•It is an odd man who foregoes supping with his family that he may serve the table of others. It is an even odder thing that his people applaud this insult against them.
Writing this piece means I failed to resist the temptation to engage in the ritualistic, end-of-year soul searching. However, I will not indulge in the usual deceptive practice of redefining defeat or of portraying miniscule achievements as historic breakthroughs. I refuse to see what is not there or to sprinkle glitter on a toad then pretend it to be beauty incarnate.
2012 was not a fine year for most Africans and the African Diaspora. The year showed what a vexatious people we can be. In cultural arts, entertainment and sports, Blacks excel. Our contributions continue to redefine how music is made and how sports are played. We cart away gold medals and achievement awards by the bushel. Yet, when it comes to politics and economics, we are more prone to run backwards or sideways than to move forward. A mystery remains unsolved.
Amid the greatness in other fields, how come Black political and economic leadership is middling? From Brazil, to the United States to most of Africa, our leadership does not approximate Black achievement in other fields. This has not always been the case. The fight against colonialism and legal racism produced black leaders more able than today’s vintage. When times were leaner, education rarer and hatred more open, Black leadership was more profound. The more unfairness the system tossed at us, the better was our leadership. In times past, our leaders rose to the occasion. Today, they sink below it.
Then, our leaders had the vision to fight for something. They struggled for the political and economic equality of their people. Although they failed as much as they succeeded, at least they tried. The stark injustice of the system made them seek an alternate reality. The servitude system demanded of them was too coarse a shackle to pretend it was a bracelet. They spoke of African and Black liberation not only out of love but of necessity. Being Black was more than a casual affiliation. It was a political and social indictment cast against us. Being part of an inescapable caste, past leaders worked for that caste.
Among the elite of today, discussion of the political economics of Blackness is the stuff of bad manners. Being black is no longer an inescapable caste. Blackness is now an optional socio-economic perspective. In effect, being Black is akin to membership in a lower-class social club. If possessed of enough money, you can buy your way out by buying your way into the elitist club. That one’s new membership in the elite is that of an inferior associate and not that of a full-fledged patron is fine. What counts is entry into the mansion. If one has to enter as a sidekick or kitchen staff, so be it.
This is the way of Black leadership today. Because leaders are no longer forced to be Black, they are under no compulsion to help the bulk of the people. Today, they can select between the dueling options of being Black visionaries or membership in the country club. Most leaders opt for the country club where the glimmer and gold are. Consequently, figures like Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba, or even Martin Luther King Jr. are impossible today. Not that they would be violently killed. Their present fate would be worse that their former ones. Today, they would be ridiculed to death. They would be called uncompromising radicals ignorant of the value of a dollar, a fine car or choice wine. They would be looked at as impractical fools dreaming on stars that don’t exist. While a modern King would still proclaim he “has a dream,” the rest of today’s leaders would retort “they have large bank accounts and thus have no need to dream.” If they cared to dream, they could hire someone to do it for them.
We have reached the juncture where Black leaders are no longer Black like their people. They are of a diluted Blackness that would rather align with the global elite than lead the masses to a better place. Instead of being our heroes, they have become pack dogs following the meat wagon to the rich house.
We have seen this behavior throughout the year. In South Africa, the Zuma government killed over thirty striking miners. To call the miners’ work hazardous is an understatement. To say they are scantily paid for their daily grapple with death is unassailable. Yet, Zuma’s praetorians acted lethally, in a way the fathers of apartheid would have cheered. The predominately white domestic and international business community rushed to pat Zuma on his back for killing his brothers. Without the struggle and efforts of these miners and people like them, Zuma never would know high office. Yet, he killed those who lifted him and accepted the dark accolades of those who worked to keep him lowly. By this single act, Zuma showed that South Africa is too big for him.
The nation needs fundamental reform. The current economic imbalance cannot endure without a resulting in convulsion. The small group of Black elitists cannot succor the great want of the poor. Sadly, this man can do nothing about it because he hasn’t the proper equipment. Arrogant and ignorant to a fault, he thought all he had to do was keep the folks happy by laughing, singing and dancing like a regular guy. However, when the party ended, the people saw that he left for the big house and the bank, while they trooped back to the dreary township. The people were not to be perpetually fooled by his false populism. They want bread, jobs, and justice not cheap merriment. The latter he was willing to give because it costs nothing and he could deliver for he was good at the fluff of politics. The former trio he was unwilling to give because it would cost him the support of the moneyed elite and because he was terrible at the substance of governance. In the end, Zuma revealed himself to be a bifurcated man. Culturally he is a Zulu of the Zulus. Politically and economically, he is closer in mindset to Pik Botha than to Nelson Mandela.
Soon, the beloved Mandela will leave the scene as all men, even the great ones, must. When he goes, so will go our race’s last extant political hero. This man who endured over twenty years in prison has been placed in prison once again. The present confinement is not his health. It is something worse. Mandela handed off the baton as well as humanly possible. Sadly, the man who now should carry it had traded in the correct baton for a more mercenary instrument. Zuma carries not the light of a just political economy but of an unequal one where the large swath of the black populace forever occupies the place made for it under the old ways. For Zuma and those like him, the fight against apartheid was simply to produce a small, Black elite to sit beside the established white one. This dismal vision constitutes Mandela’s new prison. Unlike physical trap that was Robben Island, he no longer has the lifespan or energy to escape this entrapment. Unless a miracle falls upon the nation, Mandela will leave us ruing the quality of those who now steer the ship he once captained.
