The screed issued yesterday by Doris Lessing, on accepting her 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, was the latest example of how Africans provide the backdrop — or the props — for priviledged Europeans and North Americans to fight over their diminished morality. Lessing of course grew up in Africa and is a special breed of European who long wrote about her beloved Zimbabwe with keen perception and wisdom. But who knew that Lessing, at the age of 88, was a closet Neo-Luddite seething with resentment against the youth of London and Manhattan. In her acceptance speech — read aloud by her editor in Stockholm — she complained bitterly about young men and women who have “read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.” She went to blame the Internet for corrupting youthful minds — and then romanticized about the outsized desire of a poor pregnant African for great literature. She went on to imagine how the woman, famished from not eating for three days, nevertheless maintained a lively conversation about great books.
Lessing’s broadside about the youth culture and its infatuations with digital media might be dismissed as the ravings of an old fuddy-dutty, the sort of the thing doyens of High Culture said about the spread of talking movies in the 1930s. Worse, though, Lessing dredges up images of whites propping up their own flagging sense of hard work by invoking African miseries. She made me remember how when I was a child I was told to eat everything on my plate because it would not be fair to the “starving Africans” to waste food. If Lessing truly does not wish to criticize the intellectual development of priviledged youth in wealthy societies, she should make her argument stick on its terms. Using romanticized caricatures of Africans in order to score points in some culture war neither helps her argument nor the ordinary Africans she claims to care about.