black party (the ANC) is in power. Blacks do not even have the language to articulate their experience of suffering, since the existence of structural violence is denied.78 If such articulation does exist, it is ridiculed, denied and negated. Structural violence mutates its melanin to fit various conditions and encounters, because stories of structural violence directed against the black body always invite silence.79 Even if social structures change, the presence of structural violence means that the effects are the same. This clearly shows that the national question cannot be static, but needs to be linked to the amoebic nature of structural violence. However, it is interesting to note that, even if structural violence is amoebic, its effects are the same, with the target – in Fanon’s terms – being the damned of the earth: those who are excluded and who exist at the margins of society. Structural violence continues to exist in conditions where actions are not physical and the doer can neither be seen, touched, nor pointed out. It defeats social dynamics and mutates into them and, as a result, cannot be held liable.80  Black suffering and dispossession are intermingled with structural violence. The lived experience of the black body is ‘characterised by inequality, exploitation, and coercion’.81 The binary of dispossession and possession comes into being. Those who live in the black condition, ‘where squalor, evictions, poverty, disease, and crime are rampant’, are excluded, and this form of inhumanity is seen and articulated through the stereotype of fate. In other words, blacks who are living in these hellish circumstances are often accused of being fatalistic and bringing such conditions upon themselves. The lived experience of blacks in the black condition can be fully understood by unmasking the Manichean structure, which is articulated through structural violence. Inequality, poverty and dispossession need to be understood structurally and interrogated to determine why they are ills that specifically target the black body. In other words, there is a need to understand the directionality of structural violence that enables Manichean expressions to be normalised and institutionalised to the extent that they

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become defensive when they are interrogated. Such an interrogation is rendered irrelevant, and no admission will be forthcoming, to the effect that the modes of life are different for whiteness and blackness. Landscapes of violence are both visible and invisible; they prevent people from living lives that are available to normal beings – that is, a life that allows access to basic needs is made difficult to attain. Structural violence functions effectively because of the power of denialism, and this blinds the view that the national question is about the location of the racist encounter. What Fanon is concerned about is the lived experience of the ‘Other’ who is the wretched of the earth. Blackness is interlocked into skin colour. In Fanon’s terms, this is the psycho-existential crisis, the encounter where black skin cannot hide from the anti-blackness of structural violence. ‘Look, a Negro, look, a Negro!’ is a scream shouted at the unwanted blackness. In this encounter, and after much aversion, Fanon himself finally realised that his body was a stranger in the world. His blackness was ‘determined without’. This creates a temptation for the black body – the temptation to get rid of its blackness by escaping through a constant comparison with whiteness. This is the scream that differentiates; Bulhan states, ‘The circle draws tighter and there is a little room for escape.’82 Structural violence is a circle – the eternal inferno that burns the black body beyond ashes. As a result of erasure and distortion, the death of blacks trapped in the black condition cannot be accounted for because, by definition, they are not beings in the world, but sub-beings. Maldonado-Torres says they are ‘subjects who are not considered to be part of the people [since] their situation is different’.83 The black condition is pathological par excellence, because it reduces blackness to animality. The existence of blacks in the hellish condition is regarded as the ordinary state of affairs, because the articulation of structural violence has made it so, even after the visible structures of oppression are deemed to have been eliminated. The black condition reels from one day-to-day crisis to another, and becomes normalised and institutionalised by structural violence. Paul Farmer calls structural violence a ‘deadly monotony’.84 In other words, the existential condition of black subjects is a predictable state of affairs. As such, death is expected, since existence is mere survival and not life. Structural violence also denotes social death, where the subject is dead while still alive. This death, in the form of the death of the subject and the death of subjectivity, are reinforced by subjection, which determines the forms of life.

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Fanon imagined another world – a world where the black would be human, a human who has realised his or her humanity, not as a gift from the master, but as a form of realised humanity that results from the pursuit and realisation of genuine liberation by oppressed blacks themselves. The world imagined by Fanon is yet to be realised and has not yet been born. As things stand, emancipation is not headed in the direction of attaining a world of total freedom, because the snares of the colonial matrices of power are still intact. As such, they obstruct the path to the realisation of liberation. A systematic application of Fanon to the post-1994 era in South Africa makes possible a new reading of the national liberation as a piece of tragedy rather than romance – a tragedy because it has failed to create new forms of life in relation to the black condition. It is a tragedy because of the perpetuation of neo-apartheid, with blacks rendered a powerless majority. Instead of fundamental transformation, we see only cosmetic changes. Fanon affirms this tragedy when he states that ‘the black man (sic) was acted upon’.85 The bourgeois-imagined liberation lacks the capacity to radically overhaul the anti-black structures that prolong the black condition. It is this form of imagination that makes liberation an illusion, since it is designed only to reform colonial architecture, rather than to tear it apart. In the post-1994 era, blacks in South Africa are a numerical majority with some hold on governmental power by virtue of election results. In socio-economic terms, however, this majority remains on the margins of society. Only a few black elites are included in the economic mainstream. If the post-1994 era is plagued by the black condition, this can only mean that apartheid was tinkered with so that its legacy would continue in the form of pseudo-liberation. The victories of South Africa are said to be nonracialism, a ‘progressive’ Constitution, free and fair elections, freedom and equality. Fanon could have been speaking to South Africa when he wrote:

The Manichean Structure and Fanon in Post-1994 South Africa

BEYOND EMANCIPATION

The white man, in the capacity of the master, said to the Negro, ‘From now you are free.’ But the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it. From time to time he has fought for Liberty and Justice, but these were always white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by his masters.85

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CONCLUSION Fanonian thought continues to reveal the conditions of the post-colony, in this case the fundamental limitation of the post-1994 dispensation in South Africa. It reveals the haunting exactness of what he imagined it to become: a self-fulfilling prophecy of liberation betrayed and the post-colonial predicament of repetition without difference. The snares of the colonial matrices of power and the Manichean structure conceal the fact that the legacy of the past is still in operation and gives life to structural violence, which consists of forms of violence that are hidden in structures that naturalise the form of life and the operation of society – as if this form and operation were normal, whereas in fact they are far from normal. For there to be a new world, there cannot be a colonised society. A new world prevails in a society where freedom is lived, not reduced to mere slogans, flags, national anthems, symbols, national holidays and monuments. There is a pretension that claims the national project has been tackled or, at worst, that it has failed and has resulted in a post-colonial disaster. This is far from the truth, because the post-1994 leadership is not informed by true liberation. Post-1994 South Africa is characterised by emancipation, because its operating logic is reformist. That is, apartheid has been reformed in order to create a rainbow nation, but no attempt has been made to dismantle the infrastructure of apartheid. For the black condition to change, there should be economic rights, justice and reparations. The black majority should be in charge of the economy and should be the owners of the country’s wealth. If there is a demand for economic rights in the era of civil rights, those economic rights will be considered radical. In short, the black condition is reformed by the implementation of piecemeal changes: the status quo remains. Post-1994 South Africa is not liberation, but a period of fake flag freedoms that do not address the lived experience of the black majority, who are still trapped in the hell of the black condition. To these people, liberation is just a rumour rather than a reality. Emancipation is illusionary: it only makes symbolic, reconciliatory gestures and is unable to change the concealed anti-black structures, which are the very antithesis of black humanity. The Fanonian perspective of the Manichean structure highlights the fact that the black condition is embedded in a self-imposed veil that generates misrecognition of humanity, founded on self-deception and legitimised colonisation. Genuine liberation in the post-1994 South African state cannot be imported, but must be embedded in those who want it.

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1

Maldonado-Torres, N., 2008. Against war: views from the underside of modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, p.136.

2

Fanon, F., 1990  (1961). The wretched of the earth. Translated by Farrington, C. London: Penguin, p.167.

3

Ibid.

4

Hill, M., 1997. Introduction: vipers in Shangri-la. In Hill, M. (ed.), Whiteness: a critical reader. New York: University Press, pp.1–20.

5

Bulhan, H.A., 1985. Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression, New York: Plenum Press, p.4.

6

Ahluwalia, P. and Zegeye, A., 2001. Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko: toward liberation. Social Identities, 7, pp.455–469. p.465.

7

Fanon, F., 2008 (1952). Black skin, white masks. Translated by Markmann, C.L. London: Pluto Press; Fanon, The wretched of the earth. Op. cit.

8

Maldonado-Torres, Against war. Op. cit.

9

Bhabha, H.K., 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

10 Ibid., p.2. 11 Ibid., p.43. 12 JanMohamed, A.R., 1983. Manichean aesthetics: the politics of literature in colonial Africa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 13 Fanon, F., The wretched of the earth. Op. cit. p.32. 14 Nuttall, S., 2009. Entanglement: literary and cultural reflections on postapartheid South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 15 Ibid., p.30. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p.58. 18 Bhabha, The location of culture. Op. cit. 19 Ibid., p.2. 20 JanMohamed, Manichean aesthetics. Op. cit. 21 Ibid., p.64. 22 Maldonado-Torres, Against war. Op. cit., p.142. 23 Maldonado-Torres, Against war. Op. cit.; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2013. Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: myths of decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA. 24 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit.; Mngxitama, A., 2009. Blacks can’t be racist. The New Frank Talk: Critical Essays on the Black Condition, 3, Johannesburg: Sankara Publishing. 25 Fanon, The wretched of the earth. Op. cit., p.127. 26 Ibid., p.29. 27 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit., p.7.

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28 Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression. Op. cit., p.123. 29 Wilderson III, F.B., 2008. Biko and the problematic of presence. In Mngxitama, A., Alexander, A. and Gibson, N.C. (eds), Biko lives: contesting the legacies of Steve Biko. London: Macmillan, pp.95–114. 30 Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression. Op. cit., p.142. 31 Gibson, N., 2001. The pitfalls of South Africa’s ‘liberation’. New Political Science, 23, pp. 371–387. 32 Ibid. 33 Fanon, Black skin, white masks. Op. cit. 34 Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression. Op. cit. 35 Geertsema, J., 2004. Ndebele, Fanon, agency and irony. Journal of Southern African Studies, 30(4), pp.749–763. 36 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit. 37 Maldonado-Torres, Against war. Op. cit., p.100. 38 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit. 39 Gibson, The pitfalls of South Africa’s ‘liberation’. Op. cit. 40 Fanon, Black skin, white masks. Op. cit., p.169. 41 Fanon, The wretched of the earth. Op. cit. 42 Ahluwalia and Zegeye, Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko. Op. cit., p.456. 43 Fanon, Black skin, white masks. Op. cit., p.165. 44 Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression. Op. cit. 45 JanMohamed, Manichean aesthetics. Op. cit. 46 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit. 47 Fanon, FBlack skin, white masks. Op. cit. 48 Freire, P., 1972. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Penguin. 49 Ibid., p.31. 50 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit. 51 Nursey-Bray, P., 1980. Race and nation: ideology in the thought of Frantz Fanon. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 18(1), pp.135–142. 52 Ibid. 53 Fanon, F., Black skin, white masks. Op. cit., pp.112–113. 54 Ibid., p.161. 55 Fukuyama, F., 2006 (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press. 55 Fanon, The wretched of the earth]. Op. cit., p.103. 56 Gibson, The pitfalls of South Africa’s ‘liberation’. Op. cit. 57 Fanon, Black skin, white masks. Op. cit., p.165. 58 Gibson, The pitfalls of South Africa’s ‘liberation’. Op. cit. . 59 Gordon, L.R., 2000. Existentia Africana: understanding Africana existential

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thought. London: Routledge.

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Press. 61 Ibid., p.15. 62 Gibson, N., 1999. Beyond Manicheanism: dialectics in the thought of Frantz Fanon. Journal of Political Ideologies, 4(3), pp.337–364. 63 Fanon, Black skin, white masks. Op. cit. 64 Ibid., pp.136–137. 65 Ibid., p.136. 66 Maldonado-Torres, Against war. Op. cit. 67 Kamara, J. and Van der Meer, T.M., 2007. On the dialectics of domestic colonialism and the role of violence in liberation: from fratricide to suicide. Human Architecture, 5, special double issue, pp.383–392. 68 Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed. Op. cit. 69 Ibid., p.41. 70 Kamara, J. and Van der Meer, On the dialectics of domestic colonialism. Op. cit.,

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60 Hooks, B., 1990. Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics. Boston South End

p.384. 71 Pillay, S., 2004. The mask of race? Thinking about race after apartheid: a response to Fred Hendricks. CODESRIA Bulletin, 1–3, pp.4–7. 72 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. cit. 73 Galtung, J., 1969. Violence, peace and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), pp.167–192. 74 Ibid., p.173. 75 Iadicola, P. and Shupe, A., 2003. Violence, inequality and human rights. Fifth Edition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 76 Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression. Op. cit. 77 Wilderson III, Biko and the problematic of presence. Op. cit.; Mngxitama, Blacks can’t be racist. Op. cit. 78 Iadicola and Shupe, Violence, inequality and human rights. Op. cit. 79 Galtung, Violence, peace and peace research. Op. cit. 80 Iadicola and Shupe, Violence, inequality and human rights. Op. cit., p.316. 81 Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression. Op. cit., p.129. 82 Maldonado-Torres, Against war. Op. cit., p.251. 83 Farmer, P., 2002. On suffering and structural violence: a view from below. In Vincent, J. (ed.), The anthropology of politics: a reader in ethnography, theory and critique, pp.224–237. Malden: Blackwell. 84 Fanon, The wretched of the earth. Op. cit., p.171. 85 Ibid., p.172.

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The Weapon of Theory Some Cabralian Theses on the African Political Predicament Siphamandla Zondi Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria, South Africa

ABSTRACT This chapter reflects critically on what Amílcar Cabral’s ‘Weapon of Theory’ conference address of 1966 reveals about an African-centred understanding of the current African political predicament, which is manifest in what Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni calls the neo-colonial, post-colonial moment in Africa – a period of shattered aspirations and deferred dreams for Africans after the euphoria of independence.1 This chapter is not an exploration of all Cabral’s intellectual traditions and its histories; it is limited to my meditations on selected political theses while employing an Afro-decolonial lens. While Cabralian thought has been explored to an extent, especially its Marxist imprints, its nationalist frames and perhaps its radical senses, this chapter contributes an Afro-decolonial angle to those reflections. I discuss a strand of Cabral’s revolutionary thought that has not been explored properly for its epistemological, methodological and theoretical insight, namely the agency of liberatory, political movement in the post-colony. So, in this chapter, I discuss Cabralian insight into the conundrum of the neo-colonial and post-colonial state of politics in Africa – the period of failing transition from independence to liberation and the reasons for this. I seek to demonstrate that the ‘weapon of theory’ yields a number of explanatory theses on this predicament in fresh and comprehensive ways. Therefore, the chapter contributes to understanding Cabralian contributions to African-centred thinking.

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The question of the post-colony has occupied many debates in the literature on Africa, resulting in a variety of ways of understanding and interpreting the predicament faced by the post-colonial state/nation and continent. By predicament, I mean a host of related challenges that bedevil post-colonial Africa and that manifest in such conditions as high – but jobless – economic growth, high socio-economic inequality, high levels of poverty, under-development, crises of governance, conflict and violence, marginality and the shaming of Africa in the face of the world. These conditions have resulted in deferred dreams, shattered aspirations and abiding illusions. It is an Africa that is growing, but it is also stuck in abject poverty and despair. It is an Africa of great wealth and resources, while Africans suffer from the lack of access to capital and such basic resources as water and food. Literature debates focus on crises of leadership, governance and government in explaining this condition.2 The subject of the African political condition (as Ali Mazrui called it3) has focused many of us on the character, nature and conduct of the post-colonial African state and society. The failure of African countries to build a post-colonial state that is modelled on Western thoughts and myths is evident in literature debates.4 Also, the failures encountered in the process of importing Western-style democracy – often just called democracy, without qualification – produced various versions of failed democracy, including garrison democracy,5 authoritarian democracy6 and choiceless democracy.7  Also subject to much debate is the failure to translate the promise of liberation, or the abortion of the revolutionary struggle, as liberation movements turned to governing newly independent states. The limitations of these movements and the political parties that were once in power – in relation to promoting democratic pluralism and effective governance – is used to explain the post-colonial, neo-colonial African predicament.8 In one magisterial reflection on the neocolonial post-colony, Sabelo NdlovuGatsheni has the following to say: ‘In place of the imagined postcolonial world, there exists a “postcolonial neo-colonised world” as a problematic terrain of emptiness, illusions, myths and shadows of being free and decolonised.’9 Under these conditions, the following ills thrive: violence and conflict, poor governance and corruption; dictatorship and autocracy, poverty and under-development, disease, and hopelessness. To contribute to what Tiyambe Zeleza calls recentring Africa in the conversation about Africa,10 this chapter critically reflects on theses that explain the African predicament in Amílcar Cabral’s ’Weapon of theory’

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INTRODUCTION

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address,11 and shows their explanatory power. The purpose is twofold. The first is to make the case for retrieving muted, ignored, neglected African voices to help interpret the challenges that the African state confronts today, in response to an African proverb that says, ‘Borrowed waters won’t quench your thirst.’ The second purpose is to demonstrate the explanatory value of Cabralian theses in respect of challenges that Ndlovu-Gatsheni and others describe, as indicated above. We begin with some context on the African political predicament and a case for epistemic disobedience, before turning our attention to the ‘weapon of theory’ theses.

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The challenges facing Africa after independence are the matter of much debate. Much is now understood about the subject, yet much more remains to be explored. Precisely because of the complexities that arise from a history that produced different patterns of development, power and being in Africa, the continent’s condition is a fertile ground for exploring alternative tools, modes of analysis and epistemic lenses to understand this condition. In his attempt to make sense of this complex condition, Mazrui suggested a mode of analysis he called paradox, through which he identified six dialectics that constitute the African condition: (1) Africa as a garden of Eden in decay; (2) Africa humiliated but not brutalised; (3) Africa caught between rebellion against the West and imitation of the West; (4) a poverty-stricken people on a golden continent; (5) a large continent fragmented into very small territories; and (6) a continent that is located at the centre of the world geographically, but located on the periphery of the same world economically, politically and militarily.12 This deserves full exploration, as it promises to explain a lot about the African predicament – especially in relation to challenges arising from the very idea of the modern nation-state in Africa. A strand of discourses also exists about the post-colonial state and its problems, a strand that is linked to democratisation narratives in Western scholarship that are applied to African situations. It is concerned with two things at least. The first is whether liberal democracy can take root in Africa through the building of liberal constitutions and institutions essential for this democracy, such as particular types of political parties, and the development of a culture of politics that enables this. For this reason, this discourse analyses the African political situation on the basis of principles and benchmarks set out in the so-called democratic theories. Secondly, it is preoccupied with the procedures of democracy, including free and fair

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elections, regular change of leadership and presidential term limits, separation of power, the principles of the rule of law and individualised human rights, the state’s administrative efficiency, and structures of accountability.13 On this account, this portion of the literature sees the problem as the failure of liberal democracy, or the failure to achieve liberal democracy, with little regard given to whether it was the intention of Africa to excel in liberal democracy in the first place. On this basis, African polities are thought to be bedevilled by leaders who have perverted the liberal democratic journey and manipulated democracy, in order to entrench themselves in power for their own good, by working through a network of elites to swindle the poor.14 It is with this understanding that the literature creates the impression that the biggest problem facing post-colonial Africa is the betrayal of liberal democracy. The increase in the number of countries transitioning from military rule and one-party rule to multi-party civilian rule in the aftermath of the Cold War is assumed to have been a wave of democratisation.15 Observing changes in various regions of the world where people demanded a greater say, freedoms and control over governments, observers came to the conclusion that a sudden spread of liberal democracy was transforming the African state and governance in a manner that confirmed the victory of liberal democracy. This exaggeration of the victory of liberal democracy was in line with the celebration in the West of the end of the Cold War as some sort of an ‘end of history’, as Francis Fukuyama put it16 – a purported triumph of the Western idea of liberalism (epitomised by democracy in politics, capitalism in economics, and individualism in human culture). It was assumed that it was the universal desire of all nations to mirror the example of Western liberalism in politics, economics and culture. It was therefore thought that the ordinary Africans who rose up against dictatorships did so because they desired liberal democracy. Some of the recent prescriptions of solutions to the African political predicament seek to ‘return’ Africa to the liberal democratic path via stronger electoral systems; entrenchment of the notion of private property and individualised human rights; strengthening institutions of accountability, as seen in liberal democratic thinking; and enhanced technical administrative skills for service delivery. The conduct of political characters like Robert Mugabe, Denis Sassou Nguesso, Teodoro Obiang Nguema and Yoweri Museveni dominates discussions about the ills of African politics, which are presented as an aberration in the age of liberal democracy.17 The fact that they are resented by Africans for their lack of care, vision, skill to lead and commitment to transform lives is subordinated to the assumed popular hunger for liberal democracy. So,

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their removal from power by means of a free and fair vote, external military interventions, or acts of sabotage is seen as a solution that is needed in order to enable the further march of liberal democracy. This provides the basis for another and even more sinister discourse: the narrative of ‘regime change’,18 or the forced change of government in the name of liberal democracy. This change happens via the sponsored vote, through setting term limits for political leaders, sponsored popular uprising, or a military intervention (internal or external). One strand of the discussion is generally born out of attempts to find alternative ways of understanding the predicament – attempts that include the option of rebelling against Eurocentrism, Western narratives and dominant African discourses that support globally hegemonic discourses about state and citizens. Part of this discussion is inspired by Marxist, Africanist and Global South perspectives on state, economy and society. This variety of discourses seeks to challenge dominant perspectives of liberalism and imperialism, find alternative ways of doing power, and reimagine the political. This includes growing emphasis on indigenous ethos, models and values in governance, and the demand for Africanisation. All this crystallises in the debate about the national question that has sought to explain the nature of the African condition and the solutions to it since the 1970s. For instance, the works of Issa Shivji,19 Archie Mafeje,20 Jacques Depelchin,21 Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni,22 and Ibbo Mandaza23 represent various permutations of this debate, which seek to shift discourses away from the concerns of the dominant liberal discourse about Africa. They range from anti-imperialist paradigms of thought to critical political economy perspectives. Some of these works recognise the vital links between the problems of the state today and the colonial origins of the modern African nation-state. They are a lot more interested in continuities between the colonial and the post-colonial state than the liberal discourses described above. Some tend to measure the state of politics against the promise of liberation. This strand has focused the discussion on locating the failure of democracy in the fundamental constitution of the modern nation-state that was supplanted to Africa. For instance, it has been shown that the post-colonial state is post-colonial in the sense that it has survived to this day, but neocolonial in the sense that it carries the tendencies of its colonial origins to this day. This literature has pointed to the conduct and behaviour of the state in respect of its mandate to protect and to provide for its citizens, tracing its conduct to what was learned during colonialism. The logic of the colonial state and economy did not die with the formal end of colonialism.

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For example, in Revolution and Counter-revolution in Africa, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja contends that problems deepened when the African political elite took up the fight for liberation.24 The states that won sovereignty at independence had to contend with the fact that this sovereignty was in fact limited, and also that they relied on former colonial empires for recognition.25 The new government and elite have disappointed the people by abandoning the dream of liberation and settling for governance, government, policy management and dependency on others. He argues that the allure of national liberation led to the neglect of social liberation, where the focus would have been on meeting the social, economic and political aspirations of the people. According to Nzongola-Ntalaja, one of the reasons for the abandonment of the dream is the allure of conformity and pragmatism as an option after independence.26 This allure took the form of ideological entrapment, opportunities for self-enrichment, the allure of position and flags, and a sort of defeatism in the face of the strong presence of colonial powers among the global powers that shaped the international system.27 The use of aid, trade and diplomatic ties in order to entrap independent states in service to the interests of the world system is also well recorded.28

THREE CABRALIAN THESES ON AFRICAN POLITICS Cabral is a key voice in the discourse about neo-colonial entrapments. He joins many political figures and activists who hold a strong commitment to the ideals of liberation, and intellectuals dedicated to thorough decolonisation and transformation of society. They also include younger scholars who are interested in understanding the nature of the dream that inspired liberation, those who are attracted to radical thought leadership. Reiland Rabaka places Cabral squarely at the centre of Africana critical theory, which is a term denoting a number of strands in black radical thought that seek to challenge Eurocentrism and embed the perspectives of ordinary Africans in the struggle for full liberation.29 As a feature of Africana critical theory, Cabral’s theory led to practical political actions to dethrone the colonialcapitalist-imperialist order in Guinea-Bissau and beyond. Cabral theorised ‘returning to the source’ as an act of Africans assuming control over their historicality – in order to place themselves at the centre of their destiny rather than returning to a some-time frozen, glorious past.30 Cabralianism demanded an eclectic combination of critical thought, where Marxism as a borrowed Eurocentric lens needed to be stretched in order to understand

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the colonial, the black, and the race problem in the Global South.31 Cabral referred repeatedly to his deeply critical and dialectical relationship with Marxism, appreciating its usefulness in relation to understanding the changing character of capitalism as an oppressive system, while recognising its blindness to the nuances of colonialism and its political and cultural ramifications for societies outside the West.32  Like Cornel West, Cabral understood that ‘certain phenomena of the modern world – nationalism, racism, gender oppression, homophobia, ecological devastation – have not been adequately understood by Marxist theorists’,33 and that Marx did not write with Africa and the colonised in mind. He did so without undermining the contribution of progressive thinking that Marxism brought into liberation struggles. Like Fanon’s thought, Cabralian theory combats racism, colonialism and capitalism at the same time. It critiques the world as it is: when seen from the margins it is an imperial world. Cabralian theory also critiques Eurocentric theory, what Lewis R Gordon terms a ‘conjuctive analysis’.34 Cabralian theory places the African and black struggle at the centre of the struggle for decolonial/liberated humanity. For Cabral, we are to consider ourselves soldiers in order to free ourselves and to simultaneously free humanity from this world as it is.35  In a variety of texts – which deserve more reflection and meditation as part of the decolonial turn in African and black thought and action than is possible in this essay – Cabral presented this critical revolutionary theory. It is a theory rooted in the experiences of colonised/neo-colonised people all over the world and in the aspiration to change the concrete conditions that gave rise to the struggle for liberation in the first place. It is in this context of continuing struggle, to transform the conditions that made it necessary, that we reflect on what Cabralian theses say about returning to the source in order for us as Africans to control our destiny and become motive forces for the fundamental transformation of the world. The theses chosen in this chapter do not exhaust the message of Cabral’s ‘Weapon of theory’ address in Havana; instead, only three of the 12 theses are presented, so as to illustrate their usefulness in rethinking the current political predicament. This is in line with the purpose of this book, which is to reflect on the ways in which African thinkers and doers have contributed to recentring the African perspective. Cabral’s ‘Weapon of theory’ was presented as a speech to the Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, held in Havana in January 1966. In the speech, Cabral spoke candidly to liberation movements and other anti-imperialist forces in the world about the

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limitations of their conduct in the struggle and in the world in which they fought. It was not written as a cold, theoretical piece, but as an injunction to action, a simple reading of concrete conditions in the struggle for liberation. This makes it critical, revolutionary theory in the sense that it combined thought and practice, injunctions and action, aspirations and physical mobilisation. Cabral sought to highlight what he had observed in the practices of the liberation struggle and what activists needed to think about and act on. There was always a strong incentive to shout against imperialism or to sloganeer about the victories of anti-imperialist struggles, but he chose to think about how to sharpen weapons of theory in the fight against domination and how to influence prosecution of the struggle going forward. Cabral took the view that it was best to use the tricontinental conference in order to identify weaknesses in anti-imperialist struggles and thus stimulate new thinking about ways to practically improve the search for prosperous futures. He said, ‘We are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it’; instead, he advocated launching effective struggles against it, using strong and effective revolutionary tools, including political movements.36 After recognising the breadth of the conference agenda, Cabral thought he should place before the meeting crucial subjects whose meaning and importance were fundamental to the struggle. We have called these ‘theses’, simply because Cabral was making theoretical propositions for a change in conduct, strategy and tactics. We identified twelve theses he advanced in this essay alone, but we discuss only three, due to limited space and time.

CABRALIAN THESIS 1: STRUGGLE AGAINST SELVES For Cabral, the biggest challenge facing the post-colonial state and the liberation movement is how to struggle against its own internal weaknesses. Without diminishing the significant problems arising from global imperial designs, which imposed limits on the actions of liberation movements, Cabral spoke of weaknesses from within that reinforce problems from without. He spoke as a passionate agent of the liberation struggle, a leader of the revolution against colonial rule in Guinea, and not as a mere observer or critic. The liberation movement he was part of had to contend with a tough enemy at home and abroad, a network of forces that sought to subvert the cause of the liberation struggle, including forces committed to the preservation of the colonial order in the world.37 279

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Yet, based on his careful study and keen observation, he concluded that the biggest battle facing the liberation movement – and by implication the post-colonial political system – was not against the pernicious acts of imperial forces worldwide, but against internal weaknesses. Therefore, the liberation movement’s biggest breakthrough, in his analysis, would come from the ability to overcome internal challenges, and to build internal cohesion and unity of purpose. No matter what difficulties the enemy might create on the outside, he contended, the greatest damage to the liberation cause came from conditions inside the movement. By extension, therefore, the most difficult of all challenges for the African polity are those that relate to the internal condition of the agents of change and authority. When these agents of change are drained by the internal swamp of weaknesses, they are unable to triumph against the external sea of problems. Indeed, the internal conditions of the governing party and alternative political parties, the internal state of civil society, the state of the inner workings of government, and the internal condition of the national economy are the most complicated challenges to confront today. This battle epitomises internal contradictions in the economic, social and cultural realities of each country and in political institutions in the developing world broadly and in Africa in particular. These conditions might have arisen from external mechanics, such as the divide-and-rule tactics of external powers interfering in Africa, and they might be abetted by international conditions that generate difficulties in former colonies, but they are internal in essence. They may come from the relationships that liberation movements, like political parties and governments, establish with external forces with an interest in reshaping the inner core of the states concerned, but it is the liberation movements who establish and maintain such relationships of dependency and subservience. They maintain relations that allow external powers to influence internal dynamics in a party, government and economy. They may arise from the objective condition of the worldas it is, the world that JM Blaut calls a ‘coloniser’s model of the world,’38 but they are felt and experienced as internal. They are nested in and abetted by internal conditions. For Cabral, only in some cases do external forces crudely and solely impose themselves; usually they thrive on the favourable internal dynamics of a party, government and economy. The principle of national sovereignty gives every nation and its institutions a measure of protection from the power of the mighty, who are interested in interfering everywhere. Yet, when faced with internal dissonance, dissensus and rot, this sovereignty is of limited value for the achievement of the dream of salvation. Those contemplating interference must contend with the shame of being in violation

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Obviously, other cases differ from that of Guinea; but our experience has shown us that in the general framework of daily struggle this battle against ourselves – no matter what difficulties the enemy may create – is the most

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of international law, which only the foolish can ignore. Internal forces form relationships, ranging from trade and investment agreements and political exchanges to cultural relations with others, that can amount to the subversion of sovereignty, enabling infiltration by forces of imperialism as they fight against the struggle for self-determination and freedom. Indeed, liberation movements do tie themselves to outside relationships that change their internal dynamics, so that mass parties of Africa become elite parties modelled on Western political parties or Eurocentric narratives about political parties. For pragmatic reasons or under duress, they establish these relations in the hope of deriving benefits for themselves or the governments they lead, but they end up with relations of dependency or manipulation. Indeed, this serves to explain the turn towards neoliberal economic policy and foreign-policy pragmatism in formerly revolutionary formations like the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) in Namibia, the United National Independence Party (UNIP) in Zambia and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa Cabral concluded:

difficult of all, whether for the present or the future of our people.39 

This shift from the foregrounding of observations about the intentions and actions of outside forces, over which the forces of liberation had very little control, to dealing with the internal weaknesses of anti-imperialist forces, is an earth-shattering shift in radical thought about the African political predicament. It is also central to Cabral’s work on ‘unity and struggle’, where the internal conditions of the forces for change are presented as fundamental to the success of the revolution, especially when revolutionary political consciousness is well incubated.40 

CABRALIAN THESIS 2: IDEOLOGICAL DEFICIENCY Cabral elaborates on the struggle against one’s own weaknesses by pointing to ideological deficiency as a key feature of this internal deficit. Due to the influence of Marxism on his thinking, Cabral would have been familiar with Marxist arguments about dominant ideology as a false consciousness, born out of submissiveness coagulated in the status quo, a hegemonic reality in the capitalist-imperialist world. He would have been familiar with arguments

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calling for a negation of negation, a counter-paradigm, or an alternative composite set of opinions, attitudes and convictions fuelling consciousness for a rebellion against the given hegemony. In his understanding, the struggle for liberation is also a struggle over ideas that legitimised the colonial situation, including ideas about what society is desired in the future, and what it would take to arrive at such a utopia. There is no sustainable idea without a corresponding ideology and paradigm, framing the idea and how it could be brought about. Cabral points out: The ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the national liberation movements – which is basically due to ignorance of the historical reality which these movements claim to transform – constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggle against imperialism, if not the greatest weakness of all.41

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When Cabral wrote this, the counter-ideology espoused by liberation movements accommodated African nationalism, anti-imperialism and PanAfricanism to different extents.42 African nationalism hinged on the call for national self-determination, state sovereignty, popular sovereignty and the improvement of the status of Africans. This ideology required national unity, the cohesion of motive forces and unity of purpose within the new nation. Cabral could have spoken about the ideological positions that particular liberation movements subscribed to. But his sense was that whatever form this ideology took was deficient, because it failed to draw from the historical experience of the place that the movement emerged from. The implication is that the ideological positions held by the liberation movements arose from the historical realities of others; they were imports from outside the environments in which liberation movements operated. Indeed, we now know that they generally borrowed from European ideological camps, from liberalism to Marxism, in order to frame their ideological positions.43 This led to a poor grasp of the conditions for transition to freedom, of national unity, of national land questions and of democratic change after independence. The understanding of the liberated social structure – and how it would be changed – was deficient. Even though liberation movements embraced the alternative paradigm of Marxist-Leninist ideology, this did not prevent the ideological deficiency that arose from insufficient harnessing of local history and lived realities of the ordinary people. Even after adopting the revolutionary beliefs and attitudes of Marxism, liberation movements still lacked an appreciation of the conditions that would translate national sovereignty or self-determination into prosperity and peace for all.44

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In Cabral’s thesis, the major weakness of liberation movements lay in insufficient appreciation of the historical reality they wished to transform and the dynamics essential for the change they needed. This led Cabral to comment also on the movements’ tendency to be preoccupied with the circumstances of the day and the demands of government once they assumed leadership as governing parties. The tendency was to focus on the challenges of the day and not on understanding the message of history. Without a thorough historical perspective, political formations fail to interpret the imperatives of the post-colonial moment. They also fail to appreciate the impact of historical continuity on their agendas and actions. The transition of liberation movements to political parties was therefore a problem, which runs counter to mainstream views that this transition represents a solution, and a positive.45  For Cabral, critical to this historical perspective is understanding the roots of the liberation struggle in the first place: the logic behind the struggle as it enters the post-independence phase. For Cabral, ‘the foundations and objectives of national liberation in relation to the social structure’ is an important starting point towards appreciation of the historical perspective.46  Without an understanding of the historical struggle, it becomes difficult to formulate a strong ideological orientation regarding the present and the future. Failure to grasp the forces that had shaped the social structure built by colonialism, as Peter Ekeh shows, led to ideologically deficient responses to post-independence dynamics.47  Central to this thesis is that no effective strategic agenda can emerge outside the historical context. As Cheikh Anta Diop once said, ‘No thought and particularly no philosophy, can develop outside of its historical terrain.’48 Nations and their true leaders acquire a perspective on their journey to freedom based on the clarity of a historical perspective. For this reason, Diop responded to the bankruptcy of ideology in the post-colony by archiving and narrating a five-thousand-year perspective, stretching back to the exploits of Africa’s ancient civilisations. In this sense, ideology was derived from understanding the patterns of life and development that emerged from the historical evolution of a society. The birth of both a new African and a new Africa, fully in charge of their destinies, requires that Africans acquire an historical conscience. Cabral thought of ideological deficiency as manifest in two ways. The first was acceptance of the myth that the time for ideology – especially revolutionary ideology – was over. He argued against abandoning ideological prisms built over decades of anti-colonial struggles, simply because independence had been achieved. Cabral understood that liberation was still

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a work in progress. Cabral lived during a period when there were voices that suggested that the great ideological debates had lost steam: the end of ideology had arrived.49 These views assumed the universality of the Western experience, which was the basis of this argument, thus subjecting the realities of non-Western societies to the Western one. Indeed, in spite of the influence of the ideological war between the West and the Soviet Union, Africa’s political elite became driven by self-interest and sectional agendas, rather than an explicit homegrown or contextualised ideological agenda of a sort. Some became ultra-corrupt and kleptocratic, plunging countries into deep external debt, general malaise and poverty. The literature suggests that a politics of vanity, a politics of big personalities without a clear social cause, set in during the post-independence period, resulting in the current predicament of Africa.50 Leaders lacked a clear transformational ideology to guide their thinking and actions so as to alter what they had inherited, to overcome poverty, to strengthen economies, to boost national cohesion and to expand job opportunities. Nzongola-Ntalaja paraphrases Cabral: ‘For a dominated people, genuine liberation implies the fact of regaining not only one’s historical personality as a free people but also one’s own initiative as a maker of history.’51 To became makers of history, people must understand the historical reality and out of this fashion an ideological framework for the struggle towards such a future, as is referred to here. But liberation leaders were found wanting on this account. They lacked the ability to shed ideological clarity on a tough struggle fought during the height of the global, ideological Cold War. This dearth of transformational ideology constituted a major internal weakness of the liberation movement once it gained power. The literature also refers to a political class that was swayed by external ideologies, a class that was tossed to and fro by foreign concepts and ideologies. The political and social leadership came to be driven by either communist or Western liberal ideals.52 From the 1980s, the African political and social elite became champions of the globally expanded neoliberal agenda, from the idea of a lean state to the deregulation of the economy and to decentralisation of government. This entrapped them in ideas born of historical realities different – sometimes fundamentally different – from their own. It is in this context that democracy (largely undefined in the mainstream literature, but assumed to be the liberal democracy option) became the single most important preoccupation of African politics. Every political party that emerged marketed itself as a champion of liberal democracy, and thus a catalyst for the expansion of liberalism as a Western ideology. Almost every NGO and social movement pledged commitment to liberal democracy, without any attempt to work out its ideological implications in the African

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context.53 The pursuit of democracy of various forms proceeded, giving rise to the question: How can a neo-colonial state be democratised before it is transformed or destroyed?54  In this context, opportunities were missed to build democracy in the form that African thinkers called social liberation, freedom, decolonisation and de-imperialisation. It is very clear that the African political class acquiesced to ideological onslaughts from the West, especially after the end of the Cold War. They had the option of building liberated democracy, while working to overcome the national question in the manner that the discourses of the 1990s had suggested. This included building democracy based on a new social consensus about national identity and Pan-African commitment, on a national consensus of economic transformation and on cultural and psychological liberation of some form. The African political class, and the economic and social elite along with them, squandered the opportunity to undertake social liberation as the basis for democratic reforms of the 1990s and 2000s. On this basis, social liberation was neglected, as political elites focused narrowly on national liberation for purposes of attaining national self-determination and national sovereignty in the form of the control of the state. This can be analysed as the epitome of the ideological deficiency referred to by Cabral.55 We have not sufficiently theorised this point, which Cabral put forward right at the beginning of the independence period.

CABRALIAN THESIS 3: LACK OF HOME-GROWN REVOLUTIONARY THEORY Related to the deficit of ideology, for Cabral, is the insufficiency of revolutionary theory to guide local action, the making of difficult choices, the formation of character and the leadership of social causes. It was Cabral’s observation that the cause for which the liberation struggle was fought, that which needed to be finished in the decades after independence, was weakened severely by the fact that there was not enough theory of revolutionary change behind it. Cabral used ‘ideology’ to imply intellectual and practical tools harnessed from historical reality to rethink and act on the mission of the struggle. He used ‘theory’, on the other hand, to mean interpretation of practices and efforts made during that struggle in relation to historical and current reality in order to generate new intellectual and practical tools for guiding change going forward. He had a revolutionary theory in mind, in the sense that it was one that would assist in the achievement of the revolution ideologised. Theory and ideology, therefore, were understood as mutually reinforcing strategies for achieving liberation.

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Believing that ‘every practice produces a theory’, Cabral argued for a careful interpretation of the status quo, including the realities of every moment in the evolution of the revolution, in order to draw out of these observations a sense of rules, equations, considered assumptions and imperatives about the revolution.56  Theory –  born out of the realities in the sites of contestations and combat with coloniality as a power system – is rooted in the context in which it is applied. Cabral also argued: ‘If it is true that a revolution can fail even though it be based in perfectly perceived theories, nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory.’57 A revolution cannot be sustained by a mere sequence of activities, nor by the mere agency of leaders: it is sustained by the clarity and thoroughness of the underlying theory that guides how the forward march of the revolution is understood and pursued. Cabral was clearly aware of Marxist thinking about revolutionary theory that identifies conditions for greater and faster success in revolutionary struggles. This promoted the practice of analysing objective and subjective conditions in context – and on the basis of historical consciousness – as key actions in the prosecution of a revolutionary struggle. This is what Cabral thought had been lost by liberation movements as they turned to governing inherited colonial states, with all the trappings that came with this transition. Referring to the African situation generally, Cabral took note of the impact of imperialist domination and the liberation struggles that resulted: But we also see that in the historical context of the development of these struggles, our peoples have the concrete possibility of going from their prewar situation of exploration and underdevelopment to a new stage of their historical process which can lead them to a higher form of economic, social and cultural existence.58

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To him, imperialism as a system by which capitalism extended itself globally – what we today call globalisation – provides huge benefits for its centres in North America and Western Europe, while producing ‘paralysis, stagnation and even in some cases regression’ in the dominated areas of the world.59  Internal factors – such as leadership deficit, inefficiencies in the state and economy, weak policy implementation, kleptocracy and patrimonialism, and so forth – are necessary for the smooth operation of imperialism in formerly colonised countries. This interjection alters the tenor of analysing African problems today, because it suggests a dialectical relationship between the global problem of imperialism and national problems. It say that the problems are a necessary part of how the world system operates

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for the developing world and Africa. This cannot be responded to without a sufficiently sophisticated revolutionary theory that identifies the problems, their manifestation, the forces involved, the forces to align with and for what goal, and so forth. The lack of a proper theory of liberation – necessary for the decolonisation phase that follows the attainment of independence – explains the fact that the post-colony has become what Ndlovu-Gatsheni calls a terrain of illusions, deferred dreams and shattered aspirations.60 The actions of the political class show a lack of appreciation of these conditions and how they have evolved. These actions result from the inability to theorise about the transition from national liberation to social liberation.61 Julius Nyerere, as a pre-eminent leader of the liberation movement, came to the same conclusion about the post-colonial condition in Africa. In his view, the call to fight for freedom from dominion by the obvious external enemy unites forces for liberation up to the moment of victory; ‘Unfortunately however the call to mobilise our resources so that everyone in our countries can have clean water, education, health care and a means of living is, in practice, not unifying.’62 This deficiency of theory, like that of ideology, was for Cabral manifest in the weak revolutionary conscience among the poor, and leaders, in postcolonial African society. He thought true consciousness was a product of a systematic understanding of the historical antecedents and current lived realities. Without a revolutionary theory, the African political, economic and social elite, who have managed African affairs from the 1960s to date, lack the courage to pursue fundamental change, the tenacity to lead countries beyond mere independence and the strength of character and thought to liberate independent African countries from the clutches of neo-colonial arrangements and imperialist designs that undermine their well-being. For Cabral, both ideology and theory are essential: knowledge and understanding of the political cause – including the different experiences of its journey – are necessary for advancing the reason why the liberation struggles had begun in the first place.63 For Cabral, Marxism, contextualised through African history (including the impact of colonialism), was the theoretical framework necessary for the transformation of society in the post-colony. In his view, its postulation of the political economy of evolving states offered the best way to understand the fundamental problems of the post-colony. For him, the idea that the class struggle was the motive force of history was useful, but it needed to be revised and made more precise to ‘give it an even wider application [to] ... certain characteristics of certain colonised peoples ..., peoples dominated by imperialism’.64 

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Cabral would go further to argue that the class idea must be understood differently in Africa because of the particularities of ‘progressive development’, systems for the distribution of wealth, and the intervening external factors to the socio-economic whole. This is to say, if a theory from outside has validity for revolutionary causes in Africa, then its use must be subject to proper appreciation of African society’s historical evolution. Only in this way can one avoid the crude importation of observations made in societies that differ significantly from African countries. Cabral therefore suggests that external theories only be appropriated on the basis of their reconciliation with our historical realities, present conditions and aspirations. This is what post-independence states have failed to do in most cases. Instead they imported socialism – or unquestioningly adopted Marxism or liberalism – without showing a good understanding of the African context. Taken together, these theses convey what Cabral meant when he said: ‘We know that the development of a phenomenon in movement, whatever its external appearance, depends mainly on its internal characteristics.’65 This is the starting point: the enemy is out there, but the enemy is also inside or among us as well. This dialectic of external and internal dynamics is a crucial addition to critical African political thought, especially as it relates the post-colonial, neocolonial situation, where the external forces at play are much more obvious than ‘our own weaknesses’. This intervention shifts the geography of reason in relation to analysing the African predicament in the political, economic and cultural/social realms. It makes us realise that neither the internal nor the external dynamics should be considered alone or in isolation. Understanding the internal dimensions of our problems may also serve to explain how they enable external forces to successfully sabotage, obfuscate, weaken and misdirect the struggle for liberation. The dynamics of the three theses have a direct bearing on questions of research methodology, political vision and theory that are used to explain delays in the struggle for true liberation. The three theses may also help break the silence we experience due to the dominance of Eurocentric reasoning in both academic and political discourses about the post-colonial/neo-colonial moment, be it in relation to the failure of democracy, the nature of the African state and governance,; social policy and poverty, dis-ease and disease; new forms of oppression and exploitation, and the doomed rise of Africa.

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This chapter has reflected on what constitutes critical and revolutionary Cabralian thought, and how it sheds light on the many contradictions and challenges that characterise African political conditions today. How should we interpret the facts? Rich Africa, but poor Africans; formal independence and the dependency syndrome; a commitment to peace and the ubiquity of violence; first-class good governance policies and a growing kleptocracy; a commitment to democracy but widespread autocratic tendencies, and so forth. The mainstream theories and borrowed lenses we have frequently used to understand these questions have many limitations, not least of which is a poor understanding of the dialectical relationship between internal and external dynamics that produced the current predicament. These theories tend to focus on internal dynamics, blaming Africans for their troubles, but they fail to point to the fundamental, internal weaknesses. The theories mostly lack an understanding of Africa – from inside and on its own terms. The theories are therefore trapped in the imperialism of social science.66 The Cabralian theses outlined above capture this idea that the struggle for liberation does not end at independence. The character of institutions central to such a struggle, and the political-moral character of the leadership, is critical to our understanding, even after independence. The Cabralian theses therefore invite us to meditate on the fundamental underpinnings of the current political predicament in Africa. We should do so in a manner that is designed to find real solutions to real problems facing African politics. Reflecting on these Cabralian theses reinforces the call for a much-needed recentring of Africa and the South in efforts to understand and resolve their problems. This is implicit in the decolonial turn in political thought. The Cabralian theses help explain how internal dynamics interface with the external environment to reinforce the African predicament.

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CONCLUSION

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2013. Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: myths of decolonisation. Dakar: CODESRIA.

2

Forje, J.W., 2004. Facing the challenges of globalization and regional integration: problems and prospects for Africa at the dawn of the third millennium. African Identities, 2(1), pp.7–35.

3

Mazrui, A., 1980. The African condition: a diagnosis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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4

Herbst, J., 2000. States and power in Africa: comparative lessons in authority and control. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Evans, P.B., Dietrich, R. and Theda, S., 1985. Bringing the state back in. New York: Cambridge University Press.

5

Adejumobi, S., 1998. The crisis of elections and democracy in Africa. Africa Quarterly, 38, pp.29– 53.

6

Ake, C., Bidwai, P., Bishara, A., George, S., Gorostiaga, X. et al. 1995. The Democratisation of Disempowerment: the Problem of Democracy in the Third World. London: Pluto Press.

7

Mkandawire, T., 1993. Crisis management and the making of choiceless democracies. In Joseph, R. (ed.), State, conflict, and democracy in Africa. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, pp.119–136.

8

Mbaku, J M. and Ihonvhbere, J.O., 2003. Transition to democratic governance in Africa. London: Praeger.

9 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit., p.13. 10 Zeleza, P.T., 1997. Manufacturing African studies and crises. Dakar: CODESRIA, p.6. 11 Cabral, A., 1966. The weapon of theory. Address delivered at the First Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Havana, Cuba. January 1966. Marxism in Africa Archive. Available at http://www.marxists.org/ subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm [Accessed 8 March 2009]. 12 Mazrui, A., 1979. The Reith lectures 1979: The African condition. Lecture 1 – The Garden of Eden in decay. Available at http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/ radio4/transcripts/1979_reith1.pdf [Accessed 2 March 2017]. 13 Oluwu, D. and Sako, S., 2002. Better governance and democratic renewal in Africa. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, pp.72–73. 14 Hermet, G.R. and Rouquié, A., 1978. Elections without choice. London: Macmillan. 15 Huntington, S.P., 1996. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. London: Simon & Schuster. 16 Fukuyama, F., 1989. End of history? National Interest (summer), pp.1–8. 17 Cohen, H.J., 2015. The mind of the African strongman: conversations with dictators, statesmen, and father figures. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing; LeVan, A.C., 2014. Dictators and democracy in Africa: the political economy in Nigeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 18 Lawson, S., 1993. Conceptual issues in the comparative study of regime change and democratization. Comparative Politics, 25(2), pp.183–205. 19 Shivji, I., 1989. The pitfalls of the debate on democracy. CODESRIA Bulletin, 13, pp.2–5. 20 Mafeje, A., 2000. Africanity: a combative ontology. CODESRIA Bulletin, 1, pp.66–71.

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covery and abolition. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers. 22 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit. 23 Mandaza, I., 1998. Governance and human development in southern Africa: selected essays. Harare: Sapes Books. 24 Nzongola-Ntalaja, G., 1987. Revolution and counter-revolution in Africa: essays in contemporary politics. London: Zed Books. 25 Clapham, C., 1996. Africa and the international system: the politics of state survival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 26 Nzongola-Ntalaja, Revolution and counter-revolution in Africa. Op. cit. 27 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit. 28 Shivji, I., 2006. The silences in the NGO discourse: the role and future of NGOs in Africa. African Development, 31(4), pp.22–51; Amin, S., 2002. Africa: living on the fringe. Monthly Review, 53(10). 29 Rabaka, R., 2009. Africana critical theory: reconstructing the black radical tradition, from W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral. Lanham: Lexington Books. 30 Cabral, A., 1973. Return to the source: selected speeches of Amílcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review Press; Serequeberhan, T., 1989. The possibility of African freedom: a philosophical exploration. PhD dissertation, Boston College.

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21 Depelchin, J., 2005. Silences in African history: between the syndrome of dis-

31 Moreira, A.M., 1989. The role of Marxism in the anti-colonial revolution in black Africa. PhD dissertation, Boston College; Rabaka, Africana critical theory. Op. cit., p.178. 32 Rabaka, Africana critical theory. Op. cit., p.177. 33 West, C., 1991. The ethical dimensions of Marxist thought. New York: Monthly Review Press, p.22. 34 Gordon, L.R., 1997. Her majesty’s other children: sketches of racism from a neocolonial age. Lanham: Bowman and Littlefield. 35 Cabral, A., 1972. Revolution in Guinea: selected texts. New York: Monthly Review Press, p.79. 36 Cabral, The weapon of theory. Op. cit., p.2. 37 Leys, C. and Saul, J.S., 1994. Namibia’s liberation struggle: the two-edged sword. London: James Currey; Saul, J.S., 1999. Rethinking the experiences of the southern African liberation movements. In Hyslop, J. (ed.), African democracy in the era of globalisation. Johannesburg: Witwatersand University Press, pp.167–178. 38 Blaut, J.M., 1993. The colonizer’s model of the world. New York: The Guilford Press. 39 Cabral, The weapon of theory. Op. cit., p.8.. 40 Cabral, A., 1979. Unity and struggle: speeches and writings of Amílcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review Press.

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41 Cabral, The weapon of theory. Op. cit. 42 Sithole, N., 1968. African nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. 43 Drew, A., 2000. Discordant identities and loyalties of the South African left. Aldershot: Ashgate. 44 Lowly, M., 1976. Marxists and the national question. New Left Review, 1(96), pp.81–100. 45 Southall, R., 2013. Liberation movements in power: party and state in southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press and James Currey. 46 Cabral, The weapon of theory. Op. cit., p.9. 47 Ekeh, P.P., 1975. Colonialism and the two publics in Africa: a theoretical statement. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17(1), pp.91–112. 48 Diop, C., 1991. Civilisation or barbarism: an authentic anthropology, Translated by Yaa-Lengi Meema Ngemi. Edited by Harold J. Salemson and Marjolijn de Jager. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, p.355. 49 Bell, D., 1960. The end of ideology: on the exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties. Harvard: Harvard University Press. 50 Hayden, G., 2006. African politics in comparative perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Meredith, M., 2005. The fate of Africa: a history of fifty years of independence. New York: Public Affairs. 51 Nzongola-Ntalaja, Revolution and counter-revolution in Africa. Op. cit., p.33. 52 Mbaku and Ihonvhbere, Transition to democratic governance in Africa. Op. cit. 53 Mafeje, A., 1995. Theory of democracy and the African discourse. In Chole, E. and Ibrahim, J. (eds), Democratization processes in Africa: problems and prospects. Dakar: CODESRIA, pp.54–67. 54 Mafeje, A., 2002. Democratic governance and new democracy in Africa: agenda for the future. Unpublished paper presented at the African Forum for Envisioning Africa, 26–29 April 2002, Nairobi, Kenya, p.7. 55 Shivji, I., 2003. The struggle for democracy. Unpublished paper. Author’s copy. 56 Cabral, The weapon of theory. Op. cit., p.8. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., p.9. 59 Ibid., p.11. 60 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Op. cit. 61 Nzongola-Ntalaja, Revolution and counter-revolution in Africa. Op. cit. 62 Mwakikagile, G., 2006. Life under Nyerere. Dar es Salaam: New Africa Press, p.113. 63 Cabral, The weapon of theory. Op. cit., p.4. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ake, C. 1979. Social science as imperialism: the theory of political development.

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Isaac Bangani Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle Hashi Kenneth Tafira Archie Mafeje Research Institute, University of South Africa, South Africa

ABSTRACT The national question, social formations and liberation in the post-colony have re-emerged as subjects of both academic and political debate, especially in Africa. Isaac Bangani Tabata’s contribution to the South African political scene has been effaced from the intellectual scene as part of a tradition of silencing and erasing in the country’s historiography. This privileges those who were aligned to the African National Congress (ANC) in the struggle and, to some extent, those of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) persuasion, at the expense of many others who contributed both to thinking about liberation and to prosecuting the struggle for liberation. Thus, South African colonial modernity has followed a trajectory of epistemic silences, closures and enclosures, first by colonial/apartheid whitedom and later by black officialdom and intellectuals. The silencing of Tabata and other radical philosophers of liberation deprives the southern African region of interesting thoughts regarding crucial questions in the cause of decolonisation and Africanisation of thought about the idea of liberation. Drawing from my fuller analysis in my book, Black Nationalist Thought in South Africa,1 this chapter has two purposes: to reverse the muting of Tabata by providing space for us to interact with his voice on pertinent political questions of the South, and to testify that his thought contributes to shifting the geography of reason.

INTRODUCTION Isaac Bangani Tabata contributed significantly to radical political thought about the liberation and decolonisation of African society. His interface

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with political and historical questions of his time politically and intellectually has the potential to reveal ground-breaking thought , yet this has not been explored. Of course, my book Black Nationalist Thought in South Africa attempts to fill this void, but it will be inadequate to close this gap in writings on black philosophy and history.2 From his participation in the All-African Convention (AAC) in the 1930s to his involvement with the NonEuropean Unity Movement (NEUM) in the 1940s and 1950s, Tabata was instrumental in shaping the discourse of liberation and the theorisation of the South African national question, social formation and the agrarian question. He was also influential in dissecting the real South African colonial/apartheid problem and broader African political questions. Despite his contribution to the South African political scene, Tabata has seemingly been written out of the South African and African intellectual scene. This has to do with a tradition of silences and erasures in the country’s historiography and political thought. Those located outside the dominant national narrative have suffered the same fate as Tabata. Like the colonial and apartheid officialdom, the post-apartheid dispensation, dominated by the African National Congress (ANC), has participated in the muting of critical African political thought that held divergent views regarding the struggle for liberation and freedom futures. This chapter contends that Tabata’s intellectual contribution – especially regarding long-standing issues like the national question and the purpose and trajectory of the liberation struggle3  – deserves reflecting on. This forms part of seeking a shift in the paradigms about such African subjects, which are contaminated with Eurocentric assumptions about the nation-state, postcoloniality, liberation, freedom and independence.

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The personal is political in the realm of radical political thought. People embody the thought they epitomise and their intellectualism is linked to their biography. We begin with the biography of Tabata for two reasons: the first is to place the ideas that he propounded in the context of his upbringing, which is also crucial for us to understand his consciousness; the second is because, contrary to the idea that biography is just a story, it is in fact a story plus theory – it is about the subject, the method and theory.4  Isaac Bangani Tabata was born in 1909 near Queenstown in the eastern side of the Cape colony. He studied at Lovedale College and the University

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of Fort Hare, but was forced to quit in order to work as a truck driver. He joined the multiracial Lorry Drivers Union and the Cape African Voters Association. He was politically self-educated, read leftist literature and grew fond of ideas in Marxism, like many who became politicised at the time at institutions of higher learning. He co-founded the AAC in 1935, a movement which he described in one pamphlet as ‘one more step in the political development of a people’. It was designed to respond comprehensively to the nature of South African society, which he summarised as ‘a complex structure with multiracial antagonisms … rent with the clash of conflicting classes … riddled with a destructive racialism’.5  In 1943, the AAC formed the NEUM, which, more than any other body, made the land and agrarian question a principal preoccupation of the liberation struggle. It therefore focused on land-hungry masses as the motive forces to be mobilised in order to overthrow the colonial/imperial/apartheid system and install a peasant-led order.6 Tabata believed democracy would be achieved via the hegemony of the proletariat, together with the African peasantry, on the basis that the colonial and apartheid situation had created a huge class of African peasants and a black proletariat who could lead the liberation struggle to its effective end. Tabata belonged to the frame of intellectual-activists who combined theory and activism in the pursuit of real change in the living conditions of the people. He thus developed, presented and published his thought on these conditions, on the purpose of the struggle, on the limitations of the struggle as it was waged in the 1940s and 1950s, and on the meaning of the freedom that was sought. Reiland Rabaka writes extensively on this in relation to the likes of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi and Amílcar Cabral and the black radical intellectual traditions they emerged from, in order to show that, in these, there was also a dialectical interface between radical thought and revolutionary political action.7 On this basis, Rabaka argues that there is a dearth of ‘dialectical deconstruction and reconstruction of black radical politics’,generally, and black radical thought, in particular.8 Such a reconstruction would reveal how these critical African thinkers entered into critical dialogue with ‘specific historical happenings, cultural conditions, and political practices both within and without the African world’.9 Like critical theory broadly, black radical thought is aimed at the transformation of society, with the hope of thus eliminating the human misery experienced by those on the periphery.10  As Patricia Hill Collins put it, such theory is critical in that it is committed to justice, not just for its own group, but for all humanity.11 

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Lucius Outlaw opines that there is a particular turn in critical theory when it comes to black radical thought: it ‘provides a context of our understanding with which w Amílcar e people of African descent (and others) can assess our situations and achieve enhanced clarity regarding which concrete historical possibilities are in our best interest’.12 Such radical black thought should not be treated as mere derivatives of critical thought from the West, which leads to a description of this thought as Marxist or as disciples of Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault and so forth, because that is to call into question the intellectual independence and originality of thought born of oppression.13 It is to misunderstand that the thought was born in response to the real lived experiences and observations particular to black thinkers’ environment and time.14  Tabata wrote several pamphlets and books in the same frame of mind, with the aim of identifying the condition of his people, which pointed to historical possibilities for liberation and ending the human misery that the black peasants and proletariat in South Africa experienced. His works include ‘The Rehabilitation Scheme, A New Fraud’, which elaborated on the intrigues of the Smuts government that economically enslaved Africans by further depriving them of land and livestock and coercing them into mines and onto farms as cheap labour.15 Through his voice and that of others in the AAC, peasant resistance was given impetus and the scheme was vehemently resisted. He wrote ‘The Boycott as Weapon of Struggle’, which outlined his major political thought – that is, non-collaboration with the oppressor.16 In the early 1950s, he published a book, Education for Barbarism, under Prometheus Press.17 It responded to the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which aimed to mentally retard African pupils and teachers. In 1950, his book The Awakening of a People was published by the AAC, as a history of the political development of blacks.18 It goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, when groups like Imbumba YaManyama were founded. It discusses 1912, when the ANC was formed, and the early 1920s, when the Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU) was founded as the movement for African workers: it deals with the period up to the birth of the AAC and the NEUM. The pamphlet ‘The Revolutionary Road for South Africa’ was published in 1969, while Tabata was in exile.19 In 1956, he was banned and confined to Cape Town for five years. In 1962, he formed the African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA), as a political wing of the Unity Movement, and became its foundation president. He left South Africa in 1963 and ended up in exile in Zambia, where he spent a large part of his life.

