The Sacrifice of Africa – Chapter 1a, the importance of social memory

In chapter 1 Katongole wants to establish a way of seeing Africa. He begins by describing two dominant assumptions amongst western Christians about Africa. Firstly, they assume that Christian faith exists exclusively in the religious sphere. Meanwhile, most of Africa’s struggles exist in the political sphere. Within this framework, the absolute best that Christianity can hope to accomplish is being a benevolent influence in the political sphere. Secondly, western Christians assume that the nation-state in Africa has failed. But Katongole says the nation-state in Africa has done precisely what it has been designed to do – it’s made millionaires of a select (and almost invariably corrupt) few while oppressing the many. The nation-state in Africa has accomplished the same task as the colonial regimes. Viewed this way, the Amins, Mugabes, and Mobutus of the post-colonial period are simply (and ironically) the heirs of the Leopolds, Stanleys and Kurtzes of the colonial period.

Katongole spends the rest of the book arguing against these two assumptions, but he uses the rest of the first chapter to highlight in brief an alternative view of Africa. In developing that argument, he leans heavily on Adam Hochschild’s excellent book King Leopold’s Ghost. To give a little background: Leopold was an extremely ambitious Belgian king who wanted to build a Belgian empire that would – at the very least – rival those of his European peers. However, his ambitions may have been even greater than that, perhaps aiming for even loftier Romanesque heights. In any event, Leopold was an ambitious king with a small, very young nation. In his search for an empire, he first looked to Asia and the Americas, but neither looked like viable options. He then turned to Africa and to the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley (he of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame). Stanley marketed himself to westerners as a good-hearted explorer seeking to bring the “civilizing influence of Christianity to the savages of Africa,” but his behavior in Africa suggests a rather starker motivation. Stanley employed vast convoys, cutting and brutalizing his way across wide swaths of African lands, naming major landmarks after himself and killing anyone that got in his way. Indeed, many think that Stanley was the inspiration for Conrad’s villain, Mr. Kurtz, in his novella The Heart of Darkness. The ambitious Leopold needed an explorer to establish his rule in Africa, the ambitious Stanely needed a wealthy patron to furnish his further “explorations.” It was a marriage made in hell and led to the ruthless butchering of thousands – and all done in the name of God and gold .

As he read Hochschild’s account of Stanley and Leopold’s brutality, Katongole came to understand the problem of Africa as the problem of being saved from King Leopold’s Ghost. He develops this line of thought in a few different directions. The first of which we’ll discuss in this post.

First, he discusses the importance of social memory. Here I’ll let Katongole explain because he does it quite well:

“King Leopold’s Ghost helped me see that the violence and brutality in Leopold’s Congo were not simply isolated or pathological exceptions committed by a few overzealous colonial agents; they were part and parcel of the rubber economy, (editor’s note: rubber was the main export of Leopold’s Congo, a sort of prototype for the blood diamonds of today’s west Africa) which was very rational and modern both in its design and implementation. As a modern phenomenon, it required the reorganization of Congo society under new rational modalities that ensured efficient administration and economic production. Thus, large areas of the forest were cleared, villages were resettled, quotas were assigned, compliance was recorded, and slackers were punished…. Thus, King Leopold’s Ghost ceased to be a book about the Congo and became a metaphor for Africa, raising the key issues not only of foundational narratives but of the transmission and reproductions of social memory.”

In short, colonialism was not a series of actions carried out by a few white men on many Africans. It was the total reorganization of African social life with the goal of enriching a select few beneficiaries through the manipulation and oppressions of the majority. Put another way, colonialism is not a verb, it’s a space. It’s not something that was done, it’s the creation of a space that continues to exist and continues to make certain outcomes more plausible and, indeed, almost inevitable. The import of this for Christianity in Africa is explained well by Katongole:

“Thus it became clear that if Christian social ethics in Africa was to provide a way forward in Africa, it would have to engage the layers of memory through which the performance of the colonial imagination continues to live in the present…. The sources for exploring the issues of social memory may not lie in public records, but in cultural patterns as well as unofficial texts… What this crucial observation suggested is that the task of engaging social memory also has to do with questioning and interrogating cultural forms of forgetfulness in order to uncover the patterns of performances through which the memory of history lives on.”

So Christians in Africa must not only be story-tellers, but story-creators. We must find ways to craft and tell stories that give Africans a social history that runs against the oppressive nature of colonialism. Further, we must become more adept at understanding African art and culture. If colonialism is a space rather than a verb, we must study the things that fill that space – which includes official records, but also includes the far more important songs, poetry, and fiction produced in colonial (and post-colonial Africa).

As I considered Katongole’s argument, I realized that ultimately what he’s doing is, in some ways, building on the work of sociologist Peter Berger and philosopher Charles Taylor. The Sacrifice of Africa can also be read in conversation with the work of scholar James Davidson Hunter and his recent book To Change the World. What all three of those scholars are doing in a broad, general sense, Katongole is doing with African political theory, theology, history, and literature. Berger writes often about “plausibility structures” – the culturally-held beliefs that make some actions more plausible and others less so. For example, in medieval Europe the plausibility structures of the prevailing culture in west Europe made something like the Crusades seem logical, even inevitable. Today those plausibility structures no longer exist, so we no longer crusade.

Meanwhile, Taylor has treated the question of secularism in a way similar to Katongole’s treatment of Africa, looking at the secular as a space, rather than a set of beliefs or practices. He’s distinguished between secularism 1,the beliefs and practices of individuals, secularism 2, the non-religious public square, and secularism 3, a space in which religious belief exists as one option amongst many. Finally, James Davidson Hunter’s work explores the nature of culture – how does culture change? Hunter’s response runs against the conventional attitudes of many Christians who seem to approach culture in one of three ways: The evangelists who seek to change culture through changing the hearts and minds of individuals, the politicians who seek to change culture through judicial reform, and the activists who stand outside politics and seek to advocate for various marginalized groups. (We’ll come back to these groups in a few chapters with Katongole, who highlights the exact same sub-groups in his treatment of Christians in Africa.)

Point being, what Katongole is doing is not necessarily new in a broad or general sense, but it’s very new in its application to issues concerning Africa. It’s calling everyone – but especially Christians – to look more closely and with more sophistication at questions of how cultures change. It’s a welcome and much needed call that signals a bright future for the world Christian movement. And, speaking personally, it’s an enormously exciting change for someone like myself, a history and English major with strong interests in issues of place and identity.

To recap, then, the first issue Katongole takes up in chapter 1 is the question of social memory. What sort of stories are we living in? How were they first established and told? And what impact do they have on current practices? All of these questions are being asked within the larger question of Katongole’s ongoing argument against our first two presuppositions about Christians in Africa: 1) That Christianity is a “religion” and Africa’s problems belong to the domain of “politics.” 2) That the nation-state in Africa has failed.

Next time we’ll pick up Katongole’s second bullet point in chapter 1, “the lies of noble ideas.”