Scratching the surface: Pambazuka News and emancipatory politics

Happy anniversary to the staff of Pambazuka News. What follows below is a sort of a long-winded happy anniversary card wishing you all the best, hoping that you will keep going, that you will chart new directions, that your energy will incite all generations and all people of the world connected directly or indirectly to Africa to come up with solutions to the multiple problems affecting Africans, and through Africans, humanity. It is my wish that we step out of this massive ongoing laundering system, which keeps extracting profits out of unspeakable sufferings, starting with violence against women, and against children. This violence is not new, and it looks worse when one looks at places like eastern DR Congo, but it has been going on for a very long time. For this massive suffering of women, the weak and the poor, there has never ever been what one could call a massive apology from men, the powerful and the rich. It is as if the rich are rich because they deserve to be rich. Not surprisingly, most of the history of humanity has been written from the perspective of power and violations of humanity.

Is it not strange that while slavery triggers thoughts of, and calls for, reparations, one very rarely hears of calls for reparations with regard to sexual violence. Slavery has been declared a crime against humanity, but when will sexual violence be declared a crime against humanity, and acted upon accordingly? Out of slavery emerged colonial occupation. In the case of the US, and the Caribbean, the wiping out of native populations, a genocide, led the triumphant globalisers of those times to look for an easy hunting ground for people to enslave: Africa became the prime provider of the most sought after resource of the day. In a nutshell, if one could condense the history of Africa, from the violence against women through enslavement, colonial and apartheid rule, would it be an exaggeration to see in it a massive, unrecognised, unacknowledged, laundering system? If slavery has been recognised as a crime against humanity why is it that the gains made from that crime are not returned to a fund for the healing of humanity? A healing fund for humanity is something completely different from reparations even though it does repair, but it must go further. How could one accept reparations in the very currency that gained legitimacy through a crime against humanity? That would be accepting the laundering exercise.

A healing fund for humanity would insist that it is not enough to declare sexual violence against women or slavery crimes against humanity, especially if, in the process, all such a declaration does is to give a sort of moral sheen to those who apologise, while they continue to enjoy to the maximum the consequences and the profits generated by the crimes. As one reads, feels and sees deeper into what happened to humanity through sexual violence and slavery, it is extremely difficult not to conclude that most of humanity has made a greater effort at forgetting what happened than trying to make sure of knowing what really happened. Tracing how the forgetting took place can be confusing. For example, for slavery (which included sexual violence against women), this effort occurred on both sides: on the side of those who were slaughtered physically, maimed psychically and, left to mend themselves; but also on the side of those who most profited from the crime, and some of the latter were actually related to those who were raided, herded and shipped. Kimpa Vita, daughter of a well-to-do family in the Kongo Kingdom did all she could to get the king to stop the raiding and selling. For her fearless denunciation of slavery, Capuchin missionaries countered with accusations of heresy, and had her burnt at the stake. One would think that figures like hers would have long ago been raised to the status African Liberation Heroines and Heroes. All histories, not just African, contain episodes which the descendants of the protagonists would rather not touch, out of fear, shame or both.

As a historian, I like very much what Pambuzuka News is doing, but I would like it to do even better. History is never completely known. In the case of African history, one should say histories, the surface has been barely scratched. It is not only because most of the archives are out of reach of most of the people who should be the first to know, it is primarily because the current political leadership in all African countries are not interested in knowing those histories. Worse, one sees ruling cliques literally turning their back to the history they actually contributed to bring about. One should stress, also, that this practice of moving away or against the history of one’s humanity is not peculiar to African ruling cliques. Most of the countries with a colonising past are not interested in pushing for better and greater knowledge of the complete and total history of all their people.

The study and recounting of histories that would honour and heal every single member of humanity is, with very, very few exceptions, far from the preoccupations of history departments in academia. Admittedly, revisiting fearful, shameful, dehumanising episodes (slavery, sexual violence against women, imperialisms, Nazism, colonial occupations, genocides, lynching, discriminating justice systems) of the history of humanity is not easy. In the current context, which only honours and reinforces laundered power, promoting healing histories of humanity would be considered political suicide by almost any ruler on the planet.

As Michael Neocosmos wrote sometime back in a comment on the 2007-08 Kenyan crisis, the objective of propagating and ruling by way of politics of fear is to instigate the fear of emancipatory politics. There is a connection between politics of fear, fear of emancipatory politics and fear of emancipatory healing histories of humanity. For example, but just in passing, the current global financial crisis has been given all kinds of names in the past few months, except the one name which it really deserves. However, in order to give it that name, one would need to understand the current crisis from a wider time span than the one used by most analysts. It has taken a few months to admit that it was comparable to the financial crisis of 1929. My view is that it is not. It is worse, but for that we must await another few months. The data are available, but remain unseen because those voices that count refuse to look at them. The histories are audible, visible, but will not be seen by those who have been trained not to see or hear the healing voices of humanity.

Will it be possible to hear more frequently the healing voices of those who are screaming for help, not because they are special, but because they are the voices of Pambazuka News? Will it be possible to hear the stories that the powers-that-be would rather keep silent? The examples are uncountable, but for the rest of this essay I would like to go back to Haiti. Haiti is Africa and yet, it is treated as if it is very remote from it. If Haiti was not mired in poverty, Africans (especially those with the means to do so) would be visiting, but why is Haiti so poor, after it had been the jewel of the French colonial empire during slavery? More recently in 2004, why was a democratically elected president in Jean Bertrand Aristide, kidnapped and sent to exile? In other words, what is it in Haiti’s history that, seemingly, keeps calling for such vengeful retribution from the former colonial power and its allies?

Still more recently (see Kevin Pina’s article in Pambazuka (26-08-2008), as well as the Open Letter by Madame Jean-Pierre (26-08-2008)), why has someone like Lovinsky Jean-Pierre been kidnapped, more than a year ago, and relatively so little been done to get him back to his family? When Africans (of all ages) are kidnapped, there is less concern and interest in the media controlled by the powerful, then when a white child is.

All of the above questions are related to African history, past and current. Starting with the last, Lovinsky Jean-Pierre’s biggest sin (from the point of view of the ruling clique in Haiti, and its supporters) has been to keep calling, persistently and vociferously, for the return of Aristide. And what was Aristide’s crime? To have responded as best as he could to the calls from the poorest of the poor in Haiti. His response was rooted in his understanding of the gospel and what he had learned from the solidarity of his mostly poor parishioners. The result of this process has been, in Aristide’s practice, liberation theology. But it also went further into an understanding of the unbroken connection of Haiti’s history from 1804 to today. In Haiti, emancipatory histories and emancipatory politics have been intertwined in a way that has remained indelibly seared in the conscience of its people.

The saddest aspect of this is how the South African government has colluded to do to Aristide what the powers that be wanted; to keep him under house arrest or something close to it. This is difficult to understand in view of the fact that then President Thabo Mbeki was the only African head of state present in Haiti on the 1 January 2004 bi-centenary independence celebration. From an interview he granted Peter Hallward (1), it seems that Aristide wanted to keep quiet and, thereby, demonstrated that the emancipatory politics of Fanmi Lavalas had more to do with the people of Haiti themselves than with Aristide himself. The lesson being shown in Haiti is that emancipatory politics, by definition, must be at a distance from the state. More importantly, organisation and leadership in such politics, if they are going to be emancipatory, have to rely on the principle that every one counts, everyone speaks for herself or himself. The relationship between Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas is an ongoing illustration of how emancipatory politics works.

Yet, in the most recent issue of the Brazilian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, (August 2008) Christophe Wargny goes out of his way in order not to mention Fanmi Lavalas even though it is its members who have been targeted in the so-called stabilisation process of Haiti by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) (2). It is as if the main objective of the writer (once a supporter of Aristide) is to deny, denigrate and/or erase the politics of self-reliance that have been transforming Haiti. Whatever advances had been made under Aristide, especially in the areas of health and education for the population, seemingly must not be mentioned. While he mentions the heavy price paid by the country over the years and centuries of brain drain, he deliberately does not mention what Aristide had initiated in order to stem the brain drain. It is a stunning exercise in silencing emancipatory politics and history in a single swoop. Aristide’s reliance on the self-reliant and self-confident popular politics seems to have been corroborated on 15 July 2008, when the population massively came out to commemorate his birthday, without anyone in particular calling for the march. The twin question of emancipatory politics and emancipatory histories should be at the core of the next generations of Africans battling to transform the current situation, for the better, for everyone. If all of us are willing to speak up and speak out for the ‘Wretched of the Earth’, if all of us are willing to put aside our fears, then, indeed, a new dawn for Africa and Africans will sooner than later arise.

The point is this: emancipatory politics and emancipatory histories are being generated all the time, but they will not be advertised by those who are not interested in them. As I understand it, the challenge to all of us is to make sure that Pambazuka keeps getting better at being the channel through which emancipatory battles will be waged. It is not the only one, but it is the one I know best. I look forward to the next 400 anniversaries.

(1) See the appendix in Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, Verso Press, 2007.

(2) Christophe Wargny, ‘Ainda muito longe a normalidade’, Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil, August 2003, pp. 28-9.

* Jacques Depelchin is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Berkeley-based Ota Benga International Alliance for Peace in the DR Congo.

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/