As I come to the concluding piece in the series that I began two weeks ago in this column, I think it is only fit and proper that I make a confession concerning the subject whose conversation with me provided the impetus for my reflections in the series. This is of course none other than Monday Electrician. What is the “confession” that I need to make about this compatriot? Well, simply this: if the conversation had occurred in the other place apart from Ibadan, Nigeria, in which I also live, it would have been totally different. This other place is Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Though I have had workmen come to make installations or repairs in my apartment in this location, I have never needed the services of an electrician. For that reason, for our “Monday Electrician” I would have to substitute any of the workmen I have encountered in Cambridge, Mass.
In doing this, I must say that I cannot imagine any of these American workmen telling me that a stricken sibling is the victim of evil, malefic relatives or neighbors that operate through witchcraft, through “spiritual attacks”. Similarly, I cannot think that my imagined or putative interlocutor in Cambridge, Mass, would have been so incredulous as to be rendered completely speechless if I expressed the observation to him or her that we are both on a planet that is constantly moving, constantly rotating on its invisible axis – as Monday Electrician was when I made that remark to him. No, Monday Electrician was encountered in Ibadan, Nigeria and there is no way in the world that I could have encountered a technician like him in America. And that’s my “confession”.
Are things so cut and dry in the difference between what ordinary workmen and folks in Ibadan, Nigeria know, believe and think about the world, the universe in which we live compared with what obtains in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Dear compatriots, if you expected the answer to this question to be a resounding yes, I hate to disappoint you because this is not the case at all, at least if we stick to the subject of this series and the book that I am thinking of writing, this being the relationship between rational and testable knowledges and beliefs that most people have in comparison with those that cannot be tested or proved – or disproved for that matter. In other words, what I am saying here is this: in matters of rational and non-rational knowledges, or of testable and untestable ideas and beliefs, the differences between the individuals, peoples and cultures of our world are not so fundamental, so unbridgeable that what we have is a divided humanity. Indeed, this observation is so crucial to my reflections in this series that I would go so far as caution that nothing could be more unhelpful in these matters than to fall into the trap of dividing our world and its peoples into those that live and die on the altar of rationality and testable knowledges and those that cling tenaciously to the age-old, non-rational, non-tested (and non-testable) knowledges and beliefs of their cultures. Things are far more complicated than that! To illustrate this observation, I would like to briefly discuss a “Lagosian” joke that I initially heard from a denizen of that city after which I will narrate a version of the joke that I have sometimes told as a revisionary form of the original. First then, the original version of the joke before I give my revisionary version of it.
To an invitation from an Inspector of secondary schools from the State Ministry of Education to name the first flying object or thing that came to their minds, the following collective responses from pupils were recorded at each named location: Victoria Island: airplanes! Surulere: mosquitoes! Agege: witches!. In each area that represents a known demographic constellation of the city’s population, the expected or not so surprising though funny answer was given. Thus, the class or status bias of the joke is unmistakable and is heavily weighted against Agege and the response of witches as the first object that came to mind with regard to flying things. It was this fact that prompted me to revise the joke so as to either reduce or neutralize the bias.
On the basis of this decision, I came up with the following expanded and revised responses: Victoria Island: airplanes, drones and UFO’s (unidentified flying objects). Surulere: mosquitoes, birds and bees. Agege: witches, demons and angels. For an explanation, here’s the rationale for my revisions: For the Victoria Island children of the elite, drones and UFO’s show, I hope, that when they think of flying things they are as much influenced by fanciful ideas as their counterparts in Surulere and Agege. Similarly, the inclusion of birds and bees for the children of the denizens of Surulere implies that they can and do think of pleasant objects apart from mosquitoes (and flies) if they are invited to think of flying things. Finally, for Agege, the inclusion of demons and angels in my revised version of the Lagosian joke places the kids of that mini city of working class and underclass folks squarely in the mainstream of contemporary Nigerian evangelical Christianity that cuts across all classes, all status groups. For indeed, with the exception of atheists and secular humanists, who in our country today isn’t thinking of demons and their archenemies, angels? Isn’t the epic war against Satan and his hordes the grand theme of countless sermons, hymns and tracts?
My revisionary version of this Lagosian joke is not of course intended to imply that there are no differences at all between pupils at elite neighborhoods and schools and those in poor and greatly disadvantaged areas. Rather, my point is that these differences are not written in stone, they are not unalterable. In other words, what I am arguing is that when it comes to what individuals and entire peoples know and believe, the line between the rational and the non-rational is not like the line separating day from night, the high heavens from the earth down below.
This is precisely the same point that I am making in the comparisons I made earlier in this discussion between Ibadan, Nigeria and Cambridge, Mass. In Cambridge in particular and America in general, you may not find workmen or technicians like Monday Electrician who will swear that witches and witchcraft are active parts of their reality, their world, but you can and will find people who still believe that the story of creation as told in the Book of Genesis is a literal fact and the world was created in only six days. You will find climate change deniers who vigorously disparage solid scientific evidence for climate change. You will find people who not only think that there are aliens from another planet living secretly among us, but swear that they or people they know have seen UFO’s. To this day, and against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Americans who still think that Barack Obama was not born in America and is a Moslem, not a Christian. To this day and against overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, there are thousands upon thousands of Americans and Western peoples who still believe that Africans in particular and Black people in general belong to a different or subspecies of humankind than themselves and their kind, their “race”.
Against the backdrop of these observations and declarations, I come to perhaps the three central ideas and themes of what I have been arguing in this series and what I have in mind with regard to the contents of the book that I plan to write sometime in my post-retirement future, inshallah. What are these ideas?
First, is the fact that frankly speaking, knowledges and beliefs that are rational, testable and tested interest me considerably far more than non-rational, untested and untestable ones, though I am not in principle and in habit uninterested in non-rational ideas and beliefs, especially those pertaining to religious mysticism. Secondly, I believe that the marvels, indeed the achievements of rational, tested knowledges and beliefs are infinitely more interesting and more beneficial to humanity than the heritage of non-rational knowledges and beliefs. Thirdly and lastly and coming to our own country and continent, there has been a longstanding practice of under-appreciating the heritage of rational knowledges and beliefs that come both from our own traditions and from other regions of the world.
Unfortunately, I cannot in the present context write about each of these three ideas. This being the case, I can perhaps only give assurance to the readers that in the book that I am planning to write, they will be fully and joyously elaborated. For now, what I can or should perhaps do is give a short preview, a succinct account of the third of my central ideas, this being my assertion, my claim that in our part of the world we have to contend with a long history of disregard and/or under-appreciation of the vitality, the achievements, the poetry even of rational, testable and tested knowledges and beliefs. What do I have in mind in making this declaration as a cornerstone of both my reflections in this series and the book that I plan to write?
To answer this question and for the last time in this series, let us once again invoke the figure of our enigmatic interlocutor, Monday Electrician. At this late stage in this series, let me now reveal to the readers that even though my conversation with him took place entirely in Yoruba sprinkled with, now and then, English words or terms from scientific and technological modernity, Monday Electrician was of the unspoken but fiercely held opinion that much if not all of what I was arguing were the ideas of the white man. I mean, to him the idea that we were all on a planet that was always and forever moving was the white man’s idea!
Even when I spoke specifically of electricity as a phenomenon, Monday Electrician was stolidly determined to hold on to the belief that that topic too could be of interest only to an African, a Nigerian who was the dupe, the intellectual slave of “white” knowledges and beliefs. When I told him of the wonder of once watching on a television monitor images of all that was going on in my own stomach through the technology of ultrasound resonant imaging made possible by electromagnetic waves of the frequency of x-rays, Monday Electrician saw, indeed could only see a man who was the mental captive of the Western world and its knowledge bases and belief systems. And yet, this is a technology that is being used, developed and mastered in many parts of our world, many of them outside the West. How can I turn this around, how can I make Monday Electrician a subject, not the object of a technological and scientific modernity that belongs to all of humankind? That is the task I face in the book I hope to write someday soon, inshallah.
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
