No world peace until premium placed on humanity

In June 2006, The Guardian carried an interesting story about young and radical British rapper Aki Nawaz, also known as Aki-Stani or Propa-Gandhi. The story was prompted by two record label executives threatening to resign if Nawaz went ahead to release his group’s album, All Is War (The Benefits of G-had). The album itself was partly produced in South Africa and the music group Nawaz leads is called Fun-da-Mental.

Of the album, the newspaper said it: “Contains one track which uses the words of [Osama] Bin Laden issuing ‘a statement of reason and explanation of impending conflict’ and equates him with Che Guevara. Another forensically recreates a suicide bomber at work. The opening song is a rejection of what Nawaz sees as the hypocrisy and immorality of the West.”

Nawaz represents a growing chorus of disillusioned young radicals who are deeply convinced there is more than one truth to any story and are determined, in their quest for factual knowledge, to seek and shape alternative narratives that are consistent with their ideals, beliefs and visions. Also, this crop seeks to expose the glaring inconsistencies of prevailing narratives, especially in the realm of global politics, and show how these are being used as tools for manipulation and oppression, thereby proving the exact “hypocrisy and immorality of the West”.

The Euro-American narratives of war and terrorism are the most instructive and permeating in this category of global politics, especially after the 9/11 attacks in New York. Soon after that tragedy, it became quite apparent that terrorism had a religion after all and that religion was Islam. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth — terrorism has no religion!

Those who fought in the wars of liberation across Africa — your Nelson Mandelas and Robert Mugabes — were also at one time branded terrorists, insurgents and rebels before being appropriately pronounced freedom fighters. But, there were considerate and consistent attempts to keep that notorious label of “terrorist” on them in a bid to render their just cause subversive, illegal and counter-progressive and therefore maintain domination.

Look, Europeans and Americans can create their own narratives and share these with the world. Recipients of such narratives, however, need to critically engage with them, questioning their motives and the foundation of their truth given the huge possibilities that they could have been manufactured using well-oiled propaganda machinery and that they represent only one side of any issue by denying the other side an equal opportunity to express itself.

Hence, in this era of global terrorism must Africa, for instance, continue to look at itself through the Euro-American lens, given its tortured history of slavery and colonialism? Or it badly needs to divorce itself from the Western language of hegemony, which it has so internalised; a language that now creates, for example, a living shadow of New York’s Twin Towers in the high-rising Carlton Centre in central Johannesburg and the mirage of British indispensability to the running of a country like Malawi, independent since 1964?

People like Nawaz will strongly feel they are doing the right thing by actively taking part in recovering what they perceive as a “hijacked” narrative of their own cultures and religion. Indeed, the immediate concern for many after the death and burial of Osama was not the certainty of his death but whether all Islamic rites had been observed to the letter because it means that much to Muslims.

More significantly, however, the celebrations accompanying his death, especially in the West, seem to suggest a triumph over Islam than terror itself. This awkward conflation of texts — that terrorists are Muslims and vice versa — is what frustrates and angers people like Nawaz and prompts them to take up the “arms” of verse in a bid to defend their identities from the West’s seeming onslaught because although his parents arrived in England from Pakistan in 1964 and he was born in Yorkshire, experiences of racism have never quite made him feel at home, like he belonged.

I agree with psychologist, Pamela Gerloff when she says: “A more appropriate response to [Osama’s] killing would be to mourn the many tragedies that led up to his violent death, and the violent deaths of thousands in the attempt to eliminate him from the face of the Earth; to feel compassion for anyone who, because of their role in the military or government, American or otherwise, has had to play any role in killing another.”

In parts also, the ideas of people like Nawaz resonate strongly with non-Muslims/Arabs who feel the weight of the burden not tweeting or facebooking your excitement over the death of a person like Osama brings. Does you asking for a picture of a slain Osama make you an unbeliever in the war against terror? Does you questioning whether Osama’s killing was legal under international law automatically make you an al-Qaeda sympathiser? It should not, yet it somehow does.

Quite clearly, people like Nawaz too can become that which they stand to oppose by peddling warped narratives in their bid to upset existing narratives. The likening of Osama to Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara, for example, is hugely misplaced albeit understandably so. In the aftermath of Bin Laden’s death, the temptation to liken the two will even be greater, what with the few but key similarities surrounding their deaths and burials.

In truth, however, to equate Osama to El Che — as the revolutionary was affectionately known — is to mix oil and water; it is a perversion of true heroism and what it means to be a liberator. In fact, a comparison between the two should point out more their differences. So, therein lies the danger that comes with new narratives that are couched in purportedly redemptive ideologies and seasoned with a restless impatience to win over support; their propensity to make loose and false connections between people and events reducing themselves, regrettably, to alternative propaganda.

From whence must plausible redress come therefore? From placing a premium on humanity, I say. Domination and oppression dehumanises people. In the words of Paulo Freire: “Dehumanisation, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors.”

We ought, as humans, to be guided by an unwavering commitment to the tenets of justice, peace and humanity. No life is worth more than the other and the glorification of violence needs to end if we are going to mould worthy inheritances for future generations in peaceful societies.

Freire has the last word — the “great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed [is to] liberate themselves and [more critically] their oppressors as well”.