I first read Mungo Park’s journal, Travel’s in the Interior of Africa, as a teenager. I was alarmed by his contempt for “reason”, that underpinning fundamental of human psychology which subordinates the routines of life to the question of survival. It boggled my mind that an actual human being outfitted with the same base instincts I possessed made a conscious decision to swim against the tide of intelligence, consequences be damned.
I could not see any sense, value or utility in someone throwing their lives away in the name of discovering the source of some alien river thousands of kilometres away from their kings and queens – but to the glory of those kings and queens. Then I also read somewhere about how a town in England built a monument to two of its sons who perished trying to conquer Mount Everest. What’s wrong with these people, right?
When Park died at the end, I felt no sympathy for him. Then I reread it in my late 20s. This time, I was sure I understood the difference between the white race and my own, together with the values that make each of them tick and tock.
I once heard an African-American standup comedian summing up this difference thus: “when someone walks into a diner with a gun, the white man will find out what happens there and then and the black man will find out on the news.”
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It was hilarious of course, but that is only because it was good and okay to laugh at yourself sometimes. By then, my eyes had been opened to how all that augurs to the equation of race – so, I realised that I was also “laughing at my own self”, and no one really wants to laugh at themselves. For, why would the white man choose to stand his ground for firsthand knowledge, while the black man is content being spoon-fed secondhand insight through the eye of the white man with whatever type of spin.
Reading through Park’s journal a second time, I came off with an absolutely different take on Mungo Park’s adventures and their implications on the natures of our consciousness. He played and won the game of throats. Because not even the misery of pain, loss or even a little death deterred him enough. He will further the frontiers of Human Civilization, in increasing the body of knowledge available to the world that gave his kind the crown of Darwin. Necessity is the mother of invention, and without the efforts of the Mungo Parks of Human Civilization who made traveling into the abyss and surviving a necessity, there would have been no need for the inventions that revolutionised transportation, medicine, telecommunication and information technologies among others.
By theoretical implication, if humanity did not have this kind, it would probably have not yet invented the wheel, the very bedrock of all human technology. We would probably still live in caves as cavemen. Park’s kind takes it upon itself to actually do; do something no one else has done or wants to do, attend to the wildest of human imaginations, indulge those faint curious whispers of the mind that precede ideation and creation. The Qur’an calls this kind, the “ulul albab” – great minds, if you will.
They do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard. They get off their butts because this is a game of throats, and even though no one wants the moral agony of having to beat down another living and breathing human being into the ground, when the chips are down you absolutely have to choose between yes and no. Like Alfred Tennison puts it, “There is not to reason why, it is but to do and die”. It was not just Park either – there were Columbus, Magellan, Drake, Clapperton, Pizzaro, Livingstone, Barth. The list goes on.
It was not just about crackpot swashbucklers, it was an entire system of values, of thought and of perception. It was a whole way of life. I realise I have listed and can only think of European great men but that is exactly the point – I did not stay back to find out what happened at the diner and now I only know the Euro-centric narrative, because the European risked his life and limb to find out for me.
It was daring for instance, for Newton to contemplate the humdrum reality of an apple falling on his head towards the direction of the centre of the earth and not elsewhere. We take it for granted that what goes up always comes down, but it takes courage to see beyond the bare minimums, question and challenge everything you think you know by investigating and understanding the whys and wherefores.
Every landmark human achievement had bold courage as its silver bullet. Some say that the success of America’s Apollo Programme was driven by America’s vainglorious rivalry against the Soviet Union, not the foregone conclusion of the science behind it. Apparently, even the bigwigs of the scientific community did not actually believe that it would work but that did not stop NASA. Theirs was not to reason why, it was to do and die. Yes, the driving force might have been the ‘before-the-Russians-did-it’ vanity, but even that took boldness. It was an adventure so complex it has not been replicated since then despite the vast technological leaps made since then in computing, rocket propulsion and life support sciences among others. How did they pull it off?
The Hoover Dam built in the 20s in the United States was deemed impractical by contemporary authorities in engineering design – it has since been rated the 8th Wonder of the world. I read that the theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs, was worried about ruining his career by publishing his heretical arguments on quantum mechanics but he did it anyway. He has been vindicated by nothing less than the discovery of the “God Particle” at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and won the Nobel Prize.
The point is, it’s more and we have to open our eyes and wake up. Now. And not as we went to bed last night but as the “ulul-albab” – just like our kin from Europe. We have to understand this, or lose the game of throats.
This is “the” game of throats so we do not want to find out what losing it will mean. To the prehistoric man, the answer to the question of survival was protectionism, isolation and conservative instincts. But that question has been re-asked. And the answer is how the Europeans discovered the world at the Greenwich Meridian, and why we are left at the edge of oblivion.
