Togo’s 9th Pan-Congress is What Walter Rodney Warned About
Togo will be the site of the 9th Pan-African Congress which is to be held later this year. For anyone who is familiar with the history of the current regime in Togo, it should be apparent that this Congress is an attempt to find legitimacy through Pan-Africanism. Since the protests in 2017, the dictatorship in Togo has confronted the dual challenge of trying to legitimize itself before the world while also tightening its grip on power.
The tightening of this grip came recently when the constitution of Togo was altered so that Togo now has a parliamentary system in which members of parliament select the president, rather than having the president be elected in a general election voted on by the citizens of Togo. Given that Faure Gnassingbé’s political party holds the dominant position in Togo’s national assembly, this ensures that it will now be virtually impossible to unseat Faure electorally. I will address the ramifications of Togo’s new parliamentary system in a separate piece. My main focus here is the ramifications of Togo’s Pan-African Congress.
The 2017 protests did not manage to unseat Faure, but one thing which those protests did accomplish is that the dictatorship in Togo is now in a position in which it has to improve its international reputation after the world witnessed the brutal crackdown of the protesters in Togo. One notable example of this has been the launch of the Togo First new site which exists to promote positive news about the government of Togo. The website also publishes stories in English to reach English readership as well.
This 9th Pan-African Congress is part of this effort as well. The government of Togo is hoping to provide some form of legitimacy by attaching itself to the Pan-African movement which has historically inspired hope and advancement in Africa. Upon looking at the website for the Pan-African Congress, I was struck by the fact that the website uses the faces of prominent Pan-African leaders in history to promote the Congress. There are three faces which I think are worth mentioning.
The first two are both Togolese. The first is Sylvanus Olympio, the man who was assassinated by Gnassingbé Eyadéma, Faure’s father. It’s very shameless that the very regime which killed Olympio is now using him to promote this Pan-African Congress. It’s also shameless that Gervais Koffi Djondo is being used to promote this Congress because he’s been closely aligned with the Gnassingbé dynasty and even worked in Eyadéma’s government. In other words, the website is using both Olympio and a man who worked for Olympio’s killer to promote this event.
The other face which stood out to me was Walter Rodney. This is because Rodney was forced to confront the contradictions of post-colonial societies in Africa and the Caribbean in which the class which came to power continued the same colonial policies — this was what Kwame Nkrumah referred to as neocolonialism. For Rodney, these contradictions were apparent during the Sixth Pan-African Congress which was held in Tanzania in 1974.
Rodney stated that “when the Sixth Pan-African Congress meets in Dar-es-Salaam in June 1974 it will be attended mainly by spokesmen of African and Caribbean states which in so many ways represent the negation of Pan-Africanism.” He was referring to the fact that many of the leaders who met at this Congress were individuals who were not fully committed to the vision of Pan-Africanism. He explained that the class which came to power following the end of colonialism in Africa “reneged on the cardinal principle of Pan-Africanism: namely, the unity and indivisibility of the African continent.”
One of the issues which emerged leading up to the Sixth Pan-African Congress was that conflict between Forbes Burnham and Eusi Kwayana in Guyana. Kwayana, who co-founded the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), became a leading critic of Burnham’s government. At the time Burnham was prime minister of Guyana. There was a period of time in which Kwayana was supportive of Burnham’s government and Burnham’s Pan-African efforts. Kwayana had traveled to Africa on behalf of Burnham’s government where he met with various anti-colonial movements in Africa to provide them with support. Burnham’s government provided supplies and support for many of the liberation struggles in Africa, including the liberation struggle in South Africa. Eventually Kwayana fell out with Burnham’s government over the corruption within the government.
In preparation for the Sixth Pan-African Congress, ASCRIA was involved in the formation of the Caribbean Liberation Steering Committee. Apart from Kwayana, the committee included Makandal Daaga and Khafra Kambon from Trinidad, Tim Hector from Antigua, Bobby Clarke from Barbados, and Maurice Bishop from Grenada. Burnham got the Tanzanian government to ban non-governmental organizations from the Pan-African Congress to prevent members of the Caribbean Liberation Steering Committee from attending the Congress in Tanzania. Barring Caribbean Pan-Africanists from attending was part of Burnham’s efforts to frustrate the Pan-African activities of ASCRIA. Burnham also went so far as to deport two African Americans named Mamadou Lumumba and Shango Umoja because of their connections with ASCRIA.
ASCRIA would later merge with other organizations in Guyana to form the Working People’s Alliance (WPA). When Rodney returned to Guyana from his time teaching in Tanzania, he joined the WPA and became part of the struggle against Burnham’s dictatorship. This is why it’s a mockery that Rodney’s face would be used to promote a Pan-African Congress being hosted by a dictatorship. Rodney’s struggle in Guyana was a struggle against a dictatorship which cloaked itself in Pan-Africanism. He fought against the very thing which the government of Togo is doing now. This 9th Pan-African Congress in Togo is a Congress being organized by some of the very elements who represent the negation of Pan-Africanism.
