The Genesis of Africa's Chronic Mediocrity

The Monitor (Kampala)
OPINION
June 30, 2006
Posted to the web July 1, 2006

By Timothy Kalyegira

When I wrote my column last week listing a few of the many predictions about future events that I got right in the past, I received a number of e-mails and SMS messages as well as verbal reprimands from amongst Uganda's educated middle class.

Most wondered if I was going insane and warning that I risked losing "credibility" in the eyes of the readers whose respect I had earned over the years.

Those reactions left me wondering, as I frequently have, at our major limitations as a society.

Many of the subjects I write about in "The Riddle" column disorient and perplex our best-educated people, who find these concepts strange and even frightening.

Steeped in standard academic knowledge and mainstream interpretation of news, most educated people are ill equipped to grasp ideas outside this conventional menu.

Few bothered to sit back after reading last week's column and wonder if there might just be such a thing as an invisible world or phenomena like Extrasensory Perception (ESP), déjÃ* vu that cannot be explained using conventional methods.

The standard education taught at Oxford University, the London School of Economics, and Makerere University does not entertain "non-scientific" knowledge as being real truth.

When I received an email from a friend two weeks ago inviting me to a workshop, I immediately thought against attending.

I told him that my many years of understanding how Uganda's middle class works and thinks made me sure that this was going to be just another political-economic policy session and that the majority of invited guests would be the kinds of people who have appeared as guests on radio talk shows.

My friend criticised me for being negative before even giving the workshop a chance.

However, that evening after the workshop, my friend met me and told me that the very prediction I had made about the participants had come true.

It proved, as I had foreseen, to be a familiar, pedestrian seminar, not the grand, visionary affair the organisers had positioned or would have wished it to be or appear.

I know the limits of what Ugandans --- or indeed Africans and their Diaspora in the New World --- can achieve.

We do not have that capacity for original creative thinking and that is why even if there were geniuses in our midst, our corporations, universities, and social systems would not be able to identify and harness them. Advanced thought and philosophy are not us.

To put it simply, I feel that we Africans or Black people are not very intelligent. In general, we are better suited to undertake tasks that require clerical, processing, administrative, and marketing skills. Research and development is not us.

That might explain why Uganda has produced so many AAA and AAAA students in the UNEB exams, but their impact on society years after leaving university is scarcely felt.

In Ugandan society, people with titles and positions from "reputable" institutions or centres of learning are honoured. The eccentric, the unusual, the uncommon, are shunned.

You might have noticed from the amount of respectable newspaper space they are given and the interviews for which they are sought, that the stars of Ugandan society are Managing Directors, Marketing Managers, Brand Managers, Advertising Managers, Public Relations Officers, Ministers and Ministers of State, and Presidential Assistants.

A pleasant, conformist, mediocre personality is essential for one to rise to the top in Uganda's corporate and political hierarchy and culture.

Look all around you at our corporations, army hierarchy, government ministries, embassies, and academia for the evidence. Ugandan and African society does not understand deep thinkers, philosophers, and trail blazers.

The philosophy departments at nearly all Africa's universities are deserted. Most Black people find philosophy some kind of obscure nonsense. An American in Kampala once remarked in March 2000 that there is not a single word for philosophy in any single African language.

In 1988, Father Damian Grimes, the headmaster of Namasagali College, told students at a Sunday morning conference pep talk that he had read the "Ten Point Programme" of the new NRM government.

Fr. Grimes said he had concluded that whoever wrote the Ten Point Programme had probably not read a book in 25 years. Grimes said that the NRM government was going to plunge Uganda into a dismal future. We are already starting to see this happen.

It is the same across Africa. You might be interested in the following statistics of average national Intelligence Quotient (IQ): Jews 117, Japanese 110, South Koreans 106, Singaporeans 103, Zambians 75, Tanzanians 74, Ugandans 73, Black South Africans 72, Ethiopians 67, and Sierra Leoneans 67. (The mean score or 50 per cent mark for IQ is 100, indicating that most Africans are below average.)

I have read magazines, books, and newspapers, watched TV programmes, listened to radio stations and interacted with Africans from various countries, be they elite or ordinary.

What is clear about them all is how remarkably incapable of deep philosophical thought we Black people are and how hard a time we find grasping advanced concepts.
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My recommendation:

Take a long break, forget yourself in the process and come back and you will definitely have a new look at this situation your addressing

Defyfear - I don't know exactly what you are talking about, but I do know how you feel.

BUBZ - I would be interested in hearing your response to my post "A RANT AGAINST SUB SAHARA AFRICA. We're all one here, let loose.

I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of this trash article. All I've got to say is that if this low self-esteem having fool took a look at the West and the history of mankindin general, he would know that conformists everywhere are rewarded by society more than eccentric people. This is the reality in all societies? Look at what the Spanish Inquisition did to Galileo. It's not up to society to accept every so called genuis, it's up to the said creative person to break down societal norms and show people a new way of being. There is a reason why culture exists in the first place.

Mezmerized wrote:
bighairlol

Oh I'm only being patient because that b**chain't within 5 metres of me. Otherwise Iwould fly of the handle andsmackthe black ofhim. Damn cheek.