Is Democratic Imperialism The Answer (2)?

Alas, The Country's fair share of enfeebling problems which democratic imperialism occasions need fixing. And fast! This question has dogged Akua Bonsam's finicky conscience for quite some time now. The most salient of these problems is the Hitlerite plague of ethnocentrism. It is no mere twist of fate that Akua Bonsam sees an underlying philosophical interface between ethnic Jim Crowism and Africa's artificial political boundaries, taking proper care at every opportunity to decry public infatuation with sentimental attributes of ethnic essentialism. It is not as if she is not sufficiently informed on the technicalities of human genomics, far from it. She is aware ethnicity, like race, has no scientific justification. She also believes both have serious sociological ramifications for human relations. The sociology of race and ethnicity is thus as materially relevant to human identity as the physical nomenclature of human anatomy is to biology.

Accordingly, the issue of ethnicity, the focus of our dialectic contentions, cannot be swept under the carpet for political or intellectual expedience, granted that it is as real as the glittery smile of the sun or the certainty of death, as unreal as the chimera of witchcraft or the insubstantiality of ghostliness. The point of it all is to think of the political utility of multiethnic socialization as making a dish of light soup, groundnut soup, or palm-nut soup. The ideal situation is to picture oneself fashioning the best gustatory recipe from a particular genre of soup based on optimal combinations of diverse interacting variables of ingredients―tomatoes, pepper, ginger, onions, anchovies, meat, fish, condiments, salt, and the like―while not excluding the wide scope of tastes available to man as a physiological attribute of personal individuation or of a cultural community, a question as much scientific as cultural. Let us also not ignore another overriding fact, which is that the preparer of the dish in question upholds his or her gustatory tastes as the standard of evaluation for those who should be patronizing his or her recipe. Molefi Kete Asante maintains in that regard: “However, multicultural literacy does not exist apart from the substantive knowledge of specific cultural communities. There is no multicultural literacy apart from cultural bases. It is the ability to use and integrate these cultural bases that allows us to speak of multicultural literacy.”

Asante's “cultural communities” can be likened to the five major modalities of taste: Bitterness, sourness, umami, sweetness, and saltiness. Gustatory cross-references are allowed relative to the demanding particularity of a dish and the physiological scheme of individual or communal tastes, but that is as far as they go. Gustatory cross-referencing or comparative analysis is always necessary to make up for the moral shortcomings of subjectivity. Beyond the sphere of comparative objectivity sourness cannot replace bitterness, nor can umami replace sweetness. The sharp contrast between sourness and sweetness, on the other hand, is as much a question of taste as of geography, the Arctic and the equatorial region. This array of statements gives credence to the caveat that the sociology of race or ethnicity is not as topically simplistic as the well-known reductionist heuristics for electronic configuration.

Yet, another way of looking at the question of inter-ethnic homogenization is dedicating one's measured appraisal of creative actualities to a thorough understanding of the range of human possibilities, such as the optimal experimental collaboration between the socializing potential of diverse musical instruments and the transcendental instrumentality of the human voice, which corporately gives birth to a unity of purpose, a harmony of voiced instrumentalism as movingly great as Bob Marley's “One Love” and Culture's “Peace, Love, and Harmony” and John Lennon's “Imagine” and Michael Jackson's “Heal the World” and Obuoba J.A. Adofo's “Daabi Dehyee” and Josh Groban's “You Raise Me Up.” Such an activity requires creative possibilities, exquisite taste and strenuous auditory effort, if you will, on the part of the evaluator in addition to possession of emotional and musical intelligence. It is like seeing diversity and oneness simultaneously dissolving into each other. This proposition is not far removed from the central role we hope to see diversity play in a nation-state like The Country or a multinational state like South Africa. It goes without saying that the optimal traits making up The Country's national personality could only derive from the best characterological qualities accruing from its variegated ethnicities.

But the question is not an easy one. Akua Bonsam frets about the inability of The Country's leadership to see this simple fact, those contentious claims advanced in the preceding paragraphs, with the latter choosing instead to exert oversight over this important aspect of social actualities. That notwithstanding, Akua Bonsam has proven grounds for her noble claims of scientific objectivity, that race and ethnicity are pseudoscience at best. Phrenology, alchemy, witchcraft, horoscopy, palmistry, and drapetomania are good examples of pseudoscience. As it were cancer and Ebola virus, to name but two, kill men and women irrespective of race, ethnicity, ideology, and national boundaries. What is the central point here? The point here is making sure national boundaries are not porous enough to allow unchecked transmissibility of Ebola virus, say, across them, the former, but porous enough to allow peaceful, beneficial human intercourse in the interest of development and growth. The other interesting point, previously noted, is not pretending the sociology of ethnicity does not exist per se, but acknowledging inter-ethnic actualities as a major deciding factor in harnessing the best of human talents for development and advancing the cause of humanism.