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The basic tenet of Tabata’s thought was unity of the oppressed groups in South Africa. Tabata insisted that unity was a means to liberation. The oppression in South Africa was indivisible, and thus affected a whole people. The oppressed had a responsibility to reject trusteeship, assert full equality, and see themselves as equal to other human beings, given the generations of oppression fostered by the machinery of a racist state with its legal and ideological weaponry, which hindered the oppressed from thinking independently for and by themselves. However, when the people awaken, they begin to inculcate ideas about equality, build confidence and self-reliance, and challenge the dominant ideas of the enemy class, its policies, class interests and whatever motivates its actions. In this way, they choose allies in the struggle – those suffering the same debilitations and the same political aspirations – thus charting an independent path.20 Liberation of the mind releases latent energies, sheds the inferiority complex and enables the people to advance forward with new hope and determination. The first approach was organising into a group and incorporating and uniting various wings of the oppressed under a single movement. Importantly, the oppressed had to determine what they really aspired to, rather than merely stepping into the former rulers’ shoes. Tabata proposed a federal structure that accommodated the Coloureds who belonged to the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department (Anti-CAD) and the Indians in the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), for purposes of unifying all non-Europeans in the struggle against segregation. He thought the struggle by oppressed black Africans, the Coloureds and the Indians shared aims and methods, and therefore that it would make sense to combine forces to achieve greater progress toward the shared aims. This was because they faced the same draconian discriminatory laws, such as the Native Labour Regulation Act of 1913 (amended in 1942), the Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 (amended in 1937), the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1937, the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1937, and the Master and Servants Act and the Factories Act of 1941. Tabata was of the view that the ramifications of discrimination that black Africans, Coloureds and Indians experienced created a need for non-white unity. The Coloured Affairs Department was established by Prime Minister Jan Smuts in 1943 as an advisory body, which was staffed by 20 government-appointed Coloured men. This galvanised Coloured leaders who were critical of racially discriminatory institutions into resistance, in the same way that the Native Affairs Department galvanised radical black Africans. In this sense, critical Coloureds shared the determination to oppose

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IB Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle

UNITY, NON-COLLABORATION AND BOYCOTT AS WEAPONS OF STRUGGLE

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and reverse discriminatory practices with radical black Africans, making an all-non-white unity against the white oppressor all the more desirable. By December 1943, the AAC and the National Anti-CAD came together to form the Unity Movement. It was established on the basis of the principle of non-collaboration with the system, which took the form of boycotting all mechanisms established by the system to incorporate black Africans and Coloureds. Thus, non-collaboration and boycotts became key methods of the Unity Movement’s approach to the struggle until the 1980s. Tabata refuted the claim that the Unity Movement was anti-white or racialist by saying, ‘In fact racialism is foreign to it and indeed wholly contradictory to its principles. Racialism is an enemy of Black unity.’21 The Unity Movement, of course, was dictated by objective conditions, where various black groups were subjected to racial oppression over and above economic exploitation. One major weakness among the forces fighting the racial discrimination at the time was that the masses entrusted to intellectuals the duty to speak for them and lead them based on their personality and prestige. But these intellectuals had shown weak commitment to the principles of defending the interests of the masses by fighting the system that sought to oppress them. Indeed, being labelled an NRC (referring to the Native Representative Council, set up by the colonial governments to co-opt black elites) had become a sort of badge of honour for African leaders in the late 1930s and 1940s, according to Tabata. Therefore, with a weak commitment to principle and an absence of checks and balances, opportunism gained foothold among forces prosecuting the struggle. As a result, compromise and collaboration displaced the spirit and resistance that manifested in the first AAC conference. Further, although the AAC had since the beginning accommodated all non-whites as members, it came to be dominated by Coloured and black African radicals, especially in the Cape. Tabata addressed the AAC conference on 16 December 1941, criticising the ANC for refusing to join the AAC and thus rejecting the unity of all political organisations representing the oppressed. He decried the ANC’s failure to enable the formation of an African parliament. Tabata wanted this alliance of forces opposed to white oppression and saw unity with the ANC as a bid to unite African people as a whole. He argued: Now for us unity is not an end in itself but a means to an end. We do not clamour for unity at all merely because it is pleasant to be together along the lines of the popular ditty, ‘the more we are together, the happier we shall be.’ For us unity is a necessity, it is the means whereby we shall attain

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our freedom.22

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It eminently suits the master to foster these artificial differences and supposed superiorities. The curious thing is that he has always found no more willing assistants in the game of divide and rule than the slaves themselves, who guard the rigid barriers with an almost religious zeal. The master sets the fashion in ideas and attitudes. He is supercilious towards his ‘inferiors’ and the slave in turn looks down his nose at those whom he considers to be his inferiors … he is blind to the very thing which binds all the groups together – a common misery, humiliation, destitution. In a word, common slavery.23

He added:

IB Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle

However, unity talks with the ANC broke down because of disagreements about participation in the Native NRC and collaboration in institutions designed by the white oppressive system for non-whites. The unity Tabata envisaged would have brought all groups together to confront a common enemy and to reject all its attempts to co-opt the black elite. Tabata believed that unity was essential in combating the divide-and-rule tactics of the government:

Here we have the spectacle of a whole people whose humiliation and serfdom have been maintained by a simple trick of dividing them amongst themselves. They who have been deprived of their land, stripped of all human rights, reduced to a position of harlotry in the land of their forefathers, the only land they know, have taken the weapons devised for their destruction and with their own hands have taken it against themselves.24

For Tabata, the leadership had already failed and abandoned the masses, forcing them to rely on themselves increasingly. In his assessment, the oppressed masses were fast losing trust in their leader after much promise since the founding of the Unity Movement. At the same time, white rulers had intensified their oppressive measures, seeking to force the oppressed into perpetual servitude. Tabata saw no way out of this quagmire but the obliteration of all factional divisions and differences to bolster unity in the face of an emboldened common enemy. On the AAC’s sixth anniversary, Tabata observed that there was knavish submission by leaders in the Movement and across black formations to the ruling class. The leaders, he said, had turned their attention to maintaining the goodwill of the authorities by ensuring that the masses did nothing that would improve their lot or challenge the status quo. The leaders had given themselves the task of reconciling the oppressed and the oppressor, and of avoiding conflict even

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when it was necessary to achieve justice for the masses. It had become their task, he observed, to bring about the acceptance of oppression, not the determination to overthrow it. Although African leaders were part of the oppressed, they had certain privileges they clung to steadfastly in fear of falling into the deprivations and humiliations that their less fortunate followers suffered. Tabata launched incessant critiques of the leaders for trying to make the AAC toothless by entering into negotiations with Prime Minister Jan Smuts. He lambasted their courting parliamentary representation as a ‘fraud’ and insisted that the AAC was duty-bound to explain to the masses that they could not expect justice to be achieved through this sham representation, as it was not designed to change their material conditions. In any case, he said, they would not through this means get higher wages, land, houses or education, but they would remain slaves as long as they accepted and submitted to slavery legislation. Tabata rejected the tutelage of white liberals; in his view, they were no better than conservative white racists, since both believed in the inferiority and subjugation of blacks. For Tabata, the function of liberals was to make oppression palatable, to foster false hopes in the ‘good intentions’ of the government. Of course, the liberals had a stranglehold on the African leaders because the latter had been educated by them and the former appeared to champion African rights, while their allegiance lay with the ruling class. The African leaders of the time had interests attuned to those of the oppressors and in fact were part of the abhorrent system. Worse still, liberals acted as conciliators while in fact reconciling the oppressed to their chains. He lumped the NRC together with white liberals like Ballinger and Molteno, because of the shared danger they posed to the united struggle of the oppressed. He said: I maintain that one has to be in the skin of the oppressed to feel and suffer as an African does, if he wants to represent him. This representation therefore is a farce. Even if there were, not three white representatives of six and half million Africans, but thirty, it would still be sham representation.25

Believing the parliamentary representation to be a sham, Tabata thought the NRC was ‘neither native, nor representative nor council’,26 because it was a mere spectacle and the most humiliating insult for Africans. In his view, it was ineffectual, because it would not deal with the colonial injustices, principal among which was land dispossession. 300

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IB Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle

That non-collaboration is a key feature of resistance politics generally and in South Africa is not a subject of debate. It was also a feature of resistance politics in Europe in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, when Europeans opposed first Napoleonic domination, then fascism and later Nazi rule.27  Non–collaboration was based on the understanding of how important collaborators were to the enemy and ‘how the war against them had to be as hard and unremitting as the war against the Nazis and their Gestapo; how Vidkun Quisling contributed the name in South Africa’.28 Any person who cooperated with these institutions was a ‘quisling’ who should be personally boycotted. However, quislings were difficult to detect, because they spoke the same language as the people and were of the same complexion. Generations of activists have borrowed the term and strategy of boycott to demonstrate non-collaboration. The term ‘boycott’ was first used to describe the reaction of oppressed and exploited peasants in Ireland to a certain Captain Boycott who oppressed them. He was later ostracised and forced to yield, and this practice came to be known as boycotting. Non-cooperation used by activists as a form of resistance against an oppressive system became popularly known as boycotting. The choice of boycott as a weapon of struggle is of course dictated by peculiar existing conditions.29 Boycott means arousing of consciousness, cutting binds with quislings, interrupting rulers’ plans and also the masses ‘withholding their consent’ to ‘frustrate these plans, which cannot work without their [the masses’] cooperation’.30  It also means rejecting inferiority, restoring of self-respect and showing the masses’ strength born of unity in action.31 The concept of non-collaboration was premised on the unity of those sharing limitations as a result of oppression as well as shared interests and aspirations. So, it is premised on the brotherhood born of oppression.32 For Tabata, the policy on non-collaboration signified a break with the past to undermine the influence of the herrenvolk (master race) on South African society. He stated that non-collaboration distinguished between ‘the genuine fighters for liberation and the many compromisers and opportunists, the wolves in sheep skins’.33 African participation in the NRC was therefore a ‘farce and a mockery’. In any case, three whites represented eight million Africans while two million whites were represented by 150 representatives. This sham ensured that the interests of the white ‘aristocracy’ were served without interruption or opposition from African representatives. It fooled Africans into believing that they were represented, giving them perpetual hope of justice that would never come. For Tabata, the African representatives had been sent to parliament ‘not to see justice, but to make laws to suit the mine owners and the big farmers, to force the Africans to go to

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the mines and the farms as cheap labour’.34 For that reason, Africans were obliged to use boycott and non-collaboration as weapons of struggle. The idea of unity led to many meetings of the ANC, the AAC and other interested groups and individuals. Tabata suggested the conditions for unity that the AAC should put forward, which included the acceptance of the AAC/ NEUM ten-point programme, the principle of unity of all non–Europeans, the federal structure of the Convention, and the policy of ‘non–collaboration with the oppressor’.35 This posture was part of a long tradition within the national liberation movement, but had become contested as diversity among political organisations grew. The non-collaboration point was made specifically with bodies like the Bunga and the NRC, which were criticised for collaborating with the white oppressive system, in mind. On many occasions, Tabata insisted that these bodies should reject inferiority and institutions created for an ‘inferior’ race and that they should demand full democratic rights as a basis for unity, for by non-collaboration, Tabata meant ‘unwillingness on our part to work with those institutions which were created for our own oppression’.36 A collaborator, for him, ‘was one who voluntarily supported and worked with political institutions created for the oppression of the black man’.37 However, the question of non-collaboration scuppered attempts to establish the All African National Congress, as the conditions laid out above could not be agreed to by all. Tabata was among those who thought the ANC was opposed to the unity idea for fear of being exposed as collaborators, meaning ‘at the same time they would be committing themselves if they accepted non-collaboration and they didn’t want to commit themselves’.38 In a letter to Nelson Mandela of the Congress Youth League (CYL) in 1948, Tabata outlined the critical importance of founding political organisations on principles, and for organisations not to waiver from these principles, however inconvenient it may seem with the passage of time. He argued that seeking to unite oppressed people on the course of non-collaboration with the government was one critical principle in the South African struggle. He said he was opposed to any organisation committed to collaborating with the apartheid government and thus promoting the disunity of the oppressed. Tabata made a detailed case for the AAC as a platform for uniting all African people. He explained why he thought the oppressor was so determined to destroy any possibility of unity among the oppressed, and why they sought and found willing stooges like Dr Langalibalele Dube, who broke away from the Convention with the whole of Natal to this end. Tabata observed that the white press embedded in the system of oppression found it easy to extol Dube as a great statesman, a moderate, a practical politician and ‘in fact

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IB Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle

an epitome of all virtues’.39 They crowned him with a halo of greatness and conferred a doctorate on him. In Tabata’s view, Dube embraced tribalism and led the Zulus back to tribalism in the middle of the struggle against oppression. Tabata explained that the likes of Selope Thema and Albert Xuma followed suit, breaking the ANC away from the AAC, thus attracting praise from the white press, which ironically built them up into great leaders and champions of the cause of African people. Tabata thought this disunity in African resistance politics enabled the oppressors to push Africans back to ‘the pre AAC era of sectional, factional and fratricidal strife’.40  He underlined that without ‘concessions, compromises or deviations’,41  the AAC rejected the superiority of the white race over the black and the idea of trusteeship, segregation, sectionalism and tribalism. He argued that, in contrast, the ANC allowed these tendencies to fester even within its ranks. He told Mandela that its conduct and policy helped sow confusion among the people and thus enabled the oppressor to find foothold among African people. The fact that some leaders of the ANC were part of government’s institutions, like the NRC and Location Advisory Boards, proved his point. Tabata thought the CYL’s political posturing was problematic because, on the one hand it spoke the language that rejected inferiority, while on the other, as members of the ANC, they accepted inferiority and trusteeship with all its political manifestations, like the NRC, the Advisory Boards, the Bunga and others. For this reason, the CYL became ‘political Januses’ with two heads facing in two different directions at one and the same time.42 Finally, Tabata advised Mandela that young activists like him entering resistance politics needed to learn a habit of basing their political conduct on firm principles, saying if he needed to swim against the stream, he needed to be ready to. It is not clear how Mandela and the CYL replied to this plea, but it is clear they did not follow Tabata’s line of reasoning. The efforts to build unity between the AAC and the ANC would continue for another two years. African life day by day was reduced to ‘abject harlotry’, characterised by the deprivation of political rights, a lack of education, restriction of movement and a lack of employment. As a result, frustration among Africans rose sharply and confidence among Africans in ‘the justice of most white men’ was undermined.43 As a result, the need for unified action among Africans was seen as key to the unification of the main African political organisations, namely the ANC and the AAC, to form an All African National Congress with a common programme and common principles. It was the issue of non-collaboration that led to the collapse of the proposed unity. There were also difficulties in uniting with the Indian merchant

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class running the SAIC, which aligned intellectually with the ruling authorities. Of course the government was against unity of the oppressed and aimed at breaking it. It would commit and expend considerable resources to ensure that end. The colonial policy of divide and rule is quintessential and has always been the cornerstone of white domination.

THE AGRARIAN AND LAND QUESTION

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Tabata reckoned that the oppression and exploitation of Africans was the basis of the South African economic structure; their slave labour was the bedrock of this economy. They were paid very low wages. Legal mechanisms of the day squeezed the African off the land to facilitate his labouring in mines and on farms. The denial of both land and franchise went hand in hand. Tabata observed that the major overarching problem was land hunger and lack of equitable distribution of resources: ‘In other words, our problem in this country is an agrarian problem.’44 To solve this problem and equally distribute land would require ‘a radical re-adjustment of the whole political, economic and social set-up in this country’.45 He added that the need therefore existed for non-whites to be politically liberated: ‘Thus we see the direct connection between our national, political liberation and the solution of the basic problem, that is, the agrarian problem. This connection we must always bear in mind in all our political activities.’46 In 1945 the Smuts government planned a grand programme called the Rehabilitation Scheme, which aimed at further reducing the land peasants had in the reserves. The 1945 Rehabilitation Scheme, which the Transkei Bunga readily accepted, meant regimentation of labour, under-stocking, malnutrition, disease and more land hunger for the peasants. Of course, the scheme was part of a broader native policy to oppress, exploit and dominate black people. Tabata observed that, as always in the past, the rulers tried to make it out as something which would greatly benefit Africans. While the majority in the Transkei opposed the Rehabilitation Scheme when it was first applied, the Bunga and the chiefs accepted it, thus showing the damaging effect of collaboration on the struggle for justice and freedom. Members of the AAC in the Transkei explained to the people that institutions like the Bunga had to be rejected ‘because they are foreign to a democratic system of government’, that they are part of ‘the system of trusteeship’ ‘oppression’.47 In any case, the colonial Land Acts had resulted in overpopulation, disease and unproductivity in the reserves and it was therefore improbable to talk of rehabilitation while the land question was

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IB Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle

unresolved. The Glen Grey Act (1894), conceived by Cecil John Rhodes, restricted ownership of land by Africans and introduced individual land tenure to break up the system of collective community ownership of land among Africans, in order to create a class of landless blacks.48 Since the labour and land questions were intricately bound together, the African had no incentive to leave the land to go and work; it was thus necessary for colonialists to deprive him of that land. The Glen Grey Act reached its zenith through the passing of the 1913 Land Act, which bestowed on whites the ownership of 87 per cent of the land, while Africans were pushed off the land into wage labour. The 1913  Land Act left a lasting scar on the black South African existential experience. The Act was also greatly responsible for accelerated African proletarianisation and increased peasantisation. Tabata perceived that the two main problems facing the theoretical aptitude of the liberation movement were the agrarian problem and national oppression, and he showed how they were interconnected.49 The implication was that agrarian aspirations had to be conjoined with national aspirations. Most of the people were peasants working as labourers on white farms and mines, while others were crowded in the reserves. Migrant labourers were actually peasants tied to temporary contracts, with their homes being in the reserves where they would be dumped should they be unable to work due to injury, sickness or resistance. Africans, being peasants, were primarily engaged in agriculture, but as no land was available for this, the problem of South Africa became primarily an agrarian problem. Since the peasants were the overwhelming majority, they carried the weight of the struggle. The fundamental problem in the country had to be the agrarian question which, in Tabata’s view, was the pivot and axis of the struggle. To emphasise this fact, the slogan ‘Land and Liberty!’ was used at the Unity Movement conference in 1951, showing the inseparability of the national struggle for land and the struggle for the franchise. It also illustrated a deeper understanding of peasant agency in the struggle, where the land problem was at the core. Tabata identified the second problem as national oppression. Nonwhites did not have political rights and were excluded from Parliament and all executive, legislative and judiciary institutions. All power resided in the hands of the white minority, who used this power to dominate blacks in order to facilitate the latter’s oppression/exploitation. As a result, all nonwhites became nationally oppressed. The African became a non-national in his or her own country and was reduced to the state of a foreigner. Tabata stated, ‘We do not ask permission to be here. We are here by right and are entitled to all rights of this country.’50 Given this observation, the problems facing the oppressed and, subsequently, their solutions were interconnected

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and bound together. Landlessness for the blacks was not an accident, but a deliberate instrument for economic exploitation and national oppression; it was thus the cornerstone of the economic edifice of South Africa. the land shortage was necessary to the economic structure of South Africa.51 It is from landlessness that the migrant labour system emanated. This system gave impetus to forced labour on farms while also facilitating depressed wages. The results were unequal wages based on skin colour. Again, super-exploitation was made possible because all political power resided in the hands of employers; conversely, non-whites lacked political rights. The demand therefore was for the total abolition of all discriminatory laws, nothing less than full citizenship, full and equal franchise, and the equitable distribution of the land for all men and women irrespective of colour, religious creed or race. Tabata added that anyone who fell short of these demands must be regarded as an enemy ‘who wants to come close to us in order to divert the struggle from its purpose’.52 He argued that some denied the agrarian problem and the national problem. They maintained that since South Africa is a highly industrialised country, the solution lay along the road other industrialised countries in Europe followed, and that the militant’s task was to organise and mobilise the working class to lead a socialist revolution in order to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. However, this did not fully explain the political and economic situation in South Africa. They also did not realise that ‘white workers, the enfranchised, privileged white workers in South Africa, bear the same relation to the disenfranchised black workers as the Roman proletariat bears to the Roman slaves’.53  The white left began organising racial trade unions and placed itself at the centre of the struggle, which led to reformism and economism. This policy of the Communist Party brought non-whites under its control. Tabata observed that the Communist Party either controlled or killed an organisation. Black organisations could not fight under their own banner and grow into a permanent independent force: In other words, the people are kept defenceless so that when the next onslaught takes place the Communist Party can always appear as their champion. At all times the Communist Party gets hold of one or other of the leaders of the blacks and uses him as a decoy.54 

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ON IMPERIALISM AND NATIONALISM Tabata was very familiar with the international situation and could be described as an internationalist. He saw similarities between the local struggles of the oppressed and those in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa–everywhere where oppressed people were struggling to shake off the yoke of oppression caused by imperialism/capitalism. The question and problem of liberating the oppressed in South Africa was inseparable from the economic and political liberation of the African continent. The struggle by non-Europeans in South Africa was not unique; in fact, it had been experienced elsewhere in the world. Unequal wealth distribution – the co- existence of lavish wealth and extreme poverty – had also been seen in Europe. This made the struggle in South Africa similar to struggles of the oppressed in the world. Liberation must be seen in its entirety to combat the overarching and sinister plans of imperialism. Tabata perceived that South Africa was the base of Western and local imperialism. If she became free and became a socialist state it would lead to the liberation of Central and East Africa. That would irreparably upset the plans of imperialism. However, imperialists were aware of this fact and therefore were compelled to do everything in their power to prevent that promise and that prospect. Of course, Western condemnation of apartheid was hypocritical, because it continued to support successive apartheid regimes and continued to shore up South African capital. For Tabata, imperialism and neo-colonialism, spearheaded by the USA, used methods beyond bullets, coercion and brute strength. Western imperialism established new exploitative capitalist relations with ex-colonies without the stigma of racism. Imperialism always envisages the end of an old era and the beginning of a new one, but the continued existence of capitalism is ensured through expansion and heavy investment: ‘In other words, imperialism is deeply concerned with economic domination of Africa. This means that, while granting the African states constitutional independence, it ensures the economic stranglehold over them.’56 It employs subtle

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IB Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle

where the preponderating conscious element was drawn from the white petit-bourgeois intellectual section, which was responsible for formulating policies. This section, Tabata averred, was susceptible to ruling-class ideas, since ‘their daily existence connects them with this class in manifold ways, through social and economic bonds. In fact, it is the very milieu of their existence’.55

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and surreptitious intrigues, like the incorporation of a certain stratum of the colonised as partners in the imperial machinery. When colonialists hand over self-government, they invite this layer to look after the colonisers’ investments. They do this through Kasavubus and Tshombes, who are tasked with ventriloquist performances with the Belgians speaking through them. At that time (1961), the crisis in Congo and imperialist manoeuvres disgusted African nationalists and revolutionaries everywhere. Tabata descended heavily on intellectuals whom he described as the ‘cream to be skimmed off’ so they could be part of the system. These people regarded themselves as second-class whites. These received ‘crumbs’ and expended a great amount of energy trying to attach themselves to liberals. The liberals were blamed for creating the ‘exempted natives’. The leaders, who were mainly men of letters, were accused of failing the masses. In a repressive environment, the avowed intention of white rulers was to keep the people under perpetual servitude. The leadership had a knack for knavish submission to authorities and they ensured that the people remained docile and passive and did not do anything that would improve their lot or challenge the status quo. After all, it is their political task to promote conciliation, not conflict, between the oppressed and the oppressors. It is therefore their task to promote the acceptance of oppression, not the commitment to undo it.57 For Tabata, the ANC in South Africa represented and typified this tendency described above. Tabata described the movement as stooges of imperialism, as stooges of South African liberals and the Communist Party which, has been explained above, was indistinguishable from the liberals. He thought that liberals and the Communist Party controlled and misled the ANC and politically confused the oppressed people. If the liberal bourgeoisie, who were part of the herrenvolk as well, succeeded in dislodging the die-hard Afrikaner racists from power, black faces would be incorporated into Parliament; however, this would not mean full equality for all. Tabata further stated that the reason why the ANC actively collaborated with liberals was so that they would be beneficiaries in a neo-colonial order. Again, that was the reason why they received financial and material support from liberals at home, abroad and everywhere. He believed that in politics, compromise between the oppressor and the oppressed was an anathema, a contradiction in terms. The compromise could, in his view, only happen on the basis of equilibrium between conflicting parties in the struggle. Short of this, the so-called compromise would only be a form of capitulation of the oppressed.

