Out at sea

(figuratively. It’s an extra long and ranty one, so get ready.)

Yes, spring sprung a while ago, the plant sperm did its worst and thank goodness the rain came through and put an end to that! I’ve been ambivalent about getting back to blogging. As this year and several projects draw to a close, all manner of temptations are being thrown my way. Temptations to keep me where I am, even as I know, from the thoughts I am having (and shall shortly describe), that it is imperative to get into a different space, literally and figuratively.  Maybe someone can tell me where to put all this sense of being overwhelmed; the young people in my life think I’m carting relics from the past to taint their futures, that I should stop exploring history and the place of Africans in it, because it is THE PAST and we have moved on from there. Can’t interest them in exploring the ugly history of Africa because no one wants to deal with the passions it provokes.  I am unable to explain to them and to myself, living in the globalized world  we do, the benefit or significance of knowing what wrongs went on in the past.

[image source]

J’en ai marre!

The fear of ‘too much thinking’: I get told a lot that I shouldn’t “think too much”, with the implication being that if I do, I’ll go mad and will become an object of ridicule. All’s I can say is if that’s the case then I was born mad. Instead of fearing it (the thinking too much thing), perhaps we should have a framework, markers or posts, of how to work through it. A place to put it all (that is not that only river running through the Sudan and Egypt!), a way in which we can process it all. When you read about a lot of things or get a great deal of interesting or disturbing information, naturally your mind goes into a tizzy as all your previous thoughts are attacked and destroyed, or as your mind curls up into fetal position and rocks back and forth, silently sobbing, like mine is currently doing. All you need are the tools to work through it, and usually after a period of paranoia and madness, the tumblers fall into place, the vault door swings opens, and ta da! you’re admitted to a new or at least to a slightly rearranged mindset. That, I imagine, is where personal progress, crawls or even leaps ahead in one’s state of being, would come from. Resistance (to thinking too much) simply serves to keep you in a place that is overtaken by events.

A couple of things that led me to allow myself to hurtle, no holds barred, through the halls of ‘too much thinking’:

• Ze germans: in Namibia perpetrating the Herero genocide

• Slavery: that just when I think I have heard all the horrors visited upon Africans during that period, new ones bubble up

• ‘Catching them young 1: sex, race and class in children’s fiction’ by Bob Dixon. Mind blowing analysis of books I read in childhood, and the realization of what they were sent to ‘teach’ me (sent ‘cause I recall how ubiquitous the titles were when I was growing up… And oh yeah, I went to a school that hadn’t banned Enid Blyton, so I got a full dose of her twaddle), and then the observation of how I have pushed some of these attitudes on ‘my’ children (the ones I have some influence over). And isn’t it fascinating how I’ll allow the boys to go crazy ‘cause ‘boys will be boys’ while I bark orders left, right and centre at the girls? Also, harlot originally referred to a loose man, heh heh. Hussy is a contraction of housewife.  An absolutely brilliant illustration of how flipping the script can show us how wrong conventional writing of female roles is, is also given in the first line of a news story: “Pretty, blond Mr. Vera Smith, husband of a surgeon, is to stand for the council at the next local elections” (p31).

Then ultimately, when I share all these insights with a friend, they ask me exactly how knowing all this (about subversion and the suffering of people) has made my life better. The question essentially boils down to: ok, so you know ze germans chopped heads off Herero concentration camp inmates who’d died of starvation/disease, then they had women in the camps boil the heads and scrape the flesh off the skulls with broken glass, then they’d sent these skulls to german universities for ‘race studies’, and these universities still have those skulls (having lacked the decency to send them back to Namibia for burial) right to this second, either in active use or in their stores (like Saartie Baartman and many other Africans, and the Tsavo human eaters, and the best and most complex of African art; complex art is an indicator of how civilized a people are, so removing the most civilized pieces from our view and sequestering them in the private collections of thieves and enslavers enables perpetuation of the myth that we were just running around fighting in the jungle before ‘civilization’ was brought to us by ship, or by the lost Roman legion that disappeared up the Nile). How does this knowledge improve your life?

