THE GLOBAL CAPITALIST CRISIS AND AFRICA’S FUTURE - By Prof Dani W. Nabudere

The global capitalist crisis and Africa’s future

Part I

Dani W. Nabudere

2010-09-23, Issue 497

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67237

cc A KIf we are to create and provide space and platform for African autonomous thinking on issues of the future of the continent, we have to begin by liberating ourselves from Western ways of thinking and draw knowledge and inspiration from our own heritages, argues Dani Nabudere, in a two-part article based on his inaugural address to the newly formed Nile Heritage Forum on political economy.

I am overjoyed to be asked to give this inaugural address of the newly formed Nile Heritage Forum on political economy to provide space and platform for African autonomous thinking and policy dialogue on issues of the future of the continent, free from disadvantageous foreign influences that have resulted in Africa’s weakening. While this is a noble objective, we must nevertheless avoid being overly reactive to such influences and instead build our own capacity to think and act independently regardless, by developing new ways of looking at ourselves and at the world at large. This can successfully be done if we draw inspiration and living knowledge from our well-known heritage as the home to the Cradle of Humanity.

Africa today is trailing [behind] the rest of the world because in part the African leadership has failed to mobilise its people along the lines of a Pan-African agenda that informed the earlier phases of our political development. This is due to its weak ideological base, which, instead of drawing from such a heritage, is wedded to Western ways of knowing and doing things which we have derived from their educational institutions without questioning, including Christian and Muslim religious influences.

While these external interventions have added to Africa’s modern culture in what Nkrumah called a ‘triple heritage,’ they have also left a negative impact on African intellectual capacity to think independently unlike, say, the Asian intellectuals and political leaders who have linkages to their religions and cultures. This is due to the fact that Asia, unlike Africa, was less destabilised by way of religious intrusions, resulting in its intellectual and political leadership remaining more anchored to their religions, languages and cultures.

The result is that the African economic and political scene continues to be open to the outside world for exploitation and the enrichment of big corporations and the mafia, which act in consort to help themselves to African cheap and more or less free natural and human resources. They do this with the help of the African leadership, which has been bought over by these forces to exploit their own continent in a lop-sided ‘globalisation.’

Many of these leaders use their political and economic powers not only to assist the foreign corporations, but also to enrich themselves by stealing from public coffers and from the ‘aid’ they receive for so-called ‘economic development’ of their countries. Recent statistics show that as much as US$150 billion dollars is filtered out of the continent annually by African leaders who place this ill-gotten wealth into their personal bank accounts. This is not only complicity in the impoverishment of their populations, it is outright criminal activity, which Western governments and corporations connive in because it benefits their economies. The failure of the African post-colonial states is therefore in great measure a responsibility of these leaders, which is a betrayal of the African people.

We cannot therefore blame foreigners alone for the continents’ depraved condition. There is a level at which we can blame these forces outside our continent, but there is a level at which we must accept responsibility since most of this leadership comes from the same institutions that we, as ‘educated’ Africans come from. In fact many of us who are not in the state institutions crave to have positions in the state institutions so that we may also have a share of the ‘national cake,’ which is sometimes obtained by dividing the population and creating conflicts among them by exploiting ethnic and tribal identities. African culture is used negatively in the form of ‘political tribalism’ to gain political advantages and not in their interests. Indeed, the political divisions on our continent are directed in compounding ethnic differences, which could otherwise be harnessed and managed through equitable economic and social transformation.

Even the very idea of ‘nation-building’ that was the song of the first generation of African leaders turned into political divisions based on ‘tribal’ differences, which were very much the creation of colonial ‘divide and rule’ ideologies of the imperialist powers but which we continued to exploit. The African political elites bought into this ideology to their advantage, a heritage that has led to the current state of massacres, ethnic cleaning and even genocides. We cannot blame these calamities on foreign forces alone. We as African political and economic elites have played an active role as agents in these calamities that have bedevilled our continent. We always blame these problems on the ‘colonialists’ and ‘imperialists’ while at the same time playing the role of executioners of our own people.

The calamities that bedevil the continent at the present moment are a continuation of the policies of the past, which African leaders, under neo-colonialism, have continued to pursue. Indeed, the current global economic crisis is an aspect we cannot ignore as having its roots in the weakening of the continent ever since political independence was achieved in the 1960s. Even the little ‘nationalism,’ which was reflected in the ‘Lagos Plan of Action’ and the ‘Abuja Treaty’, was abandoned in favour of Structural Adjustment Program-SAPs that were accepted by African leadership wholesale in the 1980s. This led to the abandonment of what was emerging as a ‘social’ and ‘national’ agenda.

