DAVID MWAMBARI

Introductory note: This is a creative piece first posted on Facebook for a small audience. Inspired by I Write What I Like and written in a moment of resisting “the little white man that sits on your shoulder and checks out everything you do or say”. This is therefore an attempt to follow Toni Morrison’s advice to “sort of knock him off and you’re free”. In this sense, I too “can write about anything, to anyone, for anyone”. I have included references for further reading in different sections.

Every radical book that questions ‘whiteness’, eurocentric approaches and the search for Epistemic Freedom needs to come with the famous warning: Do not try this at home or practice this at your own risk ...

The literature can affect you deeply and (dis)order your everyday speech or actions … In this example the risk was low, in others it can lead to being fired from a good job etc …

Let me tell you a story of an encounter with “power and whiteness in everyday life”

After spending many early hours of the morning immersed in foundational texts of pan-Africanists from particular struggles against racism, colonialism, etc, (a Zimbabwean, someone from Botswana, New Zealand and Canada, and some old texts on the Haitian revolution and resistance, I met with someone. The previous evening I had been in deep debate with a Congolese intellectual and comrade and our conversations were intense and constructive…

That morning I went for an appointment and my interlocutor was a white man in his white country but one that I have troubling ties with … The topic of discussion really does not matter but for you as the reader to understand let me say the following: I was a client coming to ask for a service and he was meant to explain to me some things from his professional perspective, then offer me the service.

How do I approach aggressive racism or power in general, you might ask? My usual self, most of the time, is diplomatic, especially when engaging with those with any sort of power

(but white male power is toxic on another level,

sometimes it requires a word or two of resistance even on a good day) because they can crush you in so many ways and move on, while you remain nursing your wounds for a very long time … So I tend to take it all in, shut up and transact and leave …

Anyway, these theories, oh these theories of liberation were smoking that morning, were just too deep and they were still fresh in my mind… It was like I had been drinking whisky in the morning … I was drunk with ideals of national, regional and global emancipation possibilities against white power in particular, I was on an intellectual, emotional high … Literature does that to me, especially when fermented by conversations like the one I had with the comrade …

Then, when I asked the white man a simple question on what we were to discuss, in his response he used a really bad tone. My mind alert to his white male privileges because of the early morning literature, I took offense with his manner of talking to me. Just impolite. He probably talks to everyone in this way or woke up badly as I was his first client as far as I could tell, but I did not even consider that possibility. My ‘drunk’ faculties processing his speech in very few seconds, words rolling out of his masked mouth whose teeth I could not see, sounded to me like he chose the tutorial ‘tone’, loaded with infantile innuendos that I interpreted very quickly as suggesting I had no ability to understand the simple process he was explaining to me. His tone was aggressive to my disgust.

Now usually, like I said above, when faced with this amount of arrogance or confidence in ‘whiteness’ or power, in general, I take a back seat, I say to myself here is a case study. Or, uh, someone did not sleep well, or has had a rocky life …  as If I am their therapist. I theorize on possibilities of this human being, complex and unknown, but human, and therefore there is the possibility of establishing a relationship regardless of where they are coming from. If really pissed off I say ok can I find someone who is their supervisor to give a complaint as a client … I really try, I do …

I take a step back and ask again for clarification almost to make them reflect on what they are saying, and if they appreciate how it might be coming across to me, and who we are in this conversation, the brief encounters shaped by histories of what we were told about each other, I try a cocktail of approaches borrowed from many people handling serious potential disagreements including my parents, Ghandi-ism/some old Mandelaism/mixed with MLKism/Lumumbaism, Motherteresa-ism and even remind myself of those words of Michelle Obama’s when they go low … we go high or wherever near high, depending on the doses of racism or classism etcism I am being showered with in those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks of interactions …

I try and take the education root with the Freirian school influencing my faculties and ordering steps my tongue should take to respond … Because even me I fail many times, even me, I am sure there are those who can eloquently talk about how they have been at the receiving end of my own abuse of power … (if you are one of them and reading this please don’t take this as an invitation to comment on those sins of mine, please inbox me and I will apologize) …

But not this time, not when I am drunk on the liberation literature… I went crazy, it was not only the aggressive tone of anti-whiteness that I spat out of my mouth like fire … I told him to stop being arrogant, and

insulting me as if I was not also baptized in the same eurocentric knowledge of constructing an argument that he was

He took offense that I called him arrogant, how could I, he must have thought? I gave him ammunition and he used it efficiently for minutes to come … He became even more aggressive with his tone and explained that perhaps I was not able to follow his logic, I said what?

