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Black
Education and Afro-Pessimism
By
Dr. Floyd Hayes,
III
I recall some years
ago before he died, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael)
saying that until the continent of Africa was free,
Black people nowhere would be free. Africa, like many
Blacks in the African Diaspora, remains the captive of
external forces. Yet, like the figures of Ward Connerly,
Clarence Thomas, or Condoleeza Rice, a certain amount of
collusion takes place. Although national flags fly over
the capitals of every African nation, suggesting
independence and popular freedom, there is much
unfreedom, chaos, and despair among the people. How do
we explain or understand the contradictions of African
independence today?
There is a good amount of rethinking going on within
global African and African-descended communities. Just
yesterday, I was reading Elias Kifon Bongmba. 2006.
The Dialectic of Transformation in Africa. New York:
Palgrave/Macmillan. He is from Cameroon. He, like many
other African intellectuals, is trying to make sense of
a growing sense of "Afro-pessimism" that plagues the
African continent. For him, the African crisis is the
result of a number of internal factors: the
privatization of power by African elites, the
pauperization of the state, the prodigalization of the
state, and the proliferation of violence. As solution
to these internal contradictions, Bongmba call for a
shift from pessimism to optimism, love and a new
humanism.
We live in tragic
times. Recall, Cornel West's essay on nihilism in Black
American communities in his book,
Race Matters.
Isn't it similar to the African sorrow songs of
Afro-pessimism? But I am critical of the solely internal
gaze that merely blames the victim. Being hopeless,
helpless, and unloved become the major characteristics
of this nihilist threat, according to West. Is there
another way of looking at the ascent of nihilism in the
present historical moment? Much like Bongmba, West
calls for the love ethic as a solution. Why didn't he
call for whites to end anti-Black racism? The exclusive
internal gaze doesn't challenge European neocolonialism
in Africa any more than it challenges white supremacy in
the USA. Please see my critique of West in
"Afro-Nihilism: A Reconsideration," in Cornel West: A
Critical Reader, edited by George Yancy.
In the process, Bongmba mentions the important
scholar, Mahmood Mamdani's important book,
Citizen
and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism (1996). I also would suggest Mamdani's
later book,
When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism,
Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001). And
then there is Manthia Diawara's cultural criticism of
contemporary Africa, entitled In Search of Africa
(1998). All of these studies focus on Afro-pessimism in
one way or another.
Self-criticism
always is good, but it cannot be the only manner of
criticism. Yet, this is a good bit of what is taking
place today. Many African leaders, particularly
military leaders, have seized state power and are
wielding it abusively. But then, power knows no ethics.
Power is about power! How have African elites gained
such power, how do they continue to rule, and in whose
interest do they really rule? In my humble judgment,
the analysis of internal contradictions alone won't help
to answer these questions sufficiently.
Long before he died, Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah
talked and wrote about neocolonialism. He hoped for
something like a united states of Africa—independents
states that worked for the collective development of the
continent's people. Perhaps his downfall occurred, as
Bongmba suggests, occurred because he attempted to
accomplish his aims through the use of a single
political party. OK, so the one-party state has been
problematic in Africa. But then, there also are
multi-party configurations. Conflict, severe conflict,
remains.
Way back in the late 1960s, as a graduate student at
UCLA (working on an M.A. degree in African Studies), I
was interested in the African struggle for independence
and its aftermath and the acceptance of European-carved
state boundaries. The argument among my professors and
other white/western scholars was that independent
African nations should yield to those state boundaries.
But those state boundaries often went counter to the
configurations of African nationalities. It was said
that Africans should yield to those boundaries so as not
to give rise to small states that supposedly would not
be able to sustain themselves for whatever reason. But
look at Luxembourg in Europe! I recall thinking that
those European-carved boundaries would cause unforeseen
contradictions in the years to come. Why?
Well, prior to 1914, there was no Nigeria! The Yoruba,
Igbo, Hausa-Fulani were all separate nations. Now, that
didn't necessarily mean that there was always peace
within or among these nations, but to force them into
one state set in motion, after independence, long
lasting contradictions and dilemmas. The Yoruba, Igbo,
Hausa-Fulani, and other nationalities in contemporary
Nigeria historically were different people with
different cultures, political arrangements, etc., before
Europeans arrived. But sure enough, on the eve of
Nigerian independence—actually, Nigeria should have
become independent before Ghana—a power struggle began
between Yorubas and Igbos over who would rule the
Nigerian state. Yoruba leader, Awolowo, and Igbo
leader, Azikiwe, fought it out in the 1950s. Although
independence came, these internal contradictions were
not settled. Then the Nigerian-Biafra war emerged in
the late 1960s. Nigeria withstood the Igbo nation
challenge, but those contractions only mirrored the
dilemmas that would plague Nigeria and other African
nations well into the 21st century.
My argument, then, is that the acceptance of
European-carved boundaries set in motion a great amount
of the present conflict in Africa. The struggle for
power among leaders of opposing nationalities has
resulted in the privatization of power within certain
nationalist (read "tribal") leaders in opposition to
other nationalities (read tribes). So, there is
genocide. I often wonder what would have happened if
the Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa-Fulani, and other nationalities
in Nigeria had decided to return the pre-colonial
national or independent or separate status. Suppose the
Kikuyu, Luo, Masai and others remained independent or
separate after independence? The question could be
pertinent for nations throughout the continent of
Africa. My point is that although present internal
contradictions are real, they may have their origins in
external forces, which continue to gnaw at the very
existence of Africans on the continent and their
descendants in the Diaspora.
Just quickly. Suppose in year 2010 China colonizes the
USA and Canada and forces them into one state. By 2030,
the USA and Canada fight for and win back their
independence. Would they remain one state or would
they go back to their pre-colonial separate nation-state
existence? What do you think would happen?
Why are we trying so hard to forget the long history of
Africa? We don't have to be adherents of Afrocentricity
to reject misconceptions of Africa and to value the
significance of African antiquity. Memory establishes
identity. And like the blues, memory helps us remember
those who did us wrong!
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posted 11 March 2008 |
