For a period of
some six months or so, between October, 2008 and March, 2009, I shared the
following snippets of views from some of the greatest minds amidst us with my family
and friends. In 1.10 all the way to 6.40, I pretty much shot from the hip. And
I then unplugged. I have decided to share the snippets and the unplugging that
followed with you here:
BABULE 1.10
To what extent
can one speak of an African knowledge, and in what sense? Etymologically, gnosis is related to gnosko, which in ancient Greek means “to
know”. Specifically, gnosis means
seeking to know, inquiry, methods of knowing, investigation, and even
acquaintance with someone […] Gnosis
is different from doxa or opinion,
and, on the other hand, cannot be confused with episteme, understood as both science and general intellectual
configuration.
V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge,
1988
BABULE 1.20
I
understand that facts alone can’t always settle our political disputes. Our
views on abortion aren’t determined by the science of fetal development, and
our judgement on whether and when to pull troops out of Iraq must necessarily
be based on probabilities. But sometimes there are more accurate and less
accurate answers; sometimes there are facts that cannot be spun, just as an
argument about whether it’s raining can usually be settled by stepping outside.
The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal
footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It
rewards not those who are right, but those […] who can make their arguments
most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.
Barack
Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on
Reclaiming the American Dream, 2006
BABULE
1.30
We must
be impatient with those of us in the public service who see themselves as
guardians of rubber stamps, thieves intent on self–enrichment, bureaucrats who
think they have the right to ignore the vision of Batho Pele, who come to work as late as possible, work as little as
possible and knock off as early as possible.
Thabo Mbeki, President of the Republic of
South Africa, State of the Nation Address, 2004
BABULE
1.40
The
concern for rank, the quest for distinction, and the insistence of the
[Cabinet] Minister on due pomp are expressed through such rhetorical devices as
repetition and lists, contrasts between words and things, frequent antitheses,
a tendency to exaggerate and indulge systematically in superlatives, a common
use of hyperbole and expressions that go beyond reality, and preference for
imprecise propositions and vague generalizations, complete with constant
references to the future. To be effective, this verbal trance state must reach
a point where all that matters is the harmony of the sound produced – because,
by and large, it is the particular arrangement of sound that brings on a state
of “possession” and triggers the mind’s voyaging; the space it creates through
violence, though, is, in the postcolony, totally colonized by the commandement.
The
production of vulgarity, it should be added, needs to be understood as a
deliberately cynical operation. It is political in the sense [that] every
polity is governed by “master fictions” little by little accepted into the
domain of the indisputable. The postcolonial polity can only produce “fables”
and stupefy its “subjects,” bringing on delirium when the discourse of power
penetrates its targets and drives them into realms of fantasy and
hallucination. This is why the rhetorical devices of officialese in the
postcolony can be compared to those of [Eastern European] communist regimes –
to the extent, that is, that both are actual regimes given to the production of
lies and double–speak. For this reason, then, all verbal dissidence, whether
written or sung, is the object of close surveillance and repression.
Achille
Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 2001
BABULE
2.10
The
leader pacifies the people. For years on end after independence has been won,
we see him, incapable of urging on the people to a concrete task, unable really
to open the future to them or of flinging them into the path of national reconstruction,
that is to say, of their own reconstruction; we see him reassessing the history
of independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for liberation.
The leader, because he refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie, asks the
people to fall back into the past and to become drunk on the remembrance of the
epoch which led up to independence. The leader, seen objectively, brings the
people to a halt and persists in either expelling them from history or
preventing them from taking root in it. During the struggle for liberation the
leader awakened the people and promised them a forward march, heroic and
unmitigated. Today, he uses every means to put them to sleep, and three or four
times a year asks them to remember the colonial period and to look back on the
long way they have come since then.
Frantz
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,
1963
BABULE
2.20
I
have always thought that inequalities between the rich and the poor in Malawi
are more fundamental than inequalities founded on other bases in terms of
improving standards and reducing poverty. This is not to say that regional,
district and other forms of inequality do not matter because in practice they
do. What I am suggesting is that we must be wary of allowing or using debates
over various forms of inequality to obscure and suppress debates over economic
and class inequalities. This is particularly important as we approach elections
when candidates of various shades will be searching for ways to connect to ‘the
people’.
[…]
In
my view, concocted loyalties based on ethnicity, religion and region should not
trump class. On 3 February, 1983, the State disagreed and, on the same campus
on which I work today, two Special Branch gentlemen turned up to express that
disagreement in the form of detention–without–trial orders for Tubby, Killion,
Zang, Alexander, Andy and I, all of us students in our twenties. Over the next
15 months, the State accommodated us at some of its less comfortable facilities
as a way of ‘teaching’ us that this campus talk of class struggle was really a
threat to public security under the Preservation of Public Security Act.
I
am obviously a poor learner because I insist 25 years later that it is still
really about class inequalities.
Fidelis
Edge Kanyongolo, View on Quotas, 2008
BABULE
2.30
There
are those who will still think that constitution making is a task that rests
wholly within the realm of lawyers. Indeed, all constitutional texts in modern
times have been drafted by lawyers. Behind the texts, however, are the most
important political actors and forces of a given society, persuading some
interpreters to take the view that constitution making represents the work of
the political, of political politics, and of le pouvoir constituant. In such a conception, whoever holds the
‘constituent power’, or acts in its name, hires the lawyers. But does the
method of constitution making really matter? Either way, the method itself
maybe deemed epiphenomenal – a formalistic façade either for the activity of
experts or for the fundamental expression of an unlimited sovereign power.
Andrew
Arato, Forms of Constitution Making and
Theories of Democracy, 1995
BABULE
2.40
What is consented to after a free inter–party
election is not simply which party should rule. The effect of the voting is not
merely in determining which party is in a majority in the legislature but also
which is in a minority and by what margins of strength the different parties
are separated. The balance of forces which emerges after a free election is
what enjoys the composite consent of
the electorate as a whole.
Ali
Mazrui ‘The tensions of crossing the floor in East Africa’ in AA Mazrui (ed) Violence and thought: Essays on social
tensions in Africa, 1969
BABULE
3.10
They
must ask, Can the subaltern speak?
[…] For the ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is
no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the
intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation. The problem is
that the subject’s itinerary has not been traced so as to offer an object of
seduction to the representing intellectual. […] How can we touch the
consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what
voice–consciousness can the subaltern speak? Their project, after all, is to
rewrite the development of the consciousness of the […] nation.
[…]
Within
the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference
is doubly effaced. The question is not of female participation in insurgency,
or the ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is
‘evidence’. It is, rather, that, both as object of colonial historiography and
as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male
dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no
history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in
shadow.
Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 1988
BABULE
3.20
The
stranger is a subject who has been understood in the West in very different
ways over the past eighty years. Sara Ahmed makes the important point that
strangers are not real subjects but socially constituted, discursively
produced positions. [M]y starting point is with the stranger as understood by
Laura Nielsen and her subjects—that is as someone who has not been knowingly
encountered before. Social, cultural, ethnic, or economic forms of distance or
alienation frequently underpin this personal unfamiliarity. Unintelligibility
may also do so. This does not mean the stranger is unreadable. What it does
suggest, however, is that from the perspective of the standpoint holder, they
appear too normatively different or dissonant
to
be explained to others (even as they may be affectively experienced and even
engaged with by the standpoint holder themselves).
Davina
Cooper, ‘Being in Public: The Threat and Promise of Stranger Contact’, 2007
BABULE
3.30
They
never charged Fumbani. We had not seen or heard of him since I saw him step out
of the car in front of me and go into an open prison shortly after our
abduction. While we were on trial for more than one and a half years, they kept
Fumbani locked up and pressed him to give evidence that we had come to Malawi
to kill Dr. Banda. They tortured him with spanners and electrical wires and
tried to turn him against his own parents. He was only 22 years old. They did
not succeed in making him their crown witness. He stood against it, but Fumbani
has never been the same since. He has a lot of scars on his body, but his soul
is even more scarred. He gets depressed and does not want to talk to anybody.
To date he does not want to tell his story and it is a big problem. I talk and
talk about my suffering and it helps. If he would only open up, I think that
things would clear.
Vera Mlangazua
Chirwa, Fearless Fighter: An
Autobiography, 2007
BABULE 3.40
When my
grandmother was raising me in Stamps, Arkansas, she had a particular routine when
people who were known to be whiners entered her store. Whenever she saw a known
complainer coming, she would call me from whatever I was doing and say
conspiratorially, “Sister, come inside. Come.” Of course I would obey.
[…]
As soon as the
complainer was out of the store, my grandmother would call me to stand in front
of her. And then she would say the same thing she had said at least a thousand times,
it seemed to me. “Sister, did you hear what Brother So-and-So or Sister Much to
Do complained about? You heard that?” And I would nod. Mamma would continue,
“Sister, there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor
and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. Sister, those who
expected to rise did not, their beds became their cooling boards and their
blankets became their winding sheets. And those dead folks would give anything,
anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of that
plowing that person was grumbling about. So you watch yourself about
complaining, Sister. What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is
change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t
complain.”
Maya
Angelou, ‘Complaining’, Wouldn’t Take
Nothing For My Journey Now, 1993
BABULE
4.10
[Mohandas]
Gandhi’s apparent absence from the foreground of postcolonial theory is all the
more curious […] His influence, however, is more far–reaching than the
infrequent appearance of his name might suggest. What are the reasons for his
invisibility? The historical legacy of the liberation struggles has been to
foreground the later resort to a politics of violent revolution, represented by
[Frantz] Fanon, over Gandhi’s non–violent resistance and, it could be added,
resistance to all forms of conflict, including those of class and gender. This
is augmented by Gandhi’s unfashionable adherence to the ‘spiritualization of
politics’ – the idea that the spiritual diffuses all aspects of everyday life,
including the political, and should form the basis of the way humans live. Such
is his sanctified status that much of the literature on Gandhi tends to be
devotional rather than analytical, abstracting his thoughts and beliefs while
downplaying the material aspects of his political practices.
Robert
J.C. Young, ‘Gandhi’s Invisibility’, Postcolonialism,
2001
BABULE
4.20
What
is commonly called a social or national economy is […] a network of many
interlaced economies. Its order shares, as we shall see, with the order of an
economy proper some formal characteristics but not the most important one: its
activities are not governed by a single scale or hierarchy of ends. The belief
that the economic activities of individual members of society are or ought to
be part of one economy in the strict sense of this term, and that what is
commonly described as the economy of a country or a society ought to be ordered
and judged by the same criteria as an economy proper, is a chief source of
error in this field. But, whenever we speak of the economy of a country, or of
the world, we are employing a term which suggests that these systems ought to
be run on socialist lines and directed according to a single plan so as to
serve a unitary system of ends.
While an economy
proper is an organization in the technical sense in which we have defined
[economy] […] the cosmos of the market neither is nor could be governed by such
a single scale of ends; it serves the multiplicity of separate and
incommensurable ends of all its separate members.
The confusion
which has been created by the ambiguity of the word economy is so serious that
for our present purposes it seems necessary to confine its use strictly to the
original meaning in which it describes a complex of deliberately coordinated
actions serving a single scale of ends, and to adopt another term to describe
the system of numerous interrelated economies which constitute the market
order. Since the name ‘catallactics’ has long ago been suggested for the science
which deals with the market order and has more recently been revived, it would
seem appropriate to adopt a corresponding term for the market order itself. The
term ‘catallactics’ was derived from the Greek verb katallatein (or katallassein)
which meant, significantly, not only “to exchange” but also “to admit into the
economy” and “to change from enemy to friend”. From it the adjective
‘catallactic’ has been derived to serve in the place of ‘economic’ to describe
the kind of phenomena with which the science of catallactics deals. The ancient
Greeks knew neither this term nor had a corresponding noun; if they had formed
one it would have been katallaxia.
From this we can form an English term catallaxy
which we shall use to describe the order brought about by the mutual adjustment
of many individual economies in a market. A catallaxy is thus a special kind of
spontaneous order produced by the market through people acting within the rules
of the law of property, tort and contract.
Friedrich A.
Hayek, ‘Market Order or Catallaxy’, Law,
Legislation and Liberty, 1976
BABULE 4.30
When I hear
businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in
a free-enterprise system”, I am reminded of the wonderful line about the
Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all
his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they
declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting
desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes
seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating
discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of
the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are – or would be if they or
anyone else took them seriously –preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.
Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces
that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.
[…]
The political
principle that underlies the market mechanism is unanimity. In an ideal free
market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all
cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not
participate. There are no values, no “social” responsibilities in any sense
other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a
collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form.
The political
principle that underlies the political mechanism is conformity. The individual
must serve a more general social interest – whether that be determined by a
church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and say in what
is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform. It is appropriate for some
to require others to contribute to a general social purpose whether they wish to
or not.
Unfortunately,
unanimity is not always feasible. There are some respects in which conformity
appears unavoidable, so I do not see how one can avoid the use of the political
mechanism altogether. But the doctrine of “social responsibility” taken
seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human
activity. […] That is why, […], I have called it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine”
in a free society, and [in] such a society, “there is one and only one social
responsibility of business – to use it resources and engage in activities
designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the
game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or
fraud”.
Milton Friedman,
1970
BABULE 4.40
The hour of
capitalism’s greatest triumph is its hour of crisis. The fall of the Berlin
Wall ended more than a century of political competition between capitalism and
communism. Capitalism stands alone as the only feasible way to rationally
organize a modern economy. At this moment in history, no responsible nation has
a choice. As a result, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Third
World and former communist nations have balanced their budgets,
cut subsidies, welcomed foreign investment, and dropped their tariff barriers.
Their efforts have been repaid
with bitter disappointment. From Russia to Venezuela, the past half–decade has
been a time of economic suffering, tumbling incomes, anxiety, and resentment;
of ‘starving, rioting, and looting,’ in the stinging words of Malaysian prime
minister Mahathir Mohammad. In a recent editorial the New York Times
said, ‘For much of the world, the marketplace extolled by the West in the
afterglow of victory in the Cold War has been supplanted by the cruelty of
markets, wariness toward capitalism, and dangers of instability.’ The triumph
of capitalism only in the West could be a recipe for economic and political
disaster.
[…]
But if people in countries making
the transition to capitalism are not pitiful beggars, are not helplessly
trapped in obsolete ways, and are not the uncritical prisoners of dysfunctional
cultures, what is it that prevents capitalism from delivering to them the same
wealth it has delivered to the West? Why does capitalism thrive only in the
West, as if enclosed in a bell jar?
[T]he major stumbling block that
keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to
produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labor and
creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system,
the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the poor countries of the
world cannot seem to produce for themselves, no matter how eagerly their people
engage in all the other activities that characterize a capitalist economy.
Hernando de
Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why
Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, 2001
BABULE 5.10
In
more recent years […] the problems of growth and employment in the developed
countries and the stagnation and low economic growth and the obvious role of
interventionist [S]tate in the high–performing countries have revived interest
in development economics and development States. Recent writings have
rigorously restated such central concepts of development economics as
externalities, endogenous technological learning, asymmetric information,
structural rigidities, transaction costs, and the public–good nature of
information. Each of these provides a clear theoretical justification for
public intervention.
This
counter counter–revolution, which in fact began during the prime of
neoclassical orthodoxy, has provided a basis for reassessing market failures
and once more elevating the prominent role of government. The intellectual
precursor to this revolution was provided by [Bruce] Greenwald and [Joseph]
Stiglitz [,] new trade theories [and] the new growth theories.
[…]
After
nearly two decades of controversy, the balance of opinion tends to suggest that
the way forward might well lie at the centre. It is broadly agreed that
although the market and private–sector initiatives should be the fulcrum of
economic activities, the transformation of most developing countries to higher
levels of economic performance cannot occur without a relatively efficient,
capable, and willing [S]tate.
Thandika
Mkandawire and Charles Chukwuma Soludo, Our
Continent, Our Future, 1998
BABULE
5.20
If
there is a consensus today about what strategies are most likely to promote
development in poor countries, it is this: the ‘Washington Consensus’ – the
oversimplified rendition of policies recommended by international financial
institutions and the US Treasury – did not provide the answer. [T]he [...]
Washington Consensus and [...] its orthodox recipes failed to generate economic
growth in the countries that applied them [...] [T]he ‘post–“Washington
Consensus” Consensus’, [...] has emerged as a result of the growing
dissatisfaction with the Washington Consensus failures. [The] [a]spects [of the
‘post–“Washington Consensus” Consensus’] include: the agreement that a
successful development strategy cannot come only from Washington but must
include the developing world in a meaningful way; one–size–fits–all policies
are doomed to fail; countries should be given room to experiment, use their own
judgment, and explore alternatives; development requires a balanced role
between the [S]tate and the market and the strengthening of the institutions in
each; and finally, success must be measured not only in GDP, but also must
account for distribution as well as social and environmental sustainability.
Joseph Stiglitz
‘Is there a Post–“Washington Consensus” Consensus?’ in Narcís Serra &
Joseph Stiglitz (eds.) The Washington
Consensus Reconsidered: Towards a New Global Governance, 2008
B
ABULE 5.30
It is still midmorning in Malawi when we arrive at a small
village, Nthandire, [sic] about an hour outside of Lilongwe, the capital. We
have come over dirt roads, passing women and children walking barefoot with
water jugs, wood for fuel, and other bundles. The midmorning temperature is
sweltering. In this subsistence maize–growing region of a poor, landlocked
country in southern Africa, households eke out survival from an unforgiving
terrain. This year has been a lot more difficult than usual because the rains
have failed, probably the result of an El Niño cycle. Whatever the cause, the
crops are withering in the fields that we pass.
If the village were filled with able–bodied men, who could have
built small–scale water harvesting units on rooftops and in the fields to
collect what little rain had fallen in the preceding months, the situation
would not be so dire as it is this morning. But as we arrive in the village, we
see no able–bodied young men at all. In fact, older women and dozens of children
greet us, but there is not a young man or woman of working age in sight. Where,
we ask, are the workers? Out in the fields? The aid worker who has led us to
the village shakes his head sadly and says no. They are nearly all dead. The
village has been devastated by AIDS, which has ravaged this part of Malawi for
several years now.
[...]
Malawi actually put together one of the earliest and best
conceived strategies for bringing treatment to its dying population, and gave
an enormously thoughtful response to the challenges of managing a new system of
drug delivery, patient counselling and education, community outreach, and the
financial flows that would accompany the process of training doctors. On that
basis, Malawi made proposals to the international community to help Malawians
try to reach about a third of the total infected population (about three
hundred thousand people) with anti–AIDS drug treatment within a five year
scale–up period.
Yet international processes are cruel. The donor governments –
including the United States and Europeans – told Malawi to scale back its
proposal sharply because the first proposal was ‘too ambitious and too costly.’
The next draft was cut back to a mere hundred thousand on treatment at the end
of five years. Even that was too much. In a tense five–day period, the donors
prevailed on Malawi to cut another 60 per–cent from the proposal, down to forty
thousand on treatment. This atrophied plan was submitted to the Global Fund to
Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. Incredibly, the donors that run that fund saw it
fit to cut back once again. After a long struggle, Malawi received funding to
save just twenty–five thousand at the end of five years – a death warrant from
the international community for the people of this country.
[...]
In the face of this horrific maelstrom, the world community has so
far displayed a fair bit of hand–wringing and even some high–minded rhetoric,
but precious little action.
Jeffrey
Sachs, The End of Poverty: How We Can
Make It Happen In Our Lifetime, 2005
BABULE
5.40
The
alternative strategy being proposed here is the need for an economic
environment in which the future structure of the economy is prefigured by
government’s policy thrust such that market forces are allowed some degree of free
play but nevertheless persuaded, by the structure of incentives, to direct
their investments and activities toward those select activities that promote
the fulfilment of sub–strategies. The proposed strategy entails the government
engaging in indicative planning
supported by market–augmenting
targeted and phased policy measures.
It is not
necessary that the government directly participates in productive activities
except perhaps, for some degree of participation in productive activities such
as banking, where the control over the allocation of credit is important.
In short,
through indicative planning and the selective, targeted and phased support for
key activities within a market environment, the [S]tate would ensure that
private market activities operate towards the realization of desired long term
development goals.
Guy Mhone
‘Dependency and Underdevelopment: The Limits of Structural Adjustment
Programmes and Towards a Pro–Active State–Led Development Strategy’, 1995
BABULE 6.10
1967 Parole Hearing Man: Ellis Boyd
Redding, your files say you’ve served 40 years of a life sentence. Do you feel
you’ve been rehabilitated?
Red: Rehabilitated? Well, now let me
see. You know, I don’t have any idea what that means.
1967
Parole Hearings Man:
Well, it means that you’re ready to rejoin society...
Red: I know what you think it means, sonny. To me it’s
just a made up word. A politician’s word, so young fellas like yourself can
wear a suit and a tie, and have a job. What do you really want to know? Am I
sorry for what I did?
1967
Parole Hearings Man:
Well, are you?
Red: There’s not a
day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here, or because you think
I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed
that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense
to him, tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this
old man is all that’s left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? It’s just a
bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my
time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit.
Morgan
Freeman as Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding in Shawshank
Redemption, 1994
BABULE
6.20
The Cheerful Girls At Smiller’s Bar,
1971
The
prostitutes at Smiller’s Bar beside the dusty road
Were
only girls once, in tremulous mini–skirts and oriental
Beads,
cheerfully swigging Carlsbergs and bouncing to
Rusty
simanje–manje and rumba booming in the juke–box;
They
were striking virgins bored by our Presbyterian
Prudes
until a true Presbyterian came one night. And like
To
us all, the girls offered him a seat on cheap planks
In
the dark backyard room choked with diesel–oil clouds
From
a tin–can lamp. Touched the official rolled his eyes
To
one in style. She said no; most girls only wanted
A
husband to hook or the fruits of independence to taste;
But
since then mini–skirts were banned and the girls
Of
Smiller’s Bar were ‘ugly prostitutes to boot!’
Today,
the girls still giggle about what came through
The
megaphones: the preservation of our traditional
et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera …
Jack
Mapanje ‘The Cheerful Girls At Smiller’s Bar, 1971’ in The Last of the Sweet Bananas, 2004
BABULE
6.30
We Real Cool
[The pool players.
Seven at the Golden
Shovel.]
We
real cool. We
Left
school. We
Lurk
late. We
Strike
straight. We
Sing
sin. We
Thin
gin. We
Jazz
June. We
Die
soon.
Gwendolyn
Brooks, ‘We Real Cool’ in The Bean Eaters,
1960
BABULE
6.40
Graffiti at 1st Ave.
and 46th St.,
NY
It aint your daily creeps that come
here.
No. These are not the yobs that ply
and
plunder inner city Peckham or the tsotsi of Jozi. You
will not see the rogues of Bangkok or the petty
hoodlums of Queens
here. This aint no place for the
low life from inner–city
everywhere.
World government trudges these
corridors.
FIT AND PROPER PERSONS.
I am sat in a venerated private
cubicle. The hawkish
eyes of CCTV envelop this hallowed
gentlemen’s restroom.
I look at this revered wall and
read with bewilderment:
‘The UN Sucks!’
PECULIAR PRIVACY.
I sat still…
gently smiled…
continued to read;
slowly…
and stared at the
wall with placid pleasure.
The outfits here tell tales of
sophistication: What is behind
these suave suits and glistening
leather shoes. The air here wears
exotic whiffs of fragrance. Every
space is invaded
with confident regality. The men
and women in
these offices seem air–brushed …
FIERCE FORMALITY.
I have been told of books and
covers
and judgments. Appearance and
Reality. I have
been told of curiosity and dead
cats.
I choose curiosity and read on: How
dare
these debonair world governors
proclaim on a UN wall:
‘Osama was here!’
