Africa has been failed by westernisation. It must cast off its subservience

Chigozie Obioma in The Guardian






One of the greatest ironies in the history of the collapse of any civilisation must be the initial interaction between Africans and Europeans. The Igbos in the east of Nigeria, for instance, initially saw the Europeans as madmen of strange appearance and ill-formed ideologies. On banking, the Igbos wondered how an adult in his right mind could hand over his possessions for others to keep for him. By the end of the 19th century, the “madman” had overturned their civilisation, and they had adopted his.

The irony is especially relevant in these times when, given the relative failures of most former western colonies, there have been renewed calls for recolonialisation. In September, American professor Bruce Gilley wrote an essay arguing for a recolonialisation of some states, replicating colonial governance of the past “as far as possible” and even building new colonies from scratch.

If the very foundations of his arguments are flawed, it is because he, like most people today, has come to accept that the only metric for measuring modernity is through the western lens. This is the heart of the problem.

Colonialism across most of Africa was so thorough – especially among the former British protectorates – that in its aftermath Africa was essentially hollowed out. The civilisations of the peoples, their various cultures and traditions, their religions, political philosophies and institutions, were eroded or even destroyed.

Today most of the nations in Africa should not even be called African nations, but western African nations. The language, political ideology, socio-economic structures, education, and everything that makes up a nation, even down to popular culture, do not originate from within these countries. African nations have a total dependency on foreign political philosophies and ideas, and their shifts and movements.

It is the feeblest position a state and its people can be in, because it is a position of chronic subservience. It also means that whatever becomes normalised in the west will eventually be adopted in, say, Uganda or Togo. 

This has resulted in Africa being slowly emptied of its essence, and becoming a relic, no different in substance from a statue or a museum.

Celebrations of Africa on the international scene mostly involve dancing, music, traditional fashion and other cultural artefacts – hardly ever showcasing African-originated economic ideas, social ideologies or intellectual theories. It is not that these do not exist, but the world has successfully convinced everyone – including Africans themselves – that everything African is inferior.

Central to this psychology is the proliferation of Africans being educated in the west. This trend has resulted in the rise of an army of western-influenced elites who continue the colonialism of their own people.
Imagine what can happen when an African nation with a high unemployment rate imbibes a gun culture. Consider the potential danger of a situation in Nigeria, where the Hausa man insists his culture is being appropriated by the Yoruba. Or the Christian Igbo embracing their identity, recruiting allies, and ostracising anyone who will not acquiesce with their cause.

But this is becoming Africa’s reality. Increasingly, our elites tell us that the way of the west is “modern” and “civilised”, echoing the early colonialists who dismissed our civilisations as “barbaric”, “archaic”, and “uncivilised” to install theirs. They tell us that our institutions are corrupt, that our societies are patriarchal, and that the African traditional religions are heathenish. As western supremacy entrenches itself in our psyche, we are developing a complex that embraces western ideas without considering whether or not they are compatible with our own political, social, economic and cultural system.

Although Americans may be rightly calling for “diversity”, given a history that excluded a major demographic population of black people, Nigeria’s struggle from inception has been how to unify its enormous diversity. It was the lack of that unity that resulted in the civil war of the late 1960s. This is the same for Angola, Rwanda and Uganda, to name just a few.

But this is of little concern to Africa’s elites. What matters is to find what the political currency is in the US or Europe, and to uncritically follow it. Whereas people in the west are de-emphasising patriotism and nationalism, Africans need these to build sustainable nations.

  ‘The most viable pathway would be for Africa’s elite to look within the vast political and ideological resources on which successful civilisations were built.’ Timbuktu in Mali. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

In fact, the lack of them, in favour of ethnic allegiance, has been the bane of most African nations, from Congo to Somalia: the result of the Berlin Conference of 1884, in which European leaders divvied up African territories among themselves, ignoring traditional ethnic borders.

In making a case about east Asia and citing the success of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and others, Chinese philosopher Zou Shipeng argued that the west’s claim to its culture as the only pathway to modernity creates unfair hegemony. Is it possible, he asked, to achieve modernity solely through Chinese culture?

The Middle Eastern nations are another example of cultures that have accepted material modernity but have not been westernised ideologically. They have retained their political systems which, given their theocratic cultural framework, seem best suited for these countries. Every time western nations have tried to disrupt those systems and install a western-style democracy, it has failed.

