Vusumuzi Dube
There are three troubling truths about the African continent and its people. The first truth is that all the long struggles for African liberation from colonialism did not lead to the full liberation of the continent as Africa remains economically dependent on other continents and Africans are the poorest of the poor people in the world.
The second, and very stubborn truth, is that all the bounty of African natural resources has not translated into the wealth and the happiness of the majority of Africans. The third, and perhaps the most tragic truth about Africa, is that Africans are divided economically and politically.
These three tragic and also very ugly truths about Africa have made the continent the most powerless continent of the world where everything wrong is bound to happen. Africans are not just divided among their countries but Africans within individual countries are divided along many lines including ideological lines, class lines, ethnic lines, and even religious lines.
Foreign religions have divided Africans. The divisions among Africans have made countries and the continent vulnerable to external influences, attacks, and exploitation. Africa is a theatre of world economic, political, cultural, religious, and military problems simply and squarely because Africans are divided. Africans are divided among their countries, within their countries, in their communities and individual family units.
One may even make the observation that Africans are divided within themselves. One may make the guess that the African and the black person needs to build unity within himself in order to muster the ability to unite with his family, community, country, and other Africans in Africa and in the world.
The black person, as an African, needs to work on himself in order to be able to fix the position of the continent in the world. The first point of fixing Africa is the African, perhaps.
When two brothers fight
The Igbo people of Nigeria are the true poets of the world, the flowers of humanity. One of their powerful proverbs is the aphorism that “when two brothers fight a stranger reaps the harvest.” The tensions and divisions among Africans have allowed forces and people from outside the continent to reap African resources.
The cliché that, divided we fall and united we stand, has fresh meaning and relevance for the African continent. As divided and disparate countries, Africa is going to be ignored and will not become the player in world economics and politics that the continent must be.
African resources that are scattered within individual African countries will always be available for exploitation by enterprising foreign economic vultures and political vampires if one can deploy such metaphors to describe the foreign forces that are in the business of bleeding African economies and polities for their own economic and political profits. Divided, Africans really stand to fall.
In their fall some strangers from all over the world stand to harvest the bounty of African resources.
No African liberation without African Unity
The storied African philosopher, Amilcar Cabral, wrote of the value of unity and struggle in Africa. Cabral was a political theorist who understood that unity was an important ingredient of success in the African struggle for liberation from colonialism.
He theorised that once united and resolved against colonialism, Africans had no other obstacle between them and their liberation. To write of Kwame Nkrumah’s advocacy for African unity would be to bore the reader because Nkrumah made into common-sense the call for a United States of Africa that was supposed to result from the African struggles against colonialism.
Nkrumah did not envision any form of African liberation from colonialism that did not have as its accompaniment the total unity of African countries into a United States of Africa.
For Nkrumah, the goal of the African liberation struggles, armed and unarmed, was a United States of Africa that spoke to the world in one voice. In other words, Nkrumah dreamt of an Africa where colonial borders were eradicated.
Looking at the importance that Nkrumah and Cabral gave to African unity one can make the claim that the original aim of African liberation struggles against colonialism was actually African unity followed by liberation itself. African liberation could not be imagined outside African unity and African unity was but a capital ingredient of African liberation.
When the rain began to beat us as Africans is when we ever started imagining a liberated Africa that still had colonial borders. The day we thought we could live freely and fully with colonial borders is the day we lost the secret to African liberation.
The fragile absolute
Today Africans believe in and live with African borders as if the borders were cut by God himself. That the borders are a colonial and man-made artefact has not convinced us to do away with them. We have believed and respected colonial borders more than the colonisers themselves ever did.
The colonialists knew that the borders were an administrative colonial artefact that helped the logistics of colonialism. But the African himself seems to believe that the borders are sacred gifts from the almighty and from nature.
Even the names of our countries, most of which were given by colonisers, are hugged onto by Africans as if they were talismans. As such, as Africans, we remain artefacts and products of the colonial experience that we have failed to shake off.
What the coloniser created for us we have failed to undo. In that way, we have believed in the coloniser more than he believed in himself. For the coloniser, borders were administrative tools but for us, the borders are tools of further division and chaos in the continent.
As strong and absolute as colonial borders look in Africa, they are actually fragile colonial artefacts that should have evaporated with colonialism itself. African liberation and African unity should have been enough to convince Africans that colonial borders were reversible.
I have heard some serious African scholars say that the colonial borders were some of the gifts of colonialism to Africa that were helping to make Africa governable. Such scholars can be forgiven on the grounds that they are pathetic products of colonial education that will continue to apologise for colonialism decades after colonialism should have ended.
Disbelief in colonial borders should be the beginning of African liberation wisdom that will lead Africans to political and economic unity. African economic and political unity will make the continent a powerhouse in the world as there is no continent that does not want to trade and relate with Africa.
That African borders exist, and that Africans are still divided, is the unfinished African liberation assignment. The day the former colonisers of Africa hear that the borders they built in Africa are no more is the day the former colonisers will know that Africa is not theirs and was never theirs in the first place.
As long as western countries still see their maps and borders working in Africa they will continue to believe that Africa needs them as rulers. Demolishing colonial borders will be one big way of undoing coloniality in Africa.
There is no ghost of Nkrumah or Cabral that will do this but young Africans.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of Zululand, Empangeni, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
Bongani Ndlovu