I shall use the occasion in my capacity as a writer, having chosen the terrain of our inner being, a field in which we are all amateurs. In this domain, no one has a degree, nor can anyone be audacious enough to give “learned addresses.” Our only secret — our only wisdom — is to be true to ourselves, and unafraid of publicly sharing our most vulnerable feelings. That is what I have come here to do: to share with you some of my concerns, my solitary musings.
On my eleventh birthday, 5th July 1966, Kenneth Kaunda stood in front of the microphones of Radio Lusaka to announce that an essential pillar of his people’s happiness had just been built. Kaunda thanked the Zambian people for their involvement in the creation of the country’s first university. Some months before, Kaunda had launched an appeal for each Zambian to make a contribution to the construction of the university. The response was moving: tens of thousands of people answered the appeal. Peasants gave corn, fishermen donated fish, civil servants gave money. A country of illiterates drew together to create what they imagined would constitute a new page in their history. The message from the country folk at the university’s official opening read as follows: We gave because we believe that by so doing, our grandchildren will no longer feel hunger.
Forty years on, the grandchildren of Zambian peasants still suffer from hunger. In fact, Zambians today are worse off than they were at that time. In the 1960s, Zambia benefited from a Gross National Product comparable to Singapore and Malaysia. Nowadays, there is no possible comparison between our neighbour and those two Asian countries.
Some African nations can justify their ongoing poverty because they went through wars. But Zambia never had a war. Some countries can argue that they don’t possess any natural resources. But Zambia is a nation with considerable mineral resources. Where does the fault lie for these frustrated expectations? Who failed? Was it the university? Was it society? Was it the whole world that failed? And why did Singapore and Malaysia progress while Zambia regressed?
I spoke at random of Zambia as an African country. Sadly, there is no shortage of other examples. Our continent is full of identical cases, of failed targets and frustrated aspirations. We suffer from a general lack of belief in our ability to change the destiny of our continent. It’s worth asking ourselves: what is happening? What needs to change both within and outside Africa?
These are serious questions. We cannot delude ourselves in our answers, nor continue to create a smokescreen in order to conceal responsibilities. We cannot accept that responsibility is merely the concern of governments.
Fortunately, our situation in Mozambique is unique and clearly distinct; we must acknowledge and be proud of the fact that our trajectory has been very different. One of these differences has only recently emerged. Ever since 1957, only 6 out of 153 African heads of state have abandoned power of their own volition. Joaquim Chissano is the seventh of these presidents. This may seem like a detail, but it is indicative that the political process in Mozambique has been guided by a different line of thinking.
Nevertheless, the conquests of freedom and democracy we enjoy today will only become definitive when they are transformed into culture within each one of us. And this will take generations to achieve. In the meantime, Mozambique lives under the same threats that are common to the whole continent. Hunger, poverty, disease, all this we share with the rest of Africa. The statistics are frightening: ninety million Africans will die from AIDS in the next twenty years. Mozambique’s contribution to this tragic figure will be about three million dead. Most of those who are doomed are young and represent precisely the lever with which we could remove the weight of poverty. What I mean is that Africa isn’t just losing its present, but it is losing the cornerstone upon which another future might be built.
It costs a lot of money to have a future. But it is far more expensive if all you have is a past. Before Independence, there was no future for the Zambian peasants. Now, the only time that exists for them is the future of others.
Are the challenges greater than our hopes? Our only course of action is to be optimists and do what the Brazilians call getting up, shaking the dust off, and starting again. Pessimism is a luxury reserved for the rich.
Ladies and gentlemen:
The crucial question is this: What is it that stands between us and the future we all want? Some believe that we lack more experts, more schools, more hospitals. Others believe we need more investors, more economic projects. All of this is necessary, all of this is vital. But for me, there is something else that is even more important. This thing has a name: it’s called a new attitude. If we don’t change our attitude, we won’t gain a better quality of life. We can have more technicians, more hospitals, and more schools, but we won’t be the builders of our own future.
I speak of a new attitude, but the word should really be uttered in the plural, because it contains a vast array of postures, beliefs, ideas and prejudices. For a long time now, I have defended the notion that the biggest factor in Mozambique’s backwardness isn’t found in its economy, but in our inability to generate a way of thinking that is productive, audacious and innovative. Thinking that doesn’t come from the repetition of clichés, of formulas, or of prescriptions that have been invented by others.
I sometimes ask myself: why do we find it so difficult to think of ourselves as the subjects of History? It comes, above all, from having always inherited from others the contours of our own identity. At first, Africans were invalidated. Their territory was one of absence, their time outside History. Later, Africans were studied as if they constituted some clinical case. Now, they are helped to survive in the backyard of History.
We are all at the beginning of an internal struggle to overcome our ghosts of old. We cannot enter modernity with the burden of prejudices that we currently bear; we need to shed our footwear at the door of modernity. I have counted seven dirty shoes that we need to leave at the threshold of this new era. There are many more. But I had to choose and seven is a magical number.
The First Shoe: The Idea that the Guilty Are Always Others and that We Are Always the Victims
We are already familiar with this type of discourse. Blame has been attributed to the war, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid: in a word, to everything. Except ourselves. This washing of our hands has been encouraged by some African elites who seek to remain immune from liability. The guilty are pinpointed right from the start: they are the others, people of a different ethnic group, a different race, or from some other geographical area. It is true that others have had their share of responsibility in our suffering. But some of that responsibility was always homegrown.
Some time ago, I was struck by a book entitled Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success, by a Nigerian called Chika A. Onyeani. In one of our newspapers, I reproduced a text by this economist, which is an impassioned appeal for Africans to regard themselves in a new way. Allow me to read you an excerpt from the text.