A season of 4 mobilizations

It rose to a crescendo from former President Thabo Mbeki, President Jacob Zuma and Mandela’s wife Graca Machel taking turns in spurting out joy-animating pronouncements that Madiba was climbing out of alarming grips of illness. Dancers soaked in stubborn songs and dances of prayer for ownership of their ailing hero included school children waving birthday […]

It rose to a crescendo from former President Thabo Mbeki, President Jacob Zuma and Mandela’s wife Graca Machel taking turns in spurting out joy-animating pronouncements that Madiba was climbing out of alarming grips of illness. Dancers soaked in stubborn songs and dances of prayer for ownership of their ailing hero included school children waving birthday flowers for a Grand Pa they knew was behind hospital walls even if they could not  have him loom and wave at him.
For over three weeks youths, women groups and beautiful children cheered a struggle to defeat apartheid’s wounds on a hero becoming known as ‘’Papa Long March to Unity’’. What became remarkable was the absence of bitterness in their dances and songs; no vindictive blame and rush to bitter racism; but a sprouting of renewal of nationhood out of a humus fondly called ‘’Madiba’’. White men and women were shown owning Mandela’s call for the global community to spend 67 minutes on voluntary work for mending communities. Rain-shawls of political reconstruction fell on a wounded country; strands of a rainbow grew across her skies.
There were here lessons in political engineering for ending cauldrons of bitterness in Guinea, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, South Sudan, Somalia and Democratic Republic of Congo twisted across Africa’s top and trunk. One was the lesson of “fixing’’ broken communities by terminating manufactured flares of violence. The idea of using resources inside people’s heads and muscles for doing something better than lighting flames of hatred, even if only for 67 minutes in 365 days, would bring much mending all across Africa.  The African National Congress has this moment of mobilization as a worthy export item to Africa.
No sooner had Barrack Obama and his daughters walked out of love radiated by Mandela and carried into ‘’Air force One’’, than furies exploded across the United States against a jury announcing a ‘’NOT GUILTY’’ verdict in favour of  a white adult man who had wilfully shot and killed Trayvor Martin, a black teenager, in the name of self defence. The incident had angered a multiracial civil society aroused against the failure of the police in Miami to charge the murderer with committing a crime.  It was a case in which powerful gun sellers, the Rifle Association, would have lobbied for a jury whose racist biases would echo  memories of times when white racists in Southern States – from Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida to the Virginias – cheered when they hanged  black men as a sport. One of their own had killed a black boy, it served the boy right.
The American Rifle Association would have feared a drama-soaked gift to President Obama’s anti-gun campaign. His supporters including families hurting from a mad young man gunning down school children in a rich middle class community in the northeast of the country. The Republican Party may have wished to whip back white volk solidarity while being anxious not to wreck efforts to win support among the new voting majority African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics who ensured Obama’s re-election despite their efforts to paralyse and block his ability to ensure economic recovery and jobs for voters.
If the Democrats welcomed the nationwide outrage against the verdict in Miami, it might be to give Obama a window of opportunity to anchor his last four years on throwing ‘’barbecue ribs’’ – a favourite of African-American families – to a vital ethnic voting bloc. The statistics of economic pain among African-Americans in the years of having the first black man as America’s president are desperately bleak. The number of black men in prison rose beyond the traditional 3 million inmates.
Obama sought to plant a positive seed into the multiracial anger. Dipping himself into the history of the community, he said Tayvon Martin could have been himself 35 years earlier. White people stopped clicking locks of their cars in fear of a robbery attack whenever he approached only after he became a senator and the media had given him easy recognition among the public. His main call was for all Americans to confront the pervasive historical culture of socio-economic genocide against African-Americans. His challenge is to launch a ‘’Marshall Plan’’ for America’s blacks.
Malcolm X called on Africa to get the United Nations to classify African- Americans as a colonised underdeveloped nation inside the United States; and demand for their liberation. He was assassinated. Africa must revive this call.
In 1989, Japan blamed America’s economic weakness on stupidity by wasting her black population through denial of quality education and effective income. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, China and Russia must end their silence over America’s “poor human rights record’’.
Television screens fled from America’s racial convulsions to thrills over a royal birth-watch in London. A motley of cameras sprung up across a street in front of St. Mary’s Hospital long before a marked woman walked into labour behind its doors. A subtle exploitation of memories Princess Diana’s rare charm – infused in a son who recalled her looks and popular touch – showed Britain’s genius for mobilising devotion in an invented global mind-empire. Skills that expand global fans for their football tournament – with fans crouched around television sets in dingy beer parlours and gorgeous living rooms in Africa and Asia – were put to use in selling a feudal ritual.
Under rumbling clouds of terrorist attacks in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Nigeria, it was a marvel to see no AK47-waving security goons. A clever invisible security regime gave a soft togetherness to enchanted crowds in sunshine or rain. This taming of dogs of governance is worth importing.
In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood rejects a return to horrors in decades of tortures; jails and bans from power. They have taught people power wasted by bad leadership.