On Boats, Pirates & Matters Riparian (A Speech Transcript)

These are the notes/transcript of a talk I gave at the inaugural event of Kampala’s CHAi Talks, dubbed Inception. I thought I’d avail them here for cross-reference to any future ideas I might adopt, especially regarding alterations thereto:

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Comrades & Friends—it is my utmost hope and expectation that you are well and hale—because the intention at the end of my remarks tonight, and indeed what I have been told is CHAi’s overriding & guiding philosophy—is to disrupt your certainty about things. I’d like to say that I labor under no illusions as to how tall an order this is, and were it to be applied borderlessly—we’d not leave this place until the proverbial cows returned home, so I’ll limit myself to discussing some very specific and I hope simple & comprehensible notions.

But before we get into the business of provocation—before we enter disruption mode, I hope to win over enough of your confidence in order for you to let me persuade you in the general direction of my stated aim.

So I’ll tell a little tale; about myself.

Now, shortly after I was born, many years ago, twenty-some odd—which is a heck of a long time by our national demographics that claim 70% of our population is younger than 24; meaning most if not all of us in this room are senior citizens—my parents decided to name me Surumani Manzi

This was a time when Facebook wasn’t even a word and twitter was just the annoying sounds made by disrespectful birds.

So my parents, after what one would imagine were detailed, thorough and comprehensive consultations with family, friends, the clan and perhaps even village—this was the naming norm in their day, when a child belonged to the nation and not just to the two reproductive-gamete-contributors, otherwise known as biological parents.

Today, you are less likely to name your newborn after the most famous hunter in your clan, and more likely to name them after your favorite Telemundo actor or actress.

Anyhow—guess what, as the curator’s introduction of me earlier testifies, the name my parents gave me stuck—and so I’ve had to refer to and identify myself by it since I learnt how to pronounce words.

Now, please note that this is not a particularly exciting name—I’m sorry to confess, I mean, it doesn’t turn heads or elicit uncontrollable screams of hysterical admiration—and who knows, had I been given a choice in the matter of my Christening—I’d have had a suggestion or two to put to by beloved parents and the Anglican priest who sprinkled those droplets on my temple as my two-year old self shrieked, kicked, scratched and otherwise unsuccessfully fought-off what I was convinced was a conspiracy to drown me that fateful Sunday.  

And so, like most of us here tonight—I got a name that involved consultations with everybody else but me. This means we’ve led all our lives, and negotiated our way in the world, standing upon the legacy of other people’s decisions.

Of course, along the way—and I’m certainly not unique in this—my teenage-self experimented with funkier and more catchy variations of this nominal code. In my more informal and peer-to-peer engagements—I preferred to truncate, abbreviate, season and otherwise pimp the name. So Surumani, or its Anglo-Saxon variant Solomon, became Solo, Sula, Solo the Dude, Solo the Great etc. The possibilities were endless. And as for Manzi, I’d better leave that to your no doubt rich imaginations.

And yet they say the sweetest-tasting word in anyone’s mouth or ear is the sound of their own name. For me it’s the eight Latin alphabets and six syllables.

Life is full of ironies, and this goes to show just how elusive and illusory our sense of self and claims to unique, personal identity can be—if not how intrinsically narcissistic we are.

Now, make no mistake, my parents—just like most parents—are well meaning folk, and their intentions were no doubt good in giving me the appellation that they did. And so my intention here tonight, is not to indict them for not having waited till I was old enough to have a choice before giving me a name.

My intention in this talk is not even, despite appearances so far, to complain about our names and ask us to change them if we can. I am aware that many African people have taken steps toward doing just this—formally through notarial affidavits, or informally through Twitter handles & Facebook IDs.

It is certainly a phenomenon worth exploring—but I shan’t make that my burden today.

I only chose a story on names for the opening analogy because names are the most potent symbol of identity. Our concept of language as toddlers begins with naming things. So here, the name is an analogy for value-systems, moral codes and many other acquired ‘identities’.

What therefore, after such a winding and roundabout way of introducing myself, do I wish to speak about?

Well—three things, simply.

I want to talk about the high seas, I want to talk about boats, and I want to talk about piracy.

I’ll say at the outset that these words or concepts are meant to be purely figurative and/or metaphorical—and the thread that binds them together, is identity.

Boats denote identity, the high seas denote life, and we’ll find out what piracy means later.

So in a way, I’ll be trying my hand at street-side philosophy. The one best epitomized by the animated and pixelated patrons of single-pot, many-straw drinking joints.

Let us begin with boats.

For those who have done some sailing, you know that once a boat lifts anchor and pushes off the shore into the last untamed habitat of our planet—the sea, then it becomes the last shred of hope for us.

Man has conquered the air, and people live at the top of mountains, and are trying to colonize other planets, but no one lives at the bottom of the ocean.

And I chose the boat as my metaphor, not the airplane—thought it could be argued that air is as much a fluid as water— but I prefer the boat analogy because marine accidents have the lowest survival likelihood.

In fact, there are 20% chances of surviving a boat accident, compared to 50% chances of surviving a car accident, and 95% chances of surviving a plane crush on land.

If you’re plane lands on water though, you may end up being one of the Malaysian airline crash victims who are still being searched for three years later.

Once you’re in the middle of the sea and your vessel develops a hole and begins to fill with water—there is no crash landing available to you as a recourse.

And unlike when your car stalls on a road trip, and you just get out and walk to the nearest motel or hitchhike through a forest while eating wild berries, at sea, you are just surrounded by miles of water you can’t drink.

And the difference between a life jacket and a parachute is that a parachute leads you down to safety, while a life jacket keeps you floating as you wait for death.

We are terrestrial or land mammals, and it’s good to know that we can be safe on the land, where evolution has shaped and equipped us sufficiently to be able to deal with most threats and challenges to our survival.

But life, thought of abstractly—though our personal and collective realities tend to corroborate this abstraction— is not like the land; predictable, safe or familiar. It rather is like water in its massive forms— fluid like the sea, restless and ever migratory like the river, ever hungry and never sated or filled like the oceans.

In fact, even well-known adage of water being life lends itself quite neatly to this argument.

Because while the land is rigid, stable and fixed—water is always on the move, pushing against itself, riding on currents, lapping against the coasts and sometimes, quite unluckily for us—because we’re neither amphibious nor aquatic—invading and claiming the land.

So my theory tonight is to hypothesize or postulate that our human experience of life, and the world, is like that of sailors on a vast ocean. And we undertake this journey upon the safety of our boats, which boats in this case are our identities.

Now what makes an identity? Are there real identities and fake or illusory ones? Is there such a thing as a single identity, or can a person assume multiple identities? Is it something that is fixed and inflexible, or is it a notion that can be refined, changed and—like computer software—updated over time?

And perhaps most importantly—who is in charge of giving one their identity? Is it you, the identity bearer, or it everyone and everything else that has authority over you?

And I’m referring here to authority figures like the state, family, elders, employers, community, church, mosque, companies etc.

I will not presume to answer these questions tonight. I strongly suspect that, I have neither their inclination nor the wisdom to do so ably.

So I’d like to invite you to think over a few things arising from these questions over with me.

We’ve already talked about how akin life is to seafaring, or a journey by water. And how our identities are the boats, the vessels if you like, we use to make this journey.

Now, like our identities—boats, even the best of them like the ill-fated Titanic, come with their own complications.

Of course some boats are more formidable than others—tankers and cruise ships are hardier than canoes and rafts, for illustration.

But even the most powerful boats cannot travel in a straight-lines across the water, or they risk using too much fuel and being inefficient, or damaging an engine and stalling. So from time to time, they have to change course, and take advantage of current pathways or avoid tides and headwinds.

And we should not forget that there are some little streams and rapid-infested river sections where canoes and rafts do a better than large ships, which would only run aground.

The point here is that identities are as different as there are individuals and communities, but each set and type has a purpose that it plays which should suit the needs and interests of its bearers.

Because humans, like all life forms, never act against their own interests, unless functionally compromised.

So if you’re an introvert, female, Black, Indian, middle class, unemployed, Christian, Hindu—these things should suit your needs.

And yet it’s very easy to know when one’s identity fails to align with their interests—there is an almost immediate and concerted attempt to alter it; be it in the form of hair extensions or skin bleaching for African women; or phony English accents for the continent’s elite.

