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.     

The psychological Renaissance

Abstract

Psychological renaissance is a critical step to an African Renaissance. It raises our level of self‐awareness and historical awareness. It is a precursor to the mental growth that is part of African Renaissance. Both in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora, we must be more awake, conscious of our history, our environment, of all the changes taking place, constantly processing information, and in full use of our brains ‐ at all times. In the struggle against economic and psychological enslavement which are the dual legacies of slavery and colonialism, it is absolutely necessary that we draw from our African values, our history and the examples set by our ancestors. This essay argues that a greater understanding of the motives for enslavement and racial domination is part of a psychological renaissance in a step towards an African Renaissance.     

Mbeki's African Renaissance Vision as Reflected in isiXhosa Written Poetry: 2005–2011

IsiXhosa literary critics have not yet interrogated literature that was produced during and after the tenure of Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki as deputy president and president of the Republic of South Africa in order to study the impact of his African Renaissance doctrine. This article analyses poetry that was produced from 2005 to 2011. The content of the isiXhosa written poetry is profoundly influenced by the context of former President Mbeki's African Renaissance philosophy, its implementation structures and philosophy of self-confidence and self-reliance. The selected poems analysed and interpreted in this article suggest that Mbeki's legacy of the African Renaissance empowered poets to develop a narrative that advances the building of a regenerated South African nation and the African continent. Selected poetry of the period is contextualised, and the findings reveal that the poets have a dialectical relationship with historical developments of the time, and that they demonstrate acquiescence to the African Renaissance ideology, and support the operational structures created; namely African Union, Pan-African Parliament and the Vuk’uzenzele programme.     

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.     

Africa unknown: Addressing the effects of an alienating education amongst learners in South Africa

Abstract

The article argues for the Africanisation of the South African education system, most critically at high school and tertiary levels. Using both experiential and theoretical reasoning, it seeks to present a compelling argument for the value of teaching our children, using methodologies, examples and stories they can relate to. It argues that this relatability is what will best develop the cognition of learners and better equip them to turn knowledge into action. The South African education system has often been seen as lacking a critical thinking and problem-solving element, and the article argues that this limitation is embedded in the abstractness of our curricula. The article presents a short case study highlighting just how little about Africa some of our best learners know. It ends by offering practical suggestions about how the education system could incorporate critical African knowledge in its learning models.     

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.     

“What is it that We Call the Nation”: Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala’s definition,diagnosis, and prognosis of the nation in a segregated South Africa

Abstract

This paper examines the ideology of Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala who spent 18 years in the United States from 1912 to 1930. Within two years of returning to South Africa, she founded the self-help group, the Daughters of Africa in 1932. Tshabalala used the Daughters and the widely read newspapers—Bantu World and Ilanga laseNatal—to define, construct, and diagnose the African nation she found materially and socially wanting upon her return. Tshabalala’s experience abroad and her exposure to African-American women’s clubs and her participation at the annual Chautauqua conferences in upstate New York provided the platform for her to conduct her own social service gospel in segregated South Africa. This essay, which argues that religion served as Tshabalala’s antidote to all the social ills plaguing the African nation, traces the evolution of her ideology by discussing how she was in conversation with African-American and South African male movements, and also women on the African continent.     

Counter-trafficking governance in South Africa: an analysis of the role of the KwaZulu-Natal human trafficking,prostitution, pornography and brothels task team

Determining the efficacy of available counter-trafficking strategies is just as important as understanding the phenomenon of human trafficking itself. This is so if anti-trafficking practitioners wish to make in-roads in preventing and combating human trafficking in South Africa. At the heart of the matter are the ways in which counter-trafficking governance is structured in the South African context. In this article we use the KwaZulu-Natal intersectoral task team, an un-resourced agency of provincial government mandated to prevent and combat human trafficking, as a case study to analyse the ‘4P model’ of counter-trafficking favoured in South Africa. We find that while such an integrated model has great potential, issues of institutional cooperation and coordination, pervasive public official corruption and budgetary constraints hamper its current impact and efficacy. We conclude that these issues must be addressed by South African policy-makers once legislation has been promulgated.     

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.     

