About the concept of Ubuntu

As an ideology, Afrocentrism provides a vital reference to black political thought in the United States; but in this, it can reproduce the same defects as Eurocentrism, thereby losing its own meaning. This is a problem of transcendentalism in general, as a nature of the idealist tradition, which funds modern philosophy; and which determination is serious, as hermeneutical, because of this reproduction of the defects that gave rise to it.

In this sense, the so-called African or Africanist thought only has its object in Africa, but not its nature; given in the interpretation of African traditions, but with the ideological instruments of that idealist tradition. That is the problem, because it distorts the original meaning of these African phenomena and objects, in a Western sense; perpetuating relations of cultural subordination, such as Christianity, in that function of political ideology.

In short, if Christianity served the objects of economic domination, ideology is the new capital; which in its political nature, allows the manipulation of the popular masses, subordinating them to the social structure. As an illustration of this, there would be the elaborations that interpret the concept of Ubuntu in a humanistic sense; a term of Bantu origin, restricted here to its ideological connotation, as political and social, not properly ontological.

That is the difference, since in its original context, the concept of Ubuntu is a complete ontological category; whose connotation is the social projection of the individual, but which is only possible for him as an individual. As a concept, Ubuntu can be traced through the mystical tradition of the Congo culture, in the dikenga; the cosmogram that synthesizes Bantu cosmology, and in which it functions as a category of human excellence.

However, the concept is problematic there, as part of a parallel tradition to imperial absolutism; which it justifies, in that same transcendentalist sense of European idealism, with which he coincides functionally. This is what is interesting, because these imperial formations are not natural to African tribalism; no matter how much the scholars brandish it, mimicking Western political structuralism, because of its identity complexes.

Like Congo imperialism, there was also that of Mali, Oyó and Dahomey, all equally transcendentalist; founded on a supremacy of the state, which emulates European absolutism, of the Richelieu-Mazarin doctrine. In the face of African imperialism, there is the greater naturalness of its tribalism, in a geronto-democratic model; more efficient than that of Western democracy, avoiding the oligarchic character of the latter, based on wealth.

That is what changes in the transition to postmodernity, with the transformation of capital, from financial to political; with the importance of the intellectual specialization of the middle class, in the justification of its class interests. This would be what lies behind the supposed political leadership of Afrocentrism, made up of an academic elite; that is, a specialized middle class, which seeks to define the interests of the popular class, without participating in it.

It is this elitism what can afford the luxury of transcendentalist elaborations, which ultimately defend its interests; which are of class, in the same type of determinism of which they accuse the bourgeoisie, with which they compete. Hence elaborations such as this one, which reproduce that distortion of transcendentalism, typical of the West; focusing political expression on a transcendent idea, such as that of the Common Good (Kant), rather than on an immanence.

As proof, the new boom in the ideological use of this concept comes from Monsignor Desmond Tutu; who in the Anglican tradition —not the African— responds to Christian Humanism, which is the foundation of the entire crisis of the West. We should remember that Anglicanism inherits the Christian exegetic tradition, as a science specialized in doctrinal interpretation; that justifies the political object in its transcendence —hence transcendentalism— with the reference to tradition.

From Tutu's undeniable —but Westernist— teaching, there are countless scholars given to these elaborations; but all of them come from European institutions, although they brandish African objects for their own justification. The difficulty responds to the hermeneutical nature of its contradiction, in the development of Idealism; by its subjection to the successive dichotomies of dialectics, which are nevertheless fallacious and unnecessary in their artificiality.

Ontological Pragmatism of African Origin, from the Epilogue to MogiNganga

The parallelism of the Greek and African cosmogonies is curious, although by confluence rather than direct influence; like in the rivalry of Olokun and Obatalá for control of the world in Ifé, as in Poseidon and Athena for Athens. In the Greek case, Athena defeats Poseidon by proving her usefulness, granting the people the power of judgment; in the Yoruba case, the judgment is of the divinities themselves in their sufficiency, and Obatalá wins it for his intelligence, not his usefulness. The Yemallá of popular tradition —collected by Rómulo Lachatañeré— synthesizes this conflict as existential; like the original Yembó, a sterile farmer woman, who receives fertility as she adopts Shangó, son of Obatala[1].

