from negritude to post africanism.pdf

Third Text, Vol. 24, Issue 2, March, 2010, 177–187

Introduction From Negritude to Post-Africanism Denis Ekpo

NEGRITUDE IS OVER! WELCOME BACK SENGHOR

1.

Marcien Towa, Léopold Sédar Senghor: Négritude ou Servitude?, Editions Cle, Yaoundé, 1971; Stanislaus Adotevi, Négritude et Nécrologues, Christian Bourgeois, Paris, 1972

2.

Irele and Gates’s responses contained in emails sent to the author.

The death of Negritude has long been virtually on every lip. Such viscerally anti-Negritude texts as Marcien Towa’s Léopold Sédar Senghor: Négritude ou Servitude and Stanislas Adotevi’s Négritude et Négrologues were indeed mocking requiems for Negritude intoned as early as the 1970s,1 right in the very ears of Senghor who was probably still convinced that Negritude was in its heyday. Today Negritude is considered so dead and outdated that prominent African/diasporic scholars such as Abiola Irele, Henry Louis Gates Jr and others, when contacted for this special issue, could not hide their embarrassment. Irele frankly confessed that there was nothing new to say or do about or beyond Negritude or Senghor, everything having already been oversaid and overdone. Others found less candid excuses to (un)conceal that same feeling.2 But Rasheed Araeen happened to have chanced on some flickering spirit, some spark of life still concealed in Negritude’s long embalmed body and drew my attention to it. He had re-read Senghor’s sociopolitical thoughts and had discovered that despite the racial-ethnic-artistic fetish that had been made of Negritude, there was still a specifically Senghorian intellectual life after Negritude’s ideological death. Initially I was sceptical (though I did not let him know it), for I must confess that I saw Negritude and Senghor the way the grandees saw them: there was nothing more worth saying about either. But Araeen insisted that there were sociopolitical gems in Senghor, outside Negritude’s parochial ethno-artistic fads, that deserve to be extracted and brought to the attention and benefit of our time. His persistence triggered in me a fresh curiosity that took me via Negritude to the heart of Senghorism. And there I discovered that, despite or because of Negritude, many of his signature sociopolitical, cross-cultural intuitions and daring insights have remained as misrecognised and under-exploited as they are still germane to the concerns of so-called postcolonial times. Why were these Senghorian insights, ignored or misrecognised? The reason is that Negritude

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2010) http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09528821003722108

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3.

It was Césaire who taught us to rejoice and be glad, though we had invented nothing, explored nowhere; also, not to condemn the cannibalistic past for it was proof of Africa’s counter-European manliness; see Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un rétour au pays natal, Présence Africaine, Paris, 1956

swept them along in its own ideological demise. But our findings show that, though Negritude is dead and rightly so, Senghor beyond Negritude is very much still alive. Burying Senghor along with Negritude came from the error of treating both as one and the same ideological racial-cultural monolith. In salvaging Senghor from Negritude the first move to make is, I believe, to unpack Negritude into two distinct but partially related doctrines. The second move is to fortify the resurrected Senghor with a new concept called Post-Africanism. This new concept it is hoped will prove sufficiently robust to bear the intellectual weight of a more fruitful post-Negritude engagement of Africa with the world process. But first what are the two doctrines that emerge from the dismantling of the Negritude monolith? The first is of course the official Negritude, a movement co-founded by Senghor but whose most ideologically active agents came not from Senghor but from Aimé Césaire. Although Senghor’s metaphysical solemnities on the black soul, African emotion or African participatory cosmology were seen as the intellectual foundation of this Negritude, cultural nationalism, which was the performative translation of Negritude into politics and art, was charged with its most radical Afrocentric voltage – such as unconditional race pride – by Césaire rather than Senghor.3 It was Césaire who taught us to rejoice and be glad, though we had invented nothing, explored nowhere; not to condemn the cannibalistic past, for it was proof of Africa’s counter-European manliness. The second Negritude, a crystallisation of Senghor’s most performative thoughts on politics, culture and modernity, can be distinguished as a philosophy addressed to Africa’s modernisation, centred first in a self-reassuring re-description of Africa and Africans and second in a politics of friendship and collaboration with the European holders of modernity’s powers and skills. In order not to confuse this Negritude with the official one, I prefer to call it Senghorism while the term cultural nationalism can best denote the official Negritude. Although often said to have been inspired by Senghor, cultural nationalism seems to me antithetical to Senghorism, for it pilfered from Senghor’s Negritude repertoire only those motifs that appeared to chime with a reactionary anti-modern escape into the past as well as anti-Europe resentments. Official Negritude or cultural nationalism died partly through the sheer inanity of its postulations on race, Africanity and emotivity; partly as result of the grave errors of a purely cultural-nationalistic self-understanding and apprehension of modernity. Those who say that there is nothing more to say concerning this Negritude are right, except that, in saying so, they invariably throw out the baby with the bath water. The reason for this is that the two Negritudes appear organically intertwined and synonymous with Senghor’s name. Senghor himself did not help matters for he, sometimes interchangeably, made noises of both sorts: cultural nationalistic traditionalism and a purely modernist engagement with Africa and the world. Nevertheless, although Senghor spoke of Negritude all his life, Europe, in his concrete engagements with politics both at home and internationally, superseded Negritude. He spoke Negritude but acted otherwise. Thus for Senghorism it is no longer necessary to take seriously Senghor’s metaphysico-poetic tropes, such as black soul, black aesthetics and so on, but to re-acquaint ourselves with what he said and did beyond or despite these obfuscating ideologemes.

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‘SOME ARE BORN POSTHUMOUSLY’: THE REBIRTH OF SENGHOR The second Negritude or Senghorism cannot pass away for the simple reason that the issues it engaged are still staring Africa and the world in the face. What are these issues and how can we re-engage them beyond Negritude? Most of the papers in this issue of Third Text are the result of attempts to return to the essential Senghor and extract the living seeds in his thinking from the problem of Negritude in order to make explicit their relevance to the concerns of our age. Central to Senghorism is the question of what to do with an Africa suddenly brought by Europe to the gate of world history. A reconstructive review of Senghor’s defining thoughts and activities before and after decolonisation reveals that, beneath the intoxicating poetry of lost old pagan kingdoms with their idealised naked black women, his thinking was dominated and driven almost entirely by an existential urgency, namely, the need to insert Africa properly and fully into a modernity whose gate had just been casually, almost inadvertently, half-opened by colonisation. How might Africa, gutted and brutalised by colonisation, manage to become part of the modern order? Thus while still chanting songs of praise to the unsullied splendours of foregone tribal pasts he realised that for Africa to become modern, it had to become not what it had been but what it had never been. He reasoned that the ancestral past, though beautiful in itself and worthy of respect, was not a directly relevant heritage or resource for the kind of unprecedented apprenticeship involved in transiting to the modern order. However, the past was not for that reason redundant, for it was called upon to play a vital role of therapeutic reassurance for the psychically mangled, racially disqualified, colonised subject. To this effect, Senghor mobilised aesthetics – art, poetry, music – and assigned to it the vital preparatory role of transfiguring the past for the purpose of existentially reassuring Africans as to the inherent validity and honour of their own civilisation. Once the maligned past has been aesthetically salvaged, Senghor had no difficulty in exhibiting it as Negritude in a purely compensatory aesthetico-cultural museum, while he went on performatively to think and act beyond it, realising that none of the skills, know-how and ethos required for the urgent task of getting Africa on stream for modernity could be found in the ancestral past. Thus central to Senghor’s performative political thinking beyond Negritude was his policy of engagement with Europe through wise collaboration, strategic friendship and creative alliances. He saw no intellectual or moral impediments in making strategic use of the resources of imperialism and later neo-colonialism, provided these could be deployed to aid and hasten Africa’s transition to modernity.

SENGHOR, CULTURAL NATIONALISM AND MODERNITY The image of Senghor highlighted by a reconstructive reading is that of a moderniser compelled by peculiar historical circumstances to reckon with the imperatives of race, culture and the African past. So too it becomes clear that cultural nationalism – the ideological attempt to remake modern Africa in its own nativist self-image, mostly through the

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decolonisation of the mind and institutions of modernisation – to which Senghor’s name has been attached, is an ominous misunderstanding of Senghorism. Cultural nationalism advocated against the oppressive levelling, homogenising and denigrating forces of an alien rationality, the return to nearly lost ancestral traditions and the recovery from them of erstwhile Dionysian ecstasies, the cultural splendours and the uncurbed spontaneities of tribal life. The only snag here was that, for all its hysterical anger at Europe’s colonial vandalisation of native tribal cultures and traditions, cultural nationalism also wanted modernity and wanted it covetously. But it wanted it not in opposition to restored nativism but as an adjunct or a complement to it. It wanted a specifically African path to modernity and not someone else’s. Hence the fundamentally damaging contradictions of cultural nationalist ideology. In the first place the socalled African culture or Africanity in question did not refer to an empirical reality but was merely a resistance construct. It was not what had been recovered from a common ancestral past but the name of a common emotive revolt against Europe’s racial contempt and dismissal of everything African. For in pre-colonial Africa there was no one shared, homogenising culture into which modernity could be fitted with necessary adjustments. What there was amounted to a chaotic multiplicity of incommensurable tribal mores, none of which taken individually could readily function in compatibility with the ethos of modernisation. To put it another way, in Africa the traditional tribal cultures were not a modernity-compliant heritage, but rather a counter-heritage. Thus the notion of a collective African culture serving as a common national or continental vehicle for an African path to modernisation was a massive self-delusion. The cultural nationalists, mistaking Senghor’s essentially aesthetic idea of a return to source, went ahead to advocate not only a total re-enchantment of the tribal outpost but the re-instrumentation of its pagan ways for the social, political and even technological modernisation of Africa. The neurosis of Afrocentricity became pervasive in the formulation and execution of political systems, economic policies and technological development plans, all culminating in the 1980 document The African Path to Development, dubbed the Lagos plan. The ethos of Africanity, having given rise to a meta-politics of cultural specificity, placed Africa on an unworkable path but, to be sure an African path, gave it an unworkable democracy but an African democracy, an unworkable socialism but an African socialism, etc. Thus, under the cover of a compulsory Africanity, some cultural nationalists went straight back to the archaic tribal past and misused it to furnish nonEurocentric formulae for Africanising modernity. Africanised modernity in the hands of psychotics like Mobutu Séssé Seko, Idi Amin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Gmassingbé Eyadéma to mention but the most colourful, became the abattoir for disposing of the last remnants of the heritage of modernity in Africa, including the state, the economy, reason and humanity. Many of the states formerly ruled by African cultural nationalists have never recovered from the consequences of these dangerous myths. Driven by a compulsive race hubris, aggravated by desire for impotent vengeance against Europe and an inflated idea of African dignity, cultural nationalist Africa locked itself in a auto-hypnotic rhetoric of self-reliance in finding the path to modernity and sleep-walked into one of the most disastrous human and development failures in modern

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history. Those decades of Afrocentric self-help are today still referred to as the ‘lost decades’. Senghor, whose master narrative of Negritude had in part provided the spiritual impetus for cultural nationalism, intuited early enough the inherent dangers of using incommensurable pasts and cultures to appropriate a modernity whose invention our ancestors had no part in. He opted for a Europe-facing wisdom. He knew that in an aesthetically unredeemed state, the old pagan tribal world of fabulous splendours was also in many ways a horror to behold. In fact he created Negritude partly as a voluntarist aesthetic transfiguration of the tribal past, lest we modern Africans should be tempted to recoil in fright, as Hegelian Europeans did, from so many of the unbeautiful ways of our illustrious ancestors. Unlike the cultural nationalists, he realised that one cannot talk of the essentially secularising post-tribal learning processes involved in modernisation, which requires rationalisation and a standardised world-view, while at the same time re-legitimising the separatist atavistic cultural reflexes of the tribe that are instinctively hostile to the deracinating, detribalising and disenchanting moves of modernisation. Africa has paid dearly for having misunderstood Senghor by mistaking his Negritude for a summons back to an obscurantist, hubristic and vengeful neo-traditionalism. Negritude as cultural nationalism largely contributed to the abortion of modernity in Africa; but Senghorism remains an unexhausted resource, a subtle technology of power evolved in the mire of Africa’s condition of helplessness under capitalist imperialism. Senghorism was essentially the deployment of the wise cunning of the defeated and helpless, and the performance of that wisdom and cunning on the world stage to Africa’s advantage. While Negritude deformed into cultural nationalism became the shame of Africa, Negritude as Senghorism remains Africa’s – and one of the world’s – most misunderstood strategic wisdoms. As it was Africa that misunderstood Senghor most – and paid for it most – it may be expedient, after redeeming Senghor from Negritude, to try to redeem Africa from too much Africanism.

POST-AFRICANISM Let where you are going, not where you are coming from henceforth be your honor. Your will and your foot that desire to step out beyond you – let this be your honor. Friedrich Nietzsche Thus spoke Zarasthustra

4.

Denis Ekpo, ‘Towards a Post-Africanism: Contemporary African Thoughts and PostModernism’, Textual Practice, vol 9, 1995

One such candidate for a redemptive post-Negritude renewal of Africa’s modernity is what has come to be known as Post-Africanism. What is Post-Africanism? First mooted by this author in a 1995 essay ‘Towards a Post-Africanism: Contemporary African Thought and Postmodernism’,4 it is a post-ideological umbrella for a diversity of intellectual strategies seeking to inscribe newer, more creative moves beyond the age-old fixations, obsessions and petrifications of thinking that had crystallised in and around the racial-cultural worries not only of the Negritude generation but also the so-called postcolonial zeitgeist. The idea came

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from the painful realisation that the cultural-nationalist ethos, reflexes and vocabulary that came to structure African philosophical, political and development thinking had not only dragged Africa and the African mindset into a crippling Afrocentric trap, but had also muddled most of Africa’s modernisation projects. Post-Africanism was proposed as an attempt first to deconstruct the disaster-prone emotionalism, hubris and paranoias indwelling to most ideologies of Africanism whether in art, politics or development discourse and, second, to seek newer, fresher conditions for a more performative African intellectual engagement with Africa, modernity and the West. But before I say more on what post-Africanism is or wants to be, let me add that it is not postcolonialism. Despite its gestures of radical chic, postcolonialism has often been responsible for sending some of the most intellectually misleading and befogging signals to the wretched of the third earth. One such signal that has contributed to delaying the intellectual maturation of the ex-colonies is the notion that the ability to confront imperialism and decolonise the mind of the colonised by laying bare its hidden structures of imperial domination is more important and urgent for the postcolonial subject than the ability to learn, copy or steal the ruses and skills of imperialist domination for the purpose of hastening economic growth and sociopolitical modernisation in the postcolonies. Against such wasteful and depressive deployment of intellectual resources on settling futile scores with imperialism, Post-Africanism, borrowing from Nietzsche’s notion of ‘amor fati’ – love of fate – preaches the spirit of total affirmation of all that colonial history has brought down upon us. It 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. From the post-Africanist perspective it is rather a matter of finding an entirely new perspective, a freer, bolder spirit from which the entire colonial past as well as the neo-imperialist present stands totally redeemed. Post-Africanism points towards a more creatively productive future time when postcolonial subjects released from their erstwhile compulsive anti-West resentments and fully reconciled with their historical fate – as offspring of Europe’s defeat – will discover the antianti-imperialist spirit to love and celebrate the fact that we were once colonised and, through being colonised, were happily fast-forwarded into the theatre of world history. Similarly, post-Africanism is even farther away from postmodernism. While the latter is mostly coquettish in its pretence of slaying the allegedly oppressive dragon of overmodernisation, the first expresses an ardent desire to overcome all that had hitherto obstructed Africa’s full entry into modernity. In other words, while one is a hypocritical jeremiad pronounced on a modernity that some claim to have too much of, the other is a deep yearning for the conditions conducive to the emergence of the indispensable basics of normal life in modernity. However, in my inaugural essay on postAfricanism, postmodernism had to be enlisted tactically for some of its underlying theories, especially deconstruction, which could serve as a method for seeing off the acquired insurrectional, accusatory, selfregarding as well as impotently hubristic habits of Afrocentric ideologies, including Negritude.

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5.

Friedrich Nietzsche; ‘On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life’, quoted in Malcolm Pasley, ed, Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought: A Collection of Essays, Routledge, London and New York, 2009, p 151

6.

Cultural health is here defined in Nietzsche’s sense as the innate capacity or plastic force of a people or a culture not just to recover from wounds inflicted on it from the outside but to use such wounds as a stimulus for growth. In this case Africa’s colonisation was the external wound that should have stimulated Africa out of its anthropological sclerosis and accelerated its entry into modernity. Africa’s failure to use the civilisational disturbances of colonisation as a stimulus for accelerated modernisation has been traced to many factors. One neglected explanation is that cultural nationalism choked many of the seeds of modernisation sown by colonisation.

Freed from the reactive compulsions of Negritude and postcolonialism, but also from the alien worries of postmodernism, Post-Africanism can seek new tonics for African thinking and constitutive conditions for Africa’s new cultural health. It reasons that over-exposure to debilitating ideologies of the Africanisation of modernity has unnecessarily complicated the African condition, stunting its growth and hampering its outlook on the world. It agrees with those who say that Negritude is dead but insists that saying so means recognising that there can be no African path to development except the wrong path, no specific African way or Africanity different from the ways of all pre-literate cultures stuck in a mythico-magic consciousness and waiting for rational scientific-technological Enlightenment. Post-Africanism conceives that the new cultural health of Africa must centre on a second African Enlightenment after the first tentatively colonial one was interrupted by premature decolonisation and the cultural nationalism that followed. It finds that the basic malady of Africa’s ‘modernity-consciousness’ was contracted in the wake of that interruption and diagnoses it as a chronic cultural overload: too many historical burdens weighing down on too little rationality and clarity of vision. Nietzsche had warned that an excess of historical or ancestral consciousness ‘damages a living system whether it be a human being, a people or a culture’.5 In Africa’s case it was not only the tribal past it was chewing over but anti-European paranoia and vengeful, impotent anti-imperialism. These antithetical impulses crowded out Africa’s vision of modernity, depriving it of clarity and performative efficacy. Post-Africanism’s second African Enlightenment concerns a massive disburdening of mind and vision, so that Africa can embark again on its journey of modernisation, this time deliberately travelling light.6 An Africa culturally re-disenchanted, redeemed from previous ideological redeemers and from the imperious need for messianic redemption, is the Post-Africanist Africa, no longer the mysterious and dignified Black Mother who can do no wrong or the Dark Continent that can do only wrong, but a rationally knowable sociopolitical entity and laboratory, an economic bloc and a market struggling to emerge. As an economic bloc or a political laboratory, Africa, to be sure, has been virtually stranded by globalised capitalist modernity. But the PostAfricanist point is that what it needs now to get back into the swim is no longer the hypnotising songs of master-griots, the hubristic brews of racial/ideological spell-binders, the woeful wisdom of Afro-pessimists, native or foreign, or the importunities of televised post-imperial pity, but the quiet, patient work of those with new, unencumbered and courageous knowledge. Post-Africanism moves away from a culture of anxiety about what the West thinks of us to a pragmatic confidence that negative images of Africa will be removed not by ideological blackmail or mimicries of the latest Western fad but by the demonstration of our competence in making modernity work for us here. No a priori racial dignity or African pride can do better than successfully manipulate modernity’s tools to transform Africa into a liveable, workable human space. Post-Africanism advocates a post-ideological empiricism that will draw the most appropriate inferences for the purposes of action. The audacity of Post-Africanism is not to invent new theories or radicalise existing ones but to propose a more modest Wittgensteinian rescue of the postcolonial subject from the bewitchments of either

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paranoid Africanism or mesmerised worship of Western idols. I want to illustrate this de-bewitching novelty and pragmatic flexibility of the Post-Africanist approach by considering two contrasting areas of Africa’s current modernisation projects, namely scientific-technological development and democratisation.

POST-AFRICANISM AND TECHNOLOGY

7.

Organisation of African Unity (OAU), ‘What kind of Africa in the Year 2000?’, quoted by Ronald Dore in Technological Capability in the Third World, Martin Fransman and Kenneth King, eds, Macmillan, London, 1984

8.

Ronald Dore, ‘Technological Selfreliance: Sturdy Ideal or Self-Serving Rhetoric?’, in Fransman and King, op cit, p 67

In the 1979 Monrovian Declaration of the OAU, Afrocentric Africa felt no strain of hypocrisy, self-deceit or empty boast in furiously bad-mouthing technological transfer as something utterly inimical to African pride or declaring that it was ‘stricken from the international vocabulary’.7 African dignity frowned at the degrading idea of copying other people’s technology, ie, of being tutored by the West on how to develop and grow. In place of such an inferiorising status, Africa had to build a self-reliant technological capacity to support its unique African path to development. Experience quickly proved that this was technology that did not work or had never even existed. Post-Africanism draws the full lesson from this untoward African path to technological modernisation and advocates a retreat from ethno-racial irrationality and a full-scale return to Senghor’s universal reason in this particular domain. There is no salvation for backward nations other than the schools of already successful modernisers. No point in expending resources on an African formula for cement technology. Africa must go to Asia or Europe to learn the world’s formula for producing cement properly. A crude motor spare-parts ‘factory’ in Eastern Nigeria, self-reliantly cobbled together from old iron scraps, is not thereby more ‘African’ than a high-tech factory in Japan; it is simply inefficiently stone-age. Technology that works knows no racial or national boundaries and is generally culture- and ethnicity-neutral. Post-Africanism necessarily puts an end to the self-reliance delusion and re-directs us to the schools of the world’s best practices, but also to the Senghorian school of stratagem in which disadvantaged but selfconfident learners are ready to brush aside race hubris, whether African or Western, and master the skills necessary to develop their countries. Senghorian humility, guile and strategy will get pupils back into the classrooms of the already successful modernisers. Africa’s racial honour and dignity can only be earned by successful technological/industrial modernisation through patient apprenticeship. Post-Africanist Africa should no longer worry that the world looks down on us for having invented nothing or made nothing work. Rather than trying to prove the world wrong by seeking to invent an African wheel, Africa should settle down without fuss to exploit the advantage of being the ultimate late-comer to modernity: we only have to learn and appropriate the latest of what the world has long laboured to invent and build. This may be what Dore calls the advantages of backwardness in the right hands.8

POST-AFRICANISM AND DEMOCRACY One major obstacle to a Post-Afrocentric hastening of sociopolitical modernisation is the inability to stabilise our own volcanic postcolonial

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9.

Stephen Smith, Nécrologie: Pourquoi l’Afrique meurt, Hachette, Paris, 2004

10. Ibid, p 194 11. Ibid 12. Robert Kaplan, ‘We can’t force democracy’, at http:// www.washingtonpost.com 13. Francis Fukuyama, ‘Stateness First’, Journal of Democracy, vol 16, no 1, 2005

nation-states that seem always to be erupting or about to erupt. One major reason for this failure may be the dogmatic insistence by both Africa and the West that democracy must work here too. On this issue Africa seems paradoxically unanimous – the same Africa that resists the Western ABC of technological development laps up every drop of the neo-liberal prescription drug of democracy as the panacea for all its ills. The West itself does not help by raising apocalyptic alarms: no matter what Africa does, it is doomed unless it democratises. Consider for instance Stephen Smith’s typical Western thinking on this issue in his Afro-pessimistic book Négrologie: Pourquoi l’Afrique meurt.9 After a terrifying balance-sheet on the fortunes of democratisation in Africa in the last decades, he asks: is democracy impossible in Africa? Rather than draw the obvious conclusion commanded by his findings, he proposes the non sequitur that the democratisation of Africa today, like the decolonisation of Africa five decades ago, is not optional. ‘Neither Africa nor the world has a choice.’10 He sweeps under the carpet all that he had previously documented as irrefutable evidence to the contrary. To be fair to Mr Smith, most of Africa currently reasons as he does, for it is not an uncommon refrain that ‘there is no alternative to democracy in Africa!’ For Smith, Africa cannot avoid democracy because, despite being underdeveloped and unstable, Africa must live and breathe in the same globalised temporality as the rest of the world, and democracy is the minimal requirement for convergence with global time. The infatuation of Africa’s elite with democracy, on the other hand, seems motivated by the Afrocentric anxiety of African racial dignity and pride: Africa, though still a multi-tribal patchwork, must show itself capable of operating the world’s most advanced system of political management. Smith wants Africa to democratise because it cannot extract itself from global time;11 Africa’s elites want democracy to prove to the world that it is already cloaked in global time. Against both these fallacious and disaster-prone scenarios of globalising urgency that would enforce liberal democracy on Africa, Post-Africanism pays disillusioned attention to the many illiberal and unglobalisable facts and figures, forces and signals on the ground. PostAfricanism does not mind Europhilia in the field of technological modernisation, but some of the so-called globalised political or social modernities of the West must be regarded with a philosophy of robust suspicion. Post-Africanism challenges the reigning global political idols and is prepared to think and act beyond their apparently irresistible seductions. Saying that there is no alternative to the Western model of democracy in all of postcolonial Africa flies in the face of all empirical facts. Africa does have a choice for the simple reason that, though this democracy is undoubtedly what everybody, including Africa, wants, ‘you cannot force it’, as Kaplan, a spokesman of the neo-conservatives in neo-imperialist America, puts it.12 Kaplan has finally come to reckon with what postcolonial Africa and a good part of Asia have been trying to stammer out, often with fire, smoke and nihilistic genocidal fury, since the beginning of the forced democratisation process. You cannot force democracy, because what most of the postcolonial multi-tribal patchworks want above everything is, according to another American conservative, George Santayana, ‘stateness first’.13 But did it have to cost America and the world all the wars in Asia and all the tragedies in Africa

