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Pan-Africanism—Rethinking
key issues
By
Chinweizu
Copyright
© 2010
There are several key
issues in Pan-Africanism that need to be re-examined and clarified.
I shall here look
into six of them:
I: Unity
II: Disunity or
powerlessness—What is Black Africa’s fundamental problem?
III: Collective
security
IV: Socialism or
Communalism?
V: African nation
VI: Racial privacy
--------------------------
I:
African Unity: the problem and its dimensions
One of the core
objectives of Pan-Africanism, since 1958, has been African unity.
The three key
questions about unity are: unity for what? Unity of whom? And what type of
unity? Let’s consider them, one by one.
Unity
for what?
All too often one gets the impression that Pan-Africanists are
obsessed with unity for unity’s sake. But as Chancellor Williams pointed out,
“Not ‘unity just for unity’ but unity for great achievements.”-[The
Destruction of Black Civilization, p.343] We therefore need to spell out
the paramount objective to be achieved by any unity we are talking of. I would
say that we need just enough unity to achieve the Black Power we need to
guarantee our security and survival. Anything less is inadequate; anything more
is superfluous. Black power is the only desirable objective of African Unity.
Unity
of Whom?
There is no agreement
as yet on the constituency for the much desired unity. Some, like Nkrumah,
Padmore and Diop, have advocated a unity of the entire continent of Africa, a
unity that would include the Black Africans and the Arabs in the African
continent. Some like Azikiwe and Museveni have advocated a 2
unity
of all who now reside on the African continent—Blacks and whites, including the
Arab and European colonial settlers. Yet others want the unity to be between
the Black Africans and their Diaspora in the Americas; and still others want
the unity, whatever its form or forms, to be between the Black Africans in
Africa and the Blacks world-wide, excluding the European and Asian settlers on
the continent. These differences need to be thoroughly debated and a consensus
reached on this vital question.
What
type of unity?
On this there are
divergent proposals, even though some claim that consensus has been reached,
and that differences exist only over the means of implementing it.
According to Prof.
Opoku Agyeman,
“Africa’s predicament has not been in regard to determining the
nature and character of the needed unity, but rather in respect to the
implementation of it.”
--Opoku Agyeman, (2001)in
Africa’s Persistent Vulnerable Link to Global Politics, San Jose:
iUniversity Press, 2001, p.123
However, please
consider the following statements:
“This is my plea to
the new generation of African leaders and African peoples: work for unity with
the firm conviction that, without unity there is no future for Africa. That
is, of course, if we still want to have a place in the sun. I reject the
glorification of the nation-state, which we have inherited from colonialism,
and the artificial nations we are trying to forge from that inheritance. We are
all Africans trying to be Ghanaians or Tanzanians. Fortunately for Africa we
have not been completely successful . . . Unity will not make us rich, but
it can make it difficult for Africa and the African peoples to be disregarded
and humiliated. And it will therefore increase the effectiveness of the
decisions we make and try to implement for our development. 3
--Julius
Nyerere, speaking in Ghana in 1997. Quoted in Kwesi Kwaa Prah, The African
Nation, Cape Town: CASAS, 2006, p.276
“One must say that
our first preoccupation (in foreign policy) has been and remains the creation
of working African solidarity, with a view toward African unity, the necessity
of which—now unanimously accepted—no longer seems necessary to prove.”
--Amadou Ahidjo,
1962. Quoted in The African Nation, pp.276 –277
“I think that
Pan-Africanism should be concretized either in the form of regional States or
one continental State, whichever is feasible, . . . ”
--Azikiwe, 1962, “The
Future of Pan-Africanism” in J. Ayo Langley, ed., Ideologies of Liberation
in Black Africa, 1856-1970, London: Rex Collings, 1979, p.305
“the organization of
African unity in 1963 stated its first purpose to be ‘to promote the unity and
solidarity of the African States’ ”—Nyerere, (1968) in Langley ed, Ideologies,
p.350
“The ideal of African
unity is premised on the notion that the emancipation, development and prosperity
of people of African descent can be achieved only through the unity of the
people.”
-- Kwesi Kwaa Prah, The
African Nation, p.269
There cannot be “one
Africa that fights against colonialism and another that attempts to make
arrangements with colonialism.”
--Frantz Fanon,
quoted in The African Nation, p.276
“Our objectives must
be the creation of an economic and politically federated continent. . . . If
despite goodwill on our part, North African Arabs were to refuse a continental
federation, then nothing should stand in 4
the
way of the formation of an exclusively sub-Saharan continental federation. . .
. In such an eventuality, no one could accuse sub-Saharan Africans of being
guilty of exclusivism, since their appeals to the North would have been
refused.”
--Chiekh Anta Diop,
(1977); Afriscope Interview with Carlos Moore, in Great African
Thinkers, ed by Ivan Van Sertima, New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1986,
pp. 260, 261
--------
A little reflection
will show that the nature and character of the African unity mentioned in the
above quotes is not the same. Nyerere, like Nkrumah, Azikiwe, the OAU and Diop,
is talking of unity as state integration, the integration into a federation of
the colonial states inherited at “independence”; Ahidjo is talking of
solidarity of the states; Prof Prah is talking of “the unity of the people” and
not the integration of states; Fanon was talking of unity of purpose and action
by the states. These few examples make clear that Prof Agyeman cannot be correct
in claiming that the nature and character of the African unity desired has been
agreed upon or settled.
Given
these disparate notions of African Unity, the question of “what type of African
unity” is still to be resolved. To help us move towards a resolution, I shall
now attempt to elucidate the aspects and dimensions of the issue.
Here is a list of
some different possible types of unity.
1]
Unity as state integration or political federation. Examples
of this include the USA, the EU, the former USSR, the proposed USofAfrica.
African unity of this kind, being a union of states, would exclude those
Africans of the Diaspora who have no states of their own. However, Cheikh Anta
Diop has said:
“Black communities
must find a way to articulate their historical unity. The ties between black
Africans and the blacks of Asia, Oceania, the Caribbean, South America and the
United States must be strengthened on a rational basis.”—Diop, GAT,p.246
5
Now,
if this type of unity is pushed to its global limit, as hinted by Diop in the
above passage, it would require a global Federation spanning the Black African
states of the Homeland and those of the Diaspora ranging from Fiji and Papua
New Guinea all the way west to the Black Caribbean states like Jamaica and
Belize. A geographically unwieldy and impossible union of states.
2]
Unity as solidarity of people based on distinctive racial, cultural, linguistic
and historical identity. Examples of this type include the
solidarity between the Chinese in China and their global Diaspora; a solidarity
based on their Yellow race, Han ancestry and Chinese culture, and effected on
the basis of what they call “the mirror test”—if you want to know whether you
are Chinese, look in the mirror and see.
Another example is
the racial solidarity of whites, a solidarity about which Chancellor Williams
said:
“Caucasians will wage
frightful wars against other Caucasians, but will quickly unite, as though by
instinct, against non-whites, not only in wars but in international politics.
They have developed a kind of built-in solidarity in their relations with
non-Caucasian peoples. This fact, as much as anything else, helps to explain
their position as masters of the world.” –Chancellor Williams, Destruction .
. ., p.298
Pan Africanism has
paid hardly any attention to this type of unity. In fact, it is resisted by our
racial integrationists who mistakenly denounce a racial criterion, a black
“mirror test”, as “racist”.
3]
Unity through a shared ideology or religion. Examples of this are
the unity of the population of the USA through a Constitution that articulates
a body of beliefs, i.e. the ideology of the USA; the organized State Shinto in
Meiji Japan; Christendom; Dar-al-Islam; The Free World—unified by the doctrines
of capitalism, free enterprise and anti-communism. 6
Unity
of this sort, unity by norms and customs, rites and ritualized behavior, is
explained by Konrad Lorenz as follows:
The triple function
of suppressing fighting within the group, of holding the group together, and of
setting it off, as an independent entity, against other, similar units, is
performed by culturally developed ritual . . . Any human group which
exceeds in size that which can be held together by personal love and
friendship, depends for its existence on these three functions of culturally
ritualized behavior patterns.. . . From the little peculiarities of
speech and manner which cause the smallest possible subcultural groups to stick
together, an uninterrupted gradation leads up to the most elaborated,
consciously performed, and consciously symbolical social norms and rites which
unite the largest social units of humanity in one nation, one culture, one
religion, or one political ideology.. . . It is perfectly right and
legitimate that we should consider as "good" the manners which our
parents have taught us, that we should hold sacred social norms and rites
handed down to us by the tradition of our culture. What we must guard against,
with all the power of rational responsibility, is our natural inclination to
regard the social rites and norms of other cultures as inferior. . . . The
moral of the natural history of pseudo-speciation is that we must learn to
tolerate other cultures, to shed entirely our own cultural and national
arrogance, and to realize that the social norms and rites of other cultures, to
which their members keep faith as we do to our own, have the same right to be
respected and to be regarded as sacred.
-- Konrad Lorenz, On
Aggression, New York: Bantam, 1967, pp. 74-75, 78, 79, 80
Our fidelity to the symbol
implies fidelity to everything it signifies, and this depends on the warmth of
our affection for the old custom. It is this feeling of affection that reveals
to us the value of our cultural heritage. The independent existence of any
culture, the creation of a superindividual 7
society
which outlives the single being, . . . is based on this autonomy of the
rite making it an independent motive of human action. (ibid., pp. 71-72)
---------------------
For large groups,
this is the most important source of the feeling of belonging together; but it
has never even been recognized by Pan Africanism. This type of unity is
especially important in view of the fact that Black Africans are deeply divided
by their strong adherence to the various religions and ideologies of their
white enemies.
The need is therefore
most pressing for a Pan-African ideology or religion that will bond the entire
black race together. Kwanzaa is a beginning, and should be propagated throughout
the black world.
4]
Unity through a hierarchy of organizations-- economic, social, cultural etc.
This is the kind of
unity which a conglomerate imposes on its units; an economic franchise imposes
on its outlets; the unity of the Rotarians, Kiwanis, Boy Scouts Movement; it is
also exemplified by how Wall Street unifies the economy of the USA, and the
City of London unifies the global economy of the British empire.
Lack of attention to
this type of unity has meant that there have been no efforts to create
Pan-African apex organizations to unify efforts and give leadership in the
economic, social and cultural areas of life. No great consortium of banks with
Pan-African reach and clout; no Pan-African equivalents of the Rotary Club or
the Kiwanis; No pan-African hierarchy of religious outfits, etc. Yet it is
hierarchic networks of these sorts that embody and operationalize unity.
Chancellor Williams
correctly laments that “The picture of several thousand black organizations,
each independent and vying for leadership, is substantially the same picture of
fragmentation and disunity in Africa that led to the downfall of the whole
race.” [Destruction . . ., p. 321] But the remedy for that situation is
not one massive membership organization, but the creating of hierarchized
groups of these organizations to give them coherence and the potent force for
united action under the control of the top echelon organizations. 8
5]
Unity through joint activity. This is exemplified by the
unity of the members of a football team or league, of a sporting association.
Of this kind of unity Chancellor Williams said:
“the total membership
is mutually and individually involved in activities which each feels is
important and will be directly beneficial to him all in his own lifetime. . . .
[This unity is achieved] almost unconsciously as people work together for
mutual benefits to each other and the advancement of the [group] as a whole.
Meaningful, practical activities [are] the cement which we call unity.”—[ Destruction
. . ., pp. 343-344]
Since 1958,
Pan-Africanism has had a one-track mind, and has been obsessed with state
integration. It has failed to promote joint and periodic activities like a
Youth Movement with four-yearly Youth Festivals. Its Pan-African Congresses have
not been regularized to hold, say, every 5th year.
Even its cultural festival, FESTAC, has been allowed to lapse. FESTAC should
have been organized to hold every decade, and so give Pan-Africanists in the
cultural field a festival to work towards every decade. These are the kinds of
periodic activities that help to build solidarity and win and hold adherents to
a movement.
6]
Unity as a functional bloc or League. This is the kind of unity
exhibited by blocs and alliances of states like NATO, the Arab League, the
defunct Warsaw Pact, and the British Commonwealth. About the British
Commonwealth, Azikiwe said:
“The Commonwealth is
bound by a complex system of consultation and co-operation in political,
economic, educational, scientific and cultural fields, working through many
Commonwealth organizations and through personal contacts, like the Prime
Ministers’ Conferences.”
--Azikiwe, 1962. In
Langley ed., Ideologies, p.310
The unity Diop
proposed for all the blacks when he said “The ties between black Africans and
the blacks of Asia, Oceania, the Caribbean, South America and the United 9
States
must be strengthened on a rational basis.” is probably better embodied in such
a League than in a geographically unwieldy Federation of states scattered
across the globe.
The lack of attention
to this type of unity has been disastrous for Pan-African collective security.
With everything concentrated on states integration through the continental,
Black African and Arab OAU/AU, no attention has been paid to our need for our
own organized bloc of states, a Black African League or Black World League
where matters peculiar to ourselves, matters of exclusive interest to
ourselves, could be addressed without interference by our Arab enemies.
7]
Unity through one mass organization with one voice. This
is the type of unity manifested in Garvey’s movement, the UNIA; it is also
proposed by Chancellor Williams when he suggests a “kind of massive
organization”, “a nationwide organization of Blacks only [with] an active
membership so vast that it would go far beyond the accepted scientific criteria
for determining the wishes of a whole people; [an] organization that would,
beyond all doubt, be the voice of Black America.”—[ Destruction . . ., pp.
332, 342]
A mass organization of
this sort is probably best done through an organized religion or ideology, the
type described in #3, above.
--------------
Pan-Africanists seem,
thus far, to be fixated on types #1 and #7; they have not even explored the
others. The failure of Pan-Africanism since 1958 to attend to and develop other
types of unity besides state integration, has not just been misguided. It has
helped to weaken the effectiveness of Pan-Africanism. It has left it without a
basis of appeal to the ordinary Africans whose interests are monumentally
different from those of states and presidents.
In its obsession with
states integration, it has expected a Federation of states to do the job of a
globe-spanning league of states for collective security as well as the job of
popular solidarity; it has not explored the ways and means for organizing
people’s solidarity. 10
----------------
Lack
of solidarity organs
Of the missing types
of unity, one whose absence is the most deadly is probably the lack of organs
of popular solidarity. Lack of people’s solidarity helps account for the
absence of expressions of popular support by Black Africans for the South
Sudanese, Darfurians and other victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing and
colonialism perpetrated by the racist Arab settler minority government in
Khartoum. There has been no wave of popular indignation or demonstrations
against the Black African presidents in the AU who have been campaigning to
prevent Bashir from being arrested and tried in Die Hague for his crimes
against humanity.
Also conspicuously
absent have been demonstrations of popular Pan-African solidarity with Zimbabwe
in its long struggle against the neo-colonial sanctions and regime change
campaign by the white imperialist powers.
Lack of popular
solidarity organs manifests also in the American Diaspora’s failure to support
the Afro-Sudanese against Khartoum. When not totally indifferent to the plight
of our endangered racial kith and kin, many in the American Diaspora have sided
with the Arabs out of Islamic or anti-imperialist solidarity. And they have
failed to mobilize the US government to stop the ethnic cleansing and genocide
in Darfur. They have failed to use their power as American citizens to do what
Chancellor Williams suggested, namely
“Influence American
foreign policy and actions in regard to crucial matters affecting African
nations just as effectively as American Jews can influence this country’s
relations with Israel. . . . This would be real Pan Africanism.” [Destruction
p.345]
I would suggest that
pan-Africanism needs to distinguish and build these various types of organs of
unity (these 7 do not exhaust the types). Only when we have built a dense
network of these 7 types of institutions can we be said to have organized
ourselves and achieved Black African unity.
---------------------------------------
11
II: Disunity or Powerlessness--What
is Black Africa’s fundamental problem?
What do we most
need to cure-- Disunity or powerlessness?
It is mind boggling
that the “independence” generation and its leaders focused on African disunity
as the key factor in our condition, and did not raise the separate question of
African powerlessness. It did not occur to them to ask: Was it simply disunity
that defeated us and got us colonized or was it more crucially our lack of the
appropriate kinds and magnitudes of power? Yes, we were not united in the 19th century;
but we were also powerless, particularly in the economic and military aspects
that counted in a showdown with invaders. Disunity would be the key factor in
our defeat only if we had many separate armies equipped with weapons of the
same technological level as the European armies, and if we failed simply
because our polities and our armies did not cooperate or co-ordinate. Nkrumah
and his generation were obsessed with the adage that unity is strength. But
they did not apply it correctly to our situation. They did not see that unity
does not automatically result in victory. To appreciate this point, consider a
tug-of-war contest between ten kwashiorkor skeletons on the one side and a big
and beefy Goliath on the other side. Of course, ten kwashiorkor skeletons
pulling together are stronger than any one of them, but not by much; but are
they together strong enough to defeat a heavyweight muscleman in the
tug-of-war? To stand a chance against the heavyweight muscleman, they have to
first get well, put on some weight and then train hard for the tug-of-war;
alternatively, they could recruit a sumo wrestler into their team or get at
least one of themselves to pump iron and grow into a heavyweight muscleman.
Contrary to the premise of the unity argument, the size of our polities, and
therefore the size of the army each could put on the battlefield, was not the
decisive factor in our defeat. Our bigger polities, such as the Asante and
Sokoto Empires went down to defeat because their armies were inferior in
weaponry and organization rather than in numbers. And Menelik’s Ethiopia, the
only late 19th century African polity that escaped being conquered, did so, not
because of its geographical size, but because it had upgraded the weaponry of
its army and improved its organization. The Ethiopian army, using
breech-loading rifles and artillery, annihilated the Italian force at the
Battle of Ādwa in 1896. Even if we were politically united in 1884, could we,
with our spears and bows and 12
arrows
and flintlocks, have overcome the invading European armies with their rifles,
artillery and maxim guns?
For some unexplained
reason, the “independence” generation was allergic to explicitly raising the
question of power, African power; and did not seem to realize the decisive
importance of the enormous gap in technology and military organization between
European and Black African polities in the past few centuries. This obtuseness
to the question of power—economic as well as military power—has persisted for
the last 50 years during which Pan-Africanists have harped on our need for
unity, without explicitly mentioning our separate need to build our
technological and military power. Because of this obtuseness, they have carried
on as if uniting a vast landmass would be enough to overcome our technological,
military and economic backwardness. They failed to see that a weak and
disunited people is not made powerful simply by uniting them; they must, above
all, consciously build their power, not just their unity.
