I have a good dose of melanin, making me one of the darker people prowling the streets of Johannesburg. I was born and brought up in Kenya. I carry a Kenyan passport and have official recognition as a Kenyan citizen. I can vote, run for political office and join the Kenyan army — if I want to. I love ugali, the Kenyan, harder version of pap. I adore Miriam Makeba’s music and love Hugh Masekela’s trumpet. If anything, I am the kind of person they would put in an advert for an African exhibition in China.
Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Steve Biko, Leopold Senghor, Samir Amin, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o fascinate me because I strongly identify with the struggles they write about. It is not because they are, or are not, African. Their writings are at least partly about human beings trying to claim what is rightly theirs as human beings. To be their student is not to affirm my Africanness or non-Africanness. To read Leo Tolstoy, to be enthralled by George Orwell, to appreciate Shakespeare, is not to be un-African. If anything, to insist on Ezekiel Mphahlele, Chinua Achebe and Biko, and to refuse to appreciate Tolstoy, to ignore Orwell and to banish Shakespeare, is to flatter those who make it necessary for some to declare their Africanness. It is to refuse to partake in a global community of ideas and to be boxed in an ethnic pigeonhole.
I rate President Thabo Mbeki among my top 10 leaders of the 21st century. This is not because he has declared that he is an African, or because his mother and father were patently of Bantu descent. It is because I see in him somebody who takes Africa as inextricably linked to the rest of the world; as if Africa is the world. Which it is! Mbeki speaks of economic development, he speaks of peace, he speaks of the incorporation of Africa in the global political economy, and its insertion in a global political community that is brought together by a respect of human rights of individuals as human beings. How more naturally can we think?
I understand why people want to robustly confront the Afro-pessimistic images that portray this continent as an exceptional gulag of unfounded pessimism. One should not be an African to oppose such stupidity. Any sane human being can and should. When we see this as an exclusively African struggle, we run the danger of counter-stupidity: that some people choose to see the world through highly ethnocentric eyes does not give us a right to be equally narrow-minded.
I am committed to this continent 100%. And it is not because I can declare that I am an African. It is because more than 10% of the world population of my species lives here. It is because the peoples of this continent, as much as those of other continents, have contributed to the building of the human civilisation. I also suspect that this is where I will live for most of the remaining years of my life, alongside many others, born and unborn. I therefore imagine it is only reasonable to make this a better place for human beings.
But I am afraid to declare that I am not an African. To affirm my humanity over my ethnicity, race, language and place of residence. I fear that someone will label me a coconut, or an agent of imperialism, or a sell-out or misguided. I am anxious that the gatekeepers of Africanness will expel me from the making of Africa’s history — from suffering, slavery, colonialism, racial subjugation and underdevelopment.
I am anxious that if I do not side with those who declare their Africanness, I will expose myself to racists whose survival as racists relies on the reproduction of Africans as savages with proportions that simultaneously titillate their imagination and justify their civilisational mission; all the more because I occasionally wear a pinstriped suit.
Mostly, I fear that I will be misunderÂÂstood, and labelled an anti-African, and be excluded from the ranks of those who battle for a better Africa, because I declared that I am not an African. Must I be an African to love and be loved, have children and be a good father to them, have financial security, feel proud of myself as a human being with a dark skin, hang a picture of Bob Marley in my bedroom and listen to Tracy Chapman? If all this is possible without having to declare that I am an African, then I refuse to declare that I am an African.
After all, is it not sufficient to be a human being?
Godfrey Chesang is a post-doctoral fellow at the French Institute of South Africa