Indeed, it was these ‘adjustments’ that led to the denationalisations, privatisations and liberalisations of the African economies that opened these economies to new financial sharks in an ogre of ‘financialisation,’ in which the African leadership begun to participate by heightened corruption, which drained the continent not only of the financial resources but also of the brains in what came to be called the ‘brain drain’ and mystified as the ‘brain gains.’ The current crisis on the continent must therefore be faced squarely and their origins recognised if indeed we have to move towards a new way of understanding the impacts of our role in global issues. I will give an example of how we can face this task by my own experiences arising out of these difficult times.

THE GLOBAL CAPITALIST CRISIS

Indeed, what is being called the ‘global economic meltdown’ is in actual fact a crisis of capitalism on a scale never imagined before. Analogies are made to the 1929 financial crisis, but these analogies are misplaced, because that crisis can be said to have been an ‘industrial cycle’ phenomenon which had only financial effects. The response then was Keynesian economics, which resulted in what emerged as ‘full employment’ after the war. As we now know this neo-Keynesian recipe resulted even in a more serious ‘stagflation’ that could no longer be responded to by the Keynesian ‘priming of the pump’ strategies to overcome cyclical crises. It required a ‘Chicago’ response of monetarism led by Milton Friedman which championed the financial revolution.’ It is this ‘revolution’ that came to a halt in the 2008-2009 ‘meltdown.’

Indeed, when the crisis struck the US in September 2008, the immediate reaction was that this was purely a US affair. I challenged this characterisation in my three articles which appeared in the Uganda /Sunday Monitor/ within two weeks of the crisis being acknowledged on 15 September, 2008. I argued that what we were witnessing was neither a ‘sub-prime’ mortgage crisis, a ‘credit crunch’, nor a financial crisis. I pointed out that the crisis went to the very roots of capitalism as a system. I wrote:

‘The present financial crisis afflicting the global economy should not be seen from the narrow focus of the credit crunch and its relationship to the subprime mortgage crisis in the Western countries, especially the US. The crisis goes to the very foundations of the global capitalist system and it should be analyzed from that angle. What is at the core of the crisis is the over-extension of credit on a narrow material production base. This is in a situation in which money has become increasingly detached from its material base of a money commodity that can measure its value such as gold. But this is not just a monetary phenomenon. It has its roots in the ‘real economy’ of which it is part.’

I was able to come to these conclusions because I had done some studies on the issue of money and credit seen from a Marxist epistemology, from which I published two books. The main work was ‘The Rise and Fall of Money Capital’, published in London. The second, a simplified version of the main work was ‘The Crash of International Finance Capital’, published in Harare in 1989.

The main book did not receive much circulation due to the fact that at the time it came out in 1990, the socialist world was in crisis and Marxism was not taken seriously, especially on issues of political economy given the fact that the economies of the USSR and the ‘Socialist’ countries were in crisis. The second smaller book received wider circulation and was read widely so that when the crisis struck in 2008, a South African political economist, Professor Patrick Bond, who had read both my books, gave a public lecture in Johannesburg at the height of the meltdown and declared that: ‘Professor Nabudere has been vindicated.’ The smaller book was picked up once more by Pambazuka Press, Oxford, who asked to republish it in 2009 with a new introduction and new chapter dealing with the 2008 ‘meltdown.’

I am mentioning this book because of the fact that the study enabled me to give an up-to-date analysis of the global capitalist economy when none of the official economists were able to analyse and advise our governments correctly. Even the mainstream university economists continued to pursue erroneous theories which were no longer relevant to the situation. Locally in Uganda, it was a small NGO called SEATINI, which immediately wrote to me and asked to reprint the three articles because of the favourable way in which the three articles had been received by the public. In fact when the first article appeared in the first week of October, 2008 I received some ten email responses praising my analysis, coming from as far as Chicago in the US. I responded to the SEATINI request by offering to expand the articles in a monograph, which I did. The result was an expanded 130-page monograph which they published in Kampala under the title: ‘The Global Capitalist Crisis and the Way Forward for Africa’, which came out in May 2009.

