Martin Henry BUSH WAS in Africa last week denouncing slavery and promising AIDS aid to the most ravaged region in the world. Clinton also made the swing through during his presidency. But the United States has paid far more attention to the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Europe than to the poorest continent on the planet. As the American President swung through five countries, each with symbolic significance, the leader of Africa was questioning the commitment of the continent to end its many conflicts. Thabo Mbeki, opening the African Union Summit in Maputo, Mozambique last Thursday as outgoing chairman, lamented that only a handful of the 53 states had ratified a security protocol agreed to in principle one year ago. The Peace and Security Council which is intended to give the AU the authority to undertake military interventions in conflicts in member states is in limbo.
Civil wars and AIDS are a deadly combination against the democracy and development which Thabo Mbeki so powerfully articulated in his UWI speech on which I commented last week.
There is a huge sentimental attachment to things African in this country, which has proudly done its bit, often out front, for the liberation and development of Africa. Those comments last week attracted a good deal of attention, including radio discussions on Nationwide and Independent Talk. As Dr. John Maxwell reminded the audience, Norman Manley, as Premier of Jamaica, still a colony and with virtually no direct trade with South Africa, led the world as the first country to impose a trade embargo on the Apartheid regime! We hosted South African/ANC students here. We kept our athletes and beauty queens away and were active in forcing South Africa out of the Commonwealth. It was a pleasure watching the mixed SA netball team playing Jamaica. Thabo Mbeki said something which made more sense after I spoke to Ronnie Thwaites on radio. Mbeki said he and his entourage were not guests here but "prodigal sons and daughters who have come home". The young exiled Mbeki wuz here and a guest on Thwaites Public Eye/JBC talk show. I am reminded of those famous farewell words of Martin Luther King, Jr., that there was nowhere else in the world that he had felt more alive and fully human, including in his own country, than in Jamaica. We have hosted and renewed that great Latin American liberator Simon Bolivar. We should take up the Mbeki challenge of honestly studying the failures of the Haitian Revolution and teaching the lessons to the peoples of Africa and the Black Diaspora. This venture is directly in line with our historic role as supporters of freedom struggles.
The leader of Africa spoke to his Caribbean audience at the UWI on a historically important day for the African continent, June 30, as he himself reminded the audience, almost as an afterthought, towards the end. On that day in 1960 the Democratic Republic of Congo gained its Independence with Patrice Lumunba as Prime Minister. Lumumba was removed before the year was out and murdered by the Big Powers, Mbeki declared, and the Congo has not had a democratic government since then, despite its name, until recent efforts.
It was an unlikely speech in the Social Sciences lecture theatre, often the venue for rather different kinds of deliveries on things African and Caribbean. And not everyone was pleased. A furious challenger, at question-and-answer time had to be forcefully escorted from the lecture theatre by an inspector of police, and one of the university students who kept up an annoying counter-chatter in my vicinity in the jam-packed lecture theatre announced it was time for a regime change in South Africa. Mbeki had already been challenged earlier in the day by Rastas as he spoke at Mandela Park and the freedom fighter/statesman had quickly defanged them by initiating a meeting with them for the following morning at 8:30.
In praise of the inspiration for continental African decolonisation and freedom struggles which "courageous pioneers of African freedom in the Diaspora" provided, Thabo Mbeki spoke of the first Pan-African Congress which the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams convened in Lon-don in 1900. I place his own speech at the UWI in the category of those in the past which have changed the course of events. Mbeki detailed the tragedy of the African continent: The only continent where poverty is on the rise with 40 per cent of the population below the poverty line of US$1 per day, where the share of world trade is declining and is now less than two per cent. In this mess, South Africa, with its still dominant white minority population, leads Sub-Saharan Africa on the UNDP Human Development index. The country has a per capita GDP 2 times that of Jamaica and 7 times that of Haiti, an equivalent adult literacy rate to Jamaica of about 85 per cent with Haiti at just about 50 per cent, and is the military superpower on the African continent.
In the bad old days of Apartheid, the movement of migrant labour between the front-line states and South Africa was into South Africa. Neighbouring Zimbabwe, independent since 1980 but which has chosen radical solutions to its land distribution problem which Mbeki says is worse in his country, is down at 128 on the Index and sliding fast (SA is #107, and the bottom 1/3 of the index is firmly controlled by sub-Saharan Africa.
These facts deeply irk the ideologues who see all of Africa's problems as the creations of the white colonial imperialists and would prefer to see a regime change in South Africa to get rid of the sell out president. One angry locksed lady outside SSLT verbally assaulting the white Jamaican chairman inside, Dr. John Maxwell, kept loudly insisting, "a de Europeans, a de Europeans." But is it not time that we join Thabo Mbeki in honestly asking and answering that really important question: What practically must be done by ourselves to reclaim our glorious past, to re-invent ourselves, to avoid the mistakes of the past, and to construct our own renaissance in unity and partnership?
Martin Henry is a communication consultant.
