The same difficulty has exempted the long, dramatic period of slavery from any narrative record. Why do we have no memory of this tragedy? The answer may be this: it’s because we were simultaneously slaves and slave traders.
To sum up, throughout our history, the victors and the vanquished have mingled and now, none of them wants to disinter times that are laden with guilt and resentment. Behind this demureness, there is an economy of peace, a mediation of silences, whose intelligence cannot be minimized.
The past is sacrosanct because it is the dwelling place of the dead. In order to gain access to this inner sanctum of respect, we need a founding myth that we can all agree to share. We lack this common “password” that may return time to us while also freeing us from remorse and the need to forgive and seek forgiveness. Our truth commission works because it is absent, and because in its haste to begin a new text, it only uses one key on the keyboard: the “delete” button.
It might be thought that the birth of the nation (through which we are still living) would be the most appropriate moment to assemble and reinvent our common heritage of memories. But exactly the opposite has occurred. This is our most fragile period, in which we are aware that we may be ambushed by the judgment of those who yearn for the past. This has happened in every country in the world: the beginning of a national narrative has been born out of what some have called “the syntax of forgetfulness.” Processes of homogenizing agglutination suggest that different communities forget themselves, and different groups abdicate their singularities. We are one nation because we forget the same things in the same way.
We need to empty our memory of the symbolic territory of the nation in order to re-populate it, filling our imagination with new forms, in front of a mirror that reveals to us not so much what we are, but what we can be. In our haste to have a future, we cast aside the different stages of the journey we have completed. We have all experienced this recently. With the process of Independence, we forgot we had a race, a tribe, an individuality. Even if this sense of amnesia was false, the fact is that it was lived with the intensity of a truth.
I now return to the first episode I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, that memory of the way I wound woollen threads from my mother’s hands. I do so in order to confess the following by way of conclusion: that moment, so full of peace and quiet, has another version. If you were to ask my mother, she would tell you it was hell. That’s what she still tells me today: “You wouldn’t keep still; you complained that it wasn’t a boy’s job, and I had to prod with my foot so we wouldn’t end up with a ball of tangled wool.”
This is the lesson: I have learned that if I want to celebrate my home, this home that after so many is my only home, I can’t burden my mother with all my memories. One of us must forget. And both of us end up forgetting in order that the old home can be reborn from the shadows of time. In order that we don’t entangle the ball of memory.
Address to the conference on Literature and the Memory of War, Mozambique Polytechnic University, Maputo, 2008.
What If Obama Were African?
Africans rejoiced in the victory of Obama. I was one of them. After a sleepless night, in the unreal half-light of early morning, my tears flowed as he delivered his victory speech. At that moment, I too had won a victory. The same happiness ran through me when Nelson Mandela was freed and elected as a new South African statesman, thus opening up a new route to the dignification of Africa.
On the night of 5th November, the new American president wasn’t just a man who was speaking. It was the suffocated voice of hope re-emerging, liberated, within us. My heart had cast its vote, even without permission: not accustomed to asking for much, I celebrated a boundless victory. When I went out into the street, my city had relocated to Chicago, and blacks and whites were sharing their same joyous surprise. For Obama’s victory wasn’t that of one race over another: without the massive participation of Americans of all races (including that of the white majority), the United States of America would not have given us a reason to celebrate.
On the following days, I gradually gauged the joyous reactions from the most diverse corners of our continent. Anonymous people, ordinary citizens, wanted to register their happiness. At the same time, and with some reservations, I made a note of the messages of solidarity coming from African leaders. Almost all of them called Obama “our brother.” And I thought: are all these leaders being honest? Could it be that Barack Obama is the relative of so many politically diverse folk? I have my doubts. In our haste to see prejudices only in others, we are unable to see our own racism and xenophobia. In our haste to condemn the West, we forget to take on board the lessons that reach us from that other side of the world.
It was then that I got hold of a text by the Cameroonian writer, Patrice Nganang, entitled: “What if Obama were Cameroonian?” The issues raised by my colleague from Cameroon suggested various questions to me, formulated around the following hypothesis: what if Obama were African and campaigning for the presidency of an African country? These are the questions I should like to explore in this text.
What if Obama Were African and
Running for an African presidency?
1. If Obama were African, his rival (some African George Bush) would invent changes to the Constitution, enabling him to extend his mandate beyond that initially foreseen. And our Obama would have to wait a few more years before he could run again. He might have to wait a long time, if we take into account the period an African president can be in power: some 41 years in Gabon, 39 in Lybia, 28 in Zimbabwe, 28 in Equatorial Guinea, 28 in Angola, 27 in Egypt, 26 in Cameroon. The list goes on, including fifteen presidents who have governed for more than twenty consecutive years. Mugabe will be ninety years of age when he completes his mandate, which he imposed over and above the will of the people.
2. If Obama were African, it is likely that, as a candidate of the opposition, he wouldn’t be given freedom to conduct a campaign. The same actions would be taken against him as occurred, for example, in Zimbabwe or Cameroon: he would be physically assaulted, he would then be arrested, and his passport would be confiscated. The George Bushes of Africa don’t tolerate opponents or democracy.
3. If Obama were African, he wouldn’t be an eligible candidate in most countries, because the elites in power have invented restrictive laws that close the doors of the presidency to the sons of foreigners and the descendants of immigrants. The Zambian nationalist, Kenneth Kaunda, is undergoing questioning in his own country because his parents were from Malawi. They conveniently “discovered” that the man who took Zambia to independence and governed the country for more than 25 years was, in fact, the son of Malawians, and had therefore governed “illegally” all that time. Arrested for an alleged plot to carry out a coup, our Kenneth Kaunda (who gave his name to one of the main avenues in Maputo) will be barred from political activity, just so the current regime will see itself free of an opponent.
4. Let us be clear: Obama is black in the United States. In Africa, he’s a mulatto. If Obama were African, he would have his ethnic identity thrown in his face. Not because skin colour is important for people who expect their leaders to be competent and to work hard. But our predatory elites would mount a campaign against someone they would designate as “not truly African.” The same black brother who is today greeted as the new American president would be vilified at home for being a representative of the “others,” those of another race, of another flag (or of no flag at all?).