A Pan-African Imagination

This Tuesday is Africa Day and so I have turned to a Pan African Pantheon to inspire our imagination, for in the Pan-African tradition an inspired imagination is the precursor to expanded freedom.

/ STRATEGY

Marcus Garvey stated, “A people without the knowledge of their past, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

This truth makes The Pan-African Pantheon, a collection of 36 biographical essays of prominent Pan-African ‘prophets, poets and philosophers’, edited by Professor Adekeye Adebajo a blessing. It grounds and grows us. Each profile provides a path into the past, through which we can better understand our present and imagine our future.

Every few pages has a cross-reference, “see Ngqulunga in this volume”, or “see Khadiagala in this volume”, or “see…” You get the idea. It feels like Adebajo is inviting us into his world. He generously connects us to other thinkers that may inspire us.

Clinton Hutton’s essay, “Bob Marley: Revolutionary Prophet of African Unity” traces Bob Marley’s Pan Africanism and how his music added rhyme and rhythm to the thoughts of Emperor Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, and other freedom thinkers.

Hutton reminds us that in Catch a Fire, Marley sang, “Today they say we are free / Only to be chained to poverty.” In twelve words Marley reminds us that poverty imprisons, that it enslaves and shackles.

And then in Redemption Song, he tells us that the freedom starts with self, singing “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but our selves can free our minds.”

This line took me to Barney Pityana’s essay, “Steve Biko: Philosopher of Black Consciousness.”

Biko’s gift to South Africa’s liberation is that freedom requires both understanding context and the cultivation of the self-belief to change it.

Pityana explains that Biko gave us the “possibility of the imagination that conquers”, and the understanding that “to be free was to recover and exercise one’s own personality”, and that “an acknowledgement and assertion of one’s humanity is the very essence of liberation.”

To be fully human is to be free. Being fully human and free is to resist that which limits freedom of ourselves and others. To feed one’s imagination, and that of others, can become a revolutionary act, indeed was and is a revolutionary act.

/ SELF

Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed is the story of her determination to be free, and to ensure the freedom of others.

Wangari Maathai was a scholar, an activist, an environmentalist. The first woman to obtain a PhD in East and Central Africa (at the time of her passing she had been awarded 15 honorary doctorates), she founded the Green Belt Movement in 1997 and in 2004 received the Nobel Peace Prize.

In keeping with this week’s theme of imagination’s power, Maathai tells us that, “I know now is that my parents raised me in an environment that did not give reasons for fear or uncertainty. Instead, there were many reasons to dream, to be creative, and to use my imagination. As I grew older, I learned that we can convince ourselves and our children, and, if we are leaders we can convince our citizens, that we are in danger, either from what people might do to us or what we might do to ourselves.”

By ensuring that Maathai felt safe, that she did not have reason to fear, her parents gifted her the possibility of dreaming, of being creative. And so, when Maathai confronted those who would enslave her mind, she consistently resisted, broke free, dreamt and acted to expand her freedom. She points us to the fact that our role as leaders is to lead people to places where they can dream, be creative, use their imagination and not be stymied by some fantastical fear.

She reflects that her childhood was one “where children were told living stories about the world around them, and where you cultivated the soil and the imagination in equal measure.”

She came from a world that cultivated imagination, an imagination that became the well-spring of her future activism. To increase your freedom, cultivate your imagination.

In her late 30s, her husband divorced her in a traumatic court case. Thereafter she decided to run for parliament. To be eligible she was required to resign her university post, which she did and then was blocked from being a candidate by the ruling party. She returned to the university to try and get her post back, only to discover that although she had worked at the university for 16 years, her post had been filled 12 hours after she’d resigned.

She remembers, “I had no job and no salary. I had no pension and very few savings. I was about to be evicted from my house. Everything that I had hoped for and relied on was gone—in the space of three days. I was forty-one years old and for the first time in decades I had nothing to do. I was down to zero.”

She did not stay defeated. She was unbowed. The courage her community and her family had inculcated would not be imprisoned.

She says, “None of us can control every situation we find ourselves in. What we can control is how we react when things turn against us. I have always seen failure as a challenge to pull myself up and keep going. A stumble is only one step in the long path we walk and dwelling on it only postpones the completion of our journey. Every person who has ever achieved anything has been knocked down many times. But all of them picked themselves up and kept going, and that is what I have always tried to do.”

She writes that her philosophy is that “Each person needs to raise their consciousness to a certain level so that they will not give up or succumb. If your consciousness is at such a level, you are willing to do what you believe is the right thing—popular opinion notwithstanding.”

/ SOUL

Earlier in the year I told you of ceramicist Zizipho Poswa’s successes. One of those was her first solo show iLobola held at Cape Town’s Southern Guild Gallery.

The show was recently sold-out, with each piece achieving prices between $40,000 and $50,000. It is a magnificent achievement for a South African artist to command global prices from a Cape Town stage.

Many of the sculptures are 1,80m or taller. They are majestic. This video gives you a sense both of their power and of her power.

Poswa says, “My inspiration comes from my culture and the path I have walked. I am the woman I am because of my heritage. I celebrate my heritage and I forge my own way.”

Her work is an embodiment of Pan-African inspiration; a present informed by a connection to the past; an imagination fueled by culture and freedom; creative action that is freeing and inspires freedom.

I wish you a week in which you get to be you, a week in which you create space for others to be themselves, and in doing so to contribute to a freer world.

Please share today’s letter with the Africans you love, and those that love our Africa. If this is the first time you’ve read strategy, soul & self, you can subscribe here.

Yours

Karl

PS: If you would like to work with me, I will have space for a few new clients from early July. Send me an email and we can find time for an introductory conversation.

PPS: If you were inspired by this week’s letter and want to read further, historian, yogi, and reader of this letter Ruqayya Bryce shared this fantastic reading list with me.
(This letter was first published on 23 May 2021)