A New Coat of Paint on the Slaughterhouse

The postcolonial period, the golden age, the new dawn, the Kingdom of Heaven – these times are not yet upon us, alas. Revolutions, coups, constitutions, reforms, bills of rights, guarantees, contracts – each of these has, as a matter of undeniable historical fact, simply represented a change in the farm’s ownership; perhaps a new name for the farmer, perhaps a change in his skin colour or a minor shift in the gendered expectations he enforces upon his wife, his son or his daughter. 

At best, our political changes have offered a new and more attractive coat of paint on the slaughterhouse; and at worst, our newest managers have taken the opportunity of the revolutionary moment to devise and implement whole new techniques whereby slaughterhouses may be mass-produced and made more efficient, helpfully eliminating wasteful self-motivated activities such as love, friendship, compassion, generosity, pity, all seen as obsolescent remnants of the ancien regime, unnecessary after Year Zero, sentimental masks of the fundamental enemy of management everywhere, namely, inefficiency in the obeying of the farmer’s oft-repeated orders to maximize the burden on his beasts and, thereby, to maximize his profits.