In 2009, South African scholar and activist, Prof. Sean Jacobs of the New School in New York started the online publication Africa is a Country.  Since then, the periodical has grown by leaps and bounds into a major outlet for opinion, analyses and new writing on and from what they describe as “the African left.” To its deserved credit, Africa is a Country’s publications offer revolutionary and innovative ways of analysing and thinking about Africa, focused on all aspects at the macro and micro level.

But as a regular reader of the site’s publications for a long time now, I have not stopped mulling over the name of this site especially the point it sought to make through naming itself, “Africa is a country.” Not to be misunderstood for its clearly cheeky and satirical name, the periodical runs a kicker—some form of explainer—which could be read as epic satire: “Not a continent with 55 countries.”

I know, a rose would still smell the same even when it went by another name.  But surely, there is power in a name.  My first reflex to this name is that it was a slap back, a ridicule to the scholarship—and especially western media and travel writing—which tended (and perhaps continues) to treat the African continent as a single homogenous, both geographical and analytical space: one single country.  This slap-back, as I understood it, wasn’t necessarily in response to some explicit colonialist-orientalist portrayals as that which defined colonial literature during the colonial period (such as The Flame Tress of Thika or Heart of Darkness), or the equally disparaging, subtle, and sometime mild derogatory encounters, newspaper and magazines stories and book titles—oftentimes, with evidence on Africa’s problems—(such as Robert Guest’s 2004 book, The Shackled Continent) which have continued being published to this day.

Indeed, sadly, despite being a continent renowned for its diversity 55 times (at least, going by the number of countries), a great deal of analyses, continued to talk about an Africa that was almost homogenous in all forms—histories, political practices, economies, and cultural traditions, etcetera.  Thus diversity, difference, and sometimes animosities, had all been reduced into one single homogenous entity.  Africa was the same from the Cape Town in the south to Alexandria or Bossaso in the North, and from Mombasa and Accra.  So, the often-repeated anecdote was that Euro-Americans continue to tell their African visitors about how they have friends on the continent (like it were a small village): “You are Ugandan, oh, that is great, I have friend in Nigeria, maybe you might know them…” It is not that these homogenising chronicles and encounters were in praise of African geniuosity, but rather an African collective backwardness.  Africans started fighting back—often satirically—and most memorably, Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay “How to Write about Africa” went viral after its publication in 2005.  Four years later after Wainaina’s essay, a notable outlet, Africa is a Country, was born.

While I fully appreciate the urgency to push back on these caricatured, racialised, orientalised, and homogenising renderings of Africa, I wish Africans saw themselves as a country—and not necessarily as a diverse and differentiated continent.  My intention is not to aspire for a single language or currency, neither is it an aspiration for a singular leadership and ruler or emperor.  My aspiration is rather for a political-economic theoretical position that thrives on what I see as New Colonialism.  Africans ought to appreciate the reality that while we might be undeniably diverse and different, as a continent, we are still trapped in an existential power relation; a contest over our own resources with Euro-America—and Africa is seen and approached as a continent but with several disunited and confused small countries.  With this position, I want to challenge the African elite and politicians to see themselves, not with their own eyes, but with the same eyes through which their nemeses see them.  (This actually could have been Prof. Sean Jacobs original idea if the name and site were not read as satirical clap back). While I believe seeing Africa form African vantage points is an important methodological intervention, my position is that it is more helpful, more liberating, for Africans to see themselves from the vantage point of the pugilist on the other side—as country.

From Berlin Conference to Washington Consensus (1884-1980)

If the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 met to divide the continent amongst European powers for extraction without fighting against each other, as they had been fighting during the slave trade, the 1980s meetings in Washington, which came up with the “Washington Consensus” were about extracting from the continent as one whole—without necessarily dividing it amongst the preying animals.  But while the approaches to extraction as agreed from these two meeting slightly over 100 years apart, extraction from Africa remains real, and perhaps even more perverse.  From the vantage point of the extractors, Africa is Africa—a singular space.  Even when the modes of extraction are diametrically different as is the case with almost continued direct control in West Africa through the CFC, on the one hand, and direct violence and bribery in DRC and South Sudan on the other, Africa remains a singular jungle to Euro-America—and the jungle has to be exploited by those living in the garden.

While emphasising our diversity and difference (which is undeniable), however, we have tended to use the colonial-given borders as the beginning point: these have not only become borders of nationalist pride and identity (calling ourselves Ugandans, Rwandans, or Nigerians), but have also become securitised and distinct markers of difference.  “Securing the borders” is spoken about as a matter of national security, and pride and from these, more paraphernalia such as national IDs and Passports and border crossing police and dues have become entire departments and institutions.  From there, these borders then become methodologies of generating discourse.  So, for example, one country is seen as democratic and another as autocratic, and the discussion might focus on this singular country’s democratic/autocratic credentials in comparison to another.  It is my contention that keeping countries proud of their distinctive markers especially defined through the borders is one of the ways of being controlled by the international regime of capitalist exploitation. It is the benign version of divide and conquer, which has, ironically, become a loved part of African identity—whilst core component of collective weakness.

