The Basics

Stephen's problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but creating the uncreated features of his own face. Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscience of the race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record... We create the race by creating ourselves, and then, to our great astonishment, we will have created something far more important: we will have created a culture.

-Ralph Ellison-

I know deep down in my heart that you, like me, secretly, or unconsciously long for the glorious rebirth of Africa. If you disagree with me, then do not touch that remote when you see images of a continent in perpetual tragedy and misery. Do not feel a part of it, then. Feel detached (if you have successfully detached yourself from your people's fates and are happy with your new found direction), but if you do change the channel, then recognize what you feel in that instant, what you subconsciously hope for in the moment of disbelief and ultimately, revulsion.

You feel connected.

You have so long dreamed of the glorious rebirth of your roots, and been disappointed so long that you have built fantasies of reality as it is. Right there in front of you on the glass screen you see your dream shatter, you watch as the person that you think you are dissolves into a glob, either by the sight of a cruel man showing no mercy in Rwanda, Congo or Liberia, of sudden, cold-blooded murders of members of one ethnic group by another in Nigeria, or figures in abject poverty and ignorance seeming to exist in another dimension, looking unreal.

You wish for a different picture, you wish for the sight of a better Africa and begin to wonder whether you, and those who think and look like you; sharp, clean, healthy and radiant, are a different breed from those ubiquitous images on the glass screen. You wonder whether it is possible to change the images, and though you search and find explanations that justify your present image of yourself, including the criticism of the western media for not showing images of more prosperous African areas and lives, deep down you still believe, against all the odds out there, that it can be done.

And it is true. Africa can be changed.

Consider the points below:

We are all so used to the healthy way people in the west look that we immediately recognize the bad look of a blond when we see it. We know the blond is having a hard time by the way he looks. Films of white people living in dirt and misery, torn clothes and blackened, shaggy faces are recognized as such when they are seen. Though this hardly exists in reality, Hollywood gives us an idea of how white people can look when the going is bad. When we see reports of Africans on the other hand, we are usually inclined to take the appearance for granted, forgetting that those people on the screen make it through the month on as many calories as a westerner would in a few days.

Look closely at the skin of the darkest black child on a healthy diet, and keep this appearance in mind until you see the appearance of a child in Liberia carrying a gun, and you will know what I mean.

Despite experiments in better education systems having born positive results (search for Pathé Diagne on my site, or click here to read the article), Africa still sticks to the model that doesn't work, and has as a result the largest percentage of uneducated adults of any single population in the entire world.

If we kept these, and more facts in mind, and were aware of the effect on a mentality, and even appearance that this could have, then we would not be surprised at the difference in performance, behaviour, and appearance between prosperous lands (those three thousand calories per day eating, and feathered pillow diving ones, with a vacuum cleaner to eradicate the dust in their living environment), and the others who we are so used to seeing on our television screens.

The more obtuse among us could even be given the luxury of blaming Africans for their lacks: there are ways to make a thatched hut's environment healthy, so why do they not? There are meals that are cheap and affordable even by Africans on a dollar a day salary, and can give as much calories as are needed a day, so why don't they know of these foods?

This image, and these modes of thought can be changed. These people need good leadership, and ultimately, pure manipulation. Every prosperous land is doing this.

Read through this letter and I hope it gives you another idea of how this can be done. Keep in mind that this is just a proposition; a starting point if you will, a departure from all the talk and no action that litters our past and present, and though this is also just the same - all talk and no action - it is by its very nature a novel way of looking at the African predicament.

I hope you will be secure after you have read this letter that action can be undertaken in this way and the results will be positive. I hope you will see that if we, as a group, take this, and many more proposed routes, we will not be disappointed.

The introduction to this proposition is taken from John Stewart Mill's morality of war:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.
The decayed and degraded state of moral and
patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth
war is much worse. A man who has nothing for
which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares
about more than his own personal safety, is a
miserable creature, who has no chance of being
free, unless made and kept so by the exertions
of better men than himself.

A very western way of seeing things indeed which will leave in some of my readers a question much like the one I once read on a discussion forum on the Internet, posed by a Chinese participant of the debate, to a westerner who thought in much the same way as John Stewart Mill: "Why do you feel the need to rule over the lives of others" he asked?

