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Indeed, time to think without the box

The eminent and eloquent Kenyan motivational speaker and mindset challenger and changer, Professor Patrice Loch Otieno Lumumba, popularly and fondly known as PLO Lumumba or Prof. Lumumba once challenged his audience in Windhoek, Namibia, African leaders, and Africa citizens in general, to stop thinking within and outside the box.

Instead, he asked his audience and all Africans to throw away the box and start plain thinking and self-introspection because we don’t know whose box we think within or are urged to think out of.

Thinking within or outside the box forces people to think within the same and around the same framework.   Because we Africans think within the box or around the box, we are not creative enough and lack vision even when we see others adjusting.

To illustrate his point, Lumumba gave the example of the African Union whose lofty ambitions end at the point of making resolutions and declarations. A united Africa, he argued, should have had its own currency, the Afro, by now. Yet, all 54 countries that make up Africa have each their own currency; none of which qualifies as hard currency.

Who cursed us? He asked rhetorically.

Some, especially umunthuists, have blamed our problems or curses on our inherited education system that emphasizes Eurocentric values at the expense of the African values. 

The school, like religious proselytisation, is a process of formatting people to think the same way. The more formatted one is the less one thinks independently.  For their deleterious effect, the French Marxist Philosopher, Louis Althusser described the education system and the religious institutions as ideological State apparatuses of control (ISA). Politics is another agent of thought formatting. An ISA.

Some experts disagree, arguing Asia was also colonised and underwent the same inherited education system but on that continent almost all countries are rising because their economists, their scientists, engineers, their architects, and their politicians are thinking away from the box. 

The Chinese, for example, have put aside soviet style communism or socialism and created their own brand, a socialism with Chinese characteristics, with a one party grassroots ‘democracy’ and a capitalist economy.  Cuba, which has not revolutionised itself beyond Leninism-Marxism, has remained economically stagnant.

Human beings have occupied the earth for thousands of years. In each corner of the earth, races have, over time, domesticated plants and animals as their food. Their taste-buds and digestive systems have developed to like what their ancestors considered food.  The food domestication process was not easy. Some plants were bitter and they were abandoned as vegetables or grains. Some animals were harsh and they were not included as livestock. Some birds were ‘stubborn and arrogant’ and they were left off as poultry.

Food historians say, here in Africa, the yam and other tubers, millet, sorghum and other grains were domesticated as main staple foods. Maize and wheat were not. Wheat was mostly consumed by Europeans and Arabs.  The same food historians tell us that maize or corn was the staple for South Americans, especially, Mexicans.

Through political and food colonialisation, food historians argue, we, Africans, abandoned almost all ancestral foods and opted for what the foreigners ate because of our dyera, kususuka, and vilizanga political thinking-in-the box.  

In the past 30 or 40 years, here in Malawi, too, even tribes that did not consider maize their staple have abandoned their ancestral staples, tubers and opted for maize.  Because maize requires a lot of water and rich soils, its production is resource intensive, agriculturalists tell us and we also experience.  When resources, water and fertilisers, are unavailable, maize production is problematic and food shortages occur. Which is not the case with grains like sorghum and millet.

Today we are begging for mercy for Ukraine and Russia to stop fighting and instead release their maize and wheat, yet we have cassava, masimbi or cocoyam, bananas, yam, and several fruits or pineapples, pawpaws, millet and sorghum, which can easily substitute maize.  All we need is to change our mindset and revert to what our ancestors ate until maize colonised our palettes.

And by the way, who cursed us so as to fail to produce enough food for ourselves such that year after year we cry for fresh maize stuffs?   Russia and Ukraine are fighting but their people are eating.  Germany spent six long years fighting the so-called Second World War but the Germans were eating.

We are not fighting any war. Yet we, people living in peace, are blaming those who are fighting for failing to feed us. Shouldn’t we be ashamed?

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