The Black Baseline

Europe, here we come!

Sub-Saharan Africans are the fastest-growing demographic on the planet. With a fertility rate over three times as high as European women (5.2 children per woman to 1.6) that shows few signs of decreasing, the population of Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to more than double, rising from 1.1 billion to 2.4 billion by mid-century. With so many Africans coming into the world, it is vital to understand them better, but already much of the material produced on Africa and Africans is tainted with Cultural Marxism, so, to get an accurate picture, it is vital to refer to sources that predate political correctness. Here is passage is from a book published in 1930:

They are men who are possessed by the delusion that they are leopards, and therefore must kill men, and when they are out to do this, they try to behave altogether like leopards. They go on all fours, fastening on their hands and feet real leopard’s claws or iron imitation of them, so as to leave behind them a spoor like that of a leopard; and when they catch a victim, they sever his carotid artery, as leopards do. The remarkable and uncanny fact is that most of them have become human leopards involuntary, having been made members of one of the bands without being aware of it. The band prepares in a human skull a potion made out of the blood of one of their victims, and some man on whom they have previously fixed, is secretly given some of it in one of his ordinary drinks. Then he is informed that he has drunk the potion, and therefore is from that time one of the band. Nor does any one of them resist. They are all alike, dominated by the belief that a magic potion has some magic power against which no one can successfully fight, and so they obey unresistingly. (p. 13)

Another passage from the same book:

It is absurd to talk of exploitation by the timber-merchants of the labourers who come down from the interior, if that means that wages are too low. The work that these primitive humans do often bears no relation to the wage which has to be handed out to them at the end of their contract period. During the first months of it many of them are almost wholly useless, because they have never held an axe in their hands and have first of all to learn how to use one. Nowhere in the world, probably, strange as the statement may seem, is the total cost of labour higher in proportion to the work done than in the primeval forest. (p. 45)

Likewise:

But we are not tried only by the entire absence of discipline in our savages; we suffer from their absolute inability to understand that anything can be valuable. The hospital being so near the forest it is really not at all hard for them to get firewood. But, as it is rather less trouble, they prefer to burn the beams and planks which I procure with so much trouble and such heavy expense... (p. 50)

And one more:

What work is caused us by the dysentery patients who can no longer move about, and who dirty everything where they sit or lie! Many have to be fed by hand because they are too weak to carry a spoon to their mouths. And the care of them is all the more laborious because the natives will not stir a finger to help them; to such disgusting work there is no bringing them. We therefore often have to do it all ourselves, and if there ever is a black man who will help, he is loaded with presents and smothered with praise.(p. 73)

By now – assuming you have been successfully socialized into the modern multiculturalist West by being brainwashed with notions of “White guilt,” race as a “social construct,” and “White privilege” – you must be thinking that these passages could only have been written by an extreme psychotic racist, possibly a whip-wielding slaver or paternalistic colonial fascist with a waxed moustache and sadistic twitch.

You must also be thinking that a book with such toxic examples of “hate speech” should be instantly pulped for the greater good of humanity. But while you are rightfully disgusted, you may also be feeling a wonderful warm glow, stemming from the deep love and respect you have for Blacks and other non-Whites, even if you don’t actually live among them or associate with them much.

But there is a slight problem, because these words were not in fact written by an evil racist from central casting, but instead by one of the greatest philanthropists of the 20th century and a Nobel Prize winner to boot. These are – Shock! Horror! – the words of Albert Schweitzer, a man who combined a deep love of the African with a clear-headed view of what Africans were really like.

But don’t worry about that embarrassing little detail too much. Nowadays thanks to the hegemonic forces of Liberal egalitarian tyranny, text like this, which doesn’t quite fit into the great multicultural Gleichschaltung of the West, can easily be recategorized as “racism,” while Schweitzer, like any other White man born on the wrong side of the 1960s, can quickly be inducted into the evil pantheon of racists.

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For those of you who haven’t been successfully socialized into the modern multiculturalist West, however, Schweitzer’s account, which comes from his book More From the Primeval Forest (1958 Fontana paperback edition) is an invaluable picture of what can be called the “Black Baseline,” the essential nature of Blacks before they were changed by contact with Whites.

