“Statistics about mass murder are often hard to prove. But if this number turned out to be even half as high, I thought, the Congo would have been one of the major killing grounds of modern times. Why were these deaths not mentioned in the standard litany of our century’s horrors? And why had I never before heard of them?”
– pg. 3, Introduction, KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST, by Adam Hochschild, Mariner Books, New York, 1999
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For those of us in the African Diaspora who understand how important the continent is to us as African people, the news that the president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, had signed a power-sharing agreement with the main Opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, was great news. The agreement was brokered by the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, and we will discuss Mbeki later in this column.
The people who run this newspaper, and who run the newsrooms at KREM Radio and KREM TV, are professional Belizeans who function in the Belizean marketplace. They feel, and realistically so, that their primary responsibility is to meet their weekly payrolls and to survive as businesses. 34 years after UBAD was dissolved, the young people responsible for news at Kremandala are not activists, Pan Africanists or black militants. They did not consider the Mugabe/Tsvangirai power-sharing any major news, but it is.
In the galaxy of twentieth century African freedom fighters, Robert Mugabe may be considered second only to Nelson Mandela. Mandela spent 27 years in jail; Mugabe spent ten. In the southern part of Africa, Zimbabwe’s wealth is second only to that of South Africa. While Mandela was still in jail in South Africa, Mugabe led Zimbabwe to independence in 1980. Remember, for those independence celebrations he invited the already ailing Robert Nesta Marley to perform in Harare. “Every man’s got a right to decide his own destiny …”
When these European colonial powers, like the British, agree to give you political independence, they do everything within their power to have the white supremacist inequities established during colonialism, remain as they are. In other words, you have the trappings of independence, but on the ground the masses of your people remain poor. In Zimbabwe (previously Rhodesia), whites had overrun the land and dominated ownership of it during colonialism. Some years ago, Mugabe became impatient with the status quo and decided to do something about it. The British let loose the media and financial dogs of war upon him. Zimbabwe was beaten down to its knees. Mugabe was demonized, but he trod on.
Meanwhile, in South Africa, just south of Zimbabwe, the conditionalities surrounding Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and ascension to the presidency in 1994, had, as in Zimbabwe, made it so that the financial and economic gulf between the rich white minority and the poor black majority remained essentially the same. (For more on this, read pages 195 to 217 in Naomi Klein’s THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2007.) Thabo Mbeki succeeded Mandela in 1999. Mbeki is, compared to Mugabe, a moderate, but in this recent Zimbabwe matter, he has played an important role. Because of the power-sharing agreement, there is now hope in Zimbabwe, where there had been crushing despair.
South Africa has a stake in stability to the north in Zimbabwe, because South Africa will host the World Cup in 2010. This will be a first for Africa, and there is a lot of pressure on South Africa to do Africa proud in 2010. Trouble in Zimbabwe always spills down into South Africa.
Compared to Jamaica, say, Belize is a place which is not interested in Africa. I understand why the young people who do news at Kremandala do not feel motivated or pressured to do research on the contemporary African scene and present the facts, facts which are always being distorted by the Western (white supremacist) media.
As a child of the 1960’s, I am acutely conscious of how the Western media practise their sophisticated racism. In 1960, the former Belgian Congo became independent. I was 13 years old and in the second form at St. John’s College. The monopoly government radio station in British Honduras at the time was the British Honduras Broadcasting Service (BHBS), which got its news from the BBC and the Voice of America. Immediately after independence, the Congo began to unravel. They made sure to tell us Belgian nuns were being raped by Africans. (Absolutely nothing of the millions murdered by the Belgians.) Each day on the BHBS news, we heard the names of the principals – Lumumba, Kasavubu, Mobutu, Tshombe, and, brainwashed as we were to disdain Africa, we used these names to make fun of those classmates and citizens we considered most “African.” We descendants of African slaves had been taught to hate ourselves, by schools paid for by our parents’ taxes.
What the Roman Catholic king of Belgium, Leopold II, had done in the Congo, beginning in 1885, would make you sick to your stomach if you ever had it told or read to you. The Congolese people were treated worse than animals. They were mutilated, murdered, and massacred. They were forced to work to make Leopold rich.
In 1960, the Belgians gave the Congolese independence because it was cheaper to do so. But the Congo was a country where the communist powers, Russia and China, were in competition with the Western capitalist states – the United States, France, Belgium, etc., for the Congo’s spectacular riches – gold, diamonds, copper, titanium, chromium, petroleum, uranium, and so on and so forth. The warring powers financed and armed different Congolese politicians, and the Congolese surrogates of the Cold War fought bloody battles among themselves.
In 1960, we Belizean students knew nothing of the Congolese and, worse than that, we felt no sympathy for them. We had been programmed to consider ourselves anything except Africans. If our mothers are Africans, and they were, then our grandfathers are Africans, and they were. Africa is where we came from. When Africa is weak, we are weak. When Africa becomes strong, we will become strong. Few of us Belizeans understand this. It’s a Kriol thing.
The educational system in British Honduras was always about having us seek to be as European as possible. This is my beef. It’s an old beef. In the words of Haile Selassie I, “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior, and another inferior, is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war…”