How Soyinka’s generation of intellectuals Achivement misled Africa
I suspect that Soyinka intended his declaration to be a symbolic act of revolutionary significance; an act which, though seemingly self-defeatist, would be a rallying cry for a political and intellectual fight back against right wing extremism, much like the self-immolation of the Tunisian street vendor served as a rallying cry for the Arab Spring.
But why, I asked myself, did I feel unsettled about Soyinka’s intended dramatic and emotive action? Why did I not feel encouraged or inspired by his declaration? Why did the declaration instead evoke a sense of impotence? Why did I feel that it was pitiable rather than defiant? Why was there a feeling similar to the one elicited by Lawino (main protagonist in Okot P’Bitek’s poem) when she offers archaic superstitious customs as proof of superiority of her culture?
Then it all dawned on me. Soyinka’s declaration really symbolised the futile end to which the nationalist ideological project had come. Began roughly after the Second World War, this project sought to “decolonise the mind” by validating the once denigrated African traditional worldview. Even more crucially, it sought to incorporate traditional beliefs and values in an overarching ideology of change that would guide an African political and cultural renaissance.
To this project, African intellectuals, including writers of the ‘Makerere’ generation, would commit themselves. That is why the central theme of most intellectual and artistic expression over the last 50 years is the attempt to validate the traditional worldview, and to define an ideology that would guide Africa’s future progress.
DELIBERATE INSTITUTIONALISATION
In works of fiction, this theme is promoted by juxtaposing assumed self-evident morality of the traditional society with moral decadence of Western culture. In Song of Lawino, for instance, the character of Ocol and his world are depicted as shallow, fake, ugly, self-loathing and immoral. By contrast, Lawino and her world are presented as authentic, beautiful and moral. The poem is implicit from which world, Ocol’s or Lawino’s, we should draw the cultural materials with which to construct a new African ideology of change.
For his part, Kwame Nkrumah in his book, Consciencism, defines this ideology as an amalgamation of African humanist and egalitarian principles, and socialism. The book offers no proof of the existence of these ideals in traditional African society. Nkrumah assumed that they occurred naturally in traditional society. And, of course, as many Ghanaians who suffered torture and imprisonment under Nkrumah would confirm, these ideals were absent in his rapacious and ruthless dictatorship.
As Nkrumah’s rule showed, the idea of “African democracy” that African intellectuals were trying to formulate had serious conceptual flaws. The intellectuals, just like Nkrumah, assumed that traditional societies were democratic and egalitarian by nature, and that, in these societies, everyone, including women and children, were treated equally.
They further assumed that because these democratic values existed naturally in Africa, they did not need any deliberate institutionalisation in the body politic of the newly independent nations.
The flaw in this thinking was twofold. First, as Edward Simiyu and others have established, pre-colonial societies were far from democratic. Second, even supposing they were, there was still need for a deliberate effort to institutionalise those traditional democratic values in the systems of the emerging nations.
The intellectuals had assigned themselves a curious task. They sought to formulate an ideology to guide the future progress of Africa by looking back. By contrast, the French revolutionaries who proposed the ideas of ‘liberty, equality and brotherhood’ looked to recreate new French society on the basis of new ideas of democracy and equality.
And that is how African intellectual discourse missed the opportunity to influence democratic change on the continent. This task was left to civil society organisations and the church, which in the mid and late eighties began to agitate, not for restitution of a mythical African democracy, but for a new African society based on modern democratic ideas.
The contrasting visions of civil society and the intellectuals would be captured most graphically by two events in 2000. As civil society, the church and ordinary citizens were discussing the pros and cons of different constitutional and democratic models at national conventions, African intellectuals and writers gathered under a tree in Asmara in Eriteria and declared, in the misguided spirit of Walter Rodney, that “colonial and neo-colonial forces and their local allies” had underdeveloped African economies. And, not to forget their intellectual mission over the years, they declared that “decolonisation of the African mind should go hand in hand with decolonization of the economy and politics”.
ABSURD GESTURE
These declarations were emotive and simplistic, for they did not offer practical social programmes, economic and political proposals on how to achieve decolonisation of the mind, politics and economy.
More telling of the total disconnect of the intellectuals from practical reality, they sat under a tree to symbolise democracy in pre-colonial Africa, yet failed to denounce the vicious dictatorship in Eriteria. The act of sitting under a tree, just like their simple slogans, and Soyinka’s later Green Card threat, really emphasised the comical and tragic incongruity of their situation.
What were the costs of the missed opportunity to recreate new societies based on modern ideas of democracy and justice? What were the costs of governance experiments inspired by ideas of recreating new societies from old values? The answer is seen in the economic catastrophe in Africa and the years of political repression. It is seen in the litany of failed or failing states.
It is seen in recurring violence and continuing degradation of women through stone-age practices such as FGM. It is seen in the thousands of Africans risking death in the seas to escape the hopelessness in their countries. It is seen in the ‘cult of the Green Card,’ which I define as a maniacal ambition to live in America or Europe.
And so when I heard of Soyinka’s intended gesture, it was not defiance or triumph that I sensed. It was defeat. Here was a man who had dedicated his intellectual life to reclamation of an ‘African metaphysics’ now threatening to lash out with his Green Card. Nothing can be more absurd than a vision of Soyinka hurling shreds of his Green Card to the four winds and proclaiming victory.
It is a sad and futile act, symbolising the final defeat of Soyinka’s and his generation of intellectuals’ search for Eldorado, the mythical city of gold.
