How Olódùmarè is effectively God

The problem with religious syncretism is its approach from opposites, even based on the same presupposition; which is wrong, trying to preserve religious structures in their purity, not in their functionality. For essentialism it is corruption, and for relativism it is an indiscriminate mixture of unrelated elements; and both positions assume that religions are definite phenomena, not functional systems in continuous adjustment.

But it is this continuous adjustment what gives consistency to the religious phenomenon, as its existential function; which is to regulate the relations of the concrete person with reality, in the reflection of its formal determinations. Hence, syncretism is precisely the development of this phenomenon, as an adjustment of this relationship; whose function is then ontological —and therefore structural—, relating functions of that reality, including the religious person.

So this is not a question of concrete religious identities, but of those functions of reality, conventionally represented; and where, for example, the Abrahamic God is not a figure essentially distinct from other supreme divinities. The difference would then lie not in their metaphysical nature, but in their different representations by the culture; and whose differences are in fact functional, marking that difference of their respective representations.

In that same example, the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition develops in highly institutionalized cultures; where representation fulfills a regulative function of the political and economic order, not merely existential. On the other hand, Olódùmarè belongs to a cosmology where this function is not representable, invokable or personified; that is, it is not subject to representation, because its culture has not developed that conventional institutionalization; so that their representation admits non-conceptual figures, and therefore alien to the logic of human hierarchies.

This contrast, however, is not an absolute opposition to Western rationality, but a functional difference; since this representation is not exclusive to Greek rationalism, but a consequence of its institutionality. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, religion already contracted from its double function, of infra and super-structural, to super-structural; with the political tension on the figure of the prince-priest, in which the former assumes the administration of trade and tribute.

From this transition arises the need for a conventional representation, which allows the management of the divine; in that super-structural function in which it organizes the instituted order, with culture as a transcendent identity. In this context, the equivalence between principles of different traditions is not ignorance or reductionism; rather, it is a structural operation, in which functions are translated, from one hermeneutical spectrum to another; and where hermeneutics is precisely cosmology, as a reflection of the transcendent determinations of the real.

What is thus at stake is not identity nor the names, but the function they fulfill in the cosmological system; in which Olódùmarè is "the vastness that knows the mystery", and God "the creative principle that orders the world". The equivalence does not lie in their respective attributes, but in their position in the ontological structure of culture; and in which syncretism does not fuse Olódùmarè with God out of naivety, but out of structural necessity; since what is at stake is to sustain a cosmology, whose very function is in fact existential and not religious; because the function of religion is existential, as that regulation of the relationships in which reality structures itself.

Thus, syncretism is not a symbolic negotiation, but a structure of survival, which resolves the function of the divine; and it can be said that the critics of syncretism respond even to that determination that they deny, in their representation; since, they must recognize that reductive representation of the divinity as of absolute value, not only epistemic. Thus, syncretism must be understood as an ontological reflection, of functional equivalences, that preserves religious structures; and does this subsuming them in other forms, for their validity lies in the functions they fulfill, organizing the relationships with the reality.

Problems of American Blackness 2/2

In the same sense, the political development of the black American southeast, would tend towards a form of socialism; which, weakened by corporate aggressiveness in economy, will be unsustainable like the African empires to which it appeals. These formations will thus be progressively impoverished, due to the typical unproductiveness of the political model; aggravated by the elephantiasis —also typical— of government structures, as guarantors of economic order.

Although for different reasons, this foreseeable development would be that of cases such as Haiti and Cuba; which respond to the structural weakness of sub-Saharan petty imperialism, due to its dependence on a strong personalities. That would be inevitable, due to its origin on the margins of the West culture, rather than in an effective African centrality; as emporiums of political power, in the growing weakness of the Western structure, with its progressive decadence.

This precariousness is what resembles American blackness, to that Germanic expansion in the Roman decadence; but as a process extended in time, which in Europe was only consolidated in the ninth century, with Charlemagne. In the United States, as the modern culmination of medieval chaos, the nature of the conflict is not warlike but economic; making development more imperceptible, in a political expression that transcends the ideological; but for the same reason it has more effective possibilities —than in Haiti and Cuba, for example—, in its religious nature.

What marks the violent evolution of the European Middle Ages would be the claim of universality of Christianity; which, interfering with secular power, exceeds the infrastructural capacity of local cultures. In the United States that is not the problem, but the weakness of this pretension of its political structure, as liberal; which is therefore resolved in the infrastructural function of the local churches, which is parochial and not transnational.

