The title of Moeletsi Mbeki’s new book, Architects of Poverty: Why Africa’s Capitalism needs Changing, has a progenitor: namely, the phrase architects of apartheid, which is deployed at the drop of a hat (a fedora from the 1950s, no doubt) whenever the bad old days come under rhetorical fire.
We’re used to hearing architects of apartheid, and thus Mbeki has done a neat trick here, forcing our minds to recalibrate the notions that inhere in the phrase – of powerful men doing wrong in Africa, for instance (they are black, suddenly, not white) or of the scale of the wrong (which now extends beyond South Africa’s borders).
Mbeki’s book is designed to posit “what needs to be done to break the stranglehold of the African elites on political power and to set sub-Saharan Africa once more on the road to development”. BOOK SA is pleased to bring you both the complete preface and a section of Mbeki’s chapter on BEE:
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Preface
The curator pointed to a large musket hanging on the wall – one of the items sold to Africans as part of the infamous Triangular Trade whereby manufactured goods were shipped from Europe to West Africa and exchanged for slaves, who were shipped to the Americas to grow sugar, cotton and tobacco that were then shipped back to Europe. This was mercantile capitalism in action.
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Most people have heard of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” – child soldiers and orphans who were displaced during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983 – 2005 – two million killed, according to Wikipedia). Many of the children were adopted by families in the United States and found themselves relocated to landscapes impossibly distant from those of central Africa. Think: Minneapolis in winter.
What is less well-known is that the “Lost Boys” didn’t only go to America. Other countries took them in, too – including South Africa, although, in SA’s case, it wasn’t in the open-armed fashion seen elsewhere. First, you had to walk here, which might take ten years or more. Then, you had to battle Home Affairs while finding a way to feed yourself. Eventually, if you worked hard and caught enough breaks, you could become someone. A successful businessman, for instance, or an author.
Aher Arop Bol became both. BOOK SA is pleased to bring you an excerpt from his memoir, The Lost Boy:
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(Note: Aher is seven or eight years old when he tells this story)
In July 1991 the SPLA platoon in our area was ordered to leave and move to the equatorial region of southern Sudan. Many minors were thinking of following the soldiers, rather than starving to death as so many had done in Ethiopia in 1987. We had strict orders not to leave our camp, but I, as an individual taking charge of my own life, was determined to escape.
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