Essay - An image of Africa
Africa is not poor
Africa is not poor
Breyten Breytenbach resists against the victim mentality
Africa needs to rebuilt itself. Without any help from the outside. The continent can no longer push off the guilt. ‘But self-research will exploit us from our comfortable self-image as victims of the history, of the colonialism, of the racism, of the capitalism, of the socialism, of our own innocence and intrinsic goodness…’ By Breyten Breytenbach
I am haunted by two images. They are not related and perhaps they only point indirectly to interesting matters which currently drop a shadow to the world we inhabit – barbarism, terrorism, imperialism, impoverishment, epidemics, the absence of ethical codes and a hierarchy of values, exaggerated materialism, intellectual and artistic narcissism…Still, both images illustrate for me the fresh fracture path where private and public come together.
The first image is that of the so-called ‘piano man’. On the stormy night of April 7 a white man is found roaming the street next to the beach of Sheerness in Kent. His elegant dark suit is soaked, all the business cards have been removed carefully, he carries nothing to identify himself. Obviously he has lost his memory and with that his identity. If you forget how other remembered you, you stop existing.
De man is taken to the hospital, the Medway Maritime Hospital. The national centre of missing people has been warned. No one comes forward who might know who he is. In the weeks following thousands of reactions, speculations, theories and false identifications begin on the internet. All to no avail and at last interest decreases.
The man has an anxiety disorder: if someone enters the room where he stays he crawls into a corner. After several days he draws a grand piano on a piece of paper. He is being taken to a grand piano, takes a seat and starts playing beautifully, hours non stop. Only when he plays he is able to relax. The young blond stranger with melancholic and fearful eyes does not respond to questions, does not seem to speak any language, won’t draw or write anything anymore but does compose music. He is obviously a proficient concert pianist and needs to be pulled roughly from the instrument. He presses the file with compositions closely to his chest.
The second image comes to mind – or actually rather drops from heaven – like an Icarus with burned wings. A human leg falls on the roof of Pam Hearne, who lives 9 kilometers away from the JFK-airport in New York. Later more body parts will be found in the room of the undercarriage of an airplane which through South African Airways from Johannesburg via Dakar flew towards New York.
Again no business cards or proof of identification. Pam Hearne explains how she first though it was her neighbour who was loading up his truck. ‘I am relieved that I live where I live’, she says, ‘so I don’t have to flee to save my body, as apparently this man needed to.’ The authorities declare: ‘Not during any moment the passengers on board have been in danger.’
We can say that the international climate has depraved, physically as well as morally. Without getting into the immense tendency and preference of the human to make war, without pretending to understand why this ‘lifestyle’ seems fatal as well as inevitable (if we even could call killing our fellow citizens a ‘lifestyle’) and so also without daring to estimate the vitality of the ancient countermovement towards pacification, I think I can postulate that over the past twenty years we have seen an increase of massive slaughters and a growing impotence to face the implications.
The ‘world’ – or at least significant parts of it – raised rejections that blacks in South-Africa were killed and suppressed exclusively and only because they were black.
Can we claim that the genocide in Rwanda ten years ago liberated just as much indignation?
Do we feel just as involved with the happenings in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Somalia and by what is being done to the people of Darfur, Zimbabwe and Congo?
Do we try just as hard to pull out the torch from those conflicts? Why not? Because these are remote areas with a small influence to the worldwide balance of power and with only a limited market value? Because the bloodshed and oppression isn’t the work of the white? Or are the problems too complicated, is the culture to ‘dark’ for us? Have we grown tired of trying to understand the other? Have we removed ourselves from our moral nametags and out identity why we play existentialistic plays on the piano?
We are stalked from all kinds of angles by upcoming fundamentalism, a revival of religiosity, the idea that capitalism ought to be assessing direction worldwide towards progression. An intensification of poverty and disparity and a revival of racism…
The United States have become a rogue state under presidency of George W. Bush, Europe is so convulsive nowadays like the behind of a clay ox (I use here an African saying) and in Africa the spirit has been driven to madness because of all the despair – our freedom more and more diminished by the arbitrariness by despicable rulers of by the unfettered meanness of the elite and the blackmailing of soldiers who rob citizens. At many places freedom doesn’t exist for it lacks the economical and political resources on establish it.
