PCS

[renjith p george]

Ashish Nandy
In these two essays, Nandy discusses how the growth of colonialism in
India and the responses to it were unique. The British occupation of
India was hardly marked by any bloodshed and even in the history books
we hardly read about any sustained violent response to the colonizers,
as opposed to the colonization of Africa and of Latin America. The
first essay discuss at depth the psychology adopted by the British to
conquer India using the metaphors of masculinity and feminity. The
British believed in the superiority of the masculine traits over the
feminine. It can be argued that this ideology came into being with
King Henry VIII saying goodbye to Pope and the setting up of the
Church of England, though why this happened is another story. Thus,
there was this projection of virile young men who went about
civilizing the savages. These young men faced a dilemma in India as we
were not a country of savages. Read the book and find out how they
resolved their dilemma
The essays further highlight the responses from within India to this
British image of hyper-masculinty in the form of the early socio-
religious reform movements and the military nationalism of the
educated middle-class youth. These movements had an inherent flaw to
them as they, in their ideology, acknowledged the British superiority
by attempting to pay the British in their own coin.
It is here that the Mahatma came into picture and created the powerful
androgynous image consistent with the philosophy of Hinduism to fight
‘cure the British’, as colonialism was not a one sided affair. It
affected the British equally.
The second essay discusses the search of identity within the western
and the colonized worlds in the aftermath of colonialism as there was
exchange of ideas and collision of cultures. The author explains using
the lives of Rudyard Kipling and Sri Aurobindo as strikingly similar
yet hugely different examples.
Vividly written, this is one of the most interesting pieces of non-
fiction I have read. The language and the references would be a little
difficult for the casual reader to understand easily, but once you get
started, it makes a gripping read. Just over one hundred pages long
and the cost being 150 rupees, highly recommended buy for anyone with
interest in the colonial rule, the Mahatma’s philosophy or India, in
general.
Additional info
Had William Hazlitt written his essay “On Persons with One Idea”
today, he would surely have found room for the field of postcolonial
studies. It is a field with only one idea: namely, that imperialism
and racism are such dominant features of modern life, and had such a
foundational role in the construction of our present society, that
they inform every aspect of our ideas, culture, and history.
Postcolonialism is, in theory, anti-hierarchical and anti-oppressive.
But because it has only one idea, it can easily become oppressive in
practice, and to quite a large extent. To show that this is true
within the context of one postcolonial scholar’s book, The Intimate
Enemy by Ashis Nandy, is the purpose of this essay.
Ashis Nandy might seem an unlikely candidate for such an accusation.
He is a political activist and a major commentator on contemporary
affairs, known for his championing of nonviolence and tolerance. One
of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals, he has written about
communal violence, particularly Hindu-Muslim riots and the emotionally
charged landscape of nationalism. He is no friend to the Hindu right,
which he has accused of being itself a product of British colonialism.
All varieties of chauvinism are subjected to fierce criticism at
Nandy’s hands, and he is a member of numerous human rights and civil
liberties groups.
These views are decent and humane, and Nandy is no friend to
injustice. Yet he is very much a member of the postcolonial movement,
and it often leads him to support a blinkered traditionalism for no
other reason than that it seems to be anti-Western and anti-modern.
His book, The Intimate Enemy, appeared in 1983, at a time when
postcolonialism was flourishing and when its arguments must have
appeared fresh and controversial, although they have now gone quite
stale. In essence, Nandy is making a case against modernity, and
against the entire project of secular liberal rationalism, which he
sees as more or less inseparable from colonialism, capitalism, and all
the aspects of modernization and development he finds objectionable.
Many of Nandy’s concerns about the modern world are quite
understandable: it is what he would put in their place that is less
clear. Nandy is mostly concerned with bureaucratization and the
diminishing of individuality it entails. He is horrified by modern
hierarchies of wealth and privilege, by the inequities of modern
societies and the gruesome contrast between wealth and poverty which
prevails in contemporary India. Most important of all, he recognizes
that modern science, modern weaponry, and modern efficiency have made
mass murder all the more easy and warfare all the more deadly. All of
these criticisms are certainly valid and ought to be taken into
consideration. What is less valid is the accusation that liberalism,
secularism, or rationalism are responsible for these problems, and the
corollary position that the Enlightenment experiment is bankrupt.
