How African Minds Think ; The Inconvenient Truth.

How African Minds Think; the Inconvenient Truth
Timothy Kalyegira

Throughout the 1990s, I lived a frustrated life. The main reason for which was the mistake I made in assuming that people could be accurately gauged by the schools they attended and their academic qualifications, the certifiable education that culminates in a diploma or degree.

I assumed, for example, that former students of such elite Ugandan schools as Gayaza High School, St. Mary's College Kisubi, or Kings' College Budo or those that had gone on to the world-class institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford Universities and military colleges like the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, then they were the cream of society.

I used to believe that people from certain families that had been middle-class for generations, such as the Baganda families whose children first attended Gayaza and Budo in the 1920s, were or should be more enlightened than those who were of the immediate first generation removed from the peasant class.

However, it always puzzled and frustrated me that even these people from elite schools and universities and families were still as simple, unimaginative, unenthusiastic, and average as the rest of the population. On June 26, I turn 40 and among many things, I can say I have since learned my lesson well about Africans.

The most important key by which to measure a person or a people is something called temperament, defined by Webster's New World Dictionary as "one's customary frame of mind or natural disposition; nature," that is, the person we are in our natural state, education or no education.

Having observed White societies and people, the dominant character of their culture and personalities can be summed up in the terms insight, imagination, linguistic fluency, enthusiasm, and inspiration, abstract, analytical, curious, logical, scientific, inventive, exacting, and efficient.

The prevalence of these traits in European culture explains why they seem to produce such a high number of scientists, authors, inventors and creators of world-dominating trends and products.

Furthermore, the kind of civilisation that has made Whites the World Heavyweight champions for all these centuries can only be created by people with the strange, eccentric personalities and the relentless mental energy and single-minded determination such as the Whites typically have.

Because of this, they radiate a kind of royal, magnetic, penetrating presence that no other people on earth have, which explains why we adopt their fashions, lifestyles, design concepts, sports, systems of government and law, and even strong and ancient eastern cultures like the Japanese and Chinese have been unable to withstand them.

In response to my question in 2006 "What puzzles you the most about Africans?" the reply by Daily Monitor columnist Nicholas Sengooba came close to capturing we Blacks in our true image. Wrote Sengooba: "It's our ordinariness."

That is it: our ordinariness. Our goals, attitude, expressions, difficulty with reasoning, sense of ourselves, and history are marked by how ordinary and unremarkable we are. Africans and other Blacks are, in a sense a little too ordinary in outlook, with an ambition that emphasises plain everyday pursuits like social status and economic security.

We are simply no match and never will be, for a people as eccentric as the Whites who are constantly probing for life on Mars, researching on why Queen Elizabeth I five centuries ago sacked all her cooks two days before her birthday, or who spend 20 years staring at a rock through a microscope in order to determine whether it broke away from a volcano or a meteorite.

To most of us Blacks, no matter how "sophisticated", such pursuits and engrossments would strike us as weird and sheer nonsense. To us it is a case of, fine, now that you know why Queen Elizabeth fired her cooks in 1584, then what?

This is the reason I believe that even if we somehow get universal university education in Uganda, where all adult Ugandans come to possess a quality university degree, we shall be only slightly better off than we are, but we shall still not become a Denmark. As Africans wish well, we want more than we have and are. We wish we had clean modern cities and wish we were taken seriously.

But, alas, whatever we put our hands to, be it the OAU or our individual efforts, goals, and grand national dreams, we easily run out of steam, can't organise because we get mentally distracted and exhausted rather easily, lose mental concentration, and that is as far as it goes. That is the sad riddle of the Black man down through the ages.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200806201094.html