What Would Gandhi Do? Zimbabwe, Neo-imperialism and the Lessons of Nonviolence

The theme for this year’s Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) annual conference, held from October 8 to 10 at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, could not have been more apropos. Phrased as “The Power of Nonviolence,” it compelled me to think about the ways in which Nonviolence theory and praxis could be brought to bear in the search for solutions to one of Africa’s most intractable puzzles, the case of Zimbabwe. No sooner had the conference ended and we had all returned to our respective bases than Zimbabwe shot up onto the world headlines once again. The Tsvangirai faction of the Movement for Democratic Change’s (MDC-T)) Agriculture Deputy Minister-designate Roy Bennett was indicted and remanded to jail on Wednesday October 14, to await his trial on charges believed by many to be politically motivated. He is being tried on charges of “possessing weapons for the purposes of insurgency and banditry,” according to the Zimbabwe Times. High Court Justice Charles Hungwe restored Bennett's bail two days later, on the same day that Prime Minister and MDC-T president Morgan Tsvangirai announced that the MDC-T was disengaging from the Government of National Unity. 

The Last Straw

News reports described the Roy Bennett issue as the last straw that broke the GNU’s back, despite Tsvangirai’s clarification that the disengagement was not a direct result of the Bennett trial. The Zimbabwe Times quoted Tsvangirai as telling reporters: “Let me emphasise this . . . this decision has not been made because of Bennett as some might want think. This has purely nothing to do with Bennett but with the collapse of trust in our Zanu PF partners in government.” Rumors that the MDC-T were contemplating pulling out of the Government of National Unity predated the events of this past week. The Financial Gazette titled its Friday October 2 comment “No to MDC Pull Out”, and urged the MDC-T to explore other ways of resolving the problems dogging the GNU, other than withdrawing from the eight-month marriage of convenience.

The statement from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai announcing the “disengagement” offered the context for the decision as the culmination of “outstanding, non-compliance and toxic issues” that continued “to impede the transitional government”, eight months after it was implemented. “Despite countless meetings among the Principals, despite countless press conferences, despite numerous correspondence and trips to SADC and SADC leaders and despite a SADC summit, the above issues remain outstanding,” said the statement issued on Friday, October 16. It laid out a litany of breaches, intransigence and recalcitrance from the ZANU-PF side: provincial governors had still not been appointed; the appointments of Governor of the Reserve Bank and the Attorney General had not yet been rescinded, despite their illegality; the deputy minister of Agriculture had not yet been sworn in; and the Global Political Agreement had not yet been reviewed, way past the 6-month point as was the agreement.

Tsvangirai went on to point out how ZANU-PF had failed to enact a paradigm shift to reflect the spirit of the Global Political Agreement (GPA), abusing and disrespecting it. More ominously, he cited “the extensive militarization of the countryside through massive deployment of the military and the setting up of bases of violence that we saw after the 29th of March 2008.” ZANU-PF had imposed more than 16,000 youth functionaries onto government payroll, who had been imposed on the government payroll, and there was continuation of “selective and unequal application of the rule of law”. ZANU-PF’s mouthpieces, The Herald newspaper and the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation “continue to treat the MDC and our leaders in government as if they were a third-rate treasonous and sell-out element instead of a genuine and equal partner in the transitional government.”

In what was probably a painful acknowledgement of what many had already known about the marriage of convenience, Tsvangirai turned the scathing critique inward:

“On our part, we have papered over the cracks and have sought to persuade the whole world in the last eight months that everything is working.  We have sought to persuade our constituencies that the transitional government was on course and was the only business in town. In the process, we have put at stake the reputation, credibility and trust of our movement and to ourselves as leaders. We have done everything in order to make this government work and we have done so purely for one reason, the need to restore hope and dignity to our people; the need to give our people a new start and a new beginning.”

Tsvangirai’s tone was very assertive, emphasizing how it was the MDC that was supposed to be the dominant partner in the inclusive government: “The truth of the matter is that it is our Movement that won the election of 29 March 2008. It is our Movement that has the mandate of the people to govern this country. It is our Movement that has strategically compromised on that mandate by executing the GPA and by entering into the transitional government.  It is our Movement upon which the hope and future of millions of Zimbabweans is deposited.”

In September this year the MDC started consulting its membership and support base about the idea of whether to hang in there and try to work things out. On the MDC’s website, a poll started on September 24 asked if the party should abandon the inclusive government. As of October 17, 54.5 percent of 393 respondents advised against pulling out, over 45.5 percent who voted yes. According to the Mail and Guardian of South Africa, Tsvangirai asked for an emergency meeting with Mugabe following the indictment and jailing of Bennett on Wednesday. Mugabe is said to have refused. Tsvangirai in turn refused to convene a scheduled cabinet meeting. The Sunday Times of October 18 described rumors about a meeting between President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai hours after Tsvangirai’s announcement on Friday, in addition to earlier rumors that Mugabe had been frantically attempting to meet Tsvangirai. Following the decision to disengage from the inclusive government, the MDC-T ordered all its cabinet ministers to pack up and leave their government offices and operate from their party’s headquarters, according to the Zimbabwe Times.

For many, it was just a matter of time before this unraveling was to get underway. For others, it is a disturbing trend of events for an arrangement that, however inconvenient and undesirable, had began to bear tangible fruit on the ground inasfar as the living conditions of ordinary Zimbabweans. The Zimbabwe crisis has not suffered a shortage of detailed, impassioned proposals and suggestions for how to resolve it. These have ranged from military options, from both inside agitation and outside Zimbabwe, to political settlements, such as the inclusive government, insisted upon by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which both ZANU –PF and the two MDC factions ended up agreeing upon. The monumental events of this past week are likely to unfurl that process all over again. Tsvangirai said it was now time to “assert and take our position as the dominant party in Zimbabwe,” even as the MDC-T were ceasing all collaboration with the ZANU-PF. It remains to be seen how this assumption of the MDC’s rightful place in government is going to be implemented.

Among the many proposals offered as potential ways of ending the Zimbabwe impasse, there has not been much said about nonviolent action. With the exception of a special report published in 2003 by the Washington DC-based United States Institute for Peace (USIP), none of the major think tanks and interested third parties have ever mentioned, or let alone paid attention to the issue of nonviolence as a plan of action capable of being a viable solution to the Zimbabwe crisis. This is at once curious and yet not surprising. Curious because not only has nonviolent action been successfully used in difficult contexts of political repression around the world, it has actually been adopted as a strategy by a number of groups in Zimbabwe, including the MDC itself, in its first six years. But it is also not surprising because despite the success nonviolent resistance has registered in a number of cases of repression around the world, it has not been as celebrated as military campaigns have, and continue to be. With the exception of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement in the first half of the century, first in South Africa and later in India, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights Movement in the United States of the 50s and 60s, methods of resistance to political repression that rely on means other than violence receive less attention in the mainstream media.

The 2003 special report issued by the United States Institute for Peace was titled “Zimbabwe and the Prospects for Nonviolent Political Change.” The report was commissioned by USIP’s Research and Studies Program, and was written by three scholar-analysts who were living and working in Zimbabwe at the time. Their names were not provided, for reasons of their personal safety. With the term “Nonviolent Political Change” prominently gracing the title, the report offered a detailed description of events in 2003, most notably the strategies that the MDC and its partners had undertaken to pressurize Mugabe’s ZANU-PF into democratic reforms. The report stated that when civil society groups began to emerge in the 1990s, their main tactic was to use strategies of nonviolence to bring about change in Zimbabwe. Most of these strategies took the form of mass stay-aways, which paralyzed economic activity in some of Zimbabwe’s major cities. Beyond these mass stay-aways, however, it was not clear how these civil society coalitions and the MDC approached the concept of nonviolence in both its theoretical and strategic considerations. The report offered no definitions of what it termed ‘nonviolence’, nor did it cite any particular Zimbabwean proponents of nonviolence spelling out what specific approaches they would use, other than mass stay-aways.

Violence and Nonviolence in Zimbabwe

The most compelling evidence that there were Zimbabweans who espoused nonviolence as both principle and strategy appeared in an article written by Senator David Coltart and published on the news site NewZimbabwe.com in September 2006. The article was picked up by The New African in their May 2007 issue, which had a 17-page supplement dedicated to presenting various sides to the Zimbabwe story. The sponsored supplement of the May 2007 issue of the New African dedicated six articles to the issue of violence in Zimbabwe, two of them written by two members of the MDC affected by the violence from within their own ranks.

David Coltart is an MDC-M member of parliament from the Mutambara faction who has since become Zimbabwe’s Minister of Education, Sports and Culture. Citing both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Coltart wrote that the best way to deal with Mugabe’s authoritarianism was through nonviolent techniques. He traced his personal commitment to nonviolence to two brutal wars he had experienced. First was the war for independence, and second was the Gukurahundi, the massacre of Ndebeles in what Mugabe called a war against rebels, in the mid-1980s. “These experiences made me vow that I would do all in my power to prevent further conflict in Zimbabwe,” he wrote. Coltart pointed out that violence was endemic to Zimbabwean society, going back to the wars of the 19th century.

"Violence was used by Lobengula to suppress the Shona. Violence was used to colonise and the threat of violence was used to maintain white minority rule. Violence was used to overthrow the white minority. And since independence, violence as been used to crush legitimate political opposition."

Coltart added that a culture of impunity had taken hold, in which violence was used to achieve political ends, and the perpetrators were thriving on those victories won through violence. “As a result, violence is now deeply embedded in our national psyche. Political violence is accepted as the norm.” The MDC was different from other Zimbabwean political parties because of its commitment to ending political violence and promoting nonviolence as a principle, wrote Coltart. MDC members had at various times debated as to whether the brutality of Mugabe’s government could be encountered through nonviolence, however the MDC always maintained a “broad consensus that this was the only course open to us if we were to act in the long national interest.”

Coltart was anguished by the violence that was being perpetrated by members of the MDC, a development he argued was undermining the entire nonviolent strategy. On September 28, 2004, MDC youths were said to have attempted to murder Peter Guhu, MDC Director of Security. While this incident shocked Coltart, he was even more disturbed to learn that senior MDC officials were part of the attempted murder plot. An inquiry was carried out, but no action was taken against the members who had plotted the attempted murder. More violence was to follow in May 2005, when the same MDC youth were sent to assault other MDC members. In July 2006 MDC youth from Tsvangirai’s faction seriously injured a member of Mutambara’s MDC faction, Trudy Stevenson, stoning her in the head and breaking her arm. They also damaged the car Stevenson and other party members were traveling in. Other cases of political violence perpetrated by the MDC involved petrol bombings of police officers, some of whom incurred severe burn injuries.

Coltart wrote that if the MDC were to transform Zimbabwe into a better place, “we simply have to break this cycle of violence. We will find that if we do not stamp out violence in our ranks now, it will come back to haunt us.” The reason why ZANU-PF’s political violence had reached the proportions it had was because of the century-old trend, repeating itself and no one seemed to have learned the lesson that violence begets more violence. Coltart said that violence played right into the hands of ZANU-PF, whose sole purpose had been not only to intimidate but also to “provoke the opposition into a physical fight. The regime desperately needs a pretext to use all the power at its disposal.” Whatever mass-action the MDC and its partners were to plan needed to be “carefully organized by people who have a deep-rooted commitment to and understanding of nonviolent techniques,” he wrote. 

The MDC are not the only group espousing nonviolent techniques in Zimbabwe. The women’s group Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) state in their mission statement that their goals are “based on the principles of strategic nonviolence.” When the group organized a protest to commemorate this year’s International Day of Peace on September 21 in Bulawayo, they were brutally attacked and dispersed by the police. Some onlookers threatened the police with physical violence in retaliation, but the group’s leaders stepped in and asserted the group’s nonviolent approach: “we are non-violent activists and any history should write that the people who disturbed the peace with violence were Zimbabwe Republic Police officers, not peaceful human rights defenders.”

Given the history of Zimbabwe and the role violence has played for more than a century, the idea of nonviolence would not be an easy one. One interesting irony is that even Robert Mugabe himself once read Mahatma Gandhi, and for a while contemplated nonviolent resistance, according to Mugabe biographer Heidi Holland (2008) in her book Dinner with Mugabe. The belief that Zimbabwe’s freedom could only be won through armed struggle was pervasive, probably given the brutality of the racist regime of Ian Smith. Speaking to Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer in a 1992 interview for their book on Pan-Africanist peace perspectives, then Minister of Foreign Affairs Nathan Shamuyayira said the question of nonviolence as a tactic for Zimbabwe’s independence struggle was out of the question. Many felt that the victories Gandhi had achieved for India and Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in the United States could not be used as examples for Zimbabwe, whose context was far different. But according to Coltart, the MDC did view nonviolence as a viable response to ZANU-PF’s violence, even when members of the MDC did not always adhere to nonviolent principles.

That Senator David Coltart became the new Minister of Education, Sport and Culture in February 2009 was a particularly promising sign in light of the expectation for a new curriculum and a reformed educational system. Nonviolence education requires an intellectual framework to guide practical training and discipline, under a broader Peace Education curriculum and pedagogy. Several African countries have embarked on the incorporation of Human Rights Education into their school systems, through the efforts of educational Non-Governmental Organizations. Perhaps the most significant breakthrough came in September when seven African Ministers of Education met in Mombasa, Kenya, to discuss the incorporation of Peace Education into their school systems. While seven countries were able to attend the conference, the original invitation went to twelve countries, under the auspices of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA). The twelve countries were Angola, Cote D’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya (Host), Madagascar, Mozambique, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, and Uganda. Zimbabwe was curiously not on the list, although the conference was open to any interested country on the African continent. Handled carefully and properly, the introduction of Peace Education into the school systems of African countries could be the one deciding factor that might transform the educational landscape and make the school system responsive and relevant to actual African contexts.

Incorporating Peace and Nonviolence Education into the school systems of Zimbabwe and other African countries, not to say the rest of the world, is a long-term project requiring meticulous planning, consultation and deliberation. But Zimbabweans are looking for solutions for the immediate crisis also. Long term planning need not wait for immediate solutions first, nor can immediate solutions be considered a substitute for long term planning. If the nonviolence approach adopted by the MDC, WOZA and other Zimbabwean groups is going to bear fruit, there will be an urgent need to pay serious attention to lessons from other contexts where nonviolence had been attempted, learning from both the successes and failures.

Gandhi Today

Although not a mainstream ideology, nonviolent theory and practice are not new in Africa. As Desmond Tutu writes in the preface to Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation in Africa (Sutherland & Meyer, 2002), it was in South that Mahatma Gandhi developed his concept of Satyagraha, variously understood as a soul force that seeks truth through nonviolent action. Nonviolent action has therefore been a part of the strategies that South Africans have used to end apartheid since the late 19th century. In his autobiography titled Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah (1958) discussed how Gandhi’s concept of nonviolence influenced the strategies that Ghanaians used to win their independence in 1957 as the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to do so. Uniquely called Positive Action, Nkrumah trained members of his party in nonviolent techniques, and won Ghana’s independence without resorting to violence. Zambia’s first president Kenneth Kaunda was also a proponent of nonviolent action, and wrote a book about the predicament of nonviolence for independence movements faced with brutal, racist violence. Tanzania’s first president Julius Nyerere was also a proponent of nonviolence, as were other Pan-Africanist movements which adopted various nonviolent techniques even as they also flirted with violence when they deemed it necessary.

The morning of Saturday October 10th, the last day of this year’s PJSA annual conference, started with a plenary session. The session was titled ‘Gandhian Traditions’, and brought together three distinguished scholar-activists who study and teach Gandhian nonviolence. The first panelist to speak was Dr. Veena Rani Howard of the University of Oregon, who pointed out that in today’s world Gandhi’s values were considered ascetic, and were dismissed as quaint, and merely symbolic. The second speaker was Fr. Cedric Prakash, SJ, Director of the Jesuit Centre for Human Rights, Justice and Peace in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Fr. Prakash spoke about the challenges of mainstreaming the concept of Ahimsa, or nonviolence, in Gandhi’s own backyard which today is wracked by various kinds of violence. The panel’s third and last speaker was Dr. Michael Nagler from the Metta Center for Nonviolence Education, in Berkeley, California. Dr. Nagler pointed out that there had been a major shift in our thinking about nonviolence today. He said approximately 3.6 billion today lived in a region of the world where a major nonviolent event had occurred. He said this shift could also be seen in the study of science, with a noticeable turn toward the study of positive psychology in neuroscience. Nonviolence was now being taught in institutions across the world, and even the PJSA had made Nonviolence the theme for this year’s conference, observed Dr. Nagler.

As I write, the Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking will be underway next week in Memphis, Tennessee, an annual gathering, since 2004, of peace scholars and practitioners, activists and community leaders. Georgia congressman and former student leader during the Civil Rights Movement, Representative John Lewis is pushing legislation through congress to enact a bill named H.R. 3328: the Gandhi-King Scholarly Exchange Initiative Act of 2009. If passed, the bill would fund research and collaboration amongst scholars and students in both India and the United States to promote peace and nonviolence around the world. Another bill also aimed at promoting peace and nonviolence in the United States and abroad is H.R. 808, initiated by Congressman Denis Kucinich for the establishment of a cabinet level Department of Peace and Nonviolence. Adding to the shift, the PBS television documentary series titled A Force More Powerful, produced by Steve York and Jack DuVall, and the accompanying book edited by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, catalogued no less than six major nonviolent revolutions, going back to the early 1900s up to the close of the century. That project helped tell the larger, if not less often told story of how nonviolent social change has been an important factor in 20th century struggles to end political repression.

If Dr. Nagler is indeed right about this shift, and there is good reason to believe he is, would it be too idealistic to imagine the role that nonviolence can play in seeking peaceful resolutions to some of the most difficult problems of violence and war that we are faced with today? And having seen the evidence for the presence of attempts to use nonviolent techniques in addressing the problems Zimbabwe is undergoing, what lessons might we draw from these attempts?

Lessons of Nonviolence

There are several tenets of nonviolent theory and practice that can help us begin answering the above two questions. There are noticeable differences between approaches that have suggested nonviolent strategies, and those that have not. The suggestion to use violent means to end the Zimbabwe impasse has gained traction, understandably so, given the frightening levels of violence that ZANU-PF has unleashed on members and supporters of the MDC and critiques alike. As Senator Coltart has pointed out, retaliation for this violence has played right into ZANU-PF’s philosophy of violent repression, a key lesson that nonviolence theory and practice teaches. 

As Senator Coltart has also argued, cycles of violence repeat themselves endlessly, even over hundreds of years. Nonviolent theory and practice, under the broader framework of Peace Studies, emphasizes the importance of studying the root contexts of problems in order to know how to address them. The Zimbabwe case has created such a revulsion for Robert Mugabe that to suggest a role for historical factors in leading to the present crisis has become passé. As Mahmood Mamdani observed in an essay in the London Review of Books in December 2008, the discourse on Zimbabwe turned into a dichotomous contention between two options: one either adored Mugabe, or one abhorred him. In his attempt to free the debate from such a binary, Mamdani suffered the fate of many who have made the argument for historical understanding of the roots of the problem, being dismissed as someone who was defending Robert Mugabe. Thus when Heidi Holland wrote her psychobiography of Mugabe, attempting to provide both a historical context and a psychoanalytical interpretation of why Mugabe turned from a hero to a villain, the result was a book whose description of the context that created Mugabe became something of a rare breath of honesty and a break from the vilification and demonization, which was nevertheless not totally absent.

Holland published an op-ed in the New York Times at the time her biography of Mugabe, Dinner With Mugabe, came out. The op-ed was titled ‘Make Peace with Mugabe,’ in which she pointed out that Robert Mugabe’s real quarrel was with the British, arising out of promises they had made, and had then reneged on. “Indeed, he told me that he was prepared to sacrifice the welfare of his country to prove his case against Britain,” wrote Ms. Holland, a point Mr. Mugabe buttressed in his recent CNN interview with Christian Amanpour in September 2009, when Mugabe told Amanpour one does not leave power because an imperialist has demanded thus: “You dig in.” Ms. Holland went on to suggest that for someone who was prepared to destroy his country just to make a point against an opponent, estranging and vilifying him the way the West was doing was equally reprehensible. “That he has an arguably justifiable complaint against a major Western power — namely the repudiation of the land reform pledge — is doubtless an embarrassment in the West. But that Britain and others choose to shun Mr. Mugabe rather than attempt to settle these differences is quite frankly reckless.”

As evidence of that recklessness, much has been said about “Smart sanctions,” whose devastating effects on the Zimbabwean economy, as a combination with economic mismanagement by ZANU-PF, have little that can be said to be smart about them. Not much is said about the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA), passed in the US Congress and Senate in January 2001 as S.494. Dismissed by much of the White liberal left and African critics of Mugabe as irrelevant to Zimbabwe’s economic crisis, that bill effectively prohibited the biggest international financial institutions and traditional bilateral donors from entering into any economic and financial relationships with the government of Zimbabwe. As provided in Section 3 of the Act, the terms “International Financial Institutions” and “Multilateral Development Banks” include all the global financial institutions that most African and other developing regions of the world have long depended on for loans, development aid and the day to day running of their governments. Included in these categories are the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, as well as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The Act also recommended requesting the compliance of the European Union, Canada and “other appropriate foreign countries” in maintaining the sanctions stipulated in the Act.

Love Thy Enemies, Including Robert Mugabe

Ms. Holland’s advice to the West may have been premised on the politics of realism and pragmatism, but it also points toward an important principle in nonviolent theory and practice. Both Gandhi and King preached that at the heart of principles of nonviolence was love; nonviolent activists protested against oppression and injustice whilst still being able to love and respect the perpetrator of those vices. Nonviolence strategies did not aim to defeat and humiliate an opponent, a piece of wisdom that allowed the British to leave India without ill feelings. It was this philosophy that also enabled the wider mainstream American public to understand and appreciate the Civil Rights struggle, leading to both the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 1965 respectively. Former Archbishop Desmond Tutu extended this philosophy, framed in the African concept of uBuntu, as it facilitated the extension of forgiveness from Black South Africans toward White South Africans, and enabled a transition from White minority rule to a democratic dispensation that opened up political participation for all South Africans.

It is not very easy for many people to consciously imagine themselves forgiving Robert Mugabe and facilitating a new process of engagement with him, but neither does Mugabe show signs of a capability to do that himself. But therein lies one of the hardest principles of nonviolent theory and action as bequeathed to us by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Seeing nonviolence as both principle and strategy opens up new possibilities in thinking differently about the causes of the Zimbabwe crisis, and envisioning new solutions that represent a break from the intractable impasse that has clouded the minds of many. Zimbabwean peace activists have a lot to teach us about nonviolence, given the realities of what they go through every day. Nonviolent theory and practice teaches that local activists have a much better chance of effecting change in their own locality than activists coming in from outside, with no deeper knowledge of the issues and ties to the community. This does not mean outsiders have no role to play; rather it means outsiders need to show their solidarity based on respect of local knowledge, a consciousness and awareness of historical wrongs and their own complicity in that history, as well as a readiness to learn from the people of the area.

What Gandhi and King Would Advise

We can only imagine what Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s advice would have been toward dealing with the question of Zimbabwe. However several factors highlighted in this article offer key concepts in nonviolence theory and practice as a compelling alternative towards attempts to better understand and resolve problems of violent conflict anywhere in the world.  Some of the biggest struggles to end repression in the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century have been carried out using largely nonviolent means. One such untold story is how my own country Malawi waged a largely nonviolent struggle between 1992 and 1994 to rid itself of an entrenched thirty-year dictatorship.

In Zimbabwe, the MDC, WOZA and such other groups are keeping the traditions of nonviolent struggle alive, even as they learn new lessons about what works and what does not. Entrusting a crucial Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture to a strong, respected advocate of peace and principled nonviolence is a major step that has the potential to transform the role of education in how Zimbabweans and other African nations envision the future. The spirit of uMunthu/uBuntu is not completely dead in Southern Africa; in fact it offers a new framework for uMunthu-based peace education and nonviolence, built on endogenous epistemologies that transform themselves with changing times. Handled with the requisite care and sensitivity, the recent ADEA conference in Mombasa, Kenya, by seven African Ministers of Education to lay the foundation for a peace education curriculum in African school systems will be a major step in envisioning a different future for Africa.

Mourning an Inspirational Malawian: Henry Chabwino Malunda, an Obituary

I woke up this morning and was greeted by the shocking news, via an email listserv, of the death of Henry Malunda. Henry was my immediate boss at the Malawi Institute of Education (MIE) when I worked there between 1994 and 1998. He is the one who taught me how to use a computer, an Apple Macintosh; how to do desktop publishing, and how to be an editor. Everything I learned about educational editing and publishing I learned from him. One of the exciting things for me to learn early on was seeing how to manipulate text in PageMaker (in those days) and turn it into a column the way it appears in newsprint. Just weeks before joining the editorial team at MIE I had been a Standard 7 teacher at Gunde Primary School in Ntcheu, near the border with Balaka. As a primary school teacher, chances of learning how to use a computer were next to none, then as it is today.

When I joined MIE in April 1994, Henry had just returned from Canada where he had pursued post-graduate studies in editing and publishing. Henry was a wonderful human being, and very well liked by everyone who knew him. He taught me compassion by showing me how concerned he was with my personal welfare. He once told me "Steve, we can't expect you to perform well at work when we haven't helped you sort out your personal welfare problems." In my very first lessons on how to use a computer, he had me sit down on the chair and face the screen, as he stood over my shoulder. He would then demonstrate things by having me do those things myself. His method of teaching somebody was not to just tell them by mere words, or to just do it for them, but rather to have the learner do things for themselves while he gave guidance. It is by far the most effective teaching method I have learned, one I have gone on to use myself.

It wasn’t until ten years later that the lesson Henry had taught me about how to teach would bear testimony for itself. I had returned to Malawi in February 2004 after a six-year absence to do field work for my dissertation research. I hadn’t had a chance to check my email for about a month, so when I finally found a dial-up connection in the MIE library, a line formed waiting for a turn on the terminal. It was the only Internet terminal intended for everyone, a staff of over 100. In practice, only the professionals, as the high-ranking curriculum specialists and administrators were referred to as, got an opportunity to use the Internet. It was mostly everyone with a university degree and above. The rest, known as Clerical, Technical and Support Staff (CTSs), composed mostly of everyone else who did not possess university degree, did not even attempt, except for the library staff (MIE now has high speed broadband Internet in most offices and buildings, since some two or so years ago.)

One morning in 2004, one of the CTS workers, whose ranks I had been one of during my four years there earlier in the 1990s, approached me and asked if I could help him send an email. I took him to the computer terminal, asked him to sit on the chair, and took him through a quick lesson on how to use the Internet. I explained the functions, and had him make the keystrokes and move the mouse. I overheard him later that day exclaiming how the Internet wasn’t such a mysterious thing after all; if only the bwanas would give people a chance to learn how to use it. I remembered exactly who had taught me how to teach like that, and what effect it had had on me when I was myself learning.

Henry also taught me another lesson I have found very useful to this day: start your work day by reading the newspaper and listening to the news first thing in the morning. "I don't like starting my day without knowing what is going on in the world," he once told me. And so it was that on the morning that news broke out that my children’s novel, Fleeing the War, had won first prize in the British Council’s Write a Story contest, in October 1995, it was Henry who broke the news to the MIE community.

I had bought my copy of The Nation that morning, where the news was first published, with no prior knowledge that the results of the long forgotten competition, which I had entered back in January that year, were out. I saw the story on the front page, but was too shy to go about celebrating it to everyone. I arrived at work, got into my office and sat down to begin the day’s work. I had hardly settled down on my desk when Henry bustled into the room and shouted “Congratulations, Steve! How come you just came in quietly without saying anything, as if nothing of this magnitude had happened at all?” We laughed heartily, and he went about announcing the happy news to everyone at work.

Fleeing the War would later be published into a children’s book, and three copies sent to each and every primary school and a few secondary schools in Malawi. On visiting a number of Teacher Development Centres (TDCs) in 2004, I was pleasantly surprised on a few occasions to introduce myself to staff, and be told, “Oh, we have your children’s book here!” Whereupon they would lead me inside and take me to the library corner, where a copy of the book was on display.

Henry had learned before I joined MIE that I had a passion for writing, and that I was freelancing for a few Malawian newspapers. He offered his encouragement by not merely congratulating me, but also reading my stories and engaging me in discussions about them. He was an avid reader and writer himself, frequently writing lengthy analytical features for Malawian newspapers. He was convinced that as editors of educational materials, we had a lot in common with, and to learn from, journalism. He was an intellectual in his own right, very well informed about Malawi's movers and shakers, and about world affairs.

