Breyten Breytenbach
We need to see Africa as it is – in all its brutality, excesses, riches, horror, humiliation, poverty, despair, squalor, posturing and display, beauty, and creativeness.
And this is a function of the imagination because we must make leaps in order to accommodate, in a useful fashion, the complexity of the continent and from there draw sustenance for continued creativity. Often there is a wilful misreading of the reality we live in – for racist or paternalistic purposes to justify the fact that Africa is in effect left to wallow in non-development, or else to see it as an exotic and slightly dangerous object of folkloristic pity mixed with excitement; or again, the misreading may be self-serving because we Africans wish to continue portraying ourselves as victims of history.
So, to start with, we believe it is possible and very necessary to see the continent as clearly and therefore, as imaginatively as we can. In the process, we realized that we must ask questions. Such as What, if anything, are the characteristics we share and collectively call ‘African’ from Cairo to the Cape, from Dakar to Mogadishu? Are we talking about history? Culture? Economics? Race? Or just this sad space between potential and shattered dreams? Is the vaunted ‘sameness’ or ‘difference’ perhaps only in the eye of the outside beholder? We live in bedlam or a beggar’s paradise of supposedly autonomous nation-states. Are they viable or even useful? What do they correspond to? Is there any state on the continent, South Africa included, that can look after the legitimate expectations and needs of its citizens?
Let us go deeper: What is the contents – the rights and responsibilities – of citizenship for us? What is our definition of ‘common purpose’, ‘common good’ or even ‘public good’? How much value do we put on individual human life? Who does Africa, in reality, belong to? What is the status and the protection of the hundreds of thousands of people moving across the continent from war zone to refugee camp, from poverty to peril, or even – as only too many do by any imaginable means – out of Africa altogether?
Now, when it would seem that there is a general ‘detraditionalisation’ of people – how do we read the phenomenon in terms of ‘globalisation’ (which is world consumerist capitalism) and ‘modernity’? What values did independence and liberation bring? What happened to those values? Have we been living in borrowed clothes? Is there a peculiarly African way of articulating and administering power, let alone sharing it? Do we have effective checks against the abuses of privilege? What is the weight or the influence or even the sustainability and mandate of our civil society structures? What have we changed for the better since the 50 years of Ghanaian independence? More precisely, what is the impact of our creators and observers, those whose very purpose of being is transformation, our community of artists?
In other words – what has African imagination contributed to our understanding of what we are doing to one another and to the world?
These questions are rough and broad, and I know that many answers exist and can even be
demonstrated. But how honest are we in our answers?
The second dimension of our need to “Imagine Africa” is simply the recognition of the relationship between the imaginary and the real. I take it as a common cause that part of the human condition, maybe the essential flame, is the process of imagining ourselves to be. We are who and what we are only in becoming. We survive, we live because we try to conceive of nature and the purpose of being. Our consciousness is a constant invention or the recognition of what we may be, bounded by the possible.
Maybe this is not so unique to the human condition. After all, do birds not imagine their territory and perhaps also the nature of their being through flight and song? Animals come to an experience of themselves by movement leaving traces as markers of memory. It could be that life is awareness because it knowingly strives for imagining existence and thus questioning the sense and finality of the process. Leaving traces of ourselves, as in creative productivity, could then be seen as part of the definition of consciousness for us as well. We know that in order to progress we must stretch for something just out of reach – if only for a life that will be more compassionate and decent than the cruelty, paranoia, greed, narrow corporatism or narcissism we mostly indulge in and find such ample justification for.
And so, we dream. There is the personal dream to come to terms with the inevitability of being finite; there’s the communal one of justice and freedom upon which we hope to secure the survival of the group. And then there is the dimension of moral imagination.
This brings me to the third reason, for us, to “Imagine Africa.” How do we understand the terrible morbidity of young people in some of our cities – Monrovia, Freetown – dressing up as gaudy and tattered child brides with wigs and rouged faces to go out and kill indiscriminately? How and since when did the AK47 become the instrument of initiation into adulthood? How do we explain the maiming, the senseless mayhem, the raping of infants, the greed and the graft, the cynicism of our rulers, the absence of accountable governance buried under special pleading, the decay of our public ethics, the profound
corrosion of individual and collective self-esteem because of our supposed victimhood? Is it because our societies are stalked by the death – endemic poverty and the plague of Aids? Or can it be because we never delivered on the dreams of liberation and emancipation?
I would postulate that we of this generation suffer from a massive failure of moral imagination. Instead of responsible freedom, we substituted self-enrichment and entitlement linked to cowardice, bad faith, the corruption of dependence, and that glorification of impotence or of posturing expressed as political correctness, where our languages were gutted of texture and colour and we posited our shrill interventions on the mumbo-jumbo of ‘healing’ and ‘closure’, changing the terms we use for looking at
the objectionable in the hope of thus repressing horrible realities. In some instances, we even went through the sinister farce – or are still indulging in it – where ‘confessing’ to torture and repression is intended to lead to an absolution supposed to bring about ‘reconciliation’. This must be a prime example of practising the hypocrisy of religious motivations as snake oil for social leprosy in order not to lose the essential: the power and the privileges of the rich and those whom they co-opt.
Anything, any show, any stuffed bird – but the firm commitment to proceed from our shared humanity to identify what is unacceptable and bring about justice! What ‘horizon of expectations’ are we proposing to the young? How do we interpret the flight of at least 35,000 young people, in pirogues and cayucos – with probably another 10,000 perishing in the sea or in the desert along the way – for a Europe where, at best, they will be shadow people?
And these ruling elites, the plunderers, the only act in town, are found all over Africa.
With no coherent, shared political project; with a little job opportunity in the offing; with families falling apart; with Western consumerist appetites forced down their throats; with estrangement and
obscurantism haunting them like sombre fires – what kind of “Imagine Africa” can we hold up to the young?
Our struggle for light and ultimately our success will be at the cost of brutal honesty, of questioning all the holy cows and taboos, and of remaining engaged to stay the course.
*Breyten Breytenbach is a South African writer and painter known for his opposition to apartheid, and consequent imprisonment by the South African government. This article is taken from the official speech he gave a few years back at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. Read today, the article still holds a lot of water.
