Remembering the dismembered continent (2): Ayi Kwei Armah completes his article on the "Berlin

consensus", by looking at what Africans can do to move the continent forward. The first part was
published in the last issue.

Title Annotation: AFRICA
Author: Armah, Ayi Kwei
Date: Mar 1, 2010
Words: 3947
Publication: New African
ISSN: 0142-9345

THE PURPOSE OF THE BERLIN trap, the purpose of the intellectual hole in which our Berlin-
type education places us as African intellectuals, is to make us incapable of reasoning from the
basic premise of a unified African field. There is a vast difference between what a designer
thinking as an African can aspire to, and what a designer limited to thinking as a Kenyan, a
Ghanaian, a Senegalese or a Mozambican only, can aim at.

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This is not a simple matter of intelligence; it is the much more complex issue of intelligence in a
negative context, or the same intelligence in a positive context. The dimension of that difference
is what separates the present disastrous situation we live in from the humane and prosperous
social conditions we could create if we put our minds to the challenge, as Africans.

Let's look at an industrial example. All over Africa, in households, businesses, public offices,
hospitals and schools, there is a despairing complaint about inadequate electrical energy.

Energy in the social body is blood and oxygen. Given sufficient supplies of electrical energy,
schoolchildren could study more efficiently, carpenters could produce better furniture,
constructors could build to higher standards, factories could operate where none exist today,
hospitals and laboratories could save millions of lives, and households could better plan their
nutrition, hygiene and leisure.

Africa, taken as a unified field, possesses great quantities of solar energy. Owing to the way the
continent lies athwart the equator, the quality of our sunlight and sunpower is ideal. We could
generate large quantities of solar power, clean energy of a steady, even quality, enough to power
the industrial flowering of the continent.

Cost is sometimes advanced as a disabling condition. Right now, we are paying tremendous costs
by leaving large parts of our society with no power at all, and forcing the remainder to make do
with shabby supplies of electricity that come on and off, making rational planning in any
productive field hard if not downright impossible. We are paying huge amounts for the use of
dirty forms of energy that by their nature also involve us in the murderous geopolitics of fossil
fuels.

The cost of solar and wind energy systems has gone down steadily over the past 20 years. It is
still going down. It would go down faster if Africans became serious players in the solar
industrial field. What would happen if an African group representing homeowners in different
parts of the continent wished to order not a few dozen units, but millions of solar panels and
hundreds of thousands of inverters, connecting relays and switches?

The asking price would come down steeply. Savings could be passed on to homeowners, schools
and institutions. And we could negotiate with the manufacturer to site factories where we need
them, here at home, and to train technicians to operate them, so that from being simple buyers of
solar equipment, we could become capable of designing it, making it and selling it, thus creating
a durable energy base for our economic prosperity.

To this the hardened wit may shrug and point out that the average African intellectual prefers to
think of solar power as something special to put on top of his house, so that while the whole
neighbourhood around him is steeped in powerlessness, he can bask in the glow of his
exceptional prescience.

Perception of our realities

Here we come face to face with a tough reality: the fact that the majority of those educated to fit
snugly into the Berlin structures of division easily conceive of power in personal, not social,
terms; that they are happy to be individually rich in a poor society, delighted to have their island
of uninterruptible solar power in an environment plunged into outage after shortage after
brownout, and ecstatic at the prospect of having their daughters and sons educated at expensive
foreign institutions while the educational system in the society around them rots.

Whether it is a waste of time to address the well-adjusted African intellectual in this solipsistic
heaven is a matter for debate at some later point. Right now, it is more useful to focus not on the
self-satisfied elite graduate, but on those of us who are aware that there is something inadequate
in our perception of African time and space, but remain perplexed as to what we can do about it.

Such persons need the courage to examine the basic premises of the Berlin system, if they are
ever to put themselves in a position to shift, intellectually, from its divisive imperatives to a more
accurate, more African perception of our realities. Some of the most notorious axioms of the
Berlin system may easily be put to rest through a rational examination of reality.

Take the assumption that Ancient Egypt was not part of Africa. Look at any accurate map, look
at the refugees near you, and use your intelligence. The separation of North Africa from the rest
of Africa is a trick that requires a bit more information to see through. That information is
available to anyone willing to go through the history of the continent, and to see when the
present Asian and European occupants of Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco arrived in Africa.

There was a time when the divisive conceptualisation of Africa required us to refer to "Africa
south of the Sahara and north of the Limpopo". History has removed part of that silly formula,
but the impression that there are naturally insuperable barriers between various parts of Africa
persists, even though the continent's population itself tries to flow naturally and logically over
every artificial barrier.

Intellectual barrier

There is one type of intellectual barrier that is harder to dislodge: the dogma of African
irrationality and European rationality. The problem of rationality is of central importance to any
person or group interested in social change. We would therefore do well not to sidestep it, but to
face it honestly, and to solve it with accurate historical data.

The concept of rationality is pivotal to any consideration of social change because human
progress may reasonably be conceived of as the emancipation of society from the hold of such
arbitrary fictional characters as gods and demons, tribal and racial superstitions, and the
prejudices of caste and class, followed by the frank, deliberate embrace of human intelligence as
our prime guide in interactions with our immediate environment and the universe at large.

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The embrace of human rationality has historically led to social improvements made possible by
the intelligent study of human and natural resources, the application of intelligence to the
management of both, and the creation of increasing quanta of social wealth and wellbeing as a
result.

In all societies, the process by which reason replaces unreason as the standard of human
behaviour and endeavour can be traced like a thread running through periods where kings and
emperors, priests and shamans ruled, to those in which witchcraft was exposed as mental
rubbish, royalty revealed to be social offal, and science, a way of life based on verifiable
knowledge, acknowledged as the surest path leading to an intelligent understanding and ordering
of the universe.

One of the cruder epistemological outcomes of the conquest of African space and time under the
Berlin consensus was the promulgation of the doctrine of Western rationalism and African
irrationalism. The capacity to reason, historically a social acquisition wherever humans have
lived, was appropriated and then ascribed to a single section of humanity, Europe in particular,
the West in general, meaning the descendants of Europeans.

Much of the philosophical education of Europeans and Americans consists of a systematic

immersion in a dogma according to which the first signs of human reasoning appeared in
Europe--usually "among our Greek ancestors". Such a doctrine collapses the moment it is
confronted with real, accurate, factual, historical data.

However, the fact is that nowhere within the Berlin educational system under which African
intellectuals have laboured over the past century has such data been given room to become
visible. French colonialists routinely described their society as Cartesian, as if Frenchmen were
born ratiocinating. Simultaneously, Africans were encouraged to describe our society as
thoughtless, rhythmic, playful, child-like, and irrational.

An entire industry of Berlin-style African Studies grew up luxuriating in these facile--and false--

assumptions. African intellectuals have played a shameful part in this hoax.

We have helped to strengthen the stereotype of African studies as essentially mindless by

grabbing opportunities to acquire lazy degrees in anthropology after presenting our
grandmothers' lullabies instead of studying new historical information, by focusing heavily on
drumming and dancing (humorously tagged dondology) to the exclusion of more serious but less
entertaining aspects of African culture, such as philosophy.

In the process, we have helped cover up the fact that the European claim of proprietary rights
over rationality is a historical.

Worse, there are African intellectuals so deep in the Berlin hole that they not only swallowed the
hoax about "Western rationality", but actually took to arguing, straight-faced, that (a) since
African culture was essentially irrational, and (b) since life in the modern world, modernisation,
depended on the mastery of rational routines, (c) therefore for Africa to move into the modern
world, Africa would have to borrow rationality from the West--Europe and America. It is a
formula that consecrates the partnership of deceitful teaching and gullible apprenticeship.

Laughter is out

What to do in the face of such gullibility masquerading as scholarship? Laughter, as we have

seen, is out. What we need to do, as gently as possible, but in any case firmly all the time, is to
confront the ignorant savants with real information.

Question: Does this information exist? Answer: Yes, and in such abundant quantities that if
institutes of African studies wished to get serious, they could mount course after course of
intense instruction in ancient African philosophy, literature, science and culture, alongside the
favourite dondological offerings, and generate research that would yield high-quality information
to be shared with coming generations of African students and professors.

Here, we can begin to look at a sample of the information no one gave schoolchildren under the
Berlin educational system. Let us start by pointing out that Africans in antiquity never claimed to
be the only possessors of rationality. They recognised it as a human, cultural faculty that could
be nurtured through systematic exercise and training.

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The ancient African concept of rationality was carried by several words, the most unambiguous
of which was rekh, meaning to know, with the usual variants: knowledge, intelligence, etc.
Human beings could be referred to as remetch, but scribes wishing to draw attention to the
conception of human beings as rational beings would use the word rekhiu.
Science, the accumulation of verifiable knowledge, was known under the collective name of
rekhit. Depending on the determinative sign, the word could also designate the spirit of science
personified.

Calculation, indispensable in the quantitative aspects of science, was called mn, hesbet (a word
in which Kiswahili speakers will recognise their hesabu), or tchenut.

Accuracy, that indispensable quality of rational science, was known as ekwa, and was demanded
in all such intellectual professions such as medicine, architecture and astronomy, as well as in
accountancy and law.

To teach the systematic use of reason in the management of human affairs, they [the scholars] set
up schools to which children could go from the age of four, and where the most suited could stay
and deepen their expertise as teachers and researchers with lifetime tenure. At the higher levels,
schools had institutes rationally organised for the teaching of specialised professions and
sciences.

