If beggars were horses, the rich would ride them. And they are, and they do. Just think about it.

Throughout history, down to this day, the trend has always been that the many slave for the few, and that the many have been the poor and the few have been the rich.

You do not need to be a Bolshevik to subscribe to this view. All you need is a cursory glance at the history of mankind since it started being recorded, from the Jews in Egypt to the Nike factories in Asia.

The odds have always been stacked against the poor, who have been enslaved, kept as serfs, colonised, exploited and made to labour for the rich.

Major developments in history, including the bright landmarks to which we continue to refer today, have extended certain freedoms to larger numbers of people but these numbers have always fallen short of the majority in any given polity.

The Magna Carta (1215) was about the English nobles squeezing from King John the right to lord it over their serfs as a precondition for loyalty and service to the sovereign.

Oliver Cromwell’s rebellion (1640s) was about the English gentry reasserting itself against the Crown’s claim of a divine right to rule; the masses of the English peasantry had very little to do with it.

The French Revolution (1789), despite its strong sans-culotte flavour, was essentially about the arrival of the bourgeoisie; the proletariat had to wait for the Russian Revolution (1917) to experience a momentary glimmer of hope, soon to be supplanted by monumental disappointment.

For the past couple of centuries, great peoples’ movements for emancipation have risen and faded, huge geographical spaces have been transformed for the better, economic and social lives have been elevated, diseases have been checked and poverty challenged.

Yet the majority of the peoples of the world continue to labour for the minority, from Galapagos to Kamchatka.

Obviously, the capitalist mode of production will privilege capital and whoever owns it while those who can only sell their labour have little to leverage, and have to take whatever they are offered, including starvation wages, inhuman working conditions in sweatshops and slave farms, and early deaths.

In the global scheme of things Africans find themselves at the bottom of the heap, oppressed by a long and painful experience of subjugation and humiliation, exploitation and dehumanisation.

Such memories endure and inflict greater pain when we realise that the spurious independences we hoped would mark a fresh start for us have become one huge hoax.

Betrayal

I do not know whether being exploited and humiliated by people who look like you is less painful, especially when you realise that they are doing whatever they are doing to you on behalf of your erstwhile masters.

Or whether it could be more hurtful because it involves a sense of betrayal.

The African continent will continue to suffer as long as our elites remain the surrogates of outside interests, which renders even the label of “elite” rather doubtful, for elites are not supposed to be surrogates.

Our pain will not abate as long as the masses of our people are made to slave for others and their natural resources are hypothecated to foreign interests instead of being leveraged to emancipate our people from want.

In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty, sang Prophet Robert Marley, only I doubt that our people are such fools.

There certainly are people who — too clever by half —treat them as such. But the same prophet taught us that you can fool some people some time but you can’t fool all the people all the time.

The upheavals we are witnessing across Africa — there are more to come — speak to this unsatisfactory, unacceptable state of affairs. The natives are restless and, in places, they are moving.

The hungry beggars of Africa, tiring of being horses and wishing to free themselves, may decide to eat the rich who ride them.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]