Some 38 years after his death, Ghanaians have finally decided to honour the memory of their first President, Kwame Nkrumah with a national holiday on September 21 this year, which incidentally would have marked the 100th anniversary of his birthday. The day has been declared a public holiday and aptly named Founder’s Day.

A larger than life figure, Nkrumah is credited with leading Ghana to independence from the British and championing a United States of Africa besides being a founder president of the Organisation of African Unity, now African Union.

The Africa Nkrumah envisaged is far from being a reality as the experience of writer Nuruddin Farah shows.

Below we run, in his own words, an account of his frustration with Africa’s artificial borders which, in Nkrumah’s vision, stood in the way of continental unity. Nuruddin Farah writes:

“In 2007, I telephoned the Consulate of Botswana in Cape Town on a Wednesday to inquire about a weekend visa to Gaborone as I meant to attend the wedding of a close friend’s daughter there. In reply to his question about my status and place of residence, I said that I was a permanent resident of South Africa and that I held three African passports and named these and the governments, which issued them.

He asked why I had not applied for a visa earlier, and I responded that I had just got back from a book promotion tour that had taken me to the USA, Canada, and Europe. He said I would have to wait for four to six weeks to get a visa issued on any of the three passports I held.

I was tempted to stress my disappointment by asking why his consulate was giving me a hard time about a weekend visa, while the British, the French, the US, the Swiss and Canadian embassies would not hesitate to issue me with five-to-ten-year duration visas within a few hours and while I waited. However, I thought better of it, maybe because I doubted he was the kind of reader that might enjoy my writings.

I got in touch with my friend whose daughter was getting married and a professor friend of mine who was expecting me to give a lecture at the University of Botswana to let them know that I was cancelling my trip. The professor suggested that his department apply on my behalf and recruit someone higher up in the government to intervene. That way, the consulate would issue the visa and I would attend the wedding and later in the week speak to the students and staff of the English Department. I said that the idea of going that route did not appeal to my sense of self-honour, and insisted that I would cancel my visit.

Six months or so later, I was a guest of the Federal President of Germany together with several African Heads of State among them the President of Botswana. On the second day, during coffee break, the President of Botswana asked if I had ever been to his country, given that I lived so close to it, in South Africa.

I replied that I had not; he wondered why not. I related to him what happened when I applied for a visa several months earlier whereupon he called his assistant, a lady, whom he instructed to take down my details and to make sure that I received a visa and a letter of invitation. He wanted me to promise that I would call on him once I got to Gaborone.

I declined to offer my details to the assistant. After all, my intentions were lofty, not personal, and I wanted him to see the absurdity of his government’s visa policies and to consider changing them, as it affected other Africans. In effect, I was pointing to him the set of circumstances that had led to my needing his facilitation, when Europeans, Americans, and many other nationalities from outside Africa could enter Botswana without requiring visas.

Given the opportunity, I might have referred to the to the arbitrary carving up of the continent at a meeting in Berlin, in which European colonial powers established borders within it, dividing our peoples into entities bearing hyphenated identities — British Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, Ethiopian-held Somaliland, Kenyan Somaliland and French Somaliland — and creating never-ending conflicts.

Perhaps implicit in my refusal to accept the President’s offer was this unspoken assertion: that the borders in Africa are stakes driven through our peoples’ hearts. In the Horn of Africa alone, border disputes have caused so much havoc, accounting for several all-out wars as well as the continued war of attrition between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

When I think back on my encounters over the years with sundry consular and immigration officials from various African countries, I cannot help wondering what might have become of Africa if Europeans had not imposed on our continent the maps we have today.

It follows, too, that Africa would occupy a more honourable place in the world if millions of our able-bodied men and women had not been removed to other continents as slaves, and if the savageries of Euro-greed in the insatiable shape of, to give an infamous example, King Leopold of Belgium had not been visited on the Congo. It has always been my contention that had Europe not interfered with our history and had we pursued its natural course, then we too would have developed in the same way as other continents.

Colonial subjugation and the mapping of the continent did contribute to the deceleration of our organic development as people. The mapping of Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century tethers us to a history littered with impediments.

The borders are but one of the numerous obstacle courses standing in the way of our economic and social well-being.

Indeed, the ephemeral nature of borders inspires me with guarded cynicism; their impermanence animates a caginess of the kind that produces optimism within me.

Those of us who have known the two sides of Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, will remember two of the most absurd borders between the two German entities – the one, a line of yellow buoys the height of a human above the water to mark the border in the sea between the then GDR and West Germany. The other was a road bridge at Domitz, built halfway across the River Elbe and, because uncompleted, left suspended in midair. With the fall of The Wall and the reunification of the two Germanys, the borders no longer existing point to their status of impermanence.

Sadly, this is not so in Africa. Because in 1963, our continent’s Heads of State endorsed the borders bequeathed to us by the colonial powers at the inaugural meeting of the Organization of African Unity, one felt profound sorrow at the decision, wrongfully catapulting us into everlasting political and economical disaffection, something the recent formations of regional groupings, dividing the continent into four main trading blocs, will not be able to eradicate as long we continue to endorse the border regime established in 1884 at the Berlin summit.

Borders are an anathema, which we must discard if we wish our continent to develop culturally, scientifically and economically as a single unit — and organically at that.”

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

| More on Neo-Colonialism | About Haiti |

—————————————————-

References:

1. Haiti’s storm damage compounded by poverty and neo-colonialism — by Mark Ostapiak

2. America’s neo-colonial designs — Even at the cost of 4,100 of its soldiers killed, another 30,000 or more seriously wounded, its reputation sorely tarnished, and a trillion dollar hole in its public accounts, the United States has clearly not yet learned the lesson that occupation breeds insurrection.

3. The mechanisms of neo-colonialism — Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism. By Kwame Nkrumah 1965

4. First World Greed and Third World Debt — excerpted from the book: If You Love This Planet — by Helen Caldicott

—————————————————-

—————————————————-

By: Rashid Suleiman

In the days before the Second Liberation, there were African presidents. Then there was the African president. His name was Kamuzu Banda.

Banda confounded both friend and foe. He blew cold and hot, played saviour and the devil all once. He was considered one of Africa’s most influential leaders in the last 50 years. Yet, he was among the last despots of the last century.

In sartorial elegance, he was more steadfast than Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. He was never seen in public without his trademark black three-piece suits, flywhisk, walking stick, homburg hat and handkerchief.

In education, he was as learned as Dr Agostinho Neto of Angola or Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.

Banda’s penchant for a flashy life saw him construct a sprawling 300-room palace, with a school and a supermarket.

In brutality, he was matched by Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Sekou Toure of Guniea-Conakry, Michel Micombero of Burundi, Macias Nguema of Guinea-Malabo, and Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia.

In effecting a personality cult, he overshadowed accomplished purveyors of the art like Mobutu and Eyadema. He was the personification of eccentricity. He had battalions of women dancers who entertained him wherever he went.

He caused a stir in the early 1980s when he banned American pop group Simon and Garfunkel song Cecilia from the radio. This was at a time when his relationship with his mistress, Cecilia Tamanda Kadzamira, was going through a rocky period, and he clearly did not like the lyrics of the song (“Cecilia/I’m down on my knees/I’m begging you please to come home“).

Because of his conservatism, Malawi was one of the last countries to have television, in the 1990s.

In amassing a personal fortune estimated at $320 million, Banda proved that he was as greedy and fabulously wealthy as Mobutu.

Like Houphouet-Boigny or Mobutu he constructed a sprawling 300-room palace, complete with a school and a supermarket.

He was also a man of unprecedented feats. He is the only African who left his country and stayed out for 42 years but returned to lead it to independence and rule it for 33 years. He refused to return home at one time in fear that his newly found financial resources, earned as a doctor in England, would be wiped out by his extended family.

Man of many feats

Banda is the only first generation African president who remained a ‘bachelor’ till death. His lifelong partner Cecilia Tamanda Kadzamira was just a mere live-in official hostess.

Only Algeria’s Houari Boumedienne shared with Banda the dubious distinction of never having appointed a vice-president.

Banda is one of the few African presidents with multiple birthdays. For long, his official birthday was given as May 14, 1906. But when he died in 1997, his death certificate stated that he was 99 years old, meaning he was born in 1898. Oxford University Press record that he was born in 1902.

Banda was the only African president to establish diplomatic ties with apartheid South Africa. In 1972, he became the first foreign potentate to visit apartheid South Africa since King George VI of England in 1947.

Even by the high African standards, Banda was considered a dictator par excellence. Between 1970 and 1971, he declared himself president for life of both Malawi and the ruling Malawi Congress Party. Like Amin, it is said he murdered his enemies and fed their corpses to crocodiles. In a BBC interview in the early 1990s, he threatened that should Malawian exiles calling for introduction of multipartism return home, he will feed them to crocodiles.

At the height of his power, it is said only one person in Malawi rubbed Banda the wrong way and lived to tell the tale. It is still a mystery how Gwanda Chakuamba survived the bloody purges of the dictator. He was jailed for 22-years for treason and was released at the advent of multipartism in the only presidential pardon granted by Banda in his 33-year-rule.

Banda presided over a police state where any form of dissent brought sudden death, torture, exile or deportation.

The former dictator closely monitored and controlled his peoples’ lives. It was compulsory for all adult Malawians to be card carrying members of MCP. The party cards were to be carried at all times because of random police checks. The cards were sold even to unborn children. No picture, poster or clock was hanged higher than Banda’s official portrait that adorned walls of official buildings. He prescribed a dress code for men and women in Malawi and forced foreigners to conform to it.

Women were not allowed to bare their thighs or wear trousers. Men were banned from growing beards or long hair because it signalled dissent.

Male visitors to Malawi could be seized and forced to have a hair cut. Those wishing to get visas to Malawi in the 1970s were met with the following notice: ‘Female passengers will not be permitted to enter the country if wearing short dresses or trouser suit, except in transit or at lake holiday resorts or national parks. Skirts and dresses must cover the knees to conform with government regulations. The entry of hippies and men with long hair and flared trousers is forbidden‘.

Control Freak

Any foreigner who violated the rules was deported.

Moviegoers had to watch a video of Banda first before the main course. Kissing was not allowed in public and state agents cut out scenes that contained kissing in movies.

Picture – Kamuzu Banda, Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, Kenya’s Jomo-Kenyatta and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt – In The 60’s

All the movies were first viewed and edited by Banda’s censors before they were shown. The same was done to books. The secret police frequently opened private mail for editing. They tapped phone lines and cut off calls when a speaker said a critical word against the government. During Banda’s reign, TV was banned in Malawi.

His censors ripped out pages of publications like Time and Newsweek that they considered offensive to him. History that pre-dated Banda’s rise to power was discouraged and publications on the era were destroyed.

Despite his bad side, Banda is respected in some quarters and ranked with such luminaries like the late Sir Seretse Khama of Botswana, Kenyatta, Kaunda AND Houphouet-Boigny for the prestige they brought to their countries through the sheer force of their personalities and character. He has been hailed as a national and African hero though others denounce him as a despot.

It is said that Malawians will never achieve the unity they had under Banda. He is still remembered as a man who loved and cared for his people. He is credited with developing Malawi’s education, health, infrastructure and agriculture. Under his rule, the country became self-sufficient in food.

He has been hailed as a champion of women’s rights at a time when this was not fashionable in Africa. He founded an organisation to cater for women’s rights and needs. The Chitukuko Cha Amai m’Malawi was tasked with encouraging women to excel in government, education, the community, church and other spheres of life.

Though his date of birth is in dispute, there is little doubt that Banda was born in Kasungu in Nyasaland (the colonial name of Malawi) to Mphonogo Banda and his wife Akupingamnyama Phiri of the Chewa tribe.

In 1905, he was baptised by the Church of Scotland and took the name Hastings. Later he would add the Ngwazi (lion) as part of his name. Either in 1916 or 1917 he left with an uncle, Hanock Msokera Phiri, on foot to then Southern Rhodesia — the modern day Zimbabwe.

Young Banda

In 1917, he trekked from Zimbabwe to Johannesburg where he worked in the mines till 1925 when African Methodist Church Bishop WT Vernon offered to pay for his education so long as he made his way to America. He left for New York the same year and did his high school at Wilberforce Institute, the current Central State University in Ohio.

   Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s Mausoleum [Enlarge]
He graduated in 1928 and started earning money through public lectures organised by a Ghanaian educationist he had met in South Africa. During one of the lecturers, he met a Dr Herald who helped him enrol as a premedical student at Indian University. He transferred to University of Chicago and graduated with a B Phil, majoring in history, in 1931.

He studied medicine at Meharry Medical College and qualified as a doctor in 1937. He was forced to get a second medical degree to qualify to practise in the British Empire. He got the degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1941. He practised medicine in Newcastle and London but in 1946, he was prevailed upon to represent Nyasaland African Congress at the 5th Pan Africanist Congress. That marked his entry into politics.

While in England, he was fiercely opposed to the proposed federation of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) that became a reality in 1953. Two years earlier, he had been expected to return home but he chose to move to Ghana after a scandal in which he was accused of adultery with his receptionist. He moved together with the receptionist to Ghana.

After pleas from prominent Malawi politicians, Banda returned home in 1958 — 42 years after he left — to take up the leadership of the independence struggle and Nyasaland African Congress – the forerunner to Malawi Congress Party.

Strangely, he could not speak his mother tongue Chichewa and needed an interpreter. The job first fell to John Msonthi and later John Tembo, who became his strongman till death.

After stirring trouble in the colony, Banda and several of his colleagues were arrested in 1959 and jailed in Gweru in modern day Zimbabwe. He was released in 1960 and shipped to Britain for talks leading to independence. He became Prime Minister in 1963 and led the country to independence a year later.

Fall from grace

Right from the start of his political career, Banda made no secret that he was dictator. When a number of his ministers presented him with suggestions on how to reduce his powers a month after independence, he responded with tough action. He sacked four of them while two others resigned. All ‘detractors’ fled to exile.

In 1966, a new constitution made the country a one party republic with Banda as first president. He proceeded to rule the country as an unchallenged despot till the wind of change swept him out of power in the 1990s.

First, a special assembly stripped him of his powers in 1993 before Bakili Muluzi of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the country’s first multiparty polls gave him a comprehensive whitewash the following year. He passed away in South Africa in 1997.

In his will, he instructed his long time companion, Cecilia Kadzamira, known throughout his rule as the “official hostess” to turn part of his home in his hometown of Kasungu, into a museum.

When Senator Barack Obama steps onto the stage on Thursday, next to Berlin’s Victory column, the world will be expecting a momentous speech.

   Great speakers: Enoch Powell, Mikhail Gorbachev, Barack Obama

   Great speakers: John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher

A team of Telegraph writers has compiled what they believe are the most significant addresses of the 20th and 21st centuries. The first tranche, speeches 25-13, can be viewed here. The top 12 are published here.

They limited the list to one speech per historical figure — otherwise, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King would have appeared more than once…….and, I think Obama’s speech on race relations delivered in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, deserves to be in this list.

Notes: Video and Transcript of Senator Barack Obama’s Speech on Race – in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008

Great Britain ruled parts of the Caribbean twice as long in duration as she ruled much of Africa.

When Kenya became a British colony, Britain had already been ruling Jamaica for more than two centuries. Indeed, when Jomo Kenyatta was born in the 1890s Kenya was not yet a crown colony. Yet, when he died in 1978 Kenya had ceased to be a British colony. Kenyatta had lived right through the country’s entire colonial period. He survived British rule by 15 years, having ruled Kenya himself as its first post-colonial President.

While British rule in Kenya was a matter of a single lifetime, British rule in Jamaica traversed the reigns of about 10 British monarchs. By any measure, therefore, Jamaica and much of the British West Indies were more deeply Anglicised than Kenya was. But since independence is the Caribbean getting de-Anglicised? If so, what are the causes?

A number of factors may have contributed to such a process of post-colonial de-Anglicisation. One is the surprising phenomenon of Britain’s cultural abdication. This is in sharp contrast to the missionary zeal of the French in the realm of culture. British commitment to cultural diplomacy is much weaker than that of France-both in Africa and the Caribbean.

The United Kingdom spends the equivalent of only a fraction of the French budget for cultural diplomacy. The very success of the English language globally has reduced Britain’s need to promote the language in other lands. That there is an English-speaking power mightier than Britain (the United States) also helped to dwarf Britain’s cultural role in promoting Anglo-Saxon culture.

The French language, on the other hand, is on the defensive against the devastating competition of Anglo-American cultural and linguistic expansionism. There is no French-speaking super power the equivalent of the United States. France tries to play the cultural roles of both Britain and the United States.

But the United States is itself another reason British influence in the Caribbean continues to decline. In the post-colonial era, the sheer proximity and size of the United States have been felt more directly than was possible under British imperial rule.

American investment, American tourism, American television programmes, American goods and services, and even Caribbean membership of the Organisation of American States, have all played their part in tilting the balance towards Americanisation in the Caribbean experience.

Then there is the phenomenon of American education as compared with the old colonial infatuation with the prestige of British education. There was a time when West Indians and Africans asked themselves whether being educated in the US was a more radicalising experience than being educated in Great Britain.

In the first half of the 20th Century the evidence seemed to support that proposition. Kwame Nkrumah was mainly educated in the US; his rival in Ghana, Kofi Busia, was educated in Great Britain. Nkrumah captured the torch of radical nationalism, while Busia moved to the right.

In Nigeria, the younger Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) was the voice of nationalist militancy. He was American educated. The leading British-educated Nigerians in the 1940s and even the 1950s were mainly to Zik’s right ideologically.

If it was true that American education in the first half of the 20th Century was a more radicalising experience for Africans and West Indians than was British education, what were the reasons at that time?

One factor in the first half of the century was that the United States was not only a much more racist society than Great Britain but American racism at the time was still highly institutionalised. African and Caribbean students in the United States were therefore more subject to racial humiliation and harassment than their counterparts in the United Kingdom. African and Caribbean students in American colleges were as a result more liable to get radicalised in response.

Also contributing to this radicalisation was African and Caribbean intermingling with Black Americans and being exposed to a more intense pan-African experience. Indeed, African students in the first half of the 20th C moved even further to the left.

Middle class Caribbean Blacks could go either way when highly educated. They could move more decisively to the left (going even Marxist) or become more eloquent defenders of the capitalist status quo. Less privileged Caribbean Blacks educated in the United States were more likely to go nationalist rather than socialist — often emphasising race rather than class, although their own origins were often rooted in class disadvantages.

By the second half of the 20th Century some of the most eloquent voices of the socialist left in Commonwealth Caribbean were British educated. Even Eric Williams of Trinidad was initially a product of British leftism.

George Padmore flirted with communism. And C L R James was both highly anglicised and highly leftist to the end of his days when he was nearly 90.

Today, more and more positions in journalism, the bureaucracy, politics and education are gradually occupied by the ‘Americanised’ West Indians.

The statistics are shifting in favour of the American educated. But in reality they are only narrowing the gap between them and the more influential British-educated. The de-Anglicisation of the Caribbean has not yet gone far enough to dethrone the Anglophiles in the Commonwealth Caribbean completely.

Afterall, Michael Manley in power was more prominent than Edward Seaga was in office. Manley symbolised Anglophilia; Seaga was a product of Pax-Americana.

For the products of the American experience it is still too early for them to celebrate the following: The stream of experience meanders on in the vast expanse of Caribbean time. The new will come and the old be gone. Let’s toast the fortunes of changing clime.