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Re-membering is fundamentally a process of recovery and restoration of history. It entails the painstaking processes of re-humanising and humaning. Archie Mafeje (2011, 31–32) captures the centrality of this process when he posits that ‘we would not proclaim Africanity, if it had not been denied or degraded; and we would not insist on Afrocentrism, if it had not been for Eurocentric negations’. One can safely state that such re-membering initiatives, ideologies and movements as Garveyism, Ethiopianism, Négritude, African Personality, African Socialism, African Humanism, African Renaissance and many others emerged within a context of realities of dismemberment, and existed as props developed by the dismembered across time to help in the re-membering process. With specific reference to the Négritude movement as a re-membering initiative, Léopold Sédar Senghor explicitly stated that theirs was a form of ‘return’ to black humanism after centuries of being taken through the French assimilationist colonial project (Senghor quoted in Bâ 1973, 12).

The Négritude movement was part of the broader search for identity within a context of dismemberment. Thus, we are now in a better position to state categorically that Wole Soyinkas' critique of Négritude quoted at the start of this chapter, namely that a tiger does not articulate its ‘tigritude’, was misplaced, as it ignored the context of dislocation and alienation in which the movement had arisen. Négritude was one of the earliest re-membering initiatives. Cheikh Thiam (2014) correctly understands Négritude as an early expression of an ‘Afri-centred’ conception of the human, one that was consistently critical of a Western universalisation of the human that excluded those with black pigmentation. Négritude was propelled by Césaires' ‘tormenting questions’ referred to at the start of this chapter: ‘Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this world?’ (Césaire quoted in Thiam 2014, 2).

But at a global scale, and in black peoples' struggles for re-membering, the epic Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 has to occupy a place of pride. In the first instance, this earliest black revolution defied the Eurocentric, colonial and imperial idea, evident in so much Western philosophy, of denial of the humanity of black people (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018b). It turned upside down the racist myths of a people who were naturally slaves, and who were said to be unable to develop any notions of fighting for freedom simply because they were not considered to be rational human beings (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018a). When enslaved blacks revolted on a large scale in the form of the Haitian Revolution, it became one of those events that were ‘unthinkable’ for those who had convinced themselves that black, enslaved people were naturally slaves and had no capacity to rebel. The second significance of the Haitian Revolution is that it was not only part of the unfolding modern history of slavery, racism and colonisation, but that this revolt of the enslaved challenged ‘the iron bonds of the philosophical milieu in which it was born’ (Trouillot 1995, 74).

Any acceptance of the fact that enslaved black people were up in arms against the system of slavery amounted in Western thought to acknowledgement of the humanity of black people. Europeans in general, and speculative plantation owners in particular, were not prepared to concede that they were faced with a people claiming their denied humanity. The Haitian Revolution indeed posed a difficult philosophical and intellectual problem for Western thought: how to think about and conceptualise black revolution in a world in which black people were not considered to be rational and human in the first place? This is why ‘international recognition of Haitian independence was even more difficult to gain than military victory over the forces of Napoleon’ (Trouillot 1995, 95). The most important but silenced significance of the Haitian Revolution is that it led to the collapse of the entire system of slavery, and constituted a major chapter in the history of re-membering of black people. It was truly an anti-systemic revolution, one that occupies a place of pride in the anti-systemic revolution marked by the definitive entry of the enslaved and colonised into modern history, as human beings opposed to all forms of dismemberment.

The Haitian Revolution forms an important base from which to articulate what Wa Thiong’o (2009a, 35−36) underscores as ‘re-membering visions’. It laid the foundation for such other formations as Ethiopianism and Garveyism. Wa Thiong’o (2009a, 35) notes that at the centre of Ethiopianism and Garveyism lay ‘the quest for wholeness, a quest that has underlain African struggles since the Atlantic slave trade’.

Since the time of the Haitian Revolution and later that of Marcus Garveys' International Negro Improvement Association, those human beings who have been designated as black have continued to fight for their freedom and for the recovery of their denied humanity. Pan-Africanism emerged as one broad re-membering initiative that developed from the time of William Sylvester, who planned and hosted the first Pan-African Congress in 1900, to W.E.B. Du Boiss' series of Pan-African Congresses, to Kwame Nkrumahs' struggle to unify Africa into a Pan-African Nation. In the USA, black people launched the civil rights movement as part of these initiatives. Re-membering initiatives have taken intellectual and political forms. At their centre has germinated ‘the African idea’, as opposed to the idea of Africa: ‘the African idea as the quest for freedom on a Pan-African scale extended from the diaspora to the continent and back again’ (Wa Thiong’o 2009a, 75). The African idea captures the efforts of Africans to define themselves, as opposed to the idea of Africa invoked by Valentin Y. Mudimbe (1994) that speaks to external definition of Africa and Africans.

