Thanx Karim for sharing this great commentary by Amy Niang. Incisive. The
problem probably is that African Presidents from colonialism and in
pseudo-colonialism are more driven by inexorable complex of inferiority to be
quenched by wrong timing and planning. They have no sense of purpose and no
discernible goal for the advancement of their people and countries. They are
incapable of both erasing odious histories and making inspirational ones.
Passion, unguided, in listless fanaticism.
Thanx again for sharing Karim.
Haruna.
In a message dated 3/26/2010 1:01:47 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
African Renaissance, reloaded
The old man, the behemoth and the impossible legacy
Amy Niang
2010-03-25, Issue _475_ (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/475)
_http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/63289_
(http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/63289)
(http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=fahamutech)
_Printer friendly version_
(http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/63289/print)
_
cc A J L_ (http://www.flickr.com/photos/attawayjl/4350087626/) As the
Senegalese president’s ‘Monument of the African Renaissance’ nears completion,
the 164-foot statue in Dakar demonstrates Abdoulaye Wade’s need ‘to
imprint his legacy on a continent that hasn’t fully captured the extent of his
genius’, writes Amy Niang. The monument ‘sparked debate in Senegal and
internationally, not least because of the colossal financial, political and
aesthetic scandal it has proved to be,’ says Niang. But its construction also
symbolises the failure of opposition, civil society and other social forces
to champion the needs of Senegalese people who would have preferred to ‘see
their health, education and basic living problems addressed’.
Senegal’s Mr Wade claims to be the African president awarded the most
academic degrees. The well-rounded professor’s favourite sport is,
unsurprisingly, the production of bright project ideas. President Wade has the knack
for grandiose and extravagant ideas, from high-speed underground trains that
serve the congested suburbs of Dakar to motorways that connect African
cities from Dakar to Addis, to name a few. However this time, he has decided to
give full sway to his fertile imagination and give concrete shape to it.
The _Monument of the African Renaissance _
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Renaissance_Monument) is a 164-foot giant that juts out above one of
the 328-foot tall twin hills of the capital (Les Mamelles). It defies New
York’s Statue of Liberty (151 feet) and Christ the Redeemer (328 feet) in
Rio de Janeiro. A strong and muscular African man has his arms wrapped around
a woman aloft and holding a child resolutely pointing towards the future.
For Mr Wade, the monument conveys a ‘message of dignity for Senegalese and
Africans.’ President Wade sees himself as a moral guide, a messiah. So it’
s perfectly natural and befitting his role as doyen of African leaders to
dream for his people, to envision a prosperous future for the continent and
carry his vision forward into posterity. For Wade, the monument is such an
(another) Omega master plan. It must be difficult for the mind that
fashions such a gigantic creation not to feel like a demiurge!
As the only one of the proponents of the African Renaissance movement
still serving as president – former presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Thabo
Mbeki are the two others – Wade feels he needs to imprint his legacy on a
continent that hasn’t fully captured the extent of his genius. Oblivious to the
way the Senegalese feel about the faults that punctuate his ten-year
administration, Wade is curiously apprehensive about his image internationally.
He seems little concerned about the present, but is quite keen on leaving to
posterity the cult of his greatness.
Since taking power, Wade has undertaken to mediate a number of conflicts
and crises; the services of an African patriarch of his standing could
reasonably be expected to help ease tensions. From Chad to Madagascar and the
Middle East, Wade has made seminal rounds, offering to be the healing and
mending voice of wisdom. But his meddling ways have become unwelcome in many
circles, and Wade’s supportive attitude toward the decried regimes of Daddis
Camara (Guinea), Faure E. Gnassingbé (Togo), etc, did little to help
restore confidence in his sense of judgment. As if this hyperactivity knew no
limit, President Wade embarked on organising _The Fesman (3rd World Festival
of Black Arts)_ (http://www.fesman2009.com/en/) , scheduled for 2009 and
postponed so many times that co-organisers in North and South America are
losing hope of ever seeing it take place.
What is apparent to many is a relentless quest, for recognition and
celebration, which in his view is perhaps to slow to materialise. If the prospect
of a Nobel Peace Prize has become a distant possibility, the hope of
receiving it some day is meanwhile costing the Senegalese people dearly.
Wade’s statue therefore, some argue, is the illustration of a dangerous
kind of madness that lays its petals, openly, one that risks running the
country to bankruptcy. Wade is possessed with a particular kind of madness, for
which senility is only moderately responsible. Wade has lost, a while ago,
the authority of wisdom recognised to elders of African societies. He has
also lost the authority of the democrat, the authority of competence
recognised to leaders who know how to capitalise on meagre resources for the
greater good of society. Somewhere along the way, he has become the vandal and
the renegade of the African Renaissance he so expensively purports to
promote.
Wade’s Monument of the African Renaissance has sparked much debate in
Senegal and internationally, not least because of the colossal financial,
political and aesthetic scandal it has proved to be. Wade’s project imposes on
Senegalese people burdens to which they lay no claim. Moreover, President
Wade is to receive 35 per cent of the proceeds of tourism expected to be
generated by the project, on intellectual property rights. Following the
opposition parties and civil society organisations, the intellectuals and
religious leaders have also invited themselves to the debate. Imams’ contrasted
perspectives derived from an interpretation of rules of Islam. Whilst a
majority of them point to the un-Islamic character of the physical
representation of the human form, some of them were invited to scour the holy texts in
search of supporting arguments. Needless to say, the status has polarised
and blighted the public debate, and again crystallised it in ‘pro’ and ‘
against’ camps. For President Wade, anyone who speaks out against the sculpture
must be against his rule; the members of the civil society that dare point
to the uselessness of the whole project are told off. As President Wade
sees it, ‘there is no civil society in Senegal, there are only politicians’.
A conclave of intellectuals, purportedly sponsored by the president’s
camp, even suggested that the wispily dressed woman should in fact be naked.
Surely, if this fearless family was emerging from a crater, they could not
possibly worry about what clothes they had on; busy they were, running for
their lives! It didn’t take long for people to accuse the ‘statue-ideologists
’ of being a vile representation of woolly-minded idealists zealously
allied to the cause of the president.
The nearly completed monument is also a glaring failure of the opposition,
civil society and other social forces to adopt a strong stance in 2006
when the project was being initiated. Beyond the artistic value – dubious at
best – and the given motives (Renaissance), it is the way it has been forced
upon the lives of the Senegalese that is hard to process. But what seemed
like a long inertia has converted into a mass momentum. For the ordinary
Senegalese, Wade’s brainchild is a mocking affront to the daily reality of
the great majority. At the heart of the debate is the question of the very
opportunity of the monument: Awfully expensive, aesthetically unsightly,
disparagingly indecent for some, and constructed on the basis of nebulous
financial transactions by a North Korean firm. More importantly, the Senegalese
people did not ask for its erection and would rather see their health,
education and basic living problems addressed.
Senegal has a strong independent media, and a strong but uneven and
disparate public opinion that is still struggling to occupy public space.
President Wade is concerned about the possibilities of a resolute public opinion,
although he remains, more than ever, assertively immune to calls for
moderation. His presidential function has severally encroached on his paternal
ambitions for a son, and little precaution is taken to separate the one from
the other. The very principles of equity are abandoned in favour of a ‘
monarchisation’ of power, manifest in the frequent tweaking of the
constitution, the selling off of collective land, the embezzlement of public funds, the
institution of a divide and rule policy between religious groups etc. In
fact, Senegal has become a strange kind of republic, whereby rulers conceive
little with a republican decency. The country has experienced false starts
thrice (under Presidents Senghor, Diouf and now Wade), but could never
really take off.
A friend tells me the daily awe the monument aroused in her, on her way
from work. The monument exudes, she says, ‘at night, a silent and
overwhelming presence that fills it with an obscure whiff of the pagan’. And so the
dust of an uncertain mill rubs off on mesmerised passers-by, some of them
inhabitants of the locality, social detritus produced by decades of inadequate
policies both under the Socialist administration and the Wade regime.
The debate around the statue has naturally become the receptacle of social
discontent and the resentment over the US$35 millions the statue is
alleged to cost an overburdened Senegalese population. The Senegalese do not
recognise Wade the democrat they proudly elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2007
in the current president, an 83-year-old autocrat profoundly disconnected
from the concerns, the pains and dreams of his people. For Wade’s
supporters, however, politicians and intellectuals, the monument should be embraced,
for it symbolises Africa rising from six centuries of bondage and
oppression; it symbolises Africa’s potential to start afresh and dream a brighter
future.
At work is an ongoing movement of consolidation of citizenship and an
ongoing interrogation of the place and contribution of the citizen in a
still-to-be-nation, and in a context of a vexed relationship between citizenship
and state discourse. It would be wrong to apprehend current opposition to
the monument through a discourse of derision or fatalism. The discourse is
one of opportunity that attempts – in the absence of an appropriate framework
within which to consolidate public space in the public sphere – to take
possession of the interstices between public and private space, and to
exploit the ambivalences of political rule. Counter-currents run against state
propaganda, in ways that make it difficult for the state to clamp down on
alternative discourses.
The monument is scheduled for inauguration in April, to mark the
commemoration of the 50th anniversary of independence. Interestingly, it purports to
embody an African independence that is so ostensibly absent in the
functioning of African national institutions. The Senegalese government in
particular suffers from a glaring deficit of confidence and exemplarity. The
monument, for one thing, epitomises a very African affliction: The pointless
splurging drives that have plagued the purses of many national budgets. 50
years into independence, the debate is being rekindled, as to what it should
mean for African states to be independent.
The Senegalese president is not the only one who has been stung by the bug
of celebratory monuments. In Goho Square in Abomey (Benin), the sculpture
of 19th century king Gbehanzin orders a firm ‘stop’ to French colonisers.
In Kinshasa, the Monument to Laurent-Désiré Kabila has pride of place on a
plinth in a central square. In Windhoek, Namibia, the Heroes’ Acre Monument
features amongst other things an obelisk and an Unknown Soldier holding an
AK-47. Whatever motivated the construction of these symbolic monuments,
they have in common the use of the services of North Korean firm _Mansudae
Overseas Projects_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansudae_Overseas_Projects) ,
hence the peculiar ‘Stalinist’ feel to them. Whilst African renaissance
remains a burning issue, actual and endogenous, it is not clear that this
form of tribute would do much to uplift its goals.
Perhaps in 20 years time, the symbolical force and the economic spin-offs
of Wade’s bronze behemoth may make it possible for people to accept it as
part of a Pan-African heritage, rather than decry and flay it. For now, it
is a giant bitter pill that is proving rather difficult for people to
swallow. It is also a thorny issue for the politically tormented president who is
not apologetic about indulging his wildest whims.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* _Amy Niang_ (http://www.pol.ed.ac.uk/student_profiles/amy_niang) is a
PhD candidate at the _School of Social and Political Studies_
(http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/) , University of Edinburgh
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