Global Africa: Profiles in Courage, Creativity, and Cruelty [1 ed.] 1032667125, 9781032667126

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Praise for Global Africa

“This is a powerful, precise, passionate, and painful anthology that will stand the test of time for its truthfulness. It is a work that erupts like a monument to the sacrifice and heroism of that humanity which flows through black civilization like the never-ending Nile in the night.” SIR HILARY BECKLES

VICE-CHANCELLOR, UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES

“With his quintessentially Pan-African worldview, Adekeye Adebajo has deftly rendered the kaleidoscopic landscape of African achievement. It is not without crippling threats and disappointing reversals. But resistance to tyrants and female empowerment make visible the resilience to bounce back.” PROFESSOR PEARL T. ROBINSON

TUFTS UNIVERSITY, MASSACHUSETTS

“Immensely fluent, readable, and accessible. Adekeye Adebajo’s scholarship is impeccable, his reading of multiple sources is evident, and the historical perspective he provides is essential for an analysis of the contemporary era. This book is unique in its scope and broad canvas. I do not know of a collection of profiles that is similarly expansive.” MAUREEN ISAACSON,

FORMER BOOKS EDITOR, THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT (SOUTH AFRICA)

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Adekeye Adebajo The right of Adekeye Adebajo to be identified as the author of this work, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032667126 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032667195 (pbk) ISBN: 9781032667218 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781032667218 Typeset in Ehrhardt MT Std

Global Africa

Profiles in Courage,

Creativity, and Cruelty

Adekeye Adebajo

Contents

Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction

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I. HISTORICAL FIGURES 1. Cecil Rhodes’s Crumbling Legacy 2. Was Mahatma Gandhi a Racist? 3. Revisiting Woodrow Wilson’s Liberal Legacy

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II. POLITICAL FIGURES 4. Kwame Nkrumah: Africa’s Philosopher-King 5. Albert Luthuli: The Nobel Black Moses 6. Nelson Mandela: Pan-African Prophet 7. Thabo Mbeki: Africa’s New Philosopher-King 8. Thabo Mbeki: Remembering the Renaissance Man 9. Thabo Mbeki’s Xenophobia Denialism 10. Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela: The Policy Wonk and the Patriarch 11. Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma: The Lion and the Jewel 12. Kenneth Kaunda: Farewell to Zambia’s Founding Father 13. The Fall of Robert Mugabe 14. F.W. de Klerk: A Nobel without Honour? 15. Olusegun Obasanjo: The Emperor’s New Clothes 16. Jerry Rawlings: The Death and Deification of ‘Junior Jesus’ 17. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: The Iron Lady of Liberia

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Meles Zenawi: Philosopher-King or Pragmatic Autocrat? Abiy Ahmed: Ethiopia’s Nobel Intellectual Soldier Mobutu Sese Seko: The Sick Man of Africa Idi Amin: The Making of a Warrior God Daniel arap Moi: A Ruthless Dictator Paul Kagame and Wole Soyinka: The President and the Playwright Qaddafi ’s Monarchical Delusions Obama and Africa: Dreams from Our Ancestors Obama, Clinton, and Africa Obama’s Six Deadly Sins Obama, Gandhi, and Egypt Obama’s Africa Legacy Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Donald Trump and Boris Johnson Trump’s African ‘Shithole’ is Commonplace in America Margaret Thatcher’s Black Mischief The Trial of Tony Blair The Strange Reappearance of Nicolas Sarkozy Madeleine Albright: Remembering the First Female American

Secretary of State 36. Colin Powell: The Reluctant Jamaican-American Warrior III. TECHNOCRATS 37. Boutros-Ghali’s Huge Contribution to Egypt and the World 38. Boutros Boutros-Ghali: Afro-Arab Prophet, Pharaoh, and Pope 39. Kofi Annan: African Prophet or American Poodle? 40. Adebayo Adedeji: Farewell to Africa’s Cassandra 41. Adebayo Adedeji and Jean Monnet: The Fathers of African and

European Integration 42. Raúl Prebisch and the Building of Latin America 43. Ibrahim Gambari: The Aristocratic Scholar-Diplomat 44. Lakhdar Brahimi: An Algerian Troubleshooter 45. Augustine Mahiga: A Tanzanian Peacemaker 46. Margaret Vogt: Africa Loses an Unflagging Peacemaker 47. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: Nigeria’s Iron Lady 48. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: A Super-Technocrat in Geneva 49. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma: The Alchemist 50. Naledi Pandor: South Africa’s New Diplomatic Troubleshooter

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51. Mamphela Ramphele: Defender of the Status Quo at UCT 52. Eloho Otobo: Farewell to a Pan-African Peacebuilder

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IV. ACTIVISTS 53. Remembering Martin Luther King Jr 54. John Lewis: The Last of the Mohicans 55. Wangari Maathai: Kenya’s Earth Mother 56. A Wreath for Saro-Wiwa 57. Denis Mukwege: Ennobling ‘Doctor Miracle’ 58. Ruth First’s Pan-African Martyrdom 59. Mahlangu’s Moving Martyrdom 60. Kaye Whiteman: Ode to an Obituarist 61. Tor Sellström: A Cosmopolitan Swedish Freedom Fighter

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V. WRITERS 62. A Tale of Two Continents: Dickensian Africa 63. Chinua Achebe: Farewell to Africa’s Griot 64. Soyinka’s Horseman: Who’s Afraid of Elesin Oba? 65. Wole Soyinka v. Caroline Davis: The CIA Controversy 66. James Baldwin: The Strange Persistence of Racism 67. Remembering Maya Angelou 68. Toni Morrison: America’s Black Bard 69. Bell Hooks: The Iconoclastic Feminist Scholar-Activist 70. Buchi Emecheta: Africa’s Literary Mother Courage 71. John Pepper Clark: Africa’s Protean Pioneer

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VI. PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS 72. Ali Mazrui: Farewell the Trumpets for Prophet of Pax Africana 73. Edward Said: Pioneer of Post-Colonial Studies 74. Abiola Irele: The Last Prophet of Négritude 75. Chris Wanjala: Kenya’s Pan-African Griot 76. Thandika Mkandawire: The Afropolitan Intellectual 77. Raufu Mustapha: An Organic Intellectual 78. Angela Davis: A Life of Struggle 79. Three Prophets of Reparations: Randall Robinson, Hilary Beckles,

and Ade Ajayi

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VII. ARTISTS 80. Abami Eda: Fela’s Enduring Legacy 81. Bob Marley: Rebel with a Cause 82. Michael Jackson: The Strange Disappearance of the Moonwalker 83. Burna Boy: The Afropolitan Troubadour 84. Asa: Nigeria’s Songbird 85. Measuring Sidney Poitier’s Life 86. Cynthia Erivo: Building Bridges to the Diaspora

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VIII. SPORTING FIGURES 87. Muhammad Ali: King of the World 88. Pelé: The Greatest Footballer of All Time 89. Eusébio: The King is Dead, Long Live the King! 90. The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Diego Maradona 91. George Weah: The Genius of King George 92. Samuel Eto’o: Cameroon’s Indomitable Lion 93. The Ivorian Pearl: The Life and Times of Didier Drogba 94. Africa’s Golden Generation: Salah, Mané, and Aubameyang 95. The Golden Age of West Indian Cricket 96. Jesse Owens’s Race 97. Jonah Lomu: Rugby’s First Global Superstar 98. The Greatness of Rafa Nadal 99. The Age of Hakeem 100.Flaming Flamingo: The Life and Times of Israel Adebajo

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Notes Index

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Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK REPRESENTS THE fruits of three decades of writing that also coincide with the post-apartheid and post-Cold War eras. These 100 essays on the most important Pan-African figures of the age, as well as a few key Western actors who have engaged with Africa, thus seek to capture the Zeitgeist, involving rich and diverse historical and political figures, technocrats, activists, writers, public intellectuals, musical and film artists, and sporting figures from Africa and its diaspora. The essays also reflect my own intellectual evolution and interests, written while I studied at Oxford University in England and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Massachusetts; while I was a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. and at Stanford University’s Centre for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) in California; while I served with United Nations (UN) missions in South Africa, Western Sahara, and Iraq; while I directed the Africa Programme at the International Peace Institute (IPI) and taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) in New York; while I directed the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) in Cape Town and the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ); and in my current role as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS). I thank these various institutions through which I passed for supporting my work, and for providing diverse vantage points to view the world through the prism of “Global Africa” during a transformative period in international politics. I would also like to thank the outlets that published my essays which are all acknowledged within the book: Business Day (South Africa); the Guardian ix

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(Nigeria); the Gleaner (Jamaica); the Mail and Guardian (South Africa); the Sunday Independent (South Africa); the Sunday Times (South Africa); the Johannesburg Review of Books (South Africa); Africa Review of Books (Senegal); This Day (Nigeria); Newswatch (Nigeria); the East African (Kenya); Pan Africa (London); West Africa (London); the Guardian (London); and the Times Literary Supplement (London). I took the opportunity in this book to gain my revenge on notoriously over-zealous sub-editors by restoring some of the original titles of articles and making some minor edits, but the texts have been largely left intact to reflect the mood of the era during which the essays were written. Throughout this period, I have sent most of these essays after publication to a group of about 110 friends, family, colleagues, and comrades. I have often received much encouragement and useful feed-back from many members of this dedicated group, and would like particularly to acknowledge: Abdelhamid Abdeljaber; Ladipo Adamolekun; Adunni Adebajo; Adefemi Adebajo; Adekunle Adebajo; Adebayo Adedeji; Adeleke Adekola; Jimi Adesina; Jerome Afeikhena; Kweku Ampiah; Segun Apata; Stephen Balogun; Ahmed and Rookaya Bawa; Hilary Beckles; Bridget Brereton; Torben Brylle; Rodney Bysh; Xavier and Amita Carim; Paul Chantry; Selwyn Cudjoe; Devon Curtis; Lee Daniels; Toyin Falola; Rose Francis; Ibrahim Gambari; Folarin Gbadebo-Smith; Patrick Gomes; Shelene Gomes; Holger Hansen; John and Rita Hirsch; Maureen Isaacson; Mashood Issaka; Adele Jinadu; Willard Johnson; James Jonah; Pallo Jordan; Newton Kanhema; David Keen; Gilbert Khadiagala; A.H.M. KirkGreene; Ute Klissenbauer; Koffi Kouakou; Tawana Kupe; Bunmi Makinwa; David Malone; Khabele Matlosa; William Minter; David Monyae; Fynda Obaitan; James Ogude; Oluwanifemi Olajide; Eloho Otobo; Barney Pityana; Lazarre Potier; Judith Pyke; Ismail Rashid; Shahana Rasool; Rhoda Reddock; Pearl Robinson; Anders Rönquist; Rhea Saab; Naaborle Sackeyfio; Elizabeth Schmidt; Tor and Angela Muvumba Sellström; Stephen Small; Victor Teppeh; Scott Timcke; Martin Uhomoibhi; Roel van der Veen; Gavin Williams; and Douglas Yates. I thank two external reviewers who took the time to provide substantive and useful comments which helped strengthen and structure the text. I thank Russell Martin for his usual elegantly learned copy-editing, and Christopher Merrett for his thorough proofreading and indexing. Like my award-winning 2020/2021 edited collection, The Pan-African Pantheon: Prophets, Poets, and Philosophers which this volume complements, this book seeks to contribute to rebuilding the bridges of Pan-Africanism by x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

encouraging intellectual dialogue and policy debates between Africa and its diaspora, from Bamako to Bahia to Birmingham to Bordeaux, and from the Bahamas to Bridgetown to Baltimore. ADEKEYE ADEBAJO, JOHANNESBURG

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Foreword

THE SECOND HALF OF the twentieth century witnessed a bold and bloody attempt by the Euro-American imperial complex to whiplash the world into accepting the spirit and whiteness of cultural triumphalism with its moon walking and flag planting. The shock and awe of the cosmic campaign was intended to secure another century of imperial hegemony over the earthly underlings who were expected to look up hopelessly pacified. The strategy crashed and the debris could be found all over Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and the inner cities of America and Europe. Images of the dead dusty moon were brushed aside by millions fighting wars of liberation in the jungles of Asia and Africa, and the inner cities of the imperial complex. Millions were demanding their piece of planet Earth and were prepared to die to get the hegemon out of their heads and off their backs. Scientific wonder took second place to social justice right here; humanity was rediscovering itself in the rooted, resisting bare feet of peasants and the erupting intellectual pedagogy of liberating blackness. Commitment to liberation from subaltern status showed humanity at its finest in self-recovery and stood in contrast to the dullness and dryness of lunar machinery hovering above an empty desert. The jungles of Africa and Asia, wet and abundant with life, sent a deep resonating message about the future. Black communities pierced the cosmic canopy and unleashed heaven on earth with the sweetness of freedom, justice and ownership. The black world offered the key to another realm; the revolutionary sensation of liberty by all means necessary; the ending of a cruel mechanistic modernity that projected the ‘end’ of history. Black and brown people everywhere said no to the legacy of colonial cosmologies. The black people in particular, long in the preparation of panxiii

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African liberation, threw up names of women and men who led the resistance campaign and became household heroes for the transforming century. Looking down to the earth beneath our feet and reclaiming lost rights was the black cosmology that generated its own powerful liberating epistemology. Adekeye Adebajo, a leading scholar of the pan-African pantheon, has once again gathered for our reflection and edification the identity of foot soldiers and griots of the greatest freedom movement modernity has seen: the rise of the African people from the depths of imperial oppression to a cosmic realm that has served to save planet Earth from the mindlessness of white supremacy, human exploitation and existential brinkmanship. This is not an inventory for the black political ontology. It is more, much more. It is an assembly of the identities within a global African creative consciousness that became fully awakened to the plight of those who knew the pain of plunder and said that enough is enough. Here are the identities of the anti-hegemons and their allies who took possession of the twentieth century and drove it along a different, more humane trajectory. But in between, mixed in like salt and pepper, were the black tyrants who admired the manner and messages of the oppressors and became, dialectically, the new wolves in wolves’ clothing. There is no need for an idealistic invocation; evil exists and seeks out its advocates everywhere. The liberating black world had its own envoys of oppression and emissaries of death and destruction. Adekeye keeps us aligned to this reality. We are not allowed to fly off to the moon and dance among the stars. Our feet are rooted in the realities that enabled the twenty-first century not only to come into being without slavery and apartheid and with colonialism on the run; but also to recognise the existence of counter-ideologies and new forms of domination. This is a powerful, precise, passionate and painful anthology that will stand the test of time for its truthfulness. It is a work that erupts like a monument to the sacrifice and heroism of that humanity which flows through black civilisation like the never-ending Nile in the night. But in the darkness lurk the demons to be identified and exorcised by the persistent enlightenment of humanity at its height. Sir Hilary Beckles Vice-Chancellor, University of the West Indies, Barbados

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Introduction

The consequences of enslavement and colonization are not chapters in history books but palpable, real pain in the ghettos of Washington D.C. and in the anti-Black police brutalities in the streets of Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Paris.1 ALI A. MAZRUI, KENYAN INTELLECTUAL

THIS BOOK OF 100 ESSAYS, written over the last three post-apartheid decades, provides profiles of 104 figures, mostly from the 1.4 billion-strong African population and its estimated 250 million-strong diaspora. The profiles also include global figures engaging with African issues who are assessed from an African perspective. The essays cover historical and political figures, technocrats, activists, writers, public intellectuals, musical and film artists, and sporting figures.

Black Profiles in Courage Though my book is broader in scope, its title borrows, in part, from legendary Trinidadian American basketball superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African-American Achievement (1996).2 He examines nine figures in African American history: slave rebel leader Peter Salem; antiBritish independence fighters James Armistead Lafayette and Crispus Attucks; the leader of the Amistad slave-ship revolt, Joseph Cinqué; civil rights activists Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks; a pioneering deputy United States (US) marshal, Bass Reeves; and black inventor and patent expert Lewis Howard Latimer. As Abdul-Jabbar notes: ‘There is plenty of historical precedent for the diminishment of black accomplishment … The idea was simple: Marginalize black people so they don’t count. Repress them so they can’t achieve political or 1

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economic power. Confine them to permanent underclass status as servants and slaves to keep them from rising equal to or above the white ruling class.’3 My book has the same mission as Abdul-Jabbar’s: to celebrate African achievement. But in addition to profiles of courage and creativity celebrating the achievements of the black world, I also examine racist historical figures during the imperial and colonial eras, as well as autocratic African leaders who inflicted much brutality and suffering on their own citizens, sometimes in the service of neo-colonial external interests.

Global Africa My essays acknowledge the continuing legacies and impacts of the twin scourges of slavery and colonialism,4 but also seek to capture the zeitgeist of the postapartheid era, after Africa’s ‘Thirty Year War’ for independence from alien rule, starting in the 1960s, was finally ended with the democratic victory of South Africa’s black majority in 1994. The culmination of Africa’s liberation struggles was mirrored by similar battles in the Caribbean as well as the American civil rights movement, with both involving citizens of global Africa. My use of the term ‘global Africa’ in this book is consistent with Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui’s definition as involving both geography and movement. As he noted ‘Global Africa … is divided between the Black Atlantic and the Black Indian Ocean. The Black Atlantic combines the African continent with the part of the African Diaspora that is located in Europe and the Western hemisphere … Four continents thus constitute the Black Atlantic – Africa, Europe, North America, and South America, accompanied by neighbouring islands, especially the islands of the Caribbean. The Black Indian Ocean, on the other hand, consists mainly of Africa and Asia.’5 The Black Atlantic was thus born out of the transatlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries,6 while the Black Indian Ocean emerged largely out of the Arab slave trade from 652 CE until the 1960s. Mazrui adds a more recent ‘diaspora of colonialism’ to his analysis, which he defines as ‘the dispersal of Africans which continues to occur as a result of colonization and its aftermath’.7 This newer diaspora is particularly well represented in contemporary Europe and the US. Mazrui argues that America historically forced its enslaved Africans to forget their African ancestry and instead focus on their racial identity. Global Africa thus represents an effort to‘re-Africanise’ the diaspora in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe.8 A concrete manifestation of these efforts was the five Pan-African Congresses 2

INTRODUCTION

held in European and American cities between 1919 and 1945, led by the African American scholar-activist WEB Du Bois.9 During the same epoch, Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey mobilised millions of black Americans in New York’s Harlem and across the country with his ‘Back to Africa’ movement and evocative slogan of ‘Africa for the Africans’.10 The Black Power movement, which emerged in the US during the ferment of the 1960s, was led by Trinidadian-born Stokely Carmichael, with adherents glorifying in black cultural pride and adopting a more radical stance to black liberation than the Martin Luther King Jr-led mainstream civil rights movement.11 After the birth of the global pan-African movement in 1900, led by Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams’s conference in London, African American civil society groups criticised the barbaric brutalities of Belgian king Leopold’s rule in the Congo; opposed Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia between 1936 and 1941; and, from 1948, vociferously condemned the inhumane treatment of the black population in apartheid South Africa.12 One of the most practical manifestations of global Africa occurred in 1986 when the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and African American lobby group TransAfrica had their greatest success in forcing the Ronald Reagan administration (through overriding a presidential veto) to impose economic sanctions on South Africa’s racist regime in 1986.13 The cultural aspects of global Africa are also important to stress. As African American intellectual Amiri Baraka notes: ‘blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives’.14 Blues and jazz both emerged directly from slavery, based on the rhythmic West African traditional work songs that the slaves sang on American Southern plantations. The improvisational nature of jazz is also tied to this same slave culture.15 It is no exaggeration to say that America’s popular music – from jazz to Motown to hip-hop and rap – had its roots in this slave tradition. Brazil and Cuba accounted for around 40% of all Africans who were forcibly transported during the transatlantic slave trade.16 Most of the enslaved brought traditional religions that were later fused with Catholicism, and the pantheon of Yoruba gods is more widely preserved in Brazil today than in its Nigerian homeland.

Historical Figures These essays are divided into eight main sections. The first examines three historical figures: Cecil Rhodes, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson. Racist and ruthless businessman-politician Rhodes was the greatest symbol of 3

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imperialism in the Victorian era during the late nineteenth century, plundering Africa’s riches by often brutal means while expanding British colonial territory. Woodrow Wilson was the American president between 1913 and 1921. Despite pushing for the self-determination of Eastern and Central European minority groups after the First World War (1914–1918), he denied his own black citizens the most basic civic rights and espoused racist views. His supposedly ‘liberal’ foreign policy also entailed imperial ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in Latin America and the Caribbean. Mahatma Gandhi is widely lauded for his use of satyagraha (‘soul force’ or ‘the firmness of the force of truth’) in leading the liberation of India from British rule, thus setting off the chain reaction that resulted in the liberation of Asia and Africa. He lived in South Africa for 21 years between 1893 and 1914, fighting mostly for the civil rights of the Indian community. Gandhi’s many racist utterances during this period have recently come to light,17 and his legacy is being reassessed in Africa and beyond.

Prophets of the Pan-African Pantheon The second section of the book provides kaleidoscopic profiles of 18 African and 9 Western political figures. The African personalities can be divided into three broad categories. The first includes four of the foremost leaders in the African liberation pantheon: Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and South Africa’s Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. All four were actively involved in Africa’s liberation movement as prophets of the pan-African pantheon in the struggles against the lingering impacts of slavery and colonialism.18 Both Luthuli and Mandela won the Nobel peace prize for their contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle,19 while Nkrumah and Mbeki were philosopher-kings who provided visionary intellectual leadership, particularly in the realm of foreign policy.20 The Ghanaian leader, however, also drifted into autocracy, de­ democratising his society and instituting one-party rule.

Autocrats, Kleptocrats, and Muddlers A second set of leaders have a more mixed historical legacy. Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe were both ‘founding fathers’ of their countries, contributing greatly to the liberation of southern Africa. Both, however, also instituted autocratic rule and oversaw catastrophic economic policies. Despite winning the Nobel peace prize with Nelson Mandela in 1993, FW de Klerk ruled an undemocratic apartheid state that destabilised southern 4

INTRODUCTION

Africa, and denied fundamental rights to his country’s black majority. He refused to condemn this racist policy unequivocally throughout his life, though he deserves some credit for his peacemaking efforts with Mandela that ushered in democratic rule by 1994. Still within this second group, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo had been an autocratic military head of state before becoming an elected civilian president in 1999, conducting an activist foreign policy in partnership with Thabo Mbeki’s South Africa. Some of Obasanjo’s autocratic tendencies, however, carried over into the democratic era, and his failed attempts to change the Nigerian constitution to run for a third term greatly damaged his legacy. Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings was also a military leader who became an elected civilian president. Allegations of human rights abuses carried over into the democratic era, but Rawlings remained popular among many sections of Ghana’s population during his two decades in power. South Arica’s Jacob Zuma had a similar cunning ‘native intelligence’ to Obasanjo’s, which both men used to outwit their opponents. He ensured South Africa’s entry into the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) grouping by 2011, but his administration was dogged by widespread reports of graft. Also in this group with a mixed record, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became president of Liberia in 2006 after successful technocratic roles with the World Bank and the United Nations (UN). Though she was popular with Western donors and was controversially awarded the Nobel peace prize on the eve of presidential polls in 2011, she provided funds to Liberian warlord Charles Taylor during the country’s civil war in the 1990s. Known as the ‘Iron Lady’ for her toughness, she failed, however, to transform the Liberian society and economy during her 12 years in power. The two Ethiopian leaders – Meles Zenawi and Nobel peace prize laureate Abiy Ahmed – both embodied intellectual freedom fighters who ruled through autocratic means.

Tyrants The third category of African leaders involved tyrannical leaders. Zaire’s Western-backed Mobutu Sese Seko was one of Africa’s most kleptocratic rulers. His 31-year rule brought about the very chaos he had predicted only he could prevent, and the Congo remains embroiled in civil conflict three decades after he was forced out of power. Uganda’s Idi Amin and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi similarly oversaw tyrannical regimes in which human rights abuses proliferated and opposition was often crushed. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame has followed in these 5

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tyrannical footsteps with his iron-fisted rule, clampdown on dissent, and over 90% presidential victories. Libya’s mercurial Muammar Qaddafi oversaw some socio-economic development and followed in his mentor Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser’s anti-imperial footsteps during his four decades in power. However, his rule was tyrannical amidst monarchical delusions and quixotic pan-African ideas. He did, nevertheless, contribute greatly to the creation of the African Union (AU) by 2002.

The West and the Rest The second section concludes by examining eight Western leaders. Two United States (US) Democratic presidents – Bill Clinton and Nobel peace prize laureate Barack Obama – were both intelligent, charismatic but ultimately cynical leaders, who used flowery oratory to disguise sometimes cruel decisions, such as withdrawing UN peacekeepers from Rwanda at the height of the genocide in 1994, and condoning Egyptian military human rights excesses in 2013. The prejudiced leadership of American president Donald Trump, British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy is then exposed, before assessing the legacies of two US secretaries of state: Jamaican American Colin Powell and Czech American Madeleine Albright.

Technocrats The third section examines 14 African, Latin American and Western technocrats and public servants who served in UN agencies, the AU, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), and as cabinet ministers and university administrators. These include Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali;21 Ghana’s Kofi Annan (who won the Nobel peace prize); Nigeria’s Adebayo Adedeji, Ibrahim Gambari, Margaret Vogt, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and Eloho Otobo; Algeria’s Lakhdar Brahimi; Tanzania’s Augustine Mahiga; and South Africa’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Naledi Pandor and Mamphela Ramphele. Outside Africa, the legacies of Argentina’s Raúl Prebisch and France’s Jean Monnet are set in historical context. The section thus assesses the perspectives, personalities and performance of 14 global technocrats.

Activists The fourth section analyses seven activists from Africa and its diaspora, as well

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INTRODUCTION

as two Europeans who greatly contributed to Africa’s political (Tor Sellström) and journalistic (Kaye Whiteman) struggles. I assess the legacies of American civil rights stalwarts, the Nobel peace laureate Martin Luther King Jr, and John Lewis, before examining Kenyan environmental and human rights campaigner Wangari Maathai; her Congolese fellow Nobel laureate, the anti-sexual violence campaigner Denis Mukwege; two martyred South Africans: scholar-activist Ruth First and freedom fighter Solomon Mahlangu; and martyred Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Writers The fifth section analyses the rich diversity of African literature, starting with the influence of nineteenth-century British writer Charles Dickens on the continent’s writers, before providing diverse profiles of, and debates around, eight of the greatest writers of the black world: Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka (Nobel literature prize-winner), Buchi Emecheta, and John Pepper Clark, as well as America’s James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison (Nobel literature prize-winner), and Bell Hooks.

Public Intellectuals The sixth section focuses on ten public intellectuals from Africa, its diaspora and the world who have pioneered literature on Africa’s triple heritage (Kenya’s Ali Mazrui); post-colonial studies (Palestinian American Edward Said), Négritude literary criticism (Nigeria’s Abiola Irele); post-colonial African literary criticism (Kenya’s Chris Wanjala); the political economy of rebel movements in Africa (Malawi’s Thandika Mkandawire); the politics of rural societies in Africa (Nigeria’s Raufu Mustapha); America’s prison industrial complex (America’s Angela Davis); and the struggles for global reparations (America’s Randall Robinson, Barbadian Hilary Beckles, and Nigeria’s Ade Ajayi).

Artists The seventh section examines the legacies of five artists of Africa and its diaspora: the two iconoclastic rebels, Nigeria’s Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and Jamaica’s Bob Marley; American multi-Grammy-winning pop superstar Michael Jackson; Oscar-winning Bahamian American actor Sidney Poitier and Nigerian British actress, Cynthia Erivo. The accomplishments of the more contemporary Nigerian Afrobeats Grammy-winning superstar, Burna Boy, and Nigeria’s eclectic multi-talented songbird, Asa, are then analysed. 7

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Sporting Figures The eighth section examines the legacies of 21 of the greatest sporting figures in history, mostly citizens of global Africa. The section starts with three-time world boxing heavyweight champion and civil rights campaigner Muhammad Ali. Footballers then predominate: Brazilian three-time World Cup winner Pelé; Mozambican-born European footballer of the year and two-time European Cup winner Eusébio; Argentinian World Cup-winning captain Diego Maradona; Africa’s only ballon d’or winner for the world’s best player, Liberia’s George Weah; and five African players of the year: Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o, Ivorian Didier Drogba, Egypt’s Mohamed Salah, Senegal’s Sadio Mané, and Gabon’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. I then examine the all-conquering anti-apartheid West Indian cricket team of the 1980s and early 1990s, starring Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd, Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Colin Croft, and Malcolm Marshall, before reviewing the careers of American quadruple Olympic gold medal sprinter Jesse Owens through the 2016 biopic Race. Also profiled are rugby’s first global superstar, New Zealand’s Jonah Lomu; Spanish tennis phenomenon Rafa Nadal; and Nigerian American two-time NBA (National Basketball Association) champion Hakeem Olajuwon. The section concludes with a profile of my late businessman father, Israel Adebajo, who was a sports administrator and founder of Stationery Stores football club, which won the country’s Challenge Cup in 1967 and 1968, and remained for decades the most fanatically supported club side in Nigeria’s commercial hub of Lagos. THE BOOK THUS PROVIDES – in a comprehensive but concise and highly readable volume – a panoramic view of 104 of the most interesting figures of the black world in Africa, America, the Caribbean and beyond, who have demonstrated courage, creativity and cruelty. With negative stereotyping and widespread Afrophobic views of the continent and its diaspora still so rife in the Western imagination and media, it is critical to counter these perspectives – as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar eloquently sought to do three decades ago – through these figures from the realms of history, politics, public service, activism, literature, scholarship, music, film, and sports.

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Part I

Historical Figures

1

Cecil Rhodes’s Crumbling Legacy

CECIL RHODES SET OUT to achieve immortality by leaving what he claimed would be a four-thousand-year legacy. Yet barely 120 years after his death the legacy is crumbling – in Bishop’s Stortford, Oxford, Grahamstown and Cape Town. The memorials of Rhodes, the greatest individual symbol of British imperialism, constitute a permanent assault on the descendants of his black victims, and clearly they no longer need to occupy prominent places in his hometown or at universities in England or South Africa. Yet it is critical that his memory not be totally erased. History must be preserved in ways that properly contextualise the atrocities of imperial figures such as Rhodes. His ‘cult’ is still manifest in about thirty biographies, eight novels, six plays and countless statues, films and documentaries. But, even the effort in 2003 to tie his legacy to that of Nelson Mandela appears to be unsustainable in an age of global movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter. My personal association with the legacy of Cecil Rhodes began in 1990, when I became that year’s only Rhodes Scholar from Nigeria. My uncle Segun Osoba – a radical historian – exclaimed: ‘That thing is dripping with blood. Cecil Rhodes was a brutal imperialist!’ My thoughts were more practical: if the money of a robber baron who had plundered Africa’s wealth would buy me an education at a world-class institution, then at least a slice of the treasure was returning to the continent. Yet, in Oxford, my stomach churned at dinners at Rhodes House when the assembled dignitaries would turn to a large portrait of the colonialist and raise their glasses to ‘the Founder’. I made my own silent 11

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protest and refused to take part in the strange ritual.  Cecil Rhodes was a white supremacist who committed crimes against humanity. He dispossessed black people of their ancestral lands in modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia – formerly Southern and Northern Rhodesia – through aggressive and duplicitous means, killing an estimated 60,000 people, and stealing 3.5 million square miles of southern African real estate. Between 1890 and 1895, Rhodes’s mercenaries – under the patronage of the British South Africa Company – embarked on a savage scorched-earth policy. They pillaged and raped, summarily executed black prisoners of war, stole farmland and thousands of herds of cattle, and burnt kraals. Tens of thousands of Matabele men, women and children were starved to death. Both Zambia and Zimbabwe removed statues of Rhodes from their streets after independence, though he still lies buried in Zimbabwe’s Matopos Hills. Rhodes was an often unscrupulous businessman, as well as a crude racist. He infamously said: ‘I prefer land to niggers … the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism.’ He headed the De Beers mining company, which controlled 90% of the world’s diamonds. Even before apartheid was passed into law in 1948, Rhodes, as the prime minister of the Cape Colony between 1890 and 1895, instituted its forerunner, introducing segregationist laws and disenfranchising many black citizens. He introduced hut and labour taxes to force black people into the cash economy; packed over 11,000 black miners into dog-patrolled, wire-protected barracks; and promoted draconian labour laws. In 2009 I visited the Bishop’s Stortford Museum in Hertfordshire, which provided an interesting dimension to his legacy. African music played in the background of a museum that displayed African axes, shields and other weapons forged by African blacksmiths. African drums and baskets were also on display. There were depictions of slavery and imperialism, and a recognition that Rhodes’s legacy had been contested, even during his own lifetime. Numerous photos of Rhodes littered the room. I was told by staff that even though many schoolchildren visited the museum, many English pupils did not learn about Cecil Rhodes in their education. Of far greater interest in the same building was the Rhodes Arts Complex, which offered theatre, comedies and the music of the Rhodes Rocks on Fridays. It is this entertainment that sustained the rather quiet museum, and many in the town clearly thought about Rhodes more in terms of entertainment than imperialism. And yet a community activist campaign successfully gathered over 4,000 signatures to change the name of the Rhodes 12

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Arts Complex to South Mill Arts in August 2020. The Rhodes Birthplace Trust also changed its name to the Bishop’s Stortford Museum and Arts CIO. But I cannot but feel that a more effective memorialisation might have been to rename the complex ‘the Rhodes Memorial of Imperialism’, and properly to record his crimes against humanity for present and future generations.  Cecil Rhodes dominates Oxford University more than almost any other figure. He left £100,000 (roughly £7,800,000 today) in his will for Oriel College, where he studied, to erect a new building. A statue was also built above the college on the High Street, towering over memorials to George V and Edward VII. Rhodes House is one of the most grandiose buildings in Oxford, combining Cotswold stone and a classical copper-domed rotunda, with traditional African craftsmanship, including the Great Zimbabwe bird prominently displayed atop the building. The Rhodes House Library hosts one of the finest collections of books on the British Empire and Commonwealth, as well as American history. At Oxford, Rhodes’s most enduring legacy is the scholarship named for him. About 8,000 scholars – funded from Rhodes’s £3.3 million fortune (about £258,000,000 today) – have studied at Oxford since 1903, in a scheme that excluded women until 1977. The scholarships were clearly designed for white men: half of the Rhodes trustees today remain white and male, while about 90% of the scholarships have gone, disproportionately, to white Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Rhodesians and South Africans. Rhodes – not reputed to have been a particularly good student – took eight years at Oxford to achieve a ‘gentleman’s pass’. The university controversially awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1899. Without any apparent irony, Oxford established a Rhodes Chair in Race Relations in 1953. After the success of the Rhodes Must Fall student protests to remove a statue from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in April 2015, Oxford students launched their own Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford campaign to transform what they considered to be the university’s institutionally racist culture, with 60% of minority students reportedly feeling unwelcome at the University. Three hundred student-led protesters also sought to topple Rhodes’s statue at Oriel, having gathered a petition of over 3,000 signatures. Chris Patten, the chancellor, advised protesting students to consider being educated elsewhere if they were not happy at Oxford. The protesters initially failed to achieve their goals after Oriel’s six-month ‘listening campaign’ sputtered to a halt, and alumni threatened to withhold funding. But after five years of sporadic agitation, and in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter movement, the 13

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college finally agreed to remove the statue, in principle, in 2020. The memorial is due to be moved to a museum by this summer, though some dissenting Oxford dons have thrown their weight behind British minister Robert Jenrick’s legal bid to prevent the removal of such statues. Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape city of Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) was founded with funding from the Oxford-based Rhodes Trust in 1904, and still stubbornly bears the name of its benefactor. Rhodes students marched in solidarity with the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall UCT protests, calling for a change to the name of their university and a transformation of its Eurocentric curriculum and institutional culture. As the historian Paul Maylam argued in his comprehensive Rhodes University, 1904–2016: An Intellectual, Political and Cultural History (2017), the Anglocentric university was established to ‘extend and strengthen the imperial idea in South Africa’. Rhodes’s colonial connections were reinforced by the institution’s commemoration of ‘Founder’s Day’ on 12 September, when plundering white ‘Pioneers’ founded Southern Rhodesia. The imperial theme was further reinforced by the large, often prejudiced, presence of white Rhodesian lecturers, administrators and students at the university.  Cecil Rhodes’s personal legacy was also evident at the university, with its values reflecting the criteria of Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarships: sports as character-building; a devotion to public service; and a commitment to spreading British values through a ‘Heaven’s breed’ of white supremacists. Rhodes University, with many Oxbridge-trained academics, was nicknamed ‘Oxford in the Bush’: both institutions championed imperialism, prioritised classics, took pride in small-group tutorials, segregated men from women, and required gowns at dinners in which wardens presided at ‘high tables’. Jimi Adesina, a Nigerian sociology professor who taught at Rhodes between 2001 and 2011, quipped that, on arrival in Grahamstown, ‘I could see the bush, but not Oxford.’ The institution was frozen in time, a relic of the Victorian past, continuing many practices that Oxford itself had jettisoned. Jackets and ties were worn to class and inside the library until the 1960s; ‘high tea’ was served on manicured lawns into the 1980s. The university was totally disconnected from its local, regional and continental roots.  For much of its existence, Rhodes University willingly maintained social segregation on campus, with its lily-white Council unanimously refusing to admit black students in 1933. The institution awarded honorary doctorates to the apartheid education minister JH Viljoen and its repressive state president CR Swart. Many of its academics and students – with some notable and courageous 14

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exceptions – adopted an apolitical ‘liberalism’ that advocated academic freedom without any commitment to social responsibility. For decades, black university workers were treated badly. An effort to change the university’s name in 1994 was overwhelmingly defeated in its Senate, though the institution had removed a bust of its namesake from its main entrance by 1999. Nelson Mandela received an honorary doctorate from Rhodes in 2002. But only in 2001 – nearly a century after its birth – did Rhodes University ‘discover’ Africa, acknowledging its geographical location in its vision statement. By 2012, half of its students were black, though the institutional culture still remained oppressively white. The battle over curriculum transformation was led by students in protests in 2015 and 2016. Even though a strong cohort of Nigerian, Kenyan, Zimbabwean and Basotho academics were teaching at Rhodes by the 2000s, many appeared to continue the Eurocentric traditions of the past and failed radically to transform the syllabus. In 2017, while distancing itself from its benefactor’s imperialism, the black-led Rhodes University Council voted 15–9 to keep its name, citing the issues of costs, brand name and potential loss of alumni funding. The University of Cape Town moved to Rhodes’s Groote Schuur estate in 1928. The imperialist had wanted to build a university on the foothills of Table Mountain, and UCT was the posthumous fulfilment of this dream. A bust of Rhodes stood proudly on the university’s upper campus for over eight decades. The grandiloquent Rhodes Memorial is also close to the university campus. UCT’s main hall in which graduation ceremonies take place was financed by the Rhodes Trust, and named after Rhodes’s rapacious lieutenant, Leander Starr Jameson.  Like Rhodes University, UCT was slow to admit black students, accepting only forty by 1937, and figures remained low into the 1980s. Even with these paltry numbers, the South African historian Howard Phillips demonstrated in his impressive UCT under Apartheid (2019) how the university practised social segregation against black students and workers on campus, colluding with, and caving in to, the apartheid government’s segregationist policies. In an infamous incident in 1968 – for which UCT later apologised – its Council buckled under pressure from the apartheid regime, and withdrew its earlier offer of a senior lecturership to the Cambridge-educated black South African academic Archie Mafeje. The university thus rhetorically defended academic freedom in order to perpetuate white privilege rather than to protect black rights. Connecting Rhodes University and UCT was Harry Oppenheimer, the 15

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chair of the Cecil Rhodes-affiliated Anglo American Corporation for twentyfive years until 1982. He delivered the Rhodes Commemoration Lecture at Rhodes University in 1970, disingenuously condoning the excesses of the racist imperialist in his dealings with ‘tribal, barbarous people’. Oppenheimer was also chancellor of UCT from 1967 to 1999, and regarded Africa as having been ‘backward’ until the Europeans arrived to ‘civilise’ it. Some UCT students demonstrated against his ‘racist capitalism’ and exploitation of miners. UCT’s Centre of African Studies is, however, still housed in the Harry Oppenheimer Institute Building.  UCT students led a determined two-month campaign in March–April 2015 that eventually toppled the statue of Rhodes that had been prominently displayed on its campus. This was a bid to ‘decolonise’ what the protesters saw as the university’s racist legacy and to develop a more inclusive curriculum across the disciplines. The students ridiculed the university’s self-description as an Afropolitan ‘gateway to Africa’, noting that 70% of its professoriate remained white, and that it had never hired a single black female professor (Harriet Ngubane was, however, a professor of social anthropology at UCT between 1988 and 1994). In July 2020, the statue of Rhodes in the Rhodes Memorial was defaced. The university’s main hall was also renamed Sarah Baartman Hall (after a South African female performer who was widely objectified in Europe) in December 2018, thus removing the name of Jameson. It is important to note that the controversial co-joining of the names of Cecil Rhodes and Nelson Mandela in the Mandela Rhodes Foundation in 2003 continues to confound many. While Rhodes was the greatest imperialist of the nineteenth century, Mandela was one of the greatest liberation heroes of the twentieth. Whereas Rhodes was an expansionist empire-builder, Mandela was a nation-builder who did the most to unite a South Africa divided for decades by colonialism and apartheid, and which was seemingly on the brink of a racial war. While Rhodes pursued a mission civilisatrice in Africa, Mandela embodied a ‘prophetic’ leadership which eventually freed his people from the bondage of apartheid. Critics have further noted that the conciliatory Mandela may have ended up doing long-term damage during his five-year presidency (1994–1999) by papering over racial differences and declining to force white South Africans to show more contrition to the largely black victims of apartheid. Rhodes Must Fall student protesters have often observed that many of South Africa’s five million whites continue to enjoy privileged lifestyles, while the national high priest 16

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absolved them of their sins without a proper confession or penance. Mandela’s legacy in liberating his country is secure, but the success of his efforts at national reconciliation will only endure if rapid progress can be made to narrow the country’s grotesque socio-economic inequalities, which have made South Africa among the most unequal societies in the world. History will, however, doubtless be much kinder to Mandela’s nation-building than to Rhodes’s empire-building. Times Literary Supplement (London), 31 March 2021.

17

2

Was Mahatma Gandhi a Racist?

Gandhi at 150 ON 2 OCTOBER 2019, millions of Indians – and indeed much of the world – marked Mohandas Gandhi’s 150th birthday. The Mahatma (the ‘Great Soul’) lived in South Africa for 21 years between 1893 and 1914, and honed much of his satyagraha – soul force – philosophy, including its iconic passive-resistance methods and anti-imperial tenets, on the African continent. He is widely considered to be among the greatest moral figures of the bloody twentieth century. His contributions to India’s independence struggle ensured that the sun eventually set on the British empire, and in turn, by 1960, catalysed the decolonisation of 40 Asian and African countries with a combined population of 800 million, a quarter of the world’s people at the time. Gandhi thus helped transform international society from a Western-dominated system of ‘global apartheid’ to a more diverse one in which the ‘wretched of the earth’ now had a voice. The Indian National Congress’s struggles against colonialism were spurred by Gandhi’s return to the subcontinent from South Africa in 1914, and inspired many West African nationalists, including Ghana’s JE Casely Hayford and Kwame Nkrumah, and Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo and HO Davies. The Mahatma had correctly, but somewhat patronisingly, predicted in 1924 that if Africans ‘caught the spirit of the Indian movement, their progress must be rapid’. He had also opined in 1936 that it was ‘maybe through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world’ – a 18

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prophecy that Martin Luther King Jr largely fulfilled through his leadership of America’s civil rights struggle. Gandhi’s beliefs were to inspire seven Africans and Americans who won the Nobel Peace Prize: Ralph Bunche, Albert Luthuli, Martin Luther King, Anwar Sadat, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere were also champions of Gandhi’s approach, though both eventually embraced armed struggle (as did Mandela, before changing tack towards the end of his imprisonment on Robben Island). A recurring question remains, however: how much were all these admirers aware of Gandhi’s hatred towards black South Africans? Did they not know, or did they choose to ignore, his deep prejudice so as to focus on the more positive aspects of the Mahatma’s anti-colonialism in India? Gandhi’s legacy has only recently come under much closer scrutiny. With the Mahatma’s statue having been removed from the University of Ghana’s campus in 2016, the once unthinkable question has been increasingly asked: Was Gandhi a racist? In this essay, I address this question by focusing on Gandhi’s collaboration with British imperialism in South Africa, his parochially Indian social struggles, his avowed prejudice towards black South Africans, and his support of social segregation between blacks and Indians. I then assess the fall of Gandhi’s statue at the University of Ghana (Legon) , and more recent perspectives of his legacy, which have sought to move away from his quasi-deification after martyrdom by an assassin’s bullet in January 1948. I conclude by comparing Gandhi’s legacy with that of the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes.

British Collusion A 2015 book by two Indian South African scholars, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Stanford University Press), provided incontrovertible evidence of Gandhi’s collaboration with the British Empire, as well as his disdain for South Africa’s majority black population. During the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, determined to prove himself a loyal subject of the British Raj, Gandhi mobilised Indian stretcherbearers as an ambulance corps to assist wounded British troops. British imperialists were determined to transform Natal Colony into a typical albinocracy that privileged the rights of white settlers over the black majority and Indian migrants, amidst fears of ‘black savages’ and the ‘Asiatic menace’. Gandhi believed strongly in the equality – intellectually, culturally and politically – of Indians with whites, and the superiority of Indians over blacks, whose cultures he detested and consistently disparaged in the most racist terms. He was an 19

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Orientalist – one of those anthropological creatures criticised by Edward Said for viewing the East through Western prisms and prejudices. As Gandhi put it in December 1893: ‘I venture to point out that both the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan.’ When the Zulus launched a rebellion in 1906 to resist British annexation of their lands and the destruction of their livelihoods, Gandhi once again mobilised Indians to support the imperial war effort, acting as a stretcher-bearer for the British against the oppressed blacks. About 3,500 Zulus were killed and 30,000 rendered homeless during the rebellion. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Gandhi again took up his stretcher on behalf of the British Empire. Rather incredibly, the man known as the twentieth century’s greatest apostle of non-violence offered to defend the British Empire again in 1918, urging ‘full assistance’ to the effort to overthrow the Germans.

Parochially Indian Struggles During his 21-year sojourn in South Africa, Gandhi fought parochially Indian battles, and ignored the rights of the black majority, whom he never viewed as equals or potential partners. The anglophile Gandhi was happy to live under the British Crown as a loyal subject, and regarded the imperial power as the salvation of Indians. It was only after his demands for equal rights were ignored by British mandarins that he took up the struggle for South African Indians. He fought – at the behest of Indian merchants – for Indian civil rights in Natal in 1894, employing non-violent resistance methods that involved provoking arrest and gracefully accepting punishment. Gandhi started his passive resistance demonstrations after the 1906 ‘Black Act’ was passed in the Transvaal Colony, which required Indians to be fingerprinted. He still naively believed that the British would grant equal rights to Indians. The Union of South Africa in 1910 – in which the British and defeated Boers effectively shared out the land and its bounty, while marginalising the black majority, Indians, and ‘Coloureds’ – once again confirmed the treachery of ‘perfidious Albion’. As African American scholar Oladele Kambon has noted, Gandhi later tried to whitewash his collaboration with British imperialism, his racism towards the black majority and his parochially Indian struggles, claiming, for example that he was helping wounded Zulus – instead of injured British troops – during the brutal wars of dispossession in Natal. His two autobiographies, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927) and Satyagraha in South Africa (1928), can 20

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be said, through their demonstration of selective memory on these issues, to be rewrites of history.

Kaffir-Bashing Gandhi regularly engaged in what can only be described as vituperative ‘Kaffir­ bashing’. In September 1896, he revealed how deep his racism was towards blacks, complaining – deploying shockingly crude stereotypes – that whites in Natal wished to ‘degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness’. Gandhi thus championed the colonial trope of the ‘lazy, happy native’. The end of this quote about black nudity was ironic, considering that the British prime minister Winston Churchill would later notoriously dismiss Gandhi as a ‘half-naked fakir’. (The Mahatma had himself spent the last decades of his life in a seminaked khadi in seeking to identify with India’s poor masses.) Gandhi dehumanised blacks, noting that ‘Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilised … They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.’ Continuing this repeated diatribe, Gandhi complained in 1895 that if Indians were given a lower legal standing than whites, they would be so affected ‘that from their civilised habits, they would be degraded to the habits of the aboriginal Natives’. Many of the Mahatma’s later apologists have sought to portray his racism as that of a young 24-year-old lawyer newly arrived in a country that he clearly did not yet understand. But as late as 1908, at the age of 38, Gandhi was still spewing racist venom, noting that ‘The British rulers take us to be so lowly and ignorant that they assume that, like the Kaffirs who can be pleased with toys and pins, we can also be fobbed off with trinkets’.

Apostle of Social Apartheid Even before the National Party enshrined apartheid as state policy in 1948, the South African Gandhi was a staunch believer in social apartheid. He launched several campaigns that successfully established separate public facilities for Indians and blacks. In 1895, for example, Gandhi euphorically celebrated victory for having ensured separate entrances in the Durban post office for blacks and Indians, in addition to the white entrance. It was more the lumping together of blacks and Indians that outraged Gandhi, rather than the separation of whites from the darker races. Gandhi further noted that ‘The Boer Government insulted the Indians by 21

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classing them with Kaffirs’. In 1904, while fretting about the ‘mixing of Kaffirs with the Indians’, he expressed outrage over ‘Why, of all places in Johannesburg, the Indian location should be chosen for dumping down all the kaffirs of the town’. These words presaged the 1950 Group Areas Act by nearly five decades. In 1905, when plague hit Durban, Gandhi noted that the disease would persist as long as Indians and blacks were ‘herded together indiscriminately at the hospital’. In 1909, the Mahatma was still seeking to ‘ensure that Indian prisoners are not lodged with Kaffirs’. In housing, hospitals, post offices, prisons, and toilets, Gandhi very much believed in the separation of Indians and blacks. In a precursor of apartheid’s 1950 Immorality Act, he further opposed Indians having relationships with black women, which he considered to be fraught with ‘grave danger’. Gandhi thus sought political alliances with the imperial British rather than the oppressed black majority during his time in South Africa. In his voluminous writings about this time, the Mahatma mentions just three Africans, only one of whom – African National Congress leader John Dube – he had ever met. Gandhi certainly did not have black friends, let alone acquaintances, in two decades of living among a black majority. He regarded what he termed as the culturally backward and intellectually inferior blacks as irrelevant to the future of their own country.

Gandhi Falls in Ghana As earlier noted, serious reassessment of Gandhi’s legacy achieved new momentum in academia with the publication of the book The South African Gandhi by Desai and Vahed in 2015. This re-examination spilled over spectacularly into the public sphere when staff and students successfully petitioned for the removal of Gandhi’s statue from the campus of the University in Ghana in December 2016. The memorial had been erected six months earlier following a state visit by the Indian president, Pranab Mukherjee, at which it had been unveiled. Ghana’s foreign ministry and presidency had agreed to the erection of the statue before the university had been properly consulted. Though Legon’s senior management later approved the memorial, it was clear that there had not been wide consultation among the university’s students and academic and administrative staff. This was a top-down, state-led decision imposed – many felt – on the university community. Shortly afterwards, academics and students at the university – backed by civil society activists – successfully raised a petition of over 2,200 signatures for 22

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the removal of the statue, arguing that Gandhi had been a racist, and that the presence of his statue on the campus was a particularly odious assault on the collective psyche of black people. Gandhi’s critics also argued that there was no memorial at the university to any African heroes, which they noted would have been more appropriate.

Gandhi as Heir of Rhodes? Gandhi’s life contained three great paradoxes: first, the prophet of non­ discrimination expressed some of the most bigoted views against black Africans; second, the apostle of non-violence took up his stretcher to assist the British in waging imperial wars against oppressed Zulus; and, third, the most renowned anti-imperial figure of the twentieth century collaborated with British imperialists to destroy the independence of black Africans. Many of Gandhi’s apologists, such as the Indian writer and journalist Ramachandra Guha, have tried to excuse his prejudice by noting that he was a man of his epoch. Family members like his granddaughter Ela Gandhi have argued that the Mahatma has been condemned based on ‘one or two statements’. Others have sought to portray his civic activism in South Africa as having paved the way for later black struggles. These patronising views, however, ignore two and a half centuries of indigenous resistance to British and Dutch colonisers in Africa and Asia, long before Gandhi ever set foot in South Africa in 1893. A statue commemorating Gandhi’s June 1893 expulsion from the first-class, whites-only compartment of a train – often identified as the catalysing moment in his struggles against colonialism – stands in Pietermaritzburg. Another stands in Gandhi Square, Johannesburg. Based on his utterances and actions, Gandhi was, however, clearly racist towards black people, and believed them to be inferior. After 1994, post-apartheid South Africa was on a quest to enact the myth of a ‘rainbow nation’ in the country’s great national dramaturgy of reconciliation. National heroes were needed across all races, and unity was stressed over division, even as deep wounds were papered over which did not fit the new official narrative of ‘no victors, no vanquished’. South Africa’s ‘founding father’, Nelson Mandela, rushed to embrace India’s own revered ‘founding father’ in noting: ‘He was both an Indian and a South African citizen … It was here that he taught that the destiny of the Indian Community was inseparable from that of the oppressed black majority.’ Similarly, Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, opined that ‘Gandhi … spent many years in South Africa … during which he used his extraordinary energies to fight racism’. 23

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But as we have seen, during his years in South Africa, Gandhi fought a parochially Indian struggle that was completely separate from the struggles of the black majority. He pleaded with his British oppressors to accept Indian subjects as their equal, and uttered the most vile and vulgar racial insults against black people. He also supported social apartheid, failing to interact with the black leaders of the day, who were fighting for the most basic rights of the country’s majority. There are parallels between Gandhi and the way that post-apartheid South Africa sought to rehabilitate the racist legacy of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Mandela himself unwisely linked his name forever to Rhodes in the ill-judged Mandela Rhodes Foundation in 2003, viewing this monstrous marriage as an act of reconciliation between the country’s black and white races. There were clear parallels between Rhodes and Gandhi: both were migrants who moved to South Africa in search of fame and fortune; both were British-trained lawyers and admirers of British institutions; both had laudatory hagiographies written about them before more balanced assessments emerged; and both have had their legacies re-examined, and their statues removed or defaced. Even though both Rhodes and Gandhi are often said to have been ‘men of their times’, and so should not be judged by the standards of our own age, yet there were surely many white and Indian individuals during the era – such as Olive Schreiner and Yusuf Dadoo – who supported the rights of the black majority and did not utter such vulgar racist slurs, or practise social apartheid, or support acts of dispossession of oppressed people. It must be said, though, that Gandhi was also no Rhodes. After leaving South Africa in 1914, he lived another 33 years in India, where he fought an innovative, relentless, and ultimately victorious battle against British imperialism. He also identified with and championed the rights of the poor masses of India. While neither Gandhi nor Rhodes can be exonerated by the fatuous argument that they were ‘men of their times’ – we cannot apply different moral standards to the racism of both men without drifting into sophistry – what ultimately somewhat redeems Gandhi’s legacy is the fact that he was instrumental in destroying the edifice of British imperialism, resulting in the liberation of Asia and Africa. His satyagraha inspired African and American leaders like Nkrumah, Kaunda, Sadat and King, whose struggle for civil rights ultimately made possible the presidency of the first African American, Barack Obama. As Gandhi’s biographer Judith Brown put it, he ‘gave the world beyond India grand visions and hopes which have become a recurring inspiration to men and women of other times, other 24

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places and other cultures’. Gandhi ultimately ended up on the right side of history; Rhodes did not. A statue of Gandhi was erected in London’s Parliament Square in March 2015, while others have been unveiled in the US, Germany and elsewhere. But there is no question that his brand has been badly damaged by the revelations of his racism against black South Africans. The Indian government is still, nevertheless, traversing the world seeking to offer his statues to foreign countries. Cape Town was asked by New Delhi to unveil a life-size statue of Gandhi in 2019; a reported 60% of Cape respondents did not want the project to proceed. In 2018, over 3,000 Malawian petitioners successfully opposed a statue of Gandhi being built in Blantyre. Gandhi’s statue in Johannesburg was defaced with white paint in April 2015 by protesters condemning his racism. A Gandhi statue in Davis, California, was also the site of protests in 2018. Will the Gandhi statues in Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg survive the harsh verdict of history? If both memorials are to remain intact, let them be augmented: a petition, please, for the South African government to erect a statue of John Dube in conversation with Gandhi in Pietermaritzburg, and another of Lilian Ngoyi – the ANC stalwart and key leader of the 1956 Women’s March on Pretoria – in dialogue with the Mahatma in the heart of Johannesburg. Johannesburg Review of Books (JRB), November 2019.

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3

Revisiting Woodrow Wilson’s

Liberal Legacy

ON 27 JUNE 2020, one of America’s most prestigious universities – Princeton – decided, following a five-year student-led campaign by the university’s Black Justice League, to remove the name of Woodrow Wilson from two of its prominent buildings: the School of Public and International Affairs, and its first undergraduate hall of residence. This was the most striking toppling of an icon in the recent global crusade against discredited historical figures. Princeton’s trustees devastatingly noted that ‘Wilson’s racism was significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time … [his] racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school whose scholars, students, and alumni must be firmly committed to combating the scourge of racism in all its forms.’ What made this development so momentous was that Wilson was not renowned for having been a brutal and unscrupulous imperialist like Cecil Rhodes, or a slave-holding Confederate general like Robert Lee. Instead, he was president of the United States between 1913 and 1920, having achieved reformist legislative triumphs; he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1919; and he was a dynamic president of Princeton University (1902–1910). Wilson also served as the Democratic governor of New Jersey (1910–1912), and the term ‘Wilsonian’ has been widely used to describe a liberal idealism in US foreign policy. Princeton’s decision has direct implications for institutions like Oxford

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REVISITING WOODROW WILSON’S LIBERAL LEGACY

University, with the continuing clamour to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College.

The Making of a Scholar-Politician Woodrow Wilson was born in the American Southern state of Virginia on 28 December 1856, four years before the American Civil War (1861–1865) which was fought largely over the central issue of the slave-owning South’s insistence on the right to continue this inhumane practice. Wilson’s father, Joseph, was a Presbyterian pastor and theologian who led pastorates in Georgia and North Carolina, used slave labour in his home, and defended slavery on biblical grounds. Joseph also worked as a chaplain for the Confederate army during the civil war, and several of his relatives were Confederate generals. This was the bone-deep racism that a young Woodrow inherited, a prejudice that he found difficult to shake off because it would have been akin to betraying his own faith. Wilson remains the most intellectually accomplished of America’s 45 presidents, having completed his undergraduate degree at Princeton University, attended the University of Virginia Law School, and obtained a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in history and government. He then taught at several American liberal arts colleges, eventually rising to become a full professor at Princeton. Wilson also published nine books on American politics and history, focusing especially on the American Civil War and the decade of Reconstruction (1866–1876) during which black Americans achieved some social progress. He consistently adopted a Southern perspective in interpreting this history, regarding slavery in fairly benign terms, and viewing the Ku Klux Klan – an arsonist, hooded terrorist band of racist white supremacists who emerged to oppose black progress during Reconstruction – in similar terms, as a largely misunderstood defender of Southern white interests. Wilson described the group as ‘men half outlawed, denied the suffrage, without hope of justice in the courts, who meant to take this means [violence] to make their will felt’.

Racism and Imperialism Wilson was thus a racist who identified strongly with the ‘Lost Cause’ movement, which sought to provide a revisionist view of the history of the American Civil War. The group portrayed the Southern Confederacy as consisting of decent people seeking to preserve an agrarian lifestyle against Northern industrialists, rather than the slavery-supporting white supremacists they were. Slaves were also depicted by this movement as ‘happy’. Many of the Confederate monuments 27

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currently being toppled in the American South were erected by this movement in the early 1900s during Wilson’s own political ascendancy. While I was studying international relations at Oxford in the 1990s, Woodrow Wilson was held up as the patron saint of a liberal international order, and an anti-imperialist prophet of national self-determination. But there was much that our Eurocentric curriculum left unsaid about this supposed liberal icon. We were not, for example, taught that Wilson did not recognise the most basic rights of his black citizens, that he was actively discriminating against African Americans in government jobs, and that his calls for self-determination were limited to white Central European nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia, and were not to be extended to Africa, Asia, or the Caribbean. The American president made it clear that the US should follow the model of its British cousins by assisting ‘less civilised’ peoples to attain the ‘habit of law and obedience’. Wilson was thus a child of the Jim Crow South who never betrayed his prejudiced upbringing. His racism was already evident while president of Princeton when he refused to admit black students, as Harvard and Yale were doing. He further sought to erase the record of blacks who had attended Princeton. As Wilson deceitfully argued: ‘The whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no Negro has ever applied’. As governor of New Jersey, he refused to hire blacks to work in the state service. While Wilson’s academic writing argued that the office of the US president should be ‘the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people’, in practice he spoke for a lily-white constituency and did not see black Americans as equal citizens. Wilson attacked the progress of African Americans under Reconstruction by observing that ‘the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded … It was a menace to society itself that the negroes should thus of a sudden be set free and left without tutelage or restraint’. He praised ‘docile’ slaves who stayed with their masters, contrasting them favourably with ‘vagrants, looking for pleasure and gratuitous fortune’ who inevitably ‘turned thieves or importunate beggars’. He described the end of Reconstruction as ‘the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites, the responsible class’, arguing that blacks were denied the vote in the South not because their skin was dark, but because their minds were dark. Wilson’s most egregious act of racism as president was to introduce discriminatory practices that led to the unfair and widespread retrenchment and demotion of black workers from government service. On assuming the presidency in 1913, he sacked 15 of 17 black supervisors in the federal civil 28

REVISITING WOODROW WILSON’S LIBERAL LEGACY

service, and replaced them with white supervisors. Wilson’s resegregation of the civil service – especially the Treasury, Interior, Navy, and War departments, as well as the postal services – which had been desegregated for decades, led to apartheid practices that resulted in separate offices – in some cases, black workers worked in cages like animals in a zoo – toilets, canteens, dressing rooms, and other facilities. The cynical introduction of photo identification for applications to the civil service in 1914 further resulted in open discrimination against black applicants. Wilson’s actions would have a durable and negative impact: it took another three decades before the country’s civil service started to be desegregated. The traditionally black appointees of the Register of the Treasury, and the African American ambassadors to Liberia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, were also vindictively replaced by white appointees. Wilson’s racism was again underlined in a famous exchange in the White House with a previous African American supporter, the Harvard-educated William Monroe Trotter. The fearless black journalist visited the White House with a civil rights delegation in November 1914 to try to persuade the president to reverse his resegregation practices. This was during an era when most blacks who could vote still supported the Republicans out of loyalty to the party of Abraham Lincoln, who had masterminded the legislation formally ending slavery. Trotter had submitted a petition to Wilson in the White House the previous year with 20,000 signatures from 38 states opposing discrimination in the civil service. Having seen no progress and only reversals, the black civil rights leader requested another meeting at which he noted to the president that black and white clerks had worked harmoniously in government service for fifty years. Trotter then asked Wilson in frustration: ‘Have you a “New Freedom” for white Americans and a new slavery for your Afro-American fellow citizens?’ In response, Wilson calmly argued that the separation of races was not intended to discriminate against black employees, but rather to protect them by avoiding friction with their white counterparts. The president cautioned the civil rights leaders not to create the erroneous impression that blacks were being humiliated, and concluded: ‘Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit’. When Trotter persisted that such acts degraded black employees before their white colleagues and that he was disappointed that the president did not view separation as wrong and offensive, Wilson became angry, noting that: ‘Your tone, sir, offends me … You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came,’ asking Trotter not to return to the White House. The civil rights leader sought in vain to explain: ‘I am pleading for simple justice.’ But the president accused him 29

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of trying to blackmail him by talking about having previously mobilised blacks to support Wilson electorally. In the Southern idiom, Trotter had behaved like an ‘uppity nigger’, and his delegation was effectively thrown out of the White House. It should be noted that several black and white politicians also criticised Wilson’s resegregation of the civil service during his own epoch. Members of the Ku Klux Klan regularly shot, whipped, and assaulted blacks, also burning down their homes. Wilson, nevertheless, effusively endorsed the notorious pro-Klan 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation – based on the book The Clansman by the president’s former classmate Thomas Dixon – in which Wilson’s prior scholarship was liberally quoted: ‘The white men were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes.’ The film further quoted Wilson as saying: ‘In the villages the Negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.’ Wilson screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House, inviting members of Congress and the Supreme Court, and described it as an accurate depiction of American history. The movie – which elicited protests in Boston, New York, and other major American cities by outraged citizens – provided a positive depiction of the Ku Klux Klan and a negative, stereotypical portrayal of blacks as an inferior race and as lecherous assaulters of white women. The Birth of a Nation, with its presidential endorsement, also helped to revive the Ku Klux Klan as an active group. Some of Wilson’s modern-day supporters have sought to excuse his racism by citing his supposedly liberal foreign policy. But even in this sphere, Wilson was a blatant imperialist, underlining the hypocrisy that has often characterised American foreign policy. The US had, after all, annexed half of Mexico’s territory – the states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California – by 1848 in a bloodsoaked imperial conquest justified by notions of ‘manifest destiny’, which had earlier been used to try to sanctify the genocide against the country’s indigenous population. The ‘liberal’ Wilson also engaged in ‘gunboat diplomacy’ by sending soldiers to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic, while strongly supporting continuing American imperial rule in the Philippines. He also launched a ‘regime change’ intervention into Mexico in 1914 that toppled the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta. In defence of a mission civilisatrice, Wilson clearly felt that the peoples in these countries had no right to liberty until American tutelage had led them to political maturity. 30

REVISITING WOODROW WILSON’S LIBERAL LEGACY

Rewriting a Legacy But despite his racism, Wilson did have some domestic achievements as president. Among his accomplishments was the creation of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission. Other policy successes included reluctantly extending the vote to women; successfully pushing anti-trust and anticompetitive laws; coaxing the US Congress to enact labour laws that protected railroad workers; extending loans to farmers; prohibiting child labour; and introducing tariffs that lowered duties on imports. Wilson further transformed Princeton – as university president – into a serious research institution, introducing far-sighted public policy and international affairs programmes. Wilson’s international liberalism – based on a wellspring of ‘American exceptionalism’ – derived from German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s seminal 1795 essay, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, which argued that global peace could only be achieved by democratically governed states. Wilson’s ideas about ‘collective security’ thus sought to extend domestic rule of law and public opinion to the international arena. His championing of national self-determination was similarly based on the foundations of nineteenthcentury liberalism, arguing that both peoples and nations had a right to govern themselves. Though Wilson became famous for championing ‘peace without victory’ and ‘making the world safe for democracy’ in 1917 during the First World War, as well as opposing the secret agreements of the ‘old diplomacy’ of European imperial powers, he was naive in placing too much faith in idealism over the realpolitik of European leaders during Paris Peace negotiations in 1919. The anti-imperial ‘new diplomacy’ proposed by both Wilson and revolutionary Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin thus suffered spectacular defeat. In the end, the peace adopted in Paris was a punitive one that helped trigger the grievances exploited by Adolf Hitler to sweep aside Germany’s fledgling Weimar Republic, eventually culminating in the Second World War. The 1919 Versailles Treaty itself was dead on arrival in an isolationist US Senate, leading to a catastrophic failure of personal diplomacy for the American president. Wilson’s appeal to ‘world public opinion’ was also quixotic, as flag-waving European publics had enthusiastically supported their countries’ entry into the First World War in 1914. The League of Nations failed not just because it lacked American participation. It was based on an unrealistic reflection of power dynamics and national interests in the real world, and also excluded two critical powers: Germany and Russia. The League thus embodied the very ‘victor’s 31

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justice’ that the American president had consistently sought to avoid. Wilson died on 3 February 1924 at the age of 68. Two foundations, several European streets and squares, numerous schools, a government-funded think tank, a navy submarine, and the headquarters of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), all bear his name. Despite Wilson being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, he failed to persuade his own country to join the international organisation set up to preserve the post-war peace. Due to the failure of the League and the outbreak of another global conflict, Wilson’s international reputation had become tarnished by 1939. After the Second World War, Wilson’s legacy was resurrected by crusading American foreign policy jingoists seeking to spread a gospel of democracy and human rights around the world. They often, however, hypocritically did everything possible to retard these ‘Wilsonian’ ideals in much of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia by supporting and even assisting brutal autocrats, as the toppling of leaders like Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Chile’s Salvador Allende, and Iraq’s Mohammad Mosaddegh clearly demonstrated. There was nothing progressive or liberal about Wilson’s career. He remained until his death a dyed-in-the-wool racist, even when he is assessed according to the moral standards of his own age. Princeton’s action in expunging his name from two major buildings now provides an ideal opportunity to start writing a more accurate, inclusive, and complex version of history than the one I was taught at Oxford. Times Literary Supplement (London), July 2020.

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Part II

Political Figures

4

Kwame Nkrumah: Africa’s

Philosopher-King

LAST MONTH (SEPTEMBER 2009) marked the centenary of the birth of Kwame Nkrumah, undoubtedly the most famous prophet of pan-Africanism. After Nkrumah’s fall from power in 1966, Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui described the Ghanaian leader as a ‘Leninist czar’: a royalist revolutionary who ruled in a monarchical fashion and thus lost the organisational effectiveness of a Leninist party structure. Mazrui concluded that Nkrumah would be celebrated more as a great pan-African than a great Ghanaian, an insight that has proved to be largely accurate. Nkrumah can, in a sense, be seen as a tragic figure in an African Shakespearean epic. We will recall that in Julius Caesar, the Roman Senate had made Caesar dictator perpetuus of Rome, as the Ghanaian parliament effectively made Nkrumah Ghana’s dictator. As Caesar had been viewed as ruthless and accused of weakening the powers of the Senate, Nkrumah was similarly viewed by his critics. The plot that killed Caesar was intended to prevent him from turning Rome into a monarchy; Nkrumah had himself revealed his monarchical tendencies which Ghana’s military putschists of 1966 publicly declared that they had intervened to end. Like Caesar’s patricians, Nkrumah’s political class lived lavish lifestyles and lacked a sense of noblesse oblige. While Caesar had a statue of himself installed in a Roman temple, Nkrumah had a statue of himself erected outside the Ghanaian parliament. As Brutus had betrayed Caesar, some of Nkrumah’s closest lieutenants also betrayed him after his fall from power. Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka created one of the most memorable 35

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portraits of Nkrumah’s autocratic rule in his satirical 1967 play Kongi’s Harvest. The play is set in a fictional African state called Isma. Kongi is a ‘repressive, ambitious’, messianically deluded tyrant who develops an ideology of ‘Kongism’ complete with ‘algebraic quantums’. He is assisted by a fraternity of sycophantic Aweris and backed by a brutal Carpenter’s Brigade. Some of Kongi’s main opponents like Oba Danlola have been slammed in detention, but the autocrat has failed to quell the Oba’s opposition. A plot is hatched to assassinate Kongi during the New Yam Festival, which fails, and Kongi narrowly survives. The parallels between Kongi’s and Nkumah’s rule are unmistakable. Kongism ridicules Nkrumahism as well as the algebraic pretensions of Nkrumah’s reportedly ghost-written 1964 book Consciencism. The Christ­ like delusions of Kongi recall those of Nkrumah. The Aweris are clearly the clique of sycophantic politicians around Nkrumah. The Carpenter’s Brigade could represent Nkrumah’s thuggish Workers’ Brigade and the Youth Pioneers. Danlola’s dignified presence recalls Ghana’s patrician opposition politician JB Danquah, who died in Nkrumah’s jail in 1965. The failed plot to kill Kongi mirrors the two unsuccessful assassination attempts on Nkrumah’s life. Having secured power in 1957, Nkrumah set about de-democratising the Ghanaian political system, arguing disingenuously that opposition was alien to African society. He smashed civil society by replacing it with his own peculiar brand of one-party rule. Nkrumah also developed a personality cult with praise names like Osagyefo (Redeemer), Father of the Nation, the Infallible, and the Golden Boy of Africa. The Ghanaian leader had famously implored Africa’s liberation fighters to ‘seek first the political kingdom and all other things would be added on to it’. In the end, Nkrumah would be disappointed that the political kingdom did not automatically lead to the socio-economic kingdom of industrialisation and development. The Prophet could not lead the flock to the Promised Land, and the masses turned away in droves. Nkrumah’s cocoa-based economy was simply too vulnerable to international price fluctuations, rendering socialist wealth redistribution a pipe dream. Nkrumah, however, achieved his greatest success in the area of foreign policy. He played an instrumental role in Africa’s liberation struggles and provided an intellectual vision for pan-African unity. For many Africans, Nkrumah remains a hero who gave them a sense of dignity and put their continent on the world stage. More than any other individual, he ensured that a pan-African organisation – the Organisation of African Unity – was born in 1963, placing pan-Africanism on the international agenda when other states were still in the colonial womb. In a poll in New African in 2004, Nkrumah was rated the second-greatest African of all time after Nelson Mandela. 36

KWAME NKRUMAH: AFRICA’S PHILOSOPHER-KING

As Nkrumah famously noted: ‘The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.’ His panAfrican vision was of a Union Government of African States with a common currency, an African Defence Command, and a common foreign policy. He further called for a ‘United States of Africa’ in which governments would pool their sovereignty in the areas of economics, security, and foreign policy as a way of fostering industrialisation. Nkrumah envisaged a continental authority to oversee integrated planning and transport systems, and advocated the building of a vast road and railway network, a great increase in air links, and a massive upgrading of continental ports as the foundations for an African Common Market. But the Ghanaian leader proved to be a Cassandra whose vision was too far ahead of his own age. Nkrumah was widely distrusted by his fellow African leaders for backing armed dissidents, and even his economic unions with Guinea and Mali in the 1960s proved ephemeral. Neither Ghana nor Africa was ripe for revolution, and there was a dearth of revolutionaries in both country and continent. Having lived his last six years in exile in Guinea, Nkrumah died of cancer, a lonely and sad man, in a Romanian hospital in 1972. His body was brought home to be buried in his ancestral home of Nkroful. After Nkrumah fell from power in 1966, his statue in Accra was destroyed by an angry mob. Visiting Ghana’s capital today, nostalgia for his memory has greatly increased, with the realisation that most of his political heirs performed even worse than he did. The magnificent Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, built in 1992, is a remarkable act of national restitution for Ghana’s founding father: a seven-metre bronze statue of Nkrumah stands in the place where the previous one had been destroyed. The grey marble Nkrumah mausoleum is set in a spacious flower-filled garden opposite the Old Parliament building. Nkrumah’s shadow is ubiquitous in Accra. Independence Square is another of his legacies, with the Triumphal Arch’s black star bearing the inscription ‘Freedom and Justice A.D. 1957’. Nearby is the Kwame Nkrumah Conference Centre. We leave the final word to Thabo Mbeki, the leading pan-African philosopherking of his own age. The former South African president offered a moving tribute to Nkrumah’s early hope and tragic end: ‘We were mere schoolboys when we saw the black star rise on our firmament, as the colonial Gold Coast crowned itself with the ancient African name of Ghana. We knew then that the promise we had inherited would be honoured. The African giant was awakening! But it came to pass that the march of African time snatched away that promise. Very little seemed to remain along its path except the footprints of despair.’ Sunday Independent (South Africa), 18 October 2009. 37

5

Albert Luthuli: The Nobel

Black Moses

THIS WEEK (DECEMBER 2011) marks the fiftieth anniversary of Albert Luthuli’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in the Norwegian capital of Oslo in 1961, and the delivery of one of the most eloquent and stirring speeches in the history of the award. Luthuli was the president of the African National Congress (ANC) between 1951 until his death in 1967. He was the first African to win the award and only the second black man after the African American scholar-diplomat Ralph Bunche was ennobled in 1950. Aside from Luthuli, three South Africans have won the Nobel Peace Prize, making the country the largest recipient of the prize in Africa. While Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela shared the same Christian education as Luthuli and all three were titans in the anti-apartheid struggle, FW de Klerk was in many ways the very antithesis of this struggle. De Klerk was instead the embodiment of the apartheid system he helped to destroy in a pragmatic act of politicide. Coming shortly after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, the award of the Nobel Prize to Luthuli was an attempt to highlight apartheid’s brutalities. South Africa’s ‘Black Moses’ – who titled his autobiography Let My People Go – was a traditional chief from rural KwaZulu-Natal who was uniquely able to bridge the divide between Africa’s oldest liberation movement’s urban and rural masses. He was involved in the Defiance Campaign of 1952 and led several acts of civil disobedience, was jailed, and banned. He, however, stuck doggedly to his principles of Gandhian non-violent passive resistance (though he noted that he 38

ALBERT LUTHULI: THE NOBEL BLACK MOSES

was not a pacifist), advocated economic sanctions against the apartheid regime, and consistently pushed for the inclusion of whites, Indians, and ‘Coloureds’ in the anti-apartheid struggle. Deeply steeped in Christian religious beliefs, Luthuli held that the road to freedom lay through the cross, and sacrifices and suffering would be required in order to translate Jesus’ love ethic into concrete political achievements. Like Mahatma Gandhi, the point of the struggle was to transform the enemy’s hatred through love and human dignity. Luthuli’s Nobel speech in Oslo in 1961 – ‘Africa and Freedom’ – was one of the most powerful statements ever delivered in this forum. The lyrical text was almost poetic in parts. It was a dignified and defiant speech that exposed the evil criminality of apartheid, with Luthuli bemoaning the shooting of black protesters, oppressive pass laws, bannings, prohibitions, imprisonment, forced labour, penal whippings, farm prisons, land dispossession, book bannings, and black-listing. He memorably condemned this dictatorship as representing the ‘trappings of medieval backwardness and cruelty’. Luthuli further described South Africa as a ‘museum piece in our time, a hangover from the dark past of mankind, a relic of an age which everywhere is dead or dying’. He was effectively depicting his homeland as a giant Jurassic Park of massive injustice full of political dinosaurs who would ultimately become extinct. He also invoked the memory of the warrior tradition of one of his illustrious Zulu ancestors, Shaka Zulu, paradoxically celebrating a man of war in a peace prize speech. Luthuli decried the ‘racial vaingloriousness’ and entrenched stereotypes of apartheid – which he condemned as a Frankenstein’s monster – in which many white children were brought up to regard their race as superior, clever, and industrious, while blacks were ‘inferior, slothful, stupid, evil, and clumsy’. Observing that a large segment of South Africa’s white population supported the racist government, he demonstrated how this personal racism was elevated to state policy under apartheid, with whites having the ‘right to own and control’, while blacks were reduced to ‘temporary sojourners in … cities, fit only for menial labour, and unfit to share political power’. He specifically cited the 1950 Group Areas Act under which he noted that blacks were losing even more land to ‘white greed’, even after 87% of the best land had already been reserved for whites. Luthuli complained that one million blacks were still being arrested, jailed, and fined every year for breaching unjust pass laws. He further condemned ‘Bantu’ homelands in which blacks were granted a bogus ‘independence’. But even as he delivered this stinging criticism, Luthuli continued to insist on the ANC’s vision of a non-racial democratic South Africa in which there 39

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would be equality of opportunity for all citizens to share in the country’s resources, and where institutions of learning would be open to all. While the urbane, well-read, and softly-spoken Chief referred to the 1948 United Nations (UN) Declaration of Human Rights to justify his calls for equality, he noted that South Africans must be their own liberators, as the country’s freedom could never be a ‘gift from abroad’. This was a speech that civil rights leader and fellow Nobel peace laureate Martin Luther King Jr could have delivered about apartheid America. Both prophets – as disciples of Gandhi – shared an undying belief in non-violent struggle, as well as in the ultimate triumph of the human spirit over oppression. Luthuli’s words about the ‘unconquerable spirit of mankind’ could have been uttered by King, as could his view that ‘Although methods of struggle may differ from time to time, the universal human strivings for liberty remain unchanged’. The Chief ’s magnanimity towards his oppressors, his continued calls for reconciliation, and his building of bridges with progressive white South Africans lit a torch that his fellow ANC chieftain and Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela would inherit four decades later in liberating his country. Luthuli’s Nobel speech also represented the cri de coeur of a committed panAfrican prophet, linking Africa’s independence struggle to that of apartheid South Africa. As he noted: ‘Our goal is a united Africa in which the standards of life and liberty are constantly expanding’. With his renowned moral consistency, the Chief also called for a united continent to abandon its oppressive past and build democratic societies based on humane values. As he noted: ‘This is Africa’s age … the moment when she must grapple with destiny … saying ours was a fight for noble values and worthy ends, and not for lands and the enslavement of man.’ Luthuli demonstrated that his Christian faith was the foundation for all his political actions, talking of serving the ‘Creator’, and boldly identifying himself as a ‘Christian and patriot’. He employed evocative biblical allusions, rather uncritically praised Christian missionaries (who colluded closely in the imperial project), and called for churches across the globe to join the anti-apartheid struggle. In the spirit of ubuntu, he appealed to his largely European audience to see people the world over as a common humanity and cited examples from Europe’s blood-strewn history to try to win support for Africa’s liberation. He also noted the irony that ‘the golden age of African independence is also the dark age of South Africa’s decline and retrogression’. Today, Luthuli’s memory is preserved in his family home in Groutville, 40

ALBERT LUTHULI: THE NOBEL BLACK MOSES

which has now been transformed into a national museum. In the reconstructed bedroom and study full of family and political memorabilia, Luthuli’s voice booms over a loudspeaker as his Nobel speech is played over and over again. In the words of one of his favourite poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – quoted in Luthuli’s Nobel speech – the ANC stalwart certainly left his ‘footprints on the sands of time’. Sunday Independent (South Africa), 11 December 2011.

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6

Nelson Mandela: Pan-African Prophet

NELSON ROLIHLAHLA MANDELA was one of the greatest moral figures of the twentieth century. Winner of the Nobel peace prize in 1993, he was a nationbuilder par excellence who did the most to unite a South Africa divided for decades by colonialism and apartheid and on the brink of a potential civil war. Mandela embodied a quasi-religious ‘prophetic’ leadership that eventually freed his people from the bondage of apartheid by 1994. An often neglected part of his legacy is, however, his role as a pan-African icon. Mandela’s struggle for South Africa’s liberation and pan-African solidarity also embraced prophetic rule. The charismatic leader of the African National Congress (ANC) was able to build up and maintain a devoted following in South Africa, Africa, and its diaspora even during almost three decades in jail. Mandela’s presidency, from 1994 to 1999, could also be seen in prophetic terms, as he sought to reconcile a deeply divided society, heal a conflict-ridden continent, and build bridges with the African diaspora. His rule thus represented prophetic nation-building, continental renewal, and diasporic solidarity. The younger Mandela read the writings of pan-Africanists like Trinidad’s George Padmore and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. At first inspired by Gandhian tactics of ‘passive resistance’, he would eventually come to play a leadership role in the Defiance Campaign of 1952, before initiating the ‘armed struggle’, which led to a life sentence in 1964. As Madiba memorably put it, quoting an African proverb: ‘the attacks of the wild beast cannot be averted with only bare hands’. Mandela’s visit to Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zambia, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria,

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Ghana, Senegal, and Guinea in 1962 had a profound impact on him, providing great insights into continental diplomacy and the tactics of other liberation movements. He was particularly influenced by Algeria’s Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and had always adopted a much broader pan-African vision of his country’s struggle, as the name of his party – whose members were sheltered during the apartheid struggle by many neighbouring countries, at huge costs to themselves – suggested. Mandela was widely celebrated during his lifetime as a political saint. As president, he came to symbolise his country’s racial reconciliation. The charisma of this ‘founding father’ helped South Africa’s young, democratic institutions to flower after 1994, and gave the country an international stature of which the former global pariah could never have dreamed. In contrast to Africa’s other post-independence ‘founding fathers’ such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Senegal’s Léopold Senghor, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, he bowed out gracefully at the end of his first presidential term in 1999, setting a standard for future African leaders aspiring to greatness. As Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui noted: ‘If in the last half of the twentieth century there was one single statesman in the world who came closest to being morally number one among leaders of the human race, Nelson Mandela was probably such a person.’ In a similar vein, Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian former United Nations (UN) secretary-general and Nobel peace laureate, wrote: ‘To this day, Madiba remains probably the single most admired, most respected international figure in the entire world.’ One of Mandela’s lasting legacies will be his efforts – not always successful – at promoting national and international peacemaking. He tirelessly reached out to his former enemies at home, and led peacemaking efforts in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Lesotho. During his presidency, South Africa largely shunned a military role for fear of arousing allegations of hegemonic domination, since the apartheid army had been particularly destructive in southern Africa. In what came to be known by some as the ‘Mandela Doctrine’, Madiba told his fellow leaders at the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in 1998: ‘Africa has a right and a duty to intervene to root out tyranny … We must all accept that we cannot abuse the concept of national sovereignty to deny the rest of the continent the right and duty to intervene when behind those sovereign boundaries, people are being slaughtered to protect tyranny.’ Though Mandela courageously sought to champion human rights in Africa, he was politically hurt 43

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and diplomatically isolated on the continent by a bruising diplomatic battle with General Sani Abacha after the Nigerian autocrat had brutally hanged Ken SaroWiwa and eight Ogoni activists in November 1995. As president, despite Western pressure – especially from Washington – Mandela consistently upheld personal loyalty, and insisted on maintaining his close friendship with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, both of whom had supported the ANC’s liberation struggle. This loyalty was to serve Mandela well in brokering a deal in 1999 on the Lockerbie airline bombing of 1988 – blamed on Libya by the United States (US) and Britain – which eventually lifted UN sanctions on Tripoli (imposed in 1992) by 2003. After 2000, however, Mandela did forgo personal loyalty and a conscious post-retirement decision always to be supportive of his successor, when he began to criticise Thabo Mbeki’s government and pushed for the provision of antiretroviral drugs to HIV/AIDS sufferers in South Africa, where five million people had been afflicted by the pandemic. This was a battle that Madiba – much to his later regret – had neglected during his own tenure in office. Mandela did not just fight injustice in South Africa and Africa; he also fought for the rights of all oppressed and impoverished people around the globe. Even after retiring from office, South Africa’s political prophet employed his incredible moral stature to become one of the fiercest critics of American president George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. As Madiba wondered: ‘Why does the United States behave so arrogantly? … Who are they now to pretend that they are the policeman of the world?’ Mandela also spoke for the majority of what Martiniquan intellectual Frantz Fanon described as the ‘wretched of the earth’ – an expression Mandela used in his Nobel Prize speech in 1993 – in an address of profound humanity commemorating the UN’s fiftieth anniversary in New York in October 1995: ‘What challenges us, who define ourselves as statespersons, is the clarion call to dare to think that what we are about is people – the proverbial man and woman in the street. These, the poor, the hungry, the victims of petty tyrants, the objectives of policy, demand change.’ Nigerian Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka regarded Mandela as the very expression of ‘a humanistic will and political vision’ and ‘a symbol of the culture of dialogue backed by an unparalleled generosity of spirit’. For Soyinka, Mandela was an icon and globally recognised symbol of his country’s freedom, who was constrained from defining his own identity beyond the mythical figure that his party and supporters had created for him. In the Nobel laureate’s 1988 collection of poems, Mandela’s Earth, Soyinka wrote: 44

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Your bounty threatens me, Mandela, that taut

Drumskin of your heart on which our millions

Dance. I fear we latch, fat leeches

On your veins …

What will be left of you, Mandela?

Cornel West, an African American scholar at Princeton University, placed Mandela in the context of a ‘grand democratic legacy’ stretching back to Socrates. Moving from the universalist Greek philosopher, West described Mandela as an heir of pan-African prophets like WEB Du Bois, George Padmore, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba. He also depicted Madiba as a secular prophet, an African Moses leading his people to the promised land from the oppression of white pharaohs. Madiba urged his people to be set free, and then performed the ‘miracle’ of the improbable democratic transition in South Africa’s own version of the parting of the Red Sea. West, however, warned against making Mandela ‘some kind of icon on a pedestal belonging to a museum’, exuberantly describing him as the ‘jazzman of the freedom struggle’. As a young student at Occidental College in 1979, the first black president of the US, Barack Obama, first became politically active when he engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle that sought to impose sanctions on the racist regime in South Africa. Obama counts Mandela as one of his greatest political mentors, and met him as a junior American senator while Madiba was visiting Washington DC in 2005: the only time the first black presidents of South Africa and the US ever met. Reinforcing the link to the African diaspora, in a speech to the US Congress in October 1994, Mandela quoted his fellow Nobel peace laureate Martin Luther King’s famous words from an old Negro spiritual, uttered during the 1963 ‘March on Washington’: ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last!’ Two of the twentieth century’s greatest pan-African struggles – the civil rights and anti-apartheid battles – were thus inextricably linked. Madiba’s historical significance as the ‘founding father’ of a democratic South Africa will be similar to that of George Washington for America and Mahatma Gandhi for India. Mandela was a pan-African prophet who was honoured in his own land and across the globe. His enduring legacy will be his export to the world of the pan-African spirit of ubuntu: the gift of discovering our shared humanity. Sunday Independent (South Africa), 8 December 2013. 45

7

Thabo Mbeki: Africa’s New

Philosopher-King

Building Blocks towards an African Century: Essays in Honour of Thabo Mbeki, edited by Barney Pityana (Johannesburg: Real African Publishers, 2018)

I DESCRIBED FORMER South African president Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008) in a short 2016 biography as ‘Africa’s philosopher-king’ and the most important African political figure of his generation. This book, edited by South African scholar-activist Barney Pityana, contains 12 substantive essays by leading panAfrican intellectuals, and covers a broad canvas of politics, economics, and global perspectives, with Africa at the centre of the work, reflecting Thabo’s worldview. Pityana’s introductory chapter acknowledges Mbeki’s pivotal role in creating South Africa’s post-apartheid state. Having served as President Nelson Mandela’s de facto prime minister between 1994 and 1999, Mbeki was the dominant political figure in South Africa for 14 years. Due to a long personal relationship with his subject spanning nearly five decades (though not as a member of Mbeki’s inner circle), Pityana’s chapter is sympathetic without being hagiographic. As a member of the African National Congress’s (ANC) Youth League and of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness (BC) Movement, Pityana served as a bridge between the two movements, and highlighted Mbeki’s nuanced understanding of the two strands of the South African liberation struggle, in which Thabo reached out to BC activists, many of whom he also helped to recruit in exile. Pityana is appalled by Mbeki’s removal from power by the ANC in 2008, 46

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an action which he considers to have been unconstitutional. He describes, in depth, the various assessments of Thabo as enigmatic, aloof, impenetrable, and autocratic. Instead, he portrays Mbeki as calm, cultured, thoughtful, selfless, ethical, anti-populist, a hard taskmaster, a voracious reader, and a leader deeply steeped in ANC traditions of ‘servant leadership’, having been mentored by the movement’s president, OR Tambo. Pityana also presents Thabo as a strategic leader who was the architect of South Africa’s post-apartheid governance structures. He notes that Mbeki’s greatest achievements will be in the realm of foreign policy and the building of the institutions of the African Union (AU) – the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), and the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) – several of which have, however, since become moribund. Pityana could be more critical in assessing the lack of party and popular consultation before the government’s conservative Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy was enacted in 1996. He could also have focused more attention on such issues as to why Mbeki did not use his ministers and other key figures more prominently as prophets promoting his idea of an ‘African Renaissance’. The concept has not really been widely imbibed in post-apartheid South Africa (as sporadic xenophobic attacks on African immigrants demonstrate). Pityana also could have probed deeper as to why it was so difficult for Mbeki to build a state with the capacity to reverse centuries of colonial and apartheid-induced black poverty. South African author Mark Gevisser’s seminal 2009 biography of Mbeki, The Dream Deferred, had asked if the president could have shown more courage in dealing with domestic businesses which had colluded with apartheid, and whether he could also have been less fearful of the wrath of foreign investors. Pityana’s assessment of Mbeki’s diplomacy in Zimbabwe is essentially sound. But as a mediator, Mbeki could surely have been less disdainful of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader, Morgan Tsvangirai. Pityana might also have addressed the critique of Caribbean delegates that Mbeki and other African leaders betrayed the continent and the diaspora at the 2001 United Nations (UN) World Conference against Racism in Durban by not pushing harder for reparations for slavery and colonialism. However, Pityana does part ways with Mbeki on three key issues: first, being too loyal to incompetent ministers; second, the failure by the administration to condemn xenophobia more openly; and third, while showing an understanding of Mbeki’s analysis of HIV/AIDS, Pityana suggests that the president should 47

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have left technical matters of science to experts rather than debate these controversial issues in public. One of the best essays in the book is by the British Marxist Peter Lawrence. He is particularly interesting, having studied as a classmate of Thabo Mbeki at Sussex University in England in the 1960s. Both pursued bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics, and so had a similar training. Lawrence provides a magisterial historical sweep from the three post-Second World War Keynesian decades to the triumph of neo-liberal and monetarist economics by the 1990s. He argues that this global context was important in constraining Mbeki’s economic policies as president. The run on the British pound in 1964 and the need of the left-leaning Labour government of Harold Wilson to obtain a $3.75 billion bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) occurred while Mbeki and Lawrence were studying at Sussex, and must have had a great impact on the young Thabo, shaping some of his cautious economic policies in power, as surely as Kenneth Kaunda’s disastrous nationalisation of Zambia’s copper mines and the collapse of copper prices had done while Mbeki was in ANC exile in Lusaka. Lawrence talks about their development economics textbooks at Sussex teaching about state-led development and competitive markets, in contrast to the oligopolistic companies that increasingly existed in the real world. Many of these large companies – the energy-mineral conglomerates – dominated South Africa’s own domestic market, and Mbeki, as president, co-operated with, rather than challenged, their hegemony. He defended them against American extra-territorial class-action lawsuits for apartheid crimes, and was keen to avoid killing the fat goose that lays South Africa’s golden eggs, as Robert Mugabe would do in Zimbabwe. Lawrence also notes that the South African state – unlike the successful developmental states in Asia – lacked control over its own banking sector, and had weak research and development capacity. The triumphant neo-liberal economics from the 1980s stressed a minimalist state mainly facilitating private sector productivity and maximising shareholder value, while cutting taxes, particularly for rich corporates and individuals. It was often noted by neo-liberal prophets that there was no alternative to this new gospel, which even rich countries could not avoid, given the power of capital flows across borders as well as currency speculation. Lawrence argues that neo-liberal economics failed to transform African economies, and left them integrated into the global economy as exporters of raw materials with a lower share of world trade and production than sixty years earlier. Mbeki’s GEAR and NEPAD 48

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have been criticised as being based on these very neo-liberal foundations, and a World Bank official, Richard Ketley, was brought in to advise the South African Treasury under Mbeki’s presidency. Critics have also argued that the ANC abandoned its socialist roots to run the economy not too differently from how the white-dominated Democratic Alliance (DA) opposition would have run it: in the interests of a powerful 10% white minority, rather than the black majority which had elected it to power, 55% of whom still live in grinding poverty. So, why did Mbeki abandon his progressive Sussex economics training once in power? Was it a loss of nerve – as he seemed to suggest to his biographer, Mark Gevisser – or did he simply feel that the theoretical classroom was too far removed from the real world of governance, and that South Africa was too small a country to wage economic battles against local and global corporate titans? In the end, Lawrence – an insider who was intimately familiar with Mbeki’s intellectual evolution – disappointingly fails to provide us with answers to these fundamental questions, pulling his punches somewhat in not directly wanting to criticise his former Sussex classmate. Instead, the Marxist scholar ends by suggesting that an alliance between the South African government and grassroots organisations, civil society, trade unions, and progressive media might have tamed corporate capital in South Africa, and made it more developmental. Ugandan Swedish educationist Catherine Odora Hoppers’s critique of the corporatisation of education across Africa and the damage of the World Bank and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) is accurate. But Mbeki’s use of the ‘African Renaissance’ as a guiding philosophy for the continent is not thoroughly interrogated or explained. The fundamental question also has to be addressed: why, if Mbeki was the prophet of Africa’s Renaissance, were South Africa’s ivory towers not transformed into ebony towers during his 14 years as the most powerful leader in South Africa? Why are Eurocentric paradigms and white professors still so disproportionately ubiquitous in contemporary South African academe? Nigerian scholar Adebayo Olukoshi’s chapter competently – if not particularly originally – covers the ground in analysing global economic policies in the Cold War era and their impact on Africa, peppered with sporadic quotes by Mbeki. It would, however, have been interesting to read an essay which engaged in far more detail with policies such as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), GEAR, and NEPAD within a global context. Olukoshi stresses Mbeki’s African Renaissance as having pushed Africa to organise itself to own and drive all aspects of its development agenda. The complaints about BEE benefiting a 49

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handful of politically-connected individuals would have been a good subject to discuss. The critique by late Nigerian economist and foe of the Bretton Woods institutions’ SAPs, Adebayo Adedeji, who felt that NEPAD’s over-reliance on foreign funding departed from the self-reliance goals of his Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) of 1980, is also not examined. African civil society often felt that NEPAD had been too top-down a plan, and not sufficiently consultative. Zambian academic Hellicy Ng’ambi covers Africa’s development challenges, going through the various plans of multilateral bodies like the AU, NEPAD, and the UN, without offering any really rigorous critique of the flaws in some of these plans. She also investigates various theories of leadership, praising what she considers to have been Mbeki’s visionary leadership of the continent’s socio­ economic development. Ng’ambi describes herself as a ‘disciple’ of Mbeki’s vision, but a more critical distance may have produced a more balanced essay. Tony Mbewu, who was president of South Africa’s Medical Research Council (MRC) under Mbeki and also chaired the Ministerial National Task Team of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS Antiretroviral (ARV) Plan, provides a history of the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic in which South Africa – with 6.4 million infected people by 2012 – had the highest infection rates in the world. Mbewu, however, refrains from criticising Mbeki’s HIV/AIDS policies. A 2008 Harvard University study estimated that the AIDS debacle resulted in an estimated 365,000 preventable deaths under Mbeki’s watch due to the reluctant and slow roll-out of ARV treatment: this will undoubtedly be the greatest blot on the former president’s record. In contrast to this record, the much-maligned Jacob Zuma administration developed the largest AIDS treatment programme in the world from which 3.4 million South Africans had benefited by 2016. Pedro Tabensky – a philosopher and national of Chile, Australia, Hungary, and South Africa – contributes an essay that is part biographical, somewhat distractingly talking about migrating to, and living in, South Africa. Tabensky acts as a psychologist in seeking to unpack the moral decay in South African society – rape, woundedness, ‘spaces’ of public and private life that need ‘mending’, xenophobic violence, ‘whisky revolutionaries’, corporate greed, whiteness – before calling for more ‘humility’ in tackling these challenges. A deeper and better-informed diagnosis is, however, surely required in order to ‘treat’ the ills ailing the South African patient. The leading prophet of Afro-centrism, African American scholar Molefi Asante assesses Mbeki’s African Renaissance idea within a pan-African context. He describes Mbeki as ‘a revolutionary hero who dares to visualise an Africa freed 50

THABO MBEKI: AFRICA’S NEW PHILOSOPHER-KING

from the clutches of colonial thinking’, and calls Mbeki’s message ‘Afrocentric’. While Mbeki often acknowledges Africa’s ancient glories of Egypt, Timbuktu, Fez, Carthage, Benin, and Zimbabwe, I am not sure our subject would describe his own ideas in such a parochial, essentialist, and limiting way as ‘Afrocentric’. Mbeki seems more of a cosmopolitan polyglot, as much at home with Xhosa poetry as the prose of Shakespeare; and as comfortable with the griot of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, as the Irish poetry of WB Yeats. Asante holds back from challenging the Mbeki administration’s failure to transform South Africa’s education system to one that was more rooted – ideologically and geographically – in Africa. He notes Mbeki’s support of Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide (who was granted asylum in South Africa after being deposed from power in March 2004), and his identification with Haiti as the world’s first black revolutionary republic. Asante is similarly gentle in praising the idea of the African diaspora as the AU’s sixth region, without discussing how this idea has been largely devoid of substance. He fails to ask why, for example, Mbeki and his fellow African leaders could not have invited Caribbean leaders to their summits to dialogue about building closer links with the diaspora. Asante could also have interrogated more deeply the criticism of the African Renaissance as more illusory promise than implementable policy. Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani tackles the controversial issue of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in an essay that is replete with clever phraseology which is, however, not matched by the author’s characteristic sharpness. Mamdani’s main point is that the United Nations has somewhat betrayed its mandate to deal with intervening ‘rogue states’, and become solely concerned with conflict-ridden ‘failed states’. He argues that the United States, which has often defined others as ‘rogue states’, is now itself a rogue state. Mamdani notes that Washington has been able to manipulate the international system to ignore its own transgressions – in countries such as Iraq and Libya – which it tries to justify as ‘humanitarian interventions’. Even though countries like America and France – as veto-wielding permanent members of the 15-strong UN Security Council – have indeed manipulated UN interventions for more parochial agendas, the reality is that Africa still lacks the capacity to maintain its own peace – what late Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui described as Pax Africana. There is no African Standby Force (ASF) – promised since 2010 – and the AU and Africa’s subregional bodies still lack funding and logistical and other support. Also missing in Mamdani’s analysis is the fact that most of the wars in the post-Cold War era have been intra-state rather than 51

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inter-state, which has not been the UN’s doing. These conflicts also often have regional dimensions, spilling over to destabilise neighbouring countries as evidenced by civil wars in Liberia, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from the 1990s. Mamdani’s question about how the UN – which was created to maintain international peace – came to promote domestic peace is therefore rather silly. UN peacekeeping has, in fact, been a useful innovation and helped bring stability to countries like Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Such interventions must be distinguished from more self-interested ones in Iraq and Libya. Mamdani also fails to note the praiseworthy African-led interventions in intra-state conflicts: the Nigerian-led subregional interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s at the cost of over 1,500 military fatalities; and South African-led interventions in the DRC and Burundi in the 2000s. Would both African hegemons also be considered ‘rogue states’ in Mamdani’s perverse definition? Surprisingly, not once is Mbeki mentioned in this chapter, and an analysis of his peacemaking efforts and deployment of peacekeepers to Burundi, the DRC, and Darfur would surely have enriched this essay. Bissau-Guinean development economist and administrator Carlos Lopes tackles the issue of pan-African political economy. After a potted history of panAfricanism, he notes that Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah’s Marxist views ‘lacked the more comprehensive understanding and sophistication’ of Martinique’s Frantz Fanon and Guinea-Bissau’s Amilcar Cabral. Fanon and Cabral, of course – unlike Nkrumah – never had to confront the multiple challenges of running a modern state in a difficult Cold War environment. Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie is bizarrely portrayed as an architect of pan-Africanism despite a pragmatic, death-bed conversion to the ideology after African states began to gain their independence from the 1950s. Côte d’Ivoire is described as a ‘successful economic model’, despite this French neo-colony descending into civil war six years after the three-decade autocracy of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Lopes’s comparison of the economic fortunes of Africa and Asia is also simplistic, ignoring the strategic Cold War Western support for Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan in contrast to its fuelling of Africa’s destructive proxy wars. There is not much evidence today of Lopes’s depiction of Mbeki’s era coinciding with a ‘turnaround’ in Africa’s fortune, as many of the AU’s atrophied institutions that he praises remain weak and underfunded. Finally, South African academic Chris Landsberg assesses Mbeki’s foreign policy, praising his building of AU institutions, global South strategy, and 52

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engagement with the Group of Eight (G8). While there was certainly vision and strategy, the author fails to assess the real impact and concrete results of the creation of the India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue Forum and the New Asia-Africa Strategic Partnership; Africa’s constant engagement with the G8; and efforts to transform the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and institutions of global governance like the UN Security Council, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Success in these areas was, in fact, rather limited. Landsberg’s statement that Mbeki ‘commanded an influence in world affairs usually reserved for great powers and super powers’ is therefore clearly hyperbolic. Despite these flaws, this book is an important contribution to the growing Mbeki corpus, taking its place alongside the several biographies and more recent 45-chapter 2016 book of essays, The Thabo Mbeki I Know. Pityana concedes in his introduction that this current volume is ‘gentle and appreciative … and celebratory in tone’. Its chapters are substantive and cover important issues. However, my two concluding criticisms are, first, the failure to commission a chapter on Mbeki’s decade-long post-presidency – involving peacemaking in Sudan, chairing a UN commission on illicit financing, overseeing a foundation and leadership training institute – is a glaring omission. Cameroonian scholar Elias Bongmba’s final essay deals only briefly with this important issue. Second, perhaps a few more critical essays with diverse perspectives would have enriched this book, and resulted in a more rounded picture of Africa’s philosopher-king. Johannesburg Review of Books, May 2019.

