ON November 17, 2015, Fareed Zakaria gave a live human face to a proposition made by a lady as we ate barbecued fish in a section of Abuja. She had blamed Israel’s narrative of bashing Palestinians as the root cause of the massacre that had hit Paris on a Friday of wrath. Her view had drawn vigorous rebuttals. Not long after, Zakaria put on CNN a Pakistani man who claimed that his Muslim identity had been enraged by television pictures of massacres of Muslims in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. He became an advocate of retributive violence but was, however, later disillusioned by contact in prison with inmates who horrified him with their vision of “radical Islamic’’ governance if ever they won political power. He turned to advocacy of dialogue between Muslims and Christian “crusaders’’.

His testimony recalled for me television cameras travelling up and down nooks in Sadam Hussein’s mouth bellow his shaggy hair. He had been pulled from a hole in the ground – a shelter betrayed to American soldiers hunting for him. President George Bush and his war cabinet must have celebrated this denigration of a once bragging enemy. It is, however, not clear if CNN and the White House had a clear and accurate geography of reactions they aroused in viewers around the globe. The phenomenon of “unintended consequences” may well have echoed in the staccatos of guns in Paris.

Relations between Europe and other parts of the globe in terms of conquest, colonisation, and unshared development out of colonial economic governance has a legacy whose tenacity informs attitudes and brainwaves of policy makers in Euro-America today. Comforts and accumulation of power, which came with the notion that “might is right” have, over the decades, inhibited a vigorous invention of a new order of thought and practice. Heroic challenges in the 20th Century by extraordinary individuals – ranging from Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Mihn, and Fidel Castro to Amilcar Cabral and Nelson Mandela – have been treated as temporary inconveniences in the larger flow of their power.

Technocrats in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been blamed for pre-occupation with crafting measures for containing and subverting merits in visions of these “revolutionaries.” It is not evident that these technocrats see rock boulders hidden bellow flows of their river of ‘’the more things change, the more they remain the same’’. It is not clear that they anticipated fears that gripped Europe and the United States when flows of immigrants from Syria and North Africa into Europe shook European leaders; guns of hate-filled wrath exploding in Paris.

Africa has been a victim of the intransigence of attitudes of colonial domination among Euro-American policy warriors. As winds of independence rose across the continent, officials drafted policies that built debt traps for draining incomes and resources out of Africa. Bankers carrying briefcases filled with dollar bills lured government officials into signing contracts to anchor such debts; recalling “explorers’’ exchanging bottles of liquor and mirrors for “treaties’’ signing away sovereign rights to land. Former President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki has — in a report for the African Union – denounced thefts by business corporations out of Africa of over 50 billion dollars annually.

The bombing of a Russian airline, killing 224 passengers and crew; the spraying of bullets into a theatre crowd, and the attempted infiltration of three suicide bombers into a football stadium in Paris, share a similarity with the 2001 use of aeroplanes to explode highly inflammable airline fuel into two sophisticated architectural structures in New York city. The similarity was in persons animated by reprisal against injustices, appropriating technological achievements of their enemies to engage in armed debates. The resultant “propaganda of the deed’’ creates a new vulnerability and insecurity. In Paris, the police also reported preventing a plot to attack a major business district and its high concentration of populations that use underground trains. Technological vulnerability is a weapon of the weak.
• Oculi is of Africa Vision 525 Initiative.