Nandy implicates the entire liberal worldview in aiding and abetting
imperialism, and therefore sees fit to reject it. Its talk of equality
and justice is a despicable lie intended to cover up its secretly
hierarchical, patriarchal dimensions. It is an essentially
inegalitarian doctrine masquerading as the very opposite, or so Nandy
would have us believe. The liberal worldview privileges reason over
tradition and superstition. In this sense, therefore, it puts power in
the hands of an educated elite or a scientific, Westernized
bureaucracy. It also can be used to justify imperialism as a
humanitarian attempt to bring justice, knowledge, and scientific
modernity to the backward regions of the world. That liberalism does
these things is the crux of the postcolonial argument, and Nandy
wholeheartedly embraces it.
In responding to this, we will leave aside the bizarre fact that Nandy
is himself an active supporter of global liberalism, at least in some
limited sense. Liberalism is the founding ideology behind the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), after all, which Nandy
must theoretically support. He is, indeed, a member of the People’s
Union for Civil Liberties, which is the most well-respected civil
rights group in India and has been working for decades to protect
democracy, secularism, and human rights, all of which Nandy criticizes
stridently in his writings! This contradiction is something Nandy will
have to work out for himself. What concerns us here are his arguments.
Nandy has erected a certain number of barriers to any successful
refutation of his points: mostly in the form of bizarre evasions. One
might like to accuse Nandy of being unfair in his attacks on liberals,
of spreading misinformation, but this he admits to at the very
beginning! His framework, he claims, explain his “partial, almost
cavalier, use of biographical data and the deliberate misuse of some
concepts borrowed from psychology…. The aim is to make sense of some
of the relevant categories of contemporary knowledge in Indian
terms.” (xiii, emphasis added).
Nandy’s own training is as a psychologist, yet here he announces his
intention to misuse this training so that Indians might understand his
points. It seems difficult to me to imagine anyone not finding this
rude and objectionable. Surely the individuals whose biographies are
about to be misrepresented have a right to feel angry, but so do all
the Indians in the world who would insist that they can tolerate truth
and fact, and don’t need to have important concepts in psychology
misused for the sake of their understanding. What would Amartya Sen or
Romila Thapar say to such a claim?
The above quote may be an instance of surprising honesty on Nandy’s
part, but it makes it difficult to engage with his later arguments.
One cannot be sure which of them are even accurate or properly
documented. It also makes the entire task of criticizing Nandy seem
absurd. I live on the other side of the world, after all, and come
from a different cultural background than that of Nandy. Does this
give me the right to misrepresent his life or his views? Should I
rewrite the above to suggest that Nandy does not have reasonable
criticisms of modernity but is rather a mindless reactionary? This
latter would not be true, but it would make more sense to a Western
audience, I have no doubt. On what ground would Nandy object to my
doing so?
Another evasion on Nandy’s part appears later on in the preface, when
he declares that “a purely professional critique of this book will not
do. If you do not like it [I am, I’m afraid, very much in that camp]
you will have to fight it the way one fights myths: by building or
resurrecting more convincing myths. However, even myths have their
biases.” (xiv).
Perhaps I am being dense, but I have a great deal of trouble
understanding what Nandy could possibly mean when he says that even
myths have biases. If I plan to construct a series of falsifications
in order to attack Nandy’s book, which he seems to be suggesting I do,
how could such an account be anything but biased? Had Nandy said that
even facts can be biased, that would be a remarkable assertion, but to
say that it is possible for lies to be biased is almost a tautology.
At any rate, I prefer to attempt a non-mythological critique of Nandy
that engages seriously with his arguments, even if he does not regard
such a critique as possible. This is because Nandy’s criticism of
liberalism is now so widespread in academia and has formed the
backbone of postcolonial scholarship. Those of us who would like to
see a more liberal, tolerant world, in which people are not subjected
to irrational cruelties and injustices, therefore need to be able to
respond to it.
First of all, it must be said that some liberals, namely James Mill,
but also John Stuart Mill and the other utilitarians, were supportive
of imperialism, and that liberal theories of progress lent a certain
credence to imperial designs. However, Western imperialism preceded
liberalism by a long while, and such liberalism actually provided the
first voice of opposition to it. In fact, imperialism is incompatible
with liberal, universalist principles, if one truly takes them
seriously. Montaigne, a proto-liberal if there ever was one, was
driven to a profound hatred of cruelty and injustice by the deeds of
the Spanish in America. The Conquistadors were not motivated by the
principles of liberal humanitarian intervention, meanwhile, but by God
and king. If any ideologies justified imperialism, they were
belligerent, proselytizing religion and the chauvinism of monarchs. It
was both religious intolerance and absolute monarchy, meanwhile, that
the Enlightenment went about debunking, and that liberalism has always
opposed.
