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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253012753 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/10/2014 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Africa Must Be Modern
A Manifesto
By Olúfemi Táíwò
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2014 Olúfemi TáíwòAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01275-3
CHAPTER 1
Why Africa Must Get on Board the Modernity Express
Our capacity for and evidence of self-deception on a mass scale regarding our relationship to modernity and its associated principles, practices, and processes is what has made me challenge us to come out and wrestle modernity's beast directly without ifs, buts, or other alibis.
This book has a long and varied genesis. It all goes back to sometime in the spring of 1986. I was finishing my doctoral dissertation and generally preparing with supreme confidence and optimism for my repatriation to my home country, Nigeria, where I, alongside many other fellow Nigerian expatriates then sojourning in Toronto, Canada, in search of the proverbial Golden Fleece, hoped to put our newly acquired skills to building our homeland. When I refer to confidence and optimism I am neither exaggerating nor misstating our orientation then. If there was one thing that my cohort of Nigerian graduate students congregated at that time in Toronto shared, it was a determination to be the generation of African scholars that would breach the persistent outward-looking orientation of African intellectual production. We saw it as our duty to, and were convinced that we could, stem the tide that had swept us and a lot of others to various countries of Europe and North America in pursuit of graduate degrees. We were determined to go back to Nigeria and, through our research and teaching activities, create local intellectual traditions, domesticate our scholarship, and generally create an enabling environment that would make it superfluous for our young best and brightest to seek post-graduate training abroad, especially in the humanities and the social sciences.
Judging by our own experience, we saw that in Europe and North America, not only were we constrained by the cultural context in which we were studying, our options for themes, and the general support infrastructure for relevant and critical discourse, continuity of exchanges, and the possibility of creating and sustaining a ferment in which new conflicts, ideas, tropes, themes, and so on can be incubated were nonexistent in our country of study. No doubt, we acquired some sophisticated tools of our different disciplines—we were technically sound—yet, we could not in honesty deny that we were sophisticated cultural bastards. Why were we cultural bastards? For the most part, and I am talking mostly of social scientific and humanistic disciplines, our topics did not fit into the Canadian context: they could be of interest only to Canadian "African Studies." Those of us in a discipline like philosophy could claim parentage in the so-called Western tradition. But our exemplars and even our names make us a bad fit!
The situation was more complicated in my case. Here is why. Even before I left Nigeria, I had become a Marxist whose radicalism intermixed with pan-Africanist and black nationalist commitments. So, I did not go to Canada for graduate work with a view to merely secure a job or pursue a career in teaching and research. My sights were set much higher: my Canadian training was going to be a mere stop on the long journey to changing the world and creating the best society possible for humans on earth. Towards this end, both as an undergraduate and graduate student in Nigeria, I was an activist with quite a resumé. I had done my share of public agitation, speech making, even rabble rousing, all in the service of recreating Nigeria and, by extension, our world.
Canada spoilt it all for me. I arrived in Canada thinking that, as a capitalist country, it would model many of the ills that our Marxist minds had associated with capitalism: dire living for the working masses, wide inequities in the distribution of wealth, warehousing of poor people, and the like. What is more, it took me quite some time to wean myself from the persistent belief that Toronto must be doing an incredibly effective job of hiding away its slums. After all, how could there be a major metropolis in a capitalist polity that was lacking one of its essential ornaments: warehouses for its poor and underprivileged! It eventually dawned on me that what then had been part of the dream of a new world without slums in my imagination was the banal reality of quotidian existence for Torontonians. The effect of this discovery was devastating, but not in the way that, from what I have said so far, the reader might think.
What Toronto and, by extension, Canada did was to show me that although the regaining of paradise on earth—a leitmotif of all utopian thinking—may be marked more by aspiration than by realisation, one society (the Canadian) had, at a minimum, redeemed for its members a bit of that ideal: a big city with no slum, no open gutters, clean streets, efficient public utilities, an orderly citizenry, generalised access for all—including foreign students—to health care services, and, most importantly, a say in how they were ruled and not just at election time. It showed me what the human mind can do when it sets itself to it. It showed me that what was a mere dream when I was in Nigeria had become part of my reality in Canada. The question that kept bugging me throughout my stay in Canada was: if Canadians could build a country such as I had the good fortune to inhabit for five years, why couldn't Nigerians?
It is important how we answer this question. We have two options. The first is to assert a radical difference between Canadians and Nigerians such that what Canadians are able to do, Nigerians cannot. This has to do with their respective natures—the Canadian personality versus the Nigerian personality. This is the answer that is often asserted by racists and white supremacists. Africans are congenitally incapable of creating the kind of society that I lauded in Canada. The second answer is to look closely at the enabling principles that were operational in the context of Canadian history and which might be used to explain Canada's success and see whether the same principles are present in Nigeria. On the other hand, we look at the disabling principles operational in Nigeria in the context of Nigerian history which might be used to explain Nigeria's failure. Either way, we would end up with useful insights. I took the second route. I was consumed with the desire to learn how Canadians were able to attain the reality that was a dream for which so-called idealists like me were derided in Nigeria for daring to entertain.
This brings me to that time in spring 1986 when, in the solitude of my Toronto apartment, the question hit me respecting what I was going to do on my return to Nigeria after I would have concluded my studies. It was an epiphany. Like all epiphanies, I cannot point to any particular event, incident, discussion, encounter, or prompt that arrested my thought and forced my mind to entertain the following challenge: Now that you are headed back to Nigeria, how are you going to prosecute the struggle for a changed world in that corner of the globe? Are you going to go back and pick up where you left off: rallies, marches, symposia, press conferences, and the occasional confrontation with the state and its trigger-happy goons? Although these questions were not immediately provoked, they were not without remote antecedents in my Canadian journey.
As I progressed through my studies, it became clear to me and others of my cohort that a singular failing of African radicals, especially us Marxists, was that we had misconstrued the import of Karl Marx's Thesis XI on Feuerbach which stated: "Philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." From the dearth of fundamental literature on diverse aspects of African life to a near total absence of Marxist and other radical texts on the African world, it had by then become clear to me that African leftists had been so consumed by their eagerness to change the world that they had forgotten to take the preparatory first step of interpreting it. In other words, leftist African intellectuals and those of us who were their students and were set to take our place as teachers and guides of the future brigade of world changers were engaged in an impossible task: we were trying to change a world that we barely understood. There and then I resolved that I would not go back to doing the same thing I used to do. I determined that I was going to do my best as an interpreter of the African world, one who would do research and write essays, reports, articles, etc., which would equip those who wish to change the world with left interpretations to aid their exertions. I cannot be the judge of how well I have done in that respect. But I can say with utmost confidence that this is the goal to which I have thus far dedicated my energies in the last twenty-five years of my scholarly life.
Over the years, I have focused on different spheres of that largely uninterpreted world. As far back as 1986, it was very clear to me that many left African scholars did not understand and, if they understood, did not take seriously how the global economy worked. In the period since then, we had the newly industrialising countries of Asia and Latin America prove false the Marxian orthodoxy that capitalism could not be built in the so-called periphery. We have witnessed ex-colonies with profiles less promising than those of major African countries becoming competitive players in the global market while Africa's fortunes became more decrepit with the passage of time. The demise of so-called "really existing socialism" in Central and Eastern Europe provoked a whole new scramble for places in the global capitalist economy and new challenges for socio-political theory respecting how to live and what being human entails. Again, because of our poverty of imagination, African scholars have fallen far behind the rest of the world in interpreting our world and clearing the path to change for the better for Africa's peoples.
Twenty-five years hence, and several exchanges and smaller epiphanies later, I have come to the realisation that my worries all revolve around one recurring theme: Africa's response to, engagement with, place in, experience of, and hostility to MODERNITY. Say what? Modernity? Yes, modernity, the word, the idea, the movement, and so on. How did I come to this pass? Over time I have discovered that many of the issues that ail Africa are not very different from those that other humans situated in other parts of the world have to deal with. The issues include but are by no means limited to the following: procuring a good living from the bounties of nature using the products of human ingenuity such as science and technology and by so doing freeing up more leisure for more people in which they can contemplate such arcane topics as the meaning of life, the best life for humans, what happens to us after we die, and ancillary themes. Put more specifically, Africans, no more or less than any other people, face the challenge of ensuring, for themselves and their posterity, lives that are free of the trinity of hunger, disease, and ignorance. They want to live in healthy environments. They want to lead hopeful lives where they can always expect that the future, near or far, will be better than the present, that they will have more control over the direction of their lives, that they will not live under regimes in the constitution of which they have had no hand, and that they will live long prosperous lives marked mostly by happiness.
I have said that all humans share the goals just adumbrated. But the goals assume some urgency in the African situation, given Africa's peculiar history. From about the sixteenth century until this writing, it hardly can be denied that Africa, most parts of it anyway, has not had the privilege of autochthony when it comes to the unfolding of socio-historical processes within it. First, it endured nearly three centuries of depredations brought on by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It transitioned from that into nearly a century of a colonialism that was quite unlike that anywhere else, which left the continent with a deliberate non-development of its productive forces—human and material—and made it essentially a vast rentier continent that supplies, in lieu of rent, the rest of the world, sans any value added, with raw materials that stoke the engines of commerce and manufacture in places far removed from Africa. People rightly expected and many Africans believed that the "wind of change" that ostensibly blew colonialism away from the continent would usher in "life more abundant" for their long-suffering population. No such thing happened. On the contrary, the continent passed under the twin evils of neocolonialism and military rule. It is not an exaggeration to say that Africa has yet to catch a break in almost half a millennium of its recent history.
