Ancient culture of domination spawns another murder
The slow, public murder of a black man, George Floyd, by a white policeman in Minneapolis is as callous as the enforcement of modern state power gets. The resulting protests and rioting throughout the US have stunned the rest of the world. For liberal democracy, US President Donald Trump has been a disaster. He has unsettled the entire world. The great threat now is that the turmoil in the US might scare enough Americans into voting him back into office.
Why is race such a hard-wired tumour in our society and others? The answer has to be in the way Anglo-Saxon Christianity has spread. I remember as a child how racial conflict “overseas” was always top of the news in SA under apartheid. The old SABC loved nothing better than a “race riot” in the UK or the US.
I can’t speak for anyone else but it is clear that almost wherever black people, Africans, live alongside Europeans or their descendants, they are generally poorer, less well educated and worse off in terms of health. It shows up in income and it shows up now in Covid-19 statistics.
The numbers haunt us. They are why SA cannot settle. Who would have thought the castaways of British and Dutch society in the 17th and 18th centuries could have done us so much damage? What they brought to SA, though, was not their own limited capabilities but the power of their cultures. In their cultures they were superior and black people were inferior.
If there is one thing white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism has taught over the past eight or so centuries, it is how to be “good”, or, put less politely, how to be a judgmental bigot. It’s my culture and that is my experience of it. It would have been impossible for 12.5-million Africans to have been sold across the Atlantic as slaves had Europeans not regarded them as a lesser life form.
But we must be careful not to confuse hatred with racism. It isn’t. Hate is just anger, and superiority trumps it every time. I had “racist!” spat in my face in front of my own home and it failed to move me. It’s no use accusing someone of something they don’t feel guilty of. I don’t feel superior to anyone, though it’s inevitable that the cultural vestiges of 800 years of learning will out. I understand my own agency, but I hope I’m better than my forefathers.
I’m always reminded of the death of the Xhosa king, Hintsa, in February 1835. Blamed for the loss of settler cattle, he was riding as a captive with a British force led by Harry Smith. At one point he spurred his mount away. Smith gave chase and forced Hintsa off his horse.
The king ran and Smith called to a young settler, George Southey:
“Shoot, George!” Southey shot, hitting Hintsa in the leg. The king got up and hobbled towards a river. Southey fired again and Hintsa lurched once more. They next saw him in the river, calling out for mercy. Southey’s Xhosa was perfect, but he took careful aim and fired, shattering Hintsa’s head.
They cut the jewellery off Hintsa’s neck and cut off his ears, pulled out some of his teeth, and marched on. What kind of savages do that? Smith and his wife still have three towns named after them in SA.
Our cultures are shaped by religion. Most of Spain was ruled by black people, Moors, between 711 and 1492. Together with Sephardic Jews, they ran one of the great civilisations and much gorgeous evidence of it still exists. It took the marriage of two Christian fanatics, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the Inquisition in their wake, to mount a holy war and break what today looks like an impossible union of Arab and Jew.
There’s a spot on the road to the sea outside Granada named El Ultimo Respiro del Moro (The moor’s last sigh), where the Emir Boabdil turned to gaze a final time at his Alhambra palace as he fled the Catholic horde in 1492. Jews and Muslims who remained were left to the Inquisition.
When I first saw that spot 30 years ago I realised, finally, what my culture was capable of. From early on, Christianity has been a weapon. It doesn’t hate or love. It doesn’t even care. It is a sanctimonious, intolerant, acquisitive and always superior compulsion, responsible for much of the greatness and also the misery in the world it has dominated for so long. Judeo-Christianity’s reign is already fading, but is still capable of inflicting pain. That righteous white knee on George Floyd’s neck was more than 2,000 years old.