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Witnessing in
Perilous Times
The Lynching of Robert Mugabe: Critique of
Empire, History and Memory! (Part 3)
By
Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh
Part 3
The whole
world has been bombarded with false and
manufactured facts about Mugabe being the
problem with Zimbabwe. Today Mugabe has been
portrayed as a megalomanic tyrant in the mould
of a Hitler. This may all have many elements of
truth to them. Mugabe may not be a saint. He may
be crude, and he may have committed crimes
against his own people. If Mugabe is on the dock
for his crimes, we would then support his having
his day before the tribunes of justice. But what
we can never lend our names to is the
manipulation of information and opinion, in
order to nail a notorious bad guy, who is
fortunately innocent of the charges being
labelled against him.
A thief who
stole my car on Tuesday cannot be in justice be
brought to trial for killing my wife who died of
cancer on Friday because of my chain smoking,
simply because I have not forgiven him of that
theft and have been seeking an opportunity to
give him a bad name in order to hang him, to
appease my burning sense of revenge and
vendetta. Whenever such false syllogisms are
licensed, we all should then bid farewell to
justice. When justice is crushed, peace will
continue to elude us.
Ours is not
an apologia for Mugabe. Mugabe has led Zimbabwe
for donkey years, perhaps, without anything to
show for it. He deserves the greatest rebuke for
his failures. But that does not empower the
advocacy for invasion being peddled by the
British government and media. Ours is an
apologia for truth, justice, and decency. It is
a stand against sanctimonious hypocrisy
engineered by principalities and powers of
amoral politics and corporate greed. Mugabe and
others fought for the independence of Zimbabwe
against those same forces of western greed that
are today demanding for his head on a plate.
In perilous
times such as this, bearing witness against the
onslaught of empire is the equivalent of placing
one’s head on the chopping block and inviting
the executioner to take the bestial pleasure of
severing you from your member. It is akin to
giving up one’s reputation for crucifixion in
between a crowd of buccaneers and a mass of
fence-sitters. In this interface, there is no
hope of salvation. Crucifixion in between two
such camps is like Dante’s Inferno. All
you really need to do is to abandon hope once
you enter there. Your salvation expired before
you did. None of both crowds can save you. The
buccaneers are agents and privies of the powers
that desire to do you in.
The crowds
are the chameleons on the periphery of
indecision. They are competent opportunists ever
ready to sail wherever the wind blows. Crowds
since time began have connoted those who left
their brains at home to dance to the whims and
capricious contrivances of the few, who could
manipulate and brainwash them at will. The
crowds could scream ‘Hossanna filio David’—(Hossanna
to the son of David)!!!—on a Sunday morning, and
on the evening of a Friday called ‘Good’; five
days later, be re-engineered to scream
‘crucifigium eum’—crucify him!!! Reposing your
salvation on such a camp is foolery.
Machiavelli
recognized this when he contemplated the
difficulty of instituting change in a society.
For Machiavelli, anyone who embarks on
instituting change would immediately have
enemies in those who profit from the status quo.
The status quo feeds their obscene privileges.
And their lives are tied to these estates of
obscenity. To give it up is to give up their
lives. Like Shylock of old in his allocutus,
told the learned Judge ‘Portia’ as judgement
fell on his corrosive desire for vengeance: “you
take away my life, when you take away the means
by which I live”. And that they can never abide.
To this end, they are natural opponents of
change. Any allowance or assumption of the
obverse stance is an invitation to
self-destruction or suicide.
Machiavelli
equally saw the masses one is fighting for as
the most unhelpful of all factors. They care no
less whether the revolution succeeds or not.
They have been at the receiving end. And they
have seen conquerors and messiahs come and go
with promises and hopes of a better life raised
and dashed repeatedly as to become congenital
pessimists. So these camps are no help to a guy
who desires to bear witness to his convictions.
But should
these insurmountable factors deter our resolve
in speaking our convictions? No is the answer.
The only requirement for evil to triumph is for
good men to keep silent in timidity. This
conspiracy of silence has forever empowered
impunity. It has spawned atrocities and has
legitimized horrors and abominations. Our lives
will be a monumental disgrace to whoever gave us
the privilege of life, if we are to keep silent
and allow the armada of injustice ride roughshod
on the heads of the weak because it can.
Besides, Wole Soyinka is forever right. The man
dies in him who keeps silent in the face of
tyranny!
Empire
rules
Modern
empire is a transnational incarnation of
predatory capitalism and neo-liberal feudalism
preached in modern times by the
Chicago school of economics. It is an
exclusive club of power. It remains a faceless
and amorphous cabal of power peddlers, influence
traders, war mongers, and economic hit-men,
hiding under layers and layers of institutions,
conceptual schemes, political lobbies,
corporations, and schools. It is a secret
society of the rich and powerful, who rule our
world today. It cuts across countries and is
like the Cosa Nostra in its hyper-amoral stance
to issues and life. It is an arrogant, wicked,
and heartless construct, which rules the world
through fear, tricks, and brute force. These
three pedestals of control align effectively
with the three vehicles it deploys to that end.
