Hutuba ya Rais Kikwete

REMARKS BY H.E. JAKAYA MRISHO KIKWETE, THE PRESIDENT OF UNITED REPUBLIC OF TANZANIA, AT THE OPENING CEREMONY OF THE 5TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF AFRICAN DIASPORA HERITAGE TRAIL 26th OCTOBER 2009

Honorable Dr. Jinmi Adisa, CIDO Executive Director, African Union;
The Honorable Shamsa Mwangunga, Minister of Natural Resources
and Tourism, Republic of Tanzania;
Honorable Ministers from Sudan, Angola, Gambia and Bermuda,
Senator Mark Bean, Member, ADHT Foundation Bermuda;
Dr. Gaynelle Henderson-Bailey, Executive Director, ADHT Conference;
Distinguished Participants; Ladies and Gentlemen;

I am so honoured and privileged to welcome all the distinguished guests and delegates to Tanzania. Please feel at home. I understand that this Conference is taking place in Africa for the first time. We thank the organizers for choosing Tanzania to host the Conference. We treasure this honour and confidence. I hope you will find the conference facilities and arrangements suitable enough for successful deliberations.
I was delighted to learn that arrangements have been made for delegates to visit a few tourist attractions that Tanzania has to offer. Please take advantage of your visit here to explore what our country has to offer. I promise you that you will leave Tanzania with unforgetable memories – and will encourage you to come back for a longer visit.
Pan-Africanism and Partnership in Development
Ladies and Gentlemen:
A hundred and nine years ago, a learned brother from Trinidad and Tobago called Henry Sylvester Williams sponsored a conference in London. His goal was as simple as it was noble: to bring into closer touch with each other the peoples of African descent throughout the world. That became the first Pan-African conference.
The ensuing efforts of our greatest Pan-Africanists, the likes of Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Wallace Johnson, George Padmore, Ras Makonnen, Dr. William Dubois, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and many more including Mwalimu Julius Nyerere of Tanzania throughout the following century, gave birth to a far-reaching movement of Pan-African consciousness comprising of Africans in the continent and people of African descent in the diaspora.
Anguished by the excesses of colonialism in the motherland, and dehumanising oppression in the diaspora, and guided by their firm conviction in a shared objective and destiny, in an African personality and in a glorious culture and future, these greats organized efforts to translate the Pan-Africanist thought into actions meant to reclaim human dignity.
I say this to remind ourselves that, whenever we, those who trace our heritage to this continent, meet for whatever purpose, we rekindle the spirit of Pan-Africanism. In meeting here today, we follow a path long set by our ancestors and we stand upon the foundation they built.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Despite some challenges, our kith and kin in the Diaspora have managed to attain prosperity in stable and developed societies. We, in the motherland, are still contending with poverty and underdevelopment. In essence, we are short of resources to finance social and economic development, to encourage and promote entrepreneurship, and to build strong institutions of governance meant to serve our people well.
However, we have our people in developed countries, people like you, our kith and kin – private individuals, like many of you here, who are an integral part of those economies. I am told that in the United States, about $750 billion worth of assets is held by people of African ancestry. Our request is simple: Let a small proportion of those resources be made available to help the development of the motherland. Let us transform this conference as a process of building the bridges to make that happen. Let me make myself clearly understood that we are not looking for handout. We are looking for investments, we are looking for development finance and we are looking for transfer of skills and technology. We are, as a matter of fact, looking for partnership for progress. Just as we are bound with our common heritage, let us also be bound up with our common prosperity.
Indeed, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the founding President of Tanzania, said at the Sixth Pan African Congress in 1974, that “your demand for dignity and equality in those places was always bound up with the status of your people here in the continent”.
Use your political power, or access to political power, use your knowledge and skills, and use your resources or access to resources, to help your brothers and sisters in the motherland in their fight against poverty and backwardness.
Negative Image of Africa
Ladies and Gentlemen,
For millennia, Africa has received travellers across oceans – and all of them brought back to their homes different stories about Africa. Allow me to cite a few of these. Pliny the Elder, the naval commander of the early Roman Empire, travelled to Africa. In a book volume, he reported the following back to the fellow Europeans:
“Of the Ethiopians there are diverse forms and kinds of men. Some there are toward the east that have neither nose nor nostrils, but the face all full. Others that have no upper lip, they are without tongues, and they speak by signs, and they have but a little hole to take their breath at, by the which they drink with an oaten straw ... In a part of Afrikke be people called Pteomphane, for their King they have a dog, at whose fancy they are governed" (Cited in: "Africa: A Biography of the Continent" by John Reader)
Again, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to West Africa in 1561, and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as “beasts who have no houses,” he writes, “They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts”.
What is significant with these quotes by early travelers and chroniclers of Africa, is that they represented the beginning and the entrenchment of a tradition of telling stories about Africa in the West. Indeed a tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of catastrophe, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet, Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child”. Indeed a tradition that has survived to this day, to be taken up by modern day travelers to the continent, including Mr. Keith Richburg, who wrote in his famous 1997 book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,
