Flintlocks & Knobkerries - The African National Question and The Ancient Enemy

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:03

South Africans are often genuinely surprised to discover that other nations have also been colonised, waged revolutionary struggle, rebuilt society and made peace with the ancient enemy. The realisation that our historical progress and current reality are not entirely new under the sun is like a child’s discovery that she is no longer alone in the universe but conversely (and catastrophically) is no longer the centre of it. Like the Americans, we are a navel-gazing bunch. This is partly because the challenges confronting our young republic are so daunting, but also due to a post-colonial collective inferiority complex that manifests in periodic delusions of grandeur (“Our constitution is the most progressive in the world!”) being juxtaposed with bouts of hysterical national self-flagellation (“We are so going to stuff up the world cup!”) in the angst filled public discourse. As a nation we are not dissimilar to the average 14 year old.

We also have a tendency to blame the West for our problems and imagine neo-colonial conspiracies everywhere, mainly because of consistently bad behaviour by the former imperial powers. Imagine a 14 year old whose adoptive parents beat her up for about 400 years before trying to steal and cheat her out of her rightful inheritance and you get the general picture.

Steve Biko had a lot to say about this sort of thing. One imagines that he wouldn’t be entirely surprised that we have yet to fully heal the damaged national psyche, or that we are still in the process of sorting out the relationship between Africa and the former colonial powers. These things don’t happen overnight and both parties to the relationship must want to change. Certainly in the American case, the process took some time. As late as 1957, relations between the declining Empire and her former colony were strained enough to prompt author and political commentator William Clarke to remind readers that America “came into being as a result of war with Britain” and that “conflict has never been far beneath the surface in the past 175 years.”

That this had much to do with the behaviour of the perfidious English will come as no surprise to students of history. According to Clarke:

“If the new nation looked north it saw the sullen vengeful faces of the United Empire Loyalists driven into bitter exile in Canada; if it looked west there were Indians supposedly in British pay, and forts certainly in British hands; if it looked east to the ocean it found the British Navy in almost undisputed control. This possession of sea power in particular gave the British additional capacity for cramping American independence by control of their trade, especially with the West Indies. The British minister responsible, Lord Sheffield, never let it be in doubt that he wished to make the American nation pay dearly for its presumptuous efforts at independence by literally starving them out through discriminatory tariffs and rigid application of the navigation laws. Thus it came about that the early years of American independence were a continuous challenge to Britain.” And you thought the Brits had it in for Mugabe.

Relations with the Empire completely dominated domestic politics for the first generation of America’s existence. The Federalists under Alexander Hamilton favoured a friendly settlement to improve transatlantic trade and strengthen American conservatives against the dangers of radicalism, while Thomas Jefferson’s Agrarian-Democrats argued for total independence through agricultural self-sufficiency. In the end the Democrats won the debate, partly by depicting the Federalists as puppets of the tyrannical British. As it happened, the British were pre-occupied with the Napoleonic wars during this period and the war of 1812 settled the matter. Thereafter, the Monroe Doctrine effectively asserted the right of the United States to stop a world war (the Napoleonic wars) from being fought in the Western Hemisphere.

Of course we Africans would never dream of accusing each other of being the treasonous pawns of neo-colonial adventurers. But one can’t help wondering if we need our own version of a Monroe Doctrine for the information age. Especially when one considers that China (after displacing South Africa as Ghana’s most important trading partner) is suddenly building a brand new command HQ for Ghana’s Army. Or that the Americans recently sought to establish an Africa command, based within the borders of the Union, until vociferous objections from South Africa and Nigeria forced them to backtrack. We have been down this road before: the citizens of Angola and Mozambique amongst others can testify that when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. (citizens of Angola and Mozambique...can testify that when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled)

As it happens the Zimbabwe settlement seems to contain within it the beginnings of an alternative model. Call it the Mbeki Doctrine if you will – the basic preference for African solutions to African problems. Perhaps such a doctrine could guide the AU as it does its utmost to avoid a repeat of the destructive pattern of the last 400 years, when the Great Powers used our motherlands as battlefields.

This last point is important because it is desirable for the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world to evolve in a constructive manner. Here again we may look to the dynamic between Britain and America. While it is true that conflict has never been far from the surface it is also self-evident that both sides benefited enormously from their complex interaction across the Atlantic. The relationship can be described as one of healthy tension. And it has evolved significantly over time. At the beginning of the relationship, America was the 18th century equivalent of an impoverished third world country, albeit rich in natural resources. By the end of the Second World War, Britain was playing the role of Greece to America’s Rome. If you find that scary then pause to imagine the Americans unleashed without Tony Blair or Gordon Brown holding them back. For better or worse, as Clarke puts it “[T]his basic Anglo-American friction has provided the dynamic of the Western world.”

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