The Disillusioned African

PART THREE

153 PART THREE 154 House QK, 196 Cromwell Road, Manchester M17 3CYX, ENGLAND. ear Moungo, Thank you very much for the letter. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I’ve been unable to reply until now. Things are pretty nasty with me, and I don’t really know where to start telling you. It’s clear that I’m not going to stay in this Queendom any longer, not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t. The Department of Philosophy at the Cromwell College has been closed down because of lack of funds. The university has gone bankrupt, so they claim, and because the practice here is for everyone to fend for himself, no one has lifted a finger to bail this renowned institution out of its financial Waterloo. As one African leader put it in the seventies, “When there is a change of government, some heads must roll.” The university has decided to sacrifice philosophy in its moment of crisis. The Department of Philosophy is the first casualty; it must be closed down immediately, while some other departments will follow suit if the situation fails to improve. Strange how people think of nothing to sacrifice first, but philosophy! Even here, D 155 where Hobbes, Locke, Russell and others are said to have worked hard to institute the ideas of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates! Last week I read (The Independent Magazine 18/11/89) of a celebrated Czech dissident philosopher who fled his country to Oxford and “was welcomed as a hero and intellectual star,” but who now “is reduced to giving his philosophy lectures in a Swindon saloon bar!” Why philosophy? Why not engineering, economics, business administration or something else? Just why philosophy? Yet poor Professor Redhead seems to have anticipated it all. What a ruse! The only time he’s behaved philosophically since I’ve known him was when he was told the supposedly sad news. On hearing that the department was to be closed down, he smiled and said: “What becomes of me and my African student?” Apparently, I would have been the Department’s only student for this academic year had the university not mis-speculated at the stock market on Black Monday. Until its closure, Professor Redhead ran this Department single-handedly, without any junior staff or assistant, but for Cathy his obliging secretary. I knew none of this prior to my coming. Do you think I would have flown all the way to this Queendom, had I realised from the beginning that here philosophy is 156 after all so peripheral a discipline? Never! How can one pay money to read philosophy in a country where philosophers are rewarded with a pint of lager? Professor Redhead is like someone who belongs to the past. No wonder he writes the way he does, nothing spectacular; like anyone to whom philosophy is just a pastime, a hobby of some kind, which should only be taken up when the kids have retired to bed and Madam has run short of stories about her day’s activities. As a reply to his question, Professor Redhead was told that the university administration had reached the unanimous decision that I should be parcelled and sent to another college to read philosophy, discipline of the dead and dying. As for the professor, he was asked to go and study for a diploma in computing and marketing, if he wished to remain a university employee. If he didn’t think he was being treated fairly (à l’anglaise), he was free to seek his fortune elsewhere. Without at all threatening to migrate to the USA, become a Soviet mole, or retire to a pub for pint-a-lecture philosophy, Professor Redhead readily consented, and has since gone off to London to start school afresh! It’s miraculous how some people never tire of learning; at his age and level, how does Professor Redhead expect to assimilate what to me sounds like a completely new area of 157 study? Yet, as he joked to me, henceforth when he graduates from the London Centre for Computing and Market Studies, instead of selling ideas as he has done in the past, he would produce microchips and sophisticated commercials, intended to bring about what he termed “The Information Society.” God in heaven knows what he meant, for I was too angered to be bothered. Do you imagine I accepted to be tossed...