In the same sense, the conflict seems confessional in principle, like that of the early Lutheran Reformation; but it differs in that it is interdenominational —between Baptists and Methodists— and non-jurisdictional, by its political practices. This conflict would develop surreptitiously, due to the political commitment of the so-called African Methodism; as an instrument of ideological liberalism, in a functionally conservative community, such as the black one. This would be solved with the slow migration —hence the surreptitiousness— from the Methodist to the Baptist church; by the latter's appeal to family culture —rather than to the protection of the state— in its functional conservatism; different from the liberal, as practical and not ideological, in the appeal to its existential resources, given its political precariousness.

However, that will only condition the development, which is favorable to the ideological projection of Methodism; because of its conjunction with government protection, reminiscent of the populist absolutism of Louis XIV in France; respect to which it is more efficient, materializing in a state of well-being, paid for with the public debt. Nevertheless, this will make it possible for alternative structures to emerge, in the face of the problem of unproductivity; that will end up undermining the effective scope of that state of well-being, thus surpassed as infrastructure.

To solve this, Americans would have to turn to their own history, but factual and not ancestral; that is, to find their references in their own historical singularity, which transcends African origin. An example would be the ambiguity of the indigenous wars, which in the Seminole case are also known as black; because of that North American ethnogamous peculiarity, by which blacks share with Indians the path of tears.

However, this approach —as existential rather than political— would be pragmatic and not transcendentalist; hermeneutically detaching itself from the liberal tradition, which sponsors it with its own historical reference, as ideology. Hence those contradictions that prevent the consolidation of a local black culture, in transcendentalism; with the conditioning of the past, which they will partially deny, based on their own founding myth.

An example of this denial would be the historic participation of African political structures in the slave trade; as a contradiction that would separates them from the origin they claim, making it inconsistent as a political expression. Another example would be that of the same appeal to the exceptions, and in general to the Mediterranean area; by which they cannot access the resources of the original tribal organization, such as that of geronto democracy and matrilineality.

Problems of American Blackness 1/2

The problem of blackness in the United States is identity —or lack thereof—, supplemented with its references to Africa; which provides the bases but not the structure of that identity, and much less can it resolve its determinations. It is not that this projection takes place in a vacuum, since it has a basis in the very culture of the American Southeast; whose segregationism is not only political but also due to the swampy geography of the eastern islands; resulting in a kind of New Africa, due to the isolation of the plantations, which made syncretism difficult. However, this will still be insufficient, since it still depends on the negativity of segregation, whatever its cause; not allowing the practical consistency —as positivity— of some economy, even primary, as in the Seminole case.

This is why its expression, as a culture, consists of a political projection instead of an existential one, as an ideology; with the positivist and romantic rational nature of the idealist tradition, which it shares with the liberalism that sponsors it. The problem with this is the artificiality of that liberalism, which actually acts a functional conservatism; since it consists of a vigilance over the individual, to whom it subordinates the community, in that historical transcendentalism.

In the opposite direction, cultures tend towards the same transcendentalism, but they are adequate by their tribal infrastructure; which limits that political determinism with its own cultural consistency, in the power of the family as a private space. Elements such as matrilineality, in the very infrastructural function of the clan, are limits to this transcendentalism; that ignores them in the political conventions proper to the West, such as the community or the common good.

These are values attributed to African primitivism, but never superimposed to its basic tribal infrastructure; but they do constitute in the West its very structure, with its natural reduction of culture to that political determinism. That, for example, was the case with Christianity, when it over imposed itself to tribalism, with the crown of Carlo Magno; as the moment the West culture lost its existential object, in crisis since the imperial efforts of Julio Cesar. It's for a reason that these values reach their conceptual excellence in the West, with figures such as Kant and Descartes; but in a development that starts from the very basis of that transcendentalism, from Platonic to Neoplatonic uranism; which then organized in Christianity, prepares the war debacle with which the West arrives at Modernity to end.

In African tribal primitivism, on the other hand, culture cannot lose its existential function, not even in this determinism; which, lacking sufficient infrastructure, collapses the phenomenon in its very formation, before its apotheosis. This is the case of all the empires in the sub-Saharan area, with the exceptions of Sudan, Ethiopia and Mali, for example; which are explained in their contamination by the influence of Mediterranean culture, including the religious element (Mali). In Congo, on the other hand, like Oyó in Nigeria and Dahomey, this structure cannot survive its own contradictions; because its inability to go beyond tribal organization —as domestic—, resolved in matrilineality.

The references of North American blackness to a primitive African communism would try to make up for this lack; already in that historical and transcendentalist projection of political determinism, but in a conceptual ambiguity. In this sense, they come to legitimize themselves in the exceptionality of the great imperialism, not in the tribal regularity; to which they nevertheless appeal in their ideological function, despite its direct contradiction of exceptional imperialism.

The contradiction is logical, due to the special nature of this political projection, as an ideology rather than culture; by not being on behalf of the popular class, but of an intellectual elite, formed in that patronage by political liberalism. The best example of this case would perhaps be that of W.E.B. Du Bois, probably the most outstanding personality in that segment; but because of its contradiction with black leadership in its popular origin, with figures such as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglas.

To be continued

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.

---

[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.

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.

New Abakua Suite, prelude to the MogiNganga

To Ediel González

Because of false political miscegenation, much is known about Abakuá mythology, but little of its political ascendancy; when it emerged as the Ekpe Society, putting an end to the slave trade, basing the economy on palm oil[1]. The process was obviously more complex than merely political, but it implied a clear purpose of resistance; which is extremely original, since in that same process, the Ekpe society was an emerging, unconventional alternative[2].

In fact, it would be as a result of this that the Calabar region would lose its commercial supremacy, with the railroad; which allowed the relocation of colonial authority to Lagos, without depending on the coastal privilege of the Efik culture. This would undoubtedly demonstrate great maturity and political will, to negotiate a commercial specialization; moving from the assured success of the slave hunt, to an economy of production, not of mere consumption.

This is especially important, conditioning the anthropological narrative, which explained trafficking in culture; without considering that, even if exceptionally, there were degrees of extreme maturity and will in this regard. The same would happen with the Igbo geronto-democracy model, which is common to the Cameroon area; including that Efik culture, and the complex cosmogonic movements with the Efut and Efor, from which the myth Ekpe is taken.

What this highlights is that capacity of this cultural phenomenon in its political emergence, emulating the original crisis; when the decline of the original cult (Ndem), with the development of new lifestyles, broke the social structure. Then, as now, the Ekpe Society was only a mutualist society, interested only in the priesthood; and the latter even with an openly political interest, because of the susceptibility of the traditional priesthood to sorcery; which is what beats in the gender conflict of the founding myth, after the drama of Princess Sikán, of Efut origin[3].

The secret character of the magical aspects of the phenomenon, would be what shows its political, not practical, nature; from the capture of the ekpe in the original ceremonies, producing the sound —but not the vision— that betrays its presence. This is later reduced to liturgical value, strengthening its doctrinal function, in what is already a convention; sufficient to sustain society in its emergence, with a moral code, which legitimizes the individual in his social function.

This would have been the previous cause of Ndem religiosity, due to the social disorganization in the cults of the forest; which empowering the individual with his private practice, returns to that sense with the domestic ascendancy of the female priesthood. As a political phenomenon, the organization of the Ndem cult then becomes entropic, displacing the private potential; which comes to transform itself through the female priesthood, until it also becomes politically conventional.

In any case, what this shows is the political sufficiency of that cultural structure, subsumed by the Cuban one; that in its surreptitious racism, refuses this emergency, since its most serious outbreak in the cabinet of Fulgencio Batista. However, what this process also shows is its inevitable character, as trialectic rather than dialectical; mediating throughout the Cuban internal conflict, as its true backbone, in the resilience of the black world.

---

[1] . Cf: Rosalind I.J. Hackett, Religion in Calabar, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 1988, p 42.

[2] . The Ekpe Society appears as a mature entity by the mid XIX century. Cf: Michael Ukpong Offiong The ancestral cult of the Efik and the veneration of saints, Pontificia Facultad Teológica Teresiana, Roma, 1993., p. 28.

[3] . Cf: Rosalind I.J. Hackett, Op. cit., pp 34-35.

Frantz Fanon against Negritude, the mask

If Leopold Sedar Senghor is the capital figure of Negritude, Frantz Fanon is the reaction that tries to make it revolutionary; an effort in which he ends dissolving it, because it precisely attacks the exceptionality that gives it its meaning. Fanon's dynamic in this sense reproduces that of self-confessed communism, as in the case of the Haitian René Depestre; but it is more interesting than this, because his anti-culturalism is pseudo-culturalist, in his psychological diagnosis of the political problem.

To begin with, it is impossible to have an anti-culturalism that does not participate in the culturalism that is criticized, as it’s determination; the praise of Jean Paul Sartre, the target who rationalizes Senghor's poetics, subordinates it to him, is enough for suspicion. As with Senghor, Sartre seizes Fanon in the prologue to The Wretched of the Earth, imposing his exegesis; which responds to that false universalism of political determination, to which he reduces Marxism even from its economism.

