The African Condition: what you really fail to know

by Alagie Jinkang

The Italian Airway flight from Catania to Milano has just taken off, it is 3 hours late, the voice of the captain on the loud speaker is offering free drinks in the compensation for the delay, the African passenger in the economic class orders for a double helping of soft drinks — one Orange and one Fanta — but the stewardess politely explained to the passenger that he will have to pay for the second helping. The passenger carefully surrenders his £2. An Italian couple are facing the African passenger, they have been friendly until now, a few minutes later, the couples ask for a double helping of wine — one red and one white. The same stewardess served them but declines to accept payment.

The African passenger begins to fill uncomfortable, he had been made to pay for the second helping of Fanta, had he been a victim of racism, the African resist unwilling to make himself conspicuous by complaining reluctant to offend the friendly couples opposite but in the end his racial sensibilities prevail. He quietly ask the stewardess the refund of his £2 since the stewardess has been discriminating among passengers but a little embracement follows, the African passenger was refunded but fills no sense of triumph he fills ashamed for have make a fuss. The Italian couples freezed him out from then on.

Surely the most exasperating humiliation of all is when you are not sure whether you are, in fact, being humiliated. If I pass through customs in Europe and I’m stopped when none of the white passengers is, can I be sure that this is simply the luck of the draw on that particular day? Or was the customs man influenced in his choice by the fact that I was not white?

I am prepared to concede that very often in such situations race is not a relevant factor. But I bitterly resent having to wonder whether the one per cent charge of racial prejudice was in fact there. It is not necessarily the fault of the customs officer; it is the product of the history of my people[1].

I have often wondered whether a Jew, when singled out by customs officers at Heathrow Airport for a search, ever suffers the same nagging doubt as to why he was chosen. If a Jew does not, it is one more illustration of the basic paradox I want to consider in this essay — that Africans are not necessarily the most brutalized of peoples, but they are almost certainly the most humiliated in modern history. My own modest moments of doubt about my dignity as a human being have deep historical roots, going back to the slave trade and beyond. The blacks remain the worst victims of contempt; though not necessarily the worst casualties of brutality[2]. In this instance I am using brutalization in the sense of massive physical victimization. I am not of course saying that Africans have not been physically victimized, but have only been socially and psychologically humiliated. What I am saying is that, in terms of sheer physical suffering, there are other candidates for the title of ultimate martyrdom. The Jews, for example.Africans had been hunted once in order to be sold into slavery. The slave trade dehumanized its victims but it did not devalue them. On the contrary, a commercial price was put on each victim. The men and women lost their human dignity but they acquired a market value. The Jews, on the other hand, were hunted down by the Nazis in order to be murdered. In that sense they were not only dehumanized; they were also totally devalued[3].

The blacks exported to the Americas were destined to help build a new civilization; the Jews destroyed under the Nazis were condemned as imperfections of the old civilization. Men, women and children died in those ghastly monuments of European racism at its most brutal. And blacks were not the victims of that ultimate excess in racism. In short, suffering defined in terms of physical victimization is not unique to the black experience, and has indeed found its worst manifestation outside the black world.

But brutality is one thing; humiliation is another. Humiliation takes the form of social and psychological degradation. It can sometimes take the form of being equated with goods and chattels — retaining value indeed, but like the value of pigs on a farm, or cattle on a ranch.

I want to talk about three interrelated systems of humiliation: the slave trade; European colonization of Africa; and continuing racial discrimination wherever black people live with white people. As far as slavery is concerned, the question arises as to why it was Africa that was raided for slaves instead of other parts of the world. Why was it, for example, that in the Americas the white man didn’t use more systematically the local defeated Indian populations as slave labour instead of importing blacks from thousands of miles away? In reality, there were efforts to use Indians as slave labour, especially in Spanish America, but they were largely unsuccessful[4].

