The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
There is no piece of the African continent that is insulated and safe from this disease of politics and in politics, a malady that eats away the body-politic and makes meat of the national fabrics.
It has waged its ugly head in sports, turning games between teams into bloody skirmishes. It has shown its ugly behinds in commerce and industry, reducing the world of employment, work and opportunity into a site of pain, suffering and punishment of one by another.
It literally lives in government and political party offices in Africa and has severally turned politics into a true dirty game of violent promotions and demotions of some by others.
It has made itself into a silent religion whose catechism and ecclesiastics are fulfilled in the crucifixion of others on the cross of the bloodline and the elevation of some on the altar of ancestry, in the name of motherlands and fatherlands, real and imagined, manufactured and invented even.
It has taken love away from the loftiest hearts and expelled peace from the most angelic minds, it brings Lucifer himself out of the holiest of them all. It dresses itself in respectability, presenting itself as sophisticated reason and elevated theory, hiding its primitivity and barbarism behind learned articulation. Like an experienced demon it can hide in the Bible itself and conceal its ugly meaning inside national constitutions and polished policy documents. Like true witchcraft, those who practice and live by it deny it and claim not to know it, they may not even know that they live by it.
Like witchcraft again those who suffer it talk about it long and loud until they are accused of living by it and of playing its games. It is the dark sin which the sinners accuse the victims of. Like witchcraft it can be passed on from one generation to another, it is taught and learnt, and it can be internalised and practiced so smoothly as if it does not exist at all. It normalises and naturalises itself, presents itself as common sense. Like true sorcery it feeds on hate and stereotypes, it drinks blood and chews bones of the nations during the day. It has littered Africa with shallow mass graves of the hated and the defeated, from Rwanda to Cameroon and from Kenya to the Sudan. It finished off the Khoi and the San in South Africa, and fertilised the gardens of Boeredom with the blood of the many natives in the homelands and Bantustans.
Like all kinds of evil it robs philosophers of wisdom and steals all clear vision from the prophets and the seers. It is the dark spectacles that make the world look really ugly and bloody. It has lived in the hearts of the elected and the anointed of Africa, making them vessels of Luciferic evil and hate.
It is the true Anti-Christ in that it never calls itself by its true name, it circulates with many nicknames and excuses, it is the disease that even doctors and healers die of because it works with pseudonyms and aliases, avoiding diagnosis, eluding description and avoiding prescriptions, and so is it deadly. It is the criminal that refuses to come to his day in court, except when it enters the courtrooms pretending to be a lawyer, a judge, a magistrate,
a prosecutor and an interpreter of the letters of law, when it is the real crime and the criminal.
It is the obdurate corpse that insists on waking up every day it is buried and cremated, it beats the christs in resurrections and second comings, in eternal return. 2pac described part of it when he wrote of the stubborn and thorny rose that grew on concrete floors. Intoxicated with it, possessed by it and in possession of it even the best of African intellectuals begin, not to speak truth to power, but to speak power to truth, and to silence it.
The Nightmare of the Philosophers
Like their cousins the prophets, philosophers and political visionaries can be a waste of everybody’s time. Here they can answer questions that no one has asked, avoiding the true weighty matters of the day. There they can mobilise the sound of words to display their cleverness, leaving sense unsaid, rhyming but not reasoning, sounding and really not being sensible. It is for that reason that great African leaders and minds have known and understood the problem but have not been able to solve it, if they have not added to the problem and subtracted from the solution. Like all politicians and thinkers in the world African leaders and intellectuals have been good at scratching where the national itch is not for popularity and fame, and for power. They have also found tribalism easy capital and an opportune political resource to use for their elevation. Samora Machel of the Frelimo movement in Mozambique called tribalism “the commander in chief of all African problems” meaning that it is the true elephant in the army of problems that dog the continent. As a solution to the problem the brave Machel said in Mozambique “the tribe must die in order for the nation to live.”
This wisdom was a double edged sword, some African leaders took it to mean that smaller and weaker tribes should die so that bigger and powerful tribes could become the nation, like killing the unemployed to eradicate unemployment, or the rich killing, cooking and eating the poor to eliminate poverty. The sober Julius Nyerere called tribalism a “false consciousness” which is something that is believed and lived but is not real. In denying the reality of tribalism Nyerere also denied the existence of other people that were not his tribe and therefore avoided rather than confronted the problem of tribalism, even giants can fall that way, the way of denialism.
How does one deny tribes and destroy them without destroying tribesmen and tribeswomen? The titanic Ngugi wa Thiongo vowed to never write in English but in his Gikuyu mother tongue and Kikuyu sensibility. Smart alecs accused Ngugi of thinking that all Africans and all Kenyans are Gikuyu, he was becoming nativist, they said, mistaking his tribe for the nation and the continent, the way white supremacists in their racism wish that the white race would be the human race.
The peaceable Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia cried that Africans must create one tribe called the Humanitas of humanism that lived humanly and happy ever after in the world. The clever blacks called Kaunda a denialist and avoidinist that wanted to pretend that races, tribes and ethnic groups were not a reality in the world. Thabo Mbeki of South Africa avoided the trappings of his village and his country and talked of Africans of the African Renaissance and the awakening people who shared equal citizenship with hyenas and the mosquitoes and who lived in paradisal peace among the mountains and the glades of Africa. Mbeki was accused of avoiding national responsibilities in South Africa and trying to be the president of the whole of Africa by false pretences. Equally, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was accused of trying to be the King of Africa when he proposed a United States of Africa under one African government and leader, he was blamed for mistaking Ghana for the continent. Muammar Gadhafi was accused of the sorcery of trying to advance Arab colonisation of Africa when he revived the idea of a United States of Africa. So, in peace and in justice, how does one talk about tribalism without being tribal, in what accent and what grammar?
How does one kill tribalism without killing tribes, the people and their ancestral identities, their histories and languages? Chinua Achebe of Nigeria blamed the politicians of Africa, those sly and slippery fellows of ours, they who condemn tribalism by the daylight and then by night they smuggle it back as an accomplice, political capital and a political resource to mobilise for power. Frantz Fanon blamed the African nationalists and their African nationalism who divided rather than united people.
Nationalism created locals and foreigners, insiders and outsiders in one country, producing new enemies every day, new aliens until there was no single friend left and the country was a big cemetery of tribes. Nationalists and nationalism, Fanon said, sold Africa to the lowest bidder in no other currency but “stupidity” itself. To kill hate and divisions, Fanon thought Africa should be left to its owners, the peasants and villagers not elite politicians and middle classes who profit from disunity, war and chaos in monopolising power and resources in the name of this and that ancestor, the pretenders, they who relish on popularity and populations not performance and delivery. Many African thinkers have decried the Machiavellians who have turned democratic elections in Africa into ethnic populations censuses, where one who has more tribesmen and tribewomen behind him or her becomes the winner even if they have no point or any performance to their name.
That Leninist Question
What, then, must be done is the question? Masiphula Sithole opined that Africans should acknowledge that tribes and ethnicities exist and share power and resources fairly and accordingly, because to ignore the reality of tribes is to be a tribalist denialist. Tribalism, in peace and in justice is not to belong to a tribe, to be proud of it and to speak the language, but it is to hate and to discriminate others along the lines of the tribe, it is to weaponise and instrumentalise tribal identity for political and economic advantages.
Our beloved Founding Fathers of Africa concentrated on building parties and personality cults and forgot to build nations out of different tribes, cultures and languages that would be different together and happy under one nation and one flag, singing one anthem. They opportunistically turned tribes into political factions and constituencies and thereby sentenced nations to division, war and slow death. Nation building, in peace and in justice, bringing different people with different histories under one nation in fairness and in justice is the national and continental question in Africa. This requires brave and courageous leaders and thinkers of which we are blessed with, only political will is in want. Our brave leaders and wise counsellors must build nations and nations will build parties and persons in Africa.
-Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Mbabane in Swaziland: [email protected].
