Ishmael Beah’s memoirs, A Long Way Gone, is an emergency one. Not only does Beah highlight the horrors of war that he went through in Sierra Leone, but he also reveals how gross and wasteful war is. Just like Grace Akallo’s Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda’s Children, Els De Temmerman’s Aboke Girls: Children Abducted in Northern Uganda, John Bul Dau’s God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir, the documentary, The Lost Boys of Sudan, and the film, Blood Diamond, the children who are not killed during the war are turned into soldiers and indoctrinated in murderous violence. The gun is magnified. What starts as a war tactic eventually becomes deeply ingrained in children’s mind, the gun becomes not only a ‘vehicle’ to power but power itself.

Beah begins his story in an engaging but detached manner. News of war come to him as if the war is happening in a faraway and different land. Later, as fleeing refugees begin to spill into his town does Beah realise that the war is taking place in his country. Soon it ravages a substantial chunk including his home area and neighbouring towns. In an effort to escape, Beah ends up right in the arms of the rebels. He is forced to grow. He loses his childhood, his family, his friends and part of his dream. Throughout the war he carries remnants of his dream in his pocket—cassette tapes of rap music. In his mind are snapshots of the schools he would have gone to and the kind of hip-hop artist he would have become had war not destroyed the tapestry of his dreams. This is what becomes of Beah’s land: littered with bodies. “The flies are so excited and intoxicated that they fall on the pools of blood and die.”

When I was young and impressionable I had this grand vision of saving the world. It was so easy to dream up a free and fair world where sanity, justice and good health prevailed. It was even easier to engage in activities that could quicken the coming into being of those dreams. Now that I am older, I’ve since learnt that many of us go through such phases until we arrive at a waking place. I have now known the toughest place to be; the here and now. Forget the interval for a moment. And don’t get me wrong, I am not against dreaming. That’s where we all have to start anyway. I cannot imagine how best to survive and change harsh realities without a map of radiant dreams. But we must not stamp our eyes on the map, on the canvas. We are only to look at it for direction, not dwelling. Imagine if we were to focus all our attention on the compass without moving, what would we achieve? And yet it seems to me many of us and a big number of organizational realists are trapped between the dreaming and the coming true, avoiding the here and now. I am writing about all the Millennium Development Goals setters and implementers. They haven’t stirred from the map, the deep sleep and soft dream. Here’s my analysis.

In the area of HIV/AIDS prevention, the United States government has been criticised for increasing funding for abstinence-only strategies, while religious establishments like the Catholic Church continue to question condom use. The current HIV/AIDS prevention campaign urges women especially, to abstain, be faithful, or use condoms (ABC). This is because women and girls comprise the majority of those found to be HIV positive. UNAIDS 2006 report estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa, 57% of adults with HIV are women, and young women aged 15 to 24 are more than three times likely to be infected than young men of the same age group. Based upon these statistics is the short-sighted conclusion that women should be the main target in combating HIV/AIDS. Truthfully, they are the majority that turn up to be tested and their results are easily available. In many countries in Africa, the HIV/AIDS statistics for men are hard to find, if they exist at all. Do we then conclude that the HIV/AIDS campaign should focus largely on urging the women to be more vigilant and careful when it comes to prevention or it should all the more be about empowering the men to be loving, respectful and protective towards the women?

In addition to a conflicted identity, Mildred Barya argues that the xenophobic attacks in South Africa and Africa in general can be traced to the Berlin Conference and partitioning of Africa.

Until the colonial borders are removed we will not have lasting peace anywhere in Africa. Nobody is going to deconstruct the existing borders except a group of committed African thinkers and doers. The recent South Africa shame of brother against brother, sister against sister has clearly shown that we need to make the journey to Berlin quickly, to break the curse of borders that was inflicted upon Africa by the white colonialists in 1885.

The time is ripe to reverse the trend before other clean ‘fingers’ catch the infection and oozing pus from the festering, sore fingers. The disease is the same across Africa, it only manifests differently. It happened in Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa, it has happened in Kenya in East Africa, it happened in Rwanda and continues to spill in the Great Lakes Region. It is the same happening in the Horn of Africa, now it is happening in South Africa, soon the entire Africa might begin to smell from these rotting fingers if the African Union leadership and other concerned bodies, concerned people, do not step in to curb the disease and rename the land. It is time for us Africans to change this bloody, brother-sister-hunting course and write our history as Patrice Lumumba dreamt when he said:

“Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity…it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets.”

South Africa reached pitch fever in its bursting hatred, clearly demonstrating a greater need for us to say; ‘Let there be no more South Africa but a country that accepts all Blacks, no matter where they may be coming from.’ Words alone do not bring a prophecy to pass; we are not in the days of miracles so actions must do. Short of action, South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, must eat the papers on which he wrote Black Consciousness. What is Black Consciousness without the African personality and identity? What is Black Consciousness if it is not all Africa-Black-Inclusive?