Is it therefore not understandable that desperate individuals try to escape in frail, packed cayuco’s, or hide themselves in the undercarriage of airplanes, where they won’t have any chance of surviving because either they will freeze to death or be crunched to pulp?
What do we do with the recovery of cannibalism, with the children who are given weapons to go out and murder? How did we come this far, as a group, to accept that something such as ‘collapsed states’, ‘black holes’ exist and that we can live with that?
When did we grow estranged from the awareness that of what is being done to the helpless, what we allow to happen, concerns all of us, that the bell rings for us all? Have we lost touch that true change is dependant on every one of us? Hoe did this shifting in priorities – from the other to one self – become so omnipresent? We live in the era of selfhood.
Admitted, many of our international solidarity perhaps was justified by tender affairs, hypocrisy and national and economical interests, but they at least created certain standards and embodied a certain course of behaviour.
What are the values of the world? James Wolfensohn, former president of the World bank, pointed out in an interview that authorities worldwide spend 900 billion dollar for defence, 300 billion for the support or actually aid towards the worlds richest farmers and only 56 billion meant for development aid. Poverty reduction is not very profitable as stimulating the dealing in weapon sale. According to the media the space-shield of president Bush cost approximately 58 billion dollars, while specialists calculated that the announced millennium targets (At the latest in 2015 force back poverty) which ceremoniously and in harmony by basically all the nations of the world was agreed on will be, at the earliest obtained in the year of 2147.
This arrogance must be put up against several statistics.
In 2003 704 million people lived in Africa against 307 million in the euro zone. The average life expectancy in Africa was 45,6 years against 78,9 years in Europe. Of all Africans 7,2 percent was hiv-positive against 0,3 percent of the Europeans. In Africa per person there was used 457 kilowatt on electricity against 5912 kilowatt in Europe. The average year income was five hundred dollar in Africa against 22.180 dollar in Europe. In Africa thirteen percent of the roads were accessible against 95 percent of the European roads. In 2003 Africa counted 348.000 regular flights against 3.5 million for Europe. Between 1981 and 2003 the amount of Africans that needed to live off of less than one dollar a day increased from forty to fifty percent meanwhile in that same period of time in China decreased from sixty to twenty percent.
Africa is poorer than ever before. Extreme poverty has quadrupled in the past twenty years. More than a third of the African inhabitant gets by on less than half a dollar a day. More air-money has been put into Africa than the Marshall plan brought to Europe after the second World War (even though a lot of ‘African money’ ends up in the pockets of development organisations or their local companies), so where is the industry, universities, public offices, hospitals or roads? Our civil wars – now in the two countries with the largest population, Sudan and Congo – who rage for so long already that they’ve come look endemic, permanent and unsolvable. An average Nigerian is, despite the oil bonanza, is poorer than in 1970. The country was torn apart by ethnical and religious conflicts and is one of the most corrupt places in this world. The legal department has basically collapsed. Social chaos and flight of capital are the norm. The once proud universities now have been crashed down.
Yes, we lead our lives still holding the hand of the rich humanistic traditions and yes, in no other part of the world people kill one another so easily and from such a young age. Yes, many of the horrors could be ascribed to vampire alike leaders, predators who reduce their people to beggary – Idi Amin (Uganda), Bokassa (Central African Republic), Mobutu (Zaire, now Congo), Eyadéma (Togo), Charles Taylor (Liberia), Arap Moi (Kenya), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Dos Santos (Angola) – but we also should ask ourselves the question if the less stingy leaders, ‘Christian gentlemen’ like Kaunda (Zambia) and Nyerere (Tanzania) left us something else than insane and disastrous economical policy.
Wijlen Claude Aké once said: ‘The problem is not that development failed, but it was never on the agenda in the first place’.
