{"id":16100,"date":"2010-11-10T10:59:45","date_gmt":"2010-11-10T15:59:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sierraexpressmedia.com\/?p=16100"},"modified":"2010-11-10T10:59:45","modified_gmt":"2010-11-10T15:59:45","slug":"50-years-forwardor-backward-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/?p=16100","title":{"rendered":"\u201c50 Years Forward\u201dor, Backward Again?!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The slogan for the 50th<\/sup> Independence Anniversary Celebration of the land the British colonialists carved out a boundary for and named \u201cSierra Leone<\/strong>\u201d \u2013 to better exploit its natural resources after 300 years + of the Protracted Holocaust of the Atlantic Slave Trade<\/em> –\u00a0 is \u201c50 Years Forward\u201d.<\/span><\/strong> With some 6 million people crammed in its\u00a0 47,000 square kilometers land area, Sierra Leone is too densely populated; but, with a 60% percent youthful population, density of population could mean marketing blessing, especially as this country is\u00a0 blessed\u00a0 with some of the most\u00a0 marketable mineral resources in the world (best grade of Rutile; largest quantity of iron ore in Africa; bauxite; platinum; gold, etc.).\u00a0 Emerging from one of the most nauseous and brutish wars in human history between 1991 and 2002, it is encouraging that this country is \u2018looking forward\u2019, and not backwards. Not backwards at what really should be termed as \u201850 wasted years\u2019<\/strong> of glorious opportunities and gargantuan wealth between 1961 and 2010. Given its staggering latent mineral wealth, the poverty of Sierra Leone today makes it more like the Prodigal Son in the Judeo-Christian Bible who frittered away wealth bequeathed to it by an indulgent parent<\/strong>.\u00a0 Do Sierra Leoneans have the mental capacity to look forward? <\/strong><\/p>\n

We don\u2019t.\u00a0 We are Africans, remember?\u00a0 Negroid!\u00a0 We are \u2018trapped\u2019 in sub Saharan Africa\u2019s tropical rainforest regions, which has forced us into a form of \u2018futureless mind trap\u2019.\u00a0 I draw a leaf from one of my intellectual \u2018bibles\u2019: the 1971-published\u00a0 Heinemann book I studied in sixth form in the Albert Academy in mid-1974\/1975: \u201cAfrican Traditional Religions and Philosophy\u201d, by Kenyan theologian, Prof. John F. Mbiti.<\/span><\/strong> \u2018Hear\u2019 Mbiti: \u201cA person (African!!) experiences time partly in his own individual life, and partly through the society which goes back many generations before his own birth\u2026.[Time] moves ‘backward’ rather than ‘forward’; and people set their minds not on future things, but chiefly on what has taken place<\/strong>\u2026.Time has to be experienced in order to make sense or to become real\u2026\u2026<\/em>For the African, time is e<\/em><\/strong>quivalent to, and can only consist of, actual events \u2013 events that have just occurred, events that are taking place now, or events that will likely occur very shortly<\/em><\/strong>. Theirs is a two-dimensional concept of time that only minimally corresponds with Western ideas of the \u2018present\u2019 and the \u2018past.\u2019 Mbiti identifies these dimensions as the <\/em>Sasa <\/strong>period<\/em><\/strong>,<\/strong> which encompasses the recent past, the present, and the very immediate future, and the <\/em>Zamani<\/strong> period,<\/em><\/strong> which corresponds with a deeper, more infinite past\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Let me interpret that \u2018Mbiti\u2019 for you.\u00a0 Simple:\u00a0 Africans don\u2019t think of the future.\u00a0 Look around you.\u00a0 How many Sierra Leoneans have ten days supply of food in stock in their homes?\u00a0 That was why when during our \u2018rebel war\u2019 the RUF\/AFRC rebels would invade a city like Freetown during the January 6, 1999 period and lay siege on it, most people were forced to brave coming out to confront the rebels on the streets in\u00a0 search of food \u2013 or they would starve to death.\u00a0 One of such people was one of\u00a0 my sixth form class mates in the Albert Academy, university-educated Rev. Isaac Marqui, a pastor in the A.M.E. Zion Church situated almost at\u00a0 Pademba Road\/Percival Street junction, who was shot at point blank range by child soldiers on Kissy Road as he ventured out in search of food for his starving family.\u00a0 Away from the drama and the high tension of a capital city besieged by murderous rebels, you see this train of \u2018futureless\u2019 thought among most of us\u00a0 \u2013 from the illiterate or mal-educated, from the office worker to the State House official to parliamentarians, etc.<\/p>\n

