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Features
‘Civilisation’ and the myth of African ‘savagery’
Wendy C. Hamblet
2009-11-12, Issue 457
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/60205
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In the spring of 2002, I shared a conversation with a learned man, the dean of Humanities at one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. That conversation disturbed me to such an extent that it clarified for me the focus of a philosophical mission that would carry me through the next five and a half years of my research life.[1] It clarified for me in the starkest terms the need for a scholarly meditation that would tackle explicitly the prejudices still deeply embedded in the minds of some powerful and highly educated persons holding positions of what Foucault calls Power/Knowledge in the Western academy.[2]
It was a spring afternoon. As I entered the dean’s office, I recall being struck by its sumptuousness. The bright sun flowed in the windows and danced across the softly tinted walls and plush furnishings of the spacious suite. The birds trilled from the trees outside, despite the windows being boxed up tight, as is the way in large institutions in security-obsessive nations. This was the first time that we had met, he the distinguished man with thoughtful eyes and a timely frost at the temples, and I a simple philosopher, not long tossed from the ivory tower of my graduate studies in philosophy into the cold realities of the academic marketplace.
We sat across from each other on matching lavender loveseats. The gentleman smiled amiably at me, and the conversation flitted breezily from topic to topic until it eventually settled on the subject of my research. At this point, I imagined the room to darken slightly, as it always seems to do when I attempt to explain my dark work to anyone outside my field. I shared with the man the burning question that had colonised my every thought and driven my thirst for study long before my doctoral studies forced the question into philosophical articulation for me: How do human beings, in seeming good conscience, come to do the dreadful things that they do to each other?
How are we to explain the immense abyss that divides the lofty ideals that ostensibly guide the behaviours of human societies from the stark fact of the bloody history of our species? Why, after these long millennia of ‘civilising processes’ does the madness of genocide and other crimes against humanity continue to stalk innocents everywhere? I lamented to my host: ‘Violence floods the globe; bloodletting drowns the dreams of newly developing nations across the third world; misery and carnage undermine hopes for peace and progress in the poorest and weakest countries.’
The gentleman in the plush office shifted in his seat; his eyes darted from left to right. He leaned forward, dropping his voice to a judicious whisper, clearly eager to share his wisdom with this naive and artless philosopher. ‘Wendy,’ he said solicitously, ‘These people have always been killing each other. There is nothing you or I can do about it. It’s just the way these people are.’
The facile myth whispered to me in the plush office suite that sunny spring day by my sophisticated interlocutor, the myth that global violence can be explained entirely by reference to character traits embedded in the nature of certain peoples – ‘the way these people are’ – I challenge here with heartfelt enthusiasm. I challenge the popular assumption that violence is an essential quality of certain populations. In place of this myth, I am offering an alternative, more sympathetic, but also more realistic, account of some of the world’s current violences.
Philosophers are generally reluctant to step out from the sheltering canopy of Socratic ignorance and into the stark light of soul-endangering truth claims. The philosopher worries, with good cause, what grand and sinister edifices may arise on the most humble of grounding soils. However perilous, an argument must begin from some foundation. The fundamental assumption that grounds and guides this paper is what I am naming the ‘rebounding’ nature of violence, after the expression coined by anthropologist Maurice Bloch in his fascinating study of the Orokaiva people of Papua, New Guinea, recorded in Prey into Hunter.[3] The grounding assumption is simple: When people are degraded, dehumanised, exploited, and demoralised for long periods of time, their wretchedness invades their cultural and political forms.
The violences we witness in Africa in the modern era, I contend, are best understood in their historical context, as ‘reboundings’ of earlier violences. Rebounding violence reveals itself in the agonising forms of ‘identity work’ through which suffering populations express their abjection and struggle to reclaim their sense of self-worth in the wake of denigrating histories. Long oppressed people emerge from histories of brutalisation with shattered self-worth, divided from, and suspicious of, their neighbours, and desperate for empowerment. Victim populations, cast by their oppressors as morally wanting, suffer fundamental changes to their worldviews. Having witnessed the horrors that accompany powerlessness and the efficacy of violence in the hands of the powerful, victims once freed adopt the worldview of their oppressors, and grasp the helm of power under the conviction that violence is a valuable and necessary political tool.
