Former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s famous speech, “I am an African” has invited many questions. Chief among these questions is the fundamental question concerning the reason why an African will find it necessary to declare that he or she is an African when it should be an obvious matter of fact. One of the many answers to this troubling question is that there is so much trouble about being African in the present world to the extent that one has to declare or defend the identity. This answer arises from the reality that over the centuries something fundamental has happened to Africa and to Africans. So fundamental this is that being African in Africa, philosophically, is a question rather than an answer. Africa and Africanity are questionable and are put to question because of the history of conquest and coloniality that has put the very humanity of Africans into question and the very historicity and reality of Africa into doubt. To admit that Africa is a continent, and that Africans are people, in world history and in the world system, is to admit a lot including that slavery and colonialism were a major crime against humanity for which Africans must demand reparations and other sizes and shapes of justice. Archie Mafeje put it to us that “we were not going to talk about Africanity if Africanity was not, in the first place, negated.” As such, declaring or else defending that one is an African may be an act of decolonial defiance, even if it may be a cry of the condemned and the defeated, the wretched of the earth.
What exactly happened to Africaand Africans?
African voices amongst political leaders, philosophers, historians and political activists have described what happened to Africa and Africans. The question, however, to benefit from Karl Marx, is to change the condition, the destiny and heritage of Africa, and that of Africans. I recall Chinua Achebe proclaiming that there is no authentic African that may forget the ‘colonial wound’ that bleeds on the body-politic of the continent. Mahmood Mamdani described Africa as that which was first defined by the conquerors so that it could be conveniently ruled. It is for that reason that Valentin Mudimbe wrote of the colonial “invention of Africa” where the conquerors manufactured Africa into their object and produced Africans themselves into their subjects that could be oppressed, exploited and marginalised at the same time.
Walter Rodney achieved intellectual celebrity with the detailed and erudite way in which he described ‘how Europe’ systemically and structurally ‘underdeveloped Africa,’ and rendered Africans into a collective of displaced, dispossessed and impoverished people. Because of that historical misfortune and unfortunate condition of Africa, Magobe Ramose swore that he will only accept being called an African under protest.
This he said was because even the name Africa is not African as it is a name that the continent and its people were given by their conquerors. That the name Africa is not African is, to me, as paradoxical as the theological truism that Jesus Christ was not a Christian. Africans have not run out of the diction and the vocabulary to describe and name what happened to them and the enduring question is if Africans will one day agree on the Leninian question of “what is to be done” to recover Africa from coloniality and restore the continent and its people to the natural and just condition of liberation. Conquest and domination, oppression and exploitation, have so defined the African condition to the extent that even some very bright Africans have resigned to the belief that the condition of African is normal and natural as it is.It is one of the intellectual and political projects of decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation to awaken Africans to the fact that the condition of coloniality that weighs down upon Africa is abnormal, unnatural, unjust, and that it must be overturned by any means necessary.
Kenyan philosopher, John Mbiti, complained that Africans were not only ‘notoriously religious’ but that Africa had become a dumping ground for foreign gods and foreign religions. Here Africans are seen as priests, pastors, prophets and other preachers that have become more religious than those who gave the gods and the religions in the first place. To Mbiti, theologically, Africa must step back towards its own religions and spiritually or wonder on as a cursed continent of an uprooted people.
Who fundamentally is an African?
As unfortunate, abnormal and unnatural as the condition of Africa is, being African is a much-claimed identity and possession. So many people of different identities coming from different geographic locations and directions claim to be Africans of Africa. This is so deep to the extent that scholars have spilt much ink trying to define what exactly, and who exactly is an African. When Kwame Nkrumah said an African is not only the one that was born in Africa but also one who had African born inside him, he meant that being African is as biological as it was geographic, a physical and metaphysical reality. Those that are not biologically African, even if they are geographically African, in that sense, become Africanists but may not be Africans. They may have research interest and even economic and political interests in Africa, but those interests may not make them African; it is believed. There are what can be called ‘orphans of Empire’ in Africa that came as conquerors, missionaries, merchants and Empire-builders and never went back to where they came from and remained in Africa called Africans and calling themselves as such.
If Peter Tosh were to be believed as telling truth when he sang that “no matter where you come from as long as you are a black man, you are an African” then being African is a racial and phenotypical category. More complicated is that if we believe it to be true that Africa is the cradle of humanity then we must also believe that all human beings are Africans because all humanity was born in Africa. In that sense, the conquerors and settlers of Africa may claim to have been returning home to Mother Africa, even if they returned with much violence. One must confess that the question of who is an African and who is not remains exactly that, a question, and a stubborn and durable one.
Nation-state laws and regulations as imposed by colonialism upon Africa simplify the question of who is an African and who is not. In that system an African is the one that holds the citizenship of any African country. In that sense many individuals from outside the African continent have become more African than many individuals that were born in Africa and had Africa born in them.
Decolonial Pan-Africanism
Africa must be liberated from its unfortunate condition of coloniality. That is the sense and essence of decoloniality in Africa, in my view. Decoloniality in the sense of undoing what conquest and coloniality did to Africa and Africans means that Africa must be liberated from an abnormal and unnatural condition. As such, a liberated Africa will be an Africa that is free of colonial borders and maps. An African where there is no African who is a foreigner in Africa. That will be an Africa that enjoys political and economic unity, and where Africans enjoy unity in diversity, and is a force to be reckoned with in the world economy and polity.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of Free State. This article is an abridged version of a Keynote Address before the International Conference on African Heritage by the Department of Religion Studies, University of the Free State, in collaboration with the Academy of African Indigenous Religions, Theology, and Arts, and Pan-African Strategic and Policy Research Group, on 28 October 2022. – Sunday News
