In the decade and a half since a new wave of scholarly and policy inte- rest emerged around the subject of glo- balisation, a concerted effort has been made to forge and enforce a dominant perspective that it is, by definition and in practice, something which is desi- rable and ‘good’, in which all countries, especially the developing ones, must strive to participate so that they can harvest the bountiful fruits it promises. Although somewhat simplified, it is this dominant line of thinking that has broadly underpinned much of the discourse about the ‘margina- lisation’ of Africa and the push by the international financial institutions (mainly the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) and the World Trade Organisation to encou- rage African countries to implement trade, industrial and integration policies that will completely open up their economies and, according to this pers- pective, secure their full participation in the international economic system. The fact that from Barcelona to Genoa, Goteborg to Washington, Bamako to Porto Alegre, and Seattle to Mon- terrey, a groundswell of popular international opposition has been building against the consequences of the neo- liberal underpinnings of the dominant processes and structures of globa- lisation has not prevented the conti- nued pursuit of a one-sided agenda of rapid market liberalisation. The entire ideological, political and cultural apparatus erected in support of this agenda has, itself, produced other contradictions which provide ample empirical evidence that globalisation continues to have its multiple discontents at both the national and international levels. Some of these con- tradictions, including those that are internal to the logic of the processes of globalisation itself, are amplified in most of the essays included in this edition of the CODESRIA Bulletin.
Integral to the debates on globalisation are the questions of identity, citizenship and location/geography. These questions have been amply discussed on the basis of African and other experiences, and there is no shortage of perspectives pointing to the gaps which the new context has thrown up, the dynamics of the recomposition of identities and citizenship rights that is taking place, the specificities of encounter and experience associated with location/geography, and the constraints and opportunities that are posed. It is in this overall context that discussions about Africanity and African identity have been revived, sometimes in the specific framework of re-thinking of the politics and economics of Pan-Africanism — including regional co-operation and integration, in other instances as part of a culturalist project attempting to re-conceptualise what it means to be an African today. An earlier issue of the CODESRIA Bulletin (No.1, 2000) was partly devoted to this culturalist critique and it generated a great deal of debate. Some of the main contentious points raised in that discussion are taken up in this edition by Archie Mafeje. Elsewhere, other scholars contributing to the discussion on Africanity and its pan-Africanist core have insisted that irrespective of what the experience of independence may have been, the central goals of self- reliance, freedom and unity that encapsulate the collective determination of Africans to reject foreign domination, and which energised the nationalist struggle for self- determination, remain impeccable and should, therefore, be defended.
Furthermore, beyond the sterile and often tautological discussions about Africa’s ‘marginalisation’ from the global mainstream — and here, some interesting critiques have been produced to challenge the notion of ‘mar- ginalisation’ and pose the central issue in terms of the mode/form of Africa’s integration into the world economy — there has been a renewal of discu- ssions about Africa’s place and role in the modern world system along with a re-interpretation of some of the landmark experiences the continent has undergone. Henry Louis Gates’ Wonders of the African World — broadly similar in format but not in approach and orientation to Ali Mazrui’s Triple Heritage and Basil Davidson’s The Africans — represents the single most important focus of recent debates about Africa’s historical engagement with the rest of the world. An array of commentators, including Ali Mazrui and Wole Soyinka, exchanged high-profile responses to Gates’ work, the former challenging Gates, and the latter questioning the basis of Mazrui’s cha llenge. Considering the critical impor- tance of the questions raised by Gates and a growing revisionist historiography whose focus is now extended to re-visiting the colonial experience in Africa, there is need for further serious discussions about the issues they raise. That is why the essay by Zine Magubane and Paul Zeleza in this edition of the Bulletin is particularly useful and we hope their arguments would encourage other readers to join in the debate on the interpretation of both the historical African experience and the entire pan-African project.
In the last decade, CODESRIA provided support for research on various aspects of globalisation and the African identity. The Council intends to continue mobilising African scholars to deepen their reflection on these and related questions. For this purpose, three new programme areas dealing with Africa and the Challenges of Globalisation, New Regionalist Impulses in Africa, and the African Diaspora and Diaspora Linkages are being developed and will be announced in future issues of the Bulletin.
Adebayo
Olukoshi
Felicia Oyekanmi
Re-presenting Slavery, Re-presenting Race, and
Mis-representing Africa: A Critique of
Wonders of the African World
Introduction
Henry Louis Gates Jr. may well be one of the most famous black intellectuals alive today. Since Gates Jr. took over the Department of African-American Studies at Harvard University in 1991, his every move has been documented by scholars and lay people, black and white alike. Thus, when his six-part, twelve-hour documentary, Wonders of the African World, premiered in the fall of 1999, it received tremendous attention and provoked a storm of commentaries. Undeniably, it was Gates’ status as a Harvard professor that helped to persuade PBS and a host of wealthy foundations to throw their financial weight behind the project. It was his position as a black Harvard professor, however, that ultimately gave him the authority to use the series as a vehicle to speak not only about but also for Africans and people of African descent. Not surprisingly, the fact that Gates is an African-American and the influence this had on the way in which he narrated and experienced Africa recurred time and time again in discussions on the series. It was this wide divergence of opinion and the vigour with which Gates’ supporters and detractors weighed in on the series that led us to review the debate generated by the series, by examining some of the key protagonists and issues. To this end, we looked at three sets of commentaries: first, press and public reviews garnered from newspapers and Amazon.com.; second, those posted on two academic discussion lists, the H-Net Discussion List for African-American Studies (H-Afro-Am) and the H-Net Discussion List for African History and Culture (H-Africa); third, the special issue on the series by West Africa Review. We focused, in particular, on episodes two and three, ‘The Swahili Coast’ and ‘The Slave Kingdoms’ wherein Gates tackles the issues of racial identity and African complicity in the slave trade. These two episodes, we contend, demons- trate that the series was less concerned with uncovering the mysteries of pre-colonial Africa, than it was in justifying the racial order in post- modern America. Because Gates has been called ‘the chief interpreter of the black experience for white America’ and ‘the most influential black man in the United States today’, who ‘brought money and glamour to the country’s great racial debate’, we cannot separate the ways in which he has been positioned in the academy and in public race discourses from the implicit messages of the series1.
Out of America: Henry Louis Gates Confronts Africa
A number of commentaries on the documentary series positioned Gates within long-standing debates over the relationship of African-Americans to Africa. In the editorial review of Wonders for one of the largest Web booksellers, Amazon.Com, Eugene Holley Jr. argued that Gates’ series revealed ‘an unbreakable, albeit ill- defined, relationship between Afro-Americans and Africans’2. Jonathan Reynolds, a participant in the H-Africa discussion list, agreed that the series was the ‘first of such series presented from an overtly African- American perspective’. Reynolds singled out the episodes on the Slave Kingdoms and the Swahili Coast as being particularly valuable. He found Gates’ “willingness to address popular African-American mytho- logies of Africa (his aggressive attack on the idea that Africans played no part in selling ‘fellow Africans,’ [and] his repeated comparisons of African-American and African racial identity)” to be ‘most remarkable’3. Yet, Robert Hinton, another supporter of Gates on H-Afro-Am, defended Gates’ focus on the ‘complicity’ of Africans in the slave trade on the grounds that it operated as a necessary corrective for what he termed ‘the high degree of romantic racialism in African-Americans’4.
However, significant numbers of Gates’ detractors (many of whom were African-American) criticised both episodes for their biased and Euro-centric assumptions. A parti- cularly irate J. Tolbert argued that Wonders of the African World was ‘not made to educate blacks or whites about Africa, but to absolve whites of their guilt over the historic sins of their ancestors and their present day racist behaviour’5. Molefi Asante, the doyen of Afro-centric scholarship, accused Gates of ‘sowing seeds of division between African people’ and charged the episode on the Slave Kingdoms with having the potential to ‘set back the intellectual discourse on African enslavement for fifty years if the narrative is not corrected’6. Gwen- dolyn Mikell, an African American and former president of the African Studies Association, agreed that she was ‘greatly offended by Gates’video attempts to paint a picture of an ima- ginary divide between African- Americans and African views of the Continent and its views in history’7.
The debates over Gates’ intended audience and his motives for producing the series become even more interesting when viewed against the official narrative—offered by both Gates and PBS—of the aims for the video and its intended audience. PBS, the major sponsor of the series, pitched the video as an exercise in revisionist history aimed at rewriting colonialist and white supremacist narratives of Africa.. Gates offered a virtually identical explanation of his aims for making the video in the promotional material for PBS and in a number of published interviews. In the promotional material for PBS he asserted that part of his inspiration for the video came from his experience of viewing Adam Clark’s Civilisation series as a child, which kindled his desire to make a similar epic about Africa. Despite the series’ stated aim of providing a corrective to Eurocentric myths, in practice, it expends far more energy discussing and exposing Afrocentrist myths about Africa. Indeed, the video careens between the two epistemological projects in ways that can only be described as schizophrenic.
Although Gates makes repeated references to the pernicious ways in which racist scholarship and practice have systematically suppressed and denied Africa’s unique and important role in the making of world history, his modes of address consistently frame the project as an exercise devoted to exposing African-American (mis) understanding of Africa to the light of ‘academic reason’. In the first volume of the series, ‘Black Kingdoms of the Nile,’ for example, Gates begins with a brief discussion of the impact of racism on popular conceptions of Africa and African history. However, this epistemological project is consistently undermined and overshadowed by his caricatured and dismissive portrayal of African-American consciousness of Africa. Indeed, throughout the series, Gates repeatedly made broad and sweeping generalisations about Africans and African-Americans, which were raised to the status of incontrovertible ‘truths’ because they were uttered by a trusted ‘native informant’. In the first episode of the series, for example, he stated without qualification that ‘African-Americans are obsessed with the idea of Nubia’. Indeed, the series is riddled with statements like these that homogenise African-Americans, rendering differences between them invisible and, ultimately, unim- portant. Further, Gates’ tendency to make ‘folk wisdom’ the episte- mological locus of African and African-American knowledge production works to effectively deny the very existence of African and African-American Studies. Indeed, there is nary an instance in the video where African or African-American studies are presented as disciplines with significant epistemological and theoretical divisions that arise from, reflect and impact on a diverse array of popular understandings of black culture, politics, and history.
Re-presenting Slavery, Re-presenting Race
Gates puts pre-modern Africa in the service of post-modern America
No subject sparked more debate than that of Gates’ queries into the alleged African complicity in and responsibility for the slave trade. Responses to the issue varied considerably. Some regarded the question as legitimate. Jonathan Thornton, for example, defended Gates for having posed what he regarded as a crucial historical question. ‘Why did Africans (or rather African rulers, merchants and other decision-makers) sell slaves to Europeans when it was so obviously immoral and harmful...? It needs to be taken as seriously as why Europeans did the buying and transporting of slaves.’8 Thornton’s position is not surprising. In his book, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680, he argued,
Africans were active participants in the Atlantic world, both in African trade with Europe (including the slave trade) and as slaves in the New World9.
Thornton’s history pays an under- hand homage to African agency, so beloved in African nationalist historiography, while simultaneously invoking the much older European historiographical imperative to absolve Europe of responsibility for the slave trade. Also among those who credited Gates with raising an important question was Omofolabo Ajayi. According to Ajayi, ‘the most seriously indicting and tragically revealing aspect of the series for me was not what Professor Gates did say, or not. It is what we Africans, as educators, politicians, government policy-makers etc., have failed to do over these years, in particular, since independence. We don’t discuss slavery. We don’t examine it, we don’t educate ourselves’10. The author would be on firmer grounds if he actually studied what is written and taught in history texts throughout the continent, which would indicate that his assertions are simply not true. As far as we know, the Atlantic or European slave trade constitutes a major topic in history texts used in many parts of the continent.
Thornton’s premises and Ajayi’s perspectives, however, were roundly attacked on both the Afro-American and African studies discussion lists. The question of slavery drew its salience, some observed, not only from the history of slavery itself, its causation and contexts, but also from its aftermath. As Mamaissii Dansi Hounon observed, “the central question in my view, is not ‘why did Africans (or rather African rulers, merchants and other decision-makers) sell slaves to Europeans’, but rather: why was it necessary for the Euro- peans to completely dehumanise the African, and create a perpetual caste system of institutional racism and discrimination based on the denial of the African as human, merely because they were ‘prisoners of war’?”11.
He was supported by another commentator who added, “I seriously doubt that most African descendants would have been half as troubled over this issue if they had been allowed the same dignity and autonomy as most humans during and (most impor- tantly) ‘after’ their enslavement.” The American race problem, John Philips concluded, ‘is probably at least as much a result of the long lingering effects of the legal caste system as of slavery per se’12. A number of commentators observed that the mere posing of the question of ‘blacks’ selling other ‘blacks’ into slavery bore the imprint of a distinctly Anglo- American racial sensibility. As Mamaissii Dansi Hounon stated:
The Africans did not see themselves as selling Africans (meaning) ‘Blacks by Blacks’, but rather ‘ethnic enemies by ethnic enemies’, hence, their case was not different from European ‘ethnic wars’.13
These points were elaborated in subsequent contributions. To Rhiman Rotz, the seemingly Pan-Africanist basis of the question, ‘how could Africans sell members of their own group into slavery,’ was actually rooted in a racist problematic. ‘The question is wrong, he declared’.
The people doing the selling had no meaningful conception of ‘African’; in other words, it wasn’t Africans selling other Africans into slavery; it was folks from Oyo or Dahomey selling Ashanti or Hausa into slavery. If we still had a slave trade today, would anyone think that Serbs selling Croatians, or Kosovar Albanians into slavery (or, I hasten to add, vice versa) should need some kind of ‘extra explanation because they’re all white, or all European?14.
Likewise, the episode in which Gates explored racial identity in East Africa was also criticised for the ways in which it failed to consider that Anglo-American constructions of racial identity were just that — constructions — which had no greater degree of truth or correctness than any other. The purpose of episode two, ‘The Swahili Coast’ is, ostensibly, to explore constructions of racial identity amongst East Africans. In actuality, the video quickly degenerates into Gates alternately ridiculing and berating African people who identify themselves with Arabs or Persians. The camera pans the faces and bodies of individuals who Gates knows will readily be identified by American audiences as ‘black ‘ while he demands to know from various infor- mants why they identify themselves with Persians or Arabs rather than ‘Africans’ or ‘blacks’. One of the most infuriating moments of the entire six-hour series occurs when Gates, functioning as the omniscient narrator, dismisses the right of East Africans to claim Persian ancestry based on their distant ancestors. He de-legitimises their understanding of their own genealogies, contending that he could not and would not claim Irish ancestry based on the identity of one of his distant ancestors. Chege Githiora noted that:
While “it is understandable that Bwana Gates, and any conscious North American, is obsessed by the question of race since the very foundations of the society he was born into are so racist, why should US race discourse be transposed onto Africa, or anywhere else for that matter? ‘Race’ is a social construction and therefore varies, often dramatically across societies... race can exist in a continuum determined by several factors including class, phenotype and descent...In the case of East Africa, religion (Islam) is yet another variable... So then, why does a prominent scholar like Gates, who writes so well about African- Americans, insist on making snide remarks about Africans who claim to be ‘Arabs’ or ‘Persians’, etc.? Has he not met Dominicans, Brazilians and others, black as I am, but who regard themselves as ‘Castellano’ ‘Spanish’ or ‘Indian’ etc.?15
Gates’ inability or unwillingness to probe the complex contexts and histories of racial constructions in Africa, Tricia Hepner surmised, was rooted in his insufferable self-centred arrogance. ‘Gates asks only his questions’, she observed, ‘always bringing the African experience directly back to his own, visibly discomfiting everyone from young Persian men in Zanzibar (who don’t know they are Black) to Imams and Orthodox priests with his inap- propriate questions. Time and again, Gates encounters moments that illustrate the staggering complexity of racial identities and discourses of authenticity, of tangled histories and cultural bricolages that fit together in ways that he can’t possibly comment upon, because he remains oblivious to anyone’s concerns but his own. He misses every opportunity to unpack these categories in ways that would be relevant to broader race and ethnic relations in the United States and Africa, choosing instead, to carry his own identity politics all over the continent.’16
The ways in which Gates engaged the issue of African involvement in the slave trade and racial identity in East Africa led many to speculate that Gates’ intent was to not to explore the richness of Africa’s historical legacy, but to de-legitimise the continued struggles by African-Americans against America’s racist legacy, past and future. Molefi Asante charged, ‘the themes covered in the series rest on some disturbing sub-texts, such as the undermining of a pan-African sentiment, the reinforcement of negative stereotypes…and the under- mining of the movement for African reparations. I see this series as a clear assault on the African and African- American narrative of liberation’.17 Gates’ detractors, especially among African-American intellectuals, have long attributed his celebrity less to the profundity of his scholarship and more to his conservative politics. Hence, Gates’ obsession with East Africans in Wonders ‘confused’ racial identity and his decision to make Africans, rather than Europeans, bear moral responsibility for the horrors of the slave trade.
