The following has been edited to meet Solving Africa’s guidelines. A link to the original article is provided at the bottom. You’ll understand why I haven’t simply linked to the article if you’re patient enough to read through. Compare this ending to the original. The author, Field Ruwe, is a US-based Zambian media practitioner and author. He is a PhD candidate with a B.A. in Mass Communication and Journalism, and an M.A. in History.
“It’s amazing how you all sit there and watch yourselves die,” the man next to me said. “Get up and do something about it.”
Brawny, fully bald-headed, with intense, steely eyes, he was as cold as they come. When I first discovered I was going to spend my New Year’s Eve next to him on a non-stop JetBlue flight from Los Angeles to Boston I was angst-ridden. I associate marble-shaven Caucasians with iconoclastic skin-heads, most of who are racist.
“My name is Walter,” he extended his hand as soon as I settled in my seat.
I told him mine with a precautious smile.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Zambia.”
“Zambia!” he exclaimed, “Kaunda’s country.”
“Yes,” I said, “Now Sata’s.”
“But of course,” he responded. “You just elected King Cobra as your president.”
My face lit up at the mention of Sata’s moniker. Walter smiled, and in those cold eyes I saw an amenable fellow, one of those American highbrows who shuttle between Africa and the U.S.
“I spent three years in Zambia in the 1980s,” he continued. “I wined and dined with Luke Mwananshiku, Willa Mungomba, Dr. Siteke Mwale, and many other highly intelligent Zambians.” He lowered his voice. “I was part of the IMF group that came to rip you guys off.” He smirked. “Your government put me in a million dollar mansion overlooking a shanty called Kalingalinga. From my patio I saw it all—the rich and the poor, the ailing, the dead, and the healthy.”
“Are you still with the IMF?” I asked.
“I have since moved to yet another group with similar intentions. In the next few months my colleagues and I will be in Lusaka to hypnotize the cobra. I work for the broker that has acquired a chunk of your debt. Your government owes not the World Bank, but us millions of dollars. We’ll be in Lusaka to offer your president a couple of millions and fly back with a check twenty times greater.”
“No, you won’t,” I said. “King Cobra is incorruptible. He is …”
He was laughing. “Says who? Give me an African president, just one, who has not fallen for the carrot and stick.”
Quett Masire’s name popped up.
“Oh, him, well, we never got to him because he turned down the IMF and the World Bank. It was perhaps the smartest thing for him to do.”
At midnight we were airborne. The captain wished us a happy 2012 and urged us to watch the fireworks across Los Angeles.
“Isn’t that beautiful,” Walter said looking down.
From my middle seat, I took a glance and nodded admirably.
“That’s white man’s country,” he said. “We came here on Mayflower and turned Indian land into a paradise and now the most powerful nation on earth. We discovered the bulb, and built this aircraft to fly us to pleasure resorts like Lake Zambia.”
I grinned. “There is no Lake Zambia.”
He curled his lips into a smug smile. “That’s what we call your country. You guys are as stagnant as the water in the lake. We come in with our large boats and fish your minerals and your wildlife and leave morsels—crumbs. That’s your staple food, crumbs. That corn-meal you eat, that’s crumbs, the small Tilapia fish you call Kapenta is crumbs. We the Bwanas (whites) take the cat fish. I am the Bwana and you are the Muntu. I get what I want and you get what you deserve, crumbs. That’s what lazy people get—Zambians, Africans, the entire Third World.”
The smile vanished from my face.
“I see you are getting pissed off,” Walter said and lowered his voice. “You are thinking this Bwana is a racist. That’s how most Zambians respond when I tell them the truth. They go ballistic. Okay. Let’s for a moment put our skin pigmentations, this black and white crap, aside. Tell me, my friend, what is the difference between you and me?”
“There’s no difference.”
“Absolutely none,” he exclaimed. “Scientists in the Human Genome Project have proved that. It took them thirteen years to determine the complete sequence of the three billion DNA subunits. After they were all done it was clear that 99.9% nucleotide bases were exactly the same in you and me. We are the same people. All white, Asian, Latino, and black people on this aircraft are the same.”
I gladly nodded.
“And yet I feel superior,” he smiled fatalistically. “Every white person on this plane feels superior to a black person. The white guy who picks up garbage, the homeless white trash on drugs, feels superior to you no matter his status or education. I can pick up a nincompoop from the New York streets, clean him up, and take him to Lusaka and you all be crowding around him chanting muzungu, muzungu and yet he’s a riffraff. Tell me why my angry friend.”
For a moment I was wordless.
“Please don’t blame it on slavery like the African Americans do, or colonialism, or some psychological impact or some kind of stigmatization. And don’t give me the brainwash poppycock. Give me a better answer.”
I was thinking.
He continued. “Excuse what I am about to say. Please do not take offense.”
I felt a slap of blood rush to my head and prepared for the worst.