It is a big shame that when we were beginning to recognize and celebrate the African presence globally, South Africa announced its own drum beat and danced to a different tune. When we were beginning to warm up to the World Cup come 2010, South Africa proved that it is not worthy to host the cup, that it is not ready, not yet ready. For if many South Africans cannot tolerate their brothers and sisters from the closest, neighbouring countries, how will they consider the people from far off lands? The saying that charity begins at home does not lie. Who will be safe to watch the World Cup in the folds of xenophobia? One would rather go to a less ‘privileged’ but safer country than being caught up in the throngs of xenophobia.

The way South Africa has given vent to reckless violence shows there’s something rotten at the core. We are not witnessing the surfacing of new fear, but a deep decay in the hearts and minds of the killing groups. It is not about hating the other foreigner. If anything, South Africans started with hating themselves. For a long time they have been killing what is considered their ‘own.’ They did not spare Lucky Dube; they do not spare thousands of women and young girls who are raped and murdered everyday, making South Africa one of the most dangerous countries to live in. The killings have been going on, it is only now that they have reached marginal proportions and gained a new definitive target: Black foreigners. Immigrants.

The murderers have forgotten a crucial piece of history: They have forgotten that many Africans wept with the South Africans during apartheid rule. Many African countries mobilized logistical, moral and physical support for the South African struggle. And many Africans left their safe homes to go to dangerous South Africa to fight for the freedom of South Africans. The people from Nigeria, Malawi, Zambia, Ghana, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Tanzania and several other places actively joined the South Africa struggle with good will and intentions of brother fighting for brother, sister standing by sister. They must rent their clothes now realizing not only the loss of unity that they embraced, but the shame and disgust that come with regression. The pain in a journey back to the broken road.

I did a small exercise with a large, African social group. I asked each one of the members to suggest which country in Africa they would not want to live in. 99 per cent circled South Africa. The most amazing thing is that places like Congo, Sudan’s Darfur, Chad, Somalia, Kenya and Zimbabwe where conflict is ripe and the residents are not just seated on volcanoes but are being boiled and cooked in the lava, many Africans still indicated a willingness to want to live there, to go there and help. To go and suffer with those who are suffering. This gave me hope that there is a revolution and there are Africans keeping true to the revolution, defying fear and other obstacles to fight for justice, progress and African-ness.

South Africa therefore has plunged in a senseless blood-spilling orgy. We cannot understand why this has happened if we do not recognize that a deep Identity crisis is at the bottom of the problem. Many South Africans have never quite accepted themselves as Africans. The logic therefore is simple. They cannot accept others who are Africans. Many South Africans haven’t felt safe in their own skin, in their country, in their own-ness, how then can they accept others? South Africa is warped in denial at many levels, confusion, reckless power and now, a terrible forgetfulness. This is the analysis: It will take a longer time cleaning up the South African psyche and reality than stopping all the violence in Congo and Darfur. The reason is because South Africa seems to be the only country so far that has an in-built denial system. In other countries when things are not going well, the masses and leadership to a large degree generally accept the dysfunctional phases and the need to change. There is a wide acceptability of things having gone wrong. In South Africa what you easily recognize is denial: It is not HIV/AIDS, it is not crime, it is not this and that... This is going to cost South Africa such a huge fortune in terms of time and name clearance.

How do we help South Africa to at least resolve the huge identity crisis and denial syndrome? The answer is in deconstructing and then reconstructing Africa as a whole and within that framework redefining who is a South African. Many of us know that our cultural ties and heritage go beyond colonial borders, yet we continue to wear the colonial blinds. Culture and politics have failed to make the interconnectedness shared among all Africans a check against violence. Perhaps it is time to go scientific. Here is how. If many of us are to do a DNA ethnic make-up test, we would discover various percentages of several ethnic groups that contribute to our genetic profile. This would give us good snapshots of who we are, our ancestry and our identity. We would realize we are yesterday’s people, we are much of today’s people and we will be tomorrow’s people too. In short, to borrow Alice Walker’s new book title, “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.” There isn’t going to be a so-called pure South African, the other Mozambican, Malawian, because in truth such identities do not exist, have never existed. They were coined up to suit the colonizers. Centuries down the road we still let them make us, shape us, define us. What more could be wrong with us?

For a start, I think all the so-called South Africans should do a DNA test, government sponsored. It will make us humble and teach us a thing or two about union and diversity which culture and governments have failed to teach us. Because we inherit a unique assortment of DNA from our mothers and fathers, it is possible for one’s DNA results to be different from a family members—even a sibling’s. Does this mean members of a family who discover unique differences and some noticeable similarities as well should pick up guns and fire at one another, in the name of a different DNA composition, one being more Shangaani than Zulu for instance?

