The bumbling African Union response to the Libyan crisis and, in particular, the disingenuous lead role played by the South African government, reveals the self-inflicted irrelevance of the formula “African solutions to African problems”. The AU simply seems unable to progress towards meaningful initiatives that might pre-empt future colonial-style adventurism.
“Africa”, the Somali novelist Naruddin Farah lamented in an evocative phrase over a decade ago, “is a guest in the 20th century”. Yet, at the start of the 21st century, our leaders still principally define their continental policies and principles as a negative – against “colonialism” and in opposition to “imperialism” – condemning us to remain complaining bitterly from the sidelines.
In most cases, we only hear the plaintive cry of “African solutions” after Western invention – and invariably after our own leaders have failed to come up with any substantial solution, not even a public censure. If African leaders at least challenged African dictators, then irate denunciations of perfidious imperialists would not ring so hollow. Yet once again, with Libya, the AU demonstrated that it is in danger of dwindling to precisely what the Organisation of African Unity had become: an ally of tyrants and kleptocrats.
Recently a group of more than 200 African intellectuals, including South Africa’s former President Thabo Mbeki, issued a fierce declaration denouncing the Western nations for acting like “rogue states” in Libya and scuppering the AU’s attempts to broker peace and form a government of national unity. The timing was impeccable. This open letter was issued the very week Libyan rebels had not only occupied almost the entire country but had actually entered Tripoli.
Such posturing reminds me of solemn ritual protest marches, when I was an undergraduate in the Eastern Cape, against yet another repressive apartheid act by the National Party. Academics and a gaggle of students would gather at midday to march dolefully round Grahamstown Cathedral before dispersing for lunch. While participants briefly felt better, our protest remained purely symbolic.
It was never going to give brutes such as BJ Vorster or PW Botha sleepless nights. Similarly, routine denunciations of imperialism remain mere theatrical bombast while there is no significant African action. This is the politics of gesture. It’s also an alibi for perpetual victimhood.
When an uprising occurs the AU instinctively prefers to deal with the man who commands the tanks and jet fighters – invariably sold to the rulers of that impoverished country by the usual suspects: two-faced Western powers.
So a serious start to a genuine “African solution” would be to campaign against this ruinous arms trade, where Western companies and African leaders are equally complicit; then to condemn, as loudly and fiercely as we berate the neo-imperialists, any autocrat who turns that firepower on his own people.
It is high time that African intellectuals started calling their own leaders to account. In the past, the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has harshly criticised African intellectuals for continuing to take the easy way out by blaming the West when our leaders are just as liable for the continent’s problems. Africa’s failure to move beyond colonialism to full liberation, he says, is due to a lingering slave mentality. Change will never come by simply yelling more anti-imperialist slogans.
It would be foolish to be under any illusion as to why Western powers intervene in Africa or elsewhere. It is usually to secure their own interests, especially in countries with vast resources of oil. But African diplomacy in situations of crisis currently leaves such a colossal vacuum that it allows Western powers to wrap their cynicism under a humanitarian cloak. Instead of invariably siding with the tyrant, however, the AU and South Africa might begin to articulate the genuine aspirations of “the people” and thus delegitimise the West’s presumption.
African leaders could at least set out serious guidelines for Africa’s own response – before a crisisdevelops. Otherwise Africans may be condemned to remain guests on their own continent.
