The Myth of African Savagery Research Assignment (Essay Sample)

The Myth of African Savagery
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The Myth of African Savagery
Savage constructions is a critical examination of the conventional assumption that violence is an evident quality of certain racial or ethnic populations. Wendy challenges this presumption, all too prevalent in the Western countries, that darker-skinned individuals are inherently violent. To challenge this myth, Hamblet offers a theory subjectivity changed by the violence. The book rethinks how African-American people who once lived in simple neighborly communities more egalitarian and democratic than modern states, have come to the condition of misery, abjection, and ruthless aggression. In her study, she argues that Western wealth is built upon slavery, slaughter and colonial oppression, and also suggests that the affluent West owes a great debt to the countries they trampled on their route to prosperity. The work is valuable because the newly independent countries in Africa are a good example of the wider phenomenon. The western powers continue to sack the weaker, poorer countries through trade policies, crippling debts, covert intrigue and oppressive global labor policies. People incorrectly assume that the White people are superior to their darker-skinned counterparts.
Wendy struggles to explain why, after the long centuries of civilization, people still judge people on the history of their species and why they still believe that the black community is violent (Hamblet, 2008). In addition to this, she wonders how genocides and other delinquencies against humanity continue to stalk the minority, weak and developing countries, thus undermining their hopes for peace and progress.Hamblet gave an example of when her fellow interlocutor told her that the black people had always been killing each other and that they could not do anything about it. With genuine enthusiasm, she challenges the myth that violence is an apparent quality of individual communities by offering an alternative, more realistic and more sympathetic of the current violence in the world.
After the end of the colonial rule in, the African leader took back the seats of power but still mirrored the behaviors of the previous repressors and colonial rulers. It is hardly surprising that some of them are just as brutal as the Colonials. As sure as night follows day, this violence the oppressed long into their liberation and drives and motivates them towards the direction of a future, deeply scarred by the past. Victims, of course, emerge from the history of poverty and violence (Hamblet, 2008). Their futures behaviors, therefore, often entail the desperate and relentless efforts to bring an end to their suffering by projecting their anger, miseries, and resentment on those who are in their immediate vicinity.
Africans are not violent, but they have had to endure injuries, physical abuse, and insults during the centuries of colonial rule. They have thus discovered facts about the frailty or weakness of the human conditions, the defenselessness of social forms, the vulnerability of human flesh and the incapacity of an ethos of generosity. Through rapes, myriad diverse humiliations, and beatings, they discovered that their unqualified trust in other people was foolhardy and naïve. Worst of all, they realize the inability of the most healthy self-esteem and vigorous mentality to withstand prolonged dignity (Hamblet, 2008). Communal resentment, after the violations, eventually gives rise to the agendas and ideas of revenge that turn decent and honest into the bloodthirsty.
The colonial rule was damaging to the African people, who before that had been leading simple and peaceful lives. The disintegration of families by the long years of slavery the corruption of their traditions, the effects of the wars that won independence, artistic and cultural losses are good examples of why there are stereotypes about the African people (Hamblet, 2008). Their unique artifacts vanished entirely, the traditions of naturally democratic governance and peaceful trade crushed. Most importantly, the disfiguration of life and subjects has made them change under the generations of abuse, fear, and indignity. People oppress others because violence is a very useful tool that restores order in case of chaos. When governments and rulers take up the sword in a cause seen as moral, the immediate goals are achievable, but violence tends to persist in the accepted practices of the community and the individuals, which explains the stereotypes, not because the Africans were born violent.
The practice of brutality rarely ends with the burying of the deceased. Violence is a commodity which always leaves remainders because it spawns endless mutations. The old forms of violence give birth to new forms, and the consumers of these products eventually become the peddlers. Subjectivity and brutality become entwined because it creates, transforms and sustains the patterns of social interactions, corrupts the outer world of moral and social meanings and restructures the inner world of reality. Violence erodes the bond that binds people across cultural boundaries and generations, and wipes away the trust that binds the social worlds of neighbors, family, and friends (Hamblet, 2008). The learned reactions to social stimuli now have to be unlearnt after the troubled histories. For instance, in South Africa during apartheid, Africans had to train themselves not respond to the tribulations and cries of torture victims because any form of response would spiral the repression beyond the rooms into the surrounding neighborhoods and communities. Once they learned to harden their hearts against a friend's woes, they had already abandoned a crucial part of themselves and their moral and social identity.
The fact is that to survive in areas where radical violence is rampant; people have to develop the capacity to separate themselves from their neighbors and learn the skills of dissimulation, fraud, and deceit, or join the brutality of the powerful. During the decades of the slave trade in Ivory Coast, for instance, native African individuals protected themselves by working for the slavers who gave them guns to assume the role of hunting down their fellow community people and neighbors. Other people, on the other hand, became skilled at hiding and ducking out of sight, avoiding their friends and keeping to themselves, and becoming accomplished liars. Some tribes even built whole underground villages unknown to their allies (Hamblet, 2008). People abandoned social rituals such as inquiring about the health of friends and neighbors...