PERSPERCTIVES ON AND OF AFRICA – THABO MBEKI PART 2/2 (CONTINUED)

Among others, the ancient Egyptian tombs are famous for the mummies that date back thousands of years. To be able to do mummification these Africans had to master a number of different disciplines, including physics, chemistry, medicine and surgery.

The Egyptians mastered these disciplines over many years of experience and later taught, especially the Greeks, who in turn spread this knowledge to Western Europe.

Egyptians were able to do mummification because of their high expertise in surgical techniques.

The great Egyptian civilisation was followed some millennia later, by the civilisations of Nubia, Aksum, Mapungubwe, Ghana, Mali and Great Zimbabwe.

The Malian civilisation reached its pinnacle when Timbuktu became the intellectual and trading hub between the 14th and 16th centuries. Timbuktu was a confluence of ideas, languages and cultures.

We are proud that today we are in partnership with the government of Mali working together to preserve and restore the thousands of ancient manuscripts of Timbuktu, which tell a story of a great civilisation and a centre of learning.

To put this in context one needs to juxtapose the civilisation of Timbuktu to Europe’s state of development during the same period. Much of European society was characterised by high levels of illiteracy, acute poverty and violence. To use the Hobbesian phrase, “life was nasty, brutish and short”.

However, this period was also particularly a time of great expansion for the Islamic empire that by the eighth century included much of North Africa and West Africa.

With Baghdad as its intellectual capital, this empire regarded information so highly that it offered traders a book’s weight in gold for every book put on sale.

THE BLACK DEATH

At the time when rats spread the septic plague, or “Black Death”, that would decimate one third of Europe’s population, Africa was part of a global order in which literacy, intellectualism and trade flourished.

With Timbuktu as a major trading and intellectual centre within the Malian empire, it is clear that Africa was not only a repository of knowledge from ancient civilisations across the world but evidence also indicates that Africa should also be regarded as an important conduit for knowledge to Europe during its Renaissance in the late 15th century.

The 19th century Europeans that Davidson and Bernal spoke about not only convinced themselves of their own superiority and the inferiority of blacks. They used their colonial power, which followed the period of slavery, the gun and the whip, systematically to impose their perspective on or of Africa on the rest of humanity. This reflected the change in the relations between Africa and the West, characterised by the subjugation of Africa for the material benefit of the West.

The millions of Africans transported to the Americas as slaves made these regions and the European countries that owned them prosperous on the back of black slaves while under-developing Africa.

When it became morally and otherwise impossible to continue with slavery, Europe colonised Africa and practised slave labour. Through this method, which included killings of those resisting conscription into labour camps, it is estimated that between eight and 10 million people in the Congo basin lost their lives during the reign of King Leopold II of Belgium.

Indeed, during the long period of colonialism, there are many examples of how African resources helped the development of Europe, even paying their war costs during the two World Wars.

For instance, from 1943, Britain and the US had an agreement on what was called “reverse lend lease”. This meant that US loans to Britain during the war would be repaid by raw materials.

Britain repaid the US with tin and rubber from Malaysia, cocoa from West Africa which was worth $100 million (approximately R600 million in today’s monetary terms); and diamonds from South Africa brought in more millions as Harry Oppenheimer reported to his fellow directors in 1946 that: “Sales of gem diamonds during the war secured about $300  million for Great Britain.”

Further, at the end of the 1950s, the sterling reserves of a small colony like Sierra Leone had reached £60 million (about R630 million), which went into the coffers of Britain. In 1955 the British government was holding £120 million derived from cocoa and mineral sales from Ghana. Africa’s total contribution to Britain’s sterling balances in 1945 was £446 million, which went up to £1,446 million by 1955, more than half the total gold and dollar reserves of Britain and the Commonwealth, which amounted to £2,120 million.

SLAVE LABOUR IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The Democratic Republic of Congo whose rubber was sourced through slave labour helped the Belgium of Leopold to emerge from a small underdeveloped country at the beginning of the 19th century to a developed country in the 20th century, and continued to rescue these Europeans during World War II.

After Germany had over-run Belgium, the Belgians set up a government-in-exile in London. A Mr Godding, who was the Colonial Secretary of the exiled Belgian Government, explained how they paid their expenses during this time:

“During the war, the Congo was able to finance all the expenditure of the Belgian government in London, including the diplomatic services as well as the cost of our armed forces in Europe and Africa, a total of some £40 million. In fact, thanks to the Congo, the Belgian government in London had not borrowed a shilling or a dollar, and the Belgian reserves could be left intact.”

These are but a few of the many examples that demonstrate how over centuries, African resources, human and material, ensured that Europeans live a better life and enjoy the good things of life while the countries of Africa were pushed deeper and deeper into the mire of poverty and under-development.

Today, the GDP of Belgium is about $302 billion with a population of 10 million people. The GDP of the DRC is estimated at $10 billion with a population of 60 million people.

The combined GDP of France and Britain, two countries that achieved the largest colonial presence in Africa, is about $3,5 trillion, while Africa has a combined GDP of about $600 billion.

