By Takura Zhangazha*
Africa has newer
cultural battles within our current Trumpian global context. The re-emergence
of global economic contestations between the USA, China, Russia, European
Union (EU) and the generic former colonial Global South (GS) have serious cultural
connotations beyond the immediately material.
Because what now exists is a rewind of a Cold War and post Cold War global perception of what can be considered human progress. Together with multiple racist connotations that come with a globally awkward repetition of history.
I cannot, for the purposes of this blog list all of them. Please reflect on your own preferred consciousness semblance including an historical and contemporary list of your own African cultural icons. Because they are many. And they influenced our cultural African struggles for liberatory and emancipated African minds differently.
I have deliberately mentioned culture because it is in the final analysis what makes us function on a daily basis as it relates to our own collective and in the contemporary now individual values.
And how it is closely enmeshed within a capitalist, Hollywood determined lifestyle experience of what it can or should mean to be a human being today. No matter your global geographical location.
In this technological African reference point it is important to recall how the arrival of in particular the maxim gun which defeated us in our initial struggles for liberation left us in awe of same said arrival by ship military technology. We fought gallantly but we were defeated in that moment.
By the time we saw not only the first mechanised wagons (cars) and electricity that was combined with religious fervour and a change of our social lifestyles we were lost at the proverbial (colonialist) sea.
This was mainly
because we had begun to grasp the full import of these technologies and how
they were aiding in the decimation of our peoples. So we learnt how to use them
in solidarity with others in similar corrosive/oppressive environments or with those in the
global north that sympathised with us.
We learnt how the radio worked not only by way of frequency but also by way of propaganda. Same with newspapers and magazines together with the full import of what ownership of a printing press can do.
In this eventual mimicry of what we were up against we became entrapped as Africans in a false understanding of the progressiveness of the technology that we had used/borrowed during our liberation struggles (military or civil).
We forgot that the owner of the medium also determines the message (to paraphrase a famous British engineer Marshall MacLuhan who argued about the social life changing impact of electricity on human behaviour (black, brown but mainly white).
We have come full circle to that interlinked colonial, post and neo colonial discourse of where Africa is placed with emerging "technologies of being" outlined above.
Including how they have impacted our perceptions of our existence and more significantly political, religious, economic, social and other values in the world we now live in.
And as argued by
globally public intellectuals such as Naomi Klein, Soshana Zuboff and Yannis
Varoufakis from varying nodes, we are now being reinvented as human
beings. By what they invariably refer to as 'techno-feudalism'. Something that affects us more in the Global South than the global north due to our less protective privacy laws around social media and the internet (including banking).
But as Africans and
beyond their understandably Eurocentric/ GlobalNorth centric arguments, on our
own we are faced with a colossus that seeks to repeat our technological defeat
to colonialism.
Unless we take on a more coherent and people driven cultural approach, we may be faced with a new maxim gun. Culturally only. For now.