An African thinker
Syed Badrul Ahsan recalls an idealist
There is much about Africa that we do not know. Yes, there are the civil wars and the pogroms that we are pelted with day after day through the media. The tales of corrupt, venal dictators and of the murderous nature of men, as in the Rwanda genocide of 1994 or the post-independence happenings in the Congo in the early 1960s, are what have kept us bound to the thought that Africa is a synonym for chaos. That is a mistaken belief, for Africa is a place, a continent like any other. Nature has endowed it with beauty. Its people, part of its innumerable tribes, have kept life going in the way their ancestors did long ago. Africa has had and has its cultural ferment at work. You go back to the era of Leopold Sedar Senghor, the poet president of Senegal, to appreciate the intellectual affluence of the continent. Men like Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba are synonymous with the political renaissance that freed much of Africa of colonial domination through the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1990s, it was Nelson Mandela's release from long incarceration that set Africa off into a new journey to political revival. African writers have created waves around the world. Chinua Achebe is one. Wole Soyinka is another. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the brilliant intellectual and human rights activist hanged by the murderous Sani Abacha regime in Nigeria in 1995, is another name you roll off your tongue. The young Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has given us Half of a Yellow Sun, a sad novel on the collapse of Biafra and the resultant misery of the Igbos of eastern Nigeria. So there is the richness of Africa for you. The richness acquires deeper tones when you stumble upon the late Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem's collection of incisive essays, aptly titled Speaking Truth to Power. Tajudeen, again a Nigerian, died young, in 2009. Born in 1961, he was killed in a road accident in Nairobi on Africa Liberation Day, which of course is 25 May. But in the brief span of life that he lived, he demonstrated a skill for conducting informed discourse on the many issues that plague Africa in a way few have done earlier. He was acquainted with leading political and social figures of the continent. As a leading voice in the Pan-Africanist Movement, he crisscrossed the continent trying to bridge the divides that kept Africa unable to come together, indeed unable to put in place governments that could and would promote the aspirations of their peoples. Tajudeen obtained a first class honours degree in political science from Bayero University in Kano, before going on to Oxford on a Rhodes fellowship to do a DPhil. After that it was a long association with the Pan-Africanist Movement that led him on to wider expanses of political involvement with Africa. His was a leading role in organising the seventh Pan-African Congress in Kampala in 1994, with delegates from forty-seven countries taking part. In the same year, Tajudeen was part of a team that visited Rwanda to assess conditions there. Ambushed on the trip, Tajudeen narrowly escaped death. Speaking Truth to Power is a frontal assault on the hypocrisies that have afflicted the corridors of power in Africa. It is also an objective evaluation of the realities. Consider some of the themes Tajudeen addresses in the work: Winnie Mandela at 70; Killing of John Garang: who did it?; Presidency in perpetuity; Does Meles think he's Africa's George Bush?; Corrupt leaders are mass murderers; Obama's challenge to Africans; France should be in the dock, not Kagame; Taking Pan-Africanism to the people. You emerge from a reading of the essays here wanting to learn more about a continent that has fascinated and intrigued us in equal measure.
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