For, in the passing by of this, I’d like to underline that I don’t contemplate Africa’s poverty as a result of global injustice. Sure, the cause of our stupidity party lays in the system. What else can we expect from a worldwide capitalism? But it partly depends on ourselves if we continue to twist in our poverty, in our self-pity. Africa is not poor. And although the corruption perhaps is being cranked up from London, Paris or Washington, the accessories and often also the beneficiaries are those in Africa who do themselves good from the misery of the poor. Only the Africans can save Africa and put themselves unharmed again.
To be creative we have to free ourselves from attachments. We have to continue to unchain our spirit if we want to keep it from falling back into the darkness of despair and expediency.
How do we keep our spirit free? It won’t be sufficient to sing to the darkness. To survive we have to take up the responsibility to imagine another world. What vision can we offer to a thirteen year old boy in Monrovia who now believes that for his maturity he needs to purchase an AK-47, lipstick and put on a wig, dressed in a wedding dress and start to murder? What is our proposal to the children?
Not everyone can be a ‘piano man’.
The world is mutually connected and Africa takes part in the comparison, even though the frontline between East and West lies somewhere else. Africa has always been imagined, as well as from the inside as from the outside, most of the time by escapism. Even currently it still happens.
On one hand support for the continent is being applied by pop concerts and G8-meetings and the set up of commissions and aims. On the other hand we as well hear the mantra’s being the consequent of selfhood about ‘sovereignty’, about the descent existence that the world owes to Africa, an existence that would have to be grounded on to the renewed authorisation of the lies which we – from colonialism to post-independence – have gotten to know under the cloak of good management, statecraft and political systems.
From the perceptions of Africa – who know a history of more lows that tops, a story where sometimes is been given but more has been taken – there are real cultural differences at the fundament.
It is a bout a rich variegation of approaches until death, until the continuation between the generations, until the passing of time, until the embedding of the conscious living in the unknown, until the idea and the use of ones body, until the traditional ways to bring the strength of the darkness into the light with rhythms and banishments.
These reflections were inspired by an exposition of African art which I visited in Paris. It was titled Africa ReMix. A terrible name by the way. As if an artist would suffice to mix up old expressions!
What attracted me was the primarily vitality of the works, the purpose of how the materials and surfaces were handles and the mocking tone of it.
‘Traditional’ African patterns – earth, cloths, body paints, magic – were processed in western forms like installations and video art. The installations often betrayed a narrative intention (we are nothing without a story about ourselves). The video art was (just like everywhere around the world) mainly mean, ugly and empty. With other words, this art was more cut down for the average western museum visitor. Sure, there was some modern African naturalism given to the works by the use of discarded remains of the consumption society – tin, old weapons, plastic wrappings, recycled sculptures – to put to notice that actually Africa is tarring on the waste of the developed world and that everything - how humble – can be formed into art.
Apart from this hybrid character – most of the represented African artists live and work in Europe – the exposition tossed uncomfortable questions. Why have these artists been brought together? What do artists from Northern Africa have in common with, say, artists from Congo? What connects Africans which separates them as a group from the rest of the world? And why does it seem that outsiders need to see Africa as a whole?
Is it perhaps to confirm stereotypes, contemporary expressions of exotism, now under the cloak of ‘showing respect to what is strange to us’, with the comforting implication that that part of the world is board free, exotic and in its own clearly is kept apart from its own environment.
Isn’t it Europe that emphasizes a more ‘strange’ attitude in its development? Take par excellence wealthy and cheerful countries like the Netherlands or Denmark. The biggest part of the Netherlands and Danish object against the tolerance and the international solidarity which the governmental policy established over the last thirty years. Both countries now show themselves from an angrier, xenophobic and even racist side. How did it get this far?
Apart from the primary problems, mainly of economical order, which involves the integration of great amounts of immigrants, without a doubt, cultural contrasts play a part.
The particular tolerance against diversity (in theory) and the excessive bearing undervalued the need for national connection and direction, to identity even.
Relatively uniformed cultural groups hold on tight after all to their steady familiarity with those geographical areas which they occupy.
