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/ 16 November 2007
Adekeye Adebajo reviews Nigerian writer and political activist Wole Soyinka’s memoirs.
POINT: In the grasping imagination of 19th-century European explorers, Mali’s Timbuktu was a fabled city of gold. This week’s African Union summit in Ghana evokes images of a similarly elusive quest for an African El Dorado. But putting old wine in new bottles will not integrate Africa, writes Adekeye Adebajo.
The greatest imperialist of the 19th century, Cecil Rhodes, had a dream to establish dominion over Africa from the Cape to Cairo. Rhodes’s heirs — the racist governments in Pretoria — historically saw Africa as an area of penetration, exploitation and destabilisation. This was the Africa of ”labour reserves” from which hundreds of thousands of Southern African migrants ventured to South Africa.
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/ 30 October 2006
Winning a two-year non-permanent seat on the 15-member United Nations Security Council from January 2007, with an impressive 186 out of 192 votes, is a great achievement for South Africa. The euphoria has, however, tended to obscure the reality of how limited a role non-permanent members are able to play in council decisions.
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/ 30 October 2006
Winning a two-year non-permanent seat on the 15-member United Nations Security Council from January 2007, with an impressive 186 out of 192 votes, is a great achievement for South Africa. The euphoria has, however, tended to obscure the reality of how limited a role non-permanent members are able to play in council decisions.
”When I won the Rhodes scholarship from Nigeria to study at Oxford University in 1990, an alarmed uncle exclaimed: ”That thing is dripping with blood. Cecil Rhodes was a bloody imperialist!” My thoughts at the time were more practical: to get a good education at a world-class institution,” writes Adekeye Adebajo.
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/ 12 September 2005
Fifteen years ago, Kenyan political scientist Ali Mazrui described the relationship between the United States and the Third World as a ”dialogue of the deaf”. Mazrui noted that Americans are brilliant communicators but bad listeners. This view aptly highlights the difficulties the US faced in seeking to win support at the United Nations for its controversial invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Live 8 campaign by Bob Geldof, the narcissistic fading rock star, ”to make poverty history” was naively admirable but also somewhat disturbing to watch. Here was a dynamic individual who was helping to perpetuate the stereotype of the ”dark continent” as a helpless place of poverty and disease which the white musical missionaries of a new age would help to overcome.
Western pundits have dominated the debate on United Nations reform, while African leaders have not focused attention on these crucial efforts. A group of civil society leaders from the continent tried to remedy this when we met in New York and thrashed out an African civil society response to the December 2004 report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.
The Kenyan political scientist, Ali Mazrui, was the intellectual father of the concept of Pax Africana in the 1960s. The idea is simple: Africans should, through their own efforts, consolidate, establish and enforce peace on their own continent. In the post-apartheid era, Pax Africana needs to be redefined to fit the needs of a new age, writes Adekeye Adebajo.