by Rootsie
“Pressuring G8 nations to end extreme poverty in Africa”
NPR, Sat. July 2, 2005
I have done a lot of writing on this subject of Africa, and ‘aid’ and imperialism, of the inevitable toxicity of all European and US approaches to Africa and the rest of the nonwhite world. I learned at the feet of my black colleagues at trinicenter.com, and from a certain Palestinian scholar. And bottom-line, that is the point. These things are not things whites can teach one another. There is no way out of this global morass if whites are unwilling to let the worst victims lead us all out of it.
The idea that Bob Geldof, Bono, and company are ‘pressuring’ G8 countries to address African poverty is pure fiction. Those following the news over the past months know that the ‘debt-relief’ proposals for Africa originate from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at 10 Downing St. in anticipation of Britain’s term as head of the G8 countries. This ‘Make Poverty History’ business is not some spontaneous populist uprising. You have to look to places like Venezuela and Bolivia for that. No, this is nothing more than a monstrous propaganda stunt designed to rubber-stamp the new scramble for Africa, for her oil and gas and minerals, all in the name of humanitarian mercy, pity, and charity. Well as old William Blake wrote 200 years ago, “Mercy would be no more/ If we did not make somebody poor.”
This is a very old story. During the era in which Britain controlled over 80% of the world’s land mass, all manner of triumphalist claims were made for this great ‘civilizing mission’ of theirs, perhaps no better expressed than in Rudyard Kipling’s “Whiteman’s Burden”:
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captive’s need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another’s profit
And work another’s gain.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hopes to nought…
In his study of imperialist discourse, the late Professor Edward Said points out:
“Kipling himself could not merely have happened; the same is true of his White Man. Such ideas and their authors emerge out of complex historical and cultural circumstances…One of them is the culturally sanctioned habit of deploying large generalizations by which reality is divided into various collectives…Underlying these categories is the rigidly binomial opposition of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’, with the former always encroaching upon the latter…’Our’ values were (let us say) liberal, humane, correct; they were supported by the tradition of belles-lettres, informed scholarship, rational inquiry…An imposing edifice of learning and culture was built, so to speak, in the face of actual outsiders (colonies, the poor, the delinquent) whose role in the culture was to give definition to what they were constitutionally unsuited for.” (Said, Orientalism, 227-28)
According to Bush and Blair, ‘they’ are constitutionally unsuited for democracy and self-government, and naturally need a whole lot of help from ‘us’. In fact our perception of ‘their’ brokenness has largely defined us.
The ‘opposition’ to the Blair proposals, like the Royal Africa Society, warns that the billions in aid poured into Africa (with no word of the trillions taken out) have had no effect due to the ‘corruption’ that afflicts African governments. For more than 30 years of Mobutu Sosu Seke’s reign of terror in Congo, the man for whom was coined the term ‘kleptocrat,’ American presidents and British PM’s from Kennedy to Reagan and Wilson to Thatcher celebrated him as the great voice of reason and moderation in Africa. He was their creation, and an obedient one. It is thus difficult to see what Bush and Blair mean by ‘corruption.’ Blair threatened the African Union to ‘do something’ about President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe as a prime example of the sort of thing they’re referring to. The last man standing from the anti-colonial struggle, the one who moves to get indigenous land back from white farmers, the one who rebuffs UN and European offers of ‘aid’, saying instead ‘we will do it ourselves.’
Whatever else Mugabe might be or do, it is this that makes him odious to Bush and Blair. When ‘corruption’ serves their interests, they are most willing to shut up about it, and even to aid and abet it.
Who knows, maybe Geldof and Bono have all the best intentions. Personally, I think they’re royal jesters, clowns and dupes. The fact remains that they are stuck in the imperialist paradigm, as is every white until she or he does the work to break out of it. It was Professor Edward Said who taught me to observe the language of imperialism. Watch the discourse. It has remained essentially unchanged since the Crusades. “Make Poverty History”: who is the doer, the maker, the master of history? And what is Africa to them but a silent, sullen, giant existing only as an object to have things done to it, for it? In the imperial view, Africa is “a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.” (Said, Orientalism, 48) And this latest imperial pageant is particularly nauseating when we remember that these great saviors of Africa are the ones who ruined her in the first place, not to mention the fact that they are presently reducing Iraq to rubble.
How do you talk about ‘aid’ and ‘debt forgiveness’ in reference to a place you have despoiled and robbed and continue so to do? You are able to think in these terms because everyone in Europe and the U.S., even the left, operates under the assumption that “we” alone are capable of knowing what’s good for “them,” and have the resources and might to “fix” the world. I heard an ‘activist’ saying that the rich nations alone have the ability to eradicate poverty. What makes us think so?
What if causes have effects? What if centuries of aggressive imperialism have rendered the West morally exhausted and incapable of doing anything good for anyone? Jean Paul Sartre said as much back in 1961:
“1961. Listen: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience.’ The tone is new. Who dares to speak thus? It is an African, a man from the Third World, an ex-‘native’. He adds: ‘Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to keep away from it.’ In other words, she’s done for. A truth which is not pleasant to state but of which we are all convinced, are we not, fellow-Europeans, in the marrow of our bones?” (Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth)
“Leave this Europe”, Fanon proclaims to his fellow ‘natives’. Leave the West. Like Chavez in Venezuela, use their greed for your treasure against them. Demand reparations. Make them sign a pledge to leave you alone. Tell them you have no interest in their cracked idea of a ‘world economic community.’
Young privileged people across the planet today are being treated to a big fun-fest. They are raised to expect such things, for they are given seemingly endless opportunities to feel they are good and kind and charitable, no matter what carnage their tax dollars happen to be paying for today.
Even if Live8 was what they say it is, a great outpouring of human charity, it’s nauseating. But this hoopla conceals the wicked intentions of corporate imperialists out to privatize the planet and divide up the spoils like vultures. But that’s an insult to the vultures, who only do what they are made for. If humans could only learn to do the same.
“’We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to. But there’s no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s universe. We shall be giving the word for everything—industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Surith’s Sound, and beyond it, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying continents and islands of the earth. We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess.’ (Joseph Conrad, Nostromo)
Much of the rhetoric of the “New World Order” promulgated by the American government since the end of the Cold War—with its redolent self-congratulation, its unconcealed triumphalism, its grave proclamations of responsibility—might have been scripted by Conrad’s Holyroyd: we are number one, we are bound to lead, we stand for freedom and order, and so on. No American has been immune from this structure of feeling….it is a rhetoric whose most damning characteristic is that it has been used before…with deafeningly repetitive frequency in the modern period, by the British, the French, the Belgians, the Japanese, the Russians, and now the Americans.” (Said, Culture and Imperialism, xvii).
