THE AFRICAN RENAISSANCE AND DEPENDENCE SYNDROME

There is a call from the post colonial- post apartheid African leaders for a rebirth of the African soul. This is sometimes described as an ideology or a philosophy but is largely a political revolution emerging from a belief that it is not possible to sought out Africa’s problems without engaging Africans in dealing with their own problems and defining their own future. Hence, a general call has been to provide African solutions to African problems.

The movement is called the African Renaissance. It started soon after Apartheid in the mid 1990s and many African leaders have been proponents of this ideology. Front runners of this movement are South African President Thabo Mbeki, Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, and many other African leaders. The African Renaissance should be viewed as both a political ideology and a moral proclamation. This calls for the development of African leadership and raising a people with renewed and liberated minds. The minds of the emerging African leaders must experience a mental emancipation and stop looking west whenever there is a challenge in Africa. The ambitions advanced through the African Renaissance have led to the establishment of institutions like the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). The main argument under these institutions is Africa has become of age; therefore, she must be urgently weaned from dependence syndrome.

The observation made by Franz Fanon must be taken seriously: “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it… the people of Africa are determined to fulfill their mission of making the 21st century an African century, the century of the African Renaissance.”

Africans themselves are the hope in the accomplishment of the vision of the African Renaissance. Africa should choose not to be dependent on outside help always. Because of this cancer of dependence, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair may be justified when he claims that Africa is the wound of the world. The only questions he and other former colonial masters of Africa have deliberately never wanted to either ask or answer are: Who wounded the African continent? And who shall heal this wound? The Bembas have a saying that “uupamfiwe eulwa ne chibi” meaning that the one it pains and provokes is the one who must act. It is the task of the African people to look seriously into the solutions for the problems facing the African continent. It cannot be ignored that our former colonial masters have contributed greatly to the predicaments that Africa has found herself in. Their maneuvers during the post-colonial period through the Breton Woods Institutions have not yielded much benefit to the people of Africa. Mostly the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) masterminded by the former colonial masters through the IMF and the World Bank have been the main contributors in condemning the people of Africa into embarrassing inhuman conditions of poverty. The SAPs embraced by most African governments, including the Zambian government in the early 1990s led to the fall of over 100 Zambian manufacturing industries and reduced Zambia to a dumping place for foreign made goods. The poor are growing poorer and poorer. The poverty levels which were around 58% in the early 1990s have now been rotating between 65% and 75% in the early years of the 21st century.

As a concept popularized by South African President Thabo Mbeki and other African thinkers, in African Renaissance, African people and nations are called upon to solve the many problems troubling the African continent. Many African thinkers, especially the politicians have propounded and propagated this concept bringing it to world wide attention in the late 1990s, and it has continued to be a key part of the post-apartheid intellectual agenda.

The African Renaissance also has the goal to deal with the dependence syndrome that has locked the African peoples for most of their history, especially after the slave trade. According to Mbeki the African Renaissance is a vision of continental renewal, reconstruction and reawakening. Therefore, the concept is based on economic recovery of Africa as whole, notably:

• ability to establish political democracy throughout the continent,
• demolition of neo-colonial relations between Africa and the world economic powers,
• mobilization of the African peoples to reclaim as well as direct the continent’s destiny, and
• an acceleration of people-centered as well as people driven economic growth and development.

The African Renaissance should not just be viewed as a political ideology, it must be viewed in the spirit of the renewal of the African continent and the recovery of the African identity which the people of the continent have lived without after it was robbed from them by the colonial forces. It is the goal of the African Renaissance to achieve social cohesion, democracy, economic rebuilding and growth, and the establishment of Africa as a significant player in geo-political affairs. Mbeki himself puts it in the following terms:

I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines. Patient because history is on their side, these masses do not despair because today the weather is bad. Nor do they turn triumphalist when, tomorrow, the sun rises. Whatever circumstances they have lived through and because of that experience, they are determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be (Wikipedia 2008: 1).

By so doing the African Renaissance attempts to deal with the issues of dependence syndrome. There is a call through the African Renaissance for the people in the continent to be healed from this dependence syndrome and begin to chart their continent’s economic destiny. Hence, need to embrace trade over aid. Africans are becoming more and more aware of the need to liberate themselves from the neo-colonialistic policies of the so called world powers. The current economic trends from Asia, especially China and from Latin America have proved to the world that Europe and America cannot be allowed to dominate world politics and economics anymore.

China is quickly growing into an economic giant producing numerous products that the world over is banking on. Meanwhile the Indian economy is also growing steadily while various Asian countries like Singapore are making great progress from poverty to wealth and from dependence to independence in less than fifty years from their independence. Meanwhile, Latin American countries like Cuba, Venezuela and others have turned left defying the neo-colonialistic policies of the Bretton Woods Institutions, and arrogantly rejecting western domination in their countries.