Another yet dissimilar visionary leader of this era was Gaddafi. The chief Pan Africanist of his time, Gaddafi’s vision was blurred by his megalomania and ruthlessness. His was a distorted vision of a twisted soul and thus could not be taken seriously in its entirety. Notwithstanding his mental turbidity, Gaddafi managed to see the light of an overarching reality. He did not begin his career as a Pan Africanist. He became a Pan Africanist only after he had become a global outcast. As such, he realized Africa had been made an outcast. The only way to buffer the continent from the dismal consequence of this designation was for African nations to work more closely together. One would be foolish to rest his fate on a labyrinthine mind such as Gaddafi’s. He was not fit to lead his nation to its optimal place let alone an entire continent. Yet, we must acknowledge his departure extinguished a leading voice of African unity. Worse, most African leaders cheered the Western powers as they pushed Gaddafi into the tumbrel. For their unsophisticated support of Gaddafi’s demise, African leaders got two national upheavals for the price of one.
Libya no longer figures in media reports. The place is a tempest. Armed militias rule the streets. Black Libyans suffer danger and indignity unknown under Gaddafi. Yet, Black Africa makes not a peep. The West claimed intervention was needed to protect human life. But when the human lives in danger were Black, the West turned its head. Africa mimicked the travesty. Arguably, the nation is in no better shape now than under Gaddafi. The despotism may be different but hardly is it much better. The social service network is gone and order has not been restored. Yet, the West does not rush to make post-Gaddafi Libya a success; protection and improvement of the people was never the objective. The real objective was to silence an independent, if half-crazed, voice. The West realized that interspersed with the lunacy was a compelling theme that would discomfit its long-term designs on Africa.
For supporting the West against Gaddafi, conservative African leaders got a crisis in Mali as their immediate dividend. The Malian crisis is “Gaddafi’s Revenge.” Comprised mainly of Tauregs who supported Gaddafi and radical Islamists who fought him, a loose, ever changing constellation of armed groups allied to declare independence for a slice of northern Mali as large as France.
In response to this, African leaders responded by calling for the deployment of 3200 peacekeepers to secure the territorial integrity of the nation. One would have to be supremely credulous to believe such a small deployment of ill-equipped soldiers can defeat the Tauregs and others on their desolate home turf. The Tauregs can fade into the desert at will. They are like spirits during the day and ghosts at night. They know the ways of the desert, its wind, heat and sands. The conventional equipment of the peacekeepers will be ruined by the desert conditions in short order. In essence, the deployment is an exercise in futility. Yet, when offered a chance to help, all the western powers could do was verbally support the effort with an oleaginous UN resolution. None put forth material support. No material support was forthcoming because the Western powers do not want Mali solved. They would rather see a smoldering crisis.
The longevity of this and other crises will be exploited to buttress their military budgets for sophisticated surveillance equipment in order to contain terrorism where it is and not let it get to America or Europe. Moreover, such crises turn African nations into beggars. Western governments, especially their militaries, will gain greater leverage in African capitals, thus pressuring African armies to do the dirty work in the dank places western armies refuse to go. Already more than 90 percent of African nations receive American or other Western military support. Yet, this aid has not promoted continental peace and stability. Africa remains the most instable and war-scarred continent. There is an ugly correlation between the presence of foreign military assistance and the presence of strife on the continent.
Across the ocean in America, the Black president remains obsessed with forging a budget deal that will further impoverish Black people. Such a deal is unnecessary and unwise from the humane standpoint. It is even unwise from the perspective of ensuring an economy that honors the place of the middle class as the fulcrum of durable economic growth. The deal he seeks will honor and enrich the Scrooges and moneybags of our day. President Obama is being treated as a folk hero despite the objective fact that the deal he seeks will undo ordinary folk. Now that the election is over, he has shunned the populist veneer and assumed the position of factotum of great financial power. The people gave him the victory, now he will give them the blues by handing their fate over to those who already have too much. In exchange for selling the common man down the river, he will be hailed in the mainstream press and by the hired chroniclers of the elite. His legacy will be secured in history. But the truth of the matter will be no Black man has committed such a dramatic betrayal of his people since the man who ratted on Nat Turner’s slave rebellion.
In the end, the progress we have made over the years has ironically resulted in a situation that makes further progress improbable. Because Blackness is no longer a harshly and universally imposed restriction, the Black leadership elite has the option of being Black in their political and economic orientation or flowing into the mainstream. Greater personal reward lies in going along with the rich and powerful. Thus, most leaders have joined the global circus. In Africa, this means our leaders do not spend much time worrying that both the America and China jostle to control Africa, her resources and her future. China attempts this through its financial reserves and America does it with its military might. Sadly, already much of Africa’s resources and fertile lands have been conceded to foreign interests. Major parts of the continent have become arenas of conflict in the hyperventilating war on terrorism or in an American attempt to insert its military boot before China inserts its checkbook. In America, the master practitioner of anti-Black Black leadership actively pursues a budget reduction deal that needlessly will injure Black and poor people for decades to come.
I wish things were different but they are not. I foresee nothing that will change this forlorn state except if the people become energized and cognizant of the game being played upon them. Yet, how will the people be stirred when those who lead them are content to lead them astray. The New Year shall come. I can only pray that it will be a happier one than the trend lines predict.
