This is a wake up call to all Africans.. Leaders, Citizens, Home, Abroad Young Or Old. Its a very good stuff and a must read!
Written by Field Ruwe, a Zambian journalist and author...
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.
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.
