A Renaissance of Control: Africa and its false Trophies

Reading a popular Zambian online newspaper the other day, I came across a comment apparently posted by a South African who said and I paraphrase, 

I am a South African and I have never been to any African countries but I have traveled widely overseas…. [in relation to the Zambian Vice-President’s outbursts about the South African president and the South African government] I don’t understand why these Africans who do not like us keep jumping our borders to come to our Country. After all, what can Zambia give us? All it is, from what I see, is a run-down third world country with nothing but poverty…

The lengthy comment went on, following the same line of thinking more or less. I puzzled over this for a few hours while taking my regular think-walks, mostly focusing on the many dichotomies or binaries that we Africans, as a collective, have come to imbibe. There is Pan-Africanism which in my view is a response to the torn-up communities of what are our visions of a once united and peaceful African continent used to be prior to imperial and colonial invasion. And then there are discourses of development, densely decorated in abundant vocabularies about regional and global economic integrations, the vast majority of which are Keynesian and even Adam Smithian economics language albeit tinged here and there in newer discourses about the environment, gender and so on. However, the exact pragmatics of pursuing such, call them, ideologies are desperately at odds. On another entry I will reflect on some of the difficulties associated with ethnic, traditional, nationalist, regionalist and finally, Africanism sentimentalisms. In my view, such –isms are inherently incompatible, and the definition for an African Renaissance does well to free itself from such futile attempts to consolidate them.

But the very interesting thing about the comment I have quoted above (and which I have paraphrased to reduce the more crude and offensive language the commenter used when they posted it) is as follows; South Africa in 1994 emerged out of close to 5 decades of Apartheid, preceded by 350 to 400 years of colonial rule. We are therefore looking at just under 5 centuries of oppressive ruled in which the direction of the country more and more, as the oppression grew stronger and stronger from its inception, became the outcome of intentions or wills of people other than the natives themselves. By 1994, when the second and more significant independence happened, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town (to mention the most prominent cities) had already been established as major metropolitan areas not only in relation to just other African cities but even in relation to other cities in the globe generally. In those days, South Africa’s economy, in spite of its dehumanizing and ruthlessly segregative orientation, was nonetheless already a huge, albeit largely isolated, force on the continent. It therefore becomes striking when this “monument” of an economy, built via the deliberate instrumentalization of a dehumanized “racial other” seamlessly becomes grafted in by an African commenter on a Zambian online newspaper as a beacon of South African supremacy and a standard for “othering” other African peoples.

Some would argue that it was in fact African labor that built those monuments, and yet the superior argument would for me be that any artifact or monument built in the absentia of the will of the concerned people is an affront on their humanity. Which is precisely why, even with South Africa’s huge economy, it was not enough for Africans to simply stare and marvel at the tall buildings and the big highways. Rather they aspired for self-determinism via the philosophy of democracy in which the trajectory of their nation would reflect their “wills” as a collective. These contradictions are not isolated to the South African case, for even as early as 1964, only eight months after the establishment of an independent Malawi, Kamuzu Banda (Malawi’s ruthless dictator) begun to imprint his very personality onto the Malawi state via the use of the very monuments of power that had characterized the colonial period.

Now, these very sketchy considerations make us aware of boarder, cross-cutting conditions of the self-ruled African dispensation after the collapse of the colonies. This dialectic of castigating the colonialists, while at the same time celebrating about the very monuments which should rightly only be recognized as witnesses to our oppression, has permitted the entry of a dual discourse which can only function within the diameters of an acutely oppressive political supervision. What do I mean? Discourses about freedom from an oppressor cannot naturally exist alongside the practices of celebrating the monuments set up by the oppressor which themselves remind us strongly of the oppression we lived through. As such, the liberators (that is the so-called freedom fighters) ascribed unto themselves the roles of deciding what makes up the narrative of a free Africa and what does not. And therefore, the selection of things to be adopted into what we could loosely call African culture falls precisely upon their laps to arbitrarily decide what constitutes an African rebirth and what doesn’t. This in turn facilitates the further creation of board concepts such as nationalism as ideas born out of the continuously unfolding actions of the liberators themselves, occasioning in the first place, the early instances of control masked in performances of unification, and in the last place, open declarations about what constitutes a cultural nationalism definition and what doesn’t, thereby furthering the othering of dissenting Africans. This is in a nutshell the long and short of the Kamuzu Banda dictatorship of independent Malawi.

When considered closely, it is understandable as to why then a rather politically active population responsible for the tearing down of oppressive systems prior to independence, become docile and susceptible to totalitarian control by a movement led by freedom-fighters. The overcoming of an oppressive system not only challenges the political establishment but it is also hinged upon the ideals of something that was lost or denied, something only sentimentally and vaguely envisaged but not concretely defined. That something to which the Africans of the colonial period aspired was taken over, in its definitions, by their liberators, thereby occasioning the sort of cultural definitions that only suited those in power and allowed them psychological control over the African people. I find this condition perhaps nowhere better established on the African continent than in present day Zimbabwe where somehow a full dictatorship operates side-by-side with a Judiciary and a National Assembly. For me, the mechanism works as follows. The idea of a Zimbabwean democracy is only elaborated by the incumbent president, and all other arms of government must operate within that prescribed definition handed down by that president. Zimbabwean culture is therefore handed-down. Zimbabwean nationalism is similarly handed-down. All in favor are true Zimbabwean nationals, and all dissenting are the others who have lost their African roots. The political vocabulary is frozen within that simple but immensely powerful binary whose one side is filled with abundant “handed-down” vocabulary, and whose other side is merely defined as “unAfrican” and therefore, intolerable. 

