Baba,

Thank you very much,I did enjoy it.After reading the article I was trying to 
count how many of them I know kept to the dreams and aspirations of the 
struggles,to be honest,Apart from Sanakra,I have my doubts with the 
rest,great many of them became fascist dictators,the likes of Mugabe,Dk 
Jawara  ,Nkurumah,Saikou Touray etc ended up distancing themselves from the 
People who die fighting with them and choose them to become their 
leaders.Though to arrive to such a conclusion needs a deeper look into the 
whole situation ,but,in my opinion,they are all political dictators in my 
books.

For Freedom
Saiks


>From: Baba Galleh Jallow <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list              
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: On Oppression and the Oppressed
>Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:33:47 +0000
>
>On Oppression and the Oppressed - A short essay
>
>By Baba Galleh Jallow
>
>Clearly, one of the most intractable problems facing Africa today is the 
>problem of oppression. The continent is littered with an ugly coterie of 
>oppressive political regimes as well as a critical mass of people trying to 
>resist this oppression, getting stigmatized, jailed, maimed, exiled, and 
>killed in the process. One of the means at the disposal of this critical 
>mass of oppressed “freedom fighters” is the acquisition of knowledge and a 
>greater understanding of the nature of the oppressor in relation to 
>themselves, the oppressed. For it is not enough that we know the oppressor; 
>we also need to know ourselves as people trying to bring about an end to 
>oppression. This short essay is meant as a modest contribution to that 
>self-knowledge and knowledge of the nature of oppression.
>
>The oppressor, whatever his motivations, seeks to distort the humanity of 
>the oppressed. He seeks to retard the growth of the people, chops off any 
>emerging buds of popular progress, plucks out any spots of light and sight, 
>seals tight any outlets of enlightenment, and menacingly hovers over the 
>heads of the oppressed in order to instill maximum terror and compliance 
>through a regime of actual or potential violence, physical and 
>psychological. Oppression manifests itself as a form of violence because it 
>constitutes a denial of full humanity to the oppressed; because it denies 
>people the possibility of self-affirmation, the pursuit of one’s right to 
>self-fulfillment as a full human being. Oppression is violence because the 
>oppressor appropriates to himself all rights of being, of self-fulfillment, 
>of the enjoyment of unrestricted freedoms, of a certain state of exception 
>in which he stands outside the law, while engaging the law to impose an 
>unquestionable regime of hegemony on the people. As the Brazilian writer 
>Paulo Freire puts it, “The oppressor consciousness tends to transform 
>everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, 
>property, production, the creation of people, people themselves, time – 
>everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal.” Everything 
>within its territory, in effect, is considered the personal property of the 
>oppressor and everything within its territory that refuses to be owned, 
>domesticated, and controlled must either be eliminated or neutralized. Any 
>individual or institution within this space that refuses to be turned into 
>a dehumanized, passive, and unquestioning object is regarded as a 
>subversive entity.
>
>We do not need to look far to see the manifestation of this oppressive 
>reality. We do not need to look far to see oppressors turning on the 
>oppressed and calling them evil beings, subversive liars, unpatriotic and 
>envious demons, enemies of progress and other negative imaginaries because 
>they refuse to be turned into lifeless objects and possessions of the 
>oppressor to be exploited and discarded at will. The oppressor does not see 
>that he is the source of the resistance he is confronted with, that the 
>oppressed are merely reacting to his untenable claims to their ownership 
>and the ownership of the collective property that is the nation-state, that 
>they are simply following the natural and healthy course of reaffirming and 
>pursuing their inalienable right to remain fully human, to refuse to be 
>dehumanized, objectified and relegated to the status of nonentities who 
>must live the rest of their lives in a state of tortured nothingness.
>
>Faced with the prospect of being rendered null and void as human beings 
>even as they live the one and only single life they have, it is the natural 
>vocation of a conscious people to resist oppression, to refuse to be 
>terrorized and dehumanized through engagement in an uncompromising regime 
