On August 4, Kenyans voted for a new constitution that will finally establish the country as a liberal democracy.

In so doing, it will join a growing number of African countries that have adopted liberal constitutions and become bona fide democracies.
The remaining countries on the continent still experimenting with other forms of government, will too find that they are only stalling an inevitable journey to liberal constitutional democracy.

It is fair, therefore, to say that Africa has come full circle to accepting a governance philosophy and conceptual framework for social and economic development that it had rejected soon after independence.

What we will also realise in due course is that, in addition, a liberal constitutional order also provides the material with which to build a substantive worldview, on the basis of which we can define our identity and ideologies of change, and which will enable true artistic exploration of self and society.

Therefore, whether in the short or medium term, the adoption of a liberal democracy will occasion a radical discontinuity with past efforts to construct an African worldview and an African model of socio-economic development.

It will offer as well a revitalised vision of self and society that will be the basis of a more experimental, virile and liberating art.

Up till now, attempts to define an African worldview and model of development were informed by the belief that it was within African traditional culture that we were “most at ease with ourselves, that there was the truest coincidence between us and the world (Irele,1982).

The elaboration of this idea was that colonialism occasioned a disruption of our means of social reproduction and we had become something other than what we are; alienated and lost, unable to find meaning and purpose in life.

Thus, a constant proposition in the various constructions of an African worldview and model of development was a return to traditional values and practices as a way of not only reclaiming our lost souls, but also as a basis for our socio-economic and political development.

Of course, these values and practices were assumed to be self-evidently desirable and superior to those inherited from the West via colonialism.

Cultural nationalism then is at the heart of the various theorisations of an African worldview and African model of development, and has informed all other ideological, intellectual and artistic expression.

But cultural nationalism was a disabling conceptual framework, limiting our self-expression and self-definition, and more importantly, our cultural and political growth.

Take Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, for instance, which is representative of the style, themes and points of view of most of our modern literature.

Before the white man, Okonkwo — the tragic hero of the book —was a successful man. But the coherence of his world collapses with the coming of the white man.

Unable to relate to the changing times and values, he commits suicide. The point of view of Things Fall Apart is unequivocal: only within the context of our traditional world can we find meaning and purpose.

Manipulated to express this predetermined ideological position, Okonkwo, as well as others in the book, lacks the multi-dimensional and multilayered complexity that has to be the result of an individual faced with changing and bewildering times.

With the author’s stern cultural nationalist eyes looking over their shoulders, the characters are inhibited and fail to follow their impulses and thoughts to their logical conclusions.

In an article in The EastAfrican newspaper, David Kaiza says of Achebe: “He goes at a subject in a monotone that can dull the mind.

His characters are carved out in two dimensions. The third dimension of characters coming outside the books’ themes to act in a world of senses rather than of social change is tragically missing.”

Further, encumbered by authorial intrusions to explain Igbo customs, the book begins to straddle hesitantly the line between art and social documentation.

Art, essentially, tells the story of individuals interacting with one another and with their social contexts, not social contexts interacting with one another and with their individuals.

So much of African literature has been dominated by the latter — the battle between African and Western cultures, with individuals (characters, if you like) as mere props in this ideological encounter.

African writers have employed — to use Simon Gikandi’s phrase — “the resources of art superficially “in order to advance a cultural nationalist cause.

In an article in Focus on Africa BBC magazine, Judy Kibinge, a Kenyan filmmaker, talks about the temptation to reproduce the images and habits of an idyllic traditionalism, or — I would imagine — variations thereof.

But she wonders: “What if you wanted to make a film about the life you live as a modern independent urban African, whose psychological roots are planted deep in the heart of the African city...?”

The African film industry has largely failed to explore this theme and has, instead, succumbed to the charms of cultural nationalist imageries and narratives.

Every other film contrasts happy villages, in which all are self-fulfilled, with the confusion and decay of colonial disruption.

In this filmic schema, Westernised characters drift aimlessly through life in search of an identity.

Lost in a spiritual wilderness, they exist in a world of corruption and moral decay, only finding salvation and peace when they reconnect with their traditional culture.
There is a variation to this stock portrayal, which the Nigerian movie industry has never tired of reproducing: films populated by witchdoctors and an assortment of spirits seeking to avenge betrayal of the ancestors.

Wise elders, saddened by this turn of events, and shaking their heads melodramatically, are summoned to appease the angry ancestors.

The cultural nationalist theme is not altogether absent in our art and music, as witness the proliferation of images of wizened old men watching, in tranquil surroundings of a village, the African sunset, and in the case of the latter, the constant lyrical nostalgia for times gone by.

