Onwuchekwa Jemie
Japanese and Africans compared:Thus, throughout their Meiji industrialization project, and while preparing their post-WWII re-emergence as an economic power, the Japanese took care not to repudiate their ancestor worship, their animism, their ‘pagan’ Shinto religion, and the other core aspects of their ancestral culture. Not for them the foolishness of abandoning Japanese religion and language as a precondition for modernization.
In stark contrast to the Japanese, whenever African societies have been invaded by alien forces in the last millennium, their Islamized, Christianized, or Eurochauvinized members not only repudiated their ancestral culture; they also enthusiastically joined in assaulting their own culture and demonizing their own ancestors for alleged paganism, “unbelief” or primitivism. These “fifth columnists” have zealously destroyed African religions, customs and traditions instead of identifying with and protecting them. In making its members attack itself, such alien-perverted, partially disintegrated, ‘triple-heritage’ pseudo-African societies have manifested the cultural equivalents of auto-immune diseases. African Afrophobia and Negrophobia are symptoms of this class of cultural diseases.
A strengthening, not a weakening, let alone repudiation or liquidation of ancestral
Japanese culture was the foundation for the modernization of Japan. Quite unlike Africans who have been brainwashed into thinking that, in order to learn to fly, they must first cut off and throw away their own feet. Of course, having thrown away their ancestral cultural feet, Africans have found it impossible to modernize. They have no feet left to stand upon and sprint for take off!
Ancestral culture and Black Africa’s survival:
As I pointed out earlier, many of Black Africa’s comprador elite now see African culture as nothing more than a source of fossilized arts and museum pieces to be sold to earn foreign exchange! Others view it as a disgraceful, primitive paganism that should be smashed and consigned to the bonfire.
Read Also: Japan is pouring money into hydrogen fuel research to counter LNG
Furthermore, the Black comprador notion of culture does not include African indigenous technologies and knowledge systems. It does not include the knowledge of our ecosystem as embodied in our farming techniques and our pharmacology. This part of our culture cannot be sold like works of art and is not accorded any value. It has not been harvested and included in the school curriculum, and is being rapidly lost as rural children are herded into schools that are designed to produce clerks and academics. If this continues and universal academic schooling is achieved, in another generation or two there’ll be nobody left who will knows how to farm our local crops. We will then be totally dependent on imported foods, all because we were foolish enough to follow the colonial system and the neo-colonial policies of universal academic education for every child, including the children of farmers who should be learning farm techniques through practical apprenticeship to their parents.
As Cabral pointed out, one of the disasters of modern Africa is that “anyone who has a primary school certificate no longer wants to take the plough or the hoe to till the soil.” And he urged: “In our land even if we take our people as far as the final year of secondary school we will have to take the plough or hoe today and tractors tomorrow to till our soil as we should. . . The boarding school [must cultivate] rice and other crops to supply its own food, to store and eat properly.” (Cabral, Unity and Struggle, p. 111).
Our governments have not bothered to ask the simple but vital questions: What will happen when every infant has been educated to become a clerk and to disdain farming? Who will farm and feed the country? What is the correct ratio of clerks and academics to farmers if the whole society is to be fed? Does our education system know that ratio? And is it designed to produce the correct ratio of skills in the population?
Of course, everybody should become literate, including the farmer; however, that does not require that everybody be given an academic education to the exclusion of agricultural education. In the first place, not everybody has the aptitude to become a clerk or an academic. And even if everybody did, society would be suicidal if it did not insist that only those with less aptitude for farming should go into academic learning, seeing as food production is a priority for society’s survival. Also the reward structure should favor farming rather than mere book learning, if the best are to be drawn into farming. In our present system, farming is left to the “failures.”
This matter of guaranteeing that we produce our own food, that we attain food security in Black Africa, requires that our educational philosophy and objectives and curricula be changed from the inherited colonial ones. Our society’s self-reliance in food requires that we grow our food ourselves, using the accumulated indigenous knowledge bequeathed us by our ancestors. In short, our survival depends on our according respect to the ecological and agricultural knowledge that is a vital part of our ancestral culture.
