Dear Brothers:
I am utterly tired of people who only think of one thing: to complain and lament as part of a ritual in which we present ourselves psychologically as victims. We weep and moan, we moan and weep. We complain ad nauseam about what others have done and continue to do to us. And we think the world owes us something. I am sorry to have to tell you that this is no more than an illusion. No one owes us anything. No one is disposed to abdicate from what they have, with the justification that we also want the same thing. If we want something then we must learn how to get it. We cannot go on begging, my brothers and sisters.
Forty years after Independence we still blame the colonial masters for everything that happens in Africa today. Our leaders are not always honest enough to accept responsibility for the poverty of our peoples. We accuse the Europeans of stealing and pillaging Africa’s natural resources. But I ask you this: who is inviting the Europeans to behave in this way? Is it not we?
We want others to treat us with dignity and without condescension. But at the same time, we continue to treat ourselves with a kind of benevolent complacency: we are experts in the creation of a discourse that absolves us from any guilt. And so we say:
someone steals, poor soul, because he is impoverished (forgetting that there are thousands of other impoverished people who don’t steal);
officials and the police are corrupt because, poor things, their wages aren’t enough (forgetting that no one in this world has enough wages);
politicians abuse their power because, poor things, these practices are anthropologically legitimate in so-called traditional Africa.
Abdication from any responsibility is one of the most serious stigmas that weighs upon us Africans, from North to South. There are those who claim that it is an inheritance of slavery, of that time when we were not masters of our fate. The boss, often far away and invisible, was responsible for our destiny. Or for our absence of any destiny.
Today, we haven’t even killed off the boss of former times symbolically. One of the modes of address that has emerged most rapidly over the last ten years is the word “boss.” It was as if he had never really died, as if he were waiting surreptitiously for a historic opportunity to reappear in our daily lives. Can we blame anyone for this re-emergence? No. But we are creating a society that produces inequalities and that reproduces power relationships we believed were dead and buried.
The Second Shoe:
The Idea that Success Is Not Born from Work
Only today I woke up to the news of an African president who is going to have his three-hundred-room palace exorcized because he hears “strange” noises during the night. The palace is so out of proportion to the wealth of the country that it took twenty years to complete. It’s possible president’s sleepless nights are not so much the product of evil spirits but the product of a guilty conscience.
Either way, this episode merely illustrates the way we still explain, by and large, positive and negative phenomena. That which explains misfortune sits side by side with that which justifies being blessed. The sports team wins, the work of art is awarded a prize, the company is in profit, the official got promotion? To what is all this due? The first answer, my friends, is one we are all familiar with. Success is due to good luck. And the term “good luck” means two things: we are protected by our dead ancestors, and we are protected by our living godfathers.
Success is never, or almost never, seen as the result of effort, or of work as a long-term investment. Our experiences (good or bad) are attributed to invisible forces that command our destiny. For some, this causal view is seen as so intrinsically “African” that we would forfeit our “identity” if we abdicated from it. Debates about “authentic” identities are always treacherous; what we should be debating is whether we can create a stronger, more productive vision that encourages a stronger, more active, and more participatory approach to History.
Sadly, we see ourselves more as consumers than producers. The thought that Africa might produce art, science and ideas is alien even to many Africans. So far, the continent has produced natural resources and a labour force. It has produced footballers, dancers, craftsmen. All this is acceptable because it belongs to the realm of what people understand as “nature.” But few will accept that Africans can be producers of ideas, of ethical positions, of modernity. It isn’t necessary for others to repudiate this possibility. We ourselves assume the burden of such repudiation.
According to a proverb, “the goat eats wherever he’s tethered.” All of us are familiar with the sorry use of this saying and how it governs the actions of people who take advantage of situations and of places. It’s sad enough that we compare ourselves to a goat. But it’s also symptomatic that, in these proverbs of convenience, we never identify ourselves as animals that are producers, such as, for example, the ant. Let us imagine that the saying has changed and became the following: “A goat produces wherever he’s tethered.” I’ll bet that in this event, no one would want to be a goat.
The Third Shoe: The Prejudiced
View That Whoever Criticizes Is an Enemy
Many people believe that with the end of the one-party state, intolerance towards those who thought differently would come to an end. But intolerance isn’t just the fruit of political regimes. It is the product of cultures and religions, it is the result of History. We have inherited a notion of loyalty from rural society that is too parochial. This failure to encourage a critical spirit is still more serious when it concerns our youth. The rural world is based on the authority of age. The young man, who has not married and produced children, has no rights at all, no voice and no visibility. The same process of marginalization oppresses women as well.
This whole legacy doesn’t help create a culture of honest, open debate. Personal aggression is therefore largely substituted for the discussion of ideas. It’s enough to demonize everyone who has a different opinion. There is a whole range of demons at people’s disposaclass="underline" political colouring, spiritual colour, skin colour, social origin or religion.
In discussing this matter, there is a historical component that we must consider: Mozambique was born out of a guerrilla struggle. This legacy imbued us with an epic sense of History and a deep sense of pride in the manner in which independence was won. But, through inertia, the armed struggle for national liberation also gave way to the idea that the people were a kind of army which could be commanded through military discipline. In the years following independence, we were all militants, we all had only one cause, our entire souls kowtowed in the presence of our leaders. And there were so many leaders. This legacy didn’t encourage the capacity for positive insubordination.
At this point, I’m going to let you into a secret: in the early 1980s, I was one of a group of writers and musicians who were given the responsibility of producing a new national anthem and a new party anthem for FRELIMO. The way in which this task was received is indicative of our military discipline: we were given our mission, we were requisitioned from our jobs, and at the orders of the president, Samora Machel, we were shut away in a house in Matola, having been told that we would only be allowed to leave when we had completed the anthems. This relationship between power and the artists only makes sense within a given historical moment. The truth was that we accepted the responsibility with dignity, the task was presented to us as an honour and a patriotic duty. And in fact, once there, we more or less behaved ourselves. It was a time of great privation. . and the temptations were many. In the house out in Matola, there was food, there were servants, a swimming pool, at a time when the city was suffering all kinds of shortages. During the first few days, I have to confess, we were fascinated by such privileged treatment and we allowed ourselves to while away the hours in idleness. This adolescent feeling of disobedience was our way of reaping small-scale revenge on regimental discipline.