Post by jakaswanga on May 14, 2015 15:06:08 GMT 3
VIETNAM CELEBRATES UNIFICATION DAY, WHERE IS THE AFRICAN UNION?
Long ago in 1954, far away in Geneva, in Switzerland Europe, the world powers decided their peace in Vietnam would be at the price of dividing the country into two, South and North Vietnam, along an arbitrary 17th parallel North. Vietnamese nationalism faced a stark choice. Acquiesce, or resist. Choices have consequences, but not in the sense an innocent Kenyan mind might grasp.
Colonialism in its hubris needs to split up peoples according to its own priorities, demarcating them into dominions where it can domesticate them, and docile them to its (extractive and exploitative) purposes, while infesting them with its myths which negate the culture of the colonised peoples.
National liberation then, must be the anti-thesis to that. A tall order, even in situations where, unlike the United states, colonialism has not wiped out the whole native population or supplanted it with a billion more immigrants.)
Colonialism in its unavoidable arrogance, shall listen not to the natural truths and politico-economic desires of the colonised people, nay, it shall deny them all, together with their humanity, just as the unity of their territory too, or the holiness of their commemorative days, or, indeed, just as anything of importance shall be trampled arbitrarily --nay, declared pagan and broken up, like the bodies of resistors.
Feminist scholar Patricia Daley, specialising in Burundi, has interesting insights now more ringing in the face of the stand-off in the Great lakes region. Now, suppose post-colonial Burundi did not detoxify this Belgian inculcation and, instead, internalised and developed it further?
This is why this 30-04-2015 when I was reminded by my long-distant Asian pen-pal, that one of the most important CULTURAL EVENTS would be taking place in her backyard, I went to look for a serious relevance of the Vietnam lesson to Africa.
The peoples republic of Vietnam, celebrating 40 years of re-unification in the modern era, passed with barely a mention in our Western media. Kenya is of course therein embedded. At most, it was merely refered to as the day Saigon Fell to North Vietnamese communist forces, and darkness enveloped that unfortunate strip of land.
You would not know this ----fall of Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Mihn city---- was the crowning moment in the peoples war against more than a century of colonial domination, a period in which Viet nationalism had to confront three super powers --France, Japan and the USA--- and, having adopted ultimate ideological consciousness and confidence, were able to defeat external subjugation, albeit at terrible cost. Not to mention a hostile big brother and neighbour called China.
Self-conceited geo-political giant brains like MacNamara and Kissinger, in the service of empire, revealed themselves mere hypes and, cornered by lowly, peasant renegade communist ideologue Generals like Vo Giap and Ho, found their senses of civilisation smashed and themselves disoriented. As such, they the exceptional Americans mentally degenerated into mass murderers worthy of Hitlerite medals.
Colonialism and a world order between powers, had conspired to divide the ancient country and nation of Vietnam into two, North and South. Just like in Africa.
In Africa, colonialism had decided to divide many peoples across many countries with no regard to their history, desires, aspirations nor emotions. So do we have the Somali people dispersed over much of Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia. And these days even more, since the original Somali proper has broken up into more mini Somalia's, eg the republic of Somaliland.
Attempts to solve the current quagmire in Mogadishu without facing the problematic of the ''dispersal of Somali nationhood'' is a bit like building a house without a foundation. Possible yes, but such a house must be very modest in ambition, a make-shift shelter, like a grass-thatch mudhouse that wont be a ''permanent'.
As the center of Nairobi is locked up due to a Somali problem crossin over, security analysts in Kenya may want to take a moment to ponder the concept of dispersed identities: disassemble, re-assemble, thinking of a robot in the Star Wars series.
FREELY DREAMING.
Aah, floods of history, an outpour of hearts!
Rain in a burst of tropical storm through Africa
And these earthdams called independent states
Wash away as liter, adrift to the bottom of the sea.
Many an African peoples are also spread over several countries, be they the Karamoja, the Ankole, Tutsis and Hutus, Bakongo, Baluba and, you get the idea, nearly everybody! And those states have squandered half a century in which a semblance of purpose could have been forged, a sense of nationhood and belonging inculcated, a dream worth sacrifices as was the original independence struggle kept alive; all to no avail, the African states have imploded into a grotesque of chaos and youthful fates sealed in antiquity.
From this horror we see young Africans flee, and watch them have a watery burial by the shiploads, dying to reach the old colonial continent. It is the most damning of all things. Their free and independent countries in their rising Africa has nothing to offer them. They vote with their feet. With their lives.
Meaning they have first voted with their minds, and reached a terrible conclusion. Die this Africa.
As Vietnam celebrated her unification day, and I caught glimpses of the mass funerals of young Africans in Malta and Sicily where not a single representative of an African government was represented, a terrible question formed in my heart. Are the current colonial African borders set in granite, edificed lunar rock solid forever, or are they a colonial divide and rule construct like the two Vietnam's, destined to evaporate under sustained human action, in the process of liberation struggle? A liberation struggle which, unrecognised and unannounced at the top, is nevertheless already a high-intensity conflict on the ground, explaining the genocides in Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, and you know the rest.
The latest independent country in Africa is South Sudan. As of now, the state of that state raises this question with an urgency which cancels my French leave of liberation theology!
It is obvious people are voting with their hearts. May Africans are in states they have no loyalty to, and worse, nor do they have plans to be. In deed theirs is a loyalty no more than lip service, eyeing government as a looting experience, aiming to capture the state for sectarian and parochial gain. Therefore the African state has graduated into an epicentre of mediocrity, corruption, nepotism and all the known ills we witness daily in modern media.
Not disease poverty and ignorance and the above to be fought, but TERRORISM! Security, as in Fighting Terrorism has become the survival mantra of the African state. (So the question has to be asked: what is the political economy of this terrorism? Since we know in the 50's, all African liberation movements were dubbed terrorists by the then colonial power status quo. Nelson Mandela having been for decades the most famous African terrorist kingpin in jail.)
This question must be asked, and good minds attempt. What is this terrorism thing? The whole of North Africa --Egypt, Libya, Tunesia, Algeria, Marocco, is a terrorist zone. Then the Marghreb -Sahrawi, Mauritania, Chad, Mali, Nigeria, Darfur. The Great Lakes region is a permanently active volcano. It is a harsh image all over the continent, and everybody is organising security and anti-terrorism conferences.
Could post-colonial, independent Africa be politically bankrupt? That independence has served its historical purpose, achieved its peak and is now decaying, just like the colonial order after the second world war?
Could it be, with our tough security laws, ant-terrorist hysteria, we are only re-enacting the last days of a dying colonialism, every native a potential danger; Draconian laws rushed through, with populations 'somehow' terrorised into camps? (modern refugee camps in Africa like the giant Dabaab, or the ones funded by the EU in Mauritania, could just be the equivalent of colonial concentration camps -invented by the British--- where populations were drained into, to empty the land.)
AN EPIDEMIC OF DELIBERATE INCOMPETENCE?
This mess already seems to be deliberate sabotage. Which country in Africa can we now truly say is well run? (Paul Kagame's Rwanda, outside Botswana, tops the charts they say. Hmm, under that bloody despot Kagame, Rwanda is a mental morgue, the republic of minds killed by fear. Still, it is the best we got! Even if a rotting shame! And like Barrack Obama I do not know the definition of genocide, otherwise I would hold Kagame responsible for it in East Congo.)
Is continental terrorism the labour pains of African unification, the other side of African union failure.
There is a sh!t-storm out there, and this widespread lawlessness both at the state and local level are flashes of thunder in the horizon. Of course we have sound proof ears and short-sight conditions, and are the blessed ostrich. Afrika is rising, and some say sinking. But for sure Africa is moving, shifting. Unless political economy finds something useful for all these idle young men to do, the sure thing is their rising anger and desperation, so the Sh!t storm will be a blood storm. Looking around the globe, no one really wants the young Blackman. Europeans are happy to watch them drown in droves. The exceptional America rather incarcerate them in jail, or let loose white killer-cops upon them. Arabs are, well, citing the post-Gaddaffi Libya, back to their honest vile racism; and, Africa itself, O mother Africa, she is the worst place for young blackmen. Most of them, given a chance, would rather leave to seek greener pastures everywhere, even if the journey is a sure dead end.
Who really needs this Africa then? This Africa with no place for the dreams for millions of her youth, is itself already a graveyard. Already expired like a rotten corpse awaiting a merciful burial, or, failing that, a scavenger's clean-up.
THE VIET-CONG WAR OF UNIFICATION.
The price is the cliche high. Destroying French colonialism in Indochina, rolling the super power America back in combat defeat, the peasants of Vietnam would have the full wrath of a hegemon thrown at them. +3 million dead, and decades of dread war, with saturated bombing and chemical warfare (agent orange and the rest).
We will get there. The pieces are moving into place. Consider Burundi today. Which side does one toss, constitution-shredder Nkurunzinza in official incumbency, or the rebels who have dismissed him? What do we do with the ''legitimacy'' of Mohamed Morsi of Egypt? --water which was under the bridge yesterday? And all Hail coup-plotter and sham-elections-General Fateh al Sisi!? And Kabila Joseph is set to copy Kagame who copied Museveni in shredding the constitution to elongate presidential term. --There is rebellion out there, everywhere. ''Terrorism'' stalks Africa.
14-05-2015: I wrote this when a friend from Nairobi smst me in the morning, telling me Parliament had been cordoned off by police, because of a rumoured plot to blow up parliament. --Of course that is a joke: who would want to blow up them Mpigs!? Tourism is picking up, our investment credentials are up, we have a digitally dynamic regime, Obama is coming, Kerry and Clinton are in Nairobi on the same day: Kenya is as good as they come, so who, would find a motive to blow up our Mpigs.
That is the question I am trying to answer. And it is not getting any easier. So I know there is a link I am missing. Let me get back to thinking.
I will be back.
-------------------
Long ago in 1954, far away in Geneva, in Switzerland Europe, the world powers decided their peace in Vietnam would be at the price of dividing the country into two, South and North Vietnam, along an arbitrary 17th parallel North. Vietnamese nationalism faced a stark choice. Acquiesce, or resist. Choices have consequences, but not in the sense an innocent Kenyan mind might grasp.
Colonialism in its hubris needs to split up peoples according to its own priorities, demarcating them into dominions where it can domesticate them, and docile them to its (extractive and exploitative) purposes, while infesting them with its myths which negate the culture of the colonised peoples.
National liberation then, must be the anti-thesis to that. A tall order, even in situations where, unlike the United states, colonialism has not wiped out the whole native population or supplanted it with a billion more immigrants.)
Colonialism in its unavoidable arrogance, shall listen not to the natural truths and politico-economic desires of the colonised people, nay, it shall deny them all, together with their humanity, just as the unity of their territory too, or the holiness of their commemorative days, or, indeed, just as anything of importance shall be trampled arbitrarily --nay, declared pagan and broken up, like the bodies of resistors.
Feminist scholar Patricia Daley, specialising in Burundi, has interesting insights now more ringing in the face of the stand-off in the Great lakes region.
To maximise economic exploitation of the colony, Belgians subjected Burundian peasants to forced labour and compulsory coffee cropping. By 1945, they totally Tutsified land chieftaincy, sowing the seeds of genocidal economics. Colonial masters endowed Burundi with a centralised military that was recruited on the basis of European stereotypes of martial races. Together with the evolues (native elites certified as civilised), the ethnically poisoned Burundian military constituted the machinery for organising genocide after the countrys independence.
This is why this 30-04-2015 when I was reminded by my long-distant Asian pen-pal, that one of the most important CULTURAL EVENTS would be taking place in her backyard, I went to look for a serious relevance of the Vietnam lesson to Africa.
The peoples republic of Vietnam, celebrating 40 years of re-unification in the modern era, passed with barely a mention in our Western media. Kenya is of course therein embedded. At most, it was merely refered to as the day Saigon Fell to North Vietnamese communist forces, and darkness enveloped that unfortunate strip of land.
You would not know this ----fall of Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Mihn city---- was the crowning moment in the peoples war against more than a century of colonial domination, a period in which Viet nationalism had to confront three super powers --France, Japan and the USA--- and, having adopted ultimate ideological consciousness and confidence, were able to defeat external subjugation, albeit at terrible cost. Not to mention a hostile big brother and neighbour called China.
Self-conceited geo-political giant brains like MacNamara and Kissinger, in the service of empire, revealed themselves mere hypes and, cornered by lowly, peasant renegade communist ideologue Generals like Vo Giap and Ho, found their senses of civilisation smashed and themselves disoriented. As such, they the exceptional Americans mentally degenerated into mass murderers worthy of Hitlerite medals.
Colonialism and a world order between powers, had conspired to divide the ancient country and nation of Vietnam into two, North and South. Just like in Africa.
In Africa, colonialism had decided to divide many peoples across many countries with no regard to their history, desires, aspirations nor emotions. So do we have the Somali people dispersed over much of Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia. And these days even more, since the original Somali proper has broken up into more mini Somalia's, eg the republic of Somaliland.
Attempts to solve the current quagmire in Mogadishu without facing the problematic of the ''dispersal of Somali nationhood'' is a bit like building a house without a foundation. Possible yes, but such a house must be very modest in ambition, a make-shift shelter, like a grass-thatch mudhouse that wont be a ''permanent'.
As the center of Nairobi is locked up due to a Somali problem crossin over, security analysts in Kenya may want to take a moment to ponder the concept of dispersed identities: disassemble, re-assemble, thinking of a robot in the Star Wars series.
FREELY DREAMING.
Aah, floods of history, an outpour of hearts!
Rain in a burst of tropical storm through Africa
And these earthdams called independent states
Wash away as liter, adrift to the bottom of the sea.
Many an African peoples are also spread over several countries, be they the Karamoja, the Ankole, Tutsis and Hutus, Bakongo, Baluba and, you get the idea, nearly everybody! And those states have squandered half a century in which a semblance of purpose could have been forged, a sense of nationhood and belonging inculcated, a dream worth sacrifices as was the original independence struggle kept alive; all to no avail, the African states have imploded into a grotesque of chaos and youthful fates sealed in antiquity.
From this horror we see young Africans flee, and watch them have a watery burial by the shiploads, dying to reach the old colonial continent. It is the most damning of all things. Their free and independent countries in their rising Africa has nothing to offer them. They vote with their feet. With their lives.
Meaning they have first voted with their minds, and reached a terrible conclusion. Die this Africa.
As Vietnam celebrated her unification day, and I caught glimpses of the mass funerals of young Africans in Malta and Sicily where not a single representative of an African government was represented, a terrible question formed in my heart. Are the current colonial African borders set in granite, edificed lunar rock solid forever, or are they a colonial divide and rule construct like the two Vietnam's, destined to evaporate under sustained human action, in the process of liberation struggle? A liberation struggle which, unrecognised and unannounced at the top, is nevertheless already a high-intensity conflict on the ground, explaining the genocides in Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, and you know the rest.
The latest independent country in Africa is South Sudan. As of now, the state of that state raises this question with an urgency which cancels my French leave of liberation theology!
It is obvious people are voting with their hearts. May Africans are in states they have no loyalty to, and worse, nor do they have plans to be. In deed theirs is a loyalty no more than lip service, eyeing government as a looting experience, aiming to capture the state for sectarian and parochial gain. Therefore the African state has graduated into an epicentre of mediocrity, corruption, nepotism and all the known ills we witness daily in modern media.
Not disease poverty and ignorance and the above to be fought, but TERRORISM! Security, as in Fighting Terrorism has become the survival mantra of the African state. (So the question has to be asked: what is the political economy of this terrorism? Since we know in the 50's, all African liberation movements were dubbed terrorists by the then colonial power status quo. Nelson Mandela having been for decades the most famous African terrorist kingpin in jail.)
This question must be asked, and good minds attempt. What is this terrorism thing? The whole of North Africa --Egypt, Libya, Tunesia, Algeria, Marocco, is a terrorist zone. Then the Marghreb -Sahrawi, Mauritania, Chad, Mali, Nigeria, Darfur. The Great Lakes region is a permanently active volcano. It is a harsh image all over the continent, and everybody is organising security and anti-terrorism conferences.
Could post-colonial, independent Africa be politically bankrupt? That independence has served its historical purpose, achieved its peak and is now decaying, just like the colonial order after the second world war?
Could it be, with our tough security laws, ant-terrorist hysteria, we are only re-enacting the last days of a dying colonialism, every native a potential danger; Draconian laws rushed through, with populations 'somehow' terrorised into camps? (modern refugee camps in Africa like the giant Dabaab, or the ones funded by the EU in Mauritania, could just be the equivalent of colonial concentration camps -invented by the British--- where populations were drained into, to empty the land.)
AN EPIDEMIC OF DELIBERATE INCOMPETENCE?
This mess already seems to be deliberate sabotage. Which country in Africa can we now truly say is well run? (Paul Kagame's Rwanda, outside Botswana, tops the charts they say. Hmm, under that bloody despot Kagame, Rwanda is a mental morgue, the republic of minds killed by fear. Still, it is the best we got! Even if a rotting shame! And like Barrack Obama I do not know the definition of genocide, otherwise I would hold Kagame responsible for it in East Congo.)
Is continental terrorism the labour pains of African unification, the other side of African union failure.
There is a sh!t-storm out there, and this widespread lawlessness both at the state and local level are flashes of thunder in the horizon. Of course we have sound proof ears and short-sight conditions, and are the blessed ostrich. Afrika is rising, and some say sinking. But for sure Africa is moving, shifting. Unless political economy finds something useful for all these idle young men to do, the sure thing is their rising anger and desperation, so the Sh!t storm will be a blood storm. Looking around the globe, no one really wants the young Blackman. Europeans are happy to watch them drown in droves. The exceptional America rather incarcerate them in jail, or let loose white killer-cops upon them. Arabs are, well, citing the post-Gaddaffi Libya, back to their honest vile racism; and, Africa itself, O mother Africa, she is the worst place for young blackmen. Most of them, given a chance, would rather leave to seek greener pastures everywhere, even if the journey is a sure dead end.
Who really needs this Africa then? This Africa with no place for the dreams for millions of her youth, is itself already a graveyard. Already expired like a rotten corpse awaiting a merciful burial, or, failing that, a scavenger's clean-up.
THE VIET-CONG WAR OF UNIFICATION.
The price is the cliche high. Destroying French colonialism in Indochina, rolling the super power America back in combat defeat, the peasants of Vietnam would have the full wrath of a hegemon thrown at them. +3 million dead, and decades of dread war, with saturated bombing and chemical warfare (agent orange and the rest).
We will get there. The pieces are moving into place. Consider Burundi today. Which side does one toss, constitution-shredder Nkurunzinza in official incumbency, or the rebels who have dismissed him? What do we do with the ''legitimacy'' of Mohamed Morsi of Egypt? --water which was under the bridge yesterday? And all Hail coup-plotter and sham-elections-General Fateh al Sisi!? And Kabila Joseph is set to copy Kagame who copied Museveni in shredding the constitution to elongate presidential term. --There is rebellion out there, everywhere. ''Terrorism'' stalks Africa.
14-05-2015: I wrote this when a friend from Nairobi smst me in the morning, telling me Parliament had been cordoned off by police, because of a rumoured plot to blow up parliament. --Of course that is a joke: who would want to blow up them Mpigs!? Tourism is picking up, our investment credentials are up, we have a digitally dynamic regime, Obama is coming, Kerry and Clinton are in Nairobi on the same day: Kenya is as good as they come, so who, would find a motive to blow up our Mpigs.
That is the question I am trying to answer. And it is not getting any easier. So I know there is a link I am missing. Let me get back to thinking.
The post-colonial Burundian economy replicated colonial practices of mandatory cultivation. Daley illustrates the intersection between free market economics and political violence through the story of the gold wars, wherein a Free Trade Zone funded by the World Bank attempted to make Burundi the epicentre of gold distribution in central Africa. The project, which reflected connections between international capitalists and local elites, led to the assassination of the countrys President in 1993.
By virtue of its reputation in the West as a model African country, Burundi was the highest per capita recipient of World Bank low-interest loans in the 1980s. Consequently, eager to display the success of their market reforms, donors ignored (Burundian) state repression. (p.101) The same trend is repeating today, with the IMF patting Burundi as a good adjusting state (p.103) in return for the governments privatisation of healthcare and agriculture.
By virtue of its reputation in the West as a model African country, Burundi was the highest per capita recipient of World Bank low-interest loans in the 1980s. Consequently, eager to display the success of their market reforms, donors ignored (Burundian) state repression. (p.101) The same trend is repeating today, with the IMF patting Burundi as a good adjusting state (p.103) in return for the governments privatisation of healthcare and agriculture.
I will be back.
-------------------
