Sorrow, tears and blood: France and its permanent colonies, By Toyin Falola
Cornelius Hamelberg
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAFYPD-SQCeQj10%3DCss2S7HVntBAdGqrcdkEYyZSijetkCOti_w%40mail.gmail.com.
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
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
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2023 6:33 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Sorrow, tears and blood: France and its permanent colonies, By Toyin Falola
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.
Harrow, Kenneth
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2023 3:58:04 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Sorrow, tears and blood: France and its permanent colonies, By Toyin Falola
Toyin Falola
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2023 1:41:17 PM
To: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Toyin Falola
Ken:
France should begin a process of disengagement. If it does not, what happened to Portugal in 1975 will be the scenario: its own citizens will ultimately rebel and form a coalition with Africans to fight its political elite. Macron should go and study 1789, and rethink.
TF
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Date: Tuesday, September 12, 2023 at 6:21 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/IA1PR12MB8287E9D9A1047704F6E7DA2ADAF1A%40IA1PR12MB8287.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2023 7:21 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>; Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Dompere, Kofi Kissi
Without positive action, a colonial territory cannot be truly liberated. It is doomed to creep in its petty pace from day to day towards the attainment of sham independence that turns to dust, independence which is shot through and through with the supreme interest of an alien power.[92, p.104].
The prerequisite of a correct and global strategy to defeat neo-colonialism is the ability to discover and expose the way in which a state becomes neo-colonialist. For although a neo-colonialist state enjoys only sham independence it is to all outward appearance independent, and therefore the very roots of neo-colonialism must be traced back to the struggle for independence in a colony [94, p.98].
Besides, political independence, though worth while in itself, is still only a means to the fuller redemption and realization of a people. When independence has been gained, positive action requires a new orientation away from the sheer destruction of colonialism and toward national reconstruction.
It is indeed in this address to national reconstruction that positive action faces its dangers. The cajolement, the wheedling, the seductions and the Trojan horses of neo-colonialism must be stoutly resisted, for neo-colonialism is a latter-day harp, a monster that entices its victims with sweet music [92, p.105].
KOFITo: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>; Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Sorrow, tears and blood: France and its permanent colonies, By Toyin Falola
Emmanuel Udogu
Beautiful piece. I now understand why Nigeria once banned the teaching of history in Nigeria; it’s too revealing.
While reflecting on the centrality of this essay and Nigeria, my question is: why is it that many Nigerian leaders love London so much? We witnessed this phenomenon during the last elections period. Indeed, President Buhari went to London for a week’s medical checkup. These trips left me scratching my head, and wondering about these politicians’ unpatriotic character.
Recall, if you will, that Britain, unlike France and Portugal, never practiced the policy of assimilation in Anglophone Africa. Yet, some of our political actors seem to love the UK more than Nigeria. Why?
Ike Udogu
Ike Udogu
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/PH0PR06MB9004CF624BC4C9B5585CBE7CF8F1A%40PH0PR06MB9004.namprd06.prod.outlook.com.
Victor Okafor
Harrow, Kenneth
Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2023 1:12:07 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [External] [SOCIAL NETWORK] Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Sorrow, tears and blood: France and its permanent colonies, By Toyin Falola
cornelius...@gmail.com
Re - “Maybe cornelius” etc ,
the old Kabbalistic formula ,
“ And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”
I’d just like to say, and entirely without guile, that in the realm of human affairs, much is possible. For example, after the Nakba, in the midst of the continuous decimation of Palestinians, this kind of heart-breaking, breaking news:
Saudi Arabia moving closer to "normalising" relations with Israel
Maybe, the normalisation will either put a stop to the decimation or will contribute to the normalisation of the systematic genocidal decimation.
My friend Shalom told me that at Stockholm University he was in a maths class with a fellow student who ( apparently Palestinian) on getting to know that his name was Shalom and that he was Jewish, got up to give this sordid example of subtraction to which he Shalom objected vehemently : “You have 10 Israeli settlers and you shoot 9 of them, how many remain?”
