A few months into trying to organise the first Toward an Africa without Borders Conference in 2002, it suddenly hit me — activism needs money, and for this particular conference we would need more than $30Â 000. An amount so shocking that a friend in a drunkenly candid moment all but shouted: “Conferences are overrated — give the money to the people!” But the simple truth is that there can be no change without dialogue. Plotting (and this is the business of activism) is always first through conversation.
So in that manner I justified the $30Â 000. And it was easy enough to raise this as a student organisation at the University of Wisconsin. But why were we organising pan-African events in Madison, Wisconsin — the land of cheese and truly brutal winters? What’s the point of yelling where no one can hear you? So, after our second conference, we agreed future conferences would be on the continent. We found a willing partner — the Durban Institute of Technology — and the dates were set.
In search of funding we put on our Sunday best and went knocking, but with little success at American universities. Having heard that Bill Gates was giving out money, whether you are left or right or centre, and Oprah was building $40million schools in Africa, we knew there was money out there somewhere. But we started to ask: Is there money so bad that it hurts your cause?
Here the road became difficult. On the one hand there was Audre Lorde shouting: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house!” And on the other, as one rotund Africanist scholar (identity withheld) told me: “Of course you can take dirty money — always take dirty money and do some good with it.”
What to do?
I finally came to my conclusion. As activist organisations we have to go back to the grassroots. We are not the first generation of activists to face the dirty or clean money dilemma, but I do think we are the first generation whose first instinct is to email Oprah or Bill Gates or, God forbid, Shell. We are the first generation to think we can actually bring fundamental change with foundation money.
In our case, we are still knocking on doors, but carefully reading the plaque on the door, and when it says Shell we remember Ken Saro-Wiwa.
And so it goes. We are looking forward to a successful conference this July. As you make preparations to join us in Durban, I leave you with this question: Can the means corrupt the end? — Poet Mukoma Wa Ngugi is coordinator of Toward an Africa without Borders and a columnist for BBC Focus on Africa magazine