~ INTRODUCTION ~
How have contemporary African intellectuals reacted to the rise of global human rights discourse? What theoretical positions and political commitments have led some to embrace human rights as a useful moral project and others to reject it as a neo-colonial project? Specifically, questions of nationalism vs. transnationalism and universal unification vs. experiential particularism centered on Negritude (and other thinkers) in interaction with or against colonial powers will be addressed. This paper will focus specifically on dominant ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s. The theoretical and practical approaches of Francophone African thinkers, accompanied by global contemporary scholarly analyses, provide a structural framework for the exercise of human rights.
Overlying this historiography is the assumption that a theoretical analysis to structures of power, cultural movements, and international law, can speak to the felt experiences of persons intertwined within them. Moving forward, it is vital to keep in mind that, “the rise of theory has led to the politicization of the humanities, theory appears, on closer examination, to be a symptom of the failure of the human disciplines to intervene in the politics of everyday life” (Gikandi 11). Intellectuals both within the context of decolonization and contemporary analyses must therefore ask: to what degree does this framework of blackness permeate historical manifestations in the era of decolonization? How can such cultural analyses interact with intimate experiences? And, perhaps most importantly, how can such frameworks work to guarantee a practice of human rights?
~ CONVERSATIONS WITH COLONIAL OPPRESSORS, PART I ~
As human rights approaches the process of decolonization, it must recognize and address the level of psychological alienation that African persons continue to suffer. The psychological legacies of colonization force the introversion of African identity, humanity, and unification. As pointed out by Richard Wright at the time of decolonization:
“’The [black] individual discovers that he is a sacrifice to society. This consciousness of sacrifice is developing around two opposite poles: among the whites, the pole of psychological consciousness, among the blacks, that of the realistic-social, in other words, the poles of individual consciousness for the whites, and of collective consciousness for the blacks.’” (Irele 341)
Starkly different in their structural and psychological alienation, French and African value and power systems are deliberately integrated or avoided by Francophone African intellectuals. Within Negritude, arguably the most prominent cultural and political movement in its response to decolonization’s tensions with African identity and nationhood, the founding thinkers disagreed as to the proper way to move forward as an African continent. How could their colonial experiences of France, as a representative of economically and politically dominating Western countries, integrate into their visions of modernization, briefly tasted alongside brutal oppression? Could democracy organize a multitude of African socialities and indigenous populations in order to effectively guarantee human rights? Or would such efforts result in political discrimination protected from the Western gaze? How would these “internationally determined” rights be determined, keeping in consideration the intricacies of religiously or traditionally rich and diverse societies?
International human rights collectives, conferences and coalitions were forced into an uncomfortable position of answering these questions in the moments immediately following decolonization, and far afterwards. European powers gathered to mitigate the financial responsibilities the international community would demand for their collective cultural, economic, political and real genocides. Decolonized persons pushed for attention, to various degrees of success.
~ DEFINING A HUMAN ‘RIGHT’ ~
Conversations surrounding human rights have struggled since their beginning to define not only the requirements for consideration as a human, but also the degrees to which this humanity is extended. Is the guarantee of a safe environmental space considered a right of humanity? Or sufficient financial stability to afford food, shelter, and education? Does the universality of human trim out necessary clauses of structural discrimination, such as by gender, race, ethnicity and class? How do collectivist modes of thinking in African societies impact the ability of the “international”, Western-dominated discourses on rights from a neoliberal, capitalist stance? It has proven difficult throughout the entirety of human rights history to agree upon a practiced and performed standard. However, the thought practices behind such ideologies can, debatably, orient streams of thinking in a way indicative of systems of power and their compatibility of human rights. As colonizing countries worked to skirt their obligations to pay reparations, these questions began requiring definitive and expensive answers. As this study lies in contingency with the lack of an universally definition of “human rights”, it will explore, to the best of its ability, the greatest multitude of rights’ manifestations.
African coalitions came together to discuss their necessities as individuals, indigenous groups, nation-state and a unified continent, keeping in mind the international stage to which their claims were being demanded. Most exceptional was the Butare Colloqium on Human Rights in Francophone Africa, which met in Rwanda in 1978, identified six categories of rights: right to education, right to freedom of movement, right to life, right to work, right to receive justice, and right to participate in the benefits and decision-making of the community (Hannum 64). The implications of the “right to life” were heavy; many required the interference and financial support of developed countries to support famished and isolated populations ravaged by colonization (Hannum 65). Financially disparate and disillusioned by the horrors of colonization, however, France and other colonial powers refused in many ways to acknowledge the scars of their colonial legacy.
~ DECOLONIZED FRANCOPHONE AFRICA’S ECONOMIC AND STRUCTURAL DEVELOPMENT ~
The colonial period’s legacy has left the following residual effects on African societies: (a) social classes hold political power yet no determination in progressing local economies; (b) models of economic development were based off of linear, capitalist schemes of thought, automatically forcing decolonized Africa into a disadvantaged position; (c) colonial economic legacies have left populations disenfranchised and unable to move forward given the vastness to which economic inequity affects the population (Penna and Campbell 10). Moreover, Pita Ogaba Agbese has outlined that the ruling class determines domestic inequality, effectively representing the distortion of colonial wealth and power (Penna and Campbell). Anti-colonial, Francophone, African intellectuals, as the subjects of this study, “often found themselves working under anti-democratic regimes in the post-colonization period, and this, along with many other economic constraints, has led to a migration to the West, often to France” (Hogarth 2). Thus, the democratic and developmental conditions within French-colonized African countries limit the intellectual and cultural movements and environments that can be fostered.
The postcolonial era necessitates a conversation about the infusion of national borders. Yet, within this dialogue lies immense pain, history, and space. National borders may have been drawn by colonial powers, but the choice to continue with such violently frivolous separations calls into question the permeation of colonial psychology into affected African subjects. As explained by Epko, “these nations were actually born when African nationalists blinded by race pride ratified colonialism’s arbitrary lines by transforming them into natural boundaries of nations… African nationalism yielded to the temptation of misconstruing and ratifying colonialism’s administrative boundaries by converting them into cast-iron boundaries of nation-states” (232). The infusion of national rights narratives stood as thin shields of the psychological and experienced colonization of Francophone Africa.
