African renaissance and spirituality

Abstract

The African Renaissance is now more than just an idea . . . In South Africa itself, ten years of democracy have ripened our discussions and deepened our insights. We are less starry‐eyed and euphoric, and more cautious; less optimistic but more hopeful. We are beginning to understand much better just how much South Africa is part of Africa, as we are beginning to understand that ‘Africa’ is much more than a geographical connotation. Africa is its mountains and rivers, its valleys and high places; its sweeping savannas and its dense forests; its rich soil and its intimidating deserts. But Africa is Africa mostly in her children wherever they may dwell: in the wisdom of her elders and the courage of her youth, the strength of her mothers and the dedication of her fathers. Being an African is not simply a question of sharing the land, it is sharing the fate of Africa. We have come to understand Africa not just as a place, but as a manifestation of a vision; not just the land that we come from, but the destiny that we are called to fulfil.

Africa has a rich diversity of spiritualities and proffers a deep well from which we can all drink. Within the context of the African Renaissance we are called to look anew at those values, and see how, within our new situation they could contribute to the foundation and the fabric, the content and the practical implementation of the African Renaissance for the good of all our people.     

Democracy,African intellectuals and African Renaissance

Abstract

This article argues that democracy is a prerequisite for the African Renaissance. The role of African intellectuals is crucial in making the dream of the African Renaissance come true. This article revisits the discourse on the African Renaissance, its history and content before dealing with the issue of democracy. Democracy is closely related to human rights and development and is a sine qua non for the African Renaissance. The current discourse on the African Renaissance is not new. The first international conference on the African Renaissance was held in Dakar, Senegal, from 26 February to 2 March 1996 where African intellectuals gathered to celebrate the works of Professor Cheikh Anta Diop, ten years after his death. The theme of the conference was ‘African Renaissance in the Third Millennium’. The first African Renaissance Conference in South Africa took place from 28 to 29 September 1998. Thabo Mbeki ‐ then, Deputy Pesident of South Africa ‐ read the keynote address on ‘Giving the Renaissance content: Objectives and definitions’. This article complements efforts at redefining the roles of African intellectuals in fostering democracy through a conscious application of the framework of African Renaissance.     

Re-membering my ways of knowing and learning while ‘learning otherwise’

ABSTRACT

To some people, African languages are insufficiently valued or good for nothing. Such people do not find any economic value in African languages. However, the African renaissance can inject a new lease of life into African languages. The African linguistic renaissance implies uplifting the status and use of African languages. It also means taking African languages into domains where their economic value will rise. This requires a drastic change in how African languages are perceived and treated. This article argues that, as part of the African renaissance, African languages should become income generators or job-creating entities. There is great potential for African languages to attain such economically rewarding status. African languages have slept for so long that they can now be compared to devalued currencies. The article suggests some ways through which a vibrant African languages industry can be developed and sustained.     

African indigenous ecology control and sustainable community livelihood in southern African history

Abstract

Based on sources for African Indigenous Ecology Control and Sustainable Community Livelihood in Southern African history this article argues that political independence in the Southern African region has altered the historiography of the region and the African continent as a whole. Black Africans are now looking to the past for inspiration to constitute the foundations of sustainable livelihoods using their own indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) and resources. The indicatives of the African Renaissance also demand that we draw on the significance of the control by pre-colonial African communities of their ecosystems. Existing testimonies show prosperity among pre-colonial African communities in the region. The argument is that, in order to restore the historical achievements of Africans in the region, IKS should form a constitutive part of education.     

African Renaissance: The need for gender-inclusive developmental states

ABSTRACT

This article was developed from a paper presented at a seminar at the Africa Institute of South Africa in Pretoria in 2006 while the author was an Archie Mafeje Fellow. It argues the urgent need for the construction and consolidation of gender-inclusive democratic developmental states as central to grounding the concept of an African Renaissance, for an effective transformation of the human condition, and for ensuring that this renaissance does not become romanticised and meaningless. While the notion of developmental states has gained currency in recent years, very little, if at all, has been said about gender in relation to these debates – despite the United Nations warning that ‘without engendering development, development itself is endangered.’ In other words, formulating and implementing development policies with gender lenses are crucial for development.     

Denigrating the local,glorifying the foreign: Malawian language policies in the era of African Renaissance

ABSTRACT

Malawi's Vision 2020 document, a national document that serves as a vehicle to project a future for a more developed, secure and democratically mature nation, laments the tendency of Malawians to denigrade local products and glorify all things foreign. Yet, paradoxically, the document does not address the important issue of promoting Malawi's indigenous languages. This silence can be interpreted as reflective of the population's inclination to ascribe greater value to foreign culture. In Malawi, as in many other African countries, indigenous languages are not considered worthy as media of education, subjects of advanced study or critical vehicles for national development. They are still victim to a discrimination rooted in Africa's 500 plus years of European enslavement and colonisation. Against the backdrop of the pursuit of an African Renaissance, this article looks at Malawi's language policies since independence in 1964, and at how, ten years short of an idyllic national vision, Malawi measures up on the important issue of language.     

Africa's indigenous languages as the cornerstone of the African Renaissance

Abstract

This article explores and emphasises the crucial link between the African Renaissance and Africa's indigenous languages. It sheds light on the impact of colonial languages on Africa's colonial state. Indigenous African languages, Ndhlovu (2008, 42) says ‘are essential for the decolonisation of African minds and for the African Renaissance’. However, the finding was that the promotion of colonial languages at the expense of indigenous African languages is characteristic of the colonial state of Africa. The argument is, therefore, in favour of the consideration of indigenous African languages in the promotion of African Renaissance.     

Meeting Cheikh Anta Diop on the Road to African Resurgence

The African people's relentless struggle to tell their own stories and take charge of their own historical languages is a prerequisite for achieving an African Renaissance. This argument, informed by Afrocentricity—a theoretical framework which advances the view that any examination of African issues must be informed by African history and culture—takes its cue from the great Senegalese Pan-Africanist and African Renaissance advocate, Cheikh Anta Diop. The year 2018 marks 70 years since Diop, at a tender age of 25, wrote his essay When will we be able to speak of an African Renaissance? On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of this article, it is appropriate that the African Renaissance project advocates take a moment and deeply reflect on how they can take African scholarship to higher levels and intensify and consolidate the struggle to liberate Africa from being preoccupied with the Eurocentric trajectory of privileging Europe and Europeans in all aspects of life—the intellectual, political, cultural, social and material. This article argues that embracing Africology—the Afrocentric approach to scholarship—is the first step towards the liberation of a scholarship project. Diop dedicated his life to using sciences—both the natural and social sciences for the liberation of Africa and humankind—to liberate Africans from inferiority complex, and Europeans from superiority complex. Although Diop recognised both the importance of science and ideology in the service of humanity, he drew a line between them.     

The role of mathematics and scientific thought in Africa: A Renaissance perspective

ABSTRACT

This article examines the centrality of mathematics and scientific thought in the sociocultural, human and intellectual development of a sampling of African societies. Evidence is presented which refutes the theory that Africans had no ‘intelligible sense of numeracy’ before contact with the West, and demonstrates that the propagation of this myth was part of the larger colonial project to marginalise and ‘other-ise’ African knowledge systems. Tracing Africa's early contributions to mathematics and scientific thought forces a shift from the standard Western-based approach to pedagogy in this field. It renders a subject that is perceived and presented as alien to African culture, more accessible to African learners. And ultimately, acknowledging the long history of mathematics and scientific thought in Africa is a step in foregrounding African epistemologies in knowledge production, human and social development and towards the realisation of the African Renaissance.     

