What do you mean by “UnAfrican?”

An esssay by KAJILA LUNETA

The following are the top three YouTube search results for the phrase “unAfrican”; a news panel discussing whether or not the anti-homosexuality bill most recently passed in Uganda’s parliament is unAfrican, a news story about a president who said Barack Obama was being unAfrican for advising heads of state not to hold on to power and an SABC debate in which a panel discusses whether or not liberalism as an economic structure is unAfrican. While I feel no need to lie and claim that YouTube has its hand on the pulse of contemporary culture, much less that of this continent in particular, these results do represent both the reason for this articles existence as well as state of discourse surrounding what is and isn’t “African” or “Zambian” or “insert any of the 50 other countries here”.

Whether taking the form of condemning modern trends in culture, politics, and fashion or statements made to oppose lobbying and advocacy for the change of long-held practices, one finds no shortage of people, things, or behaviours on the continent being labelled as unAfrican for the sole purpose of discrediting or framing them negatively. The frequency of this dialogue, along with the tendency to label things as lacking “Africanness,” makes me wonder: What exactly does this mean? To ask, “What are you talking about?”

 Less obvious than asking this simple question is the act of dedicating an essay to the examination of the multitude of answers to said query, as well as the reasoning that underlies the question itself, which is why that is what I will be doing here today.

To start to answer the question of what it means to be unAfrican, we must first acknowledge that the aforementioned YouTube search results will not be of much help, nor will any number of individual anecdotes and examples I could pull from thin air to prove any number of cases. This is because by its very nature as a category, something unAfrican cannot just be a list of things that do not qualify. Rather, it has to be a general characteristic or set of characteristics that, when applied to any random individual thing, can tell us whether it falls in that category or not, like mammals or sandwiches.

This nature can be illustrated by the first and most obvious interpretation of the term, one based on geography. This is to say something is “unAfrican” if it is not physically from the continent. Simple, straightforward, and not without its own popularity among users of the term, an example of such would be arguments against globalisation and other forms of intervention in local affairs from other countries around the world. Certain trends in fashion and culture are condemned along these lines, often labelled as Western influences and thus unAfrican in their attempt to override customs and practices that developed within the continent.

And while this interpretation does have instances of use that conform with its definition of “unAfrican,” a closer look at every use of the term tells us that it is by no means definitive. This is because while things that did not originate in Africa are definitely given this label, several other things of the same nature are not. Christianity and Islam are the two main religions of the continent’s nations, which are more often than not religiously conservative. Yet so far as I can tell, no one is going around professing that these belief systems are unAfrican or Western influences, even nationalism and the concepts of borders and governments as they exist today are, for better or worse, the result of outside influences on the continent.

So maybe what is being indicated by the use of this term is, instead of a blanket condemnation of all outside influence, an accusation of not conforming with a larger ideal or philosophy, inasmuch as such a thing can exist coherently within the melting pot of countries and tribes. Under this definition, the external influences mentioned earlier could be seen as having been adopted and incorporated because they matched this cultural ideal, and thus, if this philosophy/ideology could be identified, then it could serve as the standard for whether any particular thing is African or not.

When faced with the natural follow-up question of what exactly this ideal is, the best answer is most likely the collectivist nature of both pre- and post-colonial community structures. What I mean by this is that perhaps the ideal that determines whether or not someone meets the titular standard is the way of thinking that emphasises the importance of the family and the community over the individual. This answer makes the most sense in light of the most common uses of the unAfrican condemnation; all the earlier examples can be seen as the result of an individualistic worldview; homosexuality is seen as not serving the community, it does not provide children and is by its very nature subversive of the norm. To go with a slightly less inflammatory example, the belief in never physically disciplining a child, so often condemned by the older generation as “not our way” and the younger generation as “some white shit,” can be seen as a challenge towards the absolute authority of communal and family leaders. These and so many other beliefs lack the emphasis on the importance of the community that is incorporated without complaint, even in a mostly post-colonial world, like religion and nationalism.

This view even finds support in the fact that it seems to be among the common threads found in all of the continent’s thinking. In their section in African philosophy: new and old perspectives, writer Leke Adoefe points out the distinction between the duality perspective on what makes a person (that of the mind and body) found in most Western philosophies and the tripartite version of the same found in most African philosophies, which consider the relation to the community or village to be another cardinal aspect of the human, in addition to mind and body. This can be illustrated by taking an example from the terminology of the Igbo tribe of Nigeria, also covered in the book. 

They state these parts that make up a person as follows; “A person is conceived to be the union of his or her ara (body), emi (mind/soul), and ori (‘inner head’)” with this inner head being later explained to be a spiritual/mental concept separate from the mind that dictates a concept that can be best translated as “destiny” which refers to connections one has to their community. A later section of the book further posits what this means about the African conception of the individual: 

“ ….however, this personal life purpose cannot be separated from the communal reality of which the individual is only a part. This is due in part to the interconnectedness of destiny discussed above. However, it is also due to the fact that the purpose of individual existence is intricately linked with the purpose of social existence and cannot be adequately grasped outside it.”