It was through Henry Malunda that I learned of the 1994 release of the much-awaited book by Dr. John Lwanda, Kamuzu Banda of Malawi: A Study in Promise, Power and Paralysis (1993). Henry read the book in one sitting and came to work the next morning profusely recommending it to everyone. He was particularly fascinated by how deeply insightful and knowledgeable Dr. Lwanda was about the inner workings of Kamuzu's dictatorship. Henry was even more impressed by how current the book was, describing how it captured the very recent Malawi Army rapid and thorough routing of Kamuzu Banda's paramilitary wing, the Malawi Young Pioneers, in Operation Bwezani. I knew I had to buy my own copy and read the book, one of the earliest intellectual manifestations that Malawi was undergoing profound political change.

When the Malawi Institute of Journalism (MIJ) became fully operational in the late 1990s, Dr. James Ng'ombe hired Henry away from MIE, where Henry excelled at training Malawi's new crop of journalists in the post-dictatorship era. I corresponded with him for a while, during which time he forwarded me news bulletins from MIJ Radio, which I happily forwarded onto to other listservs.

Some two years ago the MIE administration convinced Henry to return to MIE to his old post as Editor, which he happily did. I last spoke with him less than a year ago when a schools project I was working on needed professional advice on educational publishing copyright. And there was no better-qualified person to answer that question than Henry.

I am deeply saddened to hear about his death, but I am content to know that he is in a better place now. Several years ago as we communicated back and forth when he was at MIJ, I wrote him an email in which I thanked him for everything he had done for me from the moment I joined MIE to the time I left. He is one of the people who have played a very important role in my life, giving me a leg up on my professional and intellectual itinerary, allowing me to embark on the few modest accomplishments I can lay claim to.

During my time at MIE, he led the editorial unit and developed it into an operation with state of the art equipment and cutting edge desktop publishing capacity. He led the team in developing and designing a style manual for educational editing and publishing in Malawi. Under the managerial aegis of Wise Chauluka, then publishing manager and assistant director at MIE, Henry oversaw the editing, designing, typesetting and publishing of the entire stock of textbooks that Malawian schools, teachers and pupils used up until PCAR three years ago. He probably continued from where he had left off when he returned to MIE two years ago, as ably as he probably did when he trained a whole generation of Malawian journalists during the years he spent at MIJ. He touched those who knew him, and left Malawi a much better place than he had found it.

On the 50-50 Campaign: Letter to Malawian Voters

Dear Malawian Voters,

On the surface, Malawian women appear poised to transform the political landscape on Tuesday, May 19th, when Malawians go to the polls to vote in presidential and parliamentary elections. For the first time in our country’s 45-year history, a woman is running for president, and two women are running mates on presidential tickets, one of them on the incumbent’s ticket. The Ministry of Women and Child Development and the NGO-Gender Network have launched what is being termed the 50-50 campaign, aiming to achieve a 50 percent women’s representation in the legislative house. But on closer examination of the numbers of women standing in the constituencies and the districts, the transformation may not have that much of an impact. In fact, there are far too few women running to even achieve a 25 percent representation.

In this post I want to explore what the numbers look like and what that tells us about the place of women in the Malawian body politic. I also want to discuss how careful, uncaricatured, endogenous forms of feminist scholarship and gender activism have been central to the effort to rethink dead-end paradigms to problems of war, conflict, structural and physical violence in the world. I will conclude by repeating what most scholars know already about why including more women in positions of influence and governance is good for our endogenous forms of home-grown democracy. Even more important, it is a potential catalyst for new ways of thinking about the societal problems that have beset Malawi and other societies in other parts of the world.

Though not always interchangeable or synonymous with one another, the concepts of gender studies and feminist scholarship are not without heated controversies, and I am using them here with that caveat in mind. I have chosen to use these terms in the broad sense that African feminists and gender researchers use them, recognizing the endogenous contexts of knowledge production that have enriched the best practices in those fields. Feminist scholarship and gender research have produced vast amounts of indigenous and pragmatic knowledge through decades, if not centuries, of women’s expertise, experiences, perspectives and contributions. Rejecting these disciplines out of an idiosyncratic distaste over caricatured and politicized distortions is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As emancipatory projects that promote inclusive and endogenous democratic practices, feminism and gender research transcend rigid paradigms that have excluded entire groups of people and their knowledge systems. They offer dynamic perspectives into uMunthu as a peace epistemology and as an indispensable vehicle of the African Renaissance project. This is the premise from which I am examining the 50-50 campaign in Malawi and what the numbers look like on the African landscape and beyond.

A brief overview of the numbers of the candidates standing in selected parts of the country paints not so rosy a picture for the chances of women contesting in this year’s elections. A total of 1180 candidates are standing in the May 19 elections across the country, and out of these only 237 are women, based on calculations using the figures provided by the Malawi Electoral Commission. This represents 20 percent of the candidate pool. Out of the country’s 193 constituencies, 144 of them have women candidates. This means 49 constituencies have no women candidates standing, while there is no single constituency that does not have a male candidate.

In the North, there are 228 candidates running, and of these 47 are women, representing 20.6 percent of the candidate pool. For the north, 26 out of 33 constituencies have women candidates. In the Central region 80 women are running out of 399 candidates, making the female representation there 20 percent. The Central region has 73 constituencies, of which only 48 have women candidates. In the south, there are 557 candidates total, and 110 of them are women. Women are represented in 70 constituencies, out of 87 in the southern region. Women in the south make up 19.7 percent of the total number of candidates standing in the elections.

Lilongwe district, where the capital city of Malawi is located, has 22 constituencies, but women are standing in only in 13 constituencies. The district has 115 candidates, the largest in the country, and only 20 of them are women. Blantyre has 13 constituencies, and women are standing in all but one of them. Yet out of the 108 candidates standing in Blantyre, women number up to 19 only.

Only 6 districts out of 28 have managed to field women in each of their constituencies. These are Karonga, Likoma Island (which has only one constituency), Chiradzulu, Mwanza, Nsanje and Neno. Likoma Islands, with its one constituency, has the best parliamentary candidate gender equity in the country. Out of its 6 candidates, half of them are women, making it 50-50. Dedza has the worst gender disparity, with only half of its constituencies managing to field women candidates. Lilongwe comes next, with no women standing in 9 of its 22 constituencies. Mzimba has 92 candidates standing, and only 14 of them are women. These percentages are based on calculations using figures available on the website of the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC).

As of the last elections of May 2004, there were 25 women parliamentarians in Malawi, out of 193. This figure represented 12.95 percent, according to the Inter Parliamentary Union website

The global leader in female representation in parliament is Rwanda, where out of 80 members, 45 are women, representing 56.25 percent. Sweden follows Rwanda at 47 percent, followed by South Africa, which achieved 45 percent from 34 percent as of the April 22, 2009 elections, becoming third in the world.

In the run up to Tuesday’s elections, the Malawi Ministry of Women and Child Development has teamed up with the NGO-Gender Network to provide financial and material support to women candidates. Women candidates can be heard on the non-partisan, privately-owned Zodiak Broadcasting Station (ZBS), in an hour-long program in which the candidates introduce themselves, the constituencies they are representing, their party or independent affiliation, their symbol, and their campaign platform. There are several male activists who are in support of the effort, and their exhortations can also be heard in the campaign commercials. The central point being made is how decades of male-dominated governance and legislation making have not moved the country forward, and how it is time for voters to turn to women. Voters are being told that women stay in their constituencies as opposed to male parliamentarians who once elected move out to the cities, and in some cases divorce their first wives to marry new wives, or cohabit with mistresses. While male politicians are easily corruptible and care more about their economic welfare, women politicians care more about everyone else, roles they play as mothers in everyday life, so go the campaign messages. What is supposed to be a constituent development fund (CDF) meant to be utilized by the people ends up being diverted for personal projects, with no one being involved in deciding how the money should be used for the benefit of the constituency.

But one also hears indistinguishable patterns of paternalism, with some both male and female candidates promising to provide development to their constituencies by bringing hospitals, schools, electricity, pipe water, among other promises. A few candidates are careful not to promise too much, pointing out that no one person can bring development as if it is a commodity one picks from one place (government) and delivers it to the rural areas. Rather, they are promising to collaborate with the people, consult widely, and work with the government and civil society to tap into available resources.

In a recent radio program on Zodiak, representatives from the 50-50 campaign, the Malawi Electoral Commission, civil society and the media sought to provide a rationale for why it is necessary to consider women candidates over their male counterparts. The one journalist on the panel explained that the campaign was decided upon after observations of how other countries were making progress in their development efforts after voting for more women candidates into parliament. He said Malawi was trying to learn from these other countries, and was also a signatory to regional, continental and global treaties dealing with various protocols, including gender equality. Contrast this rationale with a Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA) panel also broadcast on Zodiak, in which a member of this regional observer group flown into the country to monitor the elections praised Malawi for setting an example for other countries in Africa and elsewhere to follow. Whether out of modesty or an apparent inferiority complex, Malawians are not shy about their self-identifying poise to learn from other countries in Africa and elsewhere. It is rare to see a Malawian perspective being championed in the Malawian media or in the general social milieu as one others can learn from. It is always about what Malawi should be learning from everyone else on the planet. While corruption, sex scandals, inequality, classicism and other forms of social malfunction happen routinely in Europe, America and other parts of the global North, Africa is still treated as aberrant and unusual both inside the continent an outside.

On its own, the presence of more women in positions of leadership would not necessarily lead to any transformative changes in society. However that point is usually made to argue against efforts to increase women’s representation in positions of influence. A recent debate in the online Malawian newspaper Nyasatimes, between two University of Malawi lecturers, Pascal Mwale and Jessie Kabwila-Kapasula revealed how fractious and acrimonious these debates get when feminist ideology and women taking up leadership positions come up. And this is the case not only in Malawi but everywhere in the world. Mwale, head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College, argued that it was “not only opportunistic and manipulative to garner support for oneself and one’s political party from a gender grouping, either male or female, but it is also abusive and exploitative of such a grouping.” In response to Mwale, Kabwila-Kapasula, a feminist theorist and comparative literature scholar-activist in the Department of English also at Chancellor College pointed out that resistance to gender organizing was a measure whose effect was to maintain the patriarchical status quo. She was also quick to add that the women candidates on the presidential and vice presidential tickets in Malawi’s forthcoming elections were not advancing any feminist transformative agenda; rather they were there as agents of patriarchy, co-opted to create a façade of change without promoting any actual change.

On his part, Mwale was careful to offer a sensitive analysis of patriarchy in Malawian society and how it shortchanges women and impedes their progress. What he was rejecting was, in his words, a “counter-progressive” adoption of foreign ideologies with the “assumption of opposition and division between women and men in the equality thesis . . .” Kabwila-Kapasula pointed out that she was not concerned about political parties, which were already patriarchal. “Purporting to be gender blind or neutral is effectively supporting the status quo, which is patriarchy,” she argued.

The caution against African activists adopting foreign ideologies of feminism has been a subject of much scholarly debate in journals and dissertations, but very little has been offered in terms of how authentic feminist scholarship opens up new vistas for rethinking approaches to problems of conflict and violence. It is especially in peace research and peace studies where feminist thought has laid bare the relationship between sexist masculinity and neoliberal militarization (Betty Reardon, (2008). The world average is 18.4 percent, and for Sub-Saharan Africa it is 18.5. Nordic countries have the highest female parliamentary representation, at 41.4 percent, and the Arab region comes last, at 9.1 percent. The United States has 435 members of congress, and of these women make up 73, representing 16.78 percent. The US senate has 100 members, and only 15 are women, at 15 percent (the outcome of the current Minnesota senatorial legal wrangle won’t change this). Sexism and the War System,1985). This understanding and its emancipatory message of resistance and solidarity should not be lost in the turf battles for the control of the trajectory of feminist ideology. As important as is the critique against the parroting of foreign ideologies to impose them on African contexts, the second-class treatment that women receive is neither an exclusively African nor Euro-American problem; it is a problem in every society. The problems of militarism and war are the preserve of neither African nor Euro-American nations; they are problems in every society.

As Kabwila-Kapasula has argued, the resistance to feminist analyses of gender has the effect of perpetuating the male-dominated status quo, and rarely do critics of feminist theory and gender activism demonstrate a requisite sensitivity to the ethical implications of their reactionary positions. Not only is it sensible to construct structures that dismantle masculinity and its tendency for violence, it is also sensible to promote inclusion for under-represented groups in governance systems. In that regard, it is crucial for more men to champion that effort. It is true that many women leaders are as militant and warmongering as their male counterparts, but it is also true that a significant number of women offer a different way of approaching development, preventing war and resolving conflict (Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, Women Building Peace, 2007; Aili Mari Trip et. al, African Women’s Movements, 2009). These women’s perspectives matter even more today when violence, both structural as well as physical, has seen a resurgence in the conduct of world affairs. In her recent research on customary land rights in Malawi, the Malawian gender activist Olivia Mchaju Liwewe has pointed out how it is not enough to know that much of Malawian society is matrilineal, when modern legal and judiciary systems treat African traditions as outdated systems impacting women negatively (Liwewe, A History of Diminishing Returns, 2008).

Thus while electing more women into office justifies its own significance as an endogenous democratic principle, it will be useful to use that democratic principle to allow more diverse views and perspectives in how to solve societal problems and advance new knowledges for innovation and transformation. In Malawi this coming Tuesday, the figures do not offer much hope for a 50-50 representation in parliament, but they certainly offer hope for an improvement from the last election five years ago. As more men make the decision to take seriously the importance of feminist approaches to problems of gender violence and a conflict-ridden society, we should also be putting in place curriculum reforms in the teacher education and school systems to make the transformation praxical, generative and self-sustaining.

A Guest is Like Morning Dew

[Note: Following the “Last Lecture” given by the late Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch, the Associated Students of Michigan State University (ASMSU), the university’s student government, has invited Michigan State University professors to come up with their own versions of a hypothetical “last lecture.” My lecture, presented below, is the third and last in the series for the 2008-2009 academic year].

A Guest is Like Morning Dew: Teaching and Searching for uMunthu-Peace in an Asymmetrical World

Steve Sharra, Ph.D.
ASMSU “Last Lecture” Series
Wharton Center, Pasant Theatre
April 8, 2009


The title of my talk tonight comes from a Malawian proverb, in my first language, Chichewa. The Chichewa version reads as follows: Mlendo ndi mame, sachedwa kukamuka. The literal translation is that a guest is like morning dew, it doesn’t stay for long. There are two possible, inter-related meanings in this proverb. On the one hand, the proverb offers reassurance to a host that the guest they have welcomed into their house will not stay too long. There is no need therefore to worry about the inconvenience. On the other hand, the proverb is offering advice to the host on what can best be described through the use of the English proverb make hay while the sun shines. The guest is not going to stay too long; enjoy whatever time you have with them. My first language, Chichewa, has lots of proverbs offering all kinds of advice on how hosts relate with guests, and how to live life in general. Another proverb concerning guests and hosts goes: It is the guest who brings a sharp tweezers. As with most Chichewa proverbs, there is a story behind this proverb, as with the one in the title. In this particular story, a lonely traveler was passing through a village. It grew dark, and one family in the village persuaded the guest to stay for the night and continue on with the journey when it was bright and safe the next morning. During the night, one of the children in the house woke up in the middle of the night. He was crying from the pain of a thorn which had lodged itself in the child’s foot. The parents tried using a tweezers, but it was too blunt to remove the thorn. The guest woke up and brought out a tweezers. Out came the thorn.

My purpose in referring to these proverbs about guests and hosts is twofold. First, I want to reflect on what I have learned about myself and my country from having lived away for as long as I have. Malawians pride themselves on learning from other societies; a truism that originates at the level of the individual human being and the beginnings of a human society. Secondly, I want to make a suggestion about how to put educational acquisition and intellectual pursuits to uses that promote our livelihood and that of others. As in most Southern African cultures, one is human because of other human beings, a concept captured in the meaning of the term ‘uMunthu’, in the title of my talk.

The concept of uMunthu has come to stand for probably the most important, as well as the most intriguing aspect of what I have learned as a guest in this country. Most important because uMunthu is the very definition that constitutes us as human beings, bound to one another in time and space. Most intriguing because I did not begin to take seriously the importance of the term until the first time that I returned to Malawi in 2004, after being away for six years. Since then, I have come to view the world through the lenses of that concept, and to hope that teaching and learning could promote greater harmony, peace and justice in the world. I have also come to appreciate the caution from curriculum theorists that any educational curriculum and pedagogical practices are occupied by agendas that are not always explicit, nor disinterested. Faculty and students can therefore use this caution and reflect on the hidden curricula that might be covertly teaching things that do not necessarily promote a better world.

The beginnings of my journey lie in my having been born and raised in Malawi, where the concept of uMunthu-peace is at once a proud heritage and a discarded relic. I will, in the process of this talk, discuss Malawi in the context of its recent history and contemporary concerns, my failed ambitions to become a Catholic priest, and how I found redemption by becoming a teacher instead. I will also discuss my teaching for peace here at Michigan State University (MSU), and how it fits in with the larger quest for peace and justice in the MSU community, in the Greater Lansing area, and globally. I will finish with an exhortation about how the promotion of peace and justice ought to lie at the heart of our academic and intellectual pursuits, across the disciplines.

For a country that is as small as the American state of Pennsylvania, the saying that no news is good news has been both true and untrue. The size of the country, in comparison with its neighbors in Southern Africa, has been one explanation offered for why very few people outside Africa have ever heard of the country. The journalistic quip that if it bleeds, it leads, has been relatively accurate for Malawi, a country that like its neighbors in the south-eastern part of Africa, with the exception of Mozambique, has prided itself on long-lasting peaceful relations with other countries. Tourist guidebooks describe Malawi as the ‘Warm Heart of Africa’ whose people are always smiling and always eager to offer hospitality to guests from abroad. In my first language Chichewa, the language spoken by at least 80 percent of Malawians and smaller percentages of citizens of our neighboring countries, the term that most closely resembles the word “stranger” is the word we use for “guest”: “mlendo.” While the English language uses words such as guest, visitor or stranger to make distinctions about people we come into contact with, and differentiate between levels of familiarity and social distance, in Chichewa “mlendo” is the only term we have. And “mlendo” is a guest, with no suggestions as to whether the person is a stranger to be afraid of, or a guest to welcome into one’s fold.

Like all societies and nations, Malawians also view themselves through categories of national narratives and myths. Psychologists call these narratives “archetypes,” as the peace educationist Carl Mirra reminds us in his recent book on US Foreign Policy and peace education. What I have just described in the preceding thoughts is one example of a Malawian archetype, in which most Malawians like to hold on to a notion of brotherly and sisterly love; a peace-loving nation. So is the notion that Malawi is the “Warm Heart of Africa.” As with all archetypes of national character and myths, they contain some truths about a society, but they also foster some falsehoods. Some ugly truths are sometimes buried inside the stark reality, while others are repeated and internalized. So Malawi remains an unknown, obscure corner of the world where, in the eyes of the non-specialist Westerner nothing much happens. Of late, however, we, or rather our orphaned infants, have attracted the unlikely attention of celebrities, with pop star Madonna adopting one David Banda, and now attempting to adopt Chifundo James. The decision of a Malawian judge, Justice Esmie Chombo, to deny the adoption according to Malawian law, has torn Malawians into bitter, fractious emotions that betray a frightening amount of self-loathing, if not pessimism. We have also had a Malawian woman, Marie Da Silva, celebrated as one of ten CNN Heros for 2008, a development many Malawians felt proud of. On the political scene, our current president has been featured in the pages of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Financial Times for defying the advice of the IMF and the World Bank to offer farm input subsidies to Malawian farmers. That initiative has transformed Malawi from a food-importer into a food-exporter in under four years. As pointed out by the Malawian intellectual and development economist Thandika Mkandawire, the Economist Intelligence Unit has projected a more than 8 percent economic growth for Malawi for 2009, the second highest in the world after Qatar’s 14 percent.

The origins of Malawian nationhood were shaped under such obscurity, when the country, not known for mineral wealth, was mostly considered to be a labor reservoir for the gold, diamond and copper mines of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia. The first nationalist stirrings were also carried out under the same obscurity, when the activist pastor John Chilembwe led nonviolent protests in the early 1900s, culminating into an armed uprising that took his life in 1915. Barely three months into Malawi’s independence from the British in 1964, Malawi’s first president, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, chose to listen to warnings from his British advisers that his young Malawian ministers were plotting against him. Dr. Banda parted company with many members of his newly created cabinet, most of whom chose to resign in solidarity with their dissenting colleagues. Dr. Banda set about consolidating his power, which saw him rule Malawi for 30 years. The human rights group Article 19 summed up the political atmosphere in Malawi for those 30 years in its report, published toward the end of the Banda era, entitled, Where Silence Rules.

Dr. Banda’s grip on Malawi started observably to loosen at the turn of the 80s entering into the 90s. That was also the time that looking back, I see my social consciousness beginning to develop. My earliest memory of a developing political and social consciousness has become part of my autobiographical narrative. It is a lengthy tale starting with an emerging conscientization through Jamaican reggae music, walking through the years I spent as a seminarian, up to the time when I became a school teacher, at the turn of the 1990s. The late reggae star Bob Marley had a lot to do with it.

I bought my first ever cassette tape using the meager savings I kept from my school pocket money. I was in Standard 8 (8^th grade) at the time, and aged 14. That cassette tape was Bob Marley’s 1983 album, “Confrontation,” released two years after his death. It was in particular Marley’s song “Trench Town” and its lyrics about the social class struggles of poor Jamaicans that resonated with me.

The lyrics represented something I could recognize and identify with in my daily life. Although both my parents had tertiary education and were both working, my mother as a school teacher and my father as a police officer, we did not belong to the class of the well-to-do in Malawi. We always had enough food and decent clothes, but we lacked amenities that some had access to in our neighborhood. For many years the only electricity we knew of was from the night lights at the main offices where my father worked, from the bigger and better houses of senior ranked police officers nearby, and from school. There was a water faucet in the bathroom, but water was available only at night. During the day, we lined up outside the house of another police officer, slightly more senior in rank, to fetch water.

In 1985 I entered Nankhunda Seminary, still aged 14, having completed 2 years at Thondwe preparatory seminary, where I went to at age 11. It was my father’s incorrigible wish for me to become a Catholic priest. Soon it became my personal goal. I sauntered through my adolescent years praying for the strength and commitment necessary to make a difficult life-long decision. I was convinced I would succeed. Three years later, I was asked to leave the seminary.

The events surrounding my departure from the seminary have remained as vivid in my imagination as if they happened only last week. On the morning of July 17, 1988, the last day of my Form Three (11th grade), the then rector (principal) of Nankhunda Seminary, Fr. Dr. Vincent Nzolima (RIP), called for me to go and see him in his office. I took it to be a routine, casual call. I imagined that he would probably mention to me things I needed to know for the coming year. I was one of three House Captains, a leadership position I was going to carry with me into Form Four. I was also chairperson of the Lwanga Parish students at Nankhunda; captain of the school’s chess club, and also of the volleyball team. Thus nothing prepared me for the news Fr. Dr. Nzolima, a tall, slim, gentle-mannered Malawian priest delivered to me that cold mountain morning.

The seminary staff had decided that I not return for my last year of secondary school, he said to me, looking down at some papers on his desk. “The staff feel that you seem better suited to the other side of the world,” he stated in his measured, slow voice. It had become a running joke among seminarians at Nankhunda to try and parrot Fr. Dr. Nzolima’s slow, dragged speech pattern.

This news was most unexpected, and for a moment I felt as though I was floating in the air of his lowly-lit, claustrophobic office. It wasn’t until I was on the road, walking down the 6-mile descent from the western tip of Zomba Plateau, three thousand feet above sea level, that it hit me. Could this really be the end of the road for my life as a seminarian? How was I going to break the news to my parents? I did not want to believe it. My friends sensed what had happened. Nobody asked a question. I walked the rest of the way in silence, down the winding path, crossing the cold glistening streams and breathing in the fresh air of Zomba Mountain. It seemed as if even the majestic beauty of the mountain and its green overgrowth had conspired with the seminary in terminating my clerical ambitions.

The priests at Nankhunda did not like to discuss the issue of ‘weeding.’ Every time it came up, they would say it was really God who saw into everyone’s heart, and who knew whether one was going to become a priest or not. All that the priests were doing, they liked to say, was carrying out God’s pre-arranged order. It was all captured in a biblical verse, “Many are called, few are chosen,” (Matthew 22: 14). And we reflected this in the song we sang every night in the chapel before retiring to our dormitories:

Yesu ati munda wakula (Jesus says the field is huge)

Antchito aperewera (The workers are few)

Ntchito yanga ili yambiri (My work is heavy)

Adzandithandize ndani? (Who will join in and help me)?

Eh Ambuye, ndife ananu (Oh Lord, we are your children)

Tiwopa, tilibe nzeru (We fear, we have no wisdom)

Koma inu mukatifuna (But if you need us Lord)

Tidzavomera (We shall respond)

The news of the expulsion devastated my parents. My father had worked hard to get me into the Catholic seminary from when I was 11 years old, and both he and my mother were hoping I would be the first priest in all of the extended Sharra clan. Now that hope had been shattered. Not only that, but I also needed to find another secondary school for my last year. There were very few secondary schools in Malawi at the time, and the competition was always stiff. By the beginning of the next school year I had been allowed to finish my last year of secondary school at Police Secondary School, a private school built in the early 80s to accommodate children of police officers.

I had been at Police Secondary School for less than a week when I noticed an intriguing trend. Everyone was supposed to bring their own plate, fork, spoon, and cup, as the school did not provide these. That very first week my cup and plate went missing from my dorm room. I feared they had been stolen, and reported the matter to the dining hall prefect. He explained that there was a system rampant on campus in which people indiscriminately used other people’s property, without necessarily stealing them. He reassured me that my cup and plate would soon turn up somewhere. Meanwhile, he advised, “feel free to pick up and use whatever cup and plate you found lying around.”

On Friday that week I wrote an article entitled ‘Plate communism.’ I questioned the practice of taking and using other people’s utensils without their permission, and pointed out that it was an inconvenience to some. That evening somebody whispered to me that my commentary had angered some prominent senior students, who queried what right a new comer like me had in questioning established practice at the school. They threatened to deal with me. I was advised to quietly leave campus and come back in the evening, when tempers would have perhaps subsided. Early Saturday morning I left campus and went home. I spent the rest of the day at home, and returned to campus after dark.

I reported the threat to a friend, Andrews Nchesi, who went and told the English teacher who was also our drama director, Mr. Lot Dzonzi. On Monday morning at assembly, Mr. Dzonzi condemned the threat, and advised everyone that the best way to deal with ideas one found disagreeable on the Writers’ Corner was to respond in writing as well. He said the purpose of the Writers’ Corner was for people to express their ideas and engage in constructive debate. I continued writing and posting on the board, but I steered clear of openly controversial issues.

I got to know Mr. Lot Dzonzi a lot better through the drama group, and felt much inspired by him. Towards the end of the first term, he approached me and another student, Vitumbiko Kamanga, and asked us to begin reading and studying Sizwe Bansi is Dead, a two-character play by the renowned South African playwright and anti-apartheid activist, Athol Fugard (1974), for a performance later in the school year (the performance did not materialize). That year, for the first time in the history of Police Secondary School, we came third in the national schools drama festivals. The following year, after I had finished Form Four and left, Vitu wrote a play that won Police Secondary School first prize in a national HIV/AIDS playwriting competition.

One afternoon after finishing my secondary school, Mr. Dzonzi suggested that we spend one afternoon visiting the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College campus, where he would introduce me to a few important Malawian writers whom he said I needed to be in touch with. They were his former college classmates, now teaching at Chancellor College.

One Sunday evening, I heard Professor Steve Chimombo, one of Malawi’s most prolific creative writers, a teacher of writing and a long time publisher of Malawi’s only arts magazine, WASI, being interviewed on the government-run national radio station. It was the only radio station in Malawi at the time, named the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC). He was being interviewed on a weekly literary program called ‘Writers’ Corner.’

The next morning I walked to Chancellor College. I walked along the long, concrete corridor, checking the name on each door as I passed by. I located Professor Chimombo’s door, which was half ajar, and knocked. As I entered the office, my eyes landed on a face that had become familiar around Zomba Municipality. Professor Chimombo kept his hair long, and nursed a goatee, both of which made him look a lot like Wole Soyinka the Nigerian playwright and critic, the first black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1987.

