Africa’s Nobel Peacemakers
Thirteen individuals of African descent have won the Nobel peace prize since 1950.
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We should draw lessons for peacemaking, civil rights, socio-economic justice, environmental protection, nuclear disarmament and women’s rights in this contemporary era from the rich experiences of these laureates.
African Americans, Ralph Bunche (who won the Nobel prize in 1950) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1964), played an important role in the pan-African struggle, with Bunche leading the creation of the United Nations (UN) Trusteeship Council by 1947 and King championing decolonisation efforts.
Both attended Kwame Nkrumah’s independence celebration in Ghana in 1957.
South Africa was the last African country to gain its political independence in 1994, and four of its citizens won the Nobel Peace Prize: Albert Luthuli (1960), Desmond Tutu (1984), Nelson Mandela (1993), and Frederik Willem de Klerk (1993).
The ancient civilization of Egypt produced two peace laureates – President Anwar Sadat (1978), and Mohamed ElBaradei (2005), head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
They were honoured for peacemaking and nuclear disarmament respectively.
Ghana, which produced the great Pan-African prophet, Kwame Nkrumah, was honoured with the award of the peace prize to Kofi Annan (2001), the UN Secretary-General between 1997 and 2006.
Kenya, the site of one of Africa’s greatest indigenous anti-colonial movements - the Mau Mau struggle against British rule in 1952–1960 - produced a Nobel peace laureate in Wangari Maathai (2004), who devoted her life to environmental struggles. Liberia, one of Africa’s oldest republics founded in 1847 by freed American slaves, has produced the two most recent African Nobel peace laureates: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee (both in 2011) for their role in the struggle for women’s rights.
Obama and Luther King
The first American President of African descent, Kenyan-Kansan, Barack Obama, won the Nobel peace prize in 2009. His career was inspired by Martin Luther King’s civil rights struggle and he was a direct beneficiary of this movement.
As a young student in the United States (US), Obama first became politically active when he engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle, and Nelson Mandela inspired his activism.
Connections
It is also important to make connections between the struggles of these 13 individuals of African descent. Bunche and King marched together during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s; King and Luthuli issued a joint declaration against apartheid in 1962; Luthuli and Mandela worked together against apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s; Mandela appointed Desmond Tutu as head of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC); Luthuli and Tutu were both priests who were forced into politics by the inequities of apartheid; King, Luthuli, Tutu and Mandela were all skilful performers (as is Obama) who understood intuitively the importance of dramatic speeches and gestures; while F.W. de Klerk, as a young anti-apartheid-supporting student leader, invited Luthuli to address fellow students at Potchefstroom University in 1961.
There were other interactions between our 13 Nobel laureates. Obama met Tutu in South Africa as a US senator in 2006, and as president, he honoured Tutu with America’s Medal of Freedom three years later; Annan and ElBaradei were both self-effacing technocrats - rather than politicians - who rose up the ranks to head their respective institutions, seeking to serve as a “force for good” in the world and to embody the principles of their organisations; Maathai, Johnson Sirleaf, and Gbowee all courageously pursued women’s rights through methods that directly confronted authority; while Maathai worked with Annan and Tutu to promote environmental issues.
In 2006, then-senator Barack Obama planted a tree with Maathai in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park.
Both ElBaradei and Maathai were involved in unorthodox struggles that sought to link nuclear disarmament and environmental protection to global security in a new framework of human security. Both became involved in domestic democracy struggles in Egypt and Kenya respectively. Both ElBaradei and Obama shared a desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Six of our Nobel laureates who served as international civil servants or pursued global and regional issues were prophets sometimes without honour in their own homeland.
Bunche was more recognised in international circles than he was in the US; Sadat was revered in the West, but shunned and isolated in the Middle East and Africa; ElBaradei failed in his bid to play a more prominent political role in Egypt after retiring from the UN in 2009; Johnson Sirleaf failed disastrously in her first bid to become Liberia’s president in 1997; Annan spent only two years (1974-1976) as head of Ghana’s tourism board before returning to the UN; while Wangari Maathai’s environmental activism was more recognised abroad than in Kenya.
Five of our laureates – Sadat, de Klerk, Mandela, Johnson Sirleaf, and Obama – were also heads of state burdened by state power, who sometimes took difficult decisions that did not always accord to the principles of the struggles they were waging.
The writer is Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, Cape Town, South Africa, and Editor of Africa’s Peacemakers: Nobel Peace Laureates of African Descent (Zed, 2014).
A version of this article appears in print on page 42 of the Daily Graphic of March 24, 2014.
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