Before any peace movement can stop us all from shouting ‘kill the other, kill them all…’ perhaps a DNA is what will save us and show that we have enough of ‘the other’ in us; in our cells, in our genetic make up and ‘bloody’ composition, thus stopping us from wrecking havoc on our selves, the other.

* Mildred K Barya is Writer-in-Residence at TrustAfrica (www.trustafrica.org)

**Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Publisher: Riverhead books, 2004.
Hardback 334 pages.

This is why there is hope for Somalia

The novel Links, by Nuruddin Farah, opens with a very arresting line:
“Guns lack the body of human truths!”

Right away we are introduced to a story of guns and concealed truths. To untangle what lies in this statement, we follow the author’s narrative of the wars within a war, and a lost battle. Tension maps every page with each exposition of the dangerous terrain that’s become Somalia, the characters intentions and impenetrable intrigues.

Links is not a one person story. Neither is it just a political one. It is a balanced, gendered one. Each woman, each man, each child is a story. Amidst the violence and senseless horrors experienced by most characters, we are inclined to embrace Rajo, (Raasta) a child who is both vulnerable and legendary. She is seen as “a symbol of peace in war-torn Somalia, the stuff of myth, seen by the city’s residents as a conduit to a harmonious coexistence.” Wise beyond her age, she talks people out of their depression, comforts mothers and gives confidence to the children. “…she gives shape to the links between words and their meanings, and then fits them into chains of her own choosing.” By age four she has figured out what marriage is like. With “a face as ancient as the roots of a baobab,” she is referred to as the “Protected One.”

Rajo is Somalia wearing a dress and a child’s face. As her story unfolds, we find out how she is abducted but not stolen. She has to put up with risks but like enduring hope, she is the sun that rises each day to greet the once beautiful Somali land. There’s little wonder therefore that Rajo actually means hope.

We are also seduced to listen and accept the story of Jeebleh, who returns to Mogadishu after twenty years to pay homage to his mother’s grave and also settle a few scores with one of the bad guys—Caloosha. At the airport, Jeebleh presents his Somali passport. The officer leafs through the pages looking for the visa. It is Jeebleh’s turn to be sarcastic and ask when it has become “necessary for a Somali to require a visa to enter Mogadiscio?” Jeebleh must tread carefully because he is walking on eggs. He cannot tell who is a foe and who is a friend. Nothing is told straight up. He even has to go through a tangled maze to locate his mother’s actual grave. Bile, the good guy is walking on landmines with his trying-to-do-good attitude and actions. Af-Laawe, who has started an NGO to take care of the dead prides in his “Funeral with a difference!” He speaks in metaphors all through the story. He is consistent in not giving clear answers to simple questions.

“How is Bile?” Jeebleh asks Af-Laawe.
“It depends on who you talk to,” Af-Laawe responds.
Later, Jeebleh asks Af-Laawe, “Why the nickname ‘Marabou’?”
“Somebody has been telling you things,” is Af-Laawe’s response.

Behind his back there are rumors that his efficiency and expediency in gathering the bodies into his van is only because he is selling organs of the dead and making huge profits out of calamity.
Within the quandary, Farah goes on to weave a delicate hope. He uses whatever realities are at hand to send a double textured message of hope. For instance, on the collateral damage that’s become Somalia’s rubber stamp, he writes: “A cynic I know says that thanks to the vultures, the marabous and the hawks, we have no fear of diseases spreading.” In another instance, one of Jeebleh’s contacts says, “My cynical friend suggests that when the country is reconstituted as a functioning state, we should have a vulture as our national symbol.” There is irony as well as good hope considering the manner in which the sentence is stated. “…when the country is reconstituted as a national state…” Farah sees the coming into constitutional state Somalia, some day.

And the use of the vulture too must be deliberate. In ancient Egypt—Kemet land, the vulture was the symbol of royal protection won on the foreheads by pharaohs, gods and the goddess Nekhbet. Egypt then was fertile, just and prosperous. Also, the powerful Ghanaian empire before the fatal brush with colonization had the symbol of a vulture. During slave trade, for those who escaped slavery, the vulture acted as a guide to the hills, away from the dogs, the horses and the overseers. For those who collapsed or died along the way, the vulture ate (read cleared) their remains. This gave a certain sense of freedom to those Africans since they believed that the vulture would carry their spirit back to their roots, back home to Mother Africa. Farah’s use of the many deaths and vultures can be interpreted through this original African expression of freedom and return to a desired state. A delicate hope!

The major strength of the novel is Farah’s honesty about the links that break and mend Somalia. The links that are the threads of hope as well as the strands of death, the root cause of the existing chaos threatening to extend to the neighbouring nations, the network of clans and lunatic warlords. Farah merges the landscape of memory and reality to recreate a possible Somalia, scathed but not diminished.

