OUR DREAM IS ABOUT TO DIE

NELSON Mandela said clearly that if the ANC in any way treated the nation the way the previous regime did, we, the people, should unhesitatingly treat the ANC the same way we treated the racist Nats. These are strong words based on a deep conviction that good governance does not depend on who dispenses it, but on how it is dispensed.

I do not enjoy any form of negativity, nor do I waste time by finger-pointing or name-calling. But as a senior citizen who has lived through various stages of the history of this country and having queued many times at many polls in the hope that the dream of 1994 would come true, it is time for us to act on the moral injunction, so lucidly stated by Madiba. Our dream is about to die.

I am not a politician, political commentator or analyst. My expertise lies in the domain of literature, where the ebb and flow of the human condition is recorded. As such, I have become familiar with the narrative of Africa as a continent cruelly exploited and pillaged over centuries of colonial contagion. The massive oeuvre of literary material points clearly to the dire condition of the native of Africa – and here I use the word native in its purest semantic sense, devoid of politics or racism – that escalated after his first encounter with Europeans.

I have studied hundreds of novels, essays and poetry which recorded the whole pathetic saga of mindless dehumanisation of our continent’s inhabitants. This includes tales of good and bad experiences, actions and reactions that tell a tale awash with blood and genocide.

We can access the measured academia of Achebe to read about Nigeria’s efforts at shaking off the European shackles of slavery and theft. His essays, like the collection Morning yet on creation day rail vigorously, if with magisterial control, against the assumption that the denizens of Africa were waiting to be freed from barbarism and brought into the light of human decency by the pale ones who sailed into their lives with legalised pillaging in the name of royalty as their only drive of exploitation.

Or one can read the other Black novelists like Ngugi, Ben Okri, Miriama Ba, Tsitsi Dabarembga, Bessie Head and our own home-grown Alex La Guma or Zoë Wicomb. There is a plethora of reading material that catalogues attempts at decolonisation on all its varied and pathetic levels, from assimilation, through rejection, mass genocide to even the seldom-mentioned collusion that handed slavery to the white man on a plate.

Or one can read Frantz Fanon and learn how our own country is spiralling towards the revolt of the poor as predicted in his copious commentaries on the failed governance that invariably follows unchoreographed relief from the cunning coils of colonialism.

Not all commentary on the rapacity of the colonists is bitter. Salman Rushdie snidely reminds the British that, 5 000 years before they came out of their caves, Indians were already wearing silk. That is a nice bit of reductionism that always raises a smile with me, if only because it is true. When the Brits discovered that the weaving skills of Indian villages produced a product far superior to the less exotic products of England’s cotton-gins, the Brits responded with mass-amputation of Indian thumbs to protect their own pathetic looms. Such was the cruelty of greed.

The stories of African failure at good governance go back much further than our convenient excuse of racism of the previous regime.

It is to be found in the narratives of the Inca and Mayan tribes of South America, the already-mentioned Indian sub-continent, the misfortunes of the Blacks in America and the Caribbean, and the unabashed rape of many other “minor” civilisations.

We can now assume, from reading material available up to about 1850, that white was right. Whites told their own versions of what Blacks were. They were sub-human and totally out of synch with any notion of civilisation. For centuries, Africa was referred to as the Dark Continent. The South American “wild men” who had access to seemingly-endless gold reserves yet did not appreciate it, could be justifiably decimated by the hundreds of thousands by the wealth-mad Conquistadores.

What one discovers, reluctantly, is the staggering, if brutal, success of the exploitation.

When the purging started, the exploited started stealing from themselves. And where the colonials were invited to stay, the new rulers entered into unholy fiscal and social relationships that did nothing for the expectant emerging, newly-free nation.

By now, my reader can see where I am going. We need to look at history, learn from it, and then relegate it to the archives. Our present government will have learnt from this narrative that they themselves have to answer when things go wrong. Don’t look around for someone to blame. Look at yourselves.