Reasserting the African agenda for liberation
The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) held its 15th General Assembly this week, from December 17 to 21, in the Senegalese capital Dakar.
CODESRIA is the oldest and easily the most important continental African intellectual institution committed to radical scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, and in flagging the flag of African knowledge production.
Since its founding in 1972, CODESRIA has had Africa’s first-rate scholars, including two eminent Congolese thinkers Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba and Nzongola-Ntalaja, two highly respected Malawian scholars Thandika Mkwandawire and Paul Zeleza Tiyambe, the enigmatic Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe, the big-brain Nigerian Adebayo Olukoshi, the distinguished Egyptian Marxist scholar Samir Amin, the Burkinabe Joseph Ki-Zerbo, the Ugandan Mahmood Mamdani, and many others.
The theme for the 15th triannual general assembly was ‘Africa and the Crisis of Globalisation’ could not have been more apt. Among the speakers included the former South African president Thabo Mbeki.
The intensification of global integration known as globalisation, has recently suffered unprecedented backlashes right at the centre of the scheme in Europe and North America.
The status quo is being disturbed by the rise in populist movements that advocate for the return to narrow nationalist agendas and jettisoning the international liberal order under the tutelage of multilateral bodies like the World Trade Organisation.
The backlash against globalisation is located at its base, yet it is the African continent that still holds the raw end of the current international economic order. It is Africa that continues to service global capitalist interests and Western metropolitan needs.
If there is one part of the world that should revolt against globalisation, it is Africa.
In his keynote address, Mbeki ably spoke to the rapacious Western imperial pursuits in the continent, but had a more favourable assessment of what some of us consider a new imperial power, China, commending it for engaging and negotiating with Africa, something that the West never did.
The truth is that China, just like the West, has very specific and deliberate interests in Africa. Yet, as Mbeki too conceded, there appears to be no clearly defined African interests that are strategically advanced and pursued either individually or under the auspices of the African Union.
On what terms are African governments engaging with China and do they have a unified, long term agenda that tightly guards the interests of the African people?
Worse still, there is a naïve or perhaps misguided call for more global integration of Africa so as to ostensibly tap into the supposed immense economic opportunities of a tremendously dynamic global economy. One can only laugh at such an ahistorical and misleading proposition.
The African continent was integrated in the global economy in the 16th Century. Since then, it has been the place of extraction, not productivity, maintained at the margins and not taken seriously as a player with interests to pursue.
The African agenda has always and will for long remain an agenda for liberation from the shackles of imperial domination and marginalisation. This was the initial motivation for what became the global pan-African movement, born in diaspora, which became represented in the African Union (AU) and CODESRIA. It is the agenda of reclaiming the dignity of African people and attaining respectable socioeconomic status.
Mbeki tossed the challenge at CODESRIA to lead the front of providing the intellectual resources for Africa’s place in a crisis-stricken global economy. But Mbeki has been in this before, with the AU and the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), which seems to have fallen by the wayside.
But intellectuals at CODESRIA tend to talk to each other, while politicians at the AU speak to themselves and for the most part engage in egregious actions in their countries and suffer no sanctions at the AU.
Confronting Africa’s precarious place in the world will, among other things, require African rulers to think beyond narrow domestic political calculations and to have concerted conversations with pan-African thinkers at a place like CODESRIA.
Khisa is assistant professor at North Carolina State University (USA).
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