We have a great need for progressive scholarship, a scholarship that will help us bring progressive change in our continent. For many years we have sought this scholarship that will produce a progressive Africa that will meet the challenges that it faces.

For many decades, we have been bothered a lot as Africans by the challenge of violence and instability in Africa. For many decades I must say, we still have not succeeded to bring an end to violence and to instability in Africa. We must indeed ask ourselves the question, why have we not succeeded to bring stability and peace to our continent? There has been all this violence in Mali, violence in the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and recently South Sudan. Why are we unable to bring an end to these conflicts?

I always ask myself whether it is because of this question of Coloniality, and that maybe our progressive scholarship has yet to apply its mind to this question. Perhaps the paradigms that we use have not come up to answer this question clearly; maybe we have used the wrong intellectual tools.

These conflicts and the destruction to our lives have continued, not for a lack of trying on our part. We have attempted all sorts of interventions to achieve peace, security and stability. One goes to bed on Monday, only to wake up on Tuesday to discover that another conflict has erupted in another part of our continent, and this has been going on for many decades.

For many decades again, we have been trying to eradicate poverty and combat underdevelopment in Africa. You will remember that the eradication of poverty and the combatting of underdevelopment were a very central objective of our liberation struggles in Africa. As a disappointing reverse to our expectations, we continue to witness increasing rather than reducing poverty. There is persistent underdevelopment in Africa that is accompanied by wide disparities in terms of access to income and wealth for our people. The question arises therefore, why are we not making the progress that we should be making?

Each and every other day we are told about impressive rates of economic growth of 5-6%, but what impact do these exciting rates have on the quality of life of the people. Figures and statistics are good but what about their meaning to the quality of life of the people? The question endures therefore, how have we conceptualised our approaches toward defeating poverty and underdevelopment in Africa?

We hear a lot about globalisation. Globalisation is presented to us as this ineluctable force of nature without which we cannot do anything. What is this globalisation? If it is correct that this is the same globalisation that produced the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, and if it is true that globalisation produces such disasters of that kind, then why do we need it?

At the independence of Zambia in 1964, there were about 100 African owned cars in the country, the rest were owned by British colonial civil servants. I was in Zambia for 20 years. In Lusaka you would tell in the streets who was Zambian and who was a South African. While a Zambian will wait by the traffic lights for the opportunity to cross the road, a South African would weave through the cars and cross. That was the difference in exposure to the culture of vehicles. 

We had the challenge before us to raise our people from the chains of poverty; I must say today that we have not made sufficient progress. Our progressive scholarship has yet to make its contribution to allow us to understand our condition and seek solutions to these enduring problems.

We see today that the global capitalist system is in crisis, in the US. Never mind the impressive statistics, many American workers have gone out of the labour market. Is it correct therefore that we must draw examples for our own economies from these capitalist economies without critical inquiry?

Another challenge that we have in Africa is that of nation building. National unity, national cohesion and societal peace continue to elude our countries. You had the elections in Kenya in 2007, and the country fell apart. Why? Hell broke loose in South Sudan, and earlier on in the Central African Republic. In the Central African Republic people are now defined along religious lines. Why? What really happened to our nation-building project? It may very well be that we proceeded from a wrong intellectual position, or we have not really decolonised our minds.

Here in South Africa, an issue that worries me a lot is that the ANC, at its formation 102 years ago, part of its founding task was to bury forever the demon of tribalism. 102 years later, I must say now, tribalism is raising its ugly head again in the ANC, sadly. We have not understood this challenge.

One country in the continent that has succeeded and made progress in this regard is Tanzania. Since they decided that Kiswahili was going to be their national language, and they did away with traditional chiefs and their chiefdoms, they have achieved impressive national cohesion. If that has worked for the Tanzanians, why don’t the rest of us do it? An attempt has been made in Rwanda and Burundi to say there must be no Tutsi and no Hutu. The belief is that these categorisations are colonial constructs, or the categorisations were there and the colonialists found them useful in dividing and managing the people so that they can rule the colonies well. The tragedy is that the categorisations and their divisive mentality have remained with us today causing untold divisions and conflicts in our countries.

We must also think about the military coups in Africa. In light of this drive for democracy and good governance, all these nice sounding terms, we must consider what exactly these terms mean to us. I remember some years ago in Sierra Leone where two political parties both calling themselves national parties went into some elections, purportedly representing the nation but in actuality these were regional parties.

One party won and the other one lost, and initially there were no complaints or any talk that the results had been cooked or manipulated. Soon enough the party that won the elections began to develop the region that it actually represented at the expense of the other region. The same party cooked false charges against the leaders of the opposing political party, to keep them busy in court and not build their party. At the time when new elections come there is no meaningful opposition, as the other party would have been weakened. This is all supposed to be democracy, but is it? We must ask those questions.

In the Freedom Charter here in South Africa we said ‘the people must govern.’ How do we organise ourselves and the people in such a way that the people can actually govern? We must find ways of giving practical expression to the call that the people must govern. The people must govern, not the elites who use their positions of power to perpetuate themselves. We must seek the intellectual tools that will help us to realise that governance by the people, not the elites. The intervention of progressive scholarship is needed.

We have all been told that the USA is a democratic country, and that somehow we must follow their example. There are discussions in the country that we should reform our electoral system, from proportional representation to a more democratic system. In the USA, they have a system that is more representative in geographic terms, where politicians are elected to represent certain geographic constituencies.

If I were to go back into politics, I would make friends with as many rich business people as I can. That is the US politics. I dread to see what will happen in this country if we go that way. That system will further corrupt the moneyed people. The moneyed people will float to the top, and all this is called democracy, but is it?

We need this inquiry, it is not enough to say the US, Sweden and whoever is doing this, and so let us do it. Just because other people define democracy in a particular way, we need not just follow without critical inquiry. Independently in our own minds, how do we give expression to the notion that the people must govern, not the moneyed people, not the elite?

We need to think about the place of Africa in the world. Without thinking about our place in the world we may not be able to solve any of our problems. We have been told that the USA played a crucial role in the birth of South Sudan as a state in Africa. The US played midwife, we are told. The question is why the African people of South Sudan needed an American midwife for the birth of their country. I worry a lot about that. Now that that conflict has broken out, a solution from somewhere across the Atlantic must be found, and it might succeed only in postponing the conflict and not totally solving it. We must establish in the first place the reason why we find ourselves fighting. That question has a lot to do with Africa’s place in the world.

Lastly, I wonder if the African Universities have recovered. I say recovered because there was a time when African leaders were destroying the universities. The universities were producing thought leaders who were questioning the leadership and the policies of African leaders, challenging neo-colonialism, and becoming a threat to the leaders who became hostile to the intellectuals and the universities. We need those thought leaders today.

By Thabo Mbeki
Former President, Republic of South Africa.