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Africa: Continent Must Speak Up Against Prejudice
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The Nation (Nairobi)
OPINION
25 October 2007
Posted to the web 24 October 2007
Calestous Juma
Nairobi
Nobel laureate James Watson continues to be widely condemned for his claim that Africans are less intelligent than Europeans. But surprisingly, leading institutions such as the African Union (AU) and the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) have not responded to the adverse comments.
In a swift response to Watson's comments, the Science Museum and other UK-based institutions cancelled his speaking engagements. The board of trustees of his institution, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has suspended him from duty.
This is not the first time that international leaders have made adverse comments about Africa. What is inexcusable is that their outbursts hardly elicit responses from leading African institutions. The silence does more damage than the statements.
For example, two years ago President Vladimir Putin responded to a challenge about Russia's human rights record by saying: "We all know that African countries used to have a tradition of eating their own adversaries."
He added: "We don't have such a tradition or process or culture and I believe the comparison between Africa and Russia is not quite just." African still owes Putin a reasoned response to his outburst.
In a flawed speech delivered in Senegal earlier this year, French President Nikolas Sarkozy said "the African has never really entered into history. They have never really launched themselves into the future. The African peasant has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time. In this imaginary world, where everything starts over and over again, there is room neither for human endeavour, nor for the idea of progress."
President Sarkozy's outbursts were hardly challenged by leading African institutions. It fell on individual African leaders like President Abdoulaye Wade to seek to offer tutorials on social change in Africa to President Sarkozy. More comprehensive lessons on Africa from the AAS should have followed.
The task is not to engage in vitriolic but to offer reasoned responses that help to educate the world about Africa. Institutions such as the AU and the AAS could play key roles in setting the record straight.
But to do so they will need to build capacity in at least two areas. First, they need to monitor international trends and develop international capacity for swift responses when such adverse statements are made. Offering timely reaction and other forms of representation should be a function of the chairperson of the AU Commission.
Secondly, Africa needs to build the capacity to get its voice heard worldwide. There is an urgent need for African nations to strengthen their media outreach. More specifically, they should set an international radio broadcasting that is comparable in reach to the Voice of America (VoA) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
Today young Africans seeking alternatives to the VoA and the BBC tune into Radio China International. But there is no genuine African voice that can keep the international community informed on African issues.
Finally, African diplomatic missions around the world need to do more in updating the international community on Africa. Africans should not expect others to present a balanced view of their continent. It is Africa's duty to do so.
It is bad enough that leaders such as Putin, Sarkozy and Watson can so whimsically make such adverse comments about Africa. It is worse that African institutions such as the AU and AAS let them go unchallenged.
As British essayist William Hazlitt once said, "prejudice is the child of ignorance." The international community will only grow up if those affected by prejudice take on the role of educators and not passive victims.
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Prof Juma teaches at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he directs the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project.
Who is talking? But surely, Calestous Juma, what should we (Africans) do about African academics such as you and Florence Wambugu who do not only subscribe to James Watson’s genetic reductionism and determinism. Worse, you appropriate and reconstitute the rhetoric of your patrons (such as Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, multinational co-operations and their stakeholders, US farmers through USAID, etc) whose underlying cultural belief and vision is to exploit or “exterminate all the brutes”? History reminds us that slave trade was successful because some individual Africans collaborated with Western slave traders. The same is true for the success of colonization. If... [Read Full Text]
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