The analogy of musical instrumentation and the latter's marriage to the mystical instrument of the human voice says it all. A symphony of a cappella can do as well. What do we mean? We are here implying that collaboration, consensus, and comprise constitute the innovative soul of the enterprise of humanism. Akua Bonsam, nevertheless, cannot fail to notice the progression of formidable challenges placed in the way of dynamic manifestation of inter-ethnic amity by transcendence, which, according to the emotional finiteness of human wisdom, supposedly, coming as it does as countervailing pretensions to the cultural hegemony of ethnic supremacy, some believe are beyond the immediate capacity of human resolution. Are we to make of the fact that ethnic diversity is a priceless gift from transcendence then? If so, why has Akua Bonsam woefully failed to have that entered into her budgetary considerations for inter-ethnic comity? If not, why have men and women of conscience refused to embark on that spiritual journey of multiethnic homogenization?

Fact is, all those who have made serious conscious attempts, abortive or otherwise, have had to deny actualities of the self in favor of the hegemony of otherism, which is not an easy task the simple-minded and the spiritually malnourished can hope to undertake without loss of the self and of psychological sanity. Another complicating factor is that ethnicity also behaves like a flood of light among other things, an elastic experience that can either cause blindness or bring an individual's hidden vision out of the shadows of blindness into the open. The mystifying fingerprint of nature is found in this simple formulaic irony of experiential dichotomy, a Manichaean situation akin to choosing between the Nation of Poisonous People and the Nation of Decent Conmen!

It is such a painful irony that human beings crave for diversity and change, yet are concomitantly opposed to their material actuation. In addition, the shameful legacy of the so-called Hamitic Theory and the anti-African pontifications and racial supremacy theories advanced by a suite of Europe's prominent Enlightenment Thinkers, culminating in the enslavement and brutalization of Africans, Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, and large swathes of Asian populations, are living reminders of the dangers of imposing categories of ethno-racial hegemonies of a people on another. This is why good men and women everywhere must resist proponents of ethnic nationalism who cannot seem to survive on the planet without it. “Later generations are programmed, though a purposed filtering and dissemination of information, to cultivate a superior, condescending, or blatantly xenophobic agenda which graduates, over time, from mere denigrating observations, the dismissive wave of the hand, to a rigid theology,” writes Wole Soyinka.

Of course, Soyinka is clearly aware of disparaging ideas constituting themselves into a genealogy of calumniations which the powerful may necessarily deploy against the socially disadvantaged Akua Bonsam, thereby undermining the harmonious actualities of human or race relations. Soyinka is also deeply worried about those on the African continent whose very existence seems to be steeped in the fermented stew of ethnic or racial superiority. He writes: “What may come to predominate in the very quest for survival on a continent in travail is the question of whether or not there will be found among a continent's own indigenes those who manifest the characteristics of external observers in their own clearly xenophobic enterprise.” Clearly there is an unspoken intention here. Soyinka sees outright rejection or eradication of ethno-racial exceptionalism or supremacy a condition for getting rid of some of Africa's problems. This calls for vigorous questioning of received knowledge where Africa does not benefit.

Molefi Kete Asante, in contrast, looks at the issue of questioning received wisdom from an another angle: “In the end, the serious reader of writers must work to re-affirm the centrality of cultural experience as the place to begin to create a dynamic multicultural literacy because without rootedness in our own cultural territory, we have no authentic story to tell.” This analogy goes to the heart of the soup-dish preparer exemplar. In other words, one perceives of others from the standpoint of one's own temperamental peculiarities of individuation. However, there is a clear philosophical junction between Soyinka's and Asante's statements of facts from the point of view of critical theory. Failure to adapt Asante's and Soyinka's fluid thinking to The Country's skewed political composure is the primary cause of the constant bickering between Uncle Kweku Bonsam and Aunt Kweku Bonsam. Both parties do not see an imperative need to factor mutual knowledge of each other into The Country's balance sheet of nonpartisan cooperation. In the end Asante and Soyinka lament ethnic Balkanization as a negation of multiethnic homogenization.

