One observation that always struck me in Africa was meeting two people from the same ethnic group, the same town, the same village—who were as different as night and day—as a result of the same tragic history that produces rebels and future traitors, whether by action or by omission. These memories come flooding back whenever I see images of the humiliating arrest of Patrice Lumumba in 1960—the dignity of the anti-colonial revolutionary and the sadistic, worm-like mentality of Mobutu Sese Seko’s soldiers, who forced him to eat his own speech.
One of them is a tamed, colonized, obedient creature—the product of deep-seated historical and moral corruption—always ready to seize the slightest personal advantage by flattering anyone above him, whether it be the architect overseeing the construction project, the provincial official, or the minister in the capital. That same type of man who, in every town we visited, at every meeting with village leaders, never missed an opportunity to tell me, in private, that they preferred “white bosses” because they were “less corrupt than black ones.”
The other type of man was the rebel, the one with the measured smile, the one who didn’t believe everything he was told without an explanation. He was the one who seemed like a well-rounded human being, extremely intelligent not only because he was, but because he had some kind of education—almost always self-taught. He was the one capable of handling facts and arguments, and when he asked questions, it wasn’t out of flattery, but because he didn’t understand or wanted to learn or something. The typical underdog. A pau preto demon.
As a young architect in Mozambique, I made more friends among this type of laborer who, at first, had a hostile attitude toward the white man from America—mulucu ncunha. I could easily have done without their services, not because they failed to carry out any of my orders on the construction site (something no one ever did) but because I could have done so at my leisure and kept only the docile ones around.
When I left the architectural profession for the humanities, I saw this same situation repeated throughout the present and the history of Latin America, Africa, and all those colonies that had been corrupted for generations. I understood it better by reading Franz Fanon and Walter Rodney, or by listening to Malcolm X, who had already observed the existence of two types of equally oppressed people: “the house Black” and “the field Black.”
Nearly thirty years later, I reread those very words I wrote in Mozambique about the future militarization of the world to prevent genuine democratization: “But before the great civil revolution, there will be a deepening of the crisis of this obsolete order. This crisis will affect nearly every sphere, from the political to the economic, including the military… At this moment of rupture, the West will be torn between greater military control and civil disobedience… It will be the first revolution of the individual in history to oppose individualism, just as freedom will oppose liberalism.”
I never imagined there would be so little resistance. Now we see memes consisting of photographs of some dirty, poor city in Africa with captions like “African city without white people.” No one shows Manhattan or Atlanta with captions like “City built on the theft and genocide of Native Americans and the blood of enslaved Africans.” Or any other European city with the caption: “Beauty and prosperity built on the plunder and destruction of the rest of the world.” The neocolonized repeat the same thing today. Colonial patriotism is love for a ruling class that is usually located in a distant country—the empire. Colonized patriotism is blind hatred for one’s own homeland, onto which they project all their frustrations at never being equal to the imperial colonizer.
These displays of universal ignorance sell like popcorn at a movie theater, in a culture that has not only lost its enlightened education—with its calm recognition of the world’s complexity—but has also lost its composure, intelligence, and the ability to connect two links in a bicycle chain due to the hyper-fragmentation of attention characteristic of 20th-century advertising and, more radically, of 21st-century social mediaB —B something we’ve already analyzed in Flies in the Web. A History of the Commercialization of Existence and Its Media (2023) and “The Culture of Hyperfragmentation” (2010).
With the exception of proud and unpunished racists like Elon Musk, these memes come from poor, impoverished, or frustrated white people who long for the CEO lifestyle they believe they deserve simply for being white—or for being “house negroes.” These are the very same people who justify their racism and xenophobia with supremacist theories, such as the idea of race tied to a land (from the German Blut und Boden; “blood and soil”), a concept that no longer applies only to Europe—where the original inhabitants had darker skin than Obama—but to Africa itself, as is the case with the most successful offspring of South African apartheid, such as Elon Musk and Palantir CEO Peter Thiel, both deeply supremacist—classist and sexist, because the combo, like at McDonald’s, always includes the same consumer elements; the other components are God, country, and family, as if God had a preference for any particular passport; as if Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and nearly every other figure in the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran had been born into a “traditional family.”
This racial hatred among frustrated white people follows a common pattern: where there is no class consciousness, there is racial hatred. When the poor consider themselves “middle class” because they don’t live under a bridge, yet cannot stop working just to survive or to save for their old age, they end up hating their neighbors—those who stand in the way of their “right” to become millionaires. Since almost all frustrated people believe themselves to be smarter and more self-sacrificing than they actually are (their frustration stems from excessive individual expectations), it follows that their individual efforts are never fairly rewarded. For this social and psychological type, “social justice” is immoral, because it prevents them from achieving the “individual justice” of being one of the chosen few in the spotlight, receiving the applause of the losers.
Since many (too many) alienated members of the working class see themselves as millionaires who have been swindled, or as successful people who have been unjustly robbed (by the poor, by immigrants, by the state, by communists, by sorcerers), despite being small business owners, wage earners, or the unemployed, they replace their lack of class consciousness with ideological or blood-based fantasies—something that only works among the nobility.
Racial, gender, and class hatred replaces ethnic, gender, and class consciousness—and humanity itself. A perfect maneuver to distract the masses and keep them hating one another, while the ruling elite steers the course of history toward the Middle Ages (see “When Those at the Bottom Hate Each Other,” 2016). Or toward something even worse, because this is a Middle Ages where consumers are not only vassals living in the feudal clouds of tech companies, but also remain wage slaves—just as in the days of the Roman Empire, when slaves were enslaved by their debts.
This is the cultural expression of a capitalism that has ceased to produce goods in industries filled with white slaves and in the mines of the rest of the world filled with black slaves, but has instead devoted itself to sucking up capital at an ever-accelerating pace in the abstract and exclusive game of the stock markets, where the business of destruction—of wars—is by far the most lucrative.
Jorge Majfud, July 2026
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