Times for Che Guevara or Idi Amin

In South America, aristocratic families in Cuba and Argentina yielded children who denounced their parents’ alliance with economic exploitation by Euro-America; and fought to win dignity for the masses of the people. Uganda sprouted Idi Amin who gave Africa a radicalism of rude shouts and anti-racist racism diplomacy; while his people and economy bled.   Are […]

In South America, aristocratic families in Cuba and Argentina yielded children who denounced their parents’ alliance with economic exploitation by Euro-America; and fought to win dignity for the masses of the people. Uganda sprouted Idi Amin who gave Africa a radicalism of rude shouts and anti-racist racism diplomacy; while his people and economy bled.   Are they beacons for Africa’s children of the indulgent rich; and of the ‘’unwashed millions’’?
Ernesto Che Guevara was the legendary revolutionary Argentinean medical doctor who joined a triumphant guerrilla warfare in Cuba; left the job of Governor of Cuba’s Central Bank and minister of Finance; went to fight in eastern Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) and was buried in an unmarked grave in Bolivia – his hands being cut off as trophies by military officers.  An American Central Intelligence Agency operative urged a wounded Guevara to deny revolutionaries everywhere.
Guevara grew up hearing tales about his uncle as Spanish governor of Peru fighting local populations, defending their lands and their extermination. Another Uncle, Domingo Sarmiento, had criticised savagery by Spanish immigrants in Argentina under official policies which approved the extermination of indigenous populations so that vast lands of the pampas would be seized by the rich.
Anderson in his 1997 book: Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, quotes Charles Darwin’s verdict on Argentina thus:”The country will be in the hands of white Gaucho savages instead of copper-coloured Indians. The former being a little superior in education, as they are inferior in every moral virtue’’. Guevara’s wealthy mother taught him rebellion against convention by herself driving a car; wearing trousers and smoking cigarettes in public.
 After graduation, he rode a motorcycle across South America and saw everywhere European and American companies exploiting wretched, desperately poor and landless natives. He recalled his uncle’s condemnation of savagery; and joined hands with Fidel Castro’s new mission for rooting out Cuba’s socio-economic and political disease.   
A victim of asthma, Guevara fought in Cuba’s mountains; urged Fidel Castro to build a communism with human values under a leadership anchored on principles of modesty, self-sacrifice, honesty to the people and permanent dialogue and consultation with the people. His book Reminiscences, testified to fighting power of landless seasonal rural poor carefully won over by Fidel Castro and his team. While the Communist Party of Cuba glorified factory workers (the ‘’proletariat’’), Guevara and Castro gave political education to rural warriors similar to (1922-1947) serf-fuelled war by Mao Zedung in China.
This model was followed with great success in liberation struggles in Angola and Mozambique – also led by Agustinho Neto, a medical doctor, and Samora Machel, a nurse, respectively. Namibia, Zimbabwe, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde also invested heavily in the political education and fighting power of rural people turned combatants.
Political parties carrying Africa’s ‘’democracy revolu-tion’’ have not borrowed this social technology. In Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana appeals to ‘tribal marks’; religious beads dominate election appeals for votes. In Ekiti State, critics referred to winning votes by distributing bags of salt, rice, and textiles as ‘’stomach infrastructure’’. Patient home-to-home political education of voters by campaign staff of political parties is ignored and not mandatory.
Africa’s liberation wars in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde and South Africa did not ignite imagination of youth all across Africa. African governments as benefactors, and Euro-American operatives, blocked circulations of t-shirts with Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Neto, Sam Nujoma, and Robert Mugabe burning across chests of their youths.
 Idi Amin joined the army and rose up from illiteracy, with lethal ambition, to Chief of Staff by 1971. Barter claims that “by the end of the 1960s, Amin had established a secretive working relationship with the Israeli and British governments’’; British officials making clandestine deposits into Amin’s personal account to support his anticipated military coup against Milton Obote.
 On a visit to Guyana, I found out that Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda, while defying screams by the white world, made him a hero. Many Jamaicans adored a photograph of Amin sitting pretty on a chair, as white British businessmen carried him on their shoulders sweating in mid-day tropical sun.  His invitation to Queen Elizabeth to be his date at a disco in Kampala tickled many Ghanaians. His telegram of sympathy to President Richard Nixon over Nixon’s impeachment troubles for Watergate, gave Africans overdue  ‘diplomacy-of-rude-words’ to avenge daily insults by Euro-American media, writers and politicians.
Amin’s message was that Africa’s bureaucrats, ministers and presidents must end subservience to officials of foreign governments and business corporations while hiding their exploitative demands from public view. As a rugby player Private Idi Amin’s six-foot and two hundred pounds weight had bashed British soldiers and yanked their genitals.
His barbarism in butchering opponents – first exhibited against Mau Mau revolutionaries – later exploded in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, post-Amin Uganda, Somalia, South Sudan, Central African Republic, north-east Nigeria, post-Gadaffi Libya and post-Mubarak Egypt.  Engineers of post-Cold War Africa must not substitute Che Guevara’s vision with Idi Amin’s; Africa bleeding in scrambles for her natural resources. Social engineering and re-designing Africa is a task that the African Union must take seriously; or perish.