The African quest for decolonising culture is well captured by this poem:
If you want to understand me
come, bend over my African soul,
the black dockworkers’ groans,
the Tshopi’s frenzied dances,
the Shanganas’ rebellion,
the strange melody which flows
from a native song through the night.
And ask me no more
if you want to know me…
for I’m nothing more than a shell of flesh
where Africa’s uprising froze,
its cry swollen with hope.
In fact, some animated decolonising stories have lately emerged from Africa. These stories explore the revival of land, water, seed and Earth-centred cultures by indigenous and traditional communities in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Kenya. These colonising stories demonstrate the immense value of indigenous knowledge and practices in navigating the multiple ecological and social crises of our times. They are a testament to the fact that alternatives to the dominant industrial growth economy do already exist. That the damages and losses suffered since colonisation can be healed. That, by collaborating with the other species that call our territories home, we can reweave the fabric of life.
The emergence of these stories is not surprising in the backdrop of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism in Africa since long. African people have experienced great distress due to the Western control and theft of resources and the attendant social problems produced by this theft. Food insecurity and the humiliations of poverty have led to all kinds of unrest even as imperialist forces such as France and the US are always ready to militarily intervene to protect the assets of their giant companies such as Total and ExxonMobil.
The white man’s imperialism is now supplemented as also supplanted by the yellow man’s imperialism, so to say. China is slowly usurping Europe’s and USA’s role as colonial rulers of Africa. There is burgeoning literature on Chinese imperialist strategies in Africa. Colonialism is back in Africa through Beijing’s scramble for Africa through extractive and infrastructure investments. So, the emerging decolonising stories from Africa need to be also appreciated in the backdrop of colonialism with Chinese characteristics.
In this unfolding Chinese and Western stranglehold on Africa, it is worth revisiting Joseph Konrad’s 1899 novella-masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, which examines the horrors of Western colonialism, depicting it as a phenomenon that tarnishes not only the lands and peoples it exploits but also those in the West who advance it. It may be noted that the phantasmagoric Vietnam War movie, Apocalypse Now with background song of The Doors (This is the end…) is based on this Conrad’s writing with the power of creating visual effects on the reader.
The following introductory and commentary-excerpts are worth reading now:
“Heart of Darkness is the story of an English seaman, Charles Marlow, who is hired by a Belgian company to captain a river steamer in the recently established Congo Free State. Almost as soon as he arrives in the Congo, Marlow begins to hear rumours about another company employee, Kurtz, who is stationed deep in the interior of the country, hundreds of miles up the Congo River.
The second half of the novel relates Marlow’s journey upriver and his meeting with Kurtz. His health destroyed by years in the jungle, Kurtz dies on the journey back down to the coast, though not before Marlow has had a chance to glimpse “the barren darkness of his heart”. The coda to Marlow’s Congo story takes place in Europe: questioned by Kurtz’s “Intended” about his last moments, Marlow decides to tell a comforting lie, rather than reveal the truth about his descent into madness.
Heart of Darkness contains a bitter critique of imperialism in the Congo, which Conrad condemns as “rapacious and pitiless folly”. The backlash against the systematic abuse and exploitation of Congo’s indigenous inhabitants did not really get underway until the first decade of the 20th century, so that the anti-imperialist theme was ahead of its time, if only by a few years. Nor does Conrad have any patience with complacent European beliefs about racial superiority.
During the second half of the 19th century, spurious theories of racial superiority were used to legitimate empire-building, justifying European rule over native populations in places where they had no other obvious right to be. Marlow, however, is too cynical to accept this convenient fiction. The “conquest of the earth”, he says, was not the manifest destiny of European peoples; rather, it simply meant “the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves.”
The idea that Africans and Europeans have more in common than the latter might care to admit recurs later, when Marlow describes observing tribal ceremonies on the banks of the river. Confronted with local villagers “stamping” and “swaying”, their “eyes rolling”, he is shaken by a feeling of “remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar”.
Whereas most contemporary readers will be cheered by Marlow’s scepticism about the project of empire, this image of Congo’s indigenous inhabitants is more problematic. “Going up that river”, Marlow says, “was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world”, and he accordingly sees the dancing figures as remnants of “prehistoric man”.
Heart of Darkness suggests that Europeans are not essentially more highly-evolved or enlightened than the people whose territories they invade. To this extent, it punctures one of the myths of imperialist race theory. But, it also portrays Congolese villagers as primitiveness personified, inhabitants of a land that time forgot.”
Conrad had come under heavy fire as a racist for portraying the African native communities as primitive.
We now know from anthropological research that they were not ‘backward’ even as hunter-gatherer societies; on the contrary they were the ‘original Affluent societies’ with the right knowledge of ecological systems and sustainable development. And this intelligence is now blossoming and manifesting through increasing agro-ecological practices and emerging decolonising stories in Africa.
May this African renaissance free the African indigenous people from the problems of Western and Chinese neo-colonialism without waging a war like the Vietnam War!
REFERENCES
Brian Davey. 2015. Credo: Economic Beliefs in a World in Crisis. The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability. Ireland.
By Annavajhula J.C. Bose, PhD
Department of Economics, SRCC
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