Liberating the African mind
DECOLONISING the Mind, the pungent title of a seminal 1981 book by Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, still seems an elusive goal for Africa in 2013.
Perhaps the most revealing remark of the past year was that of our former Home Affairs Minister, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, following the South African government’s long and often acrimonious campaign to get her the top job at the African Union (AU). Two weeks after taking up her post, Dlamini Zuma announced her shock on discovering that donors fund more than 97 percent of AU programmes.
Many member states reneged on their contributions, she lamented. As a result, the AU was unable to meet its obligations. A liberated mind, she pointed out, could not be dependent on others.
Before the year’s end, as if to bear out her words, the president of the Central African Republic (CAR) called upon France to save him from the advance of rebels on his capital city. In the past, France has intervened in her former African colonies to prop up pliant leaders and dictators, so Francois Bozize clearly had high hopes that his plea would be heeded.
When the French president announced that the days of such French military adventures were over, Bozize’s supporters attacked the French embassy, claiming that they had been abandoned. Not much decolonised thinking there.
Instead, South Africa is now sending 400 army personnel to the CAR. This is not an AU-voted intervention. As there are South Africanowned mines there, some will doubtless see this initiative as a neo-colonial escapade to prop up an authoritarian leader who came to power in a coup in 2003.
Back home, Dlamini Zuma’s former husband, President Jacob Zuma, closed the year by managing to get the nation a-twitter with his remarks that caring for dogs as pets was part of “white culture”.
His spokesman, the busy verbal contortionist, Mac Maharaj, hurriedly explained that the president was addressing “the need to decolonise the African mind, postliberation”.
At a stroke, Africa’s mighty inheritance of serious “decolonising” thinking, from Ngugi wa Thiong’o to Steve Biko, was reduced to a stereotyped, racial parody.
The previous month Zuma had departed from his official speech while addressing traditional leaders in Parliament. He became angry and lambasted “clever blacks.” He was attacking those who objected to the proposed, highly controversial Traditional Courts Bill, which threatens to effectively disenfranchise about one third of South Africa’s citizens. This bill will essentially create a parallel justice system for rural people in the former Bantustan areas, mainly further marginalising rural women.
It has aroused widespread opposition, including from many rural organisations. The Minister for Women, Children and People with Disabilities, Lulu Xingwana, spoke out, calling it “an apartheid piece of legislation” and “oppressive to women and discriminatory”.
Such criticism seems merely to have acutely irked the president. Black people who become too clever, fumed Zuma, “become the most eloquent in criticising themselves about their own traditions and everything”.
At such times Zuma sounds like the former French president Nicholas Sarkozy, who gave a patronising speech in 2007 in which he waffled on about the “immobile” African peasant, unable to progress.
To Sarkozy this represented the “tragedy of Africa”. He recycled the persistent colonial cliche about “timeless Africa”. Sounding like a trite safari advert, Sarkozy pontificated, “The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time…”
This led Sarkozy, with smug subHegelian pomposity, to chide that feckless African peasant “who has not fully entered into history”.
Such thinking veers perilously close to the utterly dehumanising apartheid-style delusion of unchanging human essences. In that zealot’s fantasy, everyone is forced into a racial straitjacket: whites are this and blacks are that. Under apartheid, “blacks” were even separated into further rigid ethnic categories: Zulus are like this, Xhosas that, and all other groups have their own immutable “cultures”.
The inherent absurdity of such thinking ensured that it did not survive. Yet this reckless idea of racial essences and frozen cultural imperatives is resurfacing. It is profoundly reactionary.
Why is it that these strident defenders of “tradition” so seldom pick out that which is most humane and instead selectively choose that which divides and that which entrenches male power? There is increasingly a large element of bullying and intimidation in this.
Phathekile Holomisa, the president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders and an ANC member of Parliament, has articulated a direct threat against those who oppose traditional leadership.
In an article for City Press in June (so these are his own exact words), Chief Holomisa wrote: “Our opponents must not make it necessary for traditional leaders to prove their strength. If need be, though, they are quite capable of demonstrating their support and, you can be assured, such a demonstration would not be pretty.”
This sounds like thuggery. What is he threatening? To send supporters into the streets of Cape Town to harass MPs who vote against the Traditional Courts Bill? To have Minister Xingwana fired? Or that he’ll demonstrate his strength by having something “not pretty” visited on anyone who dares suggest such ugly sentiments are neither democratic nor decolonised?
Is Chief Holomisa really suggesting it is “tradition” to employ threats of coercion in the place of debate or consensus? Writer Salman Rushdie, in his recent memoir of the many years when he lived under a fatwa sentence of death for writing a book, has an elegant response to those who defend “culture” with the threat of violence.
During the time he was condemned to hide and remain silent, Rushdie used to compose dozens of imaginary letters.
In one, he says: “Bigotry, prejudice and violence are not human ‘values’. They are the proof of the absence of such values. They are not the manifestations of a person’s ‘culture’. They are indications of a person’s lack of culture. In such crucial matters, sir, to quote the great monochrome philosopher Michael Jackson, it don’t matter if you’re black or white.”
Tradition and culture are extremely complex, never reducible to pat formulas and inevitably unpredictable in the face of change. Jacob Zuma, for example, has no objection to the trappings of Western consumerism or modern technology. Despite having three official residences, the state has lavished an estimated R250 million on his rural homestead, complete with two helipads and underground bunkers.
Mirroring his former wife’s complaint about the AU being in hock to donors, Zuma has also long been unable or unwilling to pay his own way and remains reliant on a long list of benefactors.
Meanwhile the president seems to be increasingly retreating into a defensive, chauvinistic laager of “tradition”. Indeed he is beginning to sound like a caricature from the Ngugi wa Thiong’o satirical novel, Wizard of the Crow (2006), in which the ruler of a fictional kingdom, Aburiria, invokes “African tradition” to maintain control. The ruler enjoys limousines, jet planes and luxury mansions, but decrees, “the real threat to Aburiria’s future lay in people abandoning their traditions in pursuit of stressful modernity”.
Modernity is for the ruling elite; tradition for the people.
A quarter of a century before, in Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi wa Thiong’o articulated an entirely different hope: “The quest for relevance is not a call for isolationism but a recognition that national liberation is the basis of an internationalism of all the democratic and social struggles for human equality, justice, peace and progress.”
Till then, coloniser and colonised will remain trapped.
Rostron is a freelance journalist and author