Intentional Reflexivity: A note on Malawi's Culture within the Discourses of Modernism

Recently, the Justice Minister of Malawi announced the suspension of anti-gay legislation pending further deliberations on the same in Malawi's Parliament. Well, several human rights organizations including, most notably, Amnesty International applauded the move as an unprecedented step forward in the history of this matter in Malawi particularly, and  perhaps even in Africa generally. While it is not the concern of this article to talk directly about this particular case, I would like to point it out that it is unconstitutional for any member of the executive to suspend or shelve any law in Malawi. Those functions are strictly reserved for the Judiciary and the Parliament ONLY. It was surprising that our good old Western Government buddies who are so quick to point out our failures in governance have not yet raised concerns, as they usually do concerning every small thing in Malawi, about this gross violation of the principle of separation of powers. Furthermore, in terms of the social psyche of our country, it proves my earlier arguments in this blog in which I have stated that in Malawi, activism and political participation is not necessarily about Constitutionalism, rather, it is about livelihoods. As long as livelihoods are not threatened by Executive decisions, then nobody cares about what the executive does. Any upheavals resulting from such executive actions are primarily informed by culture as a standard for practises in a democracy as opposed to a reflection of what constitutes democratic practise within the ambids of the Republic's Constitution. As such, activism seldom about the principles of constitutionalism; it’s about the pocket and the stomach. But let’s move right along...

When the Europeans first arrived on the shores of the African continent, they did not find paradise. They found societies. Societies with positives as well as negatives, just like all other societies of the world. Over the next several decades and centuries, they embarked on various projects driven by whatever political and economic pursuits they wanted to realize. Some of the more notable ones were slave-trade and colonialism which impacted on the African continent in a myriad of ways. In fact, such were their pursuits that even some economic-historian scholars have argued that the World Wars of 1914 and 1940 were really wars over African colonies. Their arguments are compelling even though we can’t side-step great atrocious evils suffered by some races simply because other races foolishly thought they were superior. Perhaps it would be better to presume that those wars were the articulation of the various interests of different powerful actors of that period. *I only comment on the war here to skip to the next section of my discussion which is the independence phase of African states.

However, the next couple of decades following the Second World War period saw several African countries attain independence, including Malawi in the 1960s. The following years after independence, African States sought legitimation by projecting government as the solution to the huge number of socio-economic problems that beset African countries. Discourses were marred within the contradictions of efforts to reclaim an African identity, which was supposedly lost due to colonialism and Western activists on the African continent, and the need to modernize and attain to the very same standards of life in Western societies albeit mostly seen via the very same vehicle of colonization.

Overtime, a rapture occurred as the liberationists (the African movements that rose to power after gaining independence) begun to use the material as well as immaterial essences of modernization to portray power and prestige on the one hand, while preaching a message of Africanization on the other to pacify the people into an acceptance of their deplorable conditions. The matter of the African identity became conflated with African culture, and African culture became anything that legitimized the ailing state of leadership on the continent. For example, it was African culture for the President to be seen as the father of the nation and therefore he was infallable and beyond reproach. Meanwhile, the father figure enriched himself and his cronies using that same culture as a means of legimitzing his poor style of governance. Its my opinion that culture, however it was defined, became instrumentalized for oppression.

Furthermore, these were, in a Sociological view, the early indications of the failure of the Africanization project promised at independence. Subsequent occurrences such as the commodity price shock that many attribute to the present heavy indebtedness of African countries found fertile ground for its occurrence at time when the State was living beyond its means, and white elephant projects had to be endeavoured in order to portray some kind of socio-economic progress some 30 years after independence. Meanwhile, the liberationists were gaining great wealth from their control of the State and its resources. And the order of business on the continent, which was stricken by great poverty, became about livelihoods. Politics of the belly were beginning to set in. I wish to not articulate this condition further.

Presently, and specifically in Malawi, this contradiction continues to ensue. Case in point, gay rights. The arguments that abound within the social sphere are that gay and lesbian activities are un-African (that is, they are not of African culture). The concept of what is African itself remains more or less as ambiguous as it was in 1960 when the Malawi got its political, and not necessarily economic, independence of the Britain. Meanwhile, large motorcades that escort the presidency are seen as African; State residences all over the country are seen as African; Condom use for sexual relations with multiple partners are seen as African; and so on, and yet the right for two consenting adults to engage in same sex relations are seen as un-African. Bear in mind also that these laws were not introduced by African leaders but rather by colonial masters prior to independence. I only articulate this argument in order to illustrate a point further down, and not to get into the technicalities of what is right or wrong within the Malawian context. By and large, I think our problems aren’t about wrong or right, but rather what is practical and impractical for moving forward in a project of all-inclusive development.

The point I seek to make is thus as follows. A practical way of going about a relevant African renaissance at this point in our history is to come to the acceptance that we need to begin to relate and compare so many things we have held as static with those goals we seek to achieve. This means that we need take stock of our culture, our ways of life, our beliefs, our customs and other social things, and to match them against our goals, our aspirations, our visions. Then we need to realistically reflect on what it is we can hold on it as assets for moving forward and what we need to drop as liabilities. We must reflect upon our own culture and stop seeing it as something that was ordained by God or some sovereign "other" entity. Culture is merely a tool that permits us to see order in our World in an apolitical sense. In a political sense, culture can be and has been instrumentalized on this continent for illegitimate forms of rule and pacification for deplorable living conditions. For me, the question is no longer about what is modern versus what is traditional. It’s more a matter of what works and what doesn’t.

Modernism then becomes a project of cultural reflexivity and not necessarily a project of attempting to be like Britain or America or Japan. It is simply the task of equipping ourselves towards the betterment of ourselves within the prevalent condition of our times. In this sense, all things become African if they are used to our betterment and progress. And all things become un-African if they hamper that progress. If wearing miniskirts assists our efforts to empower, to put it in an African manner, our beloved sisters, then so be it (*satirically speaking). However and fortunately, the nature of our problems are characterized by evident conditions. People have poor or no housing, have no clean water, have little access to what is poor education, have poor access to what is low quality healthcare, have few opportunities to develop themselves economically and socially, have little influence over the course of their governments because of poor governance institutions and systems, and so on. I say all these things are un-African because they hold us back from a better life, and not because they are the features that have been largely been dealt away with by more developed countries like Japan for instance.

This argument is a mere sketch of many potentially controversial and intricate debates pertaining to numerous forms of life within the Malawian and African context, but the key is to venture into thinking about them as opposed to keeping to this fixed-static state of culture approach we have seen for way too long now. Like I said before, before Europeans came to this continent, we were not a paradise or an Eden, we were a continent full of societies that had negatives and positives. And as such, an African model for development cannot hold culture as a central incontestable and infallible feature of the African society when that culture, even in its pure pre-Europeanized form was imperfect. Again, we need to deliberately and intensively critique our cultures in order to make them more compatible for and with our efforts to develop. That, in my opinion, would constitute a more progressive African Modernization project than the antagonisms we have seen between what is Western and what is African. All things are African provided they become tools for progress, including this Windows HP computer that I so frequently use to upload updates to my little humble blog.

Cheers