Reflections on the 55th anniversary of Africa Liberation Day
AN ANNIVERSARY is a time not only to celebrate but to honestly take stock, introspect and truthfully reflect on one’s achievements and failures and to search one’s soul.
It is not a time for pomp and ceremony. It is not a time to blow one’s own horn; nor is it a time for self-delusion.
This month marks the 55th anniversary of Africa Liberation Day, the day the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was formed on May 25, 1963.
This year May also coincides with the 93rd anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest leaders the African people gave to the world, Malcolm X, born May 19, 1925. He worked closely with the brains behind the OAU, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana.
Last month, South Africa celebrated 24 years of its “freedom”.
If Nkrumah were to be resurrected, would he be happy that South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon voted in favour of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 declaring a no-fly zone over Libya, which led to the toppling and eventual public lynching and assassination of its head of state, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi?
Didn’t these African countries know that in international law a no-fly zone is a declaration of war? Didn’t they learn from what happened to Iraq in 1991?
And what were the reasons for declaring a no-fly zone over Libya?
At the height of the so-called Arab Spring, a Western NGO led by a Geneva-based Somali-born doctor concocted a lie that Libya bombed civilians.
The Russian government contradicted this through satellite pictures which showed there was no such bombing of civilians. However, they were ignored because Western powers wanted to destroy Libya because it was a bulwark against Western imperialism.
Those three African countries didn’t positively verify the facts but acted on the basis of rumours. They conducted their foreign policies on the strength of rumours and Western propaganda.
South Africa, which claims to have a democratic government, didn’t even seek approval from its Parliament and people.
The ANC government went against the tenets of African unity by presiding over the destruction of another African country that prevented other vulnerable African countries from taking loans with strings attached from Western financial institutions, thus turning them into debt slaves, since Gaddafi financed them and eradicated their dependence on Western countries.
Many South Africans are not aware that in the early 1960s many African leaders and governments, including Kenneth Kaunda, identified with Robert Sobukwe and the PAC because of their Pan Africanist philosophy.
They didn’t identify with the ANC, because of its precarious ideology. During his tour of
Africa and Britain in 1962, Nelson Mandela visited various African countries including Ghana.
Nkrumah refused to meet Nelson Mandela and said they should tell Mandela he would not meet him because Ghana identified with Sobukwe and the PAC.
Many other African leaders who met Mandela, including Kaunda, told him to wait until Sobukwe came out of prison.
These African leaders were clear 56 years ago that the ANC wasn’t an organisation to be relied upon – something that began with their adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955.
African leaders regarded the Freedom Charter as a repudiation of the African people’s anticolonialist stance of Africa for Africans.
What has Africa achieved in the last 55 years? Since independence, Africa has stagnated, if not regressed. The economic development models adopted by African countries have caused suffering. They were dictated by Western countries.
Not only do they dictate economic development models, but they also choose leaders for us. Those whose policies they don’t like and can stand their ground are toppled and/or assassinated.
Examples abound: Congo’s Patrice Lumumba on January17, 1961; Burundi’s Pierre Ngendandumwe, assassinated on January 15, 1965; Ben
Bella’s government in Algeria, overthrown on June 13, 1965; Nkrumah and Achmad Sukarno of Indonesia in February 1966; Gaddafi in 2011.
In Korea in June 1949 they assassinated Kim Koo, and so on.
I mentioned Malcolm X in the opening paragraphs because Ngendandumwe, Ben Bella, Nkrumah, Sukarno and others were assassinated and toppled because they supported Malcolm X’s 1964 petition to the UN, charging the US government with the crime of genocide against African Americans.
The atrocities Malcolm X mentioned in that petition are still being carried out today.
There is a desperate need to dismantle colonial institutions and structures in order to foster genuine political, economic, and social changes.
Ditshego is an independent researcher.