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African renaissance: Thenew struggle: Is the Africanrenaissance a Chimera?Yonah Seleti aa Associate Professor at the University of Natal ,DurbanPublished online: 01 Jun 2011.

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CURRENT WRITING 11(2) 1999 ISSN 1013-929X

African Renaissance: The New Struggle:Is the African Renaissance a Chimera?

Yonah Seleti

The strongest message from the volume of essays, African Renaissance: TheNew Struggle (1999), edited by Malegapuru William Makgoba, is that anAfrican renaissance – the rebirth of the continent – is the most desiredcondition for Africa. Many of the essays in the volume, however, subscribe tothe view that until certain obstacles are eliminated the African renaissance willbe no more than a chimera. This article will focus on some of the areas in whichscholars engage the challenges and prospects of a renaissance for Africa.Makgoba’s book also extends a desperate invitation to Africa-focusedintellectuals to participate in the debates shaping the African Renaissance asan ideological framework for the mobilisation of the masses into a socialmovement for change.

African Renaissance is an important milestone in the struggle for the rebirthof Africa, both for the specific political message as well as for the generalintellectual stimulus it offers. It provides an important record of issuespertaining to the idea of the African Renaissance that have occupied theAfrican intelligentsia for the last hundred years and more. By focusing on thecurrent challenges facing the African continent and its people and those in theDiaspora the essays concern themselves with identifying the various barriersto the rebirth of the continent, and collectively they comprise an impressivecompendium of reasons why Africa needs a renaissance. The book has fulfilledits objective of providing a historical document that is and will be used as arecord of the African Renaissance Conference in 1998, but it certainly does notprovide a blueprint for Africa’s future development.

The three editors explain how the book came about. It is an end product ofthe two-day conference held in September 1998 in Johannesburg and attendedby a record number of 470 people. According to the organisers, the conferenceaimed at defining what constituted Africanness and what Africa’s destiny was

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in the globalising world. It also aimed at formulating practical strategies andsolutions for future action that would benefit the African people. These arebroad objectives and their attainment is not easy to evaluate.

The structure and organisation of the book simply follow those of theconference, which was organised thematically. It opened with a plenarysession entitled “Giving the Renaissance Content: Objectives and Definitions”.The plenary session was – as indeed is the first part of the book – an attemptat defining Africans, what was meant by the African Renaissance, and what itsobjectives might be nationally and internationally. In doing so, it attempted toexplain the need for an African renaissance in today’s world. The conferencedivided into six breakaway sessions which provided the themes around whichthe book’s sections are arranged. The book consists of 30 essays written by 35authors, a sizeable number of whom are women. The inclusion of articlesauthored by Africans from the rest of the continent gives it something of a pan-African flavour. The collection of authors across racial lines, furthermore,helps to underscore the point that the African Renaissance is not about thecolour of the individual; it is a dynamic vision that transcends any suchdivisions.

In their Introduction, Malegapuru William Makgoba, Thaninga Shope andThami Mazwai identify three major tensions that permeated the debates andare captured within the essays: what actually constitutes Africanness, Africanculture, and African languages. These three questions are located within theglobalising world where equality, non-racism and human rights have becomecore values. The Introduction attempts to provide a framework in which tounderstand these tensions.

Defining AfricannessOn the issue of what constitutes Africanness, Makgoba, Shope and Mazwaioffer a definition that emphasises history, culture, and consciousness anddiscounts the centrality of colour and geography. Although this inclusivedefinition of Africanness generally informs the essays in the book, it is opento questioning from certain authors who adopt a more radical view of whomight be regarded as an African. The general definition, however, avoids thedanger of objectifying the African. In the context of South Africa, it distancesitself from the grand objectifications of white superiority, male superiority,Europeanism, or even Africanism. In Southern Africa the racism and sexismimposed on the population determined relationships through which the bulk ofthe population was objectified. By the same token, however, the book’sdefinition of Africanness is not characterised by ‘colour blindness’ but rather

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celebrates the differences whose sum total constitutes the African. Not allAfricans are the same, which is why it is important not to essentialise Africanidentity.

