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Today Zimbabwe joins much of the African continent in celebrating the founding of the Organisation of African Unity, now the African Union, by newly-independent African states on May 25, 1963.
It is also doing it in style: Zimbabwean youth, more specifically those affiliated to the governing Zanu-PF party, are conducting what they have dubbed a Million-Man March in Harare in honour of President Mugabe’s leadership of the country and also his place on the continent.
It is fitting that the march coincides with Africa Day in honour of a man, if not the only man here who attended that great occasion in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa back then when Zimbabwe’s own independence was only a hazy dream. The march and the celebrations represent a melding of the past and the future.
President Mugabe brings to this occasion a lot of institutional memory while the youth as the leaders of tomorrow represent a semi-transitional space in a continuum in the march towards total African freedom.
We honour the memory of those African leaders who had a vision and dreamed of a free, united and prosperous Africa. Those were men and women who looked beyond their own immediate borders and comforts to the broader aspirations of all the people of the continent under the breaking yoke of colonial rule, like they had been under slavery by the same aliens from far away shores and climes.
Indeed those were men and women who had sacrificed and were ready to sacrifice more for the greater good of the whole. Kwame Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, Jomo Kenyatta, Ahmed Ben Bella, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sekou Toure, Modiba Keita, Leopold Sedar Senghor, King Hassan and Mwalimu Julius Nyerere. We honour them all on this great day. And they are all departed.
Nothing we say in their tribute today can do justice to their sacrifices, except to ask ourselves whether we are worthy inheritors of the job they left unfinished as the Maker called them, one by one. Are we making enough to bring to fruition their dreams of a united, prosperous Africa?
Over the years since the independence of Ghana in 1957 many leaders have come and gone, most of them serving as no more than placeholders if not outright traitors to the cause of African political and economic freedom.
That is to say political independence has not yielded a golden era for most of Africa’s “wretched of the earth”. The dream and vision of the founders of the OAU have not materialised in part because our former enslavers and the colonised would have none of it and also because some of leaders who came later were and are happy to be instruments to perpetuate their people’s oppression and poverty.
President Mugabe fits comfortably in the league of the founding fathers today as their physical representative and an embodiment of their aspirations for a free Africa.
Particularly since 2000, President Mugabe has fought a battle few post-independence leaders have fought on the African continent. He has fought to end the continued looting of African resources by former enslavers and colonisers and to bring under majority control Zimbabwe’s natural resources.
As indicated earlier, the same former enslavers and colonisers will have none of it. He has been demonised and cast as the devil. He has been called names for fighting to give substance to political independence, well beyond the symbolism of a national flag.
It is unfortunate that the illusion of independence for most African states has precluded forums such as the Liberation Committee to forcibly drive the economic agenda. This has allowed the same forces opposed to Africa liberation and freedom to dictate how the continent should run its affairs.
That has led to divisions which the founding fathers could not have imagined among the new generation of African leaders. Summits are no more than talk shows. Unity is only in word. Instead, all await their turn to get accolades from Europe and America for being their faithful stewards.
That has not stopped nor deterred President Mugabe from shining the beacon and exposing European fraudsters returning to Africa as champions of democracy and human rights when they are opposed to the economic empowerment of its majority.
We honour him today. And the youths also make a symbolic pledge that his legacy will live on.
Online Reporter