In fact, Fanon's critique of Senghor —about the idealization of the African past— is erroneous and uncomprehending; for although Irrationalist is not romantic, and even romanticism is not historicist but referential in its reflexivity. This type of reduction is recurrent, precisely because of this misunderstanding of that object, in its extrapositivity; clarifying their incapacity, both to understand the real, and to provide a viable solution to their contradictions.

As if in an act of mockery (MogiNganga?), Fanon wears the black mask on the white spirit of Marxism; and gives lessons —although putting the body as a neo-cristical praxis— of how blacks should not be blacks but proletarians. Unfortunately, Fanon does not have the reference of English liberalism, which gives existential scope to W.E.B. Du Bois; his whole life is of a pure praxis, which does not allow him to peer into the paradoxical walls of history, but only to suffer it, at its feet.

Hence his poetic enthusiasm for the second verse of The Internationale, which still moves even its victims; even more so to his revolutionary and practical sensibility, not an intellectual one, exhausted in that pure existence. The mistake is in giving intellectual connotation to the groan of the slave who cannot maroon, believing in the contra mayoral; that Sartre of a ladino Marxism —not theoretical but political— as a monk who weaves theological subtleties about Marian virginity.

Fanon's books are thus only manuals of revolutionary theology, their reference is morality and not intelligence; and Negritude can do nothing in the face of this, because it is not a reality but a necessity, supposed as formal. Negritude, on the other hand, is another extension, not necessary but possible in its own formality, which is therefore not constrictive; instead of rational dogmatism, it responds to irrationalist probabilism, not to the psyche but to poetry, as poetic.

Fanon nevertheless has a capital value, enhancing the hermeneutical density, still necessary, by contradicting it; a function that becomes more amiable in that anti-culturalist pseudo-culturalism of his, instead of the political aridity of Depestre. After all, Fanon does not speak to the wretched of the earth but to himself, as yet another among them, hopeful; while Depestre participates in that elitism of the Haitian mestizo bourgeoisie, without the level of praxis that Fanon exhibits.

Leopold Sedar Senghor, or the Hermeneutical Contraction of Western Culture

In the spirit of civilization, Sedar Senghor stresses the political importance of art, but as a cultural function; not in the discursive sense of W.E.B. Du Bois[1], but of the analogical quality of aesthetic reflection as an existential function. Of course, that is only in principle, and requires the adjustment that makes it functional, in a gnoseological rather than a political sense; in a systematization, in which it already loses that analogical specialty, but is organized in a conventional hermeneutics.

This is what religious thought resolves, in its practical principle, organized in a mythological body; by which it represents an understanding of the real in its cosmic dramas, in relation to the specific culture in question. This peculiarity would then be common to all cultures, resolving the projection of the human as real, in its political expression; but also susceptible to distortion, due to the eventual superposition of that political expression, as determination; which would happen with the inevitable development of this expression, at the basis of its existential practice, as a religious one.

The contradiction is not paradoxical but apparent, due to the diachronic nature of the processes of these cultures; differing in this affectation from one to another, with their successive collisions, as they relate to each other. In the case of the West, the problem would not be in its final monotheism, which reflects —but does not determine— that superposition; but would come from the other development of philosophy, also peculiar, as a specialty of its culture.

The problem with this peculiarity would be in the political function, that this philosophical practice acquires; replacing the religious one, with conventions such as power, in an abstractionist hermeneutic, allowing its economic isolation. This would have caused the political overdimension of power, as a problem of that culture, more than in any other; since in the others it would lack this abstract nature, which allows its ideological manipulation, as the center of its ontology.

As an example, Western ontology is always resolved around the problem of Being; to the point of providing the nomenclature for its reflection, from the second generation of physiologism[2]. This is the problem of the Heracliteo-Parmenidean contradiction, from the preoccupation with the real of his first generation; that from Thales of Miletus to Anaxagoras and Anaximenes, dealt with the real as the mythological tradition, as a totality.

Being, however, is not isolable, not even in its individual condition, making this nomenclature problematic; to the point of confusing the early schools of Arab realism, trying to order the Aristotle's determination of the substance; which own condition is simultaneity, even in the other diachronic condition of these determinations. This is nevertheless compatible with quantum exceptionalism, reconciling even Einstein's doubts in a moderate determinism; treating the real no longer in the conventional abstraction of a nature, as an extension, but as a condition of phenomena, in their punctual realization.

