This essay is a response to a prompt that encouraged students to connect ideas from the book Justice by Michael Sandel with Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and an interdisciplinary unit on the colonial period in Africa. Students were asked to develop a definition of citizenship and support it with information from the two books and a variety of historical sources.
Anonymous
The strongest form of responsibility comes from solidarity which dwells on the philosophy that we owe more to the people we share with similar history, interest, and therefore contribute mostly to our identity. The philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argues, “Human –beings are story-telling beings. I can only answer the question ‘what am I to do? If I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself apart’” (What is the Right Thing to do, Location 441.5). In his quote, Alasdair singles out the interesting fact that as humans we feel closer and more connected to people we have born with. He is right about story telling because every day we see how we choose our children over others, and how we give more care and attention to our elderly parents then others. To choose who we are a part of, we have to identify the people we share with similar experiences in the course of history. Alasdair also implicitly proves wrong those who say we have no obligations at all because everybody is a part of storytelling. Everybody has association with history or experiences.
What does citizenship means? The term citizenship can be used differently depending on a level. When we are talking about the level of a country, citizenship means people are members of a particular country, and because of that, they should be loyal and patriotic to other people from that country. We can expand the term into continental citizenship which would mean people are members of a continent, and therefore they should be proud of it, and show deep interest to develop it. Indeed, citizenship overlaps with patriotism, or having love for you county more than anywhere else. Citizenship is like identity card that tells us where to live, who we live with, and we side with. The new philosophy of Communitarianism attempts to explain who we should have the first obligation to and who should we have at least obligation to. It is basically a narrative conception. Our love should start with our family, then our town, then country, then continent, and finally a citizen as the world. Communitarianism also explains why we should put our families before our country. It is because our family contributes a lot to our identity. We interact with our family more than any citizen in the world. Therefore, it feels right to say we have a special responsibility to other colonized people because in fact we share similar experiences, interest, and impacts of colonization.
We have more responsibility to other colonized people because a series of similar experiences shaped us alike. Colonization put our cultures at stake, and entrenched our countries under the shade of severe poverty. It is the interest of all African people to turn the impoverished African continent into rich one. That interests and dreams unite us into one people with an indomitable heart and strong favor of development. During colonization, imperialists started schooling in Africa, in order to modernize and convert young generations of African society into Christians. In most cases, schooling led to a generational shift. Although different society reacted differently, the reaction to that problem was the same. In Somaliland, it was not surprising that Mohamed Abdulla was fighting to save his people, culture, and religion (Mad mullah, 1-5). He saw the possibility of his people turning into monsters, so he enacted a mission to stop that. In West Africa, Samori Toure was fighting to protect the land of his Malinke people from French troops who threatened them to give up part of their land (Primary source, 1-2). In the name of Africa, and our rich culture, these great warriors ended their lives so that one day Africans would realize we are fighting against any reformer of African culture. As Africans, we all suffered from the misfortunate catastrophe of colonization. We strived hard to get to the point where we are today. The poverty and wars that inflict us today are still the results of colonization. Each year, billions of children die of Malaria and HIV because colonization precluded us the chance to develop our own factories and medicines. In many African countries, the children who are born with HIV are very high, and at very young age, these young children perish. Misfortunate circumstances like this can be called pulling factor that make all colonized people into unit family. Besides colonization, African people have similar culture.
The impact of colonization is a problem that makes us to have a special obligation because our opportunities to flourish on our own have been violated. When Europeans came to Africa, they didn’t bother to recognize that Africans were people with strong values of religion and rich culture. Filled with contempt, imperialists thought that their culture was superior and therefore they should make corrections to African culture and in return Africans should assimilate Europeans. Quickly, imperialists subverted the traditional leaders and their enhanced system. Europeans introduced the concept of warrant chiefs. In places like Igbo land, Britain used warrant chiefs to control people and as a way to communicate with Igbo people. Warrant chiefs were locally recruited and forced to impose high taxation on their people. They did what exactly British administrators told them which was to be harsh toward their people.( Warrant chiefs in Igbo land, 189) .One of the other impacts of colonization was Christianity and reformed African culture. Europeans disrupted and negatively influenced the way Africans lived and the social structure of their society. In Somaliland, during pre-colonial era most of the children were sent to Madrassa, and they grew up learning Koran studies. However, when Britain came to Somaliland, western secular education became prominent throughout the cities (Oral history). In Igbo land, when children were sent to British schools, they ended up turning against their own culture. In a history textbook, it describes how once a kid called Nweke left his family to study in school abroad. However, when he came back, he rejected to take part all the cultural ceremonies of his people (Family Struggles over schooling). In schools, children were thought that European culture was superior and African culture was inferior. Imperialists also implemented the concept of identity-cards, or giving one ethnicity more power than other ethnicities. The Rwandese civil-war that sparked in 1994 was the result of identity-card simmering issue introduced by Belgium. This war claimed the lives of many people and opened new doors for economic backlashes (Dancing under the glory of monsters, chapter 3-4)
The question that lies ahead for every African citizen is to wonder what African people can do about 19th century imperialism. In truth, we can undo our past, but it our responsibility that we should constrain that all the aspects that colonization unleashed. It is degrading for our that hundredth of years after colonization we are still fighting over the artificial borders that imperialists deliberately constructed. In the course of history, Europeans wrote many books that portrayed Africans as uncivilized and savages. Wars and conflicts in Africa would just be another evidence of Europeans’ accusations. By avoiding civil wars and anything that weights our reputation as African down, we show that we are robust people with strong values. We should stand up for our continent and develop it. We should develop our factories and medicines so that we can save the millions of children dying of Malaria and HIV. We should create techniques so that people who in live poverty can have better lives.
Some people may argue that the people of our country should have more responsibility because we share same history, and make up great part of our identity. In other words, it means should patriotism overpower continental citizenship. What mostly people don’t realize is that patriotism is prejudice, and it is very wrong of us to base our morality in the eyes of an unjustifiable idea. Patriotism is prejudice because it makes no sense to support one country over another country when both are in the same continent. Because of strong bond that colonization formed between us, we are brothers, and love should fill our gaps. Similarly, it is a weak argument to say that my first obligation should count a citizen in the world. There are two objections to this. The first objection is the idea of identity. The world doesn’t contribute a lot to our identity, but our continent does since we interact more with the people of our continent in terms of language, and economy. The second objection is that there many actions happening in the world that we are not proud of. One of the citizenship rights is to stand up things that he/she is not proponent of. But as a global citizen am I bestowed upon those rights? What special rights do I have, to become a global citizen? Citizenship comes with special rights and global citizenship doesn’t carry those rights, so it can’t be our first obligation.
After analyzing all the impacts, experiences and interests that as Africans we share we came to the conclusion that we are people who have same goals and dreams for the continent. Colonization took a great toll of our energy, and destroyed many aspects of our culture. In some African societies, the culture of people almost went to extinct because of schooling and group of missionaries. Europeans took away the time which we should develop great medicines and factories. They crated conflict between us so that while we fight they can run way with our natural resources. We realize that what is best for us is to make techniques to terminate all negative impacts of colonization including identity-cards. We can only do this if we are united, and help each other.