Gladly, for the colonial imperialists and missionaries, such was not the case in much of British and French Colonial Africa, give and take a few exceptions such as Bai Bureh vs the British in Sierra Leone (1898), The Algerian War of Independence (1954 -1962), the Mau-Mau in Kenya (1952 -1960)
In reminiscing briefly at the request of Don Harrow, I’d like to start off with the historical fact that Sierra Leone was the first British colony in Africa, and for the longest period, 150 years. When Sierra Leone attained Independence on 27th April, 1961, English remained the official language (my grandparents generation spoke Victorian English, quoted passages from the King James Version of the Bible - and there’s hardly anything that a bloke like Kperogi could have “ taught” any of them). Indeed, the Brits left behind them legacies such as institutions of Western Education, a functioning judiciary comprising learned judges , a Westminster model of parliamentary government, a civil service run mostly as a meritocracy, salaries paid on time, back then 2 Leones was = £1 Sterling (the current rate of exchange is £1 = 25, 760 Leones), there was an efficient and effective police constabulary ,it was very much a law and order society, and in the capital City and the rest of the Western Area, there was an uninterrupted flow of electricity and pipe-borne water supply - in my mind how I yearn for the spirit’s return, and I cry, as time flies…
Another milestone, another first :
King Charles III addresses the French Senate -partly in French !
Colonialism produced the phenomenon known as Anglo-Sierra Leone and the distinct category known as Anglo-Sierra Leonean, with characteristics that would take several chapters to illustrate ( the Anglo-Sierra Leonean in action in various stressful situations (smile. I think that the closest equivalent that I can think of is various “been-to” Nigerians and Ghanaians that I have encountered (There’s Soyinka’s The Interpreters etc and Ayi Kwei Armah's Semi Autobiographical Fragments and Why Are We So Blest ? which testify to a certain type of alienation ,variously diagnosed by Franz Fanon
In 1958 when I started secondary school in Sierra Leone, at the Prince of Wales School, we took first Latin, and then French as a second language, but unlike our counterparts in Dakar in Senegal and Guinea Conakry, we did not begin - in the name of some Frenchy assimilation policy, learning by rote that “Our ancestors were Gauls”; nor did we begin where I had started in Merry England, with William the Conqueror and 1066 - along with classmates Sylvester Abimbola Young, Akintola Wyse (who later on became a historian) we started at 1485, and “The War of the Roses” - our first official taste of African history was in lower six, when we studied “ The British Empire Under Queen Victoria” - which along with all the literature and philosophy that had already gone down, contributed more than slightly in altering our worldview.
From that point of view, I must say that Senegal for example had a few distinct advantages, not exactly in the person and persona of Léopold Sédar Senghor rapturously singing the praises of the Black Woman whilst busily married to a White one, although to his credit he did produce poems such as New York , as indeed, in similar spirit some of the David Diop and Birago Diop poems not to mention Grand Maître Aimé Césaire who must have impacted and is still impacting Senegal, Francophone Africa and the rest of the African Diaspora, everywhere, in a big way. In addition to with regard to Senegal in particular, the persons of Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacke and Cheikh Anta Diop impinging on our consciousness forever.
It’s time to ask Ken what it was like for him to be teaching at the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, Senegal…and in your other place of learning some other kinds of consciousness-raising in the output of e.g. Ferdinand Oyono
To be continued, but at this point, duty calls and garçon cornelius ( in Swedish, “springpojke”) has to go and get some groceries, s'il vous plaît
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2023 12:44 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
cornelius...@gmail.com
I’m afraid this will have to be piecemeal and the holiest day on the calendar is on the horizon. Lots of relevant literature on the scapegoat ,
Sometimes I feel that when we don’t want to take enough responsibility for much of the mess we've been wading through since independence, Kofi Kissi Dompere’s poignant citation of Dr Kwame Nkrumah right here, notwithstanding, I feel that we are proffering excuses such as colonialism and neo-colonialism as a scapegoat
Located on the westernmost edge of the Guinea Coast of Africa which was known as ”The White Man’s Grave” jihadist mosquitoes, malaria, yellow fever, rainy season swamps, sun burns from skin burning tropical temperatures etc, you could say that the climate not permitting , Sierra Leone was never a place for settler colonisation, unlike South Africa, what was then Rhodesia ( now Zambia and Zimbabwe) and Kenya where the climate was more congenial for the Oyibo, but there was a substantial British presence in Sierra Leone in the years before Independence. I asked Pa Google, ”How many Brits lived in Sierra Leone before independence?” but did not get a clear estimate; perhaps the Encyclopaedia Britannica could have done better, but I’d hazard a guess that it must have been over 5,000 at any given year between 1958-1961
1958, Form 1 at P.O.W the first book that we zapped through was Lorna Doone by R.D.Blackmore. On my own I read Cry, the Beloved Country, followed by Mongo Beti’s Mission to Kala ; Camara Laye, Chinua Achebe, Graham Greene, and Robert Wellesley Cole’s most popular Kossoh Town Boy ( 1960) came much much later after finishing all of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens and everything else that I could lay hands on at the British Council Library which was situated right behind my grandfather's house, by Tower Hill; so you see what colonialism did to me: whilst my classmates were busy with biology, chemistry etc I was keeping company with the likes of Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, I think to the delight of some of our English teachers, Englishmen, Von Bradshaw, Chapman ( M.A. Cantab) Michael Brunson ( Lower Six) with whom we did ”Murder in the Cathedral.”
There was also Mr. Holden ( Brit) and Mrs Holden ( Anglo-Indian
At some point a law was passed that only English should be spoken on the school premises. I was the first to break the law, on the very day it was passed. The law was either scrapped a few days later or fell into desuetude
French : We did Le Roi des montagnes with Mr. White ( Canadian) and La Porte Étroite with A.W. Rogers , a Belgian who was also the principal of the School….
To be continued
cornelius...@gmail.com
Correction :Youth and Gaspar Ruiz (Joseph Conrad
To be continued : values etc, religion , morality, impact of the English language on some of African culture, Nigeria
cornelius...@gmail.com
This was the colonial language map of Africa
It’s amazing that after the relatively brief era of colonisation , even though perhaps only as a matter of convenience, once free (like the birds on a tree) post-independent Anglophone and Francophone Africa chose to adopt what would have normally been viewed as the administrative language of oppression, namely English and French ( and German and Portuguese) the language of some of the Western and missionary-educated elites, as their official languages.
Not so surprising when for example we look at what what formed us within the first five years of Western education entirely conducted in English at the Prince of Wales School -.and I have no idea what it's like now over there, but back then in English Literature this is some of what I remember we read officially in school, forms 1-5 in the years 1958-1963 - line by line, aloud in class, not much really :
Lorna Doone - R.D. Blackmore
Youth and Gaspar Ruiz (Joseph Conrad)
South - Sir Ernest Shackleton
The Song of Hiawatha -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Silas Marner - George Eliot
Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
As You Like It - Shakespeare
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Oliver Goldsmith
I wonder what our contemporaries in Merry England, the United States, Singapore, Senegal, Guinea Conakry were reading then. Not surprisingly, I’ve met guys who only attended the Prince of Wales School for two years, enough to qualify them as Robin Crusoe’s Man Friday and they have been talking about it ever since : “I attended the Prince of Wales School!” and “when I was at M.I.T” -the importance of Western Education, “ real Englishman” etc to some earlier colonial subjects…
Well, as Ken said, “The french offered entries into french society for the elite who followed the route of education, as you can read in so many novels, or testimonies. So did the brits.They both took high school grads in their university systems and returned them to elite positions at home.”
During the second world war, there was little fear that citizens of the British and French colonies would have rebelled against their colonial masters, and joined the enemy - Hitler and the Nazis, in accordance with Malcolm X’s definitions of House Negro and Field Negro
Field Negro : “When the master got sick, they prayed that he'd die. If his house caught on fire, they'd pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.”
I.T.A .Wallace-Johnson at the start of WW2
No causal connection:
Graham Greene was a point man in Sierra Leone during WW2
Emmanuel Udogu
My view is that if Nigerian and African leaders are imbued, or if they become imbued, with the spirit of NATIONALISM or PATRIOTISM, we can collectively employ our abundant natural resources to compete effectively with the other continents in our global village. Right now, Africa most likely belongs to the 5th eleven (in a football or soccer parlance) out of about 7 continents. We have suggested ways that Africa can be catapulted to the 1st eleven in "Imagining the United States of Africa: Discourses on the Way Forward.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/324137be-8918-4d0a-bfe4-d6e46c10e336n%40googlegroups.com.
cornelius...@gmail.com
The current situation being what it is, apart from developing our indigenous mother tongues you would have thought that French being taught in Anglophone Africa would be to facilitate communications with Francophone Africa, not just to read Hugo, Balzac, Zola, Proust, Sand, Camus, Flaubert, Descartes, Rousseau and Voltaire in the original.
And there is one Abdul Karim Bangura who speaks eighteen languages and is currently learning hieroglyphics
Some more of what we read (1958-1963) from the great literary canon of the British Literary Empire making some of us to start feeling like Little Lord Fauntleroy
Henry V - Shakespeare (the very first play we read and had to commit to memory, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more”, making histrionic actors of us - like John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson and Sir Laurence Olivier-as he was in Othello. Back then, Henry V made little English warriors of us all.
As for me, I still regret that I did not enlist in the Military
The Lotos-eaters - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge
And on Friday afternoons there was “Club Activities” - the Literary and Debating Society , the School Choir, the Cricket and Athletics Club, the Chess Club, the Drama Club where everybody wanted to play the main role in whatever play we were going to perform at the annual Speech and Prize-Giving Day
Our school was essentially different from all the other secondary schools in the country in that religion was not a subject on the syllabus - so, just the other day when a Gambian Krio guy was flaunting a Biblical quote at me , “Render your hearts and not your garments” followed by an enigmatic smile (he must have thought that what he was saying was common knowledge and assumed that I was also an early product of the CMS Mission, the civilising mission also offering salvation of souls, but in fact I had to go and look up the reference to find out what he had been laughing about and beaming, so pleased with himself
So, the Holy Bible - at home, at church, and at school and I suppose the Holy Quran too, is where they got some of their/ our values from and in my opinion at that time, circa 1963, perhaps because of having read D.H. Lawrence's “Lady Chatterley's Lover” - Joyce’s “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and Chapter 13 of Ulysses - I started at Chapter 13; I found what I understood and knew of idyllic Creoledom and Creole Society - because I lived in the midst of it all, found it to be quite different from the worlds in which those characters moved as we turned the pages of those books, and about Creole Society being prudish - indeed Victorian , judgemental, and that in practice when it came to woman palaver for some of the eminent men it was a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand and not ”a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”
I think that Ike Udogu has hit the nail squarely on the head but it’s most mystifying that the word racism has still not entered the conversation and it has probably not entered the picture because we the Black people are not racists , or so we believe; "tribalists", a big yes, yes we are and yes we can, but who among us is ever going to say like Julius Malema did sometime ago, “ Kill the Boer!” - the boa constrictor yes, but not The Boer. Certainly not. One time, I did not even finish the sentence that I had started .Up at his studio, our parliament hoping for approval began, "We the Black People", when mentor Harvey Cropper cut me off shouting ," Don't come here with your racism!"
The elites of course are and feel privileged. For all their feelings of nationalism, patriotism cultural chauvinism, Nefertiti, black is beautiful etc, Sir Milton Margai was married to an oyibo English woman, Senghor, twice married to women born in France, first Ginette Éboué and then Colette Hubert Senghor. Amor vincit omnia, Ouattara is married with Dominique Ouattara
Kwame Anthony Appiah has touched on this topic in several places, beginning with his “In My Father’s House” ...
Harrow, Kenneth
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2023 12:18:45 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
cornelius...@gmail.com
cornelius...@gmail.com
A telling passage from Derek Walcott’s The Schooner Flight
“Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!
From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road
to when I was a dog on these streets;
if loving these islands must be my load,
out of corruption my soul takes wings,
But they had started to poison my soul
with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,
coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole,
so I leave it for them and their carnival—
I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road.
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,
a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
I’m just a red nigger who loves the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.”
The emphasis from up there, is on “a sound colonial education”
Such was the formal education we received as per the school syllabus and private studies, that up to 1965 I knew the history of Britain from the earliest times to circa 1965 ( and that includes the two world wars) “ Life in Shakespeare's England “etc and the colonial history of India infinitely better than the history of Africa and of Sierra Leone under colonisation. The result? Always feel great emotion when hearing or singing “God save the Queen” now getting used to “God save the King!”
When one looks at the map of Africa after the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 it's still difficult to imagine how some European powers so far, far away were able to subjugate the entire continent of Africa, to keep their colonies in check and to maintain all those colonial borders and not just for another 70 years, because most of the colonial borders are still in place and are being fiercely guarded and patrolled; you lose your compass and just a few steps later you’re in another country, Benin, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and the border guard is asking you if you can spare him a few cigarettes…
Also difficult to imagine ECOWAS getting ready to kick ass in Niger, to score a few goals for France
During the colonial period the army was known as The Royal Sierra Leone Military Force
Until Independence in 1961, the most senior officers in The Royal Regiment in Sierra Leone were British
After Independence promising army recruits, cadets are still being sent to Sandhurst .,these days, to the United States too..after all, without question, the US has a few military bases all over the continent, called AFRICOM :
I guess they would also like to establish a few such military bases in Russia, China, North Korea and Iran…
On the good side : There’s the continuing tight liaison between former British Colonial Africa and what was formerly “The Old Colonial Office” which morphed into “The Ministry of Overseas Development” and is now titled Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office //
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations
Shouldn’t we be working to improve international relations?
A special request a doyen of African film : would like to hear from Professor Harrow about How colonialism is depicted in African films
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
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
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2023 9:25 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [External] [SOCIAL NETWORK] Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Sorrow, tears and blood: France and its permanent colonies, By Toyin Falola
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.
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
cornelius...@gmail.com
Gloria In Excelsis,
Enough is enough. This is libel. For reasons best known to yourself, you are now persecuting Ken.
Why?
Ken never claimed any French exceptionalism ,or that the French were better colonialists.
Where did he ever say such things?
Blessed are the peacemakers. That's my mission
I see Ken as a decent, just, wonderful, humanist and humanitarian among us .When it comes to reason and reasonableness he is also often a stabilising and enlightening force in the forum.
I have this additional vantage point to my total estimation of the mensch that he is 👍
https://www.kenharrow.com/dvarim
Often, when a woman attacks a man so relentlessly, it could be a matter of unrequited love
As the saying goes, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”
But, it’s not that you are sighing to Ken,
“What have I done to you?
That you make everything I dread and everything I fear
Come true?” Joni Mitchell : The Sire of Sorrow (Job's Sad Song)
True : Gloria is passionately committed to whatever ideology she holds dear and in my view, often when it suits her, most unjustly, completely without reason she comes across as if she views our Kenneth as the enemy and as the embodiment or personification of the New World Order, as The US Emperor and French Imperial President’s Ambassador to this forum.
As Marvin Gaye crooned, “We've got to find a way to bring some lovin here today”
For a surety if Ken turned a new leaf and started agreeing with everything Gloria says , things would change for the better. After war cometh peace.
I think that love could easily neutralise her ( i.e. you)
Despite differences on e.g. Ukraine, Russia, China, I should hope that we are on the same side essentially ,when it comes to the value of human life.
This song from 1972 Eddie Kendricks : My People, Hold on is a direct message to you, Gloria:
“Hold on to love, let its light be your guide”
I thought of you last night, wondering how you would handle the snippet of text I have quoted down below. I first heard about some of it from the lips of Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al-Mansour and thought that it was some vile American propaganda aimed at turning Africa and Africans away from Marxism and Communism - he said that Karl Marx had written - in German on the margins of a letter he wrote to Lasalle :”I know that you’re not going to understand this because you are a nigger”
Thought of how you would react to the paragraphs subsequent to
“Marx endorsed many of the prevailing racial stereotypes"