Disobedience and African Renaissance
By Mkhosana Mathobela Bingweni
AFRICA finds itself today in a world that is engulfed in rapid climate change that is accompanied by a global warming that threatens the planet and humanity.
Anumber of dangers and conditions define the present economic and political dilemma of the world that Africa is hostage to.
The global economic meltdown occasions cruel financial crises that punish the majority poor and expand the social inequalities among the have and the have-nots of the world, the multiplicity of whom are Africans. Terrorism and the war against it have created an enveloping global climate of fear and risk that have made security, peace and happiness scarce resources. In recent history, Africans are appearing in the world as victims of terrorism or accused of being terrorists. The world has never been such an unsafe, insecure and unhappy place for humanity and nature itself.
The present political and economic condition of the world has been described as an order of coloniality of power. In this coloniality of power, man’s appetite for economic power, military might marked by a monopoly of nuclear weapons, greedy industrialisation that exhausts nature and the manipulation of knowledge and technology have turned around to threaten nature and humanity, and to put the planet itself at the risk of sudden collapse. This world order of danger, fear and permanent risk is not a natural phenomenon but a manmade disaster that has been unfolded by a capitalist world system and civilisation.
Philosophers of the Global South such as Arturo Escobar, Aime Cesaire and others have described this as a civilisation of death, where Europe has created modern problems of the world for which it has no modern solutions. Europe and America have created for the world and humanity stubborn and strong questions for which they have no stubborn and strong answers. What are simplistically called African political, economic and social problems today are in actuality world problems that Europe and America have through coloniality of power created and forced upon the world.
Africa and the Global South can only get out of this world order by a radical kind of awakening and insurrection that has popularly been called the African Renaissance, a systemic economic, political, cultural and spiritual revival. It is only through a radical African Renaissance and awakening that Africa can recover itself from its sorry position as a victim in the world.
World Rhetoric and African Logic
Europe and America have not only conquered and controlled the world through nuclear arsenal, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and other large scale instruments of pain and death. The Euro-American world system has indeed created and controlled the present world order partly by the use of military might and technological prowess. However, besides mighty force and the threats of it, the Euro-American world system has ordered and disordered the world using massive seduction and persuasion, bewitching promises and tantalising pies in the sky. Such persuasive and paradisal rhetorical representations of the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment intellectual movement were part of the mythical seductions that were circulated about Europe. Presenting Europe and America as the birth places of civilisation and progress has been the big lie of the centuries. From the 12th century to the 14th Century right up to the 17TH Century Europe claimed an awakening and an explosion of development and progress in the arts and the sciences, and the lives of the people. Intellectually, in ideas of progress and advancement, from 1715 to 1789, European historians circulated the rhetoric of Enlightenment, the light of art, science and wisdom that is supposed to have illuminated the planet with brightness and a dawn.
However, if truth be told, what was a Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe was a rhetoric whose logic in the Global South was enslavement, colonisation, conquest, displacement of peoples to the plantations of America and Europe and dispossession of colonised peoples of their dignity, lands and other resources. As a result, philosophers of the Global South such as Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel and the many philosophers of liberation in Africa, most of whom became leaders of liberation movements, noticed a darker side of the Renaissance and an underside of the enlightenment.
The Euro-American world system works through beautiful rhetoric and painful logic, monopolising success and pleasure in Europe and America while spreading pain, poverty and death in the Global South. The languages of democracy, development, human rights and civilisation are all Euro-American rhetoric that conceals the cruel hidden economic and political agendas that Europe and America continue to visit upon the Global South. The global media and globalised Eurocentric education system have become gigantic international cultural industries that circulate Euro-American rhetoric of a coming paradise while effectively concealing the hell that Empire is turning the planet into, much faster than we observe and imagine. The Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, have become financial prefects of the world that have maintained a global Washington Consensus monetary regime that has disciplined the Global South into conformity with and obedience to the Euro-American world system and its colonial and imperial orders.
African Renaissance
Thabo Mbeki was criticised for championing an African Renaissance, a philosophical and political idea that borrowed its name from the very European idea that gave birth to the enslavement and colonisation of Africa and the Global South for the benefit of Europe and America. Logically, and as explained by Thabo Mbeki himself, an Africa Renaissance must be a radically different idea, emphatically removed and opposed to the ideas of Europe and America, because a problem cannot be solved by simply using the logic that created it in the first place.
Earlier before Thabo Mbeki in 1906, another South African, Pixley Seme wrote a compelling essay and speech, calling for the “regeneration of Africa” and a political, economic, cultural and spiritual awakening of the continent. In 1937, a Nigerian philosopher of liberation and leader of the liberation movement, Nnamdi Azikiwe, published a forcefully argued book, Renascent Africa, making a clarion call for an African awakening and a revival of the continent from its painful underdevelopment, cultural death and economic impoverishment by imperialism and cultural colonisation.
Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chinweizu, Steve Biko and a multiplicity of other African thinkers were to follow up with their own ideas of the decolonisation and revival of black Africa, ideationally, economically and politically. In short, the idea of the African Renaissance, awakening or revival is one of the most powerfully imagined and argued ideas in the academy of the Global South.
The long and taxing struggles for the decolonisation and liberation of Africa from colonial direct rule were in a strong way struggles for the renaissance and awakening of Africa. More than 50 years after the first African country was decolonised, and two decades after the end of administrative apartheid in South Africa coloniality of power still has Africa in its grip of the many handed octopus. Many African states are categorised as failed states and basket cases where hopelessness has become permanence. Poverty, social inequality, disease and ignorance continue to define the lives of the majority of black people.
How possible it is to use European and American ideas of economic and political development to revive Africa is a question that must be asked. Otherwise, an African Renaissance entails disobedience to the political and economic prescriptions of the same world system that got Africa in this present political, economic and even spiritual and cultural dilemma. This disobedience to American and European knowledge and prescriptions has been called in many names such as “delinking” and “non-alignment.”
The 1955 conference of the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement in Bandung, Malaysia, was about countries of the Global South being suspicious and wary of political and economic influences of western and eastern Europe and America. Imposed and given economic and political ideas keep the continent dancing in circles of poverty and misery and being judged down by those who impoverished it in the first place.
Playing the political and economic game using the rules and standards of the enslaver and the coloniser may not be the best way to make an African Renaissance feasible.