Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon
Like “rainbow nation” we are now stuck with “African renaissance”, both of them
admittedly catchy phrases, but that’s about as far as they go. The former is, thank heavens, starting to evaporate now that everyone’s realised that access to the promised pot of gold has turned out to be on a strictly reserved basis. The latter term has now become the latest cant-phrase to which any manner of things may be attached.
Last week one of those typical SABC news department dimbos, reporting on the recent
telecommunications exhibition, spoke of the urgent necessity for every corner of Africa to be connected to the “Information Highway”. In her own simperings, “without which it will be impossible for the African renaissance to come about”. I often wonder what psychometastatic drug it is they secretly include in the female white news reporters’ lipstick up at Auckland Park. Every time they lick their lips to make them gleam on camera, the drug kicks in, sends their brains dribbling down their spines into their botties. As usual this particular one’s terminology and analysis were dream-world material.
For a start, the term “African renaissance” – notwithstanding the ideals the term is intended to denote – is a misnomer. The accepted, the virtually unequivocal meaning
of the word “renaissance” refers to the great flowering of the arts, architecture, letters and politics which took place in Europe between the late 14th and early 16th centuries,
and which is regarded as having formed the cultural transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world.
Renaissance does mean rebirth, but it is now always used in reference to the European
renaissance and little beyond that. “Renaissance” does not describe social reconstruction, political reform, balanced economic cadences, industrial and technical
interlinkings, better telephone lines, medical services, all the rest of it. Unless these and other accounts are seen as sequential to aesthetic resolutions.
A better term for African ambitions would be “revival” or perhaps “establishment”. You don’t give rebirth to a hospital that was never there or was burnt down. You build or rebuild it. You don’t “renaissancise” (yes, that verbal horror has already sprung from SAfm lips) new electronic lines of communication or more economic corridors, improved transport systems, you establish them.
I am not saying Africa does not qualify for a cultural “renaissance”, in fact it sorely does. Short of devoting an entire academic discipline to the theme, there is no adequate way to quantify the philosophical, artistic and most especially humanist loss that has been a consequence of the last few hundred years of colonised Africa. In its true sense “African renaissance” would be a resuscitation of the prodigious and extraordinary compass of African musical forms and traditions, graphic arts, ideas.
Such an effort – to retrieve the original integrity of African arts, would not of certainty be doomed. But it would be phenomenally difficult. In some places the wrecking has been too utter. The better hope is for more of the kinds of African and European fusion which produced the 20th century’s most remarkable new music, jazz.
But a new political and socio-economic construction of Africa – mainly along ensconced
First World lines – is a quite different thing. What Mr Mbeki and many others should be doing is acknowledging that “renaissance” is not only the wrong word, but a borrowed
one, to boot. When looking for a word to describe the optimistic revitalisation of Africa, why choose a European term, anyway?
Surely there is an African word to describe a confident link between things past and things to be. Something to describe an ebullient and sanguine African reconstruction. A word which eventually will enter the global lexicon as something uniquely of this
continent. The world has already had “renaissance”, they know what it means. To use it for this continent is to be second-hand.
The other part of the SABC reporter’s statement, that the success of the “African
renaissance” is wholly dependent on the continent being swamped in telecommunications, specifically that access to “The Information Highway” is a vital prerequisite, is just plain silly. The sheer simplistics of the notion don’t stand up to examination. The Internet is a new facility, by intention an electronic reference library, however crudely it is often misused. Albeit an important part of what is necessary to African reconstruction, it is not the linchpin.
No matter what acquisitive salesmen and slick politicians argue, the Internet is no magic wand. Tantalising slogans like “Global Village” and “Information Highway” are the jabberings of marketing men. To hang absurd promises on these is not only futile, it is cruel.
SUBS: PLEASE RESPECT USE OF CAPS IN TERMS SUCH AS “Middle Ages” AND “First World”.