African Renaissance

A struggle for political power is dragging the Kingdom of Lesotho towards the abyss of a violent conflict. The Democratic Republic of Congo is sliding back into a conflict of arms from which its people had hoped they had escaped forever.
The silence of peace has died on the borders of Eritrea and Ethiopia because, in a debate about an acre or two of land, guns have usurped the place of reason.
Those who had risked death in Guinea Bissau as they fought as comrades to evict the Portuguese colonialists, today stand behind opposing ramparts speaking to one another in the deadly language of bazooka and mortar shells and the fearsome rhythm of the beat of machine-gun fire.
A war seemingly without mercy rages in Algeria, made more horrifying by a savagery which seeks to anoint itself with the sanctity of a religious faith.
Thus can we say that the children of Africa, from north to south, from the east and the west and at the very centre of our continent, continue to be consumed by death dealt out by those who have proclaimed a sentence of death on dialogue and reason and on the children of Africa whose limbs are too weak to run away from the rage of adults.
Both of these, the harbingers of death and the victims of their wrath are as African as you and I.
For that reason, for the reason that we are the disembowelled African mothers and the decapitated African children of Rwanda, we have to say enough and no more.
It is because of these pitiful souls, who are the casualties of destructive force for whose birth they are not to blame, that Africa needs her renaissance. Were they alive and assured that the blight of human made death had passed for ever, we would have less need to call for that renaissance.
In the summer of light and warmth and life-giving rain, it is to mock the gods to ask them for light and warmth and life-giving rain. The passionate hope for the warming rays of the sun is the offspring of the chill and dark nights of the winters of our lives.
Africa has no need for the criminals who would acquire political power by slaughtering the innocents as do the butchers of the people of Richmond in KwaZulu-Natal.
Nor has she need for such as those who, because they did not accept that power is legitimate only because it serves the interests of the people, laid Somalia to waste and deprived its people of a country which gave its citizens a sense of being as well as the being to build themselves into a people.
Neither has Africa need for the petty gangsters who would be our governors by theft of elective positions, as a result of holding fraudulent elections, or by purchasing positions of authority through bribery and corruption.
The thieves and their accomplices, the givers of the bribes and the recipients are as African as you and I. We are the corrupter and the harlot who act together to demean our Continent and ourselves.
The time has come that we say enough and no more, and by acting to banish the shame, remake ourselves as the midwives of the African Renaissance.
An ill wind has blown me across the face of Africa. I have seen the poverty of Orlando East and the wealth of Morningside in Johannesburg. In Lusaka, I have seen the poor of Kanyama township and the prosperous residents of Kabulonga.
I have seen the African slums of Surulere in Lagos and the African opulence of Victoria Island. I have seen the faces of the poor in Mbari in Harare and the quiet wealth of Borrowdale.
And I have heard the stories of how those who had access to power, or access to those who had access to power, of how they have robbed and pillaged and broken all laws and all ethical norms and with great abandon, to acquire wealth, all of them tied by an invisible thread which they hope will connect them to Morningside and Borrowdale and Victoria Island and Kabulonga.
Everyday, you ad I see those who would be citizens of Kabulonga and Borrowdale and Victoria Island and Morningside being born everywhere in our country. Their object in life is to acquire personal wealth by means both foul and fair.
Their measure of success is the amount of wealth they can accumulate and the ostentation they can achieve, which will convince all that they are a success, because, in a visible way, they are people of means.
Thus, they seek access to power or access to those who have access to power so that they can corrupt the political order for personal gain at all costs.
In this equation, the poverty of the masses of the people becomes a necessary condition for the enrichment of the few and the corruption of political power, the only possible condition for its exercise.
It is out of this pungent mixture of greed, dehumanising poverty, obscene wealth and endemic public and private corrupt practice, that many of Africa's coups d'etat, civil wars and situations of instability are born and entrenched.
The time has come that we call a halt to the seemingly socially approved deification of the acquisition of material wealth and the abuse of state power to impoverish the people and deny our Continent the possibility to achieve sustainable economic development.
Africa cannot renew herself where its upper echelons are a mere parasite on the rest of society, enjoying as self-endowed mandate to use their political power and define the uses of such power such that its exercise ensures that our Continent reproduces itself as the periphery of the world economy, poor, underdeveloped and incapable of development.
