As a young African writer from South Africa, I argue that the development project after World War II, rooted in the modernization paradigm, urgently needs to be reinterpreted in the context of, and against, the European Enlightenment project that traces its roots to the voyages of discovery from the late fourteenth century onwards. It has become abundantly clear that development ideas and practices grounded in this model will not bring about the development that Africa wants, but will continue to undermine African development initiatives and cement the Global North's domination agenda. I argue that African reconceptualization of its ideal development model should be grounded within the riches of African history and culture and needs to position Africans as their own agents, and not as objects. Only such a reconceptualization can liberate African development from parochial Eurocentric models.

We must shift the geography of reasoning and analysis away from a Eurocentric epistemology, towards African-centred epistemologies, in particular, using Afrocentricity as a revolutionary intellectual paradigm in our quest to liberate the discourse of development from the continuing bias towards the Eurocentric ideological framework. By doing so, we can work on a model that privileges African knowledge, informed by African history, culture and African agency, towards an African reawakening. I, therefore, deploy Afrocentricity as a relevant theoretical framework to relocate the interpretation of development to an African context to enable relevance to Africa. As Asante explains, Afrocentricity establishes an intellectual standpoint in which phenomena are viewed from the perspective of African people as centred within their own historical and cultural experiences. Such a perspective enables African people to take control of their own lives and be their own agents. This will allow them to become subjects rather than objects of others’ (under)development agenda. Afrocentricity as a paradigm enables a re-examination of all dimensions of the dislocation of African people resulting from the imposition of Western thought, be it regarding culture, economics, psychology, health or religious ideas around African societies, and development in general. This interrogation and reflection will enable Africans to assert themselves epistemically, thus dismantling their entrapment in the Western epistemic colonization of the terms of reference, and enabling African people to speak as their own agents of the change that they desire, rather than merely existing as ideological dependants of the European canon of thought.

Introduction: The “Missing People” in the New German Discourse Comedy

In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze famously observed that “the people are missing” in postwar Western cinema. This is in contrast to “classical cinema”: in the earlier twentieth century, the modern medium of film had been closely associated with the modern phenomenon of the crowd on more than one level. Film and cultural theory circled around the moral dangers and political potentials of collective reception, and on-screen crowds featured prominently in the political aesthetics of socialism as well as fascism and nation-building Hollywood. In the aftermath of Hitler and Stalin, however, these crowds all but disappeared in Western political cinema: visually imagining the masses as a collective actor became exceedingly difficult. As indicated by several contributions across this volume, the rupture diagnosed by Deleuze continues to reverberate until today. In the 2010s, to be sure, the crowd had a major comeback in cultural theory, sparked by circulating media images of emerging forms of transnational collective activism: Tahrir square, Gezi Park, Occupy. But even as scholars ranging from Judith Butler to Brian Massumi, Jodi Dean, Joshua Clover, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri newly set out to theorize the “political potential” of collective assembly, this resurgence of interest in a progressive crowd aesthetics has remained overshadowed by the parallel rise of right-wing claims to embody the people. With an eye to the German anti-immigrant organization Pegida, Butler repeatedly reminds us that a “surging multitude” of publicly assembled bodies would “include lynch mobs, anti-Semitic or racist or fascist congregations.” Now in the 2020s, we may think of a new generation of activist movements, prominently including Black Lives Matter, while events such as the Capitol Riot in the U.S. seem to have further cemented the spectral superimposition of the activist people with the fascist mob.

Julian Radlmaier’s Selbstkritik eines bürgerlichen Hundes (Self-criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, 2017) tackles the question of how to cinematically reimagine activist, potentially revolutionary assembly against the backdrop of these concerns. On the plot level, Selbstkritik probes the possibilities of worker organization on the “apple plantation OKLAHOMA,” located somewhere between contemporary East Germany and Franz Kafka’s and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s ambiguously heterotopic America. Radlmaier’s film quotes these two intertexts with a poster on a street corner as well as an extradiegetic intertitle culminating in the promise that fascinated Kafka’s protagonist: “Jeder ist willkommen!” (All are welcome!).

Envisioning the Night

Schubert's songs of the night are poised between gothic and Romantic tropes. The gothic looms large in the graveyard settings discussed in chapter 1, notably ‘Leichenfantasie’, where darkness spotlights spectral presences in the moon's faint rays: ‘with dim light the moon shines over the death-still groves; / sighing, the night spirit skims through the air – / mist-clouds lament, pale stars shine down mournfully / like lamps in a vault.’ The idea of night revealing things beyond the realm of the living, implied in ‘Leichenfantasie’ through the ‘Nachtgeist’, is rendered explicit in the opening stanza of Schubert's ‘Die Nacht’, D 534, the last of his Ossian settings: ‘Night is dull and dark. / The clouds rest on the hills. / No star with green trembling beam; / no moon looks from the sky. / I hear the blast in the wood; but I hear it distant far. / The stream of the valley murmurs; but its murmur is sullen and sad.’ Such features – distant tremors and sudden blasts of sound – extend to a view of the night as not only revealing but also concealing supernatural beings, as in ‘Erlkönig’, D 328, where the son experiences the Erlking as all too real, the father dismissing his presence as a ‘streak of mist’. Night as a mix of the supernatural and the corporeal is pronounced in the opening stanza of ‘Schwestergruss’, with traces of the moon's rays but no sound: ‘In the moonlight / I wander up and down / Seeing dead bones / And a silent grave.’ These songs – distant in chronology, close in spirit – all point to the night as a backdrop to strange happenings brought about by darkness: ghostly presences, funeral processions, and eeriness as sound and silence combined. Death lingers in the shadows – ‘It is a ghost! It fades, it flies’, to quote from Ossian's ‘Die Nacht’.