“You my friend flying with me and all your kind are lazy,” he said. “When you rest your head on the pillow you don’t dream big. You and other so-called African intellectuals are damn lazy, each one of you. It is you, and not those poor starving people, who is the reason Africa is in such a deplorable state.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” I protested.
He was implacable. “Oh yes it is and I will say it again, you are lazy. Poor and uneducated Africans are the most hardworking people on earth. I saw them in the Lusaka markets and on the street selling merchandise. I saw them in villages toiling away. I saw women on Kafue Road crushing stones for sell and I wept. I said to myself where are the Zambian intellectuals? Are the Zambian engineers so imperceptive they cannot invent a simple stone crusher, or a simple water filter to purify well water for those poor villagers? Are you telling me that after thirty-seven years of independence your university school of engineering has not produced a scientist or an engineer who can make simple small machines for mass use? What is the school there for?”
I held my breath.
“Do you know where I found your intellectuals? They were in bars quaffing. They were at the Lusaka Golf Club, Lusaka Central Club, Lusaka Playhouse, and Lusaka Flying Club. I saw with my own eyes a bunch of alcoholic graduates. Zambian intellectuals work from eight to five and spend the evening drinking. We don’t. We reserve the evening for brainstorming.”
He looked me in the eye.
“And you flying to Boston and all of you Zambians in the Diaspora are just as lazy and apathetic to your country. You don’t care about your country and yet your very own parents, brothers and sisters are in Mtendere, Chawama, and in villages, all of them living in squalor. Many have died or are dying of neglect by you. They are dying of AIDS because you cannot come up with your own cure. You are here calling yourselves graduates, researchers and scientists and are fast at articulating your credentials once asked—oh, I have a PhD in this and that—PhD my foot!”
I was deflated.
“Wake up you all!” he exclaimed, attracting the attention of nearby passengers. “You should be busy lifting ideas, formulae, recipes, and diagrams from American manufacturing factories and sending them to your own factories. All those research findings and dissertation papers you compile should be your country’s treasure. Why do you think the Asians are a force to reckon with? They stole our ideas and turned them into their own. Look at Japan, China, India, just look at them.”
He paused. “The Bwana has spoken,” he said and grinned. “As long as you are dependent on my plane, I shall feel superior and you my friend shall remain inferior, how about that? The Chinese, Japanese, Indians, even Latinos are a notch better. You Africans are at the bottom of the totem pole.”
He tempered his voice. “Get over this white skin syndrome and begin to feel confident. Become innovative and make your own stuff for god’s sake.”
At 8 a.m. the plane touched down at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Walter reached for my hand.
“I know I was too strong, but I don’t give it a damn. I have been to Zambia and have seen too much poverty.” He pulled out a piece of paper and scribbled something. “Here, read this. It was written by a friend.”
He had written only the title: “Lords of Poverty.”
Thunderstruck, I had a sinking feeling. I watched Walter walk through the airport doors to a waiting car. He had left a huge dust devil twirling in my mind, stirring up sad memories of home. I could see Zambia’s literati—the cognoscente, intelligentsia, academics, highbrows, and scholars in the places he had mentioned guzzling and talking irrelevancies. I remembered some who have since passed—how they got the highest grades in mathematics and the sciences and attained the highest education on the planet. They had been to Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), only to leave us with not a single invention or discovery. I knew some by name and drunk with them at the Lusaka Playhouse and Central Sports.
Walter is right. It is true that since independence we have failed to nurture creativity and collective orientations. We as a nation lack a workhorse mentality and behave like 13 million civil servants dependent on a government pay cheque. We believe that development is generated 8-to-5 behind a desk wearing a tie with our degrees hanging on the wall. Such a working environment does not offer the opportunity for fellowship, the excitement of competition, and the spectacle of innovative rituals.
The article should have ended here. It didn’t.
What’s vexing me is that after everything Mr. Ruwe, heard Walter say, his reaction was to deflect the blame from himself (ourselves) where it rightly belongs and to point the finger at government! Madness! How does a leader stop you from inventing something? How does a leader stop you from being the change you want to see in your country and dealing with the everyday problems that are fixable without the government’s intervention? A stone crusher, better textiles, a water purifier, and other household needs. Instead, we are proud to wear our designer clothes, play on our iPads, chat on our BlackBerries and feel just that much special because we are linked – either by education or consumption – to the inventions, ideas, and achievements of the West and now, Asia.
How does government stop you from returning to Africa with your fancy Bachelor’s, Master’s or PhD and the contacts you’ve made abroad to transform your so called beloved country into a place that will no longer shame you?
You see the wahala again? See how swiftly he moved the blame to the government? Mschew!
Until we start taking personal responsibility to change the crap that is our heritage, we won’t see any changes in this generation. While we may not be the reason that Africa is what it is. We definitely will be the ones to blame if it remains as it is. I know what I have to do. And as much as I can, I will do it. What’s your move?
Nice piece and a wakeup call, but I challenge the authenticity of the quotes… you can’t sit by someone like this for 5 hrs and be able to remember all those quotes… you must have been writing them while he was talking or taping him?
