Chronicle Editor
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
When one mentions “Africa’s Triple Heritage” what comes to mind is Ali Mazrui’s important documentary of 1986; The Africans : A Triple Heritage, and a book by the same title that was published by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BCC) in collaboration with Little Brown and Company Publishers.
In that documentary Mazrui really went to town showing how Africa, thanks to colonial and imperial history, had become a continent made out of three major civilisations: The African civilisation itself, the western and Christian civilisation, and the Eastern Asian and Islamic civilisation.
It is no exaggeration that the documentary and the book are the artistic and intellectual works of history that made the name of Mazrui as a canonical African scholar of unignorable stature. Young African scholars might not know it that actually the idea of the triple heritage was not invented by Mazrui but Kwame Nkrumah the first black President of an independent country, a competent historian and philosopher.
Nkrumah believed that there was something authentic, good and strong that can be called an “African Personality” that is a product of the African civilisation untainted by other civilisations and traditions. He noted that the African personality, due to the history of colonisation and western and eastern imperialism, had come to be flavoured and or poisoned by external civilisational influences.
He understood well that, even after political independence and freedom from imperial controls Africans cannot easily and rightly walk back to their pre-colonial past and achieve their true African Personality without engaging in retrogressive primitivism of resisting modernity.
Both the philosophers and the historians of Africa are almost agreed that there is no pristine pre-colonial and authentic Africa to go back to without engaging in the negative spectacle of primitivism and the sad drama of nativism with all the toxicities and evils that it comes with. Nkrumah’s good book of 1964: Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for the Decolonisation and Development with specific reference to the African Revolution; is a philosophical and historical treatise where he fleshes out Consciencism and the idea of the African Triple Heritage.
What Nkrumah meant is that Africans can no longer reject western European, Eastern European, Asian and other influences in their history and culture. Or could they totally abandon their African Personality and traditions.
They could only creatively harvest the best of all civilisations including their own, and abandon the evils from all of them, and then come up with a new African Triple Heritage that is enriched by all the major three civilisations of the world.
This was more mathematical than philosophical reason, I think. From the historical messiness that Africa found itself burdened by forces from the West and the East, the continent could pick and eat what did not kill it and would become stronger in the Nietzschean sense of things. As a good historian, political scientist and a philosopher, Mazrui very easily adopted and adapted the idea of the triple heritage to fashion his own original work by which he became famous.
The Bitter Western and Eastern Heritages
Nkrumah and Mazrui might have overestimated the optimism that other civilisations could after all mean well for Africa. Mazrui was a descendent of both the Arabs and the Africans and his sympathies with the Islamic civilisation of the Arabs are much well known by now.
Nkrumah was a thorough-going African who was educated with a deep English diet of knowledge and sensibility. His partiality to Europe and its furnitures can also be understood. Nkrumah was also married to Helena Ritz Fathia an Egyptian Muslim woman who made the Arabic tradition look beautiful and great in the eyes of the historian, philosopher and politician.
Mazrui and Nkrumah’s evaluation and or judgment of western and eastern Asian civilisations might have been at best tempered with and at worst compromised by other interests and sensibilities. Much later in his troubled life, and maybe too late, Nkrumah regained his suspicion of the Western civilisation and understood the toxicities of neocolonialism as the highest stage of imperialism.
If Nkrumah had access to the vocabulary that is used by present intellectuals of the Global South he would have used it to describe Coloniality and prescribe the use of Decoloniality towards true liberation of Africa and the Global South. From the West and the East, Africa has only known imperial and colonial relations that are made out of political impositions and economic prescriptions that have nothing to do with Africa but the interests of other civilisations that parasitically feed on the resource-rich continent. Africa, in the scheme of the vaunted Triple Heritage has so far been so hard done by.
Xi Jinping on China-Africa Relations
President Xi Jinping of China was declared the “leadership core” of the Chinese Communist Party in 2016. In 2018, before the heads of States of African countries gathered in the Great Hall of the People in China, President Xi Jinping declared that, “together” as China and Africa “we have embarked on a distinctive path of win-win cooperation.” The gathering was the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC).
Before pledging what China will do for Africa Jinping declared what China will not do, the Five Nos, of China’s relations with Africa: No interference in African countries’ pursuit of development paths that fit their national conditions; No imposition of our will on African countries; No interference in African countries’ internal affairs; No attachment of political strings to assistance to Africa; No seeking of selfish political gains in investment and financing cooperation with Africa.
These Nos were a direct affront of what western countries have been doing in Africa. These prominent Nos to China’s approach towards its relations with Africa in search of common development and futures accompanied a list of initiatives that the country promised it will advance for and with African countries.
The industrial promotion initiative, infrastructure connectivity initiative, trade facilitation initiative, green development initiative, capacity building, healthcare support, people to people exchange, peace and security were the eight initiatives that China promised to advance for Africa’s benefit. All the initiatives clearly responded to what are pressing African developmental needs.
Having experienced poverty and marginality in the world before, China undoubtedly understands and appreciates the African condition of political and economic marginality in a troubled and troubling world. Even as they are at the level of political rhetoric, China’s Nos and Yeses in its relations with Africa look and sound liberating and empowering.
Niccolo Machiavelli warned that those that seek to lead in the change to the order of things face danger, difficulty and much risk. They are opposed by those that enjoyed the old order of things and they get lazy and hesitant support from those that are likely to enjoy the new order of things. That is the trouble that Jinping is in. Euro-America resists the increasing world primacy of China and its growing influence in Africa.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from KwaMabusabesala Village, in Siyabuswa, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
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