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Talking
bacK TO THE Empire |
From
Mogadishu to Rexdale and back again
By K’NAAN
When I was in
high school, the cold month of February
passed without my taking much notice. The
few lovable students who were political and
knew the names of their local MPs organized
cultural events. Some of the teachers who
pretended to seriously mull over the
contributions of blacks in the civil rights
movement showed grainy videos of Martin
Luther King rallies.
Now that I've made a few recordings and
gained some notoriety, I've been invited to
speak at workshops and forced to consider my
own position on the value or legitimacy of
Black History Month.
"Is there a black community?" a few of my
fellow panelists at the more unimaginative
workshops have asked. I knew the answer to
that: I was living in one, Jamestown (Rexdale),
where we were dealing with weightier
questions like "Where are the guns coming
from?"
Then there are those bloated with wisdom who
invariably ask burning questions like "Why
have we been given the shortest month of the
year?" This sort then quickly offer the
answers, while being sure to insert jargon
like "politrics" or "overstand."
Watching events in Africa, it's so easy,
surveying the hunger and the war, to forget
how the dilemma faced by blacks today was
all structured long ago at a conference
table in Germany.
On Christmas Eve 2006, Ethiopia, cheered on
by the U.S.-inspired Transitional Federal
Government, invaded my birth country,
Somalia, and overthrew the Union of Islamic
Courts. To Africans, this story seems all
too familiar. Division and conquest, war and
subjugation and here we are.
One could start the narrative with the
Stanley Electric Group, an automotive light
bulb company based in Japan, named in honour
of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, one of the most
negative figures in black history.
Stanley was born in Wales, and at the age of
six was committed to a workhouse. At 17, he
made his way by sea to New Orleans, where he
befriended a cotton broker. He later fought
on both sides of the American Civil War. But
it was as a journalist that he cemented his
ugly place in black history.
In 1871, the New York Herald commissioned
Stanley to travel in Africa. It was an
assignment that would change the course of
history when Stanley's ambitions expanded
from exploration to exploitation.
By 1876, he had found a like-minded partner,
the powerful King Leopold of Belgium, a
first cousin of Queen Victoria, who believed
that a country's greatness depended on the
acquisition of colonies.
When the king could not find support for his
ambitious expansion plans within his own
government, he started a private company,
the International African Society, and hired
Stanley to run it for him. Under the cloak
of this "philanthropic" organization, the
king assembled a private army called the
Force Publique that, through horrendous
brutality, extracted rubber and ivory riches
from the region.
Stanley thus laid the groundwork for long
Belgian rule over the Congo, a regime that
we know today claimed between 8 million and
30 million African lives. The French, who
did not recognize Leopold's private
colonization, tried to lay claim to the
region themselves.
Out of this dispute, the Berlin Conference
of 1884 convened, at which 13 European
countries and the U.S. recognized Central
Africa's Congo region as Leopold's private
property.
But the effects of the Berlin Conference
were much broader. It went on to divide the
continent into incomprehensible pieces, in a
process now known as the Scramble for
Africa.
The Europeans basically invaded, imposed a
new map on Africa according to their
geographical needs, divided tribes and
communities that traditionally got along and
confined traditional enemies inside new
shared borders.
All these years later, border disputes are
still unresolved, as in Somalia, one of the
most homogeneous countries in Africa.
Ongoing conflict there began in 1886, when
the British invaded the northern part of the
country, the French took a piece in the
north and Italians captured southern
Somalia. Ethiopia's then emperor, Menelik
II, encouraged by Britain, took over the
Ogaden region.
Celebrated Somali poet Mohammed Abdullah
Hassan led a 22-year-long colonial
resistance, one of the longest and bloodiest
in sub-Saharan Africa, in which Somalia lost
a third of its population in the north. The
decisive end came when the British, having
lost too many of their men, called on a
squadron from the Royal Air Force, fresh
from a World War I bombing run, to destroy
the resistance. Ethiopia's support back then
for the colonial powers made a long-term
enemy out of its neighbour, Somalia.
During a ceasefire in the 1980s, Somalis
lived under a U.S.-funded dictatorship that
was overthrown in 1991. The country was in
complete anarchy, with a handful of powerful
warlords struggling to dominate one another.
More than a decade later, an alternative in
the form of the faith-based Union of Islamic
Courts emerged, crippling the warlords and
restoring order in the capital of Mogadishu.
Undaunted, the U.S., citing fears of Al
Qaeda involvement, reorganized and funded
the warlords under the umbrella Alliance for
the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terorrism.
Fast-forward to 2007: Ethiopia is now
withdrawing after its December invasion, and
the U.S.-backed pro-Ethiopian Transitional
Federal Government, which made warlords from
the Alliance into ministers, has been
discredited by its reliance on Ethiopian
forces.
Division and conquest, war and subjugation,
tactical separations, ideological
impositions and here we are, under the sun
of a day when average people in these
conflicts no longer know what happened to
put them there, why they are dying and why
they will continue to die, plagued by
disadvantage, hunger and war.
Over a conference table in Germany it all
began, but we Africans, speeding to our
demise when the baton was passed , have all
too eagerly carried it on.
And so it occurs to me that the month of
February is really not so black after all,
but half black and half white like the two
men whose birthdays it commemorates,
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. And
maybe, too, like the puppet regimes of
Africa that are still in place to serve the
interests of Western countries far away.
World events today are starting to resemble
the old Scramble, with one country waving
the flag of domination. I wonder if the
Middle East will get a month all to itself
one day.
NOW MAGAZINE www.nowtoronto.com
EVERYTHING TORONTO. ONLINE.
FEBRUARY 1 - 7, 2007 | VOL. 26 NO. 22
Entire contents are © 2007 NOW
Communications Inc.
story URL: http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2007-02-01/cover_story.php |
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