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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