He also argues,accurately,that Nigerians have often cultivated a mentality conditioned by underdevelopment.One assessment of this argument, not one provided by Pius,though, would be-what is the degree to whichstate governors are measured by their ability to provide the fundamentals of basic civilized living:constant electricity,potable water in every home,all roads in good condition? To ask for hot water from taps might be asking a lot.To request gas piped to homes might also be quite demanding.The basics I have outlined,if achieved by any Nigerian government in the next five years,would have done wonders that will transform the quality of life in the country.
One can provide a litany of example of acclimatization to a culture of underdevelopment.
The relative quality of resource management in Nigeria in comparison to other African countries needs to be examined on account of Nigeria's very large share of resources:oil,land and human power.
Pius was also not taking pride in his being a student of French.That is an accident of his education in relation to the exposure it gave him to visit another African country.
With reference to Biko's point on considering learning European languages unnecessary,for my part,I see no pride in being ignorant of either African,European,Asian or Western languages.No amount of grounding in any other language will replace a sensitivity to the beauty of Yoruba tonal patterns and use of rhyme in modulating meaning as evident in Wande Abimbola's Ifa Divination Poetry.No mastery of relationships between Twi phonetics and philosophy as described by Kwesi Ra Nehem Ptah Akhan in his essays at www.odwirafo.com or between Zulu morphology and classical Zulu thought as described by Mazisi Kunene in the introduction to his The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain will replace a sensitivity to the nuances of Martin Heidegger's German in Sein und Zeit,translated as Being and Time,where Heidegger derives significant levels of meaning from his peculiar fashioning of German,or to San Juan de La Yepes modulation of meaning between various forms of knowledge by using using a similar Spanish word in varying ways to demonstrate differences between intellectual and spiritual knowledge in "Songs of the Soul in Ecstasy" which is close to if not identical with the title of the poem.
All these examples are high points in their respective languages and cultures.(Ptah Akhan sadly celebrates a fantastic form of racism directed all non-Black races that makes it necessary to read him very critically).Those outside the cultures represented by these writers are indebted to those who understand those languages and cultures and who translate these works for the rest of the world to share in those inimitable cultural treasures.
As it is,much of the most important writing by and about Africa remains untranslated from European languages.One of the most striking expositors of classical African thought I have come across is the Malian Amadou Hampate Ba.I became hooked on him after reading a translation of his great essay "The Living Tradition" in the UNESCO General History of Africa vol.1.His work is one of the few known to me that presents classical African religion in terms of values that transcend the everyday necessities of survival and the details of social existence,depicting them in terms of a metaphysical and imaginative grandeur often difficult to perceive in the more common prosaic styles styles of presenting these systems. Magnificent as the organizational structure and literary corpus,along with its rich repertoire of philosophical conceptions, of the Yoruba/Orisa tradition Ifa system ,only few writers I have read so far,such as the US babalawo David Wilson aka Awo Falokun Fatumnbi, relate Ifa to transcendental values,assisting one to juxtapose it with more obviously comprehensive systems like Buddhism and Hinduism.We are fortune to have Ba's retelling of the Fulani cosmological epic Kaidara translated from French into English,in one case with a text in both the native Fulfulde and French and in another into English.The sequel Radiance of the Great Star has been translated into English but remains very rare.His Peul Initiation and other books are untranslated from French,except for excerpts,at least as far as I know.
The Francophone world and French scholarship has brought out some of the most sophisticated treatments of classical African thought.A memorable example is Germaine Dieterlen's "Initiation among the Peul Pastoral Fulani" in African Systems of Thought of which only the abstract was translated into English.Even then,the description of correlations between the patterns formed by the coats of cattle,the celestial bodies,planes of existence and stages of initiation as they culminate in an approach to Gueno,the Eternal One,is spellbinding.One of the most striking descriptions of relationships between cosmology and architecture in Africa I understand emerges in Conversations with Ogotemmeli,transcribed in French by Marcel Griaule from the words of the Dogon thinker Ogotemmeli.We are fortunate to have a translation into English.
A seeker of knowledge ideally commands a number of languages from different parts of the world.It is always possible to make some progress on each language one at a time.
The ideal Africanist commands a range of African languages,along with non-African languages widely used in Africa:English and French,and also languages used by demographically strong African Diaspora communities,such as Spanish in Cuba. One's achievement might not approach such ideals,but their value needs to be appreciated.