* Mildred K Barya is Writer-in-Residence at TrustAfrica (www.trustafrica.org)

**Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Strife is a novel laden with, yes, strife! It is at once a family story, a national one and eventually a borderless one. The author, Shimmer Chinodya, through the Gwanangara family takes on the task of interpreting and explaining happening events first by revisiting the past to deal with the upturning, unresolved business. The spirits start talking through Kelvin Gwanangara:

‘I am Mhokoshi! I want my weapons back!’
‘I am Njiki!’ Kelvin snarls, in an old woman’s voice. ‘My spirit is roaming the forest.’ ‘I am Sabastin.’ Now a strange young man’s thin breaking voice. ‘I need rest.’
‘I am Zevezeve the porcupine. You shat and spat on me when I visited you.’
‘I am Edgar Tekere. I’m back from the war. I see blood everywhere.’

Dunge Gwanangara, after many years of living as a Christian is challenged to put aside Christianity and consult n’angas. He ends up making mistakes for he doesn’t really know how to, he’s been busy being a strict Christian. The unresolved issues only grow larger. More misfortune strikes members of his family. One of his sons becomes epileptic, another schizophrenic. Dunge’s wife—the moon huntress— hears voices. Eventually, it turns out that no one thing really works, and no one solution will come from Christianity or tradition, modernity or education, science or destiny. The past no longer holds together and science fails to offer a cure to the Gwanangara afflictions. Conflict heightens as one value weighs against another and the realization that choosing one path is no longer practical. The characters in the novel fumble about, grappling for the ‘way.’ In the words of the author, ‘Everything that can go wrong goes wrong…’ And what’s supposed to happen doesn’t happen.

The book has selfless characters who sacrifice themselves for others, and also selfish individuals who only want to depend on others, and even blame others for their misfortunes.

The most refreshing part of the novel is when the author exposes migrations and relations that link various people across Africa, rendering the current borders meaningless. The ordinary person is well integrated, it’s the elite who are confused and divided by national borders. The young, rural people have no ‘crossing’ problems, leaving Zimbabwe to go and work in Mozambique or Malawi, learn the languages there and speak them. An old woman is at ease to cross from Zambia and visit her relatives in Zimbabwe, (without papers) but the educated are lost in the legal requirements and the consequences of crossing borders without visas.

The Gwanangara family has relatives across borders and occasionally exchange visits. The sad aspect is that these visits are mostly triggered by moments of crisis; strange illnesses and death. Most of the characters are courageous and they strive to overcome the obstacles that try to pull them down.

Towards the end of the story there is a sense of ease, a mellowness softening the rough edges of strife. The Gwanangara family starts to bond, openly talking about themselves and each other without hiding behind masks. They bail each other out and hear each other out. Also, they discover the joy of involving themselves earnestly in other people’s lives. They attend the funerals, graduation parties and weddings with genuine concern and discover that some of their relatives are not as bad as they had seemed to be. ‘In fact, none of the Chivi people seem half as bad as we were made to think they were. Perhaps we should make a fresh start.’ There is a new understanding amongst relatives giving hope to open friendship and genuine love.

At the end of the narrative, Strife is not only portrayed as a family saga or a single community affair but an African one. Utilizing the drama form to conclude his story, Chinodya seems to suggest that almost every African no matter where the geographical divide must make choices as to what will work in the future and question the belief invested in science, bones or Bibles. There will be several schools of thought for influence and inspiration: education, medicine, destiny, tradition... But before arriving at a lasting solution, the past will keep calling, making coping in the present moment alone nothing but full of strife!

Weaver Press, Harare, 2006, pp 223

* Mildred K Barya is Writer-in-Residence at TrustAfrica (www.trustafrica.org)

* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Everything changed.

We are back home trying out new skins as the continent wastes on. We had believed we could save Africa. We were young dreamers. We embraced The African Manifesto, a tract which in our group became as popular as The Communist Manifesto in its time. The first oath we took steered us towards defending and liberating our national frontiers. There was trouble all around Africa. Enemies were approaching our land. We could hear their gunshots from whichever direction we faced. We did not want to run away. It was more worthy standing up to fight.

How could we have known the truth? By the time Biira and I finally agreed that it was what was left of us that needed saving, many of our comrades had died, along with our dreams. What pained Biira and I most, however, were not the deaths but the denial, the lack of a funeral. In Africa, when someone died, it was acknowledged and burial arrangements made. In fact, it seemed we respected the dead more than the living. Nowadays of course things have turned round. Alive or dead there’s no big deal. Though it’s tougher staying alive than dead, of course! And probably that’s why we have more haunted and tragic lives. For many of us life is cruel and disjointed like a chicken cut up and assembled according to the parts: the wings together, the drumsticks together and so on. When you cook them you think that you’re going to eat chicken but that’s not true. You’re only feeding on parts of a chicken. That is our life, not lived wholly.