But why pick on black Africans? Why didn’t the Europeans raid North Africa for Arab and Berber slaves, or go all the way to India? One reason was simply geographical. The slaves were needed for the Caribbean or North or South America, and West Africa was much nearer than the Indian subcontinent.

Then there was the racial distance between the white slavers and the black slaves. The very terminology that Europeans use to refer to their complexion as white and to that of Africans as black emphasized the extremities of the spectrum of pigmentation, the polar opposites of color and race. It was easier for the Europeans therefore to dehumanize those who were farthest from them in culture and complexion — and proceed to enslave them. Africans were also easier to capture simply because of their military weakness. Their combat culture of spears and bows and arrows was no match for firearms[5].

In the earlier phases of the development of capitalism, slavery was an asset. But in the late 18th and certainly in the course of the 19th century, capitalism was actually becoming hostile to slavery. The leading abolitionists were the leading capitalist powers, Britain among them[6]. And in the United States the North was more developed in capitalist terms than the Southern states. It was the North that was abolitionist and the South which defended the slave system.

Why was advance capitalism so hostile to slavery and ready to save Africa from its continuation?

The more advanced capitalism had reached a stage where slave labor was less efficient than wage labor. A slave was often bought for life, whereas a wage worker was often hired for a week. An ailing worker could be fired and replaced at next to no cost; whereas the worst time to sell a slave is when he is ailing. Owning slaves included some responsibility for non-productive members of the slave’s family, including little children and very old people. But workers could be hired at a minimum salary with little consideration of whether that was enough to keep the worker’s family alive.

Then there was the pace of urbanization in the metropolitan countries themselves and the large pool of cheap labor which was created as a result. One did not have to brave the seas or the diseases of West Africa to get cheap labor. It was available not far from Manchester or Philadelphia.

But at the same time as she was becoming the leading abolitionist nation in history Britain was also building the biggest empire in history. British capitalism was by the 19th century hostile to slavery, but it was simultaneously becoming much more favorable to imperialism. In Africa, the British flag was flying before long from the Niger delta in the west to the source of the Nile in East Africa — and from Cairo in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south[7]. Another form of humiliation — colonialism — was under way.

European imperial ambitions were of course varied. There was interest in new sources of raw materials; new potential markets for European goods, new outlets for European surplus population, regardless of the crisis of habitability in parts of Africa; new outlets for European capital to be invested in risky but excitingly challenging ventures; new potential sources of energy with all those waterfalls and subsequently with all that coal, uranium and oil; new souls to convert to Christianity — in short new worlds to conquer[8].

The third form of humiliation is racism. Some years ago, when I was still a student in The Gambia, my Professor gave account an account of his story. He was invited to lecture at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He was then, and continue to until his death, in favor of efforts made by African states to isolate South Africa diplomatically. The question which arose then was whether his visit to South Africa was to be regarded as a violation of the political boycott of that country, or simply as a contribution to the intellectual enlightenment of that racist society. Before making up his mind for certain whether to go he knew what his minimum conditions must be.

First, that he should be able to address racially-mixed audiences; secondly, that he should be free to say whatever he wanted; thirdly, that he should be free to take his, wife with him. Now, he chose that last condition in order to test the South African system at its most sensitive. The one condition which seemed impossible to meet was precisely the one which, in most other civilized societies, would be regarded as a matter of course. The University of Cape Town had consulted its lawyers, and had been told categorically that it was out of the question for him to go with his English wife to South Africa without risking proceedings under the Immorality Laws and laws against miscegenation.

He Prof. Ali related this incident in a lecture in London some years later. His topic was academic freedom in Africa. He argued that there were occasions when academic freedom in a particular society suffered because other freedoms did not exist. The freedom to mate across a racial line was, at first glance, unrelated to academic life. And yet the academic freedom of the University of Cape Town was compromised because the society as a whole had laws against mixed mating and mixed marriages[9].

