For the past few weeks, and in particular in the past fortnight, mainland Europe has been convulsed by a migratory tremor on the scale of some epic Biblical exodus. Hordes of refugees, having lost all hopes of earthly redemption, are fleeing their original homesteads with whatever they can salvage of their worldly possessions and are slogging their way towards what they consider as restitution and restoration of hope and possibilities.
In its sheer confusion and disorientation, its utter hopelessness and loss of compass and earthly moorings, this historic human armada resembles the aftermath of a catastrophic nuclear bombing. Desperate humanity are absconding from the economic ruins of the old Balkan axis, the political and economic implosion of Iraq and Syria and from the total ruination of Libya or old Carthage, if you like. As usual, the trail leads back to the cradle of humankind.
In the event, artificial barriers called national boundaries have been virtually obliterated. Many nation-states have come under a grave peril. Some of the custodians of their earthly paradises are having none of this civil invasion. A few days ago, Hungary closed its borders to the new Tartars and its security forces began unleashing restraining violence and other domestic disincentives on the hordes.
The land of the magnificent Magyars, otherwise a sedate and very cultured people and heirs to a great civilization, seems to have had enough. Some other nations more welcoming are just in the process of perfecting some prohibitive legal hurdles to deal with the exigencies as they make a spurious distinction between refugees and economic migrants. The redoubtable Brits are waiting and watching this mainland maelstrom with icy resolve. They shall not pass. Europe is in dire turmoil.
The horror! The horror of it all! If there is any redemptive trope in this trail of carnage and tale of human horror, in the pictures of hundreds drowning, many perishing on the road through sheer exhaustion and of a father clinging to the washed up corpse of an adorable son, it has to be located in the fact that this is not happening to Africans, the traditional laggards of modern civilization and orphaned destitute of history but to the triumphant victors of the race to modernity and their triumphalist choir people.
This is a trail that leads back to the cradle of humankind, our mutual humanity and common ancestry on the old plains of East Africa, a fact which Euro-American mythmakers and numerous historians are wont to deny or ignore. It speaks to the hubris that first made our proto-human ancestors dare to stand upright and walk and then to begin a long trudge towards new foundations and new beginnings across the plains of Euro-Asia and eventually to the new world.
But more importantly, it speaks to the hubris which usually makes a few people in human society with the adamantine will to power and the visionary impulse to seize the bull of history by the horns and by so doing to determine the trajectory of history and the destiny of human society. Alexander, the great Greek, the Roman emperors, the ancient Norse warrior-class, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and his Tartan hordes, Chaka the Zulu, forgotten and unrememberable old world avatars, and Napoleon Bonaparte all come to mind.
If they ever succeeded at all, it was because they were standing on the ruins of older civilizations and the collective heritage of all humankind. The granite resolve, the will to conquer and dominate their environment, the sheer chutzpah, have been burnt into their genes in millennia of human striving and the accumulated DNA of human struggle for recognition and self-actualization. As Louis Althusser, the great French Marxist philosopher, has put it with daring and defiant extremity and Structuralist pathos: “History is a process without a subject”.
The hubris of Western civilization and western modernity is to ever imagine that nothing came before it and that nothing will come after it. Around the tenth century, the leading country in the world was ancient China before it went into a long decline occasioned by a power struggle about modernity between the Mandarinate and the Imperial feudal dynasty. Artifacts retrieved from modern Kenya suggest that Chinese ships had already reached the old port of Mombasa around the seventh century.
Much earlier around the first millennium, evidence suggests that some Indonesian clans had already reached the island of Madagascar. They were then alleged to have returned to East Africa to recruit wives and other domestic accessories. They would eventually be joined by migrants and adventurers from the African mainland to inaugurate a new beginning for what would become a new people.
Mainland Africa and Africans are no strangers to epic migrations. The history of the continent is one long drama of forcible migration and forcible incorporation. Apart from the biblical migration and forcible expulsion of the ancient tribe of Judah from Egypt, there are numerous examples of long treks or voortrek as the old Dutch settlers would call it as they moved inland.
In the same region in the early nineteenth century, a military genius from the Uguni sub-clan of the Zulu welded the Zulu people and the entire region together in a series of great military triumphs leading to great dispersals or mfekane, epic depopulation and repopulation. In an act of intellectual hubris, some western historians describe Chaka as a Black Napoleon but on the scale of military innovation and raw courage Chaka was Napoleon’s equal if not superior.
Around the tenth century in what was to become modern day Yorubaland, a highborn nobleman called Oduduwa descended from the surrounding highland to the plains of Ile-Ife to commence a protracted and very bloody civil war to oust the old order in a bold visionary bid for the centralization of authority and power. His heirs gradually extended their suzerainty to the whole of Yoruba race.
