Post by upfromsumdirt on Oct 17, 2006 15:33:21 GMT -5
POV: soyinka on darfur
=========================
DARFUR: THE AVOIDANCE WORD STILL SCREAMS ITS NAME
Wole Soyinka
In a recent speech at the 50th Anniversary of the 1st International
Conference of Black Writers & Artists in Paris, Wole Soyinka warned
against the neglect of those who remain silent against the crimes
against humanity in Darfur: "As the armies of the Sudanese state mass
for the final onslaught on its long determined design of race
extermination, that future will stigmatise you one and all, will
brand you collaborators and acccomplices if you abandon the people of
Darfur to this awful fate, one that so blindingly scrawls its name
across the supplicating sands and hills of Darfur - Genocide!"
Was it not here, on this same French soil, in this culture proud
nation that sometimes appears to conflate the very notion of
civilization with whatever is uniquely French, that a culture warrior
once took the bulldozer to a hamburger joint some years ago? His
mission was - to stem the tide of a neo-barbarism that, for the
French, is synonymous with whatever is American. Lost on that-
protector of French cultural purity was a thought that must have
tickled the collective memory of former French colonials: the
Macdonalisationor Disneyisation of French urban landscape was a kind
of poetic justice in a reverse play of history. MacDonalds had
arrived from the former colony of another European power to challenge
the cultural hermeticism of a former colonizer.
The circumstances, and action directe of the bulldozer response
differed somewhat from the strategy embarked upon by the poet and
statesman Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Diop, Rene
Depestre and other cultural militants - to adopt Senghor's own
_expression - in their own time.
They were also protesting - right on the terrain of their colonizers,
and as protagonists of a distant civilisation - the ascendancy of
others over their own cultures and civilization. Theirs was of course
a far-reaching protest, initiated within the enemy camp, against the
lop-sided dialogue between France and her possessions, one that had
turned the African mind into a mere cultural receptacle of France,
indentured it to European identity and values. Thus, Negritude - to
give it its name - was compelled to commence by a seemingly
separatist strategy, one that restated an African cultural matrix in
contradistinction to the European.
The implication of this, on the surface, was that the paracletes of
Negritude commenced with a proposition of two distinct, parallel
cultures, two monologues - one, the European, the other, black
African. It was, in plain language, a strategy of fighting fire with
fire. Those who recall the phase of
black nationalism in the United States and in apartheid South Africa
- Back to Africa, Black is Beautiful, Black Consciousness etc. - will
easily recognize in Negritude both heir to, and precursor of a
tradition that is born of displacement, domination and dispossession.
Its strategy provoked accusations of counter racism from white
liberal thought - phrased benignly perhaps by Jean-Paul Sartre as -
anti-racist racism. Would all extant racial discourse - all
contemporary propositions and projects of cultural separatism were
equally benign, and even, as in this case, propitious for the
harmonization of the human race. For even this separatist
assertiveness was eventually guided into the predication of
convergence with others. This optimistic outlook, the mutual
insemination of cultures, under Leopold Sedar Senghor's restless
historicism, expanded to embrace the Arab world and its cultural
actualities, to which he gave the name - Arabite. It was the
culminating annunciation of what history itself had long proclaimed,
one that would result, inexorably - in Senghor's formulation - as the
Equilibrium of twentieth-century Humanism, the Civilisation of the
Universal.
It would be more than sufficient, in my view, if our gathering today
achieved nothing more than an evocation of that optimism, a reunion
of minds, a celebration of identity and origin, and an opening up of
the collective memory for interrogation, to determine what may be
jettisoned, and what to re invigorate as a racial contribution to the
quest for the universal. It would still remain deeply satisfying if
we have merely responded to the human impulse towards celebration,
carving out a brief pause for ourselves from the crushing demands of
an increasingly unstable world, its negativities, its season of fear
and menace, simply to bask, for two or three days in the boldness of
a 50- year old initiative that sought to wean a closed, imperial and
aggressive world of its racist limitations. It would be sufficient to
celebrate that moment, fifty years ago, when the citizens of the
continent of disdain, and their brothers and sisters in the Diaspora
joined minds to demolish the doctrines on which the mission of
colonialism was raised, and challenge the scriptures - both religious
and philosophical - on whose authority the inhuman commerce in black
flesh - Arab and European - had been justified. Celebration may
choose to limit itself to the euphoria of that event, but one that
may also be followed by the sobriety of 'the morning after' when
reflection takes over, and the expressed or implicit summons of the
occasion begin to resurface, enjoining a re-designing of the future,
of a re-positioning of attitudes, replacing complacency with re-
dedication, disturbing one's peace of mind with the summons of a
familiar imperative: a task that remains unfinished, even after fifty
years.
The very prospect of such a reunion, even before the event, may
however have provoked an alertness to current, thematically
contingent actualities, realities that exhibit the very provocations
which, in no small measure, aroused a need for that original
gathering, over and beyond the mere wish for a meeting of minds.
Realities that make the bulldozer almost a benevolent act, since that
agent of cultural eradication has since given way to the armoured
truck, the flame thrower, the strafing aircraft and the fragmentation
bomb.
Realities where - to bring it all to the present - a presumably
modern state, with its massive weaponry of coercion, has replaced the
local maverick, acts in full confidence of the control of its own
borders, and in a project for the alteration of the demography of a
humanised space, its history, its cultural uniqueness - in short, a
project for the eradication of its thriving humanity.
Even as we speak, even as the world is distracted by other heated
zones all over the globe, one such project is taking place on the
black continent, with the passive complicity of that continent's rulers.
Those who have had the dubious privilege of reading the manifestoes
of the arrowhead of a state policy of ethnic cleansing, the Sudanese
Janjaweed, an agenda pronounced, without ambiguity, as the
Arabisation of the Sudanese nation - will surely have squirmed at the
naked language of racial incitement, its claims of race superiority,
complemented by the language of contempt and disdain for the
indigenous African. It is not quite what Senghor had in mind when he
embarked on his fraternal annunciation of arabite and his proposition
for a north-south, negro-arab collaboration of cultures: Je ne parle
meme d'arabisme.. je parle d'arabite, de cette arabite qui est le
foyer irradiant des vertus de l'eternal Bedouin.
How Senghor, humanist idealist, would shudder today at the perversion
of that vision on reading contemporary tracts in which a state
commits itself -through its surrogates - to the eradication of
partners in that optimistic venture, actively condones the
elimination of those cultural partners who, to add to the grim irony,
were autochthones of that land long before the arrival of the current
apostles of race supremacy, a pernicious fantasy that one hoped had
been rebuked by monumental race criminalities of the past - the Arabo-
European enslavement of and trade in the commodity of African
peoples, by the Jim Crow culture of governance by lynch mobs and
segregation laws in the 'brave new world' of the American mainland,
by the lessons of the Holocaust, the atrocities of Apartheid South
Africa and even, so lately, the horrors of Rwanda. It is clearly the
ambition of the Sudanese government to surpass these records of
dishonour, and the world appears to accept that it deserves to
succeed, that it is right and just that an African nation join its
name to the long catalogue of racist infamy. Enjoy the starkness and
concision of directives from authenticated documents taken from the
headquarters of one Sheik Musa Hilal, acknowledged leader of the
Janjaweed: Change the demography of Darfur. Empty it of all African
tribes.
The nation that is Sudan belongs to two families of the world
community - Arab and African. These are structured, with global
recognition, as the Arab League, and the Africa Union. It is
depressing to observe the studied indifference of one - the Arab
family - to the criminality of one of its members, a nation
historically placed as a cultural bridge between two races, just as,
in Senghor's cultural architecture, the North Africa Arab world
represents the bridge between Africa and Europe. The African family,
for its part, manifests a shaming impotence that permits a re-
enactment of a history that forged the chains of colonial bondage.
But there is also a third, overarching family that is common to both
- the United Nations. When a deviant branch of that family of nations
flouts, indeed revels in the abandonment of the most basic norms of
human decency, is there really justification in evoking the excuse
that protocol requires the permission of that same arrogant and
defiant entity, one that is unambiguously indicted in the court of
universal censure, before it goes to the rescue of its abused,
violated, and dehumanized victims?
One finds it odd that this alibi for inaction was not invoked before
the rigorous intervention in former Yugoslavia, an intervention that
not only brought a rogue regime to heel, but oversaw the return and
rehabilitation of the dispersed populations of ethnic Albanians and
Moslem Croats. If the lightning speed at which the UN responded to
the recent Middle East war and its aftermath is explained away by the
willingness of the belligerents to accommodate, indeed to demand the
presence of peace enforcers from the United Nations, we are still
left with the example of intervention in central Europe over the
strenuous resistance of the murdering regimes. That leaves the
African situation in what category, exactly? Equals before the family
structures of rights and responsibilities, or yet again, fifty years
after the first organised challenge to a racist order, as the
marginalised orphans of history?
As we speak, the Africa Union is preparing to abandon the peoples of
Darfur, leaving them at the mercy of murdering, raping, and burning
gospellers of race doctrine, withdrawing even its pathetically
inadequate protection forces which, at the very least, provided a
moral presence and a modicum of restraint. We are speaking here of a
nation where mass rape is proffered as compliment to Senghor's vision
of cultural metissage. This is the established profile of a regime
that has given its peers their marching orders, read them the riot
act and delivered its ultimatum, and the African family has chosen to
obey, to beat a retreat on schedule, with its tail between its legs.
The Arab Family, one to which belongs a primary moral authority
irrespective of the location of its member on the black continent,
has steadfastly refused to call Sudan to order, indeed placed
obstacles in the way of sanctions. But by what right does this
speaker impose this moral responsibility on the Arab world?
None whatsoever, except on the authority of the protagonists of Arab
culture themselves, on their own historic claims, such as the self-
pronounced Arabist, the Sudanese prime minister, Ismail Al- Azhari,
who, in 1965, made the following declaration:
'We are proud of our Arab origin, of our Arabism and of being
Muslims. The Arabs came to this continent, as pioneers, to
disseminate a genuine culture and promote sound principles which have
shed enlightenment and civilization throughout Africa at a time when
Europe was plunged into the abyss of darkness, ignorance, and
doctrinal and scholarly backwardness. It is our ancestors who held
the torch high and led the caravan of liberation and advancement; and
it is they who provided a superior melting-pot for Greek, Persian and
Indian culture, giving them the chance to react with all that was
noble in Arab culture, and handing them back to the rest of the world
as a guide to those who wished to extend the frontiers of learning"
That lofty declaration - never mind its hyperbolic accents - but
certainly one which Leopold Sedar Senghor would have endorsed as the
ringing spirit of Arabite was made just less than a decade after the
first gathering of the black writers and artistes of the world,
impelled also by the need to situate their race and heritage
accurately in a racist world. The claims of black civilization were
no less resonant at that conference, no less proud, the mission of
race retrieval no less impassioned. And the question we must ask the
government of Sudan today is simply this: how does the current
manifesto of the Janjaweed, the champions of Arabism, its project of
cultural extermination, correspond to Al-Azhari's manifesto of
enlightenment - among numerous others.
Examine the tomes of attestation with the United Nations' fact-
finding missions, examine even the dossiers that have resulted in
sealed indictments against named individuals both in government and
in the autonomous order of the Janjaweed, soulmates of the
Milesovics, the Radovan Karavics, the Radkos of eastern Europe, and
tell us if Al-Azhari's banner of enlightenment has not been
besmirched by his Hitlerian apostles.
