A Decolonial Approach of Indigenous Identity in Africa

Abstract

European African studies traditionally deny the existence of indigenous communities in Africa, even though in the same way as the American continent, Africa was once too a region colonised by Europe. The new social and historical identities created under the coloniality of power, endure in the political and academic imagination to the extent of negating the current indigenous status of a large proportion of African nations. This issue is of great relevance in contemporary international politics due to the resurgence of the idea of indigenous identity on a global scale and as a response to modern capitalism. Particularly, following the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the General Assembly in 2007. My objective of this article is to deconstruct the historical processes that have resulted in the current denial of the existence of indigenous peoples on the African continent as part of a decolonial project.

1. Introduction

In traditional African European studies and many African policy areas, it is common to deny indigenous status to a large number of African indigenous peoples. However, like the American continent, Africa has been a region colonized by the Europeans; both territories have been subjected to white colonial oppression and their technology of exploitation/domination. Both territories have been geographically and politically constructed by European imperial power. In contrast, only the first peoples of the Americas are recognized as indigenous people questioning the status of most African communities. At present, only the first peoples of the Americas were recognized as indigenous, and very few indigenous peoples in Africa were granted that status, especially in the European imagination of Latin origin. It is even more surprising since the four languages of the colonial forces that acted on both continents—Africa and America—chose the same term to designate the native peoples, i.e., indigenous.

Lastly, in addition to this great paradox, there is the politico-historical context in which the academic discipline has traditionally named and constructed indigenous peoples, that is to say, anthropology. African indigenous peoples played a key role as “object of study” at the beginning of the constitution of anthropology as an area of knowledge and in its process of institutionalization as a scientific speciality. Despite being prominent protagonists as indigenous peoples, especially in the birth of British applied anthropology, ironically, at the end of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first century, they will be denied their right to claim their indigenous status, the same condition that they were invested by the “servant of colonialism” like Talad Assad’s reference to anthropology [1].

In this chapter, I propose to explore all these contradictions in which a large part of the European Academy is located, especially the Latin-based institutions of knowledge, which like other political actors, barely recognize the identity of Native Americans. I aim to unveil the ideology of representation [2] behind these academic positions and the ideas of African and international politicians that hold those postures. In other words, analyze the power of denomination using the construction of knowledge as one of the most powerful tools employed by the imperial apparatus of the representation of the Others colonized.

In the current context of the resurgence of indigenous identity as a political identity of resistance in much of Africa and the international arena, it is particularly urgent to dismantle the genealogy of prejudices of those who reject the existence of indigenous peoples on the African continent. The proclamation of the two International Decades of the World’s Indigenous People, 1995–2004 and 2005–2014, along with the adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2007, has this international space a leading player in this new institutional fact, according to the definition given by Jonh Searle to this term [3].

In order to reach the above purpose, I am going to use different concepts, theories and analyses of the authors who deal with decolonial criticism, making a comparative historical analysis with the aim of deconstructing the processes that have led the current capitalist power pattern to manifest the absence of indigenous people in Africa, thereby perpetuating what has very aptly been called Antonio Quijano [4] the coloniality of power.

This work is based on participant observation that I have been practising at the United Nations (UN) Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII), in New York, since 2005 and at the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) UN, in Geneva, since 2008. In addition, a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of statements made in these spaces by African indigenous peoples, states, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and experts has been carried out. To this must be added the review of abundant literature on the subject.

2. Re-conceptualizing the reality: the first contact of the “colonial disencounter”

Considering that the primary function of theory is to “conceptualise reality”, as mentioned in Ezequiel Ander-Egg’s famous book on social research [5], it is essential to explain and understand the socio-historical-theoretical framework in which this expression of reality is formulated. In our case, it is particularly relevant because our goal is to demolish the social representations that have been constructed for more than five hundred years around the term “Indigenous”. Even though this voice existed before the colonial encounter between Europe and America, it is from this point on that the concept of “indigenous” acquires the modern meanings that persist in the current collective imaginary. That is why our analysis takes this historic moment as its starting point.

