We are lost in Africa!
The death and ongoing funeral of the justly famous Nelson Mandela has provided yet another rich opportunity for us Africans to display our usual high levels of personal irresponsibility, masking our self-created internal problems under a heavy flood of words, words, words.
Advertisement
Those of us who have had the benefit of political discernment are very busy using this chance to say something, anything, to engage in our pitiful exercise of bemoaning our plight on our own continent and blaming others for all our problems.
Listening and reading some of us pontificate on the meaning of the life and death of Mandela, it would appear that we Africans refuse to grasp the meaning for ourselves of the struggle for independence, and freedom from the wicked and cruel racial discrimination that was apartheid.
We have become perpetual slaves to our need to feel like second and third class citizens in our own continent. Everything we do or say on the international stage suggests that we are at the mercy of powerful and evil forces who are so intelligent, so strong and so wily that our efforts at self-assertion are foredoomed to pitiful failure.
What accounts for this despicable lack of self-confidence in ourselves? What explains the refusal to see ourselves as a truly free people who can make and unmake ourselves in any way we choose?
I must confess that I have no answers that would satisfy us as to this continuing puzzle in the psyche of Africans on the international stage. But I am certainly not a fellow-traveller in the pointless, self-limiting excursions on how we are so exploited, so discriminated against, so underrated in world affairs. This is because I believe that I am as good as the next man, damn his colour or wealth or intelligence. The first sign of cultural and intellectual slavery is to pay needless and sycophantic homage to the supposedly awesome and limitless powers of your foes, if those who are struggling with us here on earth really are our foes, or co-citizens of the world.
Some of my friends here in Ghana on hearing of the passage of Mandela, set off immediately, at full speed, on the utterly useless and completely pointless comparison between Mandela and our own Nkrumah on the irrelevant question of who was the greatest African? I was amazed when some of my friends, who were very angry when others sought to belittle the dead President Mills last year, waxed breezily on the supposed inadequacies of Mandela as compared to Nkrumah. Come on my friends, do you think ordinary South Africans, bereaved at their sad loss, would praise you for these unkind words as their hero lies motionless in eternity?
Why? Is this comparison even necessary? Is hero-worshipping a worthy pastime for our intellectual abilities and our moral sensibilities? Or have our sensibilities been benumbed by our ceaseless partisan politicking?
Some of us are busy describing Western leaders who came to praise the dead Mandela as hypocrites whose forbears supported apartheid and whose sympathies are, therefore, feigned and insincere.
It was Vladimir Lenin who said that ‘there can be no exploitation without exploitables’; the case of us Africans, decades after political independence shows clearly that we are not interested in identifying our own interests and going forward to fight for them.
I must add quickly that that interest is not in the ever-present urge to unite the continent, but rather to create the conditions that make united actions inevitable and desirable. Those conditions must manifest in little actions that have meaning in our capacity to govern our emotions first and foremost and face the realities of nationbuilding without the opaque lenses of our crazy fights over political creeds.
Let me instantiate. Anytime I drive by the rotten edifices of the erstwhile Ghana Food Distribution Corporation in the Industrial Area in Accra, the full weight of our refusal to govern ourselves descends on me. There are people in this country for whom those rotten buildings must be maintained in their present sorrowful state than disposing them of and let our government be free to do better things with our resources than paying security guards to secure decaying buildings.
Then again,there are people in this country who are hell bent on forcing the SSNIT to keep a losing investment in a bank for reasons that are neither related to increasing the funds available to pensioners in the evening of their lives nor making sense in commerce qua commerce. All twenty-four million of us must, of necessity, superintend and approve the day-to-day operations of the SSNIT because the legal trustees cannot but be malevolent enemies of Ghanaians. For some of us, the emotional attachment is more important than the viability of the fund which sustains them.
If Nelson Mandela had followed his historical instincts, there would not have been South Africa as we know it today but admitting this is as difficult as extracting a tooth for a lot of us. The worldwide admiration for this former freedom fighter is because he permitted his reason to be the guide to the survival of the new South Africa which he founded. Emotions do not build or sustain great endeavours and mighty nations.
We must all be grateful that this simple man has, in death, wrought the enviable feat of having world leaders, who would not ordinarily say hello to each other, come together at his funeral to mourn him. No one compelled them to be there at the funeral.
It was the power and seduction of his example that drew them there. That power, that example, is what the Africa after Mandela needs to start doing; the things that need to be done to lessen the hardships of our people.
If we are able to rise above the usual, boring complaints about our lot which have become our trait since the struggle for independence, then the towering life and story of Nelson Mandela would not have been in vain.