AFRICA: THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY

Africa has meant many things to many people: to some it is the land of the noble savage; to others it is a vast reservoir of cheap labor and raw materials for exploitation; to yet others it is a vast continent of jungles and cannibals, remote and exotic, a persistent enigma.¹

It is not easy for an African to talk about Africa without referring to the age-old problems associated with it: poverty, slavery, illiteracy, and the like. But there is also a danger of drifting into apologetics and rationalizations of the events as they stand, and of pointing fingers at some historical development or some common experience². At the risk of sounding pedantic or overly cynical, I would dare to harp, albeit mildly, on the selfsame hackneyed areas of concern since their very pervasiveness can only be indicative of their importance as factors in the life and history of the African.

Africa, you were once just a name to me,

but now you lie before me with somber

challenge . . .

You are not a country, Africa

You are not a concept

Fashioned in our minds, each to each,

to hide our separate fears, to dream

our separate dreams.

Only those within you who know

their circumscribed plot

and till it well with steady plough . . .

(can say), "This is my Africa" meaning

"I am content and happy

I am fulfilled, within, without, and round

about.³

Some have disparaged Africa for its lowly state in the field of science and technology. Some have revelled in the supposed past glories of Africa as though that were sufficient to cater for today's challenges. A recent Daily Telegraph report speaks about the excavations in Sudan of a lost city which dates back to between the 8th Century B.C. and the Middle Ages:

The dig has so far uncovered a palace, houses, wall inscriptions, pottery and leather bags which show indigenous monumental architecture and writing systems as well as traces of outside influences such as those of Greece and Turkey.⁴

Revelling in this type of discovery is self-defeating since most industrialized societies have their own share of excavations and lost cities, and yet have kept new cities going. In this regard Fanon's caveat is very pertinent:

I am convinced that it would be of the greatest interest to be able to have contact with a Negro literature or architecture of the third century before Christ. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato. But I can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadalupe.⁵

The image of the African is of one desperately wanting to be heard. Trying to outdo himself to show that he actually belongs in the society of humankind, he would eagerly display his prowess in the fields of culture, of sport, of intellect and of civilization. All these efforts seem to meet with a rather listless audience who, it seems, will always require double evidence to doctor their credulity and would then give a complement more from courtesy than from solidarity. The African knows it. Even their own identity--cultural, political, religious--must await the verdict of a skeptical, stern-faced critics before they could lay any claims to authenticity. [A friend of mine had to be told his family name sounded Italian and was therefore better written AMATI rather than AMADI. Well meaning non-African acquaintances would invariably ask me to translate my name so they could understand!]

Consider the following conversation that went on recently between a friend and myself.

Friend: But what is your real name?

Me: Real name? Do you have any reason to think I bear

a false name?

Friend: Not that you have a false name, I mean your official

name - your real Christian name.

Me: Well, if I must do it all over again, my name is IZUCHUKWU,

IZU for short.

Friend: That HAS TO BE your family name for it sounds rather strange.

Me: My family name is ONYEOCHA.

Friend: What does that mean?

Me: I don't understand your question.

Friend: I mean could you translate it so I could understand?

It is said that African names always have a meaning.

The implications of this innocent and obviously friendly conversation give food for thought. As far as my friend was concerned I did not have a real name until it was either translated or substituted by an equivalent in her own language. Did I have to be a Christian or have a Christian name to be official? And given the fact that I am a Christian, who says Izu could never be a Christian name? Did I have to go around translating my name in order to be better appreciated?

In the political sphere, it took the boundaries arbitrarily drawn at the coffee table for African nations to emerge, irrespective of natural boundaries or cultural differences, and without the slightest regard for the wishes of the people. Along with the political definition came the religious, with a brand new set of moral codes forcibly supplanting the traditional. Traditional piety suddenly became idolatrous and traditional marriage which was polygamous became adulterous. On the socio-cultural level, native languages were outlawed and with them went the folkways.

The African then became by definition an eternal student whose every facet of existence first must be vetted before he could validly adopt it. Thus severed from his roots, the African has not found any sure foothold, either in the received cultures or in his embattled one. Deprived of the use of his mother tongue, he has not quite learned the new ones; yet his destiny is made to hang on this. He is thus conditioned to learn by rote things which are of little significance to his normal life.

On the political scene he is either pro-West or pro-East. Democracy is defined in ways that are incomprehensible to him and he is forced to regard as democratic a system which he would consider as devoid of consensus.⁶ Though the multi-party system may sound democratic, in reality it is the winning party whose determinations along become law for all. It regards even a simple majority as a consensus and only rarely has recourse to referendums.

Africa thus became the great arena of frantic missionary activities from the great religions whose interest is served by universalism and the sense of supremacy. Mazrui sums up the situation:

Perhaps no other continent has faced such massive attention by those who have had religions of sacred wares to propagate. In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and much of the twentieth centuries Christianity found its greatest area of voluntary dedication among private agents within the African continent. Europe exported not just administrators and businessmen but also peddlers of religious beliefs. Even before the Christians came, the Muslims had disseminated their religious ideas in various parts of the continent.⁷

We may consider this an enrichment, but the worried piecing together of succeeding events in colonial and post-colonial Africa has led to the exasperated conclusion that this was all an imperialistic, opportunistic gimmick, designed in the first place, not to Christianize or morally uplift, but as a cover for doing the African in. It takes a brave and persistent act of faith to dismiss or an equally energetic new approach to generate a less pessimistic point of view.

With true independence regained,. . . a new harmony needs to be forged, a harmony that will allow the combined presence of traditional Africa, Islamic Africa and Euro-Christian Africa, so that this presence is in tune with the original humanist principles underlying African society. . .⁸

In the final analysis it is the African who must define himself. All external parties should spare themselves the effort of always wanting to oversee what the African is about. The attempts to oversee have given rise to all kinds of misconceptions and problematic stereotypes which distort rather than define the true image of the African. Most notorious among all these are race, color and ideology, each of which will be discussed in the subsequent sections of this paper.

The African fares no better from the elements. He is almost an endangered species as a result of drought, pests, floods or famine. Aimé Césaire captures the situation in his inimitable way with the picture of a peasant farmer hand-tilling an arid soil with his hoe or "dabat":

Strike peasant, strike (the soil with your "dabat")

The first day the birds died

the second day the fish ran aground

the third day the animals emerged from the forest

and girdled the towns in a great belt hot and very strong.⁹

The Africa presented by the ethnologist is a legend in which his audience readily believed. The African tradition as it appears in the light of the neo-African culture may also be a legend, but it is one in which the African intelligence believes. It is their perfect right to declare authentic, correct and true those components of their past which they believe to be so. Thus, the conception of the tradition as it appears in the light of the neo-African culture must be considered the most valid, since it is the one which from now on will form the future of Africa. Neo-African culture appears as an unbroken extension, as the legitimate heir, of tradition.

The geographical entity known as Africa cannot be classified as a national community, nor defined in terms of a common language, culture or worldview.¹¹ [It is shocking to Africans to note how very minimal is the actual knowledge of Africa in most of Europe and the United States. Invariably the notion of Africa is that of a country somewhere around Kenya or Rhodesia or South Africa. Africa is known in terms of disasters, wars, famines. The dearth of knowledge of Africa even among academics is nothing short of surprising. The statistics given of Aids or some other occurrence includes, for example, figures for European countries, then the United States and then Africa!]

Ideologically, the northern part of Africa, predominantly Muslim, identifies more with the Arab world more than with Africa. According to Southern Africa's policy of apartheid, whites have not until recently considered themselves as Africans; indeed, the whole idea of apartheid has been aimed at Africans on the basis of color. Whites have their affiliations with Western Europe and the United States as the home of their forebears. Thus, we are left with the sub-Saharan southwest and central Africa, often referred to as the "real" Africa or "Black Africa".¹²

There are the African-Americans (courtesy of the Rev. Jesse Jackson) and the African Caribbeans (so-called "Black Souls in a white world") who by accident or design are black migrants or descendants of former slaves. There are the offspring of intermarriages between Africans and non-Africans.¹³ Who then wears the African badge; is it possible to have in-between Africans or people more or less African than others?

Even the aspect of color does not seem to provide the ultimate answer to the question of African or any identity. There are many light-skinned people in Africa, just as there are so many dark-skinned people in other parts of the world. It is, however, noteworthy that most of the attempts at identifying the African, even by Africans themselves, have never quite succeeded in getting away from the question of color. One possible explanation is the fact that the human mind often tends to work within established categories such that opinions earlier held tend to influence subsequent views. Some of the theories proffered as to the content of Africanity lean heavily on the question of race and color. Negritude is one such theory.

The schema of my normal body experience had dissolved, attacked at several points, gave way and was replaced by a schema that was racial and epidemic. In the train, I was responsible at one and the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I looked at myself objectively, discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics. And I understand all that was being held against me: cultural backwardness, fetishism, slavery, cannibalism. I wanted to be a human being, nothing more than a human being.¹⁴

As a result of this kind of situation, many African Americans wanted to become white to liberate themselves from the burdensome memory represented by a more highly pigmented skin; others wanted to seek their salvation in the acquisition of the African heritage in the new-fangled spirit of Pan-Africanism.

RATIONALIZING WITH COLOR; SENGHOR'S NEGRITUDE

the whole complex of civilized values, cultural, economic, social and political which characterize the black peoples, or precisely the Negro-African world. All these values are essentially formed by intuitive reason, which expresses itself emotionally through self-surrender . . . through myths . . . and above all, through primordial rhythms synchronized with those of the cosmos.¹⁶

Senghor's analysis understandably met with criticism in that he, among other things, advocated a process of miscegenation which hopefully would get rid of the dark pigmentation over the generations. He also considers the African as emotional rather than rational: "Emotion is black, . . . reason is Greek."¹⁷

When confronted with these things he was not about to change his views:

Young people have criticized me for reducing Negro-African knowledge to pure emotion, for denying that there is an African `reason.' . . . I should like to explain myself once again . . . "European reasoning is analytical, discursive by utilization; Negro-African reasoning is intuitive by participation."¹⁸

A closer look at Senghor's theory would reveal its vagueness in the use of such terms as civilized values, intuitive reason, emotion, self-surrender, myths, primordial rhythms. Civilized, for Senghor, would be synonymous with Westernized, and with that meaning go the other concepts as corollaries: self-surrender to these (Western) values, etc. There is no question of trying to examine more closely for the purpose of understanding, and if necessary changing the status quo. Intuitive reason is almost the opposite of deductive, reflective reason, and is more consistent with the emotional than with the rational. Thus in Senghor's theory, the African floats aimlessly with the current on the turbulent waters of the universe and reality; on the flimsy rafts of color, comfortably ensconced on the easy-chair of emotions, bereft of the compass of intentionality, with no provisions against hunger, wind and storm; with no plans, no aim, no target; blissfully relying on random flashes of ideas in order to arrive nowhere but where the tides turn.

Africans all over the continent, without a word being spoken either from one individual to another or from one African country to another, looked at the European, looked at one another, and knew that in relation to the European, they were one.²³

This cryptic observation based on "looking" would tend to suggest that Dr. Nyerere has fallen into the tendency to regard color as the important identification tag for the African, since it, more immediately than anything else, distinguishes him from people of other kinds of color.

