The chairperson of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) secretariat, Professor Wiseman Nkuhlu, and African-American celebrity Bill Cosby recently made statements that have serious implications for black people everywhere.
Nkuhlu lamented that colonialism ended 40 years ago and said it is time for Africans to wake up, stop being sorry for themselves and take charge of their destiny. In a similar vein, Cosby berated African-Americans, especially the youth, for their allegedly self-piteous state.
Quite clearly, these statements are profound and contain an element of truth. However, no matter how well-intentioned, they repeat worrying accusations that have been directed at black people throughout history. This is the view that black people should shoulder most of the blame for the debilitating social, economic and political conditions in which they live. Slave owners and colonialists were fond of such talk.
The difference is that, this time around, they come from within and, as usual, from those who are supposedly among the leading lights of black people.
It is no big revelation that self-pity is the most loathsome emotion that can be displayed by a besieged community. It denies people the ability to rebel against oppression and must be fought.
But no matter how sincere these statements may sound, when they are stripped bare they reveal a dangerous and simplistic trend that has been evident in contemporary analysis of why black people continue to be in a degrading position.
For one, they merely affirm the jaundiced view that the so-called globalised world ignores the oppressive environment that continues to affect the ability of black people to dispense of the shackles that bind them to deplorable conditions.
It is seriously naive to reduce our understanding of the condition of black people to the presumption that they have an innate belief that the world owes them something, and hence are sitting back and doing nothing to deal with their problems. No self-respecting people living in inhuman conditions anywhere can be accused of failing to want to change those conditions.
After all, if this were the case, what were the civil-rights movements and the struggle against colonialism and apartheid about?
The fact that African-Americans still occupy the bottom rung of American society cannot be blamed on their alleged unwillingness or lack of ambition to change their lives. Nor can Africans shoulder the blame for the deplorable conditions in which they find themselves.
Indeed, in trying to understand the problems that afflict black people we must first of all look inwards to weed out those tendencies within ourselves that arrest our ability to change our situation. However, in our zeal of self-criticism we must not fall into the self-defeating traps that make us lose sight of the real problems that confront us.
To argue that the main reason why black people cannot free themselves of deplorable conditions lies largely within, exhibits a serious lack of rigour in analysing and understanding the realities of the world in which we live.
If Nepad is based on this challenged view, it is doomed to fail dismally. Calls to understand the world environment and the unfair way it is structured and loaded against black people are by no stretch of imagination an excuse to run away from our responsibilities.
If black people start believing they are the laziest people around and only have themselves to blame, then we are in serious trouble.
One is inclined to dismiss these statements as a simple, elitist cop-out, as many apply this escapist rationale in explaining what are essentially serious distortions of reality.
However, they need much more thought and response, for there is a subtext here that needs cogent explanation. This will hopefully illuminate our understanding of where such an analysis comes from and why it should be roundly condemned and avoided.
What such thinking emphatically indicates is that those who espouse it do not really recognise the true situation that faces black people. It is a false representation of communities that up to now have been denied the right to express their own views — in their own interests — of how they perceive the world and how they want to change it.
Both in the United States and Africa, the time has come for those who are suffering these deprivations to articulate their positions — and what they have to say will be far removed and different from these views that seek to blame the victim.
The real victims of these conditions still need to be accorded the space to vent their feelings.