When colonial rule ended, therefore, it is hardly surprising that African leaders, taking back the seats of power, mirror the behaviours of the previous colonial rulers and repressors. Since the regimes they assume after independence have been historically designed for the express purpose of rigid social control, it is little surprise that the new leaders tend to mirror the harsh governing practices of the colonials. As sure as night-time follows day, violence follows sufferers long into their liberation, and drives them in the direction of a future, deeply burdened by the past. Victims emerge from their histories of suffering scarred, wounded, and abject. Their future behaviours often entail desperate efforts to bring closure to their suffering by projecting their miseries, resentment, and anger upon those in their immediate vicinity.
In the glory centuries of the various European empires, modern ‘civilised’ nations launched a vast assault upon small kinship groups of generally self-sufficient peaceful peoples around the globe. In the cause of moral and scientific progress and in the various names of king and god, about fifty million tribal peoples were forced to surrender half the globe to white Europeans bent on ‘civilising’ missions.[5] Though the invaders spoke of spreading the word of god and delivering the benefits of civilisation to the far reaches of the globe, in fact much of this assault composed deliberate extinction – murder undertaken on a mass scale as a blatant act of political and economic purpose. National and papal policy endorsed this global slaughter. The few indigenous peoples who survived the bloody onslaught of ‘civilization’ were then conscripted into murderous militaries to prey upon their neighbours, enslaved for cost-free labour, or ‘hired’ to work themselves to exhaustion or death as ambiguously ‘free’ people, toiling under the most miserable of conditions. Long after the mass graves had been transformed into cotton and sugar farms, long after the good Christians had rediscovered their consciences and abandoned their colonial holdings, and long after capitalist merchants had found new, more profitable ways to organise the armies of labourers for the strip-mining of their vast homeland territories, the conquests and slaughters of the imperialist era continue to be rejoiced in songs, films, and history books as grand episodes in the history of Western ‘civilisation’.
The routine harvest of insult and injury reaped by the people of Africa during centuries of colonial abuse caused the African people to discover facts about the frailty of the human condition better left unknown – the vulnerability of human flesh, the defenselessness of timeworn social forms, and the incapacity of an ethos of generosity and welcome to protect against sheer aggression. Through beatings, rapes, and myriad diverse humiliations, Africans discovered that unqualified trust in their fellow humans was naive and foolhardy. Worst of all, Africans discovered the inability of the healthiest mentality and most robust self-esteem to withstand prolonged indignity. Where insults are swallowed daily and moral outcries suppressed, where peoples are pushed from sacred lands, clans are scattered, and tribal solidarity offended, communal resentment eventually gives rise to agendas of revenge that turn the decent into the bloodthirsty. Like a time bomb, the colonial world, from the bloody moment of its birth, ticked away toward a vicious and brutal finale that would not suddenly abate with the advent of independence.
To calculate the damages afforded the colonial victims, one cannot stop at mere corpse counts and inventories of appropriated landholdings. One must consider the disintegration of families by long years of forced labour migration, the cultural and artistic losses, the corruption of time-honoured traditions, the loss of respect for the elders when children are trained in European-style schools, the effects of the bloody battles that won independence, and the long-term split those wars wedged between Africans conscripted into the colonial armies and those fighting for independence. Inimitable artefacts vanished forever; traditions of peaceful trade and ‘naturally democratic’, non-hierarchical governance were crushed. Vanished were the farsighted resource-utilisation practices that guarantee sustainability, the social traditions that render longevity and stability of cultural forms, the naturally egalitarian institutional forms, and the complex self-sustaining networks of social and economic exchange that promise self-reliance and political autonomy alongside sound neighbourliness.[5] A wealth of human life, social tradition, political skill, and artistic talent was crushed by ethnocentrism, cultural ignorance, and capitalist greed, renamed as ‘civilisation’.
Most importantly, the disfiguration of subjects and life worlds must be entered into the account of African losses. People change under long generations of indignity, fear, and abuse. People oppressed witness that violence is a highly effective tool that imposes order in situations of chaos; it is abundantly functional and proficient at this task. Once the oppressed break free of their masters’ stranglehold, they have a propensity to turn directly to violence to bring order to their world. Once the sword is taken up in a cause seen as moral, it is not easily relinquished again when the immediate goals have been achieved. Violence tends to persist in the arsenal of accepted practices of the individual and the community, ready to serve new masters and to endow future ends with the moral purity of past objectives.
