Features

Lessons in Liberation: Remembering Tajudeen

The Pambazuka News team highlights 15 of our favourite Pan-African Postcards

Pambazuka News Editors

2009-05-28, Issue 435

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/56611

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Pambazuka News has published Tajudeen’s weekly Pan-African Postcard regularly since 2004. While we joke that Tajudeen’s writing was ‘an editor’s nightmare’, it was first and foremost a source of penetrating, incisive insight into pan-African affairs, expressed with humour and an underlying sense of optimism and belief that, however great the challenges the continent faces, by uniting and organising, we can build Africa into a great place for all its citizens.

In celebration of Tajudeen’s commitment and contribution to Pan-Africanism – and to the Pambazuka community – we have picked a few of our favourite postcards to share with you. These postcards, listed in chronological order, demonstrate Tajudeen’s uncanny ability to see to the heart of the matter, to understand the workings of the human heart, to clarify complex and controversial issues and to inspire people to work for change.

2004

1) Remembering Africa Day
Our first postcard is about the importance of remembering Africa Day – or rather Africa Liberation Day, as Tajudeen referred to it – a day on which we will also now always remember him.

‘The whole of Africa may now be under African rule but the agenda of liberating our peoples from poverty, ignorance and underdevelopment is as real today as it was in the 1960s and even more urgent.’



2005

2) Wanted: Followers of Prophet Blair for missionary work in Africa
Tajudeen expresses scepticism about Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa and its plans to save the continent in 2005, a ‘make or break year’.

‘It is still seeking to adjust Africa to global forces despite timid recognition in sections of the report that trade liberalisation, privatisation and the donor-driven market mantra have hugely contributed to the collapse of infrastructure, social lives and caused great deprivation in Africa.’

2006

3) Bye-Bye to Blair, Brown, Bob and Bono – the B stars in poverty pornography
Tajudeen is relieved to see the end of attempts by ‘busy-body new missionaries in the West’ to ‘dance poverty out of town’ and ‘talk it out of existence’.

‘I hope that in the new year these NGOs will start looking more to Africa and Africans rather than false prophets, saviours and messiahs from outside.’



4) Everyday should be a Woman's Day
Tajudeen celebrates the ‘giant strides’ made by African women but says the fact that we ‘point to women in top places’ means that their achievements are still unusual.

‘…we should spend the rest of the 364 days of every year taking action locally while thinking globally on how to right these wrongs. It is impossible to create a better world without bettering the lot of women.’

5) Football, Davids and Goliaths
Why is it that there are Africans in every winning football team, asks Tajudeen, but no winning African football teams?

‘No matter how talented a player is, in football, you are part of a team. We are big on big players and short on team spirit.’



6) From now on I say: not in my name
Tajudeen’s friends at the AU summit try to work out why he looks different – it's because he’s stopped smoking, following a plea from his daughter. Listen to the podcast [mp3].

‘I was… sad that my lifestyle was making her feel that her father might not be there. The buzz, the urge and everything that goes with that puff drained out of me that morning and ever since I have not filled up the pipe again.’

7) Islamic faith replaced Communism in the pantheons of Western phobias
Tajudeen remarks on the ripple effects on religious tolerance of Pope Benedict XVI’s ill-judged comments on Islam.

‘All citizens, whether Christian or Muslim or the majority who are neither, deserve and should enjoy the full rights to the protection of their lives, place of worship, and freedom of their consciences along with other rights.’



8) Honour To Whom It is Due: Celebrating Issa Shivji
Professor Issa Shivji is a legend in his own lifetime, for whom ALUTA CONTINUA is not just a slogan, but a working motto, writes Tajudeen.

‘It is not often that Africans, especially those of us on the Left, say thank you to one of us. Often we reserve our best homage till they are no longer with us.’

2007

9) Slavery is not dead
Maybe Africans are not interested in talking about slavery because it reminds us that many of our people today, whether in Africa or in the diaspora, still live like slaves.

‘Like chiefs and emperors, kings and other slave dealers of old our presidents and prime ministers preside over a system of power that continues to make our peoples "hewers of wood and drawers of water", while the riches of this continent continue to be siphoned off by others.’



10) The embarrassing grotesqueness of presidents
Why do leaders who promise national rebirth and inspire their compatriots to believe in them end up disappointing them? It is because they stay too long in power, says Tajudeen.

‘Afrika will survive these leaders but more than that we shall overcome these obstacles. We just have to keep hope alive and continue with the struggles.’

11) A Robin Hood president of Nigeria?
Amid fears that Nigeria’s elections were rigged, President Umaru Yar’Adua must show his independence from Olusegun Obasanjo if he is to gain credibility, writes Tajudeen.

‘We cannot be blaming any problems on Obasanjo anymore. As the Americans say: The buck stops at Yar’Adua’s desk now.’



12) Death by committee
How many more bureaucratic committees do we need to decide whether or not to form an African Union government, asks Tajudeen. It is time to get the people on board.

‘…the debate in the next six months in all our countries should shift to the streets, seminar halls, parliaments, county halls and at all levels to challenge our leaders and democratise the discussion'.

13) The demand for common citizenship
Any serious talk of building a United States of Africa must begin with the need to guarantee full citizenship rights to all Africans, and the freedoms to move, settle, work and participate in the political processes anywhere they may be, argues Tajudeen.

‘The granting of African citizenship will not automatically solve all the problems of ethnicity, racism, exclusionism and intolerance. What it will set is a new and more inclusive legal and political framework for us to deal with these problems as equal members of a shared political community without anyone of us feeling superior or inferior, or at the mercy of other citizens.’



14) Welcome to democratic Kenya where you can buy your own party
Politics is about money not people, writes Tajudeen, with Kenya as the ultimate example of the privatisation of politics through the veneer of multiparty democracy.

‘…the science of Monetics may be more appropriate than political science theories in understanding how the country is governed and mis-governed.’

2008

15) Greed, pauperisation, and the free market
The global economic downturn demonstrates why Africa should not accept neoliberalism and external wisdom as the answer to all its woes.

‘For decades we are told that the state is "useless", "inefficient", "parasitic", and "anti-enterprise", yet when the wheelers and dealers are in trouble they fall back on the same state to bail them out with freebies!’



You can view more of Tajudeen’s Pan-African Postcards on the Pambazuka website.

* Tell us which are your favourite postcards and why by writing to editor@pambazuka.org or commenting online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

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