Hiiraan Online

Zimbabwean Presiden and his wife Grace Mugabe

The way the European Union-African Union Summit in Belgium this week has been handled convinces me that Europe has not lost its colonial knowledge on how to put the African in his right place.

In the interest of helping other people who might develop an interest in African affairs as we find more oil, here is a quick guide on how to insult an African.

First is that whole question of respect, or face, or whatever untranslatable term you call it in your tongue.

In my own language, treating someone with disrespect is called something like “not finding” someone, or rather not finding a place for that person in the natural order of the universe.

When you withhold hospitality, or grant it grudgingly or sarcastically, you are “not finding” the person against whom you are directing the insult.

Equally, it is insulting to be coerced to be differential  towards someone who, in your view, you should not be “finding”. Thus, there are many men who ran way from their families in the 1950s to fight the British because they thought it was disrespectful to be forced to remove their hats for European children.

NO TOUCHING

The second one is familiarity. Things have changed today, but there were times when men would kill each other over a simple matter of African manners (it is not an oxymoron).

Believe it or not, I do think that in my tribe, joking around with a man, smiling at him and touching him was a serious offence. Interaction was solemn business, words weighed with care, no touching or show of emotion, or unnecessary eye contact.

Unbroken eye contact was interpreted as an attempt to impose your will on the other man and it was more often than not responded to with violence. Actually, I think most disputes were resolved violently.

It is the height of familiarity, I think, to invite a man to your house for a feast, a meeting to decide a case, or negotiations for bride price or the purchase of land or the furtherance of commerce, and then tell him how he can come or who he can come with.

It’s just as bad as inviting a friend to a feast and asking him to bring his own food.

But the easiest way to die in Africa, even today, is to insult a man’s mother or his wife, or to insult him before any of those two relatives.

A man’s female relatives are not mentioned in African conversations other than in the most flattering of terms. A man only insults another man’s wife if, to quote my brother, the former Commissioner of Police, Maj-Gen Hussein Ali, he has “suicidal tendencies”.

BEAUTIFUL BUT DISDAINFUL

So when the European Union invited President Robert Mugabe to the Brussels Summit, that was act an of “finding” him, of giving him his rightful place in the order of things. But refusing to admit his wife was not just one insult, it was a compendium of the most terrible insults.

Denying her hospitality was definitely an act of “not finding her”, of thinking that she was not good enough for the society of human beings. “Finding” her husband after “not finding” her is in itself a most deadly insult. Were Mr Mugabe a proper African man, he would never travel to Europe again, even if they came and taped visas for the whole of Zimbabwe on his moustache.

The fellow who decided to deny Mrs Grace Mugabe a visa is guilty of the deadliest of all offences; that of being impervious to the reciprocal needs of the brotherhood of husbands. If Mr Mugabe had gone to the summit and left his wife behind, where would he have slept when he returned home?

The West is in a competition with China and other emergent countries for the friendship of poor but resource-rich countries, especially in Africa. But unlike the West, the Chinese appear to have understood that when your jigger-infested relatives come to visit, you do not wash their feet in disinfectant before admitting them into your home.

Europe continues to behave like a beautiful but disdainful village belle who pays no regard to the passage of the seasons.

In 20 years, visa bans will be meaningless. Anyone worth sanctioning will see little sense in journeying to Europe. And that is a generational insult.