Racism, cruel treatment and what Africa can learn from it all
A woman wearing a headscarf joins a demonstration organised by "Stand up to Racism" outside the French Embassy in London on August 26, 2016 against the Burkini ban on French beaches. PHOTO | JUSTIN TALLIS | AFP
What you need to know:
- European languages were among the means by which a certain Caucasian class recently imposed its religion on the world.
Sunday Nation headline claimed: “Principal Secretaries remain on the edge.”
But to be on edge (without the article the) is the idiom I know. In a word, the idiom “on edge” never requires the definite article “the”.
European languages were among the means by which a certain Caucasian class recently imposed its religion on the world.
But, as England later discovered, even if your skin be as “white” as snow, if you have treated other human beings as brainlessly as a Caucasian class has once done to black Africans, history often devises a method of making you pay for it.
If Africa’s own elite has failed to learn any lesson from such human follies as caste, sectarianism, sexism, tribalism and the racism with which a class of Caucasians has recently mistreated human beings the whole world over, an African class might also one day be tempted to treat other human races with just such mental smallness.
COLONIALISM
If it ever pans out for Africans to rule the world, the hope is that it will take place only after humanity has totally weaned itself of such forms of mental childishness as racism, religious bigotry, sexism and tribalism.
Indeed, black Africans must be powerfully warned against such folly.
For the culture of ancient black Africans — for which the Nilotes of ancient Egypt are now celebrated — may recur only very late in human history.
Africa is thus in a much better position than all other human regions to learn powerful lessons from such catastrophic follies in human history as individualism, racism, sectarianism, sexism and tribalism, most of these having been forced on Africans by a cruel economic system imposed on humanity through European colonialism.
LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Although racism is the English name for the way in which a certain class of Euro-Caucasians has, in recent centuries, treated human beings, the prejudicial ideology of racism is nascent in certain classes of all human races.
You may not be aware of any occasion on which a black African or brown Asian class has mistreated any other race — especially Euro-“white” — with any inhuman cruelty on account of its skin colour, hair texture or lip size.
Yet among the most notable things about our species is that, despite our specific brain size and our specific agility of the hand, humanity remains notable for its appalling failure to use that brain and those hands to learn any positive lesson from the follies that the leading classes of all human races and all ethnic groups have inflicted upon one another.
CRUELTY
As we approach another century of high tech, how do we explain the crying shame that the most intelligent of all of our world’s species, is the one most tightly controlled by such degrading considerations as class, race, religion, sex and tribe?
How do we explain all the 'smallnesses' of the human mind that have once led the top classes of most educated societies of the human species to inflict such appalling inhumanities upon other human beings the whole world over?