>of self-humanization, self-expression, and the total rejection of the 
>unjust oppressive order bolstered by a regime of violence and intimidation. 
>While the goal of the oppressed must never be the counter-oppression of the 
>oppressor, the message to the oppressor must be couched in no uncertain 
>terms. It must be made loud and clear to the oppressor that the oppressed 
>refuses to be dehumanized and objectified and that the oppressed insists on 
>the enjoyment of their right to full humanity – all those rights that come 
>with the reality of being fully human. But while the possibility of 
>becoming human and ending oppression must always be made implicit in the 
>message to the oppressor, the person who seeks to end oppression must never 
>fall to the temptation of trying to pacify the oppressor because this, as 
>Freire tells us again, makes the person who seeks justice a dispenser of 
>false generosity, an adherent to a regime of circular self-truths who grows 
>strangely agitated whenever any of those self-truths are challenged or 
>questioned.
>
>History is replete with examples of “freedom fighters” who become 
>oppressors as soon as they assume positions of power. This is because at 
>the critical moment of their fight against oppression, they had conceived a 
>fear of freedom itself. They had wavered between their initial principled 
>positions of uncompromising opponents of oppression and a newly assumed 
>position of a fake perception of pacification as a more viable alternative 
>and line of defense against oppression. They tend to edge closer to the 
>oppressor, granting him a certain veiled acceptance through a lame regime 
>of rationalizations and apologetics, through a lame appeal to reason and 
>fairness, and by citing lame pointers to the reality of an unalterable 
>imperfection of being, of life, the necessity of compromise in the service 
>of the exigencies of daily life. They are caught between the desire for 
>freedom and a cold, belly-numbing fear of freedom or its possibility. They 
>swing and waver with dizzying uncertainty and tend, to quote Freire again, 
>“to prefer the security of conformity . . . to the creative communion 
>produced by freedom and even the pursuit of freedom.”  They experience this 
>dilemma because from the very beginning, what they really “fought” for was 
>not the full liberation and full humanization of society, but the 
>privilege, perhaps subconscious, of identifying with the oppressor, of 
>enjoying the privileges enjoyed by the oppressor, of the opportunity to 
>rise to the level of the oppressor and share in the glittering trappings of 
>the oppressor’s perceived high station. This 
>freedom-fighter-turned-oppressor started out really focusing on the pursuit 
>of individual or class interests rather than the interests of the social 
>collectivity. Such a pursuit inevitably distorts and corrupts his mission 
>so that he becomes an oppressor as soon as he becomes powerful enough. It 
>is an absolute prerequisite for one who desires to resist oppressive 
>dehumanization that he must lose sight of individual and class interests 
>and set his sights upon the interests of the popular collectivity. One 
>cannot be free from the “oppressor consciousness” so long as one is 
>obsessed with the protection or preservation of individual or class 
>interests. While seeking to preserve individual or class interests might 
>appear the sensible thing to do in an environment of oppression, it is in 
>reality a dangerous path to perdition. The ancient African aphorism that 
>you cannot dance and dig at the same time exemplifies the folly of trying 
>to rationalize oppression even as we pose as enemies of oppression and 
>injustice.
>
>The person who desires freedom from oppression must therefore assume a 
>principled and uncompromising posture of rejection of oppression. Short of 
>engaging in physical violence, the person who seeks liberation must 
>relentless shove bitter doses of truth medicine down the throat of the 
>oppressor. And equally important, such a person must see the current 
>oppressive situation not as a hopeless permanent situation, or a situation 
>that has to be endured at all costs, but as a situation that, like all 
>others, is located within the ever-rotating wheel of life and must 
>therefore one day pass from actuality to potentiality or non-being. The 
>person who seeks liberation must therefore engage in a regime of resistance 
>perpetually inspired by an unshakeable conviction that oppression is to be 
>rejected without qualification, and that what comes next must be carefully 
>and constantly contemplated and visualized every step of the way.
>
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