Friday, February 15, 2013
Intelligence intelligence everywhere but who can stop to think?
A young man here in Ghana is expanding his
knowledge of the world by asking questions. He came from a village in the north
and much of what he believes is so indelible it is difficult to shift. He
believes that female circumcision keeps women from being promiscuous “and many
women ask for it’. When I ask him whether it should be the case that any man
who has a woman circumcised should also be circumcised, he doubles up in
laughter. What kind of world is that? He believes that it is impossible to not
believe in God and finds my extreme agnosticism part of a stand-up comic
routine. He believes that the sun goes round the earth and, on occasion, the
moon swallows the sun. He thinks that the moon is small. The idea of a moon
landing has never made itself part of his consciousness. He believes he cannot
bring me bad news and so won’t tell me when things might be going wrong in the
business. He lies, in western terms, when he says he is not smoking to an older
woman who is working alongside him and finds the odour reprehensible. Three
times. Biblically. Later I ask him why and he says it is wrong to inform his
‘mother’ of such things. He was brought up to treat all older women as his
mother and all older men as his father. He has been taught by the Company to
use the internet, Photoshop and Word though he has only been speaking and
writing in English for five years. He is the best photographer we have ever encountered.
He has an eye for how to bring out the essential nature of textiles. At the
same time he has no sense of how the internet works and connects people or that
there are satellites in the sky or that people have unique postal addresses.
Being from a village and uneducated, his existence
was different before he came to Accra seeking a better life. It was opportunistic.
A matter of survival. Very little was planned. It was a matter of reacting to
what was thrown at you. Only the imperatives of sowing and reaping and
husbandry necessitated planning. So, with his very clever mind, he does work of
a very high standard – but he cannot plan it yet. His approach to problem
solving is as opportunistic as when he was in his village. Scattergun. Trial
and error. No methodical steps. He is learning chess to try to lay down a sense
of strategy in his mental processing, the moves that might make the future
better for him - and the Company.
Sometimes he is so certain that he is right
that he cannot hear you ask him to do something at odds with his world view. He
is the product of a lack of educational provision and an evangelical Christianity
that does not encourage critical thinking. Jesus has supplanted the old Gods
and provides an answer to everything. Just pray.
We have thirty plus ‘blue collar’ workers.
We pay them three times the national basic wage for the work they do. We bring
in free literacy and numeracy and IT. We train them. They work according to
western notions of a seven hour day and a five day week. They are all bright
and intriguing individuals making their way in a new culture, far removed from
their upbringing. The demands are often alien to them. They cannot see what is
going on, what is behind what they are being asked to do. The peoples from
developed countries are born into something that they are not.
To run a company along western lines in Ghana requires a very
sophisticated sense of cultural dissonance and a realisation that sheer
intelligence, which is everywhere here, is compromised by early conditioning in
worlds so far removed from what a foreigner might assume to be the case. The
logics that underpin the way that people from developed countries behave are
not the logics of the traditions of village and tribal life. Ghana’s GNP is
among the highest in the world. What will it spend its oil money on? Health and
education? Hardly. There is little
middle class desire to change the lives of the poor. Ghana needs its own Marx.
A velvet educational revolution.
It is saddening in the extreme.
The Magus travels among a hundred cultures
and discovers cultural dissonance for himself! www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Labels: #©hana. Cultural dissonance. Deprivation and opportunity.
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