Designated Foreigners

Anti-Colonial theory — which at its most simplistic and fanatical is little more than a binary moral judgment concerning the populations left behind as a legacy of imperialism, with precious little effort at analysis — possesses one really perverse stream whereby an ostensibly indigenous people, often a minority with a peculiar history relative to the previous situation, are assigned the role of foreign colonisers. 

This might be most obvious today in the Middle East, but in fact it has often taken its most toxic forms in Africa. If I had the time I would explain here why the Rwandan genocide could not have occurred without an imposition of some of these often deliberately muddled perceptions (along with essentially bogus ethnic categorisation) but another, easier-to-outline case is that of the Swahili peoples of the East African coastline. 

For hundreds of years before the ‘scramble for Africa’, these Muslim converts had acted as middle men between the trans-oceanic traders to their east (mainly Indians and Arabs, then later on, Portuguese) and the hinterland to their west, with its gold and other desirable commodities which were traded for Asian silks and such like. 

It is this long-term connection with the dreaded C word, commerce, or worse, Capitalism, that can prove deadly to any population once the post-colonial Marxist ideologues show up. The Swahili had emphasised to the Europeans that they were different, and once the Europeans had gone, demagogues from amongst the other Bantu-speakers were more than happy to designate them as foreign settler colonists, worthy of violent expulsion. 

In fairness, the historical choice they had made, avoiding the dangers of actual maritime trade, but exploiting their control of coastal access meant that they were also driven to exploit their pagan neighbours inland simply in order to maintain a certain lifestyle within their wealthy emporia, which included slaves. 

History is necessarily complicated, and it would be a fine thing if we could always so easily decide who the oppressors and the oppressed have been in any given situation, but that is basically the starting point of a certain ideological MO, and the irony is that it often leads to terrible conflicts between the people left behind after the most obvious oppressors have departed the scene.