How Africans May Differ

from Westerners
by Gedaliah Braun [1]

I am an American who taught philosophy in several African universities

from 1976 to 1988, and have lived since that time in South Africa.
When I first came to Africa, I knew virtually nothing about the continent
or its people, but I began learning quickly. I noticed, for example, that
Africans rarely kept promises and saw no need to apologize when they
broke them. It was as if they were unaware they had done anything that
called for an apology.

It took many years for me to understand why Africans behaved this way
but I think I can now explain this and other behavior that characterizes
Africa. I believe that morality requires abstract thinking—as does
planning for the future—and that a relative deficiency in abstract
thinking may explain many things that are typically African.

What follow are not scientific findings. There could be alternative

explanations for what I have observed, but my conclusions are drawn
from more than 30 years of living among Africans.

[Image] A public service billboard in South Africa. Note old tire and gas
can.

My first inklings about what may be a deficiency in abstract thinking

came from what I began to learn about African languages. In a
conversation with students in Nigeria I asked how you would say that a
coconut is about halfway up the tree in their local language.

“You can’t say that,” they explained.

 “All you can say is that it is ‘up’.” “How about right at the top?”

“Nope; just ‘up’.”

In other words, there appeared to be no way to express gradations.*

___________________

* Here’s another, somewhat humorous (? black humor), example

from the author’s book (Racism, Guilt, Self-Hatred & Self-
Deceit) on black difficulty with “degrees or gradations”;

In 1978 I spent seven weeks in a Nigerian hospital for a bad

back. Though without a semblance of infrastructure — water,
sewage, electricity, sidewalks, paved roads, running trains, etc.
— Nigeria had colour TV. At 3 o’clock prompt the set was
turned on to a test pattern, accompanied by West African
music.
The ward had two rows of 14 beds; I was three beds from the
TV. In order for the people in the furthest beds to hear, the TV
was (naturally!) set to full volume. Being in traction, I knew
that the problem would be to get the volume turned down a
bit.
I found a likely person and said,
“Would you please turn the volume of the TV down; don’t
turn it all the way down, just some. Not like this [twisting
my hand] but like this. Do you understand?”
Yes.
“Show me what you’re going to do”….
It didn’t make any difference. The sound went down — all the
way.
“Why did you turn the TV off!” came shouts from
everywhere.
Back on it went — full blast. In theory and in practice,
Africans have difficulty with matters of degree, and I observed
endless times how concepts like precision, detail and
exactitude seem alien to them.
The reader may wonder why I didn’t just ask a nurse to lower
the volume. And then my mind flashes back to some of the
realities of Africa. In this hospital, where you literally couldn’t
get a bedpan to piss in, the reason was the nurses. Aside from
simply not being available, often lounging around and
gossiping, their overt hostility towards the patients — not to
mention laziness and incompetence — was beyond belief.
This was largely due to their need to feel “superior” by
making others “inferior“, and who better to abuse than the
hapless patients. I have since observed identical behaviour in
South Africa.
A few years later, in Nairobi, I learned something else about African
languages when two women expressed surprise at my English
dictionary.

“Isn’t English your language?” they asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my only language.”

“Then why do you need a dictionary?”

They were puzzled that I needed a dictionary, and I was puzzled by their
puzzlement. I explained that there are times when you hear a word
you’re not sure about and so you look it up.

“But if English is your language,” they asked, “how can there be

words you don’t know?”

“What?” I said. “No one knows all the words of his language.”

I have concluded that a relative deficiency in abstract thinking may

explain many things that are typically African.

“But we know all the words of Kikuyu; every Kikuyu does,” they
replied.

I was even more surprised, but gradually it dawned on me that since

their language is entirely oral, it exists only in the minds of Kikuyu
speakers. Since there is a limit to what the human brain can retain, the
overall size of the language remains more or less constant. A written
language, on the other hand, existing as it does partly in the millions of
pages of the written word, grows far beyond the capacity of anyone to
know it in its entirety. But if the size of a language is limited, it follows
that the number of concepts it contains will also be limited and hence
that both language and thinking will be impoverished.

African languages were, of necessity, sufficient in their pre-colonial

context. They are impoverished only by contrast to Western languages
and in an Africa trying to emulate the West. While numerous
dictionaries have been compiled between European and African
languages, there are few dictionaries within a single African language,
precisely because native speakers have no need for them. I did find a
Zulu-Zulu dictionary, but it was a small-format paperback of 252 pages.
My queries into Zulu began when I rang the African Language
Department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and
spoke to a white guy. Did “precision” exist in the Zulu language prior to
European contact?

“Oh,” he said, “that’s a very Eurocentric question!” and simply

wouldn’t answer.

I rang again, spoke to another white guy, and got a virtually identical
response.

[Image] Kikuyu women do not need dictionaries.

So I called the University of South Africa, a large correspondence
university in Pretoria, and spoke to a young black guy. As has so often
been my experience in Africa, we hit it off from the start. He understood
my interest in Zulu and found my questions of great interest. He
explained that the Zulu word for “precision” means “to make like a
straight line.” Was this part of indigenous Zulu? No; this was added by
the compilers of the dictionary.

But, he assured me, it was otherwise for “promise.” I was skeptical.

How about “obligation?” We both had the same dictionary (English-
Zulu, Zulu-English Dictionary, published by Witwatersrand University
Press in 1958), and looked it up. The Zulu entry means “as if to bind
one’s feet.” He said that was not indigenous but was added by the
compilers. But if Zulu didn’t have the concept of obligation, how could
it have the concept of a promise, since a promise is simply the oral
undertaking of an obligation? I was interested in this, I said, because
Africans often failed to keep promises and never apologized—as if this
didn’t warrant an apology.

A light bulb seemed to go on in his mind. Yes, he said; in fact, the Zulu
word for promise—isithembiso—is not the correct word. When a black
person “promises” he means “maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” But, I
said, this makes nonsense of promising, the very purpose of which is to
bind one to a course of action. When one is not sure he can do
something he may say, “I will try but I can’t promise.” He said he’d
heard whites say that and had never understood it till now. As a young
Romanian friend so aptly summed it up, when a black person
“promises” he means “I’ll try.”

The failure to keep promises is therefore not a language problem. It is

hard to believe that after living with whites for so long they would not
learn the correct meaning, and it is too much of a coincidence that the
same phenomenon is found in Nigeria, Kenya and Papua New Guinea,
where I have also lived. It is much more likely that Africans generally
lack the very concept and hence cannot give the word its correct
meaning. This would seem to indicate some difference in intellectual
capacity.

Note the Zulu entry for obligation: “as if to bind one’s feet.” An
obligation binds you, but it does so morally, not physically. It is an
abstract concept, which is why there is no word for it in Zulu. So what
did the authors of the dictionary do? They took this abstract concept and
made it concrete. Feet, rope, and tying are all tangible and observable,
and therefore things all blacks will understand, whereas many will not
understand what an obligation is. The fact that they had to define it in
this way is, by itself, compelling evidence for my conclusion that Zulu
thought has few abstract concepts and indirect evidence for the view
that Africans may be deficient in abstract thinking.

Abstract thinking

Abstract entities do not exist in space or time; they are typically

intangible and can’t be perceived by the senses. They are often things
that do not exist. “What would happen if everyone threw rubbish
everywhere?” refers to something we hope will not happen, but we can
still think about it.
 [Image] African art

Everything we observe with our senses occurs in time and everything

we see exists in space; yet we can perceive neither time nor space with
our senses, but only with the mind. Precision is also abstract; while we
can see and touch things made with precision, precision itself can only
be perceived by the mind.

How do we acquire abstract concepts? Is it enough to make things with

precision in order to have the concept of precision? Africans make
excellent carvings, made with precision, so why isn’t the concept in
their language? To have this concept we must not only do things with
precision but must be aware of this phenomenon and then give it a
name.
How, for example, do we acquire such concepts as belief and doubt? We
all have beliefs; even animals do. When a dog wags its tail on hearing
his master’s footsteps, it believes he is coming. But it has no concept of
belief because it has no awareness that it has this belief and so no
awareness of belief per se. In short, it has no self-consciousness, and
thus is not aware of its own mental states.

It has long seemed to me that blacks tend to lack self-awareness. If such

awareness is necessary for developing abstract concepts it is not
surprising that African languages have so few abstract terms. A lack of
self-awareness—or introspection—has advantages. In my experience
neurotic behavior, characterized by excessive and unhealthy self-
consciousness, is uncommon among blacks. I am also confident that
sexual dysfunction, which is characterized by excessive self-
consciousness, is less common among blacks than whites.

Time is another abstract concept with which Africans seem to have

difficulties. I began to wonder about this in 1998. Several Africans
drove up in a car and parked right in front of mine, blocking it.

“Hey,” I said, “you can’t park here.”

“Oh, are you about to leave?” they asked in a perfectly polite and
friendly way.

“No,” I said, “but I might later. Park over there”—and they did.

While the possibility that I might want to leave later was obvious to me,
their thinking seemed to encompass only the here and now:

“If you’re leaving right now we understand, but otherwise, what’s

the problem?”
I had other such encounters and the key question always seemed to be,
“Are you leaving now?” The future, after all, does not exist. It will exist,
but doesn’t exist now. People who have difficulty thinking of things that
do not exist will ipso facto have difficulty thinking about the future.

It appears that the Zulu word for “future”—isikhati—is the same as the
word for time, as well as for space. Realistically, this means that these
concepts probably do not exist in Zulu thought. It also appears that there
is no word for the past—meaning, the time preceding the present. The
past did exist, but no longer exists. Hence, people who may have
problems thinking of things that do not exist will have trouble thinking
of the past as well as the future.

This has an obvious bearing on such sentiments as gratitude and loyalty,

which I have long noticed are uncommon among Africans. We feel
gratitude for things that happened in the past, but for those with little
sense of the past such feelings are less likely to arise.

Why did it take me more than 20 years to notice all of this? I think it is
because our assumptions about time are so deeply rooted that we are not
even aware of making them and hence the possibility that others may
not share them simply does not occur to us. And so we don’t see it, even
when the evidence is staring us in the face.

Mathematics and maintenance

I quote from an article in the South African press about the problems
blacks have with mathematics:

“[Xhosa] is a language where polygon and plane have the same

definition … where concepts like triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon,
 hexagon are defined by only one word.” (“Finding New Languages
for Maths and Science,” Star [Johannesburg], July 24, 2002, p. 8.)

[Image] Apartheid-era sign post.

More accurately, these concepts simply do not exist in Xhosa, which,

along with Zulu, is one of the two most widely spoken languages in
South Africa. In America, blacks are said to have a;

“tendency to approximate space, numbers and time instead of

aiming for complete accuracy.” (Star, June 8, 1988, p.10.)
In other words, they are also poor at math. Notice the identical
triumvirate—space, numbers, and time. Is it just a coincidence that
these three highly abstract concepts are the ones with which blacks —
everywhere — seem to have such difficulties?

The entry in the Zulu dictionary for “number,” by the way — ningi —
means “numerous,” which is not at all the same as the concept of
number. It is clear, therefore, that there is no concept of number in Zulu.

White rule in South Africa ended in 1994. It was about ten years later
that power outages began, which eventually reached crisis proportions.
The principle reason for this is simply lack of maintenance on the
generating equipment. Maintenance is future-oriented, and the Zulu
entry in the dictionary for it is ondla, which means:

“1. Nourish, rear; bring up;

2. Keep an eye on; watch (your crop).”

In short, there is no such thing as maintenance in Zulu thought, and it

would be hard to argue that this is wholly unrelated to the fact that when
people throughout Africa say “nothing works,” it is only an
exaggeration.
 [Image] African shanty town

The New York Times reports that New York City is considering a plan
(since implemented) aimed at getting blacks to;

“do well on standardized tests and to show up for class,”

by paying them to do these things and that could;

“earn [them] as much as $500 a year.”

Students would get money for regular school attendance, every book
they read, doing well on tests, and sometimes just for taking them.
Parents would be paid for;

“keeping a full-time job … having health insurance … and

attending parent-teacher conferences.” (Jennifer Medina, “Schools
Plan to Pay Cash for Marks,” New York Times, June 19, 2007.)
The clear implication is that blacks are not very motivated. Motivation
involves thinking about the future and hence about things that do not
exist. Given black deficiencies in this regard, it is not surprising that
they would be lacking in motivation, and having to prod them in this
way is further evidence for such a deficiency.

The Zulu entry for “motivate” is banga, under which we find:

“1. Make, cause, produce something unpleasant; … to cause

trouble …

2. Contend over a claim; … fight over inheritance; …

3. Make for, aim at, journey towards … .”

Yet when I ask Africans what banga means, they have no idea. In fact,
no Zulu word could refer to motivation for the simple reason that there
is no such concept in Zulu; and if there is no such concept there cannot
be a word for it. This helps explain the need to pay blacks to behave as
if they were motivated.

The same New York Times article quotes Darwin Davis of the Urban
League as;

“caution[ing] that the … money being offered [for attending class]

was relatively paltry … and wondering … how many tests students
would need to pass to buy the latest video game.”

Instead of being shamed by the very need for such a plan, this black
activist complains that the payments aren’t enough! If he really is
unaware how his remarks will strike most readers, he is morally obtuse,
but his views may reflect a common understanding among blacks of
what morality is: not something internalized but something others
enforce from the outside. Hence his complaint that paying children to do
things they should be motivated to do on their own is that they are not
being paid enough.

In this context, I recall some remarkable discoveries by the late

American linguist, William Stewart, who spent many years in Senegal
studying local languages. Whereas Western cultures internalize norms
—“Don’t do that!” for a child, eventually becomes “I mustn’t do that”
for an adult—African cultures do not. They rely entirely on external
controls on behavior from tribal elders and other sources of authority.
When Africans were detribalized, these external constraints
disappeared, and since there never were internal constraints, the results
were crime, drugs, promiscuity, etc. Where there have been other forms
of control—as in white-ruled South Africa, colonial Africa, or the
segregated American South—this behavior was kept within tolerable
limits. But when even these controls disappear there is often unbridled
violence.

Stewart apparently never asked why African cultures did not internalize
norms, that is, why they never developed moral consciousness, but it is
unlikely that this was just a historical accident. More likely, it was the
result of deficiencies in abstract thinking ability.
 [Image] Public service message, South Africa.

One explanation for this lack of abstract thinking, including the

diminished understanding of time, is that Africans evolved in a climate
where they could live day to day without having to think ahead. They
never developed this ability because they had no need for it. Whites, on
the other hand, evolved under circumstances in which they had to
consider what would happen if they didn’t build stout houses and store
enough fuel and food for the winter. For them it was sink or swim.

Surprising confirmation of Stewart’s ideas can be found in the May/June

2006 issue of the Boston Review, a typically liberal publication. In “Do
the Right Thing: Cognitive Science’s Search for a Common Morality,”
Rebecca Saxe distinguishes between “conventional” and “moral” rules.
Conventional rules are supported by authorities but can be changed;
moral rules, on the other hand, are not based on conventional authority
and are not subject to change:

“Even three-year-old children … distinguish between moral and

conventional transgressions,” she writes.

The only exception, according to James Blair of the National Institutes

of Health, are psychopaths, who exhibit “persistent aggressive
behavior.” For them, all rules are based only on external authority, in
whose absence “anything is permissible.” The conclusion drawn from
this is that;

“healthy individuals in all cultures respect the distinction between

conventional … and moral [rules].”

However, in the same article, another anthropologist argues that;

“the special status of moral rules cannot be part of human nature,

but is … just … an artifact of Western values.”

Anita Jacobson-Widding, writing of her experiences among the

Manyika of Zimbabwe, says:

“I tried to find a word that would correspond to the English

concept of ‘morality.’ I explained what I meant by asking my
informants to describe the norms for good behavior toward other
people. The answer was unanimous. The word for this was tsika.
But when I asked my bilingual informants to translate tsika into
English, they said that it was ‘good manners’ …”
 [Image] An all-too-common problem.

She concluded that because good manners are clearly conventional

rather than moral rules, the Manyika simply did not have a concept of
morality. But how would one explain this absence? Miss Jacobson-
Widding’s explanation is the typical nonsense that could come only
from a so-called intellectual:

“the concept of morality does not exist.”

The far more likely explanation is that the concept of morality, while
otherwise universal, is enfeebled in cultures that have a deficiency in
abstract thinking.

According to now-discredited folk wisdom, blacks are;

“children in adult bodies,”

but there may be some foundation to this view. The average African
adult has the raw IQ score of the average 11-year-old white child. This
is about the age at which white children begin to internalize morality
and no longer need such strong external enforcers.

Gruesome cruelty

Another aspect of African behavior that liberals do their best to ignore

but that nevertheless requires an explanation is gratuitous cruelty. A
reviewer of Driving South, a 1993 book by David Robbins, writes:

[Image] Victim of Rwandan violence.

“A Cape social worker sees elements that revel in violence … It’s

like a cult which has embraced a lot of people who otherwise
appear normal. … At the slightest provocation their blood-lust is
 aroused. And then they want to see death, and they jeer and mock
at the suffering involved, especially the suffering of a slow and
agonizing death.” (Citizen [Johannesburg], July 12, 1993, p.6.)

There is something so unspeakably vile about this, something so beyond

depravity, that the human brain recoils. This is not merely the absence
of human empathy, but the positive enjoyment of human suffering, all
the more so when it is “slow and agonizing.” Can you imagine jeering at
and mocking someone in such horrible agony?

[Image] A “necklacing” victim

During the apartheid era, black activists used to kill traitors and enemies
by “necklacing” them. An old tire was put around the victim’s neck,
filled with gasoline, and—but it is best to let an eye-witness describe
what happened next:

“The petrol-filled tyre is jammed on your shoulders and a lighter is

placed within reach . … Your fingers are broken, needles are
pushed up your nose and you are tortured until you put the lighter
 to the petrol yourself.” (Citizen; “SA’s New Nazis,” August 10,
1993, p.18.)

The author of an article in the Chicago Tribune, describing the equally

gruesome way the Hutu killed Tutsi in the Burundi massacres, marveled
at;

“the ecstasy of killing, the lust for blood; this is the most horrible
thought. It’s beyond my reach.” (“Hutu Killers Danced In Blood
Of Victims, Videotapes Show,” Chicago Tribune, September 14,
1995, p.8.)

The lack of any moral sense is further evidenced by their having

videotaped their crimes;

“apparently want[ing] to record … [them] for posterity.”

These people apparently took pride in their work.

 [Image] Where Amy Biehl was killed.

In 1993, Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old American on a Fulbright scholarship,

was living in South Africa, where she spent most of her time in black
townships helping blacks. One day when she was driving three African
friends home, young blacks stopped the car, dragged her out, and killed
her because she was white. A retired senior South African judge, Rex
van Schalkwyk, in his 1998 book One Miracle is Not Enough, quotes
from a newspaper report on the trial of her killers:

“Supporters of the three men accused of murdering [her] … burst

out laughing in the public gallery of the Supreme Court today
when a witness told how the battered woman groaned in pain.”

This behavior, Van Schalkwyk wrote, “is impossible to explain in terms

accessible to rational minds.” (pp. 188-89.)
 [Image] Amy Biehl, helping blacks.

These incidents and the responses they evoke—“the human brain

recoils,” “beyond my reach,” “impossible to explain to rational minds”
— represent a pattern of behavior and thinking that cannot be wished
away, and offer additional support for my claim that Africans are
deficient in moral consciousness.

I have long suspected that the idea of rape is not the same in Africa as
elsewhere, and now I find confirmation of this in Newsweek:

“According to a three-year study [in Johannesburg] … more than

half of the young people interviewed — both male and female —
believe that forcing sex with someone you know does not constitute
sexual violence … [T]he casual manner in which South African
teens discuss coercive relationships and unprotected sex is
staggering.” (Tom Masland, “Breaking The Silence,” Newsweek,
July 9, 2000.)
Clearly, many blacks do not think rape is anything to be ashamed of.

The Newsweek author is puzzled by widespread behavior that is known

to lead to AIDS, asking:

“Why has the safe-sex effort failed so abjectly?”

Well, aside from their profoundly different attitudes towards sex and
violence and their heightened libido, a major factor could be their
diminished concept of time and reduced ability to think ahead.
 [Image] Liberian billboard

Nevertheless, I was still surprised by what I found in the Zulu

dictionary. The main entry for rape reads:

“1. Act hurriedly; …

2. Be greedy.

3. Rob, plunder, … take [possessions] by force.”

While these entries may be related to our concept of rape, there is one
small problem: there is no reference to sexual intercourse! In a male-
dominated culture, where saying “no” is often not an option (as
confirmed by the study just mentioned), “taking sex by force” is not
really part of the African mental calculus. Rape clearly has a moral
dimension, but perhaps not to Africans. To the extent they do not
consider coerced sex to be wrong, then, by our conception, they cannot
consider it rape because rape is wrong. If such behavior isn’t wrong it
isn’t rape.
 [Image] A sign common in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the
Apartheid era

An article about gang rape in the left-wing British paper, the Guardian,
confirms this when it quotes a young black woman:

“The thing is, they [black men] don’t see it as rape, as us being
forced. They just see it as pleasure for them.” (Rose George, “They
Don’t See it as Rape. They Just See it as Pleasure for Them,”
June 5, 2004.)

A similar attitude seems to be shared among some American blacks who

casually refer to gang rape as “running a train.” (Nathan McCall,
Makes Me Wanna Holler, Vintage Books, 1995.)

If the African understanding of rape is far afield, so may be their idea of

romance or love. I recently watched a South African television program
about having sex for money. Of the several women in the audience who
spoke up, not a single one questioned the morality of this behavior.
Indeed, one plaintively asked:

“Why else would I have sex with a man?”

From the casual way in which Africans throw around the word “love,” I
suspect their understanding of it is, at best, childish. I suspect the notion
is alien to Africans, and I would be surprised if things are very different
among American blacks. Africans hear whites speak of “love” and try to
give it a meaning from within their own conceptual repertoire. The
result is a child’s conception of this deepest of human emotions,
probably similar to their misunderstanding of the nature of a promise.

I recently located a document that was dictated to me by a young

African woman in June 1993. She called it her “story,” and the final
paragraph is a poignant illustration of what to Europeans would seem to
be a limited understanding of love:

“On my way from school, I met a boy. And he proposed me. His
name was Mokone. He tell me that he love me. And then I tell him I
will give him his answer next week. At night I was crazy about him.
I was always thinking about him.”

Moral blindness

Whenever I taught ethics I used the example of Alfred Dreyfus, a

Jewish officer in the French Army who was convicted of treason in 1894
even though the authorities knew he was innocent. Admitting their
mistake, it was said, would have a disastrous effect on military morale
and would cause great social unrest. I would in turn argue that certain
things are intrinsically wrong and not just because of their
consequences. Even if the results of freeing Dreyfus would be much
worse than keeping him in prison, he must be freed, because it is unjust
to keep an innocent man in prison.

To my amazement, an entire class in Kenya said without hesitation that

he should not be freed. Call me dense if you want, but it was 20 years
before the full significance of this began to dawn on me.
 [Image] Death is certain but accidents are not.

Africans, I believe, may generally lack the concepts of subjunctivity and

counterfactuality. Subjunctivity is conveyed in such statements as:

“What would you have done if I hadn’t showed up?”

This is contrary to fact because I did show up, and it is now impossible
for me not to have shown up. We are asking someone to imagine what
he would have done if something that didn’t happen (and now couldn’t
happen) had happened. This requires self-consciousness, and I have
already described blacks’ possible deficiency in this respect. It is
obvious that animals, for example, cannot think counterfactually,
because of their complete lack of self-awareness.

When someone I know tried to persuade his African workers to

contribute to a health insurance policy, they asked:
 “What’s it for?”

“Well, if you have an accident, it would pay for the hospital.”

Their response was immediate:

“But boss, we didn’t have an accident!”

“Yes, but what if you did?”

Reply?

“We didn’t have an accident!”

End of story.
[Image] South African AIDS education poster.
Interestingly, blacks do plan for funerals, for although an accident is
only a risk, death is a certainty. (The Zulu entries for “risk” are
“danger” and “a slippery surface.”) Given the frequent all-or-nothing
nature of black thinking, if it’s not certain you will have an accident,
then you will not have an accident. Furthermore, death is concrete and
observable: We see people grow old and die. Africans tend to be aware
of time when it is manifested in the concrete and observable.

One of the pivotal ideas underpinning morality is the Golden Rule: do

unto others as you would have them do unto you.

“How would you feel if someone stole everything you owned? Well,
that’s how he would feel if you robbed him.”

The subjunctivity here is obvious. But if Africans may generally lack

this concept, they will have difficulty in understanding the Golden Rule
and, to that extent, in understanding morality.

If this is true we might also expect their capacity for human empathy to
be diminished, and this is suggested in the examples cited above. After
all, how do we empathize? When we hear about things like
“necklacing” we instinctively — and unconsciously — think:

“How would I feel if I were that person?”

Of course I am not and cannot be that person, but to imagine being that
person gives us valuable moral “information” that we wouldn’t want
this to happen to us and so we shouldn’t want it to happen to others. To
the extent people are deficient in such abstract thinking, they will be
deficient in moral understanding and hence in human empathy—which
is what we tend to find in Africans.
In his 1990 book Devil’s Night, Ze’ev Chafets [2] quotes a black
woman speaking about the problems of Detroit:

“I know some people won’t like this, but whenever you get a whole
lot of black people, you’re gonna have problems. Blacks are
ignorant and rude.” (pp. 76-77.)

If some Africans cannot clearly imagine what their own rude behavior
feels like to others—in other words, if they cannot put themselves in the
other person’s shoes—they will be incapable of understanding what
rudeness is. For them, what we call rude may be normal and therefore,
from their perspective, not really rude. Africans may therefore not be
offended by behavior we would consider rude — not keeping
appointments, for example. One might even conjecture that African
cruelty is not the same as white cruelty, since Africans may not be fully
aware of the nature of their behavior, whereas such awareness is an
essential part of “real” cruelty.

I am hardly the only one to notice this obliviousness to others that

sometimes characterizes black behavior. Walt Harrington, a white
liberal married to a light-skinned black, makes some surprising
admissions in his 1994 book, Crossings: A White Man’s Journey Into
Black America:

“I notice a small car … in the distance. Suddenly … a bag of

garbage flies out its window . … I think, I’ll bet they’re blacks.
Over the years I’ve noticed more blacks littering than whites. I
hate to admit this because it is a prejudice. But as I pass the car, I
see that my reflex was correct—[they are blacks].”

“[As I pull] into a McDonald’s drive-through … [I see that] the car

in front of me had four black[s] in it. Again … my mind made its
unconscious calculation: We’ll be sitting here forever while these
 people decide what to order. I literally shook my head . … My God,
my kids are half black! But then the kicker: we waited and waited
and waited. Each of the four … leaned out the window and ordered
individually. The order was changed several times. We sat and sat,
and I again shook my head, this time at the conundrum that is race
in America.”

“I knew that the buried sentiment that had made me predict this
disorganization … was … racist. … But my prediction was
right.” (pp. 234-35.)

Africans also tend to litter. To understand this we must ask why whites
don’t litter, at least not as much. We ask ourselves:

“What would happen if everyone threw rubbish everywhere? It

would be a mess. So you shouldn’t do it!”

Blacks’ possible deficiency in abstract thinking makes such reasoning

more difficult, so any behavior requiring such thinking is less likely to
develop in their cultures. Even after living for generations in societies
where such thinking is commonplace, many may still fail to absorb it.
 {Image] Nigerian shanty town covered in trash and raw sewage. [3]

It should go without saying that my observations about Africans are

generalizations. I am not saying that none has the capacity for abstract
thought or moral understanding. I am speaking of tendencies and
averages, which leave room for many exceptions.

To what extent do my observations about Africans apply to American

blacks? American blacks have an average IQ of 85, which is a full 15
points higher than the African average of 70. [4] The capacity for
abstract thought is unquestionably correlated with intelligence, and so
we can expect American blacks generally to exceed Africans in these
respects.

Still, American blacks show many of the traits so striking among

Africans: low mathematical ability, diminished abstract reasoning, high
crime rates, a short time-horizon, rudeness, littering, etc. If I had lived
only among American blacks and not among Africans, I might never
have reached the conclusions I have, but the more extreme behavior
among Africans makes it easier to perceive the same tendencies among
American blacks.

http://whitelocust.wordpress.com/morality-and-abstract-thinking-how-
africans-may-differ-from-westerners/

----------------------------------------
 Footnotes

[1] Gedaliah Braun is the author of Racism, Guilt, Self-Hatred & Self-
Deceit.

Book Description
Publication Date: March 30, 2010

In 1976 I left America to teach philosophy in Ibadan, Nigeria. I made

some remarkable discoveries. First: African blacks were not uptight
about race; and second: it was obvious to them that whites were
‘cleverer’ and they made no bones about it.

It is whites who feel guilty about this and blame themselves for black
failure. Shrewd blacks use this ‘guilt’ to blackmail, browbeat and
bamboozle whites.
This sham anger is a principal weapon of psychological warfare. It is
used by women against men, blacks against whites, homosexuals
against straights and islam against the West — though always with the
help of the (alleged) wrong-doers.

The psychology here is:

Since our enemies hate us, we must have done something wrong;
perhaps if we are nice to them they won’t hate us so much. In fact
however, such appeasement always fails because it shows
weakness and breeds contempt.

Without ‘guilt’ the con game of sham anger wouldn’t work. Unless
Muslims saw a willing victim, their ‘rage’ wouldn’t exist because they
would know that it would fail. ‘Guilt’ is the glove into which the fist of
‘anger’ fits.

Racial guilt and the consequent unwillingness to speak honestly about

racial differences has led directly to the ultimate disaster of a Muslim
president who hates America.

Blacks are deficient in abstract thinking and this leads to moral

blindness. Abstract entities do not exist in space or time and can only be
perceived by the mind. Zulu has one word for space, time and the
future. In short, these concepts do not exist in Zulu. The word for
number means many; ergo, they have no concept of number. (American
blacks, by the way, are said to ‘approximate space, numbers and time’.)
There is also no concept of promising nor is there a word for truth.

Morality is abstract; i.e., it does not exist in space or time. ‘Do unto
others as you would have them do unto you’ requires thinking of things
that do not exist (‘what would happen if …?’), and is something with
which blacks have difficulty. It is thus not surprising that they have a
diminished sense of morality, nor that Barack Obama behaves like a
pathological liar.

Blacks’ difficulty in thinking of the future explains, e.g., their high rate
of criminality and HIV.

The essence of liberalism is self-hatred — always taking the side of

your adversaries. This has led to feminism, racial preferences, the
homosexual agenda, and being 'nice' to our deadliest enemies. Feminism
is closely allied with the promotion of homosexuality, abortion and
hostility towards marriage and child-rearing.

All of these have one thing in common: they are anti-life and tend
towards death. And what could be sicker than promoting behaviour that
will destroy your own society? Truly, a sickness-unto-death.

