by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 Africa Correspondent

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Mputhumi
Ntabeni

QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - Adam, my American friend, when he was still at the London School of Economics (LSE) once sent me a postcard, a reproduction of Nola Hatterman's painting, "Op het terras". On it he wrote:

This picture of a Sarimese's gentlemen in 1930's Holland has pushed through my mind those imperial strands that bind us to distant places and acquired faces. To some, a well suited savage, to others, a game of status to match the whites. But, they, from the inside, the haunted dialogue of an uncertain existence, the not quite black /nor white, of inbetweenity.

Am I wrong to see you in this picture? If so, its not for lack of respect, only understanding. Hoping I can see the real you sometime soon,

love,
Adam

The postcard reminded me of something James Baldwin once wrote in the early fifties:

What one's imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the laws of one's own personality and it is one of the ironies of black - white relationship that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is. There's hardly a country that has obsessed, to its credit, with this problem as America.

Later on, when I gave the postcard some thought, I understood his probing a little bit better and lost my initial irritation. I agree with W.E.B. DuBois that the central problem of our century is racism. That's why I decided to give his question some serious thought. When I tried answering I found myself ranting the intellectual jargon that easily passes for African Philosophy or Black Consciousness most of the time. Needless to say I was not satisfied with the answer I gave him. In retrospect I see I felt impelled to impress and show I had read the excerpts of the writings of Homi K. Bhabha. Frankly they left me with a headache and no wiser. This then is the second round of my answer to Adam.

I constantly find myself rejecting the trappings of the school of African Philosophy, the use of rational egoism to deal with the burden of colonial history. It's become little more than an antithesis of the white superiority complex with its preoccupation with racial suppositions.

For me life, especially intellectual life, requires exchange and integration. The worst thing that can happen to anyone, or culture, is to fall into self enclosed exclusiveness. This makes life, or culture, static and lacking in innovation. By culture I mean: "An accumulation of social consciousness and action in the context of a specific type of physical environment," as Wiredu put it. More dear to my heart though is Ortega. Y. Gasset's definition of culture. It's less didactic. "Culture is only the interpretation which man gives to his [collective] life, the series of more or less satisfactory solutions which he invents in order to handle his problems and the needs of his lifeŠ a work of integration, and will accept loyally all realities that make up our existence."

Culture for me then is not cast in stone, but a living dynamism that must serve the needs of the living. What's more, no culture is an unadulterated legacy of its immemorial tradition, but a historical and political concept; something to be manoeuvred for the gains of the moment. I regard civilization as nothing but fulfilled culture, something more than the mediated desires most contemporary people believe it to be. I don't hold a mystical view of or regard it as a holy cow either. In fact I see that attitude as a disguise for lack of creative innovation in the face of genuine challenges, and a failure of developing indigenous talents. I like tradition only so far as it fertilises the present into fulfilling itself, not when it fixes people to [the] fated social and historic background they were born in. I refuse to be trapped by the crudity of local colour even when I know my loyalty rests with it.

For me then, there's no African culture per se, but an African identity. It is this identity I imperatively guard against being subjugated by the more prominent identities; especially the ones that easily associate themselves with the extant and triumphant civilisation. I do not call it culture but identity. I'll have nothing to do with the domineering mania of cataloguing cultural types, as if there's such a thing as a pure culture. This paralysing futility of living in the past, together with its correlative, the gripping inferiority complex, hobbles African thought with regressive tendencies. It also invites us, as Africans who live under a dominant western culture, to an internal falsification of our lives by blackmailing us with our unquiet past.

My friend's question then, if I understood him right, becomes whether by utilising the thinking tools of another culture do I loose my African identity. It is no secret that African thought is plagued by a lack of capacity for exactness. It has not yet been blessed with its Descartes to vitalise it with simplicity and clarity. African thought is still unhinged with no unequivocal point of reference. This, and the fact that I was trained in western thinking, is one of the reasons I use western tools in my thinking. What then of my friend's question, "the haunted dialogue of uncertain existence," i.e. my supposed discomforts as a black person who's trained in Western modes of thinking.

For me the tension is rather creative. I use Western intellectual tools to deepen my African identity. What I hate, with active disdain, is the fashion, or rather the laziness, of simply projecting Western ideas along with Western-derived methods unto African conceptual frameworks. Worse, when this becomes the vox populi of duplicative nonsensical themes like "African Renaissance." This approximation is frayed and exhausted, was so even when Burckhardt first used it. It has never been enough for the historical realities of the world. I do not know why we should bog our attempt at revitalising Africa with such non-representative a term, especially since in Europe it was more or less a futile attempt to let go of traditional culture that ended up as the bigotry of pure reason and vaunting culturalism. My understanding of current efforts to revitalise Africa involves a rediscovery of our traditional orientation and values. How that compares with the European Renaissance, excerpt in a careless use of the term, beats me.