And indeed my mind has pondered this question. Most people I share these horrors with simply brush them off and say, “thank goodness that time has passed”. But of course it hasn’t. All you need to do is google “racist slur” and find dozens of cases of people who have fallen on the sword of their failure to keep up with a world evolving away from racism (though not fast enough).

I finally watched ‘blood diamond’ the other day and amidst much frothing at the mouth, I understood why it’s important to learn the brutal history of African people. That movie, and others like it, was dedicated to ‘catching them young’. I’ll explain. The day before I watched it, I’d been in a queue with a young white middle-american male. We had an interesting chat during which he revealed that he’d behaved in a corrupt manner in order to get something. I called him out on it, and he’d basically used the defense that ‘Africa made him do it’. He said, to quote him, “TIA, this is Africa”. The subtext is obviously, “how dare you expect anything more of this continent?” [just as the subtext two weeks ago when a journalist interviewing Jesse Jackson called him Al Sharpton was, “you all look the same to me”]. I’d like to say the middle american was lucky I didn’t watch blood diamond until the following day (during which, to distract myself from all those negative messages, I busied myself trying to see if anything about the Mozambican sites they shot at was familiar. I caught a few, a building with Manica on it, the hotel where the Djimon worked, and the sun rising out at sea at the start of the film, a total giveaway that they were on the east and not west coast of the continent, unless they waited until sunset to film that scene? oh, and of course the very distinctly rolling landscape of the eastern cape which cannot possibly be confused topographically for Sierra Leone or Liberia, but not to worry ‘cause it’s all just “Africa”), and so was unaware of just how cutting that remark was, though of course I knew what he was saying. I am always at a loss when in the midst of those interactions, about whether to call the person out and put a stop to the nonsense, or whether to egg them on and see the depths of their depravity. Folk I know are all about komesha’ing people in their tracks. Maybe mine is a lack of spine? Or maybe forever seeking new data points?

On the movie: I never intended to watch it and assiduously avoided it (as I do the Idi Amin movie with the fictitious scottish doctor character and whatshisface in blackface) but ended up watching it ‘cause we’d had this argument with a 17 year old I know (and am trying to indoctrinate into consciousness, mostly ‘cause they keep up with the kardashians and are completely ill-equiped to go into a South African university ‘cause they have refused to believe racism exists, but when faced with irrefutable evidence of it, then go into ‘I’ll pray it away’ mode); plus I was looking forward to a topless Djimon (a la Amistad).

There are days when I can’t believe such movies are still made in this day; how is it ever a great thing to put on your resume that you were lead actor in a movie where your character calls a black person (male in this case) a kaffir, a baboon, claims to identify him from the smell of his shit, tells him he’s just another black face on his very own continent – and therefore irrelevant and expendable – and where you defend the status quo that says white folk are God’s own right hand? And how does Djimon – the man, not the actor – psychologically deal with the role of an African who is strong, but who has to accept subjugation? I suppose he handles it in the way we’ve always been Christianized into handling it, simply accepting it: just be patient and watchful, and you will get through it in the fullness of time. I remember sharing that sentiment with three white South African men who were different shades along that spectrum of the Leo character. We were talking about Zim and they were wondering, like Leo, why the Africans didn’t just walk into the main house and get rid of the problem (yeah, ‘cause that issue is as simple as an individual holding up the progress train) and me busy quoting ‘in the fullness of time’ platitudes… they gave me a look of “oy vey!” and it made me realize what had just fallen out of my mouth without thought. Then again, if I may quote a rap musician, “game recognize game”, so when that thought of storming a main house and disposing of the problem was made real in the early 2000s, the other side, having been involved in a 1965 to 1979 tussle with southern African “anti-terrorist” elements who were busy starting fires (‘opposition’ parties) all over the place, knew what to expect and how to neutralize that threat. Who said Africans don’t learn to beat you at your own game, Leo?

