Understanding power: Africa’s only hope

Reason Wafawarova

22 July 2010

THE ability of the dominant imperial West to socially manufacture or markedly influence the state of consciousness and conduct in Africans and other non-white communities — to perpetuate white supremacy, is both the source and product of the power relations and inequalities which inhere between races.

The only time white social manufacturing of black consciousness and behaviour will ever come to an end is when the power differentials which make this process possible are equalised or reversed, and that only by black empowerment.

However, the African cannot come to this point unless and until that day is realised when Africa will come to understand the nature of power, and only then will this necessary equation or reversal of power relations begin.

There is a compelling need to understand the social origins and applications of power, and Africans must come to realise that they are as capable of acquiring power and disposing it as are their counterparts from any other race.

We must come to a point as Africans when we can consciously and deliberately choose to acquire and dispose power in our own interests, and in the defence of our own liberty. We need a very pragmatic understanding and application of power as was outlined once by Foucault.

He wrote: "Power is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are attributed not to ‘appropriation’, but to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functions; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess; that one should take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a transaction or the conquest of a territory."

In short, Foucault says power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the privilege, acquired or preserved; of the dominant elite. Power is the overall effect of its total strategic positions.

There is need for Africans to begin neutralising the traditional strategies and tactics used by dominant imperial Western elites to order, re-order and disorder African consciousness and behaviour. We have to unapologetically and resolutely embark on African-centred strategic and tactical counterattacks.

There is a metaphysical preparation needed for Africa before we can undertake such countermoves.

Firstly, we need a thorough decolonising of African consciousness and behaviour, and secondly we have to come up with a comprehensive method of organising the African community. We must come to a point when we can count on African capability in creating a collective intelligence and adaptational talent, which in turn will make it possible for Africa to overthrow white supremacy.

We may want to look at specific actions that may need to be embarked on if Africa is to win the power games that disadvantage our people today.

The Reintegration of African History

Many writers have pointed to the need for Africans to rediscover, re-examine and reintegrate the culture and history of our continent. The approaches to African history must in and of themselves conjointly become the vehicles, which facilitate the collective and co-operative action of African peoples in the pursuit of their total liberation.

It is only an appropriate reclamation of African history and culture that will provide Africans with a realistic and supportive vision of reality; with self-knowledge, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-acceptance and self-control.

We need a leadership in Africa that seeks to form empowering affectionate relationships between our people and other races — a leadership that hunts after ability for Africa to engage in proactive, self-interested productive activity. We need a self-enhancing sense of purpose and existential meaningfulness. We have to terminate this assimilationist African leadership that believes that the role of Africa in world economics is to provide natural resources and cheap labour.

The scepticism by Westerners and their black lapdogs over the capacity of black-owned companies to successfully mine Zimbabwe’s diamonds is simply a sad reflection of the African portrait of an unthinking labourer dependant on the ingenuity of his white master.

Even Finance Minister Tendai Biti seems to be clearly caught up in the racially-created illusion that says white owned ACR will add value to the perception of Zimbabwe’s diamonds than black owned Mbada and Canadile.

When Africa gets to that point of an appropriate understanding of its own history and culture, we then can be assured of an honest and accurate appraisal of our own strengths and needs, as well as those of our counterparts from other races, especially those of Europeans.

It is only this kind of understanding that will provide Africa with the strategic and tactical means to liberate itself from white supremacy.

Managing African Resources

The vulnerability of the economic organisation of the African community to the stresses placed on it by the dominant white supremacist establishment is principally caused by the repression of African centred consciousness and identity.

We have a situation where African economic institutions and resources are primarily owned, controlled, and exploited by aliens. We are even made to believe that this cruel reality is part of world freedoms and a civilised realisation of property rights. This is purely why Zimbabwe’s reclamation of its colonially stolen farmlands is regarded by Westerners as a violation of property rights.

Post independent Africa is still to achieve the ability to finance and construct the necessary social institutions to educate, train and generally socialise its constituents and provide them with the personal and social competencies which together could successfully mediate, resist, and finally overcome the hegemonic intentions of white supremacy.

It is important for Africans to foster a spirit of African nationalism and in that regard control their internal markets and resources. We need to utilise the resulting proceeds to remediate and finance our entry into international markets.

For this to happen, it is important for Africa to simultaneously pursue control of markets with the rapid and effective African centred education and socialisation of all its constituents, young and old. The scepticism from some Zimbabweans over the viability of the recently proposed indigenisation policies is basically a result of a lack of confidence in African ability, and that in itself is a result of a lack of education and socialisation in self-belief.

We need to move as a people towards relative economic independence, towards power and prestige; towards African centred cultural organisation and identity, high levels of personal and social competence. This is the only way we can engage on the forward march towards total liberation.

Neutralising Western induced pressures

The coping mechanism of African people is stressed by the effects of institutionalised racism and an international relations system driven by inherent injustices. The situation is not made any better by the amplification of an orientation towards dependency and the donor syndrome.

Africa is home to the multi-billion donor run charity industry and that is not in any way a measure of blessing. It is in fact Africa’s greatest curse after slavery and colonialism. Dependency is as crippling and ruinous as any known form of subjugation and oppression.

