I got this from a WordPress blog titled: Mind Of Malaka: www.mindofmalaka.com and I thought it would be nice to share with you all. It's interesting to know that I first saw this article in one of my entrepreneurship course modules while I was reading for exam. I was amazed when I saw the writer of the module citing the above named blog as the reference for the article, and the curious me wanting to see more from the writer went there and got this for your reading pleasure. And I wanted changing all references to Zimbabwe to refer to Nigeria instead, to send a message particularly to my fellow Nigerians but I am too lazy for that now plus I have to go study for my exam. Well, that does it, enjoy!
YOU LAZY (INTELLECTUAL) AFRICAN SCUM!
They call
the Third World the lazy man’s purview; the sluggishly slothful and languorous
prefecture. In this realm people are sleepy, dreamy, torpid, lethargic, and
therefore indigent—totally penniless, needy, destitute, poverty-stricken,
disfavored, and impoverished. In this demesne, as they call it, there are
hardly any discoveries, inventions, and innovations. Africa is the trailblazer.
Some still call it “the dark continent” for the light that flickers under the
tunnel is not that of hope, but an approaching train. And because countless
keep waiting in the way of the train, millions die and many more remain
decapitated by the day.
“It’s amazing how you all sit
there and watch yourselves die,” the man next to me said. “Get up and do
something about it.”
Brawny, fully bald-headed, with
intense, steely eyes, he was as cold as they come. When I first discovered I
was going to spend my New Year’s Eve next to him on a non-stop JetBlue flight
from Los Angeles to Boston I was angst-ridden. I associate marble-shaven
Caucasians with iconoclastic skin-heads, most of who are racist.
“My name is Walter,” he extended
his hand as soon as I settled in my seat.
I told him mine with a precautious
smile.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Zambia.”
“Zambia!” he exclaimed, “Kaunda’s
country.”
“Yes,” I said, “Now Sata’s.”
“But of course,” he responded.
“You just elected King Cobra as your president.”
My face lit up at the mention of
Sata’s moniker. Walter smiled, and in those cold eyes I saw an amenable fellow,
one of those American highbrows who shuttle between Africa and the U.S.
“I spent three years in Zambia in
the 1980s,” he continued. “I wined and dined with Luke Mwananshiku, Willa
Mungomba, Dr. Siteke Mwale, and many other highly intelligent Zambians.” He
lowered his voice. “I was part of the IMF group that came to rip you guys off.”
He smirked. “Your government put me in a million dollar mansion overlooking a
shanty called Kalingalinga. From my patio I saw it all—the rich and the poor,
the ailing, the dead, and the healthy.”
“Are you still with the IMF?” I
asked.
“I have since moved to yet another
group with similar intentions. In the next few months my colleagues and I will
be in Lusaka to hypnotize the cobra. I work for the broker that has acquired a
chunk of your debt. Your government owes not the World Bank, but us millions of
dollars. We’ll be in Lusaka to offer your president a couple of millions and
fly back with a check twenty times greater.”
“No, you won’t,” I said. “King
Cobra is incorruptible. He is …”
He was laughing. “Says who? Give
me an African president, just one, who has not fallen for the carrot and
stick.”
Quett Masire’s name popped up.
“Oh, him, well, we never got to
him because he turned down the IMF and the World Bank. It was perhaps the
smartest thing for him to do.”
At midnight we were airborne. The
captain wished us a happy 2012 and urged us to watch the fireworks across Los
Angeles.
“Isn’t that beautiful,” Walter
said looking down.
From my middle seat, I took a
glance and nodded admirably.
“That’s white man’s country,” he
said. “We came here on Mayflower and turned Indian land into a paradise and now
the most powerful nation on earth. We discovered the bulb, and built this
aircraft to fly us to pleasure resorts like Lake Zambia.”
I grinned. “There is no Lake
Zambia.”
He curled his lips into a smug
smile. “That’s what we call your country. You guys are as stagnant as the water
in the lake. We come in with our large boats and fish your minerals and your
wildlife and leave morsels—crumbs. That’s your staple food, crumbs. That
corn-meal you eat, that’s crumbs, the small Tilapia fish you call Kapenta is
crumbs. We the Bwanas (whites) take the cat fish. I am the Bwana and you are
the Muntu. I get what I want and you get what you deserve, crumbs. That’s what
lazy people get—Zambians, Africans, the entire Third World.”
