CHAPTER 15

Because we are African, who have to overcome centuries of treatment as the repulsive and unacceptable Other, could we avoid to ask the question - why have fellow human beings such a scope for love and hate, despondency and hope!

Writing about "Colonial War and Mental Disorders", Frantz Fanon said:

" We have since 1954 in various scientific works drawn the attention of both French and international psychiatrists to the difficulties that arise when seeking to 'cure' a native properly, that is to say, when seeking to make him thoroughly a part of a social background of the colonial type. (For example: when a Nkosi is transformed into a Johnson. <Our addition.>)

" Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: 'In reality, who am I?' "

But we have asked the questions that we have, of scientists, of the intelligentsia of the world. Since we have done this, because we could not do otherwise, Marcuse may be proved to have been correct, that:

" Historical backwardness may again become the historical chance of turning the wheel of progress to another direction."

But for this to happen will require of us, and the scientists, the courage to face up to the omnipotent apparatus, conscious of its power and capacity to punish non-conformity. The question is - do we have a choice!

In spite of our friends, the friends of Africa, we must stand up to say that we have had enough of the insults that demean Africans, whatever their nationality. The time has come that we gather the courage and the intellect to say that we too are human, as human as any other human being.

We are neither freaks, nor do we behave like freaks.

We have never been barbarians and are not now.

We are poor.

We live in conditions of under-development.

We are concentrated within the tropics and suffer from and enjoy the physical conditions that nature has imposed on this part of the globe.

None of this makes us sub-human.

Nor should the impact of disease, including AIDS, that afflicts us, be used in the name of questionable science and friendship with us, to reduce us to a peculiar species of humanity likely to slip back into a state of savagery.

Like the "Africans and Europeans" that Dr Konotey-Ahulu of Ghana met when he spent six weeks touring sub-Saharan Africa, we must pose the question:

" Why do the world's media appear to have conspired with some scientists to become so gratuitously extravagant with the untruth?"

The posing of that question begins the process of the humanisation of the African.

Even if we have been deceived before, we must know that the asking of this question, to which the omnipotent apparatus will object most strenuously, means that we shall overcome the centuries of racism that continue to define a subservient place for us in the world.

We must also know that we have succeeded to produce geese among us that have been fattened by those who hold us in contempt.

Writing of his own country, the African-Brazilian, Abdias do Nascimento, says:

" Black people require a scientific knowledge that allows them to formulate theoretically - in systematic and consistent form - their experience of almost five centuries of oppression, resistance, and creative struggle. There will be inevitable errors, perhaps, in our search for systematisation of our social values, in our efforts towards self-definition and self-determination of ourselves and our future paths.

"For centuries we have carried the burden of the crimes and falsities of 'scientific' Eurocentrism, its dogmas imposed upon our being as the brands of a definitive, 'universal' truth. Now we return to the obstinate 'white' segment of Brazilian society its lies, its ideology of European supremacy, the brainwashing with which it intended to rob us of our humanity, our national identity, our dignity, our liberty. By proclaiming the demise of Eurocentric mental colonisation, we celebrate the advent of quilombist liberation." (Our emphasis).

We must also remember what the demographer told Rian Malan about South African and African HIV/AIDS statistics:

" I don't have much faith. It's essentially a modelling exercise, and the exercise has always seemed to have a political dimension."

Why did we ever succumb to the introjected heteronomy, and presumed that there was no political dimension - only science, the truth, friendship and light!

It may be that Frantz Fanon provided some of the answers to this question about our 'introjected heteronomy' when he wrote 'On National Culture' that:

" When we consider the efforts made to carry out the cultural estrangement so characteristic of the colonial epoch, we realise that nothing has been left to chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive in the natives' heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality. (Our emphasis).

" On the unconscious plane, colonialism therefore did not seek to be considered by the native as a gentle, loving mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather as a mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its psychology, its biology, and its own unhappiness which is its very essence." (Our emphasis).

