Africa burns, but where are our intellectuals?

MANY OF our best minds from this continent attest to how they speak for their countries, or for Africa. One of the general assumptions among a host of them is that “colonialism is the cause of all the African problems, including its political woes.” I was reminded of this in a philosophical essay (see, “Is Africa merely an effect?” http://rguild.org/2013/08/2116#axzz30MQLnUAr) I came across a while ago that left me in one of those moods that question the moral basis of our outrage as Africans when we look at the mess around us. We all know what ails us – the rampant poverty, the political mismanagement and the seemingly never ending cycles of conflict across the continent. The essay was indicting: Some of our best African scholars and intellectuals, it observes chidingly, assume that they have escaped the influences of the colonial causal factors that have unavoidably determined the rest of Africa. That is, if the cause of what ails us currently – fifty or so years after our continental independence – is remotely colonial. That the blame may not necessarily lie in the colonial era, was, perhaps, best expressed by Field Ruwe, the Zambian journalist, in a brutally honest and self deprecating portrait of the African intellectual (see, “You Lazy Intellectual African Scum!” http://www.africanspotlight.com/2012/02/06/you-lazy-intellectual-african-scum-by-field-ruwe/). Ruwe lengthily narrates how, while on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston in the U.S., he met Walter, a white American formally working with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Walter smugly discusses why white people feel superior, and why it should be that most of Africa should be so depressingly mired in poverty. “Please don’t blame [Africa’s problems and its poverty] on colonialism, or some psychological impact or some kind of stigmatization,” Walter berates a wordless Ruwe, who was then a PhD candidate. “And don’t give me the brainwash poppycock.” When you rest your head on the pillow, Walter continues, you don’t dream big. “You and other so-called African intellectuals are damn lazy, each one of you. It is you, and not those poor starving people, who is the reason Africa is in such a deplorable state.” Wondering how African engineers can be “so imperceptive they cannot invent a simple stone crusher, or a simple water filter to purify well water for those poor villagers,” while the Asians – India, China, Japan – have excelled in copying wholesale the white man’s ideas and technology and replicating them, Walter proclaims how the “poor and uneducated Africans are the most hardworking people on earth.” The sobering point was scathing, if contemptuously made. Where are the African intellectuals? As the above mentioned essay (Is Africa Merely an Effect?) contends, our intellectuals cannot assume that they can transcend their own analysis. In one of the criticisms, the scholars are lumped together with many of Africa’s political leaders, who are only looking for excuses for their incompetence – when they blame history as a way to cover-up for their own inability to deliver the promises they made to the people during their various struggle for independence or during their electoral campaigns. As the essay suggests, referring to Africa as a third world is merely a euphemism to conjure the belief that Africa is only next in ranking to the first two developed classes of nations or to hide the fact that it is lagging far behind other nations. But it need not be so. I will paraphrase Ruwe when he observes that, “a fundamental transformation of [Africa] from what is essentially non-innovative to a strategic superior [continent] requires a bold risk-taking educated leader with a triumphalist attitude and we have one in YOU.” His was one of those rare, if brutally honest and self deprecating portrait of the African intellectual. But it should spur our leaders and intellectuals to look more closely at themselves in the mirror. The writer is commentator on local and regional issues Twitter: @gituram