Inside looking out, snow is falling and I am thinking how
happy we once were, when promises and dreams came
easy and how when we, lovers covered only by a warm

Eldoret night, your slender hand waved a prophecy
- a shooting star and you said, "when the time comes, we
shall name our first child, Kenya" and how I laughed

and said "yes our child then shall be country and human"
and we held hands, rough and toughened by shelling
castor seeds. My dear, when did our clasped hands

become heavy chains and anchors holding us to the mines
and diamond and oil fields? Our hands roughened by love
and play, these same hands – when did they learn to grip

a machete or a gun to spit hate? And this earth that drinks
our blood like a hungry child, this earth that we have
scorched to cinders - when we are done eating it, how

much of it will be left for Kenya? My dear, our child
is born, is dying. Tomorrow the child will be dead.

UW-Madison, Jan. 3rd, 2007
Commissioned by The World Today – BBC News

On Thursday December 27th 2007, shortly after polling stations were closed, Kenya was hailed as having fulfilled an African dream – to have a free and fair closely contested democratic election. But less than 48 hours later it was clear that the dream of democracy could become a nightmare of ethnic violence. Most of the casualties so far have been the poor and the marginalized – and if things continue as they are, a bitter civil war fought along ethnic lines is certain. To say that what is at stake is the very future of Kenya is not an overstatement.

To answer the question of how the promise became a nightmare one must begin with very nature of democracy and how it has been functioning in Africa.

The first element to consider is that in the absence of strong democratic institutions (the three pillars of legislature, executive and judiciary), democracies in Africa are relying more and more on the goodwill of politicians: in this case, a nation is only as democratic as its politicians.

Added to this, African democracy is in real terms an expression of ethnic tensions. Instead of rolling back tribalism (I use the derisive term deliberately), African democracy serves it. One could say that all democracies have an element of this: in the West it generally goes under the euphemism of voter demographics. When Hilary Clinton is courting the white, black or Latino vote, she is in fact practicing what might, in other circumstances, be called tribal politics.

In the Kenyan presidential election, ethnic politics were a key factor in the close election results: the incumbent Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, received very few votes in the Luo areas, while his Luo opponent, Raila Odinga, received only a very small percentage of the Kikuyu vote. In this bitterly contested election where ethnicity was the deciding factor, victory from either side was bound to spill into violence.

As a direct result of the above, questions of what true justice means and about the growing divide between haves and have-nots become lost to ethnicity. Raila is a flamboyant millionaire while Kibaki is as elite as you can get in Kenya. Lost in the fires of ethnicity is the simple fact that Kibaki and Raila have much more in common with each other than with their supporters. In this sense those engaged in the violence are, to put it bluntly, proxies in a war between two elite leaders.

Another element to consider is the extent to which the landscape of African politics has changed. We need to stop blanket condemnations of African leadership, and acknowledge that it varies and some leaders are better or worse than others. Kibaki, while not a Mandela is not a Moi or a Mobutu, or a Bokassa or an Idi Amin. By the same token the nature of opposition has changed. Since independence and the struggles against neo-colonial governments, opposition has been automatically understood as the legitimate voice of the people. But opposition no longer means the good guys. In many instances the opposition and the sitting government are practically the same as is indeed the case in Kenya. So while Raila is accusing Kibaki of vote-rigging, it could just as easily be Raila trying to rig and short-circuit the democratic process to favor himself. In other words we have no reason to take either of their claims to be true at face-value. In this impasse of two leaders intent on seizing power, respect for the democratic process couldn’t be more important.

Toward a solution, Kenyans should realize that something beautiful did happen during this election. Most of the big men of Kenyan politics were voted out of Parliament and hence out of office. Even the sons of former dictator Moi did not win seats in Parliament. There seemed to be a belief that voting was a way of talking back the Kenyan political elite, and that democracy could be made to work for the majority poor. This is the flame that we must not let die.

To nurture this flame, a recount of the votes in a transparent manner is necessary. This, no matter what one thinks of Raila or Kibaki, or whether one thinks the elections were fair or not, should be the meeting ground of all those concerned about the future, immediate and long term, of Kenya.

If the votes can be recounted in full transparency, this election will not then become the death of Kenyan democracy but rather a test along the way to a democracy with real content – the content of security, equality and justice for Kenya’s majority poor.

*Mukoma Wa Ngugi is co-editor of Pambazuka News. A version of this article first appeared at

*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Mukoma Wa Ngugi speaks to the dangers surrounding the Bill Gates initiative - Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)

"Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It ensures that the rights to use and manage lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food" – Declaration of the Forum for Food Sovereignty, Nyeleni , February 2007

From November 25th to December 2nd African farmer-, agricultural-, and pastoralist organizations from over 25 countries gathered at the Nyeleni Center in Selengue, Mali to, amongst other things, discuss the pitfalls of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) -- the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation initiative now chaired by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. With around 100 organizations present, thousands of Africans concerned with social justice and agriculture were represented.

Now, the theme of the conference might at first glance seem outrageous. After all, we are talking about Bill Gates here – a man who has become the poster child of good philanthropy. But this is precisely my point: because AGRA is a Bill Gates initiative with widely respected Kofi Annan as the chair, most of us are not going beyond the first glance. But it is important that we send a second glance AGRA’s way because what is at stake here is the very future of the continent’s agricultural practices - what is grown, how it is grown, who gets to grow it, who processes it, who sells it and where and how much the African consumer will pay. Simply put, if food is the basis of life, what is at stake is the very sustenance of the continent.

