Third Text, Vol.

24, Issue 2, March, 2010, 177187

Introduction
From Negritude to Post-Africanism
Denis Ekpo

NEGRITUDE IS OVER! WELCOME BACK SENGHOR

1.

Marcien Towa, Lopold

Sdar Senghor: Ngritude
ou Servitude?, Editions
Cle, Yaound, 1971;
Stanislaus Adotevi,
Ngritude et Ncrologues,
Christian Bourgeois, Paris,
1972

2.

Irele and Gatess responses

contained in emails sent to
the author.

The death of Negritude has long been virtually on every lip. Such viscerally anti-Negritude texts as Marcien Towas Lopold Sdar Senghor:
Ngritude ou Servitude and Stanislas Adotevis Ngritude et Ngrologues were indeed mocking requiems for Negritude intoned as early as
the 1970s,1 right in the very ears of Senghor who was probably still
convinced that Negritude was in its heyday. Today Negritude is considered so dead and outdated that prominent African/diasporic scholars
such as Abiola Irele, Henry Louis Gates Jr and others, when contacted
for this special issue, could not hide their embarrassment. Irele frankly
confessed that there was nothing new to say or do about or beyond
Negritude or Senghor, everything having already been oversaid and
overdone. Others found less candid excuses to (un)conceal that same
feeling.2
But Rasheed Araeen happened to have chanced on some flickering
spirit, some spark of life still concealed in Negritudes long embalmed
body and drew my attention to it. He had re-read Senghors sociopolitical thoughts and had discovered that despite the racial-ethnic-artistic
fetish that had been made of Negritude, there was still a specifically
Senghorian intellectual life after Negritudes ideological death. Initially I
was sceptical (though I did not let him know it), for I must confess that I
saw Negritude and Senghor the way the grandees saw them: there was
nothing more worth saying about either. But Araeen insisted that there
were sociopolitical gems in Senghor, outside Negritudes parochial
ethno-artistic fads, that deserve to be extracted and brought to the attention and benefit of our time. His persistence triggered in me a fresh curiosity that took me via Negritude to the heart of Senghorism. And there I
discovered that, despite or because of Negritude, many of his signature
sociopolitical, cross-cultural intuitions and daring insights have
remained as misrecognised and under-exploited as they are still germane
to the concerns of so-called postcolonial times. Why were these Senghorian insights, ignored or misrecognised? The reason is that Negritude

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2010)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528821003722108

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3.

It was Csaire who taught

us to rejoice and be glad,
though we had invented
nothing, explored
nowhere; also, not to
condemn the cannibalistic
past for it was proof of
Africas counter-European
manliness; see Aim
Csaire, Cahier dun rtour
au pays natal, Prsence
Africaine, Paris, 1956

swept them along in its own ideological demise. But our findings show
that, though Negritude is dead and rightly so, Senghor beyond
Negritude is very much still alive. Burying Senghor along with Negritude
came from the error of treating both as one and the same ideological
racial-cultural monolith. In salvaging Senghor from Negritude the first
move to make is, I believe, to unpack Negritude into two distinct but
partially related doctrines. The second move is to fortify the resurrected
Senghor with a new concept called Post-Africanism. This new concept it
is hoped will prove sufficiently robust to bear the intellectual weight of a
more fruitful post-Negritude engagement of Africa with the world
process. But first what are the two doctrines that emerge from the
dismantling of the Negritude monolith?
The first is of course the official Negritude, a movement co-founded
by Senghor but whose most ideologically active agents came not from
Senghor but from Aim Csaire. Although Senghors metaphysical
solemnities on the black soul, African emotion or African participatory
cosmology were seen as the intellectual foundation of this Negritude,
cultural nationalism, which was the performative translation of
Negritude into politics and art, was charged with its most radical Afrocentric voltage such as unconditional race pride by Csaire rather
than Senghor.3 It was Csaire who taught us to rejoice and be glad,
though we had invented nothing, explored nowhere; not to condemn the
cannibalistic past, for it was proof of Africas counter-European manliness. The second Negritude, a crystallisation of Senghors most performative thoughts on politics, culture and modernity, can be distinguished
as a philosophy addressed to Africas modernisation, centred first in a
self-reassuring re-description of Africa and Africans and second in a
politics of friendship and collaboration with the European holders of
modernitys powers and skills. In order not to confuse this Negritude
with the official one, I prefer to call it Senghorism while the term cultural
nationalism can best denote the official Negritude. Although often said
to have been inspired by Senghor, cultural nationalism seems to me
antithetical to Senghorism, for it pilfered from Senghors Negritude
repertoire only those motifs that appeared to chime with a reactionary
anti-modern escape into the past as well as anti-Europe resentments.
Official Negritude or cultural nationalism died partly through the
sheer inanity of its postulations on race, Africanity and emotivity; partly
as result of the grave errors of a purely cultural-nationalistic self-understanding and apprehension of modernity. Those who say that there is
nothing more to say concerning this Negritude are right, except that, in
saying so, they invariably throw out the baby with the bath water. The
reason for this is that the two Negritudes appear organically intertwined
and synonymous with Senghors name. Senghor himself did not help
matters for he, sometimes interchangeably, made noises of both sorts:
cultural nationalistic traditionalism and a purely modernist engagement
with Africa and the world. Nevertheless, although Senghor spoke of
Negritude all his life, Europe, in his concrete engagements with politics
both at home and internationally, superseded Negritude. He spoke
Negritude but acted otherwise. Thus for Senghorism it is no longer
necessary to take seriously Senghors metaphysico-poetic tropes, such as
black soul, black aesthetics and so on, but to re-acquaint ourselves with
what he said and did beyond or despite these obfuscating ideologemes.

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SOME ARE BORN POSTHUMOUSLY:

THE REBIRTH OF SENGHOR
The second Negritude or Senghorism cannot pass away for the simple
reason that the issues it engaged are still staring Africa and the world in
the face. What are these issues and how can we re-engage them beyond
Negritude? Most of the papers in this issue of Third Text are the result
of attempts to return to the essential Senghor and extract the living seeds
in his thinking from the problem of Negritude in order to make explicit
their relevance to the concerns of our age. Central to Senghorism is the
question of what to do with an Africa suddenly brought by Europe to
the gate of world history. A reconstructive review of Senghors defining
thoughts and activities before and after decolonisation reveals that,
beneath the intoxicating poetry of lost old pagan kingdoms with their
idealised naked black women, his thinking was dominated and driven
almost entirely by an existential urgency, namely, the need to insert
Africa properly and fully into a modernity whose gate had just been
casually, almost inadvertently, half-opened by colonisation. How might
Africa, gutted and brutalised by colonisation, manage to become part of
the modern order? Thus while still chanting songs of praise to the unsullied splendours of foregone tribal pasts he realised that for Africa to
become modern, it had to become not what it had been but what it had
never been. He reasoned that the ancestral past, though beautiful in itself
and worthy of respect, was not a directly relevant heritage or resource
for the kind of unprecedented apprenticeship involved in transiting to
the modern order. However, the past was not for that reason redundant,
for it was called upon to play a vital role of therapeutic reassurance for
the psychically mangled, racially disqualified, colonised subject. To this
effect, Senghor mobilised aesthetics art, poetry, music and assigned
to it the vital preparatory role of transfiguring the past for the purpose of
existentially reassuring Africans as to the inherent validity and honour of
their own civilisation. Once the maligned past has been aesthetically
salvaged, Senghor had no difficulty in exhibiting it as Negritude in a
purely compensatory aesthetico-cultural museum, while he went on
performatively to think and act beyond it, realising that none of the
skills, know-how and ethos required for the urgent task of getting Africa
on stream for modernity could be found in the ancestral past. Thus
central to Senghors performative political thinking beyond Negritude
was his policy of engagement with Europe through wise collaboration,
strategic friendship and creative alliances. He saw no intellectual or
moral impediments in making strategic use of the resources of imperialism and later neo-colonialism, provided these could be deployed to aid
and hasten Africas transition to modernity.

SENGHOR, CULTURAL NATIONALISM AND MODERNITY

The image of Senghor highlighted by a reconstructive reading is that of a
moderniser compelled by peculiar historical circumstances to reckon
with the imperatives of race, culture and the African past. So too it
becomes clear that cultural nationalism the ideological attempt to
remake modern Africa in its own nativist self-image, mostly through the

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decolonisation of the mind and institutions of modernisation to which

