Poet Aime Cesaire
Poet Aime Cesaire of Martinique passed away last week. He was an iconic co-founder of Black consciousness, long before Steve Biko.

Surprisingly, of all the non-French speaking African heads of state, only South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki sent a message of condolences to the Cesaire family.

Why the silence?

In the realm of ideas, Mbeki has been particularly adept at provoking public debates. He did so in 1996 when, as the country’s vice president, he stood before the South African Parliament and proclaimed: “I am an African“. Shortly thereafter, he launched an equally vibrant discourse on African Renaissance. Two years ago, he raised issues relating to Afrocentricism. It dominated public interest for months.

It would have been ridiculous for any other African president to stand before his Parliament and declare to be African.

In White-ruled SA, however, indoctrination against Africa was so thorough that countless Black South Africans believed that Africanness was something to be scorned. Even after political liberation, it was necessary to keep reminding them that they were indeed Africans – that South Africa is part of Africa. Hence the imperative for Mbeki’s proclamation: “I am an African”.

Evidently, it was part of Mbeki’s unwritten job description to confront the arrogance of Eurocentricism by affirming the validity of Africanness. This preoccupation thrust him into the world of ideas regarding African identity. In this course, it was inevitable to encounter the ideas of Cesaire, hence, Mbeki’s affection for the great poet.

In context of colonialism, English-speaking global Africa was dominated by political means.

British form of colonialism involved actual control, direct or indirect. This systems denigrated Africans, it was perceived as racist and English-speaking Africans transformed their anti-racist sentiments into political movements that revolted and brought about independence to Africa.

Conversely, the French colonial policy was based on assumption of French cultural superiority. Black French colonies responded culturally by questioning the cultural condescension of assimilation. To challenge the arrogance, they embarked upon romanticising blackness and its attributes.

It was at the early stages of this process that Cesaire coined the term negritude. Leopold Senghor, Senegal’s founding-president, later expanded the view intellectually and popularised it.

Assimilated Black French-speaking intellectuals in France in the 1930s encouraged themselves to ask, are we really French? The answer was clear: “We have never been French, we are not French and we shall never be French”.

While at first they had been so proud to be assimilated, they now declared war on the same assimilation policy. By the late 1950s, they were demanding political independence from France in order to safeguard their culture, their negritude.

The bid to enhance Africa as a maker of history, Afro-centricity, has taken two forms. The first is Gloriana Afro-centricity that emphasises the great and proud accomplishments of people of African ancestry. These embrace castle builders, those who built the walls of Zimbabwe or the castles of Gondar in India or the sunken churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia; many would include those who built the pyramids of Egypt as well.

The other is Proletariana Afro-centricity that emphasises the sweat of Africa’s brow, the captured African as a co-builder of modern civilisation - the enslaved as creator, the slave as innovator. Slaves helped build the industrial revolution in the western world and fuelled capitalist transformation of the northern hemisphere.

What about the colonised peoples, as victims and builders of the industrialised modern world? African resources have been used for factories that have transformed the contemporary world. Without those resources today’s global economy would be vastly different.

Negritude is a kind of proletarian Afro-centricity, at least when it indulges in romantic primitivism. Negritude salutes the African cattle herder not the African castle builder. To that extent, it is part of Afro-centricity Proletariana.

About The Author(s): Ali Mazrui and James N Kariuki — Prof. Ali Mazrui is Chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture, Kenya. James N. Kariuki is head of the African Diaspora Unit at the Africa Institute of South Africa in Pretoria.

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Great Britain ruled parts of the Caribbean twice as long in duration as she ruled much of Africa.

When Kenya became a British colony, Britain had already been ruling Jamaica for more than two centuries. Indeed, when Jomo Kenyatta was born in the 1890s Kenya was not yet a crown colony. Yet, when he died in 1978 Kenya had ceased to be a British colony. Kenyatta had lived right through the country’s entire colonial period. He survived British rule by 15 years, having ruled Kenya himself as its first post-colonial President.

