News
How Gadaffi’s false ‘Pan-Africanism’ failed to pay off
For the last few months, some African states have dominated international news: Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya.
Tunisia which has been governed with an iron fist since independence in 1957, experienced the first uprising in January. The frustration and misery of the population symbolized by the self-immolation of a young street vendor ignited the revolts that expanded to the whole region, and highlighted the abyss separating the tranquility of the governors and the distress of the governed. But this was only the beginning.
In February, the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak fell.
In May, after months of bloody battles, a new, democratically elected president was sworn in, in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast.)
The civil war that lasted more than twenty years came to an end in South Sudan, when the global peace accord signed on January 9, 2005 was applied through a referendum that consecrated the partition of that country, creating independent South Sudan on July 9, 2011.
The essential cause for the uprisings resides in the impossibility of peaceful transitions of power in many African states. By infringing on the people’s ability to breathe, and the country’s ability to aerate through democratic elections, the post-colonial state winds up producing the type of explosion that, suddenly, shatters all bearings.
The chaos left by the African dictators will not be easily or quickly resolved. And I am not so naïve as to absolve the hand of the “wanguzu” or white man, (there’s a saying that when you see the wanguzu pointing his cannon at a bird, you can be sure he is really aiming at the elephant behind the bush.) There has clearly been unequal treatment by the international community of Libya and, say, Syria or Bahrain. But we are no longer in a period of signing “Pharaoh, let my people go”. Rather, we must let Pharaoh go, by refusing to be oppressed by our own people, and by engaging in this refusal “by any means necessary.”
