(The founding continent and the founder effect)
Basil Davidson calls it the Blackman’s burden— a savage and ironic jibe at the Whiteman’s burden, the self-imposed historical duty of stamping rational order and humane civilization on the rest of the human race. Yet two hundred and fifty one years after the infamous Berlin Conference which partitioned Africa among the colonial powers(1814-1815), It is now obvious at least in Nigeria and many African countries that the messianic burden the imperialist masters imposed on themselves is facing its toughest challenge.
Based on their current circumstances, these colonial chimeras pose a grave security risk to western modernization and its expansive notion of accelerated and unimpeded progress, particularly after the triumph of liberal democracy over the Soviet Communist model. With wars raging in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and with famine, poverty and epidemics of dereliction the lot of the populace, it is just a question of time before the Dark Age is re-enacted.
When you now factor into this the virtual implosion of a vast swathe of the Middle East and the biblical outpouring of refuge attendant upon this, you get a feel of human suffering and misery on a scale unprecedented in history. The wanton brutality, the Stone Age cruelty and callous disregard for the sanctity of human life displayed by sectarian militias from Boko Haram in Nigeria, through ISIS in the Levant and the Taliban in Afghanistan suggest a new low that has not been seen since the Jewish pogrom of the Second World War.
If one theme is common to all these multi-dimensional conflicts, if there is one single and solid cause that unites the disparate combatants, it is the written and unwritten disavowal of the nation-state paradigm which has been imposed on their people by triumphant western modernity.
With the Islamic sects, from Boko Haram in Nigeria to the militantly state-evaporating al-Qaeda and ISIS, it is a violent and conscious rebuff of the nation-state arrangement and the colonial cartography which radically redrew the old map of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
The Islamists are stuck with the old notions of a theocratic world in which religiously homogenous communities could not be abridged or disrupted by the political distraction of nation-states. The Islamic empire-state cannot be curtailed and carved up like that except on the field of battle.
It has not occurred to the sectarian ideologues that it was the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in battle in old Serbia which made this possible and inevitable, just as the introduction of French artillery to modern warfare made nonsense of the weak Italian city-states and their pretensions to both nation-hood and state-hood. Machiavelli had been proved right in his strident call for a powerful new state which would put an end to the political caprices of the Italian mini-royalties.
In contemporary Africa, although the rebellion against the nation-state is neither conscious nor stringently articulated as you find in Islamic disavowals, it is obvious that some of the largest colonial contraptions on the continent have been chafing under the colonial yoke that boxed together people of diverse and mutually contradictory cultures and political orientation.
This is the basis of the endemic instability and perpetual conflicts on the continent, particularly in four of the largest countries, namely Nigeria, Sudan, CAR and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Nigeria, a thieving ruling cartel until recently presided over the systematic brutalization and decimation of the populace occasioning casual bloodletting of which the Boko Haram insurgency and bloody clashes between pastoral herdsmen and local farming populations are recent manifestations.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo where the Mobutu-Kabila kleptocracy has been continuously in power for fifty one years, the country has technically evaporated in a series of civil wars occasioning much human suffering and misery. In Sudan, Omar Bashir who has been in power since 1989, has presided over the dismemberment of the country. In CAR, the state has collapsed in chaos and mayhem as bitter ethnic feuding with a religious coloration has led to an effective partitioning of both capital and country.
In many African countries where the nation-state paradigm limps on — Angola, Mozambique, Egypt, Liberia, Sierra-Leone, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Congo Brazzaville, Algeria, Cote D’Ivoire, Mali and Kenya—it has been after bloody civil wars fought among enemy nationalities which have sown deep seeds of discord and rancour in the body politic.
Others such as Togo, Cameroons, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Egypt, Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Zimbabwe stumble on by becoming an expensive charade of liberal democracy which is the political and historical deity of the modern nation-state or by transmuting into the worst examples of one-man despotism.
It should be obvious from the foregoing analysis that except for a few shining exemplars such as Botswana, Namibia, Senegal, Tanzania, Benin and Ghana, the nation-state paradigm has fared very badly in Africa. These nations in terms of political mass and economic pull are not enough to form the critical mass that will rescue Africa.
