In a world where standardization and standardization of ideas and behavior is the rule, Nelson Mandela symbolized rejection. This dull voice, proof of life and humanity, beats in us and we stifle every day in our heart for the needs of the career.
Adama Wade
Because we must not appear singular or “extremist”, modern man has entered an era of submission to the single thought and standardization of behavior, harmonization of positions and scrubs accents.
Mandela was one of those few who said “no” and persevered in the fight to make the common good triumph. However, in Africa, if Madiba is sung everywhere, it has attracted few followers in ruling circles who prefer to manage their powers without taking risks, accepting the rules and conditions of the other.
Domination, said Pierre Bourdieu, secretes collaborationism. If this is the case, we have all become “collabos”. Indeed, by dint of realpolitik and submission, we renegotiated our independence. We have granted a monopoly of weapons supplies to such great power to enter the good graces. We have frozen the prices of such raw material to our detriment by submission reflex. We have accepted unbalanced bilateral agreements where the free movement of people is one way. We accepted military bases to protect ourselves, etc. In the long run, we renegotiated our dignity, our humanity and reintroduced a soft and standardized apartheid with the complicity of our elites.
If the brutal laws in Rodhesia and South Africa disappeared thanks to Nelson Mandela’s fight, their symbolic violence is still there in a predatory vision of Africa. By dint of compromise, by dint of wanting to please everyone, the African has become an invertebrate subject to the Chinese calendar, the French agenda, Turkish or Brazilian.
In the end, this realist spirit of African politics is the most successful expression of self-denial in favor of the esteem of the other. The fascination -superimation by the dominant leads the dominated to amputate any idea likely to offend or disturb in an imbalanced relationship that can be nourished, at times, by a harmonious complicity. It is time for Africa to break away from this Stockholm complex by initiating a new, effective partnership with its former masters.
How many of our leaders have renounced the noble struggle to complete our independence in favor of a secure career? That all these elites paralyzed by the stakes of the moment, and terrorized at the idea of annoying the partner, consider the fight of Nelson Mandela. That these elites who hesitate to emit a discordant sound, against the monotonous humming broadcast by the media (factories with consensus), have a real minute, without camera, for Nelson Mandela.
Chance wanted the departure of this lighthouse of humanity to intervene on the eve of a summit France-Africa, certainly dynamic and builder but, first and foremost, reliquat of colonization. Madiba bowed out, while a Franco-UN intervention in the Central African Republic, symptomatic of the inability of the African Union to concretize its refusal of the interference, was given the role of avoiding a new somalisation in the heart of the continent. Sacred Madiba!