Rarely does the practice of violence end with the burying of the dead. Violence is a commodity not ingested without remainder. Rather, it spawns endless mutations. Old forms of violence generate new forms, and consumers of those products become its new peddlers. Subjective spaces of identity are transformed, social scripts rewritten, and social action redressed in the light of violences suffered. Violence and subjectivity become inextricably entwined. Violence creates, sustains, and transforms patterns of social interactions, restructures the inner world of lived realities, and corrupts the outer world of social and moral meanings. Violence erodes the connectedness that binds people across generations and across cultural boundaries, and corrodes the trust that binds the social worlds of friends, family, and neighbours. Learned reactions to social stimuli have to be unlearned after violent histories. Repertoires of sensory memories have to be reprogrammed after brutalising experiences. In South Africa during apartheid, for example, black Africans had to diligently train themselves not to respond to the cries of torture victims in their housing projects, since response would spiral the repression far beyond the torture rooms and into the surrounding community. Dismissing a neighbour’s agonies is contradictory and offensive to the communal ethos typical of African peoples. Once South Africans learned to harden their hearts against a neighbour’s woes, they had abandoned an integral aspect of themselves and their social and moral identity.
The fact is that survival in zones where radical violence is the norm has to do with a people’s successful development of the capacity to cut themselves off from their neighbours and to learn the skills of furtiveness – dissimulation, deceit, and fraud – or join the cruelty of the powerful. During the centuries of slave trade in the hinterlands of the Ivory Coast, for example, native African populations protected their freedom by working for the slavers. Supplied with guns, they assumed the morally ambiguous role of hunting down their fellow tribes people and their neighbours. Others escaped the hunters by becoming skilled at ducking out of sight and hiding, keeping to themselves and avoiding their neighbours, and becoming accomplished liars. Some tribes built entire underground villages unknown even to their closest neighbours. Ancient African social rituals, such as inquiring after the health of neighbours and welcoming passersby to share food, drew suspicion and were soon abandoned.
The historical record is clear, but has never been truly philosophically examined to illuminate the implications. European colonials named Africans ‘savages’ to justify their treatment of the (for the most part) peaceful generous peoples that welcomed them into their villages. Europeans savaged the people of Africa, but justified their savagery by naming Africans savages. It is European savagery that rebounds on the African continent today, plaguing newly independent states. Violence effectively rebounds in individuals and in societies that have suffered degradation. It rebounds in ever new directions, serving new purposes, shaping new practices, and providing ever new justifications for harming others. Independence has been won and the oppressed have been freed from the tyranny of their past abuses, but after being savaged, people do not easily return to their peaceful ways; victim people do not simply step back into a lost past and pick up where they had left off, decades and centuries before.
Sometimes the historical savagery rebounds as a political problem. Some African peoples are loathe to accept in the ruling class of their nation peoples who, in the wake of colonial divide-and-conquer strategies, they now see, not as fellow sufferers in a common ‘community of the oppressed’, but as aliens infecting their nation. Other people seek revenge against their neighbours, as they recall the treachery of those conscripted into the colonial militaries to fight against independence. The historical savagery rebounds in the city streets, in the villages, and on the political stages of newly independent African nations, where the people desperately carry out pathological ‘identity work’ to recapture lost power and dignity. People continue to suffer from the humiliations they have endured in common, but their painful pasts, as similar as they are, also set them one against another, and set the exploited against the new leaders stepping into old elitist positions, maintaining the violences encoded within the inherited colonialist institutions.
The African continent of diverse and culturally rich peoples suffered long from physical, psychological, and structural violences imposed by colonial invaders under the rubric of ‘civilisation’. This meditation centres upon African peoples so abused, but the reflection could have been focused upon any of a plethora of peoples since European/Western nations began exporting their peculiar brand of ‘civilisation’. I could be describing the indigenous populations of half the globe, overrun, slaughtered, and enslaved by foreign invaders as ‘civilising projects’ swept away previous life worlds.
