Features

Africa in the new millennium: Interrogating Barbie democracy

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/42387

Francis B. Nyamnjoh (2007-07-04)

Inspired by the market logic, the world is currently hostage to a stifling
vision of democracy informed by a very narrow idea of what it is to be
beautiful, healthy, successful and free. Nowhere is this better exemplified
than in the colossal investment that consumer capitalism has made in
slimness, the greatest icon of which is Barbie. This image is made and sold
aggressively around the world by global consumer and entertainment media to
be consumed as the ideal to which all must aspire, if they are to attain the
good life. Francis Nyamnjoh assesses the lessons Africa has learned from the
implementation of Barbie democracy and examines alternatives to the market
model for Africa.


The idea of writing a paper on Barbie democracy came to me from reflections
on the idea of 'The Market' and the sort of socio-political institutions
this model has tended to inspire. In neoliberal circles, The Market is
packaged and presented as omnipotent, omniscient and infallible. It is said
to guarantee success for those disciplined by its orthodoxies. It chastises
resistance, dissidence and creative difference by a ruthless and reckless
extravagance of force, propaganda and self-proliferation. By downplaying the
positive dimensions of its sacred aura, The Market has demonstrated it has
little tolerance for human sentiments of compassion, solidarity, sociality,
conviviality, negotiation, and community, which render one vulnerable in the
face of it. The Market comes across as an autocratic and demanding catalogue
of insensitivities. As a God-substitute, it trains its followers to develop
hearts of stone, which it prescribes to people seeking a better life and to
those merely committed to staying alive. Disciples present The Market as the
one best solution for the predicaments facing individuals and communities
globally. They blame everything and everyone but The Market in case of falls
and detours on their way to Calvary. The logic and motto are simple: in
victory The Market takes credit, in failure or mitigation, The Market is not
to blame. Heads or Tails, The Market always wins.

Among external factors championed in the face of The Market are values that
insist on success as a collective pursuit, where achievement is celebrated
when it accommodates the dregs of humanity as well. Although portrayed as a
constraint by The Market, these values and the notions of success they
engender are informed by ideas of personhood and agency that see the
individual in the community and the community in the individual. Following
this view, people cannot be considered successful individuals independent of
the relationships forged with others in their communities. Such an
understanding discourages the distinction between the rich and the poor,
since it refuses to endorse the privatisation of talent, luck and success,
even when these can be traced to particular individuals and communities.
This outlook is, instead, informed by a view of humanity as simultaneously
free and constrained, and therefore subject to a negotiated, interconnected
and interdependent existence.

The Market thus equates success with the actions of those who discipline and
punish their own humanity and that of others. The Market recognises sterile
accumulation and celebrates individuals who sacrifice the sociality and
humanity it perceives as standing in the way of individual self-fulfillment.
Hence the slogan: there are no sentiments in business. The Market privileges
statistics over people, just as it does profit, and is more comfortable with
figures than with actual cases of human victims of its exploits. This makes
of surveys and quantification methodologies of collusion and subservience,
and ethnographies and qualifications methodologies of emancipation vis-à-vis
The Market and its diktats.

The Market, in a way, is comparable to the psychoanalyst. The couch is to
The Psychoanalyst what structural adjustment is to The Market. Both The
Market and The Psychoanalyst are insensitive to external factors (except
when it comes to apportioning blame), and are stubbornly standardised,
routinised and predictable in their assumptions and prescriptions. While
ready to claim success, both refuse their share of failure. To both, there
is no possibility that the structures and assumptions which inform their
existence and functions could be part of the problem for which their
patients are seeking solutions. The formula for success and failure are to
be found in the patient, exclusively. Every individual or community must
look within for inspiration to overcome predicaments.

It is within this framework of the real or assumed omniscience, omnipotence
and omnipresence of The Market that this paper examines Barbie democracy in
Africa, where states have inadequately asserted themselves vis-à-vis
orthodoxies informed by The Market, despite popular and ongoing processes to
harness the continent's distinctive creativity, adaptiveness, sociality and
conviviality in relationships.

Inspired by The Market logic, the world is currently hostage to a stifling
vision of democracy informed by a very narrow idea of what it is to be
beautiful, healthy, successful and free. Nowhere is this better exemplified
than in the colossal investment that consumer capitalism has made in
slimness, the greatest icon of which is Barbie. This image is made and sold
aggressively around the world by global consumer and entertainment media to
be consumed as the ideal to which all must aspire, if they are to attain the
good life. With a focus on consumption as the ultimate unifier, a supreme
indicator of cultural sophistication and symbol of civilization, individuals
are seen and treated as autonomous agents glued together by a selfless
Market slaving away for their cultural freedom, development and enrichment
as global citizens. By emphasising the 'unregulated flow' and
'transnationalisation' of the streamlined, standardised and routinised
cultural products of the global media industries, The Market is able to slim
all differences down into Barbie proportions. Barbie-like celebrities are
recruited to endorse slimming diets, which more ordinary people are then
persuaded to follow, with results that entail varying degrees of
disappointment.

