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Empires and
Lynching
The Lynching of Robert Mugabe: Critique of
Empire, History and Memory! (Part 2)
By
Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh
Part 2
Empires
have always lynched dissidents. They have always
murdered those who could not swallow their
discontent, or let empire get away with the
strangulating and toxic impact of its
debaucheries. They have always bludgeoned those
who refused to be intimidated by imperial
impunities; and buried those who challenged
their monumental indiscretions. They have
forever banished and brazenly barbecued their
opponents out of existence, with all the
medieval cruelty, and inquisitorial wickedness
in their arsenals.
Empire has
always crucified those who offered any
resistance to its impious excesses, or those who
couldn’t bear imperial jackboots patiently.
Jesus, the opinionated, itinerant preacher from
Galilee; who rattled a rotten and hypocritical
establishment, was handed over to the apparatus
of the Roman state; to be hung by Pontius
Pilate—a servant of empire—who allowed himself
to be played into a cul de sac, where he must
prove that he is a friend of the emperor by
sanctioning the lynching of an innocent man, or
risk losing his seat.
Equally, in
empire’s unholy name, John the baptiser had to
lose his head to the daughter of an adulteress.
JFK was not murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Contrary to the cant hawked about; empire
murdered him execution style, when he became a
threat to entrenched imperial interests,
politics of narrow insularity and corporate
profit, represented by those who rule and run
America for their gain. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
had to die, execution style when empire, like
the pharaonic Egypt of yore, realised that it
runs the risk of losing its bonded Black, slave
labour. China crushed dissidents to its tyranny
with an iron fist in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Any
challenge to empire or imperial interests is
construed as treasonable felony, and dealt with
decisively. To that end, empire has, and will
always pillory and rise to crush those who prick
its conscience; attempt to expose its hypocrisy;
ask for a moratorium on its rapacious plunder,
solicit the lifting of imperial jackboots off
their necks; or demands that empire gets its
fangs off the bleeding flesh of its victims.
This noble vocation of calling for an end to
imperial injustice is construed by empire as a
threat to its existence. It is a noble vocation
because disobedience to tyranny is obedience to
God. This is the nobility in the sacrifices of a
Nelson Mandela. But it rattles empire into
convoking the medieval brutality of its might in
slaying and making all peaceful evolution
impossible.
All empires
are polite tyrannies. And since tyrannies are
never philanthropies, empires are resolutely
ruthless. Absolute power is its end. That
explains why it is always a construct of greed
driven by a culture of fear. Fear is the
software which runs every empire. Empire
generates fear as well as it ingests fear. Ask
Americans what they are doing owning guns!
Empire entertains this perennial fear that the
victims of its injustice will one day rise and
demand redress; fear that its prisoners will
break the chains of their slavery; fear and the
knowledge of the fact that whenever the victims
are allowed to unite in their quest and demand
for justice, that collapse remains the only
logical alternative for a construct erected on
injustice as its fundament.
To this
end, empire will forever reinforce this culture
of fear. It must create new monsters of fear to
whip its domestic populace in line, crush any
pocket of opposition with ruthless impunity, and
gain their timid approval for its plunder of
others. Whenever these fears threaten to expire,
or is neutralized by whatever new realisation
that critical thinking uncovers, it must be
reinvented or repackaged, to keep its enterprise
of exploitation and indentured slavery running.
Where there are no raw materials for the
creation of new vectors of fear, empire plumbs
primitive reservoirs of angst harboured in the
collective unconscious.
It goes on
to mismanage these primeval illusions, like the
congenital fear of the stranger, in order to hew
out a new incarnation of fear. America posited
these classical symptoms of every empire on the
rise, in the course of her rise to empire. The
first carrier of this fear was communism. Today,
it is terrorism. The primeval illusion it has
for centuries mismanaged is the fear of the
Black man. Always, a face is created for this
fear. During the Cold War, it wore a Russian
face. Today, its face is Arab. Domestically,
this face is Black, male! Watch any news report
of a homicide scene in America TV. The suspect
is always identified as a “Black male”.
Empire
has always done these and worse!
But the
most notorious hurdle challenging comprehension
is why the oppressed have always raised traitors
from within, who collaborate in their oppression
and evisceration. Empire is smart! To
effectively disembowel its victim, it conscripts
collaborators from among those that it is
decimating at each point in time. The Nazis
raised some Sonderkommandos from among its
Jewish victims; some of whom became even more
efficient in disposing of the evidence of the
crime, than the Nazis would have ever wished.
The Vichy government collaborated with the Nazi
occupation forces as it plundered Paris. These
are some tiny part of an inexhaustible
collection of historical instances in this
regard. The reasons why in utter disregard of
history, imperial victims have always abandoned
themselves to be co-opted into helping empires
officiate at the human sacrifice and
inquisitorial barbecue of their brothers or
fellow victims will forever remain a mystery.
That
empires must simultaneously generate and quash
discontent is a part of its blood-curdling
ontology. But that the oppressed always allow
themselves to be seduced into self-immolation,
to appease imperial designs, is an engineered
stupidity that must be challenged at all
fronts. Empire has really fucked with the heads
and minds of the oppressed. Frantz Fanon
captured this rightly when he wrote that if
suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it goes
in to devastate the oppressed themselves.
Instead of the oppressed rising against their
chains, and those who hold them in bondage, they
scamper in timidity and feed on their fellow
inmates of this vale of tears. They rise against
those who share the same estates and scars of
oppression alongside them. They collude and
conspire in their exploitation.
That is the
tragedy of timidity, which empire exploits to
its advantage. That is the real chain holding
the oppressed to the pillars of eternal slavery.
Bob Marley was right. Whatever happens to a man
happens to him in the mind. And for us to be
really free, we must emancipate ourselves from
mental slavery. Our critique of history and
memory is in obedience to this charge of the
reggae prophet. Every bondsman in his hands
lies the keys to cancel his captivity writes
Shakespeare some centuries ago. But how can a
prisoner of Plato’s cave know that what he
beholds as reality are illusions.
How can
Africans liberate themselves from this kind of
conceptual colonialism and mental slavery, when
many of them are not even aware that they are
peddling borrowed and manufactured stereotypes
as the truths about themselves and goings on in
their continent? How can they see clearly when
many of them are wearing imperially designed
goggles, which gives them no other visual
ability except seeing and appraising reality
from Eurocentric spectral prisms?
African
self determination is non-negotiable, if we are
to develop this continent. Africa must be able
to drive her destiny. But Africans according to
Chinweizu have been miseducated unto
self-destruction. We have been diametrically
miseducated unto mutilating a perfect right
foot, because imperial brainwashing enterprise
has succeeded in emblazoning on our minds like
with red hot iron, that our right foot is evil.
That is why what the hawks of an expired
imperialism are propounding and peddling about
Zimbabwe today cannot be accepted on the score
of ethics and manners.
This is why
Robert Mugabe will be our scaffold for
critiquing history and memory of the
relationship between what Chinweizu aptly
phrased as the West, and the rest of us, in its
contemporary manifestations in Africa in general
and Zimbabwe in particular. It is directed at
those brainwashed Africans, who have bought into
the imperial rhetoric of blaming the victim, and
who are conveniently blind to the subterranean
dynamics at work in Zimbabwe; and who are
seduced by the western manufacture of opinion
and consent into seeing a personality as the
problem with Zimbabwe, instead of a whole
construct of anomie, which has deep roots in the
legacies of Africa’s imperial past; the
leadership that came out of that toxic ambience,
and the present global power matrix and
configurations.
Ours is
not, and will never be an exoneration of Mugabe
as a part of the problem. Mugabe is only a PART
of the problem. That is why the removal of
Mugabe actively pursued by the West will never
yield the result of lifting Zimbabwe out of the
doldrums. Rather, it will pave the way for a
further evisceration of that land in
subservience to Western interests, which has
never augured well for Africa, since history and
memory could recall. That the western media is
canvassing a collective amnesia about the
central issues at stake in Zimbabwe and are
ready to embezzle facts pursuant to that
project, is not surprising. But that many
Africans will prostitute themselves out as
mouthpieces of suspect opinions with imperial
ends irks reason and batters rationality. This
attitude in honour of ignorance cannot but
invite the indignation and resistance of all
whose vocation is knowledge and freedom.
Essays
of Oppressions and Narrative of Hypocrisy!