In order to help understand the different factors that have contributed to the construction of the paradox I am trying to resolve; I will structure the discourse in three narrative threads that are historically consistent: (1) I will begin by analysing the terms given by the colonisers to the Others colonised in the first contact of the “colonial encounter”, (2) Next, I will examine how different models of colonial administration have affected the naming of colonised Otherness: two Europes, two continents, two historical moments and finally, (3) I will explore the effects of the processes of independence on the construction of the new devalued identities. Along the way, we will be accompanied by the thesis of Aníbal Quijano and other post- and de-colonial authors.

Before I begin, I would like to point out that these three historical causes are not the only ones that have influenced the current recognition of the existence of indigenous peoples in Africa. Factors of political conjuncture in each case have a direct bearing on the issue. Nonetheless, in this paper, I have focused on the importance that historical events have had in the construction of the current Western imaginary that weighs on the indigenous African identity.

The socio-cultural conditions in which the modern identity of the Other so-called indigenous began to be constructed under the “modern/colonial world system” [6]. The capitalist world-system has produced and reproduced the coloniality of power, according to what Anibal Quijano said, creating new historical and social identities—whites, Indians, blacks, mestizos, olives—which, combined with a racist distribution of labour and forms of exploitation of colonial/modern capitalism, articulated a new Eurocentric hegemony based on naturalised identities [7]. Let me take a moment to go through Quijano’s concept of coloniality of power in detail since, although I share the essence of this concept, I differ in some critical nuances that emerge when we apply it to the African case.

Aníbal Quijano distinguishes between “colonialism” and “coloniality”. According to this, there have been many kinds of colonialism, but only one coloniality is understood as “a pattern of power”. The “coloniality” was born with the constitution of America and reached our days expressed in what we usually call globalization. So, globalization was based on the imposition of racial/ethnic classification on the world’s population as a cornerstone of the pattern of power and operates in each of the planes, spheres and dimensions, material and subjective, of everyday social existence and societal level. In his own words, this pattern of power: “It originates and globalizes from America”… With America (Latin), capitalism becomes a world, eurocentric and coloniality and modernity are installed and associated as the constituent axes of its specific pattern of power.” [4, p. 342].

This “specific pattern of power” originated during colonialism as a formal political system and is a structure that perpetuates the situation of domination created under the colonial relationship. The current hegemonic pattern of power, which is developed within the framework of the Wallerstenian world-system [8], was established on two fundamental axes, namely: Frist “... the social classification of the world population on the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination...” and second “the articulation of all historical forms of control of labour, its resources, and products, around capital and the world market” [4, p. 246]. Quijano’s analysis of that “fundamental axis”, which is the concept of race, is especially interesting for our work. A modern mental category codifies the phenotypic differences between conquerors and conquered and produces historically new identities: Indians and blacks, among other categorizations. These new identities were associated with the hierarchies of the colonial domination pattern that is according to Quijano: race and racial identity were established as instruments of basic social classification of the population. Nevertheless, we are faced with an interesting paradox: while it is true that the original peoples of these two continents were called differently at the beginning of American colonisation—blacks and Indians—which led to two singular institutional facts, it is no less accurate that, both in the bureaucratic administrations of the American colonies in the fifteenth century and in the African colonial governments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the same term was used to refer to the other colonised peoples: Indians. As seen below, this issue goes beyond a mere nominal question and significantly impacts today’s reality.

The second axis Quijano writes about is the: constitution of a new structure of control of labour and its resources and products that establishes a new, original and unique structure of relations of production in the world-historical experience, i.e., world capitalism. This world structure was mostly established through the creation of two institutional facts: “(a) native serfs = Americans; (b) black slaves = Africans in early American colonisation”. [4, p. 247]. However, centuries later, as Europe has embarked on its modern industrial development, largely thanks to the colonization of the African continent, an African forced labour army that will join its imperial project will also be named “indigenous”. The same bureaucratic term used at different historical points will give rise to different contemporary political realities.

