African Social Evolution
by Chris Benjamin
Ghana International Airways provided a complimentary October 2006 copy of the New African Magazine, the front page of which proclaimed boldly 'Africa's Glorious Heritage.' My pre-African introduction to Africa was to be a 27-page, multi-authored expose on one of the most prevalent myths about the continent: that before Europeans arrived there it was a massive, sprawling backwater devoid of civilized people.
As American writer Adam Hochschild wrote in his 1999 bestseller, 'King Leopold's Ghost' this myth is rooted in the racist perceptions of the colonialists themselves, who failed to see the complex societies abounding around them through their pre-conceived romantic notions of savagery. Hochschild writes:
To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its own culture and history, took a leap of empathy, a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make. To do so would have meant seeing Leopold's [King of Belgium] regime not as progress, not as civilization, but as a theft of land and freedom.
From this perspective, it is plain why Africans want to make it clear that Africa already had numerous complex societies in place by the time Europeans found their way there in the 15th century, particularly the northern part of sub-Saharan Africa, places we now know as Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania. The New African magazine was making this point abundantly clear as a follow-up to Black History Month, and they were doing so to restore a most precious resource in Africa: pride.
African pride has been much maligned by the experience of colonialism and the unprecedented scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Nigerian writer Chinweizu described this phenomenon in his seminal work 'Decolonising the African Mind.' Colonizing the mind describes a centuries-long form of psychological warfare aimed to separate the colonized from their cultures and convincing them of their own cultures' inferiority to that of the colonizer.
This practice is commonly used by colonizers and often leaves the colonized to love their oppressor. In 1964 Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah observed this love of the white oppressor in his classic novel 'The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born' as follows: "That is all anyone here struggles for: to be closer to the white man. All the shouting against the white men was not hate. It was love. Twisted, but love all the same."
Unfortunately, this mindset remains present among many of the Ghanaians I met during my time working there as a journalist, many of whom were desperate to leave their home and travel to the West for riches and glory. To live among the colonizers.
In order to decolonise the mind, African scholars, activists and writers are determined to re-write history, this time as told by the colonized, to create African pride in African history, while at the same time elucidating the great injustice that was done.
Scholars draw on archaeological, anthropological, historically recorded, and orally traditional evidence to distance Africa from the "primitive" ways of living. One journalist writing for the New African, when writing of Yoruba artworks (found in modern Nigeria) wrote that "uncivilised people cannot produce artwork of this high quality and sophistication" as one means of proof that the continent was indeed rife with civilizations by the time the Europeans arrived.
This fact of history is beyond reasonable academic debate. The evidence is overwhelming, and the Yoruba empire itself, complete with a large capital city, goes back to the 11th century. In many cases African civilizations pre-date European ones, and their knowledge of the lunar cycle was well developed before it occurred to any European to think about it. Many scientific and artistic firsts can be traced to Africa.
These truths are important, and I wholeheartedly support the effort to erase racist mythologies, but I lament that the source of African pride, or anyone's pride, should be linked to civilization. Civilization, defined by large, centralized, hierarchical societies usually surviving from the toil of the few, is the most oppressive, unjust, cancerous system of human organization in all of history. Those pre-civilised societies that Africans (and most other people too) are distancing themselves from never committed genocide, never extinguished so many species, never destroyed their own environments to the extent that "civil"ised people do.
It is ironic that African scholars' efforts to create African pride are so linked to the very system of living that created colonialism. In a sense this latest effort brings Africans one step closer to the oppressors that have become so beloved by so many who are oppressed.
Civilized oppression
Civilization's oppressions are well documented elsewhere (just ask Dr. Google), so I want to focus on a couple of examples within the African context. In the fictionalised voice of a real-life 18th century Ashanti Prince, Dutch writer Arthur Japin draws an enlightening parallel between the tyranny of civilization in Europe and Ghana, in his 2003 novel 'The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi.'
...slaves, condemned men and defeated warriors were executed in Kumasi. But I must add that it was not known to us in those days that the northern tribes also belonged to the race of men. The notion of a single human race, comprising a diversity of coexisting peoples who were in essence equal, was foreign to us. In Europe, too, that notion had only recently arisen, and the practical implications were still inconsistent. We knew only one people, "ours," and the dangers to which our kind were exposed. As a boy, the routine executions were little different to me from the slaughter of goats. Later in life this boyhood insensibility filled me with shame, until I discovered that a man's life counted for just as little in Europe at the time. The wars fought between 1792 and 1815 alone caused the sacrifice of one million five hundred and thirty thousand lives, not counting the loss of life in epidemics spread in the course of the conflicts.
The tendency for groups of humans to see outsiders as lesser species is not unique to "civil"ised societies, but the tendency to slaughter those "lesser" races en masse is, and such extreme warfare and genocide are the history of civilisation in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. Should such a history be a source of pride for any modern or post-modern people?