Schweitzer

It is very important to remember that the Black Baseline exists, because it has often been very well hidden by the distorting forces of White influence on Blacks. Historically, through slavery, Christianization, miscegenation, colonization, neo-colonialism, and the West’s cultural hegemony, we have often changed Blacks out of all recognition, or at least think we have, but the fact is that the Black Baseline remains firmly in place and continually and relentlessly exerts its own influence in countless ways.

Reading a book like Schweitzer’s is a good corrective and reminder of the foundations of sand on which we have built our version of the Black man.

The White Liberal attitude towards Blacks has two main aspects. First they think that Blacks are a blank slate, and merely need to catch up in socio-economic and educational terms, through “affirmative action,” etc., in order to become ebony versions of themselves.

Yes, there is some plausibility to these ideas. Under intense political, cultural, and economic pressure of the sort that the Black community in the USA faced before the 1960s, Black behavior did appear to change in a variety of ways. The problem today, however, is that most of this pressure has now been reinterpreted as “racist.”

The other aspect of the White Liberal attitude is a belief in Black empowerment. This is held to be an absolute moral good, and something to be desired even in the absence of actual Black improvement. It is naively hoped that such empowerment will inevitably lead Blacks in “the right direction” – i.e. to become Black versions of themselves.

These ideas are obviously absurd and contradictory. They can only be resolved in the Liberal mind by removing all agency from Blacks and by continuing to blame any flaw, failure, or Black misbehavior on “White racism.”

External Influence versus Internal Influence

It is essential to keep the Black Baseline in mind because Liberal notions of race are hegemonic and so create the conditions in which the Black Baseline will reassert itself. Once White power and influence are removed from Blacks, as in places like Haiti, Detroit, or South Africa, a process of reversion to the mean immediately starts and Blacks begin the long journey back to their original baseline.

Many aspects of Black behaviour – from the desolation of American inner cities, gangsta culture, the disintegration of the Black family (actually a White family model imposed on Blacks by Whites), etc. – can best be understood as this Black baseline reasserting itself. The more time it is given the more it will reassert itself.

But Black empowerment, wherever it happens, is always a good thing, because it instantly reveals how vastly mistaken Liberal notions of race, Blacks, and the workings of human nature are.

Schweitzer’s book recalls his years spent in Africa, mainly in the valley of the Ogooue River in the then colony of French Equatorial Africa, now known as Gabon. Interestingly this is now one of the better-of parts of Africa. This is due to a small population (1.5 million), large oil revenues, and continuing strong post-colonial French influence – partly the legacy of Schweitzer. But in his own day the country was regarded as more primitive than average.

These differences in African development between one part and another, before the coming of the White man, do not reveal an indigenous variety between Africans, although there is of course some of that. The most important factor in these differences was the degree to which African societies had been exposed to another external influence, namely that of Islam. Those part of Africa most impacted by Islam tended to have less primitive if not less brutal cultures.

You could say that some parts of Africa underwent two waves of significant external influence (or colonization), one by Islam and one by Europe.

Gabon, as a country South of the zone of Islamic influence, was only influenced by Europe, a process that continues today through the country’s economic, and cultural links with France.

But while the West continues to exert power and influence in some parts of Africa, this is (1) conditional on the West’s economic interests and (2) at odds with the West’s declared ideology of egalitarianism and cultural relativism. With its mantra of White guilt and Black empowerment, Western Liberalism constantly seeks to undermine its own dominance and influence over Africa.

The ways in which these various external (Europe, Islam) and internal (the Black Baseline) influences contend with each other can be seen in two of the biggest news stories in Africa at the moment – the abduction of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram and the breakdown into tribal anarchy of the recently independent state of Southern Sudan.

Because Nigeria has experienced waves of Islamic and European influence, it could be said that there are actually two Black Baselines at work, namely (1) Nigerian society with an admixture of Islamic influence before White colonization, and (2) Nigerian society before the arrival of Islamic influence.

Boko Haram

Under the ideological stimulus of Liberal egalitarianism, White influence has been retreating from Nigerian society and allowing it to revert back to what it was, except where economic factors create a countervailing effect in favour of Western culture. Although in many ways less potent than Western influence, Islamic influence is more assertive. It is also more ingrained in Nigerian society, having been in the country for hundreds of years, whereas European influence has very shallow roots.

