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Subject: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) More Campbell
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 08:19:06 +0200
From: Patrick Bond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Pan-Africanism and the 21st Century African Revolution:
Emancipation and Epistemological Questions
by Horace G. Campbell
Pan Africanism arose as a philosophy to restore the humanity and dignity
of the African person and indeed all humans. The concept of dignity and
humanity has gone through many iterations from the period of enslavement
to the period of colonialism, segregation and Jim Crow, the periods of
apartheid and neo-colonialism to the current period of the HIV-AIDS
pandemic when corporations have given themselves the right to patent
life forms. There are two very basic and simple propositions.
The first is the idea that the African person is respected as a human
being. “Dignity in humans involves the earning or the expectation of
personal respect or of esteem.” The second proposition is that Africans
are human beings who think and have a right to live on the planet earth.
In the twenty first century, a human being is one who is defined in
biological and spiritual terms and is different from cyborgs and robots
(mechanical objects).
African peoples, especially those in the West, are particularly
sensitive to the mechanical conceptions of humans from the period of the
transatlantic Slave Trade to the present. In the era of clones, cyborgs,
robotics, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering the question
of what or who is a human and the dignity of the human person has been
reopened.
Pan Africanists in the twenty first century continue to confront old
questions of the hierarchy of humans that became embedded in the Anglo
American thought through the period of the slave trade as well as the
new theories dealing with potential transhumans.
The bio-political questions that are arising in this century of
revolutionary technologies challenges all of humanity, but more so the
African and Indigenous persons who have been threatened with genocidal
violence in past periods of ‘scientific’ advancements in capitalist
societies. In this century, the conceptual skills along with the
creative spirit and cultures of African peoples remain one of the
frontline weapons against the attempts of capitalism to dehumanize and
to turn certain humans into mere body parts providing needed tissues and
organs for the rich. As some scientists eagerly work towards the era of
singularity (merging humans with artificial intelligence) the old
questions of access to health care for all is now joined with the
burning question of saving the planet earth and reversing the global
warming that threatens to envelop life as we know it now.
It is the proposition of this presentation that we are living in a
revolutionary period where the objective conditions are ripe for serious
transformation. The challenge lay in the ideas and organization
necessary to mobilize human beings to intervene politically to change
the mode of human economic organization. In the absence of a clear
ideology and organization the neo-conservatives at the helm of the world
economy are pushing humanity deeper into the era of counter revolution.
This counter revolution is being driven by ideas of neo-liberalism.
However, the challenges of global warming, warfare and destruction
expose the reality that the era of counter revolution is sharpening the
need for an alternative to the old ideas of revolution.
Hurricanes, floods, and the pollution of the natural environment
reinforce institutionalized racism and the social organization of
society. New eugenic theories on right breed of humans are trumpeted
while the World Trade Organization proclaims notions of intellectual
property rights. At the same time a new brand of piracy –labelled
biopiracy- is unleashed in order to seize the last genetic materials of
the planet. All these forms of oppression and exploitation are
legitimized with ideas of liberalization and freedom as the US
capitalists jostle to dominate the planet from space. These challenges
in the era of new potentialities for breaking the old backbreaking
toiling of humans are linked to the old challenges of exploitation,
sexism, patriarchy and heterosexism. Genocidal violence, warfare,
economic terrorism, obscene fundamentalism and the challenges of the
racialized planet have given new significance to the philosophy of Pan
Africanism moving the concerns from the era of the Civil Rights movement
and unity of states to the question of the emancipation of human beings.
Emancipation and emancipatory ideas have to be redefined at every stage
of the Pan African movement in so far as the politics of Pan Africanism
has undergone changes over time. It was poignant that at the very moment
when Pan Africanists should have been celebrating the victory over
apartheid in April 1994, the fastest genocide in history unfolded in
Rwanda challenging the basic Pan African creed: ‘that the African in one
part of the world is responsible for the condition of his brother and
sister in other parts of the world.’ This genocide in Rwanda, violent
contestations for power all across the continent (the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Chad,) and crimes against
humanity in Sudan along with the crude materialism of neo-liberal
globalization has awakened new interest in the ideas and philosophies of
the revolutionary traditions of the black liberation struggles. From the
period of the Haitian Revolution through to the Bolivarian revolution of
the 21st century, the Pan African movement has been linked to the ideas
and practices of revolutionary thought and practice.
