How ‘African culture’ became a tool for keeping the natives in their place “African culture” is an imposition created to define and therefore dehumanise and enslave the continent, to deny its inhabitants their history and their agency. Illustration/John Nyagah By Patrick Gathara Posted Saturday, January 25 2014 at 13:11 In Summary Rhetoric of a culture clash masks an effort to own and define what it means to be an African. It posits the existence of a common African culture, a mystical commonality that supposedly underlies the traditions and practices of the thousands of communities on the continent. How ‘African culture’ became a tool for keeping the natives in their place “African values” are articulated from the pulpits of foreign faiths. Archbishop Desmond Tutu once joked: “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.” That bible is today “African culture” and the people still don’t have the land. The dozens of gay men arrested under Nigeria’s new law, as well as others across the continent who refuse to conform to these dictates — including human-rights workers, pro-democracy activists and the many Kenyans who are defying the authorities and procuring bootleg copies of the banned Oscar-nominated movie, Wolf of Wall Street, are marked as un-African, and, without a hint of irony, systematically vilified as stooges of the West. They are jailed, tortured, exiled or murdered. Their crime is they dare to challenge the right of a small but powerful elite to define what an African is and in doing so pose a direct threat to the systems of control and privilege that have been built around that right. The refusal to be defined, to be silenced or hidden away, is terrifyingly subversive as it opens up new horizons and new avenues to self-knowledge and, ultimately, generates new centres of power. As people, especially the youth, on the continent — abetted by rising incomes and the revolution in communications technology — become increasingly impatient with the one-size-fits-all constriction of African humanity, it will become more difficult for the governing elites to continue to exploit the trope of African culture to keep their populations in check. Already, on the Internet and in other forums, one can see feminists and gay and governance activists challenging the conceptions that underlie it. Through these conversations, Africans are re-imagining themselves in new, refreshing and empowering ways, and creating spaces for authentic cultural expression.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 13:46:06 +0000
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