Thus, this (African) child which, according to the colonialist paradigm has no natural parents, becomes an object such policy as would be determined by its imposed, but real, surrogate, colonial, mother.

This mother and her society intervene to decide what is good for the child, regardless of what the child thinks. They do this to protect the child from what it thinks and feels. And so the child is exposed to all the violence that the mother will visit on the child to assert her authority and to restrain it from the folly of its thoughts and actions.

Between it and its mother, a struggle is joined, centred on the question of power, money and pure survival.

Between it and its mother there is a titanic contest centred on the conviction of the mother that her offspring is diseased with HIV/AIDS and that it infects itself with a destructive virus because of its depravity.

The mother demands that, to save itself, the child must abide by a religious dogma she has elaborated, given her power as a goddess, of chastity, condoms and drugs.

The child fights to tell the truth about its experience and reality. But it cannot defeat the concentration of financial, media, political and institutional forces that are determined to ensure that the colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its psychology, its biology, and its own unhappiness which is its very essence.

Unable to feed itself, the child must either accept the material and intellectual food from its mother, or perish.

At the same time, the child cannot escape from the hostile environment created by the same mother who, in the natural world, is supposed to protect her child from such an environment.

In this situation, it is clear that as Africans, we must learn well the instructions of Sun Tzu, the Chinese strategist, who lived more than two millennia ago. For its part, the omnipotent apparatus understands what he said, thoroughly. He said:

" When the enemy approaches carelessly and without a plan, when his flags and banners are confused and disorderly, when both men and horses often look to the rear, one can attack an enemy force ten times his own and surely rout it.

" When the forces of the feudal lords have not yet assembled, when sovereigns and ministers are not in accord, when moats and ramparts are not yet completed, when prohibitions and commands are not yet published, when the entire host is in an uproar, when they wish to advance and cannot, or to retire and do not dare, then one may attack an enemy twice his size, and in one hundred battles there will be no calamity."

(Sun Tzu: The Art of War: tr. Samuel B. Griffith, Oxford University Press, 1963.)

Perhaps, as we have fought for our humanisation and humanity as Africans, our flags and banners have been confused and disorderly.

The sovereigns and the ministers have not been in accord. Our defensive moats and ramparts have not been in place. We have wished to advance and could not. We have sought to retire but dared not. Because of all this, those who have opposed us, the omnipotent apparatus, have fought us in a hundred battles without experiencing any calamity.

Even when we have won strategic battles, despite the omnipotent apparatus, we have not recognised our historic victories.

Now, at last, we must understand in its fullest meaning that the struggle to win our right, as Africans, to be accepted by all, as human beings, is one of the most difficult struggles we will ever be called upon to wage. It calls for determination and perseverance. It demands new sacrifices. It will produce its own martyrs.

Now must we recognise that, even among the Africans, we have seen that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. In spite of everything we are and what we have done, some among us are capable of being bought.

We must identify the cats and the geese in our midst. We must say that we have seen how easy it is even for those, including Africans, who walk our streets as respectable citizens, to be gratuitously extravagant with the untruth about us.

Having read Sun Tzu, we must, at last, say - no more shall we approach carelessly and without a plan. The ceremony of African innocence is drowned!

We will fight for and defend the reality that we are African and human. Young Castro Hlongwane must never again be expelled from the Caravan Park. No longer must Africans be outcasts from the caravan park and the global village.

No longer will the Africans accept as the unalterable truth that they are a dependent people that emanates from and inhabits a continent shrouded in a terrible darkness of destructive superstition, driven and sustained by ignorance, hunger and underdevelopment, and that is victim to a self-inflicted "disease" called HIV/AIDS.

For centuries we have carried the burden of the crimes and falsities of 'scientific' Eurocentrism, its dogmas imposed upon our being as the brands of a definitive, 'universal' truth.

Against this, we have, in struggle, made the statement to which we will remain loyal - that we are human and African!

Because we are human, we shall no longer permit of control by a colonial mother who claims for herself the right unceasingly to restrain us from reclaiming our dignity.

We shall overcome!

March, 2002.