Changing Attitudes and Behaviors: The Role of Africa's Cultural Leaders

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This is a reprint of an address given at an IFPRI conference, "Assuring Food and Nutrition Security in Africa by 2020," held in Kampala, Uganda.

I have a credential for addressing you today that even those who invited me here may not be aware of. At the age of four, I fought my best friend over food. It was pounded yam, a very special item of food that I sometimes describe as having a quasi-mystical status.

We made up, of course. My mother intervened. And I learned a lesson that has stayed with me all my life. I learned the lesson of extended families. I recognized finally that Osiki—that was his name—was actually a member of the extended family and that compared with him I was a privileged child, not that we were an affluent family. I realized that he actually relied for his daily sustenance on those meals that he used to share with me—with his over-large morsels, which is why we fought.

So we made up. But Osiki, unprivileged as he was compared with me, would consider his existence and my childhood to have been very privileged compared with that of millions of children today. He would swear to this ironic status of his even without watching contemporary footage of children from the hunger zones of the continent, their stomachs bloated in malnourishment, victims of perennial drought and of war displacements year after year, but also victims of the improvident attitude of African leadership. Today Osiki would stare unbelieving at the images of homesteads where the only evidence of abundance would be swarms of flies in competition for the least moisture on the eyes, lips, and nostrils of human beings sunk in lassitude. He would shudder at the attenuation of limbs of soon-to-be mortal statistics that continue to rebuke a continent of such diverse and abundant material resources. He would recoil at the portent of once-thriving farming villages whose productive routine has been drastically attenuated by HIV/AIDS, the surviving inhabitants being just wide-eyed, orphaned children, looking lost, uncertain of the source of their next meal.

Food is allied to culture in the most organic, interactive way, and one may be brought to the aid of, enhancement of, or celebration of the other. We observe this not only in the lyricism that food evokes in some societies, but in the shared weight of multiple creative arts that are dedicated to the planting season and harvesting, elaborate performance gatherings that also serve the purpose of cohering the community. Most of us, however, prefer such collaboration to the external dependency mode; such as once occurred in one of the critical periods of food shortage on the continent, when a helpless visage of this continent came to be stamped on global consciousness.

Now, I readily admit that I am not a fan of pop music, but at least I have kept my dislike for that frequent travesty of the musical art away from the actual creators—that is, until I heard the name of a certain Bob Geldof. The cause of my dislike was quite perverse. Bob Geldof was guilty of performing a duty that I considered mine, ours—the duty of the extended family that was the ethos of my upbringing and, I am certain, the upbringing of most of us here. Bob Geldof was the name that became identified, need I remind you, as the main initiator of a concert whose centerpiece was the famous "We Are the World." My dislike of Bob Geldof, in other words, had nothing to do with music, but with pride, racial pride. Who was this man, this foreigner, who took it upon himself to fill in a space of disregard, of indifference to the plight of a people by their own leaders?

There was, without question, also a sense of frustration, even envy. Only two years before that world music concert, I was editor of the African journal Transition, later to become Ch'Indaba. We warned of the crisis of drought and famine in parts of Ethiopia, based on firsthand reports. We tended to dramatize the beginnings of another round of famine-induced migrations of Ethiopian villagers while the Emperor, Haile Selassie, wined and dined foreign dignitaries in the splendor of his palace. To drive the point home, we published a facsimile of the menu of a typical banquet that took place in the imperial palace side by side with images of starving families and makeshift camps.

Two or three years later, under the so-called People's Revolutionary Regime of Mariam Mengistu, we were obliged to return to the same scenario of leadership planlessness, only this time, it had worsened beyond imagining. Once again, millions of humans were on the move, in flight from certain starvation. The lessons of the previous years in Tigre and other provinces had not been absorbed.

African humanity, it seemed, was always expendable to most leaders. Human skeletons, of both adults and children, denoted trails that were reminiscent of the routes of the trans-Saharan slave routes—journeys that many, incidentally, like to pretend never did take place. The continent was absorbing the bleak lesson that in the critical fulfillment of the primary mission of feeding its people, there was hardly any difference between neglect of the feudal kind and the myopia of revolutionary messianism.

What was singularly aggravating about the new famine in Ethiopia was that the increase in human suffering had been caused by an ill-digested notion of the productive strategies of collectivization. The ruling Dergue, stocked full of textbook notions about the transformation of means of production through centralism, commenced a policy of deliberate displacements, uprooted and dispersed entire peoples to artificial villages, but took no note of their traditions. Of course, some of these traditions have proved inadequate. But the inhuman revolutionary zeal of the Dergue only made matters worse.

The death toll mounted. The conscience of the world could stand it no longer. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but music proved far more efficacious than both. Revolutionary slogans made way for the lyrics of the pop musician reminding the affluent that indifference to material deficiency in one part of the world merely underlined the moral deficiency of the rest. I felt this rebuke personally and took a violent dislike to this man of conscience called Bob Geldof.

Many here will recall Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God, a work that offers itself so readily today as a parable of social responsibilities and the consequences of their betrayal. The conduct of a central character in that novel, Ezeulu, the priest and spiritual guardian of the deity Ulu in an Ibo community, is a cautionary tale for the contemporary leadership of this continent. Of Ezeulu's priestly duties, none was more crucial to the survival of the community than his role as the sign reader and transmitting medium for the planting season for the new yam—you know, that commodity over which I had fought my friend at four years of age.

If the harvest failed, and that meant if the seeds were not planted at the right moment—for instance, before a seasonal change that burnt the seedlings in the earth—starvation was guaranteed for the ensuing year. The manner in which this authorization was provided goes to the very heart of an integrated community existence on many levels, and indeed, goes to the heart of what I described earlier as the quasi-mystical status of the yam, underlining the cyclic nature of Earth's renewal.

In Chinua Achebe's narrative, that signal is withheld by Ezeulu. The entire village waits on their priest, but he has a bone to pick with his people. He is smarting from a humiliation meted out to him by the colonial authority, in the person of a certain Captain Winterbottom, and additionally, from a political slight he has received from his own community. And so Ezeulu refuses to "see" the new moon whose appearance communicates to him the moment that he must eat the final symbolic tuber from the harvest of the previous year. He remains deaf to the pleas of the elders and turns a purely ritualistic procedure into a literal one. The welfare of the community is imperiled, but Ezeulu is unmoved. The priest, rather than make his world with his spiritual will and authority, was unmaking it, content to watch the community unravel at the seams.

Let me assert here the contemporary parallel that the conduct of Ezeulu evokes. It is a spiteful politics of some of our politicians who, because a constituency casts its votes for the opposition, proceed to impoverish that region, withholding public facilities, health, education, roads, water supply, including rudimentary bore holes, farming equipment, fertilizers, etc. Their language is, "You withheld your votes. Now go and eat your ballot."

Chinua Achebe, when he embarked on that work, may have been unaware that he was setting down a contemporary morality tale that is so applicable to the plight of the continent and to the leaders' betrayal of the natural expectations and confidence of their people. For one thing, when he wrote that novel, the notion of famine on the scale of the past two decades was unheard of on the continent, even in the Sahelian regions or in former colonies such as the Congo, where traditional food production systems had been subverted by the colonial policies that forced their subjects to substitute cash crops for food crops. I refer here to that period when thriving communities were turned into mere production appendages to King Leopold's commercial empire, a period of enforced quota systems when failure to attain was punished by the slicing of ears, slitting of nostrils, and amputation of limbs. In the colonial period, narrated in that work, the oil boom had not arrived to displace food as a primary preoccupation of peoples, resulting in once self-sustaining communities, now amalgamated into independent entities, finding themselves compelled to import even basic foods of which they were once, in some cases, exporters of surplus. When Arrow of God was written, neither the author nor anyone else had ever heard of a devastating affliction called HIV/AIDS.

Chinua Achebe's community of the deity Ulu is the paradigm of our continent, a continent awaiting the signal that would inaugurate a comprehensive planting that will sustain its people—that is, the annunciation of a creative, sustained, practical strategy attuned to the realities of uneven industrialization and new national entities, calling up a remedial response to the break-up of the organic productive systems of precolonial society, its demographic shifts, and the consequences of our brutal wars.

Could it be that IFPRI aspires to be the resurrected spirit of Ezeulu? But with the admonition that a community cannot wait on the voice of one individual alone, but must act collectively and methodically. IFPRI—well, not as euphonious a name as Ezeulu and hardly of totally indigenous origin, but as we say in my part of the world, if the man sees the poisonous snake, but it takes a woman to kill it, all that matters to the menaced homestead is that the snake is dead.

When Arrow of God was written in the early 1960s, the oil palm industry of southern Nigeria was still flourishing. The landscape of the northern part was adorned with groundnut pyramids, attaining such iconographic status that they were used on the national postage stamps. It is not mere nostalgia, therefore, but the necessity for our self-indictment, a bitter stock-taking, that wrung the following lines out of me, lines from the poem "Elegy for a Nation" in the collection Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known:

Yes, "even the harvest seeds were long devoured," both figuratively, out of greed, by incontinent leadership, but sometimes also from necessity, as happened in Igboland during the civil war. This condition must be recognized as the continuing fate of many African zones of civil war today, where antipersonnel mines reduce the yield potential of land even further and finish off what HIV/AIDS has begun.

In Samarkand I was indeed invoking the nation that we once knew, but Nigeria was only one of many such travesties. At least there had been war in Nigeria, with attendant distortion of production processes. The ascendancy of a war industry that resulted in the abandonment of multiple economic devices—but agriculture most especially—was a phenomenon that simply transferred itself to the oil industry once oil was discovered.

Not even successive attempts at mobilization under slogans such as "Operation Feed Yourself," "Operation Feed the Nation," "Operation This and Whatever Else" have succeeded in the resuscitation of the farm as primary source for a people's food security. Often, the main target of such endeavors was youth—how to turn the sight of youth away from the glitzy attractions of urban living and challenge them with the vital contributions that can be extracted from that basic resource, land. Nigeria is only an illustration, and it is improving these days.

No one requires to be told that this anomaly has spread all over the continent, and even in nations, like Ghana, that did not undergo the production distortion of civil war or an oil boom. I was sojourning in that nation when the markets dried up. The staple food, kenke, made from fermented corn, shrank until it virtually vanished into its wrapping of leaves, while the supermarkets' display cases held nothing but shelled coconuts. That was the paradox: There was no shortage of food in the land, but there was starvation. Food crops simply rotted away on the farms for lack of transportation thanks to the incontinent conduct, indifference, and neglect of the ruling military.

We cannot exactly return to that integrated phase of communal life, where the very process of cultivation, like other forms of life-preserving labor, was related to the overall cultural being of the community. But we can come reasonably close. We can reinvent the gods, exploiting their timeless functionalism.

I propose this dimension not merely because I am a compulsive mythologist, but because I would like to see when the new sign reader and interactive medium of our times—I'll call it "Ezeulu-IFPRI"—next sounds the gong for planting. But it is not merely experts who are summoned, but a fair representation of the small-scale, even subsistence, farmers, who remained faithful to their vocation, are closer to earth than most of us here, and are sometimes unconscious researchers into the science of food. It helps, of course, if we can link them, through familiar cultural symbols, to the world of modernity and constant technological innovations.

The two relevant deities here are, first, none other than that confessed favorite of mine, Ogun, in all his myriad transformations, the god of metallurgy and the patron deity of agriculture, a role he shares with another deity, Orisa-oko. Orisa-oko is the very spirit of leaves, the farm, and the moist elements, while Ogun is the technological impulse that transforms nature from the most rudimentary hoe and machete to the complex combine harvester, the churning mills, and transportation conveyances.

There are several models on whose scaffolding such basic, life-affirming strategies, the antithesis of hunger and starvation, can be mounted. I see no reason why a day cannot be dedicated to the culture of food renewal, its science and technology, every year, utilizing the seasonal festivals of Orisa-oko and Ogun, or their equivalents in other African cultures. Regionally or continentwide, it does not matter; the goal is to marry the cultural wealth and celebration of relevant mythologies to a forward focus on modernization through recall and celebration.

Let it never be forgotten that in the liturgies of worship, traditional songs, and rituals are lodged much knowledge concerning not merely the science of crops and food, but the pharmacology of healing. From the spirit of that past, new songs will emerge attuned to the present, abandoning the charity-propelled "We Are the World," that song of dependency, to the self-affirmation of "We Make Our World."

I envision, in short, a working festival that recovers the ethos of farming integration with life-sustaining processes, encounters that anticipate, not simply respond to, devastating vagaries of nature. Technical expositions, contests with awards that will stimulate inventiveness in the technology of food preservation and pest control, experimentation in the cultivation of new varieties, disease-resisting strains, high-yield varietals, promotion of organic fertilizers that do away with controversial chemicals—in short, an entire revolution in our approach to the food sciences that were developed for other climes, other soils, and other industrial cultures, instead giving primacy of place to our own authoritative voices, not simply the politicians', over the merits or demerits of genetically altered crops.

The past has much to teach, even if the present rides on the engines of the future. The trajectory of surplus and scarcity would be plotted in scientific caucuses that would be part of such a fiesta, with, of course, a gallery of negativities as correctives—those hideous scars on the African conscience that watched millions perish from neglect.

Culture and cultivation are deeply entrenched in traditional society. The younger generation, that is, the future, is the primary target—those who are more at home with Nintendo games than with a creative engagement with the soil that has nourished their ancestors from prehistory and sustains their very existence. If we can appeal to a youthful sense of imagination and excitement at the potential of this neglected field of resources, I believe that half the battle against hunger will be no battle at all, but a celebration of nature in transformation, stimulated by home-evolved ingenuities.

Yes, culture and the arts can prove handmaidens of cultivation. We have a choice, however: either to create our own cultural incentives that motivate productivity and lead to self-reliance, or await the handouts from the charity of the world. We must remember, however, that there is a condiment that must be swallowed with the food of charity: a chastening ingredient that is known as "pride." The choice is therefore no choice at all.

We owe it to the future that those same fly-infested mouths of want that presently occupy the gallery of a failed past are filled with the self-empowerment that will launch a new chant from the Sahel to the Cape: "We Make Our World."

Wole Soyinka is a Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature. The text above is a reprint of his 2004 address to an international audience gathered in Kampala, Uganda for a three-day conference on African food and nutrition security that IFPRI co-organized.

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