Furthermore, in examining this condition more closely, it is not surprising that other definitions pertaining to, for instance, how specific aspects of African culture ought to occur within the “dictated” democracy are similarly handed down and practiced as prescribed. However, the very deep sentimentality brought about by the initial pre-independence galvanizing messages of the liberators depicting our independence as being a return towards a something lost do not only permit for the passive reception of these forms of control but also short-circuit the other silenced implications of an African renaissance, namely, open debate and more importantly, the right to create and institute as a living people within very unique circumstances, relevant systems of culture as well as broader definitions of a post-colonial African experience. After all, if Africanism was defined by Africans of a prior generation, they themselves having acquired that from other prior Africans, why can’t today’s Africans be afforded the similar right to decide their own customs and traditions? Some of the blackmail for offsetting this sure consistency has been leveraged upon a politically strengthen narrative of ancestral spirits as being the ones who expect it of all Africans to live a certain way; that way itself being described and defined only by our liberators. The freedom of narrative was thus reduced to the mere re-telling of stories of our strong men during the fight for independence alongside folklore tales of ancestors, African prophets and spiritualists, elephants, hyenas and rabbits (hares) aimed at instilling a power friendly discipline into our young ones and ourselves. The African imagination became reduced to a politically-blunt object, designed only to receive definitions about what we ought to do today, and re-telling those tales of a handed-down or dictated history as if it were an “openly-deliberated” and consensually agreed definition of African culture, traditions, nationalism, and general experience. In conclusion therefore, African de-colonization was merely, by and large, a re-entry into an alternative form of colonization setup by the political freezing of our numerous objects and symbols of culture and experience.

In much of the SADC region, to varying degrees and with the notable exception of Botswana (even though it two shows several parallels), we find that culture and nationalism, when tracked back to the hay-days of independence, emanated as handed-down definitions for the supposed purpose of national unity building. Today, these ideas are shoved down the throats of other Africans as gospels of a re-found African experience. As such, for me, it is clear that control aided by the celebrating of our false trophies speaks of a general political fear to allow the African to experience and define for themselves what orientation they ought to acquire or develop in order to be better compatible with the things that confront them. And so women are, for instance, tightly kept to a strict presentation of what an African woman ought to be, and rape, which is in my opinion the work of person who has intended in his own heart to violate another human being, comes to be seen as an incidence arising from a woman whose demeanor violated that African woman’s presentation of herself. In a twisted way, therefore, every act of violence against women, in spite of the political rhetoric about how bad and evil it is, ferments the problem further, instilling more powerfully the misinformed position that certain kinds of women who violate the cultural code invite upon themselves this “lesson”. Indirectly, the person who perpetrates the crime – who might be arrested if they are truly unfortunate – is only symbolically sanctioned officially via the performances and discourses of the state set up, while in the domain of a strictly monitored process of how African culture ought to unfold, such incidences on further the false-expectation that if only we could all revert to that thing we lost during colonialism, these things would automatically melt away. When in my opinion, the problem arises from the very “colonizing” of what African culture ought to be by our liberators.

In returning back to the quotation I opened this brief and sketchy discussion with, this taking for trophies the very marks of our oppression highlights just how largely false our liberation was, and how furthermore, we have allowed ourselves to be doubly inflicted by not only the dehumanizing features of our past colonies, but the also the further colonization under the banner of an African Renaissance. Daily we are reminded to be Africans in our mud huts and broken schools by people riding in convoys that are nothing but modern. We walk barefoot to rallies to be addressed by leaders who live in State Palaces which are modern. We trustingly subject ourselves to traditional and cultural rituals, wallowing in dehumanizing poverty, to – in the evening – turn on our battery powered radios to listen to budget presentations quoted in figures and articulated in modern economics theory. And somehow, we are not yet able to see that cultural sentimentalism is an othering force, empowering us only to the extent to which we are only able to police ourselves into an politically acceptable order; while disempowering us from our place as Africans ready to question and demand more appropriate visions for our present conditions. Our resistance towards freeing ourselves from these crippling definitions about who an African is, to the extent that we disallow others in our societies to be whatever they choose to be, resembles only a form of political and social surveillance in my view. And it allows us to misguidedly “other” other Africans in that false-enlightened manner of the author of that scathing comment about the people of Zambia. The troubling thing is, however, that we all seem inflicted by this quest for a gone and dead African authenticity, and therefore prone to removing ourselves from open debate aimed towards the creation of a more applicable agreement of what being an African in 2013 ought to look like.