Professor Chimombo welcomed me and told me to take a seat. I introduced myself, and explained the reason I had come to his office. I asked him how I could join the Chancellor College Writers’ Workshop that he had talked about in the radio interview. He talked about his trip to Ghana, where they had established the Pan African Writers Association. He told me that the Chancellor College Writers’ Workshop was being coordinated by his colleague Dr. Anthony Nazombe. He encouraged me to go and see Dr. Nazombe, whose office was not too far from his.

Dr. Nazombe always wore a bright, pleasant and cheerful smile. He was of medium height and build, slightly bald, and clean shaven. Upon explaining to him why I had come to his office, Dr. Nazombe encouraged me to join and become a member of the Writers’ Workshop. Before I left his office I purchased a copy of his just released anthology of Malawian poetry, The Haunting Wind: New Poetry from Malawi (1990). Another Malawi, one I had not encountered before, opened up before my eyes. I read poetry that spoke about my country in a way I had not known before. In those poems I heard the voices of Malawians who had been forced into exile because political dissent had been outlawed.

Reading the poetry, I heard the voices of Malawians murdered because they had raised questions about the country’s leadership. I saw images of Malawians, materially impoverished, yet forced to praise the country’s leadership for the ‘independence’ the life president had brought us from British colonialism. I opened my eyes to the Malawi for which heroic individuals had shed blood, to end a racist dependency on a foreign ideology and regain local control of the change process, only to end up with another, equally morbid dependency.

The poems selected by Dr. Anthony Nazombe in his edited anthology took my incipient consciousness a step further into the direction that Bob Marley’s music and Jamaican reggae had already started. In the poetry, which we curiously never read in secondary school (though we had a progressive English teacher, the curriculum was uniform across the country), I uncovered a form of forbidden knowledge that wasn’t talked about in grown-up circles. On the one hand were the issues and topics buried in the cryptic verses of Malawian poetry, and on the other were the social conditions in which I lived, and in which my family and many other Malawians interacted. While some of the poems awakened my awareness about a hidden side of my country, others opened my eyes to equally repressive, exploitative conditions of inequality and injustice prevalent in other parts of the world. A poem Anthony Nazombe himself took aim at the world system in which the poor give to the rich:

The reverse of the Robin Hood saga

Is solemnly enacted year in year out

On the crown of this hill

As our revered dons steal from the poor

To give to the rich in the name of civilization,

Full economic costs and Government cuts.

Another poem, by Shemu Joyah, put into words and painted a picture of a world that could as well have been taken straight out of the 7 o’clock evening news bulletin from the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, or any American TV channel in 2009:

Early morning:

A poisonous gas

As repugnant as rotten eggs,

Will blow from the east, followed

By a shower of bullets from the West

Gradually intensifying in the afternoon.

Bombs and grenades will fall

In places of high population.

Late afternoon:

Jet-fighters and bombers

Will raid many areas avoiding those

Previously attacked to save ammunition.

Twilight will be disturbed by troopers

Parachuting from a thousand planes

To put final touches to all survivors.

At dusk a fanfare will mark

The end of a good day’s work.

Further outlook:

Similar weather,

with little changes on mountain tops

And in the deserts.

I found Shemu Joyah’s poetry gripping in its dark, ominous view of the world, which considered violence to be a facet of life not just in Malawi but elsewhere around the world. For many years I read and reread his conversation with an imaginary blind child:

Even in your immensely dark world

Where day and night merge into one pulse of time

You’ll experience the bright world without.

Do not mind the light you miss

For it is dimmer than you think

Only know that you are a homosapiens

. . .

Oh blind child

Don’t lament your sight

Only touch my face and feel it:

That is the face of a man tortured by his eyes.

In December 1989 I entered Lilongwe Teachers’ College where I was to spend four years, on and off-campus, training as a primary school teacher. An event that occurred just before we finished our program and graduated in September 1993 was evidence of the seismic political changes Malawi was undergoing. A rumor spread quickly around campus alleging that the Ministry of Education had been diverting some of the money we were supposed to receive as part of our stipends. The rumor alleged that in the contract documents the Malawi government had signed with the World Bank, which provided the loan for our teacher education program, our stipends were much higher. Dumba, who had been an obscure member of our student writers’ group, emerged as the student leader for the agitation that followed these rumors. We staged demonstrations and refused to go to class. We chanted songs about the money that had been stolen from us by the government. We put up placards denouncing the administrators of the program as thieves. Adding fuel to our actions was a national referendum held the previous year, 1992, in which the majority of Malawians had voted to end three decades of single party rule and adopt multiparty democracy. These were exciting times in Malawi. This was the first time since independence in 1964 that Malawians were able to demonstrate, and hold the government and the leadership to account for their actions. It was also the first time that the media could report on such issues, the number of newspapers having blossomed from the one government-run newspaper to well over twenty newspapers in a space of twelve months.

Today, Malawians have differing views about what life was like during Dr. Banda’s thirty-year rule. Some Malawians thrived, and they have fond memories of Dr. Banda and his rule. Many younger Malawians have come of age in the post-Banda era, and not having had experienced one-party rule, their knowledge is based on what they read, and what their elders tell them. Other Malawians suffered from the brutality of a regime whose supporters sometimes took matters into their own hands and inflicted on other Malawians fates that even Dr. Banda himself was shocked upon hearing about them after his presidency. The multi-party governments that have ruled Malawi since the end of the one-party era in 1994 have chosen not to institute any form of truth commission to investigate the abuses of that time. As a result narratives of what actually happened are subjected to speculative talk and idiosyncratic exaggerations that go either way. The worsening economic plight of many people in Malawi and the Southern African region since the early 1990s also conjures up its own explanations. To some Malawians, nostalgia comes from the economic and political stability of the one-party era, as well as its low levels of crime, hospitals that were staffed and had medicines, and schools that had teachers and enough supplies. Much of Southern Africa has experienced a substantial decline in the socio-economic status of the people, much of it stemming from a combination of mismanagement as well as the World Bank’s and the IMF’s neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Policies. For some Malawians the easy distinction is between the comforts of the one-party state versus the decline experienced after the introduction of multipartyism. For others it is between the oppression experienced then, and the social and political freedoms opened up by the change.

For me, the sustained study of what it means to be Malawian and African in the world has been central to my intellectual pursuits. Much of my reflection and analysis in the past eleven years has been enabled by the perspective of a guest in a foreign land, looking at my country and continent from outside. That perspective has given me a vantage point from which to pursue an inquiry into questions that have come to shape my worldview. It is a worldview shaped by the Malawi I grew up in, with all its contradictions about at once the humanity of uMunthu and a brutal dictatorship; my failed priestly ambitions, and my having become a teacher. It is a perspective that continues to shape the purposes and aims that I use to approach the teaching and the searching for the type of peace I have called “uMunthu-peace” in the title of this talk.

This is the fourth semester in which I am teaching an Intergrative Arts & Humanities (IAH) course whose broader theme is Moral Issues in the Arts & Humanities. The Department of Philosophy has designated this course as a Peace and Justice Studies course, and I have premised it on the theme of Rethinking Conflict and Violence. In the course I throw out a challenge to students, who come from various majors across the MSU campus. I ask students to reflect on the ways in which their disciplines, however esoteric and seemingly distant from social and political concerns of society, have the potential to promote peace both at the local as well as the global level. I always expect that the majority of students choose the course first because it falls within a set of MSU’s general graduation requirements, and second because it fits in which their overall schedule for the semester. Occasionally, a handful of students take the course because they are curious to know more about peace issues, or because they already have a personal passion for better understanding and promoting peace and justice in their communities.

The course introduces students to some of the key concepts in the study of peace and justice, which I interpret as being familiar with the types of peace defined in the literature. These concepts include positive peace, negative peace and holistic peace. Conventionally, what most people regard as “peace” is what peace scholars call “negative peace.” This is a peace obtained in the absence of overt violence or war. However it is possible to have this kind of peace, while buried inside the structures and institutions of our societies are insidious types of violence and injustice not easily observable. While negative peace is necessary as a starting point, it does not guarantee long lasting peace in and of itself. It requires positive peace, defined as the building and enactment of social structures that affirm people’s humanity and enhance the worth and value of life. Holistic peace takes this task further to connect individuals to their inner being and that of others. Holistic peace views the whole earth as an inter-related part of our community, as Aldo Leopold observed back in 1949. The need to care for the earth and consider it part of the community has been given impetus by recent high profile attention to it, including the recognition given by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to the Kenyan convervationist, Dr. Wangari Maathai, and more recently, former vice president Al Gore.

In some African, Asian and Native American cultures, nature takes on a special role in society because it is part of the living community that sustains life and also connects people with their ancestors. Holistic peace enables a view of nature that merges modern scientific knowledge with traditional forms of knowledge that mutually advance one another, while preserving the earth and its life-sustaining qualities.

It is from the definitions of who we are as human beings, and the responsibilities that those definitions bequeath to us, that the type of peace that I call uMunthu-peace emerges. This is a concept I began developing as part of my doctoral dissertation research, in 2004, but its promotion has had its fare share of celebrity promotion. The most prominent proponent of uMunthu has been the former Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, who reflected in his 1999 memoirs on the role that the concept played in the formulation of South African’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The TRC process in South Africa was not perfect, and it is sometimes blamed for having failed to address grievances whose festering wounds have proliferated the violence that has gripped South Africa since the end of apartheid. Nevertheless, Archbishop Tutu has argued that forgiveness was a necessary part of the process to move on after the type of trauma that apartheid inflicted on South Africa and its neighbors. Tutu has also observed that as an African philosophy of how human beings define their existence, the spirit of uMunthu (uBuntu) was the reason why many African countries were able to transition from colonialism to independence without retaliatory violence against white minority regimes and settler populations. Examples include Zimbabwe, Kenya, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, and many other countries.

Students and faculty interested in the promotion of peace have been excited at the news that former Archbishop Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, will be giving the commencement address at the May 2009 graduation ceremonies. He will also be awarded an Honorary Doctorate by MSU. This gesture will be a befitting tribute to a global leader for peace who has spent a life time promoting acknowledgement, confession and forgiveness as elements of peace and justice. The gesture will also place MSU on the map of efforts to promote global peace, enhancing the profile of programs and departments, faculty and students who see peace and justice as the most important goal that the academy can contribute to. It is to these peace promotion efforts by faculty and students at MSU that I want to turn to, as I conclude this talk.

I would like to note that the struggle for peace and justice locally and globally has enjoyed a nurturing space and atmosphere here at Michigan State University and in the Lansing community. MSU is renowned for its pioneering role in the struggle against apartheid in the 70s and 80s, and also in the study of agriculture as a measure for ending hunger around the world. The Peace and Justice Studies Specialization is currently conducting a pilot study, through the work of two students, Nkechi Okeafor in Anthropology, and Becca Farnum in Interdisciplinary Humanities, to create historical and intellectual profiles of peace and justice projects and community groups in and around Lansing and Michigan.

Several student groups on campus are currently engaged in projects for the promotion of peace and justice both locally and globally. The Peace and Justice Studies Specialization has keenly followed and offered moral support for these student groups and their projects, seeing an important link between academic research and scholarship on the one hand, and social and community activism on the other. In particular I would like to mention groups such as Students for Peace and Justice, under the leadership of Jessica Jensen and Becca Farnum, 4Peace, Inc., under the leadership of Horia Djimarescu; Peace Over Prejudice under the leadership of Nada Zhody and Maweza Razzaq; Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, under the leadership of Dua Aldasouqi and Afreen Syed, and more recently, Active Peace, founded by Stefanie Kendall, a doctoral candidate in Teacher Education. Just this past week, on Tuesday March 31^st, the MSU Jewish Student Union joined hands with the group Peace Over Prejudice to organize a campus forum where three Jewish and Muslim members from the One Voice Movement described efforts by young Israelis and Palestinians who are working to promote peace between Israel and Palestine.

This coming Friday, April 10^th, a group of twelve faculty members will be finishing a year-long faculty development project known as the Teaching Commons. Through the Teaching Commons initiative we have spend the 2008/2009 academic year studying MSU’s academic goals, specifically those pertaining to the internationalization of the undergraduate curriculum and the attainment of global competencies for MSU students. The outcome of the initiative will be a series of courses whose goals aim to improve curriculum delivery and pedagogy, with a specific focus on peace and justice studies content.

In the community, we have the internationally respected Michigan Peace Team, the Peace Education Center, the Greater Lansing Network Against War and Injustice, and many other such groups all dedicated to the promotion of peace in our community and around the world. There are many more groups and individuals too numerous to mention, who dedicate their time and energy to this cause. They are all part of a legacy at MSU, and an enabling atmosphere which students can and should take advantage of, and connect their learning, across the disciplines, to the promotion of peace. It is in these efforts to promote peace and justice that we see the most important cause to which one can link their academic education and intellectual pursuits.

Were this to be my last lecture, these would be the thoughts I would wish to be remembered by: A guest whose view of the world was that of dew on a summer morning. Thank you very much for coming, and for continuing to be a part of my journey learning, teaching and searching.

Auntie Zeituni and Obama’s African Burden

I was still digesting the news of Obama’s Auntie Zeituni, living in the US illegally since 2004, when the doorbell rang. It was after 5pm on Saturday afternoon, and I wasn’t expecting anybody on a cold November day at the onset of the Michigan winter. I went to see who it was, and was greeted by a tall elderly man, in a baseball cap. “I support Obama,” he announced, “and I am here to ask you to vote for him on Tuesday. Are you registered to vote?” We talked a little bit, before I thanked him and wished him good luck in his efforts.

My mind went back to Auntie Zeituni, whom I first encountered on the pages of Obama’s first autobiography, Dreams From My Father. It struck me as quite intriguing that an auntie, a blood relation of the person widely expected to become the next president of the United States of America, was an illegal immigrant in the very country her nephew was poised to be the most powerful person. If the information was indeed leaked, as was suggested by Congressman John Conyers, chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, what specific damage to Obama was the leak supposed to inflict? That Obama was keeping an illegal immigrant? That Obama had relatives who were not ‘American’? Or that Obama was indeed not “one of us,” as had been not-so-subtly suggested during the campaign?

Obama’s presidential campaign has taught a lot of us some really important, if not paradoxical, lessons about American politics. Clearly, something has moved in the galaxy as far as race relations are concerned since the civil rights era. At the same time, clearly very little has changed inasfar as the associations many Americans make with the continent of Africa and African people. And Obama has been perceptive enough to know how to keep his distance from that continent throughout the campaign. How does one explain that paradox? Even commentators and news analysts, especially in Kenya where Obama has blood ties, have been cautious, warning that Obama is first and foremost an American, and not an African.

While Obama was movingly sanguine about Kenya and Africa in his first autobiography, Dreams From My Father, he was much less so in the second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope. But even then, he did not hesitate to inform his readers about the global face that his extended family represents. He wrote:

As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and a niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe (p. 231).

On a March 17, 2008, the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote of Obama’s global profile: “If elected, Obama would be the first genuinely 21st-century leader. The China-Indonesia-Kenya-Britain-Hawaii web mirrors a world in flux.” At the time, one would have imagined that cosmopolitan aspect of Obama’s biography to have been an attractive trait of an American presidential candidate. It clearly hasn’t been; if anything, it has been one more potential bomb waiting to explode and sink Obama’s campaign.

A few days after that column’s publication in the New York Times, which was also a few days after Obama’s much-praised speech on race in America, I sat on a plane from Johannesburg to Amsterdam. I had picked up a number of newspapers to read about Obama’s speech, and had downloaded the video of the speech whilst in the field in a remote, rural part of Malawi. The gentleman next to me introduced himself, and we got talking. I asked if he had heard of Obama’s speech, and he said he hadn’t. He hadn’t used the Internet for two weeks, he said, during which time he had been doing missionary work in rural parts of South Africa. His two teenage daughters had accompanied him on the trip to bring the Christian gospel to black South Africans and help them build a church. He also confessed that he did not vote Democrat, and therefore did not have much interest in a Democratic presidential candidate anyway.

He went on to tell me that he did not understand where all the talk about racism in the US came from; if Black Americans didn’t work hard enough to uplift themselves, they should really not blame racism for holding them down. He pointed to his daughters as evidence that there was no racism in the United States: “those two daughters of mine, they don’t know what racism is. They have friends of all races.” His words left me fearing for what was really going on in latter-day missionary endeavors in Africa. I didn’t know whether his daughters’ lack of awareness of racism was the same thing as an absence of racism in the United States, which seemed to be his conclusion. Were young Americans today less racist because racism was dying in America, or was it rather because its existence was being denied strongly enough, as it had always been, that young Americans were being shielded from its existence?

How about the arrests of the two neo-Nazi youths in Tennessee recently who had mounted a plan to steal guns and use them to massacre African American students, culminating, according to the plot, in an assassination of Obama himself? After initially dismissing the story as another insignificant episode in what was probably a one-off prank, I later learned from a National Public Radio interview that in fact there was increasing agitation amongst white supremacist groups who believe that the election of Obama would force Armageddon. His election to the presidency will be the ultimate threat to white power, said a former white supremacist during the radio interview, which will galvanize all white supremacists to act, rise up and retake the country.

In February 2007 Morris Dees, Co-Founder and Chief Trial Counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), spoke at a University of Michigan social justice forum, in Ann Arbor, about the proliferation of hate groups in the United States. He said hate groups had increased by 30 percent between 2002 and 2007. He said immigration was the biggest motivator for the proliferation. Hearing Mr. Dees describe how the SPLC uses a criminal justice approach to dealing with hate crime in the United States, it led me to wonder what that really entails. Is it possible to end hate by mere recourse to law and criminal justice? Does this approach challenge racism and bigotry, transforming people into love-filled individuals who embrace and appreciate racial, ethnic, religious and gender diversity?

I ask these questions because I do think that there’s a role for the criminal justice and corrections system, but there’s also a far greater need for long-term, transformative change beyond corrections. I am not sure that the law is enough without a personal effort to transform oneself and rid oneself of hate and bigotry. As one student told our class recently, there’s a whole family and community structure where such vices are bred and cultivated. Clearly there are many young people who indeed embrace love and an appreciation for diversity, who are also aware of the real and practical existence of racism and its consequences locally and globally. But there are also those whose belief in diversity has been more a result of the denials of the existence of racism than a true transformation and awareness.

Coming back to Aunt Zeituni, the entire question about her having been served with deportation orders four years ago speaks to the hierarchical ladder the fabrication of races has manifested. In the documentary Life and Debt about the effects of IMF’s structural adjustment policies on Third World economies, by Stephanie Black, there’s a contrast made about what it takes for an American to enter Jamaica, and what it takes for a Jamaican to enter the US. For the former, it is a mere driver’s license at the port of entry. For the latter, as with most Third World people around the world, it is a herculean, heart-rending process that stretches for months. Several thousands of visa applications get rejected every single day, each of them having paid the equivalent of a non-refundable US$100. The inside of the embassy itself is a place that reduces one to fear and humiliation, requiring one to prove one’s humanity before one is considered worthy of entry.

Obviously there's a good argument to be made about the impossibility of granting a visa to each and every applicant, given the enormity of the numbers of people who want to come to the United States of America. However, the whole atmosphere attached to the process and to some inexplicable visa denials can be filled with dread and heartache for some.

Still, something has moved at a galactic level, and a lot of people around the world are filled with undeniable greater hope and admiration for the United States of America. The burden for the kind of change the world is anticipating ought not to be carried by Obama alone, if at all. As Dr. Makau Mutua, Dean and Professor of Law at State University of New York at Buffalo wrote in June 2008, the US presidency is very different from the African presidency, and most other presidencies for that matter. If elected, Obama’s constituency will be the numerous interest groups who wield influence in US domestic and foreign policy. Obama may personally understand the importance of changing the image of Africa and Africans in the eyes of Americans, but it will have to be a slow, gradual, deliberate process, or else it may merely provoke unintended consequences. And in the meantime, Aunt Zeituni has to accept her place in the hierarchy, follow the law, and return to Kenya.

Peace Studies and ‘Africa’: International Day of Peace Reflections

When I stumbled upon peace studies as an academic discipline in 2003, I saw the myriad questions I had developed over a life time, some of which I was unaware of, begin to gel into an intelligible, coherent pursuit. I wondered why it had taken me five years into graduate school to learn of the existence of peace studies as a discipline. And had it not been for a dissertation research fellowship, I can not tell whether I would have become acquainted with the discipline, and gone ahead to adopt it as an intellectual and activist framework. What seemed even more peculiar was that it felt so natural and intuitive; I realized I had been using it all along, only I hadn’t called it peace studies. Five years later, I have come to regard it as indispensable for the way I understand the world and our attempts towards solutions to its intractable problems. The tell-tale moment came in 2004, during field work in Malawi, when it occurred to me that it was what uMunthu/uBuntu demanded of us as human beings. I had set out on a sojourn to the global North, in search of truth, and had returned home at the height of that search, only to find that the object of my searching had been lying in plain sight all along. On this day, September 21, International Day of Peace, I would like to reflect on how the discipline of peace and justice studies brings together a host of multidisciplinary approaches to understanding Africa, Pan-Africans, and their place in the work of promoting global peace.

It was whilst I was in the field that I learned how to appropriate peace studies to make sense of the uMunthu/uBuntu imperative which lay at the center of the pursuit for local and global peace. In order to achieve this, I began thinking, it was necessary for peace studies to take Africa and Africans seriously. As yet, this is not the case, an argument made by Marvin Berlowitz (2002), professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Cincinnati. Berlowitz wrote in an issue of the journal Peace Review that the discipline of peace studies was plagued by Eurocentric bias. He said several African American peace leaders and activists were ignored in the scholarship, and his list included one African peace leader, and one Caribbean scholar activist.

Berlowitz’s conclusion was that Eurocentric bias pervaded the field of peace studies, and he attributed the problem to an “ideological split” that represented differing historical experiences between Euro-Americans and African Americans. In explaining why Eurocentrism was a problem in peace studies, Berlowitz listed two main reasons: it distorted our view of peace studies and the peace movement, and it precluded any viable understanding or alliance between African Americans and Euro-Americans. For example, historical events such as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and anti-colonization were active topics of research and activism in the African American community, while they were paid less attention to in mainstream peace studies.

While Berlowitz’s main concern was the place of African American peace leaders and activists in the peace studies canon, the same questions are relevant regarding the place of African peace leaders and activists. In this quest, a much more comprehensive persuasion for Africans and African contexts in peace studies has been made by Matt Meyer, a founding member of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and co-convener of the World Resisters League, and Bill Sutherland, a co-founder of the Congress for Racial Equality, and a leading thinker and activist of Pan-Africanism. Not only have Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland asserted the place of African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda and other African leaders and activists in the study of peace and justice, they have also argued for the place of Pan-Africanism and African independence and anti-colonial movements as legitimate subjects of peace studies.

Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer’s 2000 book Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation in Africa, accomplishes what no other study that I know of does: merging together Pan-Africanism, African independence and anti-colonial struggles, and Gandhian nonviolence into a coherent exploration of African contexts in the study of peace and justice. The book chronicles detailed accounts and narratives of Africa’s experiments with violence and nonviolence. The narratives are developed through interviews with African leaders and political activists, and personal reflections from Bill Sutherland. Bill Sutherland’s experiences go back to the 1950s when Ghana was fighting for its independence with Kwame Nkrumah as its leader, to the 1990s when Sutherland and Matt Meyer traveled across the continent to personally meet and interview several African leaders and activists. The book thus offers deep insights into the confluence of violence and nonviolence in Africa’s struggles for independence from Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Jerry Rawlings, Kenneth Kaunda, Graca Machel, Sam Nujoma, Nathan Shamuyayira, Emma Mashinini, and Walter Sisulu, among many others.

In his preface to the book, former Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, states that Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland’s work evokes uBuntu ideals. Tutu says Meyer and Sutherland begin to “develop a language that looks at the roots of our humanness beyond our many private contradictions” (p. xi). Tutu says Meyer and Sutherland challenge us to “better understand concepts often seen as opposed to one another—like nonviolence and armed struggle.” In so doing, they “help to focus our attention on the larger struggles we must still wage, united: for economic justice, for true freedom and equality, and for a world of lasting peace” (ibid.). Tutu goes on to inform us that Gandhi’s philosophy of soul force and nonviolence originated in a South African context, and “were based on some concepts he learned in South Africa,” during Gandhi’s stay there (xii).

In Ghana’s struggle for independence, we learn from Sutherland that Kwame Nkrumah, a leading Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial leader and activist of his time, was also a committed nonviolence advocate, and published a pamphlet in the early phase of his leadership of Ghana’s independence movement. The pamphlet was titled What I Mean By Positive Action. Positive Action was Nkrumah’s version of nonviolence, informed by the Ghanaian context of the colonialist and imperialist nature of the oppression Africans were under. Speaking decades later to Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland, one person who had been one of Nkrumah’s close associates, Komla Agbelo Gbedema, confirmed that Gandhian nonviolence was indeed the model Ghana followed. Sutherland and Meyer quote Gbedema as saying “The Gandhian movement was a our model. Some considered Positive Action a strategy or tactic, others a principle.” But for Gbedema himself, he learned his nonviolence from a Quaker teacher who taught him that violence begot violence. The Ghanaians attributed the success of their struggle to Nkrumah’s brand of nonviolence. They even invited both WEB DuBois and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr to their independence celebrations in 1957. WEB DuBois was unable to go, but Martin Luther King Jr went, and heard Nkrumah shout the words “Free at last! Free at last!” Six years later MLK himself would use those very words to end his famed “I Have Dream” speech.

Another African anti-colonial leader and activist who also believed in nonviolence as an effective approach was the first president of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda. Meyer and Sutherland write that Kaunda was an early advocate of nonviolent direct action, and pursued these ideals in the Africa Freedom Action and World Peace Brigade, a precursor to Peace Brigades International. Kaunda wrote a book titled The Riddle of Violence, in which he directly addressed the relevance of Gandhi to Zambia’s struggle for independence. In his life after the presidency, Kaunda told Meyer and Sutherland he had established the Kaunda Institute for Peace and Democracy, where there would be courses in peace studies and democracy.

In their discussions between Meyer and Sutherland and the now deceased first president of Tanzania, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the problem of achieving true independence still remains a legitimate peace and justice struggle both at the local as well as the global level. Nyerere’s role in this struggle took on a visible Pan-Africanist outlook, as had Nkrumah’s. Both African leaders invited people of African descent from outside Africa to participate in the intellectual life of Tanzanian society. Bill Sutherland was one of these figures. The late Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney was another. Nyerere, like Kaunda, also hosted South African and Zimbabwean political leaders in their struggle against their respective white minority governments.

Amongst African countries, South Africa’s presence in peace studies is much better represented. There is widespread recognition that the anti-apartheid movement garnered support amongst peace activists outside Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been researched and written about extensively in peace research, as has the story of Nelson Mandela and the debates inside the African National Congress about the efficacy and problems associated with nonviolence. What is perhaps not widely acknowledged to the extent that it deserves is the philosophy of uBuntu, of which Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a leading advocate. Whereas Pan-Africanism and the anti-colonial independence movements enter the peace studies discourse by what can be called an activist political project, the uBuntu connection to peace studies can be said to be much more organic and internal. uBuntu, which I like to refer to as uMunthu, in it’s Chichewa version, belongs to the peace and justice studies framework through its ontological definition of the collective bond of humanness, rendering responsibility for one’s neighbors on the planet an inherent core value.

If we accept Berlowitz’s claim that African American peace leaders and activists, with the exception of MLK, are absent from peace studies, African leaders and activists are even more so. If we accept Sutherland and Meyer’s argument that the African leaders they write about in their book provide an African perspective to the global peace and justice movement, then it is fair to use Berlowitz’s questions to ask why African leaders and activists are not given the attention they deserve in the peace studies scholarship. The same goes for the philosophy of uMunthu.

Amongst the texts that constitute the peace studies canon, very few of them treat Africa in a substantive, meaningful way. Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland’s are the only exception. Meyer has a couple of books on Pan African peace studies forthcoming in the next months, which will add to Guns and Gandhi in a way that ought to begin to change the peace studies landscape. The recent achievements of Kofi Annan in resolving the Kenyan post-election crisis, the fledgling, much-criticized efforts of Thabo Mbeki in Zimbabwe, and the work of the environmentalist and scholar Wangari Maathai, amongst others, ought to add to the canon.

The absence of African contributions to the global peace and justice movement poses two kinds of problems. The first problem is that of language and definition. On the one hand, the language I am most familiar with, Chichewa, does not have definitive terms for peace, violence, or nonviolence. Even in English, the best we can do to offer a response to violence is nonviolence, itself a negative formulation. And when we look at the definitions used in the literature, some of my students have a difficult time understanding why the problem of peace is worthy of their attention in a college classroom. They point to the difficulty of finding universal agreement on what peace entails as evidence that peace can not be achieved, and that therefore the study of peace itself is a futile, empty endeavor.

The second problem, like the first one, also deals with teaching peace studies. On the few occasions that African contexts get mentioned in the texts we use, students see a confirmation of the stereotypes they inherit about Africa as a place of hopelessness, helplessness and despair. There can be no denying that Africa has peculiar problems that defy easy rationalization. Even the African leaders and peace activists that Meyer and Sutherland describe in their book acknowledge this. However the persistence of Eurocentrism in the curriculum, both in Africa and outside Africa, lead to a distortion of the underlying contexts that create the problems Africa and Africans face. Those distortions entail policy prescriptions that over the decades have done little to teach students about difference, interdependence and imperialist exploitation. Even with well-meaning and critically-minded preparation for American students going to do study abroad in African countries, it is still very difficult to orient students to abandon a missionary-savior outlook and adopt an attitude in which Western societies can also learn from Africa in an equal exchange of knowledge production.

It is a reasonable claim that peace and justice studies is well disposed to provide a comprehensive and meaningful understanding of Africa’s problems, but the discipline can not accomplish this when the knowledge of Africa’s contributions to global peace and justice remains as underdeveloped as it currently is. The current crop of university students who feel compelled to study marginalized societies will be much better served by a peace and justice studies approach that does not ignore injustices at home, and that offers an Africa that is an integral part of historical and contemporary efforts to promote global peace.

Son of the Soil? Pan-Africanism & Third World Prospects in a Possible Obama Presidency

The exclamatory commentary that has accompanied Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the nomination of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate has excited, beneath it, the question of what the nomination itself, and a possible Obama presidency, might mean for the Pan-Africanist world as well as the Third World. While much of the commentary has been laudatory, there have also been cautionary tones, not to mention ambivalent ones. Beyond the excitement, caution and ambivalence of what a possible Obama presidency might entail for Pan-Africa and the Third World, what Obama himself has said in his writing, and has not said, might prove to be revelatory in attempting to explore the discussion that has exercised many minds around the world. We take this exploration by examining some of the issues that have been raised by editorialists and columnists, bloggers and other commentators in Africa and beyond. We also delve into what Obama himself has said in his two best-belling books, as we ponder how the significance of a possible Obama presidency may be realized more in the symbolic transformation of perceptions of race, racism and racial identity in the US and in the world, than in what the office of the US presidency itself is capable or incapable of achieving.

First, a word about my use of the terms “Pan-Africa” and “Pan-Africanism.” The Pan-Africa I am referring to here is the one that builds on the ideological consciousness of the global historical experiences and identities of people of African descent, and others who share that ideology for political and solidarity purposes. It is a Pan-Africanist consciousness that draws from DuBois’s hope, back in 1897, that if Africans were to be a factor in the history of the world, it would have to be through a Pan-African movement. Thus when Ghana became independent from Britain in 1957, Du Bois, unable to attend the epochal occasion due to his passport being impounded by the US government, handed over the mantle of the Pan-Africanist movement to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, through a letter that he wrote and had delivered to Nkrumah.

The 1966 military coup that overthrew Nkrumah as Ghana’s president dealt a big blow to a Pan-Africanist movement that had achieved a great deal for people of African descent, especially in Africa. The shared African identity and global consciousness spawned by Pan-Africanist ideology played a key role in mobilizing support amongst African and Third World regions in overthrowing colonialism. In the United States, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King both looked up to the Pan-African world for solidarity in overcoming American racism. With Nkrumah gone, the ideals of Pan-Africanism began atrophying, to the extent that in the 21^st century today there is no discernible movement that concerns itself with the problems that afflict Africa and people of African descent around the world. But there is no question that such a movement is as necessary today as it was in the 1950s and 60s.

In his autobiography Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama has demonstrated his awareness of both a Pan-Africanist and Third World consciousness, but for the nationalist demands of American politics today, he has not made that awareness a part of his campaign platform. But those who know Obama’s autobiographical instincts in guiding his best judgments know that his upbringing and struggle to identify himself are a core part of who he is. And it is his autobiographical narrative that has appealed to people around the globe. Thus while heeding the call to be cautious in speculating what a possible Obama presidency might do for the Pan-African world, it is worth discussing the extent to which Obama’s narrative in itself has the potential to influence new visions and energies in the study of the Pan-African world and its future prospects. Those energies have been on display in many places around the world, not least in Kenya, where Obama’s father came from.

A June 5^th editorial in The Daily Nation of Kenya, where Obama’s father, a Harvard Ph.D., hailed from, offered three reasons as to why Africans were celebrating Obama’s victory. The first reason had to do with Obama being “the first African American ever to win nomination to vie for the presidency of the world’s sole super-power.” Second, Obama was considered “a son of Africa” who has excelled in the world. And thirdly, Obama was “a son of Kenya,” since Obama traced “his roots” back to his fatherland, Kenya, in “the present-day Siaya District.” The three reasons culminated into one huge hope: Africans were hopeful that “with this win, ‘their son’ will implement Africa-friendly policies that could uplift the continent from poverty.”

In the June 8^th edition of The Sunday Times of Rwanda, columnist Frank Kagabo also reflected Obama’s blood connection to Africa, observing that Obama had “relatives living in third world poverty,” a fact which would help African people feel “good and know that nothing is impossible no matter where you come from.” In the Malawian parliament, The Daily Times quoted opposition Malawi Congress Party member of parliament Boniface Kadzamira as congratulating Senator Obama, paraphrasing the parliamentarian as saying Malawi was “likely to benefit if he wins the presidential election this August” [sic]. Hon. Kadzamira was also quoted offering a snippet of how Obama’s foreign policy might look like “He says he is likely to move away from the policies of sanctions, which has hurt countries like Zimbabwe, to negotiation. He says he will have tough aid conditions and will move away from the weapons of mass destruction to mass reconstruction”.

The Harvard University-based blog aggregating project, Global Voices Online, housed in the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has been culling blog commentary on the American elections from outside the United States, on a website called Voices Without Votes. Amongst the blogs the website is aggregating is The World Wants Obama Coalition, from where a link to the Caribbean World News announced a news item titled “Caribbean United Behind Obama”. Another linked blog, Globamania, sported the self-description, “Because the world believes in real change, too.” A round up of Kenyan bloggers by Global Voices author Rebecca Wanjiku was titled “Kenyan bloggers on Kenya’s most famous son, Barack Obama”.

But even amidst the hopes, adulations and expectations for what a “son of Africa” in the American White House could do for the continent, there have also been voices cautioning the hyped praise, and posing some searching questions. The Daily Nation’s editorial mentioned above asked: “But what is there for Africa in the American elections?” It went further still, asking: would Obama manage to “overcome the strong lobby groups that control American foreign policy and that have very little time for Africa?” More unflattering commentary came from Rasna Warah, writing in the June 9^th edition of The Daily Nation, who wielded a sharp knife over the blood ties everyone was happy to evoke. Warah’s title was upfront and blunt: “We cannot lay claims on Obama; he’s not one of us”. Warah went on to state: “What everyone seems to be forgetting is that Barack Obama is an American, not a Kenyan. His roots may lie in Kenya, but he was born and raised in the United States, and his loyalty lies with that nation, not with ours.”

As evidence for her argument, Warah cited Obama’s own words spoken when he visited Kenya as a United States Senator, in August of 2006. She quoted Obama as saying: “As a US Senator, my country and other nations have an obligation and self-interest in being full partners with Kenya and Africa. And I will do my part to shape an intelligent foreign policy that promotes peace and prosperity.” As for Obama’s autobiography Dreams From my Father, which Obama wrote after returning from Kenya and going to Harvard Law School, Warah suggested that “curiosity about his roots” was the real reason Obama visited his fatherland for the first time ever, in the summer of 1988. It was “not deep love for this country,” said Warah.

By far the most authoritative statement of caution if not negation came from Dr. Makau Mutua, Dean and University Distinguished Professor of Law at State University of New York at Buffalo, and chair of the Kenyan Human Rights Commission. Writing in the Daily Nation of June 5^th, Dr. Mutua started out by quipping that the reaction to Obama’s clinching of the Democratic nomination was as if Obama was “poised to become” the president of Kenya, or indeed Africa. The reasons, Dr. Mutua said, were three-fold: “national, racial, and ethnic pride that a black man can become ‘king’ of the empire.” Dr. Mutua then set out to demolish the expectations edifice by pointing out “the nature of the US as a state, and the character of the American presidency” as the reasons why he was urging caution to the hype of what Obama would do for the continent. Dr. Mutua contrasted between the way Africans and Americans see the office of the president as being responsible for the mounting expectations on Obama. “Africans think of presidents as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent”, wrote Dr. Mutua, saying that in Africa that perception gave the president enormous powers which ultimately determined what citizens could gain or lose. It was what created what Dr. Mutua called “tribal barons.” Not so with American politics, in which “the American presidency is a highly circumscribed office that is subject to larger national interests on which there is consensus about the purpose of government.”

What would prevent a President Obama from being helpful to Africa then were the two core functions of the American presidency: to “develop and implement a foreign policy to enhance US interests and pursue a domestic policy that will bring economic prosperity to the nation.” It was in the service of those two functions that America’s role in the world had been historically shaped, and continued to be, limiting the scope of what an individual president could do, even as he or she brought his or her personality and individuality to what is considered the most powerful leadership position in the world. Here Dr. Mutua went deeper than anybody has been daring to, to expose America as an empire whose wealth and might have been built on a foundation that has dialectically entailed the exploitation and destruction of Africa. “Why am I pessimistic about the prospects of an Obama presidency for Africa?” asked Dr. Mutua. The answer, he offered, lay in Africa’s “structurally racist and exploitative relationship with Africa. In slavery – the brutal capture, transportation, sale and exploitation of Africans to build America – and the support by the United States of Cold War despots in Africa, lies the destructive relationship between black people and America.”

As an analytical insight, Dr. Mutua’s explanation went to the heart of a historical truth that has largely been avoided by most commentators, including Obama’s own positioning of himself vis-a-viz his identity. “It is partly because of these traumas,” explained Dr. Mutua, “that Africa is so underdeveloped and marginalised in global politics. That is why to America Africa has either been an afterthought or an object of pity and charity. It would require an ideological shift by the US to change its relationship with Africa to base it on equality, fair trade and investment, and a voice for Africans in global institutions.” As such, no individual American president can achieve the kind of paradigm shift that would turn around America’s image of Africa: “These are not steps that a president can take alone because they affect fundamental American interests, and would call for a realignment of US foreign policy so that it is not simply Eurocentric.”

Dr. Mutua’s realistic analysis of what the American presidency looks like and how its foreign and domestic policy mandates shape the scope and limits of what the American presidency can achieve points to an important distinction that has to be made between the president as an individual and the president as an institution. As an individual, we only have to hark back to Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father. As I pointed out in my recent blog article on Obama, the personal importance of Africa to Barack Obama is not only evident in the book, it is profound to Obama’s own identity. The way Obama treats Kenya in Dreams From My Father leaves us in no doubt about this. In the book, Obama takes 450 pages to offer an intimate look into his life, from early days in Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, to an epochal homecoming in Kenya. The amount of detail Obama dedicates to his life in the United States and Indonesia, where he lived all his life hitherto, contrasts sharply with the one third of the book that he devotes to Kenya, where he only spent three months. His days at Harvard Law School are given a mere two sentences (p. 437).

Contrary to Rasna Warah’s suggestion that Obama went to Kenya more out of curiosity than love of the country, the answer to Obama’s deep search for identity is finally consummated and revealed in Kenya, right from the moment he steps foot on the soil. It is worth reproducing, again, the paragraph that puts Obama’s quest for identity to rest, when somebody recognizes his name in an instant:

“That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A., or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people’s memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, ‘Oh, you are so and so’s son.’ No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand” (p. 305).

However the reasons for caution in imagining what an Obama presidency may do for Africa and the Third World are equally sobering. By the time we get to the US senate and to his next book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), Africa has pretty much disappeared from Obama’s narrative, replaced by distant references that characterize much of mainstream Western attitudes about Africa. Missing even from the Index, Africa is mentioned only perfunctorily, no longer as the place Obama spent a lifetime yearning for, but rather as the known poster child for the world’s worst maladies and disorder. “There are times when considering the plight of Africa—the millions racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of twelve-year-old guerillas who know nothing but war wielding machetes or AK-47s—I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair” (p. 319). But Obama is also aware of the progress Africa has made, citing Uganda’s success with the AIDS pandemic, and the end of civil war in countries like Mozambique. He observes that “there are positive trends in Africa often hidden in the news of despair, while at the same time clinging to an Afropessimism that warns: “We should not expect to help Africa if Africa ultimately proves unwilling to help itself” (ibid.).

Obama is also able to go beyond the average politician in his candidness about the ravages brought on Indonesia and other parts of the world by the ideological juggernaut of US foreign policy. In a chapter titled “The World Beyond Our Borders,” Obama dwells on how Indonesians find it puzzling that “most Americans can’t locate Indonesia on a map,” given the role that US foreign policy has played in the fate of Indonesia “for the past 60 years” (p. 272). Providing a brief historical account of this role, Obama describes how the CIA provided “covert support to various insurgencies inside Indonesia, and cultivated close links with Indonesia’s military officers, many of whom had been trained in the United States” (p. 273). The military then went ahead and “began a massive purge of communists and their sympathizers,” leading somewhere between 500,000 and one million deaths, “with 750,000 others imprisoned or forced into exile” (ibid.).

Obama’s candor continues throughout the chapter, noting that “our record is mixed—not just in Indonesia but across the world” (p. 280). He calls American foreign policy “a jumble of warring impulses,” at times farsighted and serving the mutual interests of both the United States and other nations, and at other times making “for a more dangerous world” (ibid.). His take on Iran ought to be enlightening in light of the current saber-rattling and familiar drum beat toward another a possible military strike: “Occasionally, U.S. covert operations would engineer the removal of democratically elected leaders in countries like—with seismic repercussions that haunt us to this day” (p. 286). Yet Obama is no dogmatic ideologue, finding himself “in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview” in debates with friends on the left. He charges that progressives were eager to indict US complicity in the brutalities that took place in Chile, yet were less so in criticizing oppression in the communist bloc. Nor was he persuaded that US corporations and global trade “were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people” (p. 289).

Needless to say, such candor is as rare amongst US politicians as is knowledge of what US foreign policy has been up to around the world, in the general populace, according to several writers and thinkers, including John Perkins, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Carl Mirra, Stephen Hiatt, amongst others. Many of these thinkers have also pointed out how while some Third World leaders are indeed corrupt, Western multinational corporations, backed by a deliberate, strategic foreign policy, create the very infrastructure that facilitates the corruption, and are actually corrupt themselves. According to Perkins, Hiatt, Patrick Bond, John Christiansen, Amit Basole, Leonce Ndikumana, James Boyce, among others, this is done through debt ensnaring, off-shore tax havens, trade mispricing, and dubious advice from the IMF and the World Bank, whose complicity with foreign policy and multinational corporate interests has led to trillions of dollars being emptied out of Third World countries and poured into Western economies. This is the corruption and the looting of the Third World that has best been captured by John Perkins’ term “corporatocracy” in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Stephen Hiatt’s 2007 edited collection of essays, A Game As Old As Empire shows how pervasive the nexus of economic hitmen has become, and how closely aligned the system is between foreign policy and corporate interests.

In the final analysis, the significance of an Obama presidency for Pan-Africa and the Third World will lie less in what Barack Obama may or may not be able to do for people of African descent than in the symbolic message that his ascendancy to the most powerful office in the world will do in changing black people’s perceptions of who they are in the world, and how others view them. That has been the underlying, implicit cause of the renewed hope in what has been said by the Kenyans, the Malawians, the South Africans, the Nigerians, Caribbean commentators, and in fact every one else around the world who has joined in the celebration. While the office of the US presidency may limit Obama’s actual impact on Pan-Africa and the Third World, as Dr. Mutua warns, the symbolic importance of the achievement is what has the potential to go much further in offering a paradigm shift in the self-perception of a people whose destiny, according to Frantz Fanon, represents the possibility to refashion a new vision for the world, one beyond the limits set by European rationality and the consequences, both good and bad, that the Third World has reaped there from.

For that to happen, Obama’s own notion of what race and racism still mean in today’s America and how some minorities are overcoming it could shine some light on the path this transformation might take. Obama devotes a chapter in The Audacity of Hope to the topic of race, in which he offers both a stinging and sensitive portrayal of the bane of America’s ethnic identity, as well as the prospects of what can be achieved in breaking down racial barriers. Obama’s philosophy of race indict residual and institutional racism, but also celebrate white people and black people alike who are able to overcome the vice and chart a new path for society. Those lessons ought to apply not only to America, but to the rest of the world as well, in the apt description of the global face of Obama’s extended family as a miniature portrait of the world:

“As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and a niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe” (p. 231).

Visiting Hungary, Recalling Malawi’s Recent History

Unsure as to how much English the average Hungarian speaks, I prepare for my 2008 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit trip to Budapest, the Hungarian capital, by reading up on the country and the language. I start by googling two Hungarian playwrights, Körnel Hámvai and Pál Békés whom I got to know in 1997 as fellow Honorary Fellows of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.

In addition, I find a Lonely Planet pocket guide for the Hungarian language, and start learning a few phrases. I post a message to the Global Voices 2008 Summit listserv, asking how much Hungarian I should try to cram in before I board the plane. I mention a few phrases I have learned, just to show off. Paula, a Brazilian who blogs from London, responds and exclaims how starkly different the Hungarian she has been learning is from the one I have posted. She provides a URL link to a podcast (a recording posted on the Internet) for first time visitors to Hungary, which I listen to on the plane. When I later meet up with Paula in Budapest, I suggest to her that one of us has been learning the swear version of Hungarian—we’re yet to find out who it is.

Hardly have I put down my things in my hotel room, and introduced myself to my roommate, when the phone rings. It’s Victor Kaonga, with whom we cover Malawian blogs for Global Voices. Victor arrived earlier in the day, and he asks what I am planning to do for dinner. When we get out of the Novotel Hotel with a group of other newly arrived participants, Nicholas, from the Caribbean, leads the way to a restaurant a few blocks away. It’s around 8pm, and the sun is still up in the sky on this Hungarian summer evening. Victor comments that Budapest looks more like an improved version of Blantyre. The buildings look old, a few of them could use some maintenance. It’s unlike Sweden, where Victor has lived for the last two years. On her facebook page, another newly arrived participant posts her photos, with the caption “Budapest, no skyscrapers!”.

By Sunday, the conference has clocked three days, and a group of us take the tramway (metro train) to see the Danube River. In the background, I am hearing music I can not believe I am actually hearing. It’s the song Patapata, the version not by Miriam Makeba but the one by Dorothy Masuka, which is the one I actually love more. I nudge Juliana, a Kenyan who blogs about the environment from Chicago, and ask her if she knows the song. “Can you believe we are listening to Patapata on the tramway in Budapest!”

A few hours later while resting near a bridge by the river, Victor asks me if my cellphone’s ringtone is on. I pull the phone out of my pocket, and the inbuilt mp3 player is blaring Lawrence Mbenjere’s “Chikwesa.”

“Ah!! I hope it hasn’t been playing in my pocket all this time!! Gees!” Then it dawns on me. “I swear they were playing Patapata by Dorothy Masuka when we were on the tramway!” I was so eager to commend the Hungarians for their worldly taste in music, but now I’m not so sure anymore. I can’t believe the trick my cell phone’s mp3 player has played on me.

We have stopped on the bank of the Danube River to wait for another group which has gone in a different direction. Juliana steps closer and whispers to everyone, “Be careful. Those three young men over there--they have been following us.” In front of us is a gigantic, white, squarish building, with inelegant windows going up maybe ten floors. An elderly man who has been sitting on a bench across from us gets up and approaches us. He gets very close, and lowering his voice, asks us “Do you know about this building that you are standing in front of?” He asks in a cracking voice, with a Hungarian accent. “During the communist regime, there was a meat-grinder inside. The communists threw people into the meat-grinder, and their bodies ended up in the river.” I ask him how long ago this was, and he says he is not sure, as he was living in America at the time. “Maybe twenty or thirty years ago,” he says, before walking back to his bench.

We are stunned with the news. The other group returns, and the ever-cheerful Neha, an Indian blogger based in London, notices our mood. “Why is everyone looking so gloomy? You are so sad.” Victor turns to Neha and repeats to her the story we just heard. A few others on Neha’s heels close in to listen too. Everyone gasps in horror. “And it gets worse, Neha,” I say. “There’s worse news. I don’t know if you can handle it.”

“I can handle it.”

“It requires nerves.”

“I have the nerves. Tell me.”

“The fish we have been eating in the hotel? Comes from this river.”

Neha throws her arms in the air and shouts joyfully: “Thank God! I’m a vegetarian!” She is joined by Razan, a Syrian blogger who lives in Beirut. “I knew there was a good reason why I am a vegetarian also.” Everyone realizes I have been joking, and the mood lightens up again. “I thought you were going to tell her about the Shire River,” remarks Victor.

We proceed to walk by the riverside, watching passenger boats sailing under the bridge. We continue taking pictures as we approach an impressive neo-Gothic structure with a tall, cathedral-like dome standing above everything else on the Pest side of the Danube’s riverbank. “That’s the Hungarian Parliament,” announces Amit, a photo-blogger from India. “It’s one of the largest parliament buildings in Europe.” It was built between 1885 and 1902, as I later read in a guidebook, and is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Budapest. It is called Országház in the Hungarian language. Across the Danube on the Buda side is another impressive, historic site. It’s the Budavári palota, The Royal Palace. It was originally built as a fortress starting in 1235 AD, and reached its peak of glory between 1458 and1490, according to the Green Guide for Hungary and Budapest.

By 9pm, the sun is setting and a twilight sets in. We continue taking more pictures, and begin looking for a tramway station to return to the Novotel Hotel. Everyone is hungry, and Moussa, from Beirut, suggests a Pizza Hut he visited the other day. By the time we find it, the finals of the Euro 2008 championship have already begun, and the bars and restaurants showing the match are packed. Victor and I decide we will take our dinner back to the hotel and watch the rest of the match there.

On the plane back home, I continue reading Michael Korda’s Journey to a Revolution: A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which I started before the trip. I am struck by the way history has dealt with the Hungarian people. Korda’s description of the communist era in Hungary reads a lot like the recent history of Malawi during the one-party dictatorship. Another similarity: the Hungarians ended their communist era in the late 80s and 90s, the same period that Malawi ended its one-party dictatorship.

uMunthu, Peace and Education: On Malawi's 44th Independence Anniversary

One morning at a school near Lake Chirwa in Zomba in 1972, pupils entering their Standard 8 classroom received the shock of their lives. The portrait of then Life President Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda had been defaced. Someone had drawn into the portrait a pair of spectacles, and had written unsavory comments about the then president. The pupils informed the teacher, who informed the school's head. The head immediately convened a staff meeting. After lengthy deliberations, the school administration agreed on investigating to find out who did it. The Standard 8 teacher went back to the classroom and asked for the culprit to turn himself in. Nobody volunteered any information.

After further deliberations amongst the staff, a decision was reached. Mwandilakwira, a Standard 8 pupil, would be expelled from the school and reported to the then District Education Office (DEO). Mwandilakwira protested his innocence, but the school administration responded by saying since he was the one who sat directly underneath the president’s portrait, he was probably the pupil who did this. Mwandilakwira was ordered never to come back to the school, and his name was reported to the DEO’s office. Mwandilakwira was also told that he was effectively banned from attending school in the entire Malawi.

That was thirty six years ago. Malawi has changed a great deal since then, especially in the last sixteen years. As we celebrate yet another independence anniversary, it is right and proper to ask what 44 years of independence has meant for us as a nation. This particular year I would like to ask this question from the perspective of a teacher as a way of reflecting on the role Malawian teachers play in building the nation and setting the country on a more peaceful and prosperous course.

For me, two things stand out as the most important for a future Malawi, and indeed the world, to have. First, I envision a future Malawi in which the ideals of uMunthu form the basis of our identity, and shape the form that all our endeavors take. Second, I envision a future Malawi that is blessed with peace and social justice and bestows on everyone equal chances of success and opportunities for the affirmation of everyone’s potential and talents. I see uMunthu as an ideal that pervades through these aspirations, knowing that the success of one person in a community is beneficial for, rather than a threat to, the whole community. Our Malawian elders were not wrong when they observed that Mwana wa mnzako ngwako yemwe, ukachenjera manja udya naye (your neighbor's child is your own, his/her success is your success too).

It wasn’t until 2004 that I first started thinking about uMunthu as a serious theme in envisioning the future of Malawi and the world. The day was Saturday, April 17th. The Catholic Diocese of Zomba ordained a new bishop on that day, Rt. Rev. Fr. Thomas Msusa, to take the place of Bishop Allan Chamgwera who had retired. I witnessed the beautifully choreographed and spiritually touching event at the grounds of Zomba Catholic Secondary School. In his speech, Bishop Msusa, who had left Nankhunda Seminary a few months before I set foot there in 1988, spoke of the problems Malawi was facing, and how we needed to “become as one.” He said those words had always been his guiding biblical wisdom from his seminary days. “The African worldview is about living as one family, belonging to God,” he said. “We say ‘I am because we are’, or in Chichewa kali kokha nkanyama, tili awiri ntiwanthu (when you are on your own you are as good as an animal of the wild; when there are two of you, you form a community).”

Listening to the newly ordained Bishop Msusa that afternoon harked my mind back to former Anglican Archbishop of the Diocese of Cape Town in South Africa, Desmond Tutu. A Nobel peace laureate, former Archbishop Desmond Tutu led his country, at the request of then President Nelson Mandela, in the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In his memoirs narrating his reflections on how he experienced the TRC, No Future Without Forgiveness, Archbishop Tutu explains uBuntu as the philosophical essence that propelled the TRC. In the book the former Anglican archbishop offers a list of examples where uBuntu was the driving philosophy for many southern African countries who chose forgiveness over retaliation against white minority regimes upon attaining independence. Included on the list are Zimbabwe, Kenya and Namibia.

Some people point out that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process did not solve South Africa’s problems, and instead merely created new ones. While that may be true, with regard to what has been happening in South Africa especially in recent years and in particular this year, it is important not to blame the TRC for something it had no control over. South Africa’s problems are much more complex and difficult to understand than many of us are ready to accept. The failures of recent years belong into the broader global economic order which South Africa has been forced into by institutions with far more power than African governments can ever hope to wield. This is not to exculpate South African elites from blame, as part of the path the country has taken has been a matter of unprincipled choices in times of difficult global dilemmas. Our own country Malawi is caught up in similar influences that promote neoliberal economic competition and privatization, leaving many unable to participate, and therefore bitterly resentful. It is not always that we pause to ask ourselves the roots of the violent crime we witness in our everyday lives right here in Malawi.

Before 2004, I was not even aware that uMunthu had been the subject of serious academic and intellectual inquiry by leading Malawian and African philosophers, theologians, political scientists, and many others. Several Malawians have written entire books on the subject. They include Rev. Dr. Augustine Musopole who in 1994 published a book titled Being Human in Africa: Toward an African Christian Anthropology, Rev. Dr. Harvey Sindima who in 1995 published Africa’s Agenda: The Legacy of Liberalism and Colonialism in the Crisis of African Values, and Dr. Gerald Chigona, who in 2002 published a book titled uMunthu theology: Path of Integral Human Liberation Rooted in Jesus of Nazareth. In addition to the above books, University of Malawi scholars Richard Tambulasi and Happy Kayuni have published an article on uMunthu in Malawian politics during the one-party dictatorship and the first multiparty government. There have also been several newspaper and magazine articles on the topic, as well as performing arts groups and forums using the concept of uMunthu to describe their focus.

