African Intellectuals and Decolonization

Nicholas M. Creary

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780896804869
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West.

As this book shows, Africa's decolonization is an ongoing process across a range of fronts, and intellectuals—both African and non-African—have significant roles to play in that process. The essays collected here examine issues such as representation and retrospection; the roles of intellectuals in the public sphere; and the fundamental question of how to decolonize African knowledges. African Intellectuals and Decolonization outlines ways in which intellectual practice can serve to de-link Africa from its global representation as a debased, subordinated, deviant, and inferior entity.

Contributors
Lesley Cowling, University of the Witwatersrand
Nicholas M. Creary, University at Albany
Marlene De La Cruz, Ohio University
Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town
George Hartley, Ohio University
Janet Hess, Sonoma State University
T. Spreelin McDonald, Ohio University
Ebenezer Adebisi Olawuyi, University of Ibadan
Steve Odero Ouma, University of Nairobi
Oyeronke Oyewumi, State University of New York
at Stony Brook
Tsenay Serequeberhan, Morgan State University

Part I

Representation and Retrospection

We Need a Mau Mau in Mississippi

Malcolm X’s Political Lessons for Today

George Hartley

On December 20, 1964, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, Malcolm X declared, “Oginga Odinga [the vice president of recently liberated Kenya] is not passive. He’s not meek. He’s not humble. He’s not nonviolent. But he’s free.”

This fact was part of a larger object lesson that Malcolm X had for black Americans:

[Jomo Kenyatta, Oginga Odinga, and the Mau Mau will] go down as the greatest African patriots and freedom fighters that that continent ever knew, and they will be given credit for bringing about the independence of many of the existing independent states on that continent right now. There was a time when their image was negative, but today they’re looked upon with respect and their chief is the president and their next chief is the vice president.

I have to take time to mention that because, in my opinion, not only in Mississippi and Alabama, but right here in New York City, you and I can best learn how to get real freedom by studying how Kenyatta brought it to his people in Kenya, and how Odinga helped him, and the excellent job that was done by the Mau Mau freedom fighters. In fact, that’s what we need in Mississippi. In Mississippi we need a Mau Mau. In Alabama we need a Mau Mau. In Georgia we need a Mau Mau. Right here in Harlem, in New York City, we need a Mau Mau.

I say it with no anger; I say it with very careful forethought.¹

The most important insight of Malcolm X’s speeches and writings during the last two months of his life concerns the relationship between the African diaspora’s struggles against internal colonialism in the United States and the liberation movements’ struggles against European colonialism and U.S. neocolonialism on the African continent. The key here is the recognition that blacks on both continents are fighting the same enemy—the white power structure of capitalist imperialism. While the civil rights movement in the United States emphasized an integrationist ethos that implicitly shored up the interests of the U.S. elite, Malcolm X fought not for a civil rights movement but for a human rights movement, having learned from the examples of Patrice Lumumba and Jomo Kenyatta that a truly independent African socialism depends on the forceful resistance to colonialism.

As noted above, not long before his assassination, Malcolm X told black America that in Mississippi, in Alabama, in Georgia, and in Harlem, “we need a Mau Mau.” His message to black America was that black liberation was possible in the United States as well as in Kenya, Ghana, and the Congo; that the African American struggle was part of the global struggles against imperialism; that “the revolution on the outside of the house” was troubling enough for the power structure, but they were then “beginning to see that this struggle on the outside by the black man is affecting, infecting the black man who is on the inside of that structure” (MX, 160–61, emphasis added). The influence of the African liberation movements has, in his words, never been fully told, and black America needs to follow black Africa’s example and answer the racist violence of the white man with “vigorous action in self-defense” (164–65).

The greatest lesson for us to draw today from the speeches and interviews of Malcolm X from December 1964 to his death in February 1965 is to recognize the analytical and synthesizing moves of the argument he developed during this crucial period. This is especially true for his analysis of U.S. intervention in the Congo. These moves will allow us to draw similar conclusions regarding the intimate ties between imperialism abroad and imperialism here at home.

