Nadine Gordimer
The remark that did most harm at the club was a silly aside to the effect that the so-called white races are really pinko-grey. He only said this to be cheery, he did not realize that “white” has no more to do with a colour than “God save the King” with a god, and that it is the height of impropriety to consider what it does connote.
—from A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (62)
I stand astonished at my own moderation.
—Robert Clive’s response to a Parliamentary Inquiry on the plunder of India
Take it Decently
The obvious difference in pigmentation between the Europeans and Africans is the original point of reference for countless imaginary polarities: black and white, pure and impure, tame and wild, civilized and barbaric, rational and emotional, good and evil, decent and indecent. And in a culture built upon the systematic, racist murder and subjugation of tens of millions of Africans and Asians, members of the dominant class risk much pain and psychic confusion if they are unable to reconcile this tissue of false dichotomies at the core of imperialism.
The barter between the boy and the elderly native in “The Train from Rhodesia” is a microcosm of the imperial enterprise because it amuses the boy to toy with an old man who is attempting to eke out a meager livelihood. Oblivious to his own depravity, the boy represents all those who reveled in the plunder of Southern Africa.
“He laughed. ‘I was arguing with him for fun.’”
When the girl berates the boy for the callousness of his actions, he is “shocked by the dismay in her face.” Because the boy has internalized the imperialist denial of the old man’s humanity, the native is merely a thing to be trifled with for sport.
Unlike her boorish companion, the girl in “The Train from Rhodesia” has empathy for the old man, but as a member of the ruling race, she too is steeped in the toxic juices of Apartheid. Thus, her blindness to the inherent malevolence of imperialism is exposed by her protest that the boy should have found a way to “take it decently.”
The “shame that mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring” is merely the genesis of an appropriate response to a monstrous crime committed against entire populations for centuries.
The indecent mass murder, rape, and pillage of so much of the planet perpetrated by the Europeans over five centuries was carried out in direct contradiction to their notions of civility. When the Europeans commit such atrocities in the name of civilization who then are the real barbarians?
Richard W. Bray
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