Thanks
toyin
Biko my broda,
Since this is at least the second time I have noticed you intentionally misspell the names of folks you disagree with, I have to be honest with you and say that I see that as being disrespectful to the people whose names you butcher. I hope you can call folks their real names even when you are mad or disagree with them.
Regards,
Okey UkagaSent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
From: Biko Agozino <bikozino@yahoo.com>Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2010 23:14:43 -0700 (PDT)ReplyTo: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.comSubject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Habit of Underdevelopment
Payos,
Your inferiority complex is showing in all your writings: the monarch is not even concealing his nakedness to the enlightened who alone were presumably privileged to the truth of the clothednness of the nakedness of the noble in a democratizing world that is demanding increasing accountability and partisanship in the face of what Stuart Hall wall call authoritarian populism and even sheer group-think authoritarianism. Whenever someone identifies any originality that contributes to progressive possibilities outside the narrow biographical accident of brother Payos and without devaluing his rich cultural heritage, he sniffs a superiority complex where there is none intended but only manages to reemphasize his own peculiar mess (pekelmese) of inferiority complex.
Here, the suspicion is that Francophone and Anglophone Africa are in a pseudo struggle for supremacy (linguistioc but not political economic) to the extent that students majoring in a Francophone language from what Museveni of Uganda would call a Bantuphone country would necessarily feel themselves to be in competion with students from a Francophone country studying the same Francophony but with absolutely no reference to the fact that imperialism does not depend on the tongue you speak. Strange, innit, as Londoners would say or ent as Trinidiadians would have it, or abi no be so, for pigden?
That question would never have occurred to the rest of us who thought that an additional European language was both unjustifiable and unnecessary when we had not mastered our own native tongues and who undertook to write and pass WASC exams in our mother tongues as a matter of pride and even without teachers. For despite the pretensions to a smattering of quotations from their mothert tongue, most of the superiorist scholars avoided writing exams in their mother tongue under the excuse that they had no teachers in the asubject and even when they had teachers, wondered what jobs an expertise in vernacular could attract compared to a proud command of the whiteman's language with curious privileges of missing a whole year of university in order to improve on the tongue of the foreigner that former cohorts enjoyed more by being transplanted to French soil, especially in competition against fellow Africans who could never articluate the whateman's tongue as clearly as the superiorsist Senghore or Cesaire who would accept membership of the Community of the ancestors of Gauls to complete autonomy. Ahaa! The Tiger does not profess its Tigritude not just because the writer does not speak Tigrese as Senghore retorted but because no matter what tongue the writer speaks in, he/she could never mimic the tiger as Soyinka implied!:
'We had swag. Don't mind me. I am trying to use the dialect of young Nigerians on Facebook. My friend, Ikhide Ikheloa, says we must constantly play catch-up with that generation in our essays. I guess swag means swagger. Our swag devolved from a certain sociology of superiority that defined Nigerian-ness in relation to the rest of Africa. It wasn't just that geographical size, resources, and population meshed in the imaginary of the rulers and the elite and gave them a conceited image of Nigeria as the giant and big brother of Africa, an image that trickled down from a mediocre rulership to a sheepish followership, it was also about optics, about what you saw in "the practice of everyday life" (apologies to Michel de Certeau) in Nigeria in the 1980s.' The shakara of Payos!
The swag of French in West Africa sounds strange to those of us who seriously believed that French was marginal to the fate of West Africa. We used to jump through the window to escape another lesson in conjugate la verb because we seriously believed that we had not much to rely on from French in our livelihood or Enlightenment; and how much we regret that childish bravado but not as much as the superiorists assume. When the French teacher got a French Peugeot 504 car from the French company, Feugerolle, that was constructing the Enugu-Port Harcourt express road, we realized that French was somewhat envious but still not as important as the traditional subjects that would question the imagined attitudes of French superiorism in Anglophone-Bantuphone West Africa except in the sense of mastering two of the Master's languages compared to the one-sided mastery of the evoluee over the language of a single Prospero community by a single Caiban.
So brother Payos must have been inducted into a secret cult of superioirism that demands suspicion of any other claim to validity as a claim to attempts to inferioirize his preferences in his subjective judgment of tastes, yeah whatever, in whatever ethnic mould they might be.
