Khaya Wisdom Mayile
“The wheel of progress revolves relentlessly and all the nations of the world take their turn in the field glass of human destiny and Africa will not retreat,” so said the great African intellectual Mangaliso Sobukhwe in a speech delivered at Fort Hare University on October 12, 1949.
As the global wheel of development revolves relentlessly, with different continents taking their place in the field glass of human civilisation, the African continent, which is lagging behind according to major developmental indices, has to ask itself, “what must Africa do to take its rightful place in the field glass of human destiny or, put differently, what must Africa do to develop itself?”
As the concept of development occupies a central space in the global imagination, Africa’s first task is to rethink the dominant intellectual assumptions foundational to the concept of development, in other words Africa must transcend both the hegemonic pre- and post- Cold War meta-narratives currently informing the discourse around development.
In his celebrated revolutionary bible titled The Wretched of the Earth the existential pan-Africanist philosopher Frantz Fanon admonished Africa “not to define itself according to preceding ideologies developed in foreign countries”.
The latter point means that the first precondition envisaged for Africa’s development is to reject both Marxism, which failed in eastern Europe, and liberalism, which has caused global structural inequalities by locating the concept of development within the Pan-Africanist ideological framework. This would envisage Africa to rethink the concept of development and align it to Africa’s socio-historical organic conditions.
The second condition, which is presupposed by the first pre-condition for Africa’s development, is a need to marshal Africa’s intellectuals and reinforce their role as agents of development because of their proximity to the realm of ideas as I have argued in my previous article in the Cape Times on May 28, 2015.
In this regard, it may be instructive to note that throughout human history there is no state which has ever developed without creating an enabling environment for its intellectuals to fulfil their vocational historical mission, that of acting as midwives of development.
The third condition is for African intellectuals to form a compact with other sectors of the African community and provide intellectual guidance to the broader African community.
In his book the Negro Problem, Harvard-trained historian Dr WEB Dubois insinuates that intellectual training is a prerequisite for Africa’s development. Africa will only develop when its intellectually able citizens, “the talented tenth”, provide guidance to the masses. In this regard it may be instructive to note that Africa will never develop as long as it places its faith in leaders with backward presuppositions who are not intellectually able to comprehend the sophisticated dynamics of the current world order.
It is also instructive to note that each generation’s level of development is determined by the choices of leadership it makes and Africa’s current generation can not afford to make wrong choices.
Amenhotep, the great Kemetic philosopher, argued in 1400BC that “the state will only be developed to its fullest potential when its leaders become philosophers and its philosophers become its leaders” – an idea that was later unjustly ascribed to Plato, the Greek philosopher, and captured in his book The Republic. Africa needs this kind of leadership, aptly described by Amenhotep the African philosopher, whose intellectual property rights were violated by the Greeks.
The fourth condition is the implementation of the long- overdue idea of a United States of Africa. In an interview with Benjamin Pogrund in his biography on Mangaliso Sobukhwe, How can Man Die Better, Sobukwhe admonishes Africa “not to enter in a global market without a United States of Africa” because the consequences will be dire. Secondly, all African states are historically an integral part of an indivisible whole continent, there is no single state which can develop and solve its problems in isolation or utter disregard of the entire continent.
There is a plethora of evidence which alludes to the fact that Africa stands a greater chance of taking its rightful place in the global train of development if the continent decides to dismantle and transcend colonial boundaries by creating a United State of Africa.
The fifth condition is for Africa to prioritise and pursue an organically developed pan-Africanist revolutionary agenda which will help Africa to re-imagine itself outside the colonial modes of development. The current dominant ideas imported from Europe can not take Africa beyond the interlude of underdevelopment brought by centuries of colonialism not simply because those ideas come from Europe but due to the sociological fact that Africa’s autobiographic march to development is lodged in a peculiar sociological matrix; thus Africa urgently needs to break out of the hegemonic global structures of neo-colonialism ushered in by the historical forces driving the new global agenda since the end of the cold war.
Simultaneously, Africa must transcend the restrictive and prescriptive prism of electoral praxis of western democracy without rejecting the normative ideals of democracy.
The current form of democracy prescribed by the western-led project of modernity is incapable of advancing Africa’s development project. In his book titled Uhuru na Umoja or Freedom and Unity Julius Nyerere made an incisive point that “unlike Europe, which has not suffered like Africa, Africa has to take its politics more seriously, Africa does not need to emulate western democracy, which prioritises multi-electoral politics due to Europe’s peculiar history of politics but Africa has different objectives imposed by its different history.”
Thus, an African form of democracy has to be informed by Africa’s historical evolution; in a teleological sense Africa must not pursue development for democracy’s sake but it must pursue democracy for development’s sake!
l Mayile is a public philosopher and an independent political analyst