The ways in which Wonders, a documentary ostensibly about pre- modern Africa, appeared to sanction the racial order of a post-modern America, led Ali Mazrui, in his second widely publicised commentary on Gates, to characterise the series as a homage to what he termed ‘Black Orientalism’. The concept of Orientalism, as it was first deployed by Edward Said, was an exploration of the ways in which ideological or ‘discursive’ practices not only defined how particular people and geographic locations were analysed, observed, and ultimately dominated but also how that process actually worked to construct the very object being spoken of. Thus, Said demonstrated that ‘the Orient’, much like the mad man and the deviant, were not actually existing entities in the world simply described by discourse, but were better under- stood as ‘effects’ of that discourse. Said artfully blended this Foucaultian mode of analysis with a more orthodox Marxist analysis of the intersection between ideology and material relations. Thus, Said looked specifically at how colonialism and the project of rendering ‘the Orient’ a space that existed solely for the economic benefit of the West was and is deeply implicated in the discursive processes described above18. The notion of ‘Orientalism’ can therefore be put to extremely good use in understanding the production of Wonders as a cultural and political text.
What is novel about ‘black orientalist’ practice, as Mazrui points out, is the fact that it uses black interlocutors, thus giving it a greater degree of legitimacy and seemingly making it immune to charges of racism. The fact that this black interlocutor is also African-American is of profound significance, for it makes these texts available for use in constructing African-Americans in ways that make them, rather than institutionalised racism, responsible for the in- creasingly marginalised status of the poor and working class majority. As was shown above, constructing African- Americans as people sold into slavery ‘by their own people’ works to absolve white Americans of any responsibility for the material benefits that accrued and continue to accrue to them as a result. Similarly, when Gates de-legitimises East Africans’ under- standing of their own genealogies, he renders American racial categories trans-historical, apolitical, objective, and ‘correct’ by definition, as he simultaneously reaffirms long- standing notions about the inability of Africans to properly reason about anything, least of all, their own experiences. Thus, when read against the backdrop of the social relations that it reflects and helps to sustain, Wonders, as an instance of Black orientalism, represents the latest attempt, in the words of African- American philosopher Lewis Gordon, ‘to problematise black people instead of responding to the social problems that black people experience’19.
Indeed, as committed Africanist and Afro-Americanist scholars, we must look at Wonders and the debate that occurred in its wake as providing an important point of entry into larger and ultimately more significant areas of mutual concern: the concerted attempts to wage war—epistemic, economic, and cultural—on people of African descent around the globe. As Gordon explained, we are witnessing an attempt to construct ‘a world without blacks as a solution to the challenge of treating blacks with moral respect’20. Thus, our engagement with Wonders cannot stop at the level of critiquing the series and its aims. We might gain inspiration from W.E.B. DuBois, in whose name Gates, unfortunately, enacts much of his academic malevolence. As Gordon went on to explain:
DuBois came to the conclusion that the study of a problem was a necessary but insufficient means of eliminating it... DuBois became a revolutionary because, in the end, he saw that knowledge by itself does not compel action.21
Thus, our efforts at critiquing the series will ultimately be meaningless if they are not coupled with far-reaching attempts to transform the social relations that not only helped to give rise to the series, but which its existence ultimately celebrates and promotes.
Zine
Magubane,
Sociology & African Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and
Paul
Tiyambe Zeleza,
History & African Studies, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Notes
1. Cheryl Bentsen, ‘Head Negro In Charge’, Boston Magazine, April, 1998: 64-122. The title provoked a demonstration by African-American ministers outside the magazine’s offices, see ‘Headline on Profile of Henry Louis Gates Stirs Controversy’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 1998.
2. ‘Editorial reviews. Amazon.com’, at
<Http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/
ts/book-reviews/0375402357/104-9778317-9435109>
3. ‘Wonders of the African World: Reply’, from Jonathan Reynolds, November 2, 1999. H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
4. H-Net Discussion List for African-American Studies, H-AFRO-AM@H-NET.MSU.EDU., November 1, 1999.
5. H-NET Disucssion List for African-American Studies, H-AFRO-AM@H-NET.MSU.EDU., December 19, 1999.
6. ‘Molefi Asante on Gates’ Wonders of Africa’, from Molefi Kete Asante, November 17, H-AFRO-AM@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
7. Gwendolyn Mikell, ‘Deconstructing
Gates’ Wonders of the African World, West
Africa Review 1, 2, 2000.
Http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.2.14.
8. ‘Mainstreaming Africa: Reply’, from
John Thornton, November 9, 1999.
H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
9. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992:6-7.
10. ‘Wonders
of the African World: Reply’, from Omofolabo Ajayi, November 5, 1999.
H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
11. ‘Mainstreaming Africa: Reply’, from Mamaissii Dansi Hounon, November 20, 1999. H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
12. ‘Mainstreaming Africa: Reply’, from John Edward Philips, November 23, 1999. H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
13. ‘Mainstreaming Africa: Reply’, from Mamaissii Dansi Hounon, November 20, 1999. H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
14. ‘Mainstreaming Africa: Reply’, from Rhiman Rotz, November 27, 1999. H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
15. ‘Wonders of the African World: Replies’, from Chege Githiora, November 5, 1999. H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
16. ‘Wonders of the African World: Replies’, from Tricia Redeker Hepner, November 3, 1999. H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
17. ‘Molefi Asante on Gates’ Wonders of Africa (fwd)’ from Abdul Allkalimat, 17 November 1999. H-AFRO-AM@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
18. Edward Said, Oreintalism, New York, Vintage, 1989.
19. Lewis Gordon, His Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism in a Neo-colonial Age, New York, Rowman and Littlefield, 1997, 65.
20. Gordon, His Majesty’s, 119.
21. Lewis Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought, New York, Routledge, 2000, 94.
The difference in you, my brother (and sister), enriches rather than frightens me.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The plurality of the world stems from the multitude of diffe- rences which compose it: natural species, human societies, cultures, lifestyles and modes of expression, individuals, moments experienced by each of us, taste and colours, etc. Difference is the most universal factor; It is found every- where and it has always been like this. And at all times, it aroused curiosity and suspicion, attraction and fear, and xenophobia. These are also some of the most ‘common things in the world’, or the most universal.
As regards human society, cultural differences have always been at the source of distinctions and conflicts pitting ‘savages against the refined’, ‘barbarians against the civilised’, ‘the faithful against the unfaithful’, pagans against followers of real religions, etc. Even though we consider these cate- gories to be outdated today and even laugh about them ¾ not all, unfortunately! ¾ they have been replaced by other distinctions which are just as conflicting : ‘modern societies and archaic societies’, ‘developed against under-developed countries’, ‘free world against the rest of the world’, ‘West against East’, ‘North against South’, ‘The 7 against 77’, etc.
