The Pitfalls of African Anti-colonialism

Continued from last week

Anti-Colonialism became colonial BESIDES the colonial indoctrination of African leaders through colonial education there was yet another way that colonialism stole the minds of our leaders and turned them into colonialists. Colonialism was a violent, brutal and evil system. In order to fight it our leaders had to become courageous, skilled and vicious guerillas.

In that way colonialism forced and encouraged African leaders into violent brutality and evil. Black real and imagined sell-outs were viciously dealt with death in the guerilla camps by fellow black guerillas.

Black lives became light in the bush not only because of white racists but also black fundamentalists. Gatsheni argues in one of his historical treatises that the nationalist struggle against colonialism became a kind of school in violence and absolutism for Africans.

The war against colonialism conditioned and socialised our leaders into the same Nietzschean monsters that I describe above. Our leader came to have no other language or logic to engage with politics besides the same violence that colonialism conditioned them in. From Ghana to Egypt and Libya to Tanzania, this education into violence of African nationalist leaders was to haunt Africa for many decades to come. For many African countries, the leaders that emerged from guerilla bases to lead the people after independence had become monsters that were not to be peaceable leaders, at all. Their psyches had been violently colonised, they needed either counselling or rehabilitation to recover and become men of the people again.

Besides the educated elite that were colonially indoctrinated with colonial education and the guerillas that were colonially conditioned with brutality and cruelty, there is another class of Africans that was captured. The royalty of Africa, Kings and Chiefs were targeted. These ones were given privileges and promotions, their children sent to school and families given pay-outs. Their educated children became court interpreters and clerks.

One day I will find time to write about the notoriety of black court interpreters during the colonial era in Africa. They became a dubious lot, very corrupt and rich. Criminals paid them in livestock and sometimes in women so that in their interpretations they said those things that would exonerate the accused.

One would not go to court without pleasing the interpreter one way or another, unless if one had made peace with a jail term of hard labour. African Kings and Chiefs were bought and corrupted by colonialism, in short. Their job became to manage blacks on behalf of the white man and not to fight the white man on behalf of fellow blacks. African national leaders that came from the royalty of Africa came already colonially corrupted and compromised. I hope, dear reader, that in this short section I have made the point that anticolonialism as an ideology or political paradigm that was used to drive liberation struggles became infected with colonialism, and became colonial.

I hope I have tried to clarify how even the best of well-meaning freedom fighters were compromised by colonialism and corrupted for the benefit of its continuity after political independence in Africa.

The educated of our African leaders became black colonial white men, the brave guerillas were socialised and conditioned into colonial violence and they became brutal monsters, the royalty were captured with rewards and pleasures and became ambassadors of colonialism to their own people.

I think, away from the post-political persuasions of Afro-pessimists and Afro-optimists, the foregoing is part of the kind of analytical courage and honesty that Africa needs in order to pick its pieces up from coloniality and chaos. I say thus not as a way of blaming Africans for their colonisation but for searching for a way of undoing political coloniality in Africa, by looking inside ourselves for intellectual and political resources of liberation.

The pitfalls of anti-colonialism

One must once in a while take off his hat for Old Nick and his durable political wisdoms. Niccolo Machiavelli said it with typical lucidity that: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” In the ancient world and now, those politicians that seek to change the order of things face two dangerous enemies. The people who benefited from old systems hate and will sabotage and kill those that want to change the order of things in countries, all

revolutionaries and even reformists come to learn this.

The second enemy is the supporters of those that seek to introduce change, these supporters either lack the confidence and determination that those who resist change have or they are useless and also dangerous flatterers and sycophants looking for jobs, promotions and other favours in the new dispensation.

African anti-colonialists in shape of black-postindependence leaders failed to introduce a decolonial political order of things in Africa because of the resistance and stubborn durability of colonialism and also the lazy and most times dangerously opportunistic followership of those individuals and populations that claimed to support post-independence leaders and their governments.

One day soon I hope to write on how postindependence African political dispensations can overcome the pitfalls of anti-colonialism and establish decolonial regimes in the continent. The flattery and sycophancy of Afro-optimists is as poisonous as the bad faith of Afro-pessimists, I argue. African political futures need more brutal decolonial engagements than fragile post-political pretensions.