The ideas and philosophies of Pan Africanism are sometimes considered a
unitary phenomenon but Africans in various parts of the world reflect
and write about Pan Africanism in many different ways. In short, there
is no one definition of what constitutes revolutionary Pan Africanism.
What is, however, important is for us to grasp the emancipatory
traditions within the Pan African movement and those thinkers who have
developed a level of theoretical clarification of what it means to be a
free human, that is a human being freed from all forms of oppression.
Philosophically a new cadre of intellectuals have been interrogating the
philosophy of Pan Africanism and its importance to the working peoples.
Most importantly, the progressive men and women of the continent have
exposed the neo-colonial leaders at home and abroad. Thus far, in the
written versions of African liberation, the centrality of African women
have been in the main unrecorded in the dominant discourses on Pan
Africanism. In the words of one activist, ‘women did not write books,
but wrote history.’ Radical African feminists are not only calling for
liberation and revolution but a redefinition of the past in order to
prepare for a different future. These Pan African feminists draw
inspiration from not simply the struggles of great women, but from the
day to day struggles for life itself. It is from these struggles where
the new theories of Pan Africanism emanate. In the words of Barbara
Christian, ‘people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite
different from the Western form of abstract logic.’ Harriet Tubman was
one of those ancestors who wrote their theory by their political
practice. This was the theory of self organization, self-liberation and
self emancipation. In the twenty first century there are new scholars
and thinkers who are not shy to retreat from the abstract positivism of
‘the scientific method’ but to link to the spiritual essence of African
men and women.
At the end of the 20th Century, Phillipe Wamba’s book on Kinship moved
the discussion from the level of politics of movements, governments and
great individuals to the question of the lived experiences of Africans
at home and abroad. In this way, Philippe Wamba was able to represent
Pan Africanism both at the theoretical and intellectual discourses and
at the level of struggles of African peoples.
Drawing inspiration from his own transnational family from the USA and
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the experiences of young African
immigrants such as Amadou Diallo and the struggles against police
brutality. Wamba was using an idea of Kinship which goes beyond the
traditional biological kinship to a cultural concept of Kinship which
echoed from Cheikh Anta Diop’s view of the Cultural Unity of Africa.
Diop’s conception of the cultural unity of Africa provided a profound
starting point for the analysis of Pan Africanism in the 21st century.
This is for a number of reasons.
Firstly, Diop refused to accept the division s in Africa that has arisen
from centuries of invasions. Hence, for Diop the idea of unity does not
accept the divisions between sub-Saharan and North Africa.
Secondly, for Diop, the cultural unity of Africa was based on the
importance of the historical unity, the psychological and linguistic
unity of Africa.
Thirdly, this cultural unity transcended the artificial construction of
states and nations that arose as a result of the imperialist
partitioning of Africa at the Berlin Conference.
Hence, the goals of Pan Africanism were to be based on a federated state
that returned to the principles of matriarchy and the centrality of the
woman in the public life of Africa. This centrality was to be addressed
through a new and novel form of bicameralism in Africa.
For Diop, African Unity had to be built on the independence and autonomy
of African women and his novel form of bicameralism was articulated in
his book, Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural basis for a federated
State.
Fourthly, and very importantly, Diop did not believe in the Pan
Africanism based on racial pigmentation. In his own domestic life he
transcended these divisions between blackness and whiteness. Diop had
not only laid out the ideas for continental African Unity, but also the
ideas for a planetary civilization. In this way, Diop moved the idea of
Pan Africanism beyond that of black people to the level of planetary
unity of all peoples. Diop was also breaking the binary divisions
between Europe and Africa in order to place the debate on Pan Africanism
in a wider field.
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