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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Mar 16 2010 - 14:07:21 EST
What is Africa?
16/03/2010
By Gussai H. Sheikheldin
Source: http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article34287
“The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an
industrial and military look, but the great gift still has to come from
Africa – giving the world a more human face.” - Steve Biko.
March 1, 2010 — Not too long ago, the late Dr. John Garang was asked once,
regarding the name of the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army/Movement,
“liberation from whom?” His reply came back simple and penetrating. It
started with “Not liberation from whom; It is liberation from what.”
So, I ask today not the question with the obvious answer, but what is
Africa? It is not a question for mere intellectual entertainment. Many
important concepts we deal with today are contingent on it, such as
Pan-Africanism and Black Power. A Pan-Africanist needs a definition of that
‘Africa’ he/she is ‘panning’ (‘pan’ being a combining phrase meaning “all,”
so Pan-African means ‘all-African’). Likewise, since Black Power, or Black
Consciousness, is connected to Pan-Africanism, the question ‘what is
Africa?’ becomes inevitable, despite the observation that it has not been
sufficiently addressed this directly before.
Is the answer to this question geographically defined? But what of the
Africans spread all over the world and still tied to their homeland, not
always physically but mostly culturally and emotionally (not mentioning
those who live in the continent physically but do not belong to it
culturally or emotionally)? Is the answer demographically defined? But what
about those of African descent who had have their share of the African
history and whose present in the diasporas tied still and interrelated with
that history? Even more, is it fair to Africa, the continent, to tie it only
to the negroid races? Leaving aside that this recent classification is not
consistent with the demographic history of the continent at any point in
time, a recent genetic study concluded that the continent, as it is today,
is the most genetically diverse of all continents. Moreover, the genetic
make-up of the rest of the world is but a segment of that which exists
within the African continent (See the National Geographic magazine, issue of
March 2006). Even the recent history, the colonial and post-colonial, tells
a story of continuous re-shaping of the demographic map, influenced by many
factors involving indigenous peoples of the land, natives and migrants.
Different and massive ethnic groups surveyed the continent over long periods
of time, for different reasons, and with many subsequent generations now
became part of the continent’s large ecological and social dialectics.
Likewise, different natives of the continent surveyed Europe, South America,
the Caribbean region, North America and other regions for different reasons,
and with many subsequent generations now became essential components of the
social fabrics of those continents/regions. There are still somehow
psychological, historical and socioeconomic ties that are widely shared
among all these groups, inside and outside the continent. These ties, put
together, can help us find our answer to ‘what is Africa?’
The Mahatma Gandhi, way before he became a mahatma, was a lawyer in South
Africa. It is there where he had a first hand encounter with colonial
oppression and white supremacy’s repulsive face, and it is there that he
developed the Satyagraha philosophy and tools of resistance, later to reach
the giant potential it manifested in the de-colonization struggle of the
Indian people. That legacy of Gandhi in Africa remained with the remaining
Indian population in the continent (now native groups, no longer settlers).
Mahmoud Mamdani, for example, an African intellectual of Indian origins;
despite being deported from the country of his birth (Uganda, by the Idi
Amin regime), continued to contribute to African politics and other African
issues from his initially-forced ‘exile’ in the northern hemisphere.
On further expressions, Frantz Fanon, the black psychiatrist from the
Caribbean island of Martinique, came to the French colony of Algeria in the
late 1950s, where he made a clean break from the colonial government that
brought him to the colony and joined the ranks of the Algerian National
Liberation Front (FLN), fighting side-by-side with his new comrades (most of
whom were of Amazigh and Arabic ethnicities) and theorizing from that
position for the global de-colonization movement and, simultaneously, for
black movements. His book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ was equally celebrated
by revolutionary Africans, South Americans and West Indians, and extended to
African-Americans as well as Palestinians and Tamils in Asia. On similar
traces, Dr. Walter Rodney, the black Caribbean historian who wrote the
seminal book ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ while he was a professor at
the University of Dar es-Salaam (Tanzania) in the early 1970s. Also the
leader of the Working People’s Alliance in his native Guyana, Rodney was a
prominent Pan-Africanist. He was an articulate theorizer of Black Power, and
he made it very clear that the concept does not refer to a state of a
pigmentation (skin colour) attached to the negroid races. Black Power
instead, in this perspective, is a state of subjugation by a white (i.e.
Eurocentric) imperial system. This system extends its octopus hands to many
nations and ethnic groups, which makes them all ‘black’ by that precise
reality. ‘Black Power’ here is the antithesis to ‘White Supremacy’ or
‘Eurocentricity’; a stance against the oppressive paradigm characterized by
unfairly favouring European models and ethnic backgrounds. In order for
Black Power to be a true antithesis to this racist paradigm, it ought to
refuse the criteria upon which the paradigm classifies people, first of
which pigmentation or race. Therefore a black person, to Rodney, is not
necessarily a person of a negroid race, dark pigmentation or even African
descent, but a person who belongs to one of the oppressed groups by the
racist paradigm anywhere in the world. Black Power, therefore, is a stance
of self-empowerment against oppression taken by the revolutionaries among
these oppressed groups, no matter which ethnicity they belong to. Hence
Rodney openly spoke of the Indians of the Caribbean as ‘fellow blacks’; many
Asians in their struggle against imperialism were fellow blacks to him as
well (See Rodney’s 1969 “The Groundings with my Brothers,” Chapter 2 on
Black Power). From North America, Stokely Carmichael, the African-American
who later renamed himself Kwamé Touré – honouring the two African leaders
Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sékou Touré – played significant roles in his life
in African-American liberation movements and the Pan-African movement.
>From the natives of the continent we can speak of Steve Biko, the founding
father of Black Consciousness – synonymous to Black Power – in South Africa.
Biko had similar views to those of Walter Rodney, with some contextual
characteristics related to the South African struggle against Apartheid. He
openly called all ‘coloured’ people (as classified by the Apartheid regime)
black, just like the native Africans. Those ‘coloured’ people included many
Asian migrants like the Indian settlers who fought with Gandhi as mentioned
earlier. To Biko, “Being black is not a matter of pigmentation. Being black
is an attitude of mind.” A black person can be any non-white person, but not
automatically. A black person is a non-white who acknowledges the racist
reality of the system and chooses to defy and fight it in his/her capacity,
not yield to it. Biko theorised that when we are subjugated as groups we
have to respond as groups, and if the system oppresses us through our
ethnicities, we shall organize ourselves on that same ethnic basis to fight
our common enemy. That would not make us counter-racists because we did not
choose the rules of the game; we are simply responding with limited
practical choices. Therefore a black person would see him/herself most and
for all a human being among other human beings, refusing to be racist like
the system he/she fights, but he/she would also acknowledge the strategic
criteria of organization in the struggle at hand; i.e. in our current
historical context (See Biko’s 1978 “I Write What I Like,” a collection from
his written legacy).
So, after briefly reviewing this ray of related questions, concepts and
personalities, what is Africa? Would not the answer to this question need be
inclusive of all the issues above? Would it make a fair sense otherwise?
That is for us all to reflect upon and share; and I shall start by sharing,
in the rest of this article, some results of my own reflections.
Africa is a cause. It is one that emanates from the greater cause of human
development and emancipation. The continent of Africa, in our recent human
history, has been one where collective forms of violations against humanity
manifested more than anywhere else in the world, and these violations
extended their effects to the rest of the world. This cause is widely human
and global because it cannot be otherwise. We cannot address it without
addressing the global human predicament of which the African problem is a
blunt outcome, and we cannot attempt to find salvation for Africans in
isolation of salvation for the rest of the ‘wretched of the earth’. The
African cause is not a racial cause; neither is it a geographical one.
Capitalism and racism – the two destructive forces causing the current human
predicament – know no geographic or ‘other’ ethnic boundaries to stand in
their way. Thus, they must be confronted at the moral and the institutional
levels from which they originate, both of which are not confined to the
African continent or its inhabitants. A racist paradigm wouldn’t be defeated
by a counter-racist paradigm, and the geographic definition is just obsolete
in our world today. Therefore Africa, the cause, exists wherever Africans
exist, and Africans are those who identify with the African cause.
It’s not an exaggeration – and evidence is abundant – that there is nowhere
else on earth today where the ugliest and scariest manifestations of the
human moral failure towards genuine solidarity can be found. It’s not an
exaggeration to say that in modern history, no other continent or region
than Africa has seen the scale of slavery, brutal oppression, forced
migration and continuous exploitation of natural and human resources for the
pleasure of ‘others’. Once we understand this, we can no longer afford to
neglect Africa, the cause, as less of a priority; not if we genuinely care
for human development and emancipation. Being a Pan-Africanist, therefore,
is a matter of priority, not exclusiveness. As Ahmed Sekou Toure said, “The
imperialists utilize cultural, scientific, technical, economic, literary and
moral values to justify and maintain their regimes of exploitation and
oppression. Oppressed people, on the other hand, utilize cultural values of
a nature contrary to that of the imperialists, with the aims of better
combating imperialism and escaping the colonial regime”. Pan-Africanism,
then, is a strategic position determined by our limited practical choices in
the current historical context (much like what Steve Biko said about Black
Consciousness in South Africa). It would not do Africa justice to say that
its problems are similar in scale to the problems of the rest of the third
world. However, it would be totally naive to say that the two are not
inherently connected. If the African problem is resolved at this level of
understanding, it is my claim that the global human predicament shall be
resolved as well.
Pan-Africanism is thus a conscious stream which represents the collective
utilization of knowledge and skills, practical and theoretical of all
related fields, to serve the African cause in all possible capacities. In
the practical sense, the African cause cares for questions, such as how is
it that a continent so rich in resources that it has been exporting to the
rest of the world for the last four centuries – and especially to Europe and
North America, contributing essentially to their ‘industrial revolution’ –
be so chronically poor and degraded in the basic demands of development? How
is it that, with the net flow of wealth leaving the African continent to the
rich countries on the Northern hemisphere every year, the former is still
severely indebted to the latter? How is it that most of the so-called ‘aid
money’ given to the continent by the rich countries ends up as payments for
‘development experts’, citizens of those same rich countries, and as more
debt burden on the poor citizens of the continent? Why is it that, among the
citizens of African states, those who are most corrupt and brutal get to
stay in power the longest, while using that same ‘generous aid money’ to
flourish the business of weapon-production in rich countries? And in terms
of arts, philosophy and culture, why is it that the continent which
dynamically contributed so much to the rest of world, from early history to
this day, through trade, massive migrations and the diasporas of the slavery
era, now portrayed in the contemporary global media as the most ignorant,
primitive and static of all continents? Elements of self-criticism should be
embedded in all these questions.
As we can see, these questions apply equally, but on different levels, to
the rest of the ‘third-world’, especially the Caribbean region whose history
is clearly tied to the history of the African continent for more than four
centuries now (The history of the recently devastated Haiti is one example).
This same tie is apparent in ‘pockets’ of ethnic groups within the European,
South American and North American continents. On the bigger picture,
however, all the questions above apply to the situations of all the
‘wretched of the earth’, but the African cause makes it clear that Africa
gets the priority, here and now, not because it is more important than the
rest of the suffering, but because it is the one suffering the most!
However, as said earlier, priority should never mean exclusiveness.
It is clear to me that this human predicament is a moral predicament in its
core. It is about the level where humanity practices what it preaches. At
which point would we consider critically questioning our spoiled,
consumptive lifestyles in some parts of the world when they are clearly
surviving due to continuous suffering for many fellow humans at the other
parts of the world (and even inside those same generally spoiled parts)?
When will we truly realize what Martin Luther King Jr. meant when he said,
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”? It is also an
institutional predicament. When we seek to solve the problem by reinforcing
the same philosophical and structural tools that created it in the first
place, something must be wrong with our approach! (Capitalism and
individualistic pursuit of wealth; the global financial system and credit
regulations; The IMF, World Bank and WTO; heavily centralized systems of
governance; top-down policy; etc). These institutions seldom failed in their
lifetimes to maintain few extremely rich individuals, and their small
circles on the top of the wealth pyramid, the most unproductive in society
(production here being economic production; that of commodities and
services), while keeping the large and diverse productive groups in society
indebted to those few. A paradigm shift is needed, on the moral level and
the institutional level, to emancipate ourselves from the oppressive
structures of today which have no objective reason to exist. As the African
authentic theologian and socio-political leader, Mahmoud M. Taha, once said,
"On earth there is enough to satisfy all humans’ needs, but not enough to
satisfy the greed."
And last but not least, it is precisely because Africa, and its extended
influence beyond the continent, expresses the ugliest and scariest outcome
of the current human predicament that it has the potential of leading the
revolution for change.
*A Sudanese researcher – post-graduate student at the School of
Environmental Design and Rural Development, University of Guelph, Canada. He
can be reached at: sgussai@gmail.com