•"The fire of lightning: is our society mature enough to relate the natural occurrence of electricity with its deliberate, purposeful generation and distribution?"
The answer to the question with which I ended last week’s column is both very simple and profoundly complex. The question is: why does a phone call to China go to the particular phone number called and not to any of the other billion-plus cellphone users in that country? Before briefly dealing with both the simple and the complex answers to this question, I should perhaps reveal here the fact that it belongs to an order of questions known as “trick questions”. How is this the case? Well, by using China, the most populous nation in the world as our example, I had deliberately focused reactions to the question on the weight of numbers, that is to say on a country and a world in which the users of cell or mobile phones are legion. However, in reality, the radio frequencies upon which China’s 1.5 billion (and the world’s 4.8 billion) cellphone users are organized and grouped are limited. In other words, the networks and the providers that make the whole vast, global phenomenon of cellphone usage work are very, very limited. And that’s because the radio frequencies are limited and shared resources rooted in phenomena and processes that modern science and technology have mastered and converted to our use as a species, a global or planetary community.
Here’s another way of putting this observation across: the number of cellphone users in the world is truly awesome and moreover, it is still growing; however, instead of fragmentation and isolation, connectedness and community are the hallmarks of cellphone usage in our world. And that’s thanks largely to the fact that the laws or principles through which sounds and images can be converted to electromagnetic signals and sent and received throughout the world are limited, known values. From this observation, we can deduce the simple answer to our question: every cellphone and its user is customized to send and receive the electrical signals to which our voices (and images or pictures) are converted when we use the gadget. One mark of the customization is the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card. Another is the phone number. In other words, it doesn’t matter how many cellphone users in the world there are as long as we recognize that every single one of them is indeed customized. But that is not the end of the story for we also have to deal with the more complex answer to our billion-users question.
From the bulky telephones of the past to the small, portable cellphones of the present, and from landline phones to wireless, mobile phones that you can take everywhere with you, the modern technology of communications has taken extraordinarily amazing strides. If we take the conversion of human and natural sounds to electrical signals as the starting point, the real wonder is that as this phenomenon or operation has been brought, at least potentially, within the reach of every human being on our planet, the products or gadgets have become smaller and smaller, while at the same time fulfilling more multiple and complex tasks and functions. No landlines, no direct connections and the sending and receiving agents of the basic, foundational electromagnetic signals get smaller and smaller and yet, yet the phones get smarter and smarter! At a crucial stage of the development or unfolding of this fascinating process, communications satellites enter the picture, bringing the universe outside our terrestrial home on earth into a significant part of the epic story.
I perhaps digress. The book that I have in mind and that am writing about in this series is not about the marvels of modern telecommunications technology, though of course it will not avoid that topic. No, what is central to my projected book is the fact that every single one of the marvels of the i-phones and smartphones of the new millennium is based on knowledges and ideas that are testable and are, indeed, tested. Moreover, any literate person in the world can, with some application, educate him or herself on the knowledges and beliefs from which smartphone gadgetry operates. As a matter of fact, this was what I tried to do with Monday Electrician in our conversation on Thursday last week, the conversation that led to this series of articles in my column: I tried to spark his curiosity in the rudiments of scientific knowledge about the universe in general and, in particular, about electricity as a phenomenal entity. From the account that I gave of that conversation in this column last week, I failed woefully in that endeavor.
This was largely due to the fact that Monday Electrician seems unaware of – or resistant to – the order of knowledges and beliefs central to modern science and technology – even though he is a trained electrician who doubles as a contractor in the business of installing electrical circuitry in dwelling houses and factories. He found the idea of he and I being on a moving planet in our infinitesimally small corner of it in Oke-Bola, Ibadan, so absurd as to be beneath his commentary. And beyond the learnt, practical and repeated things that he knew about electricity, he had little interest in it as a phenomenal entity that does far many more things than lighting up houses and powering labour-saving appliances. He absolutely could not wrap his mind around the idea that sounds and images are converted to and from electrical signals during a phone conversation. Indeed, to the extent that it can be said that my “failure” with Monday Electrician was what instigated my desire to write this series as well as the book that I have in mind, to that extent is the “failure” the motive force of this discussion. Permit me to briefly engage this observation.