The mingling of these populations groups doesn’t automatically bring forth greater acceptance of the differences.
Mistakenly there is presumed that those whom we accept in their own authenticity, likewise would respect our authenticity to find together in this way, a shared non-religious fundament to built on.
It was an arrogant, moralistic approach that surpassed the country boarders, who tried to make poor countries accept what democrats believe would be good for them (like ‘democracy’!), who did not take into account the history or the hypocrisy of the North and which resulted in a revival of extreme rights in our own backyard.
Nothing of all the above discharges us within Africa from the obligation to question ourselves how to be creative and untie reshaped images. I know it feels like betrayal to acknowledge the horrors – our work, our responsibilities for it is so easy to confirm our racist pre-judgements without meaning to do so.
‘We would betray our own battle in this way’, as how it is put often.
But self investigation would bare us from our comfortable self-image as victims of history, of colonialism, of racism, of capitalism, of socialism of our own innocence and intrinsic goodness…
We would have to start to realize that from the euphoria of the liberation we have descended towards the heart of darkness. We will have to admit that the concept of the nation state as how it exists currently in Africa, merely in behalf of predatory local elites and corruption and cynical foreign companies, is not viable.
The democracy which has extended itself in our area, although with added flavours of the sweet poison of elections, will mean our death one day. We will have to face the reality that foreign aid doesn’t help. We know Africa needs to be rebuilt, with radical new principles, based on genuine autonomy and independence. We all know then we will need a moral revolution, to dispatch the needs of the continent, to bring down our bloated rhetorical and rabble-rousing bragging. This is not the task nor responsibility of the outside world.
In my opinion the moral imagination of our generation falls short here. We have replaced responsible freedom for self enrichment and appropriation, diluted with cowardness, betrayal, depraved independence, the glorification of our impotence and our political correct affectation in a language that is detached from any texture or colour. We have based our sharp interventions on abracadabra over wounds that needed to be healed and adversity we needed to leave behind, using other words for the unacceptable in the hope to not need to face up with the harsh realities. In some cases we directed –up to this very day- the lugubrious farce where the confessing of torture and suppression is expected to lead towards forgiveness and reconcilement. Every appearance, every turgid bird, anything rather than setting our shared humanity non-suggestively as a starting point to identify what is unacceptable and have the right gain towards victory.
What if our artists and intellectuals suffice with ironic remarks, as in African ReMix? What if they only try to save there own behinds, whirl themselves into their own victim-role, continue to push off the guilt and blame, wander about in immense labyrinths in their haunt for the alienated ego?
When I walked out of Africa ReMix I saw a white man my age, dressed with a style of fashion in a dark suit worn over a black T-shirt with red letters saying: ‘Africa is burning’. And I wondered if we really need to be brought back towards a fashion slogan on a T-shirt.
Freedom is guilt, because with it you bring the realisation of no-freedom. I guess you could say: Freedom is knowledge and with that responsibility.
I believe in a correlation between the South and the North where the two consciously try to strengthen, based on true sincerity and absolute equality. What Europe does for Africa is what Africa should do for Europe. I believe that a certain correlation will bring forth a movement and that consciously rooms of creativity, debate and transformation (in both directions) will be accomplished to help individuals find back their strengths. I believe that we should practise the powerlessness (in both directions) by refusing to support the reliability and the supposed sovereignty from the corrupt regimes which tar on robbery, suppression, ceremonial and glamour and neither accept that the weak will be destroyed by the globalisation of the free market.
Post Scriptum
Obviously it needs to be noted that the ‘piano man’ turned out to be a waiter from Beieren, who was rejected in love by another man, hopelessly strangled in complications of life. Apparently he had studied the behaviour of people with amnesia and had left wandering to find himself again in consensus with a romantic dream. There aren’t many ways to escape this world of control and category…for us this man was extremely intriguing, as he appeared from over the sea, in the dark, as if he came from space.There are not many ways to escape this world…Although more and more Spanish and Italian troops patrol before the coast of Africa attempting to intercept them, even though thousands who made it to Europe are criminalized by keeping them in camps or by giving them the status of shady refugees, people with dull appearance and ragged clothes risk year in year out their lives in attempt to reach ‘the paradise’. ‘Europe or death’ is how the battle cry sounds. Among them women and children. They’re the ones who die first and are tossed overboard most of the time, anonymous dead bodies which tumble in the bars of the sea, who drift ashore there tourists are bathing.
The first image is that of the so-called ‘piano man’. On the stormy night of April 7 a white man is found roaming the street next to the beach of Sheerness in Kent. His elegant dark suit is soaked, all the business cards have been removed carefully, he carries nothing to identify himself. Obviously he has lost his memory and with that his identity. If you forget how other remembered you, you stop existing.
De man is taken to the hospital, the Medway Maritime Hospital. The national centre of missing people has been warned. No one comes forward who might know who he is. In the weeks following thousands of reactions, speculations, theories and false identifications begin on the internet. All to no avail and at last interest decreases.
The man has an anxiety disorder: if someone enters the room where he stays he crawls into a corner. After several days he draws a grand piano on a piece of paper. He is being taken to a grand piano, takes a seat and starts playing beautifully, hours non stop. Only when he plays he is able to relax. The young blond stranger with melancholic and fearful eyes does not respond to questions, does not seem to speak any language, won’t draw or write anything anymore but does compose music. He is obviously a proficient concert pianist and needs to be pulled roughly from the instrument. He presses the file with compositions closely to his chest.
The second image comes to mind – or actually rather drops from heaven – like an Icarus with burned wings. A human leg falls on the roof of Pam Hearne, who lives 9 kilometers away from the JFK-airport in New York. Later more body parts will be found in the room of the undercarriage of an airplane which through South African Airways from Johannesburg via Dakar flew towards New York.
Again no business cards or proof of identification. Pam Hearne explains how she first though it was her neighbour who was loading up his truck. ‘I am relieved that I live where I live’, she says, ‘so I don’t have to flee to save my body, as apparently this man needed to.’ The authorities declare: ‘Not during any moment the passengers on board have been in danger.’
We can say that the international climate has depraved, physically as well as morally. Without getting into the immense tendency and preference of the human to make war, without pretending to understand why this ‘lifestyle’ seems fatal as well as inevitable (if we even could call killing our fellow citizens a ‘lifestyle’) and so also without daring to estimate the vitality of the ancient countermovement towards pacification, I think I can postulate that over the past twenty years we have seen an increase of massive slaughters and a growing impotence to face the implications.
The ‘world’ – or at least significant parts of it – raised rejections that blacks in South-Africa were killed and suppressed exclusively and only because they were black.
Can we claim that the genocide in Rwanda ten years ago liberated just as much indignation?
Do we feel just as involved with the happenings in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Somalia and by what is being done to the people of Darfur, Zimbabwe and Congo?
Do we try just as hard to pull out the torch from those conflicts? Why not? Because these are remote areas with a small influence to the worldwide balance of power and with only a limited market value? Because the bloodshed and oppression isn’t the work of the white? Or are the problems too complicated, is the culture to ‘dark’ for us? Have we grown tired of trying to understand the other? Have we removed ourselves from our moral nametags and out identity why we play existentialistic plays on the piano?
We are stalked from all kinds of angles by upcoming fundamentalism, a revival of religiosity, the idea that capitalism ought to be assessing direction worldwide towards progression. An intensification of poverty and disparity and a revival of racism…
The United States have become a rogue state under presidency of George W. Bush, Europe is so convulsive nowadays like the behind of a clay ox (I use here an African saying) and in Africa the spirit has been driven to madness because of all the despair – our freedom more and more diminished by the arbitrariness by despicable rulers of by the unfettered meanness of the elite and the blackmailing of soldiers who rob citizens. At many places freedom doesn’t exist for it lacks the economical and political resources on establish it.
Is it therefore not understandable that desperate individuals try to escape in frail, packed cayuco’s, or hide themselves in the undercarriage of airplanes, where they won’t have any chance of surviving because either they will freeze to death or be crunched to pulp?