Thus Fela Kuti, in the song “African Woman”, embarks on a search for an “authentic” African woman uncorrupted by Western influences.

And in a more recent echo of the same theme, the South African musician, Jabu Khanyile, pleads for an African woman “full of ubuntu”, who, in the video accompaniment, is portrayed kneeling in contented supplication before her lover.

This appropriation of womanhood and its use as a symbol of pre-colonial utopia is so ubiquitous in our artistic productions, yet most of us miss its sinister subtext of subjugation of women.

Ketu Katrak, writing in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, comments on the mythical nature of this portrayal: “The usual image is that of a woman viewed as earth goddess, possessing mysterious powers of fertility, a symbolic abstraction hardly recognisable as a flesh and blood human.” Women writers such as Buchi Emecheta have contested the claim of a happy womanhood in pre-colonial society. Commenting on her work, Earnest Emenyonu writes: “The major problem she depicts there is that of a tortured and dehumanised womanhood.”

In politics, cultural nationalism, sometimes couched in relativist philosophies, was expressed in the rejection of the modern democratic concept with its provisions for individual rights, opposition parties and separation of powers.

The view of Abdullahi an-Naim, a rights scholar, best captures the relativist tendency: “International standards on universal human rights have been primarily conceived, developed and established by the West.They cannot be accepted and implemented globally by peoples of other parts of the world.”

Most other theorisations on the subject dispensed with arguments of practicability and, while, too, rejecting — implicitly or explicitly “Western democracy”, proposed a return to assumed democratic traditions of pre-colonial societies.

Julius Nyerere who, together with Nkrumah, was perhaps the most persuasive of the proponents of “African democracy”, would write: “We in Africa have no need of being taught democracy, it is rooted in the traditional society that produced us”.

In his book Consciencism, Nkrumah expounds on a “cluster of humanist principles which underlie traditional African society” as a crucial basis of his vision for Africa. Jomo Kenyatta, in Facing Mount Kenya, claimed that “before the coming of the Europeans, the Kikuyu had a democratic regime.”
These claims are taken as axiomatic, and are not supported in any systematic way with references to theories or practices of democracy.

In so many formal and informal discussions about Africa, they are repeated as fact, on which propositions on democracy are predicated.

Yet they are not only false, but also disabling. In a groundbreaking essay titled, “The Democratic Myth in the African Traditional Societies,” V.C. Simiyu writes: “In Black Africa, whether the political system was that of the highly centralised states or the amorphous non-centralised communities, it did not belong to a democratic tradition.”

Writing elsewhere, I have compared several political and judicial concepts and practices in traditional African societies to those proposed by modern democratic theory, and concluded that they were in violation — to very significant degrees — of key tenets of democracy.

These claims of pre-colonial democracy — though, as shown, based on myths — would inform the conceptual framework for the various attempts to construct an “African democracy.”

Thus, the post-colonial state overthrew the constitutional order and in its stead substituted what — according to the Nkrumahs, Kenyattas and Nyereres, with the witting or unwitting support of the cultural nationalist theorists — was a system consistent with African traditional polity.

The product was a highly centralised authoritarian system, the traditional chief (or ruling gerontocracy) now reincarnated as president.

Renhold Niebuhr writes of Kwame Nkrumah: “The cult of personality which Nkrumah built up around himself was at least in part an attempt to borrow the trappings of a traditional chief (the ceremonies of the central government were consciously modelled on tribal rites) and to outshine them in splendour and appeal.”

In 1983, the OAU — through its Charter on Human and Peoples Rights — attempted to give coherence and legitimacy to “African democracy” by using the language of rights, claiming, for instance, that emphasis on individual rights was contrary to the African concept and practice of “group rights.”

Individual rights, it was argued in the document and in others, would produce individualism, a Western antisocial behaviour that was at the heart of dysfunctional families and communities.

It was a prodigiously disingenuous distinction from an academic point of view, but also given the fact that the OAU had, since its inception, presided over the gross abuse of both individual and group rights by its member regimes.

The ubuntu “philosophy” (I am because we are), from which the OAU drew inspiration for this distinction, is a classic example of the dangers of substituting myth for policy and programmes.
Because ubuntu claims that Africans naturally love one another, we are caught unprepared when ethnic and xenophobic killings occur, which could have been prevented by policies addressing issues of justice, access to resources or cross-cultural education.

Cultural nationalism

The attempt to graft the pre-colonial political model on to modern African states based on invented or real pasts is a subject that was treated at length and depth by Ali Mazrui in the article, “The Monarchical Tendency in African Political Culture.”

The practical effects on African life of those attempts are well documented in the recurring tragedies of civil wars, refugees, economic collapse and near despair.

But in the main, proponents of cultural nationalism have never been interested in debating concrete systems, laws, procedures and institutions, and how they interact to produce a governance that is not just fair, just and predictable, but which also enables social transformation.

They have been unwilling as well to discuss how their theories might have contributed to the tragedies that characterise the history of post-Independent Africa.

They have felt more comfortable speaking in parables and mysticisms, hoping — I am sometimes convinced — to cast spells on non-conformist minds.

So in his recent book, Re-membering Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong’o discusses spirits and memories, not just in a metaphysical sense, but also as a basis for political action: “The unity of the dead, the living, and the unborn is broken.

There is no healing, no wholeness; only a dislocation of the national psyche, for in not remembering the past, there are no inherited ideals by which to measure the excesses of the present.”

It is important to deconstruct this passage, because it encapsulates — in language, philosophy, logic and political intent — the rhetorical mysticism characteristic of theories based on cultural nationalism.

The language is emotive, and lyrically charming: the phrases are short, and quick to the point, effecting a linguistic sleight of hand, so that we do not ask, for instance, what “wholeness” means.

The philosophy of being evokes Okonkwo’s existential fate discussed at the opening stages of this argument, whose meaning is that, dislocated from our traditional culture, we succumb to all kinds of psychological ailments.

So healing will only come if we make peace with the offended spirits of our ancestors (remember our Nigerian films?).

Of course, this line of argument begs the question as to why our ancestors should take offence when they should have prepared us better technologically and otherwise to face colonialism.

But let us focus on the allusion to the state of our mental health, because the manufacture of mental diseases has been almost a correlative of cultural nationalist theorisation.

Thus, four decades after Fanon psychoanalysed colonised Africans and found all kinds of mental maladies, Mukoma wa Ngugi in his book, Conversing with Africa, diagnoses as follows: “Because the African becomes unable to locate himself or herself in this foreign language and is equally unable to find roots in the forgotten language, schizophrenia sets in.”

Proof of quackery lies in the very fact of the eloquence (in a foreign language, no less) with which these maladies are described.

If there were any truth in claims of mental problems as a result of alienation, we would now have to invoke a miracle to account for the fact that Ngugi, Fanon, Mukoma and others who dabble in this branch of health science seem not to have succumbed to the psychiatric maladies that afflict other educated Africans.

The basic argument for alienation and the attendant mental health problems is based on three falsehoods: First, the notion that it was within our traditional culture that we were “most at ease with ourselves, that there was the truest coincidence between us and the world” presupposes that traditional culture has an irreducible and eternal essence.

But the African society at the point of colonialism cannot be the same as existed, say, in the 16th century. Every generation of Africans — some generations more than others, depending on the nature of their particular historical experience — has been different in important ways from the previous.
If then alienation and the psychosis it causes is a result of this cultural distance, then Africa for millennia has been home to alienated souls with all kinds of psychiatric problems. And not just Africa; every society in the world would be similarly afflicted.

Second, the argument falsifies the process through which we maintain while expanding identities. An African schooled in science or classical music does not stop referring to herself as African because of her new knowledge. Her new experience has expanded her “African-ness”.

What Abiola Irele says of acquisition of a foreign language can be applied to other cultural acquisitions: “...one progresses towards a point at which one’s awareness becomes double. It is not only that the mind is broadened, the whole register of experience is in fact intensified.”

The third falsehood is that colonialism supplanted in toto our traditional culture and replaced it with Western culture.

But Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in his book, In My Father’s House, that the penetration of Western culture under colonialism could only have been shallow, given that the majority of Africans were still immersed in their traditions as experienced in everyday social interactions.

“To insist in these circumstances on the alienation of (Western) educated colonials, on their incapacity to appreciate and value their own traditions, is to risk mistaking both the power of this primary experience [of their own traditions] and the vigour of many forms of cultural resistance to colonialism.”

From the preceding arguments, I hope that I have — at the very least — established prima facie grounds to suspect the existence of alienation and the supposed mental afflictions outside their authors’ imagination.

As mentioned earlier, and as Ngugi’s statement implicitly confirms, a constant proposition of cultural nationalism in all its theoretical guises — Pan-Africanism, negritude, consciencism, African socialism, African Personality, ubuntu, or even the recent formulations of an African Renaissance — has been its subversion of the development logic.