Liberalism presupposes that all human beings are endowed with reason
and conscience: this is on the first page of the UDHR, which Nandy
supposedly defends. People may come from different backgrounds and may
embrace different identities, yet they all may be approached on a
basic level as reasonable creatures capable of treating one another
decently and humanely. From this extends all of liberalism, right down
to democracy. If one takes this seriously, as I said, imperialism is
unthinkable. After all, imperialism is inherently undemocratic and
authoritarian, and is based upon the assumption of unalterable
differences between cultures which can only be overcome through force:
Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations is the perfect example of
how illiberal anti-universalism plays into the hands of militarists
and chauvinists.
Universalism may make power-motivated imperialism illegitimate because
it insists on the equal dignity and rights of all people. Yet, what
are we to do when other societies commit grave injustices?
Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters is a classic of liberalism. It is
revolutionary in its criticisms of European societies and traditions,
but also in its implicit assertion that both East and West can be
criticized from the standpoint of reason and conscience. France may be
heavily assaulted in the book, but the narrative’s true personal drama
revolves around the Persian Usbek, and his relations with his numerous
wives. The brutalities of the Persian system of government and of
Islamic gender roles are criticized just as harshly as European
societies in the book.
Even this early work of liberalism expresses the essence of the
universalist outlook. We have a moral stake in all of the injustices
of the world; we are just as implicated in those of other societies as
we are in our own, and we must intervene to protect the victims from
cruelty and injustice. This intervention must not come from Western
ethnocentrism, but from a pan-civilizational awareness of shared
humanity.
Certainly authoritarian imperialism and various realpolitick schemes
which masquerade as humanitarianism are impositions, and involve
regarding members of other societies as less than human. This, in
turn, often results in grave human rights abuses (we may regard the
massive civilian causalities of the Iraq war as a recent example),
which are the very things liberals are attempting to avoid. If one
were to truly approach global intervention with humanitarian goals in
mind, however, such things could be avoided. The imperialistic
tendencies of the Mills and of other 19th century liberals were a
distortion of liberal values that could have been avoided: all these
writers had to do was look to their liberal anti-imperialist master,
Jeremy Bentham!
What is important to realize, however, is that imperialism is not the
only evil in the world, even though it is a serious one. The failure
to see this rather elementary fact characterizes a great deal of
postcolonial scholarship. One must avoid imperialism, but one must not
be so desperately fearful of intervening in other countries that one
seals off the victims of cruelty within their respective nations and
refuses to promise aid.
Nandy criticizes “Western universalism” and suggests replacing it with
an “alternative universalism” based on traditional Indic concepts.
What he fails to understand is that “Western universalism” is a
contradiction in terms, as is “alternative universalism.” Universalism
is simply universalism: it cannot be associated with a particular
culture. Liberals use whatever traditions and sources are available to
defend universalism, whether Western, Indian, or something else
entirely. Certainly Amartya Sen, in his defenses of liberalism, refers
not only to Western Enlightenment figures, but to the Buddha, various
South Asian traditions, deliberative politics in Africa, and so forth.
If Nandy were truly committed to universalism, he would make an
argument similar to that of Sen. But instead, he attacks all those who
have espoused universalist values and openly defends traditional, pre-
modern societies. His alternative universalism is really, therefore,
only a glorified particularism. It may legitimately attack the evils
of modernity, yet it has nothing to say about the horrors of the pre-
modern world, the caste system, traditional gender roles, or the
superstition and narrow-mindedness of small communities.
But if one embraces this particularism, then why should one attack
imperialism? Nandy criticizes egalitarian ideologies, the ideals of
democracy and human rights, etc. as mere hierarchies and oppressions
in disguise. In this he follows the lead of Foucault and similar
postmodern thinkers, who find in liberal institutions little more than
disguised bureaucratic power relations. But how does one know that
such hierarchies are reprehensible if equality is not a goal? If
egalitarian ideologies, democracy, and self-government are not
legitimate ideals, why should it be the case, as Nandy maintains, that
imperialism is so wrong? Along with the postcolonial theorists, he
begins with the unexplained premise that imperialism is the greatest
evil in human history, then proceeds to insist that the ideologies
which might provide a grounds for attacking it—namely, the equal
rights and dignity of all people and the value of self-determination—
are themselves imperialistic! If equality, human rights, and democracy
are not actually valuable goals, then Nandy should proceed to applaud
imperialism, authoritarianism, and the triumph of might over right.
Foucault at least was honest enough to pursue these ideas to their
horrible conclusion, eventually backing the Ayatollah Khomeini and his
reactionary movement. This is the end result of the assumption that
equality and democracy can somehow be implicated in inegalitarian,
undemocratic abuses.
Within The Intimate Enemy, there are many bizarre interpretations and
discredited assertions, just as Nandy promised there would be. To take
only one blatant example, here is his brief discussion of the 19th
century social reformer Rammohan Roy: “Rammohan had introduced into
the culture of India’s expanding middle class… the ideas of organized
religion, a sacred text, monotheism, and, above all, a patriarchal
godhead. Simultaneously, he had… [suggested] a new definition of
masculinity, based on a demystification of womanhood and on the
shifting of the locus of magicality from everyday femininity to a
transcendent male principle.” (22) It may take one more time than it
is worth to decipher that sentence, yet once one does so, one realizes
the full extent of Nandy’s misrepresentation.
I know less about Roy than many, I am sure, and I would not doubt that
there are legitimate criticisms to level against him. However, he was
a decent person who was seeking to abolish the practice of sati, which
involved the ritual self-immolation of a woman after her husband died,
and to guarantee women some basic inheritance rights. While I’m sure
he did not go far enough in his proto-feminism, he did attempt to
guarantee a few basic human rights for Indian women. Yet according to
Nandy, Roy was imposing a “masculine” worldview on a society which
respected the “mystical” side of femininity. What this mystical side
is is unclear, but Nandy seems to assume that rationality and critical
thinking are distinctly male—I know many a feminist who would beg to
differ!—while irrationality, tradition, and “magicality” are all
female. Therefore a society in which women are subjected to irrational
injustice and cruelty is deemed “feminine” while a post-Roy society in
which women have a small degree of power and agency is a male
imposition, by Nandy’s account. Would he declare Afghanistan under the
Taliban to be a “feminine” society? Certainly femininity was properly
“mystified” there, since women were so successfully sealed off from
the rest of society!
Nandy is tempted, thanks to the entire spirit of postcolonialism, to
attribute all of the world’s evils to imperialism. And because of
this, he ends up tacitly condoning all of the world’s injustices which
predate imperialism, such as patriarchy, religious intolerance, and
the violence of tradition. Given Nandy’s personal views in his public
life, he would no doubt be shocked to be accused of defending such
things. But he has in fact fallen victim to the postcolonial trap: he
has focused so exclusively on one injustice—imperialism—that he has
rendered himself inured to all the other injustices in the world which
are also crying out for redress.

On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India
Abstract
The central problematic for Guha is "the study of the historical
failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due toe the
inadquacy of the bourgeoisie as weall as of the working class to ldead
it into a decisive victory over colonialismand a bourgeois-democratic
revolution of either the classic nineteenth type under the hegemony of
the bourgeoisie or a more modern type under the hegemony of owrkers
and peasants" the colonial nation characterized by the coexistence of
two domains, which were structurally connected by domination. The
latter's domain is characterized as autonomous and traceable to pre-
colonial society includes all those not in the former the traditional
and modern elites, communist cadres and Marxist historians guha
attempts to reconcile language from Gramsci and American sociology
with Maoism of New Democracy
Ranajit Guha on Elitist Historiography – An Analysis
The essay “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” by
Ranajit Guha analyses and compares neo-colonialist historiography and
neo-nationalist historiography from the elitist perspective. The essay
also touches upon the subaltern groups’ contribution to Indian
Nationalism, which has been overlooked by the elite historiographers.
There are sixteen points discussed in the essay with reference to
bourgeoisie nationalist, colonialist, elite and subaltern tendencies
in the writing of Indian history. The essay speaks of both pre-
colonial and post-colonial India with reference to Nationalism.
The author begins by establishing the differences between the history
written by British elite groups and Indian elite groups. The British
adopt a method of neo-colonialism or the use of economic, political
and other pressures to control or influence a former dependency such
as India. This method is adopted chiefly by British writers but not
without Indian imitators. On the other hand, the neo-nationalists
attribute the entire credit of achieving Indian Independence to native
(Indian) elite groups. There are liberal British historiographers who
support this idea along with the Indian historiographers.
The one commonality however, is their prejudice to the elite class
making them predominant heroes who brought about the nationalist
consciousness in an otherwise subdued India.
