Earlier on Facebook, I promised to tackle three fundamental problems that the African society must confront if we must overcome the current political crisis of unbridled greed and corruption which appears to condemn the continent to poverty and ridicule. I am of the view that a mere political reorganization or constitutional reform would not suffice to address the problem, if the African personality at the root of the problem is not reformed.
Today, I talk about perhaps what might amount to the foundation of the problem without which any reform might be practically meaningless. I propose that rationalization of the African must be the first step towards any social or political renaissance.
What exactly does it mean to be a rational being? In a sample term, I define a rational being as a person who is committed to separating reality from imagination, who is committed to separating what he wishes to happen or exist, from what actually exists.
An ability to separate reality from imagination is fundamental to human progress because, human beings can only prosper if first, we know the nature of our universe, and second, strive to align our social world with the true nature of the universe. Our whole life and social systems are patterned on what we think is the nature of the universe.
What is the nature of human beings? Are we kindhearted, brotherly and loving? These appear to be simple questions. However, the simple answer to these questions can be fundamental to the entire social organization and individual lifestyles of people. If we agree that humanity is kindhearted and harmless, then our forefathers did not have to train men to be warriors and therefore organize an entire social structure around security.
Modern people would not have to build gates or pay security people to protect their homes. An understanding of the true nature of humanity is then important in how we pattern our lifestyles and organize our social systems. Thus, the true nature of humanity is a reality!
We may wish that all human beings behave in a particular way. But if we build our lifestyles or social systems on what we wish human beings to be, rather than what is the reality of human nature, that is, what human beings really are, we may suffer catastrophic consequences. In sum, reality is simply the truth about many puzzles of life, from the nature of humanity, nature of rainfall to the consequences of a deadly pandemic.
Let me give some examples to illustrate this point. Some time ago, two friends, a man and a woman, were trying to cross the road at a zebra crossing. The woman tried to cross the road while a car was still approaching the crossing and in subsequent discussions, the man reproached her about how dangerous that was. She responded that even if the car were to hit her, she would claim insurance money for her hospital bills since she was on the zebra crossing.
The man responded, “You better hope the insurance money isn’t covering your funeral instead”. Horrified, she replied, “That’s not my portion; back to sender”.
Perhaps most Ghanaians and indeed many Africans would react the same way. The mere mention of death and funeral evokes dread, and no one would want to be mentioned in same breath as those. She reacted that way because she felt the man was wishing her dead or at least, evoking a dreadful possibility upon her and in response she ‘wished the dread away’.
The man was not actually wishing her dead. The woman had assumed that she would only sustain some minor injuries if knocked by a car. The man pointed to her that in reality, it could be worse. He was only drawing her attention to the danger in what he thought was a bit of careless road crossing, but not to wish her dead at all.
This simple incident provides us an opportunity to distinguish between reality and imagination or wish, and how the two can often be conflated. Yes, death and funeral are two dreadful things. We all wish to live long, and perhaps forever. The reality, as gloomy as it is though, is that we would surely die and if we are lucky, we would have funerals. Another reality is that, if a person gets knocked down by a car, that person may die. As gloomy as it sounds, there is evidence that this is the reality. Do we deny this reality and live in denial, or do we accept it and organize our life patterns around it?
When the Covid-19 pandemic was at its peak, various world governments continuously updated their people on the nature of the disease and predicted its trajectory. Some governments, mostly Western governments, based on data, predicted the number of deaths that would occur in a certain time period. These are gloomy figures about an impending death and tragedy in a nation. So, were these governments right to predict the deaths of fellow countrymen?
Well, imagine that a Ghanaian government went to publicly predict that a pandemic or a disease would likely kill a certain number of Ghanaians. Imagine the uproar! Indeed, people that attempted to be ‘realistic’ in Ghana were often branded as doom mongers while government was seen by some as strenuously massaging the figures to create a glossy picture of the pandemic. But here is the real deal. There is a reality about the pandemic and that is not the same as what people might imagine it to be or wish it to be.
The Western governments that were transparent about the pandemic were not wishing evil for their countrymen. They actually meant to protect their countrymen by transparently establishing the reality about the disease so they could organize their social world to accommodate it.
On the other hand, a society that tampers with this gloomy reality and fails to order their social world around it would pay the price of more deaths. In essence, there is a difference about what we wish about the pandemic and what it actually is. Failure to separate wish from reality could be disastrous. Rational societies try to separate the two while irrational societies take as reality, what they wish it to be.
The whole enterprise of critical thinking and all that we learn through education is geared at helping us establish reality with accuracy in order to guide our decision-making processes. The equations that we solve in school, the missing ‘x’ that we were constantly solving are simply attempts to develop the tools for establishing reality, the fundamental part of our sense making of our world and how subsequently, we organize our individual and social worlds around this reality. In essence, the missing ‘x’ at the center of equations is simply the missing solution to life puzzles, the realities that we must establish in order to survive.
Yet there is ample evidence that to a large extent many African societies are trapped in bubbles of imagination rather than clear rational thinking. Reality can often be painful, for instance, acknowledging that thousands of people would die in a pandemic. It could also mean acknowledging historic tragedies or personal or social flaws. Irrational societies banish the reality away in order to avoid the discomfort they bring. For instance, in many Ghanaian tribes, great tragedies are locked under key in oaths. Huge chunks of our history are banished as oaths that no one can talk about without severe penalties.
They do this because they simply wish to behave as though the tragedy never happened and this wish is made the cornerstone of existence. But what if despite banishing the existence of these tragedies their consequences still live with us? Would it not be more reasonable to talk about these events and learn from past mistakes? I am not concerned about the consequences of these oaths though, compared to what they reveal about society, the unwillingness to embrace reality and live with it.
Similarly, individuals and groups can hardly admit their flaws and shortcomings. And then, while reality can be painful at times, wishful thinking can provide delirious self-gratification, hence irrational societies embrace wishful thinking.
For instance, there are Africans who start a roadside ‘shito’ business at home, yet they immediately parade themselves as CEOs; there are priests who are ‘archbishops’ over one-man churches; there are politicians who award themselves medals and some who confer various appellations on themselves; there are high profile people whose craving for unmerited awards made them victims of scams and phony awards; high profile musicians who claim to earn two master’s and PhD degrees within three months. All these are symptoms of a people living in an imaginary world, divorced from reality.
As I would show in subsequent articles, this conflation of imagination and reality is dangerous for society; a society that cannot distinguish substance from superficiality. It has stifled the capacity for scientific innovation; killed motivation for hard work and pursuit of true excellence; created the allure for easy shortcuts to success; created a hapless gullible society that is susceptible to easy manipulation by unscrupulous politicians; blunted the capacity for self-introspection and reform; and worse of all, blurred the distinction between what is right or wrong. Such irrational African societies are thus living in a bubble where they are imaginatively shielded from the consequences of moral bankruptcy, chronic political mismanagement and gross individual purposelessness.
This is not to say that there is nothing good about Africa or that Africans are worse than other people. But if we look carefully at our continent, and if we rage at the corruption, the greed, the mismanagement and the folly of the masses that perpetuate an unjust, immoral system, and if we genuinely crave for change, then we must equally crave to remove the African from his bubble of imagination.
A society that cannot acknowledge the reality of its nakedness in the cold cannot aspire to get warm clothes.
The writer, Prosper Kofi Senyo is doctoral student in Information & Media at Michigan State University. You can write to him at senyopro@msu.edu or follow him via LinkedIn. Watch out for more articles on these series.