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Post-Colonial? Post-Nothing. | | |
Nona's work in progress | |
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> | Editor’s Note: Looking at this a few weeks after last working on it, I found that my edits were becoming commentary on the writer’s ideas as they related to our instructor and the course, rather than an edit of her original presentation. Here, I will attempt to stay true to the writer’s original essay, and to preserve her own language (including the language from her follow-up comments). For me, the most interesting aspect of this paper is the writer’s discussion of the “post-colonial identity crisis” as it relates to a paper prompted by disagreement with our “western” professor’s views. That a liberal professor from the UWS who comes from an Eastern European (I think) Jewish family is considered representative of an imperialistic westerner is a more complex issue I do not have the capability to address.
I. Conspicuous Consumption and Thingification | | | | |
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< | I touched briefly on the failures of the post-colonial Nigerian state in my previous essay, but my analysis of decolonization was limited to the political dominion. In a conversation that followed, Eben made the comment that Nigeria won't exist in 2060, insofar as the country’s starkly different ethnic groups are incompatible with the nation-state model. Declaring that the nation-state is in it of itself incompatible with Africans is just as nonsensical as the claim that democracy cannot work in Africa. While it may be easy for the outsider to contemplate the dissolution of the African nation-state because it is a remnant of the colonial artifact, it is not easy for me to accept this proposition. | | | | |
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< | To propose that Africans create a system of governance without any remnants of colonialism is to propose that we accomplish a feat that even the mighty United States as we know it was incapable of. After all, Independence in 1776 certainly was not followed by the extrication of everything British. Westerners have no place in forcing dissolution down our throats as they forced the nation-state artifice itself upon us. | | | | |
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< | In Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argues that the operative measure of distinguishing between the owners and non-owners in our society are the things of conspicuous consumption that Veblen calls waste—during Colonialism, these things were people. “Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production. My turn to state an equation: colonization = ‘thing-ification.’ ” | >
> | In Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argues that the operative measure of distinguishing between the owners and non-owners in our society are the things of conspicuous consumption that Veblen calls waste—during Colonialism, these things were people. The Scramble For Africa is historical example of the acquisition indicative of conspicuous consumption as it appeals to Western sensibility. Africans were kidnapped from their homes, Africa's resources and minerals were pillaged, and the country was cut into territories based only on the nature of its captors. | | | | |
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< | The Scramble For Africa is historical example of the acquisition indicative of conspicuous consumption as it appeals to Western sensibility. Africans were kidnapped from their homes, Africa's resources and minerals were pillaged, and the country was cut into territories based only on the nature of its captors. Africa's initial contact with the West was as victim to this abhorrent race for waste. “The truth is that I have said something very different: to wit, that the great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too late in making contact with the rest of the world, as the manner in which that contact was brought about.” So it could be that the edifices themselves are not problematic; rather, the pattern of imposition is what created and continues to perpetuate the dilemma. | >
> | Aime Cesaire's writings at the height of the negritude movement remains equally relevant today : “Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production. My turn to state an equation: colonization = ‘thing-ification.’ ”
II. Africa was never de-colonized
Africa's initial contact with the West was as victim to this abhorrent race for waste. “The truth is that I have said something very different: to wit, that the great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too late in making contact with the rest of the world, as the manner in which that contact was brought about.” So it could be that the edifices themselves are not problematic; rather, the pattern of imposition is what created and continues to perpetuate the dilemma. | | | The problem with the nation-state model is not the model, but the way it was implemented. The argument that our system is failing is flawed, because Africa has technically been independent for over fifty years, we never actually were decolonized.
One may retort that we have been trying for over fifty years now to make the system work to no avail, but such a proposition would necessitate accepting the assumption that independence was truly commensurate to decolonization. In fact, it was not. Aime Cesaire posits that African independence is not just a political question, but one that touches on the deepest parts of the African psyche, both communally and individually. “It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society” In Cesaire’s probe, he is more interested in the lingering effects of colonization on the African psyche than on political African “independence.” Many African nations, Nigeria included, have yet to decolonize our minds as Cesaire advised. But this process will take time, lest we forget the youth of African nations in comparison with the old age and wisdom of the enlightened West. | |
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> | III. Decolonization of the Mind
the all-encompassing psychological and physical independence required for de-colonization, does not similarly require that we rid ourselves of the social and institutional structures imported by our western occupiers | | | For decolonization to really occur we need to resolve humanity’s relationship to conspicuous consumption. Genuine decolonization depends on the outcome of this inquiry on “thingification.” The tensions of inherent in de-colonization mirror the tension in veblen’s presentation of waste: (1) the desire to make my country a stronger and better place whose richness will impress the West/other countries (2) the reality that this specific nation-state model we are trying to make successful was imposed on us the West in the first place. Herein lies the root of the post-colonial identity crisis: whether wrestling off the shackles of colonialism require that Africans to completely denounce everything the West imposed upon us. Does maintaining Western structures implicitly mean that we are emulating the West and trying to prove our worth to them? | |
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> | IV. Decolonization from western imposition
I touched briefly on the failures of the post-colonial Nigerian state in my previous essay, but my analysis of decolonization was limited to the political dominion. In a conversation that followed, Eben made the comment that Nigeria won't exist in 2060, insofar as the country’s starkly different ethnic groups are incompatible with the nation-state model. Declaring that the nation-state is in it of itself incompatible with Africans is just as nonsensical as the claim that democracy cannot work in Africa. While it may be easy for the outsider to contemplate the dissolution of the African nation-state because it is a remnant of the colonial artifact, it is not easy for me to accept this proposition.
To propose that Africans create a system of governance without any remnants of colonialism is to propose that we accomplish a feat that even the mighty United States as we know it was incapable of. After all, Independence in 1776 certainly was not followed by the extrication of everything British. Westerners have no place in forcing dissolution down our throats as they forced the nation-state artifice itself upon us.
v. Flux
Like Veblen, we don’t really know what is going to happen and remain in a state of flux. But really, we should be left to figure out our own shit. In the end we are mired in a conundrum of what to do about the troubled aspects of our post-colonized state (double entendre intended) but more vexing, whose standards we are applying when we evaluate.
| | | An invocation of Frantz Fanon is quite apt in parsing out the problem. : “There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. // There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. // How do we extricate ourselves?” |
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