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So, what are you reading?
I finally finished Al-Ghazali's The Book of Knowledge. I thought it would be a quasi-religious manual about logic and argument, but it turns out to be a remarkably interesting attempt to consolidate and support the basic opinions of Islam's Prophet and the Companions on the topic of knowledge in comparison to what was deemed knowledge in his time.
Otherwise I'm attempting Said's The Question of Palestine, for reasons unrelated to my reading on Islam or contemporary events, being more interested in the idea of Othering. I'm still on Bly's Iron John, and some day soon, I hope, I will make progress in The Dawn of Everything.
I'm making a concerted effort to read the books I picked up at the Library used book sale last summer, which have been sitting in a nice row on my china cabinet for too long. So I've been diving into Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Thoughts so far (his ANC activism has just started):
-- Mandela is an excellent writer. His account of coming out of primitivism and poverty to lawyer and activist is compelling and personal, he manages to balance good humor and honest accounts of oppression. I'd compare it to Angela's Ashes though obviously a bit more serious, where you have accounts of bad experiences that focus on the personal and the human.
-- Mandela's account of his youth reveals a modernizing tension. He grows up in a traditional tribal society, or at least the British-Empire-Sponsored Disneyland version of such, his father was a close courtier of the tribe's chief and when his father died Nelson was raised as a ward of the chief. Then the chief tried to marry Nelson off to another prominent family, in a way that would aid the chief in tribal politics, and Nelson didn't want to marry her so he ran away to Johannesburg. When he got to Joburg he prevailed upon his co-tribals and friends of the chief for hospitality and help getting jobs and connections, though some turned him away or reduced their aid when the chief got in touch others continued to help him. Later on he lost another housing situation when he started dating a girl from another ethnic group, and complained of the prejudice between tribes. This is both philosophically inconsistent, and very sympathetic and human: Nelson admires the close ties of tribal life, and takes advantage of them; but he shirks the obedience to the chief and insular xenophobia that creates those ties.
-- I never realized how late Apartheid was introduced. The 1948 South African elections brought the Nationalist party to power, and only then was the system formalized. While obviously the prior colonial regimes were far from woke and equal, the post-1948 system was a very real reduction in rights for blacks and an even larger reduction in optimism for future rights. Nelson's account before 1948 maps to the British belief that their colonial possessions would slowly assume independence as they assumed civilization: the British would create a civilized local black elite which would assist in ruling over the black majority and slowly assume rights, black rights would expand over time as more blacks were civilized until equality was reached. Then the Afrikaner nationalists took power and took back rights blacks had already been granted, while making clear that blacks would never achieve equality with whites. I wonder to what degree this change reflected the Afrikaner history and ideology of themselves as the oppressed minority conquered by the British? I always thought that Apartheid developed naturally from earlier systems, I didn't realize it was a late-created and harsher system than what came before.
I feel like something that always gets left out of discussions about apartheid is that afrikaaners are not a Northern European ethnicity. They’re a lot more clannish, tribal, and xenophobic than thé Dutchmen they used to be. The British wrote lengthy screeds about how they were impoverished religious fanatics who married their underaged cousins…. A description generally not used for Northern European ethnicities. The simple lack of British universalizing, civilizing impulse is pretty easy to understand there.
It's very clear that the British viewed the Afrikaaners as colonial ethnics in the same way they viewed the Zulu, maybe a step above the blacks but fundamentally a primitive group to be managed through conflict with other such groups.
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