Notice than some of these things are presumably more permanent than others.

But if a ship steering a particular course encounters a cyclone, or realizes that it’s on a collision course with another ship—then the wisest thing to do is to change direction.

In the same way, I think that what we consider African identities are a complex, multidimensional, many-sided thing.

Most of us have inherited some of these dimensions by virtue of our birth, a few have acquired them through socialization, and even fewer have had the liberty of authoring their own identities and senses of self.

But just like a river empties one sea and fills another, our search for who we are must not be limited by where we come from, or who are born to—who our friends are, what schools we went to, or what books we read. Our identity is all of these things, yes, but it is also more.

Just like a river carrying water headlong is likely pick up minerals and other solutes along the way that create different water compositions at source and mouth.

It’s not a question of technology and modern civilization, or the lack thereof—I hear many of my fellow Pan-African enthusiasts romanticizing how being truly African involves dressing in hides and living in round huts thatched with straw.

But we are not the first people to live in these huts or wear leather—if we were, there would be no English or Japanese words for them.

It’s also not a question of mutilating the genitalia of women in order for one to be declared a real African woman—we are not the only community to do this, nor are we the first. European people did the same thing for years, but eventually abandoned it. In fact, the Amish—who are a minority people from Germanic Europe that immigrated into the US—still practice FGM today.

So there is nothing uniquely African about FGM, or witchcraft, child sacrifice or kneeling, female subservience, patriarchy, ancestor worship and animism or any of these things. Indeed, I suspect that the reason many people who call themselves Afro-Centric and Pan-African hold onto these things is because they are suffering from PCSD and PSSD.

So there is nothing African about wearing a Kanga or Kitenge made in China from cotton grown in Sri Lanka—it’s rather about wearing a suit made in Nytil, from silk produced in Youmassokuru or Lusaka. It’s not about eating Ugali made from American corn, rather than eating a bar of chocolate made from Kumasi-grown cocoa.

Culture, and in this case being African, ought be about essence, and not appearance.

There is nothing African about poverty and nakedness and hunger, just like there is nothing European about wealth or nothing Asian about hard work. These are human virtues and human vices, and every society should struggle against them and overcome them.

Colonialism and Slavery aren’t new stories, and neither is a recounting of their horrors a novel undertaking—but one dimension I would like to mention concerning them is that they, like Samwiri Karugire says in his pamphlet, hijacked our journey of progress. The interruption of our history.

So what happened is that when our journey was hijacked, we didn’t get an opportunity to learn things for ourselves, and choose what should be kept and what should be discarded as far as civilization went.

We were fed on civilizational GMOs and our ‘‘modernization’’ was fast tracked so we could be ready for the labor market of mass consumption.

The effect of this, is to inspire a romantic nostalgia in us, or a nostalgia-induced schizophrenia.

We are detached from the challenges of our reality, and appear permanently unable to face them, because an essential part of us yearns of the past and feels remorseful about an Africa that is gone too soon.

We are like children that were robbed of their childhood, or adults that skipped the adolescence stage of life— forced to become men before were had left boyhood, compelled to become mothers before we could become women.

Imagine an African seafarer setting off on a raft to beard the high and mighty seas, and then just as he leaves the coast, he is captured by pirates—let’s imagine European Pirates since its easier—and bound in servitude to them instead.

Now, this seafarer, had they not been captured, would have died from drowning when their small raft capsized a few miles from shore—but they don’t know that, because they were not given an opportunity to die.

And I think the very concepts of free-will and freedom are predicated on this; the liberty to fail, and room to make mistakes.

So they will spend the rest of their life aboard the pirate ship dreaming of all the glories they would have had aboard their raft.

This is the same thing with us, contemporary citizens of Africa, and our so-called identity.

We dream of a glorious past that we didn’t see, and of which written accounts are more legend than reality.

So we essentialize. We fight off the cognitive dissonance brought on by contradictions and insist on what the versions of truth we want.
On the one hand, Africa was a dark continent with no good in it, and on the other hand; Africa was a paradise with no evil.

We think of Bunyoro’s Kabalega only as a Hero, and we forget that he was also a brutal conqueror before Lugard stopped his marauding Abarusura with a wall of Nubian mercenaries.

We think of Ousmanne Sembanne, the Senegalese-born father of African Cinema, as a spotless hero; and we forget that he once plagiarized a movie script from his students and by his own admission; was a man full of contradictions.

We think of our past as fairy-tale like utopia; free of strife and anxiety.

Yet Africa, like any place else; is not unalloyed. We come in all shapes and sizes, in all shades and colors, in all tones and timbres.

We dream for instance of a united Black African empire—which has never existed effectively. 

Egypt, Mali, Axum, Songhai etc. were all mostly regional empires. And most of them were Muslim empires built around Islamic ideology as unifier, which is synonymous with Arab Ideology.
Yet nearly every other race has had an empire it can truly call its own. 

The Caucasians had Rome, the Han Chinese had several dynasties, the Western Asians had Persia, Assyria and Mesopotamia, the Arabs had their Caliphates and later empires like the Ottomans, India had the Gupta Empire which was a Hindu empire.

So what Pan-Africans dream of is an empire to unite all black people. And we could have had it, if we hadn’t been interrupted by colonialism, but especially by the Arab Slave Trade.

For instance, nothing should stop Uganda from colonizing and annexing Eastern Congo and South Sudan. I don’t think that the concept of ‘ territorial sovereignty’, which was devised by fully evolved European Nation-States after their birth pangs had been exhausted, is more important than the security and welfare of South-Sudanese Citizens which would be guaranteed if they were part of Uganda. 

In any case—if the stream of refugees fleeing S.Sudan persists at present levels—then Uganda will have more S.Sudanese in her territory than those in S.Sudan itself. Why not pursue the matter to its logical conclusion and have territorial control as well?

I wish to insist that this suggestion is purely hypothetical—aware as we all are that what we have in Africa are mostly robber regimes and bandit governments. But in a more ideal world, few arguments could be successfully marshaled against an African state that chooses to establish political control over an unstable neighbor for the sheer purpose of safeguarding the welfare of her black kinsmen living in that troubled territory.

Perhaps this is how a future continental African government will be formed. 

Nonetheless, these dreams our people and romantists hold are legitimate.

Of course there are many things that Africa still has, and the rest of the world has discarded – which are likely to save humanity as we know it; things like the need to depopulate cities and return people to small, communal settlements and villages where people know their neighbors and everyone’s name. They also know which wife cooked meat and which one cooked beans, and therefore which husband is lazy and which one is enterprising.

They also know which man is raising his neighbor’s child, unknowingly.

Europe is struggling to move its people out of towns, but 90% of Africa’s people still live in these villages.

Things like the Extended family, which Chinua Achebe talks about in one of final essays – arguing how European sociologists are now realizing that the much-taunted nuclear family is the breeding place for selfishness, individualism and sadism. This should explain why Europe complains of being overrun by socio and psychopaths.

We have something to teach the world through our round architectural motif – because even occidental architects now agree that rounded houses cancel out configurations of the earth’s magnetic field that cause cancer. People who live in houses with corners, are being magnetized and are very likely to develop cancer over their lifetime.

But Africa’s homes have always been round; and not only the humblest or poorest, but even the ruins and remnants of the great castles and courts of Timbuktu in Mali were circular/round unlike the ancient castles of European, Arab or Indian nobility with their square keeps.

Things like the art of conversation, which is the baseline of our humanity, as the only creatures capable of complex/sophisticated language forms; in this age of solitude and internet-induced super-independence of individuals. For example, just thing morning, I greeted a colleague by asking him what the scores of last evening’s football World Cup Matches were. I have an internet-enabled mobile phone of course, but for some reason, like many of us – I felt it would be more authentic coming from his mouth, and anyhow, it was healthy for our friendship.

All this being said, I argue in conclusion that we must be allowed to make our own mistakes, because making mistakes is the only way people turn their backs completely on solutions that don’t work.

I think that the identity crisis in Africa will only be solved when we are allowed to return to that raft and see it capsize with our own eyes—and then hopefully swim to shore—or if not, then at least we’ll die with the taste of freedom on our tongues.

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