54. Africa, between decline and progress

PANEL, “AFRICA, BETWEEN DARKNESS AND PROGRESS: CAUSES AND EFFECTS” Eugenio Nkogo Ondó Aware of the contradiction or opposition that has existed both in the linguistic-semantic and logical-ontological order between these two concepts: dusk and progress, as determinants that categorize, define or describe the states, or the essences of natural and human phenomena, we have deemed it appropriate to verify this opposition on the African continent. To do so, it is necessary to take a quick look at its history before and after colonization. Without being historians but simple observers of human reality, perhaps followers or supporters of the lines drawn by the philosophy of history, we will try to clear up the unknowns or doubts that may arise in this regard and question its causes and effects. Its old geopolitical map, in which the imperial system, accompanied by large or small kingdoms, stood out, will be progressively crumbled and even unknown and obscured by the impetuous penetration of colonialism in all its corners. Moreover, this map will be definitively replaced by the one that will emerge from the Berlin Conference (1884-1885), universally recognized as the “Conference for the distribution of Africa”. From then on, it will be divided into as many parts as those countries that discussed or participated in the said “partition”. Thus, we see that this immense land, which anthropological research has given the universal title of Cradle of Humanity on which Islam landed in the 7th and 8th centuries, and Christianity in the 15th century, will be composed of regions with different denominations, such as: French, English, German, Portuguese, Spanish Africa. After Germany lost its African and Asian colonies, although it had left indelible traces in many of them, it was nevertheless excluded from the sacred “civilizing” mission that the other European countries had to fulfill. With this exclusion, the African geopolitical map in force up to the present day was definitively configured, which, as we have already said, emerged at the end of the 19th century. If acculturation and inculturation meant the supplanting of local or traditional African cultures and their replacement by those imposed by the harsh colonial process, this implied the beginning of their decadence or decline. Hence, the yearning for freedom that will drive its selected minorities and its masses to rebel against everything that the decline entailed, in order to try to open the road that would lead them to progress, a road full of obstacles that would hinder the easy access to the desired goal. In this situation, Pan-Africanism, the first philosophical and ideological movement in the universal history of contemporary thought that took the decision to confront the great enemy, imperialism, adopted a series of strategies to implement its ideal of the struggle for the total liberation of Africa and the oppressed world. Although the expression “Pan-African Conference” was born in Chicago in 1893, its best and greatest precedent goes back to the struggle for the liberation of its people undertaken by the Mandingo Empire, in the middle of the Middle Ages, when its founder, Emperor Soundjata Keita and his army, obtaining a crushing victory over their enemies, Muslim slavers, solemnly declared La Charte du Manden, which was later recognized as the First Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While Pan-Africanism revived this project of Liberation, Imperialism went into action with its counter-offensive to implement everything it had agreed to in La Charte de l’Impérialisme ou “La Charte de la Servitude”. Because of this, it is necessary to analyze both its structure and the phases of its implementation, which led to the outbreak of the Third World War, whose terrible or devastating consequences, Africa and the entire so-called Third World suffer to this day. From here, and from this perspective, I proceed to a detailed study of the theoretical and practical models of the struggle for African liberation and the ways of access to an integral development, a difficult task to carry out because its protagonists had to face the double neo-colonialism: the external and the internal. The close collaboration, or rather the imposition of the orders of the former on the latter, will forcibly drag the African countries to a real devastation, in which, from the coups of imperialist States, to raise their lackeys or servants to absolute power, passing through the postponement and persecution of nationalists, condemned to severe sanctions depending on their degree of insubordination, up to their assassinations. Immersed in this extreme, turbulent situation, it is imperative to ask: where are you going Africa? To address this question, African intellectuals published, in 2010, a collective work entitled 50 ans après, quelle indépendande pour l’Afrique, in which my name appears as one of the co-authors. The answer is to be found in each of its countries and in the corresponding frameworks in which they are framed. After the development models undertaken by Kwame Nkurmah and Jomo Kenyatta and their followers in West and East Africa, the second stage of the struggle for African liberation and autonomous development is taking shape, in which the CAE (East African Community) project and the new Alliance of SAHEL countries, among others, are worthy of note. This calls for an objective and rigorous rethinking of the current African reality and its projection into the future. Its clarification necessarily leads to this conclusion: Africa Must Unite, Africa must unite to be the sole protagonist of the exploitation of its natural resources, in order to devote its profits to the well-being and integral development of its peoples and to speak with a single voice in the concert of nations.