AFRICANISM: GOOD FOR AFRICA?The reign of tyrants gors on
Chatters, Chris
AFRICANISM: GOOD FOR AFRICA? Will new leadership emerge? Chris Chatteris A time comes in the life of any institution or society when, for it to move forward, someone has to go. Until that person...
...The energies of entire nations are focused on getting rid of old, ineffective, and stubborn autocrats, ruling long past their "sell-by" date...
...Mbeki's utterances, designed to placate his critics, have ranged from the supportive to the mildly wrist-slapping...
...Both fought the same colonial system...
...the Africanist's description of it is colorful, harmonious, and vibrant...
...Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change is an unlikely alliance between a disaffected ethnic group (the Ndebele), white business interests, and black trade unions...
...Tsvangirai himself was the country's trade union leader...
...The Africanist intellectual in Mbeki will at least question this...
...Nujoma in Namibia, Dos Santos in Angola, Mugabe, Mbeki, and Chissano in Mozambique are a like-minded club who can do business, or at least line up for a smiling group photo at meetings of regional heads of states...
...The first strand of it is ideological...
...This would never be admitted publicly, but Mugabe's violent suppression of Ndebele "dissidents" in the early eighties illustrated the point in blood...
...The damage they have inflicted is irreparable or, if everything goes well, it will take at least a generation to repair...
...Not only are Zimbabwean whites not considered worthy of a political say because they were on the wrong side, even the Ndebele, the minority tribe that ran its own liberation movement under Joshua Nkomo, are considered heretics...
...To the struggle mentality, such a move may be seen as bold, daring, and dashing...
...Perhaps Mbeki is like the Roman spectator watching his favorite gladiator doing what he would have neither the capacity nor the courage to do...
...A luta continual (the struggle continues...
...The events in Zimbabwe have demonstrated how easy it is in Southern Africa to portray social reality as a class struggle-the white, colonial overlords versus the black underclass, the urban black stooges of Western capitalism versus the children of the soil...
...That Mugabe would want to clear whites off farms and resettle them with rural black people is something that Mbeki, in his University of Sussex-trained Chris Chatteris, S.J., teaches homiletics and philosophy of education at Saint Joseph's Theological Institute in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa...
...The West says that the Zimbabwean elections were seriously flawed...
...that occupied by black subsistence farmers is, per capita, pathetic...
...What if the potentially disaffected ethnic party (the Zulu-dominated Inkatha, led by Chief Buthelezi) got together with the hugely influential and powerful white business interests and managed to persuade the unions to break with the ANC...
...Time will tell what effect the inevitable economic spillover and contamination from Zimbabwe will have on Mbeki, whether the Africanist-Marxism of his Moscow days will give way to the economic realism of his Sussex sojourn...
...The need to remove these leadership obstacles to economic, social, and political progress is characteristic of the recent history of democracy in Africa: Consider Abacha in Nigeria, Mobutu in Zaire, Moi still in Kenya, and increasingly Sam Nujoma in Namibia...
...At least Mbeki got that right...
...The names on the gates of South African farms are mostly Afrikaans, except in KwaZulu-Natal where they are English and Scottish...
...They are comrades in arms...
...The generation in Zimbabwe who refer to themselves as the "born frees," especially the educated urban youngsters just out of higher education, take one look at the ugly gerontocracy mismanaging the country and opt to leave to seek their fortune in the land of the old colonial masters, Britain...
...Not that this reaction is unknown in other cultures...
...Messrs...
...The African renaissance may use a word from European history but its real meaning is found more in the slogan mayibuye iAfrika!: "May Africa return...
...It could mean the beginning of the end of the ANC...
...Jill Marcus, a South African government spokeswoman, says that since the Zimbabwean economy is so small compared to South Africa's, the effects will not be so bad...
...That is my sentiment entirely after spending the latter half of last year in Zimbabwe as inflation climbed to over 100 percent, the economy shrank by some 8 percent, and unemployment stood at 60 percent...
...Even when it occurs, their removal may come too late...
...The South African observer group sent to monitor the recent elections in Zimbabwe was chosen to echo its master's voice in Pretoria...
...Until that person has exited, whether voluntarily or not, nothing can happen...
...It is a convenient form of political excommunication...
...Does hiv cause aids...
...Such is the case with Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president since 1980, and now, after the recent election, hoping to last through to 2008, which he well might, since power seems to lend dictators longevity...
...The amount of land owned by white commercial farmers is vast...
...A priest who has given his life to Zimbabwe and knows it thoroughly stunned me recently with the observation that even if there were political change, it might not be possible to rebuild because the social, economic, and political depredations were, in his view, far more serious than people realized...
...not only is progress blocked, but decline is inexorable and inevitable...
...mind, might regard as crazy...
...An unfortunate element of sheer contrariness can come into this discourse, so that the issue becomes not what is said but rather who said it...
...Mbeki's "I am an African" speech (May 8,1996) is an eloquent and subtle articulation of this tradition...
...for the Africanist Mugabe is a great and powerful chief taking on the lackeys of colonialism...
...others are ipso facto excluded...
...Mbeki, unlike the classic lawyer-leader, is an economist who ought to understand that Mugabe is ruining his country's economy and creating political instability in the entire Southern African region...
...A third strand of the ideological weave is a particular view of history: only the party which led the armed struggle is worthy to lead the country...
...But in the wake of Mugabe's victory, with the businessmen saying how bad it all is for South Africa's economy, the ANC is clearly still staying the Africanist course...
...When former president Jimmy Carter, recently visiting South Africa, stated his belief in an-tiretrovirals, he was lambasted in the press by the ANC, an attack which may have been authorized by Mbeki himself...
...That is the line of Zimbabwe's ruling party...
...South African history might yet repeat Zimbabwe's, as yet another embattled African leader who ought to go clings stubbornly to power, while all around him things fall apart...
...This Africanist response is born of the repeated experience of being told what to do by others as well as how to think...
...In other words, the Marxist class struggle of industrial proletariat against capitalist becomes re-interpreted in black and white, Africa against the colonizing West...
...But more widely still, there exists a left-leaning, geopolitical comfort zone in the Southern African region, of which Mbeki is part...
...Mbeki and Mugabe come out of the same left-wing liberation tradition...
...Not so...
...Why would one want to spoil the party by letting in someone who is not quite our type...
...One of the possibly unintended effects of this view of history is that it has excluded the young...
...The immediate crisis of the Zimbabwe elections has passed, but the danger of being pulled down by the drowning man is still real...
...On the wider front of regional politics, it obviously makes sense not to antagonize Robert Mugabe if he is going to be your neighbor for the next six years...
...To the Western eye an African city may seem dirty, chaotic and noisy...
...The political logic is a little more byzantine, but also makes sense from Mbeki's point of view...
...She is clearly disingenuous in downplaying the economic "contamination" factor, that is, that my neighbor's problems spell problems for me...
...In his struggle-honed, Marxist-formed heart, however, he might find it acceptable, perhaps even desirable...
...It was clear that Mugabe was not going to take chances with the presidential election...
...But there is a logic in this lunacy...
...The phrase expresses the desire that the continent will achieve not only an economic comeback and political independence, but also a cultural zenith, in which Africa and her traditions, values, and mores can at last walk tall after a long dark night of economic and intellectual slavery...
...British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sees Mugabe as an election thief...
...To the Western observer, the farm occupations may give Mugabe the appearance of a poor man's Pol Pot or an even poorer man's Stalin-the wild and discredited notion that one can solve an economic and political problem in one fell swoop of social engineering...
...A perfect example is the Democratic Republic of the Congo...
...Another aspect of the ANC and Mbeki's Africanism is intellectual, a conscious stance that systematically questions the Western perspective on reality...
...Not that this is likely any time soon, but, with some bad economic luck and continuing high unemployment in South Africa, it could happen...
...The situation is congenial and convenient...
...With the New Economic Partnership for African Development requiring vast investments from the West, such perceptions are expensive for Africa...
...For Mbeki and the ANC, there is political risk in allowing such an alliance to succeed in a neighboring country...
...Contamination is a particularly potent force in the African context because the rest of the world tends to believe that the heart of darkness is alive and well where it has always lived, in Africa...
...This is true of South Africa as well as Zimbabwe...
...Well, as Bill Clinton said, "It's the economy, stupid...
...as the Mozambican slogan has it...
...Furthermore, the ANC always has to make sure it keeps this tradition at a boil, lest the more radically Africanist Pan African Congress outdo it in Africanism...
...There is much in this...
...the Organization of African Unity says they were fine...
...By the time Mobutu left, the damage was complete...
...Ironically, this Marxist and therefore originally non-African strand of ideology meshes conveniently with the Africanism which is such an important part of the African National Congress's (ANC) tradition...
...Western medicine says so and prescribes expensive Western antiretrovi-ral drugs as a way of slowing the illness and preventing mother-to-child infection...
...Why then does President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa support Mugabe...
Vol. 129 • July 2002 • No. 13
