WeeklySA_AdminREALITY: Pan Africanism idealists should take a fresh lesson from what is evolving in the nascent belt of coup de tat on the West Africa…
By Paul Njabulo Vilakazi
In this month of paying tribute the late black consciousness icon Steve Biko, we are challenged to reflect on and also to savour our continental history, alongside our own country’s, without any dubiety of mind, while we look back to all, given the inherent sum-total of inflections that arose in time with open minds.
Why shouldn’t South Africans begin to look at other options than the dismally failed system of politics to start new movements, such as with a mix of culture, tradition, religious diversity and governance to create more formidable and contextual governance centres of the rule by all its peoples than to continue to be gleefully led by intrinsically delusional parties, begotten and led by foreign power influence…Just for the locals to perpetually gorge themselves at troughs of filth and as just agents of others.
We would then propound to call one new movement, the Pan-South Africanist Movement (PSAM), as it goes deep into the very pertinent aspects of our Pan-South Africanism.
Just as it was most brilliantly covered by our ancestors when they had birthed the Ethiopian Movement – a socio-religion-political movement and preceded the South African Native National Congress
Broederbond
I bet you this will bring freshness to the full-blown putrid political stench we are in. If the Afrikaner tail called Broederbond wagged the bulldog called South Africa, and still do…What can beat us with a Pan-South Africanist whip far more endowed than a tail?
First and foremost, this would be one entity crying out for a re-construction of a Pan South African reality, that has always been lying there as a hanging fruit for the taking, but only delayed by concepts such as Union of South Africa, Republic of South Africa. But now it’s totally denied indigenous diversity rooted in both history and our stark ethno-Identities in the days when one deserved a capital punishment for thinking….
Indeed, possible strong coalitions with backbones and a solid moral cachet can successfully serve as strong tributaries into the long-awaited sea of Pan-South Africanism, that perennially wasted energies on finger-pointing at our various deeply diseased and disaffected each other’s past, of bloodily mulling over the liberation project…
Also, to once more showcase that a Pan-South Africanism of our large soul is still well and alive, and of great exemplary benefit to the whole mother continent.
Even if we have to revisit the one-time continental and diaspora golden egg dream of WEB Dubois, in the Diaspora (more aptly an American of African descent) and the likes of Kwame Nkrumah and Mwalimu Julius Nyerere on these shores…
Alongside the South Africa of intrinsically identity complexions and diverse power relations, showing themselves far different from the rest of the mother continent. Making the primordial Pan-Africanism of the above visionaries their probity and the foresight of their times, albeit almost totally impractical today…
Even our Anton Lembede, a protégé of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, who began to breathe a brand of Pan Africanism that would steep itself in examining the prospect of only a better-living out of South African realities as offered by this country…
Work first and foremost for a Pan-South Africanism, just like Nyerere had deviating from the earlier format constraints to bravely breathe in his own brand of uniting first his country, and, by extension greater parts of the Eastern Africa, by instituting for his multi-dialect region a uniting lingua-franca, Kiswahili…
Now, in South Africa, these fully fledged languages – and not ‘mere dialects’ – have long been entrenched by very powerful kingdoms and founding of nations even having their diverse literatures are long well alive and more than kicking…
Go tell Afrikaners, AmaZulu, AmaMpondo, BaPedi and Basotho that their languages are mere dialects, they will tell you to go to the moon. And no one would survive the war of linguistic wrath that will ensue…
Afrikaans
Whereas the former patoi that came out of the Khoi-San, Dutch, Italian and English spread among the so-called Coloureds of the Cape and pockets of Boer population spread across the country, to be formulated into a language – Afrikaans – and then registered in 1925 had ‘apartheid’ playing fields levelled more in almost canton-like settlements of the Coloured locations.
It was only later to find the stakes far higher later, when it had tried its hand in a lingua hegemonic drive through apartheid government and into the back-door of the bantu education classroom, only to fall flat on its face in the rise of all townships by the young, having sprung up in Soweto…
When I meet a wide range of South Africans, they come out to show themselves and speak for themselves from proudly, out of their own traditional and cultural heritage totemic corners.
