Since Arabs descended from the North and the Europeans arrived centuries ago, blacks (or Africans) have been enslaved, transported in chains across the oceans and occasionally even thrown into the sea, reaped crops and worked in gold and diamond mines, at “home and abroad� and, for peanuts, as it were.

They were lynched, massacred, persecuted, enlisted as soldiers or killed in their masters' battles (sometimes called World Wars), employed as domestic servants or in heavy or manual work that few whites would want to do, segregated, humiliated, forcibly moved from their huts or homes, barred from immigrating and so on. My empathy with them must be rooted in my chromosomes. According to a 20th century British novelist, Rose Maucaulay, who also wrote books on distinguished Britons who went to Portugal, “the extreme inefficiency and lack of brains of most Portuguese is put down to their negro blood; a census of 50 years ago showed 43% of negro descent. It seems that the chromosomes which cause physical racial characteristics are recessive in negroes and give way before white ones, so that their skins whiten and their hair untwists gradually; but the mental chromosomes remain dominant.�

These thoughts, which undoubtedly give a bad name to literacy, written in 1947 and published in a book Letters to a Sister in 1968, have been scientifically discredited at least since UNESCO published its Statement on Race in 1950, subscribed by some of the most notable anthropologists at the time, explaining to the obtuse that “since all men belong to the same species, Homo sapiens, a race may be defined as just one of the groups… there is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics.�. Curiously enough, since the Statement only refers “to all men�, the anthropologists inadvertently seemed to be excluding the half of humankind made up of women like Rose Maucaulay herself – but then mental progress has been accelerating since then.

Rose Maucaulay, not of course due to her views on biology, was eventually made a dame but I have seen no evidence that, even the all-white and overwhelmingly geriatric and male House of Lords, took much notice of her views. And after recent overdue reforms, I think most of the lords in the House take some pride in having the good-looking and good-thinking all-black Baroness Amos sitting or rising amongst them.

In the present circumstances, however, both the current pop-campaign which ambitiously aims to Make Poverty History or the British government’s initiative to strike a deal at the July G8 Summit at Gleneagles – better known as a “posh� golf resort than a centre for diplomatic debates – are certainly to be applauded. Even if you allow for British national interest in the promotion, Chancellor (finance minister) Gordon Brown’s conception of, and dedication to, the initiative is in the best of Scottish Labour traditions.

One of the early positive results of the pop-campaign and official initiative is that, already in the preceding weeks, there was an unusual upsurge of media interest in Africa’s plight. By coincidence or design, a comprehensive book entitled The State of Africa: A History of 50 Years of Independence by the veteran British journalist, Martin Meredith, who has written other books on Africa over many years, was also published.

Now, despite being younger than I am, Meredith seems tired enough to take the easy way out by appearing to single out “black corruption� and “bad governance� for the deplorable state of most of the continent. Since René Dumont’s pioneering False Start in Africa, we have seen such a like-minded series of books on the subject since the l960’s that the theme is no longer sensational.

In my opinion their authors seem to be influenced mainly by the forces of the western (white-dominated) book market. These are Meredith’s concluding remarks on page 668 of his modern version of John Gunther’s 1955 book Inside Africa, without even the occasional criticism of colonial rule with which Gunther’s famous pan-African tour in the 1950s was spiced:
“After decades of mismanagement and corruption, most African states have been hollowed out. They are no longer instruments capable of serving the public good. Indeed, far from being able to provide aid and protection to their citizens, African governments and the vampire-like politicians who run them are regarded by the populations they rule as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival.�

Translated into my native language, Portuguese, this concluding remark seems to imply that African countries are now nearly ripe for a “new partition� without the scramble. But with the “African populations�, like in the times of David Livingstone or Cecil Rhodes, ready to plead to their former colonial masters “please come back, all is forgiven�, such an idea is not even original as it can be found day in, day out, in most of the right-wing media in any of the Western European languages I happen to be able to read.