When we look out across Africa, we must admit that very little has changed. The rape of the African continent is still in full swing today. Enrique Dussel observes, ‘The heroes of neocolonial emancipation worked in an ambiguous political sphere, [but] Mahatma Gandhi in India, Abdel Nasser in Egypt, and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo [were] not aware that their nations [would] pass from the hands of England, France, or Belgium into the hands of the United States.’[6] In the breadbasket of Africa, people are eating dirt. They are boiling up grass to fill the hungry tummies of their children. Across the African continent, the vast majority of Africans continues to form a permanent underclass. They are still, in many respects, strangers in their own land. In many regions, there still exists the glaring paradox of indigenous poverty alongside the affluence of colonial settlers, still living like feudal overlords. The huge estates of colonials, who consider themselves indigenous after several generations on the African continent, stand just uphill from the run-down shacks of their African servants, postcolonial reminders of the violent past.
Africans are calling upon their mighty reserve of tradition to muster the solidarity that will free them from their cruel histories. Africa’s finest hour does not lie in a glorious past that has been smothered by colonial abuse. Africa’s future lies in the peculiarly African brand of peaceful socialism that keeps faith with the teachings of Africa’s great freedom-fighters – Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu, Julius Nyerere, and so many others. It falls now to the peoples of the ‘dark continent’ to demonstrate to the Western world that living humanly is not about material gain or power; it cannot be won by military troops and by ‘shock and awe’ blitzkriegs of innocents. Living humanly in the African tradition is about dwelling in peaceful companionship, where folks are ashamed to possess more than their poorest neighbours.
In the final analysis, the success of the independence struggles in postcolonial Africa must be measured in terms of the new nations’ ability to overcome their violent pasts, to recapture their traditions and histories. Africans must learn to heal the ruptures between traditional and modern modes-of-being, embodied in the lifestyle gap between the urbanised African and the rural hut-dweller. Africans must learn to hold firmly together in the face of sinister neocolonialist forces that continue to enslave their peoples, strip-mine their resources, and usurp their fishing waters and their farmlands.
Africa’s case is a particular tragedy with unique lingering effects, but, in many regards, the African historical experience symbolises the new global situation, as neocolonialism increasingly fractures third world communities across the planet, splicing them into the dual extremes of the wealthy few and the hopeless many. Where little hope exists for a decent life, there festers a hotbed, rife with resentment and riddled with religious fundamentalism, which will eventually explode into terrorism. This paper employs, as its primary example of the phenomenon of the rebounding of historical violences, the bloody conflicts we witness in newly independent nations of Africa, which continue to be interpreted by some Westerners as indicative of the essential inferiority of dark-skinned peoples, as ‘just the way these people are.’ By obliging a rethinking of the violences of modern Africa as pathological responses to, and re-enactments of, the sufferings visited upon them during the colonial era, I seek to disclose Western implication in that violence and to argue for the reparations and ongoing support that victim peoples are due.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* Wendy C. Hamblet, PhD, SAC (Dip) is an associate professor at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.
NOTES
[1] This project ended in the 2008 publication of the book Savage Constructions: The Myth of African Savagery (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Press, 2008).
[2] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, Colin Gordon, ed. & trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
[3] Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 3.
[4] John H. Bodley, Victims of Progress (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing, 1990).
[5] See Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race From 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987), pp. 21, 26.
[6] Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation (New York: Orbis Books, 1985), p. 13.
Readers' Comments
Let your voice be heard. Comment on this article.
Herewith Dr Hamblets reply to my post and my response:
Sir,
How very courageous of you to have written to me . . . off site, and under the cover of anonymity, where your misreading of my article, your historical misinformation, and your lack of generosity toward history's victims remain covert from Pambuzuka's broad readership.
I, on the other hand, did not hold covert my identity. Thus, one would have hoped that, if you decided to address me at all, you might have seen fit to use my correct name and title. I am Dr. Hamblet, not Mrs. Chamblet.
"Get over it," you say to imperialism's victims? Well, let me guess a few basic facts about your hidden identity: white male, middle-to-late age, European descent, living fairly prosperously in a first world country, whose prosperity rests in great part on the fruits of imperialism and ongoing neocolonial trade injustices. You have never been to Africa. You are unaware that many African countries, including Zimbabwe, have not even had the benefit of the "generation" you grant Europeans to heal. You haven't noticed that World War II victims have not yet healed, several generations later, in either Germany or Israel or the Jewish diaspora. And you have not the slightest knowledge of Tony Blair's rank betrayal of Britain's promises, that motivated the current violences in Zimbabwe. Nor have you read any of the post-colonial histories of Africa, free from imperialist slant.
Still, as uninformed as it is, you are welcome to your opinion. But generosity would be more becoming.
wch.
Dr. Hamblet,
In my article I raised three points that disprove your theory. I would be happy to debate those points with you however instead I receive an email from you resorting to ad hominem attacks. This is difficult to do when you don’t even know who is writing to you so you just assumed I was an old rich white man and then proceed to attack the caricature you have created.
Once again your strident racism is on display for all. Your argument appears to be that if I am a rich white male (the trifecta of evil to people such as yourself) then whatever I have to say is without merit.
By the way I am not a rich old white man. If you continue to deny that I was born and raised in Africa I am willing to publicly wager you $1000 to be donated to the winner’s charity of their choosing upon which I can produce my African birth certificate, ID book, drivers licence or passport. It seems that in your bigotry you assume that all Africans are white-hating socialists such as yourself.
Really Doctor, I expected better from you. I hope you teach your students to actually debate the facts instead of launching personal attacks. Then again when the facts are not on your side I guess personal attacks are all you have left. Maybe your debating skills have atrophied from dealing with young students in an environment where any questioning of politically correct theory results in charges of racism and sensitivity training.
As per your request I have referred to you as Doctor. Sounds like I really hit a nerve there. I understand that titles must be very important to someone such as yourself: someone that supposedly can become an expert on a part of the world they have never lived in. Do you even speak an African language Dr. Hamblet? Methinks Shamblet may be more appropriate a name.
It seems that when someone born and raised in Africa challenges your pet theories it makes you very insecure. As it should, because at the end of the day that’s all they are, fatally flawed theories. And all you are is an academic. And a poor one at that, no matter how many titles you desperately collect.
I guess the titles do impress your naive young students though that don’t know anything about Africa either and therefore can’t see through your obvious ignorance on the subject.
Interesting how you sarcastically mock me for not being courageous for not posting my comment on the website. Actually I posted the same comment I sent to you on the website it just took a few hours for the moderators to approve it. Pray do tell about your courageous deeds by comparison Dr Hamblet, apart from writing politically correct books. Have you ever fled a country with your family to escape genocide for example? Probably not although I’m sure you may have received some very nasty paper cuts reading all those books you recommend on post colonial Africa. Those things sting like a bugger.
Also interesting is how you accuse me of not being generous. I did three years of non-paid voluntary charity work in Africa. How many years have you donated Dr Hamblet? Oh yes, I forget, you spent five years of “scholarly meditation” on Africa. I’m sure the hungry Africans I was feeding would much rather have had me meditate about them. If only I was an educated doctor such as yourself I’m sure I would have realised this.
Anyway, back to the issue at hand.
I never advised us Africans to “get over it” as you say. Every people should know their history. It is crucial to understanding where we come from and to avoid repeating past mistakes.
No one argues that great evils were committed during colonialism. The problem in Africa however is that the past it is too often used as an excuse for corruption and non-performance, specifically by governments. When you keep blaming past events for today’s failures and excuse corruption and violence you enable the Robert Mugabes of Africa. When you blame an ethnic minority for a countries problems you fan the flames of hatred and eventually genocide.
It’s astounding how you tell me that I don’t understand Zimbabwe when I used to live in Bulawayo as a young child. We fled in the eighties literally with our lives.
You are right, I have not read about Africa’s post colonialism struggles like you have, I have lived it.
The first thing Mugabe did upon taking power was to massacre up to 20,000 Ndebeles. If at that time he was held accountable for his actions maybe today’s tragedy that is Zimbabwe could have been avoided. Instead people such as yourself used all kinds of excuses about him having been traumatised by colonialism to not only ignore what he had done but to provide him with even more awards and money.
Mugabe learned that he could do whatever he wanted and get away with it. Just blame colonialism and the whites. This lesson would later cost the Zimbabwean people dearly.
In the early 2000’s as the corruption of Zanu PF became unbearable the people started to become restless and demand more accountability and service delivery from their Government. This is when Mugabe started reciting all of your arguments (maybe he read one of your books.) You see the problem was not that Mugabe has billions of dollars and is one of the richest men in the world while his people starve. The problem is not that the over one hundred million pounds Britain sent after independence to establish agriculture was largely wasted and stolen by Zanu PF, the problem was not endemic corruption and nepotism within the Government. The problem was the legacy of colonialism and white people. In fact your article sounds very similar to one of Mugabes speeches, if only more eloquent.
