African Political Thought

An Intellectual History of the Quest for Freedom

Stephen Chan

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781787385504
• eBook ISBN:
  9781787387485
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

African liberation is often seen in terms of heroism, but seldom in terms of thought. Even Sartre, in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s seminal The Wretched of the Earth, wrote of the ‘native’ with his coiled muscles about to explode into rebellion. The African and the black person are denied the condition of philosophy, apparently driven only by frustration and anger.

Stephen Chan’s new book charts the long history of African political thought, from the years of North American slavery, through the development of modern African nationalism and the difficulties of governing new states, to Africa’s political philosophy today, taking on the world as an equal. He dwells at length on major figures from Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah’s postcolonial generation to Biko, Mandela and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. He shows their leadership to be inseparable from their ideas, and from those of literary giants including Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

This is no hagiography: Chan critically examines his thinkers, who also include Mugabe and Mobutu, and expresses concern for the future of Pan-Africanism. But his fascinating account reveals a thoughtful continent that has made complex, significant contributions to the world’s intellectual commons–yet continues to seek freedom.

1

ANTECEDENTS

RACE AND ROMANTICISM

Africa was far from ‘discovered’ by European missionaries and celebrity explorers. Many of the latter were feted like rock stars in the clubs and learned societies of Victorian London, and deliberately played up the ideas of exotica and backwardness.¹ Africa was not their only subject. The image of the ‘noble savage’ was drawn from the Maori resistance, of great chivalry, to white settler colonialism. But, whether adventurism in remote parts was condescending or gracious, the end result was all the same: an imperial outreach and a colonialism. The Berlin Conference at the end of 1884 and beginning of 1885 literally divided Africa among the European powers—the political cartoonists of the day portraying it like a knife to a gigantic Christmas pudding. And they were able to do so because the phenomenon of corporate colonialism, exemplified by Cecil Rhodes and his search for gold and other mineral wealth, was confined to the southern part of the continent. Northern Africa, the Maghreb, represented a contestation between established governments and European powers. The bulk of sub-Saharan Africa was valuable but not worth going to war over—thus the carving of the continent like a pudding on the day of Christ’s birth.

But North Africa was an interesting case of the continent being far from dark. In the bitter days of English isolation from Europe, when the Protestant Queen Elizabeth sought to face down the armada and pressures from Catholic Spain, her court desperately sought diplomatic allies wherever they could be found. The portrait of the Ambassador to London from Morocco, an Islamic power, still hangs from time to time in the Tate Britain. Shakespeare made a tragic hero of Othello, a mercenary admiral from North Africa serving the Venetian navy. And the British were later hoisted on their own petard as they tried to crush or apply sanctions against the infant United States. The US also sought diplomatic allies from North Africa—for instance, ironically, from what is now Libya.

In fact, Islam had appeared in Africa in the 10^th century, well before the advent of European trade missions and slave raids on the continent from the 1500s. Chinese Admiral Zheng He, in his expeditions to East Africa in the early 1400s, was able to make contact with the local population by virtue of himself being Islamic—even if with different customs and laws—leaving behind porcelain cups, fragments of which can still sometimes be found on the shores of Dar es Salaam, and taking home to his emperor a living giraffe. It epitomised an East African coast with an international exchange of ideas and culture well before the advent of European interest.

Islamic powers conducted their own slave trade in Africa, but Western plundering of sub-Saharan Africa for slaves helped populate the Caribbean islands, and led to large black populations in continental America, notably Brazil and the United States. For the most part slavery was abolished as the 19^th century wore on: in Europe in the 1830s, Brazil as late as the 1880s; in the US, it was abolished in the 1860s, but it took a bloody civil war and Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of liberty, and by then the idea of ‘return’ had already set in to the minds both of many members of the black population and their white well-wishers—who, although liberal and well-minded in the terms of their times, often saw blackness as out of place in a vast country with a white vision of its future. The African Americans who engaged with this idea and began envisaging their own future ‘back’ in Africa were some of the very first black and African people to conceive a politics responding to Western colonisation, imperialism and slavery.

