Baba, nice piece.   Well argued.  I like your second paragraph dealing with
stereotyping and definitions. You wouldn't mind if i share this on my
facebook.  Keep up.

Best,

Mboge

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 5:46 PM, Baba Jallow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Thanks Suntou.
>
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 6:38 AM, suntou touray <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Galleh an excellent piece. Keep it up. Suntou
>> On 20 Nov 2014 02:53, "Baba Galleh Jallow" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *REDEFINING AFRICA*
>>>
>>> *What people need to know about the African condition**[1]*
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> By Baba G. Jallow
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> When Creighton University’s African Students Association (AFSA)
>>> approached me to give a guest lecture at their annual banquet on the topic
>>> “Redefining Africa”, I knew exactly where they were coming from. However, I
>>> still asked them what they had in mind: Well, they said, we just want
>>> people to move away from all the negative stereotypes they associate with
>>> Africa; we want people to know that Africa is beautiful, that Africa is not
>>> all about the wars, the poverty, the disease and despair that are the
>>> common staple of western television and other media. We want people to know
>>> that there is more to Africa than meets the eye; we want you to talk about
>>> the beautiful side of Africa.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> My response to AFSA was that what Africa needs is not so much
>>> redefining, but understanding. There is no denying that Africa is a
>>> conflict-ridden continent or that Africa is a poor continent. While
>>> stereotypes like savage, backward and uncivilized are just that –
>>> stereotypes – civil wars, material poverty and disease are indeed rampant
>>> in Africa. What those who equate these problems with the essence of Africa
>>> need to know is that Africans are not poor and Africa is not experiencing
>>> conflicts because Africans are backward savages of primitive mind, or
>>> because Africans like killing each other, or because Africans are incapable
>>> of generating the kinds of ideas and innovations to overcome these
>>> challenges. What these people need to know is that the problems Africa
>>> faces today are the bitter fruits of two phenomena. The first is the series
>>> of historical encounters with western cultures that introduced and
>>> sustained severe socio-cultural, economic and political distortions in the
>>> continent. The second is a tragic failure of leadership on the part of
>>> those who took over from the colonial authorities after independence and
>>> their successors. The challenge for all who wish to improve the image and
>>> the condition of Africa is therefore to understand these twin causes of
>>> Africa’s undesirable conditions and to do what they can to ameliorate them.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Africa does not need to be redefined because Africa has never been and
>>> cannot be defined by stereotypical concepts like Dark Continent, backward
>>> peoples, or uncivilized tribes. To define something is to state or to
>>> describe its exact nature or scope. To stereotype, on the other hand, is to
>>> negatively oversimplify the image of something.  Stereotypes are not
>>> definitions; they are oversimplified attempts to redefine reality to suit
>>> perception. Thus, the stereotypical image of Africa as a Dark Continent,
>>> while widely held, can never assume the status of a valid definition
>>> because it does not state or describe the essence of Africa or Africans.
>>> Conflict, poverty and disease do not define Africa because they are mere
>>> symptoms of unfortunate historical circumstances and are alien to the true
>>> nature of Africans, just as they are alien to the true nature of all human
>>> beings. Like human beings everywhere, Africans do not like war; they would
>>> rather live in peace and harmony. Like human beings everywhere, Africans do
>>> not like disease or poverty; they would rather live healthy and prosperous
>>> lives. Africans are not fighting wars in the two Congos, Sudan, Somalia or
>>> Central Africa because they are bloodthirsty and backward savages who enjoy
>>> killing each other. Africans are not struggling with epidemics of Ebola,
>>> AIDS and persistent hunger and poverty because they are a backward people
>>> incapable of thinking through and lifting themselves out of their miseries.
>>> This, of course, does not mean that Africans are free of all responsibility
>>> for their current plight. What it does mean is that the great majority of
>>> Africans are victims of historical processes which they are still to fully
>>> understand but whose negative consequences are by no means insurmountable.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> For roughly 400 years, between 1450 and 1860, Africa was ravaged by the
>>> scourge of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The rise of the plantation
>>> system in the New World created a labor demand that was conveniently met
>>> through the enslavement of Africans largely through the agency of European
>>> slave traders and their African partners. But beyond the lingering stigma
>>> of enslavement that follows persons of African descent to this day, the
>>> effects of the Atlantic slave trade on present day Africa are almost
>>> negligible. Ironically, it was the end of the slave trade that ushered in
>>> the single most devastating historical experience Africa has suffered. That
>>> most devastating experience was colonial rule.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The slave trade was ended largely because of the growth of the
>>> Industrial Revolution in Europe. With the rise of manufacturing industries,
>>> European businesses became more interested in raw materials than in
>>> physical human labor. Among other factors, the need for raw materials and
>>> markets to sell manufactured goods led to the European scramble for African
>>> colonies in the 1880s. The scramble threatened war among the European
>>> powers and resulted in the convening of the Berlin Conference of November
>>> 1884 – January 1885 where European countries laid down rules for the
>>> peaceful partition and colonization of Africa. Between 1885 and 1900,
>>> almost the entire landmass of sub-Saharan Africa had been divided and
>>> occupied by European colonial powers.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Colonialism not only imposed alien rule on African societies but divided
>>> Africa into territories that were either too small to ever become viable
>>> nation states or too large to be effectively controlled by a central
>>> government without adequate infrastructures in place. Thus, we have tiny
>>> countries like Gambia with less than two million inhabitants and no natural
>>> resources and monster countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo with
>>> over 75, 000, 000 people and a weak central government. In addition to
>>> breaking up the continent into these geographical anomalies, colonialism
>>> disrupted African cultures and traditions, introduced harsh taxation
>>> regimes and cash economies that created conditions of extreme poverty, and
>>> instituted autocratic regimes whose cultures of oppression and exploitation
>>> remain more or less in place to this day. It is perhaps the culture of
>>> political impunity and oppression introduced and nurtured by colonial
>>> governments and perpetuated by Africa’s post-colonial leadership that
>>> represents the single most devastating cause of Africa’s current crises.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Instances of authoritarian leadership pre-dated colonialism in Africa.
>>> However, in most African societies, authoritarian leaders could be censured
>>> or even removed from power if they broke certain ethical rules of
>>> leadership. Colonial rule changed this traditional African leader-led
>>> dynamic by shifting the source of political legitimacy and sovereignty from
>>> the people to the state and altering the traditional uses of political
>>> authority. Colonial administrations claimed “the power to tax, the power to
>>> legislate, the power to administer justice, the power to appoint and to
>>> dismiss officials, the power to regulate the economy, the power to command
>>> labor,” and the power to enforce their will without question (Davis 1987:
>>> 267). However, beyond the immediate area of the capital cities, colonial
>>> administrations could only survive by depending on the power of the chiefs
>>> they tolerated or invented. With the explicit or implicit backing of their
>>> colonial masters, some African chiefs gathered unto themselves all moments
>>> of power and juridical authority, becoming miniature exceptions within the
>>> larger colonial exception to which they were beholden. While maintaining
>>> the autocratic aspects of precolonial leadership practices, some
>>> colonial-era chiefs – especially in British Africa - abandoned those
>>> aspects of African leadership cultures that rendered them accountable to
>>> their peoples. Little has changed with time.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The metaphor of new wine in old bottles adequately captures the paradox
>>> of the African nation state at independence: western political structures
>>> and institutions were super-imposed on African political cultures
>>> characterized by notions and perceptions of leadership at complete odds
>>> with the new political dispensation. The immediate post-colonial situation
>>> demanded a transformation of the authoritarian culture of the colonial
>>> state into a political culture of tolerance, inclusiveness and collective
>>> responsibility for the new nations. The situation also demanded a
>>> transformative-servant leadership that empowered the citizens of the new
>>> nations, encouraged them to actively question their government’s policies
>>> and actions, motivated them to assume leadership of the national project,
>>> and allowed them to contribute ideas towards the development of their
>>> countries. Unfortunately, most African leaders misread or deliberately
>>> ignored the demands of the post-colonial situation and did little to change
>>> the autocratic colonial political culture within which their new nation
>>> states were forged. Having justified their struggles against colonialism by
>>> appealing to rights of political inclusion, human rights, the rule of law,
>>> freedom of expression, and freedom of association, Africa’s new leaders now
>>> branded these values and practices vestiges of colonialism and symbols of
>>> neocolonialism that were unsuitable for African conditions. Draconian
>>> colonial laws were resuscitated and redeployed to muzzle the freedoms
>>> Africans struggled for and to perpetuate the injustices they struggled
>>> against. What were expected to be spaces of freedom during the anticolonial
>>> struggle morphed into spaces of oppression and fear policed by independent
>>> regimes often more tyrannical than the departed colonialists.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Colonial despotism morphed into post-colonial despotism after
>>> independence. For this reason, the intellectual energy and the ideas needed
>>> to develop Africa and deal with her many challenges were excluded. The
>>> leadership and political aspirations of citizens were delegitimized;
>>> unquestioning subjecthood was routinized; citizens were denied the right to
>>> question the actions of their government or to freely support the political
>>> movements of their choice. Oppression became the preferred mode of
>>> governance. An imposed political uniformity smothered constructive dissent,
>>> stifled political creativity and generated a culture of silent cynicism or
>>> intellectual defection of knowledgeable and creative Africans into other
>>> parts of the world – the now notorious brain-drain syndrome. Africa’s
>>> nation states are failing because the doctrines of citizen rights and
>>> obligations binding leaders and followers that characterize the western
>>> nation-state system have no comparable presence in Africa. Among other
>>> damaging consequences, this doctrinal absence and its attendant imposed
>>> uniformity in African politics leads to the eruption of civil conflicts and
>>> instabilities – military coups, assassinations and assassination attempts,
>>> and in some cases, bloody civil wars that continue to exact heavy tolls on
>>> the continent’s human and material resources, and helps perpetuate the
>>> stereotype of Africa as a continent of wild savages. To parody J. F.
