You are only primitive when your ways of life are simple

By PHILIP OCHIENG

Primitive and civilised are anthropological – not moral – categories. They refer only to a society’s level of technique and, owing to it, the number of ideas it can express. As a rule, primitive societies evince a greater sense of good and evil than civilised ones.

Though the noble savage theory is dead, many historians of ideas assert that the more civilised a society becomes, the deeper it sinks into moral filth. Thus, though the US is history’s most civilised society (in terms of skills), it is also the most crime-infested.

To be sure, primitive means backward. But here backward does not imply immorality, inconsiderateness, inhumanity, ruthlessness – things like that. Here the adjective backward refers only to the simplicity of the techniques a society deploys to come by its collective bio-mental requirements.

Given that definition, which Kenyans can affirm that Kenya is not primitive in contrast to the US – nay, even to South Korea? How many products of networked human hands, brains and vocal organs does Kenya have to import (at astronomical costs) from South Korea, a country which, in l963, was way behind us in earnings and skills?

The answer becomes unavoidable when we consider the etymology of the adjective primitive. It has the same root as the adjective primary, which refers to the first stages of development of biological, mental and social systems.

For instance, our education begins at the primary (first) level and can progress through the secondary (second) and the tertiary (third) to the quarternary (fourth) levels.

Primary – that is why we call primordial all the techno-cultural activities which characterised mankind as soon as it elbowed its way into the evolutionary landscape.

Things are primitive because they are first or primary or primordial. Primeval means “of the earliest age”), coeval of the same age and medieval of the intermediate age – the last one referring to the age between antiquity and today in European history.

It is thus only because an age is primitive that it is also crude. “Primitive energy” was the incredible force with which Gamov’s exploding ylem – the Big Bang – created our universe.

Primitive thus means first, incipient, rudimentary, inchoate and nascent. Because physiological things develop from simple to complex, anything is primitive if it exhibits the simplicity of what Nilo-Coptic called zep tepi, Hebrew abreshith and Greek genesis – the moment of creation.

Firstness then, is the primary definition of primitiveness. That is why, even in our value systems, first things are said to be prime. Thus, among our Cabinet ministers, Raila Odinga was the Prime Minister. Thus we speak of a prime candidate, prime meat, prime meridian, and suchlike — that is to say, the first of their respective kinds.

Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist