Perceptions and the Reality of Africa, Part 5: The M-Word is the new N-Word
Here is the conclusion of my “Perceptions and the Reality of Africa” lecture series, though to be accurate, this is not a lecture, but an essay. For newcomers, you may want to start first with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
After editing and reviewing the scripts in this series, I felt slightly dissatisfied with the end product. I thought it wasn’t enough to simply dust off and publish this material, which was originally delivered over video about three years ago I should compose something new for the occasion which “wrapped things up” and which also spoke to the latest developments.
The TPLF War in Ethiopia which provided so many grim and infuriating examples of media bias and willful ignorance has been replaced with another war, a genocidal conflict designed to obliterate the Amhara people. This time around, the Western media prefers to barely cover it all, and not surprisingly, once again brings absolutely no in-depth knowledge of Ethiopian history. At the same time, the plight of thousands of asylum seekers from Africa grows more urgent by the day, yet Western media is content to carry the establishment lines of their governments that what matters is protecting borders.
In re-evaluating my four lectures, I am satisfied that they still have relevancy, with ideas that should be carefully considered. But more importantly, I see how the events that first sparked these talks have led us all to a more treacherous landscape, one where African History is in peril.
A few days ago, I read CNN’s article about the ordeal of “George Retes, a 25-year-old Army veteran and father of two” who got arrested in early July by ICE during a raid at his work place in California.
A few days ago, I read CNN’s article about the ordeal of “George Retes, a 25-year-old Army veteran and father of two” who got arrested in early July by ICE during a raid at his work place in California.
And if you check out stories by CBS, the Los Angeles Times, and Associated Press, they make sure to pack it right into their headlines that he’s a vet. He’s a former soldier. Which in American culture automatically makes you a candidate for unofficial sainthood. Of course, this guy’s white. And yes, no doubt, his arrest and incarceration were harrowing, a nightmare.
What’s annoying is that the entire media coverage implies that young Mr. Retes obviously wouldn’t deserve any of that rough stuff, not like — oh, say — some people.
It’s a cute trick. You manage to side-step the whole philosophical issue of beating the shit out of desperate individuals and kicking them out of your country… while merely suggesting there’s something wrong with the way they find individuals, sometimes beat the shit out of them and then kick them out of your country. Right, ICE needs to be more selective. That’s your takeaway. Got it.
What, you may ask by now, does this have to do with the themes I explored in the four lectures I’ve published here? A lot, actually, and I’ll get to all that. But please indulge me a little bit more.
I wrote an article months ago about the nauseating trend to focus on the “nice white girls” wrongfully arrested by ICE, and the thing just went through the roof, especially with readers on Medium. Of course, news operations still refuse to change. The only thing different about George Retes as a perfectly acceptable victim is his gender.
In some cases, news outlets have made a superficial attempt to cover the stories of justly terrified refugees from say, Mexico and Haiti. These particular victims — and they are victims — are quite handy for reporters. It takes the journalists so little effort to throw in a few quotes and not bother with much background on what’s going on in these people’s homelands.
But I’m wondering: Why doesn’t NBC News or the Washington Post go talk to the family of an African man or woman whom ICE just grabbed off the street and put in a barbed wire cage?
That would require a little more homework, wouldn’t it?
Trying not to be lazy myself, I made a point of searching online to know about Africans in the US who have faced ICE. It turns out that there is a wonderful resource of a website called the Deportation Data Project, and I encourage you to check it out, even though its Excel sheets will make your head swim. There’s enough data to keep you busy for weeks.
For our purposes here, never mind the totals offered, because they merely reduce people to statistics, and you’ll confirm soon enough that the vast majority of those arrested between September 2023 and late June of this year were — not surprisingly — from Mexico and Central and South America.
But… there were also arrests of individuals from Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, Togo, and South Sudan.
If you simply go through the table with a word search for those from Ethiopia or Senegal, you’ll find “convicted criminals,” yes, but also a significant portion of those arrested as being an “Other Immigration Violator” — a term so vague as to be useless and which even the Deportation Detention Project can’t adequately define.
Why won’t CNN and AP talk to them? I think I know the answer.
Because they would have to question the entire rationale for deporting folks at all. For barring them from ever coming to visit, let alone live in the US. For refusing safe harbor to people fleeing persecution.
Year after year, no matter who’s in power in Washington, America loves selling weapons and deploying troops around the world to supposedly keep certain nations “free,” including those of such refugees. So, it’s funny how freedom demands that troops go out, but it’s not so urgent that people can come in.
