Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
The recent African Summit brought back thoughts of my multi-layered connection with the black continent. Surging through my memories were the faces of African leaders whom I've had the honour of meeting and whose visions I shared. Sadly the leaders I'm thinking of by and large never lived to see their dreams of liberty and justice come true. And it is in this context that I wonder whether the African heads of state who met in Libya paid tribute to the freedom fighters in question -- Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Jomo Kenyatta, Agostinno Neto, Leopold Sedar Senghor -- ancestors who risked their lives for the sake of national independence. As they made their speeches, were the present-day African leaders aware of the fact that what they had to say has been said before? In reality, of course, it was said in a far more effective way, with the leaders in question fighting their liberation battles in word and deed as well as, eventually, creating the Organisation of African Unity. They were not only dedicated soldiers but gifted philosophers and men of letters. I met them all, and they never failed to impress me with their conversation and warmth, Nkrumah's dream of African unity being a case in point.
It was in pursuit of this -- a noble goal if ever one existed -- that Nkrumah convened the first Conference of African States in 1958, followed in the same year by the All African Peoples Conference. The first was an official event; the second, as its title denotes, catered directly to the populace, evidencing the leader's insight into the fact that, in managing the affairs of a country, the people of that country must be taken into account. In answer to President Nkrumah's request, I was seconded to the Ghana Department of African Affairs, headed by George Padmore, to help organise the All African Peoples Conference -- an opportunity to see African unity in action. Aside from his role as a militant political leader, Nkrumah was a philosopher of distinction, something to which his book, Consciencism, bears testimony. His theory, expounded elsewhere by the great Sengalu philosopher Alionne Diop, was that the ancient Egyptians were in fact African -- a hypothesis he was to treat as fact.
During the Afro-Asian Conference at Conakry, Guinea, on the other hand, I had the pleasure of meeting President Toure -- one of the strongest militants in the former French colonies' liberation struggle -- and the only one to reject the prospect of membership in the French Commonwealth. As well as his books on trade unionism, he was an accomplished playwright with a theory about the role of theatre in the liberation struggle. As for Senghor, on the other hand, I met him first in Dakar, and once again in Cairo when he visited Egypt. He was one of two African leaders to voluntarily give up the presidential post, the other one being Julius Nyreve, the Tanzanian president who was often referred to as Moallemu or Teacher, because he was a schoolmaster before joining in the struggle. I've read Senghor's poems and his theory of Negritude. One of his favourite themes was what he called "constructive elements of a civilisation of African Negro inspiration". In his writing he stressed the role of writers and artists in decolonisation, describing politics as a single dimension of a multidimensional framework called "culture" -- something for which those who were culturally inclined, like myself, were particularly grateful. In a lecture he gave in Cairo he also drew the connection between Negro and Arab culture.
But there is not enough space to describe my equally stimulating encounters with Kenyata, Neto and other liberation fighters of the Portuguese colonies, whose lyrically nationalist poetry bears distinct resemblances to that of Aragon. Suffice it to say that, going through press reports of the recently concluded summit, and thinking of the various disasters and inter- African genocide with which the continent has been beset in recent years, one feels compelled to salute those great men, whose luminous legacy is needed now more than ever.