Thus, within the general educational institution of the temple known as per ankh, the house of
life, there could be specialised institutes such as a designers' school, per nu seshw, the per
nub for jewellers, or the per medw, for lawyers and other practitioners whose stock in trade was
verbal eloquence.

Other schools

In similar schools they trained astronomers, whose work was the rational observation of
phenomena in the visible universe, and whose aim was to acquire such a measured, precise
knowledge of the movements of earth, sky, moon, sun and stars, that by logical inference they
could correlate the appearance of specific celestial bodies with such earthly processes as floods
and droughts, thus generating information useful for the improvement of vital activities like
agriculture and land use.

It was the astronomers trained at these ancient African schools that developed concepts for the
measurement of time based on observations of regularities and variations in the daily appearance
and setting of the sun, the monthly appearance and disappearance of the moon, and the repeated
alternation of seasons, using such instruments as water clocks and nilometers.

The schools taught the careful study of the configuration of animal and human bodies, so that
doctors trained there could look at malfunctions in one part of the body, say a limb, and infer that
there was something wrong with the heart, to which they needed to apply a remedy.

Mathematicians trained in Ancient Egyptian schools, using not magic but reason, calculated the
correct angle at which blocks of stone and masonry must be placed to ensure architectural
stability.

Specialists in flood control developed instruments there for the measurement of annual variations
in the level of the River Nile, so that they could warn society at large to prepare for such
deviations from the normal ebb and flow as might have caused human distress if unprepared for.

This, no doubt about it, was the application of reason elevated to an organisational principle in
social life. The people whose way of life was thus organised around the concept of human
rationality lived a couple of thousand years before the Greeks first began practising systematic
philosophy.

But every schoolchild taught in colonial and neocolonial schools learned by rote that the Greeks
were the first to discover the concept of reason.

And anthropologists reinforced the message by presenting relentless snapshots of African

humanity as irrational, tribal, atavistic, mystery-bound, in any case alien to the quintessentially
human concept of reason.

Moving forward

It serves no purpose to focus on past harm done. The more reasonable approach is to see if the
damage done by the old colonial denial of African productivity in history, philosophy, science
and the arts is reversible. In plainer terms, can the lies told by the anthropologists serving the
Berlin system of African fragmentation be replaced with accurate information about our history,
philosophy and culture?

The answer is an unequivocal yes. The information exists. It covers the more than 3,000 years of
ancient African history before the Greeks found out what great improvements the systematic use
of reason could bring to the organisation of human life.

Even though the hostility of invading European and Arab armies and religions pushed the pursuit
of the reasoned life underground with the onset of the Christian and Muslim invasions of Africa,
the historical record of Africa did not get entirely wiped out.

Populations pushed out of the Nile valley did lose a great deal of their ancient culture, but some
still tried to set up schools and to keep records, so that the written records of African history are
available not just for the first 3,000 years of ancient history, but also for much of the ensuing
2,000 years.

These records used the scripts available to scholars at the times they wrote, just as today, we
African scholars still use French, English and Portuguese, though we could wake up and create a
language of our own. The languages included Arabic, the language of invaders, as well as
Sudani, Malian and other African languages.

Why is this information not being accessed, researched, processed and taught at institutes of
African studies and in departments of history, philosophy, literature and science throughout
Africa? Because the brothers and sisters now teaching there were not taught that the information
existed, they have tended, quite naturally, to teach what they were taught.

The problem is that what they were taught was a mixture of insufficient knowledge with great
gobs of dogma, not just dogma but dogma designed to keep Africans thinking that we have no
intellectual antecedents. This, from a systems viewpoint, is functional misinformation.

Its effectiveness can be measured by the extent to which, whenever we Africans are faced with
challenges calling for original thinking and bold, innovative intellectual effort, we collapse into
the arms of experts from the World Bank, the IMF and Foundations X, Y, and Z, conveniently
forgetting that what these institutions and the states behind them are about is not how to improve
the wellbeing of Africans, but how to improve their wellbeing at our expense by persuading us to
export what we need to keep at home if we want to create our own future.

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It is pointless to blame conformist African professors for rehashing hypocoristic anthropological

notions about Africa as an irrational society with no history and no philosophy, needing to
borrow Western rationality if it is to advance into the future.

They were given substandard intellectual tools with which to do their work, in the sense that
instead of being encouraged to learn hieroglyphic or Sudani script in order to access data on
African history, they were allowed to take the lazy path of recording and commenting on
missionary diaries, colonial decrees, and our grandmothers' lullabies for their doctorates.

Lullabies and traditional songs are fine, but as the stuff of learning they are superficial. To the
stock of African ethnic lore, schools of African studies need to add the much more challenging
data locked up in hieroglyphic, Ethiopic, Sudani and other African writings.

