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To cite this Article Kiros, Teodros(2007) 'Introduction: The African Post-Colonial State in Crisis', Socialism and
Democracy, 21: 3, 1 — 3
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08854300701599783
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300701599783
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Introduction: The African Post-Colonial
State in Crisis
Teodros Kiros
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In the process of assembling such an important issue, the attempt to be judicious and
comprehensive is not always realized. I am aware that there is much more to be said
about the questions dealt with here, and that many able thinkers on matters of common
concern are not included. I hope that some of them will be represented in future issues
of this journal. I am solely responsible for any lacunae that critics may discover.
The African crisis, argues Abiola Irele, is most evident in the visual
and literary presentation of Africa once again as the zone of non-being,
presented to the world in various guises as the epitome of helplessness
and anguish. The African self is novelized as an anguished non-being.
The passions and goodwill that were once part of post-independence
Africa quickly gave way to the gloom, pestilence, HIV/AIDS, war,
and poverty characteristic of contemporary Africa.
This reality is well captured in Irele’s essay. For the Western
literary imagination, the condition of Africa is so dystopian that the
African self is now a symbol of the worst that could happen to a
human being. In this view Africa is not the heart of light, but rather
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the “heart of darkness.” The Africa that was the center of human
civilization is now the originator of HIV/AIDS. The Africa of the Iliad
and the Odyssey – an embodiment of hospitality, generosity, and cul-
tural polish – is now a site of perversion and of war. Endless commen-
taries present Rwanda, Darfur, Ethiopia, and Eritrea as places of
brutality and savagery. Everything that is not amenable to change
and transformation is considered typically African. The Afro-optimism
of the immediate post-independence period has now been fully dis-
placed by what Irele calls Afro-pessimism. Irele does not endorse the
Afro-pessimistic portrait; he merely presents it as it floods the media.
Kwasi Wiredu, on the other hand, puts forward an Afro-optimistic
view, suggesting that the African condition can perhaps be resolved by
a consensual democracy built on compromise as the essence of
decision-making. Wiredu’s philosophically rigorous argument offers
an ideal scenario, but its implementation requires objective insti-
tutional support, which can be mediated only by social movements.
It is within these movements that the practice of consensual democracy
must be nurtured through the art of compromise.
Paget Henry joins this discussion by carrying further Fanon’s
vision of turning a new leaf and taking seriously C.L.R. James’s
respect for the common people as the originators of transformative par-
ticipatory politics. Henry believes, along with Marx, Fanon, and James,
that emancipation is the mission of working people. This principle
applies most poignantly to the African condition, and Nigel Gibson
shows its workings in the revolutionary activities of the “poors” of
Durban, South Africa, who, when faced with broken promises, did
not wait for the African National Congress (ANC) to organize them,
but took law and order into their revolutionary hearts and hands,
rejecting the efforts of the bourgeois state to silence them and covert
them into docile subjects. They said no to docility and yes to the trans-
formative politics of the streets.
Teodros Kiros 3
Daniel Egan uses Fanon’s ideas of the alienated self by showing the
role of racialized categories in the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
He argues, quite originally, that race is constructed as a tool of the
material and symbolic “niggerizing” of the oppressed. That one is
white, and therefore essentially born to rule, and the other is black,
and therefore destined to be ruled, is a binary language that is used
to rationalize the exploitation of the colonized. In his view, the subjuga-
tion of Iraqis is a particular case of what Paget Henry calls “negrifica-
tion.” The repressive binary universal, however, hides a liberating
solidarity of all the oppressed, who could transform the repression
into an emancipatory “humanist universalism” in the self-activity of
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