The African renaissance: Lessons from a predecessor

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THE WIDESPREAD INTEREST and intense private and public discussions generated by the ideal of a so-called `African renaissance' seems to justify the wisdom of the well known claim that `nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come'. It is of course always a risk to submit such a popular idea to the scrutiny of intellectuals in general, and philosophers in particular. Jameson Maluleke (1998), a journalist at The Citizen, in fact warns against this in an article about the African renaissance. He writes: Surely we can't afford to philosophise while our democracy is still learning to walk. Leave that to Socrates and his descendants. Our duty is to put our country on a firm democratic footing, to shape a paradise on the tip of Africa. As the Athenians rightfully discovered with Socrates, philosophers can indeed be dangerous people. They have the nasty habit of asking and remorselessly pursuing critical questions about all ideas--a practice which more often than not results in the undermining, if not downright ridiculisation, of these ideas. Take for instance the idea of the African renaissance. An able philosopher might enjoy him- or herself by immediately pointing out the irony of utilising so thoroughly a European concept for an event that would hopefully express the coming to fruition of Africanness. The renaissance, one could argue, was above all the historical process which constituted the current European identity and culture, for better or for worse. Does the idea of an African renaissance not demonstrate the irredeemable dependency of African thinking on the very idea of a process that revitalised and eventually constituted modern Europe--exactly at a moment when serious efforts are made to revitalise this continent's belief in itself? Another uncomfortable question that an able philosopher--that dangerous breed in the lineage of Socrates--might ask, is about the assumption that ideas (in this case the idea of an African renaissance) can influence--even change--reality. Does this not reveal a kind of Hegelianism that has, more than a century ago, already been thoroughly discredited by Karl Marx--Marx who so persuasively argued that is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life? (Marx and Engels, 1970:47). Can African reality really be changed by new ideas? Are our ideas not rather a reflection of our life processes, and are those processes in themselves not much rather the outcome of the contradictions of social reality which can only be transcended by revolutionary action? Let me immediately try and redeem myself. Although I would be honoured if anyone regards me as part of the Socratic lineage, I am not the philosopher who is intent on labouring these questions in this article--without thereby denying their undoubted importance. I certainly would also not appreciate a cup of hemlock for posing as a supporter of Marx on the last issue. I happen to be someone who is under the impression of the importance of a social context for both the generation and understanding of ideas, but I am someone who believes that ideas can influence and, yes, even change reality and society. As regards the issue of the relevance of the renaissance idea for the African context: it is my considered opinion to disagree with the way in which that question has been put in an earlier paragraph. I find it generally not very helpful to juxtapose, even oppose, `Africa' and `Europe' in the way it so often is presented in the media and even in academia. The dichotomy between `Africa' and `Europe' seems to me like a perpetuation of modernist dichotomies such as `subject/object', `reason/myth' and `language/reality'. Although I do not doubt the heuristic value of some of these distinctions for certain intellectual purposes, and without posing as a propagandist for so-called `postmodernism', I nevertheless am convinced that, on this score, postmodernism is correct. In the world in which we currently live--the global village where the alleged `different civilizations' or alleged different patterns of thinking have been meeting and interacting for centuries, where our mutual exposure and contact are without precedent, and where the mass media are consistently equalising our life worlds (although certainly not our life experiences)--it is a gross over-simplification to talk of `Africa' as something inherently different from the rest of the world, and to therefore engage in the bashing of `Eurocentrism' whenever we try to find a revised and morally more justifiable identity for ourselves as (South) Africans. …