And Africa Will Shine Forth A Statesman’s Memoir Jean Ping And Africa Will Shine Forth And Africa Will Shine Forth: A Statesman’s Memoir Jean Ping International Peace Institute, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017 www.ipinst.org © 2012 by International Peace Institute All rights reserved. Published 2012. First published in French as Et l'Afrique brillera de mille feux © L'Harmattan, Paris, 2009. Translation services provided by Transperfect Translations, New York. International Peace Institute (IPI) is an independent, international institution dedicated to promoting the prevention and settlement of conflicts between and within states through policy research and development. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this publication represent those of the author and not necessarily those of IPI. IPI welcomes consid - eration of a wide range of perspectives in the pursuit of a well- informed debate on critical policies and issues in international affairs. ISBN: 0-937722-94-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-937722-94-7 CONTENTS Preface . vi Introduction . 1 PART ONE: Backward March: The Walk of the Crayfish . 11 1. The First Steps: Political Liberation and “Limited Sovereignty” . 13 2. Maturity: Economic Liberation and Opening to the World . 19 3. The Strong Return of the “Masters” and “The Great Leap Backwards” . 28 PART TWO: The New Major Challenges . 79 4. Living Free From Fear . 80 5. Living Free From Need . 99 PART THREE: The Revival of Pan-Africanism and Multilateralism . 109 6. Shared Management of African Affairs . 110 7. Shared Management of International Affairs . 130 CONCLUSION . 148 Together, Let us Build a Better Future for Africa AFTERWORD . 167 Peace, Security, and Development in Africa: A Conversation with Jean Ping ENDNOTES . 190 vii Preface This work was written mainly after the period when I assumed the position of President of the United Nations General Assembly and before my appointment as the Chairperson of the Commission of the African Union. The words and ideas it contains do not in any way commit these two prestigious institutions nor my country, Gabon. They are the result of personal reflections intended to add to the African debate. Jean Ping 1 Introduction Everyone knows that Africa, cradle of humanity, land of the Pharaohs and human civilization, and vast reservoir of human and natural resources, is not doing well. She crosses the deepest crisis that has shaken her since the end of colonial times. The specter of chaos lurks everywhere. She is now seen as the continent of “collapsing states” and “zombie nations”; the continent of extreme poverty, misery, and injustice; the continent of horrors, of the Rwandan genocide and of the worst atrocities committed in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Darfur and elsewhere. This brutal reality has been, for quite some time now, analyzed by most observers and experts with certain fatalism, as testified by these book titles with pessimistic or even alarmist tones: “Black Africa Started on the Wrong Foot” (René Dumont), “Can Black Africa Take Off?” (Albert Meister); “And What If Africa Refused Development” (Axelle Kabou); “Africa Down” (Jacques Giri). By now, it is just a chorus of permanent lamentations about the “lost continent,” the “damned continent,” or the “cursed continent” whose past is not passing. And the rest of the world, which sees us as negligible, even contemptible (“all corrupt and all dictators,” they say), consider that henceforth, they no longer need us. 1 How could we have come to this? And yet, the African Continent, opened by gunfire five centuries ago to the influences of Western civilization and its fundamental values of humanism and progress, has always, more than any other part of the world, almost slavishly, done everything it was asked to do and yielded to the injunctions of all masters that succeeded each other at the head of the different world orders. “When the White people came to Africa,” as was said by Jomo Kenyatta, and quoted by European Commissioner Louis Michel, “we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, the White people had the land and we had the Bible.” 2 Not to “rehash the past” but to better understand where we come from and where we are going, we must remember that just 150 years ago, Africa was still under the yoke of slavery, deporta - 2 INTRODUCTION tion and the slave trade, and that fifty years ago, it was still the colonial regime of the “whip,” “ass-kicking,” and “hard labor.” So, to know where you are going and what you may become, you must necessarily know who you are, that is to say, where you come from and with what history. As the African proverb says, “When you do not know where you are going, look at where you came from.” Therefore, the current world order in which Africa is naturally inserted cannot be easily analyzed and understood without a brief look back to the orders of the past. At the heart of the issues and problems raised by these orders stands the sovereign nation-state, which has stood for, since its Western origin in the seventeenth century, the right of an independent state, master of its territory and the only legitimate holder of the use of coercion, to freely determine its choices (including economic and political) 3. It merges well with the concept of national independence. But it so happens that African countries became legally respon - sible for their own fate less than half a century ago, by freeing themselves from the European and imperial order under which they had been closely confined for centuries. Accessing this long-desired national sovereignty, the new states have gradually tried, with varying degrees of willingness and happiness, to become emancipated from their “intimacy” with their former European tutelage powers. This period of “breaking off” and the quest for real autonomy, however, gave rise to very limited economic and political choices, correspon - ding to the bipolar East-West order that prevailed during the Cold War and the ideological game of the two superpowers: capitalism or socialism. African states had to “choose” their camp, align themselves and define, depending on this choice, the nature of their internal and external policy. Not rallying meant being the enemy, without nuances. We must remember that it was for the purpose of freeing themselves from these Manichean two-sided (West-East) shackles of the Western Janus that, in 1955, emerging from the long colonial night, the “Movement of Non-Aligned Countries” was created. 4 And then abruptly, in August 1991, this bipolar order, firmly established after the Second World War, suddenly collapsed with the implosion of the USSR, paving the way to “globalization” and the birth of a new order. This created, in its infancy, great hopes and even a AND AFRICA WILL SHINE FORTH 3 phase of euphoria. Very quickly, however, Africans became disappointed and lost their illusions. They had to face reality: the market forces that had taken over the planet created winners and losers, the very rich and the very poor, dominants and dominated; it was not, as has been alleged with an air of bravado, a positive sum game that would finally prove the unity of the human race and bring “perpetual peace”; rather, it became the nightmare that, for Africa, followed the dream. African countries have been confronted with a new series of major challenges arising from the advent of another unfair order. At first, it was the rapid and radical challenge to their national sovereignty and their human dignity that had just been acquired. The brief historical digression of independence simply closed up. The “masters are back,” people whispered. And like the good old days, they said the law was for us, but did not apply it to themselves. They judged Africa only through their own lenses: gave orders and lessons, condemned and decreed fatal sanctions, convinced that they did so for the good of Humanity. Then came the unprecedented proliferation of barbaric wars, including ethnic conflicts, brought about or encour - aged in particular by the methodical deconstruction of the states and the systematic destruction of any authority. We were expecting the rule of law and human rights and we harvested “the failed states”, coups, massacres, and genocides. This was finally the regression and massive impoverishment that result from the creation of extreme wealth and poverty by the exacerbation of the market forces, under the strong momentum of structural adjustment programs and the imperatives of the “Washington Consensus.” That is how Africa regressed several decades and plunged into the ocean of poverty, disorder, and barbarism. Everything was reversed; now we walk backwards; the history of Africa stutters, it repeats itself. It is this phenomenon of reverse movement that the famous Italian writer Umberto Eco has called the “walk of the crayfish.” 5 So today, the black continent, unloved, weakened, degraded, humiliated and marginalized, is reduced to wondering whether the new order that was put in place is also its own. Faced with such a configuration of the international system, will African states finally succeed, like other states, in reacting and preserving a little bit of their national independ - 4 INTRODUCTION ence, their human dignity, their cultural identity and national security and stability, while meeting the major imperatives of change, develop - ment, modernity, universality, and unity of the human race? This is the central question that pervades this book from beginning to end. Enclosed in the folds of the new world order, subject to all sorts of threats, prisoners of ideological preconceptions, faced with the increase in all kinds of disorders, weakened by the refusal of any responsibility and privatization of everything (including “legitimate violence”), African states have had no other alternative at this stage than to hunker down again, once more.