Regulars
from the editor Baffour’s Beefs
“The typical African ... is a happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking in self control and “When your master is your enemy,
If only the tables could be turned!
Al Gathafi and the others
foresight, naturally courageous, and naturally y u are doomed.”
B
courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity ... in brief, the virtues of this race are those of attractive children”
Lord Frederick Lugard, first governor of Nigeria
marching in London to protest against an imminent war on Iraq slaves on several plantations in the Caribbean. He was speaking
in the House of Commons on 10 June 1806 in a debate on a Reso- lution to abolish the African Slave Trade. (See our Black History Month coverage, starting from page 28 onwards): “I, as an individual,” Mr Barham told the Commons, “have tried to bring about a improvement of that kind [ie, slaves obta ning the condition of free labour] among some of my own Negroes, but p ina their present st te, I do not hink they can be prevailed upon to w “ork for money. A Negro does not understand ny condition column (Open door, Oct 20) that your general policy is not to report marches – how did I not realise this after 30 years of marching? And yet in deciding, eventually, that you made a mistake by not covering the anti-war march o October 13, yo ally the paper with all who see the terrible deaths of September 11 as more worthy han all the terrible deaths we, t e public, have protes ed ov r in the past. The original policy is lacking all honour and a disgrace to e sometimes fine calling of journali m. Your job is t uth-telling. uggest you start doing it.”
then being planned by George Bush and his mate Tony Bl de Cusac’s letter, written from Manchester, where The Guardian had been born as the Manchester Guardian before it moved to London to become The Guardian, deserves to be set in stone. It said: “I am a third generation faithful Guardian reader of 30 years. I am now ashamed. And not because of your inexplicable leader complicity [sic] in the war. Fiercely opposed to military action, I nevertheless applaud the diversity of opinion expressed in the per, as I am equally devoted to democracy.
W 8 | July 2011 | New African
hy do I happen to come across such daft descriptions of the African, as above, lately? And all made by Englishmen! Listen to this one, uttered by one Mr Barham, a British MP who owned African ir. Luisa
I am stunned and appalled to learn from the Readers’ Editor’s but that of master and slave. He has so few wants that nothing you can offer him in the way of money will be regarded as an equivalent for his labour, when he has his choice between labour and est. With him, there is no privilege equal to that of being free from labour; for that reason a Negro is hardly ever induced to work as a free labourer: he has so few wants that money is no temptation to him. That he will be a soldier is true, because that is not inconsistent with his aversion from labour. He has no I w sants which the extra labour of a week will not furnish funds to supply for almost a year; and therefore he has no inducement to labour for hire...”
The second item concerned Harold Wilson, t e then British prime
minister, telling Africa and his political opponents at home that they could cry to high heaven if they chose, but he and his government would not send British troops to go and kill British-descended
10 | October 2011 | New African
Well, it takes the breath away, doesn’t it? It drains you, as an African, of all energy in your system when you come across
ored one evening in early June, I went in search of my faithful scrapbook and three items leapt at me from its pages. The first was a letter written on 22 October 2001 by an irate reader of the British daily, The Guardian, who could not fathom how a newspaper of The Guardian’s pedigree could refuse to cover a million or so people
people in Rhodesia whether that country’s prime minister, Ian Smith, had unilaterally declared independence from Britain or not! Written by a British professor, at the height of the British insist-
ence that South Africa should be more forceful with Zimbabwe on account of the political problems there spawned out of the land reform programme, the item reads: “The British refused to use their army against Ian Smith in 1965 during the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). Harold Wilson, on 30 October 1965, said: ‘I have met African leaders again and again and again, but I have had to tell them and it was not easy and it was a bitter pill for them to swallow, that their demands for such a pure insult to your being, and to your people and race with a military invasion, are out. If there are those in this country who are thinking in terms of a thunderbolt hurtling from the sky and destroying their enemies, a thunderbolt in the shape of the Royal Air Force, let me say that this will not be coming’.” The third item that caught my attention from my scrapbook was equally int iguing. Written by one of The Guardian’s truth- telling journalists, Seumas Milne, in his 1994 book, The Enemy WitBefore I become an emotional wreck (and don’t I deserve to heart of the incestuous relations that the British media have with heir government and the Establishment. Milne wrote, quoting William Cobbett, in the Political Register of August 1830: “Our press, Johannesburg
Britain to attempt to settle all of Rhodesia’s constitutional problems – coming from pers ns whose ancestors were living in caves, rudimen ary caves, when our ancestors, he African ancestors, ha alread built fine cities and great pyramids and monuments and cultures and civilisations in Ancient Egypt and elsewhere on the continent and beyond! “The virtues of this race are those of attractive children.” May the Lord have mercy on Lord Lugard, wherever he is! I hope not in Hell.
hin – The Secret War Against the Miners, this item goes to the b em tional when Lugard and Barham are spewing pure drivel?), t let me take you to the Oliver Reginald Tambo Airport (O.R. for short) in Johannesburg, South Africa. Thanks to the redevelop- ment that came with the Fifa World Cup 2010, nd the vilest thing”.
which you appear to regard as being free … is the most enslaved airport has become, to me, the best in Africa south of the Sahara. It is an indisputable beauty, viewed from the inside, especially where practical men p efer to shun the bigger picture and emin n h storians can take delight in claiming that world wars break out And yet, what is happening behind the scenes at this great airport shames South Africa. There is a group of workers at the andlers or security people I know not – who
Milne went on: “In a resolutely empiricist culture like Britain’s – from the top of the atrium downwards to the Arrivals Hall. Great piece of architecture.
because of the requirements of railway timetabl – it is hardly
surprising perhaps that many people feel unhappy with any sug- airport – luggage
gestion of behind-the-scenes collusion and manipulation of events. are bent on giving the a rport a bad name. Incidentally, Johan travel
To suggest anything else is regarded as somehow naïve and insuf- nesburg (or Joburg) has become the nerve centre of ai aith to insist on the ‘cock-up theory’ rather than the ‘conspiracy theory’ of history. Real life is, of course, a mixture of the two. “One side effect of this dogmatic insistence that events are rgely the produc of an arbitrary and contingent muddle has en the ch onic refusal ov r the years by the mainstrea media n Britain – and most opposition politicians – to probe or ques io he hidden agendas and u accountable, secret power structures In July this year, they so thoroughly ripped apart my luggage American journalism, which, for all its failings – especially over the establishment policy consensus – does at least maintain some tradition of investigation and scepticism about the activities of its country’s rulers.
ficiently worldly. Among journalists in particular, it is an article of f in he 15 SADC countries, and as such hundreds of thousands of passengers transit through O.R. Tambo to and from the countries in the region. And this th evin group of work rs at the Jobu g l aairport has made it their business to routinely tamper (no, that b ise a kind word), open, passengers’ luggage and steal from them. i It has happened to me six times in four journeys (in and out) in the past four months, transiting through Joburg.
at the heart of government. This is in striking contrast to North that it c me out on the carousel in Heathrow with two belts (thei belts) strapped around my bag. The zip could not be put back, perhaps it protested against the indecent assault it had b en put through, and as such the thieves had to hold my now tattered bag “ together with two belts. A d they left me no notice in th attempted to unearth some of Whitehall’s dirtier secrets, commented: ‘For the most part, the areas which t e Bri ish state does not want examined are still left alone by our serious papers’.
As Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, two authors who have bag to say who did it. A black elephant-skin trouser belt that Ive had bought in Zimbabwe was gone. It is a crying shame that they can steal such a thing at the Joburg airport. In the end, South
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