Inside the West's Double Standards
By Andrew M. Mwenda, 17 March 2012
I argued last week that there is a double standard among institutions - both
public and private - in the western world when dealing with an African
country like Rwanda or a European country like Belgium.
For example, mere allegations by Rwandan dissidents in the UK and Sweden to
the police that their government has sent a hit squad to kill one of them
are enough for police to take action and publicise the threat or expel a
diplomat. However, if similar allegations were made against the government
of Belgium, British or Swedish police would give Belgium the benefit of the
doubt, investigate the matter and establish some credible basis before
taking any action. The question is why the double standards when it comes to
Africa?
The fashionable view today is that we live in a post-racial world. The
election of Barack Obama, a black man, as president of the USA has been
presented as the ultimate manifestation of the triumph of color blindness.
Yet it seems to me that racism remains, only changing its form. I have come
to this conclusion only slowly and reluctantly. For many years, I argued
against African Americans and other black people living in Europe when they
told me of racism. Age and travel have given me experience and time to
reflect on the state of our world. Today, my views on racism are tempered by
a sobering awareness that the reality is much more than meets the eye.
Let us place Rwanda's "public relations problem" (as American journalist
working in Kigali put it a February 24th - March 1st article in The
Independent) in the wider context of Western standards of dealing with
Africa and its peoples. As a concept, Africa exists at two levels: as a
geographical entity and as a people. As geography, Africa includes a
northern region that is largely Arabic ethnically and Muslim by religion. In
Western mass media, scholarship and diplomacy, the Arabic north is reported
upon, studied and related to as part of the Middle East. Hence, when western
media, governments and scholars talk of Africa, they mean Sub Sahara (or
black) Africa.
In dealing with Arabs, the most dominant construct is religion - they are
treated as Muslims first, Arabs second. In dealing with Sub Sahara Africa,
the dominant construct is race; we are all "black". This "Africa" is also an
intellectual construct - there are images and symbols that people associate
with Africa promoted through Western scholarship, religion, mass media,
popular culture and language. For example, stories about Africa during the
pre-colonial period were filled with bizarre tales of cannibalism, human
sacrifice, savagery and other insane imaginations. Consequently, any mention
of Africa or its people evoked feelings of sub-humans only useful as slaves.
This construction was not pointless. It sought to justify one of the worst
tragedies in human history - the Trans-Atlantic trade in slaves from Africa
to the Americas.
As the colonial period began, a modified picture of Africa and its people
took shape. Africans were no longer sub-humans to be enslaved. They were
backward people in need of civilization. "The African," said Gen. Ian Smuts,
former Prime Minister of South Africa while giving the Rhodes Memorial
Lecture at Oxford in 1929, "has largely remained a child type, with a child
psychology and outlook. A childlike human cannot be a bad human..." Then
Albert Schweitzer like many colonial overlords said: "The Negro is a child
and with children, nothing can be done without authority."
In one of his most thoughtful writings, Karl Marx argued that the way people
organise themselves to solve their basic economic challenges - how to
clothe, house and feed themselves - requires a "superstructure" of
non-economic activity and thought; it will be bound together by laws (or
traditional customs in societies without states), supervised by government,
inspired by religion and justified by philosophy. In the same way, attempts
by the West to dominate Africa at each of the epochs have needed
intellectual justification tailor-made to a particular system of social
control.
Thus, slavery required a particular intellectual picture of Africa - to use
human beings as one would a horse. Capitalism and improved technology on the
other hand, rendered slavery inefficient. This created a necessity for free
labor from coercive conditions. Therefore, the philosophy of colonialism
about Africans had to be different from the philosophy of slavery - the
African as a perpetual child only able to work under the whip of colonial
authority. This philosophy justified and legitimised the structure of the
colonial state to its home constituencies and to the colonised.
As colonialism ended, overt racism became repugnant having been discredited
by Adolf Hitler and his NAZI allies who took it to the European mainland.
The claim that Hitler began genocides disregards history. The German
psychopathic dictator was following in a long European tradition of mass
slaughter of native peoples by European conquerors in Latin and North
America and Africa. But to return to Africa, although overt racism began to
decline at the end of colonial rule, the imagery of studying and reporting
on Africa was not transformed, it only changed manner of presentation.
Overtly racial expressions were dropped. In their place, however, particular
stereotypes have been introduced that have sustained the construction of
Africa and Africans as some incompetent humans in need of external
emancipation - by the white man.
For example, Western media today tend to focus on poverty, misery, despair,
corruption, state rapacity, violent conflicts, ritual murders, hunger,
famine, cruel and brutal leaders etc. Western scholarship follows in the
footsteps of the media, to provide intellectual explanations. Then Western
human rights organisations campaign for particular interventions to solve
the problem - the recent YouTube video calling upon the United States to
capture Uganda's rebel leader, Joseph Kony, being a good example. All this
"pressure" makes western diplomacy (sometimes, as in Libya recently,
military intervention) necessary to induce or force governments in Africa to
behave in particular ways. Such projects require local allies. Slavery and
colonialism required local chiefs as collaborators. Today, the West funds
local "civil society".
Of course Western scholarship, journalism, the human rights and humanitarian
movements and diplomacy do not invent disasters in Africa. Rather it is the
way they focus and angle this particular aspect of our reality that I find
questionable. Indeed, it is the almost complete exclusion of our other
realities that consciously or subconsciously sustains these stereotypes.
Thus, although explicitly racial arguments about Africa are rare today and
when made are scorned upon, the campaigns to end poverty, promote human
rights, democracy, feed the hungry, try African leaders at the International
Criminal Court (ICC) etc are part and parcel of a construct that seeks to
present Africa and Africans as incapable of self-government.