But in order to fully appreciate the role the sweet sounding Alliance for a Green Revolution is playing in Africa, we need to take a step back and situate AGRA in the context of other international and national forces that are undermining the well-being and sovereignty of African nations – forces that are in fact part of the problem, even as they present themselves as part of the solution.
Amongst the international forces undermining Africa’s well being is an overt US foreign policy whose goal is to consolidate a growing Empire through the pipeline of the war on terror – under the guise of spreading democracy. We have seen how well this is working in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. But even more insidious is the arm-twisting of African governments to pass anti-terror bills that tie African domestic policies to US foreign policy goals.

On top of this we must add US foreign policy-led organizations such as the USAID, and the International Republican Institute, currently active in over 40 African countries. Organizations such as the IRI build on the tracks laid down by missionaries. The missionaries came to Christianize and civilize, the IRI types come to democratize, liberalize and westernize. The missionaries paved the way for the colonialists our history teachers were fond of saying. In the future, they will be saying that organizations such as the IRI paved the way for the US Empire.

Lest this seems far-fetched, here is an example of these seemingly disparate forces at work. The IRI in 2006 helps Africa’s first woman president, Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf into power. So instrumental is the IRI that when receiving a Freedom Award from them, she declares that the “IRI was particularly active in promoting these elections. Very quickly an office was established. They came, they did workshops. They brought political groups together. They worked with the media. They educated. They instructed. They supported. They assisted the process.” [1] But even before the democracy solidified, Liberia becomes the first country to offer the United States a military base for its African Command Center. There are no coincidences here – the IRI paved the way for US further militarization of Africa using Liberia as a launching pad.

Meanwhile in Liberia, Firestone has the gall to invite the Liberian people into its website with a photograph captioned “since 1926 we have succeeded together and we have suffered together, now that peace has returned, learn how we are working for a better future for Liberia.” [2] Firestone, much like Shell, has a philanthropic arm used to cover up the actions of the other heavy, hungry and brutal arm. Under the exploitation of colonialism, industries and corporations served the nation-state. Today it is the other way around: the nation-state serves industries and corporations.

It is into this mix that we need to throw initiatives such as AGRA. An outcome statement produced by the Selingue conference organizers states that “AGRA is actually the philanthropic flagship of a large network of chemical-seed, and fertilizer companies” and is designed to “attract private investment, enroll African governments, and convince African farmers to buy new seeds and fertilizers.” [3]

Waiting at the wings, or more correctly, waiting in the AGRA boardrooms, are seed and fertilizer organizations such as Syngenta (with total sales of 1.2 billion dollars in 2004) and Monsanto (a multi billion dollar seed company), amongst other players. AGRA claims that it will help “millions lift themselves out of poverty and hunger by dramatically increasing the productivity of hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers and improving livelihoods.” [4]

AGRA further states that it will “develop and strengthen Africa’s small and medium-scale seed companies to develop and sell appropriate seeds to farmers, [it will also] develop rural agro-dealers (small rural shops, mainly owned by women) and work with local food processors that can add value to products [and] and with local micro-finance institutions.”

Pointing to Asia, AGRA claims that the green revolution there lifted millions from poverty. This claim was refuted by the Mali conference participants who pointed out the tragic case of Indian farmers. In India, farmers initially flourished under the green revolution because millions of dollars were used to buoy up the farms. But as soon as the money stopped being pumped, Indian farmers found that they could not afford hybrid seeds, or the high price of pesticides, and they entered into debt, eventually losing their land to banks. The green revolution in India really was the pauperization of the poor Indian farmer. AGRA’s promise of Agro-dealers in Africa, and its promise to follow the Asian model means small scale African farmers will be strangled by ever widening circles of dependency and debt.

AGRA claims to be African led because it appointed Kofi Annan as its chair. In Selengue, conference participants responded by saying Kofi Annan surely cannot be seen as speaking for over 50 countries and 680 million people. In any case as African American poet Sonia Sanchez, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. said in response to a question on Condoleezza Rice and Clarence Thomas “We should not fight for equal rights in order to do wrong with them.”

In this same sense, women presidents (as in the case of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf) and African UN Secretaries General (as in Kofi Annan) do not automatically do good for the continent. With Kofi Annan as the chairman of AGRA, AGRA will still do harm. And it will not be any better because he is African.

AGRA’s critics contend that the alliance will not take a definitive stand against Genetically Modified Foods. This was of grave concern to the organizations in attendance at Selengue. The AGRA website leaves a lot of wiggle room when it states that “Introduction of genetically engineered crops are not part of AGRA strategy at this time” but a little later states that “AGRA will not shy away from considering the potential of bio-technology in reducing hunger and poverty and we do not preclude future support for genetic engineering as an approach to crop variety improvement…”

Soon after he was appointed chair, Kofi Annan declared that AGRA will not use GMO’s – a statement that is contradicted in the website statement quoted above – and which he and AGRA retracted. [5] In a sense then, AGRA critics are right when they call it a “Trojan horse” for GMO’s.
Once the mask of philanthropy is removed, we find profit-hungry corporations vying to control the seed market in African countries, create a path for Genetically Modified seeds and foods and to pry open a market for chemical fertilizers – which in turn will have an adverse effect on African indigenous seed populations and destroy bio-diversity, not to mention the devastation of the environment and the salination of the soil. The philanthropic arm that Africa welcomes is in real terms paving the way for further exploitation of our resources.

In his latest novel, Wizard of the Crow, my father Ngugi Wa Thiong’o aptly talks of a corporony – a colony run by a corporation. Fiction is not so strange after all, because with AGRA we are looking at the corporatization of the food industry, from planting to production to selling and buying. With AGRA, what and how we plant and eat, and how much we pay for it will be decided in western corporate offices.