In effect, what the securitization and the newly found joys and institutions of nationalist pride in the borders took away from us is the solidity to fight as a singular block—seeing ourselves as blessed and favoured “single country” the way the new coloniser sees us.   Take for example, when the Washington Consensus was being pushed onto the African continent, several economists and ministers of finance and trade on the African continent rightly rejected them in meetings held in Addis Ababa, Accra and Europe.  Most countries in East Asia simply rejected them solidly and would not budge whatever the circumstances.  But for Africa, the IMF and the WB put individual countries under immense stress and harassed them independently.  They demanded that to qualify for aid and other grants from the WB, countries had to have a certificate of compliance form the IMF indicating that they were implementing privatisation. Something remarkable happened in East Asia that these countries collectively rejected structural adjustment. There is not enough evidence as to why even when approached individually, East Asian economies refused to oblige. In Africa, for example, countries such as Libya, Eritrea and Ethiopia refused to open up their economies for foreign players.  For a long time, these countries had to brave hostility from the western world of corporations. It took years for Ethiopia to budge, and under the Meles Zenawi presidency, Ethiopia remained protected from the scourge of privatisation. I have noted elsewhere that Zenawi spoke for the continent that was not willing to listen).  Libya finally crumbled under the weight of hostility; Eritrea still lives under sanctions; and Ethiopia is holding on.  I have it on good authority, that Ethiopia almost got ruined recently by a markets-fuelled war exploiting local ethnic cleavages.

Sadly, for the most parts of the continent, the ruins were meticulous and deliberate. Political economist Jörg Wiegratz has showed in his book, IMF auditors were under explicit instructions to forge accountabilities to show that state-run parastatals were not profitable. I recently listened to a story from one of the attendees of an OAU ministers of finance meetings in Addis in the early 1990s that after the Ghana Minister of Finance had meticulously articulated his resistance to privatisation, he then remarked that he had to balance the books of his country and was going to painfully budge to privatisation. The ruins are still new and continue to deepen every single day.

Drinking Africa in one gulp

The images of African presidents being bussed around in the UK at the funeral of their colonising queen, Elizabeth II have never left me. It seemed these African leaders made peace with their colonisers so quickly, even when the ruins of colonialism are still in their midst.  Nor the images of the same African leaders in Washington during the “Africa Puppets summit of 2022,” as Ugandan activist Mary Serumaga described it.  There is very little respect for these folks from the African continent (because many of them are modern-day compradors presiding over own countries on behalf of London, Paris or Washington).  Like school children, they could be bussed around from one corner of London to another.  They do not need specialised security nor red carpets.  And since they come from the same continent, they are assumed—and they never refute this—to represent a singular set of interests, and can therefore meet and discuss these interests in one single village meeting, normally called a “summit” without clear interests defined, except extracting from the periphery to the centre. Thus, Euro-America sees the continent as one single geography and intellectual space. Just as old school 1800 colonialism did.

However, it is important to stress that while these events I have cited above often ignominiously bring all African leaders together and treat them as coming from a singular homogenous space, the magic of looting the continent is not in approach, but rather design (of the template).  Here, a singular policy designed in Washington or Paris—such as what came to be called the Washington Consensus in 1989 or what Guillaume Blanc has termed Green Colonialism—is designed and to be applied to all Africa at once.  But because Africa is diverse—yes, here it becomes important to acknowledge diversity and difference—the policy is adapted, packaged and applied differently in these “diverse” and “different” countries. This diversity and difference in packaging and application is informed by many factors ranging from (a) servility and greed of the leaders in charge of the targeted country—the greedier, the easier and simple packaging of the policy; (b) the confidence and legitimacy of leaders especially in terms of their connections with the governed. If the leader is confident enough, before him, the approach is different. It has to be more measured, detailed and more technocratized.  In the face of insecure leaders who solely depend on serving western interests for their presidencies, the approach and vulgarity of application might be even open and deeper.  No need for much discretion. Other reasons for difference in approach and packaging are (c) the nature of government: for fully-fledged capitalist democracies (meaning, leaders are periodically changed through elections) such as South Africa, Malawi, Nigeria, Kenya or Zambia, the application is different from autocratic-democracies such Uganda, Sudan, or Zimbabwe, which organise elections but return the incumbent as president at every round.  Under almost one-party states such as Tanzania, the policies would follow a different methodology.  For others, the same policies are best applied and secured under conditions of violence such as the extraction in DRC, South Sudan, Mali, Somalia, Central African Republic and currently, Libya. In all these cases, Africa is subjected to a singular extractive machine, only applied and packaged differently.

Interestingly, these different approaches and packaging in application—of the same extractive policies—actually bamboozle both the discourse-makers and the political elite. Thus, endless chronicles, indices and ethnographies are produced theorising and celebrating these differences. In effect, emphasizing the uniqueness of these 55 countries, blurs the non-exclusiveness of the extractive policies pushed by Euro-America. This explains why almost all countries on the African continent, from so-called full democracies (South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, Lesotho, Malawi etc.), semi-democracies (Tanzania, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda), bad autocracies (Eritrea, Sudan, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe) and almost-failed states (South Sudan, Somalia, CAR etc.) with minimal variations, are afflicted by the same problems: poverty, high unemployment rates, inflation, profit repatriation, debt crises, etcetera.  At the end of the day, these problems actually blur any claims of uniqueness and diversity to the point that even these countries get ranked at almost same levels on the indicators of growth. (Doesn’t this explain why for 27 countries on the African continent, applicants for the United Kingdom visa have to have their passports shipped to South Africa for processing? For the UK, at least these 27 countries are one small place).

