Thank you very much Toyin. It has been about a year now since we met in Ibadan at the conference organized in honor of Professor Falola. I appreciate the things that you have highlighted or suggested to be more precise. But let me explain some reasons why even though I support doing those things you listed, I am still thinking deeper about the long term trajectory of the current situation in Africa and Nigeria. There are no easy answers to be frank. Here are my concerns:
a) Helping Those in Need: A Response from Homans and Blau -- To be brief, the two scholars became famous for their work on social exchange theory. While there is some shared focus between the two scholars, I want to stress the unique contribution of Blau whose social exchange theory emphasizes economics and the social structure that emerges out of social exchange relationship, especially when giving tends to be from one side and receiving tend to be on the other. Of course I can do quite a lot to help others but the reason why I dislike staying for long in my village in Bauchi State is that when I am there, people visit me and when I give them something, over time, I noticed a kind social relationship of power and status either emerges or is being solidified because I am the giver and the benefactor, and the people visiting me are the receivers. I always pray to God for the genuine spirit of humility and I never want to be in a situation where something will get into my head and I feel like I am some special person more than others. I want to be always close to and aware of my status as a mortal being. It is all about opportunity, as one theory is called "Differential Opportunity."
We can talk about what people in diaspora can do to diminish that but as a sociologist, I truly believe that if giving is always from one side to the other in a social exchange process that assigns value in a certain way, there is a power dynamic or relationship that will emerge. This is a social fact. Many diaspora fellows receive special attention or respect because of the resources that they command. I am using "resources" here in a broadly conceptualized manner, not just money.
The social exchange is not just something neutral even though many might take it for granted. Even within religious organizations, for instance, whoever gives constantly and whoever receives constantly, depending on whatever the value systems assigns value to in the the social exchange process, those regularly giving will end up assuming certain position of influence and power more than the receivers. And often if care is not taken this can transform the consciousness of the givers just like those who donate too much money in religious or political organisations.
Similarly, for instance, a pastor who feels he has special divine power (a resource) to make things happen to others who lack the power to make the same thing happen, end up becoming like a super-human being and forget about his regular humanity, thus developing "charisma" and therefore specially distinguished. What a persons ends up doing with the charisma, is an open-ended question. One sees a lot of them on television.
So in the long run, helping from here sounds good and well-intended but it can lead to the emergence of a skewed relationship in favor of the benefactor. In many parts of the world today, even when someone is younger, if the person is very wealthy, and others in his or her family are dependent on him or her, even if the dependents are older or are the person's parents, the power dynamics change in the relationship because of the nature of social exchange. I have observed this dynamic a lot while in Nigeria. The empirical question here is what sort of power relationship emerges as a byproduct of the kind of social exchange taking place which can then become the initial foundation of a particular kind of social structure? This is the concern that Blau raises and I believe it is an important issue that needs to be considered.
On another note, let us assume that what you are suggesting is for me to be charitable by helping others. Well, some scholars ask, What is wrong with charity? Here are the answers:
a) It is personal and fickle in nature; b) It assumes the dependence of the weak and poor on the will and disposition of the rich and powerful; c) It is subject to the vagaries of short term funding which may be politically determined; d) It is not about complementing; rather, it attempts to substitute for concerted social, economic, and political commitment and social action for common welfare; e) Personal morality agendas can be secretly infused into the process while it remains unexposed to public scrutiny, debate and examination; In brief, it helps legitimize the status quo by discouraging people from asking fundamental questions about the justness of the system.
These do not need to always happen and a person who is ethically reflective can be deliberate, intentional and systematic in avoiding these things that are wrong with charity, but we cannot just ignore them. This leads me to the next issue.
b) Helping Those in Need: Theotonio Dos Santos and The Structure of Dependence - At the macro - level, especially relationships between nations or social groups, giving by one side and receiving by another side long ago drew the attention of a Brazilian economist and scholar, Theotonio Dos Santos. Here is how he describes the structure of dependence: "dependence is a situation in which the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected. The relations of interdependence between two or more economies, and between these and world trade, assumes the forms of dependence when some countries (the dominant ones) can expand and can be self-sustaining, while other countries (the dependent ones) can do this only as a reflection of that expansion, which can have either a positive or a negative effect on their immediate development" (Dos Santos in American Economic Review 60:2, May 1970).