Periods of decolonization that witnessed emergences of modernizing, “Marxist” dictatorships fell subject to the exploitation of an, even smaller, wealthy elite, who did nothing more than exploitative capitalist regimes would have done for the guarantee of individual human rights (Burke 138). Moreover, leaders of Francophonie, or conversation and allegiance to the French state, tended to be bourgeois (Jacobs 10). For example, the Red Terror in Ethiopia (which was never officially colonized, but resisted occupation) was justified at one point by its leader Mengistu as, “‘the traditions in Africa are different,’ though he failed to explain the place of Lenin in African customary governance” (Burke 142). Subaltern spaces, without a standardized value system, are able to resist interference from international coalitions under the guise of particularism. And as French intellectuals theoretically “spoke to” the experiences of the colonized, the gap between the two was ever “widening”, compounding issues of representation in international spaces (Gbazoul 353).
Questions as to the viability and security of democratic nationalism forced the world order to re-examine its standards of development and modernization (Gikandi 3). Ekpo reasons that the tenability of the African nation-state can be attributed to the fragility and movement of such state structures. The obsession with democracy as the singular path to modernization is not coherent with the legitimized needs of the continent. Smith’s position is painted as, “Africa cannot avoid democracy because, despite being underdeveloped and unstable, Africa must live and breathe in the same globalized temporality as the rest of the world, and democracy is the minimal requirement for convergence with global time”; whereas, the position of African elites is desiring, “democracy to prove to the world that it is already cloaked in global time” (Ekpo 185). Traditional rights may have protected African persons in the past, but in the modern era, such systems could not be seen as legitimate (Hannum 67). This self-consciousness and relativity is both created and sustained by colonial mindsets and schemas of power.
Within international human rights discourses, the desire and antagonism to return to pre-colonial traditional structures was highly contested. Therein lay a cultural and social dualism within decolonized African persons, both to reassert cultural values anterior to their supremacist destruction and compete in a self-conscious progression towards democracy and economic modernization (Hannum 68). This dualism took on various forms: some believed that “concrete” rights were most coherent with traditional values, while “abstract” rights could touch on themes of modernization; other thinkers thought they necessarily must be more intertwined in order to properly progress in an “African identity” (Hannum 68). In many strains of thought, “African society has suffered a rupture and crisis of thought and culture as a result of the encounter with liberalism” as Western democratic structures focus on “individual materialistic concerns, while African society focuses on the material and spiritual welfare of the community” (Abebe 433). Although many values of liberalism already existed within African traditional thought, the force to which they were implemented exterior to the control of the persons affected disavowed their possibility of successfully structuring and infiltrating the economic systems (Abebe 435). In both cases, the effort to sustain legal legislation in order to protect and enforce such rights demonstrates the binary of decolonized minds, persons and states moving independently through modernization.
~ NATIONAL & INDIGENOUS RIGHTS DISCOURSES ~
Internal rights discourses frequented the topic of modernization, as the colonial period increased the internationally measured productivity of African nations at a belligerent pace. In the words of Seminga, “the requirements of development cannot in any case make us forget respect for human rights, for at the beginning as at the end, the goal of development is the guarantee of human rights” (Hannum 70). Thus, development must necessarily bring African nations to a stable operating point, in order to guarantee civil and political liberties, which were internationally recognized as human rights (Hannum 70). Movements to define development by its coherence with quality of life, over incompatible GNP comparison, dominated human rights discourses (Hannum 72). This still begs the question, however, of what will be reverted to at the point of satisfactory development, and who and when will that development be defined?
Sharma and Wright, as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto and the Director of the Sociology Department at the University of Hawaii, respectively, challenge unilateral stories of colonization, as that between Western influxes of power into African societies, to identify the forced migration of enslaved African persons into indigenous spaces as colonization as well. Through the lens of indigenous rights, they disassemble arguments of reactive nationalism by highlighting the loosening, yet still extension of the binary of power. In their words, it is:
“…Important to attend to the specificities of the oppression of people constituted as indigenous in any struggle against racism; a civil rights approach clearly does not pose a fundamental challenge to colonialism; and a forceful critique of liberal discourses of ‘democracy’ and multiculturalism is needed since they do not challenge colonial relationships.” (Sharma & Wright 122)
Sustained by academic spheres, their positions are thus one of radical liberalism, Marxist in its aversion to capitalism, and laced with elements of Foucaultian philosophies as they pertain to the relationship between the state and the energy of social relationships.
Furthermore, Sharma and Wright outline the sinister nature of neo-racism, in calling to revere the “natural” boundaries between ethnic groups. Rober Miles has illustrated that racism is “largely based on the argument that it is futile, even dangerous, to allow cultures to mix or insist that they do so” (Sharma & Wright 124). Thus, by bordering physical spaces for “differentiated” groups of people, neo-racism is sustained, enshrined in neoliberalism (Sharma & Wright 125).
The struggle to emerge from the shadow of Western, ethnocentrism and ideological white supremacy plagued systems of indigenous justice, as they were forced into constant conversation with colonial governments:
“To the extent that transitional justice acknowledges pluralistic legal orders, it does so in an over-simplistic binary manner that views state and indigenous systems as separate formal/retributive and informal/restorative spheres, failing to comprehend the ambiguous, competitive, intertwined and mutually inter-dependent relationships between them” (McAuliffe 47).
