'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.

Note: The opening paragraph contains a factual error, which I have corrected. See the correction and an accompanying apology here. 

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.