Tower of silence – African leaders and the G20

We hear a lot of people speak of a systemic crisis, yet at the same time there is very little systemic analysis going on. With regard to Africa, the most tragic is the paralysed silence in which the ruling cliques have found themselves. Africans, who have suffered the most from the most predatory system ever invented by humans, are still trying to survive in that same system as if there is no other way. Intuitively, every single human being on this planet has known for a very long while that a system that has at its roots the industrialisation of slavery cannot possibly have brought about anything positive.

One has to ask questions one never dared ask. For example, are we – not just those who are privileged to have a decent job – really better off than during the height of Atlantic slavery? By ‘we’ I do mean all those who find themselves looking for alternatives ways of living by risking their lives, and dying in unthinkable, outrageous and unacceptable ways.

Could it be that this predatory system has been so predatory that every one of us gets, in one way or other, affected/infected by its venom? And so, in the words of Aimé Césaire, have we have come to:

‘When the world shall be a tower of silence
Where we shall be the prey and the vulture’?[1]

As Africans, one of the ways out of this suicidal dead-end the world has come to is to stop spitting and trampling on our peoples and peoples' histories as though they are dispensable. Is it not time for our so-called leaders to stop mimicking and following whatever is propagated by those who have seen nothing wrong in slaughtering large segments of humanity, for the sake of maintaining a way of life (for them), a way of death for the rest of the world?

* Jacques Depelchin is a CAPES fellow at the Universidade Federal da Bahia.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

NOTES

[1]From ‘Batouque’ in Les Armes miraculeuses, Gallimard, Paris 1970, p.64