Mr Jallow,

Thank you for a very insightful essay.  It is simply beautiful and
should make us to stop and think deeply about our situation.

Best,

Mboge

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:16 AM, Baba Galleh Jallow <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Thanks Demba. Glad you like the piece. As Mahatma Gandhi teaches us, in
> order to effectively rule one's nation, one must first learn to effectively
> rule oneself (See his *Hind Swaraj*).
>
>
> ------------------------------
> Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 14:28:59 -0800
> From: [log in to unmask]
>  Subject: Re: The Oppressor and the Oppressed
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Baba,
>
> Absolutely magnificient and oh! how true and real you put it. This piece
> really should get a lot of us thinking and thinking hard.  This paragraph
> does it for me and I thank you for reminding us that we are victims of not
> only the Oppressor but ourselves as the oppressed failing to internalize the
> reality and live upto it.
>
> "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."
>
> Thanks you...
>
> Demba
>
> On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Baba Galleh Jallow <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
>
> Dear Edi,
>
> Thank you for your very kind words. You too, are a great person and have
> been making great contributions to our common fund of knowledge and wisdom.
> May God bless and guide you too. Thanks a lot for the encouraging words. May
> we all have a blessed New Year.
>
> Kind regards,
> Baba
>
> ------------------------------
> Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 21:49:04 +0000
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: The Oppressor and the Oppressed
>
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
>   Baba you are unquestionably great a poet, and thank for your spiritual
> and well meaning piece of writing thanks you for making my day with your
> touchy words. I love you Galleh and God will surely bless you on this kind
> of heart towards humanity and the course of the misunderstanding between
> people who are of the same motivation for failing to understand or lost on
> the road towards achieving their goal.
>
> Too sad and same to the politician who are themselves oppressors on the
> waiting, for if they are not oppressors on the waiting they will throw away
> their foolish pride and stop coursing or creating differences between people
> who supposed to be one. blessed you Baba Edi
>
> --- On *Wed, 9/12/09, Baba Galleh Jallow <[log in to unmask]>* wrote:
>
>
> From: Baba Galleh Jallow <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: The Oppressor and the Oppressed
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Wednesday, 9 December, 2009, 22:27
>
> The Oppressor and the Oppressed
> 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
> relentlessly 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.
> 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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