11 - 17 January 2001
Issue No.516
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 11 - 17 January 2001 Issue No.516 |
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Plain Talk
I have just received the third issue of African Perspective, a publication of the State Information Service (SIS). Containing pieces in Arabic, English and French, it contains a number of what I consider to be important essays.
The fact that the SIS publishes such a magazine reflects the importance Egypt attaches to its inclusion among the nations of this great continent. Nor is that importance anything new: Egypt's interest and involvement in African affairs has, after all, a long history.
In 1945, when I was working as a cultural attaché in London, I received orders from Cairo to attend a conference on pan-Africanism which was to be convened in Manchester. During this event, which was organised by George Padmore, I had the pleasure of meeting both Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta. It was the start of what turned out to be a long relationship, with Nkrumah in particular.
Prior to the Manchester conference other fora had discussed pan-Africanism, the debates initiated by William Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. But in many ways the Manchester event acted as a catalyst, not least because of its timing. It was convened at the end of the Second World War, a war in which African soldiers had fought alongside their colonial exploiters.
Significantly, the Manchester Conference had been called for by Africans, a fact that we should not underestimate. Neither Du Bois nor Garvey was African: the former was American, the latter from Jamaica.
Certainly the Manchester event had a galvanising effect and in its wake pan-Africanism was raised as a slogan across the colonised continent. So in many ways the call for freedom and independence was born, as it were, in the most unlikely setting of Manchester, a city whose fortunes had been built on the cotton trade and the export of finished textiles to the colonies.
The statement issued at the close of the conference affirmed the African peoples' resolve to achieve their freedom and shake off the shackles of colonialism. And it was during the conference that the National Secretariat of West Africa, based in London, was formed. I attended several meetings of the new association and forwarded all the documents it produced to Cairo. In addition, I was also required to forward to Cairo the endless succession of white and green papers on the future of the colonies published by the British government.
There was, then, a very clear interest on the part of the Egyptian government in Africa and things African. This stemmed, in part, from the particularities of Egypt's complex historical relationship with Sudan, but also -- and this is something that has never been far from the Egyptian mind across millennia of history -- because of concern over the supply of water to the Nile. In both cases it was quite clearly in Egypt's interest to build strong ties with its continental neighbours. One way of building such ties was through the provision of scholarships. I well remember that one of Egypt's strongest supporters in the Nigerian government was a one time recipient of an Egyptian scholarship to complete a PhD.
Among the African memories the SIS publication brought to mind was my sojourn in Ghana, at the request of Kwame Nkrumah. At the time I was the deputy general secretary of the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Movement, and it was my experience in coordinating that organisation's meetings that led Nkrumah to request my help in organising the meeting of independent African states, convened in Accra in 1958.
It was to be the first of many visits to Ghana. And I clearly remember my last meeting with President Nkrumah, that took place in Accra just before his ill-fated trip to Ghana. During that meeting he spoke at length about his vision of a union of African states to be headed, according to him, by Gamal Abdel-Nasser. "And I would be happy to work under him in any capacity," he told me at the time.
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