Its rhetoric of benevolence and munificence notwithstanding, The Market is
more about closures than free flows. The agents that sustain it globally
promote a largely one-way flow in consumer products that favours a
privileged minority as it compounds the impoverishment of the majority. The
Market and its corporate media police global material possibilities and
consciousness, mostly by denying access to creativity perceived to stand in
the way of profit, power and privilege. The result is a Barbie-like
socio-cultural, political and economic world devoid of complexity, richness
and diversity. In the light of such an impoverishment of difference,
plurality is mistaken for diversity, as if an appearance of plenty could not
conceal a poverty of perspectives.

Ordinary individuals and marginal communities are thus left literally at the
mercy of the Barbie-like information and entertainment burgers served them
in the interest of profit. There is a tendency towards convergence in
outlook and content, regardless of the nationalities or cultural identities
of individuals and communities at the beck and call of The Market and its
global gendarmes, the corporate media. The Market and its advocates are most
comfortable with passive, depoliticised, unthinking consumer zombies who
guarantee profitability at the least possible cost in the name of consumer
sovereignty.

Seen in terms of democracy, Barbie (slimness) is imbued with the mission of
freeing the individual of relationships or the excess bulk (obesity) of
responsibilities standing in the way of personal consumer success. Salvation
is to be found in slimness. According to this perspective, the slimmer an
individual's burden of relationships and responsibilities, the better their
life chances. Instead of encouraging the rich to get fat with
responsibilities and relationships of support to the hungry, consumer
capitalism systematically invests in the rich to be thin and unburdened, as
it fattens the poor with unfathomable responsibilities, dependencies and a
pounding sense of worthlessness and self-persecution.

This Barbie model takes the form of a dictatorship that makes a misery of
ordinary lives. But Barbie-isation is at best a bazaar to which millions are
drawn but few rewarded or given real choices. Just as obesity is considered
an abnormality, so are relationships and sociality seen as dangerous if not
watched at close range. A real or false sense of success means that people
need not be obsessive about coping with deprivation. In the words of The
Economist, [1] 'People are perfectly tuned to store energy in good years to
see them through lean ones. But when bad times never come, they are stuck
with that energy, stored around their expanding bellies' [2]. Persuading
people to get thinner becomes an obsession to be supported with
public-health warnings and media pressures.

In America for example, the risks notwithstanding, obesity-related stomach
stapling operations are on the increase, as people desperately seek to lose
weight [3]. According to Dr Trisha Macnair, the despondency of many people
who are overweight 'means that they will go to extremes to reach their goal,
try wacky diets which defy common sense, pay large amounts of money for
dubious "quick fix" remedies, and even turn to drugs from anonymous clinics,
in the hope that somewhere there is an easy answer'[4]. It seems so easy: if
only ordinary, overweight or overburdened consumers could follow the
slimming menus prescribed by those who know best, they just might realise
their dream body, beauty, health, comfort and freedom. In this way,
relationships or ties with others are seen as fat that stands in the way of
a perfect dream: something that must be burnt out of existence with health
foods, slimming pills, fitness exercises, etc. The bulk and bulky are, at
the end of the day, mostly disillusioned and disaffected, as the more they
strive, the less the satisfaction that comes their way. Instead of learning
meaningful lessons on how to bear the burdens of life, they are being
schooled on how to shed the burdens of life.

If Barbie has been sold to the rest of the world as an American icon, to
most Americans she remains a distant dream and a constant source of
embarrassment. Obesity is the order of the day, spawning an industry that
generates billions of dollars from products and services consumers hope will
help them keep fat in check. According to a recent article on 'the obesity
industry'[5] , nearly one-third of adult Americans 'are thought to be
obese', and 'American girls today shop for clothes that are roughly two
sizes bigger than those worn by their mothers'. While 'most Americans are
well aware of the risks of obesity' and believe themselves 'personally
accountable for their weight', and while 'miracle slimming drugs and the
latest dieting fads become best-sellers', 'people are not prepared to give
up taste as their solution to this problem'. They refuse to translate Barbie
into reality through embracing 'more healthy lifestyles', even if they would
rush to try out new 'easy and tasty ways to lose weight' proposed by those
seeking 'fat profits in fat people'. Sales of healthier foods may be
booming, but few are getting thinner as a result. As The Economist observes
[6], 'once people get fat, it is hard for them to get thin'. The future, far
from being one of slim Americans paying tribute to Barbie in their fantasies
or realities, The Economist foresees 'a growing herd of fat people'
providing 'lots of demand for firms supplying everything from bigger towels
to bigger beds and, alas, bigger coffins' into 'an early grave'[7].
Everywhere, bulk seems to be winning over slimness, with global estimates
rising from 200,000,000 adults in 1995 to 300,000,000 in 2003. Whether
motivated by culture or by gene, Americans, like everyone else, are, to
quote The Economist [8] once more, 'constantly trying to pack away a few
more calories just in case of a famine around the corner'. The same is true
of communities and cultures, hence the resilience of relationships and
responsibilities even amongst those individuals, communities and cultures
most rigorously committed to shedding the burdens of life.

