Things fall apart, the past returns to haunt Arabs and Africans alike

The upheavals we witness today in many regions of the world are informed by events and processes that played out over centuries and which we may have lost memories of, or even never cared to find out about.

When there is a “sudden” flare-up, UN diplomats, aid workers and others rush to first provide “humanitarian” assistance and, second, to find ways to resolve whatever conflict situation that flare-up may have caused or may have been caused by.

Rarely — except for a handful of academics employed to prepare historiographies for fact-wallets to be distributed to an upcoming ministerial conference or summit of heads of state — do we bother about the history underlying these turbulences.

So the world stumbles from crisis to crisis, from region to region, trying to put out fires that were kindled long, long ago, and which have been kept under wraps only because the particular conditions that obtained in a given polity were for a long time left undisturbed.

You disturb them and you stir a hornet’s nest, so you are likely to be stung. The American president George W stirred just such a nest when he unjustifiably invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein, the strongman who had kept that country relatively “stable,” though there can be no defence of his murderous regime.

We’d seen it in Africa when another strongman, Somalia’s dictator Siad Barre, was ousted in 1991, and the country has become not only a fratricidal orgy, but a destabilising factor in the entire region.

A discerning eye will identify an indirect link between the removal of Siad and the rise of clans and the eventual arrival on the scene of Al Shabaab.

Sadly, in Africa as well as in the Middle East, most of our countries are virtual booby-traps that were wired together by interests that were inimical to ours and have sought to maintain their stranglehold on us by playing us against each other.

There is hardly an African country — save, perhaps Burundi and Rwanda — that has the attributes of an organic nation, though even these two have their particular issues.

Basically, we are looking at disparate tribes that have been struggling to break out of their state of nature and forge an elusive nationhood, such efforts being thwarted by the smallness of the minds of our rulers whose appetites are more in evidence than their patriotic zeal.

As a result, the centrifugal forces are on all our horizons:

The Lozis in Zambia are restive about their promised Barotseland; Casamance wants out of Senegal; Mali’s Tuaregs want their own desert homeland, Azzawad; Anti-Balaka and Seleka want to burn down the so-called Central African Republic before they can share the ashes among them; Machar and Kiir seem to think South Sudan can be carved up further; the Congo lurches like some wounded behemoth between death and rotten life…. and so on and so forth.

The Middle East is not faring any better, though nuances abound. We can agree that there is no nation there either, save Iran, heir to the ancient Persian Empire. Otherwise you have a mass of sandy landscape defined by a religion and a natural resource.

Indeed, bereft of Islam and oil, where would the relevance of that region lie? Who wants camels and harsh sunshine?

However, a potent worldview transcends “national” boundaries that remain as artificial today as they were when they were pieced together by the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916; and oil lubricates its wheels, manufacturing both relevance to the world and internal dissention in equal measure.

In that imbroglio, a not-so-new force emerges promising an Islamic caliphate, harking back to the golden days of Haroun al Rashid. But these are unmitigated thugs, and at any rate the West will not allow them to set up something that could begin challenging the role of America and its allies in the area.

So alliances are forged on the hoof, as John Kerry hops from capital to capital to help mobilise Muslims to defeat Muslims, a case of Mahmoud Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, and Iraqis, Turks, Syrians and Iranians seek a bed in which to jump into with the Kurds!

So go figure!

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]