It remains a fact that this is the way that a large proportion of the world's population thinks, and will not hesitate to act on their thoughts. With this knowledge in mind, it is better to do as the Romans do and survive, than to spend the rest of your life attempting to launch a pacifistic movement and hope to be successful.

Surviving in this world requires that one think big. There are big thinkers and their projects are big money makers, and, unfortunately, policy setters. They run the world of economics, technology and innovation simply because they have few rivals who equal their size and efficiency. They beat the rest of the world by sheer size and intensity of idea. Originality is not a precondition here. They wage war on you and me not by intent, but by design. One man wanting more, another getting less.

A typical example I can give here is the current issue of AIDS drugs. Imagine a continent of human beings who are still begging for things they can easily make themselves.

It has long since been time for Africans to rise to this challenge, to equal our western counterparts in productivity and creativity. To not only have small time entrepreneurs making nothing, but buying all the time from abroad and turning our continent into a dumping ground of third rate products, but having big businesses with large, fifty metre long machines churning out parts of computers, of cars, and you name it. To design and run these machines is itself very big business, but our continent, not lacking in the know-how and resources for such construction, still has to rise to the occasion.

During the first and second world wars, we can see a lot of examples of countries which rose to the challenge of war with a richer, much more advanced enemy, and sometimes even turned the tables.

Pre-second world war Russia was not as industrially advanced as Germany, but when challenged, they rose to the challenge and transformed their primitive industry into a modern one, producing war machines at a rate which surprised even the Germans, and went on to win the war against Germany, and for some time, to lead the cold war as a world power.

I am not saying that Africa is at war. I am not preaching war propaganda. Let us look closely at Africa first before we go any further. There is an economic and political war going on in Africa. Africa is losing its war in these fields to the rest of the world, and if things stay the same, more tragedies and misery are to follow. We haven't seen anything yet. Why is our continent, now quite free from western control, failing to mobilize its resources in the same fashion as some of our world communities have done in the past?

You will put forward several arguments as to why this is so. But any student of economics will tell you that Africa has actually got all it takes already. Forget the IMF's policies, the puppet and unqualified governments that fail to set proper developmental programs, prioritizing certain industries which are needed, subsidizing others which need it; the corruption, the nepotism, the tribalism which finds its bloom in the present territorial geographic setup of the continent, etc. Thinking, clever people with big plans in mind can sidestep these foolish things, and besides, these things exist throughout the world.

It is useless putting up arguments that the margin of these vices in Africa is more when compared to more developed countries, nor the fact that so much corruption is not so harmful if a country is already developed. What we Africans need to do is to find ways of sidestepping these barriers, like the rest of the developed world has done to date. Render them useless. Let your project be an example that all others will want to follow. Africa has what it takes, and needs to wake up and stop crying to the rest of the world for help, even if, unfortunately, most of our leaders are trained to react in this way by the power that be.

What Africa has, what all other countries in the world have, which the most developed and industrialized utilize to the fullest (the sole reason they are what they are) is human capital. As Ayn Rand said, ‘man is the end in himself, not the means to an end'. Everything starts from man. Without man, nothing is possible. There can be as many resources in a country, but they are useless if man cannot make anything of them. Natural resources cannot make man. If Africans are to see any change to their present malaise, they should start by investing in the commodity man, and though this sounds like treating man like an animal that has to be raised for the market, given the best and most nutritious feeding to enable him to grow at the fastest possible rate, and have the best quality of meat, it is actually the most important part of the solution. It has to be done.

And it works.

Do not go for the age old "we cannot afford it" defence. This is brainwashing which has worked on Africans to date because of the level of maturity of the people it has been used on. The trick in to have the falsehood based in as much reality as is possible, and in this case, it is based on common sense. Any person knows what he can afford and what he cannot, and knows the consequences of extravagant spending. Without a basic understanding of the fundamentals of economics, he can easily be made to believe in the wholeness of this statement by comparison with his individual set of priorities.

Individual priorities are very different, and sometimes the very opposite of priorities which a society needs to set for itself in order to see progress (read this article for more information about things a country cannot afford not to have).

The Welfare State

It is not my intention to lecture about the appearance of the welfare state in the west, and the rest of the developed world. The basics of the phenomena are however pertinent to the issue at hand. The realisation that man is the end, and not the means to an end is the bulwark of today's welfare state. Once this realisation was made, it became apparent that, to get the best out of man, he had to be raised with care, in good health, free of emotional, physical or mental constraints.

In the period after the first world war, western countries stumbled upon this truth when confronted with competitive nation-state times. What followed were years when almost all their resources went into improving the health of their communities. They invested in the basic component of society itself. They invested in man.

The investment paid off, as it should wherever it is put into effect. Evidence of their success is there for all to see.

Though, initially, some of their methods could be considered inhumane, like when children were removed from their family environments and put into places where their progress could be properly controlled and measured, it should be seen in the context of an adverse pre war situation.

The western welfare state is not maintained because the west is rich and can afford it, but because it is one of those things that a society cannot afford to do without, at least not in the harsh, competitive nation-state epoch we live in.

The same is true of African countries. The traditional social security system that we Africans have (the extended family where family members are expected to be responsible for the well-being of each other) is almost useless in our modern day rush economy. The burden on individual members of society can become too great to bear. Though Africans are not deterred by such a noble burden, it is a weighing down of the basic resource of a country, you will agree. The competitiveness of the country on an international level where the hard cash is earned is also adversely effected.

A simple example to show this point would be to erect two identical factories and have the same number of people working in each, and have each worker belong to the same number of family members, who do not work in the factory. One company will have a social security system which extends to members of the worker's family, which, for the sake of the matter at hand, we will call the west. A percentage of the returns from the labour of the workers in this factory will be used to support their families, while the other, which we will call Africa, will have no social security system. Its workers will be paid a minimum wage.

The workers in the African model will hardly be able to compete in output with workers in the other factory. For one, they are poorly paid. They will be forced to work even when they are sick, otherwise they have no income, even if this is at the expense of total recovery, of their health and, consequently, their productivity in the factory. The little income they will get, which itself is shared with members of their own families who are in perpetual need, being members of the same control group that does not have a social security system in place, will be insufficient to maintain their health. One need not think of the mental health of people living in such circumstances, and the effect this too will have on their well-being. In the long run, the company which thought it couldn't afford to take good care of its workers, and their families, will lose out to the western model, whose output will definitely be much higher, qualitatively and quantitatively.

Investing in man doesn't mean giving him a computer, or a tractor to plough the fields, which has been the shift that western aid to Africa has taken in the past years. A hungry man, or an adult who has grown up in a malnourished environment cannot be expected to use these tools as well as another who is healthier. Such a person will be mediocre on a computer. A large field to cultivate cannot be worked as well by adults whose childhood is dominated by tragedy, misery, disease, poverty and malnutrition, as by those who are more healthy, just like you cannot expect to make good athletes from individuals who were brought up with such lacks.

Market economics and democracy are also not the answers to this problem, as the IMF and western governments callously advise before handing out their aid, when the ability to get positive returns from any of these abstracts is not present in a society. How well do you expect the company I called Africa in my example above to fare on an equal market when their competitor is the other, western model?

This doesn't mean that Market economics, democracy, computers, the Internet, tractors and the like should be cast aside. They are needed. But the emphasis of the aspirant African nation has to move from the means to an end, to the end itself. Here we will have to revamp the way we think about basic needs, from the head to the stomach, from the kitchen to the school, from the water we drink to the houses we live in. All the latest knowhow on what enables a person to develop into a sharp, healthy, strong adult will have to be observed because our nation will benefit more from individual members who are better raised. Africans will have to step into the uncomfortable but necessary position of a professional livestock farmer getting his stock ready for a competition, where the fur, the eyes, the length of the beast, the weight of the beast will be inspected by the judges.

This doesn't also mean that the present adult population will have to be considered as redundant. Means have to be found to do what can be done for those who have already grown up without this kind of care. Salvage what can be salvaged, and use it to the best of its ability. A society that embarks on this path will still need its present adult population until such a time that the generation has turned over, even if their minds are dulled by hardships, and other factors like bad sanitation, alcoholism, etc., and besides, not everyone has had an impoverished childhood in Africa, or have lost their intellectual and physical capacities because of this. Survival of the fittest makes this an impossibility.

If a total commitment is made to such a plan, Africans will be surprised by the result. It will not be a generation before we see Africans outdoing the rest of the world in activities where they have led for some time now, simply because Africans took care of the basics.

Mukazo Mukazo Vunda