MIKI TASSENI:
WORLD leaders gathered early this week for paying homage and final respects
to the most renowned political leader of the 20th century, former South
African president Nelson Mandela, who died after a long drawn out battle
with lung disease. Acclaim was unanimous and universal as to his impact to
raise political morality to a higher level, in like manner as assassinated
US civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King for his country, and Indian
hermit and nationalist Mahatma Gandhi, who awakened teeming millions in the
1930s and 1940s to reject alien rule. If Mwalimu Nyerere had a keen moral
message, Mandela was morality itself.
There is an extent however that thousands of African activists who have a
platform to express themselves have remained silent as to their misgivings
of the departed Mandela as Africa’s Mahatma and largely for the world at
large. For Mahatma Gandhi was in life closer to Nyerere than to Mandela,
namely that he remained on one side of a historical struggle, for the
defeat of the coloniser or foreign ruler, a sentiment laced with all the
other elements like racial and religious distaste, both of which have
remained a thorn on the side of independent India, as well as Africa.
Mandela showed by inimitable example how to cross those limits, his real
legacy.
To a considerable extent it was the South African condition that prepared
the late Mandela for that salutary role, to which must be added his own
acute humbleness and readiness to forgive, tied to lack of interest in
amassing power and wealth for himself and acolytes, the way it is usually
done. The South African situation in the mid-1980s was a moribund
environment of a fence erected between white and black communities, as in
the Israeli-Palestinian situation, tied down by fear laced with hatred for
the other. Equality with the black man meant communist rule and the
destruction not just of white privileges but of open society as whites knew
it.
And in this worry they were not exceedingly wrong, for the evidence is
there for all to see about Zimbabwe. The pursuit of revenge for land
alienation and decimation of Africans resisting colonialism brought up
President Mugabe’s nationalist policy. It was put up in utter contempt of
models Mandela was pursuing in South Africa.
While the anti-colonial nature of the campaign against Ian Smith and the
white minority regime in Zimbabwe had an outlet in formal declaration of
independence, that route did not exist for South Africa as it was
independent since 1910. It was an issue of finding space where all racial
groups could live in harmony, surpass their profound and deep mistrust
encapsulated in the apartheid system, resembling the cleavages today that
separate Israel and occupied territories on which Israel’s future is based,
psychologically. The world conducts an interminable game of musical chairs
as leaders come and go, pretending to negotiate Israel’s departure from
those territories, the heart of its psychic identity. It is a forlon hope,
a waste.
With the South African whites, either the Boer farming community or others
with a deep antipathy for racial integration, there was an option for
migration, especially to Australia and New Zealand where many of them soon
shifted. A breadth of professionals also migrated due to the violence that
was unfolding as Mandela and his closest associated, Cyril Ramaphosa and
Thabo Mbeki, gradually hammered out a deal, while Zulu chief Mangosuthu
Buthelezi mobilised his people against a Xhosa takeover. It was the Malcolm
X politics of domestic and field niggers, where the field nigger sees the
domestic nigger preparing to reap, to his perceived disadvantage. Mandela
let the situation slide, but upon becoming president, made enormous effort
to give pride of place to Buthelezi, going abroad and Mbeki going on
another trip, for Buthelezi to act as president for a week or so.
That method did wonders, and soon the Zulu hordes in the country’s major
cities started to feel like citizens, such that when Mbeki took over, the
fears of Xhosa rule to Zulu disadvantage had diminished considerably. In
his turn, Mbeki made efforts to keep within reach and in excellent position
the top ANC insider and for many years head of its security apparatus,
Jacob Zuma, as likely heir as chief executive. Still Mbeki attempted to
infuse a specific ethics bar which it was more or less apparent Zuma was
failing to clear that bar, though finally it was a matter of style, between
traditionalism and the pomp around it (and that needs money, plenty of it)
and a secluded, proto-missionary, civil service approach to political power.
This effort by Mbeki nearly brought South Africa to instability as patience
seemed to be running low among Zuma supporters, including the ‘entire Zulu
nation’ as it were. In that case Mbeki had to accept what was inevitable,
and was thus voted out as president of the ANC. Yet the ‘flood’ that those
around Mbeki worried could happen never took place; the South African
economy did not change much, etc.
