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Laurenti
Magesa Significance of naming one’s reality The nature of oppression and exploitation consists mainly in removing from the oppressed and exploited the ability to name themselves and their reality. In such situations the definition of who and what is exploited, is external, since it comes from the exploiter. The consequence of this is that the life and experience of the exploited and oppressed acquire legitimacy, indeed even existence, not from who one actually understands oneself to be, but from what one is made to be and do by external sources. It is definitely not possible to consider the Africans’ experience in history without taking into serious account this expropriation of their power and ability to name themselves. What else did the slave trade, slavery and the colonial experience do to them, but remove their ability to name themselves? Today neo-colonialism is doing the same thing in less crude, but nevertheless equally devastating ways in the form of economic, cultural, political and religious globalization. Not to consider this reality is to falsify African history and to bend contemporary African experience unwarrantably. When this reality is brought into the picture, it becomes obvious that a significant step in the process of African liberation and salvation is to regain the ability and power of self-definition by individuals and societies in all spheres of their life. At the initial stage, it is immaterial whether or not such self-naming is right or wrong in the estimation of the observer. What matters at this stage is the ability to say with full conviction and confidence, "This is who I am. This is what affects me. My world is such and such". In light of this, it is helpful to examine the various means that African peoples are using in the struggle towards self-definition in the current situation of comprehensive globalization. It should be said right away that any sympathiser with the African effort for liberation will do everything possible to move this process forward, or at the very least, not stand in its way. Today, globalization more than anything else, defines the parameters of the struggle. Economic globalization: a tool for pauperisation To put the struggle for self-definition into proper perspective, it is important to address the following question: In what way does globalization expropriate from the African the ability and power to name himself or herself? One may disagree with scientific materialism as a tenable social or ethical position, but it is not easy to deny or ignore the obvious deterministic effect of financial capital on the political, cultural and social life of all African societies. What propels the wheels of globalization today is primarily the economic factor. What this means is that before being political and cultural, globalization is first of all economic, even though resistance to it often takes the form of politics. In other words, economics in the form of liberal capitalism after the demise of doctrinaire socialism is currently the engine of the powerful movement to uniformalize the world. The apostles of globalization in the economic sphere are well known. They include the omnipresent and omnipotent institutions and agreements such as the IMF, World Bank and GATT. Since they influence, or to put it more correctly, since they control the political and cultural life of Africa, they hold it hostage to their whims and desires. It is almost literally true to say that when the IMF sneezes, Africa shakes and when the World Bank frowns Africa trembles. The following are the conditionalities these institutions and agreements often unilaterally impose on African economies in spite of such conditions being invariably devastating in human terms: (i) Retrenchment of workers This leaves many people without employment and a means of livelihood. Education and health suffer as a direct result of this especially when perpetual debt servicing by African countries is added into the bargain. Besides social services, development projects that would uplift these nations also suffer thereby making the countries sink even deeper into debt; a glaring example of a vicious circle. (ii) Opening up of Africa’s markets to foreign goods This is imposed in the name of free market and fair international competition. It is no secret, however, that this is killing nascent local industries. Since when did a right-thinking judge set a dwarf against a giant in a cut-throat fight, and all in the name of free and fair competition? Were it not that human life is involved, it would be a ridiculous joke. As it is, the opening up of African markets unrestrictedly to foreign goods forestalls any sensible competition between the poor and the rich nations of the world, defeating the very purpose of capitalism — certainly capitalism with a human face. In the end, there is no competition, no free market, but merely exploitation and oppression of the weak by the strong. (iii) Aid: an instrument of globalization and pauperization of Africa It is argued that although millions of dollars are poured into Africa every year in the form of loans and grants-in-aid, by the developed countries of the North, there is little notable change in the majority of cases as far as economic development is concerned. Many aid agencies and governments point to corruption as the culprit in all this. This is true, but it is only partly so. The real reason for the failure of aid to jump-start Africa’s economies has mainly to do with the fact that the type of projects aided are often irrelevant to Africa’s needs. The massive repatriation of the dividends of the aid in the form of material resources and personnel contributes to the failure of aid as a solution to Africa’s economic development. Aid thus becomes not a solution, but part of the problem; a way of globalizing poverty. As R. Cranford Pratt observed already more than a decade ago (Pratt 1983:55):
