On “You Lazy (Inellectual) African Scum” and “Blacks Don’t Read”

A Commentary by Emmanuel Konde
 
Field Ruwe’s “You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum” and the much vaunted anonymous-written “Blacks Don’t Read” belong to a genre of literature well-established in the West that speaks truth about the African mentality.  Admittedly, these short pieces are generalizations that refer to Africans or Blacks as a collectivity.  And that is the point eloquently elucidated in the last sentence of paragraph three of “Blacks Don’t Read,” which opens with SELFISNESS: “They steadfastly refuse to see that TOGETHER EACH ACHIEVES MORE….”

 Although these two short pieces have surfaced recently, there is a long tradition in the West of studying/researching and theorizing about Africans, and then applying the findings.  This practice of acquisition and application of acquired knowledge in dominating less advanced peoples has not been directed solely on Africans. In 1872, French philosopher Ernest Renan published  La réforme intellectuelle et morale in which classified the “inferior or degenerate races as follows:

The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity. With us, the common man is nearly always a declasse nobleman, his heavy hand is better suited to handling the sword than the menial tool. Rather than work, he chooses to fight, that is, he returns to, his first estate. Regere imperio populos, that is our vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. Turn the adventurers who disturb European society into a ver sacrum, a horde like those of the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, and every man will be in his right role. Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied; a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race. Reduce this noble race to working in the ergastulum like Negroes and Chinese, and they rebel. In Europe, every rebel is, more or less, a soldier who has missed his calling, a creature made for the heroic life, before whom you are setting a task that is contrary to his race - a poor worker, too good a soldier. But the life at which our workers rebel would make a Chinese or a fellah happy, as they are not military creatures in the least. Let each one do what he is made for, and all will be well.

Who will argue that Renan was off the mark?  How did he know the “fact(s)”  about Africans that led him to conclude that “a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should.…”  I think Renan’s observation about the Negro, or Blacks or Africans, came from his study of the findings of what other European researchers who had conducted field research among Africans wrote.  Yes, Renan was merely applying acquired knowledge, which Africans seldom do.

The African, as has been demonstrated on “camnet” and other for a, is more concerned about trivialities.  On camnet we spend a disproportionately huge amount of time on acrimonious debates and discussions of football, on bashing the Government of Cameroon than on thinking about, and offering, workable solutions to the problems that plague the Fatherland.

Notice that Renan’s book was published in 1872, some twelve years shy of the Berlin West Africa Conference (1884-1885)—that peacefully ended the European “Scramble for Africa”— where European powers met to agree on how to proceed with the conquest and colonization of Africa. Effective colonization and administration did not take place until after European social anthropologists had studied and provided their home governments with relevant information pertaining to the African mentality and general disposition.
 

Comments

[Va Boy]

Kunde why are you still on Camnet?

[Va Boy]

I am one of those who started Camnet, but I am not on it, because for once I agree with you. It is a waste of time. You are kind of a pompous ass, you know.

[Tanto Sammy]

Unfortunately, we are governed by the majority and not by the reasonable. We asked for democracy and not for what it offers. If we went for its values, leaders and rulers will not be our worry, but the execution of the laws will be.

The piece above is a bitter truth.