The debates (and fears) around Africanism often turn on a misreading of the term, writes Charlene Smith
AFRICANIST remains a dirty word among those who are not a darker shade of chocolate. But, and here the pigmentally challenged need to take note, a new African consciousness (the new terminology) is becoming a hallmark of the economic revolution sweeping southern and eastern African states.
Deputy President Thabo Mbeki has been lambasted by some media in recent times for being an Africanist, leading to renewed media concerns about his capacity to fill the shoes of President Nelson Mandela.
When Joe Thlohloe, former head of television news at SABC, was in the process of leaving the corporation, there were some snide remarks, as though self-explanatory, that he was the leading Africanist at SABC – in other words, off with his head.
While there is little doubt that Thlohloe deliberately advanced black people, in line with most of corporate South Africa, it is worth hearing his definition of Africanism. He first muses that South Africans still “seem to have problems with terminology: we still talk about Indians, Africans, coloureds and whites. When will we become South Africans and therefore Africans?
“We embrace anyone who owes their allegiance only to Africa. An African is anyone who is committed to working for Africa. It is very strange that an organisation like the Pan Africanist Congress, which should be at the forefront of defining Africans and Africanism, has faded into oblivion and it is people like Mbeki who are redefining the concept.
“The concept of Africanism has developed horns around it because it is seen as anti- white and that perception has not faded away.”
But Africanism also has to do with the balance of political and economic power. Thlohloe opines: “We still have a hangover from apartheid days when power was in white hands. As soon as you talk of Africanism, you immediately challenge that power structure and are seen to be excluding areas of that. A new definition has to develop of an all-embracing Africanism.”
And certainly, sensitivities around the balance of power between former colonial powermongers and new black governors seem to be at the heart of some of the fear raised in surburbia by the term “Africanism”.
Mbeki’s sin in recent times was to chide “those who have no commitment to the new society “.
He did not single out whites, but some felt the sting. Finance Week wrote: “Mbeki appears to be an Africanist – a cast of mind which appears ominous to those who find it difficult to embrace that ideology.” In the same editorial, affirmative action was held to be Africanist – which would be of interest to Europeans and Americans who introduced affirmative action long before it percolated down to Africa.
The Financial Mail referred to “a new obsession with race” as a result of affirmative action, although it said, probably correctly, that the underlying fears of South Africans remain “those who feel they will perish if they do not benefit soon from change and those who fear they will perish unless they insulate themselves against it”.
To believe that South Africa will lose its obsession with race after being force-fed a diet of racial hatred and mistrust for close to five decades, within three years of democratic elections, is naively optimistic. And to perceive efforts to reassert an African identity as acts of hostility reflect arrogance or insecurity, with a lack of awareness of African and revolutionary history that is disturbing.
Revolutionary African thinkers Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral spoke of colonialism as having made Africans into objects of history. In the early 1960s, after most African nations had achieved independence, Fanon declared that the masses had been frustrated: black people were sitting in councils of state, they manned the bureaucracies and ran the corporations, but there was a fundamental unease – nothing had really changed.
In 1972, Ayi Kwei Armah wrote with anger in his novel, Why are We so Blest?: “The main political characteristic of African leadership since the European invasion is its inability and unwillingness to connect organically with the African people because it always wants first to connect with Europe and the Europeans”, and hence Africa has been mired in a self-defeating stasis.
Thabo Mbeki’s communications director, Thami Ntenteni, in a recent article for a Johannesburg newspaper defending Mbeki’s “Africanism”, warned that Mbeki’s generosity in including Boers and Europeans who migrated here, in his definition of Africans, should not be seen as an excuse for some to suffer collective amnesia.
His concerns follow those articulated by Fanon, and is perhaps an underlying ethos in Africanism: democratic elections do not, on their own, change a way of life or a culture. The nature of government is such that even though the head of the snake may look different, the body, its heart and the organs that keep it alive – the bureaucrats – are the same. While the head may look in one direction, it is the body that moves the serpent. The contradictions that follow are not always a result of bad faith, but deliberate attention is required to get the head and body to move harmoniously.
What is needed is the creation of cohesive forces that unite people across tribes, across gender and race to work toward a common goal. It is the hardest task of nationhood. And it may be why Africanism or an African consciousness is necessary at this stage in South Africa and in sub- Saharan Africa as it tries to battle out of economic dependence.
But let us trace Mbeki’s vision of Africanism, which a Finance Week editorial writer said he would find difficulty in supporting. In his speech, “I am an African,” Mbeki wrote: “I owe my being to the Koi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape – they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen.
“I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain, still, part of me. In my veins course the blood of Malay slaves who came from the East.
“I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.
“I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind’s eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death in concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins.”
Ntenteni writes that “the Africanism of Mbeki … transcends the narrow and exclusive realm of ethnicity that some would like to confine it to”. Indeed, historically most Africanism does. PAC leader Robert Sobukwe wrote in the early 1960s that Africanism embraced those who owed their only allegiance to Africa, and this could include white people. The fact that some Poqo militants were murdering white people in townships at the time, or that his followers three decades later would adopt the slogan “one settler, one bullet” – which the PAC has since tried to distance itself from – is a measure of how ideas can be subverted by those who follow. It does not diminish the concept.
Vusi Mazimbela, political adviser to the deputy president, avoids using the term Africanist, “for the simple reason that you land up being bogged down in the -isms, and that means arguing the terms Africanist, Africanism or racist. There is content and form to what some would call an Africanist.
“The content is the reality of the history of Africa. Before the slave trade, Africa had achieved a certain level of civilisation. Part of that civilisation has been repressed and we need to revisit it. The wars of resistance in Africa against the slave trade and later against colonialism impacted on the African consciousness in the same way in which the Holocaust impacted on the Jewish psyche.
“We cannot forget this history in the struggle for transformation.”
Mazimbela explains the form and content necessary to transformation by means of an example: “There should be unity and compatibility between form and content. No matter how good the form, somewhere it is bound to falter. Several African members of the International Olympic Committee have complained that the bid for the Olympics in Cape Town in 2004 is not an African bid. One said he had been to Cape Town and said: `Everywhere I went I spoke only to white people, and you people tell us to say it is an African bid.’ That was why there was a meeting with Chris Ball and the sports minister and Cabinet.
“Ball initially argued that the majority of people in the bid were black people, but the problem is none are front people and we have had the deputy president going around the world saying this is an African bid, the world owes these Olympics to Africa.
“What the African Olympic executives are talking about is the form; the packaging is wrong. African people are saying even the content will be diluted, if it is only white people as front people.”
Mazimbela says he also sees it as simplistic to say that those whites who embrace Africa as their motherland are Africanists. While Afrikaners have developed their own culture, he says it is critical that Africanists go back to understand on a deeper level African culture and history and how it has formed the nature of society today.
“The African continent is still lagging behind. A historian will one day say the elections in South Africa in 1994 represented the end of the process of decolonisation in Africa, but where do we go from here? We need to carve out a new chapter that informs the new African renaissance.”
This imperative is not new: the late United States political scientist Walter Rodney wrote that African nationalism, the heart of Africanism, was unity that grew out of historical experience, “a sense of oneness that emerges from social groups trying to control their environment and to defend their gains against competing groups”.
Thomas Hodgkin, doyen of European Africanists, said some years back that the term referred to any organisation or group “that asserts the rights, claims and aspirations of a given African society in opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional form and objectives”. Writer Jon Qwelane, who failed to respond to requests for comment, and most adherents of the PAC would fall into this category, although Qwelane would probably dispute this.
But before we glibly cast aside their form of Africanism, stop and consider: African racism and a rejection of all that was European was a direct consequence of the cruelties suffered under European racism, and European contempt for that which is African.
One only has to see the furore racking the United Nations at present as evidence emerges of peackeepers from Belgium roasting a child in Somalia, and of Canadians and Italians raping and torturing Somalians, to realise that European racism and contempt for Africans burns fiercely behind modern facades of tolerance.
And to reiterate a point made about Africanism, the fact that some Belgian, Italian or Canadian soldiers behave like barbarians does not place in question the values those societies espouse.
The growth of Africanism began slowly and almost silently. In West Africa in 1889, a cultural organisation, the Mfantsi Amanbuhu Fekuw was formed by West African intellectuals to counter “excessive Western (namely European) influence”. One of the first things they did was to cast aside their Christian names and begin wearing traditional flowing African robes, as well as concentrating on re-examining their culture and history.
However, Africanism can lead to a penchant for fond navel-gazing. Cameroon philosopher Martien Towa noted: “When we present our past culture as something marvellous that is absolutely necessary to safeguard … we work to maintain the status quo … African philosophy must be an effort to elucidate our present situation in the world, a condition mainly of dependence and weakness. We must adopt a critical attitude toward the past as well as the present … to take our destiny into our own hands.”
Enterprise editor Thami Mazwai, who declined to comment, has emerged from a past where he was seen as a racist to be the sort of Africanist Towa would applaud. Black society and its incongruities have no more critical surveyor than Mazwai, nor does he tolerate the neat facades of northern suburbs chardonnay liberals (vintage: post-April 1994).
Qwelane and Mazwai have been important critics of a society in transition, but it is easier to be a critic than a strategist for change. We know their views on the ills of society, but we need indicators on how to change and build society. Apartheid gave us all traumatic childhoods, which in psychological terms could remove responsibility and allow us to live by excuse and blame. It is not enough to say you are sorry – apology carries responsibility for reparation.
Thlohloe says: “Most progressive people feel extremely threatened when Africanism is mentioned because they feel it excludes whites, coloureds and Indians. On the other side, it challenges old hierarchies. Even most progressive whites will find it very difficult to relinquish their position in society – they need to review their world and consider whether they are in the position they find themselves because of birth and privilege. They need to embrace Africanism and say, `I am an African, what does it take to be an African in Africa today?’
“We may have won political power but economic power is still in white hands, so the struggle continues … “
Black Consciousness leader Stephen Biko wrote: “We are looking forward to a nonracial, just and egalitarian society, in which colour, creed and race shall form no point of reference.”