Twice, in as many weeks, I have heard Zimbabwe President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa speak on the need to preserve Pan-Africanism.
by Tendai Ruben Mbofana
The other time was when Mnangagwa participated at the 37th Ordinary Session of the AU (African Union) Assembly last week, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa – where he boldly declared that Pan-Africanism was still alive.
I found myself wondering: What Pan-Africanism?
In fact, what would Mnangagwa know about Pan-Africanism?
Over the past few years, I have never ceased being perplexed as to whatever happened to true Pan-Africanism.
How did we move from a concept that was so beautiful – to something that is now being abused by ruthless African dictators to justify oppressing their own citizens?
If ever I had encountered any paradox in my life, then this is the most outstanding of them all.
I have a life-long passion for history.
One of the most fascinating to study was the ideals of Pan-Africanism.
These were espoused and propagated by such luminaries as Marcus Garvey, William Edward Burghardt (WED) Du Bois, and so many others.
Their desire was for all peoples of African descent from across the globe to stand together as one united people.
This was more important in the face of slavery and colonialism – as Africans needed to free themselves in order to finally enjoy the dignity and prosperity they deserved.
Such a spirit is what inspired many Africans into fighting for our independence.
Who would not admire and want that?
However, as we attained our independence from colonial rule, the concept of Pan-Africanism took on a more disturbing terrifying face.
It became clear that our post-independence leaders were never genuinely Pan-African but were only after serving their own selfish interests.
In typical Animal Farm fashion, suddenly ‘all Africans were equal, but some Africans were more equal than others’.
Our former liberators had swiftly morphed into our new oppressors.
In all this, they still hid behind the facade of Pan-Africanism.
They gave the impression that their tyrannical ways were all for the good of the citizens, who needed to be protected from neo-imperialists who sought to undo the gains of independence.
As such, anyone who dared oppose or criticize or stand up against the post-independence ruling elite was brutally clamped down upon – under the guise of Pan-Africanism and fighting neo-imperialists.
Those in power could then freely loot national resources and carry out corruption with impunity, knowing fully well that any resistance from the citizenry would be crushed.
Does this not remind us of the pigs in Animal Farm?
Surely, what was so Pan-Africanist about the late Zimbabwe dictator Robert Gabriel Mugabe?
As a matter of fact, what is Pan-African about his successor Mnangagwa?
What gives him the audacity to even mention that Pan-Africanism was still alive?
Alive where?
What is Pan-Africanist about Mugabe savagely massacring tens of thousands of innocent unarmed fellow Africans?
To make matters worse, this was barely two years into independence and the horrendous atrocities based purely on the victims’ language and tribe.
In the early 2000s, he further massacred hundreds more Africans simply for supporting the opposition?
Was that being a Pan-Africanist?
Yet, this is the same man SADC (Southern African Development Community) decided to honour as a hero and Pan-Africanist in 2022.
What utter nonsense and huge insult on the likes on Garvey and du Bois.
Surely, this is not what they had in mind when they came up with this concept.
Mnangagwa is not any better.
Besides having been an integral and central component of the heinous murderous Mugabe regime, his own track record as president is nothing to be proud of.
The brutal oppression of fellow Africans in Zimbabwe has continued.
Barely nine months after assuming power through a coup d’état, scores of unarmed civilians – protesting unexplained delays in announcing presidential election results – were gunned down on the streets of the capital Harare on 1st August 2018.
This hideous act was repeated a few months later, on 15th January 2019, as at least eight people were massacred whilst they demonstrated against fuel increases.
Voices of dissent have systematically been incarcerated on spurious charges.
Opposition activist Job Sikhala spent two years behind bars in pre-trial detention, whilst repeatedly denied his constitutional right to bail.
Jacob Ngarivhume languished in prison for eight months, as part of a four year jail sentence, on a conviction that lacked prima facie evidence.
Numerous more have been attacked, beaten up, abducted, and killed on the basis of their political allegiances.
Just last year, two opposition supporters (Tinashe Chitsunge and Bishop Tapfumanei Masaya) were ruthlessly killed in Harare.
