Material Basis for Anglo-Saxon Demonisation of the African

Frederick Douglass, anti-slavery organizer and journalist. His July 5, 1852 speech in Rochester, New York is still cited some 157 years later.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

Material basis for Anglo-Saxon demonisation of the African

AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
Zimbabwe Sunday Mail

So in the 1980s and 1990s a modified doctrine of “human rights” was fashioned and a programme unveiled with the singular aim of salvaging white supremacy and, in the words of Mahmood Mamdani, “paralysing and disintegrating embryonic revolutionary initiatives” in the Southern African region.

In other words, the Anglo-Saxon world under the leadership of the US unveiled a “human rights” plan intended to demobilise the African revolution in its infancy and to save white capital and white settlers while appearing to be advancing a form of “human rights” for everyone, a new form of human rights far superior to the demands of the African liberation movements themselves.

As Mamdani demonstrated: “Human rights (as redefined by the Anglo-Saxon powers) summed up the new US offensive (against Southern Africa) in the new situation (after 1975-1976).”

The Anglo-Saxon strategy was to split the African concept of liberation and revolutionary justice into two apparently opposed clusters of values: popular power, sovereignty, justice and reparations were to be cut off from “human rights, good governance, rule of law, reconciliation, forgiveness and national healing”. Since then, our people have been victims of this binary thinking.

The first set of values were seen as a weapon pointed at white capital, against imperialism, and against settlerism and white supremacy. The second set of values were seen as protecting corporate interests and preserving the white racial and class structure. In fact, this set (when cut off from popular power, national sovereignty, equality, justice, reparations and empowerment) was bound to rehabilitate apartheid and settlerism.

Not only did it lead to the granting of Nobel Peace Prizes to F. W. de Klerk, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela on the same platform — but it also led to the false conversion of the former white racist settlers into human rights activists, some of whom now form the Rhodie core of MDC-T.

This conversion has been so widespread that most Africans are now aware of Jenny Ellis, Peta Thorncroft, Peter Hain, Mike Auret, Georgina Godwin, Gerry Jackson, George Feltoe, Cathy Buckle, Roy Bennett and so many other former white settlers emerging in the 1990s as champions of human rights and Press freedom for Africans. These are the newly recruited frontline troops for white soft power.

In other words, a new myth of human rights and democracy was created in which the Anglo-Saxon oppressors became the teachers once again.

The principle which Professor Magubane has documented in Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other was explained by Sasha G. Lewis in her book the Slave Trade Today, 1979.

“(Anglo-Saxon racism) rests chained in a back corner of the white . . . psyche, ready to be unleashed like hounds at the first scent of danger. In periods of economic distress the white man has sniffed the air and smelled danger, and the dogs were let loose for their deadly chores, blinding their masters to all else but the prey and the chase.”

This white awakening happened in Southern Africa in the post-UDI, post-apartheid era. Such moments, throughout the last 500 years, are explained in Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other.

But is there indeed an established pattern of Anglo-Saxon myth-making and criminal defamation of the African over the last 500 years? Is there also a discernible method by which the myth, once constructed, is promoted and maintained?

First, let us compare two such myths, one from the 1850s and 1860s and another from the 1960s. In an attempt to bolster Dr Robert Knox’s pseudo-scientific book, The Races of Men (1850), and to set up a false science of race, Dr James Hunt set up an ethnological ladder made up of 13 supposed human races. The purpose of this pseudo-scientific ladder was to create the necessary ideological scaffolding for the second British Empire after Britain lost its North American colonies.

James Hunt claimed that he had marshalled scientific evidence to show that there were 13 known human races on earth and that the most superior race, at number one, were the Caucasians. The Africans were far down at number 7. But below the Africans there were still six other distinct and inferior races, the ladder accommodating altogether 13 different races! Magubane’s title to his book arises from the fact that the Anglo-Saxon scientists and propagandists concluded that all the “races of men” populating the earth were disposable and dispensable, except the superior Caucasian race!

According to Professor Magubane, Anglo-Saxon imperialism has not stopped creating such constructions even now. The labels change but the purpose is the same: to justify power and material gain in a competitive world in which the white rulers still believe in white supremacy.

The crisis which Robert Knox, James Hunt and their age had to cope with was made up of the following developments:

--Britain’s loss of its North American colonies which then fought a civil war among themselves over the question of slavery and the identity and fate of the African in the world.
--The revolutions of 1848 in continental Europe which were paralleled in England by a massive class struggle in response to the Industrial Revolution. One form which this struggle took in England was the Chartist Movement.
--The publication and popularisation of the Communist Manifesto which advocated class revolution, as well as Reverend Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population which depicted England as doomed by over-population and starvation.
--The philosophical and moral assault on chattel slavery and its apparent humanising of the African as well as it apparent indictment of the white society at a time when imperialism needed to move away from reliance on slavery to reliance on colonisation and colonialism which alone could keep up with the demand for raw materials for an expanding manufacturing industry.

