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G21 AFRICA - UBUNTU IS OUR LAST HOPE: MPHUTHUMI NTABENI posits the notion that unless we understand and accept our common humanity, the world is in trouble.East London, SOUTH AFRICA - It's always an honour to spend time with my friend Paul Newell from New York City who works for an NGO called Ubuntu Education Fund that's based in Port Elizabeth and New York. Recently I attended his send off braai in Walmer and got to meet his colleagues. Like our hosts, the mixed American couple, I was quite amused by their eight year old daughter who seem to have taken 'to this African thing' quite tremendously. They're wonderful people, including their ten year old son, who, on the evening, ended in a wet pool for being naughty thanks to Paul's mischievous hands.? ?
Mphuthumi Ntabeni Since the weekend happened to be around the time the US was commemorating the 9/11 event, our conversations hoovered around that event. When I discovered myself solely arguing with my host I cursed my stars and the beer in my hand for making me too voluble. I think the crux of our argument was the legacy of? 9/11. I'm of the view that the events of 9/11 followed the logic of a worldview that rejects transformative politics for the expedient hollow politics of vested interests and maintenance of the status quo.
?In a nutshell, I believe that Al-Qaeda, like Nazism, is a product of our history, not a freak exception. Without excusing the atrocities that awakened those with sophisticated ignorance, my strong belief is that events of 9/11 spelled the decline of global solidarity, democracy and universalism. For that alone they'll reverberate throughout the history of the world, along the fact that they gave Bush II a specious excuse for his blundering world politics.
?I'm of the opinion that Americans chose the trappings of imperialism long before Bush II came to the scene. Bush just used the 9/11 event to advance the vision of the New American Project. When my host said Americans chose Bush II the second time for lack of a better candidate, I envied him his trust of the American people, a trust I used to share by the way. For whatever the US government did I always trusted the eventual sense of the American people. Not anymore. Hence I've? come to believe that the people get the leaders they deserve.
?What became clear for me after the events of 9/11 was neither the scale of violence in one name or the other but the respective foes patent lack of empathy, the exhibited inability - on both sides - to see other person's point of pain. Among the many varying reasons Osama bin Laden & Co puts for the atrocities of 9/11 is that the West does not treat Muslim victims as it treats Western victims. He accuses them of lack of compassion and of hypocrisy.
? ?Africans are in a better position to use that argument, yet you don't see them attacking thousands of innocent people to pronounce their potent anger, or as collateral damage. Largely because, whatever Africans may lack, it is not sense of empathy. That is why Ubuntu is the most abiding principle of value in African societies, which in essence means that one achieves true humanity through other people.
?Listening to the shifting standards of justification for the apocalyptic barbarism of 9/11 from bin Landen & Co; and those from the American administration for war in Iraq, one is amazed at how prescient George Orwell was in his book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell hit the nail with his explanation of a perpetual state of war against shifting international enemies. The identity of the ostensible enemy does not matter, since it's a smokescreen in any case. Hence I say some enemies deserve each other.
?If history as close as the First World War teaches us anything it is that in the face of traumas and humiliations nations don't change, instead they become more what they are. Otherwise Germany would not have started the Second World War. It's high time the world, and my American host, learned to accept that the US is what it is, and stop making excuses for it. The Americans and Jihadist fundamentalist Moslems have managed to manipulate themselves into structured angst, and there's not a damned thing any of us can do to change either side. The bin Ladens and Bush IIs of this world are just good at reading the signs.
? ?The only thing the rest of us can do is to tell about the touchstones of our African inheritance, especially the moral principle of ubuntu, which seeks to promote social responsibility and solidarity, the duty of care, the virtues of cultural sensitivity, selflessness? and devotion to duty. Reawaken a vision of a global community founded on justice and equality. And hope the Americans will remember that this was also the constitutional founding principle of their nation, before it was derailed by the vice of greed.
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© 2006, GENERATOR 21.
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