WHAT IS WRONG WITH AFRICA? I have heard Africa’s Call:
by Bishop Clyde N. Ramalaine
My tribute to former President Mbeki’s justified call for an African Renaissance:
The Chinese caligraphied minibus, we travelling in digs deep into the holes of what is considered a road in North Eastern Africa. These are not potholes these are agaping ditches in the roads attesting to lack of maintenance and infrastructure management. After having been thrown around from side to side in this meandering ride in which your intestines want to jump out of your entire soma, I finally get a chance to ask my host and friend, Why are the roads in Kampala capital of Uganda in this state? His answer is simple short yet definitive, “we have not yet received aid money”. Aid money I retort! I thought you build roads and maintain the same infrastructure with taxes Governments collect from its citizens informed by systems of control and management.
Needless to say I was in Africa, Uganda one of the first countries to have gone free, yet gripped in a cycle and evil of poverty, maladministration, a war ravaged country, economically challenged and still trying to shed the impact of dictatorial Amin I wish I could say this is unique to Uganda. Kampala where the stench of poverty envelopes the firmament and peoples faces are tired of fighting an invisible enemy attest so much the story for a great majority of what constitutes the African continent.
It is this dialectical tension based awareness that this continent who comes endowed with wealth in mineral resources untold, this soil that is rich in cultural expression, who has fed the entire world and make billionaires in far flung countries, who has exported its wealth and in return received a pittance rendering it strangled in abject poverty, hopelessness and defeat. This land bereft of human resources annihilated and denied of vision when “leaders” treats state coffers as their own petty cash boxes, must pull itself out of the abyss of evil.
It is the same observation that burnt so deep in an Nkrumah that he became compelled to argue, fight and reason for an African Consciousness. This consciousness advances a clear notion that Africa must free itself. Such vision impregnated another great mind of the Southland, who risked all even his presidency in pursuit of the re-awakening of the Nkrumah vision. Thabo Mbeki was pregnant with an African Renaissance, such renaissance draws from the confirmed claim that at some point in a history of history, Africa was a free land. Africa as a land that dictated the meridian of thought construct, Africa was a space where science was practiced until the pyramids testified. This land now barren of hope, gave linguistic definition to all languages in undergird, this land engineered the first trade and bartering systems. This Africa was expressive in its sophisticated cultural pursuit as identified by the many philosophers and concomitant history expressed in craft and effigies.
This is the Africa Nkrumah and Mbeki cries MAYIBUYE, out of this awareness of a history before a history. Mbeki took this conviction further in seeing the connectedness of the Africa that must re-awake, for him it was not about one country or one tribe it was and is and must always be about the ”all of Africa”. At the heart of this renaissance is the humanity aspect of that which constitutes Africanism. Such Africanism is not a mutually exclusive term but resonates on the plateau of a self awareness, and awareness of the bludgeoning of a people, the colossal rape committed, and awareness of the thuggery, an awareness of the gross injustice colonial forces inflicted as they sought to milk this land dry.
Not only is this awareness drawn from the impact of colonialism but a conjoined immured role of Africans themselves. This enslavement of a mind who only knows how to critique itself until self awareness evaporates into oblivion and self consciousness is seared. It is the realization of who Africa once was, that must impress on every African a sense of dignity, a blooming pride for ours is rich, ours is pure ours is a call to have Africa awake. Africa therefore must awake, such awakening is undergirded by a conscious conviction that no one, no force, no nation can free Africa but Africa must necessarily free itself. Martin Luther King jnr, in one of his best speeches on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington shortly before his death asserts.. We have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.. For we refuse to accept that the well of justice is dried up and that the banks of freedom has gone bankrupt… In that same buoyant spirit Africa must cash its cheque, Africa must line up and demand its rightful space, Africa as represented in the sons and daughters of its soil must claim its stake for the claim of such is long overdue.
The problems with Africa are manifold so it’s claimed, dissertations case studies, research papers and books testify of this problem analysis, in which we somehow got stuck as we forever over analysing our history when praxis calls for implementation. Intellectuals have advanced hypothesis upon hypothesis. Ordinary Africans have oft out of frustration bellowed WHY US? Africa’s sons and daughters had left this vast land, in search of a future and a hope, they had obtained qualifications wherever they had gone they had left those in their company befuddled, mangled, stirred some even upset. They had shaken the foundations of countries where such countries questioned the very veracity of civilization of an Africa, whose sons proved the opposite.
Now I ask you what is wrong with Africa? If you expected me to list an endless litany of things that we have accused ourselves of in agreement with western world media, than u have failed to understand that Africa is conversing,
Africa is awaking, Africa is digging itself out of the Bermuda Triangle dug by colonialism, Africa is untying the shackles that Mary and Mary sings about, Africa is defying the Goree Bay enslavement, Africa is resisting the Robben Island banishment, Africa is rejecting the Savimbi wars of Angola and its accompanying blood diamond practice, Africa is condemning the genocide that redefined a Rwanda history, Africa is seeking peace in Sudan, Africa’s army is in Burundi guarding a fragile peace treaty, Africa is mediating in Somalia where one nation, with one tongue, an one religion is ravaged by a hate untold. Africa is talking about the rights of Eritreans.
This Africa is claiming its seashores back from pirate infested north east coast thugs, Africa is renegotiating mining deals that were born out of avarice. Today Africa is condemning dictators, that message must still reach Swaziland. Africa is saying to Big Brother Gaddafi this is not about individuals. Africa’s intellectuals are thinking again, Africa’s economists are hard at work seeking solutions for economic woes untold. Africa is saying to Uncle Bob in a Zimbabwe once the breadbasket of the south now the pariah state of the south, let God’s people go, vacate the seat, you have overstayed your welcome. KNaan’s melody challenge all to raise a flag, Keita’s song bellows it is your time, in the south Tsepo Tsola, the village pope, hums the battle cry of this awakening.
This Africa is saying to Nigeria, create a middle class that can sustain your nation. As the winds howl across Chad, and the dust gathers over Gambia, the drumbeat is heard from deep in the Congo, the cry of the owl retorts in Ghana its time. Reminding Algeria, Morocco regardless of skin tone you are African. Africa’s cry to Azania – Mzansi lead the way.
Africa is rising from the slum hinterland of Destitute-Ville, Africa’s sun is rising, Africa’s horn is being raised, and Africa is finding its history before history.
The irrevocable challenge for you and I is to respond to Africa’s call . What shall our response be? Are you a part, are you on the fence, are you in awaking too or do you live in assessment and analysis world until you do not sense such awakening?
What is wrong with Africa, I simply shall contend, AN ABSENCE OF MORE AFRICANS RAISING THEIRS HANDS.
Bishop Clyde N. S. Ramalaine
FROM PRESIDENT MBEKI
Your Grace Bishop Ramalaine,
Many, many thanks for your tribute and your wise words which convey the very welcome and truly inspiring message that Africa is blessed to have sons and daughters, like Your Grace, who will surely ensure that she rises from the ashes.
Many a time one feels a great sense of loneliness that as we act and speak everyday, driven by the vision and dream of an Africa reborn, we are like lost souls wandering across the great expanses of the Sahara Desert, with only the mighty and silent sand dunes on the African landscape as our audience.
It is only when we hear African patriots, such as Your Grace, speaking out as you have, that we gain assurance and strength from the knowledge that there is somebody out there, especially on our Continent, who is listening attentively and is ready to act to restore to us our dignity.
Thus does it become possible to stop shouting out the question and the plea – is there anybody there!
The sand dunes do not answer except by echoing the question back, helpful because they amplify the voice in the hope that another African, beyond the reach of the voice of the lonely traveller, will hear the echo and use the stereophonic voice of the sand dunes to answer the lonely traveller that – yes, there is somebody there!
Many a day the traveller stands surrounded by African sands that stretch as far as the eye can see, waiting, waiting for even a faint voice that says yes – there is somebody there!
Much too often the sound of a voice wafts over saying – yes, there is somebody there! But as often, this proves to be a mirage, which confirms the cruel ability of the desert to delude the thirsty traveller that what he or she sees as a water-filled oasis is but mere illusion!
But then suddenly a human and real person, an African, emerges from over the horizon to say that – yes, there are other Africans over there, even on what seem to be the desolate expanses of the African deserts. These are other Africans who hold firmly to the dream that Africa will be reborn, and that the deserts are only barren in what they seem to be.
These come to tell the truth that within their unseen depths, the African sands harbour life and life-giving water that must comfort the traveller that the African deserts do not portend death, but constitute a challenge to African ingenuity and the African mind to discover in the African deserts what they hold and hide in store, preserved for the generations as a resource without limit, to sustain a new and African life of our fulfilment at last and the recovery of our dignity, at last.
Your Grace might have heard me a number of times reciting lines from a poem by the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming. The poem includes an ominous image expressed in the words:
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out / When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert / A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. / The darkness drops again; but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleepwere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I remembered these words when I read what you had written, when, borne on the wings of your thoughts, I saw you emerge from beyond the horizon of the African desert, as though to respond to the echo of my cry carried by the desert winds – is there anybody there!
When I enveloped myself in your thoughts, I could see that no!, what I could see was not a menacing figure with “a shape with lion body and the head of a man”, and not “a rough beast, its hour come round at last”, but a beautiful African who was singing a beautiful melody in a beautiful voice, summoning us to dance a dance that foresees and celebrates Africa’s rebirth.
I overcame my fear and sense of foreboding when I came to realise that what I was seeing was not a “rough beast” that was “slouching towards Bethlehem to be born”, but a harbinger of the African future towards which Africans, through the ages, have aspired and for whose realisation they have sacrificed everything, including their lives.
I understood therefore why you questioned why the roads in Kampala were marred by potholes which African hands could easily repair, without waiting for another to donate to us ordinary asphalt and picks and shovels, to make our roads smooth again, able to carry the African traveller without submission to a ‘meandering ride on which, needlessly, your intestines want to jump out of your entire soma’.
Thus has Your Grace placed the challenge at our African feet, to take the task into our own hands to smoothe Africa’s road to her own rebirth.
Your Grace has made the profound statement that indlela yaziwa ngabayihambayo – only we, the Africans, know that the road we walk as Africans is marked by potholes.
Surely, because we, rather than another, know the state of the road we have to travel, have an obligation to repair it, because we, and nobody else, carry the burden and the pain of navigating the potholes, in the event that we allow them to remain, a hazard along our way to the glorious African future which our ancestors and predecessors, to this day, and wherever they are, urge us to transform into our present and theirs.
Your Grace, many thanks for the heartfelt plea you have made when you asked the troubling question – What is wrong with Africa?
Together with you we must make the commitment to answer this important question, determined to correct everything that has gone wrong, in practical ways!
Together, as Africans, and as you say, correctly, those of us who have the will, however few we may be, must raise our hands to affirm that we refuse to sit on the fence, having resolved that we too, whatever the cost, are and will continue to be part of the African awakening.
Many thanks and warm regards.
Thabo Mbeki.
September 18, 2010.
Copetown 