African Intellectuals and Decolonization

Introduction

Introduction Nicholas M. Creary In his 1952 study, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, Frantz Fanon pointedly asked: “Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?”1 Asking this question on the eve of much of Africa’s independence from European colonial occupation, Fanon displayed his typical prescience, foreseeing a nominally postcolonial Africa in which the continent would remain largely subjugated within a neocolonial world order. Moreover, Fanon foresaw a neocolonial world in which the process to liberation would be ongoing long after Africa’s formal independence from European colonialism. Cape Verdean/Guinean nationalist leader Amílcar Cabral summed up this idea in the Portuguese language slogan “A luta continua” (The struggle continues). Sixty years later, Africans continue to struggle to “decolonize the mind,” that is, “to seize back their creative initiative in history through a real control of all the means of communal self-definition in time and space.”2 With regard to the production of knowledge of Africa and its representation, the incompleteness of the decolonization struggle is evident in the fact that Africa today remains widely associated with chaos, illness, and disorder—a range of colonial stereotypes that say more about the seer (the West) than the seen (Africa). That is, Africa remains largely known as the Other of a colonial, Western “You.”3 As such, Africa is cast as a sociopolitical morass, a dead weight upon an outside (read white and Western) world presumably burdened with Africa’s lack of development. This prevalent (mis)conception is nothing if not a latter-day invocation of the idea of “the white man’s burden,” so central in providing moral-evolutionary trappings to the brute violence of Europe’s military conquest and colonial occupation of Africa, and enduringly instrumental in contemporary geopolitics. 2 / Introduction To recognize the weight of this tremendously powerful association of Africa with inferiority upon intellectual work is to address the fact that, as Tsenay Serequeberhan argues herein, “behind the many and varied perspectives that constitute the philosophical tradition of the West, one finds the singular view—a core grounding axiom— that European modernity is, properly speaking, isomorphic with the humanity of the human per se.” Thus, if Europe is the epitome of humanity in this dispensation, Africa is conceptually its inhuman counterpart. Or, put another way, the term “Black Human” is an oxymoron .4 Decolonizing the mind is thus the dual task of first, placing African discourses at the center of scholarship on Africa; and second, of dislocating African humanity from this human-inhuman binary. Africa cannot escape its subjugation within modernity simply by attempting to climb up through “development,” as development does not disperse the antiblackness and anti-Africanness of Western modernity. As Emmanuel Eze pointedly observed: “We do not . . . have enough reasons to expect that once everyone is rich and educated, antiblack racism will disappear.”5 Although these days few contemporary scholars producing Western narrative discourses on Africa would refer to Africans as “primitive,” current discourses frequently oppose Western “modernity” with “traditional” African cultures or practices—where “traditional” is a more acceptable euphemism for “primitive.” In short, the binary opposition of a primitive or traditional Africa to a modern or enlightened West continues to pervade academic discourses, contemporary journalistic accounts of Africa and its peoples, and the perspectives of international development and aid organizations. Thus, the challenge for African and non-African scholars alike is to establish the substantial and valid fact of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to enable the representation of Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to Western humanity. And so the quest for African subjectivity continues. We take up this challenge in this volume, as the mandate within intellectual work, to continue to strive for the decolonization of the academy and its production of knowledge of Africa. Indeed, in the spirit of Fanon, Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, Cabral, Lewis Gordon, and other revolutionary thinkers, we follow Oyèrónkéé . Oyĕwùmí’s dicta that the foundations of African thought cannot rest on Western intellectual traditions that have as one of their enduring fea- Nicholas M. Creary / 3 tures the projection of Africans as Other and our consequent domination. . . . As long as the “ancestor worship” of academic practice is not questioned, scholars in African Studies are bound to produce scholarship that does not focus primarily on Africa—for those “ancestors” not only were non-Africans...