It is often wrongly assumed that Africa and Africans are unable to develop their own world views or ideologies because they were intellectually retarded, mostly illiterate and worshipping traditional religions. For much of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, Africans were considered as living in the state of nature, unaware of their conditions and unable to integrate with the evolution of world history.
They were considered as living outside history and outside European history in particular which was advanced and a model to be imitated by the people of the world. The German ideologist Hegel said that what he called the “Absolute Idea” could not touch Africa because Africans were living in the unconscious state of evolution and could not understand what he meant by “Absolute idea”.
Colonial writers and artists borrowed a lot of prejudices from the Hegelian supreme bias and racist world view in order to develop their literatures and arts about Africa with an eye to keeping the continent under their perpetual domination. Hegel and his ideological associates came to their conclusions without studying the state of African societies and their belief systems, without analyzing their social and economic organizations. Their thinking was largely based on hasty conclusions and arrogant impressions about black people and their world views. As such Western ideology under colonialism was basically racist Eurocentric and biased.
It was later on that a Belgian philosopher and theologian called Father Placid Temples who took the pains of studying African belief systems in the Bantu communities of central Africa. In his 1945 book “Bantu Philosophy”, Placid Temples comes to the inevitable and honest conclusion that Africans had indeed their own philosophies that could be considered the basis for a serious academic or philosophical studies if anyone was interested to know African social organizations and their ideologies or faith systems.
Father Temples laid the basis of what was later on known as the African NTU philosophy which is found in Bantu language. “This vital force Temples calls it the Bantu Ontology, in short NTU means a human being and it emphasizes that there is spirit of oneness and harmony among people and nature. The concept of NTU emphasizes solidarity and oneness amongst Africans.”
In the following decades, African intellectuals could articulate an African world view or an African ontology on the basis of researches and analyses. This led the way to the emergence and recognition of African philosophy which is, “the name for an emergent, and still developing field of ideas, spaces, intellectual endeavors, discourses and discursive networks within and beyond academic philosophy.”
The last decades of the 20th century have therefore witnessed the fact that Africans have their own philosophy based on their own existential experiences. The second half of the 20th century however continued the tradition of Western philosophical dominance as African intellectual lagged behind their Western counterparts in discovering new dimensions within the African ontology or theory of existence. They rather fell prey to Western distortions of historical evolution that did not give a place to Africa but tried to once again impose Western philosophical models on Africans. They did not take part in international discourses and discussions to defend African philosophical values and put them in philosophical perspectives.
Back in 1992, Japanese-born American political scientist and Harvard professor Francis Fukuyama published his once celebrated book entitled “The End of History and the Last Man” in which he announced to the world that with the final triumph liberal capitalism human history had reached its final stage of evolution and beyond that point will be the undisputed triumph of democracy everywhere in the world.
Fukuyama came up with this not so original or so creative declaration of faith right after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The professor looked around and saw no potential ideological competitor with liberal democracy. Communism was finished in the former Soviet Union and collapsed under its own weight and the stagnation of the system as well as the lack of creativity and adaptability of a Marxist ideology that held sway over a vast empire that stretched from Europe to Asia.
As it was subsequently evident, the collapse of the Soviet system did not usher in the total or irreversible triumph of liberal democracy as the good old professor Fukuyama had prophesized. Many communist states survived the ideological attacks of the West against their systems and even thrived as China has amply demonstrated. North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, to name but a few of them continued to function despite the relentless ideological and political onslaughts of the Western powers to discredit their system that survived the waves after waves of defamations, character assassinations, subversions and blackmail.
China is the best example of not only the adaptation of ideology to reality but it showed the world that it is possible to achieve accelerated economic development by any country in the world irrespective of the type of ideology they followed or adapted. China subsequently served as a good example of economic growth under the constant attack of the West and its ideologues who tried to prove Fukuyama’s hasty conclusions in his superficial analysis of history and historical evolution.
In Africa, many former socialist regimes had collapsed due to the evaporation of Soviet economic and political assistance that served as indispensable to the survival of so called “Marxist regimes” in Africa. African revolutions at that time had been imposed on the peoples as they were imposed in other countries and could not live up to the promises. And as the wind of change started to blow across Moscow, they too were blown off like houses of card. This was what happened in Ethiopia too, despite 17 years of revolutionary rhetoric and repressive rule.
Marxism was not and could not be an African ideology. It was rather an alien ideology imported or bought from the West. Marxism was not even a Soviet ideology because they too imported it from the West and tried to adopt it with a mix of what they called Leninism, which looked relevant for some time but ended up committing ideological and/or political suicide. Why Marxist ideology worked in china is a long and controversial issue. As to Africa, it was clear that it had not even finished the anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial revolution let alone transition to a Western ideology. Democracy was born in Greece thousands of years ago and was adopted by Europe and the Western world in general and proved the better of all evils.
In Africa what proved effective was not Marxism or communism but anti-colonialism and nationalism. There are definite reasons for this. The decolonization of Africa and the emergence of independent African nations did not lead to economic independence in the continent. Colonialism gave way to neo-colonialism and continued the old economic relations of exploitation between the European and Western centers of powers and the African peripheral economies. This relationship is still going strong despite decades of political freedom.
The situation is similar to one that prevails after the end of Apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid is dead but its economic dominance over the majority of black African is still intact and even exasperated. This is also the reason why the ruling ANC is facing tough opposition and electoral backlashes since the death of nelson Mandela. This is also why groups like the Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters are gaining ground in south African politics.
The one and only ideology that is still appealing in Africa at large is therefore an ideology that was developed during the struggle for independence and continues to do so as Africa is still a continent under the economic sway of Europe and the West. It has become evident a long time ago Africa will not be free in the full sense of the term unless political freedom is complemented with economic freedom.
The main protagonist of anti-colonial ideology in Africa was an Algerian psychiatrist called Franz Fanon, who clearly formulated Africa’s ideology of freedom by analyzing the psychological undercurrents that had shaped race relations between white Europe and black Africa. He based his observations and analyses on the relationships between France, which was a colonial power that occupied Algeria by force and Africa or the black race in general and Algeria in particular.
A recent article on Franz Fanon by Adam Shatz entitled “The Revolutionary Stranger: How Franz Fanon Put theory into Practice” explores the legacy what he calls “a great post-colonialism thinker. Shatz tells us that Fanon was influenced by the French Revolution to develop his ideas on the liberation of Africa and Algeria from colonialism, an assertion that is too farfetched to be accepted as sound. Why should Fanon be inspired by the French Revolution as he was himself engaged in an African revolution whose objectives and ideological underlying was not French but African?
However, Adam Shatz came to his senses when he says that, “Yet, in the long run, Fanon believed, the African continent would have to reckon with threats more crippling than colonialism, On the one hand, Africa’s independence had come too late: rebuilding and giving a sense of direction to societies traumatized by colonial rule-societies that had long been forced to take orders from others and to see themselves through the eyes of their masters-would not be easy”
Shatz analysis of the role and thinking of Franz Fanon does not seem to be balanced as he repeatedly emphasizes on Fanon’s “Frenchness” and his inspiration from French history. Fanon lived and studied in France as a French citizen but this did not make him a non-African and much less, more French than the French. Africans who live in Europe and America nowadays can adopt European or American citizenships but this does not mean that they have cast away their skin color or their visions of the African motherland. It is rather a temporary accommodation or a deal between the West and Africa to coexist in the new global environment.
Going into Fanon’s ideology of black oppression and racism would take a much longer treatment since his books are still read across Europe, America and Africa and his ideas have not lost much of their appeal because as he himself foresaw Africa’s or the black man’s total independence will take a long time and more arduous challenges. Fanon should therefore be credited for keeping Africa’s philosophical and ideological visions alive and kicking as an immortal legacy for the still coming generations.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 9 FEBRUARY 2024