The smile vanished from my face.
“I see you are getting pissed
off,” Walter said and lowered his voice. “You are thinking this Bwana is a
racist. That’s how most Zambians respond when I tell them the truth. They go
ballistic. Okay. Let’s for a moment put our skin pigmentations, this black and
white crap, aside. Tell me, my friend, what is the difference between you and
me?”
“There’s no difference.”
“Absolutely none,” he exclaimed.
“Scientists in the Human Genome Project have proved that. It took them thirteen
years to determine the complete sequence of the three billion DNA subunits.
After they
were all done it was clear that
99.9% nucleotide bases were exactly the same in you and me. We are the same
people. All white, Asian, Latino, and black people on this aircraft are the
same.”
I gladly nodded.
“And yet I feel superior,” he
smiled fatalistically. “Every white person on this plane feels superior to a
black person. The white guy who picks up garbage, the homeless white trash on
drugs, feels superior to you no matter his status or education. I can pick up a
nincompoop from the New York streets, clean him up, and take him to Lusaka and
you all be crowding around him chanting muzungu, muzungu and yet he’s a
riffraff. Tell me why my angry friend.”
For a moment I was wordless.
“Please don’t blame it on slavery
like the African Americans do, or colonialism, or some psychological impact or
some kind of stigmatization. And don’t give me the brainwash poppycock. Give me
a better answer.”
I was thinking.
He continued. “Excuse what I am
about to say. Please do not take offense.”
I felt a slap of blood rush to my
head and prepared for the worst.
“You my friend flying with me and
all your kind are lazy,” he said. “When you rest your head on the pillow 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.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,”
I protested.
He was implacable. “Oh yes it is
and I will say it again, you are lazy. Poor and uneducated Africans are the
most hardworking people on earth. I saw them in the Lusaka markets and on the
street selling merchandise. I saw them in villages toiling away. I saw women on
Kafue Road crushing stones for sell and I wept. I said to myself where are the
Zambian intellectuals? Are the Zambian engineers so imperceptive they cannot
invent a simple stone crusher, or a simple water filter to purify well water
for those poor villagers? Are you telling me that after thirty-seven years of
independence your university school of engineering has not produced a scientist
or an engineer who can make simple small machines for mass use? What is the
school there for?”
I held my breath.
“Do you know where I found your
intellectuals? They were in bars quaffing. They were at the Lusaka Golf Club,
Lusaka Central Club, Lusaka Playhouse, and Lusaka Flying Club. I saw with my
own eyes a bunch of alcoholic graduates. Zambian intellectuals work from eight
to five and spend the evening drinking. We don’t. We reserve the evening for
brainstorming.”
He looked me in the eye.
“And you flying to Boston and all
of you Zambians in the Diaspora are just as lazy and apathetic to your country.
You don’t care about your country and yet your very own parents, brothers and
sisters are in Mtendere, Chawama, and in villages, all of them living in
squalor. Many have died or are dying of neglect by you. They are dying of AIDS
because you cannot come up with your own cure. You are here calling yourselves
graduates, researchers and scientists and are fast at articulating your credentials
once asked—oh, I have a PhD in this and that—PhD my foot!”
I was deflated.
“Wake up you all!” he exclaimed,
attracting the attention of nearby passengers. “You should be busy lifting
ideas, formulae, recipes, and diagrams from American manufacturing factories
and sending them to your own factories. All those research findings and
dissertation papers you compile should be your country’s treasure. Why do you
think the Asians are a force to reckon with? They stole our ideas and turned
them into their own. Look at Japan, China, India, just look at them.”
He paused. “The Bwana has spoken,”
he said and grinned. “As long as you are dependent on my plane, I shall feel
superior and you my friend shall remain inferior, how about that? The Chinese,
Japanese, Indians, even Latinos are a notch better. You Africans are at the
bottom of the totem pole.”