I do not believe in what some people call the African personality. There is no such thing as African personality. Africans belong to the human race and I can say talk of African personality betrays an inferiority complex. "²⁴

THE IDEOLOGICAL FACTOR: NKRUMAH'S CONSCIENCISM

The main features of Nkrumah's consciencism include the principle of egalitarianism and the consideration of man as an end rather than a means. Philosophical consciencism therefore forms "the theoretical basis for an ideology whose aim shall be to contain the African experience of Islamic and Euro-Christian presence as well as the experience of traditional African society, and, by gestation, employ them for the harmonious growth and development of that society."²⁶

Nkrumah's point of departure in the crisis of the African conscience makes his theory rather reactionary in approaching the African as trying very hard to contain the influence of these three elements. That approach led Nkrumah to assume--without trying to explain--the values proper to the African. He was reacting against colonialism, but forgot the who of the African in his pursuit of the what that is the Conscience. No identity could be established on the basis of conscience alone.

Ujamaa villages are intended to be socialist organizations created by the people, and governed by those who live and work in them. They cannot be created from outside, nor governed from outside. No one can be forced into an Ujamaa village, and no official at any level can go tell the members of an Ujamaa what they should do together, and what they should continue to do as individual farmers.²⁹

Nyerere describes the basis of this society as equality and respect for human dignity, sharing of the resources which are produced by common efforts, work by everyone and exploitation by none. Nyerere makes it clear that Ujamaa is not intended as a revival of the old settlement schemes under another name; it is a new conception. No doubt Nyerere is protesting against the injustices of capitalism. But he never trifles with his Catholic religious beliefs.³⁰ (By some coincidence, Senghor himself is a devout Catholic and Nkrumah was brought up a Catholic but later on in his political career was no longer active.)

Despite all that has been said above, the issue of African identity is not yet nearly resolved. One may begin to wonder if the whole business of African identity is not a mere intellectual conception with no footing in reality. In any case, since color, ideology and the social factors each taken by itself have failed to give any conclusive lead, this means that the African--or for that matter any person--gets lost in the rubble when reduced to components and each part is studied in isolation. The whole enquiry must be taken up once again and from a different angle.

The African is the Yoruba craftsman and the Tutsi Lord, the Nairobi mechanic and the Ibadan professor, the Fulani nomad and the Congolese villager, the hunter of the great forest and the warrior of the high plateau; the woman trader of Dakar and the factory girl of Bouake, the Benin sculptor and the Lumumbashi painter. This list of differences within the sub-Saharan Africa could be extended indefinitely.³¹

Maquet goes on to identify the constants of Africanity as becoming an African, finding one's place among kin, depending on lineage, going back to ancestors, being in harmony with reality, marrying several wives, making lineage continue, controlling without coercion, ruling alone, being identified with the people, existing for others, fixing inequalities.

As far as Maquet is concerned, his typical African manifests these characteristics. Put in other words, Maquet's African is always living in the past, a simpleton that never goes beyond the sensory level of existence, godfatherish in government, making sure that no one surpasses others, brutish, and incapable of reflection. So, according to Maquet's listing, wherever you look and find someone satisfying these characteristics, that person is an African! Consider the carefully sketched roles listed by Maquet: not one of them involves any intellectual activity! There is this meaningless talk of "being in harmony with nature", which implies a chronic passivity arising from an innate incapacity to subdue nature and make it serve his needs.³²

Apart from identifying documents, apart from traits of color or culture, something remains and perdures, looming larger than life itself. Reflecting on the transcendental qualities of the human personality I have observed as follows:

The human personality is impenetrable, incommunicable and even indestructible. Perhaps it could be frustrated or hampered by circumstances or the sheer bad will of others. It could also be enhanced, helped up and enriched by others through love or education. Even if we explain a man's body or mind, we could never explain his personality--that which makes him himself and absolutely no other. . . . I can lose everything . . . even life itself. But I can never lose my personality.³⁴

In the light of this observation, it seems that it is the African personality that must manifest itself so that the African can take his place on the world scene. Crucial to the question of personality development is contentment with what one is or has, while not giving up on what one should be. The African has been barraged into lack of self- confidence and lack of contentment with himself and his potentials: unwittingly an inferiority complex is his lot. This lack of contentment brings with it envy, irritability and lack of inner peace.

