Wandile Kasibe
Cape Town - Let me contextualise my reflection by quoting words from the father of the Guinean and Cape Verdean independence, Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, who once said: “We must act as if we answer to, and only answer to, our ancestors, our children, and the unborn.”
Cabral uttered these words from a very painful era in Africa’s unfolding history, a time marked by institutionalised imperialism, colonialism, global anti-blackness and gross human rights violations committed against people of African descent.
To Cabral, the period was “marked by the retarded conditions of our economy”, where Africans were made to exit their own history and enter into the history of Europe and the West.
In other words, for the colonising powers to defeat us, they first had to dislocate us from our history and the histories of struggles of our ancestors and those who came before them. Not only this, but they also had to take us out of humanity and locate us at the bottom rung of the human ladder in the lacuna between modern human beings and the animal kingdom as the “missing link” in order to justify their colonial violence of land dispossession.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o animates Cabral’s point by bringing our attention to the fact that imperialism was a project that sustained itself through complete exploitation of its African “subjects”; economically, politically, militarily and culturally, and he equates such a process with cultural genocide.
To Wa Thiong’o, both colonialism and imperialism were a self-castrating experience of alienation to the “self”, “on a larger scale it is like producing a society of bodiless heads and headless bodies”, something that has come to signify the kind of heads of state and leaders that we have on the continent today.
Wa Thiong’o further terms this alienation a “cultural bomb”, in other words, the continuing “cultural genocide” waged on the African cultures through colonisation and imperialistic endeavours by the powers of the “Global North”.
To Wa Thiong’o “the effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environments, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves”.
In this passage he instils in us the sense that both colonialism and imperialism have gored into the African soul and conscience a gaping wound that has left misery and despair on millions of African people.
Since the violent and notorious Scramble for Africa Berlin conference of 1884/85, where Europe and the West had formally joined forces to divide the continent in order to extract its natural resources to build their empires, we have not healed from that scar.
History informs us that natural endowments were not the only thing that was extracted and looted from the continent, but also objects of cultural and civilizational significance, as well as skeletal remains of our ancestors who are believed to be the liaison between this realm and the afterlife.
It is to this rich continental heritage that African people are bound from wherever they may find themselves in the world and therefore any violation to this heritage is a violation to our collective identity as Africans, for we are bound together by the continuity of grief.
Stones, bones, artefacts and many other signifiers of our cultural heritage are an integral part of our nationhood and spiritual sovereignty and without these signifiers we have no heritage to celebrate.
In South Africa, we are told that September is a time for us to reflect on our diverse cultural heritage, our fauna, flora, arts and many other things that make us a resilient nation whose ingenuity of the human spirit has overcome the evil of apartheid and its lingering legacy that still affects many lives today.
Captivating words that touch the inner resources of our own soul will be uttered by government bureaucrats to remind us of who we are as if we have already forgotten about the tragedies that brought us here.
We will be told to fly our South African flag high by government officials and ministers who have ignored the call to repatriate our Diaspora dead and ancestors from foreign soil in order to restore the dignity of the African people.
Many will adorn themselves with colourful traditional apparels, cover the blackness of their skin with yellow ochre pigments to give a lighter complexion to the tone of their skin.
Others will put on African beads, animal skins and carry knopkiries, shields and spears as they parade themselves to display their Africanness.
The poor will be lining up at government functions waiting to be given food parcels in order to numb their pain for a little while until another heritage programme in the following year.
Not only this, but also songs will be sung and stories told and when Heritage Day is gone all these gravitating activities will evaporate into thin air, having contributed nothing to revive the soul of the continent.
In the midst of this political performance, no one will ask the questions: Why should South Africans fly a flag with pride when their ancestors’ human remains are still a subject as well as prisoners of pseudo race “scientific” studies in museological institutions in Europe and North America?
What good does it bring to fly a flag when the sacred human remains of our ancestors are languishing on foreign soil?
Whose heritage are we celebrating when a part of our soul, our ancestors, are still in colonial bondage even in death, constantly violated by men and women of “science” who have neither cultural, spiritual or emotional connection to these sacred skeletal remains and yet they make decisions to keep them in perpetual bondage?
On the basis of our failure to advocate for the mass return of our ancestors’ sacred human remains that are still being locked in museological prisons and universities, I want to argue that perhaps we have no reason to celebrate heritage until these mortal remains are reunited with communities from which they were stolen.
And to be more specific, unless this massive repatriation and restitution takes place to restore our African dignity, we remain a soulless continent whose “soul” and conscience are locked in the darker dungeons of European museums.
Our spiritual navigation is still being dictated to by foreign forces who have self-imposed dominion and control over our ancestors’ sacred human remains and objects of cultural significance.
We are an unpeopled people whose peopleness will never be whole until we repatriate the bones of our ancestors from foreign soil.
We will continue to be treated like children of a lesser God even in the country of our forefathers and forebears, for we have allowed ourselves to be dismembered from the source of our power, our cultural identity.
In his account, Ciraj Rassool argues that “human remains have been the subject of claims and demand for repatriation, restitution, and reburial, as part of attempts to address legacies of colonial ethnology and racial science in the representation of South African people in museums in South Africa and Europe”.
Any heritage celebration that does not address this aspect of our violated history is a futile exercise whose intention is to create false expectation among the people in order to cajole the populace into compliance with colonial laws through which our violation was orchestrated in the first place.
During Heritage Month, we must use our socio-political, academic, economic, cultural and religious influence, both domestically and abroad, to drive a single agenda that calls for the mass return of our ancestors’ human remains and objects of cultural significance.
It is the nobility of this cause that Cabral implores us to respond to as a generation in our fight for freedom and sovereignty.
Dr Kasibe is the EFF Western Cape Spokesperson, Media and Liaison Officer. He writes in his personal capacity.
Cape Times