27/09/2024
WHY DON'T WE JOIN BOKO HARAM?
The late Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, once said that the task of any society with complexes is to look back and find out where it went wrong, "where the rain began to beat us". We have many complexes in the world--like the inferiority and superiority ones, leading to Na**sm, trumpism, racism and tribalism. In Africa, we particularly have the colonial disease and poverty, leading to megalomania, the cult for anything foreign, obscene theft and accumulation of material clutter and money, which some people even think may be used to secure accommodation in heaven. The task of checking where the rain began to beat us is a simple and yet such a difficult task of reading and re-reading our experiences, our cultures, our history, etc. This is what the current ethos is against, what with high-profile utterances indicating that education doesn't matter. Reason: the big-moneyed people, like Gates, Zuckerberg, and Jobs “didn’t go to college”--they even say “they are not educated”. See! When you don't read, you depend on rumours, lies and propaganda for information. You will rival Dr. Goebbels in believing that through some chemistry of repetition, you can turn a lie into truth. To set the records straight, these people are highly educated and went to universities, and THEY READ: both Gates and Zuckerberg went to Harvard, and Jobs attended Reed College. Some of these people may have stopped formal schooling (the ignorant use the phrase "dropped out"), but they did so because they had learned what they wanted and found their purposes. You need an educated mind even to find a purpose and redirect the course of your learning. So if in your idle mood, you wished your idol--money—grew like leaves on the tree of mental poverty, you're in for a rude shock. The richest people and nations have this in common: they are educated. And by education, I don't mean the mad rush for papers and titles that we see around, but meaningful acquisition and use of knowledge and imagination to connect our rich past to our rich future. It is actually a matter of reading and re-reading. I find it a very mean joke to hear that if you want to hide anything from an African, you should put it in a book. For your information, 2,300 years ago the first university existed in Africa and was the alma mater of the fathers of Western civilisation, like Archimedes. It is actually the loose-mouthed, thieving and idle barbarians that made us lose our civilization. So if we hate it so much, if we think education is so useless, why don't we join Boko Haram--and go back to Stone Age?