I had thus no need for complexes of contempt, rage or dissembling, and everywhere I moved, I saw myself as the equal or even superior of the people about me --a pardonable sin after emerging, with my country, from a long period of repression and humiliation.³⁵

whipping, hot wood on the buttocks, salt, pepper, citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes poured on bleeding wounds, mutilation of limbs, ears and private parts, burning with wax, being burnt alive, roasted in slow fires, filled with gunpowder and blown up, buried neck-deep in the earth and head smeared with sugar to attract flies and insects to a living feast³⁶

--all in the pursuit of wealth.

The trauma can hardly be exaggerated. Just for the sake of comparison, two decades after the Vietnam war some of its American veterans are still suffering the after-shocks. In Japan the population still bears the after-effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The victims of Auschwitz are still deeply troubled over their terrible experiences, and international outrage has not yet let up on seeking out and dealing with all those who had anything to do with it. By the same token, a situation of trauma and intimidation that built up over several generations is likely to take a considerable while to remedy, given the good will of all parties. All this is on the psychological level.

Ideologically, the African is torn between Western capitalism and Eastern bloc socialism. There is no word of any other possibility; his leaning is adjudged right or wrong according as he leans right or left, conservative or liberal; he rules well or badly according as he follows Westminster/Washington or Moscow/Beijing.

You may in outward appearance convert people to a new . . . faith; but if they are not educated up to the level of intellectual and moral power which that higher faith requires, the old ideas will persist in the popular mind, all the stronger in proportion to the ignorance of each individual; and those ideal will seize on and move the people, especially in cases of trouble and sickness, and in the presence of dread of death³⁷

There is the exaltation of celibacy as a super virtue within some segments of the Christian (Catholic) religion, but the African now watches as it is being seriously attacked and in danger of being overthrown. Finally, killers who, according to African ethics, are supposed to be killed, walk free due to strange twists in the interpretation of the law and the administration of justice.

The period of loss of independence has entailed for Africa a certain measure of deculturization which fortunately was not total. The cleavage between town life and village life was sufficient to prevent the deculturization from sweeping through. Because the vast majority of the African population belongs to the village rather than to town life, Africans have a clear but decisive choice before them: whether to be as alien to their own people as the government had been, or whether to pose problems and formulate ideals and national objectives meaningfully in terms of the cultures of Africa. Africa is in crisis at various levels, but that is to be expected in a period of decision and transition such as Africa faces at the moment.

The time of transition, whether short or long, will confront the African with an important decision: whether to accept modern civilization at his own expense, or to do so on his own terms, or to reject everything completely and slip back into the limbo of the past.

4. The Daily Telegraph, London and Manchester, Monday, January 4, 1988.

8. Ibid.

11. I was amazed and shocked to watch a recent Channel 4 TV show "Family Feud" where two six-member panels would win ten thousand dollars for answering questions right. One of the questions was: NAME THREE COUNTRIES OF SOUTH AMERICA. Answers: AFRICA! Spain, South Africa! The twelve panelists failed to come up with a list of three countries in South America!

14. Fanon, p. 114.

15. Downs, p. 13.

18. Senghor, On African Socialism (London, Pall Mall, 1964), p. 74.

22. Ibid., p. 237.

26. Ibid., pp. 68-70.

27. See "Ghana's Cultural History," extracts from his speech at the inauguration of the University of Ghana, Presence africaine 13, 1962) pp. 7-14.

29. Nyerere, p. 149.

30. By some coincidence, Senghor himself is a devout Catholic and Nkrumah was brought up a Catholic but later on in his poitical career was no longer active.

32. Maquet is no doubt basing his position on what Aristotle said about some people born to rule and command while others are only disposed to obey . . .

38. Smith, The Golden Stool (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1927), p. 264.

39. Okoye, p. 15.

41. Hountondji, p. 159.

42. Okoye, p. 250.