Bob Geldof, the anti-poverty campaigner and rock star, called the leaders of recently concluded G8 summit as "creeps" and denounced their work as a "total farce". The involvement of musicians for the African cause has a long history. Earlier it was Bob Marley with his inspiring “Africa Unite” and “One Love”. Bob Marley, proclaimed his African heritage with denouncement of traditional Christianity. He became a Rastafarian. Rastafarians are Jamaicans who claim to have descended from the holy African bloodline and consider Haile Sellassie, emperor of Ethipia as their only legitimate king. He is also seen as part of the Holy Trinity as the messiah promised in the Bible to return. Bob Marley, a prominent member of this group thought his holy land Africa to be a victim of white colonialism and wrote many inspiring songs against capitalism, imperialism & colonialism.
In “war” he describes how his “brothers & sisters” are tortured in Angola, Mozambique and South Africa. We all know how crippled South Africa was during the apartheid regime. Marley decided to protest against all these inhumanities. Now we see whole different kind of capitalism and neo-colonialism around the war. After the Cold War ended polarization stopped. America reign in a unipolar world where their wishes will be final. Significant movements they have introduced these days is “the war of terror”. And we all know this means looting and murdering by US army sans borders. Geldof & Bono had significant reasons to be anguished. In 2005 he hailed the G8’s decision to write off $55bn in developing world debt as a “victory for millions of campaigners across the world”. But now they are frustrated to see how promises are being broken. Africa is deprived of medicines to fight AIDS, food to feed millions of starved children and accessories and facilities to fight corruption. Decade earlier the half of Africa was plunged into bloody civil wars. Mozambique, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea everywhere the picture looked bleak. It’s not that warlords have suddenly stopped their feudal lusts and war mongering attitude, situations have improved if not to a greater extent.
Th UN representing the “civilized” community of the world is now sending peacekeepers around Africa to help local people cope with the damages of war. But the truth is hardly anything has changed when it comes to changing the mentality of corrupt government officials & warlords. Children have been used to fight most of the civil wars. Now the West led by US is creating the myth of “poverty alleviation” and hoping in vain to change the face of the continent. Franz Fanon is his Black Skins White Masks have shown how Africans are constructed by West as the inferior “OTHER”. But what is more significant is the epistemic violence of the Other is both inside and outside, it operates through the internalization of the self-as-other. Africa exists only in the image reflected by the Other. The poverty is an unconscious burden of the black and the white Other argues such burdens cannot be lifted until they(whites) show mercy. This deliberate subjugation process had been going on since the days of colonization. Fanon demonstrates how this binary opposition (blacks as opposed to whites) has created a deep racial wound among the blacks in Africa itself. Blacks are now divided as well. One, the refined, educated “black” African acceptable to the West (doesn’t matter whether they are tyrannical or not) and the other impoverished, barbaric “black” African fated to be destroyed by subjugation, hegemony inflicted war.
Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism argues how Africans were subjugated but endless theses & anti-theses leads to decolonization as the synthesized product. In the finest Hegelian fashion, Césaire demonstrates how colonialism works to "decivilize" the colonizer: torture, violence, race hatred, and immorality constitute a dead weight on the so-called civilized, pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism. The instruments of colonial power rely on barbaric, brutal violence and intimidation, and the end result is the degradation of Europe itself. Hence Césaire can only scream: "Europe is indefensible." Europe is also dependent. Anticipating Fanon's famous proposition that "Europe is literally the creation of the Third World," Césaire reveals, over and over again, that the colonizers' sense of superiority, their sense of mission as the world's civilizers, depends on turning the Other into a barbarian. The Africans, the Indians, the Asians cannot possess civilization or a culture equal to that of the imperialists, or the latter have no purpose, no justification for the exploitation and domination of the rest of the world. The colonial encounter, in other words, requires a reinvention of the colonized, the deliberate destruction of her past—what Césaire calls "thingification." And the West under the veil of civilizing the “other” has just done that.
Bob Marley was right. Africans must unite. There is no other way Africans can find a voice of their own. But who will unite them? Kwame Nkrumah made a failed attempt to unite the Africans. So did many others. Some were simply exhumed by European wrath, e.g, Patrice Lumumba of Congo. However Africa have seen successful anti-colonial drives as by the Mau Mau in Kenya and the Algerian struggle for independence. The romance of a united Africa is as effervescent as the Grail legend. It has sustained millions of dreamers & surrealists such as Aimé Césaire himself. Really it doesn’t matter if Europeans fail to reach a deal regarding $550 million of aid. What matters is driving out corruption & tyrants & oligarchs & make life easier of common people. They are bright enough to chose their destiny.
Bob Geldof & Bono should keep their mouth shut, and stop shedding crocodile tears. Buying the myth of “poverty alleviation” they are constructing Africans as the “neo Other” who should beg for mercy to the West. As if Africans must plead to send peacekeepers, to stop hungry children from dying, to reject politicians not suited to the European construct (Robert Mugabe) and to stop famine & eradicate the evil of AIDS. Africa in Bob Marley’s words is a ‘Babylon’ waiting to be resurrected by the Black Christ to lead the people to ‘Zion’, the promised land of plenty.
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