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Idealism does not always last in
practice
Written by Macharia Munene
February 26, 2008
Many times people start with high ideals of what a bright future
would be once they remove whoever they do not like, but it does
not always work out. Actualising the ideals often destroys the
idealist and enables others who had little interest in the ideals
to benefit.
Foreign interests assist in frustrating the idealists. The ideals
of the 1789 French “Third Estate” Revolutionaries and those of
African anti-colonialists who met at Manchester in 1945 after
World War II are illustrative. Colonised Africans were the
equivalent of an international Third Estate
The two illustrations, products of crises, were similar in many
ways and each tried to change the world order in its own way.
Financial bankruptcy had forced Louis XVI to call the parliament
and ended up succumbing to “inferiors” of the Third Estate.
The conference at Manchester took advantage of the psychological
destruction that Hitler’s racial purity had inflicted on racialist
ideals. Both the French “Third Estate” and the international
“Third Estate” took advantage of crises that were not of their
making. In France, Abbe Sieye effectively destroyed the usefulness
of the privileged classes and claimed that the Third Estate was
the “nation.”
At Manchester, men who had dedicated their lives to, or were about
to embark on fighting colonialism rejected the premises on which
colonialism was based, racial exploitation. They included W B du
Bois whose 1919 The Future of Africa: A Platform wanted “the
thinking classes” in the “Negro World” to have a say in the
disposition of German colonies.
There was also Kenyan political adventurer Jomo Kenyatta whose
1938 Facing Mount Kenya portrayed colonial benevolence as
hypocritical. He represented a banned Kikuyu Central Association,
KCA.
The French drafted “The Rights of Man,” proclaiming equality,
brotherhood, and liberty of man devoid of artificial distinctions.
It destroyed Europe’s old order and was the French Revolution’s
idealistic high point. Delegates at Manchester issued a “Challenge
to the Colonial Powers” and also a “Declaration to the Colonial
Workers, Farmers and Intellectuals.”
In both Manchester documents, emphasis was on freeing black people
from colonial oppression. Neither the idealism of 1789 nor that of
1945 was to last in practice because the implementers faltered.
Some “revolutionaries”, like Maximilian Robespierre, became
victims of their own engineering. He had championed the revolution,
weeded out counter-revolutionaries in the Reign of Terror, and
ended up at the guillotine .
After Manchester, Kwame Nkrumah and Kenyatta embodied
anti-colonial revolutions only to be accused of autocracy. Nkrumah,
after leading the Gold Coast to independence, was overthrown.
Kenyatta led Kenya to independence only to be accused of
autocratic neo-colonial inclinations.
Foreign interests opposed and helped to subvert the revolutionary
spirit and assisted people to acquire power to undermine the
concepts of liberty and equality. Consequently, these concepts
were reduced to platitudes.
The France that followed the Reign of Terror and the restoration
of the Bourbons after combined Europeans defeated Napoleon was not
a symbol of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Similarly, once
colonialism was eliminated in Africa, pre-independence chants of
liberty and equality became irrelevant.
Post-colonial states displayed little love for equality or liberty.
In both post revolutionary France and post colonial Africa, the
ideals of 1789 and 1945 were broken in the process of
implementation.
High ideals can break.
Munene is a professor of History and International Relations at
United States International University.
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