wfn.org | After Serving as Cold War Battleground, Africa Set for Renaissance

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

1-September-1999 
99293 
 
    After Serving as Cold War Battleground, 
    Africa Is Set for Renaissance 
 
    by Jerry L. Van Marter 
 
GENEVA - After years as the "battleground" of the Cold War, Africa is on 
the verge of a "renaissance," three African church officials declared 
yesterday. 
 
    Speaking to a group of journalists attending the World Council of 
Churches central committee meeting in Geneva, Samuel Kobia, a Kenyan who is 
a senior WCC staff member, said: "What is finally emerging now is the 
reality that African people have rich experiences and ideas that they want 
to put into practice." 
 
    Because most African countries gained their independence during the 
height of Cold War tensions, the superpowers - chiefly the Soviet Union and 
the United States - dictated the terms of their freedom. "The African 
people were robbed of the opportunity to design their own governments and 
systems," Kobia said.  "Freedom for Africans was engineered." 
 
    Immediately following independence, new African nations were plagued 
with a string of often violent coups - again created by the Cold War 
powers.  "It was not in their interest to see democracy, because it's 
easier to control the people via dictatorship," Kobia said. 
 
    Kobia said the cycle of coups and civil wars "should be approaching its 
end." He described lingering civil wars - particularly in Angola and Sierra 
Leone - as "having no legitimacy whatsoever."  In response to a question 
from ENI, he said the SPLA resistance to the Islamic fundamentalist 
government in Sudan was "the exception." 
 
    An inability to address the needs of the people of Africa was one of 
the most painful legacies of the Cold War, said Clement Janda, a Sudanese 
Anglican clergyman and general secretary of the All Africa Conference of 
Churches (AACC).  "Our problems continue because the Cold War legacy 
doesn't allow for the realistic addressing of problems," he said. 
 
    In Sudan, Janda said, there were rich deposits of oil and uranium, but, 
after 35 years of civil war, "the powers are not discussing the effects of 
the war on the people.  Instead they are discussing who will be in charge 
of the resources." 
 
    The role of the churches in such situations was to represent the 
interests of the people, said Melaku Kifle, a WCC staff member from 
Ethiopia.  Whether it be by standing in solidarity with liberation 
movements, as in South Africa, or providing a forum for discussing the 
issues, "it is the role of the church and the ecumenical movement to help 
churches understand root causes of people's problems and act on them." 
 
    Kifle expressed great hope that the Sudan Ecumenical Forum - which 
gathers church leaders from the north and south once a year to study, plan 
and strategize on the future of their war-torn country - would succeed in 
injecting the church's historic concern for the poor into negotiations that 
otherwise would only be about political power. 
 
    "It sometimes seems," said Kifle, "that only the church is willing to 
address long-term solutions." 
 
    Such insistence by the churches was beginning to produce what Kobia 
called a "renaissance" in Africa.  "From Ghana to South Africa, we are 
seeing countries adopting democratic governance," Kobia said, "and there is 
far more talk of a new society in Africa." 

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