My intention is not to downplay the diversity and uniqueness of the African continent. In fact, this (mostly cultural and geographical) uniqueness is important in understanding each other.  My contention is simply that (a) seen from the vantage point of the coloniser, Africa is seen as one single item of prey, and emphasis on diversity is good for the ways in which it enables extraction, and disables collective resistance, and (b) for efforts towards better understanding of the task ahead and fighting back—in the spirit of the Bandung Conference of 1955—Africans will have to adjust their spectacles, and see themselves through the eyes the new colonisers. While acknowledging their difference and diversity—sadly, often built around the colonial borders—they might have to see themselves as single beautiful belle coveted by a single monster that deftly uses its many heads to eat away the different body parts—because these body parts insist they are different and unique.

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This article was first published by The Pan African Review.

On the night of March 6, 1957, as Kwame Nkrumah was wiping away tears, he declared the former British colony of the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana, independent. The Ghanaian prime minister proclaimed that “From now on there is a new African in the world … ready to fight its own battles and to show that after all, the black man is capable of managing his own affairs.” According to Nkrumah, the “African Personality”—a confident, independently-minded African—had to be promoted if the African version of modernity was to have any impact. Nkrumah’s words, however (like the declarations and ideas of other postcolonial leaders) have often been labeled as inconsequential, obscure, and utopian. Instead, leaders of newly independent states in Africa and Asia in the 1950s were seen as forging fragile alliances with each other out of fear of being crushed by declining empires or ascending Cold War superpowers. They maximized their interests within a bipolar world by playing off the Soviet Union and the US against each other.

It is clear that our thinking about international relations still suffers from a myopic focus on Europe and the Cold War. Since 1945, Washington and Moscow have had their own spheres of influence in Eastern and Western Europe and have sought to carve up the rest of the globe. What is absent in those narratives, however, is the centrality of ideology and worldviews in the formation of those poles, something historians have picked up on.

After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, historians now contend, the US came out on top after a four-decade-long standoff with its ideological rival the Soviet Union. Both superpowers were locked in an ideological competition for the soul of mankind because they regarded themselves as the defenders of the Enlightenment, an 18th-century intellectual movement shaped by thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke whose obsession with modernity and reason had brought down kings and queens in the French Revolution. The US, seeing itself as the empire of liberty, and the USSR, an empire of equality, channeled their animosity into a Cold War battle for hearts and minds in Europe because atomic weapons made all-out war impossible. When Sputnik, a Soviet satellite, was launched into space on October 4, 1957, both superpowers stepped up their battle to prove the potency of their own social model for modernization. The United States Information Agency and the USSR’s propaganda agency, Telegrafnoye Agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza (TASS), set up exhibitions to show who was at the vanguard of science and technology.

In the Global South, American and Soviet officials (and from 1963 onwards the Chinese) wanted to prove how effective their societal model was as a medicine against underdevelopment—forcing postcolonial leaders to choose between one of these ideologies in their own struggle against poverty. With the choice of an ally came money for development. The tyranny of that choice, historians claim, sparked bloody civil wars among opposing factions within newly independent states. For example, as the war of independence against Portugal heated up in the 1960s and 1970s, Angola was torn apart by the struggle between the communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

In this analysis, the agency of leaders in the Global South is thus limited to harnessing the Cold War to maximize potential benefits. Nkrumah was seen as playing off East against West to obtain as much funding as possible for the Akasombo Dam, a hydroelectric project on the Volta River that was to provide electricity for the aluminum industry and is still in operation today. At the same time, Nkrumah and others within the Afro-Asian coalition tried to preserve a non-aligned position: neutrality between the two Cold War blocs, a stance enshrined at the Belgrade Conference of September 1961 and the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement. The Group of 77 and the Global South coalition within the present-day UN Climate Panel claim to be its successor. Nkrumah, who as leader of the Gold Coast’s Convention People’s Party rose to political stardom in 1952 for demanding immediate independence, supposedly was only able to resist or exploit the pressures of an unchangeable and hostile international system beyond his control.

Cold War historians consider the Congo crisis, which erupted after June 30 1960 when the Belgian colonizers left, to be emblematic of this dynamic. After a scathing speech by Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba condemning the racism of the Belgian colonizer on Independence Day, soldiers rioted, Sud-Kasai province and the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded, and Lumumba asked the Soviets for assistance because he felt the UN troops were dragging their feet. Through his actions, Lumumba ushered in an era of US-Soviet competition on the continent, while more seasoned pan-Africanists like Nkrumah, who had sent troops within the context of the UN operation in the Congo, realized they could no longer afford Cold War neutrality. After Nkrumah’s pan-African ally Lumumba was assassinated, he increasingly embraced the Soviet model while also receiving aid for his Akosombo dam from then-US president John F. Kennedy and US entrepreneur Edgar Kaiser. Depending on who you asked, Nkrumah was branded a communist or a capitalist, an ambiguity the Ghanaian leader exploited to guarantee the survival of his newly independent state.

