Blog author's essays

Writing is my hobby, so here are my essays to hopefully inspire you to write your own.
Essay 5

Ten manageable conditions/diseases that might make an otherwise loving African man abuse or even kill his wife or lover

When a man abuses his partner its not just sick, he might be literally sick and in need of medical attention.

Many relationships in Africa reach a point of no return due to domestic violence and abuse. An otherwise loving man suddenly changes in behavior and becomes violent forcing the woman to flee from the relationship. In some instances the violence ends in death of one or both partners (e.g 'passion killings') .

In some cultures women are encouraged to bear the abuse in silence hoping that it will end at some point and their once charming man will spontaneously return to normal.

It recently occurred to me that violent or abusive behavior could simply be a symptom of various manageable diseases or conditions. I set out to compile a list of some common conditions that could cause even well meaning men to become violent. All these conditions are manageable.


Ten manageable conditions/diseases that might make an otherwise loving African man abuse or even kill his wife or lover

Depression
Anxiety
Diabetes
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)
Bipolar Disorder
Schizophrenia
Low self-esteem




Once an abusive incident has occurred, acknowledge that it was a bad thing and then find a way to get the perpetrator to seek medical attention.Get the relevant medical practitioners to take an extensive history that can help them decide which of the above conditions caused the violence and then devise a suitable treatment plan. Some medical practitioners may be too lazy to help, urge the perpetrator to be very persistent until they get help.


In the minds of many Africans, African men are a symbol of staunch rationality. It is hard to fathom that they can sometimes suffer from conditions that can slightly impair their rationality. Violence and abuse are bad. However in some instances they do not mean the man is a cruel unloving person, they just mean he is a human being with a condition that sometimes affects his rationality and he needs professional help to get better.

Many of the above conditions can be managed by medication and psychotherapy.We often wrongly believe that psychotherapy is for westerners. However, given the high level of domestic abuse, many African men might need to get themselves a personal psychiatrist and/or psychologist in order to show their love to their partners. Relatives can counsel a man who is abusing his wife or lover but they are not professionals and they cannot provide medications for mental conditions that cannot be healed by psychotherapy alone like anxiety and depression.

Do not wait until it is too late to get help for the man or walk out from an otherwise perfect relationship without looking into the above conditions which are manageable.Educate yourself and your loved ones about all these conditions because the information might help you save a relationship or even a life in the future.

Essay 4

This essay explores how corporal punishment is failing Africa

Why there is no room for corporal punishment in the modern day African classroom: How nurturing classroom environments could create people passionate enough to solve Africa’s tough problems

Many Africans would agree with the statement that education is the key to a bright future for Africa. We all know that it will take very well educated people to solve almost all of Africa’s long standing problems like poverty, civil wars, tribalism and rampant corruption.However, we seldom give a thought to how to best impart this education to young Africans so that they can grow up to be independent thinkers who have a deep passion for learning and for applying their learning to find the best solutions for Africa. Many educators know that education will do good for Africa and they genuinely want students to realize this and get serious about education. If students show a lack of seriousness about education, the general view in Africa is that they should be corporally punished in order to get it into their heads that education is their only way out of bad situations. I want to respectfully disagree with this view to show that beating children in order to motivate them to learn does more harm than good for the future of Africa.

Africa’s challenges are enormous; you do not need to be a rocket scientist to know this. It will take a lot of hard work by self-motivated and independent thinking people to find viable and long-term solutions to Africa’s problems. Do students who are forced to learn by the stick become self-motivated and independent thinking individuals? Some may argue that they do, but in general corporal punishment fails to instill a sense of self-motivation in students. If your motivation to study is only to avoid getting beaten it is highly likely that you will do the minimum required to avoid beating and nothing more than that. Students are very good at finding out exactly how little to do in order to avoid getting punished. Instead of focusing their energy on becoming the best learner they can become and rising up to their full potential, students then shift their focus to finding out how to avoid a beating. School is therefore no longer a place to go to get on the road to self-actualization but a place to learn how to please the people with the stick and get out as soon as possible. There is a very little sense that school could be a place to nurture your ideas and help you grow into an independent thinker.

