Africa’s many faces of ‘freedom’
In the coming days, African liberal minds will be assembling in the ‘Mother City’ to trade ideas on a variety of strategies for effective liberal governance on our continent. Just as the old English adage says, when big minds assemble in one room, it is unlikely they will agree on anything.
In fact, when it comes to matters of liberal philosophy, I am inspired more by diversity of conclusions rather than monotony of consensus. Come to think of it, liberal democracy remains one of the leading governance models in the world because of its capacity to absorb the shock of diversity.
One subject that will stimulate my mind in Cape Town is that of freedom.
It is inconceivable that more than sixty years after the African Union was formed, there are millions of Africans who still mourn the dearth of true freedom in our different countries. True, just like with the term ‘democracy’, nobody seems to have succeeded in defining freedom. However, as in the case of oxygen, you choke when it is absent.
Had it been that the African Liberation Committee had succeeded to factor facets of true freedom into their fight against colonialism, we would not be talking about it today. I want to hazard a simple perspective on why freedom generally manifests in different faces in Africa.
There are those who argue that ‘constitutionalism’ as we practise it today was an extension of British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch colonial imperialism that came to our shores as far back as the 16th century, especially in southern Africa. African law back then was not written but entwined with oral tradition, passed from one governance generation to another. In principle, we were ruled by a ‘monarchy’ practising a crude form of village democracy based on consensus by a group of silver-haired men who routinely sat under tree sheds in a courtyard. Our freedoms were a set of traditional norms and practices engrained in the social fabric. However, I still find it questionable whether inherited chieftaincy can allow alternative forms of governance.
Written laws
Thus, for Southern Africa, ‘modern’ governance was imposed, founded on written laws. Yet even when its authors themselves would have been products of British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch ‘democracy’, they had no qualms about the nature and texture of colonial governance being authoritarian. This is the very reason why Africans became exasperated and ultimately took to arms in pursuit of ‘true’ freedom. Yet for most Africans today, we are now saddled with the same type of authoritarian rule our forefathers fought against, the only difference being the oppressors are now black, like us.
At one time we thought our continent was progressing towards true freedom, but a chain of events traced to militarisation, political self-preservation, corruption, and greed has taken the dignity out of Ubuntu. Despite most African governments boasting constitutions and five-year electoral cycles, practises have gravitated towards unbridled tin-pot dictatorship.
When African liberals demand explanation and accountability; when we advocate for constitutionalism, rule of law, property rights, and respect for individual liberties, we are called derogatory names. The ruling elite brandish the doctrine of sovereignty and patriotism at us. Some, like in South Africa, are labelled ‘agents of white capitalist interests’ and others, in Zimbabwe, are called ‘puppets of the West’.
Now, here is the good news: African liberals are not leaving the arena any time soon.
We are tired of the nauseating refrain by authoritarian dictators and their banana republic sympathisers who accuse us of not understanding or ‘distorting’ freedom. It is not their face of freedom that counts, no. These unruly militant and nationalist governments – from North, West, East, Central, to Southern Africa – claim that we ‘borrow’ the principles of freedom from ‘the West’. They want to frogmarch us into the false arena that ‘true, patriotic Africans should understand freedom differently as defined by our cultural norms and traditions’. Norms and traditions that infringe on individual liberty, freedom of choice, and the pursuit of self-actualisation – in my book – do not qualify as true freedom.
African dictators are only interested in political self-preservation, extended government control, and enrichment.
First plane to New York
If you consider it closely, the same African leaders jump onto the first plane to New York to support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Not only that, they also claim to subscribe to freedom protocols articulated in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The same governments inundate hapless citizens with international and regional protocols on ‘freedom’, yet we still see deliberate and institutional suppression of civil liberty under the guise of ‘national security’ and ‘national sovereignty’.
In Cape Town I will stand to be corrected that freedom is indivisible – whether one is in Dallas, Oslo, Rabat, Delhi, Brisbane, Lusaka, Harare, or Durban. Freedom is universal and cannot be qualified outside of its own logic.
Liberals ought to drastically change these irritating dynamics. We intend to adopt more cohesive and collaborative strategies to push back this manipulatively authoritarian face of freedom. By the end of our sojourn, we must have clarity on what institutional and implementation matrix we need, in order to call these rogue governments to account.
I long for a clear hierarchy of liberal best practices anchored on the United Nations Freedom Charter, via continental and regional protocols up to domestic constitutions. We must have an African Freedom Rapid Reaction Unit, not just as an advocacy network, but also to support all Africans whose freedom is under threat. Our AFRRU must be visible in local legislative processes all the way up to the African Parliamentary Union. We need to revisit all African constitutions and related legislative instruments to exorcise them of all demons that contaminate our freedom.
Obviously, my contextualisation of freedom is liberal-centric. This is fine because I am libertarian. However, in my previous freedom proclamations, I have attracted the ire of socialists, nationalists, and pan-Africanists. So I cannot claim ‘all Africans view freedom through the same prism’. Our opinions are not homogenous.
Another face of ‘freedom’ that might come under scrutiny is the EFF perspective. South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters come out on the extreme left, thus their perception of freedom is more on the ‘emancipation from white capitalist interests’.
‘Freedom from capitalism’
Just like pan-Africanists and nationalists, EFF leader Julius Malema believes all black Africans should be focusing on ‘freedom from capitalism’. He argues that while Africa is politically free, our continent lacks ‘economic freedom’.
However, when Yoweri Museveni unleashed his venom against the LGBQT community, Malema himself came to their defence in the name of ‘freedom of association’. Even my countrymen in South Africa under threat of xenophobia have been defended by him in the name of ‘freedom of association and movement’.
And therefore, even if I argued above for the African Freedom Rapid Reaction Unit, it must not escape our attention in Cape Town that after all, we Africans do not necessarily contextualise ‘freedom’ in the same manner.