Melville Cooke

I have long wondered why the deaths of five to six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis have been made the Holocaust that we are constantly reminded of, while the deaths of untold millions of black people at the hands of European colonisers have been made an incident that we should best forget.

And this Emancipation Day the most likely explanation, which is, of course, the simplest and most obvious one (and, naturally, the last one I thought of, sort of like looking for your cellphone everywhere but in your pocket) came to me.

So, with eager fingers, I flipped through the pages of the trusty Oxford Dictionary (which can be trusted to give 'black' a bad name) for a definition of 'black mark', which is 'a mark of discredit'. Discredit means 'harm to reputation', 'lack of credibility; doubt; disbelief'.

For me, a black mark means much more (and no, it is not just the residual colour on the elbows and knuckles of a 'bleacher'). It applies to those countries and people who have treated black people with savagery, contempt and prejudice. This makes the mark applicable to the dominant European countries and their American cousins and it would be a foolish person who publicises a black mark on their history.

Different for jews

It is different for the Jews, where the Holocaust is centred on one set of persons, the Nazis, and their leader, Adolf Hitler. Not only can the European countries that won their backyard wars over property, which somehow became world wars much as Americans have world series based on their domestic leagues, triumphantly point out that the Nazis were defeated and the scourge of the death camps erased. They can also show their lily-white hands, which do not have to be scrubbed of Jewish blood, even if now and then a footballer throws a Nazi salute to the crowd, as Paolo Di Canio did a couple times in 2005 (and at some grounds there are fans who deliver the stiff-armed gesture en masse).

It is not so for slavery; it is not so for colonialism; it is not so for Apartheid, where the black mark, if not by direct action then certainly by economic support, is widespread and permanent.

A by-product of the black mark is the insistence on presenting black complicity in slave trading, which many a black person naturally points out when the slavery debate arises. Fair enough, but every race, every nation, has its people who collude with those who are savage to their own people. During the European's second round of infighting that was mislabelled World War II Vichy French, headed by Philippe Petain, were wilful collaborators with the Nazis. We do not hear much of that now, certainly not in popular culture where the valiant French resistance is presented in film, rifles in hand, skulking around the countryside and taking on tank brigades (of course, there is always a dark-haired beauty among the bunch, with flashing eyes and ample breasts barely disguised by the sack of a fighting outfit).

Vietnam supported diem

In Vietnam, when the French gave up and the United States took over the colonial effort, they supported a man named Diem, about whom Martin Luther King Jr., speaking at the Riverside Church, New York City, on April 4, 1967, said:

"The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused."

In Iraq, after the U.S. invaded and overthrew their former friend Saddam Hussein, an interim government with a Prime Minister named Iyad Allawi was installed. To say that he was unpopular with the people who wanted the armies that bombed them to bits and called it collateral damage begone was an understatement.

Similarly, current Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is, to put it mildly, unpopular with the patriots whom those who would subdue the country for its oil (and security contracts) would have us call insurgents.

These people are not presented as traitors to their own, so why this huge black mark on blacks who collaborated with slave traders?

It is a mental thing, this black mark, and a transfer of guilt which, unfortunately, so many black people are happy to have on their psyche, because putting it on their beloved whites would disrupt the order of the world as they have been taught to see it.