The Conditions of ‘Savages’? a specimen of the catastrophically empty humanity that she wished to repudiate. Her error corresponds to a refusal to engage racism critically.57 Indeed, it makes much more sense to argue that the greatest danger of camp inmates and stateless people was to be racialised as ‘savages’-in-quotation-marks, in a way that ought to be compared to the ways in which colonial subjects were racialised — and put in camps and massacred — as ‘savages’-in-quotation-marks. However, Arendt is unable to make this argument, because she uses ‘the conditions of savages’ as a paradigmatic example of rightlessness. 58 The ‘tragedy of savage tribes’ that Arendt mentions in the final sentence of the passage cited above is that they ‘inhabit an unchanged nature which they cannot master’, 59 in other words, that they live in a state of nature, outside the common world of politics established by laws. The tragedy of camp inmates and stateless people, Arendt suggests, is that ‘these rightless people are indeed thrown back into a peculiar state of nature’. 60 Thus, according to Arendt, ‘savage tribes’ and camp inmates and stateless people both live in a state of nature, outside politics, outside a ‘world’ where law guarantees that their words carry meaning and their actions have consequences. But the difference, Arendt suggests, is that ‘savage tribes’ live in a state of nature that is somehow natural, the state of an ‘unchanged nature’,61 whereas camp inmates and stateless people are ‘thrown back’ into a state of nature that is ‘peculiar’ because it has been artificially produced. 62 Let us return, one more time, to ch 7, where Arendt describes the European encounter with ‘native tribes on the Dark Continent’. 63 In this passage, she describes these tribes as ‘prehistoric’, 64 following a tradition of referring to Africa as outside history familiar from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History: 65 The word ‘race’ has a precise meaning only when and where peoples are confronted with such tribes of which they have no historical record and which do not know any history of their own. … What made [such tribes] different from other human beings was not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality — compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike. They were, as it were, ‘natural’ human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder. 66 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 Paul Gilroy, Race and the Right to be Human (Inaugural lecture, accepting the Treaty of Utrecht Chair, Utrecht University, 3 December 2009). Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 302. ibid 300. ibid. ibid. ibid. ibid 192. ibid. Norton quotes Hegel’s infamous claim that Africa is ‘no historical part of the World… What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature’ and comments, ‘This is Arendt’s Africa’. Norton (n 4) 252, quoting Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, tr J Sibree (Dover 1956) 99. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 192 (emphasis added). 205