CHAPTER III

THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA

J. KISEKKA

POSITION OF THE QUESTION

            The individual I am to discuss and to write about belongs to the political category of  “the people”[i]  and is the average single human sexual person who, generally speaking, is born, lives and dies in contemporary Africa.

            In particular, this is an individual named Kayo Nesmo who was born in a village in Uganda.  He spent most of his infancy in poverty.  His mother did not have enough breast-milk to feed him; the family could not afford supplementary foods.  Even the staple food that could be procured from the small shamba that Kayo’s father had inherited from his grandfather was insufficient to feed the family of ten.  So they had to supplement it by working for food from neighbours.  Often times this meant trekking long distances to find one in need of their services.  Kayo’s father was a charcoal burner.  No sooner had Kayo mastered the rudiments of reading, writing, and addition, than his father advised him to fend for himself as he, too, had done. Kayo Nesmo, who had by then been confirmed in his church, began his long journey of survival by burning charcoal.  The owners, because of the trespass on private property or forest reserve, always harassed him.  If they agreed on the mode of sharing, he always felt cheated.  Whenever he took a sack of charcoal for sale, he hated to pay the market tax, so he resorted to traveling late at the night.  Yet he had to pay the owner of the bicycle he used.  Tired of this trade, he was attracted to the nearby town where he did a porter’s job for a few coins per day.  But as he could not afford to pay, as was needed, for each thing, Kayo went back to the village to resume his trade.  He got a woman and rented a two-chambered grass-thatched house.  With one mouth more to feed, Kayo worked harder cultivating other people’s gardens. Thus he gained enough money to buy a piece of land and a radio.  In due course, the woman gave birth to twins.  He liked developmental ideas and was in a sense “development prostitute” in that he has tried almost whatever one government proposed through radio programmes.  Despite all this, he has been unfortunate because any time he begins a new project, he is disappointed at the time of sales.  The prices of his products are set by forces beyond his control:  they talk of the dollar effect, which he vaguely grasps.

            The prices of the necessities of life are always rising compared to his meager income.  He is compelled to buy second-hand.  Meanwhile his family grows, they talk to him of family planning, which he does not comprehend, but he entrusts these worries to God alone.  Now in his forties he begins to question the name of Onesimo; he queries the so-called obligations to the church and the state.  As I write, Kayo is on his deathbed surrounded by his six malnourished children of tender age.  He is languishing longing to get Medicare which if found he could not afford.

            Once individuals are “thrown-into-contemporary Africa,” they struggle and hope amidst death, suffering, injustices, miseries, wars, and joys to survive or want to dominate the world and long not to be taken away from the world they did not choose. With time, individuals come to understand themselves as Homo Viator, a pilgrim, a traveler, who has to discover their ‘where from’ and ‘where to’ so as to install meaning in their being as sojourners in the world in general and in contemporary Africa in particular.

            Death is the fate which awaits rich and poor, powerful and weak, atheists and theists alike. But such factors can become the occasion for thinking of a beyond and trying to find a remedy for those evils.  Alternately, one can resign oneself and turn toward indifference to the beyond and to evil.

            History as well as our times bears palpable testimony of the need to harmonize these seemingly contradictory positions.  The contemporary period is characterized among other things by the eclipse of the beyond.  This is true both in the most and the least industrialized countries alike.  In the former the advanced successes attained in technology and in the latter the failure to satisfy one’s basic needs both leave a life of perpetual craving and generate a tendency for the individual to forget to fix one’s eyes to the heavens. In the former world, people become disillusioned with achievements that become more autonomous and dominating via the mass media. This tendency in the least developed areas of contemporary Africa as the same ambition to satisfy basic needs by working more fixes one’s eyes on earth without recourse to any power other than the human.