America filmmaker Kevin Kertscher offers an outsider's observation of modern African civilization at its worst in his 1998 book 'Africa Solo.'
Nearby was the riverfront palace that President Mobutu had built for himself, a gorgeous Palladian villa that looked like it was made of white marble. It was surrounded by a tall iron fence and to my surprise, there were no guards visible and the yard was half overgrown with weeds. Some teenagers who saw me looking in proudly told me that it was the "Maison du President." Their own houses were not far away, they said, pointing to a neighborhood of shacks nearby. I asked if Mobutu came to visit often and they said that so far he had only been there twice, for a total of about ten days.
I asked them if they thought it was okay for their president to have so much money when so many people in the country were very poor and they just replied that yes, he was a very rich and very great man. "He has many houses," they said. "It is difficult for him to sleep in all of them." I watched for a glimmer of awareness or resentment about the incongruity of his wealth, but there seemed to be none. They wished that he would come stay at his house more, but to them it seemed very natural for wealth and power to be tied up together so closely. I had the sense that a president who was not the wealthiest man in the country would seem as outrageous to them as Mobutu's corrupt government seemed to me.
Scholar Goran Hyden writes extensively about this African phenomenon, often observed as simple corruption by outsiders, in his 2005 book 'African Politics in Comparative Perspective,' using the descriptive phrase 'economy of affection.' The economy of affection means that African civilization is historically rooted in interpersonal human relationships. While European and North American capitalist economic powers vie for control of natural and manufactured resources, African powers vie for direct control of relationships. The more relationships one controls, the more powerful that person is.
Yet, in each case, the ultimate goal is control and power, to climb high in a massive hierarchy. In the 1980s Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) described by Kertscher, Mobutu was a success story. He controlled relationships (with Congolese and Americans alike) so effectively that after the CIA took down the revolutionary and troublesome Patrice Lumumba, he was able to step in and rule the country for 32 years. During those three decades he distributed favours which, when returned, helped him amass a personal fortune worth several billion US dollars.
In the end, his downfall came because of his own missteps. He underestimated one group of relationships, those with the Tutsis, who had government control in three East African countries in the late 90s. Mobutu had supported the Hutu massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, which Hyden and other scholars have concluded was the result of more a class-based than ethnic conflict. Long ago, Tutsis had been chosen by European colonial aggressors as their chosen administrators. Despite centuries of Tutsi and Hutu gene-mixing, resentment and bitterness lingered between the two groups. Mobutu's end came as one group took its latest revenge on another. DRC is still struggling to maintain peace and order.
Such class conflicts, genocides, and dictatorships, again, happen only within "civil"ised societies and their extreme hierarchies. At this point in the world's development, the continent of Africa falls at the bottom of the hierarchy. It continues to be controlled and extorted by the outside interests we collectively call neo-colonialism: unfair terms of trade, crippling debts, conditional or "tied" aid, et cetera.
The field of development has been created, ostensibly to level the playing field. Instead it acts as a game of catch-up, where any differences between Africa and Europe and North America are seen as shortcomings of Africa. Therefore, the misdeeds of the still powerful garner little public mention when compared to our tendency to glorify civilization's reign. In the words of Hochschild:
In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the populations of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way mars the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in, "its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence," is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.
Rather than glorify Africa's civilized past, we could learn and remember the true history of its civilization, warts and all. The true history of civilized Africa, like that of any true history, is far from pristine, and it is not all to be celebrated for the purpose of pride. There is pride to be taken in that honest retelling, but there are also ample hard lessons to be learned.
The dangers of discrediting other ways
Besides the history of African civilisation, there is also a substantial history to Africa that predates European contact by thousands of years in some cases. These are what "civilised" people tend to think of as primitive societies. And, there are ways of living that have survived civilisation from within Africa, and the colonial onslaught from without. The people who have maintained these ways against all odds now face perhaps their greatest challenge in the attitude that civilisation is the only way of life worth living.
This attitude is prevalent throughout Ghana. The President of a well-reputed tour company in Ghana, whom I found to be a very enlightened and progressive thinker on many broad subjects, told me and a small group of tourists, "These people around Mole [National Park] are still whining about their primitive way of life when they could make more money off tourism than hunting."
In purely financial terms he is probably right, but his statement says nothing of their right to choose how they live, or even how they acquire sustenance. For centuries the 27 villages surrounding what is now Mole National Park have made their living using a combination of subsistence farming, hunting, and gathering. Contrary to official Ghanaian propaganda, Canadian and Ghanaian researchers have found mistrust, resentment and antagonism in some of these villages toward the government of Ghana and the management of the park. Many of them used to reside within park boundaries and were forcibly removed in the 1960s, being cut off to important, even sacred, hunting, gathering and farming land.
