Kenya Socialist Web Site HARAKATI ISSUE NO. 7 (December 1999/January 2000)
Kenya Socialist Web Site HARAKATI ISSUE NO. 7 (December 1999/January 2000)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ARE WE BLACKS OR AFRICANS?
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We, the African people, have suffered a lot in the hands of the so called
“white people”. Most Africans have taken a liberal stand when it comes to
the use of the words "black" and "white". First and foremost, Liberalism has
always been the sugary ideology of imperialism: it fosters the illusion in
the exploited of the possibilities of a peaceful settlement and painless escape
from imperialist violence which, in any case, imperialists refer to as "keeping
law and order". Liberalism blurs all antagonistic class contradictions, all
the contradictions between imperialist domination and the struggle for national
liberation, seeing in the revolutionary violence of the former, the degradation
of humanity.
Liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace,
thus giving rise to a decadent, philistine attitude and bringing about political
degeneration in certain units and individuals (among the oppressed). In fact,
liberalism objectively has the effect of helping the enemy (i.e. Imperialism).
”Ignorant of their country, some people can only relate tales of ancient
Greece and other foreign lands”- Mao Tse-Tung. Thomas Jefferson, a former
President of the United States of America, a country that had fought against
Britain on the basis that all men were created equal, suspiciously advanced
the view that the Blacks, whether originally a distant race, or made distinct
by the time and circumstances, are inferior to the Whites in the endowments,
both of body and mind. This racism is expressed in the very structure of the
English language, probably the most racist of all human languages.
Here are some phrases and words in the English language depicting "black"
in a negative light: Very dark (having no colour from the absorption of all
or nearly all incident light - like coal or soot); Black night (completely
dark from the absence of light); A black look (angry, threatening); Black-hearted
(wicked, sinister, deadly); Blackmood (gloomy, depressed, sullen); Things
looked black (portending trouble or difficulty); Black economy (unofficial
economic activity); Black magic (magic involving supposed invocation of evil
spirits); Black market (an illicit traffic in officially controlled or scarce
commodities); Black mass (a travesty of the Roman Catholic mass in the worship
of Satan); Black water-fever (a complication of malaria, in which blood cells
are rapidly destroyed, resulting in dark urine); Black window (a venomous
spider, latrodectus mactans, of which the female devours the male); Blackleg
(a person who fails or declines to take part in industrial action). Then there
is Black sheep, Black September, Black hut, Black book etc.
The white racist lies were reinforced by religion, especially Christianity,
which saw God, Christ and angels in terms of whiteness while sin, the devil
and Satan were seen as black. Heaven was depicted as a place where the elect
of God would wear white robes of virgin purity, while hell was depicted as
a place where the rejects of the white God would burn to charcoal blackness.
So the African Christians, yearning for a place among the saved, sang to his
maker: ”Wash me redeemer and I shall be whiter than snow”. If God was slow
to respond, there were always hot combs and lipsticks, snowfire and Ambi
(a cosmetic) to help the spiritual journey to whiteness and black death.
White is often related to positives like the following examples reveals:
White: Resembling a surface reflecting sunlight without absorbing any of the
visible rays; of the colour of milk or fresh snow. Transparent, colourless,
member of a light- skinned race. White drain (a person, country, etc. of wealth
etc); White hope (a person expected to achieve much for a group, organisation
etc.); White noise (noise containing many frequencies with equal intensity);
White slave (a woman tricked or forced into prostitution, usually abroad);
White wash (a means employed to conceal mistakes or faults in order to clear
a person or institution of imputations).
The essential characteristic of imperialist domination remains the same:
the negation of the historical process of the dominated people by means of
violent usurpation of the freedom of development of the national productive
forces. We can state that the national liberation is the phenomenon in which
a given socio-economic whole rejects the negation of the historical process.
In other words, the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the
historical personality of the people, its return to history through destruction
of the imperialist domination to which it was subjected. National liberation
exists only when the national productive forces have been completely freed
from every kind of foreign domination.
African-Americans have succeeded in discarding the world "Black Americans".
However, in other parts of the world, the word Black (with all it's negative
images) is still attached to Africans who continue to accept this label passively
and without opposition. The question is: are we Blacks or are we Africans?
Published by Kenya Socialist Democratic Alliance
(KSDA)
email: harakatips@hotmail.com Home
Published by Kenya Socialist Democratic Alliance
(KSDA)
email: harakatips@hotmail.com Home
