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It is becoming increasingly impossible to rationalize, defend, or explain the profligacy and incompetence of many African governments. The task is made even more difficult for those of us who, by reason of our professional associations with Westerners, have become, for good or ill, accountable for what is bad on the continent. Africans who teach, work, or socialize with Westerners have the unenviable burden of explaining the continent’s woes to a prejudiced, skeptical Western audience.
It is very common to be asked at parties and social events what one thinks of the never-ending civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the genocide in the Sudan; the anarchy in Somalia; the disastrous elections in Nigeria; and other problems too numerous to catalogue here. That one is sometimes their teacher, boss, or benefactor does little to mitigate or complicate the simplistic certainties and stereotypes through which these Western friends and acquaintances understand
Africa
and Africans. That you are from one country in
Africa
, not all forty eight of them, does little to discourage the audacity and territorial scope of such inquisitive demands for explanations.
Westerners, Asians, and everyone else take liberties with African realities, substituting a part for the whole, generalizing recklessly, and projecting well-worn, self-assuring prejudices onto the continent and its peoples.
But if Westerners approach Africa with prejudiced preconceptions, the misbehavior of African governments and leaders help to solidify such prejudices and stereotypes, making it almost impossible to disabuse these Westerners of their bizarre notions of
Africa
.
Not to be misunderstood as trying to lend a sympathetic ear to prejudice or trying to understand and reason with the prejudiced, I am not attempting such a feat. The racially prejudiced cannot be swayed even by the most revolutionary transformation in
Africa
’s fortunes. Their mindset of perceiving Africans and
Africa
as perpetual inferiors is already ossified in an innate need for self-assurance, which is itself driven ultimately by a need to assert oneself through the denigration and niggerization of others. These prejudiced Westerners affirm themselves paradoxically by irrationally putting down Africans. Intellectual dialogue on
Africa
and its travails is impossible with this kind of Westerners.
But what about the genuinely inquisitive; the slightly prejudiced, whose views on Africa and its peoples—condescending as they may be—are founded not on racial prejudice but nurtured by the unflattering popular images of Africa marketed aggressively to naïve and ignorant Westerners by mediums of mass communication? Don’t we, as a duty, have to help these misinformed folks understand the nuances, complexities, multi-layered culpabilities, Western complicities, and cultural underpinnings of the negative African realities of war, famine, AIDS, poverty, corruption, waste, and bad government that are persistently presented to them as the essence of the continent? Don’t we have a duty to do battle with the well-funded, sometimes organized, and commercially lucrative industry of Western denigration of
Africa
? Aren’t our own identities as Africans under assault each time our continent or an African country is casually and organically presented as a land of wars, famine, AIDS and corruption? Isn’t it instinctive to fight back with facts and reason when the basis of your humanity is questioned with half-truths and generalizations?
These questions reflect one aspect of the moral dilemma of the African interlocutor in Western society. He feels that he has to help ignorant and prejudiced Westerners understand
Africa
more sympathetically. But he also feels that mediating the African predicament and African realities for Western audiences may amount to—or be perceived as—rationalizing, defending, minimizing, or obfuscating bad leadership, corruption, political tyranny, and other evils.
Some professional and personal experiences can exacerbate this dilemma, forcing one to walk the tight, uncomfortable rope of faulting pedestrian understandings of
Africa
while not exculpating African actors who continue to impoverish an endowed continent. In these kinds of experiences, you are put on the unsettling spot of accounting for all that is wrong with
Africa
or its constituents. I have been there several times. Sometimes I got myself entangled in logical contradictions and pedantic distinctions; other times I offered explanations that were so qualified, modified, and riddled with caveats and nuances that they lost their explanatory power. Such explanations alternately left my Western audiences confused, entrenched in their preconceptions, or thinking that I was more interested in defending the continent than in explaining the source of its woes.
The most troubling times for me are when I am perceived as unwilling to acknowledge the African complicity in
Africa
’s underdevelopment. This tears at me because I like to see myself as a harsh critic of bad African leaders and as intolerant of bad government and corruption in
Nigeria
, my country, and
Africa
. Because I have sometimes been upbraided by compatriots and some liberal Westerners for going overboard with my focus on African agency in analyzing the continent’s economic and political problems, accusations or perceptions of not sufficiently recognizing the role of African actions and inactions in the continent’s problems often catch me unawares, leaving me confused but determined to find a comfortable median to inhabit.
I teach an undergraduate seminar on African economic history from colonial times to the present. As one might imagine, the students come to the class heavily opinionated about the causes of African poverty and economic stagnation. Their favorite quest, regardless of the temporal and topical focus of our discussion, is to try and pinpoint the cause of
Africa
’s underdevelopment. A lesser quest is to pinpoint where I stand on the debate about the causal weight of historical injuries (colonialism, slavery) as well as modern day Western institutions (Bretton Woods) and practices on the one hand, and the disappointing and destructive choices of African leaders on the other. My students prefer cut and dried answers, not nuanced, complicated ones. They want me to take a position and explain it to them or convince them about it. Some of them almost want me to tell them what to believe about
Africa
’s underdevelopment. But that is not my role as a teacher; which is why I suspect that, while they enjoy the class, they often come away from our discussions disappointed at my willingness to admit nuance, indeterminacy, and inconclusiveness into the discussion.
The most uncomfortable questions come from students that I suspectc come from conservative backgrounds. They are more likely to believe that Africa’s underdevelopment is solely caused by Africans and are less likely to admit the possibility that the West’s economic relationship with Africa, expressed through many institutions and practices, could also be responsible for the sad economic state of the continent. Their evidence, though carefully cherry-picked for hyperbolic effect, is hard to challenge. How, for instance, do you explain the decision of late Ivorian leader, Felix Houphouet-Boigny to build the biggest Roman Catholic Basilica in his hometown of Yammasukro with an amount roughly equivalent to his country’s annual budget? You could balance Houphouet-Boigny’s indictment by invoking the fact that
France
stood by him and egged him on while he engaged in this mindless waste of public fund. That might be warmly received by some liberal elements. But it is at best a feeble defense, a hard sell that is unlikely to sway a student nurtured on a staple of explanations focused on African degeneracy. This is one Westerner who will almost certainly go away firmly clutching the doctrine of African self-destruction. The problem is not that these opinionated Westerners strategically select bad examples to illustrate their prejudices and preconceptions--which they do. The problem is the abundance of such bad examples and the paucity of examples of responsible, prudent, transparent, and competent leadership on the continent.
How do you explain Abacha’s $2 billion loot to a skeptical Westerner? Or Obasanjo’s transmogrification from a bankrupt farmer with N20.000 in his bank account to arguably the richest man in
Nigeria
today. How do you convince an already skeptical Westerner that these monumental acts of corruption are not responsible for Africa’s underdevelopment or are inconsequential to it, or that the complicity of Western banks, lobbyists, and businessmen mitigates these financial crimes against
Africa
’s impoverished peoples? One is informed enough to appreciate the external Western complicities in these crimes, but transferring that understanding to Westerners is a huge pedagogical undertaking.
I love to cite as an example of the white elephant phenomenon, the $80 million Abuja Stadium, which, by the way, even the World Bank says could have been built for half that amount, and which, it must be said, is now mostly rented for religious programs. Try explaining to a simple-minded American undergraduate that building a national stadium for that amount was a priority that should have taken precedence over more pressing economic, social, and infrastructural problems.
Just when I thought my task of educating Westerners about the complexity of Africa’s problems and of redistributing the focus evenly between Africa’s leadership and corruption problem and global structural interpellations can’t get any more difficult, I read in the news that Nigeria’s legitimacy-challenged government will spend N53 billion to build a Millennium Tower in Abuja! I can already see this headline feeding and fattening the conceited prejudices of Westerners who reduce all of
Africa
’s problems to a congenital African embrace of incompetence and economic irrationality. I can see new ammunition for Western (and African) scholars and commentators who have built their careers and continue to make a living by peddling such inanities.
Now I have to hope that my students don’t have access to this latest example of African leaders’ excesses. If they do, my task will be magnified. The students will be impervious to my balanced, nuanced, and complex explanations and, conversely, will be more enamored and seduced by the easy, simplistic, and surprisingly pervasive belief that Africans are the only architects of their economic conundrum.
The more one tries to dispel the facile notion of a self-destructive continent, the more African leaders reinforce it through their incompetence, corruption, profligacy, and authoritarianism.
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Posted by Robot| 28.09.2007 14:58