
Picture: Mphuthumi Ntabeni
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When you google the purpose of Africa Day (25 May), the most likely answer you’ll get is this: it is an opportunity to celebrate and showcase African diversity and success, and to highlight the cultural and economic potential that exists on the African continent. In other words, kukuzidla ngegugu lobu Afrika. All well and good. But beyond this pleasing rhetoric, what does this all mean in real experiences of Africans?
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When you google the purpose of Africa Day (25 May), the most likely answer you’ll get is this: it is an opportunity to celebrate and showcase African diversity and success, and to highlight the cultural and economic potential that exists on the African continent. In other words, kukuzidla ngegugu lobu Afrika. All well and good. But beyond this pleasing rhetoric, what does this all mean in real experiences of Africans?
Africa, of all continents, is right in celebrating the diversity of its own identities, especially since they were almost crushed or superimposed by the hegemony of colonial powers. Africa’s diversity, from Cape to Cairo, is a beautiful thing to behold. Its cultures, forming the cradle of humanity, are some of the oldest, and are invested with ancient wisdom around our species’s foundational ways of inhabiting the earth. No doubt about it, colonial oppression messed with our organic growth and development as a continent. But we also need to stop and think how we have contributed towards the stunting of African potential since our political emancipation from colonial oppression. We may discover ukufa kusembizeni, in Xhosa proverbial language; I will translate it into Shakespearean language: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves, that we are underlinings.” What ails African development mostly now, besides the fact that the workings of the capitalist system are rigged to favour the coffers of the West, are Africans themselves. We are not masters of our fate. African political leaders, in particular – mostly old and doddering (this is not ageism but a factual problem) with a self-induced right to political leadership – let us down.

Picture: Mphuthumi Ntabeni
According to the CIA World Factbook, the top 10 countries with the lowest median age are in Africa. Africa has the youngest population in the world. All things working for the best, Africa as continent should be where the people of Africa reside, stay and work - as our youthful workforce should be what carries the ageing global populations, meaning that many manufacturers should be investing in our continent as they run out of labour in their own countries. Instead, you find our young, of working age, flocking to the Western world in despair, choosing to take their chances swimming the dark seas and crossing treacherous deserts to seek economic prospects rather than sit around their own countries, where there are no economic prospects. Their deaths and cruel mistreatment should be resting uneasily on African leaders, who have created the hellish situations which cause their young to perish in foreign lands.

Picture of Mphuthumi Ntabeni and Tembeka Ngcukaitobi: Samantha Collett
Instead, the latest thing with African dictators now, when challenged by the opposition voice of their young into political unrest, sometimes is to employ mercenaries, like the Wagner Group, to kill their opponents, here in return for Russia’s access to the country’s mineral wealth. In countries like Sudan, the infighting of juntas continues unabated at the expense of the young, who die fighting meaningless wars for greedy and useless old men whose weapons are supplied by the same foreign forces (Wagner Group) who want to destabilise their country for easy access to their gold mines. In other countries, like South Africa, the potential is betrayed by the comprador capitalists of the liberation organisations, like the ANC, which are led by capitalist leeches who, in failing to implement their own commendable socio-economic vision, choose to support continuing economic oppression from which they were supposed to have liberated their own people. And the likes of Zimbabwe are under a den of these impotent used-to-be-liberators, who sow seeds of desperation and chaos by prosecuting their own citizenry to live desperate lives of immigrant labour frustration. The political elite of hollowed-from-the-inside ZANU–PF have strangled that beautiful country of almost all potential, and are now draining its economic marrow through mafia and underground gold/platinum/diamond smuggling.