This narrative however narrows the diplomatic skill of leaders such as Nkrumah to their ability to play realpolitik. The profound ideological commitments and visions of the future that animated the fight against empire were supposedly cast aside as soon as postcolonial leaders entered the international arena. Nevertheless, as Nkrumah’s nightly speech and Ghana’s archives reveal, the spread of pan-African modernity was a key objective of Accra’s foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike the powers in the Global North, African leaders believed that the civilizing mission—the belief that whites needed to psychologically and economically develop non-whites, incapable of self-government—and not tradition, was the enemy of progress.

Strikingly this ambition to correct European modernity by embracing an idealized “authentic” image of the past, something Nkrumah called the “African Personality,” did not follow the laws of Cold War realpolitik. Pan-African modernity did not emerge in opposition to or in alignment with US or Soviet ideology. Instead, Nkrumah and other freedom fighters on the African continent shared a common ambition to attain anticolonial modernity and make real the promise of the Haitian Revolution. In 1791 a charismatic Black general, Toussaint Louverture, staged a revolt in the French colonial possession of Saint-Domingue (in the area of modern-day Haiti) after the Napoleonic state reversed the abolition of slavery, in effect limiting the French revolutionary values of liberty and equality to whites. The values that European empires and the Cold War superpowers turned into the core of their respective social models, and which led them to colonize and intervene in societies beyond their borders, was from the very beginning met with resistance for being exclusionary and racist.

We should therefore understand Nukrumah and other anticolonial leaders in a new light—not as a disjointed group of men and women who resisted Cold War pressures, but as actors who held influential opinions about the precise meaning of the Enlightenment values that structured the 20th century. Anticolonial intellectuals were 19th-century revolutionaries who wanted to chart an inclusive route to progress promised by the Haitian Revolution, and independent states afforded them that opportunity. They were not very different from other revolutionaries who had also successfully embedded their beliefs within the newly created states that their revolutions afforded them. Marxists in the Soviet Union wanted to achieve the aims of the Bolshevik Revolution, capitalists in the US were eager to export the ideas of the American Revolution, and imperialists within European nation-states sought to spread the benefits of the Industrial Revolution.

African nationalists in the 1950s were steeped in the Haitian revolutionary intellectual tradition by way of the French and British West Indies. St. Lucian economist Arthur Lewis was flown into Ghana to devise an economic development strategy in line with Africa’s precolonial culture and history, because he famously did not subscribe to a single economic growth theory and attached more weight to the sociological and historical characteristics of underdeveloped societies. Nkrumah believed modernization and industrialization were powerful tools that had been wielded by people who had erroneously believed modernity meant the end of tradition instead of the end of the civilizing mission. Foreign aid could therefore be accepted from every quarter, but always had to be accompanied by ideological education in the service of psychological liberation: the freeing of Africans from the inferiority complex of the civilizing mission.

While propping up the Ghanaian economy with British, American, and Soviet funds, Ghana’s Office of the President prioritized the production of The Ghanaians, a movie that urged African countries to follow modern Ghana by showing students engaging their lecturer in a building that was still under construction. Cartoons and postcards conjured up a rich African past. Nkrumah instructed the freedom fighters who attended the All African Peoples’ Conference in Accra in 1958 to not ignore the “spiritual side of the human personality,” because Africans’ “material needs” made them vulnerable to subjugation. The liberation of African psychology also guided Kenyan leader Tom Mboya, who claimed Kenyans were “capable of gauging the ulterior motives” of those who offered assistance, while Julius Nyerere of Tanzania wanted education to liberate body and mind because “colonial education” had “induced attitudes of human inequality.”

The nerve center for psychological and cultural liberation from empire was Ghana’s Bureau of African Affairs. With its printing press, library, linguistic secretariat, conference hall, and publications section it had to spread the “African Personality,” the notion that Africans should embrace African culture and reject the colonial inferiority complex. By uniting the continent, the second pillar of pan-African modernity, Africans could be shielded from ideological alternatives, and psychological liberation could be accelerated. In Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa, George Padmore, one of Nkrumah’s closest advisers, sought to create an autonomous pan-African ideology better able to meet the challenge of underdevelopment. Pan-African and pan-Arab schemes were ranked beside imperialism, communism, or capitalism and were not understood in solely political or racial terms, but viewed as alternative development models. Even for astute theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, this was self-evident. “The strength of the pan-African drive,” he wrote in 1961, had to be “attributed precisely to the fact that it is a weapon of the modernizers.” If the pan-African project failed, modernization would also be set back.

Under a sky filled with fireworks on the eve of independence, Nkrumah had already made clear how total his vision for the world was and what was at stake. Independence would be “meaningless” unless it was “linked up totally” with that of the “continent.” Finance minister Komla Agbeli Gbedemah agreed, declaring during his visit to India in September 1957 that freedom was “indivisible.” In the words of the All-African People’s Conference Steering Committee: “stable peace” was impossible in a world that was “politically half independent and half dependent.” If Ghana’s anticolonialism stopped at its borders, the country would not be able to remain independent. Pan-African modernity had a continental focus but aspired to remake the world as a whole. In the words of C.L.R. James, “the modernization necessary in the modern world” could only be attained “in an African way.”

Ghana did not shy away from projecting its brand of anticolonial modernity to other parts of Africa. To convert Ghana’s symbolic strength into real influence, Nkrumah and his ministers developed a network strategy. After spinning webs of freedom fighters, political activists would convince the general population and, once in power, fix their gaze on Accra, ultimately leading to African unity. To that end, Accra was converted into a revolutionary Mecca, and the Conference of Independent African States (CIAS) held in April 1958, and the All-African People’s Conference later that year were organized to attract leaders and activists. In November 1959, Nkrumah announced his plan to convert the Winneba Party College into an institute where selected members of all nationalist movements could be trained to “propagate” the “essence of African unity . . . throughout the continent of Africa.” This place, which became the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute and also the Kwame Nkrumah Youth Training School, and the Builder Brigade for unemployed men, was exemplary of the Ghanaian modernization model, which fused African culture and progress. Since most students came from other African countries that were not necessarily wedded to socialism, the Bureau of African Affairs, which had devised a 10-week training program, decided to remove socialism from the curriculum. Instead, public relations techniques and courses on political party organizing—with topics such as elections, party branches, and propaganda vans—were foregrounded to strengthen the drive toward African unity and encourage the African Personality.

“Immunization” and “vaccination” were commonly relied upon by European and US psychological warfare experts in the 1950s, but were also employed after 1960 by African nationalists, who discerned a potential threat to authentic African culture, and worried about the repercussions of interference. Nkrumah believed Ghanaians and Africans had to be immunized from foreign ideas and the continent sheltered from neocolonial propaganda—the most recent iteration of a long history of continental exploitation that originated with the slave trade and evolved into the colonial project. Likewise, Hastings Banda in Malawi was adamant about African uniqueness, El Ferik Ibrahim Abboud of Sudan defined “political ideology” as a type of intrusion because it led to “political indoctrination,” and Haile Selassie talked about “engorgement”—a gradual process that destroyed identity. A non-aligned position, therefore, had to include active resistance against non-African ideologies and neocolonial intrusion. Africans had to keep an eye out for neocolonialists, who even after independence sought to undercut Africa for their own gains through all kinds of subversive activities ranging from economic penetration and cultural assimilation, to ideological domination, to psychological infiltration.

A worldview in which neocolonialists could psychologically and culturally undercut the African Personality, not the Cold War, shaped Nkrumah’s understanding of nonalignment. Nkrumah had always shied away from exploiting the Cold War rivalry, because “when the bull elephants fight, the grass is trampled down.” Playing off the USSR and the US against each other would not yield benefits, but rather result in the destruction of weak nations and make it more difficult to attain African unity. While leaders such as Julius Nyerere also expressed their fear of becoming trampled grass, Nkrumah’s Monroe Doctrine for Africa made Accra’s stance distinctive. In a speech to Congress in 1958, Nkrumah linked his reading of Marcus Garvey’s “Africa for the Africans” with the US foreign policy doctrine of 1823: “Our attitude … is very much that of America looking at the disputes of Europe in the nineteenth century. We do not wish to be involved.” Even after Lumumba’s assassination in January 1961, the archives show Nkrumah did not want to give up his nonaligned position even though an aid tried to convince him “to play the East off against the West.” Within pan-African circles in Ghana Lumumba’s assassination was seen as a vindication of the view that Africa had to unite if it wanted to safeguard its own road to progress. The Congo crisis was not a defeat, but proof that “the colonial regime” was “gasping its last breath.”

The East and the West were barred from using Ghana as a “propaganda forum” after Nkrumah learned that psychological warfare plans were developed in NATO meetings. Permanent secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Michael Dei-Anang ordered an investigation into the press releases of every embassy in Accra after he stumbled on a US research project on psychological methods “used by the Capitalists and Colonialists to win over Ghanaians.” Nkrumah also tried to personally convince other African leaders of the need to immunize their populations against neocolonialism. In a letter to Nyerere, in December 1961, Nkrumah wrote about how successful African economic integration hinged on a “stable political direction,” which only a common ideological project could provide. In a letter to Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta, Nkrumah conveyed that public opinion had to be managed because the press was a “deadly weapon” that remained in the imperialists’ arsenal and required an “effective antidote.” He offered to send an expert from the Guinea Press, a government-sponsored corporation, to assist local journalists.

The story of Ghana shows how leaders of the Global South did not just emerge in world affairs after the fall of the Berlin Wall or as a consequence of explosive economic growth in the 2000s. Rather, they have always been involved in struggles over the direction of the globe. Nationalist leaders were not only forced to make a choice between a capitalist or communist pole, but sought to correct and improve European modernity by eliminating racism and disdain for precolonial culture while promoting their own anticolonial modernization project that saw precolonial culture not as an obstacle but as a precondition for effective development.

An acknowledgment of that history helps us view the enduring influence of anticolonial critiques as expounded by countries that cry neocolonialism, such as China, India, or Brazil, as something more than hypocrisy. The defiant posture is an expression of deep-rooted ideas about a better version of modernity that are as much part of the 20th century as communism and capitalism. The debates on climate justice and social justice are therefore not a breeding ground for multipolarity, but simply a reminder that there have been multiple routes to modernity ever since modernity and progress were identified as policy objectives after World War II.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site every week.

Anglican primates are engaged in a very public spat. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Archbishop of Uganda, Stephen Kaziimba Mugalu, differ on the position of the Anglican Communion on same-sex relations. The primates’ tracasserie, has been public, tense, and is straining the bonds holding the Communion together.

