Imani Tafari-Ama | Is Ibrahim Traoré Africa’s 21st-century Garvey?

If Marcus Garvey could have imagined what an executor of his vision for Africa’s development could look like, he might have pictured President Ibrahim Traoré and his revolutionary model for Burkina Faso’s development. It is worthwhile sketching a comparison of these leaders whose brand of identity politics drew the proverbial line in the sands, separating accommodation to Euro-American power from a transformational approach to safeguarding African sovereignty.

As African leaders, both Garvey and Traoré broke ranks with norms of tentative trials at governance and not only articulated but also demonstrated the utility of a sound ideological framework, such as Race First, for forging a foolproof framework for advancing a decolonial agenda.

Although celebrated as Jamaica’s first national hero, it is remarkable that scant attention has been paid by successive Jamaican governments to the organic model of sustainable development that Garvey crafted at a time when it was life-threatening to do so. Garvey is regarded as the father of the modern discourse of racial and cultural resistance in Jamaica because of his emphasis on the importance of reclaiming African identities as a mechanism of resisting domination.

In 1914, Marcus Garvey formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) as a means of mobilising the disenfranchised and dispossessed Africans “at home and abroad” around the issues of repatriation and collective socio-economic development. He suggested that by returning to Africa, displaced Africans in the diaspora would reclaim sovereignty over their destinies. Their contact with Africans from the continent would facilitate an enterprise of universal resistance to neo-colonial domination by Western imperialist powers.

GENERALLY IGNORED

Although a significant number of grass-roots people were receptive to this overture, Garvey’s message was generally ignored by the still-colonised masses in Jamaica. Nevertheless, his advocacy for identity reclamation definitely engendered great alarm within Jamaica’s elite plantocracy, and its rising mercantile sectors, which regarded him as a serious subversive political threat.

Those within the grass-roots audience who took Garvey seriously were in two minds about whether to translate his message of racial redemption metaphysically or to take it to its literal conclusion. On the one hand, the notion of repatriation was interpreted as the basis for reinstating the potency of African identities in the diaspora, and on the other, as a physical and spiritual return to the land of the ancestors.

Garvey was most discouraged by what he recognised to be internalised racism, which prevented Africans in Jamaica from recognising their own oppression and exploitation. Rejected by the Brown middle class in Jamaica because of his attempt to contest elections on the platform of race, Garvey was determined to prove that he could successfully mobilise Africans internationally around the issue of repatriation and redemption. His primary preoccupation was to generate African race pride through the promotion of self-confidence and collective socio-economic consciousness. Ultimately, he envisaged a movement of repatriation to Africa and the establishment of modern civilizations there as the mechanism for addressing the perennial problems of displacement and dispossession. The Race Man stirred up the proverbial hornet’s nest because of the vastness of his visualisation of African redemption and the innovativeness of his organisational efforts.

Against the backdrop of Garvey’s clear-cut global activism, it is remarkable that the socio-economic development that our first national hero envisaged for Jamaica has not been realised. The failure to eradicate poverty, throw off the shackles of mental enslavement, and leverage the country’s resources for its majority population is real. Despite the trillions of dollars that have been filtered through the national coffers, the average Jamaican is marginalised from the benefits of resources that have been exploited from under their feet and dished out above their heads, and the economy remains fragile.

In September 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traoré seized power in a military coup in Burkina Faso, formerly called Upper Volta during colonial occupation. Traoré’s coup was the second one for that year. At 34, Traoré resembled Captain Thomas Sankara, previous Burkina Faso president and one of the many assassinated African leaders. Traoré’s predecessor was also 34 when he took power in a similarly revolutionary style of leadership.

PEOPLE-CENTRIC DEVELOPMENT

What is remarkable about the current leader’s radical approach to governance is Traoré’s embodiment of people-centred development. He shocked France, the colonial power since the late nineteenth century with swift marching orders and the nationalisation of the country’s resources. France and other Western countries had benefited big time from rapacious mineral extraction, which halted with the rapid rise of the no-nonsense red beret captain.

Like Garvey, Traoré is from humble beginnings. From a rural background, he graduated with honours in geology and was spotted early as a disciplined and empathetic leader. After enlisting in the armed forces, he qualified on the battlefield in skills like anti-aircraft fighting, peacekeeping, and tackling rampant insurgency, which remains a thorn in his country’s body politic.

After gaining the rank of lieutenant, Traoré was deployed to the Sahel region to perform as part of the United Nations’ peace-keeping mission in Mali. It is significant that since his ascendancy, Traoré has collaborated with Mali and Niger to depart from the African group of nations that form the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). By formulating an alternative, self-sustaining economic model, the Sahel trio provides a showpiece to the continent of what self-reliance should look like.

To prove the certitude of his sustainable development cause, Traoré, who was promoted to the rank of captain in 2020, was involved in the January 2022 coup but quickly recognised that the leader was more self-interested than concerned for the development of the citizens. His popular takeover of power has succeeded in carving out a self-determination model of socio-economic growth that has already distinguished Burkina Faso from the other 54 African states. Replacing foreign interests with local expertise, Captain Traoré’s commandeering of the gold-mining industry has propelled Burkina Faso on the pathway towards economic sovereignty, with a national currency backed by said gold.

Surviving a recent attempt on his life, now a familiar pattern, through strategic intelligence mining, Traoré is, clearly, a target because of his daring assertion of African redemption. Sounds familiar? Like what happened to leaders like Patrice Lumumba of The Congo and Guinean Amilcar Cabral? Or closer to home, the high-level hounding of Marcus Garvey, to his death, for daring to demand the realisation of a race-first agenda?

Captain Ibrahim Traoré is creating waves with his free education, healthcare, transportation infrastructure, industrialisation - including indigenous production of motor cars and parts, and climate-responsive projects have improved the quality of life for his people.

Garvey is smiling at the strides being taken by Captain Traoré, the world’s youngest leader, who is, undoubtedly, walking in his political footsteps.

Imani Tafari-Ama, PhD, is a Pan-African advocate and gender and development specialist. Send feedback to i.tafariama@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com.