WHAT TEMERITY…
WHAT INCONGRUITY…
WHAT…
Chikosa Mozesi Silungwe (on file
with the author), 2006
UNPLUGGED
‘Babule’ (pronounced wah–woo–læ) is a KyaNgonde word that literally means ‘tell them’. I
decided to develop the Babule Series
as a conversation with my family and friends on Knowledge. The unilateral
decision was made fully aware of the risks involved; I could come across as
patronizing or indeed vain. However, the Babule
Series must serve two purposes: first, it must challenge every reader to go
beyond their comfort zone and engage with other discourses on Life that are
contained in the vast human library. Secondly, the Series seeks to persuade the
reader to constantly challenge the world view through critique. A balanced
critique emerges if one fully understands the basis of the argument by the
‘Other’ before taking a definitive position whether in agreement or
disagreement with the ‘Other’. While this Series is merely a tip of the iceberg
of Knowledge out there, it is hopefully adequate to prod the reader into
‘action’.
In
the paragraphs that follow, I put the various snippets of the Series in
perspective. I demonstrate the rationale (or lack of it) in putting the
material together:
Babule 1.10 to 1.40
celebrates Africanity from the continent and the Diaspora. I took two sages
each from Francophone and Anglophone Africanity. VY Mudimbe points out the
existence of African gnosis.
Mudimbe’s scholarship has been that the tendency to fit African Knowledge into
Euro–American parameters for its own sake is retrogressive. Achille Mbembe
bluntly proffers an explanation for the tendency. He has said that the tendency
arises out of the haute bourgeois’
stranglehold on the African; a stranglehold that leaves the African in a state
of perpetual trance.
Moving
on from Mudimbe and Mbembe, I shared Obama and Mbeki. Just like it has been
said of Cuba before him, I suggest that Barack Hussein Obama, Jr is an idea.
Obama’s piece seeks to show that often simplicity makes all the difference. He
says: ‘But sometimes there are more accurate and less accurate answers;
sometimes there are facts that cannot be spun, just as an argument about
whether it’s raining can usually be settled by stepping outside.’
Thabo Mbeki highlights the lack of patriotism that pervades the public trustees
driving African political economies. It is dishonourable; and every proud
peopleist must detest this kind of dsyfunctionality in public service.
In
light of Thabo Mbeki’s rebuke, it is pertinent to go back to the beginning of
the beginning. In broad terms, Babule
2.10 to 2.40 addresses the issue of State formation and its sustainability. The
thoughts of Frantz Fanon have dominated and justified the liberation struggles
of Africa and the Diaspora whether through ‘peace’ or ‘bloodshed’ from the
1960s and beyond. Fanon’s piece from Wretched
of the Earth demonstrates, in so many ways, the political betrayal that has
befallen Africa and the Diaspora. In my view, State formation and its
sustainability depends, in part, on the manner with which the rich / poor
divide is closed. An ever–increasing middle class, the petit bourgeois, is necessary for the sustenance of the African
political economy. This is how I have read Fidelis Edge Kanyongolo. I read
Kanyongolo as implicitly agitating for the nurture of a middle class that
becomes the centrepiece of postcolonial Malawi and the wider African political
economy. In this respect, Kanyongolo’s point complements Achille Mbembe.
A
constitutional framework is a key political tool for State formation and its
sustenance. Andrew Arato urges us to be intolerant of the deference accorded to
lawyers in constitution making. Being a lawyer myself, I am not ashamed to
state that some of our kind miss the broader political–economic picture and can
be so pedantic such that their positions become muddled and jejune. In my view,
a hyper–litigious lawyer – the one who commences litigation at every
opportunity – is counter–productive to the political economy.
Babule 3.10 to 3.40 is
an all–woman ‘coterie’. Gayatri Spivak is the celebrated professor of literary
criticism and literary theory at Columbia University, New York, US. She has
been lauded as one of the pioneers of Subaltern Studies. Her article, ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’ is considered as one of the founding pieces of
Postcolonialism as a field of scholarship. Davina Cooper, a Warwick alumnus, is
a Professor of Law and Political Theory at Kent. She specializes, among other
things, in ‘everyday utopias’ – space and sites of exchange. This space and
sites includes the school, sex, religion, politics and speech.
Vera Chirwa needs no introduction. In case you do need an introduction then you
will find a wholesome Vera Chirwa in Fearless
Fighter: An Autobiography. Spivak, Cooper, Chirwa and Maya Angelou are a
celebration of womanhood. Since the beginning of ‘history’, the woman has
repeatedly triumphed against the odds. The very life of Angelou, for example,
epitomizes this resilience that, I suggest, is innate in the woman; especially
the principled and pragmatic woman.
The
decades after the Second ‘World’ War have witnessed theses and antitheses on the
nature of ‘Development’ and consequently what must underpin the ‘theory’ of a
political economy. Babule 4.10 to
4.40 delves into these treacherous, albeit exciting, waters. Robert Young’s
comments on Gandhi, while made in the context of postcolonial discourse, seek
to demonstrate that principle must underpin government, let alone, governance.
Hence, as the ‘State’ receded in the late 1970s and beyond, and as the
clichesque ‘free market economy’ took centre stage, it is important to quickly
observe the influence of the Mount Pelerin Society’s thought. Notable amongst
the Mount Pelerin socialites is Friedrich Hayek. Hayek’s thesis of the
catallaxy as a market order underlies the so–called neo–liberal order at the
beginning of the 1980s and beyond. Margaret Thatcher is on record to have
boasted that Hayek was her bedtime reading.
The most robustly sound of the marketists has remained Milton Friedman who,
with impressive academic rigour, buried the role of the ‘State’ in the
political economy. By the time Hernando de Soto arrives with his solution for
the ‘Everywhere’, the die had already been cast.
Where
are the antitheses to the ‘market’ school? In the vast array of the
‘deconstructionists’ and critics; in Babule
5.10 to 5.40, I have highlighted five scholars who, in my view, have been
relatively balanced critics over the years. First, Thandika Mkandawire and
Charles Chukwuma Soludo – Thandika being a Swedish of Malawian origin and the
incumbent director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development,
and Soludo being the incumbent governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and a
distinguished macroeconomics academic; Joseph Stiglitz – a Professor of
economics at Columbia University and a one time Clinton Administration advisor
and high ranking World Bank economist; Jeffrey Sachs – a Professor at Columbia
University and special advisor to the United Nations Secretary General; and Guy
Mhone (of recent memory) – a Malawi national and accomplished academic who, among other achievements, helped to develop
the initial framework of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR)
programme of the post–apartheid Government of South Africa. The centrist is the
new radical. In light of the present global economic climate, the market
critique has turned out prophetic.
Babule 6.10 to 6.40
epitomises the power of the word. Shawshank
Redemption can be summed up in one word: Hope. In
the words of Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne in
Shawshank Redemption: ‘...hope is a good thing...’ Mapanje invokes humour
to critique a regime’s overly regulation of social conduct. The poem is a
commentary of the infamous Decency in Dress Act; a
law passed by the Malawi legislature in 1971 banning the wearing of trousers
and mini–skirts in the case of women, and long hair and bell bottoms in the
case of men. The Act was repealed in November, 1993.
I
interpret ‘We Real Cool’ as an expansion of the urban expression ‘too cool for
school’; a parent’s rebuke of vain, youthful popularity and emphasizing the
importance of a decent education. The ‘Graffiti’ piece; may all take note that
there is more where that piece came from. These lines (and many other lines in
your minds) must be cherished. As the brother has said in as many words: ‘We
all started out crying.’
Finally,
the whole Babule Series serves as a
humble contribution to realising James Earl ‘Jimmy’ Carter’s principle; that a
person must be revered because of the content of their character and not
because of what they own. This resonates with some of the age–old principles of
our forefathers and foremothers: nzeru
n’chuma (intellect [intelligence] is wealth); akasam’wana ndindi unandi, mandanda gakwe aga (do not see the
warbler’s bird’s smallness; these are its eggs); or mulomo wa banyako ni munkhwala (shared wisdom [intellect] is a
virtue). By all means babule; you
have to tell them.
