The Postmodern Africa: Demystifying Our Singular Identity

Yes, it is true. Africa speaks in tongues; it rolls its tongue into a million folds and spreads it out only to reveal layers and layers of other tongues. But please do permit me to touch on one of these many tongues, the Yoruba language, in rendering an opening proverb for this essay:

“Agba jowo la fin so ya”

Translating this into the English would go on to read something like this:
To beat our chests proudly, our hands have to come together.

Now, this isn’t a perfect translation, trust me. But I want to think that you understand that this presupposes the idea that in making one thing whole and complete, in making a singular entity, several many plurals have to come together and without these many molecular parts, the whole is as good as non-existent.
Ok, let’s bring this home. Usually, in our discourses about Africa, every time the word Africa resonates in the ears of many, it always tends to sound like a singular component , a whole that can exist without ever looking into the parts. Naturally, we have the proclivity to personifying Africa in our minds, without giving thought to the fact that the name, Africa, is only a denigration of the many units that conglomerates into a whole.

You ever hear things like this?

Africa shall be great again.

Africa, my Africa, where is thy strength;

Africa has lost its beginning

Oh dear Africa, how I long for you

Well, these are the high-handed personifications that have made Africa into a botanical taxonomy, of which the Africans in it are merely species. Really, we should, in all honesty, do away with these ‘brazen metaphors’ because more than anything else, if we want to make and unmake changes in Africa, we must treat Africa like the name it is, and give more credence to the people within it, the countries, the tribes, the ethnic groups, the families, the hands that have in all truth come together to make up the continent.

But no, this shouldn’t be an issue for a round table discussion; it ain’t worth all that trouble. The real issue, the call-up matter that should be made an actual thrust is if in fact, the meaning of Africa, as we all know it to be, still strikes a chord in times like this.

It is not unusual to think of Africa, and think instantly of a communal group of people with black, coal skins and yellow teeth who believe in staunch values that has only wrecked them; people whose political thinking is warped beyond repair, people who live in rural greenhouses sprinkled with urbanised droppings; people who take in the sun like it is a blessing from God. People who need to be saved from themselves.

That was Africa, the Africa that was defeated, the Africa that needed lullabies, in form of loud, sorry, sad poems, to be rocked to sleep or to action. But things have changed because alongside the rest of the world, Africa has taken its place in the postmodern phase of things, in what a particular African, Edouard Glissant, calls “a world that is in a continuous state of flux”. What this simply implies is that we are no longer in an Africa where two plus two makes four; everything has taken a new title, a new course. We are in fact living in a postmodern Africa.

As this is not quite a scholarly work or a dissertation, I wouldn’t want to bore you too much with terms and definitions. But then, I would be talking gibberish if I didn’t make an attempt to denigrate the word “Postmodernism”. Fredric Jameson, a maestro in this, denunciated postmodernism as,

“The effacement of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so called mass or popular culture.” Using the American society, Jameson expatiated on how Americans have moved away from high or elite culture… of TV series and Readers Digest culture, and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening and seeing to its initiates, to adopting a new perspective on things like advertising, motels, the Las Vegas strip, Grade-B Hollywood film, of paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and the science fiction or fantasy novel. (Jameson 1,2).

Well, another scholar, Linda Hutcheon enunciated the postmodern paradox in relation to other worlds like Africa. She earmarked a postmodern society as “a decentralised community, where the centre no longer holds.”
So, you should kind of get the picture now. The postmodern world is one that is upside down, no collective sense of reasoning or responsibility. Postmodernism should not be mistaken to mean “contemporary”, but it does connote a world filled with contradictions, a sort of attempt to subvert the beliefs, the paradigms we are used to. Interesting, eh? Well, it won’t be too interesting when we think of the fact that this is exactly the position Africa and the rest of the world is.

For the rest of the world, it is not quite a surprise. But for poor, old Africa that is still seen as been on the bottom rung of the international sphere, how can that be? Well, believe it or not, postmodernism has snuck its way in through our outlets and we are sleeping snug in its arms.
Extensively, I would like to point first that, in the postmodern order of things, language through words no longer suffices as a means of expression, because “each time we try to express ourselves, we have to break with ourselves. So, we express ourselves in various means- pidgin blended into broken into Yoruba, then Igbo and some bit of American ghetto slang all in one quick swoop. You need to hear a Nigerian guy greet another Nigerian guy friend these days,

“Hey my real G, what’s up. How things dey roll for there na. Se gbo gbo nkan rosy? I saw your bae on Whatsapp the other day. That gal ehn, o sha pra pra. O ta le nu. She is dope. So, iwo no ma mo ju lo so ja ke (so you too can identify good things like this), goat like you.”

This preaches quite a lot, right?

Also, the postmodern Africans express themselves through various dress senses, music tastes, food cravings and political thought systems. And when you look whichever direction, you no longer tend to see the image of one African in yet another African. Because we have split into ourselves, we have created ourselves in the likeness of our own image. Look at this,

I am black and living in some local street in Lagos but I think and talk like my tongues are twisted into a balloon; l interact with only foreign people online; I make my money in dollars; I wear an Ankara blouse then put on an English pants, I have a earring in my nose like the Indians; I have this bead on my neck that very much looks like it comes from the sea in Puerto Rico or Brazil; I have my hair dyed and tinted like I am from the Caribbean; I don’t like the way things run in my country but I don’t give a darn so far as it does not ruin me; I am religious, Muslim, Christian, but I barely can stand my religion, left to me, I would rather not believe anything at all and if I wanted to get into a religion, it would rather be Judaism or Hinduism; I can’t get enough of Rihanna and Ed Sheeran, who just happens to be mixed breeds and I love watching Telemundo soap operas and Hollywood sci fi movies, but damn it, that’s some Spanish-Mexican-American mix.

I am African but I have merged several identities into me, so that, there is no more Africa in me, there is only an individual culture.

This is the new Africa.

Africans, we no longer have a common identity, what we have is a history, a heritage which even dates as far back as before the advent of the West.

So, you are thinking, what’s the cause of these multiple identities all wrapped in one? Well, that’s pretty much obvious. Change, evolution (not the whole scientific thingy that burst the brains but the natural evolution into knowingness, into discovery). With discovery, with knowledge comes the drive to make new things and to be new in a chic, vintage way. And yes, there is the hybridization factor. You know, people getting married to people who they normally don’t get married to, and you know, going to places they normally never stepped their feet on, accepting beliefs which erstwhile were taboos.

Let me get an assist from Edouard Glissant, an African-Caribbean who understands the workings of the hybrid system because he, like many black souls, doesn’t even know part of Africa he comes from;

“The world can no longer be shaped into a system. Too many Others and Elsewheres disturb the placid surface.... there is therefore a real discontinuity beneath the apparent continuity of our his- tory (Africans). . . The real discontinuity is that in the emergence of the periods we have defined, the decisive catalyst of change is not secreted by the circumstances but externally determined in relation to another history... (another people).”

In essence, we are who we are in Africa because of what other people in other parts of the world become. But then, as different as we might be, as individual as individuals are, right now, we can’t exclude ourselves from a community. This is because the one meaning we attach to ourselves comes from the many meanings we find out there amidst other people so that despite the fact that we only know ourselves, we only have our individual identities to reckon with; the one question we ask ourselves continually is not ‘Who am l?’, but ‘ rather: ‘Who are we?”, “Who are we as Africans.”
I am reckoning that is why there is such a group as Africa Unchained, right?

Glissant sees the African world as characterised by latency, opacity and an infinite metamorphosis, which is postmodernism in its raw form, and seriously, I couldn’t have agreed more with him.

Conclusively, Derek Walcott, some weirdo of an African poet, has these lines to offer, and they are beautiful for expressing the African postmodern dilemma.
I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation,

• The Schooner Flight (this ain’t no racist statement. This is the African truth)

And yes, it is way past the time when we should ridicule or celebrate this change, because it is being there as far back as the beginning of this generation. We just weren’t listening enough to the new piper in Africa that has taken on a new melody. So, in the stead of trying to decide the rightness or wrongness of our newly adapted non-identity, we should rather try to understand it, to listen more to the new sound of Africa. In doing this, we would really get to appreciate the whole notion of unity in diversity. So yes, I will say this first and I hope it does resonate through the continent,
Hail to the Africa that was, the Africa that is, and that will yet be (this is me treating Africa like a botanical taxonomy).