Decolonise The African Mind

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

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MARCUS GARVEY THE GREAT!

Marcus Garvey can be credited in America, with linking Blackness to Africa

WAS MARCUS GARVEY GREAT?

By Professor Gilbert Morris
Nassau, The Bahamas

Marcus Garvey is less a complex, than an opaque figure.  He can be credited in America, with linking Blackness to Africa; whilst positing that the diaspora were one people. (That’s where Bob Marley got the idea).

Strange as it may seem now, that association with Africa was verboten; as whites had convinced blacks and blacks convinced themselves, that there was nothing of value to and/or in Africa.

Countee Cullen - the American poet who was Black, who moved me most, who was the high school teacher of James Baldwin and married to WEB Dubois’ daughter - wrote “what is Africa to me/Spicy grove, cinnamon tree/what is Africa to me?”  (Derek Walcott - the St Lucian Nobel Laureate poet - also wondered about the conundrums of a far distant Africa and the alien beloved tongue in which he wrote now.  In “A Far Cry From Africa” (a double entendre titling), he wrote: “The gorilla wrestles with the superman/I who am poisoned with the blood of both/Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?/I who have cursed/The drunken officer of British rule, how choose/Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?”

This in many ways was the more enlightened, but not the general sentiment.

It wasn’t until in the Harlem Renaissance - 1920, the Benin Bronzes were shown and Alain Locke - father of the Harlem Renaissance - posited the cultural history of Africa in his “Essays on Value”, which lead Blacks to take a second look eventually.  Then came the structural decolonising/independence movements after 1950, which quickened the rise of Africa in America; even and especially amongst Blacks…including in the Caribbean.

Garvey initiated that in the 1920 with his Universal Negro Improvement Association and his philosophy of Pan-Africanism, which argued for the intellectual and cultural plentitude of Africa.

Garvey was quite entrepreneurial and established his own black Shipping Company: Black Star Line…with an unthinkable self-confidence, which was mimicked by persons such as Jack Johnson, the Black heavyweight champion boxer.

In 1922, Garvey was charged and convicted of wire fraud, but it was not for defrauding schemes of any sort.  It involved the selling of shares in his shipping company…and it is agreed by most scholars that the charges were used to silence him.

Joe Kennedy at the time was engaged in actual fraud and opium dealing…and yet saw no pause in his freedom.  Garvey’s sentence was commuted by President Andrew Jackson and in 1927, President Calvin Coolidge ordered Garvey deported to Jamaica.

Two points of note: 

1. Garvey’s main opposition in America was not whites, but Blacks like A. Philip Randolph and Walter Wilkins.  They were elite blacks who had gotten inroads with whites.  They felt that Garvey - a bit of a show off was compromising their status, speaking about this hated Africa, which they regarded as backwards.  They appealed to the Attorney General to investigate Garvey; who as a bit of a ‘dandy’, which didn’t help because of his flamboyance.  These are the same Blacks who rail-roaded Paul Roberson and who opposed Dr. Martin Luther King jr. who - from 1963 until his death - was the most hated Black man in America for his stance on the Vietnam War and for planning the “Poor People’s March on Washington”.

2. Marcus Garvey never set foot on the African continent.  Why?  Because before 1950, the countries were all colonies and no colonial government would allow his entry, which would have been a challenge to their authority.

Even in dress Garvey was audacious: there is a rich history to the uniform he wore…but in the simplest terms, he mimicked W.E.B. Dubois, who himself mimicked the Prussian elite nation builders - like Karl von Bismarck and others - who established the state of German in 1870.  Dubois studied at the Univeristy of Berlin - which I’ve visited for research purposes and where he is still well regarded - having helped to developed the discipline of sociology with Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber and others.  Dubois and Garvey wanted to achieve the same ends in the manner…that at last…all the German people were united; so they wished to advance the same amongst Blacks in the diaspora with the African continent.

So was Garvey a great man?

His contribution was significant.  He lacked the multivarious talents or global prominence of Paul Roberson, the majesty, education, pedigree and vision of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. or the sheer natural brilliance and discipline of Malcom X.  But they rose and stood on the shoulders of his natural audacity to think Africa and African origins and of an African future as substantive.

His ideas were 100 years before their time: only now we see in the Sahel, where 5 nations - Mali, Niger, now Togo and Chad together with Burkina Faso (led by the magnetic Ibrahim Traoré) have broken (are breaking) from France…steeped they are…the philosophy of Marcus Garvey, as there is no other self-dependent blueprint for Black nations confident in their significance.  Garvey is the sole philosopher in that space.  And as it was for Garvey, Roberson and King, their most strident opposition came from fellow Black presidents of African nations over-tethered to the West…even against or within their own narrow interests!

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