{UAH} The enemy may be the cold pursuit of profit, but once again, the man is white - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
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The enemy may be the cold pursuit of profit, but once again, the man is white - Comment
We used to sit down on an evening, and, over one drink after another, try to save the world by righting all its wrongs. Most times we succeeded, even if realities refused to die.
These were the days when the Vietnamese were our comrades, and we had brothers and sisters in the United States and in Cuba and in Guatemala, and when the war in Portuguese-ruled Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau was our own war.
Our city was crawling with some of the most colourful characters that you ever saw, many of them fugitives from their countries where they were wanted for a variety of things, but mostly political.
We had a good time fixing the world, however, and by the first cock crow of the morning we would repair to our abodes in elated mood. The following day would be given to more reading to discover new struggles that needed our support or to revisit old ones registering new milestones.
One sultry Dar evening we were summoned to a comrade's home to listen to a visitor from the United States.
He was one hunk of an African American, roughly six foot five with muscles to shame Rambo and a speaking style to match Malcolm X. Our evening was electrified, the man was just phenomenal.
He came from the "Belly of the Beast," he said, meaning the US, where "your brothers and sisters catch hell from can't see in the morning to can't see in the evening," meaning roughly from dawn to dusk.
He was looking for support for the struggle of the black people in America just as he was extending their support for Africa's liberation movements. Indeed, he had just come from a visit to the liberated areas under Frelimo's control in Mozambique.
There was a hitch, however. Angela Davis, leader of the Communist Party of the USA, was huge with our group, and we wanted to know whether Owussu and his African Liberation Support Committee thought they could work with her and build synergies for a stronger black movement in the US.
Owussu was not buying, and we were not budging. For him emancipation for black Americans was a race thing: The brothers and sisters were the ones catching hell and nobody who never knew directly, through personal experience, what catching hell meant could understand their plight, let alone support their struggle.
Our position was, of course, that though race has been thrown into the mix to justify evil, the motive for all forms of exploitation is economic, and black and white must come together in the name of humanity to rid the world of capitalist exploitation, colonialism, imperialism, Zionism and apartheid.
So, though Angela was a descendant of African slaves, in her struggle she worked with whites who shared her ideology.
Owussu went away half convinced. When he came back a couple of years later and found us still reordering the universe, he had changed somewhat. He had made contact with Angela and they had established a working relationship. He had also studied American society and history.
He had read every book there was to read on the history of the West and the conquest of America by Europeans. He had gone through Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton. Every move by the white man in the great colonial effort was spurred on by economic interest and the ever present profit motive.
Yes, even slavery was at base an economic programme, and once it was no longer profitable the same people who had benefited from it rushed to the forefront to abolish it…. Yes, Owussu, admitted, it was economic, and we were relieved.
Until, that is, at the end of it all, he paused and speaking slowly and deliberately, "Yes, my brothers, I'll grant you, the shit is economic, but you also have to grant me… the man is white."
Now, a black teenager was recently shot dead, sparking riots and the deployment of military-style patrols in Missouri, like you see in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the old issues addressed in James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time come to the fore. Race or economics? I wonder.
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: ulimwengu@jenerali.com
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