Restoring the African Centre-

An Essay on the moral, political and historic imperative of the African youth today.


Introduction
The leading assumption here is that Africa is in need of an urgent regeneration of ideas and alternative models of development. If you do not subscribe to this imperative, then you will not find much relevance in this reflective essay. I do not engage in cold-scholasticism-where people juggle ideas about human lives yet the closest interaction with ‘humanity’ is in form of percentages and ratios. Neither would I subscribe to the notion that action is the only form of expressing an urge for change- in this case, positive change. Amilcar Cabral, revolutionary leader of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) placed my contravening assertion in perspective when he noted in one of his numerous revolutionary speeches, ‘The Weapon of Theory’ (Address delivered to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America held in Havana in January, 1966) that:

To those who see in it a theoretical character, we would recall that every practice produces a theory, and that if it is true that a revolution can fail even though it is based on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory
(Cabral, p.2)

Therefore we must begin by asserting that sustainable action must be guided by a logical, relevant, and contextual theory. Without this theory, then we put ourselves at risk of being reactionary individuals who only react- thus placing us at the mercy of the elements that determine the action thus having power over our reactions- because they can now predict our behavior. The theory of this sustainable action does not encage us in a perpetual repetition of action- which is similar to action without theoretical backbone, but it free’s us from this pitiful situation because at once the action and the theory dwell together and in the same place. That is to say that the theory is dynamic only to the limits that the action determines, so each influences the other. Why are we mentioning the importance of theory in an essay discussing a moral, political and historic imperative? There are two fundamental reasons that must be noted:
1. The African youth, shortly after the liberation struggle for freedom from colonialism, and determined to achieve national Independence, has remained in the aforementioned pitiful state of a repetition of action. The colonialist projects of all the different European Imperialist powers-while they vary in approach and execution, rest on a common objective that is to create a slave out of the native black African. The objective of creating a slave is to serve the European master for as long as is necessary. We should note the words of the one-time Portuguese Prime Minister Marcello Caetano:

‘The blacks in Africa must be directed and moulded by Europeans but they are indispensable as assistants to the latter. I do not affirm this out of prejudice- I merely formulate an observation… The Africans by themselves did not know how to develop the territories they have inhabited for millennia, they did not account for a single technical discovery, no conquest that counts in the evolution of Humanity, nothing that can compare to the accomplishments in the areas of culture and technology by Europeans or even by Asians’
Gerald J. Bender, Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality, 1978)

This repetition of action has taken varying forms and in varying levels in different countries of Africa. However it may be argued that the worst form of repetition of action is the continuation of a search for identity and meaning in different historic contexts while remaining within the Eurocentric scope. That is to say that the African youth, while having good intentions in their search, have failed miserably because their trajectory has been launched within the path of either European written history of Africa- and thus a distorted view of their past, or by employing tools of inspiration that are far removed from the true African historical context. These tools include Religions (which provides spiritual inspiration), music and literature (which motivates the African soul, and the latter provides necessary imagination to conceive and thus allowing one to achieve the constructed dreams or aspirations), role models (for mentorship and guidance in ones life choices), concepts of life/ Ideologies (these are heavily theoretical, and guide ones actions); the employment of these tools that are Eurocentric or Westernized cannot allow for an African youth to find true relevance of their life within the right African historic context. That is why for a long time we have had an exodus of African youth to the metropolis cities of the Imperialist powers in Europe and America. The central reason for this repetition has been a lack of adequate and relevant theoretical grounding; in other words, the lack of an African ideology that offers the African youth to make sense of his/her meaning and purpose in the world. It is fairly obvious that if you grow up being fed images of white people as being the best at everything, romanticizing over love stories in Soap Operas, feeding your sympathetic emotions for American soldiers being killed in Vietnam or European explorers being terrorized in the African jungles, or imagine the impact of years and years of watching television advertisements where subtle messages that uphold white supremacy are entrenched in your psyche, or being taken to church- the supposed ‘house of God’, and bowing to a White Jesus in the name of the son of God-yet we read that he was made in our image! This constant bombardment, although it varies in its effectiveness because the youth in the villages may not be as exposed to such mediums that carry these messages, has a far-reaching effect on the actions of the African youth. For those in the village, the mentality instilled by colonialism that advanced the notion of ‘centre and periphery’- where the colonial administrative centre was called the ‘Capital city’ and the other peripheral towns were known as the ‘villages’ or ‘village-towns’; this mentality compels those living in the ‘periphery’ to always look to the ‘centre’ for lessons and guidance on what is ‘moral’ or ‘civilized’. So the outcome is a total enslavement of the Africans no matter where they live.

2. The second reason of the importance of a discussion on theory in regard to the African youth today has a lot in common with the first point. Since we have unraveled and without any doubt accept the fact that there was a process to create a slave- to enslave the black African, then it is logical to extend the analysis and posit that there must be another process of freeing a slave- to liberate the black African. This is where we begin our search for a theoretical/ideological basis for our actions- which is an act of liberation. We must unravel how the enslavement began and start to create an ‘action-plan’ that will tackle all the methods employed for our enslavement. If we have ascertained that the trajectory used so far by the African youth has proved to be futile and working against our interests, then we must determine a new trajectory. From my analysis, to dismantle one ideology necessitates a replacement by another and different one. That is to say, if we are to effectively dismantle our Eurocentric/Westernized premise of life, we must restore an African centered prism of which we view our selves and our place in the world. This African centered trajectory is the Afrocentric trajectory. This would require us not to merely ‘blacken’ all that has been fed to us as ‘white’- no, there is no need for that. What we have to do is go deep into our history- the correct history of the African experience, and unravel the best of what kept our communities strong and creative, the best of our value-system that kept our families together and gave meaning to the Ubuntu philosophy of African life. Along the path of restoring our African centre through a re-reading of our proper history, we will then see the importance of a political project of our Afrocentric trajectory. This is what inspired the early proponents of the Afrocentric political philosophy- that is, pan africanism. While it is true that pan africanism has been associated with Marxist-Leninist ideas, it is not correct that we yet again place ourselves under the intellectual, cultural and political heritage of European thought which gave birth to Marx’s analysis of man in society and subsequent ‘Leftist’ thinkers. We must centre our political ideology on Africa- and call it an Afrocentric ideology; because that is also part of liberating ourselves from the Eurocentric paradigm. So as we note the initial lack of appropriate and sufficient ideology for the African youth, we now see the relevance of discussing theory with regard to eventually inspiring action for the new liberated African youth.



The sooner we realize that as the new generation of Africans now going through the ‘democratization’ spell of our historic experience, and being thrown into the whirlwind of ‘Globalization’ with the expectation to ‘contribute to the rest of the world’, that we have our own historical duty to answer to that will determine if the degradation of Africa and all people African shall continue, the more chances we have of achieving greater levels of emancipation. We have been led to believe that indeed there has occurred an ‘end of history’ and that capitalism and western-style democracy has triumphed. This is mainly because, as Harold Macmillan, in ‘The Middle Way’ 1938 noted:

‘We have lived so long at the mercy of uncontrolled economic forces that we have become skeptical about any plan for human emancipation.’


So we do not continue with our everyday lives because we are sure that humanity has exhausted all models of development or human existence. We do so because the system that profits from our ignorance has aggressively perpetuated our ‘mental enslavement’ and thus almost totally sucked out our creativity and humane motivation to search for a better world. Despite this, and if we are to stare boldly at our dear continent and indeed the world in general, we realize that the locking of the chains on a slave does not symbolize the death of his/her freedom. It is with enthusiasm and revolutionary fervor that we shall shatter the shackles off and create our own path towards freedom.

By, Kagenza Sakufi-Rumongi: written in the capacity as a concerned pan africanist.

TO BE CONTINUED (ON THE MORAL, POLITICAL AND HISTORIC IMPERATIVES)

Please post your comments on this article below