Chronicles of the Seven Republics: A Personal journey

The gospel according to the Seven Republics is an imaginary chronicle about Africa's dream for a new narrative about her historic self-reinvention. It is a dream to reflect the regional aspirations of its people who share a common desire to take their destiny into their own hands. A regional realm, a sphere of constitutional control, economic transformation, architectural wonders, kingdom of knowledge, prosperity, opulence and the miracle of self-actualisation.

It is conceived and born out of a shared spirit to change to consolidate the collective independence of our States, united in a common experience, vision and aspiration towards the goal of economic self-reliance. That is the vision and a dream of the principles of the Seven Republics of Africa, a new vision of hope and a new assignment for our generation and for posterity.

I have not arrived at this point of political theorising and mythology by the accident of life and the coincidence of history. My political consciousness as an African and philosophical awareness as an individual are rooted deep in the experiences of my teenage and formative years. Before I was eighteen, I came across a pamphlet on African Political Philosophy and it had chapters on Negritude, Nkrumahism, Garveyism and a list of references to the lives of African American thinkers and Independence Movement theorists. I took particular interest in Garveyism and his rallying cry of “Africa for the African.”

First Reading

Now the journey from that first reading to this point - some thirty-two years later - is a narrative journey by itself. However I can say that my first inkling into the labyrinth of political philosophy and consequently almost every branch of history, political science, philosophy, new thought thinking and of course metaphysics and self-help philosophies has brought me to this point. Of course literature played a critical role in feeding my imagination in the process of envisioning Africa in new ways other than what the continent is perceived to be.

I have had the privilege of reading the Russian classics, African American literature, English writers, Latin America magical realists, French literary philosophers, African literature, Chinese mythologies and, in recent years, Australian literature. As a writer, I have relied very heavily on the theatrical process of creating my literature and the genre of the private journal as my most reliable means of self-expression. My efforts as a playwright and novelist have been so successful based on my practice as a theatre producer. However, poetry and the essay format have been my best media. I have had many plays written, and some produced.

All these creative undertakings have shaped me as a writer and even though I have tried to record my personal experiences as much as possible, travelled to many countries and lived in a few, it was Australia that provided me with the haven and the emotional sanctuary to start the process of seriously writing. Enrolling in the School for Creative Writing at the University of Canberra forced me to seriously start looking at my work as a writer and to write and meet the demands of academic requirements. So I wrote and indeed I have been very prolific, writing many short stories, epic poems, journals, travel narratives and a memoir. Throughout all this creative outpouring, it was Africa that rested firmly within the realm of the imagination. I have seen and continue to see Africa as a riddle. The dialectical unfolding of its history has never made sense to me. Regardless of how many books I have read about the history of Africa and the many philosophical angles from which I have approached the process of understanding of its history, Africa is still a riddle that can only be unravelled by reinventing what we want Africa to become.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that Africa is not something or a place one must strive to understand. As a creative writer and philosopher, it is not my task to unravel the riddles of African history because Africa's past is in riddle, in the quagmire of contradictions, conflict and confusion. I came to the conclusion that the best way I can participate in the process to rewriting the past and reinventing the future is to imagine the past, present and future as an act of existential relativism. Therefore, what I imagine Africa to be is what Africa will become because to try and untangle the web of African unwritten history is like trying to chase ones' own shadow. Africa is an ideal for which we must strive to experience. And therefore the best way to approach any understanding of African history as a political, literary and philosophical idealist is to rely on the creative process of mythologising Africa, for better or for all its ills. It is an existential choice we all have to make.

Precipice of fear

Currently, Africa's fate is hanging on the precipice of fear. It has become a continent experiencing the fear of hunger, fear of its own political power, fear of tyranny, fear of ancestral gods, fear of its potential, fear of witches and oracles, fear of superstitions, extremist violence, poverty, shadows, mysteries and the fear of fear itself. Africa is afraid of lack, diseases and the misery of existence. It is by making dramatic shifts in the mindset of the continent can the superstitions that haunt be lifted. Africa has to move towards the new hemisphere of free thinking, enlightenment, reformation, spiritual and material modernisation; self-education, freedom of expression, democracy and free enterprise within a new empire of self-knowledge, freedom of movement towards the transformation of its cultural identity from tribalism to continental nationalism.

Therefore, I was able to convince myself that I had to discard and/ or disregard the chronological process, the order of historic narratives and rather bridge the sequential flow of time, compress the geographic landscape of history and rather infuse my understanding about Africa from the point of view of what I know it to be and how I want it to become. If I must contribute to the process of knowledge creation, then it must be an understanding of Africa's imagined past and a vision for its possible future.

Creative Writing

Everything I have learnt in creative writing, fused with my experiences and education as an African, had to be brought together to create this poetic narrative of a chronicle. This story is an imaginary journey to mythologise the past and yet read into a future where all this can be possible. It is a wishful story. Tell me a story that is not born out of a wish and I will tell you a story about how great nations were founded and built by dreamers. If wishes do come true than this, it is my wish and dream for Africa, it is the chronicles of a continent foretold as an embodiment of my wish for Africa. I wrote it in one sweeping process of a creative marathon, also like an act of catharsis in the theatrical sense.

This allowed me to give myself the prerogative to use my imagination to conceive of Africa the way I want it to become. To create a new political map and redefine its history to suit my own creative purposes as a reflection of the current aspirations of its people. Therefore, the political process of self-redefinition of Africa and the philosophical task of being African must be linked to the sovereignty of a political state of being; to create new nations that would secure the freedoms of its people, its rule of laws, governed by a constitution that would “guarantee individual rights and liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all.”

No creed, tribe or gender must dominate this realm within the Seven Republics, no leader must rule without consent and the approval of their peers and constituencies. Governments must be elected through a collective set of rules that will be enshrined in the new democratic creed of universal suffrage for all. We as a people are existentially responsible for our destiny, by writing into stone, built with steel and etched into granite a vision of our future selves and dream for generations unborn to follow into eternity.

Complacency, greed, gluttony, selfishness, corruption, fetishism and profanity has taken hold and grasped the mind of Africa, seized its imagination and strangled its dreams; allowing its future to be determined by renegades and tribal mediocrity, narrow self-contentment, the primitive bliss of illiteracy and the desires of the body have become the creeds by which we live. One must ask, what happened to the dreams of the founding fathers? Why did we lose our way on the pathway of history? How did we get to the point where poverty, filth and diseases have become part of the narrative of our history? How did we allow small-minded tyrants, dictators, self-centred chiefs and polygamous rulers to take over the mandate of our dreams and historic inheritance? How? Where are the leaders with the organisational acumen, the intellectual vision, the moral fortitude, political will-power, spiritual courage and mental discipline? Where are the great leaders of Africa in a time where ineptitude now reigns?

The crisis facing Africa today is an opportunity for the reformulation of a new African Dream, the dream towards the reinvention of Africa. Within Africa there is an Egypt, a Rome, Byzantium, Europe, Canada, America, China, an Australia and a United Arab Emirates. There is everything in Africa, except its lack of imagination and its dreams. Africa has philosophers, visionaries, writers, leaders, thinkers, architects, engineers and doctors; let us give ourselves the chance to reinvent Africa within a new image of prosperity, equality and fraternity.