Distribution of inventories by parish and decade

A dreamer sits in darkness, head bowed, hands resting in front of him. All is hushed, no words, little movement. A male voice hums the last seven bars of Schubert's ‘Nacht und Träume’, D 827 – ‘sweet dreams, come back!’ (‘Holde Träume, kehret wieder!’). Haunting in its fragmentation, the music is repeated, this time with words, the man's head sinking deeper into his hands. At the words ‘Holde Träume’, the light reveals the man's own reflection, his dreamt self, gazing down on him from a podium suspended in mid-air: a mirror image of his waking self.

This scene from Samuel Beckett's last television play, ‘Nacht und Träume’, broadcast on 19 May 1983, provides a springboard for thinking about the prominence of death (whether real or imagined) in Schubert's music. Central to the discussion is the relationship between biography and art – or, more specifically, the relationship between depictions of death and Schubert's confrontation with his own mortality, as intimated in his oft-quoted letter to Leopold Kupelwieser:

Culture stands out as a critical aspect of Afrocentricity in terms of an analysis of what should inform the Afrocentric development trajectory in Africa and for Africans in the diaspora. The European invasion of Africa set in motion cultural imperialism that resulted in the dislocation of African people from their own cultural grounding.

As I have mentioned in Chapter 3, the discourse of development in Africa has remained deeply entangled in colonially imposed matrices of power. It has not enabled Africans to imagine development from the perspective of their own history and cultural experiences. Such a perspective on development has only imposed on Africa a tendency to mimic the European modernization project as the sole model that should define what development is for Africa because the conceptualization of mainstream development in the aftermath of World War II was guided by modernization theory, with its extension as a neoliberal framework derived from the experiences of Western countries.

The main challenge facing Africa since the fifteenth century, which marks the start of mercantilism and Christianization, is the need for Africans to find their own voices and a cultural anchor for their endeavour to shape Africa's development prospects. Epistemic colonization by European scholars produced a continent dependent on Europeans to define the value of African's culture, including what that culture meant for the development future of Africa. Their agenda was to create Africans who think from a European perspective and who will forever remain dependent beneficiaries of Europe. Marimba Ani in her book Yuguru: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behaviour, therefore, attacks European cultural imperialism in her reference to the concept of asili, the central seed or germinating matrix of a culture, to expose how European white supremacist thought believes in its own superiority to the denigration of African culture and humanity. As a result of the Eurocentrism of development discourse, African development discourse has for too long accepted the idea of the ‘catch-up thesis’, as Mkandawire calls it, which presents the development in Africa as seeking to be like the West – industrialized and modern.

Marcus Garvey, a noted Pan-Africanist activist, journalist and entrepreneur, wrote that ‘a people without knowledge of their historical past and culture is like a tree without roots. When all we know is the history written by those who conquered us, we remain shackled and submerged beneath their own narratives.’

The story of Africa's development trajectory must be anchored within our own African narratives. Throughout its unfolding as a theory of social change, Afrocentricity has consistently and systematically rewritten African history as a contribution to African development itself, and as part of the broader agenda of the restoration of African humanity. The objective of an Afrocentric historicism is to rediscover Africa's contributions to human civilization as the launching pad for Africa's rediscovery of itself, as opposed to the current habit of Africans always seeking to adjust to the European game plan. Thus, in Afrocentricity, an understanding of the corrected record of Africa's historical trajectory is a prerequisite for Africa's reconceptualization of its own development ideal. At the centre of an African reawakening must lie the imperative of understanding how the people of this continent have lived in their own environment to improve their quality of life. This implies that consistently and systematically challenging Eurocentric negative tropes about Africa as an uncivilized, unmodern, underdeveloped and backward continent is part of Afrocentricity's work of reclaiming their history from Eurocentric distortions and of countering the falsification of information about Africa.

The theft of Africa's history has gone hand in hand with a denial of African genius and agency. The consistent pattern of the negation of Africa by European writers has contributed to a denigration of African voices and to a devaluing of African contributions to world civilization. It is against this pervasive European epistemic injustice against Africans that Afrocentricity as a paradigm of the African Renaissance is committed to addressing the need for history to be reinterpreted from a perspective in which African people stand as subjects and not objects of European analysis. Moreover, Afrocentric historiography provides a clearer perspective on Africa's pursuit for Africa's own advancement. Thus, the discourse of development in Africa must be liberated from the factors that have negatively shaped Africa and its people, relegating them to the lower political, social and economic structures of the modern world system, which continues to be dominated by Europe and North America.