Ranjona Banerji | Why I’d Rather Live In The Global South

I belong apparently to the “Global South”. I am not certain at all what this means. To me, it sounds extremely racist. Because by implication, somewhere up there in the north are the important and powerful people. In geographical terms, the southern hemisphere is below the equator. And in general terms, bar the two poles, somewhere is always north and south of somewhere else. Then when you consider that the planet is geoid-shaped with a tilted access, spinning around in the control of the Sun, anything could be anywhere.

But we are the brown and black people, hence South. It is never clear to me where the Chinese stand on this, because they are quite far north. Nor the Russians and Slavs, because western Europeans and north Americans can be quite racist about them too. No one fits into their supreme category except they themselves. I believe the Japanese are sometimes in one category, sometimes in another, depending on global trade winds.

The notion that the north is superior to the south is in itself amusing. In some nations, like the UK for instance, the people of the south look down on people from the north. The south is where the money is; the north is full of hicks and factory workers and Scotland. In George RR Martin’s fantasy classic, Game of Thrones, the north was place to be feared because who knows what fearsome things lurked in the snow and ice and freezing cold. JRR Tolkien’s father of all fantasy classic, The Lord of the Rings, also pitted the good East and North against the wicked South and West. Although the kingdom of great kings was next to the wicked wizard. But the evil southerners wore kajal in their eyes and rode on oliphants. So, hmmm.

Before you start the lectures, I get it. Someone decided that categorising nations according to their developmental status was somehow unfair, so this north-south analogy was arrived at. It is self-admittedly not dependent on geography but rather on some whimsical notion that a less-developed nation will be fooled into thinking some superior being cares by a change in nomenclature. In this case, to me, it sounds like reality replaced by patriarchal racism. Where the Global North is largely comprised of white colonialists, settlers and exploiters and the Global South represents their victims.

We in this illogically named area know why we are underdeveloped compared to the white nations. Nor are we fooled by the pretence that this is not white versus the rest. Israel, Australia and New Zealand, for instance, maybe geographically south but they are north in this categorisation. Oooo! Quelle surprise!

Bishop Desmond Tutu’s words should echo with us forever: “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray’. We closed our eyes. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”

See, we know. We all know. In this ancient and mighty land in which I live, we have had several visitations and invaders. But none as greedy or as cruel as those from today’s Global “North”.

Now before you get even more upset, yes, who are we to talk with our caste system and inbuilt societal exploitation methods. They are despicable and unacceptable and have to be countered and stopped at every turn. We know that. Caste discrimination is illegal but insidious remnants still plague us. But there is no justification for further exploitation and division, and of course plundering and looting by external forces. Whether they came from the actual north and south or some imaginary north and south.

If you stick to India alone, you will see an upswing of anger in the Indian south about the Indian north. In our specific case, the Indian north is backward and regressive, economically and socially. The north is a burden carried by the whole nation, but mainly by the better administered and more progressive south. The result is a sly political move to contain the south’s growth and influence by redrawing electoral boundaries. Curiously enough, the fact of fairer skin in the north of India adds to this ridiculous belief in superiority over the darker-skinned south. The colour equation is also found in casteist notions of superiority.

In the larger world, the impunity with which Israel is allowed to occupy Palestine and obliterate Palestinians by the Global North is the most recent demonstration of what is essentially white supremacism. You see it in the United States of America right now. Make America Great Again in essence means: Make America European White Again. The Native Americans or First Nations or whatever hypocritical salve you apply to your conscience with words have been segregated and restricted and denied. Other residents who are not white are beaten up, thrown out, put into foreign jails… It is happening now as I write this.

The great American writer James Baldwin said in an interview in 1969: “If any white man in the world says give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing — word for word — he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be any more like him”.

Baldwin’s truth applies to any person the Global North calls a terrorist: It is a person from the Global South. A Global Northern terrorist is a sad, lonely, unloved child with mental health issues. There you have it, in black and white.

In which case, I would rather be south than north. Even if I live on the other side of the equator. After all, what’s an imaginary line on a tilted planet bound to a G2 type main sequence star? Especially when some white person can draw a line he chooses on the assumption that some other word he once chose to describe me and my kind will now upset my teeny little brown sentiments?