The careful reader of this piece would, hopefully, have noted that I place a bracket around the word, “failure” in the present discussion. This is because “failure” is perhaps not the right word to use. For how could the appropriate word be “failure” when there was not the slightest chance of success in the first place? One proof of this assertion is the fact that Monday Electrician was willing to go so far as to claim that a disbelief in witches and witchcraft was a white man’s duplicitous proposition for which any true Nigerian, any true African should show nothing but disdain. To this, add the fact that he vigorously asserted that “we” (Africans) have no obligation to prove what we “know” to them (the Western world)! They have their “science” and we have ours, that is all!
One of the most shocking claims of Monday Electrician in our conversation was an assertion that our Babalawos, Dibias, Marabouts or Sangomas traditionally did not deal in testable and tested knowledges and propositions. Herbs, the bark or sap of trees, the claw or tooth of a leopard, the ground powder of the testicles of a tiger and many more things beside these, all have their “names”, their “essences”, Monday Electrician proudly proclaimed! This of course is total nonsense, as anyone knows that has ever met and conversed with a herbalist that is not a charlatan.
I place brackets around “failure”, compatriots, because I suspect that there are many Monday Electricians out there, hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps tens of millions, including many who not only have university education, but actually teach in our tertiary educational institutions. If this is the case, it would be very mistaken, very wrongheaded to think that Monday Electrician or any of the hundreds of thousands of people like him out there can be singly and separately “corrected”. For we really are talking of the conditioned and determinate creation in our region of the world of widespread unawareness or lack of curiosity about the scientific and technological bases of modernity. Our agbero or kalo-kalo mode of capitalism is content to import and not produce any of the commodities and gadgets of up-to-the-latest-minute modernity, leaving both the masses of the citizenry and the political and educational elites largely ignorant of or indifferent to the knowledge bases of the “modernity” that we so enthusiastically and massively consume.
In a way, modernity is only a symptom, and not the root cause of the problems and crises I am discussing in this series. The struggle to attain and preserve rational, testable knowledges of the universe that we live in predates modernity. Indeed, long before the successful institutional advent of science to pride of place among humanity’s knowledge bases, all human social organizations had struggled to obtain rational, experimental knowledges of the world and its physical and environmental coordinates. What modernity did was to tremendously intensify, expand and shorten processes of the widespread distribution of rational, testable and experimental knowledges that had taken an aeon of time to consummate – but only in some societies and nations of the world and not in others. Ours happens to be one of the regions and nations of the world where the pace has either slowed down considerably or has stopped altogether. Hence Monday Electrician’s severely limited knowledge of electricity as a phenomenal force and hence our country’s longstanding and presumably insoluble problems with the generation and distribution of electrical power.
Ina monamona – the “fire of lightning”. That is the term in wide usage for electricity in the Yoruba language. Lightning is only one of the phenomenal instantiations of electricity, one that is naturally occurrent. Does this exclude modes of deliberately and purposively generated and distributed electrical energy? Frankly, I do not know. In private conversations between us, my friend, Femi Osofisan, has long argued that legends of Sango’s affinity with lightning and thunder reveal or encode the theocratic king’s “experiments” with electrical energy, experiments that ended in a tragic accident that destroyed the god-king. This argument seems to me apocryphal, the sort of after the event or the fact rationalizations that followers or devotees of an anthropomorphic god or avatar periodically provide to humanize and rehabilitate their hero or champion. Nonetheless, I must admit that it is plausible: experimental, testable knowledges did not start with the historic advent of science but had always existed in nearly all human cultures and civilizations.
I had planned to conclude the series with this week’s piece. But there remain some more issues to discuss. The astute or careful reader would have noticed that so far, we have hardly talked about untested and untestable knowledges and beliefs. Are they all of one and the same kind? Are human beings and societies divided into those with and those without untested and untestable knowledges and beliefs? What is the mix of these orders or categories of knowledge and belief in our own part of the world? And Monday Electrician, what is it about him and people like him that make them the ideal readers of the book that I have in mind to write? These and other similar questions will provide the starting point in next week’s conclusion to the series.
- Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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