A lot about Africa that is not African!

There is a lot about Africa that is not African. I am not talking about cultural imperialism where because of foreign and colonial influences Africans end up conducting themselves in many unAfrican ways, no. That is an old and simple story, even if it is not simplistic. Cultural imperialism is indeed one way in which Africa and its people have lost their authenticity and originality, which might not be a big problem for now. What I am talking about is that Africa is a product of other people, a construct of its enemies, and finally, Africa is not Africa, there is nothing African about Africa. To start with, one of my favourite African scholars, Ali Mazrui, who popularised the documentary, The Africans, raised the startling issue that the name Africa was given to our continent by Arabs. The word Afrika, meaning a “hot place” or a “sunny place.” If the name Africa does not come from any indigenous language but from a language from elsewhere, then how African is Africa, I ask. Just from the name and the naming, our continent does not seem to be itself. This continent was not named by people that were indigenous to it. The name of our continent is a descriptor from elsewhere. It might as well be an insult; we may never know. Another way of becoming true Africans in all this controversy about the name of the continent is to adopt the name, even if it might be an insult from outsiders, and use it as a weapon against them. And proudly call ourselves Africans as we were called by our haters and enemies. African Americans, through Hip-Hop and the culture that surrounded it, successfully turned the insult of the word “nigger” into a powerful slogan of power, pride, and revolution. Some interlocutors might actually say the easy thing, a lazy thing: what is in a name? I come from the boring school that holds it to be true that names matter. The way in which Africa was named and did not name itself means that, politically and historically, names matter a lot. We might as well be what we have been called by our callers. So, the answer to the cliché question, what is in a name, is that history and reality are in a name. A name is an identity given by us or given to us, we are what we are called, otherwise. Names are things and we eventually become what we are called, not what we call ourselves. Names are handles with which the world around us holds us. In short, we cannot escape our names, they are us and we are them. This, otherwise, is my starting point in fleshing out the troublesome argument that after all, Africa is not African.

An African philosophical dilemma
A leading South African, and therefore, African philosopher, Ramose Magobe wrote in 1999 that he accepted being called an African in protest because the name was imposed on the continent and himself by colonisers and imperialists. Africans did not call themselves Africans. They were called African, and told that they are Africans, and forced to believe it to be so. What Magobe regrets most is that the name came not as a friendly nickname or another moniker but a descriptor that was not necessarily friendly. It was an othering descriptor. It was a metaphor of domination, oppression and exploitation. It may have been a slur. So, when African leaders and philosophers such as Thabo Mbeki compose and recite poems like the “I am an African” speech we can ask ourselves the stubborn question, what are we celebrating? What if African problems are based on the name and identity of the continent that are given or borrowed from conquerors and haters? I hold onto the idea that even if the name was a slur and an insult, we can still own and hold it as ours and weaponise it against those that imposed it on us. This is my optimism, my positivism even. To take the mud, hold it, and throw it back to the thrower, might just be a revolutionary act. So, the African philosophical dilemma is how to be proud and powerful about a name and an identity that is, after all, a colonial and inimical construction. That Africa is not African should, maybe, embarrass us. But, because there is a waste of time and energy in being embarrassed and ashamed, we may just be Africans that know what they are doing and why they are doing that. Just as the enslaved may have their revolutionary starting point as slavery itself, our revolutionary starting point may be our being African, an imposed and a borrowed handle and moniker that has become our inevitable reality.

Africa is not African
It has become so normal, normal as it is true to state that the first African country to be independent from settler colonialism was Ghana in 1957. This is normal and natural truth. Yet, the reality is that the first country in Africa, not exactly an African country, to be freed from colonialism was Sudan. At the time Sudan achieved its independence from Britain, and then from Egypt, it did not consider itself an African country but part of the Arab world. This consideration ignored the presence of the blacks and indigenous people. That problem came to light much more radically when South Sudan was declared independent from North Sudan in 2011. Sudan had an Arabic problem, a colonial problem. This problem was much similar, is much similar, to the problem where in 1652 some white people landed in what is presently called South Africa and called themselves Afrikaners, Africans in English. As such, Africa has an Arab problem. The Arabs who named Africa as Afrika were not African but arrivants, settlers, enslavers and colonisers.

Recently, Tunisian President, Kais Saied, shocked the thinking world when he made a statement to the effect that Africans, blacks, were invading Tunisia and polluting its culture. Arab culture was, in the view of the president, in danger of being corrupted by the primitive blacks and their dirty wild ways. As such, blacks are foreigners in Tunisia which takes itself to be part of the Arab world. Many stories about the persecution of blacks in Libya have been recorded. So have such stories been recorded of the persecution of black people in Egypt. North Africa has a problem with being African and has a problem with Africans. It is such a problem that questions the assumption that Africa is African, and that Africans are Africans, after all.

When Africans boast about their historical and intellectual heritage they speak of Egypt, they speak of Timbuktu in Mali, and other parts. The Pyramids of Egypt are the pride of African civilisation. But North Africans are reluctant about being African and Africa being part of them. In other words what Africans pride themselves of and about is not African, politically. We can appropriate somethings and claim them as ours, but some things might deny and reject our claims. That is how the modern colonial world works. Our being Africa is questionable.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the Tshwane University of Technology, in Soshanguve, Pretoria, in South Africa.
This article is a simplified and short version of a Keynote Address given before the Research Seminar of the Department of Management Studies at the TUT on 30 May, 2023. Contacts: [email protected]