YOU LAZY (Intellectual) AFRICAN SCUM!
PLEASE BE PATIENT & READ IF YOU LOVE
AFRICA.
So I got this in my email this morning…
They call the Third World the lazy man’s
purview; the sluggishly slothful and
languorous prefecture. In this realm people
are sleepy, dreamy, torpid, lethargic, and
therefore indigent—totally penniless, needy,
destitute, poverty-stricken, disfavored, and
impoverished. In this demesne, as they call
it, there are hardly any discoveries,
inventions, and innovations. Africa is the
trailblazer. Some still call it “the dark
continent” for the light that flickers under
the tunnel is not that of hope, but an
approaching train. And because countless
keep waiting in the way of the train, millions
die and many more remain decapitated by
the day.
“It’s amazing how you all sit there and watch
yourselves die,” the man next to me said.
“Get up and do something about it.”
Brawny, fully bald-headed, with intense,
steely eyes, he was as cold as they come.
When I first discovered I was going to spend
my New Year’s Eve next to him on a non-
stop JetBlue flight from Los Angeles to
Boston I was angst-ridden. I associate
marble-shaven Caucasians with iconoclastic
skin-heads, most of who are racist.
“My name is Walter,” he extended his hand
as soon as I settled in my seat.
I told him mine with a precautious smile.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Zambia.”
“Zambia!” he exclaimed, “Kaunda’s country.”
“Yes,” I said, “Now Sata’s.”
“But of course,” he responded. “You just
elected King Cobra as your president.”
My face lit up at the mention of Sata’s
moniker. Walter smiled, and in those cold
eyes I saw an amenable fellow, one of those
American highbrows who shuttle between
Africa and the U.S.
“I spent three years in Zambia in the 1980s,”
he continued. “I wined and dined with Luke
Mwananshiku, Willa Mungomba, Dr. Siteke
Mwale, and many other highly intelligent
Zambians.” He lowered his voice. “I was part
of the IMF group that came to rip you guys
off.” He smirked. “Your government put me
in a million dollar mansion overlooking a
shanty called Kalingalinga. From my patio I
saw it all—the rich and the poor, the ailing,
the dead, and the healthy.”
“Are you still with the IMF?” I asked.
“I have since moved to yet another group
with similar intentions. In the next few
months my colleagues and I will be in Lusaka
to hypnotize the cobra. I work for the
broker that has acquired a chunk of your
debt. Your government owes not the World
Bank, but us millions of dollars. We’ll be in
Lusaka to offer your president a couple of
millions and fly back with a check twenty
times greater.”
“No, you won’t,” I said. “King Cobra is
incorruptible. He is …”
He was laughing. “Says who? Give me an
African president, just one, who has not
fallen for the carrot and stick.”
Quett Masire’s name popped up.
“Oh, him, well, we never got to him because
he turned down the IMF and the World Bank.
It was perhaps the smartest thing for him to
do.”
At midnight we were airborne. The captain
wished us a happy 2012 and urged us to
watch the fireworks across Los Angeles.
“Isn’t that beautiful,” Walter said looking
down.
From my middle seat, I took a glance and
nodded admirably.
“That’s white man’s country,” he said. “We
came here on Mayflower and turned Indian
land into a paradise and now the most
powerful nation on earth. We discovered the
bulb, and built this aircraft to fly us to
pleasure resorts like Lake Zambia.”
I grinned. “There is no Lake Zambia.”
He curled his lips into a smug smile. “That’s
what we call your country. You guys are as
stagnant as the water in the lake. We come in
with our large boats and fish your minerals
and your wildlife and leave morsels—crumbs.
That’s your staple food, crumbs. That corn-
meal you eat, that’s crumbs, the small Tilapia
fish you call Kapenta is crumbs. We the
Bwanas (whites) take the cat fish. I am the
Bwana and you are the Muntu. I get what I
want and you get what you deserve, crumbs.
That’s what lazy people get—Zambians,
Africans, the entire Third World.”
The smile vanished from my face.
“I see you are getting pissed off,” Walter said
and lowered his voice. “You are thinking this
Bwana is a racist. That’s how most Zambians
respond when I tell them the truth. They go
ballistic. Okay. Let’s for a moment put our
skin pigmentations, this black and white crap,
aside. Tell me, my friend, what is the
