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Africa: How to Liberate from Colonialism? | Crisis Is Always Past

Harry November 21, 2024

Nairobi — History needs to be evaluated to understand current and future humanitarian crises.

One hundred and forty years ago, representatives from almost all countries of Europe as well as the United States gathered in Berlin for 15 weeks to deliberate on the rules of what became known as the African Challenge.

Held from November 1884 to February 1885, it was an event in which no African representatives were allowed to attend and the rights and sovereignty of African peoples were subjugated to European greed for their lands and resources.

Although the Berlin West African Conference, officially known as the Berlin Conference, legitimized conquest and dispossession, it was disguised as humanitarianism. resulted in adoption General LawAmong other things, he declared the thieves’ council’s “concern” “regarding the means of promoting the spiritual and material well-being of indigenous peoples.”

The anniversary will pass largely unnoticed, but it should matter to journalists trying to help audiences understand the roots of today’s endless conflicts and humanitarian crises on the continent. There is a tendency to dehistoricize these and essentialize them as curiosities arising from mysterious “African” conditions.

But the reshaping of the continent to fit the European imagination had devastating and long-lasting effects, many of which are still felt today. It hollowed out the political, economic and social structures of the continent’s indigenous people, destroyed, recreated and hardened identities through divide and rule, inventing traditions even as it stripped the natives of their past.

It is not surprising that the fragmented, manufactured countries that emerged from this traumatic experience, tied to colonial masters, have struggled to cope with global political and environmental upheavals ever since; not to mention inherent diseases like corruption and tribalism. their colonial legacy.

None of this is to undermine African agency; Rather, it is to understand that agency is exercised and influenced by the context in which it is exercised, and that agency does not always presuppose free choices.

In Kenya, for example, the British created 41 administrative districts; From these regions, 42 “tribes” emerged from a hodgepodge of hundreds of varying ethnicities; Each of them has an “ancient” past created by the colonialists, constantly fighting with themselves. neighbors.

Similarly, it is difficult to understand the terrible state of affairs of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including the unmitigated and genocidal horrors of the Congo Free State that emerged from the Berlin Conference, without reference to its occupation by Belgium.

It is not just in Africa where an understanding of history is necessary to understand crises.

In the Caribbean, Haiti’s chronic problems can be traced to its creation as a slave colony, the “debt” its people had to pay to France to gain their freedom, and the numerous invasions and robberies carried out by the United States.

It is worth remembering that wherever a humanitarian crisis is encountered around the world, they are almost never isolated events that can be clearly separated from historical circumstances. It is these conditions that help explain what is the fundamental criterion of humanitarian crises: fragility.

Inside previous How to Liberate from Colony? colonIn , I underlined the need for journalists to be “careful, thoughtful, consistent, and clear about how they use human language and what they mean by it.”

An internal working group at The New Humanitarian defines a humanitarian crisis as occurring when “over time, a community’s capacity to cope with human, physical, economic or environmental challenges is increasingly and severely undermined or overwhelmed by local and/or global crises.” He suggested defining . policy factors”. The idea here is not only to focus on how events affect and impoverish large numbers of people, but also to suggest why vulnerability exists.

Historically, news about crises has tended to construct a bifurcated and ultimately inaccurate version of the world, characterized by Western competence and non-Western precariousness. However, investigating the reasons for this insecurity is rarely included in the field of journalism; It is accepted as a natural order that Africans will starve, West Asians will fight, and Latin America’s banana republics will oppress. The reasons why these situations occur in some geographies but do not become widespread in others are often ignored as the subject of history.

Why has history not only allowed journalists to begin to confront the racially and geographically deterministic mindsets they have internalized, but why, for example, more than a million Americans have died from Covid? constitutes a complex humanitarian emergency – hopefully leading not only to more consistent use of language, but also to questioning what constitutes a valid humanitarian intervention.