A second look
Khadija Magardie
Space constraints may be the explanation behind the bizarre selection of examples used to illustrate the horror colonialism in Shyaka Kanuma’s “colonialist atrocity smorgasbord” (“It’s time to stop whining”, December 14).
Throw out the word “colonialism” and the last thing that would spring to mind would be a traffic light.
Kanuma appears to think wise old Afs were sitting under trees, maybe smoking the occasional joint, and spending their days “in a leisurely fashion” until the whites came along and ruined everything.
One would be hard-pressed to find the dumbing down of history done in a more simplistic fashion. King Leopold and the rubber plantation are, presumably, for another day.
The aim of the piece is to shout down, once and for all, the chocolate-coloured “Eeyores” of Africa, who lament on about being hapless victims of fate, instead of acknowledging their own roles in destiny. Which is why schoolchildren may have heard about HF Verwoerd, but not about Jean-Bedel Bokassa. The descent by Kanuma into stereotypes is, nevertheless, unfortunate, detracting in a fairly substantial way from the message he was trying to convey.
“Mea culpa” pleas from African leaders are indeed long overdue, and on many fronts. The call for locals to own up for being willing partners in The Great Cop-Out is not new. What has never been as clear-cut is the scale on which this occurred.
The extent of black-on-black conflict influencing white settler occupation of the continent, or black Africans feeding the slave trade continues to underpin historical debate. And even if contemporary histori-ography was unanimous in its view, one thing would be clear, whatever Africans may have done to Africa, it was nowhere nearly on the scale as that committed by white Europe.
Kanuma holds forth at length on why the old fall-back of “blaming it on colonialism, the Boers, et cetera” does not hold water anymore, because countries on other continents have emerged from similar situations and still pulled up their socks. Which is true. He also says that some of the greatest sell-outs in African political history were Africans themselves; which is also true.
But reading his piece, one gets the feeling that Kanuma implies some kind of equal culpability between what has been done to Africa hardly amnesia material and what Africans do to themselves. This may be good and well in terms of getting Africans to own up; but the flip-side is that those who continue to plunder the continent in the form of mining and oil prospecting concessions and take their loot offshore, with the help of tin-pot African leaders; will say: “Hey, stop looking at us, look at what those blacks over there are doing to each other!”
Rather like the old case of the pot and the kettle; only this time the issue of who is the sootiest is never resolved because neither will agree to having been black to start with.