Rejection of modernity/liberalism/rights is disastrous- their crude nativism conflates these concepts with colonialism and denies agency

(Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. His research interests and writings cover Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Spindel Supplement (2019), 135–159)

When I said above that they assume that no amount of fluency in the acquired tongues would suffice to domesticate them, it is one manifestation of the attitude that affirms an essential lack of fit between, in the present case, multiparty democracy and so-called traditional African statecraft. I would like to suggest that contentions like Wiredu’s yield the persistent but wrong-headed search by African scholars for African equivalents of “democracy,” “rule of law,” “modernity,” “knowledge,” and so on. It is as if these concepts are so foreign that it does not matter what level of fluency we attain in the foreign languages, we can never domesticate them absent our thinking them in our own languages. These are problematic claims. This is where, I am afraid, proponents of decolonization have substituted a new wall for the ones that decolonization was crafted to tear down. This wall discourages interest in, much less engagement with, African discourses respecting many of the foreign ideas that have made their appearance in and impacted African life and thought over time. Because of the insistence on decolonization, Africa’s long history with the core tenets of modernity dating back to Napoleon Bonaparte’s arrival in Egypt in December 1798 commands no attention from our contemporary philosophers. The many African contributions to the discourse of civilization going back to our participation in the Mediterranean civilizations of antiquity are increasingly lost in the vapid references to “precolonial Africa.” Many now think there is nothing to be found there, and what they must do is to look for “African stuff” which is understood as not having anything to do with whatever smacks of the colonial legacy. This needs to be reversed both for theoretical and practical purposes. Political philosophical discussion in contemporary Africa is not just lacking critical engagement with political philosophy of foreign provenance; there is evidence that there is simply no engagement beyond the ritual denunciation of the colonial provenance of liberal representative democracy and its pertinent ideas and the need to find practices of African provenance or be more attuned to African history and culture. This is happening at precisely the time that Africa needs some serious education about the philosophical foundations of the entire system of governance—some form of liberal representative democracy and associated ideas like the rule of law and the dominance of rights discourse—that characterize much of the African continent outside of Eswatini, which has the last absolute monarchy in the world. Whether it is in Morocco or Egypt, Guinea Bissau or South Africa, the cry is the same: the discourse of rights, freedom, governance by consent, and inviolate human dignity. It is very difficult if not impossible to operate successfully systems wherein the underlying philosophical foundations are not part of our intellectual orientation. Abiola Irele puts it well: Our present experience of alienation stems directly from our historical encounter with Europe, and from our continuing relationship with a civilization that, in its present form, was forged in that continent, and which therefore, holds out a special interest for us. We cannot ignore the fact that the transforming values of contact with this civilization have produced the present context of our collective life, if we are to get a mental handle upon the process of transition in which we are involved. The very tensions and conditions of stress of this process would have been beneficial if they helped to concentrate our minds both wonderfully and intensely upon the nature of our alienation.34 Decolonizing theorists make it easy for scholars to not engage this literature at all and, in so doing, elide the contributions of African thinkers to the domestication of these ideas going back to the nineteenth century, especially in West and North Africa. The efforts of African thinkers to domesticate foreign ideas suffer from disinterest from the proponents of decolonization. Many African thinkers have critically engaged both foreign and indigenous ideas in trying to think through the best form of government for human efflorescence in the African context. Unfortunately, so thick is the wall that, to continue with the example of politics, many of our decolonization theorists would be hard put to name any serious political philosophers outside of Nkrumah, Fanon, Cabral, and Nyerere at any time beyond the present. And they hardly ever engage even those in their complexity. And these are the darlings that are often trotted out as theorists of decolonization. Of course, no one thinks of engaging the robust defense of liberal democracy by Obafemi Awolowo or Abiola Irele’s “In Praise of Alienation” or Paulin Hountondji on liberal individualism in our time.35 Most frightening of all, because Africans can only be resisters or victims of modernity—the dominant motif in the decolonization domain—we are unable to come to terms with the philosophical genius of African thinkers who disdain the cant of decolonizing and find it worth their while, after critical evaluation to be sure, to appropriate the core tenets of modernity as fundaments of their own thinking both in politics and in moral philosophy. This is as it should be because, again, in Irele’s words: We must not forget, too, that African labor and resources went into the building of the material prosperity of the West. In many ways, therefore, we have a claim upon Western civilization, as well as a considerable stake in it, as the instrument for the necessary transformation of our world. It is in our interest to make good that claim, to adopt strategies that will make our stake in that civilization pay handsome dividends. We cannot do this if we continue to be burdened by the complexes implanted in us under colonialism, and which are only intensified by cultural nationalism. If the Japanese had been deterred by the insults constantly hurled at them by the Europeans during the last century, they would not have been where they are today: as we all know, the yellow peril has become with time the yellow paradigm.36 But because of a penchant for nativism buoyed by a crude conflation of colonialism with modernity, we ignore Irele’s wisdom. We are not able to engage the eminently modern appropriations of a Fanon, a Cabral, or a Fatima Mernissi, a Saad Eddin Ibrahim, or Abdulai An-Naim.37 When Nelson Mandela put his triers on their back heels at his treason trial, he was not channeling some “traditional” legal philosophy nor did Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Insofar as we do not see beyond a superficial understanding of the many possible responses Africans have had to colonization across time and space, we are not able to have a robust representation of ethical debates in the African world, for example, between Senghor and Soyinka on the ethics of reconciliation.38 Much of the debate about politics and its exigencies in contemporary Africa unfolds almost innocently of theory and of the philosophical foundations of the institutions of representative government, impartial judiciary, rule of law and separation of powers that we seek to install in our various countries. Thus, it often seems as if our political operatives are building without proficiency in the discourses that structure our institutions. Scholars and practitioners alike are literally operating with significant knowledge deficits. Africa cannot afford to continue to proceed the way it has done so far in building modern institutions without deeper knowledge of the philosophical templates from which those institutions and practices were forged. We should stop shooting darts in the dark when it comes to redeeming the promise of modernity for our citizens. At a time when Africans are prosecuting their second struggle for freedom, it is a disservice to them to keep reinforcing this wall obscuring the full spectrum of African engagements with colonialism and its aftermath. A genuine commitment to human liberation cannot afford anything less.3