John Matshikiza hits back at revisionist Indian scholar Dinesh D’Souza’s defence of colonialism
What if the Spanish conquistadors had not come along and wiped out the Incas? What if the Mughal emperors had been able to continue their reign over the many regions of the Indian subcontinent, unmolested by British imperial ambitions? What if Shaka had been left alone to build an unprecedented empire on the southern tip of the African continent? What if the Egyptians had been free to analyse the mysterious Sphinx from their own perspective? And what if the Vietnamese had simply been left free to go about their Oriental way?
The questions about how the world we live in might have looked had it not been for various imperialist and colonialist interventions are endless – not least what the United States, the world’s pre-eminent imperial power, would have been like if its early colonists had not systematically wiped out the country’s original inhabitants. Would the world have been a worse or a better place?
These questions are largely academic. After all, civilisations have risen and fallen all through human history, one world view giving way to another through violent overthrow or natural exhaustion and decline.
Why then does the Indian-born, born-again-American Dinesh D’Souza find it incumbent upon himself (whoever he is) to raise two cheers for colonialism? If history has come to an end, and we have entered a brave new era of monotheistic, globalised bliss, why bring up history again?
The answer must surely be that history, in the shape of Osama bin Laden and others, has dropped a calling card on the doorstep of the New World Order, unsettling a certain sense of complacency with which we are all supposed to fall in step. D’Souza, a brown-skinned product of the Third World, has been called in to help deal with this little First World problem.
First of all, who is Dinesh D’Souza? He certainly relocated into the American mainstream long before the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre on September 11. He has at least one degree from a prestigious American university, serves on the faculty of another and rose to the position of senior domestic policy analyst at the White House under Ronald Reagan between 1987 and 1988 – not bad credentials for a spokesperson for the Radical Right.
His publications reflect exactly where he is coming from – with titles ranging from the sycophantic Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man became an Extraordinary Leader, through Illiberal Education and The Virtue of Prosperity, to The End of Racism. His essay on the benefits of colonialism is extracted from a chapter of his latest book, subtly titled What’s So Great About America (note the absence of a question mark at the end of the line and draw your own conclusions).
It is always useful, of course, to wheel out a person of colour when trying to put a new spin on the thorny issue of American race relations. In The End of Racism D’Souza argues that the American institution of slavery had nothing to do with racism. Apart from the fact that black Africans indulged in the trading of their fellow Africans, he points out that there were also black slave owners in the American Deep South – men who, he alleges, treated their human chattels with even more cruelty than white slave owners.
What he carefully fails to point out is that such slave owners, few as they were, were usually mulattos – descendants of white slave owners and enslaved African women, who would have been brought up in the Big House, rather than the slave quarters, and who therefore had a greater allegiance to the lifestyle and philosophy of their white fathers than that of their black mothers.
He also fails to point out that although the slave trade and American slavery might not have been based on racist philosophy to begin with, both certainly became part of the foundations of institutional racism – that is, race-based oppression of blacks by whites – not only in the Americas, but in Europe and Africa as well.
D’Souza’s main argument in his essay on colonialism is that ”the West did not become rich and powerful through colonial oppression. It makes no sense to claim that the West grew rich and strong by conquering other countries and taking their stuff.”
And yet there is a clear and strong link between slavery, institutional racism and colonialism, and a clear link between the growth of those institutions and the rise of Western wealth and power.
Many modern economists would side with D’Souza and argue that it is almost impossible for one country to steal wealth from another in the way that colonial critics suggest colonial countries stole wealth from their colonies. But then it depends what one means by the words ”theft” and ”wealth” – or what one understands by D’Souza’s colourful phrase ”taking their stuff”.
One could start with the European Crusades and the sacking of the Holy Land in the Middle Ages. In the 16th century Sir Francis Drake and his colleague Sir Walter Raleigh, among others, cruised the high seas in search of booty for the royal treasury – and for themselves. They were both certainly involved in the early years of the transatlantic slave trade and the establishment of the American colonies that trade helped to underpin.
Can one ignore the fact that the cotton, sugar and tobacco wealth created in those colonies through slave labour brought unheard of wealth to the nascent economies of Western Europe? This wealth was translated into capital in the form of cotton, sugar and tobacco mills and cloth-making factories – the start of the industrial revolution that gradually transformed those countries from agrarian to industrial and trading economies and increasingly urban, cohesive societies.
