Africa and the Question of Revolution

The question is and will be posed in a particular way on the African continent—therefore, it is on the African continent that the most profound conquest of truth, of trust, of faith, must occur.

(reading time: about 10 minutes)

“Heavenly Father, we thank You for the gift of life.”

When called to pray before a gathering, in public or in private, many (Protestant Christian) Kenyans will often begin with these ten words. Some do so out of habit; some do so because they have seen others do so; and others do so because they are grateful to be alive, because they experience life as a fragile, fleeting, beautiful thing that could easily have ended the previous night. They experience life as a gift.

And yet, as the years pass, it seems that it is decreasingly obvious to an increasing number of Kenyans that life is, indeed, a gift. Substance abuse and suicide rates can often serve as a rough proxy for “despair”: substance abuse, like suicide, is often an escape from reality (as in the phrase “drowning one’s sorrows” in alcohol). A 2017 study by the National Authority for the Campaign Against Alcohol and Drug Abuse (NACADA) seems to show a slight reduction in substance abuse over the previous five years, but suicide rates, while relatively low, are rising. (“Relatively” here means “in comparison with Europe and the Americas”.) The rate of induced abortion is “relatively” very low, and the great majority of Kenyans opine that abortion on demand is wrong and should be illegal. But alarmingly, over half of all married women in the country use modern contraceptives, and the fertility rate is declining steadily—United Nations projections expect it to drop below three children per couple in just five years. Among those with a university education, it is more frequently true that, as an older acquaintance of mine, a woman, said recently, “I’ve learned that, these days, I should stop assuming that young women aspire to have children.” And fewer and fewer young professionals see marriage, let along child-rearing, as desirable—at least, not in the near future.

Though these trends are, on the whole, not dramatic, they are indicators that a view of life as a gift is slowly dwindling. For what else could it mean when children are desired less—when the beauty and wonder of a newborn child, a new creation (!), is less and less recognized? What else could it mean when more and more men and women no longer yearn to love a new life into existence? As the value of children comes ever more into question, it becomes urgent to ask what seems like a revolutionary question: is life a gift?

The Revolutionary Question is a Question of Revolution

At first sight, asking this question may seem to be a self-defeating exercise. First, those who most need to hear the answer to the question often fill their senses and their minds so much with the noise of constant stimulation—incessant and frenetic music, endless series, and idle chatter in between—that they do not let themselves hear the question. They often do ask the question, deep in their hearts. As a friend of mine once confided after downing one too many bottles, beneath the unceasing exterior activity and hollow laughter, “I don’t know if happiness is possible.” But they do not confront the question. Of course, the question does merit a healthy fear, if its implications are properly understood—even though it is a fear worth confronting. The one who asks, “Is life a gift?”, if he does not see the answer, may very well be afraid that the answer will turn out to be, “No. Life is not a gift, but an emptiness.” The deepest truth of reality would be, then, not benevolence, but indifference. And if he is consistent with himself, he will arrive at the following conclusion: “I am a curse. I should not exist. No one can truly know me, as I am, and delight in my existence.” Indeed, something like this lies behind the desperate sadness or anger of many suicidal men and women.

But the question may also appear self-defeating for a different and more profound reason. “Yes, life is definitely a gift!” we may say. But why? Why is life a gift? Perhaps we would then point to reasons for gratitude: you woke up this morning, you have a bed to wake up in, you have a roof over your head, you have food on your table, you have a job, so and so is your friend, etc. However, as we have already seen, many people look at all these and many other reasons for gratitude and conclude, nevertheless, that life is not a gift, but a burden. Faced with each of these reasons, one may ask, “Why is that a gift?” Confronted with what seems to be the dark and terrible burden of a lonely existence, one may ask, “Why is it a gift that I exist?” Ultimately, it seems that there is something that they just do not see, something that they just cannot perceive about life. To put it differently, the question seems unanswerable unless one already knows the answer. The affirmative “Yes” to the question can only be perceived to be true by the one who has already accepted it as an answer. In the face of life, with all its lights and shadows, one either trusts in life, or doubts it. One either trusts or doubts in being. Not that this is always, or even often, an explicit choice—not at all. But as more and more people doubt that life is worth trusting, the fundamental nature of trust is revealed. Therefore, we may rephrase the question, “Is life a gift?” as “Why should one choose to trust in life? Why should one trust in being? And why should one trust in Being, with a capital ‘B’, in God or a god or gods?”