As a result of corporal punishment school becomes an enemy and not an ally. Teachers become authoritarian masters who exist solely to keep you in check, instead of encouraging you to explore the potential of your mind to see what it is capable of. I think it is a sad thing when a student fears their teacher because the potential for a mutually rewarding relationship will never be realized. In an ideal classroom the students should learn from the teacher and the teacher should learn from the students. Students should feel free to respectfully challenge the material the teacher is presenting and ask the teacher to defend the material in order to convince the students that the material is correct. The teacher should welcome this challenge and see it as a clear sign that the students are not just memorizing the information, they are actively engaging with it and trying to tear it apart and put it back together for themselves. Students are not likely to challenge any material presented by a teacher with access to a stick. They are more likely to just soak in the information the way it is, never question it and never fully understand it.
The question we should then ask is what happens when these students who get used to learning just to please authority become adults. Will they have the self-motivation to work tirelessly to find the difficult solutions to Africa’s problems or will they do enough to make people think they are trying and nothing more than that. The truth is that the people are more likely to do the minimum work possible and to have no passion for their jobs yet we have established that it will take a lot of passionate individuals to come up with solutions for Africa. In this sense, using corporal punishment fails to produce the right people needed to get Africa out of trouble. Many African workers, managers, CEO’s and other leaders know what they would need to do to make Africa better but because their education did not make them passionate about pursuing the best solution to a problem, they do just a little of what is required and do not go all the way. It is not their fault. Their education did not prepare them well.

My proposal is that well meaning African educators should find out better ways to motivate students to learn instead of beating them. Corporal punishment is failing Africa. The ideal kind of education for Africans is the one that will make students have a passion for not just finding a solution but for finding the best solution to a problem. Students should be made to love learning to a point where they will be asking the teacher for extra home-work or doing extra work at home on their own and then coming in to class to surprise the teacher with what they have done. Teachers should strive to have a supportive and nurturing relationship with their students instead of having a relationship based on fear. It would be in Africa’s best interest to ban not only corporal punishment but also yelling at students in the African classroom. Many African teachers like to yell at students, which is hardly a nurturing behavior. We as Africans should find out what would make students want to learn on their own because such self-motivated and independent thinking people will become the workers, the managers and even presidents, who will do the hard work required to bring greatness to Africa.


Writing is my hobby, so here are my essays to hopefully inspire you to write your own.

Essay 3 

Here is an essay I wrote about a concrete and simple strategy to bring sustainable development to Africa. Enjoy!

A tangible symbol of African Cooperation

What do the statue of liberty and the Eifel tower have in common other than that they serve as distinguishing landmarks for the places they stand on? These two features serve as a source of pride for the people of the countries they are in. They represent the determination and hard work of their ancestors. They are also a gift for future generations from their ancestors. Young people can stand at the feet of these majestic creations and feel connected to the dreams and aspirations of their forefathers who stood there to create the monuments to inspire them to realize any of their dreams.

For many people, African cooperation seems like an elusive dream. What if Africans came together to create a majestic structure that would be a tangible symbol of what Africans can achieve if we cooperate? This structure could inspire so many Africans to look forward to a positive future and would be a legacy that will impact future generations.

African cities could bid for the structure to be erected in them. The city with the least crime that shows that they could stand to benefit the most from hosting the structure would win. If many cities are tied, a blind draw could be used to pick one city.

People from across Africa could be invited to design a majestic structure that would be breathtaking. Once a design is chosen, architects from across Africa could meet to plan for the structure and to decide which materials to use which will last a long time. A contractor could then be hired to build the structure with the project being funded by various African governments and from donations by rich and regular Africans.