In a public statement on 29th May 2023, Archbishop Mugalu declared his and the Church of Uganda’s (CoU) gratitude and unqualified support for Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023. The Act prohibits people from having same-sex sexual relations. It imposes sanctions on the promotion or recognition of same-sex relations and related matters, which, according to Archbishop Mugalu, are prohibited both in the scriptures and in Ugandan culture. But a dismayed Archbishop Welby, in a press release, urged Archbishop Mugalu to withdraw his public support of laws that criminalize LGBTI people. He wrote, “There is no justification for any Province of the Anglican Communion to support such laws: not in our resolutions, not in our teachings, and not in the gospel we share.”

Was Archbishop Welby returning a compliment? In February, Archbishop Mugalu rebuked Archbishop Welby after the Church of England’s (CoE) General Synod approved the blessing of couples in same-sex unions. He condemned Welby’s approval of a change in the Church’s marriage doctrine that allowed clergy to preside over blessings of same-sex unions of couples considered “married” by the British government. Further, the CoE synod approved supplementary prayers and liturgies for such occasions.

Archbishop Welby made a curious admission on the contentious issues of human sexuality: “None of us get this right and I am only too conscious of the failing of the Church of England…” For this reason, he invited his fellow disciples across the Anglican Communion to a dialogue and urged them to desist from homophobia, racism and all other “othering” of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

I see this primates’ tiff as an acute case of culture clash, given the global texture of the Anglican Communion. The primates differed in their interpretation of the CoE Synodal Resolutions and the Ugandan Anti-homosexuality Act. Despite both having cultural advisers, the contradictions were bound to erupt, because they became mutually puzzled by each other’s behaviour which was not according to expectations. William Blake captures this contradiction best in The Everlasting Gospel:  “Both read the Bible, day, and night. But thou read’st black where I read white.”

Each primate speaks to a different audience, both at home and abroad.

The Church of England’s resolutions of February 2023

During the 2023 General Synod, the CoE passed several resolutions to enable her clergy to perform blessings for same-sex civil partnerships and marriages. The resolutions removed legal impediments to the “solemnisation of same-sex marriage in the Church of England”. They achieved this without abandoning the traditional view of marriage as legitimate and honourable. In making these accommodations in practice, the CoE welcomed the LGBTI people and repented for the harm caused.

Archbishop Welby and the CoE received these changes as a fitting response to their social milieu where justice and fairness for LGBTI peoples is enshrined in the anti-discrimination laws. Same-sex civil partnerships and marriages are now permissible. Archbishop Mugalu, on the other hand, saw the changes as a contradiction. He wondered how the CoE could maintain traditional marriage as a lifelong union between one man and one woman and at the same time permit clergy to bless couples in same-sex relationships.

Archbishop Welby claimed the CoE laboured long on the need for change before arriving at the present position. It reached the conclusion having sought the mind of scripture while seeking to “not reject Christ and His authority”. So, to question these changes, argued Archbishop Welby, makes the CoE and Anglican Church abroad “a victim of derision, contempt, and even attack for being part of the perceived ‘homophobic church’.”

But Archbishop Mugalu and the CoU were worried. Rejecting the inherited teaching on marriage and the sin of homosexual practices would damage her witness. There was a reluctance to change, for any such shift might cause the CoU and other Anglican churches to be perceived as being part of what is called the “gay church”.

Thus, while Archbishop Welby rejected Archbishop Mugalu’s statements and the tag of a “homophobic church”, Archbishop Mugalu refused the association with Archbishop Welby’s position for fear of being labelled a “gay church”.

The Church of Uganda’support for the Anti-Homosexuality Act

Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023 prohibits any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex. It also prohibits the promotion or recognition of same-sex relations and related matters. It imposes a long prison sentence for homosexual offences and life imprisonment for aggravated homosexual offences against the underage or the disabled. It also prohibits those convicted under the Act from working directly with children to aid the CoU’s mission to protect children.

Archbishop Mugalu supported the Act because, in his view, Ugandans consider sexual relations between persons of the same sex to be an aberration. The archbishop argued that the previous legislation, drawn from the colonial era, criminalized same-sex relations under the Penal Code Act of 1950. He was in favour of the Act’s strong anti-grooming measures and restrictions on promoting the homosexual lifestyle.

Rejecting the inherited teaching on marriage and the sin of homosexual practices would damage her witness.

But the Archbishop of Canterbury differed. Both he and the CoE believe that homosexual attraction is natural, not a matter of choice. It is, therefore, wrong for Uganda to criminalize people for being who they are. So, if the Church were to support laws forbidding partnerships between LGBTI people, its action would be unjust. And since the CoE believes this to be a clear injustice, its position should be reflected in the rest of its beliefs; it should become a moral and ethical force in the 21st century. Welby therefore called on the CoU to reject such “criminal sanctions against same sex attracted people”, instead affirming them as humans, because God’s love is the same for every human being, irrespective of their sexuality.

The CoU refused to be tagged as condoning injustice and claimed that it was advancing laws that protect human rights. The CoU said it had forced the government to replace the death sentence in the penal code and in earlier bills with life imprisonment. In addition, it was pointed out that the prohibitions against homosexuality in Uganda were mild compared to the laws in the Arabian Peninsula and in the Middle East.