Senghors name has been attached, is an ominous misunderstanding of
Senghorism. Cultural nationalism advocated against the oppressive
levelling, homogenising and denigrating forces of an alien rationality, the
return to nearly lost ancestral traditions and the recovery from them of
erstwhile Dionysian ecstasies, the cultural splendours and the uncurbed
spontaneities of tribal life. The only snag here was that, for all its hysterical anger at Europes colonial vandalisation of native tribal cultures and
traditions, cultural nationalism also wanted modernity and wanted it
covetously. But it wanted it not in opposition to restored nativism but as
an adjunct or a complement to it. It wanted a specifically African path to
modernity and not someone elses. Hence the fundamentally damaging
contradictions of cultural nationalist ideology. In the first place the socalled African culture or Africanity in question did not refer to an
empirical reality but was merely a resistance construct. It was not what
had been recovered from a common ancestral past but the name of a
common emotive revolt against Europes racial contempt and dismissal
of everything African. For in pre-colonial Africa there was no one
shared, homogenising culture into which modernity could be fitted with
necessary adjustments. What there was amounted to a chaotic multiplicity of incommensurable tribal mores, none of which taken individually
could readily function in compatibility with the ethos of modernisation.
To put it another way, in Africa the traditional tribal cultures were not a
modernity-compliant heritage, but rather a counter-heritage. Thus the
notion of a collective African culture serving as a common national or
continental vehicle for an African path to modernisation was a massive
self-delusion. The cultural nationalists, mistaking Senghors essentially
aesthetic idea of a return to source, went ahead to advocate not only a
total re-enchantment of the tribal outpost but the re-instrumentation of
its pagan ways for the social, political and even technological modernisation of Africa. The neurosis of Afrocentricity became pervasive in the
formulation and execution of political systems, economic policies and
technological development plans, all culminating in the 1980 document
The African Path to Development, dubbed the Lagos plan. The ethos of
Africanity, having given rise to a meta-politics of cultural specificity,
placed Africa on an unworkable path but, to be sure an African path,
gave it an unworkable democracy but an African democracy, an
unworkable socialism but an African socialism, etc. Thus, under the
cover of a compulsory Africanity, some cultural nationalists went
straight back to the archaic tribal past and misused it to furnish nonEurocentric formulae for Africanising modernity. Africanised modernity
in the hands of psychotics like Mobutu Sss Seko, Idi Amin, Jean-Bdel
Bokassa, Gmassingb Eyadma to mention but the most colourful,
became the abattoir for disposing of the last remnants of the heritage of
modernity in Africa, including the state, the economy, reason and
humanity. Many of the states formerly ruled by African cultural nationalists have never recovered from the consequences of these dangerous
myths. Driven by a compulsive race hubris, aggravated by desire for
impotent vengeance against Europe and an inflated idea of African
dignity, cultural nationalist Africa locked itself in a auto-hypnotic rhetoric of self-reliance in finding the path to modernity and sleep-walked into
one of the most disastrous human and development failures in modern

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history. Those decades of Afrocentric self-help are today still referred to

as the lost decades.
Senghor, whose master narrative of Negritude had in part provided
the spiritual impetus for cultural nationalism, intuited early enough the
inherent dangers of using incommensurable pasts and cultures to appropriate a modernity whose invention our ancestors had no part in. He
opted for a Europe-facing wisdom. He knew that in an aesthetically
unredeemed state, the old pagan tribal world of fabulous splendours was
also in many ways a horror to behold. In fact he created Negritude
partly as a voluntarist aesthetic transfiguration of the tribal past, lest we
modern Africans should be tempted to recoil in fright, as Hegelian
Europeans did, from so many of the unbeautiful ways of our illustrious
ancestors. Unlike the cultural nationalists, he realised that one cannot
talk of the essentially secularising post-tribal learning processes involved
in modernisation, which requires rationalisation and a standardised
world-view, while at the same time re-legitimising the separatist atavistic
cultural reflexes of the tribe that are instinctively hostile to the deracinating, detribalising and disenchanting moves of modernisation.
Africa has paid dearly for having misunderstood Senghor by mistaking his Negritude for a summons back to an obscurantist, hubristic and
vengeful neo-traditionalism. Negritude as cultural nationalism largely
contributed to the abortion of modernity in Africa; but Senghorism
remains an unexhausted resource, a subtle technology of power evolved
in the mire of Africas condition of helplessness under capitalist imperialism. Senghorism was essentially the deployment of the wise cunning of
the defeated and helpless, and the performance of that wisdom and
cunning on the world stage to Africas advantage. While Negritude
deformed into cultural nationalism became the shame of Africa,
Negritude as Senghorism remains Africas and one of the worlds
most misunderstood strategic wisdoms. As it was Africa that misunderstood Senghor most and paid for it most it may be expedient, after
redeeming Senghor from Negritude, to try to redeem Africa from too
much Africanism.