This error persists
till today. At the summit of African intellectuals held in Dakar, in
July 2009, this misplaced focus on uniting into a vast territory was reiterated
in President Wade's cry that "we cannot be kept into a limited space"
by African leaders who are holding on to petty little states. He lamented the weakness
of Africans at a time when other people have pooled political power in vast
territories like China, India, Brazil, Russia and the United States of America.
That this emphasis on territorial size is misplaced must
be sharply exposed by the question: Will our emancipation from imperialist
domination be effected simply by uniting our territories? Or rather by having a
powerful member even within our present disunity? What do we need: Territorial
unification without enhanced power or enhanced power even without further
territorial unification? If Nigeria made itself as powerful as Japan or
Germany, and carried out its responsibility as the core state (i.e. the leader
and protector) of the Black race, would continental union still be necessary
for our emancipation from the world’s contempt? Our African Unity
enthusiasts need to recognize that if you want your side to win a high jump
contest, you send someone who can jump eight feet; you don’t send eight midgets
who can each jump one foot, and then chain their feet together in unity.
Pan-Africanism
desperately needs to shift its focus from African unity to Black African power.
The root cause of our centuries of humiliation is not disunity but 13
powerlessness.
And, furthermore, continental union is not a prerequisite for building Black
African power. Unity should be pursued only as a means to Black African power
and not as an end in itself. Only unity of the type and extent that would yield
Black African power is relevant to our defeating our enemies and redeeming
ourselves from the world’s contempt.
__________________________
III:
Collective Security
The question of the
collective security of the Black race comes down to this: “How do we
ensure that we shall never again be enslaved, conquered and colonized by
anybody?”
It is absolutely
amazing, quite tragic and a great sin of omission, that collective security has
not explicitly been a concern of Pan-Africanism since 1958. For a people all of
whose woes for the past 2500 years (since the fall of the Black Egypt of the
Pharaohs to White Persians in 525 BC) have resulted from their inability to
secure their borders and protect their lands, populations, societies, cultures,
values etc., achieving collective security should have been, and still should
be, the paramount concern. Other than Nkrumah’s repeated demand for an African
High Command; and Azikiwe’s mention, in 1962, of the need for some arrangements
for collective security; and Haile Selassie’s mention of that need in his 1963
address at the inauguration of the OAU, I have found in the records no other
treatment that has a bearing on the issue. Nkrumah, Azikiwe and Selassie did
indeed raise the issue of collective security; however, they did so in an
a-historical form, the wrong form.
The
“Never Again” question
Consider a man who
has just escaped, half mauled, from the den of a pack of hungry lions. If he is
wise, his first order of business is to vow “Never again!” and ask how he
strayed there in the first place, and then to take steps never again to make
that mistake. If he does not do this, if he fails to learn from his harrowing
experience, he is stupid and deserves to become the dinner for the next lion he
chances upon. By failing to 14
ask
and answer that “never again” question, Black Africa’s “independence”
generation let Black Africa down and led us dangerously astray.
Unfortunately, since
the “independence” generation did not have the ancestral sankofa orientation,
the question of collective security was not posed in the correct historical
form that would have allowed our past experience to point to an answer for the
future.
The African High
Command that Nkrumah urged did not go far enough in addressing the fundamental
problem. It was limited to “an African High Command which could resist . . .
acts which threaten the territorial integrity and sovereignty of African
States.” [Revolutionary Path, p.345]; it would “plan revolutionary war,
and initiate action” so that Africa will be liberated soon. [Revolutionary
Path, p.482] It was not a doctrine that posed or answered the comprehensive
historical question of how we fell into a history of enslavement, conquest and
colonialism in the first place, and how we could ensure that we never do so
again.
Unity
for security and survival
Since 1958,
Pan-Africanism has made African Unity its prime theme and project. Now, the
usual motive for the voluntary unification of states is security and survival.
However Pan Africanism has strangely been obtuse on the matter of security and
survival for its constituency. I do not find Nkrumah, Padmore, Diop, Azikiwe
and the other advocates of continental unification anywhere articulating [and I
stand to be corrected] the argument that the paramount objective of continental
unification is the survival and security of Africans. If they did, and thought
the matter through, and had bothered to educate themselves on the nature of
Afro-Arab historical relations of the last two millennia, they would be simply
suicidal or insane to have proposed a unification of Arabs and Africans under
one continental state. Not even Nkrumah, for whom unification seems like a
panacea, [note his long catalogue of benefits that he said it would yield], saw
fit to include security and survival, whether explicitly or implicitly, among
his reasons for advocating continental unification. In light of the articulated
and demonstrated Arab ambitions in Africa for the last 1,500 years, any
unification of Black Africans with the 15
Arab
settler colonialists in Africa would be as suicidal for Black Africans as a
unification between mice and cats would be for mice.
Our
endangered situation
Consider this true
story from Sudan:
"The dispute over
oil," Victoria Ajang begins, "first became an issue of life and death
for me in 1983. That year the government began its program to pipe oil from our
land in the south up to the north. Students in my town were quite upset about
our resources being diverted by the government, and so they held a protest
march outside the local school. But the government would not tolerate this.
"On
a summer night, the government militia forces suddenly swooped in on our
village. We were at home relaxing, in the evening, when men on horses with
machine guns stormed through, shooting everyone. I saw friends fall dead in
front of me. While my husband carried out our little daughter Eva, I ran with the
few possessions I could grab. "All around us, we saw children being [hit]
in the stomach, in the leg, between the eyes. Against the dark sky, we saw
flames from the houses the soldiers had set on fire. The cries of the people
forced inside filled our ears as they burned to death. Our people were being
turned to ash."
Victoria Ajang’s
story of what happened to her village, illustrates what dangers they expose
themselves to who do not take measures to ensure their security. They will be
relaxing and entertaining themselves when their enemies make a surprise attack
and destroy them. That is the situation Black Africans have allowed themselves
to be in for 2500 years and have foolishly refused to take measures to prevent.
An
unasked question
Two vital questions
should have been asked and answered in 1958 by the All-African People’s
Conference, namely: (a) “How do we set the rest of Black Africa free from
colonialism?” (This, thankfully, was indeed asked and answered) and (b)“How
do we ensure that we shall never again be enslaved, conquered and colonized by
anybody?” (This, alas, went unasked and remains unasked and unanswered
till this day). 16
Rather
than take up the second task, we were diverted into other things. In Nkrumah’s
own words:
“Long before 1957, I
made it clear that the two major tasks to be undertaken after the ending of
colonial rule in Ghana would be the vigorous prosecution of a Pan-African
policy to advance the African Revolution, and at the same time the adoption of
measures to construct socialism in Ghana.” –[Path, p.125]
In their desire to
establish a new social order—apparently without bothering about how it would
protect itself from our enemies-- Nkrumah set about building “scientific
socialism” in Ghana; Nyerere set about building African socialism (Ujamaa) in
Tanzania; Kaunda set about building African Humanism in Zambia; Houphouet
Boigny set about building capitalism in Cote d’Ivoire; and others set about
building other systems in the other countries, but nobody saw fit to ask the paramount
question of African collective security, namely: “How do we ensure that
we shall never again be enslaved, conquered and colonized by anybody?” This
question should have informed whatever new social order they set out to build,
but it did not. What is the result today?
Consequences
of lack of historical focus on Collective Security
Several very costly
errors have flowed from this our lack of proper [sankofa] attention to our
collective security.
A] Our quest for
African unity has been misguided in three respects:
A1] We have sought to
unite a territory –the entire African continent--that is far too large for our
security needs.
A2] By not finding
out who our historic enemies are, we have included our Arab enemies among those
we seek to unite with;
A3] By not
understanding our security requirements, we failed to seriously undertake
industrialization to build African power
B] Even if we still
recognize that they were our historic enemies during the centuries of the slave
trade and colonialism, we have failed to realize that Europeans did not
stop being our enemies with the ending of political colonialism [1957-1994]. In
our amnesia 17
and
foolishness, we have treated our historic White European enemies as our best
friends, as our mentors in development and now as our so-called ‘development
partners’; and we have treated our historic Arab enemies as our African
brothers and allies, and thereby left ourselves totally unprepared for their
enemy attacks, for example:
B1] The AIDSbombing
of Black Africa by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the USA took us
totally unawares;
B2] For 50 years we
have allowed the European imperialist institutions—the UN, and especially its
IMF-World Bank-GATT/WTO troika, and our European “ex-colonizers” to tutor and
guide us into maldevelopment and chronic poverty.
B3] For 50 years we
have failed to recognize and collectively resist Arab colonialist expansionism
and racism against Black Africans, as well as the persisting enslavement of
Black Africans by Arabs.
For 50 years, for
lack of an explicit and appropriate interest in our collective security, we
failed to heed the fundamental strategic principle:
Know your enemy and
know yourself, and in a hundred battles you will never be defeated. -- Sun Tzu
Had we sought to know
our white enemies, what would we have learnt from our own sages who had already
studied them? We would have learnt the following:
The attitude of the white race is to subjugate, to exploit, and if
necessary exterminate the weaker peoples with whom they come in contact.
--- Marcus Garvey
In their relationship
with the Black race, Europeans are psychopaths.
--- Bobby Wright
Black men and women,
when will you cease to drift along the way which leads to the extermination of
the Black race?
--- Azikiwe 18
-----------
For fifty years, due
to our lack of focus on our collective security, we have failed to attend to
the task of building the power we need for our collective security.
For fifty years, due
to our lack of focus on our collective security, we have paid a heavy price
from AIDS, not just the millions that have died from it, but also the
multi-generational consequences from the social dislocations caused by the
death of parents and the abandonment of millions of babies as AIDS orphans
For fifty years, due
to our lack of focus on our collective security, we have also paid a heavy
price from the economic war waged on us by the European powers that got us into
their debt trap and impoverished us.
For fifty years, due
to our lack of focus on our collective security, we have also paid a heavy
price in the millions killed or enslaved by the Arabs, and in the land they
have seized from Black Africans.
‘Pacifist
morality’ and our lack of security consciousness?
We must observe that
it was not only the leaders who failed to ask the vital question about our
collective security; the entire “independence” generation seems to have failed
to do so. They were not suspicious of the colonial masters that had enslaved
and conquered and exploited Black Africa for centuries; and even till now we
are not suspicious of the Europeans and Arabs, which is why we give their NGOs
unchecked access to our villages, without strictly monitoring them to make sure
they are not subverting our society or culture. When a behavior is rampant in a
society, it is useful to look for an explanation in the culture. I think this
suicidal lack of security consciousness is ingrained in our culture.
Cheikh Anta Diop, in
his Two Cradles Theory, lists ‘pacifist morality’ as one of the traits of the
Southern Cradle cultures of which Black Africa is a part.
Nkrumah, in lauding
the African Personality, said: “We have the gifts of laughter and joy, a love
of music, a lack of malice, an absence of the desire for vengeance for our
wrongs, all things of intrinsic worth in a world sick of injustice, revenge,
fear and want.”—[Revolutionary Path, p.114] 19
These
traits of the African personality are not a virtue in the world as it is. The
world requires a ‘warrior morality’ not a ‘pacifist morality’.
It was Steve Biko who
observed, and correctly I think, that “we are not a suspicious race.” Some
might think that that trait is a virtue, but it is not. It might be a virtue in
‘pacifist morality’ but it is a vice in ‘warrior morality’. And the world we
live in demands ‘warrior morality’. To illustrate the warrior mentality that we
lack, here is a story from Meiji Japan:
In a Japanese Hospital
The last patient of the evening, a boy less than four years old,
is received by nurses and surgeons with smiles and gentle flatteries, to which
he does not at all respond ... He is both afraid and angry — especially angry —
at finding himself in an hospital tonight: some indiscreet person assured him
that he was being taken to the theatre; and he sang for joy on the way,
forgetting the pain of his arm; and this is not the theatre! There are doctors
here — doctors that hurt people. . . . He lets himself be stripped, and
bears the examination without wincing; but when told that he must lie down upon
a certain low table, under an electric lamp, he utters a very emphatic No! .
. . The experience inherited from his ancestors has assured him that to lie
down in the presence of a possible enemy is not good; and by the same ghostly
wisdom he has divined that the smile of the surgeon was intended to deceive ...
'But it will be so nice upon the table!' coaxingly observes a young nurse; 'see
the pretty red cloth!' No!' repeats the little man — made only more wary
by this appeal to aesthetic sentiment ... So they lay hands upon him — two
surgeons and two nurses — lift him deftly, bear him to the table with the red
cloth. Then he shouts his small cry of war — for he comes of good fighting
stock — and, to the general alarm, battles most valiantly, in spite of that
broken arm. But lo! a white wet cloth descends upon his eyes and mouth, and he
cannot cry, and there is a strange sweet smell in his nostrils, and the voices
and the lights have floated very, very far away, and he is sinking, sinking,
sinking into wavy darkness ... The slight limbs relax; for a moment the breast
heaves quickly, in the last fight of the lungs against the paralyzing
anaesthetic: then all motion stops. . . . 20
--
From Lafcadio Hearn, Writings from Japan, ed by Francis King,
Harmondsworth: Pengiun, 1984, p. 164
The people of the
“independence” generation did not have the healthy suspiciousness that was
displayed by that little Japanese boy! Nor have we acquired it till today.
Our
tragedy
Why do I say it is
tragic that we have not made collective security our paramount concern? Had we
made collective security our paramount concern, it would have forced us to
correctly answer the question: unity for whom? We would have investigated to
determine those enemies from whom we need security; and that would have obliged
us to examine the history of our relations with the Arabs and with the
Europeans. And having ascertained that Arabs are our mortal enemies, we would
not have sought continental union with them. This is one way in which our lack
of clarity on the question of who our historic enemies are has cost us dearly.
Just consider the
long war in Sudan between the Black Arabs who are entrenched in power in
Khartoum and the Black Africans of South Sudan. Black Africa would have
mobilized and won that war long ago if we had a doctrine and an organ of
collective security. In which case the genocide in Darfur would not have arisen
at all. By the same token, the enslavement of Black Africans in Mauritania by
the White Arabs there would have been ended by the collective intervention of
Black Africa. Furthermore, the current Arab campaign to seize a belt of
Sahelian borderlands stretching from Senegal to the Red Sea would have been
checked. Same with the Arab ambition to seize the entire Nile Basin, all the
way south to Kampala.
This lack of
definition of who our collective enemies are has also prevented us from being
on our guard against the Europeans. Many of us do not even recognize that the
Europeans are our enemies, despite their having enslaved and colonized and
exploited us for many centuries. Because we are not on guard against them, we
allow them to come and go unsupervised into our countries, which is how they
came in and inflicted AIDS on 21
us
by using AIDS-infected vaccines to vaccinate 97 million Black Africans in an
alleged campaign to eradicate smallpox.
So, what do we do
now?
Breeding
out pacifist morality traits
As Cabral taught us,
we need to struggle against our own weaknesses. As I have indicated, one of our
weaknesses is our pacifist morality. It manifests as our unsuspiciousness, as
our lack of malice, as an absence of the desire for vengeance for our wrongs,
especially wrongs received at the hands of whites.
Diop pointed out that the most essential function which a culture
must serve is survival [Great African Thinkers, p. 244]. As we have
seen, the pacifist morality of our culture has been maladaptive and has exposed
us to many lethal dangers. We need to repair our culture. We need to evolve a
new African culture that breeds out the pacifist mentality and inculcates a
warrior mentality in every four-year old. But can this change be effected? Yes,
it can. Just consider what Shaka did, in just ten years, with his reforms. In
fact, on just one fearsome day, he wiped out cowardice from the Zulu nation.
So, if we set about things correctly, we can change from a pacifist morality to
a warrior morality even in one generation. That is a task for our education
system.
We
need to change our child-rearing methods and adopt some functional equivalent
of the Samurai upbringing that produced that 4-year-old Japanese boy. Then we
should supplement that by emphasizing martial arts and the game of chess in
schools. We should then top it off by instituting compulsory military service
for all 18 year olds. The products of such a system are unlikely to have a
pacifist mentality, or to be obtuse about collective security. It might be
useful to indicate the basics of a Samurai education as a model of what we
should functionally reproduce:
A
Samurai upbringing
“But sons of samurai were severely disciplined in those days: and
the one of whom I write had little time for dreaming. The period of caresses
was made painfully brief for him. Even before he was invested with his first
hakama, or trousers — a great ceremony in that epoch — he was weaned as far as
possible 22
from tender
influence, and taught to check the natural impulses of childish affection.
Little comrades would ask him mockingly, 'Do you still need milk?' if they saw
him walking out with his mother, although he might love her in the house as
demonstratively as he pleased, during the hours he could pass by her side.
These were not many. All inactive pleasures were severely restricted by his
discipline; and even comforts, except during illness, were not allowed him.
Almost from the time he could speak he was enjoined to consider duty the guiding
motive of life, self-control the first requisite of conduct, pain and death
matters of no consequence in the selfish sense.
There was a grimmer side to
this Spartan discipline, designed to cultivate a cold sternness never to be
relaxed during youth, except in the screened intimacy of the home. The boys
were inured to sights of blood. They were taken to witness executions; they
were expected to display no emotions and they were obliged, on their return
home, to quell any secret feeling of horror by eating plentifully of rice
tinted blood-color by an admixture of salted plum juice. Even more difficult
things might be demanded of a very young boy — to go alone at midnight to the
execution-ground, for example, and bring back a head in proof of courage. For
the fear of the dead was held not less contemptible in a samurai than the fear
of man. The samurai child was pledged to fear nothing. In all such tests, the
demeanor exacted was perfect impassiveness; any swaggering would have been
judged quite as harshly as any sign of cowardice.
As a boy grew up, he
was obliged to find his pleasures chiefly in those bodily exercises which were
the samurai's early and constant preparations for war — archery and riding,
wrestling and fencing. Playmates were found for him; but these were older
youths, sons of retainers, chosen for ability to assist him in the practice of
martial exercises. It was their duty also to teach him how to swim, to handle a
boat, to develop his young muscles. Between such physical training and the
study of the Chinese classics the greater part of each day was divided for him.
His diet, though ample, was never dainty; his clothing, except in time of great
ceremony, was light and coarse; and he was not allowed the use of fire merely
to warm himself. While studying of winter mornings, if his hands became too
cold 23
to
use the writing brush, he would be ordered to plunge them into icy water to
restore the circulation; and if his feet were numbed by frost, he would be told
to run about in the snow to make them warm. Still more rigid was his training
in the special etiquette of the military class; and he was early made to know
that the little sword in his girdle was neither an ornament nor a plaything. He
was shown how to use it, how to take his own life at a moment's notice, without
shrinking, whenever the code of his class might so order.1
--------------------------------------------
1. Is that really the head of your father?' a prince once
asked of a samurai boy only seven years old. The child at once realized the
situation. The freshly severed head set before him was not his father's: the
daimyo had been deceived, but further deception was necessary. So the lad,
after having saluted the head with every sign of reverential grief, suddenly
cut out his own bowels. All the prince's doubts vanished before that bloody
proof of filial piety; the outlawed father was able to make good his escape;
and the memory of the child is still honored in Japanese drama and poetry.
-----------------
Also in the matter of
religion, the training of a samurai boy was peculiar. He was educated to revere
the ancient gods and the spirits of his ancestors; he was well schooled in the
Chinese ethics; and he was taught something of Buddhist philosophy and faith.
But he was likewise taught that hope of heaven and fear of hell were for the
ignorant only; and that the superior man should be influenced in his conduct by
nothing more selfish than the love of right for its own sake, and the
recognition of duty as a universal law.
Gradually, as the
period of boyhood ripened into youth, his conduct was less subjected to
supervision. He was left more and more free to act upon his own judgment, but
with full knowledge that a mistake would not be forgotten; that a serious
offense would never be fully condoned; and that a well-merited reprimand was
more to be dreaded than death. On the other hand, there were few moral dangers
against which to guard him. Professional vice was then strictly banished from
many of the provincial castle-towns; and even so much of the non-moral 24
side
of life as might have been reflected in popular romance and drama, a young
samurai could know little about. He was taught to despise that common
literature appealing either to the softer emotions or the passions, as
essentially unmanly reading; and the public theater was forbidden to his class.2 Thus,
in that innocent provincial life of Old Japan, a young samurai might grow up
exceptionally pure-minded and simple-hearted.
So grew up the young samurai
concerning whom these things are written — fearless, courteous, self-denying,
despising pleasure, and ready at an instant's notice to give his life for love,
loyalty, or honor.”
-------------------------------------
2. Samurai women, in some provinces at
least, could go to the public theater. The men could not, without committing a
breach of good manners. But in samurai homes, or within the grounds of the
yashiki, some private performances of a particular character were given.
Strolling players were the performers. I know several charming old shizoku who
have never been to a public theater in their lives, and refuse all invitations
to witness a performance. They still obey the rules of their samurai education.
--------------
Extract from “A
Conservative” in Lafcadio Hearn, Writings from Japan, pp.291-293
----------------
If we learn from the
Samurai upbringing, we cannot allow our children to be brought up on Channel O,
and the like.
A
change in our concept of security
Besides inculcating a
warrior mentality in all Black Africans, we need to change our still-colonial
concept of security.
The colonial notion
of security was the security of the colonial state and enterprise from the
people it came to exploit and oppress. This was the doctrine of security which
conceived the colonial army as a back-up for the police i.e. as an army to be
used for riot control and punitive expeditions. This doctrine has been inherited
by the neo-colonial states of Black Africa and has not been changed. [In
Nigeria it was applied 25
by
the British to suppress the Aba women’s uprising, and recently by Obasanjo to
wipe out the restive peoples of Odi and Zaki Biam].
In neo-colonial Africa,
it has been noted that a small army, incapable of serving as an effective
instrument of foreign policy, tends to ‘look inward’—to intervene in domestic
politics; and that by and large, African forces are deployed only against their
own people in their own countries. Furthermore, as Nyerere noted in 1961, “If
an African state is armed, then realistically it can only be armed against
another African state”[See Opoku Agyeman, Africa’s Persistent Vulnerable
Link to Global politics, pp. 18-23]
Can such internal
security armies defend Black Africa against the Arab League, or Belgium or
France or the UK, let alone against NATO?
Here is Azikiwe’s
suggestion for an African Convention on Collective Security.
“This should make
provisions for the following: a multilateral pact of mutual defence . . . ;
an African High Command . . .; a doctrine of non-intervention in Africa,
on the same lines as the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere. This
doctrine should make it clear that the establishment or the continued existence
of any colonial territory in the continent of Africa, by any European or
American or Asian or Australian power shall be regarded not only as an
unfriendly act, but as an act of aggression against the concert of African
States; a Pan-African Declaration of Neutralism [i.e. non-alignment] . . . ”—[Azikiwe,
(1962) “Future of Pan-Africanism” in Langley ed., Ideologies,
pp.321-322]
We need to develop
this line of thinking. Security has to be against our external enemies: Arabs,
Europeans and whoever else; and against enemy capabilities, existing and
potential. Hence we will need to monitor enemy capacity as it changes, lest we
find ourselves equipping ourselves to defend against obsolete weapons, and
preparing for the last war, as it were.
Furthermore, our
concept of security must be broadened well beyond military security to include
economic, food, health and ideological security, since we have been under
attack by the Arabs or the Europeans in all these areas. In fact, we need
collective 26
security
of a total sort-- security against all possible means of attack, presently
known and potential, and from all possible enemies.
--------------
IV:
Socialism or communalism?
Several African
leaders of the “independence” generation advocated or implemented what they
called socialism. Prof. Prah reports that,
By the mid-1960s,
practically all African heads of state, with the exception of Haile Selassie of
Ethiopia, Leon Mba of Gabon and V.S. Tubman of Liberia had at one time or the
other espoused African socialism. Consistently, such ideologues have put a
distance between what they variously defined as African socialism, and 20th century
Marxian socialist formulae, with the emphasis on class struggle. Tom Mboya
anchored his definition of African socialism on the pre-industrial
communitarian ethos of Africa. . . . In Tanzania under Julius Nyerere, populist
socialism was described as Ujamaa socialism.
-- [The African
Nation, pp. 80, 81]
The “African
socialism” of many of these leaders was a prestigious misnomer for African
communalism. Here is Tom Mboya’s exposition of it; his is quite representative
of expositions by Nyerere, Kaunda, Senghor, Mamadou Dia etc.
“In Africa the belief that 'we are all sons and daughters of the
soil' has always exercised tremendous influence on our social, economic and
political relationships. From this belief springs the logic and the practice of
equality, and the acceptance of communal ownership of the vital means of
life—the land. The hoe is to us the symbol of work. Every able-bodied man and
woman, girl and boy, has always worked. Laziness has not been tolerated, and
appropriate social sanctions have developed against it. There has been equality
of opportunity, for everyone had land—or rather, the use of land—and a hoe at
the start of life. The acquisitive instinct, which is largely responsible for
the vicious excesses and exploitation 27
under the capitalist
system, was tempered by a sense of togetherness and a rejection of graft and
meanness. There was loyalty to the society, and the society gave its members
much in return: a sense of security and universal hospitality.
These are the values for
which, in my view, African Socialism stands. The ideals and attitudes which
nourish it are indigenous, and are easily learnt, for they have been expressed
for generations in the language of the soil which our people understand, and
not in foreign slogans.
All African leaders
who have written on this subject are agreed on these points. President Nyerere
has said: 'My fellow countrymen can understand Socialism only as co-operation.'
And President Senghor of Senegal, speaking at the Dakar conference in December
1962, on the 'African roads to Socialism', said: 'Socialism is the merciless
fight against social dishonesties and injustices; fraudulent conversion of
public funds, rackets and bribes...'
I have, I hope, given
some idea already of the reason why Africans call these attitudes 'African Socialism',
and not just 'Socialism'. . . . There is a positive desire, arising out
of what may start as a negative reaction, that whatever is of value in Africa's
own culture and her own social institutions should be brought out to contribute
to the creation of the new African nation.
I wrote earlier about the
task of reconstructing the economy in the days after Independence. In the
effort to do this, new values have to be established in place of colonial
values and we have to decide what part the traditional African social and
cultural structure can play in the country's economic development. Its main
difference from the European structure, which was of course the one officially
favoured during the colonial era, is that it is communal by nature. Most African
tribes have a communal approach to life. A person is an individual only to the
extent that he is a member of a clan, a community or a family. Land was never
owned by an individual, but by the people, and could not be disposed of by
anybody. 28
Where
there were traditional heads, they held land in trust for the community
generally. Food grown on the land was regarded as food to feed the hungry among
the tribe. Although each family might have its own piece of land on which to
cultivate, when there was famine or when someone simply wanted to eat, he
merely looked for food and ate it. . . .
When money was
introduced, the African came to work for wages; but he still maintained contact
with his native land as the only source of security to which he could look in
old age or in sickness. He was secure in his mind that he could go back to his
home and be taken care of by his people. It was a social security scheme, with
no written rules, but with a strict pattern to which everyone adhered. If
someone did not adhere to the pattern, and did not take on the obligations
inherent in the system, he found that, when he next got into trouble, he
received little or no attention.
He was expected to
live harmoniously with others in his community, and to make his contribution to
work done in the village. . . .
The practice of
African Socialism involves trying to use what is relevant and good in these
African customs to create new values in the changing world of the money
economy, to build an economy which reflects the thinking of the great majority
of the people. . . . The challenge of African Socialism is to use these
traditions to find a way to build a society in which there is a place for
everybody, where everybody shares both in poverty and in prosperity, and where
emphasis is placed upon production by everyone, with security for all. . . .
In his booklet UJAMAA—the basis of African Socialism, Julius Nyerere
brings out clearly the essential difference of African from European Socialism.
He writes:
The foundation, and the objective, of African Socialism is the
Extended Family. The true African Socialist does not look on one class of men
as his brethren and another as his natural enemies. He does not form an
alliance with the "brethren" for the extermination of the
"non-brethren". He rather regards all men as his brethren—29
as members of his
ever-extending family'. 'UJAMAA, then, or "Familyhood", describes our
Socialism. It is opposed to Capitalism, which seeks to build a happy society on
the basis of the Exploitation of Man by Man. And it is equally opposed to doctrinaire
Socialism, which seeks to build its happy society on a philosophy of Inevitable
Conflict between Man and Man.
--Tom Mboya, “African Socialism” in J. Ayo Langley ed. Ideologies,
pp. 508-513
---------------
Nkrumah differed from
all the others. Nkrumah, a self-declared Marxist, espoused Marxism, which is
also known as “scientific socialism”. He declared “Pan-Africanism and socialism
are organically complementary. One cannot be achieved without the other.” [Revolutionary
Path, p. 127] Is that claim true? Nkrumah merely asserted but did not
bother to demonstrate this dogma of his. Unfortunately, it is false, as false
as his many fallacious claims about what “only a continental union government”
could achieve for Africans. It is like his opportunistic and Canute-like
nonsense that “if in the past the Sahara divided us, now it unites us.”
[p.129]. Marxism (Scientific socialism) has as much organic or historical or
cultural connection with Africa as Hinduism, Taoism or Shinto. Marxism in
Africa, just like Christianity, is an alien, imperialist import. For either of
them to be organically connected to Pan-Africanism, European cultural
imperialism would have to be organically connected to Africa, which is not the
case. As Prah pointedly asked: “What is the relevance of ‘scientific socialism’
to the notion of African unity?” [African Nation, p. 63] If it has no
relevance to the objectives of Pan-Africanism or to African history and
culture, how can it be correctly said to be organically complementary to
Pan-Africanism? That Nkrumah was both a Pan-Africanist and a Marxist, is only a
fortuitous coincidence in his intellectual life. It does not make
Pan-Africanism and Marxism organically related in any way.
Furthermore, Ayi Kwei
Armah has argued, correctly in my view, that 30
Marxism,
in its approach to non-Western societies and values, is decidedly colonialist,
Western, Eurocentric and hegemonist. . . . Marxism, in its approach to the
non-Western majority of the world's peoples, is demonstrably racist — racist in
a prejudiced, determined, dishonest and unintelligent fashion. Western racists
hold that Western art is art, but African art is primitive art. . . . what
makes Western art civilized and modern is that it originates in the West ; what
makes African art primitive is that it originates in Africa. Racism is
luxuriously illogical. That is partly why, for Marx and Engels, communism is
modern, civilized and serious when it appears in Europe (even if it has only a
spectral form).The same communist phenomenon, when it manifests itself in the
non-Western world, is dismissed as primitive communism, even though it appears
there not as a fuzzy liberal specter but in human form — vigorous, pushing
toward birth in societies familiar for ages with communism as a lost tradition
and a real hope, often aborted, sometimes fleetingly realized.
--“Masks and Marx”,
pp. 41-42
Since Pan-Africanism
is anti-racist, anti-colonialist and anti-Eurocentric, Nkrumah cannot be
correct in claiming that Pan-Africanism and a racist, colonialist and
Eurocentric Marxism, a.k.a. “scientific socialism”, are organically
complementary and that one cannot be achieved without the other. That is
tantamount to claiming that anti-racism and racism, anti-colonialism and
colonialism, anti-Eurocentrism and Eurocentrism, must be achieved together in
Africa.
In contrast to
Nkrumah’s “scientific socialism”, the African socialism of the other leaders is
derived from African communalism and therefore has a historical and organic
link to African culture. As Nyerere explained:
“By the use of the
word ‘ujamaa’, therefore, we state that for us socialism involves building on
the foundation of our past, and building also to our own design. We are not
importing a foreign ideology into Tanzania and trying to 31
smother
our distinct social patterns with it. We have deliberately decided to grow, as
a society, out of our own roots, but in a particular direction and towards a
particular kind of objective. We are doing this by emphasizing certain
characteristics of our traditional organization, and extending them so that
they can embrace the possibilities of modern technology and enable us to meet
the challenge of life in the twentieth century world.”
--Nyerere, “Ujamaa is
Tanzanian socialism” in J. Ayo Langley ed, Ideologies, p. 546
Nkrumah would have done well
to follow Nyerere and to heed Azikiwe’s wise counsel on ideologies:
“it is obligatory for
us to adopt a tolerant skepticism in respect of alien ideologies and then
examine impartially our aboriginal lore of good living. If we reacted
otherwise, then we would be desecrating the legacy which our forebears had
bequeathed to us from past generations.”—Azikiwe, “Tribalism . . . ”, in
J. Ayo Langley ed, Ideologies, p. 474
We need to note that
both Capitalism and Socialism are ideologies made-in-Europe to solve the
peculiar problems of a modern European society in which two antagonistic
classes confront each other, one having seized all the society’s means of
production leaving the other with only its labor to sell to live. Unless and
until that situation is replicated in Africa—and that would be a disaster--
these rival ideologies will remain inappropriate for Africa. After all,
theories about the camel’s way of life should not be applied to the whale’s.
It should be pointed
out that the ancestral African political economy combined private ownership
with communal ownership. As Kaunda described it:
“ our ancestors
worked collectively and co-operatively from start to finish. One might say this
was a communist way of doing things and yet these gardens remained strongly the
property of individuals. One might say here that this was 32
capitalism.
Collectively and co-operatively they harvested but when it came to storing and
selling their produce they became strongly individualistic. They did not finish
at that. When it came to sharing the fruits of their labour like meals, for
instance, they shared them communally. Indeed, one is compelled to say a
strange mixture of nineteenth-century capitalism with communism. Yet, as is
said above, this was original and the pattern essentially African.”
--Kaunda, “Humanism
in Zambia”, in J. Ayo Langley ed, Ideologies, p. 567
African
Socialism or African Communalism?
Why did these African
leaders choose the tag “African Socialism” for what was actually African
Communalism? I suspect that in the global climate of the 1960s which was
dominated by the intra-European Cold War, they found it prestigious to attach a
European label to their African-derived political ideology, hence the “Socialism”;
but they also needed to distinguish their ideology from European socialism,
hence the “African” in the name. But I think the time is past when we should
seek to enhance the value of something African by making it seem a variant of
something European. Our intellectual independence requires that we name things
correctly and on our own terms. I will therefore use the term African
Communalism henceforth to describe what has been called African socialism.
Towards
an Industrial Communalism
Nyerere, Senghor,
Kaunda, Tom Mboya, Mamadou Dia and the rest of them began the process of
formulating an ideology for building a political economy that would put in
modern form the pre-colonial African political economy of agrarian communalism.
The project remains uncompleted and should be continued from where these
pioneers left off. The challenge to work out an industrial upgrade of
pre-colonial African communalism is before our intellectuals and should be
taken up. As Nyerere put it: 33
“Who
is to keep us active in the struggle to convert nationalism to Pan-Africanism
if it is not the staffs and students of our universities? Who is it who will
have the time and ability to think out the practical problems of achieving this
goal of unification if it is not those who have an opportunity to think and
learn without direct responsibility for day-to-day affairs”—“Dilemma . . .”,
in Langley ed., Ideologies p.352
We should then invite
our students and academics to take up the challenge and provide us with the
much needed Industrial Communalist Ideology and thereby give us a framework of
ideas with which to solve our problems, with which to define and pursue our
interest in the world.
I would caution them
not to be put off by Nkrumah’s silly dictum that
“Practice without
thought is blind; thought without practice is empty.”—[Consciencism, New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1964, p. 78] We should realize that Nkrumah’s
dictum is blind to the virtues of division of labor; it suggests that thinkers
who are not also agitators should be regarded as having nothing to contribute.
And that even a muddle-headed thinker who is an agitator is preferable to a
clear thinker who is not also an agitator. Let those talented to think for us
unabashedly do so. Let those who are talented agitators and political
organizers do that unabashedly. And if we spawn any of those rare persons who
combine first rate thinking with first rate organizational skills, we should be
thankful and get them to contribute in the way Cabral and Nyerere contributed
to Africa and Mao contributed to China, and Lenin to Russia.
For the benefit of
those who take up the challenge, let me stress that they should conceptualize
our situation in a comprehensive way, so that the ideology they come up with
can help solve our problems comprehensively. Unlike Nyerere, Kaunda and co, who
were trying to work out a communalist system, but who did not explicitly impose
on their system the conditions for defending it in the world as it is today,
those who set out to fashion a neo-communalist system would do well to
consciously design it so it can achieve the Black Power necessary to protect it
in this century. The mix of principles of ownership of the land and other means
of production must be consciously such as to allow the setting up of giant
industries. In principle, there should be no reason why a 34
giant
industry should not be communally owned by an entire village or town. Modes of
ownership by communities should be invented to supplement and complement
individual ownership. In addition there is much to be learnt from the
Industrialized systems of Sweden and Japan, and from pre-colonial Asante.
According to Prof. Opoku Agyeman:
Collectivism is the
predominant impulse in Sweden, in the sense that the system emphasizes the
sovereignty of collective well-being over individual private interests. In
Japan, where society is similarly conceived in corporate terms, individuals
‘are seen to benefit only through the elevation of the group as a whole.’ In
Asante, the welfare of the national society was placed well above calculations
of individual self-interest and self-indulgence.
Prof Agyeman further
elaborates:
“The logic of the
Japanese “capitalist” system places a heavy reliance on the private market. And
yet Japan’s market economy is not based on Adam Smith’s notion “that a society
benefits from the liberation of individual greed—each person seeking his own
self-interest.” In “socialist” Sweden the government’s role has been to foster
social uses of ownership, which is overwhelmingly private, to ensure the
sovereignty of society’s interests over private interests. . . . In
“mercantilist” Asante, even though the public sector loomed larger than the
private, no rigid antipathy to private enterprise existed. On the contrary, the
private sector was nurtured by the state to generate wealth through the
fostering of a breed of private entrepreneurs.
Socially responsible uses of
the ownership of the means of production, private or public, is a demonstrable
value in all three cases. In Sweden, while it is acceptable for a private owner
of industry to create a fortune, this is conditional on the wealth being used
in socially useful ways. In Japan, the private sector exudes social
responsibility through a “corporate socialism” that confers such benefits as
lifetime employment and egalitarian job practices. In Asante, private
acquisition of wealth was encouraged but on condition that the riches were 35
obtained
by honest means and hard work and could be relied upon by the system for
pecuniary assistance.
--Opoku Agyeman, Africa’s
persistent Vulnerable link to Global Politics, pp. 92, 90, 91
The great challenge
facing African thinkers, whether or not they are also political leaders, is to
fashion an industrial communalist ideology to guide the political economy of an
industrialized Black superpower. In this task, they have much to learn from
case studies of pre-colonial African countries like Asante and Zulu; and also
from non-African countries like modern Japan, Sweden, Cuba and China.
---------
V:
The African Nation?
Is there an African
nation? Where is it? Are there African nations? If so, where are they?
I submit that the
African nation does not exist and has never existed. There is the African race,
but it is not a nation. There are many African nations, but these are what we
have learned to defame by calling them tribes. These so-called tribes were the
true nations in pre-colonial Africa. What nowadays are called African nations,
are not nations at all; each is just a country under the jurisdiction of a
state. It is fashionable to call them nation-states, but that is at best a
courtesy.
Why is it important
to determine whether or not Black Africa is a nation? Pretending that Black
Africa is a nation when it is not would be as delusional as leaning on a
walking stick without noticing that it is made of ice. When things get warm the
ice will melt and you’ll be leaning on air. Alternatively, if a builder lacks
cement blocks and, in desperation decides to call heaps of beach sand by the
name cement blocks, he will soon find that he can’t lay the heaps course on
course like he could actual blocks. For lack of the factors that make a
population cohere into a nation, the African nation, being a pseudo-nation,
would disintegrate under pressure, just like an ice stick in warm weather. For
example, suppose you had an army of the so-called African nation. And half your
36
army
were Black Muslims each of whom said in his heart: “I am a Muslim and I worship
Allah and I follow the way of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). I have
no relationship with you, except that your skin is black. The lightest Arab is
closer to me than you. If there were to be war between Muslims of any shade of
color and the darkest of black people, I will be on the side of Muslims.” If a
Black African army is filled with such people, what chance has it of defending
Black Africa from the Arabs? Such is the danger of fashionably pretending that
there is an African nation when, in fact, it doesn’t yet exist. We should all
take to heart Nyerere’s warning: “It is no part of transforming dream into
reality to pretend that things are not what they are.” –[Nyerere, “Dilemma of
the Pan-Africanist” in Langley ed., Ideologies, .p. 347]
Now back to the
question: Is Africa a nation? In attempting to answer this question
scientifically, rather than sentimentally, we would be helped by starting from
the following statements from three different disciplines: Cultural
anthropology, Historiography and Biology.
Lets hear first from
cultural anthropology through Cheikh Anta Diop:
“The cultural
identity of a people [is] centered on three components—linguistic, historical,
and psychic.”
--Diop, in Great
African Thinkers, p. 268
Also
according to Diop, the psychic factor is the domain of poets, singers, storytellers.
Note the example of the brothers Grimm who, by collecting German folk tales in
their Grimm’s Fairy Tales, laid the psychic foundation of German
national identity; also note the role of the epic Kalevala in fostering
national identity in Finland; also the role of the Mahabharata epic in
fostering Indian national consciousness. Similarly, the Old Testament has been
an indispensable anchor for Jewish identity; for the Japanese, the Nihon gi or
Chronicles of Japan, which was compiled in 720 AD and the Kojiki or
Records of Ancient Matters, which was compiled in 712 AD, with their
collections of myths, legends, 37
historical accounts, songs, customs, divination and magical
practices of ancient Japan, have provided the psychic bedrock of Japanese
national identity.
Let’s next hear from
historiography through Jaques Barzun:
“What makes a nation?
A large part of the answer to that question is: common historical memories; . .
. a common language, a core of historical memories with heroes and villains; .
. .a nation is forged into unity by successive wars and the passage of time. .
. . It takes a national war to weld the parts together by giving individuals
and groups memories of a struggle in common. Needless to add, nationalism can
arise only when a nation in this full sense has come into being.”
–[Jacques Barzun, Dawn
to Decadence, pp. 775, 776,695, 435
Finally, let’s hear
from ethology, the biological science of animal behavior, through Robert
Ardrey:
“A biological nation
is a social group …which holds as an exclusive possession a continuous area of
space, which isolates itself from others of its kind through outward
antagonism, and which through joint defense of its social territory achieves
leadership, co-operation and a capacity for concerted action. It does not
matter too much whether such a nation be composed of twenty-five individuals or
of two hundred and fifty million. It does not matter too much whether we are
considering the true lemur, the howling monkey, the smooth-billed ani, the Bushman
band, the Greek city-state, or the United States of America. The social
principle remains the same.
--Robert Ardrey, The
Territorial Imperative, pp. 210-211
What
Diop, Robert Ardrey, and Jacques Barzun together tell us is that a nation is
made by shared language, historical memory of struggles carried out together,
and a shared body of myths, legends, epics, songs etc., and it demonstrates its
nationhood by outward antagonism and the defense of its common territory. 38
It doesn’t take much reflection to grasp the fact that by these
criteria, there is no African nation as yet, and there never has been. The
African nation, though talked about in some Pan-Africanist circles, remains
only an aspiration. The languages are diverse; there is no shared body of
myths, legends, epics, songs etc; and the historical consciousness has never
been fostered.
Unsurprisingly,
we do not behave like a nation. We do not defend our joint territory. If there
was an African nation already in existence today, it would have manifested its
nationhood by collectively defending the portions of the common Black African
territory that have been under attack by Arabs for the past half century, as in
Mauritania and Sudan. In particular, a Black-African army would have gone to defend
the people of Darfur from Arab attack since the ethnic cleansing began there.
But the rest of Black Africa has left the Mauritanians and Afro Sudanese to
their fate, as if they were aliens, and their fate did not concern the rest of
us.
The
behavioral test of territorial defense aside, the contrast between India,
China, Arabia on the one hand and black Africa on the other, should highlight
the fact that Africa is not and has never been one nation. India was
politically unified in the 4th century BC and had shared a common culture for centuries even
before that; China was politically unified in the 3rd century BC and has shared a
common history and culture ever since. The Arabs became a nation through
Mohammed when they finally, and for the first time, shared the same religion
and political leadership, and then dispersed, in a burst of imperial
aggression, from the Arabian peninsula and spread to occupy the lands from the
Persian Gulf westward to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Thus, the Arabs became
a nation 14 centuries ago and have shared a common historical consciousness
ever since then. In contrast, it was only in the 20th century, with the European
conquest and colonization of all of Africa, that Black Africans first began to
think of themselves as one. And they have yet to be unified politically or
culturally, let alone in religion.
----------------
Every one of these
Black African countries of today is not a nation but a noyau, i.e. “a
collection of individuals held together by mutual animosity, who could not
survive had they no friends to hate”. Every one of the Black African countries
today is populated by 39
people
of many pre-colonial nations and is like a refugee camp into which the
populations of many genuine nations have been herded by force.
What would it take to
make nations out of these colonial concentration camps that the Europeans
carved out in the late 19th century during their scramble to conquer Africa? And what would it
take to make the African race into a nation? Lessons could be learnt from
Ashanti, Zulu, India, China. A shared struggle against our Arab enemies would
be a good start for a common historical consciousness.
But is it much use
trying to turn Black Africa into a nation this late in time? I don’t think so.
The tasks before us in this 21st century can be accomplished
without Black Africa becoming a nation. Fostering Black African unity through
various methods is more feasible and desirable. It would be much easier to turn
SADC and ECOWAS into nations, into modern superpowers, than to start doing what
India and China did three millennia ago by conquest.