The CoE noted a profound dislocation between the Church and the society we are called to serve. A dislocation not about their position concerning partnership or sexual expression, but a fundamental disagreement about justice and fairness. The society views the CoE as inhabiting a different moral universe.

The CoU refused to be tagged as condoning injustice and claimed that it was advancing laws that protect human rights.

But Archbishop Mugalu would never affirm LGBTI people, nor allow the CoU to normalize homosexuality. The defining mark of the CoU is the sacrificial blood of the Uganda Martyrs. Although their confession and baptism defined their faith, the young martyrs’ refusal to yield to the homosexual advances of their king and dying for it is legendary. Now faced with a similar challenge, how can the CoU betray them, or abandon the Lord Jesus Christ?

Why the primates’ clash?

There are two explanations for the archbishops’ clash: ethnocentrism as advanced by anthropologists like Paul Hiebert, and the psychological dynamics of culture clash as advanced by Glenn Adams and Hazel Rose Markus.

Whenever we find differences in culture, Paul G. Hiebert concludes, ethnocentrism occurs, “the tendency to judge other cultures by our own values and assumptions of our culture”. So, it becomes the norm to view one’s own cultural position as the most suitable. And this is mutual. For just as we judge others’ customs as crude, they feel the same about ours.

The divergence of the archbishops’ vision of human sexuality is unyielding. The tension stretches into their interpretation of the 1998 Lambeth Conference Resolution 1.10, the most cited Anglican authority on human sexuality that holds “homosexual practice as incompatible with scripture” and, therefore, the church “cannot advise the legitimising or blessing of same-sex unions nor ordaining those involved in same gender unions.” Archbishop Justin emphasizes the resolution’s stand that “all baptised, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ”. He “calls on all our people to minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation and to condemn irrational fear of homosexuals”.

On the other hand, Archbishop Mugalu’s reading of the resolution supports the Uganda Anti-homosexuality Act, to the dismay of Archbishop Welby, who judges the Ugandan action as inhuman from the UK point of view. Archbishop Welby’s reading of the resolution is consistent with the CoE’s position, which embraces and welcomes LGBTI people, while Archbishop Mugalu judges it from his cultural point of view as compromising and contradictory.

For Archbishop Welby, to offer loving pastoral services to individuals made in the image of God is to affirm their value and identity. Supporting Archbishop Welby, the Archbishop of York laments existing laws that target people perceived to be different. According to the Archbishop of York, unloving laws that cause prejudice, violence, discrimination, and oppression are not rooted in the Gospel’s call to love our neighbours as Christ has loved us. Homosexual orientation is now viewed as being as normal as being left-handed in Western culture. It is nature. So, to discriminate on the grounds of sexuality is unlawful and deeply wrong. The CoE refuses to inhabit a different moral universe. A further reason to re-examine our scriptures and the tradition is to see if we can find a better way.

At the heart of the divide in the Anglican Communion’s approach to pastoral care for LGBTI people is a mutual pervasive process of devaluing the non-dominant group in contact with the more dominant group. These differences are cast as the result of negative shared tendencies rather than as a matter of divergent life experiences.

The Archbishop of Uganda holds a different logic of loving pastoral care for LGBTI people. Such services, argues Archbishop Mugalu, must be understood as guiding sinners back to God’s love through repentance. The CoU holds that God condemns all sexual sin: fornication, adultery, polygamy, bestial acts, paedophilia, and homosexuality. Repentant sinners can receive God’s love by confessing the wrong done and changing their lives. The CoU’s model of care and love is found in the example of Jesus’ treatment of the woman caught in adultery. Jesus said to her “Go, and sin no more.” Since God cannot bless what he calls sin, God wants to free from bondage those caught in sexual sin. The CoU has therefore developed pastoral healing ministries and recovery centres, where LGBTI people can find healing, forgiveness, freedom, and hope.

For Archbishop Welby, to offer loving pastoral services to individuals made in the image of God is to affirm their value and identity.

Culture reveals the psychological dynamics underlying the divide. When change comes, we are asked to examine cultural practices and institutions to foster a more inclusive, equal, and just multi-cultural society. The culture cycle offers insight into the primates’ clash.

Adams and Markus observe that culture comprises explicit and implicit patterns of historically derived and selected ideas and their embodiment in institutions, practices, and artifacts. Hence, the culture cycle is conceived as a multilayered, interacting, and dynamic system of ideas, institutions, interactions and individuals.

Conceptually, the culture cycle represents the dynamic process through which the cultural and the psychological interact and mutually make up one another.

Hazel Markus and Alana Conner show culture as a system of four dynamically interacting and interdependent layers. Here, culture is composed of the ideas, institutions, and interactions that guide and reflect individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. The culture cycle can either start from the left hand or the right hand. The two archbishops seem to start the culture cycle from opposite ends.

Starting the culture cycle from the left, one begins with ideas, then the institutions and interactions that influence the individual. Consequently, cultures shape the self. For a person thinks, feels, and acts in ways that reflect and perpetuate these cultures. This appears to have been Archbishop Mugalu’s and the CoU’s starting point. Since Ugandan culture frowns on homosexuality, this norm determines how individuals in that culture respond to the demands of LGBTI people. So, according to Anita Among’, Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament, the Anti-Homosexuality Act “captures the norms and aspirations of Ugandans, for the House legislates for the citizens”. How, query’s Archbishop Mugalu, can the CoU embrace and normalize same-sex relations against their will, culture, and religious beliefs?