In my interviews with several Malawian primary school teachers since 2004, I have learned that uMunthu is a subject fit to be taught in our schools, from Standard 1 all the way to the university. This is especially important for teacher training colleges and other tertiary institutions. The teachers argued that many of Malawi’s problems of structural violence, inequality, exploitation and injustice spring from the absence of uMunthu ideals in the inculcation of values. The education system has a crucial role to play in promoting uMunthu in our society because the violence and injustice we see in our communities is in fact facilitated by the education system’s failure to offer a coherent value system that affirms our humanity and identity.

The presence of rigorously researched and analyzed treatises on the topic of uMunthu, amongst Malawians and other scholars elsewhere is an exhortation for us to make it central in our education system. In my work with Malawian primary teachers over the years, we have explored ways of teaching the values of uMunthu-based peace and social justice, even in learning areas as unlikely as Mathematics.

The consideration to make uMunthu and peace education central features of Malawian education at all levels involves rethinking the ways we train our primary school teachers also. Having been a primary school teacher myself, I have come to appreciate the need to enhance our teacher education process, to align it with the needs of present day Malawi. The two-year teacher training program has been helpful up to this point, but it has become outdated. Today’s and tomorrow’s Malawi needs teachers who are much more highly trained, who are provided the best of what our intellectual heritage has to offer. This requires making our universities an integral part of the training we give our primary school teachers. None of this can be done overnight, but that is no excuse to postpone important decisions and put them off to an unforeseeable future.

Young Malawians are bustling with intellectual energies ready to meet any academic challenges thrown their way. That is what Mwandilakwira proved to those who expelled him and banished him from attaining further education in Malawi.

After staying at home for two years without going to school, Mwandilakwira changed his name and enrolled at another school several kilometers away. There he excelled, and was selected to one of the best secondary schools in Malawi. Today he is the head of an important primary school.

Equipping teachers with the best training we can afford will be part of the process to ensure the type of future we envision for our country. It will enable teachers to assume their important role in society, in ways that empower them to uplift young Malawians, rather than attempt to destroy their future, as was the case with Mwandilakwira in 1972. Let us use the occasion of our independence anniversary to ponder the kind of future, and the kind of peace, we want for Malawi, and how best to plan for them.

Foreign Policy Mag's Top 100 Intellectuals

The current issue of Foreign Policy magazine (May/June 2008) has a list of what the magazine says are the top 100 public intellectuals living today. The subjective nature of the definition of "public intellectual", and the names of people I notice included, and left out, is enough to make me not take this exercise seriously.

But some of the people included are indeed inspirational to many people, regardless of the subjectivity of the foible of defining who a "public intellectual" is. So it got my attention, especially for those on the list who actually, in my perspective, strive to promote global peace and social justice (Noam Chomsky, Shirin Ebadi, Muhammad Yunus, etc).

I found it interesting that there are six Africans included (the magazine says 4, referring to "Sub-Saharan Africa"), two of them from Ghana (Kwame Anthony Appiah and George Ayittey). The other Africans are J.M. Coetzee (South African novelist and Nobel Laureate in Literature), Mahmood Mamdani (Uganda), Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (Egypt), and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria).

I imagined a realistic chance of finding at least two Malawians there as well, Thandika Mkandawire and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, but they are not included. There's an option for write-in candidates, so I went ahead and wrote-in both of them (I'm not sure if more than one write-in is
allowed). Ali Mazrui is also curiously missing, as is South Africa based political economist Patrick Bond, Michael Eric Dyson, Tariq Ali, Naomi Klein, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, among others (I guess one can argue about the infrequency with which some of these names appear in the public arena).

Other interesting characters on the list are Pope Benedict XVI, and Gen. David Petraeus, the US Commander in Iraq. There's also what I found to be an informative essay by the unpredictable Christopher Hitchens. He contends, for example, that the list is dominated by university professors, and informs something I had no idea about, that Gore Vidal never went to university. Jurgen Habermas and Slavoj Zizek, influential critical social theorists, are included.

You can find the whole list, and indeed write-in your own candidates whom you feel deserve to be included, at <www.foreignpolicy.com/intellectuals>. The closing date is May 15, after which the magazine will release it's version of the world's top 20 intellectuals.

Beneath Obama’s rebuke of Jeremiah Wright: Is a new global consciousness afoot?

When I learned that the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright was going to give a speech at Michigan State University on February 7^th, I spread the word to friends and colleagues I knew would love to hear Barack Obama’s pastor speak. Of the half dozen or so people I mentioned his name to, none of them had heard of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, let alone his spiritual connection to Barack Obama. I prepared a question to ask Rev. Dr. Wright, but as it turned out, I did not need to ask the question. Such was the freestyle nature of the luncheon with Rev. Dr. Wright that the topic came up on its own. Rev. Wright said one of his grand daughters came home from school one afternoon and immediately asked: “Grandpa, you and Barack cool?” To which the reverend responded, “Me and Barack cool.”

The grand daughter had overheard conversations at school in which media reports were said to have described a parting of ways between Obama and Rev. Dr. Wright. In fact the question I had prepared for Rev. Dr. Wright had been prompted by a March 6^th 2007 New York Times report in which Barack Obama had reportedly picked up the phone and disinvited Rev. Dr. Wright from Obama’s February 10^th 2007 launch of his presidential campaign. Obama was said to have told Rev. Dr. Wright that it would be advisable if he were not to show up at the launch.

The hue and cry that arose from the mainstream corporate media’s attention on the sermons of Rev. Dr. Wright appears to have died down, and the same media has reported that Obama appears to have weathered the storm with his ship more or less intact. But Obama’s campaign also carries hopes and aspirations about the image of Pan-Africa, aspirations captured in Paul Tiyambe Zeleza’s February 21^st article on The Zeleza Post. Thus almost a month after Obama’s public denunciation of Rev. Dr. Wright, it might be time to ask whether the challenge that Obama threw to the American populace about a frank discourse on race has been taken up or not. In denouncing his former pastor in the realpolitik terms he did, Obama was forced to sacrifice a part of his intellectual ideology in order to curry favor with a mainstream white America hell bent on turning a deaf ear to black America’s narratives. In so doing, Obama confirmed fears about the political compromises a black candidate is forced to make in America’s presidential politics, compromises that pit a viable black presidential candidate at odds with the aspirations of Pan-Africa and the Third World.

That Obama had to make the denunciations he did also characterizes the stubborn refusal in mainstream white America to engage with the painful discourse on the repercussions of US foreign policy, an exercise described as curiously absent especially amongst US peace educators, in a new book by Carl Mirra, a former marine and First Gulf War veteran, now associate professor at Adelphi University in New York. As we learn from Bill Fletcher Jr.’s and Manning Marable’s recent speeches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in the African American PeaceMakers as Agents For Change series, mainstream white America’s refusal to engage with the painful aspects of US foreign policy goes back to the days of African American peace leaders such as WEB DuBois, through to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Further to that, the whole episode of the anger expressed against Rev. Dr. Wright also puts the spotlight on the schizophrenic contradiction between America’s perfunctory commemorations of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s activism versus the excoriation of Rev. Dr. Wright, both of whose views have been critical of US policy and practice at home and abroad.

The March 6^th 2007 NYT report had seemed credible to me, seeing how Obama was shirking any talk of race and black people’s issues in the campaign. It was also disappointing; a sad, sobering parting of ways with a man Obama describes in such a profound, touching way in his autobiography Dreams from my Father. It was a confirmation of how to become a credible black presidential candidate with the majority white voters in American, one has to make a break with the facts and truths of the majority of black Americans’ perspectives of their lives in America.

But in his luncheon talk at Michigan State on February 7^th 2008, Dr. Wright said the New York Times report was a misrepresentation, and that everything was alright between him and Obama’s campaign. He went as far as saying until four months previously, as recent as October 2007, he did not believe mainstream America could embrace Obama’s candidacy the way it had happened in Iowa and other white majority states. He said the success of the Obama campaign was making him believe that the current generation of young Americans possessed a quality he was not aware of, and he realized that he was from a generation that may not have moved on the way young Americans, of all races, had. He said going by the support Obama was garnering amongst white college students, he was very hopeful for the future of the country.

On one hand, the speech Obama gave in Philadelphia on race in America makes one wonder whether Rev. Dr. Wright was always aware of what Obama really thought about the pastor’s views on race in America, and US foreign policy. On the other hand, one is left unsure as to whether Obama always found his pastor’s views on race and US foreign policy as “offensive” as he put it in his speech, or if he was indeed toeing a line a black presidential candidate in America needs to toe in order to become viable. Nothing in Obama’s Dreams from my Father suggests any slightest whiff of the latter position, leading one to wonder the extent to which a black presidential candidate in the United States has to go walking the tight rope of denouncing “radical blacks” while acknowledging the existence of racism in America.

The more authentic parts of Obama’s speech would appear to be the exhortations he made about the need for mainstream America to make the effort to understand the reality of life for black Americans. Said Obama: “. . . the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.” He added, in a rare moment that marked a remarkable coming to terms with an issue he had hitherto put great effort into avoiding, at least on the campaign trail, that the concerns of black people in America needed to be addressed in a real way. His frankness on this was refreshing, inasfar as this campaign. “But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

But Obama still had to appear to keep standing on mainstream ground so as to appeal to the white majority votes he can not do without. And he seized the opportunity to tell the truth about the indicators that demonstrate the depth of the experience of black America: wealth and income gap between black and white; concentrated pockets of poverty in urban and rural communities; a lack of economic opportunity among black men; the lack of basic services in urban black neighborhoods. Starkly missing was the stunning statistic that there are about 900,000 African Americans in prison, while there about 600,000 in college, figures presented by Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr. in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS TV series African American Lives.

The reaction to Obama’s speech was unprecedented. Getting online on the evening of March 20^th from Dowa district in Malawi, I read in a New York Times article that the speech was being discussed in university classrooms across the United States, and churches were spreading word that the speech would be the subject of Easter Sunday sermons. Among the numerous listservs that I subscribe to and participate in, four were actively discussing the speech, including one on which matters of race are normally not talked about. Suddenly, it appeared as if this was the first time that white Americans were being told that black Americans do have a legitimate concern with historical and contemporary racism. That this is exactly what Obama’s pastor, Rev. Dr. Wright, has been saying for years was made even more obscure by Obama’s politically strategic disowning and criticism of Rev. Wright, even as he urged an appreciation of where the pastor’s anger and that of many blacks came from.

But unlike the discussion on the four listservs, which was earnest and eager in accepting Obama’s exhortation, the mainstream media has been obsessed with relegating Pastor Dr. Wright to the fringes of incoherent radicalism. In the days following the speech, with the exception of the New York Times which demonstrated some rare open-mindedness, the mainstream corporate media revealed a deep-seated denial of the existence of the anger that Obama acknowledged. Instead, some in the mainstream media sought to further isolate Rev. Dr. Wright and paint him as a rabid radical who could only be touched with a nine foot pole. The attempt was to marginalize Dr. Wright as unrepresentative of any constituent of American society, expressing amazement that Obama associated with him for a whole twenty years. Such sentiments came from the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ward writing in the print edition of the Financial Times of London (March 22/23), Daniel Nasaw and Ewen MacAskill in the print edition of The Guardian of London (March 22), and an editorial in the Europe print edition of The Wall Street Journal (March 20-24).

The Guardian article reported that white voters in Pennsylvania and North Carolina were deserting Obama in the aftermath of the Pastor-gate issue, with one poll showing Hillary Clinton leading at 56 percent to Obama’s 30 percent in Pennsylvania, and 43 to 42 percent in North Carolina (p. 7). Two respondents interviewed in Philadelphia were quoted as saying by not leaving Rev. Dr. Wright’s church for another one, Obama shared his pastor’s opinions. It took an African American respondent to put a reality check to the gravy train, pointing out that it was only white America that found Pastor’s Wright’s anger new, “but these things happened to us” (ibid.). If white people felt uncomfortable with the pastor’s sermons, said the respondent, well, black people have felt uncomfortable for centuries in America. That punch line, left unqualified, ought to have pricked at the conscience of those in the mainstream who get alarmed when they hear a minority perspective they have always been shielded from.

Tim Wise expressed it sharply and squarely in an article originally published in Lip Magazine, and widely distributed on various websites. Wise, a deeply thoughtful and prolific anti-racist campaigner, exposed the inaccuracies involved in the claims that Dr. Wright said America deserved the 9/11 attacks, and that blacks should sing ‘God Damn America.’ Wise systematically and categorically laid a litany of the truths of black Americans’ lives that many white Americans refuse to hear about. Wrote Wise:

We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it.

Amongst his examples, Wise mentioned white people’s shock when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall refused to celebrate the 1987 bi-centennial of the constitution, arguing that most of those two hundred years had been years of “overt racism and injustice.” Wise also wrote about the disbelief amongst whites that a racist white police officer could frame a black man; white people’s shock upon learning that most black people viewed the US as a racist nation; white people getting “stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country,” among numerous other “shocks.”

Thus it was that many white people (not all) were shocked to hear what Rev. Dr. Wright had to say about racism in America, to the point of expecting Obama to publicly disown him.

So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred?

Wise’s exhortation to his fellow white Americans will most likely go unheeded, as he himself is probably written off as being on the fringes of radicalism as well. But his understanding of black America and its place in American society is as intimate as it is passionate. His choice not to excoriate Obama for his rebuke of Rev. Dr. Wright signifies the depth of that understanding. The question that persists for Obama now is what remains of his Pan-African identity, an identity he profoundly craved and beautifully constructed in his former life before politics. Clearly, the Obama who wrote Dreams from my Father is a much more authentic, deeply feeling, rigorously reflective intellectual, a far cry from the Obama campaigning to become president of the United States of America.

Despite the pretensions of the presidential campaign, Obama knows who he is, probably more so than many people in this world, a truism expressed by the New York Times columnist David Brooks on the PBS Jim Lehrer News Hour program earlier this year. Not only is Obama an exceptionally gifted writer, he is a very brilliant individual, a globally conscious intellectual, and, going by his 1995 autobiography, a Pan-Africanist, Third Worldist, and global cosmopolitan at heart.

For starters, Dreams from my Father is about 450 pages long, spanning his early days in Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, ending with his long-sought reunion with his fatherland in Kenya. The book was published in 1995 when Obama was 34 years old. Obama was in Kenya for only three months, the summer before his entry into Harvard Law School, yet out of those 450 pages, his three months in Kenya occupy about 155 pages, a whopping one third of the book! He went to Harvard University, where he probably spent no less than four years, yet his Harvard days warrant a pitiful two sentences, buried inside a nine-line paragraph (p. 437).

The most persuasive evidence about Obama’s global Pan-African identity can be found in what he writes about his three months in Kenya. On arrival at Kenyatta International Airport, the very first time that he lands on African soil, he immediately develops a powerful sense that he has arrived home, a home he has spent a lifetime searching for. His bag has not arrived with him, and he asks about what to do. A Kenyan woman, donning a British Airways uniform, notes the name on the form he has filled out, and asks if he is by any chance related to Dr. Obama. Obama responds: “He was my father.” That recognition of his name was the moment he had spent his conscious life hitherto longing for. He writes:

That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A., or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people’s memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, ‘Oh, you are so and so’s son.’ No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand.

More than a Pan-Africanist, Obama also carries sharp Third World instincts, aware of and in tune with the global solidarity that unites peoples of the world colonized and exploited by Europe and America. This is in evidence when a week or so later after his arrival in Kenya, he encounters the tensions that exist between black Africans and Kenyans of Asian origin. His cousin Auma calls him naive for imagining that everything is well between the two groups, reminiscing about his close friends from India and Pakistan in the United States, “who had supported black causes. . .” (p. 347). Obama muses, “My simple formulas for Third World solidarity had little application in Kenya. Here, persons of Indian extraction were like the Chinese in Indonesia, the Koreans in the South Side of Chicago, outsiders who knew how to trade and kept to themselves, working the margins of the racial caste system, more visible and so more vulnerable to resentment. It was nobody’s fault necessarily. It was a matter of history, an unfortunate fact of life” (p. 347-8).

Indeed, as Vijay Prashad reminds us in his recent book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2006), there used to be such a thing as a Third World project, which alongside other anti-imperialist projects such as Pan-Africanism, were part of the struggles that effectively ended political colonization around the world. Obama is fully conversant with this history, but is forced to avoid it for purposes of his presidential bid.

These then are the burdens thrust upon a black presidential aspirant in the United States, burdens few would happily shoulder. Obama appears to have the capacity to shoulder these burdens, although he must pretend to represent a parting of ways with such expectations. It is a balancing act tough enough to tire out the most seasoned athlete. For some, this parting of ways warrants little more than subdued ambivalence that an Obama presidency would do anything for black America, Pan-Africa and the Third World. For others, the demands of realpolitik require that Obama plays as close to mainstream white America as possible, including his public views on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Regardless of the true reasons for which Obama publically rebuked Rev. Dr. Wright, Obama’s candidacy does indeed represent something new in not just American politics, but also in the global discourse on race and identity. And Obama seems to be aware of this much more than perhaps many of those supporting his candidacy. It is in that awareness that hopes arise for a fundamental shift in global racial consciousness and the future of America’s place in it.

'International Thieves': Western Corruption and the Third World Financing of the Rich

Pan-Africa and the Third World are certainly on the move insofar as the west’s colonialist and racist perceptions of African and Third World people are concerned. However there are certain areas in which negative perceptions of African and Third World peoples are deeply entrenched, and will require specialized forms of informed and analytical critique to address them. Making these perceptions even harder and more complicated to deal with are tendencies within a few pockets of elites amongst African and Third World peoples themselves to pass on opportunities to address the global nature of some of the problems. The perception of corruption in Africa and other Third World countries offers one example where negative images of the global South persist, and are not adequately challenged by those endogenous elites in a position to make a difference. The story of the perception of corruption in Malawi, the staggering levels of capital flight from African countries, and the shortchanging of Zambia’s copper industry serve to illustrate the injustice of Western institutions in their hypocritical indictment of Third World corruption.

Contrary to his high profile and widely quoted pledge to stamp out corruption in Malawi made at his swearing-in ceremony in May 2004, President Bingu wa Mutharika is said to have conceded in February this year that corruption is rampant in Malawi. This follows from news that the country’s Corruption Perception rankings dropped 28 places in 2007, from 90 to 118. This has been the trend since 2001 when the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other major donors halted aid to the country, citing widespread corruption, amongst other reasons. It was the same story in 2005 when Transparency International released its 2004 National Integrity Systems TI Country Report.

That 2005 TI report was written by the late Nixon Khembo, who at the time of his death in December 2005 was a political scientist in the University of Malawi. In October 2007 the United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs’ Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) reported worsening corruption in Malawi, following the release of the 2007 Corruption Index from Transparency International. The report quoted a top Malawi government official, Henry Chimunthu Banda, then minister of energy and mining (now in transport), and erstwhile acting president while President Bingu wa Mutharika was attending the UN General Assembly, and two other civil society activists, as all agreeing with the TI assessment.

The IRIN report quoted Chimunthu Banda as observing that government was the largest employer in Malawi and therefore numerically more prone to corruption amongst public officials. Mabvuto Bamusi, national coordinator of the Human Rights Consultative Committee (HRCC), attributed the problem of corruption in Malawi to parliament’s refusal to approve the president’s choice for the position of director of the Anti-Corruption Bureau, adding that economic inequality and its resultant poverty were also part of the problem. Charles Kumbatira, executive director of Malawi Economic Justice Network (MEJN), said government had intentions to root out corruption but they needed to be matched with political will and action.

And commemorating the 2008 national anti-corruption day on February 5^th in Malawi, President wa Mutharika is said to have “conceded that corruption is rampant in Malawi’s three arms of government, namely judiciary, legislature and the executive.” This was reported by the internet-based newspaper, Nyasatimes. Hot on the heels of the president’s acknowledgement came a report from the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), which put it in no uncertain terms that Malawi was indeed a corruption-ridden country, as evidenced from a late 2007 survey which indicated that 71 percent of Malawians perceived the country to be thus. Despite the survey reportedly interwiewing respondents on their “perception” of corruption in Malawi, an IFES researcher, Rola Abdul-Latif, was quoted by Malawian newspaper The Nation as saying “It is not a secret. Malawi is a corrupt country. Corruption has not decreased from 2006.”

It is to their undoubted credit that Malawi’s political and civil society leaders acknowledge the existence of widespread corruption in the country. That first step is always necessary in attempting to address any problem. Beyond this acknowledgement that corruption is a big problem in Malawi however, there is also an urgent need to come to a deeper understanding of the broader aspects of corruption at the global level, in which Africa and other Third World countries are cheated out of billions of dollars every year by the very western institutions that go on to construct Africa as the most corrupt continent. Africa and the Third World pay a huge price when this perception and the corruption of the West itself go unchallenged. The complicity and facilitation of dominant and anti-Third World corruption indexes in this unjust practice need to be exposed.

The Western-based dominant indexes on corruption have a design that is automatically skewed against African and Third World countries, and unfairly tipped in favor of Western countries. The Tax Justice Network (TJN), formed in January 2007 at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, has been doing some ground breaking work in uncovering the design flaws of this paradigm. The TJN have been exposing the duplicity of these indexes and their anti-Third World bias. The work of the Tax Justice Network brings to light the massive corruption orchestrated by Western corporations with the facilitation of their governments, in plundering Africa and other Third World countries. TJN’s John Christensen was quoted in a 2007 radio documentary by Asad Ismi and Kristin Shwartz as saying for every $1 of so called “aid” money, $10 of corrupt money leaves Africa and goes to the West. And in his paper titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Most Corrupt of All,” presented at the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, Christensen describes how recent IMF stipulations for Third World privatization have opened up off shoring, money laundering, and tax evasion, all of them highly corrupt practices that none of the famed corruption indexes measure. Christensen attributes part of the problem to Transparency International’s definition of corruption: “the misuse of entrusted of power for private gain.”

According to Christensen, that definition focuses on corruption by public officials, but misses corporate directors and financial intermediaries who are responsible for most corruption, especially tax evasion and trade mispricing. As a result, Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) identifies Africa as the most corrupt continent. Ironically, 53% of countries said to be least corrupt by the TI index are offshore tax havens, where most of the corrupt money goes, and is never accounted for as tax returns owed to Third World countries. These tax havens include New Zealand, ranked the #1 least corrupt country; Singapore, ranked #5, Switzerland ranked #7.

At the African Studies Association annual conference in New York City last November, South African scholar Mvuselelo Ngcoya pointed out how Switzerland, ranked one of the least corrupt countries in the world, is home to the biggest commercial deposits of gold in the world, yet it has no known deposits of gold underground. All of that gold is extracted mostly from South Africa, Ghana, and other Third World countries known to have the biggest natural deposits of gold. The story of late Nigerian dictator needs no elaborate discussion here, taxpayer billions from an African country being deposited in Switzerland, with the African country being labeled one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and Switzerland one of the least.

Christensen has observed that a conservative estimate of US$1 trillion of dirty money crosses borders, with 50% of it being extracted from developing countries, and being deposited in Western countries. Capital flight from Sub-Saharan Africa is estimated at $274 billion per year, according to figures Christensen cites from the African Union. Developing countries have lost approximately $385 billion in undisclosed tax revenues, an indicator of the enormity of Western corruption which Transparency International, IFES, etc, never mention.

Christensen argues that there’s an urgent need to rethink the definition of corruption and its perception. He quotes Dr. Patrick Darling who says: “With one hand, the West has pointed the finger at corrupt African leaders, with its other hand, its bankers, lawyers,
accountants, art dealers, health authorities, universities, estate agents and embassies have been actively or passively encouraging wealth out of Africa into the West's economies.”

There’s little hope that any such change is imminent, but the effort must continue being a goal for African and Third World countries. Says Christensen:

The principal barrier standing in the way of progress towards achieving these goals is the lack of political will on the parts of the leaders of the OECD nations, most notably Switzerland, the USA and the UK, all of which are leading tax haven states. This lack of political will stems largely from the fact that western leaders, who point fingers at corrupt politicians and public servants in poorer countries whilst conveniently ignoring the harmful role of the offshore interface, are all too aware of the extent to which their own economies have become geared to dependence on capital flows from the poorer countries. They get away with this because public perceptions in the west have been shaped to pay no attention to the offshore interface. The CPI has done nothing to change this situation (Christensen, 2007, p. 16).

The effort to redefine corruption and put emphasis on how wealthy western countries are directly involved in corruption in African and Third World countries needs to especially focus on what is known as capital flight. Amit Basole, staff economist for the Center for Popular Economics (CPE) at the University of Amherst, points out how what was a US$40 billion net inflow of money into Third World countries has now reversed into a US$657 billion net outflow (cited from Ortiz, 2007; Boyce and Ndikumana, 2000). In an article on the CPE’s Econ-Atrocity blog, Basole points out that Sub-Saharan Africa alone has injected into the Western economies US$193 billion over a 26 year period, with most of it ending up in the US economy. “The insanity of this situation puts a question mark on the entire logic of the international financial system,” writes Basole.

He identifies three mechanisms through which Third World countries finance developed countries, namely, repayment of debt, accumulation of foreign exchange reserves, and trade mis-pricing. One of the most bizarre cases that exemplify the insanity of the international finance system and how it traps Third World countries into unending debt was explained by Ken Wiwa, son of the late Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro Wiwa who was executed by the Abacha regime in 1995. Reacting to news that Nigeria was going to be forgiven US$18 billion of debt, Wiwa wrote in the Guardian of London in July 2005: “it is as well to consider that the original debt was $5bn, and my country has paid back $16bn interest. And yet the books say we still ‘owe’ $35 bn!”

For instances of trade mispricing, Zambia’s case is illustrative. Asad Ismi and Kristin Schwartz’s radio documentary produced from the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi quotes Charles Abugre of the Tax Justice Network who spoke of how Zambia was being ripped off through trade mis-pricing. One example was how in 2004 the copper industry in Zambia under-reported its profits at US$1 billion, out of an estimated US$2-3 billion. Due to the low profit declared officially, Zambia received only US$8 million from the industry. Another example from Zambia appears in the March 2008 issue of the New African, in an article by Reginald Ntomba.

Ntomba writes that in the 2005-2006 fiscal year, the mining sector made US$4.7 billion. Out of that amount, the government of Zambia only obtained US$142 million in taxes, owing to tax concessions forced upon Zambia during the IMF and World Bank push for Zambia to privatize its mining industry (p. 47). It is this IMF and World Bank pressure to privatize, Ismi and Schwartz argue, that lies at the root of the explosion of global corruption in African countries.

On their own accord, the misperceptions and inaccuracies of corruption indexes in Africa and the Third World are enough to warrant urgent redress in the images they create of perpetually dysfunctional countries. But truth and honesty, though important in and of themselves, are not sufficient. Effective solutions to African and Third World problems require methodologically solid, analytically effective and ethically honest appraisals, otherwise the cycle of unworkable solutions and worsening consequences will keep repeating themselves.

Correction on article titled 'When a Pan-Africanist Library Burns: Kanyama Chiume, 1929-2007'

I wish to make a correction regarding the first paragraph of my article on the late Kanyama Chiume, posted on November 27, 2007, titled 'When a Pan-Africanist Library Burns: Kanyama Chiume, 1929-2007'. In the article I wrote that according to a response I had received to my query on Nyasanet about Mr. Chiume's whereabouts in 2003, Mr. Chiume had reportedly sold all his property and had "left Malawi for good, announcing that he would never be back in Malawi again, unless 'in a coffin.'" It has since come to my attention that Mr. Chiume never said those words. I have learned that contrary to leaving Malawi out of frustration in 1996, he in fact left in 2002, and it was due to illness, so he could be with his family in New York.

During all the time he was ill, according to Mr. Nathan Chiume, son of the late Chiume, "every single day he was impatient on going back home…"

I sincerely regret the statement, and wish apologize to the memory of the late Mr. Kanyama Chiume, and to his family, for the pain that the statement caused.

Building human libraries: Dr. wa Mutharika, food security and the Malawian elderly

The Nation newspaper in Malawi reports that its readers have voted the country's president, Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika, as the 'Nation Achiever' for the year 2007. Gracian Tukula, Editor of the Nation on Sunday, explains that the award is determined after a process that involves selecting a theme for that year, sending out nomination forms to a select group of people working in that focus area, inviting the general readership of the newspaper to also nominate their names, and having an independent committee sort out the nominations and count the votes. Following Dr. wa Mutharika's award, Tukula conducted an interview with the president, in which he expounds new thinking in Malawi about elderly and retired people. In the same interview the president also describes his government's recent success in dealing with a perennial famine problem .

Let's start with the issue of elderly and retired people. The elderly and retired people are the reason behind Dr. wa Mutharika's establishment of the Bingu Silver Grey Foundation. I have seen the foundation mentioned in Malawian papers and on the Internet a couple of times, but I never bothered to find out what it was. I don't know if it was because the foundation's name just didn't click with that part of my mind that lights up when something piques my curiosity.

Firstly, Dr. wa Mutharika's rationale for forming the foundation addresses one of the consequences emanating from the usually misleading concept of life expectancy, a concept that has never favored people from Third World societies. Bingu points out that the figure for Malawi has kept going down, plunging recently from 42 to 39 to 37. As a consequence, all the focus has been on young people, based on the assumption that there are very few Malawians living beyond those ages. Says the president: "This country has more people that are 60-plus than we ever knew."

Secondly, the idea behind the foundation lies at the heart of what I consider to be one of the most crucial indigenous modernity projects Malawi needs in order to cultivate better ways of understanding our problems and addressing them: knowledge production and dissemination. The foundation, according to the president, is aimed at bringing together the sum total knowledge reposited in the minds and experiences of elderly Malawians, making that knowledge deliberate, and sharing it with the majority of Malawians. We need to capture the president's thinking in full, with a lengthy quote: "We are here because these elderly people were here before us. They cared for us as we grew up. Therefore, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to them and we need to come in when they are unable to take care of themselves. As a matter of fact, some of the elderly have a lot of skills in various trades. Some of them were good doctors, scientists, singers, dancers and so on. So, I am trying to bring retired people together to ask them that why don't you transfer the vast knowledge and skills you have to the young people so that they are not buried with you. In the Orient — China, India, Thailand, Bangladesh and other countries — they have got things that they have been doing for 5,000 years and these were not written but were being passed on from one generation to another. After doing something for some time the father will teach the son and so on. I want Malawians to develop that spirit so that we can pass on the knowledge."

African and other Africa-centered intellectuals point out that elderly people in Africa are walking libraries, carrying in their memories and experiences vast amounts of human knowledge. In the long duree past, oral media used to be the primary means of articulating and disseminating practical and theoretical knowledge not only in Africa but elsewhere in the world. With the coming of modern methods of schooling and print technologies, we stopped developing and improving on our in-born mental capacities to process huge amounts of wisdom and practical knowledge using oral methods. Tragically, the new methods we adopted, using modern schools, are by nature exclusionary, elitist and abstract. The numbers of people who can effectively be
trained using these methods are, in comparison with the indigenous ones, appallingly small, leading to the exclusionary and elitist consequences we see in Malawi and other societies today. This results in restricted access to opportunities for social mobility and the cultivation of the human capital inherent in every breathing being.

Malawians are fond of accusing each other of jealousy and envy. Many people who single out these vices as the bane of Malawian society fail to bring the historical and sociological context knowledge production into consideration and as a result make this generalized accusation in a rather shallow, uncritical and unanalytical way. Unfortunately this includes President wa Mutharika himself, as when he tells Tukula in the interview: "The difficulty with our politics is that it is based on hatred, jealousy and envy. 'I don't like him and he must go.' We cannot progress like that."

This is not to deny the existence of hatred, jealousy and envy amongst Malawians, and their disastrous consequences on Malawian society, no. Rather, it is the absence of deeper, analytical, critical inquiry into the problem in question that is the issue. Without understanding the
historical, classist and socioeconomic contexts of jealousy in Malawi, we are advancing very few solutions to effectively deal with the problem. Would it be unreasonable to speculate that our failure to better understand the root causes of problems of jealousy in Malawi are partly a result of our failure to make use of the memories and experiences of our elders, who surely ought to be able to provide us with broader perspectives on the changes Malawian society has undergone over the last several decades?

While we are still on this question, it might also be interpreted as hypocritical, by some, that the president is talking about hatred and jealousy in Malawi amidst rumors that his government gave 2000 fertilizer coupons to each member of the president's cabinet, for distribution to supporters of the president's political party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), as alleged in the media. The allegation has also been repeated by Hon. John Tembo, leader of opposition in parliament and president of former ruling party the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), in an interview on his arrival from South Africa recently (Nyasatimes, Dec. 29, 2007). If such allegations pan out to harbor elements of truth, it will be difficult to take the president seriously in his comments about jealousy in Malawi.

One would want to learn more about the Bingu Silver Grey Foundation and what specific programs it is engaged in. But as is the practice with many Malawian institutions, they do not seem to have a place where one can make a first stop in the quest to learn more. One sees the foundation mentioned in many articles online, but no official website for the foundation comes up. As Victor Kaonga writes about the Internet in Malawi, many Malawian politicians are Internet shy and hardly make use of new media technologies. One hopes the foundation does have a website, or that they will construct one soon if they haven't already.

On a slightly different topic, that of the globally touted "Malawian solution to famine," the president tells Tukula that he is "encouraged to see people working hard to produce more food than just for their subsistence so that they can sell the surplus and use the money for other needs. That can only help the country's economy." He goes on to mention his government's program on irrigation, observing that so far the successes the country has registered have been made possible by good rains. The president says: "I am aware that if rain fails, agriculture fails and that means the economy also fails." Focusing on irrigation is a far more reliable way of consolidating the country's gains in food security that in fertilizer and seed input alone, for a drought-prone belt like the one Malawi lies in.

But there is one thing that might also need to be discussed in conjunction with food security in Malawi. From what I have seen lately in rural Dowa, Salima and Lilongwe districts, this farming season a lot of subsistence farmers have planted far more tobacco than they usually do. I don't have numbers to back this up, but it looks as if many farmers in these areas are planting more tobacco than maize, the staple crop. The reason is probably due to the good prices tobacco fetched at the auction floors this past market season. Should this end up being a widespread phenomenon, might there be a danger that come harvest time people will find themselves with an abundance of tobacco crop, and a deficit of maize? Apparently not, according to Dr. Thandika Mkandawire, who argues, in a Nyasanet response to this article, that venturing out of subsistence maize production into cash crops might be a sign that Malawi might be on the verge of turning the corner:

[It] would well be that now that we seem to have found a "technology" (or mini Green Revolution) to double maize output, we are ready to move beyond subsistence agriculture. Farmers who were barely able to feed themselves on less than two hectares may now be able feed themselves on half the land and use the other half for non-food cash crops. In some cases farmers may have considerable surpluses from the previous year to allow them to take the risk on commercial crops.

Dr. Mkandawire goes on to observe that "the increased maize production may reduce risk aversion and may finally have provided a reasonable basis for venturing into other crops," adding that Malawi just has "to get [. . .] out of subsistence farming."

When Dr. wa Mutharika went ahead with the subsidy program for farm inputs, he was going against the stipulations from international financial institutions, who approve of farm subsidies for their own farmers, but not for Third World farmers. Dr. wa Mutharika has been widely praised for having brought food security to a country that was devastated by drought and starvation twice in a space of four years. By establishing a foundation to mobilize and utilize libraries of human knowledge stashed away in the minds of elderly and retired people, the president might also be seen as going against international trends which write off elderly and retired people because of a misleading socio-econometric measure. Dr. wa Mutharika will have to find ways of resisting the temptation to divert state resources and use incumbency power for the benefit of his private foundation. Otherwise, in the context of Malawian life, it can be debated whether it makes more sense to establish a foundation whilst in office, as opposed to when one has exited office. The president will also have to broaden the new thinking about the elderly and the retired, so as to involve more Malawian institutions and individuals in harnessing and utilizing the knowledge they have to offer.

What must not be lost sight of, however, is the anti-establishment pedigree that marks so far two ideas that Mutharika has put his mind to, and has defied so-called international convention. With the tendency to analyze African leaders and their countries based on how they measure up to European and American standards, Africa needs more leaders who can serve their people, in an informed, thoughtful and meaningful way, regardless of externally referenced criteria.

Who gives who, really? Weaning Malawi out of donor dependency

For a country that is said to rely entirely on donor money for its development budget, can today's opening of the new Ntchisi-Mponela road, said to have been financed solely from Malawian taxpayer money, be a turning point from dependency to self-sufficiency? It came quite as a surprise to me to learn that the road, which cost MK2.5 billion (approx. US$18 million), was financed by not a single penny from donor money, according to Hon. Henry Mussa, minister for public works and transport. The minister said government was able to set aside that amount of money for development projects, as a result of fiscal discipline measures that the president has introduced. In fact Malawi is at the moment enjoying very high confidence levels from the international community, if we go by recent media reports, both domestic and international media. Barely a week ago the New York Times had on its front page a story about how Malawi is ending famine by disregarding stipulations from international financial institutions.

This week opened with news that the European Union was going to give Malawi MK90 billion (upward of US$400 million) for infrastructural development, and hardly had that news settled when more news broke that Malawi had qualified for the Millennium Challenge Account, set up by United States President George Bush. The amount from the MCA was not announced, although media reports suggested that the amount ranged between US$65 and almost US$700 million. And hot on the heels of that news came yet another announcement to the effect that the Malawi Government has signed a memorandum of agreement with the United Nations, for Malawi’s progress on the Millennium Development Goals, worth US$231 million (MK33 billion), according to Nyasatimes.

Not too long ago, just before delivering his speech at the UN General Assembly meeting in September this year, President Mutharika spoke at Columbia University’s World Leaders’ Forum, following an article in the Financial Times , co-authored by Jeffrey Sachs and Glenn Denning, on how Mutharika's decision to introduce fertilizer and seed input subsidies, discouraged by the international donors, had reaped Malawi a bumper harvest of surplus maize. Mutharika spoke on the same day as Iranian President Ahmadinejad, but all the media attention was on the afternoon event at which Columbia University Lee Bollinger, in the eyes of many, waylaid and arrogantly harangued Ahmadinejad. There was no mention of President wa Mutharika’s speech earlier that morning on the same campus.

Many Malawians are thrilled about this spate of what is considered exceptionally good fortune for the country. But for those who have never been comfortable with the whole conventional paradigm that constructs Third World countries as perpetually dependent on developed countries, these developments raise new questions rather than answers. The conventional paradigm is very well established with a hegemonic dominance that totally suppresses any notion about how much money and wealth leave Africa and other Third World countries each year, and go to the global North. Very few people want to talk about that. But those who do, such as the Tax Justice Network, the Jubilee Debt Campaign, The New African magazine, activists and intellectuals, among others, make it clear that the amounts that are extracted out of the continent's natural and mineral resources, not to mention intellectual labor, are far more than the amounts that are given as official aid. The ideal would be a world that recognized how much interdependent on each other we have always been, at the global level, or the truth of the matter is that much of that interdependence has occurred through violence, conflict, and exploitation. I therefore mention the desire to end dependency with a caveat. Even when economists like New York University’s Professor William Easterly, who on the surface appears to appeal to leftist critical traditions in their critiques of aid, dare not mention these facts, as in his book The White Man’s Burden: Why The West’s Efforts To Aid The Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good.

A radio documentary produced from the 2007 World Social Forum held in Nairobi, Kenya, revealed that for every US$1 that goes to Africa as aid, US$10 more leave Africa and go to the West as dirty money. It was also revealed in that radio documentary, produced by Asad Ismi and Christina Swartz, and titled The Ravaging of Africa, that the mining giant Anglo American which owns the largest share of copper mining in Zambia, in 2006 posted profits of up to US$3 billion. Yet the company under-declared on its returns to the Zambian government, and ended up paying taxed for a miserly US$8 million. Elsewhere on this blog I have written about how Nigeria is known to have initially borrowed US$5 billion, and by 2005, had repaid US$16 billion, and still owed US$35 billion. Conventionally trained economists and the rest of us find nothing absurd about this, accepting it as the workings of compound interest calculations in a capitalist framework. We are still unaware of how new networks of tax havens, offshoring mechanisms, and trade mispricing are all hauling huge amounts of money from Africa and other developing countries, to keep enriching the West, as has always historically been the case.

Even with the new road just inaugurated in Malawi today, the company that was awarded the contract, Mota Angil, is from Portugal. Malawian taxpayers are giving US$18 million of their hard-earned money to a developed European country. In his speech at Mponela, where he spoke for about nine minutes before proceeding to Ntchisi Boma where the main ceremony took place, the president repeated his warning to "colonialists" who exploit Malawian farmers by buying their tobacco at below market prices. He reported that on his way back from Portugal yesterday where he was attending the EU-Africa summit, he stopped over in Cairo, Egypt, where he secured more markets for Malawian tobacco. The president went further, in a somewhat unrelated thread, to warn that any Westerner who holds Malawians in contempt and treats them as if they are inferior beings will be asked to leave the country.

I was preoccupied with other work matters so I was unable to proceed to Ntchisi to watch the rest of the ceremony. But I watched his speech there, and those of the Member of Parliament for the area, Hon. Nkhosa Kamwendo, and the minister for public works and transport, Hon. Henry Mussa. Hon. Kamwendo is an opposition MP, and he said he was speaking not about his concerns, but rather about the people's concerns. He said there was food crisis in Ntchisi, and requested the president to send food relief. Both Hon Mussa and President Mutharika appeared to use the opportunity to jump on Hon. Kamwendo. Mussa said he was going to contradict Kamwendo, who as an opposition MP was against the budget in the mid months of this year, a situation that raised tensions in much of the population who feared that the country would grind to a halt if the deadline for passing the budget went with no agreement. Mussa insinuated that by rejecting the budget, Kamwendo and his fellow opposition MPs were rejecting the very kind of development his own district was witnessing today.

The president went even further. He repeatedly told the crowd that their MP was “lying” to them by being in the opposition and asking for government help. He extended a subtle, implicit invitation to Kamwendo, without necessarily spelling out what he meant, to come and join the government so they can work together. But the audience knew what the president meant. Where upon the eager dancing women shot to their feet and broke into a spontaneous chant: “Achoke!” “Achoke!” (He must go!). At first I was impressed that our current president, unlike previous ones, is tolerant enough to allow an opposition MP to speak at such a function. In fact I noticed one if not more dancing women in the audience dressed in MCP colors, with the late Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda prominently displayed on the chest. Hearing the attacks on the opposition politician, and the president’s implicit invitation for him to leave his party and join the president’s party, it made me wonder if we as a country will ever fully accept the fact that we claim to have opted for multiparty politics. Our mindset seems not to have accepted that. Or is it yet another symptom of our dependency on foreign ideas, which, as with the donor money we feel entitled to, we never critically question whether multiparty politics can indeed work for us? Does it ever really work even in those countries that purport to champion democracy, and use military force to impose it on others?

When Global Voices Malawi authors meet




Although we are not quite there yet, the beginning of the year 2008 will mark one year when the two Global Voices authors for Malawi, Victor Kaonga and myself, will have been writing roundups on the Malawi blogosphere. Victor and I live half a world apart, and are always in contact via email and phone. But we had never met before, until this past weekend. We are frequently in and out of Malawi, but never at the same time. That changed this weekend when we both flew into Malawi within days of each other, and managed to meet, albeit very briefly. We should be able to meet again, this time for much longer.

When a Pan-Africanist Library Burns: Kanyama Chiume, 1929-2007

When in 2003 I wrote on the Malawi discussion listserv Nyasanet, asking if anybody knew the whereabouts of Kanyama Chiume, somebody responded and said Kanyama had sold his property around 1996 and left Malawi for good, announcing that he would never be back in Malawi again, unless “in a coffin.” This week Kanyama Chiume, a Pan-Africanist who was at the forefront of Malawi’s independence throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and was later forced into exile by Dr. Kamuzu Banda, will be returning to Malawi, “in a coffin.” Chiume died on November 21, in New York, after a prolonged illness. He died a day before he would have turned 78, according to a website created by his family to commemorate his life.

The passing of Kanyama Chiume is a solemn moment that forces us to rethink what befell a beautiful dream that at its most daring moment ushered a huge part of the African world into freedom from Western imperialism. Kanyama Chiume was an articulate voice of that dream, and his passing pushes us further away from ever coming to grips with what happened to the dreams of independence and Pan-Africanism. Thankfully, though, Mr Chiume was a uniquely gifted individual who used his many talents to leave a cache of his writings from which we can glean a few nuggets towards answering those questions. One of the most authoritative places where we can gain insights into who Chiume was and the role he played in the liberation process for the Sub-Saharan African region is his eponymously titled 1982 autobiography, Kanyama Chiume, published by Panaf Books in their Pan-African Great Lives Series.

Mr. Chiume loved Malawi and Africa, and he dedicated a good part of his life to the struggle for the freedom of African peoples everywhere. It was this dedication to Malawi and to Africa, and his frankness about it, that displeased agents of neocolonialism, who slipped a wedge between Malawi’s first president Dr. Kamuzu Banda and his nine-member cabinet. Three months after independence, Malawi experienced what has become commonly referred to as “The Cabinet Crisis,” a turning point in the history of Malawi which also served as a cog in the giant wrench that stopped the Pan-Africanist movement elsewhere on the continent. It took thirty years for Malawi to emerge out of the dictatorship that followed that crisis.

Born on November 22, 1929, at Usisya in northern Malawi, Chiume wrote of his name as meaning “another piece of meat for you,” a lament from parents who had tired of many deaths in the family. Chiume’s younger brother died two months after being born, and in a tragic twist of fate, Chiume’s own mother died the following day. She was 37, Chiume tells us. His uncle came from Tanganyika, performed the funereal rites, and took Chiume to Tanganyika, now Tanzania. There Chiume quickly picked up KiSwahili, and excelled in the education system there. Chiume went to Dar es Salaam schools in the mid-1940s, at a time when Dar es Salaam was a hotbed for political activity amongst Africans. Influence from Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah came whilst Kanyama was in secondary school. Chiume would become Secretary of the Tabora Upper School Debating Society in his last year there. His debating skills would later blossom whilst as a politician in then Nyasaland, now Malawi. Tabora Upper School was the same school where future president of independent Tanzania, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, also went. In his capacity in the debating society Chiume was able to invite Nyerere back to the school to debate the topic of whether Africans were better off under colonial partitioning. Nyerere and his team so thoroughly thrashed the opposition, led by white colonial teachers and administrators, that the school threatened Chiume with expulsion back to Nyasaland.

Chiume went to Makerere College in 1949, the only institution of higher learning in the entire East African region, and in 1951 he was admitted into Makerere College’s Medicine School. Chiume later changed his major to Education, after discovering that he “could not stand human dissection” (p. 52). He majored in Physics, Chemistry and Biology. This was much to his uncle’s chagrin, who provided him with everything and deeply wanted Chiume to become a medical doctor. At Makerere Chiume’s contemporaries were people who would in later life become some of Africa’s accomplished scholars and public officials. Some of his college mates include B. Ogot, Kenya’s celebrated historian and Chancellor of Moi University in Eldoret, and the current Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki.

Chiume became president of the Makerere College Political Society, while Mwai Kibaki was a committee member. Later Chiume was joined at Makerere by other Nyasas, Vincent Gondwe, David Rubadiri (who would later become Vice Chancellor of the University of Malawi), and Augustine Bwanausi (who would later become a cabinet minister in Malawi). Chiume was also chairperson of the Makerere College Education Society. Chiume and other students formed a Nyasaland Students Association at Makerere, an association that helped the Nyasaland African Congress by doing research, and by also linking up with fellow Nyasas at Fort Hare College, where Henry Masauko Chipembere, a lifelong friend and political colleague of Chiume’s, went for his own university education.

After graduating from Makerere College Chiume taught at Alliance Secondary School in Dodoma, Tanganyika, and later won a scholarship to study law at Ramjas College in Delhi, India. Upon being approached by the Nyasaland African Congress to stand in the country’s first general election in 1956, Chiume accepted, and decided not to further pursue his interest in law. He had by this time already resigned from Alliance, after quarrelling with the white headmaster who had insinuated that the presence of a pre-adolescent girl in Chiume’s household might create immoral temptations. Chiume was extremely offended by the remark, which further gave him resolve to fight for the dignity of Africans. “I had made up my mind there and then to plunge myself into politics and to help remove the obstacles that lay before Africans who wished to have human dignity. I was determined to try and play my part, however small, to free Mother Africa” (p. 71).

In the 1956 general elections Chiume writes that he got the most votes of any candidate, and thereby became one of five African representatives in the Legislative Council. Chiume became deeply involved in not only Malawi’s independence struggle but also the struggles of other African countries. He represented his people at the 1958 Pan African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) in Zanzibar, and later that year was a part of the steering committee of the Accra All African People’s Congress, the committee that was working to lay the foundation for a future United States of Africa.

In all his travels to various African countries engaged in the struggle for independence, Chiume did not see individualized nations, separated from one another. Rather he saw one large Pan-Africa. A true Pan-Africanist, Chiume made close personal friendships as well as political and professional contacts with Africans across the continent and beyond. In the short years he was in government, he held several ministerial portfolios, including external affairs, education, and information, positions he took full advantage of in his travels to open up opportunities for Malawians and to cement relations amongst African societies.

When Ghana obtained her independence in 1957, Malawi, seven years away from her own independence, received a huge moral boost, as did many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Malawi’s first president the late Dr. Kamuzu Banda was a very close friend of Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, having known each other in their activist days in Britain where Dr Banda practiced medicine. We owe it to Chiume who described the deep involvement of Dr. Nkrumah in Malawi’s own struggle for independence from colonial rule. According to Chiume, Dr. Nkrumah made available to Malawi financial assistance, ranging from ₤100 to ₤10,000 on various occasions. Nkrumah offered air tickets for Chiume to fly to Ghana in transit between Malawi and Britain, where they continued strategizing and mobilizing resources for Malawi’s independence struggle. In Ghana Chiume was treated as a hero, given triumphant welcomes, and “carried shoulder high amidst shouts and placards to the effect that a Nyasalander murdered is a Ghanaian dead” (p. 122).

Nkrumah was unequivocal about the importance of victory in Malawi’s struggle for independence, expressing to Chiume his “vehement denunciation” of imperialism in Nyasaland. Nkrumah provided the services of a skilled Ghanaian lawyer, Mills Odoi, to come to Malawi and assist in the legal proceedings of extricating Malawi from colonialism.

Chiume saw first hand Nkrumah’s larger vision for the emancipation of all of Africa, outlining the idea of a Pan-African government to Chiume thus: “Nkrumah talked about the urgent need for an All-African government. ‘Many of our troubles, Chiume,’ he emphasized, ‘are due to the fact that we are not united. We must have a continental government to prevent the further balkanization of Africa and, as far I am concerned, when Malawi is finally free and only seven of us are ready, we should just plunge into it. Others will follow.” (p. 167).

In his day Kanyama Chiume was probably the most traveled member of the new Malawi government. Wherever he went in his capacity as minister he never failed to advocate for Malawians and Africans, and was always seeking opportunities to bring back home to Malawians. He was able to obtain assistance in the form of scholarships and material help, from many countries, including Egypt, Algeria, India, Ghana, France, Canada and the United States, among others. When he visited the United States in 1963, his entourage successfully arranged for a meeting with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but King had to cancel at the last minute and without prior warning, going to Louisiana to attend to emerging matters. They requested a meeting with President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, but were unable to meet them. They were however able to meet with Dr. Ralph Bunche, the 1950 Nobel Peace laureate, the first person of color to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Chiume’s stay in America widened his Pan-Africanist purview, at once observing the racist society black Americans lived in, and the effects that racism had on their identity struggles. Chiume wrote:

But the majority were treated as though America was not their real home, and they were made to believe that they had no past, no heritage and no history. His African forebears were presented to him as savages who had sold him into slavery. He was discouraged from finding his identity in Africa and yet the struggle he was waging in his adopted country was basically the same struggle that his African brothers were waging. While Africa remained in bondage, I felt, so would the Afro-American remain oppressed in the USA. His real hope for the future lay in him discovering who he was. The black scholar must help rewrite Africa’s history, and the black educationalist must impart the truth about our great continent. In this renaissance the Afro-American and the African must work together (p. 163).

Chiume made sure to bring this message back home from the United States, but he was doubtful if Dr. Banda, who himself had spent many years going to school in the United States, shared this worldview. Dr. Banda was far more interested in consolidating his political relationship with white colonialists in Southern Africa, including the Portuguese in next door Mocambique, and in South Africa. This incensed Malawi’s neighbors, including Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Zambia’s Kaunda, who agreed with Chiume and the other Malawian cabinet ministers that Banda’s liaisons with settler colonies in the region was a betrayal of the struggles the Africans in these countries were fighting against their oppressors. The differences between Dr. Banda and his cabinet ministers grew and became irreconcilable three months after Malawi officially got its independence. Over the years, Chiume would acquire the unenviable accolade of being Dr. Banda’s “enemy number one.”

While Chiume’s account of what led to the crisis focuses mostly on the foreign policy and philosophical disagreements between Banda and his cabinet on the country’s relationships with fellow African countries, Henry Masauko Chipembere provides another perspective that is, for one reason or another, rarely mentioned in the analyses of Malawi’s 1964 Cabinet Crisis. The result is that some analyses of how Malawi embarked on the road to dictatorship fall into the stereotypical description of African leaders as being obsessed with simple-minded power grabbing and a cruelty overdrive. While African leaders indeed deserve the lashing and bashing they routinely receive, this analysis provides too narrow a perspective and fails to consider the political context and historical forces within which colonialism was imposed and resisted.

In a paper written by Chipembere and reprinted in Chipembere: The Missing Years (Ed. Colin Baker, 2006), Chipembere provides an account of a sustained, thorough effort by the British administrators to destabilize the newly independent Malawi by driving a wedge between Dr. Banda and his young cabinet. All of a sudden, Dr. Banda began rebuking his ministers in full public view, much to the surprise of the ministers.

Dr. Banda had never been lacking in frankness in his dealings with those of us who worked close to him. He had never been slow to criticize or rebuke when he thought we had made a mistake. But such criticisms had always been made in private. To everyone’s surprise, towards the end of 1963, he developed the habit of doing so in public, and the tone and content of his remarks were often so belligerent as to constitute an attack, challenge, or denunciation of his own cabinet (p. 265).

The answer to this question, Chipembere tells us, did not take long to start showing. It requires a lengthy quote for its full impact to be noticed:

A few weeks later we began to have some idea of the cause of these attacks on us. A colleague of mine and I were visiting a number of neighboring African countries. In one of these, we learned from intelligence sources that the British administrative and intelligence officers who surrounded Dr. Banda felt insecure in their positions as long as those of us who were regarded as radicals were in the cabinet. They feared that we would soon demand that their posts be Africanized i.e. that they should be replaced by Africans about whose political loyalty and dedication the government could be absolutely confident. The officers also believed that we were potentially, if not actually, communist sympathisers and would lead the country into the communist camp. So they were striving to work for our dismissal from the cabinet. To achieve this, they were systematically sowing seeds of suspicion and distrust in Dr. Banda’s mind. They were shadowing us and were covering every meeting we addressed. Intelligence reports submitted to the Prime Minister concerning our activities and speeches were written in a way as to make the Prime Minister believe that we were, to borrow one of his favorite phrases, ‘building ourselves up’ at his expense, trying to project an image equal to, or higher than, that of the Prime Minister (p. 265-266).

Today we know that Malawi was far from the only Third World country that was penetrated and interfered with in this way. We know the forces that were behind the military coup that ousted Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, as well as the elements that instigated the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo DRC. And this interference has never ended, with its long hand suspected and sometimes caught in other conflicts on the continent, including Mocambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere in the Third World. We also know of the complicity of fellow Africans who become entangled in this enterprise, wittingly or unwittingly.

Chiume was lucky to leave Malawi alive, after attempts to assassinate him and the other dissenters. Attempts on his life followed him even outside Malawi. He sought asylum in Tanzania where in September 1975 he launched a political party, the Congress for the Second Republic of Malawi (CSR). He brought that party back to Malawi in the early 1990s when Malawians decidedly told Dr. Banda they no longer wished to be a one-party state. For a brief while Chiume was given positions in the new government that took over in 1994, the most visible one being chair of the state-run book seller, the Malawi Book Service, which soon closed its doors as IMF-driven privatization took a hold on Malawi’s economy. The new freedom did not mean much for Chiume, who found himself marginalized as out-of-touch matchona (exiles) and whose idealism was checked by “obvious tendencies of intolerance, misuse of public funds, the resurgence of political violence and corruption,” according to an October 1996 AFP report.

Chiume was said to have become too disillusioned to continue from where he had left off in the 1960s, and left Malawi again, this time willingly, vowing never to return except “in a coffin.” For a while a few Malawians talked of how the country has never made a real effort to capitalize on the wealth of knowledge and wisdom kept by her huge Diaspora. At one point one Malawian wondered why the University of Malawi could not offer people like Chiume resident professorships where they would impart their world knowledge to future generations of Malawians. It may perhaps not even be too awkward to ask how many Malawians have ever read Chiume’s autobiography, or other writings, owing to the lengthy lists of books, publications and other material that were banned in Dr. Banda’s Malawi.

Malawianizing the Internet: Discussion forums and the harnessing of knowledge: An Interview

The interview below was conducted on October 22 with Malawian journalist Kondwani Kamiyala of The Nation newspaper, and a part of what I said was used for a feature article that Kondwani wrote on the uses that Malawians put the internet to. This was before the BBC Africa Have Your Say program of Thursday November 8, which debated criticism of Malawi on the Internet and the issue of patriotism. Kondwani's feature appeared in the Society section of the Weekend Nation of Saturday November 10, 2007, and is reproduced on Kondwani's blog.



Where are you based at the moment?

Starting in 2006 I spend a number of weeks in the year in Mponela, Dowa, and the other times I'm at Michigan State University in the United States.

What is your occupation?

In Dowa I work as technical adviser for Miske Witt & Associates, Inc., on the USAID-funded Primary School Support Program: School Fees Pilot (PSSP: SFP), helping in the development and implementation of the Beginning Literacy Program in Malawi (BLP/M), aimed at improving the teaching of early literacy in early primary education in Dowa. In the United States I teach and do academic advising in Peace and Justice Studies, in the Department of Philosophy, at Michigan State University. I am also an author for Global Voices Online, an initiative of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, which follows and compiles blogs from around the world, focusing mostly on countries and regions outside Western Europe and the United States..

How has Nyasanet been beneficial to you, in connecting you to Malawians at home, and those in the diaspora?

This September marks 10 years since I first subscribed to Nyasanet, which I was introduced to by Dr. Dean Makuluni whom I first met at the University of Iowa (USA) in 1997. When used carefully, Nyasanet can provide one with a rich, broad educational experience, especially in learning about Malawi and other parts of the world from the perspectives other Malawians as well as non-Malawians who participate on Nyasanet. As somebody who studies writing pedagogy, Nyasanet provides an opportunity to explore writing, debating and analytical skills, for those who follow the debates and participate in them in a serious, comprehensive way. Fellow Malawians on Nyasanet have been very helpful in providing academic as well as general information in many areas. It serves as a repository of the various skills and capacities Malawians at home and around the world possess, skills that benefit our country and our world in ways many people are not aware of. In addition, there's of course the facility of helping one connect with friends, former classmates and former workmates, and other Malawians one would otherwise not have dreamed of ever meeting.

How has Nyasanet helped you get information on Malawi at the moment?

The above response also addresses a part of this question, but let me add that there are many Malawians who possess so much information on the history of Malawi, its contemporary issues, as well as specific disciplinary knowledge on various aspects of our nation, our African and Pan-African neighbours, and the world at large. With the proliferation of websites, online newspapers and print newspapers going online, internet radios, blogs, and other news media, Nyasanet serves as a one-stop source where Malawians post things they find elsewhere on the Internet and share with other Malawians. The significance of this type of resource is under-appreciated, and Dr Llosten Kaonga, the list owner of Nyasanet, deserves to be thanked and specially honoured for having initiated the forum, and for sustaining it for over 15 years now.

How best can Malawians utilise existing resources, like Nyasanet, on the Information Superhighway to foster development in the country?

This is an excellent question. Almost every Malawian agrees that as a nation we have enormous problems, although not many understand how many of these problems originate from the historical context of Malawi and the Pan-African world in our troubled relationship with the West. One really difficult problem resulting from this history has been the question of recognizing and producing relevant knowledge for the solving of problems, small and large, and how to promote our knowledge-making capacity, and make knowledge available to as many Malawians and Africans as possible. Forums such as Nyasanet, MalawiTalk, Malawiana, etc, have a huge potential to facilitate this knowledge-making process, and make various kinds of knowledges accessible to everyone, especially those who need them most. These are the knowledges any society needs for its development, however you define development (we can discuss this as a different topic). These knowledges are available on the Internet, and they are increasing by the minute.

In Malawi we need to do two things, broadly speaking, to facilitate this knowledge-making and knowledge dissemination process. First is to search for new ways of bringing this technology to the average Malawian. One way of doing this would be to tap into opportunities that bring computers to schools, especially primary and secondary schools, and teacher training colleges. A challenge here would be how to bring computers to schools that have no electricity. But there are people who are already working on this. We need to know who they are, and find out how we can benefit from such initiatives. Mzuzu University has a degree program in Renewable Energy Technologies, which among other things trains students in solar technologies, or at least it should. This program deserves utmost attention from government, the private sector, and other forward thinking individuals. This can help us think of how to bring energy and technology to rural parts of Malawi, a development ESCOM has decidedly failed in and frighteningly let the country down. Besides schools, we should also be thinking of other knowledge and social infrastructure in the villages, such as libraries, health centres, community centres, churches, etc.

Second is to Malawianize the Internet. By this I mean to put as much relevant information as possible on the Internet, using as many Malawian languages as we can. That way any Malawians who benefit from solar technology and cheap computers in villages can easily access knowledge on how to, for example, construct a khola that multiplies the number of eggs a chicken hatches, how to teach an aspect of arithmetic to a large class of 300 pupils sitting under a tree, among other examples. In both strategies, primary and secondary school teachers have a specially significant role to play. We need to ensure that every teacher graduating from a teacher training college, from Domasi and the other university colleges knows how to use a computer, and how to access the Internet. And then we must work on making sure these teachers continue to have Internet access when they go to teach in the schools, especially the rural schools. It may sound like day dreaming, but imagination is a powerful motivator and a mover of mountains.

Do you belong to any other forums (for instance professional fora for your particular area of interest) and how do you differentiate these, if at all, with such general discussion forums as Nyasanet?

Like other people I know, I belong to no less than 30 other forums, which for me span disciplines such as the history of education, World History, African literature, African American Studies, language policy studies, the teaching of Africa, peace studies, the philosophy of history, Marxism, the study of slavery, genocide and holocaust studies, Information Technology Malawi, and many others too numerous to list here. Of course I am also on listservs that are not academic in nature. Many of the lists I am on are moderated, and you have to have an academic and research interest in the discipline to be subscribed. The content on these lists is mostly the forwarding and sharing of information relevant to people in those disciplines, with very little heated debate, expect for the Marxism list and IT Malawi list. Nyasanet is different (as is IT Malawi) in that it is not moderated in that sense, and thus the debates go in many directions. You also get your fair share of nonsense, and lots of unreflective political partisanship , which some people find time-wasting and a nuisance. But the elders were right when they said "Walira mvula walira matope", so I take this as part of any normal society. You take from Nyasanet as much as you give.

Any other comments?

I think that the above is sufficient. But I must thank you for this brilliant idea, which confirms my belief that Malawian newspapers and the Malawian media are some of the most important resources we have as a nation, and whose role at the forefront of the development agenda needs the support of us all. Please keep it up.

Hedging hegemony: Dr Kyalo Manthi, African fossils & the ownership of science

When the news broke out in August of this year that new archaeological research in Kenya urged huge reversals in the conventional wisdom about the theory of evolution, the chasm in the reporting between the African media and the Euro-American one was astoundingly wide. Almost all of the media in the United States and in Britain who wrote about the news attributed the finding to Maeve Leakey and other Euro-American scientists. The African newspapers, on the other hand, attributed the discovery to Kenyan palaeontologist Dr Fredrick Kyalo Manthi. One writer, writing in the Daily Nation of Kenya, pointed out the discrepancy, while everyone else just reported on the finding and its hard facts.

The production and institutionalization of what becomes acceptable as knowledge is riveted with racial and geo-strategic politics, and is never neutral. A closer look at how this politics unraveled in the reportage of Dr Kyalo Manthi’s momentous discovery reveals how this tag-of-war still goes on today when most of us would like to believe that knowledge is power, and is unmediated by interest. Unfortunately the reality is not as palatable as that.

Dr. Kyalo Manthi. Photo courtesy of http://www.prehistoryclubkenya.org

The facts of the discovery are that the conventional scientific view has been that we human beings of today, homo sapiens, are an evolution out of our ancestor who walked erect, homo erectus. Homo erectus is supposed to have evolved out of an earlier ancestor, homo habilis. The earliest fossils for both species have been found in East Africa, leading most scientists to assert that Africa is the ancestral home of every single human being alive today on planet Earth. That part remains virtually unchallenged, at least in the scientific community, from the understanding of someone like me who is not an archeologist. What is now being questioned however is the idea that homo habilis existed earlier, out of whom homo erectus evolved, later. The finding in Kenya suggests that both species may have co-existed over a 500,000 year overlap. That is the news that is said to have overturned existing knowledge, leading to a need to rewrite that aspect of the theory of evolution. For our purposes as students of the Pan-African world and its place in the larger world, it is important to examine the politics accompanying this kind of knowledge production, and the effects of how the knowledge is packaged to the rest of the world.

The earliest date the story was carried was August 8, starting with The Washington Post whose headline was “Fossil shakes evolutionary tree”, by Seth Borenstein, of the Associated Press (AP). Borenstein wrote: “The new research by famed paleontologist Maeve Leakey in Kenya shows our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, calling into question the evolution of our ancestors.” Borenstein went on to explain how “In 2000 Leakey found an old H. erectus complete skull within walking distance of an upper jaw of the H. habilis, and both dated from the same general time period.”

A slightly modified version of the same AP story by Borenstein appeared in the Denver Post the next day. “The discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the same time in Kenya. That pokes holes in the chief theory of man's early evolution - that one of those species evolved from the other.”

On the same day the British Broadcasting Corporation published an article on its website, on the same story, written by James Urquhart, titled “Finds test human origins theory.” While the BBC story did not make the overt claim made by The Associated Press’s Seth Borenstein that the research was done by Maeve Leakey, it is still revealing to look at who Urquhart mostly quoted. To his credit, James Urquhart does state that the skull causing this major scientific shift was “discovered by Frederick Manthi of the National Museums of Kenya”. He quotes “Professor Meave Leakey, palaeontologist and co-director of the Koobi Fora Research Project,” “Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum,” and “Fred Spoor, professor of developmental biology at University College London, and co-author of the paper.” None of the honorific and academic titles used for Maeve Leakey, Chris Stringer and Fred Spoor, are used for Fredrick Manthi, who in fact is Senior Research Scientist, Palaeontology Department, National Museums of Kenya, and has a PhD in the field.

Appearing on the 9^th of August was the actual paper, 4 pages long, announcing the finding, in the scientific journal Nature. Titled “Implications of new early Homo fossils from Ileret, east of Lake Turkana, Kenya”, the paper was co-authored by nine researchers, the first of whom is Fred Spoor, and is ranked first in the byline. Fredrick Kyalo Manthi’s name appears next before last, and is ranked eighth. Not being privy to the reasons and arcane bargains that determine these scientific authorial rankings, we may assume that the ranking is in order of the importance of the contribution by each co-author to the research and the writing.

Also coming out on August 9th was an article in the New York Times, titled “Kenya Fossils Challenge Linear Evolution to Homo Sapiens,” written by John Noble Wilford. As with the BBC report, the New York Times’ Wilford also avoided overt claim as to which individual actually made the discovery, instead opting to quote Fred Spoor as “lead author”, and attributing to him his rightful titles. Stating that the fossils were found east of Lake Turkana, the report went on to say “Other authors include Meave G. Leakey and her daughter Louise Leakey, the Kenyan paleontologists who are co-directors of the Koobi Fora Research Project that made the discovery.” The Kenyan scientist, Dr. Fredrick Kyalo Manthi, is mentioned nowhere in the entire article, which goes on to quote other scientists from Harvard University and New York University commenting on the finding.

Meanwhile, the story as it appeared in the Kenyan media was starkly different. The Daily Nation of August 10 titled its story “New discovery shakes theory of evolution,” written by Muchemi Wachira and “Agencies.” Giving due acknowledgement to the journal Nature, and leaving out who the lead author was, the story was unequivocal as to who actually made the discovery:

“A Kenyan scientist has made a discovery which brings into question the long-held view of human evolution.

Dr Frederick Manthi, a researcher with the National Museums of Kenya, made the discovery that questioned the theory that human beings evolved from Homo Habilis to Homo Erectus.

Dr Manthi’s research over seven years suggests that Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus actually lived close together for half a million years.”

Wachira’s story went on to quote another Kenyan scientist, Dr Emma Mbua, “the head of Earth Sciences at the Museums”, and also included quotes from Dr Susan Anton (a co-author in the Nature article), in addition to naming Maeve and her daughter Louise Leakey. Wachira gave a detailed account of Dr Manthi and his work, including the specific day on which he found the skull, while taking a leisurely stroll with his friends, on his birthday. We learn, through Wachira, how Dr Manthi started off his career as an archaeologist, until getting his PhD in 2006 at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

In that same edition of The Daily Nation was another article, by Tim Querengesser, whose title expressed a sharp and immediate awareness of the hegemonic bias in the way the news was being reported: “Slowly by slowly, reluctant world starts to credit Kenyan scientists.” Querengesser observed that Meave Leakey did not attend the National Museums of Kenya function at which the fossils were unveiled, writing that “Instead, it was Dr Frederick [sic] Manthi, a Kenyan researcher who discovered the fossils near Ileret on his birthday seven years ago, who held the ancient bones before the cameras.”

Qurengesser added that “Dr Manthi’s recognition marked the first time the Leakey name was not being attributed, rightly or wrongly, to major archaeological discoveries in Kenya.” Querengesser was apparently aware of how the news had already been framed in the Euro-American media, and found it necessary to address the issue. “Although Dr Manthi is being recognised by some international media for finding the skull and jawbone, several stories running in British and US newspapers still credit a “team led by Meave Leakey” for the find.”

The Daily Nation continued with the news the following day, August 11^th, titling its next story “Scientist digs his way into history books.” The first two paragraphs, as in the previous day’s story, left no doubt as to who the paradigm shifting discovery belonged to:

“He may not have been known outside the National Museums of Kenya (NMK), where he works, but his discovery has made him a household name not only in Kenya, but also in the world. His seven-year research is likely to send publishers scrambling to rewrite history books.

Dr Fredrick Kyalo Manthi’s discovery questions the theory that the evolution of man moves from homo habilis to homo erectus.”

Appearing several days layer, a commentary by Muthoni Thang’wa in another Kenyan paper, The Standard, continued in the same spirit as the earlier Kenyan writers. Thang’wa wrote: “National Museums of Kenya [sic] Dr Kyalo Manthi’s discovery is diverting the logical line of research in human evolution that anthropologists have come to accept as the logical progression of the species.” The differences in the way the Euro-American media and their African counterparts were framing the ownership of the discovery were too stark to be missed. And it behooves us to point out these discrepancies and analyze the underlying paradigms that drive them.

The question for us now becomes how to move beyond the cliché that describes the blatant anti-Africa biases not only in the EuroAmerican media, but also in the entire knowledge enterprise. Africa and Africans continue to occupy a liminal, marginal space in the Euro-American imaginary, and the media representations of the Kenya fossils story make that glaringly clear. What is perhaps not as easy to articulate, however, are the effects this travesty has on the image of the continent, its people, their histories and possible futures.

At one level, there is little to worry about in the images of Africa manufactured by an endless Eurocentric onslaught, especially for audiences that already know about the pernicious effects of racism and the history of global injustice. There are many who know about this, both inside Africa, in the African Diaspora, and even amongst a few discerning, critical-minded Euro-Americans. But there are also many others, both inside Africa and outside, for whom the Eurocentric model is unassailable, the epitome of omniscient truth.

Consider, for example, what Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame told the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in response to a ubiquitous question posed by Kristof on his recent trip to Rwanda and other African countries. Kristof asked, all too predictably, why Asian countries which once were at par in income levels with African countries are today much richer than their African counterparts. And here was Mr Kagame’s response:

“I’m hesitant to talk about the issue of culture, but I have to -- and we have to work on it -- that culture of hard work, that culture of being ambitious and wanting to achieve [. . .] I believe that those values were in Africans, but I don’t know what dampened it -- what killed it” (NYT, July 5, 2007). Kristof goes on in the article to say that the Rwandan president reads the Harvard Business Review. Perhaps the Harvard Business Review has never published in-depth studies on how Asia has managed globalization, and the forces Africa has had to content with, but for an African president to assert that Africans no longer have ambition and a hard work ethic, and being clueless as to why, does nothing to stave off the hegemony of Eurocentric beliefs about Africa and Africans.

So at another level there is enough to worry about when African leaders and elites harbor inaccurate, uninformed beliefs about their own people. In Malawi we used to have Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda who drilled it into the nation that black people were intellectually inferior (except for himself), and that the best education one could afford was a European classical one, replete with Greek and Latin. He decreed that no black person was qualified enough to teach at his Eton-carbon copy Kamuzu Academy. Today, you still hear educated Malawians spewing forth this kind of froth.

But we also have young Malawians and Africans who see through the pseudo-intellectual basis of this kind of unreason. They are the ones who are uplifting the country and the continent in many innovative ways only the youth know best. I have already written about the likes of William Kamkwamba, Andrews Nchessie, and many others for whom it would be an insult to consider them as lacking in a hard work ethic, ambition and a desire for achievement.

The story of Dr Kyalo Manthi and the way the Euro-American media has portrayed it is another reminder of the ongoing struggles for the re-assertion of Africa and Africans both on the continent and outside. They are not struggles for their own sake; rather, they are struggles about the truth of an entire group of people striving to tell their own stories to a world long used to hearing tales of the hunt from the hunter’s perspective. There is no doubt as to the contributions of Euro-America to human knowledge, and to the continuing relevance of that paradigm to the future of knowledge-making. It is in that light that the world is hugely indebted to the generations of the Leakey family for the enormity of their contributions to human knowledge, and for enabling young scientists like Dr. Manthi to also be a part of that knowledge revolution. However buried inside the story of the production of human knowledge are the unacknowledged contributions of people outside the Euro-American frame. And this constitutes a global injustice that must be addressed.

The story of human knowledge is a very long one, going back to the earliest moments when our ancestors created art, culture and wisdom for utilizing nature’s nurture as well as surviving its harshest elements. Those capabilities have evolved over countless millennia, to the present when we can blog, and even clog an ever-expanding cyberspace. Hegemonic discourse holds that one group of people owns the means for producing this human knowledge, but the discoveries made by scientists, including Dr Kyalo Manthi, show us that all of human kind has been a part of that knowledge-making process. As one imperative in uMunthu epistemology tells us, the success of one is the success of all, one compelling reason for us to celebrate the contributions of those on the periphery of global hegemony.

Reclaiming Malawi’s Place at the Pan-African Table

It augurs very well for Malawi’s place in the pan-African world that we are celebrating our 43^rd independence anniversary this year the same week that the 9^th African Union Summit has been taking place in Accra, Ghana. After 43 odd years of independence, how many of us, not to talk of young Malawians, have a good grasp of the significance of celebrating July 6^th as Malawi’s Independence Day? Each time this date comes, we move one year further away from the moment that gave birth to our nation. It is very easy for many of us to lose sight of what this meant in 1964, what it means today and, even more importantly, in the future. It might appear as if it is mere coincidence that we in Malawi are celebrating our independence anniversary in the same week that the 9^th African Union Summit meeting in Ghana this week has debated the issue of a single government for the continent of Africa as the main topic. I argue that it is not mere coincidence. I argue that it is a sign of the times for us Malawians to step up to the continental table and take our rightful place as equal members with all the other African peoples on the continent and in the Diaspora.

For the first thirty years of our nationhood our ties with the rest of the African peoples were severed by a government led by a leader who, for the most part of his rule, did not believe in the unity of the African people. The irony of it all is that in fact Dr. Kamuzu Banda attended the 1945 Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, according to Kwesi Kwaa Praa, the first congress have taken place in 1919. Banda was a Pan-Africanist all the way up to the moment he began leading the independence struggle in Malawi. Historians are still studying what happened to the pre-independence Kamuzu, who was quite suddenly replaced by the post-independence Kamuzu who turned against his fellow Pan-Africanist colleagues. The legacy of the damage wrought on our country by this anti-Pan-Africanist policy is with us today, with many of us not fully aware of the importance of seeing ourselves in the larger ideal of a Pan-African identity and destiny. The policy of isolating ourselves from the rest of the African peoples led to a form of national amnesia insofar as the ideals that gave us a larger purpose and a vision. As Henry Masauko Chipembere wrote in 1971, we shared this larger purpose and vision with the rest of the continent, waging a struggle for freedom from a racist colonial oppression. Chipembere wrote in his paper that our struggle grew from learning what other Africans were doing in other parts of the continents, as much as other African countries also learned from the strategies we were using to achieve our independence. This year of 2007 is an auspicious one for the special fact that it has been 50 years since Ghana got its independence, an occasion that phenomenally emboldened the struggles of many other African countries, including our own.

Ghana’s independence in 1957 meant a lot for Malawi, for many reasons. For one, our first president the late Dr. Kamuzu Banda was a very close friend of Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, a friendship that started long before either country became independent. Dr. Nkrumah became actively engaged in Malawi’s own struggle for independence from colonial rule. In his 1982 autobiography detailing what it took for us to achieve independence, Kanyama Chiume, one Malawian who was at the centre of the struggle, gives an elaborate and inspiring account of the support Malawians received from many Africans on the continent, and others beyond, at the height of the struggle. Chiume writes about visiting London in 1959, whereupon learning of his presence there, Dr. Nkrumah sent ₤100 to help in the work Chiume was doing in London. Days later Nkrumah offered an air ticket for Chiume to fly directly to Ghana to continue strategizing and mobilizing resources to aid Malawi’s freedom struggle. In Ghana Chiume was given a triumphant welcome, and “was carried shoulder high amidst shouts and placards to the effect that a Nyasalander murdered is a Ghanaian dead” (p. 122).

Even more self-less support from Nkrumah came when Chiume met with Nkrumah in Ghana. Chiume writes: “When I saw Nkrumah personally he was most vehement in his denunciation of imperialism in Nyasaland. Since the Devlin Commission had already been appointed, and we were determined to defend our colleagues in detention, he offered ₤10,000 to cover the defence costs. In addition, he placed at our disposal the services of an able Ghanaian lawyer, Mills Odoi, to accompany whoever we chose to go to Central Africa for the purpose.”

Chiume goes on to talk about the larger vision that Nkrumah had for the emancipation of all of Africa, outlining the idea of a Pan-African government to Chiume when they met a second time: “Nkrumah talked about the urgent need for an All-African government. ‘Many of our troubles, Chiume,’ he emphasized, ‘are due to the fact that we are not united. We must have a continental government to prevent the further balkanization of Africa and, as far I am concerned, when Malawi is finally free and only seven of us are ready, we should just plunge into it. Others will follow.” (p. 167).

The continent of Africa and its Diaspora has paid an incalculable price for failing to act on the Pan-Africanist vision of Dr. Nkrumah, Kanyama Chiume, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Sylvester Williams, George Padmore, and others. Our countries have spent the past 50 years relying on the oftentimes guilt-ridden, sometimes benevolent conscience of our former colonial rulers who prop up our governments by providing a big fraction of our development budgets. We have many of our people believing that being dependent on our former colonial rulers is the permanent natural way of things, totally unaware that it is desirable for us to break free from this dependency and become self-sustaining. Most revealing of this pessimism and insular worldview have been the reactions this week to the issue of a union government of Africa, or a United States of Africa, that has been the center of the African Union summit this week. The opposition the idea has met from many Africans expressing their views on the BBC’s African Service programs, and in various other forums, has been eye opening in some ways, and also unsurprising in others. It would require a separate article altogether to respond to the most substantive skepticism, not to mention the purely reactionary and astonishingly uninformed comments that have come out from the mouths of many Africans used to thinking in the status quo, with no larger vision for what Africa’s future might look like.

The failure to make Pan-Africanist unity a reality is not easy to analyze as it involves many factors and contexts. The Malawi Cabinet Crisis of 1964, coming just three months after our independence meant that whatever capability Malawi had to contribute towards that ideal disappeared with the exiling and hunting down of the country’s first cabinet, which, according to Chipembere, was considered one of the most formidable on the continent. As a country we have spent very little time studying what led to the crisis, and what effect that had on our country. For us to claim our rightful place on the Pan-African table it is important that we recapture the ideals that helped us, together with other African countries, attain our independence. The struggle could never have been won had the entire country not been galvanized and involved. In the same vein, the future we envisage for ourselves will not come to fruition if we do not learn from the mistakes of the past, and find new ways of galvanizing and involving all of our citizens in charting a new vision for our future. It has to be a long-term vision, and we have to begin with teachers, pupils, and schools.

Each one of us must strive to learn more about the ideals and visions that helped us attain independence, and the role the larger Pan-African family played toward that goal. Each of us must embark on an exploration of what it means to belong to a larger Pan-African identity which embraces all Africans on the continent and all people of African descent all over the world.

The African Union Summit has done very well to commission more studies on how a union government can become a reality. Every single person of African descent both on the continent and in the Diaspora needs to join in the debate and make it richer. Unlike the polarization that some are pushing as an either top-down or a grassroots approach on how to achieve a union government, the goal of greater Pan-African unity cannot be achieved by using one approach only. It has to be approached from multiple perspectives. The heads of government have their roles to play. The grassroots also have their roles to play. The regional groupings that already exist have a role to play, as do continental bodies such as the Summit itself. Universities and teacher education institutions in Africa and in the Diaspora need to devise more academic courses and research projects on the history, politics, economics, cultural and social contexts of Pan-Africanism, and involve students in research projects. Members of Parliament must be helped to have a better, informed understanding of the project, so as to lead their constituents in making their voices heard in the grand debate. Civil society organizations must take this an important part of their responsibilities in their quest to empower ordinary, grassroots people. The opposition and skepticism that have arisen on the debate are a healthy and relevant part of the process, and must be encouraged. However we stand benefit more from a better informed and reflective discussion.

We have the resources at our disposal to embark on a mass education campaign to enable an informed debate, but we need to mobilize those resources, and make them available to everyone interested in learning more. That is only one of the ways in which we are each going to participate in the grand effort toward Pan-Africanist integration and unity.

Unleashing the Mind: William Kamkwamba, Malawian Genius, and the New Media

His is the most inspirational story I have read this year. In 2002 William Kamkwamba was unable to continue with his secondary school education, as his parents couldn’t afford the school fees. This was just after two terms in Form 1 (high school freshman), and he was 14 years old. But his desire to keep reading and learning led him into a library at a nearby primary school in the central region district of Kasungu, and to a book on how to make electricity. He went ahead and made a windmill just following the instructions in the book. The school library was donated as part of the Malawi Teacher Training Activity (MTTA), a USAID teacher development project that started in September 2004, and has involved teachers in four districts in Malawi, namely Kasungu, Machinga, Mzimba South, and Phalombe. MTTA involves partners who include the American Institutes of Research (AIR), Miske Witt & Associates (MWAI), and the Malawi Institute of Education (MIE).

I show later in this posting that Kamkwamba’s story holds an important lesson for Malawi and other countries about educational beliefs and practices, and their potential to either facilitate or kill emergent talent and creativity. In addition to William's story, I use two more examples to make the above point. I write about Andrews Nchessie, a primary school teacher also in Kasungu who is now a teacher educator, and whose own unique story shares similarly fascinating parallels with William. I also write about Nolence Mwangwego, a Malawian teacher of the French language who invented a writing script. I finish with two Malawian farmers who have made significant contributions to agricultural practices in Malawi by inventing new ways of irrigating farms: one is Friday Nikoloma of Thyolo, and the other is Dr. Chinkuntha of Dowa.

When the MTTA deputy chief of party, Dr. Hartford Mchazime heard of William’s windmill and its origins in the library donated by MTTA, he went to visit William. He brought with him journalists, and a story that appeared in the Daily Times was picked up by bloggers including Soyapi Mumba (http://soyapi.blogspot.com/) and Mike McKay (http://www.vdomck.org/). Early this month the program director of the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) annual conference, Emeka Okafor, himself a prominent blogger who saw William’s story on the above Malawian blogs, invited Kamkwamba to attend and talk at TEDGlobal, one of the world's largest technology conferences, held this year June 4-7 in Arusha, Tanzania.

Kamkwamba’s life has not been the same since. The 2007 TEDGlobal conference was also attended by the likes of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Larry Page (the guy who gave us Google), Phillipe Starck, Bono, and on previous occasions, Bill Clinton, and many other famous Who are Whos in the world. Two weeks ago he touched a computer for the first time in his life, opened an email account, and last week he started his own blog. Comments and congratulations are coming in from around the world, and in the words of one of the organizers at TED, there is a “firestorm” of interest brewing for Kamkwamba.

Not long ago stories like these used to appear once in a generation, but are now becoming more believable, thanks to the power of 21^st century innovations and technologies. The theme of the African renaissance, expressed in the phrase Afrika Aphukira, gets full expression in young people such as William and Andrews, Nolence Mwangwego, and in farmers such as Nikoloma and Chinkuntha, in Malawi, Africa, and around the world.

There is one major coincidence in Kamkwamba’s and Nchessie’s stories that I can’t resist writing about. Some time in the mid-1990s The Nation, the second of Malawi’s daily newspapers, published on its front page the story of a primary school teacher in Kasungu (same district where Kamkwamba hails from) who had invented an early flood warning system. Being in the 1990s, there were no blogs at the time, and in Malawi the Internet was non-existent. Thus the story did not go as far as Kamkwamba’s has. That teacher was Andrews Nchessie, who became my best friend when I transferred to Police Secondary School in 1988, from Nankhunda Seminary where I had been expelled for not seeming to possess the priestly vocation.

Andrews Nchessie did not stop at the early flood warning system. He went on to introduce fish farming, wind vanes, and other scientific experiments with his primary school pupils at Kasungu Demonstration Primary School, on the campus of Kasungu Teachers’ College where he trained as a teacher. He even organized Open Days at the school, inviting members of the public, including journalists, to come and see what pupils at the school were doing. One time his class experimented with goat urine as a cure for an outbreak of scabies at the school, in a science unit that involved lab technicians at the Kasungu District Hospital. This news also made the front page of The Nation.

A scientist and curriculum specialist at MIE, the late Harold Gonthi, visited Nchessie at his school, and soon started inviting him to national research conferences for educational researchers in Malawi. Soon those invitations extended to international conferences in the region and beyond, and led to an international award for his innovative teaching. He visited universities and other educational institutions in Zambia, Mocambique, South Africa, Ghana, Togo, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and recently, Germany and Norway. After spending 13 months at various universities in Norway in 2005-2006, Nchessie returned to Kasungu Demonstration Primary School, and to his Standard 4 classroom (4^th Grade). With him he brought more than a dozen computers and networking equipment, which he used to establish the first ever computer lab at Kasungu Teachers’ College. The administration recognized his efforts and promoted him from being a primary school teacher to being a lecturer at the teachers’ college.

There is one very important lesson that the stories of William Kamkwamba, Andrews Nchessie, Nolence Mwangwego, Friday Nikoloma and Dr. Chinkuntha which I talk about later in this article, teach us in Malawi but also in Africa and beyond. It is very tempting to conclude from the these stories that the problems affecting our countries, which we like to couch in the discourse of backwardness, originate in individuals not being committed enough, not working hard enough. If only every one worked as hard as William or Andrews, our countries would be very different today.

The problem with this perspective, and here is where the lesson comes in, is that it attributes the causes of the problems we always talk about to individuals, blaming them for not being diligent and hard working enough. And that is where the perspective misses the point. There is no denying that William and Nchessie are unique individuals who are serious and thoughtful in their outlook on the world. To get to where they are today, they have had to overcome insurmountable problems which many others in their community and in Malawi have failed to. While individual traits and character do play an important part in propelling one to greater realization of their potential, we live in a world in which many people are never provided opportunities through which their traits and character can blossom and shine for the world to see.

There is a conundrum here that is easy to miss. On the one hand, something is seriously wrong with a system in which somebody like William is unable to proceed with school because or lack of money for school fees, or, in Andrews’ case, unable to obtain university education because he failed to make it to the super-selective University of Malawi in 1990. On the other hand, it is not possible to tell with definitiveness whether William’s talents and hard work would have come out with such a bang had he been able to continue in a conventional secondary school. School systems can be places where individuals can indeed blossom and take off, but they are also known all over the world as places which can force one’s intellect into a conventional box and stifle one’s creativity and genius. This is a conundrum which is not easy to resolve.

In Malawi, a huge factor of the limited opportunities for enterprising individuals such as William and Andrews is the political economy and its vicious cycle of poorly equipped schools, poorly trained teachers, and very few opportunities for one to advance beyond basic education. The political economy of Malawi is tied to that of the rest of the world, and is affected by instabilities and fluctuations originating elsewhere in the world. To qualify for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), for example, countries like Malawi are required to maintain a specific ceiling on budgetary expenditure, which for some countries means putting a freeze on hiring new teachers, nurses, and other key personnel, and also on raising their salaries.

But historical factors also play a role, in how modern education came to Malawi and what that meant for endogenous ways of producing and disseminating new knowledge. All these factors have resulted in the adoption of a system that thrives on beliefs about knowledge and individual ability that label the majority of people as lacking, deficient, and undeserving of opportunities for advanced education.

We should be grateful for stories such as William’s, Andrews’, Nolence's, Friday's and Chinkuntha's, which from time to time renew our faith in our humanity and in our potential to contribute to the understanding of our own problems and the pursuit of solutions. They are young people who show us rare examples of what an excellent teacher looks like, and how an exceptional student needs the support of the broader global community in order to realize his or her potential. These stories should help us rethink how we can better restructure our economies and political systems so they can benefit more people rather than only a minority, elite few. More such stories might hopefully help us better understand how to also rethink not only our educational practices but also the beliefs that drive those practices and policies.

Therein lies the exponential potential of new media technologies, a point made astutely by Mike McKay in an email yesterday. An article appearing on the Daily Times website was easy to pass on and blog about, with links. The news spread from one blog to another, until it reached the eyes of somebody with enough influence to make things happen. It would be naive to promise that everyone else who has a remarkable story to tell will end up being recognized for it, but it is also true that without these new technologies, it is difficult to say how far the innovative hard work and achievements of William would have gone.

There are a few other stories of innovations and creativity, in addition to William and Andrews, that unfortunately have not received wider attention. Recently an article in The Nation, by Kondwani Kamiyala, described how exactly ten years ago this year Nolence Mwangwego, a teacher of the French language, launched his unique style of writing called the Mangwego script. The then Minister of Youth, Sport and Culture Kamangadazi Chambalo lauded the invention, and expressed that government was going to show interest. Although one would have hoped that the minister himself would consider his presence at the launch as government interest, and take the lead in promoting the invention, very little has come out of that interest.

In April this year I was told, by Bright Malopa, about a farmer in Thyolo who invented an irrigation system that propels water from a river and pushes it upland and irrigates his farm. Levi Zeleza Manda tells me that this farmer’s name is Friday Nikoloma, and he works with a team of four other farmers. No Malawian needs convincing about the vital importance of irrigation in Malawi, given the erratic rains we get from time to time which in recent years have caused severe food shortages. We are uniquely blessed with a huge lake, and a big river, which we have so far been unable to utilize for agricultural and food security purposes.

Another Malawian farmer who has also beaten the odds and sidestepped a stifling conventional educational system is Dr. Chinkuntha, of Dowa, said to have devised a farming system that also defies erratic rainfall. Dr. Chinkuntha never went to university, but his farming system is frequented by university researchers and students who come from beyond Malawi and the Africa region to marvel at his genius. The University of Malawi has recognized his achievements by awarding him an honorary doctorate.

I am sure there would be more stories of such type if one looked hard enough. Not all of them will receive the recognition they deserve, but without the opportunities new media technologies make possible, it would be even harder to know about these inspiring stories and learn from them. In taking advantage of the new possibilities unleashed by technology, a laudable goal will be to work hard at bridging the so-called digital divide. This entails bringing down costs and making it less expensive for more ordinary people to afford them. Such a goal needs the participation of not only government and its parastatals, but also institutions and individuals with a self-less spirit and a desire to encourage and promote less privileged Malawians, who are in the majority, and always working very hard. Thus the change we envisage in beliefs about educational practices needs to be embraced by us all in the way we understand our communities and what it means to use the spirit of uMunthu and appreciate how the success of one is the success of us all.

[In addition to William Kamkwamba's own blog, and many others that have picked up his story, the blog African Path is presenting developments in his life as they unfold.]

Festering Africa’s Wounds: Nicholas Kristof and his Africa Trips

In his column announcing the second ‘Win a trip’ contest in March of this year, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asked “why the world continue[d] to allow 30,000 children [. . .] to die each day of poverty” (March 9, 2007). The two winners of Mr Kristof’s contest, high school teacher Will Okun, from Chicago, and recent Washington University medical school graduate, Leana Wen, have now spent one full week on the trip, and are blogging about their experience at http://twofortheroad.blogs.nytimes.com/ (TimesSelect, requires paid subscription).

Will and Leana’s reflections on their time in the parts of Africa they will visit will definitely go some distance towards answering Mr. Kristof’s question, about “why the world continues to allow 30,000 children [. . .] to die each day of poverty.” But there is another question, much more malignant and often avoided in mainstream conventional thinking, that neither Mr Kristof nor his two Africa guests will be asking, let alone attempting to address. It’s a three-fold question: One, what are the deeper, underlying causes of poverty in Africa? Two, in trying to find lasting solutions to Africa’s problems, to what extent are persistent images of poverty and suffering, with no follow-up on what might the historical and global causes of those problems be, going to be of help in answering Mr. Kristof’s benign question? In other words, what effects might describing African poverty and suffering in this manner have on the kinds of solutions that get proposed to solve the said problems?

Mr Kristof deserves to be commended for the role he is playing to promote awareness about the Darfur crisis, HIV/AIDS, the devastation in the Congo, poverty and other ills ravaging parts of Africa. Equally remarkable is his idea last year to bring an American student, and this year a student, Leana, and a school teacher, Will, on his trips to African countries. In Mr. Kristof’s column announcing the contest, he was candidly forthright in his criticism of American indifference to the poverty and suffering of Africans: insularity, foreign policy that empowers the wrong people, and the failure by US universities to prepare students for what he termed global citizenship. As important as faulting American indifference might be, a focus on interventionist solutions can become a red herring, misdirecting attention from more grounded and analytically informed perspectives.

What is missing from such well meaning and considerably inspiring soul-searching exercises is the ability to bring in deeper analyses that address the legacies of past injustices and their ongoing unaddressed effects today. In addressing the problem Mr. Kristof identifies as American indifference, which seems perplexing indeed, it might be important to ask whether the image of a helpless, hopeless and ahistorical Africa might not be one of the explanations as to why Americans don’t seem to care, as an unintended consequence of the African continent that Mr. Kristof presents to his American readers.

These questions are relevant because when they are not asked, the solutions that end up being suggested and implemented are the same ones that have been tried over the decades, and have not brought any long-lasting, sustainable relief. Intervention from outside, per se, ought not to be a problem; it is in fact one important solution, but it is far from adequate, let alone sustainable. Intervention from well-wishing outsiders such as Americans and other wealthy societies is not necessarily undesirable, but at least it could take on a shape and form aimed more toward adequate and more sustainable solutions.

There are no easy, straightforward answers to the question of what causes African poverty, AIDS, and other types of suffering. Perspectives differ widely, even amongst Africans themselves. In fact there is no shortage of Africans who brook no criticism of the West, which they see as being a paragon of civilization, and above reproach. But what is always and routinely ignored is the larger picture of global, historical, political and economic contexts in which poverty, conflict and suffering occur not only in Africa but in many parts of the world, including some parts of the wealthiest countries such as the United States itself. One important cause is the perpetuation of images of pathology, hopelessness, death and destruction as endemic and innate to these places. It is as if poor and suffering people do nothing to find solutions to their problems. The dominance of the images of damnation blots out the histories, energies and solutions created by the people themselves. In the process, the only solutions deemed viable end up being intervention by well-wishing outsiders.

Yet precedents of African boldness and determination abound. This year Ghana is celebrating 50 years of independence, and for many African people worldwide, it has been an occasion to take stock of the courage and energy created by the desire for freedom and independence. The story of Ghana is a continuing inspiration for many African countries and peoples worldwide. Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa achieved their own independence with the financial, moral as well as ideological support of Ghana and its first president Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

To pessimists, Ghana is just another poor, African country, frequently compared with Malaysia said to have had the same levels of poverty when it also gained independence in the same year as Ghana. What’s not mentioned is that Nkrumah’s material, financial and ideological support for independence for all of Africa meant a huge sacrifice at the expense of Ghana itself. Dr. Nkrumah was overthrown eight years after Ghana’s independence, by circumstances strongly linked to US foreign policy. This process was repeated in other African countries, some of whom, including the Congo DRC where Kristof, Will and Leana are visiting this week, have never known peace and stability since. Yet events such as these are never linked to causes of African poverty and instability, since the question of deeper, historical causes is always and conveniently avoided.

There are success stories in many African countries, including peaceful transitions to new forms of democracy, economies growing at exponential rates, community care for HIV/AIDS orphans, to name just a few. To his credit, Mr. Kristof does write about some of these successes too, although the backdrop of the poverty, conflict and suffering is always dominant. Many African societies are rich in social networks, spirituality, art, music, and many other facets of life that no quantitative measurements can ever capture. But because the emphasis is on the death and destruction, poverty and misery, and on solutions from outside intervention, these aspects are never written about. This is not to dispute the presence of very difficult problems of poverty and instability that many African communities indeed face everyday. The daily reportage in the mainstream media overflows with these problems, which admittedly do make it harder to believe that there are alternative realities also happening on the same complex continent of Africa.

The failure to write more about Africa’s successes and what the Reverend Stewart Lane calls social and spiritual wealth are part of the reasons why after several decades of outside, well-wishing monetary and material interventions, the images of hopelessness and instability persist. Individual Americans going to and returning from Africa, like the previous winner Casey Parks and the current winners Leana and Will, might profess profound personal transformation, but it will always be in the juxtaposition of privilege and deprivation. For most others, the response is the indifference that Mr. Kristof is rightly concerned with.

It is important to re-emphasize that Mr. Kristof’s work is admirable and deserves the gratitude of many of us. The opportunities he is affording to the Americans he selects to accompany him on his trips are invaluable. But his efforts, and that of other well-wishing Westerners who go to Africa, could be equally transformative for African societies if they worked more to capture the hidden, suppressed histories, the successes and the social and spiritual riches of the various societies and countries that make up Africa.

Rest in peace, Mde First Lady

I wish to join fellow Malawians, Zimbabweans, other Africans and friends of Africa around the world in mourning the sad passing of Mrs. Ethel Mutharika, the wife of Malawi's president, Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika. Mrs. Mutharika is reported to have died on Monday, May 28, 2007.

Reports say she was suffering from cancer, but very little else is known about her illness. Mrs. Mutharika was born in Zimbabwe, and is believed to have been in her 60s, according to reports sourced from Malawi's State House.

In April this year rumors spread across Malawi of her having been critically ill and then dying, but they turned out to be false. With no official word from government as to whether the first lady was indeed sick or not, speculation was rife, with one radio station actually making news out of the rumors. Later a government press release accused the media and the opposition of innuendo, but still said nothing about the condition of the first lady.

Mrs. Mutharika founded the Ethel Mutharika Foundation that was helping poor Malawians and orphaned children, an important intervention at a critical time for Malawi just recovering from severe food shortages, and still reeling from HIV/AIDS. She will be sorely missed. May your soul rest in peace, Mde First Lady.

The New African and 21^st century Pan-Africanism

During the days of Life President Dr. Kamuzu Banda in Malawi, the only way I was able to read The New African, the London-based pan-African monthly magazine, was through a relative who managed to bring copies to Malawi from Zimbabwe, where he was teaching. The relative sadly passed away in 1997, three years after the end of one-party rule in Malawi. By that time The New African was on sale in Malawi, although I am not sure whether it had been on the list of banned publications or not during Dr. Banda’s rule.

Last Saturday, 21^st April, I entered The Central Bookshop in the Shoprite shopping mall in Blantyre, and saw a copy of the current issue of The New African. I promptly picked it up. It was the first time I was buying a copy since 1997 (a friend gave me a copy two or so years ago that he had found, quite strangely, in a bookstore in Lansing, Michigan). Although I would have bought the copy anyway, my decision was made much more conscious by the recent exhortation of two good friends, one a historian of the sexual politics of racism in colonial Ghana, who runs a column in the magazine, and the other a professor of international relations and politics who found it incredulous to learn that I did not have a subscription to what she felt was the best pan-Africanist magazine available.

So it was in the company of another very good friend, Bright Malopa, that I entered the Central Bookshop and saw a copy of The New African. Bright had urged me the previous night to buy a copy of a book by D.D. Phiri on Clements Kadalie, a Malawian who played a highly significant role in the struggle for freedom in the early years of the 20^th century in South Africa. It is titled _I See You: Life of Clements Kadalie, the man South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Namibia should not forget_ (2000).

I will write about D.D. Phiri’s book on Kadalie when I have read it in the coming weeks, but for now I want to talk about the current issue of The New African, which I must confess I now feel guilty for not having followed in the last decade or so (Thanks a lot Carina, Kiki, and Bright).

Splashed across the front page of the current issue is the title of the cover story, “Confessions of a CIA AGENT: How the imperial powers control Africa.” This story is followed by an essay on the Special Court in Sierra Leone and how it is seen as persecuting people whom Sierra Leoneans regard as heroes. Of interest to Malawians will be the fact that the Registrar of the Special Court in Sierra Leone is Lovemore Munlo, a Malawian attorney who once served as Minister of Justice in the dying days of Dr. Banda’s rule. Announcing the death of Chief Sam Hinga Norman, who was being tried by the Special Court, Mr. Munlo referred to the hip surgery that took the life of Hinga Norman as “successful,” a reference seen by many Sierra Leoneans as in bad taste, and a betrayal of the people’s wishes.

In the features section are articles on Ghana’s 50^th independence anniversary and President Kuffour’s choice to wear a suit rather than the traditional Kente; the crisis in Darfur; the Nigerian elections; Liberia’s Blue Lake; and The Gambia’s first university. Cameron Duodu’s column discusses a recent article by the British historian Nial Fergusson, who, writing about Ghana’s 50^th independence anniversary, commented on how colonialism was good for Africa as evidenced by what he sees as the failure of Africans to govern themselves. The Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo is quoted, in an interview with Ruth Tete, as saying “Africans underestimate themselves and do not have confidence in themselves. Time has come for Africans to have confidence in themselves, and to take their destiny in into their own hands. Time has come for Africans to have partners and not masters.”

The remainder of the magazine contains articles on the improving picture of health in Africa; the need to protect what is known as the “African brain”; African prostitutes storming Europe; the perspective of Canada’s Senate Committee of Foreign Relations on Africa as a “lost cause”; stopping Black Americans from voting in 20^th century United States; footballing news; and a young African industrial designer who is GM’s lead designer on their latest car, the Volt.

It would need a much longer essay to go into the details of each article in this particular issue, but suffice it to say that the magazine speaks to the continuing importance of pan-Africanist perspectives in understanding the contemporary African world. The cover story describes a new book by Larry Devlin, who was the Chief of Station in the DRCongo when the then Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. The book reveals how the assassination of Patrice Lumumba was ordered by the then US President, Dwight Eisenhower, for fear that Lumumba would turn to the Soviet Union and thereby thwart the US’s efforts to control what is considered Africa’s most strategically placed country. The article’s focus is on how the same policies aimed at gaining control of strategic resources on the continent still continue to this day, and should serve as a warning to current and future generations of African leaders (My note in the margins reads: “Tchvangirai, take note”—though not necessarily as an expression of uncritical support for Mugabe’s methods either).

The article’s author, Osei Boateng, also sends a message to African journalists to be critical of claims of objectivity and independence by the Western media, which has always operated on the principle of serving the foreign policy of their governments. Boateng’s implied caution is that some (not all) African journalists tend not to be aware of this and instead take the side of the Western media in propagating policy objectives of Western governments against those of their own countries, in the naive belief that they are pursuing objectivity and independence. I find Boateng’s argument persuasive, although I would add that in fact many Western journalists have a lot to learn from some African journalists when it comes to objectivity and independence.

Of even greater relevance to the optimistic expression of Africa’s rebirth (as in Afrika Aphukira) is the interview with President Gbagbo. His observation that Africans underestimate themselves should not be understood as pessimistic; rather, it should be understood as a diagnosis aimed at encouraging boldness amongst Africans to trust in their own perspectives and potential. Gbagbo says Africans could play a stabilizing role in the world, but the lack of confidence means that Africans are not even aware of the importance of African perspectives in the world. He says Africa has the capability to generate what he calls a “solidarity fund,” in the form of a development bank, that could come from taxes on Africa’s unique natural resources, yet Africans prefer to continue being dependent on the IMF and the World Bank.

Gbagbo talks about young Africans managing some of the world’s biggest financial institutions, yet they have no confidence in generating and managing capital for Africans. The story of Jelani Aliyu in the same issue, a young Nigerian who is the lead creative designer for the global automaker General Motors, is another example of the potential that Africans possess, but which is hampered by the lack of confidence, and is therefore stifled in many young Africans who end up languishing in the villages and on the streets.

As for Malawi, there is a growing sense of optimism amongst the middle class, who see a new Malawi emerging before their eyes. While some of this optimism is being generated by government policies that stress fiscal discipline, food security and economic stability, some of the vitality is also being generated by ordinary Malawians who have never stopped working hard, despite popular beliefs to the contrary held by the educated elite. Some have asked if Malawi will also experience a rebirth as the rest of Africa does, and my response has been that it will take a pan-Africanist perspective that asserts our place on the continent. Obviously that needs further redefinition, but I am glad to say The New African appears to me to be a part of that process to redefine pan-Africanism for the 21^st century.

We’re all Ghanaians: Reclaiming Pan-Africanism for the African Renaissance

On January 22, 1957, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, then Prime Minister of the then Gold Coast, wrote a letter to Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, inviting them to attend the auspicious occasion of what would on March 6 of that year become the independent nation of Ghana. It would be the first Black African country to achieve independence from a European colonizing country, and would be joining North African countries, including Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Sudan, who had already achieved their independence.

The US Government refused to issue passports to Dr. Du Bois and his wife Shirley to travel to Ghana. They ended up missing the hugely significant occasion. But Du Bois replied to Dr. Nkrumah’s letter, in which he performed a highly meaningful and symbolic act for the future of the Black world. Considered to be the father of Pan-Africanism, Dr. Du Bois bequeathed to Dr. Nkrumah the presidency of the Pan-African Congress, which had first met in 1919, in Paris. The next Pan-African Congress would be meeting on African soil for the first time ever, and Dr. Nkrumah would, as per Dr. Du Bois’s bestowing, be presiding over it. Thus the torch of Pan-Africanism, the struggle for people of African descent worldwide to overcome centuries of dehumanization and exploitation, was passed on to Kwame Nkrumah, to Ghana, and to Africa.

The celebrations marking 50 years of Ghana’s independence this week reassert Ghana’s place as the world center of Pan-Africanism (Pierre & Shipley, 2003, in Falola, Ed., Ghana in Africa and the World). In addition to being proud and happy for all Ghanaians in the world, I’m also very pleased for Malawi’s participation in this momentous celebration. The President of Malawi, Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika, is in Ghana as I write, with a Malawian contingent that is reported to include traditional chiefs and the Kwacha Cultural Troupe, Malawi’s national traditional dance troupe that preserves the best of Malawi’s performing arts heritage.

In Malawi we have every reason to join the Ghanaians, and the entire Pan-African world, in celebrating Ghana’s jubilee. As Walusako Mwalilino reminds everyone on the Malawi listserv Nyasanet, it was in Ghana that Malawi’s first president, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, spent a good part of the 1950s, where he became very close to Dr. Nkrumah, having first known each other in London where Dr. Banda has been practicing medicine for sometime. Dr. Nkrumah would eventually become actively engaged in Malawi’s own struggle for independence from the British. We are indebted to Kanyama Chiume, a Malawian who played a crucial role in the struggle, for giving us an elaborate and inspiring account of the support Malawians received from many Africans on the continent and others beyond, at the height of the struggle.

In his autobiography, Kanyama (1982) writes about visiting London in 1959, whereupon learning of his presence, Nkrumah sent ₤100 to help in the work Kanyama was doing in London. Days later Nkrumah offered Kanyama an airticket so that on leaving London Kanyama should fly directly to Ghana to continue strategizing and mobilizing resources to aid Malawi’s freedom struggle. In Ghana Kanyama was given a triumphant welcome, and “was carried shoulder high amidst shouts and placards to the effect that a Nyasalander murdered is a Ghanaian dead” (p. 122).

And more support from Nkrumah and Ghana was yet to come when Kanyama met with Nkrumah:

“When I saw Nkrumah personally he was most vehement in his denunciation of imperialism in Nyasaland. Since the Devlin Commission had already been appointed, and we were determined to defend our colleagues in detention, he offered ₤10,000 to cover the defence costs. In addition, he placed at our disposal the services of an able Ghanaian lawyer, Mills Odoi, to accompany whoever we chose to go to Central Africa for the purpose.”

When Kanyama met Nkrumah again in early 1964, Nkrumah could not have been more forthright and passionate about the significance of Pan-Africanism:

“Nkrumah talked about the urgent need for an All-African government. ‘Many of our troubles, Chiume,’ he emphasized, ‘are due to the fact that we are not united. We must have a continental government to prevent the further balkanization of Africa and, as far I am concerned, when Malawi is finally free and only seven of us are ready, we should just plunge into it. Others will follow.” (p. 167).

The ideals of Pan-Africanism as practiced by Du Bois, Padmore, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Toure, Nyerere, Obote and others played a very important role in helping Black Africa overcome a racist, oppressive colonialism, but it did not solve all of Pan-Africa’s problems. Even at the height of the independence struggle problems arose due to betrayals, as Gamal Nkrumah, the son of Kwame Nkrumah told the BBC this week; lack of unity; and external interference by the colonialists who were determined not to see Africans govern themselves. In the months following Malawi’s independence, Banda became increasingly dictatorial and intolerant of opposing views. He and Nkrumah fell out, and Banda even ordered the closure of the Ghanaian Embassy in Malawi. In Ghana itself internal divisions, fomented by the CIA and other Cold War suspicions, also led to problems, including the military overthrow of Nkrumah. To this extent, the Pan-Africanist philosophy was ill-prepared for the unforeseen tragedies that followed.

Whereas some might think that this spelled the death of Pan-Africanism, others think that these events provide us lessons with which to re-examine Pan-Africanism as a framework, and reclaim it for contemporary realities. The 50^th anniversary of Ghana’s independence gives us that moment to reflect on our history and re-envision the future. The African Renaissance project provides a framework in which to reassess Pan-Africanism and retool it for the struggles ahead.

Ghana has embarked on a comprehensive program to lead the rest of the Pan-African world in imagining a new Africa. The program involves harnessing the resources of the African continent and its Diaspora, to place them at the disposal of the new demands now facing us. Ghana has initiated the Joseph Project (click here for more details), inspired by the Biblical story of Joseph who was sold away by his jealous brothers, and who prospered in the foreign lands to which they sold him. He later rescued his family in their time of need. With the project, Ghana is offering citizenship, land and other rights to people of African descent from anywhere in the world. A similar idea has been discussed in the African Union, according to the blog Black Looks, and is so far looking at giving citizenship to Black Americans. Although the project has already been criticized for being economistic in its outlook, it needs no emphasizing the role that Diaspora Africans can play in reviving the entire continent of Africa. In this regard, the two types of Diasporas, the historic and the contemporary, the latter also inclusive of migration within the African continent itself, have enormous roles to play in this renewal (Zeleza, 2005, in Mkandawire, Ed., African Intellectuals).

A long-term strategy in re-envisioning Pan-Africanism for the African Renaissance will not be feasible if it does not place at its center educational curriculum and pedagogy, both on the continent and in the worldwide Diaspora. Curriculum and pedagogy, both at the teacher education and school level, constitute one of the comprehensive strategies that will awaken a Pan-Africanist consciousness in school children, teachers, and their communities, by generating new knowledge about African peoples, their histories, their struggles and aspirations. As with the Pan-Africanism of the 1960s, problems will surface, but the advances made by African peoples worldwide in various spheres of world influence in the last several decades should reassure us of our capabilities to overcome these difficulties. There will be a few who will decide that the African Diaspora identity means nothing to them, "thank God for slavery"; but there will also be plenty more who will reaffirm their Pan-African identity. Thus Ghana’s happy occasion this week is also a time to ask ourselves new questions about what Pan-Africanism might look like, and what role each of us can play, in the era of the African Renaissance.