Africa has newer cultural battles within our current Trumpian global context. The re-emergence of global economic contestations between the USA, China, Russia, European Union (EU) and the generic former colonial Global South (GS) have serious cultural connotations beyond the immediately material.
Because what now exists is a rewind of a Cold War and post Cold War global perception of what can be considered human progress. Together with multiple racist connotations that come with a globally awkward repetition of history.
I have used the term ‘newer’ because there are older ones es that have existed since our struggles against colonialism.
Ones that were led by for example cultural, musical and literature in Africa luminaries (in no preferential order such as Fela Kuti, Thomas Mapfumo, Kasongo Band, Oliver Mtukudzi, Lady Smith Black Mambazo, Ray Phiri and Stimela, Miriam Makeba, Brenda Fassie, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, China Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta, Peter Abrahams, Ezekiel Maphalele, Bessie Head, Dambudzo Marechera, Steve Biko and many others I am sure I have forgotten but not deliberately left out.
I cannot, for the purposes of this blog list all of them. Please reflect on your own preferred consciousness semblance including an historical and contemporary list of your own African cultural icons. Because they are many. And they influenced our cultural African struggles for liberatory and emancipated African minds differently.
In this while with the specific purpose of making us more confident in striving for a more equitable, justiciable and therefore fairer world for not only ourselves as Africans. But also every other previously oppressed people on the planet.
I have deliberately mentioned culture because it is in the final analysis what makes us function on a daily basis as it relates to our own collective and in the contemporary now individual values.
And how it is closely enmeshed within a capitalist, Hollywood determined lifestyle experience of what it can or should mean to be a human being today. No matter your global geographical location.
Not only because of our increasing and in most cases privatised access to electricity, telephony, mobile telephony and fibre optic enabled access to the internet and social media.
And an expansion of the historical context is important here from an African and even global anti-colonialism perspective.
In this technological African reference point it is important to recall how the arrival of in particular the maxim gun which defeated us in our initial struggles for liberation left us in awe of same said arrival by ship military technology. We fought gallantly but we were defeated in that moment.
By the time we saw not only the first mechanised wagons (cars) and electricity that was combined with religious fervour and a change of our social lifestyles we were lost at the proverbial (colonialist) sea.
We recovered with our second struggles for liberation across the African continent and the Global South.
This was mainly because we had begun to grasp the full import of these technologies and how they were aiding in the decimation of our peoples. So we learnt how to use them in solidarity with others in similar corrosive environments or those in the global north that sympathised with us.
We learnt how the radio worked not only by way of frequency but also by way of propaganda. Same with newspapers and magazines together with the full import of what ownership of a printing press can do.
In this eventual mimicry of what we were up against we became entrapped as Africans in a false understanding of the progressiveness of the technology that we had used/borrowed during our liberation struggles (military or civil).
We forgot that the owner of the medium also determines the message (to paraphrase a famous British engineer Marshall MacLuhan who argued about the social life changing impact of electricity on human behaviour (black, brown but mainly white).
We have come full circle to that interlinked colonial, post and neo colonial discourse of where Africa is placed with emerging “technologies of being” outlined above.
Including how they have impacted our perceptions of our existence and more significantly political, religious, economic, social and other values in the world we now live in.
And as argued by globally public intellectuals such as Naomi Klein, Soshana Zuboff and Yannis Varoufakis from varying nodes, we are now being reinvented as human beings. By what they invariably refer to as ‘techno-feudalism’. Something that affects us more in the Global South than the global north due to our less protective privacy laws around social media and the internet (including banking).
But as Africans and beyond their understandably Eurocentric/ GlobalNorth centric arguments, on our own we are faced with a colossus that seeks to repeat our technological defeat to colonialism.
And this via the big issue being discussed globally, with our bit part as Africans on Artificial Intelligence (AI).
I used the turn of phrase ‘bit part’ because again as Africans we don’t own the main algorithms nor the fibre optics that bring the new ICT infrastructure to us directly.
Even as we naively clamour for Starlink to keep us in the loop with mainly social media connectivity at a for now comparatively cheaper cost.
In this sense, and as a word of caution, our embrace of AI may be our newer encounter with a maxim gun. Except without the physical and rapid bullets. Just cultural ones.
You cannot harness what you do not own or control. Be it via Chinese or American owned AI or telecommunications and fibre optic companies. Where you chose to not resist and join the fray and it’s attendant benefits, remember the full import of the maxim gun.
We need a much more Pan African approach to this. And I acknowledge the work being done on language and imagining on what AI algorithms can do. But its not all about business and money or trying to be the next owner of Meta (which will never happen if you are an African and in particular a black African).We may need to rethink what entertains us as Africans. And where we want to be recognized not only physically but also via the clearly unstoppable AI, internet and its attendant social media algorithms. With the added caveat of how it affects young Africans consciousness, a debate for another day.
Unless we take on a more coherent and people driven cultural approach, we may be faced with a new maxim gun. Culturally only. For now.
Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity
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