One evening in 1997, I disembarked from a small wooden boat on an island in the Indian Ocean between Quisanga and Pangane, Mozambique. I was accompanied by the renowned author of Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire (1984), now retired from the Open University in England. Joe was a renegade American, author of several books and articles against apartheid in South Africa. I had met him in the most inaccessible province of Mozambique, Cabo Delgado, thanks to the globetrotter Nevi Castro and after sharing a few dinners with Ntewane Machel, son of the founding father of Mozambique, Samora Machel (who died in another of those mysterious plane crashes of the 1980s), and Graça Simbine, who months later became Nelson Mandela’s wife.

After a hundred moves, I have lost my notes, but something remained in my second book, Critique of Pure Passion, 1998. I also remember the names, with the freshness of youth: Ibo Island, Matembo, Qurimba…

On different islands we were greeted by the explosive joy of the children.

“Que crianças tão simpáticas,” Joe, who spoke perfect Portuguese, commented to me.

“Sim,” I replied. “Simpáticos e bastante inteligentes. Cumprimentaram-nos com ‘Bem-vindos, estúpidos homens brancos’.” (“Friendly and quite intelligent. They greeted us with ‘Welcome, stupid white men’.”)

In my notes, I tried to reflect on the fact that these expressions did not mean (I did not feel them to be) an insult, as it might mean if we called them “stupid blacks,” as Theodore Roosevelt wrote. In that case, it would be confirmation of racist and colonialist oppression. The conclusion was quite obvious: there was a clear disproportion of power. The children’s insult (which, moreover, was meant as a joke) was a counter-narrative of resistance. The expression “stupid white man” (which, purely by coincidence, was later used by Michael Moore in one of his documentaries, “Stupid White Men,” in 2001) barely qualified as cultural resistance. As individuals, we were very well received. Currently, there is no translator or dictionary from Makua (or Macua, a variation of Bantu) to Spanish, but from what I remember of my workers at the Pemba shipyard, from whom I learned some Macua and Maconde, it sounded like “nkuña nuku.”

Surrounded by marijuana fields (zuruma) that the natives neither consumed nor trafficked, we had long conversations. Joe knew more about Latin American politics than I did, a newly graduated architect and amateur writer who, like any writer, had arrived in Mozambique with my own prejudices. Like almost any Uruguayan, he detested racism, but he was convinced that he had a lot to teach my workers about construction technologies. I left something behind, stories that are irrelevant, but when I left, hiding my tears, I had been humbled: the poorest natives had taught me that there is something about happiness that we Westerners do not know, cannot know, and do not want to know.

Let’s jump across the Atlantic and almost a third of a century. On October 29, 2025, during an event organized by Turning Point USA (a right-wing political organization founded by influencer Charlie Kirk at the age of 18 to “promote the principles of free markets, limited government, and individual liberty”), the Vice President of the United States stated: “When the colonists arrived in the New World, they found widespread child sacrifice.” Abolishing this monstrous practice was “one of the great achievements of Christian civilization.” Vice President J.D. Vance was the same person who said, at another conference, that “teachers are the enemy.”

Not only is the term New World a gross Eurocentric distortion, but the claim about human sacrifices in North America is a confusion of rituals of some Mesoamerican peoples, usually chronicled by conquering soldiers such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo who sought to justify not only the conquest but their own methods based on violence and cruelty. Del Castillo was a semi-illiterate soldier, author of Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The True History of the Conquest of New Spain), published in 1632. The famous letters of Hernán Cortés that precede it are a historical confession of the terrorism applied in the conquest of the “barbarian peoples.” When Father Bartolomé de las Casas appeared with a counter-narrative, he was discredited and diagnosed with mental problems a few centuries later.

This horror rivals the brutality that was practiced in Europe at the time against children and adults. Tortures such as sitting a person accused of heresy naked on a sharp wooden pyramid (Judas Chair) or torturing and executing people in public squares as rituals of political-religious power were not only common, but are much better documented—and at the same time ignored. This political-religious fanaticism left tens of thousands of witches executed as a popular spectacle. But the only horror is always the horror of others.

In contrast, Native Americans used to educate their children without resorting to physical punishment, a method that we Americans inherited from European cultures and which, until not long ago in schools, was summed up as “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Not to mention brutal child labor, which was abolished by law less than a century ago thanks to union and feminist struggles in the United States, which took more than half a century to become law (Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938). Not to mention the sexual abuse of minors, which until recently did not even exist as a legal concept, as the practice remained in the shadows. What’s more, until shortly before the turn of the 20th century, the sexual abuse of minors had to be challenged by resorting to laws prohibiting animal cruelty.

In the cultural production of past centuries, and especially in the 20th century, as was the case with commercial novels and Hollywood films, the conquered were radically dehumanized. Even in decent films such as The Mission (1984), which defend the natives (Guaraní), they are always portrayed as naive, as “noble savages,” as passive supporting actors suffering the conflicts of the conqueror, the white man, and the European empires. The natives are depicted as toothless, while the Europeans have white smiles, when in reality it was exactly the opposite, since it was the civilized Europeans who had an aversion to hygiene, not the savages.

Popular culture has fossilized several myths, such as: “the natives were naive and superstitious”; “the natives blindly followed their chiefs”; “today we have democracy and cell phones thanks to the West.” “If Columbus had never discovered America, we would still be jumping around a campfire, half-naked and with feathers on our heads.”

When the expropriators did not invent fantasies about the evil and inferiority of others, they accused without seeing the beam in their own eyes. For example, one of the Jesuits who described his experiences in North America with greater objectivity wrote: the natives “invent different stories about the creation of the world.” (Joseph de Jouvancy. Relations des Jésuites contenant ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable dans les missions…, Vol. 33, 1610-1791, p. 286.)

Now, tell me how we stupid white men have evolved—including here squires and sepoys who are white only in name. The answer usually focuses on technological evolution, which has been overwhelmingly based on thousands of years of civilizations, now marginal, of “stupid blacks.”

jm

Ideology and Intervention: A Critical Review of Jorge Majfud’s The Wild Frontier