3. Two different ways of naming the other at the earliest moment of the “colonial disencountre”

The saying goes: “Who dominates denominates”, and behind the different forms of naming are hidden centuries of technology of domination; thus, my discourse begins from the very first moment that the modern meanings of indigenous and black identities have started to be constructed. According to this theory, this time comes when the first modern and global geocultural identity called America is created. Next to it, the first identity of the colonized subject emerges, the indigenous identity. Later, blacks, those Africans brought to the Americas to work as slave labour, will become the second modern identity given to colonized subjects. Up to this point, I share Quijanian’s thesis and his powerful concept of coloniality of power, but I dissent with his idea that America was the only place where it emerged and globalized the coloniality of power. From where I stand, Africa, like America, participated in the genesis and globalization of the global pattern of capitalist power. The “modern discovery” of the two continents by Europe takes place simultaneously; both are used simultaneously in the new worldwide system in which triangular trade is constituted; although they will indeed play different roles from their peripheral places. Let us go through these roles in detail. Let us reflect on the discursive arguments that colonial power used to differentiate the two racial categories on which the coloniality of power was founded, which Aníbal Quijano finds irrelevant. We will find the different roles played by these two new racial categories and their idiosyncrasies.

Bartolomé de las Casas, in his famous theological, juridical and philosophical defence of the capacity of the native Americans to possess reason and soul, left out the enslaved black Africans. However, he did indeed dedicate some lines denouncing the situation of the black Africans in America and defending their freedom. These were scarce and very discreet [9]. At no time did the Catholic Church have as its policy the defence of the freedom of black slaves; proof of this can be found in the various papal bulls and decrees of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries against the enslavement of Native Americans and in favour of African natives [9, p. 13]. This allowed for the further dehumanisation of the black African slave in relation to the indigenous American serf. Above all, it gave wings to the most significant bloody exodus in human history: the Atlantic slave trade.

A few years before Christopher Columbus landed on the American coast, the Portuguese Henri the Navigator landed on the African coast looking for gold and slaves. The voyages made by the Portuguese during the “Age of Discovery” during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries not only served to expand European knowledge of Africa but also initiated a process that would transform European thinking about Africans. As with the Americans, the background to this transformation of African people was the transatlantic slave trade. Africa, along with America, is “discovered” by Europe. Relations between Africa and Europe existed in the past, but there was still no coloniality of power. They were not “modern” relations, as they were later constructed by Europe.

A few years before Christopher Columbus landed on the American coast, the Portuguese Henri the Navigator landed on the African coast looking for gold and slaves. The voyages made by the Portuguese during the “Age of Discovery” during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries not only served to expand European knowledge of Africa, but also initiated a process that would transform European thinking about Africans. As with the Americans, the background to this transformation of African people was the transatlantic slave trade. Africa, along with America, is “discovered” by Europe. Of course, relations between Africa and Europe existed in the past, but there was not yet coloniality of power as such; they were not “modern” relations.

The context for this transformation in the image of the African people was the transatlantic slave trade. Slavery had been a prominent feature of classical Mediterranean culture and continued in various forms in medieval Europe. It also existed in the Muslim world, including North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. However, the Atlantic slave trade during the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries caused the forced migration of 12 million Africans to the Americas, which forged an explicit link in European minds between racial inferiority, slavery, blackness, and Africa in many ways, the modern idea of Africa emerged from the crucible of dehumanisation of Atlantic slavery, and this had different consequences from what A. Quijano points out about American indigeneity.