He tempered his voice. “Get over
this white skin syndrome and begin to feel confident. Become innovative and
make your own stuff for god’s sake.”
At 8 a.m. the plane touched down
at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Walter reached for my hand.
“I know I was too strong, but I
don’t give it a damn. I have been to Zambia and have seen too much poverty.” He
pulled out a piece of paper and scribbled something. “Here, read this. It was
written by a friend.”
He had written only the title:
“Lords of Poverty.”
Thunderstruck, I had a sinking
feeling. I watched Walter walk through the airport doors to a waiting car. He
had left a huge dust devil twirling in my mind, stirring up sad memories of
home. I could see Zambia’s literati—the cognoscente, intelligentsia, academics,
highbrows, and scholars in the places he had mentioned guzzling and talking
irrelevancies. I remembered some who have since passed—how they got the highest
grades in mathematics and the sciences and attained the highest education on
the planet. They had been to Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), only to leave us with not a single invention or discovery. I
knew some by name and drunk with them at the Lusaka Playhouse and Central
Sports.
Walter is right. It is true that
since independence we have failed to nurture creativity and collective
orientations. We as a nation lack a workhorse mentality and behave like 13
million civil servants dependent on a government pay cheque. We believe that
development is generated 8-to-5 behind a desk wearing a tie with our degrees
hanging on the wall. Such a working environment does not offer the opportunity
for fellowship, the excitement of competition, and the spectacle of innovative
rituals.
But the intelligentsia is not
solely, or even mainly, to blame. The larger failure is due to political
circumstances over which they have had little control. The past governments
failed to create an environment of possibility that fosters camaraderie,
rewards innovative ideas and encourages resilience. KK, Chiluba, Mwanawasa, and
Banda embraced orthodox ideas and therefore failed to offer many opportunities
for drawing outside the line.
I believe King Cobra’s reset has
been cast in the same faculties as those of his predecessors. If today I told
him that we can build our own car, he would throw me out.
“Naupena? Fuma apa.” (Are you mad?
Get out of here)
Knowing well that King Cobra will
not embody innovation at Walter’s level let’s begin to look for a
technologically active-positive leader who can succeed him after a term or two.
That way we can make our own stone crushers, water filters, water pumps, razor
blades, and harvesters. Let’s dream big and make tractors, cars, and planes,
or, like Walter said, forever remain inferior.
A fundamental transformation of
our country from what is essentially non-innovative to a strategic superior
African country requires a bold risk-taking educated leader with a triumphalist
attitude and we have one in YOU. Don’t be highly strung and feel insulted by
Walter. Take a moment and think about our country. Our journey from 1964 has
been marked by tears. It has been an emotionally overwhelming experience. Each
one of us has lost a loved one to poverty, hunger, and disease. The number of
graves is catching up with the population. It’s time to change our political
culture. It’s time for Zambian intellectuals to cultivate an active-positive
progressive movement that will change our lives forever. Don’t be afraid or
dispirited, rise to the challenge and salvage the remaining few of your beloved
ones.
WRITTEN BY FIELD RUWE
Field Ruwe is a US-based
Zambian media practitioner and author. He is a PhD candidate with a B.A. in
Mass Communication and Journalism, and an M.A. in History.
Working had is just a part of me, I don't know how or when I came to be a hard worker, but I just came to be out of the blue sky. Throughout my almost-two-months break, I was working for more than 12hours a day. sometimes I even work overnight just to meet up with my target goal; which is saving as enough as possible to buy another laptop before resumption. Business turned out brighter than I expected it to, eventhough I spent alot of the money (not on myself most of the times, but on people I care about and it was worth it) I still have a reasonable amount saved. And am proud of myself on this one, it takes courage to be hard working.
Thats pretty it for now, its late, I just finished watching "Ted", a movie by Seth Macfarlane; a man I admire alot. And I think am gonna sleep now, or if my sleepy girlfriend decides to wake up and reply me, I might end up sleepy around 3am. And oh, i also watched that kinda movie where the cast are all naked and doing something that people call nasty while making some silly sound that turns me on. But don't tell my girlfriend she's gonna kill me, AM SERIOUS!