THE RENAISSANCE FACTOR IN SOUTH AFRICA AND THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF AFRICAN REGIONAL GOVERNANCE (1999-2008)

ABSTRACT

This article examines a likely South African hegemony in Africa between 1999 and 2008. Hegemony is admittedly difficult to define in African regionalism studies, as it is counter intuitive to Pan-Africanism discourse. However, this article aims to show that hegemony can be a credible argument in explaining the South African driven changes that occurred in African regionalism between 1999 and 2008. The article locates key characteristics which underpin arguments of South African hegemony during the study timeline. It argues that Thabo Mbeki's governance philosophy of African renaissance was the central piece of South African Africa foreign policy that distinguishes this period from any other before or after it. By establishing hegemonic credibility in South Africa's interaction with Africa in this period, the article demonstrates how South Africa was able to contribute to transformational governance changes in Africa. This also holds lessons for South African regional ascendancy in the future.     

Towards an Afrokology of knowledge production and African regeneration

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of the scientificity of studying and generally investigating historical phenomena in which African achievements are properly recognised and appropriated as such by all humanity. This approach is not necessarily African‐centric or Afrocentric. It is a universal scientific approach that goes beyond Eurocentricism. It recognises other sources of knowledge as valid within their historical, cultural or social contexts, and seeks to dialogue with them. It recognises tradition as a fundamental pillar in the creation of such cross‐cultural knowledge in which Africans can stand out as having been the forebearers of much of what is called a Greek or European heritage. This scientific approach is provisionally called Afrokology, which encompasses the philosophical, epistemological and methodological issues, all seen as part of the process of creating an African self‐understanding that can place Africa in today's global world, and in which it is recognised as a full partner and forebear of much of the human heritage.

African scholars must pursue knowledge production that can renovate African culture, defend the African people's dignity and civilisational achievements and contribute afresh to a new global agenda that can push humanity out of the crisis of modernity as promoted by the European Enlightenment. Such knowledge must be relevant to the current needs of the masses, which they can use to bring about a social transformation out of their present plight. We cannot just talk about the production of ‘knowledge for its own sake’ without interrogating its purpose. There cannot be such a thing as the advancement of science for its own sake. Those who pursue ‘science for its own sake’ find that their knowledge is used for purposes which they may never have intended it. Eurocentric knowledge is not produced purely for its own sake. Its purpose throughout the ages has been to enable them to ‘know the natives’ in order to take control of their territories, including human and material resources (Said 1978) for their benefit. Such control of knowledge was used to exploit the non‐European peoples, to colonise them both mentally and geo‐strategically, as well as to subordinate the rest of the world to their designs and interests. This article adopts and explores Afrokology, a philosophical, epistemological and methodological approach that emphasises that Africa's achievements are recognised.

The issue of an African Renaissance, which has been advanced politically, especially by the South African President Thabo Mbeki, cannot be viewed as an event in the politics of the African political elites, although that may be their purpose. It has to be taken up, problematised, interrogated and given meaning that goes beyond the intentions of its authors, and involve the masses of the African people in it if it has the potential to mobilise. It can be used as an occasion for beginning the journey of African psychological, social, cultural as well as political liberation. It can also be used as a mobilisation statement and the basis for articulating an African agenda for knowledge production that is not only relevant to African conditions, but also sets an agenda for the reclaiming of African originality of knowledge and wisdom, which set the rest of human society on the road of civilisation.     

Cosmopolitanism and the African Renaissance: Pixley I. Seme and Alain L. Locke

Abstract

The heretofore unknown relationship between Pixley kaIsaka Seme, one of the founders of the African National Congress, and Alain L. Locke, the primary architect of the Harlem Renaissance, is revealed and explored. I suggest that Seme's Pan-African sensibilities created the conditions for Locke to explore what it means to pursue an African Renaissance; and Locke's focus on literary expression was an exemplar for Seme's later forays in journalism and cosmopolitan unions across ethnic lines. Seme and Locke, however, created significantly different concepts of African regeneration, Renaissance, race and cosmopolitanism. Their concepts are described and evaluated. Seme's approach to Renaissance is criticised for its reliance on an ideal of valuation that renders values stable and unchanging. Locke's value theory contends that valuation is necessarily engaged in transvaluation, thus, human cognition is necessarily always engaged in creating new value categories. Locke's approach is criticised because it allows for what I define as ‘sophisticated cruelty’ – the unintentional social destruction of ethnic group values. I argue that Locke's approach of moderate cosmopolitan has the least theoretical disadvantages of major concepts of cosmopolitanism and Pan Africanism.     

