THE COLONIAL HERITAGE AND THE FUTURE
As the theme of this conference is extremely vast, I will only talk about the
subject in the space I know better, Angola, though I can later extend the subject to
some observations about the rest of Africa.
In what concerns my country, the political, economic and cultural influence of
colonisation is very deep, since in some parts of the territory it lasted four centuries,
and the commercial and social contacts with the Portuguese in the coastal areas goes
back five centuries, precisely since 1482. Such frequent political and commercial
relations, with a strong focusing on the catholic religion, which necessarily affected the
culture, led to the definitive implantation of the Portuguese language in the territory.
Colonisation, Christianisation and "Portugalisation" in terms of language and culture
are processes intimately attached.
With the constant military resistance of the African populations against colonial
penetration and occupation, the domain of the territory was only effective in a global
sence in the XX century. That is why we can understand a pronounced cultural
difference between the populations on the coast, more "occidentalized", and those
from the interior of the country, that still keep cultural structures closer to what we call
traditional, although many elements of European culture are present, in particular the
Portuguese language. We may say that the Angolan coast is culturally mixed, while the
interior of the country is more African, though also influenced by exterior elements such
as the Portuguese language and Christianisation. This separation also corresponds, in
general, to the difference between the urban population and the rural population.
Although there isn't a census of the population since the independence of the country
and there are only fragmentary studies, the present perception is that the Portuguese
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language is spoken by nearly 90% of the population, evidently with different
competencies, and it is today, the most important mother tongue of the Angolan
people, comprising about 50% of the population. Curiously, this expansion of the
Portuguese language was much more intense after the Independence than during the
colonial period. On the other side, recent studies indicate that half of the population
declares itself catholic and nearly 20% declares itself non catholic Christian, where the
protestant creeds and the messianic creeds with an African origin can be included,
remaining over 30% to animist and atheist.
These few elements show that there was a very strong influence of colonisation
in the cultural component of the entire Angolan territory. But in the coastal cities the
influence reached other levels, particularly customs, social structures and even tastes.
As an example we can refer the existence since the middle of the XIX century of a
major Portuguese press, some bilingual newspapers, Portuguese and an African
language. In the case of the literary works, starting to be edited from the same period
on, middle of the XIX century, they were only published in Portuguese and, probably,
also written in that European language, a process that persists to present time.
As Portugal was a limping, poor and scarsely populated empire, the
colonisation of Angola until the XIX century was made mainly by convicts of common or
religious law, deportees to whom was given the possibility to choose between rotting in
the jails of Portugal or Brazil or risking the danger to perish in wars or defeated by
malaria in Angola, being free after a year of survival, to dedicate themselves to the
traffic of slaves, the only reason for the Portuguese domain on the territory. So, they
were not the most competent agents to "spread Faith and Civilisation". Mostly men,
they would eventually find a woman in the African communities with which they entered
into contact, and as such, effectively starting a mixed group that became a sort of
intermediary class, not only with important functions in commerce, but also in public
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administration, in the army and in the church, which started to gain progressive social
and cultural importance, a fact that marked decisively the coastal culture and its
tendency to look preferably toward the Atlantic, be it Europe or America, particularly
Brazil. To this type of culture, the African continent, or more precisely, its interior
region, was only the place where slaves were caught, a sort of barbarian land. Still
today, this cultural construction causes prejudices against the continent, which can be
seen in the Angolan diplomacy, for instance.
During the national liberation fight and after the Independence, the elite’s main
preocupation was the creation of a single Nation emerging from the fight and
afterwards, that the ensuing nation was based on the centralised State, because they
feared fractures based on ethnic and cultural differences. The Portuguese language
was one of the instruments used to acomplish this purpose. It was declared as the only
official language, the language of education, press and work. With the exception of
songs, several times using African languages, all cultural and social manifestations
were made and still are made in Portuguese. So, it is no surprise that families, in
particular urban families, prefer this language for their children, paying no attention to
the African languages.
Though the official speech had always defended the principle of the need to
defend and promote the African languages, that wasn't the reality. For that reason
sporadic attempts to teach the region’s languages to adults have never had a
continuous following. Nowadays, because of the insistence resulting from a meeting of
writers, that took place in August of last year, the government accepted the principle of
introducing the teaching of the most important mother tongues in the school. We shall
see if there is the political will to implement this decision. This is not an unimportant
question. Studying the data of some divided census made in 1983, at that time I wrote
a text where I called attention to the fact that, already then, more than two thirds of the
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children in the main cities only spoke Portuguese. Posterior data shows that this
tendency spread out and today in the territory where kimbundu, a banto language, was
traditionally spoken, Portuguese is the only language found. Kimbundu, which used to
be the second language in Angola, is in serious risk of disappearing or being
completely adulterated by the influence of the Portuguese language. When a language
vanishes, an important historical and cultural base of the individual’s dignity and his
insertion in a certain identity also disapears. For this reason, I think this is a very
important matter.
