African Visionaries
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African Visionaries

Kropp Dakubu, Maria Asante, Kropp Dakubu, Maria Asante

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eBook - ePub

African Visionaries

Kropp Dakubu, Maria Asante, Kropp Dakubu, Maria Asante

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About This Book

In over forty portraits, African writers present extraordinary people from their continent: portraits of the women and men whom they admire, people who have changed and enriched life in Africa. The portraits include inventor, founders of universities, resistance fighters, musicians, environmental activists or writers. African Visionaries is a multi-faceted book, seen through African eyes, on the most impactful people of Africa. Some of the writers contributing to the collection are: Helon Habila, Virginia Phiri, Ellen Banda-Aaku, Vronique Tadjo, Tendai Huchu, Solomon Tsehaye, Patrice Nganang and Sami Tchak.

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Year
2019
ISBN
9789988308841
Chapter 1
AMINATA DRAMANE TRAORÉ (Mali)
THE END OF DOMINATION
BY ROKHAYA DIALLO
image
Not long ago, French television was awakened from its deep slumber by an unusual phenomenon: an African woman took the stage in numerous political talks and joined in broadcast discussions. Unlike African intellectuals who quickly assume unobtrusive European masks in front of the camera, this woman confidently came forward dressed in gorgeous African clothes and did not hold a page before her. Without ceremony and with verbal skill, she advocated an unconventional point of view that threw her co-discussants completely off balance, for they were not used to crossing swords with somebody who brought up weapons different from those customary for one in their position. The ideas expressed by this proud woman exploded the clichés about Africa, as the continent of oppression and misery. Her name was Aminata Dramane Traoré.
Her story began in 1947, in Bamako, the capital of Mali. She grew up in a family of ten children. Her mother was a housewife but at the same time earned money by dyeing cloth. Her father was a clerk in the post office. A “completely normal family”, they say. From her mother she inherited a passion for textiles. In a family in which girls were not sent to school, she became the first to go to school. Like many children at this time, little Aminata only wanted to go because her best friend went to school. For the little girl, that meant a long walk, every day for six years.
Even on the first day she was struck by the fact that the school was divided in two. On one side were the “natives” and the “mulattoes” from a hostel who were taught by African teachers. On the other side, were the white girls. The separation of the two worlds was as brutal as it was official. During the break a mental wall prevented the children from playing together. Aminata TraorĂ© often recalled this "the distant world of the whites”. From afar she observed the representatives of the other world and registered their “drink bottles full of cold red or green syrup”. It was impossible not to perceive the difference with painful yearning. Against this abyss that developed in earliest childhood in the mentality of African people, she would direct her struggle.
Aminata did so well in school that she skipped a class. After the school-leaving exam she studied Psychology and Social Sciences at the University of Dakar, which now carries the name of the greatest African intellectual, Sheikh Anta Diop. However, in the storm of student revolt that broke out in May 1968, even in Senegal, the government sent the students home, so Aminata Traoré continued her studies in Frankfurt.
She was then in the world of those other pupils from primary school, and the questions of the two worlds pressed upon her still more intensively. Why the difference between Europe and Africa? Is it insurmountable? What effect does this inequality have on the thinking of Africans? She analysed this in her doctoral thesis, in which she investigated the “Development of identity among African youth”.
After gaining her doctorate, she went to the Ivory Coast, her husband’s homeland, where the economy was booming to the extent that people talked about the “Ivorian miracle”. “In those days, one would certainly not think that it would be better to stay in Europe”, she explains today. As one of the few female African scholars of that time she taught at the Institute for Ethnosociology. After her divorce she continued her career in the Ivory Coast. In the newly constituted Ministry for Women – the first in Africa – she became the project director for twenty-seven years! but was continually obstructed in her energetic efforts for the advancement of women. Incredulously, she had to recognise that important decisions were made by female experts who understood little or nothing about the realities of African countries. They all came from the industrialised countries. There it was again; this wall between north and south; between former colonial powers and dependent states. To stand up vigorously for the destruction of this omnipresent imbalance was a challenge for Aminata TraorĂ©.
Purposefully, she put together contacts with representative women of her generation in Africa. In 1977, together with the Senegalese feminist, Marie-AngĂ©lique SavanĂ©, she founded the Union of African Women for Research and Development, one of the first organisations of African women scientists. For its first programme, the union set a clear goal: the topic was “The Decolonisation of Research on Women”, which denounced the domination of African women by “female experts” from the dominant countries of the north. Through numerous initiatives this network became a central agency for the representation of the interests of women in Africa.
In 1988, by then forty one years old, she became the leader of one of the projects created by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for the advancement of women and for the improvement of water supply in Africa. In this way she came into contact with women from other parts of the world. They strengthened her in her commitment to the independence of African women and societies, among them especially, the Indian, Lyra Srinivasan, who had developed a successful pedagogical strategy to deal with illiteracy among Indian women. Through the international context of her activities Aminata Traoré achieved a deeper insight into the connections between the world economy and the problems of Africa.
In the face of the economic crises and mistakes by the so-called developed countries, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had decreed Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) for adversely affected countries as the condition for credit. As Aminata TraorĂ© could confirm from her professional experience, the experts of both of these international organisations, placed earnings from the “developing countries” above the requirements of the actual populations. Even worse, they insisted on measures that were obviously wrong, as could be seen for example in the water supply project. For, according to the rules of the SAP, African governments had to curtail all “non-profitable outlays”, those were the resources for public services, which included water supply. The water supply promptly collapsed, and programmes had to be introduced to eliminate the problem, in fact, with credit from the same countries that were demanding structural adjustment. The same thing happened with education and health and also in the economic sector. Thus the African countries were forced into a nonsensical economic policy that plunged them into a vicious circle of destruction of infrastructure, forced privatisation, distress and borrowing. It was not surprising, then, that the social expenditures of several countries constituted four per cent of the budget, and the liquidation of debt, thirty-six per cent.
To play her part toward counteracting the results of these world economic abuses, in 1992, Aminata Traoré returned to Mali and became an active advisor to the United Nations Population Fund. She set standards with a series of projects that she planned.
Against the neglect of parts of the city that due to cuts in the context of SAP no longer had garbage collection, she hit upon an unusual measure. Against all the traditional division of roles, she persuaded sixteen young women who had not been able to find any employment after their education, to take an unheard of step: for the first time Malian women sat at the steering wheel of a lorry and drove from house to house to collect garbage! With that she had not only eliminated the problem of lack of garbage removal, but also found a way towards the accomplishment of her real mission. The UN Fund then appointed her to lead sensitisation on the delicate theme of female circumcision. Through co-operation with the sixteen women she won the trust of her target group and was no longer perceived as a know-it-all stranger from the city.
At the same time she set about the cleaning of her section of the city, in which pavements and gutters had been abandoned to decay. Other parts of the city followed the example with the support of Non-Governmental Organisations from Luxembourg and Canada. In a short time the inhabitants paved an expanse of more than three hundred thousand square metres.
Following the principle of self-help and independent development, she opened the restaurant “San Toro”, in which everything came from Africa, and the Hotel DjennĂ© for alternative tourism. The Amadou HampĂątĂ© BĂą Centre, which she co-founded, was also innovative as a culture devoted to the development and transmission of traditional know-how and cultural self-confidence. Aminata TraorĂ© became a recognised figure throughout the country.
In 1997 after some delay, she took over the Ministry for Culture and Tourism. Three years later she resigned from her office because she realised that her appointment only served to silence a potential critic, for she received no means for implementing her projects. A year before, in 1999, she had published L’étau (The Vice). The book became a classic of the critical approach to globalisation and has been on the curriculum of several universities. Using the example of Mali, she showed how African countries are the football of neoliberal politics and how their local economies are systematically destroyed. She unmasked the “double standard” of the rich countries. While the African states had to withdraw economic support, the export economies in Europe and the USA received subventions, thus agricultural products from the rich countries could be offered for only a third of the price of local products in Africa. “They have only globalised hopelessness, anguish and hunger,” wrote Aminata TraorĂ©. With equal sharpness, she criticised the African elites who passively watched the selling off of their countries and spread the false belief that an incompetent state could be democratic. Thus she spoke of the “betrayal by the Ă©lites”, which provoked a strong reaction, an “unparalleled lynching by the media” as the author says.