The African Renaissance demands that we purge ourselves of the parasites and maintain a permanent vigilance against the danger of the entrenchment in African society of this rapacious stratum with its social morality according to which everything in society must be organised materially to benefit the few.
As we recall with pride the African scholar and author of the Middle Ages, Sadi of Timbuktu, who had mastered such subjects as law, logic, dialectics, grammar and rhetoric, and other African intellectuals who taught at the University of Timbuktu, we must ask the question - where are Africa's intellectuals today!
In our world in which the generation of new knowledge and its application to change the human condition is the engine which moves human society further away from barbarism, do we not have need to recall Africa's hundreds of thousands of intellectuals back from their places of emigration in Western Europe and North America, to rejoin those who remain still within our shores!
I dream of the day when these, the African mathematicians and computer specialists in Washington and New York, the African physicists, engineers, doctors, business managers and economists, will return from London and Manchester and Paris and Brussels to add to the African pool of brain power, to enquire into and find solutions to Africa's problems and challenges, to open the African door to the world of knowledge, to elevate Africa's place within the universe of research the information of new knowledge, education and information.
Africa's renewal demands that her intelligentsia must immerse itself in the titanic and all-round struggle to end poverty, ignorance, disease and backwardness, inspired by the fact that the Africans of Egypt were, in some instances, two thousand years ahead of the Europeans of Greece in the mastery of such subjects as geometry, trigonometry, algebra and chemistry.
To perpetuate their imperial domination over the peoples of Africa, the colonisers sought to enslave the African mind and to destroy the African soul.
They sought to oblige us to accept that as Africans we had contributed nothing to human; civilisation except as beasts of burden, in much the same way as those who are opposed to the emancipation of women seek to convince them that they have a place in human society; but only as beasts of burden and bearers of children.
In the end, they wanted us to despise ourselves, convinced that, if we were not sub-human, we were, at least, not equal to the colonial master and mistress and were incapable of original thought and the African creativity which has endowed the world with an extraordinary treasure of masterpieces in architecture and the fine arts.
The beginning of our rebirth as a Continent must be our own rediscovery of our soul, captured and made permanently available in the great works of creativity represented by the pyramids and sphinxes of Egypt, the stone buildings of Axum and the ruins of Carthage and Zimbabwe, the rock paintings of the San, the Benin bronzes and the African masks, the carvings of the Makonde and the stone sculptures of the Shona.
A people capable of such creativity could never have been less human than other human beings and being as human as any other, such a people can and must be its own liberator from the condition which seeks to describe our Continent and its people as the poverty stricken and disease ridden primitives in a world riding the crest of a wave of progress and human upliftment.
In that journey of self discovery and the restoration of our own self-esteem, without which we would never become combatants for the African Renaissance, we must retune our ears to the music of Zao and Franco of the Congos and the poetry of Mazisi Kunene of South Africa and refocus our eyes to behold the paintings of Malangatane of Mozambique and the sculptures of Dumile Feni of South Africa.
The call for Africa's renewal, for an African Renaissance is a call to rebellion. We must rebel against the tyrants and the dictators, those who seek to corrupt our societies and steal the wealth that belongs to the people.
We must rebel against the ordinary criminals who murder, rape and rob, and conduct war against poverty, ignorance and the backwardness of the children of Africa.
Surely, there must be politicians and business people, youth and women activists, trade unionists, religious leaders, artists and professionals from the Cape to Cairo, from Madagascar to Cape Verde, who are sufficiently enraged by Africa's condition in the world to want to join the mass crusade for Africa's renewal.
It is to these that we say, without equivocation, that to be a true African is to be a rebel in the cause of the African Renaissance, whose success in the new century and millenium is one of the great historic challenges of our time.
Let the voice of the Senegalese, Sheik Anta Diop, be heard:
"The African who has understood us is the one who, after reading of our works, would have felt a birth in himself, of another person, impelled by an historical conscience, a true creator, a Promethean carrier of a new civilisation and perfectly aware of what the whole earth owes to his ancestral genius in all the domains of science, culture and religion."
"Today each group of people, armed with its rediscovered or reinforced cultural identity, has arrived at the threshold of the post industrial era. An atavistic, but vigilant, African optimism inclines us to wish that all nations would join hands in order to build a planetary civilisation instead of sinking down to barbarism."
Thank you.
Thabo Mbeki
Africa, 13 August 1998

Dusty Shelf Scripts

Last Night ...