In his essay, “There Can Be No African Renaissance without an Africa-focused Intelligentsia”, Mahmood Mamdani historicises the notion of Africaand reflects on how the racialised notion of Africa was common not only inSouth Africa but also in other parts of Africa such as North Africa (in Makgoba1999:129). His examination of what Africa means to different people whoinhabit the continent clearly indicates that the process of objectification is notsimply a colour issue, but permeates all areas of race, class and politics. It is aconstructed notion that needs to be challenged, and Mamdani calls for thedestruction of objectified notions of Africa that champion, on the one hand, thenotion of South Africa’s exceptionalism – a widely shared prejudice that SouthAfrica may be part of Africa geographically but not politically nor culturallyand certainly not economically – and, on the other hand, the presumption of thesameness of Africa north of the Limpopo as backward and chaotic (132).Mamdani joins the chorus of African-focused intellectuals such as FrantzFanon, Herbert Vilakazi and Ngugi wa Thiong’o in their call for thedecolonisation and deracialisation of African intellectuals and academicinstitutions so that they could embrace a new and non-objectified notion ofAfrica. It is therefore not surprising that the African identity chosen for thisbook is constructed to overcome the legacies that have created barriersbetween people of African descent in the world.

African Renaissance and Cultural DiversityThe book is introduced with the premise that there is an entity called Africanculture. Although the editors note the fact that African culture is dynamic,evolving and developing over time and creolising as part of and as a consequenceof globalisation, they nevertheless still insist that there is something distinctlycalled African culture. Makgoba maintains that despite the separation engineeredby centuries of slavery and decades of colonialism, African people are still ableto relate to one another as Africans because the roots, history and consciousnessof their cultures are the same (x-xi).

The notion of a single Africa, a single experience and an autonomousculture and intellectual heritage is challenged by many scholars. KeyanTomaselli writes that to insist on such a notion is to miss “the crucialsignificance of Africa as the cradle of humankind, and to ignore the intellectual,cultural and social influences on mass migrations and interactions throughoutthe millennia” (Tomaselli 1999:46). Renowned African scholars have provided

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different typologies of Africa. Samir Amin was one of the pioneers who setcriteria for classifying different parts of Africa, albeit only colonial Africa. AliMazrui (1986) has noted the complexity of Africa in many of his works,offering in one of them four general definitions of Africa based on ‘racial’,‘continental’, power and ‘religion’. The cultural diversity of the continentdefies any attempts to compress the wealth of its heritage into a single Africanculture. The fluidity and complexity of the African cultural heritage shouldcaution against any attempt to homogenise it. As Tomaselli rightly points out,meanings are never fixed; cultures are constantly being reinvented andreconstituted both from within and through their myriad encounters withtravellers of all kinds, including academics, politicians, business people,journalists and academics, griots, immigrants and emigrants, and via themedia, education, the World Bank, UNESCO, the Internationally MonetaryFund and transnational border information and trade flows (1999:45). We needan African Renaissance that recognises the diversity of Africa, a continent thatis inhabited by thousands of culturally different societies who all add to the richtapestry of African culture in its plurality.

Another perspective represented in this book to challenge the concept of asingular and common African cultural experience is that of the creolisinginfluences on Africa. Mamdani observes: “Cultural mixing, whether enforcedor voluntary, can arise without biological mixing. From this point of view, Iwonder if we should not consider the postcolonial intelligentsia, with one footin colonial culture and another in that of their ancestors, as culturally creole?”(in Makgoba 1999:129). The question of whether the process of creolisationdoes not transform the essence of African culture needs to be debated morefully: if there is always a world culture in creation, does the dominant universalculture not supplant the African which has become part of the tapestry of thisworld culture?

A few chapters in the book address the issue of culture in depth, beginningwith Mbulelo Mzamane’s piece, “Eurocentric and Afrocentric Perspectives onAncient African History”, that challenges Eurocentric history and its assumptionthat Europeans were the only creators of what could be called ‘civilisation’,which then became synonymous with European culture. Mzamane takes timeto show the contribution of ancient Africa to world civilisation by highlightingthe glories of Egypt, Ethiopia, Timbuktu as one of the intellectual centres ofAfrica, the civilisations of Benin and Ife, the Great Zimbabwe, the Congo, andmany more. There is no doubt that this piece is written in the nationalistparadigm of the formative Africanist historiography; nonetheless, the point is

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made that Africa had its own civilisations long before the defacing encounterwith Europe.

