African Prospects
The Fundamentalist Model of Well Being Sami Tchak Novelist
#5: Improve the quality of life for the people of Africa
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very year for more than a decade I have had the chance to take part, at least once, in an event where the whole continent of Africa is central to discussion, and each time I have been inspired by so many lofty thoughts based on concrete problems and rising to those rather exalted spheres where the mind is at ease.
Spending part of my life among books and having let the illusion of the capacity for thought grow in my head, it was not always possible for me to draw pertinent conclusions from the real, the prosaic. However, in September 2017, during a short stay in my native village, Bowounda, Togo, I had a belated epiphany that opened my eyes to an idea: my village now depended materially in part on its children who had left for Europe, America, Asia . . . Money flows there as never before, and the high volume increases the average individual’s ability to consume: mobile telephones, WhatsApp and the like. But for all that, the standard of living has not improved. Poverty (indeed destitution) remains high, with farmers still finding it hard to draw from the earth the substance of their survival. Admittedly, families where at least one of their members emigrated to an African country or, ideally, out of
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the continent, benefit from a large cash contribution. Because they have rarely had much schooling, the émigrés of my village form, in the countries in which they settle, a kind of “consenting slave body” of the capitalist system. But they send a small part of their earnings to the village, not only to meet family obligations, but also to give, from a distance, the illusion of their success. They deprive themselves there of what would have permitted them to live better just to support the destitution of their families here. Of course, they buy land and build houses in the city, especially in Sokodé and Lomé, but they only lodge dreams of return that, as the years pass, logically languish. As my village is in a Muslim region, is inhabited by Muslim women and men, and I now see little girls under the age of six wearing a hijab, I had begun to fear that one day this unimportant little place would suddenly spring noisily into history because of radical Islam and the temptations it would awaken in some young people there. I confided my concerns to the imam of one of the mosques of my village, whom I will call El Hadj Alfa Issaka Bako, a scholar in the Arab language with whom I sometimes have vaguely philosophical discussions.
Of all that he said to me, I remember the following: “The tragedy of this village, Aboubakar (my name is Aboubakar Sadamba Tcha-Koura, Sami Tchak being only a pseudonym), the tragedy of this village is not the risk that our village will one day supply jihadists to the terrorist movements; the true tragedy of this village is already its growing dependence on the standardized, globalized model of happiness, a model that turns even the poorest into beings harnessed to incompressible, non-vital needs. This village has entered the universal mirage of the material. The hijab and mosques that understandably worry you are only the mask on the face of
hegemonic, extremist materialism, diabolically cruel. It is in the name of this standardized model of happiness that humans run in all directions, that many of them forget to settle down, that they scatter to the four winds, carrying corpses of dreams that become humus for their disillusions.” The imam had always criticized capitalism virulently. And that day, he did not spare me his old tune: “Aboubakar, the capitalist system is effective because of the massacres of masses that it perpetuates, symbolically and literally, everywhere in the world. It is doubtless the worst of the legal massacre systems that
humans have invented. A massacre of nature, massacres with medications, massacres with food products (the pharmaceutical and agroalimentary industries, so many other lobbies, which buy or destroy scientists and politicians to ensure the triumph of profitable and harmful lies), the world of finance, arms manufacturers and dealers, all bear the responsibility for so many human disasters. No terrorism will be as murderous as all of them put together them, that is the very soul of the West, massacres linked to the exploitation of natural wealth on and under the earth . . . Western capitalism has triumphed
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