Monday, February 8, 2010
Homme noir, qui es-tu?
Homme noir, qui es-tu?
par Mbanzulu Za Mayituku
Tu portes des noms étrangers, des prénoms d'esclaves,
Tu parles des langues étrangères, t'éloignant de ton axe maternel, de ton giron culturel,
Tu exaltes des religions étrangères, t'éloignant de ton centre cosmique,
Tu consommes étranger, te privant de tes facultés divines de créer ce qui sied à ta personne et te rendant dépendant à vie de ceux-là qui déplorent ta présence sur terre,
Tu t'appropries des dieux, des ancêtres et des coutumes étrangers, te rendant complice de ton esclavage spirituel.
Tu ne connais ton histoire, tu ne connais ta réalité,
Y trouves-tu un intérêt quelconque ?
Tu accueilles tout le monde chez toi, sans discernement et tu te mets à genou devant quiconque,
Au nom de l’universalisme ?
Penses-tu quelque chose de l'Européen ?
Penses-tu quelque chose de l'Asiatique ?
As-tu une idée préconçue sur l'étranger ?
Tu habites des pays étrangers, où tu n'as que des mauvais rôles,
Tu habites des Etats coloniaux, où l’étranger a plus de droits,
Sur la terre de tes ancêtres, l’étranger a dressé des murs qui t’empêchent de communiquer avec ton frère.
Tu te poses en défenseur de ces murs sans vouloir les casser,
Religions coloniales,
Frontières coloniales,
Langues coloniales,
Prénoms coloniaux,
Stéréotypes ethniques issus de la colonisation,
Voilà qui est source de divisions en terre-mère.
Et tu veux être plus Jésuiste que les Romains, plus Taoïste que les Chinois,
Tu veux être plus francophone que les Français, plus lusophone que les Portugais,
Tu veux être plus Congolais qu’Africain, plus Gabonais que Camerounais,
Tu veux être plus Muhammadiste que les Arabes, plus Mosaïste que les Hébreux,
Tu préfères t’appeler Mamadou plutôt que Sangaré, Pierrette plutôt que Bouanga,
Tu préfères produire ton intelligence en Anglais plutôt qu’en Igbo,
Tu préfères t’approcher du Corse plutôt que du Kouyou,
Tu préfères étudier le Latin plutôt que le Kémétique ou le Sawa.
Tu te réjouis du sourire de l'étranger, de sa grâce parce qu'il t'emploie,
Parce qu’il t’aménage un petit espace pour le bon Nègre que tu es,
Tu ne te rends compte que tu n'es qu'un chien à sa table,
Un sang impur qui abreuve ses sillons,
Tu fais tout pour le satisfaire contre tes propres frères,
Mais en fin de compte tu ne ramasses que miettes et rogatons,
On ne te sert que os et arêtes, à même le sol.
Le chien, c’est cet animal apprivoisé ayant oublié qu'il est un animal,
Il pense être un être humain en compagnie d'un être humain,
se moquant ainsi de ses autres congénères restés dans la brousse
et contre lesquels son maître le lance pour lui apporter de la ripaille.
As-tu de l'orgueil ?
Sais-tu ce que c'est, l’orgueil ?
Il faut d’abord être soi pour comprendre ce que c’est,
Tu transpires pour les autres,
Tu joues pour les autres,
Tu pries pour les autres,
Tu chantes pour les autres,
Tu fais tout contre ton propre épanouissement
dès lors que cela ne porte aucun intérêt pour l’Afrique,
Tu n’es qu’un accessoire pour les autres, un utilitaire.
On te sert Jésus tu prends,
On te sert Muhammad tu prends,
On te sert Moïse tu prends,
On te sert Brahman tu prends,
N’importe quelle sauce étrangère est bonne pour toi,
N’as-tu pas appris que tout n’est pas mangeable dans la vie ?
Quel type de personne es-tu ?
Tu brûles tes cheveux,
tu portes des perruques,
tu décapes ta peau pour ressembler à autrui,
Tu préfères être agneau plutôt que lion,
Tu préfères être coq plutôt que renard,
Tu préfères être corbeau plutôt que renard (dans la fable),
Où est ta fierté ?
Où est ton honneur ?
Où est ton âme ?
Sais-tu que tu es le premier né de Dieu ?
Sais-tu que tu es le premier à qui Dieu a parlé ?
Sais-tu que tu es le premier à qui Dieu a enseigné sciences et coutumes ?
Comment donc peux-tu accepter de talonner l’étranger ?
Comment donc peux-tu accepter d’être son paillasson ?
Comment donc peux-tu accepter d’être son élève, alors qu’il a tout appris chez toi ?
Tu as des prophètes, tu les ignores,
Tu as des racines, tu ne veux t’y rattacher,
Penses-tu pouvoir prospérer sans racines ?
Que peut être un arbre sans racines ?
Ne sont ce pas les racines qui, prenant les vitamines du sous sol nourrissent l’arbre !
Lui assurent un feuillage et une floraison !
C’est le rôle des ancêtres pour tout peuple,
Ton devoir, c’est de te rattacher à eux,
Car eux seuls savent ce qui est bon et mieux pour toi.
Sors de l’innocence,
Sors de l’ignorance,
Sors de ta torpeur millénaire,
Quitte les artifices étrangers dont tu es paré,
Brise les chaînes de l’esclavage spirituel qui te collent au postérieur de l’étranger,
Aujourd’hui et maintenant,
Prie au nom du Dieu de tes ancêtres et honore les dans tes faits et gestes,
Aie une pensée pour eux tous les jours et ils viendront à toi,
Rattache-toi à eux et ils te transmettront la sève qui te fera rayonner à travers le monde, Comme jadis.
Source: grioo.com http://www.grioo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11751Dernière édition par Yazol le Mer 13 Jan 2010 16:29; édité 2 fois
Africa in a Changing World: An Inventory
Monthly Review (Volume 61, Number 8 – January 2010) http://www.monthlyreview.org/100101serequeberhan.php
Africa in a Changing World: An Inventory
Tsenay Serequeberhan
When the axe came into the forest, the trees said: the handle is one of us.
—Turkish proverb
The Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci makes, in his Prison Notebooks, the following insightful remarks regarding the character of critical work and reflection. He states: “The beginning of a critical elaboration is the consciousness of that which really is, that is to say a ‘knowing of yourself’ as a product of the process of history that has unfolded thus far and has left in you, yourself, an infinity of traces collected without the benefit of an inventory. It is necessary initially to make such an inventory.”1
In what follows I will undertake such a task. The basic concern will be to engage the question: What has been, to date, the character of our postcolonial condition? In looking at this question what I aim to do, grosso modo, is to search for the source of our failings in the traces of the colonial past that still constitute our present and, in so doing, suggest a remedial curative stance.
Modern European colonialism—the subjection of non-European peoples designated as inferior and primitive, and their transformation for their own “improvement” and “welfare”—was enveloped in, and derived its legitimacy from, a rather stuck-up and imperious altruism. For the longest time, this violent benevolence saw itself as the proper embodiment and manifestation of humanity in intercultural relations. It was believed that a certain group of human beings, notably those with a lighter complexion, had possession of the True God and had discovered The Proper Way of organizing human life on earth; and so this group felt compelled to civilize the rest of humankind, to make it like itself, by forcefully sharing its blessings. In other words, as the missionary priest Father Placide Temples points out: “It has been said that our civilizing mission alone can justify our occupation of the lands of uncivilized peoples.”2
European colonialism saw and presented itself as the actuality of the normatively proper relations among human beings, ranked in a hierarchy of subordination. In this context, colonial subjection was seen, its harshness and violence notwithstanding, as a caring act with long-term beneficial effects. A kind of stern, unselfish venture aimed at bettering a “darker” and less fortunate humanity. As Edward W. Said put it:
But what distinguishes earlier empires, like the Roman or the Spanish or the Arabs, from the modern [colonial] empires, of which the British and French were the great ones in the nineteenth century, is the fact that the latter ones are systematic enterprises, constantly reinvested. They’re not simply arriving in a country, looting it and then leaving when the loot is exhausted. And modern empire requires, as Conrad said, an idea of service, an idea of sacrifice, an idea of redemption. Out of this you get these great, massively reinforced notions of, for example, in the case of France, the “mission civilisatrice.” That we’re not there to benefit ourselves, we’re there for the sake of the natives.3
It was under the guise and mantel of such an idea that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the dismemberment and partition of Africa, among the Christian powers of Europe, was completed. In shouldering its responsibility to the rest of us—“The White Man’s Burden,” in Rudyard Kipling’s memorable phrase—Europe expanded on the face of the earth and became global. In globalizing itself, as Said further points out, Europe generously utilized force, “but much more important…than force…was the idea inculcated in the minds of the people being colonized that it was their destiny to be ruled by the West.”4
In the design of this “destiny,” defeat and conquest, empirically contingent events to be sure, were seen as evidence of a lower humanity. The colonized are thus consigned, as if by nature, to a lower status. The logic of force, which institutes subjection, is itself taken as confirmation for the need of such subjection. Contingent effects, the effects of force, are proof positive in this schema of things of an inferior humanity in need of being conquered for its own good. And so, explorers, missionaries, adventurers, as well as the “educated public” with “scientific expectation[s],”5 who followed their bold exploits from afar in the mother-country, were all under the spell of this grounding frame. Enthralled by such a noble and flattering “destiny,” Europe engaged, in earnest, in the task of binding its “sons to exile” in the service of “new-caught, sullen peoples” in need of civilizing. In the duplicitous complicity of this inter-implicative “destiny,” Europe, in the very act of plunder, saw itself as serving a larger humanity that it had described as “Half devil and half child.”
Now, the period of colonial rule, utilizing a violent pedagogy6—the strenuous and stern work of missionaries and “humane” educators—firmly implanted in the colonized the necessity and truth of this destiny. Spellbound by a self-serving destiny, Europe overwhelmed those it subjugated with its self-adulation. It chiseled into their heads the “natural” superiority of the West and the desirability of being formed in its image. In this manner, the idea and the destiny it prescribed, were firmly implanted in the self-awareness of sections of the colonized.
A stratum, or layer, of people was thus created—westernized Africa7—that, formed in Europe’s image and by its imperious gaze, sees and understands itself and its place in the world, in subservient terms. Europe converted those it westernized to the view that their subjection was a necessity if their territories were to progress and develop and become places of civilized human habitation. It hammered into their heads the providential and beneficial nature of their subjection. Thus, violent de facto dominance in this manner secured de jure validity.
Colonialist Europe firmly entrenched in the conscious self-awareness of westernized Africa—both explicitly and subliminally—the civilized-uncivilized dichotomy, and convinced this Africa of its shameful deficit within the scope of this all-engulfing and fundamental distinction. As Basil Davidson has pointedly noted: “[M]ost Africans in Western-educated groups…held to the liberal Victorian vision of civilization kindling its light from one new nation to the next, [and] drawing each within its blessed fold, long after the local facts depicted a very different prospect.”8
For example, in 1901, Angolans living in Lisbon, having accepted the self-proclaimed European civilizing idea, published a protest against Portuguese misrule of their country. They noted that: “Portugal had conquered Angola centuries earlier…but [had] done nothing for the people’s welfare.” To this day, “‘the people remain brutalized, as in their former state’ and such neglect,” they maintained, “was an ‘outrage against civilization.’”9 What we have here, ironically, is an immanent critique, by westernized Africans, of the failure of the colonial idea to implement the destiny that it, itself, prescribes. The operative categories of this internal critique are the desirability of “European civilization” and the need to surpass “African barbarism.”
And so, it is implicitly understood and explicitly conceded that pre-colonial Africa was immersed in conditions of utter darkness. This is the operative, internalized “pretext”10 (i.e., the disappointed expectation of advances, to be secured from European rule, by the rightly colonized backward society) that implicitly condones and explicitly justifies colonial conquest. This consenting to the “pretext” of the idea is the “ideological pacification”11 of the colonized. It is the tangible correlate, on the intellectual-cultural level, of the violent physical “pacification” of the initial conquest that predicates the presence of Europe in Africa.
