Pretoria - Africans are not perpetual victims. That was former president Thabo Mbeki’s Africa Day message to South Africans in Pretoria on Wednesday.
“How educated are we about ourselves? Do we know our history?” he asked African intellectuals at the Ditsong Museum of History.
Mbeki argued that African history is linked – from the liberation of African slaves in Haiti over 200 years ago, to the victory of the Ethiopians against Italy in the Battle of Adwa in 1896 – to the liberation of South Africa in 1994. “This is all part of the process of African liberation”, he said.
Mbeki relayed how a group of young South African students had come to meet him at the Mbeki Foundation to explain how demotivated they were at school as they were consistently taught that Africans were victims of their circumstances – whether colonialism or apartheid.
Mbeki devoted his Africa Day lecture to remind us of the impressive African victories over the past centuries, which were not only victories for Africans in specific countries, but were victories for Africans as a whole. He used the example of the struggle of African slaves in Haiti and their ultimate defeat over the French in 1804. Over 60 percent of the Haitian slaves who fought for emancipation were first-generation Haitians who had been brought to the island as slaves from Africa.
Not only did they liberate the country from colonial rule, but they destroyed the capacity of the French to take over Louisiana in the US.
The primary focus of Mbeki’s lecture rested on the historic Battle of Adwa in 1896, where 100 000 Ethiopians under Emperor Menelik II fought against Italian forces that were seeking to colonise the country.
The Ethiopians fought off colonisation by uniting as a country, with the peasants supplying food to the troops, and the government purchasing modern weapons from the French and Russians, with whom they forged relations.
Mbeki hailed the Ethiopian victory as a significant African victory which signified Africa’s rising. “The victory was in direct contradiction to the Berlin Conference 11 years earlier, which carved up the continent and determined that it would be colonised,” he said.
The reaction of Europeans to the African victory was scathing. Following the Italians’ defeat, the Johannesburg Star reported in 1896 that “the crushing defeat was the most disastrous check any colonials had faced, and must be deplored by white men all over Africa”.
The Argus had declared that “Menelik must be crushed at all costs”. One European publication claimed that the mistake the Italians made was to have treated Menelik as a savage, when actually a dormant civilisation was awakening.
Mbeki relayed how, months before the Italian defeat, the Italian prime minister had described the Ethiopians as barbarians whose material and spiritual progress cried out for Roman civilisation.
He had pledged to bring the “barbarian Menelik to Rome in a cage”. A few months later, his forces were defeated and Ethiopia had risen up against the menace of colonial rule.