Post-Marxism in an African Context: The Usability of Antonio Gramsci

Abstract

�� n 1984, Presence Africaine featured a paper by Ayi Kwei Armah that amounted to an actual manifesto in its resolute indictment of a Marxist approach to African culture: “Masks and Marx: The Marxist Ethos visa-vis African Revolutionary Theory and Praxis.” As “an African, an artist, a scholar,” Armah took a peremptory and even resentful stance: “Marxism, in its approach to non-Western societies and values, is decidedly colonialist, Western, Eurocentric and hegemonist”; “Marxism [. . .] is demonstrably racist—racist in a prejudiced, determined, dishonest and unintelligent fashion” (35-65). It should be stressed that Armah’s attack, quite consistently given the premises of his argument, hit at the historicist underpinnings of Marxism, denouncing the inadequacy of a “linear philosophy of history” brought to bear on non-Western societies, and consequently on Africa. Singularly paralleling the conceptual framework of his novel Two Thousand Seasons, Armah briFskly concluded that “it needs to be pointed out that African history is the history of the African people, not the history of Europeans or Arabs in Africa.” Five years later, in his book The Theory of African Literature, Chidi Amuta voiced a vigorous rebuttal of Armah’s paradigm. “Armah is flogging a dead horse,” he wrote, and went on insisting on the necessity “to transcend the limitations of orthodox Marxism,” in that “historical materialism transcends Marxism and embodies a certain theoretical elasticity that could salvage Marxism from the present crisis and imminent obsolescence” (59-60). Armah’s and Amuti’s views, both controversial and objectionable,