Through the book, the attention of the international public was drawn to this intellectual who confronted the powerful and attacked the ruling system with insider knowledge. The activists in the movement for criticism of globalisation were especially attentive and invited her to the first World Social Forum in Brazil at Porto Alegre. With the Egyptian Samir Amin, the Senegalese Demba Moussa and Taouffik Ben Abdallah, she belonged to the “Four Musketeers” who represented the African continent at this historical meeting of the movement for the criticism of globalisation, and later founded the African Social Forum. Under the title “Intellectual Assault”, Aminata TraorĂ© gave a talk in Porto Alegre that made her a figurehead of the movement.
That Aminata TraorĂ© meanwhile has become an icon of the opposition to neo-liberal world politics, is due on the one hand, to the clear language with which she brought to light the problems of the current world order. Thus she reminded, after the attack of 11th September 2001, “In Africa, every day is a September 11”. On the other hand, she distinguished herself by a brand of aggressiveness that the professional politicians little knew how to oppose. At the World Summit in South Africa in 2002 she heard with some amazement how the French President Jacques Chirac – in contradiction to his policies – presented himself in his speech as an advocate for Africa. After the speech she went to him, “Mr. President, I have heard you make extremely friendly remarks on the affairs of African countries. Would you be prepared to initiate a revision of the relations between France and Africa?”
To this unexpected proposal, her interlocutor reacted as any politician would always react in such situations, “I’m sorry madame, just now I have no time.”
Aminata Traoré was not to be put off so easily. She addressed the President again, this time with an Open Letter to the President of France with reference to the Ivory Coast and Africa in general, in which with remarkable precision, she demonstrated the connection between the dominance of the rich countries and the situation in African states.
Her next altercation was with Chirac’s successor Sarkozy. In 2007 Sarkozy gave a speech in Dakar that is etched in the memory of Africans. In his arrogant manner, the freshly anointed President of the "Great Nation" went straight to the lectern. After he had informed the assembly in the colonial manner that colonial rule was not to blame for the problems of Africa, he spoke sanctimoniously about “the bloody wars that Africans conduct among themselves”, “genocide”, “dictators”, “fanaticism”, “corruption”, “misuse of office”, “extravagant waste” and “destruction of the environment”. He didn’t leave out a single clichĂ©. That France vigorously supported the dictators, actively opposed critical politicians and used every means to get its hands on the profitable sectors of the economy of these countries, he forgot to mention. But the old song about the “continent of catastrophe” was only an opening phrase for a lecture about the “simple soul of the African”. Apparently, illuminated by the African sun, the President became expansive and switched to cultural philosophy. Let us hear what Sarkozy proclaimed to his hosts:
“The drama of Africa resides in the fact that the African has not yet entered fully into history. The African peasant, who has lived with the seasons for thousands of years, whose ideal life is harmony with nature, knows only the eternal cycle of time that is stamped with the eternal repetition of the same deeds and the same words
 In this notion of the world, where everything always begins from the beginning, there is no place for human adventure, for the idea of progress
 The African never rages against the future. He never arrives at the idea of breaking out of repetition, to invent a future for himself.”
In the great hall of the university, named after the one who had demonstrated the Black African origin of the Egyptian civilisation, the startled audience waited for the point, for something like, “With such fantasies was Africa distinguished in the 18th century” but it was nothing of the sort. This abstruse passage was no rhetorical figure, but seriously intended, as those present realised when the lecturer called upon them “to enter into history”, and he emphasised that he said this ‘as a friend of Africa: "Open your eyes, youth of Africa and do not, as your ancestors so often did, regard global civilisation as a threat to your identity, but as something that also belongs to you”. The crowd was speechless.
It is worthy of note that the main points of Sarkozy’s tirade about the “African incapable of development” were modified citations from Hegel’s racist defamation of the inhabitants of Africa, which apparently was not previously known to the honourable President. For this lecture Sarkozy received such a thrashing – from Africa and also from France – that he found it necessary to admit mistakes. In his later trips to Africa he hazarded no further flights of culture-historical imagination.
The most prominent reaction to this Dakar Lecture was Aminata Traoré’s book L’Afrique HumiliĂ©e (Africa Humiliated). In this she analyses Sarkozy’s arrogance, which expressed the attitude of the dominant countries. She condemned the long-standing exploitation of Africa, and the irresponsibility of Europe that had deteriorated into an all-out...

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