Melville Cooke

There is no definition for 'black rage' in the ninth edition of the Concise English Dictionary. One is hardly needed, though, not with 'angry, threatening' (a black look), 'wicked, sinister, threatening' (black-hearted) and 'gloomy depressed, sullen' (a black mood) among the uses given for black.

Hence, a black rage must be very extreme, a state on the verge of insanity in which they are capable of the worst cruelty, and that is how I have seen it used in novels.

It is ironic, though, because as a race black people show a remarkable lack of rage towards other races. And on an individual level, although there are (obviously) the incessant incidents of black-on-black violence, if a couple kids get loose in a high school with guns or a string of murders are traced to one person, you can almost bet it is a Caucasian.

Except Malvo, that is.

We seem incapable of the calculated Caucasian cruelty. As a race we seem almost incapable of going into a black rage about our history during and after slavery, and we seem to avoid events that will trigger that extreme emotion. On Saturday, 71-year-old James Ford Seale was charged with two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy to commit kidnapping. This is in relation to the killing of Charles Moore and Henry Dee in 1964 in Mississippi. They were killed, weighted down and sunk in a swamp and, although two white men were arrested, a justice of the peace dismissed the case.

Mississippi Burning

The events around the killing are told in the movie Mississippi Burning, a film that I have heard several black people say they cannot stand watching. Not because the images are too painful, but because they stir a rage that they feel uncomfortable with, or even guilty about.

It is the same for the whipping of Kunte Kinte in Roots, and the same goes for the scenes of white people setting dogs on blacks in apartheid South Africa. We are uneasy with feeling anger about the cruelty that has been done to us.

However, some descendants of those who have meted out the atrocities have absolutely no problem with dishing out more of the same.

For a people who have been through slavery and the nicely termed 'colonial experience' at the hands of the Dutch, Belgians, Canadians, Spanish, French, Portugese and British, we are remarkably well-behaved towards them. So much so that P.W. Botha died peacefully last year in South Africa, publicly unapologetic about apartheid. It was as if Hitler died in Jerusalem, ranting about a pure Aryan race.

Now the Jews have this rage thing down pat. Wherever a former prison camp guard is, no matter how old he is, they will find him and somebody will come forward, number tattooed into their forearm, to detail his crimes against humanity. The Jews have the rage honed to a murderous military machine and the moral justification to slaughter Palestinians in tents and without.

Origins of our pain

I despise their treatment of the Palestinians, but I deeply admire their application of rage to their persecutors. We are so busy forgetting the origins of our pain that we can apply the machete in Rwanda until Lake Victoria is bloated with a black tide; yet, we have neglected to take care of those who created the deep divisions between the Hutus and Tutsis in the first place.

Maybe our black rage is turned inwards instead of outwards. We have not learnt that if you do unto others as they have done unto you they will hesitate before they do unto you again.

And if you turn cheek 70 times seven, you will get slapped 71 times seven. Guaranteed.

Next week: White rage.

Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.