Why we must stop apeing our colonial masters
analysis
Anthony Holiday
With this week’s decision by the Organisation for African Unity to transform itself into an African Union, in obedient mimicry of the European Union, this continent has taken yet another step in a flight from its authentic cultures, religious, artistic and political traditions in short, a flight from itself on which it has embarked since the earliest days of colonialism.
How else is one to interpret this move other than as an attempt to apply Euro-American notions of what forms of social organisation make the difference between civilised politics and barbaric “states of nature” to the plight of Africa? What else does the new dispensation signal except an African acknow-ledgement justified or not of the superiority of our erstwhile colonial masters’ way of doing things? What does it amount to, if not an admission that the European ethos represents our only hope of escape from the cycles of economic failure and fratricidal strife that have become synonymous, for many observers, with the very name of Africa?
Nonetheless, this process of capitulation is unlikely to take place without intellectual and, ultimately political resistance, symptoms of which are already salient in South Africa the very country that the powers that be in the “developed” sectors of the planet have singled out to play a leading role in the campaign for Eurocentric reform.
Among these symptoms is a tendency among our educated elites to question received wisdoms concerning what things are African and to detect in the rhetoric of ideologists, who call themselves African nationalists, overtones of concealment and investment, designed to pass off as African what is European in origin, form and intention.
Significant in this regard is the recent publication of a study by a young Afrikaner philospher, Leonharg Praeg, which seeks to unravel the conceptual tangle that constitutes the debate about the possibility of recovering and re-presenting a lost body of authentic African thought. Praeg’s book, African Philosophy and the Quest for Autonomy, presents an argument to the effect that this apparently austere and academic quest is politicised in the sense of being framed by a grand narrative of liberation that, in order to establish African philosophy as an autonomous subject, ironically reiterates Western enlightenment notions of the autonomous individual.
For Praeg, this double bind, which he styles a “disfigurement”, is in part the result of Western missionary discourse about Africa and Africans. Such discourse, he points out, typically portrays Africans as pagan “children of nature” whose conversion to Christianity would be accompanied by an initiation into a Western work ethic and an induction into Occidental policial and legal norms. One has only to recall the impact of missionary education on many leaders of independent African states Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere and Robert Mugabe are names that spring readily to mind to appreciate the practical force of Praeg’s point.
But missionary discourse assuredly does not stop at the mission station, school or church. It is to be heard in our Parliament from both government and the opposition benches. It is audible in the sermons our Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, and his Director General, Maria Ramos, regularly preach to us about the need for financial discipline and a restrained monetary policy. And it sounded in President Thabo Mbeki’s talk of an “African renaissance”, in which he managed to make a call for rapid modernisaton sound like a plea for a return to Africa’s ancient past.
My concern here is not to make a judgement about whether our contemporary missionaries are right or wrong. It may well be that the phenomenon fashionably called “globalisation” has reached a state of such intensity as to make the hope of a genuine recollection of the African inheritance a practical impossibility. Rather, I want to opine that we cannot go on using this doublespeak without generating a new politics of resistance on the part of a generation of young Africans of all colours and creeds, who demand to be told the unambiguous truth about where their leaders are taking them.
This new breed of political activist will not, at first, be very articulate and they may not seem to an older generation of African nationalist politicians to be even marginally reasonable. But they will be very angry, angry because they will hold themselves to have been deceived into believing that something rare and marvellous would at last be restored to them, only to find that the spiritual fathers of colonialism still call the tune.
If that scenario plays itself out, the statesmen, who still dominate the African scene, will find that their old strategies and slogans no longer work for them; that they can only keep such order as remains by brutal force; and that the descent into the “state of nature” of which the old missionaries warned can no longer be treated as a superstitious fantasy.
Dr Anthony Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s school of government and at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris
@Simply another quick fix
The debate over cures for Parkinson’s disease is starting from the wrong place
COMMENT
David Beresford
There are few more enthusiastic spectators of the stem cell debate than those suffering from degenerative neurological disorders, in my case Parkinson’s disease, which is often cited as among the first that will benefit from their research. But it is a debate I cannot help but feel at times is misplaced. There is something almost quaint about politicians arguing over the question as to when “human life begins” when nobody seems to have figured out what life is in the first place.
Experience with neurological drugs brings home to one how such “human” characteristics as personality, a sense of identity and perceptions of reality are dependent on chemical balances. Coupled with evolutionary theory it makes it difficult to distinguish animal life from human.
The discovery of plate tectonics and planetary phenomena ranging from volcanic activity to atmospheric conditions raises further questions about whether the Earth should be described as a living creature and one that might claim to be of a “higher” species than that represented by United States President George W Bush.
In addition, our philosophical perspectives of scientific and technological advance remain rooted in Newtonian mechanics. The digital revolution is founded, together with the Industrial Revolution, in notions of predictability which have given rise to a passion for copying and standardisation. The excitement over stem cells can be seen as a manifestation of such perspectives quick fixes to deal with illness, disability and even death by scientific exercises in reproduction.
But the setbacks dogging such research suggest that “life” may be far more complex than is appreciated.
Take, for example, my condition. The notion of a neurological disease called Parkinson’s, which leads to progressive disablement, smacks to me of oversimplification and misconceptions founded in machine-age perceptions.
For a start I have doubts whether a “disease” called Parkinson’s exists as such. The variations in both symptoms and reactions to treatment vary so substantially that “Parkinson’s” would seem at most a conceptual convenience, a loose classification of what might be seen as a range of brain “disorders”.
The description of it as “neurological” bothers me as well. Schizophrenia seems to result from the oversupply of dopamine to the brain and Parkinson’s from an undersupply. Why is one stigmatised as a “psychiatric” disorder and the other pitied as a “neurological” problem?
“Disablement” and “disorder” are also words I find dangerous. One is not disabled until one is dead. How can a “lord of the universe” like Stephen Hawking be considered “disabled”? The handicapped are disadvantaged in my experience more by society’s preconceptions as to what is normal than by their “disease”. A paraplegic might well be disadvantaged in the high jump, but advantaged in arm-wrestling. Vincent van Gogh was considered mad and yet we pay much for his views of the world.
The instinct to impose such stereotypical concepts on society again stems from Newtonian perspectives of life as copyable and best organised on a collective basis, subject to standardisation. In that way “diseases” or “dis- orders” can be dealt with with “certainty” and subjected to the panacea of pharmaceutical mass production.
Geneticists tell us that the process of human evolution seems to be over, which would seem to imply that the development of our species now lies in our hands.
To develop we need to take our minds beyond the machine age into the age of quantum theory and relativity, which suggest that the essence of life lies in paradox and the tensions to which it gives rise.
In the process we may discover the nature of life in a way that enables us to respect it and discover “disablement” and death in a way that does not frighten us.