The wealth generated from the slave trade alone was staggering. Much of this wealth ended up in state coffers in the form of duties and taxes – no mean contribution to the growth of Western infrastructures.
Many banking and insurance institutions were set up specifically to benefit from the profits from the trade in human slaves. The wealth transformed the infrastructures of cities like Bristol and Liverpool, Britain’s primary slave trading ports, and London, the country’s political and financial capital. New elites were formed, controlling the economic and social life of the society, and undermining the age-old dominance of the aristocracy.
The slave colonies and the ”stuff” (including African slaves and indentured labourers from India and China) that was transferred to metropolitan Europe, or to new colonies that fell under their control, brought not only transforming wealth to Europe – they brought industrial and social revolutions, as well as the muscle to engage in ever more audacious expeditions of armed conquest of the rest of the world.
It is also worth noting that these European countries were gaily helping themselves to the wealth and resources of the Indian and Chinese empires – which D’Souza concedes were the wealthiest and most sophisticated societies of the time. They made no bones about undermining those civilisations and finally colonising them by force.
Why would they do such a thing if there was no direct benefit to the mother country? D’Souza says: ”The West could not have reached its current state of wealth and influence by stealing from other cultures for the simple reason that there wasn’t very much to take.”
He points out that the British generously brought rubber plantations to Malaya, cocoa trees to West Africa, and tea plantations to India – presumably giving them a chance to kick-start their own economies, which the ungrateful natives never quite managed to do.
D’Souza conveniently forgets to mention other factors in the relationship between coloniser and colonised in Africa. For example, between five- and 10-million black people were slaughtered in King Leopold’s Congo Free State in the 19th century – worked to death, or punished for refusing or being unable to work, in indigenous rubber plantations that had not been imported from anywhere. Congolese rubber, which facilitated the invention of the pneumatic tyre and which in turn made bicycles, motorcycles and automobiles a viable proposition, was another cornerstone of Europe’s and America’s industrial revolutions. Useful ”stuff” indeed.
One need hardly add that the discovery of precious and strategic minerals, in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa, soon outstripped rubber in importance and further fuelled industrial development and wealth creation in the West. Colonisation placed exploitation of these resources into the exclusive control of Western governments and their corporate proxies.
The Third World surrendered its ”stuff” for free, only to re-import part of it as finished products exclusively manufactured in the metropolitan centres, at exorbitant prices from which they were destined never to recover. Nowadays this is labelled ”Third World Debt”.
There are expert economists who argue that the real expansion of First World wealth resulted from Western nations trading profitably among themselves and that capital accrued from the colonies only accounts for some 10% of that value. But what were they trading among themselves?
The history of the Dutch East India Company, to mention just one example, demonstrates how wealth earned from trading with the sophisticated Far East empires of China, Japan and Indonesia transformed the unpromising, mineral-free area of The Netherlands into a powerful trading empire with tentacles across the world, later backed up by a ruthless colonial administration orchestrated from the motherland.
But that’s old hat, of course – although D’Souza denies that it ever happened like that.
He makes the extraordinary assertion that the ”reason the West became so affluent and dominant in the modern era is that it invented three institutions: science, democracy and capitalism”. Although he grants that these institutions are based on ”universal impulses and aspirations”, he credits Western civilisation with giving them ”a unique expression”.
The existence of detailed scientific knowledge that predated the rise of Western civilisation by several centuries at centres of learning in Mali, Egypt, Persia and China doesn’t warrant a mention. That this scientific knowledge was probably transferred to Western institutions through the normal channels of human intercourse, that democratic institutions had existed at least since the days of the ancient Greeks, and that profit-based capitalism was alive and living all over the world is effectively denied, in favour of the theory that it ”is the dynamic interaction among these three Western institutions that has produced the great wealth, strength and success of Western civilisation”.
One begins to seriously wonder where this fellow went to school. D’Souza is happy to give us the answer, but it is one that is unfortunately less than edifying – although his spin on it certainly shows us where his reasoning comes from.