Liberia, for instance—as we shall discuss later—entered the world of formal states by first being a settlement of the American Colonization Society, who believed black people would enjoy greater freedom and prosperity in Africa than in the United States. The country declared independence in 1847 but did not gain US recognition until 1862, during the American Civil War. Until then more than 15,000 freed slaves and free-born blacks who all the same did not enjoy full rights in the US, and slightly over 3000 people from the Caribbean, relocated to Liberia—all carrying forms of American culture with them, much to the dismay and alienation of those who were indigenous to the territory of the so-called new state. The Liberian constitution and flag were modelled on those of the US The first president was a wealthy free-born Virginian who had not grown up in Africa. Many of the ruptures that still plague Liberia to this day owe to the peculiar form of what was effectively the black colonisation of an extant population. But, even before the efforts of the American Colonization Society, beginning in 1822, the British Crown founded a settlement in Sierra Leone in 1787 in what was called the ‘Province of Freedom’, in which it intended to resettle some of the ‘black poor’ of London, including African-Americans freed by the British during the US War of Independence. About 400 blacks and 60 whites reached Sierra Leone in May 1787. Most died of disease or in violent encounters with the indigenous inhabitants. They were effectively replaced in 1792 by 1200 black loyalists to the British Crown, who, after the US War of Independence, had been settled, unhappily, in Nova Scotia. The efforts of the British anti-slavery movement brought them to Sierra Leone where they established Freetown—still the country’s capital. They called themselves ‘settlers’ and built Freetown in the style they knew from America and continued American fashion and American manners. In addition, they established Methodism in Freetown. Again, many of today’s problems in Sierra Leone stem from the imposition of a black colonialism on a pre-existing population—although the British did not grant independence until 1961. Many in that population today remain Islamic, so the mix is about 21% Christian and 78% Muslim. Already, at the time of the foundation of Liberia and Sierra Leone, as we shall see later, people like Edward Blyden were writing about the two religions and the tensions within their African relationship.

The Exception of Ethiopia

If certain currents of thought and practice to do with ‘return’ were already being put into place by the time of the 1884–5 Berlin Conference, that conference saw Africa as a site of Africanness and blackness certainly but, all the same, with white overlords of territories formalised according to European preferences. This did not mean that Africa was necessarily acquiescent in its own colonisation. This was most apparent in the Italian effort to conquer the independent kingdom of Ethiopia and the fierce war of resistance that greeted the Italian armies. The Ethiopian struggle became emblematic of the efforts of the wider continent, so that Addis Ababa was a natural choice for the location of continental African institutions.

Ethiopia or Abyssinia had been the stuff of legend and wonder for millennia. For a long time, it—or an image of it—was all that was known in Europe of sub-Saharan Africa. In Homer’s epic poem of the Odyssey, written some 2,700 years ago, the Greek hero Odysseus, having devised the plan whereby Troy was overthrown by the stratagem of the Trojan Horse, was waylaid from returning home by the vengeful god, Poseidon, who had supported the Trojans. His detention was not unpleasant, being confined to an island for almost a decade in a conjugal relationship with the beautiful goddess, Calypso, but he longed to escape home to Greece. His chance finally came when the Ethiopians threw a party for Poseidon.

But now Poseidon had gone to visit the Ethiopians worlds away, Ethiopians off at the farthest limits of mankind,A people split in two, one part where the Sungod sets And part where the Sungod rises. There Poseidon went To receive an offering, bulls and rams by the hundred—Far away at the feast the Sea-lord sat and took his pleasure.²

There, Ethiopia was an image of sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, exotic and unknown—although seemingly on good terms with the gods. But the various legends that accrued around Ethiopia are augmented by the Ethiopians themselves, who claim that the Queen of Sheba was one of theirs and, as the wisest woman of earth, set out to test her knowledge against that of Solomon. The more substantiated claim is that the Ethiopian Coptic Church has the world’s oldest Christian liturgy and, although it was established at about the same time as the Catholic liturgy, was not bound by the imperial need to make Christianity into a religion palatable to the vast Roman Empire. The claim is therefore that of a form of worship closer than any other to the worship of the Apostles. The other major claim that Ethiopian emperors were descended from King David continues to fuel Rastafarian belief today. But, certainly it meant that at the great Battle of Adwa between the Ethiopian and Italian forces in 1896, both sides claimed to be Christian armies. To this day, in the street markets of Addis Ababa, one may buy paintings both of Sheba, in the Ethiopian version named Magda, visiting Solomon, and of the Battle of Adwa. In the latter, St George rides with the Ethiopians—but both sides have Red Cross tents, and both sides have modern armaments. In fact, the Ethiopian army was a mixture of traditional warriors and rifle-bearing soldiers—some 20,000 spearmen, including mounted cavalry, and 80,000 rifles. The army seemed to have included women, as some were named as figures of great heroism. The battle, in which the Ethiopians did claim their Christian roots as inspirational, attracted international sympathy for them, as well as recognitions of legitimacy as an independent country. The Italo-Ethiopian war of 1895–6 was won by the Ethiopians, but this did not mean that the Italians ceased their efforts to colonise the country and other parts of the Horn of Africa.

