False narratives hamper Africa's development, while dangerous new ideologies flood in from the outside.
By GEORGE AYITTEY
Africa as we know it
is a fiction, constructed after the arrival of Arab and European slave
traders, at which point the continent had already experienced millennia
of cultural and civilizational developments. That history was largely
unwritten and therefore lost. Africa in the past century was governed by
rulers, both colonial and postcolonial, who didn't know where she came
from. Artificial borders and alien political structures were set up to
govern her peoples. Rebellion, instability and economic stagnation
followed. Though the leaders have changed repeatedly, the results have
remained the same.
Consider Nigeria. The country had its
borders drawn by the British in 1914, with little regard for ethnic and
social cohesion among its hundreds of tribes. After independence in
1960, the Brits rigged the first election to ensure that power went to
the conservative elements in the north, who came to believe that it was
their natural right to rule Nigeria. In subsequent years, the country
was racked by ethnic strife, secession and civil war. No Nigerian
statesman was able to reach across to other tribes. And while the
country has regained stability in recent years, its path to development
today is hampered by corruption, misrule and the rise of radical Islam.
Of Africa
By Wole Soyinka
Yale, 199 pages, $24
Nigeria
stands in for Africa's broader plight, and it is fitting that books by
two Nigerian authors—the Nobel-winning playwright and poet Wole Soyinka
and the celebrated novelist Chinua Achebe—attempt to confront the
historical and spiritual roots of Africa's crisis. The authors—among
Africa's greatest intellectual giants—have been consistent and
courageous critics of misrule on the continent for decades, stances
which put their lives at risk and forced them to flee their native
country. Both authors see hope in Africa's indigenous religious and
political traditions.
Mr. Soyinka is "frustrated" by the
false narratives of the continent, as well by the dangerous new
ideologies flooding in from the outside. "Of Africa" is an
intellectually robust, book-length essay that attempts to unravel the
paradoxes and contradictions plaguing Nigeria and, by extension, Africa.
"What is Africa?" the author asks. What we know of the continent is
based on mythologies propagated by the early European adventurers,
colonialists, postcolonial African leaders and African Americans.
The Arabs and the Europeans were
invaders, colonizers and enslavers, who imposed their alien religions on
Africa. Neither Islam nor Christianity, as Mr. Soyinka points out, is
indigenous to Africa. While the Europeans ran the trans-Atlantic slave
trade, the Arabs ran its north and east African counterparts. But, says
the author, the suppression or denial of the equally ugly history of
Arab and Islamic plundering in Africa—perhaps for reasons of political
correctness—has allowed a new threat to emerge: "a shadowy but lethal
force determined to reenslave a continent with its chains of
fundamentalist theology!" Radical Islam has taken root in places like
Mali, Somalia and Nigeria. Mr. Soyinka sees it as more dangerous than
the corrupt, secular dictatorships. The latter, he says, can be
confronted but "the chains placed around the mind through religious
absolutism are far more constrictive, tenacious, and implacable."
According to Mr. Soyinka, the pre-eminent African issue of the 21st
century will be a "crisis of religion," and he warns that if "Africa
falls to the will of the fanatic, then the insecurity of the world
should be accepted as its future and permanent condition."
Salvation, he thinks, can be found in
"the undiscovered—or neglected, indeed, despised—terrain of African
spirituality." He discusses "Negritude," a concept first formulated by,
among others, the American civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois to
refute racist claims of black inferiority and spotlight black
contributions to civilization. Among African intellectuals, Negritude
took hold in the 1930s. To Mr. Soyinka, it is an untapped resource of
African humanism. The anti-Apartheid icon Desmond Tutu describes a
similar concept when he talks about
ubuntu—"the bundle of humanity"—and Mr. Soyinka finds his own version in the traditional religion of his Yoruba culture, Orisa.
Mr. Soyinka's motivation for writing
"Of Africa" was his search for an African humanism that could counter
the deadly consequences of religious fanaticism. He urges Africans to
remember their continent's traditions and recognize that tolerance is at
the center of African spirituality.
There Was a Country
By Chinua Achebe
The Penguin Press, 333 pages, $27.95
Mr.
Achebe's book is a history and decidedly less ambitious, philosophically
speaking. But it, too, is driven by an ideal. "There Was a Country" is a
fascinating and gripping memoir of Biafra, the country his Igbo tribe
sought to create by seceding from Nigeria. In the first years after
Nigeria's independence from Britain in 1960, the Igbo, who hail from a
region in the country's southeast, were among the most successful of the
country's tribes. They had the highest literacy rate, the highest
standard of living and the greatest proportion of citizens with
postsecondary education among the tribes. They dominated senior
positions in government and educational institutions. Igbo success bred
resentment.
The fateful day was Jan. 15, 1966, when
Maj. Chukwuma Nzeogwu, an Igbo, led a group of army officers in an
attempt to overthrow the government. It was widely misinterpreted as an
"Igbo coup" and caused a backlash throughout Nigeria: "Thirty thousand
civilian men, women and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands
were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and
burned." There was a mass exodus of the Igbo from the north. Mr. Achebe
was working at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and had just
completed a novel, "A Man of the People," which severely criticized
Nigerian politics and climaxed in a coup. Being an Igbo, he was
naturally linked to the real coup under way. Drunken soldiers appeared
at the NBS to ask him which was more powerful: their gun or his pen. The
author wasn't yet at work, and, upon hearing this account, he fled.
On May 30, 1967, the Igbo declared
their own independent country, Biafra. (Mr. Achebe would serve as its
roving cultural ambassador.) But the Nigerian government reacted
savagely to the Igbo secession, blockading the region and starving the
rebel tribe into submission. Over three million perished, mostly Igbo,
before the end of the civil war in 1970. Mr. Achebe interweaves his own
history with a harrowing account of the war.
The end of Biafra didn't bring an end
to the pogroms against the Igbo, nor to Nigeria's problems. The country
became plagued with "a home-grown enemy: the political ineptitude,
mediocrity, indiscipline, ethnic bigotry, and corruption of the ruling
class," as Mr. Achebe writes. To resolve these problems, Mr. Achebe also
invokes the Negritude embedded in the
mbari of his own Igbo
culture, which emphasizes mutual respect and coexistence. "The Igbo
believe that art, religion, everything, the whole of life are embodied
in the art of the masquerade," Mr. Achebe says. It is the cosmic
masquerade that upholds the "virtues of African tolerance and
accommodation."
It is astonishing that two authors
writing from such different perspectives should conclude that the
solutions to Africa's problems can be found in Africa—her bosom, her
humanity—and that Africans must rebuild their own indigenous
institutions.
But Messrs. Soyinka and Achebe's focus
on Negritude is problematic. It is an idea that failed miserably. Its
first African proponent, the late president of Senegal Leopold Senghor,
thoroughly discredited the concept by using it to develop an "African
socialism" as an alternative to Marxism. Socialism is fundamentally
antithetical to Africa's economic heritage, which explains why it was a
disaster wherever it was implemented in Africa—in countries as varied as
Ghana, Guinea and Tanzania, for example—producing one economic crisis
after another. (When Senghor retired as president in 1980, he settled in
France with his French wife to focus on helping improve the French
language—some Negritude!)
Messrs. Soyinka and Achebe fail to
adequately explain the genesis of African spirituality. It stems from
the belief that man doesn't live alone in the universe, which Africans
divided into three elements: the sky, the world and the earth. Each
person has a specific place and function in this universe. Human action
corresponds to the animation of nature, and each gesture correlates with
some aspect of the universe. African art, dance, music and other human
activities are a reflection of the rhythms of the universe.
The three cosmological elements—each
represented by a god—must be in perfect harmony or balance. The sky god
is the supreme among them, and each must be propitiated. If the sky god
is "angry," there will be thunder, floods, etc. If the world god is
angry, there will be conflict, war and state collapse. If the earth god
is angry, there will be poor harvest, famine, barren women and the like.
The gods may take human, inanimate or spiritual forms, and there are
many intercessors—dead or alive—between man and the gods: ancestors,
kings, chiefs, priests, medicine men. All are arranged in a hierarchical
order. Among some tribes, harmony among the cosmological elements,
called
kiet, requires corresponding human behavior: tolerance,
accommodation, etc. (Mr. Achebe's Igbo, for instance, have no gods,
since any individual person is the union of the three elements.)
Religious intolerance and fanaticism thus have no place in the highest
ideals of the African soul, something noted by both Messrs. Soyinka and
Achebe. They wouldn't coexist in a religious system that seeks harmony
among the cosmological elements.
There are more than 2,000 African
ethnic groups but despite the incredible diversity there are striking
commonalities among them. Whereas Western jurisprudence emphasizes
punishing the guilty, the widespread African tradition stresses
restitution and reconciliation or "restorative justice"—the basis of
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions established after
the dismantling of Apartheid. Africa's economic heritage featured free
village markets. There were rudimentary free markets in Timbuktu, Kano,
Salaga, Onitsa, Mombasa and elsewhere before the advent of the colonial
era. Whereas the West practiced majoritarian, or representative,
democracy, ancient Africans practiced participatory democracy, where
decisions were taken by consensus at village meetings variously called
asetena kese by the Ashanti,
ama-ala by the Igbo,
guurti by the Somali,
dare by the Shona,
ndaba by the Zulu or
kgotla by the Tswana.
More important, the traditional system
of governance was inclusive. In Senegal, slaves could send the
representatives to the king's court. There was also foreign
representation: The kings and chiefs of Angola and Asante, for example,
allowed European merchants to send their representatives to their
courts. Many empires in pre-colonial Africa—Ghana, Mali, Songhai—were
confederacies, characterized by decentralization of power and devolution
of authority.
But much of this knowledge, as Mr.
Soyinka rightly complains, has been hidden. Myths about Africa came to
replace these truths, and the problem was compounded by the failure on
all sides to distinguish between form and substance. The institutions of
democracy, free markets, money, marriage, justice, can take many forms.
Just because there were no ballot boxes or supermarkets or white-wigged
judges in pre-colonial African villages doesn't mean Africans had no
conception of those institutions. African tribal cultures aren't in
conflict with the Western; only the forms of institutions are different.
In fact, there is one area where the
two share exactly the same political philosophy. Both see the state as a
necessary evil. The American founding fathers chose to deal with this
particular threat constitutionally by limiting the powers of the state.
Africans found two unique ways to accomplish the same. The first was to
abolish the state altogether and dispense with centralized authority.
Such acephalous, or stateless, societies included the Ga, the Igbo, the
Gikuyu, the Somali and the Tallensi. These tribes have no chiefs or
kings and took the concept of freedom to its most radical limit.
Other tribes chose to have states and
centralized authority but surrounded them with councils upon councils to
prevent them from abusing their powers. Such kings had no political
powers; their role was spiritual or supernatural (to mediate among the
cosmological elements). For this role, they were mostly secluded in
their palaces and kept their royal fingers out of people's business. The
Yoruba Oona, for example, could only venture out of his palace under
the cover of darkness. Such indigenous democratic forms were eroded
during the colonial age and decimated in the post-colonial one.
So what makes up Africa's soul?
Tolerance, consensus-building, inclusion, restorative justice,
decentralization of power, free village markets and free enterprise. The
gods are angry because Africa's soul has been denigrated and trashed.
As Messrs. Soyinka and Achebe warn us, Africa is doomed unless her
rulers discover her soul. Without this knowledge, we cannot traverse the
path to development. An African proverb says, "He who does not know
where he came from does not know where he is going."
