Let Africa define contents and direction of its ‘rise’
A few years into the second decade of the 21st Century, the world witnessed a major discursive shift in the perception of Africa. Suddenly, those who had for long branded the continent as dark, uncivilised, backward, diseased, hungry, illiterate, war-torn and hopeless, etc. seemingly begun to see signs of ‘a new Africa’, one that is “rising”. Hence 10 years after describing the continent as hopeless, The Economist now talked of “a hopeful continent”, an “Africa rising”.
Time magazine dedicated its December 2012 cover story to the same. “Africa rising” became a new rallying concept for a new kind of optimism towards Africa, with its resultant multiplicity of interventions under the guise of boosting such a rise.
Despite some extras (democracy, peace, etc.), the narrative has mainly been constructed in economic terms (economic growth), which also corresponds to the predominance of Economism in world affairs especially since the 1980s. To be sure, one can sum up the whole Africa rising narrative in a single sentence: A continent that is finally on course to its eternally prescribed mission; to strive to follow and ‘catch-up’ with those considered developed.
However, what is of concern is not the fact that the IMF, World Bank, and a multitude of other self-interested entities and countries are pretentiously singing “Africa rising” to a continent ravaged by their economic policies, plunder, and weapons; for, perhaps, singing “Africa rising” is all they ought to do to feel good about themselves.
What is much more troubling is the way the narrative has received widespread acceptability across the continent. Throughout the continent, politicians, especially in those countries like Uganda deluded by tags of being “fastest growing”, have found in Africa rising strong reasons to cling onto power.
As in the case of Uganda with the ever-shifting deadlines for middle-income status, one can trace a form of blackmail by these political elites when they lie to their citizens that the main reason they cannot leave power is because they want to boost the “growth” they championed. On the other hand, many of their critics (in Opposition parties, the academia, civil society organisations, etc.) are not that different.
What many of them are opposed to is not that ruling regimes are blindly hiding under a dangerous ideology, but of not implementing enough of it.
There is reasonable consensus to the idea that economic growth is a necessary condition for Africa to rise. Limited if any attention is given to the peculiar nature of the said rise, that is, the promotion and entrenchment of a particular image of Africa: An image that corresponds to a particular social context and world view.
For instance, in the Africa rising narrative, citizens who have resorted, for survival, to vending petty goods on streets in the scotching sun, men (and sometimes women) to riding boda bodas and driving matatu, etc. are all thought of, and celebrated, as manifestations of an “entrepreneurial spirit” central in a rising Africa.
Not as examples of a kind of impotence that has resulted from years of imposing onto a people a particular way of organising society.
Even amid well-publicised natural catastrophes arising from attempts to reproduce a single social image everywhere else; the illusion of a world created in the image of the West still seems stark. Chinese, after polluting their way to ‘development’, are now seeking to externalise the costs of their endless and reckless race.
China is especially turning to ‘resource-rich’ Africa trading the same apocalyptic illusion (give us your ‘resources’ in exchange for the infrastructure you need to ‘develop’ like us). As if Chinese smogged, blue-sky-free cities should be seen as model cities. And our leaders are now ‘in bed’ with Chinese developers. We have certainly allowed ourselves to become perpetual, die-hard followers. Always waiting to act to become what others’ self-image projected onto us suggests.
When, after World War II, that image suggested that fossil fuel-fired smoke-stack industrialisation was the only road to ‘development’; Africa obeyed though with very little success. Today, those in the West who were aggressively pushing for mass industrialisation in Africa and elsewhere are jubilating not because their mission succeeded, but because it failed. Had it succeeded; the ruins (social, environmental, etc.) resulting from such ‘progress’ would have been so real to enable the view of former ‘promoters of progress’ as ‘angels of the apocalypse’.
Now the self-image is changing, and Africa (and the rest of the global South) is, once again, asked to change accordingly.
Instead of buying diesel and coal-run industrial machines; we’re now asked to buy wind mills and solar panels instead.
Environmentalists claim that wind mills are killing birds. Perhaps that will change too. The point is not to suggest an inherent danger in following and learning from others.
This is even inevitable given the nature of challenges we collectively face today. What must however be vehemently resisted is this reduction of Africa to a state of permanent passivity and the resultant perpetuity in following every junk that comes from without. True, Africa is rising. But let Africa define the contents and direction of its rise.
