Seminar 2000

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From the Postcolonial to the Global: The Testament of Julius Nyerere*

"Conscience is not only memory but promise."

"The era of globalization of the economy is also the era of localization of polity."

Let me begin by thanking the Global Partners Project for the extraordinary generosity that has made it possible for us all to gather this morning in the halls of the University of Nairobi. While I have been the beneficiary of a number of acts of academic grace, the opportunity opened up by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to make this, my first, trip to Africa has been quite simply the most astonishing and the most beautiful example that I have witnessed of the cooperation among academic institutions, charitable foundations, and nations. It is with great humility and with a rather terrifying sense of responsibility, of answerability, that I stand here this morning.

I come to you today as a philosopher and as a philosopher in a Eurocentric tradition of philosophy that has come to be known as hermeneutics: my central professional concern is with the questions and the guiding hypotheses, the conceptual successes and failures, of a more-or-less canonical series of texts that are widely taken to define the properly "philosophical." I do not come to you today as an Africanist, although I did write a dissertation many years ago on the Egyptian philosopher of late antiquity, Plotinus, and I have spent a significant portion of my teaching and research energies over the past decade dealing with philosophical traditions of Africa and the African diaspora.¹ I do not come to you today as either a political scientist or an economist or a sociologist, although what I have to say will trench on each of these disciplines. Finally, I do not come to you today as a prophet of the future: indeed, I have always suspected that Hegel was right in his famous remark that "the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk,"² and I remain deeply skeptical of any theorist who tries to envision a future world or give the future a particular shape by having recourse to his/her preferred vision of the past or present. Nevertheless, I will make a step or two into that terrain "where angels fear to tread," hoping that my tentative steps will not be interpreted as a "rush."

Nostalgia for the Postcolonial

When I first heard the news this past October that Julius K. Nyerere, the founding president of independent Tanzania and perhaps the most articulate spokesperson for "African socialism," had died, I found myself overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia. I first read Nyerere's Uhuru na Ujamaa/Freedom and Socialism³ as an undergraduate student in 1970 and remembered vividly the impression that the profound directness of his postcolonial, political vision had made upon me. Eager at the very least to ride this wave of nostalgia for a little while, I returned to Nyerere's texts of the 1960s, going back in mind and in spirit to what now seems that impossibly long time ago when the idealism of the concepts of freedom, democracy, and socialism seemed genuinely embodied and fresh.

I would like to share a little of what I found, hoping that my own nostalgic pleasure might be just a bit contagious. As early as 1961, writing of the notion of freedom, Nyerere argues that "in his own traditional society the African has always been a free individual, very much a member of his community, but seeing no conflict between his own interests and those of his community."⁴ A year later, taking up this point to mount a critique of capitalism, he notes that "in our traditional African society we were individuals within a community. We took care of the community, and the community took care of us. We neither needed nor wished to exploit our fellow men" (FU 166). I am not here to defend or dispute the veracity of Nyerere's analysis of traditional African society; rather, I would simply like to celebrate the way that he manages to give a kind of empirical content to Immanuel Kant's famously abstract formulation of the fundamental moral law as a matter of acting as a law-making member of a Kingdom of Ends.⁵ Nyerere's invocation of a possibly mythic African past makes one feel that freedom is something that can be concretely achieved and thereby satisfies a longing for a lived experience of freedom that might have seemed simply impossible. In this sense, his controversial description of precolonial African society constitutes a prescription for the postcolonial society that Tanzania was attempting to build.⁶

Turning from the concept of freedom to the much-abused concept of democracy, I return to Nyerere's earliest writings, where he defines democracy in terms of "discussion, equality, and freedom" (FU 103). Arguing that both traditional African and ancient Greek societies were committed to the centrality of discussion as a key component of the democratic ideal, Nyerere goes on to suggest with almost visible glee that the crucial difference between Africa and Europe is that only Africa traditionally recognized the inherent equality of all individuals (FU 104). Thus, he concludes that "the traditional African society. . . was a society of equals and it conducted its business through discussion . . . . 'They talk till they agree.' That gives you the very essence of traditional African democracy. It is rather a clumsy way of conducting affairs, especially in a world as impatient for results as this of the twentieth century, but discussion is one essential factor of any democracy; and the African is expert at it" (FU 103-104). In an effort to realize this democratic ideal in the twentieth century, Nyerere promoted a return to a conception of society as an extended family, a conception that lay at the heart of his government's central project of creating ujamaa villages across Tanzania. Writing in 1968, Nyerere describes the ujamaa village as "a democracy at work,"⁷ as "a voluntary association of people who decide of their own free will to live together and work together for their common good" (FD 67). "They, and no one else," Nyerere insists, "will make all the decisions about their working and living arrangements" (FD 67). Moreover, these people will join together in an ujamaa village "because they have understood that only through this method can they live and develop in dignity and freedom, receiving the full benefits of their co-operative endeavour" (FD 67-68). Again, we can see how Nyerere takes a description of traditional African society and transforms it into a prescription for a genuine and functional postcolonial democracy. At the same time — at least from the perspective of my 1960s' nostalgia — Nyerere's vision carries with it a certain charge precisely because he manages to make an apparently impossible form of radical democracy seem possible once again.