Thus, today, there are phrases, words and expressions that allow many people
not to mention race in discussing perceived failures in Africa. But they are
still able to present arguments about our perceived inherent inferiority.
The point is that it is no longer necessary to talk about race. This is
because talking about poverty, misery, hunger, brutal governments etc
conveys the same message of Africans being backward, brutal, incompetent,
incapable and hence in need of external intervention. Different factions in
the West may disagree on the nature of intervention - some may call for
military force, others diplomacy etc. - but intervene they must.
Anyone reading this article thus far would be tempted to conclude that we as
Africans need to establish our own media, think tanks, universities etc
through which we can generate knowledge about ourselves and tell our story
without such stereotypes and prejudices. Actually that is the solution. But
the problem is much more complex than that. If that solution is to work, the
complexity of how we are intellectually constructed has to be understood. As
economics Nobel laureate Robert Solow said, just because the tyre is flat
does not mean that the hole is at the bottom. The fact that Western
journalists report negatively about Africa does not necessarily mean that
African journalists and mass media owned by Africans would report about the
continent differently. On the contrary, they could even be worse.
In my experience, I find that we African elites perpetuate these negative
prejudices and stereotypes. With Rwanda, for example, the most outlandish
stereotyping is done by its own journalists supported by like-minded allies
in the regional press. A Western journalist may seek some little evidence in
spite of the low professional standards required by her news organisation
when reporting on Africa. This is because of her training and the standards
- even if low - required of her by her employer. She is also likely to check
her back for likely accusations of racism and hence tamper her statements
with some qualifiers and reservations. The African journalist is restrained
by neither.
Steve Biko said that the greatest weapon in the hand of an oppressor is
never his armies - these are secondary. It is the mind of the oppressed. The
overlord uses control of communication channels (mass media, think tanks,
universities, books, education curricula, religion, philosophy etc) to
create a particular world view - what Antonio Gramci called hegemony. This
is a mind-frame or belief system of what is normal, regular and right - as
opposed to the abnormal, irregular and wrong. In other words, the production
of knowledge is an important instrument of social control.
We African intellectuals and elites know about ourselves largely (not
entirely) through the writings of non-Africans. So we go to Stanford and
Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge to be taught who we are, what we are, what we
think, what we want, what we do, how we do it etc. Most books and research
work about us is produced by someone other than ourselves. We participate in
its consumption, not its production. The biases, prejudices and stereotypes
generated may not be driven by deliberate racial intent. However, research
into cognitive bias shows that both conscious and sub-conscious biases lead
to prejudiced views and actions even when the individual does not want to do
so.
I think most western scholars on Africa are anti-racist and seek to be as
race neutral as possible. However, they come with particular biases - most
of them sub-conscious - based on their education, culture, history, beliefs
etc. These generate cognitive schemas or thought structures that influence
what we notice and how the things we notice get interpreted by our minds.
Studies show that such schemas operate not only as part of conscious,
rational deliberations but also automatically i.e. without conscious
awareness of intent.
For example, in the United States, the mass media is awash with news of
criminal activity on a daily basis. In most cases, the criminal is always a
black male. In Michael Moore's documentary, Bowling for Columbine, there is
a play of actual television news reports sounding like a broken record in
the way they repeat this description of a criminal suspect. Research studies
into this cognitive bias show that after decades of media reports, it has
sunk in the social consciousness of the Americans, including black people,
that a criminal suspect is always a black male.
There was a study in America involving a video game where participants were
asked to shoot as quickly as possible at a target they suspected was armed.
Each target would be of either a white or black person. As the results
showed, participants were more likely to mistake a black target as armed
even when he was actually unarmed and more likely to mistake the white
target as unarmed when he was actually armed. Black participants in the
video game were also as likely as white participants to shoot at unarmed
black targets as opposed to armed white targets. These results showed a
pattern of discrimination based on subconscious thought processes, not
conscious deliberations - meaning that over the years, a common "wisdom" has
penetrated the social consciousness of Americans that a black man is a
criminal.
The point is that the knowledge created by western scholarship and mass
media that is imparted to us shapes our self-perception. For example, there
are many things our governments do as part of democratic deal-making that we
claim are signs of failure of our democratic process. Yet these very same
actions are seen in western democracies as costs of democratic compromise.
Indeed, African elites are quick to see the specks in our societies and
remain blind to the logs in western ones.
For example, elites in Africa may condemn Rwanda and Uganda occupation of DR
Congo - a country with an absentee state just across the border. But they
see nothing wrong with America and NATO occupation of Afghanistan some
10,000 miles away for over a decade. A few killings by an African army get
so much coverage compared to hundreds of death at the hands of American and
NATO aerial bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We are therefore active
participants in processes that encourage and reproduce stereotypes against
us.
Therefore, the challenge for Africa is not merely to create our own mass
media houses, universities and think tanks and staff them with people of our
skin color. The primary challenge is to develop self-awareness - to
understand the world we live in and challenge the images of who we are that
have been constructed. There are many non-Africans in Western institutions
who would see our point of view and advance it in their own media. But it is
important that we actively define who we are and develop images, symbols,
and schemas that reflect this self-perception. Only then can we expect
others to respect us.
Immediately after independence in the 1960s, there was an attempt to do
this. What happened? I will return to this question next week.
Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni and Dr. Kiiza Besigye Uganda is in anarchy"
Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni na Dk. Kiiza Besigye Uganda ni katika machafuko"
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