Unmasking the African Ghost: Theology, Politics, and the Nightmare of Failed States

By Cyril Orji

The story of Africa is a ghost story with two plots. One is foreign or imported and the other indigenous or local. The foreign plot has its origin in colonial history. The indigenous plot is African in origin. But both plots end in the same place: African trauma and culture complex. These narratives create in modern Africa a splintered consciousness and the political and economic conditions that lead to physical and psychological violence.

Unmasking the African Ghost is both a theological exploration of the reasons the political and economic systems in African countries have failed and a proposal for the paths toward recovery, anchored in the belief that Africa is a continent continuously trying to redefine its identity in the face of Eurocentrism. For the church in Africa to be a church at the service of its people, theology in Africa must take misery and oppression as the context for its reflections and its reconstruction of the social order.

An African solution to African problems must be able to meet the needs of the time. It must look to the African past to draw from its riches--particularly the African sociopolitical ethic of ubuntu. It must also look ahead and draw from the best available sociopolitical system of modern states: liberal democracy. A hybrid of these two yields ubuntucracy. Ubuntucracy removes the ghosts of both Africa and its Western colonizers and begins a new story that can help Africa survive its double bind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781506479446

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Two momentous events took place in Africa as this manuscript was being completed. The first happened on August 18, 2020, when a group of Malian military officers stormed the presidential palace and overthrew the country’s duly elected president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, in what the Washington Post described as the first coup d’état of the coronavirus era.¹ The problems that led to the ousting of President Keita, who himself first came to power through a military coup in 2012 before winning elections in 2013 and 2018, are neither new nor have anything to do with the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. The officers who masterminded the coup cited old issues as the reasons for their intervention: corruption, social and political tension, improper functioning of the organs of the state, a floundering economy, and insurgency. The military junta then claimed that it needed a three-year transition to review the foundations of the Malian state² before it could hand over power to a new civilian president.

The second event was the nationwide protest in Nigeria that began in early October 2020 when Nigerian youths took to the streets to protest the activities of the special police unit called the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Since its formation in 1992, SARS has been accused of a long list of crimes, which, according to Amnesty International, includes extortion, corruption, rape, violent harassment, and extrajudicial killings. But because of its success in fighting a seemingly endless war against the jihadist group Boko Haram in the northern part of the country, many Nigerians have a positive view of SARS in general. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the protest, even the head of the police conceded that they may have within their ranks some unruly and unprofessional officers (though he denied many of the protesters’ allegations).³ The protest has since turned deadly, adding more challenges and posing further security risks to the country’s existing problems. Echoing the condemnation of the international community for the way the Nigerian government was handling the protests, then US secretary of state, Michael Pompeo, issued a clear statement on October 22, 2020: The United States strongly condemns the use of excessive force by military forces who fired on unarmed demonstrators in Lagos, causing death and injury. We welcome an immediate investigation into any use of excessive force by members of the security forces. Those involved should be held to account in accordance with Nigerian law.⁴

The situations in Nigeria and Mali are still unfolding. No one knows how they will end. They may end up transforming both countries (one can only hope). But in the meantime, these situations speak to the larger problem of state corporatization that has resulted in ghost states in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. This book seeks to address these corruptions, corporate mentalities, and failures of the organs of the state. It is about how Africa can make a much-needed critical turn and forge a truly African democratic governance that speaks to the issues that Africans face.

Although this book recounts the history of Africa, it does not pretend to offer a comprehensive history of the origins and the ideals of the continent. Among historians and demographers, there is no consensus as to how the name Africa came to be used as a designation for the more than fifty countries that make up the continent today. But it is undeniable that the term is an external imposition. It was a label that was first used in the heydays of the Old Roman Empire with specific reference to North Africa before it was extended to the whole continent by the end of the first century AD.⁵ Africa today is both an idea and a reality. Different historical processes have coalesced to produce them. As an idea, Africa is mystical, romantic, and full of promise. It is the ancestral home of humanity, and all can look back upon it with nostalgia. But, as a reality, Africa is an existential threat to its citizens. It remains steeped in miseries and malaises rooted in political, social, economic, ecological, and even cultural factors. As one African writer puts it, Africa has a face with many scars.⁶ The road to realizing the ideal that Africa holds has been bumpy at best.

The American novelist, poet, civil rights activist, and pan-Africanist James Arthur Baldwin (1924–87) argued that it is not possible in America to be Black and not be paranoid. The racial fault lines in the United States demoralize the Black person’s sense of worth. Similarly, Africa is a demoralized continent. And being African tends to make one paranoid. Demoralization, in Baldwin’s usage, is the effect of being robbed of one’s sense of human value. In Black Africa, the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of its leadership has brought about a collective problem that is being experienced throughout the continent: the nightmare of a failed state. The book addresses, from a theological point of view, why the political and economic systems in African countries have not worked and proposes paths for recovery. Its remedy is premised on the idea that Africa is a continent that is continuously trying to redefine its identity and renegotiate itself in the face of Eurocentrism.⁷

The book has eight chapters, thematically arranged. Its basic theological assumption is that for the Church in Africa to be a church at the service of the African people, theology in Africa must take misery and oppression seriously as a context for its reflection on and reconstruction of the social order.⁸ The book has three main objectives:

1.To initiate from a theological perspective a cross-disciplinary conversation on a model of government appropriate for the African situation.

2.To use a theological analysis to show how the challenges of a failed state and the enduring problems posed by poverty, suffering, and alienation can be remedied using resources from the Christian Gospel that are inclusive and all-embracing.

3.To advance interdisciplinary collaboration between theology (the art of articulating human interrelatedness to God) and politics (the art of building structures befitting of our shared human life in a global network of human relationships) and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that contribute to the growth of the human organum.

Chapter 1 explains how the history of Africa is a ghost story with two plots. One is foreign or imported and the other indigenous or local. The foreign plot has its origin in colonial history. The indigenous plot is African in origin. But both plots end in the same place: African trauma and culture complex. These forces create in modern Africa a splintered consciousness and the political and economic conditions that lead to physical and psychological violence, conditions that come from living in artificially created territories without the requisite status of statehood required under international law. To use Frantz Fanon’s description, they have left Africans in a double bind.

Many have argued that a lack of institutional building in many of the nation-states in Africa continues to undermine any legitimate claim to national identity and will. While it is theoretically true that natural resources are crucial determinants of the health of a state, in practice, Africa continues to suffer the natural-resources curse. It is not just a diamond or the oil curse. It is now the land curse. The land curse plays out in what is now known as the land grab or the new scramble for Africa. Chapter 2 explains how the multinational corporations that are encouraging Africans to reassess their core values and bring them in line with those of the West are the same ones aiding inefficient state leaders to dispossess the people of their ancestral land and its natural resources, committing in the process ecocides of high proportion.

Chapter 3 distinguishes the various terms that have been used to describe threatened states: ungovernable spaces, weak states, fragile states, quasi-states, failing states, and failed states. While these terms are by no means synonymous, the chapter explains why the African situation lends itself to their synonymous use. Using the Fragile State Index (FSI), formerly known as the Failed State Index, to buttress the hypothesis that many of the states in Africa are failing because they have not been able to build the requisite economic and political institutions, the chapter investigates why states once classified as weak or failing in other regions of the world bounce back and recover, but African ones do not. It explains why it is only in Africa that states categorized under any of these rubrics seem to remain there in perpetuity and eventually fail.

Chapter 4 argues that the vocabulary of failed states is now part of the vernacular idiom of Africa, and its many commonwealths no longer protect and preserve the well-being of their citizens because Africa lacks leadership. One British historian has aptly described Africa as a continent of dinosaur leaders. The hemorrhaging of leadership is here conceived and described as part of the larger African ghost syndrome. Not only have some African leaders invented kleptocracy, but they have made the institution of leadership a geopolitical challenge and national security risk. Relying on historiometric study and social psychology, the chapter uncovers the prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and how it contributes to the making of dinosaur leaders.

Writing about Africa requires that one makes a parenthetical note that it is a diverse continent of more than fifty independent nations. Some of these nations have hundreds of languages, their own meanings and values, their own symbols, and idioms that inform their way of life. Understandably, there are those who object to the categorization of Africa as a geographical whole and find such sweeping generalization to be misleading. Their objections are not discounted. But chapter 5 delves into the culture hypothesis and uses it as an avenue to clarify the two difficult terms, Africa and culture, as employed in the book. It insists that the generalization of Africa as a broad whole is testable. In the social sciences, all hypotheses are to be either tested or operationalized. The generalization of Africa here, which is contained in the working hypothesis of the book itself (that Africa hemorrhages leadership because the administrative superstructure, whether introduced in the heydays of colonialism or as part of postcolonial reform efforts, has yielded only little productive infrastructure),⁹ has been operationalized by a 2013 post-Africae Munus document on just governance and common good in Africa by the Symposium of the Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM). SECAM, using this broad category, recognizes, as it were, that Africa at present is in a dangerous moment. In what seems like an echo of a remark made long ago by the Italian neo-Marxist philosopher and political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937)—that the moment when the Old is dead and the New is not yet born is a very dangerous moment indeed¹⁰—SECAM calls for a new political outlook for Africa as a whole. Thus, on the basis of this generalization made by SECAM itself, the chapter works out what might be termed an identifiable African culture. This requires an understanding of what the problem is and where its solution might lie.

Chapter 6 discusses the pervasive power of geography in the light of Ian Morris’s much-debated book, Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future (2010). The chapter accepts Morris’s basic assertion that not only are we bound by the law of geography but also that the law of geography can be both a blessing and a curse, depending on a civilization’s ability to adapt and reinvent itself. Inverting Morris’s question (from why the West rules to why Africa seems unable to get things done), the chapter contends that there must be a path for African social development. The problem is that the path has yet to be uncovered. Development here is not measured only in skills but also in terms of virtue and holiness. The chapter proposes eleven inevitable laws that must be adhered to in the quest to discover and chart Africa’s path to human social development.

Chapter 7 discusses the complex world of aid. Drawing upon Roger Riddell’s work on the two worlds of aid—the donor side and the recipient side—the chapter traces the history of aid-giving, showing how it is a double-edged sword. Sadly, while so many of the Asian countries have been developing other forms of capital and sustainable revenue, the relationship of Africa to the rest of the world is still one of a donor to a recipient. If the goal of aid is to reach a sustainable development, then that goal, at least for now, remains very much a utopia for Africa. Foreign aid has done little to improve Africa’s democratic transitions and outcomes. Higher aid-recipient nations in Africa tend to have more corruption and worse infrastructure. The chapter suggests a new direction, one in which Africa will no longer rely massively on aid but will be able to sustain its own social and political development.

Chapter 8 seeks a system of governance appropriate for the African situation. It reckons that many of the problems of postcolonial Africa have been self-inflicted. For this reason, fashioning a system of government that can address these multilayered ills must not be done from abstract principles of democracy or a romanticized notion of what may or may not have been in the African past. Many in the West, Americans in particular, are now experiencing the rude awakening that democracy is fragile, especially in the light of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by some extremists. Fashioning a new system of government must be done only by following rules that eliminate the oversights of common sense. An African solution to an African problem must be able to meet the needs of the time. It must look to the African past and draw from its riches, particularly from the African sociopolitical ethic of ubuntu. It must also be forward-looking and draw from the best available sociopolitical systems of modern states, from the Western notion of liberal democracy especially. A hybrid of these two yields ubuntucracy, which not only removes the counter-positions in both African and Western pasts but also develops a new position that can help Africa navigate and survive its double bind.

1.See Adam Taylor, The First Coup D’état of the Coronavirus Era, Washington Post, August 20, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/08/20/mali-coup-coronavirus/.↵

2.See Jeune Afrique, Mali Coup D’état: Military Proposes Three-Year Transition, Africa Report, August 24, 2020, https://www.theafricareport.com/38911/mali-coup-detat-military-proposes-three-year-transition/.↵

3.See Joe Parkinson, Nigeria Protests: What’s Happening and Why Are People Protesting Against SARS? Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/nigeria-protests-whats-happening-and-why-are-people-demonstrating-11603277989.↵

4.See Michael R. Pompeo, press statement on Ongoing Protests in Nigeria, October 22, 2020, https://www.state.gov/ongoing-protests-in-nigeria/.↵

