Chika Onyeani, Capitalist Nigger: the Road to Success. ( New York : Timbuktu Publishers, 2006.) 180 Pages; $US14.99.

       If one was around in the 1960s and went to listen to a speech by Malcolm X, this book reads like what one would expect to hear from him. It reads  like a speech given by a militant, a radical political activist excoriating black folk for their tendency to blame the white man for whatever is wrong with the race while doing nothing to right the situation by themselves. Clearly, the book is written by an angry man, not by a detached and cool headed scholar or academic. The issues were not subjected to dispassionate study but, instead, unproven assumptions were made as to their causal factors, and pithy solutions were proffered. The solutions appear spurious and not based on deep understanding of the issues at stake. The solutions appeal to the reader’s feeling, are emotive, rather than appeal to his reasoning and head. Nevertheless, the book is a welcome relief from the usual ponderous academic faire that splits hair over the minutiae of things and provides incomprehensible explanations of perceived problems, and appreciates the difficulties in solving them. Scholars do nothing while Paris burns; activists do something to put out the fire; Onyeani is doing something, something is better than nothing.

         It is enchanting to read these simplistic solutions to the black race’s complex problems. Alas, the problems are much deeper than the writer made them out to be; I would say that no one actually knows what the appropriate solutions to the problems are; perhaps, all we can do is just muddle through?

         This book is the type of book that could be used to mobilize folk into action, make them get up and go do something about the problems it talks about. Unfortunately, what they would do probably would be off the mark, since the writer appears not to have a thorough grasp of how serious the black problem is. 

       African people, who, to the writer, include Africans in Africa, Africans in the Diaspora, that is, Africans in America and African- Americans have a serious problem and no exhortative call to action would solve them like that. 

       The writer looks admiringly at the West and appreciates the progress it has made in science and technology and social-political organization and would like Africans to replicate that progress. The man appears to worship all things Western and wants to transfer them to Africa . This is wishful thinking; in fact, it smacks of magical thinking.

      It is unrealistic thinking in that the West he sees with his physical eyes is a product of 2500 years of gradual evolution, a product of what Hegel and Marx would characterize as the clashing and synthesis of many social forces. The writer, as it were, wants Africans to use his magical wand, say abracadabra and transform Africa into Europe; transform Owerri to Berkeley , California ; Lagos to New York ; Ife to Boston or Oxford . Ah, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

        The contemporary West began in Athens , Greece . 2500 years ago we behold Socrates (via Plato) teaching young Athenians to use their reason to solve problems rather than use their feelings. This emphasis on rationality clashed with mankind’s received tendency to solving problems through recourse to superstition, especially religious ones. It takes a longtime before some folks undertake to use their minds and experiences alone, to solve the human problems of existence. The easiest thing people do is to look to non-existent gods to come to our rescue.

       Plato, then Aristotle (and the atomic scientists of Greece ) made valiant efforts to redirect human attention, from feelings to reason. Rome , up to a point, embraced Greek rationalism (and mixed it with its fixations on the gods). 

       In the fifth century of our common era, Rome fell and after a period of chaos the Catholic Church emerged victorious. The Church quickly extirpated the remnants of Greek rationalism from Europe and forced Europe to descend to the Dark Ages. For almost a thousand years no new scientific ideas were generated in Europe . 

       In the meantime, Mohamed (570-632) had formed his Islamic religion in 610. His followers employed the sword, Jihad, in converting folks to this latest Semitic religion. The Mohammedans swept through North Africa and entered Spain in the eight century and, indeed, got to Southern France . Europeans rallied around their Christian kings and embarked on wars with the Mohammedans.

       The Mohammedans, apparently, reintroduced Greek classical learning into Southern Europe and stimulated what is now called the Italian Renaissance.  This meant that human beings, once again, tried to use their brains in solving problems rather than accept, unquestioningly, what the Church told them to do. In 1517 Martin Luther fired the first salvo against the Roman superstition masquerading as the Holy Catholic Church. He questioned the authority of the Church to determine doctrine for all Christians, for the papa of Rome to claim infallibility in matters concerning God and thus tell people what constitutes the true path to salvation. Luther reasoned that each individual ought to read the Bible and determine for himself what the Christians’ Lord and Savior meant as the correct path to their returning to their maker (though when folk took Luther at his words he joined force with German princes and suppressed excessive individualistic interpretation of the Bible).

        The Germanic second shot at Rome , the first brought down the Roman Empire , got the West rolling in a different direction. Men rose up challenging the leadership of the Bishop of Rome.  The Papa of Rome had his own supporters, such as King Phillip of Spain , newly awash with cash from America .  The empire of superstition fought back by gathering a formidable military power to go teach the German upstarts who is the chosen of God.  Hence, the 100 years of religious wars that culminated in the treaty of Westphalia (1648) that finally broke the Church’s back and brought about the existence of the nation state (in Europe). Thereafter each European country had its own national church and determined its political affairs free from the interference of the prince of darkness in Rome . Of course, the papa of Rome was not easily discarded but now he was considered a minor meddling irritant as Europeans, by and large, lived their lives without looking to the prince of ignorance to guide them.   

        The Protestant Reformation led to the age of reason, aka the French Enlightenment. Men like Pascal, Voltaire, Descartes and Rousseau tried to solve society’s problems through the auspices of pure reason.  They lunched a frontal attack on faith and other religious superstitions that lead human beings to attribute their conditions to the gods. The French encyclopedias sought to understand how nature works and copy it so that human beings could deal with nature (physics/natura) rationally.

        This attempt to solve problems through our heads not our hearts led to resurgence in European philosophy (science). Folks like the Polish Copernicus challenged the Church’s heliocentric view, Galileo Galilee frontally challenged the Church’s view that a god made the earth the center of the universe by showing, empirically, that the sun is the center of our solar system and the planets, of which the earth is one, cycled around the sun. Isaac Newton posited his views on mechanics and gravity.  Science is reborn.

        In Germany the idealistic philosophers emerged telling us who we are, not who the Church said that we are. Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Nietzsche wrote ponderous philosophies claiming to explicate human nature and the nature of being in general.

       In England a more balanced attempt was adopted: instead of the German tendency to try solving problems only through abstract reasoning the English insisted on having empirical solutions, not just woolly ones. David Hume, George Berkeley, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham and the other utilitarian’s’ emerged, insisting that society ought to be organized on the pleasure-pain principle. Human beings seek pleasure and avoid pain. Therefore, ascertain what gives the greatest number of the people pleasure, not pain, and make it public policy.

        French logical positivists like August Comte, George Sorel, and Emile Durkheim etc tried to organize society on purely rational grounds rather than how an imaginary god would want people to do it. 

      In Britain , the return to reason as a means of solving human problems and dealing with nature resulted in industrialization (around 1746). This meant bringing people together under one roof, factories, to manufacture products. That, in turn, led to the death of village craftsmen and radically changed society. Urban centers emerged as people were concentrated in cities to perform factory work (say, at Birmingham , England etc ). The emergence of industries and urban centers changed human beings social relationships. The aristocracy that had owned lands and lorded it over their peasant workers died and were replaced by the middle class (bourgeoisie). Workers were exploited and folk like Robert Owen, Joseph Proudhon, Charles Fourier, and Karl Marx came along and decried the exploitation of man by man and called for a new kind of society, a socialist and or communist society.

        These rational-humanistic efforts were challenged by the Romantics, and for a while it seemed that feelings would replace reason in solving human problems. The poets (ah John Milton, Alexander Pope, Schelling, Woolworth, Yeats, Tennyson etc) and others who appeal to our hearts not to our heads, for a while lunched a vigorous backlash against reason. 

       By the nineteenth century reason, especially inductive reasoning as opposed to deductive reasoning prevailed in Europe . Charles Darwin showed, conclusively, that man is a variety of animals that evolved apart from other animals and that no god created him. Boyle and Dalton transformed alchemy into modern Chemistry. Max Plank, Albert Einstein, Bohr, Born, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and others transformed Newtonian mechanics into Quantum mechanics and the modern scientific age is on its way.  Religion becomes a quaint thing that men of education look at nostalgically and wonder how men could have believed in the fairy tales of the bible.

      What is the point to all these? The point is that the modern West is a product of twenty five hundred years of gradual evolution. The West did not become what it is by merely wishing to be so but by going through certain process, a process that changed the manner of Western thinking and social organization.  Other parts of the world may not have gone through the same path and therefore may not do easily what the West did through pain and struggling.

        However, China has over four thousand years of written culture. Indeed, much of what we now think were invented in the West were actually invented in China . The same goes for India . India has, at least, 2500 years of written culture. India ’s writing, in Sanskrit, unfortunately, tended to veer towards the metaphysical rather than the physical; nevertheless, we now know that India , along with the Semitic race invented mathematics.

