The Community needs a cadre aware of risks, opportunities, and the demons that lurk below the surface.
This week we had the East African Business Summit in the Rwanda capital Kigali. And next week Zambia marks the 50th anniversary of its Independence.
How are these two events connected? Well, over the past two months Mail&Guardian Africa has been working on a project on what the story of Zambia’s founding father Kenneth Kaunda’s life, and that of all the “1960s Independence Class,” reveals about how Africa has turned out today.
The project was a stark reminder of how many things I still don’t know about Africa. So thinking about East Africa, I believe that to make both regional integration and the market work better, perhaps even more than holding business and political summits, what those with regional ambitions need to do is study East African history.
Take Somalia. It has been a total mess. Yet there was a time when deposed African leaders would flee for safety to Somalia.
Modern Somalia’s founding father Aden Abdullah Osman Daar was actually an exemplary democrat. When he lost the election in 1967, he became the first African leader to accept defeat and hand over power.
Today Somali politicians, including the semi-autonomous territories of Puntland and Somaliland, accept electoral defeat and hand over power more than anywhere else on the continent. History teaches us then that investing in Somalia’s stability, though a frustrating job, will probably yield fruit because, strange as it may seem, the society has a democratic culture!
Now take Rwanda. Right now there is controversy over the BBC’s recent “genocide denial” documentary. That “denial” and how the 1994 genocide in Rwanda played out could have been predicted at Independence.
Rwanda’s first president, Gregoire Kayibanda, was a teacher and, more importantly, a journalist. He edited two Catholic newspapers. Besides the Belgians, it was Kayibanda’s journalist skills that helped give clarity to what in Rwanda is referred to these days as “genocide ideology.”
In 1957, Kayibanda published his “Hutu Manifesto” and launched the supremacist “Parmehutu” political party. In 1963, two months after the first genocide of independent Rwanda, Kayibanda infamously asked “Who is Genocide?” after philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell tried to draw attention to the ethnic cleansing in the country. He told the Tutsi that if they tried to regain control of Kigali they “may well find that the whole Tutsi race will be wiped out.”
The Tutsi elite had not been benevolent rulers, and that fed Hutu resentment. But by the 1990s, optimists hoped Rwanda had changed somewhat.
The point is that because of the role of journalism in the fashioning of genocide doctrine, it was only natural that in 1994 it would again be Radio Milles Collines rallying the killer gangs. And of course, to the Tutsi there was the likelihood that “Kayibanda’s curse” would be visited upon them for fighting to return to their homeland.
So I return to a pet obsession. If East African leaders and business people want a successful and flourishing Community, they require a cadre with a sophisticated knowledge of its risks, opportunities, and the demons that lurk beneath its surface waiting to erupt.
They need to invest in a smart East African Institute.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com)
