LAST week we looked at the application of colonial language and knowledge systems in destroying local wisdom and knowledge systems.
I am sure that you still remember that all this was part of the imperial design – to destroy the collective identity of the colonised and to create a sustained slave; one who has no other reference point except that of the oppressor.
This week we want to expose this strategy of domesticating the African by looking at one of the means of such imperial domestication.
We shall call it ‘ontological re-appropriation’.
Just as our places and our identities were redefined, our species as a human race, as Africans, was set apart or classified in line with the ‘centre’ (which I am sure you know by now to be ‘London’).
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
It is concerned about what kinds of things exist – what entities there are in the universe, thus classifying them in terms of how they relate to and with each other. Ontology is a specification of a conceptualisation.
The word ‘ontology’ seems to generate a lot of controversy in many quarters where it is often confused with ‘epistemology’, which is about knowledge and knowing. Ontology focuses on how this knowledge is classified.
And by the way classifying is itself a process of defining or attaching new meaning to what already exists, what we have called appropriating.
This classification process is far from innocent.
It naturally removes original value and replaces it with a new meaning which is quite obviously inferior.
This is how Africans were set apart as a race to serve the colonial master’s interests ad infinitum and for as long as we accept their definition of us, we will forever act as defined to benefit the definer.
Yes.
Definitions are not meant to serve the defined; they make the defined objects of the definer.
This is the tragedy of definitions which we should overturn if we are to retain our original value.
That is why you should understand the basis of the whiteman’s ontology (system of classifying and grading human races).
It is predicated on the myth of ‘white supremacy’ which found justification from the period wrongly called the ‘Enlightenment Era’, a period which for Africans represents the ‘darkest period’ as false ideas about Africans were hatched by people who to date are popularised as philosophers when in fact they were spin doctors.
I will be demonstrating this soon to expose the lies and shame the devil.
McLaren sums up the fundamentals behind the motives and motivations of the Europeans’ conquest of Africa through slavery, colonisation and neo-colonisation. The desire for ‘capital’ is the essential factor behind the ‘official’ story.
The first crude manifestation of imperialism, slavery, was preceded and accompanied by genocide.
Europeans are the first people in history to commit mass murder by appropriating the whole continent of America.
It is indisputable that ‘slave trade’, which in fact was not a trade at all in the strictest business sense for it was a cruel mass capture and transfer of people across the Atlantic, was the key reason for the under-population of the African continent until the middle of the 20th century (Ibid:17).
In her words, “no other continent has undergone such constant and systematic bleeding.”
No rational mind would deny the demographic cataclysm where the Amerindians were wiped out on the pretext of a ridiculous reason that they did not belong to Christianity, what Sophie Bessis (2001) calls ‘cunning of reason’.
It is clear that such an excuse was part of a well-orchestrated plan to use religious discourse to justify imperialist domination.
The domination of Africa by Europe and its allies in the social, political, economic and cultural spheres has been maintained through a composite system of ideological mechanisms and prescriptive theoretical formulations.
Most of these ideological rationalisations of colonialism are grounded in the period ironically called ‘The Enlightenment period’.
As I hinted earlier, the 18th century was particularly a critical period of Europe’s great conspiracy especially against Africans.
This period was called ‘Enlightenment’ because it was presumed to be a century of new rational, civilised thinking.
However, it was ironically a period that saw fresh theorisation justifying the earlier conception of ‘might as right’ (Bessie: 2001:20).
Let us puncture some of the main trends of this ‘founding’ period, which demonstrate how racism was theorised.
A quick glimpse of selected quotes of Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Trevor-Roper about Africans will suffice to demonstrate how bogus these philosophers and historians are.
In his essay, ‘Of National Characters’ (1748), Hume claims that ‘Negroes are naturally inferior to the whites’.
He says:
“I am about to suspect that the Negroes and in general all other species of men (for they are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.
“There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor any individual eminent either in action or speculation: No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences.”
Hume’s mentality follows in the racist tradition of Aristotle who earlier on had claimed that certain groups of people are more suited for physical labour and therefore are naturally destined to be servants of those naturally made superior. Aristotle had argued:
“That men of little genius, and great bodily strength, are by nature destine to serve, and those of better capacity, to command; that the natives of Greece, and of some of other countries, being naturally superior in genius, have natural right to empire; and that the rest of mankind, being naturally stupid, are destined to labour and slavery.”
By inference the African is among the ‘naturally stupid’ as illustrated by their subjection to slavery owing to their ‘bodily strength’.
What ontology is this?
And all this coming from ‘enlightened’ philosophers?
Theirs are, plainly, philosophies justifying empire.
l To be continued