It was also a measure of the beginnings of liberalization in the interracial laws. Since then, South Africa has moved closer to abolishing its anti-miscegenation laws. But does this mean that the racial system in South Africa is softening up? If so, why? Part of the change relates to the wider world of capitalism. I mentioned earlier that Western industrial capitalism had, by the 19th century, become hostile to slavery, but at the same time it had become congenial to imperialism and colonization. Now, the system in South Africa is an amalgam of slavery and colonization. Apartheid shares with slavery the assumption of hereditary caste roles, status-based partly on descent and partly on ascriptive rules of master and servant. Just as racism and contempt for black people were at the core of the slave trade, so once again are racism and contempt for black people at the core of apartheid.

But South Africa is also a case of settler colonialism as well as being a link in the wider economic imperialism of the West. We might therefore infer that apartheid, as slavery, is something which the Western powers would genuinely detest — just as they detested the transatlantic slave trade in the 19th century. But apartheid, as imperialism, is something which Western powers identify with — just as they identified with empire-building in the 19th century.

The question today is whether the West can effectively work for the end of apartheid as a racial system without losing the economic benefits of white-dominated South Africa as an imperial system. What are the Western powers to do in the face of this dilemma? They once managed to have their abolitionist cake and eat it too. Can they now continue to eat the fruit of white-dominated South Africa and at the same time disgorge the accompanying poison of apartheid?

So far, there have been two dominant views of the role of Western investment in South Africa. One is to the effect that Western investment helps to liberalise the régime and makes effective social transformation easier to attain. The other is that such investment consolidates the racist system.

The view that Western investment is liberalizing rests partly on the West’s own historical precedent. Increasing industrialization in England gradually resulted in greater internal democratization. There was a growth of the urban proletariat, a struggle for the rights of collective bargaining, an expansion of the franchise, first to the middle classes and then to the working classes, the emergence of new political parties, and the institutionalization of the open society in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. If Western investment in South Africa has the same industrializing impact, should we not also expect it to have the same democratizing effect?

A related line of reasoning is that the Western presence in South Africa, and the consciousness of the Western model, could stimulate a demonstration effect on South African society. The example of wages being raised in Western firms within the purview of South African society would gradually help to change the standards of that society upwards[11].

Again, there is the belief that Western influence on the government in Pretoria can only be as great as the West’s economic importance to Pretoria. Any dismantling of Western investment structures in South Africa would severely undermine any liberalising influence that the West might have over the régime in power[12]. The opposing school of thought argues that with Western investment apartheid gets the de facto support of the immense economic power of international capitalism at large, and this in turn helps to give greater legitimacy to the racial system. Moreover, Western nations acquire a vested interest in the survival of the present and the past regimes in South Africa as in else were not far from Nigeria and Ivory Coast . Some even believe that apartheid with stability is better than black majority rule at the risk of chaos.

Thirdly, Western investment, to the extent to which it increases South Africa’s prosperity, enhances the vested interest of local whites in the system as it now stands, and discourages pressure for liberal reform. Western investment also increases the régime’s capacity to co-opt a minority of Africans into relatively privileged positions and distribute enough benefits to the wider population to delay a radicalization of the masses.

Finally, Western investment, by needing stability, helps to encourage the regime (apartheid ) to maintain its structure of repression as a method of assuring that stability. Where do I stand? I agree that Western investment has helped to consolidate the régime, but I also agree that Western investment may indeed liberalise the system. I go farther and argue that the two processes together will, in time, create a revolutionary situation in South Africa. Revolutions in history have tended to occur not when people are at their lowest, but precisely when matters are beginning to improve. Revolutionary situations often occur when progress is being made, but not fast enough to overtake expectations. This will turn my attention a little bit to give an example in certain African countries like Libya, Egypt, Angola and of course my own country The Gambia.

This theory is partly neo-Marxist, though I am not myself a Marxist. My proposition is that making South Africa’s economic system more modern helps to increase its incompatibility with racism, and therefore helps to dig the grave of apartheid itself. As it might have probably done already.

The economic substructure is thus able to change more rapidly than the racial superstructure. Just as capitalism developed earlier to such a level that it could no longer tolerate slavery, so capitalism in South Africa is bound, quite shortly, to develop to a level where it can no longer tolerate institutionalized segregation. I am not necessarily against the withdrawal from South Africa of Western investment. I am simply insisting that we should distinguish between expressive policies and instrumental policies and put sovereignty (although not in all terms of the word as Foucault will put it) in the centre. Expressive policies seek to declare a moral or political position, regardless of whether the declaration affects the situation. Instrumental policies seek either to induce change or to prevent it. If to boycott South Africa is to express a moral position, it does not really matter whether the boycott causes change or not. There are times when we simply have to stand up and be counted — regardless of the consequences.

My professor’s story to be counted as the story of many other Africans as well. He felt it was time to take things single-headedly regardless of the consequences. And he did it. He achieved personal sovereignty but could not actually have the same recognition from the state. From the days when I was in primary school, my father have meticulously avoided buying anything South African. But he have never thought his own little act would bring apartheid crumbling to the ground. His has been a boycott designed to express a moral position rather than to induce change. But if we are judging Western investment in instrumental, rather than expressive, terms then we have to estimate its precise consequences before we decide whether or not it should be withdrawn.

Instrumentally, Western investment will help create conditions for a revolutionary situation in South Africa before the end of the century as it has happened in the last century. Let me now summaries the argument. By increasing the prosperity of South Africa Western investment is contributing to the growth of the first really large and significant black proletarian class in Africa. By the demonstration effect of their own firms and waves Western investors raise the expectations of workers elsewhere in South Africa, and contribute towards the growth of militant economic consciousness.

By putting pressure on the South African regime to make liberal concessions, and increase the liberties of its citizens, Western governments and investors help the opponents of the regime in South Africa to know one another and organize better for additional pressures in the future. But, ultimately, the ‘white-dominated regime’ will not give up power simply through the liberalizing process just as other racial powers now in many other African states as well. They will never reach a stage when they would peacefully accept, for example, the principle of one man, one vote.

It follows, therefore, that the ultimate solution is a violent revolution in South Africa and as in many African states. Angola for an example. And my own conviction is that conditions of violent revolution in a racially segregated society can best be created when new economic classes drawn from the oppressed are demanding new rewards, and there is sufficient freedom in the society to enable revolutionaries to recruit and organise for the final confrontation with the system of injustice. This as an attribute for revolution was and still to a greater extend absent in African politics. The concept of race will not vanish in South Africa. I know am a making a great assumption but I feel is what is still more visible. As an African, we will kill each other less over religion but more over tribe or race as it is evident in South Africa, Libya, Chad, Angola, Egypt as in Nigeria, Somalia as in Ethiopia and going back to a century before and still teaching more destruction than unity in this age of sovereignty.

Race as a concept of biological differentiation is a permanent fact of life; but racism as a concept of social gradation is a finite historical phenomenon, whose end may be in sight, though not necessarily in our own lifetime.

Why am I so confident that this might well be the last century with any significant racial problems? In order to answer that, let me distinguish between two forms of human solidarity. One kind is based on a biological relationship among the members of the group. The relationship may amount to an extended family, or a clan, or a tribe — or, indeed, a race. The biological relationship could be real, in the sense that the group is descended from some joint ancestors, or it could be presumed by the members of the group. The second kind of solidarity is based on an economic relationship, again real or presumed. The clearest case of this kind of solidarity comes out of class consciousness. The workers who feel united because they see themselves in a shared economic predicament, or employers drawn together out of a sense of shared economic survival, are part of the phenomenon of economic solidarity. The history of the world so far suggests a decline in the power of biological solidarity, and a rise in the influence of economic forms of unity. Thus, such biological foundations of unity as the broad, extended family as the clan and the tribe, have certainly either declined drastically in the Northern Hemisphere or are strongly on the defensive. The question now is whether the fate of these other forms of biological solidarity will so befall racism and race consciousness as the last political bulwarks of the mythology of kith and kin.