Oduduwa had no western textbook or European authority to rely upon. In any case at that point in time, Europe had descended into the barbarity of the Dark Age. The Oduduwa revolt was part of a universal human impulse to impose order on disorder and chaos. It was a revolution to consecrate proper feudal relations. To the modern sensibility, a feudal revolution may sound like a quaint anomaly, a roaring oxymoron, but that was precisely the stage the dialectic of history had reached at that point in time.
In the light of the migratory earthquake currently convulsing Europe, it may be tempting to mistake the symptom for the disease. It is tempting to see the ruins of Iraq, the carnage in Syria and the upsurge of counter-revolutionary momentum that has obliterated the gains of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and the virtual implosion of Libya as emanating from the contradiction of modern Islam and the unending power struggle between the Sunni and the Shitte sects.
It is indeed an old succession struggle which goes back all the way to the demise of the great prophet himself and whether he should be succeeded by his blood relations or the conclave of faithful followers. It has indeed occasioned many religious civil wars and Iraq, Syria, Yemen and the Homeric battlefields of the Middle East are just a modern enactment of a historic feud.
While this is part of the narrative, it does not exhaust the whole narrative. The real narrative is powered by western intellectual and ideological arrogance as well as political hubris. As they say in Nigeria, it is the case of Islamic trouble troublesomely sleeping and western yanga waking it. When you sow the wind, you must reap the whirlwind.
At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama, a notable American intellectual and policy wonk of Japanese extraction, published what was to become a famous book. It was titled, The End of History and the Last Man. Despite later modulations and modifications, Fukuyama’s thesis was simple and seemingly impregnable: after the routing of the Soviet bear, western notion of liberal democracy, market economy and the post-Westphalian nation-state has become globally rampart and its paradigm irresistible and indestructible.
To be sure, Fukuyama was not speaking out of turn. He was merely providing an intellectual scaffolding for the collective political habitus of the western political elite and the feeling of euphoria and triumphalism that accompanied the defenestration of the communist threat. But as Paul de Man, the great Yale literary theorist has taught us, the moment of great insight is also often accompanied by great blindness.
It would seem in retrospect that Fukuyama’s error of judgment—and the western political elites’ blindness—was to confuse the working out of a particular phase of history and the commencement of a new beginning with the end of history and the irreversibility of western global dominance.
In retrospect, the political hubris emanating from this mindset and the rise of a unilateral global order dominated by America has cost the world much strife and bloody upheavals. It led to the attempt to impose liberal democracy and market economy on the Russian rump of the old Soviet Empire.
It has led to tears and bloody affront at Tiananmen Square, the destruction of Sunni/Baathist Iraq, the fearsome stalemate in Afghanistan, the evaporation of Libya, the rise of rogue democracies in Africa, the near universalization of al-Queda as a potent counter-hegemonic Islamic movement and the dramatic emergence of ISIS.
How has the “end of history” ideology fared? Internally, it has led to the bleeding of the American economy and a military overstretch for a nation that was not conceived as a warrior-state. The Russian resistance has occasioned the rise of a pan-Slavic nationalism ricocheting in Ukraine even as Putin permanently cocks a snook at the west particularly in Syria. It has led to an economically rampart China viewing the west with wary distrust even as it turns the fiscal screw with typical Chinese forbearance.
It has overturned the delicate geo-sect balance in the Islamic world in favour of a rampart theocratic Iran. It has bred some murderously virulent strains of Islam like ISIS which has taken the traditional Islamic disdain for the nation-state paradigm and liberal democracy to a new level of proactive potency. It is these flashpoints of economic insecurity, political instability in the Balkans occasioned by ideological disorientation and religious upheavals in the Middle East that are feeding the great European exodus.
But all this may be small beer compared to what is to come. When an ideologically focused, geo-politically dominant and nuclear-empowered Iran recently declared that Israel as a nation may pass into history in a matter of decades and the no-nonsense warrior-state replied in kind, we may start wondering whether Fukuyama is not right after all and whether the end of history is not upon us in ironic aplomb. Claude Levi-Strauss, the great French Structuralist anthropologist, once famously declared that the world began without humankind and may end without it.
For those who hold on to the immanent rationality of human history like yours sincerely, the world is not about to disappear and it is not yet the end of history. Other nations and people are simply developing their own political hubris as a countervailing perspective to the dominant political hubris of the west. This is what the Chinese people are doing. This is what Russia is up to. It is both an ironic tribute to as well as an ironic reproach of western dominance.
This is what Singapore and the Asian tigers have been at with sheer contempt for Western political and economic orthodoxy. It is a strain of this that has been playing out in the Islamic world and it has so far outlasted modern communism which is essentially a countervailing western ideology.
Hubris, or pride in extremity and overweening self-belief in a person, a people, a nation or an entire race, however morally reproachable its outcome often is, is a logical concomitance of history and human development. But however long it takes, the drama of human evolution shows that all that is solid will eventually melt into thin air.