Africa and its Diaspora: The principal reciprocal benefits to be derived from the amended Constitutive Act of the African Union

Abstract

Under article 3(q) (Objectives) of the Protocol on Amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union, we read the following: ‘invite and encourage the full participation of the African Diaspora as an important part of our continent, in building the African Union (AU)’. According to the AU, ‘The African Diaspora are peoples of African descent and heritage outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and who remain committed to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union’. Not only is this posture entirely consistent with the African development agenda and Renaissance, but it is also congruent with the recent and first-ever AU African Diaspora Summit which was convened on Friday, 25 May 2012, at the Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg. This is so because the Summit provided us with an excellent opportunity to continue to reflect on, and engage with, issues relevant to the development of the continent and, by extension, its multilingual and globally dispersed Diaspora. In this public lecture, it is argued that the current Amendment to the Constitutive Act of the AU in which the African Diaspora is now considered the sixth Region of the AU – an Amendment which has not yet been ratified by the requisite number of African states and one which might still be in need of some degree of disambiguation – provides the framework within which some fundamental and reciprocal benefits can be derived from an ongoing interaction between Africa and its Diaspora – especially its Older or Historic Diaspora. In essence, it is my contention that the principal reciprocal benefits that can accrue from this interaction between Africa and its Diaspora might best be captured in the language of pan-Africanisation and re-Africanisation respectively.     

Centre for African renaissance studies,the academy,the state and civil society: Methodological implications of transdisciplinarity and the African perspective

Abstract

The Centre for African Renaissance Studies (CARS) at the University of South Africa was born in a political and social environment in which there is a new groundswell for a rebirth, where there are calls for ownership, accountability, excellence, responsiveness and substantive democracy on new terms. Surrounding the centre are the state, the academy and civil society, each with its limitations as well as possibilities for an institution that is established to foster, nourish and effect change in the context of the African Renaissance. The challenge before CARS is therefore one that involves the creation of new knowledge, analyses and interpretations of social reality on an ongoing basis. In working out its linkages and its strategies for dialogue, engagement and co‐determination around the past, present and future of Africa, with players such as the state, the academy and civil society in general, therefore, the centre needs of necessity to clarify its position, role and vision in the field of knowledge production. It is here that transdisciplinarity signifies a distinct methodology in knowledge generation, development and utilisation. This article argues that the nature of the crisis we face today is definitely no longer that of ‘economics’, ‘politics’ or ‘culture’ per se; neither is it, for that matter, a crisis of the humanities versus the natural sciences; but rather it is one in which there is a peculiar convergence of all these factors and which, together, form an entirety exceeding the sum of its parts.     

Public and private higher education in South Africa in the context of the African renaissance

Abstract

This article examines the concept of higher education as a public good in relation to the currently evolving interface between public and private higher education in post‐apartheid South Africa. In order to illuminate the significance of the particular ways in which this public‐private divide is unfolding, the first part of the article sketches the history of the emergence of higher education from the South African public and private elementary and secondary education system, and reaches some conclusions about the social, political and economic considerations that drove the emergence of this dualism in the colonial era and during apartheid, and the emergent assumptions on education as a public good. Making use of Amartya Sen's thesis of development as the expansion of freedoms, the second part constitutes an examination of the manner in which the liberatory agenda of post‐apartheid education policy is shaping the current articulation between public and private higher education in South Africa. This is specifically with respect to issues of access, funding and knowledge acquisition and production. This article makes observations, not only about the consequences for development of the particular ways in which the public‐private divide is evolving and how the nature of the interface connects with issues of the public good in education, but also about the degree to which the drive for the marketisation of education is impacting on current understandings of education as a public good. In the very last section, a South African case study is used to provide broad commentary on the nature of the public‐private interface that may benefit development in the context of the African Renaissance.     

