Hegel declared as much in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) when he wrote that the Western states needn't worry about Africa. Africa was without history! If anything, his words justified among Western thinkers (academics) the continuing dismissal of African people and their descendants. Let the wealth from the global plantation system continue flowing! In Hegel's words is the echo of a papal bull, granting Portugal the right to control and enslave Africans in the Sub-Sahara while granting Spain the right to control enslaved Blacks on Canary Island (Born into Blackness, Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War). So began modern history, writes Howard French.
But what did my white classmates know of this history? Where would they have encountered a teacher honest enough to teach this history?
In American universities settings even today, there are still professors touting the greatness of the Western tradition; and for these educators, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color aren't included.
In my time, classroom discussions didn't include a recognition of all the wealth amassed by the West by extracting free labor from enslavement Black people. "With its rank and centuries-long exploitation of Africans," writes French, " the plantation-complex was the most important driver of wealth in the New World, and indeed in driving the ascension of the West." Agriculture more than gold and silver, he continues, "lifted the North Atlantic onto an entirely new trajectory" allowing it to dominate the new modern age." This wealth and cultural "greatness" is produced at the expense of "Black suffering."
Depressing topic! Better to open up a discussion on Camus, for example, and never ask why the Arab "stranger" feels so numb. So disconnected from his humanity.
The "well - read" promoters of Western greatness in academia, as a matter of life or death, routinely exclude those who could attest to how this "greatness" came about. So much defended on the production of sugar and cotton, as French discusses.
Sameness saves the astute mind of the "well read" while, to consider the inclusion of the literary works of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the canon would be to acknowledge the inferior and cancel the idea of whiteness as the greatness the inferior will never achieve. It's no wonder that in the 21 st Century, white America's shock at discovering the existence of Black and Indigenous literary works has school boards across the country rushing to ban these works.
What would happen to the belief in white supremacy?
"The Americas and their long and deep connections to Africa," writes French, needs to be understood. French asks, what would Europe have weighted in the historical balance if the last half of millennia was absent, for example, the sugar industry which amassed fortunes for individuals as well as for auxiliary industries, thus giving birth to the modernization of the Western world? Where would Europe be without the enterprising business, profitable business, of transporting Black human beings to plantation fields in Brazil, and Barbados and Jamaica and Haiti and, yes, on those plantations in the New England colonies?
I would add another question, how long will Black people be forced to endure the deliberate omission of the Western world's contribution to the continuing suffering of Black people? For Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, France, and the US benefited from the Trans-Atlantic trade market and Black suffering as a result, particularly of the production of sugar and cotton. These nations, writes French, if honest, and truly democratic, would need to "fundamentally reconsider Western identity itself."
I'm reminded of the Zimbabwean writer, Tsitse Dangarembga, 1988 novel Nervous Conditions, Nyasha, a cousin of the young narrator, Tambu, arrives back home after receiving an education in England. Tambu's dream of a European education has been her young life's goal. She'll soon be on her way. In the meantime, Nyasha is home, and it's only natural that Tambu focus her attention Nyasha, expecting to learn how to think and act among white society in England. For Tambu, the brilliant and sharp-minded Nyasha would be a perfect model of a "well-read" crowd, that is, among the "elite" class of Africans, distinguishable from the masses, at least, by what they've consumed through formal education.
Nyasha, however, has gained her greatest insight from within her home, particularly once she comes into contact with her father, a "Big Man" in the village, and "successful" product himself of a missionary education. Nyasha finds herself at odds with the ordering of life at home. Her father, Tambu observes, demands one thing and Nyasha, appearing combative, offers an alternative course of behavior that is anything but complicit.
He doesn't recognize the daughter he expected to see, a woman/daughter yielding to her role as a dutiful daughter. Home, in fact, is where Nyasha has decided to trouble white identity disguised as "universal" and good for all. Her challenges rebuke her father's rule since he is, on the one hand, a surrogate for regime of white rulers. Nyasha recognizes in him not father but something one in compliance with his role as "Big Man," of worth to power only as an enforcer of white supremacy. It's no surprise when Tambu informs us that the father thinks his daughter "mad."
Colonialism is nothing if not the conquest of land to invade the mind and diminish the spirit of a people. To accept the rule of a system that operates to conceal truth is to inhale and exhale madness day and night. Father and daughter have been indoctrinated to insist that colonialism is natural. Universal. We are beyond the necessity for gunpowder now.
It's the "'Englishness,'" Tambu's mother informs her. "Englishness"! It's a killer of Black life. It's killing Nyasha. "'It'll kill them all if they aren't careful.'"
If only someone had warned Nyasha. If only she had been careful. But she knows the home has been contaminated by the effort to suppress and bury the "uncomfortable." What Toni Morrison called the "unspeakable."
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