About Ageing...

Today, my usual Sunday meditations were characterized by a mixture of pride and bafflement at the celebration of Nelson Mandela's 90^th birthday. I am extremely proud of his achievements and his commitment to freedom and humanity that made him survive 27 years in prison. I am also proud that he retired in dignity, rather than waste his legacy and sunset years on fighting with young people over some mediocre patriarchal post otherwise known as the presidency, as Mugabe and other African leaders before him have done. And it was wonderful to see a man as esteemed as he is spend his birthday quietly in his home town of Qunu with his family (hint to African men).

On the other hand, I don't understand what I see of Mandela in the media today. It doesn't make sense to me how a man who fought for dignity of people can be comfortable with Western leaders who have recently declared Africans persona non grata in Europe through a draconian anti-immigration law. The EU recently passed a law that allows detention for up to 18 months and eventual deportation of even pregnant women and minors, an event that seems to have missed the attention of African thinkers distracted by Zimbabwe's "elections." And Madiba's birthday being celebrated in London by, among others, singers reported to have drug issues is rather puzzling. Also puzzling is his appeal to the rich to share with the poor, without mentioning the injustice through which the rich acquired wealth in the first place, an injustice which imprisoned him and his people for so long.

These contradictions trouble me because I cannot hold Madiba responsible for them. He dedicated 27 years and more of his life to the struggle for freedom in South Africa. We can't ask more of him because he has done more than enough. And we can't ask him to spend the years during which he should be enjoying appreciation and accolades, as every elder should, on the battlefront in the continuing fight for the human dignity of Africans. He is a man and a human being, not a god, and we, the younger generations, must learn his legacy in order to take over the baton in our continuing quest for freedom. On the other hand, a question lingered in my mind: how is it that African leaders in their twilight years, mostly men, seem to contradict the principles of their youth?

My first instinct was to think that maybe we Africans do not praise our heroes enough. With the encouragement of the Western world, many times under banners such as feminism, multi-culturalism and homophobia, we shoot down our heroes down for not being angels and blame them for being devils. Take any African luminary - Senghor, Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, Steve Biko - and you'll find a scholar who has written on how exclusionary and essentialist they are, and sometimes blaming them for one thing that they could not change: the fact that they are men and not women. But worse, which is most glaring in the case of Mandela, we are not willing to spend the resources holding a bash for him as the Europeans did. And please, dear reader, don't tell me about lack of resources. Africa is not that poor. We are just convinced that our culture is not worth investing time and money. We leave the development of our culture to Euro-Americans while we spend money on "bread-and-butter" issues, which usually means fattening the coffers of tribal warlords so that they don't kill us. That's why even the best of projects in the arts in Africa are funded by Ford Foundation and Bill Gates rather than by Africa's millionaires. Shame on us for not holding a birthday bash for Madiba.

But shame also on Europe and America. Shame on them for brutalizing us even in the 21^st century and then usurping our heroes who fought against that brutalization. I will say this again: Euro-America has no moral right to praise Mandela, unless that praise comes with an apology for its sins for the last 4 centuries, accompanied by a commitment to reparations and to respect for Africans' humanity. The fact that the European Union had the audacity to pass a racist and oppressive anti-immigration law, and the G8 was unable to satisfactorily commit itself to de-polluting our world or rendering the global trade structures more equitable, makes its celebration of Mandela's birthday an outright insult.

However, my bewilderment about Mandela's trajectory remains. Especially when I remember an aging Aime Cesaire who told Nicolas Sarkozy not to bother visiting him due to the immoral law passed by the French senate that praised the "benefits" of colonialism and exhorted teachers to teach them in schools. Cesaire also explicitly stated how he wanted the ceremony celebrating his life to be conducted. He was to be buried in Martinique, with no speeches made by politicians. I suspect he had foreseen the charade that met his departure for the ancestral world: French politicians suddenly remembered that Cesaire was a great poet and even asked that he be buried as a French hero in the Pantheon in Paris. However, Cesaire had left behind specific instructions: his ceremony was to have no religion, no politics. Sarkozy was therefore obliged to issue his condolences upon his arrival at the airport, while the Catholic Church was left reeling from disappointment. Meanwhile, it was wonderful to see the celebration conducted through the words of poets in an atmosphere that was distinctly Martinican.

It is against many African sensibilities to anticipate the day when one will join the next world. The fact that I am doing so in this piece is an outright anomaly which I blame on the fact that racism does not allow Africans to age peacefully and gracefully. As Cesaire shows, one who is committed to the struggle for African dignity must continue to fight even from the ancestral world, because white supremacy never goes on a break. Even when you spend your best years fighting against it, white supremacy will come back and praise you for God-knows what. On the other hand, I have already stated that we cannot demand of our heroes to continue fighting in the years during which they should be enjoying their legacy. The drudgery and work of fighting on should be taken over by younger people. And that is where a younger, still militant pan-Africanist like myself comes in. I therefore remain gracious and appreciate Mandela as a remarkable man and human being. I respect the wisdom of his age and experience, which is infinitely greater than my comparably youthful naivete and impatience.

But for the moment, I will not do the same for Prof. Ali A. Mazrui, probably because I tend to be more impatient with Kenyans than I am with other Africans. Today's issue of Kenya's Sunday Nation has published a full page piece by the eminent professor and that has left me not simply flabbergasted, but also disappointed. The thesis of Mazrui's article is that measure of great African leadership is the extent to which African leaders do not harbor resentment against their former colonial rulers. He praises Africans for their "short memory of hate," in comparison to the Irish who harbor bitterness against the English since the Orange conflicts of the 17^th century. He also talks about the Jews who have "strong collective memories of the Holocaust and earlier outbursts of the European anti-Semitism," but how that fits into his rubric "memory of hate" is difficult to understand. The examples of Africans' "short memory of hate" include Kenyatta's transformation into a staunch pro-Western capitalist, Ian Smith's seat in Zimbabwe's parliament, Mandela's visit to Mrs. Verwoed, and now Obama's rise to become "the most trusted black man in US history" due to his "tolerant multi-culturalism."

Frankly speaking, I find it difficult to believe that Prof. Mazrui is saying what I understand him to be saying. I expected a political scientist and a man who has suffered under successive government regimes to know that the tolerance for our former rulers ran parallel to the oppression and hatred of Africans by their own kith and kin. Yes, our leaders may have been nice to the white folk who deserved to go to prison for the crimes they committed during the colonial years, but how come they didn't display the same tolerance to fellow Africans? This is the question that Mazrui does not ask. Instead, he seems to equate freedom with whites and blacks reconciling, or worse, with blacks reconciling themselves to whites. However, if Mandela spent his youthful years touting for reconciliation, he never would have landed in prison in the first place. The apartheid regime would have simply tolerated him. In any case, if Africans seemingly lack "hatred" for our former colonial rulers, it is not because they had no festering wounds from a century of exploitation and humiliation. It is because their leaders, who did not deal with the colonial legacy but simply perpetuated it, managed to transform those wounds into hatred against their fellow Africans, as the histories of Rwanda, Kenya and South Africa show.

Lack of violence against Europeans in Africa should not be equated with lack of hatred. The hatred is definitely still there; it is simply directed against each other and ultimately against ourselves. To ignore this fact simply because Africans are the victims is to trivialize our humanity. That does mean that we should now direct hatred against Europeans; it means we should not hate at all. Instead, we should make a concerted effort to diagnose and heal our wounds in order to boost our love for humanity, no matter its complexion.