The three articles that appeared in the Sunday Monitor were reproduced in Pambazuka News as a single article. This combined article in Pambazuka attracted the attention of an organisation called BOTHENDS from Holland, which thought it contributed to the emerging consensus calling for a Green New Deal because of its emphasis on the need to change course and emphasise food security in our countries in Africa. In fact the last of the three articles had put forward a proposed ‘Way Forward for Africa’ after the crisis. I was invited to Amsterdam by BOTHENDS to take part in a panel discussion on the issue of the Green New Deal in which the Dutch minister of finance was invited to take part together with an Indian professor. It appeared that the passage in the articles that interested them most was the following:

‘What we have said above must already alert us as to what we have to do to get out of the mess. First, we have to look at how we can survive the crisis. For the first time, we have to wake to the reality that we need a food security policy as a matter of urgency about which we can no longer dilly-dally. That means we have to focus on the home market firstly, the regional market secondly and the global market lastly. With the production being focused on the home market, we can create our own currency in East Africa because in that case we shall have no alternative but to create it! But we cannot develop a food security policy based on food crops of which people have very little knowledge, especially since with the currency crisis; we shall not have any dollars to buy foreign food products with in the short run. The African elites will have to content themselves with indigenous crops…’

The articles in Pambazuka also attracted the attention of an organisation in Prague, Czech Republic, which on hearing that I was coming to Amsterdam also invited me to go to Prague the next day, where a large number of participants discussed the on-going economic crisis. I was expected to address the conference on the issue of how African political leadership had responded the crisis. At the time, many African leaders declared that the crisis was unlikely to affect their countries since their economies were not ‘fully’ integrated in the global capitalist economy. In fact the indications by the end of 2008 was that with a threatening recession in the industrial countries, the level of imports of raw materials was going to decline; there was also indications that ‘aid’ would decline given the precarious financial situation of the ‘donor’ countries; with reduced employment in the developed world there was also evidence that the level of the tourist industry would be affected. Transfers from African workers employed in the developed world were also likely to decline due to growing unemployment. All these indicated that the economies of the African countries would be adversely affected in the medium term if not in the short term.

The declarations from both these conferences were sent to the G20 Summit, which was being held in London on 1 April 2009. My participation in both these meetings demonstrated that organisations in Europe took seriously the analysis by African scholars if indeed they were serious analyses. It also demonstrated that while foreign organisations were quick to take note of African contributions to the debate, none of our governments and even local mainstream economists in government and the universities were able to take these debates about an alternative future seriously.

Thus while my views through these organisations could be sent to the G20 Summit to be taken into account, none of the African countries – apart from South Africa – was represented, but with no declared positions. Without attempting to blow my own trumpet, I would argue that the lack of serious intellectual engagement on these issues amongst the African leadership and academy was evidence of our inability to think for ourselves and to put forward positions that could protect the interests of our countries, instead of having to accept dictates from the ‘Washington Consensus’ or the ‘donors.’ This is a post-colonial heritage we must overcome.

THE GLOBAL CRISIS AND THE FUTURE OF AFRICA

This brings me to the whole question of the implications of the on-going capitalist crisis and what it means for Africa. I have already referred to my reactions to the crisis in October 2008 and what I conceived to be the response to the ‘Way Forward for Africa’. The concept paper of the Nile Heritage points out that the objective of the forum is ‘to support African independent scholars, civil society organisations and actors, artists and environmentalists to initiate and participate effectively and with credibility in policy dialogue so that the authentic voices of the continent can have a better impact in the development of public policies.’ It is also declared that the ‘[f]orum’s vision is that policies and strategies across the continent work to empower its peoples/to reclaim and protect its natural resources and heritage and end impoverishment and marginalisation.’With reference to the specific objects the forum wants to deepen and widen intellectual engagement, which can: ‘strengthen African-centeredness’ and to ‘[d]eepen engagement by stimulating knowledge sharing, and evidence-based policy proposals to overcome poverty, inequality, ecological challenges and marginalization of women in policy-making.’

This is a tall order and requires some digesting. The forum’s vision would require us as members of the Nile Heritage Initiative to be committed to the process of ‘empowerment’ of the ‘ordinary people’ of the continent, while at the same time or as part of this process, engage in policy dialogues with all ‘stakeholders.’ But we do know that a people that are disempowered by existing power structures cannot engage with those same power structures that are responsible for their exploitation and disempowerment because it is their weaknesses created by disempowerment by those power structures makes such dialogue meaningless. The real question is whether the empowerment of the African exploited masses can be achieved through policy dialogues or through other means?

