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I learnt it from Chinua Achebe that when white skinned people choose to write about Africa and the Africans they should do so, not with confidence and arrogance, but with the humility of strangers.
This is so because the entire history of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism was punctuated by white men writing about Africa and Africans. White missionaries, explorers, anthropologists and historians spilt much ink describing Africa and the Africans in racist and much colonial ways. So, in these decolonial days, a white person that elects to write about Africa and of Africans might have to begin with p0an apology and or explanation for the act. The tone of the writing and accent of the text should carry with it some politeness and indeed the humility of a suspect that must be sorry for past offences even if they were committed not by himself but his like. For white skinned people, it seems, there must be some collective responsibility and accountability for what whiteness as a sensibility did and said about Africa and the Africans.
What Robin Di Angelo has called “white fragility” is the easy excuses by white skinned people who claim ignorance of colonial crimes against humanity that happened when they were not yet born and such other strong but hollow arguments.
It is white fragility because it exposes weakness rather than strength of character and moral responsibility that are the basis for political accountability.
White respect and humility seem to be a priority when it comes to how they can join Africans in engaging with matters of decolonisation generally and anti-racism specifically.
Linda Martin Alcoff’s powerful philosophical essay of 1998: What Should White People Do, is a meditation on the kinds of respect and humility that white people should adopt and deploy when they seek to participate in asking questions and supplying answers concerning issues of racism and coloniality.
In other words, there should be some vulnerability that accompanies the participation of white skinned person in debates and other activisms concerning the question of Africans and their condition in the world system, historically and geographically.
In further words, a decolonial and anti-racist white skinned person should be the first one to understand if Africans in general and black people specifically, suspect him or her of racism and related prejudices. For white skinned people therefore, especially the anti-racist and the decolonial ones, the understanding that any black person will easily suspect them of racial and class prejudice might be the beginning of decolonial wisdom.
The courage to understand black suspicions and accusations of racism might be the baptismal quality of white anti-racists and decolonists. It is the burden of decolonial and anti-racist whites to carry that cross of suspicions and allegations of perpetrating, being complicit in, and or being a beneficiary of racial and class prejudice.
Why Africa is Poor: And What Africans Can Do About It
The responsibility, and or burden of white skinned people to be humble when approaching the subject of Africa and Africans crossed my mind this week when I read a book by Greg Mills. The title of the book and the observations, arguments and conclusions therein are bold, maybe too bold for one that might be African, South African, but is white. Being African, South African specifically, but white makes one a possible perpetrator or beneficiary of enduring racism and classicism at a world scale.
What I like and respect, though, is that Mills himself makes a point of the natural complicity and benefit of any white skinned person in class and racial oppression of black peoples of Africa. His book is boldly titled; Why Africa is Poor: And What Africans can Do about it. The title sounds and is magisterial, not just authoritative but possibly authoritarian in its being more instructional and less cautious.
My like and respect for Mill’s acknowledgement of his being somehow an accomplice in and beneficiary of the colonisation of Africa is not enough to insulate me from the irritation and provocation by his bold book. What stabs me in the wound is Mills’ first sentence of the book: “The main reason Africa’s people are poor is because their leaders have made this choice.” This sentence and many others in the book, a well-researched monograph, put the blame for Africa’s underdevelopment, poverty and misery squarely on the shoulders of Africans, their leaders and their history.
When one has experienced African history as an African, and as a scholar read such books as Walter Rodney’s: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, one is aware that the starting point of African problems in the world system fundamentally rests on the history of enslavement and colonisation by Europeans. That starting point is not and must not be an apology for the tyranny, corruption and sometimes laziness and incompetence of the African intellectual, business and political elite. African elites have not covered themselves in glory but in mud and blood.
Mills is bold to the point of colonial rudeness when he states such assertions as that “the world has not denied Africa the market and financial means to compete” and that “many African countries have avoided putting in place the correct policies and procedures to facilitate” African progress.
The Africa that is portrayed in Mills’ account is a lazy and suicidal continent that is not only doing nothing about its sorry condition but is also entirely responsible for its problems. Africa should engage with itself and not the West and donors to solve its problems. African writers like Dambisa Moyo of the “dead aid” fame are affirmatively cited to fortify the argument that Africa should not be given aid but should be allowed to find internal solutions for its problems.
Mills does not deny but actually describes how slavery, colonialism and imperialism structured and produced Africa into what it is. But he does so in passing and minimally, in my observation. So minimally that he might as well be denying the contribution of conquest in Africa’s underdevelopment and poverty. The faults of Africans and their leaders, are elevated to the size of the very elephant in the room of Africa’s sad condition.
The credit that Mills gives to ordinary Africans as the “hardest working people in the world” does not compensate for the blame that Mills levies on Africans for their poverty which is more of a result of colonial and imperial impoverishment. Mill’s scathing critique of Africans and their leaders is not new. Many African scholars and journalists have raised the same arguments that Mills raises.
Yet, in my view, Mill’s positionality, what and who he is makes his critique problematic.
Biography and Geography Matter
When characters such as Hellen Zille are some of the many people that sing the praises of a book one must get worried if that book does not apologise for deep crimes. In any communication the message alone is not enough but its genealogy and provenances are important. Who Mills is and from where he speaks are serious issues in understanding his bold message.
Like myself Mills is an entire PhD, the holder of the highest academic qualification in the world (a professorship, by the way, is not a qualification but a recognition that may as well be subjective and political). This particular academic has lectured in universities “from Australia to Zimbabwe, including the Pentagon, the Peruvian, Malaysian and Chilean Military Staff Colleges.” This a man in the know. He heads the Brenthurst Foundation that was established in Johannesburg in 2005 by the Oppenheimer family.
From 1994 to 2005 Mills worked at the South African Institute for International Affairs. Some of his colours of the leopard are in being among “the visiting staff of NATO Higher Defence College in Rome and the Royal College of Defence Studies in London.” He has been advisor to President Kagame of Rwanda.
Mill’s rich biography: white, male, South African and proximity to military, intelligence and financial might makes him complicit in power and the oppressions that it produces. Combined with his geographic location in South Africa in the employ of one of the richest white Africans makes Mills a suspect, looked at from the perspective of those that are in the receiving end of power. His locus of enunciation is in many ways problematic and troubling.
I must submit that Mills is the first one in his book to note this. His is a good book, and a must read for those that are concerned about the African condition and the question of decoloniality. Who should speak on “what Africans can do about” their poverty and how he should speak are important decolonial questions.
n Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
Bongani Ndlovu