Call me naïve, but I thought it was possible that 2005 could achieve even more than a historic breakthrough deal on debt relief and aid for Africa.
The conjunction of this key political moment with a huge cultural festival, Africa 05 — television and radio programmes, festivals of music, museums all over the United Kingdom hosting exhibitions — seemed to hold the promise of achieving one of those lasting shifts in public understanding of Africa.
What seemed within grasp was the start of a new relationship between the neighbouring continents of Europe and Africa — at last. Could Britain open a new page in its long engagement with Africa, finally drawing a line under the colonial themes of ”saving” and ”civilising” the continent? The wealth of African creativity evident everywhere — art, music, sculpture, film — would reinject into the public sphere a perception of the immense ingenuity, resourcefulness and reflective inquiry of Africans. It would shatter the myth of Africans as powerless victims at the mercy of Western generosity and do-goodery.
It would correct the media myth that the fate of millions of Africans is passively lying in the hands of eight men in Gleneagles, and make clear that, given half a chance, Africans can shape the circumstances of their daily lives — and their often-precarious survival — far more powerfully and effectively than the G8.
The hope was that people would get to see more of Africa than starving black babies on their screens. We would get to hear about Africans much like ourselves — with the same hopes, fears and aspirations; we would, finally, begin to identify with them as human beings. That shift of perception offered a radical potential for a more equal engagement between Europe and Africa — the kind of sustained long-term relationship necessary to deal with the huge challenges to our species of climate change and Aids.
An entire continent has been reduced to a ”scar on the conscience of the world”, stripped of its dignity and left more powerless than at any intervening point since 1787.
Post-colonialism in a globalising economy is proving even more humiliating for Africa than colonialism: its huge wealth in natural resources sequestered in secret bank accounts; its commodities commanding ever-smaller prices; its vicious wars with the exported arms of the industrial world; its government policies dictated from Washington and Geneva. Even its suffering exploited to jerk us into attention and to supply our emotional self-gratification.
British Prime Minster Tony Blair’s Africa agenda is yet another expression of what Professor John Lonsdale, the Cambridge historian of Africa, described in a lecture recently as ”the self-righteously civilising mission of the past two centuries” of Europe towards its neighbour. He concluded that ”it is a construction that infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of self-importance”.
The lost opportunity that 2005 may come to represent is not for want of trying. Visit the near-empty galleries of the Crafts Council’s Africa exhibition to marvel at African art.
It is almost as if the West can’t accept African agency: we want the simplification of the four Ps because it so neatly caters for our fears, derived from the colonial history of the ”dark continent” of Joseph Conrad fame. Is this the price that has to be paid for an instant of Western attention?
The West, in its rapacious and impatient greed, destroys with contempt or indifference all that it can’t appropriate for its own aggrandisement.
Africa exposes — like no other continent — the hubristic arrogance of the Western industrialised countries that dominate the globe and are forcing an entire species into one model of human development — a model with catastrophic shortcomings.
Now is precisely the point at which we need to learn about the genius of Africa’s own history of development, which, Lonsdale suggests, lies in the extraordinary resilience and self-sufficiency to survive and adapt in habitats not always conducive to human life.
If we recognised the immensity of this achievement of human endeavour over thousands of years, it might help to dismantle the self-satisfied superiority by which the West lays claim to a monopoly on concepts of progress and development. We — Africans and Westerners — might begin to reframe the debate and ask ourselves if it isn’t the grossly polluting G8 that is a scar on the conscience of the world. — Â