The temptation of international powers to discontinue conversations of indigenous law and representation, understood as “weak legal pluralism”, considering the challenges of assimilation such posed to democratic governments, was strong (McAuliffe 58). The tension between indigenous and democratic law systems, however, was not exclusively respectful; rather, overlapping ideologies and physical control without clear designations of power challenged the effectiveness of both systems of governance (McAuliffe 61). Not surprisingly, manipulation of competing systems of control fell into the hands of the wealthy elite, benefiting from the vacuum of power caused by decolonization, as they assumed the role of the “democratic”, centralized state, thus leaving customary law systems to those historically and systemically underrepresented (McAuliffe 61).
~ CULTURAL PARTICULARISM AND UNIVERSALISM ~
Universality has contentiously represented solely the dominant discourse of power, forcing subaltern narratives and groups into silence. But how far do these intentions go? Is it entirely idealistic to expect a universal condemnation of genocide? Or, perhaps in a more sinister way, does the emergence of relativism sustain an economically implicit hierarchy of cultural socialities, thus fortifying an expectation of conformity to dominant structures of power? Does the focus on difference intensively silence uniqueness?
There are some movements, however, that challenge Western notions of modernization and nationalism. African humanism, for example, outlines a legal methodology that moves closer to guaranteeing African societies human rights by focusing on the entirety of the collective, rather than the democratically quantified majority. Within international spaces, such as the Butare Colloquium, the necessity of seeing individual rights through the context of the collective was imperative; traditional power structures, which had served in pre-colonial eras, were no longer viable in Western perspectives and in the wake of colonization (Hannum 65). The underlying belief within this movement weaves itself into particularism, while remaining wary of relativity under an idealist banner of equity, codified by Negritude, which actually only substantiates it’s self-erasure within structural, global injustices. The separatism from Western thought, while remaining supported and encapsulated in a collective African experience, allows this movement to structure systems of governance that do not adhere to norms inapplicable to African societies and cultures.
Negritude was an emotional and intellectual response of African and Caribbean diaspora students and intellectuals (Irele 343). Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas and Leopold Sedar Senghor are credited for starting the movement in the publication of a small print journal, Volontis, in 1939 (Irele 345). Within this span of time, Cesaire published the work to be known as his masterpiece, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Irele 345). Sartre, a vocal supporter of the movement, wrote an essay for the journal, gaining it the publicity needed to gain traction among intellectual circles.
The movement first entered physical space, following the successful Bandung Conference of 1955, with the intention of asserting a non-Western cultural consciousness at the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris. During this conference, Cesaire is said to have declared, “As for us, in the particular situation in which we find ourselves, we are the propagators of souls, the multipliers of souls, and in the last resort, the inventors of souls” (Irele 347). The movement publicly peaked in the 1959 Congress in Rome. Since the decolonization of many African nations in 1960, it has sought new definition, falling on the efforts of Senghor (Irele 347). The movement has been criticized by towa for welcoming conversation with oppression; Adotevi criticized the movement for structuring it in Western anthropologies and schemes of thought.
Black diaspora movements question the legitimacy of nationalism. An interesting case study is Haiti’s relationship with Negritude. Toussaint, the leader of the Haitian revolution, has become a recurring symbol in Negritude literature; Aime Cesaire has “hailed Haiti as the cradle of its revolutionary spirit” (Irele 325). Spirituals written in the context of the Haitian Revolution can be traced back to Negritude poetry and literature. Moreover, Peter Hallward has argued that, more than the American and French, the Haitian Revolution:
“…forced the unconditional application of the principle that inspired each one: affirmation of the natural, inalienable rights of all human beings. Only in Haiti was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent…sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day…the consequences of this declaration—the end of slavery, of colonialism, of racial inequality—upheld in terms that directly embraced the world as a whole. The declaration of Haitian independence thereby dealt the myth of white supremacy a mortal and thus unforgivable blow.” (Kaisary 8)
For context, in 1915, the United States occupied Haiti, the only republic run by Black people in the Americas, after it had been an independent country for almost a century. In response, Irele, writing for The Journal of Modern Africa, claims that Haitian persons redefined “nationhood” into the spaces their white occupiers could not easily permeate: their cultural traditions (Irele 336). Haitian artists and activists drew from the resistance movements of other African diaspora persons, especially the French and the US.
Irele also claims that the strength of these resistance movements, in some way, lay in its communication with white oppressors. Through using the methodology of resistance movements within white, Western spaces, Black movements were able to succeed with vindication. She calls it “counter-acculturation” (348).) The Haitian Revolution took cues from the French Revolution (Irele 339). This viewpoint, however, is questionably laced with Eurocentrism, as it defines Haiti’s politics not only as in binary with the West, but in mimicry of such. Along similar lines, Cesaire’s literary work was revered for the challenges it posed to the notion of black victimhood, “yet at the same time, their celebrations of the Haitian Revolution were always premised on universal ethical and political values, fashioning out of the story of Haitian self-liberation a universalism that undermines racially exclusive notions of human rights” (Kaisary 201). By choosing to “transcend racial particularism”, he universalizes a case study of explicit racial origins, in doing so, appropriating the narratives of freedom fighters within the Revolution itself to serve in the continual global with the identical oppressors (Kaisary 201). Although the co-founder of Negritude has been criticized for the reliance on an “essence of Blackness” to push for human rights issues, his fellow erased the experiences of Afro-Caribbean persons and demanded the “return to Africa”, without clear economic, political or cultural intentionality to such (Kaisary 202).
~ INTERNATIONAL RIGHTS DISCOURSES ~
It is arguable that every nationalistic discourse at this point was an international rights discourse, given the extent to which colonial powers held and became intertwined with African governmental and economic structures. Within international conversations of human rights, decolonization served as a shaky space of mitigation for theoretical cultural relativism and practical protections of universal rights. Debates of engagement or separatism took on a new meaning entirely when put into conversation with imperial and colonial powers in supposedly neutral conversation spaces. Burke’s study is self-iconized as the first of its kind to substantiate these theoretical conversations. Coined as “colonial cultural relativism”, this movement did not substantially challenge the philosophy of universality as much as “the feasibility and speed to which it could be realized” (Burke 114). The question of economic development underpinned all dialogues on the actualization of human rights, thus confirming the prioritization of human rights dialogues concerning those without capital as determined by those with capital. Rather, power structures continued to be perpetuated:
“The imperial powers would perpetuate the subjugation of colonial peoples under ‘the pretext of respect for their customs’. It meant nothing less than abandoning the concept of universality for decades to come… a colonial clause would not mean the freedom of colonial people to choose human rights, but the freedom of the administering power to deny them.” (Burke 120)
Furthermore, any unpredictable element that may lead to destabilization in decolonized societies was skirted, especially when extending rights and rights language to indigenous and subjected social groups (Burke 127).
Evidently, France had exhausted its financial resources in the colonization process and was unwilling to mitigate with economic and structural reparations. Instead, the colonial state took a much more sinister, backwards angle, citing that it “must therefore punish them for their savage ingratitude before taking full advantage of it to liberate itself from racial and economic parasites” (Epko 236). Rather than acknowledging the cultural, psychological, economic and human genocide that it had undertaken, it approached conversations of decolonization as if to punish African persons for their “insolence” (Epko 236). De Gaulle, a “doggod opponent of decolonization”, embarked from the Brazzaville conference of 1944, preaching that extending human rights to African persons will serve to “prove that France is open to all races and that she has a universal mission. But on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France” (Epko 234). Such “pure” nationalisms mirrors the sentiments of white, continental French persons to disclude French-African persons, their experiences and their narratives of resistance from hegemonic spaces of power. By particularizing their stories, the French effectively silence their power.
Some representatives of postcolonial countries themselves were supportive of interference measures when they corresponded with the human rights model proposed by colonial states. Postcolonial states took the opportunity of decolonization to gain the stage needed to argue for the guaranteed interference with dangerous or violating traditional customs (Burke 129). Others pushed back against limited models of modernization and “civilization” (Burke 140). Evidently, each country’s position depended on the relative degree and angle of their latest atrocity: was it from within the indigenous administration or external forces?
International arenas of rights discourse were highly contentious spaces. The argument as to the creation of an enforceable standard of human rights for all decolonized African nations was met with intensive debate. Mirroring the cultural studies discussed previously, the tensions between universality’s and particularism’s respective compromises, sacrifices, and benefits played out in substantive discussions of legal action. Baroody pushed back against universality, claiming that it was impossible for Western states to properly converse with Islamic Law against an arbitrary, secular set of standards: “in a divided world, there were simply no universal rights to be monitored” (Burke 136). Universality and cultural relativity quickly magnetized to two sides of the same coin. Yet, although cultural relativism has been from its birthplace a space of imperialism, “during the 1980s and 1990s, cultural relativism was codified as the officially sanctioned ideology of many Asian and African diplomats and leaders” (Burke 141). Conversations of Western dominance over African ideologies and preferences were hyper sensitive. Yet, some African thinkers chose to engage and support such universal claims, despite their neoliberal, neo-racist backings, because they were promisingly laden with a baseline of rights at all, despite the inexact translation into African societies.
Some African thinkers chose to move away from international spaces as a whole, and collaborated to reimagine systems to guarantee rights within the justice system, “colonial justice system which is alien, prone to abuse and corruption, and antithetical to the African concept and practice of justice. To Oyekan, the restoration of rights, dignity, interests, and well-being of victims, offenders, and the entire community is the goal of African indigenous justice system” (148). Thus, systems of human rights must be relatable to the specificity of indigenous persons, concretely discluded from conversations of rights themselves. Rather, many indigenous persons fought to be offered the chance to express their necessities for rights within government systems or at the level of the abstracted universal humanist.
In Oyekan’s view, however, rights are the positive and enforceable currencies of a blanketed justice. The system of justice must turn away from individually estrangement in punishment, but rather compensation for the abuses suffered by the victim of the injustice (148). He heavily critiques liberalism as a race theory for it, “(1) inspired the false necessity of conjuring an African theory to which every geographical, social, and political stratum in the continent purportedly subscribes, and (2) led to the brandishing of same as a collective response to the West”(Oyekan 150). Thus, the nature of domestic justice outlined by Oyekan moves against the sweeping theories of a unified set of rights and regulations as a way of pacifying African decolonization.
Still absent from rights conversations, within which they were arguably the most affected, indigenous persons and smaller, specified ethnicities struggled to assert their needs in the equality of representation amorphously alluded to previously, without the sacrifice of generalization cautioned immediately afterwards. Berman asserts:
“Ethnicities were, in particular, the creations of elites seeking the basis for a conservative modernization. The colonial legacy of bureaucratic authoritarianism, pervasive patron-client relations, and a complex ethnic dialectic of assimilation, fragmentation and competition has persisted in post-colonial societies.”
Therefore, the privileging of small, elite groups allows them to speak for the entirety of the nation; the ability to fracture, manipulate and extort the diversities within a nation allows bourgeois actors to assert their power in international spaces. However, such positions of privilege have not always necessarily been abused. The following section will explore the diversities of positions of African thinkers on these issues.
~ CONVERSATIONS WITH COLONIAL OPPRESSORS, PART II ~
In conversations of decolonization, African intellectuals have frequented diverse positions as to the most effective and wholesome way to revitalize and revisit their narratives before the colonial period. How does one integrate the psychological other-ing implicit within economic, cultural, and national structures felt within the postcolonial African experience, while also reducing the permeation of colonial mastery? To what degree can unifications of the African experience erase the arbitrary divisions of colonial masters?
Within Negritude, the founders disagreed as to how to address conversations with white supremacy of narrative. While Senghor argues for a universalized focus to the experience of blackness, Césaire argues for both the “specificity and unity of black existence as a historically developing phenomenon that arose through the highly contingent events of the African slave trade and the New World plantation system” (Kaisary 204). Other thinkers have criticized Césairienne négritude for its focus on the “return” to a romanticized, idealized Africa and a dismissal of African diaspora experiences (Kaisary 205). Does the choice to re-enter “original” spaces after displacement demonstrate surrender or disobedience to white mastery?
