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AUTHOR: Wyatt MacGaffey PUBLISHER: Indiana University Press, 601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA. 2000 PAGES: 269 PRICE: US$39.95
From independence to date, Africans have practiced Socialism, Marxism, Communism, and all brands of democracy. Africans have practiced America’s Presidential system, the French system, and Britain’s Parliamentary system. All these have been imported by Africa's modernizing elite thought by their unsuspecting African followers as ‘educated", ‘learned’, ‘brilliant’, and all that. From Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah to Guinea’s Sekou Toure to Ghana’s Kofi Busia to Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta to Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam to Malawi’s Kamuzu Banda to Benin Republic’s Mathieu Kerekou to Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda Africa has seen not only the continuation of colonial values but also the deliberate copying of alien political values on Africans. With their exaggerated images of being ‘brilliant’ or ‘learned’, which most of them would not measure up in today’s boom in knowledge and the complicated problems facing Africa, they disregarded African indigenous political system and copied foreign political ideologies—Dr. Busia was seen more like a White man by Ghanaians than an African ( Kwame Nkrumah is on record as having spent good ten years in attempting to 'crush' indigenous chieftaincy system and in Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko declared all traditional rulers as civil servants and then rotated them to other domains, a pitiful development if the African Renaissance process is anything to go by—it’s like rotating the Asantehene to the Ga traditional area and the Ga Mantse to the Asanteland). In these unwise practices Africa's own cultural values were alienated from its own cultural bases, thus disturbing the cultural roots massively, and stifling any attempt at indigenous traditional growth, while living other negative cultural practices like juju, marabou and witchcraft intact which should have been uprooted totally for the health of the larger African cultural values and enhance the level of rationality of the African culture (African researchers and thinkers like Dr. Daniel T. Osabu-Kle are advocating for the total destruction of juju, marabou and witchcraft since they are obstacles to Africa's rapid development). In the absence of any African indigenous values informing Africa's political systems, the result is a continent having the most foreign models and theories than anywhere in the world to the detriment of Africa’s own traditional values, according to Ghana's Mr. Y.K. Amoako, executive secretary of U.N's Economic Commission of Africa, and mired in confusion. Of late as the African crises deepen and African thinkers like Ghana’s George Ayitteh proclaim "African solution for African problems," informed by the damages foreign values have done to Africa and Africans own attitudes, the talk of reconstructing the African nation-state, informed by Africa’s history and culture, and with the consent of the African peoples, as Nigeria’s Dr. Chinedu Obiora Okafor suggests, and with some modifications from some external sources, as Ghanaian-Canadian Dr. Daniel Osabu-Kle offers, is fast gaining grounds. In this book, Kongo Political Culture, the author cites the Cameroonian philosopher, F. Eboussi Boulaga, as saying the political disorder facing Africa today is due to colonial values imposed on Africa which have no relationship to local values, institutions, and political processes, and which has resulted in shallow nation-states "tricked out with forms of government but lacking the substance, maintaining its control by lies and violence." Trumpeted by many an African modernizing elite, this foreign values justify its demand, says the author, by appealing to universal reasons and values which hide their own historical and political context to the detriment of Africa's historical and native political context. The author indicates that F. Eboussi Boulaga sees the National Conferences, which have become the order of the day in Africa, especially in Francophone Africa, and which Nigerian reconstructionists are calling for same to redress their country's fragile system, despite their denouncement as ineffectual, are forums to discuss indigenous African models, which Boulaga sees as therapeutic séance and rite of passage, "all tending toward the creation of a political community by mobilizing cultural resources from deep in the unconscious." And it is in this deep African cultural "unconscious" that the author takes one particular African example, Kongo Political Culture, as a product of ancient African tradition, or "civilization" to drum home the values of many an African political culture in today’s search for solutions to Africa’s political crisis. The author takes the Kongo political culture as regional studies, and not either the lumpers, who generalise sub-Sahara Africa, or the splitters, who insist on the uniqueness of each village as fieldnotes. The reason for the regional studies over the splitters and the lumpers is that in Africa there are some broad regional characteristics, style areas, and concepts that span vast areas. In this context, that the author relies on the cultural unity of the region occupied approximately by speakers of the Western Bantu languages, in central Africa stretching to Angola through the Kouilou/Niari valley and the Zaire estuary, which has evolved over the past 2,500 years and of which a distinguishable cultural tradition, "the Ba-Kongo," speakers of the KiKongo language, in its various dialects are one product among many of the continual changes and adaptations; but the author is quick to point out that there is unsettling questions of whether the West African coastal forest zone should be included in this area. Of recent times, the BaKongo have been in varying intensities of contact with the rest of the region and Europeans since the end of the 15th century. As a result, their language is full of buried English, French and Portuguese terms. This has brought some changes, but major transformation was brought about by the Atlantic slave trade at the end of the 17th century. A second transformation, says the author, occurred at the end of the 19th century. This book is concerned with the structure of BaKongo society and thought between the period of 17th and 19th centuries. The challenge of the author is cultural translation of the BaKongo to the proximity of Western political thought. In this regard, the BaKongo political system, says the author, may be seen as 'irrational' or "religious," at least to the Western mind, and this may also not fit into Western political category of "political theory" than it did in "religion." In attempting to see the BaKongo political thought from Western lens the author acknowledges that even an interdisciplinary approach cannot provide an understanding in that context--but the BaKongos, like other African ethnic groups, understand their traditional political system very well. The author earlier informs us that even such terms like "swollen state", "soft state", "predatory state", "patron-clientalist state", "rent-seeking state", "over-extended state", "perverted capitalist state", all seen as deficiencies of the modern African nation-state, have more to do with the European imposed political structures than the indigenous African political culture, and, therefore, mean nothing in particular in the true African indigenous political cultural sense, and "of the political effects of unfamiliar institutions." The BaKongo region, like the rest of Africa, was in 1885, as part of the 1884 Berlin division of Africa, was divided, the Congo (Kinshasa) basin went to King Leopold 11 of Belgium, the Portuguese took the southern part, in Angola, and the French the northern part, as French Congo (Brazzaville). The "Congo", therefore, is derived from "Kongo." The author informs us that "Zaire" comes from the KiKongo word nzadi, "large river", applied at first to the Zaire River, formerly "the Congo." In pure Kongo political culture, chiefs were not only seeking the physical comfort of their subjects, but were "ritually qualified figures through whom occult powers of benefit to the community of their followers were controlled." The Chiefs combined political and religious functions. Like today’s boom in African juju/marabou practices, Doe, Bokassa, Amin and Abacha as reminders, wrongdoers in Kongo political system were said to use occult (juju/marabou) power to steal (looting of state treasury and general corruption), to cause disease and death, and enrich themselves at the expense of their community. The coming of the slave trade saw the export of such souls to another world, a way of ostracizing them. Kongo Chiefs were empowered by such occult powers but not for wrong doing but for the good of their communities, a bit "morally ambiguous." In the face of such moral ambiguity lay who uses the occult powers to defend and who were the enemies of the public good. However, the author informs us that who uses what powers for good or bad in Kongo political culture/power is seen through distinction established "by ritual means such as initiation, divination, and various ordeals, behind which lay the secular realities of political power—the ability to mobilize wealth, violence, and oratorical support in local competition. In such competition the loser was proved to be a "witch", the winner was accepted as a "chief." Of recent time, the Kongo political system is opening up to modernization in their own terms but a lot of the values have been disturbed by colonialism, and may be responsible for the long running crisis in the Kongo. ***** --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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