Of savagery and barbaric virtues of nations

Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965), the most beloved and respected son of Britain, a decorated war hero, a noted statesman and undisputable orator; in his account of the campaign in the Sudan and the Battle of Omdurman, in The River War (1899), said of Africans:

“The indigenous inhabitants of the country were negroes as black as coal. Strong, virile and simple-minded savages, they lived as we may imagine prehistoric men–hunting, fighting, marrying and dying, with no ideas beyond the gratification of their physical desires and no fears save those engendered by ghosts, witchcraft, the worship of ancestors and other forms of superstition common among peoples of low development.

They displayed the virtues of barbarism. They were brave and honest. The smallness of their intelligence excused the degradation of their habits. Their ignorance secured their innocence.

Yet their eulogy must be short, for though their customs, language and appearance vary with the districts they inhabit and the subdivisions to which they belong, the history of all is a confused legend of strife and misery, their natures are uniformly cruel and thriftless, and their condition is one of equal squalor and want.”

These sorts of racist insults on the disposition and intelligence of Africans was common among progenitors of vicious prejudice, who ravaged Africa and justified their atrocities by depicting Africans as sub-human.

However, conflicts across Africa, acts of genocide and the recent spate of xenophobic attacks do little to salvage her image. That remains a blemish that continues to blight her convivial face and reinforces such racist stereotypes that persisted for scores of years despite her best intentions to improve her image.

During the liberation struggle the ANC carried out acts of sabotage against apartheid installations; such acts of sabotage hastened by the heritage of brutal acts of violence that characterised the apartheid government.

During these tense times, the apartheid propaganda machinery was grinding tirelessly to instill fear on the unsuspecting white minority communities about “die swart gevaar”; that the so-called terrorists and communists were a threat to their existence and promoted right-wing extremism in the process. The suppressed majority were viewed by right-wing extremists as the savages described by Churchill.

The testimony of Nelson Mandela during his treason trial in 1964 countered Churchill’s assertion that savagery was a preserve of Africans, when he said, “Africa does have spectacular savages and brutes today, but they are not black. They are the sophisticated white rulers of South Africa who profess to be cultured, religious and civilised, but whose conduct and philosophy stamp them unmistakably as modern-day barbarians.”

Europe too has had her fair share of the savagery that Churchill attributed to Africa. From the Nazi’s ethnic cleansing to the Srebrenica massacres by Bosnian Serbs; Europe is not innocent. Evil exists everywhere!

It becomes more disconcerting when, in modern day, powerful governments perpetrate untold acts of barbarism on a grand scale and justify them as an advancement of the free-world, the institution and spread of democracy in countries that never clamoured for such democracy.

The US in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries it has interfered, Russia in Chechnya and Georgia; and China in Tibet – these countries are displaying disgraceful virtues of barbarism and utter disregard for human life.

It appears that when barbarism is complemented by economic muscle it tends to dissipate and escape the permanent memory of those who are enticed by lure of false prosperity, at the cost of all virtues upon which societies should be founded. We discount the imprudence and impropriety of these savage nations for fear of offending their inhumanity and falling to the wrong side of their wrath.

The world, imperfect as it is now, would remain so for men of robust constitution who have elected to resign to their places of comfort, impervious to the world around them – where savages and barbarians are left to their own devices, only having to contend with those men of feeble disposition. “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity,” Reverend Martin Luther King said. It is unsettling when we accept systematic violence against other human beings as the way of life and we do not act.