The Black Man’s Burden

In 1899, Joseph Rudyard Kipling, the English imperialist poet, wrote the famous poem, ‘The White man’s Burden’. The poem is a call to the United States to assume full colonial control of the Filipino people in the midst of the Philippine-American War.

He asked America, White America to be clear, to take the burdens of Empire and conquer non-White peoples to civilize them. This “white man’s burden”, according to Mr. Kipling, was the manifest destiny of White people to subjugate, dominate and civilize the inferior and subhuman species of Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders and all other non-white, non-European peoples.

Mr. Kipling was born in so-called British India, from whence his imperial and white supremacist mind was forged.

In the poem, Mr. Kipling describes Asian, Black and other colonized peoples as “half-devil, half-child”. He implores White people to “take up the White man’s burden” to lift up non-white people from their savagery and save them from themselves.

Don’t be surprised that the original version of the poem had been written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria on June 22, 1897. No more iconic jingoistic poem has been written.

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What the poem captured was the international hierarchy of races in a world dominated – and owned – by White people. The master race ideology, so to speak, would later inspire Hitler and Nazi Germany. Direct colonialism has largely been eradicated, but this racial hierarchy remains intact.

You don’t have to be university-educated to know about the racial geography of the world. Black people sit at the bottom of the heap. It doesn’t matter whether a black person is in Africa, or any of the geographical spaces in Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, which are numerically dominated by people of African descent.

Even when President Barack Obama ruled the most powerful nation on earth, many Whites still thought he was inferior to them. The election of President Obama ironically inspired the rise of Donald Trump, a virulent and unabashed racist. This brings me to an argument based on the dialectics of opposites. The White Man’s Burden necessarily gave rise to the Black Man’s Burden.

This is a large subject, so I will only address several salient points. I note that the international legal, political and economic order is totally scandalous. The notion of sovereign equality of states is largely fiction because powerful states, usually in North America and Europe, rule the roost.

Racist power structures

It doesn’t matter that Mr. Obama, an American of black Kenyan descent ruled America, or that PM Rishi Sunak, himself a Briton of Indian descendants to Kenya, now superintends the UK. Both the US and the UK fundamentally are societies ruled by racist White power structures. But in a reversal of fortunes, Mr. Obama and Mr. Sunak – the “half devil, half child” people Mr Kipling spoke about, rose to rule over the master race.

Allow me now to focus on the Black Man’s Burden. One of our biggest burdens is spiritual in the sense that we are traumatized people. The traumas of enslavement, colonialism and globalization – all fueled by the White West to its benefit – have left us deeply wounded. We lost our cultures and were remade into dumb copies of the West in which the White man is the original and we are his dumb copies. Decolonization and anti-racist resistance haven’t done much to remove our complexes of inferiority.

We still look up to the White West and mimic it. We either look to the White Christian West or the Arab and Muslim world for cultural anchors and a sense of self.

The messianic religions of Christianity and Islam are the spiritual hooks.

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This is how our African spirits have been murdered. We even bear the actual names of our White colonial conquerors and Arab invaders. You lose everything about self when you lose even your name. In my view, this is one of our biggest burdens – that of existing in the image and body of another.

This in turn feeds into our lack of self-esteem. We constantly have to explain ourselves to a skeptical world, and we do so using the lexicon and lenses of others. We are beggars to the world, and our leaders sit at the forefront our beggarly status. Every African head of state knows this, and is deeply embarrassed by it, but can do little about it.

Finally, our elite must develop a spine and self-pride.

We aren’t the doormat of the world and shouldn’t act to vindicate racism. I will give you an example.

When White tourists land in Kenya by plane or ship, they are often greeted by troupes of dancers clad in African garb. But I’ve never seen White people in New York or Amsterdam dancing like baboons elated that Black Africans have come to visit their countries. They wish Black Africans didn’t visit them. Let’s stop being clowns. We cannot, and must not, be the laughingstock of the world.