The second Italo-Ethiopian war in the era of Mussolini was one of two key factors in the demise of the League of Nations, established at the end of World War I, as Haile Selassie’s 1936 plea in front of the League saw no response that could stop the Italian invasion. Similarly, China’s plea to the League to halt the Japanese invasion of its territory met with no effectual action. Mussolini’s forces took Addis Ababa, but in this second war the Ethiopians were able to field, although to no avail, 400,000 rifles, 234 artillery pieces, and a small array of tanks and armoured cars. The liberation of Addis Ababa in 1941, by Ethiopian and Commonwealth forces, was greeted in a London still reeling from the Battle of Britain in 1940, as a key blow against the Axis powers—and this meant a curious map of post-war Africa, with the main actors in Rhodes’s south having dominion or self-governing, effectively independent, status under white governments; a North Africa with a long if problematic relationship with Europe—and indeed in ancient Tunisia, then Carthage, an attempt to conquer Rome—and a vast sub-Saharan land mass in which only Liberia, founded, perhaps colonised, by freed American slaves, and Ethiopia were recognised as independent states.

The Father: Edward Wilmot Blyden

Return, education, and the need to understand Islam informed the work of someone who should be regarded as a key founding father of modern thought—by that I mean thought intended and able to render itself in terms of hegemonic modernity, speaking back but also able to speak forwards—in Africa. Edward Wilmot Blyden was born in 1832 in St. Thomas, now in the US Virgin Islands, and was of Igbo (eastern Nigerian) descent. He was refused admission to Rutgers University because of being black and accepted encouragement from the American Colonization Society to go to Liberia, where he arrived in 1850.

Blyden had been mentored in his youth by a white US preacher, the Reverend John Knox, and from him learned Latin and Greek. Once in Liberia, he spent time both there and in neighbouring Sierra Leone, both with similar histories of settlement by foreign blacks. He worked as a journalist in both as well as in Nigeria, became editor of the Liberia Herald, and also published in the organs of the American Colonization Society. But it was in education, politics and diplomacy where he chiefly made his mark. He became Professor of Greek and Latin at Liberia College in 1861—and he would become president of the college in 1880. Before then he became Liberian Secretary of State (1862–4), and later combined being college president with being Minister of the Interior (1880–4). He was ambassador to Britain and France and returned for a lecture tour of the USA. From the turn of the century, Blyden lived mostly in Sierra Leone, where he directed the education of Muslims. That country, with its own black settlers, took education very seriously, establishing Fourah Bay College in 1827—the first university in sub-Saharan Africa, now part of the University of Sierra Leone—predating the foundation of the University of Cape Town by two years. Blyden died in Sierra Leone in 1912.

His lectures in the USA were about a ‘return’ to Africa as the essential means of avoiding racial discrimination, but his intellectual legacy resides in his book, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race.³ When it was published in 1887, many readers did not believe it could have been written by a black man, this in itself a demonstration of the discrimination against which Blyden warned. He remained a Christian, although accounts about that vary, but his argument was that Islam was a unifying force for black people—not being part of the white project of subjugation, and also having been present in Africa for many hundreds of years. It was in these respects more authentic as a religion for black people. The influence his work had can be seen in the continued sense of a homeland for those of African descent—those in a diaspora—and the advent of a form of black Islam in the USA during the civil rights era of the 1960s, most famously involving Malcolm X, as a counterpoint to the crusades of people like Martin Luther King, a Christian minister who was seen by many to be too moderate. Clearly, however, Blyden was unaware of Ethiopian Christianity and, in the Americas, it took the Rastas to highlight its existence while the US Nation of Islam continued its counterpoint to the mainstream civil rights movement.