The structure should be interesting enough to be a source of tourist attraction. Africa can then invite the world to see this structure which would prove that African cooperation is not an unattainable dream. Tourists could pay to visit the structure and the funds could be evenly divided amongst African countries every year. If the structure could be very tall, allow businesses like restaurants to be built inside it, and have elevators to take people to the top to see a great view while inside the structure, this would be ideal. For example, the structure could be a giraffe with a really long and strong neck. This would be the tallest statue of an animal anywhere in the world. People could climb up the statue to see through the eyes of the giraffe more than a thousand feet in the sky. This would be a uniquely African experience that tourists could not get anywhere else.

Instead of Westerners giving us aid for nothing, they could come and visit the structure and leave generous donations. The money could go into a highly secure device only to be opened when it is time to divide the money among African countries in order to avoid embezzlement. Some of the funds could go towards maintaining the structure in good condition.

Every African should want to take their children to the structure to show them that with a little cooperation, they can achieve anything. I would definitely swell up with pride and tears if I lived to see anything like this.

If dreaming is a crime, I am guilty. I hope some of the dreams come true some day.

Dithapelo Medupe
Sample Essay 2


Wikipedia only lists Western philosophy and Eastern Philosophy, what about African philosophy? African philosophy is neatly packed into proverbs, no wonder Wikipedia missed it.


Nowhere is African ingenuity more evident than in the African proverbs. Many Africans mistakenly think that African proverbs are merely literary devices. Chinua Achebe famously wrote that, “Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten,” implying that proverbs merely enhance speech making speech more palatable or more pleasant to the listener. While I totally agree with Mr. Achebe that proverbs decorate speech, I would like to argue that African proverbs are much more than enhancers of speech. This seemingly trivial mistake of regarding African proverbs as merely literary devices has not only hindered people from giving African proverbs the respect they truly deserve, it has also prevented the world from realizing how intellectually advanced African societies have been for centuries.

I would like to propose that African proverbs are the ‘pocket sized encyclopedias of African philosophy’ that allowed African philosophy to survive relatively unchanged over generations and generations of oral tradition based societies. Ancient Africans wanted to pass on their wisdom from generation to generation unchanged but they had not discovered writing so they could not write down this wisdom. The only tool they had at their disposal was oral tradition. Could they trust people to faithfully pass down their philosophy without forgetting some of it? It appears that an African intellectual realized that condensing the philosophy into memorable proverbs would improve the chances of the wisdom reaching future generations. Metaphors and similes using animals, trees and other objects which had distinct characteristics in African folk tales ensured that if people forgot the meaning of the proverb they could work out the meaning using logic. Just as western societies write using recognizable characters that convey meaning, these metaphors and similes served as the ‘alphabet’ that anyone who grew up in the society that used the proverbs could ‘read’. In many Tswana folk tales, a jackal is depicted as a cunning animal therefore in proverbs cunning people are metaphorically referred to as jackals. Any attentive Tswana person would immediately realize that a proverb with jackals has something to do with cunning.

In my earlier years I abhorred proverbs because I could not decipher them but as I am getting older I am continually being amazed at how easy it is becoming to decode them without looking up the meanings. They are a very clever code that required ingenuity to create and requires ingenuity to decode. I am very proud that I can ‘read’ many Tswana proverbs now. In the traditional Tswana society the more proverbs you knew and understood the more you were revered. It showed that you were a true intellect, rightfully so, because it is not everyone who can interpret proverbs correctly without assistance.

While it is fascinating that in order to make proverbs memorable and therefore durable Africans had to create a literary code that members of the society learned to decipher as they aged, my main focus is not on the ingenuity of constructing proverbs but rather on the importance of the messages contained in the proverbs. As noted above, I believe that African proverbs contain African philosophy. In the process of coding the proverbs so that they could be interpreted in the case that the meanings were forgotten, the philosophy contained in proverbs inadvertently became veiled, only available to those with the patience to figure out what the proverbs mean.

As I write this, the Wikipedia entry for the word ‘philosophy’ mentions Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy but nothing about African philosophy. It appears that the writers of the Wikipedia entry are not aware of the existence of such a thing as African philosophy. It is simply preposterous to think that people as intellectually advanced as Africans had no philosophy whatsoever but given the historical view of Africa as ‘the dark continent,’ I am not surprised. The onus is on us Africans to unveil our philosophies and explicitly espouse them in order to show the world that our skins may be dark but there is nothing dark about our minds. If we were so intellectually challenged so as to not have a developed philosophy we would not be able to comprehend the philosophies of other societies because our minds would not have the capability to process the concept. Somewhere in the world there are Western scientists trying to teach chimpanzees and gorillas to talk (or maybe even write) in order to show that Westerners can hasten the evolution of any primate given time because supposedly they hastened the evolution of the savage (Rousseau’s favorite word for Africans) Africans when they ‘encountered’ us. God forbid, if these chimpanzees ever say “hello” or write“hi” it will be seen as proof of our inferiority. The truth is that we were as intellectually advanced as the westerners the day they set foot in Africa. Even though we did not read or write before we met the Europeans, we had the capability to do so as evidenced by our ancient sophisticated coding in proverbs as previously articulated. This is why we are able to learn how to read and write while no gorilla or chimpanzee will ever read or write.

The past is the past and I do not want to dwell on it. I want Africans to write volumes and volumes of books about their philosophy in the future for themselves, their future generations and for the skeptics. The philosophy lies neatly condensed in age old proverbs. African scholars should sit down and unpack each proverb, word by word. I believe that in these proverbs we will find our moral philosophy, our political philosophy and other kinds of philosophy. Our African Platos and Rousseaus packed the philosophy into proverbs since they did not have the means to write “The African Republic” or “The African Social Contract”. “The African Republic” and “The African Social Contract” are in the proverbs, waiting to be unzipped and explored.

Here is an example of Tswana political philosophy wrapped up in a proverb.
The proverb says, “Mafoko a kgotla a mantle otlhe”, meaning all the words spoken in the traditional court/parliament are beautiful.

At first glance this seems like a simple statement until you do a little research. In the traditional Tswana society all the men in the village could attend village court meetings to decide on village matters with the chief and his advisers. Almost any man could attend these meetings, from the poorest man with only one goat, one sheep and one cow to the richest man with seven wives and a hundred cows. Before the chief would decide on any matter, he would ask all the men gathered for their opinion. Sometimes, when the poorest man tried to speak, the rich men would tell him to keep quiet because he was not rich enough to say anything. At this point any chief well versed in Tswana philosophy would say, “All the words spoken in the Tswana court are beautiful”. This meant that in the Tswana tradition you value the opinion of the rich man just as much as you value the opinion of the poor man. The chief was telling the rich men that, he was not going to discriminate against anyone because of their social status. The rich do not get some privileges over the poor in the Tswana political or social affairs. All men are equal inside a Tswana court.

People often wonder why Botswana is one of the most peaceful and least corrupt nations in Africa. Is it by chance or just pure luck? I would argue that it is not by chance but it is because of this political philosophy. The rich in a Tswana society have to humble themselves in the presence of the poor. They are traditionally required to respect the poor and the poor are also expected to respect them. This environment of mutual respect across the social classes breeds an environment favorable for peace. The rich feel compassion for the poor and try to help them while not belittling them.

More could be said on how this one proverb shaped the history of the Tswana people and accounts for good leadership in many Tswana communities. I am not a philosopher. Tswana philosophers and historians should expand every proverb in this manner to fill books and books and so should Yoruba, Zulu, Swahili and other African philosophers. I hope people will start doing this soon and maybe Wikipedia will be convinced that African philosophy exists.Expand each proverb and explicitly say what type of philosophy it falls under.