Ekpo questions the unexplored discontinuances between Senghor’s political practices and the African socialism he so thirstily desired to create under the guise of Negritude. Evidently, Ekpo cautions African persons against completely dismissing colonial powers. He makes the (unsubstantiated) claim that all nations who shunned Senghorian “path of compromise and strategic humility before Europe ended up in revolutionary utopias whose postcolonial development works have nearly all been in vain” (Ekpo 239). It is unclear however that the path of development undertaken by African nations was clearly within the scope of their own control. Ekpo’s critics go on to say that this “path of compromise” as the only effective means by which African nations may be able to use the resources of their colonizers effectively in the space of the economic vacuum forgone by decolonization:
“Senghor saw double and played double. He saw the racist mythomaniacal old patriarch hidden behind the paternalist neo-colonialist, but he pretended to see only the great de Gaulle, the grand emancipator of Africa, the providential man of 18 June. Senghor, the nègreenfant, allowed De Gaulle to indulge in a neo-colonial monologue disguised as Franco-African dialogue and cooperation.” (Ekpo 238)
Thus, the Machivallien assumption comes into stark light. As an African man experiencing the effects of colonization and focused above all on the modernization of Francophone Africa, Senghor presents a complicated portrait, in ways mirroring the ongoing argument within the scope of liberalism. Does engagement with the concept of universality permit or excuse institutionalized hierarchies? Does the engagement of the subaltern in such dialogues minimize to an inconsequential degree the strength of their perspective?
Undercutting the conversation of unified and/or fractured African experience and international human rights to protect that experience is the variable of nationhood, national supremacies, and inter-national interactions. In order to correspond to ideological Black movements, such as Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism and Negritude, the concept of the nation must be considered both at the levels of the metaphysical and the physical. What would the nation united by cultural blackness look like? How could each and every experience of blackness be represented equally and without risk of essentialism?
Chipkin explores this question in his work, “The Sublime Object of Blackness”. Evidently, the discourse of decolonization utilized “terms and phrases from both National Democratic Revolution and Black Consciousness, combines them, and references them to a new object: not Democracy, not Socialism, not Black Liberation but National Sovereignty” (Chipkin 570). In his imagined space of “National Blackness”, systemic discrimination (and colonization) becomes de-racialized and untranslatable from its modern manifestations: “the measure of NB is not the degree to which people have been freed from poverty, from exploitation, from psychological alienation, but the degree to which authentic representatives of the Nation are in power” (Chipkin 570). Thus, the space of Blackness redefines itself to that of choice, control, empowerment, and true equality. Chipkin pushes further to assert that such “psychological healing to dehumanized” black persons cannot be achieved by deracialized nation-building: “what Nation Building does is transform the presidency and the government into quasi-religious objects that endure all torments and survive with immacu- late beauty. It is the discursive condition of a dangerous, authoritarian politic” (Chipkin 581).
Yet, concept of the nation aside, the decolonized question remains: what are the cultural values of Blackness within Cultural Blackness? Is there an essence of Blackness that can be extracted from its exposure to whiteness?
~ FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN THINKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ~
The degree of recognition received by African intellectuals within a narrative reachable by Western researchers will never properly summarize the ways in which such ideologies have affected persons, rights, and rights discourses on the international and African scales. Moving through the summaries of Cameroonian writer/critic Nathalie Etoke, it is vital to remember her perspective: opposing intellectuals such as Alain Mabanckou and Abdourahman Waberi, she believes the African intellectual’s “burden of representation is an inevitable aspect of his/her historicity”, and thus has no trouble engaging with the discourse of responsibility, even for Western voyeurs (Hogarth 3). Despite her perspective, this study will do its best to consider the most prominent thinkers’ positions on the arguments of relativism and universality as she prepares them and in opposition to her thoughts.
Ahmed Sekou Touré desired an overwhelming level of control and submission to his Marxist theories, leading to widespread anti-intellectualism, purging of many African thinkers and stifling discussion in Guinea (Hogarth 2). As the unopposed president of many years (he exiled or imprisoned all his competition), his work and reign can be understood through the schema of over-reaching political power in the decolonized vacuum; his works must be taken through such a lens.
Edward Said, a Palestinian American anthropologist who worked to dismantle Orientalism, “does not appreciate the idea of the intellectual becoming ‘a faceless professional’ and proposes the idea of the non-specialized amateur with a wide range of involvement, whose specific ‘raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug’” (Hogarth 2). His position must be considered from a place of privileged removal; his advocating for the distancing of the intellectual from a washed-out representation of many persons betrays his position as a Western person pressured to comment out of fashion, rather than necessity to comment out of experience.
Nathalie Etoke, an African diaspora intellectual raised in Cameroon, proposes a different position, arguing that by writing from the experience of being African, you are representative, even if it is not a political choice per say (Hogarth 3). As it is not a choice to be African, it is not a choice to be a politicized body with such immediate implications and realities; theories of universality are too distanced from her necessarily particular experience. Along parallel lines, Applegate argues that literature is the only way to change, control and engage with the reality of being a political, voiceless body in a conversation albeit of self-control. The choice to become an intellectual is, for those experiencing such realities, commenting within privileged spheres is possibly the most removed as they may possibly become, while working within their frame of reference to improve the realities of decolonized Francophone African persons.
Fanon connected nationalism and art within his model for the future African state by idolizing Sekou Toure and Keita, political activist and poet, respectively, within a narrative of truth. This cyclical feeding relied on the production and sustainability of symbols, easily supplanted by aesthetic representations (Gikandi 9). He feared that the pressure to politically engage would diminish the scope of intellectual work within the time of decolonization. His work Les damnés de la terre advocated for heavily distinguishing these artistic and intellectual spaces to create outside of the conversation of nationalism within which he was so heavily entrenched, as he wrote alongside many Francophone African states’ rise to independence (Hogarth 3).
