Culture & historical knowledge in Africa: A Cabralian approach

This article will seek to examine the current debates about what some have characterised as an information age, a network society in the context of capitalist globalisation and its socio-cultural and political implications. It will seek to problematise the problem historically and to argue for the continued relevance of the role of history and culture in the shaping of African approaches to the so-called information revolution. It will argue that the dominant perspective on the significance of the communication and information technologies in the African socio-economic, political and cultural processes have been based on the resuscitated modernisation theories and a resurgent neo-liberal ideology which seeks to legitimize the capitalist counter-revolution on a world scale. The re-colonisation of Africa and much of the countries of the South has been accompanied by a crisis whose profoundly devastating effects on humanity are very well known. Debates as to resolve the worldwide crisis have included the role that communication and information technologies might play. It will be suggested that this has resulted in problems that are synonymous to those which Amilcar Cabral and others sought to confront and shape the intellectual tools that guided the national liberation struggle. In the current historical epoch, those intellectual tools are relevant in the struggle for the re-humanisation of humanity. They will be characterised by what Fidel Castro has termed the ‘battle of ideas’. It will be suggested that this will be best waged through the recovery of the positive cultural and historical knowledge of the African people and the selective borrowing and re-adaptation of positive cultural and intellectual tools from other societies. That will result in the liberation of the processes of the development of the productive forces. A liberatory use of information and communication technologies has to be concretized in the socio-cultural realities of Africa.