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8

Thabo Mbeki: Remembering the

Renaissance Man

Mbeki and After: Reflections on the Legacy of Thabo Mbeki, edited by Daryl Glaser (Wits University Press, 2010)

THIS EDITED BOOK IS a worthy study of the legacy of President Thabo Mbeki – the most important African political figure of his generation – between 1999 to 2008. It covers key areas of governance, society, race, and foreign policy in ten mostly well-researched and readable chapters, though they do not really speak to each other sufficiently. The book criticises what is described as Mbeki’s ‘AIDS denialism’ and his sometimes ruthless leadership style, and focuses on some of his foreign policy achievements, while several authors try to place their subject in the broader context of the African National Congress (ANC) and postapartheid South Africa. A fundamental problem of this book is the typical lack of racial and gender balance which the editor acknowledges, but blithely dismisses as a failure of invited authors to write: a poor excuse. In a country with an 80% black population, to have a book on its longest-serving post-apartheid president produced by nine white out of eleven authors and only one woman shows an appalling lack of sensitivity. In his introductory chapter, Daryl Glaser is unsettled by ‘the prominence of race in Mbeki’s world-view’, which he puzzlingly labels ‘racial nationalism’. Since the history of South Africa was based on three centuries of race-based 54

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dispossession of blacks as well as white ‘affirmative action’, followed by fifty years of institutionalised racism, how can race not be a major issue for a postapartheid leader to address? The attempt to stifle racial debates is surely one of the most dangerous time-bombs for the future of South Africa, the world’s most unequal society. This ‘race denialism’ is also one of the most disingenuous devices of a continuing albinocratic culture, occurring even in universities where such debates should be flourishing. Glaser’s and Mark Gevisser’s chapters use apparently negative phrases like ‘Africanist’, ‘Afrocentrism’, and ‘nativist’, which are totally expressions to people who engage seriously with pan-African ideas. Not only are many of these terms offensive and confusing, but Glaser and Gevisser, through this sort of woolly phraseology, tend implicitly to contrast Mbeki’s presumed European ‘modernism’ and sophistication with what often appears to be a more ‘primitive’ Africanism. For example, Glaser sets up a straw man in noting that, for Mbeki, ‘Africans appeared … as a warm and communal people, wronged by Western evildoers, collectively morally pristine prior to their corruption by white violence and materialism’. This is, of course, a wildly inaccurate and misleading observation that insults Mbeki’s undoubted intelligence. Anyone who has followed his thinking closely would know that he has often been brutally frank about the economic and political failures of post-independence Africa. Gevisser does, however, also credit Mbeki’s instrumental role in negotiations that led to South Africa’s independence in 1994, for sound management of the economy, and for creating a new black elite that continues to strive for self-reliance and excellence. Eusebius McKaiser’s chapter on race uses similar terms as Glaser and Gevisser in describing Mbeki as an ‘unrelenting champion of blackness and of Africanness’. He then rather unconvincingly uses selected speeches delivered by Mbeki to show how the early nation-builder degenerated into ‘someone who essentialised race’ and hindered the process of building a common national identity. The sometimes crude discourses on race in these three chapters are in stark contrast to the sophisticated explanation provided by Steven Friedman in the book’s strongest chapter. Friedman seeks to explain rather than condemn. Noting the pervasive view that most whites expect a black government to fail, the author sets Mbeki’s concerns with race in the context of an overwhelming desire by a black government to convince prejudiced whites of its competence in governing a complex, industrialised state. Friedman criticises the black elite’s obsession 55

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with demonstrating technical and managerial competence (which whites value) as having led to a distorted set of priorities in which progress is measured not by how much the impoverished black majority’s needs are being met, but by whether Western standards are being set. This is paradoxically the clearest sign of an inferiority complex, even as the Mbeki government was striving to prove the opposite. Friedman notes another paradox: an Mbeki administration that had always prided itself on technical management was seen in its final years as a source of mismanagement and poor service delivery amidst electricity blackouts. The author further argues that a technocratic approach to governance weakened the quality of South Africa’s democracy, with the government unable to translate the preferences of its citizens (and voters) into concrete policy from which they could benefit. As Friedman devastatingly notes, Mbeki’s policy wonks in the presidency ‘were deluded into believing that what was happening in their heads was also happening in the country’. In other chapters, Richard Calland and Chris Oxtoby competently discuss Mbeki’s sometimes heavy-handed manipulation of legal and security institutions for political ends. Mark Heywood describes the campaign by the Treatment Action Campaign to force the Mbeki administration to provide antiretroviral drugs to AIDS sufferers, though his anti-ANC vitriol sometimes appears to be self-serving justification for elite civil society. Jane Duncan assesses how dissent by groups such as the Landless People’s Movement and the Anti-Privatisation Forum was stifled under Mbeki’s rule, though it is unclear that many of the examples cited can be attributed directly to the president rather than to local authorities. In a somewhat esoteric contribution, Peter Hudson examines Mbeki’s rule in the context of ‘liberal democracy’. Two concluding chapters focus on foreign policy. Chris Landsberg mounts a trenchant defence of Mbeki’s foreign policy, comprehensively assessing its African and global contexts while innovatively linking South Africa’s efforts at socio-economic transformation at home to its ‘transformational diplomacy’ abroad. Peter Vale’s chapter appears somewhat dated, its sources are Westerncentric, and it fails to engage seriously with the Africa-centred thrust of Mbeki’s external relations. Where Africa is discussed, Vale (like Glaser and Gevisser) focuses disproportionately on the case of Zimbabwe. While one can rightly criticise the autocracy of Robert Mugabe, and while the scores of deaths and human rights abuses in Zimbabwe are inexcusable, one wonders why there has not been equal attention paid to the even more tragic cases of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Burundi in which Mbeki intervened, with 56

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over three million people having died in both countries since 1999. One of the flaws of the book may, in fact, be the inadequate coverage of Mbeki’s foreign policy record which is likely to be the most enduring legacy of his rule. Only two out of ten chapters here cover foreign policy. Since Mbeki’s building of the African Union (AU) and peacemaking efforts on the continent are likely to define him more as a foreign policy president than a domestic one, this imbalance is somewhat glaring. But having said all this, this book is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on Mbeki. It is though perhaps too early – just over two years after his departure from office – to make definitive judgements on the rule of South Africa’s self-styled ‘philosopher-king’. However, any second edition of this book must necessarily ensure better racial, gender, and intellectual diversity in analysing ‘Africa’s Renaissance man’. Sunday Independent (South Africa), 10 April 2011.

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Thabo Mbeki’s Xenophobia

Denialism

LAST MONTH (MARCH 2017) IN Johannesburg, I attended the 14th anniversary of the African Union’s African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), a South Africabased self-monitoring governance mechanism involving 36 African governments as well as their civil society, private sector, and other key constituencies. The keynote speaker at the occasion was former South African president Thabo Mbeki, who had been instrumental in establishing the mechanism in 2003. During the discussion, Mbeki criticised the Kenyan government for not having heeded the warnings of the APRM report about the country’s forthcoming electoral violence in 2007. Later asked whether he regretted that his own government had failed to act on the 2007 APRM report about impending xenophobic violence in South Africa, Mbeki launched into an extraordinary tirade that effectively amounted to ‘xenophobia denialism’. His government had denied the warnings of the APRM report in 2007 – led by the respected Nigerian economist Adebayo Adedeji – as ‘simply not true’. Mbeki’s attack on the APRM report was seen by many, at the time, as an act of infanticide by one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the mechanism which had damaged the institution’s credibility. There was a distinct impression that South Africa – in an act of jingoistic ‘exceptionalism’ – felt that the APRM had not really been devised for an ‘industrialised’ country like itself, but rather for ‘lesser’ African nations. This is despite the shocking poverty among 70% of South Africa’s population, and its status as one of the world’s most unequal societies. 58

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A year after the 2007 report’s warnings were ignored, 62 foreigners in Gauteng – mostly from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Malawi – were killed in xenophobic acts of horrendous brutality. In one particularly horrific incident in Johannesburg’s East Rand, a Mozambican citizen, Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, was beaten, stabbed, and set alight by an arsonist mob until he burned to death in front of a watching crowd. No one was ever charged for his murder, and the case was closed in 2010. As a result of the 2008 xenophobic violence, about 100,000 African nationals were forced to seek refuge in camps set up in Africa’s megapolis of Johannesburg. It must be noted that xenophobia is, of course, not restricted to South Africa, and there have historically been instances of xenophobia (mostly expulsions) against fellow Africans in Nigeria, Ghana, South Sudan, Botswana, Angola, and Zambia. At the APRM meeting, Mbeki warned that ‘To attach this label “xenophobic” results in many instances of us not understanding … what is the source of this issue’. He rightly noted that one needs to examine the root causes of xenophobic attacks such as ‘township thuggery’, poverty, more efficient foreign traders outcompeting locals, and police unresponsiveness to crime. But there is simply no contradiction between simultaneously calling attacks ‘xenophobic’ and ‘criminal’, which is the false choice that Mbeki and many South African leaders continue to insist on. The frequent gruesome attacks against gays and lesbians in South Africa – including ‘corrective rape’ and murders – are, after all, examples of both homophobia and criminality. One can surely recognise and condemn both at the same time. Mbeki further noted during the APRM discussion that ‘South Africans have a long history of coexistence with other Africans’. But a long history of coexistence was also present in the eastern Congo and Côte d’Ivoire before irresponsible politicians fanned the flames of ethnicity, leading to violent conflict. Flying in the face of all evidence, Mbeki then went on to note that ‘There isn’t a population of South Africans who attack other Africans simply because of their nationality’. It would be difficult to explain this to Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, and Malawians killed in xenophobic violence, or to Nigerians, Somalis, and Ethiopians whose shops and homes have been burned and looted and their nationals killed in attacks by scores of ordinary South Africans. These resulted in an estimated 350 deaths between 2008 and 2015. Mbeki’s comment that the failure of the police to deal with crime involving African migrants forces communities to take the law into their own hands is hardly a justification for such wanton violence. His statement that South African business people in local 59

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communities are simply ‘trying to protect [their] market’ is both insensitive and irresponsible. The former South African president then asked: ‘Why are so many foreigners not attacked?’ This clumsy and curious formulation should surely be reversed to ask why so many African nationals are actually attacked. Mbeki went on to argue that this situation could not constitute xenophobia, since the 45,000 Ethiopians in Johannesburg as well as Nigerian professionals had never been attacked. This strange statement simply represents a case of sophistry. Aside from the fact that Ethiopian shops were attacked in Johannesburg in 2008 and Ethiopian traders were killed in attacks in Durban in 2015, many Nigerian professionals like myself can point to several cases of xenophobic sentiments and stereotyping, by several South African academics as well. After Mbeki spoke at the APRM meeting, the Zambian high commissioner to South Africa, Emmanuel Mwamba, offered a stinging rebuke of the former president’s ‘xenophobia denialism’. Mwamba started by observing that Mbeki had lived in Lusaka during his exile and that Zambian leaders had not spoken in the way that he had just spoken. The ambassador went on to reject Mbeki’s denials and justifications as effectively condoning unacceptable behaviour, arguing that both xenophobia and Afrophobia needed to be strongly condemned. He highlighted the venal brutality visited on African nationals and their frequent harassment by the South African police; observed that foreign nationals in schools were now required to produce permits; and noted that rather than Mbeki focusing on petty Nigerian drug-dealers, he should instead assess the more complex structural supply chain of drug-trafficking which involves nationals from European countries. As Mwamba cautioned: ‘It doesn’t help labelling Nigerian drug-dealers … as this builds prejudice against Nigerians instead of focusing on the fight against crime.’ Nigerian scholar-diplomat Ibrahim Gambari, a new member of the eminent panel of the APRM and Mbeki’s fellow panellist, also noted the widespread involvement of South African nationals in crime, and called for a more effective response by the South African police in protecting foreign nationals. Mbeki responded to Mwamba’s angry riposte by calling for a meeting with the African diplomatic corps in South Africa, noting somewhat sarcastically that ‘maybe they could teach me something I don’t know about my own people’. South African journalist Carien du Plessis, covering the event, later wondered in amazement: ‘How could he [Mbeki] be so out of touch with sentiment amongst fellow Africans, who are made to feel their foreignness on their skins every day 60

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in South Africa, thanks to Mbeki’s own compatriots?’ The biggest damage to Thabo Mbeki’s presidential legacy was undoubtedly what his critics dubbed his ‘AIDS denialism’. In contrast, as president, one of Mbeki’s greatest legacies was his pan-African promotion of peacemaking in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Burundi, as well as his building of AU institutions such as the AU Commission, the APRM, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and the Pan-African Parliament (PAP). Will this legacy now be imperilled with these remarks? What was particularly frightening about this incident was the thought that, if one of the most pan-African leaders that South Africa has ever produced could express such jaundiced views, what do other South African leaders really think about the issue of xenophobia? Will ‘xenophobia denialism’ harm Mbeki’s pan-African credentials just as ‘AIDS denialism’ has damaged his legacy? Sunday Independent (South Africa), 30 April 2017.

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Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela:

The Policy Wonk and the Patriarch

AS THE RULING AFRICAN National Congress (ANC) celebrated its centenary last month (January 2012), it is worth assessing its African footprint under two of its most illustrious contemporary leaders, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. Mandela helped to found the ANC Youth League in 1944. He gradually metamorphosed from a black nationalist who expressed concern that South African Indians were dominating the liberation struggle to a prophet of multiracialism. He also read the writings of pan-Africanists like George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah. Madiba’s visit to Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zambia, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Ghana, Senegal, and Guinea in 1962 gave him great insights into continental diplomacy and the tactics of other African liberation movements. He was particularly influenced by Algeria’s Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). One of Mandela’s enduring legacies will be his peacemaking efforts. He tirelessly reached out to his former enemies at home, and sought to mediate disputes in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Lesotho. In what came to be known by some as the ‘Mandela Doctrine’, he told his fellow leaders at the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit in Burkina Faso in 1998: ‘Africa has a right and a duty to intervene to root out tyranny … We must all accept that we cannot abuse the concept of national sovereignty to deny the rest of the continent the right and duty to intervene when behind those sovereign boundaries, people are being slaughtered to protect tyranny.’ 62

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Even as deputy president, Mbeki had sought to step out of Mandela’s shadow through visionary leadership. He called for an African Renaissance as a doctrine for Africa’s political, economic, and social renewal, challenging Africans to discover a sense of their own self-confidence after centuries of slavery and colonialism, which had systematically denigrated their cultures and subjugated their institutions to alien rule. He was the chief architect of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in 2001 and the birth of the African Union in Durban in 2002. Mbeki sought to use the Renaissance vision to convince fellow South Africans – who had for years been indoctrinated by racist white rulers to view Africa as a place of darkness and disease from which they existed apart – to embrace not just a new South African identity, but a new African identity. His political mentor was the ANC leader in exile, Oliver Tambo, from whom he learned the skills of winning over enemies, stitching disparate coalitions together, and avoiding direct confrontation. With his father, Govan Mbeki, having been jailed with Mandela on Robben Island, Mbeki grew up deeply immersed in the liberation struggle. From 1971, he spent two decades of exile working for the ANC in Zambia, Nigeria, and Swaziland. From this first-hand experience, South Africa’s future president befriended Nigerian military ruler Olusegun Obasanjo and developed great admiration for that country’s fierce sense of independence. Under Mbeki’s presidency, South Africa established solid credentials to become Africa’s leading power. He skilfully used both a strategic partnership with Nigeria and his chairing of the AU to pursue his foreign policy goals on the continent. He was more prepared than Mandela to send peacekeepers abroad, which increased South Africa’s credibility as a major geo-strategic player in Africa. Nearly 3,000 South African troops were deployed to the DRC, Burundi, and Sudan’s Darfur region. South Africa permanently hosts the AU’s PanAfrican Parliament, which was established in Midrand in 2004. But despite Mbeki’s efforts at integrating South Africa into the rest of Africa, it is unclear how deeply entrenched these initiatives are within the country’s population and its political, intellectual, and business elite. Many in Africa question whether Mbeki’s heirs will maintain the same level of commitment to the continent that he demonstrated. Mbeki and Mandela both attended Christian missionary schools, becoming Anglophiles. Both were formal men who rarely showed their emotions in public. Whereas Mandela ruled like a patriarch, leaving policy details to his lieutenants, Mbeki was a policy wonk who revelled in the mechanics of governance. Whereas 63

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Mandela was charismatic and popular among the masses, Mbeki relied on political manoeuvring within the ANC. These very different leaders have, however, left a heavy African footprint on the sands of time. Sunday Independent (South Africa), 26 February 2012.

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Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma:

The Lion and the Jewel

IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT history repeats itself first as tragedy, and then as farce. As the African National Congress’s National General Council (NGC) starts tomorrow in Durban (September 2010), could this aphorism come to describe contemporary South African politics? The NGC in 2005 marked the beginning of the end of Thabo Mbeki’s formidable hold on his party. An open revolt led to a refusal by the ANC to remove Jacob Zuma, Mbeki’s ousted deputy president, as deputy leader of the party following corruption charges. With Zuma avoiding conviction on both graft and rape charges, Mbeki became increasingly isolated. Two years later, Zuma deposed the self-styled philosopher-king as ANC president in Polokwane through a coalition of ‘leftists’ and disaffected politicians. Opposition to Mbeki’s ruthless leadership style contributed enormously to the ascendancy of his nemesis. The story of Mbeki and Zuma recalls Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s 1963 play, The Lion and the Jewel. Set in a pre-independence Nigerian village of Ilujinle, the story centres on the courting of a beautiful young woman, Sidi, by two men: Lakunle – a Westernised schoolteacher with little understanding of his own country and its customs – and Baroka, a traditional chief who resists modernisation and Western influences on his village. Both desire Sidi, but in the end, it is the wily Baroka who wins the affection of the young woman by setting a devious trap in which he feigns sexual impotence in order to lure the ‘jewel of Ilujinle’ into the ‘lion’s den’. Baroka consummates the courtship, and Sidi agrees to marry him. 65

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I watched a performance of the play in Tshwane in 2008, as the power struggle between Mbeki and Zuma raged. In a sense, Soyinka’s play can be read as a parable of this power struggle, with Mbeki representing the Westernised, urbane Lakunle, who is out of touch with his own citizens; Zuma – who frequently dons Zulu traditional outfits and has taken three wives in traditional ceremonies – represents Baroka; while Sidi, the jewel, represents the ANC presidency, for which both men fought such a bitter struggle in Polokwane. In the end, it was Zuma who took both the jewel and the crown. Like Baroka, he relied on guile and a better understanding of the masses to mobilise support for his spectacular victory in 2007. This week marks two years since Mbeki – a tragic figure in an African Shakespearean drama – was unceremoniously ‘recalled’ from office by his own party. It is worth assessing his legacy in the context of Zuma’s first year in office. Mbeki’s biographer Mark Gevisser tells us that his subject’s favourite play was Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the tragedy of a heroic Roman soldier. The similarity between the fate of Coriolanus and that of Mbeki are eerie: both were seen as aloof and arrogant; both refused to kowtow to popular perceptions of how a leader should behave; and both were ultimately brought down by character flaws of stubbornness and arrogance. During his nine years in power, Mbeki provided South Africa with macroeconomic stability, and the country managed to promote socio-economic reforms more rapidly than any other post-colonial African state. The country enjoyed nine consecutive years of economic growth, increased social welfare assistance from 2.5 million to 12 million people, built 2.3 million housing units, and expanded electricity to 80% of the country’s households. But this neither created sufficient jobs, alleviated poverty quickly enough, nor created a large class of productive and socially conscious black entrepreneurs. The economy grew, but the people grew poorer. Post-apartheid South Africa still remains deeply unequal, and one of Mbeki’s nagging fears while in office was that the anger and frustrations of a seething black majority would boil over at the slow pace of socio-economic transformation. With continuing ‘service delivery’ protests and the recent crippling strikes, it is unlikely that Zuma will be able to overcome these challenges with greater speed and proficiency than Mbeki amidst increasing doubts about his ability to keep his coalition together and govern effectively. Undoubtedly, the most controversial policy of Mbeki’s presidency was what his critics dubbed his ‘AIDS denialism’. He demonstrated an unforgivable lack 66

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of urgency, even as figures showed that South Africa had the largest number of people infected with HIV/AIDS in the world. In 2004, the government reluctantly agreed to roll out antiretroviral drugs, after South Africa’s Constitutional Court had ordered it to do so two years earlier. This debacle will undoubtedly do the greatest damage to Mbeki’s historical legacy. Zuma’s HIV/ AIDS policies have been more proactive, and his administration has garnered praise for devising a more coherent approach, though the public health sector still remains in a shocking state of disarray. In the field of foreign policy which will be Mbeki’s greatest legacy, his African Renaissance vision called for Africa’s political and socio-economic renewal. He was the first chair of the African Union (AU); contributed to peacemaking in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Côte d’Ivoire; chaired the Non-Aligned Movement; was the intellectual architect of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development; hosted two United Nations (UN) conferences on racism and sustainable development; won the hosting of the AU’s Pan-African Parliament; was president of the influential Group of 77 developing countries at the UN; and won for South Africa a two-year seat on the UN Security Council. Zuma has built on this activist policy, with South Africa currently mediating in Zimbabwe, sitting on the AU Peace and Security Council, and expected to enter the UN Security Council next year. A strategic alliance is being forged with Angola, which could increase the country’s influence in southern Africa and beyond. There are, however, concerns that a more nakedly self-interested foreign policy is being pursued, which could ultimately alienate potential allies on the continent. Returning to domestic politics, with Zuma currently struggling to maintain his coalition intact amidst complaints of a lack of judgement, rudderless leadership, and deepening corruption in the body politic, speculation has become rife that this NGC, as with Mbeki in 2005, could signify the beginning of the end of Zuma’s powers. Will the ANC so fatally wound the president that he becomes a lame-duck one-term president? Sunday Times (South Africa), 19 September 2010.

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Kenneth Kaunda: Farewell to

Zambia’s Founding Father

ZAMBIA’S ‘FOUNDING FATHER’, Kenneth Kaunda, who died in a Lusaka hospital on 17 June at the age of 97, was the last of the first generation of African leaders who fought for the liberation of their countries. A devout Christian and ascetic Gandhian pacifist, Kaunda was a perpetual optimist who believed that all challenges could be overcome. He led Zambia to independence in 1964, ruling the country for 27 years until 1991.

A Christian Childhood Kenneth David Kaunda was born in Lubwa in Zambia’s northern province on 28 April 1924. His parents had emigrated from Malawi (then Nyasaland) so that his priest-father, David, could take up a teaching job. His mother, Helen, became one of the first black female teachers in Northern Rhodesia. They had seven children, and Kenneth was the eighth and therefore christened Buchizya, ‘the unexpected one’. The precocious child attended Lubwa Church of Scotland mission school, before joining the elite Munali secondary school in Lusaka. At the age of 19, he returned to Lubwa mission to teach, before working in Tanganyika.

From Teacher to Independence Fighter After serving as headmaster of his old Lubwa mission school, Kaunda entered 68

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politics to fight the injustices of white minority rule. He joined the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress (ANC) in 1948, and his meteoric rise was built around impressive organising, proselytising oratory, and charismatic leadership. He soon became deputy to the more conservative and cautious Harry Nkumbula. Kaunda vehemently opposed the British-controlled Central African Federation (1953–1963) involving Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, which he rightly saw as an instrument for the British to entrench white minority dominance. Kaunda was jailed in 1955 for disseminating ‘subversive’ literature. Upon his release two years later, he visited Britain and India, the home of his idol, Mahatma Gandhi, whose satyagraha non-violent methods he enthusiastically embraced. Kaunda’s attendance of the All African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958 exposed him to Africa’s most important liberation fighters. He extended his pan-Africanism to the diaspora by visiting Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. He was again imprisoned in 1959. Upon his release nine months later, he joined the United National Independence Party (UNIP), launching a nation-wide civil disobedience campaign. At the age of 40, Kaunda finally became president of independent Zambia in October 1964.

Autocratic Politician, Ruinous Economist He inherited a country of four million people that had been ill prepared for independence by British colonialists: the economy was entirely controlled by non-Zambians, and the country had just 109 university graduates, with only 0.5% of its population having attended primary school. Kaunda established free primary education, expanded health care, and mobilised his population to support the building of a university. Donning his trademark safari suits, he was an astute but ruthless politician, establishing a one-party state by 1973. His efforts at promoting a nebulous philosophy of ‘Humanism’ achieved mixed results, as he developed a personality cult in which supporters chanted ‘God in heaven – on earth, Kaunda’. He routinely won presidential elections unopposed with 80% majorities, clamped down harshly on dissent, jailed opponents like Simon Kapwepwe, and became increasingly aloof. This resulted in several attempted military coups d’état. Kaunda, however, provided political stability with careful ethnic balancing, and consistently insisted on ‘one Zambia, one nation’. But the system also prevented leadership renewal and depended entirely on Kaunda. Loyalty to the leader thus sometimes trumped competence. Kaunda, however, had a softer 69

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side and often wept in public, using his trademark white handkerchief to dab his tears. Strumming his guitar, he sang folk songs and Christian hymns. Zambia’s football team – ‘KK 11’ – was named after him. Zambia’s copper boom between 1964 and 1973 had maintained the illusion of rapid progress, but 90% of the country’s exports came from this metal whose global price crashed. The simultaneous 1973 ‘oil crisis’ tripled petroleum prices and made it difficult to import food and other essential goods. Kaunda also disastrously nationalised foreign-owned firms and created the Zambia Industrial and Mining Corporation parastatal by 1971, which soon became rife with mismanagement and corruption. The enforced cuts of the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programmes by the 1980s further deepened the economic malaise. Kaunda was widely blamed for the economic crisis and growing indebtedness. In 1991 polls, he and his party were defeated by the landslide victory of Frederick Chiluba’s Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD). He was one of the first African leaders to step down gracefully following this crushing defeat.

Regional Liberator Kaunda inhabited a rough neighbourhood in which white colonists and settlers were clinging to increasingly anachronistic albinocracies. He took over leadership of southern Africa’s Frontline States from Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, providing tremendous support to liberation movements from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique. Land-locked Zambia sacrificed much blood and treasure in these struggles, and only in 1976 did the building by China of the Tanzania–Zambia (TAZARA) railway provide a secure route for its copper exports. South Africa’s ANC had its headquarters in Lusaka. Kaunda, however, sometimes restricted its activities for fear of provoking a military response from the destructive apartheid regime. After Angola’s independence in 1975, Zambia’s support for a united front of liberation movements strained relations, resulting in the shutting down of the MPLA-supporting ANC’s Radio Freedom broadcasts for 18 months. He, however, facilitated some of the meetings between the ANC and white business in the 1980s, and consistently pressed PW Botha and FW de Klerk to release Nelson Mandela. Kaunda was often naive about the willingness of Britain and America to rein in white minority regimes and to support black majority aspirations. His Christian faith made him see the good in not just these powers, but also in Ian 70

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Smith and John Vorster, both of whom he met in 1975 in an unsuccessful bid to end the conflicts in Zimbabwe and South Africa. He got on well with the Biblebashing American president Jimmy Carter but clashed badly with Britain’s apartheid-supporting premier Margaret Thatcher.

A Legacy of Liberation Kaunda’s main legacy will clearly be his stellar contributions to the liberation of southern Africa, which also earned him widespread respect as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. He will be remembered for uniting his country’s 75 ethnic groups, and expanding access to education and health. History will, however, be less kind to his political autocracy and ruinous economic policies. Kaunda sought to stage a political comeback in 1994, but his petty and vindictive successor Frederick Chiluba – a small man suffering from a ‘Napoleon complex’ – disgracefully used constitutional chicanery and harassment (including five months of house arrest) to exclude Kaunda, absurdly arguing that the father of the nation had ruled Zambia for 27 years as a Malawian citizen. Kaunda retired from active politics in 2000, thereupon establishing the Kenneth Kaunda Children of Africa Foundation to fight HIV/AIDS, to which he had lost a son in 1987. Zambian president Edgar Lungu declared Kaunda ‘a true African icon’, South Africa’s former president Thabo Mbeki called him ‘a great African patriot’, while Namibian president Hage Geingob remembered him as ‘among those extraordinary personalities who told us to get up and fight for our continent’. The Guardian (Nigeria), 21 June 2021.

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The Fall of Robert Mugabe

AS I SAT DOWN TO write this column, word came through that Robert Mugabe, the 93-year-old leader of Zimbabwe, had resigned after 37 years in power. Wild jubilation followed in the streets of Harare and Bulawayo. But does this really represent a new dawn for this southern African country born out of the agony of a 15-year liberation war against racist white minority rule? The hatred of Mugabe has blinded many Zimbabweans and other analysts to the danger of the military toppling an elected leader, no matter how flawed. Experience from the rest of Africa should engender caution at the prospect of the military as democratic, anti-corruption messiahs. In Nigeria in 1993, one recalls former foreign minister Bolaji Akinyemi and human rights activist Gani Fawehinmi calling on then defence minister General Sani Abacha to seize power from a weak and illegitimate transitional government in the naive and forlorn hope that he would somehow hand over power to the presumed winner of the June 1993 election – annulled by the military – Moshood Abiola. Abacha did eventually seize power and invited Abiola’s allies such as Baba Gana Kingibe, Olu Onagoruwa, Lateef Jakande, and Ebenezer Babatope into his cabinet. He, however, subsequently kept power for himself, rid the cabinet of most of Abiola’s allies, and jailed the businessman when he tried to claim his presidential mandate. As will surely occur in Zimbabwe, Abacha played on the opportunism and greed of the country’s political class, using and then dispensing with them, after they had outlived their usefulness. More recently, the political opposition and civil society activists in Egypt

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cheered on the military coup by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in July 2013 which toppled the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi. El-Sisi subsequently imprisoned many of the same civil society dissidents, having swapped his military khaki for civilian robes following a sham election in May 2014. El-Sisi then transformed himself into a Pharaoh more tyrannical than the three-decade autocracy of Hosni Mubarak. In the Zimbabwe case, the military brass hats who have staged this coup are clearly defending their own narrow, sectional interests. This is not an effort to cleanse the Augean stables of the filth of a decadent regime; it is also not an attempt to take power from a corrupt autocrat in order to hand it back to the Zimbabwean masses. This is the same military that launched the scorched earth campaign of military terror which prevented opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai from taking power in the second round of presidential polls in 2008, after having defeated Mugabe in the first round. The Zimbabwean military, in fact, publicly stated that it would not allow someone like Tsvangirai without liberation struggle credentials to assume power. This is the same army that has been accused of stealing millions of dollars from illicit diamond-mining. This is the same military that has propped up Mugabe’s autocracy while the country went from being the regional bread basket to being a basket case, with Zimbabweans a fifth poorer today than they were at independence. The tragedy of this situation is that Mugabe was a genuine liberation hero who spent ten years in jail (1964–1974) and led a successful guerrilla war that liberated his country from the clutches of a racist white minority government in Rhodesia. Cecil Rhodes and his fellow British freebooters had stolen much of the country’s most fertile land in decades of pillage, plunder, and dispossession of the black majority. In the first decade of his rule, Mugabe built one of the finest education systems on the continent, many of whose graduates continue to benefit South Africa in diverse sectors of its economy. He also improved on the colonial infrastructure that he had inherited. But, in the end, Mugabe’s forcible ‘land reforms’ and seizure of white farms effectively killed the golden goose that laid the eggs. His legacy is a bankrupt country with over 80% unemployment, a quarter of the population short of food, about 3 million out of 17 million people (nearly a quarter) having left the country, and an inflation rate that, at one point, reached 500 billion%. Despite depictions of Mugabe as an omnipotent dictator, this military coup suggests that the situation in Zimbabwe was always more nuanced. He lost a constitutional referendum in 2000 and the first round of presidential elections 73

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in 2008, when a more ruthless autocrat would have rigged both polls. Mugabe reportedly tried to leave power after losing the first round of presidential polls in 2008, but the army allegedly prevented him from resigning, insisting that they must all sink or swim together. Mugabe thus effectively became a hostage of the military, a Macbethian nonagenarian leader entrapped in a castle making sporadic visits to Singapore to seek medical treatment. It was in fact his own Lady Macbeth – in the form of Grace Mugabe – who goaded the leader into taking the fatal step of firing his deputy, resulting in his downfall. Mugabe’s reign was full of paradoxes: a British-baiting anti-imperialist, he was also an anglophile who was knighted, loved cricket, and revelled in British parliamentary traditions. A fire-breathing anti-American, he ended up dollarising his economy and using the currency of the very imperial superpower that he had consistently castigated. A cunning political operator who was able to rule for nearly four decades made the most elementary political error in sacking a rival – Emmerson Mnangagwa – strongly backed by Zimababwe’s securocrats. The country’s new leader, Mnangagwa – a long-term close ally of Mugabe – is clearly part of the same Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) system that has been part of the country’s decline. Nicknamed ‘the Crocodile’ for his patient ruthlessness, he was state security minister during the massacres in Matabeleland of an estimated 20,000 minority Ndebele people between 1983 and 1984, conducted by the notorious Fifth Brigade. Mnangagwa was also reportedly a leading advocate of military repression after the first round of presidential polls in 2008. For Zimbabwe’s soldiers, he represents the safest pair of hands after Mugabe. However, this 75-year-old former vice-president can scarcely be a credible reformer, let alone an example of genuine generational change. Mugabe was clearly part of Africa’s club of ‘presidents-for-life’. He had recently boasted that he would rule Zimbabwe ‘until God says come join the other angels’. The Almighty, however, had other plans, and it is uncertain that paradise will be Mugabe’s final destination in the hereafter. Zimbabwe’s democracy will clearly not be entrenched through the barrel of a gun. It is Zimbabwe’s citizens – not its army – that should decide who rules the country. In view of the history of Africa’s putschist ‘men on horseback’, this coup may come to represent a case of Mugabeism without Mugabe. ‘Mugabe is dead, long live Mugabe!’ The Guardian (Nigeria), 30 November 2017.

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FW de Klerk: A Nobel without

Honour?

IN A TELEVISION INTERVIEW with Christiane Amanpour on CNN earlier this month (May 2012), apartheid’s last president FW de Klerk caused outrage when he appeared to defend the apartheid system that had legalised racism in South Africa between 1948 and 1990 and that was condemned by the United Nations (UN) as a ‘crime against humanity’. Cartoonists lampooned De Klerk as a political dinosaur, while other critics called on him to return the Nobel peace prize he had won with Nelson Mandela in 1993. On closer inspection, the greater outrage may actually be that so many people were surprised by De Klerk’s comments, much of which he had consistently put on the public record for decades. A close reading of this history shows that repudiating apartheid would have represented an act of political parricide for De Klerk, as his entire family history was based on the implementation of this ideology. De Klerk did not help end apartheid because it was morally repugnant, but because – in his own words – ‘it failed’ as a system of political control and socio-economic engineering. One of the most famous conversions since Saint Paul tumbled off his horse on the road to Damascus was thus undertaken more out of political pragmatism than moral conviction. During the recent CNN interview, De Klerk acknowledged that apartheid had trampled on human rights, ‘was and remains morally indefensible’, but then noted that he could only say in ‘a qualified way’ that apartheid had been morally wrong. He argued that the idea of the black majority being corralled 75

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into Bantustans was ‘not repugnant’ and was historically inaccurate since, in his view, the homelands had always been there. He then fatuously compared the Bantustans favourably to the democratic ‘velvet divorce’ of Czechoslovakia in 1993, and further noted that blacks ‘were not disenfranchised, they voted’. By this jaundiced view of history, a system that had reserved less than 15% of land for 80% of South Africans, restricted their freedom of movement, and stripped them of their human dignity was somehow defensible. The black majority must also have been consistently electing racist rulers to oppress them. Sensing the outrage caused by his comments and the immense damage it had done to his reputation, De Klerk sought to backtrack, claiming that his statements had been ‘misinterpreted’. His record, however, suggests otherwise. De Klerk was the scion of a conservative Afrikaner family and a dyed-in­ the-wool apartheid-supporting National Party (NP) member. Both his father and grandfather had been senators for the party of apartheid, and his father had served in the government of apartheid’s architect, Hendrik Verwoerd. De Klerk had held seven ministerial posts before becoming president in 1989, but had never showed any signs of a commitment to reforming the evils of the apartheid system. He was a staunch defender of white privilege who, as education minister in the 1980s, introduced a quota system to limit the number of black students in universities. Even as late as November 1989, De Klerk opposed common political institutions for all South Africans. He embarked on a remarkable political reversal three months later – releasing Nelson Mandela from 27 years of incarceration – under the pressure of continuing black protests and a plummeting economy racked by increasingly devastating economic sanctions. De Klerk, however, deserves some credit for his role in South Africa’s democratic transition. A pragmatic peacemaker, he partnered with Mandela to negotiate a remarkable and innovative power-sharing accord that brought majority rule to South Africa in 1994. But he never really seemed to recognise the evils of apartheid and to condemn it unequivocally. De Klerk was often defensive about criticisms of apartheid’s leaders, talking about ‘mutual forgiveness’ as if one side had not been disproportionately the perpetrators and the other the victims. Much to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s annoyance, De Klerk refused, during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process between 1995 and 1998, to take proper responsibility for the crimes of apartheid governments in which he had served. In his shockingly self-justifying 1999 memoir The Last Trek: A New Beginning, he sought to portray the TRC as a witch-hunt against Afrikaners, and to dismiss apartheid’s crimes as having been committed by a small group of 76

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securocrats without the knowledge of most National Party politicians. De Klerk bluntly noted: ‘I rejected the contention that one side had been morally superior to the other during the conflict’. He described the African National Congress’s armed struggle as ‘unnecessary and counter-productive’, claiming that only a ‘relatively small portion’ of the 22,000 people who died in political violence were killed by the security forces. He thus appeared effectively to blame most of the killings on the black majority and the ‘revolutionary movements’. De Klerk quoted the hard-line President PW Botha’s call for security forces to ‘wipe out terrorists’, but then noted that this ‘could not … in any way be interpreted as authorising the security forces to assassinate or murder its opponents’. Apartheid’s last leader sought to portray his party as reformers spurned by the ANC, claiming disingenuously that the National Party had accepted the vision of a united South Africa by the time the ANC accelerated its armed struggle. Criticisms of the ‘terrorists’ and ‘revolutionaries’ of the liberation struggle litter the book. De Klerk noted that the apartheid justice minister had taken care to ensure that the ‘State of Emergency’ of 1985–1986 ‘should be taken in strict compliance with the law’: a statement that seemed to imply that draconian laws passed by an illegitimate regime could somehow be considered legal. Noting that 20,000 people were detained and demonstrations prohibited, De Klerk argued that ‘I believed that all these steps were necessary’, insisting that the policy had succeeded in reducing social unrest. Though conceding that these measures also ‘created circumstances … in which serious breaches of human rights could, and did, occur’, he described them euphemistically as ‘unconventional methods to combat the revolutionary threat’. In a clear abdication of responsibility, De Klerk’s 1999 memoirs were a stout defence of the very apartheid system which he never unambiguously repudiated. He talked of the ‘undeniable progress’ that many blacks made under apartheid and praised the ‘sincere efforts’ that apartheid governments made to ‘improve their circumstances’: all this, despite the denial of proper education, health, and social services as well as the most basic political and legal rights to blacks. De Klerk described the mandate and composition of South Africa’s TRC as ‘flawed’, expressing surprise that it applied a harsher standard in judging the crimes of apartheid securocrats than ANC abuses. Burying his head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich, he noted that an ‘overwhelming majority’ of National Party members had been shocked by the human rights abuses committed by ‘some elements’ of the security forces. As in Nazi Germany, De Klerk seemed 77

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to suggest that even the leadership of the country did not know what was being done in its name. In light of this often staunch defence of apartheid, De Klerk’s recent comments should really not come as a surprise. One wonders in retrospect whether Mandela should perhaps have rejected the Nobel peace prize in 1993 rather than accept a moral equivalence between a pragmatic politician of apartheid and the political prophet who ensured its destruction. Business Day (South Africa), 28 May 2012.

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Olusegun Obasanjo: The Emperor’s

New Clothes

Obasanjo, Nigeria and the World by John Iliffe (James Currey, 2011)

THE FAMOUS FAIRY TALE of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ is a lesson in vanity and susceptibility to sycophancy. Some will recall that the story involves two unscrupulous weavers who convinced a gullible emperor into believing he was wearing new clothes when in fact he was naked. Nigeria’s president Olusegun Obasanjo (the country’s military leader between 1976 and 1979 and civilian ruler between 1999 and 2007) often bestrode the globe in beautifully embroidered agbada traditional flowing robes. But his ‘imperial rule’ and autocratic streak were often at odds with democratic principles, and metaphorically exposed the nudity of Nigeria’s emperor. Many of his 140 million subjects saw this nakedness. The only time I ever met Obasanjo was at a reception in New York after his release from Nigerian autocrat General Sani Abacha’s jail in 1998. After making some brief remarks, Obasanjo offered to go round the room and shake everyone’s hand. The impression that I came away with was of an arrogant man suffering from delusions of grandeur matched neither by intellect nor vision. British academic John Iliffe has written a well-researched and sympathetic biography of Obasanjo, the country’s longest-ruling leader. Unlike many Western academics, Iliffe has meticulously consulted Nigerian sources and reflected their perspectives on one of the country’s most controversial leaders. He curiously never interviewed his subject, an act which may have made him more willing 79

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to give Obasanjo the benefit of the doubt and to treat him sometimes naively as a patriot selflessly serving his subjects. Yet, the patriotism of Nigeria’s political elite must be seen as a self-serving means of preserving the benefits they have accrued from power. Iliffe, however, is too experienced and solid a researcher to drift into hagiography, and has not shied away from exposing the many flaws in Obasanjo’s character and rule, though often justifying some of them in ways that are unconvincing to this reviewer. The book is the most comprehensive biography of Obasanjo, but devotes only three short chapters (out of 24) to what is likely to be the subject’s main presidential legacy: his foreign policy achievements. Iliffe coherently traces Obasanjo’s early life – his army career, including his role in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) between 1960 and 1961; his command during the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970; his tenure as military ruler between 1976 and 1979; his return to a life of farming and role as a roving international statesman between 1979 and 1995; his imprisonment between 1995 and 1998; and his tenure as civilian president between 1999 and 2007. Obasanjo’s first wife published her memoirs in 2008, accusing him of neglect and physical abuse. He had taken a second wife, Stella Abebe, in 1975. Obasanjo reportedly has at least 24 children from about 12 women. His son also accused him during a divorce court case of having committed adultery with the son’s wife (which Obasanjo denied). Olusegun Obasanjo was born on 5 March 1937 in the south-western Yoruba farming village of Ibogun-Olaogun. He endured a life of poverty, which was to leave a permanent scar. His father had abandoned his mother and nine children, forcing Obasanjo the child to work while studying. His limited education made him determined to succeed, but also resulted in an intellectual and class insecurity that remained evident throughout his long career. The dozen books Obasanjo has authored is a sign of the desire to be accepted as a serious thinker. In his 2006 memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, Nigeria’s Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, more accurately described the former Nigerian president thus: ‘Obasanjo is a man of restless energies … A bullish personality, calculating and devious, yet capable of a disarming spontaneity, affecting an exaggerated country yokel act to cover up the interior actuality of the same, occasionally selfdeprecatory yet intolerant of criticism, this general remains a study in the outer limits of compulsive rivalry, even where the fields of competence or striving are miles apart’. At 19, Obasanjo taught for a while in Ibadan and passed his university exams. 80

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But unable to afford the fees, he joined the Nigerian army in 1958 at the age of 21 in order to receive training to become a civil engineer. The army became his family and he forged close relationships with Nigerians from other ethnic groups, which instilled a strong sense of patriotism. The Nigerian army at this time regarded itself as a national institution protecting the country from the excesses of corrupt and fractious politicians. The teetotal Obasanjo also received training in British military institutions. His service with the UN mission in the Congo in the 1960s instilled in him a pan-African spirit and distaste for neo­ colonialism. By the eve of the Nigerian civil war, he had risen to chief army engineer. A staunch disciplinarian, he subsequently took over command of one of the federal army’s main battalions. He played a courageous role in the civil war, captured in a self-glorifying 1980 book, My Command, which many fellow officers felt had grossly exaggerated his role in ending the war. Throughout his military career, the industrious Obasanjo comes across as the cautious, fortunate beneficiary rather than the key player or instigator of coups that led to his promotion. He was willing to serve as the second-in-command and chief of staff to the Northern general Murtala Muhammed after the 1975 coup that brought Muhammed to power, even though Obasanjo was the more senior officer. Iliffe captures well Obasanjo’s deceptive cunning and masking of his political ambitions. After Muhammed’s assassination in 1976, he accepted, apparently reluctantly, to lead Nigeria but stayed close to powerful Northern military officers and traditional leaders. Obasanjo grew only slowly into the role, at first cutting the figure of a fearful leader besieged in Lagos’s Dodan Barracks, the seat of power. The new leader, with a high sense of joie de vivre, had a pot belly hanging over his military belt, thus cutting the figure of a military Falstaff. During the military administrations in which Obasanjo served in the 1970s, agricultural production fell, food imports rose, and the naira (Nigeria’s currency) grew stronger. His ‘Operation Feed the Nation’ was not a resounding success, as oil continued to dominate the economy. Efforts at developing heavy industry met with little success. The centralising tendencies of his military rule would carry over into his later civilian regime. A draconian 1976 decree banned most strikes and allowed the detention of union leaders. The commune of radical Afro-beat musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was vindictively destroyed by Obasanjo’s soldiers in 1977, with reports of the rape of women and the eventual death of the artist’s mother, who was thrown from a window by security forces. The military regime killed demonstrating university students in 1978, closed several universities, and proscribed the National Union of University Students. 81

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Armed robbers were publicly executed. Accusations of corruption plagued the regime. More positively, Obasanjo continued the activist foreign policy of his predecessor, supporting liberation movements across southern Africa. His indigenisation decree increased the number of Nigerians engaged in private businesses, while primary school and university enrolment doubled during his tenure. Obasanjo handed over power peacefully to the administration of the Northern politician Shehu Shagari, an act for which his fellow Yoruba never forgave him, particularly as he himself had voted for Shagari. Obasanjo, however, earned a glowing international reputation as only the third African leader to have voluntarily relinquished power at the time. Upon retirement in 1979, he established a large poultry farm in Ota where he conducted international seminars through his Africa Leadership Forum. Obasanjo demonstrated a penchant for picking up and discarding fashionable ideas; this would lead him to embrace the ‘Washington Consensus’ of privatisation and free markets as civilian president. He also sought to be a back-seat driver to Shagari, describing his successor’s regime as ‘the worst’ in Nigeria’s history. Shagari resented this undignified carping by a predecessor with an oversized ego and an exaggerated perception of his own administration’s performance. He wryly noted that Obasanjo ‘had expected me to be constantly consulting him on all matters of government since he had an obsession of being a super-administrator, superdiplomat and of course a military genius’. Obasanjo was also a persistent critic of General Ibrahim Babangida’s structural adjustment economic policies and his efforts to manipulate the transition to civilian rule between 1989 and 1993, which culminated in a poll that was controversially annulled by the military. Obasanjo condemned Babangida’s ‘capacity for mischief, for evil’. Some of this criticism was courageous as Babangida really did present a genuine threat to the return of democratic rule to Nigeria. However, more self-serving was Obasanjo’s assertion in 1986 that ‘If I had remained in office, in 10 years, I would have made Nigeria a world power’. His eight years in power between 1999 and 2007 exposed this as a hollow and empty boast. Obasanjo also kept himself in the limelight through the publication of his 1990 memoirs, Not My Will. His reputation as an ‘elder statesman’ was cemented when he became a member of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group which met an imprisoned Nelson Mandela and the apartheid regime in 1986 in a bid to secure majority rule in South Africa. He damaged this reputation 82

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somewhat by unwisely running for the post of UN secretary-general in 1991, when he lost to Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali. UN Security Council members made clear that they wanted a ‘secretary’ and not a ‘general’. Obasanjo was mercilessly lampooned by Nigeria’s lively cartoonists for taking private French lessons on his farm in preparation for this election. Obasanjo was also a critic of the regime of the brutal General Sani Abacha (1993–1998), who lacked the finesse of Babangida. Abacha’s regime implicated Obasanjo in a ‘coup plot’ and arrested him in March 1995. He would remain incarcerated until Abacha’s own death in June 1998. Obasanjo used his imprisonment to fast, read the Bible, and pray. He came out of jail a ‘born-again Christian’, having lost much weight. He would soon regain the weight as well as his previous appetite for hedonistic earthly pursuits. Babangida went to Ota farm in June 1998 and reportedly encouraged Obasanjo to take the presidential nomination of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), of which Babangida was a founding member and one of its largest funders. Obasanjo’s presidential campaign had thus needed the support of a man he had earlier described as ‘a great master of intrigue, mismanagement, deceit, settlement, cover-up and self-promotion’. Obasanjo declared for the PDP in October 1998 and talked in frighteningly messianic terms: ‘I saw my survival and freedom as a message from God to do what needs to be done in Nigeria. I could not disregard the call of God to duty’. He won the presidential election against fellow Yoruba Olu Falae, a technocrat against whom Obasanjo had refused to debate before the elections – another disturbing sign of his intellectual insecurity. Though the PDP won comfortable majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as 20 of the 36 state governorships, one of the most hurtful incidents during these polls was Obasanjo’s failure to win even his own local electoral ward. He was overwhelmingly rejected by his Yoruba people, having dismissed Moshood Abiola – his former classmate and the presumed winner of the annulled 1993 poll – as not being the ‘messiah Nigeria is looking for’. Obasanjo won just 20% of the votes in the six south-western states, as Yorubas continued to distrust him as a stooge of Northern interests. In what he sought to depict almost as ‘the Second Coming’, the 62-year-old Obasanjo became Nigeria’s president in May 1999. He had won 63% of the votes in a flawed election that was, however, seen as having generally reflected the wishes of Nigerian voters. The new president arrogantly described his mandate as ‘a command from God Almighty that I should spare no effort in rebuilding this nation’. Having been invited to join the party at a late stage, Obasanjo relied 83

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heavily on strategists like his vice-president Atiku Abubakar to deliver victory, as he did not have control of the PDP at this time. He formed an alliance with the 20 state governors to increase control over the party, and moved quickly to remove the politicised officers in the Nigerian army. He retired 200 of them and replaced the most senior with officers who had not previously held political positions. This was an action that only a former military general of Obasanjo’s stature could have pulled off. In a crude act, however, he required that all but three of his cabinet ministers give him a signed but undated letter of resignation so as to keep them on a tight leash. During Obasanjo’s first term in office, from 1999 to 2003, a dozen states in Northern Nigeria introduced the constitutionally questionable application of sharia criminal law. Obasanjo had been urged by both houses of the National Assembly to seek a Supreme Court judgment on the issue, but complacently and erroneously argued that it would ‘fizzle out’. In a situation repeated sporadically between 1999 and 2007, communal riots in 2000 between Muslims and Christians in Kaduna led to hundreds of fatalities. Plateau State also experienced similar clashes in 2004. An attack by a radical Muslim sect, Boko Haram, led to hundreds of deaths in Bauchi state in July 2009, in violence that also spread to Borno and Yobe states. Three years later, Boko Haram was killing scores of Nigerians in increasingly sophisticated attacks, including a suicide attack on the UN’s headquarters in Abuja in August 2011. Obasanjo’s regime drifted uneasily between anarchy and tyranny. It used either too little or too much force to manage religious, resource, and ethnic conflicts. In Kaduna and Aba, Obasanjo was slow to control rampaging mobs. In Odi and Gbeji, in 2000 and 2001 respectively, his soldiers employed disproportionate force to ‘pacify’ the area in military campaigns of awesome destructiveness totally unworthy of a democratic government. On visiting Odi in March 2001, Obasanjo noted that ‘only a sadist’ could have ordered that sort of destruction and that his soldiers had overstepped their mandate. He, however, refused to pay compensation to rebuild the town or to condemn the soldiers. After the killing of 19 government soldiers by militia in Zaki-Biam in October 2001, an estimated 250 to 300 men were massacred in six surrounding villages. Obasanjo visited the area a whole year later, this time apologising for his soldiers’ ‘excessive use of force’. But the lack of proper accountability and continuing impunity involved in these incidents were profoundly disturbing for a government pledged to protect its citizens. Obasanjo’s first term saw a major effort to ensure regular supplies of 84

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electricity, the doubling of the health budget, and a national poverty eradication programme seeking to promote youth employment and rural infrastructure. However, industry stagnated and foreign investment remained concentrated in the oil and gas sectors. Obasanjo sought to halve poverty and achieve 6%–10% growth. But even a sympathetic Iliffe described his tackling of the economy in this first term as ‘a failure’. Obasanjo’s military instincts led to actions such as increasing petrol prices without prior consultation. He intervened in a gubernatorial contest in Anambra state to exclude a candidate he did not like. In seeking re-election for his party in 2003, his vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, reportedly described Obasanjo as ‘dictatorial, vindictive, and unforgiving’. The president won re-election thanks to Atiku’s control over the party machinery and state governors. Obasanjo had, however, been forced to show rare humility to win the party over, and confirmed Atiku’s description of him through his determination to punish his deputy for what he regarded as disloyalty and humiliating treatment. Obasanjo’s relations with his legislature were often fractious. He referred condescendingly to legislators in the House of Representatives as ‘boys’ who had ‘power without knowledge or experience’. The legislators – many of whom were themselves hardly figures of great moral rectitude – returned the favour by depicting the president as a military dictator. Obasanjo’s interference to influence the election of the Senate president was a blatant breach of the Constitution’s provision for the separation of powers. On convening a meeting of both houses, he inappropriately sought to chair the meeting, before ordering senators out of the room so that he could talk to House members alone. The volatile Obasanjo eventually lost his temper and stormed out of the meeting. He then went about purging the most senior members of the ruling PDP and replacing them with his own appointees in a 1999 party election of dubious credibility. Two years later, the party chair was replaced not in an election but by an Obasanjo-led clique, with the president creating for himself the position of party leader. The House of Representatives asked Obasanjo to resign in August 2002 or face impeachment owing to a failure to implement budgets, maintaining illegal accounts (the Excess Crude Account), disrespect for the rule of law, corruption in the presidency, and other ‘monumental inadequacies’. As Ghali Umar Na’Abba, the speaker of the House, noted to Obasanjo: ‘You claim to be a messiah and you have become arrogant.’ Having survived this impeachment bid, a vindictive Obasanjo had Na’Abba suspended from the party and denied support for re-election. 85

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The president enjoyed more success in foreign policy. Forging an alliance with South African president Thabo Mbeki, both men pushed the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1999 to ostracise regimes that engaged in unconstitutional changes of government. The two leaders also insisted that the OAU recognise the right of African states to intervene in the internal affairs of their members in egregious cases of gross human rights abuses and to stem regional instability. Obasanjo led peacemaking efforts in Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Great Lakes region. He also pushed the UN to take over Nigerianled peacekeeping missions in Sierra Leone and Liberia between 2000 and 2003 in order to share the burden. Both Obasanjo and Mbeki championed the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) to gain increased Western aid in exchange for improved African political and economic governance. They lobbied the rich world on behalf of the continent at annual G8 summits, though the results were often disappointing. Obasanjo was re-elected as president in 2003 with 61.9% of the vote in deeply flawed polls in which he won an implausible 99.92% of the vote in his home state of Ogun, and captured five of the six south-western states except Lagos. There had been violence and reports of widespread rigging, especially in the country’s South-South region. Obasanjo’s failure to ensure a clean electoral process during two elections as president must count as one of the worst blemishes on his administration. Iliffe described him as having grown increasingly ‘authoritarian, imperious, and unscrupulous’ in his second term, going on to term Obasanjo ‘a man of military instincts and volcanic temper’. The president expressed a self-righteousness about having been the only Nigerian leader whose finances had been investigated and cleared, but many remained unconvinced. Reports of the bribing of legislators by presidential aides and kickbacks being paid to the PDP continued to swirl. Allegations of favouritism in the award of oil contracts persisted. Controversially, Obasanjo launched the Transnational Corporation (Transcorp) in 2005 with a group of favoured businessmen like Aliko Dangote who had reportedly funded his presidential campaigns. Transcorp was allocated oil blocks and licences for new enterprises. In a clear conflict of interest, Obasanjo Holdings bought 200 million shares in the corporation at below market prices through bank loans. Transcorp’s purchase of Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) was subsequently annulled by the successor administration of Umaru Yar’Adua. The company never declared any dividends during Obasanjo’s rule. In another incident in May 2005, $46 million was controversially pledged by influential individuals (including state governors) towards Obasanjo’s presidential library. 86

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During his second presidential term between 2003 and 2007, Obasanjo continued to intervene in the election of legislators. The problems of the Niger Delta took up much of his time, reducing a third of Nigeria’s oil production as militant groups stepped up attacks in the area. Obasanjo’s failure to observe the rule of law was evident in 2004 when he defied a Supreme Court order to release funding to the Lagos state government’s newly created local councils. Only part of the funding was disbursed, resulting in the Chief Justice, Muhammadu Lawal Uwais, condemning the president’s ‘clear contempt of the Supreme Court’. Obasanjo’s authoritarian streak was again evident when he suspended the governor of Plateau State, Joshua Dariye, in 2004 and declared six months of constitutionally questionable military rule. Two years later, he pressured the state assembly in Ekiti state to impeach the governor, Ayo Fayose, through illegal means, before again declaring six months of military rule. Obasanjo’s National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS) sought to encourage private enterprise through privatisation and liberalisation, reduce poverty, create seven million jobs, and increase spending on social services. Foreign reserves increased from $7.5 billion in November 2003 to $45 billion in October 2006, based on high oil earnings, but the president still illegally maintained an Excess Crude Account, which he used for power stations and other projects. However, industry continued to stagnate, and despite large outlays on electricity (estimated at $3 billion) and railways, neither produced significant results. Unemployment remained at 20% in 2008 (60% for youths), and the government did not even come close to meeting its own target of seven million jobs. By the end of Obasanjo’s rule, 92% of Nigerians still lived on less than $2 a day. In the area of foreign policy, Obasanjo continued his activism, serving as AU chair in 2004–2005 and deploying Nigerian peacekeepers to Sudan’s volatile Darfur region in 2004. Closer to home, he contributed to peacemaking efforts in Togo and Guinea-Bissau. He hosted a successful Commonwealth summit in 2003 and visited China four times between 2001 and 2006. However, the results of efforts to attract Asian investors, from China, South Korea, India, and Taiwan, into the Nigerian oil sector in exchange for investment in infrastructure were disappointing. In April 2007, Nigeria staged what was widely believed to be the most flawed and fraudulent elections in its 47-year history. Ballot boxes were stuffed and stolen, voters were intimidated, and results appeared out of thin air in areas where voting had clearly not taken place, particularly in the Niger Delta. 87

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Obasanjo handed over a poisoned presidential chalice to his hand-picked successor, Umaru Yar’Adua – the governor of the northern Katsina state and the first university graduate to rule the country – after an overwhelming 70% victory (and the award to the PDP of 28 out of 36 state governorships). Election tribunals later overturned the results of six governors and more than a dozen senators by January 2008. Obasanjo left office under a torrent of abuse, with even his long-time friend and former defence minister, Theophilus Danjuma, describing him as ‘the most toxic leader that Nigeria has produced’. Despite his flawed fin de régime, Obasanjo’s tenure was not without some achievements. He travelled tirelessly to Western capitals in pursuit of the annulment of the country’s $30 billion external debt, and, along with his able and forceful finance minister between 2003 and 2006, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, was able to negotiate a deal that effectively wiped out Nigeria’s entire external debt. Obasanjo’s regime achieved 5%–6% growth rates, stabilised the naira, and introduced competitive tendering in procurement, which saved the country a reported $750 million by 2008. In the field of telecommunications, 59 million active cell phone lines were established. Obasanjo’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) was initiated in March 2003, and, led by the fearless Nuhu Ribadu, it recovered $5 billion in stolen assets and prosecuted 82 corrupt businessmen and policemen. But the EFCC was justifiably accused of manipulation by Obasanjo to target his political opponents selectively. Obasanjo’s unsuccessful and undignified attempt to change the Nigerian Constitution in April 2006 to allow him to run for a third presidential term badly damaged his democratic credentials and will remain the worst blemish on his record. His aides reportedly offered bribes of $400,000 to legislators; armed police broke up a meeting in Abuja of lawmakers and governors opposed to the third term; and state governors who failed to support the bid were threatened with impeachment. Despite Obasanjo’s denial of personal involvement in this sordid effort to subvert constitutional rule, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s 2011 memoirs, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington, confirmed that Obasanjo had unsuccessfully sought President George W Bush’s support for a third presidential term during a visit to Washington DC in 2006. This incident not only demeaned Obasanjo but also exposed the hypocrisy of his earlier vociferous criticisms of his military successors’ excesses. In a disturbing development in September 2006, the PDP’s National Executive Committee declared Obasanjo ‘life leader of the party, father of the 88

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nation, and founder of modern Nigeria’ – descriptions more commonly applied to dictators like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko or Liberia’s Samuel Doe. Obasanjo’s legacy was also tarnished by an ugly spat with his vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, which saw both men accusing each other of corruption relating to the government’s Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF). Obasanjo’s crude attempts to exclude Atiku from contesting presidential elections in 2007 (even declaring two days of public holidays to delay the seating of the Supreme Court) were undignified and unworthy of his position. Obasanjo’s legacy must, however, be assessed against the background of the serious socio-economic difficulties inherited from four years of Nigeria’s profligate Second Republic (1979–1983), followed by fifteen years of military misrule under Generals Buhari, Babangida, and Abacha between 1983 and 1998. Obasanjo had seemingly emerged from jail as a deus ex machina. He was to be a bridge between the military and civilians, between the North and the South, a new broom to sweep out the corruption and abuses of military brass hats who had lost any sense of purpose beyond plundering the national treasury and pummelling innocent citizens into brutal submission. At the beginning of his presidential term in 1999, Obasanjo inherited a plethora of conflicts. Some of these conflicts continued under his rule, leading to an estimated 12,000 deaths from violence related to religious and ethnic feuds. Nigeria’s ‘imagined communities’ developed their own differing interpretations of the same history and proceeded to defend these on the basis of birthright and blood. Though these conflicts over land, religion, resources, and chieftaincy titles mostly had local roots, opportunistic political leaders exploited them for their own parochial ends, realising how easy it was to fan the flames of simmering local brushfires. Obasanjo’s rule proved to be a bundle of contradictions. Considered an indispensable force for stability, he instead oversaw one of Nigeria’s worst periods of instability. Considered a force for unity, he presided uneasily over a country that perhaps became more divided than at any time in its history since the 1967– 1970 civil war. Considered a force for national salvation, he instead watched helplessly as the country was nearly torn apart by sectarian violence. One must concede that much of this rot had set in under successive inept administrations since 1979, but the divisions were exacerbated under Obasanjo’s rule. Suffering from what many critics have described as a ‘messiah complex’, Obasanjo seemed to be afflicted by delusions of grandeur, in which he viewed himself in the same light as Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s saintly postapartheid leader and Nobel peace laureate. But it was clear that Obasanjo 89

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lacked the stature of Mandela, one of the greatest moral figures of the twentieth century. The South African leader’s graceful exit from power in 1999 after a single presidential term was in stark contrast to Obasanjo’s tawdry efforts to seek an unconstitutional third presidential term in 2006. Obasanjo, who acted as his own petroleum minister throughout the eight years of his rule, further tarnished his historical legacy through an arrogant penchant for omniscient and omnipotent behaviour. In a survey by Afrobarometer, his approval rating had plummeted from 84% in 2000 to 32% by 2005, as Nigerians became increasingly disenchanted with his autocratic leadership style. He was often accused of using his position for personal enrichment: Obasanjo Holdings, claiming to be Nigeria’s leading agricultural company, also had wide-ranging interests in banking, as well as food and packaging; the former president reportedly gained stakes in oil and gas company Sahara Energy and in Dangote Holdings (companies that he had supported during his presidency); and he was alleged to have substantial property in Abuja and Lagos. Seemingly claiming a divine mandate, during the debates on a third presidential term in April 2006 Obasanjo made the following notorious comment to the Washington Post: ‘I believe that God is not a God of abandoned projects. If God has a project he will not abandon it.’ Thankfully, Nigeria’s legislators and civil society actors did not agree that the Almighty had a role to play in changing the country’s Constitution to give Obasanjo a third presidential term. President Umaru Yar’Adua’s death in May 2010 led to further criticisms of Obasanjo for imposing an already sick man on the country in the hope – critics said – of continuing to wield influence within the ruling party. Goodluck Jonathan took over from Yar’Adua and won the 2011 presidential elections, but reports remain of Obasanjo’s continuing influence over Jonathan’s administration. We conclude with a tale from the ‘Afro-Arab’ spring of 2011. On seeing former Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak (a former military officer who had ruled the country for thirty years) being tried in a caged jail in a Cairo courtroom in 2011, Obasanjo was reported to have expressed grave concern at the treatment of the former Egyptian ruler. He must have wondered whether this could be his own fate if a future Nigerian ‘revolutionary’ government decided to probe his administration. On the basis of the human rights abuses in Odi, Gbeji, and ZakiBiam alone, Obasanjo may well have grounds to be worried. Africa Review of Books, December 2012.

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Jerry Rawlings: The Death and

Deification of ‘Junior Jesus’

FORMER GHANAIAN PRESIDENT Jerry John Rawlings, who died last Thursday (November 2020) in Accra at the age of 73, always seemed to be an indestructible symbol of male virility. He towered over the Ghanaian political landscape for two decades (1981–2000), and his legacy is ultimately a complex one: he attracted both fanatical followers and embittered enemies. Rawlings’s father was a Scottish chemist who refused to acknowledge his son, leaving a permanent scar that the sensitive Jerry carried throughout his life. His Ewe mother, Victoria Agbotui, died just two months ago at the age of 101. Rawlings had a solid educational foundation, attending the famous Achimota College, ‘the Eton of Ghana’. It was here that he met his future wife, Nana Konadu Agyeman, with whom he had three daughters and a son. Rawlings joined the Ghanaian air force in 1968, having attended the military academy at Teshie. He was the best cadet, with impressive aerobatics skills, and became a flight lieutenant in 1978. The volatile, charismatic 32-year-old officer grew increasingly incensed by the profligacy of the military oligarchy that had ruled Ghana for a dozen years. The locust years of General Kutu Acheampong (1972–1978) during the dark days of kalabule (corruption) were particularly notorious. The fearless Rawlings had been sentenced to death for attempting to stage a coup d’état in May 1979, five weeks before the return to civilian rule. He was sprung out of jail a month later by fellow junior officers who lined up three former military heads of state 91

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– Generals Akwasi Afrifa, Fred Akuffo, and Kutu Acheampong – and five other officers, and executed them by firing squad in a sanguinary ‘house-cleaning’ exercise. This act reverberated across the continent, with Nigeria’s irate generals cutting off oil supplies to Ghana. Power was transferred back to the civilian government of the lacklustre Hilla Limann three months later. After two more years of stagnation and drift, Rawlings – nicknamed ‘Junior Jesus’ by his teeming supporters – staged his ‘Second Coming’ with a New Year’s Eve coup in 1981 in which he called for ‘holy war’. He cultivated the image of an all-action superman and a man of the people: the revolutionary in military khaki cleaned out gutters with ordinary workers; used a hoe to encourage rural people to plant crops; and showed peasants how to fire a gun. As with the 1979 coup, excesses were committed under the young putschists, as three Supreme Court judges and two military officers were assassinated. People’s defence committees acted as youth vigilantes. Amidst allegations of coup plots, opposition figures were imprisoned and securocrats proliferated. This time, Rawlings had come to stay, remaining in power as a military leader for a decade, before transforming into a civilian ruler for another decade. Rawlings at first surrounded himself with Marxist intellectuals from the University of Ghana. He then attempted – like founding president, Kwame Nkrumah – to carry out a socialist revolution without enough genuine revolutionary cadres. Like Nkrumah, he had widespread support among the urban masses, whom the middle classes dismissed as ‘verandah boys’. Though market women, youths, farmers and other groups were mobilised, Rawlings found governing more difficult than challenging corruption. The messianic leader discovered that miracles were in short supply. Rawlings launched attacks on exploitative business people, abolished import licences, and introduced price controls. He even razed Makola market to the ground. But this alchemy failed to revive the economy, and had instead created a deep financial crisis by 1982. Like Nkrumah, Rawlings soon discovered the limits of a cocoa- and goldbased economy vulnerable to fluctuations in international markets. As the economy faltered and foreign exchange reserves dried up, Rawlings changed course. The prophet of socialism transformed into the pragmatic advocate of conservative economic policies of privatisation, devaluation, sacking public workers, and removing price controls. Rawlings became a model pupil of the World Bank’s and IMF’s bitter medicine, and was generously rewarded. By 1989, Ghana was receiving $900 million in economic support as a darling of foreign donors. He, however, also used this money to electrify rural villages, 92

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build roads, and subsidise farmers. Ghanaian intellectual Kweku Ampiah described Rawlings as ‘a symbol of development’. Despite his turn to Western donors, Rawlings tried to maintain a radical panAfrican foreign policy. He was close to socialist fellow traveller and revolutionary Thomas Sankara, who attempted similar sweeping social change in Burkina Faso over four tumultuous years between 1983 and 1987. Rawlings was also close to mercurial, Afro-Arab revolutionary, Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. The Ghanaian leader further maintained close ties with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, to which over 3,000 Ghanaian students were sent. Rawlings’s greatest achievement was establishing multiparty democracy in Ghana: ironic for a military man on horseback. Having stabilised the economy, he introduced elections in 1992 in which his National Democratic Congress (NDC) won 60% of the vote against the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). But the political system had not yet been liberalised, and the ruling party used its access to state coffers to fund its campaign and increase public service salaries; it controlled the media; and it curtailed the judiciary and civil society. By 1996, however, Rawlings had relaxed many of these restrictions. He won 57% of the vote, with an impressive turn-out of 78%, compared to 50% turn-out four years earlier. Ghana is now renowned as one of Africa’s most mature democracies, with the two dominant parties having transferred power thrice among five leaders in two decades. Rawlings’s legacy as a pan-African peacemaker is also secure. As chair of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) during Liberia’s civil war in 1994–1995, he deployed Ghanaian troops and bridged the crucial relationship between Nigeria’s Sani Abacha and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, culminating in the end of the civil war by 1996. He thus acted as a ‘Pied Piper of Accra’, calling the diplomatic tunes to which the warlords eventually danced. He also collaborated closely with Abuja in conflict management efforts that ended Sierra Leone’s civil war by 2000. In his post-presidency, he served as the African Union’s envoy in Somalia. Rawlings remained popular for two decades, and most observers believe that he could easily have won another presidential term in 2000. It is to his credit that he did not attempt – like so many African autocrats – to change the constitution to run again. Part of his popularity can be explained by how deep Ghana’s rot had become, and how committed he was to social change. Rawlings, however, also had a temperamental and erratic side. He beat up his vice-president, Kow Arkaah, in a cabinet meeting in 1995. I met him once at 93

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an AU-sponsored policy conference in Cairo, and he seemed volatile and talked incessantly and sometimes incoherently. He suddenly broke into dance as we watched a belly-dancer on the cruise on the Nile. Rawlings will ultimately be remembered for having rehabilitated the memory of Kwame Nkrumah. In a noble act of national restitution in 1992, he built a bronze statue of Nkrumah in Accra’s Independence Square to honour one of the black world’s greatest pan-Africanists whose statues had been destroyed when he was toppled from power in 1966. In their impact on Ghana, both leaders have undoubtedly left the greatest legacy. The Guardian (Nigeria), 17 November 2020.

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Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: The Iron

Lady of Liberia

This Child Will Be Great: Memoirs of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President, by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (HarperCollins, 2009)

THE AWARDING OF THE Nobel Peace Prize to Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (along with Liberia’s Leymah Gbowee and Yemen’s Tawakul Karman) for championing women’s rights, four days before a presidential election in October 2011, must count as one of the most political acts in the history of the prize. It would be hard to imagine the prize being awarded to a sitting American or European leader less than a week before an election. This act also reinforced the gulf between international perceptions of Liberia’s ‘Iron Lady’ and the more critical view that many Liberians and West Africans have of her six years in office and past political record. Sirleaf ’s main opponent in the presidential election, Winston Tubman, argued that Sirleaf did not deserve the Nobel peace prize, describing her as a ‘warmonger’. In the first round of polling during the October 2011 election, the Liberian president won 43.9% of the vote to Tubman’s 32.7%. A run-off was therefore required a month later. In a reckless act of political immaturity, Tubman claimed – without producing much credible evidence – that the first round of voting had been rigged in favour of Sirleaf, and called on his supporters to boycott the second round. Violence erupted in Monrovia and led to two deaths and accusations of curbs on media freedom. Sirleaf was thus the sole candidate 95

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in the second round, winning the election unopposed. The 38% turn-out in the second round was in stark contrast to the first round’s 72%, meaning that the president’s legitimacy was likely to remain a perennial source of questioning in a second six-year term. The fact that Sirleaf ’s Unity Party still lacked a majority of seats in the House and the Senate after legislative elections could also further weaken her ability to rule effectively. As Liberia’s four million citizens ponder the aftermath of this difficult 2011 election, the life and times of their president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, seems a particularly appropriate subject of study. Sirleaf became Africa’s first elected female head of state in November 2005. One of Africa’s most accomplished technocrats, she has written an engaging memoir that has received surprisingly few reviews across the continent. It is also noteworthy that Sirleaf delivered the sixth Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg in July 2008, eulogising the Nobel Peace laureate and praising his successor Thabo Mbeki’s vision of an ‘African Renaissance’. The title of the book – This Child Will Be Great – is taken from an old man’s prophecy, and modesty is certainly not one of Sirleaf ’s qualities. She talks of growing up with a Gola father who was brought up in an AmericoLiberian household, ended up as a legislator, but then suffered the tragedy of being crippled. Her mother’s father was a German trader who had abandoned his family, and Sirleaf ’s mother grew up with an Americo-Liberian family. Both parents were thus brought up culturally as Americo-Liberians and the author refers incessantly to individuals from ‘settler’ families, contrasting these with what she describes as a ‘largely docile, uneducated population of young natives’ that would later become ‘radicalised’. The Americo-Liberians were a group of freed American slaves who founded the republic of Liberia in 1847 and systematically oppressed and marginalised the indigenous population, while mimicking the culture of their homeland. This corrupt oligarchy ruled for 133 years until a bloody coup d’état in 1980 led by a semi-literate master-sergeant, Samuel Doe, seized power after killing several members of the ancien régime. Sirleaf attended elite schools and was a tomboy who enjoyed sports. Her fellow pupils teased her mercilessly, referring to her as ‘Red Pumpkin’ due to her light skin. This led to a defensiveness about her identity that is evident in her memoir. At the tender age of 17, she married a man whose mother was from a prominent Americo-Liberian family, and had four sons with him. She worked as a bookkeeping assistant to an accountant, and when her husband went to study in the United States, she had a chance herself to enrol at Madison 96

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Business College. Sirleaf talks of her guilt at having left her sons with family members as she travelled the world, noting the lingering strain on this bond. The relationship with her children enjoys notably little attention in the book, and some reviewers of this memoir have complained about a lack of emotional as opposed to historical content. Sirleaf is close to her devout Christian mother and writes touchingly about her. She makes the rather odd comment that her mother ‘was very fair and did not much look like an African’: a narrow definition of Africanness that again suggests serious identity issues on the part of the author. Sirleaf ’s efforts to identify with rural women – based seemingly on sporadic visits to the village as a child – are therefore not totally convincing. Johnson Sirleaf left her husband when he became increasingly abusive, and the unflattering picture she paints of him is one of a philandering, jealous, ill-tempered alcoholic. She admits to having had an affair with an unnamed ‘good friend’ that lasted until his death, but she never remarried. Sirleaf joined Liberia’s finance ministry and enjoyed a meteoric rise, particularly after obtaining a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University, where she learned the most about her country while devouring the vast literature in the institution’s well-stocked libraries. Though a civil servant, Sirleaf famously criticised government corruption at a conference on Liberia in the US in 1969. She lazily describes the 27-year rule of William Tubman (1944–1971) in oxymoronic terms as a ‘benevolent dictatorship’. She became deputy minister of finance under the successor regime of William Tolbert, and used a graduation speech in 1972 to criticise the Americo-Liberian settler class – of which she was a de facto member – for its political and cultural hegemony over indigenous Liberians, warning of increasing socio-political tensions. This stunning lack of judgement was repeated several times in Sirleaf ’s career, and it would surely have been more sensible either to make private criticisms to push for reform from inside the system or to resign from the government and then go public. One sometimes cannot help thinking, in reading this memoir, that Sirleaf suffers from a folie de grandeur in which she is a gallant anti-corruption crusader single­ handedly trying to save her volatile country from erupting into chaos. Increasingly sidelined in the Tolbert administration, Sirleaf joined the World Bank in 1973, travelling to East Africa as well as to Latin America and the Caribbean, thus greatly expanding her horizons. She showed a consistently impressive determination to succeed, to master her brief and improve herself, and her capacity for hard work was beyond doubt. Though she criticised the arrogance of Bank officials in dealing with leaders of developing countries, she 97

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showed less courage in speaking out against the patronisation of the Third World in this international setting than she had done in her own domestic environment. Sirleaf returned home to the finance ministry in 1975. In another astonishing lack of judgement, she stamped ‘bullshit’ on a request from Liberia’s finance minister to the query of a British contractor, with the story appearing in the Financial Times and embarrassing the government. Sirleaf was made finance minister in August 1979, eight months before the Doe coup. Inexplicably, she agreed to work for a regime – as president of the Liberian Bank for Development and Investment – that had killed thirteen senior officials (including six of her former cabinet colleagues) as well as the president she had served. She curiously described her relationship with Doe as at first ‘complex but workable’ before souring. Sirleaf again criticised the regime she served, this time during a lecture in the US in November 1980, before returning to the World Bank. In a telling exchange, she sided with the World Bank president Robert McNamara after criticisms by renowned Kenyan academic Ali Mazrui that the American was portraying himself as Africa’s saviour. Sirleaf then became the first African female vice-president of Citibank, based in Kenya, though she travelled widely across Africa. In true diva style, she clearly revelled in the ‘good life’, living in a ‘big home’ in Nairobi’s ‘Beverly Hills’ with ‘chauffeured car, domestic servants’. She employs the royal ‘we’ throughout the book to describe herself. During visits to Liberia, Sirleaf continued to pay ‘courtesy calls’ on the autocratic Samuel Doe who she says ‘had a lot of affection for me and even trusted me’. In another loss of judgement that occurred twice, Sirleaf joined a political party while working at Citibank, later acknowledging she should have resigned first. When she was trying to win a party nomination for the presidential elections in 1997, she also had to be pushed by her employer to resign as head of the United Nations Development Programme’s Regional Bureau for Africa after reports emerged in the media that she was running for office. Sirleaf referred in another critical speech in the US in 1984 to Doe’s regime as ‘idiots’ (a loaded term significantly never used to describe the country’s Americo-Liberian rulers). Predictably, this landed her in detention on her return to Liberia, as an insecure Doe became increasingly paranoid. She was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. Following international pressure, she was released and won a seat in the Liberian Senate in 1985, which she refused to take up in protest at the fraudulent US-backed election that had led to Doe’s staying in power. Following a failed coup attempt in the same year, she was jailed 98

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again, and her unwavering faith and indomitable courage, which earned her the nickname of the ‘Iron Lady of Liberia’, come through clearly during these trials and tribulations. She was released from prison but continued to advise Doe, submitting a policy memo to him before escaping abroad after her passport had been seized. She worked for Equator Bank in the US, travelling often to Asia. In the biggest misjudgement of Sirleaf ’s career (and one that clearly still haunts her), she helped raise $10,000 to support Charles Taylor’s rebel movement, which launched a military incursion to oust Doe in December 1989. (Taylor later claimed that Sirleaf had been the international coordinator of his movement between 1986 and 1994.) She then went to visit the warlord in his bush hideout in 1990. As the civil war was destroying the country at great human cost (an estimated 250,000 people were eventually killed), Sirleaf flippantly told a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reporter that if Taylor destroyed Monrovia, it would be rebuilt and champagne would be drunk. She later described these as some of the most ‘stupid’ public statements she ever made. Sirleaf criticised historical American economic exploitation of Liberia, yet she was widely perceived, while president, as seeking to remain close to Washington. Even her book often seems aimed – with its language and subjects – at an American audience. She reflected the naive view of the Liberian settler elite that the US is ‘our great father, our patron saint. It will never let us suffer’. After the outbreak of the Liberian civil war (1989–1997), Sirleaf had called for an American intervention – which never arrived – and criticised the Economic Community of West African States’ Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) arguing, without any evidence and contrary to all military logic, that the force could have ended the fighting in Liberia much earlier. Her portrayal of ECOMOG is rather unflattering considering the incredible sacrifices, involving over 500 fatalities, during seven years of lonely peacekeeping which saved many Liberian lives. Even after the conflict restarted in 1999, continuing until 2003, Sirleaf was still flying to Washington DC to lobby for a more active American role in Liberia. As president, she is frank about having bowed to American pressure for Taylor to be handed over from Nigerian exile in June 2006 to stand trial in The Hague for alleged war crimes committed in Sierra Leone. She simultaneously notes that she would have preferred to have focused on other priorities and not to have disturbed her country’s fragile peace. As most African governments opposed the presence of a US military Africa Command on their territory, Sirleaf again displayed her obsessive fatal attraction to Uncle Sam. She uniquely called for the command to be located in her country, again 99

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opportunistically and short-sightedly demonstrating greater faith in placing her security in American arms rather than in Liberian institutions. While campaigning against Charles Taylor in presidential elections in 1997, Sirleaf was seen as elitist and out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Liberians. This election resulted in a crushing defeat, and she won only 9.5% of the vote, with Taylor triumphant in a landslide 75% victory. Liberians overwhelmingly voted for peace, judging the former warlord’s victory as their best guarantee of future stability. Sirleaf did not accept the defeat gracefully, telling former US president Jimmy Carter before the poll that it would have to be rigged in order for Taylor to win: an extraordinary lack of graciousness and commitment to the rules of the democratic game. In a further sign of pettiness, Sirleaf refused to take Taylor’s call after his victory, and failed to attend his presidential inauguration. The fact that Sirleaf could muster only 20% of the vote (coming second to former footballer George Weah, who won 28% of the ballots) in the first round of presidential elections in 2005 also suggests that Liberians were still unsure about her, despite Sirleaf ’s winning about 60% of the vote in the second round. She immodestly described her victory as representing the ‘rebirth of a nation’, later noting that the country was lucky to have the opportunity to consolidate its democracy ‘largely because of my own extensive contacts’, and suggesting that she had been born with leadership qualities. Many of Sirleaf ’s critics, however, disagreed with her somewhat messianic approach to leadership. In July 2009, Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (with a vocal dissenting minority) recommended barring Sirleaf – along with 49 other people – from holding public office for 30 years due to her support for Charles Taylor at the start of the Liberian civil war in 1989. Though Liberia’s Supreme Court subsequently declared this recommendation unconstitutional in January 2011, Sirleaf ’s allies sought to demonise and discredit the commission. They thus damaged the fragile process of reconciliation in a reckless act of spitefulness similar to Sirleaf ’s vengeful reactions to her political opponents. Under the leadership of the 73-year-old Sirleaf, Liberia has made some impressive progress in its post-conflict reconstruction efforts. By 2010, the country’s external debt of $5.8 billion had been largely forgiven through her incredible energy and prodigious networking. An estimated $16 billion in direct foreign investment has flowed in, involving a sensible diversification of investors, with the Chinese a particularly significant new presence. Some infrastructure 100

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has been repaired. An inherited budget of $80 million has quadrupled. ‘Ghost workers’ have been purged from ministerial payrolls, saving about $3 million a year. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also noted that all of the government’s monetary and fiscal targets had been met by December 2010. One of Sirleaf ’s persistent fears has been that young unemployed groups will be recruited by warlords to restart the country’s civil war which raged for 11 years until 2003. The 8,000-strong UN mission in Liberia (UNMIL) continues to guarantee security in the country amidst ongoing ethnic and religious tensions and a weak police force. The international presence will, however, clearly not remain indefinitely. Instability across the border in Côte d’Ivoire also continues to be a serious concern following post-election violence there in 2011. Liberian mercenaries were involved in this conflict, which spilled 160,000 Ivorian refugees into Liberia. Guinea also remained politically unstable (with 3,000 refugees spilling into Liberia by 2011), even as Sierra Leone continued its fragile recovery from a decade of civil war. Liberia was thus located at the epicentre of the volatile Mano River basin. The problems inherited by Sirleaf ’s administration clearly overwhelmed even her own incredible determination to succeed. Former combatants were not provided with jobs quickly enough, leading to instability and crime. In a devastating blow, Sirleaf ’s American ‘godfather’ criticised continued failures to tackle corruption in a 2010 State Department report. Even more devastating for Sirleaf ’s declared ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to corruption, the Berlin-based Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer (based on the general public’s views about corruption levels and their government’s efforts to tackle it) named Liberia the most corrupt country in the world in December 2010. Sirleaf had to fire her information minister as well as her internal affairs minister following reports of corruption. That her brother was the internal affairs minister, dismissed for graft, and her son a presidential adviser also replicated the nepotism she had earlier criticised in the Tolbert administration. With no legislative majority to work with, Sirleaf admitted that she could not afford to alienate this branch of government through an anti-corruption crusade if she wanted to pass crucial legislation. Damaging reports of the government bribing lawmakers have thus been recurrent. The president’s criticisms and firing of the combative auditor-general John Morlu (who completed 40 audits and criticised the president for not taking action against corrupt officials fingered in these reports), and the smear campaign run against him by Sirleaf ’s associates in the local media, again revealed a ruthlessness that contradicted her rhetorical 101

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attacks on the ‘debilitating cancer of corruption’. Leaked email revelations in 2007 that Sirleaf ’s former public works minister Willis Knuckles had solicited kickbacks, and the implication of her brother-in-law as well as her legal adviser in this scandal, caused further embarrassment, as Sirleaf herself publicly admitted. The sacking of House speaker Edwin Snowe – Taylor’s son-in-law, who had been a thorn in the president’s side – in 2007 following embezzling charges further revealed a selective tackling of corruption. Sirleaf dragged her feet before acting against her own associates, like Harry Greaves who was also accused of corruption. She continued to defend finance minister Augustine Ngafuan, who had been criticised by the General Auditing Commission for the disappearance of $1 million in the 2007–2008 budget. Sirleaf would later admit that she had not realised how deep-rooted and pervasive corruption was in Liberian society, suggesting a naive and out-of-touch president who had perhaps spent too much time in exile. In Liberia’s rubber- and mining-dominated economy, unemployment stood at 95% five years into Sirleaf ’s presidency (only 100,000 people out of a 2.7 million workforce were employed), while foreign aid of $425 million exceeded the country’s $370 million annual budget. The fact that many of the socio-economic problems and instances of corruption that Sirleaf criticised throughout her career continued under her own presidency suggested that there were complex, structural issues at play that diverted the resources needed to establish an efficient civil service and political system to reduce the scourge of corruption. The slow pace of change has made Liberians wary of Sirleaf ’s lofty rhetoric. The controversial election of 2011 will make it difficult for the president to reconcile and reconstruct her fragile nation. The ennobling of Liberia’s ‘Iron Lady’ by the Oslo-based Nobel peace prize committee could thus backfire spectacularly. Africa Review of Books, December 2011.

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Meles Zenawi: Philosopher-King or

Pragmatic Autocrat?

THE CEREBRAL 57-YEAR-OLD Meles Zenawi, who ruled Ethiopia for the last 21 years, died this week (August 2012), reportedly in a Brussels hospital. Meles was a man of many parts. Celebrated by donors as a visionary philosopher-king who brought development to his East African country of 75 million people, his domestic critics (many concentrated in the capital of Addis Ababa and among sections of groups like the Amhara and Oromo) condemned him as an iron­ fisted dictator. Meles’s Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) had waged a successful war, alongside the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), that toppled the dictatorship of the Soviet-backed Mengistu Haile Mariam and brought Meles to power in 1991. The new leader strongly supported Eritrea’s independence under the EPLF in 1993. Within five years, however, the former allies had fought a bloody war between 1998 and 2000 that resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths. In power, Meles pursued a pragmatic course in a coffee-dominated economy, 30% of which still relies on foreign aid. A nationalistic restriction on foreign banks and government monopolies in the energy and communications sectors was combined with incentives for foreign leasing of agricultural land to produce food and flowers. Meles often pursued an independent economic course based on a carefully thought-out strategy to commercialise small-scale farming and promote manufacturing. Rural schools and clinics have increased, while child mortality has been reduced. Meles consistently called for fairer trade and an end to aid dependency in Africa. His country saw impressive annual growth of 103

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about 9% over the last decade. But his critics charged that villagers were forcibly relocated to make way for foreign investors. They also argued that widespread poverty and food insecurity still stalk the land. Meles’s ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has remained the dominant political group in Ethiopia since 1991. In 2005, the opposition won 23 parliamentary seats in Addis Ababa. The regime reacted harshly, killing 200 protesters and locking up 30,000 opponents. Some were later tried for treason. Five years later, continued repression (including a clampdown on the media and foreign-funded NGOs, as well as the use of a draconian anti-terrorism bill) combined with a divided opposition to ensure that the EPRDF and its allies won 99.6% of votes in the country’s parliament. More opposition arrests followed these polls. Meles’s personal popularity was, however, hard to gauge in a country in which the press and civil society are closely monitored. He announced that he would step down in 2015, but had already broken a similar promise in 2010. Meles has so dominated the political system for two decades that a power vacuum now seems certain. No other political figure has the stature to hold together the fractious ruling coalition. His deputy since 2010, Hailemariam Desalegn, an engineer who also serves as foreign minister, is expected to take over as interim leader. It is, however, unlikely that this succession will be smooth, and much political uncertainty lies ahead. In his foreign policy, Meles took advantage of Addis Ababa’s hosting of the African Union (AU) Commission to raise his international profile, representing the continent in global forums like the Group of Eight (G8) and Group of Twenty (G20). The United States has also maintained close ties with Ethiopia, the preeminent military power on the Horn of Africa, benefiting from Addis Ababa’s experience and intelligence in fighting Islamist networks. Meles supported the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and has allowed Washington to send drones into Somalia from its territory. Ethiopia itself sent troops into Somalia to fight anti-American Islamists between 2006 and 2009 (and has continued to intervene sporadically in the country), and currently forms the backbone of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s volatile Abyei region. Addis Ababa is also the largest African recipient of British aid. Meles, however, avoided dependence on the West by obtaining Chinese assistance for building roads, railways, and dams, and championing a Chinese ‘model’ of development. He will ultimately be remembered as a pragmatic autocrat. Mail & Guardian (South Africa), 24 August 2012. An earlier version of this piece was first published in The Guardian (London), 8 August 2012. 104

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Abiy Ahmed: Ethiopia’s Nobel

Intellectual Soldier

ETHIOPIA’S 43-YEAR-OLD prime minister Abiy Ahmed – Africa’s youngest leader – received the $900,000 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on 10 November 2019, becoming the 13th African and 100th awardee to obtain the prize since 1901. He joins Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, South Africa’s FW de Klerk, and Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as the fourth sitting African leader – and second eastern African after Kenya’s Wangari Maathai – to be ennobled. On hearing the news, an elated Abiy noted: ‘It is a prize given to Africa, given to Ethiopia and I can imagine how the rest of Africa’s leaders will take it positively to work on [the] peacebuilding process on our continent.’ The Nobel committee awarded Abiy the prize for his efforts to ‘achieve peace and international co-operation’, highlighting his ‘decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea’. Abiy also won the award for initiating ‘important reforms that give many [Ethiopian] citizens hope for a better life and a brighter future’. Ethiopia’s premier has consistently promoted a message of medemer (coming together), making peace with Eritrea barely three months after taking office, embarking on a courageous pilgrimage to Asmara, agreeing on opening the border and communication lines, restoring travel, and reuniting families. The 1998–2000 border war between both countries resulted in 100,000 deaths and was described as akin to ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’ owing to the lack of concrete strategic interests at stake. Abiy has also sought to mediate conflicts between Eritrea and Djibouti, 105

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Somalia and Kenya, and Eritrea and Somalia. More recently, he contributed to successful efforts to establish a transitional government in Sudan between the military junta and civil society groups following the coup d’état that toppled Omar al-Bashir’s autocracy in April 2019. Abiy has further sought to promote regional integration in the Horn of Africa through joint infrastructure projects, arguing that domestic peace and development can be achieved only through these broader regional efforts. At home, he has acted as a bold reformer, releasing thousands of political prisoners, unbanning groups formerly deemed ‘terrorist’ organisations, apologising for past human rights abuses, allowing political exiles to return home, jailing senior officials engaged in corruption and human rights abuses, and lifting media restrictions and the ‘state of emergency’. He has also established a Peace and Reconciliation Commission to promote domestic reconciliation, and appointed a cabinet of gender parity and a female chief justice and president. These popular actions unleashed a wave of ‘Abiymania’ across the country. Abiy was born of a Muslim Oromo father and a Christian Amhara mother, and he grew up with an innate understanding of cultural diversity. Being from the largest Ethiopian group, the Oromo, has helped to dissipate some of the grievances of a people that have long felt marginalised. He is married to an Amhara woman and speaks Oromo, Amharic, and Tigrinya. Abiy joined the Ethiopian rebel resistance to the dreaded Derg regime of Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam at the age of 15 in 1991. He rose to become a colonel, intelligence chief, and head of cyber security, also serving as a United Nations (UN) peacekeeper in Rwanda. He obtained a doctorate from the Institute for Peace and Security Studies at Addis Ababa University, and holds two master’s degrees in transformational leadership and business administration, as well as a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. Abiy left the army to join politics in 2010 as a parliamentarian for the Oromo People’s Democratic Organisation. As a legislator, he led the establishment of a Religious Forum for Peace to foster reconciliation between Muslims and Christians involved in persistent clashes. Abiy assumed the premiership of Africa’s second most populous country in April 2018, following two years of widespread protests against government repression, land grabbing, and displacement of locals for development projects, during which 1,000 people were killed and 20,000 jailed. But despite some successes, Ethiopia’s premier has a long way to go to achieve domestic and regional stability. Even the peace deal with Eritrea – the main 106

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initiative for which he won the Nobel Prize – is threatened by the fact that his promised return of the border town of Badme to Asmara depends on the Tigray­ dominated military for implementation. After the sacrifice of so much blood to win the territory, it is unclear whether Tigrayan generals will co-operate. Ethiopia’s post-1991 federal system has aspirations for self-determination for its multiple groups. But this mainly remains a theoretical ambition, as efforts to actualise such autonomy have often created fissures that have threatened the unity of this polyglot nation. Like Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, the 108 million-strong Ethiopian state is an ethnically and religiously diverse federation which suffers from many tensions and has the potential to destabilise its entire subregion. Tigrayans, who have dominated the political space over the last three decades, are only 6% of the population, while Oromos account for 34% and Amharas 27%. Many have also questioned how entrenched Abiy’s reforms are, and whether his regime is still vulnerable to the machinations of Tigray-dominated securocrats. An assassination attempt was reported in June 2018. Despite Abiy’s efforts, personal charisma cannot be a sustainable substitute for a lack of political unity and effective state institutions. Internal instability has continued, with 2.9 million Ethiopians – the most of any country – remaining internally displaced by local conflicts, while the government still has to manage discontent in its turbulent Oromia and Amhara regions. Even after the Nobel announcement, protesters have been arrested in Addis Ababa, the internet has been blocked, and journalists have been harassed. There could be a return to autocratic methods in the name of stability. Elections in May 2020 present a major test of Abiy’s popularity and ability to keep together his fissiparous country and fragile ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) party, which is showing real signs of splintering. As Abiy received the Nobel peace prize, controversy swirled in Oslo at his refusal to attend the traditional press conferences. However, his fellow laureate, United States president Barack Obama, also did not give any media interviews while collecting the award in 2009. The hope is that the Nobel Prize will help Abiy to consolidate his reform efforts, and not become an albatross around the young premier’s neck. The Guardian (Nigeria), 10 December 2019.