Linking the question of blackism on a world scale to specific re-membering activities on the African continent, the period from the 1950s to the late 1960s was dominated by struggles for political decolonisation and the emergence of ‘post-colonial’ states. The major challenge to re-membering initiatives continues to be the active global imperial designs (Mignolo 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013a, 2013b). As noted by Grosfoguel (2007, 219), political decolonisation amounted to what he terms ‘the most powerful myths of the twentieth century’ because the withdrawal of direct colonial administrations and juridical apartheid did not ‘amount to the decolonization of the world’.

The admission of the so-called newly independent states into the United Nations simply symbolised their accommodation in an existing and un-decolonised Euro-North American-centric world system and un-deimperialised global order. This was not what re-membering entailed. These so-called newly independent states occupied the lowest echelons in an asymmetrical world system. The new world economic order that was demanded by those who had fought against colonialism did not materialise. As noted by Nkrumah (1965), neocolonialism emerged as a form of coloniality, in which the so-called independent states became entrapped in global coloniality.

At the internal level, the African leaders who had spearheaded the anti-colonial struggle displayed deep-seated ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’, to borrow a term from Fanon (1963, 98), and the consequences were what Basil Davidson (1992) terms the ‘black mans' burden’ of simply reproducing what had been invented by colonialism and imposing it on Africa. The nation-building project as a re-membering initiative was problematic, and it failed. It failed partly because the leadership that took over the state at the end of direct colonial rule were products of the same colonialism they claimed to be fighting against, and partly because of forms of mimicry involving imposition of external templates as policy on Africa. For example, these leaders imposed the Westphalian template of a tight correspondence between the nation and the state, whereby each modern sovereign state was understood to be a nation state comprised of a people who shared a common language, culture and identity, on Africa (Laakso and Olukoshi 1996, 11–13) − a continent characterised by multiculturalism, multilingualism, multiple identities and multiple religions − revealing how entrapped they were in the thinking of global coloniality. And it was not only the project of nation-building that failed. The Pan-African project itself failed, as territorial sovereignty informed by narrow nationalism was privileged over pan-African unity. The inherited economies of the newly independent states had collapsed by the beginning of the 1970s, because neocolonialism actively reinstated relations marked by coloniality in which the agents were local bourgeois classes in charge of the state. Taking advantage of this desperate situation, agents of coloniality such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund presented themselves as the cure for African problems, and they literally took over the policy space in each country as they prescribed Structural Adjustment Programmes to be adhered to by the national governments (Cheru 2009).

To confront this economic colonialism, which took the concrete form of dependency and debt-slavery, organisations representing African people, including the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), later renamed the African Union (AU), and the United Nations General Assembly (UN) produced a number of nationalist, Pan-Africanist inspired economic frameworks, ranging from the Revised Framework for the Implementation of the New International Economic Order in Africa (UNECA 1976), the Lagos Plan of Action For the Economic Development of Africa, 1980–2000 (OAU 1980), Africas' Priority Programme for Economic Recovery, 1986–1990 (OAU 1986), the Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation (UNECA 1989), the African Charter for Popular Participation in Development and Transformation (UNECA 1990), and the United Nations New Agenda for the Development of Africa (UN 1991) to the New Partnership for Economic Development (NEPAD, AU 2002). These economic initiatives ‘were opposed, undermined, and jettisoned by the Bretton Woods institutions and Africans were impeded from exercising the basic and fundamental right to make decisions about their future’ (Adedeji 2002, 4). Adebayo Adedeji (2002), who worked as the Executive Secretary General of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, described the colonial matrices of power at play in imposing exogenous ideas and policies on Africa in the 1980s and 1990s as a ‘development merchant system’.

Thus, in this chapter we posit that Africa entered the 2000s limping and still dismembered (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018b). The African Renaissance, which was spearheaded by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, was meant to provide a discursive framework for the post-2000 re-membering Africa initiatives, but suffered when Mbeki was removed from the presidency in South Africa by his own party, the African National Congress. Among the other re-membering initiatives was the conversion of the Organisation of African Unity, formed in 1963, into the African Union, on 9 July 2002, as part of the galvanisation of the African Renaissance. NEPAD and the African Peer Review Mechanism, as well as the opening of the Pan-African Parliament in South Africa on 18 March 2004, constituted the other concrete initiatives formulated under the aegis of the African Renaissance (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013a).

However, after Mbeki left the political scene, the African Renaissance lost one of its most committed advocates. At the continental level, it would seem that the optimism which accompanied these initiatives was based on an incorrect diagnosis and a misunderstanding of how the Euro-North American-centric modern world worked. The developed and industrialised Euro-North American states were never prepared to be genuine partners of Africa. They are beneficiaries of the asymmetrical structure of the modern world system and its global order. We posit that coloniality, as an active global power structure sustaining the dominance of the Global North over the Global South, was somehow forgotten by African leaders.