What do we do with the recovery of cannibalism, with the children who are given weapons to go out and murder? How did we come this far, as a group, to accept that something such as ‘collapsed states’, ‘black holes’ exist and that we can live with that?
When did we grow estranged from the awareness that of what is being done to the helpless, what we allow to happen, concerns all of us, that the bell rings for us all? Have we lost touch that true change is dependant on every one of us? Hoe did this shifting in priorities – from the other to one self – become so omnipresent? We live in the era of selfhood.
Admitted, many of our international solidarity perhaps was justified by tender affairs, hypocrisy and national and economical interests, but they at least created certain standards and embodied a certain course of behaviour.
What are the values of the world? James Wolfensohn, former president of the World bank, pointed out in an interview that authorities worldwide spend 900 billion dollar for defence, 300 billion for the support or actually aid towards the worlds richest farmers and only 56 billion meant for development aid. Poverty reduction is not very profitable as stimulating the dealing in weapon sale. According to the media the space-shield of president Bush cost approximately 58 billion dollars, while specialists calculated that the announced millennium targets (At the latest in 2015 force back poverty) which ceremoniously and in harmony by basically all the nations of the world was agreed on will be, at the earliest obtained in the year of 2147.This arrogance must be put up against several statistics.
In 2003 704 million people lived in Africa against 307 million in the euro zone. The average life expectancy in Africa was 45,6 years against 78,9 years in Europe. Of all Africans 7,2 percent was hiv-positive against 0,3 percent of the Europeans. In Africa per person there was used 457 kilowatt on electricity against 5912 kilowatt in Europe. The average year income was five hundred dollar in Africa against 22.180 dollar in Europe. In Africa thirteen percent of the roads were accessible against 95 percent of the European roads. In 2003 Africa counted 348.000 regular flights against 3.5 million for Europe. Between 1981 and 2003 the amount of Africans that needed to live off of less than one dollar a day increased from forty to fifty percent meanwhile in that same period of time in China decreased from sixty to twenty percent.
Africa is poorer than ever before. Extreme poverty has quadrupled in the past twenty years. More than a third of the African inhabitant gets by on less than half a dollar a day. More air-money has been put into Africa than the Marshall plan brought to Europe after the second World War (even though a lot of ‘African money’ ends up in the pockets of development organisations or their local companies), so where is the industry, universities, public offices, hospitals or roads? Our civil wars – now in the two countries with the largest population, Sudan and Congo – who rage for so long already that they’ve come look endemic, permanent and unsolvable. An average Nigerian is, despite the oil bonanza, is poorer than in 1970. The country was torn apart by ethnical and religious conflicts and is one of the most corrupt places in this world. The legal department has basically collapsed. Social chaos and flight of capital are the norm. The once proud universities now have been crashed down.
Yes, we lead our lives still holding the hand of the rich humanistic traditions and yes, in no other part of the world people kill one another so easily and from such a young age. Yes, many of the horrors could be ascribed to vampire alike leaders, predators who reduce their people to beggary – Idi Amin (Uganda), Bokassa (Central African Republic), Mobutu (Zaire, now Congo), Eyadéma (Togo), Charles Taylor (Liberia), Arap Moi (Kenya), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Dos Santos (Angola) – but we also should ask ourselves the question if the less stingy leaders, ‘Christian gentlemen’ like Kaunda (Zambia) and Nyerere (Tanzania) left us something else than insane and disastrous economical policy.
Wijlen Claude Aké once said: ‘The problem is not that development failed, but it was never on the agenda in the first place’.
For, in the passing by of this, I’d like to underline that I don’t contemplate Africa’s poverty as a result of global injustice. Sure, the cause of our stupidity party lays in the system. What else can we expect from a worldwide capitalism? But it partly depends on ourselves if we continue to twist in our poverty, in our self-pity. Africa is not poor. And although the corruption perhaps is being cranked up from London, Paris or Washington, the accessories and often also the beneficiaries are those in Africa who do themselves good from the misery of the poor. Only the Africans can save Africa and put themselves unharmed again.