In other words, European colonialism was established in the belief that “superior races” have the privilege and the duty to civilize the less fortunate, “inferior races.” The “ideological pacification” of the colonized occurs when this insidious and humiliating idea is decisively implanted in African psyches and is accepted by Africans as their destiny. As Frantz Fanon put it: “In the colonial context, the colonizer does not stop his work of breaking in [d’éreintement] the colonized until the latter admits loudly and clearly the supremacy of white values.”12 Long after the end of colonialism, this “breaking” goes on paying handsome dividends to our former colonizers. It secures indirect, but effective, hegemonic control of the periphery—that segment of the world which, by virtue of its broken heritage, presently occupies this marginal position. Broken docility! Is this, then, our postcolonial condition?
To date, the most enduring cultural legacy of colonialism has been this broken sector of African society that has internalized the colonial model of human existence and history. This is the segment that, on the whole, rules contemporary Africa. Not grounded in an indigenous history, but the residual dregs of colonial Europe, it has, as the yardstick of its existence, what lies beyond its shores. This is what Fanon refers to as the worship of the “Greco-Latin pedestal.” But what exactly does this mean? Let us look at a specific case.
Léopold Sédar Senghor, writing in 1960—the year of Africa—ardently affirms: “Let us stop denouncing colonialism and Europe….To be sure, conquerors sow ruin in their wake, but they also sow ideas and techniques that germinate and blossom into new harvests.”13 What does this mean? Senghor explains in detail and at length:
When placed again in context, colonization will appear to us as a necessary evil, a historical necessity whence good will emerge, but on the sole condition that we, the colonized of yesterday, become conscious and that we will it. Slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and colonialism are the successive parturitions of History, painful like all parturitions. With the difference that here the child suffers more than the mother. That does not matter. If we are fully conscious of the scope of the Advent, we shall…be more attentive to contributions than defects, to possibilities of rebirth rather than to death and destruction. Without…European depredations, no doubt…Negro Africans…would by now have created more ripe and more succulent fruits. I doubt that they would have caught up so soon with the advances caused in Europe by the Renaissance. The evil of colonization is less these ruptures than that we were deprived of the freedom to choose those European contributions most appropriate to our spirit.14
What speaks in and through Senghor is the stern educational-cultural formation of the colonial past. The destructive effects, of this past, are here presented—by a grateful pupil—as the conditions of the possibility for future beneficial effects, provided that “we, the colonized of yesterday, become conscious” that, to secure for ourselves “the advances caused in Europe by the Renaissance,” such “death and destruction” is necessary.
Indeed, if only that were the case! As former President of Tanzania, Julius K. Nyerere pointed out, Africa’s material inheritance from the colonial period was rather scanty and warped:
At independence, Tanzania or as it was then called, Tanganyika (a country four times the size of Great Britain) had approximately 200 miles of tarmac road, and its “industrial sector” consisted of six factories—including one which employed 50 persons. The countries which had sizeable Settler or mineral extraction communities (such as Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia or Congo) had strong links with the world economy, but their own development was entirely concentrated on servicing the needs of the settlers or the miners in one way or another. Again…at independence less than 50% of Tanzanian children went to school—and then for only four years or less; [and] 85% of its adults were illiterate in any language. The country had only two African engineers, 12 Doctors, and perhaps 30 Arts graduates.15
This can hardly be considered catching up with “the advances caused in Europe by the Renaissance”! Furthermore, in view of the massiveness of the destruction caused by colonial conquest, one could respond to Senghor by repeating Albert Memmi’s rhetorical question: “How can one dare compare the advantages and disadvantages of colonization? What advantages, even if a thousand times more important, could make such internal and external catastrophes acceptable?”16
But beyond Memmi’s question and Nyerere’s marshaling of evidence, it is necessary to note that Senghor’s way of “seeing” falls squarely within the confines of the “idea of service” that informs and directs the colonial project. In his use of the childhood metaphor, in his endorsement of suffering in order to secure future benefits, in his view that colonialism is “a historical necessity whence good will emerge,” in advising attentiveness to colonial contributions without even decrying all that Africa lost in being enslaved and colonized, in his eagerness to “choose” from “European contributions,” in all of this, Senghor parrots the language of the “mission civilisatrice.” His thinking, in other words, is inscribed within the confines of the hubris of the idea that it is the destiny of Africa “to be ruled by the West.”
As Chinua Achebe has noted, there is “a four-hundred-year period from the sixteenth century to the twentieth,” of abusive writing on Africa that has “developed into a tradition with a vast storehouse of lurid images to which writers went again and again through the centuries to draw ‘material’ for their books.”17 This, then, is the systematic deployment of the sedimented and layered conceptions and negative images that constitute the idea of Africa, in the grounding Western imagination. This writing orchestrates the images and consolidates the ordinary notions and conceptions of Africa as a land of heathens in need of civilizing conquest. It does so in the very process of violent interaction with the peoples it depicts in this way. This, then, is what Said refers to as “the epistemology of imperialism,”18 an assemblage of images and notions in terms of which the idea and the destiny it prescribes are articulated and authorized.
It is imperative to note that this “epistemology of imperialism,” finds its ultimate source and authorization, its metaphysical anchoring-stones, in aspects of the thinking of the icons of the modern tradition of Western philosophy. The great minds of this tradition—Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, etc.—all had access to and utilized this “storehouse of lurid images.” In expressing and articulating their differing outlooks, they streamlined the derogatory claims of this “lurid” “storehouse” and gave it currency. They did so by articulating the idea and metaphysically backing the destiny prescribed and validated by the historical conditions of their own philosophizing.19
Behind the many and varied perspectives that constitute the modern Western tradition of philosophy, one finds in varying degree the singular view, a core grounding axiom, that European modernity is, properly speaking, isomorphic with the humanity of the human, per se. As Gianni Vattimo has noted, this is “like saying: we Europeans are the best type [forma] of humanity” and “the whole course of history is structured so as to realize, more or less completely, this ideal.”20 The West sees itself as both the idea and its manifestation! The idea, whose civilizing “pretext,” as noted earlier by Davidson, westernized Africa was made to swallow—hook, line, and sinker—the same idea that directs and controls the logic of Senghor’s considered opinions.
Thus far, in our inventory, we have established that, beyond the end of colonialism, the project of domination, which constitutes its practice, endures in the subservient mode-of-life and self-awareness of westernized Africa. Its staying power is a residual, but tenacious, interiorized extroversion focused on the West.21 It is in this context, then, that we need now to ask the central question: What has been, to date, the character of our postcolonial condition?
Armed with its own sense of itself in political and armed confrontation, Africa, starting in the late 1950s, ended direct colonial rule. It is important to remember that, at the time, this was not something that was given universal acclaim. As Gerald Caplan has noted: “In 1960, a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling for the independence of all colonies was opposed by every European colonial power—Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium and Spain—plus the US and South Africa.”22
It was therefore against tremendous odds that, bit-by-bit, formal independence was secured. In this, Africa, along with the rest of the colonized world that, up to then had been excluded from history, forcefully reinserted itself into the actuality of human historical existence. And the formerly colonizing world, the West, relinquished to the newly independent states the absolute bare minimum, in all aspects of international economics and politics which, to this day, it controls in every respect. To be sure, as Fanon noted, in 1958: “The XXth century, on the scale of the world, will not only be the era of atomic discoveries and interplanetary explorations. The second upheaval of this epoch and incontestably, is the conquest by the peoples of lands that belong to them.”23
Yet when we look back, we see not only great achievements but also, and equally, great disappointments. When we look at our recent history since the days of Fanon, we see the formerly colonized being re-colonized, under various guises. For they have indeed reclaimed the “lands that belong to them” in large measure, however, the formerly colonized have failed to reclaim and control their own historical existence. More than in Asia or Latin America, this is especially true in postcolonial Africa. As one of Sembène Ousmane’s tragic-comic characters confesses, in a rather lucid moment of angst: “We are nothing better than crabs in a basket. We want the ex-occupiers’ place? We have it…Yet what change is there really in general or in particular? The colonialist is stronger, more powerful than ever before, hidden inside us, here in this very place.”24
This, then, is our postcolonial condition: How to purge the colonial residue that still controls, from “inside us,” the actuality of the present? As we noted earlier, using Senghor as an example, this is the residue of colonial Europe’s sense of history and existence; the internalized idea whose traces constitute the deplorable inheritance of our present. Yet today, the falseness of this idea, and of the global destiny it prescribes, is beyond dispute.
What has to be kept in mind is that the demise of colonialism by force of arms and political confrontation has to be, not merely the termination of the physical force that made colonialism possible, but also and more importantly, the end of the hubris that gave it intellectual and moral currency. In agreement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one has to recognize that force—for or against colonialism—does not, and cannot, bestow political or moral sanction on its effects. Such sanction, as in the past, is the work of intellectual reflection.
In our present postcolonial condition, it is imperative to note that the former colonizers, the Western powers, occupy a dominant position not merely through “the force” of their “weapons” but, much more importantly, through the “‘models’ of growth and development” that, they have created, and that “are today adopted everywhere.”25 Colonization did not merely destroy the modes-of-life through which pre-colonial Africa lived its existence; in demolishing pre-colonial Africa, it constituted Africa as a dependent and servile appendage of the West.
Colonization concurrently established the intellectual parameters, the “models of growth and development” that are operative in, and determinative of, the actuality of the present. Within this array of systematically deployed understandings and of methodically amassed knowledge (in and through which humanity interpretatively comprehends itself and regulates its relation with the natural environment), within the symmetry of concepts, models, ideas, and interpretations, that constitute the paradigms26 of knowledge and technical know-how of the human sciences and modern technology, and within this complex assemblage of conceptual instruments of knowledge and its production: To the “vast storehouse of lurid images” has been added the idea of an innately dysfunctional continent, incapable of doing for itself.
The myth of an inherently impaired darker sector of humanity has been preserved and amplified. And the daily news of Africa—genocide, man-made famine, corruption—in an ongoing manner substantiates this idea, or image, of a continent wedded to perdition. In all of this, what is lost sight of is the fact that Africa today, in spite of its independence, is a continent indirectly controlled by the West. Colonialism in Black Face—westernized Africa—is merely a façade, the fig leaf behind which the domination of the West continues unabated. As in the past, this broken segment of contemporary Africa, in its corrupt ineptness, is the conducting line of foreign imposition; the Trojan-horse containing our ongoing defeats. As Martin Plaut, a BBC Africa analyst tells us:
Driving round many African cities one is constantly struck by the blue and white…UN flags and logos. Its white 4 x 4 vehicles are to be found in the most remote corners of the rural areas. Frequently one is left with the impression that UN officials know at least as much, if not more, about [African] countries than [African] government ministers, many of whom spend more time nursing their political careers than their constituents. It is hard to escape the conclusion that if Africa is not being re-colonized by the UN, then it is certainly being run at least as much from New York as it is from most of the continent’s capitals.27
Not rooted in local conditions, the ministers and ministries of African governments are held in place by foreign props,28 lubricated by graft. And so, “Corruption” as Elizabeth Blunt, another BBC Africa analyst tells us, “is costing the continent nearly $150bn a year.”29 To be sure, there is nothing new in all of this. As Fanon noted at the dawn of African independence, “independence”—without eradicating the long-term effects of colonial rule and radically restructuring its actuality to the measure of what it names—can be nothing more than “[a] minimum of readaptation, some reforms at the summit, a flag and, down below, the undivided mass, forever ‘medievalized,’ perpetually marking time.”30
To date, and on the whole, this is the actuality of independent Africa. Each African state has a flag that designates the geographic terrain within which specific westernized elites (Francophone, Anglophone, etc.) live colonial lifestyles at the expense of the vast majority, which is relegated to archaic modes-of-life and frozen in discarded traditions. All of this happens, furthermore, with the implicit and explicit encouragement—the financial and military backing—of the former colonizers. As Said has noted, in this regard: “In effect this really means that just to be an independent postcolonial Arab, or black [African], or Indonesian is not a program, nor a process, nor a vision. It is no more than a convenient starting point from which the real work, the hard work, might begin.”31
Independence, which should have been “a convenient starting point,” was taken as the final moment of Africa reclaiming itself. The “real work, the hard work” subsequent to the formal ending of colonial rule, of cultural, economic, and political restructuring and rethinking of the character and substance of independence, was never undertaken. Instead of this “hard work” a caste of westernized Africans was established in power, and “this cast,” says Fanon, “has done nothing other than to take over unchanged the legacy of the economy, the thought, and the institutions left by the colonialists.” It is this “legacy” that today rules postcolonial Africa and constitutes the actuality of our postcolonial condition.32
The “real work, the hard work,” that Said points to, is the systematic critique of this “legacy,” aimed at seeing beyond the “models of growth and development” that mask, constitute, institute, and sustain dominance. For it is through ideas and concepts that the “legacy” of colonialism still rules the present. The “real work” is then, on the one hand, this systemic critique of the Occidental tradition that sustains these “models” and concurrently, on the other hand, a critical sifting through traditions—European and African—aimed at a new synthesis.