Pitika P Ntuli’s essay, “The Missing Link between Culture and Education:Are We Still Chasing Gods that Are Not Our Own?”, wrapped in postmodernistlingo, takes us away from the celebration of Africa’s grand achievements to thepostcolony where “we do not encounter singular pristine identities determinedby a single organising principle” (in Makgoba 1999:186). Ntuli notes that thecontesting identities operate in a number of sites and that one of these sites isthe struggle for identity and dignity through such strategies as decolonising themind on issues of language, gender, class and culture. He further underscoresthe need for African intellectuals to move away from Western logocentrism indefining who qualifies to be an African and to accept the alternative that seescomplementarity of identities as a reality of Africa. In looking at culture as botha product and a source of creation, Ntuli demonstrates how it can be used as astrategy for conscientisation of a people. He agrees with Wade Nobles that“culture’s ‘aspects’ are ideology, ethos and world view: its ‘factors’ areontology, cosmology and axiology, and its ‘manifestations’ consist of behaviour,values and attitudes” (193). It is here that Ntuli makes an important contributionto the debate on culture: when culture is used as an ideology, he says, it givesit force and power to mould personalities in a particular way, to direct theactivities of individuals and groups and to pattern behaviour. By viewingculture as a construction, not a pristine condition, Ntuli shows how the AfricanRenaissance as a cultural movement can be an integrative force and a weaponthat offers us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves as Africans in line with ournew insights. Ntuli’s conceptualisation of the African Renaissance as adiscursive strategy makes it possible to deploy it in confronting the problemsfacing Africa in a globalising world and in mobilising intellectuals as well asthe masses. The African Renaissance is thus a discursive means to creating newperceptions and identities. Ntuli maintains that one of the lessons from theliberation struggles in Africa and South Africa was that the struggle was alsoexpressed in cultural forms such as art and dance, and he concludes byindicating that this lesson could be applied in the current struggles to shape theAfrican identity. This definition of culture and its role in identity formation isliberating in many ways. Africa can have a multiplicity of cultures formed indifferent sites of struggle but they still remain African because of their locationand the elements of the struggle. This African culture does not, thank god, haveto be a mystical and homogeneous entity.

Many of the essays in this book have drawn inspiration from the work ofAmilcar Cabral and Paulo Freire in defining culture. In his piece, “African

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Culture in Education for Sustainable Development”, Micere Githae Mugolocates Cabral and Freire in the fraternity of radical revolutionaries inspired bya materialist conception of culture. Mugo maintains that human beings createculture as they relate to their material environment and total reality in theircapacity as agents of human development/ change. Cabral and Freire’scontribution is that they distinguish between two cultural traditions: culture forconquest, oppression and enslavement, and its dialectical antithesis, culture forself-naming, liberation and true human progress (in Makgoba 1999:214). ForCabral culture is inseparable from the struggle for freedom. His importantintervention is in pointing out the choice between oppressive and liberatingcultures: rejecting fossilised African cultures that silence African women andchildren, and opting for progressive, liberating patterns and paradigms ofindigenous cultural life. Mugo calls for the rejection of a ululation culture thatexploits women and school children worse than any other group. What isrefreshing here is the observation that oppressive cultures are not exogenousto Africa since aspects of African culture have been and continue to beoppressive. The implication is that the African Renaissance should be a vehiclefor cultural freedom for all sectors of society if the human potential for changeis to be released. Cabral’s – and indeed Mugo’s – perspectives on culture allowscope for a dynamic entity that is not only inherited but also in the process ofbeing made in the struggle for freedom. The struggle to make the Africanrenaissance a reality for the majority of the people must be one that is wagedby all and not only intellectuals in their ivory towers.

Language and the African RenaissanceThe third tension debated in the book is that of language. Makgoba notes thateven though most of the contributors to this volume are Africans who speakone African language or another, none has used an African language in his orher writing (ix). Nevertheless, Makgoba maintains, the nuances, impressionsand interpretations of the English language of the contributors are rooted inAfrican languages, experiences and meanings. I am in total agreement with theobservation that one of the greatest challenges facing the African Renaissanceis that of the medium of communication between its champions. Beingconscious of the debate on literature and African language, it pains me to haveto write this review in English, especially since the book under review has a lotto say about African languages in the quest for an African renaissance.

