Wafawarova Writes
By Reason Wafawarova
THERE is growing consensus in political commentary that corruption is endemic in Africa, that Africa has a somewhat hedonistic political leadership, that black people in the United States breed the criminal type of youth; that the Aboriginal-Australian is lazy, alcoholic and criminal in nature, and all this diagnosis is made in the name of research and the expertise of the so-called helping professionals.
The diagnosis of crime, corruption, alcoholism and laziness is often limited to academic theory and scientific work — never venturing into exploring the relationship between these problems and socio-political causalities.
Social workers and psychologists are often obsessed with diagnostic procedures and they rarely begin with the political system. When they do, it is often an adopted line from the prevailing propaganda pitch.
Mental health is about interpreting and predicting behaviour; about determining so much the characteristics and symptomatologies of various mental illnesses. The procedures that one learns in a school of social work and in a psychology lecture room are so deceptive that the so-called helping professionals who learn them genuinely believe that they do great scientific work, and that they are politically neutral or apolitical in their approach to duty.
Amos Wilson asserts that mental problems not only denote a disturbed psyche, or that an individual is disturbed, but that the individual in question actually disturbs the psyche of those making diagnosis of his problem. It is always a two-way process.
When a psychologist says an individual is mentally disturbed, the real point is that society is having a problem with that individual — that the individual actually disturbs society. Diagnosis in this regard must be a sort of dualistic relationship between the person being diagnosed and others around him, including the one making the diagnosis.
Inherently, diagnosis must be social in nature and as such diagnosis of social problems and mental illnesses must be viewed as a political affair. Crime, corruption, drug abuse, alcoholism and all such ills are inherently part of the political system, and they are not matters exclusively attributable to personality failures by individuals.
These problems are a reflection of how society’s values are threatened, how our way of doing things gets disturbed. The behaviour of the person we define as a sick individual is in fact an exposure of society’s own failures; of society’s own hypocrisies, and all we do as a society is collude to bring about a definition of the state of the mind of the person who is confronting our way of doing things.
When we talk of diagnosing prostitution, crime, corruption, violence and the so-called general misbehaviour by our people, what we are in reality doing is looking at the behaviour of these people in relation to the behaviour of society as a whole.
We cannot therefore limit diagnosis of a people to procedure and neutrality. It is all centred in politics. It is politics that set policies and laws, and it is politics that implement and enforce these policies and laws.
What happens is that a ruling class applies its ideological measures to the recalcitrant members of society — measures that often maintain a status quo that rationalises and justifies repression and injustice.
So we have in an unjust and unequal society the labelling of a group of people or individuals, and that labelling is carried out by the very people who maintain the injustice and inequality. So the very labels attached to the victims of that society become the means by which repression is carried out.
So society looks at its victims straight in their faces. It sees the corrupt, the prostitutes, the violent, the muggers, the thieves, the rapists and the face of this madness strikes terror in the soul of society.
Barrack Obama’s maternal grandmother used to cringe with fear at the mere sight of a bunch of young black people, and this was by Obama’s own confession during his election campaign. Even black parents in the United States will largely concur that merely seeing black teenagers on the streets or on the subways can be quite intimidating.
Elderly Zimbabweans are intimidated by the sight of certain groups of youngsters at Mbare Musika, or at such public gatherings like soccer matches. We are more frightened by our own children and people than we are by say, a bunch of Indian or White teenagers. We look at these so-called thugs and hoodlums and rarely do we ever look back at the society that has created them.
When we see these problems we demand that the Government should deploy more police officers, that the police should have zero tolerance to crime, that they should adopt a shoot to kill policy on dangerous criminals. The system tells us that there is no room or time to deal with social or political causalities. It says the menace of criminals and nuisances like prostitutes is so rampant and bad that it must be removed swiftly and ruthlessly.
At a global level we have a somewhat amusing scenario where the Western elite somehow believe that after robbing the world, after killing and destroying, after building weapons of mass destruction capable of killing each of us on Earth 10 times over, after so much capitalist profiteering and plunder, and after aggression towards so many nationalities — that the same Westerners still think they have a right to sleep peacefully at night.
They still feel they have a right to walk down the streets of Johannesburg, New York or Nairobi and feel absolutely safe, and that they have a right to be treated civilly.
Equally, the African elites expect the same to happen to them after plundering public funds and after corruptly giving away the continent’s wealth to unscrupulous investors and other crooks.
They get filthy rich by pillaging and plundering what should belong to African nations, and somehow they expect to sleep peacefully at night. They strangely feel they have a right to walk down the streets and be treated like heroes.
The world is not inhabited by such a legion of fools that plunderers and murderers should just get away with impunity. The victims of rape, deceit, plunder and looting will protest in one way or the other, be that protest self-destructive or otherwise. This is why repression and revolutions are quintessential partners whose sequel is absolutely predictable.
To maintain itself, the imperial system employs civic organisations to convert the behaviour of its victims and to pacify these people by every means possible. In some cases, they employ military force or they may create a dependency syndrome.
The idea is always to keep the victims away, to make them invisible, to convert their behaviour, to make them adjust to the imperial system, or to just keep them fighting each other.
The diagnosis of corruption in Africa by African leaders themselves is actually part of the problem, as opposed to it being a solution. It has become the means by which the leadership denies its own culpability.
The anti-corruption commissions across Africa have become a defence mechanism by which the leadership denies its guilt and defends its self-image and prerogatives. This is why the observation of the law only catching up with smaller fish and petty offenders; rarely bringing to book the grand offenders — is a common interpretation of how anti-corruption commissions are working across the continent.
Diagnosis and punishment of lesser offenders becomes the means by which the leadership projects its own criminality and its own insanity onto its victims.
The common actions of corrupt roadside police officers are simply a mirror image of how sick the system that employs them has become. The lowly public service clerk demanding a bribe before offering a service for which he was hired to do is just an expression of how sick the environment under which he works has become.
The Australian establishment makes a diagnosis of its "criminal" Aboriginal people for example. It finds such evidence as broken homes, uncaring, rejecting or permissive parents, alcoholic, absent fathers, disorganised, ghetto neighbourhoods, moral laxities and skewed values. These are findings resulting from research targeted at the victim and conducted by the system that creates the same victim.
So the system establishes a criminal type, a terrorist type, and so forth. So the criminal is profiled as under the age of 30, male, coming from a broken home, smokes, drinks heavily, and comes from a disorganised community.
Sometimes the system says the terrorist must be from a certain ethnic grouping; and this is why David Hicks was so much of news for his alleged involvement with terrorist groups in Afghanistan. If he was of Middle East origin, and not Caucasian; no Western journalist would single him out as news material.
Even when any of these descriptions may be deemed to be true; the question still remains if indeed there is a criminal nature existent in these people. Is it the criminal nature of the described criminal or is it a criminal nature that has been created by a system?
Society’s diagnosis of the individual rationalises repression just like ideology rationalises the repression of many people across the world.
Criminologists define career criminals, classify crimes into grades, and provide fantastic statics such as the assertion that it’s only 25 percent of the criminals that produce 75 percent of the crime. This, however, does not answer the question of who commits more crime in terms of crime against property.
In his book, "The Falsification of African Consciousness" Amos Wilson writes that muggers, thieves, robbers and pick pockets only commit 25 percent of crime against property; and almost all the offenders find their way to prison.
The other 75 percent is committed by white-collar fraudsters, corrupt politicians and public officials, as well as shady corporate criminals. These rarely ever get arrested, and when they get arrested, they often get away with paying ridiculous fines, or simply being forced to resign. Rarely do they ever find their way to prison.
The analysis often provided by criminologists does not deal with the root cause of the problem. It is the system that creates the criminal; it is the system that creates corruption — and then it is the very same system that identifies the crime and the corruption. The system then punishes its victims by throwing them in jail.
Ever wondered why jails create criminals that are harder and tougher than they were before arrest? Prisons are simply part of the criminal assault against victims of a criminal system to begin with. This is why prisons have become renowned crime universities — not for the study of crime, but for perfecting the art of committing more egregious crime.
So what is our preached remedy for corruption and crime? More policemen and more prisons is the normal route often chosen. Does that work?
The band-aid approach where the so-called helping professionals are trained and employed in thousands and more thousands cannot take away social ills and so-called deviant behaviour. What is needed is a fundamental restructuring of society itself.
What is needed is societal self-examination, fundamental social reconstruction, and a radical re-organisation of social relations.
When we see the increasing number of police officers, social workers and psychologists we are quick to say that more and more people are getting off the rails, that they are developing sick minds, and we even say they no longer fear God — that they have lost respect for our values and culture.
Yet no one dares say society is sick. We believe society is sacrosanct and cannot be sick. Only individual people can be sick. So we have a society which refuses to adjust itself and to seek its own healing — choosing instead to train and employ more and more of the so-called helping professionals.
Power relations in the global society as well as in regional and domestic societies are the key to the health status of those societies. Democracy is about power relations between the peoples within various societies, not necessarily between groups of political elites.
Balanced power relations will result in fairly equal opportunities for economic development and achievement, equal opportunities for social development, and equal opportunity for political say and achievement.
Where there is no balance these resultant indicators will in turn reflect the imbalances.
At the end there is dissent, rebellion, protests — and all leading to a revolution.
Global capitalism and state capitalism will always run this cycle leading to a revolution, and this is not because the revolting masses are made up of individuals with sick minds, but precisely because it is the society in which they live that would have become so sick that some remedy has to be found, one way or the other.
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