ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: Analyst’s article devoid of analytical thinking he accuses his critics of lacking
Foreign policy analyst and author Peter Fabricius recently wrote an acerbic defence of the US-Africa summit held in December. In the process he castigated Alvin Botes, Nontobeko Hlela and David Monyae for “unanalytical thinking” requiring “greater nuance”, and complained that “there remains a persistent strand of scepticism about anything the US does here”.
The phrase that most caught my attention however, was Fabricius’s observation that Islamic extremists being confronted by Western armies in Africa were “surely an enemy to all civilised people”. While reasonable people would condemn the wanton killing of civilians in the name of religion, Fabricius’s use of the loaded term “civilised people” in the context of a condescending critique of three black analysts echoes British imperial poet Rudyard Kipling’s notorious 1899 call on Western nations to “take up the white man’s burden”...
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