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 Several Africans drove up in a car and parked right in front of mine, blocking it. People who have difficulty thinking of things that do not exist will ipso facto have difficulty thinking about the future. 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. I quote from an article in the South African press about the problems blacks have with mathematics:. 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 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?
It is clear, therefore, that there is no concept of number in Zulu. White rule in South Africa ended in 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. Nourish, rear; bring up; 2. Keep an eye on; watch your crop. 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. Make, cause, produce something unpleasant; … to cause trouble. Contend over a claim; … fight over inheritance; … 3. Make for, aim at, journey towards ….
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. 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. 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. 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. For them it was sink or swim. 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. The answer was unanimous. The word for this was tsika. 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?
The average African adult has the raw IQ score of the average 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. 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 book by David Robbins, writes:. 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.
There is something so unspeakably vile about this, something so beyond depravity, that the human brain recoils. In , Amy Biehl, a 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. 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 :.
Nevertheless, I was still surprised by what I found in the Zulu dictionary. Act hurriedly; … 2. Be greedy. Rob, plunder, … take [possessions] by force. 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. They just see it as pleasure for them. 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. I suspect the notion is alien to Africans, and I would be surprised if things are very different among American blacks. I recently located a document that was dictated to me by a young African woman in June 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. Whenever I taught ethics I used the example of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army who was convicted of treason in 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.
Africans, I believe, may generally lack the concepts of subjunctivity and counterfactuality. It is obvious that animals, for example, cannot think counterfactually, because of their complete lack of self-awareness. Interestingly, blacks do plan for funerals, for although an accident is only a risk, death is a certainty. 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. 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?
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.
Blacks are ignorant and rude. 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. I am hardly the only one to notice this obliviousness to others that sometimes characterizes black behavior.
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.
Mathematics and maintenance I quote from an article in the South African press about the problems blacks have with mathematics: 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 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? It is clear, therefore, that there is no concept of number in Zulu. White rule in South Africa ended in 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. Nourish, rear; bring up; 2. Keep an eye on; watch your crop. 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.
Make, cause, produce something unpleasant; … to cause trouble. Contend over a claim; … fight over inheritance; … 3. Make for, aim at, journey towards …. 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. 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.
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. 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. For them it was sink or swim. 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.
The answer was unanimous. The word for this was tsika. 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? The average African adult has the raw IQ score of the average 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.
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. There is something so unspeakably vile about this, something so beyond depravity, that the human brain recoils. Where Amy Biehl was killed. In , Amy Biehl, a 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.
Clearly, many blacks do not think rape is anything to be ashamed of. Liberian billboard Nevertheless, I was still surprised by what I found in the Zulu dictionary.
Act hurriedly; … 2. Be greedy. Rob, plunder, … take [possessions] by force. 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. They just see it as pleasure for them. 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. I suspect the notion is alien to Africans, and I would be surprised if things are very different among American blacks. For those not familiar with this unfortunate dysfunctional family drama, the examples of simple rejection and acceptance may serve to illustrate the dynamic. In either case this is a manifestation of transgenerational spiritual disenfranchisement -- separation from indigenous space.
In the common family these games of transactional dramas occur daily and without acknowledging the rules or context of the game. In actual practice, the games are usually more complex and convoluted, at the center is fear, angst, insecurity, and scarcity -- at its core vacuous falsehood, illusion, and self deceit. Within this fundamentally insecure milieu of Self estrangement one can now easily see how guilt, race hatred, national hatreds, war, religious hatreds, intolerance, prejudice, bigotry, and false identifications are further instituted.
In other words, people can be misled and have been so for thousands of years only after they have become crippled emotionally -- only after they have become fodder for the domination of an external authoritarian or totalitarian order and this conditioning starts in early childhood or even in the womb and then is continued through status quo authoritarian institutions which reward consent and punish disobedience or dissent.
The negative conditioning rewards memorization, conformity, close-mindedness, ability to follow directions, jump through hoops, fealty, allegiance, loyalty, and obedience, depending upon its "order" through the ordering and control of the physical surroundings such as things and people , while the opposite type of training would reward open-mindedness, ability for critical thought, creative thought, self empowerment, self exploration, experimentation, and similar activities based on the principles of inter-dependence and co-evolution as an extended relationship with Self in all our relationships in Indigenous time.
The former more common approach is fear based and mostly unconscious and rife with denial supported through defensive self justification while the latter is more subtle, deeper, richer and more fertile. The former is sterile and brings more suffering repression and death, while the latter is organic, life affirming, healing, and based on unconditional Love as our Natural condition -- as Self.
From here one can easily see where dysfunctional families composed of one race, religion, nationality, or fixed belief may raise unwittingly racist, prejudiced, bigoted, xenophobic, and chauvinistic children, hence the grounds of racism often becomes established in infancy. Here we have only summarized the links between guilt and racism and its basis in the dysfunctional authoritarian family.
This would not be so bad, if the greater society did not further institutionalize and reinforce that reactive modality of false identification, guilt, strife, disparity, repression, and angst, but it does so only because it is composed and ordered by its own victims who in turn seek compensation, solace, and consolation in the scarce, coarse, empty hearted, and fear filled world compromise, adaptation, and sublimation.
That they teach and force their children to follow this "way" of suffering, also serves to justify their own guilt for themselves not questioning it, challenging it, and destroying it, but rather propagating and preserving it. For such people "their way" becomes the only way, while if some one challenges that, they are simply "wrong", which changes to "bad' or "evil" very quickly and so in the circle of self denial, escape from freedom, and self imposed spiritual alienation and ignorance becomes closed and with that again the neurotic needs for group identifications, pride, demonization of others, racism, chauvinism, war, etc.
We have seen how this scarcity fear based consciousness has an obviously large psychological, social, political, and educational as well as economic in terms of neurotic self gratification through consumerism impact upon our lives, but we yet to begin extending this life affirming principle of mutual abundance and co-creation into the spheres of education agricultural, health, and other institutions. Our meaning in life, i.
So if we are subjected to negative conditioning, we must free ourselves from that through waking up. We must also help wake up our neighbors.
Free from its noxious influence we are then enabled to act creatively, non-neurotically, with wisdom and love -- truly intelligently. Institutions created by such people who honor these principles would tend to be less self serving, exploitive of others, and less intimidating, yet there always lies the danger of the corruption of any external institution becoming self serving and thus another source of external authoritarianism.
Creativity will create itself -- evolution will evolve by itself in joy -- The End will take care of itself in Love and Peace, but how to get there is most often is anguished about. So today healers, psychologists, educators, spiritualists, grass roots social institutions, community and spiritual organizations, and CO-creators most often find their hands full just trying to treat and reverse the psychological residues of such negative conditionings.
Thus it is advantageous at the same time to attempt dismantling the process of negative programming in our youth and society so that tomorrow's adults will not have such a difficult recovery process and will not further serve the oppression which created them.
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