The novelist and dramatist that I never heard of before

My new, posthumous discovery was Carl Djaressi, who wrote in English, not in some obscure lingo, like some of the dubious Nobel Laureates who are only brought to the literati’s notice by the Swedish Academy.

What you need to know:

  • Listening to such “planners” and leaders, one is indeed tempted to wonder whether it’s the arts and humanities or the very people who mouth such inanities that are useless.

  • If a minister, MP or chief executive who is a graduate of political science, linguistics or economics stands at a podium and declares that students should not be sponsored or even given loans to study these subjects, there certainly must be something useless in the education of that person.

He was a novelist and dramatist with several titles to his name. He also wrote a significant body of verse. Yet I had never heard of him. What kind of literary professional am I?

Embarrassingly, the main reason I was hearing of this man of letters was that he had just died, a few weeks ago. No, no, it wasn’t André Brink, the bold anti-apartheid Afrikaner campaigner whom I admired and one of whose books I had evaluated for the Commonwealth Literature Prize.

My new, posthumous discovery was Carl Djaressi, who wrote in English, not in some obscure lingo, like some of the dubious Nobel Laureates who are only brought to the literati’s notice by the Swedish Academy.

He even established a playwriting fellowship, administered by the University of Wisconsin, a favourite destination for many of my students.

Some of my literary colleagues may have heard of him, or even read some of his writings, like his reportedly fascinating play, Oxygen. To those who knew or know Carl Djaressi inside out, I say kudos.

But I have an excuse for my ignorance. Carl Djaressi was a scientist. In the “normal” current state of affairs, apparently it’s not necessary, or even desirable, for a literary scholar to know or care about those “test tube and microscope” fumblers in their smelly labs.

Nor is the contempt unreciprocated. The typical science student or scholar finds little cause to care about the doings of those dreamy-eyed idlers who spend most of their study time “reciting Shakespeare to one another”.

At best, the artist or humanist is just tolerated in scientific communities as just that “softhead” who could handle neither figures nor measurements and ended up bandying words around ad nauseam.

But what makes me see red is the bunch of our leaders and policy-makers, most of them humanities or arts graduates, who go round yelling about the “uselessness” of the arts and the humanities. To these dunderheads, disciplines like history, literature, language, theology or sociology are only to be tolerated at best or, at worst, to be persecuted and denied funding and sponsorship.

Listening to such “planners” and leaders, one is indeed tempted to wonder whether it’s the arts and humanities or the very people who mouth such inanities that are useless.

If a minister, MP or chief executive who is a graduate of political science, linguistics or economics stands at a podium and declares that students should not be sponsored or even given loans to study these subjects, there certainly must be something useless in the education of that person.

Benefit of the doubt

Maybe, to give these self-haters the benefit of the doubt, we can assume that they are being pushed by their donors and bilateral partners. When leaders go on endlessly about only science graduates being the driving engines in “skilling the country” or producing job-creators instead of job-seekers, we are justified in imagining that there is an agenda that is being pushed by self-interested parties.

But we should guard against the temptation to be and remain just acceptors and followers of donor-driven programmes.

We should formulate our priorities and programmes ourselves, in view of the most urgent needs of our societies.

Africa’s number one development need is the rehabilitation of its people. Africa just cannot take off until and unless its individuals attain an acceptable level of self-respect, integrity, open-mindedness, reflection and self-confidence.

This is regardless of whether we are scientists or not. The subjugation, humiliation and dehumanization inflicted on Africans by the traumas of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism have produced a barbarous and monstrous population, full of self-hate and a consequent disregard for life and humanity.

The main educational programmes that can help systematically humanise and rehabilitate the African are to be found — naturally — in the humanities. These disciplines may be linguistic, like language and communication skills, reflective, like history, theology and philosophy, creative, like literature, drama and music, or social scientific, like gender studies and politics.

All these subjects educate us in two absolutely indispensable respects. First, they teach us how to meditate and reflect on ourselves, our society and the world as a whole. Secondly, they enable us to effectively communicate, share and interact appropriately with one another.

A familiar example that I often quote from my own discipline area is the increasing poverty of linguistic communication, especially oral communication, in our society. We are all aware of a rising dumb generation that is neither able nor willing to communicate adequately.

Denying funding and encouragement to the study of language and communication skills is tantamount to abetting the rise and growth of this dumb generation, with dire consequences for our societies.

Dumbness leads to alienation, corruption, violence.

Poor communicators cannot relate properly to themselves or to others. “Money talks”, as they say, when people can’t use their tongues to request services or demand their rights, and if people cannot talk over matters, they will fight over them.

It is the realisation of the need for such skills that drives top flight scientists, like Carl Djaressi, the inventor of the revolutionary contraceptive pill, to gravitate towards the humanities. Such people are often so involved in technical, mechanical and other such activities that they often lack and miss the opportunity to reflect, to meditate on what they are doing and the reasons for it.

This is why the truly great ones eventually gravitate to the humanities, often performing so well in them that they put us humanists to shame, and even endowing them as Djaressi did.

I have mentioned the names of such local scientists before.

The bottom line is that it is scientific to appreciate and respect the humanities. We in the humanities are expected to respect the sciences, and to strive to be more scientific in our endeavours, but the respect should be reciprocal.

And far be it from any intelligent educated person, whether scientist or humanist, to thoughtlessly bleat that either the sciences or the arts are “useless”!

 

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English.