By Ngozi Ekeoma
If one seizes the political fallout in North Africa are repeated performance of events in Arab-African relations in the last century, one could argue that the Arab Spring is not necessarily a Spring but a Sisyphean fall back to the beginning of political maturity and independence in the Arab World. After five hundred years of Ottoman rule, events of the last one hundred years opened a new beginning when Arab rulers aligned themselves with European powers to get the Turkish monkey off their heads. The First World War came and unfortunately the Arabs saw not independence but European colonialism in a new guise. England and France staked their claims and the train of history created many conditions and processes which many Arab leaders and thinkers were not clever enough to decipherer quickly and aggressively. What 2013 portrayed in my view is the Greek mythical character, Sisyphus, picking up the stone of Arab pride and dignity from the low valleys of European domination to the top of self-affirmation. In reaching the top of the mountain top, such leaders passed through many problems and challenges. In the following narrative, such an exercise in decoding the Arab Problem provides a parallel inquiry into the impact of the Arab Spring on African politica
l thought and African political activism since convergence of African political freedom after the Second World War and African decolonization and guerilla warfare before the end of apartheid.
Frankly speaking, the phenomenon which carried the name, Arab Spring , may be attractive to many Arabs and Africans but in actual fact what took place is the culmination of several processes coming with unintended consequences for the Arab actors in history. First of all, this phenomenon which is unraveling and its final outcome still puzzle many Western thinkers on the one hand and Arab activists on the other. Why is the case? Two things come to mind immediately. The modernization of Arab society and the Westernization of Arab education are the two processes which owe something to the Ottoman and to the Western missionary. Although the Ottoman failed in the First World War and the triumphant Europeans successfully created their Arab allies and co-partners through Westernization and modernization. The Arab Spring cannot be understood by Africans unless and until they draw a parallel between their peculiar African situation and the peculiar Arab situation. Whereas the Arab liberated themselves from the linguistic and political hegemony of the Ottomans, their approaches to modernity and Westernization brought them closer to European uses of creature-comforts through crass materialism and the deployment of sciences and technology. These patterns of development captured the imagination of most non-Western people and the concept of development administration and social changes in human societies owe their origins to this trend of thought and action among human beings. Anyone who challenges this argument must make a case demonstrating the contrary fact that eating sardines in metallic containers and growingly relying on manufacturing as was becoming the case in Europe since the eighteenth century. All human civilizations up to this time apparently did their best for humankind. Much as the Arab played their role as historical runners in the cosmic relay race, their stars have faded away much earlier before the Ottomans and the European took control of their lives and destinies. If there is indeed an Arab Spring, it is a return to the beginning with opportunities to change things too emotionally power and too scientifically and rationally undesirable within the modern context. The Arab Spring will make sense to me only when the new Arab leadership accepts the trend of thought since the collapse of the Ottoman and the rise of micro-nationalism among themselves. These are the series of historical and political dots that must be combined to see the lines of meaning about Arab political progress and economic development today. The geo-ethnicity and territorial claims; With respect to the question of identity, let us look at Tunisia and see how the Ben Ali regime addressed this problem. Being deeply affected by French imperialism and colonialism, Tunisians entered the era after the Second World War very much captured in the psycho-historical world described by Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon. Both writers talked about how imperialism, French language policy and the assimilation of their elites in Western ways led to the trends of development which led to this present state of affairs. . In light of this analysis Tunisians opted to be Arab and modern at the same time. But being Arab is reinforced by the historical and psycho-historical streams of emotional and Panarabian solidarity. However, being Arab and Muslim was paralleled to what happened to most Westerners now dancing in the festivals of modernity and scientific self-assertion. There is a serious problem. Can you reconcile your modern Arabness with your identity as Muslims faithful to your medieval premises of life? Forced to face these arguments, Tunisian intellectuals working with the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy argue that there is a breathing ground for both Islam and Arabitude within the context of modern science and technology.
Advocates of this line of thought would look at Mohamed Ghannouchi on aftermath of Ben Malik, harassed by the deposed Ben Ali, who inherited the modernization policies and practices of his predecessor, Habib, Bourgiba. Mr. Ghannouchi now speaks for a new Tunisia which has room for the modernists and the Islamists. True or false, this Tunisia reality parallels what is going on in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the other Arab countries. The identity question is more easily handled in Tunisia than in Sudan or elsewhere in Arabdom.
