11/7/2019

Apartheid Flourishes - The Desire to Live Apart
by
Paul Conton

Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and 40s promoted a terrible policy of racial and ethnic separation that led to the slaughter of as many as six million Jews in gas chambers before Hitler was defeated by allied forces in 1945. Hitler believed in the supremacy of a white Aryan race.

In response to these and other savage discriminations the theory of multiculturalism arose, promoted over time by a worldwide liberal movement. This theory holds that different racial, ethnic and religious groups should live together in the same communities and within national borders, and that this would be a direct counter to the odious discriminations that had occurred in the past. Several Western countries have adopted multiculturalism as official policy in the last forty or fifty years, as have many mainstream Western political parties, particularly those described as liberal.  So, given the worldwide influence of the West, it looks like a victory for those who want everyone to live together and a defeat for those who want "separateness", right? Well, not quite.

Much of the history of the world reflects a desire by groups of people to live separately. Sometimes, as in the above examples, this desire is accompanied by a terrible urge to dominate, to brutalize, to enslave for profit. In many other instances, though, this desire for separateness is less malign. Today, there is a backlash against multiculturalism in Europe and America by whites who want to keep their societies unchanged, without immigration of different ethnic groups, to keep them as they were, basically  monocultural, white societies. These conservative whites have been labelled racist by their liberal white compatriots, and there is a fierce struggle between these two groups, liberals and conservatives, epitomised by the divisions over US  President Trump.  Indeed Trump himself is often called a racist by white liberals, by US blacks and by Africans many thousands of miles away in Africa, the majority of whom seemingly have unquestioningly allied themselves with the liberals. But hold on a moment! Is this desire to live apart so bad, so different from the way many, if not most, of us feel? What makes it so wrong?

The entire concept of nationhood revolves around a desire to be apart, to be different from those in other nations, to be with people who (usually) share a common language, eat the same food, live under the same laws and constitution. Implicit in statehood is the right to erect borders and control who gets to enter. The modern state is an organized segregation against the rest of the world. For Africa this relatively new segregation is only an easing of the much greater segregations which took place in earlier times. Africa, with many hundreds of tribes, each struggling to maintain its identity and to live apart. The continent's history, from North to East to South and perhaps most of all to West, is littered with the struggles of peoples to live apart, to be by themselves and not be bothered by peoples who were in some way different. Countless wars have followed the migrations of tribes into close proximity with other tribes, each in a desperate search for its own space. The recorded history of Africa is dominated by displacements of ethnic groups over hundreds, even thousands of miles taking place over periods of many, many years. The Ashanti are generally considered to be relatively recent arrivals to central Ghana, visiting much grief among neighbouring tribes after they migrated from the north. The Zulu travelled hundreds of miles south to their present homes in South Africa, part of the much larger Bantu migration, and are blamed for the mfecane, "a period of widespread chaos and warfare among indigenous ethnic communities in southern Africa during the period between 1815 and about 1840." The Fulani, nomadic and widely dispersed across West Africa, have frequently come into conflict with other tribes they have encountered on their travels, most recently in the deadly March, 2019 Dogon/ Fulani violence in central Mali. In north Africa, Arabs supplanted Berbers, some of whom migrated south and their descendants, the Tuaregs, live today in conflict with their darker-skinned countrymen in Mali and Niger.  The dense, West African rain forest, with its small, isolated jungle communities, has had more than its share of upheaval, war and uprooting of entire communities. One tribe moving into another tribe's space, perhaps peacefully in small numbers at first, perhaps aggressively but in either case often resulting in conflict and violent dispersal.

To muddy the waters even further, large swathes of West Africa today sanction tribal enclaves in rural areas, where the land is deemed to be held communally and where there is sharp discrimination against all not belonging to the tribe or coming from the area. In Sierra Leone for instance, "non-natives" are not allowed to own land in these areas and are required to register with the local chief when they move into the area.

Moving further afield, in 2018 an American was killed with bows and arrows by an aboriginal tribe, the Sentinels, living on the remote Andaman Islands in India. These people, like other similar tribes, had indicated clearly many times that they desired nothing so much as to be left alone by the outside world.

So the desire of groups of people for "separateness", to live apart, in their exclusive community, is not at all limited to racist whites in Europe and America. Is this desire good or bad? Should it be encouraged or suppressed? Or ignored? Should these wishes be tolerated by the state or forcibly stamped out? It's hard to give a general answer. I'm tempted to say that legally-mandated segregation within national borders is always wrong and always to be condemned, but then the example of native American Indians on legally established reservations comes to mind. And within national borders if private groups of like-minded individuals come together and choose to exclude others should that not be their right in a free society? Freedom of association is supposed to be a universal human right. Over-zealous liberals say no and have successfully fought even to change the membership criteria of organizations like the Boy Scouts.

Across borders, discrimination and segregation is widespread in all countries and until now has generally attracted little criticism. In the West the issue of non-white immigration has become topical. Should immigration applications be assessed irrespective of race and religion. Liberals say yes. But what if far greater percentages of minority groups than exist in the host population are applying to immigrate, thus raising the possibility of altering the ethnic mix? Is it really wise to allow this? Conservatives say no and that the ethnic balance of immigrants should be controlled, perhaps in the form of quotas for different immigrant groups. In Africa, despite apparent majority support for Western liberal parties, we are probably much more conservative than this. Sierra Leone's 1973 Citizenship Act reserves citizenship for persons of "negro African descent".

Separation, enforced or by choice, within borders or across them, serves the very useful purpose of putting space between hostile or potentially hostile parties.  Who would argue that if Israel and Palestine were physically isolated from each other, the world would not be a safer place? Or that if the boundaries of India and Pakistan  were somehow separated by hundreds of miles the risk of conflict would not be reduced? In tiny Freetown, largely Christian at its inception, during the Colonial era as Muslims struggled to establish a foothold in the city, Muslim areas were wisely delineated from Christian areas and conflict was reduced. Many cities have their Chinatown, their French or Spanish quarter or some such, providing some degree of separation.  Certainly for Africa, hundreds of independent tribes rubbing shoulders against each other led to endless conflict. Without the modern states created by the colonial powers keeping them quiet, these tribes would still be fighting each other.

All states jealously guard their territorial integrity, and challenges to it are invariably met with force. The United States civil war, ferocious in intensity, began when Southern states wished to secede, to live apart from their northern countrymen, principally because of the issue of slavery. The Nigerian civil war, one of Africa's most deadly, began when the Eastern region, dominated by the Ibo tribe, desired to live apart from the rest of the country. Even now, fifty plus years later, a separatist movement still exists in this region. In next-door Cameroon, a large number of English speakers, possibly the majority, would vote to break away from the French speaking region if they were given a free choice. As in Czechoslovakia which, quite remarkably, was quietly and peacefully carved in 1993 into the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia, as the two regions decided they wanted to live apart. The United Kingdom is much more noisily now preparing to live apart from the rest of the European Union. The desire for apartheid, for "separateness", is actually quite common among groups of people, regions, religions,  and tribes, but is greatly suppressed by the Damocles sword of violence from the overarching state. It's very different from the liberal vision of multiculturalism and it's quite a world conundrum. We know from recent African experience that having many, small sovereign nations (tribes) results in instability and turmoil, but larger groupings, call them states, held together only by force are disunited and weak.