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Civil
Domains in African Settings: Some Issues
A discussion paper prepared by David Sogge for the Hivos Africa Consultation
in Arusha, Tanzania
June 07-09, 2004
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This paper was drawn
up at the request of Hivos staff1 as a basis
for reflection, discussion and debate, with the hope of enriching interchange
among participants in the Arusha Consultation.
As an idea-in-action,
"Civil Society" has enjoyed a meteoric career in the past fifteen
years. It has given rise to think-tanks, university degree programmes,
foreign aid units with large budgets, a cascade of books and articles
and many seminars -- some of them bringing together grantmakers and grantees.
The roots of this idea and why it has become so prominent today are beyond
this paper's scope. Instead the paper seeks merely to review to some issues
arising in current debates and thereby offer some talking-points about
the idea as applied in African contexts.
If this paper seeks
to probe and question received ideas about civil society in African settings,
it does so under the inspiration of writings such as those by Amilcar
Cabral (1924-1973), one of Africa's leading activist-intellectuals. As
a Cape Verdean Foundation bearing his name recently argued:
More than many of
his contemporaries, Amilcar Cabral valued the imperative of freedom
of thought -- perhaps the first and primordial of the many kinds of
independence. Conversely, he deplored as a source of dominance and manipulation
the denial of confidence in one's own critical and analytical thinking.
For Amilcar Cabral, "To think with our own heads, starting from
our own reality" was a principle from which flows the whole process
of liberation. With this operative concept, he referred to the capacity
to give meaning to our own history. In effect, when we uncritically
reproduce categories for interpreting the world, or simply values foreign
to us, we deny the need to formulate other meanings more consistent
with the reality of our strategic interests2.
The paper is organized
in three parts:
- Concepts matter,
but do they matter in the same way in all places?
- Dilemmas, tensions
and possibilities on the ground; and
- Topics worth probing
and debating further.
1 Thanks are due to
Karel Chambille and Ireen Dubel, Hivos staff members in The Hague, for
their useful observations on earlier drafts. All shortcomings of this
paper rest, however, with the author alone.
2 Fundação Amilcar Cabral 2003, Simpósio Internacional
Amilcar Cabral, Praia, 9 à 12 de Setembro de 2004 (announcement
posted on Internet; translated from the Portuguese).
Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
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