Okay, yes, yes, I hear you: all this is obvious and familiar. Understandably, it takes a minute to get past the racism to detect a very different seismic shift. As economist Robert Reich has pointed out, ICE’s Gestapo tactics could now be inflicted on any citizen. But things are worse than that, and not just for his fellow Americans.
Trump, along with the hypocrites who lead European nations, have virtually made everyone into migrants. It doesn’t matter anymore if you won’t plan to take a trip — you might. Given the disruptions of floods and wildfires, you may well turn into an internally displaced person, and authorities will naturally limit your rights because hey, just like refugees in a sanctuary city, you might tax local resources. Which makes you a threat in the eyes of the system.
Want to take your vacation outside North America? Great. The authorities are happy to let you leave. It’s coming back that will be your undoing.
Those of us who are citizens of the West have always had the pantomime of “freely” coming and going out of our own home countries. Now the charade is over. It’s just that the Americans are waking up to the reality, and big brand news outfits like CNN and the New York Times are struggling with it and have yet to think through the full implications. Trump now demands that you earn your way back in. And guess what? If the nice white girls from Canada or Europe and that likeable vet George Retes aren’t good enough for the system, you better believe you might be in big trouble.
You see, certain Americans want so badly to bring back the N-word. But they will settle for the next best thing: the M-word. Migrant. It implies a host of sins, just as the N-word used to be the flexible shorthand for the good ol’ boy in the South and your Boston creep who opposed bussing. It helps a lot that Europeans have already adopted it as a convenient term that can sound neutral in certain contexts yet also be invoked as a slur.
Think for a moment about the relentless and casually cruel deportation from Europe of Africans, people often desperate to escape crushing poverty, persecution, and war… Well, those barely make it into European news anymore. Certainly not in stories that get picked up by North American outlets. As I wrote in an earlier column, even Al Jazeera accepted the basic premise of the UK and French governments, that it’s somehow perfectly acceptable to turn away refugees.
Is it any surprise then that when the migrant category won’t serve, certain “civilized” Western nations will redefine people out of their human rights? As Reuters reported in April, “hundreds of foreign nationals previously protected because they grew up in France now face expulsion under legislation introduced last year.”
Credit where credit is due, Reuters examined the infuriating, heartbreaking case of Moussa Sacko, a young man who’s lived most of his life in France yet has been sent back to Mali, a country he hasn’t seen since he was a small child. And he’s still not really seeing it, as he has a chronic eye condition and back in France, lost the precious set of spectacles he relied on to help his blurry vision and stave off migraines. “I am on the outside, in a bubble between Europe and Africa,” he told Reuters.
The article does a great job of debunking one of the most heartless and phony pretexts for deportations in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. You go to prison for some offence, and even though you’ve served your time and supposedly “paid your debt to society,” Western authorities treat you as if you’re still a threat and put you on a plane.
Three years ago, a court tossed out one effort to deport Sacko after he did time for selling pot, and then a local prefecture rejected two applications for temporary residency — even though the court declared that he was fully entitled to stay. To any reasonable person, it’s clear that he was targeted. Because he’s Black. Because he’s African. And his case is not unique.
To the meanspirited who bark that he shouldn’t have done petty crimes and got what he deserved, I’d like to ask when the planes will take off and carry away the white drug dealers from Marseille or Lyon?
You see, at the height of its colonial power, France did things differently from Britain; it carried the fiction that every colony, be it Algeria or Vietnam were part of France. Treat them as French soil. Which meant every Algerian and Vietnamese was French. These colonials knew from the minute their ship hit the dock, or they walked out of the airport in Paris that no, they weren’t, and ordinary French people would treat them differently. I go into the disillusionment of some of the great French African writers and thinkers in The Gifts of Africa. My point, however, is that you shouldn’t get to trumpet the glories of empire or “civilization” and then turn around and pull the carpet out from innocent folks, the fabric you unrolled, the rules you set.
These Western “civilized” courts aren’t supposed to be a roulette wheel for governments to spin again and again. Moussa Sacko was granted the right to stay, and by the law and the principle of sheer common decency, he should be back where he used to be, in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre.
The ugly truth is that he’s not because he’s African.
James Baldwin once insisted, “What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place.”
By the way, when I chose to quote this passage above, I considered weaseling out and putting dashes after the n, but that would be such a cheat that diminishes the very point Baldwin wanted to make.
His argument was that whites reduced Black people to a classification, one expressed in a despicable vulgarity for convenient dismissal and easy contempt. Our times being what they are, the bigots who now reign want to create a more flexible classification that will start with race and region but will naturally encompass more.
Which brings us to Africans and their history, to Africans and the way Western media covers their affairs.
Even what happened to Moussa Sacko is a betrayal of both French and African history. For the authorities in Paris want to pretend that the universe began in 2024 with the government’s revisions to immigration policy. Instead of recognizing and acknowledging the historical links between France and its former African colonies — as complicated and messy as they are — the government wants to reject all that. Erase the past to keep the brown people away.
Today, the more liberal English language media outlets, as well as some major book publishers, have focused on how fascists and autocrats are “erasing history,” but they like to be selective in their examples. It’s a lot of Hitler, Hitler, Hitler until in exasperation, you want to point out, “You know there are other dictators.” Mussolini and Franco offer compelling lessons as well.
But when it comes down it, the so-called public defenders of history, and some of the newly-minted heroes who fled the US for academic positions in my country, Canada, are mostly talking their history. And they do mean their history. Not history in general. Their concern is a nationalistic one, which is understandable to an extent.
But we see an increasing number of attacks on African history, and I’m waiting for the white Western pundits to speak up over that.
I’m waiting for advocates and allies to line up in a show of strength. Because so far, I can count the number of them on one hand.
I’m not talking about the regular debates over greedy museums clutching their stolen artifacts, or the preservation of archaeological sites. Those are necessary battles, but let’s face it, they’re easy for liberal virtue signaling. No, I’m waiting for more to join the ranks of the battles that can get extremely ugly. Having been in the trenches myself, I know how deep the water gets when it floods.
Given that my area of expertise has been Ethiopia, I’m naturally more attuned to the steady parade of idiots who think they can peddle a new demonizing narrative on slavery and rewrite the facts about Haile Selassie. I do what I can for the defense, fully aware that these attacks are by design. They’re intended undermine an entire culture and to help promote a nihilistic and dangerous ethno-fascist agenda. The bigger problem is that those who benefit will not settle for taking out one nation.
The Erasure of African History
I suspect more cunning enemies wait in the wings, ones based in Washington, as well as London, Paris, Madrid, Geneva, and other capitals of Europe. It serves their purpose to belittle — and even dismantle if they can — African history. Ethiopia has been a prominent target for some because it stands in a class by itself. Its people are indomitable, unapologetic, fiercely independent. But these enemies cannot stand the idea, the enduring historical reality that Black men and women stood up to colonial onslaughts and modern weapons… and kicked the asses of their relatives.
So, as I discussed in the second lecture of this series, some have done all they can to try to define the African victories out of existence. This is also where we come back to the constant demand for Africans to authenticate their achievements, their experiences, even their traumas. Unfortunately for the likes of Bruce Gilley and other white supremacists, there is no getting around the sheer scale of ugliness and undeniable horrors of European colonialism in Africa. There is no way to plausibly deny the legacy of British, Portuguese, and American slavery and the genocides perpetrated by the British, Germans, Italians, and the Belgians, or the tortures committed by the French.
Not that they won’t keep trying.
Here is a prediction. I would like to be wrong, but sadly, I don’t think I will be.
I think that it’s possible we’ll see in the near future wholesale, out-of-control revisionism pushed on Western news websites and popular social media outlets over the Mau Mau Rebellion, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the Angolan War, the Rape of the Congo, and other key events.
It’s easy to imagine when you consider all the evidence I presented to you about the Western Media’s lies about the TPLF War. That was just one conflict. Since I delivered the four lectures three years ago, the little cottage industry that wants a “redo” on what happened with the war has kept growing. Its busy little bees and propagandists keep churning out official-sounding reports and journal articles. My latest favorite is the one by Médecins Sans Frontières, which forgets how it brought one of its own staff to tears with a lie about TPLF kidnapping and detaining workers.
So, yes, I fully expect such BS narratives to be the weapon of choice to supplant accounts of Kenyan witnesses, the oral history of South Africans, the memoir of a Ugandan official, the work of history of a professor in Mali. There’s a shameless conceit to the tactic. Its premise is that only Western opinion matters, now and forever. Only Western institutions get to decide what happened. And while all the parties involved may not be in close collusion, their aim is a shared one.