We argued on the premises of logic and power of who decides which logic is the right logic in this particular argument or why can’t he make an effort to understand me as a client … he then said I am being subjective …

My mentor and professor used to say don’t spend time on semantics unless you have time, but this time I forgot that advice … Remember I was drunk on the literature….

Again, I had just been studying feminist approaches questioning objectivity in research, so I wanted to relate now on that too … I then decided to ask him what he understood to be objective and subjective in this life, he got alarmed and wanted to show off his knowledge and, still using that condescending tone, the kind I am usually able to deconstruct in a sentence, sacrifice my feelings about it to rescue human relationships … but I took his explanation to be weak and gave it back to him in a few lines, declaring in this situation there is no objective perspective, it’s your word against mine … I was about to call for a mediator to make sure I get the service I really needed and I am sure he didn’t want to serve anymore this difficult client who won’t take the power and swallow it…

He failed to define it well in my view and I let him know that. So I defined, explained, gave examples… At that point, I felt relief behind his masked mouth and mine. I saw his eyes change. His white self approved me. It felt good to win an argument in that moment and let him know that he can’t use his words just anyhow in this conversation … He said that for 20 years he had been doing this kind of job, but he had never met a client like me … I said well here is the exception then. I said it could have been 20 years of not treating clients “like me” (hint hint hint Mr. – I am complex) right so take today as a moment of meeting new clients and treat them right or lose them …

At that point, I saw his eyes twinkling again towards advising his tone to have manners and appreciating where I was coming from … I did not expect him to understand the kind of pensive anti-colonial mood I was in, he said I see where this is going. I could tell he was concerned I was going to call it the ‘R’ word, which, if he is a white liberal man, is the worst insult and can lead to ‘white fragility’ things … For a second I thought this man must be worried I will scream “I can’t breathe“, he must have watched the trial results last night and he must be a nice guy who does not want to sit on my neck, which really allowed me to give him the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to walk away but he probably realized it would send even worse signals. At this point, I also remembered I was possibly tipsy on radical literature and needed to return to my sober self and not call for a BLM revolution kind of spirit in this unpleasantly tense encounter …

So I said, Sir, who are you to determine the future of this moment? Why do you now give yourself the power to decide how this conversation will go and where it is going, (in my mind I was really paraphrasing a conversation I had the previous evening with a comrade on whiteness and the power to decide) … In my mind, something, some churchraised good boy voice started to calm me down. That voice told me “Man, you are taking this too far. It’s not worth it, you are not achieving even the goal of this meeting.” And you too, your character and tone often drips with imperfections …

Here is the redemptive part of human beings. He must have thought the same because as soon as I turned my energy towards separating the tone (look at how I now use myself as the good guy, which is false, he too was trying), the person, and the reason for the meeting, he also decided to calm down. We both looked at each other, locked eyes, and at that point I think we told each other in silence, damn good to make your acquaintance.

And what was the reason we are meeting again? How can we transact and move on? He explained to me like I was a normal client, he used what I perceived this time as the right tone, my sensitive heart started to reduce speed … We did what we were supposed to do a few minutes ago if we had only been sensitive to each other’s predicaments … If this was not a Covid-19 historic moment we would have shaken hands because really there was a meeting of the mind, admittedly of the aggressive kind, but we did not give up on each other …

I am not responsible for what he did with the conversation, but I know it left me reflecting and with more questions than any recent encounters … We worked together and achieved our goal in this instance …

Now, what’s the point of the story? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a story. Without a moral at the end of it, told for the sake of telling stories of everyday encounters and what literature does to us as available agents … Perhaps we need to be taking these doses of knowledge in private and then meet people where they are at? But then why are we the ones to continue to take all kinds of punches, begging that the powerful use respectful tones even when only for a short transaction?

When I returned I continued reading and here again was a question: Aimé Césaire asked his friend Léopold Sédar Senghor “Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world?” And Senghor replied: “That’s quite a problem”.