“WITHOUT dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men.” Patrice Lumumba said of Africa’s quest for freedom in a letter to his wife, Letter from Thysville Prison, Congo, My Country.
As Africa turned 54 yesterday, few would disagree with the compelling fact that Africa’s road to freedom was never an easy one if the brutal wars waged by Algeria, Kenya, Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique are anything to go by.
The road to Africa’s total freedom was painful.
It was a road fraught with suffering and bravery.
A road that paved a critical period in the history of Africa and the quest for development by its people.
It was a period in which heroes were born, a period where Africans asserted their unwavering commitment to total independence.
And at times it became necessary to wage armed struggles against stubborn colonialists like Britain, France and Portugal.
That’s when the OAU’s Liberation Committee assisted affected countries militarily and logistically to wage a successful struggle.
This is why this story can never be fully told or understood without mentioning the likes of Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, Jomo Kenyatta, Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Agostinho Neto, Nelson Mandela and Sam Nujoma, among others.
There is always the need to pursue with vigour the point that without unity, Africa was never going to confront colonialism.
This was at a time colonial regimes took advantage of the Cold War era to secure support from Western powers to suppress what they termed ‘communist infiltration’.
And yet the struggle for freedom was about creating and maintaining economically free and politically independent societies across the continent.
That came at a cost.
There was Cabral, that mercurial leader.
In 1956, together with a group of Cape Verdeans, Cabral and his followers from Guinea-Bissau organised what was to be called the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), demanding improvements in economic, social and political conditions in Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea.
Their goal was negotiating independence for Portuguese Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands from their Portuguese colonisers.
When the negotiations failed, the PAIGC worked to gain the support of the Guinean villagers.
The PAIGC moved its headquarters to Conakry, Guinea, in 1960 and started an armed rebellion against the Portuguese in 1961.
In 1962 guerilla bands began attacking Portuguese army posts and police stations.
Despite the presence of Portuguese troops, which grew to more than 35 000, the PAIGC steadily expanded its influence until, by 1968, it controlled most of the country.
With the guerillas entrenched in the jungles, the Portuguese Government responded by deploying warplanes and increased troop numbers and began to bomb and raid guerilla hide-outs.
Guinean President Sekou Toure supported the nationalist forces attempting to end Portuguese colonial rule in adjacent Portuguese Guinea, from their first appearance in the early 1960s.
PAIGC had maintained its headquarters in Conakry and its rear area bases in Guinea close to the border with the Portuguese colony.
Cabral’s residence in Conakry was close to that of President Touré, and the two leaders shared a similar ideology on domestic and international affairs.
By this time, the PAIGC began openly receiving military support from the Soviet Union, China and Cuba.
While Guinea Bissau eventually got its independence, this was overshadowed by the assassination of Cabral on January 20 1973 in what is widely believed to have been an operation orchestrated by the Portuguese intelligence.
Mozambique’s FRELIMO, led by Machel and Angola’s MPLA, led by Agostinho Neto also fought bitter wars against Portugal which believed its colonies were an integral part of Lisbon.
The humiliation of South African troops by MPLA, supported by Cubans, emphasised how it was now impossible to halt the tide of African nationalism.
The OAU also played a key role in assisting Nujoma’s SWAPO, bring to an end the administrative role of apartheid South Africa through the barrel of the gun.
Kenya is well-known for the exploits of the Mau Mau which had such leaders like Kenyatta and the inspirational Dedan Kimathi.
These two great men were at the forefront of what has been recorded as one of the bloodiest fights ever witnessed in the world.
Kimathi was a leader of the Mau Mau guerillas who rebelled against British colonialism in the 1950s until his capture on October 21 1956 in Nyeri.
He was executed in February 1957, together with other 5 000 guerillas.
His body was buried in an unmarked grave whose location has not been revealed to this day.
An April 2011 report by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) lays bare the strength of the Mau Mau and the callousness of the British in their attempt to stop Kenya from attaining independence.
Below is part of the report;
The Mau Mau fighters were mainly drawn from Kenya’s major ethnic grouping, the Kikuyu.
More than a million strong, by the start of the 1950s, the Kikuyu had been increasingly economically marginalised as years of white settler-expansion ate away at their land holdings.
Since 1945, nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta of the Kenya African Union (KAU) had been pressing the British Government in vain for political rights and land reforms, with valuable holdings in the cooler Highlands to be redistributed to African owners.
But radical activists within the KAU set up a splinter group and organised a more militant kind of nationalism.
By 1952, Kikuyu fighters, along with some Embu and Meru recruits, were attacking political opponents and raiding white settler-farms and destroying livestock. Mau Mau supporters took oaths, binding them to their cause.
In October 1952, the British declared a state of emergency and began moving army re-inforcements into Kenya.
So began an aggressively fought counter-insurgency, which lasted until 1960 when the state of emergency was ended.
The number killed in the uprising is a subject of much controversy. Officially, the number of Mau Mau and other rebels killed was 11 000, including 1 090 convicts hanged by the British administration. Just 32 white settlers were killed in the eight years of emergency.
However, unofficial figures suggest a much larger number were killed in the counter-insurgency campaign.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission has said 90 000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed during the crackdown while 160 000 were detained in appalling conditions.
David Anderson, professor of African Politics at Oxford University, says he estimates the death toll in the conflict to have been as high as 25 000.
He said: “Everything that could happen did happen. Allegations about beatings and violence were widespread. Basically you could get away with murder. It was systematic.”
Then there was Ahmed Ben Bella, a farmer’s son who fought for France in the Second World War, but turned against it (France) in the brutal struggle for Algerian independence.
Bella was vehemently opposed to colonialism from an early age. He was famed for having had a run-in with a racist secondary school teacher at a tender age.
“We think in Arabic, but we talk in French,” he is believed to have told his teacher.
He joined the resistance movement that was to become the Front de Libération Nationale.
In 1949, Bella helped rob a post office in Oran, Algeria.
He was tracked down and was sentenced to a long jail term in the Blida Prison.
In 1952, with the aid of a file hidden in a loaf of bread, he broke out and went to Cairo, where he became one of the liberation movement’s nine top leaders.
On November 1 1954, while the French celebrated All Saints’ Day, the rebels struck, beginning a war of massacre.
Bella spent most of the war outside Algeria, organising clandestine arms shipments and co-ordinating political strategy.
The war lasted seven years before Ben Bella was installed as the country’s first president in 1962.
One of the bloodiest war of liberation was that waged by ZANLA and ZIPRA against the last foothold of the British Empire in Africa, Zimbabwe.
At a time the struggle seemed to have lost steam during the détente period, the AU Liberation Committee came to the rescue.
After the Lancaster House Constitution, Cde Mugabe became the first democratically elected black President of Zimbabwe.
Of course the Western Sahara problem still has to be solved.
For now, on paper, no foreign power outside the continent occupies any African state.
The dream of political independence cherished by African leaders who formed the OAU on May 25 1963 has largely been fulfilled.
What remains to be seen is how far the dream of African leaders spelt out in Addis Ababa in January 2013 would have been fulfilled by 2063.
We await to see the day when Africa will be fully in charge of its vast natural resources without any foreign interference.
Happy birthday Africa!