Picture: Mphuthumi Ntabeni
So, my dream for Africa Day is not a toothless African Union that is a club of corrupt dictators entrenching their oppressive powers, but an organisation where the membership of each state is determined by something closer to the Copenhagen criteria of a stable, free democracy, the rule of law, a functioning market economy and the acceptance of the Bill of Human Rights. That way, countries like Uganda, under the tinpot dictatorship of Yoweri Museveni, would not be allowed until they sanctioned universal rights for all, including the LGBQTIA community, and were compelled to impose clauses that limited ruling terms. An AU that would establish an independent election body to conduct free and fair elections for all AU member states, and to institute a legislative legal body to monitor the judiciary, executive and legislative operations of all its AU member states.

Picture: Mphuthumi Ntabeni
I dream of a sub-Saharan economic block, with a common currency, that would see to the establishment of things like efficient, non-governmental, independently run oil refineries in countries like Nigeria and Angola, to boost the continent’s production capacity and supply of energy to all AU states – and generate a sufficient power supply for them. I dream of an AU that helps its states that are endowed with natural wealth, to implement laws of beneficiation, to compel companies who extract mineral or agricultural produce from Africa to build factories for adding value through processing and skill transfer in those countries. That way, countries like Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and Ghana would get more value from their cocoa plantations. And those like Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana and Namibia would benefit from more than just exporting raw materials – platinum, gold, diamonds, etc – to other continents. That way, their citizens would benefit through skill transfer and job creation in processing those materials into end products. I dream of an AU that promotes, for its states, collective bargaining for better-structured deals when dealing with infrastructure loans from China or Bretton Woods institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. Until such things are happening, we shall be celebrating Africa Day with one eye crying and with half smiles for the colossal betrayal of the development of this beautiful, vibrant and ever hopeful continent. The politics are, of course, at the centre of our troubles. Where the alternatives are not brutally suppressed, they are found wanting. Africa’s problem is, in Antonio Gramsci’s language: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Lastly, I dream of an Africa that honours its own identity and looks after its cultural/historical heritage. Of a new African consciousness – not just in politics, but in a deeper worldview of environmental respect that arises from the philosophy of Ubuntu bethu, which we inherited from our forefathers and ancestors. The respect for our heritage begins by us respecting intsusa yethu (our history) and imabali zethu (our stories). Without knowing our collective identity, we shall not be able to inhabit our authentic future. Take the rather disappointing experience we had a few weeks ago, for instance: we were revisiting the mass grave of the cattle massacre in Qonce (King William’s Town), which happened during the later parts of the nineteenth century. The grave is shoved behind a well-kept, manicured memorial garden for the British soldiers who fell around the same time during the Seventh Frontier War. I was with the team from Ivanya Yethu (Xhosa slang for Our Inheritance) Foundation, which has been appointed by the Amathole District Municipality, funded by the National Heritage Council, to map spots of cultural, historical and tourist importance in the area. During my previous visits there, while researching our books with my good friend, advocate Tembeka Ngcukaiobi, we were rather disturbed by how the Xhosa mass grave was neglected at the back, infested by weeds and tall grass, as can be seen on the photos. Cattle grazed around it, which I found rather strangely appropriate, since the Xhosa love their cattle. Vagrants sat on the stone beds of British soldiers, drinking to while away the time. This time, I was initially a little glad to discover that the municipality had fenced the gardens – until we were disappointed to discover that the gates were locked and we had no idea where to get the key for access. My second disappointment was to discover that the Xhosa mass grave was still not well kept and was fenced out, though the sign at the gates points to it being a major monument here. It would not surprise me to discover that the upkeep of the British section of the garden is paid from private funds – the British know how to look after their heritage. What baffles me is the municipality, which not only doesn’t see fit to keep the Xhosa mass grave section, but has decided to lock people out from accessing their history. In a way, it is symptomatic of our attitude towards our history; we allow it to be unkempt and vandalised. As is the case, the mass grave tomb stone is of a bull’s horn, which saddened me more, because at the moment, we are not “lifting up” the fallen horn of Africa, as our national anthem urges us to: Maluphakanyiswe uphondo lwayo … Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika.
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