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.
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