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.

Ubuntu/Umunthu and Malawi's Aspiration for a Democratic Order

Ubuntu or Umunthu is very roughly an idea that spouses the view that there cannot be a "me" without an "us". This very simplified expression of Ubuntu carries with it various connotations with cross-cutting and very often inter-penetrating implications. However, because of the Ubuntu concept's deep rootedness within the bedrock of the Bantu people's very social fabric especially as a campus for navigating within a social and material world with some sense of morality, very often the contradictory aspects of this concept are generally downplayed as misinformed or misappropriated usages of the Ubuntu philosophy itself as a vague code for the existential navigation of the community embedded African as opposed to being acknowledged as the very indications tension within the pragmatics of Ubuntu itself as a life philosophy.

As a moral campus, in this case particularly pertaining to one’s continuous sense of responsibility towards the community, Ubuntu looks at social cohesion and an interdependence sustained within and by a flourishing communal system. Furthermore, the fibre that sustains this Ubuntu communal system is relational; that is, inter-human relations essentially what give the Ubuntu communal system its life-force or energy. The nature of these relationship may not and need not imply deep personal and emotional relationships. Rather they require a deliberate framing of a communal worldview or a sharedness of perspective pertaining to the character and nature of the material as well as immaterial world which then informs the basis whereupon a distinctly characterized communal system can be developed, and organized by human relations in order to exist meaningfully within the parameters of that [or those] envisioned world[s]. That is, a constructed togetherness or we-ness or us-ness.

The utopia that accompanies the Ubuntu philosophy or ideology [or even concept] is that the individual is acutely aware of the 'fact' that their existence is without meaning in the absence of others, and secondly, that in working together as a collective a lot more can be achieved, and thirdly, that the benefits of such achievements can be evenly [perhaps fairly] redistributed to all as determined by the relational networks. The implicit perception of which further implies that all human beings or persons within that social fabric are valued and treated as equals because of their selfless contributions to the communal system as well as their intrinsic value by virtue of being human. These would connote very beautiful and wonderful things as the outcomes of this very truly selfless ideology of Ubuntu whose morality seems to stem from the very pragmatics of living as human beings amongst other human beings amidst a world that is not fully comprehensible to any one mind. The communal pragmatics of Ubuntu therefore permits the finite mind to transcend the limitations of an individual human being by generating the existential experience of being amongst others, and seeing one’s contributions, albeit obscured within the mysterious mechanics of communal system vis-à-vis the external world, contribute to collective progress as well as the ‘colonization’ of that rampant, not completely comprehensible world.

On the flip side, Ubuntu’s philosophy is riddled with contradictions. Right within this blissful communal fabric which is relationally based and determined, emerge loci of power and authority, presented and masked as overseeing and guardian entities of the Ubuntu spirit. These entities are not themselves exempted from relationship as very often they are held by individuals who belong to the communal fabric itself. Their ability to render this oversight function often rests upon their demonstrated mastery, however defined, of various elements of the Ubuntu philosophy, and their ability to arbitrate amongst lapses in the communal system or fabric is both as a result of some historical pedigree as well as certain amount of mystery necessitated by the initial recognition of the finite mind of the individual, and the deity-like pragmatics of the fully functional Ubuntu philosophy as it is acted out by members of communal system. This condition necessitates the creation of illegitimate forms of power and authority and material accumulation – and indeed this critique about power illegitimacy emerges from within the Ubuntu philosophy itself which would, if exactly articulated, reject any kind of notions of differential importance amongst human persons. Furthermore, the material accumulation by those in authority also becomes masked within the ultimately unknowable rewards system of the relation based Ubuntu system.

What is of paramount importance to me however is that the Ubuntu communal system is all the time a system that is activated by the continuously conscious political animal called the human being – who, even when not intending to cause harm, is keenly aware of [or at least free to act into] the spaces opportuned to him or her by the varying depths of the different relationships within that complex Ubuntu system. An obviously, these complexities of relations carry within power connotations. That awareness comes with it abilities to act and mobilize various resources of the communal system from the very tangible material things right into the very complex and intangible symbolic things of that communal system. What then comes to be seen as pragmatic contradictions as a result of misappropriated and misunderstood Ubuntu obligations and responsibilities for the person to carry out, are in fact, the mere instances of impracticalities within the very Ubuntu system itself, stemming directly from its relational basis for [apparently organic] communal organization. This is not to mention, the very active role of individuals with considerable influence within the communal fabric to begin to activity prescribe meanings and contribute to the creation of symbolic conventions that further cement, within ambiguities of the Ubuntu communal system, their positions of continuously growing privilege.

The exact application of Ubuntu as a philosophy is in fact the reluctance to hold anything – symbolic, real or both - to any measure of exactness preferring rather to allow the relationship between any two persons to preside over the characterization of that incident with the vary wide goal-posts of inter-relational preservation on the one hand, and communal interests on the other. Here, relational or communal interests or both then determine what description will be accorded to an incident, albeit within the specific cultural system of that communal system. Any designated description, varying upon who is involved, makes different contributions to the culture code within which the Ubuntu philosophy operates. To those who see Ubuntu as the creator of culture itself, it is important to mention that unique historical experiences induce differing implementations of this very benevolent philosophy, and thereby creating unique cultures out of, to sensationally put it, what was initially a uniform philosophy of Ubuntu [if such a thing ever existed at all]. By extension therefore, Ubuntu designates the occurrence of a counter State, counter modernity, and consequently counter democratic practises. Ubuntu’s practical application necessarily would most likely than not create precedence for patrilineal political orders as evidenced in Malawi, both from the inherent description-of-incidences haggling tendencies as well as the brutal instrumentalization of the philosophy itself to maintain or develop privilege. This distinction in my mind is only analytical, otherwise, the logical outcomes of such developments ultimately lead on to the same conclusions already asserted above.

The reconciliation of Ubuntu to the democratization efforts of Malawi therefore entails an acceptance of some core themes coming from the adoption of democracy itself as a foreign system to the Ubuntu one on the one hand, and also accepting an adaption of Ubuntu philosophy one the other hand. In the latter case, the goals of Ubuntu’s philosophy are not foreign to the goals of State or the goals of democratic values. However, the mechanics through which such goals are realized are fundamentally different. Democracy as seen as the custodian of modernity embraces the deliberate articulation and codification of specific practices that sanction the various activities that occur within that system. And therefore the guard against a disruption to the state of affairs is impersonal, and always acting uniformly toward all members of that system who transgress or conform to it in those codified instances. Ubuntu, however, requires for a relational arbitration, that prescribes or imbues an incident with approximated relationally-informed descriptions, and their resultant consequences. The vein of this rendition is not to presuppose that Ubuntu is inferior or superior to Democracy, but rather that Ubuntu need not necessarily be based on relationships especially over the governance of huge social systems such as Nation States as its practice is ultimately inextricably linked to forms of governance that would in the last instance undermine its very spirit. It is important to note that democracy as an adopted system was arguably preferred because it seemed to silently champion the values of Ubuntu.

However, and particularly in post-independence upheavals for democratic transitions, the democratic model of governance was adopted in order to check or curtail the excesses suffered from an overbearing locus of power that seemed to undermine the vast entirety of the Ubuntu communal system at the national level. In which case, democracy was the preferred and silent critique of a rogue relation-dependent system which would serve as an add-on to this philosophy of community. I imagine that it would not be impossible to affix this brief analysis to Malawi’s historical archive, and to then see vividly how, intentionally and/or unintentionally, a benevolent philosophy such as Ubuntu could readily contribute, in its pragmatics, to the creation of dysfunctional states such as Malawi, Africa’s Warm Heart.

Malawi's Extraordinary Ambivalence

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about this year is that it is not business as usual in Malawi anymore. In previous blogs I have argued, with some difficulty, about social currents or transcripts, about the unwritten text that configures social currents albeit sometimes just beneath the level of our consciousness, and especially the enormous dilemmas of not necessarily extracting ourselves from our problems but rather causing them to churn in the direction of progress. Progress itself, I also argued, was to be defined in the strict terms of pragmatism in which all objects of our heavily proliferated and transcendent culture become relativized to the point where they become nothing more than tools to an end.

Now in 2013, it appears that the transcripts that underlie social interactions in Malawi have somewhat began to broaden beyond their initial parameters. The official performances of what characterize daily politics in Malawi have become old and tired. The Government of Malawi has maintained its grip on development via its heavily centralized organization. As a consequence, the public has started to demand that development directly from the centralized government, and as speculated in recent posts, while the government has suddenly though predictably found itself unable to meet out all the demands emanating from everywhere amongst the Malawian public. This is fracture number one - where the old politics of patrimonialism have folded upon themselves due to the declining space between central governments and district publics, to call them that. This shrinkage, much like globalization, has been necessitated by the availability of information technologies that are allowing people to keep abreast with the functionings of their government. Yes some of these technologies are as old as the radio itself. This modern effect was grossly underestimated by Bingu who was aware of it, and I know this, because he frequently used the public broadcaster to spread his propaganda so as to shape public opinion (not the newest trick in the book, perhaps even the oldest and most tired). But Joyce Banda has simply, as far as her behavior entails, either not considered it, or has supposed that it would work in her favor (as evidenced by her willingness to issue out more broadcasting licences to new media houses). In a nutshell, a government that seeks to be praised for everything good within its borders inadvertently invites criticism for everything bad as well. This is why a de-centralization of power is more politically prudent even for the most power hungry politicians in the World. Unless of course you are not Malawi, and you have a large and devoted enough military following to suppress any dissent associated with everything bad.

