Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

But having an expert among us does not absolve the rest of us from thinking. To begin with, the expert is generally an expert only in a narrow specialism. He can build a bridge for us perhaps, and tell us what weight of traffic it can support. But he can’t stop us from hiring an attendant who will take a bribe and look the other way while the prescribed weight is exceeded. He can set up the finest machinery for us, but he can’t create the technician who will stay at his post and watch the controls instead of going for a chat and some groundnuts under a mango tree outside.

So there is a limit to what an expert can do for us. In 1983, just before the overthrow of President Shagari’s administration, I gave an interview for a television programme which subsequently caused some offence in certain quarters. One of the questions put to me was what did I think about the President’s Green Revolution programme. And I said then, as I would say today, that it was a disaster which gave us plenty of food for thought and nothing at all in our stomach. Whereupon a certain fellow with a lot of grouse in him wrote in the papers that I should not have been asked to comment on agriculture because I was not an expert in that field. Well, we don’t really need a Ph.D. in agriculture to tell us when our stomach is empty, do we? If we are in reasonable health we should all carry around with us reliable, inbuilt alarm systems popularly called hunger to apprise us of our condition!

I must say in this regard that the best experts do not themselves encourage us to have foolish and superstitious faith in their ability to solve our diverse development problems. In an essay published by the American Economic Review in 1984 Sir Arthur Lewis, one of the foremost development economists in the world and no stranger by any means to problems of African underdevelopment, did highlight in his inimitably elegant fashion the sheer plethora of prescriptions among development experts of differing persuasions:

Every school has offered its own candidate for driver of the engine of growth. The physiocrats, agriculture; the Mercantilists, an export surplus; the classicists, the free market; the Marxists, capital; the neo-classicists, entrepreneurship; the Fabians, government; the Stalinists, industrialization; and the Chicago School, schooling.2

To sum up this marvellous passage I have composed a couplet which I beg pardon to inflict on you:

There! we have it on the best authority

Theorists of development cannot agree!

I will turn now to another world-famous economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, for a different kind of testimony. Interestingly, John Kenneth Galbraith is the current President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I must crave your indulgence to quote a fairly long extract from his address to the Academy in 1984 about the role of the arts in industry:

Finally let no one minimize the service that the arts render to established industry. In the years since World War II … there has been no economic miracle quite like that of Italy. That lovely country has gone from one political disaster to another with one of the highest rates of economic growth of any of the industrial lands. The reason is not that the Italian government is notably precise in its administration, that Italian engineers and scientists are better than others, that Italian management is inspired or that Italian trade unions are more docile than the AFL-CIO. The Italian success derives from the Italian artistic tradition. Italian products over the widest range are superior not in durability, not in engineering excellence, not in lower cost. They are better in design. Italian design and the consequent industrial success are the result of centuries of recognition of—including massive subsidy to—the arts.

In concluding his address, Galbraith made the following affirmation:

The arts are not the poor relation of the economic world. On the contrary they are at the very source of its vitality.3

Before I leave these foreign references I must return very briefly to that other miracle, Japan, to which I have already made reference. If “there has been no economic miracle quite like that of Italy,” there has been none to match Japan’s in dramatic suddenness and awesomeness of scale. It has been uniquely salutary also for thoroughly debunking all the bogus mystique summoned to explain Western industrialism—the Protestant ethic, the Graeco-Judaic tradition, etc. We, the latecomers (as Marion J. Levy calls us), have every reason to pay special attention to Japan’s success story as we take our faltering steps to modernization.

In the 1981 Tokyo Colloquium which I spoke about earlier we were attempting, among other things, to define the cultural ingredient, or as one of the Japanese scholars put it the “software,” of modernization. One of the observations that made a particularly strong impact on me in this connection was a little family anecdote by Professor Kinichiro Toba of Waseda University:

My grandfather graduated from the University of Tokyo at the beginning of the 1880s. His notebooks were full of English. My father graduated from the same university in 1920 and half of his notes were filled with English. When I graduated a generation later my notes were all in Japanese. So … it took three generations for us to consume western civilization totally via the means of our own language.4

If Professor Toba’s story is at all typical of the last 100 years of Japanese history (and we have no reason to believe otherwise), we can conclude that as Japan began the countdown to its spectacular technological lift-off it was also systematically recovering lost ground in its traditional mode of cultural expression. In one sense then it was travelling away from its old self towards a cosmopolitan, modern identity, while in another sense it was journeying back to regain a threatened past and selfhood. To comprehend the dimensions of this gigantic paradox and coax from it such unparalleled inventiveness requires not mere technical flair but the archaic energy, the perspective, the temperament of creation myths and symbolism.

It is in the very nature of creativity, in its prodigious complexity and richness, that it will accommodate paradoxes and ambiguities. But this, it seems, will alway

s elude and pose a problem for the uncreative, literal mind (which I hasten to add is not the same as the literary mind, nor even the merely literate mind). The literal mind is the one-track mind, the simplistic mind, the mind that cannot comprehend that where one thing stands, another will stand beside it—the mind (finally and alas!) which appears to dominate our current thinking on Nigeria’s need for technology.

The cry all around is for more science and less humanities (for in the narrow disposition of the literal mind more of one must mean less of the other). Our older universities have been pressured into a futile policy of attempting to allocate places on a 60:40 ratio in favour of science admissions. In addition, we have rushed to create universities of technology (and just as promptly proceeded to shut down half of them again) to demonstrate our priorities as well as confusions.

Nobody doubts that the modern developed world owes much of its success to scientific education and development. There is no doubt either that a nation can decide to emphasize science in its educational programme in order to achieve a specific national objective. When the Russians put the first man in orbit in 1961, John Kennedy responded by doubling United States space appropriations in 1962 and intensified a programme of space research which was to land Americans on the moon within the decade. But Kennedy did not ask the universities to starve out America’s liberal arts education. As a matter of fact he had previously demonstrated sufficient awareness of the national need for the arts when at his inauguration he broke with tradition and gave pride of place to a reading by Robert Frost, the great New England poet.

Furthermore, it is important to realize that because a country like America with a well-developed and viable educational system may safely switch emphases around in its educational programme it does not therefore follow that Nigeria, whose incipient programme is already in a shambles, can do the same. What kind of science can a child learn in the absence, for example, of basic language competence and an attendant inability to handle concepts?

Have we reflected on the fact that in pre-independence Nigeria the only schools equipped adequately to teach science, namely the four or five government colleges, not only produced doctors and engineers like other schools but held an almost complete monopoly in producing novelists, poets and playwrights?

Surely if this fact proves anything it is that education is a complex creative process and the more rounded it is the more productive it will become.5 It is not a machine into which you feed raw materials at one end and pick up packaged products at the other. It is, indeed, like creativity itself, “a many-splendoured thing.”

The great nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman has left us a magnificent celebration of the many-sided nature of the creative spirit:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself

(I am large, I contain multitudes) …

The universal creative rondo revolves on people and stories. People create stories create people; or rather, stories create people create stories. Was it stories first and then people, or the other way round? Most creation myths would seem to suggest the antecedence of stories—a scenario in which the story was already unfolding in the cosmos before, and even as a result of which, man came into being. Take the remarkable Fulani creation story (see this page):

In the beginning there was a huge drop of milk. Then the milk created stone; the stone created fire; the fire created water; the water created air.

Then Doondari came and took the five elements and moulded them into man. But man was proud. Then Doondari created blindness and blindness defeated man …

A fabulously rich story, it proceeds in stark successions of creation and defeat to man’s death through hubris, and then to a final happy twist of redemption when death itself, having inherited man’s arrogance, causes Doondari to descend a third time as Gueno the eternal one, to defeat death.