Kalyegira is doing it like most well schooled and ill-educated Africans
Artiste Rabadaba and visitors during his birthday party recently. Photo by Faiswal Kasirye
The Greeks had an interesting word: iatrogenesis. A disease or infection that is caused by the doctor. While it is a little-known concept, it was a main cause of death in European hospitals, especially for pregnant women, until the days of Dr Ignaz Semmelweis, who showed that this “puerperal fever” that was killing women was due to doctors’ normal procedure at the time of not using sterilised equipment. Naturally, nobody listened to Semmelweis.
At the same time, in Africa, for centuries doctors had already been practicing comparatively safer surgery on pregnant women, as was reported by a bewildered European explorer, R. W. Felkin, in his article in the Edinburg Medical Journal in 1879.
In other words: Ugandans had been centuries ahead of all of Europe regarding obstetric surgery until the Europeans came.
How is it that, today, safe surgery is considered a European thing, when in 1879 a European was surprised by how advanced surgery was in Uganda? Even though Uganda practiced antiseptic medical procedures centuries before Europeans did, why is it that every Ugandan associates safe medicine and surgery with Europe? Here is why: the European created (I’m sad to say) lots of Timothy Kalyegiras in his wake. They are today’s purveyors of iatrogenesis, spreading the disease precisely when they are trying to treat the patient.
Europe not for “correctness”
In his Sunday Monitor, June 3 article What the Ugandan middle class lacks: Philosophers, Kalyegira had a fulminating prescription for what he perceives to be Uganda’s problems. He was right on many points. The Ugandan tendencies at the receiving end of his vitriol do indeed deserve to be attacked. But those are obvious; the only real contribution he made to the discussion was dangerously-wrong, because - like most other well-schooled, poorly-educated, pseudo-urban Africans - he thinks that “European” is another word for “correct”.
Kalyegira is willing to quickly glide over the very real social failure that translates into celebrity worship in the West, while for Uganda he picks on things as trivial as desiring a current account at an international bank.
Even as he attacks the “shallowness” of others, he goes on to define his indicators of achievement as one who “travels the world all the time, … attended some of the best-regarded international conferences, personally met and talked with Bill Gates, Larry Paige [sic]”. This worship of the White man is the problem. For proof, I remind you of my opening paragraph: before we worshiped European surgery, we did far better surgery than they did; when we began worshiping European surgery, we can barely treat our people.
Kalyegira correctly decries the fact that many Ugandan women are sacrificing motherhood to work at inconsequential jobs. But where do you think we learnt this habit? It is a Western innovation. He correctly decries how cheap material concerns break potentially-good marriages, and he points us Westward for the cure. The problem is that this same problem is pandemic in the West, where it originated. Talk of spreading the disease when playing doctor! The TV that brainwashes our urbanites into pathetic financial and social decisions is only doing so by teaching them what is otherwise normal in the West, where these TV poisons come from.
Ugandans may be living beyond their means, but while this problem is universal, the Western World today is in more debt than any Africans can fathom. The entire European continent is in overwhelming debt, with at least six major countries being technically insolvent (Portugal, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain—nearly all of these the epicentres of great ancient empires, and creators of what is today recognisable as European tradition), while America is in $14 trillion of debt, an amount that technically cannot be paid off with sound money.
Kalyegira correctly denounces the big-car-big-house tendency we see around us, but this is an invention of the Americans he wants us to take lessons from. The statistics are shocking: American houses more than doubled in size in 50 years of shrinking family sizes, and they drive remarkably wasteful cars—they are the land that invented the Hummer that these “Big Size” Ugandans love, they are the land of MTV Cribs. The result was the housing credit boom and subsequent credit crunch, as well as an addiction to Middle Eastern oil for which they start endless wars. Are these the people Kalyegira wants us to learn from?
Talk of spreading the disease while playing doctor. Kalyegira says that, for us to get out of our problem, “First, we shall need teachers … people who will show us the way we ought to live and the things we ought to aspire for and what it means to be a people.” He essentially wants more of the same old stick of Africans sitting down and waiting for an inspired chanter to tell them “Turn left!” and they turn; “Turn right!” and they turn. But this is already the problem we have. Does Kalyegira not realise that the issue with TV is that it is exactly this kind of teacher? The really silly habits and decisions we have learnt from the West were delivered to us as from a teacher to a pupil. That is precisely our problem; nobody explores anymore, and if we follow Kalyegira’s advice, we would do even less of it. All that would be left would be sitting at the feet of some pontificator and being misguided.
He notes that America publishes lots of books, and he somehow links that to development. Well, the problem is that the data does not permit that conclusion. Voluminous publishing did not stop China and the USSR from having famines that led to millions of deaths. (In the case of the Soviets, the voluminous publishings of Trofim Lysenko and his fellow scientists actually led to the famines. To say nothing of our Chinese friends and the voluminous writings during the Great Leap Forward.) Scandinavian countries have paltry amounts of publications compared to China and America, but they pass America’s development metrics better than America herself.
A race with a global appeal
Besides, Africans are an acoustic people, hence their music that has vast international appeal, but also the fact that more useful discussion happens on radio in Uganda than happens in print.
Noting that West is pretty much finished, Kalyegira is casting about in a panic, looking for a new person to lead Africa. He takes it as a given that Africa cannot lead herself —just like the Europeans did — and so he comes up with this “teacher” he wants us to follow: “The Chinese, with their attention to detail and serious minds, should also help guide the clueless and ‘unserious’ African into the future. We need to develop a higher sense of existence and consciousness.” Isn’t it alarming that Kalyegira wrote those two sentences next to each other?
He is calling for a “higher sense of existence” for Africans on the one hand, while on the other asking Africans to trail meekly behind the Chinese derrière, being cheap plastic ‘MADE IN CHINA’ copies of their original self. Talk of spreading disease while playing doctor! So if we rose to the Chinese level of, say, forced abortions and government-mandated atheism, Kalyegira would laud our “higher sense of existence”?
The fundamental problem with us is that we have been convinced that we were mere apes before Europe came and saved us. As I have said before, this is not true at all. Not by a long chalk.
What Kalyegira said
The Chinese, with their attention to detail and serious minds, should also help guide the clueless and “unserious” African into the future. We need to develop a higher sense of existence and consciousness. In other words, we need to develop the title of Kenny Rogers’ 1983 album: Eyes That See In The Dark. Eyes that see in the dark. That is what we need: well-developed, thoughtful, solid minds with a level of perception, penetrating insight and in-depth knowledge that is solely missing in our African societies and to have such developed minds run our companies, government departments, schools, universities and families with mental clarity. We can only get this gravitas and rock-solid stature by reading and writing and researching advanced knowledge and information.