And the African family? I refer to the family of humanist idealism of
whom the poets and philosophers sang or preached - Aime Cesaire, Leon
Damas, Marcelino dos Santos John Mbiti, Ogotimeli, Tierno Bokar and
all. Did they not instruct that African humanism does implicate a
concern, and a responsibility towards 'my neighour'? And does that
responsibility end with the rhetoric of power and the commodity of
compromise? This African family, which vies for cultural honour with
any race on earth, will be the subject of our gathering here, so for
now, we shall merely let this question hang in the air: Has that
family made any move to openly denounce or expel this renegade member?
What happens in private caucuses within the closed chambers of the so-
called 'peer review mechanism' of NEPAD and other much vaunted
structures of restraint, is cold comfort to those who are violated
daily, who fight the hot and grainy wind for the rags on their backs,
the pitiless sun for moisture, the camels for the dry clumps of grass
that have escaped the fury of the Janjaweed arsonists. And as they
leave their camps, in sheer desperation, to forage for more
nourishing fodder, are they not set upon by the marauding Janjaweed,
slaughtered, raped, mutilated and robbed of the last shreds of their
innate dignity?
For the family of all, the United Nations, which again and again has
been compelled to avow, 'Never Again', it continues to meet in
impotence and debate in sterility. Sealed indictments against the
identified violators of humanity are admirable, but they cannot
replace the rigour and honour of prevention.
Not one member of the UN family has expressed its displeasure by
expelling Sudanese diplomats from its borders. Not one has demanded
that sanctions be universally applied to the Sudanese cesspit of
criminal impunity. For decades, Libya was declared the pariah of the
international community on suspicion and/or evidence of complicity in
terrorist acts, and of harbouring terrorists within its borders - she
was ostracized. What further dimension of state terrorism does the
world need in order to act when a government unleashes its
surrogates, armed to the teeth, supported, supplied, and logistically
enabled by its own forces and intelligence services, authorised by
well documented mandate of ethnic cleansing, its acts witnessed,
recorded and reported by the United Nations' own agencies, its
results seared on the Sudanese landscape as mass burial grounds,
ruins of burnt villages, poisoned wells, slaughtered livestock, in
the swelling army of mutilated survivors, victims of gang rape, of
diseased and overflowing refugee camps.
Words are our stock-in- trade, and writers are not slow to notice
when a word screams out through absence and avoidance. Now what is
that word that the United Nations, once again, has scrupulously
skirted, a strategic avoidance, a moral liability that led, in this
very recent memory to - Rwanda? The protocols are clear. Recognition
of a certain dimension of criminality against a people, its culture,
against the very existence of the people of Darfur compels the United
Nations to act. But no, Darfur is not the heart of Europe.
It is not the heart of Lebanon or the borders of Israel. It is
located in a land of disdain, recognized only as the home of want and
occasionally - of much sought material resources So, just what is
this word that accuses, damns, and will not be silenced? What is this
word for which so many substitutes are massed, though derobed of the
inexorable imperative, in the corridors and chambers of the United
Nations?
As writers, we cannot cease to recognize and embrace our mission of
testifying and laying ambush for escapist minds. Those who are alive
today to witness this renewed perfidy, and their successors living or
yet unborn in the mission of warning and bearing witness, will not
forget. Let words, at the very least, be mobilized towards the
fulfillment of responsibilities by those who are charged with the
protection of the weak and helpless, the temporarily disadvantaged,
let them persist in saying to you, all who hold the primary controls
of the direction of a continent's future, that that future will not
forget, nor will it forgive. As the armies of the Sudanese state mass
for the final onslaught on its long determined design of race
extermination, that future will stigmatise you one and all, will
brand you collaborators and acccomplices if you abandon the people of
Darfur to this awful fate, one that so blindingly scrawls its name
across the supplicating sands and hills of Darfur - Genocide!
. This Paper by Prof Wole Soyinka was presented at the 50th
Anniversary of the 1st International Conference of Black Writers &
Artists -Paris, 19-22nd September 2006. It is reproduced here with
the permission of the author. - not hardly....
