Professor Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, one of my senior mentors in the business of thinking and writing Africa, likes to use the analogy of the kitchen and the table whenever we have had the chance to meet and discuss the African condition since we both moved on from our faculty positions at the Pennsylvania State University a few years ago.
Professor Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, one of my senior mentors in the business of thinking and writing Africa, likes to use the analogy of the kitchen and the table whenever we have had the chance to meet and discuss the African condition since we both moved on from our faculty positions at the Pennsylvania State University a few years ago.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });
Around coffee tables in Montreal, Cape Town, and other places that the business of Africa has taken us to in recent times, the NOMA Award winner would calmly comment on the continuous marginalization of Africa and Africans in the global scheme of things.
Fifty years after independence, Africa is still largely a continent picking up crumbs from the master’s table. In Zeleza’s opinion, scholars and intellectuals whose Africanist praxis consists solely in fighting for a place for Africa at that metaphorical table are fighting the wrong battle.
“My brother”, Mwalimu Zeleza would say to me, “we must now insist on Africa’s place in the kitchen where the meal is being prepared. If you get a place at the table after much struggle, the master could still do a few things to Africa’s portion in the kitchen, just before the meal reaches the table in the dining room. The kitchen is where we need to place Africa.”
Well, Mwalimu Zeleza will be happy to know that I got to spend some time in that kitchen last week. I survived the heat but I’m not a very happy man right now.
The British High Commission in Ottawa had invited three colleagues and I to a function – three of us Africans, one Canadian. It was one of those regular A-list events in Western capitals where those who matter in government, business, NGOs, IDAs (International Development Agencies), and academia are asked to mingle and exchange business cards as they discuss the fate and condition of Africa’s one billion people over wine and cheese in a high chandeliered room. The cool people. The crème de la crème of Ottawa. And the obligatory sprinkling of Africans for purposes of political correctness. But, first, a foreboding presence. She was smiling maternally and regally at us from her framed perch on the wall.
That was the Queen of England. The Queen of Canada. And Australia. And New Zealand. After all we were in her domain. Her framed picture was inescapable as we were ushered into the bar of the British High Commission. Although I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Queen of England, I have never been able to escape a frisson of terror whenever I walk into a room with a framed picture of that woman hanging on the wall. That, for me, is always a walk into sites of memory. Memory of brigandage and plunder committed in behalf of the crown on her head. I consoled myself with the thought that her free food that I was going to eat very generously was reparation.
The occasion was the first in a series of science seminars that the British High Commission in Canada has just launched. The idea is to have influential scientists or funders of scientific knowledge passing through Ottawa present their new projects to a select audience in an atmosphere of bonhomie. And we are talking about presenters from the very top of the ladder here in the Western world. It was therefore quite remarkable that the very first presentation in the new series was going to be about Africa.
The presenter was a heavily-connected and decorated man who had spent pretty much the last thirty years at the very top of Canada’s scientific research. He had been President of the University of British Columbia for 12 years, Vice President of the University of Toronto, Chief of the Geophysics Branch at NASA, among so many other intimidating bona fides. And now, he is the CEO of CFI – Canada Foundation for Innovation.
He was born and grew up in Africa – Angola – in the 1930s. His passion for the continent was infectious and unimpeachable. He is at that point where “Livingstone’s tribe” - sun-burnt old White men who had given their hearts completely to the continent and whose youth and young adulthood had been eaten up by mosquitoes, tents, khaki shorts, and boots – find no satisfaction in their new lives in the West because of what the Robert Mugabes, Sani Abachas, Gnassingbe Eyademas, Omar Bongos, Paul Biyas, Laurent Gbagbos, Blaise Compaorés, Sassou Nguessos, and the Teodoro Obiangs of this world had gone and done to their legacy in Africa.
They must dust their retired battle garb and return to the trenches to take one last shot at Africa’s redemption. This Canadian aficionado of Africa had come up with the idea of reducing Africa’s brain drain through the inauguration of one thousand top research professorial chairs in the sciences in African Universities. Each professorship would be held for five years. His target budget for the project? Three hundred million dollars. Yes, you heard right: three hundred million dollars. Now, you know that we are talking big here. Here is how the proposal works: each of the lucky one thousand professors who get the endowed chair will be on a salary of one hundred thousand dollars per annum for five years. Translation: we pay you to sit your freaking butts down in Africa, in your own Universities, and earn the money you come here to make in our own Universities in the West.
