Naija today and yesterday, with respect to Respect for Elders (Yoruba culture)

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

Just kidding. 

It’s a very wintry Stockholm evening indeed, it was not a White Christmas in honour of Wole Soyinka’s first white hairs either, nor did it snow or rain cats and dogs on New Year’s Eve to usher in 2023 with some of the old “Same procedure as last year” - Dinner For One / The 90th Birthday which they show on Swedish TV, every New Year’s Eve. Outside our windows, it was continuous  staccato fireworks 

“Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

I was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,

Bitten by flies, fought.

My house is a decayed house,

And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

The goat coughs at night in the field overhead…”

Thus begins T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion

The antisemitic T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot the antisemite

Literary antisemitism. 

There’s worse. 

Unprintable.

You get a white Aryan supremacist as your examiner, beware…

Yesterday afternoon, after chatting with Baba Kadiri and wishing him A Prosperous New Year, just before 3 pm Stockholm time I told my Better Half to make sure that she didn’t disturb me for the next couple of hours. What’s up ? she asked me, she had just read Ojogbon’s meditation on Nothingness  - nothing to do with the Buddhist term   “Nothingness” or the void  - or the supreme ego  ( “ye are gods” ) and as for yours truly, as an emerging, unambitious, non-achiever I did what I do constantly:  I took umbrage/ refuge/cover under Solomon’s final judgement that “All is vanity”, even as I told her that it was time for some praise-singing of Ojogbon. She remonstrated, “But he has said  - specifically - that he doesn’t want any of that “. It was then that I reassured her that praise-singing is specifically a very intrinsic part of Yoruba culture and that this Event Today was actually in keeping with a time-honoured, age-old, sacred tradition of honouring and celebrating someone like Ojogbon Falola and his awe-inspiring achievements. She told me that she was sure that Ojogbon would relish the praise singing and that praise singing is intrinsic to all great African cultures. 

“All great African cultures”. 

What more could anyone say? 

It being the 1st day of 2023, Sabr got the better of me and anyway I was in no mood to argue with her. 

I thank God that everything went perfectly according to plan.

The setting: Sitting robustly and confidently on his pedestal, our very human and humane Ojogbon was put in a very contemporary historical context by our very philosophical Michael Vickers. Our Ojogbon deserves at least  this one song, from all of us and from Her Majesty: All the Things You Are 

Today,  the 2nd day of 2023, after hearing about Bitter Old Negro Obasanjo’s latest, to some people’s chagrin that Obasanjo has endorsed Peter Obi  - and that was after we all saw him singing Ojogbon Falola’s praises in a personal letter read to the Ojogbon - at the event, check it out: Olusegun Obasanjo praises Professor Toyin Falola - leaving the likes of me with mixed feelings, a bitter taste in my mouth and with a sickening stench still corrupting the air outside my nostrils, I’m left wondering, hopefully not alone in asking, can this Octogenarian Elder Obasanjo known as Pastor Obasanjo be trusted? Can he ever be taken seriously?  Is his praise-singing worth anything? Just a couple of years ago, wasn't he the man who said, “God will never forgive me if I support Atiku for the presidency”?   And what did the turncoat Chameleon do a few minutes later? He started singing Atiku’s praises! Atiku, his former vice-president who he knew so well. Of course, God did not forgive him and that is another reason why his dear soulmate Atiku - two of a kind, birds of the same feather, of course, lost to Brother Buhari. The same Obasanjo who was implicated in the sad demise of the righteous and Honourable Murtala Muhammed. The very same Obasanjo who to this day is being accused of having betrayed Chief MKO Abiola, now raises his black hand from behind, to stab his fellow Yoruba Elder, Bola Ahmed Tinubu who thank God has responded fittingly to the pig farmer's latest diatribe. By the way, I’m an Egba man too, by way of Abeokuta. 

I’d just like to add that I’m impressed, maybe inordinately so, by Peter Obi’s calm response to spoiler Brer Obasanjo’s spiel. 

“The rich seduce the poor and the old are seduced by the young” (To da people: When You Gonna Wake Up?) 

Once upon a time, Wole Soyinka too did not mince his words to Obasanjo. He told him: Just Go! 

Get Up and Go

Listen up: This album Pay the Piper fully covers the Naija situation just before the oncoming 25th February 2023 Presidential election 

I must confess that I’m in a pretty iconoclastic mood, such that if some mongrelized bariba pussycat were to cross my path just now, he or she would only have himself or herself to blame for not being anything like a  “tiger”,  like the one Shakespeare talked about, the one that his English professor at Lafayette never taught him has “ no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger “

Me? I’m thinking of the oldies, the masters and mistresses of yore, all those who have gone before. 

Comparatively speaking, with respect to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, what can even mere vermin not do on an unsullied, solid clean white page or like Bird’s Word when “Everything was silent”  like a clean white sheet of nothing asking to be filled by Romantic poetry mostly composed of some of the sweet nothings characteristic of Italian Petrarchan Sonnets or later imitators such as Sir Philip Sidney ( “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies”) and later, but not too much later, Shakespeare? 

Yesterday, when Gloria in Excelsis Emeagwali, in a flight of fancy or it could have been another fit of  fantasy waxing hyperbolic  - a  characteristic poetic disposition of the traditional Yoruba praise-singer such as yours truly King Sunny Ade, albeit in this instance it was female muse GE  not Kanye West YE elevating Ojogbon Falola to the ranks of Marx and with a mouth sweeter than honey, of course she couldn’t help but raise the Ojogbon above Shakespeare - she said that the bard’s total output could all be squeezed into any slender volume put out by Ojogbon TF  - at which point I was of course thinking about the latter - the aforementioned - WS ( William Shakespeare ) the not-so-learned,  who knew “small Latin, and less Greek” and not the 20th century WS ( Wole Soyinka, D.Litt ) who hopefully will rise to the challenge of dusting up translating King David and his son Solomon’s wisdom poetries into elegant Yoruba - at least to the satisfaction of Baba Kadiri who would then have Hebrew Scriptures being conveyed to him in his own eloquent mother tongue, directly through the agency of human (as opposed to inhuman) translation….

I was thinking fondly of the former ( he who was never awarded the Nobel prize for Literature, not even posthumously), with regard to his tremendous output of that which is highly regarded as Shakespearean Sonnets - and I was thinking about some of them the way that some of the pious rabbis think of Tehillim and what the carnal-minded, misunderstanding formerly polygamic Mormons and some of the morons regard as a highly erotic Shir Hashirim, and I suppose that it’s the same way that they approach Sufi poetry about the Beloved.

I haven't read this over. 

But who am I, who be me to complain? 

[Olasupo Laosebikan]

Never fails to dazzle/teach/laugh/dance....

Our Fadda Cornelius!

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[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Cornelius, the Wise-  you usually

 get me right, but not this time.

I did not say that Falola

was equal to  Marx.

In fact Falola and Marx are dead 

opposites. Marx was in no way

 spell bound by the Judaeo-

Christian religious system. He 

considered that it was all 

propaganda, an opiate for

 the weak, even though he 

himself was of Jewish heritage.

Falola, however, obviously 

holds on to the script and

quotes  Peter, Paul, Matthew 

and counterparts with abandon-

a tendency that would have

been viewed with utter disdain

by Marx. Marx was a producer

 of theories and explanations 

of socio - economic 

reality. Falola is generally a 

consumer of empiricist 

perceptions of the world- 

and is more Braudel than 

Marx - but what  Falola and

Marx have in common is 

gargantuan ambition and 

scale. So, too Braudel,

whose work I basically detest - 

for its overly empiricist/

Eurocentric  undertones, even 

though I admire the scope

 of his project. 

While at ABU I sat down

over many  months, and read page

by page, the fifty three volumes

of Marx that Progress Publishers

brought out at that time.They are

the best books that I have ever 

read. No vindictive, contradictory, 

violent bouts of intimidation 

and scare tactics would be found

in these non- Biblical  tomes. 

Now if I were to read all of the

books of Falola they 

would be probably thrice as much

in volume.So my focus was on the 

colossal scale of the project.

An inordinate dedication to 

the project at hand, and hard core

determination to finish the 

 job, no matter what, bind 

together the three.

The next stage is to read closely

 the collected works and define 

them in historiographical, 

and scholarly terms of originality.

That is a mighty task- 

given the scale of Falola’s work,

but can be done in the tradition

of Bangura’s “Falolaism”-for

someone interested in such a

monumental project.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, January 2, 2023 6:49 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Naija today and yesterday, with respect to Respect for Elders (Yoruba culture)

 

EXTERNAL EMAIL: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click any links or open any attachments unless you trust the sender and know the content is safe.

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Gracious Gloria,

Could you please care to post what you said in that chat - if you dare .Remember what you said about Falola in relation to Gaddafi's Sheikh Speare. 

By the way I thought about you today, in relation to  few articles I read here : https://scheerpost.com/

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

About Shakespeare 

I recall saying that the collected

works of Shakespeare amount to one 

Book.I went to check my audacious

claim since I have a copy of the book

in question - that I had planned to go through 

but never did.  It turned out to be 

one pretty hefty tome of about 

3000 pages.Ok.that amounts to

about two  or three handbooks

 but technically it is still one book.

Speaking about handbooks,

I  find them unaffordable and out

of reach for the average person.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

---

From: Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 3, 2023 8:08 PM
To: Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Cc: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Naija today and yesterday, with respect to Respect for Elders (Yoruba culture)

 

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Glorious Gloria,

What a way to begin our happy new year together in this USA-Africa Dialogue Series, you in Connecticut, USA, yours truly In Stockholm, Sweden, separated by a cold gulf called the Atlantic Ocean, nostalgia, longing, hope, love tap-dancing to and toasting the Africa that we're representing wherever we are, Babatunde Olatunji still beating those Neo-HooDoo drums in our hearts, yours, mine, ours, all of us, even the miscreants., the frogs turned princes, the wannabe accepted & respected as a fully-fledged “bi-racial” princess far from the ancestral plantation in the new world, the fat Buckingham Palace rats who wanna be elevated to teaching the little princes arithmetic, talking, reading and writing grandma's lingo to the other members and non-members of the Commonwealth….

“And the princess and the prince discuss what's real and what is not

It doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden,”

Comparing and contrasting as always, real and true, I like it when you're being funny. As you know, from experience, there are others near your calibre of high intellect who have no sense of humour (huma)  and of course, there are a few others, of low, a really low intellect who nevertheless think they are great and mighty; and of those few others there’s even one who wants to give his Nigerian fans the impression that he’s the mightiest and the greatest even though he can’t even crack an egg, talk less of cracking a joke and if you don’t believe me check the words mostly made of the bile and calumny that he has spilt in his columns, even if on one occasion, just one, he demurs and feigns humility, conceding “intellectual inferiority” to Oga Buddha,  the intellectual Naija giant who is wide awake.

You say  “the collected works of Shakespeare amount to one Book…one pretty hefty tome of about 3000 pages.”

By the same token, I guess that’s what you'd say about the West's if not the world’s most popular and most revered book the foundational Hebrew Bible whose canon closed with Malachi, more than four hundred and thirty years before Jesus appeared and was followed years later by the accretions now known as the “ New” which was added to the Tanakh and included in what Christianity refers to as  the Holy Bible which you connect with the etymology of biblos and which I connect with the Swedish word bibliotek which means library; I suppose we could say that the Bible is a collection of books and therefore or thereby a library 

 BTW, I’m feeling some remorse for having been unhappy with Olusegun Obasanjo - against my deeper and more trustworthy instincts, but how else to understand  Pastor Obasanjo who is still desperate to be of relevance - this time as a kingmaker, even as he is gradually easing out of the scene. He hopes to be around to celebrate a much Better Nigeria, the Nigeria of his dreams, he says, by the time Ojogbon Falola is celebrating his 80th Birthday.

BTW, I wish both of them ( Ojogbon Falola, and Olusegun Obasanjo and myself the ripe old age of 120 - like Moses - and speaking of age, Pastor Obasanjo must surely remember that  Moses became a Prophet when he was 80 ( eighty) years old and led the Children of Israel through their Golgotha wanderings in the wilderness for the next 40 ( years) during which time for their sustenance, the manna fell continuously from heaven and the soles of their shoes did not wear out.

 

More sincerely, in the realm of word magic, even if not quite so realistic, there’s nothing preventing us from wishing us all to live as long as it takes or to live as long as Methuselah to witness the new Nigeria, the new heaven and the new earth.

I have been mostly following  what’s been going on in Merry England  and some reactions to what’s going on in our  lovely Sweden, through the views at 

https://bernardjporter.com/

There’s hope yet. 

Consider: “ The first human ruler mentioned in the Bible was Nimrod. And he rebelled against Jehovah’s rulership. Ever since Nimrod’s day, powerful men have abused their positions of authority. Some 3,000 years ago, King Solomon wrote: “I saw the tears of the oppressed, and there was no one to comfort them. And their oppressors had the power.”—Ecclesiastes 4:1.

Things are no different today. In 2009, a United Nations publication said that bad rulership is increasingly being viewed as “one of the root causes of all evil within our societies.” ( No.2. 2020)