Iran and the miseducation of the African mind

I will never forget that day a senior editor at one of Kampala’s leading current affairs outlets said to me “I have no doubts that you, Yusuf, are capable of wearing a bomb and blowing up these offices.”

This was a man with whom we had often debated philosophy, politics, literature, democracy, the structure of the English sentence, the enlightenment, among others. He is by all standard a fine gentleman. But on the topic of terrorism, Islam, continued colonialism, the Middle East, he would only regurgitate those tired stereotypes.

I asked him why he thought I would blow up their offices, and his response was that “Muslims don’t care about life.”

Disappointed, I would not stop wondering if a man as “refined” as this comrade of mine was, how about his lesser educated comrades! Now that Iran-Israel/America conflict is ongoing, I have heard the chance to encounter many half- educated commenters chanting the badness of Iran, i.e., Muslims, and the inherent goodness of the Christian Americans.

Understood correctly that Iran is fighting an anti-colonial war (for its oil, gas and sovereignty), one would expect that people in still-colonised Africa would be cheering Iran. Because it is fighting our war. But not these Africans of the neoliberal period.

They have been so mis-educated that they don’t see colonialism in the present time. Exactly because 1990s-colonialism is more technical, heavily depoliticised and invisible to many Africans. It is debt. Banks. Monopolies.

They tell China is bad for Africa, but IMF and WB are our best friends. They tell us Islam and the Middle East are the axis of evil; and that Russia will colonise us even when Russia was not in Berlin in 1885.

Why? On the one hand it is absolute mis-education, and on the other, it is the cultural industry, which includes Hollywood, the mainstream news outlets.

MIS-EDUCATION UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

When you hear Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni privileging sciences (STEMS) over the arts, – and paying science teachers obnoxiously higher – he is neither speaking nor executing of his own programme.

Training scientists who follow manuals and scientific formulars – but not politics – is not the handiwork of Yoweri Museveni. It is the work of the colonial machine interested exclusively in apolitical labour.

When the colonisers returned under Structural Adjustment Programmes in the late 1980-early 1990s, they viewed university education as a luxury. Why produce philosophers? For these supposedly benevolent institutions, a high school certificate was good enough.

Thereafter, someone should go and either become a carpenter, plumber, engineer or medical doctor. No politics. Like under colonialism, the goal of the IMF and WB was to curtail the training and producing thinking and curious minds. These tend to be unruly and stir revolutions.

They tend to be too observant, too nosy, and often interested nationalising their country’s resources. It is over 30 years down the road, and the children of universal primary (UPE), and secondary school education (UCE) are in things. They see America, western Europe and Israel as their bosom Judeo- Christian friends.

They see 1948 Israel as the Israel in the Bible! Many Ugandans including some in serious public offices have never read a book ever since they finished their university education. In fact, they are unable to read and understand a simple English sentence.

They cannot read their native languages either. They are consumers of what their evangelical pastors tell them, Hollywood spin, and what the mainstream media outlets. Now when the cultural industry enters the mix, then no one is left behind.

CULTURAL INDUSTRY AS MASS DECEPTION

In the 2003 preface to his book, Orientalism – explaining why people still hated the Middle East regarded Middle Eastern as half-adults – Edward Said noted that the fact that bookstores in the United States, and in all major cities across the world “are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat, and the Muslim menace.”

Said noted that all of these are “written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them, and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples over there who have been such a terrible thorn in “our” flesh.”

Said continues that “accompanying such warmongering expertise have been the omnipresent CNNs and Fox News Channels of this world [add BBC, SKY] plus myriad numbers of evangelicals… innumerable tabloids and even middlebrow journals, all of them recycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations” about the Middle East, Africans and Islam.

Sadly, many African, Middle Easterners have also imbibed these claims and see themselves as devils or the problem of the world. That they need America to liberate them from themselves, which actually means America taking over their resources.

But how can America and Israel be the good guys, and small individuals in the Middle East be the devil? Western Europe and America gave us colonialism, and slave trade. They gave us two so-called World Wars. They gave us King Leopold II who killed 12m Congolese.

Germany gave us the Namibian Genocide. Germany gave us the Holocaust. Briton gave the Indian famine. Israelis gave us the Nakba. They have just given us the Gaza Genocide. America has killed 38 million people across the world in the last 50 years.

America dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan. How can they be good guys? Consider this: More recently, these people gave us the slave markets in Libya. The war in South Sudan, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo are directly connected to the work of American and Israel mining companies.

Dan Gertler International, Glencore Plc., among others. Israel and America created and funded both ISIS and Boko Haram. How could these be the good guys? Because they claim to be Christians? Africans. Wake up.

yusufkajura@gmail.com

The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.