One by one, our comrades were bundled in reed mats and blankets, and ‘disposed of.’ Our commanders called the disposal operation smooth. We learnt years later that the bodies were not flown home. That they were taken to a villa in Lubumbashi where they were slit open. That the hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs were plucked out and sold in South Africa. That’s what our government did to our fallen heroes. No consolation letters were sent to their families. No condolence messages to their friends. How can I admit that operation smooth as its name suggests was indeed fast and efficient? Years later when Biira and I sat down by the river Congo to remember our comrades, it seemed as if they had never lived, never walked here, they were never born. We had only imagined them. What had happened to our memory that we could not recall their names except one? We searched desperately for their faces, their names. How were they erased? Exhausted, shocked, we questioned our sanity, failure of the mind to recollect our absent colleagues. Had nothing happened? Had everything happened?

Biira and I are from Arcadia, a relatively small country compared to most African states. Sometimes, if you’re not careful your eyes might miss us on the map. Foreigners tease us that our country is only a strip, but we are there all the same. And those of you, who still follow news, don’t pay much attention to what you read, see, or hear about us currently. It wasn’t like that at all in the beginning. We were an enviable rich state, in control of our resources, proud of our land and the people. And we were on our way to liberating the whole of Africa. We never made it. Things changed.

Biira and I were in our final years at the Ivory Tower University, the place where our dreams became crystal clear in the liberator’s shape. We stood before the looking glass and spread our future like a carpet of luminous colours. We saw stripes of dazzling yellow, brilliant orange, deep purple, vibrant red and magnificent lime. We never even imagined a few shades of grey and other mourning colours.

Every Sunday afternoon, as the sun blazed and the sky was a clear blue without clouds, we gathered for our political study in the mess of Lumumba Hall. Officials from The Peoplist Motion Secretariat came and addressed us.

“Know your history. Do not dismiss it for it shapes the way we do things here,” Colonel Whiff said, smoking a pipe and tossing back his dreadlocks that were long enough to sweep the floor. His lazy, kind eyes searched our faces and each one of us secretly fell in love with him. He had the look of a sleepy blue ocean in a calm season. We respected him for his consistency. “Know your history, only then can you visualise what to do with the future that is yet to come,” Colonel Whiff repeated. Biira always clapped. She was a student of Political Science, incessantly drunk with words like the future, history, hegemony, ideology, manifesto, nationalism. At first, I deemed it was fit to avoid her. We were roommates. If I timed her schedule right, I knew the days when I could get to sleep before she came in and on other days I could get to the room late when she was already asleep. Still, she had a way of reaching me, rubbing me with her beliefs and dreams. If she woke up early and left me sleeping, I would find a yellow note under my pillow: “The future belongs to those who are awake.” I would respond likewise: “The future belongs to those who can see it with their eyes closed.” Sometimes she simply wrote: “The future is here. The future is now.” We carried on like that, interacting through the yellow notes without a face-to-face discussion. Then one day it happened. We were in the quadrangle waiting to watch a movie brought to us by the Life Ministry. Our hall which was shaped like a box had earned the name: ‘Box Hall’, and ourselves the ‘Boxers’. Biira seized the chance to start a fire.

“Box oyee!” She punched the air.

“Oyee!” we cheered.

“Oyee?”

“Oyee!”

“Gallant boxers, I am inviting you to a political study group on Sunday at 3 p.m. Come and hear the words of the future from the Peoplist Motion Regime…”

Watching her with fists in the air, quoting Nyerere, Nkrumah, Castro, Fanon and our dear president, amused me so much that I decided to join the group to find out the quickest way to being crazy — the source of Biira’s steam. A month later I was converted. The Peoplist Motion Regime was the way forward. Their manifesto was charmingly simple: Arcadia is one people, grouping to liberate Africa from the ravaging wars. Together we would sow the seed of oneness, the meaning of a Peoplist Nation. In Arcadia alone we had thirty two ethnic groups. It would be magical to forget our internal clashes and integrate as a Peoplist Nation. The revolutionary angle appealed to me. I was doing Comparative Literature which, in our national curriculum meant Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare, period. I wanted to be a teacher but deep down I knew I could never continue in the tradition of teaching what was being taught. Secretly, I nursed a dream of initiating a think-tank that would eventually redesign the curriculum, overhaul the syllabus and develop a new education system grounded in our own knowledge sources and civilisations. Through the Peoplist regime, I could bring my agenda to the table. The study group became my regular beat. Whenever we met, the first thing we did consciously was to put aside arguments and pretensions that might break us. We even overlooked our different academic disciplines. Together with the botanists, geologists, behavioural scientists, molecular biologists, social scientists, doctors, writers, civil engineers ... we embraced the first principle in The African Manifesto: Building an intellectual, professional army that was not only up-to-date in state of the art machinery, but also mentally trained to fight wars far and beyond. Our weapons therefore were not only to be physical—the typical and common approach to most wars and conflicts in the world—but also to provide creative and practical strategies outside the box in negotiating for peace. Other countries would learn from us.

“Timing is crucial,” Colonel Whiff said one day, rolling his eyes. “We are doing the right thing at the right time. Some of your colleagues think that what matters now is finding a good job, making money, starting a family ... they are wrong. The most important thing is being here, learning history, and standing up for Africa. We start with Arcadia.”

The state of chaos which had engulfed Africa made us believe that our political aliveness was indeed consuming us at the right time. A boil had just burst in Angola. A wound was festering in Mozambique, simmering with pus and blood. Rwanda was licking a genocide bomb and her relations with the neighbouring territories were terribly strained. Rwigyema was our man there. We rallied behind him and cried Freeeeeedom! We promised all the Rwandese desiring to return home that we would give them their country. We would help. The Peoplist Regime would resettle everyone where they wanted to be. Grand. We would teach Northern Sudan how to shake hands with Southern Sudan, and command the International Press to declare Darfur habitable. It would feature in the UN’s Special Watch of 100 places to be in the whole world. We marched there. Then Cote d’Ivoire lost her glory and started sniffing out those who were not pure Ivorians. Nonsense! The next tragedy was going to be an ethnic cleansing. We sent representatives to tell the Ivorian president and his cabinet to stop being stupid. The Peoplist Motion Regime recognised all African people as one. No authentic or contamination talk. Simply African is all we lobbied for. Then we heard that the Congo was falling apart. Our hearts went out to that vast and beautiful equatorial region. It was our duty to make peace, to re-make the Africa Nation One. We needed no messiah to inspire us on that one. We marched there.

With more energy and zeal, we flew to Angola to discipline that Savimbi dog. But then the guns he was using to terrorise his folks were not manufactured in Africa. So it wasn’t just Savimbi we would be fighting. The bad apples of Africa had strong reinforcements. Charles Taylor was backed too in his atrocities. We brought our heads together to find out exactly who powered these dictators. Our hearts burned for the continent. Our dream was that we would be one eventually, with our visionary president, our irreducible and indefatigable Peoplist Regime. I must mention here that by far Arcadia was the only independent, democratic state north of the Nile River, east of the Lake Victoria, south of the great Okavango River and west of the Sahara. We purposed to show others a clean future built from the colours of our dreams.

It took years for the scales to fall off from our eyes, for us to realise that our strategy was empty rhetoric, our government a lying game. Our actions were a contradiction of what Peoplist truly meant. The past repeated itself with all the mistakes and catastrophes. Let me tell you the truth: We did not liberate anyone. Here’s what happened:

As ambitious, ignorant dreamers, we shared the bush with snakes and spiders, while our bosses slept in the best hotels under treated mosquito nets, and very often took state funded holidays to Europe. They plundered and violated the right to life of everyday people in the areas where we were keeping peace. Our leaders got fat on the gold and disappeared with our pay. Believe me, the Peoplist paymaster, Mr. Kutaga, vanished with four billion dollars. The head of our regiment, Colonel Wafiire took all the timber that Congo could give but tried to convince us all the same with his rusty singsong: “It’s peace that we want for Africa.” He may as well have been saying, “We are for pillage.” Our time in the Congo had nothing to do with national security. Like most so-called superpowers, we were there for the resources and occupation. It took us long to awake and see through the smoke screen the image in the mirror. We engaged in senseless wars, we were told to fight without question, to kill or be killed. How different were we from a barbaric army marching to conquer, to defeat the weaker?

We saw things clearly when Dagu died. The only comrade whose name had not left us. The one who was to father Biira’s child. Dagu was an only child, a straight A student who consistently topped his Surveying class at the University. He was approved for the World Foundation Scholarship, but like us he had swallowed the pill. The dream to liberate Africa had spread its magic colours, beckoning him to forget the pursuit of further studies. We came across his head one evening. Bullets had left holes in his head, which wasn’t a whole head anymore, but a shattered cranium. It took us a great amount of time to recognise it was our Dagu. Only after we identified a green bandana bearing a few strands of hair did we remember having seen him at breakfast tying the bandana across his forehead. Near his shattered skull was a thicket of blood that had become one with the grass. What had alerted us to the scene were two vultures goring into Dagu’s brains with their hooked beaks. The rest of his body was nowhere to be seen. I knelt before a piece of his skull. Turned it round. Examined him. Dagu. I looked at Biira and sighed. She closed her eyes. That evening when we assembled, we noticed that Blanco, the surgeon was not with us.

“Where is Blanco?” Biira asked Captain Huambo.

“He’s gone on an emergency call.”

I glanced at Biira. The struggle had linked our minds together. A look shared between us often penetrated deeper to reveal that we were thinking the same thoughts. That night we became numb, not because of a brutal loss but the fact that there had been no shootings that day. Dagu was butchered by one of us.

Silently, we packed our bags. There wasn’t really much to pack, but we made an effort of it. We had to brace ourselves for what the government would call us if we survived, if they let us go our way to save what was left of us.

Word suddenly reached us that we were to have an audience with the General, who was the decision maker in our case. We rejoiced and then froze. To us, the meeting spelt freedom or doom.

Our leaving coincided with the coming of extra troops. More gold had been found in Mongbwalu, Ituri district, so it was a calculated move to mobilise an army from home to keep peace in that territory as the miners mined. At 7am after a strong cup of coffee, I strapped the army green backpack on my shoulders, saluted and shook hands with Captain Huambo.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Stay well,” I responded. I watched his face for a sign of betrayal. The face was neutral. I looked away and waved at the new deployment force from Arcadia. Did they really know what they were in for, here for? Fresh graduates with no war zone experience, headless chickens running where they ought not to run. Did they know the real reasons we were in Congo and anywhere else? I avoided looking deep in their faces to see hope alive, to see expectation, to remind me of what I had been before. It is one thing to have dreams and watch them unfold day by day, it is quite another to see them crashed and have to summon up courage to stoop and gather the broken pieces. We stumbled out of the bush towards the chopper that was waiting in the clearing. Every step of the return journey reverberated with heaviness.

Many people now say Kenya needs a few good men who want to serve without applause. Do we have them? Given the post-election violence in Kenya, it takes a sober, courageous person to look into the eye and the camera to say:

“I am sorry…we are sorry, we made a mistake…”

And yet, most times, these are the only words that those who have been wronged need to hear in order to return to the humane. The Kenyan situation during and after the elections warranted such words from the leaders. Instead, hollow-sounding words were spoken and we all know what followed: Loss. Death. Devastation. Shame. Greed for power, not service, did it. It destroyed the pride of the people and the humility within individuals. How can we gather the broken pieces to run a connecting thread through them? How can Kenya be whole, again? And perhaps the bigger question is, was there a ‘whole’ in the first place or it has always been splinters seemingly presented as one whole? A few African writers, in their own words, have something to say about Kenya’s elections and Africa’s political structures.

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AYI KWEI ARMAH

The sort of thing happening in Kenya happened in Cote d'Ivoire, Togo, and will happen again in Cameroon, in fact, every time there's an election under the present system. The problem is structural, not circumstantial. This is not only about elections: as long as we wish to remain within colonial political structures, the source of government legitimacy will remain what it was at the Berlin conference: force plus fraud. We shed blood during elections because we serve deities made in Berlin, and they have always needed human sacrifice. Part of the Berlin political deal was that massacres of the population were routine whenever they demanded democratic rights. If we want to end the bloodshed surrounding elections, we'll have to shift to a different organizational system. It is possible, but structurally, it cannot be Ugandan or Ghanaian or Kenyan. These are Berlin constructs, even if we pretend they are African. They are not. An African system is possible and feasible. It will cost nothing in human blood, and be less expensive to maintain than the present "state" system that drinks so much blood.

BRIAN CHIKWAVA

Politicians ought to see themselves as the midwives of people's hopes and aspirations. Sadly by far their greatest crime must be their compulsive disorder to take the new baby, throw it down the pit latrine and then stand around poking each other's faces: I declare it a boy and not a girl! No it was a girl I saw it! No it was a boy! So why did you throw it away? No I didn't, you did. Ok let’s hear it from the mother? No, I will punch her face if she gets involved in matters that are beyond her grasp! And so on and so on. Hopefully, among Kenya's political elite there is someone who is brave enough to go wade through all the crap, recover the baby, reunite it with its mother and restore faith in our politics.

CHIKA UNIGWE

In 2004, I travelled to Kenya for a writing workshop and stopped off for a few days in Kisumu to visit with my sister-in-law and her family. I loved Kisumu at first glance. I remember describing it to a friend as serene. Like the sea. It reminded me of Enugu, the city where I grew up in Nigeria. Not too big. Not too small. Just the right size. The people I saw seemed to exude the same sort of calmness the city itself gave. I felt if I could live anywhere else in the world, Kisumu would be it.

I carrried that image of Kisumu in my mind until towards the end of December 2007 when the civil unrests which followed the "landslide victory" of Kibaki began. Kisumu became unearthed from its sweet calm to inhabit front-page news all over the world. Kenyans became split, not along party lines, but along cultural groups. Neighbours began to call up hatred for each other. Everyday I switch on the radio to listen to the news, there are more people, ordinary people being killed. Police dispersing protesters with machine guns. People hiding in their homes, too scared to get out.