The Spectre of the ‘War of Cultures’
In the present situation, in which the dominant positions are presented under the sign of ‘globalisation’, one would have expected the emergence of a universalist view advocating ‘the international human being’, ‘world citizenship’, and the reminder that the earth belongs only to men! Un- fortunately, globalisation, whose benefits are being celebrated and which is presented to us as inevitable, does not seem to be as internationalist as they make it appear! It does not seem to concern humans: it is the free movement of capital, goods, images,... of everything but humans. For the latter, new borders, more difficult to cross than the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, are being increasingly erected to restrict their right to follow the movement of riches accumulated at their expense. To justify these new borders ¾ which can be crossed only by those entitled to do so among the rich ¾ the plurality of the world, cultural differences among peoples are presented not only as contrasting factors but as the main sources of future conflicts: this is the theory of the ‘war of cultures’ or the ‘clash of civilisations’, which is the ideological parallel to globalisation.
One of the theoreticians of the ‘War of Cultures’ is the American academic, Samuel Huntington (1997). His book , The Clash of Civilization, goes back to the theory he developed in an article with the same title, published by the Foreign Affairs Review in 19931. The author points out that his theory is the fruit of research conducted on ‘The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests’ by the Institute of Strategic Studies which he heads at the University of Harvard. For this reason, if for nothing else, we need to focus attention on his theory in order to understand what the Pentagon has in store for us.
Huntington presents his analysis as a scientific theory on the history of international politics and conflicts of the ‘modern world’. In this regard, he explains that:
For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern inter- national system with the Westphalia Treaty of 1648, conflicts of the western world opposed princes [...]. This type of conflicts, which characterised the 19th Century, continued until the First World War. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution, and the ensuing reactions, conflicts among nations were replaced by ideological conflicts, first between communism, fascism-nazism and liberal demo- cracy. During the Cold War, this latter type of conflict took the form of a conflict between the two super powers, both of which were Nation- States, in the classical European sense, and which defined their identity in terms relating to their respective ideologies (Huntington 1997:22-23).
He later adds:
With the end of the Cold War, international politics comes out of its western phase. Its epicentre becomes the interaction between western civilisation and non-western civilisations, and between components of the latter (Huntington 1997:23).
Considering that ‘civilisational iden- tity’ will be ‘increasingly important in future’, he concludes that ‘the world will be structured, to a large extent, through the interaction among seven or eight major civilisations’: the Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slovako-Orthodox, Latino-American and probably African civilisations (Huntington 1997:25). Using a geological metaphor, he predicts: ‘the most serious conflicts in future will take place along the cultural fault-line separating civilisations from one another’. This prophesy is based on a culturalist conception in which the differences between civilisations are presented as being more fundamental than all the others: economic, social, political, ideological, etc. (Huntington 1997:26-28) Religion is presented as the most important determinant of civilisational identity; thus he said: ‘civilisations differ from one another through history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, through religion’ (Huntington 1997:25).. He insists on the vital role of religion throughout the article and, more particularly, in relation to the need to identify the various population groups in a world in which all other borders disappear one after the other because of the intensification of exchanges and migratory movements (Huntington 1997). Civilisations, as defined, cannot coexist peacefully because the differences between them are essential and relate to issues as fundamental as relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the State, parents and children, husband and wife. He also insists on the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, freedom and authority, equality and hierarchy (Huntington 1997). Huntington further adds that because of these essential differences, civilisations have been and will continue to be confronted with more durable and more violent conflicts than those with only economic, political or ideological stakes! With the end of the Cold War, which at the same time marked the end of ideological conflicts, and because cultural borders are thought to be the ultimate identity referent in a world characterised by intensive exchanges and interactions among the various population groups ¾ in other words, because of globalisation ¾ future wars will essentially oppose major civilisations , as listed by Huntington.
The Confuciano-Islamic Connection
This is the future enemy of the West and its allies! If at the theoretical level, the ‘clash of civilisations’ may intervene at any ‘front line’ between the seven or eight major civilisations he mentions, the major conflicts will in future oppose the western hegemonic civilisation to other civilisations which are contesting its hegemony, and particularly to what he refers to as the Confuciano-Islamic connection. To back up his argument, he establishes a hierarchy between the differences that separate the other civilisations of the West. These dif- ferences seem to be ‘of lesser im- portance to Latin America and the orthodox countries of ex-USSR. They are even greater for Muslim, Confucian, Hindu and Buddhist societies’ (Huntington 1997:45). To compete with the West, countries belonging to these civilisations try to develop and promote their co- operation with non-western countries. According to Huntington, ‘the most important form that this co-operation can take is the Confuciano-Islamic connection which emerged to challenge the interests, values and power of the West’ (Huntington 1997). To alert the Western conscience about the danger of this connection, he adds: ‘almost all the western countries, without exception, are reducing their military power; this is also true for Russia under Boris Elstine. However, China, North Korea, and several Middle East countries are building their military capacity’. To lend weight to his theory, he gives several examples of countries with ‘military regimes’ which, from China to North Africa, develop the prohibited chemical and nuclear arms potential they have acquired or are capable of producing (Huntington 1997:46-47). Thus, according to Huntington, an imbalance is about to be created in the field of armament, to the advantage of ‘the Confuciano-Islamic connection’ and to the detriment of the West::
In this new form of competition in the armament sector, one side is developing its potential while the other is not maintaining the balance but limiting and preventing the accumulation of arms, and in so doing, reduces its own potential! (Huntington 1997:47-48)
While refraining from arguing in favour of the war of cultures, and pointing out that its objective is limited to developing ‘a descriptive hypothesis of what the future has in store’ (Huntington 1997), Huntington does not conceal the purpose of his analysis: ‘..It is in the West’s interest to promote greater co-operation within its own civilisation and, more particularly, between its European and North American components, to integrate into Western societies cultures of Eastern Europe and Latin America that are close to those of the West, develop and maintain co- operative relations with Russia and Japan, prevent the transformation of local conflicts between civilisations at war, limit the growth of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic States, moderate the reduction of Western military capacity in order to maintain superiority [in its favour] in Eastern and South-east Asia, exploit the differences and conflicts between Confucian and Islamic States, encourage other civilisations to show sympathy for Western values and interests, strengthen international institutions reflecting and legiti- mising Western values and interest and encourage the participation of non-Western States in these insti- tutions’ (Huntington 1997:48-49). Placed within the frame- work of this strategic vision of the post-Cold War world, from the White House and from the viewpoint of American interests erected into ‘Western values and interests’, wars decided and conducted by the United States and their allies, on behalf of the United Nations and NATO, whether in the Middle East or in ex- Yugoslavia, just like the apparently inconceivable alliance with the Taliban and other Islamist movements armed or supported by champions of the ‘Free World’, become very under- standable. In certain cases, it cor- responds to the objective of ‘limiting the military strength of Confucian and Islamic States’ to maintain ‘Western supe- riority’; in other cases, it involves exploiting ‘the differences and conflicts between’ these States. We thus understand the full meaning of the declaration by a top American official just after Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait: ‘we have the feeling that Hussein got himself exactly where we wanted him to be!’ (Julien 1990:17) Despite this explicit and cynical expression of American international policy, there are still people in the North and in the South of the Medi- terranean who are naive enough to believe them, and even call for American intervention to solve the problems of this region and other parts of the globe!
‘The
War of Cultures’:
A Xenophobic Ideology
Beyond the cynicism underlying Huntington’s analysis, it is important to focus attention on its xenophobic ideology which views plurality not as a wealth but a danger, a threat, a factor of war. It is the product of a culturalist conception based on the negation of the universality of the human being and his freedom, and on the inevitable opposition between groups reduced to the status of beings absolutely deter- mined by one or several arbitrarily selected cultural membership(s), among other factors, and elevated to the rank of unspecified sub- determinants. One would thus have ‘homo islamicus’, as opposed to other homo determined by their identity with what is referred to as Western Culture, Hindu Culture, Buddhist Culture, Confucian Culture, etc., in other words, humans fatally determined by unchanging cultural schemes, which pitch them against one another and prevent them from recognising each other as fellow creatures with the same dignity, the same rights inherent in their common humanity, the same hopes, the same concerns, the same need for meaning and preservation of the human being, the same reasons that enable them to understand one another and communicate ¾ in ways other than War ¾ beyond all the frontiers of time, space, religions, languages, cultures, etc. This negation of the universality of the human being is the foundation of all xenophobic ideologies regardless of whether they refer to the colour of the skin, sex, religion, culture or any other discriminating criteria. It is for this reason that the ‘war of cultures’ theory, which is as old as all the xenophobic prejudices, is claimed by both the New Right and the extreme right that inspire, without their knowledge, the advocates of war in the West, and by Islamists and their counterparts in the various geo- cultural spheres. This is the basis of the deep and insidious connivance between followers of the xenophobic identity positions of all countries and all cultures : they legitimise each other. In this regard, I have already had the opportunity to point out the connivance existing between the Extreme Right in France and Islamism (Ferjani 1991:35-37, Plénel 1987). This provides plausible explanation for the sympathy and support which the White House has always shown to Islamist movements, be it in Algeria, Afghanistan and wherever these movements do not directly attack American interests. Nothing can justify and legitimise the strategic vision based on ‘the clash of cultures’ which inspires US international policy, as well as the anti-West xenophobic hysteria of Islamist positions. The same applies to Islamist positions boosted by xenophobia towards Islam found in statements of the Extreme Right and the New Right just as it exists in those advocating the theory of the ‘war of cultures’. Thus, in the course of my discussions with Arab academics in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco, I realised that Hun- tington’s theory delights Islamist nationalists allergic to any universalist positions. Some of them share his views on the role he attributes to religion in people’s cultural identity as well as on the implacable nature of the anta- gonistic differences among major cultures. Like Huntington, they consider that Arabs and Muslims should understand that this is where one finds the civilisational conflict opposing them to the West, which had succeeded in dividing them with its so-called universalist ideologies. Like Huntington, they talk about the end of ideological conflicts without understanding ¾ or refusing to admit- that the theory on the ‘clash of civilisations’ is only an ideological delirium which, like all forms of ideological mystification, tends to confuse the specific interests of a group ¾ or a country ¾ with those of a larger grouping, whether it is in a society, a geo-political grouping or the ‘international community’.
In fact, the spectre of ‘the war of civilisations’ is nothing but an ideological mystification which, from the viewpoint of the specific interests of economic and financial powers linked to ‘Dow Jones’, calls for the disappearance of the ‘Soviet enemy’ and the need for a substitute enemy to frighten people and present American hegemony as an umbrella indis- pensable for the preservation of ‘civilised humanity’—identified as the one which accepts the ‘values and interests of the West’—against the threat of ‘Savages’ of the South, and more specifically, from the Islamic and Confucian worlds.
Rufin (1991, 1994) has shown the ideological nature of the positions which state that the South and Islam are increasingly taking up the position of the mortal enemy of Western civilisation which was occupied, in the past, by the Soviet Union. Comparing the oppositions between the Roman Empire and the ‘Savages’ of Antiquity, and those that we have established today between the West and countries of the South, he points out that Rufin :
Oppositions, whether they concern the antique world or the present-day situation, are ideas and not facts (1994:132).
In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, appropriately entitled ‘The North Barricades Itself’ (Le Nouevel Observateur 1992:24-25), he denounces:
‘the brutal and frightening image’ that is given today of countries of the South [and which] has but a sole objective, confessed or hidden: there is need to arouse common fear in order to cement the countries of the North which were enemies in the past. Now united in the same value system and with the same desire to contain uncontrollable masses in ways that go beyond new borders [...].
The North, which includes the United States, Europe, ex-USSR and Japan, henceforth have the same ideology, clearly formulated by Georges Bush during the Gulf war; the rest has either been rejected or is about to be.
Beyond this desire to ‘arouse a common fear to cement the unity of countries of the North’, on what else can one base the ‘frightening’ idea of a ‘Confuciano-Islamist connection’ which Huntington talks about without providing the least proof of its existence? Showing how to build a ‘brutal and frightening image’ in relation to Islam, Rufin (1992) further states:
Beyond its multiple national trends, the image of a unique and, to a large extent, abstract Islam emerges, opposing its theocratic fanaticism to the laic generosity of democracy (Le Nouvel Observateur 1992:222).
This is the image, backed up by ‘scientific’ works of some specialists on Islam ¾ considerably influenced by American Islamic specialists like Lewis ¾ which inspired and continue to inspire views relative to all the events pertaining to relations between ‘the Muslim world’ and the Western world. Viewed from the other side of the Mediterranean, these images concerning the South and Islam promote views of xenophobic identity which only give the American hegemony and western-centrist notions falling in behind, a taste of their own medicine.
Conclusion
The source of tensions and conflicts within human societies and between them, has nothing to do with the plu- rality of the world and the differences that enrich it. The source of tensions is to be found in the injustices, increa- sing inequalities, different forms of exclusion generated by selfishness and the craving for power which push human beings ¾ individually and collectively ¾ to consider that their desire to persevere can only be obtained to the detriment of others. In addition to these factors found in all human societies beyond the frontiers of time, space and cultures ¾ which constitute one of the signs of human universality—our era accumulates paradoxes which promote tensions and conflicts:
Between a North in which, through the free movement of capital and goods, most of the planet’s wealth is accumulated in societies experiencing a demographic decline, or stagnation, on the one hand, and on the other, a South where demographic explosion cancels out all the efforts deployed to fight against underdevelopment, misery, ignorance and various blights which might result in general unrest, because despair has become so unbearable;
Between an ethical view referring to the universality of human beings and their inalienable rights, and policies based on security concerns and the short-term mercantile inte- rests of a wealthy and unscrupulous minority;
Between globalisation, whose sole concern is the imperatives of competition, productivity and maximum profit, on the one hand, and on the other, attachment to the logic of the Nation-State whose sovereignty is crumbling under the dual effect of globalisation and the decline in solidarity based on close relations ¾ of locality, language, religion, blood, etc. ¾ to make up for the inability of these same Nation States to guarantee the solidarity destroyed by Globalisation. The ideologies based on fear of the other, just like the one that inspires theories on the ‘war of civilisations’ and identity views of both North and South, will only aggravate tensions generated by these paradoxes and by the selfishness and crave for power which are behind them.
If globalisation is inevitable, as is continuously repeated, it should not be done at the expense of humans but for their benefit. Otherwise, we will be faced not only with the ‘war of civilisation’ but with ‘the war of all against all’. And if the war is so inevitable, even though it is a war against all the dirty wars, it mistakes the selfishness of the most powerful – economically, militarily and politi- cally ¾ with the superior interests of humanity.
There is no reason why the margi- nalised victims of a system based on the interests of a wealthy minority should fight against each other for the benefit of those who oppress them and accumulate wealth at their expense. Whether they are Western-Judeo- Christians, Arab-Muslims, Slavo- Orthodox, Chinese-Conficiano- Buddhist, Japanese or Africans, those who take advantage of this system and pull the strings, always succeed in reaching an agreement despite their cultural differences. They use these differences only to manipulate their victims and prevent them from uniting. We should thus stop playing into their hands and unite against their policies, the forces of those who beyond the borders, aspire to a more just, freer and more united world, less divided by tensions and conflicts. This is maybe a naive ideological position But, it is better to have one that prefers love to hatred, sincerity to cynicism, equality to discrimination, solidarity to selfishness and justice to the craving for power.
Mohamed-Chérif Ferjani
Université de Lyon 2, France
Notes
The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order was published in French by Odile Jacob in 1997 under Le choc des civilisations. The article was also published by the Foreign Affairs Magazine in its Summer 1993 Issue No.3. The nuances presented by the book, and the reactions to the criticisms against its theories, do not make any changes to the substance of the basic ideas. The quotations refer to the original version of the article.
References
Ferjani Mohamed Ch., 1991, Islamisme, laïcité et droits de l’homme, Editions l’Harmattan, Edwy Plénel’s article on this subject in Le Monde of August 25, 1987.
Huntington S., 1997, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, Paris, Editions Odile Jacob.
