MR CHAIRMAN,
YOUR EXCELLENCIES,
YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESSES,
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
It is a unique privilege for me to address this assembly of Black and African Scholars from all over the world.
A man lived amongst us recently, a man died amongst us recently. He was respected for his Africanness, his deep humility and his painstaking and patient pursuit of originality. These three attributes-Africanness, humility and originalityare of great significance in understanding the importance of the colloquium in the Festival. If we simply and naively think that a rediscovery or exhumation of the contribution of our ancestors is an end in itself, Professor Zirimu and all of us would have failed not only ourselves but all Black and African people throughout the world.
For most people who assert the Africanness of themselves or of things, there is a standing tragedy. The psycho-physiology of knowledge would confirm a built-in handicap for any human group who cannot work in their indigenous language form. The standing tragedy of all Blacks and Africans wherever they may be is that their tongues have been pulled out and they must speak in strange tongues. To overcome this standing tragedy we need deep humility, unruffled patience and painstaking dedication. It is my hope that all these attributes would go into our quest for knowledge about ourselves and our contribution to human knowledge and civilisation.
When we made our first contact with the merchant adventurers from Western Europe , most of our shores became trading posts where primary products were exchanged for processed goods. I would like to suggest that the modification and complications of modern economic organisation and exchange apart, our uneven relationship with Europe and now including Northern America , remain basically unchanged. We continue to be trading posts which supply primary products in exchange for processed goods. The existence of import substitution industries does not detract from this fact. These trading posts are run and maintained by our citizens.
These agents can be grouped into four :
(a) Intellectual trading post agents,
(b) Commercial trading post agents,
(c) Bureaucratic trading post agents,
(d) Technical trading post agents.
The activity of these agents constitute impediments to Black African development. Today, our attention is focused on the intellectual trading post agents who to my mind have two common characteristics, that is, they possess abundant imitative capacity and they depend on alien recognition and standards for their status.
I have taken the trouble to develop this analytic framework to enable us relate the spot light on the past to our present conditions and aspirations. Only such a link can put the Colloquium in its right perspective. Are we reviewing the past for self glorification; are we establishing the contribution of Black and African scholars in the past; exhibiting our achievements to give the present-day Black and African a surer footing to make him a better agent of those who control the products of science and technology? I would suggest that the answer to these questions is emphatically 'No'.
In fact the Colloquium should be seen not as an exercise in revalorisation but entirely as a means of achieving mental liberation. I say this because the purveyor of intellect and the stock of intellectual property are key variables in the development of our minds and in enabling us to come to terms with our environment. This is not to suggest that technical bureaucratic and commercial trading post-agents do not count in this process. Much however turns on the application of intellect to our activities. To the extent that we can achieve originality in our thoughts the developmental gap which today consumes all our energy as a people will be wiped out and we would join the ranks of the leaders in technological creativity in the hope of raising the standard of living of our people.
I am deliberately steering clear of pure scholasticism because the socio-economic condition of Black and African people throughout the world is a constant reminder that whatever inquiry does not positively lead in the direction of tangible results is not the business of the Black and African scholar today. Our ancestors' contribution on the aesthetic plain, I have had cause to say, defies time. We must match this food for the spirit, this contribution of the soul with a similar contribution in man's relationship with .matter.
You are gathered here to consider at a comprehensive level the contribution of Black and African peoples to civilisation and education. Your deliberations could be taken up with the Semantics of the matter. Philology and philosophy could have a field day and at the end all Black and African people would have very little to show for your efforts. A few of us would of course derive enormous intellectual pleasure and may even praise you for presenting papers whose rigour and logic, whose clarity and depth are of the highest standards. But whose standards?
Let this Colloquium be the point when the process of liberating us from mental bondage to Western intellectual tradition will commence and Black and African intellectual flower blossom. Let it be an occasion for rejecting the role of a trading post-agent whose claim to fame is excellence in imitation. The excursion into the past as I said should not be given to self-glorification and self-justification. Every course of inquiry, every intellectual riposte must move away from telling the world and ourselves that we constructed systems of thought and action, that we built roads and empires. Now is the time to build a bridge-head for assaulting today and the future, for preparing ourselves for regaining control over our destiny.
I invite you to look around you and estimate the portion of the technology you depend on here which is Black or African. When you have answered the question to yourself the direction and purpose of your examination of Black and African past and contribution should be clear . Your inquiry must be made in the context that points in the direction of freeing your people from mental and material poverty and bondage. So Blacks and Africans may have in the past run a flourishing research centre iti Timbuktu at a time when most of Europe was unlettered.
However, unless and until this fact of your past enables you to regain communion with creativity, helps you to abandon unproductive imitation, assists you in establishing what factors made Timbuktu an intellectually productive institution, you will remain intellectual trading post-agents serving the cause of alien forces for a pittance. It is my hope that your inquiries will identify the mental and material obstacles in the way of a change of course in the direction of self-sustainable and original productivity. You must give attention to the question of the medium in which your thought process is encapsulated. Have we lost our tongues for ever? Must we think and work in the languages of Europe for ever? Must the choice of fashionable, acceptable or admissible research topics and areas be dictated to us by another culturally dominant group? Must we measure the quality of our performance by standards that are foreign? How much do we delude ourselves in the pursuit of acceptability?
How can the question raised by Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon help us to chart another direction? How can the methodology of Ibn Khaldun and Dubois, the scholarship and activism of Dan Fodio, Ismail Toure, Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah inspire us to greater heights?
As you pursue your inquiries into our contribution and heritage in the arts, languages and literature, philosophy and religion, history and government, science and technology, you must be concerned less with self-glorification and self-justification. Reaffirm and confirm to yourselves and to us that your work in the varying universities and research centres today bear a stamp of your blackness and Africanness. This stamp will however be unworthy unless such work contributes positively not to making you an efficient agent of foreign causes and interests but a tool for increasing the share of the Black and African people in the mental and material abundance and affluence which science and technology, and the social sciences make possible in today's world.
Such a feat would earn for us the dignity we crave for, the recognition we seek and the liberation we are struggling to achieve. This Festival will not be complete without a Colloquium. While the events and exhibitions provide visual displays of our art and artifacts, the Colloquium should impose living and dynamic ration on the relatively static combination of mind and motion which is dance, song, painting and sculpture. Your deliberations are therefore at the nerve centre of our quest for mental and material liberation from our status as trading posts for the industrial states of the world.
I leave you with a call to find ways and means of opening the creative impulses which will enable black individuals, black nations and aggregates of such nations to regain control of their destinies. Only thus can our people contribute anew their quota to human progress and only thus can they obtain their fair share of the world's resources.
On this note I leave you in the hope that sterile scholasticism which often stifles creativity will be held in good check and positive effort made to relate your inquiry to our socio-political and economic conditions. Such a relationship should open the way for solutions brewed and distilled in the milieu of the human condition of Black and African people, taking maximum advantage of available stock of knowledge.
I wish you all a meaningful and fruitful deliberative session and a memorable cultural feast. |
