Editor, RE: “As Africans increasingly mature politically, the West needs to embrace new thinking” (The New Times, July 20). Hope is a wondrous thing. Unfortunately, like the idea of Santa Claus, time and age beat it the hell out of you and leave in its place only hard reality. Why would those who benefit from subjugating you have any interest in changing such an exploitative relationship? For the salvation of their souls? Or to be better persons and thus build better, more caring societies? There is less chance of that Damascene Conversion than the likelihood of lions laying down with lambs, or the survival of an icicle in hell. Western society is structurally exploitative; an eat-or-be-eaten ethos permeates their own intra-society relationships, let alone their interactions with those with whom they have clear physical and cultural differences. That society’s slaver’s impulses remain as potent as when they were shipping millions of Black Africans in their holds as animals of labour. It is the same impulses that allow them to murder thousands of dark-skinned people around the world and dehumanise the victims by reducing them to nothing more than ‘collateral’ (sounds like things you confer to your bank as security for a loan). Best of luck convincing those who profit so handsomely from the subjugation of others that they should relinquish such unequal relationships. No empire in history has ever voluntarily given up its power to wrest tribute from ‘lesser’ peoples. The only times the imperial boot has been removed from those it had subdued has been through those people’s successful revolt and freeing themselves from their chains. Mwene Kalinda