Mugo’s essay has a “Rhetorical Orature Interlude” that raises questionssuch as: “What is our language? What spaces do our languages occupy in uhuruAfrica? What silences have we imposed on these mother tongues?” (in

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Makgoba 1999:217-8). Mugo further wonders why the issue of languageremains unresolved in Africa almost two decades since the apartheid murdersof the Soweto children who stood steadfastly against the imposition of thelanguage of the oppressors, Afrikaans, as the medium of instruction. Tounderscore the point that the silencing of indigenous languages in uhuru Africais inimical to the very concept of African Renaissance Mugo reminds us ofFanon’s maxim that “to speak a language is to assume its world and to carrythe weight of its civilisation” (218). Mugo makes the scathing observation thatthe values of the invaders have become our pattern, so alienating us from thespirit of our own culture and from ourselves that we now crave to “walk likethem, dress like them, talk like them” – and I might add “write like them”. Touse Fanon’s term, we have become ‘walking lies’.

Although the book under review focuses more on ‘talking back’ to themaster’s voice than on talking among ourselves, we need, however, toconcentrate on the latter as we examine the extent and impact of the discoursesgrowing in response to cultural and intellectual domination by the West. In hisessay, “Africa: Mankind’s Past and Future”, Diala Diop comments that “nocountry in the world ever undertook its development through a foreignlanguage. Africa is the only continent out of the three that experienced the yokeof colonial oppression that, several decades after her independence, is stilldivided on the grounds of European languages: so-called Anglophone,Francophone and Lusophone Africa” (in Makgoba 1999:6-7). In Diop’sappeal for a return to the sources of African civilisation, he calls for theintroduction of hieroglyphic language in education as a means to accessAfrica’s own ancient science. He maintains that the general use of Africanlanguages in institutional life would allow the widespread dissemination ofbasic education and the re-entrenchment of science to take place in Africa. Thedevelopment of Africa could only come about with the emergence of a criticalmass of educated people who are multilingual in African languages.

In his essay, “Science and Technology: Towards Prosperity in Africa”, lateron in the book, Mongane Wally Serote takes up the issue of science and Africanlanguages. He wonders how Africa could ensure “that children taught in theirmother tongue at the beginning of their education become empowered to dealwith concepts, and that diverse cultures, which can also result in multilingualismand multiculturalism, are a source of knowledge in order to find solutions toissues” (in Makgoba 1999:351). Serote summarises the conclusions on languageof the science and technology breakaway session as follows:

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• Adapt and develop the main African language groups for use in scienceand technology. For instance glossaries and dictionaries of science andtechnology terminology needed to be created.

• Encourage the teaching of science and mathematics at primary level in themother tongue.

• Publish and disseminate science and technology materials in the mainAfrican language groups.

• There should be contact on these matters with the Pan South AfricanLanguage board (PanSalb). (353)

These are very noble aspirations that would require institutional infrastructureto carry out research for selecting the few languages to be used for teachingscience and mathematics. The logistics of launching such a complex enterpriseare more intractable than the desire for an Africa with standard languages.

The lofty ideas about the role of African languages expressed by thebreakaway session on science could be given a little more context throughKwesi Kwaa Prah’s contribution, “African Renaissance or Warlordism?”.Prah points out the importance of African languages in the process of forgingAfrican unity, without which African development and revival are impossible(in Makgoba 1999:60). For Prah the way forward is to rehabilitate and developAfrican languages so that they can carry science and technology in their mostadvanced forms. He sees a need to standardise and harmonise cognatelanguage structures. He gives as one example of a mutually communicablegroup of cognate languages Lozi from Western Zambia, Tswana in Botswana,Namibia and South Africa, Sotho in Lesotho and South Africa and Pedi inSouth Africa. A similar example would comprise the Nguni-based languagesacross the southern sub-continent. Prah sees African languages as one of thebasic foundations for the institutionalisation of Africans’ aspiration towardspeace. He regards the standardisation and harmonisation of cognate languagesas contributing to African unity through improved recognition and respect fordiversity amongst the various nationalities divided by colonialism.

