Professor Lebona Mosia,80 an arts academic in South Africa, recently reflected on our Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki’s concept of an African renaissance of roots, values and identity, remarking (I quote) that our people are emerging from an ‘imaginary history … whose white folks believed that South Africa is part of Europe, America (the USA) and Australia. Blacks have always recognised that they are part of Africa.’ The same ‘imaginary history’ of course applies to Pan-Africa, to the thinking of all ex-colonial powers.
Does Thabo Mbeki’s renaissance sound like a renaissance of negritude?
I don’t believe it is. Or could be. Circumstances in our countries have changed so fundamentally since that concept of the 1950s, when liberation was still to be won. The reality of African history has long begun to be recorded and established, from where it was cut off as anthropology and prehistory and substituted by the history of foreign conquest and settlers. One of the dictionary definitions of the wide meanings of renaissance is ‘any revival in art and literature’; as we writers take to ourselves the right to vary or add to the meaning of words, I would interpret the meaning of renaissance in Mbeki’s context not as reviving the past, whether pre-colonial or of the negritude era, but of using it only as a basis for cultural self-realisation and development in an Africa that never existed before, because it is an Africa that has come through: emerged from the experience of slavery, colonial oppression, the humiliating exploitation of paternalism, economic and spiritual degradation, suffering of every nature human evil could devise. A continent that has liberated itself; overcome.
Africans have established, beyond question, that our continent is not part of anyone’s erstwhile empire. Secure in this confidence, and open-eyed at home as I hope we shall be to the necessity to apply ourselves to developing Africa’s literary variety to and fro across our own Pan-African frontiers, it’s time to cross new frontiers on our cultural horizon, to turn the literary compass to measure whether we still should be pointing in the same direction towards the outside world.
Which world? Whose world? The North–South axis was the one on which we were regarded so long only as on the receiving end, and which, latterly, we have somewhat culturally reversed: African writers have won prestigious literary prizes in England and France, and even Nobel prizes; African music has become popular abroad, the international fashion industry presently has a vogue for somewhat bizarre adaptations of African traditional dress – well, Africa dressed itself up in Europe’s three-piece suits, collar and tie; now Europe wraps itself in a pagne, a dashiki, a bou-bou …
Of course we do, and should, retain our freedom of access to, appropriation of, European and North American literary culture. I believe we have passed the stage, in the majority of our countries, of finding Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Voltaire and Melville, irrelevant. I believe that, as writers and readers, all literature of whatever origin belongs to us. There is an acceptable ‘world literature’ in this sense; one great library to which it would be a folly of self-deprivation to throw away our membership cards.
What has happened is that the works of our own writers, imparting the ethos of our peoples, have firmly and rightfully displaced those of Europeans as the definitive cultural texts in our schools and universities.
But if you place the compass on a map you will see not alone that South–South and not North–South is our closer orientation, but that if you cut out the shape of South America and that of Africa you can fit the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa together, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle making a whole – the lost continent Gondwana, sundered by cosmic cataclysms and seas.
This romantic geographical connection is merely symbolic of the actual, potential relationships that lay dormant and ignored during the colonial period when our continent of Africa was set by European powers strictly on the North–South axis. Climate and terrain are primary experiences for human beings; many South American and African countries share the same kind of basic natural environment, which determines not only the types of food they grow and eat, but the myths they created, and the nature of city life they have evolved. Both continents were conquered by European powers, their culture overrun and denigrated. Both have won their freedom from foreign powers through suffering, and suffered subsequently under brutal dictators in internecine wars among their own people. Both bear a burden of their people’s poverty and confront neo-colonialism exacted in return for their need of economic aid. Finally, there is the strange reciprocal bond: with those communities in South America descended from slaves brought from Africa.
All this in common, and yet we know so little of South American writers’ work and life. Aside from some few big names, such as Borges of Argentina, Machado de Assis of Brazil, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and now Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, we do not know the work of the majority of South American writers, with whom, in many ways, we have more existential ties than with writers in Europe and North America.
Industrialists and entrepreneurs are opening up their South–South routes of trade, matching the exchange of raw materials, processing and expertise which countries in South America and Africa can supply for one another. They are giving more than a side-glance away from the fixed gaze of North–South development. Earlier this year Mongane Wally Serote and I visited Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, and there met writers from other South American countries, as well. All were eager to grow closer to their recognition that our literatures are reciprocal in the ethos of our many shared existential situations, from the colonised past to the development problems of the present, both material and cultural. If the industrialists and entrepreneurs are paying attention to the material reciprocity, why are we, as writers, not looking South–South in a new freedom to choose which world, whose world, beyond our own with which we could create a wider one for ourselves?
