“We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp”— Toni Morrison

The debate on violence and non-violence is essentially a question on what it means to live an ethical life. To Martin Luther King, non-violence is a philosophy of being. It calls for faith in the “amazing potentialities for goodness” in all humans, where the means must justify the ends— indeed, they are the ends. In his speech on “Unfulfilled Dreams”, King preaches a philosophy whereby action and doing can exist merely within the realm of the internal self. If the act of fixing your heart is all you can find it in you to do, it’s enough. Non-violence is a “technique of action” involving intention.

But can the “boat of faith” get you through the storm on its own? After all, what does it really mean to do the right thing in the face of great wrong? First, we need to identify the wrong. For Malcolm X, the African-American problem, or as he would call it the “Negro problem”, is about a continuous investment that has been poured into the American landscape. It is an investment of blood. And if we are to take King’s conception of the means justifying the ends, then it is clear that this investment can only be made good in one way. Earlier in this course we talked about how if decolonization is a story of triumph, it is also a story of cracked skulls, broken bones and disappearances. Malcolm and King are both telling true stories— different, but true.

The stories of violence and non-violence do not need to exist in a binary; Malcolm X does not advocate needless violence in his speech, nor does King proposition passivity. But we must question what violence really is. If it is the intention to do harm, what happens when the underlying intention of a violent act is to reclaim what has been stolen from you? As Malcolm says, “how can you thank a man for giving you back what’s already yours?” An investment of blood has to be repaid in the same. And a belief in the “amazing potentialites of goodness” necessitates a recognition of the potentialities of evil. To me, the difference between non-violence and violence is not in the means through which the end is achieved, but in the site of action.

For Malcolm, there are physical, and therefore external, threats that must be recognized. It is a question of the ballot or the bullet, and this physical response of hitting back is an affirmation of his humanness, an inalienable quality. The struggle between good and evil is happening in front of his very eyes and he cannot turn the other cheek. To King, non-violence is a way of being. It transcends the colour line and manifests itself in the “story of life”. It’s a struggle, but one that happens within the self. He is not advocating a philosophy of turning the other cheek. Evil is real, but its also closer to home than you might think.

In Toni Morrison’s story of the blind woman, the children ask a very relevant question— “Is there no context for our lives?” Both Malcolm and King gave their lives to the struggle to build this context. And while Malcolm’s fiery speeches and luminescent persona reek of courage, there’s a lot to be said for the person, who, standing in the wake of unspeakable wrongs remains steadfast in one simple belief— the belief that, at the end of the day, goodness, and only goodness, will prevail. The philosophies of violence and non-violence discussed above do not exist in a parallel state to each other. They stretch through the constraints of the temporal into a time when Malcolm and King can turn to each other and say:

“Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together.”

 “Instead of airing our differences in public, we have to realize we’re all the same family.”

I loved reading Malcolm X’s autobiography. His words carry an insistency. Its almost as if he needs to be believed, and upon reading Alex Haley’s foreword it is clear that this is the case. It is Haley who finds himself in the position of coercing details regarding the events of Malcolm’s life out of him. They do not flow on their own. This is the Malcolm I was first exposed to. I understood him, I admired him, but I didn’t realize quite how magnetic his personality was.

Then I heard him speak. I felt an urgency throbbing like an undercurrent beneath his words. It didn’t seem like an impromptu speech, but it is precisely this quality of being an “off-the-cuff chat” that makes what Malcolm has to say so appealing. He speaks to the people not at them, and this can be heard through the laughter and shouts of approval when he says something that has an especial resonance. When he talks about the field negro and the house negro he does not separate himself from his argument. In fact, his words form an embrace into which his listeners are gathered. He is the “same man” as those in front of him are— he is under no pretense as to who he really is. He is “man enough to tell” it as he thinks it is and this attitude is carried forward into his narration of his own life.

Yet, Malcolm X is also more than just a man. He is an idea. While reading his speeches I couldn’t help but remember one of my favorite stories growing up, The Velveteen Rabbit. I won’t go into the particulars of the plot, but one particular sentence kept replaying in my head as I listened to Malcolm X speak:

“Once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

Whether he imagined himself into being or not, Malcolm X was real. And that is a quality that makes him “last for always”.

Re-Africanisation is a term that promises a lot. It promises a return to a stolen culture, to the very state of being African. To Cabral culture operates on an “ideological or idealist plane”— a plane on which resistance is made possible through the affirmation of a “physical and historical reality” existing alongside that which the present suggests.  Cabral is clearly on to something here.

 But what are the implications of Re-Africanisation? What are the assumptions upon which this reclamation of history is based? And to what extent is this possible?

