The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)
Freddy Macha
6 November 2008
column
The new face of American leadership will as usual affect the politics of the world including Africa. I am speaking specifically of the Congo crisis.
A crisis that has kept recurring since the scramble for the continent's riches officially began at the Berlin Conference of 1884.
History is a very important teacher. Having witnessed the elections campaign in the US, the award winning Nigerian writer Ben Okri compared Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln (voted best American President of all time by five American and English journalists) last week.
The novelist quipped in London Times: "I would say people come to secretly resemble their heroes if they have studied and embodied their heroes enough."
Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) is regarded not only as the number one American President, but also one of the world's best orators who, amongst other things, laid the ground for the abolition of slavery in the US.
That is history and history always offers wisdom.
Congo is bleeding again. The cause is her wealth and minerals which have attracted not only colonialism and business, but local thieves and murderers in equal measure.
First it was the brutal leadership of General Mobutu Sese Seko; now it is the Tutsi rebel General Laurent Nkunda. Mobutu collaborated with the Belgian government and CIA to kill Prime Minister-elect Patrice Lumumba in 1961.
A few years ago, London's New African magazine quoted one of the Belgian soldiers who took part in the killing (then dipped corpse in sulphuric acid) boasting that he kept Lumumba's wedding ring as a memento.
Since Lumumba's murder, Congo has not known peace. Whereas the so-called "reason" given for Lumumba assassination was the fight against communism, today General Nkunda is slaughtering Congolese people in the name of Christianity.
He also claims the Congolese government backs Hutu militias who committed the 1994 genocide against his own Tutsis.
Until mid-week, 250,000 people were reported displaced in Congo. According to Medicines Sans Frontiers, the French humanitarian aid agency, five million have died since 1998.
That is almost a third of the Tanzanian population. Add the rape of women and children being beaten and trampled on like animals.
What kind of life is this?
Whether religion or politics is used to justify the genocide, the murder weapons come from Europe and US.
War is big business; killings make gun factories rich.
One of the reasons that we have the credit crunch and recession at the moment is a result of billions of dollars spent to send planes and weapons to butcher people in Iraq and Afghanistan post-9/11.
In his 2001 best-seller Stupid White Men, the American film-maker and writer Michael Moore says: "No black guy owns a plane that is smuggling automatic weapons into the country.
All of this is done by the whites. But sooner or later, thousands of these legally purchased guns end up in the hands of desperate people who live in poverty and who live in their own set of fears.
To introduce guns into this volatile environment - which we white people have done little to improve - is a deadly proposition."
No wonder there are some pessimists who have been saying that if Barack Obama is elected President he will be assassinated like his heroes Abraham Lincoln (1865) and John Kennedy (1963).
Why such glum predictions? It shows how futile our thoughts have become. While Obama himself remains positive and focussed we the onlookers have been decolonised into thinking and expecting the worst.
The Congo crisis has left many Zairians I have spoken to in a very negative mindset. It is common to hear some of them talking of no future for Congo and Africa.
Even the lyrics of their music (which we love to dance to) sometimes reflect this dark, gloomy thinking. Yes, we have had horrible despots (Mobutu, Idi Amin, Bokassa) and now Nkunda in Goma.
African history is, however, littered with honourable leaders: Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Ben Bella, Patrice Lumumba, Mwalimu Nyerere, Nelson Mandela
These guys had vision; an ability to see further than their nose. That's why most (Lumumba, Nkrumah, Ben Bella) had to be forcefully removed by powers in Europe and the US in collaboration with idiots on the continent.
Those who managed to endure (Nyerere, Mandela) had to sacrifice a lot and somehow got us through. There will always be another Lumumba, a new Nkrumah, another Mandela, an Obama factor.
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Thanks for writing this, there is a light at the end of the tunnel and we must always hope, hope against hope.