60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

266 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
dominant paradigms of ‘developmentalism’ and the mental affi nities
to such modernity. The virus survived, even in the ambivalences of a
Eurocentric critique of the origins of totalitarian rule as presented in
the pioneering work, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
(1951), who herself was infected by racist perceptions that were not
always subtle. A clear indication of the ‘success story’ of bringing Europe
to most other parts of the world is that the institutions created by
colonialism to reproduce societies (state, school, and so on) survived
colonialism and remained largely unquestioned and intact. While
those controlling and executing social power may have changed, the
concept of power has not.
Similarly, the colonial legacy has remained, in most former colonising
nations, a chapter that has has yet to be fundamentally questioned and
critically explored in terms of the dominant ideology applied within
these countries – that of civilising the ‘natives’. That the hegemonic
discourse since then has changed very little in its principles is evident
with regard to West German society’s attitude to the unifi cation of
Germany since 1990, which in its nature was hardly diff erent from
colonial subjugation, and imposed the self-declared superiority of the
guardian over the foster child, or Mündel. The patronising, paternalistic
hierarchy imposed on the inferior system and its individual members
resembled basic features of the colonial mind. It is therefore still possibly
a sign of bad taste (but not as misleading as it might appear at fi rst
sight) that a prominent ‘unifi cation politician’ from the former GDR,
writing in Die Zeit around 2004 with reference to the redistribution
of property, used the analogy that East Germans were treated like the
Herero in Namibia. They were not, of course, since the Herero and
the Nama were almost annihilated, which qualifi ed the colonial war by
the German Schutztruppe (literally, ‘protection troops’!) in South West
Africa a century earlier as genocide. Hence such an analogy is at the
same time a deeply off ensive statement, adding insult to injury, and an
expression of subtly racist dispositions – expressed at a time when commemoration
activities aimed to bring this dark chapter into public discourse
and collective memory (cf. Melber 2005).
The inability to mourn, as diagnosed by Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich (1967) with reference to the reluctance of post-World
War II Germany to come to terms with the Holocaust, and express
remorse, is a phenomenon which can also be seen in the failure to
address the issue of mass violence under colonialism. It is also applicable
to the refusal to accept the fundamental challenges in terms
of re-thinking power and dominance (as well as their application in
forms of subjugation and oppression, culminating at times in exter-