The White Man's Guilt

When we first walked the streets of Nairobi we were startled and feeling uneasy over that fact that almost everybody we met was staring at us. Some people would even turn around to get a second look at the two blond wazungu on their way to work. I have now realized that this was in many ways due to a cultural shock. In Scandinavia we are raised to never stare at people, it is considered very rude. Here in Kenya, it is different. Everybody stares at everybody. It is not strange to look a stranger in the eyes when meeting on a dusty pavement. Even still with this realisation, we sometimes get the feeling that some people are not staring at us for friendly reasons. And there are plenty of reasons for a Kenyan to be hostile towards the white man…

The white man’s collective guilt, or in Swedish; ”den vite mannens kollektiva skuld”, is an expression that almost anyone living in my home country will encounter sooner or later. It usually means that people of white skin colour are more or less to be held responsible for the actions done by their white ancestors. The imperialists, conquistadors and colonialists throughout the history. In other words; when white Europeans took to the seas and conquered, enslaved and destroyed almost every society that came in their way. When millions and again millions of native Africans were chained and taken across the Atlantic Ocean to be the slaves of the Americas. For a Swedish person this has always been more or less easy to diminish. The general notion if you were to ask a random Swede on the street would be something in the line of: “We are a nation of good humanitarians! Well, yes, we used to wage a heck of a lot of wars back in the 17th and 18th centuries, but that was against other Europeans! We never colonized anyone or traded with slaves!”. In recent days more and more people are becoming aware that even though Sweden was never a successful in intercontinental colonization, attempts were made and five different territories in North America, the West-indies, Africa and India were proclaimed Swedish territory. None of these were very long lived, and the fading Swedish empire saw itself defeated by the rising European superpowers of Holland and England. When speaking of the Swedish role in slave trade, it was very marginal as compared to the European imperial nations of the time, but nevertheless it still existed.

In any case, most people argue that even though these things were horrible, they are things of the past. It is said as a joke that one is to travel to Africa to “pay off the white man’s debt”. I have to admit that I myself have used that expression, and that it was one of my reasons for doing my Master’s Thesis here in Africa. Probably the strongest of all reasons. I felt that I wanted to do something good to the world, as opposed to just turn papers in an office of a big corporation. A chance to help, at least someone, and to once and for all “pay of the debt”. It would definitely be called good karma, and help to ease the conscience in hours of darkness. So, like many other young Swedes I decided to do voluntary work in what is referred to as the “third-world”. But why is it called the “third-world”? And why is it that we are constantly and almost exclusively fed the terrible news of war, poverty and starvation from this continent? There are no easy answers, and a lot of people would argue very differently. But here is what I’ve come to realize over these past weeks through conversations, research and a lot of pondering.

Let’s first look at Kenya, since it is the only place where I can actually say that I have real experience of the problems and issues with post-colonialism. Kenya is a sometimes almost brutally capitalist society. A meal at a fast-food restaurant will cost you somewhere around 7-800 shillings. When walking down to have lunch at our closest café, I started chatting with a young man who, to me as a Swede rather ironically, called himself “Lars”. He was a metal worker, now on his way home walking from his construction site at the Yaya Centre to downtown. A walk of at least two hours, one way. On a Saturday. When I asked why he had to work on a Saturday, he smiled and said that because the wage is so low he really does not have a choice. Every little money he can get is necessary. When I asked “how little” he earned, I was expecting a pretty low wage. But what he said almost made me fall backwards. 50 shillings per day. Meaning that ONE lunch in a still relatively cheap restaurant (there are a lot of considerably more expensive places) will cost him at least 14 DAYS of hard work. Like I have described before, here in Nairobi people work a lot. Long hours, sometimes up to 12 hours per day, and most also work on Saturdays. Some even on Sundays. The reality is beginning to dawn on me. At least for Nairobi, there are few people that could be called lazy. Something that goes against the notion of most westerners, who generally believe that “Africans are lazy”. Something which is also often promoted as one of the reasons for the “lack of progress in Africa”. Like so many times before, the reality is just not simply black and white.