This was also the case with the first two centuries of European contact with west Africans. The Portuguese and the Dutch traded with many west African tribes from the mid-15th century without colonising them. For 200 years, the Igbos had “Dane guns”, mirrors, and gins, among others, but held on to their own traditions and cultures. It could therefore be argued that the “modernism” orchestrated by western colonialism, isn’t organic to the Africans. Yet proponents of recolonialisation and the African elites fail to see this.

With the sudden unexpected rise in rightwing populism across the west, it is challenging to decide what a viable future may look like. One would think African nations would take this opportunity to think for themselves, to come up with unique African systems.

However, rather than do this, the African elite class largely insists that Africa is not western enough, and is trying to drag the continent, still grappling with western modernism, into the west’s evolving postmodernist regime.

The most viable pathway would be for Africa’s elite to look within the vast political and ideological resources on which successful civilisations (the Zulu, the Igbo, the Malian dynasties of Timbuktu, the Oyo empire, etc) were built. In most Igbo states, for instance, there was an egalitarian system where an older member of a clan represented his people in the elders’ council. There were no kings or presidents. Perhaps there could be a way to adapt this unique political structure to replace the western one which has so far failed.

We need to look into these systems and extract coherent policies that can help form workable and uniquely African social and political systems. This is the only viable path to preventing the continent from fully becoming western Africa – and the only way to ending the continent’s long-term political decay.

Why I had to leave The Times

Robert Fisk:

When he worked at The Times, Robert Fisk witnessed the curious working practices of the paper's proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. Despite their jocular exchanges, the writer knew he couldn't stay...

Monday, 11 July 2011 in The Independent

He is a caliph, I suppose, almost of the Middle Eastern variety.
You hear all these awful things about Arab dictators and then, when you meet them, they are charm itself. Hafez al-Assad once held my hand in his for a long time with a paternal smile. Surely he can't be that bad, I almost said to myself – this was long before the 1982 Hama massacres. King Hussein would call me "Sir", along with most other journalists. These potentates, in public, would often joke with their ministers. Mistakes could be forgiven.
The "Hitler Diaries" were Murdoch's own mistake, after refusing to countenance his own "expert's" change of heart over the documents hours before The Times and The Sunday Times began printing them. Months later, I was passing by the paper's London office on my way back to Beirut when the foreign editor, Ivan Barnes, held up the Reuters wire copy from Bonn. "Aha!" he thundered. "The diaries are forgeries!" The West German government had proved that they must have been written long after the Führer's death.
So Barnes dispatched me to editor Charles Douglas-Home's office with the Reuters story and I marched in only to find Charlie entertaining Murdoch. "They say they're forgeries, Charlie," I announced, trying not to glance at Murdoch. But I did when he reacted. "Well, there you go," the mogul reflected with a giggle. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." Much mirth. The man's insouciance was almost catching. Great Story. It only had one problem. It wasn't true.
Oddly, he never appeared the ogre of evil, darkness and poison that he's been made out to be these past few days. Maybe it's because his editors and sub-editors and reporters repeatedly second-guessed what Murdoch would say. Murdoch was owner of The Times when I covered the blood-soaked Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Not a line was removed from my reports, however critical they were of Israel. After the invasion, Douglas-Home and Murdoch were invited by the Israelis to take a military helicopter trip into Lebanon. The Israelis tried to rubbish my reporting; Douglas-Home said he stood up for me. On the flight back to London, Douglas-Home and Murdoch sat together. "I knew Rupert was interested in what I was writing," he told me later. "He sort of waited for me to tell him what it was, although he didn't demand it. I didn't show it to him."
But things changed. Before he was editor, Douglas-Home would write for the Arabic-language Al-Majella magazine, often deeply critical of Israel. Now his Times editorials took an optimistic view of the Israeli invasion. He stated that "there is now no worthy Palestinian to whom the world can talk" and – for heaven's sake – that "perhaps at last the Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip will stop hoping that stage-strutters like Mr Arafat can rescue them miraculously from doing business with the Israelis."
All of which, of course, was official Israeli government policy at the time.
Then, in the spring of 1983, another change. I had, with Douglas-Home's full agreement, spent months investigating the death of seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners of the Israelis in Sidon. It was obvious, I concluded, that the men had been murdered – the grave-digger even told me that their corpses had been brought to him, hands tied behind their backs, showing marks of bruising. But now Douglas-Home couldn't see how we would be "justified" in running a report "so long after the event".
In other words, the very system of investigative journalism – of fact-checking and months of interviews – became self-defeating. When we got the facts, too much time had passed to print them. I asked the Israelis if they would carry out a military inquiry and, anxious to show how humanitarian they were, they duly told us there would be an official investigation. The Israeli "inquiry" was, I suspected, a fiction. But it was enough to "justify" publishing my long and detailed report. Once the Israelis could look like good guys, Douglas-Home's concerns evaporated.
When he died, of cancer, it was announced that his deputy, Charles Wilson, would edit the paper. Murdoch said that Wilson was "Charlie's choice" and I thought, so, all well and good – until I was chatting to Charlie's widow and she told me that it was the first time she had heard that Wilson's editorship had been her late husband's decision. We all knew Murdoch had signed up to all manner of guarantees of editorial independence, oversight and promises of goodwill when he bought The Times – and had then fired his first editor, Harold Evans. He would deal with the trade unionists later.
Charles Wilson – who much later became, briefly, the editor of The Independent – was a tough, friendly man who could show great kindness, as well as harshness, to his staff. He was kind to me, too. But once, when I was visiting Wilson in London, Murdoch walked into his office. "Hallo, Robert!" Murdoch greeted me, before holding a jocular conversation with Wilson. And, after he had left, Wilson said to me in a hushed voice: "See how he called you by your first name?" This was laughable. It was like the Assad smile or the King Hussein "Sir". It meant nothing. Murdoch was joking with his ministers and courtiers.
A warning sign. Still in west Beirut, where dozens of Westerners were being kidnapped, I opened The Times to discover that a pro-Israeli writer was claiming on our centre page that all journalists in west Beirut, clearly intimidated by "terrorism", could be regarded only as "bloodsuckers". Was the paper claiming that I, too, was a bloodsucker? In all this time, Murdoch had expressed exclusively pro-Israeli views, and had accepted a "Man of the Year" award from a prominent Jewish-American organisation. The Times editorials became more and more pro-Israeli, their use of the word "terrorist" ever more promiscuous.
The end came for me when I flew to Dubai in 1988 after the USS Vincennes had shot down an Iranian passenger airliner over the Gulf. Within 24 hours, I had spoken to the British air traffic controllers at Dubai, discovered that US ships had routinely been threatening British Airways airliners, and that the crew of the Vincennes appeared to have panicked. The foreign desk told me the report was up for the page-one splash. I warned them that American "leaks" that the IranAir pilot was trying to suicide-crash his aircraft on to the Vincennes were rubbish. They agreed.
Next day, my report appeared with all criticism of the Americans deleted, with all my sources ignored. The Times even carried an editorial suggesting the pilot was indeed a suicider. A subsequent US official report and accounts by US naval officers subsequently proved my dispatch correct. Except that Times readers were not allowed to see it. This was when I first made contact with The Independent. I didn't believe in The Times any more – certainly not in Rupert Murdoch.
Months later, a senior night editor who had been on duty on the night my Vincennes report arrived, recalled in a letter that he had promoted my dispatch as the splash, but that Wilson had said: "There's nothing in it. There's not a fact in it. I wouldn't even run this gibberish." Wilson, the night editor said, called it "bollocks" and "waffle". The night editor's diary for that day finished: "Shambles, chaos on Gulf story. [George] Brock [Wilson's foreign editor] rewrites Fisk."
The good news: a few months later, I was Middle East correspondent for The Independent. The bad news: I don't believe Murdoch personally interfered in any of the above events. He didn't need to. He had turned The Times into a tame, pro-Tory, pro-Israeli paper shorn of all editorial independence. If I hadn't been living in the Middle East, of course, it might have taken me longer to grasp all this.
But I worked in a region where almost every Arab journalist knows the importance of self-censorship – or direct censorship – and where kings and dictators do not need to give orders. They have satraps and ministers and senior police officers – and "democratic" governments – who know their wishes, their likes and dislikes. And they do what they believe their master wants. Of course, they all told me this was not true and went on to assert that their king/president was always right.
These past two weeks, I have been thinking of what it was like to work for Murdoch, what was wrong about it, about the use of power by proxy. For Murdoch could never be blamed. Murdoch was more caliph than ever, no more responsible for an editorial or a "news" story than a president of Syria is for a massacre – the latter would be carried out on the orders of governors who could always be tried or sacked or sent off as adviser to a prime minister – and the leader would invariably anoint his son as his successor. Think of Hafez and Bashar Assad or Hosni and Gamal Mubarak or Rupert and James. In the Middle East, Arab journalists knew what their masters wanted, and helped to create a journalistic desert without the water of freedom, an utterly skewed version of reality. So, too, within the Murdoch empire.
In the sterile world of the Murdochs, new technology was used to deprive the people of their freedom of speech and privacy. In the Arab world, surviving potentates had no problem in appointing tame prime ministers. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.