In turn, as a body of cosmological reference, mythology had practical and existential sense, not conceptual; organized into representations, similar —as systematic— to that of Aristotle's determination of the substance; whose realism was a contraction to the efficiency of mythology, as opposed to Plato's idealist abstractionism. This will be what affects the Western religious base, conditioning its realistic probabilism with determinism; solved reflexively with its hermeneutical rationalism, no matter if it is eventually and necessarily contradicted by culturalist eruptions, as Romanticism and Irrationalism.

This is what Senghor's contraction with Negritude is about, as probably the final crisis of that tradition; in which he participates, in his parallelism to the hermeneutical emergence of science, like a postmodern physiologism. For this reason, his recognition of the special function of black art lacks the Platonic sense that it has in W.E.B. Du Bois; but allowing a conciliation with its ontological efficiency, by providing the hermeneutical framework it needs in its existentialism. Du Bois is thus the Hegel of black ontology, making it immanentialist, and Cornel West the Heidegger who explains it; Senghor is then the Marx who gives it political scope, from the anthropological sense of the Haitian Jean Prince Mars; all of them in this contraction, which culminates the hermeneutical tradition of the West, in the New Black Thought.

---

[1] . Cf: From aesthetic thought in W.E.B. Du Bois and the Harlem Renaissance, in From the Niagara Crossing to the New Black Thought, Kindle 2021.

[2] . Here the problem subjacent is the inability to separate the verb “To be”, as “being” and “be”, like in the romance languages; in which “To be” could mean “to be something” or “to be somewhere” or “in some way”.

On the mystical and recurrent ghost of Duvalierianism

One of the most incomprehensible and strange phenomena of Haitian political culture, is the recurrence of voodoo; as an example, by Western standards, of the primitivism of this culture, whit repercussions on its social backwardness. In the first place, the problem would be that Haitian political culture does not respond to these parameters of the West; not being able to materialize as such since its emergence as a country, product of the same Western political crisis.

In this sense, and beyond its historical references, Haitian political tradition and culture is hard broken in its periods; without a connection between these, allowing the consolidation of any residual tradition, to be used as a reference. The first problem here is in the French pressure, posing the economic debt that prevents this organization; not only in that conflict of the nineteenth century, but also in the present, with the American interests, throughout the twentieth century.

It should be remembered the creation of the Haitian central bank, transferring the debt to the United States; and the occupation of the country for two decades, creating the imbalance that conditions any attempt at restructuring. In this context, Duvalier's rise to power —like that of Batista in Cuba— responds to this structural deficit; which is of a sufficient political tradition, and dates to the destabilization caused by the Petion-Boyer’s republic.

This instability is not due to the brutal tribalism of Dessalines and Christopher, with their monarchical pretensions; but precisely to the idealistic pretensions about a democratic republic, without the economic resources to do it. Due to the early stage of modern humanism, the incomprehension of this is easy to understand, as with any development; but no the persistence of those pretensions, despite the evidence of this importance, while still not allowing this development.

Strangely, this is what explains the ascendancy of mysticism, as a substitute for an organized political culture; which, not being able to establish itself, subsists in that perpetual —and certainly brutal—contraction of religious functionalism. This is what the monarchism of Dessalines and Christopher meant, legitimizing itself as a revolutionary mysticism; from that Boukman's proclamation to the Bondye, in which the revolution began, to Louverture's struggle with the French recalcitrance.

The answer to the Haitian political problem is thus anthropological, because the problem is first anthropological; emerged from the great crisis that was the French Revolution, as an anthropological disaster of West culture. This does not mean that the alternative to Haiti's political deficiency is Duvalier's violence, but only that it’s deficiency; and its solution would be an emergent development, by which these contradictions are appeased, in a national reconciliation; allowing the weaving —as anthropologic— of economic relations at popular level, no corporate and less still of foreign.

This is the meaning of Haitian gangs, which are also popular and not elitist, as an alternative to interventionism; whose violence is not different from that of the recurrent dictatorships, because it fulfills the same coercive function. In fact, it is not new but the same as the movement that opposed the martyrdom of Charlemagne Peralta to American interventionism; which resurfaces after the same threat of intervention, from the dictatorship —no less brutal— of Raoul Cedras.

No one will ever want to accept this premise, because of the idealistic faith that keeps the whole West in crisis; not just Haiti, which is only the place that lacks a sufficient tradition to assimilate and consume that disaster; but to the entire West, converging in the transitive —even racial— tension, that begins in Haiti and culminates in Cuba. Haiti is then only the extreme expression of that crisis, which by its dimensions resembles the Minoan cataclysm; now reproduced as culture, thus preventing its recovery, as that of Phoenician commerce on Mycenean population.