The most important element of the colonization of the mind—which is the main point underlying Malcolm X’s analysis—is the role of the press in shaping public opinion, in particular the public opinion of Afro-Americans. It is through the press that the U.S. government and the imperialist power structure are able to “psycho” black consciousness, to brainwash Afro-Americans into internalizing the colonial mythologies that justify the status quo, including the systematic violence that polices and maintains that status quo. Just as important, however, Malcolm X also developed a process of decolonizing black minds, and that involved seeing through the smokescreen created by the press and identifying with the struggles, methods, and achievements of the African liberation fighters such as the Mau Mau in Kenya and the Simbas in the Congo. As he put it:

When you begin to start thinking for yourself, you frighten them, and they try and block your getting to the public, for fear that if the public listens to you, then the public won’t listen to them anymore. . . . And if you don’t develop the analytical ability to read between the lines in what they’re saying, I’m telling you again—they’ll be building gas ovens, and before you wake up you’ll be in one of them, just like the Jews ended up in gas ovens over there in Germany. You’re in a society that’s just as capable of building gas ovens for Black people as Hitler’s society was.²

Relationship between the African Revolution
and the Afro-American Struggle

What “we know too little about,” Malcolm X told his audiences, “is our relationship with the freedom struggle of people all over the world” (MX, 117). In particular, he emphasized

the importance of realizing the direct connection between the struggle of the Afro-American in this country and the struggle of our people all over the world. As long as we think . . . that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out. Not until you start realizing your connection with the Congo. . . .

When I speak of some action for the Congo, that action also includes Congo, Mississippi. But the point and thing that I would like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that there is no kind of action in this country ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied in with the over-all international struggle. . . .

I might point out here that colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that is just confined to England or France or the United States. The interests in this country are in cahoots with the interests in France and the interests in Britain. It’s one huge complex or combine, and it creates what’s known not as the American power structure or the French power structure, but an international power structure. This international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources, so that the era in which you and I have been living during the past ten years most specifically has witnessed the upsurge on the part of the black man in Africa against the power structure. (MX, 90, 89, 160)

Analysis of the Trickery in the Congo:
Manipulation by the Press

Malcolm X spoke of the “step-by-step” process used by the press:

First they [fan] the flame in such a manner to create hysteria in the mind of the public. And then they shift gears and fan the flame in a manner designed to get the sympathy of the public. And once they go from hysteria to sympathy, their next step is to get the public to support them in whatever act they’re getting ready to go down with. You’re dealing with a cold calculating international machine, that’s so criminal in its objectives and motives that it has the seeds of its own destruction, right within. (AB)

Those seeds of destruction included the Afro-Americans’ dawning recognition of their relationship to African liberation movements. But a major task of Malcolm X’s analysis was to explain the apparent lack of sympathy by black America concerning the slaughter of black Africans. The major mystery, which he took on in his analysis of the situation regarding the Congo, was the fact that despite the mass murder taking place in an African country as Western planes dropped bombs on Congolese villages, killing black men, women, and babies, there was no “outcry, no sympathy, no support, no concern” expressed by Afro-Americans. What could account for this lack of international racial solidarity? Malcolm X’s answer was the “trickery” of the press in the service of imperialism. Afro-Americans do not sympathize because, in his words, “the press didn’t project it in such a way that it would be designed to get your sympathy. They know how to put something so that you’ll sympathize with it, and they know how to put it so you’ll be against it” (AB, emphasis added).

The recognition of this ability and willingness by the press to manipulate public emotion and opinion was the first point in Malcolm X’s decolonizing analysis of the relationship between Africa and Afro-America. This manipulation involved, among many things, the choice of loaded descriptors: the bombing was a “humanitarian project”; the planes were flown by “American-trained anti-Castro Cuban pilots”; they were doing it “in the name of freedom.” Malcolm X asked, “You see how step-by-step they grab your mind” with this propaganda? These glorious terms “are used to pave the way in your mind for what they’re going to do” (AB).

