On the Geographies of Liberation
HOW oppression and all the evils that accompany it work is a question that has troubled liberation thinkers for a long time.
The nature of the structures and systems of power that dominate the world is a subject liberation thinkers and activists can only ignore at the dear price of their irrelevance. One can actually make the observation that liberation itself may not be fully understood without a prior understanding of oppression and its various technologies, systems and structures, of domination.
This is the same way in which the struggle for good health involves strong understanding of disease and how it operates in human bodies and communities, an understanding of death sheds light into the nature of life. By that logic and for that reason philosophers of liberation are almost always those that have studied oppression and domination to some depth. Power and its various evils must be studied for liberation to be fully understood. What oppression is and what it looks like and how it works is a point to ponder in the liberation scheme of things. How the world works We have to ponder the nature of the monsters that oppress us in order to begin to imagine our liberation. Noam Chomsky’s 2010 book, How the World Works, is a recent attempt by a living philosopher to seek to offer a largescale description of how structures and systems of economic and political power oppressively operate at a world scale. Before and alongside Chomsky, Immanuel Wallerstein and other world systems theorists concerned themselves with the question of how power and oppression have, at a world scale, rendered the poor nations and their people vulnerable and negligible. Oppression, because of its structures and systems, has a shape, a size and a colour. Oppression and its domination and exploitation of countries and peoples, otherwise, is knowable. Structures of power, simply put, are the organisations, institutions and individuals through which control of countries and their peoples takes place. Systems are interconnected activities, habits, events and processes that organise power, deploy control and keep subjection and domination in motion on a daily basis. Power has structures and systems that enable it to achieve its excesses and bring domination to life. In short, the world works in a certain way and that way has to be understood. The world system is a living organism of power that operates in a certain way. Some have called it the world system as it were and others have called it the world order all in an attempt to describe how power works and organises the world and its people. The world works through classes and hierarchies of power that involve including and excluding others. A system of unnatural selection defines the order of things in the world at large and in individual countries specifically. It is that system of unnatural selection that has turned it into common sense that some people will be powerful and others powerless, some will have and others will not have access to basic resources of life in one world that otherwise has enough to go around. The day the world was classified and hierarchised might be the day when oppression began. As far back as 1755 Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote a: Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men. It bothered Rousseau how out of nowhere some people emerged as masters and other slaves and how resources of the world that are enough for everyone are artificially made to be scarce so that some powerful people and organisations can make profit. The point I wish to make here is that oppression and its evil children, domination and exploitation, are not natural but are man-made.
The domination and exploitation of some people by others is systematically and structurally made to look normal and natural when it is a crime that is committed by some men and women. Typically every enslaver wants the slave to believe that slavery is natural and normal. And every kind of coloniser wants it understood that colonialism as a system and structure of power is part of the natural order of things. Oppression habitually constructs itself as natural and normal when it is an artificial, systemic and structural crime against humanity.
The Geographies of Power
While some people consult literature to study oppression others learn of it from experience. As a learned scholar, E W B Dubois could very easily describe how power worked to subject black people. In 1903 Dubois in one of his many essays wrote that, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line,” in reference to racial segregation and oppression of people of colour. This famous assertion is widely noted by scholars and activists alike.
While the assertion is well known what is not much known is that it was not a scholar but a scarcely educated former slave, Frederick Douglass that in 1881 published an essay on “The Colour Line” in the North American Review. As a scholar Dubois was only amplifying and magnifying what an anti-slavery activist that had experienced oppression as a slave observed. Up to today the racial line, that is the classification and separation of people along the line of race has been a burdensome problem in the world system. Such monumental evils as slavery and colonialism were driven by the logic of racism which constructed myths about the inferiority of black people and the superiority of white peoples. The very First Pan-Africanist Conference of 1900, a conference in which Dubois was involved, identified racism as a major systemic and structural crime against the people of the Third World, now called the Global South, in the decolonial vocabulary of liberation.
The gesture of my present note is that racism has a wider geography than just the colour line. Racism actuality refers to an ideology of power that divides the human race along certain lines that produce powerful and powerless, privileged and less privileged people. Colour racism is only the line of oppression that has been highlighted in the systems of slavery and colonialism that have marked the world for centuries now. The gender and sexuality line, division and classification of people along the lines of gender and sexual identity is another tyrannical line that has dogged the human race and is actually racist in the sense that it also denies other human beings full humanity and renders them objects of domination and exploitation. Sexism as an ideology of power that privileges hatred and marginalisation of people of a certain sex and gender is actually a racial category and part of racism where skin colour is not a factor but gender and sexuality are.
What Archie Mafeje called the “ideology of tribalism” is actually a division and marginalisation of some members of the human race using ethnic and linguistic identity. This is in actuality racism itself where cultural difference of one people is used against them in the competition for power and resources. Further, the racist colonialists and enslavers capitalised on tribes and ethnicities to divide and rule the enslaved and the colonised peoples. In veracity tribalism is racism; it is a way of structuring and systematising the human race for purposes of oppression, marginalisation and domination.
The Boers of apartheid South Africa created homelands to separate people according to their language groups, and skin colour, in one country. The colonialists, from Berlin in 1884, created big homelands that they called countries and spheres of influence for them. Belonging within certain borders and a nationality became an ideology of nationalism. The love for one’s nation has the underside, and the darker side, of hatred of those that are called foreigners, aliens and all that. Nationalism has a xenophobic underside, I mean. Xenophobia is not just part of but it is racism. The disqualification from dignity and full life of other people by another injures the human race by dividing and classifying it for the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others. Ableism, that social habit of classifying and discriminating people according to their ability or inability of certain body parts is another racism that is rampant in society. It is not very different from ageism which is racism that privileges being old or young as a means of classifying and marginalising one people by another.
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