Undermine, rewrite, erase African history, and you take away the African migrant’s justification for escape. Without a past, he has no dignity, and you can pour on more libels that he’s a burden.
Hell, you can take away his right to travel for the sake of education or even to represent his country as a diplomat.
He or she doesn’t need to come here, they’ll say. Conditions are safe enough where they are. We know this because we set the standards. His situation didn’t sound that bad. Her? No, we won’t let her fly to London because we don’t recognize her as an official envoy. It’s our position that she doesn’t legitimately represent their people. Well, of course, we know who her people are! And they’re completely unreliable. Just check the historiography… which we created.
And let’s not forget that erasing and undermining African history helps to perpetuate the logic that the West is still needed on the continent. All those flown-in experts, the engineers and technicians (you need those Western engineers because well… you know, we have no slots available for them at universities here).
And they especially still need the billions in aid and the sanctimonious parasites from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Oh, and Western reporters! You can’t have Africans evaluating all this — how can be they objective? Why, it’s only been X number of years since that thing that happened, you know what we mean… there was a paragraph about it in the Lonely Planet guide.
When I first delivered the four lectures, there was no “Crisis in Gaza,” and yet, as its residents will remind us, Gaza had always been in crisis. The rest of us just weren’t told. I made the point in the first lecture that the way history is warped can serve a Western news agenda that wants to mislead its audience. And when Israel began its genocide of Gazans, I pointed out early on in articles and social media posts that the New York Times and the BBC used the exact same tactics in Ethiopia during the TPLF War.
It literally took close to a hundred years for Palestinians to be allowed to write their own accounts in English and get them released by major publishers. What began with sheer, instinctive bias against these witnesses and scholars became an entrenched, petrified attitude, monolithic in scope.
In the case of African history, things were slightly different. Before the 1950s, so few African historians were part of the academic and publishing establishment in the West that they were hardly seen as influential, let alone a threat. By the time the continent shook off most of its colonial chains (if not all the economic ones), the West realized that yep, African scholars could be a threat. So, the defenders of “civilization” came up with a unique strategy to guard their turf. They decided that Africa simply didn’t matter and never had.
But this ploy doesn’t work anymore. Africa has too many of the commodities the world needs. Its different peoples have demonstrated time and again their stunning ingenuity in science, technology, architecture, and the cultural arts. Hence, the return to the golden oldies that “Africans are responsible for their own messes” and “things ran smoother when their nations were colonies.” Since these arguments are toxic to any ear attached to someone with common sense, they have to be justified with rewrites of history. So, what began erratically with a base instinct of racism has now been polished up and gets recirculated by design.
The erasure of proper history in the West began in the US and the UK with the bullying and intimidation of leading educational institutions. Too bad for certain ambitious demagogues and autocrats that Africa’s educational institutions are beyond their reach, though they’re not always immune to the bribes of creepy billionaires like Bill Gates.
But I believe the best way to inoculate against toxic approaches is not to put all hope and faith into brick-and-mortar universities and government offices. Not at all. If there is one lesson from Africa that the West badly needs to learn first, it’s that progress and development isn’t the sole preserve of a sanctioned body. It can be found in communities. And in fact, looser affiliations and structures were often how African kingdoms at the height of their grandeur functioned and followed the rule of law. (I go into detailed examples of this in The Gifts of Africa.)
The West can’t even recognize that its relevance is shrinking today, and I confess that as someone who was indoctrinated in all its grandiose self-congratulations over democracy, philosophy and literature. So, it’s not necessary to prove to the West that African opinions matter. What’s far more crucial is to perpetuate the legitimate history of Africa to Africans.
It has been one of the honors of my life that my work has resonated with the people I chose to write about, and I’ve been lucky to have this happen on more than one occasion. I recognize their constituency. And it’s a continuing source of amazement to me that Westerners treat an African standing up for his or her rights or for their own heritage as some kind of affront to them personally and politically, a stand they wouldn’t hesitate to do for themselves.
My wish then is to see African schools flourish. African textbooks in tall stacks, even if young people remind me that a tablet screen is more convenient. I find comfort in the permanence of covers and pages. I reject any perception that is imposed like a curfew on thought, a punishment on free expression of the individual, whether it’s literary expression, scientific expression, creative or political.
I take this position because I prefer the reality of Africa — as do most Africans, as should any Westerner who can open their eyes. And there can be no true respect without sincere effort at gaining proper knowledge.
Africa and Africans deserve no less.