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Mobutu Sese Seko: The Sick

Man of Africa

ZAIRE, A COUNTRY OF 45 million people, which is four and a half times larger than France, has become an open sore at the heart of the continent, an over-ripe, huge mango that could spill its poison across the borders of nine countries. So, just how did Zaire reach this sorry state? Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu exploited the chaos of the Congo (Zaire) crisis of the early 1960s, when secessionist tensions and civil war killed one million Zaireans, to seize power in November 1965. Within five years, he had re­ established order and stability, won a dubious 99.9% electoral majority and was seen as an African Tito keeping together a heterogeneous polyglot of 450 ethnic groups. But his methods of control were often sanguinary: in 1966 he lured rebel leader Pierre Mulele back from exile and executed him; in 1969, his marauding soldiers killed several dozen university students. Mobutu ruled like an absolutist French medieval monarch, establishing a patrimonial system in which clients had to reaffirm loyalty to the patron in return for access to state revenues. But no client dared build an independent power base. As Mobutu warned: ‘Cite me a single Zairean village where there are two chiefs, with one in opposition. It does not exist. For Zaireans, two heads in one body make a monster.’ He shuffled clients around like a pack of cards, often rotating the most prestigious offices of state. Politicians moved between parliament and prison, and in the first decade of Mobutu’s reign, 29 officials had spent some time in jail. Nguza Karl-i-Bond, for example, went from premier to 108

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death sentence, to life imprisonment and torture, to exile, and to prime minister again. Mobutu created the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR) in 1967 as the only legitimate party which all Zaireans had to join. He elected all members of the Political Bureau, ministers, the legislature and the Judicial Council. Many of Mobutu’s politico-commercial clients came from his Equator region, as did 90% of the military top brass. Newspapers and civic groups were brought under government control. Mobutu hired the services of a Senegalese traditional healer, who also ran his hotels in Dakar. In 1967, the autocrat launched his authenticité campaign: he changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko; ordered Zaireans to replace their Christian names with African ones: renamed the country from Congo to Zaire; adopted a leopard skin toque; and established ‘Mobutism’ as a state ideology. He also cultivated a personality cult with a multitude of praise names: ‘Guide of the Zairean Revolution’, ‘Father of the Nation’, ‘Voice of the People’, ‘Supreme Combatant’, ‘Great Strategist’, ‘Grand Patron’, ‘Helmsman’, ‘Messiah’, and ‘Emperor’. The daily television news was preceded by an image of Mobutu descending from the clouds, booming out a message of hope. For several weeks in 1975, he banned the use of all names in the press except for those of the president and Zaire’s football players. His image was ubiquitous: in newspapers, on billboards, on office walls, on party pins, on banknotes, on postage stamps and on wax cloths. In 1983 he emulated his close friend, Idi Amin, by promoting himself to the rank of field marshal. One of the few sources of opposition came from the Catholic Church, which provided 75% of health services in rural areas. Its cardinals openly criticised Mobutu, and he responded by banning all religious broadcasts in 1972 and declaring Christmas a work day in 1974. But for the most part, the autocrat seemed to have respect for, and belonged to, an organisation that claimed half of the population among its disciples. Wildcat strikes by workers in Kinshasa and Shaba in 1976 and 1977 forced Mobutu into an ephemeral period of political reform, and there were limited elections to the Political Bureau. The docile MPR legislature stirred from its deep slumber to condemn corruption, and even had the effrontery to criticise the huge funds going to the presidency. Mobutu responded with characteristic brutality: in 1978, he executed 28 civilian and military figures, while 500 members of a religious sect were also massacred. As political repression continued, the decline of the Zairean economy 109

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was set in train in 1974 by the collapse of copper prices and the ill-conceived nationalisation of the country’s main industries without the requisite managerial expertise. Mobutu himself acquired major shares in diamond and agricultural enterprises, banks and foreign multinationals. Some 30% of public revenue was used for political patronage or sent to private Swiss bank accounts. Mobutu acquired prized real estate in France, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland, built eleven palaces in Zaire, converted his ancestral village of Gbadolite into a ‘Versailles in the Jungle’, sailed up and down the Zaire River in the presidential yacht, Kamayola, and amassed a personal fortune estimated at $5 billion. Within three years, the nationalisations had been reversed, but Zaire was $3 billion in debt. White elephant projects like the Maluku steel mill and Inga–Shaba power line littered the Zairean landscape, even as social services and basic infrastructure collapsed. In the realm of foreign policy, Mobutu had three pillars. He exploited the divergent interests of the triumvirate of influential Western patrons, France, Belgium and the US. Paris was keen to keep Zaire in its sphere of influence, Brussels wished to protect its large economic interests, and Washington wanted a secure Cold War ally. As a leading scholar of Zaire, Crawford Young, noted: ‘Mobutu has mastered the art of diplomacy of dependence with consummate ability’. Franco-Belgian gendarmes and American logistics saved his regime during the Shaba invasions of 1977 and 1978. In his early years, Mobutu made Africa the cornerstone of his foreign policy, working assiduously to shake off his image as a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lackey by cutting links with imperial Portugal, lambasting apartheid South Africa, hosting an OAU conference, and mediating intra-African disputes. But this foreign policy pillar crumbled dramatically in 1975 with the discovery of his co-operation with South African troops in Angola. Mobutu had failed to realise he needed a long spoon to dine with the apartheid devil, and his country was denied entry into the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The third pillar was the Arab world, with Mobutu dramatically breaking links with Israel in 1973, touring the oil-rich Gulf with a begging bowl, and calling on Moroccan troops to help give the Franco-Belgians Africa cover for their first Shaba intervention. With the end of the Cold War, Mobutu’s aid-for-allegiance game was up. The autocrat had outlived his strategic usefulness at his most vulnerable political and economic moment. Mobutu at first experienced increasing difficulties in manipulating shifting domestic foreign coalitions to his advantage. Under pressure, he was forced to allow a national conference in April 1990 and agreed 110

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to collaborate with the opposition Union Sacrée. The Western troika also cut off all economic and military aid in 1991, and called on him to give up power. Paris moved a Franco-African summit from Kinshasa to Paris, and denied him entry into France. There was even talk of seizing his enormous assets. But the resilient Mobutu fought back tenaciously. He refused to grant his national conference sovereign powers, funded many of the 200 registered political parties, refused to give up control over provincial governors, and bluntly told his Western patrons: ‘I will not be dictated to, I am not a colony.’ He astutely co-opted opposition leaders (all of whom had previously served under him), paid his new parliamentary dunderheads foreign currency to make flowery speeches, and sowed seeds of contempt between the army and his premiers by approving wage increases for his soldiers that he knew his inflation-conscious premiers would resist. The squabbling opposition also played into his hands by constantly mutating like deranged viruses. Mobutu went through five premiers in 18 months. When the most vociferous premier, Etienne Tshisekedi, refused to go, Mobutu simply appointed his own premier and retained control of the levers of power. The most cynical of Mobutu’s survival tactics was the ethnicisation of politics in the Shaba province further to divide and rule. He appointed the chauvinistic Katangan Gabriel Kyungu as governor of Shaba in 1992 to balance the increasing popularity of Kasaian opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi. This resulted in the ethnic cleansing of 100,000 Kasaians from Shaba in two years. The Kasaians, considered the ‘Jews of Zaire’, owing to their intellectual and entrepreneurial success, had long been the backbone of Zaire’s bureaucratic and business sectors. Mobutu was assisted in his political brinkmanship by two fortuitous events: the ascent of the French right to parliamentary power in 1993, and the arrival of one million Rwandan refugees in eastern Zaire in 1994. Mobutu was again invited to attend Franco-African summits; his French visa was renewed; he offered French troops a base for Operation Turquoise in April 1994; and Paris returned the favour by resuming economic aid in July 1994. Civil society protests and army mutinies further exacerbated the increasing chaos: in 1990, the security forces killed 300 university students; during the pillage of 1991, 250 Kinshasa residents were killed; in 1992, soldiers killed 33 protesting Christian group members; and in 1993, Mobutu’s undisciplined troops embarked on another pillage in Kinshasa, resulting in hundreds of deaths. The economy also continued its downward spiral: in 1988, 25% of the export revenues were still disappearing from state coffers; in 1992, illicit diamond

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exports of $300 million surpassed official diamond exports of $231 million. In 1993 Zaire entered the Guinness Book of Records with an inflation rate of 8,828%; by 1994 Zaire’s economy had shrunk to its 1958 level; and Zaire’s copper production declined from 500,000 tons in the mid-1980s to 40,000 by 1996. As leading Zaireanist Buana Kabue so succinctly put it: ‘The state does not exist or no longer exists in Zaire. It is no more than a skeleton that entertains the illusion.’ For Mobutu, 1996 was certainly the annus horribilis: as the most effective challenge to his 31-year reign gathered momentum, he lay stricken with prostate cancer. The end has come through a bizarre and unforeseen combination of circumstances. A festering war had raged in North Kivu for three years between disenfranchised Banyarwanda militias, and Nyanga and Hunde groups, resulting in 300,000 mostly Zairean Tutsis being expelled from their homes and 10,000 deaths. When a deputy governor issued a one-week ultimatum for Banyamulenge (Zairean Tutsis) in South Kivu to leave Zaire in October 1996 or be ‘exterminated’, they took up arms and routed the Zairean army. Assisted by regimes in Kigali, Kampala and Bujumbura, they then rallied with three political groups consisting of Katangans, Kasaians, Masisi, Babwari, and Bashi to form the 6,000-strong Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Kinshasa (AFDL) under the leadership of veteran Kasaian revolutionary Laurent Kabila. The rebels destroyed Hutu militia camps, forcing 760,000 Rwandan Hutus back home and temporarily ending hopes of a French-inspired intervention force to rescue Mobutu. Some 250,000 Hutu refugees are still on a westward march into Zaire’s rainforests, and there have been reports of massacres of Hutu refugees. The rebels went on to capture the key eastern Zaire towns of Goma, Bukavu, Bunia, Uvira, Kindu and Kisangani, gaining control of one-fifth of Zaire and its vital gold mines. Mobutu’s response has been to hire Belgian, Croatian, French, Russian, Serb, South African and Ukrainian mercenaries to help his feeble army launch a counter-attack. But his is an army that has largely survived on rape and pillage. The scheme has produced farcical results, with many of the white mercenaries falling prey to dysentery and many of Mobutu’s soldiers simply running away. Franco-Belgian gendarmes, who had twice rescued Mobutu are no longer politically correct guests of dishonour at this particular interventionist feast. Negotiations in Cape Town failed to secure a ceasefire, as militarily victorious rebels lack a political incentive to negotiate. 112

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In the last seven years, Mobutu has been able to use economic resources to buy his political survival. Kabila’s military threat, however, presents an altogether different challenge that seems beyond the reach of either sticks or carrots. There is now a definite sense of fin de régime, as the rebels’ military victories change the political map of Zaire. Copper-rich Shaba and diamondrich Kasai, which has recently acquired its own university, airline and brewery, already enjoy tremendous autonomy from Kinshasa and have a history of secession and a strong sense of identity. Mobutu has often warned ‘Après moi, le déluge!’ (After me, the flood!) to justify his indispensability. As the chaos he has done so much to create unfolds before his very own eyes, a more appropriate aphorism might be ‘Le déluge, c’est moi’. Mobutu leaves behind a legacy of grinding poverty, unbridled corruption, extravagant profligacy, and anarchic rebellion. But the Zairean autocrat could be right in one regard: the death of the sick man of Africa could very well signify the disappearance of the Zairean state, leaving vengeful vultures like Uganda, Rwanda and Angola to feast over its lifeless carcass. Pan Africa (London), April 1997.

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Idi Amin: The Making of a

Warrior God

WHILE ON VACATION IN London recently, I saw the film The Last King of Scotland – based on the novel by Giles Foden – depicting the tyrannical rule of Uganda’s Idi Amin between 1971 and 1979. I had feared that, like recent films about Africa such as Black Hawk Down and Lord of War, it would present a view of Africans as deranged warlords and psychopaths. I thought that, in true neo-imperial, Hollywood style, the ‘barbaric natives’ would be viewed through distorting Western eyes, with Africans as props against the backdrop of hell in which white angels eventually save the infantile natives from themselves. But I was pleasantly surprised; this gripping and entertaining film was more nuanced and subtle than most depictions of Africa. The story is told through the eyes of a Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, who is caught in the tyrant’s seductive grip. Intoxicated by the lures of power and pleasure, Garrigan becomes blind to the massacres around him. Having declared himself the king of Scotland, Amin made his soldiers wear kilts and march to the sound of bagpipes, which the film amusingly captures. Forest Whitaker’s performance as the dictator is truly breath-taking. From the moment he bounds onto the stage to address a frenzied crowd in a rural village, one knows that this is going to be an exhilarating performance. Whitaker won a Golden Globe for his performance, and it would be criminal if this were not followed up shortly by an Oscar. His performance is comparable to Ben Kingsley’s Mahatma Gandhi and Denzel Washington’s Steve Biko. 114

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The Ugandan dictator is portrayed as not just a brutish, bloodthirsty ogre and cannibal, but also as a funny, hedonistic, accordion-playing, charismatic family man. The brutality is not ignored (Amin is estimated to have killed 300,000 people in a blood-soaked reign of terror), but the movie at least seeks to explain it. Amin’s early popularity is well captured. Common people in rural areas – the majority of the population in African societies – saw Amin as one of their own, a stark contrast to the often aloof, elitist rule of his predecessor, Milton Obote. In the first few months in power, Amin traversed the length and breadth of the country, meeting elders and villagers in consultative lekgotlas. Political detainees of the Obote regime were released. Amin’s first cabinet was the best-educated in the country’s history, as the brain of the politicians was harnessed to the brawn of the soldiers. Amin, a Muslim who courted oil-rich Islamic countries, sought to ensure religious harmony by bringing Christian and Muslim leaders together. But stories soon emerged of Amin slapping and shouting down ministers. Thousands of rival Acholi and Langi ethnic group members were murdered. Events like the ‘disappearance’ of the chief justice and the vice-chancellor of Makerere University, as well as the murder of the Anglican archbishop, soon became widespread. Arbitrary decrees were passed, effectively ending the rule of law. In a vainglorious fit of folie de grandeur, Amin promoted himself from general to field marshal and declared himself ‘president for life’. His expulsion of 80,000 members of the dominant Asian commercial class from Uganda in 1972 destroyed the economy and alienated world opinion. Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui taught at Makerere University before and during the early years of Amin’s reign, and is one of the most perceptive observers of his rule. Unlike most analysts, Mazrui has sought to explain the social phenomenon of Amin, even if he sometimes came perilously close to overinterpreting evil rather than simply calling it by its name. Mazrui describes how Uganda’s lumpenmilitariat – soldiers from Amin’s Nilotic and Sudanic groups, with little education and from disadvantaged regions and poor socio- economic backgrounds – seized power, but were then not quite sure what to do with it. Many of Amin’s actions can thus be contextualised within his limited peasant world view. Amin would give press interviews in his swimming trunks; four white porters carried him on a throne. His charisma was based on what Mazrui sees as the revival of Africa’s ‘warrior tradition’ epitomised by figures like Shaka Zulu. According to this view, colonialism destroyed the warrior tradition through ‘hellfire’ — the Christian value of turning the other cheek – and ‘gunfire’ – emasculating African armies through superior military technology. 115

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Amin epitomised the masculine value of virility, with his four official wives and countless mistresses producing about sixty offspring – as well as through his physical presence as a former boxing champion, and his insistence that he feared no one but God. Hypocritically, Amin criticised his senior officials for seducing each other’s wives and cautioned university students against spreading venereal diseases. In response to Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere’s criticism of his expulsion of Uganda’s Asians, Amin taunted ‘Mwalimu’: ‘I want to assure you that I love you very much and if you had been a woman, I would have considered marrying you although your head is full of grey hair.’ Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka described Amin as a ‘sadist, mass murderer, an incompetent administrator and political buffoon’, as well as an ‘overage child’. In his 1984 A Play of Giants, he presents a biting satire that depicts Amin (‘Kamini’) and other African autocrats as vicious, paranoid, ignorant autocrats meeting at the United Nations. In the play, Amin orders the head of his central bank to ‘eat shit’ after a World Bank loan is declined. Soyinka was, however, sometimes guilty of letting external actors off the hook, and is often not as critical of Amin’s supporters. Britain – implicated in helping Amin seize power – was the first country to recognise his regime, having viewed Obote’s socialist policies with grave concern. Many African Americans also naively defended Amin, while the Organisation of African Unity shamefully made him its chair. Amin’s legacy left a strong sense of the need to ensure ethnic inclusivity in national politics and to safeguard human rights in Uganda, as epitomised by the plethora of active civil society groups in the country. His legacy has also left a strong distrust of military rule, and a determination to ensure that electoral processes are followed, even though these have sometimes been flawed. Amin’s rule has cast a long shadow over Uganda about the dangers of autocratic rule. Its current president, Yoweri Museveni – in power since 1986 – would do well to heed the lessons of a violent past in order to ensure a peaceful future. Sunday Times (South Africa), 11 February 2007.

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Daniel arap Moi: A Ruthless Dictator

DANIEL TOROITICH ARAP MOI, Kenya’s president from 1978 to 2002, died on 4 February 2020 at the age of 95. He was one of Africa’s most ruthless and uncouth autocrats. Moi was born on 2 September 1924 in a rural Rift Valley settlement as a member of the country’s Kalenjin ethnic group. His herder father died when he was only four, and he attended Christian mission schools, before working as a teacher from 1946 until 1955, when he joined the British-controlled Legislative Council. Moi was one of the founders of the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) in 1960 to challenge the hegemony of founding Kikuyu president Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya African National Union (KANU). KADU sought to protect the rights of minority ethnic groups by promoting a federal system (‘majimboism’). The party was, however, soon co-opted by KANU, and Moi became home affairs minister before becoming vice-president in 1967. He was often underestimated as a subservient political lightweight with limited ambitions, and dismissed as a ‘passing cloud’. After Kenyatta died in August 1978, Moi became president. He was so terrified of the Kikuyu clique around the presidency known as the ‘Kiambu Mafia’ that he fled his home in the Rift Valley. Only slowly did he grow into the role and gain the confidence to run the country. He traversed Kenya promoting unity, released political prisoners, and announced a strategy of Nyayo, vowing to follow in Kenyatta’s footsteps. Moi, however, soon became comfortable with the trappings of the autocratic

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accoutrements he had inherited: his predecessor’s tyrannical robes were made to be worn. He abandoned his previous commitment to federalism, opting instead for central control. Moi also established a personality cult, with banknotes and coins bearing his image; and universities, schools, roads, and public buildings named after him. Statues were erected in his image. He surrounded himself with compliant cronies and feckless flatterers. He carried the ivory stick so beloved of African autocrats, wielding it as if it had mystical powers. Moi soon declared the country to be a de jure rather than de facto one-party state in July 1982, banning all opposition to his rule. An attempted coup d’état by the country’s air force a month later provided him with the opportunity to unleash his iron fist, and he never sheathed his sword. At least 159 people were killed in the subsequent trials. Marxism was banned as a subject of study at the country’s universities, as the anti-intellectual autocrat launched a vicious assault on the country’s ivory towers. Draconian media laws were passed. Civil servants were forced to join the ruling party. All political opposition was crushed, and a ‘rule by plot’ instituted. There was a clampdown on the intelligentsia and civil society, with secret police operatives infiltrating these organisations. A torture chamber was set up in Nairobi’s notorious Nyayo House in which many dissidents were jailed, starved, and killed. Leading intellectuals like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Micere Mugo, and Alamin Mazrui were hounded into exile. Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai and other civil society activists were violently persecuted for protesting against human rights abuses and corrupt efforts to turn Uhuru Park into a skyscraper. Moi’s regime reached its nadir when Luo foreign minister Robert Ouko was murdered in 1990. A subsequent investigation revealed Ouko had been killed in one of Moi’s presidential residences, probably with the president himself present. Moi tightened his grip on key institutions such as the rubber-stamp Parliament, judiciary, and security services. He clamped down harshly on independent media. The end of the Cold War and street protests eventually culminated in multiparty politics, at the cost of 1,000 fatalities. Moi won elections in 1992 and 1997 through bribery, intimidation, violence, and rigging, as politics became a means of waging war by other means. He won respectively just 36% and 40% of the vote against a divided opposition: far from the over 90% which contemporary autocrats in Egypt and Rwanda award themselves. His weapon of divisive ethnic violence in the hands of his successors, however, came within a whisker of plunging the country into civil war in 2007. The country’s diabolical 118

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political wizard had released the ethnic genie from the national lamp. Kenya’s economy, which is East Africa’s largest, stagnated under Moi’s rule. Graft (‘magendo’) became a by-word of the Moi regime, as he hollowed out the country’s major institutions. The ‘Anglo Leasing’ scandal of the 1990s involved state contracts being awarded to fictitious firms. The Goldenberg scandal of the same epoch concerned a scheme in which the government falsely claimed to have subsidised gold exports to raise foreign currency. The fraud, allegedly involving Moi, cabinet members, and crooked businessmen, cost the country over 10% of its GDP. In 2007 WikiLeaks exposed secret trusts, shell companies, and shadowy front men in acts of corruption that were later estimated to have cost Kenya $4 billion. Following in the footsteps of Kenyatta, Moi reportedly stole large tracts of public land, awarding some to ministers, mandarins, and military brass hats as part of a system of prebendal political patronage. As Marxist regimes spread in neighbouring Ethiopia and Tanzania, the West regarded Kenya as a bulwark against such ideological influences. Moi thus became a strategic ally during the Cold War. American and British troops were hosted, and, like another Western Cold War client, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Moi presented himself as indispensable to holding the country together, even as both dictators’ cynical manipulation of political divisions made such instability inevitable once they had left power. As he was pushed by the West to adopt a multi-party political system, an embittered Moi felt betrayed by his former patrons for whom he had outlived his strategic usefulness. Moi hosted a mediation process for Sudan which eventually culminated in the independence of South Sudan by 2011. He was also involved in the successful effort to revive the East African Community by 2000. Having left office in 2002 after 24 years in power, Moi retired to his sprawling Kabarak farm – one of seven homes – in Nakuru county, rarely making public appearances. He did, however, continue to influence national politics, with President Mwai Kibaki also appointing him Kenya’s special peace envoy to Sudan in 2007. Moi married Lena Bomett, a fellow teacher, in 1950, but they separated in 1974 (she died in 2004). They brought up eight children together, and a son, Gideon, is currently a Kenyan senator. In his final years, the wheelchairbound Moi’s health began to fail and there were reports of dementia, water in the lungs, and knee problems. He remained a life-long member of the African Island Mission Church, and often liked to portray himself as an ascetic, devout Christian who shunned alcohol and material possessions, and condemned mini­ 119

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skirts and hippies. Paying tribute to his political mentor, Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta – son of the founding president – recently noted that ‘Daniel arap Moi ran a good race, kept the faith, and now he is enjoying his reward in heaven’. It is, however, unlikely that the Almighty will so easily swing open the gates of paradise to such a dyed-in-the-wool autocrat. Based on his ghastly 24­ year record in power, Moi is more likely to end up going the other way. The Guardian (Nigeria), 10 February 2020

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Paul Kagame and Wole Soyinka: The

President and the Playwright

ONE OF THE MOST CURIOUS mutual admiration clubs of recent times has been that between recently re-elected president of the small land-locked Central African state of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, and the Nigerian Nobel literature laureate, Wole Soyinka. In his rich 2006 memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, Soyinka described Kagame as ‘seven foot plus, every inch exuding intelligence and discipline … a formidable force to encounter … one of the continent’s rare breed of leaders’. The Nobel laureate went on to note that ‘Kagame belongs to that uncommon leadership order beside whom one would willingly march into battle’. In 2012, Soyinka was a guest of honour at the celebrations of Rwanda’s ‘golden jubilee’ as an independent nation, during which he praised the country as ‘a model of reconstruction [which] must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people’, before going on to note that ‘Rwanda has indicated that however thin the hope of a community can be, a hero always emerges’. A year later, Soyinka described Rwanda as a ‘paradigm for the continent’ in a talk at Howard University in Washington DC. Kagame returned the favour by delivering the keynote address at a launch of a book of essays honouring Soyinka’s 80th birthday in Accra in 2014, describing the Nobel laureate as ‘an unapologetic exponent of the universality of African values’. Wole Soyinka has been one of the most consistently eloquent campaigners for human rights across Africa over the last six decades: he was detained for 121

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27 months by General Yakubu Gowon’s administration during Nigeria’s civil war, an episode captured in his 1972 prison notes, The Man Died; he wrote a stinging rebuke of autocrats that alluded to Kwame Nkrumah’s repressive rule – Kongi’s Harvest – in 1965; and lampooned Uganda’s Idi Amin, Central African Republic’s ‘Emperor’ Jean-Bédel Bokassa, and Equatorial Guinea’s Macias Nguema in the 1984 drama A Play of Giants. Soyinka was also the most eloquent critic and a formidable activist who was forced to flee General Sani Abacha’s repressive military junta to go into exile in the United States in 1994. He was subsequently sentenced to death in absentia three years later, and returned to Nigeria only after Abacha’s death in 1998. In his satirical 2002 play, King Baabu, the Nobel laureate portrayed Abacha as a bumbling, brainless, brutish buffoon and a semi-literate, greedily corrupt military general who exchanged his military attire for a monarchical robe and a gown. With this stellar fictional and activist background, it is hard to understand the mutual admiration between Soyinka and Kagame, one of Africa’s most repressive rulers. To no one’s surprise, Paul Kagame was re-elected to a third presidential term this month (August 2017) with 98.6% of the vote. The election was scarcely free and fair, as genuine opposition was not allowed to compete against the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ruling party, which uses not just political muscle, but control of key economic sectors, to maintain itself in power. Nine supposedly independent political parties had supported Kagame for president – reminiscent of the five parties that had backed Abacha in 1998, famously dismissed by veteran politician Bola Ige as ‘five fingers of a leprous hand’. The Green Party and an independent were the only opposition candidates in Rwanda’s recent polls, and even they complained of harassment of their members by government officials. In contrast to the vociferous Western condemnation of neighbouring Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza’s changing of the constitution to run for a third presidential term last year (2016), the condoning of Kagame’s similar shenanigans by guiltridden Western donors resulted in a deafening silence in the Rwandan case. Kagame had earlier been prevented from running for president again after two terms, but a ‘spontaneous’ petition had resulted in a 2015 referendum in which 98% of voters handed him another potential 17 years of power, which could see him have five presidential terms and rule until 2034. Only ten people voted against this constitutional amendment in a population of 11 million people! It is unlikely that Kagame – a member of the Tutsi minority – would win a genuinely free and fair election in Rwanda. After the country’s Hutu president Pasteur Bizimungu resigned in 2000 and subsequently formed a political party, 122

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he was arrested two years later and sentenced to 15 years in jail for ‘inciting ethnic violence’, thus ensuring that he could not contest the 2003 presidential election against Kagame. In his defence, Kagame’s supporters rightly note that he and his army halted the 1994 genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people, when powerful members of the international community had spectacularly abdicated their own responsibility: the United States and Britain in particular insisted on the withdrawal of the 2,500-strong United Nations (UN) peacekeeping force in Rwanda which could have stopped the genocide if strengthened, while France trained and armed the génocidaires. Kagame’s supporters further point to high economic growth rates of 8% in the last 17 years; falling poverty and socio-economic inequality; and increased gender equality (with 56% female parliamentarians). Rwanda’s per capita income increased from $150 in 1994 to the current $700, and poverty reportedly fell from 57% in 2006 to 40% in 2014. Kagame’s fans also note that the regime has tackled corruption; attracted foreign investment; created a national airline; kept the streets clean (even banning the use of plastic bags); established the country as a technology hub; and built infrastructure such as roads, a conference centre, and a new airport. It is not only Wole Soyinka who has been infatuated with Kagame. Former US president Bill Clinton – who ironically did the most to prevent any international action during the 1994 Rwandan genocide – and former British premier Tony Blair have also praised Kagame’s ‘visionary leadership’, leaving one to wonder whether they apply different standards in measuring the achievements of African leaders. Kagame’s apparent achievements must be closely scrutinised. He has consistently won presidential polls with over 90% of the vote (95% in 2003; 93% in 2010; and 98% in 2017), acting like a cheating student, awarding himself marks in an exam whose results have been predetermined. Such large presidential majorities are the preserve of dictators such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. They are not how democratic leaders are elected. While Kagame has reportedly kept the streets clean, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini also famously made the trains run on time. Rwanda is a highly militarised state in which soldiers are ubiquitous. Kagame clearly runs a police state in which dissent is brutally suppressed. Human rights organisations and civil society are stifled; opposition parties harassed; and the media muzzled. Even talking of Hutus and Tutsis is regarded as ‘divisionism’, as if such a complex phenomenon as ethnicity can simply be wished away with an autocrat’s magic wand. Though he often likes to portray himself as a media­ 123

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savvy president, Kagame’s regime has clamped down harshly on media freedom. According to the BBC – whose Kinyarwanda service in Rwanda was blocked in 2014 – in the last two decades, an estimated 8 journalists were killed or ‘disappeared’, 11 were sentenced to lengthy jail terms, and 33 have been forced to flee the country into exile. Many journalists thus tend to self-censor (though there are some critical call-in radio programmes), and investigative journalists are frequently harassed. Last February, for example, the police seized the computers of two journalists of the East African newspaper. Critics such as Belgian academic Filip Reyntjens have also questioned the fiddling of Rwandan government economic figures to make the regime look better. Part of Rwanda’s economic performance is further accounted for by the fact that this growth was from a low base, and fuelled by Western guilt at having passively watched a genocide and prevented international action to stop it. Half of Rwanda’s budget a decade ago was accounted for by foreign aid; it remains about a fifth today. Like many African countries, Rwanda has also experienced growth without transformative economic development. About 80% of its population still lives below the World Bank’s poverty line of $3.10 a day. In a fit of folie de grandeur, Rwanda is sometimes described as the ‘Singapore of Africa’. The comparisons between Kagame and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew are, however, pure fantasy: though Lee was autocratic, he was also a genuine Cambridge-trained intellectual who transformed his city-state into one of the world’s most developed economies. Paralleling domestic repression, Kagame’s regime has also been accused of sponsoring assassinations of its opponents abroad. His former intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya was killed in a plush Sandton hotel in Johannesburg in 2014. Though Kigali officially denied involvement, Kagame noted shortly after the murder: ‘You can’t betray Rwanda and not get punished for it. Anyone, even those still alive, will reap the consequences.’ This chilling warning seemed to equate betraying the country with betraying its leader: a common trait of fellow autocrats like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni. Aside from his repressive domestic role, Kagame has played a destabilising regional role. Several UN reports have accused his soldiers – and those of Uganda – of looting the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s mineral resources, after Kigali and Kampala invaded the country twice from 1997, becoming embroiled in a conflict that has resulted in over 3 million deaths. An estimated 200,000 people – including, doubtless, innocent civilians – were killed when Kagame’s troops entered the eastern Congo in 1996–1997 in pursuit of former 124

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genocidal militias who were launching attacks into Rwanda. Kagame has also sought to ‘launder’ his image by hosting the African Union summit in July 2016, and chairing a report to reform the continental body. Wole Soyinka once described Nigeria – under the brutal regime of General Abacha – as enjoying the ‘peace of the graveyard’. Rwanda, under Kagame, now appears to be in a similar situation. Though one should acknowledge the progress that the country has made 23 years after a traumatic genocide, Kagame’s repressive rule could paradoxically make another genocide more, and not less, likely. By establishing a system that relies for its survival on a man suffering from a ‘messiah complex’ rather than on the more solid foundations of stable institutions, that ruler, through his demise or elimination, could bring to the surface all the pent-up frustration, resentment, and anger of the suppressed Hutu majority. The seeds of the system’s destruction may, in fact, lie within it. Kagame once noted that if he had not been able to groom a successor by 2017, ‘it means that I have not created capacity for a post-me Rwanda. I see this as a personal failure’. He is, of course, correct. The mistake that autocrats like Kagame often make is to assume their own personal immortality. The big puzzle, however, remains why Soyinka, an activist Nobel literature laureate – who famously noted that ‘the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny’ – and who has spent a six-decade career championing human rights across Africa, cannot see through the myth of a developmental dictator, and condemn this repressive system unequivocally. What explains this curious relationship between the president and the playwright? The Guardian (Nigeria), 21 August 2017.

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Qaddafi’s Monarchical Delusions

Current events in Libya suggest that the end of the regime of the world’s longest-ruling autocrat, Muammar Qaddafi, is near. It is worth tracing the life and times of this eccentric despot. After seizing power in an act of regicide against King Idris in 1969, Qaddafi initially modelled his rule on that of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the celebrated champion of Pan-Arabism. Overcome by emotion, Qaddafi fainted twice during Nasser’s funeral in Cairo in 1970. As the martyred South African liberation heroine Ruth First noted in an insightful 1974 study, Libya: The Elusive Revolution, the contradictions of Qaddafi ’s revolution were many: he simultaneously pursued a social revolution and a revival of Islamic fundamentalism; 11 young soldiers held power while claiming to represent a mass-based popular revolution; the Libyan leader condemned the corruption of the monarchical ancien régime, while cutting lucrative deals with global oil cartels; and his traditional, religious approach led him to live in a Bedouin tent and to criticise Western decadence, even as he relied on its technology and companies to finance his domestic revolution and foreign adventures. Qaddafi ’s Green Book of 1975 rejected liberal democracy in favour of what he described as direct democracy through ‘popular committees’, though these were accused of terrorising the population. In his early rule, the Libyan leader achieved some social progress through his oil wealth, and 1.5 million foreigners flocked to his country from Africa and the Middle East. In the politics of the Maghreb, Qaddafi ’s role was mercurial. Just before his country took over the presidency of the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA) in 2003,

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the Libyan leader said: ‘It’s time to put the union in the freezer’. A year later, Tripoli announced that it was leaving the AMU after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) offered rapid reaction training to Maghrebi states. Only pleas from Morocco and Tunisia prevented Qaddafi from carrying out his threat. Qaddafi would prove equally controversial south of the Sahara. He became diplomatically isolated in Africa after his 1980 military intervention in Chad, losing support among his peers for supporting dissident groups against ‘neo­ colonial’ regimes on the continent. Qaddafi sent troops to bolster the regime of the brutal Ugandan autocrat and fellow Muslim General Idi Amin between 1972 and 1979. In the 1980s, the self-styled Libyan revolutionary provided military training to the warlords of two of West Africa’s most vicious rebel groups in the 1990s: Liberia’s Charles Taylor and Sierra Leone’s Foday Sankoh. He also reportedly trained and armed Tuareg rebels who triggered a conflict in northern Mali in 1990. Qaddafi would eventually swap his pan-Arab robes for pan-African garments in anger at the lack of Arab support for Libya after Western-inspired United Nations (UN) economic and travel sanctions were imposed on Tripoli in 1992. By contrast with the muted Arab response, strong black African backing was offered in his hour of need. Indeed, the sanctions on Tripoli were eventually lifted in 1999 with the help of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, who mediated with Washington and London. Qaddafi sought to become the heir of Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah’s pan-African vision. He was the moving force behind the transformation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) into the African Union (AU), hosting several meetings in his home town of Sirte. At the AU summit in Ghana in 2007, Qaddafi championed a ‘United States of Africa’ with an all-African army, a common monetary union, as well as a central bank. But the eccentric Brother Leader’s vision was, like Nkrumah’s, rejected by most African leaders. Qaddafi also used his oil wealth to buy influence within the AU by paying the debts of member states to the organisation. With strong leaders like Mbeki and Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo having left the political stage, Qaddafi finally became chair of the AU for the first time in January 2009. This was largely a wasted year, as the Libyan leader continued to pursue his quixotic federalist dreams without the support of African leaders. As AU chair, Qaddafi was also accused of coddling fellow military putschists in Guinea, Mauritania, and Madagascar. As his four-decade autocratic reign appears to be coming to an ignominious 127

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end, Qaddafi, the self-proclaimed ‘King of Kings’, seems to be drifting into delusional madness. Having toppled a monarch to promote social justice, he recently compared his 41-year rule to that of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, wondering why similar protests were not being raised about her long reign. Coming from a lower social class, Qaddafi had always aspired to greatness and coveted King Idris’s crown. A social climber and arriviste, he donned ill-fitting borrowed royal robes to which his birth did not entitle him. As the fin de régime approaches, the Libyan despot appears to be a poor parody of the very system that he toppled. Mail & Guardian (South Africa), 4 March 2011.

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Obama and Africa: Dreams from

Our Ancestors

BARACK OBAMA, DREAMS from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Three Rivers Press, 1995); Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Crown Publishers, 2006); David Mendell, Obama: From Promise to Power (HarperCollins, 2007). When Barack (‘blessed’) Obama – the child of a Kenyan father and Kansan mother – was elected as the first African American president of the United States in November 2008, a wave of ‘Obamamania’ swept across the African continent, its diaspora, and the world. Former South African president Nelson Mandela noted: ‘Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place’; Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki said: ‘The victory of Senator Obama is our own victory because of his roots here in Kenya … we are full of pride for his success’; South African president Kgalema Motlanthe opined: ‘Your election … carries with it hope for millions … of people of … African descent both in Africa and in the diaspora’; Nigerian president Umaru Yar’Adua noted: ‘Obama’s election has finally broken the greatest barrier of prejudice in human history. For us in Nigeria, we have a great lesson to draw from this historic event’; while Ghanaian former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan exclaimed: ‘Obama’s victory demonstrates America’s extraordinary capacity to renew itself ’. Six months into his tenure, Barack Obama’s visit to Ghana in July 2009 was a twenty-four-hour sojourn that marked the second trip to Africa by America’s 129

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first black president. This followed a brief stop-over in Egypt a month earlier. In Accra, Obama delivered a major address to the Ghanaian parliament on development and democracy in which he stressed the interdependence of Africa with the rest of the world. Barack also supported African ‘agency’ in resolving its own problems, with the US acting as a partner rather than a patron. He noted his own strong identification with Africa by referring to his Kenyan father three times in the speech and observing: ‘I have the blood of Africa within me.’ His message was one of ‘good governance’ (though his earlier praise of the deceased tyrant of oil-rich Gabon, Omar Bongo, as a peacemaker in June 2009, and his embrace of autocratic oil-rich Arab sheikhs appear to contradict this); increased opportunity; better health (announcing a vague $63 billion plan to fight AIDS and malaria); and conflict resolution. The speech essentially noted that Africa needed ‘strong institutions’ rather than ‘strong men’. Obama ended by reminding Africans that Martin Luther King Jr had been inspired in his continued pursuit of the American civil rights struggle by attending Ghana’s independence celebrations in 1957. In Ghana, Obama also visited the Cape Coast Castle: a major slave post with suffocating dungeons from which human cargo was transported to Europe and the Americas. The symbolism of the first African American president at the site of a tragic and sordid historical monument in a trade in which an estimated 2 million Africans perished was particularly poignant. This visit could, however, also have revived feelings within sections of America’s black community that Obama was not a ‘real’ African American, since his ancestors – his father – came by aeroplane from Kenya to study in America, and not on a slave ship from Africa. Obama has now made two presidential visits to Africa – Accra and Cairo – both of which resemble refuelling stops on the way to or from more strategic destinations. His aides, however, insisted that the Ghana trip was linked to the Group of Eight (G8) summit that the president attended in Italy in the same week, at which issues of critical importance to Africa – food security, climate change, world trade, and the global financial crisis – were discussed. The idea was to use Ghana – which has held five multiparty elections between 1992 and 2008 – as a role model of democratic governance and civil society in promoting development in Africa. The choice of Ghana was also not disinterested: the country is expected to become an important oil exporter by 2010. About twothirds of recent US trade with Africa has been with oil-rich Nigeria, Angola, and Gabon. 130

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Even before the Ghana trip in 2009, Obama had visited Kenya, South Africa, and Darfuri refugees in Chad as a US senator in 2006. In his ancestral homeland of Kenya, he was enthusiastically received like a rock star and returning ‘son of the soil’. His condemnation of human rights abuses and corruption in Africa was widely applauded. As a student in the US, Barack had taken part in anti­ apartheid demonstrations which had helped to raise his political consciousness. I went to listen to Obama speak in Cape Town on his senatorial safari in August 2006 during a visit in which he criticised then president Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS policies. During his Cape Town speech, Obama noted the influence of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr on the anti-apartheid struggle, and called for South Africa and the US to assist poorer countries to ‘build a vibrant civil society’. I was, however, somewhat disappointed with Obama’s performance. He seemed like a machine politician, and dodged difficult questions, sometimes giving vacuous responses. Barack’s most insightful biographer is American journalist David Mendell, who has followed him closely since his time as a state legislator in Chicago and covered his 2006 Africa visit. Mendell confirmed that Barack was exhausted from jet-lag during the Cape Town speech. I subsequently followed the rise and rise of Obama, and witnessed some of the most eloquent and inspirational performances given by any politician. His soaring, often biblical campaign oratory promising a vision of a better America espoused by prophets like Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, who had preceded him, provided hope and succour to a pre-recession US that was desperately in need of both. Barack often appears to have a profound sense of justice and empathy, and has sought to speak for the voiceless and the powerless – people who are usually invisible to mainstream American politicians. As he himself put it, he wants to ‘give voice to the voiceless, and power to the powerless’. In understanding the symbolism of Obama for the continent, it is essential to revisit his African heritage. His elegant 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, describes a painful quest for identity and a vulnerability triggered by the death of an arrogant, impulsive but determined Kenyan father (in a car crash in 1982) who left his family when Barack was only two years old. Obama met his father only one other time when he was ten. He idolised his father (a goat-herder as a boy) and they both studied at Harvard University. But Barack’s father – a senior civil servant in Kenya – had died in penury, an alcoholic and abusive character who failed to fulfil either his personal ambitions or his family responsibilities. Obama was therefore determined to correct these flaws. Becoming president 131

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of the US was born out of a determination to fulfil personal ambitions that his father had clearly failed to do. The love and attention that Barack devotes to his two daughters, Malia and Sasha, appear to be a conscious attempt to make up for his own lack of paternal affection. Obama clearly identifies with Africa, as is evident from his journey of selfdiscovery to Kenya as a 26-year-old described in his 1995 memoir. As he put it: ‘The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.’ But his father’s legacy is also a heavy burden that the young, sensitive Barack is struggling to comprehend. He is clearly caught in a cultural limbo, feeling neither completely American nor African; neither completely black nor white. As he prepares to fly to Africa for the first time, Obama describes himself as a ‘Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers’. On his way to Africa, Barack tours historic sites in Europe and makes the startling observation: ‘It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful … It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.’ None of the previous 43 American presidents of European ancestry could have made such a statement, nor listed Martiniquan Frantz Fanon, as Barack does, as one of their main intellectual influences. This is what makes Obama’s ascent to the White House so phenomenal, and of such great interest to Africa. But like many African Americans, before Obama arrives in his ancestral home, he has a somewhat romanticised view of Africa which he notes ‘had become an idea more than an actual place, a new promised land, full of ancient traditions and sweeping vistas, noble struggles and talking drums’. Once in Kenya, Barack feels his father’s seemingly ubiquitous presence. He is nostalgic about Obama senior’s life and times, seeking to recreate, through this visit, a sometimes mythical past that he never knew but so badly needs to understand and feel a part of. It is with great trepidation and anxiety that Barack approached this visit, as if fearing that his long quest for identity in America would once again be frustrated. Having struggled to become an African American in order to overcome his painful fatherless childhood, it is as if he now wanted to don the robes of an African identity in order to reconnect with his ancestral homeland. In Kenya, Obama meets, and enjoys the extravagant hospitality and warmth of, his large extended Kenyan family; he speaks a bit of his native Luo; he is exposed to the corruption and ethnic tensions of Kenyan politics; he rides in matatus (rickety taxis); he eats goat curry and ugali; he goes on safari, and discovers and 132

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appreciates the beauty of the historical site of the biblical Garden of Eden; he identifies with, and makes connections between, black Americans in Chicago ghettos and Kenyans in dirt-poor Nairobi shantytowns (as well as with poor Indonesians from his childhood in Jakarta); and he is appalled by the continuing pernicious socio-economic impact of British colonialism on Kenya. In a final moving scene in the ancestral rural hometown of Siaya (where Obama bathes in the open air and uses pit-latrines), Barack breaks down and cries by his father’s grave. He is finally ‘home’, writing – perhaps a bit sentimentally – about no longer feeling watched, and not having awkward questions raised about his name or his hair. He had read about Dedan Kimathi, the great Kenyan liberation fighter during the Mau Mau struggle against British colonialism in the 1950s, and could now put a place to the legendary names he had learned about in America. Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui famously noted that Obama’s parents’ divorce could turn out historically to be ‘one of the most significant matrimonial breakups in history’. If Obama’s parents had stayed together, observed Mazrui, he would probably not have become US president. He would have grown up instead more African than American, and might have been ‘another African sending remittances home to Kenya’. His father may even have moved the family permanently back to Kenya, where Obama senior returned to live. The stability that sustained Barack’s political ambitions appears to have been provided by three strong women: his Harvard-trained African American wife, Michelle, and his white mother – Ann Dunham (who died of cancer in November 1995) – and white grandmother – Madelyn Dunham (who died two days before her grandson’s historic presidential victory in November 2008). But despite his visits to Africa, Obama himself has sometimes been guilty of reinforcing similar stereotypes of the continent, which he condemned in his 1995 memoir and Accra speech of 2009. He talks about Africa in broadbrushed Afro-pessimistic strokes in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope: ‘There are times when considering the plight of Africa – the millions racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of twelve-year-old guerrillas who know nothing but war-wielding machetes or AK-47s – I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair’. Despite Obama’s obvious identification with Africa, it must always be remembered that he is the president of America and not of Africa. Barack thus has other pressing policy priorities, which will undoubtedly take precedence over the continent’s problems. These include reviving America’s economy and 133

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securing a viable health-care plan; ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; making peace in the Middle East; repairing relations with European allies; fighting nuclear non-proliferation in North Korea and Iran; and engaging an increasingly wealthy China and erratically assertive Russia. In spite of the great expectations unleashed by his historic election in some African quarters that Obama will act as a messiah in increasing US support for Africa, even a black Gulliver will be held down by powerful Lilliputian legislators who control America’s purse strings. There is still a lack of a powerful, cohesive domestic constituency on Africa in the US which can wield the influence of the Israel lobby, even though the Jewish American population is much smaller than the 30 million African Americans, who account for 12% of the country’s population. Israel receives $3 billion of US aid a year, while Egypt obtains $2 billion a year to remain friends with Israel. Forty-eight sub-Saharan African countries, including some of the poorest in the world, share less than $1 billion annually – the clearest sign of the political nature of American aid. In contrast to policy towards Israel, US policy towards Africa is not based on consistent Congressional support and often involves seeking ad hoc coalitions in support of specific policies. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) currently has only one senator out of 100, and 43 out of 435 members in the US House of Representatives. It is thus important that pro-Africa lobbyists work closely with progressive legislators and Washington-based interest groups to influence Obama’s policies towards Africa, as they successfully did in imposing sanctions on apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. The tens of thousands of highly educated Africans in America must also be mobilised in building a viable constituency for Africa. The main outlines so far of Obama’s early Africa policy, gleaned from his senatorial career and presidential campaign, include support for the United Nations/African Union peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s Darfur region; increasing aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); supporting South Africa and Nigeria to play a leadership role in Africa; and pushing for reform of the UN, an institution that many Africans see as vital to their security and economic development. Johnnie Carson, a respected African American former ambassador to Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Uganda, has been appointed as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Building on his Ghana trip, Obama must support more strongly the role of UN peacekeeping in Africa, as well as the strengthening of African regional organisations and national health systems. Washington should play a greater role 134

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in annulling Africa’s $290 billion debt. America must also reduce its deleterious agricultural subsidies to its farmers ($108 billion in 2005), and allow free access to its markets for Africa’s agricultural products. This must be done not just out of some altruistic feeling of charity, but – as Obama himself noted in his speech in Accra – to take advantage of the potential of trade with an African market of nearly one billion consumers. It is these issues in which the first African American president must invest some political capital. Otherwise, these sporadic trips to Africa will become mere symbolic photo opportunities that feel the continent’s pain but yield no concrete benefits for Obama’s ancestral homeland. In the true spirit of our ancestors, Africans must always welcome Barack back home, but should continue to hold his feet to the communal fire. Africa Review of Books, July 2009.

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Obama, Clinton, and Africa

AS CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS take place in the United States tomorrow (4 November 2014), Democratic president Barack Obama faces the prospect of Republicans, who already control the House of Representatives, seizing control of the Senate. A similar political earthquake took place under Obama’s Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton in 1994, forcing him to ‘triangulate’ and rule as a ‘moderate’ Republican. Obama and Clinton are. in fact, cut from the same cloth: both are the most intelligent and eloquent politicians of their generation, ruthless pragmatists prepared to sacrifice core principles on the altar of political survival. Both are the only Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt (1933–1945) to have secured re­ election. Both have faced fire-spitting Republican ideologues whose venomous attacks have sometimes bordered on the irrational. African American Nobel literature laureate Toni Morrison once described Clinton as America’s first ‘black’ president, failing to anticipate a genuinely black president in her own lifetime. But there are also obvious differences between Obama and Clinton. While Clinton revels in the glad-handing and cut and thrust of politics, Obama has been notoriously reclusive, failing to do the schmoozing of Washington’s political class that his job requires. While Clinton’s folksy Southern drawl and ability to communicate complex ideas and connect with diverse audiences have endeared him to ordinary Americans, Obama’s professorial aloofness has often been derided as elitist. While Clinton – the notoriously philandering governor

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of Arkansas – was involved in a sex scandal with a White House intern in 1998, Obama appears to be squeaky-clean. While Clinton oversaw a period of peace and prosperity, Obama inherited two wars and a broken economy. There are, however, similarities in the Africa policies of both presidents. Clinton and Obama continued the neglect of the continent of their predecessors. Both undertook African diplomatic safaris at the fag end of their presidencies but did not expend much political capital on Africa. It is worth examining their similar legacies in the areas of democratisation, conflict management, and development. A myth has developed that Clinton was one of Africa’s best friends, based on two brief African diplomatic safaris in 1998 and 2000, during which he felt the continent’s pain. He had earlier announced his desire to enlarge democracies worldwide rather than keep tyrants in power. But ‘enlargement’ was soon replaced by American support for a gallery of cantankerous warlords that Clinton arrogantly dubbed Africa’s ‘new leaders’: Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi, Eritrea’s Isais Afwerki, and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. No sooner had Clinton anointed them as Africa’s model rulers than these leaders went to war against each other: Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a bloody border war between 1998 and 2000 that resulted in over 100,000 fatalities, while Uganda and Rwanda – having invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1998 – soon fell out over strategy and the spoils of war, and turned their guns on each other. Following a military coup in Egypt by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in July 2013 and the subsequent killing of nearly a thousand Muslim Brotherhood supporters, Obama refused to call this unconstitutional change of government a coup d’état. He instead continued to provide $1.5 billion to an autocratic regime that has curbed demonstrations, muzzled the media and civil society, and reportedly used US-built tanks to shell civilian areas in Sinai. Contradicting his famous speech in Ghana in 2009, Obama has now clearly decided to support a ‘strong man’ in Cairo rather than help build ‘strong institutions’. In the area of conflict management, Clinton inaccurately blamed a botched mission in October 1993 (in which 18 American soldiers and 1,000 Somalis died) on the United Nations (UN) and withdrew all 4,000 American troops from Somalia, effectively crippling the mission. Six months later, he forced the withdrawal of most of a 2,500-strong UN peacekeeping mission from Rwanda, which could clearly have been bolstered – as Clinton later admitted – to prevent the 1994 genocide. He thereby blocked any effective response to the killing of 800,000 people. Obama continued the securitisation of US policy under the 137

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truculent George W Bush, from the Sahel to Somalia, later expressing regret at the anarchic state of Libya following the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention in 2011. In the area of development, the US Congress passed the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in 2000, granting greater access to African goods in selected sectors of the American market. But 75% of American imports from Africa still consist of oil today. Obama’s ‘Power Africa’ has promised electricity to 20 million Africans but remains largely unfunded. However, he has continued the generous funding of AIDS programmes started under George W Bush, and shown leadership over the current Ebola crisis. Nevertheless, neither Obama nor Clinton has been able to transform America’s ‘malign neglect’ of Africa. Business Day (South Africa), 3 November 2014.

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Obama’s Six Deadly Sins

THE MOST POWERFUL MAN in the world, Barack Obama, is visiting South Africa, and a controversy has erupted at the University of Johannesburg following the decision to award him an honorary doctorate. Students, trade unions and Muslim groups have voiced their protest. It is important, under these circumstances, to present a solid case for the prosecution, acting as a counsel for damnation in ‘trying’ the first black president of the US for six ‘crimes’ of omission and commission. The first crime for which Obama will be tried is rank hypocrisy. Two years before becoming president in 2008, in his book The Audacity of Hope, he sought to educate Americans about their country’s past sins, exposing its historical ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in Latin America and the Caribbean; its proxy wars that propped up corrupt autocrats throughout the Third World; and its ‘extraordinary rendition’ of terror suspects to countries in which they could be tortured. As he noted: ‘Manifest destiny also meant bloody and violent conquest – of Native American tribes forcibly removed from their lands and of the Mexican army defending its territory. It was a conquest that, like slavery, contradicted America’s founding principles and tended to be justified in explicitly racist terms, a conquest that American mythology has always had difficulty fully absorbing but that other countries recognised for what it was – an exercise in raw power.’ Before becoming president, Obama also condemned the truculent George W

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Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a ‘dumb war’. At the time, Obama showed a clear understanding of the need to address the root causes of poverty that allow terrorists to find fertile ground for recruiting followers. Under his leadership, Obama’s administration stopped using the widely despised ‘war on terror’ slogan which marked Bush’s crusading militancy. For a while, Obama seemed to have restored his country’s reputation across the globe. Some of Obama’s foreign policy actions have, however, now come to resemble his predecessor’s homicidal belligerence. Obama’s first military action as president, within days of taking office, was to sanction two missile strikes against Pakistan which killed 22 people, including women and children. Three more US missile strikes a month later, in February 2009, killed another 55 people. In his first three years in office, Obama ordered targeted assassinations of suspected terrorists through an average of one drone strike every four days, compared to Bush’s average of one strike every 40 days. While Bush ordered about 50 drone strikes in eight years, Obama has ordered 375 strikes in four and a half. These actions have mostly been conducted in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and by last month they had killed an estimated 3,500 people, including hundreds of civilians, who have accounted for an estimated 10%–15% of fatalities. In September 2009, Obama also ordered the assassination in Somalia by US commandos of the alleged ringleader of an al-Qaeda cell in Kenya. As a result of these actions, critics have noted that Obama has come to represent ‘Bush with a smile’. The second ‘crime’ for which Obama should be charged is continuing Bush’s militarisation of US engagement with Africa. ‘Extraordinary rendition’ of suspected terrorists abroad has continued; 1,500 American soldiers remain in Djibouti to track terrorists, while officials of America’s Germany-based Africa Command (Africom) have continued to swarm around the continent in search of enemies. Africom now spends $300 million (R3.03 billion) a year on a hundred training programmes and exercises in 35 African countries. The Pentagon is using the command to intervene on the continent to fight terrorism and, in the case of the Libyan intervention to topple Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, in order to promote ‘regime change’. Africa should be wary of a self-appointed American policeman offering to patrol the continent in a vainglorious quest to eliminate ‘mad mullahs’. The Obama administration has also dispatched drones to Somalia and Mali. With a continuing focus on a militarised US policy, Obama drastically cut AIDS funding to Africa by $200m last year. 140

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The third charge against Obama is condoning and coddling autocrats despite his pledge during a July 2009 speech in Accra to promote ‘strong institutions, not strong men’. A month earlier, Obama delivered a speech in Cairo in which he spoke out forcefully for democratic values in Islamic countries, but then diluted his message by arguing that ‘each nation gives life to this principle in its own way’. He thus appeared to support autocratic stability over democratic freedom, and as Lebanese American intellectual Fouad Ajami observed: ‘The Arab liberals were quick to read Barack Obama, and they gave up on him. They saw his comfort with the autocracies, his eagerness to “engage” and conciliate the dictators.’ The Obama administration continued to provide Hosni Mubarak’s 30­ year mummified dictatorship in Egypt with $1.5 billion a year, more than the assistance provided to all 48 sub-Saharan African countries combined. Clearly fearing the uncertainty of a possible Islamist takeover in Cairo, Obama spoke out of both sides of his mouth during the 2011 ‘Afro-Arab Spring’ until it became clear that the political wind was blowing the way of the protesters. Just before Tunisia’s 23-year autocracy of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was toppled in 2011, Obama’s administration had approved $12m in military aid to the regime. Not wanting America to be caught on the wrong side of history again, Obama belatedly threw in his lot with the Egyptian people. But despite his lofty rhetoric following Mubarak’s ousting, this was an unedifying spectacle. Autocratic regimes in oil-rich Gabon and Equatorial Guinea also remain staunch US clients. The fourth ‘crime’ for which Obama must be charged is turning a celebration of peace – his Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo in December 2009 – into a justification for war. Obama was controversially made a Nobel laureate after only nine months in office. His speech was delivered in the shadow of two inherited American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the ennobled president explaining why it was ‘necessary’ to use force to bring about peace. Sanctimoniously employing the concept of ‘just wars’ to explain why he could not be guided by fellow Nobel laureate and civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s example alone, he noted that non-violence could not have halted tyrants such as Adolf Hitler. In stark contrast to his earlier recognition of the historical imperial actions of the US, Obama glorified his country for having ‘helped underwrite global security for more than six decades’. He went on, rather inappropriately in the context of a Nobel peace speech, to criticise Iranian 141

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and North Korean nuclear ambitions, while reserving his own country’s right to act unilaterally, thus echoing Bush’s doctrine of the ‘pre-emptive’ use of force. The fifth ‘crime’ for which Obama should be prosecuted is peddling negative stereotypes about his ancestral home, with his father having been a Kenyan citizen. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama talks about Africa in broadbrushed, Afro-pessimistic strokes: ‘There are times when considering the plight of Africa – the millions racked by Aids, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of 12-year-old guerrillas who know nothing but war wielding machetes or AK-47s – I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair.’ The African references in Obama’s Nobel speech in 2009 perpetuated similar stereotypes, with the Kenyan-Kansan referring to Somalia as a ‘failed state’ of terrorism, piracy and famine, as well as talking of genocide in Darfur, rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and repression in Zimbabwe. The sixth ‘crime’ for which Obama must be charged is historical ignorance and lavishing praise on an anti-African racist. In his 2009 Nobel speech, Obama controversially referred to Albert Schweitzer (who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952) as among the ‘giants of history’, placing him alongside previous peace laureates such as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and American war hero General George Marshall. Schweitzer was a French German doctor who set up a mission hospital in Gabon in 1913 to help the local population cure diseases and convert African ‘pagans’ to Christianity. He worked tirelessly in Gabon – with some spells in Europe – until his death in 1965. Schweitzer, however, is widely viewed as a racist who frequently referred to black Africans as ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’. As he put it: ‘The native moves under patriarchal authority. He does not understand dealing with an office, but dealing with a man.’ Schweitzer also despised Islam – the religion of Obama’s grandfather – dismissing it as having ‘never produced any thinking about the world and mankind which penetrated to the depths’. As Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui – himself, ironically, the Albert Schweitzer professor at the State University of New York – noted about the German doctor: ‘He could be accused of behaving as if the only good African was a sick one.’ Despite Obama’s sporadic diplomatic safaris to his ancestral continent, his Africa policy has represented more continuity with, rather than change from, a discredited past. In spite of the pretty poetry heard during the 2008 US presidential campaign by the most cosmopolitan and worldly of the 44 individuals to have occupied the White House, Obama has ruled in pragmatic 142

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prose. He is a dyed-in-the-wool politician who has consistently demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice core principles at the altar of political survival. For his six ‘deadly sins’, Obama will surely suffer the curse of Africa’s ancestors. The East African (Kenya), 20 July 2013.

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Obama, Gandhi, and Egypt

THE RECENT REVOLUTION BY millions of peaceful protesters in Egypt that toppled the thirty-year dictatorship of the American-backed autocrat Hosni Mubarak has been nothing short of breath-taking. Following Mubarak’s departure, United States president Barack Obama praised the ‘moral force of non-violence’ and reminisced about ‘Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice’. Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha (soul force) non-violence methods had, of course, been honed while fighting discrimination against the Indian community in South Africa. Gandhi had lived in the country for 21 years until 1914, when he returned to his homeland to use non-violence methods to destroy the mighty British Empire by 1947. In his statement on recent events in Egypt, Obama also quoted his fellow Nobel peace laureate and disciple of Gandhian non-violence, Martin Luther King Jr, who had attended Ghana’s independence celebrations in 1957. That country’s first leader, Kwame Nkrumah – dubbed the ‘Gandhi of Ghana’ – would himself take an Egyptian wife in an act of matrimonial pan-Africanism. In Accra, the African American civil rights stalwart King had noted: ‘There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.’ During his own Nobel prize speech in Oslo in 2009, Obama paid homage to both Gandhi and King. Another Nobel peace laureate, Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat (1970–1981), had also been inspired by Gandhi. As Sadat wrote in his 1978 autobiography: ‘I was struck by his character and fell in love with his image. I began to imitate him. I took off my clothes, covered myself from the waist down with an apron,

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made myself a spindle, and withdrew to a solitary nook on the roof of our house in Cairo.’ In June 2009, Obama delivered a speech in Cairo in which he spoke out forcefully for democratic values in Islamic countries, but then diluted his message by arguing that ‘each nation gives life to this principle in its own way’. During another speech in Accra a month later, he noted that Africa needed ‘strong institutions’ rather than ‘strong men’. Obama thus appeared to support democracy strongly in sub-Saharan Africa, while preferring to support autocratic stability over democratic freedom in the Arab world. As Lebanese American intellectual Fouad Ajami observed: ‘The Arab liberals were quick to read Barack Obama, and they gave up on him. They saw his comfort with the autocracies, his eagerness to “engage” and conciliate the dictators.’ The Obama administration continued to provide Mubarak’s Egypt with $1.5 billion a year, more than the annual assistance provided to all 48 sub-Saharan African countries. Clearly fearing the uncertainty of a possible Islamist takeover in Cairo, Obama spoke out of both sides of his mouth during the recent crisis until it became clear that the political wind was blowing the way of the protesters. As veteran British journalist Robert Fisk noted: ‘Calls for stability and an “orderly” transition of power were, in fact, appeals for Mubarak to stay in power.’ Despite the pretty poetry heard during the 2008 presidential campaign by the most cosmopolitan and worldly individual to occupy the White House, Obama has so far ruled in pragmatic prose. He is very much a dyed-in-the­ wool politician, cut from the same cloth as his Democratic party predecessor, Bill Clinton. Just before Tunisia’s 23-year-long tyranny of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was recently toppled, Obama’s administration had approved $12 million in military aid to the regime. Not wanting America to be caught again on the wrong side of history, Obama belatedly threw in his lot with the Egyptian people. But despite his lofty rhetoric following Mubarak’s ouster, this has been an unedifying spectacle. A line in Obama’s 2009 Nobel speech may unwittingly provide what could well become the epitaph to his own presidency: ‘Even those of us with the best of intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us.’ Barack’s instincts for being a force for good in the world have often been diverted by his country’s imperial temptations. One of Obama’s great heroes, Mahatma Gandhi, started the chain reaction that led to the liberation of Africa and Asia through his successful struggle for the liberation of India in 1947. It is the torch of liberation that Gandhi handed to Martin Luther King to wage the successful civil rights movement in America 145

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which in turn made it possible today for Obama himself to become the most powerful man on earth. Another fellow Nobel peace laureate and a third hero of Obama’s, Nelson Mandela, paid a glowing tribute to the Mahatma’s legacy in 1992: ‘Gandhiji was a South African and his memory deserves to be cherished now and in the post-apartheid era … Gandhian philosophy may be a key to human survival in the twenty-first century.’ Satyagraha was born in Africa, exported to Asia, and used to destroy European imperialism. Could the power of non-violence resistance and civic disobedience now be used to promote the democratisation of Africa and the Middle East? Business Day (South Africa), 8 March 2011.

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Obama’s Africa Legacy

IN ELEVEN DAYS, BARACK Obama’s eight-year presidency will be over. When the Kenyan-Kansan was elected the first black president of the United States in 2008, a wave of ‘Obamamania’ swept across Africa and its diaspora. By the time Obama visited Africa in 2013, the magic had worn off. The unrealistic expectations that the US president would transform the continent’s fortunes had not even come close to fruition. Obama’s Africa policy was based on four pillars: democratic governance; conflict management; economic growth and development; and access to quality health and education. But these became crumbling pillars built on rickety foundations of crass self-interest and empty symbolism. Obama continued several of the truculent George W Bush’s most egregious policies, which militarised America’s engagement with the continent. Two thousand US soldiers remained in Djibouti to track terrorists; autocratic regimes in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea as well as in Egypt, Morocco, Uganda, Rwanda, and Ethiopia remained staunch US clients, rendering Obama’s 2009 Accra pledge to support ‘strong institutions, not strong men’ meaningless. America’s Germany-based Africa Command (Africom) still roams the continent in a seemingly endless ‘war on terror’. The Obama administration in fact oversaw one of the largest military expansions into Africa: establishing small bases and outposts for drones, surveillance, air-bases, special forces, or port facilities in Kenya, Uganda, Chad, Central African Republic (CAR), South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Senegal. 147

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More positively, the Obama administration provided support to peacekeeping missions in Africa and contributed to peacemaking efforts in the Great Lakes and Horn of Africa. Rather than supporting French neo­ colonial actions in countries like Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, and CAR, however, the US president could have lent greater support to regional-led United Nations peacekeeping efforts. In 2014, Obama described the aftermath of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Libya intervention, three years earlier, as his ‘biggest foreign policy regret’, bemoaning the failure to plan for post-conflict reconstruction. Instability from Libya soon spread across the Sahel into Mali. This was effectively Obama’s mini-Iraq: acephalous Libya is now characterised by rival governments, armed groups, violent abductions, arbitrary killings, and 300,000 internally displaced persons. In the socio-economic sphere, the American-led G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition created much fewer jobs than the 650,000 it had promised. Various US programmes, however, contributed to improving education for children across the continent. Obama also inaugurated a Young African Leaders Initiative through which 500 African youths under the age of 35 (Mandela Washington Fellows) are annually provided with six weeks of intensive executive leadership training. In the area of health, Obama increased the number of people receiving treatment for HIV/AIDS from 1.7 million in 2008 to 6.7 million by 2013. His administration also actively supported victims of Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. In August 2014, Obama hosted 40 African leaders in Washington DC in the first ever US–Africa summit. This meeting was, however, effectively a talking shop that did not produce any concrete results. Obama’s signature policy – ‘Power Africa’ – was proudly touted. But as he leaves office, this $9.7 billion project to double electricity to 20 million African households has left the continent in the dark: less than 5% of new power has been generated at 400 megawatts, way short of the target of 10,000 megawatts. Much of Africa’s exports to the US also remain dominated by oil and gas. As an individual, Obama has remained widely popular across Africa. But the early lustre of Obamamania has clearly faded, as the realisation gradually dawned on Africans that even a powerful leader with close family ties to the continent could not change six decades of ‘malign neglect’ of their continent by Washington. The tragedy of this tale is that the enduring continuity of US foreign policy has trumped the early idealism of an extraordinary individual of African ancestry. Obama has not only failed to remake Africa, he has also failed 148

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to change America and the world. Many of his key achievements – healthcare, the Iran nuclear deal, rapprochement with Cuba – will now almost certainly be dismantled by the incoming Donald Trump administration. The ‘dreams of our fathers’ – recalling the title of Obama’s memorable 1995 memoirs – have now morphed into a ghastly nightmare that could reverse many of the gains of the civil rights struggle. Another ‘parting of the waves’ may soon be needed. Where is our Black Moses? Business Day (South Africa), 9 January 2017.

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Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Donald

Trump and Boris Johnson

ENGLISH WRITER LEWIS Carroll created two of the most memorable fictional characters that Alice encountered in Wonderland: Tweedledee and Tweedledum. The two rotund men in identical outfits were so similar that they are almost indistinguishable. These buffoonish characters provide an apt description of current American president Donald Trump and British prime minister Boris Johnson. While Trump is seeking re-election this year after three divisive years in office, Johnson won a landslide 80-seat victory in British parliamentary polls in December 2019. Both men are manipulative opportunists prepared to betray allies to achieve their selfish goals. Both are seen as lacking the aptitude to absorb detailed briefings and for deep policy reflection. Both have sometimes run the government like a celebrity game-show. Both wear flamboyant blond hairstyles, while trying to cultivate the air of anti-establishment pitchfork radicals. Both egomaniac leaders were, however, born in New York into privilege. Trump attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, while Johnson studied at Oxford University. Both men are nativists who have made xenophobic and vulgar comments. Trump sought to condone the actions of anti-Semitic neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017. The US president has simply thrown away the dog whistle, and openly employs a giant blow-horn to mobilise the mob. Despite this jingoism, 80% of Republican voters, 71% of white evangelicals, and almost all Republican 150

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legislators continue to back him. More recently, Trump referred to African and Caribbean countries as ‘shitholes’, and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, a hate-mongering radio jock. Boris Johnson, for his part, failed to apologise for calling black Britons ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’, and referring to Muslim women in burqas as ‘letterboxes’. He had earlier complained that Caribbean people in Britain were ‘multiplying like flies’. Both leaders have fuelled anti-immigrant sentiment and stoked divisive culture wars. While Trump has damaged the Republicans’ reputation for conservative internationalism, Johnson has destroyed his Conservative Party’s ideals of ‘one-nation Toryism’. Both men are crude populists who have been able to attract insecure workingclass voters in Michigan and Manchester with appeals to their basest instincts. Both have, however, promoted tax cuts for the rich, while pretending to be ruling in favour of the middle and working classes. Both have also been accused of monarchical delusions. Republican and Conservative legislators, however, feel that they owe their loyalty to these leaders, who are more respected as votegetters than genuinely loved by their parties. Both are congenital liars. The noses of the Pinocchio president and premier have grown longer in office. Trump has falsely claimed to have reduced the cost of prescription drugs; to be protecting patients with pre-existing conditions; and to have defeated the Islamic State (ISIS). His recent impeachment by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives was based on a clear attempt to pressure Ukraine to launch an investigation into Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden’s son’s business dealings, in an extortion effort more expected of a Mafia don. As a journalist for The Times, Johnson invented quotes that eventually led to his sacking. He was fired from the shadow cabinet for lying about an amorous affair. He led the 2016 ‘Brexit’ campaign, which grossly exaggerated how much money Britain would get back from leaving the European Union (EU). More recently, Johnson convinced Queen Elizabeth II to prorogue Parliament for five weeks on spurious, self-serving grounds. Both leaders also have a penchant for cultivating wild conspiracy theories, revealing a sense of paranoia in which alien foreigners are undermining national purity. Both are gamblers and risk-takers. Trump threatened North Korea with nuclear annihilation, boasting to its dictator, Kim Jong-un – dismissed as ‘Rocket Man’ – that America’s nuclear button was bigger than his, before sitting down to negotiate with Pyongyang. Trump’s reckless killing of Iranian general Qasem Suleimani in a drone strike in neighbouring Iraq in January 2020 nearly 151

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led to a catastrophic war that could have set the entire Middle East ablaze. In his blundering dealings with Brussels, Boris Johnson often has the air of a deranged poker player. Both men are also anti-multilateralists. While Trump has questioned the utility of NATO and the United Nations, Johnson led a populist campaign that took Britain out of the EU in January 2020 after three decades of fruitful membership. Both men are philanderers who are on their third marriages, and have been ensnared in sex scandals. But there are also differences between Trump and Johnson. While Johnson served as a two-term mayor of cosmopolitan London and foreign secretary, Trump had little prior governing experience before assuming office. Trump is usually impeccably dressed, while Johnson likes to cut a scruffy figure. Trump also leads a country that is a superpower, while Johnson leads a small island off the coast of Europe whose days of glory – when Britannia ruled the waves – are far behind it. Trump has sought to use America’s might to pressure China, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and European allies to cut trade deficits by slapping tariffs on them, often using bogus national security arguments. The American president has also taken a wrecking ball to smash the multilateral trading system, neutering the World Trade Organization in the process. He has pursued mercantilist beggar-thy-neighbour policies reminiscent of the ruinous 1930s protectionist era, which helped lead to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of the Second World War. Trump has talked loudly, and carried a big stick. In phallic machismo style, he has often acted like a gun-slinging sheriff, wielding a bigger gun than his adversaries whom he habitually challenges to deadly noon­ day duels. For all the bluster of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Johnson has recently defied Trump by choosing Chinese telecommunications company Huawei to build Britain’s 5G network. This reportedly led to a nasty row in which Trump slammed the phone in the ear of the British premier, resulting in Johnson cancelling a trip to Washington DC. But London still needs Washington more than America needs Britain. Following Brexit, a free trade deal with the US still remains a highly sought-after prize. Another Trump four-year presidential term would almost certainly fracture the Western alliance irreparably, resulting in the possible demise of NATO, to the benefit of China and Russia. Only 13% of British, French, and German citizens polled last year had faith in Trump’s foreign policy. Peace efforts in the Middle East will also be hard to resurrect as the US president would continue to 152

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act as a dishonest broker, condoning Israeli expansionism and illegal settlements. Under Boris Johnson, Britain will continue the most spectacular decline experienced by a contemporary great power. With its exit from the EU market, which takes half of its exports, London will continue to cut off its nose to spite its face. ‘Great Britain’ is on a downward spiral to becoming ‘Little England’, and could eventually lose both Scotland and Northern Ireland from the Union, declining into global irrelevance. That both of these deeply flawed leaders represent ‘leaders of the free world’ speaks volumes about the current state of Western ‘civilisation’. The Guardian (Nigeria), 19 March 2020.

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Trump’s African ‘Shithole’ is

Commonplace in America

THE PINOCCHIO-LIKE AMERICAN president Donald Trump’s recent reported query about why his country was accepting so many immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries in Africa and Haiti – a country the United States (US) had militarily occupied between 1915 and 1934 – has been widely condemned. In a reversion to Hitlerite notions of Aryan racial purity, Trump also wondered why the US did not bring in more – presumably blond and blue-eyed – immigrants from Norway. He had earlier reportedly depicted Haitians as AIDS-infected and Nigerians as living in huts. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump had called for Muslim immigrants to be banned from America, promised to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, and termed Mexican immigrants ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’. But despite the outrage at Trump’s remarks, he was expressing views that are widely held within the US political establishment and among the wider general population. Most politicians are, however, discreet enough to keep such views to themselves. But the widespread stereotyping of Africa in the US media and Hollywood has helped to shape views like Trump’s. It was the fact that these were so publicly expressed in such vulgar terms that made them so striking. Anti-black and anti-foreigner prejudices and policies have in fact been displayed and supported by US presidents and officials for decades. US president Dwight Eisenhower noted in 1954 that segregationist white Southerners were ‘not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that 154

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their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes’. Lyndon Johnson – who, as president, oversaw the passing of major civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965 – as a US Senator for two decades, regularly referred to civil rights legislation as ‘nigger bills’. Richard Nixon described black Americans as ‘Negro bastards’ who ‘live like a bunch of dogs’. The apartheid-supporting Ronald Reagan vetoed sanctions against the racist South African government in 1986, which required a two-thirds Congressional majority to overturn. Domestically, the former Hollywood actor also infamously stereotyped black women on social benefits, resulting in media depictions of ‘welfare queens’. Reagan’s ‘war on drugs’ was widely seen as targeting black Americans. His senior diplomat on Africa, Chester Crocker, described a clearly rigged election by Liberia’s American-backed autocrat Samuel Doe in 1985 as ‘a rare achievement in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World’. More recently, US president Bill Clinton – often erroneously depicted as a good friend of Africa – delayed acknowledging the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 to avoid a legal obligation to intervene. He then forced the withdrawal of most of a 2,500-strong United Nations peacekeeping mission from Rwanda in one of the worst cases of racism in international relations. Clinton later admitted that doubling the UN force could have halted the genocide. Domestically, his signing of crime legislation in 1994 that led to the incarceration of millions of non-violent black and Latino youths, and his support for welfare reform two years later, resulted in the immiseration of millions of vulnerable Americans. Hillary Clinton’s support for these policies – and infamous depiction of young offenders as ‘super predators’ – did much to damage her support among African American voters during the 2016 presidential elections. In 2001, George W Bush Jr demonstrated his ignorance of Africa by speaking about the continent in stereotypical terms, as if it were a country rather than a continent: ‘Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease’. Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, voted against Nelson Mandela’s release from prison as a congressman in 1986, branding the African National Congress a ‘terrorist organisation’. In 1995, Bush’s Jamaican American secretary of state Colin Powell described Nigerians as ‘scammers who just tend not to be honest’. Most astonishingly, the head of the US Agency for International Development, Andrew Natsios, argued six years later that AIDS drugs would be difficult to administer in Africa because ‘many Africans don’t know what Western time is. Many people in Africa have never seen a clock or a watch their entire lives. And if you say one o’clock in the afternoon, they don’t know what you are talking 155

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about. They know morning, they know noon, they know evening, they know the darkness at night. People do not know what watches and clocks are, they do not use Western means for telling time. They use the sun.’ Even the first black US president, Kenyan Kansan Barack Obama, was not innocent of peddling stereotypes about Africa that made it sound like a ‘shithole’. In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama talked about the continent in broad-brush, Afro-pessimistic strokes: ‘There are times when considering the plight of Africa – the millions racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of twelve­ year-old guerrillas who know nothing but war-wielding machetes or AK-47s – I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair’. Most of the African references in Obama’s 2009 Nobel peace prize speech were to Somalia as a ‘failed state’ of terrorism, piracy, and famine; genocide in Darfur; and rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Trump’s views are clearly crass, nativist, and abhorrent. But his negative stereotyping of Africa is not uncommon among America’s political establishment. The Guardian (Nigeria), 21 January 2018.

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Margaret Thatcher’s Black Mischief

MARGARET THATCHER IS DEAD, but Thatcherism is alive. Amidst misguided efforts to beatify the ‘Iron Lady’ as a global icon, it is important to note that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War, not Thatcher. Britain was akin to a flea on the back of an American lion in efforts to battle the ‘evil empire’. Thatcher, in fact, badly misjudged German reunification, unwisely taking the historical joke too far that Europeans liked Germany so much that they preferred to have two of them. She also suffered a humiliating rebuff in seeking to convince Beijing to allow Britain to retain control of Hong Kong for another fifty years. Her victory in the Falklands War of 1982 said more about British nostalgia for a lost colonial empire, as Britons were jingoistically rallied to defend a far-flung island with more sheep than people. Perhaps Thatcher’s most damaging legacy was her reactionary stance on the liberation of southern Africa. Richard Dowden, the British prophet of Afrophobia, recently argued that Thatcher played a ‘pivotal role in the ending of apartheid’. In a similar effort at revisionist history, a recent Business Day editorial argued that Thatcher’s support for the apartheid government was ‘overstated’, and that she was ‘partially vindicated by history’ (‘A Better World Thanks to Thatcher’, 10 April 2013). Thatcher had visited South Africa as education minister in 1972 and appeared to have been blind to apartheid’s inequities, describing her Johannesburg hotel as ‘totally non-colour conscious’. As British premier, her policies were based on protecting South Africa’s albinocracy. She described the African National

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Congress (ANC) as a ‘typical terrorist organisation’. In stark contrast, she praised one of apartheid’s most recalcitrant and racist leaders, PW Botha – who had supported Adolf Hitler during the Second World War – as a ‘candid friend’, inviting him to London in 1984. She was diplomatically isolated at Commonwealth summits, and was a staunch supporter of America’s policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the apartheid regime. This, even as she refused to talk to the ANC, which she believed would lead the country to communistinspired anarchy. Like Helen Suzman, Thatcher bitterly opposed economic sanctions against the apartheid regime. With characteristic self-righteousness, she argued that sanctions would hurt black South Africans, even as black citizens supported the necessary sacrifices entailed to bring an end to apartheid. The fact that Britain was South Africa’s largest foreign investor and that Thatcher’s husband Denis had business interests in the racist enclave weakened her moral position. In Zimbabwe, the strong ‘Rhodesia lobby’ in the Conservative Party – with large business and family links – opposed sanctions against Ian Smith’s illegitimate regime. Thatcher was sympathetic to this group, and sought at first to impose the puppet regime of Abel Muzorewa on Zimbabwe, until saner heads prevailed. Robert Mugabe won the subsequent election despite Thatcher’s wishes for a non-socialist government. In Namibia, Thatcher backed Washington’s push for Cuban soldiers to leave Angola before any settlement in the South African-occupied territory, thus delaying Namibia’s independence by a decade. She complained ruefully that if the Namibia case were ever settled, the Africans would turn all their attention on apartheid South Africa. Thatcher’s prejudiced approach to dealing with southern Africa cannot be separated from the historical xenophobia within her Conservative Party as well as her brutal approach to dealing with black people in her own country. Enoch Powell, a Conservative shadow cabinet minister, had made an infamous scaremongering ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 warning about the consequences of continuing immigration from the Commonwealth. Thatcher herself had warned in 1979 of Britain being ‘swamped by people with a different culture’. In 1990, her former trade minister Norman Tebbit questioned the patriotism of Britons of Asian and West Indian descent, demanding they undergo a ‘cricket test’ whenever England played their ancestral home countries. Thatcher introduced a British Nationality Act in 1981 and restricted immigration from selected Commonwealth countries in 1986. Her militarised and heavy-handed policing in inner-city black communities 158

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involved house raids, ‘stop and search’ arrests, arbitrary detentions, and abuse of detainees. ‘Race riots’ ensued in Brixton, Tottenham, Birmingham, Leeds, and Liverpool in 1981 and 1985, which Thatcher dismissed as a ‘spree of naked greed’ and ‘criminal hooliganism’. This explains the spontaneous street parties that followed her death in several black communities. There was a clear link between Thatcher’s callous treatment of black minorities in Britain and her disdain for the rights of the black majority in southern Africa. This prejudice appears to have extended to her daughter, Carol, who could not understand why her television career was abruptly ended in 2009 for describing the Congolese French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga as a ‘golliwog’. In the end, Mandela – the man Thatcher had dubbed a ‘terrorist’ – was immortalised with a bronze statue in London’s Parliament Square. After the dust has settled and history records its verdict, the legacy of this Nobel laureate will be the one that the twentieth century will be remembered for, not the Iron Lady’s black mischief. Business Day (South Africa), 22 April 2013.

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The Trial of Tony Blair

THE RECENT SPAT THAT erupted following Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s refusal to attend a leadership summit in Johannesburg on account of former British premier Tony Blair’s presence was a fascinating clash between two establishment figures. Tutu withdrew from the conference, charging that Blair had invaded Iraq in 2003 based on a ‘lie’; that he and United States president George W Bush had acted like ‘playground bullies’; and that since 110,000 innocent Iraqis had been killed following the invasion, Blair and Bush should be tried for war crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Tutu decried the double standards by which only African and Asian actors continue to be tried in The Hague (all 29 people indicted so far by the ICC have, in fact, been African). Such stinging criticisms have been levelled at Blair before, but none could have had the same devastating impact as Tutu, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1984 for his leadership during the anti-apartheid struggle, and who has been revered since as a moral beacon. Tutu has, however, sometimes been accused of ‘shooting from the hip’. Last year, for example, he described the Jacob Zuma administration as worse than the apartheid regime after the Dalai Lama was denied a visa to enter South Africa. Tutu’s obsession with publicity is also curious, and Nelson Mandela’s graceful exit from public life continues to contrast starkly with his constant craving for the limelight. But was Tutu right to suggest Blair be tried at The Hague? Tony Blair was in power between 1997 and 2007 and was the most successful contemporary leader of the Labour party, winning three general elections. He

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contributed to peacemaking in Northern Ireland and oversaw Scottish devolution. He, however, sometimes demonstrated a ‘muscular born-again Christianity’ and sanctimonious self-righteousness. His obsession with poll-obsessed popularity lowered the tone of British politics, often descending into manipulative spin and empty soundbites. The man who had at first been depicted as a wide-eyed cartoonish ‘Bambi’ happily skipping around the forest would eventually earn the nickname ‘Bliar’ from the British public, one million of whom protested against his decision to go to war with Iraq. Many felt, like Tutu, that he had acted in bad faith and misled the British parliament and public. The largely plagiarised ‘dodgy dossier’ and an earlier one that falsely claimed that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had the capacity to launch biological weapons within 45 minutes were a particular nadir in this debacle. The Iraq invasion had been undertaken by Bush and Blair with the justification that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). United Nations (UN) inspectors warned that no evidence for such weapons existed. That the invasion failed to uncover any weapons made Blair’s ex post facto humanitarian justifications of the invasion appear absurd and dishonest. A war of aggression, which many around the world considered to have been both illegal and illegitimate, had been launched by two self-appointed sheriffs with a hurriedly gathered posse without the UN’s blessing. Some of Blair’s cabinet ministers and his attorney-general had cautioned him against waging the war without a UN mandate. Even Western allies France and Germany opposed this hare-brained fiasco, an anachronistic neo-imperial attempt at ‘gunboat diplomacy’ aimed at imposing ‘democracy’ on an Arab autocracy through the barrel of a gun. The British bulldog was widely portrayed as an American poodle, and it was clear that the key decisions had been taken in Washington, with London largely following Bush down a blind alley. Both in his 2010 memoir A Journey and in his recent response to Tutu, Blair sought to justify the Iraq invasion on the grounds that Saddam’s egregious human rights abuses had justified the intervention. Quite aside from the difficulty of crusading Western governments going around the world deciding which morally deficient leaders to topple, what Blair has consistently failed to say is the extent to which the West had armed and funded Saddam’s chemical weapons-fuelled war of aggression against Iran between 1980 and 1988, and condoned his gas-fuelled massacres of his own people. Neither elicited vocal condemnation from Saddam’s Western allies. He was the Frankenstein’s monster of cynical Western scientists, a ‘mad dog’ fed and sustained by both America and 161

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Blair’s own country. This history greatly discredits Blair’s belated humanitarian justifications. Blair can also be ‘tried’ for often erroneously portraying himself as Africa’s best friend. Like a modern-day missionary, he condescendingly described the continent as a ‘scar on the world’s conscience’, without any evident awareness of the offensiveness of such broad stereotyping. He paid a state visit to Africa only at the fag end of his premiership; supported autocratic regimes in Ethiopia, Uganda, and Rwanda; and failed to fulfil promises of massively increasing aid to Africa. Even if Blair does not end up in The Hague, some 25 countries have laws on their books against wars of aggression. His trial may therefore not be as fanciful as it once seemed. He must wish – as King Henry II once did about Thomas Becket – that someone would rid him of South Africa’s troublesome priest. Business Day (South Africa), 10 September 2012.

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The Strange Reappearance of

Nicolas Sarkozy

LAST WEEK (JULY 2010), French president Nicolas Sarkozy celebrated the traditional Bastille Day by inviting 12 African presidents and their troops to join him for the traditional military parade down the Champs-Elysées. Though the Gallic leader sought to portray this event as the end of a neo-colonial fifty-year relationship known as Françafrique, many critics argued that the display actually reinforced the idea of African clients paying homage to a French chief. Africa has historically represented a stage on which France has sought to maintain the illusion of being a global power. An intricate network of political, military, economic, and cultural ties has been used since 1960 to promote what French leaders since Charles de Gaulle have regarded as a politique de grandeur. As France’s xenophobic immigration laws have more recently been brutally applied to African citizens, a few African leaders openly criticised the excesses of the ‘mother country’. The European Court of Human Rights condemned Paris for the use of torture and other abuses. Even as a multiracial, mostly black national team was praised for winning the 1998 football World Cup, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a fascist populist, incredibly made it to a presidential run-off after winning 17% of the national vote in 2002 – a startling loss of a national moral compass. The election of President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 saw the rise to power of a former right-wing interior minister who was accused of increasing police harassment of immigrants. Two years earlier, Sarkozy had infamously dismissed rioting African youth (after the death of two boys being pursued by police) in 163

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Paris’s impoverished suburbs as ‘scum’ who needed to be cleaned up with a water-hose. During a speech in Dakar in 2007, he argued patronisingly that ‘Africans have never really entered history. They have never really launched themselves into the future’. Showing that the leopard cannot change its spots, France had also provided military support to prop up autocratic regimes in Chad and Central African Republic in 2006, and again in Chad in 2008. However, these actions may well represent the last gasps of a dying French gendarme. This century will surely see the end of five decades of an often pernicious relationship between France and Africa. Paris has drastically reduced its investments in Africa, but will most likely retain interests in wealthier countries such as Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, and Gabon. It is already trading profitably with South Africa, Nigeria, and Angola. It increasingly involves non-francophone countries in its diplomatic summits and military training programmes. It has reduced its troops in Africa, closing three military bases. Defence treaties have also been renegotiated. When France does bid a final farewell to Africa, all those with a genuine concern for the future of the continent will heave a huge sigh of relief. This sordid relationship has represented five decades of a fatal attraction. Business Day (South Africa), 27 July 2010.

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Madeleine Albright: Remembering

the First Female American Secretary

of State

WHILE I WAS COMPLETING a short biography of the first African and the first Arab United Nations secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, word came through of the death of his nemesis: the then United States ambassador at the UN under Bill Clinton (1993–1997), Madeleine Albright, who single-handedly led the campaign that ousted the Egyptian from office in December 1996. Albright recently (March 2022) died of cancer at the age of 84.

An Irresistible Force Meets an Immovable Object After Albright accused the UN of ‘betrayal’, Boutros-Ghali condemned the ‘vulgarity’ of her language. The time was fast approaching when an irresistible force would confront an immovable object. The Egyptian’s undisguised disdain for Albright’s diplomatic skills – he felt she was an ‘unseasoned’ hectoring novice, whom some diplomats cruelly derided as ‘half bright’ – would prove fatal. Boutros later noted: ‘She seemed to have little interest in the difficult diplomatic work of persuading her foreign counterparts to go along with the positions of her government, preferring to lecture or speak in declarative sentences, or simply read verbatim from her briefing books. She seemed to assume that the mere assertion of a US policy should be sufficient to achieve the support of other nations.’ Boutros-Ghali complained that Albright was trying to instruct 165

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him on which countries to visit, which special representatives to appoint, what to say or avoid saying, and lecturing him on the importance of keeping a distance from the hostile US Congress.

A High-Tech Lynching In the last year of his five-year tenure in 1996, Boutros complained prophetically that he felt like a man condemned to execution. Albright was often crude and tactless in her vindictive campaign against the Egyptian’s re-election, asking: ‘Who would you rather have as your friend, Bill Clinton or Boutros-Ghali?’ She boosted her own chances of winning bipartisan support for her successful bid to become the first female American secretary of state between 1997 and 2000, by acting as Clinton’s willing executioner: she personally put Boutros-Ghali’s head on the guillotine and administered the fatal blow. She then presented the bodiless head to a bloodthirsty US Congress in a modern version of King Herod’s gift of John the Baptist’s head to his sanguinary wife’s daughter, Salome. In November 1996, Albright offered Boutros-Ghali the head of a proposed US-funded counter-terrorism foundation in Geneva with the title ‘secretary­ general of the UN emeritus’. The Egyptian dismissed out of hand the suggestion that he become a glorified nobody, seeing himself as fighting for the integrity of his organisation and the independence of his office. Boutros­ Ghali’s Ghanaian undersecretary-general for peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, then worked with Albright as she plotted the removal of Boutros-Ghali. Annan – a supposedly apolitical international civil servant – candidly admitted in his 2012 memoirs that he met with Albright in 1996 to discuss removing his boss and replacing him. Having failed to consult even its closest allies on its decision to oust Boutros-Ghali, Washington stood alone among the 15 Security Council members in vetoing the Egyptian’s reappointment in December 1996. Albright had triumphed in her ‘high-tech lynching’ of the first Afro-Arab UN secretary-general.

Refugee from Hitler and Stalin Marie – Madeleine in French – Korbelova was born in Prague on 15 May 1937, as the eldest child of a Czech diplomat, Josef Korbel, and his wife, Anna. Madeleine grew up in opulence, attending high school in Geneva, before fleeing with her parents and two siblings to London, as Hitler seized the Czech Sudetenland in 1939. Her father returned to Prague after the Second World War, and was posted to Belgrade as ambassador. Here, his eight-year-old daughter performed 166

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diplomatic protocol duties with her father as a flower girl in Czech traditional dress, which provided the inspiration for a future diplomatic career. As Sovietbacked communists took over the Czech government in 1948, the family fled once more. This time they successfully sought asylum in the US, where Josef secured a professorship at the University of Denver. Madeleine’s Jewish parents had converted to Catholicism in London to protect the family, which lost 26 members, including three of Madeleine’s grandparents, to the Nazi Holocaust. She was a good student, majoring in political science at the elite women’s liberal arts Wellesley College in Massachusetts, which her good friend Hillary Clinton would attend a decade later. The lifelong feminist described the college, during the conformist 1950s, as a place where young women were empowered and groomed for leadership roles. She also developed a strong sense of public service, noting: ‘I wanted to give something back to the country that had given so much to me’. The college would later name its Institute for Global Affairs after Albright. After graduating from Wellesley, Madeleine married Joseph Albright, the rich scion of a family owning a newspaper empire, in 1959. They had three daughters, as the family shuttled between Washington DC and New York. Her ambition to become a journalist was frustrated in a male-dominated industry, and she instead completed master’s and doctorate degrees at New York’s Columbia University. She then worked as a legislative staffer for Senator Edmund Muskie, and electioneered for several Democratic presidential campaigns. Her professor at Columbia, Zbigniew Brzezinski – a fellow émigré whose diplomatic family had similarly fled persecution from Poland – then head-hunted Madeleine to become a congressional liaison officer in the Jimmy Carter administration (1977–1980), after he himself had become national security adviser. Albright got divorced in 1983, teaching as a professor at Georgetown University between stints in government.

Madam Secretary As secretary of state, Albright was a strong proponent of America as the ‘indispensable nation’, as she sought to take foreign policy to the American people. She drove NATO’s expansion into her native Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary in 1999. She pushed forcefully for the use of force against Serbian warlord Slobodan Milošević and was ‘hawkish’ on preventing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from obtaining weapons of mass destruction. But Albright was sometimes gaffe-prone. As UN ambassador in 1994, she totally misread the 167

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Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 people perished, seeking to use this incident as a test case for a new, restrictive American policy of avoiding UN interventions after the killing of 18 American troops in Somalia six months earlier. She refused to call genocide by its name in her machoistic zeal to prove that Washington could ‘shut down’ a UN mission, later describing this incident as ‘her deepest regret’. In the Balkans, she assumed that Milošević’s Kosovo slaughter would quickly crumble in the face of American bombing. She insensitively noted that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to UN sanctions was ‘a price worth paying’, a statement she later regretted. As cheerleader for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, she warned that ‘there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other’, thus alienating younger women supporting the progressive senator Bernie Sanders. In acknowledgment of her historical legacy, President Barack Obama awarded Albright the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Her last article, published a day before Russia invaded Ukraine, defended the rights of sovereign democratic countries to exist, regardless of great power interests. The Gleaner (Jamaica), 3 April 2022.

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Colin Powell: The Reluctant

Jamaican-American Warrior

JAMAICAN AMERICAN FOUR-STAR general Colin Powell, who died of complications relating to Covid-19 on 18 October 2021 at the age of 84, was one of America’s most well-known public figures, with four decades of service in which he broke down racial barriers.

From the Bronx to Boot Camp Powell was born on 5 April 1937 to Jamaican immigrants, Luther (a shippingroom foreman) and Maud (a seamstress), who moved to New York in search of opportunities. He grew up in the multi-ethnic working-class South Bronx and studied geology at City College of New York. By his own admission, Powell was not a strong student, but found his passion in the college’s Reserves Officer Training Corps through which he joined a recently desegregated United States army. Here, he found the discipline, drive, camaraderie, and community that he had lacked. Powell married Alma Johnson in 1962, and they raised a son and two daughters together. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1958, serving two stints in Vietnam in 1962 and 1968. This experience scarred him, and he developed a life-long aversion to what he regarded as trigger-happy, deceitful politicians playing around with the lives of soldiers without a clear political strategy or public support. But Powell was also accused, as head of an investigation, of a cover-up of the US military’s My Lai massacre in 1968, merely refuting a letter 169

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from a serving soldier by stating that ‘relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent’. After receiving a master’s degree in business administration from Georgetown University in Washington DC in 1971, the Jamaican-American rose rapidly, serving in South Korea and with the elite 101st Airborne Division, before becoming a one-star general in 1979 at the age of 42. He then worked as a senior military assistant to US defence secretary Caspar Weinberger from 1983, before commanding an army corps in Germany three years later.

National Security Adviser As military adviser to another Republican defence secretary, Frank Carlucci, Powell was involved in planning the 1983 military invasion of Grenada. This prepared him for the role of national security adviser in the reactionary Ronald Reagan’s Republican administration between 1987 and 1989 in which Powell got blood on his hands. He was deeply involved in American support for murderous regimes in ‘dirty wars’ in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, only narrowly escaping sanction for his role in the ‘Iran–Contra’ scandal that funnelled arms to the killing squads in Nicaragua. Powell also championed the misguided policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the destructive apartheid regime in South Africa.

Joint Chiefs of Staff As the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated, he worked with the exceptionally able foreign policy team of President George HW Bush and secretary of state James Baker. Powell became the youngest chair of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, promoted over 14 more senior generals. He masterminded the military invasion of Panama in 1989, and led the Gulf War that expelled Iraq from Kuwait two years later. Despite his blustering warning ‘We’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it’ towards an ill-equipped Iraqi army, Powell had been a reluctant warrior who advocated economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein, until forced by defence secretary Dick Cheney to draw up military plans. He finished his term as the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton. Powell fought with the president over gays serving openly in the military, and famously clashed with UN ambassador Madeleine Albright, who scathingly asked him over the Bosnia slaughter: ‘What’s

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the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?’ An angry Powell’s riposte was true to character: ‘American GIs are not toy soldiers to be moved around on some global game board.’

Secretary of State Appointed George W Bush’s secretary of state in 2001, the moderate Powell had to contend with powerful conservative ‘hawks’ like vice-president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who masterminded the disastrous Iraq War of 2003–2011. The multilateralist Powell faced off against unilateralists who showed open disdain for the United Nations, and even allies like France and Germany. The general, however, often lacked the courage of his convictions, and was forced into embarrassing U-turns on Palestine, Pakistan, and North Korea. Powell’s presentation of flawed intelligence on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the UN Security Council in February 2003 was, by his own admission, a permanent ‘blot’ on his record. African American civil rights activist Harry Belafonte’s stinging condemnation of the general as a ‘house slave’ appears, in retrospect, to have understood the dynamics of a white-dominated Washington establishment. Bush asked Powell to resign from his post at Foggy Bottom in 2004. Though widely loved as a courteous and humane leader at the State Department, he did not put in the travel the job required, and failed to restrain the administration’s hawks. Cheney would later castigate Powell for expressing his views more to the public than to President Bush. As the clarion call sounded for the cabinet’s battles to begin, the general had declared himself a conscientious objector.