POST-AFRICANISM
Let where you are going, not where you are coming from henceforth be
your honor. Your will and your foot that desire to step out beyond you
let this be your honor.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus spoke Zarasthustra

4.

Denis Ekpo, Towards a

Post-Africanism:
Contemporary African
Thoughts and PostModernism, Textual
Practice, vol 9, 1995

One such candidate for a redemptive post-Negritude renewal of Africas

modernity is what has come to be known as Post-Africanism. What is
Post-Africanism? First mooted by this author in a 1995 essay Towards a
Post-Africanism: Contemporary African Thought and Postmodernism,4
it is a post-ideological umbrella for a diversity of intellectual strategies
seeking to inscribe newer, more creative moves beyond the age-old
fixations, obsessions and petrifications of thinking that had crystallised
in and around the racial-cultural worries not only of the Negritude
generation but also the so-called postcolonial zeitgeist. The idea came

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from the painful realisation that the cultural-nationalist ethos, reflexes

and vocabulary that came to structure African philosophical, political
and development thinking had not only dragged Africa and the African
mindset into a crippling Afrocentric trap, but had also muddled most of
Africas modernisation projects. Post-Africanism was proposed as an
attempt first to deconstruct the disaster-prone emotionalism, hubris and
paranoias indwelling to most ideologies of Africanism whether in art,
politics or development discourse and, second, to seek newer, fresher
conditions for a more performative African intellectual engagement with
Africa, modernity and the West.
But before I say more on what post-Africanism is or wants to be, let
me add that it is not postcolonialism. Despite its gestures of radical
chic, postcolonialism has often been responsible for sending some of
the most intellectually misleading and befogging signals to the wretched
of the third earth. One such signal that has contributed to delaying the
intellectual maturation of the ex-colonies is the notion that the ability
to confront imperialism and decolonise the mind of the colonised by
laying bare its hidden structures of imperial domination is more important and urgent for the postcolonial subject than the ability to learn,
copy or steal the ruses and skills of imperialist domination for the
purpose of hastening economic growth and sociopolitical modernisation in the postcolonies. Against such wasteful and depressive deployment of intellectual resources on settling futile scores with imperialism,
Post-Africanism, borrowing from Nietzsches notion of amor fati
love of fate preaches the spirit of total affirmation of all that colonial
history has brought down upon us. It believes that genuine postcolonial
redemption for the ex-colonised subject can no longer consist in refining ever more underhand ways to continue blaming the imperial West
or to lust after the Wests guilt-ridden, repentance-coated pity. From
the post-Africanist perspective it is rather a matter of finding an
entirely new perspective, a freer, bolder spirit from which the entire
colonial past as well as the neo-imperialist present stands totally
redeemed. Post-Africanism points towards a more creatively productive
future time when postcolonial subjects released from their erstwhile
compulsive anti-West resentments and fully reconciled with their
historical fate as offspring of Europes defeat will discover the antianti-imperialist spirit to love and celebrate the fact that we were once
colonised and, through being colonised, were happily fast-forwarded
into the theatre of world history. Similarly, post-Africanism is even
farther away from postmodernism. While the latter is mostly coquettish
in its pretence of slaying the allegedly oppressive dragon of overmodernisation, the first expresses an ardent desire to overcome all that
had hitherto obstructed Africas full entry into modernity. In other
words, while one is a hypocritical jeremiad pronounced on a modernity
that some claim to have too much of, the other is a deep yearning for
the conditions conducive to the emergence of the indispensable basics
of normal life in modernity. However, in my inaugural essay on postAfricanism, postmodernism had to be enlisted tactically for some of its
underlying theories, especially deconstruction, which could serve as a
method for seeing off the acquired insurrectional, accusatory, selfregarding as well as impotently hubristic habits of Afrocentric ideologies, including Negritude.

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5.

Friedrich Nietzsche; On
the Advantages and
Disadvantages of History
for Life, quoted in
Malcolm Pasley, ed,
Nietzsche: Imagery and
Thought: A Collection of
Essays, Routledge, London
and New York, 2009,
p 151

6.

Cultural health is here

defined in Nietzsches sense
as the innate capacity or
plastic force of a people or
a culture not just to recover
from wounds inflicted on it
from the outside but to use
such wounds as a stimulus
for growth. In this case
Africas colonisation was
the external wound that
should have stimulated
Africa out of its
anthropological sclerosis
and accelerated its entry
into modernity. Africas
failure to use the
civilisational disturbances
of colonisation as a
stimulus for accelerated
modernisation has been
traced to many factors.
One neglected explanation
is that cultural nationalism
choked many of the seeds
of modernisation sown by
colonisation.

Freed from the reactive compulsions of Negritude and postcolonialism, but also from the alien worries of postmodernism, Post-Africanism
can seek new tonics for African thinking and constitutive conditions for
Africas new cultural health. It reasons that over-exposure to debilitating
ideologies of the Africanisation of modernity has unnecessarily complicated the African condition, stunting its growth and hampering its
outlook on the world. It agrees with those who say that Negritude is dead
but insists that saying so means recognising that there can be no African
path to development except the wrong path, no specific African way or
Africanity different from the ways of all pre-literate cultures stuck in a
mythico-magic consciousness and waiting for rational scientific-technological Enlightenment. Post-Africanism conceives that the new cultural
health of Africa must centre on a second African Enlightenment after the
first tentatively colonial one was interrupted by premature decolonisation and the cultural nationalism that followed. It finds that the basic
malady of Africas modernity-consciousness was contracted in the wake
of that interruption and diagnoses it as a chronic cultural overload: too
many historical burdens weighing down on too little rationality and clarity of vision. Nietzsche had warned that an excess of historical or ancestral consciousness damages a living system whether it be a human being,
a people or a culture.5 In Africas case it was not only the tribal past it
was chewing over but anti-European paranoia and vengeful, impotent
anti-imperialism. These antithetical impulses crowded out Africas vision
of modernity, depriving it of clarity and performative efficacy. Post-Africanisms second African Enlightenment concerns a massive disburdening
of mind and vision, so that Africa can embark again on its journey of
modernisation, this time deliberately travelling light.6
An Africa culturally re-disenchanted, redeemed from previous ideological redeemers and from the imperious need for messianic redemption, is the Post-Africanist Africa, no longer the mysterious and
dignified Black Mother who can do no wrong or the Dark Continent
that can do only wrong, but a rationally knowable sociopolitical entity
and laboratory, an economic bloc and a market struggling to emerge.
As an economic bloc or a political laboratory, Africa, to be sure, has
been virtually stranded by globalised capitalist modernity. But the PostAfricanist point is that what it needs now to get back into the swim is
no longer the hypnotising songs of master-griots, the hubristic brews of
racial/ideological spell-binders, the woeful wisdom of Afro-pessimists,
native or foreign, or the importunities of televised post-imperial pity,
but the quiet, patient work of those with new, unencumbered and
courageous knowledge. Post-Africanism moves away from a culture of
anxiety about what the West thinks of us to a pragmatic confidence
that negative images of Africa will be removed not by ideological
blackmail or mimicries of the latest Western fad but by the demonstration of our competence in making modernity work for us here. No a
priori racial dignity or African pride can do better than successfully
manipulate modernitys tools to transform Africa into a liveable, workable human space. Post-Africanism advocates a post-ideological empiricism that will draw the most appropriate inferences for the purposes of
action. The audacity of Post-Africanism is not to invent new theories or
radicalise existing ones but to propose a more modest Wittgensteinian
rescue of the postcolonial subject from the bewitchments of either

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paranoid Africanism or mesmerised worship of Western idols. I want

to illustrate this de-bewitching novelty and pragmatic flexibility of the
Post-Africanist approach by considering two contrasting areas of
Africas current modernisation projects, namely scientific-technological
development and democratisation.

POST-AFRICANISM AND TECHNOLOGY

7.

Organisation of African
Unity (OAU), What kind
of Africa in the Year
2000?, quoted by Ronald
Dore in Technological
Capability in the Third
World, Martin Fransman
and Kenneth King, eds,
Macmillan, London, 1984

8.

