Reconstituting Lost Citizenships for Social Subjective Redemption: Africanist Perspectives

• In Event: Reimagining the “Global Citizenship" Discourses: A View From the Contexts of Developing Countries

Abstract

This paper argues that citizenship has primordial notations and practices that are inherent in all social contexts all over the world. Stated otherwise, even in situations where people are born with select attachments of marginalization, the potential for full citizenship with operationalizable rights and choices should still be seen as ‘natural’ to formative livelihood contexts.

In deploying the word ‘Africanist’, the paper aims to assume a generalized perspective on the experiences of the African people irrespective of their geographical locations. In these experiences, the combined forces of colonialism, slavery and current predatory forms of neoliberal globalization (with all its exclusionary economic realities and related schemes of pauperization) have effected a situation where public citizenship has been usurped, with so many of the continent’s people technically qualifying to be called subjects and not citizens (Mamdani, 1996, 1998; Abdi, 2008). Indeed, the processes of de-citizenization in the past 500 years have been so effective in the Africa context, they have created clustered platforms of ontological, epistemological, cultural, linguistic and therefore, extensive subjective deconstructions of the persona Africana. With that fact, one possible way to reconstruct such damaged citizenship is to recast, comprehensively and horizontally, people’s memories, histories, identities, and confidence in their beings and potentialities.

The point on identity deformations and how that diminishes basic citizenship rights is more than conjectural. As Charles Taylor (1995) pointed out, with dominant-subordinate relationship spawning both voluntary and involuntary impositions of false identities on people, the processes of misrecognition that result immediately damage self-esteem and self-efficacy with victims finding it difficult to achieve social development prospects. In the deconstructions, indeed, destructions, of their primordial citizenships, Africans has been dislocated identity-wise, and have therefore, not been able to realize their potential in today’s highly globalized and highly networked world system. To reverse these trends of identity deformations, underdevelopment, and weakened citizenship, the role of viable, indigenously cultured and inclusive educational contexts become paramount. By problematizing the situation, by theoretically locating the discussion, and by pointing out people’s immediate needs, therefore, the paper calls for the cultural and social reconstructions of postcolonial African education, and through that, the reconstitution of viable citizenship possibilities and long ago lost subjective redemption.

The significance of this discussion is predicated on the reality that without the critical re-excavation of the processes of the citizenship problematiques Africans face, the desired reconstruction platforms for redemption will not be achieved, and to do so, the role of decolonized educational projects becomes paramount.

Abdi, Ali A. ((2008). Citizenship and its discontents: educating for political and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In M. Peters, A. Britton & H. Blee (Eds.), Global Citizenship Education: Philosophy, Theory and Pedagogy. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

Mamdani, Mahmood (1996). Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. New Haven, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mudimbe, Valentin (1988). The invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy and the order of knowledge. Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press. literature. London: James Curry.

Author

• Ali A. Abdi, University of Alberta