WHY IS IT SO EASY TO SPEAK ON BEHALF OF ALL AFRICANS

The tendency of some Africans to so generally speak for and on behalf of all of Africa’s inhabitants is, in my view, a sad development. In fact, I have had personal misgivings with the term “Africa” itself which, as an already large consensus has held, negates and dehumanizes the specific and contextual experiences that characterize the lives of distinct African persons. This position is clear and I need not speak on it further. I however wish to speak somewhat more on what I think is an additional problem with the term or the idea of “Africa” and even “African”. These considerations will finally lead me towards the comments I wish to express about problem with the tendency of some Africans to so generally speak for and on behalf of all of Africa’s inhabitants.

Firstly, I will contextualize my argument within my own experiences so as to avoid speaking generally. I have found from my own experiences – when I have been able to travel around the SADC neighborhood of Southern Africa – that the term African, in spite of all its historical heaviness accrued from the experiences particularly of colonization, remains a hollow and blunt political term that adds no real advantages, accords no real benefits or privileges, nor provides guarantees in both the formal and informal spheres of social life for many people. It would appear to me that to be African really entails an affordance to identify directly with a particular era of time – but without necessarily participating in any deliberately inclusive and fulfilling way in the practical contemporary issues of today’s Africa. In fact, the question about today’s Africa is largely left hanging, perhaps for the purposes of maintaining a permanent distraction away from “what is really going on – you know, the wealth amassed virtually overnight, the appalling states of governance and so on” – or maybe for the sheer enormity of the effort it would take to comprehensively encapsulate all of the African experience – historical and contemporary – into a beautifully worded definition.

And yet, this would be the problem, wouldn’t it? After all, hasn’t the struggle for African independence and African renaissance been characterized by its proponents as a struggle towards “African self-writing and self-profession”? Hasn’t one of the great atrocities against the inhabitants of the African continent been their total absence in the telling of their own stories, their histories – expressing and experiencing their cultures without external processes of moral vetting? (Speaking about themselves with someone else's consent and permission as it were). In fact, more recently (perhaps more so in the last 2 decades), we have seen renewed calls, rallying Africa’s inhabitants to pursue and generate knowledge that is drawn out of “authentic” African experience: the assurance of authentic being the local persons themselves actively involved in the articulation of their own experiences. Additionally, there is a definite call for scholars to turn away from an over-reliance on knowledge produced elsewhere, and to become emboldened to speak authoritatively about their own African-experience-centered research - and with this, the definition of Africa as a black continent has seen some extension affording non-black Africans as well the freedom and space to convey and channel their own sense of African-ness. Implicit within both these moods is the basic and fundamental rationale that every “African” gets to the place where they have the courage to raise their own voice and for that voice (among millions of other voices) to be counted a legitimate and a right voice airing the legitimate and valid opinion of its owner and her outlook. This in itself has greatly blurred the traditional view about what Africa's cultural boundaries are or ought to be.

And yet these authentic voices are treated as a nuisance or even silenced by the tendency to grand-narrate about what being an African entails. As such, Africans remain under a similar stranglehold of objectification when today, they still hear self-appointed authorities, most notably in but not exclusive to governments, begin to proclaim what the definition of African-ness is, and with it, what the rules of engagement should be with regards to those who do not ascribe to those definitions – and even towards those who do not fit within those definitions (that is, who is a non-Africans). This is also where the problem of citizenship creeps into the picture. I will illustrate this complex matter in a very brief and crude adumbration as follows: Upon this slippery culturally derived definitional basis of African-ness, which is almost always applied in order to safeguard and police political spaces, the various duties, responsibilities and obligations that States have to their citizens are accorded or denied to individuals and even groups of nationals. (Keeping in mind also that many African States see themselves as custodians of authentic African culture which then forms the canvas upon which other formal arrangements such as constitutions are written and ratified. This was their natural reaction to colonialism after gaining indepedence). This is also why, in the past, I have argued that while most “Africans” are nationals of various countries, they are not at all times always citizens of their countries especially if they are seen as transgressors of this unwritten cultural-political code.

