The Third World and universal vulnerability

The Vietnamese triumph in 1954 defeated France, but did not reunite Vietnam. The American phase of the war in Vietnam cost at least three million Vietnamese lives and nearly 60,000 American lives. But Vietnam in the end illustrated that a poor and underdeveloped Asian country could militarily defeat a super power.

Afghanistan a decade later illustrated that an even poorer country could defeat the other superpower: the Soviet Union. That Afghanistan experience may have been the single most important cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The peoples of the Bandung legacy, when struggling for their independence, would dramatically change the course of global history. Another illustration was the anti-colonial struggle in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau against Portuguese imperialism.

By 1970 Portugal had become the most backward European country in Europe after Albania. Throughout its modern history Portugal had turned its back on every progressive force in European history. It had resisted the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Reformation, Industrial Revolution and the French and American Revolutions.

And then Africans fighting for their independence led to the collapse of the old Fascist order in Lisbon. Portugal lost the colonies and gained democracy, modernity and European identity.

Will the Iraqi insurgency ultimately defeat the Americans in the same way as the North Vietnamese communists defeated the US or the Mujahidden in Afghanistan defeated the old Soviet Union? History will tell. The descendants of Bandung have also demonstrated another fundamental change. In the past when developing countries fought the West militarily, the blood was shed on the soil of the developing countries.

In Kenya the Mau Mau fought the British on Kenyan soil. Not a single shot was fired in London. And when Angolans and Mozambicans fought the Portuguese; blood was not spilled in Lisbon. The Vietnamese fought the French in Dien Bien Phu – not in the port of Marseilles. Malay communists fought against the British in the 1950s, but in the jungles of Malaya rather than the streets of Manchester.

The Mujahiddeen in Afghanistan engaged the Soviets in the hills of Afghanistan, not in Leningrad or Moscow. The Americans killed and were killed in the jungles of Vietnam, not in the alleyways of Chicago or Philadelphia. What was remarkable about September 11, 2001 was that militants from the Third World brought the battle into the heartland of the most powerful Western country in history. At the World Trade Centre and at the Pentagon, the Empire was struck in the capital of the Empire itself.

The Pakistani Diaspora in London in July 2005 struck at the British railway inflicting death and destruction. Later in the same month, the Diaspora of the Horn of Africa also struck in London. In 2004, the railway system in Madrid was hit seemingly by North Africans. The Moors who had been expelled from Spain in the 15th century were back in Madrid not as conquerors but as fighters. Between the global North and the global South, a new equilibrium had been inaugurated: an equilibrium of mutual vulnerability.

But Africans, Asians and the Diaspora have not always fought for their rights with lethal weapons. Other forms of resistance have been tried out by descendants of the Bandung. The historian E.H. Carr was wrong in bracketing Gandhism and Christianity together as ‘doctrines of non-resistance.’ What Gandhi provided to Black nationalism was element of resistance to the passivity of imperial Christianity.

Carr was certainly wrong in extending the description of ‘boycott of politics’ to Gandhism as well as to Christianity. If politics is an activity between groups rather than between individuals, then Gandhism was almost a politicisation of Christian doctrine.

Mazrui teaches political science and African studies at State University, New York
amazrui@binghamton.edu