Recentering Africa; what about marginal people?
Dear reader, let’s talk about my observations in the field of global studies and the current wave of resistance in Africa.
I studied International Relations with Journalism as my undergraduate degree. The theme of my undergraduate major revolved around European society, politics and history. The political instability that engulfed Europe historically, from the rise of fascist authoritarianism in Italy to the fall of the Weimar Republic and the eventual rise of nazism in Germany, to mention a few, were glorified as critical junctions of European state formation. I found these really fascinating to know if I’m being honest. However, the questions that filled my mind during my undergrad study were; Where is my continent? Why is no one talking about Africa?
Although ninety per cent of my modules were on Europe, I did a module on Latin American politics and another on the politics of the Middle East. However, Africa was subsumed under Western history and politics. A module on European history that featured the Scramble for Africa and another on US foreign policy touched on Africa, but there was none specifically on Africa. So, I thought my university did not deem African distinctive history, politics and society important enough to be placed at the centre of my major.
The numerous political crises that are currently tearing the fabric of Nigerian society apart pushed me towards pursuing a master’s degree in International Security. International Security is fundamentally a study of security challenges from war to violence to terrorism to weapons of mass destruction with particular emphasis on how to achieve international stability (or peace, if you like) amidst all this gruesome stuff. During my master’s, It struck me that analysis now explicitly referred to Africa. African political crises and civil wars such as the Biafran war were dissected in my classes. Therefore, it occurred to me that Africa was not altogether unimportant to be placed at the centre of my discipline. It could only be placed at the centre of the discourse of violence, marginality and state failure.
Essentially, in IR (and possibly in other disciplines), Africa is represented as a category of alterity, that horrible place where the state has failed with nothing working. Its people are seen as victims of overwhelming fate who need help from the male protector — the West. My biggest problem is with the failed state thesis, which is predicated on Western rationality and has been used to explain every political/security challenge in Africa. Interestingly, Western states were not designated as failed states when going through their horrific political crises historically. Instead, these crises (some of them took about a hundred years) were praised as part of the process of Western state formation, with some analysts quoting Charles Tilly’s famous phrase; ‘war makes states and states make war’. Tilly’s phrase, which means violent conflict is inextricably linked with statehood, is rendered invalid in the case of African states that have only been free from the shackles of European imperialism for 60 years on average. Some of the failed state theorists even go as far as whitewashing the colonial legacies that have intersected with local specificities to produce current African reality, thereby lending themselves to ahistoricism.
However, an increasing number of academic work is currently challenging this Eurocentric bias or ‘epistemological ethnocentrism’, as the Congolese philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe would have it. One of my admired post-colonial academics, Sierra Leone’s Zubair Wai, has emphasised the need to recenter Africa in International Relations and situate the continent beyond narratives of lack and failure. Outside of academia, from Sudan to Nigeria to Uganda, youth are challenging the domestic structures that have seemed to reify this discourse about Africa. Since the EndSARS protests in Nigeria, there has been an emerging civic space in which Twitter is instrumental. Women are increasingly appearing in the public sphere seeking to dismantle the logic of virtual authoritarian rule. For me, the work done in academia and the emerging civic space across Africa has a single goal — to change the continent’s destiny and, eventually, recenter it from the place of peripherality. These are interesting to see. In fact, I still cannot get over how the EndSARS protest shook the foundation of the patrimonial Buhari administration. However, my reservation is that are we really engaging those who need to be engaged beyond the Zoom meetings, Twitter updates and Clubhouse discussions?
I grew up in a town (now city) in far away Ondo state, Nigeria. Growing up in a small community and finally moving to the bustling city of Lagos after higher education has made me realise that there are two groups of people in Nigeria; The urban and the rural. While the former speaks the language of civic rights and inclusion, the latter is hell-bent on preserving their perceived ethnic heritage and customs even if it requires excluding others. Mahmood Mamdani has explained the powers in these places in his idea of a ‘bifurcated state’, suggesting that it is the case across Africa. As the word ‘rural’ means, the latter group live mostly in the villages, marginal areas and so-called ungoverned spaces and have no access to the internet, making them oblivious to the conversation on the online civic space. While we are speaking the language of inclusion on Twitter and in academia, these ones, vigorously supported by their local authorities, more often than not, lean towards exclusionary policies. In my conversation with one of them last year, a preference for a return to military or colonial rule was expressed. I was not quick to criticise them because I knew their assertion was born out of frustrations with the existing political order and the feeling of inability to change it.
It is almost a truism that the success of a revolution (using the term here loosely to include all forms of civil resistance) hinges on the ability to harness the support of those at society’s lower strata against the existing power structure. Thus, how can we actualise our vision of inclusivity or even decolonise the package of assumptions about Africa when in reality the minds of these people, who make 48.04% of the population in Nigeria, is still very much colonised and authoritarian? Can the remaining 51.96%, a bulk of which are apathetic to this new movement, drive home the change we so much desire in Nigeria and across Africa?
A few weeks ago, I put up an Instagram story quoting Mudimbe; ‘For Africa, truly escaping the West involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from it…’. This quote was originally Foucault’s but was rephrased by Mudimbe to critique the philosophy of (African) social science. However, an urban university graduate in Nigeria did not see it from this context and replied, ‘the price is bad governance.’ I was taken aback. A supposedly informed youth was insinuating that Africans were not capable of good governance unless kept under the duress of Western neo-colonialism. This shows that the thinkings of some urban people and the rural person I had a conversation with are similar. The only difference is that the latter’s ignorance is not willing.
For this reason, I think our commitment to decolonising or recentering Africa would be hypothetical without engaging the necessary people. I believe in the power of small and careful action as they are what make and remake the world. A viable means of debunking the oriental tropes that have othered Africa is to decolonise the minds of marginal people and those who think like them in the city. More community outreaches are needed to achieve open government and hijack rural people from the parasitic elites, who exploit them for electoral gain. Indeed, there have been ‘humanitarian’ outreaches by NGOs before now. I put the word ‘humanitarian’ in quotes because of my reservation with the concept of humanitarianism itself which I think is usually top-down, embodies power relations and is about the humanitarian more so than the helped. My point is not that humanitarian assistance should not be given, but that rural people should not be seen as a project. Beyond passive recipients of groceries and sanitary pads, they should be seen as people with agency and those that can be involved in the actualisation of the African dream. One community at a time!
