‘New racism’ fuelling extremist violence in Africa

The killing last month of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was shot in cold blood by a white police officer in Missouri, sparked protests as far away as Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and reignited intellectual and political debates on the resurgence of racial and ethnic tensions to haunt democracy globally.

In Africa, a new wave of xenophobic attacks against African immigrants in South Africa has sparked fury across the continent. And, in Kenya, the massacre of 148 students of the Garissa University College early this month, seen as part of a string of killings of ‘blacks’ (“nywele ngumu” or kinky hair) by Somali supremacists at the Coast and North-Eastern parts, has also stoked worldwide condemnations.

The resurgence of racism globally is the focus of a special issue of Foreign Affairs Journal titled: “The Trouble with Race” (March/April 2015).
Kwame Anthony Appiah, the renowned Ghanaian scholar and author of the classic In My Father’s House (1993), and more recently “Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity” (February 2014), kicks off the debate on the resurgence of racism by citing Du Bois’ famous declaration in 1900 during the First Pan-African Conference in London that: “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line.”

After a sweeping review of the rise and fall of race as a concept that has underpinned human relations, Prof Appiah concludes that race — and ethnicity — are socially constructed categories by late 19th century scientists (biologists) and intellectuals.

However, absent in Appiah’s and other intellectual interventions in the debate on rising racial and ethnic tensions globally is a nuanced appraisal of the dynamics of “new racism” within Africa that is everywhere driving extremist violence and terrorism.

INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE

Although the term “new racism” has Western roots, having entered the corridors of intellectual discourses in the early 1980s following the resurgence of rightwing ideologies based on racist public discourse depicting immigrants as a threat, it is deeply rooted in contemporary Africa.

What today are theorised as indigenous “Islamic terrorism” and extremist violence in Africa are essentially racist projects with well calibrated political and economic ends erroneously subsumed under the rubrics of “genocide” and “terrorism”.

Imperial Ethiopia provides the oldest and most apt example of the localised politics of a racial ideology based on the notion of superiority of Abyssinians over other Africans.

The architects of imperial Ethiopia weaved the idea of Abyssinian superiority around the creation myth that posits that God molded the first humans from clay and in Ethiopia. He put the first batch in an oven to bake, but left them there too long, and they emerged burned and black, so he threw them away to the southern part of Africa.

He took the second batch from the oven too soon, and they were pasty and white, so he threw them northward, where they became the Arab and European populations. The third and final batch was just right, and God put them in Ethiopia.

Long before Italy’s Benito Mussolini overran Ethiopia and bust the myth of the racial supremacy of the Abyssinians in 1935, an article titled: “The most gifted of Africans” published by the New York Times on April 19, 1896, enchanted the Abyssinians as “decidedly a superior race to the other peoples of the Dark Continent” because of “their origin and pedigree.”

However, all this changed. In exile in London, Emperor Haile Selassie was received and hosted by Africans such as Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, becoming a convert to pan-Africanism. Addis Ababa is indisputably the capital of pan-Africanism, a galvanising supra-racial idea that all Africans are one race.

SUPERIOR VS INFERIOR

But the cost of failure by other Africans to jettison their localised racial bigotry has been dire. As the Ugandan scholar, Mahamoud Mamdani, rightly notes in his book, When Victims Become Killers (2001), underlying the 1994 Rwandan genocide was the colonial legacy of racial stereotypes of superior “semitic or Hamitic” Tutsis and inferior Hutu “Negroes”.

Similarly, a “pan-Somali” ideology akin to apartheid is driving the idea of a caliphate in Eastern Africa. Prior to the civil war, Somalia’s apartheid targeted the Bantus in southern parts (referred to collectively as Jareer or slaves). It was sustained through social mores that strongly discouraged, censured and punished any kind of sexual contact with the Jareer.

Today, pan-Somali supremacists are stretching the concept of “Jareer” in what is emerging as a racially-driven war of attrition to prevent non-Somalis from acquiring property or settling in the Muslim counties of Mandera, Wajir, Garissa and Lamu. In this war, the Jareer does not need to commit a crime of any kind, being a Jareer is itself a serious crime!

In northern Mali and the broader Sahel, terrorist groups such as the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), a splinter group of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) that nearly captured the Malian state in 2012, are using the racial language of “white” and “black”, which has specific resonance where the light-skinned Tuareg and Arabs (“whites”) are depicted as superior to the inferior non-Arab southerners (“blacks”).

However, ironically, the wrath of localised racial ideology has been brutal in Sudan’s racially mixed and predominantly Muslim Darfur region where notions of superior Arabs and inferior “blacks” underpinned the Janjaweed’s pogroms against non-Arab Muslims.

Today, two decades after South Africa ascended to democracy, apartheid’s long shadow is felt in the form of xenophobic violence against African immigrants (pejoratively known as makwerekwere) in May 2008 and April 2015. Racism may be receding globally but in Africa, its localised politics endures.

Prof Kagwanja is Chief Executive, Africa Policy Institute, [email protected]