Simultaneously, few will deny that Africa and its peoples deserve a break. I propose to argue in this manifesto that in order to join the forward march of the rest of the world—a world that has seen its erstwhile peers in misery in Asia and Latin America redeem the promise of "freedom for all, life more abundant" for their inhabitants—Africa must embrace, not just engage with modernity, and seek aggressively to install modern societies all across the continent. Put differently, I propose to do a spirited defence of the necessity of modernity as the way out of Africa's current prostrate position respecting the quality of life in it and the dismal prospects of its teeming majority.
This standpoint is informed in part by my realisation that the countries of Asia and Latin America that have transformed themselves for the better are precisely the ones that have wised up to the idea that—regardless of what they think of modernity and the West, which has benefited the most from its proliferation—a good way to improve their lot in the world is to borrow some pages from the West's playbook. I am not suggesting that they sought to become the West or that they uncritically appropriated Western forms and values. No, what they did was to realise that the concatenation of ideas and institutions represented in modernity held the most promise for the improvement of their lands and peoples. I am asking Africa, too, to do the same.
No doubt, the kind of polemic that I advance here is not new. There have been many essays and books that have called Africa on its failure to overcome its backwardness. The only difference is that many of such diatribes call for what are variously termed "African," "homegrown," or "indigenous" solutions to Africa's problems of hunger, disease, and ignorance. I eschew all such calls in what follows. I ask that Africa stop tiptoeing around modernity, stop its perfunctory engagement with it, expunge its ambivalence about it, and seek to realise the best that modernity has to offer for Africa's peoples.
I cannot be the only African who shares the point of view represented in this work. Part of why I have set out on this journey is that even though there must be many Africans who think that the continent should fully embrace modernity because it would be better off by doing so, there is a dearth of individuals making explicit cases for this attitude. This is not difficult to explain. The history of Africa's engagement with modernity has always been wracked with doubt, ambivalence, confusion, and hostility. Because the dominant thinking among Africans and non-Africans alike views modernity as coterminous with westernisation and because the West looms large in the making of the unhappy history of the continent recounted above, it is almost required of African scholars that they ritually reject anything Western or, at least, show that their relationship with it cannot be other than negative or ambivalent. I eschew any such ambivalence or hostility. The stakes are too high.
We need to distinguish between modernity and westernisation. The fact is that the two phenomena are separate and separable. Yes, the modernity that we place on offer in this work may have had its genesis, historically speaking, in Western Europe. Despite this genesis, it is inaccurate to suggest that its history was fully constituted there. Modernity may have originated in Western Europe but its history is not one with its European biography. Nor is it the case that all European countries share its heritage or that, when they do, they do so in the same way. Any credible history of modernity must reflect the global presence not just in its distribution but in its very constitution and that history cannot be complete if it omits the ways in which it has been modified in its motley migrations across the world's boundaries. In other words, how it has evolved over time has been determined by the history of interactions among Europeans, Africans, Asians, and Americans. And a true history of its discourse must reflect the many voices, traditions, and contestations that have shaped its evolution.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Africa Must Be Modern by Olúfemi Táíwò. Copyright © 2014 Olúfemi Táíwò. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface to the U.S. EditionAcknowledgements Introduction1. Why Africa Must Get on Board the Modernity Express2. The Sticky Problem of Individualism3. The Knowledge Society and Its Rewards4. Count, Measure, and Count Again5. Process, not Outcome: Why Trusting Your Leader, Godfather, Ethnic Group or Chief May Not Best Secure Your Advantage6. Against the Philosophy of Limits: Installing a Culture of HopeIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"At a time when many informed and highly placed economists, political scientists, historians, and other professionals (most of them foreigners) with stakes and expertise in African affairs appear to be locked in a futile game of breast-beating about what is wrong with the African continent, it is both a relief and a matter of gratitude to hear an African make a remorseless case such as the one in this book."
This is a little book with very big and controversial ideas. It draws a bold, clear line in the sand. African scholars everywhere on the continent will acutely recognize themselves and their condition of work in this. They cannot disagree with the truth of this book, but only with how too fearfully truthful it is.
This is a little book with very big and controversial ideas. It draws a bold, clear line in the sand. African scholars everywhere on the continent will acutely recognize themselves and their condition of work in this. They cannot disagree with the truth of this book, but only with how too fearfully truthful it is.
At a time when many informed and highly placed economists, political scientists, historians, and other professionals (most of them foreigners) with stakes and expertise in African affairs appear to be locked in a futile game of breast-beating about what is wrong with the African continent, it is both a relief and a matter of gratitude to hear an African make a remorseless case such as the one in this book.
At a time when many informed and highly placed economists, political scientists, historians, and other professionals (most of them foreigners) with stakes and expertise in African affairs appear to be locked in a futile game of breast-beating about what is wrong with the African continent, it is both a relief and a matter of gratitude to hear an African make a remorseless case such as the one in this book.