The Conceptual Killing Fields
Dr Richard A Griggs, Political Geographer,
University of Cape Town
Before dying blindfolded and dangling from a rope, Ken Saro-Wiwa uttered his last words:"Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues." Those who would now protest his death in the singular language of "human rights" and simply forget his struggle for group rights are blinded in the conceptual killing fields: an arena of indoctrinated thinking in which one cannot conceptualise nation-killing (geno=nation; cide=to kill). This leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People was an official of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation and a representative to the annual UN-sponsored conference to draft a set of group rights for the world's indigenous peoples. The "struggle" was against cultural genocide.
Saro-Wiwa's cultural identity and that of the 500 000 people he represented was Ogoni, one of some 6 000 to 9 000 internationally unrecognised nations that are subjected daily to various forms of genocide engendered by "nation-building" processes (often a euphemism for state-building by nation-destroying). From the Polar Nations of the North (Inuit) to theTasmanians in the South there are thousands of nations across the time zones resisting cultural annihilation as states seek to build identities that conform to the artificial boundaries created by history and war. Many academics now refer collectively to such submerged nations as theFourth World.
The distinction between a state which binds its citizens by legal and military means and a nation which is the product of cultural evolution in a region was not obscured until the period of the French Revolution. A nation meant a distinct people with a common history, territory, language and culture. In scientific terms it remains erroneous to equate states and nations but masses of people are indoctrinated otherwise. This process began with the French Revolution of 1789 when the Jacobins attempted to harness the power of nationalism as a means to gain a further centralisation of state powers. The state claimed to be a nation. The Royal Guard was renamed the National Guard and the Estates General in Paris (where various nations and polities had sent their representatives), was renamed the National Constituent Assembly. The French gave an old word, a tool of thought, a new meaning. The state became the nation and loyalty to the old nation became treason.
France's claim was pre-Orwellian double-speak as the revolutionaries vowed to destroy the thirty-nine nations of France that then existed (some still exist - Brittany, Occitania, Provence). The Bureau of the Public Spirit, the largest propaganda machine of the time was launched to use plays, oaths, flags, statues, and other tools, including force, to Frenchify the conquered territories of "France." Napoleon even sought to make all of Europe French. The legacy today is nation-building, the ideological equivalent of gunpowder that spread with all the colonial conquests and entered Africa. It is a form of identity-engineering that continuously brings Africans into the conceptual killing fields: states and nations cannot coexist (ideological underpinnings for great violence).
The Nigerian geopolitical situation with its 250 nations may be egregious but typical for Africa. Fifteen billion dollars a year are spent on military armaments by African states - not to defend their borders in state to state war but to maintain internal security as old nations and new states clash over resources, culture, and development plans. Power struggles between nationalist groups for either state control (e.g., Hutu VS Tutsi in Rwanda) or for territorial secession (e.g. Republic of Somaliland) have produced some of the world's longest and bloodiest wars (e.g. the secessionist struggle in Sudan has been ongoing since 1955). The inability of states to find a better construction for coexistence with nations other than"nation-building" ideology has created such instability that: most of Africa's states are either part of a war zone or receive refugees from one (25 wars altogether and half the world's refugees); genocides occur regularly (e.g., Rwanda and Burundi). In consequence famines are routine and poverty has been accentuated (e.g., many African states have cut back on social welfare benefits to increase spending on arms). African dictatorships are just a common solution.
All who collude within a system of states that allows no international rights for Fourth World nations must share responsibility for genocide. Just as Saro-Wiwa asked his executioners,"Which type of country is this," one may also ask "Which kind of world is this that is alarmed at nine hangings but is silent on genocide?" Mass-executions and terrorizing Fourth World nation peoples is an everyday occurrence but our inability to conceptualise the rights of such nations leads us to see these events as "domestic police affairs", "internal security matters" or "ethnic unrest." Genocide is downplayed as the fate of "tribes" caught in a wheel of progress - inevitable; part of "democratisation," or "economic development." Resistance to "nation-building" programmes becomes "terrorism" and "separatism." Surely the oil pipelines that cross Ogoniland can be seen as Nigeria's economic lifeline. Ogoni resistance is then"treason" to be met with extra-judicial executions and hangings. The spirit of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his people say differently: troops and oil companies have breached cultural boundaries, destroyed Ogoni environments, and failed to negotiate anything for the Ogoni nation.
It is important to speak out against injustice to individuals but even more so against the genocide in which the particular killings were rooted. To respect that Ken Saro-Wiwa's death was about the rights of nations might help bring an end to the conceptual killing fields. Within Africa's fifty states are some 1500 nations (250 in Nigeria alone) that can coexist peacefully if only we would acknowledge nation rights and negotiate territorial and cultural solutions. To do otherwise is to spawn wars, antagonism between cultures, and to generate more rootless, culture-less humans occupying monotonous landscapes.
Interestingly, Saro-Wiwa was more frequently referred to in
press reports by his state identity (Nigerian) than by his national one (Ogoni)
because state-indoctrinated peoples are uncomfortable with the coequal and
autonomous existence of nations within states. Within South Africa, the legacy
of Apartheid's identity-engineering has left an even stronger distaste for such
discourse. Thus the group rights of nations, amidst Pavlovian responses to the
horrors of Apartheid and its conflation with racism, hardly registers a thought
when it is much safer and easier to address and think about individual human
rights. Change begins at home. When we learn to recognise and acknowledge who
people say they are, respect and areal community of interest is forged. To
merely protest the effrontery to individual human rights is a sanctimonious
flapping of arms without serious self-reflection on what Saro-Wiwa referred to
as "the struggle"