{UAH} Should African States Break Up? So called leaders don't have the Guts!

Should African States Break Up?

16 March 2015, 21:45

Take a look at a map of Africa. You will surely see the arbitrariness of the borders that define the continent's landscape. Unlike its European counterpart, the continent's borders do not run along mountains and rivers, the so-called natural markers of boundaries; in some instances (e.g. the Namibia-Botswana, Niger-Algeria, DRC-Angola, Namibia-Angola, Libya-Chad) they are almost as straight as a ruler.

This is due to the partitioning that took place since the infamous Berlin Conference in which the continent was carved to the whims of the imperial powers as they were going about their "scramble for Africa." The economic and political policies driven by the pursuit of power have, for the African continent, had far-reaching existential implications. No longer would one consider themselves Shona, Igbo, Zulu or Yoruba and so on.

Rather, one is now African. As a matter of fact, the greatest legacy of colonialism in Africa is, by no small measure, this idea of Africa.

As would be expected when a hitherto disparate lot is being lumbered with a similar identity and forced to live in tandem with so external a being, in-group/out-group clashes arise. And despite the best efforts from well-meaning bodies and organisations and personnel, some hatreds seem to be beyond reconciliation.

The partitioning of Sudan in 2011 is only one successful realisation of similar ambitions; the Rwandan genocide is merely the most grotesque example of like actions which stem from a similar sentiment (here is a mirror for you, xenophobic South African); that 'we' can never live with 'them'. It is these ethnic, tribal and ideological differences which have lead Mbah and Igariwey to state in their book, African Anarchism: the History of a Movement, that "given these problems, a return to the 'anarchic elements' in African communalism is virtually inevitable.

The goal of a self-managed society born out of the free will of its people and devoid of authoritarian control and regimentation is as attractive as it is feasible in the long run."

This argument is, to some extent truly attractive. Think of the many problems which would be eradicated: corruption, state-induced crimes, police brutality, large-scale war, and perhaps even the ethnic clashes which are at the root of geopolitical instability in the continent, a fact which led Time magazine to declare in its 2014 March issue "this isn't what the 21^st century was supposed to look like!"

But, for a number of reasons, I disagree with this view. It is an isolative stance that takes the appreciation of contexts beyond the edge of sanity, and it stands poised and ready to, if anything, hurt the people whose nurturing it is meant to carry out. This suggestion is essentially a case against a number of strides which have been taken by a society of aspiring toilers.

To revert the institutions which have been developed, granted to the chagrin of many indeed, would be to hand over hundreds of millions into the abyss of tyranny and unnecessarily augment their miseries. It is worth remembering that he plagues of the twenty-first century are in no way similar to those of the pre-colonial era. And as such neither should be the responses.

Problems such as disease, wide-scale poverty, and the necessities brought on by being part of a globalised society cannot be confronted by small communes in which, as this is Africa, many a natural problem will primarily be dealt with through spiritual means, and no voices are to be heard unless they come from the tomb.  If we are to retreat to an ancient form of living while confronted by the problems of the modern age, we are marching into the arms of our assailant.

It is a suicidal notion to conceive of a form of society in which, today, the problems which plague us can be escaped by retreating from them. For I cannot imagine a society which while attaining its foodstuffs through agrarian methods is able to, simultaneously, devise methods to contain epidemics, make infrastructural provisions and delegate to the United Nations and International Court of Justice about the latest oil spill on its shores. Such dealings can only be carried out by the state. Only within the state does man have a rational existence.

It is perhaps time to put on a new set of lenses and to sing a different hymn; to come to the realisation that colonialism was a necessary moment; not in form but in its grander message. In other words it was a vehicle to a new world. One in which man became aware of his multiplicity and of the various modes in which he appears. And from here it should not be the case that we shrink from knowing the other.

Indeed the human race has not gone through the struggles that it has so that it should then be deemed the appropriate choice for a one to be coy from his brethren. Many books and many more articles have been written on the sumptuous and bitter outcomes of colonialism in the contemporary age; all differ in placement and in category – after all another man's good is another's source of pain and vice versa.

But I think a positive legacy we can all agree on is that colonialism's greatest gift to us was one another – and not just Africans but the world; for it planted the seeds towards a single world; one in which the terms of self-definition are less and less carbon copies of the ones used by ancients who, when uttering these words, were not aware of the magnitude of the human race.

Ours, thanks to the appreciation of certain facts, are characteristic of the knowledge that, in a constantly expanding universe and one to whose indifference we are always potential victims, all we have is each other. And that the structure of the world is built in such a way that the only appropriate response is one that harnesses the power of our mighty species as a whole; and in fact the whole is larger than the sum of its parts.

To de-generate to anarchy would only eat away at our capacity to navigate the storms which await us in that black hole called the future. What President John F. Kennedy said of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa in 1961 can also be said of the idea of a singular world, that is: we citizens of civilisations unborn at the time of its creation are among its inheritors and protectors.

And, in fact, I think it may be that ethnic differences are not the illness but are rather face-value symptoms of a more tangible carcinogen and one that is susceptible to intervention even in so apparently late a stage. The culprit, I believe, may be the economy. (Ah yes that good old poverty.)  

These hatreds are perhaps nothing more than signposts of material self-concern and the pursuit of self-preservation that uses the idea of 'tribe', and the divergences such a lens conjures up, as a benchmark for contempt.

This then implies two possibilities; firstly, to break-up into communes while leaving the economic issues unresolved will mean inter-tribal warfare. As  this is no longer the age of the assegai and the shield, left to their own meagre resources for self-defence, without the arm of the state (no matter how grudgingly) to make some security provisions for them would be to hand over some of the gun-deprived communes to a hungry belligerent, salivating at their burgeoning cornfields and fattened calves. And as the saying goes, the strong would do what they willed and the weak endure what they must.

Secondly, there is no way of inferring that this disintegration of the nation-state would not lead to an equally brutal bloody state of affairs; intra-group clashes (bellum omnium contra omnes); the outcome being a monument to Thomas Hobbes' warning; that "in such conditions there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

But perhaps the greatest argument against the anarchist manifesto is a look back into the past which it deems to be so desirable. For while some continue to portray it as a Golden Age of sorts, many aspects of it are hardly the standard-bearer of a harmonious society. Chief among these is its lack of the idea of individual human value so expressed and celebrated in the concept of democracy.  

Granted, the democratisation project has not (yet) been fulfilled on a continental scale,  but I cannot help feeling that its flame would dim and at last be extinguished when left to the whims of a communal leader and to the microcosmical worldview which looks at principles in an ad hominem pair of spectacles; that democracy is bad because it was brought by the same people who chained us, and that the other is not a human unless he is of my ethnicity, and that a tribal leader is legitimate only insofar as he is born into the duty of his place. What worse evils could come of such a myopic form of social engineering?

Bhaso Ndzendze is an undergraduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand and is the author of Africa: The Continent we Construct.

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