The
arrogance of empire is a congenital disease
native to every such construct. Empire can
afford to preach to other smaller constructs in
her ambience to tow lines that she would never
lift a finger towards. She moralizes, even
though her leprous debaucheries indict her
homiletics. This is exactly what the United
States and Britain are doing in Zimbabwe at the
moment. They wanted to sack Mugabe for election
fraud, when George, who is guilty of the same
crime, has not been sacked from his post. When
empire comes to equity, she cares no hoot about
the cleanliness of her hands. She accuses even
though her hands are not clean. American foreign
policy in the 20th century bears all the
impresses of elevated hypocrisy and suffocating
double standard. Ask Oliver North, or pay a
visit to Nicaragua to see for yourself. The
devastation of Iraq and the hanging of Sadaam
are testaments to empire’s arrogance.
The
wickedness of empires could be seen in the
heartlessness with which it grabs resources to
feed its greed at the expense of every other
variable. Modern ecological crises are thanks to
the yawning avarice of empire for resources to
drive its economies and those of its satellites.
This heartless greed saw Africa despoiled of the
crème of her youth in the slave trade, to drive
the industrial revolution in Europe and America.
It equally recommended that mounds and mountains
of chopped and amputated human limbs be
harvested in Congo in punishment for daring King
Leopold’s greed for Congolese rubber, timber,
and other resources. The same metaphysic
prescribed the bombing of Iraq to smithereens in
propitiation of the greed for cheap oil. It is
the same operational ontology that stands aloof
to wreck lives and poison the environment in the
Niger Delta.
Imperial
heartlessness could be seen in its fluid
propensity to wage wars and destroy every
opposition, cultures, and pedestals of value,
meaning and significance, and sources of social
legitimacy obtainable in the areas it chooses to
conquer or destroy. Pizzaro’s sacking and
destruction of the Inca civilization in
Mesoamerica; the colonial destruction of African
values, language, and desecration of the temples
of African gods, or the exiling of African kings
that are sources of authority and social
legitimacy; the American obliteration of the
Amerindians are all testaments to this.
Professor
Amy Chua did a book on how the export of
free market democracy today is really creating
spirals of unease across the world and setting
the world on fire.
Empire is
never non-profit. It is an economic predator. To
this end, citadels of profit will always
annihilate college of prophets. Mammon is a very
jealous god. It can never be worshipped
alongside any other. It demands the bodies and
blood of its opponent as the only sacrifice that
appeases it. Pursuant to this, empires in
subservience to profit entertain no qualms in
decimating cultures, sacking lands and
sanctioning genocide and annihilation of
peoples, murdering its own citizens, and
crushing every opposition raised against it.
Ancient Rome plundered Carthage and sacked
nations up to the furthest extremes of the
British Isle. Communist China of Mao’s vision,
on its way to empire, had to crush over 20
million of its citizens in a bloody cultural
revolution that is as repulsive as it was
monstrous. Soviet Russia enroute to its
communistic empire trampled upon millions of its
citizens. Need we talk about the British Empire
or the new American empire? That has been the
chequered history of empires!
Empires in
whatever forms its manifest itself are proud
bullies and monstrous oppressors, whose
interests are superlatively sacrosanct, even if
populations are to be decimated in the process.
You can ask Alexander the Great and Napoleon
Bonaparte about the reasons for their
aggressions and conquests. You can equally ask
Adolf Hitler what his ‘Lebensraum’ project; a
raw, naked territorial aggression policy was
intended to achieve. To this end, no empire has
ever won a prize for benevolence. Charity is not
the vocation of empires. This inheres in the
metaphysic of empire; namely, empire is a
construct of galloping greed. It is a bloody
enterprise.
Empires
come and go. But isolated micro-universes of
greed will always converge to build new empires
of avarice, which subsists. Once its vehicle in
a particular epoch dies, it shuffles off to
inhabit new spaces of legitimacy, wearing new
robes. Imperialism as we knew it may be no more,
but empire is alive and well. Empire and
imperialism are like icebergs. They are
three-quarters submerged. What is immediately
accessible to the eye is only one-third of its
dimensions. The fundamental aspiration of empire
is to find the price at which the majority
should be bought and sold for the profit of the
few.
The
emerging empire according to Hardt and Negri’s
is fundamentally different from the imperialism
of European dominance and capitalist expansion
of previous eras. It is a universal order that
accepts no boundaries or limits, and which today
draws on elements of U.S constitutionalism, with
its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding
frontier.[i]
A perfect example of that universal order and
its recalcitrance to accept boundaries could be
well seen in the engines driving globalization
today.[ii]
Every
empire which desires to survive must be a
chameleon. That underlies why it is a fatal
mistake today to view empire purely as a
territorial construct. The empire of today
transcends territorial jurisdictions. Hardt and
Negri are forever right! Empire remains a
universal order that accepts no boundaries.
Empire could wear the robes of an ideology and
its purveyors. The desire for survival explains
why the empire of today must be an
extra-territorial and trans-national monolithic
aristocracy of capital, which seeks to preserve
the reign of neo-liberal capitalism all over the
world.
At the
expiration of territorial empires,
extra-territorial ones arose to take their
place. Interests evolved to the point where,
empire must coagulate into a trans-national,
non-territorial alliance of aristocracies,
corporate interests, re-invented monarchies,
nation-states’ leadership, lobbies, and the
elite of various societies. This alliance made
it possible to create a legal framework for
interaction across states. This is what led to
globalization. Little wonder that globalization
shorn of its pretences benefits the rich with
much of the affluence and influence, and
bequeaths the poor a lot of the negative
consequences. This is because, globalization in
many instances have been forced to wear the
apparels designed by a conglomeration of
totalitarian capitalists, and profiteers
transcending national boundaries, who bend the
knee in supreme subservience at the same altars
of profit. And to that end, they deploy jointly
and severally the apparatuses of various nation
states and international conventions, protocols,
and institutions in furtherance of their
interests, and elimination of all threats to
their domination of the global order. To this
end today, democracy as traditionally defined in
Lincolnesque is virtually non existent, or
grossly eroded of all meanings and implications.
This
explains why elections today across many so
called democracies remain Machiavellian
smokescreens deployed to perpetuate the pretence
that the people have a stake in their
governments, while in actual fact the elites,
the lobbies, and the corporations, and not the
masses govern. This accounts for why what we
have today is an aristocracy of capital ruling
over our most inmost affairs. Ask Monsanto, ITT
or Halliburton! Ask the greedy big guys at Wall
Street, or the guys at Lockheed Martins and
other defence contractors: they will tell you,
if they are honest, who actually rules the
world. Ask the chairmen of the various boards of
the major oil companies, they know who is
actually responsible for the war in Iraq as well
as the impasse in the Niger Delta.
They are
the same people!
These guys
‘own the vast majority of resources, manipulate
stocks, control prices, and avoid taxes. They
also maintain monopolies over energy, medicine,
armaments and manufacturing by suppressing new
technologies. And they wield undue influence
over the news media and world governments with
their control of multinational corporations as
well as private organization.[iii]
In trying to find out actually who rules
America, Wallace and Wallechinsky in their work,
The People’s Almanac, stated that ‘there
are many forces at work in the US society, but
the most powerful by far are the interlocking
directorates of the major banks, corporations,
and insurance companies, with the backing of the
leaders of the military: in the words of former
president Dwight Eisenhower, ‘the
military-industrial complex.[iv]
This conglomerate is what is ruling the world
today. And in Zimbabwe, this conglomerate has
shown us its eugenic face.
This
emerging one like all empires of history is
built on the same tripod of slave labour, stolen
resources,and stolen legacies. From the unpaid
slave labour of ancient Rome to the chattel
slavery of the feudal peasantry; from the
indentured slavery of the American cotton fields
to the minimum wages of the average African
American today, it is the same slave labour.
China is utilizing its internal demography for
slave labour and modern empire on the heels of
globalization, is crowding and outsourcing to
China for the same slave labour.
Africa
remains the continent of choice for stolen
resources and stolen legacies since time
immemorial. In the 20th century the Middle
Eastern and Arabian oil fields joined it with
its oil. The scramble for Coltan; the driver of
modern interconnectivity is still financing wars
and conflicts in the Congo as blood diamonds are
doing all over Africa. Oil is contributing its
own share of death and devastation in the Niger
Delta, as the Chinese marches into Africa to
re-enact what Europe and America have done for
the last 800 years: resource exploitation! To
steal resources! From the collective amnesia at
the plight of the African Americans, to the non
apologises and non-reparation for over eight
centuries of crime committed against the African
people, to the neo-colonial insults in Zimbabwe
today, it is all the same stolen legacy!
Notes
[i]
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri:
Empire, Cambridge Massachusetts,
Harvard University Press, 2000.
[iv]
cited in Marrs, ibid, p.13
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The
Lynching of Robert Mugabe (part 1) Empires
and Lynching (part 2)
Witnessing in Perilous Times
(part 3)
Instruments of
Imperial Domination (part 4)
Slogan of
Imperial
Atrocity
(part 5)
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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