Can ‘White Masks’ lead change?

After reading Nkrumah and Nyerere’s stirring works, one finds Cabral’s piece slightly less accessible. While his musings on culture and its relevance are evocatively conveyed, but one can’t help noticing that his audience is more exclusive than that of the other two leaders. He clearly distinguishes between the two types of culture in prevalent in Africa. One is the African culture itself and stresses its importance for national liberation by asserting that ‘as with the flower in a plant, it is in culture that you find the capacity (or responsibility) for the production and the fertilizing of the seed which ensures the continuity of history’. The second culture he alludes to is the one exported by the colonizers (the Portuguese in his country’s case) and portrayed as one that is either threatened by the natives or imposed upon the naïve elite. One notices that it is these elites seem to be the targeted audience of Cabral’s paper. Rather than addressing the children of Africa as a whole, like the previously mentioned leaders did, Cabral talks to these men with black skin and white masks and seems to be entrusting them with the responsibility to relieve Africa of her pain.

It first becomes evident that this exposition is not meant for a smaller audience after Cabral alludes to the two cultures that exist but does not go into descriptions of either of these cultures. Rather he focuses on ‘culture’ itself and attempts to theorize it as both a driver of history and a significant threat to a foreign invader and sums these two up by saying that ‘it is therefore seen that imperialist domination being the negation of the true historical process of the oppressed people, it must necessarily be the negation of its cultural processes’. He is aware that his readers are more interested in cause and effect relationships rather than long descriptive pieces about a culture they view as ‘primitive’. In fact, after distinguishing between these types he talks about the native elite and hoe the colonizer ‘also arouses and develops the cultural alienation of a section of the populace either by the so-called assimilation of the indigenous people or by the creation of a social abyss between an indigenous elite and the popular mass’. He out rightly says that these people are not fit to lead liberation movements because of the cognitive divide that exists between them and the natives, a claim that is bound to incite them. This provocative claim begs the question; who is fit to lead freedom movements? He talks about how there are developments to be made as far as African culture is concerned and that mobilization is a trying task for them. Although it is absurd to suggest that the colonizers organize liberation movements he does make sense when he talks about the colonizers being able to exploit economic needs and local leaders thirst for power. The fact that these desires exist within people from Portugal as well as Africa means that they cannot be brushed under the carpet and it makes more sense for people to acknowledge their existence and deal accordingly. Technically, even the idea of national liberation is a western inspired concept. Should it be abandoned on these grounds?

Cabral makes sure not to end on a bleak note. He proposes that the leaders already chosen are the ones fit to rule because they have some understanding of and appreciation for western logic, which is important if new states are going to be members of the international arena. They will be able to integrate with the indigenous population they are leading and learn about the culture they were always taught to neglect. He maintains that culture is essentially the driving force behind national liberation movements but it needs to be fine-tuned where required as ‘culture, like history is necessarily a dynamic, moving phenomenon’, and that these particular natives may successfully do so. He doesn’t evoke a timeless past or fantasize about Pan Africanism but he does give a certain (very capable) segment of society hope that they can lead their nations and be forces of benevolence for their country. Of course it is problematic to assume that only certain people are capable of being leaders but one begins to think of how much this really matters. Apart from making no suggestion to keep reproducing a single class worthy of leadership, Cabral seems to be telling the people of liberation movements that they have made a step in the right direction by choosing these men as leaders and tells these leaders that they should use their privilege to harness good and should aspire to be noble leaders.

This is Your Time

Western history textbooks are not kind to the Soviet Union while describing the events of the twentieth century. They tend to overuse the advantage of hindsight and claim that the Soviet Union was bound to disintegrate because of various reasons such as the absence of democracy and human rights violations. Once again, the west is guilty of viewing history as a linear process in which Western Europe and the United States are at the forefront, the USSR is somewhere in the middle and the ‘backward’ colonies are at the tail end and have barely begun their journey. But once one moves beyond textbooks and archives and explores eyewitness accounts and literature produced during the time, they realize how the Soviet Union really was a life changing entity for some people. One such person is Dada Amir Haider Khan, an Indian from Rawalpindi who attended the University of the Peoples of the East in Moscow during the late 1920s. Dada recounts his experience in the Soviet Union in his memoirs and exhibits immense admiration for Moscow and the Communist government. Through this admiration one is able to realize why for 45 years the United States was worried about Communism spilling over. At a more personal level is able to prevent crass labelling of Soviet literature, rhetoric and art as ‘propaganda’ and starts to understand the appeal it held not only for Russians but the many people living under imperial rule.

Apart from posters, Soviet artists were also engaged in a movement known as Socialist Realism. It gained popularity with the government and its purpose was to “treat the present as though it did not exist and the future as though it had arrived”. Nowhere is this better exemplified than the soviet posters and art regarding growth and economic success. The Soviets celebrated not only hard work but collective efforts. The painting displays this seems to suggest that every individual must play his role if the state is to prosper. One also notices the absence of anyone regulating these workers and giving them orders, showing that one man does not benefit at the expense of many. Dada discusses this in his memoirs and defends the notion that there is no freedom of expression in the Soviet Union by exclaiming “Yes there is no freedom for a capitalist to exploit the labor of others for personal gain, nor is there freedom for counter revolutionaries to harm the Soviet institutions which have been striving to end the exploitation of man by man!”. The Soviet poster also employs the ideals of Soviet realism and looking at the future by displaying statistics that will supersede the west in terms of production. These posters depict the fact that the USSR CAN take over the west in economic terms, and if the buildings and statistics do not convey this effectively, the predominance of the color red achieves this effect and nurtures hope within the viewer. It is understandable to hear Dada recount how he “felt in the red flag a symbol of victory over the exploiting system”. The Soviet Union had become a new vision of what the future could look like and one had to be in Moscow in order to truly experience the tremendous forces that were being unleashed. Dada succinctly sums up Western biases and their devotion to their own models of development and Laisses Faire by saying that they “could not conceive that economic development could be regulated by a scientific pre meditated economic plan”

Economic and scientific advancement was something the Westerners would have still understood by the 1960s when the Soviet Union shocked everyone by launching Sputnik. What baffled the more was why people chose to follow to Soviet Union when democracy and capitalism were options. The Western countries never had to experience living lives as second class citizens. They were never made to feel like aliens in their own homeland. To the Soviet Union decolonization was a process that was linked to communist internationalism and Moscow was the capital of the revolutionary world. Through classes on political geography the Soviets made it very clear to their Eastern students that the “reality of colonialism was very real” and that they must overthrow their colonial leaders who had robbed them of a decent lifestyle for far too long. The Soviets propagated this message well before the United States did after the end of the Second World War. And they didn’t leave it there. This poster clearly distinguishes Moscow from Washington DC. It did not “exclude dark skinned people from using the public conveyances, eating places and cinema houses’. It recognized and celebrated differences as is also shown in Dada’s account. This place is a home to these people to the extent that Dada feels immense humiliation when he mistakenly violates traffic laws, as he feels a sense of responsibility for Moscow. The Soviet Union gives its people a leader who is a lot more accessible than leaders of the west as well as leaders Dada had probably heard of back in India. The people who follow communism are given the chance to adore their leader, and this adoration is not restricted to Russian men, as the poster clearly shows people from the global south as well as women. Dada also narrates how people are able to follow their religions freely, a promise that Jinnah also made to the new state of Pakistan but was sadly never followed. In a way Moscow is even friendlier to Dada than the power holders of his own country, showing how the goal of Communist internationalism was bigger than anti-imperialism; it was to eradicate oppressive social relations as a whole and to provide the colonized people with a home and a sense of pride and self-worth. It wanted to do away with the belief that these people were backward and tell them that the moment they were living in belonged to them in the same way it belonged to the white man.

Swaraj for All

If one were seated in the Parliament House at New Dehli in 1947 and was able to detach from Jawaharlal Nehru’s stirring address for a moment, he would become aware of a glaring absence. One did not have to think twice when Nehru alluded to ‘the greatest man of our generation’, yet this man was nowhere to be seen during this golden hour. While India was ridding herself of the British imperialists who had governed her for over a hundred years, Mahatma Gandhi was trying to stop the communal riots that had erupted as a result of this expulsion. He was unaffected by the hoisting of a new flag, the achievement of ‘self-determination ‘and institutions and realization of nationalistic goals. His secret? He had achieved self-rule well before the British had departed from the subcontinent.
Although Gandhi has plenty to say regarding railways, doctors and modern civilization what really baffles the reader (the one reading Gandhi’s work and the one present before the editor) is how Gandhi does not view the presence of the British as problematic. In a post war age ‘self-determination’ and being on equal footing with other countries in the international arena was considered the highest form of freedom, yet to Gandhi the concept freedom does not end with the establishment of a nation. It extends to one’s spiritual life (especially as far as the ‘Indian’ citizen is concerned) and attempts at decolonizing one’s mind. To Gandhi, when one is able to call a spade a spade and accept himself for who he truly is, and not try to emulate any third party, one is able to start recovering from the cognitive devastation that accompanies colonization and is able to gain the power if representation. Such form of escape was attempted by the students of UCT during 2015 after Maxwele ruined Cecil Rhodes’ statue. Gandhi takes pride in the portrayal of the Orient because at the end of the day it is who he truly is. He seems to thank his lucky stars that he is not a westerner and has not been perverted by modernization. He is aware of the fact that the British do not have to leave for his independence to begin, an approach which the reader is initially unable to come to terms with. Gandhi’s work applies not only to India but also extends to the Senegal described by Sembene and the Indian’s residing in Guatemala, making him an icon for the decolonized world as a whole.
Gandhi’s claim that ‘those alone who have been affected by Western Civilization have been enslaved’ frightens me. As someone who has been taught in an English medium school and thinks in English, his views seem to indicate that my generation and the one after it is not only still affected by colonialism but is suffering the worst effects. It seems to take a lot of strength to think about a good, orderly world without institutions and laws created by western civilization. For now I try to find comfort in Gandhi’s saying that ‘Those who want to do good are not selfish, they are not in a hurry’ and hope to find courage to think differently one day at a time.