6- African Cultural Identity and Self Writing

Abstract

For some time now, Achille Mbembe has warned African social scientists against the ghetto to which Marxism and nationalism has consigned them. This admonition is rooted in a personal belief that Africa lacks refreshing, internationally relevant and philosophically grounded scholarship. According to him, African scholarship is steeped in a selfimposed ghetto that has produced stultifying nativist and Afro-radicalist narratives. The narratives have, in turn, driven African scholarship to “a dead end,” one that repeatedly laments the effects of the West’s contamination of a pure “Africanness” and calls for a return to the self’s mythical ontological purity. In reclaiming this lost purity, Mbembe adds, African scholarship draws its fundamental categories from Marxism and nationalism to argue for a revolutionary politics that would free the continent from imperialism and dependence. He identifies suffering and victimization as the main episteme in these narratives. These two, he argues, position Africa as always being acted upon by forces outside its control but never acting for itself. He therefore proposes African modes of self-writing that neutralize the power relations between Africa and its colonizers and restores “agency to Africans. Unfortunately, this restoration ends up alleging that Africans are as much responsible for their suffering and trauma as those others that they accuse whether one is considering slavery, colonization or apartheid.