And if I may just add an extra point while I am on this important tangent – I have never been granted admission to any country in Africa on the basis of being an African. All admissions I have received have been based on my birth-acquired identity of Malawian or a national of Malawi. It therefore follows that to be African is merely to identify with a particular narrative which itself is very much under constant reconstruction and contestation – but it is not a status of any real practical use in contemporary African life. Africa is a wide contested notion that virtually anyone can claim to belong to, and to which no one, at least within such a state of flux, can claim exclusive rights to. Nationhood, it would seem to me, therefore is what is important for functioning across Africa’s countries, while citizenship is what is crucial for functioning within a given country provided that status is maintained by the State to the individual against some enabling cultural basis as already argued elsewhere above.

And so, when citizenship is denied, persons filter across borders and acquire various legal statuses accorded to them on the basis of them being nationals of a given country: which country has “quietly” denied or abrogated them of citizenship. At least this is what appears to be the case from my point of view. My speculation is strengthened even more by the fact that while I was in South Africa for about 4 years, I was able to make demands of the South African government which I would never dare to make of my own government at home. The stability of a citizenship status in South Africa was much more concrete than a citizenship status accorded by the Malawi State – this in spite of the fact that legally I was and still am a Malawian without having ever been a South African citizen at any time while I was there (and this is precisely my point – citizenship seems often to be culturally designated within the social and political arrangements that construct relationships between States and their people. It is as such often arbitrary: in such cases, it is faintly legalistic).

And so, with all this in mind, what then accords any particular person from the African continent the right to speak on behalf of us all? I ask this question in response to an interesting article by a British-Nigerian journalist about African-Americans and their “supposed” tendency to appropriate African cultural symbols in order to look trendy and to identify with the so-called motherland. We do not even know the boundaries of who an African is within the present soul-searching as we gradually emerge from a difficult and turbulent past. Who are any of us therefore to prescribe what aspects of “our” culture is exclusively ours. In other words, who essentially is this “us” to whom any particular aspect of “African” culture belongs. 

And what about cultural appropriation within the African continent? Is it okay for Malawians, some of whom might know very little about “Kenyan culture”, to appropriate Kenyan cultural symbols in order to look trendy in Malawi or elsewhere? What is the fundamental difference between Malawians and African-Americans with regards to a cultural artifact in say, Angola – a country that might be equally little-known to both these nationals? Or is it that African-Americans are not Africans? In that case, and once more, who exactly is an African, and when does this African speak? (This question has already been problematized above in terms of some self-identification within some aspect of a historical narrative - which itself is potentially boundless).

And then what about tribes within countries? Is it okay for one tribe in Malawi or Zambia or Uganda to take the symbols of another tribe in Malawi or Zambia or Uganda without knowing fully what they mean and then appropriate them? (Clearly these groups are both "Africans", and are within the same country). And furthermore, what about cultural appropriation within the tribe? Who exactly within the tribe knows the exact meaning of that tribe’s cultural symbolism in relation to other members of that tribe? And if only that person (him or her) knows exactly what this cultural symbolism means, how then shall the rest of them find space for their voices to tell their own stories? Does this not seem all to familiar? Were we not silenced in this fashion before in some turbulent and dehumanizing past when people stood before us and told us who we were and were not? This takes us back to our original problem… “why is it so easy to speak on behalf of all Africans?” especially in light of our history in which violence was often perpetrated through this very mechanism.

In my humble opinion, there is no further room for this type of policing of cultural life. African-Americans have as much rights as any "African" to appropriate any symbols of their choosing. This will enable all the rest of us so called “Africans” to also do the same. This continent has greatly influenced the world even from its historical position of disadvantage and has borne many children and their descendents in that process. Its time for all of Africa's children to now speak and to do so freely.

Rantings about Malawi: Who we are

Malawi is truly a Post-Colony, and this is not merely because colonization was a real event of our history. I often like to listen attentively to what various experts and pundits have to say in their diagnostics of our Great Republic, and then I also like to listen to conversations amongst our other various groups who are never heard widely through our media outlets. In these conversations, there are numerous overlaps amongst the themes, but the eventual proposals of action are quite dissimilar. In the final instance, the difference in opinion amongst various experts, pundits and all other groups can be classified as follows: expert opinions are the result of (western) education with occasional tinges of Afrocentricism here and there, pundit opinions are broadly the views of an overburdened (professional) middle-class informed by the reader-, listener- and viewerships of newspapers, radios and television, while the other opinions are of the uneducated masses who supposedly don’t know what’s good for them. Conspicuously missing are the views of big business leaders because these tend to be disembodied through the institutional voices of say National Bank, or Press and other such large corporations without any real human face.

This is broadly how our society tends to classify opinions, and this is a typical hallmark of a post-colony: a society in which natives differentiate themselves into artificial groups through which violence (symbolic, systemic and physical) is appropriated, and suffering is legitimated. The veil beneath which violence in the post-colony hides itself is in how various groups respond practically to the real situations that confront them without a broader view of how their actions contribute towards the ongoing decay in the wider social setting. The postcolony is thus an association of seemingly disaffiliated groups conjoined in what appear to be isolated activities which nonetheless amalgamate into their collective decline.

In my humble view nonetheless – and indeed it is humble because this is a rather complicated issue – most discourse in Malawi is generated out of a general tension between two broad fronts which are the views of the experts/pundits on the one side, and the unarticulated desires of all the other groups on the other side, mediated by a middle consisting of a politicized state vis-à-vis a silent yet highly influential disembodied private sector run by the super (invisible) rich. This middle is also beholden to the colonial masters who essentially sustain through grants and loans their politico-economic and economic-political fortunes, respectively. Experts/pundits articulate the desires of a middle-class wanting to flourish in terms of vague freedoms, under a limited but developmental government while clinging on to certain sentimentalities of culture and even Malawian-ness (whatever that means). At the same time, all the other groups whose desires are unarticulated aspire at least to a basic middle-class existence of proper housing, satisfactory access to education, health and security, and of course, three proper meals a day. Their desires are thus truncated and distilled into middle-class aspirations for lack of a voice of their own since they are seen as uneducated.

However, as a prominent African scholar notes (Mamdani in Citizens and Subjects), middle-class desires in the postcolony are necessarily blockades to the realization of a more universal material emancipation. This is because rights which are at the core of middle-class aspirations, within a context of high inequality, protect those who have, and deny those who don’t have. From our own experience, we all know that the postcolony is a highly unequal place and primarily so by initial colonial design and continuous postcolonial implementation across material (politico-economic), institutional as well as symbolic (socio-cultural) overlapping spheres. This is why in the past I have commented that if we are to develop more intentionally and not wait on “trickle-down” economics (which is less likely to work in a climate of insatiable greed for nothing ever trickles off the plate of the greedy if not for purposes of patronage and politics of division) we must at least devolve rights to their basic minimums, and leave the tertiary matters for a latter period. But I digress.

More importantly, the question that begs our consideration is this: what are we to do in order to find a more wholesome articulation of the Malawian condition? That is, how can we get beyond our immediate practicalities that enable our own survival at the immediate expenses of collective well-being? Looking at this question will enable us to understand ourselves better, to look into our own soul so to speak – and perhaps even understand why secession (which is unfortunately being mistaken for federalism) has become a very hot matter.

I will end like this – very few of us, including myself, know what being a Malawian is all about even on a superficial level. Americans have their fictions such as “the land of the free” or “the free world”, a pretext so powerful that it has enabled them to turn a blind eye towards obscenely grotesque and dehumanizing violence against other peoples in the name of trying to liberate and democratize them [by force] (see Libya, see Iraqi, see Afghanistan which have all become hell-holes much worse than when the so-called liberators found them. Great Britain is perhaps the only “major” country which has decided that its creed shall be “to remain globally relevant by doing everything the Americans do” and when China begins to assert itself, their creed will become “do everything the Chinese do”, and indeed this may have already started to happen. It’s really quite pathetic, and perhaps this is why Scotland sought to leave them and narrowly lost amongst other things Westminster and Brussels related.