”Virtually everything that I am, what I do and my deepest beliefs, all are the product of a world view that was brought to India by colonialism.” His understanding of technology, his beliefs in freedom of expression, self-government, equality of rights under law and the universal principle of human dignity – all these were exclusively due to British colonialism, which allowed Indians to begin ”to encounter words and ideas that were unmentioned in their ancestral culture”.
Whatever one thinks of Indians and their country, one cannot deny that they have an ancient and complex culture, supported by a vast body of written literature in every branch of knowledge. It is a culture of enquiry and experimentation, as well as tradition, with influences absorbed from across the world – including Africa. (India, home of several pre-Christian merchant clans, probably taught the West a few licks about that ”Western-invented” institution of capitalism, too, by the way.)
D’Souza’s insistence in viewing the world as a series of completely isolated societies developing at different speeds in a vertical direction, rather than as an intertwined sequence of lateral relationships that cause some to grow and some to wane at different times in history is baffling – especially coming from an Indian.
India has exported much into the world over the past few millennia -from knowledge systems to fashion to religion. But it is not ashamed of the fact that it also imported things.
The Indian academic Amartya Sen, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, points out that the chilli, a basic ingredient of traditional Indian cooking, was brought to India by the Portuguese from the ”New World”. But this ”does not make Indian cooking any less Indian. Indeed chilli has now become an ‘Indian’ spice.”
Knowledge, he concludes, is always a two-way street. ”The characterisation of an idea as ‘purely Western’ or ‘purely Indian’ can be very illusory. The origin of ideas is not the kind of thing to which ‘purity’ happens easily.”
As to the concept that ideas about individual liberty originated in the West rather than anywhere else, Sen points out that while these concepts were universally alien to the ancient world, it is only relatively recently that they became part of daily life during Europe’s Age of Enlightenment – slightly ahead of their gradual adoption in the East. It is important to recall, however, that the adoption of the concept of individual liberties for some was accompanied by the catastrophic removal of civil liberties for others. The original American Constitution of 1776, for example, which declared that ”all men were created equal,” specifically excluded human chattel slaves, of whom millions were then held in servitude in the New World, from that sweeping declaration.
D’Souza goes so far as to make the point that were it not for these concepts of individual liberty introduced by colonial invaders, the leaders of anti-colonial liberation movements would never have learned ”the language of freedom.” This really tests one’s patience.
Were Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru fighting to liberate their people from Indian ignorance or from British oppression?
Were the slave revolts that swept through both Americas and all the islands of the Caribbean in the 18th and 19th centuries directed at achieving personal enlightenment or at breaking the literal and metaphorical chains of bondage?
Should the Mau Mau thank the British for waking them up to the fact that they had a right to self-expression in their own country – having had their lands taken away from them by force by the very same British colonisers?
D’Souza would answer the last question by dismissing the entire African continent as a land of barbarians anyway. Africa is a ”cocktail of disasters … not because colonialism … lasted so long, but because it lasted a mere half-century. It was too short a time to permit Western institutions to take firm root.”
Can one really generalise about the vast African continent, as D’Souza insists on doing with regard to every situation?
Let me respond by quoting from the Polish journalist, Rysczard Kapuscinski: ”Africa is a thousand situations, varied, distinct, even contradictory. Someone will say, ‘There is a war there’ and he will be right. Someone else, ‘It is peaceful there’ and he too will be correct. Because everything depends on where and when.
”During pre-colonial times, and hence not so long ago, more than 10 000 little states, kingdoms, ethnic unions and federations existed in Africa. Roland Oliver, a historian at the University of London, draws attention to a general paradox in his book, The African Experience: it has become common parlance to say that European colonialists partitioned Africa. Partitioned? Oliver marvels. Colonialism was a brutal unification, brought about by fire and sword! Ten thousand entities were reduced to 50.”
So should we join D’Souza in uttering two cheers for colonialism, especially in Africa? As I have said, human development is a two-way street. There have certainly been some advantages to the relationship, although D’Souza himself agrees that these have probably been largely accidental rather than intentional.
The more pressing question is, should we give even half a cheer for the presence of Dinesh D’Souza’s warped, profoundly colonised intellect in the midst of our society?
The answer must surely be a resounding ”No”.