Published by the government of Zimbabwe
Reason Wafawarova
4 July 2009
(Page 2 of 2)
In that era, the missionary assumed the role of the preacher and the educator, and attacked virtually every aspect of African culture; branding African Traditional Religion as barbaric, ancestral beliefs as witch-craft, social customs like polygamy as pagan and evil, while economic behaviour was scorned as lazy and inefficient.
Today, African governments are largely regarded as despotic, tyrannic and dictatorial.
African solutions like Zimbabwe's GPA and its subsequent inclusive Government are branded products of dictatorial clubs and unacceptable by Western standards.
We, Africans; in the name of civilisation and modernity, are supposed to acknowledge the hopelessness of our own race in terms of thought processes and solving problems.
It is demanded of our civic groups and local NGOs that they make project proposals that can pass the Western definition of democratic goals so as to receive funding, and our own values related to governance issues are trounced as primitive and of no relevance in a "modern global society".
We have concurred and called ourselves fighters in the "struggle for democracy".
The NGOs that Western governments prefer to fund in helping Zimbabwe to restore its shattered economy do relentlessly promote the social relations and values of neo-liberalism -- the arm that pushes the imperial agenda from the right wing.
They extol the imperatives of Western-style democracy and obedience to imperial authority -- their primary funders.
They stress the virtues of "private property, frugality and the need to save and to accumulate", as John Daniel would put it.
The developing world in general and Africa in particular, are being coerced to enter the capitalist market economy as primary providers of raw materials and as hosts of foreign capital with no possibility of ever developing into value addition to their own raw materials.
This entrance is not entirely voluntary as the benchmarks from the West will ensure that any group that seeks independent ways of exploiting their resources will not go unpunished.
This is the context in which Zimbabwe is under the Western sanctions regime for daring to expropriate land from white colonial occupiers.
Just like the African was enlightened only good enough to have skills required for the servicing of colonial lower echelons of the economy, the African countries of today are supposed to be granted sovereignty only good enough to allow uninterrupted Western investment and profiteering through local resources.
Those who grant themselves sovereignty beyond these boundaries are "on the wrong side of history" as President Obama has inspired many to say these days.
Africans today aspire for happiness and status as a democratic people. Unfortunately that aspiration is driven by a misguided belief that we must become less and less African through the attainment of Western democratic credentials as laid down by the benchmarks such as the ones Prime Minister Tsvangirai was assigned to deliver to our primitive selves.
Just like the colonial era African had to adopt the European religion, master his language, acquire a knowledge of the rivers and mountains, kings and queens of Europe; the modern day African is supposed to adopt Western democratic values, master the language of Western Parliaments, acquire a knowledge of the political heroes of European history and support Western ventures in the Middle East and other areas.
The acquisition of African knowledge is today irrelevant to the acquisition of status.
Yet even those who do acquire Western knowledge cannot escape the second class syndrome where they are supposed to acknowledge as a blessing the endorsement of Westerners.
It is like the "boy-girl syndrome" of the colonial era where even adult and professional Africans were reduced to an infantile status of being described as "boys" or "girls" even by the children of the colonisers.
The educator of the colonial era committed himself to teach that the law was neutral and sacred, but in its application, the African soon realised that there was a double standard in that the same offences committed by Africans and Europeans were judged differently.
Rape of a European woman by an African man was frequently a capital offence, but rarely the same when roles were reversed.
Likewise, the NGOs of today are committed to teach Africa about international law and the relevance of such enforcement institutions like the International Criminal Court and the Rome Statute. However, the ICC has, in its eight years in existence indicted a total of 13 people and they are all from Africa.
This writer will quickly point out that the international tribunals that were set up to try Saddam Hussein, Milosevic and Pinochet all had nothing to with the Rome Statute or the ICC.
They were just international tribunals.
This means that the world has to disregard the war crimes of Israel in Gaza and the US' murderous misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they must define war crimes, aggression and crimes against humanity by limiting the scope to Africans.
In fact it is unthinkable that we can drag that American warlord by the name George W. Bush to The Hague but we are supposed to abide by the thinking that Al-Barshir of Sudan must be handed over to the ICC on the basis of evidence provided by the all-important Western NGOs.
Only Africans breached the Rome Statute in the first eight years of its existence; so we are told and so must we believe. How inspiring!
We hear you Prime Minister Tsvangirai when you say we have a part to play in meeting Western benchmarks but we will listen to you as Africans coming out of slavery and colonisation.
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