Protesters chant slogans in South Africa: “The good in Africa comes to life when people struggle for it.” Photo/REUTERS
Call it, if you like, Africa’s yin and yang. For every gut-wrenching atrocity and calamity that Africa faces there is an equally powerful reaffirmation of all that can be right in Africa.
A recent example is the international outcry that followed xenophobic killings in South Africa about a year ago, but it was the South Africans themselves who ultimately quelled the fires.
Staying in that country, 15 years ago Nelson Mandela was elected president which effectively slammed the door on a brutal and dehumanising system.
Further north, though, moderate Hutus who provided shelter for Tutsis risked and lost their lives in the Rwandan genocide.
Big business
Africa produces dictators and genocidaires, but it also produces political activists and Nobel peace laureates.
It is this balance between capacity for destruction and affirmation of life that has kept Africans at the table of a common humanity.
But I want to ask: why have we failed to translate the good that comes out of us in times of war into building a prolonged period of peace?
Africans have to find the strength and the will to break away definitively from this precarious and costly balance between destruction and affirmation of life.
If the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia have been telling us anything, it is that one day soon things may have been pushed too far and something will have to give —and then there will be no climbing back to the table of a common humanity for generations to come.
The good in Africa comes to life when people struggle for it, the bad emerges when they relinquish their agency and the freedom to choose and act to a leadership quick to slap on the chains of injustice and poverty.
In the middle of the last century, the first winds of change were blown by the people, but hijacked by Africa’s independence-era leadership.
The democratic spaces opened up in the 1990s were paid for by the blood and labour of the people.
Today, these spaces remain open only to the extent that the elite can keep filing in for more and more.
South Africa is a good example. After several generations of struggle South Africans finally broke apartheid’s back and in entered Nelson Mandela.
But Mandela made accommodations that ceded political power to blacks while leaving the economic and military power to the whites.
Thabo Mbeki followed and, for a further decade, desegregated the halls of power for the chosen few whilst failing to liberate the country’s wealth or land for the majority.
Now Jacob Zuma, whose affinity to big business reeks under the cologne of populism, will take his turn at the helm.
The writing on the wall is ominous, but in it there is also hope.
The warning is linked to the current African leadership, the hope to African people.
Africa does well when the people, forced by circumstances, look into themselves and create pressure groups, form village committees to raise funds or labour for a project or organise social movements to struggle for justice.
Our definition of leadership has to change.
True leadership does not come from the top or only from the elite classes.
True leadership does not need the experience of having served in the very same government or ruling party that we are trying to get rid of.
It does not prey on fears or make expedient promises or seek populism in place of popularity.
Equal trade
If genuine leadership is going to emerge from within the people, we have to create the conditions that make it possible.
Let the people cast a vote of no confidence in the opposition and the sitting governments, for the whole lot are part of problem.
In the cause of thousands coming together to refuse participation in the charade of choosing the lesser of two evils new leaders will emerge.
Our times call for new, young and dynamic African leadership that does not see Africa as a junior partner in a globalised world, one that rejects foreign aid in favour of equal trade and that struggles against inequalities within and between nations.
And after that leadership has outlived its usefulness, it too should be left on the wayside with a polite thank-you note.
The past should not to continue to bear so heavily on the present.
The past has to free the future. Used to the yin and the yang of destruction and reaffirmation, we have come to believe that this balance is the best we can do.
The writer is the author of Hurling Words at Consciousness.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
