You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum!
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.

A timely reminder for sluggers. I'm not your typical African, though.