The story is told of two Brazilian ladies who travelled on highway in a Volkswagen Beetle and had a breakdown in the middle of nowhere. They parked, got out of the car and rushed to the front to open what they thought was the bonnet. They had the shock of their life when they discovered that the engine was not there.
They decided to wave down passing vehicles so that they could get assistance.
“Help us, please!” they pleaded with a motorist who had pulled over. “We have lost the engine!”
The motorist showed no sign of alarm and walked to the back of the parked vehicle and opened what the ladies had all along thought was the boot. They (the ladies) were surprised to see the engine sitting in that rear compartment. The Good Samaritan fiddled with it and the vehicle roared back into life.
The Volkswagen was designed by German engineers at the prompting of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. They made two deliberate departures from the general designs of vehicles at that time: they fitted the engine at the back, and they did not include a radiator in the engine assembly, relying on air cooling rather than water cooling.
The poor Brazilian ladies must have known that the Volkswagen needed no water coolant but they were certainly not aware that the engine was at the back. If the vehicle had been designed to be cooled by water, the ladies would probably have opened the bonnet a number of times to refill water and would have realized that the engine was at the back of the car.
Many owners of vehicles in Malawi are like the two Brazilian ladies. All they care about is that they must be able to drive and control some gadgets – air-conditioning, music, compasses, among others – to add to their comfort. The vehicle has very much become a status symbol in Malawi. People are proud to be known as owners of some of the latest models of cars. The more expensive the car they drive the higher the prestige value it imparts to the owner. People are content to leave a legacy to the effect that they owned a certain make of car before anybody else did in the country.
But very few spend time to think in terms of how a vehicle is put together. Unlike the Japanese, we are good consumers not imitators. We may, like the Brazilian ladies, not know where the engine or any other part is, but we will be satisfied with owning and driving the cars we import from abroad.
I once attended an international printing exhibition in Germany. A number of European and American companies had their state-of-the art printing equipment on show. I stopped over to admire a flatbed scanner that one exhibitor was showcasing. Suddenly a Japanese young man showed up and stood with a fixed gaze t the scanner for some minutes. He later moved away but left a trail of accusations and counter accusations in the camp of the exhibitor.
“You have to be careful with these Japanese people,” charged one gentleman, “they can easily steal our technology and before we realize it, they will have perfected it.”
I felt sorry for myself because my presence never bothered anybody. If ever there is such a thing as industrial espionage in the manufacturing industry, it is something from which the majority of Africans would be spared. Therefore developers of sophisticated printing equipment would not lose sleep over the presence of an African at their site, as they would over a Japanese dude. We, Africans, have not shown that we can replicate, much less improve, other people’s technology. All we do is consume sophisticated gadgets with gusto, yet we do not know (neither do we care to know) how they are put together. We might not even know where the engine of our car is but still drive around proudly to show everybody that we own a vehicle.
In his hard hitting write up titled “The Capitalist Niger” a patriotic African, Chika Onyeani, writes:
“I am sitting here and looking at my nephew’s great stereo. It was made in Japan by the Aiwa corporation. …… Yes, we can sing, we can dance…… Do we even have a factory owned by a Black person where these musical products are assembled? The answer is a resounding NO!”
This should not be interpreted as scorn; it is a desperate attempt to make us search within ourselves and see where we need to change to awaken the sleeping giant in us.