This is of course the bare bones – a grossly simplified summary of a fantastic presentation made by a man totally committed to Africa. But this is also where it gets interesting. He was making a PowerPoint presentation. There were slides to indicate the road already covered and the considerable traction that the initiative has gained among those who decide your fate and mine in little rooms over coffee in Washington, London, Paris, Ottawa, and such other places. For the three hundred million dollars will not come out of his pocket. Of course not! The idea is to make the global North fund it – with contribution from African governments.
Hence the slides took us through a vertiginous labyrinth of meetings already held to secure the commitment of the G8 and G20 governments to the initiative; of attempts to make the Canadian government adopt it as part of the agenda for the G8 and G20 during the summits she hosted last year; of the promise by President Sarkozy to place it on the agenda of the G8 and G20 and France hosts the summits later this year; of endless meetings with and promises of commitment by the World Bank; the IMF; of exploratory and encouraging meetings with Carnegie, MacArthur, and other foundations; of meetings at UNESCO...
By now, I was getting dizzy... all these big names of world bodies and global foundations flying around in the room... More slides. More big names. More promises of commitment. More talk of endless meetings with officials of the African Development Bank; with officials of the African Union – he was in fact leaving for Addis Ababa the following week for more meetings; meetings already held in the Presidency of so many African countries – I saw Nigeria in the list; meetings with an unbelievable number of finance and education ministers in Africa. And just in case anyone of us in the room was still in doubt, there were slides showing letters of solidarity and pledges of commitment from many of the people he had met at the commanding heights of global politics and policy. He was quick to add that nobody had yet written a check. Just pledges and enthusiastic support for now.
I looked casually at my two African colleagues in the room and it was obvious that reality was setting in for us. Our heads were reeling. We tried to maintain our poise and retain our dignity but it was difficult to ignore the tragic irony of our situation. There we were in a room, listening to a Canadian who was reeling out the names – often on first name terms – of everybody who was anybody in the Presidencies of Africa: the usual chitchat of being chauffeured from the airport in the car of Minister X who came to welcome him the airport, the affability of Minister Y during coffee break, and the jokes cracked by President Z during dinner. It sounded like one of those situations where our friend, Dele Momodu, would write that he had breakfast with President Clinton in New York before rushing to the Vatican for a quick lunch with the Pope after which he reluctantly flew to Johannesburg for dinner with Nelson Mandela.
Only this was the real deal and not mere name dropping. And we, the three Africans in the room, marvelled painfully at the ease of access to the commanding heights of African governments once you have some change in your pocket and a white skin on your body. Our three Presidents answer names like Goodluck Jonathan, Blaise Compaoré, and Paul Biya and the three of us concluded that even with the brightest ideas we stood no chance of getting within a one hundred-mile radius of these men the way this powerful and heavily-connected Canadian strolls casually into Abuja, Ouagadougou, and Yaoundé and assembles them and their ministers for meetings and briefings. I told my African colleagues that when Olusegun Obasanjo was in power, two London police constables, who would have difficulty gaining access to the office of the secretary of the Mayor of London, went to Nigeria and strolled casually into the President’s sitting room in Aso Rock, accompanied by Nuhu Ribadu.
We had other worries. There we were listening to an initiative about Africa that had gained entrance into the ears of those who control the world and will, all things being equal, be on the agenda of the G8 and G20 summits this year; there we were listening to a possible injection of three hundred million dollars into the African University system, funding that could change the complexion of the professoriate in Africa. Yet we were in a room in the British High Commission in Ottawa filled with powerful Canadians and only three Africans. There was zero representation of African Embassies and High Commissions in Ottawa. We asked the convener of the seminar, a very charming lady who answers the job description of Science Attaché at the British High Commission. She told us that they invited African Embassies and High Commissions and was surprised that none showed up. No, not one!
Science Attaché? We also met the Science Attaché from the German embassy.
That was a new addition to my vocabulary. I didn’t know that there was anything like that in the world of embassies and high commissions. My two African colleagues were as bewildered as I was. We joked that African countries would not have any strange beast called science attaché in their diplomatic posts. They would rather have military attaché (because they are looking for weapons).
Then it hit me like a thunderbolt. This was Mwalimu Zeleza’s proverbial kitchen! If you are in a room in the West where powerful people are talking three hundred million dollars and the G8 and the G20 and the World Bank and the IMF and the UN, that is surely being in the kitchen! We were just three Africans who moved beyond the table, gained access to the kitchen, saw all the fantastic meat cooking, only to discover tragically that the meat carving knives were all still firmly in the master’s hand. That is the question I’m going to ask Mwalimu Zeleza when next I see him: now that we are in the kitchen, what are we going to do about the carving knives? Africa has none.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });