Musings of a post Cold War PanAfricanist in Botswana
Correspondent | Friday January 16, 2015 12:38
I was then curious about why it was that mainstream American sociologists were so insistent in denying the survival of African cultures in the United States not only among African Americans but also , more importantly, within general American society.
It was more than apparent to me, in other words, that due to the centuries old practices of slave trading which brought hundreds of thousands of Africans to America against their will and due to the voluntary immigration of free African descent people to American shores for many generations , black people like all diverse cultural peoples have contributed to the origins and evolution of what has become historical and contemporary mosaic American society. So why not consider and respect the home land places where people of African descent came from and would have such profound influences in building and transforming American in all areas of life, literature, cuisine, religion, business, education, politics, architecture, music, sciences, technology, you name it. That was in the 1970s.
In the 1980s I became interested in Liberia through the scholarship of African American sociologist Charles S. Johnson (1893-1956) who had traveled there in the late 1920s as the American representative of a three person League of Nations delegation commissioned to investigate the Americo-American slave trading of indigenous people. He would become the first American sociologist do fieldwork in an African society. What Johnson saw emotionally impacted him so deeply that when he returned he named his last son Jeh after a Liberian chief who saved his life ( Jeh’s son with the same name is presently U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security). He also spent some 18 years working and reworking a manuscript-Bitter Canaan: The Story of the Negro Republic- as a labor of love chronicling his Liberian experiences which would never be published during his life time. With permission from his daughter, I spent seven years in the 1980s reconstructing the background of Johnson’s manuscript and brought it out in print in 1987 with a 100 pages introduction.
Even though since post-graduate studies I had for years conducted theoretical and historical research and taught in African affairs in relation to American Studies, especially in the realm of African American experiences, I would not make it to the continent of Africa until I went in 1989 as a Fulbright Scholar to Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. In that respect, I was like many if not most American scholars interested in Africa who would research, write, and teach about African issues without ever stepping a foot on the continent or if so, not spending much time on the continent or only coming years before and not coming again though declaring to be an expert on African affairs. I wanted to correct that American tendency in being, let’s say a theoretical or an outdated authority, speaking as if I was up to date on African living experiences by beginning to spend time traveling to and occasionally taking up residence on the continent in various locations.
So Sierra Leone was my first stop and since that time I have also researched, taught, and lived in several other African countries not as an ivy tower sociologist but as a capacity building sociologist. Capacity building sociology means being concerned with everywhere I go on the continent as well as in the United States and in Brazil where I now go frequently as well, in assisting African and African diasporic institutions, communities, and governance leadership in governments and civil societies in becoming empowered. To become empowered means in my perspective to be liberated, to become emancipated from the colonialism and the racism makes we African descendent people think in our minds that we are not free human beings to be original, to be creative, to find our voices, and to engage in actions to find our own ways and to lead the way in determining our quality of life and in contributing to the betterment of global humanity. Being empowered in this day and age means being able to stand up and speak up in a world which perceives silence to mean being without perspective, being too timid to be taken seriously, or being indifferent or unaware.
In 1989 when I first set foot on African soil, I had no idea like so many others globally in the eve of the 1990s and crystallising 21st century what it meant to be in the emerging aftermath of the formal breakdown of the Cold War rivalry between the USSR and the United States in the mid to late 1980s. Needless to say, the Cold War on the African continent was a tragic layer of classical and neo-colonialism rooted in both super powers and their allies being much more concerned with their security interests on the continent rather than the quality of life conditions of African peoples. It is the reason why as in the days of colonial rule, during the Cold War decades ranging from the 1950s through the 1980s, there was so much western effort to prop up African leaders who did their bidding rather than supporting leaders who were concerned with empowering and otherwise caring for their citizens. The repressive and racist Cold War attitudes which would paralyse and otherwise cripple and induce tragic forms of conflict in the African continent would be apparent in cases such as western interference in the state leadership of Ghana and the Congo, support of the South African apartheid regime, and being indifferent towards the historical Rwanda genocidal apartheid regime.
The 1990s and first years of the 21st century have been a transitional time moving the world away from the warping dynamics of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and the Cold War. From the standpoint of national governance on the continent, the following 1990s and early 21st century events and circumstances are illustrations of this transitional period which is crystallising into what can be called Post-Cold War Africa: Black Majority Rule in South Africa, Genocide in and Home Grown Democracy in Post-Genocide Rwanda, The Continued Blooming of Botswana Traditional Post-Modern Democracy, Rewriting the Kenya Constitution To Include Citizen Participation, and The Reconstruction of Liberia.
The emerging Post-Cold War African era’s global contexts are the demographic shifts and emerging economies and consumer markets shifting political and economic buying power from North America and Europe to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. State and business leaders in Brazil, India, China, and in Southeast Asia are more than mindful of these trends and are taking their newly created places in powerful global circles. Many of them have taken what they have learned from being educated in America’s and Europe’s best universities and have fashioned their State and economic global strategies in their own nationality and cultural terms rather than becoming assimilated western non-westerners as in the forced cases of their political and economic predecessors during the days of global European descendent colonialism and Cold War days. Especially the Chinese have been very skillful in engaging in this borrowing of western knowledge for repackaging in their own national and cultural identity terms demonstrating on the state level what we now know on the individual and community level. Namely, people do much better in life when they retain their own cultural heritage such as language, ethnicity, religion, and history rather than assimilating into the ways of the dominant. It is why, to provide another example, Americans especially in large scale corporate business, retail consumer markets, in the military, elite higher education and elite pre-collegiate education, and in popular cultural markets such as professional sports and movies have shifted dramatically from cultural assimilation to cultural diversity to now emerging cultural inclusion paradigms.
While there are clearly examples of African State and civil society leaders in business, faith, law, health, and education as well as continent leaders who understand what it means to be Post-Cold War as a time of empowerment on local, national, continent, and global levels, there are few venues to bring such persons on the continent together to engage in meaningful futuristic strategic dialogue and practice implementations with real impacts on state and civil society policies. The word “futurist” is key. This is because too often when addressing African affairs issues, it is the norm to stress negatives, pathologies, and the bad mistakes that African leaders make and how far behind African peoples are.
It is indeed crucial to be realistic about the daunting problems faced by Africans ranging from every day citizens to their state and civil society leaders of all ages, cultural backgrounds, and socioeconomic statuses. But being realistic about what faces African peoples, their governments, and civil societies must mean being tenacious about problem solving to create bold viable futures for Africans usually thought of being only possible in western nations such as the United States and Great Britain. In many African nations, the problem is not being resource poor. The problem is being hope and faith poor that Africans can do and have precisely what they see Westerners having not only materially but also emotionally in being proud of who they are and having the confidence that they deserve to be respected around the world as well as at home. As well, there is stringent need for Africans to stand up more so against Western values and practices which do harm to their cultural dignities and identities and preserve or modify in their own terms their own indigenous ways of being as means to not only enhance local and national quality of life but to be major global players in and on their own terms.
As we know as social scientists about the achievement of individuals who achieve highly such as Noble Prize winners in science or those who become renowned corporate business owners or political leaders who come to change the world in positive and constructive ways, what matters most in human development which is healthy and exhilarating is hope and faith and motivation and work ethic to realise both. The host of so called development problems which impede Africans from having decent quality of life let alone the ability to become global in their thinking and practices as free expressing and acting people are sociological, political, cultural, economic, and most importantly psychological.
Thus, through hoping and through having faith in self and trusting others, and through being focused and working hard what is out here in African human environments as “development problems” can be tackled, can be transformed, can be turned around in accomplished efforts to empower the powerless. Needless to say, the problem of collectively trusting other Africans like the problem of African Americans not trusting each other and so on and so forth throughout the global African Diaspora, is what is keeping us all in the same boat of being on the bottoms of societal and global barrels if not under them. In this respect , as Francis Fukuyama’s Trust: The Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity reminds us, we have much to learn from our Asian brothers and sisters who may have their internal cultural conflicts in their nations and various Diasporas locations around the world but somehow come together to build sustainable economic activities and preserve their cultural identities where ever they reside.
From the critical standpoints of what we know and how we know and interpret and apply knowledge as researchers and policy makers, what matters most fundamentally? What matters most in the Post- Cold War African and African Diaspora, that is, the Pan African quest for liberation and indeed emancipation from the historical norms and traditions of colonialism is the active and assertive decolonisation of conventional Western ways of thinking and applying policy oriented social scientifically. This means critiquing and if need be, doing away with how we philosophise, conceptualize, measure , and program evaluate so called development problems of African descendant peoples in Western driven international development presumptions.
Over many generations we Americans have established institutionalised venues for creative, bold futuristic thinking and societal problem solving such as elite research universities, policy oriented think tanks, independent scientific laboratories and advanced study centers, citizen education institutions, informal policy influencing networks cutting across government and civil society, and human rights movements and organisations which have played central roles in problem solving embedded in hope and faith in designing , implementing , and evaluating futures, particularly based on creative and otherwise imaginative thinking which has no examples to draw from in past or present tenses.
This is where the most profound sense of American optimism lies, in mobilizing those with cutting edge cognitive skills and that is , with the keenest, the boldest imaginations to think not in the past or present but to think ahead in formulating senses of futures beyond the imaginable in the present or the past. It is this kind of futurist constructions of human possibilities which Africans and African descent people around the world have been excluded from or marginalised in or have failed to get proper credit in, resulting in the massive spread of internalised victimisation and low esteem and otherwise lack of confidence to construct and live in empowering futures.
With global power shifts in the 21st century winds of transformative change, it is this kind of constructions of empowering futures Africans and African Diaspora people around the world need to create their own doors of global power, walk through, and possess rather than continuing to view ourselves as marginalised and excluded victims thus dependent upon the futuristic terms of Dominating Others.
Botswana is an ideal national location to establish a venue for Post-Cold War African strategic thinking and policy change advocacy which thus entertains and pilots positive future possibilities for decent quality of life for Africans and for humanity in general rather than being a place of complaint and otherwise spending time dwelling on what is wrong with Africans and the rest of the world or doing good policy analysis which only stresses the past or the present or data driven and thus limiting views about futuristic possibilities. Botswana is ideal due to the Batswana nation-building story and its eminence as a noteworthy emerging democracy with deep historical indigenous freedom of expression and original thinking roots on the continent. Of course, there are strains and stresses in the emerging Botswana democracy state but challenges are universal amongst all nations regardless of the political form of their national governments. In fact, the current challenges Botswana faces as a gem in the crown of emerging African home grown democracies and democratic practices make for great points of strategic dialogue to assist the nation-state to deepen its world class reputation as a democracy and to deepen its national identity as a nation for other nations on and off the continent to learn from and thus be empowered from.*John H. Stanfield II is President of the Africans-Americas-Exchanges-Partnerships and former Interim Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Mogae International Development and Governance Research Institute
JOHN H. STANFIELD II*