(From L-R) African Union Commission Chairperson Nkosazana Clarice
Dlamini Zuma, African Union and Mauritania President Mohamed Ould Abdel
Aziz, European Union Council President Herman Van Rompuy, and EU
Commission President Jose Manuel Barosso give a joint press conference
on the second day of 4th EU-Africa summit on April 3, 2014, at the EU
Headquarters in Brussels. Some 80 nations are gathering in Brussels for
an EU-Africa summit dominated by conflict, trade and illegal migration.
AFP PHOTO / BELGA / THIERRY ROGE
I think that after interacting with
Africans for about 200 years, Europeans have understood how best to
cause an African man insult and injury.
The way the European Union-African Union Summit in
Belgium this week has been handled convinces me that Europe has not
lost its colonial knowledge on how to put the African in his right
place.
In the interest of helping other people who
might develop an interest in African affairs as we find more oil, here
is a quick guide on how to insult an African.
First is that whole question of respect, or face, or whatever untranslatable term you call it in your tongue.
In
my own language, treating someone with disrespect is called something
like “not finding” someone, or rather not finding a place for that
person in the natural order of the universe.
When you
withhold hospitality, or grant it grudgingly or sarcastically, you are
“not finding” the person against whom you are directing the insult.
Equally,
it is insulting to be coerced to be differential towards someone who,
in your view, you should not be “finding”. Thus, there are many men who
ran way from their families in the 1950s to fight the British because
they thought it was disrespectful to be forced to remove their hats for
European children.
NO TOUCHING
The
second one is familiarity. Things have changed today, but there were
times when men would kill each other over a simple matter of African
manners (it is not an oxymoron).
Believe it or not, I
do think that in my tribe, joking around with a man, smiling at him and
touching him was a serious offence. Interaction was solemn business,
words weighed with care, no touching or show of emotion, or unnecessary
eye contact.
Unbroken eye contact was interpreted as an
attempt to impose your will on the other man and it was more often than
not responded to with violence. Actually, I think most disputes were
resolved violently.
It is the height of familiarity, I
think, to invite a man to your house for a feast, a meeting to decide a
case, or negotiations for bride price or the purchase of land or the
furtherance of commerce, and then tell him how he can come or who he can
come with.
It’s just as bad as inviting a friend to a feast and asking him to bring his own food.
But
the easiest way to die in Africa, even today, is to insult a man’s
mother or his wife, or to insult him before any of those two relatives.
A
man’s female relatives are not mentioned in African conversations other
than in the most flattering of terms. A man only insults another man’s
wife if, to quote my brother, the former Commissioner of Police, Maj-Gen
Hussein Ali, he has “suicidal tendencies”.
BEAUTIFUL BUT DISDAINFUL
So
when the European Union invited President Robert Mugabe to the Brussels
Summit, that was act an of “finding” him, of giving him his rightful
place in the order of things. But refusing to admit his wife was not
just one insult, it was a compendium of the most terrible insults.
Denying
her hospitality was definitely an act of “not finding her”, of thinking
that she was not good enough for the society of human beings. “Finding”
her husband after “not finding” her is in itself a most deadly insult.
Were Mr Mugabe a proper African man, he would never travel to Europe
again, even if they came and taped visas for the whole of Zimbabwe on
his moustache.
The fellow who decided to deny Mrs Grace
Mugabe a visa is guilty of the deadliest of all offences; that of being
impervious to the reciprocal needs of the brotherhood of husbands. If
Mr Mugabe had gone to the summit and left his wife behind, where would
he have slept when he returned home?
The West is in a
competition with China and other emergent countries for the friendship
of poor but resource-rich countries, especially in Africa. But unlike
the West, the Chinese appear to have understood that when your
jigger-infested relatives come to visit, you do not wash their feet in
disinfectant before admitting them into your home.
Europe continues to behave like a beautiful but disdainful village belle who pays no regard to the passage of the seasons.
In
20 years, visa bans will be meaningless. Anyone worth sanctioning will
see little sense in journeying to Europe. And that is a generational
insult.
mmathiu@ke.nationmedia.com
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