Celebrated musician, Kanye West, has been hitting the news waves lately for his latest provocative statement that slavery was a choice. His statement has fanned the flames of racial debate in the US, with many black Americans calling him out for his little understanding of black history. The controversial hip-hop artist has come out to clarify what he really meant but the damage appears to have been done.
All the interpretations aside, Kanye appears quite bold going against the grain, but he only manages to spark such great outrage because his remarks are made in a country with a very well preserved history. Accounts of slavery and racial discrimination are well documented through various forms of literature. Great efforts have also been made to ensure this history is not forgotten, with whole months dedicated to celebrate black history in countries such as the US, the UK and Canada, and museums containing rich historical knowledge as opposed to mere artifacts.
Preserving history is not something we do particularly well. We are probably better at preserving historical artifacts than we are at preserving knowledge. This not only addresses the political – we struggle at preserving our culture as well. Case in point, to the average Dar dweller, the village museum has been reduced to a venue for wedding committee meetings, and the national museum a venue for conferences.
The problem, I reckon, has its roots in both the demand and supply sides. It’s easy to say people are not interested, but hard to convince anyone that whoever is in charge of such important institutions has made any laudable effort to get people interested. So we remain a people without a history.
Rationing Mwalimu
Arguably, Mwalimu Nyerere is the most “documented” Tanzanian, yet you get the sense that the wealth of his wisdom is more appreciated and utilized outside the country. His works are a frequent subject of debate in Ivy League schools and many other academic institutions across the world. Yet here, it is amusing how snippets of his speeches appear sporadically and conveniently when there’s a situation that demands it.
A great example is how an audio clip of Mwalimu telling workers off for demanding a wage increase during labor day somewhat magically surfaced and was circulated at the time of the latest labor day celebrations. It is easy to suspect that someone is holding on to archives upon archives of Mwalimu’s speeches, and, for reasons best known to themselves, they do not want the general public to have full access to them.
Mwalimu Nyerere, himself a great thinker, challenged Tanzanians to be self-reliant, thrive in the arts and sciences, yet the manner in which his thoughts are superficially utilized locally suggests that the present-day Tanzanian is a pale shadow of the person our founding father envisioned.
Nationalism
Nationalism, a subject taught in our schools is one we view only in that way – as something restricted to our history books. But in an increasingly globalized world, those who fail to preserve their history risk losing their national identities. This is what gives us our ‘Kanyes’, whose denial or ignorance of our history only serves to hurt us because any discontinuity in the way we view present events weakens our ability to understand and resolve our problems.
I am currently watching Bobby for President, a Netflix docuseries looking at the life of Senator Robert Kennedy, the late President Kennedy’s brother who was in the running for the top office before his assassination in 1968. It’s clear from the docuseries that the pursuit of truth about this assassination has not ended. Truth not only helps people and nations reconcile, but also offers important lessons that helps people avoid repeating past mistakes, and I believe it is historical accounts such as the Kennedys’ that have helped make American democracy what it is today.
On a personal note, this article marks a year’s worth of weekly writings published on this paper. I hope these writings will give my two-and-a-half-year-old son access to my thoughts, even in my absence, for his entire life. I have had the benefit of accessing my own father’s account of history through his novel Mzizi wa Chuki which recounts how structures in socialist Tanzania paved the way for rampant corruption in the ‘post-Nyerere era’.
If we’re to find our footing in this world and have something about us that the young and old can both rally around and become part of our national psyche; we must embark on that journey of not only recounting our history to the young, but archiving it in literature and digital formats.
This article was first published in The Citizen: https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/oped/why-disregard-for-history-is-our-greatest-undoing-2634702
