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Upset at how things never seem to work in Africa and how good ideas and projects always come to naught, late Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere concluded that the devil surely exists and that his head office must be in Africa. In a word Nyerere became convinced that Africa is hell, the very hot place where the devil fries his victims with disease, famine, violence and other painful visitations.
In the view of this column Africans as living people under the sun must surely suffer their own share of miseries but also have their season to enjoy some fortunes and partake in the rich fruits of the earth since the continent is blessed with rich human and natural resources. Slavery, colonialism and the present coloniality, manmade disasters, added to the miseries of Africa in ways that are yet to be understood, making Africa not only the dark continent but that continent that will always be behind in everything from knowledge, development, democracy, human rights and civilisation.
The capital question is, if the devil is head-quartered in Africa, where exactly is the dark fellow, if he is dark, hiding? Some gifted children of Africa have tried to answer this question, Chinweizu, Ngugi wa Thiongo and Steve Biko believed that the devil that continues to punish Africa now lives in the minds of Africans, hence the important need to decolonise the African mind. The devil entered our minds through the colonial education system, the global media and the Americanised global cultural industry that continues to feed us an unbalanced diet of images and symbols that make Europe appear superior and Africa inferior, hence our lack of confidence in industry, politics and even in sport and culture where we fail before we have even started, we have naturalised our alleged inferiority, the thinking goes.
Less spiritedly and less convincingly other Africans have offered such lazy explanations to our sorry condition as that we are the dark children of Ham, misfortune and misery are a due part of our nature and our lot in the mainland of Africa and in the diaspora. That the devil might be living in our minds or that he might be part of our very nature; still does not sufficiently answer the question why inspite of all the trying; Africa remains a loser and the leper of the world. This column seeks to argue today that in the main, the devil hides in many places in Africa but he seems to have effectively concealed himself in our tools of communication, thinking and understanding: language. It is in language as a system of thinking and communication that we have so energetically naturalised our own poverty, suffering and death as Africans and black people in the world.
Slavery and the challenge of Language
Even some of the most learned and radical Afrocentric thinkers in Africa including political leaders and professors still talk about something that is called the “slave trade.” It sounds all true and even innocent a description of the forcible selling and buying of our ancestors whose blood and sweat was used to cement the bricks of European civilisation and prosperity. The term “slave trade” naturalises our inferiority and poverty in that it suggests that our ancestors were slaves already by their own nature and that some enterprising capitalists just came from Europe and America to trade in them. “Slave trade” means that our ancestors were a problem because of being slaves and the European capitalists became a problem by only trading in these slaves, as a result we naturally became the goods to be traded and this makes the European enslavers lesser devils and forgivable criminals. We were raw materials, the crime of the enslaver was only to turn us into finished goods !
After the “slave trade” came the “emancipation.” Slavery is supposed to have ended with the “emancipation” of the slaves. It is well known that those Africans who were enslaved in many ways resisted slavery and many of them escaped or tried to. Slavery was an evil crime against humanity. There were famous uprisings like the San Domingo uprising and heroic individual slave escapes such as that of Frederick Douglass. For that reason, the word “emancipation” takes the power away from those who were enslaved and gives it to the European enslavers who became generous enough to “emancipate” the enslaved blacks. The enslaver became the generous emancipator, the kind donor of freedom to the enslaved, which is a monumental falsehood that continues to be taught today that such people as William Wilberforce remain known as kind fighters and benefactors of the black race. The enslaved black people fought for liberty and not for “emancipation,” Liberty implies a people who freed themselves from bondage and not those who were freed in generosity and pity. Slave trade as the beginning of slavery and emancipation as the end of it constitute criminal language that perpetuates black and African inferiority.
The scandal of Decolonisation in Africa
In the mainland of Africa, the individuals and groups that fought against colonialism were fighting for liberation or freedom from settlers. Most of them became liberation movements or liberation political parties. The wars of liberation in Africa were also wars for justice, the black people wanted their land and their dignity back after it was stolen by the settlers and invaders. Somewhere in the middle of all that the devil came in through the language and we are now told that the struggle was for democracy, human rights and development for all. Liberation and justice have conveniently been pushed to the backseat of the political dictionary in Africa. The devil is a liar but he is also clever.
Democracy, Human Rights and Development are wonderful human ideals, no doubt about that, but they are not more important than liberation and justice. Liberation means unconditional freedom and justice says bring back what you stole or else, and that is the message that scares the devil, it overturns imperialism, explodes capitalism and threatens coloniality to its cells.
The African political dictionary has gone fat with such beautiful catchwords as democracy, reconciliation, non-racialism, peace, human rights, ubuntu and so on. Looked at closely; these terms that have been so privileged in our daily language and are very good at concealing rather than revealing the devil’s hiding enclaves.
Decolonisation in Africa lost its teeth when it became a project for democracy, human rights, multipartyism, and development, leaving behind liberation and justice that were the original goals of the struggle against colonialism and imperialism in Africa. There is nothing that democracy, human rights, development and reconciliation mean that is not catered for under the umbrella of liberation and justice, except that liberation and justice go further to seek unconditional freedom for the oppressed and punishment for the oppressor.
South Africa is learning it the very hard way. The devil of apartheid and his lost angels of white supremacy have safely hidden themselves in the celebrated constitution. Behind the beautiful metaphors of the “rainbow nation” protected by the “ubuntu” of the poor multitudes white supremacists can still hide behind the curtain of reconciliation and call black people monkeys. Protected by the constitution, the settlers keep their loot, the economy and the blacks of Alexandra, Khayelitsha and Tembisa eat ubuntu and keep their poverty and misery.
The language of democracy, emancipation, development and so on still conceals sentiments of the old civilising mission whose assumption was that Africans had to be given God and civilisation even if by force for their own good. Development in the logic of the civilising mission does not mean that a people uplift themselves in their terms using the knowledge and the resources that nature has given them, but it means that settlers, experts and superiors come from somewhere to siphon the resources and then give you brilliant ideas and suggestions on how to survive your poverty and budget your misery and prepare for death. Reconciliation means never lift a finger against your masters.
In Africa we are dead by language! As an incomplete idea that has lost its liberatory potential and protects inequality and injustice, democracy keeps adding adjectives in attempt to hide the devil and keep its tired self fashionable: sustainable democracy, participatory democracy, liberal democracy, guided democracy and other meaningless descriptions, one word is enough, Liberation.
- The writer is based in Pretoria, South Africa.
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