Barbie may well not be anyone's reality after all, even as she is projected,
celebrated, appropriated, and aggressively marketed as an icon. Indeed,
those who most passionately pursue the Barbie ideal, quite paradoxically,
never really become Barbie at the end of the day. If they don't simply grow
into a muscular Ken as global gendarme high off imperial dogma, they become
sickly (as in the case of anorexia, for example) from all the sacrifices
they have made, and are hardly, at a closer look, worth all the investments,
torture and deprivations endured [9]. The pursuit of Barbie is at best a
mirage, at worst a consumer misadventure. If Barbie epitomises consumer
capitalism, obesity is to be likened to the community of ties, which
individuals are under sustained pressure to break in order to realise
consumer success. But since individuals, even in the worst of circumstances,
are social beings above all else, shedding relationships and
responsibilities is seldom an easy option, and very few succeed in being
happy when their ties with others are dead and buried.

Barbie democracy in Africa

What lessons has Africa learnt from its encounters with the Barbie import
labelled 'liberal democracy'? It is commonplace to claim that liberal
democracy and Africa are not good bedfellows, and how apt! Implementing
liberal democracy in Africa has been like trying to force onto the body of a
well-built, well-fed person, truly rich in bulk and all the cultural
indicators of health Africans are familiar with, a dress made to fit the
slim, de-fleshed Hollywood consumer model of a Barbie-like figure. But
instead of blaming the tiny dress or its designer, the tradition has been to
fault the popular body or the popular ideal of beauty for emphasising too
much bulk, for parading the wrong sizes, for just not being the right thing.
Not often is the experience and expertise of the designer or dressmaker
questioned, nor their audacity to assume that the parochial cultural palates
that inform their peculiar sense of beauty should play God in the lives of
regions and cultures where different criteria of beauty obtain. This
insensitivity is akin to the behaviour of a Lilliputian undertaker who would
rather trim a corpse than expand their coffin to accommodate a man-mountain,
or a carpenter whose only tool is a huge hammer and to whom every problem is
a nail. The history of difficulty at implementing liberal democracy in
Africa attests to this clash of values and attempts to ignore African
cultural realities that might well have enriched and domesticated liberal
democracy towards greater relevance. And this call for domestication must
resist the ploy by opportunistic agents that have often hidden behind
nebulous claims of African specificities to orchestrate high-handedness and
intolerance.

The greatest shortcoming of liberal democracy is its exaggerated focus on
the autonomous individual, as if there is anywhere in the world where people
can exist outside of communities or in total absence of relationships with
others. Losing the weight of community, solidarity and culture is not an
easy feat even to the most dedicated disciples of the Barbie model. By
investing so much rhetoric in the rights of the independent, liberal
democracy is left without a convincing answer pertaining to the rights of
the dependent. Although in principle liberal democracy promises rights to
all and sundry as individuals, not everyone who claims political rights is
likely to have them, even when these are clearly articulated in
constitutions and guaranteed legally. The American democratic system for
instance, which champions the Barbie model, offers some interesting examples
of how Americans, assumed to be autonomous individuals by law, find
themselves bargaining away their political, cultural and economic freedoms
in all sorts of ways under pressure from the consumer capitalist emphasis on
profit over people.