To what purpose? Anyone whose prime purpose is to get a degree would be well advised to
study a hundred local songs gathered close to home. It is a much easier path to tread. But the
study of Africa's true historical and philosophical heritage can serve a much more interesting
purpose than the acquisition of paper credentials.

Africans who learn to access the available information directly will know that centuries and
millennia ago, people like ourselves, our ancestors, thought seriously about the central issues of
life here. Some of the ideas and procedures they originated are sharply relevant to this day.

Such knowledge frees us from the crippling, cretinising superstition that we are Ghanaians,
Nigerians, Senegalese, Malawians, Chadians and Sierra Leoneans, and liberates us to think as
Africans. Thinking as Africans, we are free, mentally, to take in the vast range of possibilities
open to the entire continent, as we look for ways of solving problems confronting us all living
here.

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This is an intellectual challenge, but it is beyond the capacity of academic intellectuals to meet
alone. The academy as brought to Africa in the wake of Arab and European invaders is very
different from the ancient African learning institution that was the house of life.
In many ways, our universities and schools in Africa today are intended not to help our society
live, but to fix it in a quasi-permanent state of half-life, half-death, as its vital resources get
steadily drained away. Our universities, set to help us vegetate, are national universities; to help
us live, they would have to become, or to be replaced by, African universities.

What can we do?

Pending the rise of such African institutions of higher learning, what can any interested
intellectual do? The work required to awaken African society from the slumber of divisions to
the vitality of united thinking and action is initially a task of memory. We need to retrieve our
murdered memory, to revive our starved recollection of our potential.

We can do this by accessing and discussing the real documents of our history and philosophy. It
is cool to be able to do this as students on scholarships. But few schools and universities offer
African children scholarships if their quest is for self-knowledge. When was the last time you
heard of an African high school graduate being offered a scholarship to study Egyptology?

Outside the formal system of schools and universities, any group of awakening intellectuals can
form study groups, pool resources to acquire copies of key documents, and study them, learning
the enabling languages and such scripts as hieroglyphics whenever necessary.

Nothing prevents us from expanding our knowledge of ourselves this way, and nothing prevents
us from sharing the information we find with millions of others, using whatever skills we
possess, in whatever fields we choose: music, fiction, films, video, blogs ...

Finally, we need to clear up some confusion about African liberation. What, precisely, are we
talking about? We live in a world where every year, in 53 different places on the continent of
Africa, states celebrate their liberation from colonial rule. Nkrumah, Kaunda, Nyerere,
Lumumba, Keita and Toure are all celebrated as heroes who freed us from foreign oppression. If
they freed us, why are we still talking about our liberation as if it still lay in the future?

The answer is that the Nkrumahs and Toures worked hard indeed to liberate Africa, but they did
not have the steam and the resources they needed to reach the goal of real liberation. Some of
their generation worked directly to strengthen the Berlin system of division.

Some were waylaid and manipulated into shifting their vision from the salutary but difficult goal
of African unity, to the easier but self-defeating one of entrenching the existing colonial
boundaries.

The best we can say is that, that generation of African politicians pointed the way to African
unity, but in practice they were not able to lead us there. It is silly as well as heartless to blame
them for not reaching the goal; they started the journey. Reaching the destination is a task that
remains for new generations to accomplish.

It is work that can only be done by persons and groups able, from the start, to see themselves as
Africans, to think as Africans, to plan as Africans, to work steadily toward their goal as Africans,
and in general, to live, not just to talk, as Africans. There is no suggestion here that anyone who
can read hieroglyphs and talk about Ancient Egyptian philosophy is ready to unify Africa.

It is possible to meet Egyptologists convinced only that their small tribe came from Ancient
Egypt, that they in their individual selves possess the beauty and grace of Ancient Egyptians, but
that other Africans do not belong, and that they, and only they, deserve to inherit the glory of a
splendid past.

We need not concern ourselves with such souls. What interests us is the promise that persons
who take the trouble to immerse themselves in the real history and culture of Africa, from
antiquity to now, acquire the intellectual tools needed to explore innovative ways to the future
we need to make.

The work of removing the divisive Berlin barriers, bringing African resources under African
control, and making sure that the continent's resources serve to lift the continent's population into
a humane life, will no doubt be more complicated than the straightforward anti-colonial struggles
of the mid-20th century.

It will require a knowledgeable generation of conscious Africans, able to turn themselves into
skilled organisers, and determined to keep working steadily until they reach their goal: a united
Africa, home to a people that knows its history from the beginnings of recorded time, and which
knows enough about its cultural resources to understand that in order to find the intellectual
resources any society needs to build its future, it need not go cadging concepts from alien
sources.

What we have to do, to start with, is to remember our dismembered heritage.

COPYRIGHT 2010 IC Publications Ltd.
Copyright 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.