What the Ugandan middle class lacks: Philosophers

Radio One, FM 90, has a slot on their breakfast show just after the 7:00a.m news, called “He/She”. Listeners call in to respond to questions put to the breakfast show about crises, dilemmas and frustration in their relationships and marriage.

It is a sample of the most pressing issues within relationships among our Ugandan professional “middle class”.

What strikes me most and has since the mid 1990s is the mentality of the educated Ugandan, especially the urban educated Ugandan woman, and what we define as “success”. Relationships are strained and even breaking up over unfulfilled dreams of a most petty kind.

Simple things like a car are a serious consideration by a university-educated girl on whether to date Fred or disengage with Michael.

A girl will break up with a guy because he thinks she should stay at home and give their children special attention. She, the “career woman”, will have none of that and so this email to Radio One asking for advice.

And what is the “career” that she so fiercely wants to pursue in place of being a stay at home mother? Some obscure desk officer doing inconsequential Shs700,000-a-month clerical work in some Danish-funded NGO or just a sales representative at a mobile phone company in Kampala.

The other couple is close to breaking up because Susan is hell-bent on having her baby at a hospital in London and Brian thinks that is not an expense worth the drain.

And on and on it goes, day in, day out, The Dreams of my Fatherland. Petty, pathetic, simple, average things like cars, smart phones, high heels, sun glasses, a “ka-plot” of land, a current account at an international bank in town.

Deep research required
Somebody has to write a book or university thesis on the role that the maalo and materialism of the intellectually limited, simple-minded, upwardly mobile, university-educated urban African woman plays in perpetuating the backwardness of this continent.

And Radio One’s co-presenters Mariane and John (especially Mariane) advance and perpetuate this low-brow, low-achievement, low-expectation “maalo” definition of success.

In an sms to journalist Andrew Mwenda last Thursday, I asked him why on his Capital FM breakfast show appearance every morning, he constantly gushes out enthusiastically about how Uganda’s economy has performed well by saying “Look at the traffic jams in Kampala”.

Mwenda, who should know better, travels the world all the time, has studied at some of the world’s best universities, attended some of the best-regarded international conferences, has personally met and talked with Bill Gates, Larry Paige, co-founder of Google and other world luminaries, is himself fairly well-off by African standards and at his home he has some of the best books in the world, but he keeps defining “success” and Uganda’s supposedly economic advancement in terms of Big House, Big Car.

The theme is in the August 2000 Destiny’s Child hit song Independent Woman, Part I, where, according to its songwriter Beyonce Knowles, “The shoes on my feet/

I’ve bought it/The clothes I’m wearing/I’ve bought it” is the Black woman’s understanding of what it means to be “independent”.

The number of emails I got after last Sunday’s article (“The rural nature in Africa’s emerging middle class of ‘big sizes’”, Sunday Monitor, May 27) show there are many people interested in, embarrassed by, and concerned about this middle class that produces little of lasting value but is defined by its primitive accumulation and display of wealth.

This mediocrity in aspiration, this cluelessness about who we are, what we are doing, where we are going, what we ought to be doing and where we ought to be going - this maalo as I termed it last Sunday - lies is at the core of the post-independence Africa identity crisis.

It is the reason the vast new petroleum, natural gas, gold and diamond findings being reported all over Africa these days will not benefit Africans.

Exasperated readers asked me how we can get out of this predicament.

First, we shall need teachers. Teachers, not in the familiar classroom and chalk sense in which we understand the word.

We shall need teachers in the sense of thinkers and illustrators, guides, philosophers, instructors of the mind, 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.

What do German doctors think and discuss among themselves when President Yoweri Museveni and his family show up on a presidential jet in Berlin, then go to a clinic for basic medical checkup? In power for 26 years, billions in foreign aid, but still one must fly to Germany for basic medical checkup? Our heads of state also need special advisers on how to overcome their own “maalo”.

Europe, the most influential continent in history, developed first and foremost because it developed the mind. Long before electricity, computers, air travel and when life was still a daily grind, Europe already had a profoundly developed intellectual tradition.

Is it a coincidence that the United States which publishes 150,000 new book titles a year and China which publishes 120,000 new titles are the world’s biggest and second-biggest national economies?

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.

Not just the bits and pieces of cram work homework, coursework, theses, lecture and classroom notes we work with at school and university, to be left there upon the attainment of a diploma, certificate or degree, but advanced knowledge.

Whites from Europe and America - although over the last 20 years have degenerated into a culture soaked in celebrity gossip, eccentric pursuits, minority rights and that Facebook-ish banality - still largely know what they are doing when they mean to be serious.

They still have minds that search much more keenly and perceive much deeper than anything that can be found in urban middle class Africa.

Most Africans, even the best-educated, best-paid and most widely-travelled, are held hostage to a mindset in which university-educated professionals are still impressed by things that Whites outgrow as teenagers.

Rather than keep giving us their financial aid and grants, the best Europe and China can do is send us teachers, philosophers, thoughtful guides to help us see that a flashy Range Rover or a house with 40 metres of cables leading to satellite dishes and 50-inch flat screen TVs is not really the true mark of success, but rather is a sign of our maalo.

The reluctance to read and write books - especially among even university-educated African women - has to be overcome before we start talking of future prosperity and development. They can help us arrive at a less embarrassing image of ourselves and develop a knowledge-based, scientific society.