Roots of the Malaise

It’s too soon to speak of the death of neoliberalism, cautions Husaini, pointing its resilience in Africa, where neither leftist political parties nor sustained anti-neoliberal movements have effectively emerged to challenge the economic orthodoxy. Comparing Africa’s experience to Latin America’s “pink tide,” he argues that the absence of deep economic crises, strong movement infrastructures, and cohesive political alternatives have so far delayed rupture—but worsening conditions may soon test that stability.

“…Some of the external elements of the current political and economic context in Africa appear to align more closely with the contexts from which the pink tide emerged. The end of the faux optimism of “Africa rising,” the intensification of cost of living crises across the continent—especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia-Ukraine War—and the re-emergence of crippling debt and increasingly delegitimized party systems suggest that the grip of Africa’s last neoliberals is growing more tenuous. … If the pink tide taught us anything, it’s that crisis alone is not enough; what matters is how movements respond.”

In today’s uncertain geopolitical landscape, historical analogies have replaced future-oriented visions as the dominant framework for understanding global events and facing the anxieties of the past. While analogies can be misleading and unduly shaped by bias, they nonetheless offer a powerful cognitive tool for policymakers to simplify complexity, communicate urgency, and connect current events to past experiences.

“In a world in which universal political ideologies no longer shape the political personalities of the major geopolitical actors, historical analogies offer opportunities to move beyond pedestrian foreign-policy realism, in which political decisions are analyzed according to singular political factors or categories. Analogies, after all, are as pluralistic as history itself.”

Gilroy explores how Britain’s post-imperial decline and “stuckness” have fueled a broader global resurgence of racial nationalism, nostalgia, and authoritarianism. Drawing on cultural criticism, art, and music, he argues for cultivating a “critical imagination” grounded in anti-racism, reparative humanism, and radical attentiveness, warning that fascism’s reappearance is not confined to the past but embedded in today’s political, emotional, and technological landscapes.

“There is no safe nationalism and the nationalism of minor nationalisms or anti-imperial anti- Colonial nationalism are not a sort of resting place which is somehow inoculated against the general pathology of nationalism as authoritarian, as potentially fascistic. I just don’t see that possibility. I don’t think there’s any clean nationalism in the world any pure nationalism to be discerned … I can’t console myself with the idea that there’s a safe version of nationalism that I can kind of reach for that will, or a way of doing nationalism that will somehow not be vulnerable to these things. So maybe the answer is that you do it and in the doing you try to minimize that.”

The future of philosophical enquiry in Ethiopia stands at a crossroads, riven by two competing schools of thought: universalists, who view philosophy as a continuous global dialogue transcending cultural boundaries, and Africanists, who see it as a means of reclaiming suppressed indigenous knowledge and resisting Eurocentrism. The debate often centers on the Hatatas, two 17th-century texts whose authenticity and philosophical value are contested, with critics arguing they may be colonial fabrications driven more by ideology than philosophical inquiry.

“If Ethiopian philosophy is to make any form of progress, it needs to take part in the discussion of African philosophy as well as the universal quest for knowledge. This cannot be attained through studying only the past or, on the other hand, abandoning history and human values in the name of universality. It is not just the Hatatas but also the analysis of contemporary issues that need to be accommodated into the study of Ethiopian philosophy. At the same time, Ethiopian philosophers shouldn’t blur the distinction between philosophy and anthropology in the name of engaging in a socially grounded philosophical practice.”