Not so long ago, I attended an interesting Dar Al-Maraya publishing house event, where they introduced the British-Nigerian historian Hakim Adi, author of Pan-Africanism: A History. A book they had just published in Arabic—translated by Muhammad Abdel Karim.
By Emad Aysha
Typically, I had to chip in from a sci-fi perspective. I noted how works of SF, written by white authors, depicted Abdel Nasser in the most beastly fashion possible as some power-hungry tyrant trying to gobble up large parts of Africa. The audacity of these people, as if Europeans are more friends of Africa and black people than the pan-Arabists.
I was referring specifically to John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, but I had found similar allusions in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. More importantly, however, and I said this during the discussion, I found the same image of Egypt and Nasserism in books about the Israeli intelligence services, not least written by Israelis.
These SF writers were probably regurgitating pro-Israeli propaganda (about the Arab-Israeli conflict) devised to drive a wedge between Arabs/Muslims and Africans to the clear advantage of the Western colonial heritage.
The guest speaker had previously noted how Israel supported Western imperialism in Africa and then, following my query, debunked the whole idea of the Arab-Israeli conflict by saying that the real issue is that of the self-determination of the Palestinians. The so-called conflict has to be re-perceived in global terms.
That’s the trick, the secret recipe for progress if you ask me. Science fiction plays its part in reconceiving our identities to chart a course for a better future. A student once asked me how to solve the conflict, and I’d zeroed in on identity and conceptualising Palestine – even from a legal standpoint.
Palestinian negotiators had to stop thinking in terms of creating a nation-state and instead protect the Palestinian population and their holy places. That is, as opposed to building a state that was a state in name only but had no substance as far as its basic functions were concerned.
Attending this talk, you found that the same held true of African and Arab identities. Dr. Idi wanted consensual rule in Africa, but he wanted it to be African, not stock imitations of Western political systems. What was the point of becoming independent if all you did was what your colonisers did before you?
African leaders explicitly said all they needed to do was take over the states instead of focusing on opening up borders. Since then, African unity hasn’t even been in the school curricula.
As Muslims, we also want our political systems to fit in with our values and legal system. The pan-African dream lives on in the form of Afro-futurism and, with that, political as well as ecological systems.
Wole Talabi, speaking at a panel at WorldCon 2023 in China, gave two Afrofuturist examples. One was from a story where nanobots were inserted into everything in nature, including the sand and soil, monitoring everything and feeding it into an AI machine. Whenever anybody wanted to do something straightforward, like buying a plot of land to build a house, they’d have to get permission from the machine after it calculated the ecological impact of such an enterprise.
He also gave an example from an actual political system in Africa, where the king had to persuade his ministers of a policy or law. If he failed to persuade them, he would have to take his own life.
BACK TO BASICS: Author Hakim Adi [right] and translator Muhammad Abdel Karim [left]. Photo taken by yours truly at the aforementioned Dar Al-Maraya event.
The whole point of the Black Panther movie, something many Western observers and critics didn’t understand, was to have a traditional system of governance that was also modern and up-to-date. It also counts as a democracy because the king is regularly challenged for the throne through armed combat by a rival candidate. None of these rules are written down in a constitution, which is true enough, but the British political system doesn’t have a constitution either.
The lesson we draw from history is that what works works. There’s no reason to be sticklers for detail, and the ultimate guarantor of a political system's success or failure is people—the eternal vigilance of the citizenry and ruling elites themselves.
Watch Caligula, and you will find the Roman nobles themselves putting up with the mad dictator, despite his indiscretions against their women and gods, because it means keeping the empire together and all that means in terms of wealth and power. Just watch Napoleon, the disgraceful movie that it is, and you will have a very surreal but accurate scene where they go to Napoleon and 'beg' him to become their dictator.
It makes perfect sense in their minds since a ruler’s job is to secure the realm against foreign enemies and keep the country together through a firm hand. The nobles do the real everyday job of rulership, from collecting taxes to keeping the peasants in order. And they did overthrow him in the end after he fouled up in Russia.
As for Arabs, we need to re-conceptualize ourselves in a pan-African mould, too, the one good thing Libya’s mad dictator Qadafi ever did. He understood that unless we get into the African Union, we’ll be swallowed up either by the Europeans or the Mideasternism pushed by America, with Israel at the centre.
Dr. Idi himself noted how there were debates in the AU about whether Arabs could and should be considered Africans, and I happen to agree. Arabic, as a Semitic language, is Afro-Asian, and for all we know, the Semites themselves may have originated in Africa (or Central Asia), so we’ve got nothing to be sticklers about.
To quote the great Egyptian sci-fi advocate Ragi Enayat, "Before you can go forward, you have to dream, and before you can dream, you have to know who you are!"
