African Popular Culture and Emancipatory Politics

Amílcar Cabral (1972), Ernest Wamba dia Wamba (2003)

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The current absence of any emancipatory vision for Africa lies at the heart of our political problems of racial capitalist and colonial oppression. Any attempt to rethink political emancipation on the African continent must be able to locate a universal conception of freedom within singular cultural experiences where people live. Irrespective of the specific manner in which such struggles for freedom were thought within different historical contexts, emancipatory politics always exhibited such a dialectic when it was based within popular traditions. Yet only some militant intellectual leaders understood the importance of this dialectic in thought. The present volume outlines and discusses two particularly important views concerning the role and importance of popular culture in emancipatory politics in Africa. Each is the product of distinct forms of colonial capitalist exploitation: the former saw the light of day within a colonial context while the latter is directly confronted by the neocolonial state. All emancipatory politics are developed in confrontation with state power, and all begin with a process of discussion and debate whereby a collective subject begins to be formed. The formation of such a collective political subject has been fundamentally informed by popular cultures on the African continent. The two authors whose essays are included here understood this and posit popular culture at the centre of their politics. The first, Amílcar Cabral, addresses the central role of popular culture in the independence struggle of Guinea Bissau in the 1970s; the second, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, addresses the centrality of African popular culture in an emancipatory politics for the current Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite the distance in time that separates them, both Cabral and Wamba-dia-Wamba develop a dialectics at the core of their politics which activates the universals of culture in the present. It is this that makes their views of central importance to emancipatory thought today.

Weniger Details

Michael Neocosmos is Emeritus Professor in the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa. Amílcar Cabral was a Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, pan-africanist, intellectual, poet, theoretician, revolutionary, political organizer, nationalist and diplomat. He was one of Africa's foremost anti-colonial leaders. Also known by the nom de guerre Abel Djassi, Cabral led the nationalist movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands and the ensuing war of independence in Guinea-Bissau. He was assassinated on 20 January 1973, about eight months before Guinea-Bissau's unilateral declaration of independence. He is an inspiration to revolutionary socialists and national independence movements worldwide. Ernest Wamba dia Wamba (1942 - July 15, 2020) was a prominent Congolese academic and political theorist who became a commander of the Kisangani faction of the rebel Rally for Congolese Democracy. In 1980, he accepted a position as Professor of History at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. In 1981, while visiting his parents' village in Zaire, he was arrested by the government of Mobutu Sese-Seko for possessing a paper he had authored that was deemed 'subversive', and was detained for one year. He continued his role as a prominent figure in both academia and political circles in Africa. He is the former president of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) as well as the founder and president of the philosophy club at the University of Dar es Salaam. He was an expert in the Palaver (politics) and other indigenous forms of African democracy. He participated in the Sovereign National Conference, held from 1990 through 1992 in Zaire. In December 1997, Wamba was named a recipient of the Dutch Prince Claus Award for Culture and Development. The announcement of the award cited his 'scholarly contribution to the development of African philosophy and for sparking off the philosophical debate on social and political themes in Africa.' At this time he also worked closely with Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere to end the Burundi Civil War.