TOWARDS WHAT MANNER OF UNION?

By H.E. Professor Wole Soyinka,
Nobel Laureate

08 March 2002, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

How sad it is to acknowledge that often, the death of one individual on this continent so frequently ignites a spark of hope for the future in the heart of a community, a people, or a nation, and not only among the closely affected peoples themselves but far and wide, triggering off a palpable sigh of relief and optimism that is echoed in the observation caucuses of other nations, sometimes of the most conflicting, incompatible ideologies. One such sigh was heard in recent times after the death of one of the most incalcitrant warlords that the condition of colonialism ever brought to be on this continent. You will encounter its expression in commentary after media commentary, you will hear it canvassed among policy makers, from observatory to political observatory, and openly celebrated both in the streets, institutions and market places of the affected nations as well as in allied spaces of foreign partners, humanitatian agencies, and international organisations. Sad, but true. Even while recognising that such moments of hope may be illusory, there is nonetheless an instinctual response that the worst is over, that the route is now open to social recovery, healing, and rebirth. It speaks a lot to the formative character and ongoing dilemma of a continent that the simple demise of one individual or a handful of individuals becomes necessary in order to commence the process of regeneration, or rebirth of a dying community of people.

In this case, the individual - Jonas Savimbi - was not even a possessor of the national mantle of leadership. He was a liberationist turned warlord, albeit with a not incosiderable following, and he had certainly sustained either the longest, or the second longest running civil war on this continent - all depending on what commencement date we choose to accord its closest rival, that of the Sudanese. Consider then those cases where the individual involved has been a nationally installed, or self-installed leader, with all the resources of the nation at his command, a leader who had conducted an undefined war of attrition against his own people, ground them to submission under a powerful and ruthless security apparatus, impoverished their present and mortgaged their future - that is, left them none to which they could even look forward in consolation. The roll-call is long and dismal - Mobutu Sese Seko, Macias Nguema, Milton Obote, Sergeant Doe, Sanni Abacha etc. - and those who refused to oblige their peoples with a permanent exit from the corporeal world, however belated - that is, those whose demise was largely a matter of political absence, but a gift of inestimable relief to their peoples nonetheless - Idi Amin Dada, Mariam Mengistu, Friday Sankoh, the collective leadership of the Rwandan genocidaires etc. etc. And then we only have to transport ourselves to other nations like Zimbabwe to eavesdrop on the prayers of millions who wish that a short cut to national redemption might be found if only a certain power-obsessed near-octogenarian and once revered revolutionary leader would be called - to use a favourite expression in my country - called to higher glory! However, as earlier stated, the prospect of change, wherever it has depended on one individual, has almost always proved illusory. Indeed, sometimes, the answer to such fervent prayers has all too frequently only thrown up yet another monstrosity, and the round of prayers recommences, punctuated by the short-lived jubilation that accompanies a seeming, positive response.

What picture this paints for us of a continent under the complacent, indeed accomodating umbrella of the outgoing Organisation of African Unity is one that may be held to project, for millions of long-suffering peoples, a passionate, yet more rational prayer: that whatever continental organisation replaces the outgoing must be placed on a principle that is not yoked to the preservation or demise of any one individual leader. Indeed, it goes further: that a replacement must now take leave of the collaborative image and reality of a club of personalities in perpetual mutual adoration, and restore the propulsion of the communities of this contient to the people themselves. The phrase, admittedly turning a cliche in its loose and often opportunistic applicability, is - people's empowerment. But we all know what we mean by this. We are looking for a future that restores the ordering of a people's existence, the reproduction of the means to and quality of their social existence, to the people themselves.

The process has of course, already commenced, and perhaps it is the recognition of the commencement of this transformation in the socio-political psyche of our people that has instigated the frequent recourse to yet another much-abused phrase - African Renaissance - by some of our more optimistic leaders. Is the ongoing transformation of the erstwhile Organisation of African Unity into the African Union part of this Renaissance projection? Or have we indeed made such transformative strides since our indentureship to the colonial powers, that we can actually claim to be on the threshold of a Renaissance?

