Recolonisation is worse than slavery

[AP]

"The story of the poor goes round and round. But what about the story of the rich ? The story not being told is that of the beneficiaries of slavery and colonialism. The story of exploitation that put us into this dispensation, commodified our own life for profit. They divided and ruled. Can we unite and live ? Can we unite for the world that will be our world ? Let us rise up and begin to tell this story* of why they continue to be rich, continue to plunder." -- Wahu Kaara, Kenyan feminist activist speaking at the ASF opening plenary

At the opening plenary of the Africa Social Forum in Lusaka, Zambia (10-14 December, 2004), delegates from across the continent gave varied testimonies that coalesced around a single truth : recolonisation is worse than slavery.

Activists noted Africa's history of injustices and oppression through colonialism, slavery and apartheid, but swiftly moved on to the injustices of present-day, post-colonial Africa : privatisation and cost-recovery, wars fought over Africa's natural resources, heavy debt burdens and conditionalities, unfair trade and disease. Contrary to dominant accounts of the continent as an almost biblically 'cursed' 'basket case' and Africans as helpless victims, delegate after delegate emphasised that Africa's poverty, wars and disease pandemics are causally related to a global economic system that is predicated on the poverty of the many.

"The world, it would seem, friends, is at the end of its imagination", Corinne Kumar of Tunisia and Indonesia told the assembled plenary. How much further can the tired mechanisms of domination and exploitation be stretched ? Though they are continuously re- disguised, masquerading as World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) or Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), as the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) or Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), the instruments of oppression remain just as blatant for those attempting to access basic services like water, land, education and healthcare - with increasing difficulty.

Colonialism is a very old game, and is thus forced to maintain itself through substitutions - substitutions that activists are perpetually contesting. Substitutions of NEPAD for economic liberation, of incessant white tutelage for black independent praxis, of "efficiency" that benefits the few rather than the many, of a blameless past for a counter-hegemonic history, of the language of the powerful for localised terminology and stories, of dignity for the flat notion of "equality". Kumar's assertions were echoed by many activists throughout the Forum : it is up to the South - and Africa in particular - to champion notions of democracy that are not intrinsically tied to the market economy ; to find new notions of power that facilitate, transform, and enhance ; to redefine Africa through a discourse of dissent - one that decentres, disrupts and interrupts all that is dominant.

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