This is what Amilcar Cabral refers to as “a selective analysis of the values of the culture within the framework” of our needs and exigencies.33 It is in this way that we can properly engage our contemporary situation and further advance the ongoing decolonization of Africa. The aim in all of this is not to reject the West, nor merely to embrace our indigenousness, but to cultivate and develop a concrete synthesis, in view of the needs of our lived present. In this, the aim is to bypass the residue of our colonial past, the “models of growth and development” that perpetuate Western hegemony and are the core of our postcolonial condition. This bypassing, in tandem with exploring the possibilities of our de facto hybrid heritage, can possibly create the context in which we can directly affect, for the better, the lived existence of the vast majority of the people of Africa. For, at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is the character of the lived existence we strive toward, and help to bring about.
Unlike the West, Africa experienced modernization, not as the result of an internal process of historical transformation, but of conquest; and so, our postcolonial present, in order to measure up to its claims, must consciously institute such a process of change: a process of transformation that emerges in responding to local needs. Our postcolonial present has to be a period of time in which the achievement of independence is consolidated by the cultural-material transformation of the formerly colonized territory aimed at its socio-economic viability and the practical-concrete development of mass-participatory forms of democratic governance. These must be forms of democratic self-rule that are transparent and utilize formal procedures and methods, and are grounded in our specific struggles and differing histories.34
Just as Christianity and civilization once served the purposes of conquest and empire, “good-governance,” “global stability,” “development,” “economic growth,” “international cooperation,” “food aid,” “cultural exchange programs,” “human rights,” “rule of law,” etc., are implicitly related to the schemes in and through which the West now perpetuates its hegemony. These code-words are utilized to prolong Western preeminence beyond the colonial past. The challenge of our present is to discover how to conceptualize and think through the real concerns camouflaged by these code-words, while warding off the dominance that they are used to implement.
The challenge we face is that of thinking through the possibility of dislodging Western hegemony, in tandem with articulating counter-conceptions that affirm our freedom. In engaging the issues and concerns camouflaged and named by the above code-words, our efforts have to be directed at contesting established subservience, while inventing the forms of a truly postcolonial, democratic existence. The West today sustains its power by orchestrating the ideas with which it “seeded” our past (remember Senghor!). We need to find ways of seeing beyond this “seeding.” In this regard, the only thing we can say categorically, borrowing the words of the young Marx, is that “we do not anticipate” the future “with our dogmas” but rather “attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old.”35
As Gramsci tells us, the task of an inventory is to sift through the infinity of traces that constitute the actuality of our lived existence; to lay out a critical-methodic exploration of the past, in terms of present concerns, and in view of a desirable future; and to consolidate our independence, while discarding the residual impediments that are, to date, the actuality of our postcolonial condition. For, as Herbert Marcuse noted long ago, this condition,
is not the old colonialism and imperialism (although in some aspects, the contrast has been overdrawn: [for] there is little essential difference between a direct government by the metropolitan power, and a native government which functions only by grace of a metropolitan power). The objective rationale for the global struggle is not the need for immediate capital export, resources, [or] surplus exploitation. It is rather the danger of subversion of the established hierarchy of Master and Servant, Top and Bottom, a hierarchy which has created and sustained the have-nations, Capitalist and Communist.36
At present, we need not worry about “actually existing socialism”: it has imploded as a result of its own internal contradictions. What remain are the “have-nations” of the capitalist West which, using differing “pretexts,” intend to keep in place, and in perpetuity, this “hierarchy of Master and Servant, Top and Bottom.” The challenge is to confront this “hierarchy” on the level of ideas and bypass it, on the level of practical actuality, by concretely cultivating, and actively tending to, our democratic heritage.
Notes
1. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni Del Carcere, vol. 2, edizione critica dell’Instituto Gramsci, a cura di Valentino Gerratana (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1975), 1376.
2. Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (Paris, France: Présence Africaine, 1969), 171-72.
3. Edward W. Said, The Pen and the Sword, conversations with David Barsamian (Monroe, ME:
Common Courage Press, 1994), emphasis added, 66.
4. Said, The Pen and the Sword, 68.
5. Anne Hugon, The Exploration of Africa (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 19.
6. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L’aventure ambiguë (Paris: Julliard, 1961). This work of historical fiction is an excellent illustration of the castrating effects of this pedagogy.
7. On this point see also my discussion of “Europeanized” and “non-Europeanized” in “African Philosophy: The Point in Question,” African Philosophy: The Essential Readings, edited by Tsenay Serequeberhan (New York: Paragon, 1991), 8-9. Through a critical self-reflection (Fanon and Cabral are our prime examples) a westernized, or Europeanized, African can critically question his/her subordinate relation to European culture and history. This is one of the central themes of my book, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1994).
8. Basil Davidson, Africa in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 82-83.
9. Ibid., 43.
10. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 18. The use Lyotard makes of this term is akin to what I have referred to as the stance of false double negation in my book, Our Heritage (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 62.
11. I borrow this formulation from Said, The Pen and the Sword, 67.
12. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 43.
13. Léopold Sédar Senghor, On African Socialism, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1964), 80, 81.
14. Ibid., 82.
15. Julius K. Nyerere, “Africa: The Current Situation,” African Philosophy 11, no. 1 (June 1998), 8.
16. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1965), 118.
17. Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 26-27.
18. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 376.
19. On this, see my book, Contested Memory: The Icons of the Occidental Tradition (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007).
20. Gianni Vattimo, La società trasparente (Milan: Garzanti, 1989), 10.
21. On this, see “Africanity at the End of the 20th Century,” African Philosophy 11, no. 1 (1998).
22. Gerald Caplan, The Betrayal of Africa (Toronto, Canada: Groundwood Books, 2008), 34.
23. Frantz Fanon, “Vérités premiéres à propos du probléme colonial” (originally published in El Moudjahid, no. 27, July 22, 1958), in Pour la revolution africaine (Paris: François Maspero, 1964), 141.
24. Sembène Ousmane, Xala (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1976), emphasis added, 84.
25. Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, edited by David Ames Curtis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 200-01. In full, Castoriadis states: “Factually speaking, the West has been and remains victorious—and not only through the force of its weapons: it remains so through its ideas, through its “models” of growth and development, through the statist and other structures which, having been created by it, are today adopted everywhere.”
26. I am thinking of this term in the way that Thomas S. Kuhn established it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
27. Martin Plaut, “The UN’s all-pervasive role in Africa,” BBC News, 18 July 2007, (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6903196.stm), 2.
28. As Kwame Nkrumah noted long ago: “Although apparently strong because of their support from neocolonialists and imperialists, they are extremely vulnerable. Their survival depends on foreign support. Once this vital link is broken, they become powerless to maintain their positions and privileges.” Class Struggle in Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 12. A case in point is Mengistu Hailemariam’s Ethiopia that had to switch patrons, from the United States to the USSR, as a result of President Carter’s “human rights” oriented foreign policy. When the Carter administration made it difficult for Mengistu to secure arms—in order to squash domestic opposition and, more urgently, to prosecute the colonial war in Eritrea—he became, overnight, a Marxist-Leninist and realigned Ethiopia with the USSR, in the then-raging Cold War. Soon thereafter, with the demise of the USSR, Mengistu’s military dictatorship, lacking a foreign prop to protect it from the righteous wrath of the Eritrean Resistance, collapsed.
29. Elizabeth Blunt, “Corruption ‘costs Africa billions,’” BBC News, September 18, 2002, 02:32 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2265387.stm), 1.
30. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 147.
31. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 379.
32. Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, 117; The Wretched of the Earth, 176, emphasis added. For a recent discussion of the enduring relevance of Fanon, for thinking the political situation of contemporary Africa, see Lewis R. Gordon’s An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 220-48.
33. Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 52.
34. Here, I have in mind the precedent of Democratic Chile, the Chile of Salvador Allende. For a concise discussion of differing conceptions of democracy, see C.B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
35. Karl Marx, from a letter to Arnold Ruge (September 1843), Early Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 207.
36. Herbert Marcuse, The Essential Marcuse, Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss, eds. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 10. As if to confirm the above observation, Henry Kissinger (then U.S. Secretary of State), in a 1970 memo to Richard Nixon on Allende’s Chile, states: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact—and even precedent value for—other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our position in it.” As quoted by Naomi Klein in “Latin America’s Shock Resistance,” The Nation, November 2007, 28
Africa in a Changing World: An Inventory
Tsenay Serequeberhan
When the axe came into the forest, the trees said: the handle is one of us.
—Turkish proverb
The Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci makes, in his Prison Notebooks, the following insightful remarks regarding the character of critical work and reflection. He states: “The beginning of a critical elaboration is the consciousness of that which really is, that is to say a ‘knowing of yourself’ as a product of the process of history that has unfolded thus far and has left in you, yourself, an infinity of traces collected without the benefit of an inventory. It is necessary initially to make such an inventory.”1
In what follows I will undertake such a task. The basic concern will be to engage the question: What has been, to date, the character of our postcolonial condition? In looking at this question what I aim to do, grosso modo, is to search for the source of our failings in the traces of the colonial past that still constitute our present and, in so doing, suggest a remedial curative stance.
Modern European colonialism—the subjection of non-European peoples designated as inferior and primitive, and their transformation for their own “improvement” and “welfare”—was enveloped in, and derived its legitimacy from, a rather stuck-up and imperious altruism. For the longest time, this violent benevolence saw itself as the proper embodiment and manifestation of humanity in intercultural relations. It was believed that a certain group of human beings, notably those with a lighter complexion, had possession of the True God and had discovered The Proper Way of organizing human life on earth; and so this group felt compelled to civilize the rest of humankind, to make it like itself, by forcefully sharing its blessings. In other words, as the missionary priest Father Placide Temples points out: “It has been said that our civilizing mission alone can justify our occupation of the lands of uncivilized peoples.”2
European colonialism saw and presented itself as the actuality of the normatively proper relations among human beings, ranked in a hierarchy of subordination. In this context, colonial subjection was seen, its harshness and violence notwithstanding, as a caring act with long-term beneficial effects. A kind of stern, unselfish venture aimed at bettering a “darker” and less fortunate humanity. As Edward W. Said put it:
But what distinguishes earlier empires, like the Roman or the Spanish or the Arabs, from the modern [colonial] empires, of which the British and French were the great ones in the nineteenth century, is the fact that the latter ones are systematic enterprises, constantly reinvested. They’re not simply arriving in a country, looting it and then leaving when the loot is exhausted. And modern empire requires, as Conrad said, an idea of service, an idea of sacrifice, an idea of redemption. Out of this you get these great, massively reinforced notions of, for example, in the case of France, the “mission civilisatrice.” That we’re not there to benefit ourselves, we’re there for the sake of the natives.3
It was under the guise and mantel of such an idea that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the dismemberment and partition of Africa, among the Christian powers of Europe, was completed. In shouldering its responsibility to the rest of us—“The White Man’s Burden,” in Rudyard Kipling’s memorable phrase—Europe expanded on the face of the earth and became global. In globalizing itself, as Said further points out, Europe generously utilized force, “but much more important…than force…was the idea inculcated in the minds of the people being colonized that it was their destiny to be ruled by the West.”4
In the design of this “destiny,” defeat and conquest, empirically contingent events to be sure, were seen as evidence of a lower humanity. The colonized are thus consigned, as if by nature, to a lower status. The logic of force, which institutes subjection, is itself taken as confirmation for the need of such subjection. Contingent effects, the effects of force, are proof positive in this schema of things of an inferior humanity in need of being conquered for its own good. And so, explorers, missionaries, adventurers, as well as the “educated public” with “scientific expectation[s],”5 who followed their bold exploits from afar in the mother-country, were all under the spell of this grounding frame. Enthralled by such a noble and flattering “destiny,” Europe engaged, in earnest, in the task of binding its “sons to exile” in the service of “new-caught, sullen peoples” in need of civilizing. In the duplicitous complicity of this inter-implicative “destiny,” Europe, in the very act of plunder, saw itself as serving a larger humanity that it had described as “Half devil and half child.”
