adminCetshwayo Mabhena
There is no accident to the historical truism that almost all founding fathers of the African and Latin American liberation struggles were one way or another intellectuals and men of letters.
Slavery, colonialism and imperialism as systems of domination were products of the minds of western evil geniuses, to undo them demanded that the enslaved, colonised and imperialised engage their own intellectual gears. In that way, western philosophers of domination were to be countered by Southern philosophers of liberation.
Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the first black insurrection of November 1791 in Haiti was, contrary to the propaganda of imperialist historiographers who write of him as an illiterate, a Jesuit educated political philosopher who relished the works of Niccolo Machiavelli.
Saint-Domingue was liberated from French slavery and colonialism into Haiti thanks to the radical political philosophy and activism of L’Ouverture and his many black militants.
In Africa the year 1957 saw the liberation of a British colony of the Gold Coast into a republic of Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah, an economic ideologist and political philosopher from whose desk emerged the philosophical treatise Consciencism in 1964.
Tanganyika which is now Tanzania gave the world Julius Nyerere, a stubborn mind that deconstructed classical Marxism and distilled from it a durable political philosophy of African socialism.
There are few political leaders in the world that produced a political utopia such as that which is espoused in the philosophy of humanism that Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia touted and enchanted the African liberation struggle with.
Francophone Africa was not left out of the thought universe with its philosophy of black and African pride that was espoused in the Negritude school of thought that had its origins in the desks of the poets Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal and the artisanal Martiniquian, Aime Cesaire.
Well, there was always going to be that one Joseph Mobutu who was to take things too far with his doctrine of Authenticite, and ideology of African purity, that got him to do the nativist thing of banning western names in Zaire.
In the westernised university in Africa all the founding fathers of African liberation appear in libraries, archives and reading lists as case studies of tyranny and despotism, students are not given the epistemic opportunity to appreciate the emancipatory potential of their ideas.
Decolonial historiography has a task to carry out its own archeology of knowledge and recover the buried philosophies and wisdoms of philosophers of liberation of the South that coloniality will have us forget. Africa in particular has its wealth of philosopher kings, poet princes and the warrior kings whose strengths and limits must not be allowed to go unappreciated.
Decolonial African futurism, in politics and economics, cannot thrive outside the fertile soils of the political strengths and weaknesses of Africa’s leaders of the yesteryear. It is the time, even, to sniff the very smelly armpits of our own ancestors.
A Critique of African Decolonisation Reason
If it is not to collapse into a fanatic and polemic political ideology of the South, decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation must muster the courage to admit and critique the weaknesses and pitfalls of African theories and practices of decolonisation that have failed to deliver liberation beyond flag independence.
Why in justice did the enchanting political radicalism of Nkrumah and reconciliatory iconism of Mandela not lead to true and full liberation in Africa? How did it happen that the political pragmatism of Amilcar Cabral and the philosophical realism of Thomas Sankara never led to a truly independent Africa?
Thandika Mkandawire in 2004 opined that African founding fathers had a tendency of pretending to be philosopher kings when they were just circulating their immature and unprocessed opinions as political philosophy, hence their degeneration into despots and tyrants who thought their opinionated incantations were political wisdom.
I am persuaded more by the observation of Ramon Grosfoguel who notes that the ideologies of Nationalism and Marxism that liberation movements of Latin America and Africa adopted were limited and limiting thoughts that were inherited from the same Euro-American Empire that was being fought.
Further, the founding fathers of the Latin American and African liberation movements were educated in and by the same political and economic Eurocentricism that they were struggling to debunk.
Proverbially, tools of the master that are handed to the slave by the master cannot be trusted to be effective in demolishing the same master’s house.
In a strong way, Consciencism, Negritude, African socialism, humanism and Authenticite were all brilliant philosophies of African liberation but were tragically infected at their very birth by the same colonialism and imperialism that they were purportedly designed to fight.
In a tragic sort of way, the founding fathers of the African and Latin American liberation movements, brave and well-meaning men, were already colonial subjects and colonial agents that could fight colonialism but really not destroy coloniality.
In a word, the privilege of western and Christian education gave our leaders the minds and the eyes to fight colonialism and imperialism and also burdened them with political limits that prevented them from winning against coloniality.
While our founding liberators had the hardware to confront slavish, colonial and imperial domination their political and intellectual software had been compromised, in a strong way.
The Political Production of Founding Leaders of the South
Colonial administrations in Africa and Latin America put liberation war leaders in jail for a long time. Most of the liberation leaders were exiled and tortured in many painful ways if they were not killed.
For that reason, besides the colonial and imperial education that they were given, most of the leaders became angry minds and painful hearts that could not be peaceful and humanist leaders of their own people; they had become damaged and dangerous souls.
The colonial wound, long and deep, made some leaders of the people of the South into some kinds of monsters that became harmful to their own people after independence. If one reads African history, in particular the history of African liberation movements, one encounters horror stories of the bush wars.
It was tough in the bush. Comrades punished each other and even killed each other in conflicts of trust and betrayal. They needed rehabilitation which some did not get.
In combination, I argue, colonialism itself and the nationalist war against it, produced African and Latin American founding fathers of the liberation movements into “monsters” that could not have easily been humanised and disciplined into peaceable leaders of the masses, that is why such an icon as Nkrumah had at some point more political prisoners in his jails than the apartheid regime in South Africa.
The legendary Nyerere was not exactly friendly to political opponents as well, for instance. Making matters really worse is that the State in Africa and Latin America that nationalist leaders inherited after political independence was itself a colonial and imperial institution that inhibited and limited liberation.
Independence African and Latin American governments inherited institutions, laws and systems that were naturally colonial and imperial, there was limited or no room for full liberation to take place, the colonisers had left colonial infrastructures and mechanisms of colonial rule intact, the decolonisers were entrapped in their colonial mindsets as well and liberation simply had no chance.
From their villages, founding African and Latin American liberation leaders still carried the sensibility of pre-colonial kings that ruled with decree.
That precolonial political sensibility was combined with colonial and liberation war violence to produce leaders that were entrapped in both racism and tribalism, making the politics of the post-independence era in the Global South really difficult and dangerous for the masses.
Our collective historical dilemma in the South, otherwise, is that the inconvenient politics that are progressing are a mixture of precolonial limitations, colonial corruption and postcolonial misdirections, and that defines our struggle for liberation in the present.
The mission of our generation and present leaders, which we will fulfil or betray, is to decolonise past political traditions, courageously.
On Decolonial Afro-futurism
Such historical and political regimes of domination as apartheid in South Africa had their intellectuals and ideologues. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the Prime Minister of apartheid South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966 is considered the “mind of apartheid” but evidence is available that the real architect of segregation was the sociologist, Geoffrey Cronje.
By a sad way, Dr Verwoerd studied at Milton High School in Bulawayo as Harold Fairwood, a British pseudonym for an Afrikaner right winger, before he proceeded to South Africa.
If the politics of domination such as Nazism, apartheid, colonialism and zionism benefit from philosophers of domination that provide ideas and strategies it follows that the politics of liberation such as decolonial African Afro-futurism also need their minds and eyes in Africa and Latin America.
Founding fathers of the liberation movement of the South did their part and had their achievements and telling limits.
Decolonial Afro-futurists have their homework ahead of them, politicians and intellectuals of the South must arise that have the courage to appreciate achievements of the founding fathers and critique their failures and then forge new beginnings.
The role of intellectuals of the South as simple praise singers for regimes is a limiting role; more must be done to equip political regimes with liberatory insights not comforting myths.
By intellectuals I don’t refer to everyday academics who are hostage to routine or do I mean the usual scholars that are captive to disciplines, I mean the bandits, heretics and other prophets that are prepared to challenge Empire and its idols, and that are willing to ask their own ancestors inconvenient questions to draw liberating answers.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Durban, South Africa: [email protected].
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