There’s a play, coming soon at the theatre near you. It shall be acted by the maximum of three actors called, in order of their appearance, protagonist, deuteragonist and tritagonist.
It’s epithalamium is by none other than Rudyard. Kipling:
Take up the White Man’s burden
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.
The protagonist is a certain aspersive columnist who has been accused of racist tendencies, because he writes with disturbing understanding of the Weltanschauung of his fans, depicting their gesalt in ironic tone of subliminal racism. The natives of the backward country, where he’s settled, feel he creates too much political and racial tension. They feel he acts too much as an impotent imperialist stranded in a ‘dark continent’, like his predecessors, the likes of Henry Morton Stanley and Dr. Livingstone. Like them he wishes to transform the ‘dark continent’ after his disputed kind that refuses to embody the genius loci, the spirit of the land. So, due impotence, decays in slow burn of liver-lipped irony and sterile imagination.
The protagonist, in one of his column, decides to represent the social context of what he sees as Africans stasis as something waiting to be discovered by the élan and vitality of the Occident, or sinological adventurers. This gets the goat of another columnist, the deuteragonist of the play, who, having just awoken to the dupery and condescension of deflating imperialist mind, writes, in not so complementary manner, about the protagonist, ending up baying for his blood on public radio. The editor of the protagonist is forced by mutual detritions of working relationship, and public outcry, to dismiss the protagonist, who subsequently is duly elected to column chair by another newspaper group whom the previous editor insinuates has better tolerance for prejudice. The protagonist then continue sowing his myth relating havoc with effects of racial outrage in renewed energy and vindicated assumption. And is thinking of ways to spur the implied stasis of African collective psyche into progress.
In the absence of repenting nostos from the protagonists, the creators of the play decided, for dramatic effect, to stage the denouement in a court of law. The protagonist is summoned to appear before the judge, the tritagonist, to argue the merits of his case, which he proceed to defend as freedom of speech against intentions of prejudice. During the court case he invokes the likes of J.S. Mill, On Liberty, to support his argument for freedom of speech, neglecting to reveal that Mill emphasized absence of hurt and prejudice to others for that freedom to be justified.
The deuteragonist, who opened the case against the protagonist bases the gist of his accusation on the fact that courts of law must not allow the dressing up of paternalistic tendencies and racial undertones as ill-worn defence for freedom of speech. His argument is dressed up in banalities, clotted and circumbendibus to make appeal for profundity. The judge subsequently recueses himself on ground of suffering from ifobesity as result of argument before him.
The new judge is forced on his first day to dust his Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to familiarize himself with moral virtues as characterised by the deuteragonist’s argument. This judge tritagonist is an ambitious, protean man, who’s not above the ruck and muck of political shenanigans. And feel the time has arrived for him, since he was deracinated by the speed by which apartheid system was ditched without his personal contribution, to prove his bona fides in catching the politics of liberation by their coattails. He wishes to make example of our protagonist, but the law is against him. Eventually he has to admit that legal justice is ill-suited to judge moral ethics, especially in a society fresh from historical prejudice against one group of people. Thus the judge was heard, in his closing remarks, saying; “The comprehensiveness of legal justice would demand that all of us queue in the gallows for our respective sins, and those of our inheritance, were we to apply to rigorously apply them to moral ethics. Moral law’s justice cannot rest on precept that ‘whatever the law does not command, it forbids.’ That would make it barbaric and too closely based on the Mosaic law of afore. Hence we’re compelled to go with Ubuntu here, the precept that magnanimity is the value that embodies all moral ethics.”
Thus the element of tragedy is averted. An aristo-trash columnist is saved by African law he disparages, and is not wrongly made into martyr for freedom of speech. ‘The height of error in writing without any sense of history,’ the local paper quoted the closing remarks of the judge; ‘is revealed in using writing as means of performance art without sense of responsibility. Writers who obsess over the past might reflect history through a prism of pain and misfortune, a tragic outlook that’s depressive sometimes; but in turn they avoid the foolishness of trivialising other people’s pain. Be that as it may. Trivialising other people’s pain might be highly irresponsible and reprehensible, but it’s not criminal. We should stop the wrong mentality of criminalising and demonising people who do not agree with us . . . Often our struggle against prejudice affords us opportunity to come to independent sense of who are . . . It is the writer’s consoling capacity to create explanatory myths for their passions, even prejudice. But they can never be held responsible for the actions others take, even if inspired by their writings. That is the moral tertium quid this court is not willing to enter into, even for pursuit of justice. Case dismissed.’ The judge then pounded his gavel, and when interviewed outside court he said; “As Max Beerbohm said of Kipling, we may say of his lesser talented chichi chicks with ‘the fascination of abomination’; in whom ‘the schoolboy, the bounder, and the brute’ find ‘brilliant expression.’ Let’s stop being so Bull-hard about it!”
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