When a continent emerging from hundreds of years of colonial oppression has a virtual absence of a robust and independent movement that seeks to move away from subjugation, what you end up with is such vulnerability as we have seen through the exploitation we have seen Africa suffer at the hands of predatory aliens hailing from Europe.

The injurious effects of the oppression we have suffered at the hands of whites can only be attenuated if Africa unites in creating an effective economic-cultural bloc that will advance the interests of black people across the world in a way that will see them treated as equals with all other people of this world. We must come to a point where we view oppression-related problems as challenges to be positively solved, and as a heroic opportunity rather than an overpowering and onerous burden.

Africa can today overthrow the weight of white supremacy if we choose to engage in a thorough, honest and revolutionary self-critical analysis of the cognitive, emotional, social, informational, linguistic, economical, physical and environmental barriers which help to maintain the political-economic subordination of our people.

It is within the power of the African community to assert our will to total power and independence.

Reversing Reactionary Forces

We have a worrying problem with the African body politic. Our political leadership is littered with reactionary characters operating entirely on Eurocentric values and dictates, and even openly proud of it all.

We need the African body politic to immerse itself in the centre of an African centred political and cultural force field. This is the only way we can repel the sustained hold on our political leadership by white supremacy.

It is time we ensure that we invest in the African body politic the natural African-centred knowledge, consciousness and identity. We have to immediately free the African body politic from its Eurocentric prison, and our political leadership must be denuded of its Western markings, sensibilities, tastes and appetites. We have a duty to restore our mental and physical mechanisms so that we can train ourselves to do and to produce for self.

The energy of the African political being must be redirected from its exhaustive expenditure in the construction and maintenance of reactionary psychological defences and damage control devices to the construction and maintenance of an African centred problem-solving consciousness and identity driven by an indomitable sense of mission.

The enormous energy hosted by the African body politic must be directed toward growth and the creation of opportunities for Africa’s positive expression. This idea of Africans being manipulated by Eurocentric donors in a way that results in our people pursuing the values and interests of aliens must just be discredited and abandoned.

It does not make any sense for a Zimbabwean to be at the forefront of blocking the trading of the country’s diamonds just because they are paid by white supremacists to spend their energy doing so. Neither does it make any sense that the Zimbabwean journalists at The Standard newspaper and its sister papers, the Zimbabwe Independent and NewsDay are paid for fronting the voice of white supremacists of Rhodesian background.

Coping Strategies and Tactics

The consumerist culture of the African today is driven by eurocentrically-induced lacks, deprivations, needs, anxieties and appetites. Our people have an addictive and obsessive pursuit for compulsive consumption of Western vanity and this kills positive African-centred practices, pursuits and pleasures.

We must begin to teach our young people power relations. Our liberation can only come from a deep study and teaching of power-knowledge relations; a teaching of imaginative, creative, strategic and tactical organisation as the keys to power and self-defence.

It takes action to change the status quo of the African. The kind of action that is needed is based on an ability to discern the real issues and causes of the trials and tribulations from within and from outside the African body politic.

Our economists, politicians, business people and the generality of our people must develop an ability to solve African problems based on sound knowledge; on objective appraisals of its situation, and on its intuitive and well-developed ability to undertake conscious, rational, and constructive course of action.

Control of labelling and treatment processes

The interests of oppressors lie in changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them. The more the oppressed can be led to adapt to the ways of the oppressor; the more easily they can be dominated. Oppressors produce a consciousness in the oppressed not only by manipulating their ecological and sociological lifestyles and possibilities but also by naming the world in which both they and the oppressed exist. To name, to label, is to bring into consciousness and therefore to transform consciousness. This is why the Westerner will use every meddling tactic imaginable to dictate the lifestyles of people in other countries.

This the only way the oppressor can control the lives of these people. The Westerner wants to name and label for the African what human rights are, what democracy is, what property rights are, and what rule of law is.

This is done so that he can position himself as the controller of the lives of those for whom he labels things.

The only way Africa can transform the oppressive situation under which we live, and overcome white domination; is to deny and revoke the oppressor’s right to the licence to name the world, to categorise, to classify, or otherwise demarcate the world and people’s behaviour.

Africans must assert their right and power of self-definition — of categorising and classifying the world and the nature of their being in it.

We must come to a point where we can prescribe treatments for our own behaviour and establish the conditions of our lives. African power is defined by liberation, and liberation itself is defined by independent thought and total control of resources and the means of production.

There must be no apologies for independent nationalism and economic empowerment policies. Zimbabwe owes no apology to any single displaced white settler farmer that lost colonially acquired farmland during the Third Chimurenga.

Liberation is no cause for guilt or apologies.

African interests must be centred on African needs and aspirations and there is no reason to feel bad when Africa reclaims what belongs to it.

Whites did not feel bad when they plundered our wealth and enslaved us and the only morality that must guide African policy is the morality of reclamation and equality.

That is what understanding and utilising power is all about and the guide must be the self-interest of Africa.

There is no time to empathise with the misfortunes of beneficiaries of oppression and colonial imbalances, especially if such misfortune is in the context of the correction of these injustices.

Our interests as Africans must define our relations with the Westerner and only this attitude will sustain our resolve to regain full control of our continent and its resources.

Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia and can be contacted on Wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafawarova.com or visit www.rwafawarova @com