Then again, the point of ascribing certain crimes to ethnicity is not only comically laughable but religiously unscientific, because crime, like race or ethnicity, has not sufficiently been shown to be genotypic, if at all. Neurology has not given us much in this area of moral reasoning, for neurological investigation of the ventromedial region of the human brain is yet to reveal anything of substance by way of man's neurological propensity for crime. Akua Bonsam has failed to make a muscular case in favor of this proposition, though she is as much part of the problem of partisan propaganda as she is part of the antagonistic dilemma of consistent bickering between her parents, the NDC and the NPP. Notwithstanding her registry of reservations, the emotional sociology of political corruption, an open gangrenous wound with no prospect of closing up any time soon, eats away at the social fabric with no end in sight to constitutional or moral remediation. Quite predictably, then, it is of extreme consequence that prying minds question how a little six-year-old has come to know so much about her world, The Country. Yes, Akua Bonsam is barely six but her existential chronology puts her past the existential dendrochronology of African independence.

And she knows more than she is willing to give herself credit for!

Akua Bonsam knows democratic imperialism is politics of the heart or emotionalism, not of the mind or the head, not to talk of the politics of the soul, The Country's soul, which has irreversibly suffered a gangrenous pain of moral fermentation. She also knows democratic imperialism is merely about “create, loot, and share.” Yet the latter and the so-called Judgment Deaths pale in comparison to the daylight armed-robbery of The People which certain elite members of the Nation of Poisonous People initiated in the wake of The Country's oil discover. This is not to appeal to the sentiments of moral equalization but to expose the righteous hypocrisy of the NPP. Akua Bonsam is also fully aware of the fact that the multiethnic constitution of the Nation of Decent Conmen makes that party more appealing to a large cross-section of the electorate than its ethnocentric counterpart, its ideological archenemy, the NPP.

After all, the Nation of Poisonous People is not the undemocratic Elephant it tells The People it is, but rather an auto-cannibalistic democratic Ebola virus. Without doubt, she is aware it takes two to tango, as in the case of her parents' open sexual politics, where a baby is likely to be born out of wedlock, a baby whose otherwise bright future had already been antenatally stolen by the likes of Uncle Kweku Bonsam and Aunt Kweku Bonsam, a baby whose stolen future now belongs to the kleptomaniacal exclusivity of the stomach-and-pocket politics of wicked men and women. For how long can the Nation of Poisonous People and the Nation of Decent Conmen keep The People in the Gulag Archipelago of ignorance and poverty? Akua Bonsam believes a revolution of the mind is another corrective path to pursue to rid The Country of the debilitating stench of moral decay but her parents are vigorously opposed to it. Her view of social engineering is, however, made less tantalizing because, apparently, it is not the sophisticated arms of robbers that are depleting the national coffers. It is the innocent-looking conniving pens of The Country's educated!

What a world, a sad world permeated with moral execration of environmental pollution, crass corporate or multinational misbehavior, religiosity, male chauvinism, ethnocentrism, extreme political polarization, gross mismanagement of national wealth, child slavery, falling educational standard, widespread political and religious lies, superstition, armed robbery, a national problem of excessive preoccupation with materialism, anomie, spiritual vanity, cultural contamination, and so on. A significant section of the electorate, supposedly self-proclaimed religious, spends more quality time praying and fasting and gossiping and fornicating and stealing than devoting quality time to seeking scientific and technological solutions to everyday problems! Who is to blame? The Country? The People? Perhaps the fact of Akua Bonsam's probing eyes constantly stumbling upon his parents' corrupting sexual politicization in flagrante delicto is to blame for her and The Country's moral decay.

It is against this background that Akua Bonsam perceives The Country's praxis of constitutional dictatorship as the moral equivalent of what she calls “the imperialism of sexual democracy,” a controversial view not too fundamentally dissimilar to Gore Vida's conceptualization of American democracy as sexual. Akua Bonsam's “the imperialism of sexual democracy” is the same as the crime of rape!

