WRONG-FOOTED ON AFRICA
Sousa Jamba attacks
Western leftists who give comfort to Third World oppressors
DURING the promotion of my novel, Patriots, I was a guest of the BBC's Start the Week programme. All went well until I started talking about some of the experi- ences from which I drew to write the novel. Paul Foot, who was on the panel, dismis- sed all I said as the most reactionary rubbish he had ever heard, and hoped that my book was not as bad as my remarks on the programme. The gist of my argument — which is one of the strands running through my novel — was that most political allegiances in Africa were determined by tribe and not by ideology. This was heresy to Mr Foot. To make matters worse, I had stated earlier on that Mrs Thatcher was popular in Africa. As our political views are diametrically opposed, it was very natural that now and then, during the programme, I should have clashed with Mr Foot. But to have him dismiss all I had said as rubbish, was indeed very patronising. It was as though I, an African exile in London, were telling Mr Foot what Shrewsbury and Oxford had really been like.
I have met several leftist Westerners with views and attitudes very similar to those of Mr Foot. They worry me a lot. I once went to an east London college to give a talk about Africa. In the audience there were two Marxist lecturers. They waited patiently till I had come to the end of my talk and then began to teach me about the African reality; that is, from a Trotskyist point of view. Last year, I found myself in a Rotterdam youth hostel sharing the same room with two Russian, one Rumanian and three British students. The British, who were Marxists, delighted in holding forth on what had gone wrong in Eastern Europe. Naturally, they also kept prescribing the cure to the ills of Eastern Europe. They insisted that only socialism was proper for all East European countries. There were heated arguments: the East Europeans went on about the ills which Marxism had brought to their country.
The British insisted that they were about to be duped by Western capitalism and kept quoting Marx; they were impatient with the East Europeans. Tempers rose
and the managers of the hostel came to tell us that the cafés downtown were better suited for that type of argument.
I am aware that Mr Foot does not agree with the Marxist charlatans who have been ruling my country for the past 15 years. In fact, he would dispute the assertion that they are Marxists. But it saddens me to think that the likes of him support the very ideas which have caused so much suffering to be imposed on Africa, albeit in a different manner. Many African Marxists are now sounding like Mr Foot. After the demise of East European regimes, they are saying that what was wrong was the imple- mentation and not the doctrine.
For many Western Marxists, the struggle of the -isms has been an intellectual one. There are, however, those of us from other parts of the world where the case has been different.
Mr Foot called me a reactionary and I went back to my room in Penge where, in the evening, I heard him sounding off on yet another radio programme. A year ago, in my own country, Angola, had I express- ed some of opinions I did on Start the Week, I would have been sent to a re- education camp by people who sounded very much like Mr Foot. They too used words like 'progress', `backwards', `reac- tionary'. These were words which saw hundreds of people hauled off to prisons. Others were forced to flee from their countries and others died from thirst and starvation. To some of us, these words invoke images of lice, jiggers, bullets, groans, despair.
It is very hard for the likes of Mr Foot to start listening to those of us from the Third World whose views go counter to theirs. This is because, in the West, some leftist circles have usurped certain causes — such as race and the whole question of the Third World — as though they and only they had the definitive say about them. I am not suggesting that Paul Foot and the likes of him do not wish Africa and other parts of the Third World well; far from it. What I am saying is that to these Westerners, Africa only makes sense through their own abstract vision of 'society'.
Patriots is published by Viking at E13.99.
'First we block the motorways, then we march on their cities.'
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