Blog 3: Sukarno and Cabral

I was hard-pressed to find a significant difference in what Sukarno and Cabral had to say. The argument seems to be the same: one tool, perhaps the most insidious tool, of colonial domination was cultural domination, and this process must be reversed if Africa is to become truly 'independent'. Independence, for them, was not the uprooting of a flag, but the uprooting of a culture. Where they differ is their views of what this culture must look like. While both acknowledge that there needs to be an 'African' culture, Sukarno argues for the resurgence of a historic culture under the pretext of tolerance, whereas Cabral argues for the development of a new, integrated culture. 

Put crudely, Sukarno's 'new' culture calls for static-ness; his call is for the unfettered existence of all cultures, with no imposition from one to the other. His call is for 'unity in diversity', but an acknowledgement of diversity nonetheless. In that sense, Sukarno's argument is very liberal: he seeks to preserve individual identity, to acknowledge that differences exist but that they can be mediated, and to call for a bloc that is interdependent, but is not sorted on a hierarchy of cultures, rather, on their coexistence. 

Cabral argues for something slightly different: much like the Angel of History, Cabral casts an eye on the past but acknowledges that it is the future that Africa must fly towards. He calls for an integration; for the development of a new culture, a more nuanced culture. At various points, he deems this activity to be a "development". Cabral acknowledges that there is no golden pre-colonial history, and there is no inevitable postcolonial future. The dream of a decolonial Africa cannot, for him, be achieved simply by Sukarno's "live and let live" maxim; life must be created, and for this a critical eye must be cast on the construction of the past. He thus says that positive and indigenous cultures must be developed, and that it is this popular, unified, integrated culture that must premise the liberation struggle. 

This distinction is not semantic, it represents a fundamental conceptual difference between what Cabral and Sukarno saw the future to be. For Sukarno, the future was of co-existence: various existences under the fold of tolerance and "unity in diversity". Cabral, on the other hand, called for one existence: for him, the future is not a reversion to a mythical pre-colonial past seemingly unaffected by the process of colonialism. For him, the Angel of History must extract from the ruins of colonialism positive, progressive aspects of culture, and these must be integrated for a decolonized Africa. Cabral calls for Africa to process its pre-colonial and immediate history, and to create a culture from this processing. This new culture, for him, is the driver of Africa's liberation; it is in all senses of the word, post colonial, not simply a reversion to the mythical pre-colonial past.