In this sense, the historical figure of Shango is that of the unpopular tyrant, condemned to suicide for his excesses; which he must undertake by the hand of his wife —with her as nature—, given its own scope as a political expression. This would not be a symbol of moral value —as from historical transcendentalism— but an existential dynamic; by which in its realization, as a political expression, the human being cannot overcome his individuality; and acts according to his interests, first individual and therefore as a class, corrupting that transcendentalism.

That is why its nature, at the height of its contradictions, produces its structural crisis in as a political expression; but existential in this critical sense, because of the contradiction of its immanence, in that transcendentalism. As a historical figure, assimilated to Yakutá, Shangó thus reorders the meaning of the pantheon, inaugurating the political; who’s potential then lies in Oggún, unfolding the cosmic drama in tension with him, through Yemallá.

Like Shangó —but unlike Oggún— Yemallá is a historical figure, assimilated to the divinity of Olokun; referring to the end of the age of the Erumales[2], more conceptual than the Greek cosmogony at the end of the titanic age. As an example, the personalities associated with Shangó are also associated with politics, or at least with its pretensions; but they are in themselves tragic and controversial, tending to the violence and existential frustration of this realization.

In an explanation of the example, a primordial myth of Shango explains its tragedy, similar to that of Heracles; bringing himself the misfortune of his house, with the careless manipulation of his powers over lightning, causing his madness. Note that, with Shango as a historical figure founding the political expression of the real, this is born of water; reproducing the dynamics of the Bantu cosmogony, although not in a consequential but converging, in parallelism.

That would point to a practicality, as not arising from nothingness but from the formless, like the Greek Chaos; whose first current connotation is in the wild, the Mount (Mayombe) as the spirit (Elán?) that expresses itself in the real. As a space of effective and non-symbolic value, this is the transcendent city of literature, in its referential function; from the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev. 21:1-2) to the City of God, which ranges from Platonic Idealism to the humanism of Thomas More.

In that same function, but symbolic (political) rather than as a efferent, it appears in contemporary literature; in the transcendentalism of the so-called Magical Realism, from Santa Monica de los Venados, Macondo and Nueva Venecia. However, contrary to those previous cases, this space is not an abstraction (Eidos) that culminates the real (Power); but its Potential, to which the real turns in search of its references, which are existential, not political determinations like the former.

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[1] . Cf: Rómulo Lachatañeré, El sistema religioso de los afrocubanos [Oh, mío Yemallá!], Ed. Ciencias Sociales, La Habana 2001. // It should be noted that, contrary to Lachatañeré's mestizo and popular origin, Cuban ethnography is mostly the work of whites of bourgeois origin.

[2] . Erumale means radiance in the Yoruba language, explaining the emanationism of this cosmology, with the erumales coming from the absolutivity of God, while the orishas (Igbamoles) come from the Igba (güira) formed by Obatalá and Oduduwa.

Against modern thought

The idea that modern capitalism arises from English industrialism, eludes its origin and support by the culture; which had been expanding since the discovery of the so-called New World, flooding the market with sumptuary objects. This expansion, prior to the technological revolution, would determine the consumption habits, stimulating industrialization[1]; as a culture that is not only consumerist, but also dependent on that consumerism, in the artificiality of its economic organization.

As a culture, with its own political expression, this would be what distorts the modern understanding of culture; already in crisis due to its own hermeneutical contradiction, with the political specialization of its middle class, as an intellectual. Neither capitalism nor the bourgeoisie would be then a modern phenomenon, defining the West culture since ancient times; when the expansion of Phoenician trade —outside its own regulatory framework— reshaped the Greek political stratification.

It will be the intellectual specialization of this middle class, with modern commercialism, what will provoke the crisis; and this comes from the political —not economic— conflicts of the transition to the late Middle Ages, with the Carolingian Renaissance. That Carolingian renaissance would in fact be an extension of the Merovingian, but lacking a middle class to become a cultural expression; that only appears with Louis VI in the twelfth century, in his strategy against the expansion of the Angevin empire; and that is why it takes its reference from that Carolingian period, as the closest instance of its political legitimacy[2].