Now, the period of colonial rule, utilizing a violent pedagogy6—the strenuous and stern work of missionaries and “humane” educators—firmly implanted in the colonized the necessity and truth of this destiny. Spellbound by a self-serving destiny, Europe overwhelmed those it subjugated with its self-adulation. It chiseled into their heads the “natural” superiority of the West and the desirability of being formed in its image. In this manner, the idea and the destiny it prescribed, were firmly implanted in the self-awareness of sections of the colonized.
A stratum, or layer, of people was thus created—westernized Africa7—that, formed in Europe’s image and by its imperious gaze, sees and understands itself and its place in the world, in subservient terms. Europe converted those it westernized to the view that their subjection was a necessity if their territories were to progress and develop and become places of civilized human habitation. It hammered into their heads the providential and beneficial nature of their subjection. Thus, violent de facto dominance in this manner secured de jure validity.
Colonialist Europe firmly entrenched in the conscious self-awareness of westernized Africa—both explicitly and subliminally—the civilized-uncivilized dichotomy, and convinced this Africa of its shameful deficit within the scope of this all-engulfing and fundamental distinction. As Basil Davidson has pointedly noted: “[M]ost Africans in Western-educated groups…held to the liberal Victorian vision of civilization kindling its light from one new nation to the next, [and] drawing each within its blessed fold, long after the local facts depicted a very different prospect.”8
For example, in 1901, Angolans living in Lisbon, having accepted the self-proclaimed European civilizing idea, published a protest against Portuguese misrule of their country. They noted that: “Portugal had conquered Angola centuries earlier…but [had] done nothing for the people’s welfare.” To this day, “‘the people remain brutalized, as in their former state’ and such neglect,” they maintained, “was an ‘outrage against civilization.’”9 What we have here, ironically, is an immanent critique, by westernized Africans, of the failure of the colonial idea to implement the destiny that it, itself, prescribes. The operative categories of this internal critique are the desirability of “European civilization” and the need to surpass “African barbarism.”
And so, it is implicitly understood and explicitly conceded that pre-colonial Africa was immersed in conditions of utter darkness. This is the operative, internalized “pretext”10 (i.e., the disappointed expectation of advances, to be secured from European rule, by the rightly colonized backward society) that implicitly condones and explicitly justifies colonial conquest. This consenting to the “pretext” of the idea is the “ideological pacification”11 of the colonized. It is the tangible correlate, on the intellectual-cultural level, of the violent physical “pacification” of the initial conquest that predicates the presence of Europe in Africa.
In other words, European colonialism was established in the belief that “superior races” have the privilege and the duty to civilize the less fortunate, “inferior races.” The “ideological pacification” of the colonized occurs when this insidious and humiliating idea is decisively implanted in African psyches and is accepted by Africans as their destiny. As Frantz Fanon put it: “In the colonial context, the colonizer does not stop his work of breaking in [d’éreintement] the colonized until the latter admits loudly and clearly the supremacy of white values.”12 Long after the end of colonialism, this “breaking” goes on paying handsome dividends to our former colonizers. It secures indirect, but effective, hegemonic control of the periphery—that segment of the world which, by virtue of its broken heritage, presently occupies this marginal position. Broken docility! Is this, then, our postcolonial condition?
To date, the most enduring cultural legacy of colonialism has been this broken sector of African society that has internalized the colonial model of human existence and history. This is the segment that, on the whole, rules contemporary Africa. Not grounded in an indigenous history, but the residual dregs of colonial Europe, it has, as the yardstick of its existence, what lies beyond its shores. This is what Fanon refers to as the worship of the “Greco-Latin pedestal.” But what exactly does this mean? Let us look at a specific case.
Léopold Sédar Senghor, writing in 1960—the year of Africa—ardently affirms: “Let us stop denouncing colonialism and Europe….To be sure, conquerors sow ruin in their wake, but they also sow ideas and techniques that germinate and blossom into new harvests.”13 What does this mean? Senghor explains in detail and at length:
When placed again in context, colonization will appear to us as a necessary evil, a historical necessity whence good will emerge, but on the sole condition that we, the colonized of yesterday, become conscious and that we will it. Slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and colonialism are the successive parturitions of History, painful like all parturitions. With the difference that here the child suffers more than the mother. That does not matter. If we are fully conscious of the scope of the Advent, we shall…be more attentive to contributions than defects, to possibilities of rebirth rather than to death and destruction. Without…European depredations, no doubt…Negro Africans…would by now have created more ripe and more succulent fruits. I doubt that they would have caught up so soon with the advances caused in Europe by the Renaissance. The evil of colonization is less these ruptures than that we were deprived of the freedom to choose those European contributions most appropriate to our spirit.14
What speaks in and through Senghor is the stern educational-cultural formation of the colonial past. The destructive effects, of this past, are here presented—by a grateful pupil—as the conditions of the possibility for future beneficial effects, provided that “we, the colonized of yesterday, become conscious” that, to secure for ourselves “the advances caused in Europe by the Renaissance,” such “death and destruction” is necessary.
Indeed, if only that were the case! As former President of Tanzania, Julius K. Nyerere pointed out, Africa’s material inheritance from the colonial period was rather scanty and warped:
At independence, Tanzania or as it was then called, Tanganyika (a country four times the size of Great Britain) had approximately 200 miles of tarmac road, and its “industrial sector” consisted of six factories—including one which employed 50 persons. The countries which had sizeable Settler or mineral extraction communities (such as Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia or Congo) had strong links with the world economy, but their own development was entirely concentrated on servicing the needs of the settlers or the miners in one way or another. Again…at independence less than 50% of Tanzanian children went to school—and then for only four years or less; [and] 85% of its adults were illiterate in any language. The country had only two African engineers, 12 Doctors, and perhaps 30 Arts graduates.15
This can hardly be considered catching up with “the advances caused in Europe by the Renaissance”! Furthermore, in view of the massiveness of the destruction caused by colonial conquest, one could respond to Senghor by repeating Albert Memmi’s rhetorical question: “How can one dare compare the advantages and disadvantages of colonization? What advantages, even if a thousand times more important, could make such internal and external catastrophes acceptable?”16
But beyond Memmi’s question and Nyerere’s marshaling of evidence, it is necessary to note that Senghor’s way of “seeing” falls squarely within the confines of the “idea of service” that informs and directs the colonial project. In his use of the childhood metaphor, in his endorsement of suffering in order to secure future benefits, in his view that colonialism is “a historical necessity whence good will emerge,” in advising attentiveness to colonial contributions without even decrying all that Africa lost in being enslaved and colonized, in his eagerness to “choose” from “European contributions,” in all of this, Senghor parrots the language of the “mission civilisatrice.” His thinking, in other words, is inscribed within the confines of the hubris of the idea that it is the destiny of Africa “to be ruled by the West.”
As Chinua Achebe has noted, there is “a four-hundred-year period from the sixteenth century to the twentieth,” of abusive writing on Africa that has “developed into a tradition with a vast storehouse of lurid images to which writers went again and again through the centuries to draw ‘material’ for their books.”17 This, then, is the systematic deployment of the sedimented and layered conceptions and negative images that constitute the idea of Africa, in the grounding Western imagination. This writing orchestrates the images and consolidates the ordinary notions and conceptions of Africa as a land of heathens in need of civilizing conquest. It does so in the very process of violent interaction with the peoples it depicts in this way. This, then, is what Said refers to as “the epistemology of imperialism,”18 an assemblage of images and notions in terms of which the idea and the destiny it prescribes are articulated and authorized.
It is imperative to note that this “epistemology of imperialism,” finds its ultimate source and authorization, its metaphysical anchoring-stones, in aspects of the thinking of the icons of the modern tradition of Western philosophy. The great minds of this tradition—Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, etc.—all had access to and utilized this “storehouse of lurid images.” In expressing and articulating their differing outlooks, they streamlined the derogatory claims of this “lurid” “storehouse” and gave it currency. They did so by articulating the idea and metaphysically backing the destiny prescribed and validated by the historical conditions of their own philosophizing.19
Behind the many and varied perspectives that constitute the modern Western tradition of philosophy, one finds in varying degree the singular view, a core grounding axiom, that European modernity is, properly speaking, isomorphic with the humanity of the human, per se. As Gianni Vattimo has noted, this is “like saying: we Europeans are the best type [forma] of humanity” and “the whole course of history is structured so as to realize, more or less completely, this ideal.”20 The West sees itself as both the idea and its manifestation! The idea, whose civilizing “pretext,” as noted earlier by Davidson, westernized Africa was made to swallow—hook, line, and sinker—the same idea that directs and controls the logic of Senghor’s considered opinions.
Thus far, in our inventory, we have established that, beyond the end of colonialism, the project of domination, which constitutes its practice, endures in the subservient mode-of-life and self-awareness of westernized Africa. Its staying power is a residual, but tenacious, interiorized extroversion focused on the West.21 It is in this context, then, that we need now to ask the central question: What has been, to date, the character of our postcolonial condition?
Armed with its own sense of itself in political and armed confrontation, Africa, starting in the late 1950s, ended direct colonial rule. It is important to remember that, at the time, this was not something that was given universal acclaim. As Gerald Caplan has noted: “In 1960, a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling for the independence of all colonies was opposed by every European colonial power—Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium and Spain—plus the US and South Africa.”22
It was therefore against tremendous odds that, bit-by-bit, formal independence was secured. In this, Africa, along with the rest of the colonized world that, up to then had been excluded from history, forcefully reinserted itself into the actuality of human historical existence. And the formerly colonizing world, the West, relinquished to the newly independent states the absolute bare minimum, in all aspects of international economics and politics which, to this day, it controls in every respect. To be sure, as Fanon noted, in 1958: “The XXth century, on the scale of the world, will not only be the era of atomic discoveries and interplanetary explorations. The second upheaval of this epoch and incontestably, is the conquest by the peoples of lands that belong to them.”23
Yet when we look back, we see not only great achievements but also, and equally, great disappointments. When we look at our recent history since the days of Fanon, we see the formerly colonized being re-colonized, under various guises. For they have indeed reclaimed the “lands that belong to them” in large measure, however, the formerly colonized have failed to reclaim and control their own historical existence. More than in Asia or Latin America, this is especially true in postcolonial Africa. As one of Sembène Ousmane’s tragic-comic characters confesses, in a rather lucid moment of angst: “We are nothing better than crabs in a basket. We want the ex-occupiers’ place? We have it…Yet what change is there really in general or in particular? The colonialist is stronger, more powerful than ever before, hidden inside us, here in this very place.”24
This, then, is our postcolonial condition: How to purge the colonial residue that still controls, from “inside us,” the actuality of the present? As we noted earlier, using Senghor as an example, this is the residue of colonial Europe’s sense of history and existence; the internalized idea whose traces constitute the deplorable inheritance of our present. Yet today, the falseness of this idea, and of the global destiny it prescribes, is beyond dispute.
What has to be kept in mind is that the demise of colonialism by force of arms and political confrontation has to be, not merely the termination of the physical force that made colonialism possible, but also and more importantly, the end of the hubris that gave it intellectual and moral currency. In agreement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one has to recognize that force—for or against colonialism—does not, and cannot, bestow political or moral sanction on its effects. Such sanction, as in the past, is the work of intellectual reflection.
In our present postcolonial condition, it is imperative to note that the former colonizers, the Western powers, occupy a dominant position not merely through “the force” of their “weapons” but, much more importantly, through the “‘models’ of growth and development” that, they have created, and that “are today adopted everywhere.”25 Colonization did not merely destroy the modes-of-life through which pre-colonial Africa lived its existence; in demolishing pre-colonial Africa, it constituted Africa as a dependent and servile appendage of the West.
Colonization concurrently established the intellectual parameters, the “models of growth and development” that are operative in, and determinative of, the actuality of the present. Within this array of systematically deployed understandings and of methodically amassed knowledge (in and through which humanity interpretatively comprehends itself and regulates its relation with the natural environment), within the symmetry of concepts, models, ideas, and interpretations, that constitute the paradigms26 of knowledge and technical know-how of the human sciences and modern technology, and within this complex assemblage of conceptual instruments of knowledge and its production: To the “vast storehouse of lurid images” has been added the idea of an innately dysfunctional continent, incapable of doing for itself.
The myth of an inherently impaired darker sector of humanity has been preserved and amplified. And the daily news of Africa—genocide, man-made famine, corruption—in an ongoing manner substantiates this idea, or image, of a continent wedded to perdition. In all of this, what is lost sight of is the fact that Africa today, in spite of its independence, is a continent indirectly controlled by the West. Colonialism in Black Face—westernized Africa—is merely a façade, the fig leaf behind which the domination of the West continues unabated. As in the past, this broken segment of contemporary Africa, in its corrupt ineptness, is the conducting line of foreign imposition; the Trojan-horse containing our ongoing defeats. As Martin Plaut, a BBC Africa analyst tells us:
Driving round many African cities one is constantly struck by the blue and white…UN flags and logos. Its white 4 x 4 vehicles are to be found in the most remote corners of the rural areas. Frequently one is left with the impression that UN officials know at least as much, if not more, about [African] countries than [African] government ministers, many of whom spend more time nursing their political careers than their constituents. It is hard to escape the conclusion that if Africa is not being re-colonized by the UN, then it is certainly being run at least as much from New York as it is from most of the continent’s capitals.27
Not rooted in local conditions, the ministers and ministries of African governments are held in place by foreign props,28 lubricated by graft. And so, “Corruption” as Elizabeth Blunt, another BBC Africa analyst tells us, “is costing the continent nearly $150bn a year.”29 To be sure, there is nothing new in all of this. As Fanon noted at the dawn of African independence, “independence”—without eradicating the long-term effects of colonial rule and radically restructuring its actuality to the measure of what it names—can be nothing more than “[a] minimum of readaptation, some reforms at the summit, a flag and, down below, the undivided mass, forever ‘medievalized,’ perpetually marking time.”30
To date, and on the whole, this is the actuality of independent Africa. Each African state has a flag that designates the geographic terrain within which specific westernized elites (Francophone, Anglophone, etc.) live colonial lifestyles at the expense of the vast majority, which is relegated to archaic modes-of-life and frozen in discarded traditions. All of this happens, furthermore, with the implicit and explicit encouragement—the financial and military backing—of the former colonizers. As Said has noted, in this regard: “In effect this really means that just to be an independent postcolonial Arab, or black [African], or Indonesian is not a program, nor a process, nor a vision. It is no more than a convenient starting point from which the real work, the hard work, might begin.”31
Independence, which should have been “a convenient starting point,” was taken as the final moment of Africa reclaiming itself. The “real work, the hard work” subsequent to the formal ending of colonial rule, of cultural, economic, and political restructuring and rethinking of the character and substance of independence, was never undertaken. Instead of this “hard work” a caste of westernized Africans was established in power, and “this cast,” says Fanon, “has done nothing other than to take over unchanged the legacy of the economy, the thought, and the institutions left by the colonialists.” It is this “legacy” that today rules postcolonial Africa and constitutes the actuality of our postcolonial condition.32
The “real work, the hard work,” that Said points to, is the systematic critique of this “legacy,” aimed at seeing beyond the “models of growth and development” that mask, constitute, institute, and sustain dominance. For it is through ideas and concepts that the “legacy” of colonialism still rules the present. The “real work” is then, on the one hand, this systemic critique of the Occidental tradition that sustains these “models” and concurrently, on the other hand, a critical sifting through traditions—European and African—aimed at a new synthesis.
This is what Amilcar Cabral refers to as “a selective analysis of the values of the culture within the framework” of our needs and exigencies.33 It is in this way that we can properly engage our contemporary situation and further advance the ongoing decolonization of Africa. The aim in all of this is not to reject the West, nor merely to embrace our indigenousness, but to cultivate and develop a concrete synthesis, in view of the needs of our lived present. In this, the aim is to bypass the residue of our colonial past, the “models of growth and development” that perpetuate Western hegemony and are the core of our postcolonial condition. This bypassing, in tandem with exploring the possibilities of our de facto hybrid heritage, can possibly create the context in which we can directly affect, for the better, the lived existence of the vast majority of the people of Africa. For, at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is the character of the lived existence we strive toward, and help to bring about.
Unlike the West, Africa experienced modernization, not as the result of an internal process of historical transformation, but of conquest; and so, our postcolonial present, in order to measure up to its claims, must consciously institute such a process of change: a process of transformation that emerges in responding to local needs. Our postcolonial present has to be a period of time in which the achievement of independence is consolidated by the cultural-material transformation of the formerly colonized territory aimed at its socio-economic viability and the practical-concrete development of mass-participatory forms of democratic governance. These must be forms of democratic self-rule that are transparent and utilize formal procedures and methods, and are grounded in our specific struggles and differing histories.34
Just as Christianity and civilization once served the purposes of conquest and empire, “good-governance,” “global stability,” “development,” “economic growth,” “international cooperation,” “food aid,” “cultural exchange programs,” “human rights,” “rule of law,” etc., are implicitly related to the schemes in and through which the West now perpetuates its hegemony. These code-words are utilized to prolong Western preeminence beyond the colonial past. The challenge of our present is to discover how to conceptualize and think through the real concerns camouflaged by these code-words, while warding off the dominance that they are used to implement.
The challenge we face is that of thinking through the possibility of dislodging Western hegemony, in tandem with articulating counter-conceptions that affirm our freedom. In engaging the issues and concerns camouflaged and named by the above code-words, our efforts have to be directed at contesting established subservience, while inventing the forms of a truly postcolonial, democratic existence. The West today sustains its power by orchestrating the ideas with which it “seeded” our past (remember Senghor!). We need to find ways of seeing beyond this “seeding.” In this regard, the only thing we can say categorically, borrowing the words of the young Marx, is that “we do not anticipate” the future “with our dogmas” but rather “attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old.”35
As Gramsci tells us, the task of an inventory is to sift through the infinity of traces that constitute the actuality of our lived existence; to lay out a critical-methodic exploration of the past, in terms of present concerns, and in view of a desirable future; and to consolidate our independence, while discarding the residual impediments that are, to date, the actuality of our postcolonial condition. For, as Herbert Marcuse noted long ago, this condition,
is not the old colonialism and imperialism (although in some aspects, the contrast has been overdrawn: [for] there is little essential difference between a direct government by the metropolitan power, and a native government which functions only by grace of a metropolitan power). The objective rationale for the global struggle is not the need for immediate capital export, resources, [or] surplus exploitation. It is rather the danger of subversion of the established hierarchy of Master and Servant, Top and Bottom, a hierarchy which has created and sustained the have-nations, Capitalist and Communist.36
At present, we need not worry about “actually existing socialism”: it has imploded as a result of its own internal contradictions. What remain are the “have-nations” of the capitalist West which, using differing “pretexts,” intend to keep in place, and in perpetuity, this “hierarchy of Master and Servant, Top and Bottom.” The challenge is to confront this “hierarchy” on the level of ideas and bypass it, on the level of practical actuality, by concretely cultivating, and actively tending to, our democratic heritage.
Notes
1. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni Del Carcere, vol. 2, edizione critica dell’Instituto Gramsci, a cura di Valentino Gerratana (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1975), 1376.
2. Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (Paris, France: Présence Africaine, 1969), 171-72.
3. Edward W. Said, The Pen and the Sword, conversations with David Barsamian (Monroe, ME:
Common Courage Press, 1994), emphasis added, 66.
4. Said, The Pen and the Sword, 68.
5. Anne Hugon, The Exploration of Africa (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 19.
6. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L’aventure ambiguë (Paris: Julliard, 1961). This work of historical fiction is an excellent illustration of the castrating effects of this pedagogy.
7. On this point see also my discussion of “Europeanized” and “non-Europeanized” in “African Philosophy: The Point in Question,” African Philosophy: The Essential Readings, edited by Tsenay Serequeberhan (New York: Paragon, 1991), 8-9. Through a critical self-reflection (Fanon and Cabral are our prime examples) a westernized, or Europeanized, African can critically question his/her subordinate relation to European culture and history. This is one of the central themes of my book, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1994).
8. Basil Davidson, Africa in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 82-83.
9. Ibid., 43.
10. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 18. The use Lyotard makes of this term is akin to what I have referred to as the stance of false double negation in my book, Our Heritage (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 62.
11. I borrow this formulation from Said, The Pen and the Sword, 67.
12. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 43.
13. Léopold Sédar Senghor, On African Socialism, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1964), 80, 81.
14. Ibid., 82.
15. Julius K. Nyerere, “Africa: The Current Situation,” African Philosophy 11, no. 1 (June 1998), 8.
16. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1965), 118.
17. Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 26-27.
18. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 376.
19. On this, see my book, Contested Memory: The Icons of the Occidental Tradition (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007).
20. Gianni Vattimo, La società trasparente (Milan: Garzanti, 1989), 10.
21. On this, see “Africanity at the End of the 20th Century,” African Philosophy 11, no. 1 (1998).
22. Gerald Caplan, The Betrayal of Africa (Toronto, Canada: Groundwood Books, 2008), 34.
23. Frantz Fanon, “Vérités premiéres à propos du probléme colonial” (originally published in El Moudjahid, no. 27, July 22, 1958), in Pour la revolution africaine (Paris: François Maspero, 1964), 141.
24. Sembène Ousmane, Xala (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1976), emphasis added, 84.
25. Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, edited by David Ames Curtis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 200-01. In full, Castoriadis states: “Factually speaking, the West has been and remains victorious—and not only through the force of its weapons: it remains so through its ideas, through its “models” of growth and development, through the statist and other structures which, having been created by it, are today adopted everywhere.”
26. I am thinking of this term in the way that Thomas S. Kuhn established it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
27. Martin Plaut, “The UN’s all-pervasive role in Africa,” BBC News, 18 July 2007, (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6903196.stm), 2.
28. As Kwame Nkrumah noted long ago: “Although apparently strong because of their support from neocolonialists and imperialists, they are extremely vulnerable. Their survival depends on foreign support. Once this vital link is broken, they become powerless to maintain their positions and privileges.” Class Struggle in Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 12. A case in point is Mengistu Hailemariam’s Ethiopia that had to switch patrons, from the United States to the USSR, as a result of President Carter’s “human rights” oriented foreign policy. When the Carter administration made it difficult for Mengistu to secure arms—in order to squash domestic opposition and, more urgently, to prosecute the colonial war in Eritrea—he became, overnight, a Marxist-Leninist and realigned Ethiopia with the USSR, in the then-raging Cold War. Soon thereafter, with the demise of the USSR, Mengistu’s military dictatorship, lacking a foreign prop to protect it from the righteous wrath of the Eritrean Resistance, collapsed.
29. Elizabeth Blunt, “Corruption ‘costs Africa billions,’” BBC News, September 18, 2002, 02:32 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2265387.stm), 1.
30. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 147.
31. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 379.
32. Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, 117; The Wretched of the Earth, 176, emphasis added. For a recent discussion of the enduring relevance of Fanon, for thinking the political situation of contemporary Africa, see Lewis R. Gordon’s An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 220-48.
33. Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 52.
34. Here, I have in mind the precedent of Democratic Chile, the Chile of Salvador Allende. For a concise discussion of differing conceptions of democracy, see C.B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
35. Karl Marx, from a letter to Arnold Ruge (September 1843), Early Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 207.
36. Herbert Marcuse, The Essential Marcuse, Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss, eds. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 10. As if to confirm the above observation, Henry Kissinger (then U.S. Secretary of State), in a 1970 memo to Richard Nixon on Allende’s Chile, states: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact—and even precedent value for—other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our position in it.” As quoted by Naomi Klein in “Latin America’s Shock Resistance,” The Nation, November 2007, 28
A solar lamp to light up Haitian homes
Asia Times Online (6 August 2005)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GH06Df01.html
Aishwarya lights Africa with solar flairBy Sanjay Suri
LONDON - The sun is shining on this particularly globalized project: an Indian has been encouraged by a British award to begin manufacturing solar lamps in China with material sourced in Japan to sell to South Africa and Australia.
But until recently, Dharmappa Barki, who lives in Secunderabad in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, did not have the kindest things to say about globalization. When he won the Ashden awards, with a prize of almost US$50,000, Barki realized the difference between the globalized world of aircraft flying overhead and the dark world of many Indian villages below.
Barki has sought to dispel some of that darkness with a solar lamp he has manufactured, named the Aishwarya after India's best-known actress, Aishwarya Rai. He has sold so far more than 50,000 lamps produced at his company, NEST (Nobal Energy Solar Technologies). Aishwarya is not the first solar lamp, but it is a particularly efficient one. Priced Rs1,400 ($32), it provides three hours of good light a day. Its battery is guaranteed for three years and its solar panel for 10. The lamp, which has a bright and constant white light, has found many takers because it is backed by microcredit. Instead of a down payment of Rs1,400, buyers can pay Rs100 a month over 16 months. The Ashden award for renewable energy presented to Barki last month has done wonders for him. "There's been a huge interest in his product as a result of the awards," said Jo Walton from the Ashden awards trust in London.
"I am receiving a lot of new business inquiries," said Barki. Several new orders are in the pipeline already as a result, he said. "That includes three companies in Sri Lanka, one in Pakistan, one in Somalia and one in Australia," he said. These deals are all close to completion, according to him. But Barki has been negotiating one of his biggest projects even before the award. "I have a confirmed order for 1 million solar lanterns from South Africa over a period of two years. We are just working out the last details over pricing."
For manufacturing on that scale, Barki has worked out an agreement with a company in China. "I am getting a 40% advantage in manufacturing costs in China compared to India," he said. A difficulty has been procuring the silicon seed stock need to manufacture the solar panel on the lamp. For that Barki has entered into an alliance with a Japanese company. "This was crucial because there is a shortage of silicon seed stock around the world because of the very high demand and consumption in Germany," Barki said. "People like us are not getting enough supply, and we would never be able to meet demand without this product. Fortunately we have been able to source it from Japan. Our turnover last year was about Rs2 crore (US$500,000)," he said. Given the huge new orders in the pipeline, Barki is clearly well on the way to becoming the Bill Gates of solar lanterns.
Barki says he named his lamp Aishwarya because the actress is "a combination of beauty and brains". Many would only half-agree with him, but there can be little doubt that both Aishwaryas have found extraordinary success. The solar lamps provide a smoke-free source of light to villagers who have no access to electricity. The use of such lamps has revolutionized the lives of thousands of such people.
Barki set up his NEST in 1998, and has never looked back since he created his Aishwarya in 2001. His aim was to produce a lamp portable enough so that one could serve a whole family, and robust enough to withstand uses as varied as children poring over their studies, farmers milking a buffalo, or stallholders lighting their wares in the market. What began as a "made in India" operation is now set to acquire global inputs and find a global reach.
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GH06Df01.html
Aishwarya lights Africa with solar flairBy Sanjay Suri
LONDON - The sun is shining on this particularly globalized project: an Indian has been encouraged by a British award to begin manufacturing solar lamps in China with material sourced in Japan to sell to South Africa and Australia.
But until recently, Dharmappa Barki, who lives in Secunderabad in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, did not have the kindest things to say about globalization. When he won the Ashden awards, with a prize of almost US$50,000, Barki realized the difference between the globalized world of aircraft flying overhead and the dark world of many Indian villages below.
Barki has sought to dispel some of that darkness with a solar lamp he has manufactured, named the Aishwarya after India's best-known actress, Aishwarya Rai. He has sold so far more than 50,000 lamps produced at his company, NEST (Nobal Energy Solar Technologies). Aishwarya is not the first solar lamp, but it is a particularly efficient one. Priced Rs1,400 ($32), it provides three hours of good light a day. Its battery is guaranteed for three years and its solar panel for 10. The lamp, which has a bright and constant white light, has found many takers because it is backed by microcredit. Instead of a down payment of Rs1,400, buyers can pay Rs100 a month over 16 months. The Ashden award for renewable energy presented to Barki last month has done wonders for him. "There's been a huge interest in his product as a result of the awards," said Jo Walton from the Ashden awards trust in London.
"I am receiving a lot of new business inquiries," said Barki. Several new orders are in the pipeline already as a result, he said. "That includes three companies in Sri Lanka, one in Pakistan, one in Somalia and one in Australia," he said. These deals are all close to completion, according to him. But Barki has been negotiating one of his biggest projects even before the award. "I have a confirmed order for 1 million solar lanterns from South Africa over a period of two years. We are just working out the last details over pricing."
For manufacturing on that scale, Barki has worked out an agreement with a company in China. "I am getting a 40% advantage in manufacturing costs in China compared to India," he said. A difficulty has been procuring the silicon seed stock need to manufacture the solar panel on the lamp. For that Barki has entered into an alliance with a Japanese company. "This was crucial because there is a shortage of silicon seed stock around the world because of the very high demand and consumption in Germany," Barki said. "People like us are not getting enough supply, and we would never be able to meet demand without this product. Fortunately we have been able to source it from Japan. Our turnover last year was about Rs2 crore (US$500,000)," he said. Given the huge new orders in the pipeline, Barki is clearly well on the way to becoming the Bill Gates of solar lanterns.
Barki says he named his lamp Aishwarya because the actress is "a combination of beauty and brains". Many would only half-agree with him, but there can be little doubt that both Aishwaryas have found extraordinary success. The solar lamps provide a smoke-free source of light to villagers who have no access to electricity. The use of such lamps has revolutionized the lives of thousands of such people.
Barki set up his NEST in 1998, and has never looked back since he created his Aishwarya in 2001. His aim was to produce a lamp portable enough so that one could serve a whole family, and robust enough to withstand uses as varied as children poring over their studies, farmers milking a buffalo, or stallholders lighting their wares in the market. What began as a "made in India" operation is now set to acquire global inputs and find a global reach.
(Inter Press Service)
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Innovating our way out of underdevelopment -- The Indian example
Asia Times Online (29 January 2010)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LA29Df03.html
India's rural inventors drive change
By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI - Mansukh Prajapati invented a first-of-a-kind refrigerator that is made out of terracotta, works without electricity, costs US$53 and is selling in the thousands. It's a sample of an innovation wave from rural and small-town India enriching the world with common-sense products.
Anil Gupta, a professor at India's premier business school, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, leads a pioneering tribe of technocrats working for no-frills change at the mass level, by harnessing knowledge wealth from economically weaker sections of society.
"Being economically poor does not mean being knowledge-poor," Gupta told Asia Times Online. "But the poor who are at the bottom of the economic pyramid are often considered as being at the bottom of the knowledge pyramid as well. Nothing could be further from the truth."
To prove the truth that wisdom does not depend on university degrees, Gupta's 21-year-old Honey Bee Network has compiled an unprecedented database of 140,000 innovations created by farmers, villagers and small-town inventors. Many have no formal education or technical training. Teams of Honey Bee volunteers scout across India to hunt out local innovations, inventions and traditional knowledge practices.
The Honey Bee Network of rural and small-town inventors, academics, scientists, entrepreneurs, policymakers and volunteers gather, pool, develop and share know-how from a mass-based, much-ignored source. India's heart beats in its villages, and the country is entering a phase of listening to its heartbeat.
Gupta, who is also a visiting professor of innovation management in emerging markets at the European Business School, Frankfurt, Germany, coordinates the Honey Bee Network. In turn, the network connects with other supporting agencies in India, such as the National Innovation Foundation, Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions, the Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network, Innovation Club and the Network of Rural Universities.
The inter-connected agencies help test grassroots inventions, file for patents, find investors to develop, produce and market eco-friendly, cheaper new products. The small inventors have a chance to profit from their creativity.
"Most of the innovations in our database are open source and shared freely," said Gupta. "But if needed, we help innovators file for patents for innovations that are commercially viable." He points to Honey Bee inventors even procuring patents in the United States, with its strict patents regimen, proving the quality of technical talent available at the grassroots level.
Prajapati, a clay potter from the western state of Gujarat, is a typical success case from this new tribe of innovators with supporting angels to guide them to commercially producing their inventions.
Prajapati invented low-cost refrigeration in a country where the fridge remains out of reach of lower, middle-income groups and the poor. The Mitti Cool, made out of terracotta, an unglazed clay-based ceramic, uses an age-old practice still common in India of earthen-clay pots keeping water refreshingly below room temperature. Prajapati developed the earthen pot-cooling effect to produce a fridge that keeps food, vegetables, even milk, fresh for days, requires no maintenance, needs no electricity and costs $53, with shipping charges extra.
Prajapati's bigger success is his $1 non-stick frying pan made out of clay. It's a healthier, safer, cheaper version of non-stick utensils compared with the conventional teflon-coated chemical variety.
Gupta, who in 2007 became an honorary professor at China's Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, says cost-effective, locally sustainable grassroots innovation is the way forward to source new technologies and ideas in a global economy, to serve more people.
"It is now realized that mere reliance on market forces will not work to fill innovation gaps or to disseminate innovative ideas, products and services among disadvantaged segments of the population," says Gupta's nine-page paper "Grassroots Green Innovations for Inclusive Sustainable Development".
Such sustainable, ready-to-order inventions from the Honey Bee database range across 34 categories. They include agricultural tools and techniques, water conservation, health, education innovation, food and nutrition, traditional medicines and industrial and household goods.
Farmer Mansukh Jagani invented a motorcycle-driven ploughing machine for fields in a drought-hit region where most farmers can barely afford tractors or bullocks. Uttam Patil invented matchsticks made of natural fibers sourced from agricultural waste.
Bachu Thesia invented a long-lasting electric bulb that withstands short-circuits. When thieves began pinching the cost-saving bulbs from households and fields, Thesia inserted a slip of paper with the name of the owner into the glass bulb to help identify those that were stolen.
The Honey Bee Network, which has a presence in 75 countries, aims to prevent exploitation of traditional knowledge; multinational biotechnology corporations, for example, are accused of patenting traditional Indian medicinal knowledge such as neem and turmeric.
"Honey Bee, true to its metaphor, has been the source of pollination and cross-pollination of ideas, creativity and grassroots genius, without taking away the nectar from the flower forever," says the introductory note on the Honey Bee website.
Thousands of such ideas and products are feeding other innovation networks across India. The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chennai, part of the globally renowned IIT centers established across India, operates the "Rural Technology & Business Incubator" agency to "design, develop, and bring about innovations that would fit to most of our rural needs".
Digital Green, a Microsoft Research India project, helps increase the productivity of small farmers through low-cost information exchange, such as personal interactions among farmers and with experts. Digital Green videotapes agricultural improvements by farmers in a village and shares the innovations with other villages. The You-Tube-like information sharing aims to help small farmers across the developing world.
Highly qualified technocrats work with farmers for mutual benefit. Bangalore-based Digital Green's chief executive, Rikin Gandhi, for instance, is a computer engineer with a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born and brought up in the US, Gandhi represents a reverse-migration back to India, to help serve the country at the grassroots level.
Such change could happen faster with greater corporate common sense. Gupta said one of the major challenges was convincing big companies to invest in research and development in grassroots inventions and benefit from them.
Companies that take the plunge are making their investors happy. Mumbai-based Marico, makers of the popular Parachute coconut oil brand, found a farmer in the south Indian state of Kerala who invented a device to more safely and quickly climb coconut trees to pick the lucrative nuts.
Marico chief executive Harsh Mariwala teamed up with India's Coconut Development Board to turn the prototype into a commercially viable machine, according to a Harvard Business Review posting dated April 13, 2009. Marico then used its nation-wide network to distribute the machine to its hundreds of coconut oil suppliers. Coconut oil productivity increased, as have Marico's profits, which surged to $40.6 million last June from $12.6 million five years earlier.
Other innovation networks with a rural base are thriving across the country. The Chennai city-based Villagro calls itself a "mass transformation movement with singular objective: to create a prosperous rural India, buzzing with ideas for growth, and transform rural lives through innovations". Villagro says it has activated nearly 1,500 innovations since 2001, and benefited more than 130,000 lives in rural India.
Navi Radjou, executive director of the Center for India & Global Business at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, noticed the innovation wave during a recent trip to India. "What struck us most during this field trip is that most Indian innovators - both large and small - are now single-mindedly targeting the rural market, which accounts for 70% of India's population," Radjou said in the Harvard Business Review this month.
Radjou, who previously led the Forrester Research team on global innovation, calls for "turbocharging" India's growth by building a National Innovation Network, with public-private partnerships between grassroots entrepreneurs and large corporations.
Innovation gurus such as Professor Gupta are emphatic about grassroots knowledge bridging social and economic divides. "Some people think in terms of surviving the next day, while others have the luxury of being able to plan for the next century," he says. "When these time horizons converge, we will have a society in which the skills, knowledge and resources in which poor people are rich are validated more fully."
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LA29Df03.html
India's rural inventors drive change
By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI - Mansukh Prajapati invented a first-of-a-kind refrigerator that is made out of terracotta, works without electricity, costs US$53 and is selling in the thousands. It's a sample of an innovation wave from rural and small-town India enriching the world with common-sense products.
Anil Gupta, a professor at India's premier business school, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, leads a pioneering tribe of technocrats working for no-frills change at the mass level, by harnessing knowledge wealth from economically weaker sections of society.
"Being economically poor does not mean being knowledge-poor," Gupta told Asia Times Online. "But the poor who are at the bottom of the economic pyramid are often considered as being at the bottom of the knowledge pyramid as well. Nothing could be further from the truth."
To prove the truth that wisdom does not depend on university degrees, Gupta's 21-year-old Honey Bee Network has compiled an unprecedented database of 140,000 innovations created by farmers, villagers and small-town inventors. Many have no formal education or technical training. Teams of Honey Bee volunteers scout across India to hunt out local innovations, inventions and traditional knowledge practices.
The Honey Bee Network of rural and small-town inventors, academics, scientists, entrepreneurs, policymakers and volunteers gather, pool, develop and share know-how from a mass-based, much-ignored source. India's heart beats in its villages, and the country is entering a phase of listening to its heartbeat.
Gupta, who is also a visiting professor of innovation management in emerging markets at the European Business School, Frankfurt, Germany, coordinates the Honey Bee Network. In turn, the network connects with other supporting agencies in India, such as the National Innovation Foundation, Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions, the Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network, Innovation Club and the Network of Rural Universities.
The inter-connected agencies help test grassroots inventions, file for patents, find investors to develop, produce and market eco-friendly, cheaper new products. The small inventors have a chance to profit from their creativity.
"Most of the innovations in our database are open source and shared freely," said Gupta. "But if needed, we help innovators file for patents for innovations that are commercially viable." He points to Honey Bee inventors even procuring patents in the United States, with its strict patents regimen, proving the quality of technical talent available at the grassroots level.
Prajapati, a clay potter from the western state of Gujarat, is a typical success case from this new tribe of innovators with supporting angels to guide them to commercially producing their inventions.
Prajapati invented low-cost refrigeration in a country where the fridge remains out of reach of lower, middle-income groups and the poor. The Mitti Cool, made out of terracotta, an unglazed clay-based ceramic, uses an age-old practice still common in India of earthen-clay pots keeping water refreshingly below room temperature. Prajapati developed the earthen pot-cooling effect to produce a fridge that keeps food, vegetables, even milk, fresh for days, requires no maintenance, needs no electricity and costs $53, with shipping charges extra.
Prajapati's bigger success is his $1 non-stick frying pan made out of clay. It's a healthier, safer, cheaper version of non-stick utensils compared with the conventional teflon-coated chemical variety.
Gupta, who in 2007 became an honorary professor at China's Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, says cost-effective, locally sustainable grassroots innovation is the way forward to source new technologies and ideas in a global economy, to serve more people.
"It is now realized that mere reliance on market forces will not work to fill innovation gaps or to disseminate innovative ideas, products and services among disadvantaged segments of the population," says Gupta's nine-page paper "Grassroots Green Innovations for Inclusive Sustainable Development".
Such sustainable, ready-to-order inventions from the Honey Bee database range across 34 categories. They include agricultural tools and techniques, water conservation, health, education innovation, food and nutrition, traditional medicines and industrial and household goods.
Farmer Mansukh Jagani invented a motorcycle-driven ploughing machine for fields in a drought-hit region where most farmers can barely afford tractors or bullocks. Uttam Patil invented matchsticks made of natural fibers sourced from agricultural waste.
Bachu Thesia invented a long-lasting electric bulb that withstands short-circuits. When thieves began pinching the cost-saving bulbs from households and fields, Thesia inserted a slip of paper with the name of the owner into the glass bulb to help identify those that were stolen.
The Honey Bee Network, which has a presence in 75 countries, aims to prevent exploitation of traditional knowledge; multinational biotechnology corporations, for example, are accused of patenting traditional Indian medicinal knowledge such as neem and turmeric.
"Honey Bee, true to its metaphor, has been the source of pollination and cross-pollination of ideas, creativity and grassroots genius, without taking away the nectar from the flower forever," says the introductory note on the Honey Bee website.
Thousands of such ideas and products are feeding other innovation networks across India. The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chennai, part of the globally renowned IIT centers established across India, operates the "Rural Technology & Business Incubator" agency to "design, develop, and bring about innovations that would fit to most of our rural needs".
Digital Green, a Microsoft Research India project, helps increase the productivity of small farmers through low-cost information exchange, such as personal interactions among farmers and with experts. Digital Green videotapes agricultural improvements by farmers in a village and shares the innovations with other villages. The You-Tube-like information sharing aims to help small farmers across the developing world.
Highly qualified technocrats work with farmers for mutual benefit. Bangalore-based Digital Green's chief executive, Rikin Gandhi, for instance, is a computer engineer with a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born and brought up in the US, Gandhi represents a reverse-migration back to India, to help serve the country at the grassroots level.
Such change could happen faster with greater corporate common sense. Gupta said one of the major challenges was convincing big companies to invest in research and development in grassroots inventions and benefit from them.
Companies that take the plunge are making their investors happy. Mumbai-based Marico, makers of the popular Parachute coconut oil brand, found a farmer in the south Indian state of Kerala who invented a device to more safely and quickly climb coconut trees to pick the lucrative nuts.
Marico chief executive Harsh Mariwala teamed up with India's Coconut Development Board to turn the prototype into a commercially viable machine, according to a Harvard Business Review posting dated April 13, 2009. Marico then used its nation-wide network to distribute the machine to its hundreds of coconut oil suppliers. Coconut oil productivity increased, as have Marico's profits, which surged to $40.6 million last June from $12.6 million five years earlier.
Other innovation networks with a rural base are thriving across the country. The Chennai city-based Villagro calls itself a "mass transformation movement with singular objective: to create a prosperous rural India, buzzing with ideas for growth, and transform rural lives through innovations". Villagro says it has activated nearly 1,500 innovations since 2001, and benefited more than 130,000 lives in rural India.
Navi Radjou, executive director of the Center for India & Global Business at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, noticed the innovation wave during a recent trip to India. "What struck us most during this field trip is that most Indian innovators - both large and small - are now single-mindedly targeting the rural market, which accounts for 70% of India's population," Radjou said in the Harvard Business Review this month.
Radjou, who previously led the Forrester Research team on global innovation, calls for "turbocharging" India's growth by building a National Innovation Network, with public-private partnerships between grassroots entrepreneurs and large corporations.
Innovation gurus such as Professor Gupta are emphatic about grassroots knowledge bridging social and economic divides. "Some people think in terms of surviving the next day, while others have the luxury of being able to plan for the next century," he says. "When these time horizons converge, we will have a society in which the skills, knowledge and resources in which poor people are rich are validated more fully."
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Cancel Haiti's Debt
Published on Thursday, January 28, 2010 by YES! Magazine
Cancel Haiti's Debt
There's a growing movement to cancel Haiti's foreign debt as a way to return to the Haitian people the authority to rebuild their lives and their country.
by Sarah van Gelder
Haiti has a painful history with debt. When it won its independence in 1804 - just the second country in the hemisphere to do so - it was required to pay restitution to France. Haiti went millions of dollars (billions in today's dollars) into debt to compensate the French for their loss of property - including the lost profits from slave trading. Only by paying this restitution could Haiti end a crippling embargo by the French, British, and Americans. Money that the new government might have invested in building a new nation poured into loan payments that continued until the loan was paid off in 1947.
Today, in the wake of the earthquake that has flattened Port-au-Prince and killed more than 150,000, there is a quickly growing movement to forgive Haiti's nearly $1 billion debt, and to insure that aid to earthquake victims takes the form of grants, not more loans.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced this week that he is canceling Haiti's $295 million debt to Petrocaribe, Venezuela's energy regional energy distributor. "Haiti has no debt with Venezuela - on the contrary, it is Venezuela that has a historic debt with Haiti," Chavez said. Chavez was referring to Haiti's historic assistance to Simón Bolívar, who led Venezuela's war of independence.
Also this week, the anti-poverty group, One, handed over a petition with 150,000 signatures to the International Monetary Fund. The petition asks that the IMF cancel Haiti's $165 million debt repayment obligation when the board meets later this week. "Swift action by the IMF would increase momentum and pressure on all creditors," One said in a statement.
The head of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, plans to bring a plea for debt cancellation to the World Economic Summit meeting in Davos, Switzerland, later this week.
Noting that more than half of Haiti's debt stemmed from loans extended to the "brutal father-son dictatorship of Francois ('Papa Doc') and Jean-Claude ('Baby Doc') Duvalier," a WCC statement says: "Many of these loans did not benefit the people of Haiti. The Duvaliers appropriated tens of millions from the national treasury in their almost 30-year stay in power from 1957-1986."
The WCC also warned the IMF against "imposing detrimental economic policy conditions on the country such as the privatization of public services." Such conditions are frequently part of IMF and World Bank lending, and advocates for the poor point out that those conditions frequently undermine democratic governance and economic well-being.
The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, a brand new organization, has posted a petition that likewise calls for the cancellation of debt.
Jubilee USA, a group that has led other debt cancellation efforts, called on President Obama to press international lending agencies to make grants, not loans, and to place a moratorium on all debt payments. "All of Haiti's limited resources should be directed at recovery, not repayment," the group said in a statement.
Natural disasters and human suffering should not be used to open doors to outside interference in Haitian affairs, which history tells us would extend the suffering. Debt is one of the key ways that such influence is often accomplished, along with military occupation and the "shock doctrine" author Naomi Klein so clearly describes.
Dr. Joia Mukherjee, of Paul Farmer's famous group, Partners in Health, described what was needed during a conference call on Tuesday: The solutions to Haiti's problems will come from the Haitian people and from the government they choose, she said. "The greatest resource of Haiti is the indomitable spirit of the Haitian people," she said. But they must be unshackled from international debt.
Note: My January 13 blog lists organizations that need your donations to help the Haitian people.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Sarah van Gelder is the Executive Editor of YES! Magazine.
Cancel Haiti's Debt
There's a growing movement to cancel Haiti's foreign debt as a way to return to the Haitian people the authority to rebuild their lives and their country.
by Sarah van Gelder
Haiti has a painful history with debt. When it won its independence in 1804 - just the second country in the hemisphere to do so - it was required to pay restitution to France. Haiti went millions of dollars (billions in today's dollars) into debt to compensate the French for their loss of property - including the lost profits from slave trading. Only by paying this restitution could Haiti end a crippling embargo by the French, British, and Americans. Money that the new government might have invested in building a new nation poured into loan payments that continued until the loan was paid off in 1947.
Today, in the wake of the earthquake that has flattened Port-au-Prince and killed more than 150,000, there is a quickly growing movement to forgive Haiti's nearly $1 billion debt, and to insure that aid to earthquake victims takes the form of grants, not more loans.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced this week that he is canceling Haiti's $295 million debt to Petrocaribe, Venezuela's energy regional energy distributor. "Haiti has no debt with Venezuela - on the contrary, it is Venezuela that has a historic debt with Haiti," Chavez said. Chavez was referring to Haiti's historic assistance to Simón Bolívar, who led Venezuela's war of independence.
Also this week, the anti-poverty group, One, handed over a petition with 150,000 signatures to the International Monetary Fund. The petition asks that the IMF cancel Haiti's $165 million debt repayment obligation when the board meets later this week. "Swift action by the IMF would increase momentum and pressure on all creditors," One said in a statement.
The head of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, plans to bring a plea for debt cancellation to the World Economic Summit meeting in Davos, Switzerland, later this week.
Noting that more than half of Haiti's debt stemmed from loans extended to the "brutal father-son dictatorship of Francois ('Papa Doc') and Jean-Claude ('Baby Doc') Duvalier," a WCC statement says: "Many of these loans did not benefit the people of Haiti. The Duvaliers appropriated tens of millions from the national treasury in their almost 30-year stay in power from 1957-1986."
The WCC also warned the IMF against "imposing detrimental economic policy conditions on the country such as the privatization of public services." Such conditions are frequently part of IMF and World Bank lending, and advocates for the poor point out that those conditions frequently undermine democratic governance and economic well-being.
The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, a brand new organization, has posted a petition that likewise calls for the cancellation of debt.
Jubilee USA, a group that has led other debt cancellation efforts, called on President Obama to press international lending agencies to make grants, not loans, and to place a moratorium on all debt payments. "All of Haiti's limited resources should be directed at recovery, not repayment," the group said in a statement.
Natural disasters and human suffering should not be used to open doors to outside interference in Haitian affairs, which history tells us would extend the suffering. Debt is one of the key ways that such influence is often accomplished, along with military occupation and the "shock doctrine" author Naomi Klein so clearly describes.
Dr. Joia Mukherjee, of Paul Farmer's famous group, Partners in Health, described what was needed during a conference call on Tuesday: The solutions to Haiti's problems will come from the Haitian people and from the government they choose, she said. "The greatest resource of Haiti is the indomitable spirit of the Haitian people," she said. But they must be unshackled from international debt.
Note: My January 13 blog lists organizations that need your donations to help the Haitian people.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Sarah van Gelder is the Executive Editor of YES! Magazine.
Haiti Phoenix a Clearing House of Ideas
In the wake of the devastating January 12 earthquake, I have reactivated my one-year old blog, Haiti Phoenix. It has laid dormant these last nine months, its solitary post accusatorily pricking my guilty conscience. Now is the time to awake it from its inexcusable slumber.
As Haitians turn to the task of reconstruction of their devastated physical, social, and economic landscape with their legendary stoicism, what they will need more than anything else will be ideas, imaginative solutions to the many challenges the country has been facing in these last two centuries.
To stimulate the collective imagination and inspire action, I am turning Haiti Phoenix into a clearing house of ideas. Once a week I will be posting information garnered from my readings and from various web sources in the hope that such information might prove useful to organizations and individuals involved in the arduous enterprise of nation building. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. Many of the ideas posted on Haiti Phoenix will have been tried and applied elsewhere, in social, economic, political, and cultural contexts similar to the Haitian milieu.
I welcome contributions from Haitian compatriots and others who wish to share their own or others’ ideas for the resurrection of Haiti with Haiti Phoenix readers.
Please send your comments and texts to christophehenry1@hotmail.com .
As Haitians turn to the task of reconstruction of their devastated physical, social, and economic landscape with their legendary stoicism, what they will need more than anything else will be ideas, imaginative solutions to the many challenges the country has been facing in these last two centuries.
To stimulate the collective imagination and inspire action, I am turning Haiti Phoenix into a clearing house of ideas. Once a week I will be posting information garnered from my readings and from various web sources in the hope that such information might prove useful to organizations and individuals involved in the arduous enterprise of nation building. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. Many of the ideas posted on Haiti Phoenix will have been tried and applied elsewhere, in social, economic, political, and cultural contexts similar to the Haitian milieu.
I welcome contributions from Haitian compatriots and others who wish to share their own or others’ ideas for the resurrection of Haiti with Haiti Phoenix readers.
Please send your comments and texts to christophehenry1@hotmail.com .
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Rebuilding Haiti's Earthquake Struck Cities: Shipping Containers Turned Into Beautiful Homes
Young firm turns shipping containers into home
Sept. 23, 2008 01:19 PMThe Associated Press
Sept. 23, 2008 01:19 PMThe Associated Press
CORRALES, N.M. - It was a side trip through a destitute, ramshackle neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, that detoured Brian McCarthy from building houses in Albuquerque to an idea to offer the very poor a chance to own a home. His answer lies in a humble steel shipping container, 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, 8 1/2 feet tall.
McCarthy, 30, and three partners, Pablo Nava, 22; Kyle Annen, 23; and Mackenzie Bishop, 22, have made a prototype out of a standard shipping container that hauls goods worldwide - a 320-square-foot home with a kitchen, bath with toilet, sleeping areas, windows and a bright blue door. The exterior is painted with a white epoxy coating that has light-reflecting properties to prevent the sun's heat from penetrating. Each small house includes hookups for air conditioning, ventilation, electrical and water systems - and the units ideally could be set up in small communities to make accessing utilities more efficient.
The idea began to take shape several years ago, when McCarthy went to the Mexican border city on a field trip as part of an executive MBA program. He found himself impressed by the sophistication and rapid growth of industry in Juarez, but shocked when the bus cut through a poor neighborhood on the way out of the city.
"We saw hundreds of homes that are made out of wood pallets and cardboard and scrap metal and scrap building material," McCarthy said. When he questioned the bus driver, "he said, Well, all the people who live here work in the places you just visited.'" "It was amazing to me that in an area where there was such growth and economic prosperity, that these employees of Fortune 1000 companies were living in such poor conditions." With Juarez growing by 50,000 to 60,000 people a year and wages low, it was evident traditional homebuilding couldn't respond, said McCarthy, who'd worked in various facets of building homes in Albuquerque. An idea began taking shape about a year and a half later when he saw an article about a shipping container converted into guest quarters.
"They talked about the merits of the construction, how strong they are, how affordable they are, and how plentiful they are," McCarthy said. He called Nava, his cousin, with the low-cost home idea. A year later, Nava, then a junior at Notre Dame University, suggested entering the university's business plan competition. Their initial three-quarter page concept expanded as they advanced in the contest. Along the way, Nava invited his roommate, Annen, to join. As the group's acknowledged computer graphics whiz, Annen added drawings to give the presentation more life. Eventually, they won the contest with a 55-page document, illustrated by renderings and floor plans.
In July 2007, the partners formed PFNC Global Communities - PFNC stands for "Por Fin, Nuestra Casa," which roughly translates as "Finally, our own home." They operate out of a back room in a Corrales realty firm but eventually expect offices in Juarez or adjacent El Paso, Texas, and a Juarez plant to manufacture shipping container homes. The house faces two constraints: designing in only 320 square feet and keeping the price to around $8,000 to be affordable for the average worker at maquiladoras, manufacturing plants in Mexico along the U.S. border, McCarthy said.
The partners looked at clever designs for small condos and lofts, travel trailers and even private jet planes, adapting ideas they felt would work. "We started with a kitchen and bathroom because they're the most necessary and most basic ingredients of a home," McCarthy said. They designed a galley-style kitchen with a stove, sink, refrigerator and dinette, and a 48-square-foot bathroom with a pedestal sink, shower and commode. Adjacent to the kitchen is a bunk area for children; separate sleeping quarters for the owners lie behind the bathroom wall.
The house may be sparse by U.S. standards, but Nava said it's a huge improvement in safety, security and health over where many now live. When drawings and color pictures of the prototype were shown around a poor Juarez neighborhood, people said, "You know it'd be like a dream to live in one of these," Nava said. "You know, just the thought of having nice fresh air ventilating through the house, a large bed ... a normal kitchen and a safe home that locks and closes each night was more than appealing." Annen cites modern architectural design, with bare metal and piping. "This would fit right in any major city," he said.
The company has received a commitment for equity investment and is in the process of finishing details and closing its first round of funding. The partners anticipate starting production early next year, with the capacity to produce 3,000 homes in the first year and later ramping up. They figure a half million people could benefit from such homes in Juarez alone. PFNC doesn't intend just to build shelter. It wants to build communities, and McCarthy said the group expects to have the first pilot community on the ground late next year.
"That was our goal, more than just four walls and a roof but to kind of raise the standard of living in Juarez and other places," Nava said.
The shipping containers, which can be hauled by truck, rail or ship, are designed to stack. PFNC envisions a cluster arrangement, eight side by side and four high, with apartment-type balconies and staircases in the corners. Clusters could be arranged into squares, creating "a safe little plaza in the middle where we hope to build a soccer field or a playground, some safe area for families to be," Nava said.
PFNC wants to set up programs with maquiladoras to offer housing as an employee benefit, helping cut the high rate of worker turnover, now between 7 percent and 10 percent a month, McCarthy said. The company is working with a Mexican law firm that has handled work-to-own housing programs. "This is not a rental-type situation or free housing while you work here," McCarthy said. "Rather, the employer takes on some of the burden in setting up the financing program to transfer ownership to the employee." That's important because PFNC needs large orders to keep costs down so low-wage workers can afford the home. The incentive for employers: Studies show housing for employees dramatically increases retention, and having more workers in a given area will reduce the number of buses maquiladoras run to take people to and from their jobs.
PFNC doesn't view its homes as the last stop. "With our design and with our price point, we think we'll at least be able to take the first step of getting more families into more homes" and formal property ownership, McCarthy said. "We fully anticipate that people will move into our homes, build up some equity, sell this home," he said. "We see this is a stepping stone to get into a bigger or more comfortable home."
AP photo/Courtesy of PFNC Global Communities The container azcentral.comhttp://www.azcentral.com/business/consumer/articles/2008/09/23/20080923biz-containerhomes23-ON.html
AP photo/Courtesy of PFNC Global Communities The container azcentral.comhttp://www.azcentral.com/business/consumer/articles/2008/09/23/20080923biz-containerhomes23-ON.html
Hexayurt Project: Cheap and Durable Emergency Housing for Earthquake Struck Haiti
Housing is one of the most pressing among the many problems faced by the Haitian population in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010. Rebuilding the capital and the provincial cities destroyed by the cataclysm is an enterprise that will last decades. In the meantime, tens of thousands of homeless people have to be housed.
Here is one inexpensive and practical solution to this urgent housing problem.
As emergency shelter for all those displaced people who have suddenly become homeless, the Hexayurt seems to be an excellent option. It is inexpensive, sturdy, and easy to construct.
Go to the Hexayurt Project's website for more information:
I ask readers to circulate this information. An enterprising organization might just act on it.
Christophe Henry
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Welcome to Haiti Phoenix
Christophe Henry is my nom de plume. I will sign all my posts and articles by this pseudonym. The name of course is the inversion of King Henri Christophe’s name, with the spelling of the first name anglicized.
Appropriating the name of an admired historical figure is a common enough practice. I make no apologies, therefore, for assuming the cognomen of the greatest figure in Haitian history. In thus identifying with King Christophe, I merely wish to channel the spirit of the nation builder, of the Promethean man of vision and Nietzschean man of will. All in the hope that the Christophean ethos will pervade the land once again so that the Haitian people will rise phoenix-like from the ashes of their history.
Haunted by the Haitian conundrum, I have spent much of my adult life trying to understand why the great promise of Haiti’s historical genesis has not been fulfilled and to imagine by what means the Haitian people can achieve King Henri Christophe’s vision of a great and strong nation. The purpose of this blog is merely to light the pyre of ideas from which the Haitian phoenix can be reborn, a Christophean nation, autonomous, prosperous, proud.
Appropriating the name of an admired historical figure is a common enough practice. I make no apologies, therefore, for assuming the cognomen of the greatest figure in Haitian history. In thus identifying with King Christophe, I merely wish to channel the spirit of the nation builder, of the Promethean man of vision and Nietzschean man of will. All in the hope that the Christophean ethos will pervade the land once again so that the Haitian people will rise phoenix-like from the ashes of their history.
Haunted by the Haitian conundrum, I have spent much of my adult life trying to understand why the great promise of Haiti’s historical genesis has not been fulfilled and to imagine by what means the Haitian people can achieve King Henri Christophe’s vision of a great and strong nation. The purpose of this blog is merely to light the pyre of ideas from which the Haitian phoenix can be reborn, a Christophean nation, autonomous, prosperous, proud.
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