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Wednesday 6 April 2016

Southern African News


Writing the Struggle – Our 

condemned cultures 2


   
In his 1959 paper delivered at the Congress of Black African Writers, FRANTZ FANON talks about how the absence of national cultures also affects the struggle for liberation in Africa and how the few countries and peoples who cling onto remnants
of their culture are made redundant by disinterest and non-participation of the majority. This, writes WONDER GUCHU, still affects Africa and the African today
Culture is like glue that keeps a people together. That is why Chinese, Koreans and even Americans have strong sense of nationality than most of us in Africa.
Apart from gluing a people together regardless of their ethnicity, culture also engenders a sense of pride such that all peoples feel unsafe once their country is under threat.
Take the USA, for example, injury to one is regarded an injury to all. But in Africa, opposition parties would rather take a different opinion to that of the ruling party
just for the sake of being the opposition. There is no national pride in policies which benefit the very people African opposition parties claim to represent.
In fact, Frantz Fanon argues, in his 1959 paper delivered at the Congress of Black African Writers and included in his book, the “Wretched of the Earth”, that colonial domination “disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people”.
“This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women,” he writes.
Fanon also says where people should be dynamic in pushing for national issues and changes; the absence of culture makes it impossible for them to do so as an entity. In other words, where the natives think they would have made strides in development and progress the fact would be that they had not gotten anywhere.
“The immediate, palpable and obvious interest of such leaps ahead is nil. But if we follow up the consequences to the very end we see that preparations are being thus made to brush the cobwebs off national consciousness to question oppression and
to open up the struggle for freedom,” he explains.
Once a people adopts another people’s culture just like what most of us in Africa
have done, it becomes unimportant to fight for freedom because we would have become part of what we want to fight against.
In the event that there are people who still pursue some culture, Fanon says such actions will become just ‘a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress and a few broken-down institutions’.
This is apparent in Swaziland, for example, where dress still remains the core of a culture that has long been gone. It can also be seen in Namibia where the Herero
in particular maintain a distinct dress code which has everything to do with the former colonial master. Even the Zulu in South Africa maintain a dress code and
a few cultural traits that benefit just a few people within the society. These are just cores which, according to Fanon, are “remnants of culture” with no “real creativity and no overflowing life”.
He says such clinging to a “culture which is becoming more and more shrivelled up, inert and empty” withers away ‘the reality of the nation and the death-pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependences’.
“After a century of colonial domination we find a culture which is rigid in the extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata.
“Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the people, national oppression
and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing.”
But, Fanon, adds, such negation of national culture contributes to aggression,
“The negation of the native's culture, the contempt for any manifestation of culture whether active or emotional and the placing outside the pale of all specialised branches of organisation contribute to breed aggressive patterns of conduct in the native.” Still because of lack of a national culture, such aggression is “poorly differentiated, anarchic and ineffective”. The African intelligentsia, according to
Fanon, resorted to literature in an effort to address the absence of national cultures.
• Next week, the column discusses how African literature became a symbol of protest and an instrument for fostering national cultures.
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Southern African News