It is disappointing to note that the essays on the media and telecommunicationsin Section Six of the book do not highlight the question of using Africanlanguages (for instance Chinweizu’s “The Ten Commandments of the AfricanRenaissance Journalist (in Makgoba 1999:372)). It is all well and good to focuson the role of the media in the current global conjecture, but when we fail toaddress the issue of the languages through which the messages and images aretransmitted, the impact of the African renaissance will be limited to those whocan read and write in European languages, the languages of the global media.

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African Renaissance: A Concept in DisarrayThere is no one definition of African Renaissance coming out of this book:there are as many definitions as there are authors, and to expect them togenerate a single definition would be naive and simplistic. The three editors ofthe book look at it from different vantage points. For Thaninga Shope “[t]herenaissance of our Africanness is not about rediscovering, but about reiteratingwho we are and what we as Africans are all about” (in Makgoba 1999:xii).Thami Mazwai pitches his observation as follows: “Africa is in a transformationmode. The renaissance is about African reflection and African definition”(xii). For Makgoba, “[t]he African renaissance is a unique opportunity todefine ourselves and our agenda according to our own realities and taking intoaccount the realities of the world around us. It is about Africans being agentsof our own history and masters of our own destiny” (xii). Each of the threeeditors addresses a different aspect of what the African renaissance is about;together they articulate the need to understand our Africanness and to takecontrol of our destiny through such an understanding.

In the Prologue to the book President Thabo Mbeki views the Africanrenaissance as multifaceted. He regards it primarily as a framework formobilising all sectors of society for the political purpose of rejecting all formsof oppression, whether from African dictators or the international community.He also sees the African Renaissance as an essential aspect of the delivery ofa better life: “Our vision of an African Renaissance must have as one of itscentral aims the provision of a better life for those masses of the people whomwe say must enjoy and exercise the right to determine their future” (inMakgoba 1999:xvi). That for Mbeki the African Renaissance is a plan of actionfor remoulding the African future is clearly elaborated in his words: “The newAfrican world which the African Renaissance seeks to build is one of democracy,peace, stability, sustainable development and a better life for the people,nonracism and nonsexism, equality among the nations, a just and democraticsystem of international governance” (xviii).

Undoubtedly, one of the difficulties of the book is that African Renaissanceis too loose a concept, meaning different things to the editors, the authors andthe readers. Many scholars reject the notion of the African Renaissancebecause of its imprecise meaning. There is nothing wrong in seeking forconceptual clarity based on a singular definition; however, taking the sum totalof these definitions as providing different perspectives of the same conceptmight produce an even better way of debating its usefulness. It is also not clearwhy there need be a single meaning to a lifelong process such as the AfricanRenaissance.

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In his essay, “The African Renaissance in Historical Perspective”, BernardMakhosezwe Magubane cites Dr Pixley Isaka ka Seme’s wonderful plea todesist from the temptation to compare the African to the European Renaissance(in Makgoba 1999:32). Magubane makes the point very clearly that even forEurope the Renaissance was not easily reduced to a single definition. Each ofthese essays and conceptions of the African Renaissance in the book bringswith it the experiences of the individual author and presents us with a body ofknowledge which has become part of a collective heritage. The clear messagefrom all these definitions is the fact that the African renaissance is not an eventthat has already taken place; it is a process that heralds the dawn of a bettertomorrow for all who inhabit the African continent.

It is also important to remind readers and all pundits of the AfricanRenaissance that the idea of a renewal, a reawakening, a risorgimento, arenaissance is hardly new. As Prah observes, “each generation of Africanleadership has attempted in its own fashion to give it meaning” (in Makgoba1999:43). This sense of renewal or awakening goes as far back as the 1868Fanti Confederacy that attempted to modernise the state machinery long beforethe whole continent was humiliated through colonialism. A line of principalAfrican thinkers can be traced from the nineteenth century through the pan-Africanist congresses inspired by Du Bois to the nationalist leaders such asNkrumah who led Africa to political freedom.

African Renaissance, Reconciliation and PandemoniumThe first section of the book, which brings together senior African scholars, isthe strongest. The opening essay by Dialo Diop on “Africa: Mankind’s Pastand Future” provides a general statement of intent: what Africa must do toregain its rightful place in the world. The chapter begins by claiming the gloriesof the past. Africa’s greatest historical contribution to the world is that it is thecradle of world civilisation. Diop is concerned about Africa’s “fall from glory”and loss of sovereignty, and his essay traces the historical stages and agenciesthat contributed to this and also identifies the focus areas that could lead to anAfrican renaissance. While the historical record fits into a general Africanisthistoriography, the historical explanation for the fall from glory is limited toexternal influences and Diop fails to address the continent’s contribution to itsown regression.