Africans should grasp what is at stake here and mobilize against AGRA. African leaders have already sold off the land and the right to natural resources. They have sealed off some parts of the continent into export processing zones. They have allowed foreign military bases onto African soil. They have given organizations such as the International Republican Institute free reign to determine the very nature of African political institutions. But here it should stop. Africans simply cannot let them sell off the right to food sovereignty. Because if they do, they will be selling off the very future of Africa.

* Mukoma Wa Ngugi is Co-Editor of Pambazuka News. He is also the author of Hurling Words at Consciousness (AWP, 2006) and a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

For notes, see link below

Mukoma reflects on the recent extra-judicial killing of close to five hundred suspected Mungiki sect members in Kenya

As the story unfolds alleging that between the months of June and October 2007 close to five hundred young men in Kenya were summarily executed by the police, I find myself wondering whether African governments have put up the façade of democracy only to cover up the old heavy handed way of doing things.

I find myself asking whether democracy has taken the form of rhetorical voting – a gesture that does not deliver the content of justice promised by the fall of the Berlin wall and thawing of the cold war.

This questioning of the true nature of democracy is all the more urgent because the news of the mass killings comes a few weeks before Kenya's presidential elections on December 27th, and five years into Kenya's experimentation with democracy.

According to a preliminary report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) released on November 5th, the young men killed are mostly from the poverty stricken slums famously portrayed in the 2005 movie, The Constant Gardener. They were, the KNHCR report goes on, in all probability rounded up by the Police on the suspicion of belonging to Mungiki, a sect that claims to draw inspiration from the Gikuyu traditional way of life, and then summarily executed.

The Mungiki sect has not won any love from Kenyans because the group has been engaged in criminal enterprises such as violent exhortations to the extent of actually beheading victims. And also because it came into being and flourished with the blessing and support of former authoritarian president Daniel Arap Moi. In a country where the capital city is now referred to as 'Nairobbery', Kenyans are fatigued with violent crime.

So when in late May the police became heavy-handed with massive raids, mass arrests and occasional shooting of suspects in the slums, apart from human rights activists and those affected, everyone else shrugged it off. It was as if most of the country quietly approved off the de-facto shoot to kill orders. With the young men of Mathare criminalized, and looked down upon by the middle and upper classes, the Kenyan police had the unspoken permission to round them up and essentially cull the herd.

This is a classic case of further victimizing the victim. The residents of slums like Mathare are the poorest of the poorest. Even the definition of abject poverty (living on less than a dollar a day) does not capture the extent of deprivation. Neither do terms like under-class, 'labor reserves,' or the marginalized. These are the children of the forgotten.

The KNCHR has rightly called for a United Nations investigation. Kenyans can only hope that the whole truth will be out before the December elections. It is only right that Kenyans begin the next phase of democracy with the truth of what happened to these young men.

When under the watch of a democratic government close to 500 people are summarily executed this can only be called a perversion of democracy. For truly this kind of justice is blind killing the innocent and those whose guilt has not been weighed in a court of law.

There is a lesson for all us here. A democratic country must have principles that, no matter the circumstances, remain inviolable: It cannot condone or engage in torture, it must not imprison indefinitely or detain without trial, or threaten and intimidate its critics into silence, and it must not, it simply cannot, condone extra-judicial killings. Besides, who is to say that the killings will stop with suspected criminals and not lead to the assassination of political opponents?

Democracy must come with the content of social and economic freedom. It must commit itself to doing justice by its poorest, or it will have failed its mission of freedom.

* Mukoma Wa Ngugi is Co-Editor of Pambazuka News. He is also the author of Hurling Words at Consciousness (AWP, 2006) and a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/325/cartoon_43984_maumau.jpgAs the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) prepares to sue the British Government for personal injuries sustained by survivors of the Mau Mau war for independence whilst in British detention camps in Kenya, Mukoma Wa Ngugi unravels the Colonial myths of Christianisation and civilization and exposes the reality of torture, murder, slavery, landlessness, dehumanization and internment.

In February 2008, the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) will file a representative law-suit against Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) in the British High Court on behalf of the survivors of the Mau Mau war for independence.

The KHRC is suing HMG for “personal injuries sustained [by the survivors] while in detention camps of the Kenya Colonial Government which operated” under the direct authority of HMG during the State of Emergency (1952-60).

But to understand the law-suit in all its implications, we have to look at Africa’s historical relationship to the West and separate the image from the reality. The Enlightenment of the 1600’s sought to civilize Africans, introduce reason and logic to them, and equip them with the key to heaven through Christianization. The reality masked underneath this image was one of torture, murder and slavery.

Later, colonialism used the image of a gentle stewardship to guide Africans along until they were civilized. The reality, as the KHRC suit shows, was landlessness, torture and dehumanization, whole population internment, outright murder and mass killings.

For the Westerners and Africans alike who have sought comfort in the images, the reality difficult to take. But the reality has been well documented. Adam Hochschild, writing in King Leopold’s Ghost, estimates that 5 to 10 million Africans died as a direct result of Belgian colonization in the Congo in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. And chopping off hands, quite literally, was a form of public control.

And between 1904 and 1907, 65,000 Herero (80 percent of the total Herero population) were systematically eliminated by the Germans in Namibia. In Algeria, during the war of independence (1954 to 1962), the French routinely tortured and 'disappeared' FLN freedom fighters.

These random examples illustrate an alarmingly simple principle: One nation cannot occupy another and seek to control its resources without detaining, torturing, assassinating and terrorizing the occupied. A modern day example of this principle at work is Iraq today where torture and killings under the occupation of the United States are rampant, even though the U.S. wants to sell an image of spreading democracy.

Colonialism, Legacy and the Mau Mau

In Kenya, British colonialism followed this same principle. Caroline Elkins’ Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag and David Anderson’s Histories Of The Hanged: The Dirty War In Kenya document tortures, hangings rushed through kangaroo courts, detention camps, internments, and assassinations, not to mention psychological warfare through fear and intimidation.

Independence however did not bring justice for Kenyans - certainly not for the Mau Mau veterans. Kenyatta, even before being sworn as president in1963, had denounced the Mau Mau as terrorists. Contrary to British propaganda, Kenyatta was never a member of the Mau Mau. In an interview, Muthoni Wanyeki, Executive Director of the KHRC, said that:

"On coming to power, [Kenyatta] proceeded, through the land ownership policies(and practices) of his government (and himself), to betray everything that the Mau Mau had stood for and to entrench the landholding patterns established under the colony"[1]

It is not a surprise that Kenyatta by the early 1970’s had a few detentions and assassinations under his belt. In the words of politician J.M. Kariuki (assassinated in 1975), Kenyatta created a nation of ten millionaires and ten million beggars. He wanted the Mau Mau platform of Land and Freedom erased from Kenyan memory.

In 1978 President Moi took over when Kenyatta died and continued with the same dictatorial policies. Irony is such that in 1982, Mau Mau historian Maina Wa Kinyatti was imprisoned by the Moi government in the same Kamiti Prison where the British in 1957 hanged and buried the leader of the Mau Mau, Dedan Kimathi, in an unmarked grave.

It was not until the Kibaki government took over in 2002 that the colonial ban on the Mau Mau was removed. Finally in 2007 a statue of Kimathi stands on Kimathi Street, something unimaginable under the Kenyatta and Moi regimes.

But more important than a hero's acre or a monument is a reckoning with the colonial legacy of torture, dehumanization and pauperization. Mau Mau veterans that are still alive, along with their children and grandchildren, live in abject poverty, landless and without formal education.

The past and current Kenyan governments have as yet to ask the British government to at the very least issue an apology for the atrocities committed against the Kenyan people. The Moi and Kenyatta governments, dependent on Western aid and while maintaining a vicious elite system, were not in a position to pressure Britain for an apology. Or even to pressure HMG to reveal the exact location of Kimathi’s grave so that his widow, Mukami Kimathi, can bury him.

This dependent relationship has allowed the British to commit crimes against Kenyans with near impunity. Forty plus years since Kenya’s independence, the British Army still uses Northern Kenya for military exercises. As a result of leaving unexploded munitions behind, “hundreds of Maasai and Samburu tribes people - many of them children - are said to have been killed or maimed by unexploded bombs left by the British army at practice ranges in central Kenya over the past 50 years” the BBC reported [2] With the legal aid of Leigh Day and Co Advocates, 228 survivors took the UK government to the British High Court. In 2002, a settlement was reached in which the UK government agreed to pay 7 million dollars plus legal fees.

Economic Justice and Forgiveness

Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery[3] shows how Western economies grew at the expense of African slave labor. Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa [4] updates the argument to include colonialism –Europe developed at the direct expense of Africa. Today we find that economic giants, Barclays Bank [5], J.P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan Bank [6] are direct beneficiaries of the slave trade.

Muthoni Wanyeki argues that “it has to be recognized that the UK (and all ex-colonisers) grew at great human expense and political-economic disruption and exploitation within the ex-colonies. It is on that recognition alone that current debates on 'aid'/'development financing', trade and investment can shift as they need to.” The call for forgiveness and reconciliation then has to rest on the realization that colonialism was first and foremost an exploitative economic relationship.

Because the former colonizers continue to benefit from colonialism, while the victims of colonization continue to live in poverty, the governments of former colonizers have a moral duty to rectify the historical wrong in the present time. On the basis that colonialism as an investment is still paying off, the British cannot argue that they are not personally responsible for atrocities committed by their parents – they have inherited the economic well-being of a colonial system. They need to do right by this history because it is living.

The British government has as yet to issue a formal apology for the atrocities it committed. In the same way that Clinton expressed shame and sorrow for slavery without offering a formal apology, so did Blair for colonialism. One can express sorrow, regret and shame for causing an accidental death, but surely this is not enough for a systematic exploitation that causes millions to suffer and die.

It should be stated clearly that the authoritarian governments of Kenyatta and Moi are guilty of suppressing Mau Mau memory. And that there were thousands of Kenyans who collaborated with the British. But it should also be said that collaborators did not create colonialism, it is colonialism that created its functionaries. The real crime is colonialism.

And because colonialism if we are to be honest with history is a crime against humanity, the British parliament should at the very least pass a bill offering a formal apology to its victims in Africa. And the apology should also make provision for restitution.

Truth, Restitution, Reconciliation and Justice

While revolutionary in attempting to heal a wounded nation, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission undermined the very concept of forgiveness and justice it espoused because it did not demand that the perpetrators address in word and deed the question of restitution. Muthoni Wanyeki on the TRC says that:

Within the human rights movement in Kenya (and in Africa more broadly), the TRC process in SA while hailed for its reconciliation potential has always been critiqued for its enabling of impunity and its lack of direct recognition of, compensation for survivors.

Even though a desired by-product, the struggle against apartheid was not waged solely for blacks to forgive whites, or for whites to ask forgiveness, but to bring economic, social and political equality for all South Africans. So then here is the irony of the TRC – the perpetrators go home to their mansions, the victims back to the township.

