From cultural nationalism to liberal democracy in Africa

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