A Basketful of Water

My good friend, Moses Ochonu, a Professor of African History at Vanderbilt, once penned an essay about the frustrations of offering balanced and optimistic perspectives on the Nigerian condition, even in the context of "considerably lowered" expectations. Prior to a trip to Nigeria, Ochonu had taken the precaution of fortifying his psyche against the trauma of disappointment by lowering his expectations in line with what he deemed would be the quality of the social contract between a tragically atrophied postcolony and her citizens. He tried not to expect good roads; he tried not to expect stable power supply; he tried not to expect water from the taps; he tried not to expect safety of life and property; he tried not to expect smooth delivery of any of those routine services the state renders to the citizen; he tried not to expect courtesy from public officials; he tried not to expect people not to demand bribe. In essence, he prepared himself mentally for a trip to, well maybe not exactly hell, but to the famed threshold between earth and hell in Yoruba mythology. Although not quite in hell, the inhabitants of this liminal zone are sufficiently close to feel the heat as we see in some of the novels of D. O. Fagunwa. To protect himself, Ochonu placed the bar of expectation so low as to bury it in the sand. Yet, Nigeria managed to burrow deep into Ochonu's sand, find that buried bar of expectation, and settle down comfortably below it. In the light of this situation, my friend agonized over the dilemma of teaching Africa positively in the North American classroom when quotidian details keep pulling the rug off the feet of even the most unrepentant Afro-optimist.

A few days after I read Ochonu's piece, pondering how brilliantly it mirrors my own experience, another colleague, a Francophone African national, phoned from the US. As he had just returned from a trip to Zimbabwe, we talked Africa. He had not read Ochonu's piece but what he had to say revealed an extraordinary convergence of opinions between him and Ochonu. He told me he'd perfected a "mental survival kit" for traveling in Africa. He watches the screened flight indicator very closely in the plane. Once he notices that the plane has entered the airspace of the African continent, he takes off what he calls his "toga of Western standards" and wears his danshiki of considerably diminished expectations. That way, he's never disappointed. On the contrary, he is even pleasantly surprised whenever things work. That's the only way this seasoned Afro-optimist maintains his sanity when crisscrossing the continent.

The normalization of the substandard in Africa, its osmotic seepage into the weft of continental modes of being, can sometimes provide material for Nobel-class comedy. Accused of organizing the worst election in human history, Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria's immediate past president and current national joke, lashed out at the international community for criticizing an election that satisfied African standards! How can rational people expect an African election to measure up to international standards, Obasanjo fumed. His opinion was promptly supported by Lady Lynda Chalker, the talkative British leech who always arranges to be in the company of the most reactionary elements within the ruling cabal in Nigeria. The elections were indeed very successful by Nigerian and African standards, she crooned. Our humiliation was complete. Bless her soul! The old lady wasn't to blame. Our leaders delivered the mouth with which to abuse us to her on a platter of gold. I once took a taxi from Lomé to Kpalimé in Togo. It was a standard Peugeot 505 car meant for a driver and four passengers. As is customary in so many parts of the continent, the driver squeezed two passengers in front and sardined four in the back for a total of seven people in a car meant for five. When I drew attention to this, the driver laughed heartily and gave me a paternal response: "ca c'est pour les blancs" (those standards are for white people).

Nowhere is this production of comedy out of monumental tragedy more palpable than in the impatience with which Africa's seems to replace one negative international headline with another. Darfur supplied endless materials for international headlines and gave value, sense, and meaning to the lives of Western actors operating in what I've called the Mercy Industrial Complex. While Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and Bono were still shedding darfurized tears for international cameras, a jealous Zimbabwe drove Darfur out of the headlines. For a while, it looked like Zimbabwe was going to stay the course and spend some respectable time in the headlines but Nigeria had other ideas. Nigeria drove Zimbabwe out of international headlines with the joke she called elections in April 2007. As the giant of Africa, one would have expected other African countries to be deferential and allow Nigeria sufficient time in the sun but Kenya had other ideas. Kenya drove Nigeria out of the headlines with even worse elections, effectively confirming the seminal thesis of Professors Olusegun Obasanjo and Lynda Chalker on African elections. Before Nigerians could recover from the Kenyan affront, the shock of coming to terms with the fact that it is possible for any African country to offer a worse election scenario than Nigeria, South Africa drove Kenya out of the headlines with news of sporadic power cuts! News of power outage and rationing in South Africa got less than two weeks in the international headlines before our impatient friends in Chad drove South Africa out of the headlines. As I write, rebels have shot their way into the capital, displacing people and creating another potential refugee crisis. By now, the jet engines should be revving to move the Mercy Industrial Complex to N'djamena until another African theatre of the absurd drives Chad out of the headlines.

As a scholar paid to research and teach Africa in the West, Africa's generous production of negative headlines presents the most daunting professional challenge. You are a student of Eurocentrism. You are a student of the production of Africa in Western imagination. You are familiar with the image of Africa in the Western media. You know the tropes and metaphors of "the Africa that never was", as the title of one famous book very aptly puts it. In scholarly circuits, you are familiar with the history and discursive trajectory of Afro-pessimism. In fact, you are part of the postcolonial, dissident, and dissentient response machine to Western traducers of our past and our present. You prepare graduate seminars aimed at teaching your students how to approach Africa objectively; how not to pathologize Africa as eternal negation; how not to reduce the continent to a theatre Hobbesian self-abasement among "natives" and "tribes"; how to sift through Western sensationalism in order to arrive at objective intellectual insights. You teach them to be critical. You don't want them to wax positive when the facts are negative just to butter up their African professor. You help them to establish connections between things by placing developments in Africa in the context of broader global situations and their implications.

You do this, hoping and praying that by the time they come back to class next week, Africa would not have supplied another round of headlines that could make a mess of the entire basis of your seminar. You are aware that intellectual objectivity imposes the recognition of the supply side of things on you. The Western media may sensationalize Darfur, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Kenya but those countries supplied the material for sensationalization in the first place. Africa hardly ever disappoints. Every time they come to class, there is a fresh set of headlines to discuss briefly before class: they always google African news. "What's this thing about elections in Nigeria"? I try to give answers. "What do you make of the situation in Kenya"? I send them to The Zeleza Post to read analyses by Wandia Njoya and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. As you answer the questions, you are boiling within. But you are not mad at them. You are in fact very happy that they take your seminar and Africa sufficiently seriously to do that extra reading in African current affairs. Deep down, you know you are mad at Africa for the endless supply of the macabre. At times you feel so empty and drained that you begin to wonder if your self-imposed task of Afro-optimism makes you look like that funny character in the Yoruba folk tale who spends his/her life trying to fill a basket with water. That proverb, I guess, is the answer of the Yoruba people to the myth of Sisyphus. Every time you give an Afro-optimist lecture, the continent supplies new headlines to puncture your optimism but you keep on pouring water into that basket. Stubbornly. Your love story with Africa keeps you going. Love, hope, and faith convince you that you may one day fill that basket.

* Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Apart from his academic work, Dr. Adesanmi publishes opinion articles regularly in various internet fora. He runs a regular blog for [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org. This article first appeared at The Zeleza Post.