Africa would go a long way towards solving its problems if Africans acknowledged their role in causing the mess it is in, writes Shyaka Kanuma Will South Africa work now that political power is firmly in the hands of the black majority? This apparently impudent, patronising question has been asked a million times since 1994. That it now comes from a visitor to South Africa smacks of rudeness. That it comes from someone who has a black skin makes it sound as though I have a race-based inferiority complex. There are, however, some legitimate reasons why someone visiting from my part of Africa, Rwanda, would want to pose the question and none of them stem from any complex. For one, the stark, humiliating fact is that post-independence governments south of the Sahara and north of the Limpopo have been embarrassing failures at running their peoples affairs. (Hold on, we will get to the part about imperialists, colonialists and neo-colonialists.) For another, Africa looks at black-led South Africa as something special, as something to be proud of. For time immemorial Africans have been held in contempt by the world. We have been told we are failures and have been the butt of jokes about banana republics too long not to wish fervently that South Africa achieves the success our own states never did. South Africa is the economic engine to which we could hitch our train and get out of the quagmire in which we find ourselves.
The South Africa that we read about, that we see in photographs, that has taken shape in our minds, that we see immediately as we land at Johannesburg International, is what we would have liked our countries to be after 40 years of independence. It has a functioning economy; a society where the rule of law abides; a healthy democracy where the freedom of speech enshrined in the Constitution isnt merely something to pay lip service to. (Yes, we now know that President Thabo Mbeki is a closet HIV/Aids dissident but no “state security” agents shot the journalists who exposed that.) Hang on, said my intellectual friend from Johannesburg. The edifices you see, the big companies, the hotels, casinos and fun resorts still belong to whites. And, he added, South Africa is still is a very racist society where white men drag blacks behind trucks, set dogs on Mozambicans, go “kaffir bashing”. Plus, there are whites who, rather than see a black government succeed, will cart their wealth away! At this point, the eternal whining of Africa something we should never hear from a people who defeated apartheid begins in earnest. After a few months in South Africa, I have discovered with ever-growing dismay that the same mindsets that have so harmed my own country and the rest of the continent, are very much in evidence here. For some reason unknown to me, Africas thinkers, its politicians, newspaper editors, opinion-formers and moral leaders have failed to recognise this mindset or to identify it as one of the worst and most inadequate responses to the issues and challenges before us. It is a major reason for the incessant failure of people to put their house in order. It is the whining with which, over the years, Africans have cast themselves as helpless victims that every Tom, Dick and Harry can plunder and exploit. It is the whining that means decent white people (and Ive seen quite a number of these) who demand better services are immediately branded racists.
This whining is contemptible. It never leads to concrete action for the betterment of lives. This whining should long ago have been condemned by anyone with a sense of pride. Its odious undertones suggest a herd of bovines out in the open with any number of predatory big cats on the loose.
Why does the vicious cycle of poverty continue to dog Africa? Perhaps you, too, believe the whining response you hear at the buffet in the Kampala Sheraton, where Armani-clad, Dom Perignon-sipping Africans are repairing. “Well,” they explain, “because the legacy of colonialism is ever here, though at the moment the foreign-debt yoke is stymieing all our efforts to develop.”
What they conveniently forget is that India once a colony itself with half its population living in desperate poverty, has become the biggest supplier of software to American computer companies. Or that it retired its debts to the Bretton Woods institutions years ago. Or that in 1962 Ugandas social indicators showed it was richer than Korea. Or that Vietnam is an emerging market despite the bombings and vicious economic sanctions imposed by the United States. Others explain our failures as a continent with much justification by pointing to a host of different factors, tribalism chief among them. But can this argument adequately explain how it is that Rwanda or Burundi, which have only three tribes that speak the same language, can be the scene of so much tragedy today? To be fair, Africans are caught in a situation into which they were neither invited nor welcomed. The men who sailed from Europe to these shores all those centuries ago sought self-enrichment. They were not on an altruistic mission. They proceeded to almost deplete parts of the continent of the population during the slave trade. Then came the colonialists with their talk of “civilising” the “savage” natives and “Christianising” them. A lot has been said about all this. But the relevance to this article is that our intellectuals have tended to downplay or even sweep under the carpet the shameful role of Africans in the atrocities against their people. They have tended to heap all the blame on white racists, on imperialists, on capitalists and so on. If the chiefs of yesteryear had not been so willing to accept trinkets, hundreds of thousands of our people would not have ended up toiling in Alabamas cotton fields. If the chiefs men had not been so willing to brutally hunt down terrified compatriots and to bring them kicking and screaming to the white men in boats in exchange for a cowrie shell, not many Africans would have landed in Cuba working as slaves on sugar plantations. More recently, and closer to the South African experience, what was the former homeland leader of Bophuthatswana, Lucas Mangope, doing aligning himself with white neo-Nazis during the transition to majority rule in an episode in which a number of Africans died? And is it not true that the Inkatha Freedom Party tried to derail the transition? Are these instances not a little bit like the chiefs who sold their people to theUS? The upshot? Africans need to become seriously introspective. We need to analyse unflinchingly what ails our societies. We need to show that we are not dumb objects to be toyed with. This is not to say that all Africans lack such insight, or the necessary courage. The problem is that there seem to be too few such Africans around. None can doubt the negative effect on Africa of colonialism. The 19th century scramble for Africa, when Europeans crudely divided up the continent into fiefdoms, “protectorates” and colonies, did irreparable damage to many an African tribe and institution and interrupted whatever technological development was in progress. The effect on African self-esteem was devastating.
Almost everything the new masters did was alien to Africa. Time which people used to spend in a leisurely, uninterrupted fashion now became something to be divided into segments that had to be rigidly adhered to. How disorienting! Africans suddenly found themselves wrenched away from their comfortable villages to camps, barracks and hostels. There they woke up earlier than they had ever done to eat a hastily made breakfast. Then they would dash out at a particular hour to a certain point for the vehicle that arrived at a particular minute at the mine, the construction site, the quarry, the school.
There bells rang out signaling starting times, tea breaks, lunch breaks, time to return to work and to go back home every day, every week, every month, every year. Woe betide the fellow who tried to break the rhythm! Simple acts such as walking, standing or sitting took on new meanings under the white man. If the light turned red you stopped; green, you walked; at the bus rank you stood in a queue. Even trees that, everyone knew, grew where they pleased were now forced to grow in a rigid line on the boulevard for as far as the eye could see. In the midst of all these strange, hateful things, it was drummed into African schoolchildren that almost everything African was barbaric, savage and not worth retaining. Africans were also taught to read and write and to do other things that would make them good servants to their colonial master who had, meanwhile, “land tenured” and “land-leased” himself some choice property after giving the chief a mirror. In the long run, the indignity became too much. The result was the anti-colonial wars. But much damage had been done. Many an African detested who he or she was. Others became defiantly proud a response that led many an African head of state to bring ruin to his people in his zeal to be as anti-capitalist as he could.
Once the colonialists had departed, African life returned to its own rhythms, mindsets and ways of doing things. The new head of the newly nationalised company did not see why he should not treat it as his personal possession. Or why he should not use the company car to take the groceries home, to take his mistress places or to take his children to the zoo. He did not see the logic of hiring someone just because he or she had something called a qualification when his cousin needed a job. Or when his wifes uncles nephew needed one as badly. He did not see why, since the fruits of independence were there for the taking, he should not help himself to a quarter of the annual budgeted expenditure in order to pay for a holiday in the Swiss Alps with all trimmings such as first-class air tickets and five-star hotels. And he did not see why he should be bothered to pore too closely over the companys accounts ledgers, digest balance sheets, study expenditure reports, annual projections and other similarly irritating documents. Yes, you are right: such failings are not the monopoly of Africans. However, on other continents people tend often to subscribe rigidly to things such as accountability, performance and fear of the shareholders ire. And they are scared of scandals because exposure might mean ostracism. Another man who enjoyed the fruits of uhuru was the one who became the new foreman at a big state dairy farm and promptly got himself two more wives as his new status in society required. His impoverished relatives, hearing that a son of their area had done well, sent five of their children to him and he was expected to take care of them to feed, house and clothe them and to pay their tuition. Of course, in the African context, children of relatives are your children, and you wouldnt turn them away. The result? A lot of them ended up abused, on the streets, sniffing all kinds of hallucinogens, living meaningless lives, inevitably driven to crime.