            But man as an individual in contemporary Africa is destined to live in two different orders: existence, which is personal and full of super-personal values, and the objective world, which is impersonal and bluntly indifferent to personal values.[ii] Hence, the crucial question becomes: can such an individual find meaning, sense, and value in respect to ethics, human rights and development the situation, condition and mentality called contemporary Africa?  The ultimate outcome in any case will be between a conscious and unconscious attempt at forging a splendid though troubled synthesis akin to that of my colleague Manuel John Kamugisha Muranga ,[iii] and the Hegelian “simply looking on,” between invocation and refusal, or between despair and optimism.  What is at stake, however, above everything else is the personal identity of the individual who, due to the primacy of mass poverty, is robbed of his or her dignity (which depends on active participation in the life of society in which the individual works) and is confined to what Freire Paulo calls  “simply living” instead of “existing historically, culturally and socially.”[iv][v]

            One sees, therefore, the use of maintaining a combination of the idea of fatality—where the existence of a people is in a way predetermined and the individuals are powerless—and the concept of a characteristic tension between freedom and necessity, of “the already-there” and “the not-yet,” of the given of the past and the task of the future. Greek and Roman mythology had three goddesses: Clotho who spins thread of life, Lachesis who determines its length, and Atropos who cuts it off. These control human destiny and life, which are fixed in such a way that no effort of people can alter it. In contrast, contemporary Africa rotates on three or four corresponding gods, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the United Nations and the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Her future is a result of human action.

            Is life worthy living in contemporary Africa?  One view accepts the collaboration of God and people as a source of meaning. Another is that it is worthwhile so long as it is lived by an individual who does not have any strings which tie him to a personal God.  In any case, human action is a ray of hope that all is not lost for the individual in contemporary Africa.

GENESIS AND CHARACTERISTICS

            Despite her natural richness, Africa south of the Sahara is among the least developed areas and can, therefore, be described in all its aspects as being below average world standards. A glance at the geographical, economic and political map is sufficient to show her diversity in size, in ethnicity, in richness. Thus, it is difficult to describe Africa by a “catchword” and impossible to develop her by a “patent prescription.”  In fact, there are many Africas where the political and judicial Africa often do not coincide with the cultural or historical.⁵

            Before Africa south of the Sahara came into contact with the outside world, especially with Europe, she was known as the dark continent. But she did not lack different forms of organisations. Political organisations oscillated between the highly centralized authority of the Ganda and the “organized anarchy of the Nuer,” at the time of the Berlin conference.

            With the partition of Africa and, hence, the beginning of her “condominiumization,” came the establishment of borders and a relatively uniform socio-political model and economic apparatus administered through  “indirect and direct” rule under the political principles of “divide rule” and assimilation.  In most cases the new African elite acted as agents of colonialism, a legacy maintained today.

            Contemporary Africa, which is not an isolated fact, is a product of a relatively short course of development,[vi] marked by a relatively slow series of changes in the mode of production, trade, governance and philosophy. In a sentence, it is a combination of several motives, ancient and modern.

            Because of those two seemingly contrasting forces, contemporary Africa is at the cross-roads of internal and external influences[vii] whose combination results in the main characteristic of contemporary Africa being a challenge, which consists of a search for a splendid synthesis.  The survival of societies and, indeed, of individuals will depend on how quickly such a synthesis is forged. Thus, from the “political interaction point of view,”[viii] contemporary Africa is globally characterized by a common natural and historical heritage, but there are many factors.

            Climate: Variations in Sub-Saharan climate are unpredictable. The predominance of a humid climate encourages the survival of pests and diseases at the expense of plants, animals and human beings.

            Ecology: Tropical top soil too poor to sustain permanent agriculture as the living organisms that provide humus are killed by the sun. The heavy rains destroy and erode the particulate structure of the top soil, which is eroded by strong winds. Poverty and a high population growth compel the individual to overuse the land. The individual consciously or unconsciously rapes the environment by over-grazing, over-cutting the forest for fuel, construction and settlement, and by soil mining for building and agricultural purposes. The harmony that existed between the individual and environment is disrupted. Both the raper and the raped are accursed.

            Economy: For the average individual, the standard of living, per capital income and the growth of domestic products are very low.  The individual, who is caught up in a vicious circle of misery, becomes desperate, and his or her work ethic and morale tend to suffer. 70 percent of productivity is dictated by the contemporary economic gods of the IMF, the World Bank and dependence on a mono crop, external capital and technological expertise.

            Capitalism with its bourgeois interests is easily seen even in the countryside.  Here the cash-money nexus is little by little replacing the traditional dictum: “I am because we are.”

            Politics: From the political point of view, contemporary Africa is characterized by the absence of a shared political culture. Most governments remain authoritarian, non-participatory and “decreetive.” It is a “clientele” type of politics, which concentrates more on strategies for retaining power than on nation building.  It extends privileges to a political clique along ethnic, regional, ideological or religious divisions to ensure political power.[ix] Such a state is, therefore, weak and in search of its identity. This lack of identity is partly explained by the “indigenous” element, whereby the structures of the colonial state superseded but did not displace the complex social, cultural and political institutions of indigenous Africa. Hence there have been many experiments, with a wide array of regimes from personal dictatorship and bureaucratic regimes to Marxist-Leninist parties and populist governments. Among those experiments, “the idealized traditional” society has no counterpart in contemporary African.[x]

            No wonder then that, in most cases, one finds a military dictator become civilian in the service of development. In a  “clientele” type politics he inevitably ends up corrupt, which like cancer corrodes the whole fabric of society.

            The weakness of contemporary African states is further worsened by the artificiality and porosity of most African borders where groups with no history of mutual relations were forced to coexist as a nation. One traditional African sage describes this a situation by the “dangerous analogy” of confining “a dog and a leopard in a box.”  The artificiality and porosity of the borders maintain the potential for conflict.  In most cases, the conflict creates a high number of refugees, loss of lives and resources and the destruction of the environment and property.  However, it must be emphasized that apart from the political power, control of economic resources along sectarian lines is the main motive behind Africa’s conflicts (Biafrasaga, the Great Lakes Region conflicts, the Sudan civil war, etc.).  Contemporary Africa is politically volatile.

EFFECTS

            The elements described above have deep and sharp consequences for the character of the individual and society as a whole. A mentality of dependency will continue so long as social and political life are the result of a clientele type of politics; of hierarchical arrangements in terms of dependence permeated by a dose of bourgeois-like logic and where all relationships are mediated by the exchange of goods, possession and domination. Little by little these determine all aspects of lived experience: language, thought and all aspects of culture. Consequently, traditional terms change meaning, while freedom has another connotation.  Economic freedom means freedom of the people from controlling economic forces and relations.  Political freedom stands for the liberation of the people from a politics on which they have no effective control. Intellectual freedom means a restoration of individual thought now absorbed by indoctrination through state-controlled mass media and the abolition of public opinion. The more one talks the more one falls under  sectarianism, nepotism, tribalism, village school and region under the slogans of structural adjustment, privatization and decentralization. The more these cancers take root and the more they erode African society and facilitates its destruction.

            Some of the effects of the illusions of following a clientele-like politics have become more prominent today than ever. They are the symptoms of a decaying society. Clothing is an increasingly unaffordable. Secondhand passes as the best. This symptom has found a home even in the spiritual forms of society.  Even a short telephone call in African towns has been privatized and decentralized. The technocrats forget that this is first of all a -violation of the human rights to be at ease with oneself.  Such are the symptoms of the erosion and collapse of so-called public utilities.

            Under the guise of retrenchment and structural adjustment meant more than this. In fact, rather than a check against corruption, it became first and foremost to represent nepotism, tribalism and religionism.

            Apart from increasing the number of names for corruption, it enriched the vocabulary of languages.  For example, here in Uganda, there was the government’s official way and the private-unofficial—the quick way, “window two.” Instead of using an allusive language to denote corruption, like “coughing,” “tea,” envelope, “what do you part with?” “Enjawulo” the word for commission, “Ka commission,” is in common usage. At worst, this sort of practice has been institutionalized, even in the fabric of society. If one lost one’s way up-country, the little child at the age of understanding would first ask “how much?” before giving directions. It is to this that the bourgeois mentality reduces people.

            Driven by such mentality to steal or mishandle is synonymous with working.  Prostitution becomes a bad word, sex-working sounds better because it gives a sense of contributing to the Gross Domestic Product of a country, and at the same time, silences the sense of shame.

