The forest peoples wanted to be the guardians of our traditions. They believed that we city dwellers had distorted our customs through our contact with the West. My father came from the forest. Like hundreds of thousands of young villagers, he had come to Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, in search of a better life. He had met my mother in Fanta Citron, in Mvog-Ada, the shanty town of Yaoundé where the new arrivals had crowded. I only knew the city version of him. He used to tell to my siblings and to me that to know him, we had to spend time in his village, which was located hundreds of kilometers from Yaoundé, in the East of the country.
My father no longer had his father, who had died a few years after he was born. He and his three siblings had been robbed of all the land belonging to them by their paternal uncles, who felt that they had no responsibility to answer to their brother’s children. This meant that my father and his siblings had to ask permission to farm, or in which corner of the forest to go hunting. They had become beggars on their own land. But they were determined to recover what was rightfully theirs. At least, that was what I understood during my first two visits to the village. They consulted the village chief, the elders of the village and their maternal uncles.
That summer, the village elders and the council of notables were summoned by the village chief to meet in our courtyard. A large fire had been lit in the center of the courtyard. They all sat around it. (Women were excluded from such discussions, according to tradition.) One of the village sorcerers had been invited to summon the spirits of the ancestors. The purpose of the meeting was to give back to my father and to his siblings what was theirs. The sorcerer performed his ritual. He danced around the fire, jumping up and down and pretending to walk on the embers. He was in a trance.
“They are here. They are with us," he declared in an icy voice. "They are listening to us.” The chief stood up, called my father and his older brother. As their customs required, neither my grandmother nor my two aunts had been admitted to the council.
My little brother and I watched from afar. We had hidden behind a bush between the cocoa plantation and the fire. It was a dark night. My father and his brother looked delighted. Their uncles, however, wore long faces. The village chief and the elders moved from my father to his brother, dusting powders on them and sweeping their feet with palm leaves that the sorcerer passed over the fire. From what we understood, this was the ritual that empowered my father, my uncle and my aunts to be put on an equal footing with their father’s brothers. As the tradition called for, everything that had belonged to their father was transferred to them.
“They are happy," said the sorcerer who played the interpreter between our ancestors and the survivors of the paternal family. "They say that peace will now reign in the family and the village. They say that their duty is now fulfilled. They say that they want to rest now.” He then broke a bottle filled with palm wine, a traditional alcoholic beverage extracted from the sap of palm trees. He said he was serving the ancestors. He took another bottle of palm wine and poured it into each of the men’s glasses. They raised their glasses and drank. The ritual was completed. The damage was finally repaired, said the village chief. They embraced. My father and his siblings had done everything to finally recover their rights like many people in the village. After years of hesitation, the chief and his council had finally given in and forced the hand of the rest of the village.
In the months that followed the ritual, my father and his brother visited the village regularly. The few times I went to see my father, I realized that relations had deteriorated between the brothers and their uncles. Their uncles had officially declared that the ritual giving their nephews their rights, the same rights as them, had been revoked. They felt that the ritual had been against them and had violated their rights. They felt that the ritual was a declaration of war against them. Therefore, it was war. My father and his brother were stunned. They were helpless. Their determination to seek reparations had turned against them.
“What do we do now?” my father asked his brother as the planting season approached. They found themselves again without a plot of land to farm.
My father and his brother were convinced that they had done what was necessary to not be beggars anymore. They were convinced that they had been fair in claiming their rights and in being accepted at the same table as their uncles. For them, their uncles were the problem because they would not acknowledge their rights. But the two brothers failed to ask themselves how easy it would have been for their uncles to give up the things they had believed to own for decades. Their uncles did not see themselves as usurpers. Their sense of injustice was real and deep. My father and his brother had ignored it. They believed they were doing the right thing by involving the village elders. Perhaps they should have spoken with their uncles first, to see if it was possible to negotiate directly, to find a solution together, to come up with a plan, and to make their uncles believe that they were all on the same side. They had succeeded in doing the opposite. Their uncles saw themselves as targeted and ostracized. They believed that the brothers considered them to be their enemies.
