BY MULUGETA GUDETA
Africa is no doubt a mosaic of nations, ethnicities, linguistic diversity, religious or traditional values as well as transcendental or Pan-African cultural and/or ideological movements. If there is any place in the world similar to the richness of African identities, it may be the Indian subcontinent whose cultural wealth is being transformed into or manifested in its material and cultural diversity that is serving as binding characteristics that accelerate its socio-economic development. India, a huge country of more than 1.3 billion people has managed to make the critical leap from traditional communities into a modern and functioning democracy where the complex interplay of religion and traditional values are serving not as factors of conflicts but as catalysts in the emergence of modernizing, democratic and cohesive identity building.
China on the other hand can be said to be relatively luckier than India or Africa in the sense that it has always remained an almost monolithic entity with more than 90 percent of its people having a common ancestry and where colonialism was a short-lived experience that could not make a dent neither into its traditional belief systems nor into its secular identity. That may be why China could achieve socio-economic and cultural modernization in a relatively short time and with less shock and without compromising its history and national identity.
Of course, Africa is a relatively late emerging continental giant whose progress has been challenged by not one colonial power but by a host of colonial interests where European powers tried and failed to reconstruct the continent in their own images. India faced British colonialism and built a viable and almost all-inclusive democratic entity without compromising its traditional cultural and religious values. India has shown that democracy and cultural and traditional values are not antithetical but factor of cohesiveness and progress. However the problem faced by Africa as a continent in the post-independence period and even now is that it had to fight against a host of European powers that are still fighting tooth and nail in order to preserve and recreate or perpetuate the realities and relationships that were forged during the long centuries of colonialism and the long decades of neo-colonial influence.
The problematic of modernization in Africa largely remains a challenge of integrating traditional belief systems, cultures and belief systems into its modernizing aspirations that still remain unfulfilled despite more than 60 years of independence. The African problematic of modernization is therefore more complex and more daunting than those of India and China. Africa’s demographic wealth is still to be unleashed as a dynamic force that would catalyze the continent’s transition from traditionalism to vibrant, functional and democratic socio-economic realities.
The Oxford Handbook of Ideologies outlines the diversity inherent into modern African ideologies that have coexisted for many centuries but unfortunately did not yet succeed in helping the continent accelerate its socio-economic development process in a systematic and sustainable way. According to the Handbook of African Ideologies, “Key ideologies include African Abolitionism, and anti-colonialism, African socialism and Marxism, the Non-Aligned Movement, Negritude, Ujamaa, Ubuntu, African feminism, environmentalism and post-colonialism. Emerging as a response to racist Western ideologies, African responses were directed initially to Western audiences. The attempt to vindicate African humanism and human rights has evolved to the assertion of African contributions to world history and culture and to an engagement with African communities to promote post-colonial independence.”
Despite the diversity of ideological currents in Africa, the continent has not so far managed to integrate them into the building of a unified, cohesive and democratic institution building that could serve the modernizing and liberation aspirations of more than one billion Africans. Leaving aside what they call Abolitionism or anti-colonialism, the other attempts at searching modernizing ideologies in Africa have more or less failed to pay dividends despite the costs and liabilities of such enterprises.
African socialism and Marxism have failed miserably in Africa while they paid huge dividends in terms of modernization both in China and India, two countries whose challenges and aspirations are somehow similar to those of Africans. As we said above, India has done its homework as far releasing its huge potentials into a dynamic modernizing movement while China has become the second biggest modern economy in the world in less than four decades. Africa is still struggling to agree on a unifying ideology or ideologies while socialism is a sad and fading memory in countries such as Ethiopia, Tanzania, Angola or Mozambique despite the high price the people had paid in order to turn ideology into an engine of socio-economic development. Ujamaa or village socialism in Tanzania or Ubuntu in South Africa has not managed to bridge the huge social and income gaps and opportunities in the two countries.
African feminism or environmentalism as new ideological trends largely imported from the West. As such, they are not traditional ideological challenges whose solutions can be found within the continent of Africa. As indicated above challenge in Africa is of course the inability to translate existing ideological and cultural values into viable forces of socio-economic emancipation for all the people of Africa. Foreign ideologies like Marxism have created disasters in some African countries that opted them as leverages of development by ditching their own value systems as “backward” or “anti-developmental”. African intellectual elites have largely failed to explore ways and means of turning these ideologies into leverages of development while a huge country like China has managed to turn Marxism into an ideology of economic development by adapting it to its traditional, cultural and ideological realities.
The other challenge in African countries in their search for a modernizing ideology is the failure in institution building as a continent. Africa has managed to build a huge continental political and diplomatic institution like the OAU and then the AU. It is still fighting to strengthen and make it more effective in realizing the continent’s developmental aspirations. Yet, Africa has not yet managed to build institutions that would accelerate the regional or continental ideological or cultural integration as precondition or basis for its socio-economic development. Pan-Africanism is still the probably the only viable ideological alternative that has delivered its promises although it still needs constant renewal, enrichment or revision and critical assessment in its bid to live up to modern-day African challenges.
As indicated above, Africa is a huge continent with vast cultural assets but it has not yet managed to build a Pan-Africa cultural institution that would not only popularize African values but also help Africans know one another better and develop a unifying world view about Africa and the world. In this sense, building an All-African cultural institution is not a luxury but a must for all those people who aspire to develop a modernizing ideology and a collective African identity. Being African is not only a physical, historical or geographic concept or attitude. It is rather a way of thinking about us as a common people and projecting ourselves into the outside world. It is about how we want the world to see us and respect us and co-opt us.
Democracy is increasingly being seen as a progressive ideology human intellectual civilization has so far produced. No doubt that Africa needs democracy as a way of governing itself. Yet, African democracy cannot be adopted as a dogmatic ideology or as a one-size-fits-all alternative for Africa. In a continent where there are dozens of traditional ideologies similar to democracy, one cannot be satisfied in adopting the Western brand without critical assimilation of what works and what does not in the process of adopting democracy to African realities. To do so, we Africans need viable institutions where we can develop our brand of functional democracy instead of trying to copy paste Western models that have long proved ineffectual. In this particular area, African intellectual elites seem to prefer to adopt the shortest or least painful road of copying foreign ideologies without assessing the pros and cons of such an uncritical exercise. What Africa needs at present is initiative that inspires soul-searching and critical analyses into the very heart and soul of Africa that would rehabilitate its lost memories of past glories in a new form and content.
African intellectuals or social scientists are expected to develop their own ideological alternative and institutions instead of relying on Western models that work for the West and not for Africa. Social science is not like pure science. There is no risk in establishing scientific institutions to protect the environment or develop the economy but they cannot copy paste cultural institutions because they directly involve not nature but human beings whose lives are much more complex than environmental issues. Issues involving the long-term and fundamental issues of more than one billion people require soul-searching introspection, critical thinking and institution building as well as sustainable commitment, hard work, African responses directed not to Western but African audiences.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD THURSDAY 23 FEBRUARY 2023