5.See Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Do ‘Africans’ Exist? Genealogies and Paradoxes of African Identities and the Discourses of Nativism and Xenophobia, African Identities 3 (2010): 281–95, 284.↵

6.Elochukwu E. Uzukwu, A Listening Church: Autonomy and Communion in African Churches (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 1.↵

7.Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Do ‘Africans’ Exist?, 283.↵

8.Uzukwu, A Listening Church, 2.↵

9.See Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xxix.↵

10.As cited in Prunier, Africa’s World War, xxx.↵

1

A GHOST-FILLED CONTINENT

History is a ghost—a hungry ghost. It haunts us, shaping our experience in the image of the past. We think we are in the familiar terrible story. But what if it’s a different story that is unfolding?¹

The story of Africa is a ghost story. This ghost story needs to be told, regardless of how scary it might be. It is a story that is not yet finished. Like the proverbial son still haunted by his long-dead, estranged father, Africa’s past continues to haunt its present. In many parts of Africa, there is a widely held belief in the relationship of the living with the living-dead (ancestors). Just because one’s father is dead does not mean that his ghost no longer trails behind the son or daughter. No African dares to run away from the ghost of their father. Africans talk to their dead fathers to work out difficulties in their relationships with their dead ancestors and living family members.

The objective of this chapter is to work out the ghosts of Africa. As the American poet Charles Wright (b. 1935) described it, We were born to escort the dead, and be escorted ourselves.² Escorting the dead requires reliving experiences and recalling stories and practices—even if they are traumatic.

There are two broad strands of ghosts in Africa. One is foreign or imported, and the other native or indigenous. The origin of the foreign strand is in colonial history, and of these ghosts, there are multitudes. The ghost of Leopold³ haunts Africans who hail from what used to be the Belgian Congo (modern Democratic Republic of Congo). The ghost of France haunts Africans belonging to the Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF), a federation of eight colonial territories in Africa. The ghost of Great Britain haunts those Africans who belong to what used to be the colonies of the British Empire. And the ghost of Portugal haunts Africans of the former Portuguese territories of Africa. Later in the story, these ghosts will align with the indigenous strands of ghosts and will simultaneously haunt and shape the African experience. The French West Indian psychiatrist and political theorist Frantz Fanon (1925–61) hinted at the traumatic effect of this foreign strand of ghosts when he suggested that the colonial system was dehumanizing and was built on psychological and physical violence.⁴

The second strand of ghost is indigenous and African in origin. In its pristine form, it was part of the native African idiom and social mores. In native idioms, people talk to ghosts, particularly those of their ancestors. Talking to ghosts is both a positive feeling and an inheritance. It enables them to organize their communities along the dictates or precepts that have been handed down from age to age and transmitted from their fathers (now revered as ancestors). Just because the ancestors are dead does not mean that Africans have ceased talking to them, arguing with them, and working out their issues with them. Unfortunately, however, this native idiom was bastardized and became degenerate in the wake of Africa’s entry into modernity. It lost its positive fervor and became another source of trauma.

As Africa made its entry into modernity, the two strands of ghosts conspired against Africans and made them act against their own interests. They created in the African social imagination a culture complex. They became the forces at work in the double bind that Frantz Fanon describes so well in his 1952 masterpiece Peau Noire, Masques Blancs [Black Skin, White Masks]. Fanon speaks of the problem of colonial cultural alienation in psychoanalytic language as the constellation of delirium that mediates the social life of the victim of colonial mentality.⁵ Black skin, white mask is not a neat separation of two seemingly disparate categories of pigmentation (black and white) but a reference to the cognitive dissonance that comes from wanting to be both at the same time. It is the culminating effect of a colonial mentality that creates in the African a desire to want to be both. In other words, the foreign strands of ghosts have established in the African psyche a delirium—a desire to be a European and an African at the same time. Fanon represents the double bind as stemming from two factors: economic power (which Europeans hold) and the internalization of inferiority (which colonialism engenders).

