I first encountered the phrase “native intelligence” in law school. We were studying Law and Development, a discipline that asks why some societies prosper while others stagnate despite having constitutions, laws, educated elites, and abundant resources. On our lecturer’s very first day, he gave us a single question, not to test our knowledge of law, but our judgment. As he returned our scripts, he smiled sarcastically and remarked, “I wanted to know the nature of native intelligence I was dealing with before we go any further.”
We all laughed. Years later, I no longer think it was a joke.
What exactly is native intelligence?
Is it common sense? Practical wisdom? Instinct? Or is it something deeper,the ability to recognize what is obvious before education, ideology, titles, and ego complicate it? The world celebrates intelligence. We measure it through grades, degrees, titles, and professional success. Yet every day, highly educated people make astonishingly poor decisions.
An engineer designs a road that floods after the first rain, while an elderly villager quietly says, “Water has always passed there.” A family of graduates cannot resolve a dispute until an eighty-year-old grandmother speaks. The first well-documented successful Caesarean section observed by European physicians in the Kingdom of Bunyoro in 1879 was performed by indigenous practitioners using techniques that astonished contemporary medicine. Was that simply medical knowledge,or native intelligence refined over generations?
Perhaps the greatest misconception of our age is believing intelligence and wisdom are the same thing.They are not. Knowledge tells you a tomato is a fruit. Native intelligence tells you not to put it in a fruit salad. Law tells you what is legal. Native intelligence asks whether it is just. Economics measures growth. Native intelligence asks whether people are actually living better.
Look around, we still fill concert halls and stadiums with music written forty or fifty years ago. Soul, blues, classical music, and timeless African compositions still sound as though they were produced yesterday. Yet thousands of songs released today disappear before the next rainy season. Many who proudly call themselves musicians cannot even explain the genre of the music they create. What did previous generations possess that we are quietly losing?
Recently, I came across a lawyer celebrating his country’s recognition of the doctrine of lifting the corporate veil, a principle rooted in the landmark English case of Salomon v A. Salomon & Co. Ltd decided in 1897. More than a century later, lawyers still invoke it with almost religious reverence. But native intelligence asks a simpler question. A company cannot wake up and decide to commit fraud. A company cannot think. A company cannot sign a document without a human hand. Human beings create companies. Human beings run them. Human beings misuse them.
So why are we philosophically obsessed with proving that an artificial legal person should occasionally be ignored before we hold the actual people accountable? Does that really make sense? Perhaps the principle remains legally sound. But perhaps the greater danger is intellectual. Credit rightly belongs to the judges who developed those principles. But what principles are today’s judges creating that lawyers a hundred years from now will still proudly cite?
David F. K. Mpanga’s The Politics of Common Sense suggests that many of the problems we call political are, in truth, failures of ordinary judgment. Dr. Jim Spire Ssentongo’s What Died When We Lived poses an equally haunting question: as we celebrate progress, what essential human qualities quietly disappear? Could native intelligence be one of them?
We know corruption destroys nations, yet we normalize it.We know wars impoverish generations, yet leaders still march toward them. These are not failures of information. They are failures of judgment.+
Universities teach law, medicine, engineering, economics, and now artificial intelligence. But where is the faculty of judgment? Where is the degree in recognizing the obvious? Perhaps civilization does not need another technological revolution, It does not need faster computers, smarter algorithms, or bigger universities nearly as much as it needs a return to first principles, the quiet discipline of seeing what is obvious before complexity hides it.
James Kaliisa is a tech entrepreneur, Co-Founder & CEO Nexus Inc.