        Before Leibnitz and Newton rediscovered Calculus Oriental people were already performing differential Algebra/Geometry.  It is, therefore, not surprising that Orientals have more easily embraced the science and technology of the West and, as it seems, are on the verge of taking it and running away with it. The twenty first century, it appears, would be the Oriental century, as the twentieth century was the century of the British and the Americans and the century before that was the French Century.

      Africa has not undertaken the historical process the West and the Orient did.  Africa ’s science and technology is non-existent. Worse, Africans still think and behave as preliterate human beings did.  Africa is, at least, 2000 years behind the West in material culture. 

      Any rational person knows that you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. Onyeani comes in and tells Africans to accomplish what took the West and the Orient thousands of years to accomplish in an instant.  Is that rational expectation?  Of course it is not.

       Africans will eventually get to where the rest of humanity is but before that they have to do what the rest of humanity did: alter their society, from traditional and religion based to rational and science based; on the individual level, Africans have to perform radical surgery on their minds, their patterns of thinking and behaving, and go from agriculturalists to industrialists in their mental orientation. All things being equal, this transformation of what Joseph Conrad condescendingly called the Dark Continent would take a few centuries and, with luck, could take place in one century. The point is that Onyeani wanted to run before he walks.

      Nevertheless, Onyeani’s book is worth reading. It is a very easy read; I read it within three hours. As noted, it is not scholastic and not theoretical so the average reader would grasp its thesis without much effort. Actually, it reads like a pamphlet on how to become rich, quickly; it is in the genre of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and David Schwartz’s The Magic of Thinking Big.

        If I was not sympathetic to Onyeani I would not have had the patience to read his book through. A few pages into it and I recognized that it is not cerebral but reads like a street broadsheet. I persisted and read the book through out of respect for the writer.

     What exactly did Onyeani say? He has a central thesis running through his book.  That thought is subdivided into subplots (the various chapters of the book).

       First, Onyeani told us that the black race is shiftless and unable to fend for itself and that it has a penchant for blaming other people for its problems. He narrated how this phenomenon works. In America black Americans seem unable to participate in the American economy and are left out of it, and, generally, tell you, if you want to hear, many people no longer want to hear, am afraid to say, how white folk are the cause of all their problems. Okay, you say, so you, a black person is allowed to move into a white neighborhood why not keep your house up, why let it run down in a few months, so that white folk run from you fearing that their property values would plummet? 

       Why be a postal clerk (many blacks work for the government…they do not start their own businesses; they wait for other people to start businesses and try to work for them and, given human nature, people tend to hire those like themselves first, are last hired and first fired, and they cry discrimination and racism) and buy a Cadillac to impress the world with your non existent wealth; why not buy a Volkswagen bug, to more accurately reflect your penurious economic status?

        Why spend your little money on conspicuous consumption while neglecting the proper education of your children? Your children go through America ’s public schools, schools often not fit to train dogs.  A typical black American graduates from inner city high schools without the ability to fill out job applications forms. How are such people going to compete with white folk? 

       Okay, society designs affirmative action programs to make it possible for black folk to go to college. They graduate from college still functional illiterates and unable to compete with white folk; they earn incomes that white folk with only primary education makes!

      Onyeani talks about how black folk are economic slaves, how they are dependent on the white man for everything; how they do not manufacture any thing; how they are consumers of what white folk produce and are not producers themselves.

      In Africa the African big man like Robber Mugabe of Zimbabwe drives around in an imported British Rolls Royce while his country cannot produce a pin. Nigeria and other African countries have oil but cannot prospect for it or drill for it; white men have to come from the West to do so for them. White men perform most of the serious construction jobs done in the country (and the minor ones given to Nigerians to construct collapse in a few months). 

       It is too easy to rehash the bleak state of the black world, as Onyeani did; however, one would like to pass that depressing narration. Let us just say that Onyeani provided an accurate description of the situation. The state of the black economy, if there is such a thing as black economy, is pathetic. In Africa nothing is happening in the economic sphere, and the little that is there is owned by whites, and recently by Asians. China and India, hungry for raw materials to feed their burgeoning industries, have descended on Africa and have become the new Metropolis whereas Africa continues as the Periphery, a plantation economy, as Samira Amin and Walter Rodney would say, feeding other peoples industries, people who manufacture goods from raw materials obtained from Africa and sell it to Africans at exorbitant prices.

        So, how come Africans are unable to do what the rest of humanity is doing? Onyeani provided an unpersuasive explanation, actually, non causal explanation of why the black world is where it is at today.  He went on to provide a recipe for solving the problems.

         His recipe is for Africans to become economic realists and do what Europeans do. He perceives Europeans as social Darwinists who believe in competition where the fittest survive and the weakest die out. He wants Africans to compete and may the fittest survive and the weak die out, as such is life.

       One must hand it to Onyeani: his realism reminds one of Herbert Spenser’s philosophies of social Darwinism; his Africa would produce the equivalent of America ’s Robber Barons: Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc), a few rich folk and many poor folks.  (Some would say that the American economy is not an ideal political economy, that a better one is where wealth is spread fairly, such as the Scandinavian countries.  In America over forty six million persons do not have health insurance and many are homeless, while less than one percent of the population owns over 90% of the wealth. Onyeani’s adoration of America borders on the childish, but as already observed he is not a scholar and probably is not well informed on the pernicious aspects of America ’s class system.)

       Onyeani seems to walk his talk. He established his own newspaper publishing outfit, and from all available information seems to be making a go of it. He is a proud capitalist nigger and wants other black folk to do what he did, become capitalist niggers.

    Alas, for Onyeani, his solution seems no solution. One doubts that he has even understood the problem. Consider the conundrum of blacks scoring last in Intelligence tests. In test after test Orientals score highest (115 is their average), whites come second (100 is their average) and blacks come last (85 is their average). On standardized tests, such as Scholastic Aptitude Test (entrance to American universities) the same pattern is repeated with Asians averaging about 1200, out of 1600 possible points, whites about 1100 and blacks about 900.  These scores are reflected in how students perform at universities. If there was no discrimination against Orientals, American universities would be predominantly Oriental. A stroll in the physical science departments of American universities and you find yourself in Asia Minor . Recently, I visited the science departments of my alma mater, University of California , and felt that I was in China or India . I did not see black faces. 

        So why are black folk unable to compete in science and technology?  If they are unable to compete at universities how are they going to compete in the larger economy? How is Onyeani going to solve this problem? Problems are not solved hortatively.

     Onyeani’s book makes for easy reading but the reader should not have the illusion that it has defined the problem or solved it.  Having a day of atonement when black folk reminisce on their failings is not the same thing as solution for complex and intractable problems. 

       Africans, for whatever reasons, are too backward and it would take them a long time to catch up with the rest of humanity. The doing of science, for example, is a cultural phenomenon. A society has to develop the capacity to ask questions before it can discover answers. Most African societies are faith based and do not ask questions hence are not even looking for answers, and are not going to find answers. Have you related to Africans lately?  Do they ask scientific questions, do they even show curiosity on how things are put together?

       Ah, Africans are a happy people; they go to parties, eat and drink and dance to good music (they are good at music, dancing and sports) but do not worry their heads how the universe is put together. You go worry about physical phenomena, discover its laws and device technology to exploit them; manufacture stuff and the consumers, Africans, buy them; produce them, nah.

       One would be surprised if Africa produces a Nobel laureate in physics, chemistry and biology in this century; in the less challenging fields of literature and economics, yes; science?

        Having said all this I recommend the book to most Africans. It would, at least, make them angry to read that their continent is the shiftless continent Onyeani described it to be. The man painted such a negative picture of Africa that one wonders if he is ashamed of Africa despite his disclaimer. Perhaps, reading Onyeani’s bleak representation of Africa would make Africans ashamed of their tendency to stealing and corruption and subsequently develop the spirit of public service, curtail their famed self centeredness, develop social interest and live to serve their fellow human beings rather than use them for their own good and not care for them. The reader, hopefully, would dedicate himself to doing what would please Onyeani: uplift the backward continent of Africa ?

       I say, read Onyeani’s book; you might learn one or two things from it. The language level is tenth grade, so there is no reason why every African cannot read and understand this interesting book. If you are bothered by the phrase, “capitalist nigger”, as I am, well, forgive Onyeani’s attempt at punning; apparently, he is making fun of a term racist whites employ in putting black folks down.

*Ozodi Osuji can be reached at: ozodiosuji@gmail.com

Robot  Villager

# 1 If one was around in the 1960s and went to listen to a speech by Malcolm X, this book reads like ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 30.07.2007 11:56

Austin  Villager

# 2 Thanks for your incisive review. But for the sharpness of the criticisms readers like one would have felt more interesting even recommendable. What if the reviewer is from an academic background, isn't that the preserve of just 5-10% if not less. And what if the Africans are not gifted scientifically? Are there no other basis, even religious, societies can be organised to at least bring the maximum benefit/comfort to the maximum number of people? Can't there´be? Shouldn't there be? Repeated, incisive review, but a bit of the edge Posted by Austin| 31.07.2007 08:01