Julien C. L., 1990, ‘Fauteurs de guerre’, Le Monde Diplomatique, October.
Le Nouvel Observateur, 1992, 6-12 February.
Plényl Edwy, 1987, in Le Monde, August 25.
Rufin J. Ch. 1994, La dictature libérale, Editions Lattès.
Rufin J. Ch., 1991, L’empire et les nouveaux barbares, Editions Lattès.
What is history but a fable agreed
upon?
Peter
Hoeg (1998:120-121)
Globalisation and Its Negative Consequences
The peculiar current form of Capitalism rechristened as ‘free market economies’ rules in the vast majority of countries as our century draws to a close. This paradigm—at the core of the trans- national liberal order — has become the current hegemonic development philosophy as well. It goes by the motto of ‘trade, not aid’, no matter how uneven the former may be.
Globalisation—the new Capitalism’s flagship—denotes the ability of international capital and trans- national corporations to switch investments across the globe. In doing so, globalisation creates wealth for the few and depresses local wages and conditions of employment for the majority of people.
Globalisation has brought about a shift in power: the Nation-State has been weakened and there is a reduction in social accountability.
This makes sovereign States row rather than steer in the process of development, i.e. if countries do not intensely participate in this paradigm set by the North, they are ‘out’. As a consequence, the poor countries’ very right to development is threatened by this unrelenting liberalisation/globa- lisation process (Hazel 1999, Tandon 1999:14-16).
Globalisation has put the fate of those many in the hands of large corpo- rations. Although the ‘corporocracy’ (or Robin Sharp’s ‘corporarchy’) very well knows the negative effects of globalisation, few of them are com- mitted to change. They tend to ignore the root causes of the social problems they see as patently as everyone else, but seldom address the negative social impact of their activities. Since they lack the openness and transparency required, they pay only lip service to change and seldom change their practices (or change them in very marginal ways) (Welford 1997:7).
Moreover—in the dealings of globa- lisation—its intricate connections are so patently disguised as to become almost invisible. Or worse, the decep- tions are so brilliantly woven into its processes that falling for those decep- tions is deemed as both fashionable and progressive (Thomas 1999:5, Bijoy 1995:15-17).
In the globalisation context, the priva- tisation advocated often ends up meaning denationalisation with glo- balisation further pursuing a removal of trade barriers, (often dependence creating) technology change, and a rise in consumerism. This, on top of being rightly singled out as addi- tionally creating and accelerating poverty, disparities, exclusion, unem- ployment, alienation, environmental degradation, exploitation, corruption, violence and conflict (Bezanson nd., Jonsson 1999:81).
It is therefore not by accident that globalisation has been called ‘the imperialism of the 1990s’ (what is different between imperialism and globalisation is just the latter’s speed of expansion).
Because economic globalisation brings about marginalisation on a massive scale and economic and political domination of a magnitude never witnessed since the days of colonia- lism, it is turning into a process of globalised poverty and wholesale plunder of the neo-colonies. The effects of globalisation are thus ter- ribly uneven and they produce big winners and losers (Ramphal nd., Bijoy 1995:15-17, Hazel 1999).
Due to these negative consequences of globalisation, communities in many Third World countries are no longer able to cope—their previously suc- cessful coping strategies diminishing daily. The immediate challenge is to bolster the same communities’ coping strategies so that they can continue to help themselves under the new set of rapidly changing circumstances (Tagwireyi 1999:81).
Even business executives espousing globalisation are aware of its negative effects. An Asian executives poll ca- rried out by the Far-Eastern Economic Review in November of 1997 (p.38) showed 71% of the business leaders interviewed across the region agreeing that the benefits of globa- lisation had not been equitably distri- buted in their respective countries. Forty-eight percent of the opinion showed that globalisation had widened income disparities in their countries. Fifty percent said that it was contributing to social tensions and 60% said their respective governments were not doing enough to help those hurt by globalisation.
More surprising yet is the IMF’s over- all view on globalisation. For them, the latter links labour, production and capital markets of economies around the world. They do accept that it leads to sharp ‘short-run’ changes in the distribution of income. They further accept that globalisation is to blame for growing inequalities in developed countries as well. For example, to them, globalisation limits the ability of union workers to bargain and makes it more difficult for governments to implement equitable policies (Finance and Development 1998:2-5).
Because they are unable to do the latter, Third World governments are simply considered incapable of assuring a minimum level of welfare for their citizens. Fitting the ideology, it then implies the need to look for alternatives in the private sector or to directly privatise services (and NGOs are occasionally a convenient form of privatisation). Only that, often, such privatisation strategies lower the quality of services for the poor and end up widening the gap between the rich and poor. The alternative being written off a priori is the need to improve State credibility, accounta- bility and responsiveness to welfare matters1.
One has to acknowledge that most governments have not adopted the right strategies. But let us not develop new ones; let us make governments adopt and adapt the right and proven pro-poor strategies providing them with a set of options, and not a single pathway. Sustainable solutions proposed need to be sound and appropriate both in the way things will be done as much as in what should be done (Jonsson 1999:81).
At this point, we need not be reminded of the hard facts documenting the negative effects of globalisation. Titbits of the evidence should suffice to close this quick, maybe cari- caturised, review of its negative consequences:
Under globalisation, the annual losses to developing countries run at an estimated US$500 billion — an amount much higher than what they receive in foreign aid.
As a consequence, developing coun- tries have had a series of years of consecutive negative financial flows; this is equivalent to at least seven years of an economic haemorrhage.
From 1960 to 1999, there was a 60% fall in the prices of commodities other than oil! This resulted in a reduction of two-thirds of the developing countries’ purchasing power (UNDP 1997).
As a result, the number of hungry people around the world keeps rising every year and poverty is becoming increasingly feminised (70% of all the poor are women). Free trade has been free for business and industry but not for women and the poor. New technologies have not manifested any intrinsic pro- poor or pro-women positive effects either, although they have such a potential (which will invariably continue favouring the already wealthy and male unless we help steer in that direction). Therefore, any genuine poverty-redressing policy is bound to be gender- oriented.
A Dearth of Workable Solutions?
There is no single universal solution in sight that will promote just the benefits of globalisation to all people: giving the same advice to everyone simply did not and will not work; this is what has been called ‘the fallacy of composition’.
A balanced and realistic value-free response to globalisation is difficult, especially if one considers the current reality of a unipolar world with a North-centred and North/trans- nationals-dominated economic order (Link-Achan 1996).
On the one hand, the trans-national corporations cannot be allowed to continue to duck and dive, invest in smoke screens, espouse gradualist solutions and attempt to derive maximum publicity from piecemeal changes. They must be persuaded, cajoled or even forced to change. On the other hand, new insights are emerging as to the appropriate mix of market and government activities needed to complement each other (Welford 1997:7).
Whatever the response, promoting the economic benefits of globalisation requires mechanisms to prevent its excesses, because there is a clear trade-off between market efficiency and the social welfare of workers and peasants.
Turning again to the IMF, they see the policy responses to counter globalisa- tion to include a mix of two elements:
(a) ‘safety net interventions’ such as targeted subsidies, cash compensa- tions, severance payments to and retraining of sacked employees, wage subsides and public works pro- grammes, and
(b) ‘fiscal policies’ (the most direct tool for redistribution) such as levying highly progressive taxes, distributing shares in privatised enterprises, and increasing government spending on health and education (i.e. reallocating spending to the social sector), as well as higher minimum wages, good unemployment benefits, job protec- tion, keeping inflation low, subsi- dising lower-quality commodities and giving better access to credit, justice and public services (Finance and Development 1998:35).
How this is to be achieved, and whether the IMF plans to go for broke for these changes remains unsaid in the source cited here.
The truth is that, in the real world, the more radical visions or sustainable solutions calling for deeper social and environmental change have been diluted or silenced further with the onslaught of globalisation. In a mix of insensibility and unresponsiveness, the prevailing attitude has been to selectively reject the main features of any criticism (depending on the bias) and to keep important issues from crystallising into critical conscious- ness. This is what has been called ‘the exclusion fallacy’ (‘… if we have not considered it, it is not important…’).
On the international scene of (mercenary) technical development assistance, for example, issues of substance are turned into technical matters by paid consultants while more structural underlying issues are obfuscated. Or, similarly, aid agencies are too often unwilling to respond politically to political situations (Tandon 1999:14-16).
The Equity/Equality Approach
Equal relations between unequals reinforce inequality! (Tandon 1999:14-16)
To illustrate this, think for a while that equity under globalisation is a bit like The fight of the Mongoose and the Snake:
Both are of nearly the same strength, but invariably the mongoose wins.
It is more resourceful and it organises its strategy better to strike. The First World is like the mongoose: the Third World is like the snake. The lesson of this fable is that an asymmetry in the use of market power aggravates inequality. The affluent always end up having more political clout (and more wealth). Therefore, promoting self- interest (the soul of the market) is sim- ply not enough. We have to put some heart into it; add solidarity to self- interest. (A modicum of anti-greed policing actions may help as well…).
To achieve greater equity, a set of ‘equity modifiers’ have been pro- posed. These include: targeting inter- ventions (geographically and/or to vulnerable groups or individuals), land reform, educational/water sup- ply and sanitation/health/nutrition and family planning interventions, employment creation, grassroots par- ticipation in setting priorities, deve- lopment of non-farm rural economy, aid to rural women and taxation of polluters and degraders (Hazel 1999).
As regards gender, the latter has reached a unique status in the trans- national liberal order. Gender equality is (finally) considered compatible with the basic tenets of the neo-liberal credo. But economic equality, not (Maxwell nd.).
Remedies proposed to specifically increase equity and access to basic services therefore include financial and non-financial approaches. To recap and add, among the former are the targeting of sbsidies (i.e. selective subsidies for goods and services disproportionately consumed by the poor), prepayment plans (e.g. community-based health insurance), exemptions and the selective dropping of some fees (e.g. health and education). Among the latter are greater emphasis on decentralisation, the use of social marketing2, preven- tion and improvement of the quality of care (in health), as well as on a fairer urban/rural distribution of resources.
Surprising as it may seem, IMF thinks that more equity need not hamper growth; it could indeed reinforce growth! (sic) The Fund actually sees a strong negative link between high unequal distribution of assets and subsequent growth rates. It sees equity only in terms of ‘equality of opportunities’, though not necessarily ‘equality of outcomes’. In that sense, they agree that the poor need to increase their human capital. Equity, to them, is crucial to the political viability of globalisation…(sic). Therefore, decentralising and changing the composition of public expenditure is to them a must. For instance, expenditures on health have to increase, they say, but to be equi- table, they have to be concentrated on preventive activities in rural areas and should be targeted to the lower income quintile3 (Finance and Development 1998:2-5).
Regardless of whether IMF follows up with concrete actions on what they philosophise, we need not apologise to act with a more resolute equity bias beyond lip service since such a bias is an important corrective to the other more dominant inequitable value biases out there in the heartless market place. One of them, for sure, is basing decisions on interventions on cost-benefit analyses only; cost-benefit analyses are understandable to economists and policy-makers, but they are grounded in a reality different from what most of us experience. Economists make decisions guided by what is ultimately measurable if convertible into monetary value only).
Is this more resolute equity bias a radical proposition?. Is it necessary? Absolutely. Is it impossible? Possible. Is it likely? Not very likely, based on my latest dispassionate reality check. But what, then, are the alternatives and could they do the job on time? (World Watch 1999:5).
The Human Rights Approach
A human rights framework is reflected in the emerging UN response to fostering development in the new millennium.
Globalisation may be inevitable, but what it looks like is not — there are forces that can shape it, and human rights must be one of those forces (SCN News 1999:12-14).
As someone said, human rights can set limits to the sways of the market (SCN News 1999:11).
To restate the dogma of Human Rights, they are indivisible; they do not apply some yes and some no, some today and some tomorrow, some to us and some to them, some to the rich and some to the poor, some to women and some to men. These obligations are universal for their implementation. We are therefore compelled to ope- rationalise civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights in our daily work…
We have to be on the lookout, though. There is still much righteousness and hypocrisy in this field. One can easily lose faith in those who preach human rights and have little to offer.
Actually, with globalisation, ‘Might is Right’ has come back with a vengeance. And in a defeatist stance, we have so far accepted this fact and bowed to the forces we think we cannot effectively oppose (President Mahatir Mohamad 1998).
Making the human rights approach concrete and giving it substance is a political task. Enforcing them and holding governments accountable for their human rights record can be achieved only through political ac- tion. Soft approaches will not do (SCN News 1999:16).
Steps in the right direction, at this time, will include establishing National Human Rights Committees and setting concrete examples of rights- based programming. But bolder steps will have to follow.
Furthermore, we have to fight the indifference of our youth to the present human rights situation. Our young and upcoming colleagues also remain largely indifferent to the overwhelming negative effects globalisation is having in the world [It is during our youth — when we have faith in and fight for the ultimate answer — that we have to interest the upcoming generation in globali- sation. Later, we cave in and accept that we are always going to have to live with the big questions while leaving the responses to undefined others]. We must therefore enrol the youth before they resign themselves to the fact that all they can do is to pose the same unanswerable questions over and over again (even if in new ways), without sticking their own necks out to seek the right answers (Hoeg 1998:120-121).
Our youth seems to be more interested in the information superhighway. As if Marshall Mc Luhan’s predictions were right, in terms of action orientation, the Internet has so far been more part of the problem than of the solution. There is a valid growing lament that wisdom, imagination and virtue are lost when messages double, information halves, knowledge quarters, and often deceiving noise without origin, quality and purpose is everywhere. We have to overcome this downward spiral by using the same medium to give more appropriate direction and guidance on options to counter globalisation and foster human rights more aggressively.
Our endeavours to achieve the latter two in the new millennium will succeed if and when the youth assumes more central functions in the process of intellectual rejuvenation (a role they are now not taking up), and women (whose gender roles are being explicitly suppressed) also move more to the centre stage (CODESRIA Bulletin Nos.1 & 2, 1999:56-60).
In sum, an effective challenge to globalisation and its negative effects on human rights is possible, but this demands the same kind of intellectual commitment and vigour that characterised the anti-colonial or independence struggles.
Questions about the relevance, accountability and utility of social sciences in this process need to be explored. Are they confronting the real problems? Are the problems of globalisation and the violation of human rights being made focal points of the social sciences-based analyses and actions? Western intellectuals have simply abandoned their co- mmitment to challenging the exploi- tation and oppression of the poor, which is persistently hightened by globalisation. Concerted campaigns and struggles against poverty, ty- ranny any exploitation will form the only sustainable basis of the inte- llectual renaissance of our youth and of ourselves.
Bolder Steps are Needed
When we talk about Sustainable Development, we are talking about what we should try to become today and in the future and what that compels us to do now. Taking a mini- malist stand towards globalisation will do no harm, but neither will it do much good. Inertia in history has worked and will always work against the more visionary and radical changes deemed necessary when the same fall outside the ruling paradigm (Hoeg 1998:120-121).
Development co-operation must thus become more political, because only structural reforms will deliver sustainable development. In many aid-receiving countries, conventional politics simply is increasingly losing its primacy over commerce and industry (all too frequently, we see the failure of elections as an instrument of political renewal… As somebody said, the problem with political jokes is that they get elected). Therefore, new, bolder approaches are needed. Solutions must be geared towards controlling what fuels the problem at its roots.
The solutions to the consequences of globalisation on the health and nutrition sector, for example, cannot be medicalised any longer. Technical assistance focused on health/nutrition matters only is not enough to uproot the structural inequities underlying pervasive and unrelenting ill-health and malnutrition in the world.
But the inertia is so great and our collective virtual view of reality so distorted and entrenched, partly due to globalisation, that the likelihood of our changing that reality remains dim. Neither greater individual respon- sibility nor containment strategies will do. A solution will somehow have to be imposed on us by some powerful or strategic force, either by fate or by design and it had better be soon.
In short, we need to give a larger intellectual and political scope to our discussions on globalisation. In doing so, we have to manage to develop a political programme of more uni- versal appeal. We need to set up the framework that will connect all the different social actors to come up with a focused common agenda.
More than ever before, we need an overt political intervention, simply because economic violence is best counteracted by political antibodies, and what the people’s movements around the world want is simply ‘more’ from life, from history and from us.
When economics has ceased to strengthen social bonds and its prescriptions are actually further pauperising millions, it is time to start thinking in political terms again. This is one of my cherished iron laws.
Three Caveats
(1) As hinted above, intellectual and cultural imperialism now penetrates our minds by remote control via satellite links and the information superhighway and poses great danger to the production and development of local knowledge. But this is not a fatalistic statement. While not denying that the giant tentacles of globalisation reach into every corner of the world, this should not be equated with omni- potence.
(2) Stereotyping the object of criticism (globalisation) might emotionalise the issue rather than objectively analysing and diagnosing it. We have to give up our quick prescriptive impulses (saying what should have been done) and become more empirico-analytical (describing and dialectically inter- preting what is actually happening) (CODESRIA Bulletin nos.1&2, 1999:56-60).
(3) One can set morally desirable goals so high (or set goals without following them with sincere, workable policies) that they remain out of all realistic reach and lose all power to determine the direction of action. Even rules can be set or imposed more as a source of comfort than of good choice (Nuscheler 1998:5).
Conclusion
As you finish this, make no mistake, these seemingly abstract issues about which we write papers are matters determining the lives of millions of people. We all know that, as Benja- min’s law says, when all is said and done, a lot more is said than done. It is therefore not enough to bring these issues in the spotlight; as someone else said, we need to make more light!
The facts discussed here are more than enough to allow us to go and negotiate (or struggle) for new more radical equitable/pro-poor/pro-women/ human rights-based strategies on the highest of moral grounds.
We need to awaken the ‘investigative reporter’ in us to constantly go after the human story behind the statistic. After all, journalism is the rough draft of history — and we want to be counted in shaping it. Those whose interests we claim to serve also expect it from us.
Claudio Schuftan MD
Hanoi
Notes
1. After all, the extraordinary and more equitable growth of Vietnam and China contradicts the view that the control of economy and market by the State is inimical to growth.
2. Social marketing — one of the sweetheart companions of globalisation attempting to give it a human face — focuses on high- powered ‘Madison Ave-type’ messages and communication strategies that pursue behaviour modification and not informed choices. It is quite obvious that we should rather be trying to better understand what motivates people to change and why, and then letting them decide by themselves what steps to take to that effect.
3. Beware that valid arguments have been raised against ‘targetry’: Targeting misrepresents complex realities, involves big cost in monitoring, distorts policy and destroys political momentum for structural changes (Maxwell, WHO Bulletin 2000).
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Socio-Historical Context:
The Publication of a special issue of the CODESRIA Bulletin on Africanity could not have come at a better time for a number of reasons. Repeated publication of solely editorial pronouncements had already generated great concern among African scholars, as shown by Zeleza’s unpublished letter to the Former Executive Secretary of CODESRIA and its ramifications in Internet. Privileged editorial declarations had truly become an intellectual hindrance and threatened to degenerate into a self-satisfied monologue. Therefore, according space to a variety of representations on the question of Africanity was a felicitous and facilitative event. It gave those concerned an opportunity to find out if there were still any real issues to be addressed, apart from personal fantasies or unnecessary mystifi- cation. Judging by the tenor of the general discussion in the Bulletin, it is apparent that Africanity is not a controversial issue in the philoso- phical sense but simply a histo- rically-determined political and social construct. It is an assertion of an independent identity under the present determinate conditions.
A cursory glance would show that its resurgence among radical African scholars is traceable to three important events in contemporary African history. These are (a) the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the World Bank (b) the intellectual negation of African Studies and (c) the demise of Apartheid in South Africa. These events are not related to one another but their impact on the consciousness of African scholars, particularly in the social sciences, was the same. Whereas in the 1980s the World Bank Programmes in Africa and African Studies ‘made in USA’ came to be seen as imposition from outside, continued white domination in post-Apartheid South Africa in the 1990s is perceived as a denial of Africanity. The latter is particularly true of those African academics who came from outside and had no first-hand experience of white- settler societies and mistook majority-rule for ‘independence’, as is known elsewhere in Africa. Mahmood Mamdani’s vicissitudes at the University of Cape Town and Kwesi Prah’s preoccupation with Africanity in the same environment testify to this.
For testimony of Africanist revulsion against the intellectual and practical imposition of the World Bank, refe- rence could be made to the startling representations of ECA in 1989 in a document entitled ‘African Alter- native Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio- Economic Recovery and Transfor- mation’. This created a great stir within the Bretton Woods institutions, as nobody had ever imagined that representatives of African client-States could be so defiant in their rejection of what they saw as the excesses of the West. The second example of an Africanist challenge to the economic presumptions of the World Bank came from a research group of about 20 African economists whose primary intention was to stake their intellectual claim against the World Bank and its mischief in Africa. This is clearly reflected in the title of their final product: Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment, edited by Thandika Mkandwire and Charles Soludo (1999). As far as African Studies is con- cerned, reference has already been made in my contribution in the Bulletin to Mamdani’s authentic representa- tion, ‘A Glimpse at African Studies made in USA’ (1990) and to the final requiem for a gringo edited by William Martin and Martin West, entitled Out of One, Many Africas (1999).
Authenticity and Historical Conjuncture
The representations cited above are not random impulses. They are a culmination of political forces which have been at work over the last 20 years. In other words, Africanity is an expression of a common will. It is a historically-determined rebellion against domination by others. There is nothing new about it, except the historical conjuncture. Since the era of white colonialism, Africans have always referred to themselves as Africans in contradistinction to their foreign oppressors and exploiters. At no stage did this imply a desire to oppress others: the underlying senti- ment has always been self-liberation. At the present historical juncture, what has made Africanity appear otherwise is the political insecurity of Southern African whites who for so long had treated the Africans as the ‘other’. Now that the chickens have come to roost, they want the Africans to think of themselves as something other than what they think they are. This is a thoroughly perverse reaction. Properly understood, the problem is not Africanity but rather the ‘otherness’ on which the whites thrived and still do, as a socio- economic category. Whereas Southern African whites and their kith and kin overseas might genuinely believe that events such as land occupation in Zimbabwe are a transposition of ‘otherness’ by Africans, in fact, they are a mark of their failure to adjust under changed conditions wherein pre-existing relations of social domination are being challenged. If Southern African whites, like Bradley’s Iceman, are impelled to grab everything and, in pursuit of their avarice, are predisposed to treat the other with absolute callousness, then they can only succeed in confirming their historically-determined ‘other- ness’. This is exemplified by the white interviewee from Johannesburg who, after nearly two years of majority-rule in South Africa, insisted that, to her, ‘South Africa is a South Africa of swimming pools and picnics’. This made Mandela’s frequent declaration, ‘There shall not be any trains of gravy any longer’, sound like a voice crying in the wilderness.
This is not a philosophical or technical question, as some apologists have tried to make us believe. It is a straightforward political and social issue determined by the march of times. It has nothing to do with race either, it is a social-construct. Fabien Boulaga presents the matter in its true perspective when he states: ‘History shows that race is not a logical or scientific problem, but a political problem in search of an absolute, metaphysical justification. Who should command and who should obey? In the name of what?’ (CODESRIA Bulletin, 1, 2000). But then our philosopher detracts from this insight by giving the impression that both the subjects and the objects of racism are guilty of the same crime. Rejecting racial subordination or being treated as the other cannot be construed as the reverse side of the same coin. Rather, it is a negation of a prevailing socio-construct and an affirmation of what is denied or is believed to be denied. This can be achieved only by proffering new self-identities. Africanity and the proclaimed ‘African Renaissance’ feature very strongly in this search for a ‘second independence’. In the African context there is no evidence that these are aimed at debasing others – expropriating t