The White man’s burden revisited

Europe and Africa share history:  Europe in Africa and Africa in Europe. Today, reciprocal Euro-African influences, both negative and positive, are ever apparent.  Sadly, even as I write these words, it is the negative aspects of this historical relationship that are of visible actuality. 

Six members of a French charity, Zoé’s Ark, are currently being held in Chad on charges of child abduction for attempting to extract 103 children from Chad to France.  Among the more juicy details, ZA members fitted the children with fake bandages, disguising them as Darfur victims.  They lied about where they were taking the children, claiming to escort them to a hospital in Chad.  In fact, their intentions were to deliver perfectly healthy children to French families who had paid as much as 7000€ each to the charity.  Historical wounds and blind Western arrogance underlie these complicated international tensions.

Leopold II was not French.  He was King of what is one of Western Europe’s smallest nations, Belgium.  He also personally controlled a territory in central Africa larger than all of Western Europe, the Congo.  Leopold referred to his possession as “a magnificent cake.”   The subtleties of African identity were lost on the members of Zoé’s Ark, who claimed to be saving Sudanese orphans from the Darfur crisis when in fact the children were mostly Chadians cared for by their extended families.   The details of Leopold’s identity are likewise lost on most Africans.  He was a white European monster who helped himself to Africa’s children under the guise of Christian benevolence.  If Leopold had committed his atrocities in Europe, Europeans would remember him alongside Stalin and Hitler.  Africans however haven’t forgotten Leopold’s “orphanages.”

According to historian Adam Hochschild, Leopold began establishing “orphanages” in 1890.  “Orphans” were rounded-up forcibly and then trained as soldiers for Leopold’s vast native army used to protect Belgian economic interests in Congo, primarily rubber and ivory exportation.

It is against this historical backdrop that African skepticism to Zoé’s Ark’s self-proclaimed good intentions must be understood.  Righteous anger seems to be the appropriate response—even if we do give the good intentions of Zoé’s Ark the benefit of the doubt—to what is certainly ethnocentric arrogance.  A Ugandan observer calls their actions “modern day slavery,” digging ever deeper the breach in trust between Africa and the West. 

Now switch roles, what if Chadians, lying about their intentions in official legal documents as did Zoé’s Ark, tried to extract French children from their families in France in order to give them up for adoption in Africa?  Who would be angry then?  What would the consequences be?

Let’s call Zoé’s Ark’s kind of benevolence what it is:  The White man’s burden revisited.  Their actions are fundamentally based in the arrogance of imagined Western superiority.  It makes me angry too and, as a Westerner, ashamed.

Comments

[Todd]

Great minds think alike! I've been thinking about how this story, as well as many others in the news right now, demonstrate a general disconnect between the West and The Rest when it comes to how we see the past and the present. Because we don't face the past and repent from it, we continue to repeat it.

[jonathan]

Thanks, Todd, for you comment. I looked around your blog. Great stuff!