The argument that a language spoken by all the population strengthens the
feeling of belong to a whole is irrefutable, and absolutely understandable in a nation
building process, though there might exist multilingual nations. The problem in Angola
is that, as the competence to express oneself in Portuguese is not the same according
to the regions or social groups, in particular the domain of the written language, this
difference carries out an important social stratification, since the best educational,
employment and even business opportunities are reserved for those who hold the best
levels of language competency. During several generations, those who benefited from
the situation were always recruited from the eternally privileged elite, and the peasants
and their heirs were relegated to the heavier and less paid jobs, or destined to enlarge
the number of evergrowing unemployed in cities throughtout the country.
To end this language question, I would like to say that in my opinion it seems
necessary, practicable and not terribly expensive to arrive at a situation of bilingualism,
where each citizen speaks the national communication language, a door to the world,
in this case the Portuguese language, and a language from his origin region. That
would encourage a constant dialogue between the African and European languages,
extremely stimulating to literature, a point very important to us, in particular. This is a
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position that is gaining more and more support and I hope that the latest government's
decisions lead in that direction.
The question of language opens the door to the debate about the relation
between culture and development, which leads me to generalise some observations
that I have made, and for which I beg for your kindness, because they are dreams
rather than Cartesian reasoning, lyric speculations rather than scientific conclusions.
The problem exists and has been reported several times. Maybe the proposed solution
is the work of an insane mind. That is why I apologise in advance.
We all admit that till now, Africa has been an ungoverned and disorientated toy
in the rough see of strange and rival interests. Its own political, economic and social
organisation models have been imposed by the exterior. First the colonisation that,
when "spreading Faith and Civilisation", declared to know what was best for the people
under its domain, as if in fact it had questioned itself seriously in that regard. The model
was imposed, and it was then necessary to accept and copy the European States or
simply to copy the gestures, attitudes and movements of the white coloniser. With
weak results, because, either the African people didn't know how to fully imitate what
the white man did or thought, working with different registers, or they simply didn't want
to fully accomplish it’s implemention, since it would drive them hopelessly away from
their own identity. This attempt to create "white soul Negroes" only resulted on the
surface and in episodic cases. And it soon disintegrated as soon as the conditions for
rejection were minimally gathered. With differences according to the particular strain of
colonialism, an elite withdrawn from the populations was created. This elite was
depersonalised, living in the so called "colonised complex", as was so keenly analysed
by Albert Memmi in the beginning of the 50s. But, contrary to appearances, that
complex was not constructive, not even in the sense of leading the African people to
develop similar mentalities, although submitted to the coloniser. In the cases where this
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assimilation policy was developed, the colonised man feared the white man and
admired his capacity to dominate unknown technologies, but at the same time secretly
developed resentments, because he knew he could never be seen as an equal, and he
was just an instrument domination of other aborigines that were far from the colonial
power centres.
After the independence movements, either because of the strength of the elite
deformed by the complexes caused by colonisation, or because of the factors
connected to the so called Cold War, the fact is that some countries tried to imitate the
capitalist development models and other Eastern European models. But those models
were pale copies destined to failure, because they were imposed by the exterior and
applied without much reflection. Nowadays, with the victory of the capitalist and liberal
model, we are witnessing the injection of huge doses of the miraculous elixir called the
market economy, as the universal and sacred remedy to all diseases of African
societies. Since a universal remedy cannot be applied alone, a second miraculous cure
imposed itself, “the parliamentary democracy”. With the assistance of these two
scientific discoveries supported by two competent and victorious assistants, the IMF
and the World Bank, Africa will walk successfully towards the stars, after the turbulence
of this transition period is over. At least, that is what the owners of the World promise
us with a straight face... And some believe them.
As for me, it is time to stop and start thinking. I have been proposing for a long
time, since the moment I started to realise what the owners of the World expect from
us, that Africa has to get together, as it is still done in some societies, under one or
many big trees, with the kind spirits of the ancestors assisting and blessing amongst
the leaves, and talk about the future. We have to relearn the virtue of a calm
conversation, balancing the cases, unhurriedly, because time is our invention and we
can mould it as we want. And discuss, discuss, till we reach an agreement. This was
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how it was done in the ancient times, and now, this is the way we must ponder
important questions. We shouldn't fear those who call us retrograde, lovers of the
traditions that were surpassed by the frenzy of the machine, yearning for the uses that
have been despised by scientific progress, or other sort of kindness, when they simply
want to tell us that we are backward nations. If we are already late, maybe in an
irrecoverable way, as far as economic and technologic progress, I just don't understand
why we shouldn't admit that truly we are backward nations. And, we should learn from
that delay.
Africa has to reflect and talk. About what? The future, of course. We have to
know in what sort of society we want to live. Could the satiated and unsafe societies of
the North be our model? Do we want to live like that? Do we want to deny some of our
values, that are being daily overwhelmed by the rules that our abulic leaders receive
from the owners of the World, to adopt the rational principles of the social structure
discovered in the Occident? Or would we like to invent societies closer to our cultural
origins, according to social rules and values that have resisted by a miracle to the
constant attempts of colonisation of the spirit?
In the East of Angola, and because I was writing a book at that time, "As
Aventuras de Ngunga", which was immediately translated into the Mbunda language,
the main language of that region, I became aware of the inexistence of a word to
translate the Portuguese word orphan. And then I understood why the mbunda
language did not have the corresponding word for orphan. The reason was that in that
region there were no orphans, sociologically speaking. A child that had lost the
biological parents would immediately have other parents, people with the same age as
the child's progenitors, which were also considered the child's parents. They adopted
the child automatically. And I began to wonder that those values that prevented the
children from staying alone or in charity institutions, probably had persisted along the
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years because colonial penetration was very recent in those regions and not very
profound. But these values wouldn't resist to new economic models, to which another
person in the family is a heavy burden. I don't know what is happening today in those
regions mangled by a long war, but I am almost certain that the actual vicissitudes
were very efficient and part of the children living in the streets of Angola are also from
the societies that I visited a long time ago. Wouldn't it be a tremendous lost? Isn't there
a way to preserve this and other equivalent values that the so called “western
Civilisation” is destroying?
We should also question ourselves about the type of political and economic
organisation that we consider more adjusted to our temperament. Could it be the
celebrated parliamentary democracy, where the citizens vote each four years in some
people that nobody knows and during that time those elected do whatever they want in
the name of those who elected them? Could it be a method that means that some win
and the others lose? Wouldn't it be interesting to conciliate the African principle of
consensus with that process, in detriment to the principle of exclusion of a minority
which is forcibly implicated by an election? These are complicated questions that
cannot be easily answered. Likewise, maybe it would make sense to discuss the liberal
economic model. Would it be advisable to give the single blind strength of the market
the responsibility to establish the relative value of things? Is a tortoise really worth three
kilos of maize? Can the ineffable international organisations really determine that and
many other things from so far away? Furthermore, since presently the main economy
of our countries is informal, at least this is the sector that gathers greatest number of
people and that registers the more creative initiatives, why should we continue to throw
it to the ghetto of illegality? or should we consider it as a viable structure to seize? At
least in Luanda, the informal transports sector minimised in great part the circulation
problems suffered by the discriminated populations of the shanty towns.
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Will we have the courage, imagination, madness, call it what you want, to
gather under the tree, and try to invent a new thing, our thing?
This is my challenge and my hope. That the African people have the courage to
say: stop, wait, now it is our time to decide. We accept your wonderful discoveries, we
adopt them as ours, from the bicycle to the computer. We also want societies ruled by
the intransigent defence of the people's rights to the unrestricted freedom of option,
opinion and expression, with institutions that secure those liberties and stop firmly any
way of oppression. But those should be our institutions, which we can understand and
control, ruled by principles that we feel deep inside us, because they belong to our
culture. We also want to build peaceful societies, with equal opportunities for all and
not only for the fortunate elite. But with methods that we can successfully apply and
without violating the millenary ethics upon which we were socialised.
Destiny shall also be African if in fact we are able to impose our own decisions
to blind and deaf western power centres, dazzled by their own power and efficiency. If
we have the courage to do it, we will be helping the rest of the World searching for
more humanitarian forms of development. We will be helping self comprehension even
from those parts of Humanity that are convinced of the irreversibility of their own
progress and of the eternity of their economic, cultural and military power. Intrinsically,
Africa will be again spreading civilisation, as it did in the primordial times, when men
left the African continent to populate the rest of the Earth.
Dream, utopia, madness? Maybe. I agree that the majority of the people are not
ready to hear such heresies. But life is very dull without a little madness... And without
some heresy, no Faith will survive.
Pepetela
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