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Socialism and Democracy

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Introduction: The African Post-Colonial State in Crisis

Teodros Kiros

To cite this Article Kiros, Teodros(2007) 'Introduction: The African Post-Colonial State in Crisis', Socialism and
Democracy, 21: 3, 1 — 3
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08854300701599783
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300701599783

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 Introduction: The African Post-Colonial
State in Crisis

Teodros Kiros
Downloaded By: [Michigan State University] At: 19:53 26 January 2010

Crisis is a medical term, connoting a progressive deterioration of

the human body, threatening death unless a competent physician inter-
venes. Similarly, in the life of the African polis, crisis is a metaphor for
the dysfunctionality of institutions, most specifically, the state – that
institution which is meant to be the blood of the citizens, their center
of being. When the state fails to engage the citizens’ intelligence,
when it miserably violates their rights, when it also fails to deliver
the common good, a crisis ensues and the specter of revolution
and revolt looms on the horizon. Such a condition calls for social
movements to be the beacons of change and the harbingers of
transformation.
When the state enters a crisis, the lifeline of the citizen is threa-
tened. This is the situation of Africa now. Unless this crisis is medi-
cated, as Frantz Fanon would have said, the African state will
degenerate into war and its citizens will lose all the rights and privi-
leges that came with formal independence; they will devolve to the
zone of non-being, and will become socially and politically dead.
Africana philosophy, literature, literary theory, critical sociology,
feminist theory, and political theory, in the deft hands of scholars
and thinkers, have come together to respond to this crisis in this
special issue of Socialism and Democracy devoted to Africa, sounding a
clarion call for change, embodied in new subjectivities mediated by a
new concrete universal and anchored in social movements crucial to
transforming the African condition.


In the process of assembling such an important issue, the attempt to be judicious and
comprehensive is not always realized. I am aware that there is much more to be said
about the questions dealt with here, and that many able thinkers on matters of common
concern are not included. I hope that some of them will be represented in future issues
of this journal. I am solely responsible for any lacunae that critics may discover.

Socialism and Democracy, Vol.21, No.3, November 2007, pp.1–3

ISSN 0885-4300 print/ISSN 1745-2635 online
DOI: 10.1080/08854300701599783 # 2007 The Research Group on Socialism and Democracy
 2 Socialism and Democracy

The African crisis, argues Abiola Irele, is most evident in the visual
and literary presentation of Africa once again as the zone of non-being,
presented to the world in various guises as the epitome of helplessness
and anguish. The African self is novelized as an anguished non-being.
The passions and goodwill that were once part of post-independence
Africa quickly gave way to the gloom, pestilence, HIV/AIDS, war,
and poverty characteristic of contemporary Africa.
This reality is well captured in Irele’s essay. For the Western
literary imagination, the condition of Africa is so dystopian that the
African self is now a symbol of the worst that could happen to a
human being. In this view Africa is not the heart of light, but rather
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the “heart of darkness.” The Africa that was the center of human
civilization is now the originator of HIV/AIDS. The Africa of the Iliad
and the Odyssey – an embodiment of hospitality, generosity, and cul-
tural polish – is now a site of perversion and of war. Endless commen-
taries present Rwanda, Darfur, Ethiopia, and Eritrea as places of
brutality and savagery. Everything that is not amenable to change
and transformation is considered typically African. The Afro-optimism
of the immediate post-independence period has now been fully dis-
placed by what Irele calls Afro-pessimism. Irele does not endorse the
Afro-pessimistic portrait; he merely presents it as it floods the media.
Kwasi Wiredu, on the other hand, puts forward an Afro-optimistic
view, suggesting that the African condition can perhaps be resolved by
a consensual democracy built on compromise as the essence of
decision-making. Wiredu’s philosophically rigorous argument offers
an ideal scenario, but its implementation requires objective insti-
tutional support, which can be mediated only by social movements.
It is within these movements that the practice of consensual democracy
must be nurtured through the art of compromise.
Paget Henry joins this discussion by carrying further Fanon’s
vision of turning a new leaf and taking seriously C.L.R. James’s
respect for the common people as the originators of transformative par-
ticipatory politics. Henry believes, along with Marx, Fanon, and James,
that emancipation is the mission of working people. This principle
applies most poignantly to the African condition, and Nigel Gibson
shows its workings in the revolutionary activities of the “poors” of
Durban, South Africa, who, when faced with broken promises, did
not wait for the African National Congress (ANC) to organize them,
but took law and order into their revolutionary hearts and hands,
rejecting the efforts of the bourgeois state to silence them and covert
them into docile subjects. They said no to docility and yes to the trans-
formative politics of the streets.
 Teodros Kiros 3

Daniel Egan uses Fanon’s ideas of the alienated self by showing the
role of racialized categories in the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
He argues, quite originally, that race is constructed as a tool of the
material and symbolic “niggerizing” of the oppressed. That one is
white, and therefore essentially born to rule, and the other is black,
and therefore destined to be ruled, is a binary language that is used
to rationalize the exploitation of the colonized. In his view, the subjuga-
tion of Iraqis is a particular case of what Paget Henry calls “negrifica-
tion.” The repressive binary universal, however, hides a liberating
solidarity of all the oppressed, who could transform the repression
into an emancipatory “humanist universalism” in the self-activity of
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a social movement that aims at ending racial and ethnic categories by

fighting imperialism in all the streets, shantytowns, and cities where
the “Wretched of the Earth” reside.
Judith Van Allen examines the changing gender roles in Botswana,
as women mobilize to end legal and political inequalities affecting them
within each social class. Rejecting a longstanding culture of male supre-
macy, women are uniting to construct a new concrete universal,
inspired by the South African struggle against apartheid. What is
remarkable about Van Allen’s thesis is that it points to the new inde-
pendent role that women can play in effecting lasting change of the
African condition via social movements freed from manipulation by
dysfunctional states. Botswanan women, like their South African
sisters, are living examples of changes to come in the Africa of the
future.
Biodun Jeyifo pushes Fanon’s vision to embrace Amilcar Cabral’s
revolutionary quest for a cultural modernity that can accommodate
the complex history of African nationalities, ethnicities, and languages.
The continent’s future is poignantly portrayed in the narratives of
Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. Jeyifo collects the scattered insights
of Achebe’s political and literary interventions into one systematic
whole, in which culture is viewed, in the spirit of Cabral, as a kernel
of appropriation and transcendence, blending resistance and creativity.
In my own essay, I join this quest by articulating a vision of a new
human being originally organized by Maat, an African symbol of
justice, truth, uprightness, tolerance, and compassion. In so doing, I
suggest a basis for reorganizing African moral and economic life.