African solutions to African problems: Let's not confuse matters

By Rachel Nyaradzo Adams

A few days ago a colleague sent a piece that challenged the slogan: African solutions to African problems. In it she interrogated the validity of the slogan and argued that Africa needed to take a more global view to addressing its problems. A response is necessary because, with all due respect, I think the premise of her argument is faulty.

Firstly, to reduce the call to Africans to find their own solutions to their own problems to an argument about identity is very limited and speaks to a terrible tendency of reducing all matters to do with Africa to identity politics. I have always understood the call for African solutions to African issues to be a positive development because it acknowledges that we have some semblance of intelligence within us to be able to start exercising agency with regard to our own problems.

Secondly — it is also a positive and in fact a critical step because it is a challenge to our leaders — whether it be business, political, social or religious leaders, to stop making excuses for their lack of performance and start using initiative and innovation to come up with solutions and strategies that will leapfrog our continent to greater heights.

Thirdly, the idea that African solutions to African problems necessarily means that the global world should be excluded from conversation and participation is a false notion and a denial of the fact that there are many sensible Africans who value the contributions that non-Africans have made to the continent. And if we are to look closely at these contributions, the ones that have been truly sustainable have been the ones that have sought to understand, from Africans, the processes and approaches that would work best within African environments. I have recently come out of a conversation with one of the most successful social enterprises in the world who sought Africans’ perspectives on how their social enterprise could work in a peculiar environment like ours. Their motive: to seek an emic understanding of the socio-geographical issues because their “solution” would not work as well without the consult and collaboration of African people.

That for me is what African solutions to African problems means. It means that whether the original idea came from abroad or from within, that there has been collaboration and shared participation of African and global voices in coming up with sustainable solutions. It means that Africans engage with global developments and seek counsel on how we could make these developments work for us. It also means that we mine talent, real talent not irrational leaders claiming to have some semblance of talent, and invest in that talent so that our own can also bring their ideas forth.

It means that we create our own science and technology fairs where we can showcase the real work that committed Africans are doing to address environmental and technological challenges in their backyards. It means that the private and public sector start putting funding into African researchers so that their work can get visibility, exposure and thus peer review across the globe. It means that funders start to put resources into our media, arts and crafts so that Africans can more effectively start telling the complexity of their own stories and bring some colour and balance to the one-sided stories that currently dominate the world’s media.

African solutions to African problems means that we start rethinking our education systems and how their failure to teach both entrepreneurship and in fact the value of the slogan African solutions to African problems, means that our younger generations keep believing that they can never be their own solution to their own problems.

Will we get it wrong sometimes? Absolutely. As have so many developed regions before us. But that should not be held against us. Those failures should be used as impetus to take us to the next level. That’s what entrepreneurship is about — and there are many Africans that are practicing this right now. If we do not allow ourselves to play with the idea of African solutions to African problems, we will never take the kinds of creative risks that are pivotal to our growth and development as people.

I fear that my colleague has paid too much attention to those who have abused the slogan so that they could blame colonisation for all our problems. In that process she has ignored the fact that the slogan came into popular parlance after the 1994 Rwandan genocide where the international community looked on and African leaders learned that they had to take responsibility for their own issues. Have they learned the lesson? Evidently not! Does it make the slogan invalid? I am afraid not. I have engaged in conversations where the purist view that only “Africans” can solve their own problems has been explored and it becomes very clear, very quickly, that the argument is limited.

I also find it interesting that my colleague chose to argue that for the slogan to be valid, truly African solutions must be based on what she seems to suggest is a pure form of African philosophy, culture, religion and values. There is no such thing and her reference to globalisation is exactly the proof. Anthropologists have for a long time been trying to teach us that purity of culture has never existed anywhere, ever! The faster we begin to understand this, the faster we cease to assume that when we refer to something or someone African, we speak of some insular, unadulterated concept of being and living. Africa has been participating in and acknowledging the global economy for centuries, albeit on the back foot for a significant portion of that time. It is our responsibility as researchers and thinkers to stop taking colloquial understandings of important arguments and using them to undo their value. This is what I feel the previous writer did.

For me, and I hope for more people, African solutions to African problems is not about identity politics or about shutting the rest of the world out. African solutions to African problems is a proactive demand for a sense of responsibility and commitment from our leaders and from ourselves. It is a call to public service and contribution to the health and wealth of our own people. It is about giving the current and next generations ambition and permission to dream, to be creative and to exercise our agency in formulating solutions that we believe in and that will work for us. It is about participation in a global world and a recognition that African solutions will also be global solutions. It is what most sensible Africans are already doing anyway.

African solutions to African problems also means that we stop foregrounding identity politics so much and start recognising the power of tapping into the global creative genius for the solutions that we seek. After all the rest of the world has been tapping into our creative genius for so long.

Think about it!

Rachel Nyaradzo Adams is an anthropologist and a leadership development practitioner. She is also the founder of CATALYSTS, an organisation created to inspire individuals to dream and to turn their ideas into real projects through intellectual and strategic support. She is a Desmond Tutu Associate and lives in Johannesburg.