As I am talking to Lars, big European luxury cars zooms pass us up on the nearby road. Cars that cost more than he could ever dream of earning in a lifetime, even if he were to work every minute of it, non-stop, without sleeping. All around the city one can see advertisements for new luxury apartments with their own private beaches at the Kenyan coast. So it is apparent that some people have money that would make some of the wealthy Europeans look like bums. Nairobi has big issues with personal safety, probably no-one could disagree on that. It is strongly recommended not to be outside after sundown. Something which for most regular people causes something which could almost be called a curfew during the hours of darkness. Instead of going to the root of it, the extreme poverty and huge inequality, the growing middle class barricade themselves behind walls with barbed wire and gates patrolled by guards. So why does Nairobi have all of these problems? Again, there is no easy answer. But most would argue that corruption and embezzlement could be the biggest problem. And now we are not talking about the petty traffic police who accepts a bribe of 500 shillings to feed his family. No, when the Kenyan national budget is crippled by the fact that money in the order of millions, if not billions of Shillings disappear, that is where the big problem lays. Money that were to be used for road construction, schools and healthcare, but instead ends up in somebodies private bank account. Who can blame the policeman, if not even the governors can play by the rules?

"The Wall"

This appartment-compound even has its own watchtower

Two Nairobi street-boy rockers

"Lars"

But then, what has this got to do with colonialism? Why is old European imperial ambitions to be blamed for the fact that the teacher’s go on strikes and the roads are full of pot holes in Southern Kenya?

There were differences in the way that the colonialists ruled their colonies, depending on the colonizing nation and the colony. But one thing is found almost anywhere in today’s ex-colonies. The tribal problems and the confrontations that they have, and continue to led to. Usually this is explained in our schools as “the imperialist nations sat down and divided Africa between themselves using a ruler”. This might be the case. But it is also implied that the reason why they used a ruler, as opposed to actually looking at the existing African tribes (or in other words nations), was that it was the simplest way to do it. As if it was done by purely by chance and the motive that everyone around the imperialist table should get their part. I believe there were more sinister and calculating motives as to why the borders were placed the way they were. Because it is a fact that in most of the African colonies, the way of conquering and controlling the continent was to “divide and rule”. By not only using existing conflicts between the tribes, but also by “adding petrol to the flame”, and sometimes even creating new ethnic conflicts, the imperialists could make sure that the indigenous people of their colonies would be occupied with fighting and killing each other. Instead of fighting the occupying colonialists. Despite this, the world of colonialism fell during a twenty year-period after the Second World War. Or did it completely? During the colonialist time, different tribes had different relations with their imperial “masters”. Some accepted their colonialist masters and in that way tried to gain more benefits and leverage as opposed to their rivalling tribes. Other tribes were no less than persecuted by the imperialists. All as part of the “divide and rule”-tactics. When the British were to withdraw from Kenya in the beginning of the sixties it was already decided who was to take their place and rule the country. The Kikuyu tribe had always been privileged by the British and thus when the time came they were simply the most educated and westernized of the Kenyan tribes. So with the help and blessing of the Crown of England, Jomo Kenyatta of the Kikuyu tribe was installed as the first president of Kenya. And since he was of European colonial upbringing, he did what he saw fitting to his new standing as the ruler of the country. He grabbed somewhere around 50% of the land in the new independent Kenya, and gave most of the rest to his fellow Kikuyu generals, officials and friends.

Other tribes were not as lucky as the Kikuyu. Still to this day, the tribe is one of the most important identifiers to a Kenyan citizen. It is changing, but still a lot of people do not primarily identify themselves as “Kenyans” but as their tribe. This is not strange, considering the fact that the tribes were here long before any European colonialists drew lines on a map, separated and squashed people of different nationalities together and proclaimed the existence of a new nation that was a subject to them. Our nations in Europe have often taken several hundred years to form, or have been joined or separated with some involvement of the consent of their peoples. And still there have been, and to some extent still are enormous problems within Europe. Together with the corruption, the tribal conflicts are one of the biggest challenges for the future of the Kenyan nation. They both together have led to a dog-eat-dog society where the most important thing is to grab money for yourself when you can, and you vote not primarily for the best suited presidential candidate, but for the tribe that he represents. This creates a society built on conflict, unevenly distributed resources, where brutality is required only to survive and where a lot of people have a deeply rooted feeling of being under-privileged and mistreated. And also are. It is common for some not to say their last name when meeting someone, because by the last name it is usually easy to figure out a person’s tribal belonging. People do not trust their government officials. People become suspicious to one-another, and want what they think that everybody else has. Government institutions have little or no effect at all on daily life. In such a society, the corruption thrives. The problem with tribal conflicts, more or less induced by European imperialists, is repeated over big parts of the African continent. In the former British colony of Uganda, the psychopath Idi Amin took control over the country after the independence with the blessing of the English Crown. And he then started one of the most brutal regimes the world has ever seen, murdering people by the hundreds of thousands, often because of their tribal affiliation. In Rwanda, tribal antagonisms escalated into what became one of the worst genocides in history. The Hutus were favoured by their Belgian masters and thus when independence came they took control of the country with the blessing of Belgium. The second biggest tribe in the country, the Tutsi, were then marginalized and discriminated by the Hutus. In the beginning of the 90ies, a rebel movement had begun among the Tutsis, demanding better conditions for their tribe. When the aircraft of Rwanda’s Hutu-president was shoot down by the rebels in 1994, that sparked the systematic murdering of Tutsi by Hutu that caused somewhere between 500.000 to 1.000.000 people to be killed over a period of a couple of months. That conflict also spilled over to the neighbouring country of the former Republic of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a brutal civil war has raged for almost 20 years.

