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14 South Africa’s Elusive Quest for an African Identity: The Ironies of a South Africa–Led African Renaissance Xolela Mangcu In 1959, two of South Africa’s leading intellectuals, Eskia Mphahlele and Gerard Sekoto, visited the offices of the Society of African Culture in Paris. There they met with the editors of Presence Africaine and asked them, “Where do we come in—we, who are detribalized and are producing a proletariat art.”1 Mphahlele had just come from South Africa. He was dismissive and disdainful of negritude as just another form of “medieval clannishness.” This reflected the dominant political culture of the ANC and its multiracial alliance partners: “We are aiming at a common society and to prove that multiracial societies can thrive and become a glorious reality in Africa.”2 Mphahlele wrote a scathing attack on negritude as yet a romantic representation of the African experience: “Who is so stupid as to deny the historical fact of negritude as both a protest and a positive assertion of African values? All this is valid. What I do not accept is the way in which too much of the poetry inspired by it romanticizes Africa—as a symbol of innocence, purity, and artless primitiveness.”3 He was equally dismissive of Nkrumah’s “African personality” as inappropriate and irrelevant for a people trying to construct a multiracial society. David Attwell describes Mphahlele’s early response to negritude as an “apology for the South African intellectual’s estrangement in the face of negritude which was, at the time, the most talked-­ about of intellectuali­ zations of identity in the black world.”4 However, the hardening of racial attitudes on the part of South Africa’s white population, his experience as a member of a racial minority in the United States, and the emergence of black consciousness in South Africa led to a dramatic reassessment of Mphahlele’s political outlook. And so in 1974 he observed that “there is something about the act of and fact of communal survival inside a situation of racism that either tones down, or lends another complexion to, the hate that 298 South Africa’s Elusive Quest for an African Identity 299 is mixed with anger. Outside the situation you are on your own, you have little communal support: at best, it is intellectual. So you hate the whites you left behind with a scalding intensity. Could it be that distance creates a void and that the burning lava of hate must fill it?” But even in his embrace of negritude Mphahlele turned not to the lyricism of Senegal’s Leopold Senghor but to the radical, secular ideals of Aimé Césaire. Finally Mphahlele had come around. In 1974, he declared that ­ negritude was “the modern (cultural) equivalent of the old condition of fugitive slaves.”5 Ngugi wa Thiong’o offers a slightly different account of why the distance of exile turns into a more radical orientation. Speaking at the Macmillan-­Stewart Lectures at Harvard University, Ngugi argues that the differences can be seen in the ways in which diasporic Africans and continental Africans responded to the tremendous loss of life that occurred during slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. Whereas Africans in the diaspora were always longing for home, continental African elites have never properly mourned the deaths of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid . Ngugi argues that even though diasporic Africans lost much of their languages, they held on to what they could as a way of keeping their memory of home. They subverted the dominant languages of the New World through processes of creolization and the development of an alternative aesthetic. The result was the Negro spiritual—an aesthetic of­ resistance—which later led to the blues and jazz, calypso, hip-­ hop, and other forms of representation. He cites Aimé Césaire as someone who, even though lacking in African languages, played around with the French language, subverting and giving it a new form. Africans in the diaspora had to innovate or perish. This innovative turn is to be distinguished from the development through imitation that characterized the Europeans, who merely transplanted architectural models, place-­ names, and other things from the Old World to the New World. Ngugi argues that continental Africans did exactly the opposite of their diasporic brothers and sisters. They ran away from their languages and instead engaged in processes of evasion and denial. In the end Ngugi offers a psychoanalytic explanation for this obsession with European languages and memory on the part of continental Africans...

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