This difference between African blackness and American indigeneity was created and perpetuated institutionally until the beginning of Europeans’ penetration of the African continent. That was at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then, the effective colonization of African lands required the abolition of slavery and the official end of their Atlantic trade, which has been replaced by the exploitation of forced labour on the black continent. Africa moved from a slave-producing continent into a quasi-slave mode of production continent, what it meant to move from slavery to servitude. Servitude under slave conditions in most cases, but servitude after all.

Quijano indeed reported that Castilla’s crown decided early on the cessation the slavery of the Indians, as he argues: “to prevent their total extermination” [7, p. 249]. Nonetheless, this author does not value the arguments used in constructing these two distinct identities created by the coloniality of power. From the very beginning, these arguments helped construct the collective imaginary that would emerge around these two subaltern identities of the colonized Others: indigenous and black. For the subject under study, I consider the reasoning used to distinguish between the African black slave and the American Indian servant is particularly relevant because those arguments were the cornerstone upon which the “ideology of representation” was based. This “ideology of representation” was imposed by the colonial power with the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. As a result, the boundaries between these two modern identities—black and indigenous—were marked, and the constructed pre-judices persist in the European collective imagination, especially in the Latin one. Currently, we can clearly hear the echoes of this “ideology of representation” that persist in the pre-judices of many of the political and academic discourses about these two racial categories: indigenous versus black.

Less relevant but no less curious is the erroneous assertion of Quijano when he states that “only the Spanish and the Portuguese, as the dominant race, could receive wages, be independent traders, independent artisans or independent farmers, in short, independent producers of goods” [7, p. 249]. In Africa, certain native elites played a role that cannot be ignored. A few black Africans engaged in the slave trade, trading with European slaveholders in exchange for manufactured goods. Therefore, whereas black Africans in America certainly did not act as independent traders, the same cannot be said of Africa at the time. An Africa that was still unexplored and much less colonized.

To sum up: under the original designation in the American colonial encounter of differentiating between Indigenous and Blacks, it hides the need to maintain slave labour—black Africans—for the exploitation of the American colonies, without which there would have been no possibility, or it would have been quite different. In the same historical period, Africa was initially conceived by the Iberians and later by the rest of the Europeans as a breeding ground for slave labour. The subaltern status of African identity surpassed in time and status the indigenous category given to the natives Americans. As a modern geo-cultural identity, Africa was constructed based on the greatest contempt for the human condition, a mental structure that would leave an indelible mark on the Western imaginary. From the nineteenth century onwards, with the penetration of the African continent and its resulting effective occupation, the colonial administrations named “indigenous” all the colonised subjects of the territory. However, Africans have been living their blackness for centuries on the American continent and the coasts of their own continent.

4. The significance of the colonial administration model and its impact on the denomination of colonized otherness. Two continents: Africa and America; two Europe: Iberia and Western Europe

European explorers, more precisely the Iberian ones, landed on the African and American coasts around the same decade, but the African continent’s penetration took place many years later, well into the nineteenth century, as the Berlin conference met in 1884–1885. Let us not forget that the Berlin conference was held in 1884–1885; by then, the Americas had nearly four centuries of colonial administration behind them. However, African colonisation had not started. During that time, Africa suffered the drain of the Atlantic Trade, but we cannot speak of colonial administration until the nineteenth-twentieth century. The Europe of the “scramble of Africa” was a very different Europe from the pre-modern Iberian Europe of the early American colonisation. Even though global capitalism was colonial/modern and Eurocentric from the very beginning, as defended by the authors of the modern global system [8].

According to A. Quijano, with the creation of America, a second geo-cultural identity called Europe was created: a historically new region that emerged “as the central seat of world market control”. Although, he also recognises that “in the same historical movement there was also the relocation of the hegemony the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and the Iberian coasts to those of the north-west Atlantic” [7, p. 249]. So, geographically and temporarily speaking, two different Europes dominate the other colonised one by naming it. Both use a single term in their colonial administrations: indigenous.

