REMAPPING AFRICANNESS

During the most recent African Cup of Nations, a soccer tournament held this year in Ghana, Arab audiences were able to watch Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Sudan (all members of the Arab League) compete for the title of best soccer team in Africa. All games featuring any of these nations were dutifully broadcast in the United States by the Saudi-owned TV station, ART. Arabs in America needed to watch their fellow Arabs and perhaps join in the prayers of the Tunisian Issam Shawali who, I was told by a Tunisian friend of mine, is a world-renowned sportscaster. He is a man whose narrative of the game fuses the best and worst of Arab culture—unabashed displays of patriotism when Tunisia is on the field; poetic praise for Arab nationalism when any of the other teams are playing; and fervent prayers for all on all occasions. I didn’t see the final triumph of Egypt in the tournament, but I can only imagine what outbursts of ecstasy the Arab audiences must have been invited to participate in.

Arab nationalism is well and alive on satellite channels. It can be sweet and comforting, but it can also be fuzzy, forcing the sportscaster to find the right words to separate Arabs from Africans in a tournament that is officially African. The language of African solidarity allowed the speaker to blur the very boundaries by his unambiguous displays of Arab nationalism. Overall, he did an excellent job being the Arab nationalist and proud African, but the fault lines of culture, if not race, were never entirely erased. A non-black, Arab North Africa and a black, sub-Saharan Africa were natural assumptions to make, although this simple black-and-white scenario got complicated during the Egypt vs. Sudan match.

FIFA, the world federation of soccer, doesn’t divide the continent into northern and sub-Saharan zones, but here, too, the ideology of race is not entirely absent. Many believe that FIFA’s president, Sepp Blatter, was swayed by the notion that the real Africa is black when he chose South Africa over Morocco to host the 2010 soccer World Cup. I am not sure what my children’s teachers think when they invite me to talk about Africa in classrooms decorated with masks and images from Kenya. I just wear my djellaba and fez and blend right in. If soccer officials and American teachers do their part to bridge the arbitrary lines of culture and race in Africa, they could help reverse the impression of the vast majority of people who stubbornly believe that North Africa and the rest of the continent are not equal parts of the whole.

I almost got in trouble when I first came to New York in 1983 for insisting to an offended Jamaican that I was African. Obviously puzzled that a non-black could make such a claim, the Caribbean man became openly hostile, even though we were in an academic setting. But I was no less confused by his response—a native of Jamaica, a country on the American continent, was denying me the right to be from Africa, the landmass that includes my native Morocco. It was, to say the least, an odd scene. Bystanders, mostly white, were amused by the dispute because they, too, had their own understanding of Africa based on their own history with race. Africa, whether by its defenders or detractors, was, and still is, cast in black by a projection of minds who can’t see the blinding reality of diversity on that richest of continents.

I first started thinking about the issue of race in Africa when I realized how Arab-centric my fellow Moroccans could be. In the early 1990s, the renowned Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun declared that, as a Moroccan, he didn’t feel African at all. Instead of considering Moroccans, along with other North African states, as African Arabs, since such Arabs constitute at least three quarters of the entire Arab population, he simply “ignored the ground on which he stood” by favoring a mythical concept of identity, one that emerged fitfully in the wake of European colonialism. He privileged, in other words, the fiction of Arab nationalism over the reality of Africanness.

To be sure, Africanness is a fiction, too, or at least a word with a long and changing history. But if we accept geographical designations of continents, then we must at least acknowledge that such a place as Africa exists. Europeans live in Europe, Americans in America, and Africans are those who hail from Africa. Like America, and even Europe, Africa is also a place defined less by the skin color of its inhabitants than by the diversity of its cultures and religions. To the extent that Moroccans, Senegalese, Sudanese and Nigerians who are Muslim, are closer to one another than a Muslim Moroccan is to a Christian Syrian, although both could be considered Arab. By the same token, a Muslim Senegalese is culturally closer to a fellow Muslim Egyptian than he or she is to a Christian South African. Islam, in fact, allows us to see that Africa, like many other parts of the world, is divided along religious lines more so than it is along the barriers of race or language.

One might say that all Africans—except for the handful of elite who benefit from the schemes of corporate exploitation—are united by the suffering and painful marginalization in the age of globalization. When I examined a few African novels written by Muslims in the second half of the 20th century—whether such novels were authored by Moroccan, Senegalese, or Sudanese writers—the common theme was their protagonists’ attempts to survive the debilitating effects of European colonialism. These protagonists were all privileged members of their societies—talented, educated in colonial schools, and sent to the capitals of Europe to finish their studies. If the ultimate of Muslim travel in the past had consisted of the arduous pilgrimage to Mecca (a feat that bestowed spiritual wholeness and significant social prestige on the traveller), then today, the Europe-bound traveller comes back mutilated before eventually dying alone. And those who stay in Europe don’t fare much better.

Take, for example, Driss Chraibi’s Algerian character Yalaan Waldik (which, literally, means “a curse on your parents”) in his 1955 novel Les Boucs (The Butts). Waldik’s trip to Europe leaves him tortured and wounded; it turns him into an angry man speaking for fellow alienated Arabs—the “Butts”. He does time in prison and quickly realizes that the promise of Europe is a mere “mirage”, one, however, from which the traveller never returns. For going back to one’s native land ends up being too little, too late. The Europe-bound African is on a trip to nowhere.

Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s African classic, Ambiguous Adventure, further dramatizes the experience of the young African’s displacement. The novel opens with an emergency meeting in a Senegalese village on how best to resist “the assault of strangers [who have] come from beyond the sea.” The charismatic Most Royal Lady realizes that there is no escaping Europeanization, and there is also no alternative but to school the younger generation in the European ways.

Samba Diallo, a promising religious student from a prominent family, is chosen to spearhead this survival strategy. Unlike many of today’s Muslim extremists who study science and technology, Samba studies philosophy. He does as much as he can to resist Western influences, but he eventually begins to absorb Western values. His father senses his son’s “disquietude”, and, fearing for his perdition, calls him back. It would be too late. By that time, Samba has already lost his uncomplicated faith. The village fool (whose stories about his experiences in war-torn Europe and the wounds he suffered there sound so extravagant to the other villagers that they dismiss them as fanciful accounts), greatly alarmed by Samba’s inability to pray, kills Samba in order to save his soul. Death, the novel tells us, turns Samba into the infinite, not the nothing he had become in his exile. Death is, in fact, the “found” kingdom of no ambiguity.

The same sort of fate hounds the Sudanese “prodigy” Mustafa Sa’eed in Tayeb Salih’s masterpiece, Season of Migration to the North. Like Samba Diallo, Mustafa enrols in the European school system (English, in this case) and eventually makes his way to Cairo, “a city at the height of English rule”, where Mrs. Robinson awakens him to his sexuality. Sexual desire is thus, from the start, associated with Western women.

Once in London, the young man immediately steels himself for a war against the British, planning to seduce their women and even kill them in order to avenge a deep-seated grievance against Europeans, who, in Mustafa’s view, have waged violence against others—as well as among themselves—for centuries. He describes himself as a “colonizer” and “intruder”, “a drop of the poison which [Europe has] injected into the veins of history.”

He lies constantly and invents an identity that conforms to British stereotypes of Africans, yet he remains painfully aware that he has internalized much of the West he strongly despises. So he kills his English wife, Jean Morris, in a final but futile attempt to exorcise Western influences from his being. Only after returning to his native country to live with his new Sudanese wife and children does he realize that his situation is hopeless. His schizophrenic mental state becomes intolerable, and he drowns himself in the Nile.

More than two decades later, another Senegalese writer reminded us that the same problems continue to haunt a new generation of Muslims. Marietou M’Baye, who writes under the pseudonym Ken Bugul, published Abandoned Baobab in 1982. It is an autobiographical account of a promising student who expects to be liberated by French culture. Yet upon arriving in Belgium on a scholarship, she is quickly disillusioned by the social alienation and cold materialism of a society where only shopping seems to confer an identity. No one greets or pays attention to her. Although Bugul identifies with the predicament of all women, she also rejects Western feminism’s claims to a universal sisterhood.

Cultures are truly different, she realizes. Confused and disoriented, she seeks unfulfilling sexual relations, gets pregnant and goes through an abortion performed by a racist doctor, after which she begins to use drugs. She puts up pictures of her nude body in the room she shares with a male American G.I., starts providing massages to men, models for artists and photographers, and dances in nightclubs before finally prostituting herself for the sake of a moment of attention. Throughout her rapid descent into this marginal existence, she becomes increasingly suicidal. Mustering all the willpower she can, she returns home to Senegal, only to find out that the still-standing baobab tree—a symbol of local stability that has sustained her throughout her travails in Belgium—has long been dead. With nothing left, Bugul pronounces a eulogy for the tree that might as well be the eulogy of her life and, indeed, the entire African continent.

The same agonizing ruptures afflict young North African men. Many of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s early novels and accounts of immigrant life in France are, in some ways, the chronicle of a steadily mounting despair felt by Muslims all over Europe. Young Muslim men and women who had hoped to escape the economic and cultural constraints of their native villages and towns find themselves coping with rejection and social marginalization. Disillusionment with Europe’s promise of a better life, cheerfully peddled at home by sweet-talking colonialists and missionaries, takes on the dimension of a timeless conflict—the one pitting Islam against “infidel” Christians, or a human Africa against an exploitative Europe. Feeling betrayed and lonely, they succumb to a despondency that threatens to explode into violence.

Over the course of more than fifty years, African literature has repeatedly shown us that the African’s legal journey or illegal crossing into Europe doesn’t discriminate between North Africans and sub-Saharan ones. Today, migrants may take off from a Moroccan city like Tangier, but the zodiacs or pateras that carry these fortune seekers contain the full spectrum of African colours and languages. They travel to reclaim the lives they have been deprived of by the usurious and exploitative schemes of capitalism. One day we read an account of African immigrants being hunted down by law enforcement agents at the border zones; the next day we are treated to accounts of seabed-scrubbing trawlers emptying African waters of fish to satisfy the demanding palates of rich nations. With their natural resources snatched away by the voracious appetite of the West, many African fishermen end up on Spanish shores as lifeless bodies. The African—whether from the north, the middle, or the south of the continent—is as much an object of consumption as his or her resources are.

When I was a teenager, I attended a poetry reading in Tangier that has haunted me ever since. The poet was Cuban, and his subject was the coffee bean. It was an account of the common fate of the two, travelling from their birthplace in Africa and ending up together in the New World, with the African serving coffee to the white customer. This is now the fate of all Africans, serving bits and pieces of Africana to customers lured by the exotic. Africa is one in its destiny and diversity. Those who divide it along artificial lines would do better to listen to its voices. Africa’s annals of history bespeak a complex but, quite often, common fate. African literature continues to uphold this sensibility, affirming the invisible but robust kinship between the likes of late Driss Chraibi and Marietou M’Baye.