The Argentines are having a ball. This column sees no reason why they shouldn’t. In Diego Amanda Maradona and Lionel Messi, they have two of the greatest footballers that the world has ever produced. The mesmerising Messi is currently the world’s best footballer, and like the prodigious Maradona at his prime, he could waltz or blitz his way through a battalion of defenders with the ease and facility of a goldfish in water. The sheer ecstasy of watching these two is the ultimate in orgiastic visual pleasure.
But there are even more profound reasons why the Argentines should feel cool with themselves. The Catholic world has just elected its first ever Argentine Pope. Ninety five per cent of Argentines may be devout Catholic, but before now moving the headship of the papacy to the pampas or the whole of Latin America for that matter appeared a long shot in the dark. Now it has happened.
In addition to this is the economic and political transformation going on in Argentina . Slowly but quite discernibly, Argentina is turning the political and economic corner. In recent decades, Argentines could only live on the glory of the country’s golden age in the last quarter of the nineteenth century leading to early twentieth century. Decades of brutal military misrule and grinding economic misfortune had sapped the energy and confidence of the people.
It is also perhaps wondrously and intriguingly symbolic that Margaret Thatcher, Argentina’s greatest modern tormentor, should choose to answer the final call at the very moment of Argentinean revival and renaissance. The boulevards of Buenos Aires flared up in jubilation and ululation as the news broke that the nemesis of the nation had joined her ancestors. Famously libeled as a nation of Italians who speak Spanish but think they are English living in Paris, the Argentines appear to be finally rediscovering themselves.
But it is not just the Argentines who are headed for a starry ascent. Virtually the entire continent of South America seemed to be witnessing a continental rebirth and rejuvenation. From Panama to Peru, an entire continent is being shaken and dragged off its rutted and gutted grooves of complacency and sloth. Leading the pack is Brazil which in a decade has lifted more than 50 million people out of poverty into middle class self-sufficiency.
Brazil’s dramatic economic transformation and looming ascendancy as a global power have won grudging respect and concession from the USA. Brazil’s president, a pragmatic disciple of the iconic Lula, has been invited for a full state visit to America, the first time in about two decades that a Brazilian leader is being accorded such a honour by the US.
The entire world is watching the developments in Latin America with curiosity and bated breath. This prodigious human emancipation and stunning optimisation of humanity’s capacity for self-transformation is not the result of a sudden religious conversion or the benevolence of some ancient Aztec or Inca god or goddess. Neither is it as a result of a slavish and sterile imitation and uncreative adaptation of other people’s culture. It is a tribute to the power of visionary and original ideas to re-engineer human society.
Anywhere in the ancient and modern world where human society has taken a huge leap forward, we can be sure that some original and transformative ideas are behind the stunning advancement on behalf of all humanity. This was what happened with ancient forms of writing in ancient Egypt and old Babylon, the idea of democracy and revolutionary warfare in the Greek and Roman empires, seafaring in Ancient China, the concept of nation-state in the Iberian peninsula, the Industrial Revolution in England, modern philosophy in France, modern warfare in Germany and the revolutionary refinement of the nation-state paradigm in the US.
We can add modern exemplars like Singapore which broke the binary spatial distinction between the First and Third worlds through the brilliant ideas of one exceptional individual and of course the new experiment in the brotherhood of all humanity irrespective of race and religion in post-apartheid South Africa which owes its inspiration to the humane intellectual genius of a man called Nelson Mandela.
As armies of contending ideas wage relentless battle, all that is solid often melts into thin air. The ideas that finally lifted the Dark Age for Europe came from the Muslim world in its most visionary period and in particular from the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks which led to the exodus of philosophers, thinkers, writers and other cutting-edge contrarians to mainland Europe. In their dark and devious schema, Western historians and intellectuals often project the Dark Age as a period of global human degeneration. But this is not so. It is a clever attempt to foist a unique European fiasco on the rest of the world.
By the beginning of the tenth century, the Chinese nation was arguably the leading human society. Its sea-going vessels were described as huge clouds in the sky as a result of the size and sophistication of their masts. Extant artifacts in the Mombasa Museum in modern day Kenya suggest that Chinese sailors had visited the place around the sixth and seventh centuries. But it was around the tenth century that a vicious power struggle lasting for centuries broke out between the mandarinate and the Imperial Chinese feudal court.
At the very period when China should have opened itself to receive fresh ideas from the rest of the world, it closed itself off. A long period of national decline ensued. Chinese eyes finally opened when the British, from about eight thousand miles away, seized Hong Kong. The Japanese Imperial Army added insult to injury when it invaded and subjected the Chinese to atrocious cruelties. The Boxers’ Uprising was a protest against national humiliation as well as an incipient rebellion against the feudal order. The turmoil eventuated in the Chinese Revolution.
We must now return to our original quarry. Why is it that Latin America is experiencing an economic and political resurgence and rejuvenation while African countries, with the exception of a notable few, are gripped by stark stasis and collective retrogression? We need to establish two historical theses. First is that the religious standing and spiritual state of any society is a reflection of its intellectual stage and mental development and not the other way round. Except in moments of revolutionary crisis, all religions rely on the power of faith rather than the power of ideas. Just stick to your belief system and forget about fancy stuff which may be the handiwork of Lucifer. Unfortunately as Norman Mailer, the rogue American novelist and thinker, famously posited, there may be some devils working for God.
See where Martin Luther and the discovery of printing dragged the old Church? And see where the Latin American Liberation theologists were dragging the whole concept of salvation before the Imperial Catholic church pulled the plug in a brilliant intellectual counter-insurgency coordinated by the inevitable and cannily cerebral Cardinal Ratzinger, the first modern Pope on pension.
The second thesis is so simple and self-evident that it amounts to an intellectual scandal when it escapes our intellectuals. It is that the mode of conquest and colonial rationalisation also conditions and in the last instance determines the fate of human emancipation from the ravages of colonialism. Colonisation also has its rich and dark ironies. The first wave of Iberian modernity which allowed the Portuguese and the Spaniards to seize the South American continent was merely a dress rehearsal for the full blown Euro-American modernity that was to follow.
So is it that while the Iberians could match the later day colonial masters in the department of colonial cruelty and physical coercion, they were mere toddlers when it came to intellectual sophistication and sheer capacity for psychological intimidation. For example, the Spaniards relied on raw firepower and epochal physical cruelty in their conquest and subjugation of the old Indian empires. At that point in time, only superior technology in armaments separated the two civilisations. In fact the Incas were ahead in terms of social order even though they practiced human sacrifice on a Fordist scale.
But neither the Spaniards nor the Portuguese could come up with the sociological cum philosophical intimidation behind the French concept of the colonial subject as an “evolué”, or the intellectual coercion behind Lord Lugard’s infamous “dual mandate” which forcibly steamrolled the economy of the colonised into the metropolitan orbit in a crude rehearsal of modern globalisation. And this is not discounting the intellectually ordered millennial messianism that informs the very notion of American Exceptionalism.
With this background in mind, one can now see why it was easier for the Latin Americans to overcome the contradictions of Iberian colonisation. Raw physical conquests often beget raw physical resistance. It is easier to acquire knowledge of firearms than to acquire the firearms of modern knowledge in a context of unequal exchange. The Iberian conquest spawned several armed rebellions which began almost immediately and became the bloody trademark of the continent for the next 300 years and still counting. In the process, the people developed a heroic culture of militant self-belief and zero tolerance for tyrannical rule.
We can also see why intellectual subjugation is the worst and most deadly form of conquest. It leads directly to spiritual, economic, cultural and political enslavement. With his old religion gone, his culture subverted, his traditional institutions decimated, his modes of knowledge production devastated, the African , unlike the Chinese, the Japanese and the Indians, requires a complete makeover to even minimally function. But even to achieve this requires that he must first overcome the massive inferiority complex engendered by centuries of intellectual slavery in which he has been made to realise that he is surplus to the requirement of humanity. It is akin to being faced by a circular firing squad.
The foregoing also explains why Latin America has thrown up an original riposte to Roman Catholic orthodoxy in the form of Liberation Theology while Nigeria and Africa have come up with an even more showy and stagy version of American prosperity preaching. Both are variants of Liberation theories. But while Liberation Theology preaches individual striving on behalf of communal salvation which is achievable in this world through relentless struggle, Pentecostal/Prosperity doctrine preaches individual salvation through self-liberation from want and poverty which is also achievable in this world through the cultivation of the right attitude. Both have their uses and points of convergence and divergence.
With due respect, the Pentecostal theory of human liberation cannot begin to compare in classical erudition, intellectual rigour and sheer philosophical élan with Liberation Theology. But that is neither here nor there. Both have their practical values and ideological efficacy. While Liberation Theology is in strategic alliance with insurgent groups hoping to bring down unjust and tyrannical states in Latin America, the Pentecostal Church, at least in Nigeria, appears to be in alliance with a delinquent state which it helps to maintain order and stability by transferring to itself part of the state function of providing solace and succour to its citizens. For the fanatical adherents, this is not just an opiate but the oxygen of life itself. Needless to add that it is also an anti-revolutionary carbon monoxide.
This column does not pretend to enjoy a monopoly of wisdom. It remains an interactive session in which readers are encouraged to talk back. Since this is a very weighty matter which involves the destiny of the Black race, readers are invited to ventilate their views before the matter is brought to conclusion in a few weeks’ time.
