AFRICA'S WHITE ANCESTORS—A solemn take on Cross-Generational Corruption

I was at a rendezvous with old friends from my schooldays this past weekend, when we got around to—as is the wont with the continent’s chattering, tall-talking but deed-dreading ‘middleclass’—trading thoughts on our beleaguered country and its myriad ills.

One among our number, who happens to be on a month-long respite from his doctoral studies in one of the Schengen territories, got to filling us in on how the past few months—since he’d left to start the learning program, that is—had proven a greater eye-opener regarding global political-economics than all the books and informed opinions he’d listened to over the years.

‘If civilization is a theater and life its stage, then Africa is really a bunch of hopeless comedians and clowns where the rest of the world is engaged in high, transcendental art.’

I’ll admit those were not his actual words, but you do catch the drift, don’t you? 

The acid of his tone and the melodrama with which the words were delivered served to evoke strained laughs from the gathered group—but while we chuckled and occasionally guffawed at our own unfavorable comparison with the rest of this unkind earth’s variegated comity of nations, the sting of the accusation’s import wasn’t lost on us.

A barrage of disappointment, anger, blame-portioning and sheer resignation were voiced as the conversation soon degenerated into the unnavigable swamps and bogs of dismay at what our self-imposed governors were doing to us.

After much circumlocution and round-abouting along the alleys and boulevards of small talk however, the question we all valiantly tried but abysmally failed to find an answer to, was—How does Africa raise a corruption free generation?

The following are my afterthoughts on the matter.

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Desire-induced, Not Necessity-Driven Corruption

For any society to succeed in weaning its citizens off the teat of public theft and graft, I’m persuaded—the incentive for corruption must be restricted to the desire for luxuries, and taken fully out of the domain of meeting one’s immediate exigencies. Those tempted to pilfer resources or dip their fingers into the public purse ought to be, at the core-most, seen to be pursuing purely sybaritic and ostentatious ends.

A man diverting monies meant for construction of a primary school in some rural outpost, so as to send his children to a pricey private elementary school in Kampala—on account of the rot in public equivalents like Kitante and Nakasero—may be empathized with in his temptation, though certainly not exculpated for the misdeed.

The relevance and impetus for ‘necessity-driven’ corruption must therefore be done away with, substantially if not entirely. Public services and goods, of a quality and accessibility satisfying enough to the civil servant and public office-bearer, must be provided so that if the civil servant must steal from the treasury—it should be only to buy a new ball-dress for his girlfriend—and not to procure the Mercedes that would save her from the deathtraps and contagion-colonies that are Kampala’s public transport motorcrafts. 

We need to keep SUVs as luxuries in the eyes and minds of our people, not necessities. We need to ensure that sending a matriculated daughter to Kuala Lumpur for University is an extravagance that can be eschewed, because the quality-cum-efficacy of tertiary education offered at Makerere would be just as good as any procurable elsewhere—not the current travesty, veritable intellectual-wasteland and time-quaffing farce public (and in many ways, private) University education in Black Africa has incontrovertibly become.

Fame and Wealth are not admirable goals

One of the major downsides of Capitalism—perhaps in direct opposition to the much touted merit of incentivizing work and fueling innovation—is the promise of individual recognition and personal fortune dangled in the face of citizens, the so-called American dream.

If my biggest goal in life, as a young person coming up through the social and age ranks, is to own the biggest house among my peers or have the most exotic harem of concubines—then it becomes only a matter of time before I use my pedigree and intellectual resources to grab as much as I can of the inherently scarce resources society has at its disposal.

This is exactly the kind of mindset Africans of my generation and slightly older possess—a ‘‘hunter-gatherer’’ paradigm framed in the context of 21^st Century acquisitiveness—in which the elephants and wildebeest of old have been substituted by flashy cars, fancy clothes and sundry modernistic toys and playthings.

If we hope to birth and raise a posterity less inclined to these crude and materialistic proclivities of primitive accumulation—then the ethos and value systems we hold and consequently impart have to change radically. 

Being famous should be deemed immaterial, even contemptible—we need to teach our children that the number of Facebook friends one has, or being seen on the Telly is far less important than helping a struggling classmate with their homework, or teaching a playmate how to make a more accurate bird-sniping catapult.

They should be taught that learning our people’s proverbs and poems by heart, and seeking to apply them in one’s day-to-day is far more desirable and worthy an aspiration than owning the latest gadgetry-release from Silicon Valley or its Sino and Indo equivalents. 

They ought to learn that being respected as a kind and gentle human being and co-citizen, is a greater guarantee of social security and memorial immortality than anything intellectual property rights, patenting and copyright laws can ever assure.

A reconfiguration of society’s values, aspirations, ambitions and definitions of success and human worth is not only important, but direly necessary.

A successful man is one who loves, guards and cares; and a successful woman is she who mothers, nurtures and protects—among other vital contributions to personal and collective social life.

Politicians wait on the devil, Civil servants attend God

At the national and societal level, what has to be done is to separate politics from the civil service. While the former is a personal, individualist and expectedly selfish enterprise—the latter is an institutional ideal.

Politicians are emotional conmen and psychological tricksters whose only claim to fame is the ability to appeal to our vulnerabilities and psycho-social imperatives. This is why we need them to be eloquent, suave, debonair and exciting—they ought to be able to sway us with their words, and charm us with their looks, manner and style.

Civil servants on the other hand—only have to be reliable, principled and essentially concerned about their professionalism. It doesn’t matter how ugly a Headmaster is, or how homely the female director of a government agency appears—what counts is that they are able to dispose of their duties in the most expeditious and trouble-free fashion. 

And as a sane society—it is our duty to ensure that the silver-tongued politician we elected in our drunken hysteria and moment of sentimental abandon, does not get in the civil servant’s way.

This seems to be Africa’s greatest failure. We mistake the persuasive tongue, sharp suit, and sequined bow-tie of the politician for a sober brain and level head. We confuse his humor, sheer ruthlessness and manipulative prowess—his intimate knowledge of our fears, prejudices and cravings, to which he then devilishly appeals—with genuine care about results, and heartfelt concern for social progress.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Isn’t this evident gullibility of ours the reason why evangelical Pastors—in whom the roles of political head and organizational accounting officer are quintessentially fused—have been able to fleece, hoodwink and manipulate us in a manner, and to an extent none of their clerical antecedents ever could?

The civil service must be freed from political influence and meddling to the greatest degree possible. Politics is a personal caprice that people enter and leave at will, but the public service is an institution, a lifetime career that forms the central locus of a man’s identity, aspirations and sacrifices.

We must create a governance dispensation that gives real power and respectability to institutional actors and civil professionals—teachers, nurses, clerks and tradespersons—so that our children will grow up in the knowledge that it’s possible and desirable for one to serve their country in a capacity outside politics and still be able to cause real, meaningful and lasting change without having to appeal to the biases of mostly ignorant masses in war-like electoral contests.

And this change must be shielded or inoculated against the populist reversals of future political strongmen and ignoramuses, through power distribution arrangements that guarantee the independence-of-action and policy formulation, on the part of institutions like school and hospital management boards, police prefectures etc.

It is tragic therefore—when we place career-building and professionalism, at the mercy of ambition and fame-seeking. This has been our postcolonial African lot.

Our undead White men

In an ostensibly unrelated story—I received my secondary school instruction in a ‘traditional’ school. The word is used in Ugandan parlance, often to proud effect, to refer to Junior and Senior schools set up by and during the colonial administration of the country. (This is the same school in whose name my Old boys and I had met, as intimated earlier, during which meeting we failed at the question that inspired this opinion.)

The schools—trailed closely by hospitals, cathedrals and governance systems—are perhaps Europe’s greatest legacy in post-colonial Africa—for despite the anti-colonial wars that were fought, won and lost on these soils—those institutions very much remain haunted by the pale, insipid wraiths of their founding figures—all invariably Caucasian men and women.

The presence of these ‘traditional’ schools to-date—in a postcolonial world once buoyed but now irritated by the rhetoric of self-rule and independence—remains an indictment on our inability to mature and outgrow the obsolete remnants of what is sometimes called a ‘civilizing mission’.

Much has been said about the decolonization of the African University—yet hardly any mention is made in academia about decolonizing the secondary school, or even better, the elementary schoolroom and kindergarten—which happen to be the university’s natural ‘fishing grounds’.

Any disease is best cured when caught in early days—and if our thinkers agree that colonialism and its latter-day offshoots are ailments, then the choice regarding their prognosis and treatment regime should be a simple one.

I do not think there is anything more damaging to the esteem and self-worth of a black child—in this case the ‘elite and thinker’ of his people—than the pre-embedded, subconscious knowledge that all of their educational development and knowledge acquisition rests upon the shoulders of a dead white man or woman. That their pursuit of enlightenment is borne on the legs of some lionized ancient Christian missionary mis-adventuring in the ‘dark world’.

It will be difficult to have a world in which the leaders of our people—business, professional and political—remain indebted to the William Crichtons of this world—and still be expected to function free of the trauma that being a Frankenstein-like, mass-produced object of Europe’s ‘civilizational philanthropy’ engenders.

White schoolmasters, long dead, just won’t stop teaching our black children—and in my estimation, this is a snaring web from which generational corruption—moral, emotional and otherwise, cannot be (easily) extricated. 

The black teachers who stand tall in Africa’s post-independence classrooms only do so because they’re propped upon the powdery shoulders of apparitions lurking in the deep recesses of their own European-forged minds.

This link every African child educated through these proud, centennial schools—jubileewo-anthems and all—bears with a white ‘educational’ ancestor, must be severed once and for all, if our sons and daughters are to have any chance of growing up whole and hale.

As our peerless Elder and luminary, Bantu Biko, once remarked years ago— ‘It has always been the pattern throughout history that whosoever brings the new order knows it best and is therefore the perpetual teacher of those to whom the new order is being brought. If the white [colonists] were “right” about their culture in the eyes of the natives, then the African people could only accept whatever these new know-all tutors had to say about life. The acceptance of the colonialist-tainted version of civilization marked the turning point in the resistance of African people. We were irredeemably emasculated.’

Upon reception of a thorough beating from a rival team, the boys opt to ruminate on the dismal failings of the Ugandan national experiment

©Surumani Manzi

23rd-August-2018.