Prof. Mazrui Excites Audience in Accra

Globalisation may signal the final stage of annihilation of the Africa, except leaders of the continent rise to challenges of the concept, eminent political historian said at the weekend as he moved an otherwise excited audience close to hysteria in Accra, Ghana.

Mazrui, the Albert Schweitzer professor in the Humanities, was delivering the eighth Dubois-Padmore-Nkrumah Pan African lectures at the W.E.B. Dubois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture at Accra in Ghana. He addressed the theme: Pan Africanism In The Era Of Globalisation and his audience comprised Pan Africanists and culture scholars from around Africa and the blacks in the Diaspora. The session was chaired by Dr. Alex Kwapong, Chairman, Ghana Council of State.

According to Mazrui, Africa indeed is going to be the battle ground for globalisation. And its effect might be as devastating as that of slavery and colonialism.

Unfortunately, remarked the Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Binghamton University, New York: "African leaders do not seem to be rising to the challenges of the globalisation".

Mazrui, who said the lecture coincided with 40th anniversary of his first meeting with the late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, said: "The phenomena which is called globalisation has its winners and loosers. And in the initial stages, Africa has been among the loosers".

The 58-year-old political thinker lamented the impoverishment of the African nations in terms of technological advancement, saying: "There are universities in the United States (of America) which have more computers than an African country with 30 million people.

"This is the great 'digital divide'; a contest between the haves and the have-nots in the digital science; a distinction between the digital and the digitry".

However, Mazrui drew the ire of some members of the distinguished audience when in listing the global achievements of African intellectuals, he omitted the name of Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, the first black winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A Ghanaian contributor from the floor accused him of deliberately omitting Soyinka's name because of their prolonged disagreement over representation of historical facts about the continent. Mazrui, however, said he had "nothing personal against Wole". But he was uncomfortable with "the Scandinavians who are deciding the best literary minds from Africa".

In his contention, the Nobel prize for literature judges have smartly decided to "share" the prize among the three major distinct groups in Africa - the black African (Wole Soyinka), the Arab African (Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt) and a white African (Nadine Gordimer of South Africa).

"I have reservation that when a European wins the prize, he must have written in English, but for a black man to win the Nobel, he must write in European language. I have reservation that has nothing to do with Soyinka but with the Scandinavians who have no regard for creative writing in African languages."

To the presenter and producer of the famous 1986 Television documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, jointly produced by the BBC and the Public Broadcasting Service (WETA Washington) and the Nigerian Television Authority, "there are four major engines of globalisation across times".

And in these four spheres, Africans have always been at the forefront of the globalisation process. But he regretted that incidences of slavery, colonialism coupled with corruption and lack of vision among African political elite, have robbed the continent of a prominent role in the "villagisation" process of the world which globalisation portends.

On Kwame Nkrumah and his leading role as a pan-Africanist, Mazrui said, the former Ghanaian leader made grave errors in his approach to the pan-Africanism project. According to him, while Nkrumah was strategising pan-Africanism, he saw the entire world as his constituency. He did not reckon with the challenges posed by the Arabian world.

There is always a contest between Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism and these two divides have to be synthesised for any ideology proposing unity of the African world to have meaning. Failure to integrate the two divides, stated Mazrui, was the undoing of Nkrumah.

On the African Union recently launched by African leaders as an alternative to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), Professor Mazrui lauded the idea and said it might eventually be the saving grace for unity of Africa. But he was sceptical if the African leaders in their present political attitude and subservient relationship to Europe and the West would be able to effectively execute the project.

"Is there enough will power to pull it through. The problem of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was, there was not enough will power to push it through. But with the African Union and the plan for common market, bank and currency, it just might work out; but we need to re-orientate ourselves."

Mazrui recalled a recent meeting with proponent of the African Union, Muhammar Gaddafi, and said the Libyan leader sounded serious about the project. But he thought that Gaddafi was already making a mistake in his resolve "to cut off his fellow Arab leaders."

He added: "You cannot have an African Union that will leave out one third of the continent, the Arab nations along."

Mazrui also condemned the mass scale of corruption among the African political elites, saying this might eventually delay the movement of the continent towards development. He urged African leaders to re-orientate themselves and not repeat the mistakes of past leaders such as Nkrumah.

He said he remained convinced that Nkrumah though was a great African leader, he was a bad ruler of Ghana. "He neglected the Ghanaian people. He left them poorer than he met them. While he was expanding his pan Africanism constituency, he failed to pull his people out of poverty," contended the former Albert Lithuli Chair at the University of Jos.