With My face deeply buried

In your scent on my head rest

I savor the last left by you

Holding each breath as if its my last

My mind can not help but play

Play all that has lead to the "last" breath

Lost in the deep play of thoughts

My soul retires

With a smile on my face

Filling my room with a moonshine in winter

How good can it get?

You make me a good man

Goodnight

Orangewalk Woman

Laying mi thoughts on your mind

And drawing knowledge of you

Seeing you pace up and down mi mind

Procuring the I in miself

Allowing me to step

Step into your dimension

And wearing your perspective,

Is like looking into the cascading ripples

Ripples of the river Nile

Right by the banks of the west

And when the sun is crimson

And the sky is fiery-scarlet

And the winds are respect the time and be lull

And the trees stop dancing and the autumn leaves rest

And the ripples spread to eternity

The Nile becomes serene and becomes my mirror

And with each ripple gone

I see miself in you, Clearer and clearer.

Usted es mi corazón ls

Moyo wangu,Usted solamente...

Pinnacle of Felicity

I can feel the clouds becoming dense
As I near the snow capped apex
My visibility is abating with each foot
Felicity belittles Kilimanjaro
To a Southern African anthill
The air is so thin like an abstract apparition
I am as high as Bob ever was
While competing with a 70s hippie
Jimmy per say
I hear the today’s gliders whizzing past
I am so weary
So frail

She is right by my side
All the way from the foot of valley
The very troublesome valley
She has my hand in hers
And I have hers in mine
Our hearts are synching
Synching to one pulse
As we keep going higher and higher
To Jimmy Marley hippie land

We set our eyes on the crest
Our souls are craving that pure zenith
Rising beatitudes keep us going
As we look down to our lives in retrospect
We are a few steps away
Still hand in hand
From the Pinnacle of Felicity

I Am An African

I am an African.

I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.

The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld. The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day.

At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito. A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say - I am an African!

I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape - they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.

Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.
I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me.

In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.

I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.

My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert.

I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind's eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins.

I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds, in gold, in the same food for which my stomach yearns.

I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence.

Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that - I am an African.

I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle, the one redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend the indefensible.

I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image.

I know what if signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who, sub-human. I have seen the destruction of all sense of self-esteem, the consequent striving to be what one is not, simply to acquire some of the benefits which those who had improved themselves as masters had ensured that they enjoy.

I have experience of the situation in which race and colour is used to enrich some and impoverish the rest. I have seen the corruption of minds and souls as (word not readable) of the pursuit of an ignoble effort to perpetrate a veritable crime against humanity.

I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity of a human being emanating from the conscious, systemic and systematic oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings.

There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish reality - the beggars, the prostitutes, the street children, those who seek solace in substance abuse, those who have to steal to assuage hunger, those who have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain.
Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those who have learnt to kill for a wage. To these the extent of death is directly proportional to their personal welfare.
And so, like pawns in the service of demented souls, they kill in furtherance of the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal. They murder the innocent in the taxi wars.

They kill slowly or quickly in order to make profits from the illegal trade in narcotics. They are available for hire when husband wants to murder wife and wife, husband.
Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past - killers who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have absolute disdain for the women of our country, animals who would seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled and the old, the rapacious who brook no obstacle in their quest for self-enrichment.
All this I know and know to be true because I am an African!

Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental truth that I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines. I am born of a people who would not tolerate oppression.
I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death, torture, imprisonment, exile or persecution should result in the perpetuation of injustice.

The great masses who are our mother and father will not permit that the behaviour of the few results in the description of our country and people as barbaric.
Patient because history is on their side, these masses do not despair because today the weather is bad. Nor do they turn triumphalist when, tomorrow, the sun shines.
Whatever the circumstances they have lived through and because of that experience, they are determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be.
We are assembled here today to mark their victory in acquiring and exercising their right to formulate their own definition of what it means to be African.

The constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes and unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender of historical origins.

It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. It gives concrete expression to the sentiment we share as Africans, and will defend to the death, that the people shall govern.

It recognises the fact that the dignity of the individual is both an objective which society must pursue, and is a goal which cannot be separated from the material well-being of that individual.
It seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one national group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social echelon by another, the fear of the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental human rights and the fear of tyranny.

It aims to open the doors so that those who were disadvantaged can assume their place in society as equals with their fellow human beings without regard to colour, race, gender, age or geographic dispersal.

It provides the opportunity to enable each one and all to state their views, promote them, strive for their implementation in the process of governance without fear that a contrary view will be met with repression.

It creates a law-governed society which shall be inimical to arbitrary rule.
It enables the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means rather than resort to force.
It rejoices in the diversity of our people and creates the space for all of us voluntarily to define ourselves as one people.

As an African, this is an achievement of which I am proud, proud without reservation and proud without any feeling of conceit. Our sense of elevation at this moment also derives from the fact that this magnificent product is the unique creation of African hands and African minds.
Bit it is also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity that we could, despite the temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of all humankind, to define for ourselves what we want to be.

Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to pettiness, petulance, selfishness and short-sightedness. But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda - Glory must be sought after!

Today it feels good to be an African.

It feels good that I can stand here as a South African and as a foot soldier of a titanic African army, the African National Congress, to say to all the parties represented here, to the millions who made an input into the processes we are concluding, to our outstanding compatriots who have presided over the birth of our founding document, to the negotiators who pitted their wits one against the other, to the unseen stars who shone unseen as the management and administration of the Constitutional Assembly, the advisers, experts and publicists, to the mass communication media, to our friends across the globe - congratulations and well done!

I am an African.

I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa.
The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, Burundi and Algeria is a pain I also bear.

The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we share.

The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves us in a persistent shadow of despair.

This is a savage road to which nobody should be condemned.
This thing that we have done today, in this small corner of a great continent that has contributed so decisively to the evolution of humanity says that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her rise from the ashes.

Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now! Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace! However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will prosper!
Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however much we carry baggage from our past, however much we have been caught by the fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us err today and say - nothing can stop us now!

Thank you.
Thabo Mbeki
Capetown, South Africa 050896

April Showers

Its been a while, not that long but somewhat. I have been on crutches for abt three weeks now. It somehow feels like doing everything with 50% efficiency. Never did I think I will be the disabled one one day. To take care of you curiosity, dear reader, it was really spectecular try playing against St. Eltons in NJ. Rugby will always be my heart, has made me the man I am. I wish I played more but hey, I guess I aint good enough to make a living from it. Anyway, I crashed my ankle from 2nd floor heights in a memorable dive, rolled out of bounds and tried to get up and realised that I could not walk or stand by myself. Needless to say the rest of the weekend was messed up, hours at the hospital getting therapy. Thank you Nana for nursing me, you are a natural and by the way we are goint strong, so strong. I am getting better everyday.
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I recommitted to my career with a fire in my soul. I need to believe that I can do all that I want to do, I have to remind myself that all things are possible to all those who believe and that I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, so help me God.
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"I love you Evans, you will always be my brother and it will show in everything. "
My dear brother has had me worried, all of us as a matter of fact. From my dad, mom, gogo, Nkosi and Chele. We love you Vancy and pray for a change in izinto zako. The fast lane life always comes to a stop and most stops are somewhat with a bang.
Details withheld
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Kicked it in Naptown, IN and Chicago, IL past weekend. Made up to Crystal Lake, IL to the Naturally 7 concert. Those guys are simply at another level. Just when I think I have heard it all they show me that I am yet to get there. It always fun to learn a lot from the genuises. N'glish offered me a lifetime opportunity in prep to SAfrican tour later this year. I was really honored beyond measure. I am already working on a medley for this.
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My heart and prayers are poured out to the Virginia Tech University students and their families at Blacksburg, VA for the Massacre that wiped out 32 people. Talk about psycho. Of all ways to make a statement, why should this be an option? Help us God.