So the reason it’s important to get up close and personal with the details of all the evils and ugliness perpetrated against Africans, is to innoculate yourself against propaganda that claims we are inferior. It is extremely easy to imagine, when reading African news, that we are cursed puppets or primitives who can’t think, and this is exacerbated by our portrayal in history books and on film. The truth is that we are conscious of all the nonsense we do. There is nothing atavistic about us. Buying into the atavism angle will simply kill any thought processes that would move us forward. Notice how it’s always explained away as colonial or pre-colonial baggage and therefore nothing can be done about it? No one ever asks the victims of said ‘atavism’ what they think, instead, we are happy to import all manner of ‘solutions’.

So in that Congo where women are raped 24/7 [and it isn’t about just the physical act but also the result which will effectively neutralize the women ‘cause they’ll be too busy trying to feed their kids to kick your butt, plus you get to poison the next generation who will grow up knowing, or being informed by society, that they’re the result of physical violence. I would really love to know what African tradition says about children born out of such circumstances? Or is African tradition only loud on matters of bestowing privilege to one gender?] and the doctor who repairs their physical wounds misses out on a nobel (and therefore a spotlight on the issue) so that the prom king can get one (and I have no beef with prom king – I absolutely LOVE that he married a strong black woman and wasn’t wimpy about that like a whole lotta folk I know – am just concerned that when all’s said and done he’ll be straitjacketed and compromised, if all these committees and uncritical sycophants have their way); in that Kenya where people continue to quote extremely retarded (and they would identify them as such if they only paused for a moment to actually think about it) reasons for their nonsense; in that Somalia where ‘religious’ men are busy eyeing women’s chests (through the buibui!) to ‘scientifically’ determine who’s being deceptive by wearing a bra and who isn’t; in all these areas, we need to understand our history. In so doing it’ll helps us hold one another accountable, refusing excuses like colonialism, or the devil or the tribe or the spirit made you do it; and it helps us understand that we are not cursed, we are not damned, this is not the typical and expected behavior of Africans. Also, in the midst of all these things we’re busy using sijui what political theories when knowledge of psychology would suffice. I personally think Pavlov’s dogs explain more than much quoted Marx; also, that chap is not the only one who ever wrote on class and workers, maybe if we could broaden the list from which we read and quote, our outlooks (to development and justice and life itself) would be more nuanced and accommodating, not so absolutist and bloodthirsty?

Most important of all, knowing every thing about our history helps to pull our critics from their moral high horses by reminding us (and them) that they were not, nor are they at this present second, in any position to pillory us and make us feel any less human, any less civilized than they. I think this an important insight because a lot of the sting from the global media coverage of Africa comes from us being made to feel that we are exceptionally underdeveloped mentally ‘cause we take part in totally cruel, inhuman and primitive practices.

If you can find something more primitive and evil than chopping African limbs, just because; using Africans as your pilot study for holocaust concentration camps; breeding Africans like horses/livestock on southern plantations (and no, the Ugandan breeding for looks that was mentioned in Princess Elizabeth of Toro’s autobiography – her departed hubby had come from such a family – doesn’t count); or building your entire economy on profits from the triangular ‘African’ trade, holla.

In the meantime, I shall maintain the belief that we are a wonderful, hardy people (many other people in the world perished ‘cause they could not cope with the atrocities visited upon them, not to mention the diseases, by ‘conquerors’) who have souls, unlike the many ghouls walking around claiming more humanity than we. And naturally, like in any other population, there’s no shortage of sellouts. Unfortunately. The day we understand that we are actually incredibly privileged to be Africans (with all the good it brings that’s been turned into bad – natural hair, varying shades of skin, facial features, physical features), living on this rich and beautiful continent, then perhaps we shall all get on the progress wagon and stop our nonsense. In the meantime, I, will cling to this continent with my last fingernail. Note, I said continent, not country.