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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