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In early 1953, the Minister of Native Affairs, Hendrik Verwoerd, introduced the Bantu Education Act, which stated that the purpose of education was to train and teach people in accordance with their opportunities in life. This entailed two separate education systems: one for whites and the other for blacks (native education), in keeping with the requirements of state policy. The outcome of the Eiselen Commission on education only meant ‘educating the Black child for a subordinate society’.58 Education was used to arrest the development of black people while at the same time upholding white domination. It was logical to deny Africans education, because if they were educated, who would do the manual labour? Tabata opined that through manual training, black children were forced to build muscle rather than brain power. They were given manual instruction rather than education in the liberal arts, and religious education was made key to their education, all as part of the scheme to produce inferior blacks. Verwoerd’s attempt at Bantu Education, he thought, was ‘to wrench the African from the progress of civilization of mankind and condition him for life in a backward, tribalised community. In other words, it is education for barbarism’.59 In the Bantustans, the government offered jobs or cash to Africans as reward for doing manual jobs designed for blacks. In parallel was the education of black university students, designed to create a black middle class to be co-opted into the government’s machinery of domination as teachers, clerks and Bantustan bureaucrats employed by the oppressive system. In 1951, the National Party (NP) government passed the Bantu Authorities Act, abolishing the NRC and replacing it with a hierarchical system of tribal authorities made up of government-approved chiefs and advisers. Following military conquest and the breaking up of tribal bonds and the power of chiefs who were rallying points of resistance, colonisers faced the dilemma of how to govern the conquered natives. Missionaries came to their aid: ‘policemen-chiefs’ were created under an atmosphere of surveillance. Apartheid ideologues successfully applied this policy. The apartheid government saw the Bantu Authorities Act as a way to give Africans their ‘own’ administration, which would be modernised to align with the apartheid system. In October 1958, Prime Minister Verwoerd said ‘clear contact with chiefs’ was the official mandate of the Native Affairs Department (NAD). He had brought the Transkei chiefs – Botha Sigcau, Victor Poto, Wabana Makaula, Sabata Mtirara, Kaizer Matanzima, Sandy Majele and George Moshesh – to Pretoria to inform them of the decision to do away with native representatives in Parliament and to designate chiefs alongside their

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EDUCATING THE BARBARIANS

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tribal headmen as the legitimate mouthpieces of African people. This was a plan to fortify the Bantu authorities system, which had been rejected by Africans earlier. Tabata’s critique revealed that Verwoerd’s efforts to create Bantustans were an attempt to create Tshombes in South Africa – the chiefs that were to be used against the black masses. In South Africa, the intellectuals accepted ‘developing along our own lines’ and the dummy institutions, for their comfort. They disavowed boycott as a weapon, because it threatened their existence as collaborators. In any case, boycott constitutes non-collaboration. For Tabata, ‘developing along our own lines’ meant that people continued to be without rights, land and the vote and harassed by pass laws. It meant the continued acceptance of inferiority and segregation; Tabata was of the opinion that the segregated institutions created for a child-race were instruments of their own domination. In 1959, Tabata published a seminal book entitled Education for Barbarism, a searing critique of both Bantu Authorities and Bantu Education. Through this education, he noted, an intelligentsia emerged which, though small in number, had begun to exercise an influence out of all proportion to its size. It was able to speak the language of the rulers. These intellectuals were regarded as knowing the ways and customs of the white man and able to find their way about in the intricacies of the new system. Thus, the people looked up to them for guidance and reposed their faith in them. It was this circumstance that made the rulers turn to the intellectuals as a means of controlling the masses.60

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Instead of education liberating the oppressed people, it numbed and dumbed them using intellectuals, who became responsible for shackling the people’s minds. It was also necessary to arrest the African mind through education that promoted inferiority. Often it was the black teacher who enabled this. The effects of native education were not only about affecting the minds of those who attended school, but also about producing a section of intellectuals responsible for disseminating ideas of inferiority. From this cohort, African leadership conducted collaborationist politics. Since Africans were not allowed to pursue liberal professions, which would have enabled them to become independent earners of livelihoods, every educated black person became a clerk or teacher and depended on the state for a living. As intellectuals assumed the mantle of leadership, with the people looking up to them as they did the first generation, the second generation faced two choices: either being with the people to wage the struggle against the colonial government or siding with the latter against the people. If they associated with

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In other words, a wedge was driven between him and his people. His aspira-

IB Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle

the masses, they would be denounced as radicals and unreasonable. They would be treated with disdain by their masters and lose the little rewards and favours attached to being ‘a good boy’. The intellectual found amelioration that lessened the daily hardship of his life; ‘in other words he finds an irresistible attraction of becoming an “exempted native” and favours those actions likely to bring about his privileged position’.61  Compromise and gradualness tied them to the liberals. For the liberals, the ‘exempted native’ was most useful, as he accepted his ‘difference’ and his inferiority. Such a native was a creature who still accepted his place and was amenable to sweet reason. He could always be depended upon to transmit this line to the masses. Tabata reasons that as long as the masses follow this kind of leadership, their energies will be frittered away in temporary and temporising activities. For Tabata, during the early stages of conquest, Christianised Africans were indoctrinated with new ideas and were sequestrated from the life of their people. They were taught to think like their mission teachers, to have their outlook and worldview:

tions, to all intents and purposes, became those of his white tutor. They were diametrically opposed to those of his Black brothers who were resisting the aggressor. So successful was this plan that when wars broke out, the African evangelists and teachers either stood out or in some instances assisted the whites by giving them information concerning the doings of the people, their plans and military dispositions.’62

Conversely, the essence of education, according to Tabata, is imparting skills, building professions and disseminating ideas relevant to society. He wrote that education was carefully designed and organised so that children imbibe those moral, cultural and intellectual attitudes that are the essence of that society.63 He declared that ‘the Augean stables of the whole education system require drastic cleansing’.64

CONCLUSION The post-colony will remain a subject of much contestation of views about what it entails, what factors mark it and what implications it has for society. Not least among these contestations are Eurocentric and Africa-conscious perspectives on this important moment in the long duration of the history

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of Africa. Tabata sought, through thought and action, to contribute to advancing the cause of liberation of the black person from the ravages of colonialism and imperialism, including its epistemic forms. He sought to engage in a critical dialogue with the historical, political and social conditions of those he lived among in order to contribute to the process of eliminating human misery, true to traditional critical black political thought and black radical political activism. He sought to reason and explore ways in which political situations in Africa could be understood on the basis of political thought outside Eurocentrism. Tabata was a product of his time. The socioeconomic and socio-political conditions prevailing in South Africa shaped his worldview and outlook. It may be said that his writings and activities were responses to the sinister machinery of herrenvolk anti-black racism, but his perception was acute and prophetic, well ahead of his time. Because this resonates with the current search for a decolonial turn in education/ knowledge and in political struggles, it is important that intellectuals like Tabata be brought to life and breathe again.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

Tafira, H.K., 2016. Black nationalist thought in South Africa: the persistence of an idea of iberation. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

2 Ibid. 3

Taylor, D., 2014. The dynamics of revolution in South Africa. speeches and writ-

4

Harders, L., 2014. Legitimizing Biography: critical approaches to biographical

ings of IB Tabata. London: Resistance Books. research. Bulletin of the GHI, 55, pp.49–56. 5

Tabata, I.B., 1951. Landlessness is a means of exploitation. Lecture delivered to a meeting of the New Era Fellowship. Tabata Papers, Cape Town, 1951, p.30.

6

Kayser, R., 2002. Land and Llberty! The Non-European Unity Movement and the land question, 1933–1976. MA dissertation, University of Cape Town.

7 Rabaka, R., 2009. Africana critical theory: reconstructing the black radical tradition, from W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral. Lanham: Lexington Books. 8 Rabaka, Africana critical theory. Op. cit. p.xii. 9 Ibid. 10 Taylor, The dynamics of revolution in South Africa. Op. cit. 11 Collins, P.H., 1998. fighting words: black women and the search for social justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p.iv.

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Rowman and Littlefield, p.27. 13 Bogues, A., 2006. The human, knowledge and the word: reflecting on Sylvia Wynter. In Bogues, A. (ed.), After man, towards the human: critical essays on Sylvia Wynter. Kingston/Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, pp.315–338. 14 Bogues, A., 2003. Black heretics, black prophets: radical political intellectuals. New York: Routledge. 15 Tabata, I.B., n.d. The rehabilitation scheme, a new fraud. Available at https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/rehabilitation-scheme-new-fraud [Accessed 2 March 2012]. 16 Tabata, I.B., 1952 (1990). The boycott as weapon of struggle. Eikefontein: APDUSA. Available at https://staging.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/The%20 Boycott.pdf [Accessed 2 March 2012]. 17 Tabata, I.B., 1980. Education for barbarism: Bantu (apartheid) education in South Africa. London: Unity Movement of South Africa. 18 Tabata, I.B., 1974. The awakening of a people. Nottingham: Spokesman Books. 19 Tabata, I.B., 1969. The revolutionary road for South Africa. NEUM Papers, African Activst Archives, Michigan State University. 20 Duma, N.,1961. Next stage in the struggle for power. New Age, 9: n.p.

IB Tabata on the Purpose, Trajectory and Limitations of the Liberation Struggle

12 Outlaw, L., 2005. critical social theory in the interests of black folk. Lanham:

21 Tabata, The awakening of a people. Op. cit., n.p. 22 Tabata, I.B., 1941. A call to unity. Address delivered to the AAC conference, 16 December. Tabata Papers, Cape Town. 23 Tabata, The awakening of a people. Op. cit., p.3. 24 Ibid. 25 Tabata, A call to unity. Op. cit. 26 Ibid. 27 Rowe, M., 2005. Resistance, collaboration or third way? responses to Napoleonic rule in Germany. In Esdaile, C.J. (eds) Popular resistance in the French wars. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.67–90. 28 Alexander, N., 1989. Non-collaboration in the Western Cape, 1943–1963. In Wilmot, J. and Simons, M. (eds), The angry divide: social and economic history of the Western Cape. Cape Town: David Philip, pp.180–191. 29 Tabata, The boycott as weapon of struggle. Op. cit., p.8. 30 Ibid., p.12. 31 Ibid. 32 Tabata, I.B., 1949. A reply to JG Matthews’ article ‘Africans and Non-European Unity’. Inkundla YaBantu, 22 October. Tabata Papers, Cape Town. 33 Tabata, I.B., 1954. The agrarian problem. An address delivered to the Society of Young Africa, May. Tabata Papers, Cape Town, n.p. 34 Ibid.

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35 Neville, A. 2013. Thoughts on the new South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, p.8. 36 Tabata, The agrarian problem. Op. cit. 37 Ibid. 38 Review of the AAC/ANC National Executive Committee, in the minutes of the Annual AAC, December 1949. Tabata Papers. 39 Tabata, I.B., 1948. ‘On the organisations of the African people’, from I.B. Tabata to Nelson Mandela, 16 June, 1948. SA History online. Available at https://www. sahistory.org.za/archive/organisations-african-people-i-b-tabata-nelson-mandela-june-16-1948 [Accessed 12 April 2012]. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Tafira, Black nationalist thought in South Africa, Op. cit., p.231. 43 Tabata, A call to unity. Op. cit. 44 Landlessness is a means of exploitation. Op. cit. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Chinweizu, 1987. Decolonising the African mind. Lagos: Pero Books. 49 Tabata, The agrarian problem. Op. cit., n.p. 50 Tabata, Landlessness is a means of exploitation. Op. cit., n.p. 51 Ibid. 52 Tabata, The agrarian problem. Op. cit., n.p. 53 Tabata, Landlessness is a means of exploitation. Op. cit., n.p. 54 Tabata, The awakening of a people. Op. cit., n.p. 55 Ibid. 56 Tabata, I.B., 1960. Pan Africanist Congress venture in retrospect. September. Tabata Papers, Cape Town. 57 Tabata, The awakening of a people. Op. cit., pp.1–5, 24–25. 58 Tabata, Education for barbarism. Op. cit. 59 Ibid. 60 Tabata, The boycott as weapon of struggle. Op. cit., p.7. 61 Tabata, PPan Africanist Congress venture in retrospect. Op. cit., n.p. 62 Tabata, Landlessness is a means of exploitation. Op. cit., n.p. 63 Tabata, Education for barbarism. Op. cit. 64 Tabata, I.B., 1974. Imperialist conspiracy in Africa. Lusaka: Prometheus Publishing, n.p.

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Adebayo Adedeji on Africa’s Regional Integration and Self-Reliance Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, University of South Africa, South Africa

ABSTRACT As Africa continues to grapple with the challenge of determining the most appropriate strategy for actualising development, there have been key actors who have championed different aspects of the strategies. One of the key actors who has worked assiduously to foster regional integration and selfreliance in Africa is the late Professor Adebayo Adedeji, the Nigerian born, former executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). Using historical and documentary sources and analysis, this chapter examines the role that he played over the years in shaping theoretical and policy discourses on Africa’s development trajectory. His bold and consistent voice is put into context through engagement with his ideas and philosophy of what he considered the best way for Africa to attain inclusive development on its own terms. While his prescriptions have not been fully accepted and implemented, he has made an indelible mark on the development landscape of the continent. The chapter concludes that, regardless of the internal challenges that limited the possibility of implementing Adedeji’s recommendations, his ideas remain the most reliable and plausible ways out of the dependent and peripheral position Africa occupies in global affairs, both in the present and in the foreseeable future.

INTRODUCTION Over five decades since the majority of African countries attained political independence, the continent is still home to most of the world’s poorest countries, measured in terms of human development dimensions such

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as access to water, sanitation, health, decent jobs and education.1 The early post-independent gains made through the massive expansion of the bureaucracy, the establishment of state-led industrial enterprises, the establishment of universities and other institutions of higher learning, the expansion of hospitals, and the construction of new roads and other forms of development-enhancing infrastructures have, to a large extent, been eroded. This erosion of gains is the result of a combination of inept leadership at the domestic level, corruption, and the subjection of the continent to the logic of accumulation under the hubris of global capitalism.2 Decolonial scholars like Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni3 and Nelson Maldonado-Torres4 argue, that despite the façade of independence, coloniality continues to haunt Africa in terms of problems relating to questions of power, being and knowledge. The implications of this are evident in the continuity of the hierarchical structures of power, economical and social relations that took root during the colonial system of administration. Thus, Africa remains hostage to a political-economic system that is perpetually a caricature of reality. This is evident in the export of raw materials, the import of manufactured goods, and an over-reliance on foreign direct investment and foreign aid as a means of survival. With few exceptions, many African leaders have continued to look either to the West or, increasingly, to the East for so-called partnerships for development. Thus, a culture of dependence and an infantile sense of expectation of assistance from the former colonisers and new exploiters have remained stubbornly entrenched on the continent.5 Rather than riding the wave of the Pan-Africanist movement that inspired many to join the struggle for liberation that led most countries to political independence, since the end of colonial rule African leaders have maintained the artificial borders that imperialists created to make it easy for the continent to be exploited and perpetually subjugated. As Joseph Ki-zerbo argues, the maintenance of these borders left a trail of blood, tears and sorrow.6 Despite the continuation of what Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Brilliant Mhlanga7 referred to as the bondage of boundaries, regional integration has been recognised as one of the major strategies for fostering socio-economic development on the continent. To this end, African leaders have incorporated regional integration in virtually all development strategies that have been adopted since the 1960s. The key initiatives that African leaders have embarked on to achieve development through regional integration include the Lagos Plan of Action and the Final Act of Lagos of 1980, the Abuja Treaty of 1991, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) of 2001, and the nascent Agenda 2063 of the African Union (AU). Despite the

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lofty objectives and the high expectations that have underpinned the idea of regional integration, various factors have undermined the realisation of the integration agenda. These factors include a lack of political will, a politics of difference, a preoccupation with narrow economic integration (instead of a holistic integration of peoples and cultures), narrow nationalism, and ignorance of the history of African interactions before colonial rule.8 Additional debilitating factors have arisen due to external pressure, especially from France, which continues to pursue its suffocating domination of its former colonies. Certainly, a more integrated African continent that is anchored on the ideology of Pan-Africanism and African Personality would significantly whittle down the influence of France on these ex-colonies, which remain tied to its apron strings. As Adebayo Adedeji succinctly argues, even though France ruled parts of Africa through a regionally integrated arrangement, on the eve of its departure from Africa these colonies were bifurcated into tiny micro-states that can barely survive.9 Various actors have shaped the African integration agenda through their political commitments, intellectual engagements and civic activities. We have had political leaders (such as Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Amílcar Cabral, Ahmed Ben Bella, Julius Nyerere, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo), intellectuals (like Joseph Ki-zerbo, Ademola Oyejide, Kwesi Kwah Prah, Chinweizu and Dani Wadada Nabudere), bureaucrats (like Samuel Asante and Adebayo Adedeji) and civic actors (like Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem) who have understood the imperative of regional integration as a sine qua non for achieving not only economic development but also political relevance in a global system that is anchored on the logic of power asymmetry and racial superiority. This chapter focuses on the voice of Adekeye Adedeji in championing, validating and pursuing the agenda of regional integration and self-reliance in Africa. As Adebajo argues, Adedeji could be considered a prophet of regional integration alongside Casandra, in the league of Jean Monnet (one of the chief architects of European integration), as well as Raul Presbrich (who is credited with the integration of Latin America).10 Born in 1930 in Ijebu-Ode in Nigeria, Professor Adebayo Adedeji graduated from both London University (BSc and PhD in economics) and Harvard University (MPA). After working as an academic, he became a Cabinet minister in the military government of General Gowon (1966–1975), where he was responsible for the economic development and reconstruction of post-civil-war Nigeria. In this position, he played a catalytic role in regional integration efforts. Consequently, he is regarded as the founder and pioneer

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of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which he helped establish in May 1975 after more than three years of difficult negotiations with 16 countries with diverse spheres of influence (anglophone, francophone and lusophone). Based on his track record in both academia and government, Adedeji was appointed assistant secretary-General and executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in Addis Ababa in June 1975. He was later promoted to the rank of UN undersecretary-general in January 1978. He held this position with unrivalled success until 1991, when he resigned his appointment to return to his home – Nigeria. Apart from leading the UNECA to proffer alternative development strategies to the new-market orthodoxy of the time, Adedeji channelled his energy into the formation of regional economic communities, like the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). Adedeji was also one of the brains behind the following African-led development strategies, which are distinguished by their endogenous approaches to solving the myriad problems confronting the continent: (1) The Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa, 1980–2000 and the Final Act of Lagos (1980); (2) Africa’s Priority Programme for Economic Recovery 1986–1990 (APPER), which was later converted into the UN Programme of Action for Africa’s Economic Recovery and Development (UN–PAAERD) (1986); (3) the African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation (AAF-SAP) (1989); (4) the African Charter for Popular Participation for Development and Transformation (1990); and (5) the United Nations New Agenda for the Development of Africa in the 1990s (UN-NADAF) (1991). Even after retirement, Adedeji continued to engage with governance and development issues in Africa in his position as the executive director of the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies and a member of the AU’s/NEPAD’s African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). We are in an age in which homogeneity of thought and policy is becoming the new canon in development discourse, and in a time when external self-appointed high priests of development have mastered the art of silencing alternative voices and reasons, especially in peripheral regions of the world like Africa. It is therefore fitting to critically examine the importance of a bold and courageous voice like that of Adedeji in charting a path of self-reliance and an indigenous approach to socio-economic development on the continent. The rest of this chapter proceeds as follows. In the following section, I outline an African political-economy theoretical prism for analysing the African condition, similar to the one that informed the intellectual and

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A POLITICAL-ECONOMY ANALYSIS OF THE AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT PREDICAMENT Most African countries recorded modest growth of at least 5 per cent, measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), in the first two decades of independence. The growth rates were essentially informed by the adoption of import substitution industrialisation strategies, massive investment in critical infrastructure projects and expansion in the public sector, which boosted aggregate demand.11 But there was a lack of robustness and structural diversification, and the growth momentum was abruptly terminated, essentially because of the commodity crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As Claude Ake argues, post-colonial African economies followed the logic of the colonial economy in terms of the structure of the economy, which was mainly dominated by the export of primary commodities.12 The direction of trade and investment also followed the colonial pattern, with African countries trading more with ex-colonial empires than with one another. While these economies face internal contradictions in terms of supply-side constraints, owing largely to insufficient capital to fund critical infrastructure, they have also continued to suffer from the consequences of a global capitalist system that is skewed against them. Scholars have argued that the post-World War II period saw the global governance architecture of trade and finance being designed to unduly favour advanced capitalist countries at the expense of developing regions.13 Indeed, institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have constituted themselves into a governmentwithin-government, which enables them to impose economic policies that are deemed unchallengeable or unassailable.14 The economic crisis of the 1980s led many African countries into a huge debt burden that necessitated intervention by the Bretton Woods institutions in the management of African economies. Consequently, these institutions intervened to infuse the neo-classical economic doctrines that had become the new holy grail in international economies, under the hegemony of the idea ‘There is no alternative to the market’ (TINA). To

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policy activities of Adedeji. I then investigate his various engagements with regional integration, in terms of theory, philosophy and praxis. Next, I place the African condition within the far-sighted perspective of Adedeji on the imperatives of self-reliance and the need for an indigenous approach to development in Africa. The chapter concludes with recommendations.

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help African countries extricate themselves from the crisis or, more importantly, to help them qualify for loans, the Bretton Woods institutions forced these countries to adopt structural adjustment programmes, which were essentially anchored on TINA.15 A central tenet of the market orthodoxy is the adoption of the principle of comparative advantage, by which African countries were encouraged to continue to export primary products since they lacked manufactured goods and high-end technologies. The lessons of history and the inevitability of the usual cyclical crisis of global capitalism have proved that exporting primary products and removing tariffs do not lead to economic development.16 The external dimension of the crisis of development in Africa has been compounded by the domestic challenges of leadership and developing appropriate governance models. Ake argues that the problem of underdevelopment in Africa is first, and foremost, a problem of politics.17 This insightful intervention has multi-dimensional implications. The first is the inability of post-independence African leaders to forge nation-states out of the multiple nations that were forcefully wedged together by the imperialists. This remains a strong disincentive to development. Rather than forging democratic nation-states, ethnicity became reified, with political leaders appealing to their ethnic base as a tool for bargaining for political power. Thus, from Nigeria to Ghana, Kenya and Zambia, the politics of ethnic belonging assumed ascendancy in post-independence Africa. Secondly, since politics constitute the most secured means of acquiring power and resources, it became a zero-sum game in which the winners take all power. This problem of politics has led to continual conflict, wars of secession and separatism since independence.18 Thirdly, and closely related to the previous point, is the politics of prestige and preservation. i.e Political leaders on the continent prefer to keep their enclaves of influence by maintaining the artificial boundaries that the imperialists designed for their selfish interests. Although it is obvious from various accounts that many of these microstates cannot deliver in terms of development, their leaders have maintained a façade of sovereignty, even if this means depending on donors for the payment of salaries and being subservient to creditors because of huge debt burdens. It is precisely the last point that makes regional integration so central to the discourse on development and self-reliance in Africa. As I will show in the next section, Adedeji understood the imperative of regional integration as a solution to the predicament outlined above, and he devoted a substantial part of his career to the task of fostering regional integration in Africa in terms of thought, policy initiatives and practice. To this, I now turn.

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Adedeji’s engagement with regional integration and development had both theoretical and policy underpinnings. These dimensions are rooted in his training in economics and public administration at universities in the UK and the USA, as well as his experience as a Cabinet minister responsible for regional integration.19 His theoretical approach to regional integration was laid out in an article published in the Journal of Modern African Studies in 1970.20 In the article, he began by challenging the preoccupation of some African leaders at the time with achieving political integration as a precondition for economic integration in Africa. While noting the efforts that had been made toward achieving integration, he opted for a pragmatic approach, which he considered to be necessary to achieve integration in Africa. Perhaps it is important to mention that his awareness of the history of West Africa, which he eloquently narrated in the article, provided a strong basis for his theoretical postulations on regional integration. I quote him at length below to show his knowledge of the history of West Africa – one that was marked by great achievements before the imperial bifurcation and colonial intrusion. Adedeji notes:

Adebayo Adedeji on Africa’s Regional Integration and Self-Reliance

ADEDEJI AS INTERLOCUTOR OF REGIONAL INTEGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT

The home of some of the most remarkable achievements of early Negro civilisations, West Africa, because of the accident of climate, was able to advance towards political independence without the complication of racial problems. The relative unwholesomeness of its climate for Europeans has also enabled it to develop into a predominantly indigenous economy with economic power and political control firmly in the hands of Africans. It has made it possible for the region to achieve the most rapid economic and social advance. But like other parts of Africa, it has suffered seriously from the political fragmentation which the imperial powers imposed during the nineteenth century. One of the consequences of the scramble for Africa was that the boundaries of colonial possessions were settled with little regard to the ethnic divisions of the area.21

There is no doubt that the fragmentation of African countries led to both direct and indirect obstacles to the socio-economic development of the continent. Apart from arbitrarily grouping people of the same nationality in different countries, the heritage of colonialism ensured that African countries suffered from the additional challenge of linguistic differences. Among these differences, the linguistic barrier between the English

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-speaking and French-speaking parts of Africa remains one of the most debilitating factors hindering effective integration in the sub-region and on the continent as a whole. While the difference in language may appear too insignificant to be taken seriously when discussing regional economic integration, in practice it has presented practical and psychological barriers to African integration. The question of the identity of the people of French West Africa, for instance, was almost completely altered by the French policy of assimilation and association, to the extent that today, more than five decades after the end of official colonialism, many French-speaking Africans still consider themselves as French first and African second. This crisis of identity has continued to hinder the journey towards economic, cultural and political integration in Africa. In an analysis of the prospects of regional economic cooperation in West Africa, Adedeji examined the main theories on customs unions and economic integration of the 1960s, and concluded that the type of regional integration that took place in Europe is not feasible in the African situation. He identified six priority areas that would help realise regional integration in Africa (1) the building of a regional road network; (2) the creation of a regional airline; (3) the establishment of regional infrastructure to facilitate trade and investment; (4) the facilitation of the free movement of people, goods and services; (5) the establishment of a clearing and payments union; and (6) the abolishment of foreign exchange controls.22 Adedeji also noted that, given the history of the countries in West Africa, and especially the heritage of colonialism and alliances with France and Britain, as well as the small size of many of the markets and the low level of industrialisation, regional economic cooperation could only succeed if each member country of the cooperating entity developed its domestic capacity for economic cooperation with others. In this respect, he noted: ‘Another important lesson of the past decade’s operation in West Africa is the need for them to establish their economic independence before associating with other neighbours.’23 Further, Adedeji underlined the importance of political will and mutual respect among African leaders, for these conditions to be met. Where there is no political will, an integration agenda will be nothing more than political sloganeering, rather than taking the form of concrete policy actions and implementation of the agreed agenda. As Adebajo would later argue, Adedeji translated his theoretical postulations on regional integration (as adumbrated above) into practical policy action.24 Adedeji used his position as Minister for Economic Reconstruction and Development in Nigeria to engage with other leaders in West Africa and to form ECOWAS in 1975. Despite its failings, studies have confirmed

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Adedeji’s sixteen-year tenure became the organisation’s longest and most dynamic: he converted the ECA into a Pan-African platform to continue his efforts to promote economic integration, leading to the creation of the Preferential Trade Area for Eastern and Southern African States (PTA) in 1981 (which later became the [COMESA] in 1993); and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) in 1983.

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that the ECOWAS sub-region is the most integrated of all regional blocs in Africa. The 16 member countries have a common passport, citizens enjoy visa-free movement between member countries and there is a common external tariff.25 Adedeji’s work and relentless pursuit of regional integration did not stop at ECOWAS. Rather, after he became the executive secretary of UNECA in 1975, he worked towards the creation of other regional economic institutions on the continent. Commenting on his role at UNECA, Adebajo26 put it this way:

When he was asked to give a lecture on the history and prospects of regional integration in Africa at the Third Meeting of the African Development Forum in Addis Ababa, on March 5, 2002, Adedeji made the following remarks on his involvement in building regional integration in Africa: Having personally played a leading role in the processes that have led to the establishment of virtually all the major existing African regional integration arrangements (ARIA), namely, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS 1975), the Preferential Trade Area for Eastern and Southern Africa (PTA 1981), which was subsequently transformed into COMESA, the Central African Economic Community (CAEC 1983) and the African Economic Community (AEC 1991), this is indeed a tall order. I also had a hand in the emergence of the Final Act of Lagos (FAL 1980) and the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA 1980), of which the one was an integral part of the other. Finally, I took part in all the processes that culminated in the signing of the African Economic Community Treaty of 1991. In addition, I participated very actively in the preparation for and was at the United Nations Conference on Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries (TCDC 1978) and the South-South Caracas Conference on Economic Cooperation among Developing Countries.27

Despite setbacks to the achievement of full continental integration, Adedeji’s contribution to regional integration has continued to resonate in the subsequent actions of UNECA, which he led for many years, and of the

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AU. In its annual Assessment of Regional Integration in Africa, UNECA has consistently shown the state of affairs on integration – the challenges as well as the milestones.28 At the continental level, the AU has continued to be guided by the terms of the blueprint (the Abuja Treaty), in ways that could lead to the formation of an African economic community by 2028. There are ongoing initiatives to foster the realisation of this goal. For instance, in June 2015, three regional economic communities (the Southern African Development Community [SADC], COMESA, and the East African Community [EAC]) agreed to form a tripartite free trade area. It will have a combined GDP of about US$1.6 trillion (60 per cent of the total GDP of Africa) and a population of about 625 million people. Similarly, negotiations towards the African Continental Free Trade Area (AFCFTA) also started in Johannesburg in June 2015. In March 2018, the text of the AFCTA agreement was adopted by 44 African heads of state. While challenges remain in terms of concluding the negotiations on tariffs and rules of origin, there is now a secretariat in place. The agreement entered into force when 30 member states ratified it by 29 April 2019, and the AfCFTA has entered the operationalisation phase in ways not thought possible a few years ago.29 These initiatives also fit well with Agenda 2063 of the AU, which follows Adedeji’s theory from 1970. The Adedeji theory stipulates that economic integration should not be contingent on political integration. However, more research is needed to investigate how the national economies of Africa can be further developed so that regional integration can serve as a complementary approach to development, as Adedeji advocated. For now, there is fear among the relatively developed countries in Africa that regional integration could lead to a sub-optimal outcome, especially in terms of the movement of persons and industrialisation. This fear explains why Nigeria has not ratified the AfCFTA. This fear reflects the crisis of identity that Africans continue to face several decades after gaining political independence. Scholars have argued that no part of the continent can be considered to be developed or can develop within a global capitalist system that is historically arranged to privilege the Euro-American world as the ultimate in everything.30 As Nyamnjoh argues, it is sheer self-deception for any country in Africa to consider itself more developed than others, when, in fact, all African countries are consigned to the periphery of global capitalism.31 Thus, rather than considering other Africans as outsiders, efforts should be made to forge an alternative paradigm to the current neoliberaloriented structure. This could happen as part of a Pan-African democratic project that is inclusive, participatory and transformational, and which has the African personality as the primary referent for development.32 To

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elaborate: the fight against colonialism in many parts of the continent, and its eventual defeat, have clearly shown that the socio-economic liberation of the continent is contingent on a collective approach that is based on the reassertion of the self-confidence, pride and dignity of all Africans. Francis Adedeji notes that , among the factors that have impinged on the actualisation of regional integration, the lack of political will is fundamental.33 The fear of losing power at the national level has consistently hindered African leaders from implementing the various agreements that they have entered into to foster regional integration. It is in this context that civil society organisations should take the lead in communicating the benefits of regional integration to the people, so that this can be made one of the conditions for voting political parties and individuals into office. Those who oppose regional integration or pay lip-service to it are too ignorant of the pernicious effects of retaining the artificial boundaries that the colonialists created. Such people are also not aware of the implications of geopolitics on the national well-being of the people. Despite all pretensions to the contrary, developed countries and emerging ones find it easier to exploit African countries than they would if the continent were united. In this regard, Adedeji laments the inability of regional economic communities in Africa to effectively remove intra-regional tariff and non-tariff barriers.34 He notes that this weakness has emboldened the European Union (EU) to create different bilateral economic partnership agreements with different countries in the same region. This was against the regional economic partnership agreements which formed the basis for the commencement of negotiations between the two parties. He said: Africa’s RECs [regional economic communities] have not succeeded in effectively removing intra-REC tariff and non-tariff barriers, owing to multiple memberships of governments in different RECs. It is this failure that has given Brussels the opportunity and audacity to create overlapping bilateral and regional EPAs operating at different liberalisation speeds and time frames that cut across existing regional blocs.35

Given the racial configuration of the current world order, no single African country can confront the rampaging force of the excessively exploitative global capitalist system. The sooner Africans integrate for development, the better for their future. This leads me to the next section, which interrogates the question of self-reliance as a necessary quality requirement for the total liberation and emancipation of Africans. 325

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ADEDEJI ON SELF-RELIANCE AS A PATH TO SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT The paternalistic philosophy that informed the colonial domination of Africans was carried into the post-independence era. Apart from the economic imperative that informed colonialism, it was also considered a civilising mission. These views were supported by the modernisation theories of the late 1950s and early 1960s.36 Given the paucity of capital that defined early post-independence African countries, the high priests of development in the West felt that aid and overseas development assistance were necessary to assist these countries with development, which was expected to mirror the image of the West.37 Somehow, a majority of African leaders naively believe and expect that the West is genuinely interested in facilitating the socioeconomic transformation of a people that they have plundered for centuries. After having received trillions of US dollars in official aid, the continent remains trapped in poverty. The internal contradictions of the political economy of Africa and the politics of aid manifest in conditionalities and a lack of consultation about what the priorities of the recipients are. This has prevented external assistance from solving the problems of the continent.38 Adedeji was one of the few African elites who picked up on the incongruity between the lived experience of Africans and the irony of expecting a former oppressor to support the growth of the oppressed. His thinking on the imperative of self-reliance and the adoption of a home-grown approach to development – in which the people, rather than statistics, become the primary referent for macro-economic policy – shines through all the various lectures and policy interventions to which he contributed. For instance, the Lagos Plan of Action and the Final Act of Lagos (1980) focused essentially on how Africa should pursue self-reliance as the path to socio-economic development.39 At a lecture delivered to the Nigerian Institute for International Affairs in 1989, Adedeji noted the following in respect of self-reliance and self-confidence: As I once said elsewhere, ‘self-degradation breeds a sense of inferiority and of helplessness and aggravates vulnerability of a society’. And yet, as we all know full well, the very foundation of the oil that lubricates its engine are the possession of self-confidence by a people in themselves and in their capacities to initiate and organise their own concepts, policies and instruments for engineering change. Thus the erosion of self-confidence will further exacerbate the political and socio-economic crises that now face Africa and keep

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the continent in a perpetual state of dependence and its people in poverty

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accept our historic responsibility to be responsible and responsive masters of our economic destiny, external manipulation of our economic policies, economic decision making and economic management will loom alarmingly large in the decade ahead; and it is the outsiders’ perception and perspectives of what is good for Africa, rather than Africans’ perception and perspectives of what is good for themselves, that will prevail.40

The context for the above statement was the subordination of African economies to the logic of neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s and thereafter through the World Bank and IMF-inspired structural adjustment programmes. The high debt burden and a disarticulated economy provided the perfect justification for these external agencies to more or less take over the policy apparatus of many African states. More than a decade after this admonition to self-reliance, it would appear that African leaders did not learn anything from the lessons of the past. For instance, even though the NEPAD of 2001 was designed as a homegrown development strategy for the continent, the architects of this development blueprint expected the West to contribute US$65 billion to the project on an annual basis over several years. In response to this expectation, Adedeji noted:

Adebayo Adedeji on Africa’s Regional Integration and Self-Reliance

… unless we, the Africans, are hard-headed enough in the 1990s, and fully

There is always a child-like naivety among African leaders and policy makers that rhetoric and reality are the same and that claiming ownership is tantamount to having ownership. It is the Africans who are claiming that they are forging a partnership. The other side will no doubt continue to see it as a donor–recipient relationship.41

Adedeji has been proven right. Despite the adoption of NEPAD by the G8 countries, the promised assistance has not materialised 20 years later. Adebajo shows how Adedeji’s campaign for self-reliance and a homegrown approach to development (as encapsulated in the Lagos Plan of Action and the Final Act of Lagos, and the AAF-SAP) was criticised and vilified – both within and outside Africa.42 As Adebajo says, ‘Adedeji’s calls for self-reliance were criticized as vague and impractical; and some critics regarded as foolhardy efforts to delink Africa from the global economy.’43 The fear that Africa cannot pursue the path of self-reliance is hinged on the huge capital requirements for building infrastructure and financing investment. However, as various reports have shown, Africa is a net creditor to the world, as the continent has lost more than one trillion dollars through illicit financial flows over the past five decades.44 In other words, the

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argument that there is not sufficient capital in Africa is not entirely correct. What is sorely needed is ensuring better regulation of multinational companies that are involved in illicit financial flows and capital flights. There is also the need to put in place mechanisms that will foster accountability among politicians, many of whom have been complicit in misappropriating the resources of their countries for personal ends.

CONCLUSION

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This chapter examined the unique and powerful voice of one of the most respected African diplomats on two key issues of importance to the total emancipation of Africans from the shackles of global imperial designs, namely regional integration and self-reliant development. It has been the unfortunate experience of Africa to be classified in the zone of non-being under the racially defined global geography of reason and cartography of power, which has also manifested in horrors of economic failure and development malaise. Adedeji’s voice resonates powerfully against the imposition of ideas from elsewhere to solve problems that, in part, have external origins. Rooted in his identity as an African, and true to himself as the offspring of a people who have been unduly exploited over centuries, but aware of the great historical strides of his people before colonisation, Adedeji spent decades canvassing for the revitalisation of the human essence of the black race. He posited that this could be achieved through the reconstruction of the African mindset, from a dependent, subservient and beggarly posturing, to one of self-affirmation, self-confidence and selfreliance. Imbued with sufficient knowledge of how precolonial Africans related among themselves without the officialdom of artificial borders, he consistently canvassed for regional integration as a necessary ingredient of development strategies in Africa. Whereas some Africans who are privileged to work in international organisations unwittingly turn themselves into the lackeys of developed countries, Adedeji became one of the few who openly rebelled against the imposition of development ideas and strategies for Africa, especially by the World Bank and the IMF. Throughout his years at the UNECA, he had the presence of mind and boldness of conviction to systematically challenge the imposed market orthodoxy, such as the structural adjustment programmes in Africa. He rejected economic principles that were aimed at macro-economic stability and achieving a balance-of-payment equilibrium at the expense of the welfare of the people. In an age where the invisible hands of demand and supply were

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deemed to be the holy grail in development discourse and policy, Adedeji identified a role for the state, as the impartial arbiter and regulator of the natural proclivity of men and corporations to be greedy and exploitative. In this regard, he led UNECA to develop an alternative to the rampaging structural adjustment programmes. Years after Adedeji had spoken, both the World Bank and the IMF have realised that the structural adjustment programmes were wrongly designed. But the loss to Africa in terms of productivity, industrialisation and overall socio-economic development cannot be provided for by the architects of the problem. To avoid a repeat of what he calls the lost decade of the 1980s, Africa needs to listen to the voice of Adedeji on issues of regional integration, self-reliance and following an alternative path to development. It is important to emphasise that if regional integration must lead to development in Africa, it must transcend the preoccupation with the creation of market access. Rather, developmental regionalism that incorporates aspects of industrialisation, infrastructure and cross-border movement of people, and other factors of production, should be given greater attention. Lastly, member states must be economically viable before the regional economic community can be functional. Given the micro nature of many of the states in Africa, with little or no capacity for facilitating socio-economic development, we need to ask: Can these states ever develop to the extent that they can join a regional economic community? If they cannot develop due to their structural contradictions, what then must be done to incorporate them into the regional integration agenda? Scholars have proposed that there could be a coalition of the willing on ways in which more developed states (such as Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria) can take responsibility for the cost of integration on the continent. The AU has a role to play in coordinating this initiative through the provision of technical capacity and possibly funding to reimburse any losses that may accrue to the integrating states.45

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2015. Human development report. New York: UNDP.; Oloruntoba, S.O., 2017. Global regulation and the quest for development post-2015. In Zondi, S. and Philani, M. (eds), From millennium development goals to post-2015 sustainable development goals: the travails of international development. Pretoria: Institute for Global Dialogue, pp.166–186.

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2 Amin, S., 2002. Africa living on the fringe. Monthly Review, 53, pp.41–50; Emmanuel, A., 1972. Unequal exchange: a study of the imperialism of trade. New York: Monthly Review Press. 3

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2013. Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: myths of decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J., 2013. Perhaps decoloniality is the answer? Critical reflections on development from a decolonial epistemic perspective. Africanus: Journal of Development Studies, 43(2), pp.1–12.

4

Maldonado-Torres, N., 2007. On the coloniality of being: contributions to the development of concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), pp.240–270.

