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Owning your own civilization

In a discussion about colonialism, Brad DeLong asserts that “his” civilization consists of the moral heroes of the West, not the figures we see as villains today. Conquistadores and slave traders bad, missionaries and educators and humanitarians good. Ross Douthat — back blogging again after his long respite at Canyon Ranch getting a month-long massage, […]

In a discussion about colonialism, Brad DeLong asserts that “his” civilization consists of the moral heroes of the West, not the figures we see as villains today. Conquistadores and slave traders bad, missionaries and educators and humanitarians good. Ross Douthat — back blogging again after his long respite at Canyon Ranch getting a month-long massage, or something — is not having it. Excerpts:

How many Europeans improved conditions for future generations even as they cooperated in present-day injustices? How often were “science, industry, technology, and public health” carried on the same trains and ships that brought the lash and the maxim gun? The kind of historical surgery that DeLong wants to perform, in which the bad guys (and anyone who identifies with them in any way) get one corner and the good guys get another, is intuitively appealing, but I don’t think it’s plausible. If we want to claim to share a civilizational identity with Las Casas, then we have to admit that we share some sort of civilizational identity with Cortes as well.

And then the knife, politely inserted:

Brad DeLong holds a faculty position at a state university that owes its very existence to an American war of aggression against Mexico, in a country whose founding documents were written by slaveowners, on a continent that was ruthlessly expropriated from its indigenous population. Is he really sure that he can so cleanly separate himself from the various plunderers, exploiters, slavers and imperialists who have shaped the history of the Western world?

This is an excellent, excellent point, and one every one of us has to face about our own history, and ourselves. We can no more claim that we are free of a connection between the evil that our ancestors have done, and that our civilization or society does than we can claim we ourselves are free from sin. And to complicate matters even further, there are plenty of cases in which, over time, good comes out of evil, and vice versa. In 1995, Keith B. Richburg, reflecting on the end of his tour of duty covering Africa for the Washington Post, confronted the awful ways his personal identity is tied up in the history of slavery. Read this stunning passage. It’s one of the most morally searing things, and ruthlessly honest things, I’ve ever read.

I watched the dead float down a river in Tanzania.

Of all the gut-wrenching emotions I wrestled with during three years of covering famine, war and misery around Africa, no feeling so gripped me as the one I felt that scorching hot day last April, standing on the Rusumo Falls bridge, in a remote corner of Tanzania, watching dozens of discolored, bloated bodies floating downstream, floating from the insanity that was Rwanda.

The image of those bodies in the river lingered in my mind long after that, recurring during interminable nights in desolate hotel rooms without running water, or while I walked through the teeming refugee camps of eastern Zaire. And the same feeling kept coming back too, as much as I tried to force it from my mind. How can I describe it? Revulsion? Yes, but that doesn’t begin to touch on what I really felt. Sorrow, or pity, at the monumental waste of human life? Yes, that’s closer. But the feeling nagging at me was — is — something more, something far deeper. It’s a sentiment that, when uttered aloud, might come across as callous, self-obsessed, maybe even racist.

But I’ve felt it before, that same nagging, terrible sensation. I felt it in Somalia, walking among the living dead of Baidoa and Baardheere — towns in the middle of a devastating famine. And I felt it again in those refugee camps in Zaire, as I watched bulldozers scoop up black corpses, and trucks dump them into open pits.

I know exactly the feeling that haunts me, but I’ve just been too embarrassed to say it. So let me drop the charade and put it as simply as I can: There but for the grace of God go I.

Somewhere, sometime, maybe 400 years ago, an ancestor of mine whose name I’ll never know was shackled in leg irons, kept in a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, and then put with thousands of other Africans into the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Many of them died along the way, of disease, of hunger. But my ancestor survived, maybe because he was strong, maybe stubborn enough to want to live, or maybe just lucky. He was ripped away from his country and his family, forced into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean. Then one of his descendants somehow made it up to South Carolina, and one of those descendants, my father, made it to Detroit during the Second World War, and there I was born, 36 years ago. And if that original ancestor hadn’t been forced to make that horrific voyage, I would not have been standing there that day on the Rusumo Falls bridge, a journalist — a mere spectator — watching the bodies glide past me like river logs. No, I might have instead been one of them — or have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made that voyage.

Does that sound shocking? Does it sound almost like a justification for the terrible crime of slavery? Does it sound like this black man has forgotten his African roots? Of course it does, all that and more. And that is precisely why I have tried to keep the emotion buried so deep for so long. But as I sit before the computer screen, trying to sum up my time in Africa, I have decided I cannot lie to you, the reader. After three years traveling around this continent as a reporter for The Washington Post, I’ve become cynical, jaded. I have covered the famine and civil war in Somalia; I’ve seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire (hence the trucks dumping the bodies into pits); I’ve interviewed evil “warlords,” I’ve encountered machete-wielding Hutu mass murderers; I’ve talked to a guy in a wig and a shower cap, smoking a joint and holding an AK-47, on a bridge just outside Monrovia. I’ve seen some cities in rubble because they had been bombed, and some cities in rubble because corrupt leaders had let them rot and decay. I’ve seen monumental greed and corruption, brutality, tyranny and evil.

I’ve also seen heroism, honor and dignity in Africa, particularly in the stories of small people, anonymous people — Africans battling insurmountable odds to publish an independent newspaper, to organize a political party, usually just to survive. I interviewed an opposition leader in the back seat of a car driving around the darkened streets of Blantyre, in Malawi, because it was then too dangerous for us even to park, lest we be spotted by the ubiquitous security forces. In Zaire, I talked to an opposition leader whose son had just been doused with gasoline and burned to death, a message from dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s henchmen. And in the Rift Valley of central Kenya, I met the Rev. Festus Okonyene, an elderly African priest with the Dutch Reformed Church who endured terrible racism under the Afrikaner settlers there, and who taught me something about the meaning of tolerance, forgiveness, dignity and restraint.

But even with all the good I’ve found here, my perceptions have been hopelessly skewed by the bad. My tour in Africa coincided with two of the world’s worst tragedies, Somalia and Rwanda. I’ve had friends and colleagues killed, beaten to death by mobs, shot and left to bleed to death on a Mogadishu street.

Now, after three years, I’m beaten down and tired. And I’m no longer even going to pretend to block that feeling from my mind. I empathize with Africa’s pain. I recoil in horror at the mindless waste of human life, and human potential. I salute the gallantry and dignity and sheer perseverance of the Africans. But most of all, I feel secretly glad that my ancestor made it out — because, now, I am not one of them.

Somewhere in the US, perhaps, there is a white man the same age as Keith Richburg, and whose own ancestor was the slave trader who captured Richburg’s African ancestor, put him in shackles, stole him to America and sold him as property. And because that man committed that act of villainy centuries ago, Keith Richburg lives in freedom. Perhaps. History is so damn complicated. What is not complicated is that we own it. All of it. Even the parts that disgust us. Even as things we do today that strike us as morally good, or at least morally neutral, will disgust our descendants, who will wonder how on earth we participated in those things, and who will wish to disclaim us — something they can only do by lying to themselves.

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