In our first concern, which is to develop an African ‘world literature’ as our status, we should keep well in mind the words of the great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz.81 With the exceptions of the pre-Hispanic civilisations of America, he writes, all civilisations – including China and Japan – have been the result of intersections and clashes with foreign cultures. And the Congolais writer, Henri Lopez,82 in his novel, Le Lys et le Flamboyant, is speaking not only of the mixed blood of tribe, race and colour of many of our people in Africa, but of the interchange of ideas, of solutions to a common existence, when he writes, ‘Every civilisation is born of a forgotten mixture, every race is a variety of mixtures that is ignored.’ The nurture of our writers, our literature, is a priority which should not create for us a closed-shop African ‘world literature’, a cultural exclusivity in place of the exclusion, even post-colonial, that has kept us in an ante-room of self-styled ‘world literatures’. Let our chosen status in the world be that of writers who seek exchanges of the creative imagination, ways of thinking and writing, of fulfilling the role of repository of the people’s ethos, by opening it out, bringing to it a vital mixture of individuals and peoples recreating themselves.
Finally, at home in Africa, in the countries of our continent, let Rosa Luxemburg’s definition be at the tip of our ballpoint pens and on the screens of our word processors as we write: ‘Freedom means freedom to those who think differently.’ Let the writer’s status be recognised as both praise-singer and social critic. Let us say with Amu Djoleto:83
What you expect me to sing, I will not,
What you do not expect me to croak, I will.
1997
The Poor Are Always with Us
The Eradication of Poverty
These are the poles of perception between which we meet today. These are the oppositions of the phenomenon of want.
The first is ancient, an implied acceptance of a destined lot, everyone conditioned by class (each in his place); by religion (the meek shall inherit the earth) to be content to have no place and inherit nothing.
The second proposition refuses to accept poverty as part of human destiny. The United N
ations General Assembly’s designation of the International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty is a mission statement in the true sense. It is surely the boldest expression of faith in human endeavour ever made. It comes from the most representative body in the world. It posits perhaps the greatest human advancement ever embarked upon, an adventure greater than any attempted in the progress of humankind since we could define ourselves as such. And most important, it produces convincing proof that the goal is attainable.
Beginning last year, the United Nations Development Programme has launched an exhaustive, worldwide initiative to debunk poverty as destiny; with its partners, the United Nations system, organisations of civil society, academic institutions, the private sectors and international donor community, research has been produced which identifies the extent and nature of poverty in its many forms – and destiny.
I do not propose to cite the statistics of the world of want. They are all here, devastating, in the invaluable publications of the United Nations Development Programme – the staggering material facts of race, racial prejudice, political and social administration, geography, gender, ethnicity, agricultural practice, technological practice, industrial production, health services – everything, from the drying up of a stream to the closing down of an arms factory – that produces the phenomena of poverty as lived by the world’s 1.3 billion poor.
When you read this evidence of physical, mental and spiritual deprivation, you can reach only one conclusion: poverty is a trap. Brought about by many factors other than the obvious ones you may always have had in mind, poverty is the nadir of disempowerment.
It is a disempowerment that has existed and does exist in democracies as well as dictatorships, links them, in a way we are reluctant to have to admit. The ballot box of free and fair elections has failed to empower the poor in most of the democratic countries. The dictatorship of the people failed to do so in most countries of the Soviet empire. And since the fall of Communism, the West’s claim of freeing those countries to the establishment of a market economy and prosperity means nothing to the old people who now beg in the streets of Moscow, as the homeless do in the streets of cities of the only great power left in the world, this United States of America. In Brazil, in Argentina, in Africa, in India – where in this world except for the small welfare states of the North, are there not people in the nadir of poverty? No need to enter into ideological differences, no need to make any value judgements, here: each country has produced – or failed to end – the shameful human end product, poverty.
What is a decade, in terms of centuries of acceptance that the poor are always with us?
Our answer surely is that the world now has the knowledge, the scientific and technological ability to do away with most of the causes of poverty, and to turn around the consequences of causes it cannot prevent. There are identified practical means: what is needed is the money and commitment of governments, regional, national and bodies of world governance, to cooperate and carry out these means. And what is needed to bring this about is a roused awareness and admittance among the peoples of the world that whether there is proved to be life on Mars, and whether you may conduct your affairs electronically without leaving your armchair, the new century is not going to be a new century at all in terms of the progress of humanity if we take along with us acceptance of the shameful shackles of the past, over a billion men, women and children in poverty, and we offer only charity, that palliative to satisfy the conscience and keep the same old system of haves and have-nots quietly contained.
In view of this need for roused awareness I think it is important for us to consider, how do different people conceive poverty? How do they think about it? Historically, where did it begin?
In prehistory early humans lived by what we would call now a subsistence economy: you hunted, you gathered, and when these resources of your group ran out in one place, you moved on; only nature discriminated, making one area more salubrious than another, but there was space enough to make of this an advantage rather than a deprivation. It was with the arrival of surplus value that the phenomenon of rich and poor began; with the cultivation of the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile, when food was grown and could be stored instead of foraged and hunted, able to satisfy only short-term needs. As soon as there was more than sufficient unto the day, those who grew more than they could eat became the haves, while those whose harvest provided no surplus became the have-nots.
Basically, nothing has changed since then. Except that it is no longer possible for society to move on from one disadvantaged environment to a more salubrious one – the colonial era of the European powers was perhaps the last such movement to take place successfully, the final enactment of an obsolete solution to social problems. On an individual scale, immigrants in contemporary days generally find themselves received by locals with resentment as competitors in the labour market of the country of their aspirations, and quickly sink to a place among the poor of that country. Nothing much has changed, over the centuries, except that we have evolved what might be called a philosophy of acceptance of poverty.
Firstly, there is the question of different class perceptions of what poverty is, and how these are arrived at. There is the upper-class perception. There is the middle-class perception. And there is that of the poor themselves.
For the rich, any contingency that they themselves might sink into poverty is so remote that it need not enter their minds. They are also in the position of being bountiful so that, curiously, while they may be genuinely concerned about the existence of the poor, poverty is also a source of self-esteem. Do not be shocked by this remark; without the philanthropy of wealth, the manner in which the world has dealt with, alleviated, poverty up till now could not have been maintained at all. But this overspill of wealth is too sporadic, too personally dependent on what aspects of poverty, piecemeal, donors happen to favour, to be a solution.
I read recently that if the wealth of the ten richest individuals in the world were to be made available, the problem of the world’s 1.3 billion living in poverty could be solved. Well, one cannot expect these individuals to give up their wordly goods in toto for the world, any more than any of us, I suspect, are prepared to sacrifice our – we consider – reasonable privileges entirely for those who have none. What is asked is for those who possess and control great wealth to look at the economic structures in their countries which have made that wealth possible and yet have created conditions that make philanthropy necessary – regimes that have failed to establish the means, in adequate pay for work, in education and training, in environment, by which people may provide for themselves in self-respect and dignity. That is the thinking that will face the facts of redistribution of the world’s wealth.
The wealthy and powerful who control the consortiums and international companies, and the government agencies who plan with them, need to take responsible heed of the emphasis placed by the United Nations Development Programme on ‘putting people at the centre of development’, on the concept of development enterprises as not only or even primarily advancing the credit balance of a country and providing X number of jobs, but as the instigation of a series of social consequences that will affect the implicated community in many ways. What may put pay in the pockets of the income-poor this year may be offset, over their lifetime, by destroying their environment. Development becomes a dangerous form of social engineering it if discounts the long-term effects on social cohesion. Profit and loss, in the book-keeping of the eradication of poverty, will be a calculation of how many people’s daily lives can be entered, in the long term, on the credit column.
For the broad middle class, which includes the skilled working class in many countries, the possibility of descending to poverty is subliminally present. Their concept of poverty is tinged by fear, as well as by concern for those who suffer it: there but for the grace of God go I. A change of government, inflation, a form of affirmative action whether on principle of colour, race or simply replacement of older
employees with the young – these contingencies threaten middle-class safety with its home ownership, its insurance policies and pension funds. All the things that poverty strips one of; all the safety nets the poor do not have … Poverty is regarded as a blow of fate that just might come. Alternatively, whose fault is it? Perhaps, since the middle class is by and large industrious and ambitious – and has the possibility of advancement in terms of money and status, having a base to start from which the poor have not – the middle class often feels that it is lack of will, initiative and commitment to work as they themselves do, that keeps the poor in that condition.
The basic perception of poverty is the man begging in the street; the conclusion: surely there’s something else he could do? Unemployment is suspect as lack of ability; and well it may be in many developing countries where lack of skills makes people literally unemployable, unable to be active in sectors where employment would be available. But what has to be realised is how that lack comes about in the general disempowerment of poverty itself. To abolish the spectre of the man begging in the street, the woman huddled on her park bench home, the children staring from a refugee camp, is first to make the effort to understand what factors create this disempowerment.
Telling Times Page 58