Ayo, I’ve been on a bit of an hegira the past few months.
I’ve had the privilege of extended visits in Kenya and America.
Hence the irregular communications.
My apologies.
I’ve kept track of your columns
—internet connection big problem in USA back-country particularly—
as I’ve moved round.
Questions and thoughts provoked have been many.
Most now are ‘past history,’ so I’ll drop em.
Re your most recent: ‘Are we dropping off the global knowledge map?’
No. Of course we’re not.
In fact at present there is so much ‘cognitive info’ out and about; and available and ravenously consumed by folk worldwide—particularly our young/ students and a huge spectrum of others—that it is perhaps a matter of ‘knowledge overload’ and massive rates of inclusion/ absorption, rather than ‘falling off’ the edge (as feared by Henry the Navigator) or moving away from any ‘global knowledge map.’
Of course, WHAT we are making of this info; and HOW we are using it is another matter.
Things are badly scrambled, worldwide.
Old patterns—whether of value/ religion/ quest—are dimming, transmuting, often vanishing.
New patterns are emerging, but require adjustments in our perceptions, and are only slowly coming into view.
For those who fear there is loss of the binding tapestries of religion?
Fear not.
Throughout the back country of Kenya, America, there is little change. Tis business as usual. Marginal shifts and customary quarreling and challenges only. The challenge/ tension of the traditional grappling always with the encroachment of the modern, is present in the life of community—an atmosphere easily absorbed/ recorded when one’s sensors adjust. And of course each Faith/ culture seems to hold to what persists, at root, as an exclusionary way. Tis how us human folk like it. Tis our comfort and our bulwark against the alien/ the other. We like our parochialisms.
As for the state and positioning of the secular world?
Again, nothing unexpected.
With the world of cybernetics speeding forward at a pace none of us can meaningfully measure—or in most cases even grasp—amongst that minority of that informed population—mostly young, instrumentally sophisticated—Nigeria very much included—the spread of simple knowledge-based ideologies, goes forward apace.
With such folk, differences are acknowledged. But these are no longer on the basis of politics/ ideology/ religion—evangelical or traditional. It is much simpler. Tis on the basis of issue. Old adversarial forms which seek still to pit one group against another/ or others, are regarded as obsolete. Within such a base context; social and religious differences/ variations are accommodated with ease/ little difficulty.
The Obvious and emergent way forward, it is increasingly accepted, is through roundtable consensus and dialogue.
In this perception all the instrumental capacities afforded by cybernetics to facilitate this fast-emerging way forward raise readily and easily the new/ evolving patterns whereby life in our old structures of polity and economy are fading fast.
So it is not that Nigeria, or any other country is ‘falling off the global knowledge map.’ Indeed, tis quite the opposite. The knowledge map is being hugely expanded. People, communities, nations are alert to this. All are struggling hard to find their place/ position within. ...And if you observe folk, from bottom to top in all communities, and their constant use of Blackberries and assorted cybernetic devices; and you then see the many ways in which their lives—your life—are constantly interrogated and re-structured and re-directed; when you see and aggregate all this over large areas, you will have no difficulty in seeing how life—whether in the densely-populated back-country markets of Karenjin folk in Western Kenya; or throngs of shopping folk in a vast templated Ohio Walmart’s—the patterns of past, present and future are readily discerned.
One or two of the most brilliant instances of advance thinking, via cybernetic modes of reasoning I have encountered, came recently from the minds and beings of students in two of Nigeria’s ‘Religion-backed’ universities. Without going into the elaborate background to the ‘intellectual and moral background’ which by the vagaries of the history of man’s chance evolution in the Eastern/ Asian and European contexts (a course on ‘History of Western Political Thought’, which I taught—and in fact was the favourite of many of my students at Ife in the late 1960s—provided ethical context and frame), the focus/ the discipline/ the tight cognitive thought this induced, thus setting the base for huge technological explosion of Renaissance/ post-Renaissance and beyond (and indeed to the present day); all this has been built upon; and hence enabled us to move into astonishing/ amazing/ prolific/ high-tech material and technological world we live in today.
Folk worldwide in these areas of advanced thought and material/ instrumental and technological/ scientific development are moving forward on an increasingly ‘level field’ of exploration and achievement. African, Asian, European; they are all players in these realms which form the cutting edge of our world future.