Magubane’s essay, “The African Renaissance in Historical Perspective”, isprobably the most scholarly in the entire collection. Beginning his analysiswith the genesis and evolution of the European Renaissance, Magubane takesus through the historical record in order to show us how the rise of Europe in

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the period of European Enlightenment was closely linked to the Europeancolonisation of humanity that begot nothing but darkness, degradation, racismand misery (in Makgoba 1999:22-23). He notes the role of Christianity –referred to as “the cross and the sword” – in the enslavement and colonisationof Africa. He also considers the contribution of European anthropology,history and philosophy in humiliating Africa and its people. The legacies ofslavery, colonialism, racism and imperialism in the degradation and destructionof Africa are linked to the present crises in Africa. Finally, Magubane claimsthat while South Africans have achieved the political defeat of apartheid, it isnot a complete victory for the African people because they have not yetachieved the recovery of the productive resources that were usurped byimperialism: “The recovery of those resources will be the recovery of ourdestiny. No people can grow and achieve their humanity if their productiveforces are in alien hands. Only with the restoration of our productive forces canwe as a people act independently and achieve cultural autonomy” (34-35). Heconcludes: “As long as Africa’s economic wellbeing is dependent on thefortunes of imperialist countries, so long will the African renaissance remaina myth” (36).

The statement above is a radical call based on the reading of revolutionariessuch as Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney and Amilcar Cabral, who sacrificed theirlives in the struggle against imperialism. I would urge caution to those keen todismiss it as “old fashioned Marxist rhetoric”, however; a cursory look acrossthe Limpopo may suggest that the struggle in Zimbabwe is precisely aboutrestoring the productive forces to the people who were stripped of it not longago. The return of the productive forces to African people in Zimbabwe,Namibia and South Africa will not be achieved through the intellectualactivities of academics in their ivory towers, but it will be waged by ordinarypeople who are being marginalised and excluded from the market economy bythe selective process of globalisation. The productive forces Magubane talksabout will not be returned peacefully through negotiation; restoration will onlycome through some kind of struggle. The African Renaissance as a discursivestrategy may be mobilised to find a less destructive process than the current onein Zimbabwe.

Kwesi Kwaa Prah and Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, senior African scholars,share their knowledge of security issues in Africa. Prah provides us with arecord of Africa’s wars and the part played by the nation states in fomentingthem. He examines African participation in the two world wars and thesubsequent anti-settler colonialist wars, and wonders about the attainment of

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the African Renaissance goals in a war-torn Africa. Nzongola-Ntalaja arguesin his essay, “The Crisis in the Great Lakes Region”, that “[p]opular aspirationsfor freedom and developments in the face of authoritarian regimes andexclusionist policies constitute the backdrop to the present conflict in the GreatLakes region” (in Makgoba 1999:65). This essay, together with Prah’s, doesan excellent job of highlighting the place of pan-Africanism in findingsolutions to the African crisis. They are among the few writers who see peopleof African descent engaged in bringing African people together in the struggleto end exploitation and oppression from the nineteenth century into thepresent.

I find Ibbo Mandaza’s essay, “Reconciliation and Social Justice in SouthernAfrica: The Zimbabwe Experience”, to be prophetic in its prediction of a crisisin Southern Africa as a consequence of the failure to resolve what he terms “thenational question”. Mandaza argues that the process of reconciliation inSouthern Africa is flawed because it is based on “the individualisation ofcolonialism and apartheid, [and] the reduction of whole systems of oppressionand exploitation into the mere requirement that such individual representativesof white settler colonialism and/or apartheid as the unrepentant Ian Smith orPW Botha be held accountable for the abuse of human and democratic rights”(in Makgoba 1999:78). He further maintains that the abstraction of human anddemocratic rights and reconciliation and social justice away from both powerand class relations leads to an avoidance of the imperative of resolving the realquestion, the national question, namely the resolution of the political, socialand economic questions which were inherited from white settler colonialismand/or apartheid. Mandaza provides a critique of reconciliation that builds onMamdani’s perspective that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission resultsin contributing to a “diminished truth” (79). He denounces the strategy ofreconciliation in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe for its failure to buildinto it the imperatives of social justice that would have led to the political andeconomic emancipation of the majority. To Mandaza reconciliation, evenwhen pronounced from a position of apparent moral and political superiority,is the language of the weak, of those who have failed to overcome and conquerthe historical, political and economic odds of yesterday. He maintains thatreconciliation is the forgiveness of a small elite that inherits state powerwithout the fulfilment of social justice for the majority: “The African nationalistpetit bourgeoisie is only too content to forgive as the necessary price forattaining the class goal after so many years of struggle, imprisonment and self-denial” (81). Mandaza’s disdain for reconciliation is further revealed when he

