By Victor C. Ariole
Since antiquity, empires in their successive reigns, had come and gone; the powerful nations on their own resolved that humanity must be allowed “to breathe” after wars upon wars trying to assert supremacy over others hence ill-fated League of Nations, and the extant United Nations Organisation (UNO). To think that Russia and China are not finding their powers combining enough to reform UN, smirks of failure of humanistic “quotient” on their part, especially as they combine in their special occupation and population over the remaining three – USA, Britain and France – they are competing with.
Humanistic quotient is combination of all quotients, intelligence, social, affective, empathic, etc. Tolerance of diversity – either in its expression of colour, psychology, culture, strength, weakness, biology, resource or no resource endowment, etc. – is testing humans and relegating some to jungle humans and upgrading some to civilized humans. They are in all the continents and one can attest to that when one sees the face of either group of Whites, Browns, Blacks, Reds or Yellows when a strange one that is not like them appears in their group. It is expected and it tests one’s humanistic quotient. To reach full human or earn 100% humanistic quotient, interaction with any of the stated groups above, notwithstanding the strangeness of your external features, should be devoid of any complex – inferiority or superiority.
Voltaire, satirically, painted such interaction in his novel, “Candid or The Optimist”, as his characters ventured into Surinam a country between British Guyana and French Guyana that ought to be Spanish Guyana as the great powers divided it among themselves; all positioned on top of Brazil, the only Portuguese space of South America/close to the Caribbean shores.
Voltaire’s characters observed Black or Brown ladies playing around with monkeys as if they were of the same species and the same Black or Brown ladies were having children that were not monkeys but humans – Café-au-lait (mulattos). It is like a man who finds his way to impregnate a mad woman but declines to interact with the mad woman in day time. To Voltaire, that man ought to be seen as the madman and not the woman. So, ladies producing mulattos, human beings, were certainly not dating monkeys.
Indeed humans seems to be losing their humanness in all facets of their relationship among themselves across races and nations; more of unequally yoked people seem to be coming together and making their association greatly burdensome, and it calls for Africa – sub Saharan Africa – to re-think its association with the rest of the world; and tilling the soil for the farming work in the past required yoking either horses or cows, the chariots or ploughs, and they must be of the same size and height to make the yoke equal. The expectation is that the product of their work will be efficient and profuse.
Hence to expect abundance from an unequally yoked cows is inhuman and much or less could lead to seeing the humans who coupled such unequally yoked animals as possibly jungle minded humans.
For BRICS to be economically sustainable the yoke that binds them together must not be the type of yoke China and Russia see as binding them with USA, Britain and France in the current arrangement of the world where they see UN as coupling unequally yoked permanent security members.
Brazil (B), Russia (R), India (I), China (C) and South Africa (S) are greatly unequally yoked countries and to get them to be equally yoked, like the characters of Voltaire – Five people exploiting resources, gathering riches, suffering all the hues and cries of existential threats – who finally resolved to be together and work together as equal partners to create a beautiful garden – sustainable means of livelihood, leaving aside their pride. Let us all be engaged as equal partners in the Vineyard of Nature, making it beautiful. “Cultivons notre jardin”.
Shelving political correctness and as clearly experienced in one’s travel and interactions with reasonable groups of BRICS’ citizens, Brazil is still not fair to its Black and Brown population; Russia still awards certificate to Blacks and Browns and restricts them from using it in Russia; India with its over 200 million Dalits, Black or Brown Indians feature among them; China has over 350 million religion adherents that must remain censored; and the paradoxes of it all is that South Africa with the largest number of politically disenfranchised and materially poor Blacks and Browns, still claims Black majority rule.
Even in the recent gathering in South Africa, the most cheated in the world chessboard is still South Africa representing the Blacks and Browns. In all arrangement whether trade, politics, economic, finance, the Blacks and Browns remained unequally yoked with other races and it is high time the Blacks and Browns bound themselves with the equally yoked of other continents, remained on a high rate of human quotient and make their relationship enviable by others as well as a factor in the expected new world order. It is not only trade expansion or benefit that should matter in such associations, human fulfillment should be counter-posed with trade expansion to make humanistic quotient to matter.
From the above, “café-au-lait” leads to getting equally yoked, and it is triggered by change of mindset, and it breads diversity tolerances and it tests the humanity in members coming together. Let UN reform itself to create a mindset of tolerance, hence quasi-equally yoked members, for a start to avoid multiple BRICS.
Ariole is a Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Lagoses from Lagos
-Thisday