I try to explain both what racism is and what it is not, and devise a test
to determine whether something is racist. Racism, it is agreed, is bad; so
if something said to be racist is determined not to be bad, then it can’t
be racist. Is not wanting your child to attend a black school racist? Well,
is it bad to not want your child be in a dangerous environment and
where educational standards will be lower? If the answer is ‘No; this is
simply a reasonable concern for the well-being of your child’, then
avoiding such a school is not racist, because it is not bad; and if it’s not
bad it can’t be racist. QED.

[2] Devil's Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit by Ze'ev Chafets
On Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween, some citizens of Detroit
try to burn down their neighborhoods for an international audience of
fire buffs. This gripping and often heartbreaking tour of the “Murder
Capital of America” often seems lit by those same fires. But as a native
Detroiter, Ze’ev Chafets also shows us the city beneath the crime
statistics—its ecstatic storefront churches; its fearful and embittered
white suburbs; its cops and criminals; and the new breed of black
officials who are determined to keep Detroit running in the midst of
appalling dangers and indifference.

[3] Dustbin Estate — Life on a Nigerian Trash Heap

by Sarah Gayer, 12th January 2014

The kids shout and laugh, tease each other and run around. Mothers yell
at them, and go back to gossiping. Dads trudge through the happy
chaos, headed to work. This scene looks like a typical morning
anywhere, but it doesn’t smell like one. Welcome to Dustbin Estate!
Land reclamation in Lagos isn’t limited to the rich folks and their Eko
Atlantic. About twenty years ago, people backfilled a flood plain with
trash and built houses on the dry-ish substrate. Cheap informal schools
have popped up, offering an education to estate-dwellers for just N20
(€.09) a day. For those who can’t afford to build a shanty out of prized-
find tin and plastic, rooms let for N500 (€2.30) a month. Dustbin Estate
has no formal government because technically a garbage raft isn’t
considered land. This doesn’t stop occupants and humanitarian groups
from keeping the law, organising vocational education and setting up
makeshift health clinics.

Living on top of a garbage dump isn’t all roses and rainbows. The smell
is unbelievable. The eye-watering stench of raw sewage and rotting food
gags visitors to this neighbourhood. Water-borne diseases like cholera,
malaria and diarrhoea prevail, especially after a hard rain. All of the
water is polluted. Fumes from garbage pits burn the eyes, and give long-
term residents a ragged cough. The lucky ones live near the pit toilet, a
giant hole with a privacy shack on top. Unlucky folks squat in the street.
The people living here must have amazing immune systems.

Why on earth do people keep coming to Lagos?

Cities offer more opportunities for making money, i.e., not starving,
than the countryside. For farmers, if the crops fail, so do the families. In
megacities, the middle class with its disposable income can support
innumerable entrepreneurs: foot-washers, back street boxers, water
packet vendors.

Why are these people still living in a trash heap?

There isn't anywhere else to live. The UN has figured out the numbers.
If Lagos creates 250,000 housing units a year, for the next 20 years, the
housing shortage might be addressed. The problem with this idea is that
Nigerian construction tends to be so slap-dash that as soon as the project
is finished, rebuilding must begin again.

The housing scheme is fraught with corruption. Scam artists break into
flats while families are away, sell the place to five or so buyers, and then
skedaddle, leaving surprised homeowners to explain what happened.
This happens so frequently that people spray paint 'This house is not for
sale' on their homes before leaving town.

It’s dirty. It’s stinky. But urban planners should watch the resourceful
problem solving at Dustbin Estate. With megacities on the rise, they can
offer fascinating creative solutions to the problems of urban poverty and
overcrowding. Medically, Dustbin Estate residents may show us how to
overcome illness in a polluted environment.

Of course, it’s easy to discuss Dustbin Estate from the air-conditioned

comfort of Upwind and Far Away. As George Packer wrote in the New
Yorker, ‘As a picture of the urban future, Lagos is fascinating only if
you’re able to leave it.’

[4] For more on the IQ scores for blacks please see this blog post:

RACE, EVOLUTION, AND BEHAVIOR: A Life History

Perspective — A eight part series by Professor J. Phillipe Rushton.

Available here: https://katana17.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/race-

evolution-and-behavior-part-1/

_________________________
 Version History & Notes
Version 3: Mar 23, 2015 — Formatting changes. Added addition text
from the author’s book. Added footnote [4].

Version 2: Feb 26, 2015 — Formatting changes. Added this Ver History
note.

Version 1: Published May 10, 2014

__________________

Notes

* Images and footnotes not in original article.

__________________

Knowledge is Power in Our Struggle for Racial Survival

(Information that should be shared with as many of our people as

possible — do your part to counter Jewish control of the mainstream
media — pass it on and spread the word) … Val Koinen at KOINEN’S
CORNER

Note: This document is available at:

https://katana17.wordpress.com/