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Omoshango
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Posted: Monday January 9th, 2006 22:20 |
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http://www.frontpageafrica.com/RunScript.asp?page=42&Article_ID=1157&NWS=NWS&ap=NewsDetail.asp&p=ASP/~Pg42.asp
A Critical Review: Learning to Love Africa - 1/8/2006 6:57:12 PM
By Anthony Morgan
Contributing Writer
 Monique Maddy, who worked for the UNDP (United Nations
Development Program) in East and Central Africa, writes beautifully, and offers brilliant insight into the inner workings of UN programs like the IMF, its twin, the World Bank, and how both contribute to Africa’s continuing underdevelopment and misery.
The book also gives us a look inside the world of venture capital and how who you know is most often more important than what you know, especially if your business interests lie on the African continent. Lesson number one in raising capital: Go to an Ivy League school.
Her account of the startup of her telecommunications ventures in Tanzania and Ghana is a must-read for those interested in doing business on the continent.
But she should have ended the book there. Outside of the fact that she was born in Liberia, it seems the only reason Miss Maddy admits any connection to Africa is because it’s the only thing that makes her story interesting enough to distinguish her from other graduates of the famed Ivy League citadel of capitalist exploitation. She has nothing new to say other than the same tired old oversimplifications promulgated by uninformed western writers, and offers no workable solutions for the continent’s ills that she decries.
The very premise of an African having to learn to love the continent raises eyebrows, since that is a sentiment one would expect from a westerner, not someone born in Liberia. However imperfect one’s mother may be, it’s kind of hard to imagine them having to learn to love her.
But that insulting subtitle serves as ample warning of what’s to come. Her proffered solution to Africa’s myriad problems: vague references to “entrepreneurship,� “good governance,� and (ready for this?) colonialism!
"Rather than castigate the concept of colonialism, as political correctness and cheap rhetoric would have us do even as reality endorses and even embraces it, why not revive the institution..."
"...Even European imperialism was not as bad as what is happening in Africa now..."
"...Perhaps a more enlightened colonialism is the answer..."
I think the Harvard people forgot to inform Miss Maddy that colonialism is about profit for the colonizer, not the development of the colonized, and that there is no need to "revive the institution" since it still operates, under the guise of political "independence," or better yet, "enlightened colonialism."
As touching as her memories of Yekepa (the mining town in northern Liberia where she was born) are, Miss Maddy displays very little knowledge and understanding of Liberia and its people, having spent most of her life at private schools in England and America. She makes up for that lack of knowledge with half-hearted research that leads to oversimplification of a very complex and rich history at best, and outright historical distortion at worst.
Her historical villains (“Americo-Liberians,� as she calls the descendants of free Blacks from America that founded the country in 1822) and heroes (indigenous people) are both too one-dimensional. Americos are all racist, color-conscious, land-grabbing bigots, enslavers, and oppressors, even though she admits that most of them were less well-off than her family.
The Mandingos (her grandmother's people) were all industrious, enterprising, hard-working, honest, and honorable. No mention of the brutal subjugation Liberia's northwestern tribes suffered under the Mandingo rulers, the main reason for the widespread resentment they experience in Liberia today. Or the fact that the Mandingo capitalists flourished under the "oppressive" rule of the "Americo-Liberians."
"When the Americo-Liberians encountered the Mandingo in the 19th century they found that the Mandingo were not so easily dismissed or repressed as many of the smaller, less well organized tribes that the settlers had relatively easily defeated, forced or tricked into submission...But with superior military power the Americo-Liberian settlers were able to retain their dominance..."
Here she deliberately distorts history. First, when the "Americo-Liberians" first encountered the Mandingo people, the settlers were besieged by hostile coastal groups, and under threat of annihilation. The intervention of the Mandingo king saved them. There is no evidence of any attempt to "dismiss' or "repress" the Mandingo people.
Second, which tribes did the settlers "defeat, force or trick into submission?" Those groups hostile to the Liberian government remained undefeated and a powerful threat until President William Tubman unified the country in 1944.