Writing the Struggle – Our 

condemned cultures

   
In the past weeks, this column has dealt with the issue of culture used as a tool to destroy or enhance a people’s freedom.
Chinua Achebe aptly described African cultures as being at a crossroads while Amilca Cabral went to great length to illustrate how the oppressors made sure that the oppressed have no culture, which simply translates to identity.
Cabral argues that culture when summed up creates history and that once a people’s culture is destroyed, there won’t be any history to talk about.
In the case of Africa, the oppressors destroyed the continent’s history by making the oppressed believe that their cultures are either evil or backward.
This is exactly why Chaka is not seen as a conqueror but a ruthless tribesman who wantonly killed and drove out other tribes. Compare Chaka with Napoleon who is described as Napoleon the Great.
And when our children are taught history lessons, they will admire Napoleon more than they would do Chaka because of how each conqueror is treated in cultural and historical terms.
Today, our women die to be thin because, according to Western culture, beauty is in being slim. African cultures elsewhere admire big women.
This week, another great son of Africa, Frantz Fanon takes another dimension to how culture contributes to a whole person and how the destruction of such equally leads to lost generations.
In his speech delivered at the Congress of Black African Writers in 1959 and included as a chapter in his book, “Wretched of the Earth”, Fanon states that colonial domination “disrupts in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people”.
The speech titled, ‘Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom’, Fanon further says that most oppressed people easily allow their cultures to die because they negate “national reality by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts … by expropriation and by the systematic enslaving of men and women”.
“Every effort is made to bring the colonised person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behaviour, to recognise the unreality of his 'nation', and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure,” Fanon writes.
Consider this: Your grandfather dies and when his spirit returns, Christianity declares it an evil spirit but Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead after three days yet is seen as having overcome death.
It’s neither here nor there that your grandfather comes back in spirit and that Jesus Christ is said to have risen in his physical form – the bottom line is both died and came back.
According to Fanon, the laughing stock among the oppressed peoples are those within the intellectual group who “throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavourably criticising his own national culture, or else takes refuge in setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a way that is passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive”.
“The common nature of these two reactions lies in the fact that they both lead to impossible contradictions. Whether a turncoat or a substantialist, the native is ineffectual precisely because the analysis of the colonial situation is not carried out on strict lines.
“The colonial situation calls a halt to national culture in almost every field. Within the framework of colonial domination there is not and there will never be such phenomena as new cultural departures or changes in the national culture.
“Here and there valiant attempts are sometimes made to reanimate the cultural dynamic and to give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms and its tonalities,” Fanon points out.
Just like Cabral, Fanon also says when the oppressor condemns a culture and a people keep on it, this action is viewed as resistance to domination.
During the war of liberation for Zimbabwe, for example, the guerrillas believed that the spirit of Nehanda Nyakasikana and Sekuru Kaguvi – the doyens of the first Chimurenga – always led them.
This belief came from what Nehanda is said to have prophesied shortly before she was executed. It’s said Nehanda said her bones would one day come alive to fight back.
This cultural aspect – the belief in the power of dead – was seen by the oppressors as a threat. It was for this very reason that mbira as both an instrument and music were banned in Rhodesia.
It’s not only in Zimbabwe where the spirit of the dead was called upon as a pillar of strength but in South Africa too where the deaths of Robert Sobukwe as well as many others was exhorted in times of great need.
So in order to destroy the spirit of rebellion, the oppressor makes sure that the cultural aspect of it which gives people a common phenomenon dies first.
And we have allowed this to happen in Africa. But culture does not die completely because when a people fight back to regain their freedom, they still dig deeper into their core beliefs.
• Next week, we will see what happens when people scour their conscience for the remnants of culture for self actualisation.
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Southern African News

Writing the Struggle – Culture 

defines a people’s history

   
Amilca Cabral’s speech points at what Chinua Achebe said about Africa being at a cultural crossroads largely because there is a denial by most people on the continent of their beliefs and norms.
Cabral argues that by denying these tenets of culture, the African also denies his history because ‘culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society’.
In simple terms, he says once a people discards their culture, they also end up with no history because history is a sum total of cultural activities of a people.
Generally, a people, which adopts or adapts to a foreign culture, allows itself to be easily dominated and abused.
He writes: “Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies.”
Furthermore, he says: “Ignorance of this fact may explain the failure of several attempts at foreign domination ‑ as well as the failure of some international liberation movements.”
According to Cabral, foreign domination is impossible without “the negation of the historical process of the dominated people by means of violently usurping the free operation of the process of development of the productive forces”, which means the relationship between “man and nature, between man and his environment. Relationships and type of relationships among the individual or collective components of a society”.
“To speak of these is to speak of history, but it is also to speak of culture,” Cabral further argues. “Whatever may be the ideological or idealistic characteristics of cultural expression, culture is an essential element of the history of a people.
“Culture is, perhaps, the product of this history just as the flower is the product of a plant. Like history, or because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production.
“Culture plunges its roots into the physical reality of the environmental humus in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors.
“History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterise the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress,” he explained.
Background this to some scenarios in Africa today and you will find that leaders who stick to their cultural beliefs are regarded as backward.
One case in point is the gay issue which has caused so much suffering yet in African culture such practice is not encouraged.
Most constitutions, which do not recognise gay rights, are considered unfriendly while leaders who speak against homosexuality have borne the brunt of bad labelling.
It’s even worse when any African country that does not recognise gay rights is punished by having whatever funding withdrawn. Malawi suffered for arresting a gay couple using an old legislation enacted by the British during the colonial period. Today, we have several civic organisations and leaders who advocate for the legalisation of homosexuality in defiance of the African culture. And this is just one way African culture is being subdued and in the process history is distorted.
Another fine example is how people dress. Very few countries on the continent can boastfully show pride in national dress. The majority have adopted Western mode of dress, which, in most cases, is being abused.
So while we may pride ourselves for fighting to be free, in essence Africa still has a long struggle to make its people love themselves and keep those positive elements of their culture alive. By so doing, they will also keep history alive.
Cabral argues: “A reconversion of minds ‑ of mental set ‑ is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reconversion ‑ re-Africanisation, in our case ‑ may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle.”
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Southern African News

Writing the Struggle – Endorsing 

corruption in Africa

   
Africa’s struggle today is and should be against corruption if, at all, the continent is to create a sustainable environment for progress and success. But the situation on the ground today, just as it was then when CHINUA ACHEBE wrote his book ‘No Longer at Ease’ in 1960, does not look any promising. We have, writes WONDER GUCHU, endorsed corruption in all its forms

Nigeria got its independence in 1960, the same year Chinua Achebe wrote his second book ‘No Longer at Ease’, which some people say is a sequel to ‘Things Fall Apart’.
Of the three books in the trilogy that marks Achebe’s earliest works, ‘No Longer at Ease’, tackles the birth of corruption involving a young educated man, Obi.
Typically of African tradition, Obi’s village community raises money to send him to England for studies so that when he returns, he would help them.
Obi goes and returns home but his expectations as an educated Nigerian who has been abroad are higher than what he finds on the ground.
His people, led by the Umuofia Progressive Union, have much trust in him believing that his work as a civil servant would enable him to repay the community which would in return, enable them to send more young people to school.
But civil servants are among the least paid and Obi finds himself under these circumstances.
Still his community expects him to do what everybody else is doing – engage in corrupt activities to repay the debt and uplift his people.
This, however, is not Obi’s plan of raising money. His educational background does not allow him to be corrupt. This was the first difference between his community and Obi.
Determined to remain straightforward, Obi manages to pay-off the community debt, send his brother to school as well as look after his parents.
But it was not long after Obi finds out that what his society expects of him cannot be sustained by the civil service money. The burden of paying off the debt and looking after his family weighs him down heavily.
The first temptation for a bribe comes from Mr Mark who asks Obi to organise for his sister, Elsie, to appear before the Scholarship Board. When he turns this down, Mr Mark’s sister Elsie offers sex for her to be allowed to appear before the Scholarship Board. Again Obi turns her down.
This does not mean that Obi had no use for the money. He had just bought a ring for his girlfriend Clara and then his mother had fallen ill. Then his bank was after an outstanding loan he took to insure his car.
Although he does not want Clara’s help of £50, Obi has no choice but to take money, which, as fate would have it, gets stolen when thieves break into his car while they are clubbing.
To top it all, Obi’s family is not happy with Clara who comes from a family of Osu – a lower Nigerian caste. As if that was not trouble enough, Clara falls pregnant. They agree on abortion and Obi has to borrow money for this. Then the abortion does not go well – Clara has an infection. That means more money yet the pocket is dry.
One would sympathise with Obi and justify his action. But fact is, he lived for the people. He wanted them to see how different and educated he was. In the process, he lived beyond his means.
This is one of the causes of corruption – living beyond one’s means. In this narrative, Achebe illustrates how the educated young people fall into traps when they are supposed to lead by example.
He is also illustrating that corruption is pushed by our societies, which expect their children to live large just to show that they have an education.
In a way, this is how corruption is endorsed, accepted and promoted.
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Southern African News