To put it differently, after the TRC hearings the victims go back to a life of poverty, they remain without the means to feed, cloth or educate their children. Freedom comes without the content – it’s just a name – it has no meaning. Under these circumstances, forgiveness, healing and justice cannot exist without restitution.

The British government, which had the largest empire in the world, has cause to fear losing the Mau Mau law-suit. Once it begins where it will end? In neighboring Uganda? India? Malaysia? Or Jamaica? And if the British lose, will this set precedence for the victims of French, Belgian or Portuguese colonialism? The British government knows that losing one law-suit will open closed colonial closets all over the world.

It is precisely because this lawsuit has huge implications for the victims of colonialism all over the world that it deserves the support of all those who understand that history is still acting on us and that justice cannot exist without some form of restitution even if it comes in the form of the whole truth.

Identifying the graves of the disappeared, so that their relatives can rest; the numbers of how many killed, so that nations account for their dead; the names of the guilty, so that they may be brought to justice or forgiven; initiating the return of what was stolen: all these issues resonate with formerly colonized peoples.

For Muthoni Wanyeki says that “We see this case as being part of the process of understanding and coming to terms with our past...particularly given that our past impacts so clearly and evidently on our present.” African people in the continent and Diaspora should support the Kenya Human Rights Committee by calling on the British government to account for its torture of Mau Mau detainees.

We have to become each other’s keeper of memory and see each atrocity perpetrated on the other as part our collective memory – whether we identify as Afro-Latino, African American, or African.

We have to make common cause because ultimately the struggle for the truth will not be won because the British High Court finds it just, or because the British Government decides to come to terms with its past, it will be won because victims across Africa, the Diaspora and other survivors of colonial atrocities will make common cause with the Mau Mau struggle and vice versa. Truth will come to light because we will have demanded justice and restitution before offering forgiveness.

It is only when an apology and restitution are offered, and the victim in turn forgives that for both the perpetrator and victim true healing can take place. For me, that is the truth of justice.

Notes

1. Wanyeki, Muthoni (Kenya Human Rights Commission Executive Director). Interview by Author via e-mail. October 15th, 2007.
2. UK pay-out for Kenya bomb victims. July 19th, 2002
3. Williams, Eric. Slavery and Capitalism. New York, Russell & Russell, 1961
4. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C. Howard University Press, 1981
5. Barclays admits possible link to slavery after reparation call. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,2047237,00.html April 1, 2007
6. Corporations challenged by reparations activists http://www.usatoday.com/money/general/2002/02/21/slave-reparations.htm February 21, 2002

* Kenyan writer Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Hurling Words at Consciousness (Africa World Press, 2006) and the forthcoming New Kenyan Fiction (Ishmael Reed Publications, 2008). He is a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine.

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/323/43669-Sankara-4.jpgMukoma Wa Ngugi celebrates the lives of Thomas Sankara and Che Guevara, and in doing so, asks us to remember all our other leaders and heroes who died at the hands of colonialism and apartheid.

In April this year, we celebrated 50 yrs of Ghana’s Independence. This October, in addition to remembering the revolutionary promise of Che Guevara executed forty years ago, we will also be remembering that twenty years ago, Thomas Sankara was assassinated – a stark reminder that we are still in the state Odinga Oginga called Not Yet Uhuru. We will be remembering that if Africa suffers today, it is because yesterday its best political minds, and its most fiery and committed sons and daughters were assassinated. All for thirty pieces of silver, for tea, coffee, oil, diamonds, gold, cobalt, uranium and African sweat.

But we should also remember the living. Aziz Fall, the co-coordinator of the International Justice Campaign for Sankara (ICJS) has been receiving anonymous death threats since December 2006. They tell him “stop or be stopped” “commit suicide or face execution” and in the last one, he was informed that his family would be targeted. His crime? Coordinating 22 lawyers dedicated to using legal means to find the truth behind Sankara’s assassination.

The ICJS helped Mariam Sankara, Thomas Sankara’s widow, take her case to the United Nations after, predictably, the legal system in Burkina Faso stalled each time she appeared in court. Finally, in March 2006, the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that Sankara’s family has “the right to know the circumstances of his death.” The Committee also argued that failure to correct the natural death entry on Sankara’s death certificate, refusal to investigate his death, and “the lack of official recognition of his place of burial” pointed to “inhumane treatment of Ms. Sankara and her sons” contrary to Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Dictators and your torturers all over the world take note! Article 7 declares: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” In a strange way, the death threats against Aziz further validate the UN ruling.

Victoria Mxenge, Ruth First, Steve Biko, Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Chris Hani, Mhodlane, Kimathi and many others dead at the hands of colonialism and apartheid. But what makes the assassinations of Sankara, Lumumba or Maurice Bishop of Grenada all the more painful is knowing that they were betrayed by those closest to them Then, without exception, they were succeeded by less able people- to say the least. Their successors are egregiously guilty of violently pulling back their societies miles behind the starting line.

After Lumumba, Mobutu –a common thief who under the guise of a shallow nationalism - maimed, killed and stole in the Congo. In Grenada, Bernard Coard’s bloody counter-revolution allowed a predatory U.S. to invade Grenada. And in Burkina Faso, each day we see what President Blaise Compaore has done with the Sankara revolution.

Life expectancy is 47.9 years, adult literacy, 21.8 percent and Burkina Faso now has the dubious distinction of being ranked the 3rd poorest country in the world with 80 percent of its 13 million people living on less than two dollars a day. In November of 2007, Compaore will be running for presidency, again. I say give him five more years to see if he can do it – Let him get Burkina Faso the coveted first place title of poorest country in the whole world!

For a nation to heal, it must know and come to terms with the truth of its past. And it must make good with the promise of that past. In Kenya Dedan Kimathi was hanged and buried in an unmarked grave in Kamiti Prison by the British in 1957 where the post-independence government left him. Having set Kenya on neo-colonial rails and rewarded the collaborators with land, then turned their backs on Mau Mau veterans, both Kenyatta and Moi wanted what Kimathi stood for forgotten. Compaore is afraid of the truth because Sankara is a reminder of how far he has fallen from the promise of the revolution. Compaore knows we know he cannot make good on Sankara’s promise.

We have to remember our dead. But our presidents prefer gold monuments and statues. Sometimes they cultivate heroes’ acres without growing freedom. Better the monument be societies that are free and egalitarian. Instead of grand monuments, it is better we have nations that would welcome the revolutionary dead. Because truth be told, Nkrumah would not have been welcomed to Ghana’s 50 year celebrations. Kimathi would not be welcomed in today’s Kenya and Sankara would be assassinated again in today’s Burkina Faso.

What if Sankara had grown old with us? Would he have become a dictator as we have seen with many? We do not know. But we know how he lived, we know what he died for and his promise. That is what should matter.

Koni Benson, a friend and agitator, named her son Sankara because, she said, “What Thomas Sankara did, tried to do and what happened to him, should not be forgotten. Sankara is the history and the future of the continent. He dared us to invent the future.”

As we remember our dead – Let us also remember the living. We have to dare to dream again. We have to dare to remember the past. And we have to dare to act.

* Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Hurling Words at Consciousness (AWP, 2006) and Conversing with Africa: Politics of Change (KPH, 2003), and editor of the forthcoming, New Kenyan Fiction (Ishmael Reed Publications, 2008). He is a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine where a shorter version of this essay first appeared.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Mukoma Wa Ngugi, reflects on the third international Toward an Africa Without Borders Conference and concludes that political activists 'must invest time and energy in developing a Pan-Africanism from below'.

We either value African life, understand a black life as equal to a white life, and the poor as equally deserving as the wealthy – or we do not. This reformulation of Frantz Fanon’s 'a given society is either racist or not'; or better yet of Malcolm X’s 'If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress' are reminders that there are no fractions when it comes to human dignities and freedoms. They either exist in full or they do not. Africans, however, have been prescribed quarter-doses of health and education, one-sixteenth dignities, and piece-meal freedoms for so long that what would not be acceptable elsewhere is welcomed in Africa.

These were my thoughts recently as I travelled back from Durban, South Africa, where I spent the last two weeks of June and the first week of July as one of the organisers of the third international Toward an Africa Without Borders Conference.

This simple recognition, that we either value Africans or we do not, was fuelled by one more frightening thought. The kind of activism that we, the political activists, have been doing is not enough. It can never be enough. Problems facing the African continent, from slavery through colonialism, neocolonialism, and now the hurricane of globalisation that opens up African markets, leaving more poverty in its wake, have never been fully addressed.

Slavery was abolished and the millions who died were swept under the rugs of progress. When colonialism ended, true independence was bargained away at the Lancaster and Paris tables, colonial history and its dead blown away by the 'winds of change'. In the 1970s and 1980s we struggled against neocolonialism; but against our dying and the dead we have globalisation which has swept the idea of social justice under the carpet of a democracy without content.

At what point in history do we simply say what we are doing is not enough? Not because the path we have chosen is bad, or entirely wrong-headed. But simply because the problem is clearly much bigger than the solution we are struggling for? And if we keep doing the same things but expecting different results, aren’t we just a little bit mad?

Whether we are conservatives, World Bank officials, NGO activists, philanthropists, political and scholar-activists, the whole lot of us, we all share the same statistics. We find them indicating that in Africa infant mortality is on the rise (the only place in the world where such indicators are actually worsening). We find that millions are projected to die from Aids and the poverty that feeds the fury of treatable diseases like Malaria and TB. We look at the statistics that find African economies counting foreign aid as part of the national budget; that indicate Africa loses more money through unfair trade than it gets in foreign aid. We find indicators of the extent of environmental degradation, and the human misery caused through exploitation of resources such as oil in places like the Niger Delta. We look at statistics which, like bread crumbs, can be followed back to days of slavery; that show present day exploitation of resources and a rather bleak future if things continue as they are.

Yet, in the face of these enormous problems, based on our ideological professions, we proscribe solutions that have one thing in common – inadequacy. Conservatives launch an anti-corruption campaign, and prescribe more foreign aid, but to accountable governments. World Bank officials call for the opening of markets and transparency. Philanthropists set up more save-the-African-child foundations. NGO activists call for strategic donations and fairer US intervention. Political and scholar activists have their international conferences and alternative world summits only to pass resolutions calling for better representation of Africa in international media. In the meantime, in a most myopic move, African leaders at the helm of this sinking ship gather in Accra to call for a United Africa to be led by one president and a 2,000,000 strong army.

In a word, our various remedies have long been outstripped by the maladies. Cynicism is not mine alone here. Nelson Mandela, the face of the anti-apartheid struggle, started in 2003 a joint foundation with the apartheid/colonialism crusader Cecil Rhodes’ Trust. The Mandela-Rhodes Foundation, the website declares, seeks 'to build exceptional leadership capacity in Africa'. What could be more cynical? Who is fooling who here? In another context, this would be unbelievable: we could never imagine Jewish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel starting a Wiesel-Himmler Foundation, for example – but somehow in Africa we are willing to suspend our disbelief. With all due respect - is this madness? Have we become this cynical, or are we suffering from collective schizophrenia that allows us launder history through foundations and other self-help projects?

We are in a peculiar position of being behind history. We misread the present. And for it, the future is not ours. Each day unveils what the future will hold – the US Africa Command Centre, wars on terror that, like globalisation, have no boundaries, and an African leadership whose best foot is Mbeki’s embrace of international capital at the expense of the majority of South Africans. We must stop sending one another congratulatory notes after each successful rock concert, international conference, or summit.

These were my thoughts as I stood in the middle of Inanda Township in Durban, as I walked through settlements demolished under the watchful eye of the ANC government. Near a chemical plant, children tickled by our presence broke into giggles; but my laughter died where their feet were discoloured by walking barefoot in chemical soaked homes and playgrounds.

I could trace these thoughts to 2004 in Kenya’s Dandora slums. Sitting under a tree with writer Binyavanga Wainaina, my brothers and sisters, and members of the Kalamashaka Hip Hop band, we could hear random gunshots announcing random deaths a few miles away. Later that evening we left the slum for Runda Estate, one of the richest estates in Nairobi, to visit a progressive Kenyan politician, where we were served food by maids and cooks dressed in snappy white checkered uniforms. Then it occurred to me that our political leadership really do not see the people in Dandora, Mathare or Kangemi slums as having lives with value.

The anger and the most basic humanism that moved the revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries are gone. They have been replaced by 'progressive' politics laced with contempt for the poor; as if history did not happen; as if – here comes another statistic - the 380,000,000 Africans living in dire poverty are stubbornly refusing to take advantage of the all-you-can-eat democracy buffet. These politicians do not have the political imagination or the will to deal with the devastation of extreme poverty and the historical legacies of colonialism.

But in 2004 it had not occurred to me that even we, the political activists, had lost that imagination, if not the will. We too were speaking the same language as the politician. Realising earlier this month that African life lacked as much value in South Africa as in Kenya, that there was nothing more Pan-African than shared poverty, and the many of ways of dying, that Aids is as much a Pan-African issue as African culture, I had to admit that my way of doing things has been wholly inadequate. Not because I was waiting for a magic wand that can be waved (it is locked away in coffers of the global rich in the little drawer titled stop living at the expense of others); rather, my activism was miles away from comprehending, let alone squarely addressing, problems that were multi-generational, sanctioned by history, and local and international at the same time.

Understanding the problem, history not withstanding, lies in comprehending when and why the revolutionary became a political activist. The activist, as I understand it, was born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the revolutionary died. Revolutions under the banner of Marxism had degenerated to coups and counter-coups which produced paranoid movements and dictators. By the early 1990s, even the thin banner of Marxism was no longer being hoisted. It was war for power, one group against the other for the state house. Communism in the East collapsed; and with the chaos and deaths that followed, it was no longer fashionable to talk about the masses, classes and revolution.

But movements of trickle-down economics and welfare also produced the same results – war for profit, coups and counter-coups, paranoid dictators. Only the left took the blame. So when Margaret Thatcher declared that there was no alternative to capitalism, not only did the conservative, liberal and radical politicians believe her, but so did the would-be revolutionaries who, looking to the East, only saw chaos and turmoil.

Political activism as the mainstay of change rose out of the ashes of revolutionary activism. And imbedded in the idea of political activism is the belief that there are no other alternatives. Herein is the paradox: we, the political activists work within a closed system of no alternatives even when we think we do not. Anti-globalisation will not make a dent on globalisation; and anti-capitalism cannot counter movement of massive international capital. We simply have to break way from this closed system; offer, and fight for other alternatives.

If we are to stare boldly at the problems facing the African continent, we must dare to say that there are alternatives not only to how societies are arranged but to how we can bring about those changes. We must return to these two twin aspects of change: the boldness of revolutionary thinking and dreaming and the boldness of action. People power movements in Latin America, exemplified by Chavez, are one alternative. We must speak about their potential as well as their limitations. We cannot turn our back on what is happening in Latin America. It is our duty to keep Cuba alive, that star the United States has been trying to dull, so that it remains an example of what is possible. But if we see potential in Latin America, we must use it to jump-start our own ideas and approaches to change, not as a template to be blindly copied.

In Africa we must invest time and energy in developing a Pan-Africanism from below, one that recognises we are not uniting governments but the people; one which is revolutionary, in that it will unite the people as it frees them from local and international exploitation; that sees the emancipation of women as an integral part of its vocation, and has the content of social and economic justice. The only way to make sure of this, contrary to the July African Union meeting in Accra, is by a people’s mandate.

Pan-Africanism cannot be a lofty idea that comes from an enlightened leadership. The days of the missionary, the small glorious band of men, the talented tenth, the revolutionary van-guard are gone. Pan-Africanism will have to travel through the same borders as refugees, breaking down barriers and borders along the way. It has to travel through African languages, dynamic cultures, and the shared politics of anti-colonial struggles (after all, anti-apartheid was a pan-African struggle), and resistance in this day of globalisation. Only then shall Africans become visible to each other. And it is only when Africans are visible to each other that African solutions become possible.

There are collective questions that cannot be answered by one person in the same way a solution cannot be an individual affair. And what do the African people want? What would the economy of a united Africa look like? What kind of political systems would we create? What kind of culture would pan-Africanist frameworks produce? What kind of social-gender relations should the Africa of the future embrace? What would a borderless Africa look like? In trying to answer these questions from our various locations, we will be creating the much needed alternatives – and implementing them.

Political activism would not dream of changing governments or unifying African people. Revolutionary thinking that is cognisant of the world as it stands will. In this 21st century of a thousand changes: we are either revolutionary, or we are not.

* Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Conversing with Africa: Politics of Change (Kimaathi Publishers, 2002), the collection of poetry Hurling Words at Consciousness (Africa World Press, 2006), and editor of the forthcoming New Kenyan Fiction (Ishmael Reed Publications, 2008).

* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Mukoma Wa Ngugi argues that one of the major threats to African Democracy comes from international NGOs such as the IRI, NED and USAID. These organizations act in the interest of the United States by attempting to and often succeeding in effecting regime change and influencing political outcomes in African countries.

Some of the most important threats to democracy in Africa are the International Republican Institute (IRI), USAID and other international NGO’s that are directly funded by the United States Congress. These are US foreign policy institutions that masquerade as philanthropic organizations of good-will all the while furthering American foreign policy. They are currently operating in over 40 African countries including Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.

A brief history of the IRI is as follows: In a bid to make the world friendlier to US interests, President Ronald Reagan (a supporter of Apartheid South Africa) called for the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983. The US, he claimed, needed an organization that would “foster the infrastructure of democracy--the system of a free press, unions, political parties universities--which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.” As a result the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which spawned the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were formed. NED receives about $50 Million from the US Congress. USAID requested a staggering $9.3 billion for 2007.

Out of these three organizations, the IRI and USAID are the most active in the promotion of a world safe for US Democracy. The IRI at first “focused on planting the seeds of democracy in Latin America,” according to its website. After the “Cold War, [it] has broadened its reach to support democracy and freedom around the globe.” USAID states that U.S. foreign aid helps in “furthering America's foreign policy interests in expanding democracy and free markets while improving the lives of the citizens of the developing world.” Through what NED terms Consolidating Democracy, democratic principles and sovereignty are being violated. The NED, IRI and USAID attempt to unify opposition against a target government. They provide strategic and monetary support to the opposition. They also infiltrate university student organizations, women’s and youth groups, trade unions, teacher associations and other sectors of civil society which they then into supporting the opposition parties that they have effectively turned into a coalition. Worse than instigating a coup (a top down mechanism of change), the IRI and USAID infect the very blood lines of the country by affecting “regime change” through civil society.

Consolidating Democracy was successfully used in what the IRI refers to as the color revolutions in Ukraine (Orange), Georgia (Rose) and Kyrgyzstan (Tulip). In Haiti, democratically elected Aristide was overthrown using the same methods of unifying a rag-tag opposition and then mobilizing civil society behind it. But some countries such as Venezuela remain a failed target. The IRI’s 2005 Programs in Africa webpage states that it “provided training for political parties in Angola to establish a strong and stable political party system, and reinforce the national reconciliation process.” In Kenya it “worked with political parties to teach them how to develop positions and communicate them to voters.” In Nigeria they “focused on strengthening and preparing political parties for the 2007 elections and fostering partnerships between the parities and civil groups”. And in Liberia the IRI “sponsored the first-ever formal presidential candidate debates.”

In September 2006, when receiving the IRI 2006 Freedom Award together with Laura Bush, Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf thanked the IRI which “was particularly active in promoting [the] elections.” She added that: “Very quickly an office was established. They came, they did workshops. They brought political groups together. They worked with the media. They educated. They instructed. They supported. They assisted the process.” She was in fact recounting the steps taken to consolidate democracy in Liberia by the foreign NGO.

President Mbeki has in the past questioned to what extent South African civil society makes independent choices. This concern can be extended to the continent. For example, a Boston Globe survey “identified 159 faith-based organizations that received more than $1.7 billion in USAID prime contracts, grants and agreements from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2005” as part of President Bush’s Faith Based Initiative. The implications here are obvious. USAID has also tied acceptance of Genetically Modified food to foreign aid even in terms of disaster as in the case with Zambia in 2002. Organizations such as Oxfam have showed that GM foods in Africa would in the long run be harmful to the small scale African farmer, lead to the destruction of local food economies, create a cycle of dependency and cause more acute starvation. It was an absurd case of stopping starvation today by creating conditions for more starvation tomorrow. And in even more direct interference with the internal economy and politics of African countries, USAID, has worked in concert with the World Bank to promote the now infamous Structural Adjustment Programs. But it is the hijacking of democratic processes by using civil society that should be of the most concern to Africans concerned with genuine democracy.

The IRI and USAID don’t have to win every African election they participate in – each parliamentarian and each political organization that gets a seat in the government becomes their lobbyist. In effect, they become shareholders in the new government. And as the American proverb says, “whoever pays the piper calls the tune.” To understand the absurdity of what Africans have accepted as a norm, imagine African countries financing a third party in the United States. And in addition they also train student leaders, trade unionists, journalists and the rest of American civil society how to oppose or overthrow the US Government. Americans wouldn’t stand for it.

African election processes should be monitored by the African Union, the African Peer Review Mechanism and the international community to ensure opposition candidates get equal time in the media. Campaign finance laws should make it illegal for both the opposition and the sitting government to accept foreign funds. Taxpayer money (with a reasonable ceiling) could even be allocated to opposition parties, depending on the number of legally registered voters.

Sitting governments in Africa have access to state money, state television and newspapers and easily attract business money to line their pockets, while the opposition feels compelled to take foreign money. But foreign money perpetuates the goals of the donor. As a matter of democratic principle, alternatives have to be found. With governments that don’t address debilitating inequality, growing majorities living in absolute poverty, and opposition parties whose foreign funding sets the political platform instead of focusing on the causes of the marginalized, the gains made by those who fought for democracy with content are under threat.

* Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Conversing with Africa: Politics of Change and Hurling Words at Consciousness. He is the coordinator of Toward an Africa Without Borders and a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine where a shorter version of this article first appeared.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org