The African diplomat; Is Ruto treading a dangerous and slippery ground?

 

President William Ruto during the 22nd Comesa Summit of Heads of State and Government held in Lusaka, Zambia on June 08, 2023. [PCS, Standard]

I stared at my friend. He looked pitiful and withdrawn. His eyes had grown red and tired. The charm he used to carry when he was in active politics seems to have vanished. He shook his head slowly then turned to his glass of wine. He held it in his left hand, uttered something inaudible then downed it. This was his sixth. I was on my third glass of water and second mug of coffee. We were at a private members club and this was our fourth hour of deep discussion of African politics.

“What do you think President William Ruto is up to? Do you think he will succeed in assuaging the pain that the African continent has endured for centuries? Will he succeed where his predecessors couldn’t?” he posed

He was referring to Ruto’s charm offensive and intensive campaign for African unity in matters trade and for African countries to drop trading in US dollars and turn to local currencies. Ruto told the 22nd summit of COMESA in Lusaka, Zambia that Africa stands to gain a lot if it bargains as a continent on trade and security.

“Member states must consider donating power to the AU on maters trade, regional and global security as well as areas that Africa can benefit from engaging together rather than individually,” he said

Ruto is a young, educated and highly ambitious politician. He is the first holder of a doctorate degree to became president of Kenya. He is trying to cut for himself an image of an African Statesman. My friend’s fears and concerns are informed by the history of Africa which is written in; tears, blood and broken bones. No other people in the world, save for the Jewish Nation, have suffered like the black Africans. Centuries of slavery and colonialism left incurable scars. Many of the problems Africans endure are dipped in historical injustices.

To fix the pain and trauma, Africans must unite and enhance intra-Africa trade to enable the continent bargain strongly at the global level. After decades of misses, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCTFA), is in place to compliment numerous regional blocks. However, poor infrastructure, cross border barriers and tariffs are stiff slowing it down.

Ruto says that Africa should eliminate borders that act as barriers for trade, movements, people, goods and services. The Intra-African trade is only at 17 per cent while intra-Europe stands at 70 per cent. Asian trade is at 60 per cent and the rest of the world sits at 40 per cent. 

Efforts for Africa to stabilise and unite have in the past been viciously fought. Progressive leaders were assassinated or overthrown in sponsored coups. Some former colonial powers ensured that Africa remained divided along tribal or religious lines. Since the 1950s, when winds of change began to blow across Africa, young and ambitious leaders just like Ruto, emerged. They were burning in Pan-African fervor. They visualised a united continent growing its own trade. Some of them were eliminated. Others gave up their dreams and became the people’s tormentors. Some others clung onto power, and dying left behind disorganized and divided countries.

Africa’s curse resides in the spirit of one man. Welsh journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who in 1877 staggered into Boma in the expansive Congo. His expedition unlocked the entire Congo region. Upon his return to London, Stanley vigorously campaigned for European powers to open up the Congo to ‘trade and civilization’. According to Martin Meredith, in his book; Africa’s Elephant, a biography, the British government rejected Stanley’s suggestions.

“But in Brussels, the Belgian king, Leopold II, leaped at the opportunity. An ambitious, greedy monarch, forever scheming, Leopold had long dreamed of establishing colonies abroad and enriching himself. In 1879 Leopold hired Stanley to build a private empire for him in the Congo and exploit whatever wealth he could find. Ivory was his main hope. ‘I am desirous to see you purchase all the ivory which is to be found in the Congo,’ he wrote to Stanley.

Through Stanley, Leopold explored and exploited Africa and its resources. Eventually, Henry Morton Stanley gave his own account on the ivory trade in the Congo through his book, In Darkest Africa. He says:

“Every tusk, piece and scrap of ivory in the possession of an Arab trader has been steeped in human blood. Every pound weight has cost the life of a man, woman or child; for every five pounds a hut has been burned; for every two tusks a whole village has been destroyed; every twenty tusks have been obtained at a price of a district with all its people, villages and plantations. It is simply incredible that, because ivory is required for ornaments or billiard games, the rich heart of Africa should be laid to waste at this late year of the nineteenth century, and the native populations, tribes and nations, should be utterly destroyed…”    

It is King Leopold II, who triggered the scramble for African resources that ushered in colonialism. It is Leopold II who introduced the brutality and cruelty with which the African was treated by the white man. When his ivory trade dwindled, he ventured into rubber. Meredith captures this cruelty, thus: “To keep up the flow of rubber, company agents, backed by armed militias, imposed quotas on villages. Villagers who failed to fulfil their quotas were flogged, imprisoned, and even mutilated; their hands cut off. Hundreds were killed resisting the rubber regime.” 

The scramble for Africa was an assembly of greed beyond human imagination. European powers, some which had enslaved the black race for over five centuries, held meetings in; Berlin, Paris, London and other capitals where statesmen and diplomats bargained on how to share the spoils of virgin Africa.

African societies were torn apart. The Bakongo were shared between France, Belgium and Portugal. Somaliland was eaten up by Britain, Italy and France. Over 190 cultural groups were torn apart. “We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were,” Britain’s prime minister, Lord Salisbury, remarked sardonically to a London audience.

Martin Meredith in The State of Africa says that: “Britain traded the North Sea Island of Heligoland with the Germans for Zanzibar, and parts of northern Nigeria with the French for fishing rights off Newfoundland. France exchanged parts of Cameroon with Germany in return for German recognition of the French protectorate over Morocco. Some 10,000 African polities had been amalgamated into fourty European colonies and protectorates. Thus, were born the modern states of Africa.”

The invading forces used violence to conquer and subdue Africa. The Basuto King Moshoeshoe, was so terrified of the British attack into his mountain terrain in Southern Africa. He appealed for the protection of Queen Victoria, pleading with her that his people might be considered ‘fleas in the Queen’s blanket’. In South Africa, Kenya and some other regions, the colonial forces met stiff resistance. The number of lives lost and blood shed was appauling.  

In Ghana, in February 1951, Kwame Nkrumah who had been serving a three-year sentence for subversion was released from prison. He formed a new party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP).   

After 14 months’ imprisonment, Nkrumah walked out of the James Fort prison on 12 February. He met local British Governor Sir Charles Arden-Clarke and was asked to form a government. Nkrumah had leaped from convict to prime minister in less than a day. He recalled: ‘As I walked down the steps it was as if the whole thing had been a dream, that I was stepping down from the clouds and that I would soon wake up and find myself squatting on the prison floor eating a bowl of maize porridge’

Nkrumah’s big dream was the unity of Africa. He wanted to turn Accra into a centre of Africa liberation. Accra was to provide a base from which nationalist leaders from colonial Africa could draw support and encouragement. ‘Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.’ he said

In 1958, Nkrumah assembled leaders from all over Africa in Accra Ghana with the aim of coordinating the African non-violent movement. Over 300 delegates attended the All-African People’s Conference. Key leaders in attendance were; Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika, Joshua Nkomo from South Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Kenneth Kaunda from Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Hastings Kamuzu Banda from Nyasaland (Malawi) and Patrice Lumumba from the Belgian Congo, Amilcar Cabral from, Portuguese Guinea and a young Trade Unionist from Kenya, Tom Mboya. Mboya was chosen the one-week conference chairman. In his concluding speech, a belligerent Mboya told colonial powers that they should reverse the scramble for Africa. ‘Your time is past. Africa must be free. Scram from Africa.’         

One 35-year-old man left the conference inspired and fired up. Patrice Lumumba, however, made so many tactical blunders which led to his brutal murder. On June 30 1960, King Baudouin of Belgium delivered a speech during the independence of Congo. He praised his evil and brutal uncle Leopold II as a genius.   

An infuriated Lumumba, now Congo’s new prime minister denounced the ‘terrible suffering and exploitation of Belgian rule. He said that Baudouin’s uncle had enhanced and promoted ‘humiliating slavery’

King Leopold II turned Congo’s colonial history into the saddest and most tragic in Africa. Henry Morton Stanley carved out a territory for him along the Congo River. Stanley traversed the Congo signing ‘treaties’ with more than 400 African chiefs. He persuaded them to give up their sovereignty.