In the neo-nationalist sense the Indian elite groups are made up of
Indian elite personalities, institutions, activities and ideas. It
seems correct, for, the Indian neo-nationalist history credits the
whole of the struggle for Independence as an act performed by a group
of elitist lawyers such as Gandhi, Nehru, Ram Mohan Roy, Tilak,
Gokhale, Patel, Rajagopalachari and others.
In the neo-colonialist sense the elite groups are made up of British
colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions and cultures.
The neo-colonialist definition of Indian Nationalist portrays it as a
function of stimulus and response. A good example would be the text
book depiction of the 1857 War of Independence as “Sepoy Mutiny”. This
portrayal attempts to classify the 1857 rebellion of the Indian
soldiers as a mere reaction to a provocation of their religious
sentiments (The Enfield Cartridges). It also portrays the native elite
as a group of people who were in a learning process, trying to
assimilate a huge governing structure and understand its principles.
This too is not due to any great idealism but only because the native
elites seemed to want to gain power, wealth and positions of pride.
The Zamindars and princes (bourgeois) are always represented as the
subordinate natives who would commit treason for their own ends. They
were also depicted as being divided, inefficient, dull and easily
surmountable.
As opposed to the neo-colonialist depiction, the native elitist
historiographers depict the elite nationalists as idealists who led
the people from subjugation to freedom. There are several versions in
this sort of historiography depending on varying degrees of emphasis
on individuals and institutions. The chief aspects highlighted about
the indigenous elite nationalists are:
1. Their goodness and its phenomenal expression in the form of Indian
Nationalism.
2. Their antagonistic stance against the colonial regime.
3. Their role as promoters of the cause of the indigenous people.
4. Their altruistic and self-abnegating characters.
Guha puts it across very satirically and sardonically by placing an
opposition next to each of these tall claims.
“They have completely tried to evade the accusations of being
collaborationists, exploiters and oppressors who scrambled for power
and privilege, making them appear like spiritual men…” he says.
There are certain advantages in elite historiography. It helps:
1. In understanding the colonial state structure.
2. In knowing the various state organs and their operation during
certain historical circumstance.
3. In knowing the ‘nature of alignment of the classes’.
4. In the identification of elite ideology as dominant during certain
periods.
5. In understanding the contradictions between Indian and British
elite groups, their oppositions and coalitions.
6. In classifying the roles of certain important people and
organizations of the Indian and British elite groups.


The ideological characteristics of such historiography, is made
evident by these interpretations.
The people or the subaltern groups and their contributions have been
looked at as mere response to an elite inspiration and influence. The
British elite represents the subaltern nationalist upsurges as a ‘law-
and-order’ problem and the Indian elite represents it as the response
to the charisma of a certain leader. They use the term “vertical
mobilization of factions” to describe these leaders moving the whole
nation towards a common goal. This sort of falsehood and
misrepresentation gets exposed where history has to explain phenomena
such as the Rowlatt Movement and the Quit India Movement where the
people acted against the colonialists without any elite control or
guidance.
Such inadequate history whose efficiency is doubly crippled by beliefs
such as the ones upholding the colonialist superstructure and ‘class
outlook’ can never give the native nationalists as much importance as
they deserve. The subaltern groups mobilized themselves. Guha calls
them an “autonomous domain”. Though colonialism intruded into elite
nationalism several times and rendered it ineffective, the subaltern
nationalism continued to operate vigorously by a) adjusting and
adapting to changing conditions and b) developing new ideas in form
and content.
Subaltern politics considered mobilization as a horizontal activity
that touches upon social groups of equal status at any point in time.
The elitist groups practiced vertical mobilization that touched upon
several levels of colonial hierarchy. Such elitist mobilization
depended on the movements of the British parliamentary institutions
and such. For example, Patel who unified the Princely States after
independence did it with great difficulty by using vertical
mobilization. Horizontal mobilization involved kinship, territorial
and class associations at the level of consciousness of the people
involved. This was simpler and pragmatic. It was spontaneous and
violent unlike the controlled, legalistic, and cautious mobilization
methods of the elites.
Peasant uprisings and such subaltern revolts had a constant element of
antagonism to elite domination. This ideology was in varied degrees.
Sometimes it helped by increasing the concreteness, focus and tension
in subaltern politics. At other times, by its communal interests, it
resulted in bigotry and confusion. Two things that drove the subaltern
class in a certain path was their understanding of exploitation and of
productive labour. This was a distinct factor that set it apart from
elite politics.
