MODULE 7 INITIAL POST

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10

The Short Century: Independence and UIMM-atlon Movements In Africa, 1945-1994 An lntroditetion

Okwui Enwezor

Fellow African Free<Jom Fighters still carrying the burden of

Imperialism, pull together. We who have won our freedom

stand uncomprom;singly behind )'?U in )'?Ur sttugg/e. Take

heart. Unite )'?ur forr:,,s. O,ganlzation and discipline shall

command yoor v/cto,y. All Africa shall be free in this, our

lifetime. For this mid-twentieth century Is Africa's. This

decade is the decade of African independence. Forward

t/len to independence. To Independence Now. Tomorrow,

the Unite<J States ofAfrica. Kwame Nkrumah1

TIM Ser-• for Africa: 1a85 The story of oolonittili!'.m In Africa is a well-known one-or so it

seems. While contemporary historiography on Africa has often

focused on the pathology of violence and official institutional

degradation, very little Is said today about the structure of colonial

violence and its concomitant contribution to the historical view of

recent hlstOl)I in Africa. Where 10 begin? Benin, 1.885: No single historical event has had as much im­

pact on the shape of modem Africa than the one that took place

between November 15, 1884, and February 23, 1885, in Berlin,

under the auspices of the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The scramble for Africa that precipitated the Bertin Conference, or

the Belglan Congo Conference, and the unilateral, quasi-legal

document called the Belgian Congo Act that it engendered, illus­

trates the willingness of the fifteen European nations attending

the conference to betray, for profit, the juridical principles at the

foundations of their own civil societies.• It was at this meeting

that Africa's final fate at the hands of the imperial powers of

Europe was sealed. To be sure, the colonial enterprise was Short,

a mere but brutal seventy years (as the history of the Belgian

Congo under Leopold II reminds us). Yet It left an indelible mark,

whose crude, schematic features remain difficult both to erase

Am1 to reconcile with civirized conduct. Any attempt to retum to

that exempta,y scene of uncivil conduct that was Berlin-so master­

fully provoked and Instigated by King Leopold II of Belgium, a man

whose violent actions and gross human rights violations in ttie

Congo have come to symbolize the pernicious and brutal actMties

of colonial conquest-renders unto European history a dark blot.

It cannot be repeated enough that the territorial violations and

abject violence that followed the annexation o f most of Africa sprang

from a deeply held belief that simple issues of human decency

and legal protection do not and cannot apply to subject peoples,

especially those deemed in need of civilizing. Despite the flimsy

Illusion of respectability conveyed by the Belgian Congo and Act,

the mod rocc by European powers to occupy de~irable swaths of

African territory, whether by absurd ·1ega1· treaties or by outrigJ,t

military conquest and occupation, re presents one of the most

tragic encounters between Europe and Africa since the abolition

of slaveiy in the mid-nineteenth century. The act carved up Africa,

like war booty, into five main spheres of influence: Bntish, French,

Portuguese, Belgian, and German . Today, at the conclusion of another historical period, to view

the histoiy of the twentieth century from the vantage point of the

struggle of subject peoples to regain their Independence and liberty

is to see up close the intricate and calculating mechanisms in the

complex interrelationship of dependence and exploitation, violence

and patronization, that bore upon the emergence of numerous non­

European cultures and nations into modernity. At the conclusion

of this millennium. it is quite commonplace to ignore the dramatic processes of decolonization, from India to Indonesia, Ghana to

Kenya, Egypt to Jordan, Algeria to Congo, perhaps the most sig­

nificant events of the twentieth century. Decolonization. and its

attendant ideological and philosophical contestation of Western

imperialism, does in fact remain one of the most significant events

of the twentieth century, much as the abolition of slavery was in the

nineteenth r.Antury. but very little of what its orocesses represent

-especiany in proposirig new narratives and subjeCIMtles, identities

and nationalities, contemporary and historical torms- has produced

a proper understanding of the mutually binding relationship between

Europe and its former colonial tenitories. a relationship manffest in

areas of language, cutture. politics. law, and other social institu­

tions. Thus to reexamine and assess what this relation.ship means

with regards to the vast corpus of historical writing dedicated to

the study of the twentieth century requires new methods.

It is with this In mind that The Short Century: Independence and

Liberation Movements in Africa. 194~1994 was initiated. This

eXhibitlon and book are an attempt to construct a contemporaiy

· cmical biography" of Africa. The eXhibition·s principal aim is to

explore and elaborate on the critical paradigms and ideas related

to concepts of modernity. the political and ideological formations of

independence and liberation struggles, their impact in the production

of self -awareness, new models of cultural expression. dialogues

with processes of modernization, and what lies at the heart of

modernity itself out of the ruins of co1onialism.

lncl• P•-c• Now: Polltlcal - Social Ellllc T--. As long as Ille blad< man is among his own, he will have no

occasion, except in minor lntemal conflicts, to experience his being througt, others. There Is of course the moment of

·being for others· ofwhich Hegel speaks, btlt eve,y ontology

is made unattainable in a colonized and civllfzed society. Frantz Fancn •

Perhaps there is a need to clarify a central ~ngprinciple of this

exhibition, namely to examine the link between Independence move­

ments and liberation struggles as methOds for achieving African

l)Olltlcal autonomy and cultu ral self-awareness. Independence

and liberation on the first level are constitutive of two radical and

re-..olutiona,y political programs. One. based on the Ghandlan notion

of nonviolence and civil d isobedience (especially in West Africa).

adopted a strategy of wor1<1ng within colonial law, albeit by provoca- ·

tively testing its limits in order to mobilize popular discontent

against its oppressive system. Early independence leaders such

as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah success­

fully applied this method, using the editorial platforms of news­

papers and publications. public speeches and campaigns. strikes

and trade union activities, to disrupt the machinery of colonia l

economic interests and to undermine its legal authority. Even in

cases where this method was the desired approach, however.

there was never a guarantee against the use of violence; the Mau

Mau insurrection In Kenya in 1952, and the brutal British sup­

pression of it, being a case in poinL By the time the Mau Mau

challenge of British rule was owr, more than 50,000 Kenyans had

been killed, against under twentY losses for the British.

As we will see el sewhere. Kenya was not the exception. Armed

struggle constituted the final method in territories such as Algeria,

Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, where a mix­

ture of colonial intransigence and inflexibility undennined peace­

ful negotiations. The Front National de liberation (A.N) in Algeria,

which began an armed revolt in 1953 against French colonial mili­

tary violence, not only anecteo Algeria out naa a direct Impact on

France itself. Algeria represented both a polit ical loss and a psycho­

loglcal crisis for France.

Whatever the method on the road to independence and libera­

tion, these two programs foregrounded the necessity to overthrow

the colonial presumption. The central goal was always to wrest

the instruments of power from the colonial elite. It also needs to

be no ted that the Ghandlan method of nonviolence was never en­

tirely nonviolent. In Congo. for example, Belgium's need to exact

revenge against the charismatic Patrice Lumumba not only led

to his assassination in 1961, less than a year a~er he and his

Mowement National Congolais (MNC) successfully led the nation

to Independence as her first prime minister, it more crucialty un­ dermined the new nation's hard-won independence, setting up a

weakened and manipulated President Joseph Kasavubu for Joseph­

Desir~ Mobutu's coup d'~taL The notion of colonial revenge can

thus be seen as a subtext of the independence and liberation

struggles. whether exacted througt, imprisonment and exile or

through t orture and murder.•

With the independence of Ghana, in 1957, a powerful psycho­

logical and Ideological force put In place what would become the

m e in politic:eil event of the 1060.::;.: what Nkrumah, Chana·s. fit'$t

prime minister, in a 1958 speech at the First Al~Atriean People' s

Conference in AOcra, announced as Afrfea•s decade of indepen•

dence. In 1960, a loud cannon-shot was fired across the boW of

the political spectrum, in Africa and around the wor1d: not onlydid

seventeen African countries gain independence that year. but

,. the United Nations. upon admitting them en masse into the inter•

national body, declared that year to be the year of Africa. For the ..."' rest of the decade, independence celebrations and solemn cere­

monies of the colonial hand-over of power were as commonplace ,- n

as the zeal with which citizens of the new nations embraced their 0 ... new realit)'. :c

But wnat 1noeed IS Ule reaury of inoepenaence and llberatfon? -0

For sure. independence and liberation, in the African context, find 0

critical and philosophical • foliation in the fact that both of them "'.. announce themsetves as political and soclaJ movements in the "' ease of par>-1\f rican ism, and as a philosophy o f culture, regenera­ ..,. tion , and modem consciousness in the ease of Negritude. Aeross

...,each spectrum there i s a synthetic elaboration to clarify the pro­

gram toward modernity. V. Y. Mudimbe. reading Frantz Fanon and 0

elaborating upon tile political philosophy of Li!opold Sedar SengJ,or .... 0

and Nkrumah, two proponents of Negritude and pan-Africanism, "' says that ·the alienation caused by colonialism constitutes the "' > thesis, the African ideologies of o therness (black personality and -0

Negritude) the antithesis, and political liberation the synthesis.·•

Mudimbe's a,gument also rests on Jean-Paul Sartre's famous essay

"Black Orpheus· (1948), which introduced the postwar French pub­ .. :,:

lic to the works of the writers o f Negritude. For Clayton Eshleman <> and Annette Smith, ·1n the framework of Hegel's dialectics, Sar1re :r

...saw the Neg(itude movement as the moment of separation . of ffl

negativity, that is like the ·antithesis' following the 'thesis' o f the C') ... colonial situation and preceding the •synthesis· in which not only C:

blacks but all oppressed people would unite and t riumph over "',. u ,~if oppresSOc-s. ·~ But the Fanonian philo.sophy of liberation hO!)

a particular appeal for Mudimbe. To negotiate the antipathy of 3

cotoniaHsm, the colonized must first understand the Manichaean C:..scheme and structure of colonial domination:

The alienation of colonialism entails both the objective fact C')

of total dependence (economic, political, cultural, and re/;.

..

