The panic only really started to escalate when Christmas Eve knocked on the door, and we realised we wouldn’t be able to do Christmas like we had previously. So after the neighbourhood families had gathered to talk it out and try to find solutions, it was decided that the men would get on a bakkie and head for the municipality.
In the meantime, the womenfolk began to prepare for the Christmas celebrations: cleaning the house, the yard, peeling, cooking, peeling (urgh) and checking anything else domestic that was relegated to the domain of women. I was musing over why it was given to the men to do the fun stuff (head to head with the municipality and heated conversations? The journalist in me craved to be there, but, alas. You know.), when my attention moved to all the labouring my grandmothers were doing at the back of the garage. Since it was lights out all round, the old drievoet was hauled out, someone got the fire going, and all the peeled and chopped foods were brought outside to meet their fiery fate. We were goin’ old school.
The Original Camp Masters: Koko Sina (left) and Koko Dora (right). December 2011.
I admired how my grandmothers immediately got into work mode (as the women in my family are wont to do in crises), finding solutions to our 21st century gripes. They relished the opportunity to bend over the fire again, because you know, they hadn’t done it in oh-so-long and this is how they grew up and don’t you all know how to cook by fire and all that jazz; but also, I suspect, because they relished the nostalgia.
As I shared the throwback photo that made me remember that Christmas, one I had taken of my grandmothers cooking over the fire; I got to thinking about culture, versions of progress, and the colonial mindset that African culture is backward and stagnant; and how a lot of these attitudes are still around today. A lot of my generation is obsessed with image/status, showing the world how much we’ve got, where we’re going, what we’re doing. We care little for the attitudes and insights of our grandparents’ generation.
Post-colonial studies into the African continent have often been concerned with ‘rootedness’ and authenticity: a fixation, in some strains of theory, with returning to a pristine and pure Africa. I suppose the intent was to legitimise what had been before considered a deviant and dark continent, but diving into this discourse about what defines ‘African’ has been/is tricky. Theories concerned with the hybridisation and syncretising of cultures have fought essentialist notions of African, Africa and culture ferociously. They have sought to destabilise colonial ideologies of our continent that are patronising. These theories are valuable because they recognise (as popularised by Homi Bhabha) cultural hybridity as the cultural product of interaction between coloniser and colonised. They do not ignore the hegemonic advantage of coloniser over colonised; as Peter Burke writes, “the price of hybridisation… also includes the loss of regional traditions and of local roots”.
Traditional Tsonga dance. Source: wikipedia commons
You could say we’ve seen a move towards reclaiming those regional traditions and local roots, especially at the height of and since the Black Consciousness and similar movements around the world gained momentum, but much of that colonial attitude of doing away with ‘old backward Africa’ still remains. And it transcends race, because even amongst young Black folk there is a tendency to look on the way our ancestors did things as inferior, and behave with disdain towards those who still uphold some of those values, practices and traditions. So cultural hybridity (as a theory) explained the ‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘who’ of the erasure of our cultures, but it made no attempt to reclaim the ‘what’, which is to say, it steered away from rebuilding our cultures in the name of anti-essentialism. This Kompridis dude put it the way I thought it, check it:
Unfortunately, by rejecting outright a holistic understanding of culture (and, therefore, of language, social practice, tradition, form of life, etc.), Benhabib must do without any means by which one culture could be individuated from another. Thus, she commits herself to a view of culture which makes culture radically nonidentical with itself-a view that so exaggerates the fluidity and hybridity of cultures that no culture could ever be identical with itself long enough to be identified as one. Instead of a wholesale repudiation of holism, we need to distinguish between strong forms of holism which essentialise the identity of culture from weak forms of holism which allow us to recognize cultural differences without reifying them. One’s approach to culture can be happily holistic and historicist: holism about culture (and meaning, in general) does not reduce to, and is distinct from, essentialism.
There may be no way of telling how life would be today if colonialism had not ravaged Africa and her way of life, but to completely disregard culture in our personal lives (which are political, to be sure) is to do a disservice to more than just those who came before us: it is a disservice to ourselves and those who will come after, a return to a state of pre-cognitive liberation (or is it that we never really reached that consciousness?). What we think of the continent’s heritage shows us what we think of our future.
We assume that what made/ makes African cultures what they were/ are was the clothes, the houses: what I think is largely the ‘frills’ of tradition. And we get hung up on that. As much as I respect our freedom to choose who we want to be, it would be cool to see us pay homage to African heritage, to the original ‘camp masters’; those kings and queens who could survive without even half of the ‘conveniences’ (read distractions) that we have today. Let’s uphold the principles and philosophies that informed their values and actions and relationships. We can keep that. Gosh I hope we keep that.
**Texts I derived some of my thoughts on this matter include:
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Burke, P. Cultural Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.
Kompridis, N. “Normativizing Hybridity/ Neutralizing Culture.” Political Theory. Vol 33 (No3) (2005): 318-343.
Power, strength, honour,
DustySoul
“To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude towards Afrika becomes more positive, your understanding of and attitude towards yourself will also become more positive…” – Malcom X
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