Akua Bonsam is notably right given the availability of incontrovertible evidence on nymphomaniac parliamentarians and a gigolo president who have finally succeeded in turning the venerable offices of public accountability into notorious houses of prostitution, Floor 1 and Floor 6. Understandably the chaste offices on Floor 3 are not patronized by exploiting pimps of capitalism and syphilitic oligarchs, coming as they often do, from an external world of supposed intellectual, cultural, military, economic, racial, and political supremacy. The dismal failure of the likes of Aunt Kweku Bonsam and Uncle Kweku Bonsam to make The Country a better world for The People partly explains why the latter has taken to superstition, religiosity, and corruption to make up for the ever-widening gulf between politicians' illicit financial aggrandizement and the masses' deepening poverty. The sore-eyed friction between The People and The Country's leadership is not helped by media glamorization of social deviance and fashionable oversight of the political morality of victimology, both of which do not augur well for the institutional sanity of public intercourse in relation to multiethnic homogenization.

It just does not pay for the government to come across as The People's enemy. This fact is exceedingly important to the political morality of intra-national coherence. Some Muslims' blistering desire to see sublunary systems of caliphates established via terrorism anywhere on the planet where they gain a notable presence and most Christians' staunch belief in the actualities of the coming millenarianism in our own time are not far removed from the theological equinox of Koranic and Biblical exegetical biases. The despicable, inconceivable idea of “traditional” priests demanding body parts of albinos for money-making rituals can partly be blamed on the failure of African leadership. Further, there are always secular dimensions of economics and politics to theological dogmas. Akua Bonsam perfectly understands the emotional and intellectual complexities of these philosophical queries and, therefore, had wished there existed a more promising, effective system of egalitarian replacement for the coruscating failure of capitalism, fascism, communism, religion, and human moral weakness.

Indeed The Country is facing insurmountable problems that are manageable but for lack of political vision. The salient fact of The Country having become a productive poultry farm for breeding corrupt featherless birds of unconscionable politicians, however one attempts to look at it, dismantles Akua Bonsam's edificial faith in human capacity for progressive thinking. It is not even clear yet if the activity of critical thinking lost track of itself during the evolutionary odyssey of The Country's politicians across time. The idea of the Nation of Poisonous People's ruling The Country for eight straight years via an appropriated formula based on Pablo Escobar's statecraft techniques is intellectually and morally nauseating. Under the Nation of Poisonous People's dispensation, however, The Country became variously known as Mobuto Sese Seko Garden City of Heavenly Corruption, the Sani Abacha Republic, and the Teodoro Nguema Mbasogo Botanical Garden of Angelic Corruption.

Alas, failure of Aunt Kweku Bonsam and Uncle Kweku Bonsam to provide model leadership for The Country's impressionable youth poisons the cosmic cradle of babies yet unborn, such as Akua Bonsam, thus making the politics of leadership unattractive for those principled men and women who would otherwise have taken to politics as a life-transforming avocation. For instance, Akua Bonsam walks long distances to school under trees barefoot and hungry, then helplessly exposed to the elements, while her ferociously avaricious prostituting parents drive around in expensive cars, eat in expensive restaurants, sit in air-conditioned offices, go to school, seek medical attention overseas, and what have you, all paid for by the ever-deepening public purse of the poor, at public expense. Why should the national constitution refuse to demand that scholastic expenditure earmarked for adult politicians be instead applied toward pedagogical infrastructuralization for Akua Bonsam?

For one thing there appears to be an institutional oversight where the infrastructural needs of child pedagogy are denied entry into national budgetary considerations, because the transcendental atmosphere of constitutional dictatorship has made it a point to neutralize populist usurpation of its power of authority on behalf of the socially, economically, and politically marginalized, children of The Country mostly. Why does it appear no one seems to be doing anything to remedy the situation? It is as if The People are resigned to their Calvinist fate of second-class citizenship and political paralysis, failing to muster up courage even in vigorous pursuit of the path of least resistance to constitutional autocracy. The real deal, it seems, is that the corrupt featherless birds of unconscionable politicians would rather eat up the disenfranchised cankerworm-babies than fight for social justice on the latter's behalf. As it is both Aunt Kweku Bonsam and Uncle Kweku Bonsam are lost out on the actualities of The Country's existential sociology of development economics.

