Thinking alone: Colour, culture and Africanness

None of us would dispute the ‘fact’ that we are “black people”.  Black and proud. So imagine my astonishment then, when, at age 14, in the early 80s, going to high school in Manchester UK, I heard a ‘black’ kid (they were called ‘African-Caribbeans” then) say to a white kid, “Don’t call me black”. I was stumped. It wasn’t a culture shock; it was a culture crash.

And that was just the beginning. Crash number two was almost surreal: We were on the bus, on our way home from school. I sat next to a black class-mate and we were arguing over something, which I cannot recall now, but this mate of mine, as he was about to alight the bus, turned round to me and fired his parting shot, “Momodou, you African.” And ‘African’ in this context quite evidently his substitute for something not very nice. I still had half an hour’s bus ride to my stop. So I settled into a quiet bewilderment. A bewilderment that was to last for few years.

It was around this period that I began to intuit the possibility, that there was more to colour or names than what meets the eye.

Now, fast-forward a decade or so, and you’d be in the early 1990s, and I’d be at university, reading the great Bertrand Russell and learning that names do not denote, concepts did, and behind every name there was a concept.I let myself be held in hand by this insight, and went searching for the concept in the word “black”; specifically, when it is applied to people, when people are “adjectived” with it.

And, dear reader, what I came back home with, was pure boxing - commentary stuff: In the white corner, weighing an I.Q. of 200, is the Aryan champion from Europe, with his snow-white purity and innocence and la-di-da. In the black corner, weighing an I.Q. of about 70, is the blighted, the benighted, African under-champion; whose sole distinction is his savagely infantile upper hook. Let us be clear: we all know about the pigment variations that can exist withing a species, but such biological differentiations are never freighted with overtones of superiority or inferiority, as the case might be. Biologists simply treat them as mere facts. Being black or white, according to the science of biology, is no more than an accompanying feature of man, not his defining essence. But being what we are (not very rational), we’ve taken an accompanying feature and elevated it beyond its station.

The African-American writer, Toni Morrison, once teased us with this thought-experiment: imagine that there was a person locked up in a room, and the only information you had about him was that he was a “black person”. Now, what could one extrapolate from this piece of information about this person; his ethics, for instance, or his politics or indeed his aesthetics? Well, nothing.

That is the short and simple answer. Anything I or anyone else might form in our heads about this person, will be no more than our own “constructs”of a “black person”. A person’s skin colour is the least informative thing about him, yet we tend to hug ours as if it were our life-blood. It is both skin deep and deeply embroiled in a sinister ideology of racial differentiation. Nothing so superficial has had a more devastating aspect than the purported colour of a person’s skin. I use the word “purported” advisedly. In the US., they had the “one-drop rule”, and it worked like this: take child ‘A’, for example, her mother is all white, her father is mixed-raced (half cast) and one could argue that, rationally, child ‘A’ is closer to “white” than to “black”. But the “one-drop rule” will have none of that: A single drop of “colour” disqualified one from the exclusive club of white-membership.

It was a simple equation, really: there is white and there is non-white, and anything non-white is black. The rational element in me protests at the equation’s confusion of negatives and opposites, and the “cultural” in me objects to its simplistic reductionism. Here, man is reduced to his merely biological category. I think that it was a stroke of genius that “black Americans” have recently become “African-Americans”.

The latter term is culturally richer. More dynamic and spacious, more resonant of a specific historical reality. A comparison with what’s happening in Britain should be instructive. The Brits are more accepting of “black” these days. In fact so accepting that  even people of Asian descent are sometimes referred to by that term. This elasticity of application makes it lose any specificity, and therefore its usefulness. Actually, not entirely - it becomes a shorthand for the non-white, nothing more.

Karl Marx once declared that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” I shall adapt Marx a little, and declare that we have been only quoting our great men, in one context or another; the point, however, is to interpret them.

What do we think that Martin Luther King meant, in his great speech, where he envisaged a future when his children would be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character? I believe that Dr. King was simply fleshing-out what the first African-American Rhodes scholar, the philosopher Alain Locke once declared with philosophic brevity: “colour is not culture”. Colour is a biological accident, deserving neither pride or shame.It is the outer-clothing of the self.Culture, on the other hand, is about human thought; it is “a mode of thought which defines our moral inheritance”.

Academics have discerned two conceptions of culture.One, the romantic version, has culture as “the flow of moral energy that holds society intact”; a shared spiritual force which is manifest in all the customs, beliefs and practices of a people. The other conception, the classical one, with its latinate interpretation of the word, has culture as cultivation.

Unlike the first, which sees culture and social membership as the same, this conception treas culture as the property of an educated elite, an attainment which involves intellect and study.If the first one is “particularist”, defined as something separate, the second is “universalist”, open to the cultivated man “who sees mankind as a whole, and sympathises with human life in all its higher forms and aspirations”. For much of their histories, these two conceptions of culture have been looking at each other with bad eyes: the culture of ‘ belonging’ accusing that of cultivation, of elitism; and the accused retorting with its own counter-accusation, “methinks, you are too populist”, and the rest of us take sides depending on whether we ‘think’ we’re egalitarian or elitist. Egalitarian or elitist.

