Ethnicity and Race in Africa

Frantz Fanon offered a trenchant critique of colonialism as a form of racism at both the institutional and interpersonal levels. Being a psychiatrist, he was particularly interested in the manner in which colonial racism created problems of self-identification for blacks since it conveyed the brutal message that might was right and might was almost invariably white. By simple deduction, therefore, white was almost always right. Fanon argued very forcefully that the colonizers had successfully imposed their image of the colonized on Africans and that it was incumbent on Africans to rid themselves of this image of inferiority, often through violence. Colonial subjugation had a devastating effect on black subjects that the postcolonial regimes have not overcome, because in many ways the new black elites have simply mimicked their past rulers in the most grotesque fashion.

The Senegalese poet and president Léopold Sédar Senghor, in developing the concept of negritude, provided an eloquent negation of French culture and the colonial policies of assimilation and acculturation that produced black Frenchmen and -women as "photographic negatives of the colonizers." While their knowledge of French culture, their French accents, and their appreciation of the finer qualities of French wine may have been impeccable, a racial line prevented blacks from becoming fully fledged Frenchmen and -women. Thus, Senghor and a host of others reacted in various ways to this racial exclusion that Paul Gilroy captured so eloquently for England in his captivating title There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack.

Amilcar Cabral, for example, articulated a theory of liberation based on the retained collective cultural identity of blacks as distinct from that of the Portuguese colonialists, in his clarion call to "return to the source." His theory was rooted in the material conditions of Guinea that he regarded as a reservoir of local experiences ripe for anticolonial mobilization. Under these conditions liberation was necessarily an act of asserting and affirming African culture.

The Francophone and Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) African experiences were very different from the Anglophone, where, for example, racial exclusion led Steve Biko to a departure from the white liberal student organization as part of the Black Consciousness movement. The move was couched in political as well as psychological terms. Having seen blacks oppressed to such an extent that they started to actively despise themselves, Biko preached a counterideology of psychological liberation as a precondition for true emancipation, using slogans such as "Black man you are on your own" and "Black is beautiful." The apartheid regime defined black in the narrow sense to mean only those Africans who spoke indigenous languages, excluding the so-called coloreds and Indians. The black consciousness movement responded with a generic definition of blackness to encompass all those who suffered a common political disability, having been disenfranchised. Black was thus defined politically to mean all those who would readily support the struggle against apartheid, while those who worked the machinery of their own oppression were termed sellouts, just as similar people were called Negroes in the United States.

Given the extreme, official, and institutionalized form of racism of apartheid, it was appropriate that the third United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (Durban, 2001) should be held in South Africa. One of the debates of relevance to the definition of racism concerned whether Zionism should be included as a form of racism in terms of the manner in which the Israeli state treated the Palestinians. Both the Israeli and United States governments withdrew from the conference on account of this and other issues, while Yasser Arafat was adamant in describing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land as "a racial discrimination policy in their ugliest forms and image" and "a new and advanced type of apartheid."