"This great country of yours is the site of the last great African anger and annoyance provoked by the fundamental unjustness of man to man (apologies to Bob Marley). You, South Africans, led your country, Africa, and the global community of conscience against this historical unjustness by articulating a struggle powered not just by the bombs of "Umkhonto we Sizwe"; the global resonance of your uprisings and wars against the apartheid machine (Sharpeville); the spectacular trajectories of your great anti-apartheid heroes and sheroes (Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, Albert Luthuli, Robert Sobukwe, M.D. Naidoo, Desmond Tutu, Michael Hermal, Winnie Mandela, Ruth First and countless others); but also, and more importantly, a struggle rooted in and nourished by a deontology of culture.
In essence, your worldview, your way of life, your stories, your memory, what you thought of beauty and ugliness and how you expressed those aesthetic sentiments, how you laughed, how you loved, how and what you ate, how and what you sang, and how you danced all came together to constitute the soul of your struggle. If there is anything to be learnt from the documentary movie, Amandla, it is that you did not just fight apartheid to a standstill, you danced and sang that tragedy to its ignominious end and, in doing so, you taught the rest of us, your admirers around the world, that the unfathomable zone of potential and becoming we commonly refer to as a people's future cannot be envisaged or envisioned outside of their culture, understood in the broadest, evolving, and most dynamic sense possible.
Precisely because your future as the Rainbow Nation was secured at the price of a long-drawn struggle nurtured by your culture, by who you are; precisely because yours was the last great continental affirmation of the significance of culture – among other things – to the emergence statehood from colonial debris, you are auspiciously positioned to understand the dilemmas and the discontents framing current discussions of the role of culture in shaping the future of a continent whose friends and enemies agree is on the cusp of yet another historical moment. Having now shaken of the last yoke of colonial domination in 1994, the argument goes roughly, Africa must quit the path of blaming outsiders for her numerous challenges and begin to start being responsible for her present and future."
- Pius Adesanmi
Fascinating lecture. Read the rest here:
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