=========================
DARFUR: THE AVOIDANCE WORD STILL SCREAMS ITS NAME
Wole Soyinka
In a recent speech at the 50th Anniversary of the 1st International
Conference of Black Writers & Artists in Paris, Wole Soyinka warned
against the neglect of those who remain silent against the crimes
against humanity in Darfur: "As the armies of the Sudanese state mass
for the final onslaught on its long determined design of race
extermination, that future will stigmatise you one and all, will
brand you collaborators and acccomplices if you abandon the people of
Darfur to this awful fate, one that so blindingly scrawls its name
across the supplicating sands and hills of Darfur - Genocide!"
Was it not here, on this same French soil, in this culture proud
nation that sometimes appears to conflate the very notion of
civilization with whatever is uniquely French, that a culture warrior
once took the bulldozer to a hamburger joint some years ago? His
mission was - to stem the tide of a neo-barbarism that, for the
French, is synonymous with whatever is American. Lost on that-
protector of French cultural purity was a thought that must have
tickled the collective memory of former French colonials: the
Macdonalisationor Disneyisation of French urban landscape was a kind
of poetic justice in a reverse play of history. MacDonalds had
arrived from the former colony of another European power to challenge
the cultural hermeticism of a former colonizer.
The circumstances, and action directe of the bulldozer response
differed somewhat from the strategy embarked upon by the poet and
statesman Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Diop, Rene
Depestre and other cultural militants - to adopt Senghor's own
_expression - in their own time.
They were also protesting - right on the terrain of their colonizers,
and as protagonists of a distant civilisation - the ascendancy of
others over their own cultures and civilization. Theirs was of course
a far-reaching protest, initiated within the enemy camp, against the
lop-sided dialogue between France and her possessions, one that had
turned the African mind into a mere cultural receptacle of France,
indentured it to European identity and values. Thus, Negritude - to
give it its name - was compelled to commence by a seemingly
separatist strategy, one that restated an African cultural matrix in
contradistinction to the European.
The implication of this, on the surface, was that the paracletes of
Negritude commenced with a proposition of two distinct, parallel
cultures, two monologues - one, the European, the other, black
African. It was, in plain language, a strategy of fighting fire with
fire. Those who recall the phase of
black nationalism in the United States and in apartheid South Africa
- Back to Africa, Black is Beautiful, Black Consciousness etc. - will
easily recognize in Negritude both heir to, and precursor of a
tradition that is born of displacement, domination and dispossession.
Its strategy provoked accusations of counter racism from white
liberal thought - phrased benignly perhaps by Jean-Paul Sartre as -
anti-racist racism. Would all extant racial discourse - all
contemporary propositions and projects of cultural separatism were
equally benign, and even, as in this case, propitious for the
harmonization of the human race. For even this separatist
assertiveness was eventually guided into the predication of
convergence with others. This optimistic outlook, the mutual
insemination of cultures, under Leopold Sedar Senghor's restless
historicism, expanded to embrace the Arab world and its cultural
actualities, to which he gave the name - Arabite. It was the
culminating annunciation of what history itself had long proclaimed,
one that would result, inexorably - in Senghor's formulation - as the
Equilibrium of twentieth-century Humanism, the Civilisation of the
Universal.
