MyWeku

It is really not that dificult to take umbrage at an American Republican or right wing Presidential candidate’s utterances. Their’s is a politics of derision of the not so powerful and the idolisation of the rich and powerful whilst beating the drums of American exceptionalism. However, when that candidate is likely to win the right to stand against Barack Obama in the next American elections then his every word ought to be taken seriously.

In this instance, these words even though historical provide a sense of what Newt Gingrich’s thoughts were and most likely still are on colonialism in Africa. These views were expressed in his 1971 Ph.D. dissertation which he wrote at Tulane University, titled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960”.

Here are some quotes from that dissertation: “If the Congolese are to confront the future with realism they will need a solid understanding of their own past and an awareness of the good as well as the bad aspects of colonialism.”  “It would be just as misleading to speak in generalities of ‘white exploitation’ as it once was to talk about ‘native backwardness.”

Over at the Philosopher’s Stone, Robert Paul Wolf takes an indepth look at Newt’s dissertation and quotes from the concluding part of it, which reads: “The Belgian colonial record left no one guilty and no one innocent. The Belgian leaders had virtually absolute power. By 20th century standards they used it benevolently although without foresight. The Belgian public had abandoned a responsibility which it did not desire in the first place and which had to compete for attention with pressing and far more obvious domestic problems. The only people who suffered were the Congolese and they had suffered far more under Leopold II (and their neighbors still suffer far more under Portuguese and South African rule). That guilt which the Belgians bear is for neglect, oversight, and relatively mild exploitation. If the Congo was not the model colony Belgian publicists pretended, neither was it the disaster news reports from 1960 to 1965 suggested. To have developed a semi-modernized, semi-educated but politically innocent colony was one of the Twentieth Century’s lesser sins.” [p. 283]

These are not the thoughts of a man who does not see some benefits of colonialism for the “natives”. Anyone who is familiar with Belgian colonial rule in the Congo knows exactly how Barbaric and unforgiving it was. The Belgian King during that era, looted and bled Congo dry. To gloss over Belgian atrocities in the Congo with the excuse that the Portuguese and English treated their colonial “subjects” worse trivialises the pain of colonialsm. A recent article posted here suggests that most conflicts in Africa are caused by the creation of colonial era ”national borders” into which various African ethnic groups were herded. That pain has and continues to manifest itself in violence and genocides.

Texas in Africa also has an equally ebullient take on Newt Gingrich’s dissertation “He saw Belgian rule as beneficent.  Gingrich argues that the Belgians prepared Congolese women for the challenges of modernity, by which he presumably means that learning to wash the dishes of wealthy white women with water from a faucet was a useful 20th century skill to have in place of, say, being able to critically reason or understand what the natural rights imply about subservience and racism.”

Like the Belgian comic character – TinTin in the Congo, Newt Gingrich is a character of our colonial past and not our modern future. As the world searches for answers on dire economic problems and conflicts, one can’t help but wonder if the “annointment” of Potus Gingrich is indeed a manifestation that America has not come that far afterall. That such a flawed thinker with this level of deranged thinking stands a chance as any in becoming the next President of the United States and presiding over the world’s “problems” is scary indeed.

Realistically, a Gingrich Presidency seems inconceivale to me, but in a country that elevated one set of people over another and in one that may feel  it has “paid” for it’s historical sins by electing a black man as President, anything is possible.

Perhaps the only person who actually managed, albeit unwittingly, to make Newt Gingrich look good by defending the right of a woman to be President, is the British Comedian and Cambridge graduate Ali G. (Sasha Baron Cohen). The footage of their conversation is below follwed by a video of Newt Gingrich talking enthusiastically about his 24 day trip to Africa. It might be worth noting that he never actually visited the Congo as part of his Doctoral work to seek out what the victims of colonialism actually thought of their misfortune or “fortune” as Newt Gingrich may prefere to see it.

On second thoughts, having watched the video, I fear he would have devoted much of his time to more “African” things – The zebras, monkeys, lions and goodness knows what else, Africans have to fend off when we step out of our mud huts.

.

 

 N Thompson