This is, perhaps, the most primary question of the modern Western civilization—and, therefore, a question that we should not be surprised to hear during Africa’s continuing encounter with Western modernity. It was the question of Descartes, that revolutionary philosopher who sought to make philosophy a field of inquiry as clear-cut and certain as mathematics and the physical sciences, when he chose not to trust that what his senses perceived was truly real. It was the question of Hume and his spiritual sons in the English school of analytic philosophy whose notion of logic has powered the “digital revolution”, those men and women who say that general ideas like “man” or “woman” or “law” or “cow” or “tree” do not tell us anything about the world, who look only at how our ideas relate to one another and whether these relations enable us to produce effects outside ourselves (like the “1’s” and “0’s” of a computer), and no longer believe that it is worthwhile to seek to know what things are. It was the question of revolutionaries who turned away from any figure of authority, be it in the area of knowledge, politics, or religion, because they trusted not in any thing or person beyond themselves, but only in themselves and in their own reason. It is the question of today’s revolutionaries, longing for a utopia free from all notions of the past, a utopia that is the fruit of their hands and their minds and their hearts, a utopia in which they can create even their own bodies. It is the question that the Pontius Pilate within us asks: “What is truth?” In a word, it is the question of revolution.

This is why the question is self-defeating. As soon as one profoundly asks whether we can trust in being, or that what we see is even real, he is looking to justify trust by reason. He is seeking to reduce the transcendent object of trust to an immanent being of reason, to cram the world into the narrow confines of his cranium. To ask the question is already to answer it. Trust is just, but not justifiable. Trust makes sense, trust is reasonable, but it is not grounded on reasons.

Revolution and Trust on the African Continent

At this point, we can return to what we saw just a few paragraphs above. To trust in being (and in Being) is to say that, at its heart, the world is a gift, or even a giving—even with all the suffering that it entails. And not to trust in being is to say that the world has no meaning in itself, because its meaning can only come from the turning of the gears of our minds. Not to trust in being is to hold that the meaning of the world can only come from ourselves. And since we would have no meaning in ourselves, neither would the world. Neither past nor present has any meaning, and the only thing that resembles meaning is the future that we are creating. “What is truth?” we would scoff with Pontius Pilate. We would live for revolution alone.

At the basis of every encounter with truth lies trust. Trust is the fundamental response to truth. Trust is the horizon within which live sense perception, the apprehension or “vision” of the natures and reality of things, and logical deductions. For we must trust that what our hands touch is real, that what presents itself to us as real is real, that it is indeed possible for us to arrive at truth. And if we are to live according to the truth, we must trust in the truth. Indeed, to live according to the truth is to trust in the truth—as Socrates did, willing to be executed rather than deny the truth that he perceived and the spirit (the “daimon”, in Greek) that urged him to seek the truth, serving as a model that would be raised to an infinitely higher degree in the Christian martyrs of all ages, from the Rome-persecuted martyrs to the martyrs of Uganda under Kabaka Mwanga II, from martyred missionaries among the Goths to the martyrs of Auschwitz and the Middle East, who were willing to die rather than deny the love of their lives, the One who is the Truth.

Here, we begin to approach a response to the observations with which this essay began. To be truthful, to incarnate the truth in our thoughts and words and deeds, is to trust in the truth. To be truthful is to be faithful. And our own fidelity is founded not on our own decision to be faithful—that would only be a form of not-trusting in the truth—but, rather, on the trustworthiness of being, and ultimately, the faithfulness of Truth Himself. Thus did God reveal Himself to the Israelites, as a Father who keeps His promises, a Bridegroom who does not renounce his unfaithful Bride, and as One who gives good news to the poor.

In this respect, Achille Mbembe makes an interesting observation. In the introduction to his book, Brutalism, he looks at the economic and political systems of the world and suggests that Africa (in general), now as before, experiences more than others the rough side of the machinations that ensue at the tables of the mighty when they presume to shape the entire world for their personal profit. Those who seem to believe that power is the primary force of history [that we should trust in ourselves and not in truth] tend to strive to make the world ever more manipulable, in an ever more profound way, and across ever greater breadths of space. While this state of affairs is extending across the globe, it has long been the case in sub-Saharan Africa, and to a greater extent than other geographical loci. For this reason, he says (and I paraphrase), the question of trust is and will be posed in a particular way on the African continent—it is on the African continent that the most profound conquest of truth, of trust, of faith, must occur. Where suffering abounds, there must Truth conquer even suffering, that it may be seen that Truth has the final word—is the ultimate Word—and that Truth alone gives meaning to history.

Sons and daughters of Africa, do not be deceived by glittering lights! Do not let your hearts grow faint in the heat of the desert! Listen to the faithful “Fiat! Let it be done!” of the Blessed Virgin!

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is in the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of the drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”