Wounded Statue of Liberty

They write that French ‘’revolutionary armies quickly started carrying out a radical process of reform in the lands they’d conquered’’. They abolished remnants of serfdom and ‘’feudal land relations’’ and imposed ‘’the rule of law’’. Napoleon would adopt their project as his special mission in history. Of special value was the principle of ‘’equality before […]

They write that French ‘’revolutionary armies quickly started carrying out a radical process of reform in the lands they’d conquered’’. They abolished remnants of serfdom and ‘’feudal land relations’’ and imposed ‘’the rule of law’’. Napoleon would adopt their project as his special mission in history. Of special value was the principle of ‘’equality before the law’’: abolishing privileges of the clergy and aristocrats.  The clergy held political power; owned vast tracts of land and collected taxes from poor serfs.
The two historians are interested in this record to make the case for what they call ‘’inclusive economic institutions’’ which opened gates for the participation of those who later became the ‘’middle class’’ and gave birth to industrialisation across the affected areas of French colonisation, including Bel-gium,  the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
My interest in this record is the challenge it raises for Africa’s scholars of history. It would appear that colonial school syllabuses had problems in choosing versions of history to teach to colonised Africans and Asians. With Belgium hosting a brutal exploitation in a vast sweep of Africa – in what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo and extracting resources jointly with British, American, French companies- it would have been provocative to let Congolese and other Africans know that the Belgians were recent graduates of ‘’much suffering’’ and liberation under French revolutionary armies and Napoleon’s troops. The British had fled from American guns of liberation.
Japan’s footsteps was a history of achieving internally driven industrialisation; reforms that enabled them to achieve it; and their creating military and economic growth that would drive Britain, France, Holland and Spain out of their colonies in Asia. Juicy elements such as Japan inventing a written constitution; adopting a collection of taxes by the central government, and use of the revenue for supporting local industrialists, were likely arouse imagination among colonised Africans in directions which would endanger the orderly exploitation of their lands and labour.
This selective teaching of world history in colonial schools has been succeeded by a virtual silence as African historians turned to the noble task of putting Africa’s own history in the sun. This vigorous swing to footsteps of our ancestors has, however, starved our collective education and crippled our appetite for puzzles. As an example, France did swing from a history of liberating Europeans to what their own historian, Jean Baptiste Suret-Canale, reports as genocide across Central Africa – from Chad to Congo and Cameroun.  Massacres in Madagascar and Algeria met demands for an end to French colonial dictatorship. The Brits yielded to demands by convicts in Australia for rights to own property and electoral politics but not to Ghanaians or Kikuyu.
We have also been denied consideration of the cost of our reliance on political gains from struggles by other peoples. As an example, it was out of bloody struggles to end feudal and absolute monarchy in France that in 1789 the National Constituent Assembly enacted Article 11 which declared all citizens ‘’without distinction of birth’’ are entitled to hold ‘’any office or dignity, whether ecclesiastical, civil, or military’’. In Australia, deportees from British prisons struggled to have the right to vote and be voted for into legislative bodies. In England, King Charles 1 was executed by merchants in parliament who wanted more freedom to trade across seas and oceans; hold copyrights to their inventions, and not be burdened by taxes imposed by a greedy king and his cronies. Perhaps because we in Africa all too easily  adopted political principles which other peoples had fought for (just as China and Mohammed Ali’s Egypt merely imported technologies from Europe, instead of domesticating industrialisation), the so-called ‘’Westminster model’’ of parliamentary politics rapidly became poisoned by tribal jingoism, and military adventurism
This legacy probably accounts for the massive shock which the paralysis in American relations between President Obama and Tea Party Republicans in Congress aroused in Africa. African concerns include the subtext of racism against their African son. Even if vitriolic anti-Obama legislators like Senator Cruz (of Texas) has his eyes on arousing support for his presidential campaign in 2015, the reckless shutting down of government offices and its paralysis of small and medium scale businesses across the country, appeared “childish’’- to borrow from a BBC correspondent. A window for sunlight was, however, opened by a Republican senator from Georgia. He proclaimed that the United States is NOT a ‘’democracy’’, but a ‘’representative republic’’. In a democracy, the primacy of millions who voted for Obama because they liked his ‘’Obamacare’’, would have swayed his vote. In a representative republic his primary loyalty is to the majority of votes in his constituency.
The loyalty to the sovereignty of local political space carries much weight in American constitutional memory. Some have linked it to the legacy of groups of white immigrants fighting and defeating ‘’American Indians’’ and then seeking ties with the federal authorities with hawkish defence of their interests. Others have linked it to farmers in the South denying education, healthcare and income-generation to African-Americans so that they would remain exploited serfs.  These constitutional memories continue to grab at the breasts of the Statute of Liberty as she aspired to give equitable milk to all Americans.
The lesson for Africa in all these records is to reject the virus of ‘’Afro-pessimism’’ which sees our wars; leaders walking into temptations to misuse power; our cheating children out of quality education, etc as eternal and fatal. Creative climbs out these mishaps will instil strength in a continental republic. The strength of the American polity is in politicians fighting inside a vast space; throwing television sound bites not machetes at each other; and Republicans getting Democrats to help them heal a wounded statue today, and fight President Obama again later.