A Very British Disease

The stage was set for the premier – the first reading on British television of the new novel, Freedom, which is being hailed as the next great American novel. The writer, Jonathan Franzen, began reading. His eyes began to narrow, slowly until the point he appeared to be squinting. Then suddenly they widened, baffled, and with a cloud of confusion descending over his face he raised his bewildered glaze to the presenter sitting in front of him, and said that he had to stop. Apparently the track that he had just read was riddled with grammatical and spelling errors which even he could remember should have been dealt with several drafts before.

The furore that erupted over this literary heresy resulted in the whole [whole of the United Kingdom first edition] first edition of the book in the United Kingdom being pulled by the publishers. Obama said he had read the book, and that it was fine. The Americans take things like this very seriously. Probably, because of their relatively shorter history, the American novel is the next best thing to the narrative of the nation’s history. How could HarperCollins a publisher of such renown get it all wrong?

As a teacher I could not help myself thinking if this debacle was not symptomatic of the deplorable state of literacy in the UK today. From politicians to presenters on television and radio and down to customer service assistants in the shops one is constantly being bombarded with the wrong use of tense and words so baffling I could only excusably describe as a purposeful use of slang. Some common misapplication of tense include, “I was sat …..”, and “I done it”. It is in the classroom where one is acutely confronted with a frightful awareness of the future. Students, supposedly with eleven years of schooling behind them and yet with no concept of spelling, punctuation and grammar. I had the misfortune, well not once, but a particular bad case where a student began without a capital letter and proceeded with a track of nearly three hundred and fifty words excluding commas and full-stops, and riddled with spelling mistakes and atrocious grammar throughout its entirety.

How then has a nation that gave the world it’s most widely spoken language descended to such a stage. One could argue from here to the next millennium about the why and how, but my opinion is that since the 1960’s a certain intellectual slothfulness has crept into the nation’s psyche, coupled with half-witted politicians looking for cheap votes. Government after government have continually tampered and tinkered with the state education curriculum. There was even a period when teachers were encouraged not to be overly concerned with the language element of students’ work if the subject was other than English itself. We are at the point now where teaching has ceased to be a profession, of practitioners making independent judgements about their charges’ learning, to become humdrum exercise of clerical work, ticking check boxes and the nonsensical filing of endless forms.

One morning last week, while driving to college a professor came on the radio and said that SMS text language should be incorporated into formal language in schools because it was now the natural language of communication among the current generation. I almost drove into the car ahead of me.

What Exactly Did Obama Go To Africa To Do?

We are told that Obama went to Ghana to support democracy in Africa. Now there are many things I can tolerate, but trying to insult my intelligence is something I don’t suffer fool gladly.
I have been a fully subscribed member to the Obama fan club since he started on the road to the Presidency, I must admit he has treaded sure-footedly ever since. But on this particular issue it is definitely a nil-point for the President. Acknowledge, the entire world economy is gripped with fever, yet with the multitude of problems facing the continent is a 24-hr jaunt all that Africa really deserves? If the President could not or would not give due attention to the continent of his ancestry then he should have taken a rain cheque and come back another day. My innate cynicism has stirred me to the view that may be he could either embarrassed about his heritage or just sensitive to possible accusations of nepotistic tendencies towards Africa. There has not been any major policy statement on Africa since he arrived at the White House.

If Obama is really serious about Africa, the first thing he should have done when he arrived in Accra was to head for Accra market, get on a soap box and instruct the masses to march down to the parliament building and drag the big fat men there from their stools to the beach and string them high upside down until they regurgitated their stashes of ill-gotten wealth. In the same vein he could also galvanise the proletariat from Dakar to Addis Ababa and from Tripoli to Pretoria to do likewise. Then the CIA who are really experienced in these matters could organise some rendition flights and cook them up in some Guantanamo-style camp on a god-forsaken island off the continent. Next, he should organise a conference like that infamous Berlin Conference in 1884, but instead this time allocate each country to some management consultancy to sort out the mess and nurse these countries back to health. You skin might erupt with incredulity at the thought of this, but take a step back and think. Leadership has been the single most important factor in the shambles that has engrossed the continent. In my opinion what is more treasonable is that they have succeeded in stifling creativity, enterprise and undermining self-respect.

