Tag Governance

COLONIAL ERASURE and Post-Colonial Imaginaries of Law and Society

Brian Kagoro Leave a comment


You can only aspire for what you can construct as a clear mental picture (vision).

If the mental picture that you aspire to is merely about being an acceptable carbon copy of someone else ( i.e. another person, culture, nation, civilization, race, etc) then you are deep in mental slavery.

If what you know only empowers you to mimic someone else or another culture or race, then you are a victim of knowledge autocracy or knowledge imperialism. Who you really are, could be and should be has been totally erased. Such erasure starts with erasure of memory or history


You do not need to be a lawyer in order to understand that there is something ridiculous with African judges wearing white wigs and red gowns in our sweltering heat or lawyers wearing black gowns , white wigs and gebou(bibs). We inherited this from the colonial era and much more insidious and harmful ideologies about being, becoming and belonging at law.

Our Constitutions are mostly authored from the following assumptions, perspectives and principles :

1. African customary law shall apply in narrow family settings and with regards to the determination of traditional leadership only to the extent that it is not repugnant to general law ( read into this European or Western Law)

2. In other words, African customary law and culture doesn’t apply to issues of property; commerce, technology, education, health and almost every other important aspect of your life. Why ? Because natives were deemed to have no philosophy, no culture really and no values such as would distinguish them from mere brutish animals

3. Such that even when determining land ownership in Zimbabwe in 1918, British Privy Council was of the opinion that “the native has no concept of ownership” . Hence the Chimurenga war mantra that the Liberator was a “Son or Daughter of the Soil” …inseparable from the Land.

The idea that the land – all land – belonged to the colonial State and by parity of reasoning the white minority that presided over the State was made even more ridiculous by the view that mining claims superceded even land ownership by title deed. The mining interests of the colonial elite essentially led to a law that empowered the pillaging mining oligarchy to evict whole villages in order assert their right to dig for minerals. Questions of free prior and informed consent and mutual benefit are very recent developments.

Today we see whole villages and conservancy being pillaged by foreign prospectors protected by State Elites ( albeit Black Elites). What is tragic though is how liberating a country from colonial rule without concurrent decolonization of the law leads essentially to continuation of colonial governance and outcomes long after the white colonialists are gone. If you don’t change the structure, culture and mindset of the judiciary and lawyers you will efficiently echo an Empire long gone! Political and economic scavenging elites will decimate communities and ecology in search of El Dorado!

HISTORY PROVES ALL OF US FOOLISH
We cannot undo the harm done through constitutional, judicial and legal forms, including legal education without pressing the reset button.

If you consider the Chinese, Indian and African civilisations, they were far more advanced in their imagination of law , society and justice than the Euro-American systems that they have become absolutely dependent upon.

For instance, In the early thirteenth century, following a major military victory, the founder of the Mandingo Empire and the assembly of his wise men proclaimed in Kurukan Fuga the new Manden Charter, named after the territory situated above the upper Niger River basin, between present-day Guinea and Mali.

The Manden Charter, is one of the oldest constitutions in the world. It contains a preamble of seven chapters dealing with the following: social peace in diversity, the inviolability of the human being, education, the integrity of the motherland, food security, the abolition of slavery by razzia (or raid), and freedom of expression and trade.

Long after the Empire disappeared, the words of the Charter and the rituals associated with it are still transmitted orally within the Malinke clans. To keep the tradition alive, commemorative annual ceremonies of the historic assembly are organized in the village of Kangaba (adjacent to the vast clearing of Kurukan Fuga, which now lies in Mali, (close to the Guinean border). The ceremonies are backed by the local and national authorities of Mali and, in particular, the traditional authorities, who see it as a source of law and as promoting a message of love, peace and fraternity, which has survived through the ages. The Manden Charter continues to underlie the basis of the values and identity of the populations concerned.

At Great Zimbabwe and Mapungubgwe you will find similar renditions of law (the unwritten but well codified and practiced constitutions) that were key to social harmony, cohesion and prosperity. Our kingdoms and nations traded and inter-married thus borrowing practices from each other. If you travel from Southern Africa to Timbuktu via Lamu/Mombasa, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana and Nigeria you will naturally notice many similarities (universal practices). Our humanities and social sciences guru’s must help us codify and modernise this inert universality. Why not? After all, are we not forced to or happily practice/apply Roman-Dutch common law (read customary law) with touches of German, English and French customary practices in independent Africa?

If we continue to imagine law and justice in Roman-Dutch, German, French colonial images, then decolonization is far from being accomplished. The wigs, gowns and etcetera are mere expressions of deeply internalised coloniality! We need the courage to re-imagine.

The fact that we had and have practices of conflict resolution and conceptions of justice that are restorative in our own cultures and we have despite 60 years of independence not sought to find universal meaning out of these shows that our imagination is deeply damaged by this internalised coloniality! We are proved foolish by history.

ANOTHER AFRICA IS URGENTLY NEEDED & OVERDUE!

Brian Kagoro 2 Comments


The mission facing African youth is not one of participating or disrupting the Status Quo. No, it is one of conducting a modern ‘War-less’ and ‘Blood-less’ Revolution against the bloodsucking Elites ruining & running Africa!

A FLOOD OF CRISES BEYOND COVID-19

Beyond the scourge or scare of COVID-19, many African countries, communities, organizations, and families face innumerable crises, including the following:
– Crisis of families
-Crisis of leadership
-Crisis of citizenship
-Impasse of perception & crisis of vision
-Crisis of ethics and accountability
-Crisis of governance and politics
-Economic structural Crisis
-Ecological/Environmental Crisis

Some of the gravest manifestations of these crises are:
– Abuse of women, girls & children, and general sexual and gender-based violence. You should call this for what it really is, a Crisis of Masculinity and its toxicity. A man unable to discipline their bodies, fragile egos, unruly appetites, and the multipolarity of modern society

– Abuse of office, grand corruption, and impunity. Leaders that destroy society, institutions, constitutions, values, vision, economies, and social cohesion. We are a Leaderless society in ethical, service, and performance terms. We have millions dying because of casual sexual encounters and casual and temporary relationships with power merchants and masquerades during elections.

– Abuse of the vote and of voters by citizens that use petty short-term considerations to choose or recycle nonperforming, brutal, murderous, and thieving politicians only to spend 5 more years protesting against the predictable incompetence. In truth, we – for the most part – exchange long-term transformation and prosperity for a T-shirt, beer, or a few coins. Our transactional approach to elections can only produce wheeler-dealers and not transformative leaders

– If Vision is a redemptive and clear picture of what we need to become or can become, then we don’t have the shared transformative, let alone a redemptive one. It is one thing to make outlandish promises to voters and quite another to deliver on stuff that transforms society, nations, and continents. Negative framing of electoral messaging as ending this or that has no capacity to translate into the creation of such and such! Even more worrying is the fact that we expect to do the transformation in an ideological, ethical, values, human capacities, and skills vacuums. Please ask your leaders after they make fantastic electoral promises to show you their Team that will deliver on the promises?

– It is almost given that the number one job of most of our public servants and leaders in Africa is Corruption or grand theft. They will loot COVID-19 and any other disaster funds or money meant for infrastructure, social development, healthcare, and employment creation. For what? To buy cars, booze, impress lovers, and spend on self – That is splendid decadence and gross shallowness!

– Most of our political parties are not really organizations. They are hollow shells run like gangs or a game of Snakes and Ladders by casting dice 🎲. These have Constitutions and structures, but no meaningful skills. Check across the whole continent. How many political parties have research or policy departments? How many have leadership schools? How many have innovation or policy units? So, how do these hollow shells run competent governments? By charm or charisma of their leaders?

– Africa faces an economic structural crisis that manufactures poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation on an industrial scale. Soil fertility is being depleted, farmlands parcelled out to foreign investors like confetti at a wedding. There will be nothing left for future generations. Every natural resource is known is being exchanged for bribes or pittances without any meaningful job creation, industrialization, or thought for economic diversification. The incongruencies between our economic, social, and environmental policies should frighten you as must the short-termism. Our leaders are making long-term choices based on the duration of their term of office or the expected number of years before death

OPPORTUNITIES
Each of the crises I have described is also massive opportunities to shap, fight for, and create Another Africa, A different Africa! Another Africa is both Possible, desirable, and Imperative. You cannot create a New African reality using exhausted ideas of the future and Past. Nor is another Africa possible anchored on the current leadership, institutions, and policies. The Imperative of a New Africa calls for new names, new organizations, new approaches, new innovations, solid values, and bankable skills.

Africa’s great asset is its people, not the Big 5 or Mineral Resources. The fact that we allow the rest of the world to reduce our beauty and value to only naturally occurring phenomenon such as gold, platinum, tanzanite, oil, Game, Waterfalls, Mountains, Lakes and Oceans aptly demonstrates that we are unwitting participants in the reduction of African bodies and minds into uninteresting & unproductive forms. Some even joke that the African brain has great potential because it is yet to be fully used. This is crass self-hate or racism. Africa should be and has always been the Land of great inventions, ideas, and progress. To become this again we must not just pivot, we must transform or do a revolution!