"…The Americo-Liberians resented and despised the Mandingos..."
On what does she base that conclusion? How could she possibly know how the settlers felt about the Mandingos or any other ethnic group? There is no record of any hostilities between the settlers and the Mandingo people. All the evidence points to mutual respect and trade between the two groups. But she’s just getting started.
"Beyond the very rudimentary sense of the term as defined by the geographic contours the Americo-Liberian settlers were able to carve out for themselves in a land they had seized from the indigenous people, Liberia has never been a nation. This goes a long way toward explaining its sad predicament today."
Now, it's one thing to highlight historical injustices and the complex chaos that was colonial and pre-Tubman era Liberia. It's quite another thing entirely to deny that contemporary Liberia was and is a nation. If the reason for Liberia’s destruction is that she “was never a nation,� what is the reason for the “sad predicament� of almost every other nation in Africa? If Liberia was never a nation, neither was Nigeria or Ghana or any other African country. They are all composed of diverse ethnic groups thrown together within arbitrary borders. That any Liberian would even suggest that is unbelievable. But just in case she didn’t piss off enough Liberians with that outrageous statement, she has more historical distortions.
"Because of racial stereotype, [sic] the world did not acknowledge that Liberia remained a colony under a minority settler control, no different from South Africa, Namibia and Rhodesia, and in many respects even worse."
If that is true, why was this charge never made by African leaders? Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Toure, all of whom looked to Liberia as a role model, never mentioned minority settler rule in Liberia. Why is that?
As fashionable as it seems to be nowadays to compare Liberia to apartheid South Africa, no one can explain why the whole continent of Africa was blind to it. Not even a Harvard Business School grad could explain that one.
On Liberia’s 1850s border dispute with the British who controlled next door Sierra Leone, Miss Maddy attempts to rewrite a history she has very little knowledge of.
"When the British contested the Americo-Liberians' claims over territory close to the British colony of Sierra Leone, and claimed the right to tax the people inhabiting the area, the Liberian federation of colonies responded in 1847 by proclaiming Liberia a united and independent republic, with full sovereignty over the indigenous peoples."
The encroachment on Liberian territory by the British and the French (in Guinea and the Ivory Coast) is well documented and so is the outright armed robbery of the Gallinhas Territory between Liberia and Sierra Leone by the British and their gunboats. Why would any Liberian dispute that? It helps to consider that Miss Maddy’s father was originally from Sierra Leone.
The truth is that the indigenous people of the area, the Vai, were under attack and harassment from other tribes incited by British encroachers, and the Vais appealed to the Liberian settlers for help. The Liberians responded and with the powerful Massaquoi clan now an ally, were able through treaty to bring the area under Liberian jurisdiction.
Perhaps her angst can be traced to this:
"The fact that I inherited some of my father's very dark color made me the butt of jokes, especially among the Americo-Liberians, who subscribed to the ludicrous notion that lighter skin was a symbol of racial superiority."
Besides her obvious disdain for the descendants of American settlers, Miss Maddy demonstrates her contempt for Liberia’s indigenous people as well when she relates an experience with the Yekepa school system. She had returned from school in England and her father attempted to enroll her and her brother at the mining company’s International School, for expatriate and senior staff children. Since her two younger brothers were already enrolled, the school refused to accept two more children, saying that
"we would have to enroll in one of the schools that had been established for the most junior staff of LAMCO-the natives."
"...Mr. Ranefelt would never have dared suggest that white children go to what were known as the indigenous schools."
Note that her objection was not that the schools were substandard or inferior, but that they were “for the natives,� which is untrue in any case. The LAMCO Area School System schools were for the kids of semi-skilled and unskilled workers, not "the natives."
All in all, the book reads as if written by someone desperately trying to distance herself from Africa and Africans, while using her birth connection to the continent as a selling tool to market her otherwise uninteresting story.
It’s not the first time someone has capitalized on their “African connection� in such a blatantly dishonest way. And anyway, what does one expect from a proud graduate of the University of Third World Exploitation?
Last edited on Monday January 9th, 2006 22:29 by Omoshango
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The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
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