Joining the culture cycle from the right is reflected by individuals participating in and creating (i.e., reinforcing, resisting, and/or changing) cultures adopted by other people, in the present and the future. This is the point from which Archbishop Welby and the CoE seem to have started from in the cycle. The CoE adopted an embracing posture, following the individual experience of the young generation that has grown up in a UK society where homosexual orientation is normal. These individuals were previously rejected by the Church. So, for most of their lives, members of this generation have endured deep hurt and distress emanating from a sense of rejection and unworthiness at the hands of their own church, while finding acceptance and affirmation in the wider society. The CoE perceives this dislocation as a fundamental disagreement over justice and fairness, and thus transcending sexual expression and partnerships.

How, query’s Archbishop Mugalu, can the CoU embrace and normalize same-sex relations against their will, culture, and religious beliefs?

Taking a position against homosexuality in the Ugandan society makes the CoU, and therefore Archbishop Mugalu, a moral voice. But taking a similar position would place the CoE in dissonance with the society it aims to serve.

If this divide is to be bridged, then the Anglican Church must examine the interconnected and shifting dynamics that make up the culture cycle and afford certain ways of being while constraining others. We need to recognize that to foster more inclusive, equal, and effective institutions and practices, the deeper work will involve changing how cultures construct the meaning and nature of social group differences themselves.

We can exploit the power individuals have to shape their cultures through their actions, as we focus on how cultures shape people.

We disagree, but are not divided

 What is God saying to us Anglicans now?

The Anglican Communion may not be divided for now, but it will wither on the vine and die unless these fierce disagreements are attended to. It is possible, in the words of E. Nader, that the Anglican Communion is approaching the moment of its collapse, trailing in the dust of a British Empire whose robes are now tattered and thrown into the heap of history. Our generation is called to act to maintain the communion for the sake of the “wider church” and the world.

Since the dissonance in human sexuality ruptured, the Anglican Communion has presented two divergent visions, one based on doctrinal unity defined by the traditional teaching of the faith received, the other on progressive reforms anchored in Anglican unity and God’s providence, expressed in the Nicene Creed, the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

Archbishop Stephen Mugalu, together with his brother primates from what they have termed the Orthodox Provinces, is persuaded that only doctrinal purity and safeguarding the traditional faith will unite the Anglican Communion. Their commitment to sever the relationship with the Archbishop of Canterbury at the April 2023 Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) IV meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, should be understood as the shifting dynamics of the Church’s “serial” development observed by professor Andrew Walls.

Walls noted that as the Church moved away from its Mediterranean centre, she experienced multiple and major demographic and character shifts that brought her to its present form. With every demographic shift, the dynamic centres moved alongside the energy and the informing cultural orientations.

Together with other archbishops from the Global South, Archbishop Mugalu claims to represent 85 per cent of the Anglican Communion, which projects the demographic shift Walls mentioned. They are now asserting dynamism as they seek to shape the Communion by infusing new energy with their cultural orientation.

The Anglican Communion may not be divided for now, but it will wither on the vine and die unless these fierce disagreements are attended to.

The 2023 GAFCON IV commitment is a departure from their 2008 commitment not to leave the Anglican Communion. Then, they demanded repentance from Archbishop Rowan Williams for not sanctioning the Episcopal Church of the United States of America (ECUSA), which had violated the guidance of Lambeth Resolution 1.10. by consecrating an openly gay bishop in 2003. The inaction of Archbishop Williams led to the Archbishops from the Orthodox Provinces boycotting Lambeth 2008, and to the formation of GAFCON.

The Archbishops of the Orthodox Provinces see the CoE’s decision to bless couples in same sex unions as a betrayal of the historic faith and cannot in good conscience follow a leader whose fidelity to the faith they question. As a result, they have resolved not to recognise this Archbishop of Canterbury as their Primus inter Pares. If this threat is carried through, the primates would have dismembered one of the key instruments of the Communion. Archbishop Mugalu and the team will remain in the Communion only if the CoE repents for advancing false teachings. But they have offered to pray for the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of England to repent, in line with Revelation 2:5b: “If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.” But the CoE is not willing to repent and is open to progress to advance their witness.

Anglicans, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, who see unity as God’s providence, see God’s movement as one singular act. This is where God gathers the Church and all creation to himself. This vision is embodied in the Anglican Communion Covenant, part of which states: “In the providence of God, which holds sway even over our divisions caused by sin, various families of churches have grown up within the universal Church in history. Among these families is the Anglican Communion, which provides a particular charism and identity among the many followers and servants of Jesus.” We can call the Church “one, holy and apostolic” only where the Church shows these realities as pertaining to God, describing how God works and moves to his unifying ends.

How well this common vision of the Anglican Communion matches God’s actual identity — the “it is finished” identity of Jesus Christ by which God orders the history of creation, is subject to our interpretation. “We are not divided, but we disagree, and that is very painful,” Archbishop Welby conceded to the CoE’s General Synod.