Pan Africanism and the Zimbabwe crisis

I do want to commend Henning for his piece on Namibia and what is being lost in the process of clamping down on those who are seeking to heal the wounds of a liberation process which has maimed, tortured and killed some of the best among Africans.

Thank you Henning for pointing out what more could be lost if we do not raise the same voices which led to removing the shackles of apartheid. As I see it, the way truth and reconciliation processes have been dealt with, especially from the South African example, have left a lot to be desired. I am not interested in going through a step by step analysis of what was wrong. One could go for a long time. For those who are interested in seeing how a novelist has offered his view on how to go about healing, I recommend Ayi Kwei Armah's Healers which came out in 1978 as a disguised response to Chinua Achebe's things Fall Apart.

Armah's Healers, I am sure, will have its detractors, but it shows that the only way to heal from any wound, however deep is to go back to the most positive values of our societies, unflinchingly and without fear. Unfortunately, fear is one of the emotions most easily used and abused by those who want to insist on only one truth, their own.

Yet, healing, the desire to heal, like love, is one of the most universal emotions. Leaders who would lead their people toward reconciliation and healing would bring out all the burried truths which, like all truths, sooner or later, shall come out anyway. Such leaders should let go of their own fears or shame. Fears of being accused of being weak, shame of knowing specific cases of people who should never ever been tortured, maimed or killed.

To heal is probably one of the most difficult things to do because, given the dominant mindset, it is perceived as a sign of weakness to accept that something wrong has been done to oneself or to others. The dominant mindset stresses power through relentless violence. The enslavers and then the colonizers used to remind themselves that the only thing Africans understood was violence and brutal force. The more brutal the better. The dominant mindset can be seen at work in the Middle East, in Darfur, in Irak. It is highly contagious, especially among those who end up exercising state power. I remember reading about someone who had been in Robben Island (No it was not Mandela) and who had written a piece in a philosophy journal. His main point was that thefight against apartheid was a double fight: one to free the whites from themselves and then to free the blacks from the yoke of apartheid.

The equation has not changed: one has to continue fighting to free those who are in power to free themselves from how they have come to define power in the very same way as the previous holders. Real, deep, lasting healing can only happen as far away from the shackles of state power. If state or parastatal rationale is brought to bear it will derail any serious attempt to heal. Healing can only happen if all sides let go of habits and difinitions which are antagonistic to healing.

Can one heal without the help of state power? Indeed, the only way to heal is without the help of state power.

I shall stop here because it is my sense that Henning has touched upon one of the rawest wounds not just left over from colonial rule, but from way way back, from many layers. In that spirit, would it be wrong to suggest to the scandinavian countries which decided to pull away from Namibia that there are other possibilities (and, who knows, maybe they are doing it), such as encouraging European nations, the Vatican, the US, Arab nations which benefited from Atlantic and Oriental slavery to acknowledge what happened as a crime against humanity. The size of which is difficult to measure, except by going through a healing process where the primary concern is to heal from the mindset which developed out of the consequences (the benefits) of the crime. If it is started as a genuine process, then it could lead to real, deep and long lasting healing. Not just for Africans, not just for the victims, but for all humanity.

Thank you again Henning.