On Oppression and the Oppressed - A short essay

By Baba Galleh Jallow

Clearly, one of the most intractable problems facing Africa today is the 
problem of oppression. The continent is littered with an ugly coterie of 
oppressive political regimes as well as a critical mass of people trying to 
resist this oppression, getting stigmatized, jailed, maimed, exiled, and 
killed in the process. One of the means at the disposal of this critical 
mass of oppressed “freedom fighters” is the acquisition of knowledge and a 
greater understanding of the nature of the oppressor in relation to 
themselves, the oppressed. For it is not enough that we know the oppressor; 
we also need to know ourselves as people trying to bring about an end to 
oppression. This short essay is meant as a modest contribution to that 
self-knowledge and knowledge of the nature of oppression.

The oppressor, whatever his motivations, seeks to distort the humanity of 
the oppressed. He seeks to retard the growth of the people, chops off any 
emerging buds of popular progress, plucks out any spots of light and sight, 
seals tight any outlets of enlightenment, and menacingly hovers over the 
heads of the oppressed in order to instill maximum terror and compliance 
through a regime of actual or potential violence, physical and 
psychological. Oppression manifests itself as a form of violence because it 
constitutes a denial of full humanity to the oppressed; because it denies 
people the possibility of self-affirmation, the pursuit of one’s right to 
self-fulfillment as a full human being. Oppression is violence because the 
oppressor appropriates to himself all rights of being, of self-fulfillment, 
of the enjoyment of unrestricted freedoms, of a certain state of exception 
in which he stands outside the law, while engaging the law to impose an 
unquestionable regime of hegemony on the people. As the Brazilian writer 
Paulo Freire puts it, “The oppressor consciousness tends to transform 
everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, 
property, production, the creation of people, people themselves, time – 
everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal.” Everything 
within its territory, in effect, is considered the personal property of the 
oppressor and everything within its territory that refuses to be owned, 
domesticated, and controlled must either be eliminated or neutralized. Any 
individual or institution within this space that refuses to be turned into a 
dehumanized, passive, and unquestioning object is regarded as a subversive 
entity.

We do not need to look far to see the manifestation of this oppressive 
reality. We do not need to look far to see oppressors turning on the 
oppressed and calling them evil beings, subversive liars, unpatriotic and 
envious demons, enemies of progress and other negative imaginaries because 
they refuse to be turned into lifeless objects and possessions of the 
oppressor to be exploited and discarded at will. The oppressor does not see 
that he is the source of the resistance he is confronted with, that the 
oppressed are merely reacting to his untenable claims to their ownership and 
the ownership of the collective property that is the nation-state, that they 
are simply following the natural and healthy course of reaffirming and 
pursuing their inalienable right to remain fully human, to refuse to be 
dehumanized, objectified and relegated to the status of nonentities who must 
live the rest of their lives in a state of tortured nothingness.

Faced with the prospect of being rendered null and void as human beings even 
as they live the one and only single life they have, it is the natural 
vocation of a conscious people to resist oppression, to refuse to be 
terrorized and dehumanized through engagement in an uncompromising regime of 
self-humanization, self-expression, and the total rejection of the unjust 
oppressive order bolstered by a regime of violence and intimidation. While 
the goal of the oppressed must never be the counter-oppression of the 
oppressor, the message to the oppressor must be couched in no uncertain 
terms. It must be made loud and clear to the oppressor that the oppressed 
refuses to be dehumanized and objectified and that the oppressed insists on 
the enjoyment of their right to full humanity – all those rights that come 
with the reality of being fully human. But while the possibility of becoming 
human and ending oppression must always be made implicit in the message to 
the oppressor, the person who seeks to end oppression must never fall to the 
temptation of trying to pacify the oppressor because this, as Freire tells 
us again, makes the person who seeks justice a dispenser of false 
generosity, an adherent to a regime of circular self-truths who grows 
strangely agitated whenever any of those self-truths are challenged or 
questioned.

History is replete with examples of “freedom fighters” who become oppressors 
as soon as they assume positions of power. This is because at the critical 
moment of their fight against oppression, they had conceived a fear of 
freedom itself. They had wavered between their initial principled positions 
of uncompromising opponents of oppression and a newly assumed position of a 
fake perception of pacification as a more viable alternative and line of 
defense against oppression. They tend to edge closer to the oppressor, 
granting him a certain veiled acceptance through a lame regime of 
rationalizations and apologetics, through a lame appeal to reason and 
fairness, and by citing lame pointers to the reality of an unalterable 
imperfection of being, of life, the necessity of compromise in the service 
of the exigencies of daily life. They are caught between the desire for 
freedom and a cold, belly-numbing fear of freedom or its possibility. They 
swing and waver with dizzying uncertainty and tend, to quote Freire again, 
“to prefer the security of conformity . . . to the creative communion 
produced by freedom and even the pursuit of freedom.”  They experience this 
dilemma because from the very beginning, what they really “fought” for was 
not the full liberation and full humanization of society, but the privilege, 
perhaps subconscious, of identifying with the oppressor, of enjoying the 
privileges enjoyed by the oppressor, of the opportunity to rise to the level 
of the oppressor and share in the glittering trappings of the oppressor’s 
perceived high station. This freedom-fighter-turned-oppressor started out 
really focusing on the pursuit of individual or class interests rather than 
the interests of the social collectivity. Such a pursuit inevitably distorts 
and corrupts his mission so that he becomes an oppressor as soon as he 
becomes powerful enough. It is an absolute prerequisite for one who desires 
to resist oppressive dehumanization that he must lose sight of individual 
and class interests and set his sights upon the interests of the popular 
collectivity. One cannot be free from the “oppressor consciousness” so long 
as one is obsessed with the protection or preservation of individual or 
class interests. While seeking to preserve individual or class interests 
might appear the sensible thing to do in an environment of oppression, it is 
in reality a dangerous path to perdition. The ancient African aphorism that 
you cannot dance and dig at the same time exemplifies the folly of trying to 
rationalize oppression even as we pose as enemies of oppression and 
injustice.

The person who desires freedom from oppression must therefore assume a 
principled and uncompromising posture of rejection of oppression. Short of 
engaging in physical violence, the person who seeks liberation must 
relentless shove bitter doses of truth medicine down the throat of the 
oppressor. And equally important, such a person must see the current 
oppressive situation not as a hopeless permanent situation, or a situation 
that has to be endured at all costs, but as a situation that, like all 
others, is located within the ever-rotating wheel of life and must therefore 
one day pass from actuality to potentiality or non-being. The person who 
seeks liberation must therefore engage in a regime of resistance perpetually 
inspired by an unshakeable conviction that oppression is to be rejected 
without qualification, and that what comes next must be carefully and 
constantly contemplated and visualized every step of the way.

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