Technology, brick-and-mortar progress should never 'trump' human dignity

An array of book titles under a variety of category headings on bookshelves above a wooden chair in the corner of a San Francisco second-hand bookstore. [iStockphoto]

One of the myths sold to people, especially in the so-called Third World (who, really, did these classifications?) is that all they need is access to world-class, cutting-edge technology, swanky eight-lane highways, glass-walled skyscrapers gleaming in the African sun and they will be hunky-dory. This fixation with physical things as the primary measure of progress has always struck me as deeply misleading.

It reminds me of a myth I overheard as a small boy growing up in Embu. Village women whose children had secured white-collar jobs in Nairobi would make month-long plans to travel to the city to visit their children’s families.

They announced the impending trips to anyone who cared to listen and, on the material day, they would board a bus called Riakanau, a contraption whose wheels appeared to face diagonally away from where the ageing body pointed. It famously took a whole day to cover the mere 150 kilometres to Nairobi.

The women travelled to the big city of tall buildings and progress, armed with farm produce and live chickens, and returned with enormous loaves of bread, bags of used clothes and other hand-me-downs.

A curious thing was that the old men rarely accompanied their wives on these trips, and just as rarely made trips of their own to visit their children. Many explanations were offered. One was that, traditionally, it bordered on taboo for a man to sleep in a house where his own child and their spouse slept.

Another was that despite the affluence city dwellers displayed whenever they came visiting, they often squeezed themselves into very small houses, resorting to creative improvisations when night fell. This, understandably, would have been discomfiting for an old man.

But it is one answer, attributed to one old villager, that stayed with me. Asked whether he would like to travel to Nairobi, he quipped that he was violently opposed to the idea of relieving himself in the same house where he slept. He then went on, with an air of sagacity, to predict that disposing of waste inside the house would sooner or later spawn another crisis: how to transport waste from so many households to the bush. His words now sound prophetic, given the sewerage and drainage crises choking our towns and cities.

What lingered with me, however, was the pride and sense of dignity with which he extolled the virtue of disposing of waste outside the living house. Without saying it outright, the old man seemed to suggest that mortar-and-concrete progress was all very well, but that the bottom line of human life lay in being able to live in dignity, and to have one’s basic rights and values respected and upheld.

Those words, especially on the supremacy of human dignity, came flooding back to me years later when I began reading African-American literature. True, I had encountered the horrors of slavery in history books. I had read about the inhumane conditions of the Middle Passage, the chains, the whips, the forced labour on cotton and maize plantations in the Americas. But it is African-American fiction that brings that world alive in ways no historical account ever quite can.

Reading The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a semi-autobiographical work by one of the foremost abolitionist thinkers, one feels the full weight of dehumanisation. You feel the pain of a child living among other children but denied schooling, play and innocence solely on account of skin colour. That sense of systematic indignity is further amplified in works such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which captures Black womanhood, love, voice and agency against crushing social odds, and Toni Morrison’s The Color Purple, a searing exploration of race, gender, trauma and survival.

It also occurred to me that slavery was not a simple us-versus-them affair. While the entire enterprise was structured around race and skin colour, corrupt fellow Africans sold their own into bondage, a point powerfully dramatised by David Mulwa in Flee Mama Flee and We Come in Peace. These works remind us that indignity often has local collaborators.

Another remarkable feature of African-American writing—from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s to the present world of Donald Trump’s country —is that not all writers approach this dark history from a position of unrelieved despair. Lorraine Hansberry, in A Raisin in the Sun, likens African-American history to a raisin that grows sweeter with time. This insistence on hope also animates the poetry of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou, perhaps most memorably in Angelou’s defiant poem, “Still I Rise”.

Anyone who has read this body of work knows that beneath the glamorous image of Western metropolises painted by global media lies a story of exclusion and indignity that the world would do well to learn from.

Modern African literature continues this interrogation of the so-called land of freedom and opportunity, especially in relation to immigrants. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores this terrain in Americanah and in her short story “The Thing Around Your Neck”. But it is Ike Oguine’s slim yet devastating novella, A Squatter’s Tale, that most effectively pulls back the mask on the ironies behind the grand stories told by summer bunnies when they return home for Christmas.

These works collectively show that despite decades of progress and materially improved living conditions, that world of freedom is often not free enough to grant everyone the dignity they deserve.

African writers from the late 1950s through the 1970s also captured a parallel tragedy closer to home. They showed how, in the rush to match European modernity, many Africans trampled on the values that had sustained their societies for generations.

The sharpest satire of these mimic men and women appears in Sembène Ousmane’s Houseboy. In the novel, a young man called Toundi insults his own father and goes to live with a white priest. He moves from one European household to another, where he is routinely abused and never quite regarded as human. The novel parodies the French policy of assimilation, which sought to fashion Africans into Frenchmen without ever granting them full human dignity.

Ironically, it is in francophone Africa and French Caribbean that the négritude movement emerged. Led by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, David Diop, and Léon-Gontran Damas, the movement rejected assimilation and instead celebrated African identity, history and aesthetics in verse and prose. Yet even this romanticisation of Africa provoked a sharp rebuke from Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who famously quipped: “A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude, it pounces.”

As Africa benchmarks itself against other parts of the world, we must heed the lessons of this long and painful history. Yes, we must shake off pessimism and work collectively to make the continent great. But we must not stop at technology and brick-and-mortar development. These things matter, but they are not enough.

The greatness Africa has been gasping for over the past few centuries is not merely infrastructural. Rather, it is mainly moral and ethical. It is the greatness of humanity and dignity. If we can build world-class cities while ensuring that people live in dignity, that their rights are protected and that their humanity is affirmed, then we will have lived right.

Otherwise, we risk creating precisely the world that the old man from my village warned about;  where we make so much progress that we no longer need to squat in the bush, only to discover that we have no way of transporting the effluent of human indignity from the house to the bush.