Anthropology and Racism

Traditional education that takes place in buildings with thousands of kids and semi-kids listening to the same message, is no longer tenable.

We cannot blame the pandemic. The internet cast the first stone. Kids used to listen in awe, as teachers unveiled the wonders of Egypt and how the sun is energy.

What used to be exclusive to one professor is now open sesame online. The internet dethroned teachers. What should also come down from the throne are subjects like Anthropology, because they are not education.

They are part of imperialism, where men who did not speak Zulu, Hindi or Putonghua, wrote books about how ama-Zulu behaved, how indigenous people in India behaved and how indigenous people in China behaved.

Social Anthropology and Racism

Anthropologists from England, France and Spain ‘observed’ these people, like observing animals. They re-lit their pipes and noted down behaviour. When that was not enough, they turned to interpreters.

Interpreters were men they had ‘civilized’ to eat with a knife and fork and to speak English and French. Anthropologists then asked them to ask the ‘natives’ why they behaved in a certain manner.

For example, why would you call somebody mother, when you did not grow in her tummy for nine months or why women carried kids on their backs and not push them in strollers.

So-called research was to solicit answers to justify what anthropologists had concluded, that natives were not like white people. They were ‘half-animal’.

A lot is lost in translation, so information anthropologists gathered through interpreters is not accurate. It was a master and servant relationship. The interpreter worked for the white man who came from a faraway land in a ship.

Linking black people to animals

Anthropologists are partly responsible for the Natives + animals = one species. I once saw a documentary at a Johannesburg film festival where an indigenous woman was giving birth. She saw the film crew and tried to move away. The crew kept on pushing towards her. Why? She has no privacy because she’s an animal. I walked out of the cinema.

Anthropologists were not looking for understanding. The intention was to instill inferiority, thus justifying stealing whole countries, mining gold and diamonds free of charge.

What a British man who did not speak Zulu wrote, was immortalized in a book published in New York, by a publisher who indeed agreed with the anthropologist about the ‘animal like’ behaviour of the natives.

Books by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were compulsory reading at the University of Zululand, where I studied Anthropology. I wanted to graduate so I reproduced their views about myself.

How do I know myself? Because I grew up in a particular language setting, with teachers like my uncles, aunts, grandparents, a particular landscape, which was in all essence, real education.

Controlling ‘half humans’ and police murder

What anthropologists wrote is the foundation of apartheid in South Africa. There were racists policies like that all over Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. They are alive and well in policing in the U.S.

Police are trained to kill black men on the assumption that they are going to commit a crime. In March 2020, police executed Breonna Taylor a black woman, at home. George Floyd’s murder by David Chauvin a Minneapolis police officer in May, led to Black Lives Matter protests all over the world.

It will never stop because the seed that anthropologists planted, that black people are half-human is alive and well in so-called ‘developed countries.’

What should stop though, are subjects that are racism, not knowledge. Subjects like Anthropology.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.