It seems so simple, doesn’t it? But what about egalitarian and elitist? or is that a contradiction, a near-oxymoronic conjunction, saved only by the ‘and’. Maybe. But what the egalitarian is referring to is our “common culture”, and what the elites are pointing at is a kind of “high culture”. But far from the two being antagonists, the two feed off each other. just as it is impossible to cut one side of a piece of paper without cutting the other, so it is with our “two cultures”, when you touch one, you touch the other.

The nation is the first condition for the existence of culture. It is the space where we can institutionalise our creativity and our values. What colonialism did (in fact what it always does) was to invade this national space, divert our creativity and dislocate our values.

And after a century or so, “there comes about a veritable emaciation of the stock of national culture,” in inverse proportion to the oversupply of ‘foreign’ stock into the national consciousness. We’ve discerned two effects of this situation: the masses hold on to the ‘emaciated’ remains of our grandfathers, ever so dearly, in formalised and stereotyped ways. The new elites imitate the coloniser, to their hearts’ content. But “as soon as the colonised comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently”, then this two-fold emerging”, would constitute the “birth-hour” of a new clarity: “The native rebuilds his perceptions because he renews the purpose and dynamism of the craftsmen...”

Reader, this paragraph thus far, has been an attempt to summarise Frantz Fanon’s diagnoses of our condition. now, an interpretation. Fanon’s “craftsmen” are nothing but the “elites” of a society. “The unacknowledged legislators of the world.” those who cull from our common culture that which is significant, then cherish, value and commemorate it. And here Fanon was explicit,” the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation.” No less true in 2008 than in 1959, or indeed in 1860: The great Italian statesman, Cavour, the force behind Italian unification, captures the point seamlessly: “now we have created Italy, next we must create Italians. An African Cavour writing today would put it differently. “Now they have created Africa, next we must create Africans.

I do not believe I would be on controversial grounds, in suggesting that ‘Africa’ was an invention of colonialism. From the very name itself, to its institutions, right down to some of our attitudes, which have evolved within the colonial albatross.

The 1884 Berlin Conference drew up much of what Africa looks like today. And those who occupied the land before colonialism, didn’t call themselves “Africans”, they had other names. Ayi Kwei Armah, the Ghanaian novelist complained that at independence “politicians, even those who dreamed most fervently about new ways in their rhetoric and theory, fell back, in practice, on European structures because that was what they saw ready to hand.” In a sense, they couldn’t have done it any other way. There were no other structures to follow. The old order was destroyed by its absorption into the imperialist structures. And the very notion of Africa itself was tied up with these structures, so much so, that any structural change would have also changed “Africa”. To what? Well, your guess is as good as mine.

All the same, now, they have created Africa, next we must create Africans. But how shall we create Africans? Fanon has already hinted at an answer: self-knowledge and an “understanding of the rest of the world,” this is not so much a choice as a necessity.

And there are dangerous traps along the way. Africa isn’t feeling well. At the very least it is convalescing. slavery and colonialism were the ‘illness’. This recognition of ourselves, though, might engender a sense of despairing, resentful alienation. The sort that drains our nations’ brains, and infects our young with ‘nerves syndrome’.

If the alienation isn’t resentful, it is comical: see how our bourgeoisie wallow in the “boutique squalor” of western consumerism? Like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, most of us confuse the luxuries of the flesh with the delicacies of the sentiment. Perhaps these are the symptoms of our illness. But before we are too hasty to hate ourselves, thus lose hope, we should do well to remember that illness, or “sickness is the means by which a body frees itself of foreign matter.” And since we cannot go back to before we were sick, it falls on our shoulders to accept our inheritance with dignity (stop the bickering with history) and weave an African vision for man.

A vision which would be necessarily rooted in universal values. “The separate, insular mentality is dead. The internet cooked its goose”. So, instead of a sense of alienation, why not cultivate our capacity for creative appropriation. All cultures borrow from one another. It is not a single person’s decision, it is intrinsic in humanity itself. “only everybody knows everything.”

My colour is what biology gave me. My culure is what my Africanness can give me. But my sense of Africaness cannot be reduced to mere colour. The Afrikaner tribe of South Africa, as terrible as it has been to the other tribes, is still an African tribe. Similarly, Condi Rice, US Secretary of State, whose association with the neo-conservatives wags a few tongues every so often, has every moral light to be a neo-con, if that is where her intellect leads her.

To perceive an incongruence based on Miss Rice’s colour, is racist. Our world is a complicated business, requiring as much sophistication to grasp its complexity. Traditional Africa, like most traditional societies, will soon be a thing of the past, if not already. We must fully assimilate the implications of such a future, and fashion a modern voice, neither imitative nor nativistic, less hoarse, and more confident. We may not be able to go back to traditional life, but no need to, because our traditions are in us, as disposition, as guide, and especially as inspiration for a better future. “Destiny goes forth within people, not from without. And the terrible situation we are in is in its deepest being something helpless that wants our help.