From time to time one comes across a story that proves the accuracy of that old French proverb that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
When one looks back over the last 100 years, there is no denying that the world has mostly changed for the better. Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty; there is better access to education and health, and more people enjoy clean running water and electricity than they did in 1926.
There are plenty more examples, not least of which is that Africa is no longer suffering under the yoke of colonialism, albeit most of our economies can be best described as neocolonial.
Yet a lot more has remained the same. Reading the newspapers yesterday, I came across an article about a group of men who recently returned from Russia and Ukraine, where, they say, they had been lured to fight for the Kremlin.
Although much of the media coverage of South Africans caught in the crossfire in Ukraine has mostly focused on 17 citizens who were allegedly recruited by Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla and two others associated with former president Jacob Zuma’s MK Party, it has now become apparent that there are more of our citizens who ended up in that deadly warzone.
Media reports from other parts of Africa and Asia suggest a concerted effort by at least one private Russian military company to recruit fighters from this continent and poor countries.
Speaking to journalist Chris Makhaye, some of those who were lucky enough to return home following President Cyril Ramaphosa’s pleas to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, said Africans and others from the global south were “treated like cannon fodder”.
Africans were always pushed forward. We saw comrades from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Kenya suffer the same fate.
— South African returnee from Ukraine war
“Africans were always pushed forward. We saw comrades from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Kenya suffer the same fate. Many died or were maimed,” said one of the returned South Africans.
His comments reminded me of the horrific stories told by Africans who returned from World War 1. Many of them were deployed to war zones but without the right to carry weapons to defend themselves. Others told of being sent to areas where they died in great numbers for countries they had never set foot in.
Although they had shed blood for the Allied forces, when the victors established the League of Nations and formulated the principles for a new world order, the Africans were not invited to the negotiating table.
It would take another world war, two decades later, for the West to even start talking about independence for the colonised world. Even then, many of the colonised had to engage in both peaceful and violent struggles for their demands for freedom to be listened to.
Since the end of World War 2, humanity has lived under the belief that we’re slowly moving towards a “rules-based” global system where conflict between countries could be resolved through the United Nations without going to war. Even though armed conflicts continued to break out in various regions over the period, the fact that these never escalated into another world war was seen as a success story for the UN.
But slowly, history seems to be marching backwards to an era where “might is right” and unilateralism is the order of the day as the US, one of the key founding members of the UN, and its allies launch illegal wars against countries it regards as enemies without even attempting to first resolve matters via the UN.
The attacks on Iran by the US and Israel this weekend, which precipitated an equally violent response from Tehran and moved the world dangerously close to yet another multinational military conflict, further demonstrate that today’s world is not far from the world of the 1920s.
The belief that the end of both World War 2 and what became known as the Cold War meant the beginning of an era of international peace, where differences are resolved through dialogue, has now been emphatically shattered.
In this dangerous world we are entering, what is to be the response of African states? Are we going to allow ourselves to be dragged in and used as “cannon fodder” like those South Africans and other Africans who found themselves fighting in Ukraine?
Or are our African states, using the political power they didn’t possess in the 1920s, going to stand together with countries from the rest of the global south to demand a return to the path of multilateralism promised all those decades ago?
The war in the Gulf may look very far from us right now, but that should not lull us into a false sense of safety. Our only protection is a world that rejects foreign aggression and promotes true equality between nations, no matter how rich or poor they might be. That is the world we should always speak with one voice in demanding.