Our first
essay titled “The Real
Trouble with Zimbabwe
” and the sequel to that titled
The
Lynching of Robert Mugabe
(part 1), which informed this rejoinder, triggered off an
unprecedented controversy that dwarfed our
wildest imagination. The fallouts deluged our
concern with their urgency and depth. The
reactions to the said articles not only
attracted a broad spectrum of theories, it
created an essential arena for the ventilation
of much closet rhetoric and undeodorized
bigotry.
This
bordered not only on the cacophony of the
submissions, but also the insistence of some of
the issues raised; the reductive arguments
marshalled by some brainwashed intellectuals,
who like the prisoners in Plato’s cave refused
to rise above the dim luminescence of their
ideological caves, to confront reality on its
own terms, without the aid of borrowed or
prefabricated conceptual goggles; as well as the
grey areas that needed to be ironed out to aid a
fuller appreciation of what the true narrative
is, in and about Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe,
that signature tune of many a freedom fighter
was under a violent assault. This was marshalled
by an armada of concentrated hypocrisy; led by
Britain and supported by her ‘almighty’ ally in
iniquity—George Bush’s white House—as well as
the EU. Zimbabwe in whose memory, the great Bob
Marley sang one of his most inspirational
tributes to freedom was still in the chains of
anomie, decades after the political independence
granted it by the UK; which was only possible
with an inbuilt economic emasculation of its
black population, who are condemned to
perpetually plead for justice.
Those
essays not only gave us the podium to air our
disgust at the lynching of the powerless by the
powerful, or the enthronement of might into
right; it equally allowed us a privileged
admittance into the rotten core of the
intellectual slavery and conceptual bondage,
imprisoning so many African intellectuals in
frozen fatalism and fossilized inferiority
complex. We encountered and were jolted by the
fact that the conceptual colonization and mis-education
of the continent has been total and more far
reaching than we ever thought. The African mind
as made manifest in many of her elites and
intellectuals has been etched with the worst
form of self-loathing and inferiority complex
that defies every canon of reason and decency.
We equally met the enfeebled resistance of a few
Africans who have escaped the dark grottos of
this Plato’s cave of superlative illusion.
We
witnessed first hand how unsuccessful and
arduous their battle to reflect and show the
majority, the exact colour of their chains.
Years after The Stolen Legacy; years
after The West and the Rest of Us; years
after How Europe Underdeveloped Africa;
and years of Noam Chomsky’s unveiling of the
subtle face of imperialism; many educated
Africans are still slaves to the manufactured
illusions and conceptual schemes they carry
about as truths. This means that Chinweizu’s
efforts in calling for the decolonization of
African literature, and life, has not even
scratched the surface of the problem. The
prisoners he essayed to liberate have been
genetically re-engineered or irreversibly
brainwashed into the belief that their prison
cell is the only universe that there is. And
they carry and transmit this as a dogma, which
attracts inquisitorial cruelties whenever
questioned or challenged.
Amongst
those reactions were some well meaning, but
ideologically compromised authorities, who
applauded our vision but urged that we employ
new narratives in our enterprise of locating the
African predicament and proffering solutions to
them. Years of battling the same attitudinal
propensity that has taken root in the African
intellectual, may have blunted their axes or may
have wounded and scarred their resolve. Their
scars now command circumspection. And they
prescribe that emasculated attitude as the only
way to go since the dogs they tried to liberate
genetically mutated and configured themselves to
see their liberators as fair game.
For these
guys, we confess our inability to dance to these
drums of fear. We were out to enter an opinion
on an ultra controversial issue, not to create a
narrative. It was an essay and not a system of
thought. Essays, like Aldous Huxley—the virtuoso
of letters rightly articulated—remain a device
for saying almost everything about anything. But
essays are short pieces and it is impossible to
give all things full play within the limits of a
single essay. This is because essays belong to a
literary species whose extreme variability can
be studied most effectively within a three-poled
frame of reference.
