Africa's Season of Hope: The Dawn of a New Africa-Asia Partnership

II. Africa’s Season of Hope: The Dawn of a New Africa-Asia Partnership

II Africa’s Season of Hope: The Dawn of a New Africa-Asia Partnership Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki Chairperson and Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, Professor S. Jayakumar; Members of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies; Distinguished Guests; Ladies and Gentlemen: I would like to thank you most sincerely for the invitation extended to me to deliver this address to such an august gathering under the auspices of the Institute of Southeast Asia Studies. I am very happy because I see this as part of our important engagements that should strengthen ties between Africa and Asia. This has special significance because of the golden jubilee of the Bandung AsiaAfrica Conference, which will take place in Indonesia this weekend. It is indeed important that we have the opportunity to address a Singaporean audience on the eve of the Asia-Africa Summit, as it reminds us of your country’s support when we were given the opportunity to address the members of ASEAN on the African development programme, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), an event that gave rise to the development of a New Asia-Africa Strategic Partnership. Perhaps it is important that as we focus on the topic of today, “Africa’s Season of Hope: The Dawn of a New Africa-Asia Partnership”, we reflect briefly on the history of the colonial mentality, which drove colonialists to act in highly repressive and inhuman© 2005 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore 5© 2005 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore fashions towards the colonized. Accordingly, this made it inevitable for those living under colonial rule to mobilize for their liberation, always collaborating with others beyond national borders as well as across the oceans, as was the case with the Bandung Conference, which strengthened bonds of solidarity between Asia and Africa. As we know, both the peoples of Asia and Africa suffered many years of colonial domination, denial of freedoms and independence, and subjugation, as well as denigration of their indigenous histories, customs, and traditions. Historian Basil Davidson, writing in his book African Civilisation Revisited says: When our grandchildren reflect on the middle and later years of the twentieth century, above all on the years lying between about 1950 and 1980, and think about us writers of African history, of the history of the black peoples, I think that they will see us as emerging from a time of ignorance and misunderstanding. For these were the liberating years when accounts began at last to be squared with the malice and mystification of racism. And by racism I do not mean, of course, that phalanx of old superstitions, fears and fantasies associated with ancient white ideas about blackness, or not less ancient black ideas about whiteness, the ideas of an old world in which distance always induced distortion. By racism I mean the conscious and systematic weapon of domination, of exploitation, which first saw its demonic rise with the onset of the transAtlantic trade in African captives sold into slavery, and which, later, led on to the imperialist colonialism of yesterdays. Davidson continues: This racism was not a “mistake”, a “misunderstanding” or a 6© 2005 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore “grievous deviation from proper norms of behaviour”. It was not an accident of human error. It was not an unthinking reversion to barbarism. On the contrary, this racism was conceived as the moral justification — the necessary justification, as it was seen by those in the white man’s world who were neither thieves nor moral monsters — for doing to black people what church and state no longer thought it permissible to do to white people: the justification for enslaving black people, that is, when it was no longer permissible to enslave white people. (pp. 3–4) Indeed, given the racist mentality as described by Davidson, the Bandung Asia-Africa Conference of 1955 fifty years ago, was a necessary and inevitable occasion in the important processes of uniting those living under colonialism to accelerate their struggle for their independence and freedom. Clearly, to reflect fully on a season of hope, it is important that we also look at how far we have gone, collectively, in our global struggle against racism, xenophobia, marginalization, and underdevelopment, because it will be difficult to fully enjoy a season of hope while we still have some among us who are experiencing “the conscious and systematic weapon of domination (and) of exploitation”. At the time of the...