That renaissance tried to wipe out the legacy of ancient Africa's contribution to the world civilization.
The only way one could do this was to depict black people as sub-humans, closer to apes than to human beings. Racism reached its crescendo in the 18th century when it was turned into conventional wisdom by revered Western thinkers and philosophers such as the Frenchman Voltaire, the Scotsman David Hume, the Germans Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel and Karl Marx, men who invariably had never set foot in Africa.
Indeed, it may surprise those of the European left who nobly believe in the equality and the brotherhood of man that even radical and socialist thinkers like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin expressed racist thoughts about the genetic inferiority of Africans at one time or another.
Now if these giants of Western thought, who have influenced every aspect of Western thinking, constitute the foundation of Occidental values and attitudes towards the African, one can only wonder how deeply ingrained racism is in the unenlightened and reactionary European mind.
What is astonishing is that, knowing where we are coming from as a planet, our African thinkers and politicians still try to sell us the myth that law and the rule of law are the bedrock of a civilized society. Showing more insight than most, the American philosopher, Henry Thoreau once said: "The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free."
Speaking about racial discrimination and injustice and the need to use the law to give black Americans their civil rights, Martin Luther King once said: "Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."
William Shakespeare, through one of his characters, simply said: "The law is an ass." Personally, I like the way the Greek philosopher Plato framed the relationship between people and the law: "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly (and fairly), while bad people will find a way around the law."
In other words a thief will be a thief no matter how well brought up he is or whatever laws exist, or whatever lofty cause he claims to champion.
Which brings me to the issue of land and colonialism. Who stole what from whom? Who grabbed what from whom? For as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, the most important issue in philosophy in a post Marxist world is the meaning of words.
When we say someone is a thug, what do we mean? Is thuggish behaviour the sole monopoly of former liberation and leftwing movements? What about the aimless and apolitical loafers who will do any party's bidding for a few bucks?
If it is possible for them to be thugs why do newspapers insult their readers' intelligence by writing such hogwash as "Zanu PF thugs," and their "MDC victims?" When we say someone is a dictator or a despot, what do we mean? Are democratically elected Western leaders who try to impose their ideological will and economic policies on Third World leaders international democrats or despots? Why is it that the Western media and its toady parrots in Africa are only able to identify despots and dictators only in Africa and the Third World? Why?
The conflict over Zimbabwe's land reform programme is well documented and known. Yet while this black versus white drama over land in that country was playing, there was a similar drama unfolding in Australia, which the Western media showed very little interest in. That was because the roles of the races in that drama were reversed. This time it was the minority blacks who had almost been wiped out through genocide for which the perpetrators have never been tried or asked to pay compensation, were appealing the highest courts in the land to correct a longstanding historical wrong.
On 26 January 1788, the Union Jack was raised on land that is now part of the city of Sydney, leading to the establishment of the colony of New South Wales. Later, other colonies were formed in other parts of Australia or by separation of territory from New South Wales. The colonial borders included some offshore islands. Included within Queensland's maritime boundary was the Murray Islands, the largest of which was Murray Island or Mer, in the Torres Strait between Papua New Guinea and Australia.
When the British settlers arrived, the territory now known as Australia was populated by Aboriginal hunters and gatherers numbering about 500 000. Western legal doctrine in the 19th century was that these native people were "so low in the scale of social organisation," that it was "idle to impute to them some shadow of the rights known to our law and then to transmute it into their substance some transferable rights of property as we know them."
In other words, the land belonging to these Aboriginal people was treated as "ownerless" and thus available for acquisition by European powers.
So, using this doctrine, which was based on a European feudal doctrine of land tenure, the British Crown acquired not only "sovereignty" but beneficial ownership of the land its citizens and agents settled on.
Those Aboriginals who were not prepared to be assimilated into Australia's European society as labourers and menial workers, some were forced to, were allocated some land in what were called "reserves," the same way the British did in southern Africa.
But even on these pieces of land, these natives did not have any security of tenure or occupation, much less title.
All that changed in 1975, when through pressure from resolutions at the United Nations, many Western countries were pushed to enact Racial Discrimination Acts to protect the rights of their ethnic minorities. The law gave effect in municipal law to the key provisions of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
In 1976, in keeping with this new international spirit of racial liberalism, the Australian parliament passed a law for the Northern Territory under which Aborigines with a traditional connection with unalienated land could apply for a grant of an inalienable fee simple, a freehold title. This title allowed Aboriginals to use the land in accordance with Aboriginal traditions. A refusal of consent could be overridden by the government where a grant of mining tenement was required in the national interest.
Toeing the line, other states in Australian immediately followed the model set up by their national government in the Northern Territory.
In 1982, Eddie Mabo and four other Aboriginal Murray Islanders instituted proceedings against the conservative state of Queensland claiming ownership of parcels of land on Mer as the holders of native title. This civil claim, bearing Mabo's name, went on to define Australia's modern law on native title.
In that case, Australia's High Court held that the Queensland government was discriminating against the people of the Murray Islands in the enjoyment of their right to property, assuming that their traditional rights of ownership existed. Since a Queensland Act prohibiting the Aboriginals on Murray Island from enjoying some form of native title was inconsistent with the Racial Discrimination Act, it was invalid.
For those Aboriginals who had been fighting for their land rights in Australia, Mabo was a breathtaking breakthrough. It held that native title to the land on Mer, with exception of a few parcels is vested in the people of the Murray Islands as a communal title recognized by common law. Native title was held to survive the acquisition of sovereignty by a colonizing power and authority. So although it was the use of law and legal rights instigated by pressure from the Third World at the United Nations, the land rights of Aboriginals in Australia were restored not because of the magnanimity of the government and the majority white population in Australia. Like the freedom of blacks in South Africa, they were restored by international pressure.
The Mabo decision gave rise to considerable controversy. In 1993, after much public debate, the Australian parliament pass the Native Title Act, which adopting the common law defined in Mabo, prescribed a system for dealing with native title. Native title is recognition that the indigenous people of any country have rights and interests to land that comes from their traditional laws and customs. Under this legal doctrine alone, many of those dispossessed of their land in southern Africa can claim it back by seeking redress from the courts.
The state of Western Australia, in which 52 percent of the land was unalienated and which contains significant deposits of minerals took serious objection to the Native Title Act. It tried to repeal it through legislation which was struck down as invalid by the highest court in the land. The law is simply the encapsulation of the common sense and values of a people at any given time. Paedophiles after all believe that paedophilia will one day become legal.
Today, the only thing that is protecting the property rights of the Aboriginal minority, whose population is down to 353 000 more than 200 years later, when the natural trend is for populations to increase, are the country's highest courts.
So those who try to hide their misdeeds, historical theft and greed behind the magical power of the law should be careful. The law is double edged sword.
