Close to the Sources: Essays on Contemporary African Culture, Politics and Academy [1 ed.] 0415895952, 9780415895958

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Close to the Sources

Routledge African Studies

1. Facts, Fiction, and African Creative Imaginations Edited by Toyin Falola and Fallou Ngom 2. The Darfur Conflict Geography or Institutions? Osman Suliman 3. Music, Performance and African Identities Edited by Toyin Falola and Tyler Fleming 4. Environment and Economics in Nigeria Edited by Toyin Falola and Adam Paddock 5. Close to the Sources: Essays on Contemporary African Culture, Politics and Academy Abebe Zegeye and Maurice Vambe

Close to the Sources Essays on Contemporary African Culture, Politics and Academy

Abebe Zegeye Maurice Vambe

Abebe Zegeye, Director, Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand Maurice Vambe, Associate Professor, Department of English Studies, University of South Africa

First published in paperback 2009 by Unisa Press, University of South Africa, P O Box 392, 0003 UNISA This edition published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2009 University of South Africa © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Abebe Zegeye and Maurice Vambe to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means – mechanical or electronic, including recordings or tape recording and photocopying – without the prior permission of the publisher, excluding fair quotations for purposes of research or review. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders or use works in the public domain. We apologise for any inadvertent omissions, and will correct such errors if pointed out. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-415-89595-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-86888-540-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-80707-1 (ebk) Book Designer: Thea Bester-Swanepoel Copy editor: Bridget Theron Typesetting: Compleat Typesetters Printer: IBT Global

This book is dedicated to our late brothers, Be-Emnet Zegeye, Bernard Vambe and Albert Bamu

Contents

Acknowledgements

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CHAPTER ONE Introduction: The Assault on African Cultures

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CHAPTER TWO Notes on Theorising Black Diaspora in Africa

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CHAPTER THREE On the Postcolony and the Vulgarisation of Political Criticism

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CHAPTER FOUR Rethinking the Epistemic Conditions of Genocide in Africa

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CHAPTER FIVE African Indigenous Knowledge Systems

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CHAPTER SIX Knowledge Production and Publishing in Africa

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CHAPTER SEVEN Amilcar Cabral: National Liberation as the Basis of Africa’s Renaissances

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CHAPTER EIGHT Amilcar Cabral and the Fortunes of African Literature

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CHAPTER NINE Perspectives on Africanising Educational Curricula in Africa

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CHAPTER TEN Voices from the Fringes: Some Reflections on Postcolonial South African Writings

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Acknowledgements

The genesis of this book has been a series of conferences and meetings taking place in many countries over the last four years. We are grateful for comments, suggestions and criticisms that we have received during this period from a host of colleagues and friends. We would also like to thank the publishers who have allowed us to use chapters and papers to be able to compile this book. Chapters two and three are reworked versions of a single article, originally published as ‘Notes on Theorizing Black Diaspora from Africa’, African Identities, 5, 1 (April 2007), 5–32. A version of this paper was also presented at De Paul University, Chicago as well as the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. We are grateful for helpful comments and suggestions from Fassil Demissie and Sandra Jackson at De Paul, and Louise Bethlehem of Hebrew University. Chapter four is based on an article originally published as ‘Racializing Ethnicity and Ethnicizing Racism: Rethinking the Epistemic Conditions of Genocide in Africa’, Social Identities, 14, 6 (November 2008), 775–793. A shortened version of this paper was presented at the First Conference of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora in Dakar, Senegal. Chapter five is a reworked version of an article originally published as ‘African Indigenous Knowledge Systems’, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Centre for the Study of Economics, Historical Systems and Civilizations, XXXIX, 4 (2006), 329–358. An adapted version was also presented in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as a seminar paper, as well as at the Conference of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora in Bahai, Brazil. Chapter six has been broadly based on an article that originally appeared as ‘Knowledge Production and Publishing in Africa’, Development Southern Africa, 23, 3 (2006), 333–350. A version of this paper was also presented at the European African Studies Association in London. Chapter seven is a reworked version of an article first published as ‘Amilcar Cabral: National Liberation as the Basis of Africa’s Renaissance’, Rethinking Marxism, 20, 2 (April 2008), 188–200. The same essay also subsequently appeared as an introduction to the second edition of Amilcar Cabral: Unity and Struggle, compiled and edited by Maurice Vambe and Abebe Zegeye and published in 2008 by Unisa Press in collaboration with Tsehai Publishers. It was also given as a ix

keynote address at the South African Sociological Association’s annual congress in Grahamstown, South Africa. Chapter eight, although adapted, was originally published as ‘Amilcar Cabral and the Fortunes of African Literature’, African Identities, Special Issue, 4, 1 (April 2006), 23–44. Chapter nine was given as a paper at the conference on ‘Africanisation and Curriculum Development’ organised by the Institute for Curriculum and Learning Development that was held in Pretoria, September 2008. Chapter ten was given as a paper at a plenary session of the English Academy of Southern Africa conference on ‘Language, the Creative Arts and the Media’ at the University of Pretoria from 22–25 June 2008. Abebe Zegeye is grateful for the time spent as visiting Professor at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center at Yale. Finally, we would like to thank our tireless editors, Bridget Theron and Pamela Ryan for their expert assistance.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Assault on African Cultures Contemporary African cultures are under threat from several sources. One such source is the liberal discourse that bids Africans to forgive and forget the cruelty meted on them by white colonial masters. Another comes from the undemocratic regimes of postcolonial leaders who suppress alternative views that ordinary people have for reshaping Africa. In virtually all African countries, government leaders ‘eat’ or use the countries’ resources for their own benefit, while claiming to represent the masses. The African leaders also advance spurious and selfserving ideologies that perpetuate the unequal relations between the rich and the poor on the continent. This sense of a deepening crisis within African cultures is captured by Ali Mazrui, a liberal conservative who is rightly alarmed by what he calls ‘Africa’s short memory of hate’. He writes that the biggest threat to African cultures concerns … Africa’s short memory of hate [our emphasis]. Cultures vary considerably in their hate retention … the Irish have long retention of memories of atrocities perpetrated by the English. The Armenians have long memories of atrocities committed against them by the Turks in the Ottoman Empire. The Jews also have long memories about their martyrdom in history. On the other hand, Jomo Kenyatta proceeded to forgive his British tormentors very fast after his being released from unjust imprisonment. He even published a book entitled Suffering without Bitterness. Where but in Africa could somebody like Ian Smith, who had unleashed a war which killed many thousands of Black people, remain free after Black majority rule to torment his Black successors in power whose policies had killed far fewer people than Ian Smith’s policies had done? Is a short memory of hate a precondition for the African renaissance? Nelson Mandela lost twenty-seven of the best years of his life. Yet on being released, not only was he in favour of reconciliation between Blacks and Whites, he went on to beg white terrorists who were fasting unto death not to do so. He furthermore went out of his way to go and pay his respects to Mrs Verwoerd, the widow of the architect of apartheid. Is Africa’s short memory of hate sometimes ‘too short’? Is it nevertheless necessary for the African renaissance? (Mazrui 2004: 53) 1

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A generation of African leaders such as Kenyatta and Mandela fought colonial racism and led their respective countries to freedom from domination by minority white settlerhood. And yet, the tendency amongst African leadership to retreat politically from their positions of ‘militant’ nationalism and then offer numerous apologias for fighting colonial racism have foreclosed the once imagined democratic spaces for which many African lives were lost. Kenyatta elevated African suffering to a mini-catechism and Mandela presided over a programme of forgiveness which made forgiving tyranny sui generis to Africans. When these acts are described as ‘Africa’s short memory of hate’ we are in fact forced to confront and rethink the heroism of the struggle, particularly as authored by African male political protagonists. We are then led to realise that major threats to African cultures are also pernicious mythologies which suggest that there is a single memory of love and hate in African experiences. Africa’s ‘short memory of hate’ has made African people weaker and poorer in the face of the forces of globalisation. For Mazrui, Armenians’ memories of atrocities committed against them by the Turkish Empire, Irish memories of atrocities by the British, and the Jews’ long memories about their martyrdom in history have all historically elevated these societies to higher moral ground from which these communities are speaking against their tormentors. This is an instance of memory as an empowering tool that can be used to confront forgetfulness, because each time Africans are told to forgive and forget, they are actually being pacified. The irony, though, is that insisting that African people should forget the deeds of their torturers actually makes Africans remember all the more why it is necessary not to forgive and forget, which is exactly what their tormenters would want the masses to do. Why then was it easier for African leaders from Kenyatta to Mandela to make Africa’s memories of hate this short? Why have the leaders chosen to make African culture convenient for themselves, which undermines the essence of the very African culture the leaders purport to protect? African cultures are under siege from elite pacts between African leaders and a minority white fiefdom which leaves the majority impoverished, and the democratic space they fought to expand is pitifully restricted and compromised. African cultures are under threat from elitist nationalisms in whose name the wars of independence were fought. Those ideologies of nationalism with which the elites wage war against white settlerism emphasised military battles fought ‘against’ white settlerism and never ‘for’ an alternative vision that would displace the hated ideas that hedged around and sustained most areas of the contemporary systems of oppression. Once written about by Achebe as ‘the trouble with Nigeria’, African leadership has failed to maintain and further cultivate meaningful relations with the masses. Once dedicated fighters against colonialism; today, they have graduated and turned into dictators. For example, in postcolonial Zimbabwe, African cultures are bound by thick ropes of tyranny without the rule of law. Robert Mugabe, one-time firebrand against colonialism, has turned his guns on his people. The country’s

INTRODUCTION: ASSAULT ON AFRICAN CULTURES

political, economic and cultural institutions have been severely undermined; people’s creativity is shackled by fear of political persecution; the alternative voices are bludgeoned; the economy is personalised; a peasant cannot kill his cow without clearance from the government; visitors cannot visit the countryside without reporting to the chief; and land is distributed to cronies who do not have the slightest idea of what farming is all about. And then, most worrying, ‘… dissenting politics often take on the aspects of the political culture they are seeking to displace’ (Raftopoulos 2003: 217). African culture is under attack from the African political party in power and ironically, from those parties aspiring to be in power. Cabral partially understood the roots of this cultural rigor mortis. In a speech in which he urged Africans to struggle against their own weaknesses, Cabral also noted that the assault on African cultures is caused by ‘the ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the national liberation …’ (Cabral 1966: 2). This is a useful insight drawing our attention to the opportunism that often characterised thinking in the struggle, but also a theoretical blindness on the part of Cabral for whom a struggle can have a ‘total lack of ideology’. There is, of course, no struggle without values. One can talk of the deficiencies or contradictory values describing the movement of any form of African cultures. Such totalising language from Cabral is not surprising. He also offered a controversial formulation of African cultures, drawing the cartography of their epistemic conditions of regeneration in terms that most critics now think sum up his compromised understanding of a cultural programme that would rescue African cultures. He opined that the question of the return to the source could never arise for the masses because it is they whose culture remained intact from the colonial onslaught. Cabral advocates a partial return to the source in which educated Africans should seek ‘re-conversion of minds before or during the struggle, in daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle’ (1966: 5). Conceptions of the ‘return to the source’ of African pasts aim to recuperate in absolute terms usable elements of the past. They are in fact an intellectual assault on African cultures because they are then hypostasised and the process reduced to a physical one. This characterisation of African pasts as static can be a source of reactionary politics, even when they come from revolutionaries such as Cabral. Any return(s) to the past(s) of any African culture(s) must emphasise the plurality of perspectives brought to bear on those processes. In recognition of the contradictory realities of and within African cultures, we have in this book described the cultural/ideological and spiritual movements of the quest to make use of the sources of African contemporary cultures as ‘close to the sources’. Any attempt to retrieve African sources of inspirations from the past is overdetermined; it involves selecting certain realities and excluding others, consciously or unconsciously. Movements back towards African pasts must be understood as imagined, and their products as approximations of those evanescent pasts. The

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‘close’, in the title of our essays engages Cabral’s celebrated thesis of a single return to a unitary past, and we attempt in this book to redirect an understanding of African cultures from the perspectives implied in the polysemy of metaphors and African cultural symbols.

Epistemic Conditions for Regenerated African Cultures We draw theoretical inspiration from the work of Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth in which it is recognised that African cultures are zones of occult instabilities where fluctuating African identities are given shape. For Fanon, the Africanists who write the history of African cultures ‘… ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action, and a basis for hope’ (Fanon 1963: 187). The essays collected in this book use the benefit of hindsight to identify and critique areas where African cultures are registered. Representations of African cultures to Africans and to the world and the decisions to use certain platforms and not others are ultimately political decisions. To the extent that intellectuals work to elaborate their understanding of what constitutes contemporary African cultures, their efforts are always implicated in their power games. Chapter one is the introduction to this compilation of essays, while chapter two offers a critique of the cultural and political ideas of Kwame Anthony Appiah. We then move on to chapter three which is a dialogue with Achille Mbembe’s acclaimed work, On the Postcolony. We argue that an informed analysis of African cultures, politics and academy can benefit immensely through engaging with the works of these two important African scholars. Chapter four critiques the theoretical works of the Ugandan scholar, Mahmood Mamdani, on genocide studies in Africa. In chapter five we explore the theoretical moments of the Indianinspired subaltern studies and African political nationalism in the life of African cultures. We discuss the influence of subaltern studies in rethinking the agency of third world populations in the face of an onslaught on African cultures from global forces. We argue that the historical dimensions of political decolonisation in Africa went far beyond the celebrated militant nationalisms and that these also encompass other ways of searching for spiritual spaces of regeneration. We examine in particular the content and routes/roots of the discourse of studies on African indigenous knowledge systems. Chapter six explores the politics of knowledge production and publishing in Africa, while chapter seven traces the lines of continuity and discontinuity that arise in seeking to uncover the theoretical inspiration of the burning issue of African renaissance. In this seventh chapter, Cabral’s work is read against new efforts at understanding political and cultural renewals in Africa. Chapter eight interrogates the influences of Cabral’s work on African literature. In this chapter we argue that recent African literature has tended to confirm as well as problematise some of the theoretical statements formulated by Cabral with regard to African cultures, politics and the academy.

INTRODUCTION: ASSAULT ON AFRICAN CULTURES

In chapter nine, we examine ‘generations’ of thinking about Africanising educational curricula on the continent. We suggest that these curricula are a product of and should therefore reflect the aspirations of the people of Africa. We are aware that education is a contested terrain and as such any project of African regeneration in Africa can only be built and consolidated upon the basis of a sound, critical and flexible understanding of the cultural, political and academic forces which define the content and spiritual direction that Africa’s education should take. We refuse to be dogmatic about the perspectives of educational curricula and instead insist on favouring those which guarantee that diverse, Afro-focused voices will be instrumental in Africanising education on the continent. In chapter ten, the final chapter, we reflect on postcolonial writings in South Africa and enter the debate on whether black writing is still largely from the ‘fringes’ of this nowmaturing African democracy. Each of the areas discussed in this book forms an important aspect of the contemporaneity of African cultures. We do not entertain the notion that there is a single way of interpreting the dynamics of African cultures, politics and academy. Our intervention is just a version among multiple versions; its aim is to open avenues for further debate on the agency of African cultures. Every addition to the critical corpus of works devoted to explicating African cultures is an important contribution to the understanding of African lives that are being lived out in putatively different contexts in Africa.

CHAPTER TWO

Notes on Theorising Black Diaspora in Africa Introduction This chapter does not seek to trace and explain the origins and trajectories of the term diaspora. That has been ‘mis-done’ already and we do not want to give prominence to a theoretical malapropism. What we intend doing is to engage one theoretical site where the concept of African diaspora has been elaborated. This is in the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah has contributed significantly to the understanding of the politics of change, and the change of politics in Africa, and also in his writings on the African-American people. However, little has been done to critique the theoretical and philosophical foundations that inform Appiah’s important statements on African literature and culture. Existing literature on diaspora written from the West even from its most radical tradition has emphasised diaspora as dispersion. Europeans of Caucasian ancestry do not describe themselves as children of diaspora. Diaspora is marginality. It is the name of a discourse of displacement and political pauperism which, in the experience of Indians and Africans, can be converted into a discourse of resistance. Black diaspora in the new world (America and the Caribbean) is a racial signifier of a disadvantaged people. It traces the road from slavery to social death (Patterson 1994). More than four hundred years of domination of black people by Europeans justifies an exploration of black diaspora from the realm of the victim. However, there is much more to say about movements of political coalescence which defined the historical dimension of the politics of resistance and contradictory agency of black people of African origin that was expressed through nationalism. The tendency to see diaspora as dispersion conjures up the physical movement of people from a perceived margin located in Africa, India and other third world countries towards a perceived centre in Europe and the Americas. This theoretical simplification is historically well-documented (Rodney 1985). The characterisation of black diaspora communities in the new world as fractured and victimised, endowed with distinct qualities of resistance to four hundred years of white domination (Asante 1987) is perceived as a psychologically necessary political project although it problematically assumes that a return to Africa, to one’s native land, is easy to achieve. 6

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Theorising Black Diaspora Theorising diaspora from Africa by Africans whether in the continent or outside is conceived differently in the West by black academics or by others. Although such value judgments can appear a little conservative, such theorising should in fact endorse the particularity of its application to black communities in Africa in which there are several diasporas; spiritual, ideological and cultural. Theorising diaspora from Africa should start from that very point where we acknowledge that the internal histories of the black people in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Africa have always been subject to shifts, sometimes peaceful, but most often violent, whether induced by internal and external forces. Theorising diaspora of black people in Africa will then proceed with the knowledge that the interlocking systems of race, class and gender have shaped African communities’ identities. Even those African countries, such as Ethiopia, which were occupied very briefly by colonial powers, did not remain static in the face of the events taking place in the continent. Theorising black diaspora from Africa is fortunately a project that acknowledges the potency of nationalism in giving shape to nation states, but also suggests that celebration of African nationalism does imply a preliminary critique of its assumptions. Theorising African diaspora from the context of Somalia, for example, forces us to question whether what has failed in that country is the European imposed model of nation state or the African traditional setup based on kinship, religious affiliations – or both. Theorising black diaspora in Africa has visibly been carried out by black elites schooled in European notions of progress. It would be a-historical to reject their contributions out of hand. Some have theorised by going back to pre-European institutional civilisations expressed through Egyptology (Diop 1974; Naburere 2000). Others have theorised African diaspora from the point of view of speaking of Africans to a European audience, for the benefit of Europeans (Appiah 2000) something akin to inventing their own mode of African ‘orientalism’ in which particular vocabularies and discourses are authorised; on the surface, these studies seem to show genuine concern for the wellbeing of Africa, but in reality they reinforce the misunderstanding of the multiple identities of Africa. They entrench the image of Africa as a modern ‘heart of darkness’ where everything that can possibly go wrong in the world is to be found. These perceptions are what we interrogate in the works of Appiah in order to lay bear their negative impact on what the continent of Africa is doing as opposed to what it should do. We do not argue that what Africa is doing to itself is always good for her. Rather, we take issue with Appiah for displaying only the negative aspects of Africa, a practice that defines Africa through a chronology of absence, marginality and disease, expressed as real and imaginary. However, there are others who have theorised black diaspora in Africa from the point of view of speaking on behalf of poor African black people for their benefit (Cabral 1970; Wa Thiong’o 1981; Fanon 1963). Doing so from the ivory towers of the academic left and right has now been brought into question, assailed and

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dislodged. Such theorising has also been attempted by ‘ordinary’ people. The results have been astounding, with revelations that ordinary people are not as ordinary as that category suggests. Ordinary people do not see themselves as ‘common’ and ‘ordinary’ in the sense of having low hopes or degraded mindsets. They show an amazing capacity for struggling for a better life while embracing the ideological artefacts of the very West that they are supposed to dethrone (Hall 1994; Cooper 2003). We shall argue against an undifferentiating tendency in Appiah’s works that criminalises the masses’ initiatives (whether cultural, political or economic) which are enacted in the restrictive colonial and postcolonial contexts in Africa. Theorising black expressive diasporan cultures in Africa shows relationships, alliances and cleavages within constantly shifting boundaries of the postcolony, something akin to a relationship of dependency and antagonism with the forces surrounding them (Gilroy 1993). These diasporan cultures reveal multiple sites of cultural articulations and elaborations; there are healthy tendencies towards embracing syncretic modes of thought of greater complexity than the academics in the West and in Africa have shown in their writings. The practice of diaspora in Africa is so rich in meaning that it makes a mockery of the essentialism which insists on seeing black people only in terms of black, or for that matter, thinking that black people do not think in terms of ethnic particularity. Theorising black diaspora from Africa is much more complex in that there are multiple memories that are represented, and may represent themselves at one time as the only valid memories and at other times as arenas of colliding ‘national consciousnesses’.

Kwame Anthony Appiah and the Struggle against Nativism In his article ‘African Intellectuals and Nationalism’, Thandika Mkandawire (2005) suggests that the nationalists and their struggle for independence are often condemned or ‘occulted’ partly because of their own essentialism. This, according to Mkandawire, has occasioned ‘a whole literature deconstructing and demystifying nationalist struggles’ (2005: 10). However, he refuses to minimise the contribution of nationalists to the struggles for self-determination. While acknowledging the need to rethink most of the theoretical premises of nationalist works, Mkandawire writes: This [deconstruction] is, of course, a useful exercise but only if it also happens to be well informed which it rarely is. One feature of this writing is the extent to which the complexity of the problems faced by nationalists and the structural context of their eventual failure are downplayed. And as it is based on hindsight, it is not particularly enlightening. (Mkandawire 2005: 10)

Like Cabral (1966) and Fanon (1963), Mkandawire brings out the contradictions in the works of the African educated cultural nationalists, while acknowledging the political roles of the African elites for organising the masses to wage wars of

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national liberation. Mkandawire, just as Fanon did before him, warned against the habit of minimising the efforts of the cultural nationalists. In many ways, as will become apparent, Kwame Anthony Appiah has attacked African cultural nationalists, calling them ‘nativists’, a designation which suggests that the African cultural nationalists hunger to return Africans to the past – as if that were even possible. Appiah has emerged as one of the most significant cultural theorists on Africa in the West. He has written extensively, knowledgeably and authoritatively on African identities, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism and has offered incisive critiques on African-American philosophy. Most critics in Africa know Appiah through his book In My Father’s House (1992). This is a monumental work, exploring the diverse political and cultural sensibilities in Ghana and, by extension, the African continent. His article ‘New Literature, New Theory’, written in 2000, can be taken both as an elaboration of the deconstructive politics that Appiah engages in his former text (1992) and also an attempt to rethink some of his earlier critical positions as regards the work of ‘nativists’. In In My Father’s House he argues that an African writer who responds to colonial myths with the African myths of authenticity and (here called nativism) of the superiority of African personality, ends up elaborating an ‘alternate genealogy’ which unfortunately is entrapped in the theoretical premise of reverse discourse. To be more precise, Appiah’s criticism of cultural nationalism is directed to Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, the authors of Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980). In ‘New Literatures, New Theory’ (2000), Appiah challenges the three authors’ ‘nativism’ (Africa’s struggle against colonialism waged under the banner of cultural nationalism) in a way that makes it difficult to ignore, because of his profound insight on African literature in particular and African culture in general. For example, Appiah is aware that cultural nationalists were not just competent at mimicking European ideas of nation-building. Cultural nationalists appropriated some skills that they used to subvert the colonial system. Borrowing from, and building on Homi Bhabha’s (1996) concept of mimicry as an unsuitable cultural space, Appiah approvingly uses Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagining the nation to suggest that in the hands of the ‘natives’ African cultural nationalism soon ‘outran the colonial and the interests of the metropole’ (Appiah 2000: 59). When it comes to pinpointing the African cultural nationalists who contributed the most to the national literatures, Appiah wages a stinging attack on the masses. He identifies some of the people in the masses of Africa as ‘priests, shamans, griots’ (2000: 60) who make up the group of ‘ordinary’ intellectuals whom Appiah thinks are redundant in the struggle to reshape the contours of literatures and values in post-independence Africa. Appiah assumes that the sum total of Third World literatures is explored through the written word. This emerges from the way he denies ordinary people the identity of being described as intellectuals. He contrasts the masses with those who have acquired book knowledge; for him, therefore, Western educated academics who are ‘producing the bulk of Third World Literature’ matter the most. Let us quote him:

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There are intellectual workers – priests, shamans, griots, for example – in Africa, Asia and other parts of the world, who still operate in worlds of thought (sic) that are remote from the influences of Western discourse. But we surely live in the last days of that phase of human life in culture; and whether or not we choose to call these people ‘intellectuals’ – and this strikes me as a decision whose outcome is less important than recognizing that it has to be made – they are surely not the intellectuals who are producing the bulk of ‘Third World Literature’, nor are they articulating literary theory of criticism. (Appiah 2000: 60)

Priests, shamans and griots are grudgingly identified as intellectual workers, and at the same time described as outmoded because they are assumed to be hermetically sealed from a validating Western discourse. The written word is sanctified as the measure for ‘Third World Literature’. It is a condescending attitude that refuses to see other sites such as the oral ones, sculpture, film, and dreams, where African literatures and cultures are not only articulated but also critically elaborated. However, what has made Appiah famous and popular in the West is his attempt to demolish the cultural assumptions of those cultural nationalists who struggled and led the Africans to freedom. The cultural nationalists are castigated for maintaining an identity which, in another context, Paul Gilroy (1993) has called ethnic absolutism. This, unfortunately, Appiah does, using the very language of ethnic particularism, especially when he faults cultural nationalists for using Western concepts of resistance to domination against the very same West. Appiah is oblivious of the fact that African values and time as well as European values and time are present in the consciousness of the cultural nationalists. This is a historical condition which cannot be wished away since the advent of the unequal historical relationship between Europe and Africa. When it suits him, Appiah will argue that cultural nationalists such as Chinweizu et al., ‘invent African particularism based on the rhetoric of ancestral purity’, and the work of Frantz Fanon is invoked selectively to explain what Appiah calls the ‘anxieties of nationalism’ (Appiah 2000: 72). Toward the Decolonization of African Literature does have some faults but anyone who has read that monumental classic work attentively will be hard put to find evidence which points to the fact that the authors want Africa to go back to a presumed past of ‘pristine purity’. A call by Chinweizu and his fellow writers to base African literatures on African realities and language is deliberately misunderstood by Appiah as literary fascism. When Chinweizu, Jemie and Madubuike use some of the theoretical tools derived from the West through the globalised nature of the education that they received, they are castigated. Where the three authors make a call to rethink postcolonial Africa from the perspective of Africa’s past historical experiences, they are chided and considered anachronistic. For them, in Appiah’s deconstructive politics, there is no winning. For the benefit of those who have not read the Appiah article under consideration, or those who have read it lightly, let us refresh our memories by quoting at length the critical terms by which Appiah wants to dismiss the work of Chinweizu et al.:

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So that what [we see in] Toward the Decolonization of African Literature is, in effect, the establishment of a reverse discourse; the terms of resistance are already given us, and our contestation is entrapped within the Western cultural conjecture we affect to dispute. The pose of repudiation actually presupposes the cultural institutions of the West and the ideological matrix in which they, in turn, are imbricated. Railing against the cultural hegemony of the West, the nativists are of its party without knowing it. Indeed, the very arguments, the rhetoric of defiance that our nationalists muster, are in a sense, canonical, time tested. Or they enact a conflict that is interior to the very nationalist ideology that provided the category of ‘literature’ its conditions of emergence; defiance is determined less by ‘indigenous’ notions of resistance as by the dictates of the West’s own Hederian legacy … in their ideological inscription, the cultural nationalists remain in a position of counter-identity which is to continue to participate in an institutional configuration – to be subjected to cultural identities they ostensibly decry. (Appiah 2000: 69–71)

We have used this quote to reveal the ideological fractures and confusion that inform the theoretical elucidation in Appiah’s work. In this passage, cultural nationalists are condemned for creating a discourse of defiance based on ‘indigenous notions’ of resistance. Appiah’s understanding is that these notions are static. He then goes on to accuse the same cultural nationalists of maintaining some ‘rhetoric of ancestral spirit’ (2000: 72). Appiah wants to persuade the reader that the cultural nationalists are archaic. In this passage, the same cultural nationalists are also denigrated for appropriating some aspects of Western modernity that they deploy in order to struggle against that same West. Appiah does not appreciate the simple point that political mimicry does not always mean following dutifully the ideological apparatus of the oppressor. ‘West’ is also unproblematised as it is cast as a singular entity harbouring people with similar subjectivities whose main aim is to oppress Africans. Condemned for being too much in the past and adhering too much to a modern European identity, what Appiah has constructed and attempts to force upon us is a political and ideological cul-de-sac in which the cultural nationalist must feel immobilised. This is intended to achieve the conclusion that cultural nationalists are just like Europeans. What they are fighting for has already been ‘given to us’. In considering the trajectories of African politics led by Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nhkrumah, Samora Machel, Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe, it would be hard to substantiate that the coming of independence led by these cultural nationalists was nothing less than aspiring for position of power. In Africa’s literatures, it would be difficult to ignore (if indeed it were possible) the oral works of the griots in Niane’s Sundiata, and The Epic of Old Mali, and the written literatures of Okot P’ Bitek, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o,

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Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head, Grace Ogot and Mariama Ba, among others, that marked a break with imperialist writings of the likes of Joseph Conrad. Although a man of letters validated for the most part by those in the West, Appiah is out of touch with the realities of Africa. He does not seem to understand that ordinary people in the colonial and postcolonial context are able to acknowledge the praiseworthy political projects cultural nationalists have authored. Appiah fails to understand that these same ‘ordinary’ people have criticised some of the actions of cultural nationalists during colonialism and continue to criticise those elitedriven projects that do not promote the interests of the common people. It is to the credit of ordinary people that most of the time, their conceptions of the world are not suspended in an ‘either/or’ political situation. The masses use their indigenous options of resistance towards intolerant regimes in the same way as they contest decisions made by their own governments in the modern courts. Put differently, in the passage by Appiah above, an attempt to minimise the efforts of cultural nationalists in bringing down oppressive regimes has little purchase on the people of Africa in such countries as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Mozambique who have gone through these struggles and want a better life. There is no denying that cultural nationalists have contradictions. However, the ‘austere epistemic skepticism’ (West 1992: 697) of Appiah is a theatricalisation of the practice of literary and political criticism on the part of Appiah; he minimises the power of cultural nationalists in order to satisfy his craving for recognition by Western educational institutions. This craving manifests in the postmodern crisis of the black intellectual such as Appiah. Cornel West puts his finger on the right spot when he suggests that the alienation of those black intellectuals theorising Africa from the metropole is that intellectual ‘hedonism is prompted by the culture of consumption’ (West 1992: 690). In this pattern of cultural consumption, theorising Africa has become a huge industry. It has become a career in the sense of searching for the exotic which is then projected into the glocal world as the normative. The deleterious effect of this discourse is that Appiah wants to induce into Africans a sense that there is an ‘eclipse not simply of subjectivity but an eclipse of agency in which people no longer feel they can make a difference, so they view themselves as objects in the world’ (West 1992: 690). Appiah’s ‘New Literatures, New Theory’ is also driven by another imperative – to deny Africans a feeling of having a sense of ‘order’, and ‘authority’ as might be represented by the movements of cultural nationalism. At a time when Europe is closing ranks, confronting Iran over oil; at a time when Europe is collectively looking the other way when Africans are being massacred by the Arabs in Sudan; at a time when NATO is passing new resolutions to make military incursions into those countries of the world that defy the West, African cultural nationalists are being forced to dismantle the little power that they have. The object is to advance a spurious philosophy of the centre-less Africa, and the multiplication of small, weak African states. Cornel West must have seen this

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occur among his black people in the African and Caribbean diaspora when he suggests that there is a: … promiscuous formalism in which every text [and power base] can be turned against itself in order to show the degree to which every ground can be undermined, including the very ground that is put forward to undermine it. (West 1992, 693)

Through this domineering discourse anybody who elects to become a post colonial critic can latch on to Appiah’s passage that promotes the idea of postcolonial societies as made up of baseless, groundless, authority-less entities, all of which are identities that have been used to describe the Third World countries but not the West. In ‘New Literature, New Theory’, the reader eventually arrives at the point in the passage when cultural nationalists are further condemned for adopting an ideological position of ‘counter-identification’. This is described as continued participation in the ‘institutional configuration’ which cultural nationalists are purported to ostensibly ‘decry’. Here, the reader feels taken for a ride, abused and actually condescended to because it is the very same Appiah who has complained that cultural nationalists live too much in their past of cultural particularism. But the import of this accusation by Appiah can be felt when by stretches of the critical imagination it is apparent that Appiah is proposing that cultural nationalists must adopt a position of dis-identification. This idealistic position is elitist, dangerous and misguided because it assumes that it is no longer possible (as if it has ever been) for a continent to exist in splendid isolation, untrammelled by the world’s geopolitics which are presently tilted in favour of the West. It should be remembered that African nationalists, including those from Ghana, selectively appropriated some aspects of Western modernity to realise the very basic identity of African nation. Put differently, although Appiah is a black African, who ‘migrated’ to the West, this has not increased his ability to theorise in an enlightening way on the path that Africa has taken and needs to take. It is important to point out that the title of his article under discussion in this chapter ends with a question mark –one that he cannot provide answers to. It is not even that we fault Appiah for not finding answers for many of Africa’s numerous problems. What he has done to pose questions is a good and important step towards understanding how, why and where critics such as him need to theorise on the complexity of African diasporas. In fact, In my Father’s House contains a biblical allusion in its title which suggests that in his father’s house diverse values can be accommodated. However, in this house the value of the struggles represented by cultural nationalists are presented as vacuous.

Conclusion Without providing an internal critique of the biblical context from which Appiah derives the title of his book, it could be suggested that the masculinisation of the

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‘house’, using the figure-head of the father must be construed not only as the male chauvinism pervasive in academia, but also as another form of critical particularism in which it is the identities of men that are privileged which matter most in the postcolony. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s influential article ‘New Literatures, New Theory?’ is the one critical work by Appiah that we have analysed. We believe that the article is a reaffirmation of the political issues ably elaborated in Appiah’s In My Father’s House (1992). In particular, our critical reappraisal of Appiah’s work focused on his critique of African cultural nationalism which Appiah describes as ‘nativism’. We hoped to show that for the most part, Appiah’s misgivings on the politics of nativism are, in retrospect, founded and valid. However, we disagree with him on his spirited critique of nativism which tends to underestimate the power of political symbolism invested in the cultural movement of nativists in the context of the struggle against colonialism. We argued that nativism has weaknesses but that in the theoretical imagination of Appiah, these weaknesses have been exaggerated. It is true that the Appiah article under consideration does not in person mention any of the names we have listed above. However, it still remains difficult to understand why a critic of the prominence of Appiah can write of cultural nationalists so glibly as if he is unaware of how regional politics are conducted in Africa. We mentioned these prominent names in order to illustrate that the failings of cultural nationalists in one area cannot cloud our understanding and appreciation of their positive contributions to the continent in other aspects of African life. We suggest that Western educated scholars such as Appiah have tended to dismiss African political leadership. This has given him intellectual mileage in the American academy, itself anxious to hear its stereotype of Africa as the place where everything goes ‘wrong’ reaffirmed by Africans. This ideological project is paid for by the West, for whom Appiah has become the intellectual middleman. On a literary front, we also acknowledged as fair some of Appiah’s insights in his attempt to explain the ideological unevenness in Chinweizu et al.’s Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980). But we maintain that ideological instability within critical works is a condition of existence of any work, irrespective of the geographical location where it is published. What we object to and indeed reject in Appiah’s conclusions on Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, is his attempt to sow the irascible seeds of despair when he suggests that Chinweizu et al.’s work takes us nowhere: ‘cul[t]ural nationalism has followed the route of alternate genealogizing. We end up always in the same place; the achievement is to have invented a different past’ (Appiah 2000: 82). At first we were at a loss to decide whether Appiah’s dismissive conclusion on the works of Chinweizu and his fellow critics was motivated by pure malice or genuine theoretical miscognition on the role of Toward the Decolonization of African Literature in the evolution of African literature as a discipline in Africa. We eventually concluded, basing our arguments on close reading of Appiah’s work, that theorising Africa from the belly of metropolitan politics of patronage

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severely curtails what the critic is able to say – if indeed such a critic has something pressing to say that has not already been said about Africa by imperial scholars of the likes of Hegel. We are aware that although now permanently resident in America, Appiah is Ghanaian – that at least his father was Ghanaian – and that it is in America that he is working. This condition of being a guest, whether enforced or self-willed, can be disorienting in a society that is basically anti-African people, but pro-African raw materials. We (almost) argue that Appiah has himself become part of America’s human ‘raw’ material. The title of his book is thus primed to echo in the ears of Western audiences. This is both because most of them are chauvinists and also that they expect Africans to be chauvinists. Appiah has elected to become an orphic messenger to the West of circumstances in Ghana, and in Africa. Indeed, this role of intelligence gatherer for Europe about Africa that intellectuals assume can be a conscious acceptance of furthering the American and Western academic empires. At the end of Appiah’s article there is little one can pin down to what it is that Appiah thinks his father’s house can do. His argument throughout the article has been pegged on a cultural-populist level typical of some versions of postcolonial theory that refuse to recognise that Africa has a material existence other than the undifferentiated conception that cultural nationalists possess uniform subjectivities.

CHAPTER THREE

On the Postcolony and the Vulgarisation of Political Criticism Introduction Achille Mbembe carries out the intellectual project of theorising black diaspora in Africa from the geographical position of Africa. If Appiah can be said to be obsessed with the African cultural nationalists’ role during political decolonisation, Mbembe approaches the same problem from the space of the postcolonial (both historically linear and ideologically complicated) context of the period after independence. However, what marks Mbembe’s acuity is a particular/peculiar understanding of the problems of theorising the African black diaspora from within Africa and from Europe. His celebrated book, On the Postcolony (2001) refers. In the introduction to his book, Mbembe complains that theorising Africa from within as well as from outside the continent has been characterised by negative interpretation. The vocabulary of the discourse describes Africa in terms of a chronology of decline (Chan 2005) and imagines it as strange and monstrous, bestial, brutal, sexually licentious and connected to death, as well as an ‘object of experimentation’ (Mbembe 2001: 1–2). Mbembe attributes this anti-Africa and anti-African rhetoric to, amongst other things, the fact that there is ‘hardly ever any discourse about Africa for itself’. If there are black Africans who have written on Africa on behalf of Africa and its Africans, Mbembe finds that their work is blighted by a discourse informed by and carried through a ‘crisis of its languages, procedures and reasonings’. He finds fault with a discourse on Africa that reduces all struggles to ‘struggles of representation’, and tend towards ‘forgetting that discourses and representations have materiality’ (Mbembe 2001: 5–6). According to him, the greatest weakness of theorisations on Africa is that they often fail to account for the complex and unexpected turns, meanders, and changes of course in the lives of Africans. He puts it starkly: ‘social theory has failed also to account for times lived, not synchronically or diachronically, but in its multiplicity and simultaneities, its presence and absences’(2001: 8). The premise of On the Postcolony is then that the lived experiences of Africans in Africa are ‘rooted in a multiplicity of time trajectories and rationalities that, although particular and sometimes local, cannot be conceptualized outside a world that is, so to speak, globalized’ (2001: 9). Following from this, the central thesis is that Africa has failed to break away from the cycle of violence (2001: 103). 16

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However, reading his book one is left with a feeling that Mbembe does exactly the opposite of what he decries. While he regrets that to theorise Africa has come to mean to subject it to the domination of the intellectuals who impose certain ways of thinking about Africa, unfortunately Mbembe himself has been unable to go beyond the failings he observes in the work of other critics (from within and without) who theorise on Africa. The critical failings are most visible in the chapter ‘The Aesthetics of Vulgarity’ (2001: 102–141) in which Mbembe discusses what he calls the ‘banality of power in the postcolony’. It is important to point out that he is honest and does not want to essentialise the experiences of Cameroon as if they represent all the facets and intricacies of power politics and how these play out in other African countries. This admission is both a strength and a weakness in the sense that while the material under Mbembe’s analysis is Cameroon and is therefore specific and localised, it is also, ironically, what constitutes the greatest weakness of the chapter, namely discussing Cameroon politics in the context of ‘area studies’ which link geographical boundaries to boundaries of knowledge. On the tyranny of the methodological claims of ‘area studies’, Mamdani writes that one of the greatest weaknesses of the approach is that it ‘sees state boundaries as boundaries of knowledge, thereby turning political into epistemological boundaries’ (Mamdani 2001, xii). In the case of comprehending Cameroonian politics, an insidious consequence of this mode of theorising the African diaspora is that Mbembe links some developments between Cameroon and imperial centres such as France but does not allow the reader of his book to see how the Cameroonian experiences can ‘cross boundaries between’ postcolonies (Mamdani 2001, xiii). In Mbembe’s book, Cameroonian lives, motivations and responses to different experiences are ‘bantustanised’ since the ruled and the rulers are presented as possessing uniform or similar subjectivities at all times. This is a gross misprepresentation of the geopolitics of the African diasporas. To understand Mbembe’s project in ‘The Aesthethics of Vulgarity’ one must accept being theoretically ‘abused’ and ‘disabused’ as conditions for producing a finer critique of his critical poetics. Abuse arises from his unnuanced mode of theorising the agency of African leaders in the postcolony. He is convinced that they possess extraordinary authority that they use arbitrarily. African leaders – to be more precise, the Cameroonian leaders that Mbembe has in mind – are marked by their ‘tendency to excess and lack of proportion’ (Mbembe 2001: 102). For Mbembe, when the leaders eat, they really mean to squander national resources; they gravitate towards conspicuous consumption and moral laxity. Mbembe uses the discourse of the ‘economy of pleasure’ borrowed from Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, with its rituals of eating and drinking imaged through defecation and the prevalence of various orifices, to capture the gratuitous appetites of the Cameroonian leaders. For Mbembe, Cameroon leaders’ understanding of pleasure is a form of death. It produces licentiousness and invests certain ‘rights’ dictated by the desire to satisfy individual comforts of the flesh. However, these

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‘rights’ exempt acts of copulation from inclusion in the category [of] what is ‘shameful’. In the postcolony, diverse forms of cuissage and related ‘rights’, the concern to reproduce, and the life of the flesh complement one another, even if the ecstasy of the organs, the excesses of fine food and drink, characteristic of an economy of pleasure, may be seen as an integral part of a larger world, that of de Sade. (Mbembe 2001: 126–7)

In truth, the phenomenon of leaders who ‘eat’ on behalf of the masses they rule is not confined to the leaders of Cameroon. Bayart has made similar observations in his discussion of the ‘politics of the belly’ in which Mobuto Sese Seko has entered African and oral archives as the quintessential giant ogre with many mouths through which to feed himself at the expense of the masses. Similary, Ngugi wa Thiong’o in his Devil on the Cross (1982) has given us a portrayal of a man transformed into a beast by the economy of pleasure through the memorable character of Gitutu wa Gatanguru. Emperor Bokassa; Idi Amin; the genocidaires who turned Rwanda into a bloodbath in 1994; the Janjaweed of Sudan who are armed by the government in Khartoum to wilfully massacre black Africans in the Darfur region because of oil; and now Robert Mugabe who turned his militias against the opposition in Zimbabwe – all are examples of the excesses that Mbembe is rightfully up in arms about. However, one cannot equate the above African-monster leaders with the constructive visions we have of Nyerere, Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Mandela, Samora Machel, and the early and younger Robert Mugabe. Surely, there must be a line to be drawn when discussing the agency of African leaders? There has not been sufficient differentiation between the roles that African leaders have played to promote democracy or undermine it in Mbembe’s expose. Maybe it is true about Cameroon but in southern Africa it would be the height of vulgarising political criticism not to recognise the political role of frontline states in moving the wheels of political freedom. In Mbembe’s undifferentiated analysis of the agency of African leaders we feel an entangled ‘critical’ voice in the labyrinths within the wilderness of imperial stereotypes of African leaders. Mbembe misses the opportunity to pose the question of why some of the African leaders have allowed themselves to wallow in excess superfluity while the masses are suffering want. Such questions would force us to revisit the issue of the political/ economic organisation of the postcolony at the time of transition. They would force us to realise that the postcolony did not begin with African leaders as Mbembe seems to imply. Ultimately, they would call upon us to realise how the structural dynamics of colonialism have continued in the form of neocolonialism. These aspects of the African postcolony have not been sufficiently theorised in ‘The Aesthetics of Vulgarity’. It is a mark of entanglement in the fatalistic illogicality of the excesses of the postcolonial theorising that Mbembe does not talk about the excess of positive things that some African leaders have brought to their people. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela confounded and exceeded the expectations of his previous tormentors when he announced the policy of forgive but not forget. The theoretical gap here is that for a class to rule it must first seek to win moral leadership, and that

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force or excess gluttony are not powerful enough to coerce the masses to follow the upward path of realising their freedom. While conceding that some African leaders are on the other extreme, Mbembe undermines new ways of theorising Africa when he fails to acknowledge the close relationship of antagonism and dependency that exists between the people and those who rule them. Or as put forward by Stuart Hall (1994), we must be vigilant in our analysis of class relations in Africa because there are constantly negotiated lines of alliances and cleavages between the rulers of Cameroon and those that are ruled. The ways in which On the Postcolony is theoretically entangled in a style of understanding Africa that is heir to the works of Hegel is evident when Mbembe fails to recognise why the ordinary masses want to join the ‘conviviality’ or ‘connivance’. For Mbembe, the power of the leaders over the ruled is absolute; the powerless are discussed as a gravid mass of people, all too willing to enter into relations with the authority that dehumanises them. Mbembe writes that in the postcolony the monopoly of pain is made commonsensical because the leaders systematically apply pain to a docile mass whose practices cannot always be read in terms of opposition to the ‘deconstructing power’ and ‘disengagement’ of the state. The vulgarity of power relations [t]akes place when in their desire for a certain majesty the masses join in the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology, and when power, in its violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence. (Mbembe 2001: 133)

This is an important insight because here Mbembe refuses to romanticise ordinary people. They too internalise hierarchies of violence which they can then hand down to those who are in a weaker position. Mbembe correctly notes that the ‘community’ is not always above censure. However, this insight is presented in a tone that suggests that everyone in the community ‘clothe[s] themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology’. In other words, there is not sufficient evidence to conclude, as Mbembe authoritatively does, that all the masses of Cameroon, and by extension, of Africa are blinded to the exploitative relations that they find themselves in. Mbembe does not make it sufficiently clear that francophone Africa has a very different set of cultural and discursive characteristics from anglophone Africa and the rest of the continent. He does not reveal in detail the multiple contexts in which it is possible for the masses to engage with the leaders whom they oppose when the same leaders pronounce policies deemed inimical to the material interests of the majority of people. Put differently, what Mbembe is searching for within the historical agency of Africans is an emplotment of resistance organised around political movements that should stand up to social tyranny. This uncomplicated expectation reveals an aporia in Mbembe’s theorising Africans. For a critic who is hard to ignore, this simplification of historical processes is not only unfortunate, it cannot catch

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the fluctuating moments in people’s lives and fails to explain what happens in the zone of occult instability (Fanon 1963) where the multifarious but volatile political conduct of African masses is relatively manifested. For example, commenting on the African peasants’ reaction to the technology brought into Rhodesia by white settlers, Ranger (1967: 353) notes that ‘there is a strain of repudiation but also desire; a rejection of white mastery but a longing for African control of modern sources of wealth and power in an African environment’. However, Mbembe expects the masses in Africa to remain in that ‘denigrated space’ called the ‘masses’, an anonymous ‘abject’ object that should make resisting exploitation a life-long vocation. Mbembe glosses over the fact that the so-called ‘ordinary people’ never really think of themselves as ordinary in the sense of having limited aspirations or baser instincts. Ordinary people will aspire to live in the most expensive suburbs and send their children to expensive schools when these provide quality education. Mbembe seems to criminalise these aspirations of the masses; yet he does not decry the structural relations of production and the organisation of wealth that make it impossible for the masses to send their children to good schools, have clean water, and take time off to visit the Bahamas. The common man and woman in On the Postcolony is largely a figment of Mbembe’s skewed imagination. What Mbembe also despairs about is the way the masses toy with power, the ‘political dynamism in the subaltern African groups who appropriate the technological and sometimes the cultural resources made available by colonialism in order to forge a new idiom of resistance’ (Vambe 2004: 17). This new idiom of resistance suggests that the masses are not at all times fighting their leaders whom they hate to love and love to hate. In fact, Jean-Francois Bayart understands the multiple dimensions of the African masses’ historical agency in a more nuanced way when he suggests that ‘sometimes, the small men also work hard at political innovation and their contribution does not necessarily contradict that of the “big” men’ (Bayart 1993: 249). It would then be an oversimplification of human motivations to suggest as Mbembe does that the majority of the people have fallen victim to the processes of enrichment within the postcolony. In fact, the tone in Mbembe’s chapter on ‘The Aesthetics of Vulgarity’ is condescending and borders on criminalising the actions of the masses when they seek to improve their lives. He imagines that the masses of Cameroon should make it their only historical vocation to perpetually fight their rulers or tolerate poverty. This reasoning is informed by an elitist sensibility that refuses to acknowledge how people respond to structural inequalities in any African postcolony. Mbembe believes that in the postcolony the practices of those who command the leadership and those who are assumed to obey are so entangled as to render them both powerless. He does not convincingly explain why the rulers can be rendered powerless by their own misrule. We refuse to be theoretically forced to assume that political entanglement occurs only among the rulers and the ruled in Cameroon, as opposed to other countries, particularly in Africa.

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In Africa there is sufficient evidence that the inequality among social groups has not totally disempowered the politics of accountability in the contract between the ruled and the rulers. Each time South African masses take to the street in this post 1994 period we can safely assume that they know what it is that they are struggling for. When Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe forcibly appropriates land from an arrogant minority, we can assume that he knows that this action will guarantee his stay in power. We can also assume that some of the ordinary people have benefited from the land reform initiated by ZANU-PF in 2000. It would be difficult to totally agree with Mbembe when he categorically dismisses the political agency of both the African rulers and the masses, who he consistently casts in negative imagery: In the postcolony, an intimate tyranny links the rulers with the ruled. Just as obscenity is only another aspect of munificence, and vulgarity a normal condition of state power. If subjection appears more intense that it might be, this is because the subjects of the commandment have internalised authoritarian epistemology to the point where they reproduce themselves in all the minor circumstances of daily life – social networks, cults and secret societies, culinary practices, leisure activities, modes of consumption, styles of dress, rhetorical devices, and the whole political economy of the body. The subjection is also more intense because were they to detach themselves from these lucid resources, the subjects would, as subjects, lose the possibility of multiplying their identities. (Mbembe 2001, 128)

Few critics of Mbembe would ever suggest that the ordinary people are angels, beyond human temptations of greed, and beyond exploiting each other. But this is different from the failure to distinguish ‘subjection’ which is subordination, from ‘subjectivity’, i.e. that which implies that in the postcolony ordinary people have uneven levels of consciousness. Any claim that people possess uniform subjectivities is highly problematic. That is why Jeremy Weate, one of Mbembe’s foremost critics believes that in minimising the complex ways ordinary people function, Mbembe does not understand that people act for their own reasons, whether these are reflexively available or not. For Weate, That complicity, corruption and conviviality are at work in innumerable African contexts is undoubtedly true; that these are performed solely for the benefit of the regime is, however, deeply questionable. Mbembe’s mistake is to not recognize, beyond Sartrean masochism the pragmatic complex of reasons that motivate complicity, and the unstable flux of possibility his complex gives rise to. His notion of baroque practice alludes to what the textualist terms of this theoretical position do not allow him to unpack – that resistance as a possibility is inherent within every instance of complicity. (Weate 2003: 14)

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The conception of human agency in On the Postcolony narrows the understanding of African histories rather than expanding upon them. The argument of the book is not sufficiently nuanced. On the Postcolony does not critically consider how, when and where ‘mobile and transitory points of resistance, [produce] cleavages in a society that shifts about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings’. In fact, as Cooper elaborates further, in a colonial and postcolony society such as Cameroon for example, ordinary people have developed ‘complex strategies of coping, of seizing niches within changing economies, of multi-sided engagement with forces inside and outside the community’ (Cooper 2003: 33). Considered within the putative unequal relations that obtain in Africa, On the Postcolony is a book that is ideologically entangled. The specific nature of this entanglement can be detected in the author’s facile belief that studies on Africa and about Africa have suffered from a ‘crisis of languages, procedures and reasonings’. This post-structuralist theoretical position, hidden in pseudo antihistorical materialism is steeped in the belief that language alone as a sign system can create realities that people can live by without questioning the fundamental social organisation. When one reads Mbembe’s comments that some theories applied to Africa reduce the complex phenomena of state and power to discourses and representations, forgetting that discourses and representations have materiality, one anticipates that Mbembe’s project will avoid single-factor explanations of African realities. He does not. Instead he holds onto a reactionary strand in postcolonial theory that has become fashionable because it suggests that Africa ‘works’ because ‘disorder’ can be turned into a political instrument of normalising the bizarre. This reactionary tendency in theorising Africa is embodied in the work of Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz. They point out that one of the reasons for writing their book is to discredit the view that ‘exculpates Africans for their [mis]deeds on the grounds that the continent’s present predicament is a result of uncontrollable external forces’ (Chabal and Daloz 1999: 144). No serious critic in Africa can theorise Africans without showing how some policies by some of Africa’s elites leaders have been disastrous for the lives of the ordinary people. But this concession cannot amount to saying that political disorder is what makes things work in Africa. Yet this is exactly Chabal and Daloz’s point of departure in Theorizing Africa. They write: Our approach thus emphasizes an interpretation of politics in Africa as a mode of operation in which it is both judicious and legitimate to switch from one register to another without undue concern for the political contradictions which such behaviour might appear to induce. The lack of a clear differentiation between various registers, like the lack of distinction about the boundaries of the political, is utilized as a resource by those political actors able to do so. Hence, our notion of disorder is also a reflection of the fuzziness of what constitutes the primary and secondary registers informing politics. (Chabal and Daloz 1999: 150)

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In this ‘colonialist’ critical approach to Africa (Achebe 1997), readers have been returned to the era of Joseph Conrad’s Africa that is a ‘heart of darkness’ from which nothing positive can emerge. Mbembe appears to believe so too because for him African leaders and their masses are experts at experimenting with abuse, turning it into a normal way of life: By exercising raw power, the fetish, as embodied in the autocrat and the agents of autocracy, takes on an autonomous existence. It becomes unaccountable – or in the words of Hegel, arbitrary to the extent that it reflects only upon itself. In this situation, one should not underestimate the violence that can be set in motion to protect the vocabulary used to denote or speak of the commandement, and to safeguard the official fictions that underwrite the apparatus of domination, since these are essential to keeping people under the commandement’s spell, within an enchanted forest of adulation that, at the same time, makes them laugh. (Mbembe 2001: 110)

In Mbembe the potentially useful insights are clouded by a certain pessimism on the impossibility of Africans ever moving out of the cycle of violence.

Further Entanglement: Mbembe’s Response to Critics Another mark that Mbembe is a serious critic of African lives is that he has bravely taken the challenge to respond to his critics. He has written that most of these critics have come from Anglophone Africa, citing this as one of the reasons that On the Postcolony was originally conceived, written and published in French: French academia, French public [and the Francophone world] do not seem to have measured in its true worth, the profound significance of the recent turns in the human sciences in general, and in political and cultural critique. (Mbembe 2006:1)

Mbembe’s reaction to French indifference to his book appears to be a petulant one. French academe and establishment refute the notion of the postcolony, although the idea is slowly making its way into academic circles. This critical French silence on Mbembe’s book can almost be equated to contempt. In his efforts to be recognised by the French, his level of embeddedness or entanglement in the politics of patronage from the imperial power is revealed. In fact, French theoretical discourse is already inherently manifest in that a book on Cameroon – indeed on Africa – is ‘conceived’ in French. The movement from conceiving to conceptualisation is not simply a question of inserting thought into language. It is ideological; it implicates Mbembe in the French culture; its modes of address or interpolating the Other; its turn of phrase that is suffused with French mannerisms and attitudes; its commandement culture and ways of ordering, structuring,

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knowledge. It involves thinking and theorising about Africa and, in fact, gazing at the object called Cameroon. It may be that since the French academe can be assumed to be satisfied with Mbembe’s characterisation of Cameroonian leaders and masses as barbaric in the context of the ‘failure’ of the process of assimilation, that the French academy has no reason to respond. Their job has been done by one of their intellectual subjects with minimum political costs but with maximum ideological and cultural capital. In the context of Indian diasporan studies, Chakrabarty (1996) has lamented the self-enforced marginality of third world intellectuals who write about Africa primarily for the consumption of a European audience. These African academics work so hard to be recognised by Europe at a time when European academics do not feel obliged to be recognised by Africans. Mbembe’s admission that it is in the ‘Anglo-Saxon world that [his book] has aroused the most lively interest as well as the most creative criticism’ is also an ironical acknowledgement of difference. A difference, that is to say, in degree in how Africans experienced imperialism, and a difference in kind in the experience of how colonial subjects responded differently to colonialism and to the politics in the postcolony. It is also an admission of the fact that theoretically speaking, the ‘area study’ approach, sauced with elements of anthropology – the ideological handmaiden of imperialism – which fixed the colonised people’s identities for all time, is an approach that is not beyond contestation outside the French theoretical pedigree in which Mbembe has immersed himself. These points may appear easier to grasp when we consider instances of Mbembe’s response to his critics in which he has sought to challenge the perception of Africa as ‘crumbling under the weight of civil wars, famine, poverty, social inertia, and political stasis’. As Adesanmi puts it: ‘It has become the norm in various Africanist disciplines to homogenize the continent’s postcolonial space as one uniform site of dysfunctionality’ (Adesanmi in Mbembe 2006: 5). For Mbembe this ‘spectacular contraction of the terms of inquiry’ into ways of naming Africa is not the monopoly of Western discourse. African scholars of nationalist and Marxist ideological persuasions are guilty of the phenomenon of ‘presentism’. This is a methodological approach that constructs an image of ‘what Africa is not, and hardly says anything about what it actually is’ (Mbembe 2006: 5). As Keen says: In Afro-radical and nationalist [nativist] discursive formations, the address to the West seldom goes hand in hand with the capacity to answer for oneself, that is to be held accountable not simply by another but, already in advance, by and for oneself –to answer to oneself in the place of the other. (Keen 1997: 59, in Mbembe 2006: 7)

According to Mbembe, the trouble with cultural nationalists is that they engage in what Appiah describes as reverse discourse whose full import is to refuse to confront its own weaknesses. The significance of On the Postcolony is therefore,

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for Mbembe, to be taken as a search for a mode of writing that would make African critics account for what actually was/is happening in Africa as opposed to what should be happening in Africa. And, for Mbembe, that which is happening in Africa over and above anything else is the process by critics of overshadowing ‘the intensity of the violence of brother towards brother and the status of the sister and the mother in the midst of fratricide’ (Mbembe 2006: 11). It would be unfair not to acknowledge that On the Postcolony has probably done much good to expose the often-bizarre acts of violence which, though not a preserve of Africa, often take a grand shape in Africa. But no one has ever denied that some African leaders are corrupt or that some African peasants prey on other weak members of the African society. The question that Mbembe has, however, not been able to handle is one of excess. If some African leaders are conspicuous by the excessive ways in which they exercise their power, Mbembe himself has indulged in an excess of description that borders on sensationalising complex historical processes. If his intention is to shock Africans to their senses, then in some way he has succeeded but at the perilous price of reinforcing the very aesthetics of vulgarising political criticism. In his response to critics of On the Postcolony, Mbembe has introduced and clarified another of the projects which was at the core of his book: to think ‘with and against Fanon’ (Mbembe 2006: 11). As he puts it, thinking with Fanon means refusing to underplay the role that racism plays in the colonial world and the postcolony. But thinking against Fanon involves, for Mbembe, an Oedipus complex to want to ‘murder’ Fanon (patricide, if Fanon can be considered the father of colonial and postcolonial studies in Africa) by an act of partial disclosure of the political significance of Fanon. In one instance, Mbembe quarrels with Fanon’s understanding of how to deal with the settler. In particular, Mbembe objects to the radical militancy displayed by Fanon who once wrote that for the colonised ‘life can only arise out of the decomposing cadaver of the settler’ (Fanon 1963: 89). Fanon meant this statement to be read literally, for in a colonial context the war machinery that settlers possessed was not a figure of speech; it was as real as apartheid pushing its own tanks in 1976 Soweto, the spectacle of excess that resulted in the death of young Hector Pietersen and countless other Africans. But in Fanon’s statement, there is no stricture that is imposed on the reader to suggest that the meaning of ‘decomposing cadaver of settler’ is only to be taken literally. To the extent that the settler controlled war machinery that protected economic exploitation and other vices, Fanon’s cadaver is also the wished-for goal of many African liberation movements, especially in South Africa – to challenge the exploitative structural arrangement of capital in relation to African labour. Mbembe objects too, to what he describes as Fanon’s licence to permit Africans to possess the ‘power of giving death’ (Mbembe 2006: 13). (But this power in the postcolony, we argue, is not a literal one; even Fanon did not mean it only to be read thus.) For Mbembe (2006: 14), what is appropriate in a postcolony is to examine ways ‘in a context of a life that is precarious, disposing-of-death-itself

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could be, in fact, the core of a veritable politics of freedom’. There are two issues here. First, is the grandstanding of Mbembe when he attempts to influence a literal reading of Fanon’s statement suggesting that his poetics goes beyond the literal to the metaphorical: Because disposing-of-death-itself is precisely the kind of difference that can be neither eradicated nor integrated or overcome, the radical utopia of disposing-of-death-itself cannot be read literally. It can only be read figuratively, poetically. It can only be left to the difficult and never completed labour of decipherment. And in this absence of closure lies a politics of life and freedom that would not be a simple repetition of the originary murder. (Mbembe 2006: 14)

Mbembe’s statement denies that only a single view of understanding Africa is possible. But then he has turned ‘Africa into yet another fiction’ simply by depicting all African leadership as violent in their rule – portraying the masses as gullible and as cultural dupes who toy with power at every twist and turn – and failing to suggest alternative ways for dismantling the over-determined relations of power in the postcolony. Anyone who has watched the Cameroonian football team play in Africa, and sometimes in Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) matches, will doubt whether it is the same Cameroon without agency that Mbembe describes through the metaphor of the sleeping Africa: In contemporary Africa, these other possibilities are still in a germinal phase – multiple, fragile points of a dotted line that are not yet connected. For it is difficult to deny that in regard to the scene of our world, Africa is still to be awakened. Everything, here, or almost everything, is either yet to be aroused or to be begun anew. The signs of what Africa could be must be deciphered, and the hope to which the signs give birth nurtured. (Mbemebe 2006: 30)

Mbembe is not the first critic to use this discourse of Africa as a slumbering giant that needs awakening. Hegelian racism and Conradian imperialist rhetoric went further to conceive Africa as a tabula rasa where humanity could begin anew. Given that African theorists of a ‘serious’ stature such as Mbembe are entangled in stereotypical methods of describing their own nativity in Africa, readers of Mbembe’s book and subsequent critical response are bound to question whether indeed it has become a condition that to theorise Africa one must proceed via the pejorative language of the forefathers of Western imperialism. How and why can we appreciate the postulation that Mbembe proposes, which is that in order to embrace an ‘imagined future, we must first recognize ourselves in the trap and in the gap, in the place of the gap’? (Mbembe 2006: 29). Mbembe himself is consciously or unconsciously very eager to embrace, and be entangled in, a discourse that deprecates Africa. Despite declarations of critical openness, for Mbembe theorising African diaspora from within has been put under a severe

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theoretical spell by the very same oppressors that Mbembe decries. We can even say (with Gareth Griffith) about Mbembe that: Even when the subaltern appears to ‘speak’ there is a real danger as to whether what we are listening to is really a subaltern voice, or whether the subaltern is being spoken to by the subject position they occupy within the larger discursive economy. (Griffith 1992: 75)

For Mbembe, he has already confessed that On the Postcolony does not have ideological roots in Africa – it was conceived, written and first published in France and in the French language. What has been left in this disclaimer is that Africa was imagined as a second audience to a project that sought to prove what Europe has consecrated into scientific theories of truths in which Africa is the Other that must be demolished in order to begin ‘anew’. Unfortunately, because African history is both ugly and beautiful, it cannot be wished away. This leaves us with the question: what are the challenges facing Western trained intellectuals in theorising Africa and what can they become?

The Challenges of African/Black Intellectuals in Theorising African Diasporas In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectuals (1960), Harold Cruise sought to find the source of the problems of Dubois’ talented tenth. Cruise suggests that the crisis of the Negro intellectual was precisely that he/she wished to lead the ordinary masses but also fought hard to be accepted in the very post-slavery society that the majority of black people could not afford to get into. Dubois’ talented tenth were ‘trapped’ in their ambition to abandon the people of the lower classes in favour of the materialism of American capitalism. Some black critics with African roots have highlighted the perilous ideological position of competent mimicry that black intellectuals have decided to occupy when explaining Africa to themselves and to others. Fanon (1963) faulted black intellectuals for running after the formalism of the West and, in the process, missing the fluctuating political movements that gave shape to the conflicting values of the ordinary people. On the other hand, Cornel West (1988) identifies some important cognitive roadblocks for black intellectuals, among which is the failure in confronting head-on the interlocking issues of race, class and gender and how these affect Africans and African-American people in the era of high capitalism. For Cedric J. Robinson (1983) the paradox of theorising black diaspora is how best to confront and use the same tools that one is fighting against when explaining Africa. And Gramsci steps outside the normative definition of an ‘intellectual’ when he argues that the standard understanding of an intellectual as one who has acquired book knowledge is not enough to account for and explain the multifarious dimensions of human existence. He says, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971) that there is no human activity from which every form of

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intellectual participation can be excluded. This means that, although one can speak of intellectuals, one cannot speak of non-intellectuals because non-intellectuals do not exist. In sum: Each man, finally, outside his professional activity, carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a ‘philosopher,’ an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, to bring into being new modes of thought. (Gramsci 1971: 9)

We need new ways of thinking about and for Africa. In theorising African diasporas so much is at stake that these new ways cannot be expected to be derived only from the traditional organic intellectuals. New sources of knowledge production can be discovered in different generations of African intellectuals. Without prescribing, a democratic broadening of the alternatives sites of theorising Africa can emerge from the spectrum of African people. This is not particularising Africans as the only people who can explain their lives to themselves. It is to acknowledge that in any attempt to theorise African forms of living, which all along we have been describing as ‘diasporas’, we need input from the ‘ordinary’ people. We put the word ‘ordinary’ in inverted commas because the people do not consider themselves ordinary. The people of Africa never say they have all the answers to their problems but they constantly remind us that the ‘intellectual’ who wants to understand Africa must join in the daily struggles of the Africans themselves. We argue that Mbembe elected to join the masses’ struggle by interrogating how Africa is constructed in literature and historical works. Mbembe has made important contributions in debates on how to represent Africa to itself, and to outsiders. He provides useful insight, particularly when he explores the ways in which the African rulers apply systematic pain on those over whom they rule when forcing them to conform to the ideologies of the elite. However, we suggest that in most cases, Mbembe’s methodological approaches to understanding Africa have been unable to ward off the lure of the dominant cultures’ modes of representing African diasporas as atavistic. With this, we disagree.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to trace the trajectories of the understandings of African diasporas by critiquing the works of Achille Mbembe. We believe that the best way to pay our respects to his influential work is to engage with him. We did not set out to exhaust the exploration of Mbembe’s works; nor was our aim one of engaging in the ‘race for theory’ as lamented by Barbara Christian (1996). Rather we decided to engage in meta-criticism, the criticism of criticism, in order to make a contribution to the debates on the role of African intellectuals in the production, publication and dissemination of African knowledge. We are aware that the ‘cultural institution related to the discourse of literary theory is

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not innocent and has never been so’ (Vambe 2005: 90). We do not expect it to be. In fact, political and literary criticism has become an industry that determines whether or not people are hired. But we have stressed that the criticism of the type that Mbembe makes must not give the impression that it is motivated by the politics of the belly. We argued that the politics of philosophy or the philosophy of politics underlying the impetus to theorise African diasporas has grown into a hegemonic practice that is now akin to what Edward Said described as being supported by ‘vocabulary, scholarship and imagery’ (Said 1978: 3), from which statements about African life, and the historical agencies of its populations are authorised. On a political front, we refused to minimise the political contributions of nationalist leaders such as Cabral, Nkhrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Fanon, Nelson Mandela, Samora Machel and Sekou Toure. We also explored Achille Mbembe’s book, On the Postcolony, and his written response to his critics. Mbembe’s project revealed that it is possible to theorise Africa from the geographical space of Africa yet still fail to put a critical finger on the pulse of what it is that makes Africa work. However we argued in relation to On the Postcolony that Mbembe is a critic of note. First, Mbembe demonstrates a dogged attention to detail and, second, he commands a respectable theoretical understanding of African diasporas. This emerges in his critique of African politics in the African postcolony in which, for him, the African leadership and those whom they rule are caught in an inexorable cycle of violence that feeds on a ‘systematic application of pain’ (Mbembe 2001: 103). Excess, arbitrary action and the monopoly of violence are what Mbembe flags as the most remarkable achievement of post-independence African governments. We rejected this unwarranted Afro-pessimism because Cameroonian histories, and, by extension, African histories are so diverse that they deny the essentialism of On the Postcolony. For example, when South Africa was celebrating the end of formal apartheid in 1994, Rwanda was reeling under the most gruesome genocide whose historical roots are to be found in Belgium’s policies of divide and rule. Furthermore there was French military support of Rwandan genocidaires between 1990 and 1994. A lack of political nuance has led Mbembe’s project into the pitfall of theoretical essentialisation on African lives in the postcolony. We argued against this anthropological approach to African identities in the postcolony because it fixes Cameroonian identities for all time. We maintained that Mbembe’s desire to disentangle political and African cultural theory from the West’s modes of imagining and writing Africa have been significantly undermined by his use of the very same disabling critical tools borrowed from France’s imperial academy. The result is that Mbembe’s On the Postcolony is not an account of the complex daily interactions between Africans; it is not an account that is relevant for all Africans at all times. On the Postcolony is entangled. It says more about Africa by what it does not say than by what it authorises. We feel that Mbembe could, to great effect, disentangle his language of description and modes of reasoning from those

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global forces that gleefully expect Africa to retain its condition of being Europe’s ‘Other’. Unfortunately, Mbembe’s written response to those who have offered critiques of his book reveals a critic who latches on to a single-factor explanation of the political misfortunes of Cameroon and Africa. He is blindly convinced that what Cameroon, and by extension Africa, lacks is a ‘genealogy of responsibility’ (Mbembe 2006: 14). The irony is that he is plying his academic trade in South Africa, one of the African countries that resisted and dismantled apartheid – the political spectre that was one of the most evil systems of political rule on earth. To be more precise, Mbembe is at the University of the Witwatersrand. There, his academic successes at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) are too numerous to mention. He owes this renown in part to the relatively calm conditions that the African National Congress (ANC)-led government’s political responsibility has ensured and which make it possible for him to carry out his research. At WISER, Mbembe runs with other academics’ PhD programmes; he enables African human intellectual resources. The academic successes of Mbembe’s programmes at WISER are a far cry from the pessimism that he paints of Africa in general. This begs the obvious question: to what extent can a selective understanding of what Africa is, is itself a function of the political economy of those who fund research in any African country? However, respect is due to Mbembe who, as we have argued, remains a very important academic figure in the critical discourse of theorising on African diasporas. But as we have argued in this chapter, the ideological values and trajectories of his intellectual works are not beyond contestation. It is in this sense that Mbembe’s works can be described as crucial in the history of intellectual ideas of and about Africa. Contestation is at the core of intellectual dynamism. So too is the issue of theorising modes of Africa’s livelihoods.

CHAPTER FOUR

Rethinking the Epistemic Conditions of Genocide in Africa The Ugandan scholar, Mahmood Mamdani, has written on the question of genocide in Rwanda, and more recently, that in Darfur, Sudan. His two well-received books, Citizen and Subject (1996) and When Victims become Killers (2001) attempt to theorise the volatile concepts of what a ‘citizen’, ‘subject’ and ‘victim’ are and can mean in different postcolonial African contexts. His essays on Darfur and the engaged responses from critics, further confirm Mamdani as a committed scholar on genocide in Africa; indeed, his work is widely considered to be both theoretically inspiring and insightful. However, the question that we raise in this chapter is the extent to which it is in fact theoretically flawed. We seek to critique Mamdani’s works, in which we have identified a problem of privileging a selective understanding of genocide in his writings on Africa. Selecting an approach to the study of social movements is in fact not a problem per se, because it does not define itself, although it creates the basis of a lean and brittle understanding of genocide in Africa. Every scholarly or creative work is constructed on the basis of the exclusion of certain viewpoints that the author may not consider significant, even though readers may find more meaning in such exclusions than they do in what has been included. The issue of genocide is a very contemporary topic in Africa and has often been studied using two stunting theoretical paradigms. The first is the tendency by scholars to make use of what are unquestionably Holocaust theories. This incorrectly suggests that the African experience of genocide and the Jewish experience of Holocaust can be matched. Jewish Holocaust and African genocide share certain commonalities, but to uncritically make the Holocaust paradigmatic of African genocide can blur the specificity of the two contexts and the historical nuances that have shaped each. It can also fudge an understanding of the motives of the perpetrators and the shifting nature of the identities of the victims. This is, in a manner of speaking, simply simplifying complex realities. The second problem created by the use of a selective approach to genocide in Africa is a theoretical one of deploying ‘historical exceptionalism’ when explaining genocidal situations. Historical exceptionalism is based on the conscious politics of non-disclosure of facts which is itself a negative function of the window (or framing) theory that is based on privileging one’s fact-finding methods. That is, choosing facts to find, or evidence to project as real, at the expense of other realities of the genocide – those 31

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lying outside the frame of the window. In view of these limitations of genocide scholarship in Africa it should be possible to develop a generic theory of genocide in and for Africa; one that takes into account the variety of African experience and its different trajectories, without losing sight of the 600 years of history that have shaped Africa. We will situate what we call ‘genocide scholarship in and for Africa’ in a broader historical and theoretical context. This recognises that the exclusive preoccupation with instances of genocide in Africa does not historicise the problem; it recognises the specific context of each historical experience as making up the complexity of genocide experience.

Genocide Scholarship in and for Africa Semantic indeterminacy of the term ‘genocide’ The ambiguity of meaning at the heart of the term ‘genocide’ complicates genocide scholarship in Africa. The etymology of the word genocide is made up of ‘geno’ which refers to race and ‘cide’ that refers to killing (Ternon 1985). From this understanding, the term can address the killing of one race by another. However, in this narrow definition, the word genocide does not take into account the killing of members of one ethnic group by another. The term genocide as applied to some African experiences by critics does not help one to explain or account for the mass killing of people of an ethnic group by the leaders of that same ethnic group in contestations about ideological hegemony within the new nation. The United Nations’ definition of genocide as the destruction in part or whole of an ethnic group based on religion, ethnicity and racial identity, also fails to take into account the mass killing of people of the same cultural identity based on ideological and class differences. Nor does genocide, by itself as a term, try to differentiate why some killings are described as massacres, while others are labelled as genocide. In Africa, studies of mass killings have been influenced by colonial powers who deny that they have ever been involved in the perpetration of genocide on African communities. Thus, the semantic inadequacy of a word used to designate mass killings has created immense conceptual and theoretical problems for scholars of genocide in Africa. Comparisons with Holocaust The imposition of an overlay of Holocaust theories on African experiences has compounded the problem of understanding genocide. Studies of genocide in Africa have tended to equate the Holocaust experience with the various manifestations of genocide in Africa. This has led to a lack of nuanced studies on African genocide. Context is lost. Specificity is not considered. The motivations of the Holocaust have been conflated with those of genocide in Africa and the specific players in each case have been misunderstood. Using the Rwandan experience of genocide,

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Lemarchand argues against the notion of understanding African genocide solely through the lens of Holocaust theories: there was certainly suffering by both Rwandans and Jews, but ‘to treat Rwanda as the carbon of the Holocaust is likely to obscure its historical specificity and regional context, and ultimately lead to a misunderstanding of the motivations behind the killings’ (Lemarchand 2005: 48–49). Zimmerer proposes an ‘archaeology of genocidal thinking’. This, he argues, serves to ‘link various cases by examining certain ideologies of race and space and their development over time’, rather than ‘a mere comparative approach, which treats various instances of genocide episodically in order to find general rules, but misses out on examining how this (sic) cases are linked (Zimmerer 2006: 4). The necessity to disconnect the threads of African genocidal experience with that of the Holocaust can lead to Africans searching for the origins of African suffering on multiple sites that include slavery, colonialism and the postcolonial African elite politics of inequality (Lemarchand 2003).

Colonial origin of genocide in Africa Armah (1973) contextualises African genocide in both the trans-Saharan and transAtlantic slavery of Africans; these paved the way for colonial genocidal wars that European colonisers imposed upon Africans. On this point, Cabral (1966) opines that the authoritarian nature of the colonial systems created institutions from which violence was conceived as the ultimate weapon for European powers to impose their will on Africa. Manifestations of this colonial violence include the German genocidal wars designed to exterminate the Herero of Namibia (Krüger 2005); the French expeditionary genocide of Algerians; and King Leopold of Belgium’s pillage of Congo blood with impunity. Furthermore, the authoritarian colonial states passed on their own neuroses and coercive institutions to the new African leaders. However, few scholars of African genocide have sought to reveal in greater detail how, why, and with what consequences narrow nationalist politics promoted genocidal tendencies in postcolonial Africa. The problem has been that scholars of genocide in Africa have been all too willing to be selective in their castigation of genocidal states. It is for example true that although the post-Rwandan state has been justifiably credited with the ending of pillage in 1994, there are few studies that make it clear that the same state pursued – and still pursues  genocidal politics in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Reyntjens 2005; Umutesi 2004; Amnesty International 2005). The problem of isolating certain African states and not others as being implicated in genocidal acts is also evident in Sudan (Johnson 2003). All too often, scholars have approached African genocide through the phenomenon of historical exceptionalism. Historical exceptionalism Genocide scholarship in Africa suffers from explanatory limits inherent in fragmented theoretical frameworks. Consequently the histories of African countries are fragmented to the point where those histories are barely recognisable.

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Theories have been developed to explain the Rwandan genocide, and these have been projected as different from theories on the genocide in Sudan, Matabeleland and Zimbabwe. Different, too, it is claimed, from those explaining the genocide of the Herero in Namibia; of the Algerians by the French; in the Congo by Belgium; in Nigeria during the civil war; in Sierra Leone and in Liberia. There is a paucity of theory when explaining genocide in Africa. Historical exceptionalist theories of genocide in Africa depend upon singlefactor explanations. When writing on the Rwandan experience for instance, Taylor (1999) concentrates on the killings that took place in 1994 and fails to unearth the dynamics that led to the genocide. He gives the incorrect impression that the genocide began and ended in 1994. This also neglects to explain that the dynamics unleashed by the genocide went beyond the boundaries of Rwanda. Taylor’s work identifies the geographical boundary of Rwanda as the boundary of knowledge about the genocide. The real challenge is to go beyond the theories based on the phenomenon of historical exceptionalism that use single-factor explanations of complex realities. Such explanations of genocide tend to invoke ethnicity to account for the mass killing that is taking place in Africa (Semujanga 2003). The theoretical assumption in these studies is that in Africa it is the existence of ethnicity that is solely responsible for the genocide. This is one of the shibboleths that Africans must abandon. The mere fact of ethnic groups living in the same geographical space is not a precondition for genocide. Other single-factor explanations of genocide in Africa implicate only class differences (Pottier 2002) and fail to explain why poor people participate in killing other poor people during political violence.

The myth of an ‘international community’ As yet Africa has not built strong institutions that can deal with threats to the continent, whether these emanate from inside or outside the continent. Apart from the ineffective regional bodies such as the Economic Organisation of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADCC), the African Union (AU) is weak, poorly governed, dictated to and often manipulated by individual countries or regional powers. As good example of such manipulation as recently as 2007, is the failed attempt by Gaddaffi of Libya to extend his hegemony over African countries using AU structures. Then too, the AU membership process is voluntary; there is no binding set of criteria to control or impose sanctions on genocidal governments. Weak political structures coupled with the contentious policy of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states means that a neighbouring country can exterminate its population in the name of maintaining law and order. When genocide occurs in Africa, the AU is illequipped to deal with it. The AU and individual African countries prefer to blame the international community for not intervening (African Union 2000). Thus the AU and its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) bemoan the fact that the UN did not come to the aid of Rwanda. When the same

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international community intervenes, African countries cry: ‘neo-colonialism!’ This has allowed the discourse to create an expectation that Europe and the US will stop the genocide that Africans have initiated with the help of certain European countries (Melvern 2000). French (2005: 1) describes Africa as a ‘continent for the taking’ by any theory, or any Western government. This is because the world is acting more unilaterally, selfishly, and individualistically, only standing up to genocide in Africa where their interests –be they for oil or minerals – are threatened. Some countries in Africa and in the West benefit from genocide. Africa has yet to wake up from its slumber and understand the ‘international community’ and how it makes Africans abdicate responsibility while waiting for a fictitious world consensus (French 2005).

Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism Mamdani’s work on genocide in Africa is heir to and further perpetuates the pitfalls of genocide scholarship in Africa. However, we contend that his work sustains itself through partial disclosures, and the privileging of minority politics as if they are beyond contestation. To understand how Mamdani has located himself when theorising genocide in Africa, we need to revisit his work, Citizen and Subject (1996). Two arguments that were destined to shape Mamdani’s later work on African genocide are the separation of the concepts of ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’ and the workings of ‘customary law’ and ‘civil law’ in a colony. Each of these themes points to the politics of exclusion, but the premise upon which they are explained in Citizen and Subject shows subjectivity. The original sin of Citizen and Subject lies in its slavish following of the dual mode of explaining reality as used in colonial discourse. This dualism is upheld when Mamdani writes: ‘Discussions on Africa’s present predicament revolve around two clear tendencies: modernist and Communitarian’ (Mamdani 1996: 3). He then imputes rigid characteristics to each of these categories. The modernists are said to agitate for rights while communitarians cry in defence of culture; they want to return to the source, to Africa’s past. Although Mamdani calls for a rejection of both positions as simplifying complex realities he never rises above this dualism. Studies have been published showing the different ways in which ‘modernists’ and ‘communitarians’ constantly use cultural resources borrowed from one another. Contrary to the message in Citizen and Subject, citizenship is not a biological reality, but a social and political construct. However, when it comes to ‘subject’, Mamdani must confront the complex realities of this category. Realities such as that of being a ‘citizen’ is not a totalised identity: citizens certainly have rights but they are also subject to the rule of those who are in power. Citizenship is thus not a stable category in any context, whether it is colonial or postcolonial. Similarly, ‘subjects’ are constructed as such by those who rule over them. But ‘subjects’ suffer an additional reality – that of being put

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under subjection. Using various coercive instruments the rulers can turn ‘subjects’ into objects. This is the partial dialectic of power relations that Citizen and Subject manages to capture. What its author fails to account for is why citizens – with all their rights – revolt against their rulers. Nor does he differentiate between subjection (oppression) and subjectivities (the capacity for embodying alternative choice). The Africans who Mamdani describes as subjects groaning under customary law are in fact those who formed the bulk of the liberation forces that swept through the continent. It is inaccurate to suggest, as Mamdani does, that ‘citizenship’ was only associated with and accorded to white people who were the ruling class in the colony. In some African colonies, wealthy black people did indeed qualify for citizenship and were accepted as citizens even though they legally retained the ‘appellation’ of being described as subjects. Race was therefore not in every case what distinguished citizens (white people) from subjects (black people) (Mamdani 1996: 109). Race cannot explain why genocide takes place in postcolonial Africa, where populations are predominantly black. Class, ethnicity and ideology do provide complementary explanations which Mamdani has not addressed sufficiently in Citizen and Subject.

The Methodological Crisis The nature of power politics in the colony that became the basis for African genocide is entirely missed by Mamdani in his paper delivered in Dakar at the first conference of intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora (2004) entitled ‘Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism’. He broaches many pertinent issues, including the role of political economy in understanding the colonial legacy; invented ethnicities in postcolonial Africa; as well as indigeneity and matters of civic and individual juridical responsibilities within the nation. Mamdani’s starting point is the assertion that political economy theorists have failed us. However Mamdani does not clarify that to rule implies imposing a set of laws on people in order to control their day-to-day activities. He apparently feels that the most negative effect of colonialism was this ‘ruling’. He forgets that to rule was enabled because the Europeans had superior firepower which they used to expropriate Africa’s mineral wealth. If one were to put Mamdani’s formulation differently, one would say that he is concerned with the politics of cultural representation; his major concern seems to be that in the cultural economy of colonialism’s images of African life, Africans were deemed inferior. There have been far more cutting and critical works on the representation of natives in colonial discourse, such as those by Bhabha (1990); Fanon (1963) and Cabral (1966). The methodological crisis in Mamdani’s approach to genocide is contained in his attempt to grapple with the issue of ethnicity in Africa.1

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Reinventing the Discourse of Ethnicity Credit is due to Mamdani for reminding us that the problem of ethnicity is still with us. However, what is disturbing is the framework within which Mamdani decides to discuss this important problem. He situates the question of ethnicity within what he calls the inscribed identities derived from colonialism. Mamdani sees the burden of being a colonial subject as one that is dramatised in the binary application of law. The natives, he says, were managed or ruled through the application of customary law and the ‘colonial administrator’ used civil law to define his relation to property and those described as settlers. In fact this binary distinction is not true of the experience of colonialism in most parts of Africa. Customary law was imposed selectively and it often clashed with the application of civil law to Africans. For instance, if a black man raped a black woman in colonial Zimbabwe, he would probably be jailed, while if a white man raped a black woman he would pay a fine. Customary law was applied selectively to black men and women and to African chiefs. Chiefs who were known for resisting colonial rule were deposed and compliant ones were amply rewarded. Civil law was the overarching law applied to keep the native subordinate. Customary law on its own could not guarantee control because the native commissioners themselves depended on Africans for its interpretation and re-interpretation. The coercive machinery of police, army and secret agents were deployed in areas where there were only Africans in order to enforce the content of both civil and customary law. The distinction between customary and civil law in Mamdani’s work is therefore misleading. How then does Mamdani explain genocide in postcolonial Africa? He sees the problem of post-independence leadership as emanating from the ‘communal’ structure of power sharing. He claims (1998) that under colonialism, even if there were no elections, there was a clear distinction between the executive, the legislative, the judicial moments of power. In contrast the native authority was organized on the basis of fusion of power. The chief combined in his hands executive, legislative judicial and administrative power.

Mamdani is not the first scholar to raise this point. Clifford Geertz (2000) has said as much. This argument is made to establish the links between the failure of the elite politics of post-independence Africa and those of chiefs under colonialism. However, the contexts are different. Postcolonial leaders have much more power to manoeuvre and improve the lives of the people over whom they rule – or to coerce these same people when the leaders’ policies are questioned. This is not to deny that ethnicity exists in Africa. Where ethnicity is a factor in postcolonial Africa, as in the case of Rwanda, it has much to do with competitive politics, about who gets what in terms of meagre resources. It is possible to link ethnicity with the fortunes of colonialism in Africa. Ethnicity will be used by

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groups – the powerful and/or powerless – who are attempting to control the state apparatus and its resources in Africa.

Indigeneity versus Cosmopolitanism There are several ways, Mamdani argues, in which ethnicity manifests itself. First, it is constructed and preserved by postcolonial governments through what he terms the politics of indigeneity. He argues that indigeneity is now used as the litmus test for citizenship. He also believes that privileging some groups over others is in a way recreating the very inequalities which were the hallmark of colonialism. He argues that in privileging the indigenous over the non-indigenous, Africans turned the colonial world upside down, but did not change it. Second, Mamdani favours a cosmopolitanism in which diasporans will have free movement across borders to take over command of any country from its indigenes. This understanding of the politics of ethnicity has its roots in the rich who have pinned their hopes on liberalisation and privatisation as salvation from majority demands for justice. Mamdani goes on to criticise the conservative mainstream for penalising those who are more dynamic by defining them as settlers. But things cannot be left at this cerebral level. Mamdani’s formulation of the issue of indigeneity begs many questions. For example, the colonist may have packed his bags physically, but economically he still influences the politics of the postcolonial country. Another myth that Mamdani perpetuates is that the minorities in Africa are always poor, and necessarily weak. This is both astonishing and misleading. Even in those African countries where liberation wars were waged against the settlers, most settlers still command very real economic power. For example in Zimbabwe the white minority lived a very privileged way of life until the 2000 to 2003 land take-overs that were supported and implemented by the government. Those land take-overs were violent but the point is not lost that they were done in the name of the ordinary people; in the name of indigeneity, at least in public discourse. Put differently, given the entrenchment of racism and inequality in Zimbabwe even after independence, the Robert Mugabe government invoked the principle of indigeneity to a limited extent in the land take-overs. Mugabe emphasised justice, and claimed that those from the white minority who did not want land redistribution had failed, in the spiritual sense, to migrate from Rhodesia to the new Zimbabwe. Some moved to Australia; others went to England, although many remained in Zimbabwe. There were also those who moved to South Africa, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo. What have these issues of native and settler, citizen and subject to do with Mamdani and genocide in Africa? We suggest in this chapter that the conceptual limitations of Citizen and Subject have in fact coloured Mamdani’s understanding of genocide in Africa, and the remainder of this chapter shows how, where and why we have formed this conclusion.

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Citizens and Subjects Become Victims and Killers In When Victims become Killers (2001) a notorious linearity of colonialism and nativism is held responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Mamdani suggests that the question of genocide in Africa needs to be re-conceptualised while standing on the shoulders of previous scholars: ‘Better to stand on their shoulders than to lean against them, the more to see beyond where their sights came to rest’ (Mamdani 2001: xiv). Mamdani argues that although the Rwandan genocide possessed a ‘popular’ dimension, no scholarly work has explained this aspect convincingly. He argues that among the masses who carried out the genocide there were ‘those enthusiastic, those reluctant, and those coerced’ (2001: 18). Mamdani’s work distinguishes killings of combatants and civilians on both sides during the civil war (1990–1994), from the killings of Hutu moderates by Hutu extremists, to those of Tutsi civilians by civilian Hutu mobs. For Mamdani, the challenge in seeking to understand the Rwandan genocide is how to avoid merging and dissolving the genocide in the civil war. It would then cease to exist analytically and be severed so completely from the civil war that the act of killing would become devoid of motivation. As Mamdani puts it, ‘To see the genocide as one outcome of the defeat in the civil war would be to see it as political violence, an outcome of a power struggle between the Hutu and Tutsi elites’ (Mamdani 2001: 268). No one in his right senses could condone the massacre of the Tutsis in 1994. However, the other side of the argument is that historians and political scientists consciously or unconsciously suppress and refuse to tell the world that historically the Tutsis are an imperial (feudal) power that was used effectively by the colonising force to suppress insurgency in Rwanda. As Semujanga (2003) argues, there is no evidence to suggest that the Tutsis ever sympathised with the victimised Hutus before the 1959 Hutu revolution. Although Human Rights Watch (1999) credits the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) for ending the Rwandan genocide in 1994, it also reveals the brutal nature of the killings of the Hutus between 1990 and 1994 by the Tutsi-led RPF during the march to Kigali. When the Tutsi-led, RPF-dominated government was pursuing Hutu extremists into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), more than four million lives were lost. The RPF and its allies did not differentiate between innocent refugees and the Interharawe (Umutesi 2004). The scorched-earth, preemptive politics that the Rwandan government periodically perform in the DRC is a cause of concern for the African Union (2000). Recent revisionist autobiographical narratives further complicate the official Rwandan version of the genocide that is reproduced in When Victims become Killers. Umutesi’s Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (2004) reveals that there is a deafening silence in international media on the RPF’s aggression towards innocent Hutus as the Rwandan army marched to Kigali between April and July 1994. Utumesi’s work also brings out the atrocities committed by the RPF when they pursued and bombed refugee camps in Eastern Congo. Rusesabagina and Zoellner’s An Ordinary Man: The True Story behind

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‘Hotel Rwanda’ (2006) contradicts the accounts in most international films that depict the Hutus as all being evil killers. While autobiography as narrative is based on selective memory – a fact that problematises the ‘authority’ of its own truths – the work of Umutesi (2004) suggests that genocide did not end in Rwanda. It went beyond the borders of Rwanda precisely because genocide had a history and precedents in the Great Lake Region (Courtemanche 2004; Songolo 2005; Habimana 2005; Lemarchand 2005). Mamdani’s book is silent on the RPF-controlled radio (Radio Rwanda) broadcast on 27 July 1994 when Paul Kagame, the incumbent president of Rwanda spoke of ‘cleansing’ when describing Hutus. Mcnulty (1999: 268–269) writes that the RPF conducted killings of the Hutu people ‘off camera, in the full knowledge that where there are no images there is no story’. Mamdani’s non-disclosure of the roles played by Museveni of Uganda and Paul Kagame in the Rwandan genocide, promotes the myth that the minority are always weak, and that they need ‘protection’, whereas in post-genocide Rwanda the Tutsi minority wields enormous power that they use to silence democratic opposition under the slogan, ‘Never Again’ (Mamdani 2001; Country Report 2004). However, the greatest weakness of When Victims become Killers is the author’s refusal to complete an explanation suggested in the dialectic of his title. For him, the initial violence introduced into Rwandan society was that by the Belgian settlers in 1916, and later by the French who sponsored the Hutu extremists. Mamdani claims that the second wave of violence was by the native people that he identifies as the Hutu, who unleashed the genocide in which nearly a million (if not more) Tutsi people died (Mamdani 2001: 9–14). His argument is unconvincing. Before colonialism in Rwanda, the Hutu majority suffered various indignities such as the notorious corvee/forced labour system under the Tutsi king Rwabugiri. The Tutsis were exempt from this type of forced labour. This insight invalidates the assumption perpetrated by Mamdani, and more recently by President Kagame of Rwanda, that pre-colonial Rwanda was peaceful. Mamdani appears to be arguing that African nationalism in Rwanda led to the genocide. Nationalism by itself does not lead to genocide. But ethnic tension can indeed do so. Mamdani minimises the power of ethnicity as igniting the fires of genocide. He does so first, so as to not disclose the role of the Tutsi monarchy in creating historical conditions for future genocide; and secondly, in order to absolve the Tutsi elite of Uganda, who once they gained power from 1994 onwards, also committed crimes against humanity, particularly in the DRC. The politics of shielding the minority elites who commit acts of genocide from facing trial is not new. In Rhodesia, a minority was protected by the international community even when it killed more than 50,000 people. In South Africa apartheid was created by a white minority and its machinery moved against indigenous black people; this minority was protected because it suited US and Europe’s economic interests. Steve Biko was bludgeoned to death by the same minority. In Kenya, the Mau Mau fought a minority of white people who received enormous sympathy from

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the West. The politics of protecting minorities assumes that these minorities do not have any power that they can abuse. In the case of the Rwandan genocide, Mamdani either fails or deliberately refuses to complete the dialectic of violence that he sees playing out in Rwanda. The violence began with the discriminatory politics of the Tutsi king Rwabugiri, and swayed to the Belgian colonists in cahoots with the Tutsi in the 1930s. It was then monopolised by the Hutus in the 1950s until 1994. Mamdani does not explore how the Tutsi, once in power after 1994, conducted their own genocide of Hutu refugees in Rwanda and the DRC (African Union 2000). What we are left with in Mamdani’s formulation of the dialectic of violence in Rwanda is a degutted ‘dialectic of concepts and no longer [one] of historical forces’ (Gramsci 1971: 370). For to force Mamdani to ‘complete’ his dialectic is to urge him to confront a silence that he accuses others of perpetuating: the third silence concerns the geography of the genocide. Since the genocide happened within the boundaries of Rwanda, there is a widespread tendency to assume that it must also be an outcome of the processes that unfolded within the same boundaries. A focus confined to Rwandan state boundaries inevitably translates into a silence about regional processes that fed the dynamic leading to the genocide. (Mamdani 2001: 8)

And yet nowhere do we have a sustained critique of Yoweri Museveni’s powerful involvement in arming Kagame, who then invaded Rwanda in 1990. Nowhere in his book does Mamdani describe the atrocities that Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front committed while advancing to capture Kigali in 1994. Nowhere does he detail the brutal consequences of a war of attrition by Kagame to provide the ‘final solution’ to the problem posed by the remnants of the Interahawe who sought unwanted refuge in the DRC. Mamdani (2001: 17) shows concern about understanding the ‘mass participation’ in the Rwanda genocide. He refuses to project the genocide not only as a state project but also as ‘social project’ (Mamdani 2001: 17–18). However, he is less convincing in explaining the contradictory motivations of the masses. In chapter seven of When Victims become Killers, under the heading ‘The Civil War and the Genocide’, one expects an explanation of the motivations of the masses in taking part in the genocide. Instead, Mamdani gives anecdotes derived from interviews of genocide perpetrators who relate how many people they killed and what wealth they stole from the Tutsi. We do not really learn why they participated in a project that the state could have stopped earlier. Mamdani tells us that ‘it required not one but many hacks of a machete to kill even one person. With a machete, killing was hard work; that is why there were often several killers for every single victim (2001: 6). Here Mamdani implies that the ‘collective’ killing of an individual Tutsi by a group of Hutus naturally criminalises the whole Hutu ethnic group. The Hutu women are described as the ones who provided information on the whereabouts of the Tutsi. Here, the Hutu population has been painted as bestial,

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and this had the effect of justifying Kagame’s actions in destroying genuine Hutu opposition to his rule under the slogan ‘Never Again’ (The Economist, February 2007). Mamdani further absolves himself from differentiating between the Hutu who killed the Tutsi and the Hutu who protected them. The entire Hutu population is thus criminalised. When, in the conclusion to When Victims become Killers, entitled ‘Political Reform after Genocide’, Mamdani uses the word ‘reform’ rather than ‘dictatorship’ (Reyntjens 2005: 15), the triumph of the victors’ justice has been affirmed and condoned. This despite casual protestations registered by Mamdani when he writes that the ‘Tutsification of state institutions cannot be an effective guarantee against a repeat of the genocidal violence in Rwandan society’ (Mamdani 2001: 272). Another issue not discussed by Mamdani is the way in which the Tutsi elites have ‘ethnicised’ their quest to retain power in ways that will forever disenfranchise the Hutu majority. He correctly observes that the Hutu revolution of 1959 has historical legitimacy although it is historically limited in its racialisation of socio-economic power relations. It thus identifies the Tutsi with rich foreigners. Unfortunately this insight is not used to shed light on post-genocide Tutsi politics. Mamdani describes the Tutsi as a singularly victimised ethnic group. There is also insufficient differentiation between the ruling Tutsi elites associated with Kagame and those Tutsi who were victims. The other major problem of When Victims become Killers is its imposed premise that the upheaval in Rwanda ultimately boils down to a ‘crisis of citizenship in postcolonial Africa’ (Mamdani 2001: 39). He fails to see that multi-ethnic groups living side by side in Africa do not, as such, pose a problem. Nor does Mamdani address the issue of the way resources are allocated, or perceived to be allocated, in postcolonial Africa. Citizenship, even among migrant communities, is not in itself at the core of dissent, and even less so in contexts where people are of the same ethnic group, of similar descent, birth, or have been naturalised. Who can convincingly argue that the problem in postcolonial Zimbabwe is about citizenship? The disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands in the 1980s were more about an ideological difference than the natality and birth-rights of Zimbabwean citizens. The crisis revolved around bad governance and unequal resource allocation. The artificialisation of African problems manifests in When Victims become Killers at the point when Mamdani suggests that citizenship is implicated in contexts where people are described as alien and foreigners, for instance. This is not convincing because even those who claim to be indigenes have come from somewhere. When Victims become Killers is an important book not so much because of what it says about the Hutu, but judged by what it does not say about the elite politics that define the Tutsi power play. Mamdani offers the Tutsi the moral high ground on which present and future misrule cannot and should not be raised. He supports the conquest of a majority by a minority. If ‘victor’s justice’ is Tutsi elite rule, it follows that ‘survivor’s justice’ is also Tutsi

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rule, since the ‘survivor is a Tutsi who had been in the country at the time of the genocide and who is alive today’ (Mamdani 2001: 267). Mamdani’s misunderstanding of postcolonial ‘justices’ in Rwanda effectively brackets the majority of Hutu and reveals how these people are prevented from playing a significant role in the country’s socio-political developments after 1994. This has important implications for the realignment of political power in postgenocide Rwanda, because as Mamdani himself is forced to concede, the assumption is that every Hutu who opposed the genocide was killed. The flip side of this assumption is that every living Hutu was either an active participant or a passive onlooker in the genocide. The dilemma is that to be Hutu in contemporary Rwanda is to be presumed a perpetrator. (Mamdani 2001: 267)

If the success of When Victims become Killers has been to popularise the concept of the ‘minority’ as always being weak and vulnerable, Mamdani fares far worse when he ventures into theorising the genocide in Darfur, in Western Sudan.

Mamdani: The Darfur Essays and Theoretical Adventurism Mamdani continues to write on genocide in Africa. His latest works in this field are the essays ‘How can we Name the Darfur Crisis?’ (2005); ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’ that appeared in the London Review of Books and a riposte to his critics, in the ‘Letters’ section in the London Review of Books of 26 April 2007 entitled ‘The Politics of Naming’. Mamdani’s views in the first article are given more flesh and content in his second and third essays so it is appropriate to concentrate on these Mamdani commentaries on Darfur. If When Victims become Killers presents an awesome certainty that Hutus are killers and Tutsis are Africa’s children of Sisyphus, when it comes to the Darfur killing Mamdani refuses to name it ‘genocide’. Against all the evidence that more than 200, 000 people were killed in Darfur, he writes that what is happening in Darfur is a ‘possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality’ (2007: 4). He rejects the reality that an Arab militia is set against other Africans killing women and children and causing massive displacement. Mamdani defies all logic when he says that the problem of Darfur is not racial: ‘The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counterinsurgency and an organised insurgency’ (Mamdani 2007: 1). For Mamdani, what matters is that the Khartoum government is sponsoring both the Janjaweed militia and some African forces to fight each other. It does not bother him that the government of Khartoum first arms its own population to fight each other and second drops napalm on the Africans who are fighting against the Janjaweed in western Sudan. Mamdani makes another mistaken assumption when he claims that the Janjaweed and the Africans fighting each other are militarily on a par. This is the basis upon which he calls what is happening in Darfur a civil war. Even if they were on par,

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it is hard to imagine how Mamdani sees nothing wrong with a country at war with itself. In order to incriminate the Africans who are resisting annihilation in Darfur, he insists that the Africans are equally aggressive and violent towards their tormentors. He is worried that the genocide in Darfur has been reduced to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of military intervention. (Mamdani 2007: 3)

This is a fallacious argument because in When Victims become Killers, we saw that the Hutu are painted as demonic killers, and the Tutsis as hapless victims. The same logic is not used when describing what is happening in Darfur. This suggests two possibilities: First, that Africans are considered beasts or at most are blood-thirsty. Second, Arab blood is considered so superior that it is unthinkable for Mamdani to imagine that such blood should be spilt by black people fighting in defence of their right to exist in Sudan. He attempts to dismiss the liberation struggle of the African Darfurians in just the same way that he suggests that in Africa, black nationalism is responsible for genocide. In his reportage on the genocide in Darfur, Mamdani claims that the media has sensationalised what still contains the possibility of genocide. His essays seek to urge the reader to go on a fact-finding mission of what is happening in Darfur, and yet in the process, he tells the people what facts they should find. He insists: newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in the gruesome details and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology [‘race’] and if not that, certainly in ‘culture.’ This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer. (Mamdani 2007: 4)

It is worth noting that detailing the gory facts in western Sudan is exactly the kind of information that Mamdani gives without qualms in his study of Rwanda. He appears to be worried that if the same description of violence is made about western Sudan it would incriminate the Khartoum government. It would also incriminate the Arab world, because very few, if any, of its countries or citizens have not publicly condemned Khartoum for arming the Janjaweed. Detailing the gruesome acts of violence on black people in Darfur will create a pan-black sentiment that may work against Arab interests in Africa. Furthermore, sketching a ‘pornography of violence’ performed by the Arabs in western Sudan on the black people may revive negative historical Arab-African

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relations that have existed since the time of the trans-Saharan slave trade. As Kwesi Kwaa Prah argues, critics and academics such as Mamdani, ‘have tended to be rather squeamish about articulating their misgivings, doubts and objections about Afro-Arab relations on the continent. There even tends to be silence about the history of Arab-led slavery on this continent’ (Prah 2006: 127). Our own ideological stance is that the lives of both Arabs and Africans living in Darfur are precious and they deserve respect and the right to life. This is further enshrined in the principle of self-determination for which the Africans in Sudan are struggling. But we stress that there is a difference between this and the government-armed Arabs attacking the Africans who are fighting enforced Arabisation. Mamdani cannot silence the African people on the Darfur crisis. In fact, he conflagrates the cultural categories of Arab, Islam and Muslim. In so doing he racialises ethnicity: … many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army. Second … the various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). (Mamdani 2007: 8)

Mamdani incorrectly argues that since some Africans are serving in the Sudanese armies, they should be open to the realities of raw military attack. Also, the mere fact that some black people in Sudan speak Arabic does not make them Arabs. Many Africans in Sudan continue to practise their indigenous religions that are fused with Islam. That does not make them Arabs. As Prah (2006: 128) argues, ‘Islam does not culturally denationalise people and turn them into Arabs’. Mamdani’s theoretical argument on the genocide in Darfur has been further questioned by critics who have written on Darfur. Prunier argues that Mamdani misses the point when he compares Darfur with Iraq. For Prunier, the ‘counter-insurgency in Iraq is organised by a foreign power and is the result of foreign occupation while the counter-insurgency in Darfur is organised by the national government and has no foreign cause’ (Prunier 2007: 1). Coleman suggests that for Mamdani to ‘describe the situation in Darfur as a “civil war” instead of “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” implies that some kind of parity of force is shared between the government forces and the rebels. No such parity exists, and never has’ (2007: 4–5). Prah argues that ‘Mamdani indulges in technicist sophistry, tiptoeing nimbly around the real issues in Darfur and effectively providing solace to the Khartoum regime’ (2007: 1). Vehnämäki suggests that in Darfur a ruling-ethnic group overseeing the massacre of members of an African ethnic group is committing the crime of genocide. This is so because ‘Ethnicity per se does not sponsor genocides’ (2006: 59), but economic inequalities have spurred genocide in Darfur. Johnson has convincingly argued that the architects of the Darfur genocide are larger than individual leaders whose political whims can only be explained by

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narrow interests such as the preservation of Arab-hood at the expense of African lives. He writes that genocide in Darfur is also rape of African women and forceful take over of their land by the militia comprising of the Arab-dominated Janjaweed which is supported by the Khartoum government: But slavery is also a policy of terror, aimed directly at non-combatants, designed to make them flee their territory… As the main targets of slavery abductions are women and children, it is specifically destructive of Dinka families. This, too, is in keeping with the assimilation project also reported in the Nuba Mountains: Dinka children reared as Muslims and given Arab names cease to be Dinka; Dinka women raped by their captors give birth to children claimed by Arab lineages. (Johnson 2003: 159)

Why does Mamdani continue to question that genocide is taking place in Darfur? There are no easy answers because, as Prah notes, this is conducted in the ‘passive mood’ (Prah 2007: 3).

Mamdani’s Response to his Critics on the Darfur Genocide Mamdani’s response to his critics on the Darfur crisis confirms his inadequate understanding of the cause, course and consequences of the genocide being perpetrated on Africans by Arabs in Sudan. He writes that in contexts of genocide, the principle that should prevail is that ‘…whoever is in power is responsible for what happens on his watch’ (Mamdani 2007: 4). This is what critics are saying to Khartoum – that it should be able to rein in the Janjaweed; stop arming them; and also stop bombing Africans who are fighting for self-determination. And yet, Mamdani insists that in the event that Khartoum fails to do so, there is no need for other countries to intervene in Khartoum. When he proposes that the AU is the legitimate body that can intervene in Darfur, he says so with the full knowledge that the AU on its own does not have the capacity to change the balance of power in Sudan in any meaningful way (Lederer 2007). Mamdani attempts to portray those who might want to intervene in Khartoum by implying that this would lead to the disintegration of Sudan in the fashion of Yugoslavia and would kindle a deadly cycle of civil war. What Mamdani misses is that in the context of genocide which is taking place in Darfur, there is an ethical dimension and philosophical responsibility that ‘respect for national sovereignty should not prevent [intervention and] the prosecution of political and military leaders who are guilty of war crimes or of crimes against humanity, especially genocide’ (Gaita 2005: 153). Mamdani surprisingly suggests that those who are saying there is genocide in Darfur are alarmists; in his estimation the number of deaths there is what he describes as a ‘low of “at least” 200,000 … while the Save Darfur Coalition’s figure is 400 000’. Further, Mamdani compares the statistics with the dead in Iraq: ‘The figures given for Iraq range between a low of 150,000 proposed by Iraq’s health minister, and a high of 655,000 proposed by the Lancet.’ (Mamdani 2007:

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4). We are at a loss to understand the basis of Mamdani’s comparisons. It is pertinent to say that Mamdani, mistakenly believes that ‘there must always be murder if there is to be genocide’ (Gaita 2005: 159) and that the numbers of the dead must soar to millions before the carnage is pronounced to be genocide. This enables the Khartoum government to escape accounting for its actions in Darfur. Mamdani has a limited understanding of the ‘epistemic conditions for genocide’ (Eze 2005: 115) because he implies that the Darfur crisis is a product of the ageold problem of ethnicity in Africa. He asks himself why ‘most political violence in postcolonial Africa seems to be organised along ethnic lines’ and proceeds to answer himself that this ‘has to do with the politicisation of culture in the African colonies’ (Mamdani 2007: 4). He then traces this ostensible problem to the indirect rule under colonialism. There are several conceptual problems inherent in an explanation that pins all the misfortunes of Africa on the effects of colonisation on ethnicity. By doing this, Mamdani peddles the pernicious myth that culture was never politicised in precolonial African society. To the extent that culture is a carrier of peoples’ images in their past and present struggles, culture is already politicised. Further, and as we argued above, ethnicity is both a consequence and a potential cause of genocide particularly in historical/political contexts where there are contestations over unequal allocation and control of resources. But as Eze (2005) convincingly argues, the epistemic conditions for genocide go beyond a single factor. In the killing of Africans in Darfur, the epistemic conditions include the active presence of the supremacist ideology perpetrated by the Khartoum government; the authority to perpetrate a genocide that the government possesses when it arms the Janjaweed militias; and the shared intention to annihilate Africans who have rejected assimilation into the ideology of Arabism promoted by the Khartoum government. Mamdani’s conviction that ‘genocide requires the involvement of ordinary men and women’ (Mamdani 2007: 4) is in fact a generalisation that is historically contestable. The genocidal wars instigated by the French in Algeria, and the German annihilation of the Herero in Namibia were carried out by colonial authorities. There is no extant evidence to suggest that the ordinary men and women of these countries ever acceded to the killing of Africans. Similarly, in postcolonial Africa ethnically motivated wars such as the one that took place in Zimbabwe in Matabeleland in the 1980s and among the Ndebele were not supported by the indigenous people. Mamdani’s theories misrepresent the complexities of genocide in Africa. It is for these reasons that we propose below a tentative historico-dialectical approach to the understanding of epistemic conditions for genocide and its prevention in Africa.

Towards a Historico-Dialectical Approach to the Understanding of Genocide in Africa How then should we make sense of genocide in Africa and create a theoretical framework to understand the epistemic conditions for preventing genocide in

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Africa? As we write, Kenya is gripped in the 2007 post-electoral violence in which hundreds of lives have been lost, murdered in the fashion of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. More than 500,000 people have been internally displaced. Hunger is rife. This mayhem in Kenya occasioned by electoral fraud contradicts the picture painted by the African Union and the West earlier in 2007 that Kenya had passed the ‘rigours’ of the African Peer Review System. To introduce a robust understanding of the epistemic conditions of genocide in Africa and how to prevent it, we can turn to Fanon (1963). He has argued that we should begin with an understanding of the realities of Africa. These realities, if they are not to be abstracted, have to be rooted in the historical experience of Africa. Cabral (1966) tells as that the history of Africa has revealed to us an insight that precolonial Africa was less cohesive than it has been portrayed. To recognise this allows us to understand how, during the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic slave trade, genocide was accentuated by foreign powers. This structure of domination of Africans was the basis of authoritarian colonial politics in Africa. Coercion of Africans by colonialism sometimes led to genocide. These negative tendencies are today reproduced by Africa’s elites who recreate new conditions for genocide. Thus the genealogy of genocide in Africa can be traced on a linear continuum from slavery, through colonialism – whether by direct or indirect rule – to postcolonial elite politics. This is one aspect of a historico-dialectical framework towards developing a new theory of the aetiology of genocide in Africa. The linearity of this historico-dialectic continuum from slavery to neo-colonialism should however be complicated and radically disturbed without rejecting it. The epistemic conditions for a new understanding of genocide must discard explanations that are solely linked to ‘tribal’ politics without suggesting that these politics cannot and have not been manipulated by the elites to intensify genocide. Another aspect required for an understanding of genocide ought to acknowledge that genocide is preventable (African Union 2000). Once this is acknowledged, we can then shift from a position of ‘historicism’, that sees only systems, towards historicity, that acknowledges the instrumentality of people’s ideas in fomenting the seeds of genocide. When human beings and their numerous conflicting motives for genocide are re-cycled and identified as the proliferater of it, we can then introduce the concept of human respect for human rights as an element of human agency. This process has been left to chance in Africa; there are no strong continental institutions to prevent the occurrence of genocide. The reasons for paying attention to human agency in situations for preventing genocide are numerous. People do not just wake up being killed or participating in the killing of their neighbours. There are ideologies such as racialised ethnic identities or ethnicised racial identities that are triggered in order to divide people in the preamble to genocide. Moreover, institutions such as the African Union need to be reformed so that the membership is based on meeting agreed criteria that respect human life. A

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radically reformed AU should depend on member states’ resources to carry out its mandate. South Africa’s confusing disinterest in the AU and its programmes has undermined it. In 2007 South Africa’s contribution to the African Union fiscus was 8.25 per cent, the same as that of Libya, Egypt, Algeria and Nigeria. And yet South Africa’s voice in the day-to-day running of programmes at the AU is miniscule. South Africa’s New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) is not taken seriously at the African Union. Nigeria could have provided the kind of ideological leverage so lacking in South Africa’s contribution at the AU. But the ambiguity of conduct and greed of Nigeria’s politicians have made it impossible for African countries to make a robust contribution. Furthermore, the patronage that the AU enjoys from Western powers has impoverished the options of the African Union when it comes to resolving conflicts in African countries. The leadership of the AU lacks initiative; they are timid when facing African problems – as demonstrated by the late arrival of the AU chairperson in Kenya after the 2007 post-electoral disturbances that caused such widespread suffering. The AU leadership still entertains the notion of a (non-existent) ‘international community’ to act in Africa. The question is how to reconstitute the African Union effectively so that it is able it to prevent genocide in Africa in the future and not have to act ex post facto, as did the OAU in the case of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. We can only suggest that: ● African countries sign up on a code of conduct relating to genocide, highlighting the importance of intervention. This means sovereignty should not come first in considering intervention. ● A standing military force, paid for by all African countries, that can be deployed in genocidal contexts. ● Sanctions on genocidal states and their governments should be enforced. ● Civic education among Africa’s populations on the dangers of genocide should be instituted. ● Those leaders who have committed genocide on their populations must be punished. This would break the culture of impunity among African leaders. ● There should be (minimal) co-operation with the United Nations to intervene in crisis countries in Africa. ● Bystander states within Africa’s five regional centres should be penalised for not intervening when their action could have made a positive difference. ● The institutions that should be responsive to situations created by genocides should be strengthened by ensuring that African countries accept peer-review. Furthermore, creating a historico-dialectical approach to genocide in Africa must become a purposive and conscious interpretation of what is happening in a country, be it at peace or moving towards genocide. This means that epistemic conditions for creating a genocide-free Africa should also rest with African people

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who should refuse to bend to racist and elitist politics. Such an epistemology is ‘barely begun and much needed’ (Eze 2005: 126). Africa needs a new philosophical framework of working with its people without resorting to violence. This is not an impossibility. If it took Russia, Europe and the US to stop Hitler in his murderous campaign, African countries should stand up against genocide. It is in this context that African scholars can benefit from the theoretical works of the Jewish Holocaust – without dissolving the African experience into the Holocaust paradigm. If it has become criminal to deny the Holocaust, similar charges should be upheld against those who deny that genocide took place under conditions of slavery, colonialism and in postcolonial Africa.

Conclusion The aim of this essay was to highlight the dangers of racialising ethnic identities and ethnicising racial identities in the understanding of the term genocide and its application to Africa. We argue that this problem has its roots in the limited use of the term genocide. We also suggest that conflating or taking the Jewish Holocaust as completely paradigmatic of African genocide creates a false impression. It undermines an understanding of the peculiarity of the epistemic conditions for genocide and its prevention in Africa. We propose that the problem should be traced to slavery, colonialism and postcolonial elitist politics and urge African states not to depend on the international community. The myth of international community creates a dependency syndrome in Africa’s security matters, similar to the economic dependency of African economies on Western countries. The major weakness of extant theories on African genocide is their tendency to rely on the phenomenon of historical exceptionalism – a philosophical condition in which there is selective application of some aspects of a theory of genocide in some African contexts, and not in others. Mamdani’s work on genocide in Rwanda and Darfur is heir to and has inherited this particular problem. The consequence of this theoretical slippage is that there is in Mamdani’s work an extreme subjectivity that narrows an understanding of genocide in Africa. When theories of genocide are imposed on Africa without due regard to the nuances of the African experience, then an understanding of the peculiar nature of genocide in African countries is forfeited. It is significant that Mamdani has reminded us of the problems associated with ethnicity in Africa. Unfortunately, as we have shown, Mamdani has not been clear in his understanding of the dynamics of ethnicity, indigeneity and the rights of African people. Part of the problem is that he has not moved away from the paradigm that explains the misfortunes of Africa in terms of tribalism. Mamdani has argued that the government of Sudan trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjaweed – that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. After conceding this, Mamdani makes a volte- face and argues that ‘genocidal intent appears to be missing’ in Sudan. To suggest that there is no genocidal intent in Darfur is exactly what the Khartoum government

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wants to hear. Mamdani does not understand that genocide is not merely an event; indeed it is rarely simply so. It is, more significantly, a process. Genocide is always a consequence of an approach to warfare (Prah 2007). In Darfur, genocide openly takes on a racial dimension when the Khartoum government actively supports the Janjaweed in the murder of Africans, some of whom are Muslim and others not. Mamdani’s understanding of the Darfur crisis fudges the issues. He argues that the Africans who are dying are Arabs, and that their religion is that of Muslim, just as that of their killers. But the question is not that Africans are Arabs; it is that they are being killed. Mamdani misses the point that the African community has a humanistic obligation to intervene in any country, should the leaders of that country massacre their own people.

Endnotes 1. A full electronic version of Zegeye’s response can be found on the Africa Union website, www.africaunion.org. See, A. Zegeye, Response to Mamdani, M., ‘Beyond Settler and Native as a Political Identity: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism’, First conference of intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora, Dakar 6-9 October, 2004.

CHAPTER FIVE

African Indigenous Knowledge Systems

In this chapter, we seek to explore the theoretical underpinnings of the discourse on African indigenous knowledge systems using insights from subaltern studies, notions of indigenism, and the concept of insurgent memory. The question we ask is why African critiques of modernities invoke a discourse of African/black particularity that is honed on the assumption of stable African indigenous knowledge systems. Fanon (1963: 169) and Gilroy (1993) suggest that the invocation of tradition is itself a distinct, although covert response to the destabilising flux of colonial modernity. This explanation credits colonialism with dynamising the assumed ‘static’ African indigenous knowledge systems. In contrast, Said (1994: 1) believes that what animates appeals to traditions and indigenous African knowledge systems ‘is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms’. He suggests that the process to recover the past necessarily produces multiple African traditions and indigenous institutions, a fact that renders impossible the desire to recuperate whole, totalised and authentic notions of identities, because any act of recovery implies re-ordering of knowledge. This means that one cannot return to the original state of African identities. Chiwome looks into the internal dynamics of African indigenous knowledge systems and suggests that every culture has the capacity to renew itself through the inventiveness of its people in their unique ecologies and through interaction with other social systems. He argues that discourses on African indigenous knowledge systems inscript themselves using the language of absolute and even ethnic particularity because Africa needs to evolve its own language of development. It ‘cannot fully develop on the basis of borrowed intellectual, technological and financial resources [or through the] … generosity of donors’. He continues: When knowledge and technology are imported, the system in which they were operating in the country of origin also gets reflected and even recreated … this dependency on outside initiatives has resulted in the weakening of the survival strategies of African communities. (Chiwome 2000: vi) 52

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For Chiwome (2000) and Mammo (1999) what appears as the language of African/ black particularity in the discourses that describe African indigenous knowledge systems is a meta-effort on the part of Africa to name and globalise the values that her people generate from local African perspectives. Cabral (1970) puts a premium on the role of African culture in sustaining African knowledge systems. He even argues that in building sustainable communities and reviving African peoples’ institutions the question of the return to the source does not arise for the masses because their culture remains intact even after years of consistent assault by colonialism. However, Leo Ching departs from an emphasis on the residual language of authenticity that essentialises the global, regional, indigenous and imported, when he argues that these categories are not as neat as they appear. He suggests that the constitutive relationship between globalisation and regionalisation is a ‘constructed discursivity that is both spatialized in its transnational deterritorialization and yet reterritorialized in a specific configuration bounded by historically invented geography’ (Ching 2001: 284). Signe Howell argues in much the same vein. He claims that when confronted with some form of ‘alien knowledge’ indigenous institutions anywhere in the world will ‘appropriate it and use it according to local perceptions’ (Howell 1995: 165). Paul Gilroy (1993: 48) introduces the notion that the indigenous cultural institutions of the Black Atlantic and African populations ‘exist partly inside and [are] not always against the grand narrative of [Western] enlightenment and its operational principles’. He emphasises that African and African-American indigenous knowledge systems and the institutions that they have developed have a historical relationship in which ‘dependency and antagonism’ are closely associated. We argue that the discourses on African indigenous knowledge systems are inscribed in notions of African/black particularity, partly as a defensive measure against encroaching modernity. We also point out that African knowledge systems are the cultural expressions of the local that is not only in and of the global, but that it is the African globality from which Africa as subject can authorise views of itself, whether these views are taken seriously outside the continent or not. Indigenous knowledge systems provide examples that show the complex articulations of African realities.

African Knowledge Systems in Western Thought and the Academe Cheikh Anta Diop (1974) was one of the earliest Africans to voice concern over the absence of African cultural productions that carried indigenous knowledge systems within the newly created African academe. He asked what Africans were being taught in schools and universities. Were they being taught African indigenous knowledge systems or the history of European knowledge systems in Africa? Fundamental to that question was the observation that the category of

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‘knowledge’ as a constructed and constituted discipline at European universities recorded Europe’s memories as ‘archaeology of knowledge’ (Foucault 1972). Within Western thought and academe, most African indigenous knowledge systems have been desecrated and pejoratively described as superstition. Africa has been called the granary of ignorance, and a ‘dark continent’ without its own history, culture, and self-defining memories (Achebe 1988). The characterisation of African memory as non-knowledge gave Europe the impetus to represent Africa as primordial space – vast, empty, and naked – a blank slate on which Europe could inscribe herself and could re-order at will. European history, sociology, anthropology and ethnology were all implicated in attempting to smooth over and erase African cultural memories. Conventional European history written by Europeans for Europeans initially denied that African memory/knowledge existed at all (Ahluwalia and Zegeye 2003: 1). When the idea of simply denying the existence of African cultural history and knowledge systems became untenable in Europe, Western academe worked hard to appropriate and dislocate African identities and embedded memories through funding disciplines such as anthropology to study Africa. In the 1970s the continent experienced an upsurge of European interest in its oral culture and memory. Unsuspecting African scholars, including those who consciously colluded with Europe in downgrading African cultural achievements, received substantial funding from various European organisations to go to Africa to promote a discourse that immobilised African memories in the deep-freeze of the past, described as ‘traditional African societies’. The infiltration of African culture memory by European imperial academe and its subsequent dissociation was encouraged by the production and promotion of a vocabulary that described Africa as ontologically oral, and European thought systems as inherently rationalistic and based on written sources (Julien 1997). The fetishisation of the written word created the impression that all that was unwritten or unwritable in Africa constituted non-knowledge. After grudgingly conceding that Africa had a viable history embedded in her memory, European scholars privileged certain African oral forms such as myths and epics over others such as popular songs, proverbs, and spirit possession (Finnegan 1970). The fact that Africa is not homogeneous was summarily obliterated. The reality that indigenous knowledge systems and African memories reside at different places and are realised through different oral forms that are not accorded the same significance within the African society, was deliberately ignored. This refusal to see potential aporias, hiatuses, and amnesias within the African memory as a cultural construct or production, afforded Europe the malignant power to construct Africa as a space of exotica. This has perpetrated the ideology of ‘authenticity’ and ‘purity’ of African memory that today prevents some African scholars from looking critically at their own productions of cultural memory as the basis for African knowledge. The myth of African memory as ‘pure’ and authentic further encouraged Europeans working with their African allies in Africa to preserve and conserve obscurantist practices. In the long-term some European

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scholars colluded with African scholars resident in Africa to define and shape some burnt portions of African memory. The resultant discourse of the aboriginality of African cultural memory has become an instance of what Gareth Griffiths describes as ‘liberal’ discursive violence, parallel in many ways to the inscription of the ‘native [indigene] under the sign of the savage’ (Griffiths 1994: 71). Indigenous cultural productions and institutions in whose forms ordinary people’s memories were embedded, were marginalised and dismissed as superstition. Song, dance, spirit possession, myths, legends, theatre, folktales, sculpture, proverbs, rituals, shrines, architecture, dress, food, beads, and African cloth were constructed and projected as the products of an ‘underdeveloped spirit’ (Hegel 1944: 93–94). The empiricism of the social science paradigm became the handmaid of Europe’s imperial motives in Africa, especially as it devalued African models of knowing. The unfortunate result for indigenous African cultural institutions and knowledge systems was that a greater part of the Africans’ lived experience, embedded in unwritten sites of memory, subterranean selfhoods and new intellectual spaces of liberation, was suppressed.

Subaltern Studies and the Production of South Asian/African Knowledge Systems Theoretically speaking, in the 1980s the dominant political energies and intellectual movement that challenged Eurocentric views on Asian and African knowledge systems was provided by the subaltern studies group, with Ranarjit Guha as its pontiff. Partly influenced by Edward Said’s orientalism, subaltern studies sought to expose the harmful intellectual processes by which the peoples of the third world were constructed as objects and subjects of knowledge in European disciplines of history, sociology, literature, and science. Guha, the editor of the subaltern studies project, described the aim of this new historiography as motivated by a desire to rewrite the history of colonialism from ‘the distinct and separate point of view of the masses, using unconventional or neglected sources in popular memory, oral discourse and previously unexamined colonial administrative documents’ (Guha and Spivak 1988: vi). Armed with the powerful voices of the masses, orature and cultural memory were not severely dislocated by the colonial system. Guha also believed that the history of the under classes could be retrieved from the primary sources written by colonial ‘bureaucrats, soldiers, sleuths, planters, missionaries, traders, technicians, and landlords’ and that the recovery of the voices of the subaltern was ‘contingent upon colonial reasons’. He also suggested that the subaltern resistance could also be retrieved from ‘bourgeois-nationalist historiography’ (Guha 1988: 47, 82) In his search for alternative sites of memory and South Asian indigenous knowledge systems, Guha ‘directed’ research by subaltern studies historians to focus on Indian mythology, diasporan oral narratives, and real peasant testimonies on oppression and to demonstrate that the textual paradigm was not the only valid source of knowledge.

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The complexity of Ranajit Guha’s thoughts on the subject of how the subalterns could create indigenous Asian systems of knowledge cannot be underestimated. He pointed out that there were challenges that subaltern studies had to confront and overcome in theorising the historical agency of Asian under classes in their respective societies. In his 1988 article, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, Guha noted that in their desire to explicate the resistance to domination in the lives of ordinary people, some historians of subaltern studies were ‘blinded by the glare of a perfect and immaculate consciousness … [and saw] nothing, for instance but solidarity in the rebel behavior’, being blind to its other facets, ‘namely, betrayal’ (Guha 1988: 84). Here, Guha was warning his fellow researchers not to romanticise the agency of the Asian under classes. He was also consciously or unconsciously questioning the original theoretical bedrock of the subaltern studies project whose initial impulse was to search only those moments when the masses erupt into the visible forms of organised rebellion and resistance. Ranajit Guha must be credited for introducing scholarship on indigenous knowledge systems in South Asian historiography, a perspective that sought to interrogate Western ways of defining rationality. He clearly saw that a ‘committed inflexibility to the notion of insurgency … underestimates the power of the brakes put upon it by localism and territoriality’ (Guha 1988: 84). He insisted on acknowledging potential conflicts in the values undergirded by the very Asian indigenous systems that his project sought to recover. He was also aware that reactionary ideologies of ethnicity, tribalism and elitism could derail the aims of the political nationalist movement underpinned by the theoretical goals of the subaltern studies project. In these insights that Guha’s project brought to the fore of the global knowledge economies, we would agree with Dipesh Chakrabarty (1994), who argues that under Guha’s guidance the initial impetus of the subaltern studies project to some extent subverted Europe’s project of modernity. The challenge that the subaltern studies project posed for the Western academe actually caused an ideological reorientation in the terms by which the debates on the historical agency of the poor in society would be carried out in South Asia as well as in Africa and Europe. The subaltern studies project thus opened up intellectual spaces and new horizons of freedom through their own cultural grids of legends, religion, culture, song and third world spiritualities. It is however possible to isolate some theoretical issues that Guha’s subaltern studies project could not adequately explain. For example, his insistence on recuperating instances of subaltern resistance from colonial documents begs several questions. It is true that colonial documents could provide information on rebellion by the Indian masses, but an over-reliance on such sources underestimates the extent to which the Indian subaltern’s forms of resistance were construed. Furthermore it is not inconceivable that such documents might have misrepresented the facts in an effort to contain the rebellions. Colonial anthropology and its definitions of Asian and African studies were certainly developed as part of an orientalising project ‘with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines

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and even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles’ (Said 1978: 2). These arsenals of representing the subalterns were designed to dominate, restructure and have authority over South Asians by ‘making statements about [them], authorizing views over [them] by describing, teaching, settling, and ruling them’ (Said 1978: 3). Put differently, the very colonial sources from which Guha exhumes subaltern insurgency were the basis of colonial notions of customary law and other related ideologies of indigenous purity in South Asia. They enabled native commissioners to claim to know the native, and control him. Guha’s poetics of resistance also relies on a notion of counter-insurgency that elevates visible and organised military resistance as if these were the only ways through which the Indian subalterns exercised their political initiative. The reality, as Frederick Cooper points out, is that rural peasants where not at all times contesting British domination. The subaltern, as Ranger (1985) has shown in his discussion of the ‘peasant option’ in Rhodesia, and as Cooper (2003: 33) also suggests, developed ‘complex strategies of coping, of seizing niches within changing economies, of multi-sided engagement with forces inside and outside the community’. These initiatives by the subalterns cannot be narrowed down into a single framework that emphasises military resistance. There is also a residual duality that is implied in the term ‘subaltern’ as it is applied in Guha’s subaltern studies where it is conceived to be necessarily opposed to the dominant colonial sensibilities. The point is that some members of the subaltern studies group have begun to revise the notion of subalternity itself. This is the case with Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002) and Gayatri Spivak (1998). One wonders whether their re-conceptualisation of the notion of subaltern studies would, by Guha’s standards, not be considered as dissident. An article by Gautam Bhadra focuses on the physical resistance the author describes as having been carried out by ‘four rebel Eighteen-Fifty-Seven’ (Gautam 1988: 75). The conception of resistance to refer to a battle fought on some physical space actually narrows our understanding of the politics of resistance. In the words of Frederick Cooper, the binaries of colonizer/colonized, western/non-western and domination/ resistance begin as useful devices for opening up questions of power but end up constraining the search for precise ways in which power is deployed and the ways in which power is engaged, contested, deflected and appropriated. (Cooper 2003: 24)

The culture of the subalterns is not as autonomous as Guha suggests. The subalterns will fight those that dominate them from the same political space in which their economic initiatives are constantly being worked out (Bayart 1993). The subalterns do not wish to stay in a state of subalternity, and as suggested by Sarkar (1984: 272), the ‘subaltern category includes exploiters as well as the exploited’. The ‘dissident trend’ of theorists of subaltern studies that depart from Guha’s static notion of the term is debated further in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s provocative title, ‘Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies’ (2002).

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To write of ‘Habitations’ in the plural suggests that Chakrabarty is aware that the subalterns do not occupy uniform physical and ideological spaces at all times. He suggests that too simple a rejection of Western modernities is ‘politically suicidal’ (Chakrabarty in Cooper 2003: 24). Chakrabarty calls for a new definition and understanding of the term subaltern, one which in the words of Frederick Cooper (2003: 24), recognises that ‘African or Indian action might actually alter the boundaries of subordination within a seemingly powerful colonial regime’. Chakrabarty prompts us to begin to think anew how to Imagine another moment of subaltern history, one in which we stay – permanently, not simply as a matter of political tactic – with that which is fragmentary and episodic. Fragmentary not in the sense of fragments that challenge, not only the idea of wholeness, but the very idea of the fragment itself. (Chakrabarty 2002: 34–35)

At a more general level, we can acknowledge that the subaltern studies movement has done much to problematise issues of race, class, and ethnicity among the formerly colonised people of South Asia and Africa. However, when Chakrabarty (1994) asks the question, ‘Who speaks for Indian pasts?’ he is hinting at the problem that the memories of intellectuals of the subaltern studies do not coincide with those of the majority of Indians. The gravid mass of Indians, and by extension Africans, were not affected by British colonialism in the same way as the intellectuals of the subaltern studies group, and as such have potentially different memories of oppression from the intellectuals who drove the subaltern studies group. Today in India, as in Africa, the poor interrogate both colonialism and the subaltern studies group’s construction and representation of their memories. Subaltern studies may have begun as the theoretical elaboration of Asian, and by extension, African knowledge systems and in the process desired to push an agenda of decolonising the minds and the imaginaries of the previously conquered Asians and Africans (Wa Thiong’o 1981). The aim was to produce a contestatory counter-history but subaltern studies ended up elaborating an ‘alternate genealogy’ which according to Kwame Anthony Appiah entraps the language of resistance in a reverse discourse. The limitations of reverse discourse that subaltern studies are steeped in is that The terms of resistance are already given [them], and their [cultural nationalists] contestation is entrapped within the Western cultural conjuncture [they] affect to dispute … Railing against the cultural hegemony of the West, the nativists are of its party without knowing it … In their ideological inscription the cultural nationalists remain in a position of counter-identification … which is to continue to participate in an institutional configuration … one officially decries… (Appiah 1992: 59)

Guha’s formulation of the theoretical premises of the subaltern studies movement’s terms of engagement with Europe as well as the daily realities of South Asian

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societies inadvertently shows a theoretical aspiration to suppress the formation of new identities in the process of consolidating its own intellectual power base. In this sense then, Guha attempts to revise history by not stepping outside the functional paradigm of dominant discourses although some moments of discontinuity with elite discourses have been introduced. In Africa, the quest for a theoretical model for sustainable African indigenous knowledge systems was first carried on the cusp of the idealistic notion of indigenism; later this was partially discarded and reformulated as the politics of insurgent memory.

Representing Indigenism in African Knowledge Systems and Institutions Indigenism, according to Ronald Niezen, is the ideology that recognises the Global nature of indigenous people’s movement and [pays] greater attention to such issues as cultural relativism, collective versus individual rights, and legal/political implications of indeginous people’s claims of self-determination. (Niezen 2003: xi)

In Africa, theoretical debates on the discourse of indigenism originated from and were a response to colonialism. Africans who emphasised indigenous rights and knowledge systems wanted to tell their own stories from their own perspectives; they presented their ‘people’s history of oppression and repression’ (Niezen 2003: 74). However, representing indigenism as a counter political strategy against colonialism generated its own anxieties and was fraught with its own contradictions. Indigeneity emphasises the language of displacement, of land alienation and decline of communities occasioned by colonialism. Then too, indigeneity countered colonialism by generating a vocabulary that emphasised the cultural authenticity of the colonised. For the colonised Africans, knowledge of oppression was constructed around the invasive practices of colonialism. In reality, marginalisation of some Africans also came from within the African communities. Two telling examples of the contradictory construction and representation of indigeneity come from Zimbabwe.

Spirit Possession, Rain-making and the Shona Claims to Land Rights In his anthropological work, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (1985) David Lan tells how the Shona people’s institution of spiritual possession was used by Africans to invoke the power of ancestors to intervene in the national liberation struggle. In the myth of spirit possession, those mortals who are possessed by the Mhondoros, or Shona guardian national spirits, are said to have the power to conjure rain. This Shona myth is extended to suggest, as Lan (1985: 95) writes, that ‘the people whose ancestors bring rain own the land’. This

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story or myth functioned to contest colonial land occupation. It laid claim to a history and alternative modernity that was not written down and which colonialism could not easily infiltrate. But within the African community, the same myth (ironically) could also function as a political coda to silence the Ndebele people and other non-Shona groups on matters of land ownership, because their ancestors are not known or directly linked to the ability to make rain. This myth represents indigenism as a space of double articulation; contesting colonial hegemony on the one hand, but also promoting ethnic discrimination within the constituency of the African people on the other. The myth presents an occasion to deconstruct colonial history that projected the Zimbabwean land as empty and unoccupied at the time of colonisation, a fact that was used to justify the conquest of Zimbabwe by Cecil John Rhodes’ forces. On the other hand, the Shona claim to be the original owners of Zimbabwe promotes the myth of authenticity and purity and invokes the powers of autochthonous Shona ancestors who can then be abused in a manner that excludes other social groups from laying an equal claim to land ownership and use.

Representing Land in Zimbabwean Literature The second telling example of the paradox of theorising African knowledge systems through the political strategy of indigenism is illustrated in the literature. In Solomon Mutswairo’s novel (1983), invoked to solidify Shona claims to the ownership of land the character Pasipamire enters into a trance and begins to recover the genealogy of the Shona people. In this recovery, the Shona people are represented as the original inhabitants of Zimbabwe. Their forefathers are represented in the ritual of possession beginning with Mambire who is the father of Tobela. He in turn is the father of Murenga Sororenzou, who is the father of Chaminuka and Nehanda, who are considered the most immediate ancestors of the present-day Shona people. This genealogy functions to ‘populate’ the spiritual and physical geography of Zimbabwe with Shona ancestors. It is a genealogy that imagines the new Zimbabwe nation through the agencies of founding fathers who are distinctly Shona in origin. As used in Mutswairo’s novel, the spirit possession myth undermines colonial claims to land by suggesting that the Shona ancestors lived in Zimbabwe far back into history, beyond human memory. Historical evidence shows that the Bushmen and the Kalanga people – neither of whom are Shona – are thought to be the original inhabitants of Zimbabwe before the migrations of Bantu-speakers. In Mutswairo’s mythopoesis, there is no place for Ndebele ancestors who came into the country in 1823. In the same mythology, African female ancestors are noted only as a recent phenomenon through the figure of Nehanda. Representing indigenism through anthropology (Lan 1985) and literature (Mutswairo 1983) both show that memory is selective. By the time Mutswairo’s novel appeared the armed struggle was already over and the Shona and Ndebele peoples had recovered the land taken from them by white settlers. It is therefore

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astonishing that the novel still promotes these pernicious forms of imaginative amnesias, whose conscious or unconscious motivation was to exclude other minority social groups such as the Tonga from seeing themselves as legitimate citizens of the new Zimbabwe. What the perspective of indigenism reveals is that even the mentalities of the indigenous African people are to some extent colonially constructed; some of their thinking is geared to the colonial perception of ‘Other’; their thinking discriminates against some of their fellow Africans. In the two examples above, the African knowledge systems of the people discriminated against may never be fully known and be circulated in the public domain as valid knowledge. In other words, theorising African indigenous knowledge systems can essentialise African identities. The difficulty of producing locality is that it is ‘relational and contextual rather than scalar or spatial’. Theoretical and conceptual boundaries of what can pass as African knowledge are also ‘zones of danger requiring special ritual maintenance’ (Appadurai 1995: 204, 205). In the language of ritual, maintenance of indigenism that African cultural nationalism sometimes appropriates, policing the boundaries of collective identities involves excluding, in the imagined polis, the validity of other African people’s knowledge systems. Delimiting what is authentic indigenous knowledge can be tricky and even crippling to the efforts of indigenous people when they appear to speak in a language that emphasises difference rather than acknowledging the significance of diversity. In the wise words of Gareth Griffiths, descriptions of African indigenous knowledge systems that emphasise authentic, and coherent indigenous ‘voices’ can turn reactionary if they fail to recognise that the subaltern voice can be disabled when ‘spoken to by the subject position they occupy within the larger discursive economy’ (Griffiths 1992: 75). In other words, a theoretically idealist notion of representing indigenism can be as damaging to the Africans’ quest for self-knowledge as the colonial claims to superiority. The irony is that the discourse of indigenism simultaneously contests and imitates colonialism’s ways of producing and representing African knowledge systems.

African Indigenous Knowledge Systems as Insurgent Memory The theoretical blind spots of indigenism have in Africa provoked the search for an insurgent memory to locate new sites where African knowledge is elaborated in more open and dialogical forms. Accepting the premise that most of the principles underpinning African nationalisms were derived from European ideas of liberty and emancipation, African insurgent memory appropriated those ideas and used them against Europe. Insurgent nationalism or memory explores African dreams, drumming, song, music, ancestor veneration, spirit mediums, dress, graffiti, grave sites, the Bible, autochthonous legends, and myths of origin, in order to create a counter-discourse of resistance. Within these oral and performance sites African indigenous knowledge systems cannot easily be threatened with obliteration. The oral defers and deflects the authority invested in any utterance so that with each act of oral rendition, new knowledge is being produced in the actual live context

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of enunciation. The authority of memory as flexible cultural production enables Africans who use it to ‘problematise what is true, and establish how and with what evidence a story becomes true’ (White 2000: 33). Two examples of non-material indigenous knowledge systems/institutions are explored below.

Popular Music in Zimbabwe In Rhodesia colonial agents exercised heavy control over newspapers, television and the radio. The Rhodesia Literature Bureau was created in 1953 to monitor the content and new perspectives of knowledge in fiction written by black people. Politically suggestive works were censored. The colonial media as a whole was thus transformed into an institution that sought exercise ideological control over African minds. In this context of repression of the freedom of expression, African people fighting colonialism revisited their cultural space of popular music in order sing about their aspirations for a nation ruled by black people. Artists such as Thomas Mapfumo sang songs that satirised the colonial government, exposing the greed and hypocrisy that characterised colonial modernity. African freedom fighters at the war front also produced new songs that made ordinary people conscious of the ideological direction of the liberation struggle. These songs also gave morale to the fighting men and women and denounced traitors among the African people. The cultural institution of Shona songs as a platform of social criticism is well developed in the Shona tradition of jikinyira and mavingu. Some of the songs that were sung by Thomas Mapfumo and those fighting at the war front are included in Alec Pongweni’s book Songs that Won the Liberation Struggle (1983) which stands as testimony to the capacity of performance genres to be deployed and fulfil positive functions in societies that are in political transition. As an aspect of African knowledge systems, the songs helped Africans recover the identity and dignity that had been trampled upon by colonialism. The songs also helped recreate the history of African nationalism in ways that contradicted the individualism promoted by colonial capitalism in Rhodesia. In other words, the songs were produced as part of the global flows in which African people were naming their historical struggles in ways that approximated their aspirations for an independent Zimbabwe. But the paradox of the songs as knowledge systems was that after 1980, when the country won its independence, most of the artists were co-opted by the new nationalist government and their songs became the new status quo. In this new role, some of the songs, such as ‘Gwindingwi’ by Thomas Mapfumo, vilified those freedom fighters who remained in the bush opposing the new black government. Mapfumo’s song suggested that after the war [a]ny member of the insurgent community who [chose] to continue in such subalternity [was] regarded as hostile towards the inversive process initiated by the struggle and hence as being on the enemy’s side. (Guha and Spivak 1988: 14)

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In other words, nationalist songs such as those sung by Mapfumo in the early 1980s colluded with the new government views that labelled as ‘dissident’ those Africans whose national aspirations did not coincide with the interests of the new elites. Songs that Won the Liberation War remains a monumental work that shows the capacity of African indigenous systems to adapt to new contexts and express new aspirations. But the processes by which the book claims its intellectual space involved the silencing of the dissident voices of the fighters who sang songs criticising the heavy-handedness of the leaders during the war. The paradox of the processes of imagining the new nation in Songs that Won the Liberation War is further underscored by the fact that most of the songs celebrate individual people as heroes, rather than the collective. The lyrical voices captured in the book were authorised and produced exclusively by male singers. This buttresses the view that in some cases the narrative of war and peace explored in the songs is predominantly a male construct. The voices of women who participated in the struggle as fighters and mothers who sang at the night vigils (pungwe) in the forest, are conspicuous by their absence in this book. But this scenario is changing in post-independence Zimbabwe, where new voices such as Leonard Zhakata’s critically expose the corruption of certain government officials. Female voices have also captured some intellectual space to sing their stories, agonies and ideals but the problem is that they still sing in a patriarchal voice. The Zimbabwean female singer, Stella Chiweshe, sings songs that are still framed within the imagery of nationalism that depicts women as only biological mothers while the men are the nation-builders. Nevertheless the institution of popular music/songs in the post-independence era reveals that there is not one national memory but a multiplicity of voices and memories, each attempting to name and imagine the values of the new nation in ways that collide, collude, modify and sometimes even reject the claims of other voices struggling to elaborate through song the realities of the new Zimbabwean polis.

Popular Women’s Rituals in Ethiopia An aspect that must be transcended in the search for new for new sites of African indigenous knowledge systems is the tendency to concentrate on male-dominated forms of knowledge in which women are depicted as objects to be acted upon by historical and spiritual factors. The Ethiopian female-dominated ritual of Erecha provides one compelling practical example where women-centred meanings of being Ethiopian are elaborated. According to Meskerem Assegued, Erecha is essentially ‘an ancient indigenous religious practice … celebrated on the shore of Lake Hora Arsedi, under the shade of a large female sycamore tree’. The devotees of the Erecha ritual myth of creation are women who pay homage and ‘tribute to the water and tree spirits’ (Assegued 2004: 53). The high priestess of the Erecha ceremony is Lomi Deme, a woman who presides over the prayers, worship and ritual sacrifices to the Waka or creator, who resides in the sea water and is manifest through various ayana or spirits.

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To a casual observer, the Erecha ritual can be mistaken for one of those ‘animist’ practices conducted by the ‘backward’ peasants of Ethiopia. But the reality is that it is an institution through which devotees remember their history of oppression and also imagine the possibility of a better life in the future. Commenting on the Erecha, Abebe Zegeye writes that the ritual establishes links ‘between the tree, the lake and the habitat of the ayana, and the Waka, source of the indigenous spiritual life enacted in the ritual myth, [that] preserves the indigenous knowledge of the women of Erecha as environmentalists and conservationists’ (Zegeye 2004: 74). More importantly, the Erecha can be viewed as a spiritual site where African women are able to reassert their authority in a society that traditionally sees women as less important than men. Erecha is the carnival space that for Ethiopian women is transformed into veritable ‘new sites of resistance and identity formation, growth and consolidation’ (Zegeye 2004: 74). The resistance that the Erecha ceremony embodies is directed towards some aspects of Western modernity such as book education in Ethiopia. Bookish knowledge is perceived by some Ethiopians as disruptive of hierarchies of female authorities and a social force that erodes the authentic identity of Ethiopian women. Erecha is, however, perceived by its devotees as life-giving. Within the Erecha, spirit possession is inscribed as orality and as a way of remembering and reconstructing the dismembered identity of Ethiopian women by the forces of Western globality, which include Christianity. It is also instructive that the complexity of the Erecha devotees is such that those African/Ethiopian women who practise the ritual favour a syncretic mode of living which blends the humanistic values of the preservation of human life and the environment with the teachings of Christianity that emphasise sexual abstinence before marriage as well as refraining from any form of crime. The Erecha ritual memory transmits the enduring values of remembering and accessing, preserving, and transmitting knowledge of farming, fishing, cattle rearing, weaving, and self-reliance from one generation to the next. These indigenous knowledge systems have survived despite vigorous campaigns to discredit the Erecha as a form of paganism. The modernity of the Erecha ceremony is such that it is able to be recalled by the women who use it as an interpretive tool to filter developments that encroach on their lives and sometimes pose a threat to the well-being of Ethiopian women. But the irony of the Erecha religious ceremony is that every attempt at preserving its essential values implies reordering its facts, selecting certain aspects from the institution for continuity, while discarding some of the ritual’s characteristics that have outlived their usefulness in modern times. For example, the devotees of Erecha are no longer averse to sending their children to school. In fact despite giving an aura of women as devout traditionalists, and far from their syncretic religion constituting a form of spiritual embarrassment, Erecha devotees use their ritual as a spiritual eyeglass to comprehend the new challenges posed by the forces of Western-oriented modernity. Erecha is therefore not insulated from the disjunctive global cultural flows that shape it and Erecha, in turn, also influences

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these flows. In other words, reconceptualising African indigenous knowledge systems from the sites largely inhabited by women inflects a gendered dimension to African knowledge production. African men then cease to be the only humans who can authorise new forms of indigenous knowledge systems. Ritual myths of origin such as the Erecha do not have embedded knowledge in themselves. They are neither rigidly recreational nor sacred. It is the context of their performance rather than some innate function or form that ultimately determines their class. In other words, oral genres are volatile carriers of indigenous knowledge systems. These indigenous forms of knowledge production include among others, Traditional knowledge; ecological knowledge; medicinal knowledge, including knowledge relating to medicines and remedies; knowledge relating to biodiversity; and traditional cultural expressions in the form of music, dance, song, handcrafts, designs, stories, artwork and elements of languages. (Visser 2004: 207)

The paradox of the indigenous knowledge systems’ existence is that although the bulk of these forms have been generated by popular classes to preserve their history and culture, the same genres have also been appropriated by national elites for whom they constitute a fund of technical and thematic resources for official ‘national’ culture. Theorising about African indigenous knowledge systems has to take into account that there is no aspect of popular culture that is totally free from infiltration by dominant sensibilities. Ironically, sometimes cultural contamination of popular institutions by elite values can generate a new and dynamic institutional basis of indigenous knowledge. That is why Amilcar Cabral (1970) reminds us that in the struggle to forge a national culture, traditional elites and the educated Africans have something that they each bring to the struggle. He not only conceded that in the struggle to create African indigenous systems of knowledge the consciousness of the masses is uneven, he also suggested that African indigenous knowledge systems can actually benefit from positive accretions from the colonising culture. However, Cabral also maintained that cultural implantation of elite values can prevent popular institutions or systems of knowledge from realising their full potential in the production of new forms of local use. African indigenous knowledge systems are not hermetically sealed from external influences whether these influences are helpful or harmful. The debo and shemma indigenous social and economic institutions in Ethiopia bring out the basic ambiguities that define the existence of African knowledge production processes in a world caught in the flux of irreversible change.

Debo and Shemma: Structured Indigenous Knowledge Institutions in Ethiopia In Africa, indigenous knowledge systems also manifest themselves through structured local institutions which ordinary men and women use daily to cope with

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challenges in life. Tirfe Mammo (1999: 173) writes that indigenous knowledge systems in Ethiopia ‘incorporate the use of local institutions and informal economic activities’. Socio-economic institutions such as debo are a form of voluntary collective work associations. The debo’s social function is dependent on drawing collective energies from a community’s cultural fund of collective energies that encourage self-help projects. The debo is thus used to provide the community with skills for farming and knowledge of how to produce and preserve food against drought, which is a persistent threat in Ethiopia. Through the debo Ethiopians also generate low-level technological know-how for use in the broader community. The shemma institution is used by Ethiopian women who specialise in making handcrafts and weaving products; it is a response to the community’s need to be self-sufficient in the production of clothing and the women also produce handmade goods for sale to markets outside the local community, thereby bringing in much needed income to poor families.

Virginity Tests and Indigenous Medical Knowledge Systems in Zimbabwe Paul Gundani (2004) has described how in Zimbabwe traditional chiefs and elders have revived the age-old institution of virginity tests for young girls to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS which is ravaging southern African countries including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana and Swaziland. Gundani writes that virginity tests demonstrate that when a community is threatened with disasters not previously experienced, the community digs into its culture to try to come to terms with the new threat. The institution of virginity tests in the area of Chief Makoni in Manicaland (where Gundani conducted his research) works in the following way. The chief and village elders request girls and young women from the community to voluntarily come forward for virginity testing. Those who are found to be virgins are given certificates in recognition of their purity. It is accepted that the awareness that one is a virgin will generate self-confidence in the girls and make them ‘the subjects and agents of change towards the envisioned new moral and sexual order’. Gundani goes on to explain that the institution of virginity testing is also conceived as an instrument to discourage ‘pre-marital sex, in the hope that HIV/AIDS-free families will be founded’ (Gundani 2004: 101–102). The testing is an example of a community initiative to intervening in contexts where the very core of that community is threatened with extinction. But the validity of the institution has attracted some controversy. Some people suggest that virginity tests stereotype girls and young women as potential carriers of HIV/AIDS because the same tests are not administered to boys. Other critics say that it allows traditional leaders to assert their authority and power over female sexuality (Gundani 2004: 101). Gundani himself concludes by suggesting that the contradictions within the functioning of traditional local institutions harnessed to address new challenges show that African indigenous

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knowledge systems are not static; they are culturally volatile. According to him, virginity tests do work for some communities but the institution is ineffective in combating the threat of HIV/AIDS, especially when the ‘perceived solutions fail to match the complexity of the threat that the society is trying to eradicate’ (Gundani 2004: 105). However, for him the significance of the virginity tests is that they testify to a community willing to engage new threats to the society. In his own words, What seems clear is that when a society is under the onslaught of an external or internal threat, it mobilizes all its cultural resources in varied and sometimes contradictory ways. It is clear that community leaders will utilize the cultural and moral space that is available in order to come up with local solutions to a given threat, without necessarily waiting for guidance from central government. (Gudani 2004: 105)

The recognition of contradictions in the functioning of local African institutions that carry indigenous knowledge systems is indicative of their dynamism. It also reveals how traditional institutions can fail to adapt to new exigencies because the community is equipped with wrong or inadequate tools to deal with new phenomena. More importantly, it reminds us that theorising the agency of local institutions through which African indigenous knowledge responds to social crisis has to reckon with the fact that culture industries that fund, produce and promote discourse of African indigenous knowledge systems have the capacity to modify, distort and even subvert the intended meanings of African memories. As Stuart Hall argues [t]he cultural industries do have the power constantly to rework and reshape what they represent; and by repetition and selection, to impose and implant such definitions [of African memories] as fit more easily the descriptions of the dominant or preferred culture. (Hall 1994: 460)

This instability inherent in African indigenous knowledge systems allows for multiple interpretative points of view and it is here that ordinary folks shatter the myth of a single knowledge economy built around the written word.

The Narrative of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers’ Association (ZINATHA) The story of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers’ Association (ZINATHA) stands as testimony to the capacity of local and age-old traditional institutions to re-invent themselves. ZINATHA is the brainchild of University of Zimbabwe former vice-chancellor, Professor Gordon Chavunduka. He studied community medicine but realised that in post-independence Zimbabwe, community medicine, traditional doctors and herbal healers were not recognised as potential players in the battle against HIV/AIDS. When the pandemic had become an open reality in

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Zimbabwe in the late 1980s, Chavunduka, together with Peter Sibanda and other traditional doctors, formed ZINATHA. This medical institution was intended to fill the gap left by a collapsing government health system to develop and generate knowledge on producing some form of vaccine or antidote to the spread of the virus. The minister of health in the new nationalist government, Timothy Stamps, resisted the registration of ZINATHA. In the 1990s ZINATHA won its court case and was subsequently registered. Today, medicines developed by ZINATHA are patented and made available in pharmacies. They cure or alleviate a range of diseases from heart problems to pneumonia, tuberculosis, coughs, stress and even cancer. Evidence suggests that some of the medicines put on trial achieved symptomatic healing of the mouth ulcers and herpes associated with HIV/AIDS. The story of ZINATHA testifies to the fact that local and indigenous based medical knowledge has been and continues to help patients in the face of the AIDS global pandemic. Despite this convincing evidence some African governments, their leaders and the elites in civic organisations continue to criticise local institutions that attempt to suggest these alternative ways of solving African health problems, insisting that the intrusive and invasive power of Western medicine holds the only key to preventing diseases that plague the continent. The above examples tell the double story of the capacities of African indigenous knowledge systems and institutions to deconstruct the global narrative that projects them as inferior (Wilmer 1993: 201). They also show the ability of the local institutions to borrow technical and sometimes cultural resources from the West in order to confront socio-economic and political challenges in Africa. In other words when we seek to understand the sites, manifestations and workings of African indigenous knowledge there is a need to demonstrate a thorough understanding of how the local is produced and globalised from the perspective of Africa. Arjun Appadurai helps us to understand the politics of the ‘production of locality’ and how this is circulated in the global knowledge economy when he says that [t]he ‘locality’ of local knowledge is not only or even mainly its embeddedness in a non-negotiable here-and-now, nor its stubborn disinterest in things at large … Local knowledge is substantially about producing reliably local subjects as well as about producing reliably local neighbourhoods within which subjects can be recognized and organized. In this sense local knowledge is what it is, not principally by contrast with other knowledges … but by virtue of its teleology and ethos. (Appadurai 1995: 206)

While the local and indigenous knowledge systems are not necessarily and always counterpoised to the global, they at least retain a uniqueness that is ‘recognised’ and validated by those who use them and for whom they bring satisfactory results. Put differently, the local and indigenous knowledge systems are generated from the perspective of certain alternative modernities. Roland Robertson uses the Japanese indigenous concept of ‘glocalisation’ to suggest that even in an African

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context, what is often referred to as the local and indigenous knowledge systems are essentially expressions of the local plus the global together, which make ‘glocal’ knowledge economies. This mode of theoretically reconceptualising African indigenous knowledge systems reverses the notion of a ‘global homogenization versus heterogenization’ (Robertson 1995: 27). Re-thinking African indigenous knowledge systems forces us to recognise that the process of mainstreaming Africa through the restoration of her memory as valuable and another way of knowing and accessing knowledge, presents an occasion for theories as expressed through structured cultural indigenous institutions and non-material knowledge systems such as song, dance and folktales. This reveals an entirely different conception of the means by which cultural and ideological struggles to name, mark and control reality is conducted through these forms (Bennett 1994: 225). African indigenous knowledge systems are thus only ‘authentic’ to the extent that they are articulated in paradoxical ways; the systems claim space to stand outside the global knowledge economy, and yet they create imaginaries from cultural transactions that issue from ‘disjunctive global flows’ (Appadurai 2001: 6). African indigenous knowledge systems are thus neither culturally and intellectually coherent nor wholly distorted by the new ruling classes (Hall 1994: 461). The notion of insurgency within African memory as a cultural production means that African memory is a social construct based on a selection of certain facts and the exclusion of others. This is partly what Fanon (1963) means when he says that memory is a zone of cultural instability. Memory knows or should know itself as a partial reconstruction of African identities. It has its own forms of amnesia that have to be dealt with openly and at a theoretical level. Otherwise, the desire to recuperate memory dwindles into culturalism, an ideology that is marked by romanticising African oral productions and the knowledge institutions through which the values that underpin the quest for an alternative site of a different and yet globalised knowledge economy, can be elaborated.

Conclusion The purpose of this article was to provide a theoretical understanding that could mainstream indigenous African knowledge systems. We began by arguing that the search for modes of African institutions that carry indigenous knowledge systems is a response to Europe’s racist forms of constructing Africa through the prism of a ‘chronology of decline’ (Chan 2005). This was viewed as both a positive and a limited way of approaching the problematic of African indigenous knowledge systems. It was positive in that the search resulted in generating an alternative language and terms by which the phenomenon of African indigenous knowledge systems could be recovered. It was negative in that a search for indigenous African knowledge systems that reacts to Europe’s negative modes of naming the physical

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and intellectual identities of Africans is bound to argue using terms already dictated and to some extent over determined by Europe’s theoretical gaze. We argued that the challenge to Europe’s imperial and intellectual arrogance in the 1980s was spearheaded by the historians of subaltern studies, with Ranarjit Guha as their high priest. Subaltern studies demonstrated that South Asian societies were dynamic rather than static. Historians of subaltern studies sought to recover the agency of Indian peasants from the histories of rebellion that are recorded in colonial documents as well as in Indian mythology and some oral narratives of the diasporan communities. Subaltern studies, to some extent, generated new terms by which resistance by the subaltern could be studied. However, subaltern studies, particularly those associated with Guha tended to romanticise the potential of peasant subalterns. In this subaltern studies tendency, the under classes were written about as autonomous, and resistance is narrowed to military and visible forms of struggle. This theoretical standpoint on peasant agency fails to accommodate conflicting peasant behaviour, such as occurs when peasants work hard to take advantage of the markets provided by the very capitalist system they are fighting. We argued that Guha’s subaltern studies project ran the danger of collapsing the consciousness of peasants, seeing in them even levels of consciousness when the reality showed otherwise. This theoretical blind-spot was to some extent addressed in the second trend in subaltern studies. We showed that the works of Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty fall into this category. This tendency acknowledges contradictions within the lives of the subalterns and suggests that these poor classes also aspire to adopt a lifestyle similar to that of their oppressors. The positive aspects and the limitations of the theoretical insights that emerged from subaltern studies found their way into the early writings on African indigenous knowledge systems. The African cultural nationalists searching for new identities amid the struggle for independence adopted indigenism, an ideology that tended to find in the subaltern classes’ behaviour, everything positive. Indigenism was essential to African people’s response to internal and external forces affecting their lives during and after colonialism. Theoretically speaking, indigenism also romanticised traditional African institutions. The ideology tended to imply that the masses’ cultural creations, such as popular songs and cultural rituals, were not adversely affected by colonialism. Indgenism also fails to appreciate that African institutions adapted to new changes brought about by colonialism. Beyond indigenism, we argued that insurgent cultural memory provides a more dialectical understanding of African indigenous knowledge systems. The basic characteristic of insurgent memory is that it reveals that Africans have the capacity for contradictory identities. We showed that artists, musicians and performers are implicated in promoting African knowledge systems through oral narratives and poetic forms such as myths, songs, legends, rituals, dance, dress, ancestor veneration, spirit possession and proverbs. We stressed that these significant non-material aspects of indigenous African

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knowledge systems are not inherently positive. It is the context in which they are performed and the content that they embody which makes them a potential starting point to rethink systems that they can carry and elaborate. We suggested that African knowledge systems ought also to be represented in their changing-ness as they manifest themselves in African arts such as basketry, masks, graffiti, sculpture, wooden carvings, caves, rock paintings and architecture, and that some structured cultural institutions proliferate in Africa. Finally, as African knowledge systems become extensive qualitatively and quantitatively, the systems need new forms of archiving in textual sites such as film, drama, novels, video, the internet and television. In short, there is no absolute antagonism between African institutions, African knowledge systems and values, and the technology that can originate from other cultures.

CHAPTER SIX

Knowledge Production and Publishing in Africa The aim of this chapter is to offer a critical but open-ended analysis of the conditions under which knowledge production and publication take place in Africa. Knowledge production occurs in every society in contexts where mankind interacts with nature and with other human beings. The level of knowledge production is determined by the degree of technological sophistication that a society has achieved. The necessity to survive generates technical consciousness that enables mankind to produce more sophisticated technology that in turn is used to produce new forms of knowledge. It is then that this pool of knowledge and technical expertise ‘can be used to dominate or free human beings from the caprice of nature and powerful people in society’ (Bhebhe 2000: 7). The production of knowledge implicates and is implicated in power relations because it has to do with who has the superior technology that enables people not only to generate but also to control, store, monopolise and disseminate information as, how and when they wish to do so in order to safeguard their interests. Powerful social groups can produce words, discourses and forms of written and unwritten knowledge regimes that they have in the history of mankind often used to stereotype and control the majority of people. Foucault (1972) suggests that the relationship between power and knowledge has its origin in who owns the means of material production and the technical know-how. Foucault goes on to state that how the powerful describe, name, structure and control the minds and imaginaries of ordinary people in society is a function of discourse. By discourse, Foucault refers to the capacity human beings and social groups possess and are able to use or abuse when they evolve vocabularies that they institutionalise. They then fix the identities of those whom they subordinate, making them static and immobile. Edward Said suggests that in a colonial and post-colonial context Western powers, using their local agents in third world countries, have been able to develop elaborate cultural and political institutions by providing supporting vocabularies, scholarship, imagery, and doctrines to justify mental conquest of Africans. This, according to Said is done by the Western as well as local African elites who – to paraphrase Said (1978: 3) – make statements, authorise views, describe and teach those over whom they exercise their hegemony. However, both Foucault and Said are aware in their writings on power and knowledge production that the so-called ordinary people also possess the power to 72

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generate their own forms of knowledge which can contest, interrogate, counteract, collide and sometimes collude with the knowledge produced by the elites. This point is useful because it implies that any form of knowledge is a social and political construct and as such that knowledge can be questioned, revised and even rejected in favour of new knowledge systems. Goran Therborn (1980) supports this view when he argues that in situations where the majority of people are dominated by a few, the ‘ideology of power’ is to make the ruled believe that their social conditions are natural when in fact, the ‘power of ideology’ is such that the ordinary people are unable to understand the workings of the values that attempt to subordinate them. In the history of knowledge production, the ordinary people have forced their presence on the stage of history through struggle (Cabral 1973). The context of struggle enables ordinary people to generate knowledge that operates as counter-memory to the sensibilities of the ruling elites. C.L.R. James concurs with this view when he writes in his book The Black Jacobins, that he had made up his mind to ‘write a book in which Africans or people of African descent instead of constantly being the object of other people’s exploitation and ferocity would themselves be taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs’ (James 1982: v). We therefore argue in this article that knowledge production is a result of human intellectual effort and that it can be put to the practice of liberation or domination by elites over ordinary people; and by ordinary people over the less powerful members of their own groups (Freire 1976). We emphasise that knowledge production is separable from the concept of published knowledge although there are very intricate links between the two. While publishing depends on the value of the knowledge produced, the published knowledge in the form of the written (and the unwritten) words encourages further elucidation and elaboration of new knowledge. To publish knowledge is a means of codifying certain forms of knowledge so that it can be used by readers and oral raconteurs. Published knowledge and that implicit in the oral form enables people to reflect and elaborate on their previous knowledge so that new forms become possible. Structuring knowledge through the written or unwritten verbal forms enables people to use their critical consciousness gained in past struggles to deal with the challenges posed by nature and other human beings. In other words, publishing knowledge by itself is not a process that confers superiority to the written word. Knowledge production takes place at different sites that do not necessarily imply codifying and concretising it in the written form. Indeed, in Africa knowledge production is largely mediated through oral means such as through popular songs, myths, legends and African proverbs. These forms that orally mediate knowledge are not intrinsically reactionary or revolutionary. It is the content and values inherent in our images of what is valid knowledge and what is not, that describes the relationship of power to knowledge production (Vambe 2004).

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African Knowledge and Knowledge of Africa Knowledge production takes place in all societies. In Africa, knowledge is produced in institutionalised contexts such as universities. It is elaborated into values and ideologies and codified into the written word. However, in Africa, the power of the written word has not displaced African knowledge; this is generated not at universities but in the urban slums and rural contexts and is in most cases elaborated through oral means. In these contexts, knowledge is a manifestation of the people’s struggle with nature and with each other. It is passed from one generation to another in popular songs, folktales, myths and legends. This knowledge is by no means inferior because it is not codified in a book; knowledge production in Africa is a complicated process. It is of course true that the written word has itself has emerged from an oral base. Orally transmitted knowledge has found a new lease of life through the modern technologies of multimedia. It is thus important, to underline from the outset the distinction between knowledge production (as is implied in the processes of intellectualisation and critical reflection), and the process of publishing of knowledge, which is a mechanical process. Within the ensemble of an industrial model, publishing of knowledge occupies the middle ground. There must be knowledge production first which has to be disseminated through publishing (written, oral, or both). Once knowledge is published it creates an archive from which scholars can reflect. This process encourages the generation of new forms of knowledge that emerge from interrogating the assumptions of previous knowledge regimes. Thus in Africa, knowledge production and publishing do not necessarily mean the same, although they are intricately linked. Some people have the political power to authorise certain forms of knowledge and ensure that that it has been published and disseminated. The circulation of their knowledge is rendered wider by the aid of technology which they control and monopolise. Marginalised communities also generate knowledge and this is communicated through oral and (in some cases) low-level technology (Pikirayi 2000: 47). Although this ensures that their values and memories are circulated as knowledge, sometimes the ordinary people have to struggle against lack of the appropriate means to do so, and this may occasion the creation of appropriate indigenous technology. In the modern African context, ordinary Africans have appropriated the technologies developed and controlled by the elites so that these ordinary folk are also able to elaborate their philosophies through written channels of communication. We therefore agree with Eileen Julien (1997) who argues that the predominance of orally-based knowledge in Africa is not because Africans are oral by nature, and that Europeans are intrinsically rationalistic in their approach to life because they use the written word more than the oral. These inequalities are a function of the technological control that elites have at their disposal although in many cases that technology is developed using human and material resources from poor African nations.

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Africa’s Economic Infrastructure of Publishing It is now well known in Africa that knowledge production has become an institution (or a conglomeration of institutions) with distinct sites at universities, in civil organisations, and as part of research commissioned by postcolonial African education systems; all are purveyors of knowledge economy. Specific sites have taken over from the politics of the everyday in the production of knowledge. People are now salaried to produce certain types of knowledge and this is a process that inherently excludes the authorisation of other forms of knowledge. Knowledge is now a commodity that is bought and sold at the academic market place; it has entrenched itself. The production of knowledge is now driven by the imperative of profit. It is copyrighted and budgeted for in publishing houses. It is a selective knowledge because not everything that has been created as knowledge, or is deemed to constitute knowledge, sees the light of day. We would then suggest that the economics of knowledge production includes the entire infrastructure. Of course the publishing infrastructure is owned too. In Africa, most publishing is in foreign hands, an appendage of European publishing houses. Publishing in Africa is viewed as a special area that is not expected to produce knowledge; it is seen as a conveyor belt of information developed as knowledge in other climates. Or in most cases, if publishing is in African hands it first imagines its readers as European; it merely becomes African knowledge by virtue of marking its consumers as people living outside the borders of Africa. In these constraining circumstances it is true that African publishing has done much – mostly as popularisers of other people’s knowledge in our society. In some cases African publishers working with lean budgets and exhausted staff have created a minute body of knowledge that Africans can call theirs. Not all knowledge that Africans come to consume is produced in Africa in the continent or by people of African descent in the diaspora. We are forced to pose the following questions: What is African knowledge? Are we talking of European knowledge in Africa, or African knowledge in Europe? What are the other forms of knowledge economies existing in Africa that have been marginalised by powerful multinational publishing houses working with their local agents? How and where can these knowledge forms on the edge be mainstreamed into the public domain as valid African knowledge through publishing in Africa? Lastly, what are the links created between knowledge production and publishing in Africa in the context of the equally daunting task of democratising the knowledge production infrastructure and the African societies themselves? Africa has diverse cultural backgrounds and economies at different stages of development. Africa’s publishing industry tends to follow a pattern in which the continent’s most industrialised countries have tended to attract foreign investment in the publishing industry. This is the case with South Africa (Evans and Seeber 2000). However, this is not always the case; a small country such as Zimbabwe, for instance, has a more dynamic publishing industry than other African countries that possess the economic infrastructure to promote publishing. Zimbabwe is going through an

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economic down-turn but local publishing houses such Mambo Press, College Press, Longman Books, Baobab Books, Prestige Books and Zimbabwe Publishing House (ZBH) continue to flourish and these publishing houses have even competed at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF) held in Zimbabwe since 1980. Another exciting new development in the publishing industry in Zimbabwe is the emergence of individually or family-run publishing houses. A case in point is Weaver Press that is efficiently run by Irene Staunton with her partner and husband. Weaver Press has posted impressive publications in both fiction and non-fiction book categories in Zimbabwe. Authors such as the late Yvonne Vera, who won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa), have come from Zimbabwe. Her novel Under the Tongue (1997) was published by Baobab Books and another of her books The Stone Virgins (1999) came out under the Weaver Press label and won the Zimbabwe Publishers’ Award; the Macmillan Writers’ Prize and Sweden’s Voice of Africa award. Chenjerai Hove’s novel, Bones (1988) published by Baobab Books, won the prestigious Noma Award for Africa, and Shimmer Chinodya’s novel, Harvest of Thorns (1989) published by Baobab, also won him the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Africa region in 1990. The vibrancy of the Zimbabwean publishing industry should not surprise anybody because culture, politics and economics do not travel or function in a parallel manner; cultural industries have the capacity to thrive in adverse conditions in ways that interrogate circumstances of possibility and perpetuation. In other words, in Zimbabwe the paradox is that the negative publicity that the country is receiving and the economic disjuncture make publishing possible. In stressing this point, we are not suggesting that Africa needs any violence or economic misfortune in order for the production of knowledge and publishing to prosper. It is rather to underline the fact that cultural developments in many parts of Africa and the world do not follow a linear line of progress. In South Africa, foreign publishing houses also dominate although Afrikaner nationalists made sure that some strategic publishing is in the hands of Afrikaner capital. West African countries have traditionally been dominated by Western publishers. One of the reasons is that generally, West Africa possesses a reading public that creates a reading market for both local and international publishers. One could go on enumerating the regional differences in the kind of financial resources that go into publishing in Africa. The point is that Africa, whether North, South, East or West, is still dominated by Western publishers. They have been doing sterling work. But the fact that only a small section of locals have control over what is published has implications for the kind of material that is produced.

Knowledge Production, African Publishing and the Need for Paradigmatic Shifts The intellectual process by which something becomes knowledge is under critical debate in Africa. Colonialism not only brought written forms of knowledge; it also

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brought a certain perspective. It imported ideologies. The well-rehearsed ideology of colonialism is that African systems were archaic and had to be replaced by colonial notions of modernity and development. Colonialism brought the paradigm that was constructed on binary perceptions of reality. Its mission was to civilise and tame the African and to domesticate the environment. These mental frameworks kept Africans in servitude. This legacy has continued in some people’s minds in post-independent Africa. For example, published knowledge still commands a great deal of ‘respect’ from both African and non-African intellectuals, especially those who acquired knowledge through the written media. Some publishing houses, as part of the agenda of dominating African non-written and indigenous knowledge systems, perpetuate these colonialist perceptions. Since the 1960s African nationalism has contributed to generating a paradigmatic shift in terms that constructed and imagined the new nations through the medium of the written word. Elitist ‘written’ histories have emerged from Africanists and nationalists who created and popularised the image of a homogenous African. In historical perspective, international and local publishing houses seized the moment to produce commissioned writings and critical publications that promoted a sense of nationhood among Africans. In post-independence Zimbabwe local publishers, working with international capital, have also been at the forefront of financing production knowledge that has tended to undermine the interests of the ordinary people. A book in question is one published by Weaver Press, titled Zimbabwe: The Past is the Present (2004). Its import is to argue that postcolonial Zimbabwe is equal if not worse than the malignant tumour that was colonialism. The German scholar, Flora Veit-Wild goes as far as to state in Body, Sexuality, and Gender: Versions and Subversions in African Literature (2005) that from now on, in analysing African literature, the focus should be on moving ‘beyond wornout clichés’ of ‘cultural authenticity’ and ‘national liberation’ … towards ‘critical exploration of African modernities’. The African liberation struggles that created the peaceful conditions for Western scholars to conduct research into African literature have for the critics become clichéd. African modernities are narrowly conceived as cultural processes that can exist outside the different valences of African national liberation struggles. This goes to show that an expansion of publishing in Africa does not always mean that those knowledge systems that are being popularised are in the interests of the African people. Suddenly, homosexuality becomes a theme that surpasses in weight and intellectual imperative the need to rid Africa of the poor conditions in which Africans find themselves living in informal settlements and drinking contaminated water. Put starkly, there have been cosmetic paradigmatic shifts in the way that international capital, working with its local agents, conceptualise and publish knowledge meant for consumption by Africans. We are aware that Western critics with vast resources are in the habit of isolating those African critics who speak out against them. We are also aware that there are young African critics whose school fees have been paid for by European scholars; their time has now arrived

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to make recompense by way of betraying Africa. Knowledge production for them is not about what is happening in Africa but about their imagination of the worst predictions for Africa (Wa Ngugi 2005). In other words, some African intellectuals are willing vectors in the world intellectual equation that encourages producing knowledge about Africa, for Africa; knowledge which denigrates the object of Western desire and revulsion – Africa. The irony is that in other African countries publishing houses actually operated as third spaces where ideas of democracy were published long before these countries became independent. This is the case for example in South Africa where until 1994 some private publishers were castigated for publishing ideas that attacked the apartheid system (Evans and Seeber 2000). In yet other countries with a long history of publishing in Africa such as Ethiopia, publishing took very contradictory paths. A semi-feudal society under Emperor Haile Selassie had its own forms of publication and there were also individuals who created their own publishing houses. Of late, privately funded knowledge production and publication has become more common. The Panos Institute in Ethiopia, for instance, aims at producing knowledge by stimulating informed debate and discussion on development issues both at national and regional levels. To this end it is involved in producing radio programmes on combating violence against women, the conservation of the environment and sustainable development. These deal with the root of the problem concerned: ● For example, how the construction of violence occurs in the minds of men; the ways violence occurs, policies (national and international) and testimonies by women who have undergone various forms of violence. ● On environmental and sustainable development issues, they deal mainly with the crucial relation of environmental preservation to development in general and agriculture in particular, touching upon policy issues as well as international covenants and agreements. ● Afar radio, a programme operating as a community radio without ownership, transmits basic educational principles that are useful in the everyday life of pastoralists. It provides the community with a forum to air their views and concerns. ● AIDS radio, which is an educational tool, targets the sexually active population through calls from listeners and interviews with experts and people living with AIDS. ● Panos contracts a page in Tobya one of the Amharic weekly newspapers, to transmit knowledge on development issues. Every week it carries articles on development issues that are read by development practitioners in particular. The Forum for Social Studies (FSS) is an independent, non-profit institution engaged in policy-oriented research on the development challenges facing Ethiopia (FSS 2005). It provides a forum for the discussion of public policy and promotes public awareness. In encouraging broad participation in policy debates FSS makes

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an important contribution to democratisation. To achieve its goals, it organises public conferences and publishes and distributes its research findings to policy makers and other government officials, civil society institutions, professionals, the business community, donor agencies and the public at large. One of the FSS’s major activities in 2001 and 2002 was a series of workshops, research and publications on poverty. There was also an extended assessment of the government’s Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (IPRSP) (FSS 2005). Having launched a bi-monthly discussion forum called the Poverty Dialogue Forum, FSS held several workshops to which it invited civil society organisations, the poor, representatives of the government and donors as speakers to discuss the problems of poverty and ways to address it. The main FSS forum since 2000 has been its Policy Dialogue series. These are public workshops in which participants from civil society, government, the business community, academic and professional institutions, donor agencies and the media come together to discuss development policy issues. The aim is to provide a non-confrontational environment for dialogue and exchange of knowledge and experience among a wide spectrum of social actors. The FSS’s FM Radio programme, Dewel, broadcasts discussions on development and community issues, and was launched in 2001 (FSS 2005). Supported by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and produced in collaboration with WAAG Communication, a local media company with extensive experience in the field, the programme has attracted wide public interest. In addition, the FSS publishes diverse policy-oriented papers, monographs and briefings and a series of new titles is added to its publication list every year. FSS documents are largely the product of research findings, discussions at its public workshops, conference proceedings and occasionally specially commissioned studies. The fortunes of this diverse publishing enterprise have changed as power configurations have changed over the last 50 years. Different countries in Africa had space to experiment with different knowledge systems, depending on how they were located in relationship to the West and to themselves. The educated elite who share Western and African sensibilities introduced ideas of neo-liberal democracy. Publishing houses have tended to promote these ideas as the most appropriate modes of democracy and governance. In spite of this, other intellectuals have created their own publishing houses in order to have their ideas disseminated. The politics of knowledge production and publishing is not an innocent undertaking. It has never been. There are vested interests from government publishers as well as international and local publishers. It is possible to argue that instead of viewing this scenario negatively, the picture of the conflicting paradigms of publishing in Africa is what makes such enterprises worthwhile. It has helped keep alive debates on the need for good governance. Although publishing of the written word seems to have monopolised the limelight in Africa today, there is no point in the history of knowledge production

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in Africa at which other forms of knowledge such as popular songs and African drama were ever dormant. Oral knowledge and its circulation in rural and urban contexts in Africa has always threatened to undermine the self-proclaimed power and confidence of published knowledge. For example, in Zimbabwe the likes of the late Professor Beach of the Department of History at the University of Zimbabwe wrote history books that denigrated African heroines of the First Chimurenga. On the other hand, Aleck Pongweni, one of the first African lecturers at the University of Zimbabwe gathered songs which denigrated and criticised colonial hegemony in Rhodesia. These songs are appropriately called the Songs that Won the Liberation War (1982) in recognition of the capacity of knowledge in indigenous song to carry the aspirations for a democratic Zimbabwe when the written and electronic channels of knowledge production were heavily censored by the Rhodesian Literature Bureau. In Kenya, Maina wa Kinyatti produced a book on Mau Mau songs which reveals how through popular songs the Mau Mau guerrillas who were struggling for Kenyan independence were able to capture and forge a Kenyan national identity. The compilation of songs titled Thunder from the Mountain (1974) terrified colonialists; even the postcolonial leaders of Kenya were concerned. The book was withdrawn from circulation and the author had to seek political asylum in America. In the 1970s, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Micere Mugo, Ngugi wa Marii, Kimani Gecau and others formed and ran the Kamiriithu Community Centre at which ordinary members of the community, together with the Western educated intellectuals, were able to elaborate a distinctively Kenyan consciousness of struggle. The irony is that having created a truly indigenous knowledge system, one that captured the dreams of the African peasants, the dramatists were chased out of Kenya by Daniel Arap Moi’s government. It is clear that some black leaders, whose interests are to safeguard their elitist lifestyles and those of their Western partners, are suppressing knowledge production that has the potential to liberate Africans from the shackles of poverty in post-independent Africa. So, if one is talking about knowledge production in the postcolonial Kenyan context in particular and the African context in general, one must be able to distinguish elitist sensibilities that serve the interests of African elites and the West. This is so because the ordinary African people and some enlightened Western educated intellectuals who are struggling to shift the frame of understanding and are attempting to define an ethos of liberatory knowledge, are the ones who are hounded by their own African leaders. Knowledge production and its dissemination through publishing or by oral means cannot be taken for granted. In Africa, knowledge production and the sites where it occurs have become bitter arenas for class and ethnic struggles – in much the same way that it was a racially contested terrain in the colonial era. It is worth repeating that the primary carrier of knowledge in African societies where large sections of the population have not had access to written material is not the published book. In these communities knowledge is generated and expressed

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through unwritten songs, folktales, proverbs, masks, carvings and other modes of expressing knowledge. The politics of the modes of knowledge is precisely that it is wrong to assume that those without access to written forms of expression have no knowledge. In some parts of Africa, this assumption is still prevalent and decisions about people’s lives are taken on the basis of whether or not they have book knowledge. This has tended to undermine unwritten forms that would otherwise contribute significantly to the debate of what knowledge is within African publishing. In precolonial Africa oral forms of knowledge were also used by dominant groups to rehearse their histories, which they then used to subordinate the identities of other groups (Niane 1960). So when we talk of a paradigm shift we encourage the use of oral knowledge with the understanding that this base of African knowledge is in some cases infiltrated by dominant sensibilities. In other words, oral knowledge can interrogate the political and intellectual assumptions made in books (Vambe 2004).

Africa’s Readers and Publishing in Africa It is easy to generalise on African readers and conclude that little reading takes place in Africa and that this is why publishing houses have been unsustainable. But the picture is more complex. Countries such as Zimbabwe have a reading public of more that 80% of the population even though the country does not have a sound economic infrastructure. This is possible because cultural developments do not move at the same pace as the economic and political processes. In fact, private publishers are multiplying and this is partly responsible for the proliferation of published works. In its desire to control the cultural arts through such literary organs as the Literature Bureau, the ministry of Education and Culture in Zimbabwe has encouraged a generation of knowledge and its publication in the Shona and Ndebele languages. This has led to a proliferation of fictional works and textbooks. However, the situation differs in South Africa. Although there is a better infrastructure there, in pre-democratic times the apartheid system discriminated heavily against black people, who form the largest group, to the extent that they did not have sufficient opportunities to learn to read and write. It is ironic that with the advent of democracy in 1994, not many new publishing houses have invested in the country. Those that produce knowledge focus on publishing for secondary schools. This system of education is not yet very standardised so that potential publishing houses could take advantage of the large population to publish more widely. In other words, in Africa, the politics of knowledge production, its publication and the question of the readers’ access to these books is far from simplistic. Similarly, the presence of a variety of publications in any African country does not necessarily mean that reading is taking place, or that its population is a reading public. Issues of financial resources are crucial in any debate on reading patterns in Africa. Most African populations are poor. When these African countries are

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confronted with high levels of unemployment, general poverty and with people living below the poverty line, it can be appreciated that very little money, if any, can be committed to buying books, which are considered a luxury. The irony of the politics of reading in Africa is that sometimes reading patterns are influenced by the decisions taken by powerful internal institutions with money. The same institutions can strangulate a reading culture in Africa by introducing inappropriate strategies to deal with questions of literacy or illiteracy in Africa. For example, the World Bank blueprints revealed at the 1986 Conference of African Vice Chancellors in Harare that Africa did not need university education. Some countries followed this advice and disastrous consequences followed – their education sectors have not been significantly improved either qualitatively or quantitatively; there has been little progress since the days of colonial rule and apartheid. In Southern Africa, Zimbabwe chose not to follow the World Bank’s questionable advice, with the result that there was a literacy rate in the country of more than 80% from the 1980s. That percentage subsequently declined to about 70% mainly due to the economic melt-down which the country is currently experiencing. The point cannot be lost that it is highly inappropriate that the so-called Western experts on Africa (who are resident in European institutions) should see themselves as equipped to determine who reads what in Africa; the advice provided may well undermine Africa’s quest to enhance her knowledge production. The World Bank only helps to finance primary education in Africa. Their main aim is to create a pool of employable Africans with basic literacy for the smooth running of capitalist interests in the continent. Related to the question of African readership is the thorny issue of who decides the content of what is to be read. Who validates the kind knowledge production that gets to be published? These questions are not simply about the race, class, gender or even the natality of a person. They are epistemological. They implicate the ideological orientations of those who produce knowledge. For example, postcolonial African governments are not famous for investing in culture and the book industry. They would rather buy more arms; this is not a stereotypical depiction of African governments. Why, in a postcolonial era a country such as Zimbabwe, with a fledgling economy, is there the need to buy high powered jets from China? Similarly, being the Southern African, if not the continental superpower in Africa, why would the democratic South African government buy (as it has done) 28 fighter jets from Germany? In saying this, there is no intention to minimise the security threats to Southern Africa whether real or imagined. It is to point to the fact that sometimes African governments’ priorities do not coincide with the aspirations of the masses who want to have access to books. There is no single reason that can explain this cynicism. Perhaps a possible reason for not investing heavily in the book industry is to keep the masses in the dark, in order not to arouse their critical consciousness that might lead them to question their governments’ policies, policies which are currently not geared to the best interests of the majority of Africans.

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Compounding the reluctance of some African governments to encourage African readership are the problems associated with the hegemonic designs of Western interests in the African book industry. To give an idea of the graveness of this problem one may ask: if a white writer writes about Africa, is this African knowledge? If a man or woman of colour say, from America, writes about Africa is it African knowledge? If an African writes about Africa in European languages, is this African knowledge? The issue at stake is how to broaden the theoretical catchment area from which African knowledge can originate. Ngugi wa Thiong’o the Kenyan writer has asked similar questions in relation to the use of language in African literature. He asks (and we paraphrase): What is African literature? Is it literature about Africa or about the African experience? Is it literature written by Africans? What about a non-African who writes about Africa? Does this work qualify as African literature? What if an African sets his work in Greenland: does that qualify as African literature? Or are African languages the criteria? If so, what about Arabic, is it not foreign to Africa? What about French and English, which have become African languages? What if a European writes about Europe in an African language? If … if … if… this or that (Wa Thiong’o 1981: 6). These questions direct us to recognise the plurality of the potential sources of African knowledge systems without making us forget that the bottom line is the kind of knowledge that we are calling ‘African’. As implied in the questions that Ngugi wa Thiong’o poses, the language in which knowledge is produced and published, or orally transmitted and circulated in the communities, is what matters. It determines who reads it and who does not; and it determines who has access (even to the spoken word) and who does not. But Wa Thiong’o adds a caveat when he says that ‘writing in our languages … will not itself bring about the renaissance in African cultures if that literature does not carry the content of our people’s anti-impearialist struggles to liberate their productive forces from domination (Wa Thiong’o 1985: 125, emphasis added). Although anti-imperialist struggles are not the only struggles that Africans know, the point is made that African people’s experience at the levels of lived culture and the theoretical explications of these struggles could be the real sources of African knowledge. It is of course another complicated issue to determine who wields the power to represent these struggles (publishing) and in what form; or whether or not the knowledge becomes accessible to the majority of the people who need it most; or whether the knowledge remains the private property of a few as the situation in Africa threatens to become. The question of African readership must be conceptualised to go beyond whose national, official and ethnic languages ought to be used. This is so because the fact of writing in the Shona language of Zimbabwe does not necessarily mean the knowledge being mediated promotes the interest of the people for whom it is intended. The Shona writers’ experience with the restrictive policies of the colonial government through the Literature Bureau has shown that it is possible to use an African language to promote Western interests (Chiwome 1996). Writing in Shona

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language in Zimbabwe also does not guarantee that all the Shona people can read books written in that language and that if they can read, all have the access to the knowledge that they want. The Kenyan, Ngugi wa Thiong’o initially wrote Devil on the Cross (1982) in the Agikuyu language under the title Caitaani Mutharabaini. However, there is no empirical evidence that suggests that every Gikuyu person can read this book. This point is not meant to cast aspersions on the novel ways in which African writers and knowledge producers have been writing in indigenous languages. We are aware that any language is a carrier of culture and that people’s images of themselves and others can best be conceptualised in one’s own language. But for us, reading is a skill. It is acquired through exposure to education. It is not innate. In other words, other variable factors must be considered when rethinking African readership. One of these factors is the level of formal (alphabetic) education that the population has. To have African knowledge carried through indigenous languages requires funding if the ultimate destination of this knowledge is that it be published. This point should not under-estimate the fact that the bulk of African knowledge production happens through the oral medium and that orality still harbours this African knowledge (Vambe 2004).

African Intellectuals and African Knowledge Production and Publishing Repositioning African knowledge production by adopting democratic paradigms will deepen the ethos of transformation in society. African scholars are ashamed to identify openly with ideological positions that range them against other intellectual formations. African intellectuals who have acquired colonial or postcolonial education are made to feel ashamed and tentative to use the ideas of Cabral, Fanon, Blyden, Dubois, C.L.R. James, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Achebe and even the popular lore of our people. Dipesh Chakrabarty (1994) suggests that one of the symptoms of the subordinate status of African intellectuals in relation to European scholars is that we do indeed run to European sources to validate our experiences – the way ducks run to water. And yet, on the other hand European scholars do not feel compelled to sources gleaned from African knowledge when they write about Africa. A new kind of intellectual – an organic although perhaps not necessarily an academic one – who questions things in the spirit of reconstruction, is needed in Africa. These intellectuals will provide the human dimension to the equation of repositioning African knowledge systems. They need not come from among or be confined to those who have acquired Western modes of thinking that denigrates Africa like the character Ocol in Okot P’Bitek’s book, Song of Lawino, Song of Acol (1966), who regrets that he was born black. The alienated African intellectual who rues having been born in Africa does not understand that the under development of African knowledge production and publishing has a historical explanation and that

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it is not a biological problem. These new intellectuals need not necessarily identify willy-nilly and uncritically with the ordinary men and women, some of whom, after all, are so mentally colonised that they would even want to oppress their own families as did the male character, Jeremiah, in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, Nervous Conditions (1987). Rather, as Chakrabarty (2002) argues, we in Africa need intellectuals who fully understand the politics of knowledge production, who can challenge the stereotype of the idea of wholeness and stability imagined for Western knowledge systems and the mere fragments ascribed to the production of African knowledge. Unfortunately we have many critics who aim to destroy rather than to build. Mbembe, in our view, is one such critic. He sees Africa ONLY through teary eyes. He helps to create a perception of African knowledge as corrupted from within. His criticism of Africa is negative and cynical, encompassing its people and governments; he excludes only himself and his funders. It is a criticism that is not corrective; it aims to provoke African people and governments to act in ‘bestial terms’ so that he can rejoice and say: I told you so! We are animals! This is the import of his celebrated On the Postcolony (2001). Even in his most recent response to his critics, Mbembe (2005) has succeeded in ducking several issues which are seminal to the interrogation of his book. Instead, he introduces other new issues in order to sustain his relevance in a context where the ‘subaltern intellectuals’ like himself must continue to survive through patronage.

Africa’s Publishing and Marketing Strategy: Constraints and Prospects Marketing of African knowledge suffers from two major ailments. The first is the lack of conceptual clarity of what it is that is to be marketed and in what form. The conceptual understanding of what is marketable has to do with the regimes of knowledge that are circulated in Africa. Unfortunately what is marketed in the continent is knowledge contained in the written form or books. Other forms of African knowledge, the oral arts, for example, hardly circulate as much as they could if there were sufficient funds to move oral performers from one African country to the other; let alone from Africa to Europe. Oral artists such as musicians who are contracted to travel and perform in international contexts are funded by outsiders who benefit immensely at the expense of the artists. In some cases, as with Zimbabwean sculpture, the government has not set up structures to market the knowledge implicit in this fine-arts form. The consequence is that individual sculptors are left to the caprices of those with money; they pay a paltry sum for the sculpture and then re-sell it at an exorbitant profit in Europe. The sad dimension of the marketing of fine arts is that Western tourists have tended to create their own exhibitions of African art without the Africans knowing or benefiting from them (Ponty and Ponty 1992).

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Most of what is marketed inside Africa is the useful (and sometimes not-souseful) books that do not give due consideration to the contexts and sensitivities of the local people. Examples of the useless books that are marketed in Africa are those published in South Africa, and specifically at the University of South Africa. These books are described as wrap-around guides and are fed to African students. Many of these guides contain paradigms that have little bearing to the kind of knowledge that Africans want to acquire. Continual use of wrap-around guides at institutions of higher learning such as Unisa ironically discourage the production of African knowledge by African intellectuals. Some African intellectuals in the continent have also criticised the vigorous production of knowledge and aggressive marketing claiming that what is produced is at best mediocre. Potential readers are discouraged because Africans do not find value in these books, and at worst they are decidedly anti-African (see Mbembe 2001; Appiah 1995). Problems such as these tend to shrink African readership; it becomes uneconomic to invest in marketing when the products are either of poor value or insulting to the very people for whom the books and the audio videos are intended. The second challenge of African knowledge production and publishing has to do with the absence, near-collapse and uncoordinated marketing infrastructures in the continent. Very few marketing agents in Africa understand the law of competitive advantage. As a result book-marketing agents all want to deal in textbooks, fiction and literary work under one roof. This often stretches their financial capabilities to the extent that most are forced into bankruptcy. A case in point was Nehanda Publishers in Zimbabwe. Then too, sometimes marketing problems arise because of poor planning on the part of publishing companies. Struggling African publishers find it difficult to join marketing agents in neighbouring African countries, so there is no guarantee of a broad financial backup in times of bad business. Opportunities for additional funding by forging cooperative publishing links within Africa are few and far between and African publishers often resort to looking to European markets for assistance. The result is that the infrastructure of African marketing is geared towards satisfying the European markets to the extent that where it would be cheaper to publish a book in Africa some authors prefer to be associated with Euro-American publishers, not only to validate their knowledge but also to market their books. When books, audio tapes and videos are marketed from Europe and America to Africa they are invariably expensive because of the falling value of African currency against Western currency. In this way Europeans often produce, know, and market an ‘African’ book and control the global flow of knowledge in ways that perpetuate the unequal access to knowledge in the so-called global village. However, this general picture of marketing malaise in publishing in Africa is in certain instances qualified in that some countries have forged marketing strategies to try to take advantage of the local reading market. In Zimbabwe, textbook marketing aimed at primary and secondary schools is big business. For example, the College Press, a division of Macmillan (United Kingdom) exports

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books to Macmillan branches in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (BOLESWA). Unisa Press of South Africa have developed marketing relations with Africa Book Collective (ABC). The latter also works closely with Mambo Press and Weaver Press to market books from Zimbabwe to North American readers. Weaver Press produces books that are marketed by Prestige Books, whose forte is the distribution of African books within Zimbabwe, elsewhere in the continent, and in Europe. Local publishers sometimes create their own marketing outlets in the countries in which they operate. For example, Mambo Press in Gweru, Zimbabwe, runs Mambo Bookshops in Harare, Gweru and Bulawayo. The College Press in Harare sells its published books to book shops such as Kingstone’s and Mambo Press. Individual innovative publishers such as Irene Staunton’s Weaver Press also sell their books to local bookshops. In addition, Weaver Press co-publishes with publishers in Europe and in this way Weaver Press broadens its clients’ base. Sometimes individual authors are forced to market their own books nationally and internationally. It needs to be emphasised that lack of sound infrastructure and coordination among players in Africa still remains the greatest challenge to marketing Africa knowledge inside Africa and elsewhere.

African Knowledge Production and Publishing: A Blueprint We have argued in this chapter that knowledge production in Africa is taking place at various sites. But it cannot and should not be equated with publishing because some of the insightful African knowledge systems do not come from the written word. It is important to highlight those aspects of African knowledge production that can enhance the control process of African knowledge by Africans and for the benefit of Africans. That process can be achieved by acknowledging to ourselves that knowledge production must be committed to knowing Africa through African eyes and not via Western institutions. African intellectuals of all persuasions –from the ordinary people to the colonially and postcolonially educated intellectuals – can help. For this to take place African governments should not suppress African intellectuals; these intellectuals should not operate from a position that assumes that forging intellectual ties with the state is always negative. The untenable situation currently is that African intellectuals have made themselves self-anointed critics. They pour scorn on their governments rather than offer advice. In this respect they fail to follow the example of European intellectuals who are generally the think-tanks for their governments. We are not suggesting that there is never conflict between Western intellectuals and their governments; nor do we infer that African intellectuals should shower praise on their leaders even if their actions are reprehensible. There are, after all, some African leaders who kill their own people! African knowledge production systems and publishing can thrive if the institutions we build in Africa are responsive to the interests of the majority. Too often, competition for higher posts, lack of funds and low tolerance for selfreflective practices hamper the creation of consolidated institutions. An over

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reliance on civic organisations whose agendas are dictated by Western money has the danger of reflecting the views of those who call the tune. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can play a crucial role in fostering development but the unfortunate reality is that they have tended to abide by the foreign policies of their own governments. In Africa one is yet to see a conglomeration of NGO’s whose agendas run against their governments of origin. We maintain that the activities of NGOs should be monitored on a continentwide basis by African governments other than those in their own countries of origin. Furthermore we do not apologise for making the point that African knowledge production, publishing or dissemination of knowledge through orality should not be left to be directed and controlled by NGOs whether these are from Europe or are of African origin. Experience with NGOs in Africa shows that even those of African origin can be bought over by Western power blocs in order to undermine African culture and knowledge systems. As Africans involved in the production and publishing of African knowledge we need to increase the number of journals as sites of knowledge production, and these need to be based in Africa. We have abundant resources. Nigeria has oil; South Africa has gold, platinum and diamonds; Botswana has diamonds; Zimbabwe has land; West Africa has the most educated people in Africa. With this human and cultural capital, Africa can go far in terms of knowledge production and publishing so that this knowledge is circulated in Africa first before it goes to Europe. In producing African knowledge we should not underestimate that new academic elites, governing elites, traditional elites and a new crop of African leaders will promote a self-serving system of knowledge production, patronage and the creation of knowledge cast in their own image. In order to establish a vibrant culture of knowledge production, whether in the continent or in the diaspora, Africans need to ● identify what constitutes knowledge in an African context. ● search for sites of knowledge outside the universities. ● re-define the concept of the African university that is then globalised from an African perspective (Appadurai 1995). ● identify the old forms of knowledge and a new crop of intellectuals (not academics) that have something original to offer even if they depend on diverse ideas. ‘Everyone is an intellectual it depends on where the intellectual activity is weighted’ (Gramsci 1971). ● assemble a dedicated team with the political will to generate knowledge that has the potential to be of use to Africans in the continent, as well as in the international arena. These would then drive the intellectual processes of knowledge production and publishing or dissemination using inter, multi- and trans-disciplinary approaches.

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● apply the concept of Africanisation from a critical African perspective, determining whether knowledge production is weighted towards Africanising Western knowledge or globalising African knowledge. ● provide the financial backing, human resources and physical infrastructure that promote intellectual endeavour as well as the production, distribution and readership/access to African knowledge in any form. ● recognise that marketing of ideas is big business. It is not fortuitous. It is possible to engage in social processes of producing knowledge that is named or labelled by others. There is a danger that the vision and the linguistic description of the vision are at variance. African intellectuals must find a language in which to discuss their achievements, otherwise other people may distort these processes.

Conclusions Knowledge production, we have argued, is not necessarily established by the fact that something is written down. It is the sum total of people’s beliefs and values as they engage with other individuals and with nature. This knowledge can be codified in other ways and elaborated at other sites. We have mentioned books, popular songs, performance, and daily rituals used by the majority of the people to make sense of their worlds, as some of our examples. We have not claimed that these are the only sites where contradictory African knowledge can be recovered for the benefit of the broader African population. And because not all people have access to written material it does not mean that those people have not acquired academic knowledge are not intellectuals; they too have the potential to produce and circulate their forms of knowledge through the audio, video and orality. Put differently, before Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali was produced in written form by the great D.T. Niane (1960), the epic circulated in the oral form. Even today, it is transmitted orally and has generated multiple versions from the ‘initial’ narrative. The point about the oral forms’ capacity to refuse to carry monolithic values is the strength of African knowledge generated and circulated in oral contexts. In other words, when describing a paradigm shift in African knowledge systems we are also acknowledging the instability and contingent nature of orality. Instead of making definitive interpretations of African knowledge systems, the provisionality of the meanings in oral texts suggests their potential to be used to understand the changing African world from a multiplicity of ideological perspectives (Vambe 2004). In this paper we further argued that African knowledge production is happening in a context that is tilted in favour of Europe because Europe possesses and commands the technological resources which even the most patriotic Africans need to use in generating their own forms of African knowledge systems. The challenge that Africa faces is how to make that audio, visual representation and the unwritten forms of knowledge become part of the glocal knowledge economy that has the

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power to influence the global village (Robertson 1995). This point is significant because there is no such thing as a society which does not produce knowledge. The politics of knowledge production in Africa is defined by power relations; those in power determine who gets to publish; how knowledge is distributed; what the people may read. It seems to us that Africa has not done too badly although it is true that the continent is still largely dependent on foreign publishers to finance Africa’s ideas. Sometimes there is conflict because what Africans think should be published is not always in the interests of publishing houses who, apart from their obligation to knowledge production and dissemination, also work for profit. Local publishers function under constraints such as lean budgets and poorly trained staff, and most of them lack the financial resources to fund sizeable publishing projects. Nevertheless, they have recorded some successes. It would certainly help if they received support from their governments, but these usually have their own priorities in spending money. Then too, governments’ ideas about what kind of knowledge must be generated, published and circulated for public consumption, often differs from the expectations held by local and international and publishers. In extreme cases this leads to governments instituting legislative restrictions that threaten to destroy an already-fragile publishing industry. The politics of knowledge production can thus be defined by who has the funds and for what kind of publications. We emphasise this point even at the risk of sounding reductive.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Amilcar Cabral: National Liberation as the Basis of Africa’s Renaissances One of the major critical issues of debate in Africa is the question of revitalising African cultures. This, in South Africa, has been given the name of African renaissance and is perceived as a continental ideology. However, debates on the term are fudged in essentialisms that have obscured rather than clarified the potential unifying effect of the notion in Africa. In this chapter we contribute to the critical debate on the meanings of African renaissances, using the writings of Amilcar Cabral. He, more than most African theorists, has suggested that we need to move beyond rarefied jargon when discussing African renaissances and dwell instead on the concrete levels of African people’s lived experiences. We argue that as discourses of continental renewal or rebirth, African renaissances should be figured in the plural, and that for them to have root in the lives of African masses, the conceptualisations of African renaissances should reflect the cultural, economic and political aspirations of African people. They should relate to the past, to the lived experiences of Africans, to those currently being experienced, and also to those which reflect the aspirations of the African people for the future. A collection of texts by Amilcar Cabral, entitled Unity and Struggle (1979) has recently (2008) been re-issued in South Africa and overseas. It forces us, among other things, to link the question of national liberation struggles to South Africa’s chosen path of African renaissance. The political context of a post-apartheid South Africa affords the ideal occasion to reflect upon the various values and insights that informed Cabral’s understanding of Africa’s renaissances. South Africa gained ‘independence’ and ‘freedom’ from minority rule in 1994. However, to speak of ‘independence’ and ‘freedom’ is to use unusual political terms in a South African context, where the term ‘democracy’ is preferred. Whereas official political discourse privileges ‘democracy’, the cultural critics prefer ‘freedom’, a word they are quick to deconstruct: That freedom in South Africa was largely ceded and bequeathed, rather than seized, all the more foregrounds the diminishment and critical occlusion which marked the process of, and quest for, freedom. Freedom then becomes a handout and not a reckoning; a guaranteed idea and not a fraught and avidly awaited actuality. (Jamal 2003: 23) 91

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Drawing on the cultural critique of Albie Sachs, Ashraf Jamal suggests that whereas the word ‘democracy’ is meant to be a convenience for all South Africans, ‘freedom’ challenges the prohibitions of the unnameable … insists upon the desire to know what it means to be a South African, it is the insistence upon desire and not a nominal foreclosure that matters. (Jamal 2003: 25)

Sachs captures the contradictory role of culture in the process of attaining freedom by suggesting that Culture in the broad sense is our vision of ourselves and our world. This is a huge task facing our writers and dancers and musicians and painters and filmmakers. It is something that goes well beyond mobilising people for this or that activity, important though mobilisation might be. (Sachs 1990: 146, our emphasis)

Sachs’s understanding of the romantic aspect of culture, one that is always ahead of real life and consistently attempts to announce the dawn of a new culture, links the South African critic’s views on culture to those of Amilcar Cabral. Cabral’s writings on culture have lessons for Africa’s national liberation struggles and the ethos of pan-Africanism that is broadly understood as the inclusive process of political, economic, and cultural reconstitution. Cabral’s understanding of ‘democracy’ and ‘African renaissance’ is complicated because it is articulated and manifests itself at local and global, national and international levels. For him, The liberation of productive forces and consequently of the ability to freely determine the mode of production most appropriate to the evolution of the liberated people, necessarily opens up new prospects for the cultural process of the society in question, by returning to it all its capacity to create progress. (Cabral 1970: 4)

Cabral further suggests that A people who free themselves from foreign domination will not be culturally free unless, without underestimating the importance of positive contributions from the oppressor’s culture and other cultures, they return to the upward paths of their own culture[s]. (Cabral 1970: 4)

The notion of a return to one’s own culture is imbued with a fundamentally pluralistic ethic, one that rejects the contemporary emphasis upon a top-down political projection. To ‘return to the source’ goes beyond attempts at retrieving past identities conceived as intact. Cabral recognises that returning to the source is problematic because there is no single source but several; a return to the sources implies a recognition of the instabilities of the meanings of the sources, all of which are factors that complicate the process of the ‘return to the upward paths’ of creating history – whether that creation has a negative or positive impact on

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the lives of the people. Thus, for Cabral, there are many African renaissances, whose mass character mobilises national liberation struggles as vehicles or acts that constitute national cultures.

Cabral’s Return to the Source as the Basis of African Renaissances The idea of the ‘return to the source’ is in Cabral’s political thought not to be confused with the imagined return to a period and culture of pristine purity that was never a reality in Africa. Cabral understands that a return to the source that seeks to recuperate black people’s past history in an uncomplicated way runs the danger, at best, of romanticising the culture of the ordinary people, and may well misrepresent the dynamic values of the liberation struggle. Within the context of Africa’s renaissances, national liberation struggles are themselves acts of political, economic and cultural renewal. They are a reaffirmation of the spirit of pan-Africanism that was the continental ideology that galvanised liberation movements in the days of the black people’s struggle against different forms of colonialism in Africa. Thus to reissue Cabral’s works in the context of continental rebirth is in itself an act of political intervention in the debate surrounding the sources, content, values, vision and discourses of Africa’s renaissances. Cabral’s works force certain questions related to arrested decolonisation to resurface, begging for further interrogation in ways that bring new discourses on freedom into crisis. Certain political issues related to identity and dignity of Africans, are also refracted through new and dynamic perspectives. For Cabral The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated … Culture is, perhaps, the product of this history just as the flower is the product of a plant. Like history, or because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production. Culture plunges its roots into the physical reality of the environmental humus in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors. History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalances and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterise the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic synthesis which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress. (Cabral 1970: 2–3)

This long passage contains four important issues that underwrite Cabral’s understanding of Africa’s renaissances. First, that there cannot be any meaningful African rebirth without a return to a consideration of the importance of political

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economy or the material interests of the ordinary people. And second, that Cabral was very aware that a people’s culture encompasses their struggles and that any struggle can be successful when the people involved have conviction and selfconfidence. Third, in defining the fundamental tenets of Africa’s renaissances, Cabral did not fall into the pit of narrow economism in which Africa’s renaissances are merely seen as opening new economic markets to exploit poor African countries. And fourth, ‘cultural renaissance’, for Cabral, is first and foremost a people’s renewal. Unless culture sinks its roots into the creative humus of people’s experience, the discourses of Africa’s renaissances that are authored by Africa’s elite will surely wilt. Each of these themes that run through Cabral’s work – the return of political economy to an analysis of African realities; the transvaluation of the psychological significance of Black Consciousness; and the power of ordinary mortals to make history, are instructive to post 1994 South Africa and indeed, to the rest of the continent. Africa’s renaissances are therefore not ornamental discourses. They are a product of people’s multiple struggles which have given freedom to Africans; they have revitalised human beings in contests with nature and other human beings for the betterment of humanity. Cabral’s work makes us realise that falling short of this, Africa’s renaissances may ossify and become the name of a sterile formalism that undermines people’s quest for fulfilling material and spiritual existence not only in South Africa, but also in the wider continent and elsewhere in the world, where human beings are struggling to fashion their own dynamic identities and searching for dignity in the era of globalisation, rugged capitalism and Africa’s rebirth. The questions that Cabral’s works provoke in us relate to ● the African state’s capacity to deliver on the promises of independence ● the African state’s monopoly on violence that can be used to suppress basic majority rights ● the crisis of the nation state that is as much a crisis of politics and institutions as it is a crisis of the economy and society itself (Olukoshi and Laako 1996: 20) ● class, gendered and ethnicised dimensions of the discourse on Africa’s renaissances ● questions of constituted hegemony which will transform the mass of the people from subjects to citizens (Mamdani 1999) and ● the misperceptions and the immoderacy of European derived philosophies which imply that Africans should not just resist political order but prosper on disorder (Chabal and Daloz 1999: 155). To be sure, the discourse of African renaissance preceded 1994 (Mamdani 1999). When President Thabo Mbeki (then deputy president) pushed the question of African renaissance into the South African public sphere in 1995, he expected critical engagement and controversial, rationalised debate on the issue. But he was short-changed by many South African academics because what Mbeki in fact received was a ‘chorus’ (Mamdani 1999: 125). Too many academics were over-

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eager to please Mbeki; they did not engage him in constructive debate. Consequently the perception has arisen that South African intellectuals are unequal to the task of stimulating and promoting the agenda of African renaissance. For example, gross lack of ‘mass character’ in the discourse of Africa’s renaissances is manifest in the chorus published as African Renaissance (Makgoba 1999).

Plurality and the Mass Character of African Renaissances Turning to the question of the composition of the historical actors, Cabral consistently linked the act of political renewal to questions on the value of Africa’s renaissances and how these have permeated the culture, values and aspirations of ordinary men and women, the people of Africa. Cabral believed that although they had suffered under colonial and postcolonial tyranny, their culture, although unstable, remained indestructible. For him, although the masses were repressed, persecuted, humiliated, betrayed by certain social groups who have compromised with the foreign power [their] culture took refuge in the villages, in the forests, and in spirit of the victims of domination … Thus the question of a ‘return to the source’ or of a cultural renaissance does not arise and could not arise for the masses of the people, for it is they who are the repository of the culture and at the same time the only social sector who can preserve and build it up and make history. (Cabral 1973: 61)

Cabral knew that a minority of African people had been won over by reactionary forces, but he believed that this minority comprised the elites who were alienated from the people; he saw the constant invocation of the ideology of African renaissances as evidence of this. However, Cabral also refused to dismiss the contributions of those Africans who received colonial education. They too had something to contribute to the values of Africa’s renaissance. As Mamdani puts it, in the context of postcolonial Africa: One, there can be no renaissance without intelligentsia to drive it. Two, an African renaissance requires an African-focused intelligentsia to drive it. Third, let us reflect on the sober morning-after realisation that South Africa lacks an Africa-focused intelligentsia in critical numbers. It lacks it because the institutional apparatus of learning in this country continues to be hostile to Africa-focused thought. (Mamdani 1999: 134)

For Cabral, to have an ‘Africa-focused thought’ necessary for revitalising Africa’s rebirths means re-establishing commitment to freeing Africa’s productive forces. It means valuing the significance of the people’s culture in the fight to extend freedoms beyond the political arena into the social, economic and spiritual realm of human existence. Cabral emphasised people’s culture, with its contradictions, as the ideological linchpin and also as containing unconditional values that could effectively drive Africa’s renaissances in all spheres of human existence.

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Re-considering Cabral’s works in the context of Africa’s renaissances forces us to confront the issue of a multiplicity of historical actors as well as the composition of the main historical actors in national liberation struggles. When Mamdani (1999: 125–126) describes ‘African renaissance … [as] the name for a mutual African effort in response to a common predicament, one that South Africa shares with wider Africa’, he is reaffirming Cabral’s understanding of the plurality of Africa’s renaissances. Although Cabral wrote of the national liberation struggle in relation to the independence of Guinea and Cape Verde Islands, he also spoke for the greater Africa that was groaning under the yoke of apartheid and Portuguese, Belgian, French and British colonialism. Cabral’s address to AfricanAmericans also widened his understanding of Africa’s renaissances as phenomena that went beyond the borders of one country in Africa, or Africa as a continent. For him, African peoples’ historic struggles against different forms of slavery, of colonialisms and new forms of injustice during national liberation struggles and in the era of independence all constitute different forms of African effort at political and economic rebirth. No single country is entitled to monopolise the language of Africa’s renaissances. The lack of a mass character in the voices attempting to define African renaissance has prompted some of the contributors to the African Renaissance volume to suggest that in its present state, this debate is a one-sided monologue that has not encouraged ordinary people to think beyond what they have been told to think. Keyan Tomaselli and Arnold Shepperson sound a warning when they say that the discourse on African renaissance has been encrusted in elite values: If we who succeed the oppressor take democracy seriously, then we dare not once again cover this plurality by imposing a univocal, massoriented, or even sectional, renaissance … The political imperative of the renaissance … is to nurture and encourage people’s curiosity to test and transgress the limits of the record they encounter. (Tomaselli and Shepperson 1999: 410– 411)

Jockeying for political positions among the elites in South Africa threatens to reduce the noble discourse of Africa’s renaissance to a potential talk-shop. Mamdani (1999: 132), forever critical of contemporary African state politics, also queries the elite orientation and the absence of mass participation in the South African discourses that compete to identify the values and visions of African renaissance. He starts from the premise that we should talk of African renaissance in the plural, because ‘there is no part of Africa that is the same as anywhere else. Every part has its specificity. Oneness is not sameness’ (Mamdani 1999: 132). Mamdani further complicates the class, race and genealogy of Africa’s renaissances in questions that raise doubts about South Africa’s capacity to become the moral centre for Africa’s multiple renaissances. He asks: When did the African renaissance begin – in 1994 or earlier? Is the African renaissance to be a turnkey South African export to the rest of

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Africa? Alternatively could it be that the African renaissance does not have a single parentage, a single genealogy; that its waters come from many springs before joining a large flow? Could it be that this genealogy is as continental as its claim? (Mamdani 1999: 125)

The African Renaissances and the Myth of a Unitary Culture and Identity The rhetorical questions above are provoked by what some Africans see as an ideological ambiguity at the heart of the debate on African renaissances. This lack of ideological understanding is evidenced in the intellectual endeavour of African renaissance insofar as it is based on an undifferentiated understanding of Afro-centricity. With reference to the more general tendency in post 1994 South Africa to indulge in ‘buzzwords’, Mbulelo Mzamane (2001: 1) laments that what he calls ‘sloganeering and empty rhetoric’ is often ‘outrageously’ passed for ‘originality and profundity … Enterprising linguists could develop a new branch of socio-linguistics in South Africa devoted to the New Speak [and] the new bureaucratese’. He describes the notion of the African renaissance in similar terms as ‘the catchiest of these new phrases’, a perhaps unfair judgement given the ANC government’s demonstrated commitment to renewal in Africa. Certain commentators and institutions, however, do not bring the same gravitas to the table, and arguably misconstrue the government’s stated goals. Mzamane is particularly critical of the tendency to employ the concept of African renaissance in ways ‘obfuscating rather than illuminating’ (Mzamane 2001: 2) its practical objectives and ethical underpinnings, and indulging in rarefied jargon and dispersed language based on an undifferentiated understanding of Afro-centricity. In this regard Mzamane cites, inter alia, the African Renaissance Institute, suggesting a need to more clearly define the broader implications of a policy of renewal in Africa, and posing a series of pertinent questions: What is African about the African renaissance; what constitutes its African essence? What are Africa’s unique characteristics, which are identical from one African country to the next and are not replicated elsewhere in the world? What are the distinguishing features of the African condition; and is there a single, formulaic, Africa-centred response to the challenges identified? (Mzamane 2001: 2)

The target of Mzamane’s critique is the assumption that Africans throughout the continent share similar values, and that these values easily dovetail with those of black people elsewhere in the diaspora. In circumstances where many African countries do not even have a national vision, the imperative of reaching a consensus with regard to a fundamental set of political, social, and economic principles underpinning Africa’s renaissance becomes deeply problematic. Such a consensus, moreover, somewhat ironically implies the abandonment of nationalism and the

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principle of national sovereignty, which in turn presupposes a commitment to national accountability within the broader context of the African Union. Participants in this debate need to take cognisance of the national struggles for liberation from colonial rule during which African states embraced and radicalised European discourses and ideologies of nationalism. While the intellectual proponents of African renaissance produce a discourse that resonates with the rhetoric of a single continental ideology, in fact African countries embrace the principle of absolute national sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of an independent and sovereign state. This contradiction is partly responsible for, or can help to explain, the standoffish attitude of most African countries to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and currently in Darfur, Sudan. In other words, the lack of nuanced language that could bring out internal conflicts among Africans added to the failure to acknowledge regional, political, cultural and economic differences amongst African people. This reveals the populist nature of the sort of narrow understanding of African renaissance advanced by various participants in the African debate. It could be argued that pluralising the understanding of African renaissances is exactly the kind of thinking that the Centre for African Renaissance Studies (CARS) at Unisa is attempting to foster. In this context, renewing the content of human relations and changes of mindset are mutually reinforcing. Merely rehearsing and exchanging buzzwords is no substitute for a frank and constructive engagement with the concept of African renaissances. The apparent failure to step outside a narrow understanding of Africa’s renaissances is symptomatic of what Ramose describes as the ‘northbound gaze’ (Ramose 2000). The northbound gaze looks to the north, to Europe, for theoretical approval of its assumptions. In this way the findings become a subjective discourse of a subject’s voice. At home, it wears all the trappings of a search for an adulterated experience identified as distinctively African. Such quasi-traditionalist discourses of Africa’s renaissances assume that all that is knowable about Africa is now known, and all that remains to be done is to reinterpret Africa’s past experience in the light of present struggles. As we have seen, Cabral rejects this skewed understanding; for him African renaissances can creatively be understood and rebuilt on the theoretical bedrock that emphasises the plurality and mass character of Africa’s renaissance processes. His interpretation forces us to re-evaluate the theoretical contours of the ideology of Black Consciousness as it was articulated in South Africa in the 1970s and continues to be articulated today.

Cabral, Biko and the Transvaluation of Black Consciousness In the iconography of African political nationalism in South Africa, Steve Biko captures the confluence of most of the values harboured by black South Africans as they struggled against apartheid. Biko rejected as skewed, the facile understanding of apartheid as simply a moral terror. Apartheid in South Africa was the political correlate of colonialism elsewhere in Africa, but with an added, particularly virulent, racial dimension. Biko found himself redefining Black Consciousness as

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a psychological liberation struggle; a struggle against ideas imprinted in the minds of the black selves. Black Consciousness politics aimed at decolonising the mind (Wa Thiong’o 1986), to help Africans regain confidence in themselves so that they would start the ‘long road to freedom’. For Biko, black people should accept that the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress … our situation is not a mistake on the part of whites but a deliberate act, and no amount of moral lecturing will persuade the white man to ‘correct’ the situation. (Biko in Bernstein 1987, 14)

Biko further understood that South Africa’s liberation struggle could be derailed by reactionary forces within white and even among the black communities if Africans succumbed to the divisive politics of ethnicity and tribalism: ‘We are oppressed, not as individuals, not as Zulus, Xhosas, Vendas or Indians. We must use that very concept to unite ... ourselves and to respond as a cohesive group’ (Biko in Bernstein 1987: 15). This point is valid to the extent that colonial and apartheid ideologies certainly racialised African identities. However, the language of anticolonialism implicit in Biko’s voice sometimes does not sufficiently interrogate what the rule of freedom might encompass. In other words, merely replacing minority with majority domination, and domestic with foreign oppression, may not provide an adequate solution. This is so because for as long as the politics of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ prevails, the postcolonial mindset remains trapped in the logic of colonial and apartheid experience. It could also be argued that although collective resistance is appropriate, it does not always guarantee total freedom. In Biko’s ideological arsenal blackness does not in itself possess inherent goodness or badness. Blackness is an ideological construct or prop, to be used as a rallying point for resistance. Barney Pityana, co-founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, and a close political lieutenant of Steve Biko wrote: Many would prefer to be colour-blind; to them skin pigmentation is merely an accident of creation. To us it is something much more fundamental. It is a synonym for subjection, an identification for the disinherited …The holders of public authority exercise their power by the consent of their subjects. The subjects have an ultimate right to revoke this authority in the event of its abuse, or corruptive employment. (Pityana, quoted in Woods 1987: 36–37)

Here, Pityana joins the likes of Cabral, Biko, Rodney, Paul Gilroy, and Cedric Robinson who re-define Black Consciousness in terms of the need to rehabilitate black people from the psychological damage inflicted by the apartheid system. He explains in a later work (1999) that the mental warfare black people must wage as an act of moral renewal or renaissance had to be informed by an ideology that would understand the scope of apartheid’s structural power in order to contest the economic motives that drove the project of racial separateness. Pityana writes that white people

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Monopolised all key positions and centres of power and preferred occupations. They appropriated far more than their share in educational, welfare and other social services, and they maintained a wide gap between themselves and other races in terms of technical skills and consequently the wealth of the land. (Pityana 1999: 37)

In his view the corrective political and ideological instrument to reverse economic imbalances between white and black people had to begin with a programme to encourage, amongst black people a sense of shared consensus and vision even though these proved to be contingent and equally unstable. This understanding of the imperatives of Black Consciousness became the ideological hallmark of Biko’s politics: Black Consciousness can therefore be seen as a stage preceding any invasion, any abolition of the ego by desire. The first step, therefore, is to make the black man see himself, to pump life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth … This is what we mean by an inward-looking process. This makes consciousness, Black Consciousness, imminent in our own eyes. The confidence thus generated will give them a sense of pride and awareness. (Pityana 1999: 37–38)

The accuracy of these statements about the ideology of Black Consciousness takes on special significance when considered in the context of African renaissance in the period after 1994. First, while South Africans have acquired the power of the vote and control of the state machinery, economic power has not effectively been transferred into the hands of the majority of black people. Second, unemployment is a serious problem in South Africa, and more particularly in black communities. Third, crime is induced by poverty and low levels of skill among black political constituencies. The transvaluation or transformation of Black Consciousness politics when seen or read through the ideological spectacles of Cabral’s notion of liberation struggle makes us recognise the class character of the Black Consciousness Movement in post-apartheid South Africa. This recognition in South African – and African society for that matter – is critical because there is a confused and confusing discourse of Africanisation and African renaissance emanating from South Africa that has little hold on the ground. The transformation of Black Consciousness in the era of Africa’s renaissances requires new and sharpened tools of social analysis. It requires an ideological reassessment of what it means to be African in South Africa – and in any other part of Africa. It requires us to transcend a certain populism that is powerful at present but had tenuous links with the Black Consciousness of the late 1960s and early 1970s before it broke away from white-led associations. The transformation process also calls for an openended critique of Black Consciousness to take place among Africans so that it can

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excise those who seek to monopolise its discourse in order to intimidate those who want to revitalise it. The transformation process must address the immediate and practical interests of Africans. It would also help to reject some aspects of Black Consciousness ideology – such as the myth of black collective interests that have now become fossilised clichés.

South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a Model of African Renaissances Amilcar Cabral warns us that in the continuing national struggles, there are many hazards, the deadliest of which is the ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the national liberation movements – which is basically due to ignorance of the historical reality which these movement claim to transform – constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggle. (Cabral 1966: 2)

Cabral adds that neither the elite African leaders, nor the masses should monopolise ways of seeing and explicating reality. He was always guided by experience in generating theory, through which he made further reflections on reality in order to be in touch with the aspirations of the ordinary people. He is compelling in observing that ‘we would recall that every practice produces a theory, and that if it is true that a revolution can fail even though it be based on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory’ (Cabral 1966: 3). Here, Cabral reveals that theory cannot substitute for reality because theory is often an inadequate representation of reality. Any political action whether embodied in the spirit of the individual’s struggle against society or a visible political movement’s attempts to create new values, cannot abolish the role of spontaneity. Theory can only survive the test of time if it allows space for explaining the unintended results of social action. In the post 1994 dispensation, South Africa chose African renaissance as its ideological torch bearer for the renewal and cultural rebirth of the values of the country and those of the African continent. Mbembe (2001: 5) describes searches for ideological moorings, such as the quest for an African renaissance, as having been occasioned by a crisis in the languages, procedures, and reasonings about Africa. Reacting to the propensity of postcolonial theory to obscure rather than clarify issues, to disarm opponents through jargon, to demolish centres and not build a firm foundation for understanding Africa’s new political economy, Ella Shohat (1996: 322) critiques the indeterminacy of what she calls postcolonialism’s ‘multiplicity of dizzying positionalities’. Perhaps it is in this context that one can discuss the South African TRC endeavour as an informing ideology of African renaissance – as understood in some measure by certain South African academics. It is tempting to view the TRC in South Africa as a formal means of institutionalising the conception of black people as being prepared to forgive.

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An African renaissance based on the philosophy of ‘forgive and forget’ cannot wish away the harsh realities of history but it seeks to uncover ‘truths’ about the apartheid death machine; truths from within the liberation movements and within the politics of the township. This process, one could further argue, was meant to have South Africans of all colours and political persuasions atone for their past historical sins. The major irony is that the TRC became an instrument designed to produce and reflect upon the myth of magnanimity. This mythological assumed generosity and readiness to forgive, this obligation to forget a history of repression, is being vigorously contested. The problem of representing the TRC in South Africa as a model of African renaissance is that the subjective understanding of South African histories is driven by a moral imperative and that in the case of the TRC this imperative has severe limitations. It cannot easily translate into tangible deliverables of the revolution such as houses, employment opportunities and economic freedom for most South Africans. Ali Mazrui has felt obliged to comment on the politics of equating ‘truths and reconciliation commissions’ in Africa to a redemptive continental ideology of African renaissance. For Mazrui: This concerns Africa’s short memory of hate [our emphasis]. Cultures vary considerably in their hate retention … the Irish have long retention of memories of atrocities perpetrated by the English. The Armenians have long memories of atrocities committed against them by the Turks in the Ottoman Empire. The Jews also have long memories about their martyrdom in history. On the other hand, Jomo Kenyatta proceeded to forgive his British tormentors very fast after his being released from unjust imprisonment. He even published a book entitled Suffering without Bitterness. Where but in Africa could somebody like Ian Smith, who had unleashed a war which killed many thousands of Black people, remain free after Black majority rule to torment his Black successors in power whose policies had killed far fewer people than Ian Smith’s policies had done? Is a short memory of hate a precondition for the African renaissance? Nelson Mandela lost twenty-seven of the best years of his life. Yet on being released, not only was he in favour of reconciliation between black and white people, he went on to beg white terrorists who were fasting unto death not to do so. He furthermore went out of his way to go and pay his respects to Mrs Verwoerd, the widow of the architect of apartheid. Is Africa’s short memory of hate sometimes ‘too short’? Is it nevertheless necessary for the African renaissance? (Mazrui 2004: 53)

Mazrui is certainly not suggesting that ‘hate’ should be answered by ‘hate’. He feels that what have been compromised by Africa’s leaders in this repertoire of ‘short memory of hate’, are the complex political and economic realities that constitute the fulfilment of the national liberation agenda. The constant insistence that people must forget their history of repression makes them recall it with greater clarity, and

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in different ways – ways that undercut the official suggestion that such histories can be forgotten. Put differently, forgiveness in the absence of restorative justice becomes psychologically damaging, as do Africa’s attempts, via TRC initiatives, to ‘equalise crimes’ and minimise the horror of apartheid and colonialism and the regressive systems indigenous to Africa.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to link Cabral’s politics (summarised in his writings on the national liberation struggle) to the issues of democracy and African renaissances that post 1994 South Africa is grappling with. It was shown that in Cabral’s works there are the seeds of several African renaissances. These are rooted in political, economic and cultural projects of renewal. Whether we give these processes names such as ‘freedom’, ‘independence’ or ‘democracy’ as in the case of South African political parlance, there can be no avoidance of the reality that the circumstances under which people live are the measure of democracy. Cabral once remarked that people do not eat ideas. We can only hope that he meant that people’s access to material goods, to spiritual freedom, cultural creativity and the freedom to explore new realities beyond political name-tags come first – or are as important as theorising the realities of African rebirths. Cabral’s work is heavily inclined towards encouraging people to take control of their sources of livelihood. This suggests that talk of African renaissances that does not consider the material contexts in which people are living is merely idealist and obscures the real issues. Cabral’s accent on the material being of the Africans in the postcolony does not mean that his work is oblivious of the capacity that people have to use their consciousness in order to alter their situations in life. Cabral’s work is significant to South Africa and the rest of the continent because it re-awakens in Africans the desire to understand the realities of multiple identities that the people of Africa are able to command. Re-issuing his works in South Africa (and subjecting them to renewed interrogation) is thus a theoretical intervention to add to the lively debates on the role of cultures in shaping the new ethos of Africa.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Amilcar Cabral and the Fortunes of African Literature Amilcar Cabral remains a significant African revolutionary, an able political leader, a profound cultural theorist and a provocative philosopher of the African struggle for freedom. His theoretical works, particularly ‘National Liberation and Culture’; ‘Return to the Source’; ‘Identity and Dignity in the Context of the Liberation Struggle’; and ‘The Weapon of Theory’ have influenced the creative trajectory in African literature in significant ways. An application of the theoretical insights of his work to African literature helps us to understand and critically elaborate the spirit of struggle captured in Africa’s diverse arts. This chapter sets out to analyse four creative literary texts from Africa using a theoretical lens derived from the work of Cabral. We have deliberately not considered any text from Lusophone or Portuguese Africa because we believe that the influence of Amilcar Cabral’s theoretical writings transcends the literary boundaries carved out as a consequence of the 1884 Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa into Anglophone, Lusophone and Francophone Africa. The chosen texts are Mission to Kala (1958) by the Camerounian born, Mongo Beti; Harvest of Thorns (1989) by the Zimbabwean, Shimmer Chinodya; Devil on the Cross (1982) by the Kenyan, Ngugi wa Thiong’o; and Nervous Conditions (1988) by Tsitsi Dangarembga, also a Zimbabwean. These novels have not only been drawn from different African countries; they also plot a story of the national liberation struggle from the colonial period up to the postcolonial era. We argue that there are very visible instances where Cabral’s cultural writings have influenced the direction of African creativity. We also suggest that African literature written after 1970, when Cabral’s ideas were first intellectually circulated, interrogate and modify some of Cabral’s beliefs. This dialogical relationship between Cabral’s work and African literature should reorient African politicians, historians, sociologists and cultural critics so that they begin to appreciate the contribution of Cabral’s work to movements in African intellectual discourses. That process, in our view, mainstreams African thought and ideologies and also demonstrates that Cabral’s works have influenced and have also been influenced by African literature that preceded them; and, we suggest, are destined to influence African creativity that is yet to emerge. Critical works on Amilcar Cabral have tended to focus more on his political career. Although a welcome development, this tends to narrow our understanding 104

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of Cabral’s politics of cultural resistance and his culture of political resistance to colonial rule. His political theory and cultural writings have been endlessly invoked to explain the paradoxes of African people’s dignity and identities in postcolonial Africa. Critics of African literature have also drawn on Cabral’s works with the aim of bringing out the multiple ways his thought has influenced the direction of African literature. Conversely, using notions of African subalternity and postcoloniality, Africa’s creative writers have depicted post independence African realities as also engaging Cabral’s theoretical works. The political consciousness of Cabral’s works echoes well beyond the artificial boundaries suggested by any single focused study of his writings and speeches. A multi-disciplinary approach, on the other hand, locates the essence of Africa’s continued struggles within a postcolonial context. It reorients how African literature is read, reinterpreted and used to identify the pitch at which new debates and controversies on questions of African agencies are lodged. Creative writers of Africa sometimes consciously and unconsciously base their fictional portrayals of life in urban and rural Africa on Cabral’s ‘National Liberation and Culture’ (1970) and ‘Return to the Source’ (1973). These theoretical works have also been used by critics of African literature to explain the themes of ‘return to the source’; national liberational struggle; the role of culture in and as literature; matters of betrayal of the masses in poctcolonial Africa; and the new postcolonial struggles fought by African masses that are depicted in African literature.

Cabral: National Liberation and Culture The richness of Amilcar Cabral’s theoretical writings derives from his practical experience as the political leader of the Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Cabral fought Portuguese colonialism; he wrote about national liberation while actively involved in leading his country’s struggle, so that for him the struggle for independence and the acts of narrating the nation and development of national consciousness went hand in hand. In his widely read theoretical work, ‘National Liberation and Culture’, he identifies ‘imperialist colonial domination’ (Cabral 1970: 2) as the enemy of the people. Imperialism, Cabral contended, could be challenged by the alliance of peasants, workers and some educated Africans who had succeeded in being re-converted so as to identify with the aspirations of the masses. National struggle, for Cabral, implies resistance against foreign domination of the productive forces, whereas social revolution is manifest in the class struggles within colonial and postcolonial contexts, and among Africans. A central thesis in his writings was the role of culture in enabling Africans to create a united front to contest colonial hegemony. For Cabral The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that

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is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies. (Cabral, 1970: 2)

Cabral’s accent on culture as a carrier of people’s values in history is informed by an acute awareness that this culture is not uniform among Africans. He learnt from experience that those Africans resisting imperialist domination need to confront and deal with what he describes as the ‘struggle against our own weakness’ (Cabral 1966: 2) in order for their struggles to succeed. He advocated an ideological programme of a ‘return to the source’ in which those Africans alienated by education could commit class suicide and begin to identify with the political and material interests of the masses. The ‘return to the source’ was also an ideological imperative for ordinary people to constantly evaluate their own conduct in the struggle. Contrary to critics who believe that Cabral romanticised the company of ordinary people, he was well aware that their levels of understanding the imperatives were certainly ‘not uniform’ (Cabral 1970: 4). Importantly, Cabral recognised that the masses could benefit from some ‘positive accretions from the oppressor and other cultures’. Further, for Cabral, ‘privileged classes’ and ‘traditional and religious leaders’ could also bring something to the struggle (Cabral 1970: 4–6). For him, national culture was an aggregate of the positive contributions of several African political players with material aspirations that often collided, sometimes colluded and confirmed one another and even, on occasion, interrogated each other. Cabral recognised class struggle as one axis around which national liberation would be waged, but he refused to dismiss ethnicity and gender struggles as inconsequential to the shaping of the contours of national culture. A youthful poem by Cabral reveals that women or gender issues mark some aspects of the struggle that give a different meaning to the whole idea of national culture. Come with me, old Mama, come gather your strength, to reach the gate. The friendly rain has already come to greet you and is beating within my heart. (Cabral, in Amuta 1989: 93)

This verse testifies to Cabral’s convictions that African literature is implicated in elaborating, through images, the imperatives of national liberation and culture. Creative writers are in politics: the question is, whose politics (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1981: 71) In a later work Wa Thiong’o elaborates further on the relationship of African writers to the liberation struggle when he says: It seems to me that the African writer now, the one who opts for becoming an integral part of the African revolution, has no choice but that of aligning himself with the people: their economic, political and cultural struggle for survival. In

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that situation, he will have to confront the languages of struggle spoken by people in whose service he has put his pen. Such a writer will have to rediscover the real languages of struggle in the actions and speeches of his people, learn from their great heritage of orature ... learn from their great optimism and faith in the capacity of human beings to remake their world and renew themselves. He must be part of the song the people sing as once again they take up arms to smash the neo-colonial state to complete the anti-imperialist national democratic revolution (Wa Thiong’o, 1993: 74).

Mission to Kala and the Challenge of Returning to the Source One of the key terms that describe Cabral’s poetics of national liberation and culture is his notion of ‘return to the source’. Cabral understood that colonialism created divisions among Africans. A consequence of these internal conflicts among Africans is dramatised in Mongo Biti’s novel, Mission to Kala (1958). One of the characters, Medza, is an African student who has failed his exams. He goes to Vimili to see Niam, his uncle, and from here is dispatched to negotiate for the return of Niam’s wife from Kala. Beti uses this plot to expose the insidious nature of colonial education. Those who acquire colonial education regard themselves as superior and begin to look down upon fellow Africans as if they are savages. This discourse of othering comes out in Medza as he embarks on his journey to Kala. He hopes to civilise the people of Kala who he sees as incomplete, ‘primitive’ human beings; he is mentally and spiritually alienated from the people of Kala. His own cousin, Zambo, is a ‘hulking devil’ (Biti 1958: 21, 23). This aggressive construction of the image of the Kalans as sub-humans is evidence of colonialism’s encroachment into the lives of Africans. Medza is thus a vector of colonialism in so far as he perpetuates the colonial myth that projected Africans as either devils or perpetual children. The author emphasises the racial epithets in Medza’s language to underline the crisis of consciousness in the mis-educated Africans. Amilcar Cabral helps us to understand the phenomenon of psychological alienation and spiritual displacement of Africans when he says that colonialism ‘provokes and develops the cultural alienation of a part of the population’ (Cabral 1970: 5) in order to divide the colonised and render them weak against the coloniser. In Mission to Kala, Medza is initially a typical colonial subject who has accepted the doctrine that colonial values are superior to those of Africans. He validates the claim that colonial education was designed to induce subservience to colonial masters. Cabral warned that the tragedy of Africa was that it was ruled by such people as Medza, whose spiritual anchorage was not among the ordinary African men and women. Cabral then proposes that if the mis-educated Africans are to make a mark, they have to participate in people’s struggles against the machinations of imperialism. A return to the source at an ideological level means identifying with the broad-based quest for democracy that ordinary people engage in daily. But Cabral

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also warned that a ‘return to the source’ is not a return to romanticising some of the aspects of the cultural lives of the ordinary people. For him, a ‘return to the source’ is an ideological re-conversion to the goals of Africanisation. It is a spiritual reorientation on the part of the alienated Africans to reposition themselves positively in relationship to the struggle to control the productive forces: A reconversion of minds – of mental set – is thus indispensable to the true integration of the people into the liberation movement. Such conversion, re-Africanization, in our case may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle. (Cabral 1970: 5)

It is when Medza arrives in Kala that he begins to think anew and reflect on the historical vocation of the educated people in Africa. Kala and its society of ‘illiterate’ Africans is transformed into a ‘large classroom’ where Medza gets in touch with the ordinary people. Medza is shocked to realise that Zambo (his cousin) can easily communicate with women. In contrast to Medza’s educational abstraction and spiritual puritanism, the people of Kala are earthy, energetic alcoholics who dance vigorously through their lives. It is to the credit of Mongo Beti that he reveals the bankruptcy in Medza’s educational background. He can describe the capitalised agriculture in America; he has impressive ‘colonial knowledge’. But the Kalans’ response to his lectures is cold and detached, implying that people are only too aware that capitalist intrusion has made their lives miserable. When Medza talks to the Kalans about the Russian communal (Kolkhoz) system of agriculture, they brighten up, suggesting that they identify with the ethos of the system of agriculture that emphasises sharing rather than individualism. Medza grows increasingly critical of the education that he has acquired, which blinds him from appreciating the lives of ordinary people and all their contradictions. He says ‘My resentment against schools and educational systems mounted steadily as the days passed by. I saw a school as a kind of giant ogre, swallowing young boys, digesting them, vomiting them up again, sucked dry of their youthful essence [they] were skeletons’ (Biti 1958: 68). The critical consciousness that Medza develops and the resistance that he shows against colonial education reveal that even the so-called colonially educated Africans were not totally alienated from the struggles of ordinary people. In fact, Cabral suggests that individual acts of rebellion against colonial values were the basis of anti-colonial movements in Africa. In the context of the ‘return to the source’, Medza’s developing consciousness would find fruition when exercised in the struggle against social tyranny. Cabral suggests that: the cultural combat against colonial domination – the first phase of the liberation movement – can be planned efficiently only on the basis of the culture of the rural and urban working masses, including the nationalist

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(revolutionary) ‘petit bourgeoisie’ who have been re-Africanized or who are ready for cultural reconversion. (Cabral 1970: 6)

In Mission to Kala it is from the Kalans that Medza learns to be critical of colonial education. He defies his father and the exploitative capitalist view that his father believes in. Medza’s mark of partial liberation or return to the well- springs of communal identity is marked by the fact that he can take Edima (a young woman) home and refuses to be beaten by his father. ‘Suddenly I know that my father would never beat me again, that if he punishes me to the limit there was only one possible result – fight. As you will have seen it took me many years to make this simple discovery’. For Medza, the power and right to decide the direction of his life comes through an act of rebellion against a father who is described as a ‘colonial stooge’ (Biti 1958: 167, 172). What has happened to Medza is a psychological revolution. By interacting with the ordinary folks of Kala he has extended his own horizons of critical thinking; he has created space within which to define the self. In other words, the context of struggle against colonial values, as they are embodied in colonial education, occasions moments of decolonising the imaginaries of the African subalterns. In the novel, Medza knows that his new identity as a fighter is still incomplete but he owes his transformation to the people of Kala. As he says: ‘anyway which of us, when you come to think of it, really owed thanks to the other?’ (Biti 1958: 181) Medza believes that it is the experience of interrogating colonial relations that has liberated him. The journey to the Kala is as physical as it is emotional, spiritual and ideological. It enables Medza to understand that the tragedy of Africa is that it is ruled by a clique of mis-educated elites who know little of the interests of the ordinary people. These elites make sure that the material interests of the metropole are safeguarded. Colonial education was designed to encourage its recipients not to question the order of things. This goal, it seems, was sometimes undermined when Africans used this very education to question its values. In some cases, however, African leaders have been unable to outgrow the weakness in the values they imbibed through the colonial educational system. By the end of the novel, Medza can identify the nature of the African confidently, saying that the tragedy which our nation is suffering today is that of a man left to his own devices in a world which does not belong to him, which he has not made and does not understand. (Biti 1958: 181)

Mission to Kala conveys the complex scenario in which Africans living under colonialism possess differentiated expectations, perceptions and views about the system. In the novel, class formation manifests itself within the African communities who possess different perspectives on the perceived benefits of colonialism. Not only does colonialism create an educated elite class, but also new authorities and loyalties. In Vimili, the colonially installed local chief exploits the ordinary Africans, the very people he is supposed to protect. This local chief is a

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rich man and lives in an imposing villa. As a collaborator with the colonial system the same chief has forced gangs … and ... betrayed fugitives to the authorities, and acted as an informer. He has used our traditional tribal hierarchy as a vehicle for his underhand intrigues and flouted our laws and customs when he no longer needed them. (Biti 1958: 18)

The tragic story of traditional chiefs who abdicated their roles when they collaborated with colonial agents slowed the struggle for independence. Cabral explains these contradictions within the African community in terms of uneven levels of consciousness since in a colonial context African ‘political leaders – even the most famous – may be culturally alienated people’ (Cabral 1970: 5). In Mission to Kala, the ordinary people are also satirised for their ‘religious’ adoration of colonial education. In fact, if they have the opportunity, they will use this to oppress other Africans. The old man who sends Medza to Kala believes that his nephew could easily intimidate the Kalans with his education by waving a letter written in French – showing that colonialism also makes investments of an ideological and cultural nature. ‘Duckfoot’ Johnny, Zambo’s age-mate has internalised the patriarchal Kalan society’s social prejudice over African women. For him, women are sexual objects; he is also ‘totally impervious to alcohol’ (Beti 1958: 15, 38, 117). Here, Mongo Beti refuses to gloss over the weaknesses of the ordinary people. He agrees with Cabral who remarked that during the engagement with forces of colonialism, the greatest challenge is to go beyond or struggle against our own weaknesses because the political consciousness among the people is far from uniform (Cabral 1970: 4). However, Beti shows in Mission to Kala that despite their ideological weaknesses he has faith in the capacity of ordinary Africans to create a new national culture. In the novel some Kalans know how to use colonial education to subvert colonial values and further their economic interests in a basically hostile situation. Zambo is both an able sportsman and a good farmer. Other African families have also appropriated the colonial discourse of producing for the market as well as for domestic consumption. They have adopted the ‘peasant option’ (Ranger 1985) to stave off the possibility of being drawn into the colonial system as mere labourers. And the initiative in agriculture has at the same time undermined the colonial myth that projected Africans as ‘lazy’. In Mission to Kala, we are told that African agricultural workers worked very hard in the forest (Biti 1958: 41). This labour benefited the Kalans, and admittedly in this way they participated in propping up the colonial system; but they also simultaneously challenged primitive accumulation, which was understood to belong exclusively to white people. In Mission to Kala the likes of Medza are initially on the side of French colonialism, only to be depicted later as rejecting colonial values. The ordinary people are described as energetic and adaptive to the economic imperative introduced by the colonial system. In essence, Mongo Beti shows his conviction that these ordinary

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people carry the destiny of Africans in the struggle against colonialism. Cabral went agrees when he maintains that in the armed national struggle, African resistance has a ‘mass character’. This national dimension of the liberation movement on the political level, yet having its basis in popular culture (Cabral 1970: 4, 6), is highly dramatised in the next novel under discussion, Harvest of Thorns (1989) by Zimbabwean Shimmer Chinodya.

Harvest of Thorns: An Armed National Liberation War A fundamental re-conceptualisation of the idea of ‘return to the source’ emphasises the capacity of the ‘privileged classes’ to identify with the material struggles of the masses (Cabral 1970: 6). The ultimate political consummation of this idea of return to the source is concretised in Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns a humorous yet serious novel set in Rhodesia. The narrative itself is constructed along what Cabral (1966: 1) calls the ‘national’ struggle a phase in the history of Africa that is characterised by people who ‘take up arms and fight’ against colonialism. The aim of the struggle is to expel foreign domination of the available productive forces. For Cabral, the national struggle with its emphasis on freeing the productive forces enables Africans to ‘return to the upward paths of their own culture’ (Cabral 1970: 4). The ordinary African men and women can ‘return to history, through the destruction of the imperialist domination’ to which the people have been subjected. Cabral was therefore convinced that national liberation takes place when, and only when, national productive forces are completely free of all kinds of foreign domination. The liberation of productive forces and consequently the ability to determine the mode of production most appropriate to the evolution of the liberated people, necessarily opens up new prospects for the cultural development of the society in question, by returning to that society all its capacity to create progress. (Cabral 1970: 3–4)

In Harvest of Thorns, Benjamin Tichafa, alias Comrade Pasi Nemasellouts, is aware that the conflict between Africans and colonialism is based on who should control the land. The conflict is also one of the clashes of the commutarian values of Africans and the selfish individualism promoted by colonialism. At the forest camp, Benjamin learns that the Zimbabwean struggle is about how to change from colonial capitalism to ‘socialism and democracy’ and how to reject racism and discrimination. The struggle to free the productive forces was also a struggle to free the entire cultural imagination of the colonised so that the people would promote a just society. At the pungwe (night vigil), freedom fighters and the African men and women who supported the struggle, received political talks on Capitalism and socialism and democracy; and equitable distribution of wealth; and equal rights; and injustice and justice; and the Land Apportionment Act; and segregation and exploitation and neo-colonialism

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… you gasped to be told five per cent of the population owned the better half of Rhodesia and earned more than the other ninety five percent together; that they had the best jobs, homes, schools, hospitals. (Chinodya 1989: 115)

The dossier of colonial misdeeds captured above sharpened the masses’ understanding of the imperative to wage a war of liberation. Although the educated Africans participated in the national liberation, it was the culture of resistance of the under classes that provided the creative and critical push to take the decision to wage war against foreign imposition. Baas Die, Chinodya’s leader of the African guerrillas who are fighting against colonialism in Rhodesia, captures the story of the subjugation of Africans and the expropriation of their land by colonial settlers through the folktale of strangers. In this folktale (Chinoyda 1989: 153-162), the white settlers (the ‘Strangers’) violate the generosity of Africans. They are the enemy; it is they who enslave Africans and drive them from their ancestral lands. In Baas Die’s folktale the strangers introduce oppressive laws that impact heavily upon the lives of the African people: The Strangers came down to the village. They burnt down the huts. They destroyed the gardens … They extended their field over the area where the village had been … The villagers … lost their lands and livestock to the Strangers … The Strangers made new rules now. The villagers’ wives had to be counted … Their children had to be counted … Their cattle and goats and sheep had to be counted … No villager could cut a roll of grass without permission. No villager could build a hut without permission. (Chinodya 1989: 162–163)

It is this total onslaught on the African people’s way of life that generated resentment among Africans. This resentment towards enforced poverty was channelled into an armed struggle that was waged for 15 years. In other words, colonialism created the seeds of its own demise. In Harvest of Thorns popular resistance is organised by the petit bourgeoisie who are educated in colonial schools, although the manpower and womenpower of the whole struggle is based on popular uprising. It is the women and men from the peasant class and the urban youth who form the rank and file of the struggle; from them the struggle derives its human-power. Young girls cook for the fighters, while young men are trained to become combatants (Chinodya 1989: 152). But just like Cabral, Shimmer Chinodya refuses to romanticise the ordinary people. They are equally capable of betraying the revolution. In the novel such a person is Mai Tawanda, who has been bought over by the system to report the whereabouts of the guerrillas and is eventually killed by the freedom fighters for her acts of betrayal. Through the depiction of Mai Tawanda, Shimmer Chinodya can be said to be modifying Cabral’s assertion that the question of the ‘return to the source’ could not arise for the popular masses because their culture remained intact during colonialism. As Cabral puts it in his own words: ‘it is they who are

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the repository of the culture and at the same time the only social sector who can preserve and build it up and make history’ (Cabral: 1973: 61). Anthony Chennells has misread this passage; he suggests that Cabral ‘essentialises’ ordinary people and projects them as an undifferentiated social group with similar imaginaries, or subjectivities. For Chennells, in Cabral’s postulation, the peasantry is idealised and accorded powers of resistance, which is ahistorical (Chennells 1999: 13). When read out of context in this way, his comment appears to ring true. But it actually reveals extraordinary insensitivity; Chennells fails to recognise the sensitivity that Cabral displays in understanding the colonial context and the contradictions of peasant voices within the national liberation struggle. Cabral understood that sometimes ordinary people are able to work together to fight for a common cause, while at other times these same people display inconsistent behaviour. Cabral believed that although popular culture ‘has a mass character, it is not uniform, it is not equally developed in all sectors of society’. The attitude of each social group towards the liberation struggle is dictated by its economic interests, but is also influenced profoundly by its culture (Cabral 1970: 4). Furthermore, Cabral refused to dismiss or underestimate the ‘positive accretions from the oppressor and other culture’ from whom the ordinary people conveniently appropriate certain cultural resources to interrogate the social relations of domination. He also noted that ‘several traditional and religious leaders joined the struggle at the very beginning or during its development, making an enthusiastic contribution to the cause of liberation’ (Cabral 1970: 4–5). In the same vein, he refused to underplay the ‘positive contribution which privileged classes may bring to the struggle’; for him whatever may be the complexity of this basic cultural panorama, the liberation movement must be capable of distinguishing within it the essential from the secondary, the positive from the negative, the progressive from the reactionary, in order to characterize the master line which defines progressively a national culture. (Cabral 1970: 6)

In Harvest of Thorns, the horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of culture among the ordinary people manifests in the conflicting ways that the ordinary people display when narrating the national liberation struggle. In chapter 26 of the novel, Chinodya’s omniscient narrator describes the battle in Old Sachikonye village using multiple perspectives. He refuses to commit himself to a single narrative because there are several truths and memories competing to name the emerging ethos of the struggle. Chinodya says of the battle: ‘Now many stories have been told about that battle on the hill in Sachikonye’s village. Many stories, some true, some not so true, some highly-coloured by the terror and imagination of the people who heard about Sachikonye’s village’. Each of the paragraphs in this chapter insists on providing a different account of the battle, and by extension, of the national liberation war. One paragraph begins: ‘Stories about a witch called Mai Tawanda who poisoned

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a comrade.’ In another paragraph: ‘It is said by some that the comrades knew all along she was a traitor’. In yet another: ‘Some people say Headman Sachikonye was going to be killed’. There are several other examples, including ‘And it is said that people began to talk about the dead woman’. ‘And it is said by others that the spirit of Mbuya Wehanda came into the leader of the comrades.’ And, becoming more gruesome: ‘It is said the comrades … had all been shot dead and taken by soldiers to be dragged in the dust or dangled from helicopters as slain terrorists, in the sight of school children herded out of classrooms’ (Chinodya 1989: 190–193). Just as it is for Cabral, in Harvest of the Thorns the national liberation struggle as deed, action, history or culture is a political space of contestation. Chinodya insists that the processes of narrating the struggle, of producing history, are an area of intellectual contestation. Just as Baas Die’s folktale is a narrative representing itself as national memory, each of the conflicting accounts of the battle in Sachikonye’s village contains versions and sub-versions of memories of the struggle. The insistence on open-endedness instead of closure; on arbitrariness of image and polyvalence of the sign inscribed in the war, memories suggest that the language of naming the conflicting constituencies of the national liberation struggle is highly volatile and relatively unified. The production of a plurality of war accounts also implies the potential ideological difference of those who participated in that struggle. The fact that multiple accounts of the war lay claim to an absolute truth reveals the capacity of the novel to institutionalise self-interrogation of the narratives of the new Zimbabwe nation that the author is imagining. Flora VeitWild, for instance, writes that in Harvest of Thorns the act of pluralising narrative embedded in subjective ideological positions reveals that ‘truth is elusive; there is no single and definitive version of what happened’(Veit-Wild 1993: 328). Stanley Nyamfukudza, a fellow Zimbabwe writer, agrees when he writes that the war of liberation can never be one person’s story: the scenario was much too complex for that, the sides and realities too various, so that every authentic version that is added is another nuance in the maturity of the flavour of the wine. (Nyamfukudza 1993: 11)

To say about Harvest of Thorns that the truth is elusive does not of course mean that there is no truth about the value of the struggle that Shimmer Chinodya writes about. Cabral has suggested that within the national liberation struggle, ‘truths’ collide, collude and question each other. In Harvest of Thorns, the struggles for the freedom of the ordinary people are ‘fragmentary and episodic’ (Gramsci 1971: 52). Ordinary people can celebrate the coming of political independence in the same novel that criticises the betrayal of the masses by the nationalist leaders. Betrayal in Harvest of Thorns is prefigured in the title of the novel in which instead of enjoying the fruits of independence people are pricked and bleeding; in their poverty they are aware that although the battles have been won, this does not automatically transform into material realities and jobs for the likes of Benjamin.

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At the end of Harvest of Thorns, Benjamin’s sense of regret is conveyed by the third person narrator who reports: He’s only twenty and he has no job or house of his own yet but, he tells himself he’ll do all he can to raise the little bundle of humanity in the cot. He’ll do all he can, even though all he has is a pair of chapped hands. He tells himself he’ll do it. (Chinodya 1989: 248)

Chinodya has narrowed the concept of understanding the nature of betrayal to Benjamin’s failure to secure a job in postcolonial Zimbabwe. Cabral suggests that this mode of thinking about betrayal in postcolonial Africa is informed by a moralistic perspective that fails to realise that even those leaders who are popular in anti-imperialist struggles can be alienated from the people they purport to serve. He goes on to suggest that this betrayal can appropriately be understood in the context of the conflicts that inform what he calls the ‘social revolution’ which is based on class struggle. He is aware that part of the problem that Shimmer Chinodya had to grapple with in his novel is that within the nationalist movement, the ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the national liberation movements – which is basically due to ignorance of the historical reality which these movements claim to transform – constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggle against imperialism. (Cabral 1966: 2)

These ‘ideological deficiencies’ are sharply dramatised in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Devil on the Cross (1982), a novel that thematises class struggle in postcolonial Kenya.

Devil on the Cross: Resistance to Postcolonial Betrayal If there is any novel that has successfully transformed Cabral’s idea of return to the source into a creative theme, it is Devil on the Cross. The novel was initially published in Agikuyu, one of the major indigenous Kenyan languages, as Caitaani Mutharabaini (1980). Wa Thiong’o remarked that after writing Petals of Blood (1978) in English he experienced something of a crisis: ‘I knew who I was writing about, but who was I writing for?’ (Wa Thiong’o 1986: 72) This question led him to think of writing in a language which the majority of the Kenyan people, especially the Agikuyu, could understand. For Wa Thiong’o this meant making connections with the speech patterns of the ordinary people, their folktales, songs and other forms, such as allegory. In his conceptualisation of Caitaani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross) he suggests that he had ‘no alternative but to return to the roots, return to the sources of their being, in the rhythms of life and speech and languages of the Kenyan masses’ (Wa Thiong’o 1986: 73). For him the use of indigenous Kenyan languages in the novel could not be done for its own sake. History has shown that colonialism also encouraged the use of African languages, albeit infiltrated with

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colonial values and exploitative innuendos. Wa Thiong’o is, however, unromantic about the use of African languages in literature: ‘but writing in our languages ... will not in itself bring about the renaissance in African cultures if that literature does not carry the content of our people’s anti-imperialist struggles to liberate their productive forces from foreign control’ (Wa Thiong’o 1986: 127). In Devil on the Cross, the content of struggle is depicted through oral tales. In the first is about a peasant who ‘used to carry an ogre on his back’. The peasant consulted a diviner who advised the peasant to get rid of the ogre by pouring boiling oil on his back. The moral of the story highlighted that freedom comes through struggle. As the diviner told the peasant ‘nothing good was ever born of perfect conditions’. The peasant went home and did as he was told and was duly ‘saved from certain death’ (Wa Thiong’o 1982: 62). The second allegory is of a beautiful girl, famed for rejecting the overtures of all the local men, until a stranger ‘from a foreign country ... who was a man-eating ogre’ snatches her away. He tore off Nyanjiru’s limbs one by one and ate them’ (Wa Thiong’o 1982: 62). The third tale tells of an honest man, Ndinguri, who sold his soul to the devil in order to acquire wealth. This was the beginning of the end. Before long, Ndinguri, ‘began to fart property, to shit property, to ? property, to scratch property, to laugh property, to think property, to dream property, to talk property, to sweat property … Property would fly from other peoples hands to land in Ndinguri’s palms’ (Wa Thiong’o 1982: 64). The fourth tale is one adapted from the Bible; it is about a master who gave his servants money to keep for him until he came back from a far-away journey. Upon returning, he asked what his servants had done with the money. By using 500,000 shillings, the first servant doubled the money to a million shillings. The master was happy because of the ‘fantastic rate of profit’ that had accrued. The second servant doubled 200,000 shillings and also satisfies the master. The third servant buried the money in the ground and it did not accrue any interest or make any profit. The servant realised that without the sweat of the worker, the master will not grow richer: Ha! I will never kneel down before the lifeless god of capitalism again. I will be a slave no more … If today I joined hands with all the others who have opted to be masters over their own sweat, there would be no limit to the wealth we could produce for our people and country.

The response of the irate master is swift; he orders the arrest of the servant who has not been prepared to be exploited: No! You black people are incapable of such rebellious thoughts! No! You black people are incapable of planning and working out ways of cutting the ropes that tie you to your masters. You must therefore have been misled by communists … You have become a real threat to the peace and stability that used to exist in this country for me and my local

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representatives, the guardians of my property. (Wa Thiong’o 1982: 84–85)

Each of these oral tales is an allegory commenting on the power relations in Kenya in the early 1980s between the capitalists (some local and some foreignbased) and the African subalterns comprising workers, peasants and re-converted intellectuals. The tales, especially the one about the peasant and the ogre and about the master and his rebellious third servant, are used to depict the collective of workers, peasants and the educated Africans fighting the ‘devil’ of colonial capitalism. Devil on the Cross opens with a war of words between Boss Kihara, and his secretary, Jacinta Wariinga. The cause of this animosity is that Boss Kihara wants to sleep with Jacinta without her consent. When she refuses to submit she loses both her job and her young boyfriend (Wa Thiong’o 1982: 24–25). The struggle between Boss Kihara and Wariinga is magnified in the novel and the author is able to depict the class struggle between the capitalist ‘haves’ and the poor ‘have-not’ masses. For him the ‘fundamental opposition in Africa today remains imperialism and capitalism on the one hand and national liberation and socialism on the other; between a small class of native “haves” which is tied to international monopoly capital and the masses of the people’ (Wa Thiong’o 1981: 78–79). In Devil on the Cross, Gitutu wa Gaatanguru represents the comprador ruling class that is willing to safeguard the economic interests of Western imperialism. In his own testimony on how the rich steal from the poor, Gitutu boasts of his wealth and he proposes to the panel of judges that they begin to sell air to the ordinary people (Wa Thiong’o 1982: 100–104). The author also allows another thief, Mwireri wa Mukirai to testify in front of the judges but the thief angers the panel because he proposes that the Kenyan capitalists should throw out the foreign element and be allowed a monopoly on the exploitation of Kenyan resources (Wa Thiong’o 1982: 171). For threatening to undermine the relationship between the comprador class and international capital, Mwireri wa Mukirai is killed by Mwaura, the mercenary employed by international and local capital. It is to the credit of Wa Thiong’o that he shows that within the capitalist classes there is a great deal of in-house fighting. He also makes it clear, when describing how Nyina wa Mbooi is mercilessly beaten by her husband, that the upper classes are guilty of gender discrimination against their own women. Just as for Cabral, for whom resistance to postcolonial betrayal has a ‘mass character’ in Devil on the Cross the class of the exploiters is confronted by the ire of the workers, peasants and intellectuals such as Gatuiria. Muturi, the worker, is the one who organises the poor people to march towards a cave where the capitalist thieves are competing. Wa Thiong’o insists that the social revolution can only be led by the workers; the worker party burns the cave and when Wariinga and Gatuiria enter they ‘found the whole cave reeking of burnt debris and smoke. The whole place had been completely surrounded by the Njeruca crowd’ (Wa Thiong’o 1982: 207). The author is convinced that the ordinary people have the capacity

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to transform the unequal power balance in postcolonial Africa through class struggle. In Devil on the Cross, he portrays the masses as if all have a common understanding of the need to fight the new exploiters. He does not leave room for the reader to experience the self-doubts that characterise some ordinary people in the context of the liberation struggle. James Ogude agrees with this criticism when he says that sometimes Wa Thiong’o romanticises the masses’ historical agency in a postcolonial context when he depicts them as having ‘uniform goals and interests’ (Ogude 1999: 145). In Wa Thiongo’s desire to see the fruition of a social revolution in which the ordinary people control the productive forces, he simplistically ‘projects a unity and a coordinated political will onto the masses by creating in them a voluntary awareness of their plight and he endows them with a revolutionary consciousness that is not fully anchored in their material reality’ (Ogude 1999: 146). This depiction of the postcolonial Kenyan society in Manichean terms reducible to two contesting images of ‘the robber and the robbed’ underestimates other sources of political mobilisation against exploitation in Kenya (Wa Thiong’o 1981: 123). The reality, as Cabral shows, is that even when postcolonial resistance is based on popular culture, this culture is not informed by a uniform consciousness among the fighters. Cabral also argues that some elements of the privileged classes and religious leaders can bring to the struggle critical contradictions. In other words, in Wa Thiongo’s portrayal of the masses as the historical agents for change in postcolonial Africa, the reader does not see the masses’ consciousness growing in the struggle. And yet as Cabral reminds us, no revolution can succeed without total immersion in the practice of the liberation struggle as a political strategy as well as an act of culture. In Devil on the Cross the crisis of postcolonial Kenyan society is not only as a result of class contradictions. There is also a crisis in the language of narrating the agency of the resisters. Wa Thiongo’s dilemma in Devil on the Cross ‘lies precisely in the fact that Kenyan society does not afford him a tradition of a working-class struggle or a literary tradition directed primarily at bringing about socialist transformation’ (Ogude 1999: 145). In fact, Cabral warned in his own theoretical writings that African writers and critics could end up narrowing their understanding of the dialectics of the national liberation struggle if they projected the class struggle as the only axis around which the social revolution could be fought. Cabral believed that other political variables such as ethnicity and genderrelated struggles should not be underestimated because they give different shape and direction to the national liberation struggle. Wa Thiong’o tries to respond to the question of African female agency in the national liberation struggle by depicting Wangari the peasant, and Wariinga the educated clerk, participating in the struggle. We read in Devil on the Cross that the internal and external exploiters were chased from the cave by a broad-based mass movement mobilised and led by Muturi, the worker. And yet, as Wariinga is reflecting on the resistance of the

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masses to domination by foreign and local exploiters, she is convinced that she will ‘never allow herself to be a mere flower, whose purpose is to decorate the doors and windows and tables of other people’s lives, waiting to be thrown on to a rubbish heap the moment the splendour of her body withers’ (Wa Thiong’o 1982: 216). In fact, by the end of the novel, Wariinga comes to know that the old man of Ngorika is Wambui, her daughter’s father. Wariinga is incensed by this knowledge and in a fit of rage she shoots the old man. What emerges here is that what began as a collective struggle is narrowing down to a paternal-maternal vendetta. But as the narrator explains, the shooting of the old man is the beginning of a bitter, broadbased struggle: ‘She knew with all her heart that the hardest struggles of her life’s journey lay ahead’ (Wa Thiong’o 1982: 254). The irony in postcolonial Africa is that these struggles that Wariinga is to face in her future will not only come from internal and external exploiters, but also from sexual harassment, discrimination and oppression from ordinary men and women who belong to the peasant and working class. This question of the gendered nature of postcolonial society is explored in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, Nervous Conditions.

Nervous Conditions and the Quest for Mental Liberation Nervous Conditions (1988) does not approach the question of national liberation and culture from an open perspective of armed struggle and class conflict. The Zimbabwe liberation war is mentioned only once; instead the emphasis falls on mental liberation. Nor is colonialism the only enemy against which Tsitsi Dangarembga’s women fight – the main culprit that subordinates women is African patriarchy. Nervous Conditions is a creative critique and extension of national forms of resistance by African women living under the baleful eyes of colonialism and African patriarchy in the colonial context. The title, Nervous Conditions initially identifies as its provenance Jean Paul Sartre’s comment in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963) in which he says that ‘The status of the “native” is a “nervous condition” introduced and maintained by the settler among the colonized people with their consent’ (Fanon 1963: 17). In her Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga is aware of the pernicious influence and presence of the colonial master. But the novel chooses to narrativise a different kind of resistance that takes the form of gender struggle within the African postcolonial society. For Dangarembga both under colonialism and in postcolonial Zimbabwe, the margins that the ordinary men and women occupy are defined by their own contradictions and gender struggles. In these margins some women fight back at the source of their social oppression while others consent. ‘In this squeezed space, black women live a life of sexual discrimination from their men and as a result black women find themselves collaborating with black men against colonialism even as the same women fight their own men’ (Vambe 2004: 1). Susan Z. Andrade (2002: 54) further notes that Nervous Conditions ‘dispels the notion that colonialism is upheld primarily through brute force in Southern Rhodesia’. And Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo (2004: 1) agrees when she adds that it

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challenges the ‘stereotype of women as victim, placed alongside the stereotypes created by male writers of rural woman as a good wife and mother and an urban woman as a prostitute and temptress’. The recognition that the public domestic space is fraught with its own contradictions enables Dangarembga to effect a revision of nationalist history that is usually and simplistically plotted on an anti-colonial war executed by men with women playing second fiddle. Dangarembga complicates her narrative by allowing her heroines or her female characters to sometimes be ‘attracted to or at least seek empowerment within the new order which a transforming colonialism has made available’ (Chennells 1996: 60). This contradictory articulation of resistance, incorporation and negotiation of new identities for African women characterises the responses of Maiguru, Nyasha, Tambudzai, Lucia, and Ma’Shingai in Nervous Conditions. Nervous Conditions tells several stories simultaneously: the story of Babamukuru who is the senior patriarch of the Sigaukes, his wife Maiguru and two children, Nyasha and Chido. The novel also tells the story of Jeremiah, Ma’ Shingayi’s husband, and their children Nhamo and Tambudzai. The other immediate relative of the Sigaukes given prominency is Lucia, who is Ma’Shingayi’s younger sister and is married to Takesure. Babamukuru derives his authority from Shona culture because he is the senior patriarch. He has also acquired European values through European education which is an education system designed to encourage passivity, loyalty, and compliance to authority. It is ironic that the same type of education was used by some Africans to challenge colonialism. However, in the case of Babamukuru this education made him ‘cultivatable, in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator’ (Dangarembga 1988: 19). Significantly, the novel depicts black men as authoritative, confused, unreliable, and un-heroic. The author wants to create literary and ideological space for the construction of her images of black women who fight both colonial injustice and patriarchal arrogance. Nervous Conditions presents the reader with young female characters who refuse to be oppressed by either colonialism or African patriarchy. Nyasha, who is Babamukuru’s daughter, has also acquired European education. She uses this same education to subvert colonial stereotypes of African women and patriarchal values that encourage looking down on black women as second class citizens. In Nervous Conditions colonial education, ironically, enabled the younger generation of African women to shape their ‘own futures in ways not always foreseen – or endorsed – by missionaries, capital ... [or] the state’(Schmidt 1992: 39), or, indeed, by African patriarchy. Dangarembga reworks Cabral’s notion of ‘return to the source’ so that it becomes an occasion for black women to assert their quest to enjoy unfettered freedoms. In the novel, Nyasha is a young woman of the questioning type; she will not bring her parents a mukwambo (son-in-law). While at school, Nyasha wanted to know whether the Jews’ claim to Palestine was valid; whether monarchy was a just form of government; the nature of life and relations before colonisation; and exactly why UDI was declared and what it

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meant. At home she refused to be ‘anyone’s underdog’ and demanded to be treated with respect by Babamukuru. When he failed to comply with her demands Nyasha resisted in no uncertain terms. Nyasha also teaches her niece, Tambudzai, that in life there are ‘other struggles to engage in’ and galvanised by Nyasha’s stories, Tambudzai grows to defy Nhamo and Babamukuru. Of her rebellion and new self-awareness against the Sigauke patriarchy Tambudzai says that ‘something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed’ (Dangarembga 1988: 204). In depicting Tambudzai, the author emphasises the need and importance of a critical and self-reflexive mind that refuses to take surface realities for granted. Nor does Dangarembga ignore Tambudzai’s uneasy and often strained relationships with her grandmother, Maiguru, and her own mother – all women belonging to an older generation – who, over ‘generations of threat and assault and neglect’ ‘belonged’ first to their fathers and then to their husbands’ (Dangarembga 1988: 138, 153). In Nervous Conditions the language of national liberation struggle is expressed by Tambudzai’s mother. Of her status in a colonial context she complains that the ‘poverty of blackness’ has reconstituted the identities of African women in ways that have rendered them vulnerable to colonialism and African male rule. For Tambudzai’s mother, ‘this business of womanhood is a heavy burden … And these days it is worse, with the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of womanhood on the other, Aiwa!’ (Dangarembga 1988: 16)

Just as for Cabral who linked gender struggles to the larger national and social quests for freedom, in Nervous Conditions, Dangarembga links issues of class, race and gender as interlocking systems of sexploitation. The paradox is that the same woman, Tamudzai’s mother, who analyses national liberation struggle in terms of race, gender and class, contradictions herself and is emasculated from action to the point where she has resigned herself to her fate of being men’s underdog. She advises her daughter, Tambudzai, to bear the pain that society metes out to women. Through this dual and contradictory portrayal of Tambudzai’s mother, the author insists (just as Cabral did) that there are uneven levels of consciousness in the social group of women. In the novel there are, in other words, also individual characters who show inconsistencies within themselves on the voice of struggle. In Tambudzai’s mother there is a simultaneous desire to rebel against social convention as well as conformity to male authority. In the closing pages of Nervous Conditions Tambudzai rejects the values embodied in mission education even although she has used its liberal principles of equality to challenge Babamukuru’s middle-class narrative of success. Tambudzai also rejects her mother’s stoic attitude towards life and the the obsession shown by Jeremiah (her father) to control female sexuality. Nervous Conditions is a profound novel whose treatment of the national liberation struggle is one of affirmation and critical contestation. It shows Babamukuru, the African patriarch,

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who despite his European education returns to his rural community (the ‘source’) to help his people acquire European education and cope in a colonial context. The novel condemns the likes of ordinary men like Jeremiah who enjoy dominating the lives of their women but is more sympathetic to poor women who accept conditions of enforced poverty. The author admires characters such as Lucia, who despite a lack of schooling is nevertheless able to assert her freedom of thinking critically in the presence of African men. Dangarembga refuses to plot her novel as a national romance based on an armed struggle or a palpable class struggle. Rather, her concern is to reveal that ‘cultural resistance’ (Cabral 1970: 2) also takes the form of gender struggles. Nervous Conditions is ultimately a novel about a female writer ‘authoring’ and in the process ‘authorising’ female characters that speak in voices or tones that are situated outside the frame of reference of both colonialism and African patriarchy. At the end of the novel, Tambudzai Sigauke confidently narrates her ‘own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men’ (Dangarembga 1988: 204). What this means is that for Tambudzai, the myth of the exceptional woman [or guerrilla] is therefore undermined, first by the open acknowledgement that she was produced by a collective, and secondly by the parallel unravelling of her narrative counterpart. (Andrade 2002: 37)

More importantly, for Tambudzai, the national liberation struggle assumes the mantle of a quest for mental freedom. Nervous Conditions anticipates more struggles by African women in the postcolonial context, emerging out of new contradictory narratives of women of the future whose stories, writes Dangarembga, will eventually ‘fill another volume’. For her, national heroism is engendered in social struggles fought by postcolonial women for communal justice. In Nervous Conditions the lack of emphasis on armed struggle suggests that military war without mental liberation of the different people in the social strata leads to partial freedom. This fact echoes Amilcar Cabral’s statement that one of the enemies of the national liberation struggle among Africans is ‘ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology’ (Cabral 1966: 2). He insists that mental liberation is a precondition for the success of the armed struggle, but also argues that theory cannot take precedence over experience or political practice: ‘we would recall that every practice produces a theory, and that if it is true that a revolution can fail even though it be based on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory’ (Cabral 1966: 3). In Nervous Conditions, the women-centred struggles produce a theory which helps one to understand the constantly shifting social positions of women in postcolonial Zimbabwean society. In depicting these struggles by women against colonialism, male rule and oppression from other women, Nervous Conditions reworks Cabral’s concept of national liberation struggle in ways that confirm the novel as both a critique and an extension of the idea. The novel asserts that the struggles that women

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wage in the margin that they occupy in postcolonial African society are in fact ways by which African women are reinventing their identities.

Conclusion Mission to Kala, a novel written in the late 1950s, prefigures the theme of the ‘return to the source’ which was to pre-occupy Cabral in the 1970s. The novel suggests that some of the Africans who attended colonial schools were not totally alienated from the struggles of the ordinary people. Through Medza, the anti-hero, Mongo Beti depicts that the educated could be re-Africanised or re-converted to ‘return to the source’ of the struggle of the masses. Mission to Kala also dramatises a point that Cabral was to take up in ‘National Liberation and Culture’, namely, that although the anti-colonial struggle has a mass character, the ordinary people’s perceptions and understanding of the ideological goals of the war are not uniform. This fact partly helps to anticipate and appreciate the source of betrayal, a theme that is dramatised in Harvest of Thorns. Cabral believed that after years of humiliation, denigration and oppression, the ordinary Africans could rediscover their true identity and dignity in the context of the liberation struggle. In Harvest of Thorns, Benjamin is one of the Africans who join the armed struggle to topple the intransigent Ian Douglas Smith’s colonial regime in Rhodesia. This phase of the liberation struggle which Cabral defined as an act of culture focuses on the African nation within Rhodesia to struggle and free the land from the domination by white settlers. In Harvest of Thorns, the goal of the economic national liberation struggle is not immediately achieved. What is indeed achieved is political independence. This phase sets the stage for the ‘social revolution’ marked by class, gender and ethnic conflicts in the new African postcolonial communities. It is to the credit of Cabral that in his theoretical writings he foresaw the trend towards betrayal of the masses. In both ‘Return to the Source’, and ‘National Liberation and Culture’ Cabral insists that it is those leaders who could not be re-converted who occupy the mantle of the neo-colonial state today. Cabral agrees with Fanon (1963) who ascribes the betrayal of the masses to the crisis or pitfalls of national consciousness among the nationalist parties that came to power in Africa. Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Devil on the Cross dramatises the oppressive class relations which define postcolonial Kenya in particular and Africa by extension. Like Cabral, who argues that in Africa struggle takes different forms, in Devil on the Cross, he offers the collective resistance of workers, peasants and some intellectuals as the classes who have the potential to contest neo-colonial power blocs in order to return the masses to what Cabral describes as the ‘upward paths of their culture’ (Cabral 1970: 4). In postcolonial Africa, the under-classes display tendencies to collective solidarity as well as individual selfishness. This ‘fragmentary and episodic’ life of the oppressed (Gramsci 1971) enables the reader to understand that the subaltern classes are also, ironically, made up of ‘exploiters and the exploited’ (Sarkar 1984: 274).

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Dangarembga’s novel, Nervous Conditions, takes up this theme of the contradictions in the lives of African subalterns and refuses to reduce the postcolonial struggles to a single axis called class struggle. In her novel she dramatises the gendered struggles that take place in the context of a colonial margin occupied by black people. Where Cabral suggests that cultural resistance is indestructible and takes many forms, one such form is the mental liberation for Tambudzai in Nervous Conditions. The legacy of Cabral also tells us that culture is not static. The best of African writers acknowledge this truism without forgetting that whatever theories inform African literature these have their basis in people’s experiences of struggle. Cabral insists that at least in African politics and its imaginative depiction in African literature, ‘every practice produces a theory and that if it is true that a revolution can fail even though it be based on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory’ (Cabral 1966: 3). As we celebrate the enduring legacy of Cabral’s theoretical writings on national liberation and culture, and returning to the source, we do so in the knowledge that African literature can only remain relevant to the lives of millions of Africans if it continues to draw upon, expand and represent those images of the struggles that defined Cabral’s entire life.

CHAPTER NINE

Perspectives on Africanising Educational Curricula in Africa The broad aim of this discussion is to rethink and identify best practices in Africanising curricula in Africa’s education. This is in fact a difficult task owing to the imprecision of what is meant by Africanisation. Further, conceptualisations of Africanisation are sometimes too narrow, and in other cases rendered so diffuse that there is no clarity on levels of Africanisation. We need to reach some consensus on whether we are discussing Africanisation as the standard achieved or to be achieved; on the process of adaptation, appropriation, rejection and consolidation of values in historical transitions. Furthermore, a preliminary critique of Africanity is necessary in order to move forward. In the ongoing debate on Africanisation, these levels are sometimes conflated with each other to a point where they are barely recognisable, while in other cases attention is focused on one level at the expense of the others. We now discuss the major arguments on what Africanisation is; suggest the epistemic conditions for a dialogical Africanisation process; and then propose some standards or benchmarks by which Africanising educational curricula in Africa can be deemed productive, relevant and workable in an African context.

Introduction Until Valentine Mudimbe (1988) usefully intervened to show that most of the time the political identity ‘Africa’ is a European invention, scholarship from Africa (and from Africans in the diaspora) tended to take the political identity ‘Africa’ for granted. Hegelian characterisation of Africa as tabula rasa to be recreated in the image of Europe, and historian Trevor Roper’s Africans who are perpetual children without history, paved the way for Conradian imperialistic justifications of the conquest of African people, to purportedly tame the savages and mould them into human beings. In the twenty-first century more ludicrous understandings of who an African is have also been peddled by such well-known personalities as Mahood Mamdani, for whom an African is anybody who chooses to pursue a career in Africa. This irresponsible answer to the question ‘Who is an African?’ has important implications for the understanding of the stakes that characterise the debates on Africanisation. For if anybody from anywhere can choose to be an African by virtue of having an interest in Africa, it unfortunately follows that if 125

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that person commands power to influence or legislate on African education, then the foreigners’ interests and priorities find their way into African education. The flip side of this opportunistic definition of an African is that Africans are black people who historically have no other home than in Africa. Clearly, this is an oversimplification because African elites prescribe Africanisation of curricula as suitable for African masses when the same elites send their children to schools that emphasise the superiority of European values (Ramose 1996). Why then has Africanisation become such a heated topic of discussion in the twenty-first century in Africa and the diaspora? What are the terms on which the debate is being carried out? And what have all these questions to do with curriculum development in Africa’s education?

Racialised Conservative Perspectives on Africanisation of Education and Curriculum Development Africanisation is a derivative discourse. It can only be named through a process of negation, a negation that characterises it against that which Africanisation disavows. Africanisation is also reverse discourse: if colonialism rode on the crest of wanting to ‘Europeanise’ or ‘civilise’ Africans, Africanisation is the African response to a colonising genre. But Africanisation can also be a fractured response to an equally dominant but fractured discourse. The terms of the debate advanced by those calling for Africanisation are in a sense already assumed: the recuperation of a distinct and yet unified identity for Africans. If colonialism is the European ideology of conquest against which Africanisation is in revolt, apartheid contained a simultaneous affirmation and rejection of Africanisation. To the extent that Africans were excluded from participating in European education, apartheid rejected not only the sharing of the fruits of modernisation and enlightenment, but also removed the control of Africanisation or domesticating European education in Africa from African hands. And yet, to the extent that apartheid named bantustan education in the (artificially designated) bantustans as that which must form the core of Africanisation for black Africans, then apartheid already sought to predetermine and prescribe an inferior teleology of the project of Africanisation. When apartheid discriminated against Africans in the provision of European education perceived as quality education, and named ‘bantu’ education as the fitting education for Africans, each of these approaches to Africanisation by apartheid constituted a form of radical conservatism. African responses to the options of Africanisations offered to them by apartheid were also ambiguous: decrying the inferior bantu education and yet holding on to the notion of the superiority of European inspired traditions of education that apartheid had defined as only for itself. This raises the following questions: Did the African liberation movements in South Africa in particular and Africa in general have coherent and alternative systems of education that they wanted to elaborate after gaining political rule?

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Did black people resent their inferior education while simultaneously envying the education made available only to white people in South Africa and the rest of Africa? Did any of the African nationalist liberation movements see it as necessary and possible to question the very capitalist basis that survived on, needed and justified a discriminatory education system in Africa? These questions are not merely rhetorical but are also very valid, because in the rest of Africa very few countries were willing to jettison the colonial models of European education systems that they have adopted. In the case of South Africa, after 1994 the country experimented with models of education derived from America and modified in Australia and adapted them for the South African situation in the form of Outcomes Based Education (OBE). It is semantic tiptoeing to call OBE ‘traditional’, ‘transitional’ or ‘transformational’, because the theoretical assumptions are not reconfigured for use in Africa. A project of Africanisation inspired by OBE has limits: its emphasis on redress is historically justifiable, but answers back to a dominant paradigm along the very terms dictated by the values and language of denial contained in the dominant discourse. Thus, from an Africanist perspective, education rooted in OBE remains a subservient educational project; its allegiance to capital and its subservience to the profit motive dictated by the industrial complex model, renders it an impoverished perspective. It is an agenda of education for the poor masses; African elites (both black and white) send their children to schools that impart European forms of education considered international, cosmopolitan and ultimately guaranteeing a competitive future.

Afro-centric Education Perspectives on Africanisation and Curriculum Development When some post-independent African elites rejected bantu education in favour of European education, other African elites (Ngqakayi-Moutang 2006; Sabo 1994) proposed a model of Africanisation of educational curriculum based on Afrokology (Nabudere 2006). Its roots are in Asante’s theories of Afrocentrism. The most abiding tenet of Afrocentrism is that an Africanised curriculum should, in its entirety, be carved from Africa and diasporan experiences, from which it draws its cultural resources: [It] holds that the African experience in its totality is simultaneously the foundation and the source for construction of all forms of knowledge. On this basis, it maintains that the African experience is by definition nontransferable but nevertheless communicable. (Ramose 1996: vi)

Afrocentrism locates the values of Africanising African education in orature which is in this perspective held as containing irrefutable evidence of the purity of African identities. Further supporting this reasoning, Kunnie suggests that a project of Africanisation of curriculum change in Africa should

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re-examine and re-appropriate such indigenous knowledge systems such as myths and oral narrative and inscribe them at the centre of the learnerexperience as constituting new modes of knowing. (Kunnie 2000: 167)

Conceding that Africanisation is ideological and consists of values that must be put at the centre of education in Africa, it is caricaturing the debate of Africanisation to suggest, as Kunnie does, that the mere use of oral forms amounts to Africanisng the curriculum. For one thing, historical evidence has shown that apartheid in South Africa was (precisely in this manner) based on segmenting reality, ascribing ‘tribal rituals, myths and songs’ to African knowledge, and in this way encouraging the perception that takes obscurantist African practices as that which should be at the core of Africanising curricula in black communities. Afro-centrism creates and enforces isolated genealogies of knowledge as that which constitutes knowledge in the African world. In the process, it is less liberating, for its modes of othering reinforce the perception that Africanisation equates to ghettoisation; it is acceptance of a lower epistemology. When Afro-centric critics describe orality as sui generis to African communities, it deprives Africans and the process of Africanisation of the benefit of enjoying advanced technology. It appeals to nature and not nurture. It refuses to acknowledge that Africanisation can mean different things to white people and to black people, among white people and within black communities in Africa. Afrocentrism insists on re-inventing its own conservatism based on an alternate genealogy (Appiah 1992). This implies that Afrocentrism ends up elaborating an agenda of Africanisation that is incestuous because it denies the historical cross-currents that have shaped it from other non-African cultures. The result is a product called Africanism (Jeevanantham 2004: 1), conceived as a static and undifferentiated curriculum that cannot speak to the diverse richness of African content and contexts (Vambe 2006). To this extent, the elaboration of Afrocentric theories of Africanisation of curricula in Africa and in the diaspora functions as a potent vector in limiting what is knowable or can be known about the epistemic possibilities and conditions of the process of Africanisation for a liberating pedagogy in African education (Freire 1963). Afrokological models of Africanisation are heir to the theoretical blindness of the assumptions of Afrocentrism. As defined by Naburere, Afrikology recognises other sources of knowledge as valid within their historical, cultural or social contexts. However, Afrikology’s main emphasis is that it recognises tradition as a fundamental pillar in the creation of such crosscultural knowledge in which Africans can stand out as having been the forebearers of much of what is called a Greek or European heritage. (Nabudere 2006: 7)

Clearly, it is only a discourse in crisis itself, such as Afrikology, that speaks of a ‘tradition’ rather than traditions, and seeks validation via its contribution to Greek and European heritage. Afrolokogy looks back into Africa’s past in order to validate

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its existence in the present. Nabudere writes that ‘It is not Afrikology because it is African but it is Afro – because it emanates from the source of the universal system of knowledge in Africa’ (Nabudere 2006: 8). Evidence of African-based knowledge is proffered, such as the Egyptian pyramids, the architecture of Great Zimbabwe, the Dogon masks of Benin and the immortalised history of Mali by African griots. Nabudere reasons that if Africa is the cradle of humanity, then a credible programme of Africanisation of its educational curriculum must emerge from this edifice. Thus, one of the key pillars of Afrokology is that a standard or benchmark for Africa’s development, particularly towards harmonising its educational curricula through Africanisation, is already set up against the past creativity of Africans. It cannot in fact be forgotten that the heroic acts of Africans and their past deeds, as argued in the discourse of Afrikology, are meant to provide inspiration for Africanisation that is then projected as that which present and future generations must emulate. In this understanding of Afrikology, Africanisation is located in the space of past African experiences that should inform the values of Africanisation in the present and future. It is remarkable, though, that one of these values that must inform the project of Africanising the curricula of Africa’s education is depicted as a unified whole that has emerged from collective authorship: We have to start with the proposition that African knowledge is collective and on that basis build concepts and theories, which recognise it as such and reward the communities concerned for any use or application of their knowledge for profit … Western notions of ‘intellectual property’ cannot therefore be applied, except by imposition of ‘modernity’ upon Africans – which a majority of Africans have refused to accept … It is the task of Afrokology, applying the epistemology of Thothism (derived from Thoth, the African Egyptian God of Knowledge) to bring this reality out and mainstream it. (Nabudere 2006: 21)

In this passage, the understanding of the necessity to mainstream African values into Africanisation of Africa’s educational curriculum proceeds from a position of misframing the problematic. First, ‘African knowledge’ which is never named in the plural is not given any concrete form. It is simply there as a reality that can unproblematically be transferred into the present. Second, a mythology is concocted which is that African knowledge is ‘collective’. In reality, the history of the development of material and spiritual cultures has not shown Africans as spontaneous beings who can think of a particular problem at the same time, and solve it in the same manner at the same moment. In other words, there has never been a situation where Africans acted like automatons. What there has been and still is, is that individuals are able to create a song, and make technological instruments available which then became popularised in the community where they are found to be useful.

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An Africanisation programme that does not value individual creativity and initiatives, as is the case with Afrokological assumptions, can only undermine the efforts that ordinary people display when they want to make Western modernity work for themselves. Technological inventions by Africans can only be mainstreamed into an Africanisation programme effectively when they are patented, their creators known, and their work acknowledged. It is thus ahistorical for Nabudere, with his theory of Afrikology, to suggest that ‘Western notions of intellectual property’ cannot be applied to African creations. It should be understood that Africans have lost out in the past and could continue to lose out in the struggle to Africanise their education if their technological creations are not considered as individual ‘intellectual property’ that can nevertheless find collective use in the African continent. The irony is that disciples of Afrokology such as Nabudere copyright their written work and derive profit from it although they would presumably find the same situation untenable for the intellectual productions of ordinary people. Put differently, because African elite pronouncements on education are written down, elite Africans determine what must pass as the content and form of an Africanised curriculum in Africa. It is therefore a mode of ventriloquism for Nabudere to suggest that modernity is always imposed on Africans. African people whose lives the ideology of Afrikology purports to defend, appropriate modern tools, values and education to make these artefacts work for themselves. Africans use their experiences to make sense of their environment and in the process appropriate the cultural resources that colonialism and Western modernity have made available. This point is missed by the proponents of Afrikology whose elite ideology is condescending to the majority of Africans who want to see real change in the terms by which the debate on Africanisation is carried out. Because Afrikology argues for an Africanisation programme that must be retrieved from a frozen past, it falls into its third sin which is its inability to see contradictions in the values that ordinary people live out. For instance, Nabudere accords ordinary people unwarranted power to interpret the needs of Africanisation when he writes that it is only they who know and can produce knowledge, and are able to decide for whom it can be produced (Nabudere 2006: 30). The contradiction in this statement is not in the recognition that people can produce knowledge. This is common knowledge and needs no debate. However, what needs to be interrogated, and which Nabudere’s narcissistic enquiry has not confronted, is that the structures of feeling, thinking and understanding of realities by the ordinary people are not beyond infiltration by dominant ideologies. One instance of that infiltration is Afrokology’s romanticisation of the agency of Africans. In other words, Afrikology is a beleaguered discourse of elite politics in crisis. Its remedies for a viable Africanisation of curricula in Africa are, by a twisted logic, alienating to the very people for whom it claims to speak. Its language is rarefied, its indulgence in coining obscure terminologies such as ‘Afrikology’, and its choice to live in the past, are what Fanon criticises when he writes that:

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I am ready to concede that on the plane of factual being the past existence of an Aztec civilization does not change anything very much in the diet of the Mexican peasant of today. I admit that all the proofs of a wonderful Songhais civilization will not change the fact today the Songhais are under-fed and illiterate, thrown between sky and water with empty heads and empty eyes. (Fanon 1963: 168)

For Fanon, it is not sufficient to evoke the images of the past and uncritically project them as the basis of a viable Africanisation of the curriculum agenda in contemporary Africa. Afrikology identifies the ‘glorious’ African past, establishes it as the benchmark for a regenerated Africanising agenda and then leap-frogs towards a product called Afrikology, adumbrated as the ultimate philosophical guide for Africanising in Africa. In the process, Afrikology ducks the difficult question of theorising the process of an Africanised curriculum, for it is in conceptualising Africanisation as a historical process that one is bound to confront the ‘zone of occult instability’ where people dwell, which is a space of painful contradictions (Fanon 1963: 183). In this zone of occult instability, Africans reject a rigid and absolutised definition of Africanisation. As Fanon further argues, the native intellectual who writes for his people ‘ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope’ (Fanon 1963: 187). Yet, Afrikology’s reliance on the definition of tradition as static is meant to foreclose dialogical engagement with that past so as not to fashion alternative values that must inform a continental project of Africanising educational curricula in Africa, one that is based on the assimilation of the best practices in curriculum development that different intellectual formations have to offer to Africa. It is because of the recognition of the blind-spots of Afrikology’s terms of theorising the contours of a distinct, yet universal, an African, yet cosmopolitan Africanisation of the curricula agenda, that the neo-liberal perspectives have re-invented their own discourses to suggest the tenets of Africanisation in Africa.

Neo-Liberal Perspectives on Africanisation of Educational Curricula in Africa The theoretical inspiration for the understanding of the source, content and path for Africanisation of educational curricula as defined by neo-liberals is eclectic. If Afrokologists could be described as ‘para-keepers’ who contest the theoretical claims and policy aims that seek to situate Africanisation within the globalisation paradigm (Zeleza 2006: 209), then neo-liberals can be described as ‘para-makers’ who believe that Africanisation of curricula can benefit from the insights offered by globalisation. However, it is important to distinguish ‘different’ intellectual formations within the neo-liberals who promote Africanisation. For example, one group of neo-liberals who believe (as do Afrikologists) that values for Africanisation can only come from Africa’s past glory, also believe that Africanisation can benefit from a process of adaptation of values from other non-African cultures.

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Makgoba, for instance, views Africanisation as ‘a process or vehicle for defining, interpreting, promoting and transmitting African thought, philosophy, identity and culture’ (Makgoba, 1998: 49). His insistence on the transmission of distinct African thought, philosophy, identity and culture can in fact be understood as an attempt to revive an aboriginal language of purity of identity and theoretical absolutism accorded to the values that should inform an Africanised curriculum. And yet, Makgoba does not rule out the possibility of imagining a process of Africanising curricula in Africa that are dependent on and survive upon incorporating, adapting, integrating other cultures into and through African visions and interpretations to provide the dynamism, evolution and adaptation that is so essential for survival and success of peoples of African origin in the global village. (Makgoba 1998: 49)

In other words, those whom Gramsci (1971) calls ‘organic intellectuals’, the ‘traditional’ neo-liberals such as Makgoba, want to harness the best values that are at the core of Afrikology as well as those values that should be appropriated from African diasporan and white cultures of the West to inform the content, ideology and politico-philosophical attitudes underscoring Africanisation of curricula in Africa. Traditional neo-liberals see major barriers to Africanisation as emerging from the politicisation of the word Africanisation, a process that has forced Europeans to be sceptical of the project. Makgoba describes the constituent elements of this politicisation of the word Africanisation when he writes that The word Africanisation has become negatively politicised. Politically, it conjures up a deja vu phenomenon of dictatorships, military coups, the expulsions, exodus of Europeans and Asians, and unstable governments; economically, it represents poverty, famines and a mess; in developmental terms, it reminds one of the total lack of it; in education, it brings into focus the lowering of standards, campus trashing, kidnappings, poor academic scholarship; in health it brings memories of mutilation of bodies, witchcraft and AIDS somewhere in the continent. Europeans have found this word, its interpretation and what it embodies, uncomfortable. (Makgoba 1998: 51)

However, and because of the casual description of Africanisation through the imagery of a ‘chronology of decline’ (Chan 2005), there has been stiff resistance to the successful implementation of Africanisation in Africa. ‘Modernist’ neoliberals use the evidence of Africa’s bad record of human rights to suggest that Africanisation of curricula can effectively be carried out within the confines of the ideological project of global capitalism. This economic and political context is said to provide the neo-liberal agenda with liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation of Africanisation of the education curriculum in Africa, through university institutions. Zeleza (2006) captures the interests of global intellectual

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and economic capital in shaping the form, content, process and even providing the infrastructure of the project of Africanisation when he writes in critical vein that: The construction of scholarly knowledge about Africa has always been an international enterprise. In fact, it is outsiders, not African intellectuals, who tend to set the terms of debate [on Africanisation, so that] there is no other region in the world that has suffered more from ‘theoretical extraversion’ than Africa, where externally derived intellectual perspectives, preoccupations, and perversions play such a powerful role in scholarship, not to mention policy formulation and even popular discourse. (Zeleza 2006: 209)

Despite the potential of ‘perversion’ that can arise from an Africanisation project driven by interests external to Africa, modernist neo-liberals call for ‘ownership, accountability, excellence, and responsiveness to a substantive Africanisation process, driven by Africans’ (Hoppers 2006: 33). For modernist neo-liberals, the very attempt at theorising Africanisation should be seen as a desire to dictate the terms by which Africanisation is discussed in Africa and elsewhere. That is why for Odora Hoppers, Africanisation of curricula can adequately be done in the context of the African renaissance project that is based on the recognition of methodological shift from mono-disciplinary research through inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, terminating in a multi-disciplinary approach. Here, the attraction of a multi-disciplinary approach in the efforts at implementing Africanisation is that it undermines the fragmented approaches used to understand knowledge production in Africa and that it offers a kind of flexibility that should allow students to take course offerings across disciplines. Multi-disciplinary approaches are conceived as best suited to driving the agenda of Africanisation because of their perceived inherent openness that involves an acceptance of manifested contradictions based on the ‘unknown, unexpected and the unforeseeable tolerance inbuilt into it [that] implies acknowledging the right to ideas and truths opposed to our own’ (Hoppers 2006: 36). Hoppers further argues that when Africanisation is conducted through a recognition of the power of multi-disciplinary approaches to generate indigenous knowledge systems, the crisis of an African educational curriculum ceases to be of ‘economics’, ‘politics’ or culture per se; neither is it, for that matter, a crisis of the humanities versus the natural sciences; but rather it is one in which there is a peculiar convergence of all these factors and which, together, form the entirety exceeding the sum of its parts. (Hoppers 2006: 33)

Gutto (2006: 320) also suggests that Africanisation of curricula has more to do with connectivity in which the centrality of ‘history, culture, mathematics, science and technology’ is recognised. Seductive as this formulation of the process of Africanisation of curricula may be, it nevertheless does not address the ideological

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attitudes underlying the theoretical assumptions of the subject offerings that are taught across all curricula. This technicist approach to Africanisation proposed by modernist neo-liberals assumes that insights are unproblematically transferable from one field of study to another. A technicist approach to Africanisation lacks African-inspired standards and ends up consolidating the hegemonic hold that European models of curriculum development presently have on Africa. In the technicist approach to Africanisation little is said about the need to decolonise the content and the attitudes surrounding the actual teaching of particular subjects. Choice of subjects to study is emphasised irrespective of where the syllabus informing the curriculum is created. Consequently, the call by modernist neo-liberals to Africanise is in fact an expression of a desire to catch up with European models of curriculum development. No alternative curriculum informed by African experiences is projected as desirable. It is not being suggested here that European curricula cannot dynamise the Africanisation of an African curriculum in exciting and unexpected ways. What is being contested in the modernist neo-liberals’ programme of Africanisation curricula is a refusal to mainstream African experiences and content. What is being questioned is the construction and presentation of the mythologies of European models of curriculum development as unassailable. This trend of abstracting African experiences from the lives of Africans is in fact at play in the project that replaces Africanisation of curricula with harmonisation of curriculum. Each of these tendencies obscures the main issues implicated in the difficult process of Africanising education curricula in Africa. These challenges force us to search elsewhere to explore the possibilities of creating the epistemic conditions for an emancipatory discourse on the Africanisation of education curricula in Africa.

Rethinking Liberatory Conditions for Sustainable Discourse on Africanisation The theories informed by racial conservatism, Afrokology and neo-liberalism demonstrate different meanings that have been attached to notions of Africanising the current curricula in African education institutions. However, as argued above, none of them succeeds in large measure to reveal the links between Africanisation as standard, process and product, which is so crucial in identifying the epistemic conditions that would concretely lead us to an emancipatory discourse of Africanisation. What follows below points to some of the important issues which further redefine the concept of Africanisation, without suggesting that these are the only factors which are important in determining the quality of Africanisation as standard, process and product. These suggested issues do not exhaust the possible content of the concept of Africanisation; they only point to what needs to be done. It is impossible to legislate over the content that should be the carrier of Africanisation at a continental level because this is a matter which can be dealt with only at each national level. However, it is suggested that institutions that

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should deal with matters of standardising education in Africa can be built initially in Africa’s five regions, so as to construct common but legally binding instruments that will then facilitate mutual exchange of experiences in the construction of a framework for Africanisation. Gutto suggests, for example, that the modest efforts at constructing a model of curriculum should be informed by the understanding that all Africans and peoples of African descent need to possess some basic, shared common knowledge about Africa, the diaspora, and the world – and to acquire critical approaches to contextualised learning. (Gutto 2006: 306)

In this regard, the African Union’s efforts at creating an agreed instrument for harmonising education may be seen as a positive move although much needs to be done to encourage a buy-in by ministries of education of the member states.

Human Factor Development It is important for Africa’s institutions of higher learning to demonstrate the will to Africanise, but this alone is not enough. There is a need to train human capital in the form of directors, lecturers, and those in the Human Resource (HR) management sector. These, together with other significant role players, can become the drivers whose vision is informed by a deeper but collective understanding of the necessity to mainstream African knowledge systems, making sure that they are contextually relevant to the ever evolving needs of Africa’s people. Africanising the Content of Syllabi A deeper knowledge of what Africanisation should mean will take care of the diversity of Africa’s experiences so that we emerge with educational content that is at once local and global, and which serves humanity beyond the boundaries of a single country. This means also that history, literature, agriculture, medicine and law should be grounded in African indigenous knowledge systems. This is not to say that Africanisation will banish European knowledges. That would be impossible, and counter-productive. What is useful for a dialogical programme of Africanisation is to carefully sample the best practices from Africa and Europe so that students are singularly African in outlook without losing the opportunity to become cosmopolitan. The global village dictates that Africanising content must first answer to the African people’s agenda before considering other people’s forms of knowledge. Africanisation of Research Priorities Research is a key component for Africanising curricula. Africanisation demands a willingness from visionary drivers to establish useful journals that produce knowledge not simply for promotion of individuals but for the purpose of enhancing

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the quality of life of Africans. This task requires a different level of research, that is, meta-research which generates forms of knowledge that consciously align with the goals of Africanisation. Meta-research requires the clear funding of the research portfolio so that junior and senior academics can produce research output that matches world standards, or surpasses them.

Africanisation and the Input of Financial Resources An idea, a vision, and perspectives that are to inform the processes of Africanisation can only materialise when the national institutions of education are adequately resourced. Financial resources are required to train people in HR, to fund research and to communicate the vision of Africanisation to society. Researchers and academics need to be rewarded in order to motivate them to continue engaging with issues of Africanisation since the priorities of the process are never static, but require constant reflection and updating of the earlier goals of Africanisation. Access to Quality Education through Africanising Students This means that from as early as Grade 1, African students are required to have access to an education system that emphasises African values. It pays few dividends to start ‘Africanising’ students at university level while the foundation phase is left Euro-centric and intact; this might well mean that by the time students move to senior grades they suffer from dissociation of sensibilities. That is why Africanisation should aim to produce a unique, critical, and dependable student and citizen whose worldview is informed by an understanding of his/her history, culture and social background. This of course is not meant to equate Africanisation with ghettoisation. African students need to be immersed in the practical as well as theoretical dimensions of learning so that the choice of the country’s educational direction should not be based on ad hoc planning. Africanising the Communication of Africanisation The process of Africanisation will not happen just because there is a desire to do so. New channels of communicating the goals of Africanisation must be put in place, with offices, and communications officers to disseminate information on specific targets of Africanisation during the process of roll-out of the programme. Too often, the masses of Africans in whose name programmes such as Africanisation are undertaken, are not consulted. Consequently, the very people who are supposed to benefit from it may begin to resist efforts at Africanisation. It cannot be taken for granted that talking about Africanisation is Africanising.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to think through the Africanisation process in order to emerge with suggestions on best practices of curriculum development in Africa.

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Conceptually, we proceeded in two diametrically opposed ways. First, we sought to understand the process of Africanising curricula in Africa by way of highlighting what Africanisation is not, or should not be. Africanisation of education curricula should not discriminate against or exclude people in terms of race, gender and sex. Africanisation is also not a return to the past to retrieve a static identity for Africans. Africanisation is a standard, a process and a product, established and constantly revised in order to arrive at shared values. Africanisation will be said to have taken place when the curricula to which Africans are exposed is about the lived experiences of Africans. Africanisation means that Africans are assuming ownership in using different forms of technology to improve their own lives. Africanisation is not the equivalent of ubuntuism; it is more inclusive and tolerant of diverse views from Africans and non-Africans, while ubuntuism is narrow, regional and exclusive. Africanisation evolves values whose content is relevant and context bound to Africa without necessarily being reduced to a geneaological isolate. In this chapter, we identified four basic arguments that have been used to construct what Africanisation means in Africa. Racial conservatism is an ideology of superiority, one that dictated to Africans, one that is equivalent to bantustan education. This narrow and exploitative definition of Africanisation is the basis of racial discrimination. It was rejected by the proponents of Afro-centrism and Afrokology, for whom Africanisation is the process of drawing educational values from Africa’s past greatness. However, the limitations of Afrokological definitions of Africanisation became apparent when the proponents adopted narrow aesthetics which refused to acknowledge the role of non-African cultures in moulding the content and context of the debates on Africanisation. We partially agreed with Afrokology’s desire to root Africanisation in African experiences. We also acknowledge as significant the neo-liberal definitions of Africanisation as a product of globalising forces. Because Africanisation is always a transforming product, we concluded by suggesting that Africanisation should have its content and context Africa-centred. We then suggested that since Africanisation is a process, it takes human willpower to drive its agenda, which needs financial resources. We concluded by calling attention to the need to Africanise the way we communicate the imperatives of Africanisation to all the people of Africa so that its discourse does not become the privilege of a few elected people. Africanisation is thus a process of becoming challenged to meet the ever changing demands of the African people.

CHAPTER TEN

Voices from the Fringes: Some Reflections on Postcolonial South African Writings Introduction: Rethinking the Concept of a Literary Rainbow Nation One of the major paradoxes of the post 1994 democratic dispensation in South Africa is the paucity of literary criticism by black people. It is a paradox because democracy, we expected, would usher in a new wave of creative writing. If this assertion carries with it a sense of a sanguine mood, it is in part because of the exasperation we feel about the scant literary creativity by black people, particularly in the English language. The sense of alienation from a supposed critical rainbow nation is heightened by the reality that there is in fact a reproduction of the conditions of underdevelopment that make it difficult for a black authored, fully fledged flowering of works of literary criticism devoted to explicating the vibrant sphere of black indigenous literature in African languages. We do not by any means claim that there is a drought of literary criticism within black communities in South Africa; it is well known that South Africa’s position in journal production remains as yet un-assailable and accounts for nearly 50 per cent of all the journal publications in the continent. However, we ask the question related to whether or not black people are still writing; and if they are competitive in creative and critical works; and whether, indeed, they have access to the minority dominated South African journals? In the space of owning, managing, editing and publication of knowledge production, black South Africans have not entirely made meaningful headway. Our restless observation of the paucity of black literary criticism in a country whose majority populations are black might perhaps be misplaced, even when those anxieties are not entirely unjustified. For example, the period prior to 1994 witnessed constant surges of cultural production in which South African black literatures were in fact used as weapons of struggle. This creativity by black people has not been followed in the era of democracy with the same vigour as before 1994, even although freedom had opened some spaces for experimenting with new forms of literary creativity. There are numerous reasons for this disjuncture in both black literary creativity and criticism. Jonathan Jansen (2001:19) writes that it is one thing to open the doors of learning to young black South Africans, and quite another thing to transform what is inside the house and behind the doors of education. 138

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Lewis Nkosi is even more forthright when he avers that in postcolonial South Africa, particularly after 1994, a minority controls the means of literary production, to the extent that South African literature is unfortunately the literature of a single ethnic group. For most part, he claims, what is produced in South African universities is white produced, and circulated in white managed journals of literary criticism that are ironically packaged for both a white and black audience. It matters a great deal whose values are validated in a country whose public ideology rightfully emphasises philosophies constructed around ideas of ‘ubuntuism’, ‘rainbow nation’ and ‘African renaissance’. Nkosi (2008: 9) critiques the effects of the myth of national reconciliation in the field of South Africa literary criticism when he says that it encourages ‘… a certain schizophrenia … in the country whereby those who benefit from racial identities denounce its manifestation in others’. Going on to use Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas in their book Kafka, towards a Minority Literature and Mill Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1984), Nkosi challenges the myth that a minority is always weak and threatened by the majority: Their analysis makes it clear that they are not concerned with a reading of minorities and majorities in terms of numbers because the ‘minorities do not necessarily define themselves by the smallness of their numbers’. There is a sense, for example, in which a numerical majority in a multiethnic society like ours can be seen to be effectively a ‘minority’ in the field of cultural production, producing at best a ‘minor’ Literature, while a numerical minority, through access to cultural capital and through control of institutions of symbolical and commodity exchange, can be seen to be constituting the real ‘majority’. (Nkosi 2008: 10)

How a ‘majority’ of people is constructed and constituted into a ‘minority’ in the arena of knowledge production in a South African democracy is not accidental; a journal such as The English Academy Review (EAR), 24, 1 (May 2007) helps us to understand how this processing of narrow-casting knowledge is created in the image of the minority with power to decide on what people read. This issue of EAR claims, among other things, that it is a forum dedicated to the vision of ‘promoting effective English as a vital resource and of respecting Africa’s diverse linguistic ecology [and that] it welcomes submissions on language, as well as educational, philosophical and literary topics from southern Africa and across the globe’ (Editorial page, unnumbered). By and large, this mandate is met in the numerous issues of The English Academy Review. In particular, we draw attention to the successful issues that have focused on a broad array of thematic concerns ranging from critiques of literary works, popular culture and, on occasion, essays that focus on some works from the continent. But it is here that something begins to unhinge somewhat. The English Academy Review is within its rights, and probably the framework of the journal, to focus mainly on southern African literature and culture. However, in EAR, southern Africa means primarily works from South Africa. This is a very old

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mythology, helping as it does to project South Africa as the literary giant in the southern African region. But the parallel may not be lost that such ‘exclusivising’ politics sometimes create a ‘laager mentality’ which is reproduced not only at the level of stomach politics (Bayart 1993) but also in writing about southern Africa. One could ask further: is it a failure of academics/ critics or the EAR’s editorial board that they have neglected to recognise that Dominic Mulaisho of Zambia gave us The Smoke that Thunders (1979); that from Mozambique the voice of Luis Bernardo Honwana’s Who Killed Mangy-Dog and other Stories (1969) was heard; and that Pepetela from Angola penned Mayombe (1983). All these literary classics are part of the commonwealth of southern Africa’s literary heritage. From Zimbabwe emerged Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain (1975); Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgin (2003); Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) and The Book of Not: A Novel (2006); Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger: A Novella and Short Stories (1978) and Black Sunlight (1980). All this literary creativity came from Zimbabwe despite (or because of) the loss of governability in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. We could argue further that this condition made it possible for creative works to emerge and flourish. Of course, no one is saying that EAR has only focused on South Africa. Such an assumption is contradicted by the evidence provided in the latest issue that has some articles from Zimbabwe. But the point that needs to be made is that there is insufficient inclusion of black South African authors in most of the issues of EAR and when one finds them it is the usual Zakes Mda. No one is against Mda, who has remained prolific over the years, even since 1994 as seen in his works such as The Heart of Redness (2000) (in English) and Ditiragatso: Sesotho sa Leboa (2002). His Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995 (1997) testifies to his literary stature and his reputation is salutary in South Africa and the entire continent. However, do physical boundaries and spatial geography correspond directly to boundaries of knowledge in Africa? In other words is it a state of ‘nervous condition’ that makes EAR deaf to the literary cross-currents that link southern Africa’s works with those from other parts of Africa, such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Matigari (1989); Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991); Achebe’s Anthills of the Savanna (1987); or Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (2004) by Umutesi of Rwanda? And yet in EAR, if it is not Mda under discussion, it is Coetzee or Krog. Of course all these South African greats, they too, can and should lay claim to a southern African literary ‘home’. But it is the thought of it; of the possibilities of canonising very few authors from South Africa and then projecting these as representative of the southern Africa. An inflationary commentary of works of art of writers described as the canon creates a picture of a terrifying literary politics that has a hold on the realities of creativity as we know it in South/southern Africa. In other words, the politics of the hegemonic gaze on black literature has sometimes disempowered and continues to disempower the practise of literary criticism by black scholars.

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Nkosi suggests that another pernicious reality that now characterises black literary production is that despite the discourses of ‘truth and reconciliation’ in the political arena in South Africa, there remains an ‘unhealed, incurable split between black and white writing’. He attributes this literary hiatus to the ‘memory of the sjambok’ (2007: 665–666), itself a negative historical legacy of an apartheid system that has meant that South African literature has become ‘a movement wholly occupied, managed and dominated by white writers, with black writers’ playing second fiddle: Though often treated as natural, sometimes as a positive sign of our cultural diversity and richness, and as such a reason for celebration rather than regret, this difference between black and white writing can also be read as a sign of social disparity and technological discrepancy. In a post-apartheid South Africa it is clearly a cause for embarrassment. It exists and on the one side as a reminder of historical neglect and the impoverishment of black writing and on the other of cultural privilege and opportunity in the case of white writing…This discrepancy is particularly noticeable in the domain of theory. (Nkosi 2007: 664) Beneath this critique of the neglect of black writing is also a criticism that implies that the black middle class in South Africa has, since 1994, taken a long time to capitalise on the spaces that the coming of democracy opened. There are ideological constraints for black writers such as the habit they have of understanding South African realities through what Njabulo Ndebele (1991) – borrowing a phrase from Roland Barthes – calls the spectacle of excess. A writing grooved in the phenomenon of the spectacle of excess creates binaries which inhibit nuanced understanding of the complex articulations of shifting identities. Writing on the African middle classes and black elites’ failure to create an enduring national consciousnesses and their own identity, by which they could lead the masses, Fanon argues that Under the colonial system, a middle class which accumulates capital is an impossible phenomenon. Now, precisely, it would seem that the historical vocation of an authentic national middle class in an under-developed country is to repudiate its own nature in so far as it is bourgeois, that is to say in so far as it is a tool of capitalism, and to make itself the willing slave of that revolutionary capital which is the people … an authentic national middle class ought to consider as its bounden duty to betray the calling fate has marked out for it, and to put itself to school with people: in other words to put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial universities. But unhappily we shall see that very often the national middle class does not follow this heroic, positive, fruitful and just path; rather, it disappears with its soul set at peace into the shocking ways – shocking because antinational – of a traditional bourgeoisie, of a bourgeoisie which is stupidly, contemptibly, cynically bourgeois. (Fanon 1963: 120–121)

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If one can argue with Fanon that in Africa, the black elites have not done what the white middle classes did in Europe in fostering enterprise in industry, academia and philosophy, does this mean for example that there is then a lack of will-power on the part of black South Africans to write? Is it true that they are not writing? If the black people are writing, where are they writing and circulating their cultural productions? Where are they criticising each other’s works, and how do the black South Africans receive criticism from fellow literary comrades? Again, what could be the other factors assiduously contributing to the process we perceive as undermining black literary creativity and criticism in South Africa? It is demonstrable that beyond the harmful effects of apartheid on black literary politics in South Africa some possible reasons are taking centre stage. These have to do with the notion of ‘solidarity criticism’ and the culture of intolerance to alternative views. It is a pernicious new culture, an attitude of ‘kill the messenger’, one which is congealing within South African political life in general (see chapter five). However, within the same shrinking spaces of literary democracy, South Africa remains a contested space were some important developments are taking place in the cultural site of youth literary production; this ‘something’ which was sidelined by hegemonic grand narratives on the fight against apartheid, are beginning to fight their ways to the surface of public life. The anthology of poetry We Are (2008) edited by Natalia Molebatsi, suggests such a space which is not totally outside the gaze of reconciliation narratives but nonetheless is situated at the cross-roads of new thinking on how to write about South Africa, once described by Desmond Tutu as the ‘rainbow nation’, in which both the agents of apartheid and their victims – black and white – are ironically ‘God’s children’. We Are provides us with an opportunity to reflect on some of the deleterious and cavalier attitudes of some established South African publishing houses in dealing with youthful voices in the new nation. We also choose to focus on it to show the insights observed by an international publisher that has agreed to publish this work. We are also interested in analysing a few of the poems in this anthology with a view to extrapolate the direction that South African literature might take if these writers are taken seriously by the publishing industry.

Some Random Thoughts on South African Cultural Criticism Criticism of South African literature has a history that goes back far beyond 1994. This should be exciting news because it implies that any new developments in the field of cultural criticism are in fact building on the existing critical corpus. We remember the Drum and Staffrider generation with fondness because although it was patronised by capital, it provided unexpected channels of dissent to the prevailing authorities. Anne McClintock’s black poetry of the Staffrider generation rejected the literary ‘culture of malnutrition with which blacks had been fed’ (2007: 391). Thus a ‘Staffrider poet, as the editorial of the first issue explained, is … a “skelm of sorts”, a miscreant hanging at an acute angle to official law and convention’

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Tenacious and precarious, at odds with state decree, a black poet became a ‘mobile, disreputable bearer of tidings’ (McClintock 2007: 392). The Drum and Staffrider moments are in fact reminiscent of the great Harlem renaissance in which black people forcefully registered their literary presence on the American literary canvas, giving themselves a sense of deserved entitlement to being American regardless of the fact that most of the capital that funded black art was white owned. There is of course no relationship of conditional isomorphism between the intentions of art financiers and the multiple meanings that can exfoliate from critical judgments on art. The sometimes unexpected result is that such art can bring into question and crisis the very system that has made its conditions of existence possible. The history of black literary creativity expanded in America after the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s, while black literary creations from South Africa have dwindled since 1994. Some would decry our comparison which in no way is meant to equate 14 years of South African democracy to more than 400 years of black literary development in America. It cannot be denied that in South Africa things would have been different had there been no ‘arrested [literary] decolonization [in] critical theory’ (Jeyifo 2007: 432). This is because the present critical landscape in South Africa is in fact slanted towards a minority cultural production. There are critical voices that have been allowed to pass as the literary canon and discussed as unassailable. For example, anthologies of South African literature are described as superficial if they do not include Eskia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959). Of course Mphahlele is a black writer and it makes sense that he should be included in anthologies of South African Literatures, because he has shaped South African literature and critical practices in undeniable ways. Down Second Avenue has been a prescribed text at secondary school level in neighbouring Zimbabwe since the 1980s, which is testimony to the influence and respect he has commanded from the black literary establishment. Alongside Mphahlele is Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy (1946); Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948); Nadine Gordimer’s July People (1981); and Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999). But it is indeed a disgrace that there was a crop of writers just before and immediately after 1994 who recreated South African lives through the genre of autobiography such as the towering Long Walk to Freedom (1994), that have still not received sustained criticism. Is it too early in the history of black South Africa’s literary criticism to expect close engagement with the works of South Africa’s black nationalists?

Black Aesthetics and the Politics of Literary Tokenism in South Africa The cultural achievements of black critics pale into insignificance in post 1994 when compared to the steady literary output that has come from English-speaking scholars. J.A. Kearney’s Representing Dissension: Riot, Rebellion and Resistance in the South African Novel (2003) focuses exclusively on writings by white South

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Africans, most of whom are of English extraction. Leon de Kock, Louise Bethlehem and Sonja Laden’s South Africa in the Global Imaginary (2004) is a towering achievement; its critical essays certainly dwell on issues pertinent to cultural identities in democratic South Africa, but it is unfortunate that although some black personages are written about, there are virtually no black writers represented in this insightful book. Michael Titlestad’s Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage (2004) remains one of the very well elaborated critiques of the interface between orality and the written word composed by black people. Of course Titlestad is white but this does not detract from the quality of his work. However, his is a book that looks at black literary productions in South Africa from a long tradition of sharing continuities and discontinuities with the politics of literary production; it draws on the consumption patterns of the old order that was dislodged in 1994.1 The racial dimensions of writing critical practice matter because it is the process by which some textual voices are canonised while others are marginalised. Henry Louis Gates (1992: 32) reminds us that a canon is often represented as the ‘essence of the tradition, indeed, as the marrow of tradition; the connection between the texts of the canon is meant to reveal the tradition’s inherent, or veiled, logic, its internal rationale’. But he is quick to deconstruct this definition of a canon when he writes that None of us is naïve enough to believe that ‘the canonical’ is self-evident, absolute, or neutral. It is a commonplace of contemporary criticism to say that scholars make canons. But, just as often, writers make canons, too, both by critical revaluation and by reclamation through revision. (Gates 1992: 33)

In his Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) he goes on to say that literary canons should not be taken for granted under a loose umbrella of national culture, because national cultures are critical discourses and the traditions they debate may not necessarily be about books revealing shared values. As a possible set of selections among possible sets of selections that are deemed representative of cultures, different modes of articulation are in fact hegemonic (Gates 1992: 17–42). They are implicated in power relations; they speak of who speaks; and from what literary space and ideological position. Teachers in schools, critics and scholars in universities often decide on behalf of the learning population what is to be included or excluded in any reading course (Wa Thiong’o 1982). Sometimes governments have specific cultural goals and they often encourage critics and teachers to put certain works of art (rather than others) at the centre of syllabi. While the political ‘consciousness’ of reconciliation in South Africa was imagined as desirable for fostering national unity, it is likely that a novel or a critical practice that reveals the gaps in the TRC would be more acceptable; one that centres on university syllabi without invoking the appellations of ‘spoiler’, ‘rebel’, ‘unpatriotic’, and

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‘Communist’! Even despite the fact that in South Africa the Communist Party is one of the tripartite members of the ANC-led government. How do we in South Africa deal with residual processes of political and cultural consolidation that seek to bracket out those works which though of high quality may be considered dissident, and therefore inappropriate for academic consumption by the reading population? Such processes of suppressing potentially alternative voices may never really be enacted openly; they are subsumed under totalising discourses and ideologies that privilege the commonsensical so that it should appear ‘obvious’ to prescribe Krog’s A Change of Tongue (2003), and not Makeba’s Makeba: My Story (1988). Why should it be made natural by critics of South African literature to let their students of literature know Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) without feeling the disgrace of not reading William Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1986), that finely tuned autobiography bringing to the surface the strategies used by black people to survive apartheid colonialism. Literary tokenism in South African universities prevents students from imagining that Krog and Makeba are both writers from South Africa; that both deserve to be read and given an equal platform in the country’s university literary syllabi.

The Political Basis of ‘Solidarity Criticism’ and its Effects on South African Literary Cultures The literary demobilisation of average South African readers is framed in the terms in which political discourse is carried out in the country. In chapter five we have indicated that in South Africa, whereas official political discourse privileges ‘democracy’, the cultural critics prefer ‘freedom’, a word they are quick to deconstruct and fragment (Jamal 2003). One outcome of this for democratic South Africa is the phenomenon of literary criticism being locked in the prison-house of ‘solidarity criticism’. This manifests itself in South Africa in different ways. We saw in chapter five how Sachs himself captured the contradictory role in which culture is used to participate in naturalising ‘solidarity criticism’, when in the final days of the apartheid era he wrote that culture workers in the democratic era had a momentous task ahead of them to embrace and project a very different vision of the new South Africa beyond the entrenched (struggle) literature of mobilisation (Jamal 2003). Sachs’ contribution to the cultural debate in the early 1990s suggests that there are cultural slippages in a South African society that is unevenly conditioned to understand that unity and uniformity as metaphors of a stable democracy in Africa mean the same thing. They do not. Albie Sachs’ understanding of solidarity criticism reveals this lexical and ideological disjuncture when he suggests that the positive movement of anti-apartheid also contained in it a contradiction: that art can only be cherished when it serves political dogmas; that critical practice in southern Africa can be carried out in English, by black and white literary politicians. Once these dogmas have become the status quo, it is difficult to offer

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creative and critical constructive criticism without being labelled a rebel. This situation creates, according to Sachs, a cruel culture of sycophancy even in the field of criticism of literature. Sachs identifies the deleterious effects of academic and creative sycophancy when he writes complaining against solidarity criticism. He says Allow me, as someone who has for many years been arguing precisely that art should be seen as an instrument of struggle, to explain why suddenly this affirmation seems not only banal and devoid of real content, but actually wrong and potentially harmful. In the first place, it results in an impoverishment of our art. Instead of getting real criticism, we get solidarity criticism. Our artists are not pushed to improve the quality of their work, it is enough that it be politically correct. The more fists and spears and guns, the better. The range of themes is narrowed down so much that all that is funny or curious or genuinely tragic in the world is excluded. Ambiguity and contradiction are completely shut out, and the only conflict permitted is that between the old and the new, as if there were only bad in the past and only good in the future. (Sachs 2007: 132)

Solidarity criticism is solipsistic; it prevents genuine interrogation of how black South African writers can rise above their ideological limitations. And yet, in reality the people of South Africa love and have fun amidst crime, graft and corruption. Sachs asks the South African writers, particularly black writers to embrace in their writings the totalities of the contradictory lives of the people. He asks writers to be critical of the wrong-doings of ANC, the dearest political party of many South Africans both black and white: Can it be that once we join the ANC we do not make love any more, that when the comrades go to bed they discuss the role of the white working class? …What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including our sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world? There is nothing that the apartheid rulers would like more than to convince us that because apartheid is ugly, the world is ugly. ANC members are full of fun and romanticism and dreams, we enjoy and wonder at the beauties of nature and the marvels of human creation, yet if you look at most of our art and literature you would think we were living in the greyest and most sombre of all worlds, completely shut in by apartheid. It is as though our rulers stalk every page and haunt every picture; everything is obsessed by the oppressors and the trauma they have imposed, nothing is about us and the new consciousness we are developing. Listen in contrast to the music of Hugh Masekela, of Abdullah Ibrahim, of Jonas Gwanga, of Miriam Makeba, and you are in a universe of wit and grace and vitality

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and intimacy, there is invention and modulation of mood, ecstasy and sadness; this is a cop-free world in which the emergent personality of our people manifests itself….No one told Hugh or Abdullah to write their music in this or that way, to be progressive or committed, to introduce humour or gaiety or a strong beat so as to be optimistic. There music conveys genuine confidence because it springs from inside the personality and experience of each of them, from popular tradition and the sounds of contemporary life; we respond to it because it tells us something lovely and vivaciously about ourselves, not because the lyrics are about how to win a strike or blow up a petrol dump. It bypasses, overwhelms, ignores apartheid, establishes its own space. So it could be with our writers and painters, if only they could shake off the gravity of their anguish and break free from the solemn formulas of commitment that (like myself) have tried for so many years to impose upon them. (Sachs 2007: 133)

This passage was obviously directed to South African writers writing against apartheid; but its potency is that curiously, it is a commentary on contemporary creative critical aesthetics in South Africa. Its power derives from the author’s capacity to anticipate the contradictions undermining the production of a literature of freedom. Not only is solidarity criticism one of the factors holding back critical art; South African art dwells on the obvious; when it does so, it becomes oblivious of other potentially subversive currency. More significantly, Masekela, Makeba, Gwanga and Ibrahim are the kind of writers that one does NOT see featuring in the great South African literary canon. They are marginalised, and yet their work pulsates with the wisdom from popular traditions that links them to rediscovering the ordinary in the human experience. Sachs frowns upon the philistine art that sees revolution and struggle only in those works that are openly political; the works that venerate open revolt are tethered to apartheid teleology and ways of imagining realities.

In Search of New Literary Paradigms to Free Black Literary Imaginations It is important, however, to note that there have been notable achievements by some black writers and critics. Here, one can single out the most influential critical book on black literature and popular culture, Njabulo Ndebele’s Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture (1991). We share Ndebele’s concern, expressed in another of his works, that South African black protest literature reveals the traits of ‘solidarity criticism’ that displays ‘socially entrenched manner of thinking about the South African reality; a manner of thinking which over the years, has gathered its own momentum and now reproduces itself uncritically…’ (2007: 126). Ndebele believes that there must be within South African black writers a

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freeing of the imagination in which what constitutes the field of relevance is extended considerably. What is relevant is the entire community of the oppressed. For example, politics is not confined only to the seizure of state power; it can also be the decision by members of a township women’s burial’s society to replace a corrupt leader with a new one. The significance of the moral and ethical issues that may be involved in this matter together with whatever insightful revelations may be made about the interplay of human motives, ought not to be underestimated. They have a direct bearing on the quality of social awareness. (Ndebele 2007: 129)

Furthermore in South African creative works of art and its criticism, there needs to be an ‘accompanying change of discourse from the rhetoric of oppression to that of process and exploration. This would imply an open-endedness in the use of language, a search for originality of expression and a sensitivity to dialogue’ (Ndebele 2007: 131). This implies moving away from literary complacency. Attempts to identify uncritically with a literary canon defining itself narrowly will consciously or unconsciously promote another canon. This in fact poses practical problems, one of which is to refuse to create space for plurality of voices. Plurality here is not conceived in terms of a cacophony of voices, it is more to do with accepting flexible selves. Ndebele is not alone in attempting to create more democratic black literary traditions. Andries Oliphant has been struggling to double as lecturer and serving as editor of Journal of Literary Studies, as well as pursuing the creative career. One of the high points of his endeavour was the editing of a collection of short stories entitled At the Rendezvous of Victory and other Stories (1999). An unassuming character, Oliphant has not only previously and successfully run pan-African doctorate workshops that brought doctoral students from all over Africa; in the recent past he has also registered more accomplishments in the field of editing and commissioning political writings, notably in the form of the two volume book Democracy X: Marking the Present, Re-Presenting the Past (2004), and a new journal Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing (2008). Beyond Oliphant’s illustrious work one still finds evidence of mere tokenism; even the magisterial African Renaissance edited by William Makgoba does not have a single critical voice on the status of South African black literature in 1999! Maybe, at present in South Africa no one is yet ready for a literature that rejects the totalising discourse of African nationalisms and white neo-liberalisms, with their politics of the rand and market economics at the expense of the masses. Maybe, the individual is still so much part of the collective to the extent that any attempt to suggest an alternative society is not yet acceptable in a country that arguably went through severe trauma at the hands of apartheid. We are therefore aware that our readings of the complex nature of South African literatures and its criticism is partial; however, we believe that neither the writing nor its criticism has yet reached a point where the notion of patriotism is linked to the concept of

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creative dissidentry in which an author can work for his/her country by criticising those aspects of its inane culture that are unprogressive. For example it seems that it is possible to raise fundamental questions of the political killings that rocked black South African communities in the 1980s, but many unfair-minded South Africans will grow angry at the mention that South African has not done enough to accommodate the so-called foreigners. The usual stock in trade expressed or unarticulated assumptions’ response is that foreigners are black; that they ran away from their ruined economies. Although these perceptions are not shared by all South Africans, they were immortalised by the then Minister of Safety and Security, Comrade Charles Nqakula. It is too late in the day to say that Nqakula has recanted his position; maybe South African literatures and its criticism have not reached that stage because there is no single road to African renaissances in the continent. If our criticism of South African cultures is misconstrued it is likely to raise concern that it appears ‘fascist’ because we write as if South African society and its cultural productions are homogeneous; as if we are attempting to impose imported models of human behaviour derived from elsewhere. South Africans have a right to argue so. But the question central to our thesis thus far is how to tell a fellow comrade from the struggle that present struggles require new literary tactics without being labelled reactionary or even a rebel who must be vanquished. Similarly, we pose the question: what happens when previous subaltern literatures become the literary status quo? Guha and Spivak, two subaltern historians, suggest that one of the bad signs in the literary politics of the postcolony is that ‘any member of the insurgent community who chooses to continue in such subalternity is regarded as hostile towards the inversive process initiated by the struggle and hence as being on the enemy’s side’ (Guha and Spivak 1988: 14). The inclination to consider ‘hostile’ any alternative voices for change, particularly by those who are on the fringes of political and literary power in the postcolony, is also criticised by Rosemary Jolly for whom If the atrocities that characterised South Africa before the April 1994 election are to make any sense at all, moral outrage must be supplemented by critical evaluation of the terms used to phrase condemnations of racism in the age of (semiconscious) late colonialism. This activity needs to take place in various intersecting spheres –economic, social, political and cultural – in numerous different localized contexts, but it must proceed with an awareness of its international implications. (Jolly 1996: 365–383)

In ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’, Sachs anticipated the need to confront the inner tensions within black communities when he wrote that ‘culture is us, it is who we are, how we see ourselves and the vision we have of the world’ (Sachs 2007: 134). Sachs also avers that in the process of creating a new ‘vision’ for South Africa,

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We should also not be afraid to enter into our own contradictions and difficulties, because we have sufficient confidence to do that. If we can reach down to our roots – and not invented roots, real roots –with all the tragedy of contradiction, the interest, the variety, the surprise that’s involved in that, then I think that will do more to destroy the domination of the oppressor than simply putting the oppressor up as a target all the time. (Sachs 1990: 104)

Sachs might be raising another set of controversial issues when he imagines the possibility of ‘real roots’, ‘not invented roots’ because all cultural roots are invented; but the import of his message is just that working hard to persuade Africans that South Africans are the best does not require us to force our views down the throats of others. On the contrary, we excercise true leadership by being non-hegemonic, by selflessly trying to create the widest unity of the oppressed and to encourage all forces for change, by showing the people that we fighting not to impose a view upon them but to give them the right to choose the kind of society they want and the kind of government they want. We are not afraid of the ballot box, of open debate of opposition. (Sachs 2007: 137)

In black literary cultures those conditions for a quest of human tolerance are prefigured in the black poetry of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in South Africa.

Resistance Poetry in South Africa in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s In the 1970s and 1980s, as Molebatsi (2008) has shown, different trends within the genres of poetry emerged and their object of attack was invariably the visible excesses of apartheid, although some women performance genres critiqued the separation of families by apartheid; the loss of morals in black communities; and the challenges that black women faced when suddenly finding themselves having to take care of disintegrating families. The poetry of Mzwakhe Mbuli and Alfred Qabula is demonstrative of engaged poetics whose claim to commitment was on open criticism of apartheid. Even within this resistance genre of poetry there are significant differences; Mbuli’s poetry is mass-based, while that of Qabula is worker-based (Brown 1996: 120–145). Poetry was linked to the politics of the African National Congress and elaborated its ideological line in as much as the poetry found new life in serving the interests of politics. This creative performance was also solidarity inspired because of poetry’s capacity to unite. But after 1994 Mbuli redefined his relationship with the new authorities. When today we hear Mbuli on the airwaves performing at soccer matches and other ‘inane’ contexts, can we say that he has moved away from politics or that he is now involved in

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politics of a different kind? This chequered question presents a burden as well as a formidable challenge to the younger post 1994 poets. If one moves outside the institutionalised and somewhat predictable but useful poetry of Mbuli and Qabula into the grey area of popular music, contradictory idioms of what the rainbow nation signifies can be discerned. For example while Skwatta Kamp’s composition, ‘Politics’ (Segalo 2006: 29) brims with anger over the failure of the ANC government to deliver on economic promises and cutting down on crime, Hip-Hop Pantsula’s ‘Harambe’ (Segalo 2006: 31) toes the ANC party line, urging people to pool their resources for the collective common good. Compare the following lines from Skwatta Kamp: The struggle goes on and the people still …Your campaign punch line was ‘better life for all’/ Five years later your punch line was ‘stall’.

To those of Pantsula: I’m the type of brother who can drink in any bar now. ’Cause of you I’m educated. Because of you the Black youth of today is emancipated.

It is easy to dismiss Skwatta Kamp as fastidious, and fault Pantsula for seeking party patronage. We are able to sympathise with both positions. However, Skwatta Kamp’s sense of betrayal arises from a perception of hopes dashed. For him, how can a political party that promised South Africans prosperity, now ‘stall’? Skwatta Kamp would rather quit when he sings ‘Signing out, A-N-C later’. On the other hand, Pantsula believes that it is the party of elder politicians that liberated the youth from imminent death and not vice versa. Both Skwatta Kamp and Pantsula can reasonably be described as youth in search of new spiritual compasses in the new democracy; however each of the singers proceeds from solidarity musical politics. This tendency continues in youth poetry in post 2000 South Africa.

We Are and the New Idiom of Poetical Revolutionary Radicalism South Africans experienced the alienating effects of apartheid and sometimes of the very nationalist political narratives that sought to dislodge apartheid; each of these politics can be accused of attempting to pigeonhole African culture without equating the wrongs of apartheid and those of African nationalism. The latter was the historical dimension to the struggle against the former. However, if African nationalism in South Africa was mass-based and continues to be so, and if sometimes it shows bizarre manifestations – like the xenophobic attacks on black foreigners in March and April 2008 – we can certainly claim that new political perspectives are emerging from youthful cultural productions. In this new poetics it is possible to imagine that despite them being ‘on the margin’ of the literature of reconciliation, the literary cultures from the ‘fringe’ affirm continuities and discontinuities with the liberal tradition of white literature as well as the pan-

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African radical politics of the era of political decolonisation that swept Africa in the 1960s. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1993) calls this cultural movement, ‘moving the centre’, a way to designate the forced as well as willed reconstitution of literary production in Africa, a process that we see at work in the anthology of youth poetry that Molebatsi has put together.

Some Pieces from We Are (2008) We Are is introduced with the language of panache; the anthology represents ‘diverse and powerful voices’ from ‘young people who are just mad about the word’ (p. ix). The young poets/ producers are living in times that are ‘mad, scary annoying, challenging, inspiring and uplifting’ (p. x). Because of these different emotions that inform the poetic visions of the young artists in South Africa, we are told, the anthology provides a cultural qua literary space where the poets are ‘who you think we are, should be, or could become’ (p. xii). The editor claims in her preface that since the majority of the poets are female voices, they are ‘not your official poet or puppet’ (p. xii). This is a swift attack on the misogyny within South Africa’s literary cultures. In We Are, most of the poetry mixes or extends the poetic musical traditions of performance, so richly vibrant in South Africa (Gunner 1994). Some of the poets began as musical troubadours emboldened by the power of the word. Most publish and circulate their literary creations outside the institutionalised publishing houses, preferring to publish their work themselves. And there is no literary drought suffered by young poets. Some of their poetry identifies individuals and the community projects where they began or to which they are affiliated. The following list is not exhaustive but is indicative of the cultural vibrancy and versatility of youth literary productions. Names that tumble from the pages are those of Gcina Mhlophe, Lebo Mashile, Malika Lueen Ndlovu, Natalia Molebatsi, Kethiwe Ntshangase, Otumile Shupinyaneng, Aryan Kaganof, Percy Mabande, Maserame June Madingwane, Lucille Greeff, Myesha Jenkins and Maakomele Manaka. In some of the poems, the reader cannot fail to detect the assertive politics of the new generation of young cultural producers. For example, in Shelley Barry’s piece ‘bound/aries’ the poet announces that the present and future of rewriting the poetic narratives of South Africa belongs to the young. Barry effuses: ‘… from where I sit/ perhaps it’s you bound to a language/ I just don’t fit’ (p. 2). A refusal to be stereotyped is accompanied by a search for a new idiom to name the new realities in South Africa. An act of revising rehearsed and second handeddown narratives must insist on an alternative poetics: ‘We have to write our own chapters/ paint our revolution across blank spaces/ dance and stomp upon our space on the page and make it sacred.’ In these lines, there is need to interrogate clichés derived from official discourses that resurrect old forms of languages that equate unity with uniformity in the new era of democracy. The dark clouds of the official mythologies that threaten to bury new voices calling for a change of values can be resisted. That process is paradoxical in that in seeking to author a new language of freedom of expression, the poets have to ‘embroider … history

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on coloured cloth/ name this apartheid/ crush it with art’ in order to embrace the ‘space we carve/ the place we sculpt’ (p. 3). The ideological project to reclaim intellectual space threatened with official amnesia must proceed from a perspective that acknowledges the harmful effects imposed by the resurgence of racial politics in South Africa. Barry cries out despite the national posturing promoted by grand philosophies of the rainbow nation, that ‘somewhere between our side their side that side still lies a gaping divide/ Barcelona too far from Linton Grange’ (This side of P.E. 2008: 5). Lebogang Mashile’s poem, ‘Coloured’ (p. 57) also wonders whether or not the vision of a multi-racial society without exploitation is possible in post-apartheid South Africa given the persistence of the politics of unreformed racial arrogance worsened by the material rift between the rich and the poor. And Philippa Taa de Villiers adds a new dimension that democratic South Africa can be essentialised at the expense of a community of both black and white people, men and women: ‘these days they sit together/ this man, this woman/ who have spent so many words/ on one another, / that now/ they are paupers/ in their rich intimacy’ (de Villiers in Molebatsi 2008). Sabata Mpho Mokae’s poem, ‘If these Hills could Scream’ (p. 60) signals a departure from state politics to individual politics, to township violence. In this poem Mokae partialises national and nationalist memories so that we are not grooved into thinking of state politics as that which can only form the stuff of poetry. There is a quest for an uninhibited creative voice which nevertheless seeks to disrupt normative and binary ways of thinking about South African society. In the poem, ‘Streets of Johannesburg’ (p. 61) the reader comes face to face with the grim realities of crime perpetrated by ordinary citizens on the police as well as on other fellow citizens. Here, Mokae refuses to romanticise the ordinary people, instead, deciding to paint them as also capable of inflicting pain on their kind. This piece moves away from the older generation in which apartheid is almost always held responsible for individual failings of members of society. Mokae insists that despite attempted cultural genocide on ordinary South Africans by apartheid, those very same people can still take control of their destinies in a positive way. Napo Masheane’s ‘A Room between my Legs’ (p. 52) brings us head on with the brute reality of a girl (now a woman of 58 years) who has been unable to forget how the ‘thick hands of uncles played invasion’ with her private parts. This invasion was a prelude to long years of repeated molestation, rape, heartbreak and hurt that she had to endure. The African communities are critically exposed for the fallacious arguments they advance that their men rape because this neurosis has been passed to them by apartheid. There is violence of black on black in South Africa. Its origin is complex and it is not condoned in any way. The violation of females by the people from whom they expect protection takes on an eerie dimension in the second of his poems, ‘Gratitude’ (p. 51), where it is the father who ‘took my virginity’ (Masheane in Molebatsi 2008: 60), thus re-echoing Sachs

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that ‘every culture has its positive and negative aspects’, which it has to confront critically, work through and resolve in the best way possible (Sachs 2007: 136). In ‘A Poet’s Lament’ (p. 33) Percy Mabandu moves away from the preoccupations with nationalist leaders – a trend that characterised the immediate post-apartheid South African literature by ordinary writers and the leaders themselves. In the poem the stuff of poetry is the suffering of ‘kids’ foraging for food in the bins lined in the streets; it is a poetry of ‘beaten women’s tears’ and the betrayed working men’s wounds. This poem begins to uncouple the assumptions belying the national myth of a rainbow society that is characterised by democratic practices. It does not suggest that in democracies such as is South Africa there are no social tensions; democratic content is far from the hurts and pains of children and poverty of people. The politics of the liberation struggle that promoted the myth of collective national aspirations and interests for all times are interrogated. The ‘terrifying rupture’ we find in the discourses of liberation movements, particularly the threatening rifts within the ANC as it prepares for its fourth democratic elections cannot be wished as away as the work of a few malcontents. Such tensions reveal the pitches of the struggle for capture of state resources by comrades who once shared the identity of being apartheid’s subalterns. Makgano Mamabolo’s poem ‘Dear Madiba’ (p. 38) drags the reader into the murky world of child and drug abuse and pregnancies in South African society. However, the poem rises above this world and reveals a girl child who refuses to be conscripted into the world of crime. What is rejected in this poem is flawed or destructive agency (Motsemme 2007). People have the capacity to rise above forces that promote human depravity. The varied poetic narratives in We Are constitute a mark of poetic maturity by young South African poets. They consciously refuse to be influenced by the previous literary establishment that thrived on the spectacle of excess (Ndebele 1994). Natalia Molebatsi’s own poem, ‘We Are’ (p. 65) insists that the youth of South Africa can author their own ‘stories that are open’ to a plurality of interpretations. Because for her, poetry is ‘creation and movement’; there are inevitable shifts in the subjects that the youth will deal with. The same is true of the ways they deal with imagery, and the metaphors they will employ to name realities in their own way. Poetry, she writes, must evoke in us new ways of imagining life; it must enable the poet to ‘raise his/ her ‘story’s voice to go beyond and beyond…any ghost that could suck out your way up to clouds of choice’. This ‘choice’ is historically rooted in a poetic consciousness that is aware of varied traditions of black literary activities from which to draw poetic inspiration. At the same time choice is also poetic licence that draws in the readers to imagine the possibilities of rupturing normative ways of reading literature. Poetry must encourage an enquiring mind and bring previous certitudes into crises of credibility. Molebatsi rejects socialised imaginaries, and in this aspect echoes Njabulo Ndebele’s important observation that what is needed in South African literary revolution is a rethinking of the entire ways of producing cultural artefacts.

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On the other hand, Philippa Taa de Villiers’ poem, ‘Origin’ (p. 12) also implores the writer-poet and reader to step outside the protocols of dominant discourses in both the composition and reception of poetic works. De Villiers believes that it is the role of poetry to promote the romantic aspect of art which is always ahead of life; it this imaginative aspect of poetry that helps society to define the ever-shifting contours of new cultural identities. This quest to work for the South African society by working against its received ways of perceiving reality, is what marks out the poets of We Are as inaugurating new poetic sensibilities. Remember too that these young innovators are working in a restrictive cultural space in which their voices from the fringes are considered suspicious when they question the established white and black traditus of writings and literary criticism in South Africa.

Conclusion It would be presumptuous to imagine that in the space of a single reflective chapter it is possible to exhaust the commentary on the rich literary achievement of South Africans. Reflections are not meant to be absolute; they only afford a view of someone looking back with the wisdom (or lack of hindsight) in the fashion of the mythical Sankofa bird of Ghana. Reflections will be opinionated but are not intended to disparage because they are enabled by the very availability of the literary cultures they critically reflect upon. There have been calls in South Africa recently to defend the democratic spaces, to differ without being called a rebel; that carries negative consequences and the real possibility of excommunication from the political and literary polis. If we have appeared rambling about the significance of EAR in the furtherance of a particular poetics in South African letters, it is because of the difficulty of resolving the dialectic of outsider-insider to the academic discourses taking place in English academy. Or perhaps, one should accept rambling as a potentially enabling condition for an open minded critique of written literatures. It would thus be a disgrace – to echo Coetzee – to imagine that literary criticism of the kind we need to free Africa of its own intellectual lapses can afford to be limited to a mere pat on the back by teachers of literatures, critics and the writers/ poets. What are the literary arteries that bind South Africa with the rest of Africa? What influences have permeated South African literature to that in north, east, west and central Africa? What is so special about southern Africa? If our questions begin to sound either fastidious, or to use Irele’s apt phrase, ‘in praise of [our own] alienation’ it is because, as he further argues, ‘the phenomenon of alienation in its positive aspect is the generating principle of culture, the condition of human development’ (Irele 2007: 599–608). The aim of this concluding chapter in our book was therefore to initiate a preliminary debate on the direction of South Africa black literary and critical productions. The chapter argued that South Africa has a long history of literary production; that this history is fragmented, that sometimes a reader gets a sense that most of what is being described as the sum total of the

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country’s literary output is really reflecting the asymmetrical power relations in the field of literary production. There has been little black literary aesthetic production in English in South Africa in the period after 1994; literary creations from the Afrikaner community or by authors of Afrikaner descent tend to dominate. This is in part a result of the politics of literary criticism that tend to over-comment on this literature at the expense of black aesthetics. We also argued that black aesthetics from South Africa suffer from literary solipsisticism induced by the phenomenon of ‘solidarity criticism’. We are not in favour of deconstructing literature for the sake of it; but we believe that solidarity criticism protects those who practise it against critical engagement with their multiple selves. This produces an impoverished aesthetics at best and discourages writing at worst because in its assumptions comrades should not be criticised as it is said this would be unpatriotic. The chapter then suggested that one of the neglected areas in literary criticism is the consideration of youth cultural productions. So much creative writing in South Africa has been done and continues to be written by young South African writers, both black and white. However, literary criticism has tended to push this creativity to the margin by virtue of not frequently producing critical books devoted to the appreciation of this particular form of writing tradition. Molebatsi’s We Are has some of the very illuminating poetry by young South Africans. This poetry is distinct in its imagery and metaphors, and exudes a conscious refusal to depict South African realities in binary terms. This anthology of poetry is potentially one of the many that are emerging from the labours of young South Africans. What is refreshing in the poetry is the non-conformist attitude in approaching present-day racial, class and gender politics because they are not beyond social contestation.

Endnotes 1. The publications by De Kock and Titlestad form part of the ongoing Imagined South Africa Series (under the general editorship of Abebe Zegeye) that was launched by Unisa Press in 2004, the tenth year of South Africa’s democracy. For an insightful critique of the series, see K. Parker, ‘Imagined South Africa’, African Identities, 6, 1 (February 2008), 83–92. Kenneth Parker is a black South African writer and academic who left the apartheid state in the 1960s and now lives and works in London. His own contribution to the same series, Brief Chronicles: South African Literatures in Historical Context (Pretoria: Unisa Press, forthcoming) is due to be launched at the end of 2008 or early 2009.

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Index

academe 53-55 Africa(n)(s) 1, 7, 16-17 academics 7, 14, 24 book industry 83 communities 52, 53 cultural nationalists 8-9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 61 culture(s) 1-5, 9, 53, 54, 91-92 diaspora 6-15, 16 educational curricula 125-137 ethnicity 37, 38, 40, 42, 47 genocide 31-51 identities 4, 7, 9, 61 indigenous knowledge systems 52-71 inequality 21 intellectuals 27-28, 84-85, 87 knowledge 74 knowledge production 72-90 leaders 1, 2, 17-18, 19, 25, 33, 37, 101 literature 9, 10, 11-13, 83, 104-124 memory 54-55, 69 modernities 77 nationalism 7, 13, 40, 151 people 1, 2 politics 6, 11 publishing 72-90 readers 81-84 renaissance(s) 1, 91-103 slavery 33, 46 theorising 16-30 African Union 34, 39, 48, 49 Africanisation 125-137 communication of Africanisation 136 financial resources 136 research priorities 135-136 students 136 Africanising curricula 125-137 content of syllabi 135 human factor development 135

multi-disciplinary approach 133 Africanism 128 Afro-centric education 127-131 Afrocentrism 127-128 Afrokology 127, 128-131 Algeria 33, 47 apartheid 1, 25, 29, 30, 40, 81, 96, 98, 126, 150, 151 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 6, 7, 8-13, 58 Arabs 43-46, 51 Beti, Mongo Mission to Kala 104, 107-111 Biko, Steve 98-101 black academics 7, 14, 24 aesthetics 143-145, 156 Africans 16 cultural institutions 53 diaspora 6-15, 16 intellectuals 27-28 literary imaginations 147-150 literary production 141 people 1, 6 Black Consciousness 94, 98-101 book industry 83 Cabral, Amilcar 3, 11, 33, 48, 53, 65, 91-103, 104-124 National Liberation and Culture 105-107 Cameroon 17-18, 19, 22, 24, 30 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 56, 57-58, 70, 84 Ching, Leo 53 Chinodya, Shimmer Harvest of Thorns 104, 111-115 Chiweshe, Stella 63 Chiwome, E 52-53 citizens 35-36, 39-43, 42

169

170

claims to land rights 59-60 colonial anthropology 56 education 107, 110 origin of genocide in Africa 33 racism 2, 25 violence 33 colonialism 2, 12, 18, 20, 35-36, 37, 39, 48, 53, 55, 59-60, 76-77, 96, 107, 111 Congo 33 cosmopolitanism 38 cultural criticism 142-143 history 54 institutions 53 memory 54-55 nationalists 8-9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 24, 61 renaissance 91 curriculum development 127-131 customary law 37 Dangarembga, Tsitsi Nervous Conditions 104, 119-123 Darfur (Sudan) 31, 33, 43-47, 50, 51 debo 65-66 democracy 18, 91, 103 diasporas theorising of 6-15, 16, 27-28 Diop Cheikh, A 53 educational curricula Africanising of 125-137 neo-liberal perspectives 131-134 Ethiopia 63-66, 78 ethnicity 37, 38, 40, 42, 47, 50 Fanon, Frantz 8, 10, 25, 48, 52 Foucault, M 72 freedom 18-19, 91-93 of expression 62 genocide 31-51 colonial origin 33 epistemic conditions 48 historical exceptionalism 33-34 historico-dialectical approach 47-50 international community 34-35 scholarship 32-36 Ghana 13, 15 Gilroy, P 52, 53 globalisation 53

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Guha, Ranarjit 55-57, 70 hate 1, 2 historical exceptionalism 31, 33-34 HIV/AIDS 66, 67 Holocaust 31, 32-33, 50 Howell, Signe 53 imperialism 26, 105 Indians 56-58, 70 indigeneity 38 indigenism 59-61, 70 indigenous knowledge systems 52-71 medical knowledge systems 66-67 insurgent memory 61-62 intellectuals 9, 10, 17, 24, 27-28, 84-85, 87 international community 34-35, 50 Kaunda, K 18 Kenya 12, 48, 80 Kenyatta, Jomo 1, 2, 18 Khartoum 43-47, 50, 51 killers 39-43, 44 knowledge economy 75 of Africa 74 production 72-90 language 52, 53, 83 liberation struggles 99, 114, 119 literary canons 144, 147 criticism 138-142, 156 cultures 145-147 paradigms 147-150 rainbow nation 138-142 tokenism 143-145 literature African 83, 104-124 Zimbabwe 60-61 Machel, Samora 18 Mamdani, Mahmood 31, 35-51, 96 Mammo, T 53 Mandela, Nelson 1, 2, 11, 18 Mapfumo, Thomas 62 marketing strategy publishing 85-87 mass character African renaissances 95-97

INDEX

Mazrui, Ali 1, 2, 102 Mbeki, Thabo 94 Mbembe, Achille 16-30, 85 memory 54-55, 60, 61-62, 69 mental liberation 119, 122 methodological crisis 36 Mkandawire, Thandika 8 Mozambique 12 Mugabe, Robert 2, 11, 18, 21, 38 music 62-63 Mutswairo, Solomon 60 myths 34-35, 59-60 Nabudere, DW 127-130 Namibia 33, 47 national liberation 91-103, 111, 114 nationalism 2, 7, 8-9, 40, 98, 151 nativism 8-13, 26, 39 Ndebele, Njabulo 147-148 neo-liberals 131-134 Nigeria 49 Nkrumah, K 18 Nyerere, J 18 Oliphant, Andries 148 oral arts 85 forms 54, 55, 61, 73, 74, 81, 89 knowledge 80 paradigmatic shifts 76-81 patriarchy 119 Pityana, Barney 99 plurality 95-97 poetical revolutionary radicalism 151-152 political criticism 16-30 economy 101 freedom 18 nationalism 98 parties 3 violence 39, 47 politics 6, 11, 21, 22, 29, 35, 79, 85, 100, 153 popular music Zimbabwe 62-63 post-apartheid South Africa 91, 100 postcolonial Africa 33, 36, 42, 47 South African writings 138-156 postcolony 8, 16-30

171

power 17, 19, 20, 26, 36, 37, 73 published knowledge 73 publishing 72-90 blueprint 87-89 economic infrastructure 75-76 houses 76, 77, 78, 86-87 industry 76 marketing strategy 85-87 and readers 81-84 racism 2, 25, 26, 38, 99, 153 radicalism 151-152 rain-making 59-60 readers 81-84 regionalisation 53 renaissance(s) 1, 91-103 mass character 95-97 plurality 95-97 TRC 101-103 unitary culture and identity 97-98 resistance poetry 150-151 return to the source 93-95, 107-108, 111, 112, 115 rituals 63-65 Erecha 63-64 Rwanda 29, 31, 33, 34, 39-43 Sachs, Albie 92, 145-147, 150 Said, Edward 52, 55, 72 settlers 25, 38 shemma 65-66 Shona 83-84 claims to land rights 59-61 songs 62 slavery 33, 46, 96 Smith, Ian 1 solidarity criticism 145-147 sources 1-5, 92-95, 107-108 South Africa 12, 29, 40, 75 black aesthetics 143-145 cultural criticism 142-143 education 126-127 freedom 91-93 literary criticism 138-142, 156 literary cultures 145-147 literary tokenism 143-145 poetry 151-155 political nationalism 98 postcolonial writings 138-156 publishing 78, 81, 86 renaissance 91

172

resistance poetry 150-151 TRC 101-103 South Asian/African knowledge systems 55-59 South Asian historiography 56 spirit possession 59-60 Spivak, GC 57, 70 struggles 3, 8, 12, 16, 21, 44, 63, 77, 92, 94, 96, 99, 106, 114 subaltern studies 55-59, 70 subjects 35-36, 39-43 Sudan 31, 33, 43-47 superstition 54, 55 technology 72, 74 theoretical adventurism 43-46 Therborn, Goran 73 TRC 101-103, 144 Truth and Reconciliation Commission see TRC unitary culture and identity 97-98 victims 39-43, 44 violence 25, 33, 39, 41, 44, 47 virginity tests 66-67 vulgarity 16-30

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Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi 83, 84 Devil on the Cross 104, 115-119 We Are 142, 151-155 Weate, Jeremy 21 West, Cornel 12-13 Western modernities 58 publishers 76 thought 53-55 women Ethiopia 65-66 and patriarchy 119 rituals 63-65 Zegeye, Abebe 64 Zhakata, Leonard 63 Zimbabwe 2, 12, 18, 38, 42, 47, 60, 82, 85 literature 60-61, 140 medical knowledge systems 66-67 popular music 62-63 publishing 75-76, 77, 80 readers 81 Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers’ Association see ZINATHA ZINATHA 67-69