Nairobi — Nations prosper when their citizens become adventurous, travel beyond their borders, learn and apply what is positive to the development of their motherland, something Africa is slow in doing writes OKELLO OCULI in Abuja, Nigeria

It has been suggested that the wars of national liberation fought by Spaniards and Portuguese against Muslim colonisers from North Africa (the so-called "Moors"), led to the growth of the power hidden in the science of drawing maps.

Before the Suez Canal was built, Portuguese and Spanish anti-colonialists had been forced to creep along the coast of Africa until Vasco Da Gama reached East Africa in 1498

The linkage went through the socio-geographical reality of the "Moors" being Muslim rulers whose religion had won power and converts from lands around Turkey in the east to Morocco in the west, thereby blocking ancient trading routes across eastern Asia into Persia (now Iran), Afghanistan, China and India that Christian traders had previously used.

In 1999, this story was still being told at Fez, an ancient town that lies five hours away in a train journey from Casablanca on the western coast of Morocco. Fez prides itself as the refuge to which the defeated colonisers who had been driven out of the Iberian Peninsula came to settle and sulk.

The closure of that trade route would later make the building of the Suez Canal -to connect the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean- an historic return to the area by Christian countries with French engineers enjoying the honour of displaying their national genius in building the waterway.

Crept along the coast

The canal also symbolised a return to an ancient maritime route that had been used by the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt to travel around the southern tip of Africa and return home via the western entry into the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean.

Before the Suez Canal was built, Portuguese and Spanish anti-colonialists had been forced to creep along the coast of Africa until Vasco Da Gama reached East Africa in 1498 and crowned his efforts by sailing to India and thereby the ancient sources of spices, silk cloth, knowledge of type writers, and gun powder in China.

Getting to Vasco Da Gama too quickly misses a vital matter.

Portugal became the first country in Europe to build an empire out of a combination of geographical knowledge and trade that would come to run along a global network. That knowledge was directly linked to political power.

The kings of Portugal supported Royal cartographers (map makers) who, with great hunger, grabbed all information brought in by traders to make maps.

The maps enabled Portugal's rulers and merchants to venture into distant territories, harvest and loot resources. That this power assumed strategic importance among Europeans is suggested by British aristocrats creating an organisation they called a "Geographical Society" and getting the monarch to award it a charter hence the Royal Geographical Society.

This society would finance economic, military, and scientific spies (known in text books as "explorers") to travel across Africa.

The most celebrated of the explorers would come down lanes of history as David Livingstone, Samuel Baker, and Mungo Park.

The Italians exploded their own interest in these matters in a more colourful way. In 1502, the Duke Ercole d'Este of Ferrara persuaded an Italian diplomat to carry out a most historic theft of a state secret: He had the diplomat steal, from Portugal, a copy of Cantino Planiphere, a large map of the world.

To appreciate the enormous value of this European aristocratic thievery executed in 1502, it is important to note that Christopher Columbus had reached the Caribbean in 1492 while on a blind, hungry sea journey in search of India. Little wonder that his ignorance became engraved in the name of the group of islands in the Caribbean Sea as the West Indies.

Also, a fellow called Petro Alvarez Cabral had reached Brazil. His most celebrated gift to Africa would, centuries later, be freedom fighter and liberator, in the 1960s and 1970s: Amilca Cabral of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde.

The historic importance of map-drawing ties in with the role of knowledge in the history of relations between peoples: Worshippers of Gautama Buddha learnt from him several religious instructions. Among these are: acting right, thinking right, concentration and above all emphasis on learning.

When you see the Japanese pressing their palms and taking a bow of respect and politeness towards each other one thousand times a day, it is because their Buddhist injunction insists on each "acting right". When you hear a European writer advising American and European businessmen and industrialists to keep in view the fact that Japanese industrial workers make things to the utmost levels of perfection, it is because Buddha taught them that "concentration" is a great virtue.

Innovation and invention

And, when a 2007 story in the Financial Times (of London) has it that Chinese university graduates in information technology are weak at innovation and invention but excellent in performing given tasks, hear therein echoes of Buddha's emphasis on learning; including memorising vast amounts of written texts.

These observations raise two challenges for Africa. Europeans have a deeply entrenched historical tradition of making maps and using map knowledge to reach out and plunder resources from other lands. The mindset has served them well and continues to do so.

They have, since Russia's Yuri Gagarin went into space, turned their mapping hunger to the outer wilderness beyond stars and known galaxies.