Certain events, certain achievements do nudge us, understandably, towards the hyperbolic vision that aspires to, and indeed appropriates the Renaissance expression before its true advent.We have only to remind ourselves of the miracle of South Africa where the past - that deadweight on the umbilical cord of a new entity - was exorcised in a manner that took the entire world by surprise and served that world a lesson on the possible routes to resolution of a seemingly intractable conflict. And, contrasting so vividly with the earlier mentioned Angolan war - whose resolution does not appear as yet ready to be heralded by the departure of its main prosecutor - there is the termination of the civil war in Mozambique, a conclusion that might even appear to have been divinely ordered in its timing. That timing enabled a now united nation to cope with the worst flood disaster ever experienced by an African nation within living memory. A flood of epic biblical proportions, no less. Drought, yes - the continent was accustomed to this - but flood, nothing quite like this had ever been visited upon the continent. It was as if the flood was sent to remind warring African nations that there is one potent enemy always lurking round the corner, towards whose control all sensible nations should conserve their forces - Nature. First, a plague of droughts and famine, next the Flood - are we heading for the fire next time? This deluge may not have produced a Noah's Ark, but the poignant image that went round the world - one that will remain engraved on many minds till death - that image of the trapped mother who gave birth in a tree - such a portent may be read as a glimmer of potential redemption. It is a picture that should be hung on the office walls of all African political and national leaders, spurring them to reassess their understanding of the purpose of social organisation to which all existing resources should be directed - is it towards the nurturing of life? Or the repudiation of life in the cause of ego, and the desperate consolidation of power?

And there are other spaces of relief , active expressions of people's self-empowerment - the swift termination of the incipient tyranny of General Guei in Ivory Coast, being among the most recent, and the most uplifting, since it was one of those rare instances of a successful people's uprising, spontaneous but also, alas, exacting in its toll. The restoration of that democracy - for this, indeed, is what we are speaking of, democracy, genuine participation in civic and political life and in all its structures and social ramifications - that democratic restoration was a triumph of a people's will. To move away from all mystification, this is what democracty entails, and what answers to the name also of people's empowerment. Restoration of democracy within that polity is also being accompanied by a public soul-searching, a review of the past, irrespective of personalitites, as demonstrated in Ivory Coast's own version of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. One must record also the belated resolve of the Organisation of African Unity to tolerate no more military coups - we expect that the organ that succeeds it will enshrine this among its cardinal protocols, abandoning once for all the policy of non-interference which only translates as being accessories before, during and after state criminality. Nor must we forget the collaborative effort now being undertaken to wage war against AIDS - again much much belated, but nonetheless a hint of a new seriousness that offers a glimmer of hope that the present proliferation of ghost towns and villages, wasted by this appalling scourge, may at least be gradually arrested.

Does the proposed Africa Union intend to respond differently from its predecessor to the ongoing regression of Zimbabwe into a land of fear engendered by state thuggery, whose predictable consequence is the collapse of economic structures and a slow strangulation of civic life? Here, once again, we are confronted by that perennial phenomenon of the African leader who simply cannot bear to be parted from power even in his dotage. One should be forgiven for imagining that surely, especially in that region, after the dismal lesson of Hastings Banda, the temptation to act out those words of egregious arrogance and folly - l'etat, c'est moi - would have diminished. The contrary is what we are certainly witnessing in the conduct of our once revered revolutionary and liberation warrior, Robert Mugabe. Playing the race card with a cynical crudeness, the real victims of his ambition are millions of Zimbabweans who desire change, an opportunity for change, and are entitled to it as equal partners in the struggle for liberation.

