Of Humans and Hegemonic Delusions

An Essay

„Are Franconians a tribe?“
„Of course not.“
“What about – just to keep the F in things – Frisians?”
“For heaven’s sake, of course not!”

This was a dialogue between me and a participant in one of my communication and intercultural training courses. We had just done a classroom global tour of non-verbal communication and were together doing a little test with multiple choice answers (for example tapping the side of one’s own head with a forefinger to another person, means: you’re an intelligent one but in German it means you’re an idiot or raving mad. Nodding the head in Greece means No and shaking the head from side to side means Yes . And, if a German speaker, you have definitely at one time or another become confused or raised the eyebrows when a Greek picks up the phone and says the sound of NEE! which to the Greek speakers means YES, to the German NO – of course).

I had just explained that Malawians do not look at each other directly in the eyes as a sign of politeness, not because they are congenital liars or are forbidden to look at the so-called “white” people in the eye.

The participant above wanted to know whether my “tribe” - the Luos of Lake Victoria - also consider looking at another person straight in the eyes as bad manners and rude. Taking some small cultural nuances like gender, age and social position into account, they do. But I didn’t tell the participant this straight away. Instead I tried a backdoor approach and asked, “Are Franconians a tribe?”
Of course not.
Frisians?
Of course not

“Okay, let’s take a leap over to… say, the Monegasques? The people of Monaco, the smallest sovereign state (after the Vatican) with a population of 31,900 and an area of 189 hectares. Smaller than the smallest farm of a Kenyan rancher. Are the Monegasques a tribe?”

This time it was the participant who instead of giving me an answer asked in reply, “Monaco?”

I nodded. “In the South West of Europe. An enclave in the South East of France on the Mediterranean.”

“They’re Europeans!” explained the perplexed participant.

“Precisely,” I nodded again. And wondered if this participant would be equally perplexed if I mentioned that the Inuits are Danish and therefore Europeans. Instead I told him that my group of people in Kenya, the Luos, number over six million people, the world is in the 21st century and tribes seem to have been imported from the Stone Age.

“But they live in Africa. Tribes live in Africa,” he insisted. Like: crocodiles live in water and any fool knows that, for heaven’s sake.

Isn’t this a familiar one, I thought to myself, along the lines of: I have nothing against blacks? But I was no Freud or Jung and perfectly unable to sort out psychological damages handed over from generation to generation of the pink ethnic groups going back several hundred years. I was here to lecture on intercultural communication.

In situations like this – which are far too often here in Germany – I sometimes can’t help feeling like a Herero facing a von Trotha who is more than determined to rob me of both land, cattle and soul, come what may.

I too have caught myself being subconsciously enmeshed in my own native culture and upbringing. To give but a few examples: despite having been educated in Europe from a young age I still have qualms about pathologists – they are my untouchables. If my child one day tells me he wants to be a pathologist I wouldn’t stop him. But I would definitely feel uncomfortable mentioning his profession to others. I simply feel that cutting up the dead is sacrilegious.
I wouldn’t go to a male gynaecologist unless my life absolutely depended on it.
I got upset with my German girlfriend when she sold her old car to her own eighteen-year-old son, explaining to me that the child has to learn that “nothing comes from nothing”. In my Luo community she would be a pariah. My friends are puzzled about my insistent on having a separate bedroom from that of my husband, a thing which to me is as normal as breathing. I’m still flabbergasted about the fact that prisoners here are allowed weekends “off” and then actually walk straight back in to jail after the weekend!

When I first took my husband to Kenya for a holiday, we rented a self-drive in Nairobi from a well-known international car hire firm. It even bears the name of Europe. The rental car manager, a Kenyan of British descent, wished us all the best with the car and hoped we wouldn’t get into a fracas with “a bad policeman” in Kenya but reassured us that all Kenyan policemen were “good” anyway. This was no surprise to me. But when I explained to my agitato wide-eyed husband what a good policeman meant, he opened his mouth but found no words to say back. A good policeman is one with whom you can sort out differences with a bit of chai – baksheesh, bribe, call it what you fancy. A bad policeman is that rare fellow who will book you in if you try to bribe him or her in order to get out of your differences. The latter is a rare breed indeed in Kenya.

“Don’t worry, my love,” I said to my husband. “Once the bad one books us in we’ll meet tons of the good ones in there and sort things out all the same.”

I still cringe when I witness children who ignore parental requests and utter swear words back which effectively render the parents powerless:
Clean your bedroom, please.
Not now, I have something to attend to.
What’s so important then?
My own business, gaddamnit! Don’t start giving me stress!
It was only a question! Come back here! Come back he…

Some years ago a European crown prince married a media-touted “party girl”. Not only that. The party girl had an out-of-marriage son. A cousin of mine studying in Washington called me to say that my family were now (yet again!) very glum about the fact that they knew and had told me I was marrying into an inhuman and decadent race on their way to human disintegration. “Kelleb,” I told my cousin in cold anger, “you’re married to an American woman too, remember? And you’re a man – a family cornerstone instead of the chaff on the roof that I traditionally am.”
“An African-American woman, dear Coz. She brought her cooking pots to me, you took yours to the Uncultured Skinless Ones! But give me a choice between Schiffer and Sabatini and I’m dropping dead for Sabatini.” "You missed the one about what gentlemen prefer, Kelleb!"
I thought to myself, so the barbed wire is not so much the country of origin but the colour of the skin, whichever turf one comes from. Every time Europeans fail to live up to the standards of my Luoland people and their Luoland rulers and aristocracy, I get a little jab in the ribs from the family, to put it mildly. Kelleb is my favourite cousin and I knew he was not gloating. In the eyes of my family I had married into a subhuman race and they could in the end prove this to me to boot, thank CNN. To this day I remain a royal K’Orinda-Yimbo, because of the “pure” blood of my parents in my veins which has to be honoured. But neither my husband nor our mutual children will ever be considered K’Orinda-Yimbos. Neither my husband nor my children will ever inherit the titles of princes or princesses.

But coming back to the beginning of my essay. This is one of the phenomena I’ve come to call Megignoarrogance Complex. Mega ignorance coupled with mega arrogance. It is practically inborn. I’m often asked about my “tribe” although the Luos number about six million people. When I’m in Luoland, thank the globalisation of the media, I’m being queried about the “animalistic” sexual practises of the “Skinless Ones” and their growing taste for ordering fellow human beings (preferably the minors) through the ‘Net, murdering each other, cutting up the bodies and keeping them in their freezers for later dinner party stews. This is regarded a “normal” Western aberration among my people.

Policemen in Germany arrest “Schwarz Afrikaner und ein Marokkaner ”. A black African and a Moroccan. A ZDF television newsreader states (about the Sudanese refugees in the ship Cap Anamur): „Sogar die Afrikaner kann man das nicht antun“. Even Africans shouldn’t have that done to them. It is so „normal“ to the newsreader that he does not consciously realise what he is actually saying. Almost like the “Kinder-statt-Inder” – children instead of (IT programmers) Indians – slip of the tongue. That one about the Cap Anamur Sudanese would never be dared here in Germany had it been about natives of the Golan Heights.

The race for the new Pope was heating up. On Sunday afternoon, 17th April 2005, in a programme on ZDF titled “Ein Leben für den Frieden” – A Life for Peace – the commentator got to the part where he was talking about possible successors of Pope John Paul II. He mentioned all the prospective candidates by name and country, giving a brief account of their biographies. Then he concluded: “Es könnte auch ein Schwarzer sein.” It could also be a black. Period. No name, no country, no brief biography, but a pigmentation. This is something that no other country in the West but Germany can get away with in the public media, consequently no other country dares to be so grossly and publicly disdainful of Africans. It is as if we are all Christians but the pink-coloureds are more Christian than others – even if Christianity sprouted at the tip of Africa and Europeans never came up with a world religion. It makes me wonder whether, when we finally all stand at the gates of heaven, St Peter would announce: Oh you good Black Children of the Lord, please line up at the back and let the good Pink Children of God come in first – it looks like a storm is brewing and the Pink Children could get wet!

My colleagues ask me what dialect my so-called "tribe" speaks. I say they speak a language known as Dholuo. Is that „afrikanisch?” they ask. I tell them it certainly is not „europäisch“.

Many of my seminarees can’t unknot the fact that a woman from Africa (even if a German citizen) is teaching them about communication and culture in their own good old Europe – particularly the so-called re-settlers of German stock from the former Soviet Union. To such people I’m the living proof of why German culture is deteriorating. To them I’m rummaging about in the family silver cupboard where I have no business poking my brown nose (excuse the pun). Stuck in traffic jams driving my own car, loud remarks have been callously hurled at me about what else of his, apart from the car, my pimp puts at my service.

I’ve calculated strategies, where I send my staff to negotiate business deals on my behalf until the final signing of the contract. And it gives me great pleasure when I finally put my signature down on the contract with the remarks, “You have been negotiating with magnificent generals – I’m their commander-in-chief.” And my “generals” and I have good laughs over this.

The Megignoarrogance Complex has tons of 19th century baggage. My favourite news report is the Weltspiegel in ARD on Sundays. There, viewers get morsels like “the Mau-Mau tribe of Kenya”. A ritual filmed in Lesotho (size: 0,0377% of the African continent) is cloaked with the words “It’s a widely spread African tradition”. Is the Oktoberfest a widely spread European tradition from Vladivostok to Dublin? Is the RAF a tribe of Germany? A Kenyan TV newsreader would never make such a blunder about Europe or Asia or any other part of the world outside and within Africa. Yet the Western world with its unlimited sources and resources for optimum education and information, from the minute one is conceived to the day they are buried, are not even alarmed at being so arrogantly ignorant about a continent that dominates the global map flickering on their TV sets hundreds of times a day. It’s a complex complex. It has the elements of both enormous fear and guilt. My stumbling stone of wisdom here is the famous journalistic 5 Questions. The WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE and HOW. When all is said and done, "racial" (all humankind are of one single "race") arrogance and ignorance are an integral part of the human factor. Only some have the ways and means to spread the contagion more disastrously and faster than a virus on its own fertile environment. www.akinyi.princess.de
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