French rally was about the right to offend even your president

Eye

SO ARE African lives less important to the international community than Western lives? After the worldwide attention paid to the Paris killings by Islamic militants, this is a question being asked and generally answered in the affirmative.

The refrain is that although fewer than two dozen French were killed, in that week the Islamic terror group Boko Haram slayed 2 000 Nigerians against a backdrop of distinct international indifference. But it’s not that simple. Although insidious imperialism remains widespread, there is in this case no easy arithmetic proof.

Something remarkable happened last weekend in France. Estimates vary, but more than three million French people took to the streets. It was the biggest march since the 1944 liberation from Nazi occupation. Nominally, they were marching in solidarity with a dozen satirists and the police officers trying to protect them, and four shoppers in a Jewish supermarket – all murdered by Islamic militants. The march, however, was far more than a commemoration or show of defiance.

After all, France is the same as any established Western democracy in that political ennui is pervasive. French politicians are as craven, uninspiring, petty and self-serving as anywhere else. The resulting voter distaste has translated, as else- where in the EU, into steadily dropping election turnouts – from 82 percent in 1946 to 55 percent in 2012.

Now suddenly, it seems from the posters, the chants, songs and interviews, the marchers once more found inspiration and solace in the values of that revolution which more than two centuries ago brought them democracy. The 1789 overthrow of absolutist monarchy, despite the violence and excess that was to follow, was embodied in its cry of Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!

Sunday’s march was in similar spirit about shoulder- to- shoulder fraternity with those under attack, encapsulated in the Je Suis Charlie banners and, most movingly, the Je Suis Juif banners carried by Muslims and others who weren’t Jewish.

This march was about the liberty to offend your neighbour, your priest, your imam, and – note well, ANC sycophants – your president. And, finally, it was about a dawning realisation that unless there was true equality for all hues and faiths in today’s France, the ghettos would continue to breed terrorists and fanatics.

There is then a political universality to what happened in Paris, and dozens of other French cities and towns, that transcends the effects of another, however shocking, terrorist attack of the kind that happens with varying degrees of severity all the time.

Africa correspondent Simon Allison writes in the Daily Maverick that while there are many good excuses for the fact that even the Nigeria media gave the Paris killings more coverage than the killings in their own country, it is a shameful “symbol of how we as Africans neglect Africa’s own tragedies, and prioritise Western lives over our own’’.

That’s only partly true. The French rally because they believe doing so will make a real difference.

Unfortunately, the Nigerian deaths stand in stark contrast because they are the direct result of state, political and social institutions that do not function properly and will not function properly in the foreseeable future. So there are no African solidarity marches, no obsessive African media analysis of the Nigerian killings, because there is no point. To rally would be a triumph of optimism over experience. African political ennui and passivity are widespread because democracy, where it exists, is not yet vibrant enough to force their political elites to act.

It is futile to expect the world to wring its hands over our tragedies when we not only sullenly accept them, but have come to expect them. If we Africans can’t or won’t help ourselves, why should the world give a damn?

Allison points to the “egregious hypocrisy” of Gabonese president Ali Bongo Ondimba attending the Paris march in support of freedom of expression, while violently suppressing those same rights at home. There’s another egregious hypocrisy closer to home.

After some delay, President Jacob Zuma’s government issued a statement condemning the “calculated and barbaric” Paris terrorism. “Such deliberate attacks against journalists and the public contravene international law and constitute a crime against humanity.”

Fine sentiments, but how credible? They come from a government that erodes press freedom and a leader who has used defamation claims to intimidate cartoonists and journalists. From a political alliance which appeared to condone populist violence when two men defaced The Spear, a painting depicting Zuma as an autocrat, and argue for laws to protect presidential “dignity”.

There is another French lesson in all this. The Spear depicted Zuma as Russia’s Lenin. Perhaps more appropriate would have been Louis XIV, the pre-revolutionary French monarch who proclaimed boastfully “I am the state”. Follow WSM on Twitter

@TheJaundicedEye