By Kofi Annan
Global warming does not respect borders. A mindset shift is required if world leaders are to save us from ourselves
The UN climate change conference in Copenhagen offers the prospect of a robust political deal, endorsed by the world's leaders and witnessed by the world's people, that sets out clear targets and a timeline for translating it into law. To be a truly historic achievement, such a deal must do two things.
First, it must lay the basis for a global regime and subsequent agreements that limit global temperature rise in accordance with the scientific evidence. Second, it must provide clarity on the mobilisation and volume of financial resources to support developing countries to adapt to climate change.
The stakes are enormous. Economic growth has been achieved at great environmental and social cost, aggravating inequality and human vulnerability. The irreparable damage that is being inflicted on ecosystems, agricultural productivity, forests and water systems is accelerating. Threats to health, life and livelihoods are growing. Disasters are also increasing in scale and frequency.
But despite the mounting evidence of negative impacts, reaching a deal will not be easy. It will require extraordinary political courage – both to cut the deal and to communicate its necessity to the public.
A mindset shift is required. Distrust and competition persist between regions and nations, manifest in a "no, you must show your cards first" attitude that has dogged the negotiations leading up to Copenhagen. This has to be overcome.
A deal that is not based on the best scientific evidence will be nothing better than a line in the sand as the tide comes in. But short-term considerations, including from special interest groups and electoral demands, are working against long-term solutions.
Success in reaching a deal will require leaders to think for future generations, and for citizens other than their own. It will require them to think about inclusive and comprehensive arrangements, not just a patched up compilation of national or regional interests.
A deal that stops at rhetoric and does not actually meet the needs of the poorest and most climate vulnerable countries simply will not work. The climate cannot be "fixed" in one continent and not another. Climate change does not respect national borders. We are all in the same boat; a hole at one end will sink us all.
For it to work, climate justice must be at the heart of the agreement. An unfair deal will come unstuck. Industrialised countries such as the United States must naturally take the lead in reducing emissions and supporting others to follow suit, but developing countries like India or China also have an increasing responsibility to do so as their economies continue to grow.
Tragically, it is the poorest and least responsible who are having to bear the brunt of the climate challenge as rising temperatures exacerbate poverty, hunger and vulnerability to disease for billions of people. They need both immediate help to strengthen their climate resilience as well as long-term support to enable them to adapt to changing weather patterns, reduce deforestation, and pursue low-emissions, clean energy growth strategies.
The deal must include a package of commitments in line with the science and the imperative of reducing global emissions by 50-85% relative to 2000 levels by 2050.
This requires a schedule for richer countries to move to 25-40% emission cuts by 2020 from 1990 baselines; clear measures for emerging economies to cut emissions intensity; and clarity about both immediate and longer term finance and technical support for developing countries, notably the poorest and most vulnerable among them.
Will we get there? The targets that have been proposed for emission reductions by many industrialised countries such as the EU, Japan and Norway are encouraging, as are those being made by the big emerging economies including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and South Korea.
Recent announcements by the US on emission targets represent a significant shift and provide a basis for scaling up commitments in the coming years. So does the recognition by emerging economies that they also have a role in supporting the most vulnerable countries.
Welcome too are the proposals for financial support to LDCs and small island states made at the Commonwealth summit in Trinidad, as well as proposals by the Netherlands, France, and the UK, among others.
But much greater specificity on finance is needed. Existing official development assistance (ODA) commitments to help the poorest countries meet the Millennium Development Goals need to be met. And significant additional finance that is separate from and additional to ODA needs to be mobilised to support them meet the incremental costs generated by climate change.
A deal that is not clear on the finance will be both unacceptable to developing countries, and unworkable. Finding the additional resources and communicating its necessity will not be easy, particularly in the current economic climate, but it must be done.
A successful deal could incentivise not only good stewardship of forests and more sustainable land use, but also massive investment into low-carbon growth and a healthier planet, including in sectors such as energy generation, construction and transportation.
And it could usher in an era of qualitatively new international co-operation based on common but differentiated responsibilities – not just for managing climate change, but for human development, social justice and global security.
Ultimately, at stake is whether our leaders can work to help us save ourselves from … well, from ourselves. The legacy of today's politicians will be determined in the weeks to come.
• Kofi Annan was UN secretary-general from 1997 to 2006. He now chairs the Kofi Annan Foundation and the Africa Progress Panel and is president of the Global Humanitarian Forum
Thursday 10 December 2009
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.
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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