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“The search for knowledge should not be synonymous with increasing alienation and loneliness. In our particular circumstances it is so. It has been planned that way. Knowledge about the world we live in is the property of the alien because the alien has conquered us. The thirst for knowledge therefore becomes perverted into the desire for getting close to the alien, getting out of the self. Result: loneliness as a way of life. This loneliness is an inevitable part of the assimilationist African’s life within the imperial structure. Because of the way information is distributed in the total structure – high information in the center, low information on the peripheries – overall clarity is potentially possible only from the central heights. The structures in the peripheral areas are meant to dispense low, negative or mystificatory information. The choices are clear. Those who stay in the peripheral areas intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, totally, are not lonely. They are in touch with home, not cut off. The price they pay for not being lonely, however, is that they suffer the crudest forms of manipulation, mystification, planned ignorance. Those who shift from the periphery to the center can hope to escape some of these cruder forms of manipulation. But the price they pay is loneliness, separation from home, the constant necessity to adjust to what is alien, eccentric to the self. All this is in the present structuring of the machinery for acquiring knowledge, not in the essential nature of the learning process itself.”
Ayi Kwei Armah