My own conviction is that racism will go the way of tribalism — and gradually make its exit from human experience, except on a very modest scale. Yet this most important political and sometimes line which holds Africa’s freedom, sovereignty and the whole governmentality. In Europe, tribalism was almost the first to go among these forms of biological alignment. Racism may well be the last to go. In Africa, on the other hand, racism is likely to end first, following the liberation of Southern Africa. But tribalism may last much longer; though, ultimately, also doomed to extinction in the generation which will follow.

The consensus now emerging within the world system on issues of race is sometimes merely rhetorical, but nevertheless part of the reality of the contemporary world. In future, people will quarrel over incomes, jobs and commodities. They will quarrel less and less over race and tribe. Until then neo-liberalism as in the terms of Foucault are doom to progress in Africa.

References

[1] Kevin Shillington, History of Africa, Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Avenue, first published 1989 and revised 2005, page 178. I will argue that the roots of European racism goes back to slavery and to the transatlantic trade even though the deep roots of racism might go farer than this, Africans were viewed by Europeans almost exclusively as slaves as if this was their natural state. European argued that taking Africans out of their native continent, they were rescuing them from their primitive and barbaric existence. And it were this very reasons that took Europeans to colonised Africa in the late 19th century justifying their claims that they were transporting civilisation and Christianity.

2 Paul Johnson, History of the Jews,Havaper Perennial, published in 1988, page 424–519.

[4] Kevin Shillington, History of Africa, Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Avenue, first published 1989 and revised 2005, page 167–176. The nature and the decision to take slaves from Africa was both humiliating and gives no regards to her sovereignty. But if my claim for African sovereignty at this period is to be term very early or unrecognised either because of it ‘lack of governmentality’ or because of the negligence, the selfish and arrogant approaches by the European towards Africa, however, what is clear until today is that Africa is still dancing to the tunes of Europeans or Americans most to which they are compelled. And this is what I will call as neo-colonialism. Sovereignty looking from the glasses of Foucault, I will argue was never recognised by the West in Africa and this continue until today but by Africans themselves.[5] Ibid

[6]A. Gordon & Donald L. Gordon, fourth edition Understanding Contemporary Africa, Lynnne Rienner Publishers Boulder London, 2007, page 43–44. He maintains that by the end of the eighteen century towards the 19th century, the price of sugar was declining and because of overproduction and also the price of slaves were also on the rise because of the stiffer competition between African suppliers. And due to this according to the authors, the power and influence of the plantation owners in the British Parliament was reducing. The industrial revolution was spawning a new dominant class of industrialist in Great Britain who were finding it increasingly necessary to seek new markets abroad for the clothing, pottery and metal goods they were producing in growing quantities. These manufacturers show Africa as a good source of market where they could easily get cheap raw materials. The Haitian revolution where people of African descent overthrew European domination, the abolition movement, the presence of the French in the sugar industry and of course from some growing acceptance of the egalitarian principles of the French Revolution and The US war of independence led the British, with the strongest navy in the world to abandon the slave trade.

[7] A. Gordon & Donald L. Gordon, Page 45–46.

[8] Kevin Shillington, page 301–306.

[9] Nelson Mandela inaugural speech, Pretoria , 5/10/1994

[10] His lecture was later published and, as a result, he received a letter from the Office of the Prime Minister of South Africa, stating that the laws in question did not apply to him. Subsequently, the Vice- Chancellor of the University was publicly reprimanded for misinforming a foreign scholar. In reality, the apparent attempt by the then Prime Minister, Mr Vorster, to assure him that the laws against mixed mating did not apply to him was presumably part of the strategy at the time to facilitate greater interaction between South Africans an Africans from elsewhere in the continent.[11] A. Gordon & Donald L. Gordon, Understanding Contemporary Africa, Lynnne Rienner Publishers Boulder London, 2007, page 57–59.[12] K. Shillington, page 317–321.