by ZANGA CHIMOMBO
Ancient Egyptians were not Asians, nor aliens.
“Genocide might indeed be a worse demon of our nature.”
When black civilisation was destroyed first time round there was little to show for its former glories apart from squat noses and thick lips on statues and other artworks that invading lighter folks successively reduced. After all, if writing is confined to a priestly caste in immobile temples it is hard for it to remain a concern when there are sea peoples, the Hyksos, Cambyses or Alexander on your tail; let alone Jihadists on their way to the Iberian peninsula. Neither do papyrus scrolls keep well in the deserts nor rainforests nor savannahs depending on which compass direction you chose to flee. I would imagine too that tablets become rather heavy especially when they have to compete with a basket of provisions on the limited space that is one’s head.
Jared Diamond is probably right that this unfolding of events has more to do with latitude than attitude. Otherwise Yali’s valid question remains: if mankind evolved in Africa and civilization not so far from it (within an Africa “Minor” in a different manner of looking at the same familiar things), why didn’t “black” people go on to bring about globalization in this recent instance?
If the roles were reversed, however, I am not sure quarter would be given either as incidents of counter-racist racism demonstrate. Come to think of it, when homo sapiens sapiens overran Eurasia from Africa, I doubt that lesser higher primates were tickled into extinction. Genocide might indeed be a worse demon of our nature.Browner people aren’t less racist. We just haven’t had as many opportunities to demonstrate it spectacularly as these darker demons of our nature did in Rwanda not so long ago. I fear that genocide is a base tendency and that we must continually strive to educate ourselves and each other in order to seek out the humanity in the “other” if we are to co-exist on this spaceship hurtling through the void.
“Papyrus scrolls keep well in the deserts nor rainforests nor savannahs.”
As a corollary though, human beings seem to possess an instinctive fear of group annihilation. Perhaps we intuitively recognize that we create and destroy the future; that we have this power today, are supermen now as we live, in contrast with Nietzsche’s unborn supermen of tomorrow. Hence we huddle together according to our petty little distinguishing characteristics. Perhaps indeed hate must be allowed to be expressed as freedom of speech, if only to identify opportunities to educate, if at all this is practical. However, reading daily depredations on minorities all over the world I dread that even education may not be enough to rein in our prejudices. Yet, in order for the ideal of multiculturalism to maintain its legitimacy, it must be presented as not only possible but inevitable. There is no alternative.
Multiculturalism is an unintended consequence of the actions of the class that initiated it for its own benefits. Cultural imperialism was a loyal bedfellow of the more vicious naked capitalism. A lowly class European would become an upper class colonial; those subjects who could afford to travel to the core from their periphery would enter at the bottom no matter their status back home and claw themselves up, sometimes over generations. A process that usually involved a form of physical “whitening” too.
Having destroyed the superstructures of browner people wherever they might have been (often with the excuse that this was in subject peoples’ own interests, especially if they happened to live on top of a pile of wealth), doesn’t the Chinese adage about saving someone’s life apply? So the west should now be responsible for our destiny? (H*ll no!) Thus immigration is blowback from colonialism much as we prefer to hang around together with people just like us. Frequently, though, the individual destinies of migrants can be quite bright for some of them in their new homelands.
“In order for the ideal of multiculturalism to maintain its legitimacy, it must be presented as not only possible but inevitable.”
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