Patience running out for African leaders tormenting their people

There is always danger in mistaking endurance for consent. Do African leaders tend to confuse citizens’ patience for consent? Chinua Achebe, in Anthills of the Savannah, examines ordinary citizens’ suffering.

He reflects on the people’s endurance of the excesses of the political class. He wonders where their patience comes from. “What fountain of patience do they draw from?” Achebe asks.

In this, he reminds us of Albert Camus’ reflections on Sisyphus. This tragic hero is condemned by the gods of mischief to push a rock up the mountain, forever.

Each time he gets to the top, a goddess kicks it down again. What must go on in Sisyphus’ mind, as he walks down the hill to fetch the rock, again? Camus concludes that Sisyphus must be happy. Are poor Africans happy? If they are, is it because they enjoy their condition?

Do they love the way the political class treats them? Do they enjoy lining up for handouts from politicians? When they clap for verbal rubbish at political rallies, is it because they love what is being said? Do they agree? 

Are they happy when they sleep hungry? Or when they live in hovels with flying toilets; have no school fees; cannot access healthcare; trek for miles to look for manual labour that they might not find; read about billions stolen by the ruling class; and the lot? Is it correct to assume they must be happy and will continue to live that way?

Camus’s Sisyphus is not happy because his labour is sweet. He is happy because he has looked the gods in the eye. He has recognised the absurdity of his fate.

He has decided that his consciousness itself is a form of rebellion. If he is happy, then this happiness is philosophical, not sociological.

It is happiness born out of clarity of understanding his situation, and not out of comfort with this situation. 

This distinction is critical when speaking of Africa, or of the poor of the world generally. Their circumstances are not metaphysical like Sisyphus’. Their situation is real. Sociological.

Although they are not doing anything about it for now, they are aware that something is cooking inside them. One day, it will come to the boil. The flying toilet will turn into soaring larvae. It will fly away with everything in the vicinity. This is what African billionaire thieves in power must always remember. 

Achebe does not describe a metaphysical hero like Sisyphus. His characters are real human beings, like you and me. Our patience is being mined and abused. It is being turned into a survival mechanism for us. Achebe’s question about our patience is not, therefore, romantic. It is at once a moral and political question.

How deep can our fountain of endurance go before it becomes a quiet indictment of those who keep refilling our suffering? How long will they sell us bottom-up development stories and Singaporean myths? 

If Africans are Sisyphian, they are not so in the Albert Camus sense. They are not pushing the difficult rock of life as a defiant act of freedom. They are rather carrying it because their history has strapped it to their backs. Political power in Uganda, Guinea, Tanzania, and Kenya has enslaved them to suffering and empty promises. Is that existential rebellion, or is it a constrained survival? 

Philosophy teaches us that people who endure externally imposed hardships are not necessarily reconciled to them. They are often simply trapped. 

At first they think of private personal escape routes. They imagine they can find private solutions to public challenges. Meanwhile, they live one day at a time, as they hope that things will get better.

In literature, we have learned that poverty produces a psychology of compression.

Look at John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Look at Anthills of the Savannah Grasslands. Then look at Tess of the D’Urbervilles and On God’s Bits of Wood.

The horizon in which the suffering individual lives shrinks. Focus is on today’s meal. Today’s bus fare. Today’s school fees. Today’s medicine. 

Survival becomes a daily occupation. Critical thinking may become a luxury. However, leaders should never imagine that the people are blind.

The explanation is that resistance costs energy. They do not have that for now. The French storming of the Bastille in 1789, however, teaches us that the day is not far when, in one massive surge of sudden energy, the people will say, “Let us march!”

That is how Ferdinand Marcos, Hosni Mubarak, Sheikh Hasina, and Nicolae Ceaușescu will find themselves in the dustbin of history. 

- Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke