herero today

[David Casseres]

om Pynchon:

"A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a
topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked
on as anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among
the cattle. How provoking, to watch one's subject population dwindling
like this, year after year. What's a colony without its dusky natives?
Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big chunk of
desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction
or the mining -- wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that
sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows
up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas
Markets.... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the
outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down
and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his
slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood
with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go
in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the
hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and the cannabis
and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death,
as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe.
Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and
down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all
its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those
cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts.... No word ever gets
back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no
matter how dirty, how animal it gets...." (GR 317)

On 1/19/06, kelber at mindspring.com <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> The article says it wasn't a one-sided conflict.  50,000 Herero dead to 50 German dead?  Yeah, I'd call that one-sided.
>
> ----Original Message-----
> >From: Paul Taylor <neon.taylor at gmail.com>
> >Sent: Jan 19, 2006 4:36 PM
> >To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> >Subject: herero today
> >
> >http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4623516.stm
> >
> >--PT
> >
>
>