The African National Congress, as its name says was conceptualized
as one of the most institutionalized responses to the institutionalization of
imperialism and colonialism into a constitutional construct. At the turn of the
20th Century, and after a brutal non-black war about who has the right to have
hegemony over the emerging need for a State to be in charge of legitimizing
dispossession and codifying its lawfulness to be settled by courts, the
decision to exclude Africans was responded to by establishing the African
National Congress. The idea of self-determination of Africans found an
institutional home, the nodes of African power and authority, including
influence such as churches, were collected into a Native Congress whose
inaugural reach was regional, non-sexist, and transcending tribal divides the
were institutional reception structures of imperialism and colonialism.
Conceptualized
through the youth imagination of young men like Pixley Ka Seme, and many others
that traveled the length and breadth of South Africa, the birth of the ANC
became a magnet to many that led to liberation struggles and negotiations of their
countries in the continent. Faced with a settler-type of colonialism that
built institutions of leadership, most of whom were a human necessity, save for
their human objects of native exclusion and control, the Native Congress had to
find a way to co-exist with the advantages of colonial power matrices rather
than seeking to fundamentally overturn them. In fact, the ambiguity of the
demands by earlier leaders of the Native Congress seems to have been a message
that then leaders had recognized that to succeed in achieving the objects of the
Congress, they must avoid provoking an unfavorable response, and instead opted
to replicate aspects of the colonial institutional models, or striving to match
the colonial way of living as an application to be accepted as part of the
intruding civilization.
It
would be the persistent pursuit of hegemonic power over South Africa, and the
consequence of the Rhodesian colonial object of a Cape-to-Cairo colony, which
would discipline the leadership into realizing in later years that their
pursuit of freedom cannot co-exist with the hegemonic arrogance of imperialism,
colonialism, and its adjuncts of racism and later apartheid. The National in
the name of Congress, especially its relationship with Africans grew to be
the ideological enemy of all that wanted Africa in its divided form, and never
to be allowed to have a strong state, save if its interests are in congruence
with the hegemonic ambitions of European imperialism and colonialism including
its mercantilist economic structuring of colonies. As a substrate of what full
steam settler occupation of colonies, South Africa's state-building and development
construct was based on the creation of its 'nationhood' in the image and
paradigm of European attitudes towards Africa, notwithstanding that they never
planned to return to Europe.
Fast
track to the post-WWI and in-1920 recession leadership of the ANC that was recognized
globally as the most organized voice of Africans, it started a process of
defining Africa it imagined through the African Claims document,
interestingly facilitated by a Pixley Ka Seme Presidency of the ANC. 'Imvo za
Bantu' became a substrate document that contributed to the many chronicles on
African liberation and planted seeds of continental imagination of Africa. With
a higher concentration of human influence and leadership institutions, such as
Fort Hare University, South Africa provided nodal points at which elite
consensus about the idea of liberation could be concretized albeit in the image
of what was curriculated. A thesis of an African State was birthed out of what
it should not do than it is a self-standing construct, an away from what
exists content of struggle was developed, save for the 'Imvo za BaNTu' construct
which projected an Africa beyond colonialism. As these constructs were taking
root, there was a global consolidation of colonial and imperial power process
of institutionalizing dominance of the Global South by a Global North.
The
definition of the sovereignty of European countries got concretized into a
construct that defines Africa as an asset with which European Countries could
undergird their balance sheet to qualify as a global power. A global order was
thus established. The order's contradiction with Marxist-Leninist thought on
imperialism pitted the global north, now joined by a
'dollar-balance-sheet-based' imperial power, the USA, with the Soviet Union, a
declared force of the left. The exigencies of establishing liberal order-built
criteria to embrace into a club of liberalism hegemonizing regularized election
of leaders, appetite for less state involvement in the economy, and the institutionalization
of the rule of law as the basis upon which a country's adjudicative power is to
be applied. Multilateral institutions to 'police' the world into submitting to
the liberal order would be created and create conditions for the voluntary
compliance of the global South to be perpetual subjects, in hegemonic power
terms, of those countries that colonized them.
As
understanding of the shallowness of what liberation would mean to African
Liberation movements increased, the appetite to give them the liberation grew
commensurate to the extent of readiness by these movements to govern their
liberated countries as franchises of those that colonized them, now joined by
those that wanted to continue with the pillage of Africa's resource endowments.
The construct would follow a pattern of negotiating a constitution with the
existing state ideological infrastructure and the organs of state edifice as
the fundamental departure point on how to repurpose the newly liberated state to
meet the objectives of liberation. A constitution would then be produced, it would
have the primary objectives of providing an integrated measure of regularity
and predictability for the entire 'liberated and yet still colonial space', as
well as the bureaucratization of systems within a legal framework that is
anchored on the institutionalization power relations as they obtain with
acceptable modifications that accommodate new governors of the system. The
legality of a new liberated African state would be legitimized by the new
constitution to the extent that it guides subsequent legislation to foreground
society's attachment, loyalty, and allegiance to the new order without touching
the morality of what would its consequences be to the social order. Natives
trained in law would then be the new human institutions of leadership into the
irreversibility of the established order, save for managing its periodic and
painful moments of ecdysis.
The process would be crowned by rituals that are dated and given celebratory importance such as freedom day, Africa day, and at worst biographical days to entrench into the psyche of society the illusion of liberation that has no economic content. As celebrations of illusions grow into moments of lamenting what tangibles of freedom are not accruing in real terms to society in a way that catapults them in all phases of the industrial revolution paths, recognition that the new liberation order may not come, and the social capital sustaining the illusions will begin to expire in a prolonged deterioration rather than a sudden collapse.
As
we celebrate Africa Month, and almost constructed a R22m flag to ritualize
empty nationhood, and parade state-sponsored surface calm of African
democracies under stress, we should do so by understanding the core deficits of leadership
and institutions of leadership that Africa is carrying as a burgeoning debt to
future generations. The real tragedy is not that African leadership, in all
sectors, is continuing with this flawed vision that seek ye first the political
kingdom and the rest will follow, it is that their interpretation of how to
grow Africa economically is anchored on foreign direct investment as the alpha
and omega of economic thought. This they do with the largest factor endowments
that only require a consensus of state-led recovery based on private sector
ideation on where opportunities to industrialize Africa lie. We can only hope
that these ritualized celebrations and celebrities involved, most of whom are
unfortunately not innocent in the constraining of Africa, will stop the damage
of orthodox economic thinking, and push for a retreat from being influenced by
complexes whose objects are to build a consensus of national interests of the
dominant global north. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela, yingiselani
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