This raises the question of our role in society as ‘organic’ intellectuals or civil society organisations engaged in some form of intellectual and/or society intervention activities. Our role must go beyond policy engagements to promote the interests of the marginalised and poverty-stricken citizens. It must involve a process of unlearning and learning not only of the disempowered masses but also of the disoriented intellectuals who have been alienated from their cultures and heritages by Western culture, education and material inducements. This is what accounts for the widening gap between the African elites or intellectuals and the masses of the people for what is really the real missing link in Africa’s transformation – the distance between the African masses and the African intellectuals. As Professor Hubert Vilakazi of South Africa has observed:

‘The peculiar situation here is that knowledge of the principles and patterns of African civilisation (have) remained with ordinary, uncertificated men and women, especially of those in rural areas. The tragedy of African civilisation is that Western-educated Africans became lost and irrelevant as intellectuals who could develop African civilisation further. Historically, intellectuals of any civilisation are the voices of that civilisation to the rest of the world; they are the instruments of the development of the higher culture of that civilisation. The tragedy of Africa, after conquest by the West, is that her intellectuals, by and large, absconded and abdicated their role as developers, minstrels and trumpeters of African civilisation. African civilisation then stagnated; what remained alive in the minds of languages of the overwhelming majority of Africans remained undeveloped. Uncertificated Africans are denied respect and opportunities for development; they could not sing out, articulate and develop the unique patterns of African civilisation.’

Professor Vilakazi adds that Africa therefore finds herself in an awkward situation because it needs to develop an educational system founded upon and building on the civilisation of the overwhelming majority of its people, yet her intellectuals are strangers to that civilisation. They have no spiritual or intellectual sympathetic relationship with the culture and civilisation embracing the masses of African people. Yet the biggest spiritual and mental challenge the African intellectuals face of their massive re-education process can only be provided by the African ‘uncertificated’ African men and women who live largely in rural areas. He concludes:

‘We are talking here about a massive cultural revolution consisting, first, of our intellectuals going back to ordinary African men and women to receive education of African culture and civilisation. Second, [this] shall break new ground in that those un-certificated men and women shall be incorporated as full participants in the construction of the high culture of Africa. This shall be the first instance in history where certificated intellectuals alone shall not be the sole builders and determinants of high culture, but shall be working side by side with ordinary men and women in rural and urban life. Intellectuals must become anthropologists doing fieldwork, like Frobenius. But unlike academic Western anthropologists, African intellectuals shall be doing field work among their own people as part of a truly great effort aimed at reconstructing Africa and preparing all of humanity for conquering the world for humanism.’

Professor Vilakazi is quoted here at length to demonstrate that the exercise we are trying to set in motion here has occupied the sharpest minds of ‘organic intellectuals’ on the African continent. He is also quoted at length because of the relevance of his ideas to what we are trying to say of the need to link the rural communities to African intellectuals and centres of high learning. Professor Vilakazi challenges all of us to wake up to this reality and create a new relationship between ourselves and the African masses who are our bearers. Such a new relationship shall imply a process of unlearning and relearning on our part. This is the only way we can resurrect the deep values of African humanism (‘Ubuntu’) that is so badly needed in today’s gadgetised and digitised world without the human touch and spirit.

While the problem Vilakazi poses is a real one, there exists nevertheless a link between the two components of African society. A non-African cannot play the role the African elite are required to play in the transformation of their society. Therefore, the new approach seeks to build on the unity of the two social forces as necessary for the reconstruction of Africa from ruins inflicted by Europe. Just like Vilakazi, who would like to see the African intelligentsia, being tutored by their ‘uncerticificated’ men and women to jointly produce a new African high culture that would be at the base of the African Renaissance, Y. V. Mudimbe too would like to see the emergence of a ‘wider authority’ of a ‘critical library’ of the westernised African intellectual’s discourses developed together with ‘the experience of rejected forms of wisdom, which are not part of the structures of political power and scientific knowledge.’

This is a useful reminder despite the fact that Mudimbe himself, according to the African philosopher D. A. Masolo: ‘lamentably fails to emancipate himself from the vicious circle inherent in the deconstructionist stance’ of how this ‘usable past’ should be used by African ‘experts’ to construct an ‘authentic’ African episteme. In short, if we are to join the African masses in transforming the continent, we must move towards establishing a truly Pan-African University. The object of the Pan-African University is indeed to overcome this epistemological divide between the ‘uncertificated Africans’ and the African intelligentsia.

Afrikan languages must therefore have to be at the centre of developing the university at all African community sites of knowledge. Language, as Cabral rightly pointed out, is at the centre of articulating a people’s culture. Cabral pointed out that the African revolution would have been impossible without African people resorting to their cultures to resist domination. Culture, according to him, is therefore a revolutionary force in society. It is because language has remained an ‘unresolved issue’ in Africa’s development that present day education has remained an alien system. Mucere Mugo quotes Franz Fanon who wrote: ‘to speak a language is to assume its world and carry the weight of its civilisation’. Professor Kwesi K. Prah has argued consistently over many years that the absence of Afrikan languages has been the ‘key missing link’ in Afrikan development.

What is the Way Forward?

       The Way Forward beyond neo-liberal agenda’s is therefore to move towards an African agenda for social and economic transformation of the continent. However, as argued above, this requires our linking with the African masses through learning and unlearning processes, which must encompass both the African intellectual and the African masses. To move towards the establishment of the Pan-African University requires developing an epistemology that can enable us to access the knowledge embedded in our communities. This is because all knowledge is a creature of languages and African languages are a store of immense knowledge and wisdom.

We at the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute have been working along these lines to create an epistemology which we have called Afrikology. This has laid a solid ground for the building of a new African institution, which is based on the African peoples’ heritage. As the originators of human knowledge and wisdom, the African people created a basis that enabled other societies in Asia and Europe to develop a global-universal system of knowledge that emerged from the first human beings in the Human Cradle located on the continent of Africa -the original homestead of all humanity. These activities begun with the grassroots research work of Afrika Study Centre-ASC in pastoral communities in North-Eastern Uganda-beginning with traditional conflict resolution research aimed at overcoming destructive cattle rustling that went on between the pastoralists and their agricultural neighbours. These conflicts had increasingly turned inwards between the pastoralist communities themselves across the whole region of East Africa. The research enabled a dialogue to begin within the communities, which later turned into a questioning of whether the research activities were really reaching out to the real issues as understood by the pastoralist communities themselves.

This questioning led to further programmes in the communities and academic links, including my membership of the US-based Social Science Research Council’s-SSRC programme on human security and international cooperation in which I had raised the question of epistemology in dealing with issues of research and creation of pools of knowledge by scholars and ‘practitioners.’ These ‘field building’ research activities involved new players that led to a new understanding of knowledge production and application. It was in this context that the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute-MPAI came into existence to engage in research at a very high academic level in which we began to raise issues of epistemology in much more considered form and in the writing of the first monographs on the issue. These monographs were later developed into full-fledged monographs on philosophy and epistemology of Afrikology.

The grassroots research carried out by Afrika Study Centre-ASC produced results about the way we should understood pastoral communities and their knowledge systems. It led to the questioning of the current Eurocentric epistemologies, including Cartesian ‘scientific epistemologies.’    The second area of research by ASC was the “Field Building” research activity in which the challenge made in the SSRC of New York took on a hands-on grassroots approach in which certain Community Sites of Knowledge were identified and included in the dialogues. The SSRC idea was to bring together into a ‘pool’ ‘all’ knowledge produced by academic scholars and ‘practitioners’ in their ‘intervention’ activities so that such collected knowledge would be available to all ‘users.’ My query was that such a ‘pool’ was not inclusive of all the knowledge available in Uganda-adding that such a proposed model would leave all ‘indigenous knowledge’ out of consideration. The SSRC agreed to the inclusion of custodians of such knowledge in the ‘field building’ activity and it was during this activity that the epistemological issues became transparent for it turned out that the ‘scholars’ and ‘practitioners’ had long assumed that their disciplines and methodologies covered ‘indigenous knowledge.’ This was rejected by the custodians who insisted that their ‘ways of knowing’ (epistemology) were different because they took into account the communities’ cultural and spiritual values, which ‘modern’ scientific approach ignored and in fact castigated as ‘superstitious.’

This is when the creation of the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute-MPAI became crucial because it was found that research on epistemological issues needed to be raised at a high academic level to problematise existing Western academic disciplines and epistemologies. This led to the first theoretical paper written by me entitled: Epistemological Foundations and Global knowledge production. This paper was published without authorization by the African Political Science Association in their journal-Journal of African Political Economy-AJOPE.

At this point, the issue of the establishment of a Pan-Afrikan university was raised in a paper authored by me entitled: Towards the establishment of the Pan-African University, which was also published by the African Political Science Association in their above-mentioned journal. Both these papers led to debates amongst the MPAI research fellows that led to the development of discussions on ‘Ways of Knowing’ (epistemology) and ‘Ways of Being’ (Ontology) as well as the role of culture and language in knowledge production. The first theoretical paper, which advanced Afrikology as an epistemology that was capable of reaching out to Community Sites of Knowledge was also produced by me entitled: Towards an Afrikology of Knowledge production and African Regeneration, which was published in the International journal of African Renaissance Studies of the University of South Africa-UNISA. This theoretical paper was further developed and passed through a series of versions of an expanded Monograph, which finally came to be referred to as: Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness, which is being published by the Africa Institute of South Africa-AISA in Pretoria. A further effort was made to develop this epistemology and relate it to research and the concept of “Restoration” which emerged out of the research on ‘Restorative Justice.’ This resulted in another monograph entitled: Research, Hermeneutics, Transdisciplinarity and Afrikology: Towards a Restorative Learning and Understanding. This monograph has been taken on by the UNISA Chair held by a Ugandan academic Catherine Odora Hoppers who wants to use to create a framework for developing African knowledge.

       As pointed out above, the idea behind Afrikology as an epistemology springs from the fact that all cultures and languages are the producers of knowledge. As producers of knowledge, all language communities have something to offer to the pool of human knowledge. Therefore the many African languages are a treasure trove of knowledge, which must not just be ‘preserved,’ but reactivated and brought into use to promote African transformation as well as being available to other communities, hence its universality.

       But since the custodians of this knowledge are the ‘uncertificated’ African men and women living in rural areas, it follows that they alone can dispense such knowledge through their universities and centres of higher learning of which they shall be part. In fact the African Community Sites of Knowledge in this sense have become the biggest universities from which the African intellectuals can derive their discharge their unlearning and promote a new ‘organic’ restorat5ive learning and understanding through their own languages-learning through research and listening and dialogue.

Nothing demonstrates better the importance of recognising African Community Sites of Knowledge than the research work which UNESCO carried out in the 1970s to write a General History of Africa. According to Prof. Curtin in his chapter in volume 1 of the UNESCO General History of Africa: Methodology and African Prehistory, the process of collecting the data and information to write such a history was a gradual one so that with the re-emergence of an authentically Afrocentric history the need arose to “join forces with the movement for an all-embracing social history in the first place through an interdisciplinary approach combining the histories of agriculture, urbanisation, and social and economic relations, and subsequently as a result of these advances made in history based on field surveys. According to him:

“The latter approach freed researchers from the constraining influence of archives in which the documents were often unreliable and were basically flawed because of the prejudices of the people who compiled them from the time of the slave trade to the end of the colonial period. The first-hand verbal accounts of contemporary African victims of colonization have proved an effective counterweight to the testimony of official papers. Moreover, as a result of the methodology evolved for making use of oral tradition, historians of Africa have become pioneers in that field and have made a remarkable contribution to its development.”    

       Prof. Curtin continues that this approach, which had been adopted by some “far-sighted scholar-administrators in the colonial service” and which enabled them to collect  “accounts of African traditions, where countermanded by academic prejudices of people like Murdock, following the footsteps of the British functionalist anthropologists by “bluntly asserting that ‘indigenous oral traditions are completely undependable.’ However, following the publication of Jan Vansina’s book: Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology [1961], in which he and other scholars, including Africans, “demonstrated the validity of oral tradition as a historical source, provided that it was subjected to the necessary critical controls. The seminars held later by historians in Dakar in 1961 and in Dar es Salaam in 1965 had emphasized the same view, “as well as the roles of linguistics and archaeology,” so long as they were also subjected to the same critical controls, we should add.

       Prof. Curtin also notes that it was the process of the decolonisation of African history that also liberated “colonial history” by reversing it, and did away with the presentation of European conquerors “as heroes of civilisation.”  

“In the work of the historians of decolonisation, the picture was completely changed and aligned more closely to the facts: the heroes were the African resistance fighters, whereas the conquerors were the leaders of expeditionary columns and colonial governors, who equated right with might, a policy always applied with brutality and sometimes with bloody consequences. A second step forwards was taken when the spotlight was focussed on the protest and resistance campaigns which, at the height of the colonial period, were to pave the way for the national liberation movements.”

       These approaches had rendered outstanding service to the other social sciences, and what achieved this was not the interdisciplinary methodology, but that for the first time African voices through their oral traditions had brought out the facts of their heritage and knowledge systems. The African decolonisation struggle had even gone further to ‘reverse’ the way history was henceforth to be written: as a social history. Primarily, the results showed that ‘traditional’ Africa had never been static and changeless, as the prejudiced Eurocentric historians such as Coupland had asserted on the History of East Africa. The studies from oral tradition also disproved those economists, historians, political scientists and sociologists who had split Africa into the ‘before’ and ‘after,’ implying separation of traditional and ‘modern’ Africa in which the former was depicted as static and the later as dynamic because it was said to have ‘jolted (Africa) into action,” because “before” it was “a world that had lain sleeping until them.” Curtin ends by observing that:

“It was the English-speaking anthropologists who were most put out by the revelation that dynamic internal forces had been at work in traditional African society. As functionalists, they had taken the structures of that society and had set about isolating the different agents or groups that had played a specific role in the original balanced state of things; their method entailed analysing the real and observable present and sifting out everything that might have been added since the arrival of the Europeans, so as to end up with an indigenous ‘model’ in the pristine state, in a sort of timeless ‘anthropological present’. It is true that this approach, which was dominated by the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, helped give an insight into the workings of societies. But this partiality for an Africa that was as ‘primitive’ as possible and, what is more, was immobilized in the museum of the ethnological present, tended to strip the peoples of Africa of one of their most important dimensions: their historical development. Consequently, historical studies had a positive impact on functionalism by recalling that the present is by definition transient’”

