Trend of ideas in African Intellectual history: Who is right

How the African Intellectuals used Culture in the Different Phases of Struggle for Equality

The notion of culture in African intellectual history was understood and used by African intellectuals in three distinctive phases.

As used by Blyden, culture was an important tool for creating consciousness among the West African Communities. This was to be achieved by fostering pride in culture and the history of race. His entry points were that the Negro was endowed with special attributes, and that Africans customs and institutions represented a significant aspect of character of a race. In this line, Blyden envisioned culture, as the solid foundation on which his would be West African federation will rest. Though he treated Europeans interactions with Africans as a necessary evil because of his belief that Europeans will inadvertently served Africans in the process of serving their (Europeans) interest, Blyden fear that African culture risk obliteration in the hands of the Europeans prompted him to scathingly attack the missionary.

He criticized them for seeking to Europeanize Africans and thus thwarts the development of the African personality. He charged them of creating unnecessary sectarian divisions among Africans and of disparaging and destroying African customs and institutions which were useful and which were not incompatible with the highest tenets of Christianity.

Implicit in this criticism of European missionaries for allegedly destroying African culture was the understanding of culture as the leeway where the cardinal characteristics of the Negro race could be preserved against the onslaught of Christian missionaries. These characteristics were articulated in his claim that African social system was socialist, cooperative and equitable, all of which according to him were conspicuously absent in the European societies. Blyden encouraged the formation of independent Churches as the antidote to Europeans cultural menace. Here, culture was used as the rallying point in the quest for racial identity.

As you used during the colonial era, culture was used by African intellectuals to grapple with an idea of the quest for nationhood under the colonial rule. Given that colonial project was cast on the cultural moulds that emphasized European cultural superiority, Africans intellectual were left with no options other than to resort to the intellectual engagement in their attempt to find their cultural roots. One notable product of these attempts was Negritude defined by Senghor as “the sum of the cultural values of the black world; that is a certain active presence in the world, or better in the universe…it is essentially relating with others, an opening out to the world of contact and participation with others”. As a cultural movement, Negritude was presented as the movement of the entire black world regardless of where black people lived. This was done under the assumption that most of the problems faced by black people both in Africa and in Diaspora were the products of the Europeans belief that Africans have no culture. It was also a response to the policy of assimilation in which Africans were considered civilized only after they have demonstrated proficiency in French and renounced their culture.

In a sense, if colonial authorities were diminishing the existence of African culture in order to justify colonial project as the “civilizing mission”, African intellectuals on the other hand were determined to assert the existence of the glorious past and of African beliefs and traditions. African intellectuals who ascribed to Negritude understood that it was only in culture that they would be able to redeem the lost pride of Africa. They were preoccupied with the task of proving that Africa had something to celebrate in its past. Negritude thus, represent the movement towards recovery of a certain sense of spiritual integrity by the black man, as the definition of a black collective identity, as well as a new world view derived from a new feeling for the African heritage of values and experience. The reliance on arts is the demonstration of this.

If the intellectuals during the pre-colonial and colonial periods were concerned with culture, their concerns were limited to the theoretical levels. In postcolonial Africa, intellectuals were concerned with the praxis of African culture as opposed to its theoretical aspects. One of those intellectuals who rose to the challenge in quest for development model in the newly independent Tanganyika was Nyerere with his notion of African Socialism. Nyerere expounded on his idea of African socialism by arguing that Ujamaa, which means family-hood was the basis for African socialism. He asserted that family-hood described our socialism, it is opposed to capitalism, which seeks to build a happy society on the basis of exploitation of man by man; and it is equally opposed to doctrinaire socialism which seeks to build its happy society on a philosophy of inevitable conflict between man and man. In Nyerere’s view, culture is the fountain that African intellectuals should draw from in their pursuit for practical solutions to the problems facing them in their newly independent countries. Modern African Socialism, Nyerere said, can draw from its traditional heritage, the recognition of the society as an extension of the basic family unit. Embodied in the call to look back to African traditions in search for answers to problems facing Africans in terms of development was the outright rejection of the application of the foreign concepts such as Capitalism and Socialism. Instead, Nyerere extolled the egalitarian nature of the past African societies, their redistributive dispositions and their cooperative tendencies and called for intellectuals to retrace their steps in search for these lost African attributes.

In these three phases, there is no doubt that the idea of African culture was articulated in the quest for ideas that were foreign to African setting. For example the nation state is the Europeans concept and pursuing it in the name of African culture is antithetical to the whole idea. In that effect, this means what the African intellectuals did in these three phases was to recast European concepts to suit their political aspirations. It is this tension that later led to the disparagement of African culture by other intellectuals for its inadequacy in meeting the real challenges and its failure to acknowledge historical discontinuities.

Among the intellectuals who criticized African culture for its lack of pragmatism are Fanon, Mphahlele and Irele.Fanon take on African culture is that it was devoid of action. He refused the accommodationists approach of harmonious co-existence of black and whites. Instead, he claimed that there is no future in the world for black and whites on the basis of racial equality and mutual respect as the accommodationists like Blyden had postulated. To him the liberal conceptions of equality in which Blyden drew most of his argument were meaningless slogans that drain the black man of the will to act, which make him not to achieve a full consciousness of his total degradation. Here, Fanon rejects the compromise inherent in the accommodation approach.

On Negritude, Fanon acknowledged that it is an understandable reaction to the white man cultural arrogance. However, he at the same time raised doubts on its viability on answering the black man’s predicaments. Fanon’s reservations on Negritude were based on two things. The first was that he saw Negritude as a barren narcissism, which was grossly inadequate for the redemption of the black man. According to Fanon, Negritude tackles white racism at the level where it is least likely to get the results. This is because Negritude tends to skirt around the real cause of racism, which is the white man’s desire to exploit the black man economically.

Secondly, he saw Negritude as a diversionary ideology for the same reasons that it confined the black man on the realm of art festivals and does nothing to prevent the white man from exploiting the black man mineral resources.

For Mphahlele, the idea of African personality championed by Blyden had serious shortcomings one of which was the insistence of cultural pride or independence as a prerequisite or even as a substitute for, a political action.

Moreover, Mphahlele considered elitist the version of the African personality articulated by Bylden. He posited African personality at the level he referred to as the common man level. At this level, he observed, we can see the concept in terms of the African as he is, of what is happening to him, which may help us arrived at what he should be. In choosing to define African personality at the layman level, Mphahlele tends to emphasize regional specificities. He tended to discard the very relevance of any pan-African cultural homogeneity. His desire for the emphasis on cultural heterogeneity in tackling African problems came out clearly in the way he rejected Negritude as an artistic program which is unworkable for modern Africa. He gave an example of how pan-African ideas cannot work in modern African, in the case of Southern Africa. “In Southern Africa, the black writer talks best about the ghetto life he knows; the white writer best about his own ghetto life. We see each other, black and white, as it were through a keyhole.” Mphahlele seem to suggest that African intellectuals need not spend time on grand ideas of African personality at the continental level, they should instead, start from what they know best if they were to be relevant.

On the part of Abiola, he accused those who still evoke the idea of African culture in the political and economic circles of hypocrisy and failure to acknowledge the historical discontinuities. To him, colonialism had left an indelible mark on the African ways of life, which cannot be erased under any circumstance. His charged of hypocrisy emanate from the fact that most political institutions in African are fashioned after the European system of government. He cited that most African countries are democratic republics with written constitutions, a legal document which is the source of legitimacy in the modern political system. With these institutions in place, talking about African culture as the replacement to what African is already operating on is out of touch with reality according to Abiola.

He contended also that the idea of African culture is susceptible to manipulations for motives that have nothing to do with genuine respect for African way of life. In Irele words, “This kind of manipulation has attained a remarkable level of cynicism in politics of some African states-popular attention is diverted to wearing of leopard skins over the safari suit, the whole sale adoption of indigenous names, animation of traditional dancing, while the serious business of holding onto power and amassing fabulous wealth goes on elsewhere.” Here, the appeal to tradition as a sham of serving political ends smacked hypocrisy in Irele’s opinion.

The Role Played by the Intellectuals in the struggle for independence and in post-colonial Africa

During the struggle against colonialism, many intellectuals were preoccupied with the reflection and interpretation of the revolutionary sentiment among the masses. These intellectuals according to Ngugi realigned themselves with the deepest aspirations of the society at that time, but did not always understand the true dimensions of those aspirations, or rather did not always adequately evaluate the real enemy of these aspirations. The principal reason behind their inability to identify the real enemy of people’s aspirations was that imperialism was seen in terms of the skin pigmentation of the colonizers. The very organization of the colonial society in which social rewards and punishment were carefully structured on the mystique of color according to Ngugi, led to a situation in which exploitation was justified under the images of blacks and whites. And this made it easier for politicians and intellectuals alike to easily cast anti-colonial struggle along the color lines.In a sense, what intellectuals in this era were celebrating in their writings was the departure of Whiteman with the implied hope that the incoming black man by virtue of his blackness would right the wrong and heal the wounds of centuries of slavery and colonialism. This postulation of inherent conflict of values between Africans and Europeans allegedly responsible for the ills meted out against Africans made the intellectuals at the threshold of independence to ignore the existence of disparate values in Africa. However, it did not take long for the euphoric celebration of the Whiteman’s departure to die down, because it was realized that the middle class who took over from colonists was bent on maintaining the status quo. “New style imperialism was dependent on the maturing class of natives, already conceived and born by colonialism whose positions and aspirations as a group were not in any fundamental conflict with money juggling classes…the real centres of power like Zurich, the City of London and Wall Street.”

As a result of this realization, the definition of an intellectual shifted to mean ardent critics of the classes who reneged on the nobles goals African fought for, and instead chose to be intermediaries of the newly metamorphosed imperialism. The intellectual, who emerged during this era, took a critical stance against the anti-national, anti-democratic, neo-colonial character of the rulings. According to Ngugi, he began to connect these ills not just to the moral failings or otherwise of this or that ruler, but to the perpetuation of imperialist domination through comprador ruling classes in Africa. In this era, the writers or the intellectuals took imperialism seriously and began to disparage internal classes for forming alliances with the new companies of profiteers that were sanctioned by the imperialists. This tenacious step to ally with the people by the intellectuals presented them with a dilemma. This is because; joining the people against class struggle is tantamount to antagonizing the state, which comes with the consequence of imprisonment or banishment. Alternatively, the intellectual can opt to be the state functionary and cease to be one. Despite this conundrum facing the intellectual, Ngugi asserted that the African writer now, the one who opts for becoming an integral part of the African revolution, has no choice but that of aligning himself with the people: their economic, political and cultural struggle for survival.

Fanon was in deed an example of the intellectual of the late 1960s described by Ngugi. He noted the vulnerability of the Nationalists Parties led by the middle class intellectuals against the onslaught of neo-colonialism. His reservation came from his principle that the colonists were aware of the middle class party’s lack of a popular base, and was not in touch with peasantry who comprised ninety percent of they people. As long as political sovereignty was not bestowed upon the peasants, the middle class with it opportunistic instincts would cheat the masses out of the fruits of independence through the formation of alliance with the imperialists. The truth is that, short of armed struggle and the investing of political sovereignty in the masses and their leaders, the pattern that has developed in Africa is that as soon as the middle classes got control of political power, they proceeded to run the state much in the same way that the departing imperialists had done before them, calling up for support the same repressive legislations, using the same instruments of coercion to ensure perpetuity in office, and avoiding the disturbance of bureaucratic structure as much as possible, that to all intents and purposes, nothing much would change except that the color of the new ruler is black where that of the colonialists was white.

Among the reasons he articulated to shore up is argument that the roots of a true revolution in Africa lies in the village and not in the city were; first, the peasants constitute more than three quarters of the entire population, secondly, the peasants were the less affected by colonial culture which has the effect of devitalizing the African personality, and thirdly, the peasants have gained less from the colonial social structure and are therefore ever ready, once sufficiently aroused, to tear down colonial edifice, without looking back. To Fanon, an intellectual is someone who guides the masses in their quest for a genuine political independence based on popular sovereignty controlled by the peasant. Both Fanon and Ngugi looked at an intellectual as someone who helps in raising consciousness in peasants and channeled their resentment towards political elites who abet their exploitation.

Irele on the other hand, scorned upon the idea of cultural nationalism that African intellectuals were preoccupying themselves with in all its forms. He instead proposed that the only way out for Africa to extricate itself from her present alienation is through rapid adoption of values enshrined in the scientific methods, organization, discipline and order. In other words, the role of an intellectual in Irele’s conception is to clarify to the masses that there is nothing inherently bad in adopting Western values. If we can accept the scientific and technological civilization which has come down to us, historically from Europe we can improve the quality of our lives, if we can accept that our modern institutions should be based on political and social ideas articulated elsewhere, there is no reason why we should exclude from our acceptance other valuable areas of experience simple because of their association with Europe. If Ngugi and Fanon saw the true liberation of Africa in the impoverished masses or peasants, Irele stance radically differed from theirs because it obliquely suggests that the true liberation of Africa lies in petty bourgeoisie. It goes without saying that emulating Europe’s civilization means accepting distinct classes in society, that is to say upper class, middle class and lower class, a conception, which is antithesis to the ideas of Fanon and Ngugi. This is because; Irele line of argument is not different from that of elitist middle class who took power immediately after independence.

The Future of the African Intellectual History

Trapped in the binary of West versus South, African intellectual history will not radically shift from the problems it obsessed itself with since the era of anti-colonial struggle. After independence, the intellectuals after being disappointed by the elites who took power concentrated their criticism on neo-colonialism or imperialists attempt to control independent African states economically through alliance formation with the petty bourgeoisie in Africa. The way forward for these intellectuals was to raise consciousness in the masses to take control of their lives through revolutionary struggle. T

his appeal to the masses led to civil wars, changes in government through military takeovers and no apparent change was achieved. The wave of democratization that swept across Africa at the end of Cold War did not empower the masses. Corruptions still rein supreme in most African countries at a time when democracy was supposed to make these leaders account for their actions.The aid regime with its conditionalities has become the contemporary analogue of imperialism condemned by African intellectuals in 1970s. It subverts the tenets of democracy because the conditions attached to aid, such as the roll back of the state from services provision and the retrenchment of government employees shift the accountability of the elected officials from the electorates to donors, who happened to be westerners. Since the majority of the affected by these policies happened to be the poor, the task of African intellectuals will be to criticize the system and at the same raised the awareness among the peasants on their democratic rights.