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for these wise men to recognise this old wisdom of the political sages of independent Africa? Why did the West in the first place want Africa to think that becoming democratic was something it had to do as a categorical imperative, irrespective of any tragic consequences that could result from its forceful imposition? If the minimal conditions for a working democracy, including ‘stateness first’, are simply not there, then we must go back and reinterpret the negative realities spawned by democratisation, not as evidence of Africa’s congenital incapacity for political modernisation but as signals of a deep systemic rejection of its electioneering multi-party form by the current nation-state system in Africa.

POST-AFRICANISM AND ART Hegel had said that philosophy is nothing but the best thoughts of the age. What ‘best thoughts’ have we produced in an age that imprisons us? Post-Africanism wants to be the thought of Africa in relation to a much anticipated future age compelled prematurely into being and aborted by the curses of the present age. A Post-Africanist art is summoned by positive force to the role of an avant-garde to imagine and play midwife to a redeemed future. In other words, art in the post-Africanist sense is the requisite pregnancy that can deliver a counter-future to the current postcolonial stillbirth of modernity. The problem is, can what currently passes for African art, so-called postcolonial art, take the weight of such redemption? An inspection of current African art, after Senghor, shows that many post-Negritude artists are still busy mining or recycling, from the many real troubles of the postcolonies, faked tribal authenticities or old nativist identities and selling these to the West as postcolonial art. But the Senghorian task of reconciling a postcolonial para-modernity, sickly, at odds with itself and without solid anchors in modernity, cannot be achieved by our artists and art historians opportunistically appeasing the exotic itches of blasé Westerners with simulated ethnicities. As we know, art via cultural nationalism was Africa’s major route to entanglement in the cross-cultural complications of modernity. At the twilight of both Negritude and cultural nationalism, we know that the road to a nativistic recovery of lost cultural health is barred to Africa, for there can be no cultural health for Africa other than what she can recover from coming to terms with her essentially non-native colonialist historicity. We also know that chronically sick cultures are more prone than others not just to illegitimate politics and unworkable modernities but also to unhealthy art. Consequently, Post-Africanism proposes as a cure to the current anachronistic nativism of postcolonial art a return to Senghor’s anti-Negritude aesthetic wisdom, namely, suspending the past and ethnicities in a purely aesthetico-cultural museum so that truly modern African art can be birthed and deployed in the service of Africa’s modernisation. In this sense a Post-Africanist art can serve as the chief purveyor and promoter of Africa’s new cultural health, no longer pathologically urged to bleed from the old scars of history or perpetually to blame others, but now able to use past wounds as stimulants to faster growth. For post-Africanist art to serve as stimulant to the new hopes of Africa, the new artist must necessarily desist from all defensive cultural protectionism and no longer adopt the victim’s mien but Zarasthustra’s

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14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, quoted in Pasley, op cit, p 87

courage and voluntarism: ‘What does it matter that you have miscarried! What matters is how much is still possible?’14 For today’s pseudo-globalising generation, the primacy of democracy has replaced the Afro-narcissistic obsessions with dignity and pride. However, for a Post-Africanist epoch, the business of thinking is premised exclusively on mobilising all of modernity’s cultural resources to put modernity properly to work in an Africa of the future. We should first seek a functional all-embracing modernisation of Africa so that all else, including dignity, prosperity and democracy, will be added unto us.

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