However, despite the coincidence in using the same signifier, the imaginary constructed on the signified differs substantially. The Mediterranean Europe of the first colonial encounter with America is an agricultural Europe, where traditional or charismatic Weberian rationality predominates more in its colonising logic, far from the modern rationality of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that will dominate the colonisation of the African continent. In the course of this “second colonial encounter”, the development and importance of bureaucracy as a dispositive of power, understood in Foucault’s terms [10], imposed on the administration of the colonies, will play a transcendental role. In contrast, the church was the central dispositive of power during the first encounter in Mediterranean Europe with the Americas was the church. On the contrary, the colonising Europe of Africa is the Europe of the thoroughly modern industrial revolution, whose logically formal legal rationality and patriarchal and heterosexual of its bureaucracy were fully developed. Of course, the brutality and violence of the invasion of the territory are common to the “two Europes”. The three Weberian logics of domination are present Even in both imperialist processes. By contrast, the development of formal legal instrumental power achieved during the nineteenth to twentieth century is far from what was realised on the Iberian Peninsula during the fifteenth to sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

This last feature is highly relevant, particularly when it is a question of creating what Quijano calls a new global intersubjectivity as part of that “pattern of world power” [4, 251 p.]. Though it is true that “with America, a whole universe of new material and intersubjective relations begins” in Quijano’s words, I consider that this new “intersubjectivity” will not fully develop before the development of this typically western mode of rationalization that Max Weber described in his work [11]. The application of the formal legal logic that governs the new hegemonic centre of power constituted in Western Europe will be the one that governs and helps “the control of all forms of control of subjectivity, of culture, and especially of knowledge, of the production of knowledge.” [4, 251 p.] and will be applied in all its glory during the African colonization.

I believe that Quijano’s analysis of how modernity and rationality were imagined as European products is far from satisfactory. Much more detailed and accurate seems to me the one elaborated by Max Weber [11].

Let us remember Weber’s four ideal types of social action and his three types of domination; only formal legal rationality occurred in the West with its industrialization. Formal rationality involves the rational calculation of means to ends based on universally applied rules, regulations, and laws [12], especially in economic, legal, and scientific institutions, as well as in bureaucratic forms of domination. Formal rationality is institutionalized in such large-scale structures as the bureaucracy, modern law, and the capitalist economy. The choice of means to ends is determined by these macro structures and their rules and laws. It was the same rationality that reigned in the administration of Western Europe, prevailed in the academic world, and dominated the capitalist system. We must keep in mind that Weber thought that in social reality, both forms of domination and types of rationality were not given purely but that elements of one or the other were found even if one dominated. Weber is talking about ideal types that are models or the type of social action that dominates society. Even so, formal legal rationality could only be found in the West and along with the birth of modern capitalism.

The modern scientific disciplines born in the heat of the new rationality originated will collaborate, constructing the imperial power and dominion over the Other cultures arming arguments to the epistemicide they will carry out. Anthropology played a crucial role, a product of this particular form of rationalization that contributed to constructing the ideology of representation of this colonized Other. Alongside the other “sciences” which supported it, anthropology occupied the epistemic place of the enunciation of colonial power, that is, as the space where the knowledge of colonial power is created and expressed: Its place of enunciation. Under his “universal reason”, he created the regulating fiction of the human/animal, masculine/feminine, here/there, rational/irrational and many other representations of his modern/colonial world-system, including that non-rational otherness which their/he called indigenous or black. They relegated subjects categorized as indigenous or blacks to the corner of the primitive, savage and barbaric, invalidating them as gnoseological subjects. En ocasiones, la antropología fue más allá y colaboró con los gobiernos coloniales. Specifically, applied anthropology, in hits consolidation as a Scientific discipline, received the British Government’s support for hits service in the overseas colonies [1]. From India to Africa, anthropology served to power to “solve the problems” to which indigenous societies were affected by the new influences due to the modern colonial encounter [13]. Now, as a university discipline, anthropology did not consolidate its status until the Second World War; but that was not an obstacle that prevented it from participating in the creation of the rules of imperial representation of the Others African indigenous. To the imaginary constructed on the devalued native American alterity is added the weight of being underdeveloped of the industrial era, more primitive if it fits in the scale of western evolution [14].

