How colonialism produced unreal political identities

31 May, 2020 - 00:05 0 Views
How colonialism produced unreal political identities Albert Memmi

The Sunday News

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena

The coronavirus is true to the philosophical understanding of “illness as the night-sides of life.” Illness, especially that of pandemic and endemic extents gives human beings “onerous citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” in one world. Illness, otherwise is a producer of inequalities.

In this short article I think of Albert Memmi in a consideration of Covid-19 as but one of the many metaphors of coloniality. Memmi, the Tunisian novelist and essayist has died in France at the monumental age of 99 years. He wrote the canonical: Coloniser and the Colonised, classic of 1974. At its publication and subsequent wild circulation the book achieved fame for its confiscation by colonial police in the continent of Africa. The book was considered mental poison that would, if left at large, corrupt the minds of the colonised and inspire rebellions.

Memmi is in the league of Frantz Fanon in the articulation of the psycho-logics and socio-logics of the colonial condition and experience in Africa. Memmi’s physical retreat from this world at a time when the coronavirus scourge is advancing invites reflections into the way Africa is losing its eyes, ears and brains at a time that it needs them the most. It is to Memmi that we owe such pithy descriptions of the colonial condition as that “just as the bourgeoisie proposes an image of the proletariat, the existence of the coloniser requires that an image of the colonised be suggested.”

Memmi poignantly noted how the coloniser invents the colonised and reduces them to manageable objects that are to be owned and exploited. It is Memmi who registered that colonialists manufacture a cultural gulf between themselves and the colonised, exploit that difference for their benefit and pretend that the colonial relationship is a natural fact for which they are not to blame. In short, Memmi became one of the African political philosophers who noted how colonialism produced unreal political identities that were used for the real material benefit of Empire.

An African nightmare
Two French scientists went public that a coronavirus vaccine that they were working on would have to be tested in Africa before it is tried on humans in the West. Their apology and public shame were too late. One world business mogul said in Africa “it’s going to be terrible, people will be dying in the streets, piles of bodies” of “these vulnerable people in their small shacks cannot protect themselves, they don’t even have water, the disease will strike people in Africa more than anywhere.” She might have been speaking as a God fearing philanthropist that she is but her bold projection rhymed with the colonial invention of Africa as a place to be saved, and of a people to be rescued from their darkness.

Like the scientists who openly suggested the use of Africans as guinea pigs, she fed into an image of Africa that is an imperial construct. What is tragic is that on the ground these colonial constructions and stereotypes of Africa will appear to be truths. What will not be obvious is why and how Africa will end up the home of coronavirus when in reality it is a disease that originated elsewhere.

The colonial metaphors
The word colonialism itself is a borrowing from the biological sciences. When a colony of bacteria invades a body and makes it sick an infection has taken place. The coronavirus invaded Africa and because of the conditions in the continent, conditions of poverty, scarcity and inequality the malady is likely to settle and become endemic. Like HIV/ Aids, malaria, ebola and yellow fever disease in Africa will create a market for multinational pharmaceutical corporations that sell medicines and healthcare. African governments will be told to stop thinking and debating but listen to the wisdom of good scientists in the West, buy and distribute drugs to save lives. Any suggestion by Africans that a remedy can be found within the continent will be ridiculed and laughed off as another act of dark Africa’s trade in superstitions and black magic.

The lockdowns across the world are also reinforcing rather than negating existing inequalities. Already we know that there are essential people and non-essential people. There are dispensable and also disposable people whose jobs and lifestyles will compel them to be exposed to the virus and be the fodder. Africa has the largest population of people who, even if they wished, cannot keep and maintain social distances. There are people that are socially unable to keep certain social distances and lock themselves out of the firing line of the virus.

African scholars and journalists are trained and disciplined away from asking the difficult questions. Every scholar and journalist that wants to keep his or her credentials must shy away from any thinking that might sound like conspiracy theory and keep safely on information and knowledge that is officially given from powerful centres. That is how academic disciplines work. They keep the students disciplined and thinking within permitted perimeters where no real discoveries can be made but sterile repetitions of given knowledge. For underdeveloped, impoverished and alienated people that have been made to live in the underside of modernity and power, it should come naturally to experience and see the world as conspiring against us.

For those that have not been at the top of the food chain, that have not been on the high table but on the menu of the world-system conspiracy thinking and conspiracy readiness may not have to be taught. Some strong answers to the strong questions that coronavirus poses might be hidden beyond the line of thinking that divides permitted knowledge from conspiracy theory. The colonised are natural conspiracy theorists, otherwise, because they have known what it is to be conspired against and to be consigned to the menu of the world. When Fanon prayed for a body that asks questions he meant exactly that the black and African body must if it is to survive, ask stubborn questions that cross the line.

The Courage of Wisdom
The life and thought of Albert Memmi has not been that of a philosopher that loves wisdom but that one that has the courage of love in an unhappy world. Memmi asked stubborn and forbidden questions about the world and became homeless, stateless and nationless for it. In thinking about Memmi, one writer has recalled Theodor Adorno who said “to those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home.” Memmi was an intellectual bandit who pondered much on the unbuttered side of the slice of the world, Africa. His unsung book, a sequel to the classic I mentioned above is: Decolonisation and the Decolonised, of 2006. It is a book that is yet to be understood.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria: [email protected].

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