With the notion of the ujamaa village, we are at the controversial core of Nyerere's concrete vision of socialism, and I think it is worth dwelling a little on this vision today since the very idea of socialism seems to have lost virtually all of its appeal for many of us. Speaking in Cairo in 1967, Nyerere claims: "For socialism the basic purpose is the well-being of the people, and the basic assumption is an acceptance of human equality" (FS 303). He goes on to argue, however, that there is nothing utopian about this. "On the contrary," he insists, "[socialism] is based on the facts of human nature. It is a doctrine which accepts mankind as it is, and demands such an organization of society that man's inequalities are put to the service of his equality" (FS 303). Such claims as these always leave my students non-plussed; it is, after all, difficult for even the most determined cynic to reject such shameless idealism. It is less difficult, however, to question Nyerere's vision of leadership in his idealized democratic socialism. In the same Cairo speech, he maintains that "there must be, among the leadership, a desire and a determination to serve alongside of, and in complete identification with, the masses. The people must be, and must know themselves to be, sovereign. Socialism cannot be imposed upon people; they can be guided; they can be led. But ultimately they must be involved" (FS 309) It does not take a sophisticated, deconstructionist reading of this passage to suggest that Nyerere's own vision of leadership inescapably separates the leadership from what he calls "the masses": if a leader must desire and be determined to serve alongside his/her people, it would seem to follow that s/he is not, in fact, one of them. Nevertheless, Nyerere seems to answer this objection at the very end of his remarks, when he stresses that the function of leadership is "to propose, to explain, and to persuade. For our education does not give us rights over the people. It does not justify arrogance, nor attitudes of superiority" (FS 310). No doubt, my own nostalgia in reading Nyerere today is tied to a longing that public service might seem so essentially unselfish, a longing for leaders who act as Nyerere characterizes his own actions, and, thus, a longing for leaders who are genuine exemplars, leaders who are what they ought to be.

Such was what I will call the philosophical content of my nostalgia last fall, and I will be the first to admit that Julius Nyerere's testament left me wallowing those days in a longing for the impossible. Yet, in his contribution to the extraordinary volume, For Nelson Mandela, Jacques Derrida suggests that there are always at least two ways "to receive a testament."⁸ "One can inflect it," Derrida argues, "toward what bears witness only to a past and knows itself condemned to reflecting on what will not return . . . . But, another inflection, if the testament is always made in front of witnesses, a witness in front of witnesses, it is also to open and enjoin, it is to confide in others the responsibility of a future. To bear witness, to test, to attest, to contest, to present oneself before witnesses."⁹ There can be no question that Nyerere himself sees his philosophical legacy in this second sense of opening up a vision of the future and asking others to be answerable for this future. The question, however, that I cannot help but ask is whether or not Nyerere's testament opens up a viable future for us, a future for which we might be willing to accept responsibility.

The "Vanishing Present"

At about the same time as I learned of the death of Nyerere, I received a copy of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's latest book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, subtitled Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.¹⁰ As is typical of Spivak's work, the book is brilliant and yet agonizingly difficult to read. What makes the book difficult, however, is not a willful obscurity of style but the manner in which Spivak tries to reveal in writing the multidimensional ways in which her own views of the postcolonial situation have changed over the past decade and, in fact, remain currently in flux. At the risk of simplifying a subtle and complex argument, I would suggest that Spivak's Critique is essentially trying to show that her own approach to postcolonial theory during the past twenty-five years — and she has almost single-handedly defined the character of postcolonial theory for many people in the humanities and the social sciences —has been rendered profoundly suspect by the economic and political consequences of multinational corporate globalization in the latter 1990s. What had seemed the "present" of postcolonial economies, states, and cultures has almost instantaneously "vanished" in the wake of the various trends of globalization. What remains "today" and what will be "present" "tomorrow" of the "postcolonial" seem at this point absolutely uncertain and even undecidable. Hence, Spivak's own responses to many of the grand issues of recent postcolonial theory now appear somewhat muted and uncertain, and she uses her formidable skills as a deconstructionist primarily to encourage the suspension of all easy judgment.