The nature of Malawi's ambivalence is extraordinary indeed (pardon my rather long introduction). The excessive centralization of power has had the following effect, amongst many, in the way citizens and central government interact. In the first place, all good things (metaphorically speaking) come from the president, the parent of the nation, who is wisest and most powerful. Secondly, in spite of all that power and wisdom, not everyone receives good things from the president except those who are close to him or her (because the president will reward his or her children depending on the value of their work that is culturally, while perhaps the real reason for this is that the president simply does not have enough resources at the disposal of his or her government to meet everyone’s need). And lastly, there are so many of us who have seen all four presidents of Malawi - three of them already having come and gone – and have not yet received any favors. Furthermore, the limited resources of the Malawi government have become all the more apparent now than ever before because firstly, the dramatic expulsion of the British envoy has firmly, maybe unfairly, been imprinted on everybody as the root cause of the current economic woes, and secondly, the more recent campaign efforts of Joyce Banda who goes around telling people that Malawi needs the assistance of British government, the World Bank and the IMF even citing them as the authority upon which she is assured that her reforms will work, further diminishes the power of her own government. Here, we can already see an impractical and self-conflicting discourse - it says I am the President your God in the same breath as it says I am not all powerful and all capable. Perhaps the globetrotting seeks to push a somewhat different message that says, “I am your President, the special one, who is able to convince the sophisticated west into assisting our country... and therefore I am something beyond the ordinary.”

Now, in examining the public sphere or space, you also begin to see this same impractical and self-invalidating principle. The performances of power such as motorcades, military escorts, red carpets, external visits, massive entourages and the works all serve to cause faith in the Presidents abilities to meet needs. These are indeed expected by many people who go to see the President. They expect this portrayal of power and general extravagance. And yet, because this power has remained more or less accessible to the few, amidst the growing knowledge that it is all in fact a hoax and that the president's government doesn’t even have funds to keep itself running, causes a despair and yearning for something different, something more. However, beyond the confines of the pre-texting transcript of social and political life, that something more remains at most only vaguely defined, and at worst, only seen as an idea or concept of a better life. Its like a need felt by the citizen to somehow move beyond this crippling state of affairs. It would not, in my opinion, be wrong to presuppose this because where a state is heavily corrupt and therefore arbitrary in its allocation of "benefits", a great deal of suspicion ensues and not just suspicion towards the State, but to the Malawian public generally. It is not uncommon to find Malawians complain about corruption in public, but during those encounters, those involved in the dialogue are without corruption while everybody else who constitutes the generalized public is deemed corrupt. To put it comically, there might have been an instance in which every adult Malawian in Malawi could have been complaining to another adult about corruption with this generalized picture of the otherness of corruption within the broader society. In which case, everyone was at that moment un-corrupt while everyone else was corrupt (see what I mean?)  This is a case of at least three impractical and self-conflicting logics (the Presidential one, the public-government one, and lastly, the individual-public one). The social transcript as it is is not able to fully encompass this, call it, problem. It seems the public space is fresh for newer and more relevant discourse.

The intricate and meta-theoretic details of this strange position can be seen within the writings of Cultural Sociologists. I for one do not fully espouse their positions but I feel that this filter called culture produces the sorts of subjectivities that could explain a lot of some of the more self-conflicting happenings in Malawi even though the exact motivating causes of such might in fact emanate from the felt living conditions of that country's people. In a nutshell, this extraordinary ambivalence is a good thing for this reason; the political stage and its associated performances will have to be changed. And since we are in a crisis state of economy, it is unlikely that any larger than life projections of the presidency or of upper government generally will fly with the people. That line of performance no longer sits well because we are now all too aware of our government’s limitations. The presidency has only the option of diminishing and presenting an image that is more in tandem with the conditions of the people. As a consequence, institutions will be strengthened because larger than life figures of personalities will not be tolerated by the public. The arrested or limited transcript of the social as it now stands means the debate or the opinions in the public stage might be minimal, but the resistance will be strong. These last sentences I made are highly optimistic and need to be further fortified with some more rigorous examination. That should lead me to my next blog post in the next several days.

Let’s see how this all pans out in 2013.

Currencies of our Society: My Personal Crisis

I recall one morning, speaking to my Social Theory lecturer, Prof Burton, commenting on Postmodernism, telling him that the central problem I had with "thinking in a postmodern way was that their were no handles, and the arguments or sketches provided by postmodernist thinkers just never seemed to land... they remained afloat in the air of academic jargon, so to speak". My professor, without even thinking too deeply about what I had raised, within a split second said to me, "perhaps your inability to think in a postmodernist way is proof of how deeply oppressed your mind has become amidst the prevalent systems of analysis..." and that was it. Lol. I truly enjoy our intellectual encounters.

 

This particular encounter happened some 7 months ago, but it left we extremely uneasy. I am particularly petty in the sense that my mind tends to become easily obsessed with every small claim I encounter on the daily basis. The possibility that perhaps all I knew and understood was merely a prescribed system of order to provide a basis for imbuing familiarity upon social life was too much for me to dismiss. And I subsequently pondered considerably around this claim's possibility.

 

Perhaps nowhere else does one find a similar unrest, and upheaval, to distill reality than within the realm of feminist thinking. Naively, in the past, I dismissed faminism as merely a political activity aimed at engendering a fairness between the sexes. However, further reading into feminism has awakened me to the possibility that perhaps the oppression of women points towards a different sort of oppression that is incurred by both men and women together. In simple terms, "he who enslaves another must commit a large amount of resources and will to ensure that the oppressed party remains a slave." Below, I will attempt to put these seemingly isolated paragraphs into something coherent, using my personal crisis as an illustration.

 

Feminist thinkers, especially those who theorize about the formulation of identity at the infancy stage, essentially argue that the human being, is born with an amorpheous slate of mind. As the child experiences the world, be it through engagements with the family and other people generally, they begin to acquire a sense of self that is distinct and separate from the objects, inclusive of people, that constitute social reality. With this development of self, comes the stratification of the mind, the psyche, that imprints upon the very soul of the person a sort of blueprint for all manner of social transactions. The individual is coded with a lingu franca so to speak, that is essentially the very, albeit intangible, material that composes and orders the social world as it operates. This means therefore that the individual becomes instrumentalized to think and know in a manner that is ingredient for the continuity of the social machinary. By the time the individual comes to see themselves as female or male, they are not only seeing this difference of sex as a matter of mere nomenclature, but rather, this view of self is in fact the self itself, along with all the blueprinting that permits any kind of functioning within the social setup. Essentially, for feminists, this is how patriarchy continues to be self recreating. It activates itself continuously via the creation of new "humans". Anything outside that strict definition of human is insane or not human, just as Foucault argued in his The Order of Things.

 

Personnally, and in deeply reflecting upon my own life, I find that I agree with the transactory aspects of these postulations. Social transactions, here standing for all manner of intra- and inter-human engagement, are not at all natural. They are in fact, despite being realities in themselves, actual manifestations of people's individual blueprints. We hear not merely because there is the propagation of sound through the air, but also because what is spoken co-relates with what we have already been inscribed with as persons within our stratified minds. Take for instance, language. We understand a language because we already know that language. The resultant harmony and coordinated essences of social life vis-a-vis could therefore be seen as, to put it mildly, the familiarities seen in what is completely unfamiliar by human conduits, who relate with each other based on the interplay between internal databases and external things. This position is similiar to what Sassaure and subsequent others argued about signs (signiers and signieds, and even Derrida's critique of the text).

 

Because I lost my mother when I was 12, and then my father when I was 20, I had to, from that age of 12, adopt a view of life that instrumentalized all material and immaterial resources for my own survival and betterment. This attitude forced me to see my environment, both inside and outside myself, as a vast array of affordances or a storehouse of equipment. My duty was to reach into that environment and attempt to form any number of tools that would help improve my position in terms of survival. As a result, even culture seized to overcast me, rather, I reduced it to a mere toolbox for solutions. If certain aspects of that culture proved irrelevant to my survival, I discarded them. If they proved useful, I kept them. Culture became merely a tool for me, as did all other things in the social environment. The one thing I did not anticipate though was that once I had turned my social reality into nothing more than a catalogue of affordances, the very essences and blueprints that I had been imbued within me as a child would also change both in terms of what I meant when I wished to extend meaning, as well as what I heard when others, external to me, attempted to transact meaning. In short, I had began to fracture my blueprint to violate what constituted a normal social transaction. The result, as years when on, in my early twenties, I began to experience a significant crisis of identity. I simply could not relate to much of what was going on in society - that is, much of everything had lost all meaning to me. Furthermore, I felt as though everytime I attempted to render a meaning towards the social, that meaning was often not understood. The only thing I new for a fact was my deep love for my sister. That was never in any state of doubt.

 

To translate all this abstraction into something tangible, and in returning back to my earlier take on feminism, even my relations with members of the opposite sex seemed off. My approach to any kind of relationship is that everything around us and within us was ultimately at our disposal to use for the betterment of ourselves and our relationship in the long run. I would often hear, amongst the more self-aware and outspoken female counterparts, powerful arguments for equality and their aspirations to see a different organization of the social in which men and women had the same status. I must admit that I had never thought about gender issues much except that I simply did not see why men were valued more in society than women simply because it just didnt seat well with any kind of value-free logic, and secondly because amidst the rampant poverty in Malawi, I did not see why I would want to oppress my wife if her success in her profession gave us a better chance to survive and live under more favorable conditions. Again, for me, life is all about affordances and culture is nothing more than a tool that I can be discarded or enforced on the strict basis of relevance.

 

But when I would then get closer to these powerful advocates of equality, I often found that their blueprint for functioning socially was still very much hardwired towards maintaining the prevalent social contract that informed social transactions. To cut a long story short, a man who keeps coming back to the women he is dating or to whom he is married to confer with her over every matter under the sun is simply viewed as a weak man in my society, and such relationships are often doomed to failured. Its almost like, right in our souls, we are only able to relate with one another on the basis of domination and oppression. The prison of patriachy that the activist so powerfully criticizes is also the basis for that activists' own security. The severing of the social order that prescribed meaning and purpose to the entire array of social objects and things we encounter daily for a newer one is too unsettling. Furthermore, in much the same way as I felt when I told my professor that I could not think in a postmodern way, we, both men and women, are simply so deeply "oppressed" by our current arrangements that we simply would not have a language that would permit us to familiarize ourselves with a blank, value-free reality absent of the ordering forces of culture, of "present society", of patriarchy. So the man must continue to man the cage, and the women must continue to woman the space within that cage, and humanity must continue to organize itself around the very limited experience of guards and prisoners that makes up society as we know it.

 

In conclusion.... well, there is no conclusion, except that it is entirely possible to feel completely alien to ones own social environment despite having been produced by and grown up in it. Secondly, a huge amount of helplessness can characterize a life in which one observes the actions of some many others and wonders why those actions are given such transcendental meaning. Why women in Zambia must see themselves as the sole liabilities for failures in their marriages, singing songs such as "I was nothing but today my vagina has set me free" at their weddings. Why women in Zimbabwe must go to great lengths to practice and become experts of the bedroom, going so far as to even make sure that their husbands pleasantries are kept nicely clean and tidy with an assortment of bedside hand towels and scented soaps (as if the man was not able to clean his own body). Why women in Malawi testify proudly about what is clearly oppressive and unfair treatment when men sleep outside the home, blaming their own inability to tame their own loins on one or another inadequacy of the wife.

 

These are simply observations and criticisms I am making about instances of already set up "patriarchical" institutions. A feminist would perhaps argue that all such institutions ought to be abolished in the first place before true transformation can occur. That is, to deliberately castrate the institutional aspects of the social system so as to limit its damning instrumentalization of people. Because in simple terms, oppression and generally "order" is just the language we speak. As Derrida so prolifically summed it all up, albeit in a somewhat different analysis, "there is nothing outside the text". Surely, as a young man who has sought to critique his own culture, there truly is a crisis of identity beyond the cultural transcript of society. However, we must be willing to develop a new system of transactions that would permit us to arrive at a more just and fair society. That transcript could in fact be the genesis of a new modernity, in which social currencies carry within them inherent essences of equality as well as an internal call for expansion and freedom. A society whose anchoring locality, which is presently a system of guards and prisoners, is delocalized into a different system even though I am not able to name it or describe it, so to speak. Recall, there is nothing beyond the text - or to put it sternly, what is not within the realm of transactory currencies, including language, simply does not exist. Fatalistic, huh?

 

I know, there are numerous detours in the course of this writing. But I hope the gist has been transmitted accordingly. Thanks for reading.

 

Cheers!

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