difference between you and me?”
“There’s no difference.”
“Absolutely none,” he exclaimed. “Scientists
in the Human Genome Project have proved
that. It took them thirteen years to
determine the complete sequence of the
three billion DNA subunits. After they
were all done it was clear that 99.9%
nucleotide bases were exactly the same in
you and me. We are the same people. All
white, Asian, Latino, and black people on this
aircraft are the same.”
I gladly nodded.
“And yet I feel superior,” he smiled
fatalistically. “Every white person on this
plane feels superior to a black person. The
white guy who picks up garbage, the
homeless white trash on drugs, feels superior
to you no matter his status or education. I
can pick up a nincompoop from the New
York streets, clean him up, and take him to
Lusaka and you all be crowding around him
chanting muzungu, muzungu and yet he’s a
riffraff. Tell me why my angry friend.”
For a moment I was wordless.
“Please don’t blame it on slavery like the
African Americans do, or colonialism, or
some psychological impact or some kind of
stigmatization. And don’t give me the
brainwash poppycock. Give me a better
answer.”
I was thinking.
He continued. “Excuse what I am about to
say. Please do not take offense.”
I felt a slap of blood rush to my head and
prepared for the worst.
“You my friend flying with me and all your
kind are lazy,” he said. “When you rest your
head on the pillow you don’t dream big. You
and other so-called African intellectuals are
damn lazy, each one of you. It is you, and
not those poor starving people, who is the
reason Africa is in such a deplorable state.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” I protested.
He was implacable. “Oh yes it is and I will
say it again, you are lazy. Poor and
uneducated Africans are the most
hardworking people on earth. I saw them in
the Lusaka markets and on the street selling
merchandise. I saw them in villages toiling
away. I saw women on Kafue Road crushing
stones for sell and I wept. I said to myself
where are the Zambian intellectuals? Are the
Zambian engineers so imperceptive they
cannot invent a simple stone crusher, or a
simple water filter to purify well water for
those poor villagers? Are you telling me that
after thirty-seven years of independence
your university school of engineering has not
produced a scientist or an engineer who can
make simple small machines for mass use?
What is the school there for?”
I held my breath.
“Do you know where I found your
intellectuals? They were in bars quaffing.
They were at the Lusaka Golf Club, Lusaka
Central Club, Lusaka Playhouse, and Lusaka
Flying Club. I saw with my own eyes a bunch
of alcoholic graduates. Zambian intellectuals
work from eight to five and spend the
evening drinking. We don’t. We reserve the
evening for brainstorming.”
He looked me in the eye.
“And you flying to Boston and all of you
Zambians in the Diaspora are just as lazy and
apathetic to your country. You don’t care
about your country and yet your very own
parents, brothers and sisters are in
Mtendere, Chawama, and in villages, all of
them living in squalor. Many have died or
are dying of neglect by you. They are dying
of AIDS because you cannot come up with
your own cure. You are here calling
yourselves graduates, researchers and
scientists and are fast at articulating your
credentials once asked—oh, I have a PhD in
this and that—PhD my foot!”
I was deflated.
“Wake up you all!” he exclaimed, attracting
the attention of nearby passengers. “You
should be busy lifting ideas, formulae,
recipes, and diagrams from American
manufacturing factories and sending them to
your own factories. All those research
findings and dissertation papers you compile
should be your country’s treasure. Why do
you think the Asians are a force to reckon
with? They stole our ideas and turned them
into their own. Look at Japan, China, India,
just look at them.”
He paused. “The Bwana has spoken,” he said
and grinned. “As long as you are dependent
on my plane, I shall feel superior and you
my friend shall remain inferior, how about
that? The Chinese, Japanese, Indians, even
Latinos are a notch better. You Africans are
at the bottom of the totem pole.”
He tempered his voice. “Get over this white
skin syndrome and begin to feel confident.
Become innovative and make your own stuff
for god’s sake.”
At 8 a.m. the plane touched down at
