By Anote
Ajeluorou
ALTHOUGH there
are no known programmes of action by governments of African countries towards
promoting the ‘International Decade for People of African Descent’ declared by
the United Nations (UN) in 2013, which started on January 1, 2015 and will run
till 2024, only Badagry Diapora Festival 2015, which ended last month, took
steps in redirecting attention to people of African descent outside the
continent. The festival had an International Symposium on Toussaint
L’ouverture, the Haitian revolution of 1791; he led the revolt that ousted
Haiti’s colonial power France to gain independence in 1804. The festival’s
theme, ‘Toussaint L’ouverture: The Catalyst for the Global Struggle of the
Black Race’, was instructive in many respects.
The UN General Assembly’s International
Decade for People of African Descent has as theme ‘People of African descent:
recognition, justice and development’. The main objective of the international
decade is to promote respect, protection and fulfilment of all human rights and
fundamental freedoms for people of African descent, as recognized in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The decade will provide an opportunity
to recognize the significant contribution made by people of African descent to
societies and to propose concrete measures to promote their full inclusion and
to combat all forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related
intolerance.
Brazil, with the largest population of black
people outside the continent, has the decade focusing on the following objectives:
“to strengthen national, regional and international action and cooperation in
relation to the full enjoyment of economic, social, cultural, civil and
political rights by people of African descent, and their full and equal
participation in all aspects of society; to promote a greater knowledge of and
respect for the diverse heritage, culture and contribution of people of African
descent to the development of societies, and to adopt and strengthen national,
regional and international legal frameworks in accordance with the Durban
Declaration and Programme of Action and the International Convention on the
Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination, and to ensure their full and
effective implementation”.
The decade will enable the United Nations,
Member States, civil society and all other relevant actors to join with people
of African descent and take effective measures for the implementation of the
programme of activities in the spirit of recognition, justice and development.
At the heart of Badagry Diaspora Festival
2015 was the essential condition of black people in the Diaspora and their
possible integration with the motherland. It also coincided with the
International Day for the Remembrance of Slave Trade and its Abolition declared
by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation
(UNESCO) in 1988. Organised by the Mr. Babatunde Olaide-Mesewaku-led African
Renaissance Foundation (AREFO), the festival had guests from Haiti, Benin
Republic and Nigeria as resource persons who articulated the fundamentals of
synergy between Africa Diaspora and the motherland. Sadly, it had no support
from either Lagos State or federal governments.
But on the whole, there was disappointment at
how African countries have fared in ameliorating the essential conditions of
the Blackman and the need to improve on it to raise the profile of Africans
everywhere from a deprived, oppressed, corrupt and downtrodden race continually
at the receiving end of other peoples’ evil machinations. But more importantly,
the symposium turned attention to conditions prevalent in modern Africa that
continue to force its young and skilled professionals to migrate to the west in
what some have aptly termed the second wave of voluntary slave labour through
perilous routes not unlike what happened during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
and the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade centuries ago. Only this time, it’s voluntary
enslavement largely for economic reasons.
Badagry festival organiser, Olaide-Mesewaku
brought the historical import of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to the fore
when he called it a monumental genocide, with its moral burden lying heavily on
Europeans. He argued, “As the Holocaust is to the Jews so is the slave trade to
Africans, though the two experiences are not comparable in terms of effects,
scope and magnitude, duration and loss as the African experience remains the
worst in human history. But while we
have events and ceremonies, monuments and institutions commemorating the
Holocaust in Israel and all over Europe and America, African leaders are either
afraid or shy to talk about or be associated with the history of the slave
trade. This, to me, is a calculated attempt towards excision of the memory of
the history of slave trade.
“In response to this historical void, I
therefore propose the establishment of an ‘Institute for Diaspora Studies’ in
Nigeria. The institute will seek to address, amongst other things, the issues
of the slave trade and its aftermath, modern slavery, neo-colonialism, child labour,
human trafficking and the question of oppression in all ramification. The
institute will help in no small measure to reposition Nigeria’s socio-political
and economic relations and stimulate re-connection with African descents in the
diaspora. Badagry is well positioned for the establishment of this institute”.
IMAGES of
thousands of black Africans crossing the Mediterranean Sea through the
Straights of Gilbrata and perishing in the process have become a source of
concern in a migratory wave that bleeds the continent dry of the skilled
professionals that should develop her.
Indeed, Mere Jah Evejah, who has since
emigrated from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to settle in neighbouring Benin
Republic, noted that Europeans enslaved Africans for their knowledge and skills
(scientific and otherwise) in their plantations, noting that if Europeans were
honest they would say the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was “transfer of knowledge
from Africa to Europe and the Americas; they needed our knowledge and took
Africans by force”.
However, the tables would seem to have
turned, with able-bodied African professionals voluntarily fleeing the
continent to Europe and North America for better living conditions. It was Dr.
Amos O. Abisoye of Department of Social Sciences, Crawford University, Ogun
State, who put the dire situation in context in his presentation, ‘African
Political Leadership and Development: The Diaspora Connection’ at the Badagry
festival, where he castigated African leaders for the forced migration of Africans
in modern times.
He argued, “A thin line differentiates the
forced migration of the slave trade era from the rampant incidence of brain
drain which is now the order of the day in Africa. The west has continued to
pull out the best of Africa’s population today just as it was during the slave
trade era. Today, there is seismic immigration of human assets including many
of the most vibrant scholars from African universities and colleges to North
America and European institutions. Many of the experienced, vibrant scholars
leaving the shores of Africa are simply irreplaceable and indispensable…
“Knowledge of the quantity and quality of
African professionals in the Diaspora can only lead to lamentation for our
motherland. The current pain and hardships faced by Africans leave no one in
doubt that if a slave ship anchored on the Atlantic shore today, many Africans
would volunteer to jump in it and be taken to the west”.
While Abisoye’s argument was not flattering,
he did not spare Africans for abandoning the Office of the Citizen, the reason
why they are afraid to rise up against their internal oppressors the way
L’ouverture and his fellow wayfarers, all former slaves, did in Haiti to
liberate themselves and procure precious freedom. Abisoye further asserted,
“The fundamental difference is that the slaves of the southern plantation
system stopped at nothing in their quest for freedom, whereas present-day
Africans have become too weak and unable to challenge those who exploit and
dominate them.
“The courage and determination of African
slaves like Tousaint L’ouverture who led his people to challenge those who
enslaved them remain the greatest challenge of black slavery in our
generation”.
Undoubtedly, the place of the black man in a
modern world has increasingly come into question and so crucial that the U.N.
is taking steps to redress it while African leaders are clueless on what to do.
Little or nothing is being done to narrow the gulf between Africa Diaspora and
the motherland. Economic and political conditions on the continent do not
attract Diaspora returnees. Perhaps, the continent’s leaders would need to take
a cue from the U.N.’s decade-long searchlight being beamed on issues limiting
the black race from achieving optimal capacity.
Abisoye enjoined Africa Diaspora to form a
coalition against corruption in African, which he attributes to the rampant
poverty and under-development in the motherland.
SECRETARY of a
pan African political party in Benin Republic Mr. Oluwafemi Kochoni said only a
pan African strategy of action founded on the discipline exhibited by
L’ouverture and his henchmen in Haiti could revise Africa’s current woeful
fortunes. He noted that this was so because Africa was too weak to withstand
the onslaught of globalizasion, and therefore canvased for an enlightening
education that liberated the mind and freed the individual mentally.
Haitian Jacques Nicolas sued for a
pan-African cultural activism, and sought closer cooperation between the
Diaspora and the motherland using the instrumentality of the art. He stated,
“And if the arts and the culture are both the card and the standard of a
nation, we understand why the true African Renaissance will be through its
culture, its arts and its traditions, as well as when all states on the continent
will unite, not only among themselves but also with their diaspora to form a
fishbowl world of this wonderful bundle of brotherhood and solidarity that will
be the spearhead of a new Africa, the Africa of our dreams, and to which I am
already so flattered and proud to belong. And through me, the entire African
diaspora, a new Africa that will no longer be the maligned, disinherited and
overused continent, but a continent that will finally play its role in global
governance”.
The question African leaders should ask
themselves: how can the U.N.-declared decade be leveraged to better the lot of
Africans and begin the process of forging enduring partnerships with those in
the Diaspora for stronger economic and political ties to improve the continent
dark image? A developed Africa motherland would be attractive to those in the
Diaspora. More importantly, a developed Africa will stem the tide of wanton
migrations to Europe and North America. It also means available educated
manpower that will solve Africa’s manifold problems.
Therefore, African leaders must be roused
from their slumber to take action for the decade to count for the generality of
Africans the world over.