As for modern governance: With each ‘regime change/ each emptying of a public treasury on the departure of an oligarch/ with each ‘election’ which all now can see affords no ‘choice’, but simply a ‘change’ of oligarch with only rhetoric and no active commitment to tackling and resolving vital/ critical issues of massive public concern/ with the passage of yet another of these ‘obsolete rotations’ (with existing laws remaining firmly in place; so that the incoming oligarch will be enabled immediately to start ’primitive accumulation and acquisition’); with all of these now well known, and long obsolete paths being followed; the gap between ‘the obsolete,’ and ‘the emergent’ becomes ever narrower. ...Some say change to ‘the Emergent’ is imminent.
Oligarchs in Europe/ USA/ the Western lands; as well as those in the so-called developing world; all know the end is nigh. All know the instruments they push and pull, have long since failed to meet basic public needs. They know this. And military and police—and indeed cybernetics—help them to retain a presence amongst increasingly hostile ‘home folk.’ Our Peace Envoy Blair is but one instance. He is not welcome in Britain. He travels always with armour plate/ bodyguards; and when in UK he lives imprisoned within his varied mansions. ...In Kenya, the splendid new palace of the Deputy President is located conveniently beside the Army Barracks. ...Tis now the same for most, if not all. ...Their only wish is that when the end comes, twill be AFTER they have departed office, and taken their cut of the spoils.
So there we have it.
Religion, secularism, politics, leadership, the role of cybernetics, ‘the obsolete,’ and ‘the emergent.’
This is the ‘Global knowledge map’—and these are its determinants—of which they and we are all cognizant.
Nigeria is certainly prominent amongst these countries of our world.
But it shares its characteristics with most other African and non-Western regions.
And all the world’s countries of today are hovering at an obvious cusp point.
Turbulent change is coming.
But no one can quite see in what form.
Nor can they say WHEN.
And when it does,
Can we hope it will evade the pattern of
Egypt, Libya, Syria?
Are alternative systems,
Adapted to modern requirements
Prepared, structured and
Ready to plug in?
Is this not important?
So much for my simplistic Elder comments.
I was saying much the same in Kenya; and in deeply conflicted American communities.
Tis little different in Nigeria.
The difference of course being that the 98er in America complains of obesity, un/ under-employment/ declining pay and benefits; whereas in African states his opposite number faces a more stark reality. For him/ her, life is lived at the very margins. The reality daily to be faced by many is the looming spectre of starvation and death.
Africa produces the hungry fighters of this modern world.
Tis the hungry fighters who force change.
And when it comes it will go far beyond Africa.
Best, Michael v
------ Forwarded Message
From: Dr Banji OYEYINKA <boyeyinka@hotmail.com>
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2013 17:14:10 +0000
To: Prof Ayo OLUKOTUN <ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com>, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso <jumoyin@yahoo.co.uk>, "
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: ARE WE FALLING OFF THE GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE MAP?
ARE WE FALLING OFF THE GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE MAP?
Ayo Olukotun
“Regrettably, Nigerian governments do not fund documentation and safeguarding. Government implements economic injunctions from the World Bank but neglects those on culture, which is the foundation of sustainable development and modernisation” – Professor Karin Barber 2013
Have you read Professor Femi Taiwo’s latest book: ‘Africa Must be Modern?’ The question was put to me in a gentle whisper by G. G. Darah, Professor of oral literature and folklore at last week’s Conference of the Nigerian Oral Literature Association (NOLA) held in Ibadan. At Darah’s beckoning, I sat next to him in one of the plenary sessions. Sitting close to Darah and myself was renowned Kenyan academic and poet, Professor Chris Wanjala who in the course of his trip would later weep for Nigeria when he saw the desolation that had overtaken the National Arts Theatre, Iganmu since the Festac colloquium of 1977 when he last visited the country.
Answering Darah’s question, I said, “No, I haven’t but Taiwo mentioned the book to me in the course of our ecstatic reunion in my office at Lead City University last month.” Femi Taiwo is one of Nigeria’s finest minds and Professor of philosophy at Cornell University in New York. Of course, I needed no further prodding to grab a copy of the book at the earliest opportunity and to race through its brilliant, polemical, sometimes actively debatable contents for the next two days. It turned out that one of the most interesting sections of the book, at least for me, relates to the search for indigenous narratives and tropes on which to anchor our development experience and scholarship – one of the key themes of the Oral Literature conference.
Obviously, the matter of creating a knowledge society in Nigeria, and by implication, a modern one is related to emerging concerns about how knowledge generation, transmission and sharing are context bound activities. In other words, folklore, cultural and linguistic diversities are increasingly viewed as central to and affect the architecture of knowledge systems.