Good governance and democratic leadership for an African Renaissance: A reflection on AU member states’ compliance with the AUCPCC

Abstract

After decades of corrupt post-colonial governance, African leaders collectively acknowledged that good governance was a prerequisite for African renewal and required an unprecedented fight against corruption prevailing on the continent. The Constitutive Act of the African Union (CA-AU) features good governance among its objectives and principles. Good governance was stressed further in subsequent AU instruments adopted within the framework of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and its African Peer-Review Mechanism (APRM). AU leaders’ commitment to fighting corruption culminated in the adoption of the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption (AUCPCC).

As Africans prepare to commemorate the first decade since the adoption of the AUCPCC, this article reflects on AU member states’ compliance with this instrument, the challenges, and the prospects for a successful fight against corruption. It argues that despite some progress made, this scourge remains unabated and has even aggravated. Most African states have failed to comply fully with the AUCPCC. However, the fight against corruption should be strengthened with the participation of all the stakeholders at national, regional and international levels. Partnerships have to be built and consolidated without neglecting the crucial contribution of the people under a democratic leadership committed to good governance in order to achieve an African Renaissance in the 21^st century.     

AFRICAN RENAISSANCE AND NEGOTIATION OF YORUBA IDENTITY IN THE DIASPORA: A CASE STUDY OF NIGERIAN STUDENTS IN CAPE TOWN

ABSTRACT

Drawing on poststructuralist discourse analysis and Hall's (1990) notion of diaspora cultural identities, this article explores the discontinuation and maintenance of Yoruba identity options by students at three Western Cape Province universities. Interviews and observations data are used to consider how different forms of representations and cultural practices associated with Yoruba in Nigeria lead to equally fragmented and hybrid lifestyles and identity options in the Diaspora due to the changed socio-cultural conditions. The argument shows the ruptures and fragmentation of Yoruba cultural elements as students try to fit into the South African socio-cultural contexts while trying to live ‘home’ life away from home. It also shows cultural appropriation by local South Africans who claim Nigerian [Yoruba] affiliation through wearing Yoruba attire and partaking in Nigerian [Yoruba] cuisine. The authors argue that identities are produced across national and ethnic boundaries not only through language choices, but also through dress, food and other semiotic resources, and that to promote the ideals of an African renaissance, there is need to recognise that Africa is a consequence of not just similarities, but more so of various critical points of profound difference and discontinuity. The article concludes that African renaissance entails embracing shared African cultural heritage and differences as the norm; and transnational competition, interdependency and interconnectedness are critical ingredients for the technological and socio- economic development of Africa.     

Reclaiming our minds; reclaiming our souls; reclaiming our people: A call to the black world

Abstract

From Barbados to Burundi and from New Guinea to Nigeria, almost all that is known about crucial developments in other black nations comes from white world news organisations ‐ BBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and other corporate‐controlled media. Owing to this, as well as to the general longstanding relationship between the white world and the African Diaspora, our peoples, our strivings, our triumphs ‐ are either routinely ignored or grotesquely distorted. There is no structural mechanism for the sharing of information throughout the African Diaspora. As a result, we truly are at the mercy of a corporate‐controlled media that not only presents either no information or distorted information about the African Diaspora to the rest of the world, but feeds these distortions to us throughout the African Diaspora. In the process, the international media promotes and inculcates standards and values that are philosophically and culturally discordant with the global African reality.