In recent decades there has also been an important change in Western attitudes. After decolonization in the 1960s, the West continued to exert strong indirect influence over many African countries through economic, diplomatic, and moral power. This was motivated by the imperatives of the Cold War. But since the end of the Cold War over 20 years ago, the West’s ideological emphasis has switched from an implicitly White hegemonic neo-colonialist attitude to an egalitarian multiculturalism tailored to its domestic needs.

From the African viewpoint this manifests itself as a loss of White mojo. Regardless of how many aid or anti-poverty efforts – or even military interventions – there are, the West, with its new egalitarian, culturally relativistic ideology, just looks weak, and its influence continues to ebb. In this environment Africa returns to its baselines – Islamic or primordial.

In Nigeria, since independence in 1960, European influence has steadily declined, but the same cannot be said Islam. On the contrary, Islamic influence seems to be growing and organizing itself. Boko Haram defines itself as specifically anti-Western, the name translating as “Western Education Sin.” Obviously Islam does not suffer from the same process of ideological self-loathing as Western Liberalism.

But while Nigeria reverts back to its pre-British Islamic baseline, we have to remember that there are Islamic societies and Islamic societies, and that not all Islamic societies are alike. Beneath Nigeria’s Islamic baseline, the more primordial African baseline continues to exert its undying influence. Despite its overt Islamism, Boko Haram is actually a fair approximation of both processes, melding tribalistic, voodooistic, and Islamic elements together into a brutal cocktail. Like Schweitzer’s leopard men cult, this is a group that thrives on a male dynamic of group violence, although instead of the leopard as their avatar they have adopted the bloodthirsty prophet.

As I said before, though, Black empowerment is always a wonderful thing. One of the most interesting aspects of this case is the statement by Boko Haram that they intend to sell the girls in order to raise money. In other words, the hegemonic White man abolishes slavery, but the empowered Black man simply ignores this and brings it right back in again. Let the Liberals sit and ponder that one, before they find a way to blame it all on White racism again.

Double Decolonization

While Nigeria veers back to two atavistic baselines, the South Sudan shows what Nigeria might look like without the influence of Islam. Following independence from the Islamic North in 2011, South Sudan has quickly fallen apart and now is the scene of massacres, “tribocidal” warfare, and famine. Both North Sudan and South Sudan are ethnically diverse, with various large tribal groups, but the North, thanks to an Islamic culture, has been able to maintain a crude political unity, and for a time was also able to impose this on the South. Since independence however the South has come apart at the seams in a dramatic case of reversion to the Black Baseline.

This is significant because other ethnically diverse non-Muslim countries have been able to maintain a modicum of political unity. Schweiter’s old haunt of Gabon is a good example, as this is just as ethnically diverse as South Sudan. The real difference between these two cases is the relative continuity and strength of European influence.

In the case of Gabon, France maintained strong links after independence and helped prevent fragmentation. In the case of South Sudan, following the departure of the British in 1956, there was a period of uneasy Islamic dominance. This effectively filtered out stabilizing post-colonial influence by Britain.

With weak European influence and weak Islamic influence, following the completion of what can be called it “double decolonization” in 2011, the country quickly went off the rails. Rather than becoming another relatively docile and malleable neo-colonial entity like Gabon, the country is now sliding into its own version of the Mfecane – the great inter-tribal bloodbath that cleared the way for the Boer colonization of South Africa.

One of the sad pleasures of Africa’s constant troubles is the delicacy with which the Western media reports them. Ludicrously respectful news organizations like the BBC insist on translating atavistic tribal bloodbaths into the nomenclature of serious political struggles, ensuring the mismatch between the “rational” and the real, and a constant supply of absurdities.

While taking about bodies rotting in the streets of the town of Bentiu for two weeks, the BBC talks about the “rebel forces” re-taking the town from “pro-government” troops, when these terms simply refer to the different Nuer and Dinka tribes, intent on massacring each other and raping each other’s woman.

Liberal egalitarianism means Black empowerment, and Black empowerment means reversion to the mean, to the Black baseline. In Nigeria this means Boko Haram showing their contempt for Western education by auctioning off schoolgirls on the slave block. Elsewhere it means something even worse. In Africa the West has created a vacuum and they call it progress. Those projections of 2.4 billion Sub-Saharan Africans by mid-century may be a little optimistic.


Colin Liddell
Counter-Currents
8th May, 2014