From this interpretation of the self as consisting of more than just the internal world of the individual, we can reasonably conclude that the act of questioning if something is African is (consciously or not) an exercise in measuring that thing against the standard that what is African is what is respectful of the sanctity and authority of the community and society and not the value of the individual separate from this community. And that calling it unAfrican is to find it wanting by these very standards. Conservative Christianity? African. face tattoos? UnAfrican. Face tattoos that match those everyone else in the tribe has? African. Thus, this conclusion works perfectly fine as a category by my own internally created standards, problem solved.

 And yet I can’t stop myself from finding a new, more interesting problem: I chose my words in that last paragraph much more carefully than the ones that came before it, and I did this because while I do find this conclusion reasonable, I don’t necessarily find it satisfying. The reason I don’t find it satisfying is because it operates under the assumption that the definition of what an identity is or isn’t is something that can be determined by observing the people who held said identity in the past. Obvious as that sounds, the only reason it’s the most intuitive way of defining an identity is that it relies on the authority these people have by virtue of having the basic characteristic of “person born in Africa” and then going outwards from there to see what other meanings get attached to the identity. And this is all fine and free of apparent contradictions until you acknowledge that so often this un-Africanness is tacked on to people who also have the supposedly authority-granting characteristic of “person who was born in Africa”. This illustrates the earlier stated presumption because it essentially says “we defined what this identity means because we are the natives of this continent and you, who is also a native of this continent, must conform to this definition, otherwise you are not truly African”. 

It is not collectivism in particular, nor any other aspect of Africanness as defined in the past, that I take issue with. far from it, I find that collectivist/communal-focused societies are less likely to have the cartoonish wealth inequality that plagues most hyper-individualistic nations, stifling as they may be to personal expression. Even if I did have a problem with certain aspects of traditionalist Africa (which I very much do but don’t have the time or energy to get into) deferring to this way of being African, my particular way of being African would still rely on an inverted version of the earlier stated assumption, just deferring to some nebulous idea of the ever-improving present as opposed to an equally nebulous idea of the unquestionable past. Coming to terms with this allowed me to reach the conclusion that this entire exercise calls into question the very nature of something as vague as national/cultural identity, and who gets to define a thing that is so shifting and shapeless by nature, which, as far as conclusions go, is horrible, as it only complicates the issue. Yes, the past seemed the most reasonable place to start, as even those who do not conform do so in relation to their upbringing, and are thus equally influenced by the culture as those who conform. But even this does not account for the ever-shifting state of culture that result from parents passing down values slightly different from the ones they were taught by their parents as the times change, and that itself also fails to make sense in consideration of the facts that due to the advent of the internet parents and children in the modern day may as well speak entirely different cultural languages. The result is an unhelpfully large set of meanings attached to the label of African, with all parties having some degree of entitlement to define what the identity entails, but none having the ability to overwrite the definitions others with this authority attach to it. Suffice to say, these musings prompted the kind of ontological uncertainty that compels one to do something unreasonable like write a three-page essay.

The uncertainty I refer to can be best described thusly: words like African, white, black, or sandwich are categories that by their very nature require defined boundaries of what does and does not qualify. And where these categories double as identities, they function to denote more than just the physical. But this change does not make us want to give them boundaries any less; we still refer to things as unAfrican or black or white, despite the wide cultural languages within them. Any attempt to extract a coherent standard of identification, as I just spent the last dozen or so paragraphs doing with the category of “African”, will ultimately exclude so many naturally occurring parts of the group the category loses meaning. Because Africans who do not conform to or believe in these communal ideals do not cease to be African in any tangible way, and if they do not, then what purpose does calling them unAfrican serve? My immediate impulse when faced with this is to denounce the concept of stable identities to begin with, but this, too, is not without problems, because identities do, in fact, exist. Whether or not they are coherent does not change the fact that they form the building blocks of every human being’s self-image. While I may be exaggerating the metaphysical stakes of this conflict, it nonetheless remains a problem in need of solving. And the solution, I realised upon a not inconsiderable amount of thinking, is Spiderman.

To be specific, the solution is not in the whole intellectual property of Spiderman, as that would be ridiculous. Rather, it lies specifically in the animated film Spiderman across the spider-verse, sequel to Spiderman into the spider-verse, and the second film in the (at time of writing) unfinished spider-verse trilogy.

The films in general show a thematic concern with identity, explored through the mantle of the titular super hero, but I have no particular use for the first film as it mostly deals with the process of becoming a thing, and the self-doubt and imposter syndrome that comes with that process, a theme that is resolved by the films oft stated proclamation that “anyone can wear the mask”. While poignant, this is of no real use to my particular focus on the identity of African, which is an inborn characteristic and thus does not map onto those themes as well. It does, however, map conveniently well onto the themes of across the spider-verse, which takes advantage of its position as a sequel to deal with the process of being a thing, and dealing with the expectations of the things that others have decided are integral to an identity that you already possess.

The dimension-hopping animated film finds particular relevance to this question of what constitutes an identity through its introduction of the concept of canon events. occurrences that are deemed to not only always happen to every Spiderman but must happen to every Spiderman. My concern is not so much with the in-universe explanation of imminent multiversal collapse but rather with interpersonal justification given by the characters in the film (usually those whose tragic canon events have already occurred) that they would not be who they are without these things, and thus these things are integral to the act of being Spiderman.

One could hardly stop themselves from drawing parallels between this appeal to the past as a way of deciding what defines an identity and the rhetoric surrounding the use of “unAfrican-ness” discussed earlier. That doing or not doing this particular thing makes you unAfrican because these are the things I associated with my identity of being African. 

And neither of these statements is necessarily false, the spider men who have experienced their canon events most likely do associate their motivation for their heroics with said trauma, and the things that are deemed unAfrican are, in most cases, contrary to the things that have defined the identity of most of our continent in the past. Having noticed the similarities between these two ways of defining, as well as policing an identity, the solution to the question of both who defines what an identity is and what it takes to label someone to be other within a group is in who the film deems its antagonist.

The main villain of the movie, as well as the one to condemn the protagonist as “not really Spiderman” (parallels are fun), is both the character to introduce the concept of the canon, and he is the one who is the most dedicated to ensuring that others comply with its specifications. The film paints the other canon-compliant spider men in a relatively positive light compared to this character in particular because of their dedication to enforcing their concept of Spiderman as “the hero who suffers” even on those who tell themselves a different narrative about the identity shown in Miles’ statement of “Spiderman always chooses both”. This is why, contrary to that of the first film’s mission statement, the sequel has the main character’s constant self-affirmations of “I am Spiderman” despite everything said to the contrary.

It is from this reading that I can extract something of a theme and proceed from the masked vigilante portion of this essay, the identity of “African” need not be a consistent meaning that excludes those who bear the name but don’t comply with all of those meanings. As the term unAfrican so often seems to serve the function of doing. Rather, it can exist as a collection of meanings that not only change, but can exist simultaneously. I emphasise the latter of the two because I feel like any genuine concern that something isn’t African in nature is premised on the assumption that the thing condemned is a replacement of meanings, and not a development of it. Even assuming that these concerns come from a purely genuine place, short of the kind of extreme violence that comes from genocide or a sequel to colonialism, then no culture can truly be erased in any meaningful sense. They can only change into something that is built from and exists in the context of both the thing influencing said transition and the very thing that was changed in the first place. External influence on our culture is not replacing the traditional values that made it up in the past, but rather being placed on top of them in the context of those who are both aware of what came before and perceptive to these new cultural meanings.

None of this is to say that conversions about our African-ness and the things that benefit and hinder our culture cannot exist, but rather that the label of unAfrican and the negative connotations that seem to come baked into the phrase serve no purpose in such a conversion. Even as I say this, an imaginary individual made for the purpose of proving a point could respond to my conclusion that this is a model of Africanness is still incoherent and made of aspects that cannot be reconciled, and that the desire to determine what does and does not qualify as something like African or not is a natural part of how humans experience categories. My response to this person who exists exclusively inside my head would be twofold;

Firstly, in regards to the model being inconsistent, I would answer that yes, it is, and why is that bad thing? While sounding ridiculous at first, this is the genuine stance I have come to regarding most identities of this type, not just African and Spiderman. For reasons I hope to have shown by now, short of the literal defining principle of the group (e.g., being born in Africa), literally nothing can be said of a cultural category that applies to all of its members and their experiences of defining what that membership means to them, resulting in the aforementioned incoherence. I would only be convinced that this supposed incoherence is an inaccuracy or something that needs correction if it actually served as a hindrance of literally any kind to the experience of belonging to said group, and the only thing hindered is the subject of my second response to my imaginary opponent.

The claim that the desire to place things and behaviours into the category of not x by nature or y by nature is one that could very well be argued to be intrinsic to how people in identities behave towards themselves and one another. There is something to be said here about how we come to the conclusions of what is and isn’t human nature and the flaws in the concept, but that’s a different paper, so instead let’s assume that this way of interacting with identity is a natural default. That does not make it useful, nor does it make it the end state of the way these interactions play out. In fact, this allegedly natural desire to police behaviour from inside the group by determining one to be not really in the group is the only aspect that doesn’t mesh with the model of identity/Africanness proposed.

Thus, we could reasonably conclude that the problem then arises not in identities being multifaceted and contradictory, but rather in the act of enforcing specific meanings on those who so obviously bear the identity, but do so differently. There has never really been any concern about who/what was or was not African, as that is an obvious question of lineage, ancestry, and geography. Rather, the rhetoric surrounding un-Africaness was more concerned with who was being African properly by whatever definition was most convenient to the one condemning. And considering the amount of labour put into both determining what was even being asked in the first place and how to comply with said request, I find un-asking the question to be an altogether more appealing solution.