Peace Fiesta For And By Africa
Okello Oculi seeks backing from all quarters to celebrate the liberation of the continent
November 11, 2018 was celebrated with much pageantry by leaders from 70 countries assembled in Paris, while the British saved their Queen from un-British dank alien weather by holding a “nationalistic’’ one in London. With the horrendous figure of 10 to 19 million deaths – depending on which estimate seems appropriate – the end of World War 1 deserves dignified mourning. The organisers allowed for some discrepancies. The German Chancellor, for example, knew that in Russia where her government smuggled Vladimir Lenin as leader of Bolshevik communists back into Russia to grab power from the Czar, American, British and French governments rose to support a counter-revolutionary war to dislodge Lenin’s new government.
Another notable snag was the absence of African, Arab, Indian, Vietnamese and Indonesian troops - countries colonised by European combatants. Perhaps the paradox of their participation in killing German troops and those of her Ottoman Turkish allies resulting in stirring up demands for independence against colonising empires was too bitter to include in the celebration soup.
Some voices complained that governments counted only deaths and injuries among their soldiers but not among civilians. In Tanganyika, for example, the mobile war by a German general around the colony caused famines due to cereals and livestock seized from local communities as well as deaths from exhaustion in carrying weapons. Casualties from colonies were not buried in graves. Their names were merely written on stone walls.
Among those denied graves were heads of commercial enterprises, industries and manufacturers whose invisible hands stoked the war. They had grinned and picked their teeth knowingly when politicians claimed that World War 1 taught a lesson that would inhibit all future impulses for war. The claim was in the slogan that it “would end all wars’’.
What these industrialists knew was that the struggle for raw materials from the colonies would intensify; and African, Arab and Asian peoples would suffer forever more. Vladimir Lenin exposed hands of American and European banks and finance capital going on the rampage across foreign lands and sought to arouse opposition against them among exploited peoples.
George Padmore - a Caribbean intellectual and an ally of Lenin - surveyed British colonies and, in 1956, published the book “How Britain Rules Africa’’ as part of the campaign to arouse political rebellion among Africans. His meeting with Kwame Nkrumah in London in 1945 would carry forward demands launched by W.E.B. Dubois that the treaty ending World War1 must reward African soldiers with freedom and independence.
Nkrumah as Prime Minister of newly independent Ghana, convened in 1958 an “All Africa Conference’’ at Accra. It was attended by politicians from both newly independent and non-independent Africans that were on the march to give the second half of the 20th Century the glorified mission of Africa Democratising Human History.
The march became hotter and blood-drenched. The war for liberation of occupied land began in Algeria. Three million French settlers in agriculture, commerce and government organs called on troops from France to join them in a brutal war for slaughtering Algerians into silence. Abdel Aziz Bouteflika, the current president of Algeria, as an 18-year-old militant, was carrying messages from fighters lodged in the mountains of Tunisia to fighters hidden in the labyrinth of the Arab Quarter of Algiers and Oran. He must have massaged his memories as he witnesses the ceremonies in Paris.
In 1961 Dr Eduardo Mondlane visited newly independent Tanganyika, a former trustee Territory of the United Nations, to check on its tender walk with Uhuru (independence). He was Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University who was serving on a Visiting Mission of the United Nations. Prime Minister Julius Nyerere is reported to have called him aside and asked Mondlane if he would carry the cross of winning freedom for Mozambique, his homeland, from Portuguese colonial dictatorship.
If he was willing to try, Tanganyika would support him. When we met him in Dar es Salaam in 1966, he was leading the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO). The Portuguese Secret Police (PIDE) later assassinated him with a letter-bomb.
Amilcar Cabral used his research tour of provinces of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde to map the economic needs of farmers, fishermen/women and herders of cattle and other livestock, as well as those of under-employed youths in urban areas. What he saw convinced him that his people were not the village idiots that Karl Marx imagined. They understood the texture of Portuguese exploitation. They could, if given new awareness, fight a war for freedom from oppression and exploitation.
A union between Samora Machel (of Mozambique), Agustinho Neto (of Angola), and Amilcar Cabral, evolved the conviction in the power of trained rural communities and urban militants to fight and defeat colonial armies. Robert Mugabe joined them in Zimbabwe. Likewise, Sam Nujoma of South-West Africa (now Namibia). The African National Congress (ANC) and PAIGC campaigned vigorously abroad to tame support for racist dictatorships by Margaret Thatcher, Dictator Salazaar and President Reagan.
Africa’s warriors for Liberation bled for four decades to crown the last half of the 20th Century with respect for human dignity by declaring Apartheid as “A Crime Against Humanity’’. The day the last gun went silent as liberation fighters waved in victory dances and songs must every year be honoured by Africa’s presidents, military, youths, women and musicians assembled.
The day the last gun went silent as liberation fighters waved in victory dances and songs must every year be honoured by Africa’s presidents, military, youths, women and musicians assembled