After his political rallies where he stirred people up into a frenzy of hatred against colonialism and whites in general government trucks would arrive to cart his young “war veterans” led by Hitler Hunzvi to white farms where they would proceed to harass, threaten, assault, torture and eventually kill the white farmers and their families.
Now you can debate about whether whites should be in Africa or own land but the reality is once the farmers had been killed or driven off their farms the country inevitably descended into starvation and terminal decline. A friend there sent me a one hundred trillion dollar Zimbabwean banknote, now worthless. By killing the white African farmers millions of black Africans are now literally starving to death.
I have friends and family (both black and white) that were killed by Mugabes thugs so when you engage in hate speech about whites I have seen the direct consequences of it. It is one thing to say these things in America and quite another when the same arguments are used against a very small minority in a country going through tumultuous times.
If you wrote a book about how Jews are to blame for all of Germanys post WWI problems and Hitler used it to justify killing Jews would you not have some blood on your hands? This analogy is not without merit as Mugabe publicly expressed his admiration for Hitler and his desire to be a “Hitler tenfold.” He then proceeded to demonise an ethic minority and cleanse them from his country.
After we fled Zimbabwe we moved to South Africa. As a school child present at the inauguration of Mandela as president in ’94 I remember the hope and optimism that the whole country felt at the time.
Now however the picture looks dim. South Africa has the highest murder, rape, HIV, and unemployment rate in the world. A girl growing up in South Africa today has more of a chance of being raped than learning to read.
But all is not yet lost. There are some very competent, educated people (both black and white) that could still make this country work. The question is will South Africa have another Mandela, a man who acknowledged the past but looked forward to solutions for the future or will it have another Mugabe, another corrupt politician who blames all the countries ills on colonialism and whites while robbing it blind?
There is already another Mugabe in the making by the name of Julius Malema, the head of the ANC youth league who’s anti-white speeches echo those of Mugabe and may well result in another genocide and the destruction of the country should he gain power.
To sum up, of course whites committed many evils during colonisation. And as I said every people should know and remember their history. However people such as Dr Hamblet that blame whites exclusively for Africa’s problems are no different than people that blame people of colour or Jews exclusively for their respective countries ills. They are both racists and fanatics, just two sides of the same coin.
What Africa needs is people that will hold their Governments accountable and look for solutions for the future instead of blaming minority groups and living in the past. One path leads to progress, the other to genocide and destruction.
Mukiwa
I read this article with shock and dismay - that someone could have such drivel published on the Pambazuka space produced a deep sense of dismay in me;and please do not retort that this is an expression of democracy because that is simply a crass excuse for allowing reactionary views to occupy spaces that progressives have consciously and carefully crafted - for the expression of progressive views.
That we could read such unabashed reactionary pontificating about Africans, after all the courageous work that African scholars have undertaken to rebutt this bleeding heart liberalism, gives me serious cause to worry about the future of this newsletter and the progress we assume we are making.
How does one respond after the sense of outrage has passed? Maybe to suggest to the author that she get past her sense of inate privilege ( expressed in her patronising representation of Africans as 'victims' who have no agency ( of course!!) except the learnt ability to perpetuate the vileness of their oppressors (in line with being the mimics that we are made out to be by racist supremacy).
I strongly recommend that the author re-position her intellect in a thinking space which explains differntly, the views of the Dean, ( who serves as her convenient nemesis) which are also her own even if she claims otherwise, by adopting a critique of whiteness and supremacy. If she is able to make this courageous conceptual shift, she will no doubt realise that it is the violence of the white colonials which has destroyed them and their societies, and which is perpetuated through militarism and cultural hegemony, to name only a few of the ways that neo-imperialism continues systems of plunder and destruction in Africa and in the societies of the South. She need not look across the ocean for examples of how violation 'eats its inventors' - all around her in US society are the blighted landscapes of human and socio-cultural violation that await her attention and rescue.
I cannot even imagine the difficulties of 'committing racial suicide' to paraphrase Cabral - but I know that if she and her colleagues who think within such paradigms were to actually re-situate themselves in a critique of their white violent history - she might be able to imagine that Africans are much more than 'victims' to be pitied and rescued from themselves.
