Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
Thabo Mbeki, eloquent wielder of words though he is, has given himself a nigh impossible task: talking up an African revival. How the hell can the deputy president talk of an “African renaissance” when this continent is maimed by murder and misery? Look at Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan – among others.
How can he talk of revival when, in his own words, “the children of Africa continue to be consumed by death dealt out by those who have proclaimed a sentence of death on dialogue and reason and on the children of Africa whose limbs are too weak to run away from the rage of the adults”? How, indeed?
There is a short answer. As I read him, Mbeki is not claiming that an African revival is well under way. He is saying something more modest. In the four speeches he has given which embrace the idea, he has said revival is a process upon which Africans must – and can – now consciously embark. Progress in South Africa and a few other African countries has created a platform from which to begin serious work.
Put another way: Africans have hit rock bottom; they can choose to bounce along the bottom, which means to choose despair; or they can place before themselves a vision of their own economic, political and cultural awakening, and get on with realising it bit by bit.
Africa can regain her will; she can recover her subjectivity in a story for too long told by others. Or she may not. It is up to Africans. They choose. So, stripped of its rhetorical flourishes, Mbeki’s vision is, as I understand it, can-do; must-do.
There are three ways to ensure nothing good comes of this talk of “African renaissance”. One is to make it a plaything of the sterile intellectuals who lurk around the edges of the political process. These are the Lilliputian types who would sit about contemplating what “African renaissance” is or is not – as if it can be anything other than what we make it and what circumstances allow us to make it.
The question before us is: what do we want “African renaissance” to mean? What do we want it to involve? And the next question is, in Mbeki’s simple words in a speech in Swakopmund last month: “How do we do it?”
The closest Mbeki has come to giving his own answers to these questions in public was in another speech, at the United Nations University in Tokyo in April.
What he wants is to draw pride from the achievements of African societies before they were plundered by the colonial powers from the 1600s onwards; he wants to advance an appreciation of African abilities and genius among fellow Africans and beyond; he wants to promote the spread of basically liberal democratic systems of government in African states; he wants to see to “the establishment of modern multi-sector economies”, open and attractive to investors; and he wants to improve education, health and other social provision among Africans. That’s unobjectionable motherhood, mieliepap and modernisation in my eyes.
Mbeki seems to be saying, quite sensibly, that the artistic and cultural renaissance he hopes for depends substantially on creating security and prosperity. It is the kind of perspective with which a progressive 15th-century Florentine silk merchant might have had little argument.
The second way to make sure nothing worthwhile comes of the idea of an “African renaissance” would be to set up some sort of command centre for it. Just imagine the futile political piety of phalanxes of intellectuals, businesspeople, workers, peasants and artists marching off to the music of 4 000 tractors to do their “renaissance tasks”.
We must hope that we have learned our lesson: having seen that the more closely we plan an economy, the more surely we hobble it, we can perhaps appreciate that a renaissance cannot be legislated. We can set out to improve the conditions for economic and cultural revival, yes; but we cannot order renaissance into being.
I get nervous when I hear some commentators talking of “the African renaissance” as if it has been brought into being by the mere use of the word.
In this respect it may be worth pointing out that the word “renaissance” to describe the great revival of culture, learning and economic activity in Europe between the 14th and 16th centuries was first used only three centuries later in the 1800s. The man who then did so was Jules Michelet, I am told by a helpful historian at the University of Cape Town.
This suggests a renaissance may be one of those things which is best (perhaps only) identified after the fact.
The third way to ensure no good comes of this talk of “African renaissance” is to build it into a totalising idea. I am alarmed when I read, as I did last weekend, one commentator proclaim that “the renaissance”, as he sees it, embraces a “philosophy”.
He seemed to imply some sort of doctrine. In doing so, he may have been talking nonsense, but what he said was no less dangerous for being nonsense.
Our century has seen a number of examples of how dangerous big ideas can be, particularly big ideas which promise us a brighter tomorrow and demand that we all become historical optimists.
Mbeki would do us all a favour if he broke his idea down into little pieces, the kind of pieces that would encourage a Transkei peasant to grow an extra row of mielies to buy textbooks for her bright daughter, a worker to put in overtime to be able to extend his house, a businessman to increase his rate of domestic investment, a journalist to criticise without fear, a scientist to do his or her research here in Africa, and an artist to experiment with new ways of seeing. Can-do; must-do.