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 graduating from 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 America’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 Iran—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 indicts residual and institutional racism, but also celebrates 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.