Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari
3 July 2009
opinion
ABOUT a week ago, the librarian in the department of political science at the Sorbonne forwarded me an interesting e-mail from the prestigious Gorée Institute in Senegal.
Part of the noble objectives of the said institute is to promote an Africa that is peaceful and capable of assuming its role in the world through the optimisation of its creative human resources.
Returning to the e-mail in question it exactly was talking about the need for Africa to come up with the next Albert Einstein.
By all accounts, Albert Einstein is mythical in science and is an intellectual yardstick in scientific endeavour. Irrespective of how you look at it, the challenge to come up with an African Einstein is pretty formidable.
Be that as it may, what was partly encouraging about the mail is the tone and need to start reflecting about the importance of deepening scientific enterprise in Africa.
But what is of interest about this mail and what forced the issue to my column page is when the librarian raised the e-mail contents about an 'African Einstein' with my European colleagues during one of our intermittent coffee break discussions.
There was a deafening silence of no comment, until one of them replied sarcastically: "ah bon!" (really!). In fact, that deafening silence and the sarcastic "really" could have meant two things.
First, it could mean that they are impressed with Africa's ambitions to have an Einstein made in an Africa laboratory.
Alternatively, it could have been a matter of saying: "not the Africa we know". My instinctive paranoia compels me to discount the first assumption. It is rather the second: my European colleagues simple don't believe that the next Albert Einstein would come from an African science laboratory.
Yes, it could be an African, but he or she would do so in a science laboratory at Cambridge University in the UK, the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie Paris VI, Heidelberg University in Germany or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.
Without being apologetic, I don't think that we are dealing with racial stereotypes - but there is an empirical reality.
Africa is still largely excluded from the world of science and knowledge. Thus, any mention of an African Einstein will draw those blank stares.
How do we salvage this situation? Part of the problem is not necessarily a policy question. In fact, it is not. Our scientific policies can rival the best around the world. After all, they are not sui-generis, but are rather inspired or in some instances copied from the best around the world during those famous fact-finding missions.
Our inability to harness scientific knowledge and skills is a political problem, more than a matter of bad policy. Policy without vision and political will is meaningless. It is as good as having no policy at all.
African leaders and individuals in positions of authority are struggling to internalise the importance and utility of African skills in various domains, not only in leadership positions, but also in advisory roles. There are Africans who have excelled, who have been to the best universities and importantly who are ready to make a contribution to their respective countries. But a PhD fellow would oftentimes get encouraged to look for opportunities in the West.
Worryingly, such advice also comes from policy-makers. In some instances, the best skills in science, econometrics or finance would leave a small country like Namibia without raising alarm on the part of policy makers.
Yet, the very same country would not hesitate to recruit fresh graduates from European countries as consultants for jobs that can be done by locals.
There is a profound political inability to explore and exploit the available human resources in our countries. It is this indifference when it comes doing what matters most that is at the heart of our failure to harness the next Albert Einstein.
Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari is a PhD fellow in political science at the University of Paris - Panthéon Sorbonne, France.
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