USA Africa Dialogue Series - Diaspora GIFT @ 50

Diaspora  GIFT @ 50
                                                   BYY

                                                    Okello Oculi
                                                    Africa Vision 525 Initiative

At fifty there is still a dance or three in a lady or a man for her or him to  be vain and grateful for receiving birthday gifts from children, members of the clan and friends. More importantly, it is a time when children are sure of the benefits they owe the upbringing they got from parents. As successful people say in biographical interviews, they deeply attribute their success in life to the "discipline" they were subjected to as toddlers and teenagers even though its severity often made them doubt whether their father was really their biological father. For some it is surely the time they start allowing themselves to wonder what quality of coffins they will use as parting gifts to their parents - a thought which, God forbid, should not come to be as yet.

With regards to those in the Diaspora, it is useful to recall an analogy that Prime Minister Julius Nyerere once made. He likened those sent to school in Africa to messengers sent by villagers hit my famine and severe food shortage to borrow food from a far away village. If they arrive in the better-off village and settle down to eat and end their hunger while forgetting the condition of those who had sent them, they are judged harshly. Nyerere  insisted that graduates of schools and testify institutions must to take back to their villages, the benefits of the knowledge they had learnt in classrooms, laboratories and field researches..

The relevance of this analogy is today dramatized in both the local media and  academic literature by the quantum of US Dollars and Euros that gatekeepers of economies call "annual remittances". In 2009 as much as 8 billion dollars was cited as the amount that entered Nigeria's economy as remittances by the Diaspora.  These are easily measurable flows.  Some of these values come in the form of equipment for rendering services such as medical equipment and pharmaceutical supplies for hospitals built at hometowns. Their impact may be more durable than those of funds that go into status-enhancing prestige consumables like golden or platinum coffins and Brazilian wigs for fashionable ladies.

My non-for-profit NGO, Africa Vision 525 Initiative, in 2008 published volume one, of a book series, consisting of chapters by Professors Toyin Falola, Ali Mazrui, Mahmud Mamdani, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja and others as part of a Pan-African Diaspora.  Dr. Tade Aina has been sending out vital information about opportunities for funded research challenges for those who can jump into pools of competition for grants. The values of these flows are not easy to measure.
The Internet has provided a highway for a rapid and vast flow of intellectual outputs from the Diaspora.  Some distribution-focused ones re-disseminate material published in Nigerian newspapers. Some focus on commentaries on information received on events and political drama in Nigeria.  There are those that are preoccupied with local home events, with Ekiti, Ogun and Edo States being most favoured. There is a category that cherish throwing lavish insults at those who challenge their viewpoints. A valuable category broadcast deaths and obituaries. In recent times a growing number of Nigerian husbands are reported to have murdering their spouses.

It is significant that there is little production of commentaries on American affairs whether in the humanities or in 'Scientific Nigeria'. It was a delight meeting an engineer based in Sao Paolo in Brazil at a conference in Dakar on the matter of urgent invention of a United States of Africa.  He emphasized engineering lessons for Africa from his Brazilian experience.  The study of America and the Americas for the benefit of informing Nigerians is simply lacking. In the field of Political Science, for example, there is little investment is research in the working of the American legislative system at local, state and federal levels as potential guides to Nigerian practitioners of a system widely known to have been borrowed from the American tradition of power. When I interviewed a state legislator in Wisconsin, aides to a Senator in Washington Dc, and a local education policy-maker who was also teaching at Howard University, for lessons in relations between elected officials and their constituencies, it was greeted with much surprise . It was an undeveloped field.

In the field of Literature, Diaspora scholars have seen their mission more in reporting African writers to their American audience than in reporting the tradition of American literature to audiences back in Africa. At an African Languages and Literature Conference held in Fez in Morocco, the three poets who travelled from Nigeria and one teacher of Literature from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, were grossly outnumbered from Diaspora scholars working in North American universities. These Diaspora scholars did not, however, present comparative studies of American and African Literature. Little was reported on Literature by Africa-Americans giants like Baldwin, Walker, Alison and even W.E.B Dubois, etc, let alone younger and contemporary writers.

In the Social Sciences there is a neglect of studies of North Africa, Southern. Central and Eastern Africa in a way that can build a body of  expert advice for Nigeria's business sector and diplomats.  With the current severe collapse in infrastructure and top researchers and scholars in Nigeria's universities, the failure to use research funds and rich library resources in the Americas, has served as double weakness and loss to Nigerian academic and policy makers.  When a group of scholars were working on a book on Nigeria's foreign policy in the last fifty years, senior diplomats who gave us collective consultation were rather emphatic about severe weaknesses in the lack of research capacity and resources available to officials. The severity of the situation was dramatized by the more favorable comments in the intellectual power that the first generation of diplomats had exhibited compared to recent decades.

On 24th September, 2010 the American Embassy brought Dr. Walker to talk to an audience dominated by medical doctors on what he called "Street Medicine". His clients are destitute who sleep on streets to frost prone cities like Philadelphia and more favorable Florida and San Francisco.  The most powerful part of his lecture was a short documentary film on his star patients.  The shock value of the revelation that poverty exists among white people in America was palpable. It was clear that he expected it and wished to experience it. The shock for me was despite the millions of Nigerians in the Diaspora across the United States of America, this silence about poverty in "God's Own Country" was common among medical doctors. Perhaps telling it "like it is" about conditions in that country is, mistakenly assumed to  diminish the social power of a Texan or Minnesotan accent in a Diaspora come home to visit.

At a recent gathering of top university teachers charged with working out strategies for reviving the book culture in Nigeria's academia, a suggestion that scholars should translate widely celebrated books from Nigeria and other parts of the world in all disciplines into their mother tongue, was met with a combination of enthusiasm and panic. Those in panic were tormented by reported research on learning experiences which showed that countries like Indonesia, Japan, Holland, Portugal, and Sweden etc France who taught science subjects in their mother tongue achieved higher scores in scientific creativity.  A mental fatigue gripped those confronted with the imperative of using their mother tongue to promote linguistic self-reliance.

The lesson is clearly that the Diaspora carries a special intellectual burden towards building that form of power inside Nigeria and the rest of Africa. They have a rich tradition of "Area Studies" and Travel (Tourism) books and newspaper in their host countries to draw from. A strange version of "revolutionary thinking" in the Washington DC area was deeply offended when  I said, in an interview about my book Discourses on African Affairs (by Africa World Press), that  I was conducting interviews to learn possible lessons from the American legislative culture. This was considered outrageous and reactionary; for how can we learn from imperialism. This bizarre form of intellectual isolationism will continue to make Africa fail to gain from the vast intellectual capacity and opportunities in its Diaspora. It must end; and do so as a vital birthday gifts to all African countries that are celebrating birthdays at 50.

--  

Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222  (fax)
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue