African renaissance is possible but only when people hold leadership to account

Barrack MulukaThere are some Kenyans out there, doing a great job. They are helping jigger victims overcome their adversity. They are teaching them basic hygiene and generally showing them how to keep jiggers away.When I was growing up in Emanyulia, long ago, there was a story about a man called Otsialo. They said he was responsible for the jigger menace that afflicted not just Emanyulia, but most parts of Kenya’s Western Province in those days. Now this Otsialo, they said, had materialised one morning, at the royal palace in the Wanga Kingdom, all the way from Kabaka’s court in Mengo, Uganda. He carried a giant gourd. The Wanga Kingdom, if you will recall, was itself part of the satellites of the Kingdom of Buganda in its glorious days. For whatever reason, Otsialo had fallen foul with the authorities in Mengo and fled eastwards. This was how Otsialo arrived at the Nabongo’s court with a gourd of jiggers. They do not appear to have received him well in Wanga. He therefore broke his gourd and unleashed the dreaded sand fleas, right there in the royal palace. The rest has been so much history in the sands, all the way to Murang’a in Central Province. If you ask the people of Emanyulia about the origins of jiggers, they will tell you they came from Uganda. The origin was royal and the entry point was also royal.We have come a long way from the days of Otsialo and narratives of gourds of jiggers. You do not see that many jigger infested people as you did in the 1960s and in the 1970s. Appleby, a Church Missionary Society evangelist of the years devoted her life not only to evangelising, but also to addressing questions of basic hygiene. The local people christened her ‘Shimwenyi’, on account of her permanent smile.Primary school youth in Buluhya in the 1950s and 1960s as a matter of course, read Shimwenyi’s children’s storybook, Omukhasi Omubooli. This is to say The Talkative Woman. Her narratives focused on basic hygiene. The jigger was a recurrent character in the narratives. A very basic relation was established between cleanliness and good health. Like most problems that simple primary healthcare would sort out, jiggers are a matter of failing to pay attention to basic hygiene.But the jigger problem is larger than the flea in your toe. It is as big as the royal flea in the royal palace. For, Prof Chinua Achebe has never ceased reminding us – the trouble with Africa is simply and squarely a question of poor leadership. Political hygiene is a fundamental problem. On account of political hygiene deficiency, foreigners come to Africa to teach us how to wash our hands. Think of this again. Yes, foreigners coming to Africa to teach us how to wash our hands? Just imagine someone seated on an aeroplane, all the way from Europe, with only one mission, "I am going to Africa, to teach the people how to wash their hands." Think of that again. This is the 21st century. Americans have gone to Mars. They have chained time and condensed space. In this age, you can fly from Seoul in South Korea on Saturday and get to Washington on Friday of the same week. When they ask you, "When did you leave Seoul?" you could very well tell them, "I left tomorrow." Science has made nonsense of space. Cybernation and telecommunication have revolutionised the world in our own lifetime. In this same age, people are flying to Africa to teach us how to wash our hands and how to remove jiggers from our toes. Good grief!It was not always this way. Once, long ago, Africa ruled the world. The story is rarely told of African academies and citystates, centuries before the birth of Christ. History students have read, however, of the great civilisation that was Carthage, in modern day Tunisia. Carthage was brought to its knees in 146 BC and the citizens sold into slavery, following defeat in the last of four wars that have gone down in history as the Punic Wars (264 – 146 BC). But this was not until after the great Hannibal of Carthage had led his armies to Rome, riding not on horseback but on elephants. In that age, when conquest was glorified, Africans occupied Rome for 15 years, on account of superior military and organisational abilities.This is to say nothing of the glory that was Egypt, thousands of years BC. Senegalese scholar, Chiek Anta Diop, has demonstrated in a volume titled African Origins of Civilization: Fact or myth that ancient Egyptians were black Africans? These are the people who built pyramids with mathematical precision that baffles the world to this day. Then there were the African citystates that straddled the Nile valley, such as Thebes and Memphis. Indeed when we read the Theban narratives that engaged such classical minds as Themistocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, do we not read of the dead African civilisations of yore? And could there be possibility that these great philosophers were in fact African?We might never get to know the answers to some of these troublesome questions. The great African library of ancient Alexandria would have provided the answers. But Julius Caesar of Rome burnt it in 48 BC. In its day, this was the greatest and most significant repository of knowledge in the ancient world. Western historians, such as the famous Plutarch, have told us that the burning was accidental. But there has been deliberate distortion of African history over the centuries. Even canonical western scholars, like Hegel, have stated that Africa has always been ‘the dark continent.’ This makes us doubt Plutarch on the library. But more significant than all this is that Africa can wake up again. We need not be the continent that is best known for jiggers and jigger awards. An African Renaissance is possible, but if only African people will hold the leadership to account.okwaromuluka@yahoo.comThe writer is a publishing editor and media consultant

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