After Colonialism

...EAST WIND OVER AFRICA By John K. Cooley Walker...

...Cooley unwittingly demonstrates that the Chinese, for all their wily and inscrutable machinations, have also been unsuccessful...

...But how we need such reporters in an age when most British journalists are trying to match Evelyn Waugh's Ishmaelian correspondents-giving us personalized pap-and most American correspondents are aping John Gunther's offerings of formless facts...

...A deeply prejudiced Britisher in Kenya stays on happily, once having conceded that power rests with the fly-whisk in Kenyatta's hand...

...The fruits of the continent are not going to be given up to them any more easily just because they are able to buy that minister, build that dam, promote that rebellion...

...he simply does not happen to be the inheritor of a tradition of culture (in which, for example, romantic love plays a major part he could hardly understand), language and logic that is peculiar to our GrecoChristian world...

...But there are many places where people react differently: If you had an accident when you parked your car over the rim of a hill yesterday, you curse a man or expiate a god, but you can feel safe in doing the same thing today because observable logic is not at work on the road, but rather haphazard evil...

...A Kenyan politician, attempting to explain "Uhuru" to a foreigner, argued seriously that freedom is "doing what your father tells you to...

...Let us send Peace Corps volunteers, by all means, and wizened philosophers if we must...

...His heart is peasantlike, simple, angry, feels everything is mysterious...

...5.95...

...whatever gains they have made have come through the use of the pocketbook and not the heart...

...It is rather that the gulf between the European and African cultures is as vast and as unbridgeable as ever...

...For all his basic good sense, Memmi's display fails...

...At that time, moreover, he prided himself excessively in it and had little sense of the need for accommodation of-or even of the existence of-other cultures...

...Logic is not universal, no matter how much the Greeks insisted it was...

...The white Kenyan can find an accommodation ("I'd rather have my throat cut here than retire in England We've all got used to Africans in the clubs and restaurants...

...But first we have to see that it is there...

...Memmi demonstrates that the French (and by extension, the British) had no success in bridging the gulf and turned instead to shoring it...

...while an unprejudiced white Rhodesian wrestles with the fear that the Africans around him would just not provide the kind of nation in which his values have a chance of surviving...

...But when all the lists are drawn and the ogres begin to shrink, it is clear that the Chinese really have not been successful after all...

...It is not surprising that he could do no more than enslave the people he came to deal with, for when communication fails, the only recourse is coercion...

...And in each country the attitudes seem to work...

...West shows that the whites of the bottom half of the continent had no better success, and for the most part have given up trying...

...Livingstone...

...Memmi's book, an American edition of a work first published in France in 1957, portrays the figures on both sides of the gap...

...For Memmi is at base part colonizer and part colonized, and the interplay creates not understanding but, predictably, confusion...

...Recognizing this, it becomes easier to understand why the whole of colonialism was such a muck-up...

...On the contrary, they are as baffled by the Africans as the British were, and their yellow skin gives them no better understanding of the black than our pink one does...

...He is so French from the neck up that he can declare he is writing "an inventory of conditions of colonized people"-as if these could be inventoried!-"in order to understand myself and to identify my place in the society of other men...

...In the process, and apparently unconsciously, West accurately measures the cultural gulf in whitesettled Africa-Kenya, Rhodesia, South Africa and the Portuguese territories...

...let us keep trying, from some discreet wing, to search for, even to build, the tenuous bridges that may help to narrow the gulf...

...However silly his title, he records with an excellent ear (if a dubious sense of history) the complicated response to the winds of change of those who wish to be unchanging...

...The logical conclusion of all this is that we must listen to the cry of the African orators: "Africa for the Africans...

...Perhaps a few chance incidents from my own experience will help convey what I mean: A Nigerian driver of a lorry in which I happened to be a passenger could see no reason not to park in the middle of a highway, out of sight just over the ridge of a hill, to fix a flateven though his brother, only the week before, had lost his truck in an accident when he did the same...

...Africa for the Africans-perhaps outsiders will one day learn to understand the lesson...

...Thus colonialism soon built its deaf machine of dictatorial control, and for both enslaver and slaved, might alone meant light...

...And though there are some excellent strokes, spread with remarkable clarity and dispassion on each portrait, none emerge clearly in the end...

...They barge in, secure in the knowledge that, given the chance, they will be able to understand Africa, to cross the gulf earlier colonizers created by racial bias (so say the Chinese), capitalistic profit motive (so say the Russians), or lack of identity with the natives (so say we...

...Such incidents reflect a deep and sometimes almost unnegotiable cultural division...

...What Albert Memmi does seem to realize in his The Colonizer and the Colonized, is that the twain do not meet-or at least not without their mutual peril...

...The whites of Kenya and Rhodesia have learned that the real cause of separation is two cultures, two logics, two languages in conflict...

...He is not stupid-not at all...

...So far, we have been marching ahead, chin high, and stumbling into it in the dark...

...Not that they always do a good job-but it is clear that we have not either...

...Not surprisingly today in Africa the colonizer (or ex-colonizer) powerful, narrowminded and high-minded, self-sacrificing and self-serving is still incapable of bridging the gap between himself and the colonized (or oncecolonized)-willing and devious, absorptive and resistant...

...Richard West, who concentrates only on the colonizers, is obviously dealing with a simpler subject and he succeeds in being much clearer than Memmi...

...He has written a simple, straightforward and complete account of what the Chinese have done in Africa, and he tries to show that because they work so hard for success they succeed...

...no communication, only the machinery of giving and accepting orders...

...He quotes the broadcasts and names the manipulators, pointing out who is where and why...

...it is a sad, over-wrought testament of the unbridgeability of the cultural gulf...

...Reviewed by J. KIRK SALE Editorial staff, "New York Times Magazine" The legacy of colonialism that most encumbers Western relations with Africa, is not the bitter xenophobia of the young African nationalists, nor the ritual anti-Western politics of the African left, nor even Portugal's anachronistic rule over its feeble colonies...

...The brash nations new to colonialism-America, Russia, Chinadon't seem to realize this...

...The 19th century Briton or Frenchman was entrapped in one culture...

...the South African, a brutal tyranny ("The black giant of Africa wants to talk about things he does not yet understand, wants to be where he still is not The real giant of Africa [is] the white man -and his name is Afrikaner...

...In his East Wind Over Africa, John K. Cooley demonstrates the Chinese failure-though he hardly seems to recognize, as he shakes his head over their "African offensive, that they have in fact failed...

...his mind is full of French philosophy and cerebral French notions that everything can be categorized and measured...

...In the independent countries, where the whites have proven to be a mere gadfly and not the giant monolith that the African nationalists once suspected them of being, and where the African can-and sometimes does-control his own uncertain destiny, the gulf is just as broad and the relations between native and outsider just as murky...

...It is not only in the white-dominated countries, however, that the gulf is obvious...

...logic is a cultural phenomenon, and its tenets take different shapes, and its syllogisms different forms, under the tropical sun...

...246 pp...

...He therefore believes he knows both well: His heart tells him how painful it is to live under the boot of the French, while his mind tells him how delightful it is to read their encyclopedias...

...Only a Frenchman would think that by defining terms and constructing categories he could know himself...

...West, it is true, is "just" a reporter...

...the Rhodesians, a nervous intransigence ("Don't you agree that the coons are inferior...

...Like Racine, Memmi believes that form is substance, and philosophizing, truth...

...The great myth is that it is racial prejudice which basically separates white and black...

...Yet the new colonizers have had no more success than the old in crossing the gulf...

...West shows that racial prejudice is indeed the smallest of Africa's cultural barriers...

...The tragedy is that when colonialism was forced to bow out (or to find more devious forms), it left no understanding as a legacy, only a regimen...

...And the Ghanaian peasant was completely bewildered by the concept that two-plus-two-equals-four, because his life, and therefore his language, had no use and no meaning for such a concept...

...And for that matter, whatever the educative effect of cultural anthropology, we seldom realize how much a prisoner of our inheritance we are-at least until put down in the midst of those who do not share it...

...Memmi is a Tunisian Jew of a class which the French consider colonized, yet which regards itself a segment of the colonizers...

...We are left with a European book with Frenchified thoughts, and the feeling that his unhappy African self is rolled up somewhere around a small woodfire in a battered hut that is hidden, as always, from the outside eye...

...But in none of these countries is there the hoped for blurring of lines between black and white...

...West's The White Tribes of Africa is the result of a journey in 1964 through the white-settled areas of Africa, during which he changed from a vaguely pro-settler, conservative iconoclast to a man who realizes the wrongness and futility of trying to make a black continent white...

...It is extremely difficult to carry on the most ordinary kinds of business with a man who not only lacks any sense of "twoplus-two" but also makes none of the same logical connections you make in talking about the matter...

...For us, the past determines the future: If you had an accident when you parked your car over the rim of a hill yesterday, you will not park in the same spot today...

...In fact, far from having been narrowed during the colonial years, the distance and misunderstanding between the European and African are probably greater today than in the era of Dr...