Seasons of barbarism

Wole Soyinka once asserted that ‘’the very fact of violence in Africa puts the notion of an African renaissance to a bitter test’’. His gaze had grazed on Somalia as a field of blood; Southern Sudan draping independence with a mad Rwanda-type genocide, and Kenya’s students at Garissa University slaughtered in the hundreds. He had […]

Wole Soyinka once asserted that ‘’the very fact of violence in Africa puts the notion of an African renaissance to a bitter test’’. His gaze had grazed on Somalia as a field of blood; Southern Sudan draping independence with a mad Rwanda-type genocide, and Kenya’s students at Garissa University slaughtered in the hundreds. He had spoken before men waving Islam as their shield slaughtered Egyptian and Ethiopian Coptic Christians on glittering beaches for the benefit of Euro-American television audiences. As Pablo Neruda once wrote, ‘there are many of us inside each of our individual bodies’.
The recent barbarism inside South Africa deserves some attention because it has a peculiar legacy whose inspiration was a Christian Calvinist claim that God had allocated to Dutch immigrants a mission to ‘’civilize’’ black peoples who lived on vast lands with abundant agricultural fecundity; precious ores of metals and diamonds under its soils, and endless blessings of sunshine. Coming from European traditions of ruthless feudalism that was being overtaken by a creeping barbarism of capitalism, they brought the practices of thirty years of tribal wars across Europe; not sharing familyhood and a common flowering humanism.
A German heritage of ‘’dialectics’’ became translated into destroying the human status and dignity of African peoples in order to build development for European immigrants from Algeria to the Cape of Good Hope. The African was reduced to muscle power animating productive labour, thereby justifying excluding them from sharing political activities of voting and being voted for; administering multi-racial community activities; and sharing happiness and prosperity.
 The dialectic warns that out of the womb of the present reality will emerge forces that will kill it and give birth to a higher form of reality. The panic in that promise led to a brutal determination to block all forms of African rebellion. From literature to cohabitating and having babies, officials feared viruses of rebellion. Miriam Makeba’s song, ‘’Tell me now where did the little flee go; somebody tell me!’’ made a subversive reference to Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment. Novels like Chinua Achebe’s ‘’Things Fall Apart’’ were seen as preaching about African resistance and nationalism. Both were banned.
The government adopted rare use of brutalities against African peoples; ruthlessly overworking them on European-owned farms and inside deadly mines. It crushed demands for relief from the official hell.  David Easton’s view of government as the monopoly owner of means of ‘’legitimate violence’’ – as opposed to monopolising the promotion of virtue in community existence – was most apt.
Bold commentators, including President Jacob Zuma, have noted that this permanent violence deposited barbarism in both white and black South Africans. A journalist witnessed a group of black school children in Soweto pulling out a car owner, stripping him naked, marching him down a street, beating him to death, and walking away casually. A policewoman left her job and started a security company which quickly made her a millionaire. Over three thousand private security companies patrol rich neighbourhoods.
Devising cures for this cancer of barbarism after the political apartheid fell in South Africa calls for a ‘Mandela Curative Plan’’ which borrows from cleansing the ‘’holocaust’’ against Jews from minds of Germans. Just as Cuba sent troops which broke the back of South African troops inside Angola, the African Union must inject social technology and investment funds to defeat mass poverty and four centuries of wrath in South Africans.
A form of barbarism may have also crept into Nigeria’s legislative politics. Since 1999, parliamentarians resisted control by political party leaders. Up to 2007, PDP majority legislators fought against a bullying PDP president. The 2011-2015 House of Representatives humiliated PDP leaders by electing rebels as Speaker and Deputy Speaker. They rent out fury against a robust rebuke of kleptocratic practices among them by a PDP-appointed Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. The recurring failure of 75 per cent of legislators to be re-elected, may however, be a rebuke of their abandoning of the party as protector of the voters’ ‘’general humanity’’.
 Their expression of the power of the individual in each legislator gave visibility to the National Assembly as a locus of cheeky power. The resultant erosion of that moral authority in community-endorsed principles in manifestoes of political parties, might allow the triumph as ‘’neo-political barbarism’’.