In 1977 I went window -shopping in New York. A pretty ball –pen caught my eyes and I asked the price. A Latino lad lashed out at me: “Can’t you read the price tag, stupid nigger!”
I felt the insult in my bones. Not so much the “stupid’” bit as the “nigger tag.” As a matter of fact, I call myself stupid several times a day even now. As if I did not know, I looked in the mirror. The Latino guy was absolutely right. I was and still am a Negro, a brown Negro to be precise. But why is Negro pejoratively degraded to “nigger’ and stigmatized? A black race horse is as majestic as a white one and as fast. Black marble walls and ebony furniture elicit as much awe and admiration as white ones.
Besides, there are stupid whites (and Latinos) as there are black or brown ones, and beautiful whites (or Latinos) as there are black or brown ones. Believe it or not, in 2008 I campaigned vigorously for Barack Obama via the internet, thinking that if a black human being was elected President of the United States of America and was made the most powerful person in the world, the nigger stigma would be banished once and for all.
Admittedly, the Negro image was temporarily elevated and the euphoria that this generated among blacks in Africa and elsewhere was quite remarkable. But Obama is only a human being and therefore like any other human being ,black, white or yellow, had his successes as well as his failures in office. In due course, he was considered to be a rarity in the black race. Besides, he is white on his mother’s side and his positive impact on race relations soon began to wane. Eventually, what seemed like a retributive backlash in the person of Donald Trump appeared too convincing to discard as a mere coincidence.
A long time after the Latino lad incident, I met my former sociology lecturer at Hailesellasie University (now Addis Ababa University), Prof Shenck, a white gentleman, and told him about the racist slur. He used to give me an A + ahead of Caroline, a beautiful “Caucasian American lass, who usually sat next to me in class. She once rudely snatched my answer sheet to compare it with hers at the top of which was scribbled aB+ in red. “What’s it that you have written to get an A+?” She had mumbled something to that effect.
“I would not be surprised to hear an aspersion of that sort in the US for a time as far back as 1977. At any rate, racism is racial and unless what’s supposed to be your race does well as a race in economics, science and technology, such racist denigrations, openly or covertly, are likely to persist,” said Prof, Shenck. That pithy comment gave me a life time’s worth of insight into the nature of racism.
Sometime after Prof. Shenck’s wise words, a British scientist, a geneticist, I think it was, was expelled from the fellowship of the British Royal Science Academy for saying that only the extremely fine psychomotor coordination of a Caucasian can execute the exquisite backstrokes in tennis. The biased scientist probably had not heard about Arthur Ashe, but then he was a black rarity at least until the Williams sisters.
I know blacks excel in sports, particularly in American football, basketball and long- distance running, sprints, etc. But all this is associated with brawn rather than brain and does very little to improve ingrained racial stereotypes. Even a black Einstein or Gauss would not make a significant dent in the black stigma. They would both be dismissed as outliers, exceptions to the general racial rule of inferiority as regards the Negros.
I was lost in thought brooding over the issue when my long –time friend Tesfaye Tirffe walked over to me and said: “Lewis Hamilton has won again!” But Tesfaye’s news was not much of a relief to me, because Lewis Hamilton is like Barack Obama on his mother’s side. No doubt Lewis Hamilton is a genius at the steering wheel in formula (FI).
In fact, Tesfaye Tirffe has always been a greater inspiration to me than Hamilton. He stood top of the class at Sandhurst British Royal Military Academy, sending the teaching staff there into disarray. It was in the mid- 1960’s when there was quite a lot of at least subtle racism in British society, and the faculty were not sure what the Queen’s response would be when a black cadet was presented to Her Majesty to be honored by the sword awarding ceremony. The Queen first thought the “black genius” was from one of her African Commonwealth nations, but when she was told that the smart young lad was from Ethiopia, her smile broadened and became warmer as she reminisced about Emperor Haileselassie’s exile in the UK during World War II under King George VI, her own father.
“Come on, Tek. You should be excited about a Lewis Hamilton win. He may be like Obama but he is still a person of color”, Tesfaye Tirffe said in an upbeat tone.
“I know, but he is an outlier, an exception and a rarity. Didn’t I tell you what Prof. Shenck said about racism against blacks? Unless we
blacks prove ourselves to be equal to the rest of humanity as a race, there is no way we can erase the black stigma from the face of planet earth,” I replied with a thinly veiled feeling of resignation,
Tesfaye nodded rather vehemently in total agreement and said : You’re right Tek! Caucasians used to call the Japanese “white apes” and the Chinese “slant eyes.” Not any more, because now the Japanese and the Chinese have proved themselves to be economic, scientific and technological titans on a par with the Caucasian Americans and Europeans! It is us black Africans, Arabs and Latinos who are at the bottom of the economic, scientific and technological league table and who are suffering from the emotional wounds and scars inflicted by racial insults, aspersions and slurs.”
Tesfaye Tirffe’s brilliance was uplifting beyond measure. I was temporarily paralyzed by a surge of patriotic and racial emotion. In my frenzied fantasy, I flew all the way back to New York to meet that Latino lad who called me “stupid nigger.” I thought I met him and mounted a ferocious diatribe against him and said: “You think you are superior to me because you are a little more light –skinned than me, but you are not even aware we belong in the same broad inferior racial cohort in the eyes of Caucasians, wise guy! I am going to lead the charge to get us all out of this racial inferiority complex. I am determined to utilize my ancient Axumite civilization spaceship to get to the pinnacle of economic, scientific and technological development. You don’t even know you have your own Aztec civilization spaceship, stupid Latino!”
Tisfaye Terffe, who appeared to be alarmed at my rather intense emotional paroxysm said: “Anything wrong, Tek?”
“Nothing wrong. It is just my wild imagination. But I believe at least one black African country should have reached the stage of economic, scientific and technological development that South Korea has attained for us blacks to prove that we are as good as any racial group in the world. Black Africa has had over 60 years to do it in since independence, and we Ethiopians have had over a thousand years since the decline of our Axumite civilization and over 120 years since Adwa?”
“You are absolutely right, Tek. It seems we have given up on trying tocatch up with Caucasians and are actually regressing into ‘the loose change of major -league racism’ of identity – based sectarianism under systematic racial pressure from neighboring Arabs!”
“You know something, Tek? I have heard them say that we don’t deserve to sit on all this fertile land while they themselves fight over strips of desert wilderness.”
“That’s dangerous talk! It unleashes a struggle for survival which is extremely difficult to ward off unless we Ethiopians put our act together and get ourselves out of the madness of identity –based politics!” I remarked in response to Tesfaye Teriffe’s alarming information.
“By the way, Tek, I forget to tell you that your former teacher Prof. Shenck is coming over to Addis day after tomorrow to participate in the International Conference of Ethiopian Studies. He is scheduled to present a paper on how Ethiopia forfeited her pioneering role as a beacon of Black African renaissance in the modern era.”
“Tes, you must have misheard the title of the paper or the name of the presenter. Prof. Shenck is never that kind of a person. He’s always been optimistic about Ethiopia. You’d better check it out again”, I commented, remembering Prof. Shenck’s positive outlook in his lectures years ago at Hailesellassie University. To which Tesfaye Tirffe replied:
“You may be right, but the fact of the matter is that Ethiopia has so far failed to capitalize on Lucy, the Axumite civilization, the Lallibelian and Gondorian revival, the Gada system, Adewa and the modernizing efforts of Hailesellassie to stage a sustainable economic, scientific and technological revolution in order to successfully erase the “nigger stigma” from the face of the earth. The Latinos have Brazil and the Arabs have Dubai. What does Black Africa have as a black community and racial group? Maybe Ghana?”
“ I have a dream that one day…”, I began feigning a recital of Martin Luther King’s immortal words, and Tesfaye Tirffe broke into laughter uttering indistinctly at the same time, “Ok Tek, Let’s call it a day”, and walked away briskly.
Postscript: Brig. General Tesfaye Tirffe was a brilliant high school classmate of mine at Haileselassie Day School (Kokeb Tsibahe) and did stand top of his class at Sandhurst and was awarded the ceremonial sword from Queen Elizabeth. Sadly, he was executed by firing squad after being allegedly implicated in a coup attempt against President Mengistu Hailemariam in 1989. The anachronism in the story is fictional and deliberate.
The Ethiopian Herald Sunday Edition 8 March 2020
BY TEKLEBIRHAN GEBREMICHAEL