South Africans have rapidly developed their own fictions such as “the rainbow nation” even though certain colors of that rainbow are more visible than others: to put it mildly, the loudest color of the South African rainbow is male as their citizenship is heavily gendered, and we haven’t even talked about race yet. Oh, I forgot, ours is “the peace loving nation” – which to me sounds like telling people to condone all things in the name of peace even to their very own eminent demise. This is why we peacefully let MEC get away with murder at the last polls even though we are far less tolerant of “murder” amongst ourselves because this creed is about being beholden to the grace and excellence of our leaders by keeping others and ourselves in check (also known as Kamuzu-ism). But in the absence of some kind of national creed, countries are reduced to nothing more that territories of personal practicalities that contribute to the decay people through those same practicalities hope to escape. After all, nations are nothing more than constructs – but some fictions are closer to reality than others, and this is what I was getting at when I listed those other countries as examples. Next time, I hope to make another contribution in which I will present what I think would be the steps towards the more wholesome of such fictions. I hope to do so before the beloved north leaves us… that is, before it constructs itself into a new nation.

By the way, with regard to the Northern secession agitations, I do not know if I will be leaving or being left. This is because I belong through my extended families to both places – the north and the south, and recently I have developed new roots in the central region as well. I hope those of us with parents from the north and the south will we be allowed to have dual citizenship to both Malawi (main) and Northern Malawi. Or perhaps we can be constructed into some group of disadvantaged people towards whom large sums of compensatory money will flow… lol. But perhaps this too would in fact be a closer illustration of the creedless practicalities that continue to bedevil us: mere symptoms of the same problems.

Distorted Foundations: Malawi Elections 2014

So its been a while since the last time I posted to this blog. And this has been for the simple reason that there has been a lot to take in, reflect upon and process. It has also been a rather interesting period because of the tension between my own emotional sensitivities and the objective victories of the democratic systems for which I often so fervently champion.

 

I must admit though that in recent months - within this period of silence - have lost considerable confidence in democracy particularly as a system for development. That being said, democracy at least allows me to state my disappointments with it or its implementation openly; firstly because it allows for even the dimmest opportunities for a citizen to see what is going wrong in high places, and secondly that even in its distorted implementation, it enables a certain level of depersonalization which allows for institutional reform. The latter is important because it is easier to reform systems than it is to reform despots. On the other extreme, there is the developmental authoritarian regime which, unless it were filled with the good spirits of Ghandi or Mandela or Dr King and others (you will notice that the list is easily exhausted), is largely incapable neither to implement development with any kind of real objectivity aside from personalizations which impede reform nor to provide adequate room for systemic reform. Unless you are the Chinese miracle, authoritarianism is often the supreme law of the dictator... it is a dictatorship which crystalizes into laws and cultures that foment and perpetrate it. And so since I have such little faith in human beings including myself, I guess I am relegated by default to the role of a pessimistic democrat at best.

 

In previous blogs I have often spoken about the corrupted "spirit" of public life which makes it almost impossible for even the most objective and clear of regulations, laws and stipulations to be seen in their neutral manner. I have rather pessimistically stated that any law or contract written down to facilitate any number of interactions will be seen in light of this "spirit" rather than for what that law is objectively; and consequently, reason becomes nothing more than the rhetorical instrument used to accomplish unreasonable ends. And this of course is what has implied my usual stubborn position that unless there be a revolution of leadership at the top which fundamentally alters the relations of power and the discourses that enable its deployment, there can be no real hope to rapidly transform our society into something positive for the majority. This is because within the realm of interests manifesting as rhetoricized reason, there is no limit to which newer forms of interpretations other than the reasonable one can be created and implemented in accordance with the prevailing corrupt spirit of that time.

 

Anyway, so recently the democratic institutions, namely the Courts of Malawi came through, firstly by blocking the attempted annulment of the elections by former President Joyce Banda, then tying the Malawi Electoral Commissions' (MEC) hands for a period of two to three days when they attempted to recount the vote in view of what they said were serious irregularities, and lastly by forcing the Malawi Electoral Commission to announce the electoral results which 7 of their 10 commissioners had refused to append their signatures to. This is bitter-sweet for me because on the one hand I was moved deeply to realize that our institutions had grown mature enough to arbitrate, and block off interferences, in a serious matter such as a national election. But on the other hand, I saw once more the typical style in which we do things in Malawi, where what is obvious is shrouded in rhetoric while what is less obvious is clarified in a chorus of technocratic verbiage. I will explain.

 

What compelled the Courts to order MEC to announce the results which MEC itself as an independent body has called flawed with "serious irregularities" was a clause somewhere in the electoral law that stated that results were to be announced within 8-days of casting the last vote. The Court stated that MEC had the full authority to do whatever it wanted to do in order to verify results (that is to ascertain their credibility) but this was to be done within the 8-days. I am no legal expert but it is clear to me that this law does not require MEC to announce fraudulent results. Secondly, that this law does not mean to say that casting a vote is one event, while announcing the victor of the vote is another because this would be tantamount to charging MEC with the authority to administer elections and then decide by some corrupt collusion that a winner was some candidate arbitrarily selected by the group of commissioners. Furthermore, since swearing in traditionally happens within twelve hours of the announcement of the result, there is no way the public would be able to contend that decision before the new president was sworn in. But of course, the entire judgment or ruling didn't consider any of these matters. Perhaps MEC should have taken a step further to say that the entire vote was a huge failure and that another one had to be conducted; this was probably their only way out since maintaining that a physical audit had to be undertaken implied that these "serious irregularities" were not serious enough to offset who the eventual winner would be. Nevertheless, every vote should count. Elections in Malawi are not the business of compiling aggregates but rather the serious matter of ensuring that even the lonely dissenter's vote is captured on the tally.

 

More so, ideally, and as a nation that has undergone systematic repression since 1891 through the British and then the Kamuzu Banda colonizations, you would expect a little less naivety on the part of our, as we have all seen, very powerful Judges. The law, as I understand it in Malawi, is written in a bottom-up manner, with some laws speaking more closely about the fundamental premises upon which our nation was created post-1994, and others speaking more about the regulations governing secondary and tertiary matters of public and institutional life. What I mean by this is simply that: where all authority to govern is held by citizens and conferred by the vote to elected custodians, there can be no law that prevents the occurrence of that first fundamental pillar. In a narrow sense, the 8-day law could not have been upheld by a Court of Law at the expense of a legitimate handing over of power by Malawi's sovereigns into the hands of a president. The question that should have been asked importantly was rather "how long would a reasonable extension be as requested by MEC". And interestingly, MEC would have had a proposal that could have been challenged by the counsel of those who opposed it. The Court would have heard both arguments and decided on what, under those unique circumstances, would be a reasonable extension. For me, this was a monumental occasion that was missed by our judiciary's commitment to pedantry.

 

In a country where the majority are poor largely by systematic design, the courts of Malawi need to see that the laws fundamentally are held to the foundational pillars of reconstruction and redistribution of economic, social and political resources to those citizens. This is implicit in the writing of our constitution which beyond just reciting the Bill of Rights goes further to stipulate in various provisions equally important developmental rights in direct response to periods prior to democratic Malawi in 1994. As such, the law must be a living and breathing set of standards that ears and sees the condition of the people. The law cannot be read and interpreted with the attitude of finality, but rather in the attitude of continuous reconstruction and rebuilding; and this is the monumental task that was bestowed upon our very powerful Judiciary (recall also that the judiciary has the power to review any decision or action - not just legal - that is made by the executive for conformity to the Malawi constitution... need I say more?). But of course, so many other things that we developed well-meaningly in Malawi have now become a painful thorn in the side of their intended beneficiaries. In the end, nobody wins - rather, we all lose together as we adhere to continuously distorting our otherwise good foundations.

 

Nevertheless... Congratulations to my dear 5th President of Malawi... Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika... May this be the beginning of better days.

Revolution or Pragmatism from a Modest Malawian View Point

This essay will touch of several separate topics. The aim will be more to show how nuances of various topics have a role to play within the broader and tumultuous realm of politics. At this point in my life, I am convinced that we all are involved in politics, even when we have said to ourselves that we are apolitical, and this position is what currently drives me towards the conclusions I often make.

 

Revolution is a powerful word which captures the process of achieving the idealisms of the various groupings and factions that play their part in the dense political sphere. The dominant canons or discourses around which the definitional essence of that word are derived are embedded at least in the contemporary setting in a Marxian sense albeit no always within the Marxian conclusions. That sense is that revolutions entail that moment in which there is the realization of a critical mass of some awareness whose content manifests in a focused overthrow of an undesirable status quo. However, beyond the massive manifestation of that awareness' content upon the status quo is an undefined utopian space in which the shattered and yet remnant symbolisms of the previous order are arbitrarily designated into unequivocal, incoherent and generally unsystematic definitions about what a utopian existence actually should look like. This existentialist vacuum is in my interpretation what necessitates the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Marxist intellectual chapters, as well as an inherent intra-social resistances within the matrix of social actors generally towards revolution. More correctly, revolution isn't the object of disdain in and of itself - rather the lack of definitional exactness with regards to singular subjects following the overthrow of a status quo is.

 

An automatic solution therefore to this problem is a benevolent dictatorship or the dictatorship of Fidel Castro or more exactly, the dictatorship ascribed by a consenting proletariat. A dictatorship that is somehow geared towards total emancipation upwards even to the level of aesthetics, while maintaining a strong reformist position towards what are admittedly, even in Marxist and Hegelian doctrine themselves, the fundamental roots of all epiphenomenal human existence including aesthetics. This is after all the very reason why there is a lengthy and hostile critic of ideology within those same writings in which ideology is the manifest pacifier of endemic economic arrangements. Nonetheless, the imposition of a dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise, remains nothing more than an balancing stone to a very complicated question, and that question is, after the revolution that involves hundreds of thousands of people, from where then shall we draw a definition from which a utopian existence could be designed and implemented. This is precisely where Africa as a continent finds itself. Unlike its sister continents who through the processes of intentional but still nonetheless organic development (and I don't not say development to mean progress) have through the passing of time arrived at varying crystalized definitions of what life on those continents is about, and subsequently approximations of what is worth preserving. In Africa, the dilemma is ominous because the revolution is said to have already happened at independence; a revolution of political independence and self-determinism which however, within the very same decades of self-rule, had become subservient to the broader concerns of limiting economic circumstances. Or, to put it differently, circumstances that warranted self-rule in conjunction with continued economic dependence. This is of course for the simple reason that after independence was gained, the remnant symbolisms of State-ism and capitalism (or communism as its fierce opponent) had translated the revolutionary language pre-independence into ideals only realizable or imaginable within the precincts of the language or discourse of State-ism itself. It was either that as stepping stone for the political sustainability of the definitional dictatorships or the abyss of "the lack of utopian definitions".

 

Residually,  therefore the constitution of power which was required to reform or revolve that African condition remained in tact because of the absence of definitional exactness. In turn, this translated into a strange commitment to dictatorships even when the economic might of the State was clearly not within the control of the dictator per se but in the arm of the donating colonial-mother. The African revolution therefore in a practical terms was a vision whose viability was defined externally, but experienced and suffered internally - and to this effect, entirely experienced in a continuous juxtaposition with an abhorred and yet desired other. The definition granting powers of African executive branches defined only the modalities for maintaining the rights to twist and spin African definitions within an already prevailing language of dependence and its subsequent longings, while their true abilities to transform tangibly the lives of those they claimed those definitions were for was housed in London, or New York, or Berlin or other far flung places of African Longing. This tension, I claim in this essay, is visible today. But I also make another claim that may startle those who are often too militant about apportioning blame upon imperialism; that African dysfunction within such an arrangement is collegially of our own making.

 

I proceed as follows; even within the discourse of revolution, our continent's thinkers and politicians tussle over redistributing wealth, expanding services so as to engender socio-economic development, and other reforms that would materially - that is in terms of global/western definitions of wellness - improve the standing of African people. Revolution is thus laced everywhere within prevailing global definitions of wellness or betterment. There is also for example the naïve taking for granted of self-evident qualities and conditions that would universally speak to all of humanities desires and aspirations which are also fundamental universal doctrines about humanity which are western. They are the same self-evident criteria that are for example used to justify international acts of aggression and war. Now, the point is not to push for an alternative because clearly even if such an alternative could be produced, the argument I have presented so far attests to precisely the opposite of such an alternative. It seems clear that within our own dysfunctional marauding we are in fact all aspiring to - due to the historical outputs of our, call them, earlier induced or otherwise dispositions at independence and before - approximations towards the Western ideal anyway. And this is unsurprising because the Utopia, arrested by economic limitations, enabled by benevolent developed states whose acts of donation animate with life the wills of our political actors on our continent and our overall projects, are themselves imaginably the ideal. In this case they are donating as ideals, or financing the realization of an approved ideal. For we all know that violated ideals lead to aid cuts which often collapse political definitional powers eg. Malawi.

 

I find therefore that within that mess, arguments pertaining to what is essentially human in its origin or what is imbued as a consequence of an imposing other may be important to some, but my outlook is typically more modest. Firstly, we have a utopian desire that cannot be defined in any manner that could render it as a universal concept that reflected all aspirations. Our historical experience itself denies this. The utopian definitional vacuum only necessitates the need for a balancing benevolent dictatorship which masquerades as benevolent precisely because it sits in the vacuum of the absence of a definition. And lastly, we have the status quo rampant with currents of discontent and suffering, opulence and luxury, all of which a defined presently in various but nonetheless owned or conscious approximation towards western standards or antagonisms against those same western standards. Our own experience thus seems to force us to see the West as the only viable, resented or loved, alternative in the context in which a revolutionary future presents only a utopia with a void existentialist definition. So I ask, what then is the viable basis for any revolution anyway if its eventually is precisely the antithesis of the very aesthetic freedoms - or languages - we as Africans seek to protect; definitions which are blanketed in African rhetoric about a lost glory in a Western vocabulary.

 

I have many times before stated that such questions shouldn't have to matter at all if indeed we - and as our historical record has shown - have defined ourselves presently within the very things we claim to hate. Of what use therefore is this perpetual commitment to towards revolution when, even at this present time a pragmatic programmatic would be sufficient to heal the wounds of the unjustly suffering who predominantly already identify their betterment in terms of a Western vocabulary? The self-made aspect of our African problems have therefore more do with our own reluctance to see our circumstances for what they are, to be honest about the languages in which we speak or articulate them, and to move decisively to absolve them within a set of terms that are already present and rampant within the prevailing order - terms that are unfortunately western such as the State itself or even Citizenship. Visions about paradise are great, but Africa must come to terms with the reality that we are limited by what we can actually do. And that limited space of what we can do is much more fulfilling for all of us than what has been the case so far since independence in this longing for a utopia that we only know as a paradise but cant define in any tangibly existential manner.

 

The language that systems that function objectively within our own borders; that do not shield malpractice and offenders; and that attempt to symmetrically treat all citizens of States on the singular basis of their citizenships indeed echoes calls for a modernization of Africa. But we ourselves can begin to find the additional merits and demerits arising out of our own commitments to actualize a system of State to its very logical conclusions in manner that would permit us to transcend the western nostalgia, and arrive towards a cultural dictum that would define our own experiences. This would liberate us from this perpetual juxtapositional existence of always snaking around the central monolithic ideal in our ambivalent love for and hate of the West. The dysfunction brought about by high political powers designated to act as revolutionary prophets - or the quest for subsequent prophets following the pursuit of a new utopia - without the means to express their visions in economic terms and let alone in any fair terms always leave nations open to the appetites of those central personalities of power. Subsequently positions Africans to see the West as the ideal. Internal cohesion is therefore the first step towards any kind of decolonization effort. Revolution for me remains nothing but a revolutionary idea. What we need is Pragmatism - within the already rampant discourses, which follows into an honest realization of where we are, accounts for how we see ourselves there, and what practical affordances and limitations we face to better ourselves within those already rampant concepts.

 

 

The Simplicity of Greatness: A down to earth view of Mandela

Very little can be taken away from Mandela in terms of what he managed to achieve for his great country, and the ripples that swept various parts of our continent and indeed our world as a result of those achievements. At face value, the ideals for which Mandela stood - and was prepared to die for - did raise a few hairs on some backs particularly because of their implications as regards leadership on this continent and beyond. But a deeper view into Mandela's ideals reveals perhaps the workings of one of the most prudent political minds we have yet seen on our continent.

I think Mandela keenly understood the human condition, and firmly believed that the majority of human suffering was a direct consequence of mostly selfish and self-serving human actions. In respect of that realization, Mandela sought out to make the most of what such an unenviable condition could conjure up if only it were political configured in specific ways for its own internal egocentricities to consolidate into a form of cooperation and co-existence.

Of all the fights for self-rule on the African continent, no designated group of Africans ever cooperated with each other in order to inherit a bigger and wealthier economy than that of South Africa. And by extension, the shear promise of being in charge of such an monument of an economy naturally shifted that economy into a center of focus for the various racially differentiated factions of the South African "nation". In this regard, while the calls for nationalization and indigenization rang louder as their fore-running calls of Ujama and African communism declined, they did not dissuade Mandela into heeding them. For him, the bare pragmatics of the long awaited transition into self-rule that his organization alongside the many others who have today been overpowered by the ANC's liberation rhetoric, required the careful preservation of the common center of stakes which was the economy, tinged with the gradual and cautious transition that would enable Africans to slowly filter into its ranks. The logic for this move was simple: radical transformation would only be sustainable in the short and barely into the medium terms precisely because a destroyed economy which had become the focus and aspiration of the previously oppressed would only become a catalyst for rogue centers of power each of them committed to their own ambitions. But implement a gradual transition, then all you have to deal with are the on-going cries of those who felt the transition was moving too slow while the economy itself cushioned and soaked up some of the discontent as more and more people were absorbed into it. This is why for me, as much as many people cry foul about Mandela's handling of South Africa's transition, I think that their ability to cry and to feel like they have been heard has lot to do with the fact that South Africa is what it is today rather than what it would have been if there had been a radical shift at "independence". And to add more flesh to this argument, there is still not yet an African president who inherited a country at independence and didn't treat its inherited economy as a sacred-cow. Kamuzu Banda of Malawi did it, Mugabe did it (up until he became radical), Dos Santos did it, Kaunda did it and several others - albeit within the constraints of that characterized their times. The overt difference therefore between Mandela's transition and the transitions of others was simply this: while other African countries aspired for self-rule with less of an impression of the economies they would inherit because they were significantly smaller, South Africa's much larger economy made a deeper impression of the gains to be realized upon the realization of self-rule. And by default, the economy was the battlefield which Mandela, in his political shrewdness, quickly moved to de-militarize.

Now the questions that need to be asked within such a scenario can only be about the practicalities of implementing the vision of the South Africa so many seek to see while accepting the centrality of South Africa's economy in that entire process. After all, there is nothing else that, even within the vague definition of Africanness, acts as a distinguish-er between "Africans" as a whole and "South Africans" as a specific group of Africans other than the economic difference between other African countries and that of South Africa. And this is not to mention the place such an economy accords South Africa globally. Now, if the economy of South Africa is so central to the extent that it has demarcated and instilled African identity itself into two blocs namely "South Africans" and "Africans", what kind of a man would realistically implode such an economy upon which the very warring and radical factions themselves based their radical ideas? For me, Mandela saw an imperfect but prudent resolution to an enormous dilemma, and opted for it. He would preserve the economy, and champion a painstaking slow process of integration that would span several decades, fully aware that that very thing everyone was very radical about was the sole entity that gave a nation rising out of decades of conflict and violence any chance at cohesiveness and perhaps a shot at unity. And furthermore, if democracy would remain the aspired-for ideal, then radicalism could not be an option. The process therefore of building a nation sat squarely on creating the impression that given the de-racialized and objective systems that would come with democracy, the country then emerge de-personalized and as such united in a seemingly disembodied and automated economy... an economy that seemed to represent everyone and no one in particular with the grand effect of instituting a formative or an embryonic state of unity essential for holding the entire contraption, if you please, together.

But then a surface examination of such a prudent choice would point us to what remains the dominant criticism of Mandela which is that he was too good to the oppressor at the expense of his own people. There is always a certain level of substance in every argument but I am not so inclined to take such a criticism wholesale, because like I have argued above... South Africa's economy is its identity, as in a great sense the focus of its struggle, and today remains its basis of difference from the rest of the continent. It was therefore within the parameters of that economy that human dignity had been lost under the evils of racism. And as such, dignity would be restored largely through re-integration into it. Perhaps this is why the economy is concurrently resented and loved by its citizens on the basis of its exclusion and its rewards respectively. Radically tampering with it would no doubt have created a different South Africa. I am just not sure if that alternative version would have yielded greater levels of hope than we see presently.

But in a few weeks or months, who knows. I might be compelled to think differently about this entire topic. Sometime next week, I hope to post an argument about Revolution within the African context. I will pre-empt the following: I don't think that such a concept exists in the real world outside the realm of ideals.