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The Struggle for African Identity: Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance

2003, BRILL eBooks

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Adonis & Abbey Publishers, 2018

The birth of the African Renaissance was articulated by Cheikh Anta Diop who believed that the challenges of the African continent shall overcome through the confrontation of cultural, scientific and economic renewal. Former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki populated it with an intention of advocating for self-determination, unity, identity, development, and transformation of political and economy of the continent. The envisioned statement was to see Africa as a unitary continent that could fight imperialism and capitalism which were seen as enemies of development from an Africanism

On 8 May 1996, Thabo Mbeki made what, within the context of the politics of identity in South Africa, was regarded as a ground breaking speech in which he boldly declared: "I am an African. " This predated a call for the 'African renaissance ' in an address to the United States Corporation Council on Africa in 1997. Since then, the concept of the African renaissance has assumed a life of its own, not only within the borders of South Africa but throughout the African continent. The term and the idea of an African ren-aissance are not new. Neither is the pronouncement of an African identity an historic one since so many people have, over the centuries, publicly declared and identified themselves as Africans. This paper argues that the concept of the renaissance has since brought into sharp focus the post-Apartheid notion of the 'return'. Two conceptions about 'the return ' are identified. The first is an Afro-pessimistic conception that construe...

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2009

The essay discusses the trajectory of the African renaissance as an idea and a project, a task that in essence entails examining Africa's postcolonial development paradigms, performances, and prospects. It is argued that this idea represents a recurrent yearning for a usable future aching deep in the consciousness of a people with painful memories of suffering, struggle, and survival against the historical ravages of slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism, a longing for sustainable development, for viable African modernities. Recently, the dreams and discourses of the African renaissance have been driven as much by Afro-optimism as by Afro-pessimism, by both the positive and the negative political and economic changes that have taken place in postcolonial Africa. The essay is divided into four parts. It begins with a brief survey of the resurgence of the idea of the African renaissance in the 1990s in postapartheid South Africa. Then it examines Africa's complex and contra...

Africa Society Conference Program, 2000

Abstract Since the 2000s, Africa has carried out a project of its regeneration, popularly known as the African Renaissance. This vision of a self-reliant and developed continent is embodied in the figure of Pixley ka Isaka Seme. Seme had first eloquently articulated this vision in 1906 in an award-winning speech titled the Regeneration of Africa. He had implemented its fundamental ideas of uniting African tribes in 1912 when he facilitated the founding of the oldest political movement in the continent - the South African Native National Congress (SNNC) - the precursor of the African National Congress (ANC). The traces of Seme and the African Renaissance are not obvious in the projects of NEPAD, the African Parliament and so on. They rather remain buried in the archives of the history of the ANC, and the social history of South Africa - but also in the dreams, aspirations and imagination of patriotic Africans. The aim of this article is to explore how and why a shared memory of Seme has to be built; to contribute to the construction of an ideology that will be instrumental in underpinning the work of resisting the negative effects of the empire or globalization.

The focus of this study is to bring out an appropriate methodology and present the function of universities in discussing the need for a collective and institutional portage of the United States of Africa and African Renaissance offers a social, cultural and economic vision of Africa, whereas, the United States of Africa presents an essentially political view of Africa. We insist that be a vision, because of its remote nature from the daily masses concerns, needs specific treatment to gradually take root in the collective memory and serve as a compass for the future. Second, we place particular emphasis on the function of the historical African communities scattered around the world with Africa as their original geographic base. Thus we argue that a collective portage of the binomial concept of African Renaissance-United States of Africa should stimulate the large constitutive movement for African people eager to live together as one, although scattered throughout the world.

This study adopted a survey approach to assess the level of awareness and understanding of Pan-African ideology among African nationals (people of African heritage that live in Africa). The samples consist of 680 African nationals from Nigeria, Mali, Cameroon, Malawi, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and Canada. Findings reveal that Pan-Africanism and African Renaissance are rarely discussed on national media (55.6%) and local media (54.5%); social media (36.4%) and educational institutions (36.4%) constitute the major source of awareness of the concepts among African nationals. However, the ideology of Pan-Africanism has been applied successfully in conflict prevention, management and resolution (but not in respect for human rights), and African nationals are convinced that Pan-Africanism promotes Africa's shared values and identity. We conclude that Pan-Africanism ideology is changing with structural transformation inherent in the globalization process; therefore there is a need for the reconstruction and rebranding of the ideology in order to survive neocolonialism inherent in the capitalist slave-driven and exploitative corporate globalization being promoted in the 21st century. Hence, African governments need to seize opportunity of the booming interned technology to promote the ideology of Pan-Africanism from grassroots to all levels of society.

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• DOI: 10.1215/9780822377450-084
• Corpus ID: 156207819

I Am an African

• Published 19 November 2013
• Sociology, History

57 Citations

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Extracts from one of South African President Thabo Mbeki’s most stirring speeches

18 June 2011 "I am an African. I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land. I am an African! I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape, they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and independence and they who, as a people, perished in the result. Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again. I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me. In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture is a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done. I am a grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom. My mind and my knowledge of myself are formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert. I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind's eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins. I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds, gold, in the same food for which my stomach yearns. I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence. Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that: I am an African. I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle; the one to redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend the indefensible. I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image. I know what it signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who subhuman ... I have experience of the situation in which race and colour is used to enrich some and impoverish the rest... I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity of a human being emanating from the conscious, systemic and systematic oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings. There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish reality, the beggars, the prostitutes, the street children, those who seek solace in substance abuse, those who have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain. Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those who have learnt to kill for a wage ... Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past, killers who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have disdain for the women of our country, animals who would seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled and the old, the rapacious who brook no obstacle in their quest for self enrichment. All this I know and know to be true because I am an African! Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental truth that I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines, of a people who would not tolerate oppression. I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death, torture, imprisonment, exile or persecution should result in the perpetuation of injustice. I am an African. I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa ... The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we share. The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves us in a persistent shadow of despair. Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now! Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace! However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will prosper!" Source: Mbeki, T. in (2003). Sowetan, 18 June, p.17.

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