Africa Spirited Back to Colonial Slavery Through Libya

Former African National Congress leader and first president of a non-racial, democratic South Africa, Nelson Mandela, with Libyan Leader of the Revolution Muammar Gaddafi. Libya is longtime supporter of Southern Africa., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Reason Wafawarova: Spirited back to colonial slavery

Thursday, 01 September 2011 02:00
Zimbabwe Herald

Africa has haplessly watched the insanity of NATO in Libya, the AU has passively watched French and English military jets being used as the air force for the rag tag rebels in Libya, and today Africa listens attentively as Westerners say they want to bring humanitarian aid to Libya, a country that owes no debt to anyone, a country whose US$70 billion has been illegally confiscated by Western powers, indeed a country that has been the AU's major funder for years.

This writer broke in tears listening to a rebel in Libya saying "we built this entire infrastructure with Gaddafi, and we will build it again. We are capable of building our country."

He had been asked by a journalist why he was wantonly shooting at buildings and smashing windows.

To me this was a sad sight of a young African being spirited back to colonial domination, being used by Western powers to destroy what took forty years for Libya to build, and totally lacking consciousness over the meaning of national independence. We have a sad reality where the destructive acts of Libyan rebels are celebrated as freedom fighting; while we are told to ignore the threat the continent is facing by allowing Western war planes to rampage our cities at will.

I feel so powerless to stop it, yet so powerful to fight it all. This is a time when one feels like doing anything possible to hit back, anything thinkable or imaginable. This aggression by Westerners can be for long but it won't be forever.

The current African Union is a bunch of cowardly bucolic boofheads totally mesmerised by Western donor funding. They look pretty scared as they seem all determined to avoid angering the Westerners. What an unthinking lot of hopeless traitors!

It is just as good that they are no longer called the Organisation of African Unity - that fiery club founded by strong characters like Kwameh Nkurumah, Haille Sellassie, Muammar Gaddafi, Milton Obote, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, and Abdel Nasser, later to be graced by such revolutionaries like Thomas Sankara, Samora Machel, President Mugabe, Eduardo dos Santos, Sam Nujoma, Nelson Mandela and such other heroes.

Who among the bunch of the new leaders we have today could untie the shoes of Nasser, Nkrumah or Julius Nyerere? The OAU would never stand aside and look while little bullies like Sarkozy and Cameron have a field day bombing the cities of a fellow African state; after inviting themselves.

Now it is time to write on behalf of the great, disinherited people of Africa, a continent so disparagingly named the "Third World". It is time to speak with the language of clarity, frankness and facts. This writer wishes to explain the reasons for our revolt to what is happening in Libya today and what is likely to happen in the aftermath, even though it may be hard to succeed in convincing those who today stand by Westerners as our continent is being bombarded and destroyed by lethal fire power.

The term "third world" was invented after the fall of colonial empires in order to better perpetuate foreign control of our intellectual, cultural, economic and political life. We stand today counted as a poor people incapable of deposing our own tyrants and dictators, indeed incapable of defining our own path to democratic governance. We are being coerced to give credence to this gigantic fraud of history and accepting the status of the "hinterland of the satiated West."

We are expected to cheer Westerners as they ruthlessly burn down Libya. Africa must never lose the awareness of the tricontinental whole that was the basis of the Non- Aligned Movement.

There is a special solidarity that unites the three continents of Asia, Latin America and Africa in the indisputable struggle against the same political gangsters and economic exploiters that history has ever known.

As Jose Marti once said, the life of formerly colonised peoples affirms "that our cheek feels the blow struck against any man, anywhere in the world." Every African worth the dignity of our independence must feel the blow struck against Libya today, the blow from the insane Europeans with the backing of their

North American cousins. From the days of slavery to the era of colonialism Africa has been turning the other cheek. But the blows were redoubled. The evil heart of the Westerner did not soften.

Today the blows have been modified as "high precision bombing" and the heart of the Westerner has become all the more ruthlessly evil - destroying in minutes what took decades to build in Libya.

The truth of the weak has been trembled under foot and the lies of the strong are prevailing. When the same Westerners came to enslave our ancestors and to colonise us in the 19th century the word of Christ was betrayed and his cross was transformed into a bludgeon.

They put on his robe and they rent our souls and bodies asunder. They obscured and westernised his message. But we understand Christ's message as one of universal liberation and justice.

It is time for Africa to rise to true consciousness and open our eyes to imperialism and its machinations. We must stand up to the West and tell them there will be no more blows. In Zimbabwe we stood up in 2000 and we said there would be no more blows over our farm lands. We fought back and asserted ourselves.

Now we are saying next are our mines and industries and we will stop the blows from Western multinational corporations in these sectors. That is not negotiable.

But shall we be reminded that after Muammar Gaddafi took over power from King Idriss in 1969 he also stopped the blows of the Westerner in Libya, emulating what Abdel Nasser was doing in neighbouring Egypt?

Gaddafi transformed Libya from the second poorest country on earth to arguably the richest in Africa, constructing the 400km Great Man Made River (GMMR), making the Libyan Desert green, providing free housing for all Libyans, free education, free health, interest free loans and the cheapest cars and fuel on earth. Libya has no debt and is not a member of the IMF and other global lending institutions.

All that is going to change now, as Libya will be adopted into "the family of nations," the euphemism for the West's client states.

We all thought the blows were no more for Libya. Then came Ronald Reagan bombing what Libyans were building, and we saw Gaddafi triumph over that aggression in 1986.

Today, 25 years later we see what it means to stop the blows of imperialism. What Gaddafi built in four decades the triumvirate gang of Sarkozy, Obama and Cameron destroyed in a matter of hours of mindless bombing, with the whole world watching in silence, and we are even being coerced to celebrate the insanity.

So we are being reminded as Zimbabweans that repossessing our resources does not necessarily mean that we have halted the blows from the West. And the warning is not empty at all, especially with some Benghazi minded people within our midst.

We are dealing with a generation of whites that feels it is betraying the legacy of white supremacy by letting weaker countries practice independent nationalism. Now they want to spirit us back to colonial slavery by leveraging on the blissful ignorance of the young African and the gullibility of the current political leadership in Africa - a whole bunch largely composed of puppet politicians and cowards that do not seem to know how to run countries without Western aid.

We must state categorically that there is no salvation for African people unless we turn our backs on all the aid and economic models that charlatans of all types have tried to sell us in the last twenty years. Since 1989, the West has been selling African leaders deadly economic models designed to create perpetual dependency in the name of liberalism and the doctrine of a global free market.

There is essentially no salvation for us outside the rejection of these models.

There is no development for Africa separate from a rupture as was the kind seen with Zimbabwe's land reform program, the kind of rapture advocated for by South Africa's ANC Youth League. Revolutions are not negotiated.

They are radically carried out. Jacob Zuma can only silence the revolutionary voice of Julius Malema on behalf of Western interests, and that is a thoroughly dangerous path to take.

We are aware of the intellectual giants emerging to preserve and perpetuate Western capitalist hegemony in the name of freedoms and liberties, mostly preached under the umbrella theme of democracy. These are people awakened by the dizzying rise of millions of people in rags, aghast at the threat of these hunger driven multitudes determined to end their agony at the expense of wealthy imperialists, the way the landless peasants of Zimbabwe ended their deprivation by ousting those colonial settlers who occupied their land, indeed the way the masses of South Africa are going to rise against the occupiers of their farm lands not so long from now.

We are facing a cowardly club of imperialists who do not want to face us as the masses of Africa. Rather they anxiously search for miracle concepts and new forms of models for our countries, preaching democracy today, and freedom tomorrow, human rights the next day, civic rights the other day - all the time brainwashing young African minds with vainglorious rhetoric.

A reading of the numerous publications of innumerable forums and seminars on democracy and human rights is ample illustration of this.

Far be it from this writer to ridicule the patient efforts of honest intellectuals who, because they have eyes to see, are discovering each day the terrible intentions of Western imperialists, who each passing day impose on us ruinous instructions and directives that often come in the name of development.

We are in real danger of being spirited back to a world of slavery dressed up in today's fashions of liberty and freedoms. Why would any sane African accept American weapons, regardless of the war to be fought, given the devilish record of the United States in international affairs?

But today the US can forcibly take Libya's US$70 billion, only to parcel it back to the country by giving it in bits and pieces to rebels who use it to purchase machine guns, bombs and tankers from the US military industry - only to use these weapons to destroy what Libya built over four decades of toiling and legendary commitment. It is a script so difficult to fathom, so sad to confront, and so deplorable, and purely evil in intent and practice.

It is heart breaking to see Libyan rebels begging Westerners to release US$2,5 billion of their own money, so they can use it to buy weapons to destroy Tripoli and other Libyan cities in the name of fighting for democracy and freedom. We have every reason to be afraid as Africans.

We have an educated middle class that is not prepared to part ways with the privileges brought to it by the few benefits of imperialism.

The unwillingness to give up these privileges is a result of both intellectual laziness and the fact that these people have tasted the Western way of life - albeit at a consumerist level.

Now Africa's parliaments are filled with lazy bones carried in bodies of empty headed people who are not at all aware that all genuine political struggle requires rigorous, theoretical debate, and they refuse to rise to the intellectual effort of conceiving new concepts equal to the murderous struggle that lies ahead of us - a struggle whose beginning is the aggression we have seen carried out on

Libya - a struggle surely unavoidable in the future given the foothold the West has been allowed in Africa already. The AU is now composed of passive and pathetic consumer leaders who wallow in terminology fetishised by the West, just as they wallow in the joy of visiting Western luxurious places, or in Western whiskey and champagne consumed in obscene looking lounges. We need a patriotic and proud youth who will put this country and this continent ahead of any other perceived privileges. Tears will never dry.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer.