60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

16 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
human activities. One can only hope that this waking-up to Nature’s
revenge will be followed immediately by a similar waking-up to humanity’s
screams for help. As will be clear in a few paragraphs, the
frames which have been used to straightjacket Africa and its various
historical phases must be jettisoned, once and for all. In great part
because what happened to Africans as a whole had already been infl
icted on other people, especially those who, upon being ‘discovered’
(in the Americas, in particular), spoke up and stated Truths which,
precisely because they were considered too inconvenient by the discoverers,
had to be crushed. Should one not ask the descendants of
the discoverers to act diff erently and acknowledge that long before
their scientifi c instruments confi rmed it, Natives of many parts of the
planet had eloquently expressed similar, if not more dire warnings
concerning the destruction of life processes. They did so in various
ways, treated for the most part as primitive, unscientifi c folklore, with
occasional exceptions. 6
How inconvenient is the truth according to Al Gore?
The systematic destruction of Nature, peoples, their way of living
and of thinking about themselves, humanity, has grown apace with a
way of telling people how to understand that process of destruction
in such a way as to submit to it. ‘It’ refers, in general, to the socioeconomic
systems which have grown out of the processes that followed
the conquest of the Americas, the industrialisation of Atlantic
slavery, the occupation and colonisation of Africa. These processes
include the attempts to resist, without doing away with the inaugural
practices and mindset.
Looked at from such an angle, the unfolding of the war in Iraq looks
very much like a replay and a concentrated version of all the conquering
expeditions from 1492 to the present. What is surprising is the inability/refusal
of some of the most radical critics to go to the root of
the problem, and not just stop at the level of the most visible culprits
– an inept president, an incompetent administration, a corrupt corporate
culture, and so on.
6 One of the most important exceptions, in Africa during colonial times, is the work
among the Dogon, carried out by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen. The works
of Cheikh Anta Diop and, more recently, of Théophile Obenga have shown that such
an approach to Nature has roots which go far back in the history of humanity. More
recently, Ayi Kwei Armah’s KMT – In the House of Life (2002) has gone even further,
showing that the legacy of Ancient Egypt does not reside in the pyramids or the
thinking of those who commissioned them.