... "

gious) and the sul>)ective process of tne self-<rlctlmlzation .., of tne dominated. Tne colonized intemalizes tne Imposed

racial stereo!ypeS, pa,t/cularly in attitudes toward technolo­ ... gy, cu/ture, and language. Blacl< personality and negritude ,.'" appear as tne only means of negating this tnesis, and

Fanon expounds tne antithesis in terms ofant/racist sym­ ... bols. Negritude oecomes the intellectual and emotional ffl,. sign of opposition to the Ideology of whfte superiority. At .. the same time, it asserts an authenticity wflich eventually

expresses i tself as a radical negation: rejection of racial "' ffl humiliation, rel>eflion against the rat/OflaHty of domination.

and revolt against the whole colMiafist system. This sym­ .., bolic violence ultimately tums into nationalfsm and sub­ ,- sequently leads to a pofitlcal struggle for /il>erat/on.' 3

Against this backdrop. the independence and liberation struggles ,..and revolts repl'esent the twin ivojP-1":t~ from which the text of

African modernity after World War II was fashioned. First. their ... z

:,:central aim was the destruction of the inferiority complex im­ 0

posed by colonialism; second, they attacked the disempowering ... devices of colonial injustice and economic exploitation: third, they

0

affirmed a political and social vision that recuts the fabric of the .. u

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Tbe Sbort Centu,y / Okwul Enwezor

modemistdialectic of progress and change; foorth, they desctibed

an ethic of modernity and a view of history that puts Africa in the

center of all intemationaJ events; and fifth, they rejected the

anachronism of European cultural superiority and argued for an

African ctitical subjectivity that Is both a political ethic and a cultural

Ideology.

The Cultural Dimension of Decolonlzatlon: MCId•ml-,

P■r>:Afrlcanlsm, Nec,ttucle, ..ct African Art

Our error was not that we fought with the weapons of

colon/a/Ism-most African po/Irie/ans. thougt, not all, ur,,

fortunately, are anticolonialist- but with the weapons of

Europe. L6opold Sedar Senghor'

Since culture r1oes not Just reflect the world in images but

acrualty througn those very Images conditions a child to

see that world in a certain way, the colonial child was

made to see the world and where he stands in it as seen

and defined by or reflected in the culture of the language

of imposition. Ngugl Wa Thiong·o•

As much as the political ideologies. nationalist movements, and

other decolonization tropes constitute bases for self•fashlonlng

knowledge, on a cultural level decolonization represents the ex•

emplary scene of ambivalence. This ambivalence i s readily perceiY­

able In the complex relationship bet-veen colonial discourse and

the African Interpretation and use of that d iscourse. Ambivalence

and alienation have been crucial terms emploved to describe the

relationship of the colonized to the colonial text. As such, the

crux of this exhibit ion concerns. on the one hand, the uses of the

normative sttucture of modernism and, on the other, the uses or nonuses of that structure.

Here. however. we are not coneemed with nor unduly exer•

cised by the modernism dispatched by some colonial envoy and

assimilated by Africans. The modernism addressed in this exhibition

concerns the African systematiZation, deployment. and usage of

modem forms. values. and structure. It may be productive to look

closely at how African mooemism accomplishes its modernity. To

begin with, this modemism is not founded on an ideology of the

universal, nor is it based on the recognition and assimilation of

an autonomous European modemism, or on the continuity of the

epistemic field of artistic territorializalion achielled and consecrated

by the colonial project.

Paris, 1934: While Europe is in the grips of fascism. amidst It

lies a marginalized and restless population of Africans and West

Indians . One way or the other the silence will break. because the

colonized wish to speak. Ren6 Maran·s Batoua/a (1921), an ant i­

colonial novel set within an African culturescape, had been pub­

lished and had won the Goncourt priZe a decade before. The WO<!<

of African-American and West Indian writers such as Langston

Hughes, Claude Mackay, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. which

tonne<! the crux of the Hartem Renaissance, were becoming readi ly

available in Europe and made an impression on Africans livirg there.

Marcus Garvey's ·return to Africa• movement provided the political

ballast . What the Hartem Renaissance writers and Garvey offered

was a view of blackness (Africanness if you will) that found value

and beauty in African culture and history as subjects for their art,

much in the same wwy that African sculpture and religious rituals

had penetrated Cubism and Surrealism.

The Negritude movement- begun by Aim~ C6saire, Seng)lor, L6on Dam~s., and other African and Caribbean students in Paris i:n

1934, and one of the key founding moments of African modern­

ism- had absorbed this lesson. Through L'Etuctiant noir, a small

student review founded by Senghot' and Damas, the tramewoc1< that

would p,opel Negritude into the ranks of the Paris intellectual and

artistic scene was bom. To swy that this difficult birth was an event

of great importance would be to understate its radical import.

Negritude. facing the example of African-American writers of the

Harlem Rena ssance during the Jazz age, wtien black culture carried

a bit of the charge of the exotic and was desirable, posited a con­

scious intel'ectual dramatization of African atterity. and insisted

on tne reality and originality of an African culture in the making of

modernity. Thus African modernism from this instance onward

achieved its first synthesis through an act of internal reflexivity on

the status and value of Afriican cull\Jre. It also constructed for itself

a tool for bringing aboot a strvctural and philosophical change in

the makingof mOdem culture. Aocording to Sartre, •Negritude is the

negro·s being.ir,,the-wO<'ld. •,o This ·being,ir,,the-wo<1d" and its arrival

in the cultural and literary economy of Europe are not merely a production of bombastic self-regard; its •antiracist racism,· as

Sartre puts it, Is a strategy of subversion and rebellion. Thus

Negritude. as a modemist avanti!arde. was baSed on the construc­ tion of an ethic, a field of practice. and on the primacy of African

subjectivity and subject matte, in order to contradict colonial

alienation. It was the same impetus that led Kenyatta to try to

demonstrate in his an thropclogical study ·Facing Moont Kenya;

The Tribal Life of the Gikuyus· that the Gikuyus as an African people

had a conception of society. politics. law, and culture that was as

complex and sophisticated as that of any European culture.