5 Adedeji, A., 2002. History and prospects of regional integration in Africa. Lecture delivered at the third meeting of the African Development Forum, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, March 5. Available at https://repository.uneca.org/handle/10855/31368 [Accessed 12 March 2017]; Moyo, D., 2009. Dead aid: why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa. London and New York: Allen Lane. 6

Ki-Zerbo, J., 2005. African intellectuals, nationalism and pan-Africanism: a testimony. In Mkandawire, T. (ed.), African intellectuals: rethinking politics, language, gender and development. Dakar: CODESRIA, pp.78–97.

7

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J. and Mhlanga, B., 2013. Introduction: Borders, identities, the `northern problem’ and ethno-futures in postcolonial Africa. In Ndlovu Gasheni , S.J. and Mhlanga, B. (eds), Bondage of boundaries and identity politics in postcolonial Africa. Pretoria: African Institute of South Africa, pp.1–23.

8

Oloruntoba, Global regulation. Op. cit.; Zeleza, P., 1993. A modern history of Africa vol.1: the nineteenth century. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers in association with Council for the Development of Social Science in Africa.

9

Adedeji, A., 2012. The travails of regional integration in Africa. In Adebajo, A. and Whiteman, K. (eds)., The EU and Africa: From Eurafrique to Afro-Europa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp.83–104.

10 Adebajo, A., 2014. Two prophets of regional integration: Presbrich and Adedeji. In Currie-Alder, B., Kanbur, R., Malone, D.M. and Medhora, R. (eds), International development: ideas, experience and prospects. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.323–338. 11 Soludo, C. and Ogbu, O., 2004. The politics of trade policy in Africa. In Soludo, C., Ogbu, O. and Chang, H-J. (eds), Politics of trade and industrial policy in Africa: forced consensus? Ottawa: IDRC Books, pp.111–134; Adedeji, History and prospects of regional integration in Africa. Op. cit. 12 Ake, C., 1981. The political economy of Africa. Harlow: Longman.

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14 Chang, H.J., 2015. The industrialisation imperative: why does Africa still have to industrialise? Addis Ababa: United Nations Economic Commission for Africa; Stiglitz, J., 2002. Globalization and its discontents. New York: W.W. Norton; Oloruntoba, Global regulation. Op. cit. 15 Fine, B., 2009. Development as zombieconomics in the age of neo-liberalism. Third World Quarterly, 30(5), pp.885–904; Mkandawire, T. and Soludo, C., 1999. Our continent, our future: African perspectives on structural adjustment.Dakar: CODESRIA. 16 Chang, The industrialisation imperative. Op. cit. 17 Ake, C., 1996. Democracy and development in Africa. Maryland: Brookings Institution. 18 Achu, C., 2018. Identity politics and wars of secession in Africa. In Oloruntoba, S. and Falola, T. (eds), Palgrave handbook of African politics, governance and development, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.321–334. 19 Adebajo, Two prophets of regional integration. Op. cit.

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13 Robert, W., 2013. The art of power maintenance. Challenge, 56(1), pp.5–39.

20 Adedeji, A., 1970. Prospects for regional economic cooperation in West Africa. Journal of Modern African Studies, 8, pp.213–231. 21 Ibid., p.214. 22 Ibid., pp.213–231. 23 Ibid., p.225. 24 Adebajo, Two prophets of regional integration. Op. cit., pp.323–338. 25 See Gumede, V., Oloruntoba, S., Kamga Djoyou, S., Mokoena, D. and Nkenkana, A., 2018. Migration and regional integration in Africa. Dakar: CODESRIA. 26 Adebajo, Two prophets of regional integration. Op. cit., pp.323–338. 27 Adedeji, History and prospects of regional integration in Africa. Op. cit., p.1. 28 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa., 2015. Assessing regional integration in Africa. UNECA: Addis Ababa; UNECA, 2014. Assessing regional integration in Africa. UNECA: Addis Ababa. 29 Tralac, 2020. African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) legal texts and policy documents. Available at https://www.tralac.org/resources [Accessed 12 May 2020]. 30 Amin, S., 2014. Introduction: alternative to the neoliberal system of globalisation and militarism. In H. Sharawy (ed.), Political and social thought in Africa. Dakar: CODESRIA, pp.1–16. 31 Nyamnjoh, F.B., 2006. Insiders and outsiders – citizenship and xenophobia in contemporary southern Africa. Dakar: CODESRIA.

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32 Adedeji, A., 1989. Africa in the nineteen-nineties: a decade for socio-economic recovery and transformation or another lost decade? Foundation Lecture, Lecture Series No. 68, Nigeria Institute of International Affairs, Lagos; NIIA. Amin, Introduction. Op. cit.; Ki-Zerbo, african intellectuals, nationalism and pan-Africanism. Op. cit. 33 Adedeji, History and prospects of regional integration in Africa. Op. cit., p.8. 34 Adedeji, The travails of regional integration in Africa. Op. cit., p.102. 35 Ibid. 36 Nasong’o, W., 2018. competing theories and concepts on politics, governance, and development. In Oloruntoba, S.O. and Falola, T. (eds), Palgrave handbook of African politics, governance and development. New York: Macmillan, pp.43–56. 37 Mkandawire, T., 2011. Running while others walk: knowledge and the challenge of Africa’s development. Africa Development, 36(2), pp.1–36. 38 Moyo, Dead aid. Op. cit. 39 Adedeji, The travails of regional integration in Africa. Op. cit., p.89. 40 Adedeji, History and prospects of regional integration in Africa. Op.cit, pp.4–5. 41 Adedeji, A., 2002. From Lagos Plan of Action to the New Partnership for African Development and from the Acts of Lagos to the Constitute Act: Whither Africa? Keynote address presented at the African Forum for Envisioning Africa, Nairobi, Kenya, April 26–29, p.11. 42 Adebajo, Two prophets of regional integration. Op. cit. 43 Ibid., pp.323–338. 44 UNECA, 2015. Illicit financial flows: report of the High-Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows, commissioned by the AU/ECA Conference of Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, Addis Ababa: ECA. 45 Oloruntoba, S.O., and Gumede, V., 2017. Regional hegemons as a catalyst to continental integration: a comparative analysis of Nigeria and South Africa. In Landsberg, C. (ed.), Africa’s integration and development in Africa. Johannesburg: Real Publishers, pp.245–258.

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INDEX A Abuja Treaty (1991) 316, 324 Achebe, Chinua and colonialism 78, 81, 86, 87, 88 and coloniality 77, 81, 85 decolonial philosophical perspective of 84–85 decolonial politics in Things Fall Apart 85–90 and decolonisation 77, 78, 81, 90 and dialogue of civilisations 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 83, 85–90 and epistemic disobedience 74, 75, 77, 87, 90 on Eurocentrism/Eurocentricity 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 89 literary and philosophical formation of 78–83 and the master’s tool 76–77 political philosophy of 74, 75 Adedeji, Adebayo and African-led development strategies 318 background of 317, 318 as interlocutor of regional integration and development 321–325 on self-reliance as path to socioeconomic development 325–328 theory of 324 and UNECA 315, 318, 323, 324, 328, 329 see also regional integration Africa for Africans (slogan) 116, 117, 123 Africa’s emplacement and environment at the margins 192–194 African Commissioner for Refugees and Displaced Africans 242–243 African consciousness 99, 100, 179 see also Pan-African consciousness African democracy current forms of 217 holistic approach to 218 nature of 223, 227 African diaspora and the AU 118, 119 in Latin America 119 and Pan-Africanism 110, 112, 223 and repatriation 128 as sixth region of Africa 118 African government 82, 120, 244 African integration 247, 322 agenda 317 see also regional integration African literature 75, 86, 88, 118, 139 African National Congress (ANC) and the AAC 298, 300, 302, 303

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and all-non-white unity 298, 299, 302, 303 and disunity in African resistance 303 founders of 110 and fundamental transformation 262 and the Manichean structure 263, 264 and the PAC 112 and post-apartheid dispensation 253, 258, 259, 294 and the SANNC 161 and structural violence 265, 281 Tabata’s view of 308 African nationalism 6, 25, 234, 246, 282 see also black nationalism; Garveyism; Pan-Africanism; PanAfrican movement African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) 228, 318 African Personality 317, 324 African Renaissance v, 228 African scholarship 134, 145, 148 African solutions to African problems 234 African Union (AU) 196, 228, 316, 318 Constitutive Act of the 118, 119 initiatives 237, 324 African Union Security Council (AUSC) 240–241, 246, 247 African unity with the diaspora 118, 131 ideas/ideals of 116, 117, 118 Africana critical theory 277 African-Americans alienation in American society of 98, 99, 100 and consciousness of Africa 95, 96, 97 and Garveyism 104–111, 123 and the image of Africa in history 95–104 importance of Africa to 95, 96, 97 and repatriation 126 and World War I 105 Africanisation of knowledge and education v, 1, 2, 5, 165 of thought 216, 293 Africentricity see Afrocentricity Afrikaner nationalist school 159, 160 Afrocentricity analytical elements of 155, 156 and colonial and post-colonial narratives 155 and colonialism 155, 156, 157 and coloniality 155, 165 concept/definitions of 153, 154, 156, 157

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on disciplines 162–164 and Euro-American knowledge 161, 162, 163, 164 and Eurocentrism/Eurocentricity 155, 157, 158, 165 future of 164 genesis of the idea of 153–156 and liberation 155 and Nkrumah 153 and self-determination 154 and South-African historiography 158–162 as a synthesis 157–158 theory of 152, 153, 154, 156 see also Asante Afrophobic (xenophobic) attacks 258 Agenda 2063 of the African Union (AU) 228, 316, 324 agrarian and land problem/question in Africa 138 in South Africa 294, 295, 304–307 Ake, Claude and African-centred scholarship 217–220 and democratisation 217, 218, 220, 224, 225 on development in Africa 215, 216, 217, 218, 220 on liberal democracy 215, 217, 221, 222, 225, 228 and Pan-Africanism 218, 223, 227, 228 philosophical and conceptual standpoint of 220–223 and politics of development and democracy 226 on post-colonial African economies 319 significance of intellectual legacy of 227–228 on underdevelopment in Africa 320 and ‘The unique case of African democracy’ 223–226 Al-Koni, Ibrahim conception/representation of human– animal relations 55, 56, 59–70 desert ethic of 53, 68, 69, 70 desert philosophy of 63 English translation of fiction by 54 environmentalism of 54, 55 ethics in fiction of 55, 58, 68, 69, 70 gender in fiction of 62, 62, 65 and metahumanism 9, 53, 56, 57, 58, 65, 68, 70, 71 and metamorphosis 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 68, 69 and posthumanism 53, 56, 57, 58, 62, 65, 70, 71 All-African Convention (AAC) 294, 295, 296 and the ANC 298, 300, 302, 303 leadership 300

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and parliamentary representation 299, 300 and unity of African resistance politics 298, 299, 300, 302, 303 see also Tabata Almohad caliphs 31, 33, 34, 36 movement 31, 34, 37, 43, 49 political programme 33, 34 rule 33, 36, 37, 41, 42, 47 rulers 42–47 Almohadism 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 46, 47, 49 Almohads (Al-Muwahhid), the 35–41 history of 32, 36, 37 and Ibn Rushd’s ideas 34, 36, 40 ideology of 34, 39, 40, 41, 44, 46 and philosophy 33, 34, 43, 44, 47 Almoravids, the 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42 alterity, epistemology of 134, 135, 138, 141, 142, 145 see also othering American imperialism 103, 105 Anglo-Saxon chauvinism 104 expansionism 104 animals and Al-Koni 53–59 human relationships with 55, 56, 59–70 metamorphoses of 56, 59–62 and posthumanism 56 animism 55 anthropomorphism 40 anti-apartheid scholars 222 struggle 260, 294, 295, 302, 307 anti-imperialist struggle 104, 105, 121, 276, 279, 281, 282 apartheid and Bantu education 163, 309 collapse of 142 and emancipation 260 expansion 160, 161 formulation of 19 and historiography 160, 162 infrastructure of 261, 268 inheritance/legacy of 146, 258, 261, 267 and the liberation struggle 294, 295, 302, 307 and negotiated settlement 252 and post-1994 South Africa 253, 257 and structural violence 264, 265 system and Biko 172, 173 Arabic fiction 66 literature 56, 177 philosophy 33 Aristotle 32, 43, 44, 45, 48 Asante, Molefi Kete 152 on Eurocentrism 157, 158

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and structural violence 265, 266 bondage of boundaries 316 border thinking 197, 204, 205, 209 boundaries artificial 316, 320, 325, 328 and Berlin Conference 18, 102 bondage of 316 epistemological 14 of knowledge 14, 163 political 14, 320, 321, 325 Bulhan, Hussein 256, 257, 258, 266

B Back to Africa movement 95, 126 philosophy 108, 109 settlement 128 slogan 107, 120 see also repatriation Bandung Conference (1955) 110 Bantu Education 296, 309, 310 Berlin Conference (1884) 18, 102 curse of 2, 225 Biko, Bantu Stephen and Afrocentricity 164 and blackness 173 black political aesthetics of 172–177 political struggle of 172 and ‘whiteness’ 171, 172, 173, 175 Bill of Rights 252 black condition, the and emancipation 267, 268 in era of imperialism 103 and Garveyism 109 and liberation gone awry 258–264 and the Manichean structure 256, 257, 265 in post-1994 South Africa 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 267 and structural violence 264, 266 Black Consciousness Movement 176 black consciousness and African-Americans 104 and Biko 172, 175, 176 black nationalism and African-Americans 97, 98 and African consciousness 99, 100 see also African nationalism; Garveyism; Pan-Africanism; PanAfrican movement black political administration 252, 253 blackness and Biko 172, 173, 175, 179, 186 and British imperial history 160 and colonisation of the mind 258 in liberation 261 lived experience of 252 and the Manichean structure 256, 257 and Pan-Africanism 109 and racial oppression 99 and Senghor 183 as socio-political situation 175

C Cabral, Amílcar 7, 8 on African democracy 218 and Africana critical theory 277 and capitalism 278, 286 in context of the African political predicament 274–277 and Eurocentrism/Eurocentricity 277, 278 and home-grown revolutionary theory 285–288 and ideological deficiency 281–385 and liberation 277, 278, 279, 288, 289 and Marxism 277, 278, 281, 282, 286, 287 and struggle against selves 279–281 theses on African politics 277–288 ‘Weapon of theory’ address of 278, 279 Cabralian theses 277–288 capitalism and African economies 327 and apartheid system 172, 173 and Cabralian theory 278, 286 and development in Africa 226, 319, 320, 324, 325 and the environment 193, 195, 198 and neo-colonialism 307 as oppressive system 278, 307 in post-1994 South Africa 253, 255, 258 settler 171 and Western liberalism 275 choiceless democracy 273 Christianity 2, 55, 68, 160, 174, 175 civil society existing/indigenous 23–25, 27 according to Mamdani 12, 14, 17, 22, 23–25 programmatic 12, 23, 27 and regional integration 325 clanocracy 237, 243, 246 climate change 190, 196, 206 collective colonialism 102 community ownership 305 democratic participation 9, 215 democracy 243 colonial difference 197–198

Index

and the genesis of Afrocentricity 153–156 on knowledge production 159, 163 on South African history 159 see also Afrocentricity assimilation 171, 180, 263, 322 Atlantic slave trade 102, 153 authoritarian democracy 224, 273 authoritarianism 222 autocracy 222, 273 Averroës see Ibn Rushd

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governmentality and power 18–21 languages 76, 77, 87, 88, 225 matrices of power 4, 257, 267, 268 colonialism and Achebe’s literature 78, 81, 86, 87, 88 and Africans in diaspora 124 and the African state 236, 247 and Afrocentricity 155, 156, 157 and anthropology 138 and Cabralian theory 278 and coloniality 2 and decentring of Africa from its history and culture 153 and democracy 217, 221 heritage/legacy of 146, 219, 321, 322 to ‘independence’ 17 and the idea of the beautiful 170 and imperialism 102 and influence on African culture 183 interpretation of 15, 16 to neo-colonialism 5 and the philosophy of liberation 84, 85 and politicised identities 13, 23 and post-1994 South African 257, 258, 261, 264 and racial essentialism 181 coloniality and Africanity 140 and Afrocentricity 155, 165 of being 192, 193, 194, 256 and colonialism 2 as combative ontology 134, 141, 143, 145 concept of 2, 84, 192 definition/description of 2, 84, 236 and environmental knowledge 192 and epistemic implications 2–4 and genocides/epistemicides 3 of knowledge 192, 193, 194, 205 and the Manichean structure 255, 256, 257, 264 and the ‘native question’ 19 of nature 193, 194–195, 197, 203 and notions of beauty 170 and post-1994 South Africa 253, 258 of power 170, 192, 194, 197, 236, 255, 286 and the radicalism of Achebe 77, 81, 85 and refugee crisis 242 see also modernity; neo-colonialism colonisation 3 and anthropology 136, 138 of the Cape 159 from within 247 intra-African 238–239 in Kenya 197 of knowledge 78, 79 and the Manichean structure 257, 268 of the mind 202, 258 and the ‘native question’ 19

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of space and time 192 and victimhood 82 see also coloniality commodification of local economies 198 of natural resources 190, 193, 195 communalism 9, 215 compulsory deculturation 97 conflict resolution 234–236, 243, 246, 247 consensual and collective democratic participation 9, 215 constitutional government 221 continental (African) challenges 233, 234, 247 conflict 246 government 228, 240 initiatives for democracy and development 228 integration 216, 323, 324 peace 241 Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) 26 corruption 64, 82, 273, 316 cosmopolitanism 142 crimes against humanity 82 critical race theory 155 Cugoano, Ottobah 110, 111 D Darwinism 102 decolonial thinking, and Maathai’s philosophy 202–208 transmodernity 85, 87, 89, 90 decoloniality 80, 81, 82, 83, 88, 202, 209 decolonisation Achebe’s fight for 77, 78, 81, 90 and Africanity 141 and Cabralian theses 277 of education v, 2, 5 and the environment 191 epistemic struggles for 2 of knowledge v, 2, 4, 5, 90, 165 Mamdani on 15, 19, 24 and the Manichean structure 257 myth of 236, 242 radical political thought about 293 of the state 24 and theory of liberation 287 deculturation 97 deforestation 59, 195, 198 dehumanisation 77, 80, 100, 105, 110, 256, 257, 258 democracy Ake’s ideas on/scholarship 215–229 from apartheid to 252, 253, 264 crisis of 226, 228, 229 current forms of African 217 and development in Africa 215–229 dominant narratives on 223 and the environment 195, 196, 200, 202, 203

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E ecofeminism 190, 206 ecological activism 199, 207 difference 198 justice 9, 190 literacy 199, 201, 207 systems 191 economic communities 242, 318, 323, 324, 325, 329 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 242, 247, 318, 322, 323 Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) 242 economic exploitation 100, 124, 176, 298, 306 integration (in Africa) 240, 317, 321, 322, 323, 324

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egalitarianism 221 electoral politics 105 process 252 systems 275 emancipation 103, 104, 108, 109 and Africanity 142, 145 and aesthetics 170, 175, 178 and the black condition 267, 268 and genuine liberation 267, 268 myth of 264 and post-1994 South Africa 252, 259, 260, 264, 267, 268 Emancipation Proclamation (1863) 103 environment at the margins 190, 192–194 environmental justice 9, 190, 193, 194, 196, 200, 201, 206, 207 philosophy 192, 197, 200, 205, 206, 209 sustainability 190, 198 environmentalism 55, 190, 191, 194, 195, 197, 200, 202, 203, 208, 209 epistemic delinking 208, 209 disobedience 6, 75, 77, 87, 90, 202, 208, 216 epistemicide 3, 4, 80, 134, 136, 143, 146, 148, 158, 219 see also genocide epistemological boundaries 14 domination 192 freedom 216, 217 heritage v epistemology of alterity 134, 135, 138, 141, 142, 145, 147 ethics and Africanity 141 and Al-Koni’s fiction 55, 58, 68, 69, 70 and environmental activism 196, 201 Ethiopia as inspiration 122 invasion of 69, 128, 129 and repatriation 127, 128, 129 Ethiopian Anthem 125 Ethiopian World Federation (EWF) 127, 128, 129 ethnicity 21, 23, 162, 200, 257, 320 Euro-American civilisation 75 empire 74, 76, 84 knowledge 159, 162, 163, 164 liberalism 17 slave trade 102 Eurocentric cosmology 193, 204 environmentalism 209 epistemology 193 rationality 1, 6, 7 theory 164, 278

Index

failure of 218, 276, 288 foreignness of imposed 225 and Garveyism 105 and multi-partyism 17 nature and type of 223, 224, 225 politics of development and 226 politics of development and 226, 227 procedures of 274, 275 quality of 225 universalised 224 versions of failed 273 see also African democracy; liberal democracy democratic participation 9, 215 democratisation and Ake’s scholarship 217, 218, 220, 224 and civil society 24 impediments to 225 in post-1994 South Africa 252 waves of 223, 228, 275 in Western scholarship 274 see also democracy dependency syndrome 289 theory 4, 20 on Western states and institutions 237, 280, 281 depoliticisation 252 deracialisation 24, 25, 27, 255, 259 desert ethic 53, 55, 68, 69 desertification 198 despotism 82 detribalisation 25, 27 development strategies (African-led) 316, 318, 327, 328 dictatorship 17, 220, 273, 275, 306 divide-and-rule tactics 280, 299, 304 Du Bois, WEB 103, 104, 106–107 and Garveyism 108, 110 and Husseinian vision 180 and Pan-Africanism 110

