African Social Evolution

Civilized oppression
Civilization’s oppressions are well documented elsewhere (just ask Dr. Google), so I want to focus on a couple of examples within the African context. In the fictionalised voice of a real-life 18th century Ashanti Prince, Dutch writer Arthur Japin draws an enlightening parallel between the tyranny of civilization in Europe and Ghana, in his 2003 novel ‘The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi.’

…slaves, condemned men and defeated warriors were executed in Kumasi. But I must add that it was not known to us in those days that the northern tribes also belonged to the race of men. The notion of a single human race, comprising a diversity of coexisting peoples who were in essence equal, was foreign to us. In Europe, too, that notion had only recently arisen, and the practical implications were still inconsistent. We knew only one people – ours – and the dangers to which our kind were exposed. As a boy, the routine executions were little different to me from the slaughter of goats. Later in life this boyhood insensibility filled me with shame, until I discovered that a man’s life counted for just as little in Europe at the time. The wars fought between 1792 and 1815 alone caused the sacrifice of one million five hundred and thirty thousand lives, not counting the loss of life in epidemics spread in the course of the conflicts.

The tendency for groups of humans to see outsiders as lesser species is not unique to ‘civil’ised societies, but the tendency to slaughter those ‘lesser’ races en masse is, and such extreme warfare and genocide are the history of civilisation in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. Should such a history be a source of pride for any modern or post-modern people?

America filmmaker Kevin Kertscher offers an outsider’s observation of modern African civilization at its worst in his 1998 book ‘Africa Solo.’

Nearby was the riverfront palace that President Mobutu had built for himself, a gorgeous Palladian villa that looked like it was made of white marble. It was surrounded by a tall iron fence and to my surprise, there were no guards visible and the yard was half overgrown with weeds. Some teenagers who saw me looking in proudly told me that it was the “Maison du President.”…Their own houses were not far away, they said, pointing to a neighborhood of shacks nearby. I asked if Mobutu came to visit often and they said that so far he had only been there twice, for a total of about ten days.

I asked them if they thought it was okay for their president to have so much money when so many people in the country were very poor and they just replied that yes, he was a very rich and very great man. “He has many houses,” they said. “It is difficult for him to sleep in all of them.”…I watched for a glimmer of awareness or resentment about the incongruity of his wealth, but there seemed to be none. They wished that he would come stay at his house more, but to them it seemed very natural for wealth and power to be tied up together so closely. I had the sense that a president who was not the wealthiest man in the country would seem as outrageous to them as Mobutu’s corrupt government seemed to me.

Scholar Goran Hyden writes extensively about this African phenomenon, often observed as simple corruption by outsiders, in his 2005 book ‘African Politics in Comparative Perspective,’ using the descriptive phrase “economy of affection.” The economy of affection means that African civilization is historically rooted in interpersonal human relationships. While European and North American capitalist economic powers vie for control of natural and manufactured resources, African powers vie for direct control of relationships. The more relationships one controls, the more powerful that person is.

Yet, in each case, the ultimate goal is control and power, to climb high in a massive hierarchy. In the 1980s Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) described by Kertscher, Mobutu was a success story. He controlled relationships (with Congolese and Americans alike) so effectively that after the CIA took down the revolutionary and troublesome Patrice Lumumba, he was able to step in and rule the country for 32 years. During those three decades he distributed favours which, when returned, helped him amass a personal fortune worth several billion US dollars.

In the end, his downfall came because of his own missteps – he underestimated one group of relationships, those with the Tutsis, who had government control in three East African countries in the late 90s. Mobutu had supported the Hutu massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, which Hyden and other scholars have concluded was the result of more a class-based than ethnic conflict. Long ago, Tutsis had been chosen by European colonial aggressors as their chosen administrators. Despite centuries of Tutsi and Hutu gene-mixing, resentment and bitterness lingered between the two groups. Mobutu’s end came as one group took its latest revenge on another. DRC is still struggling to maintain peace and order.

Such class conflicts, genocides, and dictatorships, again, happen only within ‘civil’ised societies and their extreme hierarchies. At this point in the world’s development, the continent of Africa falls at the bottom of the hierarchy. It continues to be controlled and extorted by the outside interests we collectively call neo-colonialism: unfair terms of trade, crippling debts, conditional or ‘tied’ aid, et cetera.

The field of development has been created, ostensibly to level the playing field. Instead it acts as a game of catch-up, where any differences between Africa and Europe and North America are seen as shortcomings of Africa. Therefore, the misdeeds of the still powerful garner little public mention when compared to our tendency to glorify civilization’s reign. In the words of Hochschild:

In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the populations of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way mars the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in – its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence – is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.

Rather than glorify Africa’s civilized past, we could learn and remember the true history of its civilization, warts and all. The true history of civilized Africa, like that of any true history, is far from pristine, and it is not all to be celebrated for the purpose of pride. There is pride to be taken in that honest retelling, but there are also ample hard lessons to be learned.

Read on: Dangers of discrediting other ways