The other problem I have with this "short memory of hate" is the inherent equation of African memory with hatred. The fact that we remember the evils that Euro-America has committed against us does not mean that we hate people of European descent. It simply means that we remember what we have been through so that we understand what we are today. And that memory is not restricted to colonial rule: we also remember legends, folklore, history, songs as well as the feats and experiences of our family and precedessors that have little, if anything, to do with Euro-America. If Euro-America is uncomfortable with our memory, it is due to two things.

First, it suffers from a guilty conscience which can only be atoned through justice and reparations, so that it considers an evocation or even a hint of our colonial past an accusation against them. Yet if we point fingers at Euro-America today, it is not because of actions safely tucked away in the past. We do so because Euro-America continues to benefit from those actions by perpetuating the global inequality founded on racism, slavery and exploitation. This is not about love or hate; it's about justice, or the lack of it. Even their Bible says that repentance must be accompanied by rejecting the erring path and making amends, as is evident in the story of Zacheus, something which Euro-America is yet to do.

Second, racism is a disease of narcissicism entrenched by centuries-old institutions and practices that encourage people of European ancestry to define themselves by negation to those of African ancestry. For this reason, people of European descent may consider anything we Africans say or do which does not include them at all, or which does not include them favorably, as opposition to them. This pathology can only be healed through concerted healing and the arduous task of confronting their own history, not through Africans erasing their own memory in the name of love or lack of hatred.

Besides, I am exasperated with the exhortation of Africans to love Euro-Americans (which usually means accept the status quo) while Euro-America reciprocates this "love" through instituting draconian laws and pacifying us with the economic windfall, otherwise dubbed "philanthropy." Malcolm X kept saying it, and I will repeat it here: it is folly to love people who don't love us. Love depends on a relationship that is edifying for the parties involved. A relationship in which one party exploits the other and which is mediated by the rhetoric of affection, or lack thereof, has nothing to do with love or hate. It has everything to do with sadism and masochism. They say there is a thin line between love and hate because the difference is not in the feeling but in its result. Whether one loves or hates, the emotional energy, thought and commitment in thinking about the other remains the same. Consequently, if Africans do not love Euro-Americans, it does not mean we hate them. It just means we have no feelings about them either way. But we do have strong feelings about justice because we love humanity and demand that humanity pays for the sins of oppression. In any case, love and hate do not apply except to close interractions. We do love (or hate) the Europeans with whom we work, speak, or are married to. By the same token, Europeans do not hate Africans; they are just raised in institutions and a history that pathology tunes them to negate us. Racism is not hatred; it's a disease of habitual bad faith and dehumanization.

In addition, it is presumptive to dictate how people should heal from their wounds. If Africans remember and mourn slavery and colonialism for the next two millenia, or if Jews do the same for the Holocaust, that is their prerogative. Only the wounded know how much the wounds inflicted in the past continue to hurt, and so we cannot dictate how they will grieve. Part of repentance is respecting people's right to grieve for as long as is necessary, and learning to bite our tongues and not accuse people of wallowing in the past, especially if we are the ones who inflicted that suffering.

Frankly, Prof. Mazrui's piece surprises me, just as Ngugi wa Thiong'o's praise for Kibaki just before Kenya's "elections" surprised me. I do not expect such articles from men of their stature, experience and rank, which has led me to wonder if ageing for Africans means contradicting the principles that people stood for in their youth. But like I have said, white supremacy is relentless; it requires us to be on perpetual fighting mode when we should be ageing gracefully while upholding the eternal principles we defended in our youth. And when white supremacy can't beat the legacy of our leaders, it will heap them with accolades that overwhelm and scare younger Africans into thinking that Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King before him, became complicit. On the other hand, who knows? Forty years from now - if the ancestors are that kind to me - a young African will be writing to blast me for deviating from the principles which I am now vehemently defending. And I might be shaking my head at how little she knows.

In anticipation of that great day, I join the rest of the world in wishing Madiba a very happy birthday and many more. Mzee Mandela, we are proud of you. I wish we Africans would be more vigorous in showing it.