From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Fri Aug 28 2009 - 08:32:54 EDT
Colonialism reclaiming Africa?
by Andrew M. Mwenda
August 28, 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/coverStoryPictures/14933.jpg.
Colonialism is back; bold and unashamed. The West has decided to reclaim
leadership in Africa. Only last week, I watched US Secretary of State, Mrs
Hillary Clinton, give instructions to Kenyan politicians on how they should
manage the affairs of Kenya. She demanded that the democratically elected
ruling coalition in Kenya create a tribunal to try the perpetrators of last
year's post election violence. If not, she threatened, the International
Criminal Court (ICC) will take over.
A significant section of the Kenyan society think there should be a
tribunal. But the Kenyan cabinet, composed of both the ruling party and the
opposition parties debated this matter. In their wisdom, they decided it is
better to pursue political reconciliation as opposed to punitive criminal
justice. I share this view, like many Kenyans do and others don't. And that
is the beauty of democracy; once a decision is taken by the governing body,
all should respect it.
It is unwise to pursue punitive criminal justice when seeking to resolve
violence born of political disagreement. This is especially so in
circumstances where the balance of power between both sides to a conflict is
close to an equilibrium. Under such circumstances, any criminal prosecution
process would tend to reignite violence. Why? Because criminal justice tends
to demonise "the other"! This drives the accused persons to resort to
violence in self defense. The best path is political reconciliation.
This was the basis of the success of Nelson Mandela in post Apartheid South
Africa; Paul Kagame in post genocide Rwanda, even the United States after
its civil war in 1864. In all these cases, the perpetrators of political
violence were brought back into the political process through tough
bargains. Decision making is never a choice between right and wrong. It is a
product of serious trade-offs. But why did the US hail Mandela but is
condemning Kenya for seeking a similar path?
Unlike 19th century colonialism which involved the direct presence of
colonial officials to implement colonial law, the new colonialism (Ghana's
Kwame Nkrumah called it neocolonialism) relies on lectures, instructions,
intimidation and blackmail. It has put international institutions in place
to specifically deal with African leaders - the best example being the ICC.
NATO air strikes in Afghanistan are killing civilians in droves. Please
watch if there is even a whisper about the culpability of any Western leader
- America's Barack Obama or Britains's Gordon Brown.
Old colonialism understood the importance of a combination of material and
ideological incentives in recruiting local allies. So it Christianised
Africans and provided minimum education for catechists and clerks in order
to create an intellectual class in support of colonial rule. But it also
provided material incentives - salaried employment, land grants, and other
forms of colonial-state patronage.
The agents of the new colonialism are secular missionaries promoting
democracy, human rights and justice as is sang by the master i.e. without
context. They refuse to acknowledge that pursuing them in complete disregard
of context can produce results at odds with the intended purpose. The US
refused to jam radio Mille Collines during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994
saying such action would violate the principles of free speech. The
genociders enjoyed their freedom to mobilise for mass murder.
The agents of the new colonialism believe that Africa's future lies in
handouts of foreign assistance - financial, military, ideological, technical
etc. By speaking in the master's language, their supporters among local
elites sound civilized and get accepted in the master's councils. By
promoting Western "assistance", they get the jobs paid for in foreign aid
projects.
If previously the West lacked an authentic voice to convince Africans that
they need to be treated like children, now it has that voice in Obama. Since
he is considered black, he is the perfect instrument to tell us how to
manage our affairs. African elites, with a deeply rooted peasant mentality
of identity as the basis of cooperation, believe that since Obama is "black"
then he represents their interests.
Yet regardless of his African ancestry, Obama is an American president. His
primary obligation is to serve American interests. Over the last century,
the US has intervened in other countries not to promote democracy but its
national interest. As experience shows, democracy has not been America's
allay in the pursuit of its interests abroad.
Consequently, America has removed democratic governments and replaced them
with its favored dictatorships - in Iran in 1953, Chile in 1974, Congo in
1960, etc. It has always used its military and intelligence services to
bomb, invade or carry out clandestine missions in other nations. In none of
these cases has democratic government come as a direct result. Instead,
often democracy has developed in opposition to American interference.
The US and other Western nations have always advanced the values of liberty,
freedom and social justice only instrumentally when it serves their
interest. But these values have never been meant to inform real Western
practice. That is why the West pretends to be more concerned about democracy
in Iran when it is in bed with some of the worst dictatorships in the Middle
East - Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc. It seems to me that the use of democracy and
human rights is the ancillary one of image-making.
The urge behind the West's increasing intrusion into Africa's governance
seems to be a desire to dominate the continent. This is now being expressed
in the writings of two of the scholars receiving most funding for their work
on how the West should "help Africa" - professors Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia
and Paul Collier of Oxford. Their work has become very explicit in their
contempt of Africa's internal ability to reform itself. Increasingly, they
are publishing works suggesting that the solution for Africa's internal
problems is "international" (actually read Western) assistance through
foreign financial aid and military intervention.
I will return to Collier's bold suggestions about how countries of the
"bottom billion" need international military intervention and governance
instructions to become solvent in another article. Suffice it to say that if
our founding fathers like Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba who passionately
believed in our sovereignty as a people came back today, they would not
believe that half a century later, colonialism is making a comeback.
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