The next point, the counterpoint, in Malcolm X’s decolonizing analysis was to offer an alternative description of these events and actors that better explained the power dynamics at play:

These pilots are hired, their salaries are paid by the United States government. They’re called mercenaries, these pilots are. And a mercenary is not someone who kills you because he’s patriotic. He kills you for blood money, he’s a hired killer. This is what a mercenary means. And they’re able to take these hired killers, put them in American planes, with American bombs, and drop them on African villages, blowing to bits Black men, Black women, Black children, Black babies, and you Black people sitting over here cool like it doesn’t even involve you. You’re a fool. They’ll do it to them today, and do it to you tomorrow. Because you and I and they are all the same. (AB)

Next, Malcolm X explained what has since come to be known as a classic “postcolonial” situation: In order to legitimate its colonialist interventions, the U.S. government handpicks a criminal to prop up as leader of the newly independent state, someone who allows U.S. interests unfettered access to the resources of the nation, cracks down on his own people when they protest, and allows foreign military forces to operate within the country. In the case of the Congo, Malcolm X explained:

They take Tshombe. . . . He’s the worst African that was ever born. . . . He’s the murderer of Lumumba . . . the first and only rightful prime minister of the Congo. . . . The United States takes him, puts him over the Congo, and supports his government with your tax dollars. . . . His salary’s paid by the United States government. . . . His first move is to bring in South Africans, who hate everything in sight. He hires those South Africans to come and kill his own Congolese people. And the United States, again, pays their salary. (AB)

Malcolm X explained that this justification of the installation of Tshombe as the only African who could “bring unity to” the Congo was really just a cover for their real reason for imperialist interest in the country, which was to recapture the country in order to exploit its vast mineral resources, to take advantage of its strategic geographic location as a base for intervention in other African countries, and to counter the inspiration of the Congolese liberation fighters who would support other African nations in their wars against colonialism.

Another cynical move by the press was their lack of coverage of the thousands of dead Congolese blacks while decrying the capture of white hostages: “A white skin is more valuable than a . . . black skin. This is what they’re implying! . . . They’re vicious in their whiteness” (AB). The most insidious effect of this press manipulation, however, was that the other side of projection is internalization. Given the three- to four-century history of seeing negative images of Africa and Africans projected in the Western press, the Afro-American has tended to internalize these negative images. Malcolm X described this process:

They always project Africa in a negative light: jungle savages, cannibals, nothing civilized. Why then naturally it was so negative that it was negative to you and me, and you and I began to hate it. We didn’t want anybody telling us anything about Africa, much less calling us Africans. In hating Africa and in hating the Africans, we ended up hating ourselves, without even realizing it. Because you can’t hate the roots of a tree, and not hate the tree. You can’t hate your origin and not end up hating yourself. You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself. . . .

And this is what the white man knows. So they very skillfully make you and me hate our African identity, our African characteristics. . . . It made us feel inferior; it made us feel inadequate; made us feel helpless. And when we fell victims to this feeling of inadequacy or inferiority or helplessness, we turned to somebody else to show us the way. (MX, 168, 169)

Manipulation by the Government

Like the mainstream Western media, the government of the United States was a tool for imperialist control of the globe. And like the media, the government played its own role in the “trickery” involving perceptions, sympathies, antipathies, and ultimately action—or more often inaction. As Malcolm X explained, “After 1959 the spirit of African nationalism was fanned to a high flame and we then began to witness the complete collapse of colonialism” (MX, 169–70). Because the European countries that were losing territory and influence across the globe were so thoroughly identified with imperialism, international capital had to find a new governmental vehicle to carry on its legacy, a government that was not so obviously identified with the history of Western imperialism.

As Malcolm X put it, “They pulled a trick that was colossal. . . . They passed the ball to Uncle Sam. And he picked it up and has been r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Representation and Retrospection
• Part II: Decolonizing Public Spheres: Conflicts and Negotiations
• Part III: Decolonizing Knowledge: Intellectual Imperatives and Epistemic Dialogues
• Contributors
• Index