By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

JUST as Africa could not have achieved political independence without understanding global politics, it cannot achieve the economic integration (discussed at the 2009 Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Summit in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, and at the launch of the African Economic Platform (AEP) in Mauritius in March 2017) without first realising the risks and opportunities created by the end of the Washington Consensus which US President Donald Trump is speeding up.
So, in order to put the agenda of African economic integration in its proper context, it is necessary to define the American Empire or the Washington Consensus which Donald Trump is bringing to a speedy end.
It is necessary to show how that ‘consensus’, exercised through control of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) hindered regional and continental integration in Africa.
In his report to the Seventh Summit of the Non-Aligned Countries (NAM) in 1983, Cuba’s founder and now late President Fidel Castro referred to the privilege of the US as expressed through the continuing status and residual power of its currency, the US dollar.
Susan Strange elaborated and put in different words the same function of perceived US power.
The global financial tsunami which started in the US in 2008 exposed the reality explained by the late Cuban President Castro and by Susan Strange: The power and prosperity of the US economic empire depended on maintaining a constant global perception of ‘American greatness’, American prosperity, American innovation, entrepreneurship, productivity and efficiency long after the reality had changed.
To shore up this global perception, the US Federal Reserve and the Obama administration had to engage in ‘quantitative easing’ or the sheer printing of US dollar notes for the whole world and to allow the US debt to grow further.
But there was always the risk that the bottom of the barrel would fall out and expose US bankruptcy for what it is, if the Chinese and other countries to which the US had become indebted should refuse to go along with the global perception, pull the plug and precipitate an implosion.
In other words, the perception of American economic greatness had become unsustainable.
As a result, Donald Trump represents an end to the Washington Consensus because he is taking a hard-nosed accountant’s view of the US position which has not been applied since the end of the Gold Standard.
The implications of this new US stance for the COMESA and for the recently launched AEP are obvious.
For the first time, Africa, COMESA, SADC and the AEP can literally find their own economic way out of the contradictions of global capitalism without having to apologise to Washington as in the past.
That is what Trump means when he says his presidency is no longer going to be the presidency of the whole world.
He will not continue to engage in quantitative easing for the sake of pumping money into the global economy in order to maintain a fake perception of the Washington Consensus.
Even if the Trump revolution failed, it would, at a minimum, have disrupted the Washington Consensus and distracted the Western powers enough to allow areas formerly dominated by the empire to go their own ways economically.
A new generation of young businessmen and women is going to prosper as a result of the new AEP and COMESA economics unveiled at the COMESA Summit at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe in June 2009 and at the AEP in 2017.
But that prosperity will be short-lived or even abortive unless this new generation of African entrepreneurs pays close attention to the liberation politics which has brought East, Central and southern Africa to this stage under African leadership.
We are referring here to a long history of conflicting and competing integration efforts — one driven by Africans themselves and the other driven by Western powers.
To show why this political history is relevant to the defence of the new AEP and COMESA economics, let us just examine the decisions consolidated at Victoria Falls in 2009.
l The COMESA Summit itself had to wait for a political settlement in Zimbabwe which was sponsored by another regional body, SADC, and managed by South Africa, which is not yet a member of COMESA.
This showed that Zimbabwe is a critical bridge politically and strategically between SADC and COMESA and would play such a role in the harmonisation of a future customs union bringing together the COMESA, SADC and SACU.
l The COMESA Summit reaffirmed its 2003 condemnation of illegal Euro-American sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe and proceeded to elect that host country to chair COMESA in the face of Western efforts to intensify and prolong Zimbabwe’s isolation.
l The COMESA Summit also came to the defence of another member, Sudan, by rejecting the selective indictment of that country’s current President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
l The COMESA Summit, by implication, demonstrated the growing irrelevance of the G7-sponsored New Programme for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) which the UK, EU and US wanted to use as an instrument for further isolating Zimbabwe and keeping Africa solely within the Western orbit.
Donald Trump is not going to fund NEPAD.
l He is even cutting budgets to USAID.
l The COMESA and AEP summits also put into doubt the European Union’s efforts to separate South Africa from SADC and the rest of Africa, efforts which were outlined in EU documents such as Towards an EU-South Africa Strategic Partnership which stated that ‘South Africa therefore is a natural partner to Europe on the African continent… Building on shared values and mutual interests as well as profound cultural links, the EU and South Africa have developed a multifaceted, comprehensive partnership…’
Donald Trump is threatening to scuttle both the EU and NATO and to stop traditional US patronage of these organisations.
He finds better value in co-operation with Russia because of its massive natural resource base.
What this situation means is that there have been at least two on-going, conflicting and competing integration processes in southern Africa for the last 600 years or more.
The AEP and COMESA Summit meetings in June 2009 and March 2017 marked the culmination of the African side of that struggle to date.
If we take history maps of southern and Eastern Africa before 1500, we discover that the trade routes of this region went to Persia, Arabia, India and China.
After 1500 and especially following the imperialist Berlin Conference of 1884, Africa was completely cut off from India, Persia, Arabia and China.
African countries and nations in the latter period appear on maps as appendages of Western powers, with all of the Congo being the private estate of King Leopold of Belgium!
African liberation movements of the late 20th Century therefore began the current ‘Look East’ policy by retracing those ancient trade routes back to China, India, Russia, Indonesia and so forth, where they obtained weapons and training to liberate Guinea Bissau, Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe with the help of the Liberation Committee of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
Therefore the African line that leads to the AEP and COMESA is a long one.
It began with the realisation by Africans in the Diaspora and at home that white people did not steal only the millions of African bodies they took to the Americas as slaves but also the bulk of Africa itself and its riches.
So the pan-African Conferences and Congresses which met in London, Lisbon, Paris, New York and Manchester between 1900 and 1945 were aware that they would continue ‘lodging’ and drifting unless and until the African Diaspora was free, the African continent itself cleared of white occupation and the indigenous people liberated economically, politically, morally as well as culturally.
As time went on, Diaspora Africans began to interact with continental Africans.
History lists Dr Aggrey of Achimota, Ghana; Blaise Diagne of Senegal; John L. Dhube of South Africa; Dr D.D.T. Jabavu of South Africa; Enock Mgijima of South Africa; Majola Agbebi of Nigeria; Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi and Dr Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana — as the continental Africans who interacted with the Diaspora pan-Africanists and planted the seeds of modern African liberation.
From these interactions, we can proceed to indicate a few milestones in that history, especially in what is now the SADC region.
In 1899 South Africans formed the Natal Native Congress, a precursor to the African National Congress (ANC).
Between 1893 and 1896 the Ndebele and Shona of Zimbabwe co-operated in military efforts to evict Cecil John Rhodes’ British South Africa Company and its settlers from Zimbabwe.
Between 1907 and 1909, South Africans formed the South African Native Convention which was meant to resist white racist efforts to form the Union of South Africa for white settlers only.
Then, 1912 is the year the now ruling ANC of South Africa was formed.
Of course, some of our readers may wonder how these events could be said to constitute early seeds of Africa regional economic integration. They represent efforts at integration because they were all meant to re-member, to rejoin, what the white settler and white slave catcher had dismembered.
The severed links to the east were to prove crucial in the struggle to reclaim Africa.
Rhodes’ ‘Cape to Cairo’ megalomania and path were to be scrapped.
The relevance of these indigenous African efforts becomes dramatic when we come to the group known as the Generation of ‘49.
These are the young Africans who met at Fort Hare University in South Africa in the late 1940s in the wake of the declaration of apartheid as the official policy and doctrine of the white settler-regime in South Africa. The Generation of ’49 included Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, Harry Nkumbula and many others who went back home and started their own African National Congresses (ANCs).
There followed the foundings of the African National Congress of Nyasaland (Malawi), the African National Congress of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (Zimbabwe).
In the meantime, in the late 1950s, Dr Kwame Nkrumah returned from the Diaspora where pan-Africanism had been ‘lodging’ since its 1900 conference in London.
The year Ghana attained its independence, 1957, is also the year of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia which launched the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which was to play a pivotal role together with the OAU in helping to liberate Africa.
The year 1957 also saw the formation of the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress, the parent of the National Democratic Party (NDP), Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU), and Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU).
One year after Ghana’s independence, Nkrumah called the All African People’s Conference in Accra, Ghana, thereby marking the homecoming of organised pan-Africanism.
This was followed by the momentous formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, five years later in May 1963.
The OAU then set up the Liberation Committee to support armed liberation movements in southern Africa and Guinea Bissau in the wake of the overthrow of the Congolese revolution and the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 by the Belgians who were assisted by the CIA and white Rhodesian and South African mercenaries.
In other words, the African political line that we see culminating in the AEP and COMESA Summits is related to NAM, to the Frontline States, to the Southern Africa Development Co-ordinating Committee (SADCC), to the Asia-Africa Summit, the China-Africa Summit, the India-Africa Summit and all the ‘Look East’ policies pioneered by African liberation movements and recently given economic content by current African governments.
How important these African regional integration efforts are can be appreciated more if we also trace the white line of integration from such concepts as Cape of Good Hope, Cape-to-Cairo, Anglo-Boer War, the 1948 British project called United States of Africa, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the apartheid ideas of Total Strategy and the Constellation of Southern African States, Constructive Engagement, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, New Economic Plan for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), the US Africa Command (Africom) and the selectively applied US African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA).
These represent the white imperialist and settlerist dream over Africa.
To appreciate the significance of that white dream against AEP and COMESA, we cite just one example in conclusion:
In a letter entitled ‘Enjoy it while it lasts, comrades’, one Alistair Hull told the Editor of the Zimbabwe Independent, published November 7 2003:

“The New World Order advocates (seen here as Anglo-Saxons) will ultimately implement a one-world political system which will operate from a major city somewhere in Europe where there will be a global economy and a one-world religious system, that is, the much talked about ecumenical church… Elements of our paranoid (Zimbabwean) leadership keep babbling on about sovereignty and the fact that we will never be a colony again.
They keep on accusing the World Bank and the IMF of having ulterior motives for Zimbabwe.

The IMF and the World Bank are just one of the ‘1 000 points of light’ President (George) Bush (Senior) spoke about at the same time he announced the coming new world order.

The ‘1 000 points of light’ he mentioned are the various organisations and institutions that are slowly and insidiously doing the groundwork for a new world order.

Any country whose Government does not conform to this will ultimately be brought down by whatever means the new world order [Anglo-Saxons] see fit.

President Mugabe and ZANU PF are bucking the new world order and will ultimately be brought down by these people whether they like it or not as was Ian Smith and Rhodesia. We are all pawns in a game — they had better believe it.”

So, behind the Euro-American sanctions against Zimbabwe, behind the European desire to integrate South Africa into Europe and cut it from SADC and the AU, there are real white fantasies such as those expressed by Alistair Hull in the Zimbabwe Independent.
Hull’s article was a white celebration of the US-UK invasion of Iraq which concluded that the same invasion forces would come to Zimbabwe after Iraq.
Hull helps because he is honest in expressing Euro-American fantasies which put in proper perspective issues such as the ICC’s recent indictment of President Al-Bashir of Sudan which COMESA threw out.
The indictment is part of a cynical strategy which has little to do with human rights, and the COMESA Summit recognised this.
The dream which Hull expressed was consistent with the Washington Consensus.
Any astute pan-Africanist thinker and planner cannot miss the fact that the current US administration of Trump has scuttled the global pan-European component of that white fantancy, leaving wise Africans to fill that space with their own vision(s).