There is
the pole of the personal, and the
autobiographical; there is the pole of the
objective, the factual, and the
concrete-particular and there is the pole of the
abstract universal. According to Huxley, most
essayists are at home and at their best in the
neighbourhood of only one of the essay’s three
poles, or at most only in the neighbourhood of
two of them. This inheres in the fact that there
are the predominantly personal essayists, who
write fragments of reflective autobiography and
who look at the world through the keyhole of
anecdote and description. There are the
predominantly objective essayists who do not
speak directly of themselves but turn their
attention outward to some literary or scientific
or political theme. Their art consists in
setting forth, passing judgement upon, and
drawing general conclusions from, the relevant
data.[i]
Some other
tenants and inmates of this chimerical cave
accused our efforts of being a misrepresentation
of the illusions they carry about as truth.
These unconscious proselytes of a false
epistemology showed themselves incapable of
comprehending that truth is greater than the sum
total of their diseased illusions and engineered
perceptions. Truth remains what it is, quite
oblivious of perceptions. Some of the prisoners
in this gilded cage called for our heads and
essayed to forbid us from airing our opinions.
The sanctity of fundamental freedoms has never
been a deterrence to fanatics and
fundamentalists, who lay claims to a monopoly of
wisdom. Anyone who proves impervious or allergic
to their narrow insularity, or dares disagree
with them is a ripe candidate for decapitation.
They use their freedom of free speech to canvass
the muzzling of other people’s right to free
speech. Some others in the same club called us
spastic, unbelievably stupid and so many other
unprintable metaphors. We could shoulder that.
This is because in spite of all their
name-callings, they never called us liars. This
is because the facts we tendered towered
incontrovertibly above their perceptual inertia.
Zimbabwe
has now assumed the role of a mountain of
decision. African renaissance must either start
after this battle, or will be once more
postponed to our eternal discomfiture. Every
renaissance starts with a saturation of the
intellectual landscape with the awareness of the
need to convoke an exodus from a dysfunctional
history of regress. The internet is helping
propel this discourse and awareness in our day
because the establishment media would not. All
that is needed is the sustenance of the momentum
and tempo of this awareness; and constructively
channelling it to irrigate our perceptual
universe, and possibly lead to positive action.
Our
contribution to this discourse is an essay on
the hypocrisies of might. It is a critical
rebellion against the manufactured opinions
imposed as facts on an unsuspecting world, using
the vehicles of the Western press; whose
suffocating prejudice in relation to everything
African is really convulsively ugly as it is
repulsive. The first part of our contribution
examined an insistent dialectic of hypocrisy,
which has bedevilled every attempt to sift
through, or wade across the fundamental issues
raised by Zimbabwe. As a narrative fashioned in
the fiery furnaces of oppression, we can
understand the fusillade of reactions trailing
this topic, most especially from the neo-liberal
feudal establishment in whose interest it is to
maintain this citadel and rhetoric of
oppression, aimed at re-enthroning it in
Zimbabwe. Although we welcome their
dissatisfaction with out stand, we fear that we
are going to fall victim to the avaricious anger
of those whose lives depend on injustice, and
the pain of others to thrive. Martyrdom is the
destination of those who confront imperial
arrogance with the shields of justice and
conviction. But truth remains its own
recompense. That is the only inspiration for
bearing witness even in perilous times.
Our essay
argues that for Africa to defeat colonial and
imperial incursions into her body-politic, and
be able to drive her destiny to the advantage of
her peoples, foreign intervention in African
affairs must be at our invitation and terms. The
local collaborators to the imperial machine must
be recognized and neutralized. This is the only
way to gain that kind of true independence which
respects the will of the people and never the
will of the local collaborators of outside
powers. This is to say that many Africans
need a conceptual decolonization for them to see
both imperial perfidy and domestic kleptocracy
for what they are; namely two sides of the same
coin.
Mugabe may
have tyrannical persuasions. Which politician
doesn’t? He may be a political crook. That is
an allegation. But these can never be a
justification for Britain to attempt to
re-colonize Zimbabwe through the backdoor.
Mugabe’s fate must be decided by the people of
Zimbabwe, and not by Britain or her allies. We
are fighting for the principle and right of a
nation to take care of its destiny and internal
affairs without let and intimidation from an
imperial ogre. No African country has ever
intervened in the political process of any
European country. Why would European countries
keep on intervening in the political process in
Africa? Our critique of western hypocrisy is not
because Mugabe is a saint, but because of the
necessity of standing with justice and defending
a principle, even using if a man accused as a
useless tyrant happens by as the vehicle for our
convictions. Justice should not be at the whims
of the powerful.
Ours is
designed to generate a debate on the way forward
for Africa. We have many Mugabes scattered
across Africa. We equally have many other
imperial puppets that value their greed and
subservient puppetry roles, more than they care
for the welfare and the posterity of their
people. But the West does not target these,
simply because they are implementing a western
designed blueprint. Were they to err in doing
that, Mugabe’s fate will befall them. To this
end, my argument cannot be misconstrued as an
exoneration of African leadership of blame in
the crises manacling the continent. I have done
that to a very great extent. My work, "African
Poverty as a failure of leadership"
took care of that. The point at stake here is
African self determination; the need for
Africans to chase away the hawk, before settling
down to ask the chick, why it frolicked at the
playgrounds of predators. And that is a duty we
must discharge. Our charity must begin here at
home.
This piece
comes with a Caveat! It is written with those,
who approach the temple of facts with an open
mind; who love the intercourse with ideas
without the condoms of bigotry intruding,
clouding and frustrating the fructification of
their minds, consequent on that intimate
conjugation. It is not meant for those who
confuse and deceive themselves into supposing
that thinking consists only in rearranging their
prejudices, or advertising their bigotries; and
invoking every contrivance in bending facts to
suit their opinions. It is equally not meant for
those in whom facts are not sacred; and who
would never listen and understand other view
points other than the solipsistic insularities
echoing from the Black holes they harbour as
minds. Whatever goes into these minds, like in
black holes is forever lost. It is also not for
those who are narcissistic in their love of
their own voices and echoes of same. For every
other seeker after the truth, it is a dialogue.
Let it begin!
[i]
See: Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays,
New York, Bantam Books, 1960, p. v.
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Bill Moyers Interviews Douglass A. Blackmon, author
of
Slavery by Another Name:
The Re-Enslavement of Black
Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008)
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
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Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial
Guinea—Among the worst
of these brutal dictators
has been President Teodoro
Obiang of Equatorial Guinea.
The oil-rich West African
nation is just one example
of many repressive regimes
in Africa, including Chad,
Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia,
Gabon, Kenya, Morocco,
Rwanda, Senegal, Swaziland
and Uganda that receive U.S.
militarised aid. According
to Ken Silverstein of
Harper's magazine, Zimbabwe
looks like Sweden by
comparison with Equatorial
Guinea. Yet, Zimbabwe is
demonised and considered an
enemy of the West. In May
2008's rigged elections,
when Obiang's party won 99
per cent of the vote, not a
single Western media outlet
had the honesty and courage
to report the fraudulent
results and were accepted as
democratic. Obiang came to
power in 1979 after he
toppled and executed his
uncle in a military coup
d'état. Francisco Macias
Nguema was a monster who
murdered as many as 50,000
Equatorial Guineans (10 % of
the population) during his
long rule. |
Obiang is not very different from his
uncle. He was his uncle defence
minister. In Silverstein's words, Obiang
is "a killer. He is a murderer. He is a
torturer and a crook. And he is a
thief", who siphoned off hundreds of
millions of dollars from the people of
Equatorial Guinea into his family U.S.
bank account. Obiang is the "worst
dictator in Africa", added Silverstein.
(For more on EG see: Ken Silverstein,
U.S. Oil Politics in the "Kuwait of
Africa", The Nation, April 22, 2002).
And because he doesn't trust his own
people, Obiang reliess on Moroccan
mercenaries to provide for his internal
security.
As
President Robert Mugabe is deliberately
demonised in the West, particularly in
Britain and the U.S., Obiang is welcomed
by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
as a "good friend" of the U.S. And the
abysmal human rights record in
Equatorial Guinea and the crimes
committed by the dictator and his
cronies have received little media
attention in the West. Despite the
wealth generated by oil, nearly half of
all Equatorial Guinea children under
five are malnourished and live in
miserable condition without potable
water or electricity. According to the
CIA World Factbook, Equatorial Guinea is
"ruled by ruthless leaders which have
badly mismanaged the economy". But
because of oil, the "poster child of
undemocratic practices" is considered
one of America's most valuable allies in
Africa today. Countercurrents
If you like this article consider making
a donation
Horace Campbell.
Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the
Patriarchal Model of Liberation
(2003)
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posted 20 July 2008 |