The upshot? While the white man did a lot to disrupt, even to destroy the African, Africans have done their fair share, too. Africa would go a long way towards solving its problems if Africans now frankly acknowledged their role in causing the mess the continent is in. (And what condemnation Africans visit on whites should be tempered by the role that true white friends played in ending colonialism and apartheid.) Would there be so much civil strife stemming from the scarcity of resources if those resources that were available were better managed? Are white people to blame because many Africans have calorific intakes so low that half the adult population can never lead productive lives? What about infant mortality rates of 110 to 1000 childbirths, or the obscene number of people who die from easily preventable or treatable diseases? Are globalisation, international aid donors and the difficult terms on which loans are granted also to blame? Maybe. But remember, other people elsewhere in the world have had to contend with these same problems, yet we are always far worse off. Introspection, self-flagellation, merciless auto-analysis. These are some of the qualities Africans would do very well to substitute for their whining. The effects of colonialism, imperialist oppression, brutal dictators, their abominable governments and hunger these look more and more like excuses for not seriously shaping our own destiny. These excuses have been repeated too often. They no longer survive scrutiny. It is high time Africans found answers in other directions and from the look of things, South Africans too, had better be involved in the search. Let us start our search by considering the chorus of moans that went up some weeks ago when a white man killed his black employee by tying him to a truck and dragging him behind it. The whine was that black lives are still regarded as cheap because the killer didnt get a severe enough sentence. Despite the hullabaloo, no one posed a very pertinent question: what made Pieter Odendaal imagine he could get away with the appalling murder of Mosoko Rampuru more than seven years into the new dispensation? (And lets forget about all the balderdash that Odendaal was out of his mind at the time.)
Likewise, how could another white racist in Cape Town set his dogs on a black and believe he might get away with it? How could three white teenagers set out to beat and kill a few “kaffirs”? Part of the answer lies in the action that is often not taken against the perpetrators of acts of this kind. Another is the absence of sustained anger productively channelled in non-violent ways. Forgiving and forgetting are commendable sides of ubuntu. But pickets, protests, political mobilisation and private lawsuits can go a long way towards developing a civil environment in South Africa patently intolerant of such racist outrages. But a significant part of the answer lies in the broader environment: in the fact of African disregard for African life. Congolese soldiers plunder and torment their civilian population purely for material gain. Kenyan policemen routinely shoot, rob and rape the people they are supposed to protect. Rwandese soldiers are loaded in the most unairworthy Antonovs en route to combat. Poor Nigerians die in infernos, scooping up oil at spills from poorly maintained pipelines. And so on. The appalling fact is that there is very little respect for a black life, even among blacks themselves. Where is respect for black life in the new South Africa when armies of unqualified taxi drivers in unroadworthy vehicles are permitted to slaughter people daily? Or when babies contract HIV from their mothers because their government refuses to provide nevirapine? Someone should tell it to the editorial writers: a dead black is not any more dead because a white killed him. Africans need to assert themselves. It is one of the qualities Africa has never possessed in sufficient quantities.
After independence Africans overwhelmingly submitted themselves to their new oppressors who now wore the same colour. Presidents, generals and rebel leaders knew they could take and took African lives for granted. The result is that destructive cycles of violence are now a perpetual feature of our continent. The lack of outrage, the indifference, are what produce, for example, the absence of any sense of urgency among city authorities to shift garbage or provide public transport to suffering citizens. It is as if people think they cannot expect more for the taxes they pay or from the votes they cast. As a black African, I know I live in a world for which other people made the rules long ago, and that the cards are stacked heavily against me. I know political correctness or not that skin colour attracts prejudice; that the customs official at the European airport will give me a humiliating body search (for drugs, or just for fun?) and subject me to a grilling though my passport is in order; and that my continent accounts for just more than a paltry 1% of world economic activity (measured as gross domestic product).
But I will not wallow in self-pity and neither will I whine about racism and other such things for the good reason that I have not yet given the world cause to respect me. Rather, I will adapt. I will retain that which is dear to my identity. I will discard whatever is anachronistic and useless. I will find better ways to interact with the world. I will make it show the respect due to me. And I can achieve this only through self-respect, self-assertion, introspection and other traits that have served others so well, and that seem so lacking among Africans. Will South Africa work? It is for South Africans to decide. This kwerekwere can remark, however, that I have seen many countries to the north of South Africa and that you have a lot going for you here. South Africa has size, natural resources and a sound economy serving a reasonably sized population of reasonably well-off people. Believe me, Ive never seen any township in Africa where people have so many cars, TVs, desktop computers, microwaves. Where people have so much disposable income to buy things like newspapers, and eat beef, milk and eggs on a daily basis.
But as Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of Congo have demonstrated, it is not enough just to possess minerals or oil. What is needed is a “thought quake”: a revolution of mentalities; and it begins with you and me, black individuals.
Shyaka Kanuma is a Rwandan journalist now in South Africa. He was among the winners at this years CNN African Journalist of the Year ceremony
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