Like Ngugi Wa Thiongo pointed out recently, this has gone beyond the rigging of elections. That is not fixed by burning churches with people in them. It is not fixed by killing children hardly old enough to vote. This has mutated into ethnic cleansing. And if we are not careful this could escalate into something more monstrous, more odious than the genocide that decimated Rwanda in 1994 and from which the nation still trills.

NURUDDIN FARAH

Total abuse of the Kenyan people's confidence in themselves; distortion of the African people's faith in their future; blind daylight robbery of our trust, our self-worth. This is criminal.

CHUMA NWOKOLO

Kenya snatched the baton of electoral violence. Today, she flees with that old dog, Tribalism, snapping at her heels. Escalating deaths, fractured lives and a gloomy déjà vu: we have seen this race for life a dozen times before. It is a case of ‘two fighting’; except that the main pugilists will not draw their own blood, they draw the blood of pawns. Presently one combatant will blink and the other will cart away the prize. Then (relative) ‘peace and stability’ will return to allow the venal dogs (far preferable to these blood-thirsty hounds) to return to their haunts at the Kenyan trough.

Yet, ethnic nations (tribes if you prefer) are not the core problem any more than can be a problem to be Kenyan/Tanzanian/Ugandan. It takes a leader of Hitler’s persuasion to convert German/Aryan/Jewish identities into issues of life and death, of genocide. Across the board in Africa it is past time to criminalize recidivist leadership with the potential for genocide. Across the continent, a new fad, the ‘Blanding of Africa’ is gaining currency: the effacement of ethnic nations (Kikuyu, Nupe…) in favour of nation-states (Mali, Sudan…). It would be another signal mistake in a long sequence. Rather than erase the ancient personalities, languages and cultures of our ethnic nations, I’d far rather erase the Kenyan, Nigerian, South African borders and spill their nations and peoples into their geographic envelope…

So much for dreams!

Yet, we do have a problem when armed zombies take to the streets, seeking innocents from other tribes. Without for one moment exculpating those monsters, we need to ask who sustains, channels, manipulates, and benefits from tribalism? Those masterminds behind the machetes are the focal enemy. It is well and good to crisis-manage Kenya by seeking which of two should rule, or how the twain may share power. But the larger issue—beyond election rigging—is: which leaders are worthy of the seat of power.

In these days of geometric escalations from tribal tension to genocide, truth is, beating the tribal drum is much more inimical to the national fabric than the crime of stuffing more ballot boxes than the other chap. The first thing a national leader does, on the day after he ‘wins’ 51% of the vote, is to make a speech wooing the 49% who campaigned and voted against him. How on earth does a ‘leader’ bring on board the survivors of people he has vicariously run through with a spear?

Leaders who have blood on their hands should simply walk away. Leaders who have pounded the tribal drum should not mount the National stage. Kenya—Africa—deserves far better.

For their part, opposition leaders, like many an incumbent, often fail the Solomon Test. (When King Solomon ordered that a disputed baby be cut in two and a bloody half given to each of the contesting mothers, one of them relinquished her claim to the baby in order to save its life. The other insisted that the baby be divided. Instantly, Solomon knew the real mother.) Too many African leaders would rather burn their countries to the ground than walk away. They would rather blow up nations with the dynamite of tribal tension than articulate the policies, and invest the truly hard work of building national consensus. We should put them out of business. It is not an act of courage to fight incumbent dictators by appealing to a tribal caucus. It is an act of moral cowardice; it says: ‘I cannot win this nation, and I have no ideas, no clue, as to how to wrest power, so I’ll just knock over the barrow.’ The tribal rhetoric is now quite passé, the hallmark of leaders bereft of ideas.

Unfortunately, once a party plays the ethnic card it becomes quite hard for others to avoid getting sucked in. Tribalism is the ultimate slippery slope, greased with tragic history. Even today, it peppers European war and politics. We need leaders with a new language, a new vision and a new toolkit for power. Kenya should stop in its track right now, turn around, and stare down that dog, Tribalism, and its sundry demons. This circuit she is running is a loop that descends into hell.

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From the writer’s perspectives, it is clear no party is going to govern peacefully anywhere in Africa in old wineskins. Sagging wineskins. It would be like characters playing parts that do not suit them in a drama. Would they go on forcefully to play or they would have to stop, question the fitness, and write their own script? This is where we are. Why in this century would we be condemning our brothers and sisters to cheap deaths? We need to re-invent ourselves and redefine where we live but first, we must put aside fat egos and lust for power before we can design and embrace an all-inclusive newness.

* Mildred K Barya is Writer-in-Residence at TrustAfrica (www.trustafrica.org)

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