Many countries are becoming more and more aware that they can do without European and American influence, not to mention the fact that capitalism is not the best economic theory. China has thrived under communism, and many Latin American countries are leaning towards communism and humanism, viewing capitalism as a vehicle used by the oppressor to oppress poor countries and dominate them.

The African Renaissance is calling Africans to re-read the past objectively without wearing the spectacles of the colonial master. Soon, the African will recapture his beautiful and yet hidden memories. He will discover that his great- great ancestors even before the colonial master ever showed up on the continent had established a civilized Kingdom of Timbuktu with a well structured organizational hierarchy having medical doctors, judges, priests and other learned men who were bountifully maintained at the king’s costs and charges. An African will further discover how her ancestors had discovered the so called Victoria Falls and named it the Mosi-O-Tunya long before David Livingstone stepped his feet on the beautiful African soil. This is why Africans are called upon to regain their Ubuntu (humanness) and rediscover their African soul. Because the Africans have presented the great and permanent works of creativity available in such works as the Pyramids and sphinxes of Egypt, the stone buildings of Axum in Ethiopia, the ruins of Carthage and Zimbabwe, the rock paintings of the San, the Benin bronzes of Nigeria, the African masks, the cravings of the Makonde in Tanzania, the stone sculpture of the Shona and the Ng’ombe Ilede trading center in Zambia just to mention but a few.

Some of the earliest universities were found at Alexandria in Egypt. All these provide an African enough historical reason to re-affirm his status and become actively involved in shaping his own destiny. The African destiny can no longer be decided by the people who don’t even know what it means to be African.

Moreover the Bible and Christianity are seen as affirming the Ubuntu of the African peoples. Africa became a home for the child Jesus when his life was threatened by King Herod. On this land Jesus, the incarnate God himself was proud to step, walk and live for some years. Some key figures in the Bible like the Ethiopian Eunuch and Simeon of Cyrene (who carried Jesus’ cross) were evidently Africans. Some prominent people in church history like Augustine of Hippo were Africans. Very important Christian decisions that still affect Christianity today such as the canonicity of certain books of the Bible were decided at Carthage in Africa. Africans must be made aware of their beautiful history and be helped to realize that they also have a special place in the eyes of God.

African Renaissance: Realizing the Vision

The vision of the African Renaissance may not be realized until we develop our leadership. Good leadership will be cardinal in re-affirming the Ubuntu of the African peoples. If we can develop African leadership, we can develop the African continent. Frantz Fanon encourages the people of Africa to pursue the vision of the African Renaissance when he writes:

Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it. With South Africa leading from the front, the people of Africa are determined to fulfill their mission of making the 21stcentury an African century, a century of the African Renaissance (Lotter, 2008:1).

This vision calls for the development of a new generation of leaders for a new Africa. Africa has a very serious leadership task. The status of this continent can also be largely blamed on the kinds of leaderships we have entrusted our continent into in our various countries. African leaders have several times fallen prey to the selfish pursuits of the foreign powers and sold the continent off resulting into wars, poverty and other terrible vices.

During the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, over ten thousand people were dying every month within a period of ten years. At the end of the ten years the DRC had lost over twelve million lives half of which were children (BBC: 2008). Many times election results have been disputed leading to unprecedented levels of social unrest and anarchy. Just in the first week of 2008, the disputed re-election of Mwai Kibaki as a president of Kenya caused the death of over one thousand five hundred lives with half a million displaced as refugees. Chief proponent of the African Renaissance, Thabo Mbeki has found it very hard to deal with the political problems between ZANU-PF’s Robert Mugabe and Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai.

The question is, are Africans truly capable of solving their own problems especially under their current leaderships? Sometimes it has been felt that Africa simply does not have enough capacity and money to effectively deal with its problems. The African Union (AU) has been having a tough time to address the problems in the Darfur region of Sudan. The twentieth century witnessed an Africa characterized by colonialism, poverty, post-colonial wars, apartheid, genocide, coup plots, and other challenges. Some of these challenges were confronted and dealt with through the dedicated, sacrificial, visionary and resilient leadership of people like Kenneth Kaunda, Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and other comrades some of which paid with their lives to see Africa overcome its challenges. However, many of these challenges have crossed over into the twenty first century. Leaders of post- colonial Africa seem to have failed the continent in many ways. This calls for a development of a new crop of leaders for a new Africa who will redefine the destiny of this land and make the twenty first century a century of the African Renaissance. Charles Mwewa calls these, the Emerging African Leadership, and he addresses this challenge in his upcoming book, The Burden of Zambia.

African leaders must, however, be recommended for the efforts made to establish democratic governance in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Nigeria and Angola which were war ravaged. Cease fires in these countries are partly to be recommended on the efforts made by the African Union, and other region groupings to ensure peace and tranquility. This should serve to boost the confidence of the emerging leaders and help them increase their capacity to provide African solutions to African problems. The church must actively participate in the vision of the African Renaissance by taking deliberate steps to train leaders both for ecclesiastical and political purposes. If the light of the gospel can shine on the continent, Africa can have hope registered in its face.