Then, the most cold-hearted cruelty against fellow Africans is the unimaginable suffering and poverty authored by the ruling elite.
What justice and Pan-Africanism is there when nearly half the population of Zimbabwe lives in extreme poverty?
Is that Pan-Africanism when an estimated 3.5 million ordinary citizens are facing hunger?
Yet, in all this, those in power – who want to be regarded as Pan-Africanists – are looting national resources with reckless abandon, as they live in obscene opulence in a sea of poverty.
In spite of the abundance we have is our God-given mineral wealth – the fruits are only enjoyed by a handful of the powerful and those aligned to them.
As a matter of fact, those communities living in areas where minerals have been discovered are ruthlessly removed without any meaningful compensation, neither are they benefiting from their own wealth.
Where are the people of Chiadzwa today?
Under what conditions are they living?
Rural areas are still largely stuck in the state they were in during the colonial era – if not worse, since the infrastructure constructed in that period now lies in ruin.
Why are we still walking over 20 kilometres to the nearest health care facility nearly 44 years after independence?
Would the US$3 billion our country is losing annually through mineral smuggling, illicit financial transactions, and other corrupt activities not have gone a long way in solving these challenges?
Surely, would we not be having state-of-the-art cancer machines (at every public hospital), essential medications, and functional ambulances?
Yet, the ruling elite would rather purchase a US$54 million presidential jet!
How many cancer machines could we have bought?
How many lives would have been saved had that US$54 million been used for the benefit of the citizens?
Why are Zimbabweans still dying from ancient diseases as cholera – in a country lacking the most basic potable water supply mechanisms?
Is that what Mnangagwa describes as ‘Pan-Africanism still alive’?
Where is he seeing Pan-Africanism in this horrible cruelty against Zimbabweans?
In fact, where on the entire African continent is Pan-Africanism still alive?
Genuine Pan-Africanism is about putting the interests of fellow Africans ahead of personal ambitions and pleasures.
Pan-Africanism is about selflessness in the pursuit of a better life for the majority.
As far as I am concerned, Pan-Africanism died a long time ago!
● Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to WhatsApp, or email: mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com, or visit website: https://mbofanatendairuben.news.blog/
Aime Cesaire: Founding father of Negritude
The most influential Francophone Caribbean writer of his generation, Aimé Césaire was one of the founding fathers of Negritude, the black consciousness movement that sought to assert pride in African cultural values to counterbalance the inferior status accorded to them in European colonial thinking.
He was born into a peasant family at Basse-Pointe in the northern part of Martinique in 1913, close to the site of the town of St Pierre, the former capital of Martinique, which had been completely destroyed by a volcanic eruption seven years before his birth. He grew up in a poverty-stricken environment in the wake of this disaster and volcanic imagery pervades his poetry.
For his schooling, he went to Martinique's new capital of Fort-de-France, where he mixed with the assimilated middle classes and emerged as the complex product of a double socialisation. Educated in the French public school system and steeped in the classics of French poetry, he also identified with his island's repressed African culture, sometimes likening himself to the figure of the griot, the oral storyteller who serves as the repository of West African communities' histories and traditions.
Césaire won a scholarship to study in Paris, arriving there in 1931 as an 18-year-old and living there at a time when intellectual debates about African distinctiveness were gathering momentum. Along with the French Guyanese Léon-Gontran Damas and the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor, he launched the magazine L'Etudiant noir ("The Black Student") in 1934. The three young men drew inspiration from the Harlem Renaissance's efforts to promote the richness of African cultural identity and particularly opposed French assimilationist policies.
During these years Césaire began to develop the ideas for his most famous poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939; translated as Return to My Native Land, 1969), the work in which he coined the term "négritude". The surrealist André Breton, who became a good friend of Césaire's after a 1942 visit to Martinique and who helped to introduce his work to Parisian literary circles, called the Cahier "the greatest lyric monument of this time".