As you can see, while support from the diaspora is good and maybe well-intended, the kinds of concerns I have in the long run are captured in the sentiment of Dos Santos' analysis. My sense is that in the near future, given what you suggested, the giving will be from the diaspora to the people back in Nigeria or Africa. But while this might start as something innocent, innocuous and charitable, benevolent and well-intended, the unintended consequence will be a structure of dependence. Dambisa Moyo raised some arguments along this line in her book Dead Aid, which has generated a lot of reaction. Western aid while well-intended, has done a lot of damage also to how many African countries pursue development. The point is not that foreign aid as such is bad or charitable giving by one social group to another is bad, but in spite of its good intention, it often results in a structure of dependence between African countries or people who rely on western nations or social groups in the West or anywhere for that matter for charitable giving, and on that basis, a power relationship of inequality emerges. Where this initial foundation of inequality goes in terms of shaping the social structure is an open-ended question. If we are pretty sure that the powerful who become elevated by this kind of social exchange will use their power, ethically and compassionately then we do not have to worry about this at all. But history shows that this is often not always the case. So in the long run, I am more inclined to a strategy that will make Africans and Nigerians in particular more self-sustaining and self-reliant so that what they receive does not become a long term situation that will just lead them to subservience and change their attitudes about themselves and about the charitable givers.
C) Contribute by Writing and Planting Ideas: I like this argument too. I love studying ideas. My interest started from elementary school but I attribute the greatest inspiration to a Ghanaian scholar by name Professor Ernest K. Dumor. Dumor taught in one of the universities in Michigan for a long time before returning to Africa. He was the chair of the Sociology Department at Bayero University Kano, Nigeria where I did my undergraduate studies. He was very thorough and in our social theory course, he introduced us to the varieties of revolutions that took place in Europe to create the modern world and I went to the reserve section of the library and read all the assigned references. But when we look closely at ideas, we have to be concerned about what factors gives rise to certain ideas, what makes people espouse them, why they do so at a particular time, how do they convey the ideas, and why do people embrace the ideas? All these may have nothing to do with the truthfulness of the ideas or their authenticity in some cases. This is what is referred to as "the ethnography of ideas" as J.M. Blaut discusses it in his The Colonizer's Model of the World.
On another note, the following quotes from Mannheim gives me concern that often the conversation we are having is just among a small group of people in academia. I am not saying the conversation is not good but I am just concerned about the number of people involved compared to the people out there that need to be involved for social change to become broad-based. Not even everyone in academia engages in such discussion seriously in Africa. Here are the quotes that make me feel the masses in Africa are by and large excluded or just used as sources of data by many of us who are academic scholars. At least in Nigeria, any good observer in the university there will note that the passion driving scholarly work for the most part is not necessarily to solve the problems of the masses but to improves one's scholarly standing. This is true to a high degree even in American universities. There are times where there are overlaps between the solutions to a problem and the scholarly contribution of some scholars, but for many, it is about how to facilitate one's elevation in the academic pecking order. The quotes:
"All knowledge and all ideas are 'bound to a location,' though to different degrees, within the social structure and the historical process. At times a particular group can have fuller access to the understanding of a social phenomenon than other groups, but no group can have total access to it. Ideas are rooted in the differential location in historical time and social structure of their proponents so that thought is inevitably perspectivistic."
Existential factors:
"Are relevant not only to the genesis of ideas, but that they penetrate into the forms and content and that they decisively determine the scope and the intensity of our experience and observation, i.e., the 'perspective of the subject."
"That not only do fundamental orientations, evaluations, and the content of ideas differ but that the manner of stating a problem, the sort of approach made, and even the categories in which experiences are subsumed, collected, and ordered vary according to the social position of the observer."
Without some explicit commitment, much of the conversation about ideas is taking place among people in certain locations of the social structure that are different from those that Fanon called "The Wretched of the Earth," those treated by the neoliberal economic social order as "surplus people" and with all the knowledge in society produced by scholars, they sometimes have to act like the "Los Indignados" movement in Spain to create knowledge and meaning that is relevant immediately to their social location in the society and its social structure . The great motivation for most of the exchange of ideas is professional growth of the scholar which in many cases may not be directly relevant to the situation of peasants, rural women and the underclass in Africa. Many scholars in academic setting are all in a rush to reach somewhere in the academic pecking. If such a rise is always a benefit to ordinary people, then it will not be an issue of concern. But often it may have no relationship or positive impact on the existential struggles of the masses. Some of works by scholars maybe about the masses, but it is not available in such a way that the masses can easily access it and translate it into something real and practical. So there is a lacunae between the two sides.
The issue of course is that even when people have the ideas, there is no guarantee that they will translate it into concrete practice. What they decide to do with what they know is a moral and ethical question and not a simple academic one as such. If we had well-developed civil society organizations in Africa, this can make a huge difference as they can help in translating the meaningful contribution by scholars into practice. What I am saying here applies to many in the American higher education system. Other factors just mitigate the broader desirable effects and consequences of meaningful intellectual conversation. The conversation becomes limited to a small percentage of the country's population especially when disciplinary jargon is used.
d) How Many People Read, Are Willing and Can Afford to Buy the Books? Another issue worth thinking about is even if we invest in ideas through writing books with colleagues in Africa, first, you have to ask, how deep do those ideas penetrate the social structure of African society or Nigerian society in particular. How deep do they penetrate the consciousness of people there? There is a comedian in the U.S. who once joked that if you want to hide something from a black person, put it in a book. Even among whites in America, the percentage of people who seriously read is small, and among those who read, if you subtract those that read for the sake of passing an exam in school, it is even lower. Moreover even when people master the ideas after reading, there are still other important considerations with regard to whether the ideas can contribute broadly in transforming society. Such considerations include: the capacity to meaningful adopt and adapt the ideas to a social context after understanding it; how long do people who read and understand the ideas keep the ideas in their consciousness; and finally, to what extent are they willing to cultivate the moral and ethical insights from the ideas as preparation to transform the world by first transforming their consciousness. We should remember what Marx said which at one point appeared very controversial that it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but on the contrary their social existence that determines their consciousness. So if ideas can shape consciousness, the mediating factor is social existence, and of course once developed, consciousness can also shape social existence. It is a dialectical process. Sometimes you discuss ideas with students even at the graduate level and three weeks later if you ask them about those ideas, many of them can hardly recall the ideas accurately.
Part of the problem is the tyranny of the urgent where people are very busy working to pay their bills and another reason is what Herbert Marcuse, Freudian Marxist, calls "repressive desublimation" in his book "One Dimensional Man" where the culture industry capitalizes on the so-called freedom in liberal democracy and make citizens serious consumers of entertainment that preoccupies the minds of many people thereby distracting them from thinking about issues of great importance for the transformation of society e.g., social justice. So in this case humans become free in liberal democracy, but the desublimation of the repressive ego does not lead to freedom especially in a capitalist society because it leads to just pursuing short term gratification that are often in the realm of sensual desires. The Nigerian social media as part of the culture industry is overwhelmingly preoccupied with reporting the lifestyles of celebrities of which maybe more than 90% of them are in Lagos. They tell you who is sleeping with who, who is going out with who, who made millions, or who did something extraordinary like burying his father in a newly ordered BMW vehicle as a way of demonstrating his wealth.
I was in Nigeria for thirteen months last year. Many Nigerians in diaspora told me that they cannot stay in Nigeria for that long (and maybe for good reasons), but frankly I adjusted very well. Of course my earlier training was in "rural sociology"and I used to spend a lot of time reading the journal of peasant studies. It is only on rare occasion you find people who are fascinated with reading in Nigeria. Even in the universities, the percentage of highly committed readers is not high based on my experience there. I can be corrected if I am wrong on this observation.
I conducted research on six topics. One research topic out of the six I investigated while in Nigeria was visiting drinking places to see what people discuss during their leisure time. The availability and meaningful use of leisure time is critical in how people through participating in progressive civil society groups and contribute to bringing about civil repair. Before the French revolution, the saloons in Paris were the places where vibrant ideas were discussed about the Enlightenment, which contributed to educating and mobilizing the people. I wanted to see what Nigerian drinking places do in this respect with regard to use of leisure time. When I discussed it first with graduate students in class, one older student told me that I should not expect any serious discussion at all, let alone progressive ideas. He said if the people are young, they will just be talking about the body parts of a woman and if they are middle age, business and money, and then the elderly will talk about politics and power. When the elderly talk about power and politics, it is often not with the intention of bringing about progressive and broad-based social transformation but as a pathway of getting access to privileges such as money and influence. I did not find anything that indicates the drinking place is a place where people discuss ideas that are being debated based on a book or what a scholar said or wrote that have consequences for life and social transformation. Next time I am back in Nigeria, I will spend sometime with newspaper vendors to see what kinds of arguments people engage in around that environment and what potentials are there for broad-based social transformation from such discussion. These for Mannheim will be different locations in the social structure which can be source for generating ideas applicable to that particular context.
