<incom> Do Africans Dream of Electric Sheep?

[Guido Sohne]

We live in a Third World within The World, where hard labor is for
life, struggling to eke out a better existence as do all our fellow
human beings. Where at times one wonders, what is the point in
continuing, in struggling given all the obstacles, seen or unseen,
that we encounter, seeking to find what we can of happiness, a refuge
from the realities of life. We sometimes ask ourselves, as Africans,
what the problem is, where it comes from, what we must solve in order
to secure for ourselves a new world in which there is no point in
asking "what's the point in continuing?", where it instead becomes a
straightforward matter of honest work and just rewards, not
skullduggery or thievery.

To answer that question, of what Africa's problem is, strikes at the
heart of identity. I find myself unable to answer the simple question
of who I am, instead finding resolution, not in the answer, but in the
questions consequent to the original question itself. I am not an
answer. I am an endless series of questions.

I can't call myself a Ghanaian, though I believe myself to be one.
"Ghana" is a post-colonial African state - an artificial and illogical
construct based on borders not of our own choice or making. It has
meaning in the geographical sense, and increasingly, in a de-facto
adopted alternate sense, of alienated identity becoming accepted
identity. I can't claim to belong to a particular tribe, since I speak
no tribal language. I can't tell people I am Catholic because I don't
practice and am deeply skeptical of the organized mainstream
religions. I'm not sure that I can't call myself a cyborg, since I
habitually wear clothes and spectacles, and prefer to use computing
devices when possible.

However, at the least I can be sure that I am a male human of mixed
race, culture and identity with an inclination towards being
rebelliously eccentric and contrary, almost on the verge of being an
aberration; in the astronomical sense of "apparent displacement of a
celestial object from its true position, caused by the relative motion
of the observer and the object" - I have seen my star and he is me.

Identity appears to be a series of facets to which the self attaches
its own meaning. It is the mirror in which we would wish to see
ourselves that dutifully reflects back our self ideals and dreams, our
self adulation. Or it can be the chains in which we are bound by the
conditioning we have undergone since birth, a life long shaping of the
mind and the personality. And as humans, we all know how difficult
habits can be to overcome. How people are attached to religions and
nationalities by default, not by choice, although on the surface, it
does appear to be by choice!

Societies, which sometimes identify themselves as nations, or as
regional power blocs, or even as states within a federation act as
kaleidoscopes on the already fragmented identities we have of
ourselves, and the cohesiveness of a society is the extent to which
these personal aspects of identity resonate with the others with whom
we share the society, how the will of the individual can become the
will of the nation, the will to power.

But why does this matter for Africa, this issue of identity? I think
it has to do with ideas and creativity. The expressions of the mind
are shaped by having thoughts and concepts that are synthesized
continuously into new products, fads or fashions; human thought is to
a large extent, the constant recycling and recombination of old words,
sentences and ideas, almost always leading to incremental change with
periodic breakthroughs and grand leaps forward.

You can't think of what you can't imagine - our creativity on the
individual level is limited by the range of ideas we already have and
understand, the scope of different experiences, the ability to draw on
history to glean advice from dire times gone by. For societies such as
those we have here in Africa, there is still much to be done to
propagate knowledge and education, to fill the people's minds with
dreams to fire their imaginations. Dreams of an end to hunger, for
water and energy to be affordable and for the opportunity to live on
an honest day's work. Dreams of a manifest destiny.

It is for this reason that it is disturbing to note the current trend,
in the information age, to secure and limit information, to control
its flow and to manipulate or intercept it for partisan gain, because
this trend is an attack on thought itself, where certain kinds of
thought become crime. It is very interesting to think of how some
aspects of the seemingly unique facets of the collective self appear
to be unchanged through human history. How we are as a world,
convulsed in the throes of enmity between mutually incompatible and
increasingly obsolete religious traditions going back roughly two
thousand years.

Have we really changed? Yes and no. We are immensely more advanced,
yet at the same time equally primitive in many aspects of behavior and
morality but we still move and walk to the same heart beat. Certain
kinds of societal changes are very slow, extremely slow and they shape
the very heart of contemporary human identity where we now have a
discord and clash between the need to be agile, to embrace change,
shifting to Internet time, where global human thought is vastly
augmented and communications accelerated and the opposing human need
to maintain an unwieldy but comforting status quo, hanging on to our
obsolete ideas and religions for dear life, so as not to disturb the
anchors and foundations upon which our mirrors lie.

Perhaps we are on the threshold of fundamental change, maybe even
mandated by possible coming energy and economic crises of global
environmental change, natural resource depletion and escalating human
conflict over sharing ever dwindling resources in this century. In
such an age, where the change is fundamental and not incremental, we
would need to foster the ability, the mentality to cope with, to
embrace rapid change and to be able to accelerate the rate of change
in areas that are critical to our development.

Ultimately, innovation and creativity, whether on a national or
individual level stems from the ability to incorporate environmental
change into planning or activities that would improve one's current
position, from being able to learn in realtime. Innovation also
provides the human race with the tools needed to shift the odds in
life towards a better life experience. Human traditions provide a
stable base on which each society programs and conditions its
individuals for success in life, setting the stage for more innovation
to occur.

Thus societies in which ideals and dreams are alive and achievable
will be inherently more vital in the sense that when these ideals and
dreams resonate within each individual, collectively, great works are
achieved. I believe that this is the key to national competitiveness;
where the rubber meets the road on which we each drive our personas,
in pursuit of and shaping our own identities and destinies.

I believe that Africa's problems lie within a shattered identity,
mended into a schizophrenic post-colonial state of depression. Yet we
still have our dreams, even more fiercely so, but the world is truly
real for us, the obstacles actual and not imagined. I feel that I am
watching a world gone mad, bereft of purpose and logic, consumed in a
myopic daily grind of survival to the next day that has lost sight of
these very human, very common dreams of liberty, prosperity and
security. Where in our schizophrenia, we are surrounded by bipolar
disorder, neurosis and mass confusion.

We have far more urgent problems than we seem to realize and I can't
help but wonder if collectively, the human race is setting itself up
for a murderously demagogic game of chicken against a reinforced
concrete wall. We can't seem to understand that we are all in this
together, instead preferring to fight with ourselves; these are also
manifestations of identity, but instead of resonance, we have discord
because we are operating within limited realizations of the simple
fact that the world is better shared in mutual cooperation than
divided along opposed factions.

If Africa's problem lies within fractured identity, then we can begin
to wonder about the fractured identity of the world itself, divided
between the Third World, which we are portrayed as, and The World,
where we actually have to live and share. I had a dream, said Martin
Luther King. I think I know what that dream was too, a dream that I
believe many share within this world. A dream where we can wake up to
a sane, comfortable reality, out of the illusions and the hall of
mirrors that house our current, collective, human identity - out of
the rut in which many of our kind are needlessly suffering through
unjust and unfair negligence of the common, basic needs of the human
race.