Let us however not lose sight of some fundamental issues that must be held pertinent to a once settler-colony like Zimbabwe, where a grossly disproportionate few control the largest and richest swathes of farmland in the nation. Abdul Nasser in his time was compelled to tackle such a situation head-on, dispossessing the feudal oligargy and reinvesting the land among the fellahin. The struggle of the Sandinista in Nicaragua against a landowning monopoly composed of a few select families is equally historic. Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centred squarely on the ownership of land, even right down to contemporary times, with the revolt of the neo- Zapatistas. There is therefore nothing extraordinary or blameworthy in any moves to execute a policy that aims for a more egalitarian apportionment of land and its resources. The question that must be put to Robert Mugabe however is this: just what have you been doing as Head of a virtual one-party government in nearly a quarter of a century. Is there no orderly, structured alternative to the unleashing of so-called war veterans on farm owners, their families and - a majority of the affected who are however mostly neglected in western reporting - African farmhands and managers? That last especially, the farm workers. In the history of takeover of factories, I have yet to learn of armies of peasants or university lecturers being instigated to take over the ownership and operations of such factories - no, it is logically the workers themselves. They may be expected to lock out the owners and turn the factory into a cooperative, sometimes retaining the former operatives in management or technical positions in order to ensure continuity in efficiency and productivity. Even Stalin in his mad race to collectivise land and eliminate all those conveniently designated kulaks did not send veterans of Russia's revolutionary wars to take over the land. Not that his results were much better, but he appeared at least to have given some thought to structural transfers, which is something totally absent from Mugabe's methodology - if one could call it that, being a violent, chaotic process in response to an ancient history of dispossession, and for the declared intent for the restoration land justice.

Stung and humiliated by the clear knowledge that the elections two years ago in Zimbabwe constituted a victory for the opposition - never mind that a vicious campaign of intimidation, murders and other dismal forms of state terror, identical with the present campaign - had succeeded in providing his party a numerical majority - the ageing lion has resorted to the most blatant, time-dishonoured methods of African dictators who fail to understand that a people must be led in dignity, not dragged on their knees along the pathway to social transformation. Resignations and dismissals of judges have been manipulated at a speed unprecedented in the history of Zimbabwe's judiciary, so that that institution is now packed with Mugabe's creatures, guaranteed to do his bidding and overturn constitutional modes of redresss. Free expression has become hazardous, as writers and journalists skeeter around increasingly ill-defined parameters of toleration that recall the darkest days of Idi Amin's Uganda. In vain his own peers, his brother heads of states in neighbouring countries, and with similar revolutionary credentials attempt to call Feurher Mugabe to order - no, he is far too gone on the route to self-apostheosization, indifferent to the price that African nations and peoples continue to pay when forced along this cul-de-sac. A messy end-game is in store for that unlucky nation, the enthronement of brute force as the force of law, and even the possibility of a civil war. To an opposition of Zimbabwe that remains unbowed, unshaken in their determination to effect change, I forward to you my simple words of solidarity. May the gods of this continent, guardians of the mores of equity, stay behind you and make your gift of eventual victory yet another affirmation of the unquenchable spirit of peoples, and a further degradation of the cult of the individual.

Let me invoke here the title of a seminal novel by the Ghanainan writer, Ayi Kwei Armah certainly one of the pithiest of this genre: The Beautyful Ones are Not yet Born. It is taken from an inscription on that ubiquitous conveyance that is variously known in Africa as the tro-tro, mammy-wagon, bolekaja etc., inscriptions that have formed the subjects of not a few monographs on culture and social mores, as well as coffee-table catalogues. These inscriptions are often taken from proverbs, expressions of traditional wisdoms, sound-bites from the most unlikely sources, wrenched from their original contexts - which may vary from the bible, Shakespeare or the koran to Indian or kung-fu films. I shall not however go into any exposition of that work and its scatological review of the immediate post-colonial African reality - I performed that service in a recent lecture as part of a series titled Democracy Unrealized - from which lecture, in fact, some of the ongoing commentary has been adapted. No, for my purpose today, I shall merely call attention to the repertory of folk sayings from which that title was borrowed. The eclectic appropriation of shorthand expressions for contemporary realities, anxieties, aspirations and even as a record of events is very much a feature of popular culture that extends beyond these mobile murals. I often think that a compulsory exercise for leaders should take the form of a staggered ride through the length and breath of the country in one of these mammy-wagons, that is, changing transportation every twenty-five kilometres or so. Not only would they acquire a very real lesson in 'how the other side lives', they might begin to understand that these crude inscriptions are the very definition of the existential reality and world views of their companions in those rickety and tumultuous, and often fatal contraptions. They would experience the environment over which they preside as 'the other side' does, with all the bumps, corrugations, filth, real-life commerce, raucousness, uncertainties, real-time tragedies and petty triumphs, but above all a resilience that often is the sole surviving element as society itself collapses.

