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Paul Kagame

Baffour Ankomah Correspondent
AN Akan proverb in Ghana says: “The head of a man is not like a paw-paw that you can split open and know what goes on there.” After my interview with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda on August 28, I have been wondering what goes on in the heads of the “outsiders” who come to Africa intending to teach us the way of the world. In the olden days, they would have been on a “civilising mission”, the proverbial “white man’s burden”. These days they dare not say that, but, in essence, it is the same mission.

In the interview with President Kagame, we talked a lot about these all-knowing “outsiders”. My trouble now, and it is significant, is to try to get into the heads of these wonderful outsiders and gauge how they see us and why they see us so. It is a difficult task so please pray for me. In the olden days, it was easier to do.

You just looked at the “settlers” who came to lord over us and their ways, and it told you how they saw us and why they saw us so. For instance, they had their own suburbs, their own shops, their own schools, their own clubs, their own hospitals, and if it were possible their own countries inside our countries.

They called our clothes “ethnic”, not meaning “non-Western” but something more; and we accepted that our clothes were indeed “ethnic”. So in those days it was easy to gauge how they saw us, sometimes by merely looking at what they wrote about us.

Consider this from A.J.A. Peck, a white Rhodesian solicitor whose first book, Rhodesia Accuses, published in March 1966, sold 85 000 copies because the white liked it so much that one white buyer bought a hefty 2 000 copies at a go to distribute to every MP in the Australian and New Zealand parliaments. Can you imagine, as far away as that!

Was it because unlike other writers, Peck did not suffer from the bikini syndrome — where what they reveal is interesting but what they hide is vital?

The “white man’s burden”

In Chapter 7 of Rhodesia Accuses, Peck, who was also a politician, used the sarcastic headline: “The ‘Sins’ of the Rhodesians”, which he defined as follows: “Cecil John Rhodesia in 1898 laid down the principle of ‘equal rights for all civilised men’; and ever since that time this has been the political philosophy of the Rhodesians.”

The “white man’s burden” must have been a heavy one. Wrote Peck: “To understand the attitude of the Rhodesians fully, it is essential to go back to the early days when the Pioneer Column, which consisted mainly of people of British stock, peacefully occupied Rhodesia in 1890.

“The Pioneers then found an indigenous population of considerably less than half a million, living in huts made of sticks, mud and thatch, and subsisting by herding cattle and cultivating small fields, which they abandoned when the soil became exhausted.”

From here on, kind reader, please pay particular attention to Peck’s language and reasoning. We are trying to get into their heads. He wrote: “The entire indigenous population was illiterate, their technology was equivalent to that of the Britons in 55 BC when the Romans arrived, their personal hygiene was far from irreproachable, their knowledge of medicine rudimentary and confined to the use of a few herbs, and even the very concept of money was totally unknown to them — they measured their wealth only in cattle, and they one and all believed in witchcraft.”

Well, dear reader, do me a favour by going to the Black History Month section of the October issue (of New African magazine pages 71-89) and compare Peck’s “Britons 0f 55 BC” with the Moors (the ancient people of Northwest Africa and West Africa) who, together with their Islamic colleagues from Arabia, conquered southern Europe in 711 AD and ruled it for 781 years until 1492 and, in the process, brought civilisation and enlightenment to Europe.

We know all about the intellectual somersaults that some European historians and scholars have performed in their attempts to deny that the Moors were black Africans. But never mind. Facts will remain facts.

For now, let’s concentrate on Peck’s rationalisation of why the Rhodesians set themselves apart from the indigenous people whose country they stole. “Perhaps”, he wrote, “(one of) the silliest modes of expressions ever coined is that people are penalised ‘merely because of the colour of their skin’.

“If the colour of a man’s skin were all that entered into problems of a sociological nature, their solution might be much easier; in fact, far more was involved.”

He went on: “When the Pioneers arrived in Rhodesia, they found four almost insuperable barriers separating them socially from the indigenous peoples: (1) considerations of hygiene, (2), the language barrier, (3) the almost total ignorance on the part of the African of anything other than tribal custom, and — like-wise — (4) the European’s ignorance of the tribal life.”

Mother of all insults
And then came the mother of all insults. “Large numbers of the African people have never used a handkerchiefs in their lives; and, living in a mud hut with a fire burning in the centre of the floor (there is no fireplace) with the nearest water supply a stream a quarter of a mile away, it is difficult — if not impossible — for rural (ie, the majority of) Africans to maintain standards of hygiene acceptable to the European. Added to which, not being as sophisticated in regard to medical matters as the European, large numbers suffer from, not merely one, but several — perhaps — communicable — diseases.”

Then, in his infinite mercy, Peck suddenly remembered to grant the African a bit of credit but immediately took it away in the same breath: “Happily,” he wrote, “this state of affairs is passing away; but readers outside Africa would do well to remember that the disinclination of the white Rhodesian to share amenities does not, basically, spring from mere vulgar prejudice: it finds its origin, fundamentally, in an almost instinctive desire to preserve standards in this regard.”

Peck then claimed that “for such other defects as he may possess, the African is by no means necessarily to blame. Controversy always has raged, and possibly always will rage, as to the degree to which a man’s ability is due to hereditary or to environmental factors”.

Here mercifully, Solicitor Peck, a judge and jury in his own court, ruled that the “defects” of the African were not hereditary but environmentally induced, and so “when the affairs of Africa are considered, it must never be forgotten that (and from here he writes in capital letters) the family and cultural background of possibly the majority of Africans is still extraordinarily primitive.

And that the African, in most cases, has not had the advantages of an educational environment equivalent even to that of the English primary school child.” Peck was writing between late 1965 and early 1966. My question is: what was going through his head when he was writing those things about us? Join me next month to find out. — NA.