A similar insight-that the complex forces of globalization at the end of the twentieth century have transformed societies, economies and cultures across the globe-is pursued in a rather different direction by Spanish sociologist, Manuel Castells, in his three volume work, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture.¹¹ I cannot begin to sketch Castells' argument in any detail here, but it seems to me that he has made the first significant attempt to understand the impact of the information revolution that has come to the fore in the past decade. His detailed analysis of what he calls informational capitalism is particularly striking in that he shows how and why the development of digital computing and of resources such as the internet inevitably generated the trends towards globalization of economies and cultures that are so visible today. However, where Spivak sees in these trends reasons for theoretical caution, Castells takes the opportunity he sees to create a staggering, over-arching theoretical account of structural transformations in what he calls "the network society." The society in which we find ourselves today "is made up," Castells argues, "of networks of production, power, and experience, which construct a culture of virtuality in the global flows that transcend time and space. Not all dimensions and institutions of society follow the logic of the network society, in the same way that industrial societies included for a long time many pre-industrial forms of human existence. But all societies in the Information Age are indeed penetrated, with different intensity, by the pervasive logic of the network society, whose dynamic expansion gradually absorbs and subdues pre-existing social forms" (III.370).

There are two far-reaching consequences of Castells' theoretical vision which seem to me of critical importance for us today, here in Nairobi. The first consequence deals with what happens to those parts of the world which have been, for a variety of historical and economic reasons, essentially excluded from the global flows of capital and information that effectively constitute the contemporary global economy. These parts of the world-which according to Castells include most of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as large pockets of the inner cities in the United States and Western Europe-constitute an entity he calls "the fourth world," a world defined by the "simultaneous economic development and underdevelopment, social inclusion and social exclusion" characteristic of informational, global capitalism (III:82). Writing of Africa, in particular, Castells warns that "technological dependency and technological underdevelopment, in a period of accelerated technological change in the rest of the world, make it literally impossible for Africa to compete internationally either in manufacturing or in advanced services." Caught in "a downward spiral of competitiveness," Africa according to Castells' analysis, "becomes increasingly marginalized in the informational/global economy by each leap forward in technological change" (III:95)

The second consequence of Castells' theory that strikes me as valuable for us today grows out of his account of the current state of personal experience for those included within the web of informational capitalism. Arguing that power "becomes inscribed, at a fundamental level, in the cultural codes through which people and institutions represent life and make decisions, including political decisions" (III:367), Castells goes on to offer his own conception of the "vanishing present." The present is, he maintains, essentially timeless and without space, because "all expressions from all times and from all spaces are mixed in the same hypertext, constantly rearranged, and communicated at any time, anywhere, depending on the interests of senders and the moods of receivers. This virtuality is our reality because it is within the framework of these timeless, placeless, symbolic systems that we construct the categories, and evoke the images, that shape behavior, induce politics, nurture dreams, and trigger nightmares" (III:370).¹² While this vision may or may not seem appealing, Castells celebrates its implications for human personality. Because what he calls "real virtuality" is constantly in flux, human beings caught up in the culture of the information age are necessarily in constant flux as well. Castells argues at some length that the very nature of the human personality is in the process of being transformed, that we are rapidly becoming "flexible personalities, able to engage endlessly in the reconstruction of the self, rather than to define the self through adaptation to what were once conventional social roles, which are no longer viable and which have thus ceased to make sense." "Nowadays," Castells maintains, "people produce forms of sociability, rather than follow models of behavior" (III:369).

If the present has effectively vanished and we live and act in a virtual timelessness, I cannot help but come back to my original question, in a slightly reformulated version: does the philosophical testament of Julius Nyerere open up a viable path for us to follow now, a path for which we might be willing to accept responsibility? To put the question another way: is Derrida right in the statement that appears as my first epigraph? Is it true that "conscience is not only memory but promise"?¹³

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Footnotes p. 1

1. See, for example, Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee (eds.), I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). Back

2. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Allen W. Wood, translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23. Back

3. Julius K. Nyerere, Uhuru na Ujamaa/Freedom and Socialism: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1965-1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Hereafter abbreviated FS.  Back

4. Julius K. Nyerere, Uhuru na Umoja/Freedom and Unity: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1952-65 (Dar Es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1966), 105. Hereafter abbreviated FU. Back

5. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by James W. Ellington, 3d ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993), 39-40. Back

6. On the undecidability of the descriptive and the prescriptive, between the constative and the performative, see Jacques Derrida, "Declarations of Independence," translated by Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper, New Political Science 15 (1986):7-15. Back

7. Julius K. Nyerere, Uhuru na Maendeleo/Freedom and Development: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1968-1973 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 69. Hereafter abbreviated FD. Back

8. Jacques Derrida, "The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, In Admiration," translated by Mary Ann Caws and Isabelle Lorenz, in Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili (eds.), For Nelson Mandela (New York: Seaver Books, 1987), 13-42, 37. Back

9. Ibid. Back

10. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Back

11. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, 3 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996-1998). Back

12. Castells elaborates this claim at I:429-468. Back

13. Derrida, For Nelson Mandela, 38. Back

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