            The paradox persists, freedom promised becomes freedom betrayed, richness enjoyable turns to poverty embraced, the more foreign investors are lured to the continent the more idlers are created.  The would-be decentralization and privatization meant to distribute resources equally, becomes the Philosophy of Eating. And the paradox continues where those whose needs are already satisfied continue to have too much, and those who are not ensured their daily bread continue to grow in number and to live longing for a decent life beyond survival. In the process, the individual losses his or her autonomy.

            The interior dimension or “the inner liberty,” which is the private space in which an individual becomes and remains oneself, diminishes, which means that even the “critical power of reason” is silenced and easily becomes passive reconciliation with the opposition. The consequences of the loss of this critical power inevitably ends in the most terrible alienation—a self-identification of the individual with the imposed ideology as reality—resulting in bad conscience.

            Bad conscience turns out to be the reality, where the individual survives on handouts in the form of empty promises and services offered by the incumbent leadership which he or she genuinely or ingenuously supports.  It becomes a way of life through the distribution of propaganda that offers more theater than bread to a growing number of individuals.  In such a way, forms of thought and behaviour become one dimensional and the ideas and objectives that go beyond such a way of life are either pulverized or completely discarded.

CAUSES

            Marx identified the causes of such alienation as the exploitation of workers by the owners of capital, who deprive them of the plus-value of the products. By neglecting the influence of other factors in society, he enhanced the economic factor as determinant of the course of history.  Can the primacy of the economy be the defining element of the human situation for all times? I answer negatively and consider the power of domination to be the root of most evils in contemporary Africa.

            Only through the rationality of the individual can responsibility be restored; repressive society cannot be the last word.  If man is the origin of certain historical situations that resulted from pursuing the logic of domination, then the same man retains the possibility for changing this. Hence, the individual in contemporary Africa must realize that most of the misery and poverty he or she experiences is not god sent but man invented; therefore, it is the person who has the key to one’s destiny. Bad leadership, the lack of the basics of life—including reading, writing and addition, the elements of hygiene, good eating habits and the ecological degradation—in a word, mass poverty—is caused by the individual’s lack of recognition of self-hood in oneself and in the other.  The result is perpetuation of the Hegelian dialectic of recognition in its negative stance.

            Such a mentality, corroborated by a clientele-type politics, that willy-nilly ends up corrupting the whole fabric of society, and the upholding of human rights as a prerequisite for development fails.  In other words, the desire to consume, destroy or appropriate blinds rationality and dominates the other. When the leadership in vogue fails to control and harness nature, they pour their rage on the governed.  The degree of suffering, at least of material suffering, is proportional to the distance one is, in terms of socio-political classes, from the center of political and economic power.

            The individual I am discussing, the one who does not ask who the people are, is at the most remote distance from the hub of any type of power.  The moment such individuals despair will be their end. Fortunately, they still possesses the instinct of survival reflected in some of the ways they envisage liberation, which must be a combination of internal and external factors. In this struggle, they must not lose sight of the fact that “a nonhumanity is found in the very formation and development of civilization, states and empires, tribes and nations, revolutions and reactions, wars and industrial capitalistic progress.”[xi]

WAYS OF LIBERATION

            “When a people works for liberation, its struggle is ultimately a spiritual one, even though it is necessarily carried out at the political, economic and cultural levels.”[xii] What emerges from the above discussion is the fact that for the most part the totalitarianism, domination and alienation in contemporary Africa is a product of human beings who are beings responsible for their history.  Hence, the real question is how is the individual to overcome such a state?

            Logically, determinists would opt for total resignation. Nevertheless and incoherently, men like Karl Marx envisaged an armed struggle against the bourgeoisie; revolution was Marx’s answer, and the proletariat was destined to win.  Facts, however, have proven that in contemporary Africa revolutions devour their children and the individual is used as a stepping stone later only to be discarded.

            Liberation is possible and the nature of liberation required by the individual in contemporary Africa is not the fatalistic, but one which the individual has to create or else it will not come not evolve positively as desired.[xiii] It will come to this desired form only if the individual begins to break the “culture of silence” and “self-censorship” and critically discourses upon the world, remaking his or her world by “learning to read the word through a reading of the world.”[xiv] In this way, one will be able to pursue truth by calling things by their proper names and by learning to recognize facts as they are without overrating them.

            This, however, entails that the individual laboriously goes through the whole process, not merely of thinking, but of consistent critical thinking, which albeit with difficulties guides one to critical action. To arrive at that level of engagement, where word becomes testimony, the individual ought to be aware of the fact that thinking is thanking (for) what is above, below and equal to one who thinks. It invokes pleasant and unpleasant elements by reflecting critically on the instant, “memory-less” culture that is common in contemporary Africa as promoted by the dominating bourgeois culture through mass media and the advertisement industry.

            A “memory-historical-less culture” is the fruit of the individual cherishing oral tradition, rumour gossiping at the expense of written tradition. The dominance of a culture tends to culminate in a hearing but not a listening, follows the decline in the development of ideas, concepts, skills and, hence, the up-rootedness of the individual.

            Only by remembering what happened yesterday that can one return in one’s historical awareness and to relocate oneself in the world.  Such historical consciousness opens the individual to possible action instead of a passive acceptance of the way things are.

            For the individual in contemporary Africa, the aim should be to create a memory filled multi-dimensional culture through a combination of the “horizontal and vertical eye approach,” which encourages individuals to “think together” aloud[xv] to counteract the opportunities denied him or her by authoritarian rule.

            The fragile authoritarian condition of the African state, which tends to inculcate in the individual a “culture of silence” and the “I do not care attitude” or the “everything goes mentality” so long as one inhabits and enjoys the thrill of the moment, has to be overcome by remembering and rediscovering the role of the hearth of the fireplace. This provides, first of all, a place of focus for the family, light, a convenient atmosphere for the exchange of ideas with the elders and a place to impart wise ways from older generations to  younger ones.

            One of the main characteristics of hearth was that it was a center of warmth for the whole family, a center of plenty as people used to get their fire for pipe smoking and used it for roasting edibles of every sort. It was a center of dreaming and planning.  Today that reality is no more. Families no longer have the time and space to converge at the fireplace. The so-called modern type of education has created a big gap especially in terms of values between the younger and older generation.  If the individual in contemporary Africa is to survive beyond subsisting from hand to mouth, then they ought to recreate the fireplace.  The consequences of a “narrativeless, written-less and memory-less” culture is forgetting the hearth as a locus of symbolizing or putting the two faces of the coin together: ‘human rights’ violations on the ground and ideal conditions, what divides people and what unites them, genuine and sham leadership, mass poverty and mass abundance, the condition of the ruler and the ruled, historie and geschichte, past and present, future and past, master and slave . . . so as to be able to forge that longed-for synthesis.  Failure to symbolize naturally means failure to synthesize, which leads to failure to sympathize (feel, suffer-with), with the victims of human rights violations and mass poverty.  Because to symbolize is to synthesize and to synthesize is to sympathize, the whole circle would end in a lack of solidarity, where the individual despairs of oneself, of one’s equals, of one’s superiors and inferiors because one no longer dares to take any initiative as an individual.

Narrative is a critical key to our identity for we all need a story to live by in order to make sense of the otherwise unrelated events of life to find a sense of dignity. It is only by enabling alternative stories to be heard that an “elitist history” may be pried open to offer an entry point for the oppressed who have otherwise been excluded from public history.[xvi]

            Certainly it will not be the authoritarian, clientele-like leader who will allow those alternative story narratives. It will be the individual aided by a genuine philosopher. In this case, a genuine or committed philosopher is one who knows that “only for the sake of those without hope have we been given hope” (Walter Benjamin). The philosopher is one who understands and practices philosophy not only as love of wisdom (theoretical) but also as “wisdom of love” (practical engagement), which synthesis gives him or her the courage “to shed the pretences of always wanting to assume the ideologically neutral positions adored by bourgeois academicians” (Nkuhukhire-Owa-Mataze). Such a philosopher will be the product of a combination of various motives and will have to emerge from the ranks of the poor akin to people like Nelson Mandele, Mahtama Gandhi ,nd Kaguta Museveni. The philosopher’s role in this noble duty, to borrow Paulo Freire’s term, is that of conscientization, or helping the individual to come back home from a long journey. He or she needs this help simply because, as Carbine Deirdre and Martin O’ Reilly rightly assert, that public action is often constrained by the shame of poverty, and often it is others who champion his or her cause.

