THIS intriguingly entitled pamphlet by Richard Pithouse is part of the Thinking Freedom series produced by New Frame, a South African-based social justice media project committed to “accurate, careful and credible news.”

As a literary form, the pamphlet has a long and important history, serving the purpose of informing the public directly of current issues and often attacking Establishment ideologies in ways delivered today through social media and Pithouse charts the historical inter-relationship of Christianity, colonialism, capitalism and racism through the ongoing establishment of European hegemony over the world.

He uses the stepping stones of key moments deriving from the very same month in 1492 when Columbus set off on the great New World treasure hunt — with Papal carte blanche — the Jews were driven out of Spain and the emergence of a European ideological project was established.

As it developed, so racism as we know it came into being. The first use of the term, derived from the Italian “razza” denoting breeds of dog, occurred in the 15th century.

Significantly, it was contemporaneous with the early stages of colonialism and its history of blood, cruelty and greed.  

Slavery, of course, existed, in ancient times but its peculiar association with the skin colour of human beings belongs to the profit-driven exploitation of 12 million Africans shipped to the Americas, sanctioned by the exploiters’ religious code.

Pithouse does not allow the 18th-century radical enlightenment and liberal thinkers off the hook.

He exposes “the underside of modernity,” so that even when revolution came to America and France most people “were expelled from the count of the human … and the rights of man.”

The final section, A Counter Humanism, seeks to find a potential answer to the dominant social structure.

But Pithouse recognises that we are living through a revanchist period which, despite the narrow political defeat of the “grotesque” Donald Trump, has other powers determined to “secure the racial order that emerged from the events of 1492.”

It is a truism that unless we understand our history we can not understand our present and will certainly not be able to change our future and Pithouse succinctly provides a useful pathway through a problematic landscape.

Published by Daraja Press, £8.