The True Size of Africa
NOW THAT THE #MAP IS DONE (AT LAST); LET’s DECOLONISE THE AFRICAN MIND!
By Professor Gilbert Morris
Nassau, N.P., The Bahamas
In the postcolonial world, we have the habit of acting so late - after so much damage has been done - that when the action comes, it feeling like a distraction.
The map and the vision occupy different orders of reality, one spatial and measurable, the other durational and willed, yet the two orders are not wholly severed from one another, since a diminished spatial self-image may weaken the very capacity for durational commitment that coordination demands. Correcting the map removes one obstacle among many. It does not construct the institutions, the shared curricula, or the negotiated sacrifices of sovereignty that a genuine continental future requires.
One understands: Africans have hardly been in charge of their countries. Colonial powers became imperial powers and the actual foreign policy of the G7 was in assisting each other in continuing to exploit former colonies…by invading them, or in the case of France, killing more than a dozen of their leaders who don’t comply; using BRETTONWoods institurions to cripple them and international media to demonise them…all whilst stealing their resources under puppet regimes installed against the wishes of the African peoples.
Today, we are in a slightly different place: the Sahel hero-zone which is leading the way to a decolonised mind operating away from western institutions, but responsive to citizens.
Yet, whilst Dangote is a commerical bright spot in Nigeria (and there are others), he faces treachery in attempts to maintain the slavish extraction-led status quo; Boko in Botswana and the Namibians are showing signs - even if they talk more than do for now - Ruto is failing utterly in Kenya; Senegal’s president is destroying friendships to maintain a colonised dynamic with France, as are Cote D’Ivoire, DRC, Tanzania, Chad, with Uganda offering to serve as handmaiden to genocide in Gaza! Rwanda and Ethiopia seem willing to risk other African lives for an African success story - though we must love their diligence - Somalia, Libya and the Sudans seem cursed by dishonest African and decietful foreign hands. Zambia, Gambia, Ghana - which seems to start and stop - Malawi, Madagascar, Eritrea seem in limbo, as Zimbabwe is trying to tell us a good story…even if with troubling signs. South Africa is the biggest disappointment - as we thought it would be a role model for other African nations. Instead it’s pursued the worst of Nigeria. All the rest are doing nothing to speak of…either holding onto old systems or old leaders wasting Africa’s moment of youth!
This does not mean there aren’t bright stories in Africa. But the time for such stories has passed: AFRICA NEEDS COORDINATED ACTION NOW…if it is to build the future expected for so long by its youth now supported by the largest number of skilled talented Africans returning to the continent.
Africa must get busy cultivating a new development model away from western neoliberal financialisation: Africa can’t just develop skyscrapers, cramped urban settings, based on financialisation and extraction. These systems failed and are failing in the West.
By “financialization” I mean the historical process, traced by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and by David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), whereby capital accumulation shifts its center of gravity from the production of goods toward the trading of claims on future production, so that value comes to be measured increasingly in instruments detached from the material and communal life they nominally represent. By “neoliberalism” I mean the doctrine, formalized in the WashingtonConsensus of the late 1980s, that prescribes market liberalization, privatization, and fiscal austerity as universal conditions of development, largely irrespective of local historical circumstance. By “civilizational approach” I mean a developmental orientation grounded in the relational ontologies indigenous to African social thought, of which Ubuntu, glossed by John Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophy (1969) as the principle that personhood is constituted through community rather than prior to it, is the most widely cited instance. We must not waste time celebrating maps: we must use that momentum to coordinate to achieve larger immediate goals.
Africa must coordinate to conceive another model of civilisation based upon a blend of ancient ways and systems augmented by modern sustainability and eGovernance…with the aim like Singapore of full participation and full inclusion.
Strategic coordination around a civilizational vision offers Africa a genuine ground for de-risking from financialized neoliberalism, supported by convergent evidence from philosophy, political economy, and cultural theory, and by the historical record of structural adjustment’s documented costs and of Botswana’s counterexample. That vision remains incomplete as a program until it specifies the accountability mechanisms that would prevent its capture by the authoritarian temptation that authenticité already illustrates, and until it resolves, case by case, which indigenous structures are genuinely communal and which are colonial ossifications inherited under the name of custom. That resolution cannot be accomplished in the abstract; it requires the disciplined, state-by-state forensic labor that any serious civilizational project must undertake before it can be trusted with the name.
Professor Gilbert Morris