When the attitude to underdevelopment is defined simply in terms of the preference for the certainty of interrupted electricity supply as an alternative to the supposed boredom of interrupted power supplies by an academic closeted in a never-power-failure environ of effico Canada, mind you, you bring out your cultural weapons and expect a barrage from what Baba Sho dubbed neo-Tarzanism. First of all, you fire back, underdevelopment is not a quality of the native's personality that could be cured through a shrinking of the native mind, but a structural problem that recognizes that even in some underdeveloped countries, uninterrupted electricity supply is the norm and not the exception but definitely not in all and that even in some where they supply one day and take two months in power vacation, the iconography of a native god of electricity remains a national symbol without irony in the taken-for-granted phrase, never expect power always. Thus the scandalous interruption of electricity supply or the interruption of private generators that manage to suffocate so many with CO2 poisoning is a pragmatic social problem to be solved through praxis rather than be swept under the impossibilism carpet of attitudes or public opinion about underdevelopment which never tell us what it feels like to be a social statitic.
So for Dokinta Payos the impish, as always, the question is not whose underdevelopment is greater than whose but, what is to be done? The answer could be at different levels. 1) Stop feeling superior to fellow Africans as a rule and stop smelling an ambush in your imaginary struggle to see whose imperialism is better than the other in a vain attempt to privilege archaic despotism in preference to republican democracy.; 2) Stop generalizing your inferiority complex to the rest of the discourse about the question of African liberation by seeking which African culture to defend against your own very selective chosen exemplars in terms of whose Mercedes is bigger than whose; 3) Prescribe solutions to the problem instead of assuming that the answers are embodied in one, some, or in all of the above; it could be none of the above!
Biko
--- On Fri, 8/6/10, Pius Adesanmi <piusadesanmi@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Pius Adesanmi <piusadesanmi@yahoo.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Habit of Underdevelopment
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Friday, August 6, 2010, 11:37 PM
http://saharareporters.com/column/habit-underdevelopment
The Habit of Underdevelopment
By Pius Adesanmi
We were young. I was eighteen and my nineteen course mates were mostly in their mid-twenties. We were in 300 Level. We were lucky. We were going to Togo as the last set of French undergraduates in Nigeria to travel to that country for the year abroad programme. None of us had ever ventured beyond the shores of Nigeria. Our juniors in 200 Level were sulking. The following year, they would head out to the Nigerian French Language Village in Badagry as the pioneer set of that new institution. Those who studied French before our generation wouldn't consider us lucky. They went to France for the year abroad. As the locust years came upon Nigeria in the early 1980s, the Nigerian government quietly signed agreements with institutions in Togo and Niger Republic. Northern Universities went to Niger. The south went to Togo. Even that proved too expensive with time, hence the decision to cancel the year abroad after my set.
We had swag. Don't mind me. I am trying to use the dialect of young Nigerians on Facebook. My friend, Ikhide Ikheloa, says we must constantly play catch-up with that generation in our essays. I guess swag means swagger. Our swag devolved from a certain sociology of superiority that defined Nigerian-ness in relation to the rest of Africa. It wasn't just that geographical size, resources, and population meshed in the imaginary of the rulers and the elite and gave them a conceited image of Nigeria as the giant and big brother of Africa, an image that trickled down from a mediocre rulership to a sheepish followership, it was also about optics, about what you saw in "the practice of everyday life" (apologies to Michel de Certeau) in Nigeria in the 1980s.
Africa was ubiquitous in the Nigeria of the 1980s. You did not go to Africa. Africa came to you. The rest of Africa came to your feet as a subaltern in your everyday interactions. Africa came to your feet, literally and metaphorically, in the form of that roving Ghanaian shoe maker (sobata) who sat at your feet and fortified your new shoes by threading the soles or polished your old shoes; Africa came to you in the form of the house boy or house girl from Cotonou; Africa came to you in the form of the family driver from Lomé; Africa came to you in the form of the Bozo maiguard from Niger Republic; Africa came to you in the form of the occasional washman from Mali, Senegal, Gambia or Sierra Leone. You evolved in a national atmospherics of menial jobs performed by nationals of other African countries.
That was not all. There were the students. Undergraduates from South Africa found refuge in Nigerian Universities. They enjoyed the much-vaunted African hospitality because the South African struggle was also ours. Olusegun Obasanjo had even assured them that Nigeria would invade South Africa with African juju and Yoruba ogun abenugongo to drive out Pieter Botha. Most of them were on Nigerian scholarships. We were still two decades away from a future that would have their xenophobic younger brothers and sisters look scornfully at Nigerians in the streets of Johannesburg or Pretoria and call them makwerekwere. There were students from Cameroon all over Nigerian Universities. You got a sense that they came because there weren't enough Universities in Paul Biya's fief and that kinda played into your sense of being the big brother.
These were the spectres of alterity that defined Africa in Nigeria's popular imagination. Nigeria was always going to be the superior mansion with uncountable rooms open to less privileged nationals of other African countries: "those small small countries", as we say in Nigeria. Those countries were prepared to go wherever Nigeria went. Thumbing their noses at Nigeria (Ghana dares to intimidate Nigerian businesses today) would come later after we missed the train to the 21st century. For instance, when we withdrew from the Commonwealth games to protest Margaret Thatcher's love nwantintin with Apartheid, the rest of the continent lined up respectfully behind Nigeria.
Given this background, it is easy to imagine our triumphalist arrival in Lomé in 1989. Our swag gave the impression of a bunch of Nigerian undergraduates who felt that they were doing Togo a favour by going to that small country. That's how Nigeria had socialised us to relate to the rest of Africa. There was a national mirror that constantly asked you to look not at your own reflection but at the rest of Africa genuflecting at your feet. Gnassingbé Eyadéma's Togo was going to show us the real mirror for the first time in our lives.
The trouble with underdevelopment is that it is always packaged in the hardware language of the social sciences, UN expats, NGOs, and actors in the Mercy Industrial Complex who reach out to hearts and pockets in the West via OXFAM, Bono, Madonna, Jeffrey Sachs, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, and Save the Children in order to deliver mosquito nets, dig wells, or supply UNICEF-assisted wooden slates to children going to school under trees, their distended bellies and fly-infested running noses always capable of winning the next Pulitzer Prize for Photography. No one pays attention to the software reality of underdevelopment as habit, culture, and psychology.
If old habits die hard, underdevelopment as habit does not even have death in its dictionary. It sticks to your skin like the beard of a Taliban Mullah and becomes an insidious practice of everyday life irrespective of your location. As psychology, underdevelopment farms a mental universe of perpetual self-actuation and puts a wedge between you and the sentient reality around you. Thus, it took almost three to four days after our arrival in Lomé before we realised for the first time that whatever their version of NEPA was hadn't "taken light" since we arrived. So conditioned were we by the habit of underdevelopment that we just settled in the villa d'accueil (university guest house) in downtown Lomé and lived the reality of Nigeria's constant power failures in our heads, totally oblivious to the reality on the ground.
I believe it was Tunde Ajibade, our class rep, who first noticed the alarming oddity of constant, uninterrupted electricity: "E gbo na, o ma dabi pe won ti muna lo lati jeta?" And the rest of us mocked him and commented on his endless capacity to come up with outlandish stories: "Tunde you don come again o. How dem no go dey take light? Where you see dat one before?" Some of us offered: "maybe dem dey take light for night when we dey sleep". Citizens of the giant of Africa were encountering development for the first time in their lives and their cognitive capacities just couldn't handle it – they were prisoners of the habit of underdevelopment.
By the end of the first week, we had to gba kamu and accept the fact that constant electricity was taken for granted in Togo. This affected our socialization into development. The authorities of the Université du Bénin (now Université de Lomé) had moved us into students' hostels on campus (I would find out years later that student accommodation in France was not too superior to the facilities in Lomé). We were beginning to make Togolese friends – exploring the whole range of undergraduate life with them in spaces of intellection and socialization on and off campus. That meant we had vocabularies of underdevelopment for which we had to find equivalents in French to carry the weight of our Nigerian world.
Consider the expression for the idea of power interruption in French – panne d'életricité. If you tried to explain the idea of the Nigerian power failure to your new Togolese friend and you said panne d'életricité, what came up in his mind was either a bulb suddenly snapping out of life and you replaced it or the extremely unusual situation of a mechanical fault in some central power station and you would have been warned weeks ahead of the scheduled maintenance shut down. That's what panne d'életricité covered in the semantic world of the Togolese. So we explained and explained and explained the Nigerian version of things, the frown on the faces of our Togolese friends a testament to their inability to grasp our Nigerian version of underdevelopment.
One other feature of the habit of underdevelopment is that your vocabulary is always superfluous because you need more words to carry the weight of experiences unknown to civilized humanity. For an entire year in Togo, we had a baggage of redundant Nigerian words and expressions: half current, power rationing, lantern, generators, etc. The move from underdevelopment to development also meant that we had to cope with translocations in meaning. Take something as simple as candles. Apart from the spiritual value of candles in aladura churches in Nigeria, they are first and foremost part of the instrumental world of power failure. In Togo, we had to transfer candles to the exclusive context of Catholic church rituals and candlelit dinners. You did not stock up on candles because you expected the electricity company to "take light".