No latter-day brand of a politically contrived unifying machine would ever succeed in seeing all these as a hotchpotch of some unitary state, nor a Pan Africanism not nuanced first within the realities of the South Africa/Azania/Malundi/HaMogale… That would be a gross treasonable betrayal of history, identity and foundations of our nations, colonially dubbed tribes.
My intention here is not about the polemising the moot-point, as it is in earnest the consolidation of a rationale around right now, an aged dream whose present-day disciples have just jumped into the bandwagon, without the acumen, to contextualise it into the present-day realities. That also, interestingly, has in the authoring of the Pan-African ideal been clouded by more sentimentality around the material realities of the continents’ intra-continental/ geopolitics and roguish power relations could be neutered.
Jamborees
Facts such as the very first Pan-Africanist Conference was held in Imperial London in 1900 raises the eyebrow as to who were the powers and the surreptitious intent behind it all…
Followed by those held in six Western countries, some repeating themselves in hosting the supposed African Indaba, then in Dar-es-Salaam, Kampala and finally South Africa, where it showed up only in 2014 to a reception that can hardly be remembered even by our royalty – in a country otherwise very eclectic in offering Motherland education, through its multi-faceted histories, cultures and sub-cultures in its peneplains and Pediplains…
Not even the so-called Pan-Africanist parliament foisted on us and perched on an ivory tower of the elite, to hatch empty platitudes about the continent and the Diaspora’s half-cooked idyllic future for us, without us; the masses (and Sovereign people of the continent- not iddy-bitty by any stretch of the imagination of some college licentiates).
All these – like their cousins – the OAU and AU have never now in two decades made any splash on the world scene, but ending up only as palaverous jamborees at worst, one after the other and egregious damp-squibs.
All these were deeply sullied from their beginnings, of course, including the ‘pristine’ formation of the very first Pan-Africanist Conference in the jamboree atmosphere of an imperial country, and, in company of insidious jesters pretending to run a trade fair, cheek by jowl with such a supposed to have been a very august meeting to rebirth the African continent.
The above suggesting that this was not purely an African continental sole evolution of thought with consequences that exclusively serve the mother continent is a fact that need a continuum of heavy intellectual interrogation.
Francophone
So that those who will still – in all earnest – and not just for political expediency pray for the Pan Africanist ideal should take a fresh lesson from what is evolving in the nascent belt of coup de tat, that possibly would ultimately bring forth a new thing – a, for starters, a confederation of the Western African Francophone countries with more than a lot in common… In a country like South Africa, in which coup de tat and coup de graces, are more than far-fetched, given our far more deeply embraced developing democracy – warts and all – that many citizens would not sacrifice precious blood, if abruptly tempered with…
The best-ever we can do for the continent, is to moult out of the archaic Pan-Africanist skin, (which has served its idealised dream) and from which vantage point, it is only the West benefitting by machinating a big plot that: ‘Hey unite as an amorphous mongrelised monolith, and let us fully control you from one cunning centre’
Unless we are some automaton US illiterate imbeciles, who think Moscow is in America and Gazankulu in Israel; all owing to a hugely poisoned national ethos…
Unfortunately, the rookie South African wannabe Pan-Africanist ‘intellectual’ is rooted more in the anime/manga first engineered by the West than that which should be primarily organically brewed in our own ethos and natural evolution of our multi- nations… All this won’t come with just caveat emptor; but more the hardest of work…
Therefore, for starters: what about the establishing of PSAM-Motherland University somewhere out in the serenity of the Northern Cape, with prospects of even setting it up first as a Pan-South African intellectual city…
And, to promptly open its faculties to the rest of the Motherland to finally up to the multi-technicolour of our ethno-cultural diversities, regional histories and the Diaspora…
I submit this, to be one of the highly thought-out plan to lay new sound and profound foundations for futuristic and more realistic footings for this old dearest dream of ours.
- Vilakazi is a pastor and renowned political commentator
