Chielozona Eze - Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa

Preface

I was an undergraduate student of comparative literature in Bayreuth, Germany, when Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 and South Africas general election in 1994, and when he instituted the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Like millions of other people, I had the feeling that something of far-reaching global political and moral relevance was taking place in South Africa. Much later, as I read Mandelas biography, Long Walk to Freedom , and Desmond Tutus No Future without Forgiveness , I was drawn to the social and moral reach of the ideas that these leaders projected. They provided alternatives to much of what I had understood about the African political and moral landscape. I knew that they were transforming (South) Africa, but I did not have the language to articulate my thoughts about this transformation. In 2004, when I was part of the UCLA Global Fellowship program as a postdoctoral fellow, I began to think seriously about the theoretical import of these two South African moral leaders and the historical relevance of South Africas peaceful political transition. This transition and the moral premises of the TRC meant something larger than ordinary historical events. They were a metaphor, a tool that can be used to explain the world in ways that could inform relationships between peoples in Africa and all over the world.

I had previously embraced most Western theories of life and society largely as an intellectual exercise. Very few of them could help me interpret my experience as a citizen of a postcolonial African country and of the world. Marxist theory did not help me understand my experience growing up under various military regimes. It never adequately explained any of Africas structural and foundational problems. Nor were postcolonial theories of much help. However, shaped by these theories, I grew up eager to defend Africa against the West, but I never learned how to be in solidarity with other Africans who are not of my ethnicity. For the most part, solidarity had been understood as being collectively against the imperialists because of our common experience as colonized and black peoples in a world in which whiteness has been cast as the norm and blackness as its opposite. The conventional postcolonial theories that emphasized difference therefore did not speak to my experience as an African who had encountered the humanity of white people outside the historical Manichaean paradigm. To be sure, postcolonial theory was a means of intellectual resistance to the technologies of oppression and exploitation instituted by colonialism. Its pitfall, though, lay in its reification of identity and difference even while it justifiably held Western nations accountable for the miseries in their former colonies. Theories of hybridity, mtissage , and so forth that were meant to counter the absoluteness of the colonial paradigm fell short of suggesting robust ethical ways to live in a world of increasing diversity, or ways to find a solidarity that transcends the historical divide between the colonizer and the colonized and between various formerly colonized peoples. Nelson Mandelas and Desmond Tutus South Africa provided the missing link.

That said, I am not yet ready to join those who have announced the imminent death of postcolonial theory. It does, however, appear that postcolonialism, at least in the African context, has devolved into an accusatory binarism that ultimately works against Africa. Those of us who grew up in independent African states and are witnesses to the corruption of their leaders that has led to their countries dysfunction feel the pain of dishonesty when we blame the West for our conditions. Postcolonialism has not given us a tool with which we can account for the poverty, homophobia, genocide, xenophobia, sexism, and bigotry that wreak havoc in the lives of the people we know. Thus, the ultimate questions that have occupied my intellectual attention are these: How can we respond to the suffering and pain all around us? How can we explain and affect the system that controls our lives in such a way that we affirm the lives of people we know and are open to others we do not know? How can we affect human flourishing in Africa?