Communities such as these have lived in ways that were more successful, peaceful, and sustainable, for tens of thousands of years at least, than has the new way of "civil"isation. Civilised people live in large-scale agricultural and urban societies, tend to have short-term memories of their own histories (going back a few hundred years at best), and tend to think that their way of life is the best if not the only way. As the Ghanaian propaganda points out, it is these "civil"ised ways of life that have encroached on traditional hunting lands and made the old ways untenable.
While Mole National Park has done wonders for the elephant and bird populations and provided valuable foreign income for its staff and for the Government of Ghana, the communities surrounding the park now live in abject, hand-to-mouth poverty, separate from eons of tradition. They can often be seen swarming tourists begging for hand-outs to supplement their meagre sustainable farming operations, carved out in an unforgiving savannah.
Similar suppression of a group of people who live largely by hunting and gathering is happening in many other parts of Africa, most famously in Botswana (the current African darling of the development community in the UN, EU, and USA), where the San (commonly called Bush People) have been forced off their land and then granted access to it again by the Supreme Court on the condition that they don't bring any herd animals with them.
The backward logic at play in this caveat is that if the San are going to live a traditional way of life, it has to be a hundred percent, no behaviours learned from colonialists (African or otherwise), such as herding. It is a fine illustration of one of the most prevalent conflicts in the world today: civilization versus everyone else. The Supreme Court of Botswana, like most members of civilised societies, were incapable of understanding that a culture can adapt new ways of attaining sustenance without completely changing the way they live.
The challenge faced by Africa, and by everyone else, is: can we not reconcile our civilizations with other ways of living and organizing our societies? If not, civilization will probably win out in the short term; it always has before. In the long term, humanity will either find other ways of living or destroy itself.
This is indeed also the challenge for the discontents of society, be it civilised or otherwise. Kertscher writes of a well-travelled Masai man whom he meets in Kenya, "He was unable to integrate what he had seen of the world into his own culture and so he was a man without a country, without a real home."
The man had told him, "I do not even know if I really am a Masai any longer." Like this man, those of us who have become disenchanted with civilisation's delusions find ourselves unsure where we belong, traversing two worlds, comfortable in neither. Except in our case we are the descendents of the "civil"ised, totalitarian agriculturalists, convinced of our rightness, disconnected from our roots, with no more land, off to colonize more land or serve the factory owners manufacturing toys for the top of the hierarchy. In our generation, some of us have acquired the resources to take to the road again, this time for pleasure, the ultimate nomads as alluded by scholar and filmmaker Hugh Brody.
But perhaps on both sides we expect too much. In critically self-examining our own histories, we can see the flaws in the ways we have organized, the ways our societies have lived. Botswana can thus see that civilisation is enormously flawed, but that the San have taken a useful practice, herding, and incorporated it into their way of being. This does not make them part of the mainstream civilisation. Rather than go whole hog and live like the majority of this planet's population, they have simply taken what is useful.
For the discontents of civilisation, there are many excellent examples, inspirations to choose from, people who, as Hugh Brody wrote in his 2001 book 'The Other Side of Eden':
Consciously choose low levels of material comfort and small numbers of children to avoid the need for large incomes, thereby pursuing lives in which they may survive without regular jobs and devote themselves instead to creative work and family life. This way of being encompasses a concern about the destruction of the natural world by the ever-growing pressures to reshape it in the interest of surplus and profit.
Personally, the most resource-consuming thing I ever did was take a year to travel much of the Eastern Hemisphere, five months of it in Ghana, as one of those interfering and annoying ultimate nomads, analysing everything with an outsider's eye, making and writing (not always well informed) judgements along the way. Who am I to tell Africa what to do?
So, lacking the insider knowledge of Africa, I'll go even bigger; I'll offer my advice not to Africa but to the world: re-tell history, honour the truth. Celebrate and take pride in the places where your respective peoples fought injustice or simply lived well without taking from others. Doing so inherently means not celebrating just your civilisation's achievements, but also acknowledging what came before it, those traditional ways of living, which were localized, connected to the land, and in tune with the vast and complex web of life. Such ways of being are never colonial. They are ways at peace with and respectful of the earth. And it is in these traditions that come emerging ways that, in writer Daniel Quinn's words, move beyond civilisation.
We might also, as Hochschild advises, acknowledge and learn from the uglier places of the past and present, in order to break the pattern observed as long ago as the 14th century by Ibn Khaldun, in which "Those who are conquered always want to imitate the conqueror in his main characteristics." By not recreating such forms of hierarchical oppression, by not mimicking the colonialist so that the oppressed become oppressors, we can break civilisation's cancerous cycle, and new and exciting ways of living will emerge all over the world.
