XX Part #1 &COUNTING 13

Africa and Europe have had a continuous contact of more than 400 years. It has been a relationship of domination, exploitation and oppression. Whatever happens in Europe tends to have ripple effects in Africa. Therefore any idea that has become fashionable in Europe trickles down into intellectual and political discussions/battles in Africa.


One of the key aspects of this globalisation is information. There is a sense in which the world has become a village. Thanks to CNN and the radical transformation in Satellite broadcasting, many places in Africa where it may be difficult to get a clean cup of water, you can still watch CNN.

One of the ironies of this technological advancement is that while Europeans and Americans are struggling for supremacy in space, struggling to hoist their flags and competing about who makes it in the shortest time and highest orbit, in Africa as, in many parts of the Third World, "We are still trying to get to the Village" as Prof. Ali Mazrui puts it.

Thus, while people in Europe may be obsessed by Globalisation, we are still talking of Villagisation, getting to the village where the majority of our people work and live.

The discussion on globalisation has a particular context - i.e. the collapse of the previously existing socialist block (U.S.S.R and Eastern Europe). This discourse has been ushered in by various intellectual ideas and Political conclusions drawn from them such as Samuel Huntington's CLASH OF CIVILISATION and Francis Fukuyama's END OF HISTORY.

The theory of end of Ideology has of course been with us before Fukuyama's annihilation of history and the triumphalism about the hegemony of western values, ideas and civilisation. In short, a celebration of the assumed victory of capitalism over socialism. The collapse of Eastern Europe has bought about a new arrogance by Euro-American imperialist powers, with no check from a countervailing force. Thus there is a drive to homogenize the world at all levels (economic, ideological and political) but more perniciously, at the cultural level.

Its ideologists insist that we must think the same way, organise society in the same way, not allowing any alternatives to Western values and systems of organising society. In this hegemonic scheme, the rest of us, who are actually the vast majority of humanity, are supposed to be non-starters or at best, late comers whose only destiny is to follow the lead and paths already trodden by the West. To put it more crudely: America won the cold war and the prize of that victory is for the rest of us to Americanise.

There is a saying." if two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers". But it is also true that even if two elephants make love, the grass still suffers. That is the conclusion we in the Third World can draw from Soviet collaboration with the West and the collapse of Eastern Europe.

When the USSR and the USA were at each other's throats during the Cold War, we were victims. Our political groups and movements, our governments and states were judged whether they were pro-west or pro-east. The tragic consequences of that experience can be seen today in places like Angola, Ethiopia, Somalia and Mozambique, just as they are evident in Vietnam and Cambodi