Human rights everywhere are under a new attack. A neo-liberal attack. Liberalism as defined by the west and its growing number of proponents in Africa dictates a total shift for the role of the individual in society. From its connections to the familial, customary, and ethnic and its ritual connections to the village network, individualism has now shifted towards the total liberation of the individual from everything. Liberalism, in this sense, undermines the traditional bond of the individual to the family and it elevates the individual as the center of all decision-making and consideration. Neoliberalism has centered the individual above all human interactions of any village.
Hence, on the surface, liberalism does not appear as a threat to the individual, only as a threat to tradition. Who doesn’t want more and more rights? Who doesn’t want fewer and fewer responsibilities? But further scrutiny reveals a fundamental contradiction for purpose. A contradiction in the sense that when an individual, say a mother, has a newborn, neoliberals now claim the baby is its own individual and separate from the mother. How can the same liberals who postulate the right of the woman over her womb, and grant her the absolute and sole right over the life of the unborn, turn around to separate a human child that is still totally dependent on the mother, as a separate entity from its mother?
More, this is a contradiction for purpose because it only serves the ultimate agenda of the liberal—to coax women into becoming reproductive machines for the slave-like-industry that has been at the foundation of the making of the west’s most powerful empire, the United States of America. By first separating the mother and her unborn child from the village, in the name of the right to her body, she is entirely left in the care of the government. Since the United States of America, for example, is an oligarchy, it implies that the safety and health of the mother and her unborn child are at the behest of the oligarchy. When she walks into an OBGYN office until she delivers that baby in a hospital, the decisions about her health and safety are held by these institutions. No longer has the husband, or the nuclear family, or the extended family, or the clan, any say in the health and safety of the mother and her unborn child.
Why? The mother and her unborn child is an individual. That is the claim. Yet, the expectation in liberal society is that she adheres to the dictates of the private health institutions like Planned Parenthood. So much for her individualism. If they wish for her to abort the baby, she must. If they wish for her to keep the baby, she must. If they wish for her to medicate and vaccinate through pregnancy, she must. If they wish to harvest her genetic material, i.e. the unborn child even without the permission of half the donor of that genetic material (the father), for the private industry’s various research endeavors, liberalism demands that she single-handedly gives that authorization to Planned Parenthood, or any clinic for that matter. The contradiction is that Liberalism promotes the perception that she is the only individual that ultimately makes these decisions for herself and her unborn child as a single entity without the permission of the father or anyone else.
However, none of these decisions by the mother and the unborn child are possible without the doctors and nurses and social workers of the private healthcare industry and America’s human research industrial complex (AHRIC). The mother subscribes—without having any alternatives—to all the suggestions, all the recommendations and all the proposed treatments given to her by the public and private healthcare institutions the government mandates.
Despite this reality that the mother is never making her own decisions, liberals promote the uncanny misrepresentation of their theory of individualism that only the mother cooks-up and signs off on the life of her offspring without a third party. For that matter, liberalism for the mother is also at worst the subversion of actual motherhood. While at first liberalism isolates the mother from her village it secondarily and ultimately also separates the child from the mother! Liberalism which preached its disgust against the mother as a baby machine to her husband has invariably coaxed women into becoming reproductive machines for the slave-like-industry of the oligarchy.
Motherhood—which begins at pregnancy as the unborn child needs care even as it grows inside the womb—takes its full form and grace when the child is born and as the mother continues to nurture the baby to health and strength. Motherhood does not end at all. In fact, its responsibilities only reduce in number and size as the child grows into adulthood and assumes its own personhood. In the African consciousness, motherhood is forever. That is, it lasts for the entire lives of the mother and her children and thereafter into eternity as the mother becomes a grandmother, a great grandmother and ultimately an ancestor. The link between the mother and the child is never broken.
Liberalism advocates something totally anti-human in this regard, and there’s no doubt that its grounding in the west’s imperial adventures in Africa and beyond and its founding on the slave plantations in the Americas informs its philosophy. All human beings, which the implications of liberalism will show, are by default chattel, and are owned by the government, by the oligarchy. The mother can claim her individual human rights and extend this right to the unborn child (in so far as AHRIC dictates these rights) until the child is born, at which point she can no longer extend her human rights to reject treatment to protect the child from medical exploitation.
The child is chattel. If the American Human Research Industrial Complex prescribes an ear surgery for a two-day old infant before it has enough time to acclimatize to its mother’s nipples, the mother has no choice but to oblige. If the mother attempts to seek permission to “think about it” or even seek a second opinion, AHRIC would trigger the ever-ready services of a member of the Social Worker gestapo, planted there at the hospital for these purposes, to find and charge the mother with medical neglect. The gestapo has an ever-powerful list of juvenile court judges to automatically sign off on these threats (or court orders) to the mother and her new baby. In America, the mother is seriously not aware that she’s chattel, a fattened cow of the medical industrial complex, until her child is born. To the contrary, the liberal attempt to break the pregnant mother, swollen feet and all, out of the jail cell of the kitchen has landed the mother the role of the reproductive machine for the slave-like-industries of the oligarchy.
Western liberalism hence is not about enstooling more and more human rights. It is about stripping them away. Liberal ideas about individualism are only stooped in extricating the traditional village network from the individual and replacing this network with the profit-seeking private enterprise of the oligarchy. If the claim is that African tradition is restrictive, western liberalism on the other hand is more pernicious and even dangerous. Liberalism and conservatism (i.e. tradition) are both choices that societies make. One does not precede the other. One is not an advancement from the other. One is not an evolution from the other.
Liberalism and African tradition are choices that face many modern nation states in Africa today. Choices that they have to make good on, although the threat to tradition stems from the constant attacks of newly-grown western liberal scholars on African life. The lack of understanding of liberalism, however, poses a serious danger to African life as the concerted cultivation of the human foundations of African consciousness about such matters as motherhood, with all its faults, do not only predate the western European one, but it also remains in all its analyses more stable and far more humane than liberalism.