Writing the Struggle – When the 

lid falls, hell breaks loose

   
The struggle narrative in Nuruddin Farah’s third book in the ‘Blood in the Sun’ trilogy, ‘Secrets’, is both individual and collective.
The individual narrative is the simple story of Kalaman, who is trying his best to live as decent as he could. He runs a translation and letter writing company in Mogadishu and is just another guy down the street.
Inwardly, Kalaman suffers psychologically because of secrets which his family habours and hides. On his own, Kalaman also has a secret – his childhood sweetheart, Sholoongo, who happens on his door one day when he thought that that part of his past had died.
Sholoongo is not only back but she has come to find a man fit to be the father of her children. Her first stop is Kalaman.
But the secrets Kalaman wants to uncover are about his family. He, therefore, sniffs around for bits and pieces from his parents as well as the maid.
In the end, Kalaman manages to get the truth although the narrative does not say what it was that he finds except that the discovery did not cure him of his psychological problems which make him a confused wreck that has no idea whether he was going or coming.
Sholoongo emerges just when the militias are congregating in Mogadishu ahead of Siad Barre’s fall.
This was in early 90s just at the time when the Somali civil war, which saw the ouster of the General, erupted.
The state of Somalia is visible in Kalaman’s narrative.
General Siad Barre had secrets – he had to lie in order to be accepted for training in the police force.
After the coup that saw him assume power, General Siad Barre’s regime had a lot of clandestine activities among them the summary executions of opponents done in the dead of the night.
The regime identified clanism as one of the threats to Somalia’s stability and banned such practices.
But the practice did not die. It proliferated secretly until 1990 when warlords joined hands and combined forces against Siad Barre’s regime.
When Siad Barre took up office, the regime pursued a mixture of Islam and Socialism – a religious belief and ideology that are not in any way related.
In so doing, the regime dabbled in confusion which, in the end, saw it failing despite some progress made in forging unity among the people.
Although there was nationalisation of banks, industries, and other businesses as well as the establishment of co-operative farms where voluntary labour was utilised, corruption emerged as the regime’s biggest enemy.
It was this confusion which saw Somalia drowning in civil strife and becoming one of Africa’s poorest countries.
The narratives – Kalaman and Somalia’s – come to a head at the same time – 1991. Kalaman’s discovery causes disturbances while Somalia sees the fall of Siad Barre.
For both Kalaman and his country, nothing was the same any more.
Although Somalis have a new president now, the situation is yet to normalise. One part of the country is enjoying relative peace while the other is at war.
“The reason why the strife has not ended is because it has no clan base. There are open and closed secrets even in Somali society. There is the open secret that the civil war in Somalia is about a conflict between various groups. (But) there is a hidden agenda … power…” Farah says.

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Southern African News


Writing the Struggle – Giving to 

dominate


   
Africa has always been held hostage by small gifts it receives from ‘well-wishers’ and donors. Such gifts have rendered the continent dependent on the West. Most often, such gifts do not just come but have strings attached, writes WONDER GUCHU as he looks into Nurrudin Farah’s book ‘Gifts’, the second offering in his trilogy Blood in the Sun
Published in Britain in 1993, ‘Gifts’ reads like nurse Duniya’s simple story about her daily struggle to make ends meet.
As a young girl in the village, Duniya’s father gives her over to a blind rich man, Zubair, who gives her twins but soon becomes a widow and moves into Mogadishu.
There she meets and marries an alcoholic journalist who also comes from a rich family. It was a short-lived union but one that also brings about a child.
Then she meets Bosaaso, a wealthy American-educated economist and they fall in love but again Duniya is not one to depend on a man. She casts away her head scarf and teaches herself how to drive and swim.
She takes her children aside and forbids them from receiving gifts from their fathers’ families because she is aware that ‘no giving innocent’.
Her children come up with the term ‘corpse food’ referring to gifts from their fathers’ families.
It is this term ‘corpse food’ which rings true about the state of Somalia that has been reduced to a corpse, as a result of the civil war. In a way, Duniya’s children seem to chillingly refer to Somalia as dependent on various donors.
Duniya’s life mirrors collusion between donors, local chiefs and multi-nationals to loot the ‘corpse’ Somalia in form of pay-back for loans.
Farah, who spent some time living in the Gambia in the early 70s, says he learnt about the “debilitating and dehumanising impact of food aid” then.
Apart from benefiting from pay-backs, those who give to Africa also help boost their industries back home. In terms of grain, the farmer in the USA or Europe gets a boost because their products are bought.
For the recipient country, such aid can only suppress the effort by local farmers to provide for their nation and earn a living for themselves.
“A gift, which can also be interpreted as aid, is in a sense a type of poison,” says Farah in one interview. “It destroys the receiver.It is the same story in Somalia.
What’s worse,” he says, “much of the aid in Somalia is controlled by a ‘mafia’ that has little contact with the people who are supposed to be its beneficiaries.”
There has always to be some strings attached to the gifts and in the case of the British in Somalia, their interest is the untapped oil reserves while Kenya benefits from the civil war by hosting aid agencies operating in the civil war-torn country.
In the novel, Farah notes: “We give hoping to receive something corresponding to what we’ve offered… We give (to) express our affection and compassion towards the recipients… We give as members of a group, to confirm our loyalty to it… We give to meet the demand of a contract… We give and may consider this act as part of our penance… We give in order to feel superior to those whose receiving hands are placed below ours… We give to corrupt… We give to dominate…”
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