Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
Nationalism can become an extraordinarily defensive frame of mind. It can be used to justify hostility to foreign views and innovations and, so, wielded to defend the most backward elements at home. It is this negative potential of nationalism that makes me suspicious of talk of an “African renaissance”.
But nationalism need not be insecure or conservative. It can, perhaps just as easily, be outward-looking, competitive and open to change.
To the extent that the “African renaissance” he seeks is a nationalist project, President Thabo Mbeki does not appear to conceive of it as a refuge for those Africans who might wish to exclude themselves from the world. Rather, the awakening he seeks will come in Africa’s fuller engagement with the world, via openness.
This drift is clear in Mbeki’s latest statement dealing with the renaissance theme – delivered to his fellow heads of state at the Organisation of African Unity summit in Algiers on July 13. It makes interesting reading. And it is perhaps surprising that there has not been wider reportage and commentary on it.
Here was someone trying to cajole his colleagues in the Algerian capital out of a well-established and depressingly familiar pattern of thought and behaviour among African political leaders. It is one that expresses unjustified faith in the persuasive powers of political sentiment and moral accusation, and shouts out a shopping list of grievances and entitlement claims.
Here was Mbeki calling for an intelligent, “conscious and deliberate intervention in the process of globalisation” by Africans to overcome their marginalisation in the world economy. Here was a man with a left- wing heart being right-headed.
“The challenge we have to meet is to develop our own sovereign continental capacity to participate in the global processes aimed at producing [a] framework of rules, institutions and established practices to promote our own interests … to insert ourselves in a beneficial manner into the global and globalising economy.”
For Mbeki, fostering an “African renaissance” appears to be most immediately about making economic progress. To this end, Africa needs politicians with a “profound understanding of economics” so that where they intervene in the economy they do so in an “informed manner”.
Moreover, in his view, securing economic progress requires a radical change in the continent’s political culture. He and other African leaders have to ensure “democracy, good governance, the recovery of humane African values, peace and stability”.
“Mere moral appeals from the have-nots to the haves are not likely to take us very far,” he said.
True, this is generality. There was something else in the speech which blunted my enthusiasm, too. It was Mbeki’s insistence, common with many other leaders on the continent, that governments – “the chiefs”, as he calls them – play the major role in achieving this African awakening. For example, he spoke in commandist terms of “the mobilisation of our intellectual resources” to identify what practical things Africans should do and how they should do them. Later he spoke of the need to “activate” intellectuals.
Some might feel – I do – that the further the deadening hand of the African state is kept from any attempt at renaissance, the greater the chances of an awakening.
But perhaps I exaggerate Mbeki’s quasi- martial air. For a short while later he spoke of how it would make “no sense” for governments “to act in a manner which alienates this important resource [intellectuals], for example by seeking to suppress independent opinion”.
Well now, there’s a statement for you at home and us at the Mail & Guardian to cling on to.
Mbeki’s Algiers statement joins a growing body of major speeches dealing with his idea of stimulating an “African renaissance” over the next century. There is still precious little flesh on the bone, but in Algiers he confirmed the shape his thought is taking.
A number of aspects are evident. Mbeki believes sentiment and the purest of intentions are no substitute for policy designed and implemented to achieve specific results. Faced with the reality of the global dominance of market capitalism, there is less sense in whining about it than in finding innovative and cunning ways of participating in it to our own best advantage and ensuring the rules are changed to our advantage, too.
An open contest of ideas is crucial to delivering up these ways and means of benefiting from globalisation; intellectual defensiveness and notions of African inferiority should be jettisoned – and will be as practical progress is made. Ancient African values, once recovered, have much to teach the world about building humane social and economic relations. And, underlying it all, democracy is a precondition for peace and progress on the continent.
“We must again become our own liberators,” he said. “Thus will we turn the century that will soon be upon us into an African century, and realise the objective of an `African renaissance’.”
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
Yes. Probably not, however, if you are one of Africa’s surviving tyrants.