To be creative we have to free ourselves from attachments. We have to continue to unchain our spirit if we want to keep it from falling back into the darkness of despair and expediency.
How do we keep our spirit free? It won’t be sufficient to sing to the darkness. To survive we have to take up the responsibility to imagine another world. What vision can we offer to a thirteen year old boy in Monrovia who now believes that for his maturity he needs to purchase an AK-47, lipstick and put on a wig, dressed in a wedding dress and start to murder? What is our proposal to the children?
Not everyone can be a ‘piano man’.
The world is mutually connected and Africa takes part in the comparison, even though the frontline between East and West lies somewhere else. Africa has always been imagined, as well as from the inside as from the outside, most of the time by escapism. Even currently it still happens.
On one hand support for the continent is being applied by pop concerts and G8-meetings and the set up of commissions and aims. On the other hand we as well hear the mantra’s being the consequent of selfhood about ‘sovereignty’, about the descent existence that the world owes to Africa, an existence that would have to be grounded on to the renewed authorisation of the lies which we – from colonialism to post-independence – have gotten to know under the cloak of good management, statecraft and political systems.
From the perceptions of Africa – who know a history of more lows that tops, a story where sometimes is been given but more has been taken – there are real cultural differences at the fundament.
It is a bout a rich variegation of approaches until death, until the continuation between the generations, until the passing of time, until the embedding of the conscious living in the unknown, until the idea and the use of ones body, until the traditional ways to bring the strength of the darkness into the light with rhythms and banishments.
These reflections were inspired by an exposition of African art which I visited in Paris. It was titled Africa ReMix. A terrible name by the way. As if an artist would suffice to mix up old expressions!What attracted me was the primarily vitality of the works, the purpose of how the materials and surfaces were handles and the mocking tone of it.
‘Traditional’ African patterns – earth, cloths, body paints, magic – were processed in western forms like installations and video art. The installations often betrayed a narrative intention (we are nothing without a story about ourselves). The video art was (just like everywhere around the world) mainly mean, ugly and empty. With other words, this art was more cut down for the average western museum visitor. Sure, there was some modern African naturalism given to the works by the use of discarded remains of the consumption society – tin, old weapons, plastic wrappings, recycled sculptures – to put to notice that actually Africa is tarring on the waste of the developed world and that everything - how humble – can be formed into art.
Apart from this hybrid character – most of the represented African artists live and work in Europe – the exposition tossed uncomfortable questions. Why have these artists been brought together? What do artists from Northern Africa have in common with, say, artists from Congo? What connects Africans which separates them as a group from the rest of the world? And why does it seem that outsiders need to see Africa as a whole?
Is it perhaps to confirm stereotypes, contemporary expressions of exotism, now under the cloak of ‘showing respect to what is strange to us’, with the comforting implication that that part of the world is board free, exotic and in its own clearly is kept apart from its own environment.
Isn’t it Europe that emphasizes a more ‘strange’ attitude in its development? Take par excellence wealthy and cheerful countries like the Netherlands or Denmark. The biggest part of the Netherlands and Danish object against the tolerance and the international solidarity which the governmental policy established over the last thirty years. Both countries now show themselves from an angrier, xenophobic and even racist side. How did it get this far?
Apart from the primary problems, mainly of economical order, which involves the integration of great amounts of immigrants, without a doubt, cultural contrasts play a part.
The particular tolerance against diversity (in theory) and the excessive bearing undervalued the need for national connection and direction, to identity even.
Relatively uniformed cultural groups hold on tight after all to their steady familiarity with those geographical areas which they occupy.
The mingling of these populations groups doesn’t automatically bring forth greater acceptance of the differences.
Mistakenly there is presumed that those whom we accept in their own authenticity, likewise would respect our authenticity to find together in this way, a shared non-religious fundament to built on.
It was an arrogant, moralistic approach that surpassed the country boarders, who tried to make poor countries accept what democrats believe would be good for them (like ‘democracy’!), who did not take into account the history or the hypocrisy of the North and which resulted in a revival of extreme rights in our own backyard.
