*

An African Parliament of Liberators
*

Two days before the publication of this edition of ANC TODAY, the 3rd
African Union Assembly of Heads of State and Government unanimously accepted
South Africa's offer to host the Pan African Parliament (PAP). This marks
yet another important step forward in the implementation of the
comprehensive African transformation programme represented by the AU and its
development programme, NEPAD.

The Assembly also took the important step of adopting the Statutes of the
Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the AU (ECOSOCC). Given the fact
that we now have the protocol defining the tasks and other elements of this
Council, the Assembly went further to urge the Chairperson of the AU
Commission "to take urgent measures for the launching and operationalisation
of ECOSOCC."

Also notable in this regard, the Assembly also requested "the Executive
Council (of the AU) to take appropriate measures to define, at the earliest
opportunity, the meaning of the African Diaspora". This is consistent with
the decision taken at the Durban Founding Assembly of the AU for our
continent to establish structured relations with the African Diaspora,
defining this Diaspora as part of the process that must lead to the success
of the African Renaissance.

The progress made with regard to the PAP, including the decision to locate
it in South Africa, and the imminence of the establishment of ECOSOCC, bring
to the fore the strategic matter of the role of the African masses in the
struggle for the renewal of their continent.

Quite naturally, up to now, our governments have led the processes of
African transformation represented by the AU and NEPAD. Nevertheless, the
2001 Lusaka Summit of the OAU directed the Member States to popularise both
the AU and NEPAD among the African masses. In reality, however, much needs
to be done to give effect to this decision.

The establishment of the PAP and the formation of ECOSOCC further emphasise
the need for the empowerment of our people to play their role in changing
their lives for the better. Our movement must respond to this challenge and
ensure that we both supply the people with the knowledge they need, as well
as organise them actively to participate in what inevitably will be a
protracted struggle for the victory of the African renaissance.

For many centuries now, Africa has been victim to many developments that
have placed Africans everywhere among the most "wretched of the earth".
These developments include the transportation of millions of Africans across
both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans as slaves, producing disastrous effects
on the cohesion and productive capacity of African societies and leading to
the formation of slave colonies in North and South America and the
Caribbean.

Writing about the "Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist" in his well-known
treatise "Das Kapital", Karl Marx said:

"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement
and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the
conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren
for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the
era of capitalist production."

A more recent book, "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild, first
published in 1998, also reflects on the practice and impact of the slave
trade on the Congo. He writes that, "Within a few decades (of the first time
the Portuguese came to the Congo), the Western hemisphere became a huge,
lucrative, nearly insatiable market for African slaves. They were put to
work by the millions in Brazil's mines and on its coffee plantations, as
well as on the Caribbean islands where other European powers quickly began
using the lush, fertile land to grow sugar.

"The lust for slave profits engulfed even some of the (Portuguese) priests,
who abandoned their preaching, took black women as concubines, kept slaves
themselves, and sold their students and converts into slavery."

He writes of a king of the baKongo, who had become a Christian convert,
Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, who wrote to King Jo?o III of Portugal in 1526 as
follows: "Each day the traders are kidnapping our people - children of this
country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own
family.Thiscorruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is
entirely
depopulated.We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no
merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass.It is our wish that this
Kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves."

King Jo?o III responded to this heartfelt plea as follows: "You.tell me that
you want no slave-trading in your domains, because this trade is
depopulating your country.The Portuguese there, on the contrary, tell me how
vast the Congo is, and how it is so thickly populated that it seems as if no
slave has ever left."

Commenting on the "Scramble for Africa", which led to the colonisation of
our continent, Hoschschild writes: "Underlying much of Europe's excitement
was the hope that Africa would be a source of raw materials to feed the
Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials - slaves - for
the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe's earlier dealings
with Africa. Expectations quickened dramatically after prospectors
discovered diamonds in South Africa in 1867 and gold some two decades later.
But Europeans liked to think of themselves as having higher motives. The
British, in particular, fervently believed in bringing 'civilisation' and
Christianity to the natives; they were curious about what lay in the
continent's unknown interior; and they were filled with righteousness about
combating slavery. Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high
moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and
only in 1838 had slavery's vestiges been abolished in the British Empire."

The majority of the peoples of Africa gained their independence from
colonial domination from the 1950's onwards, climaxing in our own liberation
in 1994. The countries all of us inherited had been deeply scarred by
depopulation resulting from "the turning of Africa into a warren for the
commercial hunting of black skins" of which Marx and Hoschchild wrote; its
use as "a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution" that
Hochschild spoke about; and the racism that Hochschild reported, which led
"the British, in particular, fervently (to) believe in bringing
'civilisation' and Christianity to the natives."

There is a continuing and urgent need for Africa's historians, sociologists
and others to assess and write about the long-term impact of these three
historical phenomena on Africa - slavery, colonialism and racism. There are
some in our country and the rest of the world who demand that we should view
and treat these phenomena merely as a matter of historical record, with no
relevance to our contemporary struggles for Africa's rebirth.

In part, this is driven by the determination to compel the victims of gross
injustice to forget the harm that was done to them, inducing a collective
African amnesia, the better to be able to persuade the victims to blame
themselves for their wretchedness. We see this clearly in our own country,
where some insist that apartheid is a thing of the past, and that all
references to the continuing impact of that past constitute an attempt to
"play the race card."

And yet, for us, it is critically important that we understand the impact of
that past, to empower ourselves to deal effectively with the present. Our
purposes are not informed by any desire to blame those historically
responsible for the most terrible crimes against humanity, but to design the
policies and programmes that must help us to achieve Africa's renaissance.

African scholarship has a responsibility to inform us about the consequences
of the depopulation of Africa through slavery on the formation of the
colonial system. Similarly, African scholarship has a responsibility to
educate us about the consequences of the colonial system on the birth and
practice of neo-colonialism that has characterised much of Africa during the
years of its independence. It has a duty to educate us about the emergence
and impact of racism on the societies that were the victims of slavery,
colonialism and neo-colonialism.

Together we have the responsibility fully to understand contemporary African
reality as it has been formed by the historical phenomena of slavery,
colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism, which are not separated one from
the other by any Chinese walls. Between these phenomena there are no
discontinuities, as there is no discontinuity between the past and the
present, affording us the possibility to respond to the present as though
there was no past.

As we have indicated, this past includes the recent period of
neo-colonialism. During this phase of the evolution of Africa, we have seen
African systems of governance continue to treat the African peoples as
masses who deserve to be alienated from the process of determining their
future, with many of the new African rulers attaching themselves as a
parasitic element on African society, as had done the slave traders and the
colonial masters.

In principle this was no different from the arrogance which convinced Joao
III of Portugal that so long as there was an African not in bondage, there
was an African who remained to be subjected to slavery, or the British, who
knew it as a matter of fact that they had a manifest destiny to "civilise"
the "primitive" African natives.

We have seen African systems of governance succumb to a global economic
order born of slavery and colonialism, which defined Africa as a source of
raw materials produced by cheap African labour, making it inevitable that
Africa would be subjected to a sustained process of escalating
impoverishment and underdevelopment.

We have seen how the new rulers accepted the racism that projected African
subservience to a "superior" Western world, taking pride in their absorption
of the cultures and languages of their former colonisers, and their
alienation from their own cultures and languages, which they had learnt to
despise as "uncivilised".

We have seen the entrenchment of the belief that the achievement of the goal
of a better life for the African natives was dependent on the sustained
goodwill of the Western world to favour these masses with the transfer of
resources in the form of "aid" or "overseas development assistance".

The complex of the issues we have mentioned has led to the generalised
African economic and social crisis from which the peoples of Africa have to
extricate themselves. What this calls for is a veritable revolution that
must lead to the eradication of poverty and underdevelopment on our
continent, the restoration of the dignity of the African people, including
those in the Diaspora, and victory in the struggle to end the global
marginalisation of Africa and Africans.

By their very nature, genuine revolutions release the enormous energies that
reside among the masses of the people, drawing these masses into the process
of the making of history. No genuine revolution has ever succeeded by
relying on the actions of a revolutionary elite acting outside of the
involvement of the masses of the people, or predicated on the demobilisation
and immobilisation of the masses.

The call to achieve Africa's renaissance is therefore necessarily a call to
the African masses to rise up in struggle to defeat poverty and
underdevelopment, to end Africa's marginalisation and to restore the dignity
of Africans everywhere. The genuine democratisation of African politics and
systems of governance, and the empowerment of the African masses to be their
own liberators, as visualised both in the Constitutive Act of the AU and
NEPAD, is critical to the achievement of this objective.

Failure to realise these goals would nullify the historic possibility we
have to make decisive advances towards Africa's renaissance. This would
condemn all Africans to the perpetuation of their status as the "wretched of
the earth".

It is our responsibility, acting together with all other patriotic forces in
Africa and the African Diaspora, to ensure that we mobilise the masses of
the people to act as their own liberators, taking advantage of the current
African and global conjuncture that presents us with the possibility to
achieve the old-age dream of the genuine, all-round emancipation of the
African people.

The Pan African Parliament, composed of elected representatives of the
African masses, as well as the AU ECOSOCC have a duty to ensure that they
too discharge their responsibilities to mobilise the masses of the peoples
of Africa actively to participate in the titanic and protracted struggle to
achieve Africa's renewal.

As hosts of the PAP we have a responsibility to create the best possible
conditions for this assembly of the peoples of Africa to carry out its work.
As a country we have the duty warmly to welcome the continental people's
tribunes and to provide the setting that must inspire them to play their
role at the head of the risen African masses.

Similarly, like all the other countries that constitute the membership of
the African Union, we will also have to ensure that the delegates we send to
the ECOSOCC are themselves genuine representatives of the masses of our
peoples, and not merely non-governmental formations that have achieved
public prominence on the basis of foreign funding. The establishment of the
ECOSOCC means that none of us can afford any longer to defer grappling with
the resolution of the question of what we, in the African context, mean by
the categories, civil society and social movements
.

By the decisions it took, the 3rd Assembly of the AU, held at the
headquarters of the Union, Addis Ababa, has provided us with additional
instruments of progressive change in Africa. Fully to realise the potential
of these decisions, both the PAP and ECOSOCC must be constituted and
function as genuine representatives of the masses of our people. Only in
this way will they be able to play their role as the vanguard institutions
for the mobilisation of the African people to act as their own liberators.

By south african prisident



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