Once I was in a hotel in Ikeja Lagos and I saw this young female employee just watching a western movie that was violent. It was difficult to even get her attention. Towards the end, I asked her politely what she found very interesting in the movie? No any meaningful answer. It is just entertainment. Many think that the Nigerian youth because they are youth are better agents of change but what I saw was a great amount of consumerism and the desire to get rich quick and flaunt extravagant wealth. So I am not against writing and planting ideas, but given what I saw, I wonder how many people really read what we write among the power elite or the general public, especially those at the bottom of the totem pole. How can we get the ideas in the books reach them. It is just a small group of people in academia and some professions that read, but many in academia read for their personal and professional growth without an agenda of how to transform the nation, and maybe this is justified because they feel powerless.
At one time around Easter, I had to ship some boxes with books from Lagos to another part of Nigeria. So when we went to ABC Transport office to do that, I was there for close to 30 minutes and I saw a person reading a book there that he never raised his head from the book to see who is passing by even close to him. He just turned one page after another. I did not ask him the title of the book he was reading, but when I was done, I moved close to him and said, "excuse me, please I just want to say something." And I told him that I have been in Nigeria for quite some time and have been very observant about the reading culture but never saw a person in public seriously reading a book the way he was engaged in reading his book. Even even among students on campus, there are few people who do that kind of reading with high concentration except during exam time. So I told the man that I just wanted to congratulate him for being so disciplined in what he was doing.
My point is even if we publish books, which is excellent and I am 100% in support of, yet only a small percentage of people are willing and can afford to buy the books and read them, how can we ensure that the ideas penetrate into the different parts and locations of the social structure in the sense that Mannheim made reference to. It primarily becomes a conversation among a small group of people. It is not our fault, but I am wondering practically and strategically how the ideas can shake the society by reaching all parts of the social structure.
But of even great interest, Weber in his "Economy and Society" argues that ideas can only bring about change even when they are available when the ideas intersect with the social and material interest of those capable of using them and have power to apply them to bring about change. For instance, when one reads, "The Road From Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective" one realizes that the ideas have existed for a long time, but it was only when late Prime Minister Thatcher and late President Ronald Reagan came to power and found the ideas intersecting with their social and material interest that the ideas were translated into public policy. I proceed now to my last point.
e) Expensive Access and Inadequate Access to Internet: There are many Nigerians who probably given the right conditions are highly motivated to learn. I have encountered many in the country and I believe this is the case across many African countries. There is so much information on the internet that can educate one and increase his or her intellectual and professional capacity. But when I was in Nigeria, I paid more for internet access there than here in the U.S. Sometimes, the internet on the phone is even more reliable than on the computer. But how much serious work can one do on a phone? You can buy much internet service but if you use it so much or intensively, you can finish a hundred dollar worth of internet data in a week if you download so much. So even when many Nigerians want to access information on the internet, the digital divide ensures that only a small percentage can afford to do so. And the internet access varies with region in the country, city and location within the city. I experienced all that. This is not much different in some respect with the U.S. where some rural communities still use dial up system to access internet and faster internet access is more available in rich zip codes and neighborhood with high concentration of professionals and educated people who can afford to pay a high amount for the service. South Korea is more wired than the U.S. because U.S. will by and large only allow private companies to provide that service and private companies are concerned about rate of return and so they do not invest much in poor communities or rural areas. In South Korea, the state took the initiative to wire the country.
Sometimes in Nigeria one needs to stay in very expensive hotel to get efficient internet access. I truly believe it is a great idea to create websites with useful information that our brothers and sisters in Africa can access but how many can have that access, and even if they have, what percentage of the population cares. All this is not the fault of the person providing such service from the Western world. What I am trying to address is going beyond the general claim about the role of ideas by examining the mechanisms for translating the ideas into all parts and locations of the social structure in Africa. I do not think we can honestly ignore that.
We need to plant ideas, educate people, etc. But given Nigeria's history, and the rate in which ideas have been an inspiration for socially desirable change, how many ideas do we need or what critical mass do we have to reach in that respect to turn the country or the African continent into a sustainably progressive direction? How many educated people do we need if that is the focus to turn the direction of the country and the continent? It is just like religion. How many God-fearing people do you need to transform Africa in general and Nigeria in particular? What do you have to add to religion as we know it today to make it a strong promoter of progressive social transformation? All the election rigging in Nigeria is committed by either Christians or Muslims on the most part. Where did God go with regard to his moral teaching to them? Compared to 1960, today we have more imams and pastors, but religion seems to have undesirable impact on public morality or morality in the public square. Someone though in Nigeria told me that, well, without religion things could have been worse. So this is the defense.