As bulldozers razed down concrete fences and houses along Congo Cross and Wilkinson Road over the past month to construct a four-lane road in the heart of the burgeoning and crammed capital city of Freetown, one Mr. Conton wrote a provocative piece published in several newspapers, titled, \u201cNatin Pas Advantage\u201d<\/span><\/strong>.<\/span> Mr. Conton hails from the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me\u00a0 of one of the most highly educated Northern Province families in Sierra Leone –\u00a0 what can be termed as \u2018blue blood\u2019 in European terms.\u00a0 Conton lampooned the APC\u00a0 government for not exercising forethought in using alternative routes for the road, and bulldozing people\u2019s houses \u2013 some of them historic 100 year-old wooden houses \u2013 and not granting them compensation. Conton is wrong, by my estimation.\u00a0 I applaud President Ernest Bai Koroma for not manifesting what \u2018Thinker\u2019\/columnist, Charlie Hughes, in the 1990s once derided as \u2018balls-less-ness\u2019\u00a0 in a newspaper article in THE DEMOCRAT \u2013 with our Ernest having the balls to arouse the wrath of elites of the ilk of Mr. Conton to march Freetown into the future. <\/strong> We desperately need wider roads around Freetown (are the expected teeming tourists going to take three hours from downtown Freetown to our idyllic beaches in the West?!!); or, even in 10 year\u2019s time, we would be literally suffocating to death with noxious fumes from vehicular traffic.\u00a0 At the national level, lurching away from the past and soaring into the future\u00a0 demands a lot of balls, a deafening of the ears to the screams of the multitudes who would be hurt (like China experienced again and again as they surged forward over the past sixty years) as they are stuck in the time trap of the past. But, Mr. Conton was, paradoxically, right in his ridicule of government\u2019s action.<\/p>\n

From \u2018Day One\u2019 of holding the reins of power in 2007, a \u2018future-thinking\u2019 President Koroma should have started making plans for the 2011 independence celebrations<\/strong>.\u00a0 That should have included advanced warning to the land owners in the Congo Cross\/Wilkinson Road area; and negotiations, and budgetary appropriations for their just compensation.\u00a0 President Koroma couldn\u2019t do that.\u00a0 He couldn\u2019t think of that long a future, most likely. Neither was\u00a0 President Tejan Kabba a \u2018futures-President\u2019, or he\u00a0 should\u2019ve formed a committee in 2001, or, in 2004, at the worst, for the 2011 50th<\/sup> Independence Celebrations.\u00a0 Both Presidents are largely stuck in the past, like their Negroid Sierra Leonean followers<\/strong>.\u00a0 If we are to move forward into the future, we have to begin to think like white men; think futuristically; think linear.\u00a0 That will be a monumental mind shift.\u00a0 There will be need for thousands of psychiatrists to guide us in this \u2018Time Olympics-like Jump\u2019. You know we only have a single western-trained psychiatrist in the country, Dr. Edward Nahim.\u00a0 Since we must jump into future-thinking for us to grow, experience sustainable development, we need hundreds of amateur psychiatrists to give our Negroid African minds electric shocks that would unfreeze our \u2018backward-thinking\u2019 minds and make it flow fluidly into the future.\u00a0 I start therapy for you.\u00a0 Brace yourself.\u00a0 Here goes!!!<\/p>\n

Last week Sunday, I listened entranced, fascinated, to one of the most intellectual programmes on the BBC World Service radio, \u201cTHE FORUM\u201d<\/span><\/strong>, as U.S. astronomer, Chris Impey, moved the world in astronomical time span to the future \u2013 to \u2018the end of the universe\u2019<\/strong>.\u00a0 The \u2018end of the universe\u2019<\/strong>, Impey postulated,\u00a0 could be any time from hundreds of billions of years from today to trillions of years hence.\u00a0 Ha!! I warned you, didn\u2019t I?\u00a0 The shock treatment continues for you. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I searched for more information in the w.w.w. <\/em>on this topic of the \u2018end of the universe<\/strong>\u2019.\u00a0 One of the most beguiling I found was this one written by one Jim Holt (posted in THE EGGHEAD, on March 4, 2004), titled, \u201cHow Will the Universe End<\/span><\/strong>\u201d.\u00a0 Holt, who also writes for some of America\u2019s most prestigious print media like THE NEW YORKER and NEW YORK TIMES magazine, titillated me with his opening prose. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/strong>One of my favorite moments in Woody Allen’s film <\/span><\/strong>Annie Hall<\/span><\/em><\/strong> is when Alvy Singer (Allen’s alter ego) is shown having an existential crisis as a little boy. His mother summons a psychiatrist<\/strong>, one Dr. Flicker, to find out what’s wrong.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

\u2018\u2018Why are you depressed, Alvy?\u2019 Dr. Flicker\u00a0 (the psychiatrist) asks.<\/p>\n

\u2018The universe is expanding,\u2019 Alvy says. \u2018The universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, some day it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.\u2019<\/p>\n

“\u2019Why is that your business?\u2019 interrupts his mother. Turning to the psychiatrist, she announces, \u2018He’s stopped doing his homework<\/strong>!\u2019<\/p>\n

“`That’s the point?\u2019 Alvy says.<\/p>\n

“\u2019What has the universe got to do with it!\u2019 his mother shouts. \u2018You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Flicker jumps in: \u2018It won’t be expanding for billions of years, Alvy, and we’ve got to enjoy ourselves while we’re here, eh? Ha ha ha.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I used to take Dr. Flicker’s side in this matter. How silly to despond about the end of everything! After all, the cosmos was born only around 13 billion years ago, when the Big Bang happened,<\/strong> and parts of it will remain hospitable to our descendants for a good hundred billion years, even as the whole thing continues to spread out\u2026.<\/p>\n

A half-dozen years ago, however, astronomers peering through their telescopes began to notice something rather alarming. The expansion of the universe, their observations indicated, was not proceeding at the stately, ever-slowing pace that Einstein’s equations had predicted. Instead, it was speeding up. Some \u2018dark energy\u2019 was evidently pushing against gravity, sending galaxies hurtling away from one another at a runaway rate<\/strong>. New measurements earlier this year confirmed this strange finding\u2026.<\/p>\n

Stop!!!\u00a0 Stopppppppp!!!!<\/strong> I can hear your screaming through the ear plugs I had in my ears\u00a0 in expectation of the excruciating pain my forcing you to leap into the that too distant a future would cause you. Okay, let us don\u2019t bother ourselves with the end of the universe; let us be unperturbed that\u00a0 about five thousand years from now\u00a0 our sun will lose its energy, and die out; or, we should remain unconcerned that a thousand years from now\u00a0 our sun will become incredibly hot, and boil up the oceans on planet earth, and that will force all intelligent life on earth to either go underground, or, some twenty billion of humanity\u00a0 will have to escape\u00a0 to Mars or some other distant planets\u2026.\u00a0 Let President Koroma lead us into the \u2018near future\u2019\u2026.of 2012.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is going to happen in 2012?<\/strong> As we going to have a tribal armed face-off in what we could masquerade to the world as democratic elections?\u00a0 What future are we preparing for our millions of youth and children who we are schooling in institutions were they are barely able to read or write; living out their youthful lives not learning carpentry, tailoring, farming, etc. \u2013 yet, thronging the cities?\u00a0 What is going to happen to our country as we churn out every year thousands of mal-educated university graduates who would have bloated expectations but would not be equipped to meet those expectations, and there would be cut-throat competition for limited jobs and opportunities? <\/strong> As we approach the 50th<\/sup> Independence Anniversary Celebration of our country, we must become really independent in thought by developing that courage enough to do our own diagnosis of our most chronic national mind problems and hazard suggesting cures for them.<\/p>\n

One of our worst diseases as a nation, as Africans, is this inability to think about the future.<\/strong> In Monrovia, Liberia, the environment\/development organization I was the brains and\u00a0 co-founder\/CEO for, was (is) called \u201cSave My Future Conservation Society\u201d.<\/span><\/strong> That was in between 1987 and 1990.\u00a0 I realized that educating people to conserve and preserve the invaluable wealthy tropical rainforests in Liberia would entail \u2018moving them into the future\u2019 \u2013 so that they can see the horrors that await them should they not change their \u2018attitudes\u2019 and their habits of being trapped in the past, and wantonly decimating their forests.\u00a0 As we aim to move \u201c50 Years Forward\u201d, we absolutely need those Sierra Leoneans who have the capacity to move into the future and yank our compatriot away from the dead hand of the past<\/strong>.\u00a0 There is going to be need for Thinkers, and generalists, like Oswald Hanciles in the vanguard of this \u2018Futures-Train\u2019, those who have the intellectual capacity and mental flexibility to\u00a0 juggle complex variables, and piece them together, showing how they all interface to forge a desirable future.<\/p>\n

Oswald Hanciles, Freetown<\/em><\/p>\n

Stay with Sierra Express Media, for your trusted place in news!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The slogan for the 50th Independence Anniversary Celebration of the land the British colonialists carved out a boundary for and named \u201cSierra Leone\u201d \u2013 to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":75801,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[671,1],"tags":[5848,5839,84,3892,5492],"class_list":["post-16100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-uncategorized","tag-50-years-forward","tag-50th-anniversary","tag-development","tag-infrastructure","tag-sierra-leone-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/75801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}