As for the "noble or well suited savage" syndrome my friend refers to, the less said about it the better. I haven't found any thinking black person who thinks it to be a compliment. It's a product of the racist, white superiority complex that originated, in phrasing, with the likes of rodomontade Rousseau.

Mputhumi's friend
Adam

It's indisputable that an African, wherever he maybe in the world, carries a certain sense of desperation within. Not from "uncertain existence," but more from white presumptions. Added is an embarrassment about the sterile fermentation of African solutions that encourages these presumptions. Naturally the presumptions come from Africa's lack of self-reliance. The fact that African independence, more often than not, has, in the past, meant a complete annihilation of her people by her leaders or the ruling party [is at the core of this embarrassment]. To compensate for this paucity and lack of acuity African leaders had a tendency, when they failed to construct systems to uplift their people, of inventing exhibitionist pavilions of false ideals. The miserable ease by which these enthusiastic half-visions, hints, deliver the development of Africa to occidental whims is most frustrating to thinking Africans with foresight, and makes them wary of their theories.

To get back to Adam's question, indeed history does not only entrap us, it is trapped with us. It manifests itself as guilt on whites and mostly as rage on blacks wherever the racial question is concerned.

The challenge is in not suppressing but dissembling these sentiments. In finding an intellectual response that is up to the standard of our human dignity. Even that is only half the task. There has to be found a natural effective behaviour that embodies common values between whites and blacks into the actuality of everyday life. For that to be possible there's to be found a way of eradicating the deep entrenched mentality in the white man's mind which consciously or unconsciously regards a black man as inferior. The fact that a black man who is distinguished in anything is still regarded as an exotic rarity betrays this mindset. This is not necessarily a white man's fault but a baggage of history. From this we're left with a dilemma: a white man who genuinely respects a black person's achievements but cannot help measuring him by different standards than he uses for other white men. And a black man who though distinguished in his own right cannot escape the white man's power because he's made to feel guilty for mastering the extant culture that his ancestors did not initiate. Whatever he does, so long as he uses the white man's tools, mores, technology, and the rest, he's regarded, even by an illiterate white man, as an up-start. He has no way of enforcing his identity on the white man's mind. The culture to which he has been grafted by historical events regards him as an impostor. No matter what he does there's always this quiet underlying accusation. Hence my friend's innocent, though insulting, question.

Still, it remains unto the black man, in modern life, to fashion out his experience in a manner that'll give a sustained voice to his identity until it's taken as natural. For now that voice will be patented, as Badlwin said.

What makes things difficult is a great deal of unconscious will power for making wrong assumptions on the part of most white people when it comes to black folks. Most white people are not naturally malicious but just too lazy to reflect on the situation. It's easier to maintain the naivety of non-reflective life in order to service the distrust of black people, or evade the responsibility of dealing with one's true feelings. They do this, as Raheem said in his last "Radioactive" column, by keeping away from black people. That way they avoid the uncomfortable situation of having to deal with the racial issue cropping up in their dear world.

Still the decent white man does not want to be hated, or left out of the so-called progressive world. The solution lies then in resisting the tendency to unconsciously condescend against the black man. One way of doing this, as I said, is choosing not to judge black people with different standards he uses on a white person. [When a white person does this,] he allows the black person the unspeakable liberty of the unredeemed. "Oh poor people, let them. Why shouldn't theyŠ"  That's just dissembling motives and being evasive of one's intensities instead of dealing with them.

Some white people, like Adam, do make an effort. It took guts, for instance, for him and his friends to come and stay in a South African township, an environment completely different from theirs, which was sometimes a little dangerous for them. I dare speak on their behalf and say they didn't undertake this as an exotic adventure to satisfy their privileged, lacking in challenge American life. It was a genuine desire to see how others live.

As for the white / black issue; it's important to keep in mind that it is not of human fallen nature to be completely free from internal warfares. If that sounds too theological, I'll leave it to Adam to put in modern language with its predilection for the parlance of Psychology:

...And beyond that, I think there is a strand of social and psychological projection that is woven through this, that the bigger issue is reinforcement of perception and how we are in some way prisoners of each others expectations. At least that's part of what I get out of it.