I wish the historic message was broadcast to all Africans home and abroad.
I am referring to President Robert Mugabe’s speech rejecting calls from the UN to implement gay rights in his country.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly meeting recently, the remaining radical Pan-Africanist said though upholding human rights is the obligation of all member states, he vehemently rejected the imposition of what he called “new rights” for gay marriage that have been advocated elsewhere in the world.
“We equally reject attempts to prescribe new rights that are contrary to our norms, values, traditions and beliefs. We are not gays. Cooperation and respect for each other will advance the cause of human rights worldwide. Confrontation, vilification and double standards will not,” he told members of the General Assembly.
Mugabe had earlier called homosexuals “worse than pigs and dogs.” A spokesperson for his ruling party, Zanu-PF, has said same-sex marriage had no place in Africa.
Currently chairperson of the African Union, Mugabe urged nations to invest in economic development on the African continent, saying a stronger Africa would be beneficial to the world.
“Africa is not looking for handouts. Rather it is looking for partners in massive infrastructure development. In creating and exploiting the value chains from the God given natural resources and in improving the quality of life of the continents citizens. The entire world stands to benefit from an economically empowered African continent than from one emasculated by deprivation and with an over dependence on others,” Mugabe said.
Mugabe also called for UN reform and has long criticised the absence of an African country with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
“While the world has drastically changed since 1945, the United Nations and indeed the global governance architecture remains mired in a long bygone era. This archaic hierarchy among nations threatens to erode the confidence and support that the United Nations commands among the majority, but disadvantaged of its membership. We are disappointed that we have lost the opportunity of this anniversary to address this burning issue of the reform of the United Nations Security Council in a manner that satisfies the just demands and expectations among us. I wish to reiterate our strong attachment to Africa’s common position of the reform of the Security Council.”
In a thinly veiled reference to the Western crusade to bully small, developing countries to accept gay rights, President Mugabe said the UN Charter was the standard by which nations should be measured.
In that regard he said he rejected the politicisation of this important issue and the application of double standards to victimise those who dare think independently of the self appointed prefects of our time.
‘We equally reject attempts to prescribe ‘new rights’ that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions and beliefs. Cooperation and respect for each other will advance the cause of human rights worldwide. Confrontation, vilification and double standards will not.’
It is the word ‘prefects of our time’ that I can cull from the mother of all speeches by the last revolutionary this continent has ever produced.
Since our ill-fated contact with the Western culture, we have been hapless victims of the Western culture which has engulfed our values and norms like a king snake that swallows other snakes for food.
Though I am a very strong proponent of human rights and social justice, I am at odds to what extent we in Africa should adopt these western-dictated rights without disrupting the cultural status quo of our rich culture.
This brings to mind the missionaries’ ecclesiastical crusade of braving a rugged terrain and facing hostile ‘primitive’ tribes to spread Christianity to Africa in order to ‘civilise’ the heathen natives.
The missionaries succeeded in spreading a diluted form of Christianity (far divorced from Christ’s teaching) which together with other forms of westernisation has created all kinds of subsequent problems we are grappling with today.
We have ultimately failed to come to terms with all the problems created by becoming ‘civilised’.
There are also less innocuous moral standards that the Western world and Christianity has imposed on our culture like banning polygamy when even monogamy in their societies doesn’t work.
Now people like Mugabe and a lean choir of Africans are asking hard questions, since they are all wondering who gave the Western world the right to deny other cultures their cultural heritage.
Apart from dispensing science and technology, the Western world is the worst placed to impose Western human rights upon others.
The Western world needs to clean up its own house before it can judge whether another house needs cleaning.
There is abundant evidence of how the Western world has historically destroyed many cultures and sub-cultures through a diluted version of Christianity and Western morality.
While I agree that every culture has both good and bad in it forcing people into adopting complicated and often convoluted western ways of life indiscriminately is an action the victims will regret for many years to come.
The long crusade to civilise other cultures has only succeeded in destroying them as a people of dignity, culture, and heritage.
Like Mugabe has noted, the West needs to respect the diversity of nations and cultures and allow others the right to dignity and their heritage just as the so called civilised world values its own norms.
Where ever the Western world has imposed its culture conflicts have arisen since the forced culture is rarely better than that of host countries.
Consider this, while other cultures permit men to beat their wives into a pulp, is it any worse than bombing innocent men, women, and children into bits and pieces as a result of the collateral damage of war in other lands?
While other countries in the Middle East have at least maintained their cultures considering the onslaught of westernisation, Africa is a hapless victim of this offensive.
Scholars have noted that though British worldwide expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an economic and political phenomenon, there was also a strong social and cultural dimension to it.
This is what Rudyard Kipling termed the ‘white man’s burden’ evidenced by religious proselytising, by, amongst others, the London Missionary Society, which was “an agent of British cultural imperialism.”
Another way was by the imposition of educational material on the colonies for an “imperial curriculum” that lauded the West and usually condemned almost everything African.
This curriculum promoted the empire through books, illustrative materials, and educational syllabi as part of an education policy geared to cultural imperialism.
Nowadays, the Western world is using NGOs, university curriculum, the media, entertainment and several western-approved methods with the same intent of lauding the dictum west is best.
It is such cultural imperialism Mugabe is challenging.