Since these leaders are unlikely to accept this therapeutic, and even heuristic excercise for the understanding and management of power, perhaps they should simply be compelled to memorise as many of the inscriptions as their brains can accomodate or else simply recite from a pocket-book of these selections, and meditate on one inscription every day, before or after their morning prayers. Maybe even replace their prayers and other spiritual invocations - which appear to have taken the African continent nowhere anyway - with a meditation on a select few, indeed, just one per day so as not to place them under any mental strain. No Telephone line to Heaven. Chop small, no quench. The Young shall Grow. Monkey dey work, baboon dey chop. Allah dey! No Condition is Permanent ......ah yes, that especially - No Condition is Permanent. You can debate, analyse, reify or fetishize democracy as long and as elaborately as you like but, place your average citizen in a motor park with lorries filled with dozens of these inscriptions, ask that worker or peasant to point out any single item that accurately defines democracy for him and the odds are that he will unerringly point at that lorry bearing the inscription: No Condition is Permanent. Has the African Union yet decided on a logo and/or motto? If not, may I suggest that the search is over? - You couldn't define more adequately what should inform the principles of association more profoundly, distinguish it from its predecessors, and affect the conduct of its members. Definitely, I encourage a picture of that long-suffering human conveyances, and that rubric lettered over its side: No Condition is Permanent.

No condition is Permanent? There is need to urge that wisdom also on those leaders whose view of society is static, unchanging. I shall therefore proceed with yet another image, an uncomfortable one that implicates a subject that is sometimes considered as delicate, requiring careful handling. Why a subject whose matter provokes mayhem, death and wholesale destruction is considered delicate - I find myself out of sympathy with such a notion. I find nothing delicate in any mission that constantly provokes bloodshed and often reduces one half of humankind to a second class, no indeed to a sub-stratum of humanity. I find it unacceptable. There are issues that have been religiously - yes, religiously - avoided in the deliberations of the outgoing body, and it would be a betrayal of the people of this continent if this avoidance continues into the new association. The very notion of association - or integration, an expression that occurs again and again at this encounter - is based on the eradication of boundaries - national boundaries, economic boundaries, ethnic boundaries etc. etc. Most of these aspects of needful integration have been exhaustively dealt with in numerous encounters, but I am convinced that little, if any attention has been paid to one that is exacting the most horrendous toll on our people today - I refer to the religious boundary.

There is something especially unseemly about the avoidance posture assumed by one part of an organisation when yet another part constantly thrusts it forward in the most aggressive manner, in a way that affronts the humanistic self-definition of others, yet demands that obeisance be paid to its arrogant claims of supremacy in world views. The image I refer to is a very present one, the image of a woman crouched in pain, or buried up to her neck in earth, then subjected to the hideous torture of a barrage of stones for giving her body to whom she wants, and under her own terms of association. No one seated in this assembly can pretend that this urgent image does not hang over us - the fate of the woman Safiyat and hundreds like her at the hands of those who have chosen to interprete their scriptures, not for the enhancement and dignity of their fellow beings, but as mandate for pristine governance of the most cruel and dehumanising kind.

