The White Man’s Burden

How the West seeks to dominate poor countries using the language of democracy and human rights

THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda |  We return to EU ambassadors expressing concern over human rights abuses by the Uganda government at a meeting with Gen. Salim Saleh last month. The German ambassador made a spirited case on how this is damaging Uganda’s reputation. There is nothing wrong with what he said. But I find it intriguing that a German ambassador is more concerned about Uganda’s image than Uganda’s leaders. Talk of mourning more than the bereaved. Why do Europeans care more about us than we do ourselves? And it comes to them naturally, subconsciously, and even unconsciously.

Modern international law is based on the principle of sovereign equality among states. This demands noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. This principle, created by the Peace of Westphalia, ended the universalist claims of the Holy Roman Empire. Under the higher sovereignty of the Catholic Church, the Roman Emperor could exercise authority over other entities. Westphalia sought to preserve cultural and civilizational distinctiveness as a defense of sovereign equality.

Yet Europeans respected this principle among themselves only. Beyond Europe, they exercised a hegemonic order based on sovereign inequality, a relationship of superior and inferior nations. Here, the rules that applied to international relations among European states were not applied in relations between European states and others outside Europe. To justify this, Europeans invented intellectual and ideological arguments for this.

In his poem, The White Man’s Burden, British author Rudyard Kipling used the analogy of the jungle versus the garden to describe international affairs. He argued that civilized and barbaric people do not have the same claim to sovereignty. The garden represents the civilized, where nations abide by rules and norms, engage in diplomacy, and cooperate for the greater good. The jungle represents an anarchic and chaotic world, a dangerous and unpredictable place in which only the strongest survive.

Kipling presented sovereign inequality as the remedial solution to sovereign equality. He argued that it was the duty of the virtuous gardener (the European) to cultivate the jungle (Africa, Asia, Latin America) to make it a garden. This was the white man’s burden. Hence colonialism was presented as a civilizing mission. White people came claiming to seek to liberate us from the tyranny of our customs and the despotism of our chiefs. And nowhere is propaganda more effective [and dangerous] than when it uses [and abuses] obvious facts—because these claims were not entirely false.

Yet the aims of the colonialists were different from those openly stated. However, many Africans then, like today, genuinely believed these tall tales. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart recounts this encounter and the confusion it generated. In Uganda, Semei Kakungulu fought with the British against Omukama Kabalega and Kabaka Mwanga. These collaborators adopted European practices and converted to Christianity. As a reward, they were given access to the benefits of modernity: Western education and official positions in the colonial state. But colonialism engendered the worst European practices in Africa: genocide, racial discrimination, land alienation, extortionate taxation, and forced labor.

Without the active collaboration of African elites, colonialism would not have gained a foothold on our continent. Colonialism did not win because it had superior weapons of military conquest. Such victory would have been tenuous. It won because it convinced African elites that it came to serve our own good. Indeed, no system of governance can survive purely by force. It needs an ideological justification, hence the role of the claims of a “civilizing mission” in entrenching colonialism.

The propaganda tools for European hegemony have been sharpened. Today’s civilizing mission is the claim to promote democracy, human rights, development, good governance, etc. These are presented as “universal values” that should justify disregard for international law, which prohibits interference in the internal affairs of nations. It is incredible that 120 years later, African elite have not seen through this façade. They still look to the white man as savior. We have our domestic problems, no doubt. But these cannot and will never be solved by European intervention. Only Africans, through their struggles, can solve our problems.

There is a much bigger problem with Western hegemonic ambitions. Many Europeans, following the idea of “perpetual peace” by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, believe that by spreading democracy, the world reduces the risk of war. The problem with democratic peace theory is that it pits the world between good governments and evil regimes. The West believes that they are morally superior and therefore have a moral duty to spread and defend democracy and human rights everywhere. This presents a contradiction; the essence of democracy is to criticize and constrain power. But here democracy is being used to extend Western power.

This is the crisis we face in international relations today. Since the end of the first Cold War, the West has used claims of spreading democracy and defending human rights to invade other countries: Libya, Somalia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc., Governments have been toppled, and states have collapsed, leaving anarchy, all in the name of human rights and democracy. Yet this “responsibility to protect” has only been used against those governments that are not friendly to the West. Brutal dictatorships friendly to the West are protected with arms, technology, and military bases by the West.

Even claims of democracy are dubious. Who defines democracy? The West. Who then decides which country is democratic and which is a dictatorship? The West. Who decides which country’s sovereignty or territorial integrity should be violated in the name of democracy, human rights, and/or the right of self-determination? The West. The West writes the rules of international law. It becomes the accuser, the investigator, the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and the executioner of a sentence. How is this democratic, fair, or just? The collective West, with only 20% of the world’s population, seeks to dictate to the rest with 80% of the world population. How is that democratic—by any stretch of the imagination?

We must remember that Europeans and their cousins in North America have interests. These interests are not always consistent with our own. Europeans cannot promote these interests through naked aggression. They need a seemingly universal ideology to justify their interventions; hence, they claim to promote democracy and human rights. We should not be fooled by high-sounding slogans that mask insidious motives. If Europeans genuinely believed in such ideals, they would not be sponsoring a genocide in Gaza. They would not be humiliating Africans trying to travel to their countries and causing their deaths on the oceans. I rest my case.

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amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug