Expert answer:Write a 5 page paper about social justice followin
Solved by verified expert:Assignment QuestionSocial justice is a dominant theme in the writings of both Thomas Sankara and Chinua Achebe, while Amilcar Cabral represents culture as a bulwark against annihilation. First, discuss whether or not this is an accurate representation of the authors’ views; and second, what are your views on each of the authors central argument.General Instructions:Carefully read and follow the instructions to avoid deduction of points.Assignment is due next week, Oct 23. Bring your paper to class.Write 5 full pages; nothing less, more is fine.Essay begins on the first line of page 1 and ends on last line of page 5 or page 6. Your name and the question must be on the cover page NOT on the first page of the essay. List all the articles utilized on page 6, in alphabetical order, last name first. Do not use any materials other than the course readings.Formatting Instructions:Times New Roman, Font 12, Double-spaced, One inch (1”) margins all around, Paragraph indent = 0.5.” Spacing between paragraphs = 0.0.” Pages number should be at the bottom right of the page.
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The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
Africa Is People
Author(s): Chinua Achebe
Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 313-321
Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25091546
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Chinua Achebe
Africa Is People
himself, but not
the title
I have chosen
this event
may
It quote
is generally
a good
sign for
when
someone
begins to
sound peculiar to some of you, and the best way I can explain
what it’s all about is to quote myself.
An Invitation .Arrives
I believe it was in the first weeks of 1989 that I received an
invitation to an anniversary meeting?the twenty-fifth year, or
something like that?of the Organization for Economic Coop
eration and Development (OECD) in Paris. I accepted without
quite figuring out what I could possibly contribute to such a
meeting/celebration. My initial puzzlement continued right in
to the meeting itself. In fact it grew as the proceedings got under
way. Here was I, an African novelist among predominantly
European and American bankers and economists; a guest, as it
were, from the world’s poverty-stricken provinces to a gather
ing of the rich and powerful in the metropolis. As I listened to
them?Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians?I was
left in no doubt by the assurance they displayed, that these were
the masters of our world savoring the benefits of their success.
They read and discussed papers on economic and development
matters in different regions of the world. They talked in partic
ular about the magic bullet of the 1980s, structural adjustment,
specially designed for those parts of the world where economies
had gone completely haywire. The matter was really simple, the
experts seemed to be saying; the only reason for failure to de
velop was indiscipline of all kinds, and the remedy was a quick,
sharp administration of shock treatment that would yank the
sufferer out of the swamp of improvidence back onto the high
and firm road of free market economy. The most recurrent pre
scriptions for this condition were the removal of subsidies on
This was the second lecture delivered in the Presidential Fellows
Program to the World Bank on June 17, 1998.
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The Massachusetts Review
food and fuel and the devaluation of the national currency. Yes,
the experts conceded, some pain would inevitably accompany
these measures, but such pain was negligible in comparison to
the disaster that would surely take place if nothing was done
now.
Then the governor of the Bank of Kenya made his p
tion. As I recall the events, he was probably the only
rican at that session. He asked the experts to consider
of Zambia, which according to him had accepted, and
practicing, a structural adjustment regime for somet
10 years, and whose economic condition was now w
it had been when they began their treatment. An .Am
pert who seemed to command great attention and wa
high deference in the room, spoke again. He repeated
already been said many times before: “Be patient, it w
in time, trust me,” or words to that effect.
Insight Dawns
At that point I received something like a stab of insight. It
suddenly became clear to me why I had been invited, what I was
doing there in that strange assembly. I signaled my desire to
speak and was given the floor. I told them what I had just rec
ognized. I said that what was going on before me was a fiction
workshop, no more and no less! “Here you are, spinning your
fine theories to be tried out in your imaginary laboratories. You
are developing new drugs and feeding them to a bunch of lab
oratory guinea pigs and hoping for the best. I have news for
you. Africa is not fiction. Africa is people, real people. Have
you thought of that? You are brilliant people, world experts.
You may even have the very best intentions. But have you
thought, really thought, of Africa as people? I will tell you the
experience of my own country, Nigeria, with structural adjust
ment. After two years of this remedy we saw the country’s mini
mum wage fall in value from the equivalent of 15 British pounds
to 5 pounds a month. This is not a lab report; it is not a mathe
matical exercise. We are talking about someone whose income,
which is already miserable enough, is now reduced to one-third
of what it was two years ago. And this flesh-and-blood man has
a wife and children. You say he should simply go home and
tell them to be patient. Now let me ask you this question. Would
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Africa Is People
you recommend a similar remedy to your own government?
How do you sell it to an elected president? You are asking him
to commit political suicide, or perhaps to get rid of elections
altogether until he has fixed the economy. Do you realize that’s
what you are doing?”
I thought I could read astonishment on some of the faces on
the opposite side of the huge circular table of the conference
room, or perhaps it was just my optimistic imagination. But
one thing I do know for certain. The director-general (or what
ever he was called) of the OECD beside whom I was sitting, a
Dutchman and quite a giant, had muttered to me, under his
breath, at least twice: “Give it to them!”
I came away from that strange conference with enhanced op
timism for the human condition. For who could have imagined
that in the very heart of the enemy’s citadel a friend and ally
might be lurking, like that irreverent Dutchman happy enough
to set my cat among his own pigeons!
I therefore came to this Presidential Fellows Lecture of the
World Bank with expectations rather than puzzlement. And I
thank President Wolfensohn for his vigorous engagement with
Africa’s problems and for giving me the privilege of addressing
this very distinguished and strategic forum, Tariq Husain for
arranging the details with such care and consideration, and my
young friends Tijan Salla and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala for persis
tently encouraging me to come.
Examining the Reality of Africa
Africa Is People may seem too simple and too obvious a state
ment for such a reflective opportunity as this, but I have found
that the most simple things can still give us a lot of trouble,
even the brightest among us, especially in matters concern
ing Africa. One of the greatest men of the 20th century, Albert
Schweitzer?philosopher, theologian, musician, medical mis
sionary?failed completely to see the most obvious fact about
Africa, and so went ahead to say: “The African is indeed my
brother, but my junior brother.” Now, did we or did anyone
we know take Dr. Schweitzer up on that blasphemy? Oh no. On
the contrary. He was admired to the point of adulation and Lam
berene, the very site on African soil where he uttered his outrage,
was turned into a place of pilgrimage.
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The Massachusetts Review
Or let us take another much-admired 20th-century figure, the
first writer, as it happens, to grace the cover of the newly founded
Time magazine. I am talking, of course, about that extraordi
nary Polish-born, French-speaking, English sea captain and
novelist, Joseph Conrad. He recorded in his memoir his first
experience of seeing a black man in these remarkable words:
A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my
conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested
in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I
used to dream for years afterwards.
My attention was first drawn to these observations of Conrad’s
in a scholarly work, not very widely known, by Jonah Raskin.
Its title was the Mythology of Imperialism, and it was published
in 1971 by Random House. I mention this because Mr. Raskin’s
title defines the cultural source out of which Conrad derived his
words and ideas. Conrad’s fixation, admitted so openly by him
in his memoir and conspicuously present in his fiction, has gone
largely unremarked in literary and scholarly evaluations of his
work. Why? Because it is grounded quite firmly in that mythol
ogy of imperialism which has so effectively conditioned contem
porary civilization and its modes of education. Imperial domi
nation required a new language to describe the world it had
created and the people it had subjugated. Not surprisingly, this
new language did not celebrate these subject peoples nor toast
them as heroes. Rather it painted them in the most lurid colors.
Africa, being European imperialism’s prime target, with hardly
a square foot escaping the fate of imperial occupation, naturally
received the full measure of this adverse definition. Add to that
the massive derogatory endeavor of the previous three centuries
of the Atlantic slave trade to label black people, and we can begin
to get some idea of the magnitude of the problem we may have
today with the simple concept: aAfrica Is People.
James Baldwin made an analogous point about black people
in America, descendants of Africa. In his essay “Fifth Avenue,
Uptown” he wrote:
Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straight forward
statement containing seven words. People who have mastered
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Africa Is People
Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud and the Bible find this
statement impenetrable.
The point of all this is to alert policymakers in such institu
tions as the World Bank to the image burden that .Africa bears
into the 21st century and make them recognize how that image
had molded contemporary attitudes, including perhaps their
own, to that continent.
Do I hear in my mind’s ear someone sighing wearily: there
we go again; another session of whining and complaining! Let
me assure you that I personally abhor and detest winners. Those
who know me will already know this. To those who don’t, I
recommend a little pamphlet I wrote at a critical point in Ni
geria’s troubles. I called it The Trouble with Nigeria, and it is
arguably the harshest statement ever made about that unhappy
country. It is so harsh that whenever I see one of the many for
eign critics of Nigeria quoting from it I want to strangle them!
No, I am not an apologist for Africa’s many failings. And I am
hard-headed enough to realize that we must not be soft on them,
must never go out to justify them. But I am also rational enough
to realize that we should strive to understand our failings objec
tively and not simply swallow the mystifications and mythol
ogies cooked up by those whose goodwill we have every reason
to suspect.
Now, I understand and accept the logic that if a country mis
manages its resources it should be prepared to face the music
of hard times. Long ago I wrote a novel about a young African
man, well-educated, full of promise and good intentions, who
nevertheless got his affairs (fiscal and otherwise) in a big mess.
And did he pay dearly for it!
I did not blame the banks for his plight. What I did do, or
try to do, was offer leads to my readers for exploring the roots
of the hero’s predicament by separating those factors for which
an individual may justly be held accountable from others that
are systemic and beyond the individual’s control. That critical,
analytical adventure to which the book invites its readers would
not have helped the doomed hero a whole lot, but the reader
can at least go away with the satisfaction of having tried to be
fair and just, and with the reward, hopefully, of a little enlight
enment on the human condition.
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The Massachusetts Review
The countries of Africa (especially Sub-Saharan Africa) on
which I am focusing my attention are not the only ones who
suffer the plight of poverty in the world today. All the so-called
Third World peoples are, more or less, in the same net, as indeed
are all the poor everywhere, even in the midst of plenty in the
First and Second worlds.
Like the unfortunate young man in my novel, the poor of
the world may be guilty of this and that act of foolishness, but
nothing they have done or left undone quite explains all the
odds that seem to be stacked up against them. We are sometimes
tempted to look at them as so many ne’er-do-wells we can simply
ignore. But they are not our fiction; they are greater than their
badge of suffering, because they are human.
Last week there was news on television about fighting in the
Horn of Africa between Ethiopia and Eritrea. As I had come
to expect, the news was very short indeed. The only background
material the newscaster gave to flesh out the bald announce
ment of the fight was that Ethiopia and Eritrea were among the
world’s poorest nations. And he was off, to other news and other
places. How much additional enlightenment did that piece of
information about poverty give the viewer about the fighting
or the fighters? What about telling the viewer, in the same num
ber of words, that Eritrea was a province of Ethiopia until re
cently? But no. The poverty synecdoche is more attractive and
less trouble; you simply reach for it from the handy storehouse
of mythology about Africa. No taxing research required.
Appealing to Donors and Lenders: Do the Right Thing
And since poverty seems so important to us when we think
about Africa, how much do we really know about it?
In 1960 a bloody civil war broke out in Congo soon after its
colonizer, Belgium, beat a hasty retreat from the territory. With
in months its young, radical, and idealistic prime minister was
brutally murdered by his rivals. It is now widely accepted that
the CIA played the leading role in taking him out and install
ing a corrupt demagogue called Mobutu, whose main attraction
was presumably his claim to be an anticommunist. Mobutu set
about plundering the wealth of this vast country, as large as
the whole of Western Europe, and also fomenting trouble in
Congo’s neighboring countries, aiding and abetting the de
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Africa Is People
stabilization of Angola and openly cooperating with the apart
heid white-minority regime in South Africa. Mobutu’s legacy
was truly horrendous. He stole and stashed away billions in for
eign banks. He even stole his country’s name and baptized it
as Zaire. Today Congo, strategically positioned in the heart of
Africa, vast in size and mineral wealth, has become one of the
poorest nations on earth. Who are we to hold responsible for
this: the Congolese people, Mobutu, or his sponsors the CIA?
