Former President Kgalema Motlanthe spoke at the annual Africa Day International event hosted by Rhodes University’s Pan African Youth Dialogue (PAYD) yesterday May 25.
Rhodes’ Deputy Vice-Chancellor Dr Peter Clayton welcomed Mr Motlanthle to a crowded Eden Grove lecture theatre, along with Chairperson of PAYD Xolani Nyali, who introduced the theme of the evening, Pan Aficanism in the 21st century.
Motlanthe opened his speech with a comical reference to his biographical introduction by Siphokazi Magadla stating, “every time I’m welcomed I’m always left with a deep sense of ambivalence, because it sounds like my obituary.”
He went on to discuss the need for the 21st century Pan African consciousness to escape the constraints of racialised thinking to embrace the broadest sense of humanism possible.
“In South Africa the culture of rich national debate over key issues has evaporated,” said Motlanthe.
He said that this bodes ill for us as a nation, as we will not have an understanding of our past or future.
He critiqued a dominant strand of post-colonial thinking which sees pre-colonial Africa as an idyll out of time, and beyond the natural failings of the human condition.
He attributed this “nativist” thinking to the reduction of failures in post-colonial leadership to external factors rather than part of the human condition. It also disregarded the always present relations of capital which have led to the persisting global economic inequality and the presence of neo-colonialism in Africa, he said.
“We had great expectations that we would develop rapidly,” said Motlanthe. “We had only to take political control and nothing but good would result. But the road has been long and difficult.”
Economic colonialism, he argued, has been obscured by this privilege of racial thinking, which is why he is not surprised by the leadership failures and popular uprisings on the continent, such as most recently seen in Burundi.
A second concept of the 21st century Pan African consciousness he said, moves beyond the commonality of skin colour and racial essence to be a truly “transcendent vision.”
“The oppressed must not in turn become the oppressors, but restore the humanity of both,” said Motlanthe.
Human solidarity, he said, will support other forms of identification which defy ethnic essence such the fear of strangers in xenophobia.
“It is the duty of Pan Africanism to expand to the furthest definition of humanism,” said Motlanthe. “To see human universality as a way of reordering our world.”
He concluded his speech with a quote by Gabriel García Márquez “Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
The questions that followed the speech ranged from interrogating humanness to discussing recent affairs such as xenophobic attacks and the debates around removing colonial statues. On more than one occasion Motlanthe had the crowd chuckling with his parable responses and the common sense quips.
The discussions frequently returned to the importance of addressing the past in order to see our way into the future. Motlanthe commented on this using a metaphor of four V’s.
“First we were victims, then we became victors, we are seen to be a vanguard, however, we must guard against becoming the villains of the future” said Motlanthe.
Motlanthe was thanked by members of Rhodes academic staff and the PAYD for his presence, and Allan Magubane urged him to return to attend the African Leadership Summit which PAYD will hold in December this year.
The Africa Day event is held to commemorate the formation of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963.
Article by: Jane Berg