Governments and peoples of the African Diaspora must begin to discuss, debate, and re‐think for ourselves, and amongst ourselves, those circumstances and conditions, those values and realities, those yardsticks by which we will measure and judge ourselves. It is based on these standards that we should judge and assess the health and appeal of all nations. There are certain priorities, of course, that all nations and peoples should embrace ‐ an informed and educated populace; affordable health care for all; employment that serves the needs of the individual and the interests of the nation. Beyond that, however, throughout the Diaspora we in the African Diaspora must recognise the strengths that are uniquely ours, and build on them. The giraffe becomes a pathetic caricature when it attempts to be a gazelle. The time has come for us to reclaim and re‐assert our essential African‐ness; to build societies where the social, economic, and spiritual development of the human being is paramount; to recognise all that is ours materially and spiritually ‐ the minerals in the earth, the forests above it, our waterways, our God‐given resources that for so long have been the source of enormous wealth for everyone but us; our traditions, our values, culture, our kinship networks, our humanity.     

Towards a new paradigm for pan‐African knowledge production and application in the context of the African renaissance

Abstract

The article argues that the primary purpose of education, both formal and non‐formal, is the development of interrelated and interdependent sets of human capacity to think, to know and to act by honing social consciousness or awareness, values and skills. Investing in education is therefore viewed as investment in the development of social capital that combines with material resources and other non‐material phenomena to produce goods and services, as well as a favourable spiritual environment for human sustenance and development.

Education in Africa needs a fundamental paradigm change which entails, among other things, focusing on confronting, with a view to correcting and departing from, hegemonic knowledge and knowledge systems that are predicated on racist paradigms that have deliberately and otherwise distorted, and continue to distort, the reality of who Africans really are. The article visits some of the terrains most in need of this change: contestations about the roles Africans and Africa have played in human civilisation during the four main historical periods to date: Africa's leadership as the cradle of humankind or the Naissance of Humanity; Africa's leadership in all fields of knowledge and human achievements at the beginning of modern civilisation up to about the fourteenth century AD; the fifteenth century AD to the present which marks the only period in human development when Africa and Africans have been dominated and marginalised by mainly European civilisation and its global projections; and, the emerging era of the renaissance of Africa and other marginalised peoples.

A model curriculum that requires supplementation by the specific characteristics of each country that adopts it is suggested as a step towards this paradigm change. This modest effort at constructing a model curriculum is informed by the understanding that all Africans and peoples of African descent need to possess some basic, shared common knowledge about Africa, the Diaspora and the world ‐ and to acquire critical approaches to contextualised learning.     

In search of real justice for Africa and Africans,and her/their descendants in a world of justice,injustices and impunity

Abstract

The quest for justice by Africans and peoples of African descent, wherever they may be in the world, is arguably one of the most daunting mental, psychological, moral, legal and material challenges facing humanity in general, and the peoples of Africa in particular. It is a question of whether African peoples demand justice for the wrongs committed against Africa and its peoples over the last 500 years, or whether Africa and African peoples accept complicity in the global impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of those injustices, and by doing so diminish the significance of contemporary enthusiasm for global justice. Centralising the question of impunity to date for horrendous crimes, gross human and peoples’ rights violations and other injustices against Africa and Africans is not meant to distract Africans in Africa and the diaspora from the quest, in the 21^st century, for a new Africa that we have a historical responsibility to build and, by doing so, to ensure that the past is not repeated. Acknowledging the wrongs of the past and making symbolic reparative actions for those wrongs are essential for ensuring that the pursuit for a better world of justice is not built on top of underlying sinkholes and on the waste dumps of past injustices. Critical breakthroughs, such as the commitment enshrined in the Constitutive Act of the African Union (2000), on crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and the prohibition of unconstitutional change of government, must be vigorously pursued to their logical conclusion. To do so requires an understanding of where Africans, in their relationship with peoples in the rest of the world, are coming from. Smaller parts of the world have experienced similar heinous injustices with impunity, and Africa's pursuit of real justice also applies to those states and their peoples. Corrective or reparative justice is needed to clear the path for the meaningful and honest promotion of real global justice in the making of the future. It is imperative that the making of the African Renaissance confront real global justice for the sake of the past, the present and the future.