It would be more than sufficient, in my view, if our gathering today
achieved nothing more than an evocation of that optimism, a reunion
of minds, a celebration of identity and origin, and an opening up of
the collective memory for interrogation, to determine what may be
jettisoned, and what to re invigorate as a racial contribution to the
quest for the universal. It would still remain deeply satisfying if
we have merely responded to the human impulse towards celebration,
carving out a brief pause for ourselves from the crushing demands of
an increasingly unstable world, its negativities, its season of fear
and menace, simply to bask, for two or three days in the boldness of
a 50- year old initiative that sought to wean a closed, imperial and
aggressive world of its racist limitations. It would be sufficient to
celebrate that moment, fifty years ago, when the citizens of the
continent of disdain, and their brothers and sisters in the Diaspora
joined minds to demolish the doctrines on which the mission of
colonialism was raised, and challenge the scriptures - both religious
and philosophical - on whose authority the inhuman commerce in black
flesh - Arab and European - had been justified. Celebration may
choose to limit itself to the euphoria of that event, but one that
may also be followed by the sobriety of 'the morning after' when
reflection takes over, and the expressed or implicit summons of the
occasion begin to resurface, enjoining a re-designing of the future,
of a re-positioning of attitudes, replacing complacency with re-
dedication, disturbing one's peace of mind with the summons of a
familiar imperative: a task that remains unfinished, even after fifty
years.
The very prospect of such a reunion, even before the event, may
however have provoked an alertness to current, thematically
contingent actualities, realities that exhibit the very provocations
which, in no small measure, aroused a need for that original
gathering, over and beyond the mere wish for a meeting of minds.
Realities that make the bulldozer almost a benevolent act, since that
agent of cultural eradication has since given way to the armoured
truck, the flame thrower, the strafing aircraft and the fragmentation
bomb.
Realities where - to bring it all to the present - a presumably
modern state, with its massive weaponry of coercion, has replaced the
local maverick, acts in full confidence of the control of its own
borders, and in a project for the alteration of the demography of a
humanised space, its history, its cultural uniqueness - in short, a
project for the eradication of its thriving humanity.
Even as we speak, even as the world is distracted by other heated
zones all over the globe, one such project is taking place on the
black continent, with the passive complicity of that continent's rulers.
Those who have had the dubious privilege of reading the manifestoes
of the arrowhead of a state policy of ethnic cleansing, the Sudanese
Janjaweed, an agenda pronounced, without ambiguity, as the
Arabisation of the Sudanese nation - will surely have squirmed at the
naked language of racial incitement, its claims of race superiority,
complemented by the language of contempt and disdain for the
indigenous African. It is not quite what Senghor had in mind when he
embarked on his fraternal annunciation of arabite and his proposition
for a north-south, negro-arab collaboration of cultures: Je ne parle
meme d'arabisme.. je parle d'arabite, de cette arabite qui est le
foyer irradiant des vertus de l'eternal Bedouin.
How Senghor, humanist idealist, would shudder today at the perversion
of that vision on reading contemporary tracts in which a state
commits itself -through its surrogates - to the eradication of
partners in that optimistic venture, actively condones the
elimination of those cultural partners who, to add to the grim irony,
were autochthones of that land long before the arrival of the current
apostles of race supremacy, a pernicious fantasy that one hoped had
been rebuked by monumental race criminalities of the past - the Arabo-
European enslavement of and trade in the commodity of African
peoples, by the Jim Crow culture of governance by lynch mobs and
segregation laws in the 'brave new world' of the American mainland,
by the lessons of the Holocaust, the atrocities of Apartheid South
Africa and even, so lately, the horrors of Rwanda. It is clearly the
ambition of the Sudanese government to surpass these records of
dishonour, and the world appears to accept that it deserves to
succeed, that it is right and just that an African nation join its
name to the long catalogue of racist infamy. Enjoy the starkness and
concision of directives from authenticated documents taken from the
headquarters of one Sheik Musa Hilal, acknowledged leader of the
Janjaweed: Change the demography of Darfur. Empty it of all African
tribes.
The nation that is Sudan belongs to two families of the world
community - Arab and African. These are structured, with global
recognition, as the Arab League, and the Africa Union. It is
depressing to observe the studied indifference of one - the Arab
family - to the criminality of one of its members, a nation
historically placed as a cultural bridge between two races, just as,
in Senghor's cultural architecture, the North Africa Arab world
represents the bridge between Africa and Europe. The African family,
for its part, manifests a shaming impotence that permits a re-
enactment of a history that forged the chains of colonial bondage.