And failure of leadership means a lot of things to many people. What exactly does this statement of fact mean? That that hungry innocent baby boy or baby girl, Akua Bonsam, is a potential Boko Haram seething-bomb waiting to explode in her parents' hypocritical pockmarked faces. African-Americans unleashed that seething-bomb of public anger against their oppressors; Black South Africans let loose that seething-bomb against the amoral architects of Apartheid, so did Haitians against France, the Jacobins against the Girondins, etc., Martin Luther against Catholic orthodoxy and exegetical autocracy…Moreover, other than what we have been saying all along, Akua Bonsam does not seem to come across as an observational outlier as far as public critique of The Country's leadership, religious fundamentalism, and secular autocracy go. She is in fact on the same page with Wole Soyinka. He writes: “Alas, failure to choose is the worst of choices. Between fundamentalist ruthlessness and secular excess there is not really much of a dilemma, and it a choice that matters, not just to the African continent….”

He further maintains: “While secular dictatorship can be confronted at various stages, the testimony of history is that the chains placed around the mind through religious absolutism are far more constrictive, tenacious, and implacable than those of their secular counterparts.” Quite correctly, Soyinka technically makes the human mind a battleground for the competing claims of secular brutality and religious fundamentalism. Likewise, Akua Bonsam has not shied away from this Soyinkan philosophical truth. Then, if the human mind is indeed an acknowledged epitope for moral attestation of contrasting ideological contentions, what is there to do in order to rehabilitate a mind that succumbs to crushing hegemonies of religious absolutism and secular cruelty? This is not an easy question. But while our analytic radar is presently zoomed on The Country's politicians, Aunt Kweku Bonsam and Uncle Kweku Bonsam, it is only proper we deal directly with them through focused contraction of strategic possibilities of antidotal categorization, where we push for aspiring politicians to serve some quality time in relative isolation for the purpose of deep spiritual reflection in the slave dungeons dotting the coasts of Africa.

What is the moral of our proposition? It is that the thought of aspiring politicians' spending some quality time in Robben Island, for instance, should not be an awful proposition at all, though it does not necessarily follow that will make a political hopeful a conscionable soul. We have the prime example of unchecked political corruption in the African National Congress as a powerful internal critique of our proposition. What else? Comprehensive psychiatric evaluation of aspiring politicians is a moral necessity required to weed out potential sick minds from ascending to the throne of parliamentarianism and presidentialism, granted the possibility of such sick minds passing for sane political modalities in the body politic. Akua Bonsam's dream in which the NDC and the NPP went to considerable extents masterly disguised as Good Samaritans, then appearing to her in hopes of saving her from the physiological prehension of her thirsty stupor, is a testimony to the extent to which desperation feeds the rapacity of corrupt politicians. It takes a serious psychiatric case to push the boundary of insanity that far.

There is also a burning need to identify those aspiring politicians likely to get tainted with the dry paint of recidivation. The latter admission makes more sense as the crime statistics on The Country's politicians dealing hard drugs in the body politic and abroad to finance their political parties keep expanding as leavened dough. No wonder disaffected youths like Akua Bonsam have turned to hard drugs to numb their frothing pain of frustration as well as their emotional hurt from leadership failure, and to political child prostitution for political survival, as Anas Aremeyaw Anas, one of the world's best innovative investigative journalists, makes it eloquently clear, demonstrating how relatively easy it is to acquire hard drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, in The Country's prisons than on the streets.

Thus, it may appear public clamor for bringing back instrumental penal constructs, such as the pre-colonial evil forest and communal banishment of social deviants including criminal politicians, are legitimately called for, as Aunt Kweku Bonsam and Uncle Kweku Bonsam are doing all they can within their power to reinstate the stipulations spelt out in the Bond of 1844 and developed during the Scramble for Africa in The Country. Therefore, could encouraging all relatively young contemporary politicians to embark on life-learning travels on time machines to the shameful epochs of colonialism and slavery serve as a useful comparative modality for one human being treating his or her fellow humanely? Surely the past is blessed with resourceful libraries of practical experiences which can light the modernizing path of racial and ethnic hostilities. Soyinka maintains in this context:

“As long as the past is fictionalized or denied, Africa is doomed to the curse of repetition, albeit in disguised, even refined forms. Instances are numerous, but none so flagrant, none so attributable to the failure to transcend a past of inhuman race relations, as the conduct of an unrepentant ruling class of Sudan. There the sacred space of memory is indeed preserved―and abused―while the rest of the world reposes under the shade of the Tree of Forgetfulness.”

The past is The Country's and The People's future. This is not to say the future should be a prison of the past! It merely means the past should provide the necessary armor of moral chaperonage which the future may require for spiritual guidance.

We shall return…