Therefore the new “science” of race helped to justify land theft, looting, genocide and brutal exploitation beyond the former slave plantations and beyond the confines of the first British empire.

To test Professor Magubane’s claim about self-justifying Anglo-Saxon constructions, let us move more than one century from the 1860s to 1961.

In response to the challenges of socialism, communism and the liberation movements of the South, Professor W. W. Rostow published a book called The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, which, like the constructions of Robert Knox and James Hunt, also claimed to be scientific.

On Page xi, Rostow also created a construction in the form of a development ladder ranking 14 nations. He created three clusters within which the 14 nations were made to fit: the stage of industrial take-off; the stage of industrial maturity; and the stage of high mass consumption.

At the top of the ladder, and leading the whole world were Britain, the United States, France and Germany. At the bottom of the 14 were India and China. The whole of Africa had not yet even attempted a take-off. In Latin America only Mexico and Argentina had begun to take off, according to Rostow’s scheme.

The biggest problem with these types of construction and explanation is what the former slave and African freedom fighter in the US, Fredrick Douglas, explained in his speech at Western Reserve College on July 2 1854, where he said:

“The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims. Thus the very crimes of slavery become slavery’s best defence. By making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery, they excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a free man.”

In the Rostow scheme of 1961, the global effects of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism are presumed to be given and natural.

As a result, the potential for China and India to overtake Europe and the US could not even be entertained. Even more profound is the fact that Rostow used the pseudo-scientific myth to hide the fact that Britain plundered and destroyed indigenous Indian industry and society in order to enable itself to “take off”.

This is most relevant to Zimbabwe and the problems of the MDC formations, illegal sanctions, human rights and media freedom, for instance.

There is a direct link between the real sanctions, the effects of the sanctions on the daily lives of the people and the racist fantasies of genocide and national extinction which prevail in the “regime change” rhetoric against Zimbabwe and its liberation movement.

In the same way, the purpose of chattel slavery was to debase and exploit the African; but the rhetoric and propaganda against abolition of slavery insisted that Africans should not be freed because they were naturally debased, sub-human, and incapable of coping with freedom without the guidance and control of the Anglo-Saxon.

A close study of this regime change rhetoric or discourse clearly shows that economic genocide is the real purpose of the sanctions, but the genocide-like effects of the same sanctions must be blamed only on Zanu-PF corruption and mismanagement. A few examples may help the reader here:

On February 20 2008, Al Jazeera aired a cut-and-paste documentary called Inside Zimbabwe on its Witness programme. The documentary fits the same pattern set by the EU, the US, the British and the MDC in that it uses the same strategy of describing and exaggerating the common effects of sanctions (just like the common effects of slavery in the 1860s) upon the people of Zimbabwe in order to portray genocide-like conditions while never mentioning sanctions or the imperialists’ policy of economic strangulation of the same people.

Only Zanu-PF corruption and mismanagement must be mentioned as causes, just as the supposed natural inferiority of Africans was supposed to explain and justify the debased state of the African under slavery.

Al Jazeera’s Witness effort mixed up the effects of HIV and Aids, effects of drought, effects of land reform, effects of SAP, effects of slum clearance and effects of sanctions in order to reach several conclusions or impressions, such as:

--That life expectancy in Zimbabwe was the lowest on earth and down to 34 years: This is a lie.
--That all the food and means of livelihood left in Zimbabwe derive from Zimbabwean migrants working abroad and sending money back home. This is a lie.
--That Zimbabwe has the highest inflation in the world, which was highly questionable.
--That land redistribution and agrarian reform have been an absolute disaster and that there is no African farming taking place in the whole country. This is a lie.
--That all these alleged genocide-like conditions have been caused by Zanu-PF through an unnecessary land revolution, through corruption and mismanagement; and
--That therefore illegal sanctions should be intensified in order to punish and overthrow Zanu-PF and save “the people!”

The meaning of this history is that for the last 500 years, Anglo-Saxon elites have deliberately incited their societies to hate Africans, not because Africa wronged or robbed Europe, but because the universal hatred of Africa and Africans was the ideological superstructure for lucrative plunder and exploitation.

Rostow in 1961 merely extended that superstructure to suit the Anglo-Saxon cold war led by the US. So, the content of the myth may change depending on the latest crisis. Otherwise the strategy and the tactics have been the same for the last 500 years.

The question to the Zimbabwean voter is: how could a proud political party of Africans, and for Africans, partner the same Anglo-Saxon forces again in a similar crime 500 years later? When will we learn?