I read somewhere that during the 1960s when most African countries were becoming ‘independent’, that it would take the continent between sixty to a hundred years to catch up with the developed world. Today, as the tiger economies of south-east Asia hurtle faster forwards and playing catch up with the main players on the stage, Africa is accelerating backwards from the point where it was back in the 1960s. If you think I am joking I will tell a true story.

Recently one morning, my mother was driving out of the house when she accidentally hit a man on a bicycle laden with produce for the market. The man hit his head on the tarmac but the only sign of injury was a wound on the side of his head. Mindful that the man might also be concussed, she got him into the car and drove him to the hospital. At the General Hospital, there were no staff at reception, no nurses to willing to be accosted and definitely not a single doctor in sight. When she finally way laid a nurse she was told that a doctor who should have been on duty was still at home. My mum then begged the nurse to have a look at the man. After surveying the wound, the nurse duly announced that she needed to shave the area around the wound to be able to clean it but no blades were available in hospital. So mother provided some change to purchase a pack of blades from a shop opposite the hospital entrance. Meanwhile she insisted she get hold of the doctor. After several attempts at getting a connection to the doctor’s cell phone she finally got him
‘Doctor … doctor, can you hear me. Yes, I am Mrs Henshaw, wife of the man who used to be Director of Medical Services you remember. Please, I need you to come down immediately. I have a patient here I want you to see.’
‘I’m sorry madam. I don’t have transport…’
‘Ok, ok, where do you live – I’ll send my driver.’

Well over an hour later, the doctor arrived. He began preliminaries: checked the wound, asked how the patient was feeling, felt the area around his neck etc. Then he fished out a pen torch and switched it on - no power. He took out the batteries. Gave them a good shake and returned them to the casing - still no power.
‘Madam, the batteries are not working.’ So a second trip was made back to the shop to get the batteries.

When the doctor had established that the patient would indeed survive he turned to my mother, with a sheepish smile plastered on his face. ‘Madam if you don’t mind, find me something small there, I can use to get home.’

If that is not enough to convince you of the backward trajectory of the African continent I will tell you of another experience. I have always hacked on to my children about how incomparable the education I received back in Nigeria was to what they were getting here now in the UK: the discipline, the regime that instilled steeliness and a competitive spirit that has allowed one to thrive in all circumstances. When we were on a visit to Nigeria a couple of years ago, I took them to visit the old missionary secondary school I still treasured so much. It was an adventure that back-fired miserably.

Even before stepping out of the car, I sensed that all was not going to be well. The old school buildings looked like they had not been blessed with a coat of paint since I left over thirty years ago. Windows and doors in classrooms dangled perilously on their hinges. The solid desks cum lockers we had used in my time were now replaced by cheap wooden benches that looked as they had been knocked up in a hurry by some amateur carpenter.

As we progressed towards the dormitories at the rear, I was horrified that the lawns and course ways I had toiled on every Friday afternoon after studies to keep trim and geometrically lined now looked like a building site that the workers had refused to clear up before they left.

The students were on vacation, so we took the opportunity to peep into to see my old dormitory. ‘Daddy, you mean you stayed in this place,’ my daughter cried out in disbelief. The ceiling looked like it had been on the front line of defence against the elements, battered and soaked most of it had given up the ghost and since crumbled away; mould and grime now substituted as paint on the walls while the floor, liberally infested with craters and gravely bumps looked just like the lunar landscape in the pictures we saw back then that had been beamed back by the Apollo 11 mission.‘It wasn’t like this when I was here,’ I managed to reply lamely.

On our way back to the car my son, the younger and more reflective of the siblings said in his normally measured tones, ‘It was like a pig-sty in there’. Lost in my own thought, eyes watered by memories, I said to myself, ‘I wouldn’t put pigs in there - not if I would have to eat them later.’ But there was something else about the encounter that my imagination really couldn’t quite accommodate; it was why an old ragged shirt should be hanging from the rafter right up in the centre of the hall.

The future indeed still looks dire. Lack of real democratic structures has meant that new leadership cadres are not being allowed to develop to take over from the political monoliths that have been in place since the independence era.

The common man in Africa, perhaps too stoically, has carried the brunt of this debacle, partly in ignorance and partly through the machinations of the elite that have divided sections of society preventing them from articulating their grievances and forming a common consensus for change. But if there is one certainty it is that change is inevitable. People are beginning to feel that they have nothing to lose. The process of how change will come about is open to conjecture, but we want it now, not tomorrow or next year.

This is why we need Obama to really turn the heat up on these people. A President, of African ancestry, in the White House I believe has more credibility with millions of Africans than any of the local tin-pot presidents that have been installed through sham elections on the continent. Surely it would not be too much of a leap of reason to apply the same justification for Afghanistan to a few countries on the continent. He could start by freezing all foreign held accounts and properties, impose a ban on all foreign travel or attending international conferences, indeed stop aid in all manner and forms.

The West might still think Africa is some god-forsaken land thousands of miles away that can be kept on the back-burner with little bits of scrap; it should not be too smug though to the scenario of hunger and despair leading to a new wave of terrorism emanating from the continent and spilling on to the streets of London and New York.

On Fathers and Sons

It was my birthday yesterday, and rather than embark on any revelry to mark my growing assault on the years, I plumbed instead for ‘quality’ time with the family, granted in the form of a meal in front of the TV and a video chosen, poignantly, by my kids. And poignantly I must say, for they had picked the film ‘W’, from the local video store.

Now, while I am in danger of committing Harikari here, I must admit to having a soft spot for old GW. Despite or in spite of his bumbling ways and at times misguided attempts at forging his reactionary views on the world I find something inherently simple and disarmingly decent about the guy. I don’t know how accurate the film purports to be to actual events. Oliver Stone the director is a serious film maker and I am sure he has an angle on this, but the film portrays a man with serious short-comings not least a generous amount of self-doubt. However, putting aside accusations of America wanting to control the world’s oil reserves or revenge for 9/11, I have a sneaking feeling that Dubya’s invasion of Iraq could have been based on nothing more sinister than a son’s arching need to win his father’s respect.

Most fathers instinctively want, or at least expect their sons to do better than they did themselves. Daddy Bush by all accounts was an accomplished man: successful business man, ambassador to China, director of the CIA, two-term vice president and for one, if inglorious, term as president. So if you were in Dubya’s shoes you probably don’t have many options bar having to man a spacecraft to the moon to feel the same sense of accomplishment. A tall, if not insurmountable, order if there was one. One therefore doesn’t have to be an Einstein or genius of the same ilk to figure how that the bludgeoning of a country – in this case Iraq to clear up his father’s unfinished business – was the least plausible for a desperate son.

Indeed one feels to have supped at the same table, and have an understanding of the demons dancing around in Dubya psyche. For although of not the same rarefied level, I myself was faced with a successful father, a physician and probably the first African playwright to be published in the English-speaking world. A man whose stature was so elevated in society that it was easy to place any label you wanted on him and it would fit. Although no acerbic comments were made, for indeed he was a man of great gentleness, it was always easy for one to generate untold feelings of great expectations, intertwined with a debilitating fear of failure. A horror I never quite conquered in nearly three decades. Like Dubya one had tried to rebel, first against, and then tried to be everything his father had been. A first and solitary attempt, at completing the draft of a novel drew absolutely no response of any kind. Twenty years later, after he died I found it wrapped and tucked away among his personal papers.

A few years before he passed away, he wrote in a letter, ‘son, I am really proud of you’. Words I found hard, and still difficult to digest. I do wish now he had said that earlier. Much, much earlier.