Back To Hengari: Thinking About The Impossible In Africa?

KNOWLEDGE, more than ever before, is power. But this remains a scarce commodity in much of Africa. How then do we salvage that situation? Alfredo Hengari posed that question in two of his recent post-scriptum articles.

And I don’t think that he was merely engaging us in exegesis for its own sake or just knowledge for the sake of it, but engaging us in a broader debate about how Africa can move forward in its quest to improve the human condition.My reading of his intervention is that this is not just an idealist rendering cast in Western philosophical discourses and notions of modernity by invoking Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Or dreaming of an Einstein made in Africa.Hengari is challenging African scholars, intellectuals and political leaders to provide the scholarly, intellectual and political compass to help guide their societies to the promised land of ‘milk and honey’. It’s a challenge to Africa to claim its historical place in the global market of ideas, of science and knowledge and not just to remain a provider of raw materials. Because every society has the ability and capacity to generate own ideas and knowledge in order to apply mind to matter.On his 50th birthday anniversary in 1984, the Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, bemoaned the African condition when he spoke of his generation of African elite as: ‘mine has been a wasted generation’. I remember that Hengari once wrote about a ‘generation that would fail Namibia’ – our generation.In his ‘I am an African’ speech in 1996, Thabo Mbeki situates himself firmly within the context and in the service of Africa and wanted others to join him in search of the continent’s resurgence. Is Hengari perhaps responding to that call? It’s not an entirely complex exercise to understand where Hengari is coming from. First, sitting in the ivory towers of Paris intellectual life provides a good vantage point from which to understand one’s own condition at least from a comparative perspective. I’m paraphrasing Edward Said here, the late Palestinian scholar, on his notion of an intellectual as an outsider. The other reason, which many people don’t appreciate, is that when an African is in Europe, USA or some other Asians countries, people there don’t really care much which political party you belong to. All that they would ask, if they are really curious, is which country you hail from. So the failure in much of Africa is thus seen as symptomatic of the continent’s trappings and not attributed to a specific political party unless, of course, one is talking to a person with specific political interest of a particular country. Thus sometimes one is pushed into a corner to defend even the most indefensible situation. So, no African residing outside the continent would want to see the constant perpetuation of its ‘shame’ and ‘human suffering’ making headlines in international news media.We should thus not take defensive posturing against criticism from others but rather realistically assess our own problems and see how best to address them. Because looming in the background is a world that is increasingly being cleaved into two segments: the one comprised of functioning and viable states exercising the full panoply of rights and privileges needed and the other world mired in an economic and political free-fall.So what Hengari and kindred spirits are doing is to challenge the African intelligentsia and policymakers to come up with needed antidotes to reverse the decay and the political will to administer the bitter pill required to revive our societies.But all these are better said than done because we are currently operating in an economic and political context that is not very conducive to new ideas. All our thinking is frozen in the language of the past. It is this fixation based on the past that has blinded us to contemporary realities and conditions. There is no social space for new ideas to take roots and knowledge to blossom in such a fossilised political environment that has no appreciation for information as a tool that can make nations realize their full potentials.The question is then: can a genuine African state emerge from the spoils of colonial legacy? Or we are witnessing what Patrick Chabal has termed the Africanisation of African politics – a return to the politics of looting, theft, corruption and to re-tribalisation? Is colonialism being replaced, at least in certain parts of the continent, by ethnocracy and stomachtocracy?I implore analysts and critics not to relent even in the face of these unfortunate developments. Because structuralists and deconstructionists remind us that language constructs context. And that language embodies political, social and ideological meaning and thus has significant public consequences. So let’s engage in that Socratic dialogue as Hengari urges us to do.