But there is also a third, overarching family that is common to both
- the United Nations. When a deviant branch of that family of nations
flouts, indeed revels in the abandonment of the most basic norms of
human decency, is there really justification in evoking the excuse
that protocol requires the permission of that same arrogant and
defiant entity, one that is unambiguously indicted in the court of
universal censure, before it goes to the rescue of its abused,
violated, and dehumanized victims?
One finds it odd that this alibi for inaction was not invoked before
the rigorous intervention in former Yugoslavia, an intervention that
not only brought a rogue regime to heel, but oversaw the return and
rehabilitation of the dispersed populations of ethnic Albanians and
Moslem Croats. If the lightning speed at which the UN responded to
the recent Middle East war and its aftermath is explained away by the
willingness of the belligerents to accommodate, indeed to demand the
presence of peace enforcers from the United Nations, we are still
left with the example of intervention in central Europe over the
strenuous resistance of the murdering regimes. That leaves the
African situation in what category, exactly? Equals before the family
structures of rights and responsibilities, or yet again, fifty years
after the first organised challenge to a racist order, as the
marginalised orphans of history?
As we speak, the Africa Union is preparing to abandon the peoples of
Darfur, leaving them at the mercy of murdering, raping, and burning
gospellers of race doctrine, withdrawing even its pathetically
inadequate protection forces which, at the very least, provided a
moral presence and a modicum of restraint. We are speaking here of a
nation where mass rape is proffered as compliment to Senghor's vision
of cultural metissage. This is the established profile of a regime
that has given its peers their marching orders, read them the riot
act and delivered its ultimatum, and the African family has chosen to
obey, to beat a retreat on schedule, with its tail between its legs.
The Arab Family, one to which belongs a primary moral authority
irrespective of the location of its member on the black continent,
has steadfastly refused to call Sudan to order, indeed placed
obstacles in the way of sanctions. But by what right does this
speaker impose this moral responsibility on the Arab world?
None whatsoever, except on the authority of the protagonists of Arab
culture themselves, on their own historic claims, such as the self-
pronounced Arabist, the Sudanese prime minister, Ismail Al- Azhari,
who, in 1965, made the following declaration:
'We are proud of our Arab origin, of our Arabism and of being
Muslims. The Arabs came to this continent, as pioneers, to
disseminate a genuine culture and promote sound principles which have
shed enlightenment and civilization throughout Africa at a time when
Europe was plunged into the abyss of darkness, ignorance, and
doctrinal and scholarly backwardness. It is our ancestors who held
the torch high and led the caravan of liberation and advancement; and
it is they who provided a superior melting-pot for Greek, Persian and
Indian culture, giving them the chance to react with all that was
noble in Arab culture, and handing them back to the rest of the world
as a guide to those who wished to extend the frontiers of learning"
That lofty declaration - never mind its hyperbolic accents - but
certainly one which Leopold Sedar Senghor would have endorsed as the
ringing spirit of Arabite was made just less than a decade after the
first gathering of the black writers and artistes of the world,
impelled also by the need to situate their race and heritage
accurately in a racist world. The claims of black civilization were
no less resonant at that conference, no less proud, the mission of
race retrieval no less impassioned. And the question we must ask the
government of Sudan today is simply this: how does the current
manifesto of the Janjaweed, the champions of Arabism, its project of
cultural extermination, correspond to Al-Azhari's manifesto of
enlightenment - among numerous others.
Examine the tomes of attestation with the United Nations' fact-
finding missions, examine even the dossiers that have resulted in
sealed indictments against named individuals both in government and
in the autonomous order of the Janjaweed, soulmates of the
Milesovics, the Radovan Karavics, the Radkos of eastern Europe, and
tell us if Al-Azhari's banner of enlightenment has not been
besmirched by his Hitlerian apostles.