       In his preface to the General History, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, the Director-General of UNESCO, observed that since the European Middle Ages, which was the drawing line between the European dark ages and the modern era, the new Europe was used as the yard stick for judging other societies, although the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, based on oral tradition, were rightly regarded as essential sources of the history of ancient Greece from which Europe was claiming its heritage for their renaissance. Much of this source also contained elements of African history, but this was ignored and African oral tradition, the collective memory of peoples of Africa that “holds the thread of many events marking their lives, was rejected as worthless.” 

But, M’Bow added, African oral tradition and history, “after being long despised, has now emerged as an invaluable instrument for discovering the history of Africa, making it possible to follow the movements of its different peoples in both space and time, to understand the African vision of the world from inside and to grasp the original features of the values on which the cultures and institutions of the continent is based.

       Therefore, we have a peoples’ history as the entry point in going deeper into the African soul to discover what Africa stood for and what it offers today. The oral tradition and the hieroglyphs as well as the archaeological sources, literature, art, religion, philosophy all offer the opportunity to bridge the confusing “paradigms,” methodologies and scientific epistemologies that have alienated humankind from historical bearings rendering modern society into a materialistic, greedy and immoral society that foregrounds self-interest above community. The attempt to bridge these confusing academic disciplines has been done by Afrikology, which is a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production.

       The other “aberration” was the “ethnographic contempt for the sequence of events” and a tendency to concentrate on structures and a certain linguistic approach that became “blind and deaf” to the dynamics of language, which was also the weakness of functionalist anthropologists. Therefore, for African historians, the interdisciplinary approach was not a question of choice, but one of necessity and in this respect M’Bow regarded oral tradition as a “fully-fledge historical source.”

In this respect too, Ki-Zerbo placed emphasis on linguistics, which he regarded as an “inexhaustible historical source, for tradition is encapsulated in the living museum of language.” It is not only a psychological entity, its vocabulary “is like sedimentary layer in which the realities forged by each people’s history are deposited.” He added: “But conversely, it is language, the ‘word’, which conveys the ideological and cultural or political messages and which makes and unmakes history and makes it afresh by creating the ideas and rules governing behaviour. Some of the concepts involved are untranslatable because they bear the stamp of an entire culture.”

       It seems to me that the real problem here is the idea of the academic disciplines themselves and the epistemology upon which they are based. Once we accept that we have to operate within these disciplines in order to “recreate images of (African) social life,” ostensibly one that projects their authentic selves, it is naïve, in my humble opinion, to expect that people who have been trained and disciplined to see African society from the outside and whose disciplinary concepts and ways of thinking are imbued with prejudices built within the disciplines conceptual frameworks and language, can abandon these conceptual framework unless they have internalised another epistemological framework that accords with the communal and oral character of the African wholeness, which Afrikology seeks to overcome.

In short, the scholars must be ideological transformed to see through the conceptual and theoretical frameworks they use and to cope different meanings that cannot sometimes be not only linguistically translatable but even epistemologically consistent with the new concepts found within the African traditions themselves. It is also idealistic and naïve to expect the intellectuals to just ‘change’ their ‘outlook’ and work coherently with other equally segmented and academically fragmented disciplined individuals, whose ideological positions might be incompatible. This is even more so if new centres of research and learning have to be organisationally structured to accommodate this fragmentation and compartmentalisation, where the epistemological and ideological elements are already pre-determined in the structures to be erected and the individuals to be deployed.

        These Eurocentric epistemological and methodological approaches must be undermined if we are to make any progress in advancing scholarship under conditions of an African ‘renaissance’ and regeneration. African scholars together with the African masses have to create a new world by being able to recognise their existing cosmological worlds. As we move from the outside to the inside, we have to define new approaches of understanding that are appropriate to the African world. Academic disciplines in Europe arose with the needs of the time to serve particular interests. They were not created by God for all times and for all societies. They are human creations that serve particular (class) interests.

Prof  Ki-Zerbo himself argues that it is an “imperative requirement” that African history “should at last be seen from within instead of being interpreted through references to other societies, readymade ideas and prejudices.” It is time for us, he challenges, “to take an inside look at our identity and our growing awareness.” He is particularly bothered by the fact that “our history is being explained by a whole series of words and concepts that have come from Europe or other continents and that translate - and quite often betray – realities and structures created in another linguistic and social context.” But we cannot do this, if at the same time, we detach the academic disciplines from their concepts and prejudices by adopting interdisciplinary methodologies, which he advocated. To do so, we would be moving in vicious circles with the blissful hope that these same academic disciplines will deliver us from the problems we seek to overcome.