We are a vibrant and dynamic people, forging our own destinies and struggling with both the consequences of history and the challenges of the contemporary moment - and we are doing this regardless of the neo-imperial hegemony that confronts us at every turn.
It is long past the time that whites who want to be nice - begin by rescuing themselves from their racial privilege and their nasty past.
McFadden
Patricia McFadden
When looking at Africa’s problem of endemic violence you took the predictable politically correct stand which goes something like this: whenever a non-white group is behaving in a manner that is offensive or not achieving the success of other groups find a way to blame white people for it.
Non-whites are never responsible for their actions; they and their cultures beyond reproach but have been corrupted by whites resulting in the non-desirable behaviour. If there are no direct incidences of racism to point to call it institutional racism. If there are no whites present call it globalisation or the legacy of colonialism.
This is a form of soft racism that treats blacks like children. White populations that have endured war, violence, occupation, genocide (all these things happened during WWII for example) are expected to be able to recover within a decade and become prosperous peaceful countries. Yet you blame Africa’s ills on events that happened generations ago.
The implicit understanding then is that Africans cannot recover from these events or achieve success like white people can. This is seen every day when African underperformance is blamed on slavery and other events that happened hundreds of years ago.
Your theory also has some gaping holes in it. Firstly, according to the records of the first non-African explorers into Africa the continent was in a constant state of tribal warfare with violence and ethnic conflict being the norm rather than the exception. How is this explained by the effects of colonialism?
Secondly there are countries in Africa that have never been colonised. How do you explain the fact that they are generally worse off than their ex-colonial neighbours?
Thirdly is colonisation dooms a society to failure and an endless cycle of violence how do you explain the success of ex-colonies such as Singapore, India and the United States?
I was born in Africa and lived there for most of my life. It is a very complex place with no clear solutions.
Certainly the last thing Africans need is another white academic living in her ivory tower on the other side of the world reinforcing their victim status and fanning the flames of more ethnic hatred against a minority such as is currently being witnessed in Zimbabwe.
Your article is just an exercise in politically correct feel good blame whitey drivel. Maybe if you were not a racist and viewed blacks through the same critical lens that you view whites you would offer solutions instead of more pathetic grovelling and hand wringing.
Mukiwa
Thank you for a somewhat philosophical view on the subject of violence.
Well now, "human" cruelty has always existed, in Africa right now very much by direct violence. In US by proxy, you rarely see it in the news. It’s like a big prison camp the whole country. You are borne in to a block and you rarely come away from it. And the killing is as extensive there as on other places around the world. (Of course there are always exceptions to the rule) And you know what it all about? ; Money, power, control, profit!
That is the bottom line. The II world war would have been over in 2 weeks if it weren’t for the fact t hat the US controlled Oil companies around the world at the time made a huge amount of money from the deal. The US owned Oil companies even continued to support Germany with Oil AFTER USA was part of the war in Europe. (even after protests in the US senate) So the main culprit was the oil companies. Germany did not have any oil to conduct war with. That’s a fact! The war in Sudan? OIL, The war in Afghanistan GAS pipeline that the Taliban didn’t agree too. Congo? OIL, Angola? OIL. Then there is Diamonds, Minerals, (Ugandan-Congo border bandits) Iraq-Oil of course! You could go on forever with this listing.
What often shows in media as a dispute of land is always about what lies beneath it.
So how come humans are such cruel creatures then? Well first of all if you are under the impression that there is some sort of divine plan to all this you first have to look in to all the 7000 and some religions that exists around the world and see if they hold the right answer to that question. Religion is a faith and you can believe what ever you like it still doesn’t take you one step closer to the “truth” unless you analyze the fact why humans are so easily led to believe just about anything. Then there is the question about fear…
The fear of being killed can take any “human” just about anywhere when it comes to survival.
But all in all I would say that the main culprit when it comes to war and violence today is the big cooperation’s, multinational most of them. They have their own little agenda of gaining access to more control, power, money and profit, they don’t care one bit about the local population or the ramification of their plotting.
If you look at this behaviorist point of view, you will find the same behavior among many of the other mammals on the planet. Competition over grazing, territories, food recourses, etc.
But in many cases they are smarter than we because mostly they are just playacting and more careful and aware of their own scarce recourses.
And we always think of ourselves as equipped with brain capacity and logic? Hmm I guess we still have a long, long way to go.
/Zappa
Zappa