Africa Reimagined

Reclaiming a sense of abundance and prosperity

Hlumelo Biko

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781868429424
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Africa Reimagined is a passionately argued appeal for a rediscovery of our African identity. Going beyond the problems of a single country, Hlumelo Biko calls for a reorientation of values, on a continental scale, to suit the needs and priorities of Africans. Building on the premise that slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid fundamentally unbalanced the values and indeed the very self-concept of Africans, he offers realistic steps to return to a more balanced Afro-centric identity.

Historically, African values were shaped by a sense of abundance, in material and mental terms, and by strong ties of community. The intrusion of religious, economic and legal systems imposed by conquerors, traders and missionaries upset this balance, and the African identity was subsumed by the values of the newcomers.

Biko shows how a reimagining of Africa can restore the sense of abundance and possibility, and what a rebirth of the continent on Pan-African lines might look like. This is not about the churn of the news cycle or party politics – although he identifies the political party as one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism. Instead, drawing on latest research, he offers a practical, pragmatic vision anchored in the here and now.

By looking beyond identities and values imposed from outside, and transcending the divisions and frontiers imposed under colonialism, it should be possible for Africans to develop fully their skills, values and ingenuity, to build institutions that reflect African values, and to create wealth for the benefit of the continent as a whole.

1

Normalising abnormality

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, a parent sets up what they think is a teaching moment, only to get a rude awakening themselves, resulting in their learning more than they are teaching. In 2018 I took my son to watch the film Black Panther, thinking that I would be exposing him to something that would make him more (as the kids say these days) ‘woke’. But I was the one whose eyes were opened. Growing up in townships in South Africa like Lenyenye, Langa and Gugulethu, I did not have occasion to read Marvel comics. Apart from knowing that Black Panther was one of the few superhero movies with an African superhero, I went in blind.

I was stunned by the film and what it stood for. Director Ryan Coogler created a new subjective reality in which the most technologically advanced nation in the world is a secretive African one named Wakanda. This nation has managed to harvest the extraordinary powers derived from a mineral resource named vibranium to build a capital city that showcases technology the rest of the world hasn’t even heard of yet. Against the backdrop of majestic skyscrapers, vibranium-powered hovering cars fly alongside a magnetic-levitation train zipping along an elevated track.

Once we adjust to the glitz and the glamour that surrounds this mystical world, we notice some interesting details that complete the mind-bending assault on our traditional view of normal. African beads, clothing patterns and traditional weapons sit side by side with space-age artillery and cloth made using nanotechnology. African music plays in the background of a command centre that would make NASA jealous. The generals in the army are dominated by women, whose outfits combine Masai warrior clothing with Star Trek-type gear.

This serves to instantaneously challenge the viewer’s previously held assumptions about standards and norms. In a ‘normal’ superhero movie, the superhero (whether they come from space or if their mutation happened here on earth) is from some small town in the United States of America, has an American accent and is ‘white’. We don’t think twice about these details. We simply accept, and are indeed primed by society to accept, them as normal. Yet this social priming is hardly benign. The signals we pick up indicate important details about how the world works and what the ethnic pecking order is. From these signals, and from the stylised intersubjective view of white superiority reinforced by popular culture, we start to form hardened views of socially acceptable hierarchies and the limitations they imply for our expectations of certain ethnic groups.

Most of us are constantly alert to the signals that indicate whether what we are doing is socially acceptable or not. This instinct has allowed humans to organise themselves around generally accepted ways of acting, from which come morals, ethics, values and laws. As humans have developed, we have come to use the terms ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ as shorthand to describe these ways of acting, or behaviour.

We deem something to be normal if it conforms to a standard. Accordingly, whoever creates the standard gets to determine the social acceptability of behaviour. When studying and writing about different social impulses, social scientists often speak of norms and values. We don’t always ask who sets the original standard against which such norms are judged. It is only in very rare cases that norms or values are more than loosely defined descriptions that attempt to explain what are often fairly recent practices. More worryingly, our inability to rigorously test norms against the backdrop of historical changes in social structure and the nature of cultural influences on social action leads us to make conclusions about behaviour that are often faulty.

We would do well to remember Emile Durkheim’s thoughtful reflection: ‘All empirical instances of social action can be said to be shaped and channelled, on the one hand, by social structure, culture and (on the other hand by) collective emotions.’1 In today’s winner-takes-all approach to history, just one side of Durkheim’s social equation is satisfied, namely, that norms are what the dominant social power structures say they are. Not enough room is left to consider the enormous role played by collective emotions in legitimising rules and norms.

Africans, who over the last thousand years have not often been the victors in conflicts with people of other continents and religions, have lost their voice in history. Over the last 2 500 years, in particular, Africans have seen their norms and values recede into the social background. This has been exaggerated by the way in which African history has been written. Our history has hidden from us the crucial role that culture and collective emotions play in the long-term sustainability of what elites have pronounced to be modern norms. To put this another way, there have been long periods of history during which the Pharaonic Dynasties of Egypt (3100 BCE to 332 BCE), the Kingdom of Mapungubwe (900–1300), the Kingdom of Mali (1230–1670), the Kingdom of Axum/Abyssinia, both in modern-day Ethiopia (1270–1636), the Kingdom of Kongo (1390–1888) and the Kingdom of Ghana (700–1240) had legitimate claim to being among the wealthiest and most advanced societies in the world. These periods are completely ignored, or presented in a bastardised fashion, by popular African history.

I begin this book with an appeal for the appreciation of cultural identity, because such an appreciation is a prerequisite for our ability to reimagine Africa. The foundation for reimagining Africa has been laid perhaps most substantially by scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Dr Yosef Ben-Jochannan, John Henrik Clarke, Chancellor Williams, Dr Ivan van Sertima and Professor George GM James, who are regarded by many Pan Africanists as the pre-eminent historians of ancient African civilisation. For Cheikh Anta Diop, an approach to the study of norms and values has to be mindful of the following factors: ‘For every individual his or her own cultural identity is a function of that of his or her people. Consequently, one must define the cultural identity of a people. This means to a great extent one must analyse the components of the collective personality. We know that three factors contribute to its formation: 1) a historical factor; 2) a linguistic factor; 3) a psychological factor.’2 Understanding a people requires a keen knowledge of their history, their languages and how they construct reality.

The political struggle of African nations for liberation from colonialism and/or imperialism has been misjudged as a struggle purely for the attainment of liberal democracy. This has led to a severe misreading of the influence of both collective emotions and cultural sentiment on desired popular norms.3 An alternative way to look at the struggle for liberation in Africa could be as a struggle for self-determination. Looking at the liberation struggle in this way requires faith in the ability of the African masses to self-determine. Self-determination implies the attainment of both political and economic freedom. Defining the objective in this way would also require an admission that post-colonial African societies have failed to carry out the self-determination required by the people, thus the struggle very much continues.

Had the struggle for self-determination been won, the historical, linguistic and psychological factors identified by Diop would have been embedded in African societies in a way that would lead to radically different political economies, dominated by the desires of the majority of African people. In the absence of a concerted attempt to let the people shape post-colonial society, elites have allowed an Anglo-Saxon form of capitalism to become the drumbeat to which Africans march. This march has radically distorted the individual African’s ability to enforce the natural balance between work and leisure. The result has been the compromising of the social fabric of modern African families in the process of so-called development.

Since antiquity, societies the world over have structured themselves so as to most effectively coordinate the lives of the individuals who make up the collective with maximum benefit to succeed in the key priorities of a given historical period. Since time immemorial, those priorities have included mating, safely raising offspring, worshipping one’s chosen god(s) and efficiently feeding the collective unit (whether a nuclear or a broader conception of kinfolk).

Later, the priorities of societies necessarily shifted as populations grew and the complexity of social coordination intensified. These changes included the development of animal and plant husbandry, collective rituals/ceremonies, environmental challenges such as rising or sinking river levels, and warfare. With each increasing degree of complexity, the individual’s welfare became increasingly diametrically opposed to that of the collective. Each stage of development has come with an encroachment on individual leisure time. Africa has moved from the colonial to post-colonial stage without stopping to ask people whether this is the best way to organise their time.

European societies have had the luxury of a much more gradual restructuring. They have migrated from the more easy-going, leisure-oriented lifestyles of Ancient Greek society to the hard-charging work-centric outlook of modern European society. Ancient Greek society, being greatly influenced by the universal outlook of the Egyptians, had a more balanced view of labour and leisure than does modern-day European society. Aristotle puts this distinction into sharp relief: ‘The end of labour is to gain leisure.’4 In fact, Greek philo­sophers believed very strongly in the unity of mind and body and in the relationship between all forms of human skills and qualities.

This Ancient Greek view of life is most influential in the way human society has woven together education, sports and leisure within our school systems. The towns built by the Romans, themselves greatly influenced by the Egyptians and the Greeks, included amphitheatres, public baths and gymnasiums, all indicating the importance of leisure in their lives. But underlying Aristotle’s comment is the resignation to a particular sequence of life: work first, play later. Leisure was seen, even in Ancient Greek society, as a reward for work.

Plato, in The Republic, affirms Aristotle’s view about what today we call ‘work-life balance’: ‘First duty, then happiness, is the natural order of our moral ideas.’5 It is interesting that, even as Plato hints at the immorality of the pursuit of happiness, his own reflections on the topic were the result of unrestricted leisure time spent thinking, reading and writing. This is the sleight of hand that elites have used to cement class differences the world over. Upper-class members of society have leisure time that allows them time for reflection, reading and self-improvement. Members of the lower classes, on the other hand, have to work mindlessly for most of their waking hours.

Daniel McLean and Amy Hurd, authors of a standard textbook on leisure studies, suggest that, over time, technological development has tipped the work-life balance in favour of work. However, ‘tribal societies do not make the same sharp distinction between leisure and work that more technologically advanced societies do. Whereas the latter set aside different periods of time for work and relaxation, a tribal pre-technological society had no such precise separations. In tribal societies work tends to be varied and creative rather than being a narrow, specialised task demanding a specialised skill as in modern industry.’6 I agree that economic development, and the increasing specialisation of labour that comes with it, has made the distinction between work and leisure more rigid. I would argue, however, that the technological sophistication of a society is not the leading indi...