Thank goodness, the perpetrators and would-be perpetrators of such crimes against humanity do not permit us to forget their atavistic resolve. Only a few days ago - on March 5th to be precise, a group within Nigeria lauched a campaign to stop the ratitification of a number of United Nations conventions on the grounds that these conventions are contrary to their religious values. And what are those conventions. This group targetted specifically the Convention against "cruel, inhuman and other degrading treatment or punishment, the Convention Against Women and the Convention against Child Abuse"

Of course, it is boringly predictable hat we shall be tagged an enemy of this or that religion, denounced as bigots and fronts for some other religion - usually associated most tendentiously with the christian west - a familiar ploy that is intended to tar opposing voices with the very traits that characterise the proponents of these dark readings of universally known and respected spiritual texts. When I say they are respected however, this does not mean that they are not constantly challenged, subjected to conflicting exegeses, contradictory readings even by proponents and followers of that religion. Even translations differ in critical aspects. So what element is it that arbitrates these contradictory readings? Violence. The ascendancy of naked, brutish, violence and the readiness to destabilise society. The capacity to rouse a mob from the first two sentences of an incendiary sermon and send them rampaging through the streets, slitting the throats of innocents or setting their homes on fire. Have we, the black peoples of this continent, no lesson to impart to the world concerning the nature of tolerance, accomodation, and a genuine respect for the spirituality of others?

Religion must be granted its public space, protected, and even celebrated in its seasonal manifestations but, fundamentally, religion is an experience whose primal space is that private interiority of every individual. As long as this continent, as we have inherited it, is a quiltwork of religious patches, then any effort at integrating those parts in any form will be valid only through the negotiated subjection of such parts to a certain minimal code of conduct and usage, most especially where the context is the human entity. In matters that concern the basic entities of such an association, and for whom the association exists - that is, its humanity - we must embrace the duty, the responsibility of choice. We cannot substitute, must not substitute for a secular - civilian or military - dictatorship, we must not substitute for this secular project of dehumanisation a theocratic one, and we must must make this declaration resonate throughout the continent. If we fail to do so, much plain criminal conduct of some states will receive, tacitly, the endorsement and complicity of such an organisation.

I am obliged to utilise my own benighted country, Nigeria, as an example, and a caution. This is a nation where successive presidents and military dictators - christian or moslem - never did attempt to turn the nation into a theocracy. Thus what we are witnessing today goes beyond religion. It is simply politics by other means. Again, I invoke that ubiquitous motto on our public transportation - No Condition is Permanent - to remind our theocratic bullies that the status of women in the twenty-first century cannot remain the same as it was in the sixth or sixteenth - if indeed it ever so abased even then. Let us boldly - because truthfully - assert that as many faces of islam as there are of bhuddism, judaism, christianity, hinduism or orisa worship. In our resolve to cohabit and associate therefore, it behoves us to choose, among several interpretative options - a code of socio-religious usage that does not militate against or degrade our human inheritance - an inherent dignity - that is the common denominator of our very humanity - no matter what religion we espouse.

Religion cannot become the justification for discrimination against women, nor for the enforced marrying of underage children, as some of these proponents would have us believe. Nor can religion justify reducing a woman to a messy pulp for her sexual proclivities while the man is free to indulge his libido. In my religion, which is that of the orisa, a religion of a far more ancient anteriority than the so-called world religions, the very notion is abominable. That, I am certain, will be found to be a constant within the credo of many traditional African religions - I therefore contemptuously reject, as dishonest and ahistorical, any gospel that claims that our position on the social degradation of the female sex in our society is the result of our mental conditioning by an external culture or mores. Before this assembly rises, a call should be made to the president of that beleaguered nation, Nigeria, to stand firm in the face of the murdering zealots who again and again set our streets on fire, and attempt to out-Taliban the Taliban in a society that has enjoyed a secular set of relationships since pre-colonial times.

The disease that began in the northern part of my nation, Nigeria, has begun to spread. It threatens to destabilise the comparatively harmonised existence of some of the neighbouring nations - in case some of you have yet to grasp what is happening in that region, do take it from me, or else conduct your own enquiries. We are therefore not speaking in the abstract but cautioning in the face of actuality. This projected Union must come out boldly in favour of the secular state as a condition of membership. It must set its face resolutely against the very notion of theocracy as defining the nation ideal. Indeed, the African continent should define itself - wherever structured - by a repudiation of any nation that is theocratic in constitution. The problems that we are compelled to confront are sufficiently immense, without the complications that are imposed by the theocratic order, or more truthfully, disorder. If any new organisation of African nations must provide itself any validity for existence, it must confront this new theocratic arrogation that was virtually unknown at the nativity of the precedent union.