Dithapelo Medupe


The following is an essay I wrote to give people a sense of the kind of the critical thinking that will get you published on this site.



Sample Essay 1

(Title)
Judging African intellect by carefully assessing the hut

(The 250 words or less abstract)

In this essay I argue that the hut, which is seen by many people as backwards, is actually a very clever creation that displays an amazing ability to problem solve by our African ancestors who designed it. Taking into consideration the environmental constraints in most of Africa and the traditional lifestyles of many African groups that used to build huts, the hut was the most well suited building which should lead us to conclude that people of great intellect created huts. I will argue that it would have been illogical for Africans living a traditional life to build permanent brick houses because the African climate did not require brick houses and also because constant droughts required some Africans to live semi-nomadic lives forcing them to abandon their homes from time to time in search of greener pastures. Abandoning huts is much more feasible than abandoning brick houses because huts are biodegradable. Given the rate at which some African groups had to move, if they were building brick houses, it would not have taken long before most of the land was covered by brick houses no one wanted. You should read this essay because after reading it you will never look at a hut quite the same way again and you will appreciate its ingenuity.

(The Essay)

Many Africans are always wondering at the back of their minds whether we are really as intelligent as Asians, Americans and Europeans. They build complex buildings that last for centuries while we traditionally build simple temporary huts that require constant maintenance. It is hard to feel intelligent when our architecture appears to be so basic and has been labeled, along with other aspects of our cultures, as primitive or barbaric or even backwards. Is the hut really as barbaric as we have been led to believe, or is it a great display of our ability to problem-solve? Will a critical analysis of the hut put to rest our fears of possibly being less smart than people from other continents or will it point out holes in our logic? I will argue that the hut became so widespread across Africa because it was a logical and even ingenious solution to the problem of trying to design optimal housing for the African setting.

The first important consideration in trying to design optimal housing is will it protect the inhabitants from the weather and dangerous animals? A well designed hut will withstand at least one season of torrential rain in the tropical rain forest which is the place with the most rainfall in Africa. After a harsh rainy season the walls of huts can be reinforced with more mud and worn out grass can be replaced with freshly cut grass rendering the huts ready for the next rainy season. In addition to protecting people from the extremes of the weather, huts can keep out most dangerous animals like lions and jackals. Since most huts provided optimal safety to their inhabitants we can conclude that our ancestors took adequate protection into consideration when making huts which is what any logical person would do. If huts were flimsy and prone to destruction by animals and the weather while people were actually living in them this would bring the intelligence of our forefathers into question but well maintaned huts are very protective.

The second consideration that any logical person attempting to design optimal housing should make is whether the housing will suit their lifestyle. Some African groups had to move around to find better food sources if a drought occurred, soil fertility declined or water became scarce. These people required a kind of housing that they could easily abandon and huts, which can be destroyed by the weather and termites in a short while if they are abandoned, were perfect. However, some groups lived in fertile areas with good rainfall so they required their houses to be long term and durable. Amazingly, huts were also adequate for these people because as mentioned above, regularly maintaining a hut by replacing grass and reinforcing the mud structure can make it last a long time. In this sense huts were semi-permanent houses that could be customized for various African ways of living, which to me is very brilliant.

The final important consideration is whether the materials required to make the housing are readily available in the environment. Studies on African history have shown that the Bantu speaking groups were once one group with one language before they spread out across Africa. Some historians have even combined all Bantu languages in a lab to come up with the possible original Bantu language they termed ‘ur-Bantu’. We can assume that before these Bantu people split they built one type of hut using the materials available in their area of origin. As the groups split and moved to new environments we find that the groups modified their style of building huts to fit well with their new environment. This shows an amazing ability to adapt to new environments through problem solving and a careful analysis of the new environment. It displays how innovative our ancestors were. They realized that a hut was not a hut just because it was made of certain materials but because it could protect people. They ingeniously experimented with the materials in their new places to determine which would work well as alternatives to the materials from the environment they had left behind when migrating. The diversity of the designs of the Bantu huts is something every African should take pride in.

The fact that huts satisfy all the above criteria for building optimal housing cannot be attributed to chance. Sound logic was used to bring huts into existence and to perfect them. An indirect way to show that huts were the results of sophisticated thought is to consider whether the Africans who invented huts would build huts if they found themselves in a place with a different environment like Britain, for example. Given that the Africans took into consideration the weather and availability of materials in creating huts in Africa we should expect them to do the same in Britain. Taking these things into consideration for Britain the hut is not strong enough to withstand snowy winters and the frequent rain. We would expect the Africans to realize this and then build strong permanent houses using the most available materials like wood, stones and hard baked bricks because the environment would require them to do so. Since there would be no need to move around to find water and food due to good rainfall in Britain, the Africans would not need their homes to be semi-permanent making the hut even more unsuitable. The hut is a perfect solution to the 'multi-variable' equations that faced Africans in Africa. It shows that the Africans who made it would use logic to build suitable housing under different environments. In Britain, these Africans would have built strong houses just like the British. African huts were perfect for the environmental constraints in Africa just as much as British architecture is perfect for the environmental constraints in Britain. It was therefore wrong for the Europeans who first encountered African huts to look down on huts without taking time to think about why Africans made huts.

Perhaps the interesting question to ask is if imaginary Europeans who had never lived in the European climate, which would have required them to build strong permanent houses, found themselves in pre-colonial Africa, what type of housing would they build. How about similarly imaginary Asians who had never been anywhere but Africa? Since no one doubts European intellect or Asian intellect, the answer to this question is very important. If someone can argue convincingly that after taking into consideration the climate in Africa and the available materials, these imaginary European and Asian people would have built something much better than the hut then we could safely conclude that Africans have an inferior intellect. Given that I have shown that, for the pre-colonial African setting, the hut was the most intelligent design, I do not see how anyone could persuasively argue that something more intelligent could have been built. If these imaginary non-Africans decided to build brick houses in Africa given the lifestyle demanded by the conditions in pre-colonial Africa then every time they needed to move to find sustenance they would have had to leave behind unwanted non-degradable houses that could have ended up taking up a lot of space. A permanent house was simply not logical for the African setting in which our ancestors lived.

In conclusion, taking into consideration the environment and the lifestyles of our ancestors who created the hut, the hut was the best possible design. If Europeans and Asians had found themselves in Africa along with our African ancestors, they would have had to build huts or something similar. Anything more complex or permanent would have been illogical. The hut might look simple but the logic behind its creation is far from simple. Based on this line of argument, African intellect is just as good as that of people of European and Asian descent, therefore as Africans we must stop wondering whether we are less intellectually endowed or not. Our ancestors adequately solved the logical problem of constructing optimal housing. If I was a teacher grading how well Africans solved this logical problem, I would give them an A+ for the hut. It is possible my view is biased because I am African after all, but I challenge anyone to come up with a convincing logical argument that proves me wrong and shows that the hut was not the best possible solution for the problem of creating optimal housing in pre-colonial Africa.

Dithapelo Medupe

Please note:
The abstract tells you exactly what the essay is about. You could just read the abstract without the essay and know what I think about the hut. Your abstract must do the same.

My essay is just a sample. I used logical analysis in the essay which is a form of critical thinking but feel free to use other types of critical thinking like assessing the clarity, credibility and/or relevance of an aspect of your topic of choice.

Before submitting your essay,please ask yourself these two questions:
1) Does my essay show original critical thinking about the subject matter or am I just rehashing widely known ideas that have been said already by other people?
2) Is my thesis clear and convincingly supported?

If you can honestly answer yes to these two questions, then your essay stands a chance of getting posted

Good luck

1 comment:

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