Despite all of the despair and problems, there is great hope. There is a new generation now growing up in the former colonies. One which has not been raised as servants of imperialism. An afro-centric movement is slowly, but surely gaining momentum amongst the young in Nairobi. Here people discuss politics on an entirely different level than in the west. I am very happy to see the rise of what could become a new political era in Europe, with people again discussing real matters and politics around the coffee table, but here the stakes are very different. A lot more to be gained, and bigger obstacles. And ironically, one could argue that in one sense Africa is right now the least colonized continent in the world (apart from maybe Antarctica). Even though raw capitalism is very prominent here in Kenya, the big multinational imperial capitalism has not quite gotten its claws into this place. There is not a McDonald’s in every street corner, and a Starbucks across the road from that. Not everybody drives a brand new car just because they feel that they must. Not everybody is a walking poster for Prada, Nike and Adidas. Sure, there is a huge billboard for “Kentucky Fried Chicken” just on our way to work, and there is a growing hunger for expensive brands among the growing middle class who looks to the west for guidance on how to lead the “happy life”. But there is still hope that this might be the one place in the world where people actually keep their own culture and values, and not just buy the simple mantra of the capitalized western world that says “consumption is the road to happiness!”. The education levels are rising fast, and if one wants to be witty one can joke and say that “The national bird of Kenya is the crane!” due to all the construction going on in Nairobi. This place is evolving fast, the question is which road the young Kenyans, and for that matter all of the other nationalities of Africa will chose. I am just hoping they will not do the same mistakes that we have done where I come from.

The back-door

Pipeline

Forgotten corridor

"Some people walk with broken shoes"

With all this in mind, I think it is time for the Western World to acknowledge the full extent of the role that colonialism still plays in Africa. It is also important to ponder the fact that our high standard of living in Europe as opposed to the poverty in Africa is largely a direct causality of one another. And even though for example Sweden was not a “real” part of the colonization and slave trade, we have still largely benefited from it. All of Europe and the Western World has. By making some nations very wealthy through the use of a steady stream of “free” slave labour and “free” natural resources from Africa, it enabled them to engage in trade with other European nations that built the wealth that we are now living on and take for granted. And in some ways that extortion of resources is still going on, with the exploits of minerals and the use of low wage-workforce.

So what can be done by me and you, if you also feel that there is something wrong with all this. How can we help and try to set things straight? Apologizing for the colour of your skin and for the wrong deeds of your ancestors is not going to change anything for anyone. Burying oneself in all of the misery and problems will only make you depressed and invoke you in a feeling of hopelessness. But by seeking knowledge, being open-minded and focusing on the things you can do, instead of the ones that are impossible, we can make a change. Will I have paid off my part of the white man’s collective debt when I am done here in Africa? Certainly not. I will have to continue to question myself, seek the truth and spread the word of openness and tolerance. By shining the light of knowledge on the darkness of ignorance. No-one can do everything, and if you become overwhelmed by all of the conflicts and suffering and simply quit trying, it is not going to be good for anyone. Instead, it is better to just focus on just one thing that drives you, and if you have to, ignore the rest. No-one can do everything, but everybody can do something.


And that something might just change the world.