Then, Modernity, with the fall of Granada and the discovery of the New World, would not be an original renaissance; but a reordering of the old one, explaining the postmodern persistence of the feudal political structure; including the tying to the gleba (land), by which citizens cannot move freely between countries. All this implies that modern thought —from Descartes to Kant, Hegel and Marx— develops as a political fiction; hermeneutically conditioned by its economic dependence, on both the aristocracy and the crown that funds it; explaining the period as a progressive disorder, rather than as a cultural order properly speaking.

Hence, the crisis in which Modernity culminates in the nineteenth century is not exactly political but anthropological; surpassing in this that of the Roman Empire —which survived in the Byzantine— and that of archaic Greece; to resolve itself in a postmodernity, which only marks the establishment of a new order, like that of the Germans in Rome. To understand this phenomenon, it is then necessary to overcome its determination, which is hermeneutical; not economic, because the economy only makes possible its historical realization as a political expression, but does not determine it.

Hence, any renewal of the structure will come always from its popular base, ethnically defined in an identity; because this identity is what provides them with the referents of their needs, as existential instead of political. This will reshape that hermeneutic, in its political framework as an order in disintegration, due to its dysfunctionality; but without its determination, given that marginality for which it had resorted to his identity, rather than to political convention.

None of this can be understood by modern thought, as dialectic and not trialectic, creating an epistemological loop; for which it can understand history, but not its determination, which is transhistorical, as a condition of reality. Hence this insufficiency, from which all its projections are contradictory but in dichotomies, not trichotomies; because of its incomprehension of the transhistorical nature of the real, structured in its immanence, not in its transcendence.

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[1] . It refers not only to gold and silver, which facilitated mercantilism by flooding the markets, but also to consumer goods, such as tobacco, alcohol and sugar, which are not as important to existence as English wool, which they displace.

[2] . It refers to the formation of cities under royal protection—with a bureaucratic structure—within fiefs under Angevin jurisdiction; referring to the entity formed by the County of Anjou and the Duchies of Aquitaine and Normandy, owned by the English crown. It’s from this function that is understood the pseudo-aristocratic character of the middle class; because its functional displacement of that aristocracy, providing the State with the new capital of ideology, with its of its intellectual specialization.

Hip Hop

Kendrik Lamar is the latest statement about Hip Hop in the United States, perhaps more than Childish Gambino; but before the two of them, it was a carefree —and therefore existential— way of expressing American culture; which is always that of the dangerous black ghettos, because gentrification has already distorted everything else. In this sense, the guilty silence in the face of the scandal with which Eminem triumphs, on black stages, is understandable; recalling the legend of the King, who is said to have stolen the spirit (soul) from the blacks, to commercialize it, white at last.

No one seems to stop before that undaunted faculty of reality, which realizes itself over the artificiality of prejudices; because Eminem and Elvis would be the proof of a process as surreptitious as it is public, of blackening of culture. The phenomenon is less scandalous —although denied just the same— among Cubans, because of the coexistence in the tenements; which, forced by economic precariousness, does not offer the lateral escapes of the state of well-being, and forces mutualism.

In any case, Elvis Presley's vulgar sensuality and Eminem's white trash violence show the same thing; and it is the existential nature of all transcendence, as a condition proper to the immanent, and not a parallel value. This is the peculiarity concealed by the fiery political speeches of Lamar and Gambino, who are black; because it resides in that precariousness that protests, not in the protest, which is delegitimized by the success of the protesters.

Obviously, as a peculiarity it is also subtle, and that is why it can go unnoticed by the interest of those protesters; who are obviously not interested in the effectiveness of their protest —making it banal— but in the success it brings. This, in fact, is also understandable and legitimate, if in the end precariousness has aesthetic value and in that a commercial scope; even if it loses consistency in the racking, as another trap of God, when it promotes our ethical suprematism.

The truth is that Hip Hop is poetic, because it is the pure and legitimate expression of an existential experience; visible even in that sublimated violence of Destiny Child in Iwant a soldier, already dissolved in Beyonce's divinity. Hip Hop today, like Blues yesterday —and rumba in Cuba—, is the contribution of blackness to the cultural adjustment of the West; and it is no coincidence that they all resolve themselves in a footwork, with which the dance expresses its rhythmic naturalness.

On the other hand, the great speeches of Lamar and Gambino are not made for dancing, or even for reflection; they demand assent —not consent— looking defiantly to see who dares to make any other gesture than their obviousness. They are hypocritical in its uselessness, like the critical Realism of the French with the falsity of their anti-heroic humanism; while, in contrast, the simplicity with which the violent man condescends to the gentle gesture is more realistic and effective.

