Prof. Raymond K. Kent: AN
OPEN LETTER TO KOFI ANNAN THE SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE UNITED
NATIONS
AN OPEN LETTER TO
KOFI ANNAN
THE SECRETARY GENERAL
OF THE UNITED NATIONS
R.K.Kent, Historian
26/08/06
Dear Mr.
Secretary General,,
There is no one on the planet earth who has borne a
heavier cross as a
victim of racism, individually and collectively, than men and
women from Your own Continent of
Africa.
The obvious incubator of the racist
virus was the slave trade but its
arrest ( by about mid-Nineteenth century) did nothing to end
the racist perceptions attached to
Africans in Africa and in the
New World.
Its manifestations have been many and varied. At one level, the great
Zande people of Central
Africa (just take a look
at the Atlas of Zande material culture, prepared by Dr. Schweinfurth)
were perceived as “cannibals” and called the “Nyam-Nyam.” Tied to this
man-eating perception at another level, was
an old newspaper
advertisement. A captive white man is about to be cooked in a
large pot somewhere in Africa and is begging for
mercy. The local Chief turns to him and says “show me something I
have not
seen and I will let you out.” The
white man produces
a lighter with a certain well-known brand
name and lights it up. The chief gave the order to let him out and said “ I
have used many lighters but never had one that worked
on first try.”
Between these two examples stood the notion that Africans were sub-human,
evil, lazy, guilty of brutal savagery
in conflicts, while
Africa was a place without
history. We now have an eight-volume History of Africa under
the UNESCO auspices.. For Africans, assimilation
into societies of the New
World was a road full of racist thorns.
Yet, it was their sweat and
blood that
contributed to the richness in many
parts of it. (In Brazil, for example, they even
modified the Portuguese language , cuisine
and music; .by historical admissions, a successful
Portuguese colonization of
Brazil would have been
unworkable without Africans).
Germany’s
Third Reich was a modern promoter of racism while
proclaiming the superiority of the Aryan Race yet –even after all the
Nazi horrors – the Germans
(2)
did not become guilty as a PEOPLE. .
This has permitted the Germans to escape the worst consequences, rebuild their
society and become an important Democracy in Europe. Quintessentially,
“United Nations” is an anti-racist edifice. One would
have
thought that its basic sinew
consists of rejecting the notion that any PEOPLE can be deemed guilty as such
because of misdeeds of its governors or egregious crimes com-mitted by
some of its members. It is the same sinew that holds the
United
States together as a single nation despite
the myriad origins of its population.
Alas, just when one would have thought that a racist individual could not
hold office in the U.N. or be named as its representative, the opposite has just
happened. At a meeting in Vienna, the special U.N. envoy appointed to deal with
the status of Kosovo, Marti Ahtisari of Finland has just revealed himself as a
crass modern racist who assigns guilt to an entire people—the Serbs at Kosovo--
without shame or respect for his Office. Even worse, on
grounds that can be dismantled by anyone who knows the
details of the Yugoslav fratricide, in which all sides took part and
some of which have been assisted heavily
from abroad.
The minimal effort at the U.N. to react to the virus that keeps
recurring, this time in an appointed U.N. representative, is to remove him and
replace him with someone who is not sick. I trust that the General Secretary,
who comes from Ghana, does not share such a
racist view and will not tolerate it by silence or failure to
act.
Respectfully,
Raymond K. Kent (Emeritus)
History
Department,
University of
California,
Berkeley, CA
94720..
