A lot of it is about migration, I mean much of what the world is suffering today flows out of people and peoples being restless and mobile, going from place to place, vacating spaces and filling up spaces elsewhere as the case may be, and entering into relationships that may engender future complications.
The adage that everybody came from somewhere else may not sound like an overstatement simply because the history of each one of us seems to be placing our ancestors very close to where we are today but just think a little bit about a few centuries back.
Even with the English, that arrogant race that once did “bestride the world like a Colossus” are a recent migrant tribe to the smallish islands out there that they have seen proper to call “Great”.
Yes, even the great Romans seem to have emanated from some Greek islands who underwent various ‘collabos’, mutations and synthesizations that made them what they were before they arrived wherever they were headed. Idem for all the civilisations in Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas and Oceania, great and not so great.
But we are different than all those, it being said that humankind somehow originated from Africa and spread outward to other lands, which should make all the other races to sit up and take notice and show some respect to us as their forefathers, (whatever that would be worth.
But in our self-contained land pieces we call home, we are more likely to grow chauvinistic and lay exclusive claim to where we are, and — if our ignorance suffers the same level of ambition as that of extreme Zionism — to cite God as our biblical real-estate agent in whose name we are going to exterminate whoever says they were there before we landed.
In certain cases, when new immigrants arrived and found welcoming hosts they settled without a fuss, and thus blended peoples, cultures and histories.
In others, however, antagonisms on both sides were the initial impetus for the relationship, and things developed in one way or another, sometimes by annihilation (as in America and Oceania), sometimes by working out a modus vivendi.
In certain cases, a lot of water had to go under the bridge before the hatchet was buried (such as the end of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994 or the Good Friday agreement in Ireland in 1998).
But in the particular case of the Native Americans of the US, Donald Trump’s forbears used slow attrition, aided by smallpox, forced labour, war and whiskey to impose ‘pacification.’ Consequently, the issues relating to the genocide of the “Red Indians” is buried, largely in oblivion.
Some of the conflicts engendered by the more ragged aspects of migration have not died out entirely, even after decades of enforced ‘normalcy.’ And now, hard-nosed imperialists believe that if past crimes have not been punished there is no reason to suppose that fresh ones will be.
So, they will try to make Gaza a Middle East riviera and return South Africa to Apartheid, where it should have remained in the first place if wiser counsel had prevailed when it mattered.
Mental cartographers are hard at work reimagining the world as it ought to be. Even in Africa, where it was said, back in 1964, that tinkering with colonial frontiers—however arbitrary and illogical they were — would be to invite disaster, some people in Kinshasa, Congo, seek to ignore the dictates of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) on the issue.
Of course, in parenthesis, a question has to emerge in our minds from time to time: We have sanctified colonial frontiers since 1964 for expediency’s sake, not out of principle: In principle, we abjure these borders as being symptomatic of our subjugation by foreign powers during our Dark Ages.
But this would have made sense only if it served as a clarion call for the unification of the African continent, not as a pious wish we reverentially inherit from Kwame Nkrumah and the founding fathers, but as a pragmatic, programmatic desire to redeem Africa from her tribulations of the past.
This is particularly troubling now, as our ongoing division and disunity leave us vulnerable in a world that grows more aggressive every day.
It still remains true that we all came from elsewhere, and the whole world came from Africa, or so we are told, and we incline to believe this particular line of thought.
In light of this belief, we Africans are called upon to take up the leadership mantle that behoves us as the elders of the world, to impart to the world some basic principles of propriety and decorum, which the world seems to have lost every time we observe the behaviour of the big leaders of the world who are refusing to be great.
For instance, we might want to start by civilising Donald Trump and his vice, J. D. Vance, that it is improper to receive a guest in your home (Vlodomir Zelensky) and to tell them to their face that they should go kiss the feet of their sworn enemy… That is in bad taste, even if you have decided to throw the poor little guy under the bus. At least have manners!
Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam.
Subscribe to continue reading this premium articleSubscribe to continue reading this premium article
