Memo to shithole countries: "The wind of a rich benefactor does not foul the air"
6 min readBy DAVID NDII – Memo to shithole countries
In May 2000, The Economist carried a cover story, The Hopeless Continent. It said: “No one can blame Africans for the weather, but most of the continent’s shortcomings owe less to acts of God than to acts of man. These acts are not exclusively African—brutality, despotism and corruption exist everywhere—but African societies, for reasons buried in their cultures, seem especially susceptible to them.”
His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family. Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.”
In 1994, Thabo Mbeki captured the spirit of South Africa’s liberation in a famous speech “I am an African”, which launched him as Africa’s post-cold war political visionary. In the following years the spirit evolved into the idea of an African Renaissance. To be sure, the idea of an African Renaissance was first espoused by Cheikh Anta Diop in the 1940s and 40s and are published in a collection of essays Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in Culture and Development, 1946-1960.
The Renaissance was an epoch of European cultural revival dating from the 14th to the 17th century. It is known mostly for artistic and architectural achievements. The iconic figures of the Renaissance include Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and William Shakespeare. The monumental dome of the Florence Cathedral is considered the first renaissance building, and St Peters Basilica its grandest. Virtually all of the Renaissance’s architectural masterpieces are cathedrals and palaces.
The Renaissance was followed by The Enlightenment, also referred to as the Age of Reason. It is dated from around mid-17th century and ending with the French Revolution (1789). Its iconic figures are philosophers and scientists who changed what Europeans thought about man, society and nature. Its emblematic project was a book, The Encyclopedia, subtitled “A reasoned dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts” credited to its founding editor French philosopher Denis Diderot. Its mission as stated by Diderot was to change the way people think, to inform themselves and to know things. The Enlightenment did exactly that.
In his wake came Voltaire, Hobbes, Locke, Rosseau and Montesquieu with revolutionary political ideas such as secular government, social contract, sovereignty of the people and separation of powers and three revolutions in their wake. Adam Smith bequeathed us the invisible hand and principle of value addition.
Johannes Kepler extricated the science of astronomy from the alchemy of astrology. Isaac Newton and Wilfred Liebniz independently invented calculus without which we could not do the math to land on the moon. When you flaunt your erudition by referring to human beings as homo sapiens and pot as cannabis you are, wittingly or otherwise, paying homage to Linneaus, the Swedish botanist who devised biological taxonomy.
The renaissance metaphor would have been meaningful if it were focused on cultural revival, for surely, cultural subjugation is at the core of Africa’s post colonial underachievement. We see nothing of the sort.
The fastest growing cultural phenomenon is commercial religion. The procurement led Chinese build vainglorious public works stand out for their lack of architectural merit and cultural significance. I would be surprised to hear that some of our crippling debt have strayed into a grand museum to rival Bilbao’s Guggenheim or performance centre to rival the Sydney Opera House. Our edifice obsessed political leaders are philistines.
We will also have to quit begging. If we want to ride bullet trains we ought to know how to build them, or be able to pay for them. In both instances, knowledge of calculus would be helpful.
As long as we live by the begging bowl, we shall be disrespected and insulted.
In the alternative, we just have to grin and bear it. In Gikuyu we say uthuri wa ndonga ndunungaga (the wind of rich benefactors does not foul the air).
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