AfrICANDO 2007
Kovens Conference Center
Florida International University

20th September 2007

I am pleased to be there this afternoon and I would like to thank the Foundation for Democracy in Africa and especially thank Fred Oladeinde for this kind invitation to speak here at lunch this afternoon.

Up until 2nd May 2007, I served as my country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and now being in Opposition again unexpectedly, this is the time to work on ideas for the future, to develop them and to nurture them.   Today is a part of that process.

My country is quite small as are many countries in the Caribbean region from Bermuda in the north to Trinidad and Tobago in the south.  However, it is clear that the African Diaspora that resides in the region has given of its intellectual talent and abilities in the world far beyond its impact in sheer numbers.

The region boasts of three Nobel Laureates: Sir Arthur Lewis, Derek Walcott and Sir Vidian S. Naipaul.  It is always interesting for me to go down the list of names of those of African descent in the halls of power in the United States and see the Afro Caribbean antecedents of many of these leaders.

The dominant culture in the region is the creolized American culture of the United States, an off shoot of the culture of Europe.  The Caribbean is a part of that cultural milieu.

One of our Prime Ministers Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent has described the Caribbean civilization: the blend of the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia that developed in the Caribbean.  It is out of that context that I come, that Rex Nettleford has described as the rhythm of Africa with the melody of Europe.

Dr. W.E. B. Dubois writing in his famous Souls of Black Folks, who himself had roots in The Bahamas, described the question of the 20th century as that of the colour line.  He was part of the Pan African movement, that movement born in the Caribbean in the 19th century that led the way in the fight for anti colonialism and in the larger fight for the dignity and upliftment of black men and women around the world.

I dare say that is still the question today with black people still seeking to bleach away their darkness with creams and potions, fifty years after Martin Luther King reminded us that it is not the colour of your skin but the content of your character that counts.

But change is difficult.

Centuries of negatives and anti black conditioning are simply a hard habit to break.  All of our societies struggle with this in the region.  Our policies are coloured by it where Europe continues to be the dominant cultural and economic force and Africa; the force that really drives our societies, that is at the centre of the ethos of our people, is more often than not relegated to a sideline.

Junkanoo is our national festival.  Its roots are in Africa and if you come to The Bahamas on the day after Christmas called Boxing Day, you will find in the wee hours of the morning our young men and women organized in groups and they rush in massive and colourful parades to the sound of the cowbell and the goatskin drum.

It is said that this festival began in slavery and today it is transformed from small local celebrations to a massive national parade that is the focus of cultural and economic empowerment for masses of black Bahamians.

You will find the Gombay in Bermuda, a similar masquerade and you will find Junkanoo in rural Jamaica together with Pocamania and other African cultural expressions and Voodoo in Haiti.

Of course Jamaica is the home to the Rastafarians, an indigenous denomination that has spread around the region and around the world.  One of its central themes is back to Africa.

Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent went back to Africa and took some of the Rasta community from St. Vincent with him in a moving display of Pan Africanism.

This is all positive and celebratory, yet the question of the colour line that Dr. Du Bois posited in 1903 in the Souls of Black Folk remains.  It comes at us front and centre on our televisions screens and many other media with one negative image after the next:  poverty, dirt, flies, death and destruction, war and famine, hopelessness and despair are associated too much in the popular will with Africa.

So it still continues the image of Africa as a deep dark continent in need of saving from outside or from above.

Imagine then you are young man or woman today in Africa or in the Caribbean or the Americas and this is the atmosphere and the culture within which you have grown up.

It was back in 1973 that I was a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and students had come back from their one year overseas.  We were all expected to make our film presentation on where we had been.  Everyone sat through Asia and Europe and South America.  Then it was Africa’s turn, the room was noisy as people headed for the exits: “Africa! Ugh! Deepest Darkest,” said one young man as he bolted for the door.

You can only imagine then the real strength of our fore parents, in the face of this unremitting and unrelenting hostility even from amongst those of our own race, colour and hue who would cling to these negative images.

How did our fore parents manage to get up in the morning and face the task of moving themselves and their families forward and in developing the countries that they had been brought to against their wills or in countries in which they were dispossessed and were second class citizens held in tyranny by a minority tribe from another continent, that minority tribe imbued with a misplaced sense of entitlement.

It is remarkable the stories of Africa itself and the survival of the countries that were undeveloped, pillaged of their resources and their people, their peoples under educated and then with the lowering of a flag handed over independence as the colonial powers headed for the exits.

The relationship between Africa and Europe has remained the same since then: Europe dominates with capital and technology and Africa provides the raw materials at fire sale prices, with no technology transfers, no savings of wealth but Africa is told they must continue to give and reform and change and do better.

