Critical thinking and the African identity
Font size: Leo Igwe 29/12/2010 00:03:00
SIR: I want to start this piece by stating emphatically that if lack of critical thinking or inability to apply one’s common sense to issues is what makes one an African, then I am not an African. I say this - and I really mean it. I hereby renounce my African identity if it means that I should not exercise my critical intelligence or apply reason and science in all areas of human endeavour.

If being an African means I should suspend and shut down my thinking faculty and blindly accept whatever any person or prophet says or preaches, then, I say, count me out. Don’t count me as an African. I am making this assertion because very often blind faith, dogma and fetishism are identified with African mentality.

Whenever I try to apply logic, critical reasoning and scientific temper to issues during public debates, I am often accused of not thinking like an African. I am always told that I think like a white man or that I have a western mentality. As if critical thinking or the scientific outlook is for westerners alone or that critical thinking can only be exercised by people from a particular race or region. No, this is not the case.

And would you go as far as to say you could make the same call to all progressive people whatever their skin colour and ethnic history and etcetera that there might well be a reformulation of how we constitute our identities?

PG: Of course that’s why I dedicated my last book to Thomas Hurndall and Rachel Corrie. I was interested in how the form of solidarity which is practised by the human shields and other people who put their own more valuable bodies at risk in situations where there are colonial economies operating; I was interested in their motivations and in what they told us about forms of accountability and responsibility that we face in the light of other calls. Those situations are going to proliferate, I don’t just mean ones which are going to require human shields, I mean ones where national attachments are in some sort of disjunctive relationship with more humane, more civilised, more worldly ways of being in the world. Universities are going to come into the front line in the new civilisationism. Apparently we’re all going to be spying on our veiled students and all the rest of it. These things may even be relevant in that kind of institutional setting.

MF: True, true, true and the other book the one that’s a sort of your encounters with musicians – say a couple of things about that . . .