I sincerely hope that this emphasis on “African corruption� does not develop into a selective form of racism whereby Africans will now become divided into a ruling “in-group� singularly endowed with greed, and a victimised mass crying for liberation from outside.

As it happens, between 1950 and 1959 before I became a journalist committed to the cause of pan-Africanism, I was an international banking official in none other than Barclays Bank Dominion, Colonial and Overseas – later known simply as Barclays Bank DCO – in Mozambique. The stringent exchange control rules that applied in most of Africa at the time when protectionism in the USA and imperialist prerogative instead of “globalisation� prevailed in the “democratic� world, kept private and official corruption at minimum levels. But I, an economist reporter by profession and a student of colonialist exploitation by inclination for nearly a decade, still know enough about modern Africa to state that in a situation where most African currencies are not convertible, certainly over the counter, large scale corruption can only be feasible with the connivance and abeyance of international trading concerns, including banks.

Barclays Bank DCO after a forced temporary absence at the end of “apartheid� in South Africa has recently rejoined the competition in a banking market that, despite or because of large-scale corruption, is still one of the most profitable in the free-for-all world of international business.

In the context of Africa’s contemporary plight, readers of New African might remember a provocative letter written or at least subscribed by a Mr. Scott Rasmussen, fromSausalito, California, (NA, June 2005), criticising this magazine for “privileging a type of self-pity he has found in Africa and the black Diaspora in three continents�, and challenging one of its columnists to explain why “if Africans are so much smarter than Europeans how did the later manage to enslave millions of the former?�

Regarding such a complex question, two points promptly spring to mind. Either Sausalito, California, is the kind of affluent place where some people have nothing better to do with their time than write silly e-mail letters to magazine editors, or its author, having been brought up in and never grown out of the age of TV is used to that type of TV interviews which end up with such questions as: “We have only three minutes left, so what do you think about the future of humankind?�

Assuming Rasmussen, as his surname suggests is of Danish origin, how would he feel like if someone asked him: “If the Danish are so smart, why is it that they have fallen into such obscurity since the ancient Vikings and later imperialism, or the pioneering abolition of slavery, that they are now mainly known for their bacon?� But such questions, of course, would be as offensive to others as his letter was intended to be to Africans.

Curiously enough, at about the same time as his e-mail was published in this magazine, the London-based New Scientist weekly on 14 May reported the findings of a research study at the University of California, Los Angeles, which concluded that “subconscious negative feelings or stereotypes about black people are learned through American culture�. The scientist leading the study, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging, found that hidden anti-black prejudices are shared by whites as well as blacks. He added that he thought “the results are very specific to this society (American), where the portrayals of African-Americans are not very positive on average�.

In my long empirical experience also in three continents, I have often found that most Africans, far from being convinced of being smart or superior as so many other peoples on average are, are full of unjustified racial self doubts, inherited from a singularly long past of oppression both in the countries their ancestors were exported to as cattle, or in their own continent where their social and educational development was suspended in time or conditioned to the demands of the colonialist market.

In another point, Rasmussen’s letter was also wrong. Contrary to his rejoicing final statement that the “donor community� has moved away from Africa, the British campaign to Make Poverty History is going ahead with widespread popular support. As for the New African, well, it too was founded, and has expanded, in the fight against those prejudices and stereotypes that Africans themselves inevitably also share in the prevailing Western-based culture.

To quote from one of the most impressive statements in the current campaign for aid which appeared in the British daily, The Guardian (13 June 2005), and written by Christopher Davis, the female anthropologist of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies: “Africa is maintained in the world economy as a kind of frontier. In this sense, Africa is part of our future. Far from being behind, it lies before us.�

If Africa is not put just on probation, and large corruption is seen not as a feature exclusive to African governance, but a product of international rich men’s collusion, the British pop-campaign and official initiative will be worthwhile.

http://www.africasia.com/services/op...tle=figueiredo