Big-up Everybody!

23,Aug 1999
'People are standing up everywhere to let their ethnicity and cultural differences show as a form of protest against what in reality is their marginalisation on a world scale'

We said elsewhere that one must be mindful that "the world of the 21st century is radically different to the world of the '50s and '60s", and whereas then, the required historic mission was "to transform the system of colonial relationships, to establish an indigenous sovereign nation state with the specific task to facilitate economic transformation and political development in the context of a world threatened by the probable devastation from nuclear warfare, intense Cold War, polarity between East and West and the delicate balancing of a non-aligned Third World Movement, today, that world is now no more."

And we painted the realities of today's world in the following words: "Multi-national corporations have bridged East and West and North and South, following the dictates of capital accumulation and wealth generation. The need to continuously extend and deepen markets has transformed the world into a global village.

The nation state, which before was the objective of all struggles, is now being viewed as irrelevant, as a hindrance to further development with all its attendant laws, regulations and fiscal barriers to economic transactions.

"This demand of capital for a global village brings to the fore new levels of people's demands for political and cultural sovereignty and ethnic distinction; the very counter to the idea of being reduced by economic necessities to a general sameness, to a common cultural denomination within a global village dominated by North American technology and Americanisation." The cultural and religious militancy portrayed by Islamic and Hindu peoples, the resurgence of Pan-Africanism and anti-Eurocentric African philosophy all over the world today, are each a direct result of the imposition of the dictates of globalisation. People are standing up everywhere to let their ethnicity and cultural differences show as a form of protest against what in reality is their marginalisation on a world scale.

That is the general tendency in the world today as distinct from yesterday when generally people seemed comfortable with the dominant culture of the North. That kind of absurdity of long ago is what serves today to foster ethnic nationalism, "the cry to re-establish without any doubt who we are, the crucial need, as the youths say today, to 'big-up weself!' and which must be addressed by all serious social and political leaders of today."

It means, therefore, that "a cultural policy as part of one's political programme is a must.

Politics must come to terms with people's genuine fears and concerns as well as their hopes, ambitions and aspirations. Moral judgments are not to be made against ethnic nationalists. To do so is to engage in religion, not politics.

The new politics must determine how we intervene in all the various social milieu, how we engage each and everybody, in order to transform their vision unto a more positive and enlightened world view. We must start where people are and take the process from there.

The lesson for us all is that the universal lies within the specific and vice-versa. What allows for development, what allows for genuine education as people seek to interpret their own experiences and pose their own solutions, is the process of democracy itself. People learn from their self-activity and their self-organisations. That is all we know and all we ever need to know.

In the language of the youths, we say "big-up everybody!"