(TALKZIMBABWE) Cedrick Ngalande - Opinion
Cedrick Ngalande - OpinionWed, 10 Jun 2009 14:48:00 +0000
This important article by CEDRICK NGALANDE was written three years ago. We reproduce it in its entirety.
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A FRIEND of mine once told me a funny old Soviet joke. An American was trained rigorously for many years to spy on the USSR. When the day finally came, he was secretly dropped in a remote region of the Soviet Union. He made his way to Moscow, and sat in restaurant to enjoy a warm meal. Suddenly, two men came in, took him outside the restaurant and told him that they were arresting him for spying on Russia.
The man was deeply troubled. He had done everything he was trained to do. What was it that he had done wrong? As the men were taking him to a waiting vehicle, he decided to ask them how they knew that he was a spy. One of them looked at him, paused for a moment, and said: "Well, we don't have Black people in Russia".
This very funny story illustrates a very important point: Although the man was highly trained and qualified in Russian espionage, there was this minute but crucial information that he didn't know. Africans could learn a lot from this joke.
Africa is a poor continent with huge problems. Addressing these problems requires vast amounts of money, which the continent does not have. The rich Western world has those funds, and often and times again, it is Western experts who design solutions to these African problems. The trouble with such an arrangement is that, due to cultural differences, most of these Western-based solutions are inevitably based on a stereotypical understanding of Africa. Thus, they are flowed and cannot work.
Unfortunately, the Black African intellectual who is in a better position to critique and direct these Western-oriented remedies fails to do so, and instead endorses each of them. This tendency has rendered Africa unable to solve any of her problems. As a result, millions of dollars have been wasted on flawed projects, unnecessarily prolonging the misery Africans in some cases. If African intellectuals could think and act independently, half of the continent's problems would automatically go away.
About 15 years ago, the USAid sponsored an education project in Malawi. Numerous studies had indicated that the dropout rate of girls from primary schools in the country was higher than that of boys. Upon seeing these statistics, USAid in Malawi believed that they knew what the problem was and how to solve it. To the Americans, the high dropping rate for girls was due to older men taking advantage of them and impregnating or marrying them.
Older men were said to be giving money to poor girls in return for sexual favours. It was also concluded that parents in Malawi favour young boys when it comes to sending children to school. In order to solve the problem, USAid decided to set up a project called Girls Attainment for Basic Education (GABLE). Under this program, girls would get free primary and secondary school education.
They would also receive free books and pencils and, in some cases, pocket money. This, the Americans argued, would keep 'sugar daddies' away. At the end of five years of a well-funded and well-executed GABLE, the impact of the program was minimal at best considering demographic growth.
While this failure could have been a great surprise to most Americans, such was not the case at all for Malawians. In truth, most teenage girls were impregnated by boys from their own age group, not by adults as claimed by donors. Moreover, Malawian parents do not necessarily favour girls when it comes to sending children to school, and this was surely not true in 1995.
Regardless of gender, all children are encouraged to go to school, since it is a generally shared belief that in such a poor country education is the only guarantee for future success. The basic premise of GABLE was, therefore, flawed. No matter how well the program was funded or executed, it simply could not work.
Two points ought to be noted here. First, while there was little evidence to support their conclusion, Americans strongly believed that young girls in Malawi dropped out of school because they were impregnated by grown-up men. One could argue that such a conclusion was in large part based on the American perception of Africa. Americans tend to believe that in Black African culture older men take advantage of much younger women.
Thus, their understanding of the high drop out rate for girls in Malawi was in part based on this stereotype, which in turn led them to design a flawed project.
Second, although Malawian intellectuals, most of who grew up in the country and were therefore very familiar with its culture, knew that the premise of GABLE was flawed, they kept their doubts private. Even worse than failing to take their concerns to the donors who designed GABLE, they gave a rosy picture of the project in their interviews with the media. This allowed GABLE to go ahead, until its ultimate failure.
If Malawian intellectuals had voiced their criticism of this project from the beginning, it could perhaps have been readjusted in order to provide a more suitable solution to the problem that it was intended to solve. Instead, one is only left to imagine the amount of money that could have been saved, and what could have been achieved.
The tendency by African intellectuals to endorse European views is firmly rooted in the history of the continent. Through Euro-centrism, being an intellectual has been defined in a way that makes it a synonym with being pro-Western. Based on such a view, an intellectual is the one who supports British/European opinion, who thrives to be like a European, to look like one, even to marry one.
Such thinking subjects the development of Africa to its submission to Europe, since every action undertaken in the continent has to be weighed in terms of Western interests. Nevertheless, this is the philosophy that has been widely taught in schools across Africa. Accustomed to endorsing European views, African intellectuals have become inept at thinking for themselves. This has resulted in a form of 'dead' intellectualism, whereas African intellectuals, though highly educated, sit and wait for Westerners to put forth opinions so that they can endorse them in turn.
It is no secret that Europeans have invested a great deal of effort to cultivate this situation. This is obvious with Western media. The coverage of Africa is almost exclusively dominated by negative news, and this holds true for South Africa. Conversely, front page news are usually reserved for positive stories about Europe and the West in general; in the British media, these often deal with the royal family, footballers such as David Beckham, just to name a few. Such propaganda has helped shape African intellectualism.
Indeed, the propaganda has paid off, big time, and as a result it is not uncommon to see Africans looking down at themselves. For instance, when a case of domestic violence occurs in an African community, the first reaction from locals, including intellectuals, is often to blame "African culture". Currently in South Africa, former Vice President Jacob Zuma is on trial for rape.
Many of the country's Black commentators have already explained this saga through the lens of a so-called 'negative' African culture that is an attribute of a male chauvinistic society. This is a clear endorsement of the perspective that comes from the European media. Similarly, corruption, election fraud, violence and other problems, though not exclusive to Africa, are attributed to the 'negativity' of African culture.
In truth, these same problems are found in Western societies. However, Westerners do not blame them on the negativity of their culture. Hardly does a day go by in the United States of America without news of yet another much older man kidnapping a 6-year old girl or boy, raping and eventually murdering her or him. One could easily imagine what would be said, had such events been happening in an African country.
Similarly, corruption is widespread and it does indeed occur at a much larger scale in Western countries. As these words are being penned down, Prime Minister Howard of Australia is going through a corruption inquiry about his government. In the United States, a famous politician from Texas is currently on trial for corruption. In Italy, incumbent Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is disputing election results, citing fraud. And, of course, the episode of the 2000 U.S. presidential election that opposed Al Gore and George W. Bush is still fresh in everybody's mind. And the list goes on.
The above attests to the fact that such problems are not exclusive to Africa, and this point, African intellectuals ought to make clear. They need to understand that Africa cannot solve its problems without independent thinkers of its own, and that their failure to critique Western-inspired solutions has failed the continent. One illustration is the prolonged fight against HIV/AIDS.
In Malawi, for instance, the first condom advertisements were aired on MBC in the late 1980s. Broadcast at night after 10 p.m. at first, they were later aired to the public at all hours of day and night. When the new government came into office in 1994, marches against HIV/AIDS were organized, in which even the president participated. The only national broadcaster at the time would carry these events live.
This was followed with Tinkanena, a radio play intended for young people aged between 8 and 15. This program combined explicitness with entertainment, and because of its popularity among young viewers it ran for several years - it could still be running at the moment. Both the marches and the radio broadcasts were organized on the premise that HIV/AIDS spread in Africa because of the failure of people to talk about it and sex, and that the problem would go away if discussion were encouraged.
Today in Malawi, however, the rate of HIV/AIDS infection remains high, and no study has shown a decline in that rate. Thus, something must be wrong with a solution that simply advocates discussion to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. The 8-15-year old youngsters who used to be targeted by the radio play Tinkanena are now 20-27-year old grown ups, which also currently represents the riskiest group. Did they forget about HIV/AIDS after being bombarded by messages on the issue for 12 years?
In reality, Malawians do talk about HIV/AIDS and sex in their homes. They already did before 1994, when the programs were initiated. Thus, simply discussing HIV/AIDS as a solution to fight it was flawed from the beginning. The author of these lines remembers going to his native village for the holidays in 1994, and being told there about the dangers of HIV/AIDS and the methods of prevention by an old lady who had received no formal schooling. She had learnt about the disease at a local hospital and from the radio. And if she knew what she was telling me, why wouldn't have the younger and more educated people of Malawi?