To understand these problems of identity as well as the challenges relating to the political culture as a result of the Arab Spring, it is a fact that the Arab was the only people during the Cold War who suffered from the problems and challenges of three simultaneous conflicts at the same time. There was the American-Soviet rivalry and the pressing demands to align them with one or the other; there was the Arab-Israeli conflict which mobilized all Arabs against the peoples of the state of Israel; there was also the rivalry between Arab radical republicans who abhorred kings and queens and their counterpart running monarchies through the Arab World. What is ironical as well as contradictory about the Arab Spring lies in the heart of the mystery about characters jockeying for control of state and society in the Arab World. Professor Sulayman Nyang of Howard University had articulated this argument when he that the Arab intellectuals are genuinely advocating residual Arabism on the one hand and Islamism on the other, but must seriously, address the pressing question of identity and social change in the world of religious pluralism and gender equality. What is emerging in the political debates of Muslim intellectuals, particularly in the West, is the imperative to balance the demands of religious pluralism on the one hand and social transformation of human life as dictated by modernity and globalization, on the other.
This is why the Tunisian, the Libyan, the Egyptian, Syrian, Yemeni and Arabian Gulf phenomena speak volumes to Africans who care to pay attention. Compared to the Africans the Arab enjoyed five things lacking on the African situation. There is a unity of language which manifests itself in two ways: Arabic as a lingual Franca; Arab as a language of ritual efficacy for Muslims using classical Arabic of the Quran. Swahili could have served us well. Unfortunately, during the Festac Festival in 1976, Wole Soyinka urged the Africans to embrace Swahili as an African continental response to language crisis. This call was ignored.
Negotiating the Arab linguistic territory, Arabs will have to start making their pilgrim progress by seeking the ray of light of modernity in the early mornings of this spring. The second is the abundant of resources if there is meaningful Arab nationalism which allocates resources for the mutual transformation of Arab society and people. The third advantage of the Arabs lies in their smaller numbers and their greater chances of bringing science and technology to their people without be necessarily dependent and insolvent in the eyes of the Western powers. The fourth Arab advantage lies in their ability to benefit from a global solidarity mediated by their collective association with the claims and legacies of Prophet Muhammad. This idea was utilized by both Nasserite of Egypt and Baathist of Syria and Iraq, on the one hand, and the Saudi monarchy with its own notion of Faisalism under King Faisal.
Without making any puerile joke on this matter, were the green are leaves symbolically reminding Arabs about Prophet Muhammad choice of colors in this world? Speaking metaphorically, one should say that the claims of the rebels against the tyrannies in the Arab world can only be successful if they can rein in the autocracies of the men in khakis as well as those in royal garments The Holy Prophet of Islam fought against Meccan oppression and the green color represented something colorfully and psychologically. Both ironically and paradoxically, the late Muammar Qaddaffi chose the green color (symbolized in his Green Book) to
differential himself and the Libyan Jamahiriya from Chairman Mao Tsetung and his Red book. What was striking in the last days of his rule was his decision to call himself “King of kings in Africa,” after having overthrown a monarch forty years earlier. The family members of the overthrown Sanusi dynasty are back in circulation. The big question is whether they and the ruling royals will realize the dictates of human history that the days of ruling as opposed to regaining monarchs are gone.
Here our analysis relies on the lessons to be learned from the Arab Situation. The first is the vulnerability of dictatorships. The second is the imperative for struggling democracies to educate their peoples so that they can build certain structures for social living and peaceful communication. The third is the development of a moral economy in which every man, woman and child is instructed in the solid arts of budgeting one’s emotion. In a pluralistic age, ethnocentrism and political pride and prejudice as detrimental to good politics and effective governance. In order for the Arabs to succeed in the twenty first century, they must avoid the errors of the ruling party of Sudan to build a new political culture with room for modernity on the one hand and cultural pluralism on the other. Africa has a long way to go because we have yet to harness our collective traditional knowledge in our dying languages when we go to the banquet of civilizations as argued by the late Leopold Senghor