Culture is “the product of history” and simultaneously its creator. Re-Africanisation is not simply a promise to return to a mythic anti-colonial past, but also an affirmation that this past did indeed exist— that it was real. And if we think about this further, it’s clear that this is really just another way of Cabral saying that he exists— that he too is real. To me, Cabral’s speech is not important merely in terms of content. His words resonate into the present. They are laced with hope, and this is not always easy to come by. “History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterize the evolution of a society”. But it also allows us to do something else. Through narratives of culture, history “allows us to know the dynamic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress”.

Re-Africanisation is a struggle for just that— survival. It infers that progress can occur at multiple levels, and that is not unidimensional as western culture seems to suggest. But it must be realized that this idea of a unified culture comes at a cost. How do you create just one definition for what it means to be African? The problem here is one of identity. If identity is going to be defined through the quality of being resistant to domination, then what will it mean to be African in a time when there is no need to resist? The term Re-Africanisation is based on an assumption— the prefix “re” suggests a return to the past, which Cabral insists can only happen through an enforcement of popular culture. Yet in a land which is so diverse, to whose past will he be returning. Can multiple cultures really be collapsed into one that easily? Will they not also resist?

Cabral puts the need for national liberation via cultural resistance very succinctly when he says the following: “it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture”. This is true insofar as it suggests culture as a weapon against imperialism. But who will decide which culture in Africa is the one which justly represents all its people— which culture takes on the shape of a weapon best?

According to Cabral, while “it is true that the multiplicity of social and ethnic groups complicates the effort to determine the role of culture in the liberation movement… it is vital not to lose sight of the decisive importance of the liberation struggle”. Yet of what use is this struggle if it robs the very people it exists for, of their individual cultural identities?

Re-Africanisation promises the answer to a fundamental question— Who am I? Yet, Re-Africanisation also threatens to merge the possibilities of that answer into each other until the question itself changes from ‘Who am I?’ to ‘Who are we?’.

“In their early childhoods they were taken by public minded or conscientious people from adverse circumstances and placed in different children’s home which the Party and Soviet authorities had set up throughout the USSR for such children who had no parents or guardians” 

In Dada Amir Haider’s narrative, the world he portrays is rose tinted. As he fondly recalls his time in Moscow, many characters populate his account, not least of all Noora, the young girl who “was actually not an abandoned child”. Noora is one of many children who left the restrictions of their home for a world which promised above all else to be nothing like the past they had known. The “conservatism” of Noora’s mother causes conflict not only in the microcosm of the relationship between parent and child but in the macrocosmic struggle between the shackles of the past and the free future envisioned through communist doctrine. 

Anyone who is even slightly informed about the world they live in would easily recognize the first poster. But in case you don’t (or in case you think I don’t) its title, which roughly translates to “Children, What Do You Know Of The Fuhrer?” says it all. Now, I am not entirely sure about the history of the piece, but for my argument I am going to read it as a challenge to the image shown. As he holds up the little girl, Hitler is the picture of benevolence. Yet, he is framed by a question that haunts— “What do you children know of the truth that lies behind the smiling figure in front of you? Do you, or will you ever, know of the destruction he leaves in his wake?” 

The second poster couldn’t be more different from the first in terms of the place from where it originated. And while the former attempted to promote fascist agenda, the latter has as its central premise, the aim of propagating communism. Yet, in terms of aesthetic, the two are frighteningly similar. Both have flags, happy people, and most importantly, a child being supported in the air by the ideology of the land they live in. So why is Noora’s story important in context to these two posters?  

What does it mean to let go of the past? On a national level it is clear that this is no easy task. Yet, what Dada Amir Haider fails to mention, except for in his innocent account of Noora, is the impediment caused in this transition between past and present, by the very fact of it not merely taking place on the level of the macrocosm. When Noora goes home, her mother says, “please leave me alone”. Noora is hence, abandoned by her mother till she lands in the hands of the state, and in the arms of the men lifting the little girl up in the poster.  

Letting go of the past comes at a price. But Noora’s story has more concerning undertones than merely this to it. She, and other children like her, are to all extents and purposes prey to the whims of the State. And even more frightening, is the fact that like the little girl in the poster, these children become pawns in a chess game of politics. They smile, and to men like Dada Amir they seem happy. After all, like he says, they have been “taken in” by those who are “public minded”. It is important to work for the mutual benefit of society at large, but this too comes at a cost when the needs of the individual merge into those of the collective till the two are indistinguishable from each other.  

The little girl in the second poster probably knows next to nothing about communism. As she hangs suspended in the air, perhaps she smiles because she thinks she’s flying. Or maybe she smiles because she has been told to do so. There is a cost to involving children in grownup matters of politics— their childhood. It may be argued that the way things were before didn’t really ensure that childhood was a privilege available to all children. Yet the chains that bound them down in the past, haven’t really been lost. They have merely taken on a new shape— that of two men holding a smiling girl up in the air.