Letter to an Old Flame

Dear Africa,

Greetings from Australia! Well, how time flies! It’s the 9^th anniversary of our divorce and I thought I should seize the occasion to write and find out how you’re doing. Strictly for old times’ sake, since we have both moved on with our lives. I must apologize again for my letter that leaked in the year 2000 and caused both of us so much embarrassment. I know you never believed me but I must tell you again that I never meant to make it public. We had just divorced, emotions were still raw, and I felt an urgent need to write down why I gave up on you. It was a note to myself. How it got to the internet and circulated so widely, I will never know. The accursed internet is also the reason why I’m unable to ever be completely sealed off from all the information going around about you. I try but the internet won’t let me get away from you. Perhaps it’s the same with you? Do you still think about me some times? I know the answer. Africa, you are what Nigerians call Oyingbo market. You don’t miss any absent market woman.

Perhaps I am wrong to call you an old flame? Perhaps our love story still hasn’t ended? After all, you took up some three decades of my life before I realized that you were always going to hold my skin and my history against me despite my love for you. No matter how much I labored in African studies, that epistemic mine field that assembles your children, lovers, admirers, friends, foes and all who desire to know you and build up a knowledge warehouse about you for future generations, I was always going to be the mzungu, the white man whose ancestors did terrible things to you and whose contemporaries in Washington, London, and Paris continue to do terrible things to you. I was permanently guilty by association and heritage.

Even when I noticed that some of your so-called autochthonous children were capable of inflicting such injuries on you and themselves that would make Adolf Hitler recoil in humane indignation, you insisted that the explanation must be found outside, somehow tied to what my ancestors did to you. Intra- and inter-ethnic clashes in East Africa? I was responsible. Islamic militants in Northern Nigeria transform the periodic slaughter of Igbo people into the sixth pillar of their own brand of Islam? I was responsible. Africa’s political elite would rather shore up their personal and class fortunes than develop their people and their countries? I was responsible. Cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe? I was responsible. The slaughter of child-witches by Christians in southern Nigeria? I was responsible. Name it! I was responsible for all that. My white skin became a feel-good, psychological salve needed to rationalize the monumental demission of your own children.

Now, this was quite depressing. Trust me, I would have trudged on had my own praxis translated to even the minutest, verifiable result in terms of ameliorating your piteous and visibly worsening condition. But nothing worked. I tried theory. It didn’t work. I tried praxis. It didn’t work. And, of course, my original sin of being a white Africanist pretending to have any answers was never not going to stand in the way. So, I “checked out” of African studies like Nigeria’s famous Andrew. Now, what is this I hear that you have now turned the relentless nativism with which you put me out of business against your own children? What is this I hear about a fundamentalist nativism that has a worrisomely increasing number of your children transform location at home into the Newfoundland of epistemic authenticity in African studies? What is this I hear about a new politics of exclusion that is busy farming a marriage between location in Africa and morality, criminalizing the trajectories of your children caught up in the globalization and transnationalization of academic labour?

The stories I hear from this part of the world are sufficiently depressing. I know I shouldn’t gloat but almost feel justified now that I left you. What have I not heard? Where do I start? Many are the stories of your children in Euro-America who return home for periodic engagements with continental communities of discourse and find themselves in tricky territory. They walk on thorns and nails, constantly having to contend with sly and not-so-sly delegitimations of whatever it is they have to say and offer. From the hostile “who the heck do you think you are?” or “what do you know about these things?” to the patronizing “you know, things have changed since you left”; from the accusatory “if we all left like you…” to the irritating “you now think and act like them” and the dismissive “is it because you are abroad?”, the underlying message is never ambiguous: you may still be us but you are no longer sufficiently us. The quality of your us-ness has been diluted, forever suspect.

This explains why your children plying their trade in Mzungu land exhibit dangerous symptoms of what I call the Okonkwo complex. If Okonkwo lived in a visceral fear of being deemed effeminate, your children abroad live in permanent fear of being deemed uppity and arrogant by the sentinels of authenticity and legitimacy back home. The symptoms of their Okonkwo complex are easy to recognize when they are attending academic events back home and communing with ‘home-colleagues’ who must certify them “still somewhat us” at the end of the exercise. The exaggerated display of affability, the exaggerated use of local lingo, the continuous performance of humility, the hesitation and gruesome mental calculations before paying for the beer in social gatherings – pay too quickly and you could be guilty of assuming that colleagues at home are paupers, don’t pay quickly enough and you could be guilty of being stingy despite your dollars and Euros. It’s is a lose-lose situation for these diasporic Okonkwos. Every statement, every sentence is susceptible to misinterpretation: are you trying to say that those at home are not brilliant, not the very best in their fields? I need not get into how each of them manages the variations of this scenario they experience when they go home. They all have and know their own stories.

It is the mission moralisatrice of the new attitudes of nativism and authenticity emanating from your home-based children that is so invidious and so utterly counter-productive. The divergent and extremely rich transnational trajectories of your children working in Euro-America are simply lumped into a monolithic basket of flight, treachery, and abandonment. Movement becomes at once immoral and amoral. It has even gotten to a point where some of your children who used to be outside but who have returned to Africa join the morality dance as soon as they get home. They begin to author essays, framing their return narratives as acts of moral courage which leave no one in doubt that they are really indicting those ‘amoral’ colleagues abroad who have not followed their example by returning to the proverbial African classroom.

Like all totalistic discourses, the discourse of nativistic morality assumes that the African classroom is a concept easily defined and needs not be problematized. When is an African classroom? What is an African classroom? I know of one of your children who teaches in Canada. Last semester, he had ninety-five undergraduates in his AFRI 1001 (Introduction to African Studies) course. Sixty-six of those students were from Africa. Not Africans born in Canada. They were from Africa. They were from thirty-two of Africa’s fifty-three countries. Yes, one of your amoral children who abandoned African classrooms had thirty two African countries assembled in just one undergraduate class in Canada. He taught more than half the continent in one course. What are the chances of having such a geographic swathe in a single classroom in such “authentic sites” as Ibadan, Legon, or Makerere? Is an African studies class with sixty-six students from thirty-two African countries an African classroom? Is a classroom with sixty-six Arab students in Tunis, who are more plugged into their psychic and cultural affiliations with the Middle East, an African classroom? Is a classroom of sixty-six Afrikaner students in Stellenbosch, who belong heart and soul to their European imaginaries and are overly conscious of their first world circumstances, an African classroom? Again, when is an African classroom?  

Africa, if, like a Molue or Matatu bus driver, you continue on this slope towards an exclusivist, nombrilistic nativism, I fear you may end up insisting that mucus-nosed and under-dressed African students must be gathered in the open (under dogon yaro trees) and be taught by volunteers from international charitable organizations, using chalk and other pedagogical materials donated by UNICEF before you are satisfied that the stringent and sacrosanct requirements of an “authentic African classroom” have been met. In essence, anybody not holding evening graduate seminars in overcrowded classrooms illuminated by Kerosene lanterns must be deemed to have made the amoral choice of abandoning the African classroom. Anybody not using stencil and Gestetner machines to roll exam question papers in the 21^st century has abandoned ship. At this rate, you may even insist on reviewing the case of Nigerian faculty in Ghanaian Universities in order to determine if they are guilty of abandoning the African classroom. After all, they left the terrible conditions of Nigerian classrooms for the slightly more infrastructurally auspicious conditions of Ghanaian classrooms.

I have so many other things to say but this letter has already gotten so long. I am not even sure you won’t be offended by my frank observations. I don’t know if I still have the right to dabble into your affairs after our divorce. What do I even know? I am just an old white man now teaching international development studies in Australia. I loved you. I still do.

Your old flame (?)

Gavin Kitching