            This is done with a conviction that, “without a narrative, a person’s life is merely a random sequence of unrelated events; birth and death are inscrutable, temporality is a terror and burden, suffering and loss remain mute and unintelligible.”[xvii] What stories must be told then; and to whom? First and foremost, individuals must loudly narrate their own stories and events as really experienced.  Soliloquy as a category of philosophical thinking and the formation of ideas for further action of liberation must be revisited and reactivated. The philosopher ought to relate it to one’s generation, to one’s social class and must go further in telling it to other classes, too. The stories the individual has to tell are not only of “historie,”—written history in which corrupt leadership often dominates, but also of “Geschichte” as acted history, which is full of the intricate motives of the individual in relation to others in one’s own and other classes.

            Narratives ought to take the individual back to one’s foundations and to the roots of one’s social, political, economic, cultural, environmental, and gnoseological woes.  This appeals to the comprehension of the past and to the individual’s limits. Going back to foundations always saves the individual from forgetfulness of the meaningful events of their culture, but also from the “everything goes, and you and I feel comfortable by enjoying the thrill of the moment mentality.” In the long run, this is the culture of consumerism, which, as Sheldrake Philip right asserts, “ tends to encourage a memory-less culture without a sense of historical identity.”[xviii]  Apart from “learning to read the word through a reading of the world,” the individual must little by little learn to write the word through a writing of the word.

            One of the roles of the philosopher-educator would, therefore, be to educate and to be educated by, emphasizing the fact that every instance is meaningful and bears interpretable signs.  To interpret, however, is to commit oneself to a history which implies continuities, and which leads further to responsibility. In the end commitment and responsibility mean that history includes the past, the present and the future.  For the individual, such a historical consciousness opens upon the category of “trust” as the way of living with uncertainty (political, social, economical, environmental) as daily preoccupations.

            Yet another role of the philosopher-educator is to awaken the individual to the fact that liberation is a continual task of engagement and that “every liberation depends on the awareness of servitude.”  Often times, ignorance is the common element shared by both the individuals of the lumpen proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

            This is exactly as depicted in the Hegelian dialectic of recognition. Self-criticism rather than self-censorship becomes indispensable in which reason reflects on its faults which are evident on the social, political and cultural levels,.

            Last, but not least, the philosopher-educator as the conscience of society has to bring home to the individual the lesson that each discourse has to contribute, to consolidating the prospect either of being which measures people in general or of the protagorian man who makes himself the measure of all things.

CONCLUSION

            Throughout this paper I have tried in implicit and explicit ways to depict mass poverty (domination) as the highest form of human rights violation.  This emerges as a complex human phenomenon in below-average-world standards indicated in income and employment, health and food, access to services, shelter and clothing, education, self-respect and dignity, fear and insecurity, participation in the lifestyles of a community and personal abilities to use resources and power.[xix]

            Such a presentation, however, is inspired by Dall’ Asta’s division of human rights into three fundamental categories: personal rights to freedom, the rights to political participation and to social and cultural rights.  These last, on which I have based my discussion, guarantee the realization of a quality of life conforming to those other rights.[xx]

            Kayo’s story typified the lives of many individuals in the villages of contemporary Africa.  They are entangled in a vicious circle of mass poverty.  To such Kayos, ethics can no longer be a question of right or wrong but of what sort of people they become as a result of their actions in the course of their struggle for survival.  We have, therefore, to go beyond the rhetoric of human rights and development as a weapon of the clientele-like politics that characterizes contemporary Africa in order to safeguard the supreme value of the individual. Kayo must be brought to understand that while his fate lies within the hands of gods, he has the power to influence his destiny by exploring the use of reason.

NOTES