The Postcolonial Turn: Re-Imagining Anthropology and Africa

Chapter 2. Africanity: A Combative Ontology

31 2 Africanity: A Combative Ontology* Archie Mafeje Prelude This article is inspired by Out of One, Many Africas (1999), an incredible intellectual insurrection instigated by William Martin and Michael West. For their courage, persistence, and intellectual integrity, they deserve, and the recognition. The best way of appreciating their contribution would have been to review their book in full but for me there was the danger of biting more than I could chew. Therefore, I chose to respond to some of the leading ideas in the book these include the pending demise of Africanity, and the necessity of Afrocentrism. As would be readily agreed, these issues are as big as they are controversial but intensely that even ‘distinguished elders’ are willing to the chagrin of ‘Brave New World’ advocates. Even so, the risk is not too great since they have the advantage of hindsight, unlike neophytes who are often too easily infatuated with fashions. Since fashions are very changeable, it stands to reason that ahistoricity is a greater risk than historicity. To evolve lasting meanings, we must be ‘rooted’ in something. The fashionable ‘free-floating signifier’ is an illusion in a double sense. First, nobody can think and act outside historically determined circumstances and still hope to be a social signifier of any kind. In other words, while we are free to choose the role in which we cast ourselves as active agents of history, we do not put on the agenda the social issues to which we respond. These are imposed on us by history. For example, we would not talk of freedom, if there was no prior condition in which this was denied; we would not be anti- * Originally published in CODESRIA Bulletin 2000, no 1: 66-71. 32 The Postcolonial Turn racism if we had not been its victims; we would not proclaim Africanity, if it had not been denied or degraded; and we would not insist on Afrocentrism, if it had not been for Eurocentric negations, Secondly, unlike, the illusory ‘free-floating signifier’, it is the historical juncture which defines us socially and intellectually. At this point in time there are certain critical issues which African scholars have to clarify so as to indicate what might be the underpinnings of the eagerly awaited African renaissance. Of necessity, under the determinate global conditions an African renaissance must entail a rebellion – a conscious rejection of past transgressions, a determined negation of negations. Initially, such representations will not be credited by those who uphold the status quo. If they be robust and persistent, they will sooner or later elicit a plea from men and women of reason and goodwill for a dialogue. Not surprisingly, this is already happening. Before they have rediscovered themselves and have exorboured on the continent for so long, African scholars are being invited to an extraverted contemplation about ‘our common future’. The ostensible reason is that such self-affirming constructs as ‘Afrocentrism’ are too confining and will succeed only in ‘ghettoising’ African intellectuals. These entreaties should be resolutely spurned because the classical liberal idea of a universal (WO) man is like a mirage in the face of self-perpetuation hierarchies in Bush’s and Clinton’s ‘New World Order’. For the Africans who are at bottom of the pile, authentic representations need not connote anything more than that ‘charity begins at home (a very fitting Anglo-Saxon adage) which is a conscious refusal to be turned into ‘free-floating signifiers’. Thus, Africanity, if properly understood, has profound political, ideological, cosmological, and intellectual implications. Africanity versus Afrocentrism Although in current debates the two terms are often used as interchangeable or, at least, as having a common referent, this need not be the case. Conceptually, it is possible to distinguish clearly between the two. Contrary to the suppositions of the Temple University school represented by Tsehloane Keto (now back in South Africa) in Out of One, Many Africas which made a regarded as 33 Chapter 2: Africanity – A Combative Ontology methodological requirement for decolonising knowledge in Africa or as an antidote to Eurocentrism through which all knowledge about Africa has been filtered. Although this had been justified by appealing to dubious ‘universal standards’, the fact of the matter is that Africa is the only region which has suffered such total paradigmatic domination. In a simple and unpolemical manner Kwesi Prah (1997) in an unpublished but pointed communication makes the same observation: Rather strikingly, in comparative...