Leopold Senghor

Minkah Makalani notes that although Pan-Africanism actually reflects a range of political views, at a basic level, it is a belief that African peoples, both on the African continent and in the Diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny. This sense of interconnected pasts and futures provides the rich tapestry of narratives to shore up this evolved African consciousness. This discourse then comes half a century into the independence of its states and two decades into the lives of post liberated states on the continent. Against the background of the pristine visions of the futures of Africa adumbrated two hundred years ago, it can be surmised that independence set Africa back by consolidating a curse of the division of its peoples setting them against each other within the states that by 1963 had decided the false logic of colonial expropriation and division of Africa.

It comes almost two hundred years since a young black Methodist minister, Richard Allen, along with another black clergyman, Absalom Jones, in 1787 rebelled against the Church and established the Free African Society. This benevolent organization held religious services and mutual aid for “free Africans and their descendants” in Philadelphia. This early enterprise reflected an expansive worldview and an African consciousness evident also in Allen’s support for emigration back to Africa and Haiti. That impulse toward an African identity was also apparent in the religious practices of enslaved people throughout the Americas, who tended to develop syncretic religions that blended African deities and belief systems with Christianity and Catholicism, giving rise to Santería in Cuba, Vodun in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and Candomblé in Brazi. Another important political form of a religious Pan-Africanist worldview appeared in the form of Ethiopianism.

South Africa was thickly in the midst of the distillation of these dominant and organic African consciousness. Makalani specifies that Ethiopianism assumed institutional form in southern Africa in the late-1800s, following visits from the African Methodist Episcopal Church, especially Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. He identifies two groups, one led by Joseph Mathunye Kanyane Napo in 1888, the other by Mangena Maake Mokone that in 1892 broke from the Anglican and Methodist churches. Mokone established the Ethiopian Church in 1892, which joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church four years later. This led to several South Africans visiting the United States and attending historically black colleges, including some of the earliest leaders of the African Native National Congress. Ethiopianism was also believed to have played a role in the 1906 Natal Zulu Rebellion.

Thomas Sankara

The depth of these sentiments is reflected in the 1944 Manifesto of the Youth wing of the African National Congress clearly advancing that the African regards the Universe as one composite whole; an organic entity, progressively driving towards greater harmony and unity whose individual parts exist merely as interdependent aspects of one whole realising their fullest life in the corporate life where communal contentment is the absolute measure of values. His philosophy of life strives towards unity and aggregation; towards greater social responsibility. While this was in the specific context of South Africa, it indeed could be extended to the understanding that the unity of Africa is integral to the unity of the world. In fact the first two paragraphs of the preamble of the 1944 Constitution of the ANC Youth League was explicit that WHEREAS Africanism must be promoted i.e. Africans must struggle for development, progress and national liberation so as to occupy their rightful and honourable place among nations of the world; AND WHEREAS African Youth must be united, consolidated, trained and disciplined because from their ranks future leaders will be recruited. This organic African ferment of the late nineteen century was extirpated by the interaction of human foibles of Africa’s early leaders and historical exigencies that was integral to the process leading to all manners of independence across the continent.

But before we delve into the curse of the post-colonial African state and its equally and inevitable complicit states system, let us touch on the concept of modernity as it is central to the evolution, the ceaseless adaptations, of the Westaphalian states system from its heuristic conceptualization to the four or even five main classes of states clearly differentiated by the evolutionary trajectory of the Modern Westphalian state to the Post-modern states, as well as the fixations in time and orientations of a mechanically created post colonial state in Africa, including the retrograde pre Westaphalian state in Asia that are unable to delineate between the secular and the metaphysical in state affairs and national life.

It is crucial at this point to capture one of the most outstanding insights that have emerged from interrogative explorations in the understanding of the process of modernity. In this we fall back to Marshall Berman, via a Perry Anderson review of his work, All that is Solid Melts into Air.

Modernism, Modernity, Modernization

Anderson captures Berman’s essential definition that modernity is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. He calls this body of experience “modernity”. Modernity thrusts us in a paradoxical environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Berman postulated that modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But he emphasizes that it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air”.

What generates this maelstrom? For Berman, it is a host of social processes—he lists scientific discoveries, industrial upheavals, demographic transformations, urban expansions, national states, mass movements—all propelled, in the last instance, by the ‘ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating’ capitalist world market. These processes he calls, for convenient short-hand, socio-economic modernization. Out of the experience born of modernization, in turn has emerged what he describes as the ‘amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own’—‘visions and values that have come to be loosely grouped together under the name of “modernism” ’. …

Anderson concludes that the intention of Berman was to reveal the ‘dialectics of modernization and modernism’. Again, he surmises that between these two demarcations lies the key middle term of modernity itself—neither economic process nor cultural vision but the historical experience mediating the one to the other. What constitutes the nature of the linkage between them? Essentially, for Berman, it is development.

Again for Africa, what has been the nature of the modernization process and the strand of its peculiar modernity. What has been the historical experience on which to predicate a realistic prognosis in 2016 of the futures of Africa and its peoples? What are the visions and values that have come to be loosely grouped together in the last half century of independence and the two decades of post liberation era in Africa. Kleptomania, illicit financial outflows, personal appropriations of national patrimony, civilian coup d’etat against the peoples of the continent, the institutionalization of dynastic rule, a penchant of continental leadership to move in droves from Washington to Paris, Peking to New Delhi with supplicating bowls of dignified beggars. last time they were in Delhi, each of them receive U$ 10 million on the average. Africa’s distorted modernity is the result of a two level game. This game drives the conspiracies of a largely discredited leadership and their external neo-colonial backers. The phenomenon is aptly codified in classic theoretical edifices propounded by Immanuel Wallenstein, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Enzo Falleto of the Dependencia School that is also integral to the World System theory articulated by Immanuel Wallenstain. Their kindred spirits in Africa include the Mahmood Mamdanis and Edwin Madunagus.

Meanwhile, most would agree that if we are to understand the 21st-century social world we must come to grips with the concept of globalization. The concept reflects another successful foray of classical modernization school to appropriate and vacate key concepts from the radical intellectual orientation of their meanings.Among those who share this view of globalization and reject new paradigmatic thinking on the current age is Immanuel Wallerstein, the world-renowned sociologist and ‘father’ of the world system paradigm. World-system theory, however, started out not as a theory of globalization but of development. In the late 1950s, the field of development was dominated by the modernization school, which came under attack from the dependencia theories and other radical Third World approaches to international inequalities. Wallerstein’s colleague the late Giovanni Arrighi observed that ‘world-systems analysis as a distinctive sociological paradigm emerged at least 15 years before the use of globalization as a signifier that blazed across the headlines and exploded as a subject of academic research and publication. Globalization as a concept defanged world systems and turned around the focus

In this globalized ferment, do the entrenched visions of the futures of a prostrate and ever supplicant Africa and values on which they are anchored constitute a legitimate brand of modernism? The subversion of legitimated visions and values are iterated in the One Party state/One Man state (OPs/OMs) that was ensconced in the classic patrimonial governance paradigm in the Cold War era, or the Post One Party State/Post One Man state (POMs/POPs) associated with the neo-patrimonial state in the era of post sovereign conferences. This transmogrification was witnessed immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of Apartheid in South Africa.

The end of Apartheid, what I have described elsewhere as the Post Mandela World Order, presented its very liberating moments for Africa. But, as usual, it was frittered away on the altar of the anti-climatic interfaces of human foibles with Africa’s post- independence, post-revolution historicity. Surveying the somber contemporaneous landscape, what defining and redeeming attributes demarcate the post-liberation societies of the post-revolutionary era in Africa from the pervasive systemic morass of those who got independence on a relatively golden platter. What a futile existential differentiation between Sassou Nguesso’s Congo Brazzaville, from the land of Marien Ngouabi, and Angola’s Augustiho Neto’s, a poetic visionary who extolled we the children of the bush sanzallas in the hands of Dos Santos and his globally infamous daughter, or even separate Amilcar Cabral’s Guinea Bissau from the Islamic Republic of the Gambia next door.

For emphasis, you heard me right-the Islamic Republic of Gambia in the heart of West Africa- the probable home to the ancestors of Absalom Jones and Cyril Allen. Or Sedar Senghor’s negritude Senegal from Blaise Compaore’s, a treacherous assassin of Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso. What separates Liberia’s Charles Gankay Taylor from his ultimate nemesis Olusegun Aremu Okikiolu Obasanjo’s Nigeria? And then Mobutu Sese Seko, Idi Amin, Sani Abacha, Musa Traore, Blaise Compaore, Gnassingbe Etienne Eyadema, Jean-Bedel Bokassa. These purveyors of infamy in the arena post-colonial African state are legion. Even the icons of our peoples’ revolutions have been struck and deformed by the catatonic illogic of Africa’s post-coloniality or, as some rightly remind us, of Africa’s neo-coloniality.

Resulting from the pervasive fixations with these African entrenched depreciations of authentic values, let us introduce the Africa of today as presented in a new three volume encyclopedia on Africa: An Encyclopedia of Culture and Society.

At 11.67 million square miles, Africa is the second largest continent on earth, encompassing just over one-fifth of the planet’s landmass. Residents of Africa represent fully one seventh of the total world population, and population growth estimates routinely project expansion beyond two billion by the end of the century. Despite these facts, popular, and even academic, treatments of Africa often leave much to be desired. In popular media, Africa is rarely favored with mention, except in cases of war, famine, or disease. Africans are regularly caricatured as simple, backward, and inherently prone to lawlessness and violence. Such an image reduces Africans to hopeless victims of environmental, cultural, and even biological determinism. Such an image of Africa risks echoing the worst prejudices that have been hauled at the continent-claims of inferiority and helplessness that have been used to justify economic exploitation, colonial conquest, and slavery

This represents the fervent candour of African intellectuals in the Diaspora. Indeed, Africa presents tragic paradoxes. Alarmingly, the reality is that most of Africa is perpetually in conflict, lawlessness and societal collapse, and vulnerable to the ravages of disease and natural disasters. African states are the world’s poorest, weakest and most artificial states launched into the international arena, raising questions as to how such states have managed to survive. The question has also been asked as to what extent the survival of those states is now threatened. Yet long term solutions to Africa’s crises remain as elusive as they are essential. Whole sub-regions in Africa are in chaos. At the start of the new millennium, crises and wars were raging in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal in West Africa; the Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo (Brazzaville), and Central African Republic in Central Africa; Angola in the East; and Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea in the north and the Horn of Africa. Tribal, religious, economic and political tensions threatened to precipitate new bloodshed in Burundi, Nigeria, Guinea Bissau, Cameroun, Guinea Conakry and Zimbabwe. The Westphalian, domestic sovereignty of the post-colonial African state is often being challenged, even as its international legal sovereignty is compromised and fragile. Because of the illogic behind the construction of the post colonial African state, attempts to forge nations out of them continue to flounder.