We have often been described as the Dark Continent by the Mzungus. Incapable of self rule, lazy, backward, inhumane, corrupt, whose idea of work as one of the characters in the great malimu the Zanzbari Mr. Abdulrazak Gurnahs’ beautifully written book ‘Desertion’ describes as ‘men sitting under a tree waiting for the mango to ripen’.
Someone once said history is not a chronicle of the past but an account of why and how something happened the way it did. This then I believe is the context within which one needs to view the history of our Continent in general and that of the region we know as East Africa in particular.
One can reasonably assume that our modern history— or whatever there is of it— all started with Africa’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah. Kwami Nkrumah was born September 21, 1909, at Nkroful in what was then the British-ruled Gold Coast. Nkrumah was trained as a teacher, and had his early schooling both in the United States and in England in the 1930’s. It is fair to say that when he first came to power Nkrumah was a sincere politician and his intentions were noble.
How he metamorphosed into what he became is still a mystery. The most striking thing about Nkrumah and what we will never forget about him is that when he first came on the scene in 1957 he told us Africans ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall be added unto you.’
So it is sad to note that Kwami Nkrumah became one of the most corrupt leaders of our Continent. At the height of his ignorance he had given himself the title of ‘Osagyefu’ the ‘redeemer’ and even established an ideological center designed to spread his personal philosophy about how we Africans are to be governed. Ever since the advent of this one time nationalist the decay, the rot and the race to the bottom had been spiraling out of control.
The rampant corruption, the civil strife, the tribal, ethnic, the region and religion rivalry, the ‘disappearance’ of dissidents had its entire genesis in Ghana under Nkrumah. After decolonization (or liberation, what ever one wants to call it) the only thing Africans had wanted was order, prosperity, justice, meaningful employment, political participation and a measured degree of personal freedoms. What they got instead was arbitrary Government, prisons, executions, torture, hunger and exile.
This has been the zeitgeist, the modus-vivendi under which subsequent rulers have been operating and thriving. As Robert Guest in his excellent book the "Shackled Continent" writes ‘too often in Africa men with guns twist the rules to enrich themselves ‘ and this had left the population of this once rich Continent more destitute than even the word destitute can describe.
Just looking at the statistics, by the time Ghana’s’ Rawlings (Rawlings of the blues eyes and red beard) left his power in 1993 the GDP of the country was exactly 50% less than it was when Nkrumah was overthrown. In Ethiopia by the time Meles annihilated innocent bystanders in his epic high noon gunfight on the streets of Addis, the per capita income of Ethiopians was some 30 dollars less than it was when Hailesellasie left under the blazing guns of Mengistu. And the economy of Eritrea? Well, no the World Bank does not have economic indicators for countries that are still on the barter system.
Whether one is in Ethiopian, Uganda or Kenya, the Sudan or Zimbabwe, the history or the narration of what happened the way it did is interchangeable, associative, commutative and transitive. The countries are led by an unscrupulous bunch of cutthroats. An amalgam of butchers enriching themselves at the expense of their countrymen and lying wastes the Continent in the process.
Take Uganda for example. Almost thirty years after the advent of Nkrumah in Ghana came Yeweri Museveni in Uganda. During his inaugural in 1986, Yoweri Kaguta Musevini had declared what we all Africans had hoped to hear from any leader in the forty or so years that had passed. In an eerie deja vu of what Nkrumah had said 30 years earlier, Museveni declared "The people of Africa, the people of Uganda, are entitled to a democratic government. It is not a favour from any regime. The sovereign people must be the public, not the Government". But twenty years down the road what a disappointment he turned out to be.
Uganda under Museveni could have been different and should have been different. He, of all, was the better-educated, the most class- conscious and the most politically-aware. He was urbane, well read, articulate. And in the initial years he no doubt had tried to deliver on his promise. But like his predecessors he also fell into the same trap. The same insatiable thirst for power. Hunting down the opposition, the intimidation of political rivals, the changing of the Constitution, you name it.
Another example of the ills that had beset our Continent is Kenya. Recently, there was news about corruption in high places in Kenya. The news was that this came as news.
In Kenya, corruption is as endemic as the mango trees. Here in this beautiful ex British colony any government official who is not criminally oriented will be kosher meat for hungry lions in the Serengeti.
In short the story of Kenya is a story of apartheid where a rich Kenyan-Indian mercantile class lives in segregated colonies, and runs virtually everything with the active connivance of the Kenyan ruling political class who has abrogated their responsibilities to the working poor of this potentially rich country.
Ethiopia under the Tigrean cabal could also have had a better shot at both a democratic future and a measured economic progress. The country had a relatively better civil service which could have played a very positive role in development activities and was relatively better endowed with physical resources (innumerable rivers, large tracts of land and a hard working diverse population). Fourteen years down the road, the same faces in the same places and nothing to show for it.
Although the Tigrean rag tag army who ousted a brutal military dictatorship had an unprecedented opportunity to create a better world and to become a force for positive change. Tigrean hegemony, ineptness, their insatiable hunger for riches, cronyism, nepotism and their distrust and intense hatred of the Amhara nephtegna made the TPLF even go down lower then their old nemesis.
Ethiopia’s’ Zenawi used the same ruses, the same old tactics of deception to change the constitution to prolong his tenure. The recent election of course was a farce. Why four more years of Meles should be weighted on the same scale with the lives of forty Ethiopians is beyond me. Even one life is worth everything.
But then again the opposition in Ethiopia is no improvement on the TPLF either. Myopic, provincial, parochial. They have a vision all right. A backward view. They are not evil. Only the more detestable. And in the final analysis who wins doesn’t make much of a difference anyway because either way the Ethiopian people lose.
And then we come to Eritrea. My beloved Eritrea was of course never a country in the real sense (or essence) of the word. There is no need to recount the origins of Eritrea in detail here. Suffice it to say that Eritrea was an Italian idea.
In brief, during the great scramble and plunder for resources in the 19th. century, Europe’s weakest country, Italy, was able to consolidate its hold on the coastal regions which it took from Egypt and the Assab area that the Italian Giusseppe Sapeto had purchase from the Afar sultanate. With the demise of Yohannes of Ethiopia and the active aqcuiscence of Minilik, the Italians were able to consolidate their hold and under fascism Italy was able to expropriate large tracts of land from the local population and construct modern day Eritrea.
Although the system of governance in the early years was through the use of local vassals (the so called rases and dejazmachs and cavaliers) after its geographical bounders were delineated and agreements signed with Ethiopia the colonial power was able to transfer a huge number of its citizens from impoverished Italy as a settler society in what it called Eritrea.
The Italians started forcing Eritreans to live in increasingly segregated ghettos (such as Abashawl.) As a colonial power, Italy never provided the people with anything worthwhile, be it schools, health facilities, running water, electricity, a functioning sewage system or meaningful employment. The suffering and deprivation is too long to detail her but let it suffice to say that participation in Government was non existent.
It is a legacy of this and later atrocities committed against the Eritrean people that today we see the current rulers cannot address our collective concerns simply because they don’t have the skills or the talent to do so. Like me, none of today’s Eritrean leaders had ever attended institutions of higher learning. And like most of us in the Diaspora, none of them have either ever worked in any meaningful administrative or specialized occupation. All were soldiers once. They should have remained soldiers forever.
As in many other African States, tension between Eritrea’s religious and ethnic communities has always been there since its inception regardless of how much we may wish it away. The outright assault on the ELF by the Christian highlanders during the struggle for secession (and their crime ?) was our own mini Rwanda. A phenomenon rooted in history. Peace is maintained only when one side accepts its place in the hierarchy and its junior status in the political structure of the country.
At the risk of being accused of schadenfruede, I would like to add that when today I hear some ‘Christians’ decry the leaders that be of stripping them of their right of worship, I cringe. For me, rights are total, rights are indivisible and impartial. This is not the time to talk of selective rights because when a single right is undermined all rights are undermined.
It would of course be naïve of me to blame the current leadership for all our problems, for all our ills. But it would also be equally naïve not to censure them for trying to maintain the status quo ante. We cannot be held responsible for what our parents felt in years gone by. But we owe it to ourselves to teach our children the evils of bigotry.
This tension is nowhere more pronounced than it is in the Diaspora. Most of those who profess loyalty to the Isaias dictatorship are, to put it mildly, kin and kith like me (although no one can accuse me of genuflection to the regime). The crowd that falls head over heels to grace their meetings. The crowd that drinks itself to a stupor in their festivals. The so-called patriotic wing (hagerawian) of the exiled community. The fawning, the salivation, the hysteria, the tantrums the drool is there for everyone to see.
I cannot blame these group for expressing their unbound devotion and love for their country. I am of the enlightened type who believes it is the right of every Eritrean to love or not to love his country. What I am against is the rabid, virulent and aggressive quasi-nationalism exhibited by many of my fellow travelers.
Patriotism is good. It gets rewarded. More patriotism is more good. It brings even more rewards. It is also self-referential. But what if the tyrant decrees all who profess patriotism and their families be immediately repatriated to the heimat. The scurrying down the rat whole will begin. I should know. I dine and wine with patriots.
But what makes vitriolic patriotism like this extremely dangerous especially in the African context is well documented in two books about the Rwandan genocide. One, When Victims Become Killers, by Mahmood Mandani and the other, Machete Season, by Jean Hatzfeld.
Here the authors recount how the rebels, as one Tutsi rebel put it, came to Kigali thinking they would face criminals in the State found a ‘criminal population’. False patriotism breeds dangerous trends that can easily bring about such genocidal tendencies in others where the population participates in the extermination of a whole ethnic group not because they are the enemy since they have nothing to do with the political decisions but because it becomes economically profitable to do so. Your neighbors’ land, his furniture, his wife etc.
It the Woyanes hadn’t been a militarily powerful group in Ethiopia today you can imagine how people like Negede Gobeze or Professor Mesfin Wolde Mariam (people with dubious characters and ample evidence about their role in the Derge regime) had tried to agitate the population to rise and eliminate Tigreans.
The history of individuals like Isaise who also participate in hate politics not only against the Woyanes but also against their own ‘country men’ is also very educational. One need not be a rocket scientist to imagine how demagogues and ideologues like those in the current leadership we have can unleash primitive passions for negative purposes should they find it politically expedient.
That is why today we are witnessing supporters of the current leadership fanning hate politics with the active participation of these leaders, not only against all Tigrean who were once their friends their neighbors their drinking buddies, who have nothing to do with Badme but against even our own people who oppose the excesses of our own Government.
If one needs any evidence one only needs to listen to Radio Eritrea or read some of the articles in Dahai, Shabait et al. There may be those who may try to deny this, who may try to excuse their behavior by saying not us, not here. But that is exactly what those who participated in the Rwandan genocide also said. So what makes us different from Hutus or Turks or Serbs or Germans, pray tell me.
Can our leaders change? Can they learn from the past? from history? No they can’t, and no they won't. So short of overthrowing them, there is nothing we can do to change their political misjudgment or restore their sanity. It is like the old English saying "You can teach a dog to walk on two legs but he will still remain a dog."
So what is in it for the country? Wherein lies our future? You may ask. And what about the so called opposition? The Jebha or the ELF or the EDM or whatever they are calling themselves these days? Oh yes the opposition. They seem to be everywhere but they are no where. No they are no different from their counterparts in the leadership. Stultified, ossified, mummified. Relics of an era gone by.
No, if there is any future it is with the young. The pure, the untainted, the straight thinking and the straight talking young. The educated young. We witnessed it in San Diego. A small girl stood up and stood tall and told the uncivilized manure to address her in a civilized manner. She done us honor. For this we salute her.
They probably did not get her message. Simply put she told them ‘let’s put the sloganeering and pep talk aside and let us have some meaningful political debate’. This debate is not simply about Isaias. He is a spent force. An empty barrel, to put it in his own words. He belongs to the past. This debate is about us, about Eritrea and by extension about our region and about our Continent.
There is where the future is. With our young. With a new generation of leaders like her one day we will make the mzungus eat their words. We will change the way we view ourselves and we will change the way the world views us. As the old African saying goes remember "No condition is permanent"
Fulluy@aol.com
