James Watsons’ assertion that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners is yet another storm in Africa’s boiling tea cup of underachievement. Examined dispassionately, this furor is a clear case of “Kata wo to ba woto “. For the uninitiated, “Kata wo to baa wo to”, in the game of draughts, happens when a player falls into a trap that makes him move to cover his rear. In doing so, he inadvertently exposes his whole rear to annihilation.
‘Kata wo to baa wo to‘, cover your behind now, only to expose it later. Sweet bodements! Before anyone gets ideas, let me stress that I am not here as some black sheep about to turn against my people and agree with Mr. Watson’s assertions. Science, many great minds and enough protests have successfully challenged the validity of such scientific racism. And when we consider the smart Africans who have served in high levels of industry, academia, politics, science and technology, business, sports and entertainment, we are reassured within our guts that the African is as smart as the Westerner. Smug in this genetic reaffirmation, we tend however to squirm within its sordid manifestations in socio-economic development in our home countries. Undaunted, we quickly qualify our lack of capability with the excuse that circumstances have not provided the African the opportunity to realize our collective potential.
Making a case for the African, Cameron Duodu, the veteran Ghanaian journalist and writer defines intelligence as the effective adaptation to one’s environment. He believes that though Africa may look ‘dismal today………it is not because its people are less intelligent than Westerners. It is simply that the Western way of life has been imposed on Africans, and their (African) techniques for operating subsistence economies no longer have the capability to serve the needs that the western production paradigm….. has brought in its wake.” After this clear admission of our inability to effectively adapt to our changing environment he concludes - quite logically if I may add - that, if “Truth be told, the whole of Africa should be clinically schizophrenic”.
Mr. Duodu, in short, pleads the neo-colonialist argument that the depredations wrought by slavery and colonization have caused the hardships in the post-independent era. These hardships are precisely what causes Mr. Watson to be ‘inherently gloomy about the prospects of Africa’ because the west was making the mistake of dictating social policies to us based on an overrated sense of our rather inferior intelligence. We may easily refute this conclusion of an overrated sense of our intelligence, but can we refute that neo-colonialism is not an inevitable force of domination and Africans are causal agents in their own development. And, further, if African states, south of the Sahara are still lagging behind terribly after 50 years of independence, then there must exist a structural malaise within the leaderships of the different countries that deter them from being effective causative agents in their nations’ development. It is not a lack of intelligence; it is not forced domination; plain and simple, it is ineptitude. And when ineptitude is so pervasive across a continent, and the political elite wallow in it with such delightful complacency, while in many cases the majorities of their populations wallow in poverty, I would definitely say they have suffered severe retardations to their intelligence.
In truth, as to the intelligence factor, we Africans have covered our behinds. Lettered Africans of both sexes in the diaspora have proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that they can perform at any level of competence of their western counterparts. But when it comes to this intelligence being applied to the problems of development in the home country, a great divide emerges between the possession of this god-given intelligence and its practice. “Kata wo to baa wo to”, the covered behinds tend to get exposed. It is worthwhile considering some instances of this disconnect.
Dr George Ayittey, one of the most articulate and prolific writers among Ghanaian intellectuals abroad teaches and researches issues in Economics in a university in the US, the world’s most technologically advanced country. In his writings one finds the most incisive critique of the African political elite, their preferences for profligacy with the public purse, and the destructive policies they have undertaken to result in the current marginalization and impoverishment of the continent. But in his book, “Africa unchained”, where for the first time he embarks on a blueprint for the solution of Africa’s problems of development, he advocates a concept called the ‘Atinga model‘, which would have us legitimize an obsolete customary system of land ownership and agricultural practice. From this recidivist lapse into obsoletism, he expects Africans to slowly find our unique paths to modernism. What is interesting about his proposal is that, as an individual African, he sees himself totally capable of performing in the highest technological bastion of the world, but when it comes to his own people, he does not see them capable of anything more than Atingaism.
On the Okyeame internet discussion forum, a site patronized by a collection of Ghanaian academics and professionals, Dr Ayittey was soundly castigated for this Atinga model but the counter suggestions were no more connected to the Ghanaian reality. Another Ghanaian academic, an excellent thinker in linguistic theory, advocated the planning of a high speed underground railway for Tamale - an even more fantastic idea than the Atinga model. I could not help but imagine Atinga, with hoe and cutlass, boarding the Tamale bullet train to meet his buddies for some pito, brewed as part of the President’s Special Initiative. S imilarly, another African professional working in an international financial and development organization, an expert in gene applications in crop science, advocates the ‘mechanized hoe’ - slow improvements to the cutlass and the hoe - in order to develop our agriculture. He was impressed, once on a visit to his home country, to see a young native blacksmith manufacturing and selling rather crude farm implements that doubled as hoe and garden forks. To him it represented a significant improvement of indigenous technology. Again, like Dr Ayittey, this African had surmounted the world of high science but could not assign similar capabilities to his home bretheren. From these and other numerous instances, in the yawning gulf between hoes and cutlasses, on the one hand, and imitation of some infrastructure from advanced western cites, on the other, the mind of the African can be frozen into a stasis that renders him unable to fathom the way out of our people’s demise.
Writing about the educated West African in 1911, Rev Attoh-Ahuma, the celebrated early nationalist of Ghana, stated that, “… to reason from particulars to generals, from effects to causes - there is a great gulf fixed and so long as the breach between the two processes of rationalization continues to yawn, so long shall we remain Imitators not Initiators.” Almost a hundred years later, we still seem to suffer from this disconnect. I n September, the Ghanaian High Commissioner in Canada held an informal meeting with Ghanaian residents in Halifax, Canada, a population made up largely of professionals, academics and their families. At question time after her presentation, I asked why the government was promoting the brain gain and return of Ghanaian professionals to help in the country’s development, when it was contracting most of its major infrastructural developments - dams, schools, roads and even public toilets - to foreigners. A highly educated woman with a PhD, she answered that Ghanaians were lazy, and it was better to award these contracts to foreigners who could be trusted with the swift completion of this work. Her sentiments were shared by a Ghanaian diasporan, an agricultural research expert within the Canadian establishment, who gave testimony from personal experience in support of this purported laziness of the Ghanaian.
Had this accusation of an inherent laziness in Ghanaians been announced as the empirical findings of a white intellectual, I am sure we would be up in arms, but by our own elite, like the Senior Minister, JH Mensah’s query about ineptitude being genetic among Ghanaian politicians, it seemed more acceptable. But, I am not one to give in easily, and I asked Her Excellency if she thought there was a natural propensity to laziness within the Ghanaian. She might have smelled a trap in my question so she came out to clarify her statement by saying the private sector in Ghana was not lazy; it was the government sector that was composed of lazy malcontents. She had covered her behind, but had exposed it further! For if the government sector was naturally prone to laziness and so foreigners had to undertake our infrastructural development, would it not be advisable then to bring these foreigners to run the government since, by implication, government appointees, including herself, would also be naturally lazy? “Kata woto, baa wo to” ! But then, let us not kid ourselves. With Ghana’s budget so heavily dependent on multilateral institutions, foreigners do, to a large extent, run our government.
A quick visit to Ghanaian intellectual portals like Ghanaweb would be enough to convince anyone about a dearth of the exercise of intelligence in civil debates. A site for the exchange of intellectual ideas on development related issues, one would be astonished at the depth of invective based on tribal and political factions from people purporting to be academics and professionals, especially, in the diaspora. One academic, a professor of business and finance in a western university, once swore that no Ewe should be allowed to rule Ghana again because, according to him, Ewes dominated government positions and privelege during the Rawlings era. He refused to budge from his position even after he had been shown incontrovertible evidence that this view, held by a few Ghanaians, was mere myth and perception, and Akans as the majority ethnic group still dominated these positions. Not soon after this he attested to his intelligence based on the fact that he had a PhD and, unabashedly, consigned people without a PhD to the realms of the unintelligent or less intelligent.
Again, Attoh Ahuma’s voice comes to mind that, “Thinking is an art. It is the greatest blessing in the gift of heaven, and may not even be found in some talented men, who would box the compass of the whole circle of academical education”. It is not as if our elite do not think. When it comes to our country, however, as Mr. Duodo said, we become, well, ‘schizophrenic’.
But if you think this vile exercise of intellect or the lack of it, is limited to our intelligent people in the diaspora alone, then think again because our behinds are again exposed by those intelligent Ghanaians at home. What predominates there is a Shavian world of disillusion and doubt, nurtured in large part by a primitive system of landownership and agriculture; where throngs of our people engage daily in an agonized struggle to flee the country aided by a state that now wants to sell them for foreign exchange anyway; where a morbid national obsession with the dead and their funerals has substituted itself for dominant economic activity; where mutual co-existence and social cohesion that were supposed to be safeguarded by kinship have been replaced by cupidity, avarice and selfishness, attitudes acquired and ossified since the time of the slave trade; where the state would readily rob and murder its own citizens to appease foreign companies and improve their own private bank accounts; and where the spiritual nutrition of the political elite is to pick-pocket applause from fanatical supporters, merely for obeying the diktat of international financial institutions upon whom they are dependent.
From this perspective then are we in Africa less intelligent than Westerners? I would say, from the scientific evidence, the answer is no.
But , over the last 50 years, have we behaved less intelligently that the westerners?
Abi?
Oyiwa!
Kwesi Yeboah, Halifax, Canada
kwesi_yeboah@hotmail.com