It also took some time before we noticed the constant water supply. The day we moved to University residence, one of us, Michael Ogunlana, had immediately gone to the Grand Marché, Lomé's central market, to buy two plastic jerry cans for water storage. When he came back, the rest of us scolded him for not reminding us of that vital necessity and we all rushed to the market to buy plastic jerry cans and buckets. Well, we spent an entire year in Lomé and hot and cold water never stopped gushing out of the taps. Our Togolese friends on campus laughed heartily when we told them why we had bought those containers!
Such was the gap in basic public service delivery between Togo and Nigeria that we had had to shed the last shred of our illusion of being the giant of Africa by the end of the first month of our one-year sojourn. It was humiliating. The Yoruba would say "a fi itiju karun." At the end of our programme, we returned to Nigeria as humbled emissaries of the rest of Africa to our compatriots. We returned to a country where folks who had never stepped out of their underdevelopment were too far gone in the socialization that had them speak condescendingly about "those small small African countries" in beer parlour banter, never mind that they could be drinking beer chilled with ice block, the table littered with candles and kerosene lanterns because the beer parlour had not had light in three days.
And we would try to tell them that the people they were talking about in those "small small African countries" were beyond power and water failure. And they would dismiss us in that Nigerian spirit of never tolerating the idea of our being second to any country in Africa: "Ol'boy leave matter jare. Una own too much sef. Small time una go say Lomé na London." That is what makes Nigeria tick. Even the burukutu or paraga drinker in Lagos feels superior to the cabernet sauvignon drinker in Nairobi. Years later, as predestination would make me crisscross close to thirty African countries as a cultural scholar, I developed a private development index by trying to determine in my own unscientific way which of the following even the poorest citizens of any African country I was visiting could take for granted: (1) electricity, (2) pipe-borne water, (3) health services, (4) roads, (5) security.
Needless to say, in all my travels in Africa, the self-styled giant of Africa still presents the only situation where citizens, rich and poor, cannot take at least one of the five items above for granted. Our report card is a flat zero in all five. This colossal failure perhaps explains why our habit of underdevelopment has even begun to spin a subculture that is so peculiarly Nigerian: the nostalgia for disorder. I have an upper class Nigerian friend who has visited me once in the US and once in Canada. He is going to kill me when he reads this. He is one of those Nigerians who can afford frequent trips to Euro-America. I have never known him to spend more than two weeks outside of Nigeria. He is always itching to return home. The last time he visited me in Ottawa, I asked him why he was always in such a rush to go back to Nigeria.
His answer is how I first came by my tentative theory of nostalgia for disorder as an aspect of our habit of underdevelopment. Pius, he answered calmly over beer and peppersoup, when we wake up tomorrow, we can be sure that there will be light and water. We can be sure that the traffic lights will be working. If you have appointments, you can be sure that folks will be there on time. That is too much order and predictability for me. I'd die of boredom living in a place like this. I can never imagine life without the permanent drama of Nigeria's unpredictability. Your brain has to be on duty 24/7 in Nigeria. You go to sleep calculating the following day like a game of chess or even Russian roulette and the dynamics may have changed by the time you wake up. That's life. Nigeria is where the action is.
Since the habit of underdevelopment requires an endless rush of adrenaline into the system as you negotiate the quotidian in Nigeria, it may very well be life as my friend had stated enthusiastically but it also freezes Nigeria in time. Look at it this way: twenty-one years after twenty Nigerian undergraduates were humbled by their experience of infrastructure and public service delivery in Togo, it still took two Federal ministers, the Speaker of the Federal House of Representathieves, a state governor, and his commissioners to go and commission a third-rate flyover bridge in Ogun state recently. And those comical characters put up a national show of shame to boot.
Because they are all corrupt members of the rulership who travel wastefully all the time to developed countries – the corrupt governor is said to be in China as I write, the Speaker trained in Britain – why would they all waste the Nigerian tax payer's time by going to commission an ordinary flyover bridge in the 21st century despite all they see during their foreign trips that should convince them that the said bridge is a tragic sign of our backwardness? The answer is simple: it's the habit of underdevelopment. It's in the blood.
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