Political and cultural globalization: a source of alienation Lack of fair play as a constituent element of economic globalization determines, as I have already pointed out, the political and cultural orientation as well as the development of Africa in a very fundamental way. I shall illustrate each, by an example, in contemporary African politics, culture and religion (with special emphasis on Christianity) to show how economic globalization and oppression become political and cultural globalization and how these, in turn, bias Africans against themselves and their world. Writing on the situation brought about by the demise of doctrinaire socialism, Saral Sarkar observes (1991:369):
Most dictators and dictatorships in Africa’s recent history have been sustained by powerful democratic countries of the North. We can cite as examples: Belgium in Rwanda; France, Belgium and the United States in Mobutu’s Zaire and various Western governments and transnational corporations in Amin’s Uganda, Somalia, Sudan and Nigeria under the many military juntas. But this is not what democracy should be about. Democracy should primarily be a matter of how human beings relate on the basis of justice, respect and mutual concern. As I noted elsewhere (Magesa 1996:89):
Instead of emphasizing human relationships of respect, justice and tolerance, the pressure that is currently brought to bear on Africa to democratise really stresses the theoretical and secondary, particularly, multipartyism. I do not wish to suggest, for a moment, that the multiparty system of politics is irrelevant for democracy in Africa. What I am saying is that this system alone does not guarantee a just orientation in society and that it must be combined with internal and external structures of justice for democracy to deserve the name. But, as it is now, the pressure for multipartyism in most African countries is alienating. Most often, Africans are forced to copy systems of democracy which took the countries in question many long years of trial and error to adjust to their social and cultural environments. Africa is denied this necessary experience. Therefore, its effort to democratize lacks local content and thus tends to be alienating. Perhaps this has been the reason for the failure of a certain kind of democracy in many parts of the continent. Those countries that have attempted to be original in this endeavour have fared much better. The most obvious evidence of alienation, however, is in the cultural sphere. Economic globalization brings with it the glitter of the West’s consumer goods, attendant attitudes and behaviour. Electronics is a case in point. The video machine has affected everything among a big segment of the African population: from the attitude of shame attached to the black colour of one’s skin and texture of one’s hair, through sexual behaviour and even orientation, to the attitude towards one’s elders and ancestors. What the TV/video has done in a decade to alienate Africa from itself is probably worse than what colonialism did in the same area in more than a century. Once again, I am not suggesting for a moment that TV and the video machine are an enemy of Africa in an absolute sense, even in the specific area of culture. What I am saying is that it becomes an enemy when what is beamed on it, and consequently accepted as reality in Africa, has no African content; does not, in fact, portray African reality. It is not possible to imagine that you are living and experiencing one reality while you are actually living and experiencing a different reality without being alienated. Elements of globalization and alienation in Christianity Even today, Christians imagine that they are living one reality — that of the official (Western) teaching of the Church — while they are actually living another — that of African Religion. The problem is not that this situation is not known, but that the Church, in its globalizing endeavour, refuses to act and correct this condition of dual religious consciousness of which Robert J. Schreiter wrote (1985: 145):
Universal teaching, particularly on morals, is bound to lead people into dual religious consciousness. One thinks immediately of the recently issued, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994, as a classic example of globalization in the religious sphere. How will the Church in Africa use this Catechism? As a stepping stone towards relevant catechisis or as the ultimate goal? From present trends, one fears that the latter may be the case, thus further alienating African Christians from themselves and their basic religious environment. Globalization under the Christian Church in Africa is as old as the missionary movement itself. It is deeply ingrained in the transplantation model of mission; a model which predominated until recently although today, theoretical emphasis is placed on the inculturation model. It must be stressed, however, that inculturation is still largely academic and does not touch the real world of those religiously oppressed by Christian globalization. Among these, as I fear the use of the Catechism will prove, the transplantation model unconsciously retains its strength. Understanding history from the point of view of the oppressed The Framework for the Study of Five Hundred Years of Colonial History from the Point of View of the Colonised Peoples, is the reality within which to situate the African perspective developed by the African and Asian Spirituality Consultation (AASC, 15th- 24th July, 1994). The main objective, as the Framework states is:
The aim of the exercise (AASC: 13) is specifically:
The objectives, methodology to reach them, source materials for study and the issues that AASC puts forward can be summarised simply as the effort of the oppressed to define and name themselves and their environment. For this is principally what they have been dispossessed of since "Vasco da Gama reached India in May 1498". According to the AASC:
This otherwise unduly long quotation can be easily justified. It is a clear and unambiguous expression of how the process of recapturing the ability of the South to define itself should proceed. It captures the need for self-naming which, in practical terms, involves the reappropriation of social, political and above all, economic rights of States in the international community. In 1947 a committee of the American National Catholic Welfare Conference proposed some of these rights and submitted them to the Commission of Human Rights of the United Nations Organization under Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. They include: (i)
The right of every State to exist free of political, military or economic
aggression from any other State. They further include: (i)
The right to obtain from the international community redress of grievances
arising from unjust treaties imposed by force. Poor peoples, nations and States want to look at history against rights such as these. But, in their case, have these rights been respected? Or are they respected only in the case of the rich and powerful nations and States of the North? Does the present process of social, political and economic globalization favour the practice of democracy in the international community whose objective is the welfare of human beings? With such questions in mind, the following description paints a clear picture of the situation the world is faced with: Capitalism, in our time, is characterized by an increasing economic dictatorship. This is not so noticeable in the concentration of wealth as in the accumulation of economic power in the hands of a small number of men, the trustees and managers of capital, dispensers of credit, which fulfils, in the economic organism, the function of blood in the human organism. This concentration of economic power has been the natural outcome of an unbridled competition that has brought about its own ruin. Economic dictatorship gives rise in its turn to ruthless political strife in both national and international spheres (CSG: 74, emphasis added): African imagination In his recent book, Christianity and the African Imagination, the Africanist Aylward Shorter asserts that:
This constitutes Africa’s imagination in the religious (Christian) sphere. It is an exercise in self-definition and naming. But it has parallels in the political and economic fields as well as in the social sphere. The African imagination must be put to work in the formulation and construction of democratic theories and institutions that are relevant to the cultural and political history of this continent. Ultimately, as F. Ochieng’ Odhiambo (1997:18) has noted so well:
In the cultural sphere, the African imagination must valorize the continent’s traditional cultural values which still govern and direct its peoples’ life. Superficial imitation promoted by globalization and fostered by the modern means of mass communication, which in a fundamental sense alienates Africans from themselves, is an enemy of Africa, and must be seen as such. The African imagination must devise ways and means to counteract these and other alienating trends. Fertility of the African imagination in the process of self-definition is especially required in the economic field which, as I have tried to show, determines the other spheres. Economic imagination and the political will of African nations and States need to go hand in hand. Can the various States, separately, but especially together, muster the political will to assert their rights in the community of nations? This is what the African and Asian Spirituality Consultation proposes to do for Africa and Asia, and for the oppressed South generally. Conclusion The poet Rudyard Kipling wrote:
Africa, Asia and the entire South know exactly the destructive effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism upon them. At the very least, they deserve to be listened to when they describe that suffering. Two reactions by those who inflicted the suffering in the first place are unwarranted: to preach contentment to the oppressed and exploited or to tell them that what they are describing is not what they are really experiencing! Bibliography AASC (African and Asian Spirituality Consultation), "Framework for the Study of Five Hundred Years of Colonial History from the Point of View of the Colonized Peoples" in Quest 137 (April), 1995. CSG (Catholic Social Guild), A Code of Social Principles, (Oxford: Catholic Social Guild), 1952. Magesa, L., in H. Assefa and G. Wachira, eds., Peacemaking and Democratisation in Africa (Nairobi/Kampala: East African Educational Publishers), 1991. Odhiambo, F.O., in D. Kyeyune, ed., New Trends for the empowerment of the People (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa), 1997. Pratt, R.C., in J. Torrie, ed., Banking on Poverty (Toronto: Between the Lines), 1983. Sarkal, S., "The Future of Socialism — Which Socialism? in Alternatives 16:3 (Summer), 1991. Schreiter, R.J., Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books), 1985. Shorter, A., Christianity and the African Imagination (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa), 1996.
Ref.: African Ecclesial Review, vol. 40, nn. 5 & 6, October/December 1998.
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