In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

61 Chapter Eleven PHANTOMS OF THE PAST ne of the contraptions conceived by the West to subjugate Africans was the myth about Africa’s barbarity. The white man arrogated upon himself the task of bringing light to the so-called “dark” continent. Africans were perceived as a benighted savage cannibalistic bunch of people devoid of civilization. However, underlying this seeming benevolence was the belief that the African continent would become a source of raw materials to feed Western industries. The lust for wealth engulfed even some European priests, who abandoned their evangelizing mission, took black women as concubines, kept slaves themselves, and sold their “converts” into slavery. Unaware of the evil deeds of these self-styled missionaries, Africans continued to revere them; oblivious of the fact that these priests were actually ancillaries of the colonial administration. Mongo Beti has described the “civilizing mission” as a gigantic western scheme used as a ploy to dispossess Africans not only of their wealth but also of their cultural identity. As Bjornson (1991:328) has pointed out: By unmasking the self-serving rhetoric that obscures the nature of neo-colonialist exploitation, Beti proposed to destroy the credibility of this false image. Beti argues that every African intellectual has an obligation to foster the culture of his people and to control its image because those who fail to do so will fall prey to the bluff about the superiority of the white man’s culture. What he means by “culture” is not an outmoded set of superstitions but rather the actual life and aspirations of the people. Hoodwinked by the white man’s self-proclaimed superiority over the dark race, Africans and people of African descent have failed to realize that the West harbors its own savages and cannibals? In other words, what has been brandished as modernism in the West is only a façade calculated to shroud the barbaric nature of Westerners. If you take a walk down memory lane and recall the genocide of the American Indians, you would agree with the point I am trying to make. The story of the encounter between European settlers and America’s native population does not make for pleasant reading. Among early accounts, perhaps the most famous is Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1888), a doleful recitation of forced O 62 removals, killings, and callous disregard. Jackson’s book clearly captures some essential elements of what happened. Another scholar that has written about the genocide of native Americans is Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. He contends that the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a "vast genocide [...] the most sustained on record."(Quoted in Lewy,1) By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, native Americans had undergone the "worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people."( Quoted in Lewy,1) In the judgment of Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., “there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a “race” of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history."(Quoted in Lewy,1) I have singled out the American Indian Holocaust for discussion because of the importance of America in the game of pace-setting on the globe. The West is replete with similar histories. More recently, in July 20, 2004, the ‘Associated Press’ carried a headline story of a cannibal resident in Kansas city in the United States of America. The paper reported that on July 23, 2004, twenty-five yearold Marc Sappington was convicted of murdering three acquaintances, including a teenager whose body was dismembered and partially eaten. The cannibal pleaded guilty on murder charges as well as one count each of kidnapping and aggravated burglary stemming from a separate carjacking. Sappington told the court that voices ordered him to kill and eat Terry Green, 25, Michael Weaver Jr., 22 and Alton Fred Brown 16, over a four-day span in April 2001. He further asserted that the voices he heard told him he had to eat human flesh and drink human blood or he would die—voices he said he only heard when he was high on the hallucinogenic drug called PCP. Your take...

Share