-
8. The Murky Present and the MysteriousFuture
- CODESRIA
- Chapter
- Additional Information
8 The Murky Present and the Mysterious Future We have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. New technologies alter our lives daily. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free. (John Gray 2004: 110) Introduction What runs through this concluding chapter is the complex theme of phenomenology of human uncertainty. The question of human uncertainty in this present century is obvious even to historians who are generally comfortable with engagement of human pasts rather than the murky present and the mysterious future. Becker (1994: xii-xiv) explained ‘phenomenology of uncertainty’ as being characterised by appearances of convergence and intersection of epochs resulting in instabilities and doubts about the adequacies of the existing normative order of life, lack of confidence in existing worldviews, fragmentation of identities, rupturing of known values of sociality and civility, and visible signs of emptiness of notions of the nationstate . This uncertainty engenders a new search for certainty and alternative forms of organization of human life beyond Westphalian ideas that put the nation-state at the centre of human life. Wole Soyinka in his 2004 BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures, spoke on one aspect of human uncertainty which he called the ‘climate of fear’. His words: Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization 240 A few decades ago the existence of collective fear had an immediate identifiable face—the nuclear bomb. While that source is not totally absent today, one can claim that we have moved beyond the fear of the bomb. A nuclear menace is also implicated in the current climate of fear, but the atom bomb is only another weapon in its arsenal […] What terrifies the world, however, is no longer the possibility of over-muscled states unleashing on the world the ultimate scenario—the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) that once, paradoxically, also served as its own mutually restraining mechanism. Today the fear is one of furtive, invisible power, the power of the quasi-state, that entity that lays no claim to any physical boundaries , flies no national flag, is unlisted in any international associations, and is in every bit as mad as the MAD gospel of annihilation that was so calmly enunciated by superpowers (Soyinka 2004: 8-9). Soyinka was meditating on global terrorism as a source of global uncertainty and insecurity which was personified by Osama Bin Laden who was killed by the United States military forces in Pakistan on the Easter eve of 2011. The human race is also facing the threat of HIV&AIDS which continues to ravage in Africa partly because antiretroviral treatment is scarce and unaffordable for the poor communities affected. The uncertainty that has engulfed the world has shaken the foundations of the strong post-Cold War neoliberal humanism that was even eclipsing well-known religious eschatologies of the twentieth century, be they of Islamic or Christian motif. What is at stake and in crisis is the ides of progress. Progress is that strong human belief in people’s agency to free themselves from any kind of external limits and constraints to their lives. Uncertainty has also manifested itself in discourses of development studies. The intellectual uncertainty and the crisis of belief in progress were traced to the 1990s. It was openly encapsulated in various versions of postmodern thinking and the rise of the notions of the risk society. The idea of a risk society was introduced by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck in 1986, capturing a developing feeling that it was useless to look into the future and to plan ahead because of unpredictable uncertainties (Beck 1994). This thinking came on the heels of development pessimism of the 1980s informed by the notions of the unbridgeable gap between the poor and rich countries that continued to widen since 1945. Wolfgang Sachs (1992:1) threw in the towel on development and proposed that: ‘It is time to dismantle this mental structure.’ Uncertainty about development was felt more strongly in the ‘postcolonial neocolonized world’ that is discussed in this book where serious economic development has been elusive since the 1970s. The miscarriage of the decolonization project that became manifest in the late 1960s and early 1970s [3.239.119.159] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:23 GMT) 241 opened the doors for uncertainty to reign within Africa. But the uncertainty has always coexisted with both pessimism and optimism. Nevertheless, scholars...