This typically Weberian legal rationality also existed in all fields of the new colonial administrations. French direct governments and British indirect governments named the other colonised African: indigenous. All the fully capitalistic colonial authorities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used formal legal domination to exercise their rule, which led to structural changes in African societies. This typically Weberian legal rationality also existed in all fields of the new colonial administrations. French direct governments and British indirect governments named the other colonised African: indigenous. All the fully capitalistic colonial authorities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used formal legal domination to exercise their rule, which led to structural changes in African societies. The creation of local “tribal leaders” [15] and forced internal migrations where there was not enough labour to exploit the resources of a wealth-hungry Europe completely altered community life. Colonial authorities used customary laws to enforce native policy [16], making their social engineering a true example of typically Western Weberian rationality and often with the assistance of applied anthropology. Not only were ethnic groups or political leaders created, but the link between authority and power possessed by traditional African leaders was broken.

These “new traditional leaders” chosen by the colonial government will acquire a power that did not exist until then, while local authority will continue to be exercised by religious or other leaders. In this regard, I would like to clarify that before European colonisation, the political organisation of African societies was not only in the hands of tribal leaders. Far from it, political power as a social concept reaches subtleties that are difficult to measure, and African societies are as diverse as their territory is vast. I only want to highlight the colonial administration’s disruption of the “traditional” social organisation of African communities and the changes related to authority and power. This disconnection between power and authority will go crescendo, and the consequences will be difficult to foresee in contemporary Africa. For example, Patrick Chabal writing about “the politics of being” in Africa, talks about the need for “modern” politicians to use “traditional” authority in order to satisfy the demands of the “traditional” world in which the political leaders themselves also belong [17], 65–68 pp.

Summing up: A Western Europe that started its industrial revolution creates and applies the technology of domination—the formal legal rational bureaucratic apparatus—more complex and sophisticated than the one constructed by Iberian Europe, agricultural and far behind the modernity of the north. The representation of this colonised indigenous Other in both Europe differs significantly, to the point of denying indigenous status to the African due to comparative offence with that “first” image created under the colonisation of Mediterranean Europe about “the indigenous” in America. To this subtle difference, which Quijano does not include in his analysis, between the two Europes—agricultural and industrial—we could add the effects they have had and continue to have on the recognition of the indigenous African identity, depending on how this formal legal-rational domination was applied in the different models of European colonial administration. What we call direct or indirect governments, and their variations have had an impact on the prevalence of an indigenous African identity up to the present day. This other historical condition will result in a greater or lesser obstacle on the road to recognising their political identity.

For example, it is interesting to note that most African indigenous peoples from British colonial administration tend to have less difficulty in recognising their indigenous identities, such as the Maasai (Kenya, Tanzania), the Ogiek, the Samburu, the Turkana (Kenya), the Cushite, the Nio-Hamite, the San (Tanzania), the Himba (Namibia) or the Khoekhoe (South Africa). On the other hand, fewer cases of indigenous identity are recognised in African countries under the French administration. However, the forms of colonial domination were more complex than the simple classification of “direct” or “indirect rule”, so a case-by-case study is mandatory. The variability of the cases and their historical particularities make it difficult to elaborate a universal proposition on this question, which also goes beyond the purpose of the present chapter. In this paper, I only want to point out the need for a historical analysis of colonial administrations if we are to understand better current attitudes to the recognition of indigenous identities in Africa.

