One of the most insidious forms of prejudice is the inability to see beyond one’s own understanding of what prejudice even looks like. Consider the media flurry over the death on Tuesday of Michael Sata, the fifth president of Zambia. Major news outlets – the BBC, al-Jazeera and CNN – have dutifully reported the facts: Sata, who concealed his terminal illness for months, was known as King Cobra for his vitriolic tongue; his politics entailed aggressive, sometimes racially inflected, jabs at ruling and infiltrating powers (the Zambian elite, the Chinese); he did some good, he did some bad; he fell short, he will be missed. But most of these reports have also placed curious emphasis on Sata’s vice-president, Guy Scott, who will now step in as interim president for the 90-day period mandated by the constitution before a general election is held. Untimely presidential death by illness has happened in Zambia before, as recently as 2008. When Levy Mwanawasa died halfway through his second term, the vice-president, Rupiah Banda, stepped in and won the interim election. So why is the world so interested in this old story from this young country? Well, as the BBC put it: “Zambian President Sata death: White interim leader appointed.” Yes, Vice-President Scott is white – or what Zambians call, with a measure of fond condescension, a muzungu. He is the “first white president in Africa in 30 years”, some say; “well, since South Africa’s FW de Klerk,” others report with a meaningful look; “Oops, ahem, sorry, the first one since Mauritian prime minister Paul Berénger,” still others hasten to correct. Cue collective eye-rolling from Zambians at home and abroad. As Scott said when he was elected in 2011: “I have long suspected Zambia is moving from a postcolonial to a cosmopolitan condition.” Or, as a (black) Zambian tweeted yesterday: “OH MY GOD our interim president is white! Do not chat to me about Africa not being progressive.” But of course the UK, blinded by the paternalistic mists of postcolonial guilt, would worry about a backslide. And the US, which only sees in black and white, would find this state of things confusing. Instead of recognising, as the internet does, that Scott’s position is a sign of political progress akin to the US election of a minority president, the mainstream media seems to be carrying that double-bladed hatchet of racial anxiety. Scott’s interim position must be either a sign of black passivity or a harbinger of the threat that always hovers behind a black majority: the spectre of the black crowd, its riots and rampage and rage. No matter that Guy Scott was born in Livingstone (in what was then Northern Rhodesia) and is a Zambian citizen. No matter that Scott has been our white Zambian vice-president for three years, or that Sata’s death and Scott’s constitutionally stipulated succession has been on our minds since Sata was first rumoured to be ill many months ago. No matter that Scott has been a major political player since the 1990s, shifting from party to party until he ended up in the Patriotic Front (PF) as Sata’s running mate. The two men were already actual mates. An unlikely pair – Scott a PhD with a scathing sense of irony; Sata an outspoken populist with a reputation for stepping on toes – they spent more than a decade building the PF together and shared genuine respect. As Scott put it in a Guardian interview in 2013: “Michael’s very clever, he knows people tend to regard him as a racist because he talks rough. He’s usually tried it out on me already. He says things like, ‘What would you be if you weren’t white?’ I said, ‘The president?’ That shut him up.” Scott lost a friend as well as a president on Tuesday night. Sata died in London just four days after the 50th anniversary of Zambia’s independence from the British empire on 24 October. He was too ill to attend the celebrations, in which foreign dignitaries and political leaders extolled the country’s virtues: a relatively stable economy, a thriving democracy, a near dearth of coups, a rejection of tribalism. Special praise was reserved, as usual, for Kenneth Kaunda, the “father of the nation”, the professed humanist and avowed socialist who deftly guided the country out of British colonialism into independence in 1964 and then, well, lingered a bit. We’ve only had five presidents in 50 years because Kaunda was president for 26 of them. Five years after he ousted Kaunda, Frederick Chiluba pushed a constitutional amendment through parliament requiring that the president’s parents be Zambian by birth or descent, a ploy to deport Kaunda, whose father was born in Nyasaland (now Malawi). Chiluba succeeded in passing the amendment, only to have it used against him. In 1998, the Zambian supreme court adjudicated that regardless of whether Chiluba’s father was born in Mozambique or Zaire, as his opponents alleged, anyone who was “ordinarily resident” in Zambia when the country came into being on 24 October 1964 became a citizen on that day. This ruling is pertinent to the question of Scott’s eligibility as president; his parents emigrated to Northern Rhodesia from Scotland and England in 1927 and 1940, respectively. According to the supreme court, Scott is a “founding” citizen of Zambia so his parentage isn’t in question, just as Chiluba’s wasn’t. But Scott himself has taken the spirit of the amendment to heart. “I won’t run for the presidency at the election because constitutionally, I can’t,” he said. The ultimate fate of the constitutional amendment about presidential parentage isn’t yet clear, but it’s unlikely a new constitution will be ratified in time for the election in three months. Zambians have been more focused on another constitutional change, to electoral policy: from a simple majority to a “50% plus one vote” majority, with a run-off between two finalists if necessary. This makes a big difference in a democracy that evinces a true commitment to a multi-party system (the last election had 10 parties with statistically significant votes). With this kind of complexity, the wisest move on PF’s part is to allow white Guy Scott, the man least likely to run, to hold the reins until the real contenders have wrangled it out. What’s on people’s minds isn’t the colour of Scott’s skin; it’s which candidate PF will select among the range of other possible successors to Sata. I called home to ask, how is everything? Everything is quiet. The nation is in mourning. The TV broadcasts interviews with self-congratulatory politicians; the radio plays patriotic songs reminding us of our motto, “One Zambia, One Nation”; the ubiquitous blue minibuses flash their lights as they barrel down Great East Road. As one tweet puts it: “The irony is that the western media probably cares more about #GuyScott’s whiteness than Zambians do.”
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 00:34:16 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015