There is a continuous sequence of connections between all of us — ‘six degrees of separation” some have called it — and yet we seldom bother to look in the mirror and try to make sense of them. Like that song: ‘the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone connected to the leg bone, the leg bone connected to the knee bone”, et cetera, et cetera. How can we go on without recognising each other? And yet, willy-nilly, we do.
So I am roaming round Europe on a seemingly unconnected sequence of assignments, but can’t help noticing that everything somehow ties together as I go along.
Week two. I have accepted an invitation to give a speech to a medical NGO based in the northern Italian city of Padua on how Europe can change the way it relates to Africa. ‘What can we really do to help you?” is the question that springs from the mouth of every earnest delegate in the room.
To begin with, who am I to give an answer? The topic is vast. It is one that is constantly addressed by the leaders of the Third World at every meeting of the G7, the G8 and I don’t know how many other expensive ‘Gee, what shall we do about foreign debt?” meetings that take place on the political/economic calendar of globalisation.
It is a question that seems to be structured in such a way that the wretched of the Earth are constantly held at arms length, knocking on the door of wealth and power, only to be sent away empty handed once again, with another regional Third World War the only discernible outcome.
I am helped by the fact that the previous week, as I set out on my swinging, 21st-century European safari, I had listened spellbound to a keynote speech by Tunisian writer Abdel Wahab Meddeb at a literary event in Berlin.
Meddeb chooses to bring the issue right into the centre of the frame. He calls his talk Smuggling Paths. It is a poetic meditation on the implacable disjuncture between Europe’s need for Africa, and Africa’s desire for all that Europe seems to represent.
He locates his ‘smuggler’s path” in northern Morocco, in a little town where thousands of young Arab and African men gather like moths attracted to an impossible flame, and plot among themselves how to escape the poverty of their origins for the inconceivable wealth and opportunity of the north — the European continent, a tantalising breath away, its southernmost tip on the Spanish mainland distinctly visible across the straits of Gibraltar.
Hundreds of these young men part company with their meagre savings to be smuggled in unreliable boats across those narrow, choppy seas. Those who don’t drown during the crossing land on Spanish or Italian soil, only to be rounded up like disorderly animals and transported back to their savage impoverishment in the harsh, dark Africa from which they originated. A few escape the cruel net and stagger into an uncertain future as menial labourers in the furthest flung corners of Europe — the new diaspora.
Taking the cue from Meddeb’s powerful imagery, I begin my speech in Padua by referring to the African warrior Hannibal. Hannibal Barca was the Carthaginian general who led an African army across those same straits of Gibraltar, mounted on loping and invincible African elephants, to wage war against the Roman empire that had the nerve to think that it could colonise Africa, its riches and all who lived in it.
He led his forces through the length of Spain, across the Pyrenees into France, along the Rhone river, and finally across the Alps into the Italian heartland, destroying Roman armies with ferocious accuracy as he went.
The Romans never defeated Hannibal in a major campaign. It took them 16 long years of war to finally isolate him in southern Italy, and then pursue him through the Middle East where, trapped far from the escape routes of his native land, he finally gave up the ghost.
Hannibal had vowed at his father’s deathbed to wage a continuous war of vengeance against the invading Romans.
His modern-day descendants —insignificant looking, threadbare, wild eyed, ruminating young men smoking Turkish cigarettes and staring jealously across those same Moroccan straits at the flashy cars of Europe flaunting themselves in the glaring sunlight along the corniches of the Spanish mainland, almost a stone’s throw away — have sworn a different kind of unspoken vengeance.
Deep inside their eyes, you can see that the Punic wars, launched by Hannibal more than 2 000 years ago, are far from over. In their eyes it is from Europe, not from Africa, that a long-term debt must be exacted.
So how, I am asked, in this picturesque, wealthy Italian city of Padua, wearing its timeless history on its elegant sleeve, basking in the power of Nato and the euro: How can Europe help this Africa that the news images refer to only in terms of poverty, despotism, prostitution and Aids?
I am old enough, I guess, to choke back my instinctive anger at the tone of the question — but only just.
How can I answer? The north must stop looking at the south as a basket case, crying out for salvation. And the south must stop looking to the north as a benchmark for transcendence into the modern age. We all live in the same age. And we all continue to be trapped in the same cage of jealousy, stored up anger and greed. And sometimes, just once in a while, love and cooperation.
Can Europe help Africa? Yes — by finally starting to see it as a mirror of itself. We are not ‘the other.”
The knee bone is connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone to the hip bone, and so on. Europe, and the all-powerful euro that keeps Africa and the rest of the former colonies impoverished, would not be what it is without the brooding, living, dazzling, eclectic presence of Africa.
Beyond that, there is no answer.