The debacle between Luis Suarez and Patrice Evra is one which goes way past football and allows us to enter the vicissitudes of primitive human behaviour. Few cases could better illustrate the statement of French writer Albert Camus, recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, when he said « All I know most certainly about morality and obligations, I owe to football ». As the Uruguayan refused to admit he called Patrice Evra a negro before withdrawing his statement and arguing that such an expression is common in the Spanish language (making things even worse), Suarez decided he would end the polemic generated by his own self-righteous behaviour by proving even more reckless and amazingly refusing to shake Patrice Evra’s hand on Sunday, a gesture which may in hindsight be regarded as the lowest ever point in the historic rivalry between Manchester and Liverpool, or the day when the encounter between the two most decorated clubs in England was instrumentalized and became the theater of the most primitive demonstration of what French ethnologist Octave Mannoni once defined as « colonizer psychology ».
It should firstly be pointed out that Luis Suarez barely celebrated his 25th birthday weeks ago, so that his actions should in the end merely be regarded as those of a little kid. However little kids sometimes display innately the instinctive behaviour showed by their parents, actually they sometimes do it even better than adults themselves, as kids are restricted to see what their parents have to offer and aren’t yet swayed upon by other environmental factors such as peer pressure. This piece does not attempt to kick a man when he is down, as Suarez knows fully he fragilized his own position at Liverpool FC more than anyone else’s on Sunday. But it is useful to see through his behaviour, just what his parents taught him. Those who called Suarez a racist after he handled a near-goal for Ghana in the 2010 World Cup (the free-kick leading to Adiyiah’s header and Suarez’s handball having never been a foul in the first place) are about as wrong as those who do NOT call him, or at least his actions, racist in the Evra case these days.
In the end, understanding this paraplaxis (known as a physical Freudian slip) also explains the cheek behind the Uruguayan national football team nicknaming itself Charrúas after the indigenous tribe which once populated the region before the Spaniards came in and submitted them to slavery and ultimately extinction. How these very same Spaniards (or rather their distant offspring, but it should come clear by the end of this piece that it makes little difference) dared naming themselves after natives they genocided stems roughly from the same behaviour pattern as Luis Suarez deciding he should be the one assessing whether or not to shake Patrice Evra’s hand, rather than the opposite.
Octave Mannoni opposed in his 1950 book The Psychology of Colonization the Western European inferiority complex, named after Prospero in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, to a dependence complex of the Madagascar native tribes, named after Caliban (Prospero’s slave in that play). Written in a period (the 1950s) of increasingly positive feelings for Communism, seen as having freed Europe from Nazism in the Second World war, the book argues that the Marxist interpretation of colonialization whereby Western Europe invaded the rest of the world purely for the sake of profit and hoarding natural resources is way too simplistic. Indeed, it is Western Europe’s inferiority complex, with European types feeling the insatiable need to « supersede their father » (a Freudian lexicon familiar to Mannoni, initially a psychoanalyst) which explains why Europeans jumped on ships and sailed away, as far as they could, so that they could « kill their father » there and impose their superiority.
On the other hand, natives in these colonies (initially Madagascar, Mannoni’s case study, but later a widespread assessment of most colonies) do not feel the need to supersede their father because they live in peace with their parents, for it is conversely the memory of their dead ancestors that they cherish and which they try to reminisce and adjust their deeds to.
It is not therefore not to make a profit but to retreat forwards (what the Germans call « Flucht nach vorn » and the French « fuite en avant ») that Western Europeans seek domination abroad through colonization. Colonized tribes on the other hand have, according to Mannoni, a proclivity to become dependent simply because of the absence of this inferiority complex towards a Father figure, which makes them unlikely to seek superiority towards one’s fellow in the sequel. This argument got Mannoni under intense fire by some of his fellow anti-colonialization militants such as Aimé Césaire.
By reacting angrily to Suarez’s denial to shake his hand, Patrice Evra said no to this secular dependence of the Black man to the colonizer, a submission which led 12 millions Africans to be shipped out of their continent in the 18th century in the slave trade, hundreds of thousands of which from the infamous House of Slaves built 3 kilometers off the coast of Senegal’s capital Dakar, Evra’s native city. By grabbing Suarez’s hand, a gesture rightly criticized afterwards, he said he would not abide to the decision of the Uruguayan, and that it should rather be the other way round.
By denying to shake his hand, Suarez put himself above Patrice Evra in the moral conflict that had brought both men at odds. Despite reassuring his club before the game that he would proceed to shake hands, he did not resist his genetic predisposition to impose domination, brought about by a Prospero complex which led his ancestors to colonize Uruguay in 1516. Patrice Evra’s most gentlemanly reaction should have been not to acknowledge Suarez’s stupidity and move on, rather than catch his hand angrily. But the Manchester United captain could not possibly fall a victim to the same dependency complex that enslaved so many millions.
The reaction by Liverpool FC in the aftermath of the game also displayed typical traits of an inferiority complex. Repeatedly attempting to put themselves down as the victim, most in and out the club refused to condemn Suarez’s move in the immediate aftermath to the game. Without dwelling on the history of the city of Liverpool, it is well known that colonization is a familiar matter to any Irishman crossing the Irish Sea to settle in England in the wake of the Great Famine. And that the primitive reactions observed on these occasions are vastly influenced by the same Prospero complex as the one leading Suarez to act the way he did.
It finally took the intervention of Liverpool’s American owners, subscribing to an entirely different system of values than this inferiority/dependence complex, to at last bring an end to a masquerade that lasted a few seconds but whose consequences shall persist forever in the mind of both protagonists, their teams and the millions of fans who saw it live. The day when Liverpool tried to colonize Manchester United – and failed miserably.
Yeah, you can't go getting banned.