On Oppression and the Oppressed – Part Two By Baba Galleh Jallow A discussion of oppression and the oppressed must inevitably lead us to the issue of who leads the struggle for liberation from oppression. In most cases, such a role is assumed by people who are academically and economically better off than the average oppressed person; these people step forward to assume the mantle of leadership against oppression, to act as champions of the oppressed, and as voices of those they consider the voiceless. They form political organizations and create manifestos and slogans proclaiming their aims and objectives, and set about condemning the oppressors while at the same time courting the support of the oppressed by offering themselves up as better alternatives to the oppressors. The interesting thing is that in at least 8 out of 10 cases, these champions of the oppressed fail in their endeavors; or in the rare situations in which they succeed, find themselves proving unequal to their self-assigned task of ending oppression, becoming instead as bad as, or even worse than, the oppressors they dislodge. While there are undoubtedly many reasons for this failure of leadership, a failure to truly identify with the oppressed masses must rank among the top causes. Coming mostly from middle-class backgrounds, most leaders of anti-oppression movements fail to truly identify with the oppressed people. Rather than view and treat the people as partners to be creatively engaged and dialogued with in the course of the struggle against oppression, such leaders specialize in the ephemeral politics of propaganda, slinging mud at their opponents on all sides of the political divide and preaching endlessly to the people on how morally superior they are and what glittering goodies they would deliver should they assume positions of power and authority. They engage in such empty politicking with the erroneous presupposition that all the people want to hear is how their current lot will be improved once the oppressor is removed from power. Sadly, in most cases, these messages, because they sound so commonplace and monotonous, fail to register with the people and these leaders are dismissed as just another bunch of power-hungry politicians. During Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde’s struggle for liberation from Portuguese colonialism, Amilcar Cabral repeatedly taught that those intellectuals who wanted to be true and effective leaders of the people must commit what he called class suicide. They must be able to purge themselves of all pretences to superior knowledge, wisdom or leadership skills, and identify totally with the oppressed if they wanted to be authentic leaders of the people. He argued that a leadership that seeks to lead from whatever kind of high pedestal is doomed to failure. Once they totally identify with the people and the people with them, those who assume leadership of the oppressed will find, when they assume positions of political power, that they are either unable or unwilling to become oppressors because of their internalized and assimilated affinities with the people. The necessity of class suicide aside, it has also been observed that some oppressed people tend to be more hostile towards each other than towards their oppressors. Many oppressed people tend to assume a fatalistic attitude vis-à-vis their oppression, blaming their unhappy conditions on divine providence and therefore failing to see any connection between their sufferings and their oppressors. And the oppressor, through a malicious combination of vicious cunning and open brutality, dedicates all his energies at keeping things just this way by making the people believe that the best way to keep out of unnecessary trouble is through a slavish regime of total, unquestioning submission. This often leads to a situation in which all the repressed humiliation and rage of the oppressed are horizontally unleashed at their fellow oppressed at the slightest semblance of provocation. Frantz Fanon observed this curious phenomenon among the oppressed Algerian peasants in The Wretched of the Earth. “While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him, and to make him crawl to them,” he writes, “you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native.” But while a certain degree of fear may be excused at the level of the peasant – the oppressed person who does not entirely blame his wretched plight on the oppressor – the issue becomes tricky when we note that this horizontal hostility towards fellow oppressed is also found among the ranks of those who pose as champions of the oppressed. Indeed, the mutual hostility and unhealthy rivalry within and between the leadership of opposition and alternative political parties and organizations in Africa is far more acrimonious than that expressed towards the oppressive regimes they are out to replace. The oppressor regime can dish out any number of demeaning slurs and even outright insults on the heads of opposition leaders with little or no comparable reaction or response. But one mild word of criticism or disagreement from one opposition leader to the other often has the effect of eliciting a disproportionate barrage of invectives against the daring culprit. Some scholars like Paulo Freire and Albert Memmi attribute this strange phenomenon partly to a certain inferiority complex on the part of the opposition leaders and partly to an unconscious desire to be seen as high and mighty as the oppressor and therefore way above being the object of such petty criticisms from their fellow equal opposition leaders. But this tendency of the oppressed to be hostile to their fellow victims of oppression is not limited to the peasant and the leaders alone. It is also observed among the ranks of oppressed people located between the masses on one hand and the leaders on the other. This middle section of “freedom fighters” are often observed engaging in a kind of horizontal hostility with their supposed comrades in the anti-oppression struggle to the extent that they lose sight of their original objective. Thus in discussion groups, Diasporan communities, and internet mailing lists, one observes a troubling level of horizontal hostility and acrimonious debate between people supposed to be fighting for an end to oppression. One observes a troubling trend towards the creation of acute hostility and enmity within the ranks of people who are supposed to be fighting the same monster of oppression and for a certain level of tolerance and mutual respect for one another. What should happen in such forums is not endless bickering, the assumption of rigid, unchanging positions, or the presumption of infallibility, but the observance of maximum civility on all sides – a desire to teach and a readiness to learn; a desire to convince and a readiness to be convinced; a desire to prove that one’s position is right, and a readiness to be proven wrong; a habit of always keeping in mind that all human beings are fallible, that people have a right to their opinions, however contrary to one’s own; that in building a democratic culture, we must start from within our own selves. Intolerance of dissenting opinion, it should be remembered, is one of the chief defining characteristics of oppression. _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! 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