Blyden stood unsuccessfully for the Presidency of Liberia in 1885. Only 2,310 votes were cast, the franchise being restricted to registered landowners and not available to the ‘native’, non-settler populations of the Liberian hinterland outside Monrovia.⁴ The question mark over Blyden’s thought was to do with what made one both an emancipated and civic black. Was it blackness in itself? Or was it qualities that came from education and private ownership of pro­perty? Communal ownership and indigenous religions that were not Islamic (or Christian) did not equip one for citizenship. Women of course, as everywhere in that period, achieved the franchise only slowly and, in Liberia, in a fragmented fashion. Blyden’s later life in Sierra Leone, educating black Muslims, was as much therefore a project in citizenship as in education itself. To be fair, in the UK, 1885 marked the start of an era in which electoral reform was slowly being achieved, and still had ownership protocols as part of the eligibility to vote. Liberia could say it was near the forefront of modern practice. But it was not leading it. Freedom from discrimination for some meant discrimination for those who had lived in the land for centuries before the arrival of the American Colonization Society. Again, Liberia was hardly alone. Indigenous Americans did not achieve the franchise in the USA until 1924, and first-generation Asian immigrants could not achieve citizenship until 1952.

As for Islam, what Islam precisely did Blyden mean? Was there an African Islam of which he was aware, and was this cognisant of the extraordinarily rich and diverse forms of religious organisation and governance this could entail in both nomadic and sophisticated urban life; its historiography and genealogies; rituals and culture?⁵ In Blyden’s time, this richness was largely unknown in its detail to Western scholars.

So there is something curiously partial about the work of a man who, all the same, pioneered the sense that black freedom and black pride could be achieved through black ‘authenticity’ in a black continent with, if not a black religion, a less white one.

The Acknowledged Giant: W.E.B. Du Bois

Born in 1868 in Massachusetts, just after the American civil war which had been fought over slavery, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (who refused to pronounce his name in the French manner, preferring ‘doo boyz’) achieved distinction by becoming Harvard’s first black PhD. It was that kind of distinction that, for all his pioneering work, marked him. He essentially saw a future whereby black Americans would be mentored and taken forward by their own intellectual elite, what he called ‘the talented tenth’, and the means behind this would be education. By this he meant a full ‘classical’ education, not one confined to vocational or industrial training. He was opposed therefore to the so-called ‘Atlanta Compromise’ put forward by Booker T. Washington—whereby, in the southern USA, blacks would accept continuing white superiority on the condition that educational (largely education in industrial pursuits) and economic opportunities would be accorded them—a gradualist approach to equality based on education. Du Bois was against any gradualism that retained inequality. Full civil rights was a precondition for Du Bois for any possibility of black advancement. Within these rights, the ‘talented tenth’ would tow the 90% forward towards the fulfilment of opportunities within an already achieved equality.

Du Bois was an activist, vocal against the discriminations and lynchings in the south. He documented discrimination against black soldiers during World War I—and he partook in a full range of movements that were not specific to the black American condition: he believed capitalism lay behind racism, he was a peace activist and, in his later life, was in favour of nuclear disarmament. The FBI had a 750-page file on him as his work impacted upon a USA in the throes of the McCarthy anti-Communist witch-hunt era. Above all, he became renowned for his support of the pan-African Congresses that, in an increasingly influential and mobilising series, helped establish both black nationalism and the possibility of a pan-Africanism on the African cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Antecedents: Race and Romanticism
• 2. National Consciousness, International Struggle: Cabral, Kaunda and the Thought of Liberation
• 3. The New African Man: The Political Thought of Transformation
• 4. ‘Big Men’: The Limitations in Thought of Mobutu and Banda
• 5. The Coup ‘Artists’ and the New Nationalisms on Command: Rawlings and Sankara
• 6. The Legacy of Fanon
• 7. The Old Liberationist: Robert Mugabe
• 8. The Moral African and the African Renaissance: Thabo Mbeki
• 9. The Responsibility to Be Free: The Untapped Potential of a New Pan-Africanism
• 10. Maledictions of the Political Order: A Selection of Modern Challenges
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover