Hi Mboge: Thanks for the kind words. No, I don't mind at all. Please share as much as you wish to.
Best,
Baba
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 18:06:22 +0100
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Redefining Africa
To: [log in to unmask]
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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