Twilight of A General Powell left the military in 1994 at the age of 57, spending time on the lucrative lecture circuit, running the Alliance for Youth charity, and rebuilding old Volvos. He was the most popular political figure in the US with a 64% favourability rating, and was courted by both the Republican and Democratic parties. He flirted with a presidential run in 1996 as his bestselling autobiography, My American Journey, was published but bowed to his wife Alma’s fear of assassination. By now, Powell had acquired a reputation for being a political chameleon, registering as an independent, but voting for three Democratic presidents in 1960, 1964, and 1976, before loyally serving the Republican Ronald Reagan. He finally came out as a Republican in 1995.

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Two years later, Powell became the founding chair of America’s Promise, a civil society organisation supporting at-risk children. He also chaired the board of visitors of the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at City College of New York. The notoriously cautious Powell, who often downplayed depictions of himself as a symbol of black achievement, eventually spoke out for African American rights and child welfare issues. He became so disenchanted with the Republican Party that he voted for the Democrats in the last four elections, from Barack Obama to Hillary Cilton to Joe Biden. His contempt for Donald Trump’s racist rabble-rousing was so strong that he declared the president ‘a national disgrace’, and left the Republican Party after Trump’s storm troopers attacked the Capitol building in January 2021. Powell was a dyed-in-the-wool soldier who preferred to lead by example than become embroiled in controversial policy battles. He was a cautious bureaucrat who operated best behind the scenes, protected by powerful politicians. Pragmatism thus often trumped principles. As Caspar Weinberger noted: ‘Colin is quintessentially a good soldier who does his duty and carries out orders.’ When exposed to the full glare of political responsibility as secretary of state, Powell faltered, and tragically besmirched a career built up over forty years of public service. The Gleaner (Jamaica), 23 October 2021.

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Part III

Technocrats

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Boutros-Ghali’s Huge Contribution to

Egypt and the World

FIVE YEARS AGO (2016) BOUTROS Boutros-Ghali, one of Africa’s foremost scholar-diplomats, died in Cairo. He served as the sixth UN secretary-general between 1992 and 1997, helping build the foundations of the world’s postCold War security architecture. By 1994 the world body had deployed 75,000 peacekeepers to 17 trouble spots, compared to 13 in the previous four decades. Despite being the most intellectually accomplished of the nine UN secretaries-general – and the first African and Arab in the post – no biography of him exists in English on the Egyptian.  Boutros-Ghali was born in Cairo on 14 November 1922. He attended the French secondary school in the Egyptian capital, living in the family mansion. He often visited Tahrir Square in his youth, and embraced Egypt’s rich heritage, frequently touting the thousand-year-old Al-Azhar theological university and ancient Pharaonic civilisations. The Cairo in which Boutros-Ghali grew up was not dissimilar to many of the evocative descriptions of Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said’s own Cairene childhood. The city’s ornate Victorian and Mediterranean architecture stood alongside bustling bazaars, minareted mosques and the allegorical alleys so vividly depicted by Egyptian Nobel literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Boutros-Ghali’s grandfather, after whom he was named, had served as prime minister of Egypt before being assassinated by a political extremist in February 1910. Two uncles had also served as foreign minister. Boutros-Ghali respected his Christian Coptic faith, but was neither active in the church nor overtly religious. 175

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After completing his undergraduate law degree at the University of Cairo, he finished his postgraduate studies at Sciences Po and the University of Paris. Boutros-Ghali was a self-described cosmopolitan Arab federalist who looked to Germany’s Otto von Bismarck as his model for pan-Arab unity. He became a professor at 27, eventually teaching for 28 years at Cairo University. He published the first book on the UN in Arabic, and also wrote prolifically on the Organisation of African Unity and Third World politics. Boutros-Ghali directed Egypt’s Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic and Political Studies before swapping the world of theory for practice by serving as deputy foreign minister and minister of state between 1977 and 1991. Here, he played a central role in peacemaking with Israel between 1977 and 1981. During these negotiations, as a member of the Coptic Christian minority he took huge personal risks and was a prime target for assassination. As UN secretary-general, Boutros-Ghali achieved peacekeeping successes in Mozambique, Cambodia and El Salvador, while spectacular failures occurred in Rwanda, Bosnia and Angola. Peacebuilding missions were also pioneered in Namibia and Haiti. Boutros-Ghali’s landmark 1992 document, An Agenda for Peace, remains an indispensable guide to the tools and techniques employed by the UN. As the ‘Pope on the East River’, he consistently championed issues of development, democratisation and human rights. After stepping down as UN secretary-general amid unrelenting US opposition, the 74-year-old Boutros-Ghali served as secretary-general of the Paris-based Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie between 1997 and 2002, promoting French language and culture across the globe. Borrowing from his UN experience, he broadened the organisation’s mandate to include issues of peace, development and democratisation. After leaving La Francophonie, Boutros-Ghali chaired the Geneva-based South Centre between 2003 and 2006. This was a think tank dedicated to the ‘right to development’, an issue he had vigorously pursued at the UN. Always with an eye to posterity and worried that his papers would not be well preserved in Egypt, Boutros-Ghali placed his official documents at Stanford University in the US. He had a bad fall at his home in Cairo in February 2016 and died in hospital shortly after at the age of 93. Boutros-Ghali was granted a state funeral in a ceremony attended by Egypt’s political elite. He was buried at the Boutrosiya family church alongside his grandfather, with whom he shared a stubborn devotion to public service in the true spirit of noblesse oblige. Business Day (South Africa), 26 April 2021. 176

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Boutros Boutros-Ghali: Afro-Arab

Prophet, Pharaoh, and Pope

EGYPTIAN SCHOLAR-DIPLOMAT Boutros Boutros-Ghali took office as the first African and first Arab UN secretary-general thirty years ago. He is portrayed in my new short biography as a prophet, pharaoh, and pope. The Egyptian was a renowned professor of international law and international relations, publishing and teaching on issues related to the UN, regional organisations such as the Arab League and the Organisation of African Unity, as well as the Non-Aligned Movement. These events are well captured in Boutros-Ghali’s 1997 memoirs, Egypt’s Road to Jerusalem: A Diplomat’s Story of the Struggle for Peace in the Middle East. Acting as a peacemaking ‘prophet’, as Egypt’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Boutros-Ghali led negotiations between 1977 and 1981 that culminated in a peace treaty with Israel. His entire academic and public life had thus prepared him well for the role of UN secretary-general. As UN secretary-general between 1992 and 1996, he played the role of a stubborn ‘pharaoh’ in an often imperious approach, standing up against powerful members of the UN Security Council in the critical area of managing peacekeeping operations in the post-Cold War era. Finally, as UN secretary-general, Boutros-Ghali pursued the role of a secular ‘Pope’ in leading conceptual debates on development, democratisation, and human rights, as well as hosting mega-summits on the environment (Rio, 1992), human rights (Vienna, 1993), population (Cairo, 1994), social development (Copenhagen, 1995), and women (Beijing, 1995). 177

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Of the eight former UN secretaries-general since 1945, no historical biography in English has surprisingly been written on Boutros-Ghali, the most intellectually accomplished office-holder. An eminent scholardiplomat and the sixth UN secretary-general, Boutros held the office in the immediate post-Cold War era when co-operation between the US and Russia resumed after a 45-year thaw. This led to great expectations that the world body would finally work as its ‘founding fathers’ had intended it to. An unprecedented number of peacekeeping missions were launched under the Egyptian’s leadership: by 1994, the UN had deployed 75,000 peacekeepers to 17 trouble spots. During the previous four decades, the world body had deployed just 13 peacekeeping missions. A Coptic Christian from a rich and politically connected family, he acquired a deep sense of noblesse oblige and a commitment to public service from his family heritage. His grandfather, Boutros Ghali Pasha, had served as prime minister of Egypt under the British protectorate, before being assassinated by a political extremist in February 1910. Two uncles had also served as foreign minister, another as agriculture minister, while several cousins served as ministers, parliamentarians, and diplomats. But the Egyptian was also the ultimate outsider: a patrician within a mass of poverty in his country; a Copt within an overwhelmingly Muslim society; and an Arab within an overwhelmingly black African continental population. As UN secretary-general between 1992 and 1996, Boutros-Ghali clashed fatally with the world body’s most powerful member – the US – earning him the unenviable tag of being the only UN secretary-general to have been denied a second five-year term in office. His relationship with the 15-member UN Security Council was a difficult one. The Egyptian bluntly condemned the double standards of three powerful Western members of the Council – the US, Britain, and France – in selectively authorising UN interventions in what he described as ‘rich men’s wars’ in Europe’s Balkans, while neglecting Africa’s ‘orphan conflicts’. The Council’s powerful members, in turn, ignored many of Boutros-Ghali’s ambitious ideas, preferring instead to retain tight control over decision-making on UN peacekeeping missions. The Egyptian worked with the Council to establish peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Cambodia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Somalia, which resulted in important conflict management innovations in the post-Cold War era. Boutros-Ghali also achieved some success in promoting norms of international transitional justice, but suffered disappointments in the areas 178

BOUTROS BOUTROS-GHALI: AFRO-ARAB PROPHET, PHARAOH, AND POPE

of development and democratisation. He actively promoted the interests of weak and poor developing countries, who formed the majority of the current 193-member UN General Assembly, against the more parochial interests of powerful, richer countries. Boutros often expressed the Southern criticism that the rich North was too focused on security issues, to the detriment of socio­ economic development. As UN secretary-general, he frequently decried the lack of democratisation in the World Bank and the IMF, promoted progressive ideas on development and human rights, and enacted some important administrative reforms within the UN. During his tenure in office, Boutros displayed a fierce and often courageous independence: he insisted on maintaining a veto over air strikes in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995; refused Washington’s demand to approve a UN deployment in Haiti in 1994 until troop contributors and time-frames had been agreed; chastised his political masters for manipulating the UN over Iraq and Libya; and berated them for dumping impossible tasks on the world body without providing it with the resources to deliver on its responsibilities. The Egyptian scholar-diplomat recorded all of these complaints in a trenchant 1999 memoir, Unvanquished: A US–UN Saga. Boutros-Ghali’s greatest legacy may be his 1992 document, An Agenda for Peace, a framework developed at the end of the Cold War for a new global security architecture which is still widely practised today. It outlined a continuum from conflict prevention to peacemaking to peacekeeping to peacebuilding, while advocating the strengthening of regional peacekeeping bodies to lighten the burden on the UN. Current Portuguese UN secretary-general António Guterres acknowledged the importance of this document on its 30th anniversary in seeking to shape A New Agenda for Peace, as part of a High-Level Advisory Board on Global Public Goods. Business Day (South Africa), 19 September 2022.

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Kofi Annan: African Prophet or

American Poodle?

Stanley Meisler, Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in A World of War (John Wiley & Sons, 2007) and James Traub, The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

GHANA’S KOFI ANNAN was the first black African to serve as secretary-general of the United Nations (UN) – between 1997 and 2006 – and he shared the Nobel peace prize with the UN in 2001. During his ten-year tenure, Annan courageously, but perhaps naively, championed the cause of ‘humanitarian intervention’. After a steep decline in the mid-1990s, peacekeeping increased again by 2005 to around 80,000 troops, with a budget of $3.2 billion. African countries like Sudan, Congo, Liberia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Côte d’Ivoire were the main beneficiaries. Annan also moved the UN bureaucracy from its creative inertia to embrace views and actors from outside the system: mainly civil society and the private sector. Annan’s predecessor as secretary-general was Egyptian scholar-diplomat Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992–1996), who fell out with the UN’s most powerful member, the United States, and became the first holder of the post to be denied a second term in office. While Kofi Annan was naturally calm and conciliatory, Boutros-Ghali was stubborn and studious; where Annan was a bureaucratic creature of the UN system, having spent thirty years rising up the system, and having lived mostly in Western capitals, Boutros-Ghali – a former professor of 180

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law and politics – was the most intellectually accomplished secretary-general in the history of the office. As Egypt’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Boutros-Ghali had an intuitive grasp of Third World politics which Annan lacked, and he was more prepared than Annan to stand up to bullying from powerful Western actors. These two biographies of Kofi Annan by American journalists James Traub and Stanley Meisler are impressive in the tremendous access that they gained to both their subject and his key associates. While Traub appears to have started as an admirer of Kofi Annan and became more critical towards the difficult end of his tenure, Meisler’s account sometimes verges on hagiography. Both authors focus on the crucial relationship between the UN and the US. This is particularly important since Annan had studied at American institutions – Macalester College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – and was effectively put in office by the Americans, after their ambassador at the UN Madeleine Albright had waged a poisonous and vindictive campaign to remove the arrogant Boutros-Ghali. Astonishingly, Annan and some of his key supporters within the UN secretly worked with Washington as it plotted the removal of the first African secretary-general – Boutros-Ghali later talked of betrayal by one’s ‘closest collaborator’. Annan brought two American officials involved in ousting Boutros-Ghali – Bob Orr and Michael Sheehan – into the UN. Many of the respected intellectuals that Annan relied on – John Ruggie, Michael Doyle and Jeffrey Sachs – were North Americans, and he often sought the advice of American universities rather than Southern ones. He did, however, also have key policy advisers from the global South: Iqbal Riza (Pakistan), Shashi Tharoor (India), Lakhdar Brahimi (Algeria), and Ibrahim Gambari (Nigeria). Annan’s first trip on assuming office was to Washington DC in March 1997. Though this was the start of a bid to collect an American debt to the UN of $1.6 billion – being withheld in order to secure internal UN management reforms and reduced US contributions to the organisation – the symbolism of the visit confirmed to many the great debt that Annan himself owed to the superpower for his election. The Ghanaian never shook off the image among many Southern diplomats of being an American poodle. Though the US had played a central role in creating the UN in 1945 and the American public largely supported the organisation, powerful interests within the US Congress, led by Jesse Helms, the prejudiced, conservative chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the conservative majority of Republican congressman Newt Gingrich, consistently attacked the UN. The Bill Clinton administration (1993–2000) 181

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was unwilling to expend much political capital defending the world body from often outlandish and ill-informed attacks in perverse acts of infanticide. Some Americans complained that black UN helicopters were flying around the country in a bid to create a ‘world government’, while UN-declared World Heritage Sites in America (of which there are about 878 around the world) were seen as a sign of the violation of US sovereignty. The Clinton administration added to these suspicions of the UN by irresponsibly and erroneously blaming the deaths of 18 American soldiers in Somalia in October 1993 – in a fiasco planned entirely from the Pentagon – on the UN. The US wielded tremendous influence on Annan, getting him to appoint UN special representatives to Afghanistan, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Annan did sometimes disagree with Washington – for example, travelling to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein in February 1998. He had embarked on this trip against the express wishes of US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who was said to browbeat Annan and even screamed at him. Albright had done the most to remove Boutros-Ghali and in effect secure Annan’s appointment: for her, this was now pay-back time. Annan often stayed close to the US, establishing a particularly close relationship with its forceful ambassador to the UN, former US permanent representative to the UN Richard Holbrooke. Before becoming UN secretary-general, Annan had been promoted by Boutros-Ghali to the post of undersecretary-general for peacekeeping in 1993. Despite some of the myths around Annan’s outstanding performance in this role, this period saw monumental blunders in Bosnia and Rwanda, which did great damage to the UN’s reputation. Independent reports later commissioned by the UN and released in 1999 criticised Annan and his officials who adopted a bureaucratic posture of undue caution and over-restrictive interpretations of UN mandates, although the Security Council’s powerful veto-wielding permanent members (particularly the US, Britain and France) also share a great deal of the blame for these two debacles. About three months before the start of the Rwandan genocide, which killed 800,000 people in 1994, the senior officials in the 2,500-strong UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda had warned Annan’s office of the impending genocide. They had received instructions to avoid a Somalialike UN fiasco and to avoid the use of force at all costs. In Bosnia, in July 1995, UN peacekeepers – who had been warned by Annan’s officials against the use of air strikes except if the UN mission was directly threatened – had failed to act as 7,400 Muslims were slaughtered by Serbs in a UN-declared ‘safe haven’. In both cases, the responsibility for acting lay largely with the UN’s powerful states, 182

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but the independent inquiries into both incidents noted that Annan’s staff did not fulfil their own responsibility by reporting transparently and courageously to the UN Security Council. In the face of mass murder, a pedantic insistence on neutrality had trumped an impartial duty to call murder by its name and to pressure the Security Council to act. As UN secretary-general at the time, Boutros-Ghali must also share some of the blame for these failures. After he became UN secretary-general, Annan’s consistent championing of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’ civilians if governments were unwilling or unable to do so appeared to be contradictory in light of his own timidity in reacting to crises in Rwanda and Bosnia. Perhaps this proselytising was done out of a sense of guilt: Rwanda, in particular, appears to have personally scarred Annan, and continues to dog his historical legacy. Annan added insult to injury when he visited Rwanda as secretary-general in 1998 and said that he had ‘no regrets’ and that the violence ‘came from within’. Incensed senior officials in Kigali criticised his insensitivity and boycotted a reception in his honour. Another example of a lack of understanding of the nuances of Third World politics was evident after Annan gave a speech championing ‘humanitarian intervention’ to the 192-member UN General Assembly in 1999. Leader after leader from the global South stood up to criticise what they saw as his naivety in promoting a doctrine that could allow powerful Western states to use this argument to undermine the sovereignty of weaker states. Though some of these autocratic leaders were clearly hypocritically protecting their own regimes from scrutiny, such fears appeared to be confirmed by the widely condemned American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 which was launched without UN Security Council authorisation and justified partly on humanitarian grounds. Another myth about Kofi Annan was that he was a great reformer. On assuming office in 1997, he sought to reduce staffing by 10%; asked that the UN General Assembly (the body where the global South has a solid majority and had successfully fought decolonisation battles) stop micro-managing the UN budget, and give him a freer hand in making high-level appointments. The Assembly – many of whose members came to believe that Annan’s tenure ironically led to Western domination of strategic positions in the UN secretariat and the marginalisation of African staff – duly ignored Annan’s suggestions. A later effort to reform the UN in 2005 also ended disappointingly, with a failure to expand the anachronistic 15-member Security Council (on which the US, Russia, China, France and Britain sit as veto-wielding permanent members, and in which Africa and South America remain the only major regions in the world 183

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without a permanent seat). Annan was seen by many in the global South as using the reform effort in 2005 to repair his damaged relationship with Washington, and there is ample evidence provided in these two books that the reform process and Annan’s 2005 In Larger Freedom report (drafted largely by two Americans, Bob Orr and Stephen Stedman) were crafted explicitly to gain Washington’s support. Even some of Annan’s senior aides complained that, as important as the US was, one could not focus disproportionately on one country to the detriment of the interests of the other 191 states. During the 2005 reform process, there were disappointments for the global South’s ‘development agenda’, with the acerbic US ambassador to the UN John Bolton – the only one of America’s permanent representatives with whom Annan had a difficult relationship – seeking (despite Annan’s efforts to tailor the reforms in ways that were acceptable to Washington) to reverse many of the US’s earlier commitments on aid and the Millennium Development Goals. Powerful American-led Western states also failed to gain support for some of their preferences on terrorism, human rights and non-proliferation. The three issues on which agreement was reached – establishing a Peacebuilding Commission; creating a Human Rights Council; and promoting the ‘responsibility to protect’ – have proved to be disappointing so far: the Peacebuilding Commission has failed to mobilise the resources and political support to promote effective peacebuilding in post-conflict societies, amidst bureaucratic turf battles among the UN’s feuding fiefdoms; the Human Rights Council remains as partisan and politicised as its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission; while the enunciation of the ‘responsibility to protect’ has spectacularly failed to have any impact on protecting civilians in Sudan’s Darfur region or Congo’s Kivu province. Annan eventually fell out with the Bush administration over two issues in 2004: he had clumsily and belatedly declared the US invasion of Iraq ‘illegal’ during a television interview; and he had written a letter to Bush warning of the negative consequences of attacking the Iraqi city of Falluja. While Annan was correct on the merits of both incidents, the hawkish Bush administration regarded his interventions as an attempt to influence the US election campaign – dominated by the controversial invasion of Iraq – in favour of Democratic candidate John Kerry. The Falluja letter had been sent two days before the election, and was regarded as a treacherous act by the unforgiving Bush administration. The ‘oil-for-food’ scandal would provide Washington with the opportunity 184

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to carry out the political crucifixion of Annan. In a programme run by UN officials to provide humanitarian relief to the sanctions-hit regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the head of the programme, Benon Sevan, was accused by an independent investigation of having received kickbacks of about $150,000 from the Iraqi government. Annan was accused of serious management failures for not having reported financial irregularities to the Security Council and for not implementing a system of effective oversight over the programme. Iqbal Riza, Annan’s chief of staff, was criticised for shredding documents on Iraq after the investigation had started. Like Rwanda and Srebrenica, though the companies of powerful UN member states like Russia and France benefited disproportionately from this programme and both the US and Britain were aware of many of the flaws in the programme, the failure of the secretariat to act transparently would again damage Annan politically. Perhaps most hurtfully, Annan’s son, Kojo, had benefited from payments from a Swiss firm, Cotecna – to the tune of about $200,000 – which had won a contract from the oil-for-food programme, and whose executives Annan had met three times. Kojo had earlier misled investigators about having cut off links with the company before it won the contract, but had continued receiving payments for at least six years. An earlier internal UN investigation into this case had cleared Kofi Annan of any wrongdoing in just one day, again underlining the lack of accountability and the culture of rarely accepting responsibility for failures within the UN secretariat. Annan astonishingly would later seek to blame Kojo’s behaviour not on his own failings as a parent, but on ‘the environment in Lagos’, reinforcing negative stereotypes about Africa. Conservative US Senators like Norm Coleman and newspaper columnists like William Safire started calling for Annan’s head. Bush refused to offer his support to the beleaguered secretary-general, and senior officials of the Bush administration refused to meet with Annan on a proposed trip to Washington in December 2004. Karma seemed finally to have caught up with Annan: he almost appeared to be suffering the curse of Africa’s ancestors, having co-operated in the betrayal of the continent’s first secretary-general and his own boss, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who had promoted him to head of UN peacekeeping. In the midst of his travails, a naïve Annan himself complained about having been betrayed by his former supporters around the world. He literally and figuratively lost his voice. His hands visibly trembled in meetings. He seriously considered resigning and was reportedly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Annan had become a deer caught in the headlights of an American ‘juggernaut’ 185

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that threatened to flatten him. As the battle clarion was sounded, the General lacked the backbone to rally his troops. He lost his nerve, and declared himself a conscientious objector. John Danforth, the US ambassador to the UN, was eventually instructed to call off the ‘mad dogs’ that had been unleashed on Annan, belatedly pledging support for the UN secretary-general. But the damage had already been done, and Annan was rendered a lame duck two years before the end of his second term. Many of Annan’s staff felt that he was endangering the lives of UN personnel in Iraq by not closing the office there in order to placate Washington. Many UN employees also saw his reform proposals in 2005 as an effort to curry favour with the Bush administration. After Annan’s failure to take action against powerful staff members accused of sexual harassment, nepotism and corruption, a demoralised UN Staff Council – already enraged by the death of 22 of their colleagues in a Baghdad bombing in August 2003 – passed an unprecedented vote of no confidence in Annan’s leadership in November 2004. Annan’s shameful treatment and dismissal of Iqbal Riza and Elizabeth Lindenmayer, chef de cabinet and his deputy respectively, and two of his closest and most loyal lieutenants that he had known and worked with for over two decades, revealed the shocking sense of panic, desperation and siege that had taken over Turtle Bay. Following a meal with powerful, largely North American friends in former US permanent representative to the UN, Richard Holbrooke’s home in December 2004 – during which Annan had been dutifully taking notes – the secretary-general effectively followed promptings that he fire some of his lieutenants and appoint as his deputy, Mark Malloch Brown, a South African British former World Bank official and long-time friend of Annan, who was head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP). It is widely said that Malloch Brown (the current British minister for Africa) ran the UN for the last two years of Annan’s tenure, and James Traub notes that the Americans reduced Annan to their ‘puppet’ through Malloch Brown. Annan’s troubled exit from office in 2006 could yet transform him into a prophet without honour, with his final years being embroiled in scandal and having been rendered a lame duck by the US, the country that did the most to anoint him as secretary-general. Annan finally and painfully discovered the ancient wisdom, that one needs a long spoon to sup with the devil. Africa Review of Books, January 2009.

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Adebayo Adedeji: Farewell to Africa’s

Cassandra

NIGERIAN SCHOLAR-TECHNOCRAT Adebayo Adedeji, who died on Wednesday, 25 April 2018, at the age of 87, was one of Africa’s greatest public servants, policy intellectuals, and renowned visionaries of regional integration. I first met him at a conference at Harvard University in Massachusetts in 1993, where he chided a pestering audience member, telling him that he always knew the Harvard seminar to be very rigorous. I encountered him again in 2001, and by this time he was much mellower, warmer, and less distant. He gave a wonderful keynote address at a conference I organised in Abuja on regional integration in West Africa, and a year later in New York delivered another masterful keynote that methodically demolished two international sacred cows: the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Adedeji was an independent and fearless thinker who spoke passionately and eloquently. When I moved to direct the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) in Cape Town in 2003, he joined the board and, for over a decade, rarely missed a meeting, also lending his great wisdom and experience to countless policy seminars and book projects. Adebayo Adedeji was born on 21 December 1930 and grew up in IjebuOde under British colonial rule. This experience left a fierce anti-colonial mark on Adedeji, shaping his later professional exploits. His middle-class parents were farmers who worked on a cocoa and nut plantation and left him in the care of a disciplinarian grandmother, ‘Mama Eleja’, an enterprising, shrewd, 187

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and determined fish-seller and indomitable matriarch. Even though she was illiterate, Adedeji’s grandmother pushed the young boy to study consistently. The precocious Adebayo was a child prodigy who responded well to the constant prodding. He attended Ijebu-Ode Grammar School as an early entrant. His farmer father was also an important influence, encouraging Adebayo to study hard to become a doctor. After completing his primary and secondary education in Nigeria, Adedeji studied economics and public administration at the universities of Leicester, Harvard, and London, eventually obtaining a doctorate in economics. He returned to Nigeria in 1958 to take up a senior post in the Western Region’s ministry of economic planning, serving under the tutelage of the renowned Simeon Adebo. The 30-year-old Adedeji was widely recognised as a rising star, but he also acquired a fearsome reputation among more junior civil servants. In 1963, Adebayo – who had always described himself as a ‘reluctant civil servant’ – left government service to take up an academic post at Nigeria’s University of Ile-Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University). Four years later, at the age of 36, he had earned the title of professor of economics and public administration. He transformed the university’s Institute of Administration into an effective training ground for both Nigerian and African public servants. In 1971, at the age of 40, Adedeji was appointed Nigeria’s minister of economic reconstruction and development by the military regime of General Yakubu Gowon. He would oversee the country’s difficult post-war peacebuilding efforts. Nigeria’s civil war of 1967–1970 had resulted in one million deaths and led to much destruction of the country’s infrastructure, particularly in the secessionist Eastern Region. The fortuitous discovery of large oilfields propelled the country to become one of the world’s largest oil exporters. Along with other cabinet colleagues and powerful mandarins, Adedeji crafted and implemented five-year national development plans that called for rapid industrialisation and laid the foundations for much of the infrastructure that Nigeria still continues to rely on, though failing woefully to maintain. He also created the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in 1973 to forge national unity. Adedeji had many entertaining anecdotes about tough cabinet meetings in which the hot-tempered General Murtala Muhammed would threaten the mild-mannered General Gowon. His greatest feats were, however, in the area of regional integration. Adedeji was widely regarded to have been ‘the father of ECOWAS’, the Economic Community of West African States. He had outlined a vision for regional 188

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integration in West Africa in the Journal of Modern African Studies in 1970, before turning theory into practice by 1975. While serving as Gowon’s minister of economic development, he convinced 15 other West African leaders to establish ECOWAS, following tireless ‘shuttle diplomacy’ across the subregion. He captured these efforts in a memorable 2004 chapter, ‘ECOWAS: A Retrospective Journey’, in which he described his painstaking efforts, surprisingly crediting Côte d’Ivoire’s president Félix Houphouët-Boigny with bridging West Africa’s historical francophone–anglophone divide. Adedeji also consistently argued that regional integration must be seen as an instrument for national survival and socio-economic transformation. In 1975, he was head-hunted by the UN to lead its Addis Ababa-based Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). His 16-year tenure became the organisation’s longest and most dynamic: he converted the ECA into a panAfrican platform to continue his efforts to promote economic integration, leading to the creation of the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) in 1981 and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) in 1983. The indefatigable Adedeji, who frequently worked 18-hour days, again acquired a fearsome reputation, insisting that one of two lifts at the ECA secretariat be blocked off for him on arrival at the office every morning so he could avoid having to wait. He collaborated closely with successive Organisation of African Unity (OAU) secretaries-general in Addis Ababa, and became a confidant and economic adviser to many African leaders whom he addressed at annual continental summits. Adedeji established a particularly close friendship with Julius Nyerere after he delivered a series of lectures in Tanzania in 1971, in which he had indiscreetly declared to ‘Mwalimu’ that he had not met a single socialist in the country. The scholar-administrator established a reputation as a pragmatic economist more interested in solving problems than being constrained by ideological straitjackets. Assisted by a formidable team of largely African economists, he used the ECA to launch the most sustained assault on the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) implemented from the 1980s by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Adedeji coined the widely used term ‘the lost decade’ to describe Africa’s rapid decline in the 1980s, and argued against what he saw as the Bretton Woods institutions’ approach of ‘growth without development’ and export-led integration of African states into the world economy on massively unequal terms. He stressed instead the need for Africa to use its own resources to promote greater intra-African growth by prioritising 189

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agriculture and regional integration. Adedeji led the development of Africa’s Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation of 1989 and the African Charter for Popular Participation in Development and Transformation of 1990. He often challenged Africa’s ‘mindless imitation’ of Western development models, and pushed instead for a human-centred view of development and integration. He thus championed the collective self-reliance and self-sustainability principles of his 1980 Lagos Plan of Action, which was adopted by the OAU but left to gather dust on the shelves of African development ministries in the face of opposition by Western donors. The renowned Ghanaian political economist SKB Asante described Adedeji as an ‘African Cassandra’, a visionary prophet who saw the future clearly, but whose truthful prophecies often went unheeded until it was too late. In the end, the Bank and the Fund reversed the large cuts in education and health spending that had decimated Africa’s socio-economic sector in the 1980s and 1990s. Debt relief also became fashionable over a decade after Adedeji had warned about the unsustainability of Africa’s $250 billion external debt in the 1980s. After retiring from the ECA in 1991, Adedeji continued his regional integration and peacemaking efforts in Africa: he served on a committee to review the ECOWAS treaty in 1992; he was on another body to transform the OAU into the African Union (AU) in 2002; he was a mediator in Zimbabwe in 2002; he headed the Commonwealth team to observe Kenya’s election in 2002–2003; and in 2007 he chaired the committee which audited the five-year integration efforts of the African Union. Adedeji also established the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies (ACDESS) as a policy think tank in Ijebu-Ode, which sadly became moribund. His elevation to the Panel of Eminent Persons of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) in 2003 did not stop him from continuing to criticise the Thabo Mbeki-led NEPAD. His main complaint was that the plan was ahistorical and too externally dependent in abandoning the self-reliant integration principles of the Lagos Plan of Action, and in naively ignoring the failure of external donors to contribute substantive resources towards implementing past African-led development plans. Adedeji was the lead panellist of the South African APRM country review process, which took place between 2005 and 2007. Its report acknowledged the country’s political and economic progress, but criticised the slow pace of socio-economic transformation and growing inequalities, cautioning against the growing threat of xenophobic attacks in 190

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South Africa. Like the proverbial ostrich that buries its head in the sand, the notoriously thin-skinned government of Thabo Mbeki strongly objected to the report’s criticisms, arrogantly and irresponsibly dismissing the xenophobic threat as ‘simply not true’. This was one of the most painful moments in Adedeji’s career. He would, however, once again prove to be a Cassandra: in May 2008, 62 foreigners were killed in South Africa and 100,000 people displaced in horrific attacks against foreigners. Adedeji was also scathing about Nigeria’s failure to fulfil its potential, noting in 2004: ‘No country that is confronted with a long period of political instability, economic stagnation, and regression, and is reputed to be one of the most corrupt societies in the world, has a moral basis to lead others. If it tries to, it will be resisted.’ He turned down the chance to head Nigeria’s interim government after the annulment of democratic elections by the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida in June 1993. Adedeji’s attempt to secure the Nigerian presidency after retiring from the ECA in 1991 proved unsuccessful, demonstrating that no prophet is honoured in his own homeland. In terms of historical stature, Adedeji will take his rightful place alongside such global figures as Argentina’s Raúl Prebisch and France’s Jean Monnet as the foremost prophet of regional integration on his own continent. May his soul rest in peace. The Guardian (Nigeria), 1 May 2018.

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Adebayo Adedeji and Jean Monnet:

The Fathers of African and European

Integration

NIGERIAN SCHOLAR-DIPLOMAT Adebayo Adedeji – the chair of South Africa’s African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) process of 2006–2007 – turned 80 last month (December 2010), having earlier announced his retirement from public life in July 2010 after fifty years of dedicated service to the continent. Adedeji and Frenchman Jean Monnet are widely regarded as having been the fathers of regional integration in Africa and Europe respectively. Both men were propelled into prominence and achieved professional success at an early age. Both were put in charge of reconstructing their countries after destructive conflicts. Both were men of vision who enjoyed the trust of powerful political actors. Both were, however, ultimately frustrated in their efforts to unite their continents, Africa and Europe. Jean Monnet grew up in the French town of Cognac, working in his family’s brandy business. His travels to Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa provided him with an education on other cultures and a ‘window on the world’. Monnet did not much like school and what he described as ‘bookish knowledge’. Sent by his father at the age of 16 to live with a wine merchant in London, he learned English in order to be able to communicate with his clientele. The cognac business thus forced the Gallic merchant to expand his horizons beyond the provincialism of his small French town to become a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. 192

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During the First World War (1914–1918), Monnet coordinated the supplies of Allied merchant fleets. During the Second World War (1939–1945), he led Anglo-French supply programmes. Though Monnet was keen to use international cooperation as a means of avoiding war, he also contributed to war efforts to achieve peace. At the age of 30, he became deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations – the precursor of the United Nations (UN) – in 1919 until 1923, when he returned to private business. Between 1947 and 1955, Monnet headed the commission for France’s post­ war reconstruction, before becoming the chief architect of European integration. He authored the Schuman Plan of 1950, named after French foreign minister Robert Schuman. Monnet then served, between 1952 and 1955, as president of the plan’s main body: the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which involved France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – the six founding members of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. Led by Monnet, the ECSC created institutions such as the Common Assembly, the Special Council of Ministers, and the Court of Justice – forerunners of the key organs of the current 27-member European Union (EU). As Monnet famously noted: ‘Nothing is possible without men; nothing is lasting without institutions.’ The Frenchman died in 1979 at the age of 90, having devoted his life to promoting peace and regional integration in Europe. Like Monnet, Adedeji grew up in a small town, having been raised in IjebuOde in south-west Nigeria under British colonial rule. This experience would leave a fierce anti-colonial mark on him. Adedeji’s middle-class parents were farmers, who left him in the care of his disciplinarian grandmother ‘Mama Eleja’, an enterprising, shrewd, and determined fish-seller and indomitable matriarch. Even though she was formally illiterate, Adedeji’s grandmother pushed the young precocious boy to study consistently and he became an outstanding student. Unlike Monnet, Adedeji excelled academically, studying economics and public administration at the universities of Leicester, Harvard, and London, and eventually obtaining a doctorate. He returned to Nigeria in 1958 – two years before the country’s independence – to take up a senior post in the Western Region’s ministry of economic planning. He then taught at Nigeria’s University of Ile-Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), becoming a full professor of economics and public administration at the age of 36. In 1971, Adedeji was appointed Nigeria’s minister of economic reconstruction 193

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and development by the military regime of General Yakubu Gowon. He oversaw the country’s difficult post-war peacebuilding efforts after a devastating conflict that had left one million dead and wreaked much destruction, particularly in the country’s Eastern Region. The fortuitous discovery of oil helped Adedeji and the country’s powerful mandarins to build much of the infrastructure that laid the foundation for Nigeria’s perennially delayed industrial take-off. Adedeji became ‘the father of ECOWAS’ (the Economic Community of West African States), after persuading 16 West African leaders to establish a common market in 1975 following tireless ‘shuttle diplomacy’ across the subregion. The body was based on the Nigerian technocrat’s vision, which consistently argued that regional integration must become an instrument for national survival and socio-economic transformation. Adedeji then joined the United Nations to lead its Addis Ababa-based Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in 1975. His 16-year tenure was the ECA’s longest and most dynamic in that position. He skilfully converted the organisation into a pan-African platform to continue his efforts at promoting economic integration, leading the creation of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) in 1981 and 1983 respectively. Adedeji would later chair and publish a December 2007 report on the African Union, which advocated the acceleration of regional integration on the continent, and made concrete recommendations for strengthening Africa’s regional bodies. Sadly, the AU has failed to give this report the priority it deserves. Both Adedeji and Monnet headed powerful international organisations through which they promoted their visions of regional integration. Both enjoyed generating ideas but realised that they had to relate these concepts to practical action and muster political support to implement them. Both men shared an aversion to the operation of blind market forces and regarded politics as inseparable from economics. Both regarded regional integration as a means to promote peace and socio-economic development. Both were far-sighted visionaries who often saw the future more clearly than the leaders they sought to advise. In the end, however, both men proved to be Cassandras: Adedeji never saw his dream of an African Common Market fulfilled, while Monnet’s dream of a ‘United States of Europe’ has yet to be realised. This Day (Nigeria), 29 January 2011.

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Raúl Prebisch and the Building of

Latin America

AS AFRICA STRUGGLES WITH the challenges of region-building, it is worth considering the legacy of Raúl Prebisch, a visionary Argentinian economist who contributed tremendously to the building of Latin America sixty years ago. Prebisch was born in 1901. He studied and taught economics at the University of Buenos Aires before serving as undersecretary of finance and agriculture. At 34, he became the first director of Argentina’s central bank, serving a militarybacked oligarchy, which later became discredited. His world view was heavily influenced by orthodox Western economic thinking. After a military coup in 1943, he was dismissed and ostracised by the regime. Almost like an intellectual Che Guevara whose motorcycle travels across Latin America transformed him into the world’s most famous guerrilla leader, Prebisch spent six years in the wilderness travelling more comfortably than his famous compatriot across the region as a banking consultant. He eventually found succour in the Chilean capital of Santiago, where he served as the United Nations (UN) Economic Commission for Latin America’s executive secretary from 1950 to 1963. The US had been determined to shut down the ECLA, which it regarded as an unwelcome rival to the Washington-based Organization of American States’ Economic and Social Council. Prebisch mobilised political support across Latin America for its governments to take ownership of the body and to stare down the US juggernaut. His ECLA produced country studies of such high quality that he convinced regional governments to embarrass 195

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Washington into keeping the organisation alive. Before joining the ECLA, Prebisch had achieved prominence when he presented his seminal report, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems, to the newly established organisation in 1949. He rejected neo­ classical international trade theories that argued that such commerce benefited all countries due to the comparative advantage each enjoyed. The ruinous effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s on Latin American economies were a formative experience for Prebisch. He was unconvinced international trade would reduce the income gap between rich and poor governments. He urged Latin American governments to overturn the international division of labour in which the northern ‘centre’ exported manufactured goods to developing countries, the prices of which continued to increase, while the southern ‘periphery’ exported agricultural goods and minerals to the north, the prices of which continued to decline. Led by Prebisch, ECLA ‘structuralists’ proposed a strategy based on importsubstitution and employing protectionist high tariffs on manufacturing imports and a tax on primary exports to encourage the creation of a larger industrial sector. The organisation’s two-yearly economic surveys sought to push Latin American governments to break the vicious cycle of low productivity, low income and low savings by increasing industrialisation through restructuring domestic imports and production. Prebisch’s approach was to find ‘historical moments’ to use new ideas to transform institutions into movements for structural change. He believed fervently in the role of the state in social engineering and economic planning. Working 18-hour days at the ECLA with a team of some of the continent’s finest economists, Prebisch and his disciples spread the heretical gospel of ‘structuralism’. They questioned whether growth would necessarily result in improved income distribution, and called for greater external savings to support regional development. Prebisch also focused on trying to create a Latin American Common Market, often complaining that Latin America’s 20 states operated in ‘watertight compartments’. He urged co-operation in areas such as iron and steel at a time when agriculture-dominated regional trade was a derisory 7%. He preached specialisation based on regional planning as a way of industrialising through the economies of scale of a larger market. Though critics often dismissed Prebisch’s ideas as ‘impractical’ and ‘socialist’, he consistently promoted the role of the private sector, international trade and foreign capital. His success at the ECLA, though, may have contained 196

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the seeds of its own failure. After he had sold structuralism as a theory for economic development, these ideas did not translate into success in the real world of practice, leading to regional governments losing faith in the new religion. Prebisch later blamed the failures on ineffective implementation by incompetent Latin American governments, in contrast to the success of countries such as South Korea. Today, the increasing economic success of China and Brazil has rendered Prebisch’s binary North–South divide somewhat anachronistic. He died in 1986 at the age of 85, with The Economist dubbing him ‘Latin America’s Keynes’. In the end, Prebisch was a tragic prophet whose vision for regional integration and development in Latin America went largely unfulfilled. It was, however, a heroic failure born not of a lack of ambition, but of power. Business Day (South Africa), 3 December 2012.

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Ibrahim Gambari: The Aristocratic

Scholar-Diplomat

IBRAHIM AGBOOLA GAMBARI was born in Ilorin on 24 November 1944. As the son of the late emir of Ilorin, Sulu Gambari, and brother of the current emir, Kolapo Gambari, his aristocratic background instilled in him a sense of noblesse oblige: there is a profound belief that such royal status entails an obligation to public duty. In the early years of post-independence Nigeria, Gambari attended the elite King’s College in Lagos, before proceeding to the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1965. In the volatile 1960s, the LSE, a finishing school for future African and Asian political leaders, had a reputation for being a hotbed of radical dissent and vociferous anti-establishment protest. The young Gambari often joined in the student protests outside Rhodesia House against Ian Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in political science from LSE in 1968, Gambari crossed the Atlantic to begin a doctorate in political science at New York’s Columbia University. Colleagues at Columbia remember him as a studious and serious-minded student with a profound sense of purpose, pursuing his personal mission with single-minded determination. While completing his doctorate, he was already married to Fatima Oniyangi (they have three children), and taught part-time at two New York universities: the City University and State University. Having obtained the golden fleece of his doctorate in 1974, he worked for three years as assistant professor at New York’s State University. Turning down the chance of a lucrative career as a tenured professor in America, 198

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he returned to a Nigeria still awash with oil wealth in 1977. Working his way rapidly up the academic ladder at Zaria’s Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), he became an associate professor by the time President Shehu Shagari appointed him director-general of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) in October 1983. He was to remain only three months in this job, when General Buhari’s New Year’s Eve coup of 1983 propelled him to the position of minister of foreign affairs. By birth, breeding and background, Gambari was well placed, and at the age of 39, he had become one of Nigeria’s youngest foreign ministers, and the first to possess a solid academic training in the field of diplomacy. As a young foreign minister in the department of pompous plenipotentiaries who were all older than he, Gambari was at first regarded as a young upstart theoretician with no practical experience. But he quickly won the support of most of his powerful mandarins through his sheer competence and the fact that he enjoyed the total confidence of his military superiors. (General Idiagbon also came from Ilorin’s political elite.) Gambari would later describe the sacred drama of bureaucratic politics in his ministry: ‘the directors-general and the permanent secretary spent much time and energy subverting one another and, on occasions when they agreed, subverting their minister as well’. But the fact that he had succeeded in winning the confidence of his diplomats was borne out in the memoirs of his director-general for African affairs, Ambassador Olujimi Jolaoso, who wrote about Gambari: ‘He was indeed determined to succeed and would have left quite a credible and enduring mark on Nigerian diplomacy if he had the time.’ Gambari lost his job after 20 months as a result of General Ibrahim Babangida’s August 1985 coup. He returned to ABU, becoming a full professor in 1986, and between 1986 and 1989 was a visiting professor at Washington’s reputable School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a breeding ground for America’s brightest bureaucrats. He was appointed Nigeria’s permanent representative to the UN in 1990. Gambari is Nigeria’s longest-serving UN ambassador, having represented the country for six years (eventually nine years). Africa was particularly fortunate to have such a forceful defender of its cause at the world body at a time when conflicts proliferated in Angola, Somalia, Liberia and Rwanda. After a closely fought campaign, Nigeria was elected to the UN Security Council for a two-year term in 1993. Gambari soon impressed his 14 other colleagues on the body regarded as the UN’s powder keg: he forced African issues onto the Security Council’s agenda, and ensured that the continent did not fall off the map of the world’s concerns. 199

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As the last chair of the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid from 1990 to 1994, he warned the West against a precipitate lifting of economic sanctions before the transition to majority rule had become irreversible. He was a frequent visitor to South Africa during these four years. At the UN, Gambari had two other favourite hobby horses: he campaigned indefatigably for a permanent African seat on the UN Security Council (with a clear predilection for Nigeria to occupy it), and he consistently pushed for the UN to become more actively involved in economic development and the resolution of the debt crisis. A strong supporter of the UN, Gambari urged at an NIIA lecture in 1992: ‘the members of the United Nations must perceive and use the organisation as a purposeful forum and instrument for securing a world order: collectively defined, designed and defended’. He chaired the UN Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations. Gambari has always sought to bridge the gap between theoretical scholar and practical diplomat. As UN ambassador, he maintained a gruelling schedule of public lectures in the US, Europe and the Middle East, and regularly attended academic conferences. His ideas have been clearly set out in three books. The Domestic Politics of Nigeria’s Foreign Policy was published in 1980. An extension of his doctoral thesis at Columbia, it examines the link between domestic politics and foreign policy during Nigeria’s First Republic. When at SAIS from 1986 to 1989, he wrote Theory and Reality in Foreign Policy Decision-Making, a lucid account of his tenure as foreign minister, and Comparative Study of Regional Integration, which examines the dilemma facing ECOWAS, drawing on parallels and differences between integration efforts in East and southern Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. He further published two books: Africa’s Security Questions (2001) and The United Nations in a Changing World Order (2007), which both draw on his practical experience at the UN. In his academic work, Gambari was never tired of stressing the inextricable link between a strong domestic base and an active foreign policy. During his convocation address at the University of Abuja in January 1996, he alerted Nigerians to the dangers of their declining economic position, saying: ‘We must never allow our influence on the African continent to decline; it remains our springboard to greatness.’ Gambari is credited with having been the first foreign minister to have publicly articulated the idea of four concentric circles guiding Nigeria’s foreign priorities: the innermost circle representing Nigeria’s security; the second, the West African subregion; the third, the rest of Africa and the OAU; and the fourth, international organisations and extra-African countries. Many scholars of Nigeria’s foreign policy have covered these various themes, but 200

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few have been able to adopt a holistic approach and illuminate their work with the practical insights which have been the hallmarks of Gambari’s scholarship. Observers have noted the political dexterity and uncanny survival skills of this professor of political science, who has been able to put into practice the sixteenth-century theoretical treatises on political survival of the most famous scholar-diplomat of all: Florence’s Niccolò Machiavelli. Gambari has pulled off the incredible feat of serving under five (eventually unpopular) Nigerian regimes and still enjoyed a high reputation. Despite the criticisms of Nigeria and its international condemnation after the 1995 Saro-Wiwa hanging, Gambari’s personal reputation as a competent and articulate spokesman for his country has endured. His colleagues in the West were amazed that he did not resign to maintain his personal integrity: but a sense of duty and devotion to public service has been deeply inculcated in him. Gambari sees the defence of his country’s honour as his ultimate task, and relishes more the difficult challenge of representing Nigeria during the dog days of economic bust than the cosy, halcyon days of the oil boom. To leave a sinking ship was out of the question; he chose to sink or swim with the regime. Gambari’s rise to prominence was also helped in no small measure by his affable character, his modesty and pleasant demeanour as well as his sharp wit. He is unassuming and dignified, and has a cosmopolitan air that endeared him to African, Arab, Asian, European and Latin American diplomats who frequently attended receptions at Nigeria’s glittering glasshouse embassy. He has also won the respect of African diplomats and scholars with his often scathing criticism of the patronising and condescending attitude of the Western press towards Africa. In one famous case in 1993, he wrote a trenchant response to the New York Times; while not justifying the annulment of the 1993 elections, he bluntly told his short-sighted critics that ‘Nigeria will find its own way to democracy’. Paradoxically, the professor has often sounded radical in his criticism of the West. During a memorable lecture on ‘Africa and the New World Order’ at Oxford University in 1992, he castigated the West’s double standards in maintaining nuclear weapons while denying it to poorer ‘rogue states’. He ridiculed ideas of a ‘new world order’ and the ‘end of history’ as Eurocentric constructs that ignore the growing economic and political marginalisation of Africa. During his Abuja University convocation speech, Gambari warned against a ‘new global apartheid of industrialised North imposing minority rule on an impoverished, underdeveloped South’. But he also has his critics. Detractors have berated him for not speaking 201

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out against the excesses of the regimes under which he has served, as well as the wide-ranging and unpopular purge of the foreign service which occurred under his tenure. However, a careful reading of Gambari’s work clearly shows that he is critical of some of these policies (like the expulsion of ‘illegal aliens’ under Buhari), even though his criticism is often subtly couched in general terms. Despite the evident tension between the objective scholar and the partisan diplomat, Gambari has often managed to maintain an independence of thought which is rare among academic public officials in Nigeria: he has warned against a hasty review of Nigeria’s foreign policy; called for a halt to the creation of more unviable federal states; criticised the mounting costs of the ECOMOG operation; advocated democratic change in Nigeria and an end to maladministration; and, after attending Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration in May 1994, contrasted South Africa’s confidence with Nigeria’s ‘state of domestic despondency and international scorn’. At the age of only 51, Gambari has already achieved much. It would be tempting to speculate on a career in politics, but the professor is deeply aware of the precarious and anarchical nature of politics in the developing world. His character would seem unsuited for the rough and tumble of the labyrinthine jungle that provides the backdrop to Nigerian politics. Still, he keeps his cards close to his chest and has assiduously cultivated an intricate network of political allies. He has also been careful to make few political enemies in his rise to the top. Pan Africa (London), September/October 1996.

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Lakhdar Brahimi: An Algerian

Troubleshooter

ALGERIAN TROUBLESHOOTER LAKHDAR Brahimi recently apologised to the people of Syria for his failure to reach an agreement to end its three-year civil conflict following recent talks in Geneva. More than 100,000 Syrians have died in this war, 4.25 million have been internally displaced, and 2 million have become refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt. Though the resolution of this conflict, which has pitted Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds and assorted jihadists against one another, remains intractable, its 80-year-old Algerian mediator is a man of great experience and diplomatic acumen. Brahimi replaced Ghanaian former United Nations (UN) secretary-general Kofi Annan as the joint UN–Arab League mediator in Syria in September 2012. In throwing in the towel, Annan had described the situation as a ‘brick wall’. Brahimi took up this metaphor, noting that, standing in front of a brick wall, he would look for cracks in it, or else try to go around it. As he noted: ‘I’m coming to this job with my eyes open, and no illusions.’ Indeed, his road to Damascus has been difficult, and both the Syrian government and rebels have refused a Saul-like Damascene conversion. The US, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have supported the rebels, while Russia, China, Iran, and Hezbollah have backed President Bashar al-Assad. Brahimi left his studies in France in 1956 at the age of 22 to join his country’s liberation struggle in a savage war of independence against a brutal French colonial administration, which resulted in one million mostly Algerian deaths. 203

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He admired Egypt’s charismatic leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading panArab prophet of the age, who also promoted pan-Africanism and non-alignment. Brahimi served as the Front de libération nationale’s representative in south-east Asia for five years, before becoming Algeria’s ambassador to Egypt and Britain. He was undersecretary-general of the Arab League for seven years, before serving as Algeria’s foreign minister between 1991 and 1993 – a particularly difficult period after a civil war erupted following the annulment by Algeria’s military of elections that Islamists were poised to win. As a special envoy for the Arab League, Brahimi was credited with crafting the Taif agreement that ended Lebanon’s 15-year civil war in 1989. Since 1993, he has served three UN secretaries-general as a favoured troubleshooter for two decades. He was the UN special representative in South Africa, Haiti and Afghanistan, and was its special envoy to Zaire, Sudan, Burundi, Liberia, Nigeria, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Iraq and Yemen. Brahimi has said his time as head of the UN observer mission to South Africa between 1993 and 1994 was one of the highlights of his career. He is also a member of the Elders group, established in 2007 along with other luminaries such as Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan and Jimmy Carter. Brahimi is widely regarded as a pious, patient and pragmatic mediator, who possesses excellent political judgement and good listening skills. He is an urbane, cosmopolitan citizen of the world who was living in comfortable exile in Paris until called upon to try to end Syria’s civil war. While negotiating the Bonn conference for Afghanistan in 2001, Brahimi famously made the parties stay up all night until they had reached an agreement. He describes his mediation technique as navigating by sight: looking for a solution while making no assumptions about the outcomes of peacemaking. Though a consummate diplomat, he can also be outspoken. Brahimi criticised the failures of the US occupation in Iraq after 2003. While in Iraq, he also described Israeli policies as ‘the big poison in the region’. He has berated the moral quality of leadership in the Third World, and criticised Western Islamophobia. Unlike Annan, Brahimi speaks Arabic and, having served with the Arab League and travelled to Syria for five decades, understands the conflict much better. He did not call for Assad’s ouster, as the pro-Western Annan had done, effectively ending any leverage he might have had on the stronger party. But Brahimi also has his detractors. Some Americans have accused him of condoning autocratic regimes in the Arab world. Some Third World scholars 204

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have accused him of legitimising US neo-imperial rule in Afghanistan and Iraq and promoting Washington’s preferences in Haiti. His 2000 review of UN peacekeeping was also criticised by some in Africa as having provided an excuse for powerful Western countries to engage in selective rather than collective security. A pro-Assad group recently called Brahimi ‘one­ eyed and many-tongued’. Despite these criticisms, Brahimi is widely acknowledged to be one of the few diplomats who could potentially craft a solution to Syria’s bloody conflict. He noted 18 months ago that he accepted the job out of ‘perhaps a bit of vanity and an excessive sense of duty’. Business Day (South Africa), 24 February 2014.

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Augustine Mahiga: A Tanzanian

Peacemaker

TANZANIA’S JUSTICE MINISTER Augustine Mahiga, who died on 1 May 2020 at the age of 74 was an eminent pan-African peacemaker and humanitarian widely renowned for his intelligence, integrity, and humility. Born in the central Tanzanian town of Iringa with its picturesque cliffs, valleys, and rocks, he did all his early schooling in Tosamaganga. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Dar es Salaam, before earning master’s and doctorate degrees in international relations from the University of Toronto. Mahiga then worked in the office of founding president Julius Nyerere, serving as director-general of intelligence and security, while teaching part-time at Dar University. He switched from spymaster and university don to diplomat when he joined the country’s foreign ministry in 1983, serving in Ottawa and Geneva. He then served with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), enjoying a successful decade-long career in the Great Lakes, Liberia, India, and Italy. In a published 2009 chapter I commissioned on the UNHCR, Mahiga skilfully traced the history of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the 1967 Status of Refugees protocol, and the 1969 Organisation of African Unity refugee convention, showing how refugee flows, driven by conflicts, have resulted in innovation in refugee protection. Ever the discreet diplomat, Mahiga pulled his punches in not criticising the pernicious roles of France, the US, and Belgium during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The politically astute Tanzanian then served as his country’s permanent 206

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representative to the UN between 2003 and 2010. He sat on the UN Security Council in 2005–2006; was actively involved in the UN reform process of Ghanaian UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, after which he served on the inaugural UN Peacebuilding Commission; and was active in pushing refugee issues and the protection of civilians in the UN Economic and Social Council. Mahiga then served as UN special representative in Somalia between 2010 and 2013, spending weeks reading up on the country’s complex clan structures before assuming the post. In a fractious conflict-ridden system of squabbling politicians and warlords, he courageously moved the UN office from Nairobi to Mogadishu, braving attacks from al-Shabaab militants. In a 2018 book chapter I commissioned, Mahiga described how he was able to establish the first functioning government inside Somalia in 20 years in 2011, though the situation in the country still remains unstable. Instrumental in his peacemaking efforts was his long-standing friendship – forged at Dar University – with Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, who acted as a regional mediator and contributed the bulk of troops to the 22,000-strong AU mission in Somalia, alongside Ethiopia, Kenya, Burundi, and Djibouti. Mahiga praised the role of Somali civil society and traditional elders in peacemaking efforts, while providing a cogent critique of liberal peacebuilding in Somalia, with its one-size-fits-all model. He argued that the approach failed to ensure the political participation of marginalised groups (especially women), and noted that the insistence on elections was no panacea, as these polls often deepened divisions. Mahiga thus called for a greater focus on social needs and social justice. He, however, again held back from criticising the role of the US in Somalia in exacerbating an already complicated situation through military operations, drone strikes, and ‘targeted’ assassinations, which sometimes resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians. After leaving the UN, Mahiga unsuccessfully ran for president of Tanzania’s ruling party in 2015, before being appointed foreign minister by the eventual victor, John Magufuli. His tenure was noted for restoring Tanzania’s central role in the East African Community (EAC), even as he remained active in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Exhausted from the international travel he had endured all his adult life, Mahiga became justice minister in 2019, and occupied this post until his death. He was buried in his ancestral home of Tosamaganga between the graves of his parents which he had visited two weeks earlier, thus fulfilling his final wish. Business Day (South Africa), 18 May 2020. 207

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Margaret Vogt: Africa Loses an

Unflagging Peacemaker

MARGARET VOGT, WHO died at the age of 64 on 23 September 2014, was a panAfrican peacemaker and scholar-diplomat, who contributed tremendously to Africa’s evolving security architecture. She was involved in student activism during her school days in Lagos, before obtaining her master’s degree from Columbia University in New York. She joined her country’s top foreign policy think tank, the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), rising to the post of associate research professor. Rather unusually for a woman at the time, she specialised in security studies, an area that had hitherto been closely guarded by the country’s securocrats. She would become the first civilian director of studies at Nigeria’s Command and Staff College and a lecturer at its War College. A dyed-in-the-wool pan-African, she married a Beninois, Michel, with whom she had six children. Vogt moved to New York in 1995 to head the Africa Programme of the International Peace Institute (IPI), a think tank that works closely with and on the United Nations (UN). In this role for more than three years, she led the team of experts that crafted a security mechanism for the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) – now the African Union (AU) – which subsequently sought to manage conflicts across the continent. Vogt also pushed the OAU to make more efforts to involve women in African peacemaking and peacebuilding initiatives. While helping to establish the OAU security mechanism, she led another team of experts to devise a security mechanism for the Economic Community of West 208

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African States (ECOWAS) in 1998–1999. This was the first such subregional mechanism on the continent, and built on the lessons of the organisation’s peacekeeping missions in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Vogt had, in fact, co-edited one of the earliest books on the ECOWAS Ceasefire Monitoring Group mission in Liberia in 1992; another on Nigeria’s historical peacekeeping role in 1993; and a two-volume comparative study of peacekeeping in Chad and Liberia in 1996. Following her stint at IPI, Vogt moved across the street to join the UN and spent the rest of her 15 years working for the cause of peace in the world body. As deputy director-general in the Department of Political Affairs, she strove tirelessly to calm African conflicts, build closer ties with the AU, and provide conceptual thinking to a UN not always renowned for sound analysis. She was head-hunted by Malian AU commission chair Alpha Konaré and seconded by the UN to serve as his chef de cabinet in Addis Ababa between 2003 and 2005. Her understanding of the byzantine UN bureaucracy proved crucial to AU efforts to establish peacekeeping partnerships with the world body in Burundi and Sudan’s Darfur region. Her direct access to Olusegun Obasanjo was also indispensable when the Nigerian president chaired the continental body between 2004 and 2005. Vogt’s necessary ‘gate-keeping’ role made her enemies at the AU, but she also retained many supporters. After returning to her UN post in Turtle Bay from Addis Ababa, Vogt brought theory and praxis together in a seminal chapter on the world body’s relationship with the AU and ECOWAS in a book I edited on the UN’s role in Africa in 2009. Ever the intrepid professional nomad, she accepted the challenge of serving as the deputy special representative of the UN Political Office for Somalia based in Nairobi. It would be her ‘second coming’ to the issue of Somalia, having served as a UN demobilisation officer in the country in 1994. She worked indefatigably to foster collaboration between the AU peacekeeping force in Somalia and the UN office. Her final posting was to serve as special representative of the UN Integrated Peacebuilding Office in the Central African Republic (CAR) between 2011 and 2013. The UN’s constantly expressed desire to promote strong women to senior positions has often turned out to be rhetorical hot air, and it took Vogt much longer to ascend the UN ladder than it should have, often serving under male bosses less experienced and knowledgeable than she was. By the time of her final posting in Bangui, Vogt was in a wheelchair, and courageously soldiered on in peacemaking efforts in the CAR. Some blamed her for having been too close to the autocratic government of François Bozizé 209

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before the peace process fell apart in 2013. Vogt, however, gave a combative and cogent defence of her peacemaking efforts at a seminar in Cape Town in 2013, highlighting the pernicious role of economic interests and external powers such as France in the CAR. A prodigious networker who was deeply religious, she endeared herself with her motherly demeanour and mentoring skills to many of her younger colleagues, and she will be fondly remembered as an eminent pan-African peacemaker. Business Day (South Africa), 6 October 2014.

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Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: Nigeria’s

Iron Lady

Reforming the Unreformable: Lessons from Nigeria by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (MIT Press, 2012)

ON THE SIDELINES OF the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Cape Town in March 2013, I chaired a book launch starring Nigeria’s formidable first female finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, resplendent in her trademark African traditional dress and matching headgear. She talked unpretentiously, without the affected foreign accent of some Nigerians who have spent two decades abroad. She had recently published a book titled Reforming the Unreformable on her time – between 2003 and 2006 – as finance minister of Africa’s largest economy, the world’s eighth most populous state, and its sixth-largest oil-producer. She had been the architect of the deal to pay off Nigeria’s $30 billion debt (the second largest such debt deal with the Paris Club of creditors at the time), and led a team of technocratic reformers seeking to tackle corruption, build efficient public and private institutions, obtain Nigeria’s first sovereign debt rating, and transform the country into an emerging economy. Without any notes, Okonjo-Iweala gave a fluent, inspiring, and intrepid 30-minute presentation, breaking down complicated economic concepts in ways that were easy for the general audience to digest. She berated Nigeria’s failure to create a system of sound planning and financial management of its oil resources; described Herculean efforts to fight vested interests at great 211

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personal cost; detailed how she had used her impressive international network to achieve Nigeria’s debt deal; observed that Nigeria’s political class appeared to be intimidated by its economic technocrats; and brushed off concerns about women not being equal to men. Nicknamed Okonjo-‘Wahala’ (Troublemaker) by Nigeria’s lively press, she gave a virtuoso performance to a South African audience fed on a constant staple of stereotypes about corrupt Nigerian drugtraffickers. My impression of Nigeria’s ‘Iron Lady’ was of an incredibly competent, courageous, and intelligent individual with a strong sense of public service. I also had the impression of a diva who was aware of her own importance, clearly enjoyed her celebrity status, and came across as a ‘head of state in waiting’. Okonjo-Iweala is not shy about blowing her own trumpet and her role in the Nigerian reform team, talking of the ‘legitimacy and dynamism that I brought to the team’. Forbes named her among the ten most influential women in the world in 2011, while Foreign Policy listed her among the top 100 global thinkers in the same year. The 60-year-old technocrat’s brilliant economic credentials are from the prestigious Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she obtained her doctorate. It is clear that the poor grasp of complex economic issues that many of Nigeria’s political leaders and parliamentary dunderheads have exhibited is what has given technocrats like Okonjo-Iweala their immense power, and a belief that they can take better decisions than the leaders they seek to advice. In her book, Okonjo-Iweala describes in brutally frank terms the mutual antipathy between politicians and technocrats: ‘We would keep away from politics, since in any case most of the politicians left a lot to be desired. In fact, I could sense that the politicians felt our team did not appreciate them and regarded them with disdain.’ During the Cape Town book launch in March 2013, Okonjo-Iweala made the rather intriguing point that she eventually came to see no difference between politicians and technocrats, and noted that she had had to become a politician (while belonging to no party) in order to be able to do her job effectively. This phenomenon of political technocrats was particularly prominent during the era of the ‘super permsecs’ (permanent secretaries) or powerful mandarins under military rule in the early 1970s. It produced such prominent figures as Allison Ayida, Phillip Asiodu, Abdulazeez Atta, and Ahmed Joda, who dominated General Yakubu Gowon’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. Okonjo-Iweala grew up in a solidly middle-class Nigerian family with both parents being professors. Her upbringing was a happy, idyllic one full of ballet 212

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classes and piano lessons until the Nigerian civil war of 1967–1970 forced her family back east, after they lost all their savings. Her father was recruited into the Biafran army. Living on one meal a day, watching children dying, and sleeping on the floor of a bunker were formative experiences that made Okonjo-Iweala determined to succeed, and perhaps also contributed to her three-decade exile in graduate school and at the World Bank in Washington DC, where she rose to become vice-president in 2002. Okonjo-Iweala avoids such personal details in Reforming the Unreformable and focuses squarely on her time as finance minister between 2003 and 2006. The book took her four years to write. Despite the technical subject matter, it is highly readable, rich in detail, and devoid of complex economic jargon. The story is well told and presents a bird’s-eye view of Nigeria’s chronically underperforming and staggeringly corrupt state. Her six-month stint as economic adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2000 had led to OkonjoIweala establishing a Debt Management Office and had given her insights into the country’s parlous policymaking environment. The book covers the strategies of Okonjo-Iweala’s ‘economic team’; the actual implementation of goals to address the structural constraints to private enterprise in Nigeria’s economy through privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation; restructuring the civil service, trade, tariffs, customs and banking sectors; the battle against corruption; the successful, titanic struggle to achieve the annulment of Nigeria’s debt; and the lessons learned from the reform process. Okonjo-Iweala herself recognises at the outset: ‘Nigeria has always been complex to govern in a way outsiders do not often understand or fully grasp’. She describes the country’s three decades of military rule as ‘politically and economically disastrous’ and castigates Nigeria’s ‘kleptocratic elite’ which she notes has ‘a very limited vision’. The country’s Lilliputian leadership had failed to invest sensibly $300 billion of oil earnings since the 1970s. Okonjo-Iweala observes that the same rapacious elite may be one of the largest obstacles to reform, as it continues to feed at the trough of a parasitic state. She describes the deleterious impact of the ‘oil curse’ on Nigeria’s agricultural and other sectors, as well as its destruction of the country’s moral and social fabric. She condemns ‘white elephant’ projects such as the Ajaokuta Steel Mills in which $5 billion was squandered without any concrete results. Before embarking on her reforms, Okonjo-Iweala obtained advice from Brazil’s former deputy finance minister and a World Bank board member, Amaury Bier. In an impressive example of South–South sharing, based on Brazil’s own 213

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reform experiences, she was advised to pick a like-minded ‘economic team’ to fight the tough battles in cabinet; have a comprehensive strategy; and ensure the sustainability of reforms by underpinning them with binding legislation. In crafting the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2007, Nigeria also looked to what Brazil had done and sought to adapt this example to its own legislation. The ‘economic team’ – including individuals such as Charles Soludo, Nasir el-Rufai, Obiageli Ezekwesili, Nenadi Usman, Nuhu Ribadu, and Bode Agusto – crafted the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), which set out to tackle four key challenges: poor economic management; weak public institutions and poor governance; the failure of the state to deliver public services; and a hostile environment for private sector growth. The team sought to bring rationality to a deliberately irrational process designed to enable widespread graft. The reforms recorded some notable successes. A controversial Excess Crude Oil Account (ECA) was created to ensure that savings for the future could be used to stabilise the management of Nigeria’s finances. The country’s rapacious state governors, however, questioned its constitutionality. Half of the country’s revenue has to be shared by the federal government with its 36 states, the federal capital territory, and 774 local government bodies. To increase transparency, Okonjo-Iweala published monthly in national newspapers the funds that state governors and local governments received, in order to empower their constituents to hold them accountable. Another major achievement of the reforms was the liberalisation of Nigeria’s antiquated telecommunications sector in 2003, allowing private mobile phone operators like South Africa’s Mobile Telephone Networks (MTN) and Nigeria’s Glo to provide services to millions of Nigerians. Banking reforms also saw the consolidation of banks from 89 to 25 and the increase in their capital base from $15 million to $192 million. A competitive bidding process for contracts saved the country about $1.5 billion in two and a half years. The climax of this rich story is undoubtedly the historic debt deal after a successful two-year effort between the Nigerian government and the Paris Club between 2003 and 2005. Okonjo-Iweala deserves the most credit for this impressive achievement. Before the debt deal in 2002, Nigeria’s annual debt service to the Paris Club of $3 billion would have represented a third of its overall budget, ten times the national health budget, and five times the education budget. Okonjo-Iweala negotiated a $1 billion annual payment to restore Nigeria’s fiscal credibility. Following marathon all-night negotiating sessions in 214

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Paris in October 2005, the deal was struck, with Nigeria paying $12 billion and being relieved of $18 billion of debt. The agreement led to Nigeria’s first-ever sovereign credit rating, and non-oil sector foreign direct investment doubled from $2 billion to $4 billion following the accord. Okonjo-Iweala is honest in admitting that her reform efforts could have benefited more from cultivating cabinet members and consulting more with civil society and the civil service. This suggests that rather than proceeding through intellectual argumentation and rational persuasion, it was often assumed that ‘vested interests’ would block reforms. Changes were therefore often pushed through with the assistance of the notoriously autocratic president, Olusegun Obasanjo, without proper intellectual debate and disagreement or wide consultation with key interest groups. It is almost as if some of the genuine opposition to reforms is treated as treasonous, and critics of reform are sometimes unfairly branded as being part of corrupt ‘vested interests’. Astonishingly, Okonjo-Iweala admits that the reformers actually stopped trying to gain the support of senior civil servants in their efforts to reform the civil service. It was no surprise that this particular effort at reform failed spectacularly. The reformers often come across in the book as a secret society and cabal of unaccountable priests championing a religion of neo-liberal reform. Such dogma was, however, not to be challenged, and anyone who tried was branded a heretic, to be burned at the stake. The NEEDS strategy – like the continental New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) championed by leaders like Olusegun Obasanjo and South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki – turned out to be a top-down plan imposed on the country without proper and widespread consultation and buy-in from critical civil society actors. The Nigerian civil society actors in the book remain mostly nameless and faceless. Their criticisms of NEEDS are never spelt out or explained. One does not have a sense that there was any serious engagement with these groups. The core of Nigeria’s intelligentsia is caricatured as ‘inclined towards socialism’, as if this somehow made this minority (certainly not a ‘core’, as Okonjo-Iweala asserts) less patriotic. She tends to lump all opponents of reform together, sometimes blurring the line between opportunistic vested interests and genuine intellectual opposition. The views of Nigerian and African economists and think tanks are also completely absent from the book, even as Western scholars like Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs are admiringly cited. Indigenous solutions to these deep-seated problems clearly do not seem to have been taken as seriously as external advice. 215

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Okonjo-Iweala seems to have an exaggerated faith in external civil society and other actors, many of whom, such as Ann Pettifor of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, she cites adoringly. Some of these individuals, like the Irish pop stars Bono and Bob Geldof, in fact trivialise African anti-poverty causes, disempower Africans, and expose the poverty of genuine leadership in these critical areas. Okonjo-Iweala’s key reform allies, from whom advice is often sought, also appear to be external actors: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF); the British Department for International Development (DFID); the Commonwealth Secretariat; and the Washington DC-based Centre for Global Development. In terms of other reforms, the author frankly concedes that customs reform was an ‘outright failure’. There were also glaring supervisory and regulatory failures that led to a severe banking crisis in 2008–2009 which nearly destroyed Nigeria’s financial sector. This industry was exposed as being riddled with greed and corruption as any other in the country, with lavish lifestyles and spending being sustained with the funds of ordinary depositors. The worst banks were identified as Afribank, Finbank, Intercontinental Bank, Oceanic Bank, and Union Bank, which collectively had $7.6 billion in bad loans, while accounting for 40% of Nigeria’s bank credit. The ‘panacea’ of privatisation also turned out to be a mirage. Okonjo-Iweala herself concedes that its success was mixed, as vested political interests were able to influence the outcomes of these processes to feather their own nests. She notes that ‘Nigeria had become synonymous with the word “corruption”’. The mechanics and incidents of corruption in the country are vividly described in the book: monitoring and evaluation officials bribed to authorise incomplete projects; ‘leakages’ in the Budget Office and Accountant General’s office due to poor record-keeping; senior civil servants sharing the ill-gotten interest on government deposits with officials in commercial banks; ‘ghost workers’ collecting salaries and pensions of non-existent staff; legislators inflating budgets; profligate public enterprises being treated as personal nest eggs; private bankers engaging in ‘insider trading’ and squandering depositors’ funds; General Sani Abacha stashing $505 million of stolen money in Swiss bank accounts and raiding the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for $2.2 billion which was carried away in trucks; the money-laundering (nearly £2 million) governor of Bayelsa state, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, jumping bail in London and escaping back to Nigeria disguised as a woman; the governor of Delta state, James Ibori, jailed in London for fraud and money-laundering; TSKJ consortium (including 216

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French, Italian, American, and Japanese firms) paying $180 million in kickbacks to win a $2 billion gas contract in 1995; and Siemens paying bribes totalling €10 million to Nigerian government officials between 2001 and 2004. One of the author’s most interesting insights is that state governors in Nigeria have almost complete autonomy in managing billions of dollars in state funds. That they have immunity from prosecution for criminal acts while in office often results in a culture of impunity. There is thus a disconnect between state revenues, service delivery, and the accountability of these governors to their constituents for widespread theft of state resources. It would have been useful to obtain from the author more concrete ideas (rather than the nebulous suggestion of ‘a less permissive Nigerian constitution’) to reform such a fundamentally pernicious system. Okonjo-Iweala’s remedies for tackling corruption – mustering political will; focusing on the most damaging corruption; developing measurable indicators for success; and withstanding personal intimidation – also seem rather academic and do not seem capable of addressing this cancer systematically at its roots. Part of the obvious problem which Okonjo-Iweala is unwilling to spell out is that fish rots from the top: many of the political leaders with whom she is working are part of the problem of corruption she is seeking to tackle. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) arraigned five governors in 2007, convicting two; Nigeria’s inspector-general was convicted and sentenced to six months in jail; while several billions of naira in stolen money was recovered. The EFCC was, however, clearly used selectively by Obasanjo as a political instrument to intimidate and neuter his opponents. This rich narrative demonstrates the importance of cultivating influential people in order to achieve key goals: in this case, the annulment of Nigeria’s debt in 2005. US president George W Bush and his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice; British premier Tony Blair and his chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown; Mexican finance minister Francisco Gil Díaz; World Bank president Jim Wolfensohn; the IMF’s first deputy managing director, Anne Krueger; deputy German finance manager Caio Koch-Weser (Okonjo-Iweala’s former boss at the World Bank); senior deputy director-general in Japan’s finance ministry Kiyoshi Kodera (a former World Bank colleague); secretary-general at the Paris Club secretariat Emmanuel Moulin (a former alternate World Bank executive director); and the World Bank’s Nigeria country director Hafez Ghanem – all play an instrumental part in Nigeria’s debt drama. It was almost as if Okonjo-Iweala’s two-decade career at the World Bank had prepared her for this historic role. 217

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In one particularly memorable passage in the book, the author recounts a visit to the White House in May 2005 during which President Obasanjo struggles to convince George W Bush to back the annulment of Nigeria’s debt. Okonjo-Iweala steps in, realising that she may never get such an opportunity to state Abuja’s case. Her points about Nigeria being a poor, infrastructurestarved country with a large population catches Bush’s attention, and he asks for a letter setting out Nigeria’s arguments, eventually obtaining American support for the debt deal. In another colourful passage, Okonjo-Iweala demonstrates great determination and resourcefulness in ambushing Italian finance minister Domenico Siniscalco in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. She button-holes him by grabbing his jacket, explains her mission, and manages to gain his support for Nigeria’s debt annulment over a cup of tea. For all her undoubted brilliance, Okonjo-Iweala has several blind spots. Her criticisms of the World Bank’s and IMF’s diabolically devastating twenty-year socio-economic experiments – the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) – on African guinea pigs from the 1980s, involving large-scale enforced cuts in health and education and consistently wrong advice, and conducted in an utterly unaccountable manner that often undermined the democratic wishes of African populations, are extremely muted. Many of the officials of these institutions are often technically gifted but staggeringly ignorant about the political, social, and cultural environments in which they are operating, leading them often to cause more harm than good. Okonjo-Iweala unsurprisingly comes across as an ideological proselytiser for World Bank doctrines of growth, ‘good governance’, property rights, and private enterprise. Her economic orthodoxy – and what critics dub ‘trickle-down economics’, which are obsessed with growth – has earned her many enemies on the intellectual left, though she often acted more pragmatically in government, not hesitating to promote state intervention when she thought it the right course to take. Though a competent economist, Okonjo-Iweala can sometimes come across as politically naive. Critics have charged her with lacking political antennae: she received much blame for the bungled effort to eliminate oil subsidies of $8 billion in Nigeria in October 2004. She had underestimated the widespread anger and cynicism of the Nigerian public towards a corrupt and corpulent political class that was not trusted to spend any surpluses resulting from removing oil subsidies in the public interest. (Six people were killed in the ensuing demonstrations.) She again came in for scathing criticism when she pushed for the removal of oil subsidies in her second stint as finance minister in January 2012, which led 218

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to nation-wide demonstrations and the government of Goodluck Jonathan eventually negotiating a compromise. Okonjo-Iweala sometimes describes issues such as the impact of the removal of fuel subsidies on the poor and massive retrenchments of workers in cold, technical language that is devoid of empathy. It is almost as if workers are units of labour rather than real people with flesh and bones, and families to feed. In April 2014, she declared that the Boko Haram terrorist threat had been ‘isolated’ in Borno and Yobe states. The group, however, had a much wider reach. In terms of gender issues, Okonjo-Iweala also appears to promote the fight by individual leadership rather than by waging specific gender-focused battles, thereby opening her up to charges that, like the original ‘Iron Lady’ – Britain’s Margaret Thatcher – she is no different from her power-seeking male colleagues, and often fails to promote the cause of women systematically. Okonjo-Iweala also pulls her punches in her complex relationship with President Olusegun Obasanjo, euphemistically talking about him as sometimes using ‘strong-arm tactics’ to describe an autocratic leadership style. She tried unsuccessfully to resign a few weeks into the job in 2003 after Obasanjo announced publicly the moving of the Budget Office from the finance ministry to the presidency without consulting her. A compromise was eventually reached, and Okonjo-Iweala withdrew her resignation. Obasanjo would undermine his finance minister again in failing to support the reform of Nigeria’s corruptionriddled port system. She was moved from finance to foreign minister by Obasanjo in June 2006 after – according to her account – she blocked powerful businessmen and their political patrons from the president’s ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) from obtaining import licences for rice and other products (which would have hurt poor Nigerian rice farmers being encouraged to produce locally), allegedly in order to raise funds for the 2007 election. Okonjo-Iweala seemed almost to distance the president from his own decision. It would have been interesting to know the extent to which she felt betrayed by the notoriously vindictive Obasanjo, having helped to steward the most important achievement of his presidency – the debt deal of 2005. OkonjoIweala cites Obasanjo condemning Nigeria’s public enterprises as incompetent and corrupt without noting that many of these agencies had been set up under military regimes in which he had served in the 1970s. In another memorable incident in the book, Obasanjo banned – ‘with immediate effect’ – imports of glass bottles to Nigeria following a complaint from a local manufacturer during a meeting in the presidential mansion of ‘Aso Rock’, without any prior analysis 219

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or consultation. (The decision had to be partly reversed within six months.) Despite taking off his military khaki to don civilian presidential robes, Obasanjo surely has to take some responsibility for some of Okonjo-Iweala’s trenchant critiques of the two-decade mismanagement by military regimes and the corruption under his own civilian regime. A prodigious and skilful networker, Okonjo-Iweala’s stellar international reputation was confirmed when she ran for the presidency of the World Bank in 2012 at the urging of many of Africa’s leaders and her international backers. She received the endorsement of the prestigious Western establishment publications, the Financial Times and The Economist, as well as prominent economists like Indian American Jagdish Bhagwati, who praised her ‘enormous competence and renowned wit’. Shamefully, the World Bank and the IMF have been headed for the past seven decades by an American and European respectively. After serving as the widely respected managing director at the World Bank (its second most powerful position) between 2007 and 2011, Okonjo-Iweala returned to Nigeria in the enhanced position of minister for the economy and finance. Her ‘second coming’ has, however, not proved to be as messianic as the first, perhaps confirming the observation that there are no second acts in life. Okonjo-Iweala has struggled to have the same impact in her second stint as finance minister. The great debt deal – the signal achievement of her first term – is being reversed under her very nose, as Nigeria’s external debt rose to $9.7 billion and its domestic debt to a massive $57.9 billion by December 2014. The impeccable integrity of her first term has been increasingly questioned. Accusations have increased of her turning a blind eye to graft to pursue greater political ambitions. In February 2014, the governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, blew the whistle on an alleged $12 billion (from an initial claim of $20 billion) in missing funds from the accounts of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). Okonjo-Iweala investigated and noted that the missing amount was closer to $10.8 billion, and demanded a forensic audit of the NNPC. Many asked how a finance minister could be in the dark about the apparent disappearance of a sum amounting to Nigeria’s entire budget in 2002. Okonjo-Iweala was clearly rattled by the political damage to her international reputation. In an interview with the BBC following these claims, she lost her cool, noting: ‘It would be very easy for me to sit at the World Bank and earn a nice salary and criticise. I gave up a comfortable career to come here.’ In a fit of folie de grandeur, Okonjo-Iweala appeared to depict her service 220

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as a favour to her country. This was clearly not her finest hour. Despite these difficulties, the finance minister’s second term has not been completely devoid of achievements. Like the fabled tell-tale ‘Amebo’ in Nigeria’s grand drama of The Village Headmaster, she blew the whistle on the damage of oil bunkering to the national fiscus, revealing, in February 2012, that such theft resulted in the loss of $1 billion a month (155,000 barrels a day) to the treasury. For her outspoken courage, Nigeria’s ‘Iron Lady’ has had to endure some difficult personal incidents. Her 83-year-old mother was kidnapped for five days in December 2012. The traumatised ‘Iron Lady’ revealed a religious side, praying successfully for her mother’s safe return. So, was Okonjo-Iweala successful in ‘reforming the unreformable’? Though clearly steeped in the dark arts of bureaucratic intrigue after two decades in the snakepit that is the World Bank, Okonjo-Iweala and her band of reformers lacked the necessary political power to move a country as diverse and complex as Nigeria to adopt her reforms in a sustained manner. If one assesses her efforts in terms of the goals of the comprehensive strategy of NEEDS set out by the reformers, the results are not encouraging. Nigeria still suffers from poor economic management and poor governance; the country’s public institutions remain weak, while the state is still failing woefully to deliver public services in areas such as electricity and water. The author herself notes that Nigeria would require $10 billion annually in infrastructure investments – the amount that the country spent on food imports in 2010, even though it clearly had the capacity to feed itself. Despite $1 billion annually being channelled into poverty reduction programmes (a condition of Nigeria’s debt annulment deal), such programmes have clearly failed to have any appreciable impact on relieving the misery of the country’s teeming masses. This is despite widespread youth unemployment, in a population in which 70% of Nigerians are 30 years old or younger. Okonjo-Iweala admits that her team of reformers underestimated how much time it would take to implement and embed their reforms. She also concedes that they tried to take on too much at the same time, and should have better prioritised and sequenced the reforms. A decade after Nigeria’s historic debt deal, poverty and inequality continue to be unacceptably high in Nigeria, with an estimated 70% of the population of 160 million living below the poverty line. The country’s public health and education sectors have crumbled, as has much of its infrastructure. Corruption remains as rampant and embedded in economic life as it was a decade ago. The economy, it seems, is growing, but the people are clearly growing poorer. 221

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For all the loud talk of Nigeria being one of the world’s fastest-growing economies since 2003, Nigerian economist Adebayo Adedeji’s caution in the 1980s – while serving as the executive director of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) – against an approach of ‘growth without development’ that resulted from the two Bretton Woods institutions’ Structural Adjustment Programmes, does not seem to have been heeded. Even Okonjo-Iweala concedes at the end of her book that the jury is still out on whether her reforms had launched Nigeria on the path to sustainable growth and development. Particularly since her doctorate at MIT focused on regional economic development and she served as Nigeria’s foreign minister for three months between June and August 2006, it would have been useful to have seen in the book a strategy for harnessing Nigeria’s domestic development efforts to those of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Despite these shortcomings, Nigeria’s ‘Iron Lady’ should be credited for her incredible achievement in annulling the country’s $30 billion external debt and for bringing some sanity to the country’s financial management. Ever the optimist having survived the trauma of living through a civil war, Okonjo­ Iweala’s faith in Nigerians seems undiminished: ‘This is an entrepreneurial country. Everybody’s hustling.’ Moving from the local to the continental level, the author also recognises the potential of Pax Nigeriana in noting: ‘When Nigeria succeeds in transforming itself, it will transform Africa.’ Africa Review of Books, March 2015.

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Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: A Super-

Technocrat in Geneva

NIGERIA’S FORMER FINANCE minister, 66-year-old Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, becomes director-general of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization (WTO) today (28 February 2021). She is the first woman and the first African to serve in the post. Widely known as ‘the Iron Lady’ for her tough anti-corruption crusading, Okonjo-Iweala is a competent, courageous, and intelligent Harvard-trained development economist with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT). She spent 25 years at the World Bank rising to be vicepresident, and revels in her celebrity status as a widely-networked ‘Davos dame’. The WTO was created in 1995 as the world’s main forum for multilateral trade. It has a 623-strong secretariat with a $217 million annual budget. The organisation has, however, attracted many critics who feel that it has become dysfunctional, having failed to conclude any global trade-liberalising deals since the collapse of the 2001 Doha round. The WTO secretariat’s Westerndominated policy intellectuals also still reflect the neo-liberal ideology of the Bretton Woods institutions from which Okonjo-Iweala herself emerged. Xavier Carim, South Africa’s former ambassador to the WTO and one of its most skilled negotiators, insightfully demonstrated in a 2019 paper how the organisation has used the expansion of global markets and protection of intellectual property greatly to enrich large corporations and global finance, while restricting development space for poorer countries. He further argued that rich countries have buried the Doha developmental agenda in favour of 223

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their own more parochial interests. Many developing countries view WTO trade accords as unbalanced and detrimental to their interests, while Northern industrial policies have constrained the South’s industrialisation efforts. As anti­ globalisation street protesters have consistently argued, these ‘lords of poverty’ have helped ensure greater unemployment and inequality across the globe. Okonjo-Iweala has outlined four key priorities: producing cheap generic Covid vaccines at a time when the pandemic has reduced global trade flows by 9.2%; accelerating global economic recovery; championing new deals on fisheries and e-commerce; and reviving the WTO dispute settlement mechanism. The US administration of Donald Trump neutered the organisation’s appellate body for arbitrating trade disputes, and employed bogus national security arguments to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium imports. Though Joe Biden will be more multilateralist, anti-China trade sentiment has become increasingly bipartisan in Washington, as Beijing continues to restrict exports and subsidise state-owned enterprises. Sino-American tensions are thus likely to continue, though OkonjoIweala is keen to halt the pernicious ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ trade policies that have contributed to past armed conflicts. She will, however, learn quickly that when two elephants fight, it is the grass underneath that suffers. Okonjo-Iweala is deeply aware that developing countries have lost hope in the WTO’s ability to deliver on their development agenda. She will thus have to walk a tightrope between rich mercantilist nations and the majority of members belonging to the Southern ‘trade union of the poor’. With much less power than the United Nations secretary-general, OkonjoIweala will be even more a ‘secretary’ than a ‘general’. She has no authority to make governments take any actions that they do not wish to. She cannot arbitrate trade disputes. She is effectively a servant rather than a master of the 164 member states. Her main tools are advocating, cajoling, convincing, and building alliances to get members to act. The widespread support for her candidacy should, however, provide some political capital from which to draw. Past WTO directors-general have included the dynamic Frenchman, Pascal Lamy and the recently departed cautious Brazilian Roberto Azevêdo. Okonjo-Iweala has portrayed herself as a reformist new broom ready to sweep away the cobwebs of deadwood and bureaucratic inertia in order to establish a new organisation that is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. However, Nigeria’s supremely selfconfident Iron Lady will soon discover from her scenic office on Lake Geneva that she has no magic wand with which to cast a spell on member states. Business Day (South Africa), 28 February 2021. 224

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Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma:

The Alchemist

Woman in the Wings by Carien du Plessis (Cape Town: Penguin Books, 2017)

THIS IS A JOURNALIST’S BOOK, succinct and readable, with some interesting insights into the life and times of 69-year-old Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who has held three high-profile ministerial portfolios under the presidencies of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe, and Jacob Zuma, and who has now, surprisingly, returned to the South African cabinet as a minister in the Presidency under Cyril Ramaphosa – the man she lost to in her recent quest to become president of the African National Congress (ANC). Woman in the Wings is not, however, the biography of Dlamini-Zuma, who was also chairperson of the African Union Commission (AU) between 2012 and 2017, that we required – but it is, perhaps, in its South African self-centredness, the biography we deserve. Allow me to explain this thinking in the review that follows, which examines Dlamini-Zuma’s formative experiences; assesses her ministerial performance between 1994 and 2012; analyses her chairing of the AU; and offers concluding reflections on Agenda 2063, her euphoric fifty-year vision for the continent. The ANC presidential campaign of 2017 was Dlamini-Zuma’s to lose, and she contrived to lose it. Having been ahead of deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa for most of the race, she ultimately misread the dramatic changes that had taken place in South Africa’s political landscape since 2012, when she left for Addis Ababa to chair the AU. She was clearly too close to her deeply unpopular exhusband, then president Jacob Zuma, on whose ‘premier league’ of provincial 225

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leaders and financial patronage network she relied for her campaign. On the other hand, calling her ‘no different from Jacob Zuma … she is Jacob Zuma in a doek [headwrap]’, as commentator Justice Malala once did, and as quoted in Woman in the Wings, is decidedly off the mark, a clearly sexist repudiation of her own identity and record. On the hustings, Dlamini-Zuma was often her own worst enemy, as when she ignored questions on why she had a presidential protection unit as a nonministerial candidate. She simply refused to provide any answers to the media, creating the sense that she was entitled and unused to accountability. Du Plessis’s book is particularly strong at exploring the dynamics at play in smaller questions like this, but the author, surprisingly, does not tackle many larger ones. For example: what of the possibility that misogyny among ANC delegates played a countervailing role against Dlamini-Zuma’s candidacy – one that, along with Dlamini-Zuma’s clumsy handling of day-to-day controversies, ultimately ensured that the final glass ceiling remained unshattered in South Africa? A strong woman leader, foiled again: is Dlamini-Zuma South Africa’s Hillary Clinton? The comparison might have seemed apt, even before the outcome was known, but it is avoided in Woman in the Wings. This reviewer is moved further to ask, in admittedly post hoc fashion: How can the ANC continue to claim a non-sexist tradition when, after the votes were counted, only one of the top six positions – that of deputy secretary-general – went to a woman? Dlamini-Zuma’s time as chair of the AU is at the heart of this biography, forming a large percentage of the book’s pages. Disappointingly, these sections fail to provide any real sense of the significance and consequences of her fouryear tenure there. The author complains about the failure of political associates of Dlamini-Zuma to talk to her, but she could have cast her net further and canvassed AU sources more widely, instead of relying heavily, in the wake of this lack of access, on South African analysts, many with no sound record on African and AU issues. There is also an over-reliance on South African media outlets like The Star, Business Day, City Press, the Cape Times and Sunday Times, which have a chequered record when it comes to coverage of continental issues. Although Du Plessis attempts to delineate Dlamini-Zuma’s record in something like objective terms, the impression left is, at times, of a simple aggregation of clippings and soundbites.

Formative Experiences That said, Du Plessis has some success drawing out the paradoxes of her subject: a woman with rural roots who led a continental body; a gender activist 226

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who married a polygamist; and a popular leader with a problematic lack of charisma. The book’s early chapters reveal interesting insights into Dlamini­ Zuma’s childhood and ideological awakening. Her home, something of an apartheid-era rural idyll, set among KwaZulu-Natal’s rolling hills, wooded forests, and snow-covered Drakensberg mountains, was dominated by her schoolteacher father, Willibrord Dlamini, and her strict, homemaker mother, Rose Dlamini-Zuma. The eldest of eight children, Nkosazana attended the famous mission school Adams College, which had also trained ANC stalwarts Albert Luthuli and John Dube, as well as the former presidents of Uganda and Botswana, Milton Obote and Seretse Khama. Adams College was where Dlamini-Zuma’s political consciousness was first awakened, and where she assumed her first leadership roles. She wanted to be a lawyer, but acceded to her father’s demand to study medicine, first graduating with a degree in zoology from the University of Zululand, before pursuing her medical studies at the University of Natal. She became vicepresident of Steve Biko’s South African Students’ Organisation before going into exile in Swaziland, where she met both Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki. Steeped at first in the ideology of Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement, rather than in the ANC’s non-racialism, she envisioned a radical restructuring of the capitalist, imperialist South African economy, before settling into more mainstream ANC policies, and becoming sceptical about the efficacy of Black Consciousness in liberating South Africa. Dlamini-Zuma does not seem to have carried her earlier youthful radicalism into government, and only belatedly returned to it, via the rather unconvincing mantra of ‘radical economic transformation’ that she espoused – along with a host of people in the pro-Zuma camp – during her 2017 campaign. She completed her medical studies at Bristol University in England, where she headed the ANC’s youth section in exile, and travelled tirelessly across Europe spreading the party’s liberation gospel. Dlamini-Zuma returned to Swaziland to work in a government hospital, continuing her ANC activities, and there married Jacob Zuma (who was already married to two other women) in 1982 – but the book does not provide much detail on the courtship and relationship, though we are told that the lobola (bride price) was eleven head of cattle. The couple had four daughters together, but were often apart. DlaminiZuma completed a postgraduate diploma at the University of Liverpool, and thereafter worked in a British hospital for two years. She went to the ANC’s headquarters-in-exile in the Zambian capital of Lusaka before returning home 227

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after Nelson Mandela’s release from jail in February 1990. Her marriage to Jacob Zuma ended in divorce in 1998.

Locked in the Cabinet As Mandela’s health minister between 1994 and 1999, Dlamini-Zuma was often portrayed in the media as ‘Godzuma’: unsmiling, arrogant, brusque. She delivered free health care to poor women and children; faced down South Africa’s powerful tobacco lobby in banning smoking in public places; brought hundreds of Cuban doctors to South Africa, in both a show of solidarity with a country that had played a critical role in the anti-apartheid struggle and as a pragmatic means of filling a skills gap; and fought avaricious pharmaceutical companies which were blocking the purchase of cheap antiretroviral treatments for HIV/AIDS sufferers. But where there were ups, there were also downs: Du Plessis records how Dlamini-Zuma became embroiled in the 1996 Sarafina II scandal, which saw R14 million from her budget allocated to an anti-AIDS play by her friend Mbongeni Ngema. Perhaps this was where the popular conceptions about her lack of accountability and sense of entitlement began to take root, as DlaminiZuma toughed out the situation and was fortunate to have been protected by President Mandela. She was also involved in the Virodene scandal, when she and deputy president Thabo Mbeki pushed an untested toxic industrial solvent as an anti-AIDS drug in opposition to the advice of the country’s Medicines Control Council. Dlamini-Zuma, to her credit, later challenged Mbeki’s views on HIV/ AIDS, which led him publicly to withdraw from debates on the issue. As foreign minister between 1999 and 2009, Dlamini-Zuma was active in such diplomatic theatres as Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Tony Leon, an opposition leader, had quipped that her appointment was like ‘sending the bull into the china shop’, and Du Plessis describes a ‘brusque and abrasive management style’. However, the author fails to take into account how much Dlamini-Zuma’s influence was overshadowed by Mbeki’s: he personally mediated the DRC peace process, and he personally led the Zimbabwe negotiations, rather than delegate them to Dlamini-Zuma. The author criticises her for promoting ‘quiet diplomacy’ towards Robert Mugabe’s regime in Harare when it was, in fact, Mbeki-led ANC and government policy. Mbeki was, in a sense, effectively his own foreign minister on key issues, with Dlamini-Zuma as implementer rather than initiator. Du Plessis is on more solid ground in criticising Dlamini-Zuma’s blocking of Tibetan spiritual leader and Nobel peace laureate the Dalai Lama’s visit to South Africa in 2009. 228

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Dlamini-Zuma would turn down Mbeki’s offer to be his deputy president, after he fired her ex-husband in 2005, following pleas from the four Zuma daughters. In her role as home affairs minister between 2009 and 2012, meanwhile, she comes in for praise, in Woman in the Wings, for her energy, efficiency, and empathy. In a repeat of the South–South solidarity she showed while health minister, she brought Cuban immigration experts in to help train local officials. Unlike many senior South African government officials (including Mbeki himself), the Western-trained Dlamini-Zuma did not automatically turn to the West for models for South Africa. And so, without wanting to suffer from an over-reliance on the often superficial yearly ministerial ratings of the Mail & Guardian – which this book does – it nonetheless seems a fair conclusion that Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has been one of democratic South Africa’s most effective cabinet mandarins.