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Eurocentrism/Eurocentricity 136, 198 and Achebe 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 89 and Afrocentricity 155, 157, 157, 158, 165 and Cabralian theory 277, 278 and democracy in Africa 217, 219, 228 Mafeje on 147, 148 Mamdani on 14 and modernity 205 Zeleza on 4–5 Euromodern colonialism 2, 4 Euromodernity 2 F Fanon, Frantz and the black condition 258, 258 on colonial economy 255 on colonialism 16, 79 and concept of Manichean structure 251, 255, 256, 257, 268 on emancipation 266, 267, 268 existential phenomenology of 8, 252 on liberation 260, 261, 262, 267 relevance of thought to post-1994 South Africa 251, 252, 253, 267 on structural violence 265, 266 feminism 4, 9, 112, 206 Final Act of Lagos (1980) 316, 318, 323, 326, 327 see also Lagos Plan of Action flag freedom 261, 262, 268 forced labour 98, 306 Freedmen’s Bureau 103 G garrison democracy 273 Garvey movement membership of 109, 123 rise of 105 significance of 106 see also Back to Africa movement; Garveyism Garvey, Marcus and an African state 119, 120, 122–125 birth and childhood 121 economic programme of 121, 122 establishment of business enterprises 125 ideals embodied in 117, 130 ideas and impact of 105, 107, 108, 109, 129 and Negro World 124 and Pan-Africanism 119, 120, 121, 131 and repatriation 125, 126, 127, 130 and self-reliance 120, 122, 123 and UNIA 104, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126 on Washington’s programme 122 see also Back to Africa movement; Garvey movement; Garveyism

Garveyism in America and the Caribbean 100 and the black condition 109 embodiment of ideals and actions in 117 international meaning of 108 and leadership 108 and qualitative changes 106 purpose of 105 rise of 100 see also Back to Africa movement; black nationalism; Garvey movement; Pan-Africanism gender activists 112 and Al-Koni’s fiction 62, 62, 65 boundaries 62, 63 and environmental knowledge 191, 192 hierarchy 2 oppression 278 relations 206, 207, 208 genocides 3, 13, 15, 80, 159, 246 see also epistemicide Ghana, independence of 111, 119, 124 Gikuyu culture 196, 197, 205 Glen Grey Act (1894) 305 global capitalism 226, 316, 319, 320, 324, 325 globalisation 5, 54, 192, 198, 258, 286 Greek democracy 221, 224 philosophy, and Islamic philosophy 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 Green Belt Movement (GBM) activities of 200, 202 core values of 198, 206 ecological activism of 199, 207 establishing/forming the 195, 196, 197, 198, 206 and metaphor of the tree 199 rhetoric and practices of 199, 203 strategies 196, 205 see also Maathai H Haitian Revolution 223 Harlem Renaissance 108, 123 human rights challenges and the ICC 237 citizens as the bearer of 17, 18 and the GBM 195, 206 individualised 275 and justice in Africa 26 humanism 53, 57, 65, 70, 190 Huntington, Samuel 75, 77, 85, 89, 223 Hussein, Taha 169, 171 and adoption of Western aesthetic categories 180, 181, 186 conception of modernity of 180–181 on Egypt 177, 178 ‘Feel like a European’ argument of 177–181, 184

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I Ibn Rushd and Almohadism 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 46 birth and early life of 41–42 commentaries on Aristotle 44, 45 ideas/philosophy of 34, 36, 40 orientalist view of the work of 32, 33 patronage from Almohad ruler 43, 44, 45 philosophical project of 34, 38, 49 philosophy and political thought prior to 47–49 politico-religious ideology 44, 45 Straussian approach to the work of 33 Ibn Tumart, Muhammad and Almohadism 33, 34, 36, 38 biography of 37 intellectual doctrine of 39, 40 reformist ideas/vision of 33, 38, 39, 47 religious approach of 34, 37, 39 theological doctrine/principles of 34, 38, 40, 49 imperial recolonisation 238 imperialism artificial boundaries created by 316, 320 and collective colonialism 102 and colonial languages to rebuke 76, 77 and the environment 193 and inferiorisation of Africa 84, 85, 96 and national problems 286 and nationalism 307–308 perspectives of 276 and revolutionary theory 287 of social science 222, 289 struggles against 279, 282 in the USA 103, 104, 105, 108 indigenous civil society in Africa 23–25 forms of knowledge 196 individual rights 221 individualism 57, 63, 209, 275 industrialism 103, 138 intellectual liberation 179 inter-African colonisation and annexation 238–239 International Criminal Court (ICC) 26, 233, 235, 236, 237, 247 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 319, 327, 328, 329 invented and politicised identities in Africa 21–23

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Islam, and the Almohads 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 Islamic ethical system 58 law 39 reformist movement 36 theology 37 Islamic philosophy academic approaches to 32, 33 of the classical period 47–48 impact of Greek philosophy on 47, 48, 49 impact on Western philosophy 32 and political thought 48, 49

Index

on the Orient and the Occident 177, 178, 179 political vision of 178 on true scientific, artistic and literary independence 179–180 Husseinian argument/vision 179, 180

J jihad (holy war) 46 Jim Crow laws 105 juridical freedom 259 K kleptocracy 286, 289 Ku Klux Klan 105, 108 L Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa 316, 318, 323, 326, 327 see also Final Act of Lagos liberal democracy and the African political predicament 275, 276, 284 Ake on 215, 217, 221, 222, 225, 228 ideological implications in African context 284, 285 limitations and irrelevance to Africa 225 and regime change 276 universalisation of 215, 224 see also multi-party democracy; representative democracy liberation and aesthetic concepts of beauty 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 186 and Africans in diaspora 99, 100, 111 and Afrocentricity 155 and the agrarian problem/question 294, 295, 304, 305 Biko’s strategy for 175, 176, 177 and the black condition 258–264 and Cabralian theses 277, 278, 279, 288, 289 and class 112 and coloniality 2, 76, 165 and colonial languages 76, 77 decolonial struggle for 78, 82 discourse of 294 of Egypt 179 global struggle for Africa’s 116 illusion of 252, 259, 260, 267 and imperialism 307 of the individual 261 leaders 284 of the mind 297 movements 280, 281, 282, 283, 286

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Index

oppressed as part of 263, 267, 307 and pedagogy of the oppressed 259 philosophers of 76, 78, 81, 83, 84, 85 philosophy of 75, 81, 84, 85, 90, 252 in post-1994 South Africa 252, 253, 255, 264, 268 racism as primary contradiction in South African 112 realisation of genuine 267 Senghor’s contribution to African 181 theory of 287 M Maathai, Wangari activism and thoughts 9, 190, 195, 196, 199, 200 autobiography of 196, 197 and decolonial thinking 202–208, 209 and gender relations 206, 207, 208 and locus of enunciation 204, 209 and modernity 201, 203, 209 and peace efforts 195, 199, 200, 203 philosophies of 196, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 209 and pluriversality 205, 206, 209 and politics of difference 197, 198–202 and primacy of culture 205 symbolism of the tree 197, 199, 200, 208 see also Green Belt Movement Mafeje, Archie 9, 99, 101 and Africanity 140–145 and anthropology 136, 138, 140, 144, 145, 147 and epistemology of alterity 134, 135, 138, 141, 142, 145, 147 ethnographic work of 135 on Eurocentrism/Eurocentricity 147, 148 and intellectual context 135–140 legacy and personal contribution to scholarship 145–148, 163, 219 on Marxism 139, 140 and the concept of negation 145 on Western civilisation 135, 137 see also Africanity Magubane, Bernard assessment of Pan-African movement 109–111 on African-American consciousness of Africa 95–104 on black nationalism 97, 98, 99, 100 on Garveyism 105–109 on imperialism 103, 104 on the legacy of slavery 102 lessons from 111–113 and Marxism 112 oeuvre of 94, 95, 113 and Pan Africanist Congress 112 on social order and identity 101 Mahdism 37 Mamdani, Mahmoud

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on civil society 12, 14, 17, 22, 23–25 on colonial governmentality and power 18–21 contributions to rethinking thinking on Africa 12, 13–18 on decolonisation 15, 19 24 on Eurocentrism/Eurocentricity 14 on existing/indigenous civil society in Africa 23–25 on invented and politicised identities in Africa 21–23 and the ‘native question’ 19 on transitional justice (in Africa) 12, 25–27 Manichean structure 8, 254–258 and the ANC 262, 263, 264 and the black condition 265, 268 Fanon’s concept of 251, 255, 256, 257, 268 and hybridity 254 Manicheanism 256, 257, 258 see also Manichean structure Marxism and Africanity 142 and Cabralianism 277, 278, 281, 282, 286, 287 Mafeje on 139, 140 and Magubane 112 in South Africa 139, 140, 159, 160, 161 and Tabata 295, 296 Mazrui, Ali Al’amin and an African Commissioner for Refugees and Displaced Africans 242–243 and African solutions to African problems 234 on African states 237 and an African Union Security Council (AUSC) 240, 246 on Afrocentricity 158 on colonialism 16 and conflict resolution 234–236, 243, 246, 247 on decolonisation 236 and dialectics of the African condition 274 on inter-African colonisation and annexation 238–239 on mediation 243 on military invention 238 and a Pan-African Council of Elders 245–246 and a Pan-African Emergency Force 241–242 Pax Africana argument of 235, 237, 246, 247 propositions/suggestions for governance problems and conflict by 237, 247 on regional integration 239–240 and re-traditionalisation of Africa 243 and sharing of power 244–245

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N Namibia, and Garvey’s ideals 121 National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) 106, 107 national oppression 305, 306 self-determination 282, 285 nationalism and African-Americans 97 and civil society 24, 25 doctrine of 109 and imperialism 307–308 Magubane on 97, 98, 99, 100 and Pan-Africanism 233, 245 and politicisation of identity 22 and regional integration 317 relationship between Pan-Africanism and 246 self-determination and African 282, 285

Tabata on 307–308 see also black nationalism; Garveyism; Pan-Africanism; PanAfrican movement nation-state 23, 274, 276, 320 native question, the 19 Native Representative Council (NRC) 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 309 negotiated settlement 252, 259, 262 Negritude 169, 171, 184, 185 Negro World 104, 124 neo-apartheid 267 neo-colonialism 4, 5, 193, 219, 307 neoliberal capitalism 327 new imperialism 4 New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) 228, 316, 318, 327 Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o 16, 54, 75, 154, 189 Nkrumah, Kwame and ‘Afrocentricity’ 153 and Garvey 104, 118, 119, 124 and neo-colonialism 4 and Pan-Africanism 124, 131 and regional integration 317 nomadic life 55, 64, 66 pastoralists 54, 67, 68 nomadism 55, 56 non-collaboration (with the oppressor) 296, 298, 301, 302, 303, 310 Nuremberg framework 13 paradigm 26 template of justice 12, 27 Nyerere, Mwalimu Julius 22, 23, 287, 317

Index

see also Pax Africana mediation 234, 237, 243 messianic movements 107 metahumanism 9, 53, 56, 57, 58, 65, 68, 70, 71 metamorphosis 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 68, 69 Métissage 169, 171, 182, 183, 184 military intervention 238, 276 power-sharing between civilians and the 245 rule 244, 275 sharing of political power by the 244, 245 misanthropic scepticism 79 modern nation-state 274, 276 modernity 197 and colonisation of space and time 192 crisis of 194, 198 and decolonial perspective 84 and environmental crises 194 and environmentalism 195 and genocides/epistemicides 3 Hussein’s conception of 180, 181 and indigenous cultures and knowledges 203 myth of 71 overcoming 205 see also coloniality monotheisms 39, 55, 58, 68 multi-party anarchy 245 civilian rule 275 democracy 221, 222, 228 elections 222, 225 politics 200, 207 system 244, 245 multi-partyism 17, 222 Muslim rule, in Spain prior to the twelfth century 34–35

O one-party rule 275 tyranny 245 oppression acceptance of 300, 308 of African-Americans 101, 105 of all colonised people 100 Biko on 172, 173, 177 of black workers 98 brotherhood born of 301 and the illusion of liberation 253, 262 caused by imperialism/capitalism 307 institutions created for 302 and the land question 304, 305, 306 and Manicheanism 257 and misanthropic scepticism 79 new forms of 288 and Pan-Africanism 109 of people of African descent 123 psychological aspects/dimensions of 99, 107 rationalisations of 96 and the South African economic structure 304 in South Africa 297, 298 structures of 262, 266

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Index

of women 112 oral traditions of the Sahel 56 Organization of African Unity (OAU) vi, vii formation of 118, 128 transformation to AU 237 othering 142, 145, 163, 185, 186 of the black body 264–266 see also alterity P Padmore, George 106, 118 Pan-African consciousness 109, 110 education vi, vii philosophy of OAU founders 118 Pan-African Conference (1900) v Pan-African Council of Elders 237, 245–246 Pan-African Emergency Force 237, 241–242 Pan-African movement Magubane’s assessment of 109, 110, 111 and regional integration 316, 317 see also black nationalism; PanAfricanism Pan-Africanism and African diaspora 110, 118 and (African) nationalism 234, 246 in America 100, 111 in the Caribbean 100, 111, 121 and Claude Ake 218, 223, 227, 228 of Du Bois 110 evolution of 110, 120 and Garveyism 109, 110 genealogy of 110 and the image of Africa 109–111 and Kwame Nkrumah 124, 131 and Marcus Garvey 119, 120, 124, 131 in South Africa 112 see also black nationalism; PanAfrican movement Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) 112, 193 Pan-Africanist thought first exponents of 110, 111 and Garvey 119, 120 see also black nationalism; PanAfricanism parastatals 226 parliamentary representation 300 Pax Africana 9, 233, 234, 235, 237, 239, 241, 246, 247 see also peace-building peace and Maathai’s efforts 190, 195, 199, 200, 203 and Mazruian thought 233, 234, 235, 239, 240, 244, 246 and a Pan-African Council of Elders 245, 246 peace-building 200, 233, 234, 246

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see also Pax Africana pedagogy of the oppressed 259 pluralism 17, 164, 273 pluritopic hermeneutics 205, 209 pluriversality 75, 89, 90, 205, 206, 208, 209 political administration 252, 253 philosophy 33, 74, 75 political-economy analysis, of the African development predicament 319–320 politics of difference 197, 198–202, 209, 317 popular democracy 221, 228 sovereignty 228, 282 post-1994 (South Africa) and the black condition 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258–264, 266, 267, 268 democratisation 252 dispensation 251, 267 emancipation 252, 259, 260, 264, 267, 268 entanglement (according to Nuttall) 254 hybridity (according to Bhabha) 254 leadership 262, 263, 268 and liberation 251, 252, 258–264, 267, 268 and the Manichean structure 254–258 and relevance of Fanon’s thought 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 258, 260, 261, 262, 266, 267 and structural violence 264–266 transition 253, 254, 257, 258, 260, 264 see also post-apartheid post-apartheid and the black condition 251, 261 dispensation 294 project 161 see also post-1994 (South Africa) post-colonial African economies 319 challenges/dilemmas 13, 23, 27, 273 elites 220, 259 political system 280 reform 21, 22, 25, 27 theory 155 see also post-colonial Africa; postcolonial state post-colonial Africa and aesthetics 170 challenges of 21, 273 and a crisis of democracy 228, 229 and Eurocentrism 136 governance of 235 impact of Garvey’s ideas in 130 pluralism in 17 reform in 22, 25 and transitional justice 26 tyranny and corruption in 82

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R racial oppression and blackness 99 psychological dimensions of 99 racial superiority 123, 317 racism absurdity of 185 and the black condition 263 and the concept of race 181 and Cabralian theory 278 and capitalism 173 and colonialism 78, 81, 82, 83, 169, 170, 181, 185 and economic exploitation 176 entrenched technologies of 253 Garvey’s struggles against 116 historiography involving 161 ideology of 95, 109 and liberation struggles 112 after political independence 85 and Pan-African consciousness 109 and power relations 2 resurgence of 257 and self-contempt 96 Senghor on 181, 185, 186 victims of 24 and Western intellectualism 147 white mechanisms of 172 radical egalitarianism 221 rainbow nation, notion of 254, 261, 268 Rastafari community 126, 127, 130 in Ethiopia 128 and repatriation 127, 128, 129, 130 rational theology 49 recentring of Africa 7, 117, 152, 216, 273, 289 of African people 159 of African perspective 152, 219, 278 recolonisation 237, 238, 247 refugee crisis 238, 242, 243 states 237 regime change 276 regional economic communities 318, 325, 324, 325, 329 regional integration

and Adedeji 9, 317, 320, 321–325, 328 benefits of 325 and civil society 325 and development strategies 315, 316, 318, 327, 328 factors undermining realisation of 317, 325 and Mazrui’s Pax Africana 237, 239–240 and Nkrumah 317 and Pan-Africanism 316, 317 priority areas for realisation of 322 and self-reliance 320 and socio-economic development 316, 321, 329 see also Adedeji; African integration repatriation and African-Americans 126 demand for 125–130 and Ethiopia 127, 128, 129 and Garvey 125, 126, 127, 130 politics 117 and Rastafari community 127, 128, 129, 130 representative democracy 221, 222 see also liberal democracy; multi-party democracy re-traditionalisation of Africa 237, 243 see also clanocracy revolutionary theory 278, 279 lack of home-grown 285–288

Index

see also post-colonial state post-colonial state crisis of 225, 226, 229 and current struggles 27 and failed democracy 273 internal weaknesses of 279–281 and liberal democracy 274, 275, 276 nature of development in 217 see also post-colonial Africa posthumanism 56, 57, 58, 62, 65, 70, 71 power, sharing of 244–245 precolonial ecology 205 ecosystem 197 pseudo-liberation 261, 267 psychological liberation 175, 260, 285

S Saint Ann’s Bay (Jamaica), prophets of 117 Selassie, Haile vi, vii, 127, 128, 129 self-affirmation 116, 118, 140, 328 self-destruction 70, 258 self-determination through Africanity 134, 135, 142 and African nationalism 282, 285 and Afrocentricity 153 nation as the bearer of the right to 17, 18 and sovereignty of African scholarship 134 self-reliance and the envisioned African state 119–125 perspective of Adedeji on 320, 326–328, 329 and regional integration 320 Seme, Pixley ka Isaka v, vi Senghor, Léopold Sédar 8, 171 on question of African beauty 181, 182 and Negritude 184, 185 on the Other 185, 186 and concept of races and cultures (Métissage) 183, 184, 185 on racism and colonialism 181, 185, 186

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and concept of time and space 182, 183 settler capitalism 171 Shashamane 127, 128, 129 slave trade 102, 130, 153 slavery 76, 80, 82, 83, 84 abolition of 102 and liberation in SA 299, 300 and Pan-Africanist thought 111 rationalisation of 96, 101 and South African historiography 160 social justice 190, 193, 195, 202 liberation 277, 285, 287 order, and identity 101 socialism 177, 288 socio-economic development (in Africa) Adedeji on self-reliance as a path to 326–328 and regional integration 316, 321, 329 socio-economic liberation 325 South African history/historiography 112, 158–162 South African National Native Congress (SANNC) 160, 161 state sovereignty 282 statism 226 Straussian approach/position, and Islamic philosophy 33 structural violence and the black condition 264, 266 and the Manichean structure 268 and ‘othering’ of the black body 264–266 T Tabata, Isaac Bangani and the AAC 295 on the agrarian and land question 304–307 biography of 294–296 and boycotts 298, 301, 302, 310 critiques of leadership 299, 300, 311 on education systems 309–311 on imperialism and nationalism 307–308 on national oppression 305 and non-collaboration 298, 301, 302, 303, 310 silencing of 293, 294 and unity of oppressed groups 297, 298, 299, 302 works by 296 see also All-African Convention (AAC) transitional justice (in Africa) 12, 25–27 transmodernity 85, 87, 89, 90, 205, 209 transnational ecological activism 207 tribalism 137, 147, 148, 257, 303 tricontinental conference (1966) 278, 279 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 252

Tuareg animism 55 culture 58, 59, 61, 63 mythology 56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 68 Tuareg-Islamic culture 59, 61 U unified African state 116, 119 Union of South Africa, 1910 settlement of 112 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) 315, 318, 323, 324, 328, 329 United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 240, 241, 246 Universal Ethiopian Anthem 125 universal knowledge 143, 159, 163, 204 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) convention 124, 125 in Harlem 123 in Jamaica 123 membership of 123 in Namibia 121, 122 programmes of 124, 126 purpose of 126 reach of 104, 120 see also Garvey; Negro World urbanisation 138 V victimhood 82, 264 W Walker, David 111 Washington, Booker T 106, 107, 108, 121, 122 wealth accumulation of 259 distribution of 288, 307 of indigenous knowledge 196 owners of country’s 268 ‘Weapon of theory’ address 278, 279 Western epistemology 202, 204–205 white capitalism 172 domination 120, 304, 309 supremacy 106, 109, 162, 165 whiteness Biko on 171, 172, 173, 175, 186 and British imperial history 160 and liberation 261 and structural violence 265, 266 Williams, Henry Sylvester v, 118 World Bank 142, 319, 327, 328, 329 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 319 World War I, and the Garvey movement 105, 123 World War II 17, 241, 319 X xenophobia 257, 258 Z Zeleza, Tiyambe 4–5, 219, 273

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