Development — new ideas, discoveries and inventions — almost always involves negating the traditional; being willing to think outside the familiar context of routine, ritual and belief.

When Galileo said that the earth revolved around the sun, he was not only stating a scientific fact, but was also unmasking as untrue a central dogma of the Catholic faith.

When Descartes defined his being in cerebral terms (I think therefore I am) he was negating a tradition of defining oneself in spiritual terms.

And Darwin’s theory of evolution questioned the dogma of creation that was at the core of European religion and the self-perception of the European man and woman.

Development — in the sense I have pointed out — does not seek to confirm the “truths” of the past, but to unmask its falsehoods; it is the product of a process of demythologising the past, not mythologising it.

The propositions, therefore, that the metaphysics, values and practices provided by our traditional culture should form the materials with which to construct our conceptual framework for socio-economic and political development, have impeded our post-Independence development project.

What is an African identity? What is an African worldview? How do we modernise Africa? These are the foundational questions of modern intellectual and ideological expression on Africa by both Africans and people of African descent.

But curiously, instead of using the cultural and intellectual resources of modern experience to reflect on these questions, and, therefore, define (or reinvent) an African identity, worldview and conceptual framework for socio-economic development in modern terms, the intellectuals went on a quixotic mental search for an African metaphysical Eldorado.

That search found the fool’s gold of cultural nationalism, which would come to form the basis for much of the theorisation around these questions.

But since it was fake gold, our intellectuals turned to the dubious rationality of alchemy. Myths substituted facts, ethnic and national fictions replaced history; mystiques of race were propagated as ideologies of change.

The past was divested of its manifold imperfections and promoted as utopia; ancient tyrannical polities were styled democracies; oppressive cultures became “ideals by which to measure the excesses of the present”; villains like Sekou Toure and Kwame Nkrumah were idolised as heroes.

Pseudo-theories

The project of African renewal, of reinventing Africa so as to be able to take advantage of modernity, was muddled by a dizzying succession of pseudo-theories, mysticisms and unstructured discussions.

Conceptually blinded by this cacophony, the continent groped around in conceptual darkness for location and direction, and then finally paused in near despair.

There are those who might say that pan-Africanism — the prototype of theories based on the mystique of race and culture — is still useful as a means of uniting African nations, and Africans and the diaspora. But even in this capacity, it is redundant and dangerous. The shared values in democracy and growing regional integration will bring the nations of Africa ever closer together.

And as I have argued, relying on the myth of natural love instead of policy and process is harmful to our purposes.

Increasingly, Africans and people of African descent will have to accept that trade, investment, mutual intellectual and other interests will be the means by which they come together, just as do the Chinese in mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia and elsewhere.

Even pan-Africanism’s goal of a political union of African states — for long imbued with romantic appeal — might not, in the end, be necessary. As nations prosper under liberal democracy and intra-Africa trade, a political union will begin to look like an anachronistic ambition.

In the Central Business District of Nairobi, there is a building that housed specially-constructed torture chambers, where scores of democratic activists were tortured by a regime determined to keep democracy at bay.

But systematic torture was not unique to Kenya. Almost every African country has had its torture chambers, from the State Research Bureau under Idi Amin to Sekou Toure’s prisons, thus forming, to adapt the title of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous novel, a torture archipelago throughout the African continent.

Now as African countries — one by one — adopt liberal democratic values as the organising architecture of their nationhood and societies, a different dotting is taking shape — a democratic archipelago.

Liberal democracy will now provide a true foundation on which to base our project of renewal. Its values, practices, laws, institutions, procedures and systems will now become the material with which to construct an African identity, worldview and a conceptual framework for Africa’s socio-economic development.

It will not only ensure justice for all, but it will also determine the way we relate to one another as individuals, ethnic groups, and races, and how we share our resources.

And once we begin to define our “African-ness” in terms of shared values, ideals and goals, and not in racial terms, other races — Asians, Europeans, Arabs — who have made the continent their home will now be able to participate in the concept of “African-ness.”

Africans will also now — consciously or not — have to re-evaluate their cultural values and practices against the constitutional values. All our ideological and other expression will now be valid only to the extent to which they enrich the experience of democracy.

With democracy and freedom, and now unencumbered by the dictates of cultural nationalism, Africans can explore in art and literature the experiences of the new African, thus further enriching the African identity and worldview.

We can now say that the true African Renaissance has finally begun.

Tee Ngugi is a former columnist for The Namibian newspaper and The Southern Times weekly, and now works for an NGO