----------
VI:
Racial Privacy
Some continentalist Pan-Africanists have claimed that a Pan-Africanism
that excludes the Arabs is xenophobic toward Arabs, is exclusivist and guilty
of Black racism. That is a false and mischievous claim that only serves the
Arab interest. Those who make it either do not understand xenophobia or they
are up to mischief. Let me show why.
The
scarecrow of Black racism/xenophobia/exclusivism, etc.
Is it xenophobic to
exclude your enemy from your family meeting? Do you even invite your best
friend to a family meeting, let alone a proven enemy? There is such a thing as
racial privacy. Just like family privacy, it should be inviolable. It entitles
blacks to exclude non-blacks from organizations devoted to the liberation and
welfare of the Black race. For those who do not know their history of Pan
Africanism, let me point out that this racial privacy principle is a founding
tenet of Pan-Africanism as illustrated by the First Pan-African Congress in
Paris in 1919, under DuBois’ leadership, when it made an appeal to the post WWI Paris Peace Conference to “give
the Negro race of Africa a 40
chance to develop unhindered by other races.” And in 1920,
the Garvey Movement, in its First International Convention, also declared: “We
demand complete control of our social institutions without interference by any
alien race or races.” –[ DECLARATION OF RIGHTS OF THE NEGRO PEOPLES OF THE WORLD]
In July 2007, I did a piece which, I was told, generated a
lot of reactions on the internet, including the charge of Black racism. It was
titled
“USofAfrica, NO! USofBlack-Africa, YES!”
In
calling for a United States of Black Africa, as opposed to the USofAfrica of
Arabs and Black Africans that is being promoted by Gaddafi, I am merely
insisting on Black African Unity in a form that excludes Arabs and thereby
preserves our racial privacy and autonomy. Some blacks who are committed to the
continentalist USofAfrica project, with Black Africans as well as Arabs in it,
have seen fit to charge that the concept of a USofBlack Africa is exclusivist,
is xenophobic to Arabs. But that is not true. It is simply an insistence on our
black racial privacy so that we can pursue our Pan-Africanism unhindered by
other races, and in particular without interference from our Arab enemies.
This
principle of Black racial privacy that I am upholding was also upheld by
Stokeley Carmichael and SNCC in the USA in the 1960s during the upsurge of the
Black Power Movement there. It was also upheld by Steve Biko and the Black
Consciousness Movement in South Africa in the early 1970s. In the cases of SNCC
and the BCM, the white liberal overseers of Blacks responded by accusing them
of “black racism.” But SNCC and BCM were not cowed; they refuted the charges
and went ahead to organize as blacks-only outfits.
This
charge of xenophobia when blacks want to organize themselves, by themselves and
for themselves, is a variant of the usual charge of ‘black racism’/exclusivism
and what not. This is usually made by the white overseers who do not want
blacks to break free from their white supremacist control. The new twist is
that the enemy’s charge, false though it is, is being made by black Africans
who parade themselves as Pan-Africanists.
Let
me remind you that our white enemy’s attempt to deny us racial privacy goes
back all the way to plantation slavery days when the slave-masters lived in
fear 41
of rebellion by the slaves. To minimize rebellion, the
masters did everything they could to prevent the slaves from getting together
all by themselves, lest they plot rebellion.
Charging “black
racism” when blacks want to exercise their right to racial privacy is an update
of the slave-masters’ ancient ploys. The charge is made plausible by the
fallacious, hidden premise that an outfit that is black and monoracial in
membership is ipso facto racist or black supremacist.
But is a blacks-only
association racist? No, it is not. Unfortunately, many of our Black African
intellectuals have been brainwashed to think it is. This false doctrine is one
of the greatest obstacles to Black African solidarity and unity. It sets us up
to be manipulated by the white racists who dread to see blacks come together by
themselves lest we organize to liberate ourselves from their white supremacist
system in which Black Africans are trapped. The doctrine is a scarecrow with
which liberal white supremacists delight to frighten independent-minded black
Africans back into their racist mental control.
To help us to stop
falling prey to this enemy trick, let us learn from how Steve Biko dealt
decisively with the charge.
In the early 1970s,
the young Steve Biko, in building his Black Consciousness Movement, developed
the much-needed therapy for this our integrationist mania and our fear of being
dubbed a black segregationist, black racist, separatist, exclusivist and what
have you. Among other things, he correctly argued that integration was a false
antithesis to segregation/apartheid, and that the correct antithesis was Black
solidarity/unity. For the specific context of apartheid South Africa, he argued
that:
“It is time we killed
this false political coalition between blacks and whites as long as it is set
up on a wrong analysis of our situation . . . [and because] it forms at present
the greatest stumbling block to our unity. . . . The basic problem in South
Africa has been analysed by liberal whites as being apartheid. . . . For the liberals,
the thesis is apartheid, the antithesis is non-racialism, but the synthesis
is very feebly defined. They want to tell the blacks that they see
integration as the ideal solution. Black Consciousness defines the situation differently.
The thesis is in fact a strong white racism and therefore, the antithesis
to this must, ipso facto, 42
be a
strong solidarity amongst the blacks on whom this white racism seeks to prey”
(Biko [1987], I Write What I Like, p. 90).
And Biko further
observes, quite correctly, that:
“The concept of
integration . . . is full of unquestioned assumptions. . . . It is a concept
long defined by whites and never examined by blacks. . . . [It is one of the]
concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the
black man’s mind. . . . Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of
life, . . . the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with
his brothers around the cause of their oppression—the blackness of their skin –
and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to
perpetual servitude” (Biko, pp. 91-92).
Biko, the Black
Consciousness prophet, further argued that, in South Africa,
“As long as blacks
are suffering from inferiority complex – a result of 300 years of deliberate
oppression, denigration and derision – they will be useless as co-architects of
a normal society. . . . Hence what is necessary as a prelude to anything else
that may come is a very strong grass-roots build-up of black consciousness such
that blacks can learn to assert themselves and stake their rightful claim”
(Biko, p. 21).
And Biko drives his
point home thus:
“Those who know,
define racism as discrimination by a group against another for the purposes of
subjugation or maintaining subjugation. In other words one cannot be a racist
unless he has the power to subjugate. What blacks are doing is merely to
respond to a situation in which they find themselves the objects of white
racism. We are in the position in which we are because of our skin. We are
collectively segregated against -- what can be more logical than for us to
respond as a group? When workers come together under the auspices of a trade
union to strive for the betterment of their conditions, nobody expresses
surprise in the Western world. It is the done thing. Nobody accuses them of
separatist tendencies. Teachers fight their battles, garbagemen do the same,
nobody acts as a 43
trustee
for another. Somehow, however, when blacks want to do their thing the liberal
establishment seems to detect an anomaly. This is in fact a counter-anomaly.
The anomaly was there in the first instance when the liberals were presumptuous
enough to think that it behooved them to fight the battle for the blacks”(Biko,
p. 25).
Biko’s full critique of integration should be required
reading by all Black Africans today.
This Black
Consciousness therapy helped to produce a new breed of black freedom fighter in
South Africa, the self-confident type, unconfused and uncrippled by fears
implanted by false liberal doctrines like integration and non-racialism. It
produced self-confident blacks who insisted on doing things for themselves and
all by themselves, and who did not feel they had to prove themselves to whites.
And this new breed proved decisive in the victory against apartheid.
Now, Biko’s argument
applies with equal force to the matter of integration between Arabs and their
Black African victims in a USofAfrica.
Portrait
of a Black Racist
Finally, let me ask:
What would it take to be the black racist that white racists accuse separatist
blacks of being? What would a black racist look like? For a blacks-only
association to be racist, it would additionally have to be black supremacist in
doctrine or practice, i.e. it would have to be a mirror image in black face of
the KKK in the USA, or the Nazi Party in Germany or the National Party in
Apartheid South Africa.
It would have to
assert or seek to implement the superstition that there is a hierarchy of races;
that the black race is inherently and inevitably (biologically or by
theological or pseudo-scientific decree) superior to all other races; and that
Blacks are the master race, ordained to rule all others. It would have to
believe or declare the black equivalent of what Apartheid South Africa’s Prime
Minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, said: “I believe in the supremacy of the white man.
. . and I am prepared to maintain it by force.”
Monoracialism does
not say or imply any of the above. So the equation of black monoracialism with
black racism is fallacious. 44
I do
not know of any blacks who assert or have asserted such. Do you?
Black racial privacy is our right and
duty, and it is not racist!!!
I urge you: Listen to
Biko! Do not listen to our white supremacist enemies, Arab or European, or to
their black megaphones in our midst. Do not listen to these pro-Arab Fifth
Columnists, these traitors at the top, who are masquerading as Pan-Africanists.
Listen to Biko; listen to DuBois; listen to Garvey and listen very well: Black
Africans, like any other race, have a duty and a right to organize themselves,
by themselves and for themselves, without interference from other races. Only
the enemies of Blacks would question that right. Racial privacy is not black
racism nor Nazism nor fascism nor xenophobia. Insist on our racial privacy
whenever it helps us protect ourselves. Don’t be intimidated by this scarecrow
charge that is based on the fallacy that a monoracial black outfit is ipso
facto black supremacist and therefore racist.
Like Garvey said: “Go
ahead, Negroes, and organize yourselves! . . .To suggest that there is no need
for Negro racial organization . . . is but to, by the game of deception, lay
the trap for the destruction of [our] people. . . .” [P.O.II: 16,]
_
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