The trouble with distancing African intellectuals involved in artistic expressions of fiction and visual art from the political emergence of nation-states was the hierarchal nature of knowledge and power in decolonized societies. Pierre Bourdieu pointed this out, saying, “not all intellectuals can be reasonably expected to be anti-government dissidents, especially in Africa when they were part of the small, educated elite that almost naturally became part of the state apparatus” (Hogarth 3). Moreover, European writers were sent to observe the Rwandan genocide and write on it; it became a sign of status to sustain a commentary on atrocities, distanced from both the artistic representation and the implications of the political climate. This is just as Fanon cautioned against; Marxist thought heavily works against such positions in his theories of alienation and estrangement.
~ IMAGINATIVE NARRATIVE SPACES ~
Lack of representation of subaltern voices physically and textually has provided no sanctioned safe spaces for expression of experience. Thus, African authors, in the moments following decolonization and deep into the present, have created new narratives, integrative creative spaces of fiction. Justifying the imperialist history written by their oppressors, the “created” space reclaims the experiences of colonization by its survivors. The “African novel” is therefore a protest, and frequently African intellectuals, activists, writers and politicians oscillated between roles interchangeably (Arab 365). Arab claims that it is a space of catharsis, where “sensationalism” “turns social – political criticism into incoherent babblings” (Arab 367). This “political criticism” was richly creative in Francophone Africa, as “the Nigerians started to write in Ibadan or Lagos rather than London… no first hand knowledge of the English literary scene of the fifties… not in Britain any ideologically influential literary movement comparable to the French “litterature engagee” (Arab 369). Thus, the correspondence of rights discourses, intellectual spaces and fiction authors proceeds confidently under the coordination of French studies.
Yet, questions remain: how does the African novel work to foster an environment in which African identity and narrative can be explored? How does the identity exploration in the African novel correspond with Black Cultural Nationalism identity formation?
Stilted by widespread economic disparity in the post-colonial era, African persons have been typically unable to enjoy the leisure of reading. Thus, African intellectuals have struggled to understand and anticipate their audience through their experiential perspective. Most frequently, they have accounted that they do not write for the African person themselves; this leaves the Western voyeur (Arab 102). According to African scholar Mphahele, the narrative structure and purposing of the African novel can be forcefully coerced into Western constructs of novel writing and reviewing (Arab 102).
There are some discrepancies, however. Cahier, written by Negritude’s Césaire, “puts Haiti’s revolutionary history to work towards the construction of a coherent and empowering subjectivity that recovers an assertion of rights crystallised in the drama of a monumental episode of anti-imperialist struggle” (Kaisary 202). Thus, despite widespread inabilities to write creative histories for the most affected persons, movements with traction in the Western world, such as Negritude, have been able to be financially supported and projected into the world at large.
Moreover, there cannot be one experience to which an African writer attests to; blackness within Africa is incredibly complex. As stated by African intellectual Camara, in response to an interviewer questioning, “is the African aware of a double audience to be satisfied?”:
“This is not a problem for the African writer. It is a political problem. We do not have a culture. We have cultures. We have not yet regrouped our forces. The great African civilization is poorly represented. At the moment, we are cultural satellites; one is either French-African, English-African, or Arab-African. For this reason, foreign languages, which are indispensable as a means of communication with the outside world, must be preserved. But there has to be an African culture.” (Arab 36)
The effects of a diverse colonial history have affected and assimilated into African narratives in such a way that is both part of an “African” experience and inextricable from narratives of domination, respectively. The “great African civilization” referenced may nod to a desire to return to the pre-colonial, effectively erasing the colonial experiences; this is highly contested by intellectuals, however.
The question of language written and published in my African intellectuals is a place of contention. Choosing to write in English, Mphahele may say it best:
“First, if you are writing about your people’s experiences, you are writing primarily and initially in response to oppression. You are going to be talking about ideas that operate in English, which do not necessarily interpret in the same abstraction in an African language. What I mean is that when you first come in contact with the words liberty, freedom, and oppression, these are abstract things that we would never have spoken about in Africa. They come to us in English, so that have English connotations, and they come heavily loaded with a culture and thought which are part of that language.” (45)
For Mphahele, the choice of which language to write in is political warfare in itself. By choosing to keep the language of the oppressor to discuss themes of oppression, he distances himself and his African experience from the pervading contact with Western power discourses, pushing forward with his control over his voice. Cesaire, as well, continued this minimalization of the ramifications of colonial tongues: “French is merely a tool, a medium to express his alienation” (Gbazoul 353). Ngugi posits, “What is the difference between a politican who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?” (Gbazoul 371) By this, he means that the economic and political superstructures of Africa will not change without linguistic resistance. That responsibility must, he implies, be led by the bourgeois elites privileged to even choose their language of expression as their work enters the world. This is an area that human rights discourses have been unable to breach, for the most part, as English or French colonial translation is necessary to agree upon a standardized system of rights; thus, the place of power remains inside the language of and with colonial deciders.
Using the case study of Algeria, this historiography will dig deeper into the affiliations of African thinkers, acting in adherence and negotiation with colonial powers, and those whom prophesized against it. The infiltration of Arabic, before colonization, legitimized the bourgeois elite into wealth separatism, which affected the cultural, political and social lives and expectations of decolonized Francophone persons. Within the government, for example, Minister of Finance, Mr. Mwai Kibaki was honored and adored in public office, as he used English, however, when he used Kikuyu for the first time, he was exiled: “[when a] hegemonic group who see their interests threatened… resulting in a violent reaction” (Gbazoul 376). As for Francophone thinkers, Algerian Boudjera and Ngugi state that “to use a colonial language is to enrich it, to open its space, to feed it with new ideas and cultures” (Gbazoul 370). They state that the choice to engage in colonial languages is a bourgeois way to profit off of the estranged working class. Thus, the choice to engage in colonially infused languages became contended on the bases of economic manipulation and power dynamics, rather than theory, morality or universality.
Achebe sees English as a compromise of culture in the name of economic development. English was the language of choice in the modernization progress, as China Achebe states: “I think English is only a stopgap; it will not be used always. It is not a language that expresses the people’s culture. I see it as a temporary phenomenon that is dying” (PNA 54). Moreover, post-independence Africa witnessed an excruciating neo-colonial linguistic hegemony, in which foreign aid programmes required the use of English to sustain partnership (Lebdail 364). These linguistic hierarchies were not limited to English alone; Algeria refused to join l’AUPELF, an association for the expansion of French language (Lebdail 364).
Efforts made by African writers and intellectuals to spread ideologies through fiction were not met without resistance, however. Many of the authors aforementioned attested to the difficulty of publishing works through houses based in France or run by the French-occupied government. Houses restricted the languages that could be published in and the content that could be published. Sembene states, “It is a capitalist regime, a bit monolithic and different from [communist and] other regimes. In… France, there are several publishing houses, if one house refuses, another will accept, but in Africa there is only one, if it refuses, you have no choice.” (59) Thus, the affirmation of European ideologies gave more authority to the writer to spread their work into global spaces.
Thus, the language that intellectuals published their works in proved to be very indicative of their personal and political stance in relation to France, French colonizers, and the French language. However, beyond the choice to avoid writing in French, the choice to write in dialect of the intellectual or the language spoken by the majority of the assembled nation could indicate a level of adherence to colonial border-drawing, focus towards the particular experience of the group speaking the local dialect, belief in the unification across various colonial experiences in opposition to colonial powers, etc. As Gikandi states: “the artist had, after all, been an ally of the politician during the nationalist struggle, while becoming a writer had been one of the most important sources of legitimacy for the political” (1). Thus, it is of the absolute essence that various forms of narrative description, language and place of publication are considered and analyzed as contributors to the cultural movements surrounding human rights discourses during decolonization.
The intersections between nationalism, rights discourses and written artistic expression were plentiful in the time of decolonization. Wole Soyinka cautioned against the seductive transition from discourses on the permeability of universalized rights into Marxist spaces. Soyinka predicted this would permit authoritarian regimes to occupy and control the newly bordered country’s wealth, for supposedly altruistic, communist ends. He further claimed that the subversive artist had the political opportunity, more than the self-serving politician, “to connect the artistic vision to a specific narrative of universal freedom” in the name of human rights (Gikandi 2). He also saw aesthetic as the ideal space for universality, even morality; however, he lamented the plight of the artist being expected, even required, to assume political or nationalistic particularism given their subverted, yet interwoven place in society (Gikandi 2). And still, Gikandi raises an important point: “How and why was it possible to celebrate a people’s art and culture and be indifferent to their survival as human beings?” (4). The story of the African intellectual, communicating through the novel, the poem, the song and the work of visual art, must be taken into careful consideration when looking into the anesthetization of postcolonial cultural movements in conversation with human rights discourses.
In some ways, it was impossible for the African writer not to become a political body, estranged into political art. Within the voyeurism of Western readership, the African narrative held a particular tension, in that post-colonial discussions were the closest many Western allies had come to African issues and narratives. Thus, the novel was able to delineate the structural violence of Western thought grouping African persons into the “single story”:
“Between the novel of despair and the novel of political commitment, there is a motley/collection of fictional works whose thematic preoccupations range from Third-World consciousness to universalism, from African Zdanovism to literary libertarianism, from belated anti-colonialist protest to social criticism, from adventure stories to politics-fiction.” (Arab 369)
In a space of reimagining the humanity of the “other”, from legal legislature of the international elites to sensational news of the everyday reader, an escape from such narratives of trauma and racial responsibility allowed implicated Western eyes to have an entry point into political issues. Empathy is a weapon.
Through these fictitious narratives, empathy has the potentiality to open the gateway for neutralization. Staggered and confused by the way to “treat the other”, Western voyeurs struggled with, “what these questions and problems seemed to imply was that when it came to questions of universalism (and all theories, even theories of difference, derive their authority from a certain claim to universality) either a different standard was being used for Africa, or that the notion of African difference was so deeply enshrined in the institutions of Western knowledge that it was difficult to dislodge” (Gikandi 6). Thus, the author argues that his personal publishing experiences have revealed post-structuralism as the disguised reconstruction of Eurocentricism (Gikandi 6). Within the intricacies of recovery from colonization, the strongest strain to rely on, given the psychological and material power structures, was that of the colonial powers; artistic spaces are heavily implicated in this standardized expectation. Although African thinkers can imagine new spaces and narratives enshrined in the possibility of empathy, there is much to do to move forward.
~ LOOKING FORWARD ~
As we look forward into the future of human rights and decolonized, Francophone Africa, we must take the cues of contemporary African thinkers, building on and jumping off of the impact of Negritude. Post-Africanism, proposed by Ekpo, presents that it is neither possible for Africa to modernize with her eyes locked on the legacies of colonization nor the indigenous civilizations that preceded it. He scorns the obsession with returning to the traditions of pre-modern African societies as a way of presenting postcolonial stories to the developed world and “believes that genuine postcolonial redemption for the ex-colonised subject can no longer consist in refining ever more underhand ways to continue blaming the imperial West or to lust after the West’s guilt-ridden, repentance-coated pity” (Ekpo 182). This Post-Africanism thus requires an erasure of the West, its periodically contained dominance, and its long-felt effects on the African person; its implication is contentious as it is realistic neither of the economic and material realities of the decolonized African continent or the psychological trauma still being experienced by decolonized African bodies.
~ CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ~
The conversation of democracy has been proven to intersect multiple concerns within decolonized African states: nationhood, modernization, domestic rights, international interference, humanity, citizenship, identity, collective consciousness, and narrative. It is thus vital to critically analyze all intersections of the governmental structure as it pertained to Francophone Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Within local governances, both traditional customary law and democratic law must be interwoven and respected on equal footing. In order to bring the gap of psychological colonization, African subjects must hold sufficient control over the decisions that affect them in order to create sustainable, liberal democracies moving forward (Abebe 444). Evidently, power structures cowering under the guise of Marx’s first phase of socialism are ineffective in transitioning nations to collectivist, cooperative, communist societies; they serve as guises of power. Many of the thinkers analyzed held Marxist ideologies; yet, as Marx would have predicted, those most adversely affected by colonization remained for the most part estranged from their realities. Given the trauma of estrangement and alienation of colonization, compounded with the internalized racism associated with double consciousness, it doesn’t not seem to be possible, from my perspective, to come to an equitable system of representation to include ethnicities and indigenous persons in communist structures. Rather, it is absolutely necessary for democratic systems to be built from the baseline of African traditions, instead of the superimposition felt in these post-colonial moments.
The space of universality has been occupied by cosmopolitan internationals, focused on their assumptions of power, rather than ensuring the best quality of life and rights protections for the persons they implicitly or explicitly speak for. Within the conversations of universality, cultural relativism and particularism, proponents for universality, under the banner of liberalism, tended to be educated, wealthy males comfortable washing out the struggles of African persons for an ends, be it art, political deliberation, or privileged spaces within their own countries. The avocation for human rights should not have to exist as a conversation. The inability to bridge and engage with difference, especially without having self-serving intentions, has massive repercussions, looking towards the future of equality and human rights for all persons.
African thinkers are still unsure of how to answer these questions. Facing different degrees and manifestations of engagement with white supremacist spaces, perspectives as to how to unite or particularize, in response or avoidance, and with/out an intention of direction. Issues of ethno-centricism, neo-racism and neocolonialism perpetrate similar (congruent, minimized through a different lens) psychological subordinations, in comparison with the felt realities of economic, cultural and political colonization. The assumption of unification of all Black persons, given what has been outlined here, is extremely dangerous. Although there cannot be one united Black cultural consciousness, do the shared experiences of conversation with supremacist international spaces constitute a great enough bond? That is not a question that has or can be answered explicitly here by one perspective; rather, it requires the care and attention necessary to ensure the safety and stability of all persons, in the spirit of universal human equality.
The bonding of the nation-state holds a certain degree of international appreciation, achievement and ease of coordination. Thus, the preservation of national boundaries in the post-colonial era could demonstrate a degree of internalized allegiance to colonial powers. However, due to the makers of the decision residing in, generally, disproportionate amounts of power and privilege, the decision to respect the physical and psychological nationhood necessitate critical examination. Unfortunately, given the circumstances of psychological, emotional and spiritual trauma, as well as the orally recorded traditions of many African societies, many of the answers to these questions are not recorded in an accessible way. The question of nationhood is thus highly historically contentious, but not necessarily malignant given the importance of collectivity and community within African traditional customs. The imposition of Western values is problematic theoretically, but were we not reminded to keep in mind the inability to translate theory into praxis effortlessly?
The divisions within the African community as to a directed movement back to pre-colonial traditional customs, or looking towards the future, psychological trauma and stunted economic modernization held in mind are immensely complicated. There does not appear to be a singular way to move forward, as some desire to erase colonial histories and others necessitate acknowledgement of their experiences. This played out aggressively in the perspectives of African writers, as to who they are writing for, what are they writing about, who’s language they are writing in, and who is controlling the economic profit of the novels’ publishing. Every intellectual has the right to assert his or her opinion; no guidance can be given here.
However, the way to which such conversations with traditional values, indigenous law, and international spaces played out in the postcolonial era draws into harsh interrogation the nature of Western, colonial powers after their occupations. Altruism is a delusion; within international spaces, especially given the threat of reparations, state, and non-state to a lesser effect, actors will always exercise what is best for them. Thus, the perspective of Western thinkers, academics and politicians complicit in these discussions arguing on behalf of decolonized African subjects is effectively invalid. It is not their assertion to make.
It feels immensely difficult to remain optimistic in times and spaces such as these. The translation from theory (such as Marxism) to praxis (abuses of power simply shifted) more often than not leaves the subject entirely forlorn. Will global superpowers ever truly repay the damages of colonization? It doesn’t seem likely. The unfortunate trend of the emergence of human rights discourses, in the moments immediately following atrocity, send harsh signals as to the imbalance of power, whimsically exercised by dominant states to the yielding reception of weaker states.
As simplistic as it may sound, the most obvious solution to injustices unaddressed by human rights is to create justice within the framework of human rights itself. Empathy is the first and foremost human right.
These debates, and their subsequent, analyses remain vastly unsettled. As time progresses, the distance accumulated from such visual markers of atrocity increases; yet the surrounding existence of the felt repercussions of such genocides has not wavered. In it’s subtlities, it only grows more and more sinister. Although contemporary movements, such as Post-Africanism, project theoretical displacement that is not to say experiences of misrepresentation, lack of representation, or non-existence are not still felt on an intimate, national, and international level.
However, by reimagining narratives spaces, alternative forms of resistance come to bear. The continual negotiation of boundaries of power and state interference will rage on; perspectives as to the clearest possible pathway to the guarantee of rights are by no means unified. By continuing to create new imaginations of experience, groups marginalized by singular stories are strengthened to reclaim their past, look towards the future, and mitigate the felt experiences of the present, stuck in time between two frames of concrete thought, and millions of imagined realities.
~ ADMISSIONS, GREIVANCES, PERSPECTIVES ~
There are countless analyses on the effects of Negritude and human rights in the decolonization era; this is by no means an exhaustive study given its length and scope. The researcher is a college-educated, financially privileged, American, white woman writing in the United States through the lenses of multicultural feminism, Marxism and Foucaultian postmodernism. Although unbiased impartiality was pursued over the course of research collection and analysis, evidently some perspectival endorsements are intertwined.
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turbulence. 