By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

AT a much deeper level, the problem for Africans is that the idea of development and progress comes from transferring the racist language of misconstrued linear evolution of plants and animals to human beings and then from there to culture, technology and whole societies.
As Karl-Henrik Robert points out in the paper cited in this instalment, the capitalist reading of evolution was wrong.
The best lesson for humanity from nature is not linear progress.
It is the relational or cyclical dynamism of life which is the source of value, the source of sustainability.
Even deeper is the fact that capitalist development discourse involves reading and re-labelling historical events backwards that is in retrospect.
When they took place in real history, the so-called phases or stages of economic growth and development which WW Rostow elaborated in his 1960 book did not have the names or meaning which the professor assigned them.
The rise of England as an economic power followed slavery and the English Revolution; the rise of France as an economic power followed slavery and the French Revolution.
The rise of Holland followed slavery and the freedom of the Netherlands from Spanish rule.
The rise of the United States as a world economic power followed hundreds of years of genocide and slavery as well as the American Revolution and the American Civil War.
The rise of the former Soviet Union as a global superpower followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
And now the arrival of China as the second largest global economy is partly a result of the Chinese Revolution.
All these peoples were pursuing their emancipation in their own time and space, but not following development programmes prescribed by the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organisation or USAID.
There was no Washington Consensus and no University of Chicago economics to prescribe one neoliberal agenda for the whole world or for a single revolutionary movement.
Now, if there is one thing which the imperial powers want to crush everywhere, it is revolution.
That is why in 1982 Maimire Mennasmay published a paper called Political Theory, Political Science and African Development in which he lamented the wholesale adoption of Eurocentric linear time and language in the field of Political Science in Africa, which has resulted in “the negation of the notion of the human being as historical agent.”
The language used by the African university needs liberation from narcissistic, linear narratives of progress.
As a result, Africans “are reduced (in political science and development studies) to being spectators engaged in an involuntary movement (and programme) which is unidirectional, objective, and mechanical.
“In short, such a conception of time cannot recognise (Africans) as moral agents.
“It is then impossible for the (Western-trained) political scientist to see the historical nature of what is called development.”
That historical nature must now take into account the ecological and relational critique of linear ‘progress’.
African relational ethics lies at the centre of that world movement.
What Rostow and Sunter implied by the linear chronologies and typologies of development they constructed was the “thesis that the end of history has already been achieved by those (called the First World) whose history (read backwards) has produced the grammar of development.”
We see the consequences of that stupid drama in Liberia and Sierra Leone especially: the best ‘growth’ and FDI statistics side-by-side with the massive spread and terror of a satanic epidemic called Ebola.
In one of those countries, the sitting president began her rule by dispatching her predecessor to The Hague.
She herself is a North American protégé of Citi Bank and the World Bank.
And her government is thoroughly incompetent in the face of the Ebola catastrophe.
The African in this linear narrative is not supposed to engage in revolution now because past revolutions elsewhere produced a universal grammar of development which the African only needs to memorise and grasp.
“By dehistoricising social time, the latter (the history of the West) is made to be a universal grammar of development.”
It is not surprising, therefore that, as a result of the earth movement or the ecology movement, many scientists now agree that the Africans were correct.
Life is relational and cyclical; advancement is not linear.
One such scientist is Dr Karl-Henrik Robert.
One of his papers is appropriately called Educating a Nation: The Natural Step.
Karl-Henrik Robert learned the relational philosophy of life from studying the history of cells, whereas Africans learned it from observing nature, from animals and from the dariro and the pungwe.
Where Africans begin with the aesthetics and ethics of the human circle (dariro), Karl-Henrik Robert begins with the cell.
Says Robert:
“Let us begin by focussing on the cell.
“We cannot discuss politics or ideologies without it.
“The cell is only concerned with conditions necessary for sustaining and propagating life.
“It also reminds us that we are inescapably a part of nature.
“It also happens that really all our natural resources have been created by cells. With sunlight as the sole energy supply, those natural resources have been created in growing, self-sustaining cycles — the waste from one species providing nutrition for another.
“The only processes that we can rely on indefinitely are cyclical (that is relational); all linear processes must eventually come to an end.”
The reinterpretation of the foundations of life as relational and cyclical and not linear leads to a re-interpretation of Genesis 1:3:
“And God said: Let there be light, and there was light.
And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.”
Karl Henrik-Robert writes:
“Over billions of years, a toxic stew of inorganic compounds has been transformed by cells into mineral deposits, forests, fish, soil, breathable air and water — the very foundation of our economy and our healthy existence.
“With sunlight as the sole energy supply, those natural resources have been created in growing, self-sustaining cycles.”
This light is what God declared to be good.
But the Cartesian linear view has taken that light and the resulting fire to build a linear dead-end civilisation.
Yet that very same light and fire in the relational, cyclical perspective is also the genesis of the dynamism of ecology and relational life of the cell and the dariro.
But Cartesian narcissism and individualism stole the light and the fire to fuel dead-end, linear pursuits.
The ecology movement seeks to rescue the light and the fire and use them to fuel a sustainable, relational model of civilisation and to avoid the dead-end.
The way that ‘end’ is showing itself in global warming and climate change suggests a dead-end to linear corporatism.
In Southern Africa, since the white settlers were driven by their linear narcissism and greed, they thought the abundance of wildlife was because African ‘savages’ did not understand the value of their rich endowments in animals, forests, grasslands and rivers.
There were no problems of wild life extinction, acid rain, river siltation or desertification; because African culture was itself founded on relational ethics which we still find elaborated through the system of totems and what white people disparagingly called ‘taboos’.
As far back as the arrival of Jan Van Riebeek in South Africa in 1652, white accounts of African communities reflect surprise at the abundance in crops, livestock and game surrounding the ‘savages’.
Therefore, Karl-Henrik Robert concludes by confronting the white myth of progress:
“We have lost control, and are moving backwards in evolution.
“The extinction of (countless) species, deforestation, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and all other assaults on nature are but different aspects of the same mistake — increased reliance on linear process.”