Decades later, it is my father and his brother’s bewilderment at their uncles’ revolt that comes to mind when I analyze what went wrong with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, the progressive ideology and its programs which aimed to provide a kind of network to those who traditionally don’t have one. I think this is how it should have been presented. Nepotism, connections, golf bros, cigar bros, tech bros and other private, professional and exclusive clubs are most often made up of cis straight white men who co-opt each other. The worst part is that we take it for granted. It is normal. We do not object when kids of wealthy families or rich alumni receive preferential treatment when they apply to Ivy League schools. Or when people are able to find jobs based on the people they know. It is a reproduction of White elites among themselves. And it is generally accepted without question.
DEI aimed to give minorities, women and white people from working-class backgrounds a tool to overcome their economic and social disadvantage.
But like my father and his siblings, DEI advocates have managed to unite their opponents against them to the point that the acronym has become the most reviled word ever.
For many, DEI and its programs have introduced racism and discrimination against white men. They call it “the woke mind virus” and consider it a threat to the Western civilization.
“DEI must DIE,” Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, said on X on December 15, 2023. “The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination.”
This was two months after he said “DEI is racist & sexist.”
Musk, who spent $250 million of his own money to help the campaign of now President-elect Donald Trump against Vice President Kamala Harris, promised to end DEI. He called for a “Resistance”.
It is almost certain that DEI is all but dead.
Here is how DEI went wrong.
One of the biggest mistakes of DEI advocates is that they have allowed the idea to take root that their fight was that of the oppressed against the oppressors of yesterday. In doing so, DEI became for many a kind of revenge of the oppressed on their oppressors. Others read in it the revenge of the colonized against the colonists, which meant putting the past on trial and reopening some of the dark pages of the history of the West. Seen from this angle, it amounted to putting white people on trial to correct the mistakes of the past.
DEI has thus put many of its current opponents on the defensive. Even among liberals, many have felt that they are expected to apologize for mistakes they did not personally commit.
DEI and the #MeToo movement are the faces of progressivism in the culture war. They are grouped under the umbrella of woke. They punish those who do not act according to the new norms. It is what has come to be known as the “cancel culture”. Anyone who does not fit into what is considered acceptable, according to DEI advocates, is canceled. Anyone who speaks or behaves outside the new norms is thrown to the dogs of political correctness and destroyed. There is no purgatory like in the Catholic religion, which sits between heaven and hell. There is only heaven and hell. This black and white view of the world has led to the cancellation and the destruction of many people. And the worst thing is that there is no rehabilitation.
DEI has erected new rules for living together. Whoever dares to break them is immediately canceled. It is a form of intellectual intolerance.
One of the most symptomatic aspects of this morality police is the question of transgender people. DEI advocates have never tolerated any divergence of views on this point. For example, they have called bigots and canceled those who believe that only cis women should be allowed to practice in women’s sports or use women’s restrooms. They cancel those who believe that trans women are not women.
Even in art, there has been a strong desire to impose diversity everywhere, to the point of trying to bastardize classic works. For example, a Black James Bond is not in the spirit of Ian Fleming’s work, my son recently told me. He told me that a Black 007 would make the legendary series lose its authenticity.
Our society is changing very fast. But one cannot force change. People deserve the right to be educated, to be given the time they need to accept new norms. DEI advocates believe that change should be embraced without people asking questions or trying to reconcile the changes with what they have been accustomed to for generations. DEI advocates want to plow ahead. They don’t like resistance. Resistance makes one a bigot.
Creating a society of people who fear their own shadow
DEI advocates have helped kill spontaneity in almost every aspect of social life. People are afraid of saying the wrong thing. They are afraid of how any phrase or action will be interpreted. They are afraid of expressing their true thoughts. They are afraid of speaking their mind. You get angry in a work setting and you are reported to HR. You are encouraged to only say positive things to your colleagues, your friends, your kids, if you want to avoid the risk of being called toxic. This intolerance makes people not know how to behave. They second-guess themselves and those around them, because a misinterpreted gesture or a wrong word could be a reason to be canceled.
In the end, DEI advocates wanted to force their way through. Any revolution — and DEI is a cultural revolution — needs to be embraced. People need the time to consider the change and accept it. They need to make it their own. They must be on board.
A revolution needs to win people’s hearts. DEI acted like it didn’t need to do that. Its advocates acted like my father and his brother decades ago. They forced their way through, feeding divisions and forcing people to take sides.
If liberals want to win the next culture war, they have to start by winning hearts. You can’t win a cultural revolution by fighting against the people you are trying to change.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Luc Olinga's work on Medium.