Kuir ë Garang*
"When there is a crisis in Africa, the west lights up in excitement! It's almost like the 'rediscovery' of Africa, again. Africa appears! It's almost sadistic!"
For someone who writes political commentaries, some of which negative, the above question may sound odd. But let's get the context. Seriously.
In fact, I'm not going to stop writing political
commentaries on South Sudan and Africa. To me, it is a personal, moral duty. But
something about the recent crisis in Ethiopia
and the current crisis in Sudan
have made me realize something ominous, and sad. It is about the purpose of
criticism.
There are various reasons why analysts,
critics, journalists, writers, and scholars write about (and mostly against) Africa,
especially African leaders.
Some of us, who were born in Africa, have a vested interest. We criticize
African leaders because we want change in governance and service provision. As such,
we don’t criticize to denigrate. We criticize to inspire change.
But this is not necessarily the case with [some] western scholars, writers and journalists who write about Africa. Some of them have made criticism of Africa,
especially the focus on negative events, a career. They criticize not because
they want change.
Unfortunately, those of us who criticize
African countries get lump up together in the same category as westerners who
have made negative writings on Africa a lucrative profession.
It’s unbelievable.
They don't want Africa to improve! They
want it to be the way it is! It's good for business!
When there is a crisis in Africa, the west lights up in excitement! It's almost
like the 'rediscovery' of Africa, again. Africa appears! It's
almost sadistic!
Sadly, this sadistic excitement about African crises puts Africa on the front
pages of major newspapers and websites. And then the excitement disappears, and
Africa vanishes from the front pages…until the next crisis, the next horror!
It is almost impossible to see Africa on
the front pages of western newspapers for something positive. Even academic journals
also focus on negative topics as regular and special issues are riddled with
negative themes. This has become standard.
This, like the colonial Dark Continent
narrative, continues to perpetuate this dark image of Africa in western consciousness.
It is like the tragedy of the commons. Who will write positively about
Africa?
When, for instance, a boy or a high school girl in the west tells an African
immigrant to 'go back to the jungle', the same journalists and scholars who
project Africa as the abode of horror, who only show animals and the
jungle, civil wars, famines, corruption, and dictatorship, reflect these young
people as informed and ignorant.
But the same people criticizing these kids
are the ones who gave them this image of Africa. Where else can these young
people get a mysterious, non-existent positive image of Africa? The same people
who create the image criticize the very consumers of their labours.
Getting lumped up with the Dark Continent careerist is to be uncharitable to
those of us who only want change. There are those who benefit more from a
chaotic Africa than from an orderly, successful, and peaceful Africa. What
would they do if Africa changes for the better? It would be a loss to them.
They may reorient to the new realities. But this would take time.
For those of us who have relatives in Africa, a positive change is a necessity.
We therefore want African leaders, however harsh we may appear to them, to
improve.
We also want Africa to be peaceful so we
can visit and drive through the countryside without fear of being robbed, being
shot at or, worse, getting killed.
How beautiful would it be for a South Sudanese
living in Canada to go to South Sudan and drive from Narus to Renk without
feeling insecure! How beautiful would it be for a South Sudanese from Australia
to go to Juba and debate senior political leaders without being intimidated!
“But wait!” you may say! “What you are
saying is preposterous! How can you, in good conscience, compare modern western
writers with colonial writers?”
I hear you. But think.
Slave traders and slave masters did not acknowledge
that slavery was evil until it was abolished. European countries believed the
atrocities they committed in Africa were part of the ‘civilizing mission.’ Not
until the end of official imperial colonialism did some, of good conscience, acknowledge
the horrors of their ways. Today, westerners are missing the picture. What they
do in and about Africa is objective and necessary, apparently. They write what
they see. Right!
While Joseph Conrad and Mary Kingsley, for
instance, may have written about their 19th century African horrors;
modern westerners are writing their African horrors. It pays to make Africa dark and anomic than to
make it bright and hopeful!
Below are some horrors.
This is how Alex de Waal begins his article,
The
Revolution No One Wanted:
'Khartoum,
is being destroyed in a fight to the death between two venal, brutal generals…But
if we look at the city’s 200-year history, the fighting shouldn’t be a
surprise. Khartoum was founded on a command post built for the purposes of
imperial robbery – and every subsequent regime has continued this practice. In
ordinary circumstances, Sudan is run by a cabal of merchants and generals who
plunder the darker-skinned people of the marchlands and bring their wealth to
Khartoum, a relatively opulent city and a haven of calm. But the logic of
kleptocracy is inexorable: when the cartel is bankrupt, the mobsters shoot it
out. We saw this in Liberia and Somalia thirty years ago. The ransack of the
Sudanese state today is ten times bigger.'
Horror:
‘cabal of merchants and generals’, ‘venal brutal generals’, ‘cartel’, ‘mobster’.
You’d think de Waal is writing about Italian Mobsters in New York or Montreal
in a tabloid. But mind you; this is London Review of Books.
First, let me be fair…
To many of us, de Waal is describing an objective
reality. It happened; it is happening. We have seen ghastly images of Rapid ResponseForces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces destroying the city and killing
innocent civilians.
The above portrayal of the Sudanese crisis
is therefore welcome. On face value, this is okay, even admirable.
But think!
Has de Waal ever described a positive African
event in such a strong, captivating language? (This is a topic for another day).
For now, I can say that his only focus are African horrors.
Let’s go back in time. Nineteen-century. Mary Kingsley, in Travels in West Africa,
writes:
‘The
more you know of the West Coast of Africa, the more you realise its dangers.
For example, on your first voyage out you hardly believe the stories of fever
told by the old Coasters. That is because you do not then understand the type
of man who is telling them, a man who goes to his death with a joke in his
teeth. But a short experience of your own, particularly if you happen on a
place having one of its periodic epidemics, soon demonstrates that the
underlying horror of the thing is there, a rotting corpse which the old Coaster
has dusted over with jokes to cover it so that it hardly shows at a distance,
but which, when you come yourself to live alongside, you soon become cognisant
of. Many men, when they have got ashore and settled, realise this, and let the
horror get a grip on them; a state briefly and locally described as funk, and a
state that usually ends fatally; and you can hardly blame them.’
Horror! This is West Africa, the ‘white
man’s grave’, as it was called then. And here is Joseph Conrad in Heart of
Darkness:
‘We
were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an
unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking
possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound
anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend,
there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of
yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping of feet stamping, of
bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless
foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and
incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us,
welcoming us—who could tell?’
Horror! What else could they have done? As
Achille Mbembe has noted in On the Postcolony, it is difficult to write positively
about Africa. True. That is why some of us criticize African problems.
However, we also mix the positive and the
negative. We don’t focus exclusively on the depressing. That would be to take
pleasure in African problems, to be sadistic.
It is therefore important to distinguish between
those who criticize because they want positive change and those who take
sadistic pleasure in talking about African problems…the horror!
Kuir ë Garang is the editor of The Philosophical Refugee. Twitter @kuirthiy
