I live the main part of my life these days in a limbo universe – a globalised, 21st- century version of the migrant labourer. My personal life, when I have one, is with my family in Cameroon. My intellectual life is played out on the Senegalese island of Goree, where I am employed to work on pan-African cultural initiatives. And my ancestral life, which embraces both work and family, is conducted in South Africa. (So now I’ve introduced myself, at last.)
It is those other lives in West and Central Africa that constantly give me a sense of perspective on my
South African life. And it is during the limbo-within-a-limbo life of air travel between those lives that I find time to reflect on the different poles between which I live.
This week my travelling companion has been a book called Masks, written by Englishman Adam Lively.
Now, just as an aside, I have to point out that Lively was a friend of mine when I lived in London. We first met in a bar in Notting Hill Gate, sometime in the waning years of the last century, introduced to each other by a mutual friend and up-and-coming figure of that era, Ben Okri. We were just three anonymous, aspiring writers in the corner of the pub who shared a passion for literature, history and draft Guinness.
Okri, as you know, achieved sudden fame when he won the Booker prize for his first novel, The Famished Road. Lively and I, as the grey hairs creep in and we edge into our mid-40s, are still biding our time.
The important thing is that we are all still hanging in there, and are somehow, against the logic of separation, still able to communicate indirectly through the printed word.
The printed word, this time round, is represented by Lively’s book, which I happened to choose to keep me company on this particular round of flights. And although it is not a perfect piece of literature (it’s a thesis full of fascinating reflections, really) it still feels like just another logical extension of the kind of conversations the three of us used to have in Notting Hill Gate: about blackness, race and the imagination.
So who is Lively, an average white man, to be writing about this subject? It doesn’t matter. What matters is the kind of interesting material he has dug up, in what I know to have been almost a lifelong quest on his part to dig out the roots of this hauntingly abstract and destructive theme – one that has played a dominant part in political and philosophical thought since the middle of the second millennium, and which doesn’t yet seem to have played itself out by any means as we enter the third.
Who started this race thing, anyway?
Lively, speaking as a white European, says decisively that it was Europe that cast the first stone, and continues to hurl its missiles in the direction of the black part of humanity, with lethal effect.
What is important about his book is that it asks not just whether this is the case, but why. It is a rare and vital act of self-exploration and throws up some startling conclusions, from early on in the text.
There is the steady elevation of ignorant prejudice to religious (read Christian) orthodoxy, and thence to the level of scientific respectability – as in this description from the seminal Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who compared the European’s “fair, sanguine” complexion and “gentle, acute, inventive” nature with the African’s flat nose, “tumid” lips and “crafty, indolent, negligent” temperament, “governed by caprice”.
These pseudo-scientific conclusions, which were said to apply to all members of all races without exclusion, led to reinterpretations of the Jewish and Christian scriptures in order to change their application from the general to the specific -in other words, implying that rather than all humanity deriving from Adam and Eve, each race had its own separate Adam and its own separate Eve and never the twain should be allowed to meet.
White South Africa and white America were the prime consumers of this revisionist orthodoxy.
Some of Lively’s most interesting discoveries relate to the clash between the Western liberal and reactionary schools of thought in the race debate. The most chilling is contained in the conclusions of Charles Darwin, the great 19th-century evolutionist (and therefore advocate of an egalitarian identity). Speaking of the West’s self-styled superiority, Darwin wrote: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.”
It is this distillation of the process of racist ideology, from “harmless” name-calling to systematic genocide, that makes you sit up and think as you page through Lively’s book – not just when you think of the European genocide of the 1940s, but especially when you recall Wouter Basson and his thousands of untried test tubes, and wonder about the psychological and physical plagues that are unaccountably stalking the black continent today.
What is certain is that the next world war will not be a loud and visible one, like its predecessors. The next world war will be a subtle and far more devastating affair. The possibility is that it has probably already begun.
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