Is Africa really rising?

Ama Biney

Is Africa really rising?

For whom does it rise?

It rises for neoliberal and neo-colonial African governments selling off large tracts of land to outsiders for food or bio-fuel jatropha while their people go hungry and landless

Ask the widows of the Marikana miners ‘is Africa rising’ or those in the Unemployed Peoples Movement, Abahlali, or those living in the black townships of South Africa and across the rest of Africa

Is Africa really rising for the women and young girls who have been raped in the Congo?

It rises for a small African middle class whilst the 99 percent remain in the rural areas as farmers, unable to get subsidies like their European counterparts whose governments intervene on their behalf

Africa rises for those with forked tongue who ‘talk left and walk right’

Africa is rising for the charismatic Christian preachers engaging in what they call ‘prosperity preaching’ to congregations obliged to pay one tenth of their miserly wages as tithes so the preacher can wear designer suits from Italy

Africa is rising for the continued exploitation of its enormous wealth by MNCs, tax evaders and those who engage in illicit wealth appropriation in a continued (not new) scramble for Africa

Africa is rising for a tiny black elite who believe in NEPAD and market fundamentalism alongside their governments committed to such policies

Africa is rising for those African women who equate economic freedom with the means to purchase Brazilian and Korean weave, false eyelashes and nails in their aspirations to resemble an African Barbie doll

Africa is rising for those few countries who have recently discovered oil: Uganda, Ghana, Ivory Coast – but will their people say the same in 20 years and not meet the same wretched fate as the peoples of the Niger Delta of Nigeria?

Let us not be deceived.

Africans can only rise if the vast majority rise in Pan-African consciousness, towards a socially just economic system that destroys neoliberal capitalism and ALL forms of oppression

Africans can only rise when we cease self-loathing and return to Ubuntu and self-love

African people can only rise in realising this vision.