While British rule in Kenya was a matter of a single lifetime, British rule in Jamaica traversed the reigns of about 10 British monarchs. By any measure, therefore, Jamaica and much of the British West Indies were more deeply Anglicised than Kenya was. But since independence is the Caribbean getting de-Anglicised? If so, what are the causes?

A number of factors may have contributed to such a process of post-colonial de-Anglicisation. One is the surprising phenomenon of Britain’s cultural abdication. This is in sharp contrast to the missionary zeal of the French in the realm of culture. British commitment to cultural diplomacy is much weaker than that of France-both in Africa and the Caribbean.

The United Kingdom spends the equivalent of only a fraction of the French budget for cultural diplomacy. The very success of the English language globally has reduced Britain’s need to promote the language in other lands. That there is an English-speaking power mightier than Britain (the United States) also helped to dwarf Britain’s cultural role in promoting Anglo-Saxon culture.

The French language, on the other hand, is on the defensive against the devastating competition of Anglo-American cultural and linguistic expansionism. There is no French-speaking super power the equivalent of the United States. France tries to play the cultural roles of both Britain and the United States.

But the United States is itself another reason British influence in the Caribbean continues to decline. In the post-colonial era, the sheer proximity and size of the United States have been felt more directly than was possible under British imperial rule.

American investment, American tourism, American television programmes, American goods and services, and even Caribbean membership of the Organisation of American States, have all played their part in tilting the balance towards Americanisation in the Caribbean experience.

Then there is the phenomenon of American education as compared with the old colonial infatuation with the prestige of British education. There was a time when West Indians and Africans asked themselves whether being educated in the US was a more radicalising experience than being educated in Great Britain.

In the first half of the 20th Century the evidence seemed to support that proposition. Kwame Nkrumah was mainly educated in the US; his rival in Ghana, Kofi Busia, was educated in Great Britain. Nkrumah captured the torch of radical nationalism, while Busia moved to the right.

In Nigeria, the younger Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) was the voice of nationalist militancy. He was American educated. The leading British-educated Nigerians in the 1940s and even the 1950s were mainly to Zik’s right ideologically.

If it was true that American education in the first half of the 20th Century was a more radicalising experience for Africans and West Indians than was British education, what were the reasons at that time?

One factor in the first half of the century was that the United States was not only a much more racist society than Great Britain but American racism at the time was still highly institutionalised. African and Caribbean students in the United States were therefore more subject to racial humiliation and harassment than their counterparts in the United Kingdom. African and Caribbean students in American colleges were as a result more liable to get radicalised in response.

Also contributing to this radicalisation was African and Caribbean intermingling with Black Americans and being exposed to a more intense pan-African experience. Indeed, African students in the first half of the 20th C moved even further to the left.

Middle class Caribbean Blacks could go either way when highly educated. They could move more decisively to the left (going even Marxist) or become more eloquent defenders of the capitalist status quo. Less privileged Caribbean Blacks educated in the United States were more likely to go nationalist rather than socialist — often emphasising race rather than class, although their own origins were often rooted in class disadvantages.

By the second half of the 20th Century some of the most eloquent voices of the socialist left in Commonwealth Caribbean were British educated. Even Eric Williams of Trinidad was initially a product of British leftism.

George Padmore flirted with communism. And C L R James was both highly anglicised and highly leftist to the end of his days when he was nearly 90.

Today, more and more positions in journalism, the bureaucracy, politics and education are gradually occupied by the ‘Americanised’ West Indians.

The statistics are shifting in favour of the American educated. But in reality they are only narrowing the gap between them and the more influential British-educated. The de-Anglicisation of the Caribbean has not yet gone far enough to dethrone the Anglophiles in the Commonwealth Caribbean completely.

Afterall, Michael Manley in power was more prominent than Edward Seaga was in office. Manley symbolised Anglophilia; Seaga was a product of Pax-Americana.

For the products of the American experience it is still too early for them to celebrate the following: The stream of experience meanders on in the vast expanse of Caribbean time. The new will come and the old be gone. Let’s toast the fortunes of changing clime.

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