As Africans, our struggle is to engage in both the total emancipation of our continent from the social, political and economic legacy of colonialism and apartheid as well as to reclaim our history, identity and traditions and on the foundation that our ancestors built for all of humanity, rebuild our societies to ensure that they are developed and prosperous.

Because of the stubborn persistence of perspectives about Africa that are centuries old, even today we are told that Africa does not exist.

“Does Africa exist?” This was the question posed in the lead article of an influential American foreign policy journal, American Diplomacy, on July 26, 2001. Appearing barely a week after African leaders took the seminal step to transform the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) into the African Union (AU), this widely distributed article gave a rare glimpse into the thinking of a section of the American foreign policy establishment.

The author, Dr Michael Radu, a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, started by rubbishing Africa’s efforts towards greater Pan-African unity as being as useful as “the reshuffling of the chairs on the deck of the Titanic”.

He went on to state that “there is no such thing as ‘Africa’ in any meaningful political and cultural sense (and) beyond accidents of geography, there is no such thing as ‘Africa’. “

In what have become the common ingredients of Afro-pessimism, Radu goes on to portray Africa as being incapable of plotting her own future due, on the one hand, to her diversity in terms of language and religion and on the other, allegedly endemic “tribalism, corruption, genocide, failing states, poverty, and HIV/Aids.” He then advises that to advance, Africa should engage in “self-criticism and (take) steps toward more honesty, free markets and elite accountability.”

While one is tempted to write off Radu’s comments as mere crude simplifications of Africa’s complex challenges, it is important to place it in the context of two powerful phenomena impacting on Africa and the world.

These are, firstly, the deeply entrenched tradition of “otherisation” of Africa, to borrow a word from Ali Mazrui, and secondly the renewed vigour among Western scholars to assert that African states are ineluctably unable to bring about the kind of change required to improve the lives of ordinary Africans.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the USA, the latter tendency started creeping into the work of a number of well-placed Western scholars – with some even arguing for reversion to former imperial policies.

Most notable among these was the call made by a senior British diplomat, Robert Cooper, for what he called “a new liberal imperialism”.

A NEW LIBERAL IMPERIALISM

According to Cooper: “The challenge to the post-modern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the post-modern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era-force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.”

In the same vein, Gordon Frisch suggests that: “Before any political solution can work, law and order, almost totally lacking in sub-Saharan Africa, must prevail. To accomplish this, as history has proven time and again in Africa, the most effective means is by the use of mercenaries.

“Neither the UN nor civilized governments have the mandate or the will to do the job. Once peace has been ‘made’, then perhaps the UN could participate in ‘keeping’ it. Then, African governments should invite former colonists back as partners in running their countries, developing their economies and educating their people.”

The other tendency, referred to earlier as the “otherisation” of Africa, has an even longer history. This phenomenon of defining “the other” as the antithesis of what is the norm, the acceptable, was often used to justify actions of an inhumane nature. Under the guise of “saving” or “bringing civilisation” to “the other”, policies and practices such as colonialism and apartheid could be sanctioned.

By denying people the cultural or social traits of the “civilised”, the powerful could denigrate a people’s history. Coupled with a continued process of indoctrination this would eventually also erode the self-worth and sense of humanity of “the other”. The African continent and her people have suffered this fate in a very real sense. Peoples’ identities were destroyed, whether by replacing their indigenous names with foreign ones or wiping away place names through to the destruction of cultures and traditions.

Colonial education simply denied Africans their claim to a past by denouncing the relevance of their experiences. Sadly, the impact of these phenomena persists, and if allowed to continue, poses the risk of leading to a world in which “might is right” and diversity and self-determination are seen as constituting a menace to “order”. It is in this context that Africa’s quest for renewal and the affirmation of our culture, heritage and identity need to be understood.

Through the AU and Nepad (New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development) it is possible to address the main challenges facing us. These include:

• We are all aware that many of our countries on the African continent are heavily reliant on donor money to meet our budget needs. We have to deliver our countries from this stranglehold;
• We need to build capacity in policy making processes and build strong and viable policy-making institutions such that we achieve policy-making autonomy where our decisions and policies are rooted on African realities, experiences and aspirations.
• We need to consolidate our work on peace and security for all our people and invest in mechanisms that work on reconciliation processes and peace management.
• There is an urgent need to answer the question – what forces constitute the African progressive movement in Africa and what should we do to mobilise these progressive forces to ensure general convergence of views and perspectives on Africa and the manner in which we can accelerate our renaissance; and
• It is only if we confront these and other realities in a manner that empowers us to deal effectively with the many problems that are a legacy of many centuries of subjugation, that we can and will build a continent that is free, independent, peaceful, democratic, developed and prosperous.
• Within this perspective, we must continue to claim the 21st as the African Century, ready to engage in serious, protracted and popular struggle to transform this noble dream into reality.

FOR US THE NEW MILLENNIUM MUST CONTINUE TO COMMUNICATE THE UNEQUIVOCAL MESSAGE THAT AFRICA SHALL BE FREE.

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