Let us illustrate this with reference to the way in which farmers adopt or reject high yielding crop varieties introduced from the industrialised West. A rural geographer and international development expert, Dr. Oluwayomi Atte told the story once of how shocked some development experts were when farmers in a particular locale, unanimously opted for a local grain variety rather than an imported version which grew rapidly and boosted production. Upon interrogation of the farmers on this apparently irrational behaviour, the experts were told that the farmers could put the local grain to a variety of culinary uses which the imported variety did not afford. The dialogue between the experts and the farmers resulted in the adoption of both varieties of grain, one for export and the other to cater to the different food tastes of the farmers.
This buttresses the point about different knowledge cultures in which in the words of one expert ‘knowledge is understood to gain meaning as a result of the way it is used in the context of interaction.’ This also provides the context for Taiwo’s critique of our universities as externally oriented to the extent that its workers are more inclined to ‘garnering honours from outside’ than producing knowledge that will impact on Nigerian on African problems.
A knowledge society is one which sets out to employ knowledge to ameliorate the human condition and one in which knowledge is prized as a principal resource both for its own sake and in problem solving capacities. We are, Taiwo insists, not developing knowledge communities constituted by expertise on Nigerian and African conditions; enriched by debates on local problems and developing policy competencies around indigenous puzzles. To illustrate his point, Taiwo refers to the insistence of our universities that the results of researches on local themes should be published in so called ‘international journals’ to be recognised.
He argues, first of all, that all international journals are local in their countries of origin. There is also, he maintains an element of self devaluation in appealing to experts’ validation in a context where most of these experts are not very informed about Africa. Taiwo’s position, which must of course be weighed against the possibility of the rigging of internal evaluation criteria (‘man know man’) is of more general application in our national life.
If Nigeria were a knowledge society, Taiwo says, the city of Ibadan, location of several momentous events in Nigerian history such as the assassination that preceded the second military coup of 1966 would have generated its own academic mini-industry. Similarly, the activities of the charmed circle of writers and iconic artists such as Wole Soyinka, Ulli Beier, Chinua Achebe, J. P. Clark, Duro Ladipo, who at one point all flourished in Ibadan, would have produced several memorable studies.
In contrast to such expectations, Taiwo laments that, “Ibadan, as far as I know, does not even have a historical society, has no bodies for historical preservation; and hosts no archivist of its intellectual and material artefacts.” What is true of Ibadan, one of the largest cities on the continent is also true for the rest of the country and reflects just how much taste or attention we have for documentation, storage and retrieval. Is it any wonder then that young Nigerians educated abroad, write with reverence about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and other American founding fathers but know next to nothing about Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo or Ahmadu Bello?
Taiwo, like several eminent Nigerian academics, is in my view mistaken, however, when he sees the spreading embrace of Christianity as “a slide to ‘irrationality’ and the manifestations of a ‘virulently anti-knowledge society’”. Taiwo must know having lived in the United States for many years that the universities of Harvard, Yale and Princeton were founded by Christian ministers. Princeton’s motto, ‘Deisub nomine viget’ (Under God she flourishes) underlines its Christian origins. In Nigeria, the educational antecedents of Pastor Adeboye, Pastor W. F. Kumuyi, Bishop Matthew Kukah, Bishop David Oyedepo all of who not only have doctorate degrees but are in the main founders of universities speak to enlightening auspices. What then is ‘irrational’ or ‘anti-knowledge’ about balanced Christianity?
Interestingly, Taiwo mentions the divorce between intellectuals based outside the universities and those in the Ivory Tower as an index of weak and incoherent knowledge system. I perfectly agree with him on this score and have often wondered why our Mass Communication departments have no need of the proven journalistic skills of the late Alade Odunewu, Tony Momoh, Mohamed Haruna, Dele Sobowale and Doyin Abiola among others? In Britain, star journalists are appointed to academic departments to ‘brand’ and legitimate the impartation of knowledge; whereas in Nigeria they are kept at arms’ length.
What then is the way out? It should be noted that our prospects of successfully driving to a knowledge society is bound up with the emergence of visionary political leadership, which will implement policies that will make the ongoing ASUU strike, for example, unnecessary; and which understands that a society that undervalues scholarship disqualifies itself from being a part of the emergent innovation-driven system of the global knowledge economy. Is anyone listening?
Prof Olukotun is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Entrepreneurial Studies at Lead City University, Ibadan.
ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com 0705 584 1236
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