The Japanese and the Chinese have Buddhism guiding their mind steps. The concentration they have put into "acting right" and "thinking right" so that they can catch up with, and overtake, Euro-America is paying high dividends. It did get atomic bombs dropped on Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki and vast quantities of opium served to China's past rulers (by the British), but both peoples have bounced back.

The other gift from Buddha that must be kept in view is the injunction never to be contented in relying on other people's achievements and merely copying their notions of the good life.

Hundreds and thousands of Africans travelled to Europe between 1920 and 1960. We now know that the most talented among them included Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Kamuzu Banda, Sadiq al Mahdi, Boutros Boutros Ghali and others.

We are yet to have maps of Europe, the Americas or Asia drawn by one of them. A biographer has claimed that Senghor's interest in African culture sprang out of a surge of influence on French intellectuals and power elite by an anthropological study done by a Frenchman on village life in western France.

Senghor, Alion Diop or Houphuet Boigny (who were cabinet ministers in France), never wrote a single book on France; never sketched the various sizes of heads of natives of France and Europe; never wrote about the politics of a French village or described conditions in a French factory.

Jomo Kenyatta failed to write a companion work on the anthropology of Britain to be compared with his famous Facing Mount Kenya.

Nigerian politicians continue to put much breath in quoting obscure and not-so-obscure American or British leaders. The more scholarly among them lean on classical Greece and Ancient Rome to legitimise authority. But, there is yet to be a book by a Nigerian even on matters as urgent as the history of the length of skirts in females in the Americas and capitalist Europe.

Nigerians like to complain about the shoddy work their tailors and builders do in comparison in preference to perfectionists from Ghana and Senegal. The Obasanjo administration spent eight tumultuous years (1999-2007) hacking at civil servants for their chronic "corruption and indiscipline" (or not "acting right"); their "unpatriotic" activities (or not taking their nationalism seriously while doing their work of administration with "concentration").

Stories and research reports about Mobutu's rule over Congo (1965-1998) make Nigeria's case a little less harrowing. Sudan has excelled in mass murder and destruction of community life in Darfur. The question to ponder over is whether it should have been Buddha who walked into Africa for refuge and not baby Jesus of Nazareth to Egypt.

Yet that may have been a false start. Perhaps we should look into our toes with urgent concentration.

By chance, our failures continue to be in not building on ancient instructions from tribal age-mates of Buddha who worked to build cultural instructions all across Africa.

The Guardian daily newspaper (published out of Lagos on August I, 2007), reported that Nigeria's Speaker of the House of Representatives, Patricia Foluke Ette, burst into tears on learning that a ten-year old girl had been raped by a forty-year old man. The paper added that a report had also listed 20 other rape cases in Suluja, a suburb of Abuja, Nigeria's capital.

A tabloid also carried stories of a Navy police officer at a naval base at Port Harcourt, who had drawn the wrath of parents for routinely raping school girls in a Navy-run Primary School. Nigeria's world famous novelist, Chinua Achebe, might have added that things are still continuing to fall apart in his country because successive rulers failed to build on ancient values.

Daily Nation columnist Charles Onyango Obbo once wrote to tell me of a wondrous event that people in his village had been witness to. A stranger, who turned out to be Japanese, had arrived unannounced to study a most obscure language of a most tiny ethnic group in the area.

Due to the limited number of people who speak that language, Uganda's broadcast media, let alone the print group, had never patronised and honoured it with usage as a tool of communication. And yet a sane man from Japan had already spent weeks recording and putting its sound structure to pen and paper.

To underline the seriousness of his mission, he was seen to swim and trudge through swamps and mud to map his prey. The villagers did not rush out to grab and tie ropes around the man, doubtful about his sanity. Instead, the Ugandan villagers wrote to express their sense of wonder.

The Japanese once had an empire across Asia and put millions of settlers in China's Manchuria Province.

In 2007 there are over 270,000 workers in Japan whose parents once migrated to Brazil and Peru-exploiting maps is clearly not alien to the Japanese.

Perhaps there is a lesson here for ending the epidemic of things falling apart in Africa. African governments may wish to give their disenchanted, unemployed youths the mission of going out to draw maps of other parts of the world.

One starting point may be the drawing maps of the other Africa beyond their countries of birth.

Map-power may a useful, novel frontier for fuelling the spirit of nationalism in Africa - including that nationalism that will yet create the United States of Africa.

Africa Insight is an initiative of the Nation Media Group's Africa Media Network Project.