Who will pay the penalty of structural adjustment? Of course
that question is already irrelevant. The people are already ad
justed to grinding poverty and long-range instability.
Congo is by no means the only country in Africa to have for
eign powers choose or sustain its leader. It is merely the most
scandalous in scale and effrontery.
President Clinton was right on target when he apologized to
Africa for the unprincipled conduct of American foreign policy
during the Cold War, a policy that scorched the young hope
of Africa’s independence struggle like seedlings in a drought.
I have not gone into all this unpleasant matter to prompt any
new apologies, but to make all of us wary of those easy, facile
comments about Africa’s incurable poverty or the endemic in
capacity of Africans to get their act together and move ahead
like everybody else.
I cannot presume to tell world bankers anything about public
finance or economics and the rest. I have told you stories. Now
let me make a couple of suggestions.
From an organization in Britain called Jubilee 2000 I have
received communication lately about their noble campaign to
persuade leaders of the world’s rich nations (G8 countries) to
cancel the debts owed them by the world’s 50 poorest nations.
I was made to understand that the British government was half
persuaded that it should be done, and that the Canadians were
possibly of the same view. But, on the negative side, I learned
that Japan and Germany were adamantly opposed to the pro
posal. About the most important factor, America, my informant
had this to say: “When asked about cancellation their tongues
speak sweetly, like some of Homer’s Greeks, but their hearts are
closed. It needs another poet to go to them and lay siege to those
hearts . . . will you be that poet?” On our flight here yesterday
my wife, noticing perhaps my anxiety, showed me a passage in
a book she was reading. “The fact that a message may not be
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The Massachusetts Review
received is no reason not to send it. I immediately recognized
the affinity between this thought and another I knew, wearing
its proverbial Igbo dress: “Let us perform the sacrifice and leave
the blame on the doorstep of the spirits.” That’s what I have
now done.
Regarding Japan and Germany, beneficiaries both of postwar
reconstruction assistance, I would appeal not to their hearts, but
to their memories and to their sense of irony. And for good mea
sure I shall tell them the parable of Jesus about the servant who
was forgiven a huge debt by his master, on leaving whose audi
ence he chanced upon a fellow servant who owed him a very
small sum of money, seized him by the throat, and had him tor
tured and thrown into jail.
A Plea for Good Governance
My second request to the World Bank goes to the very root
of the problem: the looting of the wealth of poor nations by
corrupt leaders and their cronies. This crime is compounded by
the expatriation of these funds into foreign banks where they
are put into the service of foreign economies. Consequently the
victim country is defrauded twice if my economics is correct: it
is defrauded of the wealth that is stolen from its treasury, and
also of the development potential of that wealth.
In asking the World Bank to take a lead in the recovery of
the stolen resources of poor countries, I am fully aware that such
criminal transactions are not made through the World Bank.
I am also aware that banks are not set up to act as a police force.
But we live in terrible times when an individual tyrant or a small
clique of looters in power can destroy the lives and the future
of whole countries and whole populations by their greed. The
consequences of these actions can be of genocidal proportions.
Herein lies the root of the horrifying statistic to which Pres
ident Wolfensohn recently drew attention: “You will be stag
gered to know, as I was, that 37 percent of African private wealth
is held outside Africa, whereas for Asia the share is 3 percent
and for Latin America it is 17 percent (James D. Wolfensohn:
Africa’s Moment, Washington, D.C., World Bank, 1998). It
would be a great pity if the world were to sit back in the face
of this tragedy …
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