"So where are we headed? And what are we doing about it? And how are those of us who have mouths to speak articulating the dangerous times we are suddenly living through once more?"

—John Matshikiza

These questions raised by John Matshikiza, columnist and editor for one of South Africa's leading newspapers, The Mail and Guardian, resonate very closely with some of the questions I have occupied myself with daily since this madness took to monstrous proportions in the past few months. With everyday that I walk past the 'Peace Camp' stationed outside the Campus Center I am always amazed at the proficiency with which selective activism and sympathy are distributed to distant causes. Let's face it: the United States has never really been tickled by any African fancies. The U.S. has been the hidden culprit pulling the strings from behind the curtains in the puppet drama staging the post-colonial African malaise. U.S. powers stretch their tentacles to engineer the dissemination of panic and fear through elaborate print capitalisms and audio-visual media.

The U.S. regulates and filters the directions in which sympathy is channeled in a similar manner. When the United States is implicated, directly or indirectly in any arena of African politics and economics, the intricacies of Africa's ongoing struggles are merely relegated to textual abstraction in scholarly journals. Or if lucky, they find space among the random blurbs at the bottom of the television screen while CNN broadcasts more urgent matters. I cannot do justice to any concealed truths and since it is not within my capacity to reorganize the transmission of information, I will reflect on my own country's [strategic] role in this war that has passed with an entire continent's organized silence.

South Africa is often seen as an anomaly among African countries. The almost rhythmic coexistence of the first and the third world within the same territorial space is striking. By night, an aerial view of the skyline of Joburg is indistinguishable from that of New York City or London. But the paved streets separating one high rise from the next host enterprising street vendors who bear the December heat with the same tenacity with which they braze the chills of June when business runs slow. Mini-bus commuters trek from the dusty streets of townships to occupy their desks in office complexes. If they are that lucky.

For most, the reality is anything from guarding the mansions and townhouses now housing the so called 'emerging black middle class,' or laboring away in coffee shops and restaurants where yuppies of the Rainbow Nation sip on cocktails and take smoking breaks from their shopping sprees at Diesel Style Lab and Guess. I am not launching an attack on the current disposition of South African youth. I am a product of this post-apartheid hybridism. It is not a question of whether I embrace the first world or third world camps of South African schizophrenia. Such a choice is merely conceptual and all reality reflects is a multiplicity of nuanced identities obscuring the thin lines between and within these camps. As such, it seems we float in limbo amidst this current of 'Reconstruction and Development'...or whatever it is they call it these days.

But, I also know that these exciting trinkets of middle-class hedonism are not unrelated to the position our leaders take in world affairs. Whether or not South Africa (and many other nations in Sub-Saharan Africa) forges ahead on the treacherous ascent towards that elusive pie in the sky of hyper-capitalism is contingent in part on its role in the war in Iraq and its aftermath, which I guess has already begun.

President Thabo Mbeki voiced a cool and clinical opposition to the war, and his predecessor Nelson Mandela was uncompromisingly damning of the Blair and Bush administrations. Mbeki may not have the charismatic aura of Mandela, but he commands the cunning savvy of a cultivated politician—with a calculated dogmatism to mould his confidence.

Sometimes I amuse myself by seeing him as the symbolic lovechild borne of the West's adulterous affair with nature's evil twin. His stance on salient political issues is emblematic of these apparent contradictions. We need only recall that Mbeki is the same president who evoked international scrutiny when he denied the connection of full blown AIDS to HIV, and only months later insisted on maintaining a controversial silent diplomacy over the mayhem plaguing Zimbabwe under the ZANU-PF administration. In the face of mounting pressure from Britain to co-sign a ratification indefinitely suspending Robert Mugabe from the Commonwealth, he chose to put the pen back in his pocket and take the paperwork home to read it over. This gesture did not prevent Mbeki from allaying the fears of investors about the possible spill over of Zimbabwe's instability over the borders of South Africa. After a meeting with corporate representatives from Daimler-Chrysler, AAB, Capital Alliance and Unilever, Mbeki secured a multi-million dollar investment package with the International Investment Council.

In retrospect, there was nothing dramatically risky in Mbeki's expression of dissent over the actions taken against Iraq by the U.S. and Britain. The majority of UN members voiced the same opinion. What is important then is not who joined the Bush/Blair bandwagon and who did not, but what are everybody's plans for the aftermath. It is no coincidence that against the background of the looming war earlier last month, the New Economic Program for African Development (NEPAD) was launched in Abuja, Nigeria. African and Western delegates represented at this conference urged Mbeki to announce "Africa's stance" on the war, as if the entire continent spoke from one mind and with one tongue. While African countries swayed from east to west in the reminiscent fashion of cold-war politics, one stance had to be made to represent the continent in this familiar board game. The fact that it is African leaders themselves who appointed Mbeki as the spokesperson for the continent is very telling of what the continent has learned from the past. The U.S., Britain and the rest of Europe are not about to entertain abstract theories about heterogeneity and pluralism. For these powers Africa is only tenable as far as it remains a manageable 'homogenous' economic and political entity. It features in only when called upon to sing the background vocals for that age-old Euro-American masterpiece.

The ideological battleground of the Cold War stretched far and wide and Africa was not an exception. The wounds stretching deep into the cultures and socio-economic structures in different parts of the continent were merely bandaged with consolation prizes. Consolations awarded in the form of regional integration initiatives and loans for the structural adjustments necessary to facilitate those projects. Needless to say, there were no houses to be built if the foundations had been turned to quicksand before the bricks were laid. It seems that yet again, after a major world event master-minded by the same usual suspects, Africa is kept just above the sand to allow breathing, and the same masters of illusion hand out palliative measures such as NEPAD and appoint a physician to regulate the doses of this medicine while the Godfather & Co. take on more pressing operations. The U.S. has unanimously ordained itself the Godfather of humankind. And in the haze of an imperialist hangover, England pulls the chords for the U.S. where the U.S. can't quite focus.

Thus England has paved the way for another development hick-up, NEPAD, and if this one is to be pulled through, Mbeki better walk into the sunset with America and Britain as they 'repatriate' democracy and other trinkets of Western hegemony to Iraq. Africa is entangled yet again, and the cameras filming this drama cast terror all over the screens and speakers of eyes and ears tuned to CNN, BBC et al.

Every day that I walk the six blocks from my apartment and absent-mindedly make my way towards the student union I am snapped out of my usual spaced out pensiveness and confront the euphoria of pseudo-progressiveness emanating from the Peace Camp. When I hear those protestors' chants screaming to imaginary audiences and circulating petitions to nowhere, I am reminded of how it is that forgetfulness is invented and the world's attention is distorted to silence Africa's perpetual bind.