“I am an American, but a black man, a descendant of slaves brought from Africa. If things had been different, I might have been one of them (that means “the Africans”) – or might have met some anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage to slavery. Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I will throw it back into your face, and then I will rub your nose in the images of the rotting flesh of the victims of the genocide of the Tutsis of Rwanda. Sorry, but I have been there. I have had an AK-47 rammed up my nose; I have talked to machete-wielding Hutu militiamen with the blood of their latest victims splattered across their T-shirts. I have seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire, a famine in Somalia, a civil war in Liberia. I have seen cities bombed to near rubble, and other cities reduced to rubble, because their leaders let them rot and decay while they spirited away billions of dollars - yes, billions - into overseas bank accounts. Thank God my ancestors got out, because, now, I am not one of them.”
Ladies and Gentlemen,
In the few paragraphs, quoted from books that travelers to Africa have written, we have traversed a millennium. But the truth is that we have not travelled very far with regard to the projection of frightening images of savagery that attend the continent of Africa.
I have always wondered why negative image of Africa so persist. It is clear that what we see and read on international media as the image of Africa, indeed what is taken to be representative of Africa, has been entrenched for millennia.
But you and I know that what Pliny the Elder and John Locke reported represents their own imagination of Africa and the Africans, and what our brother Keith Richburg chose to focus on as the sum of all Africa is not a complete picture of Africa.
Yes, Africa, the seat of glorious civilizations and the cradle of mankind, has had a turbulent history. But, the continent is on the move. It is no longer simply a place of the popular images of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved by kindhearted foreigners.
Africa is on the move. Democratisation is being entrenched – we no longer tolerate military coups; corruption is being tackled vigorously – we are no longer defensive about it. Regional and continental institutions are being strengthened and they are being used to advance the security and development agenda. Investments are flowing in; the middle class is on the increase; our economies are growing; and the future looks bright.
There are many good stories about Africa that need to be told, that need to be heard. We are all responsible for spreading these good stories. Every morning in Africa, honest men and women wake up to tend their farms, attend their stalls, get their kids to school, register new businesses, celebrate weddings and graduations. They pray to God that they fear. Every day, progress is being made in healthcare, education, infrastructure, and many other areas.
We have to ensure that we have a say in how African stories are told, who tells them, when they are told, and how many stories are told, for that is critical in the fostering the accurate image of Africa, and ensure that successive generations of members of the African diaspora grow up proud of their ancestry and their motherland. They are not fearful, or embarrased, of coming back because of the images of Africa that have been created.
Preserving Heritage
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The critical part of telling our story is preserving our history and imparting the legacy of our pain, struggle and triumph to our successive generations. I am happy that this conference is aimed at achieving this objective. I am delighted that this year, you have chosen to focus on how we can turn the artefacts, the assets and sites of our heritage into tourism opportunities.
For us on the eastern part of the African continent, this is indeed long overdue. I understand that the interaction between Africa and the new world was much more intense on the Western part of Africa, through trans-Atlantic slave trade. But I would like to contend that in addition to countries such as Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria and others in West Africa, many countries in East Africa, including Tanzania, also represent real pilgrimage to the motherland for our brothers and sisters in the diaspora.
In holding this meeting in Tanzania, we have the opportunity to highlight the East African Slave Trade perpetrated by Arabs. Indeed, this slave trade route played an important part in worldwide enslavement of African peoples.
Advancing Tourism
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This conference is unique for its dual purpose. First, we are here to remind ourselves that we are one and of the same roots and heritage and, therefore, explore those roots and heritage. Secondly, in seeking to turn our heritage assets and sites into tourism destinations, we are advancing our economies and enhancing understanding among cultures and civilisations.
We in Africa understand that we need to do more to increase our share of global tourist arrivals. Despite our wide range of attractions, we in Sub-Saharan Africa received only 3.2 percent of all worldwide tourists last year while Europe received 53.1 percent.
I understand that there are some constraints with regard to air transport to Africa but I also know that we have to market ourselves much more aggressively. For instance, when tourists and other visitors think of Africa, they think of wildlife and safari. We have to put more efforts to showcase a range of attractions existing in Africa. The focus and theme of this Conference helps us in this objective.
It is important that this Conference enhances economic viability of the African diaspora countries and conserve the essence of African descent, culture and history; maintain and transform our tangible and intangible cultural assets into viable tourism attractions, and promote sustainable economic development for cultural education programs, particularly to the communities where such heritage sites are located.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I would like to end by once again thanking the organisers for associating me with this Conference. I am so moved to see so many people from the Diaspora so committed to the understanding and preservation of our heritage.
Let us hold hands across oceans and work together, let us continue our solidarity and treat the artificial divide of the oceans like that of the river across our common village. Together, let us demonstrate, in word and deed, that the continental drift that curved up the once unified super-continent has not had an impact on us. We still owe our existence to the same grandparents of all humanity. The grandparents that started their tentative human steps and practised their earlier civilisation in this continent. They who left their footprints in the volcanic ashes at Laetoli as if to remind us that today we meet at the true cradle of mankind.
I thank you for your kind attention!