Africa’s rich record of ‘change’
96 % of Burundi’s population are peasant farmers when not being slaughtered by gun men or rotting in flight as refugees in Tanzania and Congo. The 4 % in urban centres lack numbers of votes for a politician to sing to’. Colonial rulers notoriously ignored absence of balanced diets among Africans. Despite deepening malnutrition they […]
96 % of Burundi’s population are peasant farmers when not being slaughtered by gun men or rotting in flight as refugees in Tanzania and Congo. The 4 % in urban centres lack numbers of votes for a politician to sing to’. Colonial rulers notoriously ignored absence of balanced diets among Africans. Despite deepening malnutrition they produced coffee, cotton and tea exported to industries abroad. Entrenching planting fruit trees, vegetables, mushrooms and medicinal plants is a positive ‘changer’ of lives.
When China built a railway line from the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Ndola in Zambia’s copper mines, hundreds of Chinese workers drained swamps and hauled bars of rail side-by-side with African workers. They sought to shatter racist cultures of Africans sweating while ‘’white’’ men barked at them.
In 2012, Burundi’s population consisted of 86 per cent Hutu and 14 percent Tutsi. In 1974 the mainly Tutsi army hunted down and killed 100,000 (one hundred thousand) Hutu to revenge a mass killing of 10,000 (ten thousand) Tutsi. The countryside became a veritable graveyard not flowering citizens. President Nkurunziza’s tilling the soil together with village farmers reaffirms their humanity and sovereignty over their soil. Where leader touch by the ‘’great unwashed’’ masses, Nkurunziza is domesticating cultures of power. It, however, carries the danger of dictatorial manipulation of public tempers.
Mallam Aminu Kano went into villages and spent nights sleeping under harmattan season’s open sky but he also preached condemnation of feudal tyranny and greed.
Field Marshall Idi Amin invented change as anti-racist racism in work. Under brilliant tropical heat over Kampala, he had a team of British businessmen sweat carrying his bulky size on their shoulders as he waved to hilarious crowds. He was reversing a ritual of humiliation commonly used by colonial officials.
Julius Nyerere resigned after only three months in power. That change is yet to be repeated across the world. For one year he toured the countryside hearing people’s expectations of independence or ‘’Uhuru’’. They told him they would now be like Europeans who had never worked; servants, tax payers and prisoners did all the work. Under Uhuru, government would import those who would dig their farms for them.
In alarm, he invented the slogan of ‘’UHURU NA KAZI’’ or ‘’FREEDOM AND WORK’’. Terror of work under German colonial dictators had incited mass revolt, the ‘’MAJI MAJI War’’ (or fighting with magical water which German bullets could not penetrate).Promoting work with ‘’Ujamaa’’ cooperative villagers was sabotaged by officials who also used force on villagers.
Jomo Kenyatta countered Kenyans retreating from European ‘labour terrorism’ by disparaging socialist ideas laziness and calling for a regime of ‘’sharing poverty’’; instead of working to produce wealth. He coined the rallying shout of ‘HAARAAMBEE! (or ‘let is pull it together’) but not sharing land to the landless so that they could do Haraambee farming with him and his top officials. Kenyatta claimed that Christian missionaries tricked Africans into closing their eyes in prayer. When they opened their eyes; white people had stolen their land. He too would be accused of grabbing land from under shouts of Haraambee! Change can have sharp teeth.
Nyerere, Kenyatta and Idi Amin did not invent a doctrine extolling work with a power to match that of Japanese Buddhism and German capitalism’s ‘’Protestant Ethic’’. The belief that achieving excellence in the quality of an individual’s work is a prime way of worshiping one’s God and gaining heaven remains critical for the competitiveness of Japanese products. Lee Kuan Yew pays tribute to this belief system in animating their struggle to dredge out of Singaporeans a colonial mentality virus of dependence on Britain.
In African countries, the doctrine of ‘’work is only for slaves’’ combined with ‘’power is for eating by me and my family’’ feeds corruption and gives lack of responsibility for public welfare a dignity it does not deserve. Its promoters forget that colonial rulers applied intensive genius of their most brilliant graduates to engineer ‘’change’’ in foreign lands to serve imperial economies. They were intensively reviewed from London or Paris. Africa’s ‘’change’’ lacks animating doctrinal fuel. Chinua Achebe’s ‘’CHI’’ blindly and furiously imports junk from Korea, India, Euro- America and China; while it crushing inventions in Aba and Ibadan. There is urgent need to return to this unfinished task.