Hence the poetic efficacy of Hip Hop, so little elaborated that it blushes the snobbery of the damned and lost poets; and for which Cubans should rethink the simplicity of regaetón, whose “reparterismo” replicates neigborishm. With similar subtleties, timba emerged in Cuba imitating the arrangements of black Disco music in the United States, for example; and even a mythical Rob Parissi has no problem acknowledging that Funky rescued him, precisely because of his uniqueness as a white.

It should not be forgotten, the dynamic is due to the reflexive function of poetic act, which never descends into discursive; that is why American television is populated with horror, speaking to emotion and not to intelligence; for if it were truly to speak to the intelligence, then he would have to be honest, and that is only guaranteed by horror. It is not a rhetorical game, but the dramatic value of existential experience, which is always bitter; because as sensible, effective knowledge is based on pain, giving meaning to pleasure and joy.

Bantu persistence in Cuba, another prelude to the MogiNganga

One element slips away its silent presence in the political violence of Cuba's history, and that is its undeniable raciality; it may be invisible today, given the trauma that paralyzed all processes in the country, but latent in its rawness and potential. Of course, even the political trauma of the Cuban revolution exhibits its racial nature, in its own recurrences; but it has also camouflaged this nature of the conflict, with the myth of priorities, avoiding its transhistoricity.

Cuban racial violence would be submerged in politics since independence itself, which was already artificial; if in fact it did not count on the will of the people to redeem, but on the interests of his economic elite, which it legitimized. The first break would occur with the very first conflict of the republic, given its inconsistency, not directly but laterally racial; capitalizing on racial resentment in the face of the apathy and cynicism of that economic elite, which was already also political.

That would not be gratuitous, coming from the arrogance that justified this violence, with its literary and political fictions; which is the perversion inflicted with Martí's martyrology, like a useless Christ in that idealism of the modern spirit. Nor will it be gratuitous that the expression of times and place is Modernism, with its symbolist grandiloquence; surreptitiously perpetuating the postposition of black people, which is the one bringing some realism, in his existential pragmatism.

From there, like everything that is denied, that element will feed on its own negation, growing in its potentiality; not so total as to annihilate the nation, but enough to wash it down, in its impossibility. However, nothing can hide the contradiction, transparent in the inconsistency of the country's projections; and in which, what is frustrated with surreptitious racism is reality itself, rather than the black who expresses it.

The Negro, as a person in whom reality as a human is enhanced, cannot be frustrated in the face of difficulty; but only to remain in that same latency, looking for the way out in which to realize itself as that reality. Racial frustration is here the political trick with which he is manipulated, to tie him in symbol to transcendentalism; which as historical instead of metaphysical, does not offer him any possibility, but is what keeps him unreal.

The conflict then erupted in 1906, with Quintín Banderas, executed by the arrogance of his own naivety; in which, like the mythical popular simple faith of Catholicism, he mocked those he executed, in the name of his executioners. The conflict thus becomes scandalous with the massacre of 1912, but it is insidiously hidden, blaming Morúa Delgado; who covers the bastardy of José Martí, like the cursed inheritance of a nation arisen against the will of its people.

That’s why the conflict is retracted to the crisis of the Batistatos, making it clear that the problem is of a cultural nature; it is transhistorical instead of historical, not of transcendence but of immanence, denying the cosmos that sustains the black; and with it the whole adjustment of the Western culture, as the force in which the Negro would realize himself, if he overcomes the difficult. The peculiarity consists in the double religiosity that permeates Batista's culture, blackened in its popular character; with strong and cunning officials, such as the Coc of Buena Vista, positioned over the corpse of the one from San Isidro.

It is known that Morúa Delgado was a Freemason like Martí, it is speculated if that —unlike him— he could be a palero too; but it is known that Gustavo E. Urrutia was a palero, with fables of cauldrons buried in the gardens of Miramar; signifying, to the horror of Cuban Catholicism, that cultural advance, insidious because of hermeneutical in existentialism. Nor can it be gratuitous that the political violence against Batista was led by the Catholic university students; with a systematicity that provokes a reaction in accordance with its bloodthirstiness, but unforgivable for what it meant.