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Why Are The Dying Singing And Dancing
By Mukazo Mukazo Vunda
Passages from a Dickens novel reveal profound knowledge of human nature, European in particular. Dickens wasn't fooled by appearances, for example. Unlike the many who had what he termed as "the forgetful nature of human beings", he could clearly see into the true nature of a neat clad, english gentleman, however misleading the current world mood was. He had witnessed such men turn from impressive, good mannered, educated fellows into murderous monsters at a moment's notice, especially in times of war.
He lived from 1812 to 1870, way before the major world wars, but his observations are repeated time and time again in the first and second world wars, and are valid even today. His observations are especially true for a country known for it's technical sophistication today.
When exigent times visited Germany in the thirties, and their money was devalued, they quickly turned to barter, with cigarettes as the medium of exchange. This eased up their predicament somewhat, but ultimately didn't help since the source of their economic woes lay deep in the recession that had gripped the entire world. It all seemed lost for the majority of Germans until a short, blue eyed, dark haired man appeared on the horizon, explaining the source of their misery, and promising to root it out given the chance.
Germans gave this man the chance, and would later follow this man through thick and thin, even when the ultimate sacrifice was their own race, the race of the "uber-mensch". As one historian put it, "they would follow him blindly, with a touching faith, over the precipice to the destruction of their nation".
In hindsight, Germans were really taken for a ride, using their own particular nature, by one who understood human nature, as scripts from his own diary reveal. This negative side notwithstanding, it did seem, at least for a while, even to the most informed, that they had a right to their claim of superiority. They were set to win the imperialist's war, thanks to this positioning on the evolutionary ladder, and few would have argued against this truth while the going was good for the Germans, until the day when they overreached themselves, leading to their final defeat.
As fallen self-appointed angels, the uber-mensch wasn't very different from other forms of humanity. In defeat, Germans lost all semblance of their proud selves. With the gloves removed for all other forms of humanity already, little prevented them from baring their fangs on each other. Reports would soon surface that Germans were engaged in activities worthy of the lowliest of savages. Cannibalism was not a rare occurrence.
People are people wherever you go. Or are they?
Africans, today's marginalized, the supernumeraries, have actually run the entire gamut of German experiences, for much longer than the former, with more depth to the crisis, but, unlike Germans, they have hardly reacted as radically to each one of these situations as Germans did. What germans went through within a decade and a half, Africans have repeatedly gone through in a few centuries, with the last three decades as the best model. Today, the cool that Africans still hold despite all this remains baffling, precisely because former, educated depictions of Africans have preferred to give this cool nature to everyone but Africans.
Currencies in many African countries did get devalued to the point where Africans would actually have benefited from the introduction of a different standard, but, except in rare, isolated instances, they didn't invent one. Some may argue here of the lack of innovative capacities on the part of Africans, as opposed to their more speculative humans in Europe, but then barter is not a standard that would be considered beyond any group, and, with this lack of initiative in mind, one would wonder why blind violence of underfed, emotional humans hasn't been the rampant culmination.
Wars have followed Africans since they defeated colonialism, which have impeded progress, and caused widespread hunger which has resulted in millions of deaths. These disasters have been followed closely by the latest in modern cameras, and brought into our living rooms without the usual censorship that follows such reports when they are happening in Europe. In all of this, some aspect of humans in such dire straits has been absent. Africans thinned out to the bones feeding on other humans have escaped western prying cameras. The practice of cannibalism, which always follows starving people, has been conspicuosly absent from the African scene of hunger.
Standards of living have continued to plummet in all but a select few of the countries, continuing to fall even after they had hit lows in which bare survival is impossible, with the rest of the world getting richer, and the rest of the world living right there in the midst of Africans, owning the means of production, having a monopoly over the resources which rightly belong to Africans, and, here too, except in rare, isolated instances, no leader has emerged who has proposed that the eradication of the rich foreigners poses the answer to the problem, whom Africans have followed in ernest, as the Germans did.