It is a profound irony that it is in Africa, the very cradle of civilization and from where our human ancestors first began their epic slouch towards Asia, Europe and the rest of the world that colonial hubris and narcissism has met its Waterloo. Even in captivity,It is not easy to force one’s political deity on others.
But the objective cost of the structural and spiritual resistance to the nation-state paradigm in Africa is the continuous regression of the continent in all parameters of inclusive governance and developmental indices.In all available data of human progress, African nations comfortably pick the rear. The nation-state may not be perfect, but it is an obvious historical improvement on fiefdoms and kingdoms.
The fact remains that history, in all its all brutal and alienating necessities, waits for no laggard society. While we are still sulking about the nation-state, African countries are being frog-marched to the post-nation frontiers in the age of relentless globalization. We can no longer have the Berlin Conference all over again. That epoch is gone forever even where there are residues of the old empire system everywhere.
Since we cannot unscramble egg that is already scrambled, a lot would depend on African nations and nationalists to find within themselves the strength, energy and vision to reform the colonial incubus that they have been saddled with by the imperialists before they can join the mainstream of humanity. As Marx famously puts it, verily one day Germany would find itself on the road to ruins with Britain and France without having achieved their economic prosperity.
Just as it happened with the internationalization of the slave trade which caught the people of Africa napping because of their lack of maritime and military innovations, the absence of viable nation-states on the continent may prove perilous to the people in the global sweepstakes that will follow the “opening” up of hitherto remote possibilities by the relentless onslaught of globalization.
No one is sure of what the new frontiers of human evolution will look like, whether it will lead to a modification of the existing nation-state paradigm, its transformation to something more refined or its superannuation by something totally novel.
But we can glimpse the emerging world order in the rise of new economic superpowers, the deepening poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, the accelerating gap between the rich nations and the poverty-wracked hell-holes on earth , the rise of the new right both as a political as well as a spiritual category and the advent of a new class of international mega-citizens who play and operate beyond the nation-states.
All these developments will no doubt rebound on Africa as a passive object of history and a mere pawn in a play of giants. But there is a sense in which Africa will play a leading role in the emerging global configuration that is if the founder effect as propounded in the field known as population genetics is applied to global population and the phenomenon of the nation-state.
But what is the founder effect? Put simply and with bald brevity, founder effect is the thinning and shrinking of genetic pool when people set out from their original homestead to find new colonies and new countries as the case may be. Consequently, the genetic variation available is increasingly limited and with that the possibilities of human expansiveness and talent formation.
As the original homestead of the human race, Africa retains its largest genetic pool and possibilities of genetic recombination in infinite permutations. What this means—and as we are beginning to find out— is that as time goes on the most physically, intellectually and artistically gifted people among the human race will come from Africa: the best athletes,singers, footballers, philosophers, writers, actors, scientific geniuses and intellectual avatars.
What impact will this rare species of humanity, this special breed at the summit of human evolution, have on Africa, the founding and fathering continent? Practically nil, unfortunately as long as the nation-state does not come to scratch in Africa.
As it is already happening, this new breed of super-people will shun the chaos and disorder of Africa for the safe and liberating confines of the civilized world where they will gladly and joyously pay Value Added Tax for the value that the refined world has added to their life away from a dark and savage continent.
If care is not taken by visionary African nationalists, it is possible that by the time the third wave of globalizationis fully with us, the fate of the continent as a perpetual human plantation for growing exceptionally endowed export to the west and a nursery for the transplantation of talents to advanced countries would have been sealed.
By then, it will not matter to the rest of the world, whether Africa has viable or functioning nation-states. As it was the case with oil until most recently and earlier with the procurement of slaves what will be important is the uninterrupted flow of human talent from Africa to the west. The Portuguese, the first bearers of western modernity to Africa, have taught us in Guinea Bissau and to a lesser extent in Angola and Mozambique that you don’t need a nation to have a plantation or slave depot.
WhenPliny the Second famously observed that something new always comes out of Africa, he was not only referring to the endless assortment of African oddities, oddballs and crackpots that entertained the Roman imperial court. He was also referring to the illustrious retinue of great African generals, writers, philosophers, actorsetc who graced the Roman imperium. Several thousand years later, something new is still coming out of Africa, just as it was in the beginning.