Chair of the AU Commission It is also fair to say that this effectiveness on South African soil did not transplant terribly well to Ethiopia. The core of Woman in the Wings – Dlamini­ Zuma’s time as chairperson of the AU Commission – is, in many ways, its least compelling component. The author posits that Dlamini-Zuma was effectively ‘deployed’ to the AU by the ANC in order to limit her local political potential – effectively taking her out of local politics. South Africa thus, in the process, broke the continental body’s unwritten rule that no citizen of a big country should occupy the position of chair. The book’s lack of nuance on the AU as an institution is demonstrated repeatedly: for example, in its blaming of Gabonese AU Commission chair Jean Ping for failures in Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, and Egypt, rather than examining how local, regional, and global power politics intersect in ways that, as with the United Nations, render the AU’s head more of a secretary than a general. The author’s frequent criticisms of what she sees as an anachronistic South African ‘anti-Western liberation movement mentality’ shows a further failure to understand the widespread perception of South Africa as a ‘Western Trojan horse’ in many parts of Africa, due to its whitedominated economy, academy, and civil society. Her criticism of Dlamini-Zuma finding the French ‘unnecessarily meddlesome’ shows a lack of understanding of the ‘pyromaniac fireman’ role that the Gallic nation has historically played in theatres like Togo, the DRC, Chad, and the Central African Republic (CAR) – and continues to play, today, in the Sahel – as well as its well-documented, shameful actions during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when it helped to train 229

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and arm many of the country’s génocidaires. Du Plessis also does not go into much detail about one of the most persistent criticisms of Dlamini-Zuma’s tenure at the AU: that she used South African nationals as key advisers and as her main security detail in Addis Ababa, which only reinforced perceptions of South Africa as an insular nation. In blaming Dlamini-Zuma for not doing more to halt conflicts in South Sudan, Libya, Mali, Burundi, and the CAR, the author again demonstrates a lack of understanding of the local, regional, and global dynamics that informed these conflicts; and she also erroneously blames a decision by African countries to withdraw from the International Criminal Court – which was subsequently not widely implemented – on the Dlamini-Zuma-led AU rather than, more accurately, on the agitations of member states such as Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, and Gambia. Du Plessis hits the mark, though, in highlighting Dlamini-Zuma’s championing of gender issues, her most consistent priority during her four-year tenure. Dlamini-Zuma, to be sure, was quite conscious of her trail-blazing role as the first-ever female head of a continental body and the responsibilities that went with playing this pioneering role. But her biographer fails to give more credit to Dlamini-Zuma’s leading the drive to suspend Egypt from the AU after General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s military coup in 2013: it took real political courage to move against one of the five biggest (assessed) financial contributors to Dlamini-Zuma’s own organisation’s budget. Du Plessis is on firmer ground in criticising Dlamini-Zuma’s lethargic response – particularly as a former health practitioner – to the Ebola crisis in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, only belatedly visiting the three countries after much criticism. But she also quotes, approvingly, the highly personalised, caustic critique of Nigerian human rights activist Chidi Odinkalu, that Dlamini-Zuma’s tenure enabled the spread of autocracy on the continent: a totally jaundiced and misguided view, more shrill than substantive. Add to this hodgepodge a final misstep: Woman in the Wings is far too kind to Dlamini-Zuma’s 2013 Agenda 2063, portraying the quixotic plan to develop and modernise Africa as the continent’s first-ever navigable map to prosperity. The main problem with a fifty-year plan, of course, is that none of its authors will be alive to be held accountable for its inevitable failure. More than any other initiative, this plan represents the triumph of style over substance that rests at the heart of Dlamini-Zuma’s AU Commission – it is an alchemic text whose euphoric ideas include increasing intra-African trade 230

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from 12% in 2013 to 50% by 2045; making corruption and impunity a thing of the past; rendering government institutions developmental, democratic, and accountable; silencing all the guns by 2020; and ending terrorism, genderbased violence, illicit trade in small arms, and drug and human trafficking. This was a magical, mystical world of diplomatic marabouts, fetishes, and incantations.

Nkrumah’s Ghost Setting aside Du Plessis’s book for a moment – or, perhaps, fleshing out a counter-narrative that is less parochial and more pan-African – although Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma sought to provide visionary leadership to the AU through the text of Agenda 2063, it is worth asking whether she might not have been stalked by the ghost of Ghana’s founding leader, Kwame Nkrumah, while composing it. The lessons of his failed vision, in the 1960s, of a common African currency, government, and military command do not appear to have been learned by Dlamini-Zuma. It is not clear that she took into account the political and socio-economic constraints of her own era in outlining her fifty-year plan for the continent. While she had successes as AU chair – under her leadership, the 15-member AU Peace and Security Council continued to be active in African conflicts; gender issues were prioritised; and there were some administrative and management reforms – the Commission continues to struggle, after fifteen years, to establish its independence; and it still lacks the ability to take real initiative on behalf of its 55 members. The organisation’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) lacks the resources and capacity to undertake significant work; the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) largely remains a talking shop; while the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) has failed to provide genuine civil society participation in the AU’s institutions. In short, despite Dlamini-Zuma’s efforts, the AU was not transformed in any fundamental way during her four years. In seeking, through Agenda 2063, to legislate what is desirable into existence – as if by magic – and through the piecemeal approach of employing empty, highsounding slogans that are more symbolic than substantive, Dlamini-Zuma’s efforts are not unlike Du Plessis’s, whose reconstruction of her subject’s life ultimately lacks the requisite complexity. Indeed, the fate of Woman in the Wings is likely to be similar to that of Agenda 2063; both serve up distinctly unsatisfying – and sometimes unrecognisable – portraits. Another, more comprehensive and 231

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nuanced biography of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is doubtless waiting in time’s wings, but whether it will see the light of day is as open a question as whether South Africa will ever have a woman president. Johannesburg Review of Books, May 2018.

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Naledi Pandor: South Africa’s New

Diplomatic Troubleshooter

NALEDI PANDOR WAS APPOINTED South Africa’s foreign minister in the recent cabinet reshuffle (June 2019). The 65-year-old was ‘stunned’ by the appointment, asking President Cyril Ramaphosa, ‘What happened to higher education?’ She candidly conceded that she ‘will have to learn diplomacy’, which she said ‘is not my strength’. Pandor has, however been a fast learner in the three cabinet posts she has occupied since 2004: education, science and technology, and home affairs. Calm and reserved, she is widely regarded as competent, and is neither ideological nor factionalised. She thinks on her feet, speaks well, and has an engaging personality: all important attributes of a good diplomat. She is also something of a scholar-diplomat, having earned degrees from the universities of Botswana, London, Stellenbosch, and Harvard, and a recent doctorate in education from the University of Pretoria. Politics flow through Pandor’s veins, and her political pedigree has inculcated in her a sense of noblesse oblige and a devotion to public service. She is the grand­ daughter of Z.K. Matthews, African National Congress (ANC) Cape president, Botswana’s ambassador to Washington, and the first graduate of Fort Hare. She is also the daughter of ANC stalwart Joe Matthews, who later joined the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). Naledi separated politically from her father over his support for Transkei independence in 1976. She grew up in Durban before studying in Lesotho and Botswana, with these experiences shaping her sense of 233

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pan-African solidarity. She met her future husband, Sharif Joseph Pandor, while studying in Gaborone, and converted to Islam. As education minister, Pandor overhauled the failed Outcomes-Based Education System, and reacted promptly to complaints about gender-based violence on university campuses and about student funding. The country’s universities, however, remain fundamentally untransformed. As minister of science and technology, she promoted joint research chairs with African universities, and successfully pushed for South Africa to host the Square Kilometre Array Telescope. At Home Affairs, she sought to consolidate the reforms of her predecessor, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Pandor has sometimes been courageously outspoken on issues of integrity. In 2017, she criticised her party’s failure to implement a decision on lifestyle audits. She was reported to have been part of a group of ANC rebels calling for President Zuma’s ouster in 2016. Officials at the Department of International Relations and Co-operation (DIRCO) have welcomed her appointment. She has had multiple briefings, and expressed a wish to engage with civil society and foreign policy think tanks. Her short tenure has, so far, been a baptism of fire. She showed her toughness by slapping down Zindzi Mandela, South Africa’s ambassador to Denmark, for controversial tweets on the country’s land reform process. Pandor has cautioned against vision without concrete action, and stressed the need for foreign policy to be linked to addressing socio-economic challenges at home. She has championed ‘economic diplomacy’ and the need to prioritise youth across Africa. She has also called for South Africa to defend human rights around the globe, though this view is likely to come up against the realities of world politics and South Africa’s own limitations as a regional power. Pandor has already travelled to Beijing for a meeting on the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation, giving fluent media interviews. She also attended the Group of 20 summit in Tokyo this past weekend. Her attention is likely to be taken up by South Africa’s tenure of a seat on the United Nations Security Council (2019–2020), which South Africa will chair in October. President Ramaphosa also takes over the chairing of the African Union next year, which will involve setting priorities to manage conflicts and transitions in Libya, Algeria, Sudan, South Sudan, and the Sahel. Closer to home, fragile situations in Lesotho, Eswatini (Swaziland), and the Congo may involve diplomacy within the Southern African Development Community (SADC). She will also need urgently to mend the critical strategic relationship with Nigeria, which has been 234

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neglected over the past decade. South Africa’s top diplomatic trouble-shooter – who recently noted that she is ‘really exhausted’ after 14 years in cabinet – may be wary of the ‘shuttle diplomacy’ and air miles she will have to log in her new job. But, she can perhaps take comfort that the 65-year-old American secretary of state Hillary Clinton left the job after four years in 2012, having logged a record 956,733 air miles in visiting 112 countries over 401 days. Business Day (South Africa), 1 July 2019.

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Mamphela Ramphele: Defender of the

Status Quo at UCT

AMID THE FERMENT AT THE University of Cape Town (UCT) over issues of transformation, the role of black vice-chancellors in transforming postapartheid universities deserves more attention. Mamphela Ramphele, the first black and first female vice-chancellor of UCT, between 1996 and 2000, has put her thoughts in writing in her 2013 memoirs, A Passion for Freedom. Ramphele describes how she was head-hunted by the incumbent vicechancellor, Stuart Saunders, in 1991, to become the first black and first female deputy vice-chancellor in UCT’s 73-year history. She was reluctant to assume the post owing to her ‘dislike for public office’. Tasked with attending marathon meetings with students, she noted students should comment only on academic issues and not on university decision-making. Many black male students particularly opposed Ramphele’s candidacy as vice-chancellor because – according to her – she had been tough on sexual harassment, set boundaries on transformation, and insisted on ‘excellence’. As Ramphele noted: ‘They felt I lacked empathy, that I was a sell-out.’ She dismissed these views as representing the ‘psychology of the oppressed’, blaming them on the fear of the students that they would not be good enough. Ramphele, however, seemed to confirm this lack of empathy in her dealings with the university’s poorly paid black cleaning staff (who she insisted were fairly paid). She regarded them as ‘disruptive’ for demanding increased wages, noting that ‘UCT was not a factory’, and accused them of treating UCT as 236

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‘their private bank’ by taking out university loans. She outsourced the cleaning services. As deputy vice-chancellor, Ramphele’s reaction to students taking over the Bremner administrative building (as they did in the recent Rhodes Must Fall protests) was to urge management to go home and let campus security deal with the students. She condemned the ‘aggressive methods’ of the students as ‘intolerable’. It is instructive that while serving as deputy vice-chancellor, Ramphele sat on the boards of Anglo American and Old Mutual for six years, complaining that she eventually resigned after her criticisms of the migrant labour system and other suggestions were consistently ignored. As she observed, ‘That generation of white liberals would politely go through the motions of being attentive yet make no changes to how they ran their institutions.’ Ramphele somehow missed the link between these institutions and the entrenched white privilege at UCT. Though criticising UCT’s approach as implying that ‘blacks were to be advanced by whites to where the latter already were’, she contradicts this by constant talk of ‘excellence’ and ‘raising standards’ in the same way that both concepts are often used to equate competence with whiteness. Her description of the attitude of black South Africans to academia is often patronising. She notes, for example, that criticism of her joining UCT faded as ‘more black South Africans realised the importance of academic work as real work’. Intriguingly, Ramphele counts Harry Oppenheimer as one of her confidants while in office. He was chancellor of UCT from 1967 to 1999 and chair of Anglo American for 25 years. He regarded Africa as having been ‘backward’ until Europeans arrived to ‘civilise’ it. In setting out to transform UCT as vice-chancellor, Ramphele was scathing about its Council, which she regarded as ‘an old boys’ network that had paid more attention to continuing traditions than to management and maintenance. Inexplicably, it was to members of this same network that Ramphele turned in her bid to transform the university. Even though she observed that ‘Black Consciousness prepared me for this position’, it is unclear how she used this experience in her transformation efforts. She significantly failed to support Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani’s efforts to transform UCT’s African history curriculum in 1996. Ramphele’s main achievements at UCT appear to be her tough stance against sexual harassment, completing a new library and renovating old buildings. She 237

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herself noted: ‘I think that possibly the thing I am most proud of is changing the institutional culture of UCT.’ Many would challenge this claim, with students continuing to complain about a Eurocentric culture and curriculum, and with only five black full professors out of more than 200 today (April 2015). If Ramphele really achieved her goals, why are so many UCT students protesting about a lack of transformation fifteen years later? Were Ramphele and her successor, Njabulo Ndebele, in office rather than in power? Business Day (South Africa), 20 April 2015.

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Eloho Otobo: Farewell to a Pan-

African Peacebuilder

NIGERIAN SCHOLAR-DIPLOMAT Ejeviome Eloho Otobo recently died in New York at the age of 70 (June 2022). He had retired in 2013 as deputy director of the United Nations (UN) Peacebuilding Support Office after a distinguished career in public service. Before joining the UN, he had worked in the Nigerian foreign service. Eloho obtained his master’s degree in public administration at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government in Massachusetts, having earlier obtained his bachelor’s degree in sociology at the University of Lagos. He wrote three books: Consolidating Peace: The Role of the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (2015); Africa in Transition: A New Way of Looking at Progress in the Region (2017); and the co-edited African Development in the 21st Century: Adebayo Adedeji’s Theories and Contributions (2015). Otobo summarised his thoughts on the UN Peacebuilding Commission in a rich 2018 chapter I commissioned. Setting out the great expectations that followed the establishment of the body he served as deputy head, Eloho noted that the commission had not lived up to the initial aspirations of the international community, due largely to a lack of resources and sustained support from the great powers. He assessed the body’s performance in the six African cases with which it had engaged: Burundi, Central African Republic, Guinea, GuineaBissau, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Otobo praised the dynamic role played by the chairs of the commission’s country configurations from small but well-endowed European donor countries – Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland – who mobilised resources and effectively

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engaged with international financial institutions. He further stressed the need for peacebuilders to prioritise advocacy, resource mobilisation, and complementing other actors, rather than trying to replicate traditional development efforts. He urged the commission to focus on ‘soft’ issues such as transitional justice, inclusive political dialogue, and greater civil society participation in peacebuilding activities. Otobo admirably detached himself from a body he had helped to pioneer in order to offer constructive advice to policymakers. Otobo also wrote on African security and governance issues. His 2017 book, Africa in Transition, examined multiple transitions: from autocratic regimes to multiparty democracies; from civil wars to sustainable peace; from stateled economies to market-driven economies; from high-carbon to low-carbon economies; and from rural communities to urban settlements. Amidst Africa’s growing economic indebtedness and infrastructural deficits, Eloho consistently advocated effective security, rule of law, popular participation, and independent state institutions. He remained a perennial optimist about the continent’s development prospects, pushing African leaders consistently to prioritise good education, sound institutions, and the effective use of technology. Born in the oil-rich Delta region, Eloho was a ‘detribalised’ Nigerian. A patriot to the core, he spent much of his retirement years providing policy recommendations to cure his country’s ills in the Nigerian media. The pieces provided policy advice to enable Nigeria to play a leadership role on the continent, which Otobo felt was increasingly imperilled by widespread poverty, crippling indebtedness, and growing insecurity across the country. He persistently stressed that providing security to citizens was the main responsibility of the Nigerian government. The environmental degradation of his beloved Niger Delta by foreign oil companies was another issue on which Eloho wrote passionately. He never gave up on the idea of a united, stable and prosperous Nigeria, and expressed hope in the creative ingenuity of his compatriots. Otobo was a director of the editorial board of Prime Business Africa and a non-resident senior fellow at the Global Governance Institute in Brussels. He consulted for the African Union, the African Development Bank, and the UN in retirement. Self-effacing and studiously polite, Eloho persistently offered evidence-based policy advice for transforming Nigeria, Africa, and the UN. He fervently believed in a sustained battle of ideas in which reason and logic triumphed over ignorance and superstition. In that sense, he was the ultimate Renaissance man. Business Day (South Africa), 10 July 2022. 240

Part IV

Activists

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Remembering Martin Luther King Jr

APRIL 2018 MARKED THE 50th anniversary of the martyrdom of slain civil rights stalwart Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) in Memphis, a commemoration that has remarkably gone largely unnoticed in much of Africa. July 2018 also celebrates the centenary of King’s fellow Nobel peace laureate Nelson Mandela’s birth. Both the civil rights and anti-apartheid struggles were symbolically linked when Mandela – in a 1994 speech to the United States Congress – echoed King’s words from the 1963 March on Washington, borrowed from an old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last!’ Both of these liberation struggles focused on combating racial injustice and social inequality. The black ghettos of the American civil rights struggle mirrored the black townships of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. King and his fellow Nobel peace laureate, South Africa’s Albert Luthuli, issued a joint declaration condemning apartheid in 1962, and during his Nobel Prize speech two years later, MLK honoured Luthuli ‘whose struggles with and for his people are still met with the most brutal expression of man’s inhumanity to man’. King also championed decolonisation efforts in Africa, attending Kwame Nkrumah’s independence celebration in Accra in 1957. As he noted: ‘The liberation struggle in Africa has been the greatest single international influence on American Negro students. Frequently I hear them say that if their African brothers can break the bonds of colonialism, surely the American Negro can break Jim Crow.’ King became the youngest winner of the Nobel peace prize in 1964 at the age

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of 35. He was a prophetic troubadour and a religious griot who tirelessly preached the gospel of black liberation across the vast expanse of the American colossus. MLK was described in a rich 2013 essay by African American journalist Lee Daniels as the ‘great provocateur’ and ‘apostle of non-violence’, while African American pastor-intellectual Michael Eric Dyson more recently called him a ‘troublemaker for Jesus’. King came from a solidly middle-class background: his father, grandfather, and great-grandfathers had all been preachers. He thus followed in a long line of proselytising ancestors. His faith in the ministry was bolstered at Atlanta’s all-black Morehouse College, before he went on to earn a doctorate in theology from Boston University. King was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a strike by sanitation workers. His martyrdom at the age of 39 was as tragic as those of similar pan-African figures assassinated before they reached their fortieth birthday: Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Walter Rodney. A day before his death, during his famous ‘Mountaintop’ speech, King had, like a black Moses, warned his disciples that he had seen the Promised Land – having spent many years wandering across the American wilderness – but might not get there with them. He marched towards his painful destiny with the grace and dignity of a Christ-like figure. After his death, violence flared in over a hundred American cities in which 12 people died and 1,200 buildings were burned, in stark contradiction to the very principles of non-violence that King had consistently preached. Through the dog days of countless demonstrations, bus boycotts, and freedom rides that marked one of the most dangerous and violent epochs in American history, King demonstrated a resilience and fearlessness that was almost unnerving, arguing that ‘The only way we can really achieve freedom is to somehow conquer the fear of death. For if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live’. MLK’s home was fire-bombed and he was stabbed – nearly fatally – in a New York department store. Handsome, charismatic, and always impeccably dressed, he remains one of the greatest orators of all time. He was relentless and indefatigable in pursuing the liberation struggle. No town was too small and no city too large in spreading the liberation gospel and finding converts to the cause. He had an unbending belief in the rightness of his cause. India’s Mahatma Gandhi lived between 1893 and 1914 in South Africa, where he developed the satyagraha (‘soul force) non-violent resistance methods to fight discrimination against the Indian community, provoking arrest and 244

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accepting punishment, while seeking to convert the oppressor to recognise the justness of his cause. Gandhi returned to India in 1914, and launched satyagraha, strikes, and mass demonstrations that eventually brought down the mighty British Empire. King was inspired by Jesus’ love ethic, and felt that it was through Gandhi that Christ’s teachings had been most effectively actualised. MLK thus unwaveringly adopted Gandhi’s methods to wage America’s civil rights struggle under the banner of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King viewed ‘passive resistance’ as a ‘philosophy of life’, arguing that ‘I’m committed to non-violence absolutely’. Even as he recognised the ‘volcanic lava of bitterness and frustration’ in America’s streets, he argued against violent riots, noting that they would lead to a more brutal backlash against black communities, and relieve whites of their guilt while intensifying their fears. King instead sought to ‘transmute the inchoate rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative channel’. He advocated multiracial peaceful demonstrations that would promote solidarity and unity. Like a post-1990 Mandela, he consistently preached racial reconciliation. King was, however, heavily criticised for his pacifist stance by Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the Black Power movement, and countless black youth groups. Though MLK is now often portrayed in the popular imagination solely as a civil rights icon, he waged a lonely ‘Poor People’s Campaign’ in the last three years of his life. Tackling these sensitive issues made him widely unpopular. King was not just waging a race but also a class war, describing himself as a ‘profound advocate of the social gospel’ preaching solidarity and ‘economic justice’ among multiracial workers. He was a disciple of both Jesus and Marx, criticising a capitalist system that he felt put profits ahead of human rights, calling for decent jobs, housing, and education, as well as the redistribution of wealth. King’s much-heralded 1963 March on Washington had, after all, been about jobs and freedom. MLK thus advocated an ‘economic bill of rights’, insisting on a living wage, a secure income, access to land and capital, and greater civic participation in governance. Having achieved civil and voting rights legislation by 1965, King saw economic equality as the next phase of the struggle. Unlike Kwame Nkrumah, he argued that achieving the political kingdom was not enough; America also had to embark on a further quest for an elusive economic kingdom. While consistently insisting on non-violence in waging his struggle, King could sometimes sound as radical as Malcolm X, describing his own approach as ‘militant non-violence’. MLK complained that ‘White America has allowed 245

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itself to be indifferent to race prejudice and economic denial’. In his famous 1963 ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, he criticised the ‘white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order than to justice’, observing that ‘most Americans are unconscious racists’. King was particularly scathing in his criticisms of the hypocrisy of white Americans in the North, hiding behind condemnation of Southern white racism, while themselves supporting segregated housing and schools, and condoning the ghettos in which poor blacks lived. His economic battles led him logically to oppose America’s brutal imperial war in Vietnam on the basis that the country needed more butter than guns. He condemned the terrible triplets of racism, poverty, and war, arguing that Uncle Sam’s grotesque military expenditures in Asia were better spent on vanquishing poverty at home. He insisted that military swords be turned into productive ploughshares. As King put it: ‘When the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer.’ The civil rights establishment opposed King’s anti-Vietnam stance which they felt would harm support for their cause. Their criticisms and distancing themselves from King must have been one of the most painful moments in his life. But MLK characteristically demonstrated the courage of his conviction. In assessing King’s legacy, it is significant that his national holiday each January is one of only three that honour an individual in the US: the other two figures are explorer Christopher Columbus and founding president George Washington. A 30-feet granite statue of King has been erected in Washington DC across from the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. The Lorraine Motel, where he was murdered, has been converted into a National Civil Rights Museum. Across from the Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta in which MLK had delivered some of his most searing sermons is his aquatic crypt, where he lies buried next to a museum honouring his legacy. It was the torch of liberation that Gandhi handed to King that made it possible for Barack Obama to serve as the first black president of the US (2009–2016). Obama’s career had been inspired by his fellow Nobel laureate’s civil rights struggle, and his pursuit of universal health care was a struggle that King had waged four decades earlier. King was, however, not a saint, as evidenced by his adulterous affairs that were leaked by America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. His militant activism has, however, been somewhat downplayed by some contemporary writers. As African American scholar Cornel West noted: ‘A radical man deeply hated and held in contempt is recast as if he was a universally loved moderate.’ This was, in a sense, similar to the way Mandela’s early radicalism has often been erased 246

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from history. More recent American civic struggles such as Black Lives Matter, the Occupy Movement, and the Living Wage campaign can, in fact, be seen as having been inspired by King. Today, many middle-class whites still silently condone brutal policing methods that imprison and maim a disproportionate number of black youths, as long as their streets and suburbs are safe. Perhaps the greatest recent tribute to MLK’s legacy was the 2014 film Selma, which captured the struggle to achieve voting rights for blacks in apartheid America. Underlining continuing pan-African connections, the Nigerian British actor David Oyelowo gave a scintillating performance as King. MLK’s wife, Coretta Scott, is played with great poise by another Nigerian Briton, Carmen Ejogo. It is perhaps through such continuing cultural collaborations that the pan-African bridges forged by King, Luthuli, and Nkrumah can be rebuilt. Sunday Independent (South Africa), 16 June 2018.

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John Lewis: The Last of the Mohicans

THE DEATH, THIS MONTH (August 2020), of African American Congressman John Lewis – the last surviving member of the youthful speakers at the iconic August 1963 March on Washington – marks the distinctive passing of a golden age of sacred struggle. This was the generation of determined, dedicated, and disciplined activists who sacrificed their lives for black freedom and equality, and taught the United States how to live up to its founding ideals. This was also America’s greatest generation who gave birth to the evocative lexicon of sit-ins, freedom rides, ‘redemptive suffering’, non-violence, and ‘beloved community’. John Robert Lewis was born on 21 February 1940 in rural Alabama in the American South to sharecropping parents who raised ten children. His parents later grew cotton, corn, and peanuts on their own small farm. John lived in a home without electricity or plumbing, confronting racism early on, when he was denied access to a local library. His early calling was evangelism, and his family nicknamed him ‘Preacher’. He famously acted as a poultry preacher, proselytising to his feathered flock as he tended the family chicken. Lewis became inspired to join the civil rights struggle when he heard a young Martin Luther King Jr preaching on the radio during the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott. He wrote to King asking for help to enrol in his local whites-only university, and the civil rights leader sent him a bus ticket in 1958 to visit him in Montgomery, where he was recruited to the struggle. Lewis studied at the black Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville. His parents opposed his activism, cautioning him to avoid trouble and accept the world as it was: theirs was an approach of passive non-resistance. 248

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Lewis was renowned for his humility, integrity, and fearlessness. He developed an unshakable faith in the justness of his cause and a staunch belief in the ultimate triumph of his ‘holy crusade’. He often invoked King’s ‘beloved community’ as a utopian vision of a world without poverty, war, and racism. In 1961, he was among the first 13 activists who embarked on a freedom ride: a bus tour that sought to desegregate inter-state transport to, and public facilities in, the American South. The freedom riders suffered harassment by white mobs and police in South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. Lewis was a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) – with activists like Diane Nash, Marion Barry, Julian Bond, and Stokely Carmichael – which worked closely with King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Both adopted Gandhian ‘passive resistance’ tactics of seeking to turn the enemy’s hate against itself. Both also sought to transform Jesus’ love ethic into a powerful weapon to disarm the enemy. SNCC staged sit-ins and sought to desegregate public amenities across apartheid America. Its members regularly suffered beatings, and some were murdered. Lewis himself was arrested 40 times between 1960 and 1966. A 23-year-old Lewis cemented his reputation in civil rights folklore when he was one of the ‘Big Six’ – with Martin Luther King Jr, Whitney Young Jr, Philip Randolph, James Farmer Jr, and Roy Wilkins – to organise the 1963 March on Washington. Renowned as a firebrand, Lewis reluctantly succumbed to the pleas of older leaders to remove criticisms of the John F Kennedy administration from his speech. Shortly before King delivered his seminal ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Lewis asserted to the 200,000-strong crowd: ‘By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy.’ He was, however, best known for attempting to lead, with Hosea Williams, the March 1965 protest from Selma to Montgomery on ‘Bloody Sunday’. About 600 peaceful protesters were attacked with tear gas, clubs, and whips by Alabama state troopers on horseback. Lewis’s skull was fractured in an attack immortalised in the 2014 film Selma. This attack was widely televised across America as part of the staged dramaturgy of the epic civil rights struggle, helping to galvanise the passage of the Voting Rights Act five months later. Despite these landmark legislative victories, Lewis recognised that non­ violence was losing its allure among the black masses. As he later noted ‘The road of non-violence had essentially run out’. Within this more radicalised context, Lewis was replaced as chair of SNCC in 1966 by the fiery Trinidadian-American 249

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apostle of ‘Black Power’, Stokely Carmichael. At 26, Lewis had peaked, and was burned out. He headed a Voter Education Project and completed his bachelor’s at Nashville’s Fisk University in 1967. A year later, Lewis met and married Lillian Miles, a teacher who became a life-long confidant until her death in 2012. They had a son, John-Miles Lewis. In 1968, Lewis worked on Robert F Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and was present when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, a few months after Lewis’s ‘older brother’ Martin Luther King’s own martyrdom. Lewis eventually worked in the Jimmy Carter administration’s Action programme in the late 1970s, before becoming an Atlanta City councillor in 1981. Five years later, he fought an acrimonious battle for Georgia’s Democratic House of Representatives seat with his former SNCC comrade Julian Bond. The contrast between both could not have been starker: the favoured Bond was a light-skinned, articulate, and urbane heir of wealthy parents, while Lewis was a dark-skinned, rural farm boy with a Southern drawl. The hustings saw Lewis portray himself as a ‘work horse’ to Bond’s ‘show horse’, and he accused his wealthy opponent of drug use and corruption, also belittling his civil rights record. Lewis won narrowly, and went on to serve in Washington DC for the rest of his 33 years on earth, being re-elected 16 times. In the US Congress, Lewis quickly earned a reputation for being ‘the conscience of Congress’, though his legislative record was sparse. The former grassroots firebrand had become institutionalised in a body renowned for tawdry deal-making and pork-barrel politics. Lewis opposed Bill Clinton’s destructive 1998 ‘Welfare Reform’ bill that plunged many black families into penury. He also condemned US military spending and the illegal 2003 Iraq intervention. Lewis further championed South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s; supported the restoration of democracy to Haiti in the 1990s; opposed the genocidal campaign by Sudanese jihadists in Darfur in the 2000s; and, closer to home, campaigned for gay and immigration rights in the 2010s. He boycotted George W Bush’s inauguration in 2001 in protest at Supreme Court meddling, and boycotted Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017 in protest at Russian meddling. The war-mongering Bush later somewhat made amends by actualising Lewis’s consistent championing of a National Museum of African American History, which opened in Washington DC in 2016. The race-baiting Trump – whom Lewis described as ‘racist’ – dismissed the congressman as ‘all talk, talk, talk – no action or results’. Before America’s first black president, Barack Obama, gave his presidential 250

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inauguration speech in 2009, he dramatically went over to hug Lewis for having paved the way for his presidency. In awarding Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom – America’s highest civilian honour – in 2011, Obama noted that ‘Generations from now, when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind’. Lewis lived long enough to see the US Supreme Court’s 2013 reversal of some of the gains of the Voting Rights Act, as well as the recent Black Lives Matter–led global protests. Having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2019, he succumbed to his final battle at the age of 80. Two years before, Lewis had cautioned a new generation on Twitter that ‘Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get into good trouble.’ Lewis was a leading figure in America’s greatest generation, and he was the last of the great Mohicans. The Guardian (Nigeria), 10 August 2020.

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Wangari Maathai: Kenya’s Earth Mother

KENYAN ENVIRONMENTAL CAMPAIGNER and Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai died this week (September 2011) from cancer at the age of 71. She was born in the village of Ihithe close to the cloud-covered majesty of Mount Kenya. She drank water from the stream, but became conscious at an early age of the destruction of the country’s forests by commercial plantations. Wangari completed her early university studies in the United States, and later became the first East African woman to obtain a doctorate (in biology). As if by a prophetic vision, she resigned her professorship at the University of Nairobi in 1977 in a bid to save the country’s forests and fight for the plight of rural women. She would eventually lead the Green Belt Movement to plant 30 million trees across Africa. Since deforestation and soil erosion were making it difficult for women to find firewood, the movement paid them to plant trees. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) is appropriately located in Maathai’s native Kenya. Wangari fought consistently for women’s and human rights, developing a citizen education programme. Her husband, however, left her for being ‘too educated, too strong, too stubborn, and too hard to control’. She was head of Kenya’s National Council of Women, and successfully protested against the corrupt and autocratic regime of Daniel arap Moi, which sought in 1989 to build a high-rise office park in the green belt of Uhuru Park. As she defiantly noted: ‘Our forefathers shed blood for our land’. The government harassed and jailed her during the 1990s as she extended her battle to championing the release of Kenyan political prisoners. Throughout these struggles, the tree remained the symbol of democratic contestation and conflict resolution. 252

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Maathai became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2004 for her contributions to ‘sustainable development, democracy, and peace’. Many found it odd that an environmentalist could be awarded the prize, but this victory helped to reinforce the link between the environment, poverty, governance, and conflict. Remarkably, only 12 of the 116 Nobel Peace laureates have been women. Wangari identified totally with Africa. At the traditional ceremony of waving to the crowd on the balcony while receiving the Nobel Prize in Norway, she danced a joyous African dance. At her Nobel lecture, she was resplendent in an orange and black African dress with headgear to match. She noted: ‘I am especially mindful of women and the girl child. I hope it [the prize] will encourage them to raise their voices and take more space for leadership.’ In 2002, Wangari was elected to the Kenyan parliament, and a year later, became assistant minister for environment. In 2005, she became the first president of the African Union’s Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC). This was a controversial appointment, as Wangari was a Kenyan politician, purportedly representing the main civil society organ of the continental body. She also had her critics who accused her of lacking intellectual gravitas, and lambasted her for a statement that the AIDS virus might have been created in Western laboratories to annihilate African populations, the last part of which Wangari denied having made. Maathai’s ideas on development will be another enduring legacy. In her 2009 book, The Challenge for Africa, she cited positive examples of ‘millennium villages’ in Kenya in which health, education, and farming improved dramatically as a result of carefully targeted aid and the participation of citizens in development. Wangari also noted how, during the Cold War, aid often undermined its stated objectives of poverty alleviation and development. As co-chair of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt cancellation in Kenya, she criticised the heavy-handed ‘conditionalities’ imposed on African governments to slash health and education budgets and to liberalise their markets before obtaining debt relief. She further berated the irresponsibility of creditors who lent billions of dollars to corrupt and often unaccountable governments without a proper assessment of whether these debts could ever be repaid. She went on to criticise the unfair trade practices of powerful Western and Asian countries that continued to protect cotton, wheat, sugar, and other products, to the detriment of African farmers. As Kenyan professor at Wits University Gilbert Khadiagala observed, among Kenyan politicians Wangari displayed principled consistency to her causes and did not pander to the widespread ethnic politics that nearly tore the country 253

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apart after disputed elections in 2007. As Maathai noted: ‘We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds.’ With her life’s struggles complete, we bid farewell to Africa’s indomitable ‘Earth Mother’. Business Day (South Africa), 28 September 2011.

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A Wreath for Saro-Wiwa

ON 10 NOVEMBER 1995 Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists accused of complicity in murder, were marched to the gallows and hanged by Nigeria’s ruling junta of General Sani Abacha. At the time I was too stunned by the sheer brutality of this act to put pen to paper. On this first anniversary of the hangings, the dust has settled somewhat, and I feel able to assess the struggle for which Ken Saro-Wiwa, Newswatch’s man of the year in 1995, ultimately gave up his life. Until Saro-Wiwa’s death, Ogoniland was treated by most Nigerians as a darkling plain where ignorant armies clashed by night in a far-off land of which they knew little and cared even less. This was a struggle waged by a 500,000-strong minority among other minorities. But then suddenly, what had been a local and not even a regional issue bypassed the national stage to become an international issue, as Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth and international environmental groups lobbied for a boycott of Shell products. The Anglo-Dutch oil conglomerate, Shell, first struck oil in Olobiri in 1956. But since then, the dreams of the six million people in the one thousand oilproducing communities of Rivers, Delta and Akwa Ibom states, of developing their communities through this black gold have been transformed into an unmitigated nightmare for the Andoni, Brass, Diobu, Ijaw, Isekiri, Isoko, Kalibari, Nembe, Ogoni and Okrika. As early as 1970, the Ogoni leaders were already petitioning the Rivers State military governor about the nefarious activities of Shell BP in Ogoniland. These are not idle complaints. As Saro-Wiwa noted: fishermen had to give

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up fishing owing to polluted rivers. Farmers had to give up farming owing to oil-strewn arable land. Hunters had to give up hunting owing to the pollution of rainforests and mangrove swamps. Skin diseases and respiratory problems have resulted from the constant flaring of gas. Cholera outbreaks resulted from polluted springs. Buildings became cracked, and zinc roofs were confiscated without adequate compensation. Oil pipelines passed through private dwellings. In short, the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta have been turned into a wasteland, their fishponds into poisoned wells, their atmosphere into a holocaust chamber. Behaving like a cynical ‘aid donor’, Saro-Wiwa showed how Shell foisted substandard equipment on people it clearly regards as subhuman, using obsolete, anachronistic and environmentally unfriendly equipment and methods that failed to meet international standards. This smacks of grotesque racism. With so much national outrage at the dumping by Italian firms of toxic waste in Koko in 1988, one wonders why there was so much silence at Shell’s efforts to turn parts of Nigeria into an environmental waste dump. Rather than own up to its errors, Shell was at first economical with the truth, attempting to blame most of its oil spillages on sabotage by Ogoni and other activities. In July 1996, the British Advertising Standards Authority reprimanded Shell for not substantiating such claims. Shell truly acted like a thoroughly irresponsible global citizen: its chair, John Jennings, admitted that its drilling standards were lower in Nigeria than elsewhere, and in May 1996 a former Shell employee, Dutch environmentalist Bopp van Dessel, criticised Shell’s drilling, gas flaring, and oil spills in the Niger Delta, admitting: ‘It is clear to me that Shell was devastating the area.’ The Ecologist also reported that between 1982 and 1992 Shell’s Nigeria oilfields spilled 1.6 million gallons of oil in 27 separate incidents: despite operating in in about 100 countries, an astronomically high 40% of Shell’s oil spills occurred in Nigeria. Not surprisingly, Shell’s actions led to sporadic protests in the oil-producing communities: in 1986, Shell recorded 86 separate attacks on its installations; in 1987, protesting youths in the Cross Rivers village of Iko halted Shell operations: during the long hot summer of 1992, 30 protesters were shot in the Baran oilfield; in December 1993, a Shell station was attacked in Nembe Creek; in February 1995, there were demonstrations against Shell in Port Harcourt; in June 1996, 60 protesters forced Shell to close a drilling rig near Warri; and in the worst recorded incident in October 1990, 80 people were massacred and 495 homes destroyed. In Umuechem, after 63 Niger Delta communities staged anti-Shell riots, Shell specifically requested the protection of the notorious ‘kill and go’ and mobile police. 256

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The international reaction to Shell’s deleterious environmental policies has been scarcely less hostile. After the Saro-Wiwa hanging, environmental groups, like Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, and Friends of the Earth, called for a boycott of Shell’s products and petrol stations; the European Parliament described Ogoniland as ‘an environmental nightmare’. Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, scarcely a bastion of radicalism, dropped Shell as one of its patrons. Even on the tiny island of Jersey there was a campaign by legislators to boycott Shell products. As Friends of the Earth’s Jonathon Porritt put it: ‘It is hard to ignore the stain of blood now spreading down that once-proud corporate logo.’ A large, experienced corporation had been caught with its ethical pants down, and irate environmental lobby groups proceeded to administer a thorough whipping to its most vulnerable spot. Shell has belatedly tried to argue that it has contributed to the social development of the oil-producing areas, but this deathbed conversion has convinced few people: it is clear that the company has made billions of dollars from oil-rich areas and ploughed back only a pittance into local communities. In twenty years, between 1961 and 1981, Shell provided a paltry 1,000 secondary school scholarships and 181 overseas university scholarships. In Ogoniland in this period, it built one road and had a paltry $30 million annual community development programme. But not only had Shell done too little too late, it has often taken small measures as an excuse to avoid the greater costs of cleaning up areas which it has consistently polluted. Most villages in the Niger Delta area are still without clean water, hospitals, schools, electricity and accessible roads. The $2 million Shell spent establishing a commission at the start of Saro-Wiwa’s campaign in February 1995 could have provided clean water to all of Ogoniland. Unlike companies like Mobil, which reacted to earlier protests by increasing spending on community development, Saro-Wiwa exposed how Shell argued that its job was to maximise profits, and that its comparative advantage is neither in promoting welfare nor delivering services: perfidious Albion thus metamorphosed into parsimonious Albion. Shell has also contented that in maximising profit, Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ has increased the welfare of Nigerians. But the evidence clearly shows this wealth has not trickled down to the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta. While the main responsibility for regulating Shell and undertaking social development lies with the Nigerian government, Shell can hardly avoid its own responsibilities: as Saro-Wiwa and the people in the Niger Delta rightly point out, it is Shell that they see polluting their areas and not military brass hats. It is clear that bad publicity is also bad for business. If moral 257

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arguments could not persuade Shell to clean up its act earlier, the hard-headed pragmatism (the need to maintain its corporate image and consumers) should have sufficed to do the trick. American companies operating in apartheid South Africa provided social services for exploited blacks for the very same pragmatic reasons, and it was shocking to see Shell, an experienced multinational, fail to take pre-emptive action to ward off criticism. Even Shell’s general business principles recognised the need to ‘take a constructive interest in societal matters which may not be directly related to business’. Shell cannot simply continue its voyeuristic penchant for hiding under the skirts of Nigeria’s soldiers. Saro-Wiwa consistently argued that Shell, the largest international producer, has a 30% stake in the Nigerian oil industry, earning an estimated $1.8 billion a year from the sale of Bonny light: this was more than the national income of countries like Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Sierra Leone and Togo. Shell often argues that the Nigerian government takes 60% of the oil rent, but one should also point out that oil constitutes 80% of government spending, which has to be used to develop the whole country. Shell was asked only to contribute to the development of a small area which it damaged in the first place. But, as Saro-Wiwa also consistently argued, one must not absolve Nigeria’s military government from its own responsibilities: it failed to curb Shell’s excesses, and has been heavy-handed in its military campaign in the Niger Delta. But the excesses of our military brass hats are all too familiar. Shell is a lesserknown beast whose excess also need to be exposed, including its admission that it imported arms for the use of the Nigerian police. In 1992, Nigerian military ruler, General Ibrahim Babangida, established the Oil and Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC), and increased the share of oil revenue to oil-producing areas from 1.5% to 3%. OMPADEC’s funds must be increased further, and it must build roads, bridges, and dams, and supply the electricity, water and education to which the wealth of these areas entitles them. As petroleum minister Dan Etete acknowledged, ‘The environmental problem must be properly addressed and it is an issue in international politics now.’ Perhaps some good can come out of this terrible tragedy. Long after the soldiers have left the national stage, the greatest legacy of the hanging of the ‘Ogoni nine’ will be the attention the event shed on the degradation and destruction of Nigeria’s oil-producing communities. For achieving this, I wish to place a wreath to mark the courage of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Tell (Nigeria), 25 November 1996. 258

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Denis Mukwege: Ennobling

‘Doctor Miracle’

TODAY (10 DECEMBER 2018) IN the Norwegian capital of Oslo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) surgeon-activist Denis Mukwege will be awarded the Nobel peace prize along with Iraqi Yazidi rape survivor and activist Nadia Murad. The prize comes a decade after United Nations Security Council resolution 1820 declared sexual violence a war crime. The 63-year-old Mukwege is widely admired at home and abroad for his reconstructive surgery on women who have been raped during the Congo’s two-decade conflict in which over three million people have died. He becomes the twelfth African to be awarded the prize. The Nobel committee described him as ‘the foremost, most unifying symbol … of the struggle to end sexual violence in war and armed conflict’. Born in Bukavu on 1 March 1955, Mukwege was inspired as a child to become a doctor when he accompanied his priestly father to hospitals and observed the hopelessness of patients. He studied medicine across the border in Burundi, before earning a degree in gynaecology and obstetrics at the University of Angers in France. He later obtained a doctorate from Brussels’s Université Libre. Starting off by operating in tents, Mukwege eventually set up his 450­ bed Panzi Hospital in the hilly, forest-covered eastern Congolese city of Bukavu overlooking Lake Kivu. The facility now has 370 doctors, nurses, and support staff. Performing about 10 surgeries a day, Mukwege has treated over 50,000 victims of sexual violence. He developed an approach based on four key pillars: medical care, psychological support, education and reintegration into local 259

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communities, and legal aid. Head pastor in his local church, he also co-founded the ‘City of Joy’ in 2011, which has helped over 1,100 victims of conflicts to heal by providing socio-psychological support, as well as language and life skills. Mukwege has been scathing about the Congolese government’s failure to protect its own citizens from the sexual violence of government soldiers and marauding militias. He has often noted the paradox of those sent to protect citizens becoming criminal perpetrators, and described Congolese soldiers as ‘completely sick’, arguing that traumatised members of the armed forces were themselves victims. Mukwege’s fearless outspokenness has led to threats on his life. Shortly after delivering a withering speech at the UN in 2012, he was attacked by gunmen, and only narrowly escaped death. Mukwege fled to Belgium with his family, but returned three months later, when local women community activists raised money to pay for his air ticket. UN peacekeepers were deployed to protect his hospital where he now sleeps, making him a virtual prisoner. It is the resilience of his victims that has given him the strength to continue this difficult work. Mukwege has also condemned the negative actions of neighbouring governments like Rwanda in the DRC, as well as the passive inaction of the broader international community. Despite the dangers involved in his advocacy, he has campaigned tirelessly for action against gender-based violence across the globe, consistently castigating the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, while noting that, just as with other weapons of mass destruction, the idea is to destroy the social fabric of local communities. This is done through inflicting humiliation and trauma as a way of destabilising and controlling terrorised populations. Mukwege has often argued that peacemakers must address the root causes of the Congo’s conflict, and not just its symptoms. The activist gynaecologist has thus focused on poor governance, ineffectual security sector reform, and the role of minerals – gold, coltan, and tin – in fuelling the Congolese conflict. He has often depicted his own work merely as a palliative band-aid, arguing that more long-term solutions are needed by local and external actors to rebuild the Congolese state. Mukwege has also insisted that sexual violence is not a gender question, but an issue of humanity. He has further objected to any negative stereotyping of Africa, noting that countries like Bosnia, Syria, and Colombia have also experienced sexual violence. In the true spirit of ubuntu, Mukwege noted: ‘In every raped woman, I see my wife. In every raped mother, I see my mother and in every raped child, my 260

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own children.’ Images of the Congo in the Western media have often depicted helpless victims of conflicts or gun-toting militias. With this Nobel victory, Mukwege has courageously demonstrated that his country has genuine heroes with real agency and their own voices, battling against incredible odds to make a difference. Business Day (South Africa), 10 December 2018.

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Ruth First’s Pan-African Martyrdom

‘DEATH IS AN EXERCISE IN pan-Africanism.’ Kenyan intellectual Ali Mazrui’s expression aptly captures Ruth First’s pan-African martyrdom 28 years ago this week (August 2010) at the age of 57. As she noted: ‘I count myself an African, and there is no cause I hold dearer.’ A letter-bomb dispatched by the apartheid regime killed First in Mozambique in 1982. She was in the presence of Pallo Jordan, head of research of the African National Congress (ANC) at the time. Talking to Jordan recently in Cape Town, I could see he was still visibly shaken, three decades later, at recalling the incident and his own serious injuries. At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings a decade after this horrific assassination, the apartheid government’s intelligence officer Craig Williamson was granted amnesty for First’s killing in exchange for his confession. ANC stalwart Walter Sisulu described First as ‘one of the most dynamic personalities in the movement’, while Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer called her a ‘radical activist, thinker and a fine writer’. During her lifetime, First published seven major books and edited the biographies of three pan-African icons – Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, and Kenya’s Oginga Odinga. Fellowships have subsequently been named after her at Wits and Rhodes universities. A committed pan-African, Ruth did not cut off Africa’s head at the Sahara Desert, and wrote and conducted fieldwork across the continent. Her panAfrican legacy has, however, been curiously neglected in a South Africa that often erroneously identifies the ideology with the radical Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Even First’s husband – struggle hero Joe Slovo – could not

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really understand why Ruth was so interested in African countries far beyond the Limpopo. Her pan-Africanism was clearly ahead of its age, with many in post-apartheid South Africa still unsure today whether they are living within or apart from Africa. First was born into a Jewish family in 1925, with her grandparents having emigrated from Russia and Lithuania. Her parents were members of the Communist Party of South Africa and inculcated in their daughter a sense of social justice at an early age. As a child, Ruth was shy, and began hiding behind her famous dark glasses. Many who knew her often referred to her sense of style and obsession with Italian shoes. She had a brilliant mind, a forceful and, to some, an intimidating personality, and could be prickly and domineering. First and Slovo had three daughters, who often felt abandoned and embittered by their parents’ frequent absence, as Gillian Slovo’s 1997 Every Secret Thing revealed. As a journalist for fifteen years, Ruth wrote stinging exposés of exploited black farm-workers and miners and covered bus boycotts. She read Nigeria’s Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The work of this fine investigative journalist was banned by the apartheid government. She helped to draft the 1955 Freedom Charter, but was prevented from attending the Congress in Kliptown. She was arrested and imprisoned for 117 days in 1963 – an experience vividly captured in a 1965 book; in a 1966 film in which she played herself; and in the 1988 movie A World Apart written by her daughter Shawn Slovo. Following this harrowing experience, First fled into exile and would never again return to South Africa. Moving eventually to Britain, she plunged into the activities of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. She effectively betrayed her own race, and saw herself as defying the values for which many white South Africans stood. Many of her tribe came to regard her as a traitor. Ruth’s first book in 1963, South West Africa, was a pioneering work about South Africa’s export of its racist methods to Namibia. She taught a course in women’s studies at Durham University, and particularly inspired female students, attempting to build up their confidence and intellectual independence in a male-dominated environment – a battle she herself fought consistently throughout her life, as both ANC stalwarts Albie Sachs and Ben Turok confirmed to me. Ruth took a sabbatical at Tanzania’s University of Dar es Salaam, a hotbed of Marxist radicalism. This experience of witnessing independent academics waging lively debates while seeking to engage with the socialist regime of Julius Nyerere would influence her own move to Mozambique. 263

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For the last four years of her life between 1978 and 1982, First worked as research director at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique, ironically named after the martyred Mozambican liberation leader who had himself been killed by a letter-bomb in Tanzania in 1969. Her centre was a think tank to train the cadres of the ruling Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) party. First’s work also focused on the country’s migrant labour system with South Africa. Some of this research was conducted with the ANC policy intellectual and current minister of trade and industry Rob Davies, who recently told me that Ruth saw no contradiction between being simultaneously supportive and critical of the Mozambican government. First was sceptical of the support that many Western academics provided to one-party states and ‘charismatic leaders’ in Africa in the 1960s. This intrepid scholar-activist thus traversed Africa conducting interviews with peasants, politicians, military men, and mandarins, in a bid to understand the phenomenon of the coup d’état in countries like Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Ghana, and Sudan. In the process, she produced the seminal The Barrel of a Gun in 1970. Four years later, she published Libya: The Elusive Revolution, based on personal interviews with Muammar Qaddafi and other Libyan personalities. So, what is First’s legacy three decades after her tragic martyrdom? She was often presciently prophetic in her judgements: her scepticism of Soviet and Chinese communism, one-party states and military rule in Africa, the durability of apartheid in Namibia and South Africa, and of Ethiopian control of Eritrea, all proved in the end to be correct. She also saw more clearly than most the importance of economic sanctions in forcing political change in South Africa. Algeria’s founding president, Ben Bella, famously implored African leaders in 1963 to ‘die a little or even completely so that the peoples still under colonial domination may be free and African unity may not be a vain word’. Ruth First died completely so that Africa could be free and united, and tragically did not live to see the liberation of her own country twelve years after her death. Mail & Guardian (South Africa), 20 August 2010.

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Mahlangu’s Moving Martyrdom

I RECENTLY WATCHED the remarkable biopic Kalushi: The Story of Solomom Mahlangu. Nearly a decade in the making, and directed by Mandla Dube – who had produced an earlier documentary and television series on Mahlangu – it is uncompromisingly South African in its casting, directing, and cinematography. The acting is superb, the film is beautifully shot, the dialogue is rich and interspersed with isiZulu, isiXhosa, and Sesotho idioms, and the story of a remarkably courageous young man who gives up his life for the cause is well told in the tradition of the African griot. Dube interestingly sees Kalushi not as an anti-apartheid movie, but as a love story and coming-of-age tale. Mahlangu is a 19-year-old student and street-hawker selling vegetables. He comes of age during the 1976 Soweto uprising, which led to the death of at least 176 student protesters. Solomon is a jazz aficionado and avid reader, who is gradually pushed to join the African National Congress’s armed struggle in exile by an incident in which a white policeman beats him up and urinates on him. His political awakening, beliefs, and identity evolve gradually. He spent six months in a Mozambican refugee camp before receiving military training with Umkhonto we Sizwe at an ANC camp in Angola. Solomon is superbly played with stoic reserve and quiet confidence by the impressive Thabo Rametsi, who noted: ‘This is a real character: he grows, he is colourful and he is beautiful … It is good for a South African to play a South African lead and tell our stories … I hope this film sends a message that we can play our own roles and that we don’t need an Idris Elba, a Michael B Jordan or a Morgan Freeman.’ Rametsi directly engages the long-running controversy of the presence of foreign stars (with Denzel Washington also playing Steve 265

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Biko, and Jennifer Hudson playing Winnie Mandela), which can bring box office success and attract greater funding and international audiences. Two strong women are at the centre of Solomon’s life: his domestic worker single mother, Martha (ably played by Gcina Mhlope), and Mahlangu’s girlfriend, Brenda Viera (the indomitable Pearl Thusi). Brenda is a strong, gritty young activist who becomes visibly subdued as the reality of Mahlangu’s impending death hits home. Thabo Malema renders a superb performance as the trigger-happy Mondy Motloung, providing much of the best humour to relieve this tragic tale. Solomon Mahlangu, Motloung, and George Mahlangu were involved in a botched operation on the way to join protests ahead of 16 June commemorations in Soweto in 1977, resulting in the death of two white civilians. Solomon Mahlangu and Motloung – the latter had actually killed the two civilians – were arrested, and Mahlangu was sentenced to death in March 1978 under the draconian apartheid-era legal principle of ‘common purpose’. Solomon was hanged a month later and secretly buried in Atteridgeville by a jittery racist regime that feared angry crowds at his political funeral. In a remarkable act of restitution, Mahlangu was reinterred in the Mamelodi cemetery in April 1993 with a plaque memorialising his famous last words: ‘My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom.’ Sadly, I saw the film in an empty theatre of just seven people in Johannesburg’s Newtown Junction. Many South Africans have not come out to support this impressive piece of historiography, just as the 2005 Tsotsi was seen by large audiences only after it had won an Oscar. Kalushi recently won best film at the Luxor African Film Festival and is gaining widespread acclaim. It cost R28.7 million to make and opened in 32 South African screens, dropping to only 10 screens within six weeks, and grossing just R2.9 million. Dube, however, has decided to take the film across the country to show it in rural areas and townships, and other educational departments should follow KwaZulu-Natal’s lead of showing the movie in classrooms. Today, Mahlangu is commemorated by a statue and a square bearing his name in Mamelodi; the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania; and a postage stamp. South Africa’s contemporary student movement – which has turned ‘Iyho uSolomon’, a song honouring Mahlangu, into an anthem of its struggle – forced the renaming of the Senate House at Wits University after Solomon. Kalushi is a remarkable commemoration of the martyrdom of a previously forgotten foot soldier of the struggle which every South African should see. Business Day (South Africa), 15 May 2017. 266

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Kaye Whiteman: Ode to an Obituarist

IT FEELS SO STRANGE TO be writing an obituary for a serial obituarist. Kaye Whiteman, who died on 17 May 2014 at the age of 78, was one of the most prolific names in African journalism over the last five decades. He wrote eloquent obituaries regularly for The Guardian of London on such diverse figures as Nigeria’s Emeka Ojukwu, Sierra Leone’s Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, Gabon’s Omar Bongo, Germany’s Ulli Beier, and former British high commissioner to Nigeria Lord Thurlow. Kaye was the editor of the London-based West Africa magazine for nearly two decades from 1982 to 1999 (having been deputy editor between 1963 and 1973). He was a walking encyclopedia, and was as comfortable speaking about history and politics as he was about obscure aspects of literature and culture. He was a true Renaissance man and cosmopolitan citizen of the world. Kaye grew up steeped in Quaker education in Saffron Walden, a charming English market town. We visited the town five years ago with his Barbadian wife, Marva (with whom he had a son, Simon), to stay in a palatial mansion of a mutual asset manager friend. Kaye graciously showed us around his birthplace, favourite playgrounds as a child, and even his former family home. As a young man, he attended Oxford University where he read history in the 1950s. It was in this beautiful but conservative city of dreaming spires and lost causes that he had his political awakening. During the Suez crisis of 1956 when Britain and France, allied with Israel, tried to steal Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Suez Canal, he recalled a moving speech by Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell at the Oxford Union, and his shame at the British-led neo-colonial invasion. Kaye cut his teeth in journalism from 1961 as an assistant to the news editor of the now defunct picture paper, The Sphere. He covered the Congo crisis and 267

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constitutional conferences to liquidate African empires. He was particularly impressed with the South African musical King Kong, and became friends with Todd Matshikiza (who wrote its score) and his wife, Esmé. He immersed himself in African highlife, art exhibitions, and writers in cosmopolitan London. He covered the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966, later describing it as ‘an unfurling piece of magical realism’. He also attended similar grand festivals in Algiers and Lagos, and was in the secessionist ‘Republic of Biafra’ just after it surrendered to the Nigerian government in 1970. I first got to know Kaye in South Africa when we both served as international observers during the country’s historic 1994 election. I lived for three months in Johannesburg’s cosmopolitan Yeoville, and Kaye was so fascinated by the bohemian cafés and restaurants of Rockey Street that he would often sign off emails years later with nostalgic expressions about the hope that the ‘spirit of Rockey Street’ survived. In the middle of the 1994 election campaign in South Africa, then rising intellectual Chris Landsberg hosted both of us to a memorable talk at the Centre for Policy Studies on the ‘Politics of West Africa’. After the election, Kaye put together an issue of West Africa on ‘Nelson Mandela’s South Africa’ with articles by Chris Landsberg, Ibrahim Gambari (Nigeria’s then ambassador to the United Nations), Tunji Lardner (one of Nigeria’s finest journalists), and me. In fact, Chris Landsberg and I got our big writing break from this article, and would write regularly for West Africa as graduate students at Oxford (as would Ghana’s Kweku Ampiah), receiving free copies of the magazine in lieu of payment from the struggling publication. The breadth of Kaye’s writing was truly impressive. As a journalist, he covered summits of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), Franco-Africa, the Commonwealth, and the European Union (EU)–African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) States. A great raconteur, he would often describe how he watched Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah put his head in his hands in utter frustration at the inaugural OAU summit in Addis Ababa in 1963, when he realised that his ideas for pan-African integration had been soundly defeated. Kaye vividly recalled the ‘spirit of Rabat’ while attending the OAU summit in 1972; and the ‘spirit of Lomé’ in 1975 that united ACP states in negotiations with the EU. He was particularly fascinated by the relationship between France and Africa, and spent much time travelling throughout francophone Africa. He also moved more in his later life from the short sprint of journalism to longer studies, writing a history of Ecobank and a politico-social study of Lagos. We co-edited a book together in 2012 on EU–Africa relations. Kaye also contributed insightful pieces to academic books: a magisterial essay of breadth and elegance on Africa/Europe

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relations from the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 to the Tripoli EU–Africa summit of 2010; a rich chapter on Nigeria–British relations since 1960; and a comparative study of the French, British, and American roles in Africa. While visiting Brussels to research and launch our co-edited book on the EU and Africa, Kaye nostalgically recalled his time there as a fonctionnaire and senior information official at the European Commission between 1973 and 1982. He recounted to me how he was told by a French colleague as he was departing Brussels that his career had been ‘perfectly horizontal’: he had failed to play the ruthless politics of the Eurocrats in the quest for perpetual promotions up the career ladder. The fact that Kaye gave up a comfortable existence and chance for a cushy pension to take up the editorship of West Africa in 1982 demonstrated his commitment to both his craft and the continent. As the problems in West Africa piled up by the mid-1990s, I sometimes visited Kaye in his office in London. He cut a morose and forlorn figure who was seeing much of his life’s work undone by the mismanagement and military autocracy of the magazine’s distracted Nigerian government, owners of West Africa since 1979. He would complain over tea about the ‘barbarism of Cold Harbour Lane’, the site of West Africa, near Brixton. But through all the difficult times of irregularly paid salaries and political interference, he somehow kept producing an interesting magazine, which was forced to pull its punches about the deteriorating political and economic situation in the Nigeria of the 1990s. After West Africa’s collapse by 1999, Kaye served as director of information and public affairs at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London (and enjoyed a close relationship with its Nigerian head, Emeka Anyaoku). He then launched and edited Business Day in Lagos between 2001 and 2002, writing a weekly column for them until his death. He was a trustee of the Africa Centre in London. Kaye believed in the ‘supreme power of language to change the world’, and talked of writing his memoirs. He loved Oxford and always relished visits there, going often to reunions at his old college, Queen’s, and as a trustee of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. We were together at Oxford in March, launching two books on The EU and Africa and Nobel Peace Laureates of African Descent. We rode the bus back together from Oxford to London, chatting all the way. It would be the last time I saw him alive. In a special issue of West Africa to commemorate its 80th anniversary in 1997, Kaye had expressed the hope that the magazine would reach its centenary in 2017. Sadly, neither he nor the magazine achieved this milestone. Sunday Independent (South Africa), 25 May 2014.

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Tor Sellström: A Cosmopolitan

Swedish Freedom Fighter

TOR SELLSTRÖM, WHO RECENTLY died in Uppsala (September 2022) at the age of 75 after a long battle with cancer, was a cultured and cosmopolitan Swede who contributed greatly to southern Africa’s liberation struggle. Born into a solidly middle-class family in the central Swedish city of Västerås on Lake Mälaren, he attended the universities of Stockholm, Barcelona, and the elite Paris Institute of Political Studies, becoming a multilingual polyglot and fluent speaker of Swedish, Spanish, French, and English. He was part of the ‘Eurorail generation’ that set out to create a common European identity, long before Sweden belatedly joined the European Union in 1995. Tor looked beyond Europe to study and support liberation struggles in Latin America, getting arrested by the military in Chile in 1973 just before the coup d’état that toppled the revolutionary regime of Salvador Allende. These efforts resulted in his book Mass Mobilization and People Power in Chile, 1970–1973. From 1977, he devoted the next two decades to backing liberation struggles in southern Africa. Starting with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Angola, he supported Namibia’s South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). Joining the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), he spent the next decade in Zambia, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe, coordinating support to liberation movements across southern Africa. In Lusaka, he got to know Thabo and Zanele Mbeki and much of the ANC’s exiled leadership. Following Namibia’s independence in 1990, Tor contributed to building the new nation’s research 270

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capacity, serving as deputy director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit. He co-authored Kassinga: A Story Untold with Namibian journalist-poet Mvula ya Nangolo on the 1978 massacre of Namibian civilians and soldiers in Angola by the apartheid air force. Tor then joined the Sweden-based Nordic Africa Institute in 1994, producing his magnum opus: a meticulously documented three-volume history of Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, an outstanding work that will be his major intellectual legacy. He returned to post-apartheid South Africa with SIDA in 2002 to work as an economic counsellor at the Swedish embassy in Pretoria, which is where I first encountered him. I was always struck by his encyclopaedic erudition, good humour, and total identification with Africa’s liberation struggles. He was the only donor I met, in two decades, who questioned the lavish support for members of the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS), some of whose members had reportedly helped to craft destabilisation policies for the apartheid government, which wrought deadly destruction across southern Africa. Before leaving South Africa, Tor worked with the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) in Durban as a senior adviser, again mentoring local researchers. Another enduring intellectual contribution Tor made was a magisterial chapter on the UN Trusteeship Council in a book I edited in 2009 on Africa and the United Nations. In this historically grounded essay, he detailed how the UN had worked with the Organisation of African Unity to create new norms and principles of self-determination, and to devise innovative methods to support the independence of non-self-governing territories, as well as liberation struggles in Algeria, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. He highlighted the role of Tanzanian diplomat Salim Ahmed Salim in adroitly steering the UN’s Decolonization Committee, which helped to mobilise humanitarian support and legal recognition – often in the teeth of opposition from powerful apartheid-supporting Western governments – for Africa’s liberation movements. South Africa’s deputy foreign minister Alvin Botes described Tor as ‘an exemplary international diplomat, a jewel of our time, a man of unparalleled courage and towering achievement, and a man of dignity and deep humanity’. The cosmopolitan Swede not only researched and wrote the history of Southern Africa’s liberation, he lived it. He is survived by his wife Angela Muvumba Sellström, his son Erik, and his sisters Kajsa and Ebba. Business Day (South Africa), 2 October 2022. 271

Part V

Writers

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A Tale of Two Continents:

Dickensian Africa

AS WE APPROACH THE 210TH anniversary of the birth of the British writer of the Victorian era Charles Dickens (1812–1870) next year (2022), it is interesting to investigate the connections between Africa and, arguably, the world’s greatest novelist. Several African authors have noted the influence that Dickens had on their writing: Nigerians Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola, and Ben Okri; Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o; Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah; Cameroon’s Mongo Beti; and Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz. All of these writers significantly lived under European imperial rule and grew up reading Dickens as part of their colonial education. South Africa’s Es’kia Mphahlele produced a stage version of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, a revolutionary version of which was also staged in black townships in the 1950s; students in South Africa’s elite Eastern Cape Lovedale College, inspired by their reading of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, staged protests demanding better food; Ethiopia’s Sahle Sellassie Berhane Mariam translated Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities into Amharic; while Dickens’s David Copperfield was translated into Arabic. Africa’s first Nobel literature laureate, Wole Soyinka, noted that his father had a collection of Dickens’s novels: ‘When I was a child I devoured Dickens. I think there is hardly any volume of Dickens’s work that I have not read. There was something that fascinated me about the kind of life he depicted and I remember that in school I read literally all Dickens’s novels.’ Many of the themes with which Dickens dealt – poverty, class, exploitation, 274

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religion, and emigration – are subjects with which post-colonial African writers have grappled, and contemporary African writers and the broader society are still addressing. Dickens’s posthumously published retelling of the story of Jesus Christ to children every Christmas, The Life of Our Lord (1934), chimes with the core religious beliefs of Africa’s 631 million Christians. His ventures into the supernatural world through ghost stories like the 1843 A Christmas Carol strike a chord with superstitious Africans. In the African diaspora, Trinidadian Nobel literature laureate VS Naipaul frequently paid tribute to Dickens’s influence, particularly in the 1961 A House for Mr Biswas, in which father and son read Dickens in colonial Trinidad.

Culture and Imperialism: Dickens and Edward Said Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said was the most prominent pioneer of the field of Post-colonial Studies, with the publication of his 1978 Orientalism. The seminal study sought to deconstruct Western stereotypes of the Middle East in the clash between the Occident and the Orient. In the more ambitious 1994 Culture and Imperialism, Said elegantly demonstrated how ‘Empire follows Art’, showing how culture was often used – consciously and unconsciously – by Western authors in support of the imperial project. He demonstrated how even great works of poetry, fiction, and philosophy were used in the service of slavery, colonialism, and racism. As Said put it: ‘Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination.’ Dickens was very much a part of the imperial world, with his four sons serving in the army in India, trading in the East, and working in Canada and the US. As Said noted, Dickens’s 1848 novel, Dombey and Son, expresses well the core ideals of Pax Britannica: the mercantile ethos, imperial free trade, and unlimited commercial opportunities in the colonies. Dickens often sprinkled references to his country’s far-flung colonies in novels such as David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations (1861), Dombey and Son (1848), Bleak House (1853), and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840). The mercantilists in his work also casually refer to the Caribbean and India. Several of Dickens’s characters emigrate to the colonies. For example, Bleak House’s Mrs Jellyby abandons her children to care for locals in a fictional African country, while Pip in Great Expectations ends up leading a firm in Egypt. 275

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Captain Cuttle reminds us in Dombey and Son that the sea is telling us about ‘Rule Britannia’ at a time when the Royal Navy ruled the waves. Symbols of imperial greatness are also frequently invoked in this novel: the Royal Exchange, East India House, and the Bank of England. Another image invoked in the imperial capital of London is the River Thames, which recalls colonial adventures and global trade, while one of the characters, Walter Gay, sails to the British Caribbean colony of Barbados. Britain’s Victorians believed fervently that Pax Britannica represented the greatest moral force in the world. Rudyard Kipling had, after all, in his notorious 1899 poem, urged Western conquistadors to ‘Take up the white man’s burden

The savage wars of peace

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease.’

Imperial robber barons like Cecil Rhodes, explorers like David Livingstone, and poets like Kipling thus called for a triple mission of commerce, Christianity, and civilisation. Dickens’s books arrived in Africa shortly after European powers had set the rules for the ‘Scramble for Africa’ at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. The proliferation of printing presses thereafter facilitated the dissemination of the European novel across the ‘Dark Continent’.

Hard Times: Dickens as Social Reformer Dickens’s zeal as a social reformer derived from his own difficult childhood in which he and his family were imprisoned for three months due to his father’s indebtedness. The 12-year-old Charles had himself had to abandon school to work long hours in a boot-blacking factory for six shillings a week. He thus experienced first-hand the brutal exploitation of the industrial capitalism of the Victorian era. As Dickens later noted: ‘The never-to-be-forgotten misery of that old time bred a certain shrinking sensitiveness in a certain ill-clad, ill-fed child, that I have found come back in the never-to-be-forgotten misery of this later time.’ Dickens often felt a sense of guilt at his wealth as a successful writer, when he observed the sea of poverty around him. He is thus reported to have left much of his wealth to charity and to his extended family. Dickens became famous for his social crusading and reforming zeal through his novels, essays, journalism, and speeches. He vividly described the widespread

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poverty of London’s East End in the 1859 travelogue, The Uncommercial Traveller: ‘A squalid maze of streets, courts, and alleys of miserable houses let out in single rooms. A wilderness of dirt, rags, and hunger. A mud-desert, chiefly inhabited by a tribe from whom employment has departed, or to whom it comes but fitfully and rarely.’ This rich portrayal of Victorian London’s poverty would fit parts of many of contemporary Africa’s greatest cities: Lagos, Cairo, Addis Ababa, Kinshasa, Nairobi, and Johannesburg. The suffering of destitute and homeless children depicted in such shocking detail in novels like Oliver Twist (1838), Little Dorrit (1857), and David Copperfield (1850) – greatly inspired by Dickens’s anger at being stripped of his own childhood – would also find resonance in many of these African megapolises. Dickens often linked the slavetype conditions of industrial workers in London to those of labourers in Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond. Zimbabwean scholar Greenwell Matsika attempted to ‘Africanise’ Dickens’s 1854 Hard Times in an innovative 2000 essay. He noted that the key themes of the novel – sharing, solidarity, spirituality, respect, and hospitality – were similar to African values of ubuntu: the gift of discovering our shared humanity. Matsika contrasted the novel’s brutal capitalism focused on ‘rational analysis, mathematical precision, and intelligibility in the service of profit’ with ‘a joyful humanism based on wholeness, healing, fellow-feeling and celebration’. Dickens mercilessly satirises the mechanistic monotony and rote-learning of Mr Thomas Gradgrind’s approach to education, contrasting it with the spontaneity, solidarity, and humanity of Stephen and Rachel, as well as Sleary’s Circus community. Matsika notes that teachers like M’Choakumchild in Hard Times appeared to be mass-produced, with the material side of humans privileged over the spiritual. Dickens condemned the inhumane exploitation of ‘the Hands’ in the northern industrial locale of Coketown, and the mechanical education system designed to produce robots to work in factories in which profits trump everything. The teachers are creating machines rather than men, and Dickens presents a dystopian view of industrial society. The working classes live as if imprisoned and exploited. This is a society that has no ethical framework, and in which life is dreary, monotonous, and ultimately meaningless. Coketown has lost any sense of community to an individualism and heartlessness that ruthlessly pursues wealth at all costs. As the novel notes: ‘The whole town seemed to be frying in oil.’ Many of these stinging criticisms of exploitation of the weak in Victorian society were evident in Dickens’s novels: in Oliver Twist, he condemned the 277

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squalid conditions and unrelenting cruelty of sadistic supervisors experienced by children in workhouses; Bleak House indicted the English Chancery court system (dealing with wills) and helped advance judicial reforms; Little Dorrit saw Amy Dorrit born and raised in the debtor’s Marshalsea prison, with Dickens relentlessly lampooning the incompetent British bureaucracy as the ‘Circumlocution Office’.

Bleak House: Dickens as Anti-Imperialist Dickens was an abolitionist who spoke out consistently against slavery: ‘I accepted no public mark of respect in any place where slavery was … I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt by this country, in its failure of its example to earth.’ In his writings on African Americans in American Notes, Dickens had also unequivocally condemned the inhumanity of slavery. In short stories like ‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners’ of 1857, he exposed the virulence of racism among middle-class and lower-class British imperialists who put class differences aside to unite against dark-skinned rebels. Dickens expressed opposition to British imperialism, which he felt diverted muchneeded resources from social needs at home to oppressive adventures abroad. American scholar Lillian Nayder has described how Bleak House depicted British missionaries and empire-builders as irresponsible housekeepers ‘too near­ sighted to notice the plight of their own children and their own poor’. Dickens himself observed in 1948: ‘the work at home must be completed thoroughly, or there is no hope abroad’. His novels dealing with empire are thus often used as a mirror to reflect on the brutal exploitation of rapidly industrialising Britain. As Zimbabwean scholar Wendy Jacobson noted about Dickens: ‘his London is civilised centre and barbaric periphery, savages are home-grown and black, and greed is rife in the City as well as in the swamps of the New World. Glamour abroad actually scrutinises misery at home’. Industrialisation in England was used to exploit and enslave workers. In the colonies, it was used to subdue and subjugate locals to alien rule through the ‘Maxim gun’, as well as technological advances and the expansion of railways. In the 1844 novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens condemned America’s genocidal and slave origins as rooted in ‘Oedipal violence’ and ‘transgressive desire’. His horror at the brutality of America’s white colonists is clear. He savagely satirises the absurdities of British colonists in the Caribbean, complaining about ‘our noble society for providing the infant negroes in the 278

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West Indies with flannel waistcoats and moral pocket handkerchiefs’. He equally satirised Australian settlers – another genocidal species in a penal colony – in Great Expectations, for their mimicry of British class snobbery. Dickens often used the image of the exploited child as a metaphor of colonialism through such figures as Pip in Great Expectations. Imperialists widely depicted the colonised as Peter Pan – children who never grew up and are perpetually in need of civilisation and conversion to Christianity. The greatest imperialist of the Victorian era, Rhodes, notoriously noted that ‘the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism’. Even though Dickens did not live to write about South Africa’s ‘gold rush’ of the 1880s featuring characters like Rhodes, he did describe the ‘gold rush’ of the 1850s – from Australia to California – as a kind of ‘yellow fever’. Despite his progressive stance on social issues, Dickens was, however, not above embracing some of the jingoism of his Victorian peers. Several contemporary critics have accused him of racism, anti-Semitism, and even of supporting imperialism. Dickens dismissed what he regarded as non-European ‘primitive cultures’ and insisted on their assimilation into superior Western cultures. He referred to Indians in a private letter as ‘dogs – low, treacherous, murderous, tigerous villains’. After the 1857 Indian Rebellion, he called for their ‘extermination’, praising the ‘mutilation’ of the ‘wretched Hindoo’. Contradicting his consistent anti-abolitionist stance, in an 1868 letter Dickens condemned ‘the melancholy absurdity of giving the people [African Americans] the vote’. He described Native Americans as ‘murderous’, primitive, dirty, cruel, and truculent. The charge of anti-Semitism has centred mainly on Dickens’s stereotypical portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist, in which he referred to him as ‘the Jew’ 257 times.

Things Fall Apart: Dickens and Chinua Achebe Several African scholars have compared the works of Charles Dickens to those of the Booker International prize-winning author Chinua Achebe. While Dickens exposed class stereotypes, Achebe exposed racial stereotypes. As Greenwell Matsika notes, just as Thomas Gradgrind assumed in Hard Times that the lower classes of Coketown had no history and were backward people in need of civilisation, Achebe revealed the same type of prejudices among British colonial administrators in Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964). Both colonial Nigerians and the poor of Coketown thus needed to be ‘othered’ and dehumanised to justify their exploitation. 279

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Nigerian scholar Mohammed Attai Yakubu offered a comparison between Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. He contrasted Dickens’s use of standard English and slang with Achebe’s use of Nigerian English and pidgin. He highlighted Dickens’s satirical use of irony and humour to condemn the 1834 Poor Law in Oliver Twist: he derides Mrs Mann as the ‘benevolent protectress’, condemns the children in the workhouse being served ‘three meals of thin gruel a day’, and ridicules the reaction to Oliver’s ‘commission of the impious and profane offence of asking for more’. Yakubu contrasted Dickens’s irony with Achebe’s use of rich Igbo proverbs such as ‘A man who brings home ant-infested faggots should not complain if he is visited by lizards’. The protagonist in Arrow of God, Ezeulu, uses this proverb to argue that, since his son Oduche’s conversion to Christianity had been his own decision, he should face the consequences of this act. Ezeulu then notes that ‘When two brothers fight, a stranger reaps the harvest’, to show how the intrusion of British missionaries and colonial officers had exploited the divisions among the people of Umuaro, and damaged their traditional values. Sudan-based scholars Ahmed Adam Abdallah and Yousif Amer Babiker also examined Dickens and Achebe comparatively, highlighting examples from Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Things Fall Apart, and No Longer at Ease. They contrasted values dealt with by Dickens such as honesty, faithfulness, and nobility with Achebe’s depiction of polygamy, patriotism, and nationalism. The authors noted Dickens’s efforts at campaigning against a brutal industrial capitalism in which children are widely exploited. Achebe’s main concern was to correct many of the misrepresentations of Africa in colonial European literature, as well as to rail against the corrupt excesses of Africa’s parasitic post-colonial elite. The authors note that both Dickens and Achebe were greatly influenced by their social and cultural circumstances, and both novelists thus stressed themes of marriage and family life in all four novels. Ideas around the Protestant work ethic, charity for the needy, and consideration for fellow human beings are also reflected in the work of the two authors. As Pip helps Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, so also does Oberika assist Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart. Further afield, Indonesian scholar M. Supriyatno also offered an interesting comparison of Dickens’s David Copperfield and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The author provides a glimpse of David Copperfield (Dickens’s most autobiographical novel) being sent away to Salem boarding school by his stepfather, Edward Murdstone, who subsequently forces him to work in a factory in London after his kind-hearted mother, Clara, dies. David’s landlord, Wilkins 280

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Micawber, is locked up in a debtor’s prison after going bankrupt. Copperfield escapes to Dover where his aunt, Betsey Trotwood, raises him. After losing his first wife, David finds love and contentment with Agnes Wickfield. Supriyatno also summarises Things Fall Apart in which Obi Okonkwo, a respected member of the Umuofia community in eastern Nigeria, kills a boy, Ikemefuna, from a neighbouring village – at the instruction of the community – who has been under his care following a peace settlement. Okonkwo thereafter suffers several misfortunes: he accidentally murders a member of the community at a funeral; is sent into a seven-year exile in order to appease the gods; and returns to find white missionaries and colonialists have infiltrated his village. Okonkwo seeks to mobilise support to defend his traditional religion from the white man’s Christianity, but is abandoned by his own kinsfolk after killing a colonial emissary. He ends up committing suicide by hanging himself. Both novels depict the vice and virtues characteristic of all societies: Copperfield’s struggles to survive are mirrored by Okonkwo’s. While David is banished to boarding school, Okonkwo is forced into exile. We thus see the universality of the human experience through both novels. There is, however, also the contrast in the endings: the triumph of Copperfield finding true happiness, and the tragedy of Okonkwo’s martyrdom, as his society is lost to British colonisers. Both novels show the fragility of life and how easy it is to lose fortune, fame, and family. Both Copperfield and Okonkwo struggle to come to terms with difficult industrial and colonial societies in transition. Copperfield eventually adapts, and succeeds in finding contentment. Okonkwo, though already highly respected in his community, fails to adapt to his changing circumstances, and pays the ultimate price.

Boy Called Twist: Dickens in Cape Town South African film director Tim Greene’s Boy Called Twist adapted Oliver Twist for the big screen in 2004. The drama is set in a contemporary local context, depicting both Cape Town’s great mountainous beauty and the widespread poverty of the back alleys of its derelict townships. The film was entirely South African-funded with a South African cast. Moodphase5ive and other Cape Town musicians provide an authentic soundtrack of soul, reggae, and jazz rhythms. The mother of the mixed-race Twist – impressively played by Jarrid Geduld – dies in childbirth. He is then frequently maltreated as he goes from a rural orphanage, Weltevreden, in the swampy wastes of the Swartland, to indentured child labour harvesting crops in the field, and a rural undertaker, before escaping to the big 281

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city of Cape Town 180 kilometres away, hitching a ride on the back of a truck. As with Dickens’s gang of Fagin’s child pickpockets, the South African Twist falls into a gang of young crooks led by a dreadlocked Caribbean Rastafarian Fagin, tutored by the Artful Dodger. Other Dickensian figures such as the gangster Bill Sykes (Bart Fouché), his prostitute girlfriend Nancy (Kim Engelbrecht), Monks, and Mr Brownlow also appear in the film. As with Dickens’s Oliver, Greene’s Twist is a soft, sensitive child in search of love but often betrayed by adults. In another localisation of the timeless classic, Twist asks for more pap at his village orphanage, and Ebrahim Bassedien, a middle-class Cape Malay Muslim from whom Twist’s gang tries to steal, turns out to be his sympathetic grandfather who provides him with the loving home he has been denied all his life. The periodic voice of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer highlights the diversity of Cape Town and the Muslim sanctuary that Twist has entered. The movie tackles contemporary issues of post-apartheid South Africa: street urchins, poverty, gangsterism, HIV/AIDS, and homelessness. As South African critic Jean Barker perceptively noted: ‘Boy Called Twist refuses to smugly wag a finger, make a sweeping moral judgment or idealise either the children or the adults.’

Great Expectations: Dickens’s African Heirs Reinforcing how expansive and interconnected Britain’s empire was, a portrait of a young Charles Dickens lost for 130 years, was discovered in Pietermaritzburg in 2017. It had been painted by British artist Margaret Gillies in 1843, and exhibited at London’s Royal Academy of Arts a year later. The painting had apparently found its way to Africa through the relatives of Gillies’s adopted daughter, who emigrated to South Africa in the 1860s. Returning to Edward Said with whom we started this essay, the Palestinian American famously noted that ‘at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world’, the victims of empire must ‘assert their own identity and the existence of their own history’. Charles Dickens was one of the pioneers of the ‘great European novel’ during the imperial age. His influence was not just in Africa but globally, as the many stage plays of A Christmas Carol in America and multiple readings and stagings of his work across the Caribbean, Australasia, the Middle East, and Asia demonstrate. Dickens’s work often inspired colonial subjects to write narratives in which the Empire struck back. The first generation of Africa’s post-colonial writers were true heirs of Dickens, as many of them have acknowledged. They, however, narrated their 282

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own anti-imperial stories from the point of view of the periphery rather than through the metropolitan gaze. In contemporary Africa, a new generation of griots are producing a bountiful harvest of rich writing, some of which can also trace its lineage to Dickens’s genius, again underlining his timelessness. Nigeria’s Bernadine Evaristo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ghana’s Esi Edugyan and Ayesha Harruna Attah, Ethiopia’s Maaza Mengiste, Uganda’s Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo and Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Zambia’s Namwali Serpell, South Africa’s Damon Galgut, Morocco’s Laila Lalami, Egypt’s Ahdaf Soueif, and Libya’s Hisham Matar are all part of this great storytelling tradition. Africa’s talented contemporary generation of cosmopolitan global citizens are producing the ‘great African novel’ to describe their post-colonial age of hard times and great expectations. Johannesburg Review of Books, June 2021.

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Chinua Achebe: Farewell to

Africa’s Griot

AFRICAN GRIOTS ARE FABLED storytellers who pass on the history of their people to successive generations. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, who recently died (March 2013) at the age of 82, was undoubtedly the continent’s finest griot. A member of the Igbo ethnic group, he introduced his people’s culture and cosmology to the world through simple prose based on local folklore and oral traditions rich with proverbs. He published five novels, one memoir, five essay collections, five books of poetry, and eight short story collections (including four children’s books). He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972. The Heinemann African Writers Series, which Achebe advised editorially for ten years, published 273 books by writers such as Peter Abrahams, Nelson Mandela, Alex La Guma, Steve Biko, Nadine Gordimer, Mongane Serote, and Dennis Brutus. Nelson Mandela famously described Achebe as having ‘brought Africa to the rest of the world’, and noted that ‘the prison walls fell down’ whenever he read Achebe. His fellow South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer described Achebe as ‘gloriously gifted with the magic of an ebullient, generous, great talent’. African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison noted that his writing had been a liberating education ‘in a way nothing had been before’. Following Achebe’s death, Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and fellow writer John Pepper Clark described his work as representing ‘the domination of the human spirit over the forces of repression, bigotry and retrogression’. 284

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Achebe has been described as ‘the father of the African novel’ and his 1958 classic, Things Fall Apart (written at the age of 28), has sold 12 million copies and been translated into over 50 languages, making him the continent’s most widely read novelist. He was deeply steeped in the Western canon of Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, and Yeats. His life mirrored Nigeria’s own history: part of the first generation of idealistic intellectuals at the University College, Ibadan, he later worked as a radio producer while writing his books; he served as a roving ambassador for the secessionist ‘Republic of Biafra’ during Nigeria’s civil war (1967–1970); returned from self-imposed American academic exile in 1976 as a university professor; served briefly as deputy president of the socialist People’s Redemption Party (PRP) during Nigeria’s Second Republic (1979–1983); and returned unwillingly to another American teaching exile after suffering a car crash in Nigeria in 1990, which left him paralysed from the waist down. He would never return to live in his homeland. Achebe’s early novels, Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease (1960), and Arrow of God (1964), dealt with the personal tragedies that arose from the clash of cultures between African tradition and intrusive Western values imported by colonial mandarins and missionaries. His novels A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), as well as the 1983 long essay, The Trouble with Nigeria, were devastating critiques of a corpulent and corrupt Nigerian political class which had squandered its bountiful inheritance. Achebe was equally unsparing of Nigerian citizens who he felt condoned the excesses of their leaders. He was so disgusted with the parlous state of his homeland that he twice rejected a prestigious national award, in 2004 and 2011. Like the late Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said, in the Arab context, Achebe consistently challenged European narratives of Africa for dehumanising its people and denying them their own history. As he wisely noted: ‘Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter’. In Achebe’s celebrated 1975 critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he described the Polish-Englishman as a ‘purveyor of comforting myths’ and a ‘thoroughgoing racist’, whose work is ‘a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question’. As Achebe noted: ‘Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world”, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality’. He observed that the Africans in the novella are depicted as animals who make ‘a violent babble of uncouth sounds’. 285

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The Nigerian civil war, in which at least one million mostly Igbo citizens died, left Achebe personally traumatised. His muse deserted him, and he did not publish another novel for two decades. His memoir, There Was a Country, published in 2012, was a nostalgic and embittered personal history of ‘Biafra’. Four decades after the end of the civil war, Achebe was still condemning the ‘genocide’ against Igbos and the failure to reintegrate what he considered the country’s most enterprising group fully into national life. The book predictably triggered a firestorm of controversy in Nigeria’s cyberspace and print media, with some accusing the author of being an ethnic jingoist. Biafra died, but Nigeria survived. Achebe, however, argued until the end of his life that in that survival still lay the seeds of the country’s destruction. As he memorably noted: ‘the man who brings ant-infested faggots into the hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit’. Business Day (South Africa), 25 March 2013.

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Soyinka’s Horseman: Who’s Afraid of

Elesin Oba?

THE NIGERIAN FILM ELESIN Oba (The King’s Horseman) was released on Netflix in October 2022 to widespread acclaim. The movie is an adaptation of the country’s Nobel laureate and foremost playwright Wole Soyinka’s most famous work, the 1975 Death and the King’s Horseman. It was directed by Soyinka protégé Biyi Bandele, who tragically died in August 2022 before the film’s Netflix release. A versatile artist, Bandele had previously directed the 2013 adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 Biafra novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the largest grossing Nigerian movie of all time, before the release of Kemi Adetiba’s 2016 The Wedding Party. Bandele had previously also adapted Chinua Achebe’s 1958 classic, Things Fall Apart, for the stage in 1997. His last work, Elesin Oba, is thus a fitting tribute to the illustrious career of a 54-year-old director whom Soyinka described as ‘a unique talent … fired with creative zeal and sense of inspiration … a great loss to the creative world’.

The Play: Death and the King’s Horseman Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman was written – largely over a weekend – while the playwright was in exile at Cambridge University’s Churchill College in 1972–1973. The play pays homage to Yoruba theatre which was born out of the rituals of royal burial ceremonies. The work was partly inspired by the prejudiced attitudes that Soyinka encountered in Britain, further triggered

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by the bust of arch-imperialist Winston Churchill, which he walked past daily in the college. The drama was based on real-life events in colonial British-ruled Nigeria in December 1944, when the Alafin of Oyo, Oba Siyanbola Ladigbolu, died and his ‘Master of the Horse’, Olokun Esin Jinadu, failed to perform the ritual of following him into the afterlife through ritual suicide. The Horseman was arrested by the British colonial officer upon learning of the planned death. Instead, Jinadu’s son, Murana, killed himself to avoid bringing shame to his family and community. One of Soyinka’s most insightful biographers, James Gibbs, describes the five-scene play, which is set in the marketplace in which Elesin Oba – surrounded by drummers and praise-singers – is exuberantly and joyfully dancing himself to death, covered in elegant cloth by the market women. Here we see the egotistical Horseman’s obsession with libidinal earthly pleasures. He convinces Iyaloja, mother of the market women, to let him marry a young virgin – her son’s fiancée – as a way of spreading his seed and leaving a legacy before proceeding to join his dead monarch. Iyaloja reluctantly grants Elesin’s final wish, with a warning that he will be cursed if he fails to carry out his deadly duty. Totally disrespecting traditional African customs, the British district officer Simon Pilkings and his wife Jane dress up in egungun (masquerade) costume to attend a ball at which the visiting Prince of Wales is present. Pilkings had earlier assisted Elesin’s son, Olunde, to win a scholarship to an English medical school. As the Horseman tarries to fulfil his destiny, flamboyantly exhibiting the evidence of having deflowered his bride, he enters a deep trance and lingers in the gulf between the living and the dead, accompanied by musical elegies. His prevarication allows time for Pilkings to arrest Elesin in order to prevent him from carrying out what the intellectually shallow and culturally insensitive colonial officer and his similarly condescending wife consider a ‘barbaric’ act. As Elesin is imprisoned, Iyaloja comes to taunt and condemn him for having betrayed his king, whose spirit will now roam the earth, and be prevented from entering the afterlife. The Horseman has thus brought shame to the entire community. This chain of events results in further tragedy.

The Play: Performance and Palavers One of Soyinka’s main goals in the play was to contrast the African embrace of death – based on the Yoruba cosmology of the interrelated trinity of the living, the dead, and the unborn – as a triumph in fulfilling a sacred ritual, with the Western perception of death as an unmitigated tragedy. His consistent reference 288

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to his patron deity Ogun – the god of iron, warfare, and creativity – is again present in this play as it was in A Dance of the Forests and The Road (both first published in 1963). Just like Arab suicide bombers, Soyinka felt that the Western mind often struggles to grasp the idea of self-sacrificing ritual murder. The Nobel laureate has directed his play three times: in Ile-Ife (1976), Chicago (1979), and New York (1987), preferring to see the work as a clarion call for a dialogue of cultures rather than a reductionist ‘clash of cultures’. The play was recently performed at Terra Kulture in Lagos in 2021. It has, however, historically attracted Nigerian critics, with the Westernised middleclass often rejecting the championing of ‘regressive’ African traditions, and the worshipping of ‘pagan’ African gods. Marxists criticised its ‘bourgeois elitism’, while ‘modernists’ noted that British missionaries like Mary Slessor had stopped ‘barbaric’ practices like the killing of twins in Calabar in the 1870s. Soyinka mounted a characteristically trenchant defence in a 1978 essay, ‘Who’s Afraid of Elesin Oba?’, in which he criticised the ‘vulgar Marxism’ of Biodun Jeyifo and Femi Osofisan, complaining that ‘our intellectuals tend to construct a false or adumbrated reality of their own social milieu. The more “historical” their claims the less factually history-conscious their analysis.’ James Gibbs sees the play as having been inspired by some of the work of William Shakespeare whom Soyinka greatly admires. There are similar Shakespearean themes of honour and suicide (Henry IV and Romeo and Juliet) in Death and the King’s Horseman. The didactic style and exuberant songs employed by German playwright Bertolt Brecht are another important influence. Many consider Death and the King’s Horseman as Soyinka’s finest play, with Gibbs describing it as ‘a major contribution to twentieth century drama’.

The Film: Elesin Oba Biyi Bandele’s film Elesin Oba sticks closely to the plot and prose of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. The marketplace and music are omnipresent, while the colourful costumes and cinematography enhance the spectacle. Elesin Oba is played by the impressive Odunlade Adekola, while Shaffy Bello is outstanding as Iyaloja. The vain Horseman is susceptible to flattery by ‘Olohun­ iyo’ and other praise-singers. As Iyaloja cautions him: ‘the earth is yours. But be sure the seed you leave in it attracts no curse.’ Elesin Oba, however, desecrates his sacred duty through his uncontrolled sexual urges. He dishonours his community’s cultural norms by simultaneously staging a wedding and a funeral. The times are further put out of joint, as the social order is disrupted by the 289

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alien force of British rule. In stark contrast, Elesin’s son, Olunde, demonstrates that, even with his Western education, he has a deeper commitment to his communal traditions than his father, vociferously defending the Horseman’s duty to commit suicide by comparing it to the sacrifices made by British soldiers during the Second World War. Biyi Bandele clearly sought to celebrate Soyinka’s poetic English prose through the movie. It seems, however, that Elesin Oba – like Hubert Ogunde’s 1980 classic, Aiye – could have lent itself better to an all-Yoruba script with English subtitles rather than mainly Yoruba songs and limited Yoruba dialogue. This would have vividly demonstrated that a rich, ancient African language was capable of carrying world culture, and may have attracted more attention to itself as a contender for best foreign film awards. Nevertheless, Patrick Ezema described the movie as ‘a perfectly executed depiction of Yoruba culture’, while John Anderson celebrated it as ‘a film of grand acting, flamboyant colour, vaulting ambition and global conflict’. The Guardian (Nigeria), 28 November 2022.

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Wole Soyinka v. Caroline Davis:

The CIA Controversy

IN 2020, CAROLINE DAVIS, a British scholar, now based at University College London, published the book African Literature and the CIA: Networks of Authorship and Publishing (Cambridge University Press). The author argued that the United States Central Intelligence Agency had embarked on a covert operation from 1961 to fund the publication and dissemination of specific books abroad in a bid to extend American influence, using publishers, literary agents and, where possible, co-opted authors. By 1967, more than a thousand books had been produced or sponsored by the CIA under this covert programme, which was funded to the tune of some $265 million a year.

The CIA’s Culture Wars in Africa The programme was part of America’s Cold War cultural struggle with the Soviet Union, which was also trying to use activist art, literature, and plays to sway countries into its ideological camp. Washington thus justified its activities as an effort to counter ‘communist subversion’. In her book, Davis sets out to assess whether the CIA succeeded in infiltrating African scholars and institutions to produce ‘new circuits of cultural and literary power’, and to examine the extent to which the career and work of individual African scholars were assisted by the CIA’s literary networks. She focuses on three writers: Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, South Africa’s Nathaniel Nakasa – who died in suspicious circumstances after

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spending the night in the New York apartment of the executive director of the CIA-funded Farfield Foundation – and Botswana’s Bessie Head. The CIA set up the Orwellian-sounding Congress of Cultural Freedom in Paris in 1950, with offices in 35 countries. It sponsored conferences, literary prizes, art exhibitions, and more than 20 prestigious magazines, including the London-based Encounter, the US-based Partisan Review, the German-based Der Monat, the French-based Preuves, the Italian-based Tempo Presente, the Japanese-based Jiyu, and the Latin American-based Mundo Nuevo. The CCF consisted of a network of Ivy League-dominated conservative cold warriors who were waging a cultural battle against what they considered to be ‘liberal’ academic, cultural, and literary institutions across the globe. Their goal was to foster global literature to follow the ‘conservative, modernist’ aims of ‘promoting art for art’s sake’, in contrast to the proselytising Soviet aim of using art for explicitly liberationist purposes. In 1952, the CIA also set up the Farfield Foundation in New York, which masqueraded as a philanthropic organisation ‘to strengthen the cultural ties which bind the nations of the world’. This foundation indirectly supported the work of African writers through largely British and American publishers, and also provided travel grants, scholarships, and salaries. The American intelligence agency thus waged cultural war not through crude propaganda, but by the more subtle means of the infiltration of establishment publications, thus ironically helping an African literary canon arise in the process. This was not direct censorship, but a careful identification of academics and scholars trained in the Western tradition, and with a favourable sensibility in their approach to the methods and aesthetics of this scholarship: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, Lewis Nkosi, Dennis Brutus, Esk’ia Mphahlele, Alex La Guma, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Kofi Awoonor. These were, of course, the cream of Africa’s post-independence literary scene. The covert CIA funding of the CCF was exposed in the New York Times in 1966 and Ramparts in 1967. When the revelations surfaced, all of these scholars were careful to note that their work was independent, and had not been influenced by CIA funding, as borne out by the literature they produced. These writers were far from being willing recipients of CIA patronage; it is certain that even without external funding, they would surely have risen to the top. Their work was also far from being depoliticised, as the CIA’s cultural architects had hoped, and much of it, including many works in the Heinemann African Writers series – which produced 273 books and created Africa’s post-independence literary canon – 292

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was anti-colonial, targeting European powers like Britain, France and Belgium. As South Africa’s Esk’ia Mphahlele angrily noted in response to the revelations: ‘Yes, the CIA stinks … We were had. But in Africa, we have done nothing with the knowledge that the money came from the CIA; nor have we done anything we would not have done if the money had come from elsewhere … it is dishonest to pretend that the value of what has been achieved is morally tainted.’ Through the CCF and Farfield Foundation, the CIA financed arts centres, media broadcasts, conferences, and theatre productions, establishing literary hubs in Ibadan, Kampala, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, as well as using existing hubs in London and Paris, and infiltrating establishment literary and media outlets. The agency deliberately focused on ‘high art’, especially plays, poetry, and other works of literature produced by world-class African writers and scholars, and funded many of post-independence Africa’s leading magazines in the 1960s: Transition, Black Orpheus, The Classic, Africa South, and New Africa. It further sponsored book publications by Présence Africaine in Paris, Chemchemi in Kenya, and Mbari in Nigeria. The spy agency thus paradoxically seemed to be empowering African publishing by creating indigenous publishing outlets that were independent from their previously colonial metropolitan centres.

Soyinka and His CIA Discontents A chapter in Davis’s book entitled ‘Wole Soyinka, the Transcription Centre, and the CIA’ has caused a storm of controversy. In it, Davis sets out to assess the extent to which CIA support had contributed to Soyinka’s ‘canonical status’. She alleges that Africa’s first Nobel Literature laureate was supported by three CIA-funded organisations: the US-centred CCF and the Farfield Foundation, and the London-based Transcription Centre. She further claims that this assistance helped Soyinka’s meteoric rise to international prominence. Davis has used archival records from the CCF and the Transcription Centre to seek to substantiate her claims, and thus is able to quote extensively from personal correspondence between Soyinka and his alleged CIA-backed funders. Davis admits that ‘there is no evidence that Soyinka was aware of the CIA source of his patronage during the [early] 1960s, or that the CCF or its affiliated institutions exercised a direct influence on his writing’. But Davis also asserts that Soyinka became aware of CIA funding of the Transcription Centre in 1967, and had not previously questioned how the Centre got its money. Davis quotes American scholar Peter Kalliney as insisting that CCF support did not, in any way, turn Soyinka into a ‘US puppet’, while also citing American 293

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poet Juliana Spahr’s explosive but unverified claim that the playwright had ‘unusually close ties to the US government’ and met frequently with American intelligence in the 1970s. Soyinka had himself acknowledged what he described as his unwitting proximity to the CIA in his 2006 memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn: ‘we would discover that we had been dining, and with relish, with the original of that serpentine incarnation the devil, romping in our postcolonial Garden of Eden and gorging on the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge! Nothing – virtually no project, no cultural initiative – was left un-brushed by the CIA’s reptilian coils.’

Funding Journals and Conferences Davis details how the CIA supported journals in which Soyinka was involved, including Black Orpheus. The Ibadan-based Mbari Writers and Artists Club was also said to have received CIA funding. She notes that CIA-funded conferences prominently featured Soyinka: the 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression in Kampala, the Berlin Arts Festival in 1964, and the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. Soyinka himself was editing Africa’s leading politico-cultural journal, Transition, in exile in Accra between 1973 and 1976, when CIA support to it through the CCF was exposed, and it was forced to shut down. Davis argues that, from 1963, Dennis Duerden, the British director of the Transcription Centre – through largesse from the Farfield Foundation – effectively became Soyinka’s chief external promoter. Duerden enthusiastically funded the playwright’s attendance at conferences and festivals, and financed many stage productions. He also reportedly funded – in partnership with New York’s National Television and Radio Centre – eight 30-minute television programmes featuring Soyinka and South African author Lewis Nkosi interviewing other leading African writers, including Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, Kenya’s Grace Ogot, and Guinea’s Camara Laye, with Soyinka himself also being interviewed by Nkosi.

Staging Theatre and Publishing Plays Davis notes that the drama competition that Soyinka famously won on the eve of Nigeria’s independence in 1960 (to stage his seminal play, A Dance of the Forests) had been established by the CCF through CIA agent Michael Josselson. Duerden reportedly bought the rights to Soyinka’s play The Swamp Dwellers in 1964 for broadcasting in the US, with the Farfield Foundation supporting the 294

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production. Davis notes that Soyinka was lukewarm about the project, and had advised Duerden to abandon it before its low-key release in 1966. The Briton also successfully pushed for the Farfield Foundation to fund the production of Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel at London’s Theatre Royal for a month between September and October 1965. According to Davis, Soyinka then allegedly visited New York in 1966 to request funding from the Farfield Foundation. Duerden registered the OrisunIjinle Theatre Company in London, with Soyinka as its artistic director. Davis, however, notes that the playwright was unenthusiastic about the Londonbased group, with his focus firmly on his own Orisun company in Nigeria. The Transcription Centre reportedly further funded a 1966 tour of Britain by Soyinka through the Arts Council. The visit took in a production of Soyinka’s 1963 play The Trials of Brother Jero at the Hampstead Theatre Club in London, directed by South Africa’s Athol Fugard; a staging of Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel at London’s Royal Court Theatre; visits to Leicester and Southampton universities; and television appearances on the BBC and Granada Television. After the CIA link was exposed in 1966, Duerden reportedly began to turn off Soyinka’s funding taps. Davis also describes how Duerden worked closely with Rex Collings, Soyinka’s Oxford University Press editor, to publish the Nigerian writer’s plays and poetry, including A Dance of the Forests (1963); The Lion and the Jewel (1963); The Road (1965); and Kongi’s Harvest (1965). After Collings left OUP to join Methuen in 1966, Soyinka followed him. Methuen would later publish Idanre, and Other Poems (1967) and Prisonettes: Poems from Prison (1969). Here it must be observed that Soyinka is correct in calling out Davis for unfairly tarring Rex Collings implicitly with the CIA conspiracy brush, without solid evidence.

Protecting a Political Prisoner During two periods of imprisonment by the Nigerian government, the Transcription Centre, the Farfield Foundation, and the CCF launched an international lobbying campaign for Soyinka’s release. From 1965 to 1966, the playwright was jailed for holding a radio station at gunpoint to prevent the announcement of a victory speech by Nigeria’s Western region premier Samuel Akintola after a disputed election. Davis notes that the three organisations further ensured that Soyinka’s plight was kept alive by Amnesty International, the New York Times, and the Sunday Times (London), even sending a lawyer to assess the playwright’s condition, while meeting his £700 legal costs. Soyinka 295

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was jailed again for 26 months in 1967–1969 for seeking to mediate a peace deal with secessionist Biafra during Nigeria’s civil war. Davis noted that all three CIA-funded organisations once more launched an energetic campaign for Soyinka’s release through Amnesty International, The Times (London), and the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Farfield Foundation and the CCF both closed down during this period, after their covert CIA links had been exposed.

Kongi’s Robust Riposte Soyinka – popularly referred to by the name of the lead character in his 1965 play, Kongi’s Harvest – produced a characteristically trenchant riposte to these allegations. He published a 165-page essay entitled Trumpism in Academe: The Example of Caroline Davis and Spahring Partners (Bookcraft, second edition, 2021), in which he threatened to ‘pursue these women, Caroline Davis and Juliana Spahr, to the end of the earth and into the pit of hell until they reveal to the world when and where I was meeting CIA agents’. Though Davis never levelled this accusation – it was Spahr who claimed that Soyinka regularly met American spooks, based, she said, on ‘diplomatic cables’ – he called for a conference to be organised at Harvard University to confront his accusers. The Nobel laureate further cautioned that ‘The battle is joined. The Republic of Liars has now extended from Nigeria to the United States.’ This was a weighty response to a book chapter of some fifteen pages. Soyinka further wrote to the US government in April 2021 to request that the diplomatic cables cited by Spahr, of his alleged meetings with US intelligence officials, be released under the US Freedom of Information Act. Having not received any documents by the time of his essay’s publication, he described the essay as ‘a holding preliminary recourse’. Despite Davis only briefly citing, in half a sentence, Spahr’s claim about Soyinka’s ties to American intelligence, Soyinka lumped both writers together as ‘the Desperate Dons of historical revisionism’.

Of Spooks and Straw Women Spahr is strangely cast by Soyinka as a collaborator of Davis’s, rather than simply someone whom the latter quotes in her book. We thus have, in Soyinka’s response, a potpourri of straw women. Soyinka describes Davis and Spahr as ‘neophytes’, ‘manipulators and liars’, and ‘sloppy scholars and middling poets’. He dismisses both as ‘Trumpian’ academics engaged in spreading lies and engaging in patronising Eurocentric analyses that disparage the achievements 296

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of the first generation of post-independence African artists. He condemns their revelations as ‘a re-hashed, augmented version of an old wives’ tale, full of sound and fury, signifying – piffle’. He laments the fact that the field of humanities is ‘open to any kind of misfit and unscrupulous interloper’. He professes outrage at Davis and Spahr’s ‘act of generational pseudo-intellectual hubris’ produced by ‘a species of academic thuggery’. He never makes it clear, however, how Davis’s 162-footnoted chapter reflects the rumour- and conspiracy-fuelled rabblerousing nativism of former US president Donald Trump. Davis’s analysis contains sober scholarship; surely it should be challenged on these terms? Soyinka is on more solid ground when he accuses Davis of trying to portray him and his generation of writers as CIA puppets and ‘international hustlers ready to dance to the donor piper’s tune’. He condemns her methodology as ‘prejudicially selecting from findings of the past industry of others’ and points out that Davis contradicts herself by talking of him directly receiving, and simultaneously covertly obtaining, CIA funds. But we see a regression into the paranoid when Soyinka speculates on whether Davis is working with some of his ‘neo-Tarzanist’ Nigerian critics to discredit him. Davis, along with Spahr, is accused of whipping up ‘the dehydrated froth of long discarded milk to suggest that child poisoners are still alive and on a rampage’, and both women are derided as ‘scholarly muckrakers who continue to insist that there remain juicy but sleazy chunks of meat to regurgitate’. Soyinka further argues that Davis should have provided the broader context of the Cold War’s cultural struggles, noting that he received book royalties from the Soviet government and also established a close relationship with socialist Cuba, meeting Fidel Castro, engaging the African diaspora community in Havana, and being honoured with a national award. These engagements, however, do not fundamentally negate Davis’s point about CIA funding being indirectly paid to African artists through Western foundations. Soyinka also goes to great lengths in a bid to rebut Davis’s claim that he rose to international prominence through this funding, by highlighting the roles of key admirers of his plays in the Theatre Royal Stratford, the Royal Court Theatre, and the New Shakespeare Theatre, as well as outstanding reviews and excerpts of his work in prestigious outlets such as The Observer and Granta. It is also important to note that Soyinka had his own, self-made powerful allies in the arts and culture space. African American film producer Ossie Davis produced an adaptation of Kongi’s Harvest in 1970. Soyinka also had his own extensive network of academics in the US, and two of his protégés, African 297

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American Henry ‘Skip’ Gates and Ghanaian Briton Kwame Anthony Appiah – whom he had mentored as a fellow at Cambridge University in 1973–1974 – went on to assume powerful positions at Duke, Princeton, and Harvard. Soyinka further notes the role of his contacts in the British parliament and PEN International in campaigning for his release from jail in the 1960s. He argues that, unlike countries like Cuba and France, the US never actually granted him a national honour.

No End to a Controversy It is understandable that a Nobel laureate would take umbrage at the suggestion that he was ‘the CIA’s African literary protégé’, a status that saw him ‘propelled to global prominence and designated Africa’s foremost writer’. His retort is that Davis is ‘an unbridled, mendacious hustler’ with ‘an apartheid mind-set’. Davis’s constant talk of CIA ‘patrons’ certainly does insinuate some form of collusion and control, despite her protestations to the contrary, and gets to the heart of Soyinka’s main beef with Davis: that she ‘has just one predetermined destination and nothing must stand in her way: to write off a generation of African writers and cultural avant-garde as nothing more than CIA protégés, with the celebrated black Nobel laureate in the lead’. The truth of the matter is dodged by all: the Nigerian playwright would clearly have risen to the top of the literary firmament even without CIA support, which could indeed have indirectly assisted his rise to fame, as it did many Western and other writers who unknowingly received similar support. Any suggestion that Soyinka was also a pro-American agent would not be borne out by his political activism, which frequently condemned US-supported Cold war clients. He did not choose the comfortable life of a CIA-funded operative, and clearly ‘spoke truth to power’ at nearly every opportunity. He was a vociferous and outspoken critic of the warmongering George W Bush administration (2001–2008), and has, for six decades, railed against autocracy in Nigeria, paying the price through detention and exile. Some of these experiences were recorded in the 1971 title, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, and in his portrayal of the grotesque Nigerian dictator General Sani Abacha in his 2002 play, King Baabu. The playwright also consistently takes on autocracy across the continent, as evident in his 1984 A Play of Giants, which mercilessly satirises four African autocrats: Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko (helped to power by the CIA, before becoming a reliable American Cold War client), Uganda’s Idi Amin, Equatorial Guinea’s Macias Nguema, and Central African Republic’s 298

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Jean-Baptiste Bokassa. Soyinka has, however, more recently become close with the US-backed Rwandan autocrat Paul Kagame, whose excesses he has failed to condemn. Instead of a 165-page screed, a proper response to Davis should have, for example, seen Soyinka responding directly to allegations that he visited New York in 1966 to request funding from the CIA-funded Farfield Foundation. The Nigerian playwright questions whether post-independence African festivals had really been funded by the CIA, as Davis asserts. He is unsure whether there was CIA funding of his independence play, A Dance of the Forests, as asserted by Davis. But for all his eloquent fervour, Soyinka has not rebutted these allegations in the detailed, evidence-based manner that could have put an end to this debate. He concludes with yet another challenge to Davis and Spahr to take part in an international public debate, which Davis has rejected. Despite the Nobel laureate’s poetic prose and powerful polemic, this controversy is far from over, and to that extent Soyinka will find it hard to escape those notorious ‘reptilian coils’ of the CIA. Johannesburg Review of Books, May 2022.

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James Baldwin: The Strange

Persistence of Racism

ON THE 400TH ANNIVERSARY of the arrival of the first African slaves in the United States in 2019, a debate has erupted on whether reparations should be paid to the descendants of African slaves. Democrats have backed a Congressional investigation into the issue, while prominent Republicans have opposed it, citing the difficulty of identifying victims. The idea is opposed by 80% of whites. This divide symbolises America’s continuing inability to deal with its racist past. Next month (August 2019) would have marked the 95th anniversary of the birth of African American writer, James Baldwin, who died in December 1987, but whose views on race are still very relevant to contemporary society. Haitian American director Raoul Peck vividly brought to life in a 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, James Baldwin’s unfinished 1979 project ‘Remember This House.’ These 30 pages of notes were to have been a book narrating his story of America through the lives of three of his contemporary activist allies and personal friends: Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, who had all been assassinated before they turned 40, between 1963 and 1968. The documentary was constructed from notes that Baldwin had put together, and narrated by African American actor Samuel L Jackson. Peck’s documentary is determined to tell the history of people that he felt America had made invisible. He sets out consciously to connect America’s racist past with the continuing racism of the present through Baldwin’s uncompromisingly honest narrative. He described himself as ‘a librettist crafting the script for an opera from the scattered work of a revered author’. Baldwin’s 300

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critique of race relations in America is relentless and unforgiving. He describes how he was moved by images of a 15-year-old black girl, Dorothy Counts, being transported to school in North Carolina in the 1950s – being taunted and spat at by a deranged white mob – as the school system was being desegregated. He knew that his exile in Parisian cafés discussing the brutal French war in Algeria (which killed one million indigenous people) and problems in black America was over, and that he had to lend his voice to the new battles at home. He returned to the US in 1957 after nearly a decade of French exile. Baldwin describes how a young white female teacher had mentored and motivated him, and as a result of her influence ‘I never really managed to hate white people’. He resists the urge of black Muslims and Black Panthers to hate, based on personal humiliations, because he sees the goodness in individual whites. Baldwin also discusses how Hollywood films shaped his perceptions as he grew up, and how he felt a sense of humiliation. He saw only white heroes depicted in movies, and describes black fear of white terrorism in these movies. Baldwin notes his shock at discovering that he was cheering for the cowboys killing Indians in spaghetti westerns, only later to discover ‘that the Indians were you’. He describes his alienation from a country and system that did not have any place for him. He criticises how Hollywood erases the crimes of America’s ‘original sins’ – genocide against the native inhabitants, and exploitative and brutal slavery. The crimes of the country’s slave-owning, ‘founding fathers’ are often simply whitewashed, even today by contemporary ‘professional’ historians whose hagiographic biographies do a disservice to their profession. Baldwin contrasts Hollywood’s portrayal of white male heroes with the role of leading black men Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, who suppressed any anger and who were not allowed to become sex symbols because of white America’s ‘infantile, furtive sexuality’. Baldwin is particularly scathing of the hypocrisy of white Christians because they ‘did not live by the commandment “love one another as I love you”’. He saw his role mainly as one of bearing witness on the side of oppressed blacks at the continuing injustices of an America in massive denial of its crimes. A fiercely independent intellectual, Baldwin insisted on doing his own thinking and avoided being constrained by any organised group. He contrasts the radical approach of Malcolm X with Martin Luther King’s Christian-inspired Gandhian non-violence, describing how their positions converged increasingly as their martyrdom drew closer. As he noted: ‘Martin picked up Malcolm’s burden, articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see … Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop.’ He 301

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notes why Malcolm X’s message resonates with so many black people because ‘He tells them that they really exist’. Baldwin describes how empty he felt at hearing about Medgar Evans’s assassination, remembering how the civil rights leader once told him about the tattered clothes from a lynched black body hanging on a tree for days. The banality of evil is well captured, and in an echo of WEB Du Bois’s question ‘What does it feel like to be a problem?’, Baldwin says in anguish, ‘This country does not know what to do with its black population.’ He notes how he has been shaped by his past to accept an American identity and a common humanity which whites consistently continue to deny to blacks. Baldwin berates widespread white indifference at black suffering, with blacks wondering ‘how are you going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority … I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart.’ He excoriates the failure of America to acknowledge that the country benefited from the free labour of slaves who for nearly four centuries built the country but were consistently shut out of sharing in the American Dream. He is particularly critical of white ‘liberals’ like the Kennedy brothers – John and Robert – criticising their apathy and ignorance due to America’s social segregation. He describes a particularly memorable meeting with Robert Kennedy as attorneygeneral, with other civil rights activists, at which RFK behaved to Baldwin as if the activists had been wasting his time. Baldwin is particularly scathing of a complacent white middle class which – as in contemporary America – chose to ignore the plight of black people, burying their head in the sand on race issues as long as their suburbs and streets were safe. Peck worked methodically on this project for a decade. He uses contemporary images of racial strife in Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter struggles. Jordan Hoffman described Baldwin’s documentary as ‘one of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made’; Ann Hornaday dubbed it ‘a stinging rebuke, searing provocation and soothing balm all in one’; while Kenneth Turan called it ‘a mesmerising cinematic experience’. The future America which Baldwin saw was a bleak dystopia in which injustice, cruelty, and racism continued. For him, this is a country that has consistently failed to live up to its founding principles, keeping a tenth of its population enslaved for centuries, even while proclaiming liberty, justice and equality for all. America’s past remains to haunt the present in a legacy in which 50% of black children are today born on or below the poverty line, and a third of black men are in jail, even as police killings of unarmed blacks continue unabated. Business Day (South Africa), 15 July 2019. 302

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Remembering Maya Angelou

AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITER, poet, singer and actress Maya Angelou died in May 2014 at the age of 86. Her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – about the pain and endurance of growing up as a black girl in the racist American South – smashed the myth of a lack of broad interest in black female autobiography. The book would inspire a generation of black feminist authors like Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and Pulitzer-winning novelist Alice Walker. Angelou was herself inspired by black writers like Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar as well as the classics: William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen. She later befriended James Baldwin, who encouraged her to tell her own stories. In her subsequent six autobiographies, Angelou wrote about her time as a single mother, streetcar conductor, ‘madam’ of prostitutes, calypso dancer, Broadway actress, food chef and her three marriages: to Tosh Angelos, a sailor of Greek descent; to a South African Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) freedom fighter, Vusumzi Make, with whom she moved to Cairo, where she worked as a journalist; and to Paul du Feu, a writer and cartoonist. She was also involved in the civil rights struggle, working with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. She published 35 books and 10 volumes of poetry and starred in the 1977 television epic on slavery, Roots. Her lyrical poems such as ‘Still I Rise’ throbbed with jazzy rhythms that told of the tragedies and triumphs of the black struggle:

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You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

She won a Grammy for best spoken-word album three times and was nominated for a Tony acting award and a Pulitzer poetry prize. When she delivered a poem, ‘On the Pulse of Morning’, at fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration in 1993, she became only the third poet to have been granted this honour. In her final years, Maya was a professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Angelou identified deeply with Africa and wore African clothes until her dying days. One of the most fascinating of her autobiographies described her three-year sojourn in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana between 1962 and 1965. The book, titled All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, is a remarkable memoir that tells of Angelou’s time working as an administrator at the University of Ghana and later as a journalist. She writes about the euphoria of African Americans going to a newly liberated Africa: ‘We were black Americans in West Africa, where for the first time in our lives, the colour of our skin was accepted as correct and normal’. She describes the tight-knit and often naive African American community of educated professionals – the ‘Revolutionist Returnees’ – in Accra, escaping the racism in America, and heeding Nkrumah’s call to return to their ancestral home. Crushingly, the exiles fail to be accepted by a new African elite eager to enjoy the fruits of a recently won freedom. The longing of the African Americans for some of the comforts of their racist homeland thus returns, in conflicting emotions of nostalgia and revulsion. The black exiles want so badly to be accepted by their hosts, dressing in African clothes, donning African hairstyles, and learning African languages. As Angelou poignantly notes, they had ‘left one familiar place of painful memory for another strange place with none’. But Maya also enjoys warm friendships, particularly with Efua Sutherland, a pioneering Ghanaian playwright and director of traditional street theatre, who comforted Angelou as her son lay injured in hospital following a car accident. She eventually befriends a journalist, TD Bafoo, who invites her to his home, and offers her work with the Ghanaian Times. Angelou describes with elegance the faces, gestures and voices of her American relatives that she recognises in the Ghanaians she encounters. She

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writes about market women roasting plantains; eats groundnut stew, pepper soup, plantains and kenke; visits a colourful durbar; breaks down while visiting a slave castle in the Cape Coast; dances to the live beats of Nigerian musician Bobby Benson’s melodious Highlife; has an affair with a polygamous Malian businessman; reminisces about Nkrumah’s ‘African Personality’; hears pastors delivering sermons resembling those of black Baptist preachers in the American South; and describes how the mood of the country darkened following an assassination attempt on Nkrumah’s life, which fuelled a mistrust of the African American community and other foreigners, as Ghana’s Osagyefo (Redeemer) tragically drifted towards autocracy. Angelou also describes the death of the towering African American intellectual, WEB Du Bois – who had been invited to live in Accra by Nkrumah and granted Ghanaian citizenship – on the same night as Martin Luther King’s famous March on Washington in August 1963. She further writes about a memorable visit to Accra by the charismatic Malcolm X, who met Nkrumah and delivered a rousing speech at the University of Ghana, while on a continental tour to drum up support with African governments for the African American cause at the United Nations (UN). Having recently broken away from the Nation of Islam, Angelou describes how Malcolm X encounters in Accra one of the group’s most famous adherents, the heavyweight boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who refuses to acknowledge the visibly shattered prodigal preacher. Maya paints one of the most intimate and complex portraits of Malcolm X, which humanises the caricature of the fiery radical, and shows him to be a canny, intelligent, and increasingly broad-minded thinker who had embraced the vision of a common humanity following his life-changing hajj to Mecca. A sorrowful Angelou left Ghana in 1965 with a great sense of nostalgia: ‘I knew my people had never completely left Africa. We had sung it in our blues, shouted it in our gospel and danced the continent in our breakdowns.’ Angelou received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the first African American president Barack Obama in February 2011. Obama – noting that his mother had named his own sister ‘Maya’ after Angelou – offered an eloquent elegy after her death, describing Angelou as ‘one of the brightest lights of our time – a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman’. Maya’s last poem was a memorable tribute to Nelson Mandela – whom she had met in Cairo in 1962 – titled ‘His Day Is Done’. It was written after Mandela’s death in December 1993 (and five months before her own death). As Angelou recited: 305

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Your man of strength, Gideon, emerging triumphant …

we watched as the hope of Africa sprang through the prison’s doors.

His stupendous heart intact, his gargantuan will hale and hearty …

No sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again and bring the dawn.

Yes, Mandela’s day is done, yet we, his inheritors, will open the gates

wider for

Reconciliation …

The Guardian (Nigeria), 29 June 2015.

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Toni Morrison: America’s Black Bard

TONI MORRISON, THE AFRICAN American Nobel Prize laureate, who died on 5 August at the age of 88, was a true force of nature. Born in the steel-mining town of Lorain in Ohio on 18 February 1931, she grew up in a cosmopolitan environment with the descendants of Poles, Italians, and Spaniards. But this was also the time of the Great Depression, and the family struggled financially. Morrison’s grandfather had been a slave. Her father, George Wofford, worked at several jobs in order to pay the rent, while her mother, Ramah Willis, was a housewife and homemaker, looking after four children. Morrison had some harrowing experiences in a nomadic childhood moving from house to house. An arsonist landlord once tried to burn down their home in order to evict the family. But her Midwestern childhood was also full of African American music, myths, folktales, and fantasy, planting the seeds for much of her later creative work. Morrison – who converted to Catholicism at the age of 12 – attended the most prominent historically black college, Howard University in Washington DC, studying English, and also taking an active part in drama and acting in plays about African American life. She dived deeper into the Western canon to which she had been exposed in high school: Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert, and Jane Austen. She joined a sorority which she later discovered was for light-skinned black women, thus becoming exposed to the politics of pigmentation. She also experienced the segregation of public services like transport and toilets in the capital of apartheid America. Morrison left the ebony tower of Howard in 1953 for the Ivy League of

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Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to do her master’s in English. She returned to teach at Howard, with Trinidadian American activist Stokely Carmichael being one of her students. In 1958, she married Jamaican architect and academic Harold Morrison, whom she met at Howard. The unhappy marriage produced two sons – Harold and Slade – but ended after six years while Morrison was pregnant with her second child. She would later controversially complain that the union failed partly because ‘women in Jamaica are very subservient in their marriages’. Morrison then found a job as an editor at Alfred Knopf – later Random House – based on an advertisement she had seen in the New York Review of Books, eventually becoming its first black female fiction editor. Desperately lonely, she woke up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising her two young sons. She used her job as editor in a lily-white industry to empower black writers and expose them to the American mainstream, publishing books by Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Gayl Jones, June Jordan, and Toni Cade Bambara. She consciously set out to create a ‘canon of black work’ in an unselfish and selfeffacing mission. Her pan-Africanism was reflected not just in her marriage to a Caribbean man, but in her production of anthologies of Nigeria’s two most renowned writers, fellow Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. It took Morrison five years to complete her debut novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), about an 11-year-old black girl so consumed by self-hate that she prayed for blue eyes. The girl was later raped and impregnated by her father, sending her spiralling into insanity. Despite this ghastly outcome, the book was also an ode to the ‘Black is Beautiful’ and ‘Black Power’ slogans of the era. Morrison had published Bluest Eye without letting her employers know. When they found out, they brought her into their stable, and would publish all of her subsequent books. Morrison resigned from Random House in 1983 to write full-time. She insisted on focusing on strong black characters – usually women – telling their individual stories within the larger context of a racist America, insisting that she would narrate these tales on her own terms, ‘without the white gaze’. As Morrison memorably noted: ‘I’m writing for black people, in the same way Tolstoy was not writing for me’. She insisted on writing about the little people that the more conventional ‘big man’ version of history had forgotten. She also wrote about the redemptive spirit of black communities and the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity. She dealt with unflinching honesty with difficult issues of murder, rape incest, and racism. She believed that the past was not yet past, and still remained behind to haunt the present. 308

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The ‘magical realism’ in some of her books led to comparisons with Colombian fellow Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Morrison’s second novel, Sula (1973), dealt with the tale of two black women in a Midwestern American town and their relationship of sisterhood. The lyrical Song of Solomon (1977) brought Morrison to national attention, dealing with a middle-class Michigan man in search of his personal and family identity. Tar Baby (1981) was set on a Caribbean island; Jazz (1992) evoked the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; Paradise (1997) was located in an all-black community in the western US; Love (2003) dealt with the aftermath of the death of a black hotelier; A Mercy (2008) returned to the theme of early American slavery; Home (2012) focused on the relationship between a black returning Korean war veteran and his sister; God Help the Child (2015) returns to the theme of a black woman confronting racial prejudice. Beloved (1987) was, however, Morrison’s magnum opus. This story of infanticide was based on a true incident of an escaped nineteenth-century slave woman who slit her child’s throat when recaptured, so that the infant would not have to live in slavery. The ghost of the child would later return. Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, and Thandie Newton starred in the 1998 film version, which flopped at the box office. Despite Morrison’s talents, she had to wait two decades to be given the acclaim that she deserved in a sector that remained stubbornly white and maledominated. Song of Solomon had won the lesser National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977. Morrison’s books appeared regularly in the New York Times bestseller lists, as well as the influential Oprah Winfrey book club. When Beloved failed to win the National Book Award in 1987, 48 black writers – including Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker – placed an open letter in the New York Times complaining about this lack of recognition. The book won the Pulitzer prize a year later. The Nobel Prize for Literature followed in 1993 – the first black woman ever to win it, and the first native-born American in 31 years – cementing Morrison’s global reputation and winning her millions of new readers. Toni also taught at the elite Princeton and Yale universities, becoming the first black woman to hold a professorial chair at an Ivy League university (Princeton) in 1989 even without a doctorate. The first African American president Barack Obama awarded her the presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. But, despite her role as an outspoken public intellectual consistently condemning police brutality against minorities, Morrison could sometimes be politically naive. She described Bill Clinton in 1998 as America’s ‘first black president’ without examining in detail the devastating impact of his crime and 309

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welfare policies, as well as his spectacular failures during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. She seemed infatuated with her friend Barack Obama, without critically analysing his failure to demonstrate the courage of his conviction in prosecuting deadly drone warfare and securitising US policies in Africa. She backed Hillary Clinton without critically assessing her support for harsh crime measures and a harmful, hawkish foreign policy in Libya. Morrison wrote eleven novels, two plays, two collections of essays, two books of short fiction, and five children’s books. The death of her 45-year-old son Slade (who co-wrote some of her children’s books) in 2010 – from pancreatic cancer – was a devastating blow, from which she never really recovered. Barack Obama described Morrison as ‘one of our country’s most distinguished storytellers’; Alice Walker called her ‘a great writer whose extraordinary novels leave an indelible imprint on the consciousness of all who read them’; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted that ‘she was Black and she didn’t apologise for her Blackness’; Arifa Akbar observed that Morrison delivered ‘unwavering truths with an intelligent rage that is almost equal to hope;’ Ben Okri praised the ‘unique jazz-tinged poetry of her tone’; while Aminatta Forna described Morrison as ‘one of the greatest of a generation of writers who helped to shift the centre of the literary imagination’. Despite signing a contract for a memoir, Morrison never wrote it. A 2019 documentary, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, directed by her Grammy-winning friend Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, captured the key moments in her life and work, as the indomitable silver dreadlocked black bard and contemporary griot – who insisted on being referred to as a black female writer – talked directly into the camera. It is a worthy tribute to a remarkable and uncompromising woman of letters of the African diaspora. The most eloquent chronicler of American slavery has ironically died in the year of the 400th anniversary of this grotesque crime against humanity. The Guardian (Nigeria), 11 August 2019.

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Bell Hooks: The Iconoclastic Feminist

Scholar-Activist

PIONEERING AFRICAN AMERICAN scholar-activist Bell Hooks died recently (in December 2021) of kidney failure at the age of 69. She published 40 books, mostly on the intersection between gender, race, and class. Hooks was a versatile writer and trenchant essayist who also wrote on psychology, pedagogy, art, music, and spirituality. A Renaissance woman, she published poetry, memoirs, literary criticism, film reviews, and children’s books, while also producing documentaries. She was an organic intellectual who believed in speaking in the colloquial idiom of working-class black Americans, so that her work could reach and represent marginalised communities whose self-confidence and sense of identity she sought to bolster.

A Rural Southern Childhood Gloria Jean Watkins – Bell Hooks – was born on 25 September 1952 in the small working-class town of Hopkinsville in rural Kentucky. Her father, Veodis, was a postal worker, while her mother, Rosa, was a homemaker. Gloria – the fourth of seven children – adopted the nom de plume Bell Hooks in honour of her outspoken great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. Gloria wrote the name with initial letters in lower case to stress the need for readers to focus on her text rather than her person: a stark contrast to the shameless self-promotion of the contemporary narcissistic social media generation. Intellectually gifted

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and a prodigious reader, Hooks grew up in racially segregated schools, imbibing the poetry of William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Browning, as well as African Americans Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. She attended an integrated high school in Kentucky, as America’s civil rights movement gathered pace in the 1960s.

The Evolution of a Radical Black Feminist: Stanford, Wisconsin, and Santa Cruz Hooks won a scholarship to Stanford University, in California, where she completed a bachelor’s degree in English in 1974. This was the first time that she had left rural Kentucky, and Stanford was a culture shock. She took refuge in a group of local working-class black women while working as a telephone operator. Hooks obtained a master’s from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976, and finished her doctorate at the University of California at Santa Cruz seven years later, with a thesis on the work of African American Nobel literature laureate Toni Morrison. Having acquired a first-rate education at these mostly white-dominated institutions, Hooks was ready to confront the world. She was fearless in saying radical things that many thought but dared not voice. She wore her hair in natural African plaits, and played the role of a contemporary Joan of Arc prepared to be burned at the stake for her heretical views. In launching a sustained assault on what she described as the ‘imperialist white supremacy capitalist patriarchy’ system, her lifelong credo was uncompromising: ‘A devaluation of Black womanhood occurred as a result of the sexual exploitation of Black women during slavery that has not altered in the course of hundreds of years.’ She also railed against the powerlessness of blacks in fighting the ubiquitous negative stereotyping of their image in white-dominated American media, film, and society.

The Cultural Warrior Hooks’s work was courageous, confrontational, and critical. She resisted the elitist tag of ‘public intellectual’, preferring instead to see herself more as a grassroots scholar-activist. She was a pioneering iconoclast and unabashed cultural warrior who set out to slaughter feminist sacred cows and orthodox shibboleths. Hooks gave black feminists the confidence to find their own voice, and to narrate their own stories. African American feminists like Angela Davis and Alice Walker had forced the establishment of Black Women’s Studies into American university curricula by the late 1970s, successfully arguing that their 312

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narratives had been marginalised in Black Studies syllabi. Hooks was their heir. Her first book was a collection of poems, And There We Wept, published in 1978 while teaching at the University of Southern California. Hooks’s 1981 Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism became an iconic feminist text. It dealt with historical and contemporary black female oppression, based on the brutality of slavery and the imperialism of patriarchy. She was unfazed by some of the hostile reviews of her work, continuing to condemn the ‘acts of persecution, torture – the terrorism that breaks the spirits’. She insisted that black women must move from being imperial objects to liberated subjects, and resisted efforts to silence strong black radical voices. Her 1984 Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was a searing critique of mainstream white feminist theory which she felt erased the experiences of black women, and privileged those of white middleclass women. Hooks thus called for the centring of marginal black and brown women, and the recognition of socio-economic inequalities in building a more inclusive women’s movement. In 1989, Hooks published Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Two years later, came Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, a collaboration with African American celebrity theology scholar Cornel West, who described Hooks as ‘an intellectual giant’. The 1993 Sisters of the Yam urged political resistance and self-healing for black women throughout the African diaspora. Three years later, she published Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood and, in the same year, Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies. In 2004, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity emerged. She criticised black patriarchy, but also sympathetically acknowledged the historical victimisation and oppression of black men, whose inclusion she consistently promoted in the fight to defeat patriarchy. Her books were translated into 15 languages, and continue to be used in curricula across the globe. By the 2000s, Hooks had become a celebrity academic whose work was required reading on every continent. Often wading into popular culture, she criticised the phallocentrism of Spike Lee’s films and the ideological inconsistencies of Beyoncé’s art.

Home, Sweet Home Hooks returned to her close-knit community in Kentucky in 2004, and lived out the last 17 years of her life there. She taught at Berea College, and had the foresight to set up the Bell Hooks Institute at the university in 2014, which now hosts all her archives and collected works. By this time, the self-described ‘Buddhist Christian’ had reduced her teaching load, and spent time meditating, 313

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visiting family and friends, and writing in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. She had mellowed somewhat, stressing the importance of love and community to heal America’s deep racial and gender wounds. As she noted: ‘I believe wholeheartedly that the only way out of domination is love.’ Hooks was the ultimate iconoclast who consistently challenged conventional orthodoxy, and charted her own original path. In the process, she did much to force black feminist narratives into the intellectual mainstream. Prophetic to the end, Hooks had envisioned the aftermath of her own demise: ‘This is the way I imagine “the end”: I close my eyes and see hands holding a Chinese red lacquer bowl, walking to the top of the Kentucky hill I call my own, scattering my remains as though they are seeds and not ash, a burnt offering, on solid ground vulnerable to the wind and rain – all that is left of my body gone, my being shifted, passed away, moving forward on and into eternity.’ The Guardian (Nigeria), 24 February 2022.

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Buchi Emecheta: Farewell to Africa’s

Literary Mother Courage

A TRAIL-BLAZING MEMBER of the pioneering generation of post-independence African literature giants, Florence Onyebuchi ‘Buchi’ Emecheta died in London on 25 January 2017 at the age of 72, and the world is the poorer for it. She was born of Igbo parents from Nigeria’s oil-rich Delta region on 21 July 1944. Her father was a railway worker who died when she was nine. She was brought up by her mother in the cosmopolitan colonial capital of Lagos, having to convince her parents to let her join her brother to go to school. She won a scholarship to Methodist Girls’ High School at 10, but left school seven years later, marrying Sylvester Onwordi, to whom she had been engaged since she was 11. Emecheta moved to London when her husband went to study there in the same year that her country achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1960. However, her own life in exile proved to be anything but a personal liberation. She had five children in six years, and endured an abusive, loveless, and sometimes violent marriage. Her spouse burnt the manuscript of her first novel, The Bride Price, which she later had to reconstruct. She said at the time that she felt that her husband had burnt her child. Demonstrating the incredible resourcefulness, discipline, and strength of many of the female characters in her often semi-biographical novels, Emecheta – a redoubtable African Mother Courage – often woke up early in the morning to write, even as she brought up five children on her own, worked as a library 315

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officer in the British Museum, while completing a bachelor’s degree in sociology. She would later toil as a youth and community worker in impoverished black communities in North London’s Camden Town. Emecheta’s publishing career started when she wrote a regular column for the New Statesman, which provided the inspiration for her 1972 novel, In the Ditch, describing the difficult experiences of a single mother, Adah, living in a grimy housing estate in London while struggling as a librarian to bring up five children. Her novels Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), and Destination Biafra (1982) all dealt with similar themes of gender discrimination; racial, sexual and colonial oppression; the disempowerment of women; and female independence and ingenuity. All these tales had strong female lead characters struggling to free themselves from the shackles of patriarchal and colonial domination. Emecheta relentlessly excoriated the male-chauvinist notion that the main ambition of women should be to have children and stay at home as property of their husbands. She wrote in an uncompromising and unvarnished style, determined to give voice to the voiceless and to portray the bleak world to which African women were often consigned by societal hierarchies. Emecheta’s most famous novel, The Joys of Motherhood, remains a pan-African classic. Bathed in pathos and the unfulfilled dreams of the heroine, Nnu Ego, the book was an urban response to the pioneering Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, published 13 years earlier. Nwapa’s novel was set in a village and portrayed a childless but independent woman who worships a similarly childless and independent water goddess. Both women, however, achieve fulfilment outside marriage and motherhood. Emecheta borrows the title of her classic novel from a question in Efuru, responding to Nwapa’s query of why women worshipped the deity despite never having achieved the ‘joy of motherhood’. In her novel, Emecheta demolishes this idea as a myth, based on her own largely joyless motherhood. Her novel is an ironic exposition of motherhood’s many humiliations and unfulfilled expectations, amidst the enormous unacknowledged sacrifices of Nnu Ego. The heroine dies a lonely and tragic death, abandoned not only by friends but by her seven children. Ego’s lament is truly heart-wrenching: ‘God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled by herself, a full human being, not anybody’s appendage?’ Emecheta’s iconoclastic novel sought to shatter the stereotypical, one-dimensional ideal of the pure, heroic mother-figure often portrayed in the first-generation of African literature. The critic Elleke Boehmer 316

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noted that The Joys of Motherhood ‘exposes the overall emotional and spiritual barrenness an African woman … can experience, no matter how richly she is endowed with children’. Emecheta was a pioneer, tackling patriarchy – based on her own personal experiences – even before an international women’s movement had arisen championing a new generation of social rights and equality in male-dominated societies. In that sense, she was like another pioneer, Kenya’s Wangari Maathai, the late Nobel peace prize laureate and environmental, gender, and human rights activist, who also left an abusive husband who was uncomfortable with her self-recognition. Emecheta was not afraid to express her discomfort with the alienating, Western middle-class feminism that she found in Europe, which did not speak directly to her own lived experiences. As she later noted: ‘If I am now a feminist, I am an African feminist.’ Emecheta was a visiting professor in English at the University of Calabar in Nigeria between 1980 and 1981, but was not tempted to settle back home. She lectured at the universities of Yale and London in 1982, and travelled the globe promoting her vision of women’s empowerment. Even as a widely published author, Emecheta never stopped learning and obtained a doctorate in social education from the University of London in 1991. She had founded the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company with her son Sylvester in 1982, and devoted much of her time to this venture in her latter years. Emecheta published 16 novels, an autobiography, Head above Water (1984), three children’s books, and three plays. She won the Jock Campbell Award for The Slave Girl in 1978; was listed by Granta magazine as among the ‘Best Young British Novelists’ in 1983; two of her plays, A Kind of Marriage and A Family Bargain, were produced for BBC Television in 1976 and 1987 respectively; she was honoured in 2004 by the British Library as one of fifty black and Asian writers who made a major contribution to British literature; and, a year later, was awarded an honorary OBE (Order of the British Empire). Emecheta described her books as ‘stories of the world where women face the universal problems of poverty, neglect, violence, and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical’. She inspired a generation of African and black British writers. Marie Umeh noted: ‘It is through Buchi Emecheta that the souls of voiceless Nigerian women … are revealed.’ Emecheta was regarded by friends – as Danuta Keane noted in her obituary of Emecheta in The Guardian of London – as ‘warm, caring, and humorous’. Her books have formed part of the curriculum of universities 317

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across Africa and its diaspora for decades, and it was in the Diaspora that Emecheta lived most of her life and died. A dyed-in-the-wool pan-African, she once famously exhorted: ‘Black women all over the world should reunite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.’ The Guardian (Nigeria), 21 January 2017.

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John Pepper Clark: Africa’s Protean

Pioneer

JOHN PEPPER CLARK-BEKEDEREMO, the Nigerian poet and playwright and a pioneering post-independence writer, died on 13 October 2020 at the age of 85. He published ten collections of poems, seven plays, one book of essays, a travelogue, and a translation of an epic tale. Born on 6 April 1935 in the oilproducing Niger Delta to Ijaw parents during the era of British colonial rule, Clark attended Native administration schools – experiences that later shaped his anti-colonial outlook. A brilliant student and voracious reader, he won scholarships to attend his local Government College in Ughelli and Nigeria’s premier University of Ibadan, where he studied English. Clark became the first editor of the university’s poetry journal, The Horn, which published many of his contemporaries who would go on to become some of Nigeria’s greatest writers: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Christopher Okigbo. After graduation in 1960 – the year of Nigeria’s independence – Clark worked briefly for the Ministry of Information in Nigeria’s Western region, before joining the Daily Express newspaper in Lagos as a features editor. He launched his literary career, writing poetry that was heavily influenced by Greek mythology and the Western canon: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Yeats, Blake, and Tennyson. He fervently believed that his dual African and Western heritage enriched his work, seeing himself as a ‘cultural mulatto’ who was somewhat alienated from his own traditions as a result of his Western education. In ‘Agbor Dance’, he laments no longer being able to do the traditional dance. Many poems such as ‘Night Rain’, ‘Fulani Cattle’, ‘Abiku’, and ‘Ibadan Dawn’ are full 319

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of nostalgia for his ancestral homeland, as well as his childhood and university experiences. Though considered somewhat apolitical at the beginning of his career, Clark’s poetry ironically became more political than his plays. His poem ‘Ivibie: A Song of Wrong’ railed against the evils of slavery and colonialism. A fellowship at Princeton University in 1963–1964 resulted in an embittered, scathing travelogue, America, Their America, in which Clark condemned what he regarded as the US’s technology-obsessed, dehumanised society. Poems like ‘Service’ ‘Boeing Crossing’, and ‘Cave Call’ reinforced his strong feelings on this issue. On his return home, he joined the University of Ibadan’s Institute of African Studies under Kenneth Dike, a pioneer of the Ibadan School of History, which advocated the use of oral history to narrate colonial history from an African perspective. Clark did the same using poetry and legends. In 1966, he translated into English The Ozidi Saga, an Ijaw epic of ritual, song, and dance, moving to the University of Lagos (UNILAG) during this period, where he eventually became a full professor. All of Clark’s plays were set in the Niger Delta as an ode to his ancestral traditions. His first one, Song of a Goat, borrowed from traditional legends to depict a tragedy – in the epic Greek style – of an impotent man whose virile brother has a son with his frustrated sister-in-law. Its sequel, The Masquerade, continues the story of the family curse. The Raft followed, which some regarded as having predicted the attempted secession of the country’s Eastern region. This incident precipitated the Nigerian civil war of 1967–1970 in which one million mostly Igbos died. The Biafra War darkened Clark’s outlook on Nigeria. His 1970 book Casualties: Poems 1966–68 was a lyrical, meditative cri de coeur about the dismal decade of the 1960s. In an environment of civil war and military rule, he wrote in parables, bitingly satirising the political figures of this volatile epoch with terms like ‘His Excellency the Masquerade’, and using animal descriptions for them such as ‘crocodile’, ‘alligator’, ‘cockerel’, and ‘rat’. Poems like ‘Seasons of Omens’, ‘Exodus’, and ‘Dirge’ were evocative of this melancholic decade of troubles. Sierra Leonean poet Syl Cheney-Coker described the collection as a ‘sombre lament, at once sad, yet hopeful’. In 1970, Clark published a collection of essays, The Example of Shakespeare. After leaving UNILAG in 1980, he formed the PEC Repertory Theatre with his devoted wife, Ebun Odutola, who was also a professor at UNILAG and with whom he had three children. His Bikora Plays were performed in his theatre, as was the comedy The Wives’ Revolt. By the time Clark published the collection 320

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of poems State of the Union in 1985, he was totally disenchanted with Nigeria’s drift into military autocracy following the collapse of the Second Republic two years earlier. He consistently condemned the corruption of military brass hats and mandarins, as well as politicians and professors. Clark also excoriated pastors who he felt exploited the gullibility of their followers in order to enrich themselves. In the poem ‘The Sovereign’, he describes Nigeria not as a nation, but as ‘an amalgamation … all spread between sea and desert’. In 1986, Clark led Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe to visit military autocrat General Ibrahim Babangida on an unsuccessful mission to plead for clemency for alleged military coup-plotters, who included the poet-soldier General Mamman Vatsa. Two years later, he published Mandela and Other Poems which meditated on old age and the inevitability of death. His 1999 A Lot from Paradise was drenched with nostalgia for the narrow creeks of his riverine native homeland of Kiagbodo. His 2007 documentary, Oil at the Bottom, underlined his commitment to exposing the role of the Nigerian government and foreign oil companies like Shell in despoiling the environment and ruining the livelihoods of the inhabitants of the Niger Delta. Clark was awarded the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award in 2001. UNILAG named an endowed centre after him in 2014, and awarded him an honorary doctorate three years later. Young Nigerian writers founded the JP Clark Literary Society in 2015. An indefatigable writer, Clark published his last collection of poems, Remains of a Tide, in 2018. His verse has been widely translated into German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, and Hindi. His Nigerian biographer and fellow poet, Femi Osofisan, noted that ‘of all his contemporaries, JP [Clark] has arguably been the most protean, the most selfregenerating, and the most continuously experimental’; his American biographer Robert Wren, described Clark as ‘a poet and playwright of the first rank in both originality and expressive power’; while Nigerian professor Biodun Jeyifo described him as ‘one of the finest literary artists our continent has produced … the Balogun Otolorin of African Literature’. As Nigeria continues to reel from multiple conflicts, it is worth recalling John Pepper Clark’s words: O let us light the funeral pile

But let us not become its faggot

O let us charcoal the mad cutters of teak

But let us not cut down the clan.

The Guardian (Nigeria), 20 October 2020. 321

Part VI

Public Intellectuals

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Ali Mazrui: Farewell the Trumpets

for Prophet of Pax Africana

KENYAN POLITICAL SCIENTIST Ali Mazrui, who died at 81 this week (October 2014), was undoubtedly the foremost African public intellectual of the last 50 years. He was born in Mombasa in 1933. His father was the chief Islamic judge in Kenya. While I was studying international relations in England and the United States (US), much of the literature we read was extremely Eurocentric, and Africa was marginal to Western concerns. It was during this period that I stumbled across Ali Mazrui. I was immediately amazed at this master wordsmith’s elegant and unconventional style, unflinching commitment to pan-Africanism, tremendous intellectual honesty, and fierce independence of thought. He connected Africa to interests as wide-ranging as Plato, Rousseau, Shakespeare, John Milton, Edmund Burke, Rudyard Kipling, and Muhammad Ali. I have often mined the vast treasure trove of what is now termed ‘Mazruiana’. On topics including African security, the United Nations (UN), Afro-Asian co-operation, hegemonic leadership, external intervention in Africa, pan-Africanism, and the significance to Africa of figures like WEB Du Bois, Mahatma Gandhi, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama, the Kenyan scholar wrote insightfully for five decades. On some of these subjects, Mazrui’s was sometimes the only solid literature available. I thus dedicated my 2010 book of essays, The Curse of Berlin, to the ‘global African’ who was undoubtedly the doyen of Africa’s international relations. 325

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Mazrui generously contributed a substantial preface to introduce these essays, which masterfully drew together the threads of the main themes in the book. The ‘multiple Mazrui’ is Africa’s foremost prophet of Pax Africana, an expression which he was particularly proud to have coined. He obtained a master’s degree from Columbia University and his doctorate from Oxford, before becoming the youngest full professor at Uganda’s Makerere University in 1965 at the age of 32. He was critical of Marxism, and instead championed a brand of radical pan-African liberalism devoid of what he regarded as liberalism’s hypocritical application by powerful Western countries, which he termed ‘global apartheid’. In a seminal study in 1967, Towards a Pax Africana, Mazrui called for Africans to create and consolidate peace on their own continent. His idea of ‘continental jurisdiction’ was a sort of ‘Monroe Doctrine’ urging outsiders to stay out of the continent. In the related concept of ‘racial sovereignty’, Mazrui argued that inter-African interventions by sisterly African states was more legitimate than those of outsiders. As Africa’s post-independence euphoria was dampened by political assassinations, military coups, and civil wars, Mazrui’s own writing darkened. His haunting 1971 novel, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, ‘tries’ Nigeria’s greatest poet for the ‘crimes’ of putting ‘tribe’ before nation, and for betraying his art by swapping the pen for a pistol. The novel was set in a hereafter called ‘After Africa’ in the context of the bloody disunity of the Nigerian civil war of 1967–1970. The writing of the book was cathartic, as Mazrui had had to seek therapy for the trauma of a conflict that had threatened to tear Africa’s Gulliver apart. But it was his most influential article in 1966 that demonstrated Mazrui’s courageous independence of thought. Writing shortly after Kwame Nkrumah fell from power, the Kenyan scholar depicted the Ghanaian leader as a ‘Leninist czar’, a royalist revolutionary. Mazrui argued that Nkrumah had ruled in a monarchical fashion and thus lost the organisational effectiveness of a Leninist party structure. He concluded that Nkrumah would be celebrated more as a great pan-African than a great Ghanaian. Though he was vilified by many at the time for daring to criticise a pan-African icon, Mazrui’s analysis stood the test of time. The Kenyan intellectual even entered the fray surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (which earned Rushdie a deadly fatwa by enraged mullahs) in 1989, with a provocative essay that showed why the book was so offensive to Muslims. Mazrui was also the first African to deliver the BBC’s prestigious Reith Lectures, diagnosing the ‘African condition’ while controversially calling for temporary nuclear proliferation in the Third World to 326

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shock nuclear powers into global disarmament. The Kenyan was named among the world’s hundred leading public intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine in 2005. One of Africa’s foremost thinkers, and author of over forty books and scores of journal and newspaper articles, he has arguably contributed more to shaping perceptions about contemporary Africa than any other scholar. A dyed-in-the-wool pan-African, he was not only a theoretician but served on two Organisation of African Unity (OAU) eminent panels on reparations, and on transforming the continental body into the African Union (AU). He was the Albert Luthuli professor-at-large at Nigeria’s University of Jos, and the inaugural Walter Rodney professor at the University of Guyana. He also served as chancellor of the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya. Mazrui’s 1986 nine-part television series, The Africans, is widely considered to have been one of the most comprehensive assessments of African politics, economics, culture, and society ever made. A Western-trained Kenyan Muslim, inspired by St Thomas’s nineteenth century ‘Father of Pan-Africanism,’ Edward Blyden, Mazrui had focused his documentary on Africa’s ‘triple heritage’ of indigenous, Islamic, and Western influences, which he himself embodied. The Africans established his global reputation but was also controversial. The American-based National Endowment for the Humanities, which had partly funded the project, removed its name from the credits due to the documentary’s alleged anti-Americanism. South African Nobel literature laureate JM Coetzee also accused Mazrui of a ‘certain self-righteousness’ and of being too much of an apostle of ‘Black Consciousness’, though it was clear that Coetzee himself lacked the most basic understanding of pan-Africanism. Never afraid to speak his mind and challenge sacred cows, Mazrui criticised Africa’s lack of a ‘Protestant work ethic’ and the failure of Africans to imbibe the productive rather than consumerist aspects of Western societies. Even as Idi Amin was widely dismissed as a brutal buffoon, Mazrui sought to contextualise what he termed Uganda’s lumpenmilitariat’s behaviour as part of an indigenous African ‘warrior tradition’. The Kenyan scholar, however, subsequently had to flee Makerere University in 1973 as a result of Amin’s tyranny, and spent the rest of his life teaching at the American universities of Michigan and Binghamton. While many praised Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere’s own greatness as a leader, he described Mwalimu’s socio-economic villageisation policies of ujamaa (familyhood) as a ‘heroic failure’. Mazrui was clearly an iconoclast. As everyone celebrated South Africa’s 327

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‘rainbow nation’ after 1994 under the globally revered leadership of Nelson Mandela, he noted that South African whites had told blacks: ‘You take the crown and we will keep the jewels.’ He, however, also championed utopian ideas of the ‘recolonisation’ of conflict-ridden parts of Africa under a UN ‘trusteeship’, which triggered an acrimonious debate with late South African academic Archie Mafeje. Returning to Mazrui’s The Africans, Nigerian Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka’s attacks on this documentary in the Harvard-based Transition journal led to one of the most famous and ferocious debates in pan-African scholarship in 1991–1992. Soyinka effectively accused Mazrui of an Islamophile slant in the documentary, berating him for underplaying the damage of the Arab slave trade on Africa, and for trivialising and misrepresenting African indigenous cultures. The Nobel laureate hyperbolically described the series as a ‘Satanic trilogy’, shockingly questioning the credibility of the author as an Arab to make a genuinely authentic documentary about the story of Africa, and parochially asking that the story be retold from a black African perspective. (The late Palestinian American Edward Said expressed regret at this reaction.) Soyinka felt that the series denigrated African indigenous cultures, treating them in a superficial manner; and noted that The Africans was one-sidedly championing the role of Islam in Africa, while being dismissive of the Christian aspect of the triple legacy. The Nobel laureate appeared to suggest that the documentary came dangerously close to championing Islamic supremacy. He thus insisted that ‘Mazrui’s plaint on behalf of Islam remains both contrived and sinister’. Mazrui sought to defend himself by accusing Soyinka of having written a ‘parable of deception’. He insisted that Soyinka had seen only part of his documentary, since his comments did not reflect his obvious erudition. In Mazrui’s responses, he acknowledged that Africa’s first Nobel literature laureate was ‘among the most profound literary figures that Africa has produced’ and described him as ‘a giant among the writers of the world’. Soyinka was never as charitable, dismissing Mazrui as ‘brainwashed’, ‘alien’, and ‘Arab’. Mazrui, however, also accused Soyinka of being ‘anti-Arab’, ‘antiMuslim’, and a Yoruba ethnic chauvinist. He noted that his documentary celebrated indigenous African cultures not in a trivial or superficial manner, but acknowledged Africa as the birthplace of both humankind and of the world’s first great civilisation of Egypt. Mazrui further argued that the series highlighted the admirable bonds of loyalty and solidarity that have kept the 328

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African family together. Noting that indigenous cultures must be the foundation for any successful synthesis of Africa’s ‘triple heritage’, he called on Africa to restore spiritual balance in order to prevent further erosion of indigenous values. While Mazrui was highly critical of the role of Christianity and Islam in addressing Africa’s challenges, he noted that indigenous cultures had been the least criticised. Most fair-minded observers would agree with Mazrui that The Africans was a fundamentally pro-African documentary. Both intellectual titans happily reconciled at a seminar at Binghamton University in April 2002. The last time I saw Mazrui was when I attended a seminar celebrating his 80th birthday in Binghamton in April 2013. I took part in a memorable final session honouring the recently deceased Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, with Mazrui and Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Former Nigerian military leader General Yakubu Gowon was also at this meeting, at which I ‘tried’ Mazrui and Soyinka for putting ego before the African cause by engaging in an uncivil debate. Mazrui had uttered the paradoxically immortal words: ‘Death is an exercise in pan-Africanism.’ He described death as the most horizontal form of panAfricanism. He is now one of our noble ancestors, and is survived by a Nigerian wife, Pauline, with whom he had two sons and an adopted daughter, having had three sons with British wife Molly. Until we all meet again in the land of the ancestors in ‘After Africa’, sleep well, ‘Mzee’. Sunday Independent (South Africa), 19 October 2014.

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Edward Said: Pioneer of Post-Colonial

Studies

THIS MONTH (OCTOBER 2013) marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Edward Said. He was born of Christian parents in British-ruled Palestine on 1 November 1935, grew up in Cairo, and then went to the United States, where he studied at Princeton and Harvard. The towering Palestinian American intellectual, who wrote 23 books, became the most eloquent voice for the rights of Palestinians. He taught for forty years in the English department at Columbia University in New York (which Said regarded as the ‘exilic city par excellence’), and served as a member of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile for 14 years before resigning in 1991. Said later accused Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat of having sold out the struggle by becoming a willing accomplice of Israeli occupation following the 1993 Oslo Accords. A gifted pianist who published musical criticism, he contributed regularly to mainstream Western newspapers and spoke to the Arab world directly through a regular column in Al-Ahram. He trenchantly criticised Israel’s ‘exclusivity and xenophobia towards the Arabs’ as well as its denial of Palestinian rights. His courageous advocacy led to the Jewish Defence League branding him a ‘Nazi’ in 1985, and his university office was torched by political arsonists. Said effectively pioneered the field of post-colonial studies with his publication of Orientalism in 1978. This book sought to deconstruct Western stereotypes of the Middle East in the clash between the Occident and the Orient. In a more ambitious 1994 study, Culture and Imperialism, Said elegantly demonstrated how ‘Empire follows Art’ by showing how culture was often 330

EDWARD SAID: PIONEER OF POST-COLONIAL STUDIES

used – consciously and unconsciously – by Western authors in support of the imperial project. He demonstrated how even great works of poetry, fiction, and philosophy were used in the service of slavery, colonialism, and racism. As Said put it: ‘Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination.’ Rudyard Kipling, the British poet of imperialism, was a prime example of Said’s critique, with his 1899 poem urging Western imperialists to ‘Take up the white man’s burden

The savage wars of peace

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease.’

Said urged former colonial people to use their own narratives to counter misrepresentations of them by the West. He sought to deconstruct classic Western novels like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and countless travel writers and filmmakers, noting that the ‘hegemony of Western imperial ideology’ was often used to denigrate and damage other cultures. Said specifically criticised the writings of eminent authors such as Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and VS Naipaul, noting: ‘What are striking in these discourses are the rhetorical figures one keeps encountering in their descriptions of “the mysterious East”, as well as the stereotypes about “the African [or Indian or Irish or Jamaican or Chinese] mind”, the notions about bringing civilisation to primitive or barbaric peoples, the disturbingly familiar ideas about flogging or death or extended punishment being required when ‘they’ misbehaved or became rebellious, because “they” mainly understood force or violence best; “they” were not like “us”, and for that reason deserved to be ruled.’ Said argued that Joseph Conrad had perfectly expressed the traits of cultural imperialism in his famous 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness. Though himself a Polish émigré to Britain who was able to see through some of the corruption of imperial domination, Conrad was, in the end, unable to accept that the African characters he portrayed also had independent lives and cultures not controlled by Western imperialists. Though Conrad was able to expose the domineering avarice of imperialism, Said noted that Heart of Darkness was essentially about Europe’s imperial mastery over Africa, with the ‘natives’ having no culture

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or history of their own or the will to break the chains of bondage to win their independence. Science, history, and learning all come from the West, and European tutelage over Africans seemed inevitable and preordained by nature. Said also promoted a positive synthesis of cultures, recognising the globalising, potentially positive impact of the post-imperial world. He used the work of anti-colonial writers like Frantz Fanon, CLR James, Walter Rodney, Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Tayeb Salih, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez to show how ‘the Empire’ had struck back with its own counter-narratives that challenged the arrogant and racist misrepresentations of Western authors. Said particularly praised the 1986 nine-part documentary The Africans by Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui, which sought to narrate the history of Africa from an unapologetically pan-African perspective. As Said noted: ‘Here at last was an African on prime-time television, in the West, daring to accuse the West of what it had done, thus reopening a file considered closed.’ Another important Saidian theme was that the past could not simply be discarded, as it continues to inform the present. He was a particularly vocal critic of American power, accusing his adopted homeland of acting like a selfappointed global policeman. Said saw in the propaganda for America’s wars in Vietnam and Iraq the same nativist appeals of earlier imperial powers, with intellectuals, journalists, soldiers, artists, and ordinary citizens uncritically wrapping themselves in the star-spangled banner in patriotic defence of their country’s neo-colonial aggression. He particularly criticised – notably in the 1981 Covering Islam – the demonisation of Islam in the West and the often crude lumping together of its one billion people of diverse cultures and six major languages. He decried the ‘othering’ of Islam, which he saw as having replaced communism as the new enemy of the West (the US launched eight military strikes against Muslim countries between 1998 and 2013). Another impressive aspect of Said’s work is that he criticised Third World autocrats such as Uganda’s Idi Amin and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein (‘a deeply unattractive, indeed revoltingly tough and callous leader’) as consistently and ferociously as he condemned Western neo-imperialism. Even Egypt’s Anwar Sadat did not escape his sharp pen, with Said describing the Nobel peace laureate as behaving in ways that American daydreamers imagine that ‘great native “rulers” ought to be’. In contrast, Said admired Nelson Mandela’s ‘firmness and conviction’, contrasting this with a lack of principled leadership among Palestinians and Arabs. 332

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Another of Said’s key concerns, elaborated in his 1993 Reith Lectures on Representations of the Intellectual, was the need for secular intellectuals to engage with the public to ‘speak truth to power’, stir up debate and controversy, and avoid patriotic nationalism and corporate thinking. Describing himself as a ‘stupidly stubborn secular intellectual’ and humanist, Said regarded intellectuals as iconoclastic, marginal exiles and outsiders who belonged to no tribe and subscribed to no creed. They had therefore to speak out for their fellow displaced and dispossessed. He cites James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Noam Chomsky, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Virginia Woolf as exemplary figures of dissent who challenged the status quo and sought to uphold ‘eternal standards of truth and justice’. He dismissed establishment intellectuals as serving ‘gods that always fail’. True intellectuals are seen, in contrast, as crusaders against corruption; promoters of human freedom and knowledge; defenders of the weak and voiceless; confronters of orthodoxy and dogma; and challengers of oppressive authority. Intellectuals are also exiles in the metaphysical sense of being unsettled and unsettling others, while traversing disciplines and demolishing idées fixes. As Said noted: ‘The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still.’ Said has often noted that the power to narrate or block narratives from emerging were important aspects of cultural imperialism. Today, the hold that the cartel of still mostly white men has over the mainstream international media is a powerful tool in shaping how people view the world. Depicting Africa as a ‘hopeless continent’ of culturally backward people prone to perennial conflicts is scarcely going to persuade public opinion in the West to support efforts to end Africa’s tragic conflicts. Such Afrophobic Western misrepresentations of Africa must be deconstructed, and Africans have to force their own narratives onto the global agenda. Said was the ultimate cosmopolitan citizen of the world. As he explained: ‘I have remained, as a native from the Arab and Muslim world, someone who belongs to the other side. This has enabled me in a sense to live on both sides, and to try to mediate between them.’ He was an Arab who challenged Western prejudices, a Christian who defended the rights of Muslims, and a public intellectual who became a political activist. On this tenth anniversary of his death, I wish to place a wreath to Said’s memory for providing us with the tools to expose the flawed and prejudiced musings of Western apostles of Afrophobia. Sunday Independent (South Africa), 6 October 2013. 333

74

Abiola Irele: The Last Prophet of

Négritude

FRANCIS ABIOLA IRELE, who died in Boston on 2 July 2017 at the age of 81, was undoubtedly the foremost prophet of the concept of Négritude, to which he devoted his entire intellectual career for over five decades. I first met him as an undergraduate while studying German at the University of Ibadan in 1985 when he was head of the Department of Modern Languages and a professor of French. At the time, with the social distance typical of such relationships, he struck me as aloof, absent-minded, and remote. Later in my academic career, I would meet ‘Prof ’ in diverse American cities during annual African Studies Association (ASA) conferences. Seeing him wandering around on his own, I would sit down with him to a coffee and talk about various issues relating to Nigeria, Africa, and the world. I still remember his magisterial MKO Abiola Lecture on ‘African Studies as Discipline and Vocation’ during the ASA meeting in Indianapolis in November 2014. After Irele’s death, tributes flooded in from around the world. Harvard­ based Nigerian scholar Biodun Jeyifo described him as ‘indisputably the world’s greatest scholar of Négritude’; Kenya’s Princeton-based Simon Gikandi called him ‘a walking archive’, before noting that ‘more than any other scholar of his generation, Irele brought a forceful intellect, a cosmopolitan outlook, and authoritative voice to the study of African literature’; eminent Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare described Irele as ‘a man and scholar constantly re-inventing himself and his ideas, an ageless humanist with an astounding combination of youthful 334

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energy and the seasoned wisdom that comes with age’; Nigerian academic Remi Raji praised Irele as ‘the original olohum iyo (salt-tongued artist), and teacher of teachers’; while American academic Kenneth Harrow eulogised him as ‘a major voice for African studies, a generous humanist, an insightful scholar … an iroko tree in our forest of scholars’. Abiola Irele was born on 22 May 1936 in a colonial Nigeria still under British rule for the first 24 years of his life: an experience that shaped his writing in its fierce pan-Africanism. Though born in Ora in Edo state, he moved to Enugu at the age of six (after his father, who worked as a civil servant in the Post and Telegraph Department, was transferred there), where he learned to speak Igbo. He would return to Lagos to live with his father, attending the Catholic schools St Patrick’s, St Mathias’s, and St Gregory’s in accordance with the family faith. He was exposed to folk tales and oral poetry even before entering the University of Ibadan in 1957, where he was a contemporary of JP Clark, Florence Nwapa, and Christopher Okigbo. Irele was not just a scholar in Ibadan; his appearance in the opera The Magic Flute and his singing of librettos with a golden voice in the university’s Trenchard Hall are fondly remembered by his contemporaries. He went to Paris for two years to learn French in 1960 – the annus mirabilis of Nigeria’s independence – and obtained a doctorate in French literature from the prestigious Sorbonne University. Irele lived in Paris’s Latin quarter near the offices of Présence Africaine – the leading literary journal on African and Caribbean literature in the francophone world – for which he wrote, immersing himself in pan-African circles. Returning home with the proverbial golden fleece, he put his pan-Africanism into practice, teaching at Ghana’s Legon University as well as the universities of Ife, Lagos, and Ibadan in the 1970s and 1980s. He edited the journal Black Orpheus, between 1968 and 1975. Irele’s inaugural lecture at Ibadan in November 1982, ‘In Praise of Alienation’, became the stuff of legend. A deep thinker and fluent writer, his body of work focused obsessively on Négritude, with a particular prioritising of its two leading figures: Senegal’s Léopold Senghor and Martinique’s Aimé Césaire. Irele traced the antecedents of the ‘African personality’ to the West Indian Edward Blyden and credited the birth of Négritude to the poetry of Césaire – whom he termed the ‘arch­ poet of Négritude’. He, however, regarded Senghor as the concept’s greatest theoretician and philosopher, with the Senegalese poet-president’s definition of Négritude as a ‘cultural and spiritual endowment of the Black man’ based on African mysticism. Irele often recognised radical French philosopher Jean-Paul 335

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Sartre’s role in expounding on the concept of Négritude, while noting Sartre’s cultural limitations in not belonging to the black cultural world. Interpreting Senghor, Irele noted that ‘Négritude functions as a synonym of the “collective soul” of all the Black peoples’. This movement glorified black culture, looking back nostalgically at a rich African past, and affirmed the worth and dignity of black people across the globe. Irele shared both Senghor’s and Césaire’s love of the language and culture, but – unlike them – was also deeply immersed in his own traditional African cultures. He was, for decades, the most articulate, and one of the few, prophets of Négritude left after many had abandoned the creed in the post-independence era. He often proselytised in the wilderness, sometimes discovering an oasis where he could quench the thirst of the few faithful devotees of a dying religion. Irele became the very personification of the Négritude he had mastered in all of its complexities. He firmly believed that both Négritude and pan-Africanism would be essential foundations for the reconstruction of a new African identity in the modern world. He thus sought to keep updating the doctrine for new generations to understand and relate to their own particular circumstances. The ultimate cultural bridge-builder, Irele constantly interpreted the francophone world of black poetry and prose for an anglophone audience, leading Biodun Jeyifo to describe him as ‘the greatest border crosser of [his] generation’. Irele was the ultimate Renaissance man: a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, a bon vivant, and connoisseur of opera, wine, and good food. He was as comfortable with the Greek and Roman classics as he was with African art and music. He discussed Yoruba and Zulu linguistics and poetry as easily as he sang Mozart and recited Dante. One of the most commented upon qualities of Irele was his deep humility despite all of his undoubted accomplishments. He always disagreed with the multitude of critics of Négritude, such as Wole Soyinka, Martinique’s Frantz Fanon, and Benin’s Stanislas Adotévi – who saw it as essentialist, apolitical, glorifying European culture, or demeaning black culture – with decorum and civility, often showing great respect for their scholarship. Irele was self-effacing to a fault, often reluctant to put himself in the limelight, but instead maintaining the role of the detached literary critic mediating fierce intellectual disputes as an ‘honest broker’. One of the most important and often unheralded aspects of Irele’s career was his tireless mentoring of two generations of younger scholars. As Wisconsinbased Nigerian academic Tejumola Olaniyan noted: ‘his biggest accomplishment was a careful cultivation of junior scholars’. During his early career in Nigeria, 336

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he published younger scholars in the student journal, The Horn. Irele’s New Horn Press later introduced to the literary world younger poets such as Niyi Osundare, Femi Osofisan, Harry Garuba, Mabel Segun, and Jean-Baptiste Tati Loutard. Simon Gikandi recalled how, when as a young Kenyan struggling to establish himself in the American academe, Irele took him under his wing, getting him to write a monograph on Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o for the Cambridge African Writers Series which Irele edited, before asking Gikandi to co-edit a two-volume Cambridge history of African and Caribbean literature with him. Niyi Osundare dedicated his recent book of poetry, Only the Road Could Talk, to Irele shortly before his death. Osundare further recalled how Irele had published his first collection of poetry and coined its title, Songs of the Marketplace. In 1989, Irele joined the ‘brain drain’ from the continent to teach African, French, and comparative literature at Ohio State University. He left Ohio in 2003 to join Harvard as a professor of Africa and African American Studies. His publications include The African Experience in Literature and Ideology; The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora; and The Négritude Moment: Explorations in Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Thought. Irele was also general editor of the Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature series, and edited the prestigious Transition journal for five years. He generously coordinated new editions – with critical essays – of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. In 2011, Irele’s colleagues published his Festschrift – under the editorship of Biodun Jeyifo – The World in Africa and Africa in the World: Essays in Honour of Abiola Irele. A year earlier, Irele had returned to Nigeria to become the founding provost of humanities and social sciences at Kwara State University, and generously donated his library to the new institution, also editing a start-up journal, The Savannah Review. Irele, however, returned to Harvard shortly after. Kwara State, nevertheless, established an annual Abiola Irele Seminar in Theory and Criticism in his honour. The last time I saw ‘Prof ’ was two weeks before his death. He presented a paper on Léopold Senghor and chaired a panel on African philosophers at a three-day conference on ‘The Pan-African Pantheon’ hosted by my Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). Even after missing his connecting flight in New York, he still made this 16­ hour odyssey, determined to keep his commitment to a younger admirer. Many of our participants commented on Irele’s intelligence, charm, and humility. As 337

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I spoke with him before a dinner hosted by the vice-chancellor of UJ, Ihron Rensburg, he was in great spirits, looking forward to writing a series of essays for Harvard’s prestigious WEB Du Bois Institute on ‘The African Renaissance: From Léopold Senghor to Thabo Mbeki’. He generously noted that my minibiography on Mbeki that I had gifted him at the 2016 ASA in Washington DC had been useful to him in this regard, and I promised to send him more literature on Mbeki. Unfortunately, this innovative book will now never be written: a great loss to the field of pan-African thought. During this last conference that Irele attended in Johannesburg, he also gave me a copy of his 2011 collection of essays on The Négritude Moment – dedicated to the memory of what he described as an ‘exemplary father’. His inscription in the book simply read: ‘To Adekeye with admiration!’ It is a book I shall forever treasure. Ironically, Irele’s last conference was on the topic of the pan-African pantheon. He has himself now joined the ranks of the ancestors, and will take his rightful place among the literary deities of ‘After Africa’ such as fellow prophets Césaire and Senghor. The Black Orpheus and last prophet of Négritude has finally entered the Dead Poet’s Society. The Guardian (Nigeria), 25 July 2017.

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Chris Wanjala: Kenya’s Pan-African

Griot

KENYAN SCHOLAR AND literary critic Chris Wanjala, who died at the age of 75 in October 2018, was among the pioneering first generation of post-colonial East African scholars of English literature. Renowned for a self-effacing humility, he taught at the University of Nairobi for four decades, publishing ten books and more than fifty articles. A public intellectual along with other university colleagues in the early 1970s  – including Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Okot p’Bitek, and Taban lo Liyong  – Wanjala helped transform the curriculum from a Eurocentric one to one that had African oral and written literature at the centre of its intellectual enterprise. In the process, they also transformed literature curricula across East Africa. It was this story that Wanjala told at a conference we hosted at the University of Johannesburg in August 2018 on potential lessons for curriculum transformation in South Africa from experiences in the rest of Africa. In displacing courses taught by British lecturers at the University of Nairobi that had focused solely on the Western canon, the young pioneers criticised Western education and philosophy for suppressing African voices of dissent and liberation, and set out instead to promote ‘aesthetic theories based on oral literature’ centred on African people, society, and history. Though he was part of this ‘Nairobi school of literature’, Wanjala continued to argue for a rigorous philosophical foundation to underpin this Africanisation of a colonially inherited curriculum, and insisted the Western canon must 339

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continue to be taught alongside African literature, and that strong writing skills and textual criticism must not be lost. He believed strongly that language could not be divorced from literature. Wanjala thus promoted the use of African languages, teaching Kiswahili literature. He further argued for the study of African political thought, and consistently criticised the ‘servile mimicry’ of African scholars who sought validation from the West. The issue of cultural alienation was a central focus of his work. Wanjala was a cosmopolitan scholar who was as conversant with Shakespeare and Dickens as he was with Tolstoy and Brecht. He was, however, primarily an uncompromising pan-Africanist who had an unusual grasp of not only East African literature, but also southern and West African, as well as Caribbean literature. He introduced two generations of Kenyan students to Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ousmane Sembène, Derek Walcott, Lewis Nkosi, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Alex La Guma, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee. A subject that was particularly close to Wanjala’s heart was the role of African intellectuals in society. Two of his memorable essays captured his rich insights into these debates. In a 2005 article on the iconoclastic South African writer of the Drum era of the 1950s, Lewis Nkosi, Wanjala described how the author often maintained a tone of ‘detached humour and urbane irony’ in his literary criticism. He noted Nkosi’s dismissal of black South Afircan fiction as ‘lacking the combination of art and imagination needed to grasp the African reality’, as well as the South African writer’s often vitriolic criticisms, for example, dubbing Mphahlele’s prose as ‘dull-witted’. Nkosi could be even more scathing: ‘I fail to see what particular use a deranged poet is to the armed struggle.’ He felt South African writers in exile played only a marginal role in the liberation struggle, especially if they lacked an organic link to the masses. In a 2017 essay, Wanjala reviewed Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui’s 1971 novel, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, in which Mazrui tried Nigeria’s greatest poet – who had been killed in the Nigerian civil war fighting for Igbo secession – in an African hereafter for betraying his art by swapping his pen for a pistol, and for putting ethnicity before his country. Wanjala regarded Mazrui as having sided, in the novel, with the ‘counsel for damnation’, liberal Ghanaian lawyer Apolo-Gyamfi, who, like Mazrui, had studied at Oxford. Both Mazrui and Apolo-Gyamfi felt the artist’s loyalty should have been to broader society, and not to a parochial community. Wanjala saw Mazrui as portraying more negatively the ‘counsel for salvation’, Kenyan journalist Khamisi, who he felt viewed the 340

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artist as committed to a more communal Africa. Wanjala was, however, scathing about the alienation of the African intellectual and political elite from the masses, and accused Mazrui of ‘wagging his tail to please his imperial master’. Wanjala has now himself joined the ancestors in the hereafter that Mazrui dubbed ‘After Africa’. Business Day (South Africa), 29 October 2018.

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Thandika Mkandawire: The

Afropolitan Intellectual

THANDIKA MKANDAWIRE, WHO died on 27 March 2020 at the age of 79, was the ultimate Afropolitan intellectual. He was not only a dyed-in-the-wool panAfricanist, but a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. Born of a Malawian father and a Zimbabwean mother, he grew up in both countries, and then spent the rest of his life in the US, Zimbabwe, Senegal, and Europe. Also a Swedish citizen, he was married to a Swede, and died in Stockholm. As a young firebrand who came of age under British colonial rule, Mkandawire was involved in Malawi’s independence struggle. He was arrested in 1960 after protesting against British prime minister Harold Macmillan’s visit to Blantyre on his ‘Winds of Change’ tour of Africa. Thandika won a scholarship to study journalism at Ohio State University in the US, and was then exiled from Malawi for three decades by the country’s erratic dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Mkandawire headed the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies (ZIDS) from 1982 to 1985, helping to train the country’s first post-independence generation of social scientists. In 1978 he helped to found the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, which he headed from 1985 to 1996. CODESRIA produced some of the best research on the continent on issues of militarism, class struggle, social movements, and socio-economic development. But critics complained that this rich harvest was not well disseminated, and thus did not directly challenge literature on Africa in Western policy and academic circles. Others regarded CODESRIA as a cult of 342

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heretical leftist scholars who lacked ideological diversity. But the impact of the think tank in promoting pan-African discourses was never in doubt. Mkandawire spent from 1996 to 2006 leading the Geneva-based United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), which lacked the policy influence of the Addis Ababa-based UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), particularly under its flamboyant Nigerian head, Adebayo Adedeji, between 1975 and 1991. Thandika then went on to occupy the chair in African development at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where his inaugural lecture, ‘Africa Must Run While Others Walk’, borrowed its title from Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere. He ended his illustrious career at Sweden’s Institute for Future Studies. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and a great admirer of Nelson Mandela. One of Mkandawire’s most celebrated articles was his magisterial Nyerere Lecture, ‘Fifty Years of African Independence’, delivered at the University of Dar es Salaam in 2013. In it, he stressed the commitment and courage of African nationalism in driving the continent’s successful liberation struggle, while bemoaning more contemporary ahistorical approaches to assessing Africa’s challenges, which often dismissed the impact of slavery, colonialism, and the Cold War. Thandika was, however, equally unsparing in his criticisms of African civilian and military autocrats who manipulated fears of disunity to justify tyrannical rule. He further derided Western scholars who propounded pseudo-theories about the ‘routinisation of charisma’ to justify such autocracy. Mkandawire observed that many of the draconian laws adopted by African leaders were inherited from colonial powers, further arguing that the Cold War’s superpower patrons cultivated autocratic rulers. He highlighted the fact that African countries grew rapidly between 1960 and 1975, massively expanding education and health. He praised Africa’s pragmatic decision to freeze colonial borders for reducing inter-state conflicts. Thandika countered the notion that Africans had simply retreated into national shells after independence, noting that Africa ‘is the most sung about, the most painted, the most sculptured and carved of any continent’. Mkandawire wondered why Africa, like Asia, had not been able to produce ‘developmental states’ that effectively promoted industrialisation. He, however, consistently insisted on the importance of democratic governance, and was critical of Western-backed ‘developmental’ autocrats like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings, and Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi who ran ‘choiceless democracies’. He further bemoaned the failure of African leaders to 343

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diversify their economies, and particularly castigated their inability to embrace genuine regional integration. Thandika was one of the most eloquent critics of the World Bank’s and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in the 1980s and 1990s. He noted that the Bretton Woods institutions had launched these diabolical experiments on African guinea pigs involving large enforced cuts in health, education, and employment. These reforms often undermined democratic governance and fuelled social unrest. As Mkandawire noted, the main features of the SAPs involved massive increases in social inequality; neglect of infrastructure; lack of indigenous ownership of development programmes; technological dependence; the retrenchment of the state; and a damaging one-size-fits-all model. Thandika further stressed that Africa’s economic recovery by 1995 was based on its exports to Asia doubling to 27%, and had not created sufficient employment. With the Chinese boom slowing, he cautioned against the fragility of Africa’s ‘growth without development’ approach and massive de-industrialisation, based not on greater production but on higher prices. Mkandawire played the role of the public intellectual for much of his life, courageously confronting the stereotyping of Africa by leading Western scholars, who often produced ‘heavily-footnoted travelogue’ and lazy analyses that lacked an empirical basis. There were no sacred cows or intellectual demigods spared in these often conceptually brilliant, elegantly lucid but stinging critiques. Thandika methodically demolished British economist Paul Collier’s notorious thesis that African civil wars could be attributed more to the greed of rebel movements than to genuine group grievances. He described British academic Stephen Ellis’s work on Liberia’s civil war as ‘poorly veiled’ racist writing that suggested that ‘there is something fundamentally wrong with African culture’. Mkandawire instead reminded readers of the urban roots of African rebel movements in explaining their brutality against rural peasants. He ridiculed American academic Jeffrey Sachs as a ‘poverty-reduction Band Aid guru’ who moved seamlessly between Davos and the World Social Forum. He criticised the lack of empirical rigour in the work of American political economist Robert Bates and condemned the prejudiced ‘neo-patrimonial’ analysis of scholars like the Frenchman Jean-François Bayart and the American William Reno. Mkandawire’s career was devoted to restoring Africa’s humanity. He was optimistic about Africa’s next generation, though he worried about their ‘naïve cosmopolitanism’. Many have remarked on Thandika’s sardonic wit. Despite his deep commitment and sharp academic jabs, he was an amiable bon vivant, 344

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often clad in the smart jackets so beloved of Western-trained African academics. Having lived most of his life in the global diaspora, Thandika was a strong believer in rebuilding bridges between Africa and its scattered descendants, noting that ‘a detached diaspora would be like a head without a body’. Not only did Mkandawire admire such historical figures as Edward Blyden, WEB Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Bob Marley, he also felt that the 2018 blockbuster movie Black Panther ‘contributed in a spectacular way to the cultural underpinnings and imaginary of Pan-Africanism’. For him, ‘a new PanAfricanism must be democratically anchored and based on notions of solidarity and collective self-reliance’. Tanzanian scholar Issa Shivji offered perhaps the most fitting tribute to his friend in 2013: ‘For Thandika the whole continent is his country … He is an African first, an African last and an African always. The Pan-African spirit resides in him.’ The Guardian (Nigeria), 27 March 2020.

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Raufu Mustapha: An Organic

Intellectual

ABDUL RAUFU MUSTAPHA, WHO died in England in September 2017 at the age of 63, taught African politics at Oxford University for two decades, having previously studied and taught at two Northern Nigerian institutions: Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, and Bayero University in Kano. Raufu himself was from Ilorin: the geographical, cultural, and political crossroads of Nigeria. He sought in his scholarship and activist politics to serve as a bridge between North and South, debunking stereotypes about each region, and seeking to interpret and explain North to South and South to North. He was a classic embodiment of Nigeria’s complexity: having been born in the eastern Nigerian city of Aba, he spoke the country’s three main languages of Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba fluently. Raufu was the ultimate ‘detribalised’ and polyglot Nigerian, and a passionate believer in his country’s future. He was also atypical of the stereotypical brash, boastful, and loud Nigerian: he was quietly outspoken, humble, and warm-hearted. The only time I ever saw Raufu angry was when he spoke about the petty politics of his almost lily-white Oxford Africanist colleagues. He, however, enjoyed a close friendship with his South African mentor, Gavin Williams – to whom he dedicated two books – who had taught him at Oxford, where he obtained his doctorate. He was also particularly proud to have been an AHM Kirk-Greene fellow, named after the English Oxford Nigerianist to whom Raufu also dedicated a book. Mustapha was a staunch pan-Africanist who was active 346

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in the work of the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), serving on its Scientific Committee. His areas of intellectual interest ranged from democratisation in Africa, to identity politics and ethnicity, and the politics of rural societies in Africa: topics which he approached with a consistent commitment to equity and humanity. Raufu was also an organic intellectual who sought to communicate the concepts of the marginalised masses to a wider audience, and to put his ideas into practice in the cause of social justice. He was always on the side of the talakawa: the poor and marginalised commoners, with whom he directly and empathetically interacted in his research on rural development. Mustapha was a first-rate scholar who wrote and spoke lucidly, and thought profoundly, always open to considering other perspectives. He was, however, never afraid to take an independent line if he felt this to be the intellectually honest path. While studying and teaching at ABU, he was active in the struggles of students, trade unionists, and academic unions, particularly during the dog days of General Sani Abacha’s tyranny (1993–1998). He conducted fieldwork for his Oxford doctorate on agrarian politics among disenfranchised village communities near Kano. He wrote with anguished passion about Nigeria, consistently highlighting its potential, while castigating its profligate political class. Raufu always insisted on complexity and nuance in understanding his country. He was not afraid to place the blame for the origins of the Nigerian crisis squarely where it lay: with British colonial engineering, noting that the imperial power had created profound and long-lasting fissures in the Nigerian polity. He observed that the British governor-general Lord Lugard had run two administrations in Northern and Southern Nigeria, even as much larger India and Sudan had a single administration. But Mustapha also placed the blame for more contemporary problems on the ‘intense elite manipulation of religion and ethnicity for political ends’. In an article in The Guardian of London in June 2010 titled ‘Nigeria: Africa’s Flawed Diamond’, Mustapha described characteristics which he felt demonstrated the contradictory nature of the complex Nigerian state, asking elegantly: ‘Is such a country Africa’s superpower – or its superproblem?’ He went on to note four diverse characterisations of the country in the British media: negative depictions of the lack of a proper transition by the then ailing Nigerian president Umaru Yar’Adua (in another Guardian of London article in January 2010, Raufu had strongly castigated Yar’Adua and his cabinet for failing to respect the Nigerian Constitution); and coverage of sectarian killings in the 347

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northern city of Jos. He contrasted these two negative views of Nigeria with the rave reviews of twelfth-century sculptures from the ancient kingdom of Ile-Ife at a British Museum exhibition; and also noted the ‘enduring “can do” spirit’ of Nigerians depicted in a BBC television trilogy, Welcome to Lagos. Mustapha went on to make the insightful point that while most large countries in Africa such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan had suffered effective disintegration due to regionalist rebellions, Nigeria’s federation continued to endure. He also noted the country’s stellar peacekeeping role in Liberia and Sierra Leone, arguing that ‘No system of international governance in Africa will endure without Nigerian cooperation.’ In another article that I had successfully pleaded with Raufu to contribute to South Africa’s Mail & Guardian on Boko Haram in April 2012, he offered one of the most sophisticated understandings of the militant Salafist group, which has now killed an estimated 20,000 people and internally displaced two million in north-eastern Nigeria. Mustapha warned that Boko Haram’s ‘gnawing at the religious, ethnic and regional fault lines of Nigerian society’ threatened the nation-state, before going on to demolish what he regarded as the various myths peddled about the group in Northern and Southern Nigeria, as well as in the Western media. He described these perspectives as an ‘unhelpful cacophony of domestic and foreign noise’. Raufu dismissed the Southern Nigerian conspiracy theory – citing specifically Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, as a prominent advocate – that Boko Haram was the creation of Northern Muslim politicians seeking to constrain Goodluck Jonathan, a Southern president. He equally rubbished the Northern conspiracy theory that Boko Haram’s attacks were not the acts of Muslims, but an attempt to discredit Islam by American-backed agents seeking to dismember Nigeria. Raufu similarly criticised American scholar Jean Herskovits for describing the militants as ‘criminal gangs’, and for insisting that Boko Haram had been militarily defeated in 2009. He ridiculed The Economist’s fanciful assessment that the militants were disenfranchised Northern Nigerian youths seeking to tap into generous amnesty funding enjoyed by demobilised youths in Nigeria’s oilproducing Niger Delta region. Mustapha went on to explain Boko Haram as an outgrowth of Nigeria’s massive North–South divide, in which the North lagged behind in education, health, and other key social indicators, having poverty rates 15 times higher than in the South. He further noted that the militants were providing education, basic services, and jobs to their socially marginalised supporters. 348

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Raufu argued that the sobriquet of Boko Haram – ‘Western education is sin’ – had misled many analysts into depicting the group as an atavistic, antimodern movement ‘frozen in sixth-century Islam’. He insisted that the militants must be viewed as an evolving rather than a static group, and that it in fact represented a contemporary manifestation of the high poverty levels and human rights abuses in Nigerian society. Mustapha is, as usual, scathing about Nigeria’s leadership, noting that ‘conspicuous consumption of ill-gotten wealth by this elite breeds hopelessness and recklessness’. He concluded that ‘Boko Haram is the symptom of the failure of nation-building and democratic politics in Nigeria’. Demonstrating his usual balance, Raufu also praised the insights and understanding of Boko Haram by American diplomatic officials in Abuja. I co-edited a book with Mustapha in 2008 titled Gulliver’s Troubles: Nigeria’s Foreign Policy after the Cold War. We launched the volume together at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) in Lagos in 2008 – with former Commonwealth secretary-general Emeka Anyaoku in the chair. I remember Raufu adamantly and successfully insisting – even on foreign policy – that we needed a strong Northern voice as a discussant for such a launch to balance the preponderance of Southern voices. In his rich chapter in the book – ‘The Three Faces of Nigeria’s Foreign Policy: Nationhood, Identity, and External Relations’ – Raufu demonstrated his intellectual versatility in seamlessly linking the country’s domestic and foreign policies. He identified three distinct ‘faces’ of Nigerian foreign policy: first, the formal world of diplomats, technocrats, national institutions, and formal negotiations; second, the way in which Nigeria’s ‘fractured’ nationhood continues to constrain its foreign policy goals; and third, the impact of Nigeria’s global reputation – for widespread corruption and fraud, though he argued that this was often unnuanced and unfair – or ‘identity’, on its foreign policy. Mustapha noted that, since the last two ‘faces’ imposed unnecessary costs on the pursuit of Nigeria’s foreign policy goals, they needed to be prioritised in the formal foreign policy process. He was particularly scathing in his criticism of Western scholars like Frenchman Jean-François Bayart for interpreting increasing criminal activities in Africa and their convergence with politics as a cultural expression of African societies, noting that such views ‘display more paternalistic prejudice than sober-minded social science’ and help fuel attacks against migrants in the West and South Africa. Mustapha was also one of the earliest scholars to recognise the importance of remittances from African diasporas – like Nigeria’s – which have now surpassed foreign aid to the continent. Raufu’s conclusion in 349

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Gulliver’s Troubles made the profound point that ‘Nigeria needs a social contract with its citizens as a basis for demanding their loyalty and support for both its domestic and foreign policies’. Among Mustapha’s other publications are four co-edited volumes: the 2010 Turning Points in African Democracy; the 2013 Conflicts and Security in West Africa; the 2014 Sects and Social Disorder: Muslim Identities and Conflict in Northern Nigeria; and the forthcoming Creed and Grievance: Muslim–Christian Relations and Conflict Resolution in Northern Nigeria. He was particularly fascinated by the presence of white Zimbabwean farmers in Nigeria, and conducted innovative research on this topic. My biggest disappointment about Raufu’s passing – as I expressed to him directly – was that the magnum opus that he was crafting on Nigeria politics for James Currey Publishers was abandoned, as he selflessly devoted his energies into collaborative projects on Nigeria’s religious and ethnicfuelled conflicts with the country’s younger scholars based in the country. This was heroic, but also a huge loss to the world of scholarship in a critical area in which very few scholars had Raufu’s lived and varied experiences, as well as his diverse and unique understanding of the Nigerian situation. Among the many tributes that poured in after his death, Sierra Leonean scholar Yusuf Bangura’s moving obituary, described Raufu as having ‘lived a life of courage, commitment and fulfilment’; Nigerian scholar Jibrin Ibrahim noted that ‘For Raufu, the purpose of life was the construction of a better society’; while Nigerian intellectuals Anthony Akinola and Shehu Othman described him as ‘a scholar and well-admired gentleman … a kind and generous patriot’. Former Nigerian foreign minister and UN troubleshooter Ibrahim Gambari – a fellow indigene of Ilorin who had been Raufu’s professor at ABU in the 1970s – delivered a memorial lecture in Abuja last month on the domestic challenges of Nigeria’s foreign policy in honour of Mustapha. Raufu was buried in Ilorin. He is survived by his devoted Canadian wife, Kate Meagher, who lived in Nigeria for many years and currently teaches at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), as well as by their two children, Asma’u and Seyi, graduates of University College London and Oxford University, respectively. The world of scholarship bids farewell to a gentle soul, a national bridgebuilder, and an organic intellectual. The Guardian (Nigeria), 10 September 2017.

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Angela Davis: A Life of Struggle

AFRICAN AMERICAN STRUGGLE stalwart Angela Davis, recently (September 2016) gave the Steve Biko annual lecture in Tshwane (Pretoria) on ‘Legacies and Unfinished Activism’. She started by honouring Biko’s legacy in transforming lives and institutions, and articulating a ‘politics of blackness’ that released blacks from a sense of inferiority. Davis made links between historical struggles from the Haitian revolution (1791–1804) to the contemporary ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the US, praising the latter struggle’s young leaders, and cautioning the older generation to stop describing them as leaderless because they did not fit the charismatic, religious-oriented leadership of previous generations. She described South Africa as a ‘beacon of the world’ whose anti-apartheid leaders and women’s movement had inspired America’s own civil rights struggle, of which Davis was a leading light. She praised South Africa’s ‘Fees Must Fall’ movement, hugged protesting young students from Pretoria Girls’ High, and condemned the South African government’s militaristic approach to tackling peaceful protests. She also celebrated the history of resistance – from boxer Muhammad Ali to American football’s Colin Kaepernick – while calling for greater focus on hidden, structural forms of racism. Davis further advocated collective agency, critical thinking, and ‘new technologies of struggle’. As she defiantly noted: ‘We cannot stop dreaming and we cannot stop struggling.’ The 72-year-old Davis grew up in a middle-class home in 1950s Alabama, taking piano and dancing lessons. She also witnessed the bombings of black homes and churches by white racists. Her communism was forged in her New York

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high school, before attending Brandeis University, where she was mentored by German philosopher Herbert Marcuse. He encouraged her to study at France’s Sorbonne and Germany’s Frankfurt University, where she immersed herself in the work of European Marxist structuralists, eventually pursuing doctoral studies in East Germany’s Humboldt University. Davis was also inspired by Stuart Hall, the Jamaican British sociologist. Martiniquan Jamaican American Harry Belafonte was another important influence, who encouraged her to study the work of Afro-Marxists Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto (whom Davis met in Tanzania in 1973), and Samora Machel. She read Che Guevera, Fidel Castro, and Frantz Fanon. These experiences gave Davis a cosmopolitanism that was often less parochial than the black nationalism of her fellow Black Panthers. She joined America’s Communist Party, and ran as its vice-presidential candidate in national elections in 1984 and 1988. Her appointment as a lecturer at the University of California in 1969 was controversial. The state’s governor, Ronald Reagan, and the university board fired her twice for her communist beliefs (overturned by a judge), and her ‘inflammatory’ rhetoric. With her trademark Afro, Davis continued vociferously to condemn the Vietnam War, racism, and sexism, and was an early advocate of gay rights. The most famous incident involving the indomitable feminist was her 18-month imprisonment and trial for kidnapping and murder after a gang staged a courtroom release of prisoners that resulted in the murder of a judge. President Richard Nixon described Davis as ‘a dangerous terrorist’, and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) named her among its ten most wanted people. Davis did not deny buying the arms used in the kidnapping, but was freed of the charges which carried a death penalty. (She has since changed her position on gun ownership in support of gun control.) During these trials and tribulations, James Baldwin wrote a touching open letter to Davis, noting, ‘We must fight for your life … and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber.’ The Rolling Stones, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono, also penned songs in her honour. Davis broke with the Communist Party in 1991, though she remains committed to an anti-capitalist future. Her more recent battles have involved what she describes as America’s ‘prison industrial complex’. Calling for restorative rather than retributive justice, she has condemned the racism involved in private, profit-driven prisons that have incarcerated one million African Americans out of a 2.3 million prison population, comparing the industry to a system of slavery 352

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which demonises society’s most powerless people. Davis advocates instead for more resources to go towards education, housing, employment, and building viable communities. She was an eloquent critic of George W Bush’s ‘war on terror’, condemned his lethargic response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 (in which many homeless blacks were effectively abandoned by their own government), and supported the anti-capitalist ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement of 2011. As Davis noted: ‘It’s always a collective process to change the world.’ Business Day (South Africa), 19 September 2016.

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Three Prophets of Reparations:

Randall Robinson, Hilary Beckles,

and Ade Ajayi

IN THE LIGHT OF THE recent global anti-slavery and anti-colonial protests, a burning issue that has not been prominently addressed is that of reparations for the victims of these two evil scourges in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa. How can Western nations who enslaved and colonised black people over five centuries repair this pernicious damage that has left these regions with the triple burden of a lack of development, diseases, and deadly conflicts? This remains a festering wound that needs to be urgently addressed. Three prophets have been at the forefront of these debates: African-American lawyer Randall Robinson and the Barbadian and Nigerian historians Hilary Beckles and Ade Ajayi. As the 400th anniversary of American slavery was commemorated last year (2019), the thorny issue of reparations for descendants of this exploitative system of enforced servitude and uncompensated labour has once more come to the fore. Similar campaigns also exist in Africa and the Caribbean. Rather perversely, it was slave-owners – and not the slaves themselves or their descendants – who were compensated by the American and British governments for the loss of their ‘property’. The British government, for example, paid the contemporary equivalent of £20 billion to slave-owners after it abolished slavery in 1833. Democrats in the United States House of Representatives and Senate have now belatedly embraced the cause of reparations, and some institutions like Brown, 354

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Harvard and Yale universities that benefited from the slave trade have started to acknowledge their role in this sordid commerce, and begun putting programmes of restitution in place. The most articulate American crusader for reparations has been the activist Randall Robinson, who led the civil society anti-apartheid struggle in the US in the 1980s through his NGO, TransAfrica. He consistently argued for reparations in order to close the 250-year gap between white and black Americans created by plantation slavery. As Robinson correctly noted: ‘the black Holocaust is far and away the most heinous human rights crime visited upon any group of people in the world over the last five hundred years’. He urged America’s largely white ruling class to redress these historical wrongs, if the country is to have a future as a united people. Robinson further noted that Germany paid Jews reparations for the devastating but much shorter Holocaust (1933–1945) – estimated at $60 billion – while Japanese Americans interned in concentration camps by President Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War (1939–1945) were also compensated with a $1.2 million payment. He further observed that indigenous populations received land and money for the Australian government’s genocidal campaign against them: between 1788 and 1901, this population was reduced by 90% from an estimated 750,000 to 50,000, mostly through violence, dispossession, and disease. Members of Canada’s Inuit indigenous group also received $700 million in compensation from the government. To understand the structural impact of slavery to which Robinson is alluding, one should note that during the current Covid-19 crisis, African Americans have formed a disproportionate percentage of its fatalities, accounting for 30% of deaths, though constituting only 13% of the US population. The diet of black Americans has made them more vulnerable to diabetes, asthma, hypertension, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, lung disease, and other chronic illnesses. Continuing discrimination in health, education, employment, and housing has further exacerbated this situation. In the Caribbean, Hilary Beckles has led the reparations debate, consistently noting that ‘slavery and genocide in the Caribbean are lived experiences despite over a century of emancipation. Everywhere their legacies shape the lives of the majority and harm their capacity for advancement.’ Modern illnesses common among Caribbean citizens like diabetes and hypertension can be traced directly to the bad diet and other ailments inherited from the era of European slavery and colonialism. Beckles thus called for an apology and the need for Britain to take responsibility for its crimes against humanity 355

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committed in the Caribbean. Reparations should, he argued, be paid by the British state, its banks, merchant houses, insurances companies and the Church of England, which all benefited directly from slavery. The West Indies had, after all, noted Beckles, been the ‘hub of the British Empire’, where most of its wealth had been generated, particularly after losing the US as a colony in 1776. A 2004 estimate of the cost of the slave trade to the Caribbean arrived at a figure of £7.5 trillion. Beckles therefore urged Britain and other European states involved in the slave trade – Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Sweden – to pay reparations to Caribbean nations in order to repair this damage. He currently chairs the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) Reparations Commission, established in 2013, to pursue compensation from European nations for the transatlantic slave trade. National committees on reparations have thus been established across the region to achieve this goal. In August 2019, Glasgow University agreed to raise £20 million to establish a joint Centre for Development Research at the University of the West Indies (UWI) to start to atone for having benefited from Scottish slave traders in the Caribbean. All Souls College, Oxford, also announced an annual scholarship for Caribbean students, and provided a £100,000 grant to a college in Barbados, for having received funding from a Barbadian-born eighteenth-century British slaver, Christopher Codrington, after whom the main college library was named until January 2021. In the African context, the late Ade Ajayi was a member of the Organisation of African Unity’s (OAU) Eminent Persons Group on Reparations in 1992– 1993, which – through the 1993 Abuja Declaration – demanded that the West recognise its moral debt to Africa and its diaspora for slavery and colonialism, and pay these populations full monetary compensation. Late Nigerian businessman-politician Moshood Abiola was a prime mover of this group, which he chaired. Other members included Kenya’s Ali Mazrui and Jamaica’s Dudley Thompson. Ajayi, a key member of the panel, was among the most eloquent continental advocates of reparations until his death in August 2014. As he noted in 1993: ‘The Crusade for Reparation is … to seek to understand the African condition in depth, to educate the African and the non-African about it, to seek an acknowledgment of wrongs which have impaired the political and socio­ economic fabric of Africa and, through restitution or reparation, to attempt to give Africa and Africans a fresh start.’ Ajayi noted that discussions about the contributions of the slave trade 356

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to the West’s industrialisation have been neglected, and also criticised the ambiguous or indifferent attitude of African scholars to this issue. He argued that a major motive of European colonial rule was to keep African labour in a cheap state akin to slavery, using methods perfected during two centuries of Caribbean colonialism. He further noted that about one million Africans had died defending the territories of their European colonial masters during two world wars (1914–1918 and 1939–1945). Ajayi thus called for four key measures to achieve reparations: domestic education and mobilisation in African societies; documentation and research on the costs of slavery and colonialism; making a cogent case for reparations; and agreeing on the strategy, manner, and mode of reparations, having placed the issue on the agenda of the United Nations. Reparations are an emotive issue that all progressive activists across the globe should embrace. One cannot acknowledge the pernicious impact of five centuries of Western slavery and colonialism on Africans, African Americans, Caribbeans, and South Americans without supporting the necessary measures to repair these glaring historical crimes against humanity. The Gleaner (Jamaica), 27 September 2020.

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Part VII

Artists

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Abami Eda: Fela’s Enduring Legacy

THIS MONTH (AUGUST 2017) marks the 20th anniversary of the death of legendary Afro-beat superstar Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Fela was an institution in Nigeria’s social and political life, creating local idioms that have become very much part of the local vernacular. He was a voice for the voiceless, the national conscience, the defender of the defenceless, an unabashed polygamist, and a perennial rebel with a cause. A musical Orpheus who made magic with his saxophone and biting lyrics, he was a political Cassandra whose prophecies often went unheeded by his cynical and sceptical compatriots. A compliant, conservative middle class often dismissed Fela as a decadent, half-naked, marijuana-smoking madman, a promiscuous Pied Piper of Perdition leading the country’s youth astray. Fela betrayed his own class in speaking out for the weak and downtrodden rather than settling into the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle to which his family background entitled him. He developed his unique fusion of African indigenous rhythms and jazz, using his native Yoruba language and pidgin English to reach a mass audience. A man of the people, he sang about social issues and everyday life that ordinary people could relate to. He mocked the materialism of African women, ridiculed the blustering shakara (false bravery) of Nigerian men, and mercilessly lambasted Nigeria’s prodigal political class as ‘Vagabonds in Power (VIP)’ for selling out their country and mortgaging their children’s future. Fela, a thorn in the side of many corrupt regimes, spent an estimated 200 spells between detention and the recording studio. He spoke truth to power,

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castigating the misrule and mismanagement of Nigeria’s profligate ruling elite. During the country’s lavish Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, Fela refused to take part in the event so as not to legitimise the military government of General Olusegun Obasanjo. His self-declared commune – the ‘sovereign’ Kalakuta Republic – was burned down a week after FESTAC by what the government described as ‘unknown soldiers’, and his 78-year-old mother was thrown from a window, leading to her death a year later. Fela, who was very close to his mother, never recovered from her death. He felt guilt-ridden that she had died as a result of his struggle. The Afrobeat star drew inspiration from these events to ridicule Nigeria’s ‘lumpenmilitariat’ and securocrats as ‘Zombies’ and ‘Yellow Fever’. For many young Nigerians of my generation, his ‘shrine’ in Lagos’s sprawling suburb of Ikeja was a sacred place of pilgrimage. He was the lavish high priest at this paradoxical temple of sin and salvation. Fela combined great respect for the pantheon of traditional Yoruba deities and cosmology with sinful sex and drugs. He was also a committed pan-Africanist, who believed fiercely in the culture and heritage of blacks on the continent and in the diaspora. A ten-month trip to the United States during the civil rights struggle in 1969–1970 seemed to radicalise him. He celebrated Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Thomas Sankara (who visited his ‘Shrine’ in Lagos). But Fela also had his critics. He was often described as an autocratic band-leader, and was accused of misogyny by feminists who regarded his stereotypical portrayal of the ‘real’ African woman as ‘strong, submissive and subordinate’ as antiquated. In order to pay homage to ‘Abami Eda’ (the Strange One), I recently visited the Kalakuta Museum on a trip to Lagos. This was the house in which Fela had lived and in which he lies buried. As one enters the building on Gbemisola street in Ikeja, Fela’s graveside is on the left hand side of the house. It is a simple tomb with a triangular design and a sign above the grave that simply reads: ‘Fela 1938–1997’. The house has three floors with intimate family photos hung up all along the walls. These pictures depict scenes from Fela’s life and times: his father, the family patriarch and famous educationist; his indomitable mother who was one of Africa’s first female activists; his two main wives and six children; Fela’s two medical doctor brothers, one a former health minister and the other a human rights activist; the family home in Abeokuta; Fela with his two fists clenched and raised in defiance; his ‘dancing queens’ with horrific injuries following the 1977 362

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attack by soldiers; Fela’s ‘wedding’ to 27 of these ‘queens’ shortly afterwards in a powerful demonstration of solidarity with women whom the establishment had sought to depict as prostitutes; life performances with the ‘Africa 70’ and ‘Egypt 80’ bands; and Fela lying in state in a glass coffin with a huge spliff of marijuana in his hand. Fela’s second-floor bedroom has been preserved with his wardrobe of multi­ coloured outfits, a saxophone, a deep freezer, and the mattress on the floor on which he slept. In a side room next to the bedroom are his multi-coloured shoes, two mannequins in underwear, and his fur coats, used for travelling to colder climes. In another room are newspaper cuttings from the Daily Times with headlines of important events in Fela’s life such as some of his detentions by the police, and legal battles with several governments. In the same room is a typewriter and the manifesto of Fela’s Movement of the People (MOP) party set up in 1979 to contest presidential elections. Yet another room had wood carvings and paintings of Fela by an artist, while outside was a colourful mural. The recent event that posthumously cemented Fela’s reputation as a global musical icon was the Broadway show Fela!, which debuted in New York in 2009 before travelling to Europe and Lagos. A 2014 documentary, Finding Fela, captured highlights of this musical, interspersed with live performances by Fela and interviews with him, his children, his managers, his former band members, and two biographers, Carlos Moore and Michael Veal. Paul McCartney also describes a memorable visit to ‘the Shrine’. The musical Fela! was choreographed by Bill T Jones, who is extensively interviewed in the documentary. Fela! was set in ‘the Shrine’ in Lagos. The musical tells the story of the life and times of its subject: his priestly, musical grandfather and father; Fela being sent to London to study medicine and turning instead to music before experiencing racism for the first time; his political education in America during its civil rights struggle; and his innovative creation of Afrobeat. Finding Fela is a journey of discovery, showing how the Afrobeat star grew up in a musical household playing the piano and singing in the school choir. Fela’s incredible courage and commitment to social justice are enduring characteristics that come through clearly in the documentary. Finding Fela travels to the bustling megapolis of Lagos, whose social life Fela had contributed massively to shaping. It visits the sites of Fela’s ‘shrines’ where he would have ‘yabbis night’ and ‘ladies night’, the high priest effortlessly educating and entertaining the flock. Fela’s son Seun talks about his father’s incredible creative genius in which he would let songs gestate and then, as if 363

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poured forth by his ancestral muse, produce the perfect song in one single session. We also see how Fela would lead different parts of his musical band as if a master chef mixing diverse ingredients into a tasty stew. The insights of Fela’s children – Femi, Yeni, and Seun – are particularly interesting as they note that their father treated them like other members of his commune, insisting that they call him ‘Fela’ rather than ‘daddy’. This was a difficult childhood in which Femi, in particular, feared that Fela’s constant confrontations with Nigeria’s securocrats would get them killed. His children were often the last to receive his attention and affection, and the chaos of the ‘Kalakuta Republic’ – with an estimated 250 people milling around – is well captured in the documentary, with even a timetable for wives to spend the night with the Afrobeat star. Yeni cries in the documentary as she recalls the terrible events of the military attack on Fela’s home in 1977, in which both her father and grandmother suffered broken legs. The documentary then goes through Fela’s repertoire: ‘Jeun ko ku’ (Chop till you quench) which was his first big hit, and ‘Alagbon Close’, when he first directly confronted military misrule. ‘Zombie’, ‘Sorrow, Tears, and Blood’, and ‘Coffin for Head of State’ represent anti-securocrat anthems of this rebellious period. During a raid on his home in 1981 – under the supposedly democratic government of Shehu Shagari – Fela was so badly beaten that he bled from the head. These frequent confrontations with authority seemed to fuel his fearless creativity. The documentary then goes on to show the extravagant, well-choreographed set of Fela!, involving his skimpily clad ‘dancing queens’ with braids and braces and painted faces. The stage is exuberant, with a picture of Kuti’s mother, Funmilayo, permanently on display. She helped shape Fela’s radical pan-African political views and the show is centred on this relationship. The musical sees a melancholy Fela constantly hallucinating like a black Hamlet in a haze of smoke, while using African masquerades as intermediaries to visit his mother in the land of the ancestors in the spectacular ‘Dance of the Orisas’. Other figures from the Yoruba pantheon such as Ogun, Sango, and Esu – guardian of the crossroads – also feature in this performance. The documentary and musical further highlight the role of another woman who greatly influenced Fela’s political awakening: former Black Panther Sandra Izsadore, who introduced the Afro-jazz star to the work of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. The musical captures well Fela’s insatiable musical and sexual appetites, which seemed to fuel his genius. 364

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After Fela was sentenced to five years in jail by General Muhammadu Buhari’s regime in 1984 for currency trafficking, he came out of prison 18 months later (after the judge famously went to jail to apologise to him), a seemingly broken man. There was a certain sadness in Fela’s eyes as he stared coldly ahead as if in a trance, his eyes glazed, morose and disillusioned that two decades of defiant struggle had not changed the Nigerian situation. This led to the final creative phase of his life in which such hits as ‘Army Arrangement’, ‘Beasts of No Nation’, and ‘Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense’ were released. Fela saw himself as playing classical African music in the mode of Bach and Beethoven, and felt the need to express himself through these more spiritual, highly percussive songs. When Fela died of AIDS in August 1997 at the age of 58, a million Nigerians lined the streets of Lagos to bid him farewell: a scene well captured in Finding Fela. In an event that symbolised the passing of a legend, rain poured down even as the sun shone, as a great son of Africa joined the ranks of the ancestors. Today, Fela’s legacy is carried forward by his sons, Femi and Seun Kuti, who play music inspired by their father’s Afrobeat. But the struggles against which Fela fought – corruption, state abuse, African disunity – still continue to blight our contemporary landscape. Even many who dismissed Fela during his lifetime now regard him as a visionary prophet who was ahead of his time. As the Afrobeat star memorably noted: ‘To be spiritual is not by praying and going to church. Spiritualism is the understanding of the universe so that it can be a better place to live in.’ The Guardian (Nigeria), 23 August 2017.

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Bob Marley: Rebel with a Cause

THIRTY YEARS AGO THIS week (May 2011), Bob Marley died of cancer in a Miami hospital at the age of 36. The Jamaican reggae star was a musical genius and prophet of pan-Africanism who also spread the gospel of Rastafarianism across the world. Marley’s astonishing legacy is confirmed by the fact that his music, involving about twenty major albums, still accounts for half of all reggae music sold. He is probably the most famous and recognisable individual ever to have emerged from the Caribbean. Robert Nesta Marley was born in the rural Saint Ann parish of Jamaica. His father was a white 49-year-old soldier in the British army who briefly but unhappily married Bob’s black teenage mother. Marley would later speak harshly about this relationship: ‘one o’ dem slave stories: white guy get the black woman and breed her’. Bob grew up helping his maternal grandfather raise cattle and goats. He was exposed at an early age to the gross inequalities of wealth and racial hierarchies in the British colony and former sugar-growing slave plantation which Marley’s mostly West African ancestors had settled from the seventeenth century. He was raised Catholic, reinforced by his later Rastafarian beliefs, and many of his songs drew inspiration directly from the Bible. Another famous indigene of Saint Ann was Marcus Garvey, an iconic figure in the pan-African pantheon whose career greatly influenced Marley’s. From 1914 until his death in 1940, Garvey preached a gospel of black self-improvement and pride in a common African heritage. He took his message across America, attracting millions of devotees. Garvey was a black Moses seeking to repatriate

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blacks from the bondage of white pharaohs to an African promised land, which he referred to as ‘Ethiopia’. He appeared to regard this more as a metaphorical place and was critical of aspects of Emperor Haile Selassie’s rule. Rastafarianism spread in Jamaica from the 1920s, with its dreadlocked marijuana-smoking adherents being committed to religious doctrines of the Amharic Bible and avoiding alcohol and meat. Marley regarded Garvey and Selassie as his two greatest influences, and saw it as his duty to lead his people out of a sinful Babylon to the promised land of Zion (Ethiopia). An assassination attempt on his life in Jamaica in 1976 shook Marley badly and forced him to spend less time in his homeland. Bob Marley and his Wailers performed at a peace concert in Jamaica two year later, during which he held aloft the hands of the two main political antagonists, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, in an act of national reconciliation. For his efforts, the singer was awarded the United Nations Medal of Peace. Marley identified strongly with Africa throughout his life. As he memorably noted: ‘A people without knowledge of their past is no better than a tree without roots’. Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, whom Rastafarians regarded as a Messiah, had been deposed by the brutal socialist regime of Haile Mengistu in 1974, and died a year later. By the time Marley made his pilgrimage to Addis Ababa three years later, much of the Emperor’s legacy had been replaced by MarxistLeninist symbols, and Bob was shocked to discover that Selassie had been a widely despised tyrant. The visit, however, reinforced Marley’s pan-Africanism, and shortly afterwards he recorded the liberation songs ‘Zimbabwe’ and ‘Africa Unite’. Both appeared in the 1979 Survival album, as Marley increasingly connected the struggles in Africa and its diaspora. The 1976 song ‘War’ had been an anti­ apartheid lament, while albums such as Exodus, Uprising, and the posthumous Confrontation championed similar themes of black emancipation. One of the highlights of Marley’s life was being the guest of honour at the celebration of Zimbabwe’s independence in April 1980. Bob Marley became a household name across Africa and its diaspora. South Africa’s Lucky Dube, Côte d’Ivoire’s Alpha Blondy, and Nigeria’s Majek Fashek were all dreadlocked superstars who drew inspiration from him. The Wailers’ 1979 appearances at the Apollo Theatre in New York’s Harlem district were a particularly proud moment in reaching out to black America. Marley had long admired the singing of James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, and Tina Turner; the writing of WEB Du Bois; and the sporting and political activism of Muhammad 367

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Ali. Stevie Wonder responded to Bob’s ‘Jamming’ with his famous ‘Master Blaster’ tribute. By 1976, Marley had become a global superstar, and Rolling Stone magazine named the Wailers the band of the year. They toured Europe, North America, Australasia, and Asia, attracting huge crowds. Indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada venerated Marley. Artists like Paul Simon, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton (who recorded the Wailers’ ‘I Shot the Sheriff ’ in 1974) drew inspiration from his reggae. The parallels between Marley and late Nigerian Afro-beat superstar Fela Anikulapo-Kuti – another musical griot of pan-Africanism – were remarkable. Both troubadours courageously championed the rights of the poor and oppressed and sought to sing in their vernacular. Both braved government harassment in order to continue spreading their message. While Marley boasted that he carried war in his shoes, Fela warned that he carried death in his pouch. Marley’s ‘groundings’ with his followers were mirrored by Fela’s ‘yabbis’ sessions. Both had communes – ‘Pimpers’ Paradises’ – that were regarded by their respective governments as dens of sinful debauchery. Both were regarded by conservative middle-class society as pernicious pied pipers leading the youth astray. Both were demanding band-leaders and workaholic perfectionists. Both smoked ganja and had many female partners. Marley’s ‘reggae priestesses’ were matched by Fela’s ‘dancing queens’. Both men adored their mothers. Neither musician paid too much attention to management and money, and both were consequently taken advantage of. Both had huge funerals, and after Marley’s death in 1981 a huge storm rocked Kingston, while rain and sunshine were simultaneously witnessed on the day of Fela’s funeral in Lagos in 1987. The legacies of both men are continued by their famous musical children. Jamaica conferred its Order of Merit on its favourite son in April 1981, a month before Marley’s death. His state funeral in Kingston was overseen by Coptic priests of the Ethiopian Church, with obsequies delivered by the governor general, prime minister, and the main opposition leader. In life, Marley had been extremely generous. In death, many litigious cases caused family rifts and divisions among the Wailers, as Bob had not left a will. His wife, Rita Marley, and her advisers were accused of forging his signature to divert funds from his estate. More positively, Time magazine voted Marley’s 1977 Exodus as the album of the century in 1999. In the same year, Marley’s legacy was memorably revived during a concert in Jamaica starring Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, and 368

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Tracy Chapman, who joined Marley’s family and artists like Jimmy Cliff to perform 24 of his songs. In 2001, Marley posthumously won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. A statue and museum have been built in his honour in Jamaica. In 2005, 200,000 fans gathered in Addis Ababa for a concert that celebrated his life. These tributes were fitting celebrations of the life and times of a musical legend who had uncompromisingly and eloquently told the anguished story of Africa and its diaspora. Sunday Independent (South Africa), 15 May 2011.

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Michael Jackson: The Strange

Disappearance of the Moonwalker

MICHAEL JACKSON ALWAYS appeared to be one of those ‘invincible’ and indestructible forces of nature. In the Bible, angels made heavenly music and it was, after all, the Archangel Michael who had banished Lucifer from heaven. Jackson had become the iconic ‘King of Pop’ who reigned for four decades, selling a staggering 750 million albums in the process. Growing up as a child in Lagos, I had listened to his music and watched his phenomenal performances as the precocious, handsome lead singer in the Jackson 5. I would myself buy an electric ‘Hot-pick’ comb in an attempt to grow an Afro like those of Michael and his brothers. He was the epitome of a successful black teenager who, along with the Motown family, helped to break some of the most formidable barriers in apartheid America. Black singers could now make money from their own music. Jackson’s musical influences were unashamedly black soul singers James Brown and Jackie Wilson. Michael Jackson’s silky voice and suave moves in Jackson 5 hits like ‘Dancing Machine’, ‘Shake Your Body Down to the Ground’ and smooth ballads like ‘The Love You Save’, and ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ were aired on our black-and­ white television sets in Lagos. But even as a child, Jackson’s eyes always had an incredible sadness born of a childhood that never was. He was already an old man before his time, singing about lost love even before having experienced any such emotion. The Jacksons’ success was a source of great pride to many Africans at a time of post-independence solidarity with the continuing civil rights struggle 370

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in America. By 1979, I was a teenage schoolboy in England returning frequently to Nigeria. Disco fever was at fever-pitch as Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall defined the era with danceable tracks like ‘Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough’ and ‘Working Day and Night’. Jackson’s playful falsetto voice itself was almost used as an accompanying instrument to coax any listener on to the dance floor. In 1982, the 24-year-old singer released Thriller, which changed the face of pop music forever. I was still in an English boarding school addicted to buying vinyl albums and singles before the era of the CD. I bought Thriller; was among the first set of fans camped outside the HMV record store in London to buy The Making of Thriller; acquired the red-and-black Thriller leather jacket; had jerry curls; and did the crutch-grabbing, moon-walking, toe-stopping moves of the most phenomenal dance-and-song artist the world has ever seen. I even performed a version of ‘Beat It’ as an exchange student in East Germany. I went to Madam Tussaud’s in London with my sister when Jackson unveiled a wax statue of himself. Thriller would become the highest-selling record of all time with over 100 million sales, and turned Jackson into the first black artist to have crossed over and won fans with a silky mix of pop, funk, rock, and soul. Previously the cable Music Television (MTV) had largely refused to play black artists. It was the popularity of Jackson and the threat by CBS to withdraw its other acts that forced a change of mind. The hard-rock guitar sounds of ‘Beat It’ and later ‘Dirty Diana’ showed Jackson’s constant efforts to reach a multiracial audience. In the end, he seemed to want to transcend every possible boundary, and almost became an androgynous hermaphrodite: neither boy nor man, neither woman nor man, neither black nor white. This confusing and damaging quest for immortal perfection would eventually lead to child molestation accusations, which left him visibly broken. These incidents unfortunately overshadowed his incredible generosity, contributing to children’s charities and funding scholarships for African American college students. In 1987, I visited the United States for the first time, just as Bad was released. I bought the album, watched the video and noted the soulful ballad ‘Liberian Girl’ – another example of Jackson identifying with his ancestral homeland. Michael was to use black women of impressive beauty in his videos: Ola Ray, the African American, in ‘Thriller’, the Somali supermodel Iman in ‘Remember the Time’, and the Jamaican Briton Naomi Campbell in ‘In the Closet’. Africa would make another appearance in the memorable video ‘Remember the Time’, set in the ancient Egypt of the Pharaohs. Kenyan Maasai danced with Jackson 371

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in ‘Black or White’. As a graduate student in England, I went to see Jackson perform live at Wembley stadium in 1992 during the ‘Dangerous Tour’, which involved 69 concerts across the globe watched by 3.5 million people. I still had great respect for Jackson’s talent but was no longer as enamoured with him, being unsettled by the face-lifts that had lightened his skin, narrowed his nose, and introduced a cleft in his chin. But I was still dazzled by the unbelievable vocal talent and dance moves of the greatest performance I had ever seen. Jackson emerged from the bottom of the stage, froze for a few minutes to soak up the adulation of his fans, and then launched into the dancy ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Something’, displaying all the range of the meticulously choreographed moves and flamboyant costumes. The highlight of the show was an absolutely riveting performance of ‘Human Nature’ in which he twisted his body in the robotic dance of a master contortionist, moved as if suffering massive electric shocks, froze like a statue, and fell to his knees. After a non-stop two hours of enthralling hits and amazing dance sequences, Jackson left the stadium in an astronaut’s outfit by levitating over the audience to a booming announcement, ‘Michael Jackson has left the stadium’. The videos ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Beat It’, and ‘Thriller’ were to revolutionise the music industry, and no artist made more spectacular videos than Jackson. It is through these videos – the most audacious and breath-taking visuals of song­ and-dance the world has seen – that he will be most remembered. Jackson simultaneously played out his child-like fantasies and sought to promote radical social change. He was simultaneously Peter Pan and Pied Piper: he made musical magic and sought to lead the world to a paradisiacal ‘Neverland’ where there would be no more war or pain. In ‘Thriller’ and ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ he dances playfully behind attractive women. In ‘Beat It’, ‘Bad’, ‘Smooth Criminal’ and ‘You Rock My World’, he plays the tough gangster trying to make bad guys change their ways through dance. In ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Remember the Time’ he uses magic to turn into a cat. In ‘Thriller’ and ‘Ghosts’, he shows his fascination with the supernatural, while denying any association with ‘the occult’. The video ‘Ghosts’ also revealed a self-deprecatory side to Jackson: in a spectacular dance scene as a skeleton, he takes off his head and bows. This follows a scene in which his face literally falls apart, melting into sand on the floor. The video ‘Leave Me Alone’ equally played on Jackson’s weirdness, showing him fooling around with his pet monkey amidst press reports of his sleeping in an oxygen chamber to try to keep himself young. Jackson had actually had the 372

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picture of the oxygen chamber taken himself, and he sought to manipulate the media to maintain the mystique of the boy-child, while complaining about the media’s obsession with him. In ‘Say, Say, Say’, Jackson plays the clown in a fairground. The ‘Tears of a Clown’ probably sum up well his personal loneliness, and a song of the most famous sad clown, Charlie Chaplin, ‘Smile’ – which Michael later recorded – was said to be his favourite. Jackson’s own loneliness was clear in the video ‘You Are Not Alone’. For most of the video, Michael sang against the background of a desert and an empty casino, and seemed to be persuading himself that he was not alone while hauntingly appearing to have been as lonely and vulnerable as the Scarecrow he played in the 1978 screen adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. Similar to ‘You are Not Alone’ is the video from a concert performance of ‘Will You Be There’, a moving gospel-like ballad in the old Negro spiritual tradition in which an apparently higher being pledges to be there for Michael in his darkest hour of need, even as an angel descends onto the stage to embrace and comfort him. Another set of videos sees Michael seeking to save the world through music. ‘Heal the World’, ‘Man in the Mirror’ and ‘Earth Song’ all have scenes of the destructive power of man-made wars, natural disasters, the Ku Klux Klan, and Adolf Hitler juxtaposed with heroic images of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King Jr and Mother Teresa. ‘Black or White’ calls for racial harmony in the world, and extends Martin Luther King’s message to focus on the content of people’s character rather than the colour of their skin. The musical environmentalist in ‘Earth Song’ shows a Garden of Eden being destroyed by man-made wars and offers a frightening image of nuclear Armageddon with zebras, giraffes and elephants all dying out, only to be revived by the tree-hugging Pied Piper of Pop’s tuneful ballad. At the end of the short film ‘Moonwalker’, a group of African singers in black suits sing an a cappella song ‘Come and See the Moon Is Dancing’, and celebrate what a wonderful sight it is to behold. In the end, the Moonwalker disappeared as the brightest star in our galaxy without the opportunity to bid farewell to his fans. As he joins the ancestors to continue making music in the hereafter, the world is unlikely to see his like again. The music and moonwalking have come to an abrupt end. The Moonwalker has taken his final bow. Michael Jackson has, indeed, left the stadium. Sunday Independent (South Africa), 12 July 2009.

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Burna Boy: The Afropolitan Troubadour

IN MARCH 2021, 29-YEAR-OLD singer Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu – better known as Burna Boy – became the first Nigerian to win an individual Grammy for best album in the World Music category. He triumphed for his 2020 Twice as Tall album. As he noted: ‘This is a big win for Africans of my generation all over the world.’ Burna Boy describes his music as ‘Afrofusion’: an inventive mix of Afrobeat, dancehall, reggae, R&B, and road rap drawn from Africa, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and black America, combined with classical Western violin and piano. Nigeria’s $73 million entertainment industry is the fastest-growing in the world. Though the albums of Sunny Ade, Femi Kuti, and Seun Kuti had all previously been nominated for Grammys, none had ever won the award. This victory demonstrated Burna Boy’s gritty determination, having lost last year to Beninois songstress Angélique Kidjo in the same category. The Nigerian superstar has 6.3 million followers on Instagram; his albums have drawn tens of millions of streams; and Twice as Tall had five million streams in its first hour of release. Burna Boy sees himself as part of a youthful generation that is seeking to transform the negative image of Africa as a continent of wars, disease and famine. His songs are local but seek a global audience. Having burst onto the music scene in 2011 – the year of the youth-led Afro-Arab Spring – he identifies strongly with Africa’s 60% youth population. He is articulate and soft-spoken, and driven by a sense of divine destiny to leave a lasting legacy through his music. He has thus consciously sought to create a body of work that captures the

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zeitgeist. A generous collaborator, Burna Boy mobilises a pan-African orchestra to create revolutionary anthems. Supremely self-confident, the Nigerian singer firmly believes he is better than any of his rivals. But he is also a paradox: his shy and humble private demeanour contrasts starkly with his flamboyant and brash stage alter ego. He is also deeply religious, wearing a cross as an earring amidst a body full of tattoos, rings, and jewellery, all in the image of a foul-mouthed gangsta rapper.

A Meteoric Rise Burna Boy was born in Nigeria’s fifth-largest city of Port Harcourt in the oilproducing Niger Delta. His father, Samuel, managed a welding company while his multilingual academic mother, Bosede, was a translator, before becoming his manager. Damini thus had a solidly middle-class background, attending Corona Secondary School in Ogun State, before studying media technology at Sussex University and media communications and culture at Oxford Brookes University, both in England. He is an Afropolitan citizen of the world fighting the cause of marginalised, voiceless youth. His grandfather, Benson Idonnije, had been the first manager of Nigeria’s most famous musician: Afrobeat superstar Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Burna Boy’s great idols growing up were Fela and the Jamaicans Bob Marley and Buju Banton. Deeply influenced by Fela – singing in English, Yoruba, Igbo, and the pidgin of the masses – he has remained true to his culture. Like Fela, Burna Boy has also been a consistent social critic who has condemned Africa’s political class for not taking its youth seriously, and for failing to create the enabling environment for them to fulfil their huge potential. His 2013 L.i.f.e (Leaving an Impact for Eternity) album was a homage to the music of Fela, Sunny Ade, and Bob Marley, produced by the trusted Leriq. His meteoric rise led to a record deal with Atlantic Records in 2017. His third album, Outside, was released a year later to critical acclaim from a growing legion of youthful fans. Burna Boy’s popularity was confirmed as he played to a sold-out O2 Academy in London’s Brixton district, where he had spent part of his childhood among Caribbean and African youth. His success was further recognised when he won the 2019 Black Entertainment Television Awards, and recorded the only solo single on Beyoncé’s The Lion King: The Gift. Burna Boy’s ‘My Money, My Baby’ also appeared on the star-studded soundtrack of the 2019 romantic road-crime drama Queen and Slim.

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Pan-African Gulliver: African Giant, Twice as Tall Burna Boy’s guiding philosophy is pan-Africanism. He firmly believes in rebuilding bridges with the African diaspora, viewing Africa as the mother continent and birthplace of humankind. He sees himself as ‘building a bridge that leads every Black person in the world to come together’. As he argued, ‘the world started from Africa. So music must have started from Africa.’ Burna Boy has called quixotically for all African countries to unite with a single passport, and argued that history must be taught from both the perspective of the coloniser and the colonised. Playing on Nigeria’s nickname as ‘the giant of Africa’ and his childhood obsession with superheroes, he often uses the image of a Gulliver to depict the huge potential of the continent and its diaspora. Burna Boy released African Giant in 2019 as a homage to this pan-African spirit. It won the Album of the Year at the 2019 All Africa Music Awards, and was accompanied by the hugely successful African Giant global tour which sold out Wembley Arena. Songs like ‘Another Story’ condemn the negative impact of the Royal Niger Company in imposing colonial rule on Nigeria; ‘Collateral Damage’ criticises the cowardice of Nigerians in not confronting their oppressors; while ‘Wetin Man Go Do’ laments the suffering of the masses. In 2020, Twice as Tall was released, with Burna Boy setting out explicitly to win a Grammy, lamenting his loss the previous year in ‘Level Up’. The album debuted at number 1 on the Billboard World Albums charts, and involved collaboration with global artists such as Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs and Youssou N’Dour. Twice as Tall was mostly recorded during the Covid-19 lockdown, and Burna Boy’s artistic versatility is on full display: ‘23’ is a homage to basketball superstar Michael Jordan, inspired by the Netflix documentary The Last Dance; the pop song ‘Monsters You Made’ is accompanied by an artistically brilliant video rich with traditional costumes and dance, and condemns oppressive African governments and foreign collaborators who have ruined the future of African youth; ‘Onyeka’ is an ode to Nigerian social activist Onyeka Onwenu; ‘Naughty by Nature’ is a rap song; ‘Time Flies’ is a sultry melody; while ‘Wetin Dey Sup’ is a lament complete with police sirens. In an era of Black Lives Matter, the Nigerian Afrobeats star has explicitly linked the struggles against police and securocrat brutality on unarmed blacks in America and Nigeria.

The World at His Feet Burna Boy’s success has attracted many accolades. Aniefiok Ekpoudom noted that he ‘has elegance, grace and charisma, a magnetic aura that follows him like a 376

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shadow’; Sean Combs observed that ‘He’s not just on a musical artist trip. He’s a revolutionary. His conviction is serious’; while John Pareles raved: ‘Burna Boy’s Afro-fusion is omnivorous and supremely catchy.’ With this Grammy win, built on his hard work, ambition, and hunger to succeed, the Nigerian superstar has leapt above the rest of the competition and established himself as the leading troubadour of Afrobeats. The world is now firmly at his feet. The Guardian (Nigeria), 29 March 2021.

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Asa: Nigeria’s Songbird

NIGERIAN SONGSTRESS AND songwriter Asa (Bukola Elemide) recently (in July 2022) caused a stir by singing – in a long black dress, appearing to mourn the demise of the nation – her hit 2007 song ‘Fire on the Mountain’ to Nigerian leaders, including President Muhammadu Buhari, at an event in the presidential villa in Abuja. Social media was abuzz with praise for the 39-year-old Nigerian artist’s courage in speaking truth to power. As she noted in the her biting lyrics: ‘There is fire on the mountain and nobody seems to be on the run … I see the blood of an innocent child … Hey Mr soldier man … What did he say to make you so blind to your conscience and reason.’ The artist name Asa – meaning ‘hawk’ in Yoruba – was a nickname given to Bukola by an old man in a bustling Lagos market while returning the lost child, who frequently wandered off on her own, to her mother. The pseudonym of a hawk is particularly apt: these birds are renowned for nesting in high trees, which fits Asa’s eccentric loner personality. Hawks also have a hoarse screech consistent with Asa’s unique, husky voice.

A Tale of Two Cities: Lagos and Paris Asa was born in Paris of Nigerian parents, Akin and Arsah Elemide, from Abeokuta, who were studying cinematography while working to make ends meet. She returned to Nigeria in 1984 at the age of two during the military regime of General Muhammadu Buhari. Her disciplinarian father worked as an engineer and cinematographer covering weddings and other social events, while her mother taught and kept a shop. Asa lived, with her three brothers, in the 378

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overcrowded FESTAC town, built for participants in the second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture hosted in Lagos seven years earlier. She was a shy nerdy tomboy and loner, having to do much housework as the only girl in the family. This forced her to grow up quickly. Her family was part of the white-garment Celestial Church, where her thick voice prevented her from joining the choir, though she remained deeply religious. Her mother’s warnings not to look at boys due to the high youth pregnancy in her commune made Asa somewhat uptight. As with many Yoruba children, a strong distrust of family, friends, and strangers was ingrained in her as a child. Asa attended the elite Corona school in Lagos before going on to secondary school in a Federal Government College in Nigeria’s scenic Middle Belt city of Jos. She returned to Lagos State University to study theatre arts and music but dropped out after only six months to pursue her musical passion, enrolling in Peter King’s College of Music in Badagry. Her father immediately cut off her stipend, having wanted her to study law or medicine. Living with her grandparents, Asa earned money from studio performances and tours. She bought her first guitar at the age of 20, determined to emulate Bob Marley, with her own dreadlocks and strumming instrument. Her authenticity and fresh original sound were also reminiscent of the dreadlocked multi-platinum selling African American guitar-playing Tracy Chapman. Asa also plays the piano and the trumpet. Growing up in Lagos exposed Asa to Nigeria’s cosmopolitan, bustling megalopolis of 15 million inhabitants. She fell in love with the city, in which she still spends much of her time in a house by the lagoon on the plush island, writing by the ocean and playing dodgems by riding her motorcycle through traffic. She finds Lagos ‘hip’, full of hustle, exhilarating, and exhausting. At the age of 18, Asa returned to the city of her birth, seeking to enrol at Paris’s IMEP Paris College of Music. But her teachers told her she did not require any further training, and was ready to record albums. Asa took up residence in Paris, despite having only ‘survival French’. She eventually performed in clubs, revelling in the city’s street art, and recording albums in the French capital. She has contrasted Paris’s racial discrimination with Lagos’s gender discrimination, while noting: ‘I never want to lose the local feeling, but I also never want to totally reject or lose the global aim.’ The acrimonious divorce of Asa’s parents was a traumatic experience that plunged her more deeply into her music as a therapeutic balm. She became closer to her mother, to whom she dedicated the entrancing praise song ‘So Beautiful’. 379

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Muses and Music Asa’s musical roots were forged from listening to her father’s record collection in Lagos. Nigerian artists like Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Sunny Ade, Ebenezer Obey, and Yoruba Fuji, Highlife, and Apala artists were plentiful in her home. She would later discover Afro-jazz artist, Lagbaja. Asa often sings in her native Yoruba, which she describes as ‘one of the most beautiful languages in the world’. Also included in her father’s collection was Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, Miriam Makeba, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, and Lauryn Hill. At the age of 22 in 2004, Asa met Janet Nwose, who remains her manager. Nwose introduced the raw talent to blind Nigerian producer Cobhams Emmanuel Asuquo. They clicked immediately, and produced her first studio album, Asa, in 2007 when Bukola was just 25. Her music has been described variously as ‘neo-soul’ and ‘indie-pop’, and is an eclectic mix of her musical influences: soul, hip hop, R&B, jazz, reggae, funk, folk, and pop. She sings ballads, mid-tempo, and dance music in her silky, mellifluous voice. She has consistently rejected being pigeon-holed and despises the amorphous label of ‘World Music’. Hits like the hugely successful ‘Jailer’, ‘Fire on the Mountain’, and ‘Bibanke’ were standout singles from her debut album, which sold over 400,000 copies. She won France’s Prix Constantin in 2008 for the best new artist. She also started opening for Beyoncé, Snoop Dogg, John Legend, Akon, and Lenny Kravitz, who shocked her when they first met in Paris by serenading her with ‘Jailer’. Grammy-winning Beninois singer Angélique Kidjo became an early mentor, while Oscar-winning Kenyan Lupita Nyong’o remains a fan. In 2010, Beautiful Imperfection was released. It sold over 400,000 copies, with hits such as ‘Eyé Adaba’, ‘Be My Man’, and ‘Preacher Man’. Four years later, Bed of Stone followed, with hits such as ‘Eyo’, ‘Satan Be Gone’, and ‘Dead Again’. In 2019 came Lucid, which met with mixed acclaim, with songs such as ‘Murder in USA’ and ‘My Dear’. By this time, Asa’s fan base had spread exponentially across Africa, Europe, the United States, Australia, the Middle East, and Asia. She embarked on a world tour between 2015 and 2017. She was touring Europe when the Covid pandemic hit in February 2020. Her impulsive decision to get one of the last flights out of Paris to Lagos brought her out of her musical shell. Rather than going into total isolation, she flung the doors of her home open to Nigerian artists, organising multiple jam sessions at her home studio. The result was her heavily percussioned February 2022 ‘V’ album in which she collaborated with Afrobeat superstar Wizkid; highlife duo The Cavemen; and 380

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Ghanaian soulstress Amaarae. The album, produced by precocious 20-year­ old P.Priime, was an ode to Afrobeats – which Asa calls ‘our birthright’ – and represented a move away from her comfort zone. She also learned to be less of an over-rehearsed perfectionist and more of an experimental improvisator.

Rebel with a Cause Asa has often identified Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and Bob Marley as her greatest influences: ‘I saw the way they affected people with their words, they made the government react, people loved, people laughed, and I wanted to do the same thing.’ But despite her biting lyrics, she has not been as confrontational as the two marijuana-smoking superstars, stressing entertainment over education as her primary artistic responsibility. As Asa noted, ‘I don’t believe in aggression.’ Her criticisms of Nigeria’s malaise are thus often couched in generalities, and the country’s leadership is not singled out personally for condemnation. An avid reader, Asa has often had to explain to a marriage-obsessed Nigerian society why she has not tied the knot at the age of 39. She admitted that she has been selfishly enjoying her own company, and guarded her time to meditate alone in the early hours of the morning. She believes strongly in education as a liberating force, also noting the importance of travel in exposing citizens to diverse cultures. As Asa stated: ‘We will not put an end to extreme poverty if we do not give priority to education especially girls’ education.’ She is outspoken about the need for gender equality in a misogynist Nigerian society rife with gender abuse and low political representation of women. She has persistently lamented the curse of oil in hampering Nigeria’s development. She has organised charity concerts to pay for children to be educated, bemoaning the ubiquitous presence of street children across the country. Asa takes every opportunity to return to Nigeria and believes strongly in performing for her compatriots. She is proud of her ancestry, and deeply conscious of her Nigerian roots. She consistently wants to remain humble and give back to Nigerians, on the basis that charity begins at home. The Guardian (Nigeria), 11 August 2022.

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Measuring Sidney Poitier’s Life

PIONEERING BAHAMIAN AMERICAN actor Sidney Poitier, who died this month (January 2022) at the age of 94, was Hollywood’s first black global megastar, appearing in over 40 films. His 2000 autobiography, The Measure of a Man, recalled how his success had been achieved against seemingly insurmountable odds. Poitier’s parents – Evelyn and Reginald – were tomato farmers on the poverty-ridden Cat Island in the Bahamas. Sidney was born two months prematurely in Miami, where his parents had travelled to sell tomatoes. His father did not expect the tiny child to survive, and had bought a small coffin. His mother, however, consulted a local soothsayer who predicted that her seventh and youngest child ‘will walk with kings [and] be rich and famous’.

The Pioneer The charismatic Poitier became the first black actor in history to win a lead actor Oscar in 1964 at the age of 37, a record matched only 38 years later when Denzel Washington and Halle Berry triumphed in the same category at the 2002 Oscars, at which Poitier also won a lifetime award. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by African American president Barack Obama in 2009, having been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. Poitier radically changed perceptions of black people from the 1950s, as the American civil rights struggle raged, forcing the gilded gates of Hollywood open to other black actors. Even by the illusory standards of the fabled ‘American Dream’, Poitier’s success was a totally improbable fairy tale. He left school in the Bahamas after 382

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only 18 months, and worked as a water-boy for labourers. He then moved to Miami to live with an older brother at 15, washing dishes and digging ditches. For the first time in his life, he experienced racism in apartheid America. While walking in a rich suburb in Florida, a group of white policemen put a gun to his forehead and debated for ten agonising minutes whether to shoot him in his right or left eye. He moved to New York’s Afropolitan Harlem district, sleeping rough in bus terminals, in public toilets, and on rooftops. He washed dishes, plucked chickens, and carried luggage. In frustration, he joined the US army in 1943 at the age of 16, and had an unhappy stint in a physiotherapy unit. In his first informal acting role, Poitier feigned insanity to secure a military discharge. He also imbibed the cultural diversity of the city’s lively theatre and jazz scene. The barely literate Bahamian then applied to act at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem where his thick Caribbean accent twice led to failed auditions. Determined to succeed, he bought a cheap radio and spent hours imitating the American accents of the announcers. Poitier negotiated a job at the Negro Theatre as a janitor in exchange for acting lessons, eventually becoming an understudy to his lifelong friend, Martiniquan-Jamaican American Harry Belafonte. He got his first break acting in an all-black production of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata in 1946, before exchanging the glitz of Broadway for the glamour of Hollywood.

Triumphant in Tinseltown Tall, dignified, and strikingly handsome, Poitier was comfortable in his own skin having grown up as a self-confident youth in the Bahamas. He was reassuring to white audiences in the same way that Kenyan Kansan American president Barack Obama reassured whites that he was not an ‘angry black man’. Poitier deliberately took roles that depicted strong black characters with ‘refinement, education and accomplishment’. He suppressed his sexuality to calm the fears of squirming white audiences. The 23-year-old got his Hollywood break in the 1950 movie No Way Out, about a black doctor who is harassed by a racist white patient. Poitier strongly backed America’s civil rights struggle, marching on Washington in 1963 and maintaining a close relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. He refused to distance himself from the principled and persecuted black artist-activist Paul Robeson. A consciousness of the ancestral home developed after Poitier spent time in South Africa filming the 1951 Cry, the Beloved Country in which he played a black priest alongside another of his activist heroes, 383

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Caribbean American Canada Lee, whose father had emigrated from the Virgin Islands. Poitier became a lifelong opponent of the apartheid system, describing the country as ‘the worst place I have ever been’. He later portrayed South Africa’s liberation hero Nelson Mandela in a 1997 television movie, Mandela and De Klerk. Another 1957 film Something of Value had seen Poitier playing a Mau Mau sympathiser in a Kenya fighting for independence from British rule. The Bahamian American became the first black artist to be nominated for a leading role Oscar in 1958 for The Defiant Ones, about two escaped black and white convicts chained together. Three years later, he reprised his Broadway role for the film version of African American author Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, about frustrated black aspirations in Chicago. As the Civil Rights Act was being passed by 1964, Poitier won the leading actor Oscar for the 1963 Lilies of the Field, a low-budget film about an itinerant handyman who helped German nuns to build a chapel in the Arizona desert. By now, he had become the world’s biggest box office attraction, with three blockbusters in 1967: he played a schoolmaster taming rebellious students in a school in London’s derelict East End in the adaptation of Guyanese author ER Braithwaite’s To Sir, with Love; he portrayed a Philadelphia detective working with a prejudiced Mississippi sheriff in In the Heat of the Night; and in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he depicted a widowed doctor convincing ‘liberal’ white parents to marry their daughter. By the late 1960s, the martyred Martin Luther King Jr’s non-violence methods had been overtaken by the more radical Black Power movement. Poitier was increasingly accused of being an Uncle Tom, ‘the white man’s Black man’, and a ‘showcase Negro’. The ultimate outsider who had spent his childhood in the Caribbean, Poitier was so stung by the growing criticisms that he retreated to the Bahamas for four years. He returned to America, and turned more to directing, producing Buck and the Preacher (1972), acting alongside Harry Belafonte. The Poitier-directed Uptown Saturday Night (1974) with Bill Cosby, and Stir Crazy (1980) with Richard Pryor, were box-office hits which increasingly provided opportunities for black actors.

Legacy Poitier had married African American model Juanita Hardy in 1950, and they had four daughters together. The couple divorced after 15 years amidst revelations that Poitier had conducted a nine-year affair with African American actress and co-star Diahann Carroll. He married white Canadian actress Joanna Shimkus in 1976, with whom he had two more daughters. 384

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Poitier was a quiet revolutionary who used charm and grace rather than a pitchfork to convince white audiences to embrace a common humanity. Still only in his thirties at the height of his fame, he often felt the weight of having to represent 18 million black Americans. Following Poitier’s death, GrenadanTrinidadian British director Steve McQueen described him as ‘an icon to the Black diaspora’; Denzel Washington noted that Poitier had ‘opened doors for all of us that had been closed for years’; Viola Davis praised Poitier’s ‘dignity, normalcy, strength, excellence and sheer electricity’; while Oprah Winfrey regretted that ‘the greatest of the Great Trees has fallen’. The Gleaner (Jamaica), 23 January 2022.

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Cynthia Erivo: Building Bridges to

the Diaspora

NIGERIAN BRITISH ACTRESS and singer Cynthia Onyedinmanasu Chinasaokwu Erivo was the only black artist nominated for an Oscar in the 2020 Academy Awards in Hollywood for her role in Harriet which has grossed over $41.7 million at the box office. With her bleached white hair, ear piercings, large round rings, and long, colourful fingernails, Erivo could not be overlooked. She was nominated for best actress and best original song, but she lost in both categories to the outstanding Renée Zellweger and the veteran Elton John. Clad in a golden gown, her powerful rendition of ‘Stand Up’ at the Oscars ceremony won her plaudits across Tinseltown. At just 33, Erivo has already won prestigious Tony, Emmy, and Grammy awards, and seems destined for greatness. Reinforcing the five-year criticisms of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, the lack of diversity in Oscar nominees was condemned by many, including an outspoken Erivo, who could more conveniently have kept quiet to avoid stoking controversy. Black films like Queen and Slim and Just Mercy were overlooked. However, the best film and best director victories of South Korean film Parasite (which has grossed $44 million in the US) added welcome diversity to the winners. The Oscars have been castigated for nominating just 14 black women out of 100 for the best actress and best supporting actress categories over the last decade. The continuing criticism is that black female nominees are often typecast in subservient roles: Hattie McDaniel’s slave in Gone with The Wind; Whoopi Goldberg’s hustler psychic in Ghost; Halle Berry’s betrayer-wife in Monster’s 386

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Ball; Octavia Spencer’s housemaid in The Help; and Viola Davis’s long-suffering wife in Fences. The 2019 biopic Harriet, for which Erivo was nominated, told the story of the African American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who was born into slavery in the American South, but escaped in 1849 by walking a hundred miles from Maryland to Pennsylvania. She then joined the Anti-Slavery Society to become a ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad, an intricate network used by escaping slaves. She returned 19 times to the pre-bellum American South to free at least 70 slaves. In the process, Harriet had to evade dangerous obstacles largely involving slave catchers, earning herself the sobriquet ‘Moses’. Like the biblical figure, she figuratively parted the Red Sea, before using the celestial North Star to guide freed slaves to the promised land. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Tubman became the first woman commander, leading an all-black battalion to free over 700 slaves in South Carolina. The pioneering activist also campaigned for women’s rights as part of the suffragettes. She was thus an early feminist and civil rights campaigner, even before these terms were ever used. Tubman died at the age of 91 in 1913. Harriet – shot in rainy, rural Virginia – is a fast-moving thriller with a lyrical musical score and cinematography that is, at times, breath-taking: golden sunsets, lush landscapes, dense forests, and bright stars. In this era of Black Panther, Tubman is a nineteenth-century superhero, with her magical powers being the divine visions of the past and future that help guide her during her many escapades. A pistol-wielding Harriet defiantly proclaims ‘liberty or death’, and sings soaring Negro spirituals to lift the spirits of her fellow plantation workers. Without ignoring the trauma of the evil system of slavery, the film’s African American director Kasi Lemmons (who directed the delightful 2013 musical Black Nativity) avoids the graphic depiction of Caribbean British director Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, whose slow, lingering pace perfectly captured the tedium and hopelessness of Southern plantation life. Harriet, in contrast, is fast-paced and action-packed. Even amidst the hopelessness of plantation slavery, black agency and heroism are on full display. Erivo’s lead performance has been widely praised, even by critics of the movie who nevertheless felt that her sparkling performance carried the film. AO Scott described her role as a ‘precise and passionate performance’; Roxana Hadadi noted that she ‘effectively conveys a woman in constant forward motion’; while Tomris Laffly observed that ‘Erivo’s performance might very well become a definitive one, synonymous with Tubman’. Like Harriet, Erivo stands at just 387

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five feet tall. She perfectly personified Tubman’s resourcefulness, courage, and indomitable spirit, capturing well her transformation from a slave girl into a fearless leader of a liberation movement. As Erivo noted about Harriet: ‘She was a human being with the full scope of emotions: sadness, love, happiness, all of that. We wanted to make sure people knew that of her.’ Erivo became totally immersed in the role, praying each time before going on the set, and feeling a spiritual connection to her protagonist: ‘I feel as if Harriet is complicit in the storytelling. I feel that she’s around. It’s comforting to be able to reach into your faith to tell the story of somebody who has faith.’ It is hard to believe that Harriet is only Erivo’s third feature film after Widows and Bad Times at the El Royale (both released in 2018). She grew up in south London with a Nigerian immigrant mother who worked as a nurse, her father being largely absent from their lives. She attended a Catholic school and started studying music psychology at the University of East London, before graduating from London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Erivo directly faced insidious British racism, and saw her mother racially abused. Like Tubman, she maintained a steely determination to succeed against difficult odds. It is perhaps noteworthy that she now lives permanently in New York, and achieved greater success in America than in Britain. Also significant was that she was nominated for an Oscar for Harriet, but not for a British Academy Film Award. Her powerful protest was to turn down the request to perform at the award ceremony in London, noting that the institution did not ‘represent people of colour in the right light’, and refusing to be tokenised by her country of birth. Erivo’s strong black identity has been important to her artistic choices: she has played leading roles in stage productions of Sister Act and The Color Purple in the West End and on Broadway. She will be playing African American soul idol Aretha Franklin in a forthcoming series. The versatile thespian has also performed Shakespearean plays. Despite Erivo’s desire to build bridges with the American diaspora, tensions still continue. She was widely criticised for a clumsy tweet about a ‘ghetto American accent’. Several African American artists and reviewers also continue to condemn the casting of non-African Americans such as Erivo, Kenya’s Lupita Nyong’o, and Nigerian Britons Chiwetel Ejiofor, Carmen Ejogo, and David Oyelowo in lead roles in such movies as the 2013 12 Years a Slave and the 2014 Selma. Erivo, however, remains deeply conscious of films like Harriet helping to shed light on contemporary injustices such as the separation of Latin American 388

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immigrant families seeking to enter the US, and British citizens of Caribbean descent of the Windrush generation being forcibly deported to countries that many of them have never visited. As she wistfully cautioned: ‘Hopefully, the film will serve as a reminder that if we don’t do the work we’re supposed to do, we’re going backwards.’ The Guardian (Nigeria), 3 March 2020.

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Part VIII

Sporting Figures

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Muhammad Ali: King of the World

‘FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY, sting like a bee.’ Muhammad Ali, who died last week (June 2016) at the age of 74, eloquently expressed the way he had redefined boxing, becoming the world’s first global sporting icon. A heavyweight champion was not meant to dance around the ring like a ballerina. His feet and hands were lightning-quick. He put his hands down, leaned back, and bobbed and weaved with his head. The ‘Ali shuffle’ and ‘rope-a-dope’ revolutionised the sport. The world had never seen such an unorthodox boxer who made brutal violence seem so graceful, and gave pugilists a respectability that such primordial bestiality could not otherwise have earned. Handsome, charismatic, and telegenic, even before the era of globalisation, Ali used an incredible wit, skilful self-promotion, boastful showmanship, and unbridled talent to put himself on the world map. Brash, arrogant, and loud, he repeatedly told all who cared to listen, ‘I am the greatest!’ In the heady 1960s, Ali was to boxing what Pelé was to football and what the Beatles were to music. He was immortalised in Madame Tussaud’s, and appeared on the cover of Time, Life, and Ringside. There was the famous meeting with Nelson Mandela in 1990: one a former anti-apartheid hero who was also a keen boxer, the other the most legendary former heavyweight boxer and former civil rights campaigner. As Mandela noted: ‘Muhammad Ali was not just my hero, but the hero of millions of young, black South Africans … He was an inspiration to me, even in prison, because I thought of his courage and his commitment to his sport.’

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Ali was born Cassis Clay in January 1942 to a father, Cassius senior, who was a painter and church muralist, and a mother, Odessa, who was a homemaker and domestic worker. The struggling family had some white ancestry. They attended a Baptist church in a segregated American South still sweltering with racism. It was Ali’s father who first inculcated radical ideas of black pride in his son from the teachings of flamboyant Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey. Ali later noted that the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 – allegedly for whistling at a white woman – forged his political awakening. After his new bicycle was stolen, the 12-year-old told a white police officer, Joe Martin, that he wanted to ‘whip’ the thief. Martin invited Ali to join his boxing gym to learn how to fight. The sport introduced stability and discipline and gave Ali an ambition and drive missing in his schoolwork. A black trainer, Fred Stoner, was another early mentor. Ali learned fast and, with his natural gifts, earned two Golden Gloves titles. Famously petrified of flying, the 18-year-old travelled to the Olympic Games in Rome in 1960, and won the gold medal in the light-heavyweight division. However, on returning home to Louisville, Ali was called the ‘Olympic nigger’ and denied entry into some restaurants. A group of local white millionaires, nevertheless, recognised his potential, and gave him a contract, guided by Miami-based trainer Angelo Dundee, who remained in his corner throughout his career. At 22, Ali established his legend by defeating the ferocious Sonny Liston in 1964 to become heavyweight champion of the world. The intimidating Liston had the largest fists of any heavyweight champion, and had used savage jabs to defeat the reigning world champion, Floyd Patterson, in one round in 1962. Ali called Liston a ‘big ugly bear’ and predicted he would knock him out in the seventh round. Many journalists had thus lined up to watch the ‘Lip of Louisville’ being silenced. Ali fulfilled his prediction, famously jumping around the ring triumphantly screaming, ‘Eat your words! I shook up the world! I’m king of the world’. Muhammad had, from the start always had a global outlook, looking to the world beyond America, which often assumed that it was the world and that what was good for Coca-Cola was also good for the world. Ali’s early exposure to the global showpiece of the Olympics made him realise that he could appeal not just to his colossal country, but to the entire globe. A year after his victory against Liston, Ali repeated the feat, defeating Liston in the first round with what mythically came to be called the ‘phantom punch’. Civil rights leader Martin 394

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Luther King Jr congratulated Ali. President Lyndon Johnson, however, ignored this achievement, and it was not until the presidency of Gerald Ford that Ali was invited to the White House in 1974. The new heavyweight champion of the world embodied ‘black power’ in an era of the civil rights struggle, the Black Panthers, and post-independence Africa. In an America that even then suffered from Islamophobia, Ali showed remarkable courage in changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali in 1964 and adopting Islam as his religion in a show of unrepentant selfassertion. He joined the radical, separatist Nation of Islam. Ali’s relationship with his former mentor Malcolm X soon deteriorated after the latter left the group, before being assassinated in 1965. Ali later regretted this betrayal and would himself break from the Nation of Islam, embracing orthodox Islam in 1975. But despite his strong faith, his serial marital infidelities exposed a contradictory side. He was married four times and fathered nine children. At the prime of his career in 1967, Ali was barred from boxing for three and a half years for refusing to be conscripted to fight America’s imperialist war in Vietnam. As he famously noted: ‘I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong … no Vietcong ever called me “nigger”.’ Ali was denied the status of conscientious objector for standing up for his principles until the US Supreme Court unanimously overturned the decision in 1971. By then, however, he had lost millions of dollars and some of the best years of his professional career. Only at 29 did the years of wilderness end, and Ali’s ‘second coming’ into the ring begin. In his absence, a new crop of heavyweights had appeared on the scene. He fought a trilogy of memorable battles with ‘Smoking’ Joe Frazier, the reigning heavyweight champion whom Ali offensively referred to as a dumb, ugly ‘gorilla’. This triggered a life-long animosity between the two men. The first epic bout in 1971 – ‘the fight of the century’ – saw a rusty Ali lose for the first time in his professional career on points after 15 bruising rounds. Ali defeated Frazier in the second fight three years later in a 12-round decision. The third fight – ‘the thrilla in Manila’ – in 1975 is widely acknowledged to have been one of the most brutal slugfests in history. Frazier failed to come out of his corner in the fourteenth round after his eyes had been badly cut. Ali would collapse shortly after in triumph, later describing the fight as a ‘near death’ experience. The ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ between Ali and George Foreman in Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire – now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – is undoubtedly the most famous boxing match in history. It netted each fighter an incredible $5 million purse. This was a David vs Goliath battle of biblical 395

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proportions, a contest between brains and brawn, between raw strength and unnerving courage. An irresistible force was finally encountering an immutable object. The undefeated Foreman had destroyed Frazier in two lop-sided fights to claim the heavyweight title, and was even larger than the fearsome Sonny Liston. I remember staying up until the early hours of the morning to watch ‘the miracle after midnight’ on a black-and-white television in Lagos. As a dancing 32-year-old Ali and a snarling 24-year-old Foreman stepped into the ring, the 60,000-strong Congolese crowd screamed, ‘Ali, bomaye!’ (Ali, kill him!) The ageing challenger employed his ‘rope-a-dope’ tactic: covering his face, dancing around gracefully, and leaning on the ropes. He taunted Foreman to throw more punches, saying, ‘Is that all you got, George?’ Ali took some ferocious punishment, allowing Foreman to punch himself to exhaustion, before knocking him out in the eighth round. As Ali later noted: ‘The bull is stronger, but the matador’s smarter’. The 1996 documentary When We Were Kings vividly captured the extravagant occasion, while Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Norman Mailer also saw the fight live and recorded it in his 1975 book The Fight. Ali continued to defeat the cream of heavyweights: Jimmy Young, Ken Norton, and Earnie Shavers. In 1978, however, he lost and regained his title against Leon Spinks at the age of 36, the only heavyweight fighter to have won the title three times. Ali unwisely refused to retire, losing a painful bout to reigning heavyweight champion and former sparring partner Larry Holmes in ten one-sided rounds in 1980. He would finally retire after losing his last fight to Trevor Berbick a year later. By this time, Ali’s speech had already began to slur, and many believe that the punishment he suffered in the ring contributed to exacerbating the Parkinson’s disease that was diagnosed in 1984. He bravely lived with the illness for the last 32 years of his life. One of the most poignant sporting moments of all time was surely the image of a trembling Ali lighting the Olympic torch at the 1996 games in Atlanta. Despite his illness, Ali tried to live a devout Muslim life. As he noted: ‘I’m not afraid of dying. I have faith; I do everything I can to live my life right; and I believe that dying will bring me closer to God.’ He promoted peace and reconciliation throughout the world, embarking on goodwill missions to Afghanistan and North Korea, taking medical supplies to Cuba, and travelling to Iraq to free 15 American hostages. He raised millions of dollars to fight Parkinson’s disease, and visited sick and disabled children. Ali’s last wife, Lonnie, whom he married in 1986, became his devoted pillar of strength. 396

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In 2005, the Muhammad Ali Centre was founded in his home town in Louisville as a monument to his incredible sporting legacy. His life was captured in a feature film, Ali, starring Will Smith in 2001. Countless documentaries have been made. Ali’s universal appeal was underlined by the fact that it was the war-mongering US president George W Bush who awarded him the Medal of Freedom (the country’s highest civilian honour) in 2005. In a 21-year career, Ali had fought every heavyweight contender in a golden generation that produced a bountiful harvest of talent. He won 56 fights and lost only five, including two when he was clearly past his peak. Barack Obama, the first black president of the US, keeps a pair of the boxer’s gloves near the Oval Office under the iconic photograph of Ali towering over Sonny Liston. Obama noted after Ali’s death: ‘He stood with King and Mandela; stood up when it was hard; spoke out when others wouldn’t.’ The ‘King of the World’ has now mounted his throne for the last time, and ridden off into the sunset in a blaze of glory. The Guardian (Nigeria), 10 June 2016.

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Pelé: The Greatest Footballer of All

Time

AN EARLY MEMORY OF recently deceased Brazilian football superstar Pelé (who succumbed to cancer at the age of 82) was my mother telling me how she had watched him play live for Santos against a Nigerian national side (consisting largely of my late father’s Stationery Stores’ players) at Onikan Stadium in Lagos in 1969. Her main recollection was how effortlessly he had glided gazellelike across the pitch. As a child, I watched the 1973 British documentary Giants of Brazil, which celebrated the glorious Pelé-inspired 1970 World Cup-winning team, which is still widely believed to have been the greatest side of all time and the gold standard of international football. Edson Arantes do Nascimento (named after the American inventor Thomas Edison) was nicknamed Pelé. Born on 23 October 1940 to Dondinho and Celeste, he grew up in a shack in the poverty-stricken Brazilian town of Três Corações, playing football barefoot on the streets with a ball of paper and rags. From the age of seven, he worked as a shoeshine boy and sold stolen peanuts for the family to make ends meet. Dondinho had moved his family to São Paulo to pursue a football career, but an injury had put paid to his ambitions. Pelé was a prodigy who joined Santos football club at the age of 15, and made his debut for Brazil a year later. He was lightning quick; had mesmerising dribbling skills and incredible acceleration; performed magical feints, nutmegs, and acrobatic bicycle kicks; shot equally well with both feet; was a powerful header of the ball; and ghosted past defenders like a ballerina. He went on to 398

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become the only footballer to have won three World Cups, scoring a record 1,283 career goals in 1,367 games (including over 500 friendlies). Despite this incredible rags-to-riches story, Pelé’s social environment made his success even more remarkable. During the transatlantic slave trade, Portuguese-ruled Brazil had imported 5.1 million enslaved and exploited workers from Africa who produced sugar and coffee on dreary plantations. The country abolished slavery only in 1888. African cultures have, however, greatly influenced Brazilian arts, literature, music, and sports, with Yoruba deities fused with Catholic saints to create the religion of Candomblé. But, despite the prominence of black Brazilian footballers, military police still routinely gun down black youths in impoverished favelas (slums) – a constant reminder of the deep racism and structural inequalities that continue in this mythical ‘racial democracy’.

Brazil: The Three World Cups Pelé’s three World Cup triumphs are elegantly captured in the 2021 Netflix documentary bearing his name, in which the wheelchair-bound protagonist narrates his life story. He was only 17 when he went to Sweden in 1958 as part of Brazil’s team of superstars including Vavá, Didi, and Garrincha. It was the first time Pelé had ever left Brazil, and he kept asking his teammates whether there were only black people in his country, as most of the other teams were lily-white. The teenager exploded onto the world stage in Sweden, scoring a quarter-final winner against Wales, a semi-final hat-trick against France, and two spectacular goals – one controlled on his chest before lobbing it over a defender and volleying home – in the final against Sweden. At the end of the game, overcome with emotion, the teenager dramatically fainted, having finally fulfilled his promise to his father to win a World Cup for him after Dondinho had wept following Uruguay’s defeat of Brazil at its home World Cup in 1950. This event had resulted in a collective national mental breakdown, with AfroBrazilian players particularly scapegoated for the defeat. Pelé played only two matches during the 1962 World Cup in Chile, having sustained a groin injury. Magical winger Garrincha stepped in and almost single­ handedly drove the country to victory. Pelé suffered further disappointment four years later at the World Cup in England, as Bulgarian and Portuguese defenders ferociously fouled him out of the tournament with tackles that would be banned in today’s game. The experience so frustrated the Brazilian superstar that he vowed never again to play in a World Cup. 399

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Pressured by Brazil’s military junta, Pelé fortunately changed his mind, and agreed to play in Mexico in 1970. After shambolic preparations, the team regrouped to achieve sporting immortality. A 29-year-old Pelé – widely written off as past his prime – became the grand conductor of a perfectly tuned orchestra starring artists like Jairzinho (who scored in every game), Tostão, Rivellino, Gérson, and Carlos Alberto. This was the first World Cup to be televised in glorious technicolour, and Brazil’s golden shirts and blue shorts glistened in the Mexican sun as the Seleção delivered virtuoso performances of futebol arte. They won all seven matches, including beating defending champions England 1–0, Uruguay 3–1 in the semi-final, and Italy 4–1 in an enthralling final. Pelé played a part in 14 of the team’s 19 goals. He eventually ended his international career in 1971, having scored 77 goals in 92 games, a record only equalled by Neymar during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Santos: Club Career Joining Santos as a 15-year-old in 1956, Pelé hit the ground running, scoring 59 goals in the 1958 season, a record that still stands today. By the 1960s, the Santásticos were one of the best teams in the world (the original ‘dream team’), winning six Brazilian championships, two Copa Libertadores (South American championships), and two Intercontinental Cups (between the champions of Europe and South America). In order to pay Pelé’s salary, Santos had to embark on a relentless series of world tours, globalising the club game before the era of globalisation. A cross between New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team and the basketball-playing Harlem Globetrotters, Santos dominated and entertained, putting a team from a small Brazilian port city firmly on the world map. Not only did Santos beat local rivals Corinthians and Botafogo, but also Boca Juniors, AC Milan, and Benfica. The team is widely believed to be one of the best club sides of all time, providing eight players for the Brazilian national squad in 1963. Throughout his many successes, Pelé’s humility and devout Catholicism shone through. He fervently believed that his talent was God-given.

Politics, Profits, and Philandering Pelé’s World Cup exploits in 1958 had restored national pride to a country that was rapidly industrialising, and shaking off its stereotypical image as a mono-crop coffee exporter. The attractive footballing style that Pelé dubbed o jogo bonito (the beautiful game) coincided with a period of socio-economic renaissance. Musicians, poets, and documentary-makers lyrically narrated 400

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Pelé’s tale. But things soon turned ugly. An American-backed coup d’état brought to power in 1964 a brutal 21-year military regime that oversaw torture, disappearances, deaths, and a curb on freedom of expression and movement. Student demonstrators were brutally mowed down. Pelé and football provided temporary succour and balm to a schizophrenic nation, imprisoned by its own rulers. With Pelé attracting attention from European clubs, the military junta declared him a ‘non-exportable national treasure’. The generals sought to use him for regime propaganda. The young superstar, however, adopted an apolitical stance, refusing to condemn the military, while arguing that his job was to play football. He did, however, campaign passionately for Brazil’s children to be given better educational opportunities. After a successful career in Brazil, Pelé came out of retirement to play for the New York Cosmos between 1975 and 1978 in a deal facilitated by the United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger. The Brazilian popularised ‘soccer’ in a country more familiar with baseball, basketball, and American football. Pelé was paid $7 million for three years, more than he had earned in two decades with Santos. Even in late retirement, the Brazilian superstar lucratively endorsed Mastercard, Pepsi, Puma, and Viagra, and was an ambassador for the United Nations and FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). Too trusting, he had engaged incompetent business managers, and had twice lost and had to rebuild his fortune. He married three times, with his first two marriages collapsing in divorce amidst reports of adultery. He had six children, but scandalously refused to acknowledge a daughter who had successfully passed a paternity test.

Legacy: The Late Afternoon of Life Between 1995 and 1998, Pelé served as his country’s sports minister under the previously left-wing sociologist disciple of dependency theory Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who described the superstar as ‘a symbol of Brazilian emancipation’. In cabinet, Pelé was able to enact reforms facilitating the free movement of Brazilian footballers, but was less successful at cleaning out the Augean stables of the country’s football administration. Brazilians nicknamed Pelé o Rei do Futebol (king of football). His influence was similar to Muhammad Ali’s on boxing, Michael Jordan’s on basketball, and Michael Jackson’s on pop music. 401

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When he died in December 2022, over 230,000 mourners filed past Pelé’s coffin, including the country’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who in his youth had watched the superstar play live. FIFA boss Gianni Infantino and head of the South American football association Alejandro Domínguez also attended the memorial. Sadly, scarcely any of the recent generation of Brazilian superstars showed up to honour their country’s greatest ambassador. Particularly irksome was the absence of Neymar, the current no. 10 (a jersey Pelé made famous) in Brazil’s national team, who had played for Pelé’s Santos. Despite praising his supposed idol on social media as ‘a voice to the poor’, Neymar embodies many of the current generation of brattish, narcissistic football superstars. He had earlier endorsed the fascist rightwing Jair Bolsonaro – the ‘Trump of the Tropics’ – for re-election as Brazil’s president. Brazilian president Lula noted about Pelé: ‘Few Brazilians took the name of our country as far as he did’; Argentinian World Cup winner Jorge Valdano described him as ‘an idea of perfection’; Barney Ronay dubbed him ‘the father of the modern game’; Jonathan Wilson called him ‘a player of grace and imagination’; Lawrie Mifflin described him as ‘a transformative figure in twentieth-century sport’; while Michael Pooler and Bryan Harris acknowledged the Brazilian as ‘one of the most popular and recognisable athletes of the 20th century.’ Pelé was voted the most famous person in the world in 1970, named athlete of the century by the International Olympic Committee in 1999, and a year later FIFA joint player of the century (with Argentina’s Diego Maradona). He symbolised, in a real sense, the golden age of the ‘beautiful game’ before the loss of innocence that followed the commercialisation of FIFA in 1974, and the financial scandals over the subsequent five decades under the corrupt reigns of João Havelange and Sepp Blatter (well captured in Netflix’s 2022 FIFA Uncovered). Pelé was a timeless figure, the brightest star in the footballing galaxy, a pioneer of global celebrity, and undoubtedly the greatest footballer of all time. This article was written after the death of Pelé on 29 December 2022.

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Eusébio: The King Is Dead, Long

Live the King!

EUSÉBIO DA SILVA FERREIRA, who died on 5 January 2014 at the age of 71 of a heart attack after a few years of poor health, was nicknamed ‘the King’ (O Rei) in his adopted homeland of Portugal. He was born in Maputo on 25 January 1942 to a white Angolan railway mechanic and a black Mozambican mother. Eusébio’s father died when he was eight, and he developed a passion for football, playing barefoot with a ball stuffed with stockings and newspapers on dirt pitches in Maputo. At 15, he signed for the local Sporting Club, earning himself the sobriquet ‘the Phenomenon of Mafalala’. Explaining his natural talent, Eusébio later noted: ‘I just took a few kicks at the ball, and it seemed the ball and I took a liking to each other’. He joined Portuguese and European champions Benfica in 1961 at the age of 19 for a paltry $1,700. However, since Eusébio had played for Sporting Lisbon’s feeder team in Maputo, the deal triggered a massive row between the two Lisbon giants, Benfica and Sporting. Upon his arrival in Portugal, Eusébio spent two weeks in the fishing village of Lagos in the Algarve, instructed by Benfica officials not to leave his hotel room. This led to charges by Sporting that the teenager had been ‘kidnapped’. The tussle was only resolved in court after five tortuous months. Eusébio was a lightning-paced striker nicknamed the ‘Black Panther’ due to his blistering acceleration, agility, and clinical finishing. He was athletic and stocky at 5 feet 9 inches, and built like a sturdy bull with the speed of a cheetah. He had dazzling dribbling skills that allowed him to ghost past defenders at pace, 403

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and a thunderous right foot unleashed with deadly force. He scored with pile drivers, delicate lobs, and guided missiles. He was the complete striker, ahead of his time in terms of his talent, technique, pace, and power. Eusébio had a fierce determination to succeed, was fearless, and had an incredible belief in his own abilities. Even as a newly arrived 19-year-old, he calmly announced his intention to break into the first team of the European champions, Benfica. In an early game for the club against Brazilian superstar Pelé’s Santos in 1961, as Benfica was losing 4–0, Eusébio came on as a secondhalf substitute to score a hat-trick, serving notice of his arrival on the global stage. In his first full season with Benfica, he led them to win the European Cup, scoring two goals in the famous 1962 final against Spanish giants Real Madrid, which had earlier won five consecutive European cups between 1956 and 1960. The Spanish team included Eusébio’s idol, Argentinian legend Alfredo Di Stéfano, as well as the Hungarian maestro Ferenc Puskás. After the game, Puskás and Eusébio swapped shirts: an act which many saw as a generational passing of the torch from the deadliest striker in Europe to his heir apparent. The AfroPortuguese guided Benfica to three more European cup finals, all of which they lost to AC Milan (1963), Inter Milan (1965), and Manchester United (1968). Eusébio’s self-confidence was infectious and rubbed off on his teammates. He effectively transformed decent Benfica and Portuguese national sides into great teams through sheer will-power and a towering presence. Eusébio would establish his immortality among the pantheon of football deities alongside such names as Pelé, Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff, and Franz Beckenbauer through his stellar performances at the 1966 World Cup in England. He scored two goals in a 3–1 win over Pelé’s Brazil, and another in a 3–0 victory over Bulgaria. He often showed great determination even in the face of seemingly impossible odds. With Portugal losing 3–0 at half-time against North Korea, Eusébio scored four goals in a dazzling second-half display, picking up the ball from the net after his first two goals and placing it on the centre spot to restart the game. He scored the lone goal in the 2-1 semi-final loss to eventual winners England, and scored another goal against the Soviet Union to help win the third-place match. Eusébio famously burst into tears after the semi-final loss to England later saying: ‘I looked at the sky and said, “Lord what have I done to deserve this?”’ This match entered into Portuguese sporting folklore as jogo das lágrimas (the game of tears). Eusébio was the top goal-scorer in the tournament with nine goals, and Portugal has never reached such dazzling heights in a World Cup since. This virtuoso performance was immortalised with a wax statue of the Mozambican prodigy at Madam Tussaud’s museum in London. Eusébio would 404

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eventually score 41 goals in 64 games for Portugal. The Afro-Portuguese superstar went on to win the league title with Benfica 11 times, becoming top scorer of his domestic league a record seven times. He also won five Portuguese cups and the ballon d’or – the European player of the year – in 1965, as well as being runner-up in 1962 and 1966. Only one other African player – Liberia’s George Weah in 1995 – has won this prestigious accolade. Eusébio also won the ‘golden boot’ as the highest goal-scorer in Europe in 1968 (with 48 goals) and 1973 (with 40 goals). He would eventually score an astonishing 733 goals in 745 professional games. He was named among the ten greatest footballers in a 1998 poll conducted by the world football federation, FIFA. After 15 years with Benfica, Eusébio played out his final days mostly in the new North American soccer league, which an equally ageing Pelé was trying to popularise. The two greatest black players of African descent of their generation, who were good friends, were thus reunited. Both lusophone superstars had been used by autocratic governments in Lisbon and Brasilia for propaganda purposes. Underlining the exploitation of top African players by European clubs that still sometimes continues today, Eusébio earned four times more a year in North America than he had earned with Benfica. He led the Toronto Metros-Croatia to a North American soccer league title in 1976. A long-term knee injury would, however, eventually force him to hang up his boots two years later, after a glittering two-decade career. Eusébio remained largely apolitical throughout his career. The fact that his native Mozambique was a Portuguese colony until 1975 meant that he did not even have a choice but to play for Portugal if he wanted to experience international football. The Iberian nation was ruled by the iron-fisted rightwing dictatorship of António Salazar between 1932 and 1968. This resulted in Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, and Guinea-Bissau waging wars of liberation against an incompetent and poorly resourced imperial power. Under the policy of lusotropicalism, Salazar had argued that Portugal’s multicultural, multiracial, and pluricontinental identity justified its perpetuation of its ‘civilising’ mission over its African and Asian colonies. Constrained by a repressive dictatorship in Lisbon, Eusébio never spoke out in support of the liberation struggle against Portuguese imperialism in his homeland. He was even somewhat uncomfortable with his nickname of ‘Black Panther’, which he thought might have linked him too closely to America’s radical ‘Black Panther’ movement. After Inter Milan offered to pay Eusébio forty times his salary at Benfica to move to Italy in 1964, Salazar declared him a ‘national 405

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treasure’ and prevented him from leaving the country. The dictator also made Eusébio undergo three years of military service as a further obstacle. Eusébio would later describe Salazar as a ‘slave master’, explaining that he stayed silent for so long out of fear of being jailed. The Afro-Portuguese, however, visited Mozambique frequently, and noted at the end of his career that ‘I represented Africa and Portugal’. In an era of superstars with oversized egos such as Real Madrid’s Portuguese galáctico (superstar) Cristiano Ronaldo, Eusébio’s widely noted humility, unpretentious nature, and sportsmanship stood out. As Eusébio noted: ‘I respect the football of today, but the football of my time was better. Football today is just commercial’. Even though African players have been playing in European leagues since the 1920s, Eusébio was undoubtedly the first global superstar to emerge from the continent. He blazed a trail that makes it possible for today’s African superstars such as Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o, Côte d’Ivoire’s Didier Drogba and Yaya Touré, Ghana’s Michael Essien, and Nigeria’s John Obi Mikel to ply their trade in Europe. Despite Eusébio’s African ancestry, there was a strange and lukewarm response to his death from Mozambican officialdom, demonstrating once again the biblical saying that no prophet is honoured in his own homeland. In stark contrast, the Portuguese government declared three days of national mourning and ordered all flags to be flown at half-mast. A large statue outside Benfica’s ‘Stadium of Lights’ had immortalised Eusébio in bronze in 1992. In a 2009 documentary, the Afro-Portuguese expressed a wish that his funeral cortège stop in front of his statue and make its way around the stadium before going into the giant coliseum. He expected there would be a lot of people present to witness the scene, while hoping that God gave him a few more years to live. This scenario was played out last Sunday just as Eusébio had wished. Tens of thousands of people turned out to bid farewell to Portugal’s greatest player, who was also the brightest star to have come out of Africa. Portugal’s prime minister Pedro Coelho described Eusébio as ‘a football genius … an outstanding athlete and generous man’. José Mourinho, the Portuguese coach of English club Chelsea, noted: ‘I prefer to look upon him as immortal.’ It is Eusébio’s incredible footballing legacy that ensures that even though the King is dead, his name will live on forever. The Guardian (Nigeria), January 2014.

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The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of

Diego Maradona

THE FOOTBALL WORLD CUP in Qatar this month (November 2022) will be the first in forty years not to feature one of the greatest footballers in history as a superstar or exuberant fan. Argentina’s Diego Armando Maradona died two years ago this month at the age of 60. His sublime performances in leading his country to the 1986 World Cup trophy has been rivalled only by Garrincha’s dominant displays in Brazil’s 1962 triumph.

The Rise Diego Maradona was born in the poverty-stricken Buenos Aires shantytown of Villa Fiorito on 30 October 1960. His father, Diego senior, was a bone-meat factory worker of Guaraní Indian stock, while his homemaker mother, ‘Doňa Tota’, ensured a strong Roman Catholic upbringing. Diego grew up with his seven siblings in a shack without running water. Football provided the young boy’s escape from poverty after his uncle gave him a leather football for his third birthday. He obsessively played in the slum’s potrero (meadow), spending hours juggling the ball in the air. Maradona joined Argentinos Juniors at 16, scoring 116 goals in as many games. At 20, he joined Boca Juniors, scoring 28 times in 40 appearances to lead them to Argentina’s Primera División Metropolitano title in 1982. The five feet five attacking midfielder had incredible vision, dazzling acceleration, and close dribbling skills.

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Maradona moved to Spanish giants Barcelona in 1982 for a world-record £5 million fee, spending only two years in Catalonia. He was often targeted for rough treatment by defenders determined to stop him with tackles that would in today’s game receive straight red cards. He won the Copa del Rey with Barca, scoring 38 goals in two seasons. However, he fought with club president, José Luís Núňez. During one explosive confrontation, he entered the club’s trophy room and started smashing up cups until his confiscated passport was returned. Diego embodied ‘player power’ long before the term entered into popular parlance. In 1984, he moved to Napoli in another world-record £6.9 million transfer. Naples was in Italy’s poorer South, and proved a much better fit. Here, Diego reached his peak during six glorious years in which he won two Scudettos (league titles) in 1987 and 1990 – the first by any non-northern Italian team – and the UEFA Cup in 1989. Maradona made his debut for Argentina at the age of 16. His greatest disappointment was being cut from César Menotti’s World Cup squad in 1978, which the Argentinian hosts went on to win. A year later, Diego led his country to win the youth World Cup in Tokyo. Maradona’s first senior World Cup was in Spain in 1982. In a match against Italy, he felt the brunt of the hard-tackling hatchet man, Claudio Gentile, who nearly stripped him naked. Maradona’s World Cup ended in disgrace, when he was sent off for kicking a player in a game lost to arch-rivals Brazil. Though a crushing experience, the tournament made him more determined to succeed. The 1986 World Cup in Mexico cemented Maradona’s legend in football’s pantheon. In the quarter-final against England, he showed both his deviousness and genius. Feigning to head the ball, he instead fisted it into the net without the referee having seen it. He later famously described the goal as having been scored by ‘the hand of God’. Like the trickster in Third World folktales, he felt he had ‘picked England’s pocket’, rejecting embittered British claims of cheating. Moments later, Maradona received a pass in his own half. He turned swiftly, and set off on a dazzling 70-yard slalom run in which he dribbled past six England players before scoring what a FIFA poll later voted as ‘the goal of the century’. Maradona had publicly presented the England match as just another football game. Privately, however, he was desperate to avenge Argentina’s loss to Britain in the 1982 Falklands War. Like Holland’s Johan Cruyff against Germany in the 1974 World Cup final, Maradona wanted not only to beat but to humiliate England. He scored two more spectacular goals against a dazed Belgian side in the semi-finals, before providing the crucial assist that saw the Albicelestes 408

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overcome a solid German team 3–2 in the final. Diego scored 34 goals in 91 appearances for Argentina.

The Fall Having become the world’s first global superstar in the multimedia age, Maradona found fame suffocating. As his Spanish biographer, Guillem Balagué, noted: ‘Diego never accepted half-measures – he embodied excess, a messianic character who often spoke of himself in the third person, a man who lacked boundaries’. Maradona’s unremitting two-decade hedonistic philandering and passion for sports cars continued, even as he became addicted to cocaine and alcohol, having become entangled with Naples’s Camorra mafia. His fall from grace came at the 1994 World Cup in the United States, when he was expelled from the tournament for using the performance-enhancing drug ephedrine. The trickster had finally run out of tricks. For years, he had surreptitiously carried around a plastic penis and clear urine sample to deceive drug testers. Maradona received another 15-month ban for cocaine use in 1991, before playing out his career with Sevilla, Newell’s Old Boys, and Boca Juniors. He had scored 259 goals in 491 club matches. While coaching unfashionable teams in Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico, Maradona had become sickly. The death of his parents by 2015 denied him the non-judgemental anchors who had tried to keep him from the path of perdition. In the last two decades of his life, Maradona constantly suffered from obesity, heart, lung, and liver problems, depression, anemia, and dehydration, eventually succumbing to cardiac arrest following brain surgery. His long-suffering and devoted wife Claudia (with whom he had two daughters) eventually filed for divorce in 2003 after twenty years of a frustrating marriage in which her husband had fathered a reported nine other children.

The Resurrection Paradoxically, Maradona simultaneously represented fulfilled and wasted genius. South African journalist Carlos Amato dubbed him ‘the angel with horns’. He coached Argentina for two years, guiding his country to a creditable quarter-final finish at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Diego liked to portray himself as a rebel with a cause. He read prolifically about his country and continent, and had a tattoo of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara emblazoned on his arm, and another of Cuban leader Fidel Castro on his calf. He would later find sanctuary in Cuba as a guest of Castro. 409

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Only Brazil’s Pelé can be considered to have been a greater player than Maradona, having scored 1,283 career goals, won three World Cups, and been more consistently outstanding over a longer period. But while the Brazilian played in brilliant Santos and Brazilian teams, what made Maradona’s achievements so remarkable was that his individual genius transformed ordinary Napoli and Argentinian teams into world-beaters. Today, Maradona is still revered as a god in his native Argentina, where he embodies a nostalgic golden age that his country has long lost. The cult of ‘El Diego’ is firmly entrenched in the national psyche in the 45 films and documentaries, fifty books, hundreds of university courses, and countless musical tangos. After his death, Diego lay in state at the presidential palace, with three days of national mourning declared. His Buenos Aires home has been converted into a museum, while Argentinos Juniors have named their stadium after him. In Italy, Neapolitans still worship Diego like a deity: Napoli’s stadium is named after him and the club retired his number 10 jersey, while his image is ubiquitous on murals across the city. Argentina’s current talisman, Lionel Messi, unlike Maradona, grew up largely in the sheltered environment of Barcelona’s academy. His embrace by Argentinians has therefore never been as symbiotic as Maradona’s – a true son of the soil who delivered World Cup victory and restored national pride. Diego was a man of the people who understood the suffering of the masses from lived experience in a way that Messi never could. The 35-year-old Messi is undoubtedly the world’s greatest player of his generation, and Qatar will be his last chance to win a World Cup, having lost a final to Germany in Brazil in 2014. The world wonders whether Argentina’s current number 10 can finally replicate the heroics of his idol during that long, hot, glorious Mexican summer 36 years ago. The Guardian (Nigeria), 14 November 2022.

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George Weah: The Genius of King

George

THIS TALE IS NOT ABOUT the madness of England’s King George, but about the genius of Liberia’s George Oppong Weah, the triple-crowned African, European and world footballer of the year. The 29-year-old striker has established a formidable reputation in soccer’s undisputed mecca, Italy’s Serie A, where the world’s greatest players parade their talents. In an AC Milan team studded with stars like Roberto Baggio, Franco Baresi and Marco Simone, Weah twinkles like a million stars in this enticing galaxy of talent. The club’s leading league scorer with eight goals, he is Milan’s crown jewel and the cornerstone around which its success is being built. King George majestically strides past players in his orange boots with quicksilver footwork and a dazzling array of skills. His acceleration is electrifying. He has a ferocious shot with both feet. His dribbling skills are superb. He is brilliant header of the ball. He is as powerful as a bull. He is a creative and unselfish player who sets up as many goals as he scores. Italian soccer pundit Giacomo Bulgarelli describes him as ‘the most complete player currently plying his trade in Italy’, while his coach, Fabio Capello, is equally glowing in his admiration: ‘He can do anything he likes with the ball … a great footballer.’ In a recent league game against Napoli, Weah pushed the ball between the two defenders near the half-way line and sprinted clear of them before coolly slotting the ball past the onrushing goalkeeper. He then set the San Siro Stadium alight by breaking into his characteristic, flamboyant victory dance, sprinting away from his teammates 411

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with quick, short strides and fists clenched below his knees, rousing the ecstatic Milan faithful into a frenzy. Such sights have become commonplace whenever George Weah plays. Not since the Mozambican-born Eusébio sliced through defences for Benfica and Portugal in the 1960s has a player of African descent made such an impression in European football. There have been other African stars in Europe – Cameroon’s Roger Milla, Ghana’s Abedi Pele and Nigeria’s Finidi George – but none have won the universal recognition that comes with the titles of European and world player of the year. Weah is a superstar who has reached the apogee of his sport. But his journey to the top was strewn with difficult obstacles. Weah was born in a Monrovian shanty town on 1 October 1966. His father died when he was three and his poor mother carted him off to live with his grandmother. He grew up in Monrovia’s Claretown, playing football with an empty Cola can in the company of other street urchins, often walking around on an empty stomach, and going barefoot. Unable to afford his school fees, he often gambled to make ends meet. As Weah himself would later admit, ‘It has been extremely difficult, and if I hadn’t had a lot of courage in the early days I wouldn’t be here today.’ He left school at 15, worked as a telephone technician in Monrovia, and joined the Liberian team Young Survivors. He went on to play for other Liberian club sides: Bougrange, Mighty Barrolle and Invincible Eleven. At Invincible Eleven, some erratic performances earned Weah a reputation for being a lazy player, and he was dropped from the team. After fighting his way back, his performances were so impressive that he soon moved to leading Ivorian (African Sports) and Cameroonian (Tonnerre Yaoundé) club sides between 1987 and 1988. He stayed in Cameroon only three months before Arsène Wenger, the coach of French first-division club side Monaco, made him an irresistible offer and Weah moved to France for £60,000. In his first game for Monaco, he played ‘catastrophically’ by his own admission. Wenger pulled him aside in the dressing room afterwards, telling him to believe more in himself and live like a professional, and that if he managed both, he would one day be one of the world’s best players. This proved to be a defining moment in Weah’s career, and since then he has never looked back. In four seasons (1988–1992) with Monaco, he scored 47 goals in 103 games, was named African footballer of the year in 1989, and helped his team win the French Cup in 1991. In 1992, he moved to another leading French club, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) for £3 million (at the time a record for any African player). He enjoyed much success during his three­ 412

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year Parisian sojourn, scoring 32 goals in 96 games and leading his team to win the French championship in 1994 and the French Cup in 1993 and 1995. But things turned sour for Weah in 1995 and he left PSG in rancorous and unhappy circumstances. After helping his club to the European Champions cup semi-final with a record seven goals, tension between him and manager Luis Fernandez led to the nomadic Liberian undertaking another European voyage – this time swapping the socio-cultural gaiety of Paris for the stylish élan of Milan. A £6.5 million transfer (the highest for any African player) had been negotiated before PSG met AC Milan in the European Cup semi-final, but Weah was stung by accusations that he had purposely played badly out of loyalty to his future club. He was forced to endure racist chants from PSG fans in his last home game, and one ungrateful banner read, ‘Go Weah – we don’t need you’. Weah’s strength of character was aptly demonstrated by how quickly he has put this adversity behind him to establish himself in Italy. George Weah is a devout Muslim (later converting back to Christianity), a shrewd businessman (he has a restaurant and two apartments in New York) and a devoted family man. His talents have made him fabulously wealthy with an annual salary of £2.4 million and a three-year footwear sponsorship deal worth £1 million. But, perhaps remembering his own difficult beginnings, Weah has been generous with his wealth: he spent £5,000 of his own money settling the account of the indigent Liberian Football Association; he gives the Association £2,000 a month for running costs and to develop youth soccer; he settled hotel bills and airfares, bought balls and jerseys, and negotiated a £30,000 sponsorship deal with Italian sports franchise Diadora, as he captained Liberia’s national team, the Lone Stars, to qualify for its first-ever Africa Nations Cup; he funds the Liberian soccer teams Staten Island Invaders and the Junior Professionals, as well as a soccer academy; he has offered gifts to orphans and handicapped children in Liberia. Like the equally devout Muslim, Nigerian basketball superstar Hakeem Olajuwon, Weah dismisses praise of his generosity and says he is merely giving back some of what has been divinely received: ‘I do what I can. You cannot buy a place in Heaven. All I have done is use what God has given me to seek inner peace.’ Other admirable qualities of King George include his humility and deep sense of gratitude to the people that have helped him to the top. He has a charming modesty and down-to-earthness that belie the magnitude of his success. He still has the common touch of his humble beginnings and has never forgotten the hard lessons of life learnt during his climb from poverty: hard 413

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work, determination and an insatiable will to succeed. He dedicated his European footballer of the year award jointly to his former coach at Monaco, Arsène Wenger, and to all African footballers. Receiving his award, he said of Wenger: ‘A good man has been rewarded … He has been like a father to me. Regarding African footballers, he seems to feel a sense of fraternal solidarity with players who have experienced similar prejudices in European football, and recognises the vast potential of the continent, telling Europeans, “If you only knew how many George Weahs there are in Africa.”’ Weah also deflects the constant stream of praise in Italy, by pointing to the crucial role of his Milan teammates in creating opportunities for him. The Liberian superstar is deeply patriotic and bluntly asserts, ‘I’m proud of Liberia and I don’t think people should look down on us.’ His profound sense of self-respect and dignity have made him greatly distressed at negative impressions of Liberia that have filtered out of savage warlords terrorising helpless citizens during the country’s civil war since 1990. Weah seems to have an overwhelming desire to counter these negative stereotypes by presenting another more positive, more optimistic image of Liberia through his sport. A worthy ambassador for his country, he has not been shy to wade into the politics of Liberia’s six-year civil war, which has seen 150,000 deaths and produced 200,000 refugees. He has often voiced his strong disapproval of the actions of the power-hungry warmongers who have torn the country apart. As Weah saw it, ‘What was going on in Liberia was not war. It was a national suicide. Nonsense, crazy. And people became sick of it.’ Weah has tried to use football to help the process of national reconciliation. Liberian refugees came from camps in Nigeria, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire to see the Lone Stars qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations. Whenever the national team play, Liberians stay by their radio and warlords temporarily lay down their arms. As president of the Liberian Football Association Willard Russell put it: ‘The Lone Stars are the only institution in our country that is non-partisan … we should use it as a vehicle for unity.’ Before travelling to South Africa to play the Africa Cup of Nations, Weah’s ambition was to have a team photograph with President Nelson Mandela that would be sent back home and hung on every wall to assist the process of reconciliation. As Weah noted, ‘We as footballers must try to make sure the battles do not start again. We are the pride of the nation, we are listened to, and we must fight for peace.’ George Weah’s unprecedented successes have helped prove to the world 414

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that African football has truly come of age. There are now 300 Africans playing professionally in Europe, Africa’s World Cup slots have been increased from three to five, and the continent is expected to host the World Cup in the next ten to fifteen years. Like Roger Milla, Weah plans to play on till he is 40 and wants eventually to become a libero in the Ruud Gullit mould. After hanging up his boots, he would like to head Liberia’s Football Association or become a UN sports ambassador. Liberia has become a calmer place since the August 1995 Abuja Agreement saw the warlords joining the transitional council of state. The traumatised country is, however, still desperately in need of a soothing balm and therapeutic reconciliation. George Weah’s glowing performances have given Liberians a brief respite from six years of madness. He has offered them something to cheer about in their season of anomie, and, in return, they have expressed their adoration by crowning him king of their hearts. West Africa (London), 18–24 March 1996.

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Samuel Eto’o: Cameroon’s

Indomitable Lion

LAST WEEK (MAY 2010), Samuel Eto’o, the captain of the Cameroon national football team, ‘the Indomitable Lions’, sent shock waves across the world when he threatened to withdraw from the World Cup. This followed stinging criticism from Roger Milla, a man Eto’o had idolised as a child. The country’s legendary former striker accused Eto’o of underperforming for the national team in contrast to his outstanding form for his European clubs, Barcelona and Inter Milan. In an angry riposte, the younger man criticised Milla for having become ‘famous at 40’, a reference to the latter’s exploits during Cameroon’s 1990 World Cup which ended at the quarter-final stage. Though Eto’o and the team did have a poor Africa Nations cup last January – crashing out to winners Egypt 3–1 in the quarter-final – the superstar scored nine goals in his country’s successful qualification for the 2010 World Cup. This spat recalled the famous needling between Brazilian legends Pelé and Ronaldo before the 2002 World Cup. Eto’o can be a brooding spirit, a volatile, complex, and unpredictable character. He has a sense of self-worth and supreme belief in his own abilities. Described as an inspirational leader by his former Dutch coach at Barcelona, Frank Rijkaard, Cameroon’s French coach Paul Le Guen clearly made the superstar team captain in the hope it would bring out the best in him. Eto’o is undoubtedly Africa’s most successful player and one of the best strikers in the world. He is the world’s fourth best-paid footballer with an estimated annual salary of R90 million. He left Cameroon’s UCB Douala at 15 416

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to join Real Madrid, was loaned out to various Spanish clubs, and then enjoyed a meteoric rise that saw him play for his country at the age of 16. He is the first player in history to have won the European champions league (scoring in two finals), domestic cup, and domestic league in two consecutive seasons (with Barcelona and Inter Milan); he won three European champions league titles; was top scorer in the Spanish league in 2006; won the Olympic soccer gold with Cameroon in 2000, as well as the Africa Cup of Nations in 2000 and 2002; he is the continental competition’s all-time top scorer with 18 goals as well as his country’s most prolific scorer with 44 goals in 94 games; he was named African footballer of the year an unprecedented three times between 2003 and 2005; and he has scored 168 goals in 297 games for Mallorca, Barcelona, and Inter Milan in ten seasons. Eto’o still plays with a distinctly African style, with dribbling skills, deceptive shimmies, ‘nutmegs’, and lightning acceleration. He is clearly made in Africa and polished in Europe. He can score with both feet, using speed and trickery to elude defenders before unleashing thunderous shots or subtle chips from the edge of the penalty box, or accurately placing shots past defences. My most enduring memory of Eto’o was the goal he scored against hosts Nigeria in the final of the Africa Cup of Nations in Lagos in 2000. Demanding the ball be pushed in front of him, he sprinted past Nigeria’s defenders, and calmly slotted the ball home. It was an audacious act of supreme self-confidence and supreme skill, all executed in the smoothest motion. Eto’o has an African spirit of generosity: after leading unfancied Mallorca to win the Spanish cup in 2003, he donated R300,000 to feed the team’s travelling supporters. Acting like a one-man government, he has given his Cameroonian teammates money and gifts after crucial victories. Eto’o also has a sensitive side to him: after missing a penalty in the 2006 Africa Cup of Nations quarter-final against Ivory Coast, he lay on the pitch crying inconsolably. This sensitivity was also evident in Eto’o’s praiseworthy campaign to stamp out the widespread racist chants against black players in Spanish football. In reaction to monkey chants from Real Zaragoza fans in 2005, he celebrated a goal with a defiant circus monkey act. Less amusingly, he had to be restrained by teammates from storming off the pitch following racist chants from the same notorious fans a year later. Eto’o frequently refers to God and has been dismissive of the widespread use of muti in African football. But despite this apparent piety, the Cameroonian also has a fiery, prickly side. Famously thin-skinned, Eto’o devours both 417

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European and Cameroonian media reports about his performances. In 2002, his former agent accused him of threatening assault. A year later, a journalist filed a complaint with the Spanish police alleging that Eto’o had threatened to kill him. In 2008, Eto’o apologised for headbutting a reporter following yet another altercation. Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe described his superstar compatriot as a ‘narcissist’, a sentiment echoed by Inter Milan fans who have nicknamed him ‘Fuoriclasse’ (Incomparable) for his mercurial eccentricity. After Barcelona defeated arch-rivals Real Madrid to win the Spanish league in 2005, Eto’o sang ‘Madrid, bastards, hail the champions’: a provocative act for which he later apologised to his former club. In 2007, the Cameroonian refused to come on as substitute in a league game after a row with coach Frank Rijkaard. Such tantrums by Cameroon’s enfant terrible doubtless contributed to his transfer to Milan in 2009. Off the pitch, Eto’o has teamed up with the United Nations Environment Programme and Puma to raise awareness of habitat and species conservation. He loves Congolese music, and married a glamorous Ivorian, Georgette, in 2007, with whom he has three children. As Eto’o prepares for his third World Cup in South Africa next week, Africa will hope that one of its greatest sons will finally fulfil his huge international potential on the world’s greatest stage. The roar of this gifted Indomitable Lion must not be a destructive, angry one, but rather one that inspires his team to make a country and continent proud. Sunday Times (South Africa), 6 June 2010.

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The Ivorian Pearl: The Life and

Times of Didier Drogba

Didier Drogba: The Autobiography by Didier Drogba (Aurum Press, 2008)

Didier Drogba: Portrait of a Hero by John McShane (John Blake, 2007)

THE YEAR 2010 SAW South Africa staging the first football World Cup ever hosted by an African country at an estimated cost of $6 billion. As former South African president Thabo Mbeki – under whose leadership the World Cup bid was won – said: ‘We want to ensure that one day, historians will reflect upon the 2010 World Cup as a moment when Africa stood tall and resolutely turned the tide on centuries of poverty and conflict. We want to show that Africa’s time has come’. Ivorian striker Didier Yves Drogba, the reigning African footballer of the year, had similarly expressed his optimism in a 2008 autobiography, saying, ‘I’d love to be the one lifting the Cup to the blue Johannesburg sky, proving I am an African at heart.’. The Ivorian pearl was keen to prove on the largest stage on the globe that the world was his oyster. Though Africa’s first World Cup was well organised and well attended, with the exception of Ghana none of the other five African teams (Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon and Algeria) went past the first round of the competition. Didier Drogba’s ‘Elephants’ failed to make it out of ‘the group of death’ after losing to Brazil, drawing with Portugal, and beating North Korea. Drogba had bravely played with an injured elbow during the World Cup, as he had courageously played for his country through the pain of injury at the Africa Cup of Nations in Ghana in 2008. 419

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Côte d’Ivoire’s disappointing World Cup results in South Africa had been repeated four years earlier in Germany. Amidst bickering rancour and envy of Drogba and the disproportionate media attention the superstar was garnering, the team failed to break out of yet another ‘group of death’ which had included the Netherlands, Argentina, and Serbia. Drogba confessed, in his 2008 autobiography, that he had nearly walked out on the team in Germany due to the tense situation. The Africa Cup of Nations in January 2010 had also seen a strangely out-of-sorts Drogba playing like a shadow of himself. He scored just one goal in the competition as the team lost to Algeria in the quarter-final; Drogba later apologised to his compatriots for the poor showing. Though he was voted African footballer of the year in 2006 and 2009 and has netted 45 goals in 71 international matches, the 32-year-old Didier sadly never enjoyed success at the World Cup or the Africa Cup of Nations. This disappointment contrasts greatly with the glittering success that Drogba has enjoyed at club level, making him one of the continent’s biggest superstars of all time. Playing for Chelsea, with half an hour to go in England’s Football Association (FA) cup final at Wembley stadium against Portsmouth in May 2010, Drogba was fouled at the edge of the box on a mazy, dribbling run. He dusted himself off and stepped up to drill a spectacular free kick with the inside of his foot into the corner of the net. Always the man for the big occasion, Didier had also scored in the 2008 FA cup final against Everton, as well as scoring the only goal in the defeat of Manchester United in the FA cup final in 2007. In 2010, the Ivorian scored three goals in an 8–0 win against Wigan to help Chelsea clinch the premiership title. In the process, Drogba scored 29 league goals to win the ‘golden boot’ as the league’s top scorer. In 2006, the Ivorian had also scored the most goals in England: 33 in 60 matches in all competitions. Along with Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o, Drogba is undoubtedly the greatest African footballer of his generation and one of the best strikers in the world. He is strong as a bull, fast as a cheetah, and stealthy as a panther. He scores goals with both feet, is a great header of the ball, and has dazzling close control and a magnificent first touch, whether chesting or bringing the ball down with his feet. Not only does he score goals, but he unselfishly sets up countless opportunities for teammates. He leads the forward line with guile, aplomb, and fearlessness. As described in his refreshingly frank 2008 autobiography, Drogba left Côte d’Ivoire as a five-year-old boy, having played football on the dusty streets of Abidjan in an over-sized Argentinian jersey. Spending a year as an eight-year-old in the Ivorian town of Yamoussoukro, Didier later criticised its grandiloquent 420

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cathedral – the ‘basilica in the bush’ – as the ‘folly’ of francophile founding president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who had ruled the country like a Gallic monarch between 1960 until his death in 1993. Drogba was sent to France to live with his uncle, Michel Goba, a professional footballer. As his itinerant uncle moved around France playing for different clubs, the young boy experienced racism, which left him an outspoken advocate against the scourge. He would later criticise the apartheid system in which top African players in Europe earn less than their European and South American counterparts. Drogba described the pain of exile as a ‘stab in the heart’, complaining: ‘I can’t live without the Côte d’Ivoire, without breathing the air of my own continent.’ In describing the loneliness of exile and nostalgia for his ancestral home, the Ivorian waxed lyrical, evoking the Guinean author Camara Laye’s 1954 novel The Dark Child: the recollections of an African student similarly suffering the loneliness of French exile. Didier’s teenage years in France were cold, lonely, and largely friendless, and the sense of socio-cultural dislocation is strong, with football providing some solace. Drogba’s father was a bank manager in Côte d’Ivoire, while his mother was still a student when the young boy left for France, before later becoming a banker. It was felt that sending the oldest of six children to Europe would increase his chances for success in life. As the Ivorian economy faced increasing austerity, Drogba’s entire family – with both his parents having lost their job – would follow him to live in France in the early 1990s, easing the pain of exile and keeping him firmly rooted to his African culture. After turning professional, Didier continued to send money to his parents. His former bank manager father often had to take menial jobs in France to keep the family going. The family of eight lived in a cramped flat in a poor banlieu (suburb) of hopelessness with other African immigrants. This was the sort of suburb in which disaffected, rioting youths live, some of whom current French president and then populist right-wing interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy insultingly described in 2005 as ‘scum’ who needed to be washed down with a hose-pipe. After clashes with his father who – reflecting the prejudice of Africa’s middle classes – preferred that Didier focus on his studies than on football, Drogba had to give up football for a year to re-sit his failed exams. He did eventually complete a diploma in accounting before signing a professional contract with French second division club Le Mans at the age of 21. He later moved to lowly French first division team Guingamp, before his stellar performances led to his transfer to the glamorous Olympique de Marseille – a city of 421

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immigrants overlooking the Mediterranean – at the age of 25. His footballing heroes included Algerian Frenchman Zinedine Zidane, Ghanaian Abedi Pelé, Dutchman Marco van Basten, Brazilians Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos, French strikers Jean-Pierre Papin and Thierry Henry, and Englishman Chris Waddle. Drogba was determined to succeed at his chosen vocation and worked hard to keep improving. He was named Player of the Year by his fellow professionals in France in 2004, though some critics regarded him as arrogant and difficult. At the beginning of his career, Drogba had problems adjusting to the life of a professional footballer. He was forced to curtail his insatiable lust for junk food, designer clothes, and night-clubbing, which had earned him the nickname ‘Tupac’, after the late American gangster-rapper. The injuries that have followed Didier throughout his professional career are described in excruciating detail in his autobiography. Drogba was fortunate to have strong African professional mentors in France: his Senegalese agents Pape Diouf and Thierno Seydi, both regarded as older brothers. Having left home at such a young age, Didier seems to have sought out father figures in agents and coaches. His sense of pan-African solidarity was developed in France in reaction to the racism of a society in which the rightwing Jean-Marie Le Pen won nearly a fifth of national votes in elections in 2002. Even in Europe, Drogba ate African food, listened to African music, danced the Ivorian coupé-décalé, and praised the resilience and sense of communalism of Africans. His marriage to a publicity-shy Malian wife, Lalla (with whom he is bringing up three children), was another act of pan-Africanism, and his partner and confidante helped him to overcome his loneliness and kept him grounded during his meteoric rise to global superstardom. African teammates also sustained Drogba in France and England. However, the Ivorian is a secular humanist – who has attended both church and mosque – and a proud cosmopolitan citizen of the world. Personal loyalty was always important to Drogba, and throughout his career, he has needed to get on well with coaches to play well. He sometimes appeared to forget that football was a business and not just a game. His tearful reluctance to leave his beloved French club Olympique Marseille – the team he idolised as a child – to join Chelsea in a $30 million transfer (the most for an African player at the time) in 2004 revealed a certain naivety, almost treating his club as family rather than employer. The relationship between Drogba and José Mourinho, his Portuguese manager at Chelsea, also underlined this point. Mourinho wrote the foreword to Drogba’s autobiography, describing a special embrace and pledge of 422

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loyalty as the player was about to join Chelsea. As Mourinho noted after signing Drogba: ‘I see the qualities of power and speed. Also his control on the first touch and the way he fights – he’s a player who can achieve great success.’ The Portuguese coach regarded Didier as one of the best strikers in Europe along with Frenchman Thierry Henry and Brazilian Ronaldo. The Ivorian in turn considered the ‘Special One’ to be one of the best managers in the world, a clairvoyant soothsayer who kept faith in him after a difficult first season adjusting to life in England. Mourinho often defended Drogba against the rabid British media pack. After the victorious FA cup final in 2007, player and manager hugged each other and cried together. When Mourinho was sacked by the club’s erratic Russian billionaire oligarch owner, Roman Abramovich, months after this cup triumph, Didier was one of the few players to speak out publicly against the dismissal and was visibly angry enough to want to leave the club. Drogba’s anger has, however, sometimes got the better of him and hurt his team: he was sent off against Barcelona in a crucial Champions League game in 2005, and suspended for throwing a tantrum after losing a European semi­ final game to Barcelona in 2009. He has also sometimes been too thin-skinned, overreacting to criticism from the media and fans. After Mourinho left, he indiscreetly revealed tensions in the Chelsea camp to the media. Didier holds dual Ivorian and French citizenship and the love-hate relationship towards the mother country comes through strongly in his autobiography. Though he often feels an attachment to his adopted country and notes that he could have played for France instead of Côte d’Ivoire, he criticised the simplistic and biased coverage of the Ivorian civil war in the Gallic media, condemning the distorted official reporting of the killing of 50 Ivorian protesters in Abidjan by French soldiers in 2004. He also expressed anger at France’s continuing ‘patronising, neo-colonial policy’ towards its former colony, demanding that Côte d’Ivoire be left alone to make its own decisions free of pernicious French meddling. Drogba observed how America was becoming an alternative to France for many Ivorians, as a result of discredited Gallic policies in Africa. He also vented his spleen on irresponsible Ivorian politicians who foment ethnic divisions in his country, and expressed sadness at the departure of 8,000 French citizens from his country in 2004, many of whom he viewed as fellow Ivorians. Much as Liberia’s George Weah – a former African, European, and world footballer of the year – used football as a symbol of national unity during his country’s civil war of 1990–1997 (and unsuccessfully ran for president of the 423

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country in 2005), Drogba has sought to use his country’s national team – the ‘Elephants’ – to promote national reconciliation following Côte d’Ivoire’s own civil war, which erupted in 2002, ten days after Didier made his international debut. As Drogba noted: ‘when you score, nobody is asking which ethnic group the goal scorer comes from’. He insisted after winning the African footballer of the year award in 2006 that the national team visit the rebel-held capital of Bouaké and play a game there as a way of forging national unity and reconciliation. As Didier noted: ‘While the Elephants are fighting, Côte d’Ivoire can bandage its wounds.’ Qualifying for the World Cup in 2006 and 2010, Drogba and his teammates sought to provide succour and comfort to a nation that had endured years of civil conflict. Drogba’s biographer John McShane described his subject as ‘a genuine superstar revered with a deference almost befitting a god by his fellow countrymen and women’. Didier is treated as royalty in his country, with the presidential plane being put at his disposal to visit parts of Côte d’Ivoire. He is fully aware of his cult status in a country that reveres its greatest-ever footballer, and has sought to use this awe to speak out for national unity, calling on fighters to bid farewell to arms. He has also met President Laurent Gbagbo several times as an ambassador of peace. As Drogba rather immodestly put it: ‘I am no longer a football player, I am an apostle of peace, a bond between the north and the south.’ Didier was named a United Nations goodwill ambassador in 2007, only the third footballer to earn this honour. He has a keen sense of history, and is determined to leave a legacy almost as an obligation to his iconic status. He has preached the importance of education to the country’s youth, built a school in his father’s village, and set up a foundation to fight disease, with plans to build a hospital in Abidjan. For Drogba’s efforts, one of Africa’s greatest-ever footballers earned global recognition when he was named one of the hundred most influential people in the world by Time magazine in May 2010, appearing on its cover. Africa Review of Books, June 2010.

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Africa’s Golden Generation: Salah,

Mané, and Aubameyang

THE ENGLISH FOOTBALL Premier League is currently enjoying halcyon days with four English teams having contested the European Champions League (Liverpool vs Tottenham) on 1 June 2019 and the Europa Cup (Arsenal vs Chelsea), three days earlier. Six of the ten richest clubs in the world are English, and Premier League teams are estimated to spend 80% more than their competitors across Europe for equivalent talent. Liverpool, for example, splashed out £300 million on transfers and players’ salaries this season. The English like to boast that their league is the best in the world, despite the fact that its clubs had not, before last week, won the Champions League in seven years. They certainly have the richest and most competitive league but have, until this year, failed to dominate Europe. A major story of this season was undoubtedly the fact that three African players – Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah (Egypt) and Sadio Mané (Senegal), and Arsenal’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (Gabon) – shared the Golden Boot for the most league goals scored in the English season (22). All three played in Europe’s top two cup competitions last week, with Liverpool winning and Arsenal losing. Salah and Mané honed their skills in Africa before moving to Europe, while Aubameyang was born and grew up in Europe. Their triumph underlines the abundance of footballing talent across Africa: Salah is from North Africa, Mané from West Africa, and Aubameyang from Central Africa. Many rough footballing diamonds still remain to be unearthed on the continent. The 425

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story of these three individuals is clear proof of Africa’s impact on the most popular sport in the world. The 27-year-old Mohamed Salah – valued at over £100 million – also won the Golden Boot in England last year. He was voted African Footballer of the Year in 2017 and 2018, and FIFA’s third- best player in the world in 2018 (behind Real Madrid’s Luka Modric and Cristiano Ronaldo). Salah is renowned for his mazy runs, dribbling skills, and deadly finishing. He joined Swiss club Basel at the age of 20, before moving to Chelsea, where he had just three league appearances and struggled to adapt to the physicality of the English game. He played in Italy’s Serie A with Fiorentina and Roma, and it was after he joined Liverpool for €42 million in 2017 that he developed into a superstar, scoring a record 32 goals (43 in all competitions) in 2018, to lead his club to a second-place league finish (after Manchester City) and runner-up (to Real Madrid) in the European Champions League final. Salah has scored 71 goals in just 104 appearances for Liverpool. Nicknamed ‘the Egyptian King’ on Merseyside, he is widely idolised in Egypt, as evidenced by schools and streets named after him, and his ubiquitous image on many murals. He has led ‘the Pharaohs’ to the World Cup, Olympics, and the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon), which is to be hosted in his home country over the next two months. He has scored an impressive 39 goals in 62 games for the national team. Renowned for his humility and down-to-earthness, Salah is most comfortable with close friends that he grew up with, and shuns the bright lights. He is also known for his generous philanthropy in supporting social upliftment programmes in his home town of Nagrig. The 27-year-old Sadio Mané arrived in France to play for Metz at the age of 20. He struggled to adjust to playing in the snow and was withdrawn after 30 minutes in his first league game, leading to a flood of tears. Homesick and forlorn, he nearly gave up his dreams, but persevered. A sensitive and quiet soul, Mané again burst into tears after he missed a penalty in the Africa Cup of Nations quarter-final match for Senegal’s ‘Lions of Teranga’ against eventual winners Cameroon’s ‘Indomitable Lions’, in 2017. He has scored 16 goals for Senegal in 60 appearances, leading them also to Olympic and World Cup appearances. In the English league, Mané established his legend by scoring a 176-second hat-trick for Southampton in 2015, having earlier starred for Red Bull Salzburg in Austria. He is known for his close control, lightning pace, and intelligent creativity. It was after he joined Liverpool in 2016 for £34 million that his prodigious talent was finally realised. He has become a genuine superstar, though his quiet personality sometimes denies him the acclaim he deserves. As 426

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his German coach and father figure Jürgen Klopp noted, Mané sometimes lacks belief in his own incredible abilities. The Senegalese did not score in the 4–0 ‘miracle of Anfield’ victory over Barcelona in the Champions League semi-final, but he did inspire his team with steely determination. He has scored 59 goals in 122 Liverpool appearances, and is now valued at £76 million. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang – nicknamed ‘Auba’ – is valued at £67 million, £11 million more than the price when he joined Arsenal in 2018. With a mischievous toothy grin, the Gabonese was renowned at the start of his career with the AC Milan youth team for his speed and self-confidence. The 29-year­ old striker is also known as a prankster in the dressing room. He famously celebrated goals at Borussia Dortmund by donning Batman and Spiderman masks. Aubameyang rose to fame when he broke the German goal-scoring record by scoring in eight consecutive games for Borussia Dortmund in 2015, and also winning the African Footballer of the Year and Bundesliga Player of the Year awards in the same year. He scored 35 goals the following year, with several dazzling displays in the Champions League, and ended at Dortmund with 141 goals in 213 appearances. He already has an impressive 41 goals in just 64 Arsenal appearances. Like Thierry Henry, Aubemeyang’s legendary Antillean-French predecessor at Arsenal (with whom he shares the number 14 jersey), the Gabonese converted from being a winger to a centre forward. Early in their careers, critics accused both of possessing blistering pace but lacking deadly finishing. Aubameyang’s memorable hat-trick in Arsenal’s Europa Cup semi-final fired the Gunners into the final, and his assists have also been impressive. British journalist Barney Ronay described him as ‘the deadliest, most thrillingly old-school centre-forward in the Premier League’. The Gabonese is also the most economical striker in Europe, scoring the most goals with the fewest shots, and he has the best minutes-per­ goal ratio in Premier League history. After winning the Golden Boot with Salah and Mané, Aubameyang proudly noted: ‘We are representing Africa.’ His father, Pierre-François – the major inspiration in his life who instilled great self-belief in Pierre-Emerick – captained the Gabonese national team, as has his son. Aubameyang has scored 24 goals in 59 appearances for his country, leading ‘the Panthers’ to the Olympics and Afcon. Both Aubameyang and Salah idolised the Brazilian World Cup-winning striker Ronaldo as kids. Mané idolised Brazilian World Cup winner Ronaldinho. Both Mané and Salah are short in stature, shy personalities, and devout Muslims who prostrate in prayer, kissing the ground to enact the sujud while celebrating 427

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goals. All three superstars are part of Africa’s golden generation of footballers who have conquered the world by playing what Brazilian legend Pelé famously described as ‘the beautiful game’. The Guardian (Nigeria), 20 June 2019.

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The Golden Age of

West Indian Cricket

SOUTH AFRICAN CRICKETER Quinton de Kock’s politically inept decision not to ‘take the knee’ as an anti-racism gesture during the T20 cricket world cup game against the West Indies in October 2021 forces us to recall a golden age of West Indian dominance of the sport, when cricketing superstars championed antiracism causes.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Caribbean players had traditionally been derided as ‘Calypso cricketers’: entertaining and undisciplined, and prone to buckle easily under pressure. The greatest generation of West Indian cricketers of 1976–1995 shattered this myth. They reigned supreme during a period of decolonisation and anti-apartheid struggles in southern Africa, supported by many Caribbean countries and citizens. Between 1976 and 1986, the West Indies won 15 out of 17 test series. The team also became the best one-day side in the world, winning the cricket World Cup in 1975 and 1979, before losing its third consecutive final in 1983. Between 1975 and 1987, the West Indies won an impressive 74% of one-day international matches. The team captains of the all-conquering sides, Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards, openly embraced the important pan-African symbolism of their victories. Lloyd unapologetically advocated anti-apartheid causes, and was unequivocal 429

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in an address to the United Nations: ‘Racism is contrary to the United Nations Charter; it is contrary to humanity … I consider it my duty to add my voice from the perspective of the captaincy of the West Indies cricket team to the chorus of condemnation of the system of apartheid.’ The Guyanese became the first West Indian cricketer to win 100 test caps, eventually scoring 7,515 runs at an average of nearly 47, including 19 centuries. He was a father figure for his players, enjoying their fierce loyalty. Trinidadian British broadcaster Trevor McDonald noted about Lloyd: ‘He had come to represent everything that was solid, durable, responsible and honourable about West Indian cricket.’ The Guyanese masterminded the revolution in Caribbean cricket. Having suffered from a destructive Australian four-pronged fastbowling attack – Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson, Gary Gilmour, and Max Walker – in the 1975–1976 Test series, on his return home he scoured the Caribbean, seeking out fast bowlers. Lloyd then unleashed on the world what became known as ‘the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’: Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Colin Croft, and Malcolm Marshall. They became the most fearsome pacemen in world cricket, raining down bouncers at speeds of 90 miles an hour. The West Indian bowlers intimidated batsmen into submission even before they took to the pitch. The team also had incredible batsmen in Richards, Lloyd, Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, and Alvin Kallicharran.

The Windrush Wars The test series in England during the long, hot summer of 1976 was when the West Indies had the first opportunity to unleash their fearsome bowling attack and incredible batsmen against their former colonial master. A rampaging Holding and Roberts took 56 of the 84 wickets that fell in a 3–0 series victory. Viv Richard’s superlative displays (829 runs at an average of 118.42), and Michael Holding’s explosive 28 wickets in four tests for an average of 12 runs, gave the long-suffering West Indian community in Britain – the ‘Windrush generation’ of immigrants – a great sense of pride that had been denied them in broader British society. The Caribbean cricketers had been motivated to succeed by the condescending comments of the South African-born England captain, Tony Greig, who noted that the West Indians were overrated, and that he would make them ‘grovel’. Some regarded the comment as racist, with the image of a subservient dog grovelling before its dominant Master. The West Indian team 430

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used this as extra motivation to send a message to the mother country and its former ‘white dominions’. This was the context for the overwhelming displays of black pride by West Indians attending tests at the Oval, Lord’s, Old Trafford, and Nottingham. Senior Caribbean players persistently reminded their younger counterparts never to forget that they were playing for their often maligned compatriots living in England. Gordon Greenidge had a personal grudge in this series, having lived in England from the age of eight and experienced widespread racism at school. The formidable West Indian team again beat England 5–0 in 1984–1985, leading to the famous ‘Blackwash’ headline. Richards, HA Gomes, and Greenidge excelled with the bat, while speed merchants Joel Garner and Malcolm Marshall performed magic with the ball.

The Pied Piper of Pan-Africanism The Viv Richards era between 1985 and 1995 was even more impressive than Lloyd’s, as he never lost a test series, despite having to rebuild the team with players like Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh, and Patrick Patterson. Richards’s Somerset teammate and close friend, England all-rounder Ian Botham, paid the Antiguan the ultimate tribute in describing him as a better batsman than the legendary Australian Don Bradman. The Antiguan became the first global superstar of cricket in the television age. He coolly chewed gum, as he effortlessly sauntered his way to countless test centuries. Richards was a supreme batsman and problem-solver. As with legendary Panamanian Jamaican George Headley, his sighting of the ball and movement of his feet were outstanding. He was totally fearless against diverse bowlers (refusing to wear protective helmets), and he had a range of spectacular strokes. Politically, Richards, the ‘Master Blaster’, was the ultimate Pied Piper of pan-Africanism, who spoke through his bat – which he described as a sword – in uncompromising anti-colonial tones. He literally wore his anti-racism on his sleeves, with his red, gold and green armband representing the blood shed by his people and the wealth that had been stolen from Africa and its diaspora. As he bluntly put it: ‘I believe very strongly in the black man asserting himself in this world.’ Richards thus embraced the Black Power movement in the US. He listened to Bob Marley’s ‘battlefield music’ to relax before games, and proudly embraced the widely marginalised Rastafarian community. Richards strongly believed that his team was on a sacred mission to prove the equality of black people with the rest of the world, bluntly stating that ‘playing 431

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cricket is in itself a political action’. He clearly explained why he turned down a reported $1 million to play in apartheid South Africa: ‘As long as the black majority in South Africa remains suppressed by the apartheid system, I could never come to terms with playing cricket there. I would be letting down my own people back in Antigua and it would destroy my self-esteem.’ The Antiguan thus used cricket to wage a broader liberation struggle: ‘I would like to think that I carried my bat for the liberation of Africa and other oppressed people everywhere.’

From Calypso to Colossus Between February 1980 and March 1995, the West Indian cricket team went unbeaten in test series, becoming one of the greatest teams in the history of sport. The fact that the West Indians maintained their dominance over two decades finally shattered the negative stereotypes of a lack of organisational discipline among black people across the globe. The Caribbean Colossus had finally trumped the West Indian Calypso. The Gleaner (Jamaica), 7 November 2021.

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Jesse Owens’s Race

ACCORDING TO GREEK mythology, the origins of the recently concluded Olympic Games (August 2016) lie in the gods on Mount Olympus engaging in sporting contests, and the ancient games commemorated the patriarch deity, Zeus. Since 1896, the children of the world have come out to play every four years to demonstrate the power of sport in uniting the globe. Perhaps, the most dramatic modern Olympic moment occurred 80 years ago in Berlin. A 22-year-old African American, Jesse Owens, shattered German chancellor Adolf Hitler’s myth of white Aryan invincibility by winning four gold medals. Berlin was to be Hitler’s showpiece Olympics to mark the rebirth of Germany as a great power and the triumph of Nazi ideology. Owens instead pissed on Hitler’s parade, turning out one of the greatest performances yet witnessed. These events were immortalised in controversial German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 epic, Olympia, which had ironically been commissioned by Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry to demonstrate German athletic prowess. Instead, the documentary perfectly captured Owens’s graceful, almost effortless upright running style and lightning-quick, short strides as he won the 100 metres and the 100-metres relay (both world records), the 200 metres and the long jump (both Olympic records). The biopic Race, which chronicled Owens’s life story, was released in 2016. He was born into poverty in Alabama. His sharecropper father was part of the ‘Great Migration’ of blacks from the segregated South in the 1920s. The family

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ended up in Cleveland, where Owens joined the Ohio State athletics team. Living in Depression-era America, Owens was denied access to a scholarship due to his race and had to work four jobs. When he travelled with his team, he was forced to eat in separate restaurants and sleep in separate hotels. Despite these obstacles, Owens established his legend a year before the Olympics, breaking three world records (long jump, 220-yard sprint and 220­ yard hurdles), and equalling another (110-yard dash) in a virtuoso 45-minute display of greatness. The movie Race focuses on Owens’s relationship with his tough-talking, temperamental white coach, Larry Snyder. The moral dilemma about whether to legitimise Hitler’s propaganda games or boycott them is tackled in the movie. The enormous social pressures on the young Owens are evident when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) urges him to boycott the Olympics. In the end, Jesse shows great self-belief and character in deciding that the best way to fight the prejudice of his home country and Hitler was to triumph in Berlin. Race also centres on a crucial friendship between Owens and German athlete Carl ‘Luz’ Long, who, in the pressured cauldron of the competition in Berlin, sportingly provides Owens with advice in the long jump that helped the American defeat his German rival. As the German was sent to fight for his country in the Second World War, he wrote an emotional letter to Owens, saying that he feared he would not survive the war, and urging him to visit his son in Germany and tell him about their friendship – which Owens did after the war, in which Luz died on the Western front. Ironically, while Owens lives in a racist country that denies blacks their most basic rights, he travels to the heart of Nazism in Berlin and is widely feted as a superstar, able to stay in the same accommodation as his colleagues. Like another great Olympian, Muhammad Ali, three decades later, even after returning from the games, Owens continues to suffer the stifling racism of his home country. US president Franklin Roosevelt failed even to acknowledge Owens’s remarkable achievement. Vindictive American athletics authorities would remove Jesse’s sporting licence for refusing to compete in a European tour. He thus tragically resorted to running against racehorses, and struggled financially before succumbing to lung cancer in 1980 at the age of 66. It took nearly five decades before another great African American, Carl Lewis, repeated Owens’s remarkable feat by winning four gold medals in the same events at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. 434

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Owens was honoured with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, had streets named after him in Cleveland and Berlin, a statue erected in Ohio, and a memorial park and museum dedicated to him in Alabama. He remains one of the greatest Olympians of all time, and Berlin became the most iconic example of the triumph of sports over politics. Business Day (South Africa), 22 August 2016.

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Jonah Lomu: Rugby’s First Global

Superstar

JONAH LOMU, WHO recently died at the age of 40 in Auckland, New Zealand, was the first global superstar of rugby union. He was a child of Tongan immigrants; his father, Semisi, was a factory worker and his mother, Hepi, a homemaker. He was sent back to Tonga from New Zealand at the age of one to be brought up by an aunt for six years. On his return, Lomu had a tough childhood in a crime-ridden south Auckland neighbourhood. His domestic situation was volatile, with his alcoholic father frequently beating him, his mother and his siblings. After one such incident in which his mother was abused, Lomu threw his dad across the room and was expelled from the family home. He would not speak to his father again for years, reconciling with him only shortly before Semisi’s death in 2012. It was at the Methodist Wesley College boarding school that Lomu found the stability and structure that allowed his talents to flourish. He excelled as an athlete and channelled the rage he felt for his father into rugby. He went on to play for New Zealand at under-17, under-19 and under-21 levels, before making a spectacular entry into international rugby with his outstanding performances for New Zealand at the 1994 Hong Kong Sevens. Guided by his Welsh manager, Phil Kingsley Jones, Lomu went on to become the youngest All Black at the age of 19, a year before the 1995 World Cup in South Africa, where he established his legend. At that event, a global audience saw the blistering pace and brute strength of the All Blacks’ phenomenon: a colossal 20-year-old, six feet nine, 118 kg left­ 436

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winger with thunder thighs and huge biceps, who ran the 100 metres in 10.8 seconds. Never before had the game seen such a devastating combination of bulldozer and gazelle. He revolutionised the position of winger and was named the player of the tournament at the 1995 World Cup. The Kiwis lost the final to South Africa after a mysterious food-poisoning incident. Lomu’s four tries in the semi-final against England are, however, still widely considered to have been the greatest individual performance seen in world rugby, as he ran around, at and through a hapless English defence. Lomu drew large audiences to the sport and was credited with providing the impetus for the professionalism of rugby union. A PlayStation would be named after him, and he was immortalised in wax at Madame Tussaud’s in London. During the World Cup final in South Africa, Lomu realised how popular he had become only after he went to a mall to buy toothpaste and a large crowd followed him. He needed security to escort him back to his hotel. He would star again in the 1999 World Cup, helping the All Blacks to reach the semi-final, in which he again scored a memorable try against France, running through about seven players like a knife slicing through bread. Lomu ended his two world cups with a record 15 tries, eventually scoring 37 tries in 63 internationals and winning the Sevens World Cup for New Zealand in 2001. By this time, a rare kidney disease – nephrotic syndrome – had become debilitating. After a kidney transplant in 2004 failed seven years later, Lomu had to go on six-hourly dialysis three times a week. Following several unsuccessful come-backs, he was forced to accept the sad reality that his career was over at 27, when he should have been at his peak. He dedicated himself to coaching, supported children’s charities and served as an inspiration to numerous black Polynesian athletes. Lomu’s family life was somewhat tempestuous, and he married three times in his short life. He met his first wife, South African Tanya Rutter, at a braai (barbecue) during the 1995 World Cup. He was married to Fiona Taylor for five years from 2003, before marrying Nadene Quirk in 2011 and having two sons – Brayley and Dhyreille – with her. Although ferocious on the pitch, the warm, self-effacing and sometimes shy Lomu remained a gentle giant off it. His humility was widely admired. He kept his feet firmly on the ground, and never forgot his origins. As Lomu himself memorably noted: ‘Tonga runs deep in me, like still waters. You can’t escape your roots. It’s like a calling and it has shaped the way I am.’ Business Day (South Africa), 30 November 2015. 437

98

The Greatness of Rafa Nadal

SPANISH TENNIS SUPERSTAR Rafa Nadal’s recent victory at the French Open (June 2022) was his 14th at Roland Garros and 22nd Grand Slam victory, taking him – at 36 years old – two ahead of his ‘Big Three’ arch-rivals: Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. It is incredible to think how many more majors he might have won if Nadal had not been forced to miss 11 Grand Slams through injury. The 40-year-old Federer, recovering from a knee injury, is unlikely to win any more majors. Only the 35-year-old Djokovic could yet surpass Nadal’s record. Rafa’s achievements also include winning all four Grand Slams at least twice, two US Open titles, two Wimbledon, and two Australian titles. He won Olympic gold medals in singles and doubles, and has also lifted five Davis cups with Spain.

The Boy from Mallorca Rafael Nadal Parera grew up in a five-storey building on the Spanish island of Mallorca, with his businessman father Sebastián, homemaker mother Ana María, and younger sister María Isabel. His footballer uncle Migual Ángel played for Mallorca, Barcelona, and the Spanish national team, granting young Rafa access to his Brazilian Barcelona idol, Ronaldo. Another uncle, Toni, a tennis coach, recognised his nephew’s natural tennis talent at the age of four. Four years later, the precocious Rafa won a regional under-12 championship. The natural right­ hander was converted into a left-handed tennis player by his uncle. By 12, Rafa had won Spanish and European tennis championships, though he never gave up his passion for football, often watching his beloved Real Madrid, 438

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including during the recent Champions League final victory against Liverpool in Paris. He travelled to Johannesburg in 2010 to see the Spanish football team lift the World Cup. Nadal turned professional at 15 in 2001, helping Spain defeat the US at the Davis Cup three years later.

An Explosive Decade (2005–2014) It was in 2005 that Rafa – as a raw 19-year-old – exploded onto the global tennis scene by winning the French Open, rising to world no. 3. Wearing his trademark bandana, he resembled more an Aztec warrior than a Spanish conquistador. The hallmark of Nadal’s game has been that of a master matador with the ferociousness of a prowling tiger and a never-say-die attitude. He unleashes killer forehand groundstrokes with heavy backspin, and a sledgehammer double-handed backhand. With quick footwork, uncanny anticipation, and using devastating speed to cover the court, he is a supreme problem-solver and one of the game’s greatest returners of serve. He is consistently magnanimous in victory, and gracious in defeat. At 24, Nadal became the youngest winner of the career Grand Slam of all four titles. After winning two more French Open titles, Nadal met Federer at Wimbledon in 2008, having lost to him in the final the year before. In one of the greatest matches in tennis history, Rafa vanquished his great rival in a gripping five-set match that lasted nearly five hours. He finally became world no. 1 following this victory. A year later, Nadal won his first Australian Open. In 2010, he won his second Wimbledon crown and his first US Open, confirming he was more than a clay court specialist. By 2012, he had broken legendary Swede Björn Borg’s record of six Roland Garros titles. An eighth French Open title and second US crown were achieved a year later.

Overcoming Trials and Tribulations (2015–2022) Perhaps more than any tennis superstar, Nadal has had to suffer through multiple injuries that have often kept him sidelined for months. He has always responded with stoic self-belief and an indomitable spirit. Sounding almost religious in promoting suffering before salvation, Rafa noted: ‘I learned during my career to enjoy suffering.’ The Spaniard described his credo, deeply inculcated from childhood by Uncle Toni: ‘Endure, put up with whatever comes your way, learn to overcome weakness and pain, push yourself to breaking point but never cave in.’ His incredible resilience is evident in the fact that he has always come back stronger, and found a way to keep winning. 439

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Nadal’s all-action swashbuckling style inevitably resulted in many injuries. He was incapacitated for much of 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, and 2022. The injuries have involved damaged ribs, back, wrist, appendix, hip, knee, and abdomen. He recently had to take painkillers to numb his left foot before matches at the French Open. Diagnosed with the degenerative Müller-Weiss syndrome, which has afflicted him since he was 17, he has just undergone ablation surgery, with a needle inserted into his nerves. It, however, remains unclear whether this can be a long-term solution. Rafa failed to win a Grand Slam in 2015 and 2016. Only in 2017 did he again triumph at Roland Garros, adding the US Open crown three months later. He would triumph in Paris again in 2019, 2020, and 2022, and his Australian victory in 2022 was unexpected, as he had missed most of 2021 through injury. Many have prematurely written Nadal’s sporting obituary, and time and again he has proved that these rumours were greatly exaggerated. Even in the late autumn of his career, Rafa has kept improving: developing a stronger serve, strengthening his serve-and-volley game, giving up on lost causes rather than chasing down every ball, and improving his drop shots.

A Legacy of Greatness Nadal’s legacy will undoubtedly be defined by his titanic rivalry with Federer and Djokovic, each of whom he has met in nine Grand Slam finals. The ‘Big Three’ have played 61 out of 74 (82%) majors since 2003, underlining their dominance of a glorious generation. Despite much hype about Federer having no weaknesses, Nadal was clearly his nemesis, dominating him in many of their matches, and ending up with a 24–16 head-to-head in victories, including 10–4 in Grand Slams. Nadal was the only player to have beaten Federer on clay, grass, and hardcourts at majors. His ruthless 6–1, 6–3, 6–0 demolition of the Swiss maestro at the 2008 French Open final nearly reduced Federer to tears. The crude stereotypes contrasting Federer’s balletic poetry to Nadal’s brute force have often been contradicted by the Spaniard’s sublime artistry and the Swiss’s aggressive slugging. If Nadal was Federer’s nemesis, Djokovic has clearly been Nadal’s, with a 30–29 win record over the Spaniard, though Nadal leads 11–7 at Grand Slams. The Serb uniquely defeated the Spaniard seven consecutive times between 2014 and 2017, achieving a straight-sets obliteration at the 2019 Australian Open final, during which Nadal won just eight games. Rafa gained his revenge in the following year’s French Open at which Djokovic was wiped off the court in three 440

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sets, winning just seven games. In the 2022 French Open quarter-final, both played exquisite tennis. Djokovic described Rafa’s intimidatory intensity before matches, noting: ‘It creates the challenge in your mind that I’m going in with a gladiator … a mental giant and also a physical giant.’ Now that he has won more Grand Slams than any other player, while winning at least one major for 15 years including 112 victories and only 3 defeats at the French Open, and having the highest career match-winning ratio of 83%, the increasingly brooding Nadal’s legacy as the greatest player in tennis history seems assured. The Guardian (Nigeria), 15 June 2022.

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The Age of Hakeem

THE DREAM EPITOMISES the very fabric of American society. The ‘American Dream’ after all entails a dogged but often naive belief that anyone can rise from rags to riches through adherence to the Protestant work ethic and a healthy dose of luck. Hakeem Olajuwon, the 32-year-old Nigerian American basketball superstar, aptly nicknamed ‘The Dream’ by an adoring US public (which christened its Olympic basketballers the ‘dream team’), is the very embodiment of such a meteoric rise from grass to grace. Hakeem grew up in a traditional Muslim home in the sprawling city of Lagos. In a soccer-crazy nation of 90 million, he inevitably started out as a goalkeeper (doubtless responsible for his agility and dexterous ball-handling skills) before turning to basketball as a teenager. He honed his talents in the sweltering heat of the baking hard courts of Rowe Park in Yaba. The 7-foot giant was derided as a ‘beanpole’ and dismissed as a ‘freak’, but he remained true to his dream of one day playing with the very best in the world’s toughest league, America’s National Basketball Association (NBA). Nobody is laughing now: today, the freakish beanpole has risen against seemingly insurmountable odds to become a household name in the US, where he is widely acknowledged as one of the most gifted players to have graced the hallowed courts of the NBA, the undisputed mecca of basketball leagues where only the crème de la crème parade their talents. Olajuwon left Nigeria in 1983 as a raw 20-year-old to take up a sports scholarship at the University of Houston in Texas. While successfully striving

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towards a degree in mass communications, he found the time to guide his university to two collegiate championship finals. But by then, he had already established a glowing reputation as the most exciting prospect in the multimillion-dollar NCAA league, earning himself the prestigious no. 1 draft pick even above players like Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing. Twelve years after reaching America’s shores, Hakeem has just guided his Houston Rockets to their second consecutive ‘world’ championship (Americans have a parochial habit of referring to all their national sports leagues as world championships). Hakeem turned in a dazzling virtuoso display of breath-taking prowess, averaging an impressive 32.8 points in the series and winning the most valuable player (MVP) award for a second consecutive year – a feat achieved before only by the legendary Michael Jordan. Playing the last two games on Houston’s home court, the ‘Summit’, Hakeem proved himself to be the inimitable basketball Zeus on Mount Olympus. The team’s Herculean efforts included defeating the league’s top four teams, winning nine out of twelve away games and lifting the title itself with a resounding 4-0 victory. The Houston Rockets outperformed the Utah Jazz, outshone the Phoenix Suns, out-spiked the San Antonio Spurs, and finally made the Orlando Magic disappear. After his championship exploits, one might have expected to see in Hakeem the gloating triumphalism of a conqueror. Instead he was magnanimous in his victory, quickly going over to embrace the Orlando Magic’s vanquished 20-year-old sensation Shaquille O’Neal, and responding with subdued joy in post-game interviews, thanking Allah and hoping for more respect for his team from fans, who until recently were still mourning the departure of Michael Jordan. His modesty and humility never fail to astound Americans, more accustomed to the brash and boastful basketballers parading ‘attitude’ and ‘trash-talking’ on and off the courts. Amidst the euphoria, Hakeem has retained a sense of reality. The hype and razzmatazz attached to superstardom have never gone to his head and he has unbelievable awareness of where he is going. ‘You get all this acclamation, but you’re still humble. You are disciplined, and when you have that, you have peace of mind,’ he says philosophically. Hakeem is soft-spoken and extremely unpretentious. Unlike many Nigerian athletes who go abroad and return home with dripping jerry curls and fake American accents, he has remained true to his roots. He has never forgotten his family back home, buying a house for his mother, educating his siblings, and sending money and sportswear to former teammates in Nigeria. During the last football World Cup played in the US in 1994, he displayed his deep-rooted 443

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patriotism by coming to watch Nigeria’s Super Eagles play in Boston. I was fortunate enough to shake his massive hand and was struck by his warmth and humility, as he smilingly pressed flesh and patiently obliged with his autograph. A sharp dresser, he was a towering and immaculate figure in his specially tailored suit. Hakeem’s most recent exploits have already earned an increase in his endorsements from $1m to $3m after recent deals with Uncle Ben’s and Taco Bell. This sum is still far below O’Neal’s $16m and Jordan’s $30m. But it is clear that Olajuwon has steadfastly refused to sacrifice his core beliefs at the altar of consumer-driven avarice. After the NBA finals, he left for Europe as the NBA’s goodwill ambassador to spread the gospel of basketball. On the way, he stopped off in Mecca to give thanks to the Almighty, and to renew once more his pledge to the religion that has provided him the inner peace to enjoy his successes and the humanity to share his rewards. After the era of Bird, Magic, and Jordan, the stuff of which dreams are made has been in short supply in the NBA. Hakeem rose to the occasion and led his team to perform the miraculous feat of winning two consecutive NBA titles. The last two seasons have clearly shown that the dream has come true; the age of Hakeem has finally arrived. West Africa (London), 31 July – 6 August 1995.

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Flaming Flamingo: The Life and

Times of Israel Adebajo

ISRAEL ADEBAYO OGUNYEADE Adebajo was born on 21 January 1920 in the south­ western Nigerian town of Imobi in the fishing district of Epe in Lagos State, which had been the capital of the Ijebu Kingdom in the eighteenth century. He was born under British colonial rule, just six years after the amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria by Lord Lugard. Israel died 50 years ago today (25 July 2019) in London, aged just 49, leaving behind fourteen children and four wives. The fact that Adebajo achieved so much in such a short life was credit to his innate entrepreneurial gifts and visionary sports administration skills. Israel’s grandfather, Jeremiah, was a missionary who had brought Christianity to Imobi. He thus grew up in a Christian home, imbibing values such as the Protestant work ethic and the dignity of labour. His father died when he was 14, forcing him to assume family responsibilities at an early age. He travelled to Lagos from Epe by boat in 1939 at the age of 19 on the eve of the Second World War, with the colonial government having not invested much in Nigeria’s road infrastructure. Israel slept on the floor of the home of his uncle, Pa Taiwo, who worked for the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC). He attended St Peter’s Church School in Faji (having earlier studied at Epe Grammar School), and also undertook secretarial studies. He, however, never went to university, and was a self-made man.

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Israel at Work: A Pioneering Entrepreneur Israel became a typist with the Daily Times in 1942, banging away on an old typewriter in a dark room, while also working as a vendor. To earn extra income, he used relatives to sell paper and stationery at bus stops in Nigeria’s bustling capital of Lagos. While working for the newspaper, Israel noticed that the firm always needed stationery, and he set up a business to supply the Daily Times. His first employees were his first wife, Olabisi, and his perennially loyal cousin Christopher Adelaja, popularly known as ‘Brother Teacher’, in whom Israel had complete trust. As the business grew, Adebajo set up the Nigerian Office Stationery Supply (NOSS) Stores in 1944 in Willoughby Street on Lagos Island. The British colonial government had practised a social apartheid since the 1920s, with only Europeans allowed to live in the segregated suburb of Ikoyi, interacting with Nigerians largely in the commercial hub of Lagos Island. By 1950, Israel had built his first house in Rotimi Street in the Lagos district of Surulere, moving from Odufege Street on Lagos Island. He was able to rent out property in Rotimi Street to the British colonial army in a lucrative deal. By 1956, he travelled to England to meet with his suppliers – such as Rexel – and became the sole agent for important stationery products and office equipment such as paper, pens, and writing pads, establishing a monopoly over carbon paper. He also set up the Nigeria Paper Converters Limited as a manufacturing arm. His biggest inspiration and role model was John Dickinson, the British stationer who – having supplied paper to the East India Company at the height of the industrial revolution – set up a company in 1804 to manufacture paper from pulp in mills using a machine he had designed. Dickinson’s new methods would help transform the printing and publishing industry, making text and exercise books much cheaper to produce. Israel also wanted to emulate Dickinson by establishing a manufacturing company in Apapa’s Creek Road to make envelopes – a dream that remained unrealised at the time of his death in 1969. The British colonial government was also a large customer of NOSS Stores, and British Crown agents worked closely with the company, paying for goods in bulk. By the time Adebajo returned from England in 1956, he had acquired three houses. He also built a country home in the village of Naforija near Epe. His grandfather, Jeremiah, had led the building of St Michael’s Church in Imobi, where he lies buried. His brother Alfred later managed the church, which Israel helped to furnish. Israel himself was active in the St Peter’s Church on Lagos Island (where he had gone to school), donating a marble baptistery in 1968. Shortly after Nigeria’s independence in October 1960, Adebajo had the 446

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vision to build an office and factory in the Lagos district of Apapa, which was then largely swamp land. His office on Warehouse Road was the first building in the area, and the factory produced toilet rolls and accounting books. Israel had also built residences in North Avenue and Kofo Abayomi Street in Apapa by 1964, further investing in property in nearby Calcutta Crescent. He owned five houses on Martins Street in Yaba, an area which had previously been inhabited by swamp dwellers. Adebajo was a workaholic who was in a hurry to conquer new empires, almost as if he knew he did not have much time to live. By this time, he had purchased two homes in London’s Brent Cross and Chiswick areas, and several of his children were attending private schools in England: his daughter Adeola was the first African to attend Headington, followed by her sister Yanju, while sons Kunle, Leke, and Niyi went to Skippers Hill and Dover College. The religious Israel had expressed the hope that some of his children might one day study at Jesus College, Cambridge. Like many Nigerian fathers, he never really sat down with his children to talk to them about his life’s struggles and successes. NOSS Stores – with branches across Nigeria – had paid-up capital in 1969 valued at over £100,000 (about £1.4 million in today’s money). Adebajo was now able to indulge his passion for cars by buying Jaguars, a Pontiac, and a Cadillac. On his 40th birthday in January 1960, the high priest of highlife music, Victor Olaiya, entertained invited guests at his home on Rotimi Street. Israel was also wealthy enough to embark on a world cruise in 1962 that took in Egypt, Australia, and America, sending his children postcards along the way. His generosity was legendary, gifting houses to family and friends, and even supporting strangers seeking financial assistance. He was widely praised for his intelligence, warmth, and humility, consistently refusing to take a chieftaincy title and be addressed as ‘Chief ’.

Israel at Play: Super Stores Israel Adebajo had always been a sports fanatic, and was a member of the Island Club where he played tennis. He was also a founding member of Lagos’s Metropolitan Club. He visited the racecourse on Lagos Island with his sons to watch horse racing. He befriended, Alfred Osula, who became the first Nigerian editor of the Daily Times, and, from him, he bought land in the Lagos district of Agege where he built a soccer stadium. Israel would establish his own football club in 1958, having bought Oluwole Philips Football Club, which he transformed into Stationery Stores Football Club (SSFC). He then ploughed 447

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profits from the company into the new club. But the club was not just a pastime: it was skilfully used to market the company and its products. At this time, it was mostly large companies like Leventis, the United Africa Company (UAC), the Nigerian Railway Corporation, and the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN) that could afford to own football clubs in Nigeria. It was, though, unusual for an individual to own such a major club, and have his name and company so closely associated with it as ‘the Adebajo Babes’. Israel often came late to games at Onikan Stadium (former King George V Stadium) in Lagos – then the mecca of Nigerian football – due to a hypertensive condition and nervousness that his team might lose. Borrowing the logo from a Brazilian team of a flamingo, the players of Stationery Stores – nicknamed the ‘Flaming Flamingos’ for igniting pitches with their exciting play – were decked out in a yellow jersey with maroon stripes, and the round logo of ‘SSFC’ with a flamingo emblazoned in the middle of the stripe. They also wore yellow shorts with yellow handkerchiefs hanging around their necks. These colourful outfits added to the glamour and flamboyance of Stationery Stores in the city that revels in repeating the common refrain ‘Eko for Show’. The team played an attractive brand of flowing, fluent, and attacking football which Lagosians quickly embraced. Stores’ main rivals in Lagos were ECN, Julius Berger, Railways, and Leventis, as the club started dominating the Lagos Challenge Cup. Israel was determined to end Ghana’s dominance of West African football, and Stationery Stores was the first Nigerian team to play in the Africa Cup of Champion Clubs in 1968. Adebajo was a pioneering pan-African, employing players from Ghana, Togo, Dahomey (now Benin), and other West African countries. Friendlies were organised with teams like Ghana’s Asante Kotoko. A decade before the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was born in 1975 through the vision of another prominent Nigerian – Adebayo Adedeji – Adebajo was already pioneering the free movement of labour across the subregion. The man who washed the team’s jerseys – ‘Baba Wash and Press’ – was himself a Togolese national. Israel was also a competent, passionate, and generous sports administrator. His career in this sector was impressive, transferring his management skills from his business to the arena of sports. He served on the board of the Lagos Football Association, and was treasurer of the Nigerian Football Association (NFA) from 1958 until his death in 1969. The NFA oversaw the building of the National Stadium in Lagos’s Surulere district in 1961. Subsequent Nigerian sports administrators, however, allowed the stadium to fall into an embarrassing 448

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state of disrepair, and it closed in 2004. Adebajo’s era of sports administrators seemed a far cry from today’s largely venal, incompetent, and corrupt crop of administrators running Nigerian sports. He generously imported the special jerseys used by the national football team – the ‘Green Eagles’ – during the 1968 Olympic qualifiers. In 1965, he had also created the Youth Sports Federation of Apapa (YSFA), consistently championing the cause of youth development. The all-conquering Stores team, which won two Challenge cups in a row in 1967 and 1968, had players that have since become legends of the Nigerian game and part of the country’s sporting pantheon: acrobatic goalkeepers Peter Fregene and Inua Lawal Rigogo (nicknamed the ‘Flying Cat’ by Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah), Tony ‘World 2’ Igwe, Segun ‘Rock of Gibraltar’ Olumodeji, Peter ‘Eusébio’ Anieke, Sam Opone, Muyiwa ‘Lucky Boy’ Oshode, Willie Andrews, Baba Alli, and Mohammed Lawal. Nine members of this team famously represented Nigeria at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, playing to a creditable 3–3 draw against Brazil. The support of Stationery Stores in Lagos was fanatical, and many have compared it to a cult, even a religion. As the most well-supported team in the ethnically cosmopolitan city, Stores also sought to unite diverse ethnic and class groups for a common cause in the nation’s capital, particularly during its own halcyon days, even as the Nigerian civil raged between 1967 and 1970.

Israel’s Last Days: So Much to Do, So Little Time Israel’s death in July 1969 was a shock to his family, friends, and fans. He fell ill on Palm Sunday in April 1969, and became increasingly fatigued. He was eventually diagnosed as suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. A team of doctors – led by Ekpo Eyo and Aderonmi Laja – attended him. He started working increasingly from home, dictating letters to his private secretary, and going occasionally to the office. As he observed his health deteriorating, Israel – renowned for his meticulousness – went to his lawyer, Adeyanju Osijo, by the end of May 1969 to ask him to start preparing a will. He signed the will in his NOSS Stores office – witnessed by two staff members – on 25 June, exactly a month before his death. He asked that the will be back-dated to his birthday on 21 January, as this would be his birthday gift to his wives and children. The lawyer kept a copy of the will, and deposited copies with Standard and Barclays banks on the instruction of the testator. On 24 June, one of the sick man’s wives, Irene, organised a sara (thanksgiving prayer meal) attended by Israel’s brother Luke and some office staff. 449

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Three days later, he visited his wife, Adunni, to consult on naming his lastborn child, Adefemi Mofolorunso, born just four days earlier. Advised to seek more specialised treatment abroad, he left Nigeria on 28 June 1969, never to return alive. On the same day as his departure for London, he went personally to Standard Bank in Apapa to procure traveller’s cheques for his trip. He was admitted to the Royal Free Hospital on arrival in London for about three weeks, discharged, and readmitted. He stayed part of the time with his sister Florence Odunsi, who visited him in hospital every day. Sheila Sherlock – an expert in liver diseases – was the doctor in charge of his care at the hospital. She reported Israel’s death on the morning of 25 July. Adebajo’s funeral was a huge affair, with throngs of people and footballers of Stationery Stores juggling the ball along the route as part of the large cortège accompanying the hearse to the burial site in his country home in Naforija. Musicians composed elegies, with the most famous being juju superstar Sunny Ade and his Green Spot Band’s song ‘Late Israel Adebajo’. Israel was buried near his parents’ graves. A striking large white marble statue in his image – clad in traditional flowing robes with his signature tall upright cap and long chain hanging around his neck – was erected above the grave on the first anniversary of his death in July 1970.

Israel’s Legacy: Life without the Founder As earlier noted, Israel Adebajo was a polygamist, who had four wives and fourteen children. As is typical in such cases once the patriarch departs, the feuding soon began, as the glue that had kept the family together came unstuck. A 1971 landmark court case pitched two legal giants against each other in a Clash of the judicial Titans: Kehinde Sofola was counsel for the defence, while Rotimi Williams was counsel for the prosecution. Legendary Oxford-trained chief justice of Lagos state John Idowu Conrad Taylor added to the drama, delivering a magisterial judgment that has since been studied in legal classrooms across Nigeria. The crux of the case revolved around Israel Adebajo’s wife Irene’s legal team arguing that her husband was not of sound mind when he made his will. They therefore requested that the document be declared null and void, arguing that Israel Adebajo had died intestate. Judge Taylor, however, in his final judgment, declared that the document was ‘the last will of a free and capable testator’. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, before being dismissed by Chief Justice Taslim Elias. But the judicial process adversely affected the reputation of the company, scaring off potential investors. 450

FLAMING FLAMINGO: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ISRAEL ADEBAJO

Israel Adebajo’s legacy is remarkable as a pre-independence entrepreneur and founder of one of the first privately owned football clubs in Nigeria. None of the previous clubs had the large following of Stationery Stores. Even when compared internationally, his achievements were impressive. Though the Fiatowning Agnelli family in Italy bought Juventus Football Club in 1923, television mogul Silvio Berlusconi took over AC Milan only in 1986. In the Nigerian context, it was only in the 1980s that business tycoons Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu and Moshood Abiola established successful football clubs with large followings. But both the company and the club fell on hard times following the death of their founder. Many members of Stores’ double Challenge Cup-winning team left the club, as funding and bonuses dried up, and management became less efficient. The club still produced players like Yomi Peters, Haruna ‘Master Dribbler’ Ilerika, Yakubu Mambo, Sanni Mohammed, Peter Rufai, Ike Shorounmu, Wakilu Oyenuga, Asudu Ibrahim, Taiwo Affinih, Daniel Ajibode, and Julius Akpele. Shooting Stars of Ibadan’s midfield maestro Mudashiru Lawal also joined Stores in the twilight of his career. The team continued to have the most fanatical supporters in Nigerian football, and won the Lagos State Challenge Cup in 1974 and 1976, the national FA Cup in 1982 and 1990, and the Premier League in 1992, narrowly losing to Cameroon’s Union Douala 2–1 in the two-legged final of the Africa Cup Winners’ Cup in 1981. The common refrain from the stands was ‘Up Stores’, ‘Up Super’, ‘Triple Flaming’, and ‘Gbogbo wa l’ore Adebajo! Iyo!’ (‘Let us not, out of malice, spoil a good thing since we are all friends of Israel Adebajo’). But Super Stores – widely known as ‘the darling club of Lagos’ – would suffer many trials and tribulations, as other teams like Rangers, Shooting Stars, Bendel Insurance, Mighty Jets, Abiola Babes, Leventis, and Iwuanyanwu Nationale came to the fore. A bribery scandal in 1985 led to the exit of several players, accused of having taken money to throw a match. Stores was relegated from the Nigerian first division in 1993, a year after winning the league. Salaries and sign-on fees were irregularly paid. By this time, the club’s supporters consisted of businessmen, journalists, civil servants, politicians, professionals, taxi-drivers, touts, and ‘area boys’. Stores’ fans acquired a fearsome reputation and, by the 1980s, were seen in some quarters as thuggish hooligans prepared to intimidate rival fans as well as bully opposition players and referees. This image was reinforced by an incident in Ibadan during a Challenge Cup match against Rangers in September 1995, when Stores supporters invaded the pitch in the 87th minute after a controversial penalty was awarded to, and scored by, Rangers. 451

GLOBAL AFRICA

In the ensuing melee, the younger brother of Super Eagles legend Finidi George – Igeniwari – was shot in the team bus by what the Nigerian police often refer to as ‘a stray bullet’ following the ‘accidental discharge’ of a weapon. He later died of his wounds. Stores was thereafter banned for three years from playing in the Nigerian league. At the end of the ban in 1998, the Flaming Flamingos were suspended from the second division following a legal dispute over the ownership of the club. Stores players, by this time, were playing without formal contracts, bonuses often went unpaid, and even some of their kit was not provided by the management. The club returned to the league in 2004, only to be relegated in the same season. In one game against Nitel United, Stores notoriously arrived with only 11 players, and did not have a single substitute on the bench! Its fanatical supporters clubs – with 52 Nigerian chapters and 10 overseas branches by 2016 – mobilised funds and ensured that Stores returned to the league in 2014. The following season, the ‘Adebajo Babes’ did not play competitively in order to enable a restructuring of the club, before returning in 2017. Throughout these difficult times, fans remained fiercely loyal, raising money to pay players’ salaries and transfer fees, travelling with them across the country and the continent, and even supervising the training of the team and player conduct. A particularly important financier in the early 1990s was Sola Idowu, popularly known as ‘Mr Anonymous’. The demise of the football club was mirrored in the demise of the company. After the death of its founder, the Nigerian Office Stationery Supply Stores became a shadow of its former self, barely functioning with a skeletal staff, as other companies like Onward Paper Mill took over the space occupied by Israel’s previous dominance of the sector. NOSS Stores recovered somewhat in the 1970s but continued – like the football club – to limp from crisis to crisis, as successive post-1985 military governments in Nigeria devalued the naira, making it increasingly difficult for companies like NOSS to import parts and equipment from abroad. Fires to NOSS properties in 1982 and 2007 were further setbacks, even as the company struggled to build a new factory in Amuwo Odofin. Israel Adebajo’s estate, which should have been wound down by 1992, remains a site of contestation among family members. The News Matrics reported in May 2019 that two of his children – Adeola and Adetilewa – were removed as executors of Israel’s will through a judgment of the Lagos High Court by Justice MO Obadina. This followed a complaint brought by one of Israel’s wives, Irene, and three children – Gloria, Adeleke, and Margaret – over non-remittance of proceeds from the estate. Fifty years after his death, the family patriarch’s soul 452

FLAMING FLAMINGO: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ISRAEL ADEBAJO

has not been allowed to rest in peace, as family squabbles have continued. Israel Adebajo was an enterprising, dedicated, and visionary pioneer who worked hard and played hard. He has left an enduring legacy in Nigerian commerce and sports. Israel, however, was full of paradoxes: he was from a poor background, but became a prosperous businessman; he had limited education, but used an acute intelligence to build a business empire; he was simultaneously polygamous and pious; and he was both an earnest entrepreneur and an extravagant entertainer. On this fiftieth anniversary and golden jubilee of Israel’s passing, it is fitting to remember the life and times of the original ‘Flaming Flamingo’, who left an indelible mark on the footprints of time. I was two years old when he died. He was my father. The Guardian (Nigeria), 25, 26, and 28 July 2019.

453

Notes

1 Ali A. Mazrui, ‘Global Africa: From Abolitionists to Reparationists’, in Ali A. Mazrui, Black Reparations in the Era of Globalization (Binghamton: Institute of Global Cultural Studies, 2002), p. 62. 2 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African-American Achievement (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1996). 3 Abdul-Jabbar, Black Profiles in Courage, p. xxiii. 4 See, for example, Adekeye Adebajo, ‘Pan-Africanism: From the Twin Plagues of European Locusts to Africa’s Triple Quest for Emancipation’, in Adekeye Adebajo (ed.), The Pan-African Pantheon: Prophets, Poets, and Philosophers (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2020; and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 3–57. 5 Ali A. Mazrui, ‘The Black Atlantic from Othello to Obama: In Search of a Postracial Society’, in Adekeye Adebajo and Kaye Whiteman (eds.), The EU and Africa: From Eurafrique to Afro-Europa (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Hurst; and Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), p. 420. 6 See, for example, Hilary McD. Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt (Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies Press, 2013). 7 Mazrui. ‘Global Africa’, p. 60. 8 Ali.A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (London: BBC Publications, 1986), pp. 109–13. 9 See Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: WEB Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 10 See Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 11 See, for example, Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia (London and New York: Verso, 1998). 12 See, for example, Elliot P. Skinner, African Americans and US Policy toward Africa 1850–1924: In Defense of Black Nationality (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1992). 13 See, for example, Pearl T. Robinson, ‘Randall Robinson: Pan-African Foreign Policy Virtuoso’, in Adebajo, The Pan-African Pantheon, pp. 277–96.

454

NOTES

14 Amiri Baraka (previously LeRoi Jones), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York and London: Harper, 1963), p. 17. 15 Baraka, Blues People, pp. 17–31. 16 Cited in Theresa Singleton and Marcos André Torres de Souza, ‘Archaeologies of the African Diaspora: Brazil, Cuba, and the United States’, in Teresita Majewski and David Gaimster (eds.), International Handbook of Historical Archaeology (New York: Springer, 2009), p. 450; and Ana Lucia Araújo, ‘Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade in Brazil and Cuba from an Afro-Atlantic Perspective’, Almanack, 12 (January–April 2016), p. 1. 17 See Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (California: Stanford University Press, 2015). 18 See Adebajo, The Pan-African Pantheon. 19 See Adekeye Adebajo (ed.), Africa’s Peacemakers: Nobel Peace Laureates of African Descent (London: Zed Books, 2013). 20 See Adekeye Adebajo, ‘Thabo Mbeki: A Nkrumahist Renaissance?’ in Adekeye Adebajo, The Curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Hurst; and Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010), pp. 233–59; and Adekeye Adebajo, Thabo Mbeki: Africa’s PhilosopherKing (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2016; and Johannesburg: Jacana, 2016), pp. 13–24. 21 See Adekeye Adebajo, Boutros Boutros-Ghali: Afro-Arab Prophet, Pharaoh, and Pope (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2022; and Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2023).

455

Index

Abacha, Sani 44, 72, 83, 93, 122, 216, 255, 298 Abiola, Moshood 72, 83, 356, 451 Abiy Ahmed Ali 5, 105വ7 Abubakar, Atiku 84, 85, 89 Acheampong, Kutu 91, 92 Achebe, Chinua 7, 274, 279, 284വ6, 292, 294, 308, 319, 321, 329, 332, 337, 340 Ade, Sunny 374, 375, 380, 450 Adebajo, Adunni 450 Adebajo, Alfred 446 Adebajo, Irene 449, 450, 452 Adebajo, Israel Adebayo Ogunyeade 8, 445വ8, 449വ51, 452വ3 Adebajo, Jeremiah 445, 446 Adebajo, Luke 449 Adebajo, Olabisi 446 Adebo, Simeon 187 Adedeji, Adebayo 6, 58, 187വ91, 192, 193വ4, 222, 343, 448 Adekola, Odunlade 289 Adelaja, Christopher 446 Adesina, Jimi 14 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 283, 310 Adotévi, Stanislas 336 Africa diaspora 2, 51, 345, 349, 367, 369, 376 and US and Western policy 134വ5, 137വ8, 140, 142വ3, 147വ9, 201, 291വ3

wars and conflict 51വ2, 63, 333, 344 Africa Leadership Forum 82 African Giant (Burna Boy) 376 African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA, USA) 138 African National Congress (ANC) 70, 77, 157വ8 African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) 47, 58, 190 African Renaissance 47, 49, 50വ1, 62, 96 African Standby Force (ASF) 51 African Union (AU) 47, 51, 52വ3, 57, 62, 104, 125, 127, 194, 229, 230വ1 The Africans (Mazrui) 327, 328വ9, 332 Africom (USA) 140, 147 Afrifa, Akwasi 92 Afrobeat 363, 365, 380വ1 Afro-centrism 50വ1 Afrofusion 374, 377 Agbotui, Victoria 91 Agyeman, Nana Konadu 91 Aidoo, Ama Ata 292 Ajayi, Ade 7, 354, 356വ7 Akbar, Arifa 310 Akintola, Samuel 295 Akon 380 Akuffo, Fred 92 Alamieyeseigha, Diepreye 216 Al-Assad, Bashar 203, 204 Al-Bashir, Omar 123

457

GLOBAL AFRICA

Albright, Joseph 167

Albright, Madeleine 6, 165വ8, 170വ1,

181, 182

Ali, Lonnie 396

Ali, Muhammad 8, 305, 308, 351, 367വ8,

393വ7, 401, 434

All African People’s Conference (Accra,

1958) 69

Ambrose, Curtly 431

American Civil War 27വ8, 387

Amin, Idi 5, 109, 114വ16, 121, 127, 298,

327, 332

Ampiah, Kweku 268

Angelos, Tosh 303

Angelou, Maya 7, 303വ6, 309

Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela (Abami Eda) 7, 81,

361വ5, 368, 374, 375, 380, 381

Annan, Kofi 6, 42, 129, 166, 180, 181,

182, 183വ4, 185വ6, 203, 204

Annan, Kojo 185

Anyaoku, Emeka 269, 349

apartheid 39, 75വ8 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 298

Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) 126വ7 Arafat, Yasser 330

Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 51

Arkaah, Kow 93

Armah, Ayi Kwei 274

Arrow of God (Achebe) 280, 285

Asa 7, 378വ81 Asante, S.K.B. 190

Asiodu, Phillip 212

Asuquo, Cobhams Emmanuel 380

Atta, Abdulazeez 212

Attah, Ayesha Harruna 283

Aubameyang, Pierre-Emerick 8, 425, 427

Aubameyang, Pierre-François 427, 428

Awolowo, Obafemi 18

Awoonor, Kofi 292

Ayida, Allison 212

Azevédo, Roberto 224

Baartman, Sarah 16

Babangida, Ibrahim 82, 83, 191, 199,

258, 321

Back to Africa movement 3

Badu, Erykah 368

Bafoo, T.D. 304

Baker, James 170

Baldwin, James 7, 300വ2, 303, 333, 352

Bambara, Toni Cade 308

Banda, Hastings Kamuzu 342

Bandele, Biyi 287, 290

Banton, Buju 375

Barry, Marion 249

basketball 442വ4 Bates, Robert 344

Bayart, Jean-François 344, 349

Beckles, Hilary 7, 354, 355വ6 Belafonte, Harry 171, 301, 353, 383, 384

Bello, Shaffy 289

Beloved (Morrison) 309

Ben Ali, Zine el-Abidine 123, 141, 145

Ben Bella, Ahmed 264

Berbick, Trevor 396

Berry, Halle 382, 386

Beti, Mongo 274

Beyoncé 313, 375, 380

Bhagwati, Jagdish 220

Biden, Joe 151, 224

Bier, Amaury 213വ14 Biko, Steve 265വ6, 351

Bishop’s Stortford Museum 12വ13 Bizimungu, Pasteur 122വ3 Black Atlantic 2

Black Consciousness 227, 237

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) 49വ50 Black Indian Ocean 2

Black Justice League (Princeton

University) 26

Black Lives Matter (BLM) 11, 247, 351, 376

Black Panther (film) 345, 387

Black Panthers 352

Black Power movement 3, 245, 384, 431

Blair, Tony 6, 123, 160വ1, 162, 217

Bleak House (Dickens) 278

Blondy, Alpha 367

blues 3

Blyden, Edward 327, 335, 345

458

NOTES

Bokassa, Jean-Bédel 122, 298വ9 Boko Haram 84, 219, 348വ9

Bolsonaro, Jair 402

Bolton, John 184

Bomett, Lena 119

Bond, Julian 249, 250

Bongo, Omar 130

Bono 216

Borg, Björn 439

Botha, P.W. 77, 158

Botham, Ian 431

Boutros-Ghali, Boutros 6, 165വ6, 175വ6,

177വ9, 180വ1, 182, 183, 185

boxing 393വ7 Boy Called Twist (Greene) 281വ2 Bozizé, François 209വ10 Brahimi, Lakhdar 6, 181, 203വ5 Brexit 151, 152

British South Africa Company 12

Brooks, Gwendolyn 312

Brown, Gordon 217

Brown, James 367, 370

Brutus, Dennis 292

Brzezinski, Zbigniew 167

Buhari, Muhammadu 89, 199, 202, 365, 378

Bulawayo, NoViolet 283

Bunche, Ralph 19, 38

Burna Boy 7, 374വ7 Bush, George W. 88, 138, 139വ40, 147,

155, 160, 161, 170, 171, 184, 185, 186,

217, 218, 250, 298, 353, 397

Cabral, Amilcar 52, 352

Campbell, Naomi 371

Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 401

Carim, Xavier 223വ4 Carlucci, Frank 170

Carmichael, Stokely 3, 249, 250, 308

Carroll, Diahann 384

Carson, Johnnie 134

Carter, Jimmy 71, 204

Casely Hayford, J.E. 18

Castro, Fidel 44, 93, 352, 409

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 291വ4,

297, 299

Césaire, Aimé 335, 336, 337

Chapman, Tracy 369, 379

Cheney, Dick 155, 170, 171

Chiluba, Frederick 70, 71

Chomsky, Noam 333

Churchill, Winston 21

Clapton, Eric 368

Clark-Bekederemo, John Pepper 7, 284,

292, 319വ21, 335

Clay, Cassius see Ali, Muhammad

Clay, Cassius Sr and Odessa 394

Cliff, Jimmy 369

Clinton, Bill 6, 123, 136വ7, 138, 145, 155,

166, 170, 250, 304, 309വ10

Clinton, Hillary 155, 168, 235, 310

Codrington, Christopher 356

Coetzee, J.M. 327, 340

Coleman, Norm 185

Collier, Paul 344

Collings, Rex 295

Coltrane, John 364

Combs, Sean (Diddy) 376, 377

Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group 82

Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF)

292, 293, 294, 295വ6

Congressional Black Caucus (CBC, USA)

3, 134

Conrad, Joseph 331വ2

corruption 101വ2, 119, 213, 214, 216വ17,

218, 219, 220വ1

Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA, Dakar) 342വ3 Counts, Dorothy 301

Covid-19 pandemic 224, 355

cricket 429വ32

Crocker, Chester 155

Croft, Colin 8, 430

curriculum transformation 339വ40

Dadoo, Yusuf 24

Dalai Lama 228

Danforth, John 186

Dangote, Aliko 86

Danquah, J.B. 36

459

GLOBAL AFRICA

Dariye, Joshua 87

The Dark Child (Laye) 421

David Copperfield (Dickens) 280വ1 Davies, H.O. 18

Davies, Rob 264

Davis, Angela 7, 308, 309, 312, 351വ3, 364

Davis, Caroline 291, 296വ7, 298

Davis, Miles 364

Davis, Ossie 297

Davis, Viola 385, 387

De Klerk, F.W. 4വ5, 38, 75വ8, 105

De Kock, Quinton 429

Death and the King’s Horseman (Soyinka) 287വ9 Dickens, Charles 7, 274വ81, 282വ3, 303

Dickinson, John 446

Dike, Kenneth 320

Diouf, Pape 422

Dixon, Thomas 30

Djokovic, Novak 438, 440വ1 Dlamini, Willibrord and Rose 227

Dlamini-Zuma, Nkosazana 6, 225വ9,

230വ2, 234

Doe, Samuel 96, 98, 99, 155

Domínguez, Alejandro 402

Drogba, Didier Yves 8, 406, 419, 420വ4

Drogba, Lalla 422

Du Bois, W.E.B. 3, 45, 302, 305, 325,

345, 367

Du Feu, Paul 303

Dube, John 22, 25, 227

Dube, Lucky 367

Dube, Mandla 265

Duerden, Dennis 294, 295

Dunbar, Paul Laurence 303

Dundee, Angelo 394

Dunham, Ann 133

Dunham, Madelyn 133

Edugyan, Esi 283

Eisenhower, Dwight D. 154വ5 Ejiofor, Chiwetel 388

Ejogo, Carmen 247, 388

Elders group 204

Elemide, Akin and Arsah 378, 379

Elemide, Bukola see Asa Elesin Oba (film) 287, 289വ90 Elias, Taslim 450

Ellis, Stephen 344

El-Sisi, Abdel Fattah 73, 137, 232

Emecheta, Buchi (Florence Onyebuchi) 7, 314വ18 Erivo, Cynthia Onyedinmanasu Chinasaokwu 7, 386, 387വ9 Essien, Michael 406

Etete, Dan 258

Eto’o, Georgette 418

Eto’o, Samuel 8, 406, 416വ18, 420

European Coal and Steel Community

(ECSC) 193

Eusébio 8, 403വ6, 412

Evaristo, Bernadine 283

Evers, Medgar 244, 300, 302

Every Secret Thing (Gillian Slovo) 263

Ewing, Patrick 443

Excess Crude Account (Nigeria) 85, 87

Exodus (Marley) 368

Fairfield Foundation 292, 293, 294,

295വ6, 299

Falae, Olu 83

Fanon, Frantz 44, 52, 132, 332, 336, 352

Farmer, James Jr 249

Fashek, Majek 367

Fayose, Ayo 87

Federer, Roger 438, 439, 440

Fela! (musical) 363, 364

Ferreira, Eusébio da Silva see Eusébio ebola 230

Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC,

Economic and Financial Crimes

Nigeria) 362, 379

Commission (EFCC, Nigeria) 88

FIFA and World cups 399വ400, 402, 419

Economic Community of West African

Finding Fela (film) 363വ4, 365

States (ECOWAS) 93, 99, 188വ9, 194, First, Ruth 7, 262വ4 208വ9, 222, 448

football see soccer

460

NOTES

Ford, Gerald 395

Foreman, George 395, 396

Forna, Aminatta 310

Franklin, Aretha 380, 388

Frazier, Joe 395, 396

Freedom Charter (South Africa, 1955) 263

Friends of the Earth 257

Fugard, Athol 295

Fuji, Yoruba 380

Gaitskell, Hugh 267

Galgut, Damon 283

Gambari, Ibrahim Agboola 6, 60, 181,

198വ202, 268, 350

Gandhi, Ela 23

Gandhi, Mahatma 4, 18വ25, 39, 40, 45,

69, 131, 144, 145, 244വ5, 246, 325

Garner, Joel 431

Garuba, Harry 337

Garvey, Marcus 3, 345, 362, 366വ7, 394

Gates, Henry (Skip) 298

Gaye, Marvin 380

Gbagbo, Laurent 424

Geldof, Bob 216

George, Finidi 412

Ghanem, Hafez 217

Gikandi, Simon 337

Gil Díaz, Francisco 217

Gingrich, Newt 181

Global Africa 2

Glover, Danny 309

Goba, Michel 421

Gomes, H.A. 431

Gorbachev, Mikhail 157

Gordimer, Nadine 262, 284, 340

Gowon, Yakubu 122, 188, 194, 212, 329

Greaves, Harry 102

Green Belt Movement 252

Green Book (Qaddafi) 126

Greene, Graham 331

Greenfield-Sanders, Timothy 310

Greenidge, Gordon 430, 431

Greenpeace 257

Greig, Tony 430

Group Areas Act (South Africa, 1959) 39

Growth, Employment, and Redistribution

(GEAR) strategy (South Africa) 47,

48വ9

Guevara, Che 352, 409

Guha, Ramachandra 23

Haile Selassie 52, 367

Hailemariam Desalegn 104

Hall, Stuart 352

Hard Times (Dickens) 277, 279

Hardy, Juanita 384

Harriet (film) 386, 387വ9 Haynes, Desmond 430

Head, Bessie 292

Headley, George 431

Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 285, 331വ2 Helms, Jesse 181

Henry, Thierry 422, 423, 427

Herskovits, Jean 348

Hill, Lauryn 368, 380

Hitler, Adolf 433

HIV/AIDS 44, 47വ8, 50, 56, 66വ7, 71,

131, 138, 140, 145വ6, 228, 253

Holbrooke, Richard 182, 186

Holding, Michael 8, 430

Hollywood 301, 382

Holmes, Larry 396

Hooks, Bell 7, 311വ12, 313വ14 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix 52, 189, 421

Huawei 152

Hudson, Jennifer 266

Hughes, Langston 303, 312

Hussein, Saddam 161വ2, 167, 170, 182,

185, 332

I Am Not Your Negro (Baldwin) 300, 302

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

(Angelou) 303

Ibori, James 216

Idonnije, Benson 375

Idowu, Sola 452

Idris, King 126

Iman 371

imperialism 275വ6, 278വ9, 331, 333

Infantino, Gianni 402

461

GLOBAL AFRICA

intellectuals 333

Irele, Francis Abiola 7, 334വ8

Isais Afwerki 137

Islam 332, 395

Iwuanyanwu, Emmanuel 451

Izsadore, Sandra 364

Jackson, Michael 7, 370വ3, 380, 401

Jackson, Samuel L. 300

James, C.L.R. 332

Jameson, Leander Starr 15, 16

jazz 3

Jennings, John 256

Jenrick, Robert 14

Jewish Defence League 330

Jinadu, Olokun Esin 288

Joda, Ahmed 212

Johnson, Boris 6, 150, 151, 152, 153

Johnson, Lyndon 155, 395

Johnson Sirleaf, Ellen 5, 95വ102, 105

Jolaoso, Olujimi 199

Jonathan, Goodluck 90, 219, 348

Jones, Gayl 308

Jordan, June 308

Jordan, Michael 376, 401, 443, 444

Jordan, Pallo 262

Josselson, Michael 294

The Joys of Motherhood (Emecheta) 316വ17

Jubilee 2000 253

Kabila, Laurent 112, 113

Kaepernick, Colin 351

Kagame, Paul 5വ6, 121, 122വ5, 137, 299

Kalakuta Republic 362, 364

Kallicharran, Alvin 430

Kalushi (film) 265, 266

Kant, Immanuel 31

Kapwepwe, Simon 69

Karegeya, Patrick 124

Kaunda, Kenneth 4, 19, 24, 42, 48, 68വ71

Kennedy, John F. 249, 302

Kennedy, Robert F. 250, 302

Kenyatta, Jomo 42

Kenyatta, Uhuru 120

Kerry, John 184

Khama, Seretse 227

Kibaki, Mwai 119, 129

Kidjo, Angélique 374, 380

Kim Jong Un 151

Kimathi, Dedan 133

King, Martin Luther Jr 3, 7, 19, 24, 40,

45, 69, 130, 131, 141, 144, 145വ6,

243വ4, 245വ6, 247, 248, 249, 300,

301, 303, 362, 373, 383, 384, 394വ5

King Baabu (Soyinka) 122, 298

King Kong (musical) 268

Kingsley Jones, Phil 436

Kipling, Rudyard 276, 331

Kissinger, Henry 401

Knuckles, Willis 102

Koch-Weser, Caio 217

Kodera, Kiyoshi 217

Konaré, Alpha 209

Kongi’s Harvest (Soyinka) 35വ6, 122,

296, 297

Kravitz, Lenny 380

Krueger, Anne 217

Ku Klux Klan 27, 30

Kuti, Femi 364, 365

Kuti, Funmilayo 364

Kuti, Seun 363, 364, 365, 374

Kuti, Yeni 364

Kyungu, Gabriel 111

La Guma, Alex 292, 340

Ladigbolu, Oba Siyanbola 288

Lagos Plan of Action (1980) 190

Lalami, Laila 283

Lamy, Pascal 224

Landsberg, Chris 268

Lardner, Tunji 268

The Last King of Scotland (film) 114വ15

Laye, Camara 295

Le Pen, Jean-Marie 163, 422

League of Nations 31വ2

Lee, Canada 384

Lee, Spike 313

Lee Kwan Yew 124

Legend, John 380

Lenin, Vladimir 31

462

NOTES

Leon, Tony 228

Lewis, Carl 434

Lewis, John Robert 7, 248വ51

Lilies of the Field (film) 384

Limann, Hilla 92

Limbaugh, Rush 151

Lindenmayer, Elizabeth 186

The Lion and the Jewel (Soyinka) 65വ6

Liston, Sonny 394, 396, 397

Living Wage campaign 247

Livingstone, David 276

Liyong, Taban lo 339

Lloyd, Clive 8, 429വ30

Lomu, Jonah 8, 436വ7

Lomu, Semisi and Hepi 436

Lone Stars (soccer team) 413, 414

Long, Carl (Luz) 434

Loutard, Jean-Baptiste Tati 337

Lugard, Frederick 347, 445

Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio 402

Lumumba, Patrice 45, 362

Luthuli, Albert 4, 19, 38വ41, 227, 243, 247

Maathai, Wangari 7, 105, 118, 252വ4, 317

Machel, Samora 352

Mafeje, Archie 15, 328

Magufuli, John 207

Mahfouz, Naguib 175, 274

Mahiga, Augustine 6, 206വ7 Mahlangu, George 266

Mahlangu, Martha 266

Mahlangu, Solomon 7, 265വ6 Mailer, Norman 396

Make, Vusumzi 303

Makeba, Miriam 380

Makumbi, Jennifer Nansubuga 283

Malcolm X 45, 69, 244, 245, 300, 301വ2,

303, 305, 333, 345, 362, 364, 395

Malema, Thabo 266

Malloch Brown, Mark 186

Mamdani, Mahmood 237

Mandela, Nelson Rohlihlala 4, 15, 16വ17, 19,

23, 24, 38, 40, 42വ5, 62, 63വ4, 76, 78, 82,

129, 146, 155, 160, 204, 228, 243, 246വ7,

284, 305വ6, 325, 332, 393, 414

Mandela, Winnie 266

Mandela, Zindzi 234

Mandela Doctrine 62

Mandela Rhodes Foundation 16, 24

Mané, Sadio 8, 425, 426വ8 Manley, Michael 367

Maradona, Claudia 409

Maradona, Diego Armando 8, 402, 404,

407വ10

Maradona, Diego Snr and Doña Tota

407, 409

March on Washington (1963) 245, 248, 249

Marcuse, Herbert 352

Marley, Bob (Robert Nesta) 7, 345, 366,

367വ9, 375, 379, 380, 381, 431

Marley, Rita 368

Márquez, Gabriel Garcia 332

Marshall, Malcolm 8, 430, 431

Martin, Joe 394

Matar, Hisham 283

Matshikiza, Todd 268

Matthews, Joe 233

Matthews, Z.K. 233

Mayfield, Curtis 367

Mazrui, Alamin 118

Mazrui, Ali 7, 115, 133, 325വ9, 340വ1, 356

Mbeki, Govan 63

Mbeki, Thabo 4, 23, 37, 44, 46വ9, 50വ1,

52വ3, 54വ5, 56വ7, 58, 59വ61, 62,

63വ4, 65, 66വ7, 86, 191, 215, 227, 228,

270, 419

McCartney, Paul 363, 368

McQueen, Steve 385, 387

Meles Zenawi Asres 5, 103, 137, 343

Mengiste, Maaza 283

Mengistu Haile Mariam 103, 367

Messi, Lionel 410

Mhlope, Gcina 266

Mikel, John Obi 406

Miles, Lilian 250

military coups 72വ3, 74, 81, 91വ2, 96, 106,

111, 137, 264

Milla, Roger 412, 415, 416

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

187

463

GLOBAL AFRICA

Miloševiđ, Slobodan 167, 168 Mkandawire, Thandika 7, 342, 343വ5 Mnangagwa, Emmerson 74 Mobutu Sese Seko 5, 108, 109വ13, 119, 298 Moi, Daniel arap 5, 117വ20, 252 Moi, Gideon 119 Monnet, Jean 6, 192വ3, 191, 194 Morlu, John 101 Morrison, Howard 308 Morrison, Slade 310 Morrison, Toni 7, 284, 303, 307വ10, 312 Morsi, Mohamed 73 Motlanthe, Kgalema 129 Motloung, Mondy 266 Moulin, Emmanuel 217 Mourinho, José 406, 422വ3 Mphahlele, Es’kia (Ezekiel) 274, 292, 293, 340 Mubarak, Hosni 73, 90, 123, 141, 144, 145 Mugabe, Grace 74 Mugabe, Robert 4, 48, 72, 73വ4, 158, 228 Mugo, Micere 118 Muhammed, Murtala 81, 188 Mukwege, Denis 7, 259വ61 Mukherjee, Pranab 22 Mulule, Pierre 108 Museveni, Yoweri 116, 137, 207, 343 Mustapha, Abdul Raufu 7, 346വ50 Muzorewa, Abel 158 Mwamba, Emmanuel 60 Na’Abba, Ghali Umar 85 Nadal Parera, Rafa 8, 438വ41 Naipaul, V.S. 275, 331 Nakasa, Nathaniel 291വ2 Nangolo, Mvula ya 271 Nascimento, Dondinho and Celeste do 398, 399 Nascimento, Edson Arantes do see Pelé Nash, Diane 249 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 6, 126, 204 Nation of Islam 395 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, USA) 434

National Basketball Association (NBA, USA) 442 National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS, Nigeria) 87, 214, 215, 221 National Stadium (Lagos) 448വ9 Natsios, Andrew 155വ6 Ndebele, Njabulo 238 N’Dour, Youssou 376 Négritude 334, 335വ6 Neruda, Pablo 332 Neto, Agostinho 352 New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) 47, 48വ9, 62, 86, 187, 190, 215, 231 Newton, Thandie 309 Neymar 400, 402 Ngafuan, Augustine 102 Ngema, Mbongeni 228 Ngoyi, Lilian 25 Ngubane, Harriet 16 Nguema, Macias 122, 298 Nguza Karl-i-Bond 108വ9 Niger Delta 256വ8 Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) 220 Nigerian Office Stationery Supply (NOSS, Lagos) Stores 446, 447, 452 Nixon, Richard 155, 352 Nkosi, Lewis 292, 294, 340 Nkrumah, Kwame 4, 18, 24, 35വ7, 42, 52, 62, 92, 94, 122, 127, 144, 231, 243, 245, 247, 268, 304, 305, 325, 326, 362 Nkumbula, Harry 69 Nkurunziza, Pierre 122 Nobel prizes 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 75, 78, 95, 102, 105, 107, 141വ2, 144, 145, 160, 180, 243, 253, 259, 309, 328 non-racialism 39വ40 Norton, Ken 396 Núñez, José Luis 408 Nwapa, Florence (Flora) 316, 335 Nwose, Janet 380 Nyerere, Julius 19, 42, 116, 189, 263, 327, 343 Nyong’o, Lupita 380, 388 464

NOTES

Obama, Barack 6, 19, 24, 45, 107, 129വ35,

136വ8, 139വ43, 144, 145, 146, 147വ9,

156, 168, 246, 250വ1, 305, 309, 310,

325, 382, 383, 397

Obama, Michelle 133

Obasanjo, Olusegun 5, 63, 79വ87, 88വ90,

209, 213, 215, 217, 218, 219വ20, 362

Obey, Ebenezer 380

Obote, Milton 115, 116, 227

Occupy Movement 247, 353

Odinkalu, Chidi 230

Odunsi, Florence 450

Odutola, Ebun 320

Ogot, Grace 294

Ogulu, Damini Ebunoluwa see Burna Boy Ogulu, Samuel and Bosede 375

Oil and Mineral Producing Areas

Development Commission

(OMPADEC, Nigeria) 258

Okigbo, Christopher 292, 319, 326, 335,

340വ1

Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi 6, 88, 211വ19,

220വ1, 222, 223, 224

Okri, Ben 274, 310

Olaiya, Victor 447

Olajuwon, Hakeem 8, 413, 442വ4 Olympia (Riefenstahl) 433

Olympic Games 433, 434

O’Neal, Shaquille 443, 444

Oniyangi, Fatima 198

Onwenu, Onyeka 376

Onwordi, Sylvester 315

Onwordi, Sylvester Jr 317

Operation Turquoise 111

Oppenheimer, Harry 15വ16, 237

Organisation of African Unity (OAU) 36,

86, 116

Oscars 386വ7 Osijo, Adeyanju 449

Osoba, Segun 11

Osofisan, Femi 337

Osula, Alfred 447

Osundare, Niyi 337

Otobo, Eloho 6, 239വ40 Ouko, Robert 118

Owens, Jesse 8, 433വ5

Oxford University 13, 26വ7

Oyelowo, David 247, 388

Padmore, George 42, 45, 62, 326

Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) 262

pan-African congresses (1919വ1945) 2വ3

Pan-African Parliament (PAP) 47, 63, 231

pan-Africanism 36, 37, 40, 42

Pandor, Naledi 6, 233വ5

Pandor, Sharif Joseph 234

Paris Club 214വ15

Patten, Chris 13

Patterson, Floyd 394

Patterson, Patrick 431

Pax Africana 51, 326

P’Bitek, Okot 339

Peck, Raoul 300വ1, 302

Pelé 8, 398വ402, 404, 405, 409, 416

Pelé, Abedi Ayew 412, 422

Pettifor, Ann 216

Ping, Jean 229

Pityana, Barney 46വ8, 53

A Play of Giants (Soyinka) 116, 122, 298

Poitier, Evelyn and Richard 382

Poitier, Sidney 7, 301, 382വ5

post-colonial studies 330വ1

Powell, Alma 171

Powell, Colin 6, 155

Powell, Enoch 158

Prebisch, Raúl 6, 191, 195വ7

Princeton University 26, 28, 31, 32

prisons 352വ3

Puskás, Ferenc 404

Qaddafi, Muammar 6, 44, 93, 126വ8,

140, 264

Quirk, Nadene 437

Race (film) 433, 434

race and racism 28വ30, 54വ6, 300വ2, 417, 430

Rainforest Action Network 257

Ramaphosa, Cyril 233, 234

Rametsi, Thabo 265വ6

Ramphele, Mamphela 6, 236വ8

Randolph, Philip 249

465

GLOBAL AFRICA

Rastafarianism 366, 367, 431

Rawlings, Jerry John 5, 91, 92വ4, 343

Ray, Ola 371

Reagan, Ronald 3, 155, 352

Reconstruction (US) 27

reggae 366, 368

Reno, William 344

reparations 354വ6, 357

Rhodes, Cecil 3വ4, 11വ14, 16, 24, 25, 74,

276, 279

Rhodes Must Fall 11, 13വ14, 16

Rhodes scholarships 11വ12, 13

Rhodes University 14വ16 Ribadu, Nuhu 88, 214

Rice, Condoleezza 217

Richards, Viv 8, 429, 430, 431വ2

Riza, Iqbal 181, 185, 186

Roberts, Andy 8, 430

Robeson, Paul 383

Robinson, Randall 7, 354, 355

Rodney, Walter 244, 332

Roosevelt, Franklin 434

Ross, Diana 380

rugby 436വ7 Rumble in the Jungle (Kinshasa, 1974) 395വ6 Rumsfeld, Donald 171

Rushdie, Salman 326

Russell, Bertrand 333

Rutter, Tanya 437

Sachs, Albie 263

Sachs, Jeffrey 344

Sadat, Anwar 19, 24, 105, 144വ5, 332

Safire, William 185

Sahle Sellassie Berhane Mariam 274

Said, Edward 7, 20, 175, 275, 282, 328,

330വ3

Salah, Mohamed 8, 425, 426, 427വ8

Salazar, António 405വ6 Salih, Tayeb 332

Salim Ahmed Salim 271

sanctions against South Africa 3

Sanders, Bernie 168

Sankara, Thomas 93, 362

Sankoh, Foday 127

Santos (soccer club) 400

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi 220

Sarkozy, Nicolas 6, 163, 421

Saro-Wiwa, Ken 44, 201, 255, 256, 257, 258

Sartre, Jean-Paul 333, 335വ6 Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 326

satyagraha 18, 146, 244വ5

Saunders, Stuart 236

Schreiner, Olive 24

Schuman Plan (1950) 193

Schweitzer, Albert 142

Scott, Coretta 247

Seaga, Edward 367

segregation 29വ30 Segun, Mabel 337

Sellström, Tor 7, 270വ1 Selma (film) 247, 249

Sembène, Ousmane 340

Senghor, Léopold 42, 335, 336

Serpell, Namwali 283

Sevan, Benon 185

sexual violence 258വ61 Seydi, Thierno 422

Shagari, Shehu 81, 199, 364

Shaka 39, 115

sharia law 84

Shavers, Earnie 396

Shell 255വ8, 321

Sherlock, Sheila 450

Shimkus, Joanna 384

Simon, Paul 368

Simone, Nina 380

Siniscalco, Domenico 218

Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson see Johnson Sirleaf, Ellen Sisulu, Walter 262

slavery and the slave trade 2, 3, 27വ8, 130,

278, 300, 301, 302, 309, 310, 312,

354വ6, 357, 399

Slessor, Mary 289

Slovo, Joe 262വ3 Smith, Ian 70വ1, 158

Smith, Will 397

Snoop Dogg 380

466

NOTES

Snowe, Edwin 102

Snyder, Larry 434

soccer 398വ400, 403വ6, 407വ10, 411വ15,

416വ18, 420വ4, 425വ8, 447വ9, 450,

451വ2

Sofola, Kehinde 450

Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College

(SOMAFCO) 266

Soueif, Ahdaf 283

Soyinka, Wole 7, 44വ5, 80, 116, 121വ2,

125, 263, 274, 284, 287വ90, 291, 292,

293വ9, 308, 319, 321,

328, 329, 332, 336, 340, 348; see also titles

of specific works

Spahr, Juliana 294, 296വ7, 299

Spinks, Leon 396

Stationery Stores Football Club (Lagos)

398, 447വ8, 449, 450, 451വ2

Stoner, Fred 394

structural adjustment programmes

(SAPs) 189വ90, 218, 222, 344

structuralism (economic) 196വ7

Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC, USA) 249

Suleimani, Qasem 151വ2

Sutherland, Efua 304

Suzman, Helen 158

Swart, C.R. 14

A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) 274

Tambo, Oliver 63

Tanzania-Zambia railway (TAZARA) 70

Taylor, Charles 5, 93, 99, 100, 127

Taylor, Fiona 437

Taylor, John Idowu Conrad 450

Tebbit, Norman 158

tennis 438വ41 Tharoor, Shashi 181

Thatcher, Carol 159

Thatcher, Denis 158

Thatcher, Margaret 6, 71, 157വ9 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 280, 281, 287, 337

Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 118, 263, 274, 329,

332, 337, 339

Thompson, Dudley 356

Thriller (Jackson) 371

Thusi, Pearl 266

Till, Emmett 394

Tolbert, William 97

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (film) 310

Touré, Yaya 406

TransAfrica 3, 354

Transcription Centre (London) 293, 295വ6 Transnational Corporation (Transcorp,

Nigeria) 86

Trotter, William Monroe 29വ30 Trump, Donald 6, 149, 150വ13, 154, 156,

149, 150വ3, 224, 297

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

(Liberia) 100

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) 76വ7 Tshisekedi, Etienne 111

Tshuma, Novuyo Rosa 283

Tsonga, Jo-Wilfried 159

Tsotsi (film) 266

Tsvangirai, Morgan 47, 73

Tubman, Harriet 387വ8 Tubman, William 97

Tubman, Winston 95

Turner, Tina 367

Turok, Ben 263

Tutu, Desmond 19, 38, 76, 160, 204

Tutuola, Amos 274, 340

Twice as Tall (Burna Boy) 374, 376

ubuntu 277

United Nations 51, 181വ4, 200

Economic Commission for Africa

(ECA) 189, 194, 343

Economic Commission for Latin

America (ECLA) 195വ7

Environment Programme (UNEP)

252, 418

Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) 101

Peacebuilding Commission 239വ40

Research Institute for Social

Development (UNRISD) 343

World Conference Against Racism

(Durban, 2001) 47വ8

467

GLOBAL AFRICA

University of Cape Town (UCT) 15വ16,

236വ7\University of Ghana (Legon)

19, 22വ3

Uwais, Muhammadu Lawal 87

Van Bessel, Bopp 256

Vatsa, Mamman 321

Versailles Treaty (1919) 31

Viera, Brenda 266

Viljoen, J.H. 14

Vogt, Margaret 6, 208വ10

Vorster, John 71

The Wailers 367, 368

Walcott, Derek 332, 340

Walker, Alice 303, 309, 310, 312

Walsh, Courtney 431

Wanjala, Chris 7, 339വ41

Washington, Denzel 265, 382, 385

Washington, George 45

Watkins, Gloria Jean see Hooks, Bell

Weah, George Oppong 8, 100, 405,

411വ15, 423വ4

Weinberger, Caspar 170, 172

Wenger, Arsène 412, 414

West, Cornel 313

West Indian cricket team 8, 429വ32

Whitaker, Forest 114വ15

Whiteman, Kaye 7, 267വ9

Wilkins, Roy 249

Williams, Gavin 346

Williams, Henry Sylvester 3

Williams, Hosea 249

Williams, Rotimi 450

Williamson, Craig 262

Willis, Ramah 307

Wilson, Jackie 370

Wilson, Woodrow 4, 26വ32 Windrush generation 389, 430

Winfrey, Oprah 309, 364

Wofford, George 307

Wolfensohn, Jim 217

Wonder, Stevie 368

Woolf, Virginia 333

A World Apart (Shawn Slovo) 263

World Bank 49, 97വ8 World Trade Organization (WTO) 152,

223വ4

xenophobic violence 58, 59വ60, 190വ1 Yar’Adua, Umaru 86, 88, 90, 129, 347

Young, Jimmy 395

Young, Whitney Jr 249

Young African Leaders Initiative 148

Zuma, Jacob 5, 65, 66, 67, 160, 227, 229, 234

468