Nonviolent Africa-One Man's Quest
by Frederick B. Hudson
A white Columbia University graduate student, Matt Mayer, announces his
plans to resist President Jimmy Carter's new Selective Service registration
program in 1980. After significant media attention including an interview in
Rolling Stone magazine, he finds himself at a War Resisters International
convocation in 1982, hoping to meet resisters from every spot on the globe.
But no comrades are present from Africa, Latin America, or Asia. The
American resister becomes convinced that racism divides those who proclaim a
devotion to peace even at the cost of incarceration. He looks for a mentor
from the communities of color. He finds one. With forty years in the pacifist
trenches.
Bill Sutherland is an African American who refused military service in
World War II-when many blacks saw the war as a coveted opportunity to assert
their claims to full citizenship.
Influenced as a youth by the strategies of Mahatma Gandhi, Sutherland
worked after graduation from Bates College in Maine for the Quaker affiliated
American Friends Service Committee. In 1942, Sutherland joined noted
activist(and Chicago 7 defendant) Dave Dellinger in the Lewisburg Federal
Penitentiary as a war resister.
After his release from prison in 1945, Sutherland pedaled around Europe
on a bicycle trip. He met African students in London and Paris whose
enthusiasm for the possibility of liberation on the African continent sparked
a virus of commitment in Sutherland that infected his revolutionary
compatriots on "the Dark Continent" for years and tears.
Matt Mayer and Bill Sutherland have collaborated on a remarkable book,
Guns and Gandhi in Africa, which probes the dilemma a advocating nonviolence
in the face of brutality that held people in thrall with pistols, whips,
barbed wire, identity passes, and unspeakable horrors.
This work by Mayer and Sutherland is not a biography. Sutherland's
selflessness required that the pages reflect the experiences, philosophies,
strategies, and tactics employed by African leaders who shared confidences
with the two authors.
A remarkable man, Mr. Sutherland. How many people, living or dead had
prolonged tete-a-tetes with Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, tom
Mboya(who was representing an imprisoned Jomo Kenyatta), and Bayard Rustin-at
the same meeting?
Ghana was the first African country where Sutherland settled-it was after
all the first to achieve independence after World War II. Sutherland
observed Nkrumah's efforts to a build a state via a mass movement and the
creation of institutions responsive to the needs of the people.
Mayer and Sutherland returned to Ghana in 1992 . Sutherland's oldest
daughter has remained there since her birth and has become that country's
Deputy Minister in charge of Higher Education. She helps them meet leaders
who review Nkrumah's successes and failures to implement a strategy called
Positive Action-an offshoot of the Gandhian movement featuring sit-down
strikes, boycotts and noncooperation which lead to Ghana's independence in
1957.
These civil rights techniques had usefulness after independence-the Ghanaian
Minister of Finance provoked President Eisenhower to invest U.S. dollars in
the Volta River development project after he was refused a glass of orange
juice in then Jim Crow Maryland!
Meyer and Sutherland review Nkrumah's commitment to Pan-African
solidarity. This quest was shared by Sutherland during his over thirty year
residence in Tanzania where he discussed Africa's hope often with Julius
Nyerere who was president from 1962 to 1985.
Committed to African liberation, Nyerere offered sanctuary in Tanzania to
members of the African National Congress and numerous other rebel groups from
Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Uganda. In 1978, under Nyerere's
leadership, Tanzanian troops entered Uganda, deposing dictator Idi Amin.
Nyerere explained these actions by saying: "when you win, the morale of
the African freedom fighters will go up and the morale of their opponents
throughout southern Africa will go down. I said that's what we should
do-demonstrate success-which we did."
The most graphic test of the authors' nonviolent creed is challenged in
their discussions with South African leaders. Interviews with a variety of
freedom fighters stress their life long commitment to struggle and social
transformation. Yet the choice of violence by some freedom fighters hangs
heavy over the discussions and cannot be fully dismissed as futile in the
strife that eventually won enfranchisement for the black majority.
Insightful interviews with Kenneth Kaunda, the former President of Zambia
and Graca Machel, the widow of the assassinated head of Mozambique(and Nelson
Mandela's present wife) further flesh out the frustrating attempts of
Africa's leaders to find nonviolent solutions to current problems of
globalization and debt relief.
Despite a continuing, almost strident insistence on pushing a nonviolent
commitment, this book offers a world of privileged conversations with Malcolm
X, Gandhi's granddaughter who remained in South Africa to organize, President
Jerry Rawlings of Ghana and a host of other African and Afro-American
leaders. Sutherland still sees the world through non-violent eyes. Let us
hope his vision is fulfilled.
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