Renaissance and Rediscovery
The Educational Journal has carried many editorials
and articles analysing and describing the political and economic
forces that have brought South Africa to its present condition.
A description of that condition makes very depressing reading.
Indeed it has frightened away the very capital-rich foreign friends
to whom the ruling elite have looked to secure for them another
term of office in 1999. Those friends it was hoped would make
the long-term investments, establish factories, provide necessary
skills, training and jobs and extend their multinational bases
to ensure a healthy flow of profit from South Africa to their
international investors and perchance some swelling of South African
revenues. These expectations were based firmly on the ruling party's
unequivocal adoption of the Free Market and the principles of
private enterprise. Within a few months of having to offer a new
basket of promises to an electorate demanding rewards for its
uncomplaining loyalty and support during the years of apartheid
oppression, the ANC leadership have come up with a new mantra
- Renaissance in Africa.
In the 1960s the Conservative Governments of Europe
responded to the anti-imperial revolts of the colonial peoples
of Africa by offering them "Independence" as the panacea
for all their ills. As the colonial dominoes fell one after the
other the peoples of Africa reasserted their humanity and staked
their claims to membership of all the world councils as equal
partners. That theirs was merely a junior status was however affirmed,
as the Great Powers that have divided the world into their spheres
of interest would give to their former colonies seats in only
the subordinate assemblies. The colonial peoples nevertheless
looked forward with gloomy optimism to building their cities,
to rejuvenating their agriculture, to building homes, schools
factories and farms, to enjoying leisure and cultural enrichment.
Alas, the Imperial bankers continued to direct where investments
would be made, what minerals would be mined, what crops would
be grown and at what prices colonial products would be traded
on the world markets. African merchants and traders were allowed
to feed off the crumbs and become the bloated agents of their
counterparts in the capitals of Europe and America. For local
consumption the politicians would show that "Independence"
worked for the voters as the roads, railways and harbours were
built and extended, schools were staffed, hospitals opened and
doctors and nurses trained. Houses could be built and farms developed
with loans at apparently generously low rates of interest. The
bankers of London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and New York were free
with their loans as the minerals and raw materials flowed to the
industrial heartlands of Europe, America and Japan. The skills
of their educated and trained citizens could produce the manufactured
goods to sell to the under-educated and under-skilled peoples
of the former colonies. Profits could flow to the industrialised
mother-countries. Talented African youth were encouraged and financially
assisted to study in England, France, America, Germany where they
could learn the political and economic doctrines and skills intended
to preserve their homelands for "development".
Neo-colonialism became the defining relationship
between Africa and the Imperial motherlands. The World Bank and
International Monetary Fund dictated how the "Independent"
states would manage their Structural Adjustment Programmes to
meet the mounting loads of debt incurred by the African middle-class
governments that claimed to be democratic representatives of the
wage-slaves of their cities and rural peasants. The World Trade
Organisation (formerly GATT) set the terms and conditions of their
international trade.
When in 1998 we look then with Thabo Mbeki at an
Africa in disarray, at crime-ridden cities with squalid camps
of homeless "squatters" on their peripheries, at long
lines of unemployed and directionless youth, at islands of wealth
and comfort in a sea of homelessness and miserable poverty, at
gun-wielding "freedom" fighters killing fellow-citizens
and former comrades in tribal and class conflict, the questions
arise: Where did it go wrong? How do we set it right?
In the watershed years before Independence the colonial
political leaders were faced with choices of direction. Although
the years before UHURU had in most cases already predetermined
the course of future development, the leaderships of the colonial
peoples could still choose whether to collaborate with their European
Governments or to cut the umbilical cord and make their political
independence also an economic independence. Misled by Kwame Nkrumah's
injunction "seek ye first the political kingdom", there
were those whose hearts and minds were captivated by the cultures,
the way of life, the non-African customs and mores as their bodies
succumbed to the fleshpots and financial rewards of trade and
commerce. They became the local agents of the foreign stock-markets.
Such were the defenders of the imperial connection who conspired
and manoeuvred to prevent the dissemination of anti-imperial ideas
and agitation. They promoted and nurtured the tribal, class and
religious dissensions whose roots had been planted by colonial
regimes to subvert progress towards real democracy. In every African
state of the late 20th century these individuals and
their parties were guided, protected and bank-rolled, not only
directly by the bankers and foreign treasuries, but also indirectly
via the local and foreign agents of the multi-national corporations
whose interests they had to serve. The byways of financial dealings
offered rich rewards for the unscrupulous wheelers and dealers.
Even the supposedly anti-capitalist leaders of labour were seduced
by the lure of profit. Corruption flourished even as political
and social morality sank to abysmal depths. From corruption and
degeneracy in high places the cancer of scorn for law and civic
responsibility spread through the body politic. We must do more
than merely deplore in pious horror the daily descent of African
society into moral and social decay and sectarian warfare - all
this at a time when the technological developments and scientific
advances of this century offer the tools and means for building
a vastly better life for all, insulated against roller-coasting
international stock-markets. Besides the stone monuments and artefacts
of ancestral art that learned archaeologists have revealed and
restored for preservation in world museums, the history of Africa
also has an Honour Roll of men and women of vision and courage
who understood the forces that set in motion the economic and
cultural enslavement of their states and peoples. In every former
colony in Africa there are preserved the memories and written
records of those freedom fighters who couched the ideology of
true independence and social transformation in their local and
regional contexts. They also understood how imperial capital had
bound Africa from North to South and East to West. The individuals
who propounded the fundamentals necessary for social regeneration
figure large in the records of Liberation. But the millions of
Africans who perished in the slave ships and the plantations of
America, who died in the mines or factories or who starved to
death in rural poverty have earned recognition and deserve the
continuation of that struggle to right the wrongs of the past.
When Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Eduard Mondlane,
Aristides Pereira, Julius Nyerere, Felix Moumié, Sekou
Touré, Leopold Senghor and countless others who attempted
to break the shackles of imperial dependence became once again
household names, there might be seen more clearly how the devastation
wrought by the intrusion of European and American capital into
Africa might be repaired.
The files and archives of the security systems of
Europe and America must be opened to expose the machinations and
mechanisms that were used to murder individuals, to seduce and
corrupt others, to discredit and destroy parties and movements
that offered real resistance to capital and Imperialism. The peoples
of the Third World will remain impoverished and oppressed while
they remain untutored in the possibilities of a different way
of life. A true African Renaissance must lead to a rediscovery
of the revolutionary past of Africa and the rebuilding of a humane
culture that soars far above the degeneracy of Hollywood and Broadway.
From the successes and failures of Africa's visionary leaders
must be reconstructed an Organisation of African Unity that is
not a mere gendarme watching over European and American political
and economic interests in Africa. It must be an Executive Authority
for the reconstruction in Africa of Education and Technology,
Agriculture, Trade, Art and Music to provide the bases for Africa
to become aligned with the freedom-loving peoples of the world.
[THE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL VOL.68 #5, OFFICIAL ORGAN
OF THE TEACHERS' LEAGUE OF SOUTH AFRICA, SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1998]
EDITOR: Mrs. HN Kies, 15 Upper Bloem Street, Cape Town, 8001
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