My Beauty Best Teacher

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong discusses the Internalist way of thinking with George Ayittey:

Q. How did the “Internalist School” came about?
Ayittey: It evolved rather slowly in the 1970s. When Africa gained its independence in the 1960s, the euphoria that gripped the continent was infectious. “Free at last!” was the chant that resonated across Africa. African nationalist leaders who won independence for their respective countries were hailed as heroes and deified. Currencies bore their portraits. Statues and monuments were built and named after them. It was sacrilegious to criticize them. They outlawed opposition parties, declared their countries to be one-party states and themselves “presidents for life.” Their intolerance of dissent, lack of democratic freedom and creeping despotism sowed the seeds of internalist revolt.
Very soon in the late 1960s, the euphoria over independence and the honeymoon wore off. It became increasingly clear that Africa had traded one set of masters (white colonialists) for another (black neo-colonialists.) The oppression and exploitation of the African continued unabated. Soldiers stepped in a spate of coups in the 1970s but the soldiers were themselves another batch of “crocodile liberators,” far worse than the despots they replaced. Africa’s post colonial story is one truculent tale of one betrayal after another. This has little to do with colonialism but leadership failure.

The need for both Process and Content in education.
The Politics of Aid and Begging in Zimbabwe
The Senegal story begins to sour. The question is was it ever built on strong foundations?
Leo Igwe calls for a Renewal of the Thinking Culture and a conference is announced on the subject.
Untangling a complex-Kofi Akosah-Sarpong

Chido Makunike dicusses Asia's tainted attitudes towards Africa.-Cheetah Index
Which Way Nigeria puts the spotlight on Judicial corruption.
The Curse of Oil contd-SMH
Abdul-Nasser Alidu takes another look at privatization
Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes about promoting the African Way-Patriotic Vanguard
Nigerian Muse argues against fuel subsidies.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes:

In a world that is increasingly becoming rational - with its technological feats and advancing sciences and booming intelligences and transnationalities and increasing hybridization of all kinds of human endeavours – excessive use of the word “God” not only blurs reasoning, paradoxically, God’s ultimate gift to humankind, but also complicate the situation of majority of Ghanaians who are praying daily, as the highly filled churches and mosques show, to escape painful poverty, some caused by the very politicians who appear not to understand their situations. In this sense, the excessive use of the word “God,” in the face of poverty (most Ghanaians live on $2.00 a day) and diseases and ignorance and backwardness, is seen as a “primitive, frightening and atavistic.”

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes::

The heavy criticism of the African elite in relation to Africa’s progress is that they are the frontline directors of progress and, as intellectuals, are the main players of development ideas for progress. They should be questioned about Africa’s development troubles. Whether they are playing with ideas or directing development, the elites should be informed by African values first. Because of their education system or their own inability to think within their values first, especially in policy-making, African elites have projected “debilitating intellectual incoherence” in tackling the continent’s development. They are skewed, more or less, towards talking Western values or thinking of Western values when tackling Africa’s progress.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong reports on Courage Quashigah's campaign for a return to traditional foods:
He argues for,

Balanced nutrition by consuming healthy traditional Ghanaian food, as a bulwark against “preventing ill health,” is as vital as curative measures in the face of severe inadequate health infrastructure. Such observation comes in the face of similar admonitions in Japan, a country admired by Ghanaians for their ability to mix their traditional values with the dominant Western neo-liberal ones in their development process...The lessons here are that Ghanaian indigenous foods, with its heavy emphasis on green vegetables, like the famed healthy Arab/Mediterranean foods, are among some of the healthiest in the world.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes:

Africa has seen all kinds of development paradigms that have never fully factored in her rich values and experiences, unlike places like Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia. Why should Africa be made to go through all these non-African-created development paradigms? Because the Western world thought that Africans are not developed, or more appropriately, not "civilized," and that they could replicate their values and experiences in Africa in their self-imposed "civilizing mission." They did this without factoring in Africa's values and experiences because they wanted to play God by re-creating Africans in their development image...Still, in terms of Africa's development progress, almost all the foreign development paradigms are not bad. The problems have been how to mix Africa's environment with these development paradigms so as to facilitate a better sustainable development, as advocates of the modernization theory say. This inability of African elites to creatively mix their values and experiences with their colonial legacies and the enabling aspects of the global development values, have not only seen Western governments continue largely with the modernization theory but also international development agencies' programs that come in the form of foreign development aid.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes about the bane of 'miracles' in Sub-Saharan Africa."...In a continent where poverty is massive, resulting in weak sanitation/medical systems and a culture some of which aspects are troublingly mired in superstition, gullibility, and disturbing ignorance, the deep hope for miracles to cure diseases and other distresses is high, bordering on the tacky or fanatical. From the Gambia to South Africa, Africans believe in miracles are legendary. In West Africa, where spiritual churches are most prominent compared to other parts of Africa, people attend churches 24 hours a day with the hope of visions and miracles. Aside from the spiritual churches and the old, tied orthodox churches, juju and marabou mediums and witchdoctors abound, attracting miracle and vision seekers helpless in the face insurmountable distress..."

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes:
Prof. Ali Mazrui’s address at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Dakar, Senegal-based CODESRIA on the theme “Intellectuals, Nationalism and the Pan-African Ideal” reveals the growing talks, African-wide, about the implications of the African culture and the continent’s development process. The central theme of Mazrui, currently Chancellor of Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, address is twofold. Why African intellectuals are mediocre and why this informs their inability to appropriate Pan-Africanism ideals into Africa’s development process. I would prefer why African elites have not being able to appropriate African cultural values into Africa’s development process as other elites in other parts of the world have done in their development process.

Using the East African region as a continental reference, Mazrui, known globally as one of Africa’s leading thinkers, reveals how undemocratic political climates undermined Africa’s intellectual growth, and how, by extension, this impacted on the continent’s development process. Unlike other ex-colonies, such as Japan, of which Mazrui used greatly as an example to show how African elites failed to match their Western education with their African values in both their intellectual development and the continent’s progress, the trouble with African elites and the continent’s development process is that, the elites play with ideas are not informed by Africa’s innate, indigenous values or ideas by rather the Western ideas that they have had in formal schools.

Mazrui himself shows this contradicting and confusing state of the African elites in this statement: “Uganda had for Head of Government a person who had changed his name because of admiration of the author of the great English poem, Paradise Lost. Obote became Milton Obote out of admiration of John Milton.” While in the spirit of universal intellectuality Obote could admire Milton, his admiration for a non-African poet and the fact that he is a Head of State, may have let Ugandan and African youth to admire more non-African elites than indigenous Ugandan and African elites. The central issue here is role model, values, and inspiration in the development process. In this sense, Obote did not deeply help the growth of African values and her progress. If Obote had done so, and by implications of Mazrui’s own account of the mediocrity of African intellectuals, and greatly touted a non-African value not because he was educated in Western paradigms but, like most African elites, because either he did not understand African values deeply enough or was mesmerized by Western values or did not respect African values or was confused about African values in relations to the continent’s progress.

Still, Mazrui’s argument that “The capacity to be curious and fascinated by ideas has to start early in the educational process. The spirit of intellectualism has to be nourished from primary school onwards, but it can die at the university level if mediocrity prevails,” reveals that the problem of Africa’s intellectual growth is not only at the university level but also at the primary school level; where the values, images and examples which are heavily European-centred are formed. So, if the African primary education system is heavily Western structured, it flows and grows to the high school level, and then later to the university level; thus sowing a culture of mediocrity, in terms of African values not predominantly dictating the intellectual life of the African child early enough. It is in this sense, that Ghana’s Dr. Y.K. Amoako, the former UN Economic Commission for Africa executive secretary, has observed that Africa is the only region in the world where foreign development paradigms dominate her development process. Not only does this indicate that Africa’s development process is not “culturally close” to Africans, but also a revelation that African elites are mediocre in both their intellectualizing and their direction of the continent’s progress.

This has made the African elite mediocre in their own innate environment and in their development process struggles. The mediocrity has come about because Africa’s elites do not think deeply from within Africa’s values first and the enabling aspects of their colonial legacies second in the continent’s development process. Mazrui himself testify of the Japanese elites doing so in their country’s development process. “In this connection it is worth bearing in mind important differences between the westernization of Africa and the modernization of Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Japan’s original modernization involved considerable selectivity on the part of the Japanese themselves (“Western Technique, Japanese Spirit”). The whole purpose of selective Japanese westernization was to protect Japan against the West, rather than merely to submit to western cultural attractions. The emphasis in Japan was therefore on the technical and technological techniques of the West, rather than on literary and verbal culture. The Japanese slogan of “western technique, Japanese spirit” at the time captured this ambition to borrow technology from the West while deliberately protecting a substantial part of Japanese culture. In a sense, Japan’s technological westernization was designed to reduce the danger of other forms of cultural dependency.”

This process should starts from childhood to adulthood based on a curriculum skillfully cast in African values first and any other borrowed ones second; more especially, in preparing African elites’ minds at an earlier stage: from primary and high schools levels. It is in this process that African elites, from their early formation to their university crystallization, will be “culturally close” to the African society, will be culturally close to the African’s progress in the continent’s development journey. By not being culturally close to the African society, African elites could not undertake the Japanese cultural selectivity in relations to their colonial legacies and the enabling aspects of the global culture, and, have, therefore, become both heavily technologically and culturally dependent upon the Western world despite their superb innate culture having huge technological and cultural values for progress. Writes Mazrui, “The nature of westernization in Africa has been very different. Far from emphasizing western productive technology and reducing western life-styles and verbal culture, Africa has reversed the Japanese order of emphasis. Among the factors which have facilitated this reversal has been the role of the African university as a vehicle of Western influence on African culture.”

The challenge for African elites today is how to overturn the contradiction they have caused in Africa’s progress by thinking first from within African values first, by matching African values with the enabling aspects of their colonial legacies and the global values, and by intellectually linking this “to the wider world of scholarship and science.”

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes that"...African culture should be hugely factored in in the continent's development process in order to make the continent's development holistic and closer to Africans because of the long-running damages and distortions done by colonialism...Africa's development process should move around the continent's innate cultural values and its mixture both with her colonial legacies and the enabling asparts of the global culture..."

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong comments on the bane of superstition and irrationality and efforts being made to mitigate their effects."...West Africans need a new mindset and new thinking informed by their experiences, culture and history. West Africans live in new challenges and new dangers, some of which emanate from within their culture, unknown to them has led them lead a dim life...In a move reminiscent of the European Enlightenment era, which used reason to demolish entrenched deadly superstitions, Ghanaian scientists are currently working on strategies that would help explain things rationally, based on facts and given reasons, and are also mapping out strategies for science acculturation in order to minimize the degree of irrationality in the Ghanaian society...The challenges facing the nation today is to transform the minds, attitudes and behaviours in our society to appreciate scientific approach to doing things..."
Via GhanaWeb

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong indicts journalists for their complicitness in perpetuating the memes of superstition, a phenomenon all too common across Africa. "...All intellectual laziness aside, what worries me, and I have a lot of worries as a Ghanaian/African development journalist, is a lack of a questioning, critical response to such supernatual interpretation of events that affects practically all that matters in Ghana/Africa...While most Ghanaians accept journalistic inquiry into various wrong doings or oversights or the implications of petroluem prices on the average Ghanaian, journalists have failed in asking about the implications of the rain of prophetic and other spiritual activities in Ghana's development process... By throwing journalistic inquiry on prophetic, juju-marabou mediums, religion and other spiritual activities that are inhibiting the Ghanaian development process, Ghanaian journalists will help open up the dark recesses of the paranoids and conspiracy theorists who feed on Ghanaians deep-seated beliefs in the superstitions such as witchcraft and prophetic revelations that block people from finding rational, reasonable solutions to their problems..."
Via GhanaWeb

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong responds to Y. Fredua-Kwateng's question "Are you an internalist or externalist? "...there is no internalist or externalist in the Ghana/African development process debate, there is the confused African elite not trying to grasp all the factors that have contributed to Africa's so-called "agonies," including the long-running exclusion of deeper implications of the African culture in both local and international development planning or thinking in Africa's development process.The Internalists came about because for uncritically long time African elites, for their own benefits against the peoples upkeep, which demonstrated their weaknesses, had blamed the continent's problems on external factors alone without looking at the internal factors that have also contributed to the continent's problems. "Imperialism, Down with Imperialism," said the largely the Externalists' slogans of the 1960s against today's Internalists rantings such as the Dr. George Ayittey-minted "African Solutions for African Problems," which opened up the African development process debate, both locally and internationally, by incorporating the Interenalists' stance. The Internalists are not saying Ghanaians/Africans should separate the internal factors such as predatory elites that have slowed down Africa's progress from the external forces such as the impact of colonialism; what they are saying is that in discussing Africa's problems we have to take note of the internal factors too so as to have fuller understanding of the continent's problems, especially in making policies. This is what South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki is saying in his "African Renaissance" project, and other thinkers such as Dr. George Ayittey, of American University in Washington D.C., and myself are advocatng...",GhanaWeb.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes about efforts to engage African traditional rulers in the continent's development process. The Asantehene "...is fast projecting the thinking of Africa's development process, an act whereby traditional values and the colonial legacies are balanced out in Africa's development process. The the development inbalances have occured since independence from the European colonialists who, in their infinite ignorance of Africa's values, imposed their development paradigms on Africa as one of their several ways of civilising the "primitive" African.Over the years, such erroneous development thinking has created not only distortions, damages, confusion and unwarrented crises but also wrong notions, especially among the so-called African elites who are educated in Eurocentric values, that Africa's values in her development process are inferior to the European ones. Confused for long, and either unable to extricate themselves from the imposed European development values so as to let African values drive their development practices or intellectually weak in mixing their African values with the European ones, as other ex-colonies such as South Korea, Singapore, Japan or Brazil has done in their develoment process...",GhanaWeb.