The George W Bush administration in Washington DC clearly means business. They are moving towards delivering the most massive tax cuts in history for their citizens- especially those who already have lots of money anyway. They have brought the much-discredited Star Wars programme back to life, even though there is no longer a discernible Evil Empire to be defensive about. And, true to their electoral promises, they are riding roughshod over the snivelling environmental lobby whose cries for the preservation of the wilderness have brought such an uncharacteristic sense of hesitancy into American
political life. The green light has been given for the ruthless exploitation of the oil reserves of the northern tundra.
So there’s a fresh, breezy, square-jawed confidence back where it counts on the world stage.
In Hollywood, the revisiting of Pearl Harbor is sending out an unambiguous signal to the perfidious slit-eyes of this world (right after the spy plane saga over Southern China, nogal) that says, ‘You don’t mess with Uncle Sam and get away with it.’ And a badly made movie called Before Night Falls is able to turn the gay-rights issue into an obscure vehicle for the trashing of Fidel Castro’s Cuba – an antidote to the legitimacy that the spunky island state had gained through such jelly-kneed Clinton-era offerings as The Buena Vista Social Club.
Clinton’s creepy Africa policy has also been chucked out without too much waste of time, and the Bush administration has pulled out a master card in its place – a black secretary of state who can articulate right-wing policy without being accused of being a racist. With that one deft move, the loony left and their Third World Fellow Travellers have been snookered.
Yes, Bush and his crew mean business, all right. On his recent whirlwind tour of four African states, General Colin Powell announced that, as the United States’s ‘only African-American secretary of state so far, I will enthusiastically engage with Africa on behalf of the American people’.
Now, is this scary, or what?
What Africa needs is some kind of Superman or Superwoman (preferably black) who can engage with the most powerful nation in the world on its own behalf, in its own language and on its own terms – not the other way round. The thought of Africa being engaged from above yet again – and by someone whom you can’t even shake a stick at because he comes as a ‘brother’ – is too ghastly to contemplate.
What is it ‘the American people’ want from Africa, anyway, that they have to send out an ex-Jamaican ex-soldier, a man who kicked six kinds of hell out of the Vietcong and Saddam Hussein for a living at one time, to come and get it on their behalf? They’ve already got Tarzan and The Lion King. What have we got left that they could possibly be interested in?
I guess we shall just have to wait and see.
But it has not taken too long for the potential power of this new genie to be revealed. There was a little hiccup when the secretary of state’s delegation was unexpectedly forced to hole up on the Wits campus for an hour by a bunch of unruly students, his impressive force of bodyguards unable to simply shoot their way out of trouble this time for reasons of protocol.
But it did not take long for the posse to get back in the saddle and ride on into the next dead-end gulch to tell the folks what was going to be what from now on.
At Wits, the general had already pointed out that ‘the true test of democracy is not the first election or the second or the third; democracy takes root when leaders step down peacefully, when they are voted out of office or when their terms expire’.
In Nairobi, Kenya, President Daniel Arap Moi, whose own sell-by date had long since expired, listened stony faced as the general abandoned diplomatic protocol and referred directly to one of his fellow African leaders. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Powell said, had no business clinging to power after more than 20 years in office. Moi did not appear to make any personal connection.
But Mugabe himself must have been forced to sit up and pay attention when, not much more than a week after Powell’s Nairobi declaration, Chenjerai ‘Hitler’ Hunzvi, coordinator of the Zimbabwean farm invasions and one of the president’s closest associates, died of a mysterious disease in a Harare hospital. It was as if the Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (also out on general release in a new version, as it happens) was stalking anyone who dared to defy the diktat of General Colin Powell, the Brother from Another Planet.
There are those who have been muttering that Powell, among others, should be put on trial for crimes against humanity, emanating from his role as a senior serving officer at the time of massacres of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers during the Vietnam War, as well as for unleashing waves of high-explosive overkill into the backs of Saddam’s retreating armies during the Gulf War.
But there is another issue that tends to be overlooked.
In the distasteful realm of racial classification, Powell, at a glance, would appear to have a far higher percentage of white blood in him than anything else. In this go-getting world, he might have been forgiven for trying to pass for white.
But in this age when race and power are also still inextricably bound up in a fatal and unloving embrace, there might well be calls down the line for putting him on trial for another kind of misdemeanour – coming to Africa and trying to pass for black.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza