Page 160 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Beyond Nationalism
democracy to challenge elitist democracy. African American studies and politics that
glorify African monarchies or chiefs need to reconsider their positions, because these
African elites and their biological or ideological descendants have been engaging in
the destruction of Africa by participating in the slave trade and becoming collabora-
tive classes or “global pimps” that have contributed to the underdevelopment of
Africa. Even Afrocentric scholars who claim to place Africa at the center of their
scholarship ignore various African democratic traditions and focus their studies on
monarchies like most Euro-American Africanists. Those Africanists, including most
African scholars, degrade African democratic traditions just as their Euro-American
counterparts do. Describing how Ethiopianists degraded the Oromo democratic sys-
tem known as Gada by considering Oromo society “stateless” prior to their coloniza-
tion,Asmarom Legesse asserts that “since monarchy was in decline in most of Europe,
and the transition to democracy became the epitome of Europe’s highest political as-
pirations, admitting that some varieties of democracy were firmly planted in Africa in
the 16th century when in fact they were not fully established in Britain, the United
States and France until the 17th or 18th centuries and in some part of Europe as late
as the middle of the 20th century would have made the ideological premise of the
‘civilizing mission’ somewhat implausible.The idea, further, that African democracies
may have some constitutional features that are more advanced than their European
counterpart was and still is considered quite heretical.” 56
Recognizing the existence of various forms of democracy before Africa was parti-
tioned and colonized and challenging Euro-American - centric scholarship that ra-
tionalizes and justifies ethnonational stratification can help to develop a
human-centric and original scholarship. Learning about Oromo society, with its com-
plex laws, elaborate legislative tradition, and well-developed methods of dispute set-
tlement, and about the Oromo nation struggle can present a new perspective for
African and African American studies and politics.African Americans and Oromos can
ally with each other on global level by exchanging political and cultural experiences
and re-creating the ideology of pan-Africanism and global solidarity based on the
principles of popular democracy and egalitarian world order.
Scholars have a responsibility to challenge current assumptions that function to
keep racialized/ethnicized states in power. Misleading assumptions about indigenous
or dominated peoples and their movements must be exposed. It is important that the
world community be informed about the danger of allowing the existence of double
standards for humanity based on the criterion of race/ethnicity. Most existing liberal
and Marxist historiographies do not adequately explain the phenomenon of oppressed
nationalism and fail to develop a comprehensive and critical theory of nationalism.
Since the subjugated ethnonations mainly engage in cultural and political struggles as
a means to dismantle hierarchical racial/ethnonational relations, there is urgency for
understanding problems and struggles for human liberation.There cannot be durable
world peace without eliminating the root causes of these conflicts and achieving the
liberation of the repressed sectors of humanity. Currently, world peace is maintained
by force. One thing we need to realize is that peace maintained in this way is tempo-
rary and not durable.We have important lessons to learn from Great Britain, which
one time boasted that “the sun never sets on the British Empire,” and from the Soviet
Union, which aspired to control the whole world.As England lost its empire and its
hegemony, so the Soviet Union, despite its massive nuclear weapons and its illusive
“socialist” ideology, recently lost its satellite states.Today, the core of the former Soviet