So long as the “scientific methodologies,” that were ideologically “constructed” to animalise the African people are not themselves problematised, deconstructed and new epistemologies developed based on African cosmogonies, it will be difficult to “domesticate” these same academic disciplines to re-humanise the world. Linguistic gimmicks will not do unless these are built on the principle that African languages are the tools through which a dialogue is possible that alone can promote their self-understanding and orient African scholars towards their own societies. This can only be achieved through a holistic, transdisciplinary Afrikology that foregrounds dialogue through African languages, which are holistic and non-fragmented according to academic ‘disciplines.’

Even in the area of linguistics that we all believe should be at the core of our work, and it is in fact in this area that we can be inspired to develop new ways of knowing ourselves, there is a lot of innovative work that has to be done. Prof. Greenberg adds that the Africa displays a greater degree of linguistic complexity than other continents and that the classification of African languages that has so far been carried out by mainly western linguists have created even more confusion because by following their individual conceptualisations, “the linguistic divisions constructed by one researcher or another are disturbingly reminiscent of the colonial divisions of yesteryear [Greenberg, 1989: 121]. To cure this problem, he calls for more monographs to be written so that more “scientific identifications of the outlines of the groups that may exist between the major “families” and the basic units, “which are currently the only irrefutable evidence. For this to be done, Greenberg, calls for Africans scholars themselves to do this work and this cannot be done in my view without the African griots and other indigenous linguistic experts becoming part of the process of research and teaching.

  This work was in fact begun with the pioneering attempt by Cheikh Anta Diop to link the Egyptian language with several West African languages followed by the work of Professor Theophile Obenga in the same field. It was with their work and struggle that the ancient Egyptian language, which had previously been linked to Semitic group of languages, was corrected at the UNESCO Symposium organised in Cairo in 1974 on ‘The Peopling of Ancient Egypt” to be part of the family of African languages. This major achievement brought nearer the acknowledgement of Egypt as an African civilisation and not an Asiatic one as had been argued by the Eurocentric ‘Egyptologists.’

The essence of the matter is that African scholars must be prepared to do the kind of research that is original and that can enable them to abandon Eurocentric clothing of academia and engage in dialogue with the experts in their communities. They have to admit that in that case, they alone cannot determine the research agenda from above, but must humble themselves to come under the feet of the African sages and griots, just like the Greek students like Plato did in Egypt to learn at the feet of the Egyptian scribes.  The designing of the research is not a top-down affair. It has to involve those who have the knowledge and information required for whatever is desired to be achieved by the research. In that case, the methodology cannot be predetermined. It has to be ‘negotiated’ with those ‘who know’ and during this process, the problem of the academic disciplines in which the hypotheses are formulated will be determined by the result of the dialogue between the researcher and (the researched)-those who know. The crucial question will be: “What is the purpose of the knowledge to be created.” Is it for knowledge’s sake or is it intended to result in some good for the community who will participate in such a research and knowledge production? This question cannot be answered in the abstract. It can only be answered with the people who can produce the knowledge and for whom it should be produced because they will know what use it is for.

Time has come when the African elites must stop looking down at their community compatriots as ignorant and illiterate, while the villagers look upon them as agents of foreign culture and economic interests. Hostility exists between the two and there is no trust between them since relationships between them is based on top-down “development” dictates passed on by the elite to the “ignorant masses.” This is the reason why African cultures and civilisation have stagnated, only changing to accommodate foreign inspired solutions.

If we are therefore we are to create and provide space and platform for African automous thinking on issues of the future of the continent free from disadvantageous foreign influences that have resulted in Africa’s weakening, we have to begin by liberating ourselves from the dominant epistemologies and adopt such an epistemology such as Afrikology that can enable us to draw knowledge and inspiration from our own heritages, which our people created through their languages. This knowledge is a living knowledge and incorporates our heritages. A Nile Heritage has deep roots in the origins of the Human Cradle, which is located in the Nile Valley. Ethiopian, Nubian and Egyptian civilisations were its flowering. Since then, our heritage was invaded and taken over by foreigners in Egypt and now in the rest of the continent. This injurious invasion must be fought back as the struggle in the Sudan has demonstrated. It is a long and arduous struggle, which must not only take an armed form. It has foremost to take the form of RESISTANCE THROUGH KNOWLEDGE and such knowledge is to be found deep in our heritage. So let us work on it. We are very much behind time.