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maintains that it is a mechanism to ensure the continued property rights of thewhites – or, as he quotes Ali Mazrui: “The white man said to the black man:‘You take the crown and I will keep the jewels’” (81). In all fairness, Mandazanotes that this is a compromise not only imposed by historical circumstancesbut also one which the new African state has no power to challenge, in the shortto the medium range, for fear of hostile reaction at home and abroad.

In demonstrating that the aims of reconciliation and those of social justiceare contradictory and irreconcilable, Mandaza points to the “land war” inZimbabwe as the consequence of the contradiction. He postulates that the landwar in Zimbabwe that has occupied the media could possibly be a feature ofSouth African society in future should the state fail to restructure propertyrights that include land ownership. Mandaza apportions the responsibility forthe irreconcilable and contradictory interests of social justice and reconciliationto both the constitutional arrangements at independence in Zimbabwe, Namibiaand South Africa on the one hand and to the new emergent African bourgeoisieon the other, for failing to challenge the legacies of the past.

African Intellectuals and the African RenaissanceThe book has a great deal of material on the role of Africa-focused intellectualsin the realisation of the African renaissance, and it is fair to conclude that it istargeted at the African intelligentsia. Mamdani makes it very clear that therecan be no African renaissance without an intellectual rebirth, a reawakening ofthe mind. He goes further by stating that there can be no African renaissancewithout an Africa-focused intelligentsia to drive it, and he regrets that SouthAfrica does not possess an Africa-focused intelligentsia to play this role.Herbert W Vilakazi points out in his essay, “The Problem of AfricanUniversities”, that intellectuals of any civilisation are its voice to the rest of theworld; they are the instruments for the development of the higher culture of thatcivilisation. When it comes to Africa, he argues that African intellectuals, byand large, absconded and abdicated their role as developers, minstrels andtrumpeters of African civilisation (in Makgoba 1999: 203). Little wonder thenthat African civilisation stagnated. He concludes that African intellectualsneed a massive re-education because they “have no spiritual or intellectualsympathetic relationship with the culture and civilisation embracing themasses of the African people” (204). Mugo scathingly states that Africanintellectuals have remained a breed of “spoiled children” who have electedthemselves community chiefs as opposed to being its constituents (in Makgoba1999:223). He cautions against repeating the failure of the Pan-Africanistproject to turn into a serious social movement because it was championed in

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Is the African Renaissance a Chimera

elitist garb. Unless the masses, women and youth are integral partners in themobilisation for the African Renaissance we are likely to repeat the errors ofthe past.

The criticism of black intellectuals spreads through the entire book, theirweaknesses are analysed and solutions suggested. These range from institutionalregeneration to individual re-education and rebirth. However, it is only fair topoint out that the African Renaissance project has not embraced the masses,women, and youth in various countries and regions across the continent.Notwithstanding their limitations, intellectuals bear a historical responsibilityto transcend these barriers. It is only reasonable to point out that they operatein a very hostile environment that sees the assertion of Africanness as a threatto the status quo. The challenge to African thinkers and leaders is to engage theuncertified masses, and to debate and formulate strategies that will mobilise thehuman potential for real progress.

ReferencesFanon, F. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.Makgoba, Malegapuru William (ed). 1999. African Renaissance: The New Struggle.

Johannesburg & Cape Town: Mafube and Tafelberg.Mazrui, Ali. 1986. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Boston: Little Brown.Tomaselli, Keyan. 1999. “Cultural Studies and Renaissance in Africa: Recovering

Praxis”. Scrutiny2 4(2):43-48.

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