Labouring through the communiqué, I asked myself; did the African and other Third World leaders who populate the Commonwealth, wade through the document before endorsing it? Did their technocrats examine so long a communiqué before committing their countries to it? If they did, why was it not summarised into concrete, easily digestible points?
I was not really surprised because the headmaster of the Commonwealth is Britain, a country whose parliament is famous for long debates and whose current prime minister, the Honourable Boris Johnson, is a master of circumlocution. Given the verbosity, I was tempted to ask whether Mr Johnson wrote the communiqué; but it did not contain the flowery nature of his often combative prose.
To be sure, colonisation and the process of de-colonisation were nightmares for the victims. The Pan Africanist, Frantz Fanon began his famous 1963 book,with the truism that: “National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”
In his speech at the Commonwealth, Johnson told the 54 countries gathered a lie that they and Britain “are united by an invisible thread of shared values, history and friendship.” In truth, the thread of colonialism is visible and the coloniser and the colonised could not historically have had shared values and friendship.
Charles spoke to the heart of the Commonwealth when he told the gathering: “It seems to me that there are lessons in this for our Commonwealth family. For while we strive together for peace, prosperity and democracy, I want to acknowledge that the roots of our contemporary association run deep into the most painful period of our history. I cannot describe the depths of my personal sorrow at the suffering of so many, as I continue to deepen my own understanding of slavery’s enduring impact.
An intriguing aspect of this conference was the emergence of Rwanda’s Paul Kagame as the new chair of the Commonwealth. His country, like Mozambique which had also joined the Commonwealth, was not a former British colony. Rwanda was colonised by the French and Mozambique by the Portuguese. But within thirteen years of joining the Commonwealth, Rwanda holds the chair. Is this a strategy to draw in more countries that were colonised by other competitors?as members.
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