Robert Mugabe, the only African who may fit the profile of such a ruler, has hardly dealt so ruthlessly with his opponents as former European rulers are known to have done, whether surreptitiously or openly, and Africans have been more divided over the issue than would be expected of such in other climes, than would be expected of a people in desperate times.
Everyone argues that the cause of Africa's defeat to the west lies in some Africans selling the welfare of their own people, unknowingly in most cases, to western powers. Without these African individuals, the west would not have enslaved, let alone colonized Africa. Even today's economic and political environment in which Africa is constantly getting the shorter end of the stick can be blamed on African complicity, if one understands that it takes two to tango. The west is constantly getting away with deals which maintain the marginalization of the continent. They cannot be able to achieve this alone, unless they use obvious force on us, being mature individuals who can distinguish between good and bad. This leaves no doubt that much of what the west is getting away with is being allowed by African governments who actually, even in our day, recognize the primacy of western interests.
This may sound simplistic, but it is true at base. The resources which a large segment of the African workforce slaves to extract or produce are in Africa, within African borders, under African control. There is no way they can leave the continent if Africans do not first accept to send them over to the west for give-away prices, accepting as such to maintain their workforce, their citizens, in conditions of near starvation. It is therefore well within the powers of African people to stop their exploitation, and a point of no return where refusing to accept western terms of trade would lead to the collapse of the entire continent has definitely not been reached. As such, the fact that it is not too late to turn the tables is getting overlooked.
The call by conscious Africans for African leaders to stop believing in an eventual partnership with the western corporate world is therefore bound to fall on deaf ears, considering the mental state of the above, and merely end up informing those who are not yet aware of a fruitless trend. The issue is no longer of puppets of the west in control, but of men who look as normal as any leader, outwardly seeming to possess the potentials of such, and are as legitimate as can be, but are bred in institutions of learning which teach them to first look to the west whenever they are in a constricted position. These men see the west as the immediate helper in times of trouble, as the only route to survival when death threatens. Selling for free or accepting raw deals then becomes a matter of instinct.
Undisputedly, African defeat and subjugation has thus depended on the abuse by Africa's enemies of the more uninformed, weaker of mind, and confused among us.
African survival, on the other hand, has depended on the physical strength of the African, and on an overabundance of Africans who believe in the cause. Africans have fought the same war, and maintained the same objectives, while staying divided. The African story of survival is unique in that the continent has faced a force that was enough to dismantle it a long time ago, but has survived by its members dividing, by edit of the occupying force, and then the divided parts fighting in the name of the whole. At the grassroots level, Africans have stayed united in aim, and this is where it has mattered.
This truth becomes more obvious when one looks to the Germans during the period they were ruled by the infamous SS machine and finds that members of one family would actively conspire in the demise of the other sibling, revealing a sinister side to human nature which seems to point to the one with the advantage as the possessor of common opinion.
Africans would not have survived western imperialism if they had allowed themselves to degenerate to the levels of their counterparts in Europe.
All of this said, we are still left with the mild African temperament. The route cause of this temperament can be found in the make up of the African, and, to a greater extent, in the culture shared by Africans themselves the world over, since in the long run this can have an effect on the former. I believe that, just like a welfare system results in the reduction of, say, crime, aspects of African culture are to blame for the mild nature of Africans, playing a role in subduing urges which would otherwise be vented at public rallies, football stadiums, or in reaction to social ills. The self explanatory question "why are the dying singing and dancing?" says it all.
Further more, one would be pressed to find out the advantage of having such a culture, which, even though an obvious advancement compared to other leaner cultures, which, for this reason, has been adopted by almost all in our age, breeds such stress free temperaments in such a cold world as ours, where a more reactive, radical nature as Germans showed during the second world war, without the other disadvantages, would be the better option.
Aspects of a culture which act as an opiate could well be an advantage to a creative group with a common mission, to a free group in control of their destinies, but not to the marginalized in a world full of backstabbing and self-defeating others.
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