Nothing of all the above discharges us within Africa from the obligation to question ourselves how to be creative and untie reshaped images. I know it feels like betrayal to acknowledge the horrors – our work, our responsibilities for it is so easy to confirm our racist pre-judgements without meaning to do so.
‘We would betray our own battle in this way’, as how it is put often.
But self investigation would bare us from our comfortable self-image as victims of history, of colonialism, of racism, of capitalism, of socialism of our own innocence and intrinsic goodness…
We would have to start to realize that from the euphoria of the liberation we have descended towards the heart of darkness. We will have to admit that the concept of the nation state as how it exists currently in Africa, merely in behalf of predatory local elites and corruption and cynical foreign companies, is not viable.
The democracy which has extended itself in our area, although with added flavours of the sweet poison of elections, will mean our death one day. We will have to face the reality that foreign aid doesn’t help. We know Africa needs to be rebuilt, with radical new principles, based on genuine autonomy and independence. We all know then we will need a moral revolution, to dispatch the needs of the continent, to bring down our bloated rhetorical and rabble-rousing bragging. This is not the task nor responsibility of the outside world.
In my opinion the moral imagination of our generation falls short here. We have replaced responsible freedom for self enrichment and appropriation, diluted with cowardness, betrayal, depraved independence, the glorification of our impotence and our political correct affectation in a language that is detached from any texture or colour. We have based our sharp interventions on abracadabra over wounds that needed to be healed and adversity we needed to leave behind, using other words for the unacceptable in the hope to not need to face up with the harsh realities. In some cases we directed –up to this very day- the lugubrious farce where the confessing of torture and suppression is expected to lead towards forgiveness and reconcilement. Every appearance, every turgid bird, anything rather than setting our shared humanity non-suggestively as a starting point to identify what is unacceptable and have the right gain towards victory.
What if our artists and intellectuals suffice with ironic remarks, as in African ReMix? What if they only try to save there own behinds, whirl themselves into their own victim-role, continue to push off the guilt and blame, wander about in immense labyrinths in their haunt for the alienated ego?
When I walked out of Africa ReMix I saw a white man my age, dressed with a style of fashion in a dark suit worn over a black T-shirt with red letters saying: ‘Africa is burning’. And I wondered if we really need to be brought back towards a fashion slogan on a T-shirt.
Freedom is guilt, because with it you bring the realisation of no-freedom. I guess you could say: Freedom is knowledge and with that responsibility.
I believe in a correlation between the South and the North where the two consciously try to strengthen, based on true sincerity and absolute equality. What Europe does for Africa is what Africa should do for Europe. I believe that a certain correlation will bring forth a movement and that consciously rooms of creativity, debate and transformation (in both directions) will be accomplished to help individuals find back their strengths. I believe that we should practise the powerlessness (in both directions) by refusing to support the reliability and the supposed sovereignty from the corrupt regimes which tar on robbery, suppression, ceremonial and glamour and neither accept that the weak will be destroyed by the globalisation of the free market.
Post ScriptumObviously it needs to be noted that the ‘piano man’ turned out to be a waiter from Beieren, who was rejected in love by another man, hopelessly strangled in complications of life. Apparently he had studied the behaviour of people with amnesia and had left wandering to find himself again in consensus with a romantic dream. There aren’t many ways to escape this world of control and category…for us this man was extremely intriguing, as he appeared from over the sea, in the dark, as if he came from space.There are not many ways to escape this world…Although more and more Spanish and Italian troops patrol before the coast of Africa attempting to intercept them, even though thousands who made it to Europe are criminalized by keeping them in camps or by giving them the status of shady refugees, people with dull appearance and ragged clothes risk year in year out their lives in attempt to reach ‘the paradise’. ‘Europe or death’ is how the battle cry sounds. Among them women and children. They’re the ones who die first and are tossed overboard most of the time, anonymous dead bodies which tumble in the bars of the sea, who drift ashore there tourists are bathing.
