The diaspora’s gift to Africa at 50

In an analogy relevant to the diaspora, Julius Nyerere once likened those sent to school in Africa to messengers sent by villagers hit by famine and severe food shortage to borrow food from a far-away village. If they arrive in the better-off village and settle down to eat and end their hunger while forgetting the condition of those who had sent them, they are judged harshly.

Nyerere insisted that graduates of schools and tertiary institutions must take back to their villages the benefits of the knowledge imparted to them.

The relevance of this analogy is dramatised in both the local media and academic literature by the dollars and euros that gatekeepers of economies call ‘annual remittances’. In 2009 as much as US$8-billion was cited as the amount that entered Nigeria’s economy as remittances by the diaspora. These are easily measurable flows. Some of these values come in the form of equipment for rendering services such as medical equipment and pharmaceutical supplies for hospitals.

In 2008, my not-for-profit NGO, Africa Vision 525 Initiative, published volume one of a book series consisting of chapters by Professors Toyin Falola, Ali Mazrui, Mahmood Mamdani, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja and others.

The Internet has facilitated a rapid and vast flow of intellectual outputs from the diaspora. Some focus on re-disseminating material published in Nigerian newspapers. Some focus on commentary on information received on events and the political dramas in Nigeria. There are those that are preoccupied with local events, with Ekiti, Ogun and Edo States being most favoured. There is also a category that cherishes throwing lavish insults at those who challenge their viewpoints. A valuable category broadcast deaths and obituaries. In recent times a growing number of Nigerian husbands are reported to have murdered their spouses.

It is significant that there is little production of commentaries on American affairs. It was a delight meeting an engineer based in Sao Paolo in Brazil at a Dakar conference on the United States of Africa. He emphasised engineering lessons for Africa from his Brazilian experience. The study of America and the Americas for the benefit of informing Nigerians is simply lacking.

In the field of political science, for example, there is little investment in research in the working of the American legislative system at local, state and federal levels. This could act as a potential guide for Nigerian practitioners using a system widely known to have been borrowed from the American tradition of power. When I interviewed a state legislator in Wisconsin, aides to a senator in Washington DC, and a local education policy-maker who was also teaching at Howard University, for lessons in relations between elected officials and their constituencies, it was greeted with much surprise. It was an undeveloped field.

In the field of literature, diaspora scholars have seen their mission more in reporting African writers to their American audience than in reporting the tradition of American literature to audiences back in Africa. At an African languages and literature conference held in Fez in Morocco, three poets who had traveled from Nigeria and a literature teacher from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, were grossly outnumbered by diaspora scholars working in North American universities. These diaspora scholars did not, however, present comparative studies of American and African literature. Little was reported on literature by African-American giants like Baldwin, Walker, Alison and even Dubois, let alone contemporary writers.

With the current severe collapse in infrastructure, the failure to use research funds and the rich library resources in the Americas, has been a loss to Nigerian academics and policy makers. When a group of scholars were working on a book on Nigeria’s foreign policy over the last 50 years, senior diplomats who gave us collective consultations were rather emphatic about severe weaknesses in the lack of research capacity and resources available to officials. The severity of the situation was dramatised by the more favourable comments that the first generation of diplomats exhibited, compared to recent decades.

On 24 September 2010, the American embassy brought Dr. Walker to talk to an audience dominated by medical doctors on what he called ‘street medicine’. His clients are destitute and sleep on streets in frost prone cities like Philadelphia, as well as more favourable cities like Florida and San Francisco. The most powerful part of his lecture was a short documentary film on his star patients. The shock value of the revelation that poverty exists among white people in America was palpable. It was clear that he expected it and wished to experience it. The shock for me was that despite the millions of Nigerians in the diaspora across US, this silence about poverty in ‘God’s Own Country’ was common among medical doctors. Perhaps telling it like it is about conditions in that country is mistakenly assumed to diminish the social power of a Texan or Minnesotan accent in a member of the diaspora come home to visit.

At a recent gathering of top university teachers charged with working out strategies for reviving the book culture in Nigeria’s academia, a suggestion that scholars should translate widely celebrated books from Nigeria and other parts of the world into their mother tongue was met with a combination of enthusiasm and panic. Those in panic were tormented by reported research which showed that countries like Indonesia, Japan, Holland, Portugal, Sweden and France who taught science subjects in their mother tongue achieved higher scores in scientific creativity. A mental fatigue gripped those confronted with the imperative of using their mother tongue to promote linguistic self-reliance.

The lesson is clearly that the diaspora carries a special intellectual burden towards building that form of power inside Nigeria and the rest of Africa. They have a rich tradition of ‘area studies’ and travel books and newspapers in their host countries to draw from. A strange version of ‘revolutionary thinking’ in the Washington DC area was deeply offended when I said, in an interview about my book ‘Discourses on African Affairs’ (Africa World Press), that I was conducting interviews to learn possible lessons from the American legislative culture. This was considered outrageous and reactionary, for how can we learn from imperialism? This bizarre form of intellectual isolationism will continue to make Africa fail to gain from the vast intellectual capacity and opportunities in its diaspora. It must end. To do so would be a vital birthday gift to all African countries that are turning 50.

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* Okello Oculi is executive director of the Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
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