Chichi dodos

The Nation Television (NTV) recently aired a section of Professor Ali Mazrui’s Documentary Film The African, A triple Heritage. The section entitled ‘Tools of Exploitation’ tells the story of Africans as inhabitants of Africa, and of Africans as those whose heritage and culture stem from Africa though slavery robbed them of this heritage.

Watching the documentary, one can’t help but admire with awe the depth of knowledge that Mazrui commands and the eloquent way with which he renders it in the documentary film. Produced in 1986, the film has nine sixty-minute sections in the documentary series. The triple heritage in the film refers to the three main cultural influences on Africa: traditional African culture, Islamic culture, and Western culture.

The 1933 born scholar definitely enjoys the membership of the crème de la crème club of Kenyan and indeed African scholars. Having done considerable research into the problems facing Africa since the days of slavery to the present day globalization fad, Professor Ali Mazrui and his peers owe their motherland guidance in the struggle against imperialism from the West.

In the ‘Tools of Exploitation’, Mazrui picturesquely talks of the forced labour that Africans had to accord the West through slavery and how this has made the West forge ahead economically leaving Africa lagging behind. This notwithstanding, listening to Mazrui’s remarks on this issue, reminds one of a bird called the Chichi dodo talked about in Ayi Kweyi Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born.

In this novel, Ayi Kweyi Armah creates an analogy of this interesting bird. The Chichi dodo claims to be a very clean bird which hates any form of filth. The bird goes through all pains to keep filth out of its way. The ironical thing about the Chichi dodo is that despite its sanitary standards, it feeds on maggots which are found in animal excrement. The bird feeds from the filth it so loathes.

This brings a question to mind, are the scholars we have in Africa positivist only in as far as academia is concerned or are they actually drinking the wine they preach against. How thin is the line that separates scholarly renditions from heartfelt reflections on the African problem?

These questions pop up because in his film, Mazrui talks of Africans being forcefully uprooted out of Africa to go and help industrialize the West while in his time, Mazrui willingly goes to live and work in the West and consequently helps the West to advance further through his knowledge. Sounds more like the Chichi dodo talking about the moral filth of the West when you have to live there for your food.

Mazrui is not alone in this situation. Great African scholars have written great books and advanced enviable arguments about the problems facing Africa. Most of them trace the problems to the instability the colonial masters introduced in Africa and which the West is still perpetuating through neo-colonialism and imperialism. What leaves one baffled is the fact that most if not all of these scholars end up getting attracted to the lusture of the very West they blame for Africa’s problems.

With the world becoming a global village, arguing that African scholars should not seek to teach in the West would be naïve. This notwithstanding, such scholars need to put their knowledge to work for the benefit of their homeland and not play leading roles in the brain drain drama directed by the West.

While Professor Mazrui is a Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University, New York, in Africa, he holds the ceremonial positions of Professor-at-Large at the University of Jos in Nigeria and Chancellor of the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya. I would like to believe that our ailing education systems need more attention from our scholars than the departments in New York universities.

Writers like Ngugi Wa Thiong’o have spent their whole lives fighting the capitalist ideology of the West and its exploitative ways but like the Chichi dodo, they have to live in the ‘filth’ for food. Ngugi left Kenya for political reasons and threats to his life. He vowed never to come back for as long as Moi was still the president and true to his word, he never did. It was only after Moi left power that Ngugi made his return. The return was not a return in the sense of the word, it was a visit because after a short stint in the country, he ‘returned’ to America.

Ngugi is now a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Director of the International Centre for Writing and Translation at the University of California Irvine. This has made Ngugi drift further away from home to the extent that he can not make authoritative deductions on the socio-political situations back at home.

In a recent article written by Ngugi and published on the internet by thepatrioticvanguard.com entitled Ngugi Wa Thiong’o Reflects on Mwai Kibaki and the 2007 Kenyan General Election, one can vividly see the way Ngugi’s grasp on the political scenario back at home is loosing its grip. He admits to determining the situation back at home using the services he receives at Kenyan diplomatic offices abroad.

He says “As a writer I try to get glimpses into the big picture through small things. I have seen a very improved courtesy in the Kenya embassies to which I have gone for services, especially in Los Angeles, Johannesburg and London, a far cry from the previous era.”

This clearly shows that Ngugi has lost touch with the have nots he spent all his literary energy on in trying to liberate the poor from yokes of oppression. The poor watchman who lives in Mathare Slums and the workers at the Export Processing Zone factories do not even know what kind of services are offered at Kenyan embassies.

In the wake of the post election violence recently experienced in Kenya, one wonders if the permanent and continued presence of scholars like Ngugi, Mazrui or Professor Makau Mutua in the country would have led to a different consciousness among the voters.

One wonders what moral authority scholars like Leopold Sedar Senghor had to accuse the West of plunder in Africa when they secretly went to bed with the same West. In his negritude poetic movement, Senghor talked in great praise of the marvelous nature of Africa and the beauty of being African. This conviction on the beauty of the African land, people and ways did not however stop him from spending the last years of his life with his wife in Normandy, France, where he passed away on 20 December 2001. As a token of thanks, the then French president Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin the Prime Minister did not attend his funeral held on 29 December 2001 in Dakar.

It is time our scholars gave up their highly paying jobs and trooped back home to help us in moving our continent forward. If they do believe in the theories they advance and the arguments they make, they should place their country and continent before their materialistic gains. They should stop building the West because of the monetary gain they get from it. It is time they stopped talking the talk and started walking the walk.