>>> Kennedy’s famous dictum, by making peaceful change impossible, African
>>> leaders made violent change inevitable.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Before wrapping up this conversation, I would like to highlight another
>>> damaging historical experience whose consequences were as devastating as
>>> the consequences of colonial rule. African countries gained independence
>>> just as the ideological cold war between western capitalism and eastern
>>> communism was heating up. Within the context of the cold war, Africa was a
>>> proxy battleground. The priorities of the United States and her capitalist
>>> allies on the one hand and the former Soviet Union and her communist allies
>>> on the other did not include the prevention of dictatorship or the
>>> promotion of human rights. Their chief priority was to keep enemy ideology
>>> from spreading into what they considered their spheres of influence. The
>>> west conducted a war against communism; the east conducted a war against
>>> capitalism. Whichever African government or leader supported one ideology
>>> or the other received the blanket support of that ideology’s patron. Thus,
>>> the United States and her western allies supported the brutal Apartheid
>>> regime in South Africa from 1948 until the middle of the 1980s; they also
>>> supported kleptocrats like Mobutu of the former Belgian Congo, bloody
>>> despots like Samuel Doe of Liberia and so-called single party democracies
>>> in Gambia, the Ivory Coast, Kenya and Uganda in the name of the war against
>>> communism. In Somalia, the so-called super powers supported the notoriously
>>> brutal regime of Mohamed Siad Barre, thus laying the groundwork for the
>>> brutal and almost intractable civil war that has afflicted that country for
>>> two decades now. In Ethiopia, the communists engineered the overthrow of
>>> western ally Emperor Haile Selassie and propped up the brutal military
>>> despotism of Mengistu Haile Mariam, who then proceeded to execute what has
>>> gone down in Ethiopian history as the “Red Terror”. Both ideological camps
>>> supplied their African puppets with money and arms which they used to
>>> oppress and kill their peoples, plunder their countries’ human and material
>>> resources and prevent the growth of an enlightened citizenry that could
>>> hold its leaders accountable and participate in the constructive
>>> transformations of their nations into viable political, economic and social
>>> entities. In essence, lack of political empowerment explains why Africa and
>>> Africans remain prostrate at the foot of the ladder of development, however
>>> defined.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> In conclusion, I would just repeat that Africa is not defined by poverty
>>> and conflict. European colonizers and writers tried to redefine Africa as a
>>> dark continent because they mistook difference for inferiority. Africa is
>>> not conflict-ridden or poor because Africans are incapable of enlightened
>>> thought and constructive action. The African condition is a consequence of
>>> a series of unfortunate historical encounters with western and eastern
>>> imperialism whose negative consequences are perpetuated by a history of bad
>>> and irresponsible leadership. In spite of all of the wars and diseases and
>>> poverty however, Africans remain a beautiful and happy people. Those in
>>> this audience who have visited the continent can attest to the fact that
>>> Africans are generally a happy people. Perhaps because of the limited
>>> intrusion of capitalism and its tendency to dehumanize, Africans remain
>>> connected to their humanity. The damaging culture of extreme individualism
>>> characteristic of western societies is alien to African societies. Yes in
>>> Africa, people are poor; but yes, in Africa people are also happy. So what
>>> Africa needs is not redefinition but understanding.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
>>> [1] A version of this paper was delivered as a guest lecture at the
>>> annual banquet of the Creighton University African Students Association
>>> (AFSA) in March 2014.
>>>
>>>
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