I think it has been a remarkable journey for Africa and for the societies where Africans live in this region in the Americas and the Caribbean against these odds.

We are fed a steady diet in our education that everything about us is negative.  Yet the voices continue fight for the right our human dignity and pride and in the words of Maya Angelou we shall rise and we have risen and we will continue to rise.

The question really is what policy instruments we ought to use to bring about development.  Clearly there is a role for Overseas Development Assistance (ODA).  It is interesting to note that since the promises made at Gleneagles for Overseas Development Assistance to Africa, no country has provided the level of assistance promised and in the case of the United States that development assistance overall has fallen.

There is also a role for trade not aid.  That means that the trade policies of the developed and the undeveloped countries should be so adjusted that they encourage the development of societies, not their under development and not the continued pillaging of their societies.

The Caribbean argues today with the Europeans on sugar and bananas, crops left by the fleeing colonial power.  We have our independence and the former colonial powers now treat us to speeches about good governance and eliminating corruption, all worthy goals but the catch is we must get over it and move forward and forget the past, because this is the present and it is the present after all that counts.

Today, the African Caribbean and Pacific Countries are all faced with negotiating a successor to the Lome and Contonou Agreements, both named after two African capitals.  These agreements have regulated trade for the past fifty years between the post colonial powers and the old states of the empires of France and the United Kingdom with their European allies.  The agreements permitted the incorporation of pre existing arrangements for the former colonies.

Some have argued you see that colonialism and empire building was really about market access.  The British got a captive market and so did the French: you had to buy French or buy British and you had to provide your raw materials to them at concessionary prices.

In our own country for example the Bacardi Company moved to The Bahamas in part because they could not accesses the markets of the United Kingdom and colonies duty free so The Bahamas as a then British colony became a natural point for production of their sprits to access the United Kingdom’s markets.  Later, Lome and Contonou grandfathered in those concessions as the British joined the European Union.

Now those arrangements have to fall away because of the World Trade Organization and its strictures.  So the idea of one way preferences has to fall away in exchange for reciprocal trade agreements.  Never mind the fact that in the trade equation, the dominant partner is still Europe, and that while societies in the ACP are being force fed a diet of change, there are no adequate proposals for transition provisions and inadequate cushioning money for transitions.

Recently, I was quite shocked at the Stentorian tone in which the former British Minister and now Trade Commissioner for Europe Peter Mandelson spoke about the need to conclude an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA).

In his address he said that the there must be agreements signed by 31st December 2007 or the existing preferences would fall away and they would then fall to the general system of preferences which would be less favourable than the existing regimes.  He said that Europe did not propose a delay and did not propose to seek any extensions.  He said that this was not a negotiating tactic; that it was serious and he did not believe that the ACP countries were serious in seeking to bring about an agreement.

Of course, this caused a great deal of consternation in capitals throughout the Caribbean and Africa.   There are deep concerns about the problems of market access especially to the services in our respective countries, and further about the transition provisions in place for bananas and sugar, but for Africa in particular there was great concern about the question of monies for development.

The Europeans have simply come up short and it appears that they are only paying lip service to monies for development.  In other words, it appears again that Europe absolves itself of any historic responsibility for the state of the under development of Africa or the Caribbean.

I happen to be amongst those Foreign Ministers at the time who thought that the ACP were in fact not going as quickly as they should have but I must tell you that I was seriously offended by the tenor and tone of the remarks of Mr. Mandelson and if I know the region and Africa, the remarks probably had the opposite affect that he intended.  He came off like a colonial overlord hectoring his lieges to comply with this wishes or else.  It was deeply offensive to many.

In The Bahamas Bacardi has since announced that it is leaving The Bahamas to move to Puerto Rico, even though they did not cite the fact of no EPA as a factor.

Our own government, I think mistakenly, has announced that they will not sign the agreement in December.  I think that this removes the pressure on our country to modernize itself.

However, we are in good company in the sense that while the Caribbean region is most advanced along the way, there are deep divisions over the services offer.

The Caribbean has tourism and financial services sectors, the sectors that the region turned to after the primary production of sugar and bananas went belly up.

Now what Europe proposes in a real way may in fact scuttle those sectors if the region caves in to the European position.

You may remember that the late Sir John Compton came to office in part because he promised his people that he would resolve this matter for the banana farmers in St. Lucia and get them a better deal.

This day speaks to the links between culture and development.  Indeed this whole state of negotiations between Africa the Caribbean and Europe speaks of a cultural differences, a lack of understanding about how people think and make decisions in our countries, and a lack of respect for those processes.

I remember as a minister of The Bahamas being deeply offended by the comments made about our country by a European Commissioner.  At a conference in the Dominican Republic, I represented The Bahamas at a meeting and I thought I was in an old Hollywood movie.