Ronald Dore,
Technological Selfreliance: Sturdy Ideal or
Self-Serving Rhetoric?, in
Fransman and King, op cit,
p 67

In the 1979 Monrovian Declaration of the OAU, Afrocentric Africa felt

no strain of hypocrisy, self-deceit or empty boast in furiously bad-mouthing technological transfer as something utterly inimical to African pride
or declaring that it was stricken from the international vocabulary.7
African dignity frowned at the degrading idea of copying other peoples
technology, ie, of being tutored by the West on how to develop and grow.
In place of such an inferiorising status, Africa had to build a self-reliant
technological capacity to support its unique African path to development. Experience quickly proved that this was technology that did not
work or had never even existed. Post-Africanism draws the full lesson
from this untoward African path to technological modernisation and
advocates a retreat from ethno-racial irrationality and a full-scale return
to Senghors universal reason in this particular domain. There is no salvation for backward nations other than the schools of already successful
modernisers. No point in expending resources on an African formula for
cement technology. Africa must go to Asia or Europe to learn the worlds
formula for producing cement properly. A crude motor spare-parts
factory in Eastern Nigeria, self-reliantly cobbled together from old iron
scraps, is not thereby more African than a high-tech factory in Japan; it
is simply inefficiently stone-age. Technology that works knows no racial
or national boundaries and is generally culture- and ethnicity-neutral.
Post-Africanism necessarily puts an end to the self-reliance delusion
and re-directs us to the schools of the worlds best practices, but also to
the Senghorian school of stratagem in which disadvantaged but selfconfident learners are ready to brush aside race hubris, whether African
or Western, and master the skills necessary to develop their countries.
Senghorian humility, guile and strategy will get pupils back into the classrooms of the already successful modernisers. Africas racial honour and
dignity can only be earned by successful technological/industrial modernisation through patient apprenticeship. Post-Africanist Africa should no
longer worry that the world looks down on us for having invented nothing or made nothing work. Rather than trying to prove the world wrong
by seeking to invent an African wheel, Africa should settle down without
fuss to exploit the advantage of being the ultimate late-comer to modernity: we only have to learn and appropriate the latest of what the world
has long laboured to invent and build. This may be what Dore calls the
advantages of backwardness in the right hands.8

POST-AFRICANISM AND DEMOCRACY

One major obstacle to a Post-Afrocentric hastening of sociopolitical
modernisation is the inability to stabilise our own volcanic postcolonial

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9.

Stephen Smith, Ncrologie:

Pourquoi lAfrique meurt,
Hachette, Paris, 2004

10. Ibid, p 194

11. Ibid
12. Robert Kaplan, We cant
force democracy, at http://
www.washingtonpost.com
13. Francis Fukuyama,
Stateness First, Journal of
Democracy, vol 16, no 1,
2005

nation-states that seem always to be erupting or about to erupt. One

major reason for this failure may be the dogmatic insistence by both
Africa and the West that democracy must work here too. On this issue
Africa seems paradoxically unanimous the same Africa that resists the
Western ABC of technological development laps up every drop of the
neo-liberal prescription drug of democracy as the panacea for all its ills.
The West itself does not help by raising apocalyptic alarms: no matter
what Africa does, it is doomed unless it democratises.
Consider for instance Stephen Smiths typical Western thinking on
this issue in his Afro-pessimistic book Ngrologie: Pourquoi lAfrique
meurt.9 After a terrifying balance-sheet on the fortunes of democratisation in Africa in the last decades, he asks: is democracy impossible in
Africa? Rather than draw the obvious conclusion commanded by his
findings, he proposes the non sequitur that the democratisation of Africa
today, like the decolonisation of Africa five decades ago, is not optional.
Neither Africa nor the world has a choice.10 He sweeps under the
carpet all that he had previously documented as irrefutable evidence to
the contrary. To be fair to Mr Smith, most of Africa currently reasons as
he does, for it is not an uncommon refrain that there is no alternative to
democracy in Africa! For Smith, Africa cannot avoid democracy
because, despite being underdeveloped and unstable, Africa must live
and breathe in the same globalised temporality as the rest of the world,
and democracy is the minimal requirement for convergence with global
time. The infatuation of Africas elite with democracy, on the other
hand, seems motivated by the Afrocentric anxiety of African racial
dignity and pride: Africa, though still a multi-tribal patchwork, must
show itself capable of operating the worlds most advanced system of
political management. Smith wants Africa to democratise because it
cannot extract itself from global time;11 Africas elites want democracy
to prove to the world that it is already cloaked in global time.
Against both these fallacious and disaster-prone scenarios of
globalising urgency that would enforce liberal democracy on Africa,
Post-Africanism pays disillusioned attention to the many illiberal and
unglobalisable facts and figures, forces and signals on the ground. PostAfricanism does not mind Europhilia in the field of technological
modernisation, but some of the so-called globalised political or social
modernities of the West must be regarded with a philosophy of robust
suspicion. Post-Africanism challenges the reigning global political idols
and is prepared to think and act beyond their apparently irresistible
seductions. Saying that there is no alternative to the Western model of
democracy in all of postcolonial Africa flies in the face of all empirical
facts. Africa does have a choice for the simple reason that, though this
democracy is undoubtedly what everybody, including Africa, wants,
you cannot force it, as Kaplan, a spokesman of the neo-conservatives in
neo-imperialist America, puts it.12 Kaplan has finally come to reckon
with what postcolonial Africa and a good part of Asia have been trying
to stammer out, often with fire, smoke and nihilistic genocidal fury,
since the beginning of the forced democratisation process. You cannot
force democracy, because what most of the postcolonial multi-tribal
patchworks want above everything is, according to another American
conservative, George Santayana, stateness first.13 But did it have to cost
America and the world all the wars in Asia and all the tragedies in Africa

