I had just wanted to post this on my blog space at www.dirtyhiphophead.blogspot.com when the thought of putting here struck and sorry I can’t scan the cover of the book so you can see. Let me state this upfront: I have mixed feelings about this book. And I would be inclined to believe that I have lots of company in this. Yet, when faced with its explosive mixture of provocative statements, I rend myself to what might be more plausible: this is not for the faint-hearted, it doesn’t leave any middle ground to anyone, you are either for or against its tenets, because it’s not everyday you are punched in the face with things like this, written by a Black man: “Nobody owes the Black race anything!”
Yes, that was the subtitle
to a paper titled “Truth, Honesty and Frankness” with which the author, Chika Onyeani, claims to have once, in the context of this book’s main argument, enlightened students at the Morgan State University, one of the premier Black Universities in the US, which left me pondering: truth, honesty and frankness… nobody owes the black race anything… really?! On to another of his famous statements: “We are a consumer race, we produce nothing and consume what others produce.”… Really? I marvel.
"Capitalist Nigger, The Road to Success (A Spider-Web Doctrine)" has been sparking controversy ever since it was published in the first year of this century. But make no mistake, the author was head-on intent on it: “I decided to write Capitalist Nigger to open a debate on the state of the African race. But in doing so, my intention was not to treat my own contribution to the debate with kid gloves. It is to tell it like it is, the truth and nothing but he truth. My observations are bound to infuriate a lot of my people. Even the title of this book is bound to make a lot of people angry. Many people will be angry, to say it mildly, when I question the intelligence of my people compared to the Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Malaysians, Filipinos) and others who attained independence at the same time as most African countries. If the book generates the kind of dialogue, debate or argument for or against the position I have taken, so be it. But it would even be more relevant if in the process, solutions are offered to help extricate Africans from being a consumer to a productive race.”
I have included it among my “books of life” for no other reason than its opening statement, made out of an African Proverb: “It is not what you call me, but what I answer to, that matters most.” Indeed, to me this is the most meaningful statement made in the entire book… and it was produced by Africans, so I would presume that we do produce something after all. It tells us that if, instead of responding to what those who call us “niggers” want to make of us, we rather respond to what we want to make of ourselves positively, we will be opening our own road to success in whatever we decide to do to better our lot in life.
As he puts it: “We are creatures of habit. We like to take advantage of every situation. And Caucasians have been taking advantage of the Black Race in every situation from the enslaving of Africans and plucking them to America to the present time of trying to demean us by the word Nigger. What is really in a word? We make it what we want it to mean. By accepting what others want us to believe a word means, we re invariably giving them the satisfaction of feeling superiority over us. But when we hardly notice such an appellation as meaningless, it not only makes the user of the word totally stupid, it also takes away his feeling of superiority."
I agree with and have ample working proof of it in my own life – for instance, in my own country of origin, Angola, the word "nigger" is now being almost "literally" translated into "complexado" and that’s the way I respond to it; I even tried to “force-feed” this book to my son despite not being myself entirely convinced of its underlying “doctrine”… and I am not sure that it was because of it that he is now carving a career for himself in one of the top two banks in the UK.
However, my deepest misgivings about it come from the realisation that Onyeani pretended to present an “Economic doctrine”, which, according to its editors, “is bound to revolutionize economic thinking for years to come”, while overlooking History, Sociology, International Politics, Institutions and even Economics, just to set a minimum set of requirements. For instance, is it so easy to take it for granted that, as he states, “Africans blame either the British, French or little Portuguese/Spanish for their problems. Africans in America blame the Caucasians for all their problems, or any other ethnic group they have allowed to take over their neighborhoods, a frequently recurring phenomenon. Africans blame the IMF, the World Bank, the G8, the former colonial masters for the abject poverty in our respective countries. We blame the wars ravaging several African sectors on the interference of our former colonial masters on “our internal affairs”?
I don’t buy it hands down, in spite of having witnessed the "half-felt" awe he was treated with when he visited South Africa in 2005, while this book became the best-seller of the year in that country. So, in the end, to me it results in little more than a “airport self-help business book”, which is capable of unsettling one’s deepest-sitting convictions about the Black race and its “life, universe and everything”, but ultimately fails to draw me to its most compelling call: "We’ve got to stop whining and stop begging. The Black race needs to wake up and stand on it’s own feet… We need to recognize and learn from others what it takes to succeed. We need to adopt the "devil-may-care" attitude and the "killer-instinct and whatever-it-takes attitude" of the white Caucasian, and the "spider web economic mentality" of the Asian";… or to convince me of its ultimate charge: “We are not men enough to accept responsibility for our actions”… if nothing else because I’m not a man and have been doing nothing else in my life to this day but to take responsibility for my actions, refusing to beg and always standing on my own feet, even if knowing that if I were more pliable to the various political, ideological and institutional setups I have been faced with along my life I wouldn’t have any reasons for whining.
So, definitely, I am still to be bought in by Onyeani’s “doctrine”, mainly because I cannot see my life, as a Black person, as “purely and simply about making money in any way possible”, as "Capitalist Nigger" is presented to its readers.