Mbeki and the peace process in Africa: A contribution to Africa's renaissance

Abstract

Critics of South African President Thabo Mbeki's constant, consistent and continuous involvement in the continental wars and conflicts insist that the president's prime focus should be South Africa, and solving its basic problems of poverty and unemployment. However, it is important to highlight the duel relationship between South Africa and the continent during the long struggle against apartheid. Mozambique, Angola, and in part Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland are what they are now because of the reign of terror unleashed on them as a result of their direct support to the South African liberation movements. The poverty and starvation apparent in Angola and Mozambique were perpetrated by the white minority regime's constant bombing of, and acts of violence against these two countries, and direct support of the anti‐government forces. As for the South African liberation movements, they continued to exist and function mainly because of the support offered to them by their independent African brothers. It must be realised that without this support, which for some countries was very costly (i.e., economically, socially and psychologically), liberation would not have come when it did. It has fallen on the shoulders of the newly liberated South Africa to try and intervene in the wars that cause instability on the continent and to try to bring about peace.     

The Voice of (Which?) Africa: Miriam Makeba in America

Throughout her time as a concert singer in 1960s America Miriam Makeba was promoted as the embodied voice of a sonic, imagined Africa. Where her white audiences were attracted to the complete ‘‘otherness’’ of her African blackness, her black American audiences saw themselves – or imagined versions of themselves – put on stage, and built solidarities between their own struggle and the struggle against apartheid. In this essay, I argue that the discourses that followed Makeba’s voice and body reflected the evolving attitudes of America towards Africa, and, through Africa, its contradictory relationship to its own African American citizens. Makeba played on these discourses to craft a political and musical identity in solidarity with black and diasporic causes. This identity, embodied in the persona of ‘‘Mama Africa,’’ allowed Makeba the flexibility to speak to and for her fellow (South) Africans with cultural authority. By joining the oft-opposed positions of ‘‘Africa’’ and ‘‘The World,’’ Makeba became what I’m calling an African Cosmopolitan.     

South Africa’s Inclusion in BRICS: Challenges and Prospects for Development in Africa

Abstract

The forming of alliances on the international scene has reflected a provisional arrangement in the world economy. Amongst such alliances was the formation of BRICS by the five world economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa into what is commonly known as BRICS. BRICS is considered a joint initiative, aimed at shifting conventional norms in international economic and political cooperation to create a new trans-continental platform for these actors. Each member country in BRICS has, in one way or another, reflected growth either through its economy foreign policy, and developmental pursuit. However, South Africa is portrayed by some researchers as lagging behind, when compared to the other member countries. Hence, this study sought to analyse the potential mediumand long-term implications of South Africa's inclusion in BRICS. The study also aimed to underscore the benefits and risks associated with South Africa's membership in the alliance in the area of development; specifically poverty reduction, foreign policy, trade, and global partnership. The researchers collected secondary data to analytically critique the inclusion of South Africa in the BRICS alliance, its benefits, and shortcomings for development in South Africa, and in Africa as a whole. We argue that as a global player under BRICS, South Africa has opened a new vista of opportunities, including transnational gateways to Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with the attendant inflow of infrastructural and developmental investments, enriching educational exchanges and technology transfers. The article concludes by stressing the need for South Africa and other African countries to formulate policies that will drive meaningful development in their respective countries. The authors recommend that African leaders should come up with innate policies that are Africa-centred, that would incite development internally.     

Looking from South Africa to the World: A Story of Identity for our Times

The article is a consideration of the question of identity in South Africa, and also in a global context. Just as South Africa has looked to the world in order to understand its place, so too the world might look to South Africa to illuminate patterns less immediately visible elsewhere. Far from being unrepresentative in the apartheid period, South Africa was the ‘state of exception’ that incarnated and concentrated global realities; equally in the current era the reciprocal relations between the South African and the global evoke haunting concerns. The article begins with a consideration of the ‘classic’ generation of anti-apartheid activists, including figures such as Nelson Mandela and Bram Fischer, as they fashioned a new sense of South African identity. Yet it goes on to consider what happens when the classic period is over, and older definitions and oppositions are no longer available. Here the navigations of fiction, both in South Africa and elsewhere, become significant, and the article examines the work of writers from Gordimer, Coetzee and Ndebele, to Caryl Phillips and W. G. Sebald. It ends with a contemplation of the current period, nearly twenty years after the democratic transition in South Africa. In the era of the Marikana massacre and other pressing developments, both music and fiction open up some of the ambiguities and obligations. Drawing on Agamben, I suggest the intrinsic mutuality of the ‘home’ and the ‘foreign’ in establishing a more promising—and challenging—sense of belonging and identity both in South Africa and the world.     

Xenophobia across the class divide: South African attitudes towards foreigners 2003–2012

In May 2008 anti-immigrant riots in South Africa displaced more than a hundred thousand people. Despite the media attention that the riots attracted, there has been no study that presents trend data on anti-immigrant sentiment for the period after 2008. This paper uses data from the nine rounds of the South African Social Attitudes Survey over the period 2003–2012 to fill this gap and test the success of government commitments to reduce anti-immigrant prejudice. The results reveal that attempts to combat xenophobia have been ineffectual, with anti-immigrant sentiment prevalent and widespread in 2012. Afrophobia was observed, with a majority of citizens identifying foreign African nationals as the group they least wanted to come and live in South Africa. The government is advised to urgently address the alarming and widespread pervasiveness of anti-immigrant sentiment in South Africa.     

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.     

“Putting Food back on the table”: Decolonising towards a Sustainable University that Feeds Us in South Africa

Abstract

The higher education landscape in South African (SA) has recently experienced a wave of student movement organised under the #MustFall campaign, where students demanded quality and accessible higher education. This movement spoke against the colonial character of the curriculum, demographic representation, institutional cultures, and architecture of the university in South Africa today, which excludes the majority of the students who cannot access higher education in South Africa. It is in this context that the high cost of higher education was questioned, with some questioning the very “idea of the university”, and the role of the university in a society contending with income inequalities, unemployment, and poverty. This article seeks to position food at the centre of decolonising tools towards a sustainable African university of the future. Looking at growing levels of hunger, and the lack of access to food among our students, I argue that in putting food at the centre, regarding our understanding of the curriculum, shape, size, and future of the university in South Africa, we might begin to transform the exclusivist, uncaring and elitist spaces that define a university. In trying to rethink the ‘‘idea of the university’’ in South Africa I look at one of the enduring institutions of knowledge in African societies—uMakhulu (“Senior Mother/Grandmother”) as a body that can reconnect the African university to its matriarchal heritage, in order to define a university that can feed itself beyond the narrow neoliberal understanding of sustainability.     

South Africa's financial and economic prospects for the next five years

South African dominance of trade in Africa as well as its position as a regional hegemon was entrenched by the Trade, Development and Cooperation Agreement (TDCA) with the European Union in 1999. South Africa's full-blown integration into the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) formation since 2011 has brought new dynamics, however, as South Africa now has a marked BRICS orientation. Although the European Union (EU) as a bloc is still South Africa's largest trading partner, China has become South Africa's largest single-country trading partner. The question arises as to whether this new found loyalty makes sense in terms of South Africa's regional position and its trade prospects. Against the background of more intra-industry trade with the EU and the new and growing inter-industry trade with the other BRICS economies, South Africa's trade share of African trade has been in relative decline. This study uses an international political economy framework to analyse South African trade hegemony based on the TDCA and the possible effects of a shift towards BRICS. The conclusion is that, although the shift towards BRICS can politically be justified, economically it should not be at the expense of the benefits of the more advantageous relationship with the EU.     

Ubuntu. The missing link in the rights discourse in post-apartheid transformation in South Africa

ABSTRACT

A human rights discourse has been central to both the anti-apartheid struggle of South Africa and the country's post-apartheid transformation. But in the drive to extend constitutionally mandated social and economic rights to all South Africans, the approach has had shortcomings. The current neo-liberal economic policy framework constrains policy choices and, in some instances, restricts fair adjudication of rights by the courts. The revival of notions of African Renaissance and indigenous ethnophilosophies, notably ubuntu, which shares the primacy of human dignity of a rights discourse, offers new perspectives. This article looks at the limitations of the human rights discourse and at how ubuntu, as a principled basis for judicial decision making, can contribute to the evolution of the rights discourse in South Africa and lead towards greater realisation of constitutional rights for all.     

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.     

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.