Failing this, then perhaps it is time to propose the existence of two unions - the theocratic, and the secular. Let those who believe that nationhood or society can only realise itself through immutable laws that are not subject to enquiry, discovery and evolution - let all such found their own union while the rest, those who believe that the human entity is endowed with the intelligence and vision to regulate its conduct and constantly recreate its existence - formulate and pursue their secular destiny in a separate and humanised grouping. We seek a Union where the fundamental human rights of man, woman and child form the bedrock of social interraction, an egalitarian dispensation that truly jettisons the cult of mystification in the mundane arena of material development, and social governance.

Now, a quick look at one or two other parameters of some urgency that may eventually justify this change of garments on the collective shoulders of long cohabiting neighbours:

In tackling issues of economic cooperation and developmental pojects, if the Union intends to forge policies for salvaging the economic health of the continent by a structured promotion of more and more micro-economic programming as opposed to grandiose projects which only land African nations in deeper debts and problems of sourcing and maintenance, then it would have created a viable union, the lives of whose peoples are enchanced by true self-reliance. This economic approach is naturally dependent on the devolution of increased autonomy and control to the constituent units that presently make up our nations, so that productivity becomes decentralised. Governmental policies which lead to the monopoly of power and resources at the centre while depleting the supply regions, is detrimental to the full economic self-realisation of our peoples. If the union leads to the abandonment of the unsustainable mentality of the megalopolis, the pursuit of authentic federal structures over ossified centralisation - that would be yet another laudable purpose to its existence, since this would drastically transform the face of the continent - in concrete terms. It would democratise its component units, so that we do not continue to perpetuate the inegalitarian phenomenon of obscenely affluent capitals squatting on top of, and feeding off haphazard and ill-developed slum villages whose neglected populations only drift towards the glitzy centres, perpetuating the feature of bloated, lop-sided capitals that burst open at the seams under the strain on its service resources. We need, in short, new developmental models that offer us unique national landscapes, humanized, decentralisation and democratisation made manifest, even in the very architectural language that defines our physical existence. And finally:

If, for instance, the Union intends to beam its searchlight on the urgent task of terminating, as rapidly as possible the cycle of wars that are waged so murderously over colonially imposed national boundaries - such as the recent Ethiopian-Eritrean bloodbath, an event of surely historic inanity - it would have proved that the continent has indeed reached maturity and resolved not to perpetuate, as a mindless agent, the callous disregard, indeed contempt for African peoples - as opposed to veneration of their raw material and other natural resources - that motivated the cavalier manner in which the continent was carved up in the first place. The primary wealth of a nation is its people. Neither Nation nor Society is abstract, but concretely defined by the palpable existence of the humanity that animates and recreates any inert slab of real estate. Africa has an opportunity to radicalise her existence by embarking on a policy of resolving her internal boundary disputes through the means of ascertaining the wishes of the people who actually inhabit, develop, and produce their existence from such disputed areas. We hold the view that no piece of mere territorial holding, including its natural resources, is worth the life of one of our fellow men, women or children.. If the ultimate goal of the African continuent is to create some form of rational - as supposed to merely sentimental - political union, the present boundaries, imposed on the continent by imperial powers, must be designated as negotiable - wherever they remain costly sources of friction. In any case, they prove more and more meaningless every day to the people they enclose, and the loss of lives in their defence indicts a lack of visionary thinking and planning on the part of our political leadership.

The era of nation glorification, which all too often proves to be little more than power manifestation and leadership vanity, should be brought to an end, and if the proposed union hastens the demise of obsolete nation-thinking, and the emergence of peoples as the driving force of social existence, then we approach a truly progressive stage in the evolution of our unique species, and aspirations towards a Renaissance may indeed begin to have meaning, and relevance. Too much has been sacrificed for what should be a purely service agency - the nation - at the expense of its humanity. The ultimate envisioning of social organisation as a humane undertaking should begin to inform present social strategies, and the banner across that Renaissance horizon, however dimly glimpsed, should read simply: Let nations die, that humanity may live.