Even here in the United States, having taught western humanities, I told a public gathering in my school that for a civilization to trace is genealogy to the Ancient Greeks, and to read all the big ideas and issues that were raised since those days, through the different phases of evolution such as the Roman Empire, Medieval Scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Modernity, and and then come and end up with a crap called neoliberal capitalist economy as an expression of the highest achievement of the contemporary vision of a good human society is frankly, in many respects, a waste of the human lives that fought for human "progress" in revolutions in the past. Note that I cannot even say progress without putting it in inverted commas.
Where do we go from here, where the dignity of humanity is increasingly becoming fragile and "the human" is increasingly disappearing? Given all this, I conclude with a feeling of pessimism at the intellectual level but OPTIMISM OF THE HEART. Thank you very much.
Samuel Zalanga, Ph.D.
Bethel University
Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Reconciliation Studies,
Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive, #24, Saint Paul, MN 55112.
Office Phone: 651-638-6023
There are various things you can do.You can help those in need in various ways.Writing itself is significant because it plants seeds in people's minds.You can provide on the ground assistance, by coming and going, or help within a digital context, such as the information sharing and advisory assistance of Pius Adesanmi's Facebook Doctoral Lounge and Toyin Falola's continuous stream of collaborative book projects, among other possibilities. Moyo Okediji's Facebook University of African Art is also priceless in developing cutting edge text in a collaborative, open access context.You dont have to live in Nigeria to contribute, even decisively.toyin--On Mon, 25 Feb 2019 at 10:54, Samuel Zalanga <szalanga@gmail.com> wrote:Lamentation! For how long? We cannot continue deceiving ourselves. Can we continue to blame outsiders for this? It pains to see those situations on social media even though sometimes the social media can be misleading. I just felt depressed in the past two days as though someone very close that I know died? Why?Because at my age now, I have been deceived so many times. Frankly when I see well-dressed Nigerian politicians, my heartbeat goes faster because since I was young, I have seen those same type of people claiming to be leaders committed to improving the lives of ordinary people, a group I identify with without apology. This inspired me to study development studies and social change, which exposed me more to the variety of struggles in different human societies aimed at elevating their lives. But it appears those elites have not internalized social constraints mechanisms. One out of the many important requirements for all well-functioning societies is devising effective means and mechanisms for regulating people's aspirations, since there is a tendency for humans to have insatiable desires, or to allow their aspirations go wild while the means for achieving them is not there. The gap between the two leads to anomie among other things.Given the way things are, I will probably finish my time on earth without seeing Nigeria reach what I was hoping for when I was younger. While I have a better opportunity to thrive and flourish in the United States, part of me feels that from the point of view of economics of education, the people's money in Nigeria was used to educate me with the hope that when I graduate I will contribute to national development. In the first place, this was the justification and reason why such money was denied to rural women and peasants (among other social groups), who surely needed it for the provision of healthy drinking water, medical facilities for the sick, especially pregnant women, and for the poor to improve their productivity and livelihood. A huge amount of that money was invested in me and others, and the question is what have I done to those masses who it seems have been swindled?But even back in Nigeria, many scholars have either been reduced or they have reduced themselves to the role of a resource person rather than social agents for bringing about civil repair and social transformation so that as John Rawls said, it must benefit first and foremost "the least advantaged people" in society. And the greatest frustration is that when one understands what is happening at the bottom of the pyramid of the Nigerian society, it is hard to persuade oneself that one can change the situation from here by metaphorically "firing missiles" from far away.SamuelSamuel Zalanga, Ph.D.Bethel UniversityDepartment of Anthropology, Sociology and Reconciliation Studies,Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive, #24, Saint Paul, MN 55112.Office Phone: 651-638-6023--On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 4:24 AM Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:--Instagram, Facebook and possibly Twitter and others are crucial for following developments in the ongoing Nigerian electionsViolence, destruction of voting materials, murder of a youth corper and a young voter, stoning to death and burning of an alleged political party thug disrupting voting, voters in line, a politician moving around with bullion vans, dancing to celebrate defiance of mediocrity and agents of death, disruptions of voters by thugs spraying machine gun fire...all these and more await you on these platforms which are indispensable to a bird's eye view of what should be a normal, peaceful process but which has made parts of Nigeria a theatre of war
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment