An
African Parliament of Liberators
Two days before the publication of this edition of ANC TODAY, the 3rd
African Union Assembly of Heads of State and Government unanimously accepted
South Africa's offer to host the Pan African Parliament (PAP). This marks
yet another important step forward in the implementation of the comprehensive
African transformation programme represented by the AU and its development
programme, NEPAD.
The Assembly also took the important step of
adopting the Statutes of the Economic, Social and Cultural Council
of the AU (ECOSOCC). Given the fact that we now have the protocol defining
the tasks and other elements of this Council, the Assembly went further
to urge the Chairperson of the AU Commission "to take urgent measures
for the launching and operationalisation of ECOSOCC."
Also notable in this regard, the Assembly also
requested "the Executive
Council (of the AU) to take appropriate measures to define, at the earliest
opportunity, the meaning of the African Diaspora". This is consistent
with the decision taken at the Durban Founding Assembly of the AU for
our continent to establish structured relations with the African Diaspora,
defining this Diaspora as part of the process that must lead to the success
of the African Renaissance.
The progress made with regard to the PAP, including the decision to
locate it in South Africa, and the imminence of the establishment of
ECOSOCC, bring to the fore the strategic matter of the role of the African
masses in the struggle for the renewal of their continent.
Quite naturally, up to now, our governments have led the processes of
African transformation represented by the AU and NEPAD. Nevertheless,
the 2001 Lusaka Summit of the OAU directed the Member States to popularise
both the AU and NEPAD among the African masses. In reality, however,
much needs to be done to give effect to this decision.
The establishment of the PAP and the formation of ECOSOCC further emphasise
the need for the empowerment of our people to play their role in changing
their lives for the better. Our movement must respond to this challenge
and ensure that we both supply the people with the knowledge they need,
as well as organise them actively to participate in what inevitably will
be a protracted struggle for the victory of the African renaissance.
For many centuries now, Africa has been victim
to many developments that have placed Africans everywhere among the
most "wretched of
the earth". These developments include the transportation of millions
of Africans across both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans as slaves, producing
disastrous effects on the cohesion and productive capacity of African
societies and leading to the formation of slave colonies in North and
South America and the Caribbean.
Writing about the "Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist" in
his well-known treatise "Das Kapital", Karl Marx said:
"The discovery of gold and silver in America,
the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal
population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies,
the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black
skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production."
A more recent book, "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild,
first published in 1998, also reflects on the practice and impact of
the slave trade on the Congo. He writes that, "Within a few decades
(of the first time the Portuguese came to the Congo), the Western hemisphere
became a huge, lucrative, nearly insatiable market for African slaves.
They were put to work by the millions in Brazil's mines and on its coffee
plantations, as well as on the Caribbean islands where other European
powers quickly began using the lush, fertile land to grow sugar.
"The lust for slave profits engulfed even
some of the (Portuguese) priests, who abandoned their preaching, took
black women as concubines, kept slaves themselves, and sold their students
and converts into slavery."
He writes of a king of the baKongo, who had become
a Christian convert, Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, who wrote to King Jo?o
III of Portugal in 1526 as follows: "Each day the traders are
kidnapping our people - children of this country, sons of our nobles
and vassals, even people of our own family.This corruption and depravity
are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated.We need in
this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless
it is wine and flour for Mass.It is our wish that this Kingdom not
be a place for the trade or transport of slaves."
King Jo?o III responded to this heartfelt plea
as follows: "You.tell
me that you want no slave-trading in your domains, because this trade
is depopulating your country.The Portuguese there, on the contrary, tell
me how vast the Congo is, and how it is so thickly populated that it
seems as if no slave has ever left."
Commenting on the "Scramble for Africa", which led to the
colonisation of our continent, Hoschschild writes: "Underlying much
of Europe's excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source of
raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for
raw materials - slaves - for the colonial plantation economy had driven
most of Europe's earlier dealings with Africa. Expectations quickened
dramatically after prospectors discovered diamonds in South Africa in
1867 and gold some two decades later. But Europeans liked to think of
themselves as having higher motives. The British, in particular, fervently
believed in bringing 'civilisation' and Christianity to the natives;
they were curious about what lay in the continent's unknown interior;
and they were filled with righteousness about combating slavery. Britain,
of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery.
British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had
slavery's vestiges been abolished in the British Empire."
The majority of the peoples of Africa gained
their independence from colonial domination from the 1950's onwards,
climaxing in our own liberation in 1994. The countries all of us inherited
had been deeply scarred by depopulation resulting from "the turning of Africa into a warren
for the commercial hunting of black skins" of which Marx and Hoschchild
wrote; its use as "a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial
Revolution" that Hochschild spoke about; and the racism that Hochschild
reported, which led "the British, in particular, fervently (to)
believe in bringing 'civilisation' and Christianity to the natives."
There is a continuing and urgent need for Africa's historians, sociologists
and others to assess and write about the long-term impact of these three
historical phenomena on Africa - slavery, colonialism and racism. There
are some in our country and the rest of the world who demand that we
should view and treat these phenomena merely as a matter of historical
record, with no relevance to our contemporary struggles for Africa's
rebirth.
In part, this is driven by the determination
to compel the victims of gross injustice to forget the harm that was
done to them, inducing a collective African amnesia, the better to
be able to persuade the victims to blame themselves for their wretchedness.
We see this clearly in our own country, where some insist that apartheid
is a thing of the past, and that all references to the continuing impact
of that past constitute an attempt to "play the race card."
And yet, for us, it is critically important that we understand the impact
of that past, to empower ourselves to deal effectively with the present.
Our purposes are not informed by any desire to blame those historically
responsible for the most terrible crimes against humanity, but to design
the policies and programmes that must help us to achieve Africa's renaissance.
African scholarship has a responsibility to inform us about the consequences
of the depopulation of Africa through slavery on the formation of the
colonial system. Similarly, African scholarship has a responsibility
to educate us about the consequences of the colonial system on the birth
and practice of neo-colonialism that has characterised much of Africa
during the years of its independence. It has a duty to educate us about
the emergence and impact of racism on the societies that were the victims
of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Together we have the responsibility fully to understand contemporary
African reality as it has been formed by the historical phenomena of
slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism, which are not separated
one from the other by any Chinese walls. Between these phenomena there
are no discontinuities, as there is no discontinuity between the past
and the present, affording us the possibility to respond to the present
as though there was no past.
As we have indicated, this past includes the recent period of neo-colonialism.
During this phase of the evolution of Africa, we have seen African systems
of governance continue to treat the African peoples as masses who deserve
to be alienated from the process of determining their future, with many
of the new African rulers attaching themselves as a parasitic element
on African society, as had done the slave traders and the colonial masters.
In principle this was no different from the arrogance
which convinced Joao III of Portugal that so long as there was an African
not in bondage, there was an African who remained to be subjected to
slavery, or the British, who knew it as a matter of fact that they
had a manifest destiny to "civilise" the "primitive" African
natives.
We have seen African systems of governance succumb to a global economic
order born of slavery and colonialism, which defined Africa as a source
of raw materials produced by cheap African labour, making it inevitable
that Africa would be subjected to a sustained process of escalating impoverishment
and underdevelopment.
We have seen how the new rulers accepted the
racism that projected African subservience to a "superior" Western world, taking pride in
their absorption of the cultures and languages of their former colonisers,
and their alienation from their own cultures and languages, which they
had learnt to despise as "uncivilised".
We have seen the entrenchment of the belief that
the achievement of the goal of a better life for the African natives
was dependent on the sustained goodwill of the Western world to favour
these masses with the transfer of resources in the form of "aid" or "overseas
development assistance".
The complex of the issues we have mentioned has led to the generalised
African economic and social crisis from which the peoples of Africa have
to extricate themselves. What this calls for is a veritable revolution
that must lead to the eradication of poverty and underdevelopment on
our continent, the restoration of the dignity of the African people,
including those in the Diaspora, and victory in the struggle to end the
global marginalisation of Africa and Africans.
By their very nature, genuine revolutions release the enormous energies
that reside among the masses of the people, drawing these masses into
the process of the making of history. No genuine revolution has ever
succeeded by relying on the actions of a revolutionary elite acting outside
of the involvement of the masses of the people, or predicated on the
demobilisation and immobilisation of the masses.
The call to achieve Africa's renaissance is therefore necessarily a
call to the African masses to rise up in struggle to defeat poverty and
underdevelopment, to end Africa's marginalisation and to restore the
dignity of Africans everywhere. The genuine democratisation of African
politics and systems of governance, and the empowerment of the African
masses to be their own liberators, as visualised both in the Constitutive
Act of the AU and NEPAD, is critical to the achievement of this objective.
Failure to realise these goals would nullify
the historic possibility we have to make decisive advances towards
Africa's renaissance. This would condemn all Africans to the perpetuation
of their status as the "wretched
of the earth".
It is our responsibility, acting together with all other patriotic forces
in Africa and the African Diaspora, to ensure that we mobilise the masses
of the people to act as their own liberators, taking advantage of the
current African and global conjuncture that presents us with the possibility
to achieve the old-age dream of the genuine, all-round emancipation of
the African people.
The Pan African Parliament, composed of elected representatives of the
African masses, as well as the AU ECOSOCC have a duty to ensure that
they too discharge their responsibilities to mobilise the masses of the
peoples of Africa actively to participate in the titanic and protracted
struggle to achieve Africa's renewal.
As hosts of the PAP we have a responsibility to create the best possible
conditions for this assembly of the peoples of Africa to carry out its
work. As a country we have the duty warmly to welcome the continental
people's tribunes and to provide the setting that must inspire them to
play their role at the head of the risen African masses.
Similarly, like all the other countries that constitute the membership
of the African Union, we will also have to ensure that the delegates
we send to the ECOSOCC are themselves genuine representatives of the
masses of our peoples, and not merely non-governmental formations that
have achieved public prominence on the basis of foreign funding. The
establishment of the ECOSOCC means that none of us can afford any longer
to defer grappling with the resolution of the question of what we, in
the African context, mean by the categories, civil society and social
movements.
By the decisions it took, the 3rd Assembly of the AU, held at the headquarters
of the Union, Addis Ababa, has provided us with additional instruments
of progressive change in Africa. Fully to realise the potential of these
decisions, both the PAP and ECOSOCC must be constituted and function
as genuine representatives of the masses of our people. Only in this
way will they be able to play their role as the vanguard institutions
for the mobilisation of the African people to act as their own liberators.
|
