The Sunday Mail
Kwame Tapiwa Muzawazi
With no rallying point, we are on autopilot to nowhere.
Another May is upon us. And that means another Africa Day.
After observing this occasion for almost 50 years now, it’s time to take stock.
There was a time when the African voice counted for much in global politics.
This is a time when Africa spoke with one voice on the issue of liberating African countries.
The 94 years between 1900 and the 1994 South African transition from apartheid saw congresses, conferences and political actions that catapulted Africa to global political prominence.
Today, Africa is nowhere near that forceful relevance.
One could plausibly argue that this continent of 55 countries and over 1 billion people is at its weakest when it comes to fighting for and defending what’s good for the ordinary African.
What’s next, Africa?
We fought and got the right to run the affairs of our countries, but it’s evident that the fruits of independence are as elusive to grasp in our hands as a slippery fish.
Every generation has a question to answer and actions to take.
What’s the burning question of the day?
Whilst the 20th century was meant to address the issue of Africa freeing herself from the manacles of colonisation, this century has the next calling.
The 21st century must become the epoch of Africans freeing themselves from educational and cultural colonisation — those invisible aspects that are still pervasive. It must be the century of the Second African Revolution.
A century where battles move from the bushes and valleys of guerrilla warfare to the economic and intellectual front.
There is a dozen or so issues that post-colonial Africa needs to confront with decisiveness and determination.
For today, let’s just look at three.
Educational content
Across Africa, most school textbooks have not changed even though the continent claims to be independent.
Resultantly, our teachers are producing nicely colonised graduates who know more the history and geography of Europe than Africa’s.
In English classes, they teach us to say “as white as snow”, yet we don’t live in ice-cold countries — there is milk is Africa.
In Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa, the most popular song they sing during playtime in schools is called “Christopher Columbus: The Great Man”.
It praises Columbus for being a path-breaking explorer and navigator.
Yet our kids should be singing about Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan who pioneered global travel and upon whose autobiography — A Gift To Those Who Contemplate the Gift of Cities and the Wonders of Travelling — Columbus himself relied for planning his colonialist navigations.
The fallacy of Western electoral democracy
One of the icons of African independence, Julius Nyerere, famously said “Democracy is not a bottle of Coca-Cola which you can import”.
He was warning against the stampede to embrace the Western notion of “government of the people by the people”, which wave began in the late 1950s and continues today. Africa has never paused a moment to ask what the best political system for Africa is, especially in accordance with our history, culture and peculiar circumstances.
It’s been 60 years of Africa’s experiment with the Western doctrine, and that is long enough to warrant an audit.
Sadly, those 60 years have proved that there is no relationship whatsoever between what the West says democracy is and development.
Elections in Africa are more expensive than elsewhere in the world per capita; they take more people to organise and are a logistical nightmare.
Even more interesting, there are countries such as China, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar whose people have never heard of elections but enjoy the highest quality of life and development.
The cold facts on the ground are so worrying that Africa needs to urgently organise a summit of summits — similar in magnitude to the 1945 Pan-African Congress held in Manchester — to answer a historic question: why is it that the more elections we have organised since 1957, the more we have got poorer as Africa?
The world’s richest country on paper is the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But DRC has failed to realise the promise of its vast and unparalleled wealth on the simple count that it has failed to hold “free and fair elections” since independence from Belgium in 1960.
Then there is poor Zimbabwe, which is the world’s only country that is expected to hold a textbook-perfect election to the extent that whoever leads Zimbabwe is trapped in expectations of heavenly perfectionism.
Hope for the youth
Back home, young Africans prefer to die in the treacherous waters of the Mediterranean Sea crossing over to Europe in search of a better life.
Between 2017 and 2018, the United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration reported that 5000 Africans died whilst trying to emigrate to Europe.
This matter has received endless publicity but neither the African Union nor African governments have said or done anything decisive.
Yet we are forced to remember year-in, year-out and mourn 1 500 white people who died at sea in the Titanic in 1912.
But 5 000 Africans who sank yesterday can be mourned and forgotten by way of solemn tweets!
My 16-year-old niece asked a question which till now I wonder whether I answered correctly: “Uncle, if Europe and America were to station ships on the coasts of Africa and invite the youth of Africa to voluntary slavery in their countries, how many young Africans will not go?”
I just shook my head and told her I will research and come back to her . . .
A new world order
Whether Brexit happens or not, the European Union and Britain itself will not be the same.
Whether Trump wins in 2020 or not, the USA will not be the same.
The electoral victories of white supremacist political parties in the Western world point to the fact that we have reached the end of the post-World War II liberal order and are now in a new era.
Africa must smell the coffee because it’s increasingly becoming fashionable in former liberal Europe and America to run and win elections on an anti-Africans crusade. Now that time and history have had their say, Prophet Samuel Huntington has been proved right: we are now in the era of the “clash of civilisations”.
History, however, has not been kind to Prophet Fukuyama who had the unenlightened audacity to proclaim that the end of the Soviet Union was the “end of history” and beginning of eternal supremacy of Western-style liberal democracy.
If anything, a new era has begun, launched by the collapse of Western democracy institutions and theories.
For the West, things are falling apart — slowly, but fast — and “the centre cannot hold”.
America, which used to lead the Western Orchestra Band, is going solo.
The UK is struggling to disentangle itself from Europe and also go solo.
Russia is ever more resurgent and confident the good old times are back.
And within the next 10 years, we will witness China’s coronation as the most powerful nation on Earth in many respects. Meanwhile, right now the Minister of Finance for Malawi, like the overwhelming majority of his peers across Africa, is preparing the 2020 national budget, of which 90 percent is dependent on Western countries’ benevolence.
Africa, wake up and smell the coffee!
Africa must today find a rallying point upon which to tie the activities of its leaders and societies.
The real enemy for Africa in the 21st century is not colonialism: it is the black man himself; his own passivity; his own sins of omission and lethargic approach to his own affairs.
With no rallying point, we are on autopilot to nowhere.
And that rallying point must address the fundamental, structural issues — it must be revolutionary.
It must be intellectual.
Kwame Tapiwa Muzawazi is a Zimbabwean Pan-Africanist, explorer, publisher and thinker. He has been to 52 African countries on research missions and serves as CEO to the Book of African Records/Institute of African Knowledge.