In 1885, Leopold obtained international approval for his personal empire. He called it the Congo Free State. It was nearly one million square miles, seventy-five times the size of Belgium. It comprised interconnecting rivers running deep into the interior with resources ranging from; ivory, palm oil, timber, and coper. He named himself, King Sovereign.

Joseph Conrad, who worked as a river captain on the Congo for six months, immortalized Leopold’s greed and violence in his novel Heart of Darkness. Kurtz, the main character in the novel is a known ivory collector. He is however a sick man, tormented by his own cruelty. On his deathbed, he dies while whispering: ‘The horror, the horror’

Leopold, then turned to rubber. Working with companies, he stripped Congo’s equatorial forests of all the wild rubber. Companies imposed quotas on villages. Those who failed were flogged, imprisoned and mutilated. Thousands were killed for resisting Leopold’s rubber regime. He provoked uprising and revolts. He left behind burnt villages, terrified refugees, starvation and disease. After 23 years of reign of terror, Leopold became one of the richest men in Europe. He had annihilated more than 10 million Congolese.      

Joseph Conrad described Leopold’s reign as; ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.’  In 1908, after public furor over his rubber terror, he handed over his private empire to the Belgian government. A small group representing an alliance between the government, the Catholic Church and giant mining corporations took over Congo. The suffering of the locals intensified. Today, the Congo remains divided and in turmoil. Multinational corporation are still mining minerals that drive their multimillion-dollar industries.

Congolese were never consulted about the system of government. They had no political voice. They had no rights to own land. They couldn’t travel freely. They were denied education.   

Lumumba, born in 1925 in Batatela, Kasi province, was a tall, thin man. He had a charismatic personality and great oratorial powers. But he had an explosive temper. He only had four years of primary school education and one year of technical training at a school for postal clerks. He was however extremely intelligent but restless. In 1956 he was convicted of embezzlement. He spent one year in prison. Upon his release he moved to the capital, Leopoldville where he worked as a salesman for a local brewer.

In 1958, Lumumba joined the Movement National Congress (MNC). He was then allowed to travel to Accra Ghana in December 1958 to attend the All-African Peoples Conference, where his ambition grew wings. He launched the struggle against colonial rule.

He told King Baudouin; ‘We are no longer your monkeys’. Soon after independence, there was mutiny in the Congolese army with officers demanding more pay. Lumumba chose his trusted friend Joseph Mobutu as Chief of Staff. Mobutu had been discharged from the military in 1956 after seven years’ service. He took up freelance journalism and was also paid as an informer of the Belgian police to spy on fellow Congolese.

Riots continued throughout the Congo. Whites were humiliated, beaten and raped. Lack of experience and misplaced anger became Lumumba’s undoing. The Belgian government flew in troops. On July 11 the crises worsened. The Belgian government, Belgian mining and commercial firms, connived with the Katanga leader, Moise Tshombe, to declare Katanga an independent state. Within a fortnight of independence, Congo slid into crisis. Internal security had collapsed and the army degenerated into a rabble. The Belgians were desperate to oust Lumumba.

Lumumba appealed to the United Nations for help. The UN flew in troops. Lumumba demanded that UN troops throw Belgium out of Congo. He said that if the UN troops didn’t do so by midnight of 19, July, he would invite the Soviet Union to intervene. By invoking the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, Lumumba had just committed political suicide. The US was infuriated but still invited Lumumba to Washington for talks. After the US visit, Belgian troops were withdrawn but Lumumba demanded that the UN troops break up the cessation in Katanga. The UN declined.

On 15 August, Lumumba made a fatal mistake. His obsession for military victory in Katanga sent him to seek Soviet Union’s assistance. He planned to use Soviet aircraft, trucks and crews to regain control of Kasai in the south that also faced secession. At a meeting of the US National Security Council, President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the elimination of Lumumba.

The CIA operations chief then, Richard Bissel said that the President would have preferred to have Lumumba taken out in some other way other than assassination; “But he regarded Lumumba as I did and a lot of other people did; as a mad dog…and he wanted the problem delt with.’

Meanwhile, Lumumba moved into Kasai with disastrous military consequences. Hundreds Baluba tribesmen were massacred. The UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold described the events there as bearing: ‘the characteristics of the crime of genocide’. Colonel Mobutu, fell out with.