Boston’s Logan International Airport. Walter
reached for my hand.
“I know I was too strong, but I don’t give it a
damn. I have been to Zambia and have seen
too much poverty.” He pulled out a piece of
paper and scribbled something. “Here, read
this. It was written by a friend.”
He had written only the title: “Lords of
Poverty.”
Thunderstruck, I had a sinking feeling. I
watched Walter walk through the airport
doors to a waiting car. He had left a huge
dust devil twirling in my mind, stirring up
sad memories of home. I could see Zambia’s
literati—the cognoscente, intelligentsia,
academics, highbrows, and scholars in the
places he had mentioned guzzling and talking
irrelevancies. I remembered some who have
since passed—how they got the highest
grades in mathematics and the sciences and
attained the highest education on the planet.
They had been to Harvard, Oxford, Yale,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
only to leave us with not a single invention
or discovery. I knew some by name and
drunk with them at the Lusaka Playhouse and
Central Sports.
Walter is right. It is true that since
independence we have failed to nurture
creativity and collective orientations. We as a
nation lack a workhorse mentality and
behave like 13 million civil servants
dependent on a government pay cheque. We
believe that development is generated 8-to-5
behind a desk wearing a tie with our degrees
hanging on the wall. Such a working
environment does not offer the opportunity
for fellowship, the excitement of
competition, and the spectacle of innovative
rituals.
But the intelligentsia is not solely, or even
mainly, to blame. The larger failure is due to
political circumstances over which they have
had little control. The past governments
failed to create an environment of possibility
that fosters camaraderie, rewards innovative
ideas and encourages resilience. KK, Chiluba,
Mwanawasa, and Banda embraced orthodox
ideas and therefore failed to offer many
opportunities for drawing outside the line.
I believe King Cobra’s reset has been cast in
the same faculties as those of his
predecessors. If today I told him that we can
build our own car, he would throw me out.
“Naupena? Fuma apa.” (Are you mad? Get out
of here)
Knowing well that King Cobra will not
embody innovation at Walter’s level let’s
begin to look for a technologically active-
positive leader who can succeed him after a
term or two. That way we can make our own
stone crushers, water filters, water pumps,
razor blades, and harvesters. Let’s dream big
and make tractors, cars, and planes, or, like
Walter said, forever remain inferior.
A fundamental transformation of our country
from what is essentially non-innovative to a
strategic superior African country requires a
bold risk-taking educated leader with a
triumphalist attitude and we have one in
YOU. Don’t be highly strung and feel insulted
by Walter. Take a moment and think about
our country. Our journey from 1964 has
been marked by tears. It has been an
emotionally overwhelming experience. Each
one of us has lost a loved one to poverty,
hunger, and disease. The number of graves is
catching up with the population. It’s time to
change our political culture. It’s time for
Zambian intellectuals to cultivate an active-
positive progressive movement that will
change our lives forever. Don’t be afraid or
dispirited, rise to the challenge and salvage
the remaining few of your beloved ones.
Field Ruwe is a US-based Zambian media
practitioner and author. He is a PhD
candidate with a B.A. in Mass
Communication and Journalism, and an M.A.
in History.

Just change the names and insert Nigeria / Nigerian names and places and you have pure unadulterated truth. Yes we have bad leaders but we also have bad followers. As individuals we ought to start being the change we want to see. And stop being emotional, sectarian and tribalistic about the going ons in our country.

^ok sir, but all the same we are all africans.
we long for better africa some days..
1love.

,.,.

nice storz. i would like to publish this on mz magazine, hope you dont mind. contact us via africanliterarytimes@gmail.com. nice story again

ijezie4: nice storz. i would like to publish this on mz magazine, hope you dont mind. contact us via africanliterarytimes@gmail.com. nice story again

ok no problem

Nice write up...

sgtmark: Nice write up...

thanks