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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