On July 26 2007, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy presented a ground-breaking lecture at the University of Dakar in Senegal.
There is value in allowing time to purify the mind, by exposing the charlatans that come to us wearing the garb of patriotism, proclaiming themselves the true tribunes of the African people.
These self-appointed tribunes spared no ounce of energy railing against Sarkozy for suggesting that “the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history”.
More than five years on, the atmosphere seems propitious for genuine patriots to reflect soberly on the weighty matters addressed by Sarkozy in his speech of rare frankness.
The lack of courage to accept unpalatable truth is one of humanity’s greatest weaknesses. Who in Africa does not know the reality described by Sarkozy in his Dakar lecture?
“The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time,” Sarkozy observed.
Those of us who did not read about the African condition but who lived it, will be familiar with life in rural Africa, where there are no traces of what would, in a serious sense, merit the word “progress”.
In Sarkozy’s words, man in rural Africa “rests immobile in the centre of a static order where everything seems to have been written beforehand”.
Sarkozy is right, nothing fundamentally changes in the drudgery of rural life. What seems to be movement is in reality a merry-go-round whose pace and rhythm is predetermined by nature.
When the summer rains come, man in rural Africa takes up his hoe to till the land for basic survival. In winter he gets trapped in activities that do not transform his environment much, waiting for the next summer to do the very things he did the previous season.
Nothing in this rudimentary cycle influences history in its proper sense. As Alexandre Kojève correctly observed, man is “history only in and by action that negates the given”.
Taking into account the great transformations of the modern world today, what are we as Africans to produce as evidence that we are indeed negating the given?
Strangely, the few Africans who, through education, have managed to escape rural life are the loudest in dismissing those who state the reality of rural Africa.
These elites manufacture fantasies of African greatness as a shield against inferiority when in the company of people from more developed parts of the world.
Given the paucity of evidence to back up their claims, the African elites fall back on historical romanticism, painting a rosy picture of a continent that was once great, even though they themselves never lived in such a great continent.
The corollary is that, had the colonisers not disrupted Africa’s progress, the continent would have been as developed as the rest of the developed world.
This is how a nostalgic narrative of Africa takes shape. It is a rear-view mirror perspective, animated by a greatness that was. Sarkozy calls it “the myth of the eternal return”.
The African elites have dismissed Sarkozy as a racist. They are most likely to string a thousand unkind words against anyone who sees an iota of truth in Sarkozy’s observations.
The author of this column faces the danger of being sneered at as an apologist for racism and colonialism, even as he is notorious for ruthlessness against racism. The challenge, though, is not to be swayed by people who sell the claim that nothing is wrong with us Africans.
The progressively patriotic among us must acknowledge that Africa does not represent the best of human potential.
This is precisely what the nations of the East did.
In the 19th century, the Meiji in Japan acknowledged that their people were backward, and therefore that something needed to be done to facilitate an escape from their static order, where everything seemed to have been written beforehand.
In the 20th century, Southeast Asian nations followed the example of Japan; they came to terms with their backwardness, and learnt from Western societies. Look where South Korea is today.
In the late 1970s, the Chinese acknowledged their own backwardness; they also learnt at the feet of the West.
Today, China is the second-largest economy in the world.
The courage to swallow pride is not a mark of capitulation, but a quality of true greatness.
Sarkozy threw a challenge: “Africa’s problem is not to invent for itself a more or less mythical past to help it to support the present, but to invent the future with suitable means.”
The beginning in this regard would be to come to terms with our collective backwardness, not to dismiss people who tell the truth about us. Only then can we learn from those who are ahead.
Prince Mashele is the CEO of the Forum for Public Dialogue
To swallow pride is not to capitulate, it is greatness
There is value in allowing time to purify the mind, by exposing the charlatans that come to us wearing the garb of patriotism, proclaiming themselves the true tribunes of the African people.
These self-appointed tribunes spared no ounce of energy railing against Sarkozy for suggesting that “the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history”.
More than five years on, the atmosphere seems propitious for genuine patriots to reflect soberly on the weighty matters addressed by Sarkozy in his speech of rare frankness.
The lack of courage to accept unpalatable truth is one of humanity’s greatest weaknesses. Who in Africa does not know the reality described by Sarkozy in his Dakar lecture?
“The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time,” Sarkozy observed.
Those of us who did not read about the African condition but who lived it, will be familiar with life in rural Africa, where there are no traces of what would, in a serious sense, merit the word “progress”.
In Sarkozy’s words, man in rural Africa “rests immobile in the centre of a static order where everything seems to have been written beforehand”.
Sarkozy is right, nothing fundamentally changes in the drudgery of rural life. What seems to be movement is in reality a merry-go-round whose pace and rhythm is predetermined by nature.
When the summer rains come, man in rural Africa takes up his hoe to till the land for basic survival. In winter he gets trapped in activities that do not transform his environment much, waiting for the next summer to do the very things he did the previous season.
Nothing in this rudimentary cycle influences history in its proper sense. As Alexandre Kojève correctly observed, man is “history only in and by action that negates the given”.
Taking into account the great transformations of the modern world today, what are we as Africans to produce as evidence that we are indeed negating the given?
Strangely, the few Africans who, through education, have managed to escape rural life are the loudest in dismissing those who state the reality of rural Africa.
These elites manufacture fantasies of African greatness as a shield against inferiority when in the company of people from more developed parts of the world.
Given the paucity of evidence to back up their claims, the African elites fall back on historical romanticism, painting a rosy picture of a continent that was once great, even though they themselves never lived in such a great continent.
The corollary is that, had the colonisers not disrupted Africa’s progress, the continent would have been as developed as the rest of the developed world.
This is how a nostalgic narrative of Africa takes shape. It is a rear-view mirror perspective, animated by a greatness that was. Sarkozy calls it “the myth of the eternal return”.
The African elites have dismissed Sarkozy as a racist. They are most likely to string a thousand unkind words against anyone who sees an iota of truth in Sarkozy’s observations.
The author of this column faces the danger of being sneered at as an apologist for racism and colonialism, even as he is notorious for ruthlessness against racism. The challenge, though, is not to be swayed by people who sell the claim that nothing is wrong with us Africans.
The progressively patriotic among us must acknowledge that Africa does not represent the best of human potential.
This is precisely what the nations of the East did.
In the 19th century, the Meiji in Japan acknowledged that their people were backward, and therefore that something needed to be done to facilitate an escape from their static order, where everything seemed to have been written beforehand.
In the 20th century, Southeast Asian nations followed the example of Japan; they came to terms with their backwardness, and learnt from Western societies. Look where South Korea is today.
In the late 1970s, the Chinese acknowledged their own backwardness; they also learnt at the feet of the West.
Today, China is the second-largest economy in the world.
The courage to swallow pride is not a mark of capitulation, but a quality of true greatness.
Sarkozy threw a challenge: “Africa’s problem is not to invent for itself a more or less mythical past to help it to support the present, but to invent the future with suitable means.”
The beginning in this regard would be to come to terms with our collective backwardness, not to dismiss people who tell the truth about us. Only then can we learn from those who are ahead.
Prince Mashele is the CEO of the Forum for Public Dialogue
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