Even within the ambit of South African politics, there are many who aren’t
Mandelan at heart, among fringe groups of the old apartheid system with a
die hard racist outlook, occasionally putting up macabre acts of violence
against some black servants, nearly enslaved individuals. There is also
that group among the old ANC Freedom Charter and its proto-communist
outlook, favoring nationalisation of energy, mining, banking and a host of
other economic pillars, what in Tanzania is equivalent to wishing the
Arusha Declaration had remained intact, or those even in Tanzania who
editorialise to praise President Mugabe’s policies of dispossession of
whites and ’empowerement’ of ‘ex-freedom fighters’ some of whom are 35
years old, toddlers at independence. Africa has a distinctive affinity with
dispossessing whites or placing property under the state if local
capitalists cannot command it.
That is why, unlike the Caribbean which has long side removed the colour or
race reference point in its politics, Africa has so far failed to take up
the offer by the European Union of an economic partnership agreement,
where European firms would have the same legal rights as local firms when
they operate in Africa. Former president Benjamin Mkapa has been the
government’s foremost spokesman against that project, listing all its
potential woes to Africa’s development – totally unaware that Mwalimu’s
last appearance at the Nkrumah Hall in the University of Dar es Salaam in
December 1997 was devoted to that theme.. He was saying that Europe would
scarcely make such an offer to Africa because sub-Saharan Africa was far
too distant from its shores to make a difference in the politics of the
major European by migrations. North Africa, by contrast, could expect such
an accord, in much the same way as Mexico was in NAFTA (North Atlantic Free
Trade Area) with the United States and Canada, as it shares a long land
border with America.
In other words what Mwalimu was dreaming of in the last years of his life
is what Mandela has been doing all along, but like Mwalimu, Mandela did not
arrive there all at once, but through adopting the armed struggle (with a
Tanganyika passport given by Mwalimu for military training in Algeria in
1962). After entering prison in 1963 and seeing how things had gone after
20 and then 25 years, he decided that there was no other way but taking the
way of the Gospel, of ‘loving thy enemies, and praying for those who
torment you.’ Mandela realised what our rulers are yet to grasp, that when
one lives by resentment, he takes poison and then believes that the poison
will kill his enemies. Therefore in Mwalimu’s time and subsequently the
country has rejected formal property over land, to avoid foreigners picking
the land – so Kenya exports ten times more to the US under AGOA with far
less arable land.
While Tanzania is on a slightly higher value level in the Mandela scale of
values than Zimbabwe, there are far too many things in common and much the
same tragedies, of excessive violence either at the political level the way
communalism and vengeance has decimated Zanzibar and ruined its hppes of
economic growth, or at the social level. The scale of violence on the
Mainland, characterised by incessant human sacrifices so as to succeed in
an ineffcient environment is staggering, but all that is hypothetical as it
is a no-go area for media and politics. Tanzania amply compares with Haiti,
the poorest country of the Americas which is keeping a communal,
quasi-feudal land regime and exports labour for farms of its neighbours.
The politics there is ruthless as are the voodoo sacrifices, and we are
beginning to learn those arts as well, as violence is sharply creeping up
in politics.
The golden rule that Mandela discovered after close to 25 years in prison
and then began to send out ‘short text messages’ to the apartheid regime
that enabled serious negotiations to start on the country’s future, was
given to Mwalimu and his TANU colleagues in 1954. They announced that
principle, ‘all men (human beings) are my bretheren and Africa is one,’
which would have ensured the rights of Europeans, Arabs, Indians and
Africans (or other immigrants or refugees in due course) in the country, in
purchasing or selling property and live ‘together as one.’ Mwalimu and TANU
rejected that principle and substituted it with ‘all human beings are
equal,’ and of course each stays in his country, not migrate here or
purchase property. So far we are still anchored in this refusal, and it
fosters the poverty that we have, as all cash made by immigrant
populations, or even local bigwigs, is stashed outside. Ideas like those of
Zitto Kabwe that it should simply be brought back, while not able to
purchase any property, are unrealistic, reflecting the same old resentment.
(ends)