Whenever Mwalimu Nyerere felt he did not understand something, Seithy Chachage writes in this week's Pambazuka News, he sought to "read history backwards". Experience has continually shown us that it is not poverty per se which is the real problem of the world, but rather "the division of mankind into rich and poor", a division which allows a small minority to persistently dominate all others. If attempts at poverty eradication are not to simply replicate seemingly timeless inequalities, Nyerere stressed, social and political development must go hand in hand with economic growth, or indeed even before. What are needed, Chachage concludes, are "historical forms of knowledge" to encourage Africans to intervene in response to their marginalisation and to break from a "life devoid of all forms of arbitrariness—whether class, gender, race [or] communal exclusivity".
Tagged under Governance