Jacob Zuma Should Mind His Business of Governance

South Africa's President Jacob Zuma stirred up quite a billow of national uproar recently, when he was quoted by the South African Times newspaper as having suggested that much of the country's current socioeconomic problems were engendered by the advent and propagation of European-styled Christianity (See “South Africa's Zuma Draws Flak for Christianity Comments” Modernghana.com 12/21/11).

Among the problems highlighted by the African National Congress (ANC) stalwart were the establishment of orphanages and retirement and nursing homes for the frail and elderly. In reality, though, it would have been far more accurate for Mr. Zuma to have pointed to the invasion and colonization of his country by the West as the one overriding factor that upended the old African ways of doing things.

Even so, it may be more properly in synch with the record books, as it were, for Mr. Zuma to have observed that Western-led industrialization of the southern tip of the primeval continent caused a sharp division of labor and professional specialization which brought about the clinical institutionalization of hitherto organic institutional practices. But, of course, adopting such a conservative perspective only naively idealizes cultural practices that were far, far from the sort of polemic self-glorification that constitutes the “essentialist” essence of the widely and wisely discredited Afrocentric/relativist ideological agenda.

In other words while, indeed, theoretically and philosophically speaking, there was no such a thing as the orphaned child, as long as known relatives of the orphaned communally abounded; nonetheless, the reality on the proverbial ground pointed to the almost invariable abject neglect of orphaned children by adult relatives who, themselves, often had teeming members of their own immediate families to mind. And this grim reality is poignantly explained by that old song by Ghana's Ramblers' International Dance Band which observed that whenever the patriarch and main breadwinner of a family died, the latter's relatives were often heard consoling the bereaved children with the following platitudinous canard: “When one father dies, another father readily replaces the deceased one.”

The Jerry Hansen-led group goes on to say that the foregoing words are only uttered to pacify the departing soul, so as to ease him fast and quietly on his way to the land and world down under. For no sooner has the deceased been buried than his relatives ravenously and triumphantly seize the opportunity to remind the dead man's children of the fact of their being absolutely on their own henceforth. The most painful irony of ironies here is that such flat and abrupt telling off occurs amidst the ravenous divvying up of the property and personal belongings of the deceased by extended family members.

What I am essentially driving at here, of course, is the fact that temporal distance can often mislead even the most astute among us to naively presume the old ways of doing things to have, somehow, been perfect in nature and practice. In reality, however, no human-fashioned cultural establishment is governed by a static principle, for we are constantly evolving, both biologically and psychologically, for any sober person to feel safe, comfortable and complacent about frozen and ossified cultures in the name of authenticity.

And I, for one, would be utterly flabbergasted if any one of us wakes up one of these days to learn that, indeed, the key operatives of the African National Congress elected Mr. Zuma president of their great, democratic republic in order for the controversial ANC leader to nostalgically brood over the old, traditional African ways of doing things, rather than wisely moving a multiethnic, multicultural and multiracial South Africa towards the cutting-edge of science and technology in our twenty-first century global-village community.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Selected Political Writings” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].