This is another illustration of how African intellectuals, by their silence, have let the continent down. They knew that Africans talked about sexually transmitted diseases and sexual matters in their families, but they failed to voice their criticism to the Western experts who designed the campaigns mentioned above.
Making themselves heard could perhaps have helped rectify those programs for the better. Instead, 10 years have been lost preaching to the choir &endash; repeating slogans, organizing expensive concerts and other activities, supposedly to encourage people to talk about HIV/AIDS.
Another shortcoming in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa is attributable to the fact that it is almost exclusively directed at men. The emphasis has been on encouraging African men to be faithful to their wives, to use condoms, etc. Why are women often ignored in such messages? Again, the answer to this question lies in the stereotypes that are held by the Westerners who design such programs. To them, the perverted, African man is responsible for the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as he is for all other problems that affect the continent: Only he can be unfaithful, and only he will refuse to use condoms. Westerners and African women may be guilty of a similar conduct, however.
Regarding African women, it is not uncommon to hear sexually active young men in Malawi discuss how their girlfriends are annoyed by the use of condoms, which many see as an offense, a sign that the man does not trust them. Some girls have been said to go even as far as to claim that they were allergic to condoms. Wouldn't the fight against HIV/AIDS be more effective if women were targeted as well?
Unfortunately, they have commonly been ignored, and this could have been prevented had African intellectuals been fully involved in designing the programs.
In South Africa, the fight against HIV/AIDS has been hijacked by various people, each with a different agenda. Following the fall of the Apartheid, the white community realized that they could no longer get back to power through democracy. They, therefore, resorted to negative portrayals of the new government, as if to say to the world: "We told you so, these people cannot rule as well as we would".
Fortunately for them, they found a largely receptive Western world that was more than willing to listen to white people rather than Black Africans on the issues affecting South Africa &endash; and to echo their claims.
Out of such machinations came a story that accused President Thabo Mbeki of denying the link between HIV and AIDS. To this day, no text or audio recording has ever been produced to verify such a statement. Nevertheless, this did not stop the South African, and eventually the European media, from claiming that the words attributed to Thabo Mbeki were the source of all HIV/AIDS-related problems in South Africa.
That this disease was already at a critical stage in the country before Thabo Mbeki came to power was conveniently ignored. Also ignored was the fact that his was the only government in the whole world to increase HIV/AIDS spending more than threefold in a decade.
What really happened was that Mbeki formed a committee to look into the causes of the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa, based on an African perspective instead of a European one. Though this was the reasonable approach to adopt, some immediately attacked him claiming that he was undermining the fight against the disease. They went as far as to claim that because of Thabo Mbeki's actions Black South Africans would stop taking messages about AIDS/HIV seriously.
The same happened early this month when Jacob Zuma claimed in his court testimony that he had taken a shower after sex with his accuser in order to minimize the risk of contracting HIV. Though his statement was naïve to say the least, pundits have been quick to blame on it a rolling back of decades of advances in the fight against the disease.
The above calls for a couple of remarks. First, it is a contradiction to claim that such advances have been made in the fight against HIV/AIDS in South Africa while during the same period the authors of such claims have consistently claimed that the government was doing too little and that no progress was being made. Second, it is interesting to note that none of the commentators or so-called experts who have accused Mbeki and Zuma of confusing the Black population on HIV/AIDS is Black.
Nevertheless, this does not seem to prevent them from knowing better about Black culture than Blacks themselves. Are they so enlightened, or do they believe native Africans to be so ignorant that they would give more credit to what a politician says in his own defense in court than to the advice that they receive from their physicians?
As in the cases of Africa's other problems, the fight against HIV/AIDS has been hijacked by people with various stereotypes about Africans, resulting in the whole focus being misdirected. It is the duty of Black African intellectuals to help correct the course and to focus on more successful strategies. Unfortunately, they remain silent at the moment.
The case of Zimbabwe is another illustration of the apathy of African intellectuals. The history of Zimbabwe is well known. During the colonial era, the British forcibly took land from the Black majority in Zimbabwe and gave it to the white minority, the British settlers. The sovereign government of Zimbabwe now wants the land to be returned to its rightful owners, which Britain opposes on the grounds that President Mugabe intends to redistribute it to his 'cronies'.
Mugabe has repeatedly denounced the British opposition to the land being restituted. This has not stopped Britain from rallying its allies and imposing various sanctions on Zimbabwe to sabotage Zimbabwe's economy, causing shortages and increasing the mortality rate of its population. The authors of these sanctions have used their negative effects to try to prove the Zimbabwean government wrong, and to force it to submit to their will and interests.
Hopefully, African intellectuals will come to acknowledge that the situation in Zimbabwe is less about human rights than an unending power struggle between Black natives on the one hand, and the white settlers and their Western kin on the other. Zimbabwe's economy may be going through a crisis at the moment, but Mugabe's stance is likely to benefit his country, and perhaps the whole continent, in the long run.
Prosperity without a guarantee to the people of a basic claim on their own country is purely aesthetic and will quickly fade away. Black Americans fought against segregation even though under such a system they were believed to be better off than Blacks in other parts of the world. They had to endure a number of temporary problems for long-term gains.
Similarly, Malawians fought against the British, risking a war that could make their lives miserable, but it was a necessary fight. And Black South Africans fought against the Apartheid, even though their conditions under that system could have been regarded by some as the best for Black people in Southern Africa. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness are worth fighting for, even when this means their temporary forfeiture.
Should Black Africans control their own destiny? This is the question Dr Banda, former President of Malawi, answered in the affirmative while he led the fight against colonialism. So did Nelson Mandela answer during his fight against the Apartheid. And so did Thabo Mbeki by handling the Zimbabwe crisis brilliantly. One can hardly over-emphasize the intelligent analysis made by Mbeki on the Zimbabwe issue, in his weekly ANC email newsletter of December 12-18, 2003 titled, We will resist the upside view of Africa. This article can still be seen on the ANC website.
Media reports that government has decided to invite Robert Mugabe and name a road after him are a very welcome development. But I will predict that you will see many in the so called human rights organizations in Malawi who will be vehemently be opposed to that visit. If you ask them why they take that stand, they will not be able to give you a definite answer other than that the BBC says he is a bad man.
They will simply parrot and regurgitate what they read somewhere in the European press, believing that in repeating those European sentiments, they are being intellectuals. Their reluctance to analyze the complex nature of the Zimbabwe situation within the context of the country's history is a very worrying in deed. And perhaps the most interesting aspect of these NGOs is their source of funding bringing us to the question, whose interest do the NGOs serve; their donors or the masses? Most of these NGOs would not survive a day if they do not receive this donor money. One wonders whether in this case they are free to think and act independently of those donors.
The Zimbabwe issue could easily have been solved if Black African intellectuals had chosen to critique the British position and to present the truth. Unfortunately, they are once again busy endorsing the European opinion. As such, some of their commentaries sound similar to articles taken straight from the BBC World News Website. Africa deserves better.
The European media is of course not too comfortable with progress on this continent. Everything has to be portrayed in a negative light. Take South Africa, for instance. This is a country that has been tremendous progress despite lot odds against it. South Africa is a success story. But you will not know this by reading the European press. Everything about South Africa, especially ANC, is trashed. In every major elections that have taken place after 1994, the European press, especially BBC, have predicted that the Black lead government will loose its big majority and that the minority DA will win big. And with election results they have been proven wrong.
Africans need to start speaking out, calling out these wrong press reports, and critiquing flawed western initiatives. This is the only way countries and continents grow. As Africans, we need to put forward our points of view. When you go China, you will find that the Chinese media and their experts present news from a Chinese perspective. When you go to Europe you find the European media presenting news from a European perspective. The American media certainly presents the American perspective. But when you come to Africa, everybody seems to sing the European perspective. Surprise, surprise! Is there an African perspective on anything at all?
Even up to now, most African media largely relies on European media to provide them with news. The Reuters and the BBC, though thousand of miles away, are still major sources of information to most Black African media even if the story is about a country next door. How do we expect the South African media controlled by the largely apartheid friendly media to report fairly on the ANC led government and any Black African government? Can the British media whose government is locked in a dispute with Zimbabwe give a fair assessment of the Zimbabwe crisis? These are difficult questions.
Unless African intellectuals stand up and start acting as intellectuals, this continent will never ever develop.
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This article was originally published special to USAfrica The Newspaper, Houston, CLASS magazine, USAfricaonline.com and The Black Business Journal.
Labels: INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
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