It is said that to err is human and to forgive is divine.
If this adage holds true, then Africans are the most divine amongst the world’s peoples as no other race has suffered more at the sometimes-atrocious hand of fate.
Yet, as the atrocities fluctuate between varying degrees of shock, disgust and anger, Africans tend to hide the scars deep within and carry on.
Who can forget the incursions of the slaving Arabs into North Africa in the 9th Century, or the Atlantic Slave Trade and civil and tribal wars, as in the case of Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Sudan and Liberia?
How about the sponsored wars, as in the DRC, Angola and elsewhere?
What about the genocide of the Herero and Nama of Namibia under German occupation and the Congolese of the Congo Free State under Belgium’s King Leopold II?
Through it all Africans remain that resilient lot that continues to rise, no matter how many times they fall or are made to fall.
As in the case of other continents, the peoples of Africa, for the sake of territorial and economic expansion, had, at different times in history, been at war with neighbouring and faraway states.
This was also true in Europe, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific. Although slavery was a practice common the world over, no where did it take the level of brutality, scale and complete lack of care for human life as in Africa, encouraged and funded by Arabs and Europeans.
The Arab slave traders took over four million Africans via the Red Sea, four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, and nine million through the Trans-Saharan trade route. The European sponsored Atlantic Slave Trade took between eleven and twenty million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean, with millions more dying in the process of being transported and taken into slavery.
Still, Africans seem to have put these deeds behind them and continue on, even though an official apology for slavery from U.K, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Arabia, Brazil, the U.S, and some African tribes, is still lacking. Germany, for its part in the deaths of 65, 000 Herero and 10, 000 Nama killed in Namibia in 1904, and Belgium, for the 20-30 million Congolese who died under King Leopold between 1885-1905, have yet to apologise to these countries. But Africans, by their silence on the issues, have forgiven these wrongs and still continue to see the West as their friend and send billions of dollars in business deals to them, with very little coming the other way. In order to avoid compensating countries and peoples affected by the slave trade, colonisation and genocide the West continues to point to the fact that these atrocities happened in the past. They contend that the present generation should not have to pay for the deeds of the past, even though it continues to benefit from the staggering wealth generated as a result of the past. However, Africans do more business with the West than with each other.
Apart from forgiving others, the recent being the surprising forgiveness by the leaders of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) of 300 years of crimes against the peoples of South Africa by whites in that country, Africans have also demonstrated the act of forgiveness to their own.
Nowhere is that forgiveness more encouraging than in Sierra Leone and Rwanda. When the civil war started in Sierra Leone, most of that country’s peoples supported it. Starting off as probably the richest, in terms of reserves and mineral wealth, and the most educated country in West Africa at independence, by 1990, Sierra Leone had become one of the poorest countries in the world due to corruption and mismanagement of the country’s mineral wealth. The internal pressures created by poverty led a broken people to perpetrate levels of violence, the kinds never before seen, on each other that shocked the entire world.
But despite ten years of amputations, mutilations, starvation, rape, disease and cold-blooded murder, the victims of this war were able to forgive the perpetrators and commit to building a society where civil wars, and the corruption, greed and inequality that lead to them, would be a thing of the past. In its work, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Sierra Leone is trying to augment the process of reconciliation in order to make the process of forgiveness a national one in order to point forward to a better future for all. The same could be said of Rwanda, where in a hundred days in 1994 between eight hundred thousand and a million Tutsis, and moderate Hutus were hacked, shot, burned, drowned and hanged to death by Hutus. Before this, there were already signs that the majority Hutu population of Rwanda was concocting genocide.
When Belgium, the erstwhile colonial master of Rwanda, took over the land they instituted a policy where they elevated a minority over a majority tribe, the Tutsis over the Hutus. For the most part of the last century a violent political struggle and severe mistrust created a chasm between the two groups, who before the advent of the Belgians existed as a socio-economic unit. But when someone shot down the plane of Rwanda’s Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana on 6th April 1994, they immediately blamed the Tutsis. The result of the accusation was priests killing parishioners, kids killing their playmates, neighbours killing neighbours, and police and soldiers killing unarmed civilians. Despite the loss of so many lives, the Tutsis of Rwanda, through the TRC, have been able to forgive the Hutu killers and are committed to the rebuilding of a trust lost during the colonial era.
Countless atrocities have been committed across the world: the Germans against the Jews during WWII; the Japanese against China, Korea and much of Asia; the Turks against the Armenians; Europeans against the Indigenous populations of the Americas and the Pacific, etc, etc, etc. While they should never be forgotten, countries’ refusal to admit responsibility, regret and apology over these crimes against humanity will see them continue to have an effect on current relationships among nations.
Forgiveness is the only way the world can avoid more disasters of the like. Hopefully, future generations will not witness the likes of Sierra Leone, Rwanda or World Wars and the peace that comes from forgiveness will usher in the much-fabled 1000 years of world peace.
