The American jazz poet, Langston Hughes, famously wrote: What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore—and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
Oft quoted, it was appropriately used by Mark Gevisser as the title of his 2007 biography: Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred. The dream was of self-determination for this continent—an African Renaissance. But a thin veil divides any dream from nightmare.
The continent of Africa exists as a separate entity to the landmass of Eurasia in spite of nature. Going back to the time of the Pharoah Sesostris some two thousand years before the birth of Christ, men had tried — mostly unsuccessfully — to permanently link the waters of the Mediterranean with that of the Red Sea. It took almost four millennia before Ferdinand de Lesseps successfully amputated the continent from Asia at the Arabian Peninsula some 150 years ago.
In many ways, the cutting of the Suez Canal — from Port Said in the north to Port Tawfik in the south — is the story of Africa. Some 1,5 million people were involved in the construction over the ten year period – nearly all of them forced labour. Thousands of labourers died in the process. But forced labour is still a step up from slavery; which once again is the story of Africa.
Between the 7th and 20th centuries, some 18 million people were taken from Africa as slaves by the Arab slave trade. Between the 15 th and 19th centuries, a further 12 million people were taken as slaves to the Americas by the Atlantic slave trade. Arab and African alike profited immensely from trafficking in the misery of their fellow humans. It took anti-slavery legislation passed by the British in 1807, and 50 years thereafter of action by the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, to break the back of this traditional African practice.
The death of slavery brought many of the West African economies to their knees, including the Ashanti Empire (Ghana), the Kingdom of Dahomey (Benin), and the Oyo Empire (Nigeria). Deprived of that main source of revenue, they eventually succumbed to military conquest by the colonial powers. When the colonial powers left, they took to fighting among themselves. Many of those conflicts continue to this day.
And that microcosm encapsulates the larger reality of Africa. Thabo Mbeki knows this tale, and knows the history of this continent probably better than most historians. Nevertheless, he had a dream of going against history. For a while, it seemed he might succeed.
The dream did not explode. It was shot in the head. The last of its champions crawled out of a sewer pipe to be greeted by a fate which he would, no doubt, have himself visited upon his enemies. The death of Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi — ironically brought about by Mbeki’s successor when our government acceded to Nato’s bombing of Libya — is a body blow to the African Renaissance from which there is no getting up.
The way ahead points to an increasingly fragmented Africa. The children of the Arab Spring will seek the fellowship of their brethren in the Islamic world rather than that of the Christians of Sub-Sahara. The end result of that journey has already been revealed to us by the conflict which tore apart Sudan, and which will eventually replicate in Nigeria and on to other places. Oh, that way madness lies…
And that, sadly, will be the legacy of Jacob Zuma. History will mark him as the man who held the future of Africa in his grasp, but handed it away to the Occident because he failed to read the fine print.