Internet platform for an African Renaissance
Philosophy
This website is committed to the goals of an African renaissance, meaning the recovery, rehabilitation and imaginative recreation of African civilisation, culture and history. The African renaissance is best understood as a counter-discursive project guiding the ‘transversal power struggles’ waged by people of African descent in defence of their specific values, beliefs and worldviews. From its inception it has been part of the counter-hegemonic mode of globalisation and has always ‘used the masters’ tools to dismantle the master’s house’.
The Internet as Counter-Discursive Instrument
We believe that ICTs and particularly the Internet – Western instruments of globalising capitalism – can be utilised in a variety of ways to underpin today’s African renaissance strategies. Itself characterised by interactivity and operating through networks, the Internet supports the web-like model of popular creative and transformative resistance which seems to be the best way of countering and subverting ‘modern power’.
Creating an African Discursive Space
The Western discourse ownership is mainly a function of the West’s formal control of research, publication and dissemination structures and hence setting agendas. As a relatively autonomous zone of discourse production and validation, Cyberspace offers the opportunity to generate an Africa-centred discourse without having to make any major financial or technological investments. Indeed, the Internet as a new platform for for the elaboration, negotiation and validation of knowledge, may well be instrumental in what Chinweizu calls a ‘deliberate and calculated process of syncretism’: “On the one hand, our culture has to destroy all encrustations of colonial mentality, and on the other, has to map out new foundations for an African modernity […] one which, above all, emphasises valuable continuities with our pre-colonial culture, welcomes vitalising contributions from other cultures, and exercises inventive genius in making a healthy and distinguishable synthesis from them all.” The Internet, as a decentralized archipelago of relatively autonomous zones, potentially offers the possibility to a wide range of communities to produce their own knowledge and participate in the negotiation of ‘legitimate knowledge’.
Education and Conscientisation
Current access to relevant documentation and publication in Africa is difficult. In such a situation the Internet, while not in the least replacing physical structures, provides the space to collect, structure and make Africa-centred documentation available to a global public. This is indeed crucial at least in three complementary ways:
The first and basic task is to create an African renaissance electronic documentation centre. As has been shown, the African renaissance has a long history. It has thus been expressed in a number of ideas, theories and movements. It has its labels and manifestos both in Africa and outside Africa. Together they constitute a whole body of African renaissance knowledge. This can be enlarged by a whole ‘like-minded’ body of literature from other Third World countries like the ground-breaking works by Ghandi, Freire and others and by the valuable contributions generated in the North, for example the works of people like Galtung, Sachs, Capra and many others. These works and texts are rarely available in Africa.
Moreover, by enlarging this collection of documents and texts to the whole African intellectual heritage, that is to the history of Africa beginning with its earliest documents and texts dating back at least as far as 2300 B.C., the Internet could significantly contribute to the historical task of restoring Africans to their culture and enabling them to reclaim their history. Not so much in an attempt to once more claim some extra-continental validity by proving that Africa was part of humanity after all, but to reconcile Africans with their history and enable them to turn away from their ‘hypnotised gaze upon the master’ which has indeed been largely responsible for the creative failure of the liberation process since the 1960s. The aim thus is to incite creativity for new ways and solutions instead of continually trying to ‘catch up’ in an allegedly universal and linear development process.
Finally, Ntuli has drawn attention to the need to create core courses on the African renaissance perspectives to be taken in all universities and to pursue the development of guidelines toward an African-centred teaching methodology. The Internet on the one hand could underpin such courses by providing access to otherwise non-available materials. Also, the new possibilities of distance education make it almost inevitable to create an African renaissance Virtual University (VU) which could indeed draw upon scholarship worldwide and offer an alternative to the mainstream Western VUs.
Wider Integration
This strategy fundamentally builds on the Pan-African roots of the African renaissance endeavour which emerged out of a common struggle challenging the right of the Europeans to impose their cultural-spiritual values on African communities. Pan-Africanism enabled the mobilisation of the African people in the liberation of the continent by fundamentally drawing on the ‘counter-hegemonic’ face of globalisation, that is, the new possibilities of contestation provided by global communication and encounter inherent to the globalisation process. Where it failed was in the establishment of effective intra-continental means of communication and integration.
The Internet provides means of communication which open modes of non-national and border-transgressing interaction and integration so far impossible with traditional communication technologies. By creating linkages with institutions, government structures and the community, the Internet affords the possibility of horizontal interpenetration and regional integration not only on the continental level within Africa but also on the South-South and South-North levels.
Yet, beyond this, by affording a “profoundly relational model in which negotiated views of reality are built, where all receivers are also potentially emitters, and where truly dialogical interaction can take place”, the Internet potentially provides the means for what Mazrui calls ‘cultural synthesis’ that is the building of a new common African identity which will forge solidarity among nations that have shared the common African Experience. What is at stake is the stimulation of a new sense of shared civilization and collective destiny which goes beyond mere racial identification. Such integration processes will obviously require more than a mere Internet platform and will have to involve ‘real cooperation’ in politics, security, economy and culture. Yet, as such processes are profoundly discursive and dialogical, a virtual dialogical and discursive space appears to be an invaluable facilitator.
Domestication
Domestication, according to Mazrui, involves making imported institutions and knowledges more relevant to local context. Civilization has grown out of mutual intellectual and cultural stimulation which indeed is the natural process in which local communities consume global culture. Post-colonial experience e.g. also shows that colonised cultures have often been so resilient and transformative that they changed the character of imperial culture itself. 'Domestication’ however has neither been encouraged by the West, which has at best exported if not imposed its institutions and knowledges, nor by the post-colonial African governments and elites who, in their determination to maintain colonial structures of power and privilege have constricted the effective development of a hybridised knowledge, opting instead, as Ki-Zerbo maintains, for a mixture that includes ‘not only the negative elements of colonisation, but also the most negative characteristics of the pre-colonial era.’ In this sense, the problem with inherited African institutions like the African university, media, technology and even the African state, is not so much that these are culturally completely alien, but that they have become fossilized or ‘undomesticated’.
According to Melucci, the more the public spaces are open, the more dominant codes and discourses can be appropriated in unpredictable ways and interpreted differently by the people. The Internet can provide an open space to negotiate meanings. Its ‘fluid architecture’ encourages practices of mixing, reusing, and recombining knowledge and information, in other words, for the corrective appropriation of ‘globalocentric’ knowledge to local uses and locally specific practices of knowing.
Counterpenetration
Counterpenetration has ever since been an integral part of the African renaissance strategy. It involves “infiltrating the infiltrators – counterpenetrating the citadels of power.” (Mazrui) While counterpenetration can also be observed in relation to markets and populations, cultural and intellectual counterpenetration have been most effective modes of post-colonial resistance. Indeed, what the ‘plan’ of imperial expansion had not bargained for was that “the immensely prestigious and powerful imperial culture found itself appropriated in projects of counter-colonial resistance which drew upon the many different indigenous local and hybrid processes of self-determination to defy, erode and sometimes supplant the prodigious power of imperial cultural knowledge.” (Ashcroft)
Through the appropriation and transformation of dominant technologies for the purpose of re-inscribing and representing their specific cultural identity, post-colonial societies have effectively interpolated, interjected and interrupted dominant discourses and changed them in subtle ways. In literary writing for example, Ashcroft maintains, the dominant language and its discursive forms are appropriated to express widely differing cultural experiences. Far from being merely a quest for recognition by the former colonial master, counterpenetration is a search for a more balanced globalisation. It is a quest for a more symmetrical interdependence.” (Mazrui)
Thus, by providing an alternative ‘sustainable’ publishing platform with the definite advantages of being neither restricted in space – comprehensive collections of important works in all formats (audio, video, text) are possible – and readily and constantly available at a very low cost throughout the world, the Internet may well be used as a ‘digital weapon’ for the progressive transformation of dominant actor-networks and other forms of globalisation. It could be instrumental for the South to ‘theorise back’, that is, to generate counter-hegemonic discourses in order to realise what has been called the ‘triple agenda of deconstruction, reconstruction and regeneration’ and thus contribute to the re-invention of the social and global.
Indigenisation
Another strategy of transcending dependency is indigenisation, which includes “greater utilisation of indigenous techniques, personnel, and approaches to purposeful change.” Central to indigenisation is the greater use of indigenous languages. The pertinent question here is: Can African people champion their renaissance through the medium of foreign languages? Language represents ‘symbolic power’ (Bourdieu) and the continued ‘hegemony of European languages’ in Africa is largely responsible for the continued subjugation of most African people who in the vast majority live in their indigenous languages throughout their lives. The choice of a foreign language in education and administration not only is an alienating experience and an insurmountable barrier to knowledge for millions of African children, hampering the full utilisation of their imagination and other capacities and consequently the development of their respective countries: it may well be one of the major problems of African democracy and governance.
A post-structural African renaissance which seeks the freeing of the creative energies of the people of the continent cannot be built on foreign languages. It will have to devise ways of using and developing indigenous African languages which, as a consequence of decades of official neglect, today lack scientific and technological vocabulary. Hence, Mazrui holds, African languages need to be purposefully revitalised as part of long-term national development.
While this involves major political decisions and the enactment of corrective policies in almost all fields, the Internet could become a major support, not only for the revaluing of African languages, but also for their processing and scientification. By creating dialogical and discursive spaces in indigenous languages, the Internet could contribute to the widening of debates on the major issues of the African renaissance and thereby to larger participation by ‘ordinary and uncertified Africans’. The Internet also offers the space for popularising research which, to become relevant to African people, in the future will have to be conducted in indigenous languages. Moreover, by creating artistic, scientific and literary platforms in indigenous languages, the fluid and interactive architecture of the Internet – beyond being instrumental for the preservation of cultural heritage through the storing of idioms, proverbs, popular sayings, tongue-twisters, riddles, myths, legends, songs and poetry – provides the means for the perpetuation and processing of such living cultures and traditions.