17 June 2021

Tonight, I was welcomed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by the sad news of the death of the first President of the Republic of Zambia and a founding father of the nation, His Excellency Dr. Kenneth Kaunda.

In this moment of great loss to Zambians and indeed all Africans, I wish to express my heartfelt condolences to the Kaunda family, President Edgar Lungu, and the government and people of the Republic of Zambia.

The demise of President Kaunda at the grand old age of 97 years brings to end the pioneers and forefathers who led the struggles for decolonisation of the African continent and received the instrument of Independence from the colonial masters in Africa.

Let all Africans and friends of Africa take solace in the knowledge that President Kaunda has gone home to a well-deserved rest and to proudly take his place beside his brothers such as Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Nelson Mandela of South Africa to name but a few.

All of them, without exception, were nationalists who made sacrifices in diverse ways. Some, like Patrice Lumumba, untimely lost their lives soon after independence. We are consoled that God granted President Kaunda long life to witness the progression of Africa through five decades of proud and not-so proud moments.

In December 2015, I visited President Kaunda at his home in Lusaka in what was to be our last meeting. As we discussed about everything from family to politics in our two countries and indeed in Africa generally, I asked him if the Africa that we have today is the Africa for which he and his contemporaries struggled and fought. President Kaunda was visibly pained in his response and at some point he broke down and wept. It was obvious to me how disappointed he was about some of the challenges that have plagued our continent for decades since independence.

As we mourn President Kaunda, my prayer is that the death of this great African son and leader will remind us of the sacrifices that he and his contemporaries who fought for Africa’s independence made. Let it remind us of the vision that they had for Africa; their hopes and aspirations; their dream for a free, strong, united and prosperous Africa. Let us, African leaders and people, never let the labour of these heroes past be in vain.

Rest well, KK. Africa is free and will be great.

It has become increasingly common for scholars, activists and politicians who see Africa from African vantage points to be outraged by neo-orientalist portrayals of Africa by scholars and media from the West. By “African vantage points”, I mean that they tend to explain and offer context, on the global stage, to the well-publicised crimes of Africa’s leaderships as opposed to calling them out. I mean, whilst they are critical of Muammar Gaddafi or Robert Mugabe, they are unwilling to support coalitions of “vanguards of justice and human rights” to flash them out, even if flashing out a bad leader comes by way of sanctions. These scholars and activists are my main audience.

It is my contention that we need to be kinder and more sensitive to the West’s celebrity-missionary intellectuals and media. They commit no crime when they “misrepresent” the continent. In fact, misrepresentation as a term does not even apply to them as, indeed, they are not mispresenting anything but simply doing their job. It is liberating to be aware that 95 per cent of academics, the media, and other commentators from the West will — oftentimes involuntarily, instinctively or by association — follow the foreign policy positions of their countries. So, Michela Wrong, Nic Cheeseman, Robert Guest and others remain intellectuals of empire. But with a sophistication; they are not crude like their predecessors (such as the colonial anthropologists who were, among other things, openly racist and abusive). This new breed of missionary-scholar speaks to the visible wrongs in our midst, but decides never to offer them any context, longue durée, causation, and abstraction whatsoever, to the point that they have even conscripted surrogates from amongst us. This new breed is more tactical, more sophisticated, but as dangerous as their predecessors.

Reflecting on Wrong’s recent book, Do Not Disturb, Jörg Wiegratz and Leo Zeilig have reminded us about the timeless monster trope in the Western media and academia in reference to African “autocratic” presidents. It is worth stressing that presidents that are labelled “monsters” are not necessarily innocent individuals; they are and have actually committed crimes to fit the label. But while their badness ought not to be denied, it has to be understood as a timeless fact about all politicians: their monstrosity ought to be understood as a function of power – thus the truism that power corrupts, and this is not limited to Africa. In reality however, those characterised as monsters across formerly colonised places have been men (and women) unwilling to allow modern imperial plunder disguised as free trade and often sold in the language of human rights. Please note that monsters do not start out as monsters in both their political character and in the ways in which the world sees and writes about them. Oftentimes, they simply undergo a key transformation at that sobering moment of encounter with the imperial capitalist machine. Slovenian theorist, Slavoj Zizek has described this moment, as a “key dilemma” for any president.

This new breed of missionary-scholar speaks to the visible wrongs in our midst, but decides never to offer them any context, longue durée, causation, and abstraction.

Ugandan president Idi Amin started out as a darling of the West. But he became a monster as soon as he chose to get the natives out of the backwaters of the economy, which actually meant taking the economy away from the Indian-Asians, the “deputies of colonialists” as historian Lwanga-Lunyiigo calls them. (Since they were neither settlers nor natives at independence, the only category left in this push and pull of belonging was as deputies to the colonialists, but they inexplicably stayed on in the colonies even after the end of colonialism). After Amin radically pulled the rag from under their feet — as Kenya and Tanzania had done using their legal systems — Uganda’s former colonisers who had actually shipped Indians into the region and deliberately privileged them over the natives, were the first to demonise Amin. Once politically bad, Amin also became bad in the scholarship. Most famously, he became a “white pumpkin” in popular media circles.

Queen Elizabeth II bestowed a knighthood on Mugabe, a subtle bribe to get him to ignore land reforms, a burning issue at independence.  For 20 years, Mugabe remained a darling of the West, never antagonising white farmers and instead, becoming ensnared in endless negotiations with them and the UK government to find a less radical or less painful way to allow them to keep the land they had grabbed under colonialism. Even when the British government gave Mugabe money to buy land for redistribution, the white landowners refused to sell. Caving in to pressure from inside his own party and from former combatants, Mugabe then took a hard stance on land. Shamelessly, Zimbabwe’s former colonisers took back their bribe, and the media and academia competed in badmouthing Mugabe.

In nearby South Africa, the bribe that was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nelson Mandela was working wonders. Mandela admitted in his memoir, Long Walk to Freedom, that he had blatantly defied the ANC’s resolutions in his ignorant and childlike pursuit of political independence. In effect, he left South Africa’s entire economy in the hands of white South Africans. As Zizek puts it, if Mandela had really won, he would never have become a darling of the West — and of the world. Similarly, before Kagame started taking a hard stance towards the West, he had been their darling for years. He is now a monster. Ever wondered why with all Museveni’s crimes, he is yet to become a monster? Well, Museveni is in Somalia, Central African Republic, South Sudan, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is providing the calm under which foreign mining companies enjoy Congolese resources, and European pirates enjoy Somalia’s marine resources. Thus, despite his crimes against Ugandans, he is yet to make the label, to be called a monster.

The point I am making here is that a huge percentage of scholarship and media in the West reflects the foreign policies of their masters. This is true not just in the so-called “formerly colonised” places but it is also true of Europe’s and America’s relations across the world where their exploitative tentacles are being resisted. Mainstream scholarship, and media, which is largely “a bunch of frauds” as Noam Chomsky puts it, will often find the “ethical imperative” to blast leaderships in Russia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, China, and even helpless Palestine — as long as their multinationals face stiff opposition to attempts to monopolise the economies of these countries.

They simply undergo a key transformation at that sobering moment of encounter with the imperial capitalist machine.

The crime of the leaderships of these countries is trying to extract maximum benefit from their mineral resources — especially oil, gold, lithium and platinum —  and fighting for their land. As these leaders are derided by EU and American politicians, Western scholars and journalists endlessly chant their badness. These same scholars and media also pour their blood, sweat and tears to ensure that the crimes of empire are not exposed. Ali Mazrui told us as much in 1997 when the BBC censored him for reporting factually about Muammar Gaddafi. More recently, The Conversation killed a well-researched piece by Matthew Alford on how “western media rationalises and amplifies state-sanctioned violence and wars as millions die.”

Please note that these fellows in the Western-based media and academia hate being associated with their countries’ foreign policies. They will vehemently deny this accusation. They prefer to appear to be objective academics and analysts building their craft on fieldwork and evidence. But there are two handicaps: first, you’ll never hear them speak out against the crimes of their own countries the way they do about those of other countries. You do not see them calling out Israel’s colonisation of Palestine. You do not see them joining Black Lives Matter, nor see them call out the wars in Yemen, Iraq, and the entire Middle East that were started on the basis of inexistent intelligence.  And this isn’t a case of disciplined focus or areas studies; it is a lie. A true activist-scholar has to start at home. Sadly, you have heard them downplay the double standards of structural adjustment, or simply keep quiet. They are happy to harp on about democracy and human rights as if there is no close connection between livelihoods and the resultant modes of governance. Or they do not see the continued pain of structural adjustment with which their countries have disempowered local African populations.

Second, and this is the big point I intend to make: working or simply following the foreign policy positions of their countries is not a crime on their part. They really have no choice.  Even those most aware of it end up with very limited choices. To appropriate David Scott, they have been conscripted to this mission. They did not choose to work for their countries as earlier intellectuals of empire did; they were simply conscripted. To survive as scholars, they have to stay true to the mission of the master who not only introduced them to these parts of the world, but who also enables their intellectual and financial power to undertake scholarship in these parts.

That the majority are unaware of their conscription is how it is meant to be. But even for those who are seemingly aware of their conscription and would want to resist, there are limits as to how far they can go in challenging the dream of their master, the very one who enables them to thrive in the first place. This is an existential dilemma. The conscription is more discreet nowadays as it takes the form of funding, historical connections, etc. For example, there are exponentially more scholars from the UK than from France or Germany working in the former British colonies, in the same way that there are more scholars from France than from the UK in the former French colonies. And although this form of conscription runs deep, it remains largely invisible.

The bigger point I wish to make is this: scholarship is closely linked to the economy—and to politics. Until Africans develop their economies to fund their scholarship, these chaps from the West will continue to say whatever they want – and there will always be good evidence to back up any arguments they choose to make, which actually makes their scholarship appear sound and objective. But as Foucault has told us, to focus on a particular argument is often a political position and not an intellectual one. It is not intellectual persuasion or a case of overwhelming evidence. It is power and politics.

My intention is not to make the conscription of Western media and scholars at the service of their countries’ foreign policies a crime (perhaps if they knew, they would be humbler). It is to remind African intellectuals and activists that there is need to spend more time fighting at home to better their politics and economies. This, in turn, will give them the intellectual and political power to also push our side of the story.

Last week, as the Covid-19 virus claimed more than 10,000 lives each day, the leaders of the G7 met to discuss their plans to end the pandemic.

Since the last G7 meeting in February, one million more people have died from Covid-19. A new wave of the pandemic is decidedly here — and with it, the warning that the virus could mutate further and become resistant to existing vaccines.

And yet, despite this lethal urgency, a plan and commitment to vaccinate the world failed to materialize in Cornwall. Even the heralded pledge to donate a billion doses of the Covid-19 vaccine — a fraction of the 11 billion doses the world needs, and spread over a year and a half — dropped to 870 million by the time the meetings concluded, out of which only 613 million doses are truly new.

We cannot seriously expect the G7 leaders to challenge a global health system that they constructed. Nor can we wait around for fresh promises of charity. As the G7 pose for photographs on the beach, new variants of concern continue to accelerate the virus’s assault: the Alpha variant in the UK, Beta in South Africa, Gamma in Brazil, and now, Delta in India. Every minute that global cooperation is delayed is another neighborhood of lives at risk.

As of today, the G7 countries have purchased over a third of the world’s vaccine supply, despite making up only 13% of the global population. Africa, meanwhile, with its 1.34 billion people, has vaccinated a meagre 1.8% of its population. The result: At the current rate, low-income countries will be left waiting 57 years for everyone to be fully vaccinated.

That is why the Progressive International is bringing together a new planetary alliance of government ministers, political leaders, and vaccine manufacturers in an emergency summit for #VaccineInternationalism.

In this moment, every laboratory, every factory, every scientist, and every healthcare worker must be empowered to produce and deliver more vaccines for everyone, everywhere. Instead, high- and middle-income countries have used up more than 85% of the world’s vaccine supply. Many have done nothing to waive patent monopolies on vaccines. None of them have done anything to force a transfer of vaccine technology to the world.

Today, as most of the world grapples with having any vaccines at all, the United States and other rich countries grapple with what will soon be huge surpluses of vaccines.

It is clear: The end of this pandemic is now being artificially delayed. It could end — we could make enough vaccines in one year, according to Public Citizen — but instead of sharing technology and cooperating to manufacture vaccines, powerful pharmaceutical companies are choosing to extend it. The IQVIA report on the potential market for booster shots is telling: an estimated $157 billion will be spent worldwide on Covid-19 vaccines through 2025. Governments have already transferred extraordinary amounts of public money into private pockets, creating nine new billionaires — pharmaceutical executives that have handsomely profited from a monopoly on Covid-19 vaccines. Their combined wealth is enough to fully vaccinate some 780 million people in low-income countries.

This cannot go on. Now, delegations of the Global South are coming together to demonstrate models of vaccine internationalism — Cuba, Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, Kenya, Kerala, and more. Joining their call are allies from the Global North, from the UK, Canada, New Zealand — standing ready to challenge their governments to end their loyalty to Big Pharma and surrender their control over global health institutions. With vaccine manufacturers like Virchow, Biolyse, and Fiocruz stating their willingness to do their part — this coalition has a simple goal: to produce, distribute, and deliver vaccines for all.

With this summit, the Progressive International is sounding the alarm: our lives and liberty are in danger, and the sovereignty of the South is at stake. These progressive forces are coming together to set the stage for a new kind of politics —where solidarity is more than a slogan.