5. Independent processes and reconstruction of postcolonial identities

We move on to the third narrative thread: how new contemporary subaltern identities have been influenced by how colonial subjects were named and named themselves during the processes of independence. The leaders who participated in the new nation-states and their nationalist discourses have had, and continue to have, a notable influence on the construction of the identities currently claimed by the collectives living within their national borders. While on the American continent, it was the white elites, mainly the colonists themselves, who led the process of independence from the metropolis in Africa, it was the African elites—albeit occidentalised ones—who led the process. Occidentalised or the new occidentalised class refers to the acculturated African social group, knowledgeable in the colonisers’ languages and prepared for the tasks of administration or economic management. Introduced to Western logic and behaviour, this social group was a necessity of the coloniser who had the collaboration of African sectors who saw in their rapprochement with European power the possibility of improving their social positions. From this group came conformists and Protestants, but for all of them, nationalism would be the theoretical expression of the occidentalised, as Ferran Iniestas rightly points out [18].

As a consequence of this, the white American pro-independence elites had the need to preserve in their nationalist discourse the distinction between a differentiated white “we” and an indigenous “they”. An indigenous “they” was used as a national symbol, although not included in the emancipatory project. In the African case, the “we” of the African independence elite is constructed by the occidentalised black African, where there is no place for a “we” other than the indigenous “they”. The elites of the new national governments will declare: “In Africa, we are all indigenous”.

By the 1950s and 1960s, most African countries had become independent, resulting in a new change in the internal organisation of African societies. The gap between authority and power created under the colonial rule will widen with the creation of nation-states with complex and unpredictable consequences for contemporary Africa. Previously exercised by colonial “tribal leaders”, Political power will be replaced by modern nationalist bourgeois leaders, the so-called occidentalised. Whether rebellious or conformist, this black elite will be educated under the modern rational eurocentric hegemonic model and will constitute a qualitative and transcendent change in the interpretation of power in the “new” African national societies. Many of them educated in Western universities, this new social elite—the occidentalised—led the struggles for independence in Africa.

Over the years and with the birth of nation-states, indigenism became an instrument at the service of the new national identity, a tool to destroy the multiple local identities. Korsbaek and Sámano have referred to this political instrument as state indigenism that hides or shows integrationist, assimilationist, paternalistic policies [19], that is, the use of indigeneity to integrate them into a single national identity. That will be the same state indigenism that will lead most African states NOT to recognise Indigenous Peoples in their territories under the claim that “we are all indigenous in Africa”.

The Western-educated male elites will lead this national integrationist discourse, while millions of subalterns will continue their silent resistance. Their voices remain silenced until they encounter new transnational spaces of demands in which they can once again raise their voices. The years of oppression by the old and now new economic, political and cultural powers, together with the disillusionment with the grand narratives of modernity—Marxism and nationalism—that were at the centre of the first anti-colonial struggle, began to take root in the social consciousness of the natives.

New post-colonial identities and the re-signification of the “old” ones that had been dormant or manipulated up to that point are emerging. A qualitative change has occurred in the meaning of identity, in the meaning of “being indigenous”. Colonial history and the processes of independence of the new states will play a transcendental role in recognition of this collective subject called indigenous in what some authors have called the Second-wave indigeneity [20]

6. Conclusions

In this chapter, I have tried to unravel the historical ideological and political burden that hides the denial of the existence of indigenous people in Africa. African indigenous peoples have been adapting to the harsh circumstances that have come their way: first to European colonisation and later to nationalist policies of integration and assimilation. As indigenous peoples, they are confronted with the forms of domination brought about by developing the global pattern of capitalist power. However, new spaces of resistance are opening up in the complex pattern of power.

Nevertheless, new spaces of resistance are opening up in the complex pattern of power. At the end of 1993, and following the recommendation of the World Conference on Human Rights, the General Assembly proclaimed the first International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People (1995–2004) to be followed by the Second International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People (2005–2014). During this time, spaces of global confluence have been created where Indigenous Peoples from all parts of the world come to express their demands and their subordinate situation. The result of the joint work between them and other institutions is the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, approved by the General Assembly in 2007. In the meantime, significant linguistic changes will also occur as a result of the confluence of the various forms of resistance of peoples that remain under the yoke of colonisation. This second wave of indigeneity assumes that decolonisation is an unfinished process and indigeneity is a politics of resistance [20], 2 p.

The most serious error in which those who deny the indigenous status of Africans is to interpret identity from an essentialist perspective. To consider any identity as an immanent being is to continue reproducing the coloniality of power. It is as foolish to understand indigenous identity in an essentialist way as it is to conceive of Western identity in the same way.

Like all current indigenous identities, indigenous African identity is a political, postcolonial, contemporary, and global identity [14] that forces us to take a constructivist approach. Indigenous identity is political because it is constructed under and through social conflict. As such, it can only be explained within the socio-political contexts in which it emerges. We must consider the struggles and the power that constitute them. As a collective identity, it generates consciousness in and for itself, expressed in a differentiated “we”.

On the other hand, the adjective postcolonial is particularly significant in our case, as it places us in the geographical and historical context. Geographically, it places us in the territories conquered by the colonial power and historically, it places us in the process of colonisation [21]; this adjective is relevant because of the centrality that the immaterial social fact of colonisation acquires.

Also, being a contemporary identity means that it could adapt to current political conditions. The term indigenous has travelled through time, acquiring different meanings. While for centuries, marked by colonialism, “the Indian” in its subaltern condition has undergone a process of pejorativisation, today it is being re-evaluated. In the process of exaltation, the new Planetary Indigenous Social Movement has re-semantized the old indigenous category positively, endowing it with identity pride and directing it towards the conquest of cultural and political self-determination. A struggle strengthened after the approval of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 by the UN.

Furthermore, it is a global identity since it has suffered and suffered with different collective subjects around the globe the experience of colonisation. From their different realities, they agree on a different way of being in the world, cooperating with other counter-hegemonic actors of the organised global resistance, whose objective is to respond to the global hegemonic power. The new Indigenous being emerged from the dialectic of colonisation. They claim their right to relate, imagine and think of themselves as a collective subject that puts into practice its own mode of representation after centuries of colonial repression and in response to the collective identities invented by the West.

The integrative function that nation-states were intended to fulfil is diluted in the new globalised world. “New” imagined communities are re-emerging in the international arena with new conceptualisations of the world that are more transnational than Western [21]. As part of this so-called Fourth World, the indigenous cultural minorities reappear on the global stage. Devalued Otherness during years of equalitarianism is now re-signified in the identity process, and it becomes the ontological desire, the desire “to be” at the “Age of difference”. It is not simply that postcolonial critique denounces the new material and cultural conditions to which the subalterns are subjected, but also that those marginalised, subjugated memories of colonisation, those memories of minorities, alter-native counter-memories [22], are now re-written by the colonised subaltern subjects helping them to re-establish macerated pride. Postcolonial “new” political identities sprout re-constructed through new identitarian pride [14].

The imperialist social engineering used under African colonisation, based on a more complex formal legal logic than that which initiated the coloniality of power in the Americas, makes the cases of African Indigenous Peoples particularly difficult. The imperial social order of European colonialism has left an inheritance to African indigenous peoples that overshadow and further obstructs the tortuous path that can lead them out of the subaltern place to which they have been relegated. To reveal the condition of subjugation in which they have been displaced, we have to study the historical context and the processes of domination. To this must be added the complex reality that dominates the ongoing globalisation: aided by today’s economic powers, new actors reproduce the global pattern of capitalist power more strongly.

Moreover, nevertheless, in the heat of the new social movements of resistance, African Indigenous Peoples are breaking through, staging the history of the West entangled in the webs of their own language. A terminology that talks about the structure of capitalist power, they were told they were slaves; they were told they were black; they were told they were subjects of kings they did not know; they were told they were indigenous, without knowing what it meant; they were told they belonged to a state and had to comply with its borders and its laws, laws they ignored; now they say “we are”, in a struggle they never gave up.