That’s a question that came up a lot in journalism classes. But remember how often you tell stories over dinner with friends. You may not remember word for word what happens in a story, but our brains do a pretty good job of keeping main ideas and phrases. Don’t get bogged down by technicalities. Besides, this was clearly condensed so we could get the main points. So yeah, what’s your move anonymous?
I see reason in the white man’s lashing of African intellectuals in his conversation with the young Zambian to a large extent. However I am sure that there are groups here and there who have the talent and zeal to do what is right as African intellectuals.But the forces against them are enormous.
From history, it is apparent that there are elites in Africa who tried to build their countries up to a level worthy of praise and perhaps comparable to a white man’s land today. But such persons hit the wall and others met their death in the process in the hands of their own people remotely controlled by the white man.
Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah and their likes lost out in the hands of their countrymen whom the West used to do their dirty jobs. Those who lived on became disabled by same culprits of detraction.
Nkrumah had initiated an Atomic Agency in Ghana as far back as in the fifties. His plan was scuttled by the west and they made sure he was dethroned and sent on exile where he died.
Lumumba, Africa’s equivalent of Abraham Lincoln, of course was murdered by conspiracy of the west. He was as intellectual as can be and had great plans for his country but because the west wanted what his country had, they made sure he did not continue to see the light of the day. That country is still in trouble till date. Without peace and harmony arts and innovation suffer in a country.
During the civil war in Nigeria, the Biafran’s sustained themselves within a blockaded enclave in which they manufactured their own arms and even refined their own crude oil into gasoline. After the war they have remained suppressed. Their son’s and daughters have been so demoralized that they have become useful to other nations. Even (non)refining of petroleum is causing riots today in Nigeria. Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Philip Emeagwali to mention only three Nigerian intellectuals, are just a few example of how a nation alienates its intellectuals. I can go on and on.
The point is that in addition to the slave trade, Berlin conference scrambled for Africa and never left it to develop without their (dis)control. The British for example has not left their old colonies alone, especially Nigeria where they would rather instigate the people to commit genocide for them to retain their presence and control.
A retiring Chief Justice of Nigeria said recently that while the Nigerian civil war raged, an European leader whom they approached to help Biafra said, no, because (according to the leader)they (the west) do not want another Japan springing up especially in Africa.
So while I share the sentiments of the discussant in the JetBlue flight, I know Africans have been up against some evil counterproductive forces that have more or less mesmerized them into capitulation to non-achievement syndrome.
Ok. So we’re up against some formidable odds. Let’s not do anything. I also remember the beauty of Biafra’s resourcefulness and it is a shame that it was only during a banding together against a shared enemy did that environment flourish. And it’s a huge huge shame that the Nigerian government would rather refine its oil abroad than fund its own people to figure out how to do it at home. But then what? Do we fold our hands and give up because the odds are against us?
I think most of us Africans rely too much on government. And by that I don’t mean the actual people in power, but more so the idea that there NEEDS to be someone in power. Nothing stops a wealthy private individual from funding the mass production of an item. In fact, it already happens in Aba. But instead of making things that matter, people copy designer clothes and shoes. Yes, there are lots of things to tackle, but what I see this article saying is this:
Where are our efforts to deal with the smaller problems? Why do we still live as if we are in the dark ages? Seriously, why isn’t there a stone crusher? Why do the street kiosks have to be so ugly and dirty? Why do we have such low standards for ourselves? Why do we agree to get into terrible looking trucks that are death machines? Demand drives supply. Yes, the problem is systemic and deep-rooted. But before I point the finger elsewhere, I’m reminded that change starts at home.
i’m speechless………….
As far it’s up to me I will do the right thing always and everything I lay my hands on, I will do diligently.
That’s my first move
Anonymous has a point. I think technicalities are important. For a writer like your type, and for a great website of this nature, I think it matters what information people put here and how the information is conveyed. It seems the author has a wonderful story to tell, but I agree with anonymous that I myself, I am not convinced by the authenticity of this man’s quotes and choice of words to tell his story. Perhaps your placing of a shorter version here takes away some of the tone of the article. Maybe I should look at the whole article. I don’ts see any link here for it.
But both you and him have a point.
In a court of law, testimony is accepted as one’s best and most honest recollection of events. Life happens and we don’t walk around with recorders. Imagine it was you on that plane, I bet you too would have been shocked into remembering a good chunk o the conversation. Granted it has been edited to flow and feel natural, however, the greatest works of journalism aren’t just the ones that follow the rules, but know how to rightly break them. The author was honest in stating the circumstances u der which the information was obtained. I for one I’m happy to see any transcript at all whether or not it adheres strictly word for word. The great thing about this article is that each of us k OAS deep down that what we are reading is painfully true. Maybe that’s what makes it a really hard pill to swallow?
WOW! As a black American starting business in Australia, this startles me to think more. Y am I here? What is the purpose? What will be done with the wealth attained? Oh my goodness… Junior, thank you for sharing!