Drawing on surrealist techniques, the poem took its inspiration from the Martinican landscape and Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the first phase of the Haitian Revolution, whose biography Césaire would later write (Toussaint Louverture: la révolution française et le problème colonial, published 1960). It asserted a claim to Afro-Caribbean ownership of the archipelago, "which is one of the two sides of the incandescence through which the equator walks its tightrope to Africa". The poem explores the distinctiveness of black cultural identity in a historically grounded manner that prefigures the black consciousness movements of the 1960s, the decade when it became popular in the English-speaking world, thanks to a Penguin translation. Stylistically varied, it moves between impassioned prose outbursts against injustice and a more lyrical mode that celebrates black ancestry.
In 1937 Césaire married another Martinican, Suzanne Roussy, with whom he had six children. They moved back to Martinique, where Césaire became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, in 1939. Along with Suzanne and René Ménil he edited the influential review Tropiques, which further developed the ideas of Negritude from 1940 to 1943.
In 1947 he was a co-founder of another highly influential Paris-based journal, Présence Africaine. His classic Discours sur le colonialisme (1950; Discourse on Colonialism, 1972) came out of a speech in which he indicted American imperialism along with older forms of colonialism.
Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945, a position he was to hold with just one brief interruption until 2001, and he also became a deputy in France's National Assembly, where he served from 1946 until 1956 and again from 1958 until 1993. He dominated Martinican political life in the decades that followed his appointment to these two positions and played a pivotal role in the formation of the policy of départementalisation, which integrated Martinique into metropolitan France as one of a number of newly founded DOMs (départements d'outre mers / overseas departments).
DOM status was intended to end colonialism by giving France's overseas colonies parity with departments in metropolitan France, but with decision-making still centred in Paris, it was subsequently considered highly controversial and many came to feel that it worked to the detriment of Martinique. Césaire was affiliated with the French Communist Party, but left this in 1956 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958 and later allied himself with the Socialist Party in France, supporting Ségolène Royal in the 2007 French elections
Césaire taught the Martinican psychologist and cultural theorist Franz Fanon, whose more vehemently activist writings extended debates about ways of combating colonialism in the 1960s. He was also a significant influence on another younger contemporary, Edouard Glissant, who moved away from Negritude towards the notion of antillanité, which emphasised the Caribbeanness of Martinican identity.
Increasingly, a later generation of black intellectuals came to feel that Césaire's critique of colonialism was not radical enough and he was also attacked for not writing in French Creole. At the same time the ideas of Negritude came under fire for suggesting that all persons of African descent shared common inherited characteristics. However, unlike Senghor, who argued that African consciousness is innately different from European, since it functions through an intuitive form of thinking in which the analytical faculties are subordinate to the emotional, Césaire saw Negritude as a historical phenomenon that had evolved from commonalities in the post-colonial history of African peoples, particularly the experience of the Atlantic slave ships and plantation slavery.
Césaire's other volumes of poetry include Les Armes miraculeuses ( "Miraculous Weapons", 1946), Le Corps perdu (1950; Disembodied, 1973), a collection with illustrations by Picasso, and Ferrements ("Ironwork", 1960). An English edition of his Collected Poetry was published in 1983. His plays include La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963; The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1970), another work concerned with aspects of the Haitian Revolution, Une saison au Congo (1967; A Season in the Congo, 1969), which deals with the death of Patrice Lumumba, and Une Tempête (1969; A Tempest, 1985), an adaptation of Shakespeare's play which followed the French psychoanalyst and author Octave Mannoni and the Barbadian novelist George Lamming in using the play's archetypes in a critique of colonialism.
On his death, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, praised Césaire as a "great poet" and a "great humanist", and he is to be honoured with a state funeral on Sunday.
John Thieme
Aimé Fernand Césaire, poet, dramatist and politician: born Basse-Pointe, Martinique 26 June 1913; teacher, Lycée Schoelcher, Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1939-45; mayor of Fort-de-France, 1945-83, 1984-2001; deputy, French National Assembly, representing Martinique 1946-83; married 1937 Suzanne Roussy (died 1968; four sons, two daughters); died Fort-de-France, Martinique 17April 2008.
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