Manchester, September 1945; World War II is over. African

and West Indian soldiers from the war. along with students and

trade unionists. stage a radical congress that demands, among

other th ings, independence and the right of self-determination for

Africa and the West Indies. The organizers had made clear the

contradiction of colonialism by fighting to help secure freedom for

Europe during the war. Organized by George Padmore. Nkrumah,

Peter Abrahams, Kenyatta, and many others, the Afth pan-African

Congress openly contested the European right to rule Africa and

other colonies.

Like Negritude, pan-Afrlcanlsm situated itself in the field of the

subjective. It sprang from the political recognition of an African

search for social and cultural equality and autonomy. Where

Negritude began as a Francophone phenomenon , pan-Atricani.sm

found its strongest appeal among Anglophone artists and stu­

dents. In terms of art and culture. Negritude and pa~frlcanism

soog)lt their meaning and viability in relation not to a canon (art

h istory tor examp'.e) but to a political and social process (contem­

porary African society) . •

If, as Senghor had indicated, Negritude w~ a humanism and

Nkrumah's pan-Africanism centered on the African personality.

one other approach to African modernism is to see in it an aware­

ness by artists, intellectuals, activists, poets and writers, political

leaders and students, a necessity to subvert and destroy European

cultural imperialism as the sine qua non of progressive culture. Thus African mocremism arrives at 11s strongest proposition In

relation t o its progressive alignment against racism and petty •

European superiotity. ~saire had articulated it best when he

stated his case fo, Negritude, insisting:

my negritude is nei ther tower nor cathedral

it takes root in the red flesh o f the soil

It takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky

It breaks through the apaque prostration with its upright

pat/enceu But ~saire's self-0eprecation is not merely a pragmatic strategy;

within it lies Ule prime argument of many Africans for rejecting the construction of a questionable universal subject. We see this re­

jection of universalism formal ly embodied in the principle of non­

alignment of the Bandung conference in :L956. African delegates

to the conference saw in its ethos a way to begin with a fresh per­

spective, while not rejecting the West completely. Bandung was a statement and declaration of autonomy. AS the Old colonial wo~d

crumbled, a new order of social, political. and economic relations

among nations of the developing world took hold. These relation­

ships in part exemplified a critical reSPOOse to that wl1ich Western

modernity could neither property digest nor outright negate. Thus

wt, etrn say that Western modernity's limits expo.$e it to e porollel

international dimension of polrtical philosophy. ln a sense. the

objectification and inscription by the formerly marginalized of a

new will to power into a political philosophyof equality and respect

for other nations and cultures in the international a rena specify

for us a new consciousness of mocfemlty as it took hold among the

formerly colonized. Thus. rather than pure celebration, Cesaire·s

is an occasion to muse over the process of regeneration:

I say tight on/ 11le Old negritude

progressively cadavers itself

the horizon breaks, recoils and expands

and througt, I/le shreddingofclouds the flashing ofa sign

the slave ship cracks everywhere. . . . Its belly coovulses

and resounds . •. . TIie ghastly tapeworm

of its cargo gnaws the fer;d guts of the strange sucklingof

the sea!12

Like tile cracking of the slave ship, tile relationship of African

modernity to Europe' s construction of the universal subject is botll

a critique and modification, a rip in the body of the colonial text.

The aesthetics of African artists and writers in the post-Wood War II

period were never founded on a spatial concept to wl1ich a proper

geography could be ascribed: thAir AA~thetics constituted both an

ethic and an imaginary. On this basis the internal cohesion of mid­

century African aesthetics is first a discourse of an awareness of

otherness, and second a process of regeneration that draws upon

the particularity of an African perspective. According to Mudimbe,

·1n literature this posit ion is expressed in three major w-ays: first,

,. in terms of domestication of political power (Ezekiel Mphahlele,

:0 Mongo Beti, and Sembene Ovsmane): second, in criticism of ... colonial life (Chlnua Achebe, D. cnraibi, Ferdinand Oyono): and third,

in the celebration of African souri:es of life (A. Loba. A. Sefrioul, ('),. Cl>eikh Hamidou Kane). • is C..

The crystallization of a powerful political ideology through ;r;

pa~frlc;~11is111 is anottte, moment a;t whi~h the reletion..ship of ... power and knowledge between Africa and Europe was reworked. 0

Pan-Africanism in the post-World War II period was never the (I>

amelioration of an African cultural order but a field of recognition :0

that sought active political, social, cultural, and economic integ,a­

tion of Africa into the international system. On this level, pan,.

Africanism was a more critical and P<e>gressive project than :,:

Negritude. Pan-Africanism's promotion of the notion of a collective C

production of a common social space was rooted in the twin ideas C

of the recognition of the discourse of otherness and the need of .,"' regeneration based on that recognition. Mudimbe reminds us that ... .,,it was in the political essays of earty pan-Africanists such as

z; Nnamdi Azikiwe. in Renascent Africa (1937), Nkrumah, in Toward -c

COionial Freedom (1947), Obafemi Awo'owo, in Path toward

Nigerian Freedom (1947), Cesaire, in Dlscours wr le coloniafisme

(1950), and Fanon, in Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), "that

a clearly pmg,essive awakening gradually affirmed the principles

of African natK>nalism and intemational integration.~ •for a number ,.,of African Intellectuals.· he continues, "these works have been, and

probably still are, major sources for tllei r cultural autonomy .• ,. C:

Takin• lflv• ntory: O.OOlonlzlnal African Cultural Produetion

Our books in the colonial schools taught us about tile wars of the Gauls, I/le lives of Joan of Arc and Napoleon. lf'le

list of French departements, and tile poems of Lamartine

and the theater of Molii!re, as if Africa had never had a

his tory, a pasr. a geographical existence, or a cultural 1/fe.

Our students were valued only for their aptitude for this

po/Icy ofcomplete cultural assimlfation.

Ahmed Sekou Toure"'

By the early :L960s. the concept of African liberation had g,adual ly

shifted from political dogma to tile realm of cultural nationalism ,. and liberation. Some of tile inherent ambiguity of Negritude in rela­

tion to European cultural hegemony was challenged by a more :0

militant discourse. In their searing study of postcolonial literature .. and cntique of the attempt to domesticate Mrican litera,y production

C: by subsuming it into the European canon. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa

Jemie, and lhechul<Wu Madubuike had this to say:

TIie cultural task in hand is 10 fend offa!/ foreign domination

ofAfrican culture, to systematically destroy a ll encrustations

of colon/al and stave mental ity, to clear the bushes and

stake out new foundar;ons for a liberated African modernity.

This is a process that must take place in all spheres of African life- in govemment lndustJy, family and social life, .. education, city planning, architecture, arts, entertainment,

C etc.16

A liberated African modernity? The question bears upon what tllis 0

exhibition seeks to demonStrate, namely, that the construction of

13

.

I 1lM Sbort Century / Okwul Enwez.or

African mooomity In the twentieth century is inextricably bound to

the defense and legitimation of all and every sphere of African

thoug)lt and life. It seems unnecessa,y, then, to make an argument

that does not take the totality of this manifestation (political.

social, economic, ioontity, culture. etc.) Into full account. Thus this

e)(hibition and the book that accompanies it should be understood in light of this totality. which bcors upon the OOMtnJction of both

a political sphere and a cultural order.

In fact artists and intellectuals maoo lllis analysis tile very

heart of their d iscourse- that to constitute a decolonized African

aesthetic, one must first make a complete inventory of what needs

to be deeolonlzed. The Kenyan novelist. dramatist. and essayist

Ngugi Wa Thiong·o had exactly such a thing in mind in his equally

militant and sobef1y polemic view of African literature. Ngugi insists

that the inventory requires. firs4 a systematic review of what con,.

stitutes African l iterature, and that part of that review requires the

decolonizing of one's mind; a part of Which is the rejection of the

Africanness of any African literature written in colonial languages.

He sees in the language of African literature a means of mediating

for an African audience a sense of their own reality. He writes that

"language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means

of communication and a can-ier of culture.·" Ngugi goes further,

suggesting that only literature written in African languages can

qualify as African literature. and describing its method in relation

to its capacity to produce and carry a meaningful representation

to real life by noting that ·1anguage as corrmunicatlon i s speech

and it imitates the language of real life, that is communication In

production. · 1•

Ngugi's well-argued position and analysis of the situation of

African writing in Whatever colonial language could just as easily

be transmuted to the situation of visual art. But not all African

writers were in agreement that literature written in European la~

guages by Africans Is necessarily illegitimate and colonial. Some

writers Insisted that colonialism was a reality. that to critique it Is

to recognize it, and that writers and artists must be allowed to

work in whatever method allows them the fullest capacity to ex­

press their ideas. Chinua Achebe saw the entire relationship of

African representation to European languages as one of choice

rather than of imposition. Writers, he cautioned, must not be put

in positions Where they have to choose sioos. WO!e S~nka, the

Nigerian Nobel laureate, had already made a preemptive strike

aga·nst a stance like Ngugi's, dispensing with What he saw as the wrong-t,eaood essentialism of such a position, particularly In the

philosophy of Negritude. In a famous quip against Negrfwde's es­

sentialism, Soyinka stated. "A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. •

He pointed. in other words, to the pitfalls of relying on genetic cooos

and false African experience as the prerequisite for an authentic

African cultural voice. Though Soyinka did not need to justify the fact that Yoruba

cosmology, religJon, epic tradttion, poet,y, ritual, and language were

S?""'es for his dense poetic, literary, and dramatic wO<kS. he non~

theless came under attack from Chinwelzu, Jemie, and Madubuike.

Who called tllemselves Bolel<aja critics.,. The Bolekafa critics ao­

cused Soyinka, J.P. Clark. and Christopher Okigllo of constituting

a parade of writers whose works employed African imagery and

situation in order to domesticate it within a European modernist

literary fon-nalism. They read this as a loss of self-=nfodence, and

a compromise of the radical call for a total break with colonialism.

Such debates made their rounds in conferences on African litera­

ture. language. and culture througt,out the 1960s and '70s. In tho Fifth Pan-African COt\Sf9S.$ of 1045. the rallying call was

for emancipation, independence, and a drive toward an autonomous

African culture; in the First Congress of Nefll'O Writers and Artists

in 1956, at the Sorbonne, and the second Congress in Rome in

1959, the focus was on African culture and history as a theme of

a rediscovered past and dignity; at the Conference of African

Writers of English Expression, at Makerere University College,

Kampala, Uganda, in 1962. the debate concerned the state of

African literature In the postindependence period and the role of

the writer in nation.butlding. But more than any other discussion,

the Makerere University College conference raised an issue that

had for a time been skirted: the linguistic tool of African literature.

and who its audience was. Within the visual arts. a similar debate

was developing among artists in groups such as the Zaria Art

Society, who were labeled ·zana Rebels· fo, questioning the fon-na~

ist European curriculum of art education In Nigeria. There was also

the multiracial Amadlozi group in SoUth Africa, Who sought inspira­

tlon in African fonns. themes, and history rather than looking toward

Europe; and similarly in Senegal the Ecole de Dakar adapted

Sengt,orian Negritude as a source of inspiration. In 1966, the

5enegalese government, under the patronage of President Sengt,or,

ofl!anized a landmark i,ai>-African festival. the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts N~res. not only to celebrate the culture of

Africa and its diaspora but also to examine the remarkable achieve­

ments of the previous twenty yea,s. In a sense, the Premier Festival

MondiaJ was an anniversary of the independence movements.