There was the Development Commissioner of the EU; in short sleeves without his coat in a room with his officials and a fan squeaking and blowing hot air overhead.  He is sweating and he is busy telling me what is wrong with our country and why we need to make our decisions in a different way.

I am not one to mince words which I did not on that occasion.  But the answer was the same: take it or leave it.

The question then is what do we do?

The traditional routes of overseas development assistance, trade not aid and its adjunct foreign direct investment have not always proven to be healthy alternatives.

Clearly these alternatives continue to be in the mix of policy initiatives but coming from out of the mist is the old, tried and true religion that of self determination: the marshalling of African resources to achieve the goals for Africa and its Diaspora.

In this regard, I want to thank the President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki for the support of his government for the convening of the Diaspora and its resources.

We have had two wonderful convocations in Jamaica and just recently in August in Barbados.   The way is clear; Africans must marshal their own resources.  Our political situation is much better than the 19th century and so governments which we control can now bring state resources to bear on marshalling the public and private sector to bring development, health, and peace.

Governments surely understand their own cultures, and surely culture is a key to development. The Bahamas and much of the Caribbean region use the tourism model.  There is much scope for that in Africa.

It seems to me that one policy ought to be the partnering with Caribbean countries and countries in Africa on tourism matters.  For example, I have seen pictures of the vistas in Sierra Leone and it reminds me so much of the Caribbean.  The possibilities for tourism development are endless and the Caribbean has the expertise and the know how to help Africa develop this tourist potential.

Not only is there the potential for tourist visits but also the potential for the export of products including art works, clothing, jewelry and finished products.  It must be possible in this way to marshal indigenous resources to so drive development forward. Tourism is but one example of partnering.

I believe then that there is a positive future.  The spirit of the African people throughout the world is a strong one, it is self reliant.

It seems to me that if this ethos of self reliance remains front and centre of our methodologies, Africa must succeed.  It must infect the governance issues that have to be addressed.  It will infect the way we approach our international treaties and the obligations that arise from them.

This ethos of self reliance will also remove the beggar mentality that is so often present in international fora, groveling mendicancy as the late Errol Barrow of Barbados used to put it and the view that Africa is just a big basket case.

I find nothing more objectionable when I know what potential there is and I know that the good stories do not get told.

At our recent conference in Barbados, we were transfixed by an interesting idea advanced by Dr. Carl Blackwood who is a Trinidadian émigré in the United States who lives in Silicon Valley.  He advanced the notion of an African satellite.  He said that every continent had gone into the space business except Africa.

Dr. Blackwood asked the Conference to recommend to the Heads of Government of the Caribbean region and of Africa that we collaborate on the building and launching of an African satellite from design through construction to launch.  He has the expertise to design and build it.  Some asked why?  He said for itself and for the knowledge and capacity building amongst Africans at home on the continent and in the Diaspora.

I was so intrigued by this idea that has since been adopted by the Conference that I personally pledged to help him make it a reality.  I have since followed up with the relevant governmental authority with a view to getting it on the agenda of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs when they meet to consider the Conferences ideas.

Dr. Blackwood said that the equator is the best launching site for rockets because it can use the natural forces to help propel it into space.  Africa has a vast stretch of the equator and he could not understand why we have not built a site in Africa, ideally in Kenya to build and launch satellites.  He believes that this can be done as an all African project from both the continent and the Diaspora.  It is an idea that you should file away and look for it to come into fruition.

Long ago the late President Julius Nyerere promoted the idea of the African way to develop the economy using the example of village councils and a people’s democracy.  While many argued that this was not the best way forward, what it showed us is that it is possible to inculcate into public policy an African way of doing things.

As policy is very often a constant voyage of discovery, it is time to look again and continue to look for new models as to how to succeed.  Certainly, the asue which we inherited from Africa in the Caribbean where people pool their resources, and the movement of women in the micro lending field, are examples of the local culture being incorporated into public policy.

But to me front and centre must be the building of the self esteem of our people.  No more bleaching creams and denigration of that which is black.  We must uphold the notion of the content of character over the colour of the skin.  When we will have accomplished that then the true revolution will have been accomplished.

The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina writing in the July issue of Vanity Fair devoted entirely to Africa said this and I leave you with it: “The habit – of trying to turn the second-largest continent in the world, which has 53 countries and nearly a billion people of every variety and situation into one giant crisis – is now one of the biggest problems Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Ghana face.

“We have learned to ignore the shrill screams coming from the peddlers of hopelessness.  We motor on faith and enterprise, with small steps.  On hope and without hysteria.”

Amen to that!

I thank you very much indeed.