Mid 2009, Pretoria. South Africa. We headed towards the city centre on wheels with David Abdulai; my scheduled dialogue with his UNISA students was over. The background music on our way was Lumba, Lumba Lumba Lumba. Never met a professor as much in love with Daddy Lumba. Soon a blinking traffic light brought us to a halt. Within seconds came a boy of ten who walked closer, pulled a small cloth, and started wiping our windscreen. David waved a quick ‘No’ with his swinging wipers. But our new friend would not budge; he composed himself and dropped a bombshell: ‘Sir, Sir,’ he sobbed, ’What I was trying to do is better than stealing! You stopped me from wiping your windscreen; but this is better than stealing, isn’t it.’ Wow!
Dumb-founded, I sighed and saw David reach into his wallet and bring out 50 Rands. ‘This is for you,’ he told the boy as we took off on green, virtually humbled by that slice of black social life in South Africa: ‘Odd jobs better than stealing’ … odd jobs…stealing…echoed as we sped on the highway towards Pretoria.
That boy must be 30years now, and perhaps aware of the war his colleagues have declared on African immigrants: to create jobs for themselves and save idle hands from ‘stealing.’ In the past few weeks, it has been nerve wracking watching television without prior warning about disturbing images. Blood thirsty South African Blacks on a mission to search and destabilize the enemy: African immigrants. They are arrested, prosecuted, proven guilty and sentenced to kicks, slaps, torture, eviction, in minutes. Black South Africans now decide to unleash violence, perhaps to fulfil requirements for jobs advertised, so they can work rather than idle. It is partly their vengeance for jobs taken by immigrants, work opportunities squandered. If jobs are slipping away to foreigners, the answer is not formal education, not skills training nor apprenticeship; but street gangs, confrontation, instant justice rough and ready: these would perhaps provide the diplomas and degrees needed to fill vacant positions. Victims of attack include patients seeking medical care, kids at school; women, the weak and ailing who cannot flee. For once, the sympathy of black Africa has shifted to the white race vicariously joining them to fight back insurgents by any means possible. The South African security is either on vacation or looks away, virtually admitting their Government’s tacit approval and support in the senseless onslaught on immigrants. For the incumbent President, Ramaphosa, how else would votes accrue to his party with a diminishing popular base?
35 years after Mandela’s 1990 release; and 14 years after his death, selective amnesia has set in; and memory has collapsed on sacrifices by black Africa in the fight for freedom. Our status has been reversed from allies against racism to sworn enemies. Did Africa toil in vain in the collective fight against apartheid? In our little worlds, did we not fight side by side, big and small: Kwame Nkrumah’s open door policy for oppressed South African refugees; celebrated South African singer Marian Makeba given a Ghanaian passport when dispossessed of travel documents; international student hostels for student refugees; admission of freedom fighters to Nkrumah’s Ideological Institute at Winneba; Nkrumah’s financial and logistical support to Mandela in the early 1960s. In 1991 after his release, Mandela headed to Ghana to thank Nkrumah’s Ghana through J. J. Rawlings. The cheering crowd during Mandela’s state ride in Ghana said it all.
At the turn of the new century, however, ally has turned villain.
But there were bigger martyrs we have not acknowledged enough. 1970, the Editor of state-owned ‘Daily Graphic’ lost his job after slamming Ghana Government’s unpopular policy of dialogue with South Africa. Asiakwa-born Cameron Duodu, author of the novel ‘The Gab Boys,’ after a year of editing Ghana’s premier daily, blasted the Busia Government for avoiding the more prudent option of joining the boycott of South Africa. Days after the Graphic editorial (titled ‘Dialogue Cui Bono’) Cameron Duodu was dismissed as Editor. Now 88 the well-respected ‘Gab Boy’, is back in Ghana after years of free lancing and working with the BBC. Cameron Duodu’s much awaited memoires will soon be released.
We fought apartheid South Africa from even outside Ghana. Mid 1980s, as a doctoral student at Indiana University, and secretary of a vocal African Student Association, I joined hands for a major anti-apartheid demonstration led by ASA President Folu Ogundimu, now a professor at Michigan State. We took over the Don Meadows on campus and made noise. The agenda was to agitate for Indiana to withdraw the University’s multi-million investment in South Africa, to help bring down the racist Government.
1990: shortly before Mandela release. The African Theater Collective of Legon primed itself for a major assignment. I was an associate member of this dynamic theater group emerging from the School of Performing Arts. Membership included Kofi Portuphy, Jenise Newman, Esther Ofei, Kwame Botwe Asamoah, Stella Something Something; Ababio, Nii Sowah, Nii Sai, Joyce Kennedy etc. We went on a nation-wide ‘Free Mandela’ tour, performing in various secondary schools. The climax was our participation in an anti-Apartheid Festival in Wa, Upper West: we had travelled a distance of 565 kilometers to fight Apartheid through theater. Our poetry performance ‘Mandela: Symbol of Resistance’ won a prestigious award. But we achieved this only to be confronted on our return journey, with a stone throwing gang of kids at Sakpa, near Bole. The kids smashed the windscreen of our 70-seater bus and sped through the savanna grasslands towards their hamlets, fleeing in their birthday clothes. Were we angry? Yes, furious; but we later came to terms with the bigger picture. Those children were not to blame; they were children of Soweto fighting apartheid. The stone throwing boys were protesting our criminal neglect of Northern Ghana in development; they were indeed celebrating the anti-apartheid festival their own way. There could be Mandelas among them; Steve Bikos, Bishop Tutus, protesting internal apartheid in Ghana; a conspiracy by the South against Northern Ghana.
Mandela was soon to be released. His freedom enabled us to attend conferences in South Africa. One such was a language conference at University of Western Cape, which facilitated my visit to Robben Island where Mandela was incarcerated– a thirty minute ferry ride. I saw his famous tiny cell, and beddings; but I was also touched by the encircling vegetation: sweet scented eucalyptus plants which dried our tears, after hearing Mandela’s agony in prison.
Years after this, the University of Ghana in 2002 (while I was Dean of the Arts Faculty) found it fit to confer on Nelson Mandela an honorary doctorate degree in Law at a special ceremony in Johannesburg.
But how can I complete my sentimental trip with no word about our complete immersion in 2006, when I led a group of Legon Faculty and students on APARC, a project by University of Boston, to interact with past African Presidents: Jerry Rawlings (and wife), Kenneth Kaunda, (Zambia), Arap Moi (Kenya), Ketumile Masire (Botswana), Karl Offman(Mauritius), Soglo (Benin), Mkapa (Tanzania) etc. It was a rare opportunity also to meet students and faculty from other parts of Ghana and US. Our rich experience included a trip to Soweto, where we dined, visited their museum, and got a rare opportunity to enter the red-brick home of Winnie Mandela, former wife of Nelson Mandela. The apartheid museum down town Joburg was profound and engaging. But our interaction the next morning with past heads of state topped it all: open handshakes and dialogue with Kenneth Kaunda, Offman, etc; and Oh lest I forget: a lively speech by the youthful son of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko who autographed his latest book for participants. What a thrilling experience!
But what does it mean to work so hard, only lose that rare bond in xenophobia? Have Nkrumah and Mandela toiled in vain? And who steps in, to save brothers in each other’s throat?
Agoo. African Union! Is anybody home?
Kwesi Yankah
(kyankah@ashesi.edu.gh)
