adminCabral argues that culture when summed up creates history and that once a people’s culture is destroyed, there won’t be any history to talk about.
In the case of Africa, the oppressors destroyed the continent’s history by making the oppressed believe that their cultures are either evil or backward.
This is exactly why Chaka is not seen as a conqueror but a ruthless tribesman who wantonly killed and drove out other tribes. Compare Chaka with Napoleon who is described as Napoleon the Great.
And when our children are taught history lessons, they will admire Napoleon more than they would do Chaka because of how each conqueror is treated in cultural and historical terms. Today, our women die to be thin because, according to Western culture, beauty is in being slim. African cultures elsewhere admire big women.
Another great son of Africa, Frantz Fanon took another dimension to how culture contributes to a whole person and how the destruction of such equally leads to lost generations.
In his speech delivered at the Congress of Black African Writers in 1959 and included as a chapter in his book, “Wretched of the Earth”, Fanon states that colonial domination “disrupts in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people”.
The speech titled, ‘Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom’, Fanon further says that most oppressed people easily allow their cultures to die because they negate “national reality by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts . . . by expropriation and by the systematic enslaving of men and women”.
“Every effort is made to bring the colonised person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behaviour, to recognise the unreality of his ‘nation’, and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure,” Fanon writes.
Consider this: Your grandfather dies and when his spirit returns, Christianity declares it an evil spirit but Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead after three days yet is seen as having overcome death.
It’s neither here nor there that your grandfather comes back in spirit and that Jesus Christ is said to have risen in his physical form — the bottom line is both died and came back.
According to Fanon, the laughing stock among the oppressed peoples are those within the intellectual group who “throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavourably criticising his own national culture, or else takes refuge in setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a way that is passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive”.
“The common nature of these two reactions lies in the fact that they both lead to impossible contradictions. Whether a turncoat or a substantialist, the native is ineffectual precisely because the analysis of the colonial situation is not carried out on strict lines.
“The colonial situation calls a halt to national culture in almost every field. Within the framework of colonial domination there is not and there will never be such phenomena as new cultural departures or changes in the national culture. Here and there valiant attempts are sometimes made to reanimate the cultural dynamic and to give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms and its tonalities,” Fanon points out.
Just like Cabral, Fanon also says when the oppressor condemns a culture and a people keep on it, this action is viewed as resistance to domination.
During the war of liberation for Zimbabwe, for example, the guerrillas believed that the spirit of Nehanda Nyakasikana and Sekuru Kaguvi — the doyens of the first Chimurenga — always led them.
This belief came from what Nehanda is said to have prophesied shortly before she was executed. It’s said Nehanda said her bones would one day come alive to fight back. This cultural aspect — the belief in the power of dead — was seen by the oppressors as a threat. It was for this very reason that mbira as both an instrument and music were banned in Rhodesia.
It’s not only in Zimbabwe where the spirit of the dead was called upon as a pillar of strength but in South Africa too where the deaths of Robert Sobukwe as well as many others was exhorted in times of great need.
So in order to destroy the spirit of rebellion, the oppressor makes sure that the cultural aspect of it which gives people a common phenomenon dies first.
And we have allowed this to happen in Africa. But culture does not die completely because when a people fight back to regain their freedom, they still dig deeper into their core beliefs.
Fanon talks about how the absence of national cultures also affects the struggle for liberation in Africa and how the few countries and peoples who cling onto remnants of their culture are made redundant by disinterest and non-participation of the majority. This still affects Africa and the African today.
Culture is like glue that keeps a people together. That is why Chinese, Koreans and even Americans have strong sense of nationality than most of us in Africa.
Apart from gluing a people together regardless of their ethnicity, culture also engenders a sense of pride such that all peoples feel unsafe once their country is under threat. Take the USA, for example, injury to one is regarded an injury to all. But in Africa, opposition parties would rather take a different opinion to that of the ruling party just for the sake of being the opposition.
There is no national pride in policies which benefit the very people African opposition parties claim to represent. In fact, Fanon argues, that colonial domination “disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people”.
“This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women,” he writes.
Fanon also says where people should be dynamic in pushing for national issues and changes; the absence of culture makes it impossible for them to do so as an entity.
In other words, where the natives think they would have made strides in development and progress the fact would be that they had not gotten anywhere.
“The immediate, palpable and obvious interest of such leaps ahead is nil. But if we follow up the consequences to the very end we see that preparations are being thus made to brush the cobwebs off national consciousness to question oppression and to open up the struggle for freedom,” he explains.
Once a people adopts another people’s culture just like what most of us in Africa have done, it becomes unimportant to fight for freedom because we would have become part of what we want to fight against.
In the event that there are people who still pursue some culture, Fanon says such actions will become just ‘a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress and a few broken-down institutions’.
This is apparent in Swaziland, for example, where dress still remains the core of a culture that has long been gone. It can also be seen in Namibia where the Herero in particular maintain a distinct dress code which has everything to do with the former colonial master. Even the Zulu in South Africa maintain a dress code and a few cultural traits that benefit just a few people within the society. These are just cores which, according to Fanon, are “remnants of culture” with no “real creativity and no overflowing life”.
He says such clinging to a “culture which is becoming more and more shrivelled up, inert and empty” withers away ‘the reality of the nation and the death-pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependences’.
“After a century of colonial domination we find a culture which is rigid in the extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata.
“Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing.”
But, Fanon, adds, such negation of national culture contributes to aggression, “The negation of the native’s culture, the contempt for any manifestation of culture whether active or emotional and the placing outside the pale of all specialised branches of organisation contribute to breed aggressive patterns of conduct in the native.” Still because of lack of a national culture, such aggression is “poorly differentiated, anarchic and ineffective”. The African intelligentsia, according to Fanon, resorted to literature in an effort to address the absence of national cultures. — The Southern Times.
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