Looking back today at the period between 1945 and 1965, it

is clear that there was already in formation an eme,gent category of

discourse that would furnish us with the tools with which to anatyze

African modernity. That the debates and theories formulated in

the period under study In this eXhibition have yielded a rich trove of

material rrom which we can begin a proper historical examination

of the constitutive models of African creative. intellectual, political,

and subjective practices is the great profit of this exhibition. The

legacy of this discourse is the ethical. social. political, cultural,

historical. and above all the epistemological compass they have

fashioned for the study of modem and contempora,y African culture.

We make the necessary link to the relatioos between modem and

contemporary art in this eXhlblt ion with a view of the historical im­

pact of the independence period on the activities and thinking of

many African artists working today. What we will encounter In the

e)(hibition. Which looks at the totality of all spheres of production In

Africa (music, photography, art, literature, theater, film, and archi­ tecture), bOth by Africans and Europeans. is the insistent paradox of

all mooomities, namely that they are simultaneously inwMHooking

and totally open to all influence and receptive to rich dialogues.

The exhibition Is divided into seven distinct subject areas: art,

photography, fi lm. architecture. graphics. theater, and literature. •

All of these are intimately linked to a wider hi\tOrical framework.

The subjects presented here are distinguished not as categories

or paradigms, but as general d iscursive frames, allowing us to

trace developments within each area and wherever possible to

draw conclusions on specific topics or operations depending on

U"le context. In no w;ry should a clear line be drawn between each

subject: instead. each section operates in mutual oetermination

and entanglement. constantly maintaining a -soft· boundary that

could allow critical interpenetrations. That Africa was a staging ground for some of the most impor­

tant questions of postwar politics and society, and that these

questions made a crucial impact on identity, modernity. freedom.

subjectivity, ethics. and culture. can no longer be debated. The

more salient question aris' ng from this exhibition Is: "What is

African and what Is Africa to us?" This is, of course, a question

neither philosophy nor metaphysics can provide answers to. But

suffice it to say that Tile Short Century: Independence and

LJoeratlon Movements in Africa, 1.945-1994 represents an Africa

of the Imagination. as much as it addresses Africa in the context

of her lived experiences and realities.

Conclualon: The R.- To conclude, I should like to say something about the historical

documents-essays, speeches. manifestos, resolutions. pamph­

lets- that are gathered in this book as an anthology, forming a

aucial part ot the prQject that must be seen in relation to its visual

dimension. Throughout this text I have argued that the processes of Afrtcan lndepenoence and lilJi:,-ralion Ulat beg.on in the period ofter

Wortd War II produced an epistemological change In the Western

conception of the universal subject. challenging and transfonming

the ontological limits imposed by European hegemony over African

history and societies. Before the end of World War II. the world

was essentially divided into two spheres.: the colonizer and the

oolonized. This division manifested itself further into two spatial

distinctions: Europe and its colonies. Toe critical emergence of

new African nations from colonial vassalage and into nationhood

ushered in a fresh context, the narrative of which is inscribed in a

new kind of historical text. This text defined limits to colonial pcwer

and authority, ushering In a world no longer constituted by the

Manlchaean scheme of the absolute self and the abject other.

The Reader Is divided into two thematic sections. The first,

Politics/ Ideology/ Ethics. seeks to analyze the questions that

concern the discourses of pan-Afrieanism. pan•Arabism, liberation

movements, and African socialism. and their structural and dis­

cursive performance in organlzil1g social and philosophical thoog)lts.

The second section engages culture, as an operation of subject

fonmation. and the emergence of artistic and l iterary production.

This section looks closely at the role of culture In the practice of the

everyday and tho artiC:\.llation of popular and lndividu.eat vi~ion~.

With this in mind, any analysis of the tumultuous period of

African decolonization must seek to begin with the primary texts

and actions of that historical moment. The question for such an

enterprise could be posed this way: In what forms and forums

were the activities that were the spur for the independence and

,. liberation movements Otganized? And who were the chief iclecr

logues. theoreticians, and leaders of these nascent movements? ..."' The many essays, speeehes. manifestos. conference resolutions.

and pamphlets gathered in this volume commit themselVes to ex• () ... ploring those questions. The Reader recommends it,self as one of 0

◄those rare occasions that allow for a deeper penetration of an :z: imponam hlstork::al project In oc-de, better to under$tand its com­ .. plexity and heterogeneity. By carefully reading these texts address­ 0

ing contemporaneous events and attitudes, we become witnesses "'.. to the confrontations that shaped the processes of African moder•

nity in the mid-twentieth century. we learn how they were written,

and in what arel'\Ss they found their audience. ...

themes of decolonization through the critical exegesis of varied "' The task here is more than the mere recapitulation of the majOr

0 ...intellectual , political, cultural, and theoretical frameworks. The 0

Reader is a signPost for revisiting those themes. focusing on how Q

new interpretation.s of African modemity were framed and dis­ "',...seminated. More important, we would do well to read the texts in :r

relation to their lmPort in organizing the forms and Ideals of the -<

new societies after colonialism. Attached to this purpose Is the

emergence of ideas of subjectivity and tonms of representation that ,. :u

seek to link praxis and theory, ideology and action, emancipation ()

and agency. history and consciousness, race and difference. nation­ ,:

hood and citizenship, identity and society. Many of the texts in­ ,,, cluded here can be read today as documents of their time, while ()

othe<S remain as vivid to political, cultural, philosophical, and literary ... C:

theories as they were when they were written. :z,

To reod Afri~ in 'lgt'lt of these form.ativo and well-argued pos~ "' tlons is to emerge on the other side of the present African condition

3 and the unfinished project of decolonization. Yet underlying many of C:

the debates In this volume are contradictions that require forceful "' argumentation In the formulation of the goals of an African modem consciousness- whether those goals are based on instruments of

armed struggle. or on the tension between cultural philosophies and ;,:

political ideologies. or whether they are allied and subservient to ,. Western democratic traditions and the instiMions of global capita~ ... ism. On such a platform. the multiple voices In this volume give us

an occasion to readapt many forms of histo<ical argument concern­

Ing African modernity, especially in relation to the links between ... European models of political practice. institutions, and artistic and ., intellectual fonms, be they painting, sculpture, the novel, poetry. ,.

_, music. or film, and the modalities of today·s African Rea/pc,litik.

C: What one must also search for are the sl!lfls of rupture em­ "'

bedded in the very formation of African freedom from European "' colonization. From this rupture we may be able to glimpse the be­

ginnings of several notions of identity discourse and cultural phi~

osophy. social movements and ideological projects. that became

solid ified bOth in popular political agltation and in the founding ,.texts of intellectual develooments. In these texts, the discourses

and projects take such names as Negritude, pan-Africanism, ... black consciousness. pan-Arablsm, the African personality.

African socialism, A~ic-.an nationalism, and so on. These critical

projects. more than being ideological. posit affinmatively the deep

entanglement of Africans in the project of twentietl><:entury

15

-- ,

I TIie Shott Century / Okwul Enw ezor

modernity. Itwill become 00\lious that the instruments of action with

which African independence (political and cultural) was fought test

many of the ear1ier arguments. which often made no links between

Africa and what could now be viewed as a historic period of global

transition. Today it seems impossible to believe that the emancipato,y

pro;ect of reoenn1ng Afr1ca·s relc;:1liumship to the ,est of the world

and particularly to Europe- a projeCt championed by a generation of

young. determined, radical, and zealous students and trade-union

members from U1e 1930s onward- should have happened in U1e

short span of less than twen(Y-five yea,s. Of course the groundwork

for the radical beginnings of the movements of the 1930s. ·4Os.

and '50s had already been laid in the wor1<s of writers, historians.

and political activists such as Edward Wilmot Blyden . Ate.xander

Crummel, W.E.8. Dubois, and Hec1)ert Macaulay, and in events such

as the formation of the ANC in 1912, and so forth. By the time

World War II ended, in fact, the conflagration stoked by the move­

ments ofpan,Africanism (in the Anglophone world), Negritude (in the

Francophone world), and pan-Arabism (in the Maghreb) meant that

the horizon for a newrange of actions had broadened significantly.

This book, then. offers a means of accounting for the urgent

issues U1at were placed before the postwar publics of Europe on

U1e one hand and Africa on the other. as parts of a strong critical

discourse on colonialism, independence. liberation, autonomy.

sell-determination. and freedom. These texts, I would argue, must

not be read, as we are so often wont to do, as merely di scursive

and speculative. On the contrary. many of them were manuals for

aGtiOn $ linked to p ro.xis ond d il'ected toward tho l)(Odue:tlon of the

subjective throug)'l the liberation of the individual. On U1e next

level, the Reader Is not simply an anthology for the Afrlcanlst or

Africanophile: it is complied as part of the historical record of the

twentiel/1 century. as a way to deepen our engagement with forms

of historical understanding and narration.

In the context of decolonilation. on which many of U1e texts

pivot, the a,guments and ideologies are many: the means and

methodologies for their realization and Integration into the political

cultures and structures of the emergent natio~states are diverse

and varied. Moreover, they point to the richness that accompanied

the debates of this generation of thinkers (African and European

alike) in formulating forms of governance and the Political ethics

of the new societies born in the aftermath of independence and

liberation. Despite the variety of positions expressed in the present

volume. the main impetus is the instrumenta.lization of the pro­

cedures of an Africanist intellectual space, and througt, U1at

space a penetration of the question of what it means to be m od­

em, African. and free in a w0t1d in wh ich the notion of coronialism

is diametrically opposed to that of European democracy, Institu­

tions of which not long ago made Africans and others into subject

r,,3nr,IA.!... Whatever we may make of them (esoecially of those

positions that today may seem to us untenable), t hey remain a

strong knot in the tangled web of the modem condition- ciphers

tor decoding the fracti ous memo,y of a time lived in the shadow

of subjection and born in the deeply unethical code and moral

conduct of cotonialism.

1. Kwame Nkrumah. prime mini$ter of Ghana.. speech at tne opentng session of the AH·A.'riean Peopae·s Conference on Monday, December 8 , 1958. In AJMfrlcan People's Confsrence.