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for these wise men to recognise this old wisdom of the political sages of
independent Africa? Why did the West in the first place want Africa to
think that becoming democratic was something it had to do as a categorical imperative, irrespective of any tragic consequences that could result
from its forceful imposition? If the minimal conditions for a working
democracy, including stateness first, are simply not there, then we must
go back and reinterpret the negative realities spawned by democratisation, not as evidence of Africas congenital incapacity for political
modernisation but as signals of a deep systemic rejection of its electioneering multi-party form by the current nation-state system in Africa.

POST-AFRICANISM AND ART

Hegel had said that philosophy is nothing but the best thoughts of the
age. What best thoughts have we produced in an age that imprisons us?
Post-Africanism wants to be the thought of Africa in relation to a much
anticipated future age compelled prematurely into being and aborted by
the curses of the present age. A Post-Africanist art is summoned by positive force to the role of an avant-garde to imagine and play midwife to a
redeemed future. In other words, art in the post-Africanist sense is the
requisite pregnancy that can deliver a counter-future to the current postcolonial stillbirth of modernity. The problem is, can what currently passes
for African art, so-called postcolonial art, take the weight of such
redemption? An inspection of current African art, after Senghor, shows
that many post-Negritude artists are still busy mining or recycling, from
the many real troubles of the postcolonies, faked tribal authenticities or
old nativist identities and selling these to the West as postcolonial art. But
the Senghorian task of reconciling a postcolonial para-modernity, sickly,
at odds with itself and without solid anchors in modernity, cannot be
achieved by our artists and art historians opportunistically appeasing the
exotic itches of blas Westerners with simulated ethnicities.
As we know, art via cultural nationalism was Africas major route to
entanglement in the cross-cultural complications of modernity. At the
twilight of both Negritude and cultural nationalism, we know that the
road to a nativistic recovery of lost cultural health is barred to Africa, for
there can be no cultural health for Africa other than what she can
recover from coming to terms with her essentially non-native colonialist
historicity. We also know that chronically sick cultures are more prone
than others not just to illegitimate politics and unworkable modernities
but also to unhealthy art. Consequently, Post-Africanism proposes as a
cure to the current anachronistic nativism of postcolonial art a return to
Senghors anti-Negritude aesthetic wisdom, namely, suspending the past
and ethnicities in a purely aesthetico-cultural museum so that truly
modern African art can be birthed and deployed in the service of Africas
modernisation. In this sense a Post-Africanist art can serve as the chief
purveyor and promoter of Africas new cultural health, no longer pathologically urged to bleed from the old scars of history or perpetually to
blame others, but now able to use past wounds as stimulants to faster
growth. For post-Africanist art to serve as stimulant to the new hopes of
Africa, the new artist must necessarily desist from all defensive cultural
protectionism and no longer adopt the victims mien but Zarasthustras

187

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus

Spoke Zarathustra, quoted
in Pasley, op cit, p 87

courage and voluntarism: What does it matter that you have miscarried!
What matters is how much is still possible?14
For todays pseudo-globalising generation, the primacy of democracy
has replaced the Afro-narcissistic obsessions with dignity and pride.
However, for a Post-Africanist epoch, the business of thinking is
premised exclusively on mobilising all of modernitys cultural resources
to put modernity properly to work in an Africa of the future. We should
first seek a functional all-embracing modernisation of Africa so that all
else, including dignity, prosperity and democracy, will be added unto us.

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