For journalists, worrying about etiquette may seem as outmoded as tipping your top hat to a lady. Few of us care which knife and fork we use around the dining table. Business, academic and political big shorts on the other hand love a bit of culture, and nothing says perfect sense of occasion better than a jacket and a tie around the conference table.
A cursory glance at the forty or so bodies hunched around the conference table at a week-long conference organized by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) could tell journalists in their jeans and casual windbreakers apart from political leaders and the academia in formal suits and ties.
Listening to the presentations, however, you would be forgiven for thinking the academic and political leaders were the ones wearing jeans and sneakers. It was the academia and political leaders with their black consciousness and Pan-Africanism credentials who set the conference room buzzing with their arguments that deciding what to wear or how to eat are some of the treasured arsenals in the fight to free Africa from the colonial yoke.
A celebrated Pan- Africanist and proponent of black consciousness, Dr. Mosibudi Mangena, feels the African intelligentsia has failed the continent having led the fight against colonial rule only to now serve the colonial masters. He argues for instance, that the mode of government of the former colonial power, its institutions and traditions are replicated almost to the letter by liberated African countries.
“The language of debate in parliament and of doing state business must be colonial. The fact that the majority of the people understand neither their language nor the colonial way of conducting government business does not matter. This means the vast majority of the masses do not understand what is being said and done in their name,” argues Professor Mangena.
“The educated group imbibes the history, culture and mannerisms of their colonizers and tries hard to imitate the lifestyle of their idols. The way they dress, the food they eat and the manner of tackling edibles, the music they play and the books they read, must all be as near as possible to what the colonizer would approve. The more you can quote Shakespeare and Yeats the better, and it is more profound to know the British flowers called daffodils than any indigenous African ones,” Mangena told participants.
Mangena holds the view that an educated elite that is socially, culturally and economically disconnected from its society is a “disaster”.
“Such an elite is incapable of an organic bond with the people for the collective and wholesome development of society. This might be part of the inhibiting factors in the socio-economic advancement of our continent,” said the soft spoken scholar with extreme pan-africanist views.
“I was born in a farm and went to a school made of mud. My true name is Mosibudi, but the schoolteacher decided to add ‘Aaron’ to my names so that I was close as possible to the Europeans. The tragedy though is that up to this day I still do not know what Aaron means,” said Mangena.
Although the conference was convened to fight xenophobia, the prevailing tone reflected a movement away from a sense of common humanity towards exclusive groupings around color, history and geography.
Presenters who spoke in defence of black consciousness and Pan Africanism took the “our way or the highway route” highlighting the lack of shared experience between Africa and other continents from which humanity can construct a generally acceptable way of living.
Most presenters who spoke about the problems facing the continent and xenophobia used color, historical experience and geographic identity as their rallying cries, instead of attempting to bridge the gap between the different colors, different continents and the different historical backgrounds.
Former Pan African Congress President Dr. Motsoko Pheko insists that Pan African Nationalism is the only solution to African problems and said any philosophy that propels Africans to be servants of other nations must be rejected. “Africa is more dependent economically than it was when seeking independence. Pan Africanism is opposed by those who benefit from Africa’s mineral wealth,” argued Pheko.
Participants also had to deal with xenophobia within the context of South Africa and the continent. In May 2008 scores of Africans including South African citizens around the country’s shanty towns were butchered in that country when residents complained that “foreigners” were grabbing their jobs. A former university of Botswana academic, Professor Michael Neocosmos observed that xenophobia is not a problem of the poor.
He argues that xenophobic attitudes are widespread in South Africa. “Why are the poor attacking the poor not the wealthy?” Asked Neocosmos. He said in a different context, other ethnic groups may find others to be causing problems. Participants generally agreed that xenophobic attitudes are found the world over. Neocosmos authored the book “From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners” Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South Africa in which he argues that xenophobia should be understood as a political discourse and practice. He argued that in South Africa, the history of xenophobia is intimately connected to the manner in which citizenship has been conceived and fought over the past fifty years.
In the context of the Pan Africanism and Black Consciousness debate, even Christianity came across as an “us” and “them” political ideology with one of South Africa’s renowned politicians, Professor Mathole Motshekga punching holes on some of the bible teachings. Motshekga blames the Greeks for distorting information originating from Africa. He argued that there exists another version of the Bible which the West would not allow Africans to get hold of.
After being subjected to doses of black consciousness the forty journalists from SADC emerged from the conference some convinced, others confused about challenges facing the region and the rest of the continent, the origins of the Bantu speaking people, and that the white man deliberately removed the noses from the famous Egyptian pyramids because they resembled those of blacks.
The conference highlighted the dearth of common humanity and a sense of community that cuts across color, history and geography and the need to rescue political leaders and the intelligentsia from its parallel universe.
