What the Ugandan
middle class lacks:
Philosophers
Ugandans prefer posh weddings, even if their means may not allow for such extravagance. File Photo.
By Timothy KalyegiraPosted Sunday, June 3 2012
Most Africans, even the best-educated, best-paid and most widely-travelled, are held hostage to a mindset in which university-educated professionals are still impressed by things that Whites outgrow as teenagers.
Rather than keep giving us their financial aid and grants, the best Europe and China can do is send us teachers, philosophers, thoughtful guides to help us see that a flashy Range Rover or a house with 40 metres of cables leading to satellite dishes and 50-inch flat screen TVs is not really the true mark of success, but rather is a sign of our maalo.
The reluctance to read and write books - especially among even university-educated African women - has to be overcome before we start talking of future prosperity and development. They can help us arrive at a less embarrassing image of ourselves and develop a knowledge-based, scientific society.
This mediocrity in aspiration, this cluelessness about who we are, what we are doing, where we are going, what we ought to be doing and where we ought to be going - this maalo as I termed it last Sunday - lies is at the core of the post-independence Africa identity crisis.
It is the reason the vast new petroleum, natural gas, gold and diamond findings being reported all over Africa these days will not benefit Africans.
Exasperated readers asked me how we can get out of this predicament.
First, we shall need teachers. Teachers, not in the familiar classroom and chalk sense in which we understand the word.
We shall need teachers in the sense of thinkers and illustrators, guides, philosophers, instructors of the mind, people who will show us the way we ought to live and the things we ought to aspire for and what it means to be a people.
Europe, the most influential continent in history, developed first and foremost because it developed the mind. Long before electricity, computers, air travel and when life was still a daily grind, Europe already had a profoundly developed intellectual tradition. Is it a coincidence that the United States which publishes 150,000 new book titles a year and China which publishes 120,000 new titles are the world’s biggest and second-biggest national economies?What do German doctors think and discuss among themselves when President Yoweri Museveni and his family show up on a presidential jet in Berlin, then go to a clinic for basic medical checkup? In power for 26 years, billions in foreign aid, but still one must fly to Germany for basic medical checkup? Our heads of state also need special advisers on how to overcome their own “maalo”.
The Chinese, with their attention to detail and serious minds, should also help guide the clueless and “unserious” African into the future. We need to develop a higher sense of existence and consciousness. In other words, we need to develop the title of Kenny Rogers’ 1983 album: Eyes That See In The Dark.
Eyes that see in the dark. That is what we need: well-developed, thoughtful, solid minds with a level of perception, penetrating insight and in-depth knowledge that is solely missing in our African societies and to have such developed minds run our companies, government departments, schools, universities and families with mental clarity.
We can only get this gravitas and rock-solid stature by reading and writing and researching advanced knowledge and information.
Not just the bits and pieces of cram work homework, coursework, theses, lecture and classroom notes we work with at school and university, to be left there upon the attainment of a diploma, certificate or degree, but advanced knowledge.
Whites from Europe and America - although over the last 20 years have degenerated into a culture soaked in celebrity gossip, eccentric pursuits, minority rights and that Facebook-ish banality - still largely know what they are doing when they mean to be serious.
They still have minds that search much more keenly and perceive much deeper than anything that can be found in urban middle class Africa.
Most Africans, even the best-educated, best-paid and most widely-travelled, are held hostage to a mindset in which university-educated professionals are still impressed by things that Whites outgrow as teenagers.
Rather than keep giving us their financial aid and grants, the best Europe and China can do is send us teachers, philosophers, thoughtful guides to help us see that a flashy Range Rover or a house with 40 metres of cables leading to satellite dishes and 50-inch flat screen TVs is not really the true mark of success, but rather is a sign of our maalo.
The reluctance to read and write books - especially among even university-educated African women - has to be overcome before we start talking of future prosperity and development. They can help us arrive at a less embarrassing image of ourselves and develop a knowledge-based, scientific society.
