Throughout Africa, debates about cultural preservation and conventional values are more and more being influenced by forces that promote conservative social agendas rooted in colonial and missionary legacies. These actions, typically backed by beneficiant Western funding, search to impose inflexible, exclusionary values that contradict the continent’s various and traditionally dynamic cultures.
A current instance of this dynamic performed out final week in Nairobi, the place the second Pan-African Convention on Household Values organised by the Africa Christian Professionals Discussion board sparked controversy by claiming to defend “conventional” African household values.
The occasion’s overseas supporters, together with the Middle for Household and Human Rights (C-Fam) and Household Watch Worldwide, are identified for his or her opposition to LGBTQ rights, reproductive well being, and complete intercourse schooling.
These organisations, some categorized as hate teams by the United States-based Southern Poverty Legislation Middle, typically current their positions as inherently African, regardless of their deep connections to Western conservative funding.
This duplicity got here to the fore forward of the convention in Nairobi when it was revealed that the preliminary checklist of audio system consisted solely of white males.
Through the occasion, individuals had been urged to “resist rising tendencies that search to redefine marriage, weaken the establishment of household, or devalue human sexuality” and to rise as much as defend the African household from a “new colonialism”.
But the very fact is that the narrative of preserving custom that was on full show on the convention is much from natural. As a substitute, it itself continues a sample established through the colonial period, when imperial powers imposed patriarchal norms and strict social hierarchies underneath the guise of paradoxically each preserving and “civilising” indigenous cultures.
In doing so, missionary and colonial establishments each reimagined and reframed African social buildings to align with Victorian beliefs, embedding inflexible gender roles and heteronormative household fashions into the social cloth and inventing supposedly historical and unchanging “traditions” to help them.
The latter had been themselves constructed on self-serving concepts of Africans as “noble savages”, residing in pleased conformity with supposedly “pure” values, trapped by petrified “tradition”, and undisturbed by the ethical questions that plagued their civilised Western counterparts from whose corruption they wanted to be protected.
Because the convention demonstrated, native political actors and governments typically help these agendas, both for political expediency or resulting from real alignment with their conservative worldview. There may be additionally help from some quarters of the NGO sector, which provides the actions a veneer of legitimacy whereas obscuring their colonial roots.
The Nairobi convention put the Kenya Pink Cross Society (KRCS) within the highlight when it was accused of endorsing the occasion by permitting it to be hosted on the Boma Lodge, which it co-owns. Although KRCS has denied any direct involvement within the occasion, declaring that it was not concerned within the day-to-day choices of the resort administration, the controversy nonetheless highlights the challenges and risks even well-meaning humanitarian organisations can face.
Humanitarian establishments have traditionally been complicit within the colonial enterprise, and it’s maybe not shocking that they wrestle to see via narratives that search to solidify colonial agendas underneath the guise of defending indigenous values.
A part of the issue is that there’s rising confusion about what strategy must be taken to handle rising calls to “decolonise” the actions of the help trade. One facet of this course of is a recognition of the primacy of indigenous values and native practices of mutual support.
Nonetheless, when organisations fail to critically study whether or not the values coded as indigenous or, on this case, “African”, in actuality mirror and embed colonial logics and assumptions about indigenous societies, they could inadvertently discover themselves perpetuating dangerous agendas.
That’s the reason, when confronted with narratives reminiscent of those propagated on the Pan-African Convention on Household Values, you will need to perceive the distinction between decolonisation and decoloniality.
Although associated, the 2 frameworks are distinct. The primary largely focuses on transferring energy to the previously colonised, whereas the latter offers with the logics and values which might be the legacy of colonisation.
Within the aftermath of the Sixties’ decolonisation, the failure to handle coloniality left many African international locations saddled with elites, states, and governance preparations that upheld colonial frameworks and approaches. Kenya itself was a working example.
In 1967, almost 4 years after independence, Masinde Muliro, a distinguished Kenyan politician, noticed: “In the present day we now have a black man’s Authorities, and the black man’s Authorities administers precisely the identical rules, rigorously, because the colonial administration used to do.”
Equally, support organisations focusing solely on empowering native actors may find yourself reinforcing the deliberate reframing of regressive, colonial-era values as genuine African traditions.
Complicated decolonisation for decoloniality dangers legitimising dangerous ideologies by permitting them to masquerade as cultural preservation. Recognising the historic roots of those supposed traditions is important, not only for humanitarian companies however for societies at massive. With out this consciousness, we threat enabling actions that use custom as a weapon to oppress, slightly than as a software to heal and unify.
The lesson is evident: to genuinely transfer ahead, we should be prepared to always mirror on how colonial legacies proceed to form modern cultural and social norms and debates. Solely then can we construct a future rooted in real, various, and inclusive understandings of African id.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.