[Debate] An imaginary trip to the land of the Anthropoid Apes: RW Johnson’s racist outburst, apartheid nostalgia and other hysterics

Sat Apr 14 05:11:55 BST 2012

An imaginary trip to the land of the Anthropoid Apes: RW Johnson’s racist
outburst, apartheid nostalgia and other hysterics

by Mandisi Majavu

"The basic question in attacking is not how to kill the enemy group---that
is usually impossible---but what direction to attack from."-- Go proverb.

In 2010, RW Johnson wrote:

“We are being besieged by baboons again. This happens quite often here on
the Constantiaberg mountains (an extension of the Table Mountain  range).
Baboons are common in the Cape and they are a great deal larger than the
vervet monkeys I was used to dealing with in  KwaZulu-Natal. They jump onto
roofs, overturn dustbins and generally make a nuisance of themselves; since
their teeth are very dirty, their bite can be poisonous. They seem to have
lots of baby baboons – it’s been a very mild winter and so spring is coming
early – and they’re looking for food. The local dogs don’t like them but
appear to have learned their lesson from the last baboon visit: then, a
large rottweiler attacked the apes, who calmly tore it limb from limb.

“Meanwhile in the squatter camps, there is rising tension as the threat
mounts of murderous violence against foreign migrants once the World Cup
finishes on 11 July. These migrants – Zimbabweans, Malawians, Congolese,
Angolans, Somalis and others – are often refugees and they too are here
essentially searching for food. The Somalis are the most enterprising and
have set up successful little shops in the townships and squatter camps,
but several dozen Somali shopkeepers have already been murdered, clearly at
the instigation of local black shopkeepers who don’t appreciate the
competition. The ANC is embarrassed by it all and has roundly declared that
there will be no such violence. The truth is that no one knows. The place
worst hit by violence in the last xenophobic riots here was De Doorns and
the army moved into that settlement last week, clearly anticipating
trouble. The tension is ominous and makes for a rather schizoid atmosphere
as the Cup itself mounts towards its climax.”

The comparison and the contrast between baboons that are looking for food
and the African migrants who “flood” Cape Town in search of food too is the
straw that broke camel’s back. [RW Johnson had actually wrote in a
different article: “more and more of Africa floods towards Cape
Town...”[i]<#_edn1>]
Seventy three 73 academics and writers from across the globe wrote to the
London Review of Books (LRB) stating that RW Johnson is “peddling highly
offensive, age-old racist stereotypes”. They further pointed out that “we
find it baffling therefore that you continue to publish work by RW Johnson
that, in our opinion, is often stacked with the superficial and the
racist.”

The LRB was forced to apologise for publishing RW Johnson’s racist rant.
The LRB claimed that it was “an error of judgment on our part to publish
it. We’re sorry. We have since taken the post down.”  The editor of the
LRB, Mary Kay-Wilmers, admitted in an article that appeared in the Guardian
that “we didn't read it [RW Johnson’s racist rant] carefully enough, we
didn't see it, we didn't imagine it."

 What is it that Mary Kay-Wilmers and her cohorts didn’t see and imagine?
What they didn’t see is the historical context and the racist colonial
canon from which RW Johnson draws from in his article. For a very long
time, white colonisers viewed blacks as the "missing link" between the
anthropoid apes and civilized (white) mankind (Brantlinger 1985). Hence,
French anthropologists like Julian-Joseph Virey could write in 1837: “The
skull of a negro is thick, and sutures very closely united. ... their
propensity to sensations and nervous excitements, is excessive. All these
signs indicate a greater animal disposition than in the white” (Virey:
167).

A logical historical reading of RW Johnson’s article would take this into
account. However, a self-serving ahistorical and irrational reading would
read like Paul Trewhela’s response to my article. Perhaps thinking that he
is the only person who can read English and critically analyse arguments,
Paul Trewhela writes that the LRB censored RW Johnson.

“The citation below contains my response on the blog of the London Review
of Books to an act of censorship carried out by the LRB against Johnson in
July 2010, following a smear circulated by his political and academic
opponents. That smear, reproduced by Majavu in his article on ZNet, was as
shamefully unproven as Majavu's, and set a bad precedent.”

Seventy three writers and academics from across the globe did not find it
hard to locate RW Johnson’s racist outburst within a racist colonial canon
that has always likened blacks to apes, monkeys and baboons. Arrogant and
irrational, Paul Trewhela writes that the 73 writers and academics who
signed the letter gave “no citation from Johnson’s offending text, bar
three words.” It does not astonish me that this kind of denial and
self-serving illusion comes from one of the liberal dinosaurs from the old
days. In fact I expect it.

*Apartheid nostalgia and other hysterics  ***

Although RW Johnson manages to tone down his rants and ravings in his other
writings, however he does make it clear that he writes from the point of
view that reinforces white supremacist perspectives.  For instance, writing
about transformation in South African universities, RW Johnson argues that
transformation in reality means that “university entrance criteria would be
ratcheted down so as to make it easier for black students from lousy
schools to gain entry but the pretence was that standards has been
maintained.”

RW Johnson continues:

“...black academics who were often clearly rather weak would be appointed
in preference to whites who were often stronger on the pretence that these
blacks were at least equally good or better; and finally, as the research
output of these new appointees was often derisory, all manner of strategems
would be adopted to disguise the resultant deterioration in the
university's research profile - retired, honorary or supernumerary faculty
would have their research counted as part of the university's output, and
so on.”

 RW Johnson is of the view that black Vice Chancellors are intellectually
inferior to Vice Chancellors who oversaw universities during the apartheid
heydays.

“You just had to look at the modern breed of vice-chancellor and compare
them to the old breed - Duminy, Malherbe, Bozzoli - who had fought for
academic freedom against apartheid, to understand how much had been lost.
Not just in courage and intellectual gravitas, but in intellectual depth
and, indeed, in truthfulness.”

Extolling the virtues of apartheid, RW Johnson points out that:

“African nationalism entirely lacks the institution-building skills of the
earlier waves. English-speaking whites bequeathed the country its major
liberal universities, a network of private schools, key public corporations
and a series of Anglo-churches. Afrikaners left behind them Afrikaans
financial institutions, the DRC, the Afrikaans universities and hoerskools.
African nationalism has built no distinctive institutions of its own
outside the party itself.”

What’s next? An eulogy of the Nationalsozialismus’s military might,
engineering and scientific breakthroughs?

* *

*References:*

Brantlinger , P. (1985). Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth
of the Dark Continent.  *Critical Inquiry,* Vol. 12 (1).

Danso, R.  &  MacDonald, D. A.  (2000). Writing xenophobia: Immigration and
the press in post-apartheid South Africa. *The Southern African Migration
Project*:   http://www.idasa.org/media/uploads/outputs/files/SAMP%2017.pdf

Johnson, RW. (2011). The rise and decline of ANC hegemony. *PoliticsWeb:*
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=272165&sn=Marketingweb+detail

 Virey, J.J. (1996). Natural history of the negro species particularly. In
H.F. Augstein, *Race” The origins of an idea, 1760 – 1850*. Thoemmes Press:
Bristol.

Younge, G. (2010). Writers and academics protest over ‘racist’ LRB blogpost.
*The Guardian*:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/21/protest-lrb-blogpost

------------------------------

[i] <#_ednref1> Writing about xenophobia in South African media, Danso and
MacDonald (2000) point out that headlines are particularly bad in this
respect, with bold titles like, ‘Illegals in SA add to decay of cities’, ‘6
million migrants headed our way’, ‘Africa floods into Cape Town’, and
‘francophone invasion’ being common examples. “In total, 25% of the
articles surveyed used sensational headlines and 9% used sensational
metaphors in the text of the report.”
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