2. The countries were represented by Graf Kapntst of Russia, Baron Larnbermoot and le Comte van der Sttaten Ponthoz of 8elglum. Baron de Courcel of France, Said Pas.cha of Tul"key, the Marquis de P&nafiel and M. de Se,pa Pimentel of Portugal, Graf de Lamay of Italy, Sir Edward t-.1alet ot Great 8rtteln. Graf de Benomar 01 ~pain. Herr oe Vina of Denrnack,

General Baron BHctt of ~'eden and Notwfrf. Graf von Hattfeldt.. Herr Bus.ch. and Herr von Kus.s.erow o f Germany, Gtaf SrecMnyi of Austria «Id Hungary, and Jonkheer van der Hoeven of the Nethertands. J.A. Kasson and H. S, Sanford attended in the capacity of obserwrs for the United

States.

3. Frantz Fanon, BlltCS< Sl<in, 1-'Yhite Mask$, ttans.. Cnarles Lam Markham (New Yonc G<a... Press. 1967), p. 109.

4. Recently a •wmumba Commission" was set up in Bel.glum to examine the role of the Belgian government in his assasslnatiOn. The same prooess of reexamsii~ colonial participation in me torture. kldnape:,ing. and exec:utJon of Algerian rebels by French soldiers is currently underway in France. l.n South Afr1ea. the Truth and Reconciliation Cormiission has looked into the "gross human rtghts violations· of the apartheid &ovemment. This will ~ggest that colonial violence durl"8 the petiOd of the lndependene& and liberation movements was moce the norm than me excepdon. 5. V.Y. Mudlmbe. The lnvttrttion of Afrlcil: Gnosis, PhlJosophy, and the On/er ofKnowt«sge (Bloomingu>n and lndian~is: Indiana UIWOfSlty Press; LOndOn: James Currey. 1988}, p. 92.

6. Clayton Eshleman and Ann-ette Smith. In Aimtf C~saire: 11Je Collected ~•tlY• trans. Eshleman and Smill> (Berk8tey and Los Angeles: Unlve<sity of ~llfomla Press. 1983). p. 7.

7. Mvdlmbe. Tl'le ltrt1ttntlon ofAfrica, p . 93.

8.. L&O;>old Sedar Senghor. "1he African Road to Soclallsm: An Anempt at Definition, · in l\'> llfrican Socialism, trans. Mercer COOi< (New York: Fre<tetlek A. Pree&er P\:blishers, 1964), p. 68.

9. Ng\,gJ W& Thiong'O, Deco!onlzlf11l the Mind: The PoUtlos of I.AngUlti/8 In Nrlcatt Lit8fatvro (London: James Currey. Nairobi: Heinemann. l~J. p . 17.

10. Jean-Paul Sert.re. ·slack Orpheus.· In Vlhat Is U tMatvre 8fld Ofhttr Es58Y$. trans. Steven Unpr (Cambridge. Mass,; Harvard Untve<slty Press. 1988). p. 314. Sartre's essay ona;naHy appeared In French, under the titfe •orpt16e Noir.• as the inttoductk>n to SenihOr"S 1948 Antholotie de la novvelte pc6Sie nl11f8 8l1\fsla8ache de latlgtle fra,w;ajs(J, the first attempt to t>nr,g t011<>1her • body of lfi"""l'WOfkS exemplifyin& the Sl)irit of Neg/itude. But the most radical WOC'k of thls lltenro.ire was CMaite"s serTWlal long poem "Cattier d'un ,et:ot.w au pays natar- (NoteboOk Of a Retum to the Native Land),

at 1938. Debate continues tOday on when exactly me term "N~tucte· was &st used. but d'!.<e eartlest published appewanoe of it was in C6salre·s poem. which includes the lines, •My negrftude is not a stone, its deafness hurled a&aitlst the clamot of day/my negritude Is not a leokOrna of dead liquid OYer

the earth·s dead eye/ rrry nee,itude is neither tower nor cathechl.•

11. C6salre. ·Notebe>Okof a Retum to the Native Land,· in Alm4 Clsalre: Tile Collected Poetry, pp. 67, 69.

12. Ibid.. p. 79.

13. Mudimbe. 7he Invention ofAMca, p. 9·2.

14. Ibid,. p. 90.

15. Ahmed Sekou Tourll. ·The Polit ic-al Leader as a Representative of a Culture.· lect1.1re cSelivered at the Second Congress of Black Write<~ and Artists, Rome. 1959.

16. Cl'llm\'eizU and lhec:hukwu Madubulke. Tow3fd the Decolonization ol Afric8n Utem<'-"" (Washington. O.C.: Howard Unlverslly Press. 1983), p. 1.

17. Ngugl, Decoloniling thB Mind. p. 13.

18. Ibid.. p. 13. 19. The v.'OC'd Bolek8J8 toughly translates trom tne Yon.Jbe o:s -Cc.H,M: Ul;;l'wo, let's fight.• a metaphor 800l)ted by Chinweizu, Jemie. and Madlb.ike for the kind of critical operatioo they were performing on postcolonia1 iterature. In th&it minds a c,eal deal of this literature was pretentious, p<>mpou.s, and exemplary of~at they called ·Ho;:,kins d isease.· a tefe<enoe to the kind of colonial Sti tish literature teUC,,t in most university literature. departments in An.glophooe Africa.

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18