Meiji Japan, in its effort to modernize, did not throw away its indigenous agricultural techniques as “primitive”. Rather, it carried out land reform and other social changes that liberated the energies and initiatives of the farmers and made them more productive. That was one more way in which Japan used its ancestral culture to help its modernization. While aiming to build modern battleships, they did not destroy the rice growing system that fed everybody. They were not foolish. They did not destroy their ancestral culture but added new dimensions adapted from abroad to strengthen it. But we are doing the very opposite in Black Africa, destroying our ancestral culture wholesale in the stupid belief that modernization is Europeanization and requires the abandonment of everything traditional and African.
Meiji Japan had its ancestral culture still intact when it embarked on self-modernization. Black Africa today has had its culture shattered, marginalized and already half-forgotten after five centuries of assault by Europeans together with, in some parts, 14 centuries of Arab assault. If Black Africa is to embark on self-modernization now, what must it do about its shattered ancestral culture? After centuries of de-Africanization and alienation, we need cultural rehabilitation through re-Africanization to make us as fit culturally to embark on the adventure of self-modernization as the Meiji Japanese were. As Diop put it:
“The cultural renaissance of our people is inconceivable outside of the restoration of both our historical past and our languages to a privileged position as the vehicles of modern education, technology, science and the creative sensibility of our people. As long as the historical path linking us to our ancestors is not understood, critically appraised, legitimized, we will be unable to build a new culture. To this end the retrieval of our national languages is foremost. A systematic policy in favor of their growth, the inclusion of a modern technological and scientific lexicon, can no longer be eluded.” [Great African Thinkers, p.269]
But what is the chance that we shall re-Africanize ourselves?
Re-Africanization and its obstacles:
Let us hear from Ayi Kwei Armah:
“The Eurocentrism of the African elite is, according to Fanon, a colonial illness requiring a specific cure inseparable from revolutionary activity. Cabral agrees, and he names the cure as re-Africanization (in Return To The Source, 45.3.4).
“Fanon says the process of re-Africanization is something the majority of Africa’s people want. It is also positive and has an inherently revolutionary dynamic because it winnows out merely tribalistic values, leaving positive, inclusive values as a basis for future development. The majority of Africans want the institutional re-Africanization of the continent but the elite class is against any cleansing process because this will destroy it together with its Eurocentric philosophies. Thus, for the generality of the Westernized elite, re-Africanization can only be a catastrophe. An innovative minority, however, will have the sense to make common cause with the African people and so discover (in praxis) abandoned or even unsuspected values and social practices of a highly positive nature.
“Both Fanon and Cabral specify, among these regenerative values, the practice of democratic discussion, self-criticism, open debate of a vigorous, frank tenor, collegial decision-making structures and collegial program design and communal construction (in Return… 55.1). These are the rules of [communalist] democracy which selective use of other traditional African practices and values like universal age-group organization, democratic election and recall of administrators, could reinforce (ibid., 45.1.1).
“There are numerous obstacles, both authors point out, but the positive evidence indicates that Africans – the peasant people – prefer democratic self-government because that is the best traditional way they know.
“The most serious domestic obstacle facing re-Africanization is the elite itself which has a self-preserving habit of sabotaging any possibility of democratic decision-making. It prefers mystificatory, colonial bureaucratic manipulation to voluntary participation. This preference is explainable because the elite is that part of the population whose values are derived from the Western way of life. The accent is on individualistic or familial priorities, the maximization of personal perquisites and the minimization of personal sacrifice to the point of avoiding productivity. Fanon says that this class is simply incapable of implementing any innovative or meliorative program whatsoever (in The Wretched of the Earth, 176.0.1). The mission it has accepted is crudely to preserve for itself the irrational, unjust privileges set up by the old order and it cannot do this if it allows open, democratic discussion of priorities, plans and practices. So it hides behind formulae that allow it to avoid democratization.” (Ayi Kwei Armah, from “Masks and Marx”, Presence Africaine, No 131, [1984]).