Despite the living contradictions that stopped the subaltern politics
from actualization in history, clear demarcations ideology, operation
and spontaneity can be made between subaltern politics and elite
politics. The failure of the bourgeoisie in speaking for the nation is
evident. Their hegemony created a dichotomy which cannot be ignored by
an interpreted of history. Ignoring the vast differences in ideologies
between the subaltern and the elite could mislead the history reader.
These two factions are not watertight compartments sealed off from one
another. They still overlap due to bourgeoisie attempts to integrate
them. These efforts succeeded when backed by anti-imperialist motives.
They failed miserably causing nasty strife among the sects when the
anti-imperialist motives were not firm and when compromises were made
with the colonialists. A good example would be the partition of India
and Pakistan.
Due to the inability of the working class to rise above the local
limitations, and the lack of good leadership, history has interpreted
their national struggles as fragmented local rebellions for economic,
political and petty reasons. The inadequacy of the bourgeoisie and the
working class has resulted in a historic failure.
The end result could have been either ‘a democratic revolution under
the bourgeoisie hegemony’ or ‘a ‘new-democracy’ under the subaltern
hegemony’. Unfortunately, it was neither.
Ranajit Guha concludes with a need to resolutely fight against elitist
historiography by ” I) rejection of spurious and unhistorical monism
and II) recognition of the co-existence and interaction of the elite
and subaltern domains of politics”. The purpose of the writers of
subaltern studies, he says, is to create a convergence of elitist
views and ideas opposing it. Criticism and discussions that ensue
would help in learning a great deal more about how to preserve the
integrity of historiography.

Africa, by David Diop

David Mandessi Diop (19271960) was a revolutionary African poet born
in France but with parents of West African descent. His poems
highlighted problems of Africa brought about by colonialism and gave a
message to Africans to bring about change and freedom. He was known
for his involvement in the negritude movement in France, a movement
started by Black writers and artists protesting against French
colonialism and its effects of African culture and values. His views
and feelings were published in "Presence Africaine" and in his book of
poems "Coups de pillon" which was published in 1956. Diop died at the
age of 33 in a plane crash.
Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings
On the banks of the distant river
The poem starts by Diop reminiscing about Africa, a land he has not
seen but only heard about from his grandmother's songs. His choice of
words like "distant" symbolise how far he is from his country, a
feeling based on his real life as he lived in France throughout his
childhood and only visited Africa in the 1950s. Despite this, he
paints a vivid scene of Africa and the proud warriors who walk on its
"ancestral savannahs" You can sense how much he misses his homeland by
his stress on the word Africa, and he continues to call it "My Africa"
to emphasise it is his land and his feelings of patriotism towards it.
I have never known you
But your blood flows in my veins
Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields
The blood of your sweat
The sweat of your work
The work of your slavery
He continues to say that he has never known Africa, but despite the
distance he cannot deny how much it is a part of him. The "beautiful
black blood" which flows in his veins describes his African descent
and shows how much Africa is a part of him and his love for it and its
people. The next verses are angry and accusatory as he stresses that
it is the blood and sweat of his people which is irrigating the fields
for the benefit of other people. By this he is pointing a finger at
the colonialists who exploited Black people and used them as slaves to
profit from their hard labour.
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is unbent
This back that never breaks under the weight of humiliation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying no to the whip under the midday sun
In these verses he urges the Black people to stand up to the pain and
the humiliation that they are suffering in their own land. He reminds
them of the strength and pride they have in them and to say no to the
whip of the colonialist which makes them work under the hot midday sun
and leaves scars on their backs. Despite this suffering he urges them
to be strong and remain unbent and not let this break them despite the
weight of their suffering.

But a grave voice answers me
Impetuous child that tree, young and strong That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
Springing up patiently, obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquires
The bitter taste of liberty.
In these verses the wise voice of Africa chides him for thinking
"impetuous" thoughts, and implies to us that a continent lies in wait
for something to happen. It urges the Africans to be patient and not
hasty like children as there is change on the horizon. The tree "young
and strong" represents the young people of Africa who are patiently
but "obstinately" waiting until they get the liberty they want. At the
moment the tree is alone, meaning the African struggle is a lonely
battle but they will achieve the freedom and liberty they want no
matter how bitter the taste in getting it. It is among the "white and
faded" flowers by which he means the colonialists who will fade in
time while the youthful Africans grow in strength and wait for their
moment of freedom.