I think Ali is being “clever” like the proverbial hare.

Honestly, we need to stop looking at everything the West, including their vile practices, as gospel truth. Taking on interns, with the sole intention of getting unpaid labour, even if it is the "sneaker network" that gets you coffee is despicable. The intern, no matter how enterprising, will be used and dumped.

"Why would a rational employer - whose goal is to maximise margins (within a very difficult / hostile business environment) - be interested in paying an experienced ex-intern, when they can simply get a fresh unpaid intern for free, train them within hours or a couple of days, even as other unpaids hold the temporary slack? This where we are headed - if not there already. The youth are "working" but they are still technically unemployed because they are not earning a living."

If getting “ahead" means bowing down to the "scacity mentality” idol and the stepping on people is one’s business success mantra, may that business perish and it’s “rational” employer perish.

Please note, we are not talking about the graduate who feels entitled to get paid internship, no. Those kinds of people will always be weeded out by the system. Their attitude alone is their undoing. We are talking about the ones with little to no social advantage of networks of family or friends who can supoort unpaid internship.

This is where our Africans, “Utu ni watu”, “Ubuntu” and “I am because we are” comes in.

Best Regards,

Jimmy Gitonga

Web Software Design and Development 

LinkedIn: Jimmy Gitonga | Twitter: @Afrowave

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Web: afroshok.com

On 3 Apr 2019, at 3:15 PM, kictanet-request@lists.kictanet.or.ke wrote:

Many thanks for your thoughts Ali.?
Indeed, words in most languages can have multiple, totally unrelated, meanings (e.g. "saw" the noun/hardware, "saw" the verb/cutting, and "saw" the past tense of "see"... or in Swahili "paka" the cat vs "paka" as in to paint) so in this case the appropriate focus would be on the vocation-oriented definition of "intern" (though I can see material for contextual innuendo in the two meanings hehe).

Some well known intellectuals on twitter are getting stuck on written definitions and relying on logical fallacies which is not intellectually sincere. Are definitions cast in stone? Can they have a shelf-life? Don't they change with time??

Fact: Definitions only document meaning as it evolves over time; they are not the source of meaning. The general rule of thumb is that Informality precedes formality.
Thankfully the etymology (origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning) of "intern" shows that the meaning and usage, in professional context, has indeed been evolving.

According to an online source (link below), the term is believed to have been documented as a noun circa 1879 for the teaching and medical professions, and then extended to other profesions around 1963. It was formally recognize as a verb circa 1933 within the medical field.
Prior to that, and going back as far as medieval times (in western cultures), people learned through apprenticeships and although you did not get "paid" in the narrow sense of the term, your boss provided you with free *accommodation* and *food*. Such contextual nuances around the apprenticeship system are (conveniently) ignored by advocates of unpaid internships.

In African culture (link below), apprenticeship was a very POSITIVE community experience. People had EMPATHY for one another and collective gains were favored over individual gains. Not caring whether someone had food or a safe place to sleep was unheard of. Lets face it, cold blooded, greed motivated exploitation of the youth within a community is an alien concept in most (if not all) of pre-colonial Africa.?

In traditional China and (I believe) India the apprentice is technically "adopted" and the relationship is parent - child, but in vocational context. There is mutual love, concern and caring even if the apprentice is treated harshly. It never crosses over to predation.

We are Africans. Unless we want to give up our core identity, the quest for meaning in everything we do (and the policies we support) has to be done within the context of our Africanness. Even as we adopt poitive aspects of foreign cultures in a cosmopolitan world, we can strive to retain the best aspects of our indigenous cultures. For example if the industrialized world had emulated positive African philosophies like simple contented living in harmony with nature, we would not have existential problems like climate change, WMDs, world wars, economic inequality and so on.?

Imported meanings are not rules cast in stone. We can, if we want to, define our own modern, African, definition of the word "intern" in a way that that protects our youth from abuse and exploitation.?

The youth are our children and our future. Let us not raise a generation of bitter, angry and resentful people. It's not a smart thing to do.
Thanks & have a great day!

Patrick.
Patrick A. M. Maina[Cross Domain Innovator | Independent Public Policy Analyst - Indigenous Innovations]
Links:
1. Etymology of the word "intern":https://www.etymonline.com/word/intern

2. Traditional apprenticeship in Africahttps://www.academia.edu/11682853/Revisiting_the_role_of_traditional_apprenticeship_in_traditional_Africa_vocational_pedagogy

3. Weird history of internshiphttps://www.businessinsider.com/the-weird-history-of-how-internships-came-to-be-2016-

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