And the African family? I refer to the family of humanist idealism of
whom the poets and philosophers sang or preached - Aime Cesaire, Leon
Damas, Marcelino dos Santos John Mbiti, Ogotimeli, Tierno Bokar and
all. Did they not instruct that African humanism does implicate a
concern, and a responsibility towards 'my neighour'? And does that
responsibility end with the rhetoric of power and the commodity of
compromise? This African family, which vies for cultural honour with
any race on earth, will be the subject of our gathering here, so for
now, we shall merely let this question hang in the air: Has that
family made any move to openly denounce or expel this renegade member?
What happens in private caucuses within the closed chambers of the so-
called 'peer review mechanism' of NEPAD and other much vaunted
structures of restraint, is cold comfort to those who are violated
daily, who fight the hot and grainy wind for the rags on their backs,
the pitiless sun for moisture, the camels for the dry clumps of grass
that have escaped the fury of the Janjaweed arsonists. And as they
leave their camps, in sheer desperation, to forage for more
nourishing fodder, are they not set upon by the marauding Janjaweed,
slaughtered, raped, mutilated and robbed of the last shreds of their
innate dignity?
For the family of all, the United Nations, which again and again has
been compelled to avow, 'Never Again', it continues to meet in
impotence and debate in sterility. Sealed indictments against the
identified violators of humanity are admirable, but they cannot
replace the rigour and honour of prevention.
Not one member of the UN family has expressed its displeasure by
expelling Sudanese diplomats from its borders. Not one has demanded
that sanctions be universally applied to the Sudanese cesspit of
criminal impunity. For decades, Libya was declared the pariah of the
international community on suspicion and/or evidence of complicity in
terrorist acts, and of harbouring terrorists within its borders - she
was ostracized. What further dimension of state terrorism does the
world need in order to act when a government unleashes its
surrogates, armed to the teeth, supported, supplied, and logistically
enabled by its own forces and intelligence services, authorised by
well documented mandate of ethnic cleansing, its acts witnessed,
recorded and reported by the United Nations' own agencies, its
results seared on the Sudanese landscape as mass burial grounds,
ruins of burnt villages, poisoned wells, slaughtered livestock, in
the swelling army of mutilated survivors, victims of gang rape, of
diseased and overflowing refugee camps.
Words are our stock-in- trade, and writers are not slow to notice
when a word screams out through absence and avoidance. Now what is
that word that the United Nations, once again, has scrupulously
skirted, a strategic avoidance, a moral liability that led, in this
very recent memory to - Rwanda? The protocols are clear. Recognition
of a certain dimension of criminality against a people, its culture,
against the very existence of the people of Darfur compels the United
Nations to act. But no, Darfur is not the heart of Europe.
It is not the heart of Lebanon or the borders of Israel. It is
located in a land of disdain, recognized only as the home of want and
occasionally - of much sought material resources So, just what is
this word that accuses, damns, and will not be silenced? What is this
word for which so many substitutes are massed, though derobed of the
inexorable imperative, in the corridors and chambers of the United
Nations?
As writers, we cannot cease to recognize and embrace our mission of
testifying and laying ambush for escapist minds. Those who are alive
today to witness this renewed perfidy, and their successors living or
yet unborn in the mission of warning and bearing witness, will not
forget. Let words, at the very least, be mobilized towards the
fulfillment of responsibilities by those who are charged with the
protection of the weak and helpless, the temporarily disadvantaged,
let them persist in saying to you, all who hold the primary controls
of the direction of a continent's future, that that future will not
forget, nor will it forgive. As the armies of the Sudanese state mass
for the final onslaught on its long determined design of race
extermination, that future will stigmatise you one and all, will
brand you collaborators and acccomplices if you abandon the people of
Darfur to this awful fate, one that so blindingly scrawls its name
across the supplicating sands and hills of Darfur - Genocide!
. This Paper by Prof Wole Soyinka was presented at the 50th
Anniversary of the 1st International Conference of Black Writers &
Artists -Paris, 19-22nd September 2006. It is reproduced here with
the permission of the author. - not hardly....
