Tormenting existential questions driving African futures
Like all human beings, Africans, since the emergence of human species from such places at the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, have been inventing and reinventing their lives and creating their futures. They have been inventors of tools (from stone to iron), domesticating animals, building institutions and making majestic civilizations like that of Kongo, Egypt, Songhai Mali, Great Zimbabwe, and Ghana. All this was possible when Africans were free from coloniality. The unfolding of Euromodernity constituted by coloniality inhibited African freedom and as noted above forced them into a new time in which they were considered to be frozen into an unchanging past, if not in a ‘dark continent’ where there was not even history prior to arrival of the white colonialists. Remember Georg Hegel’s dismissal of Africa and Africans as ‘difficult to comprehend’, not fitting into a ‘principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas – the category of Universality’, that ‘consciousness has not yet attained of any substantial objective existence – as for example, God, or law’, and concluding that:
The Negro […] exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality – all that we call feeling – if we would rightly comprehend him. There is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character. (Hegel 1956: 93).
Hegel failed to understand African people and resorted to dismissing them and writing them out of human history. Hugh Trevor-Roper (1965) also denied that Africans had a history, highlighting that they were enveloped in a mantle of darkness and concluding that darkness was not a subject of history. Thus, for a people with a denied humanity and stolen history their struggles and dreams reflected this existential quandary invented for them. It is not surprising that they posed what Aime Cesaire termed ‘tormenting questions’ as they imagined the future:
•Who am I? What are we?
•Who are we in the in this anti-Black world?
•How are we to recover our denied history?
•What does it feel like to be defined as a problem?
•What is liberation and freedom?
•How can we take charge of our future?
Tendayi Sithole (2020) reflected on these questions as he grappled with the prospects of life itself for those people who were designated as Black, especially how they thought about their condition and their presence in an anti-Black world where they are dismembered. Dismemberment is as a dehumanizing imperial ‘act of absolute social engineering’ as ‘the foundation, fuel, and consequence of Europe’s capitalist modernity’ began with continues to haunt African people on the continent and in the African Diaspora (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 2009: 5). At its centre was what Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) termed ‘coloniality of being’ – a foundational dismemberment which produced Whiteness as a badge of supremacy and Blackness as a sign of being deficient. The second process of dismemberment Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2009: 5) described as occurring when ‘the African personhood was divided into two halves: the continent and its diaspora’, as Africans were captured and reduced to commodities and sold in the market during the mercantile period of unfolding racial capitalism.
The third was the scrambling for and partitioning of Africa legitimized by the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, in which the continent was ‘literally fragmented and reconstituted […] into British, French, Portuguese, German, Belgian, and Spanish Africa’. (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1986: 12). Those African people who were forcibly transported as cargo across the Atlantic Ocean suffered a further dismemberment: each person was ‘now separated not only from his[/her] continent and his[/her] labour but also from his[/her] very sovereign being’ (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 2009: 6). The expropriation of land by colonial governments and the resultant dispossession of the Africans/Blacks of their means of livelihood, especially in white settler colonies of the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, Algeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, among others, constituted another form of dismemberment. These dismemberments provoked the decolonial initiatives and struggles for ‘re-membering’ as a key leitmotif of reworlding from the Global South in general and Africa in particular.
Therefore, for any deeper understanding of African utopic registers of the future, there is need for an appreciation of how these existential-cum-epistemic questions shaped the consciousness of those people rendered as Black and native, as well as how they informed their imaginations of the future. Such intellectual-cum-political-cum-ideological formations as the Black tradition emerged from this context of multiple denials of life chances. Black radical tradition informed decolonization struggles that were themselves about the recovery of the denied past, the making of the present, and the invention of a future. This takes us to the identified Black/African utopic registers of the future, with racism, enslavement, colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteronormative patriarchy constituting the oppression from which to liberate African and Black people. Liberation and freedom existed and continue to exist as future horizons.