Notwithstanding the Barbie rhetoric, The American Dream does not come true
for everyone who embraces it. The citizenship and consumer sovereignty
promised all Americans, can in reality be afforded only in degree and by
those who manage to harness the limited economic, cultural and social
opportunities that translate into reality, legal and political rights or
abstract notions of the autonomous individual. The rest, to get by, must
negotiate themselves various levels of subjection and alienation, often with
devastating costs to their humanity and that of their dependants or others.
Being a rights-bearing individual ceases to be as automatic in reality as is
claimed in principle. For those who succeed after hard struggle, the
tendency is to monopolise opportunities, since it is, quite paradoxically,
only by curbing the rights of others that advantages are best guaranteed in
effect. Like with fighting obesity, the majority are those who struggle on a
daily basis to fulfil themselves, with varying degrees of failure. This is
an effort which, under consumer capitalism, is blamed on the individual to
the extent that he or she has failed to sacrifice others through the
sacrifice of history, memory, relations or community. Most acquire few
advantages despite the profound alienation, inequality, violence, cultural
and social malaise, psychic and emotional disorders and exploitation taking
place in America today (and increasingly elsewhere) linked to consumer
capitalism's suffocating grip on human imagination and creativity. These
limitations of Barbie democracy in the American context may well appear a
more palatable form of subjection to some Africans by comparison, but the
need to address the rights of the casualties of independent success is no
less compelling in America.

Since Barbie democracy appears uncomfortable with salient relationships,
community and creative diversity, Africans who subscribe to its rhetoric as
leaders find themselves reduced to a Jekyll-and-Hyde democracy: tolerant in
principle but muffling in practice. Such African leaders, whether in
government, the opposition or civil society, are forced to keep up
appearances with Barbie democracy in a context where people are clamouring
for recognition and representation as cultural, religious and regional
communities. The competing claims for their attention by internal interest
groups and external forces explain the apparent contradictions, hypocrisy
and double standards that ensue when their actions are appreciated
exclusively from the standpoint of Barbie democracy.

Africa's alternative to Barbie democracy

Despite the noted shortcomings of Barbie democracy, the quest for the
missing cultural link in African democracy requires serious negotiation and
flexibility, to avoid throwing the Barbie baby out with the bath water. It
requires a creativity and nuance that emphasise interdependence between the
individual and the community, and between the state and the various cultural
configurations that dwell within it. The vision should be a democracy that
guarantees not only individual rights and freedoms, but also the interests
of communal and cultural solidarities, big and small.

A compelling argument can be made to the effect that the problem in Africa
has been undomesticated Barbie democracy, not democracy as pursued in
broader forms and possibilities. For democracy to be meaningful in the new
millennium, there is a need for honesty about the limitations of the Barbie
model, and for recognition of the complex realities, interconnections, and
diversities that animate the lives of social actors everywhere. The
direction and quality of democracy in the new millennium would depend on an
open marriage or conviviality between individual aspirations and community
interests, since individuals continue to belong to solidarities despite
attempts at conversion by Barbie. It is a fact of life that most people are
committed to primary forms of belonging, to which state and country are only
secondary, and promoters of Barbie democracy ought to be more honest about
this, to avoid opportunism. It is by acknowledging and providing for the
reality of individuals who straddle different margins of identity and
belonging, and who are willing or forced to be both 'citizens' and
'subjects', that democracy stands its greatest chance anywhere. If
harvesting rights and entitlements requires the denial of rights and
entitlements, the only democracy that would make sense in the new millennium
is one that reconciles autonomy with dependency, citizenship with
subjection. And as the most subjected continent where opportunism has
blossomed, Africa should play a leading role in bringing about a democracy
more in tune with the rights of dependants.

REFERENCES

This is an updated version of an earlier paper in Dutch published in
Internationale Samenwerking (Publication of Dutch Ministry of Foreign
Affairs for Development Cooperation), No.12, December 2003, pp.28-30.
1] December 13, 2003, p.11
2] I would extend it beyond people to include communities and solidarities
of various kinds.
3] http://www.asbs.org/html/rationale/rationale.html
4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/features/obesity_surgery.shtml
5] The Economist, September 27, 2003, pp.68-69
6] December 13, p.11, 2003
7] The Economist, September 27, 2003, pp.68-69; December 13, 2003, p.11.
8] December 13, p.11, 2003
9] Just by way of a quick example, the UK Daily Mail of October 22, 2003,
pp.24-25, carried the confessions of five women who tried celebrity diets
for six weeks, and all complained about the disturbing unseen effects on
their bodies. One found the diet a nightmare that didn't seem healthy, made
her feel nauseous, and gave her stomach pains all the time. To another, her
diet was horrible, tiring and difficult to follow because too prohibitive. A
third branded the diet an expensive hassle, and a fourth, who was
'incredibly tired and desperately missed tasty, easy food such as pasta and
rice', wondered if 'anyone could live like this for long'



* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Associate Professor and Head of Publications and
Dissemination with the Council for the Development of Social Science
Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Email: [log in to unmask], Website:
www.nyamnjoh.com

* Please send comments to [log in to unmask] or comment online at
www.pambazuka.org

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