An intense three-day consultation dealing with trade, aid, and debt drew a wide variety of people committed to economic justice for Africa, limited not just to experts but including students, former missionaries, government officials and church leaders. Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Njongonkulu Ndungane gave the keynote address for the June 4-6 consultation in a suburb of Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Washington Office on Africa and the Stony Point Conference Center. A second voice from Africa, a theologian and economist from Tanzania, was just as blunt. We are pushing our governments to disengage themselves from these tyrants. Our people have suffered for too long under their domination.
Nobody wants to be dependent.
But there is no chance for freedom unless the chains of debt bondage are broken. Both Mwombeki and Ndungane endorsed Jubilee 2000, an international campaign calling for cancellation of the burden of debt in the developing world and a new, more cooperative, economic order, based on the biblical vision from Leviticus 25. After working in small groups, participants met in a plenary to hammer out elements of a strategy to address issues of trade, aid and debt. Greed seems to be at the basis of this oppressive system, producing massive poverty clearly recognizable in the problems of disease, hunger, illiteracy, violence, death, crime and immorality.