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Not in black or white
Stella Orakwue, New African
June 2007

http://www.africasia.com/services/opinions/opinions.php?ID=1346&title=orakwue

Love and hate, which?

What you think and what you do. What you say and what you do. What you feel and how you behave and react. It is my profound belief that Africans are simply unable to sustain anything other than short-term conflict between these mind-body actions.

When I wrote in May's column that I am now prepared to kill any person, anybody, who attacks my brain, I am quite sure that there will be people who think that I am joking. That I am, perhaps, using the word "kill" as people do when they say things like "I'd kill for that dress!", or "I'd kill for a hamburger", or "that person is so funny, she kills me!". Figures of speech.

Probably some people think I am using a "figure of speech" or making a throwaway comment. Those of you who have been reading my columns for the past six years should know by now that I do not make throwaway comments.
I am now ready to kill anyone who tries to interfere with the way that my brain and my mind work for the reasons that follow. First, I'll start by asking myself some simple questions.

"What do I do?"

I am a writer.

"What do I do as a writer?"

I think.

"What tools do I use in my work as a thinker?"

My tools are my mind. My toolkit is my brain.

Clearly, therefore, if you try to harm, interfere, disrupt, destroy my mind, my brain, then you are trying to destroy the work that my brain produces. You are trying to destroy me, for I cannot replace my mind or my brain with another. I have no intention of losing either.

Radical writers' minds have long been targets for malicious, sadistic, vicious, destructive attacks by those who do not like how some of us think and what we think about.

The hope is that if the persecuting authorities and the people they employ do the job well enough then either the radical writer will self-destruct in private (go "mad" slowly in the confines of their own home) or the writer will be institutionalised in a psychiatric hospital. Their work will have been stopped. Their tools rendered useless. The writer put away. Not writing.

The history of writing is packed with examples. Many of them are people I admire greatly and whose lives I find inspirational. A long chain of writers in history who have been driven by terroristic actions into committing suicide, or who have "gone to pieces", been hospitalised, become psychotic, become drug addicts, been sent to prison for "criminal offences", and whose private and public lives were trashed. Others had private family and financial lives which were secure while their professional lives were targeted by the state, the thought police and private companies, trashed.But what is history for if not to lead us by the hand in order to understand what is happening today? Secondly, you may ask yourselves how do I know so much about the techniques that brain terrorists and their paid slaves use? I know of what I write because their techniques have been used against me for the past four years and unto the present day.

The fact that I am still here I can only put down to the obviously considerable mental, psychic, resources that I clearly possess. However, I shall never forgive and I shall never forget. I am now prepared to go to prison for my actions because, now, life in prison would be for me a cakewalk.

My privacy was utterly violated. Thanks to the apologies made to me by two men who came up to me two years ago, without my asking, and who confirmed the brain terrorists' actions against me that they had witnessed, I know that I - and these two brave Asian men - am neither paranoid nor delusional nor having auditory hallucinations.

The experiences of the last few years have, consequently, led to severe changes in my personality when I am in the company of people I do not know. These changes are too tedious to list here, but let me summarise them by saying that what I call severe, you may call similar in behaviour to a European who is being impolite.

But I have also developed a capacity for hatred that even I find remarkable in its depth, and which is far more serious. A capacity for hatred that has, and will have, serious repercussions for the rest of my life on other people.

As African people, the ability to maintain hatred for a long time is an ability that we have lacked. Except, of course, when it comes to "hating" another African or black person - in those cases we seem to be fully equipped for such endeavours especially over trivial matters, like other people's success or material possessions.

But when it comes to hating, really hating, people from other races who are at the root causes of our problems, then it appears that we have no capacity, or that our capacities are seriously weak, or that our capacities evaporate like milk that is left boiling.

Yet what do we see people from other races doing? We see nothing but solidified hatred: milked, churned, curdled, cut up hatred. Patted and spread, branded and distributed, sold to others who do not look like us so that they can eat up, digest, and then spew out hatred.

Hatred is their staple diet. It is what keeps them going. It is why they do what they do. They hate us. Why do we not understand this? Hatred is what fuels them. It is what spurs them on in their work of all persuasions, from economic to academic, from seeking land to seeking money. Hatred owns them. Hatred speaks to them. It has always been their driving, motor force. And things have not changed.

These people can deny it as much as they like. That is their primary occupation: to deny that they hate us. But these are people who do not know themselves even after centuries upon centuries of indulgent self study. They do not know how much they hate. And that makes them very, very dangerous people to know and to be near.

We seem to be alone among racial groups in not being able to hate other races like this. We seem incapable of digesting such an enormous amount of hatred. Why do we not seem able to store it in our bodies?

I believe that not hating the right people enough has done us, as Africans, irreparable harm and now puts us in tremendous, constant danger. It does. It leaves us unaware of what other people ultimately want to do to us. It leaves us exposed to their quietly hidden, behind-the-scenes, actions.

They come up to us smiling in our faces, wanting to shake us by the hand, trilling pleasantries, saying they want our "friendship", claiming they want to "know" us, to "get along" with us, to "work" with us, to do "business" with us, "live in harmony" with us, pretending that they want "integration" and "social relations", and to "help" us.

But they curdle their actions with their hate-filled, socially unsayable thoughts. Reality reveals their weasel, deceitful words. Then they try to draw the shutters down over our eyes again. Reality uncovers their hatred - but how late it still is before, yet again, we realise what was going on, and how big the discrepancies are between their words and their actions.
What you think and what you do. What you say and what you do. What you feel and how you behave and react. It is my profound belief that Africans are simply unable to sustain anything other than short-term conflict between these mind-body actions.

Being in harmony is what rules our mind-body actions; it is what determines and governs how our African minds work with our bodies. We are unable to maintain an outer world, physical behaviour, that is in conflict with our inner, mental world. And we certainly could not do it over years, decades, let alone centuries.

There is no conflict between our inner, mental spaces and our outer, public actions. We would not be able to tolerate having white people in such close proximity to us if there were such conflicts within us. But the mere sight of the colour of our black skins sets off a hate time-bomb in other races' heads. Their actions reveal what they really think about us when they just see us and they need know nothing else about us.

I have learned to hate. I have squared the harmonic circle. I have learned to sustain hatred and to maintain it. There are now people I will not tolerate anywhere near me. I have discovered that, like love, hatred is just an emotion.
Why is one emotion - love - supposedly "better" for you than another - hate? Why are we told that hate will only make us bitter? It does not. Why are Africans told: "You must forgive" those whose actions are pure, distilled, racist hatred? I will not.

I have discovered that just as you can live with love inside you, you can also live with hatred inside you.

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