As with all traumas, the cure comes only through a careful diagnosis and a commitment to follow the prescribed remedy. As part of the long process of unearthing the diagnosis, this chapter aims at sorting out and clarifying the different layers of African ghosts that have traumatized the continent with a view to laying a foundation for unmasking them. Taking a cue from the American poet Tony Hoagland (1953–2018), who wrote that modern consciousness may be splintered but that one function of poetry in our time is to help fasten it back together,⁶ the understanding here is that where modern African consciousness is broken, there must be a pathway to rebuilding it. We are each, after all, bearers of the histories that are embedded in the various traditions we inherit.⁷ We have to transform these ghosts, or they will continue to haunt us.

UNDERSTANDING THE AFRICAN GHOST

The African ghost is an enigma. It is African in origin and orientation. Before it evolved into a trauma and devolved into something that calls into question the black man’s humanity,⁸ the ghost was part of African idiom, part of what it means to be human in African societies. It belonged to the dialectic of authority in Africa, where almost everyone grows up believing in ghosts. Tales of ghosts are told daily there, foremost among them fables of the spirits of dead ancestors. They are often told to instill fear and serve as a call to action. A classic example is found in Chinua Achebe’s prototypal postcolonial novel Things Fall Apart (1958), which was intended as a rebuttal of Western misrepresentations of African cultures and values. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939) made caricatures of Africa. Conrad depicted life in Africa as full of misery, pain, diseases, death, and lawlessness, while Cary described Africans (Nigerians in particular) as nothing more than buffoons and savages.

Achebe responds to these misrepresentations from an African perspective.⁹ Using the Ibo tribe (sometimes spelt Igbo) of southeast Nigeria as an example, Achebe discountenances the idea that traditional Africans were merely a superstitious lot who blindly followed the dictates of their religious practices. He shows, rather, that the clan members have an organized way of resolving disputes and that this was part of the native idiom. He describes a ceremonial gathering in which the clan’s ancestral spirits, known as the egwugwu, walk among the people, as was usually the case whenever the clan was faced with an important domestic problem, particularly one with the potential to bring unrest and subversion. Justice has to be rendered according to the clan’s laws and traditions. The egwugwu render this justice.

The egwugwu usually emerge from a secret house that no one is allowed to enter, except for the elders, who are solely men. To reinforce the mystery of their position as ancestral spirits, the nine men posing as spirits wear masks. As soon as they emerge from their secret location, women and children almost instinctively burst into a great shout and flee. In the gender roles that have been handed down, No woman ever asked questions about the most powerful and the most secret cult in the clan.¹⁰ Although some clan members, including the wives and children of Okonkwo, the tragic hero of Achebe’s novel, "noticed that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo,"¹¹ they had to make believe that he was one of the dead fathers of the clan. It does not matter whether people knew that the egwugwu impersonating the clan spirits were mere men, some of whom may even be related to them. Their sight was a terrifying spectacle, and everyone was filled with fear. Achebe recalls how one woman who saw the masked spirits took to her heels and had to be restrained by her kinsfolk.

Achebe’s depiction of the masked spirit is exclusively focused on the practices of Ibo culture. He makes no attempt to explore the different experiences of other ethnic groups such as the Yoruba or the Hausa in Nigeria¹² or the hundreds of others on the continent. But this critique in no way undercuts Achebe’s essential argument. The story of the masked spirits is a fair representation of the appearance of ghosts in African idiom and of how this phenomenon unfolds in many African societies. It is Achebe’s subtle way of drawing attention to both the good and the bad in African cultures and traditions.

A similar portrayal of African ghosts, and a critique of what is good and bad in native African idioms, is also found in Camara Laye’s autobiographical novel, The African Child, originally published in French as L’Enfant noir [The Dark Child] (1954). Growing up as a young man in Guinea, Laye details the clan’s belief in spiritual forces, particularly hoodoo (black magic). He tells us that his father, by virtue of belonging to the Malinke tribe, possesses some supernatural powers, such as the power of the black snake, and can make gold out of iron. His mother also possesses magical powers. Because Laye is narrating a mythical story, it is difficult to tell where facts merge with fiction; the tales he tells of supernatural powers and spirits were widely accepted in Guinea, as in most of Africa, and went unchallenged for a long time.¹³ But this critique does not undercut Laye’s argument about belief in supernatural powers and spirits, which is routine in many African societies.

Achebe’s