Chielozona
Eze, Africa is a Country
Yes, April was the
cruelest month in South Africa in recent history. In the mid weeks of the
month, too many pictures stirred up bad memories. A black man in his late
twenties kissing a sparkly machete. A young man crouching by the side of a
wall, holding a sharp knife, ready to use. A group of angry black men
brandishing hatchets. Three white policemen pointing their guns at a
bloodthirsty mob. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the last one is a
dictionary. Three white policemen ready to shoot black men, who were after
other black men in South Africa. There can be no greater irony. You can hear
Queen Victoria saying: I told you so. These people needed to be protected from
themselves.
But it would be wrong for
Queen Victoria to celebrate, wherever she might be. Nothing can ever justify
violence and looting. And so, I imagine what I, a Nigerian man, would have done
if I were found between angry, hatchet-wielding youths and policemen with guns.
Would I have run to the descendants of those who massacred innocent
demonstrators at Sharpeville, or those whom I was taught in my Pan-African and
Black Consciousness classes to love and be in solidarity with because we all
are blacks? And having run to the white policemen for refuge, how can I not
redefine who my neighbor is? This question applies in Johannesburg as it does
in Lagos, Nairobi or Chicago. Who is my neighbor? Who deserves my empathy? Do I
have empathy at all? Is blackness still a moral imperative?
The truth of our global
age is that autochthony, nativism, or heritage no longer define us exclusively.
Whereas they may have helped us Africans to challenge European imperialism in
the past, they are now injurious to our humanity. It is time to rethink the
moral conditions of not just our solidarity, but, indeed, our existence. If we
are incapable of responding to the pain of the other, regardless of who that
other is, then the fault might be in our humanity, not in our economic
deprivation. But that’s precisely the issue. We have instinctively promoted victimhood
to sainthood, and we are morally the poorer for that.
Solidarity based on
phenotype or heritage is dangerous. He who loves you because of your skin color
can hate you for the same reason. The love is literally only skin deep. It is a
given in our history that in our pan-African love fest we failed to advance our
moral horizon just as the Afrikaners who constructed their solidarity on race
did not. The Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness on which my generation of
Africans was suckled, ended up being at best the means through which we
Africans put off the fire burning on the continent. And now we seem to have
become mere fire fighters, not ready to go beyond emergency response to
reality.
Could it then be that our
self-perception and our moral world got stuck in the perceived dignity of
difference to white people and in the supposed inviolability of our culture?
How else could Jacob Zuma have taken recourse to his Zulu culture as a justification
for sleeping with a woman against her will? Perhaps it is not a stretch to
suggest that all over Africa the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost.
As the Nigerian cultural critic, Denis Ekpo suggests, it is time we liberated
ourselves from our liberators and their jaded ideas of Africa. It is time we
imagined a more profound, universal, moral world, in tune with the global age
which Africa is undoubtedly part of. Where do we look for answers? Achille
Mbembe analyzes the mind of those blacks who went after other blacks: “To kill
‘these foreigners’, we need to be as close as possible to their body which we
then set in flames or dissect, each blow opening a huge wound that can never be
healed. Or if it is healed at all, it must leave on ‘these foreigners’ the
kinds of scars that can never be erased.”
The issue then is not
that the other black body stands in the way of your progress; rather, it is a
case of an infernal hatred of this other body, performed in a macabre
ritualistic glee. This is more than ordinary xenophobia can explain.
Explanation has to be sought in the realm of psychology: how has the black man
developed such an aversion for his fellow black man, for what looks like him?
Perhaps we could look for explanation in the realm of ethics: did black people
learn to hate the historical enemy (the colonialists) more than they knew how
to love themselves? Their bodies?
What is the black body to
me? What is the body in pain to me? Until we sufficiently answer these
questions, or at least think deeply about them, violence will keep spreading
all over Africa. Today the Zulus go after Zimbabweans. Tomorrow, they will go
after Xhosas. This is not a prophecy. It is the unavoidable arc of nativism and
bigotry. Those who start out attacking others, on the basis of difference, end
up attacking their own people on the basis of … well, difference. Fanon said it
a while ago; Mbembe reframed it today: “It does not stop with ‘these
foreigners’. It is in its DNA to end up turning onto itself in a dramatic gesture
of inversion.” There can be no greater challenge for us all.
