--
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/D1ED1745-5DE1-46B1-84BF-B495F29B8C0B%40austin.utexas.edu.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPq-FWuBRxkf05YWEC_-YujoTc9woX9T6B4gqf8ugL6kKR%3D0oQ%40mail.gmail.com.
Joe:
Let me start by expressing my condolence to you on the loss of our colleagues, including the recent death of Sylvanus Spencer, the Head of Department. His contributions to “freedom of expression,” as applied to politics and health are significant. A small but dedicated historians—as IB notes—is impressive. And I also thank our great friend, Professor Peter Dumbuya, who packed his luggage from Georgia and returned to Sierra Leone. Of course, the world knows that Professor Alusine Jalloh is my friend of over three decades. We also thank him for packing his luggage from Texas to return home. He is now the Head of Department.
This debate is coming at the right time when we just obtained copyright release on three of the books written by these great historians. Pan-African University Press will be reprinting them in 2022.
Our efforts is to meet some of the challenges raised by IB. The University and the Dept. are looking for places in Europe and the US to train a new generation of PhD students (my private view on this is well known as to the outcome of this strategy as they wont return back home). They are looking for support to train those on the ground. We have to thank the Blydens who recently donated a sum of $3,000.
Let the productive arguments continue.
Thank you.
TF
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/A786BBCF-C873-4FF2-A8FE-B9C455E6CB9B%40gmail.com.
Please be cautious: **External Email**
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/PH0PR06MB72381ADB529053A8E162CC7EF8EB9%40PH0PR06MB7238.namprd06.prod.outlook.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPq-FWuBRxkf05YWEC_-YujoTc9woX9T6B4gqf8ugL6kKR%3D0oQ%40mail.gmail.com.
|
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/404565316.1586936.1627609851211%40mail.yahoo.com.
|
Biko:
IB can defend himself, but certain things are not correct in the responses to him.
I think I see two sub-texts in his piece:
I think he went too far in his Sierra Leone history only for Sierra Leoneans, but he will be doing us a favor by explaining why he said this.
TF
From:
'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday, July 29, 2021 at 11:12 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Nation Without Historians: Could this be the Future of the Sierra Leonean Past(s)?
This is a good start for an intellectual history of Sierra Leone, something similar should be done for every state in Africa. Comrade IBA (malaria in Igbo, is he suffering from archive fever?) should be commended for his efforts but he should be encouraged to drop the ungrammatical use of 'an' for 'an historian' and other jarring deployments of silent consonants with 'an' when 'a' would terrorize the ears less; for that was what we learned in elementary school, contrary to American colloquialism.
Moses was right in pointing out that IBA should go beyond nationalist history and class struggles to also explore the history of gender and race in the social structuration of that colony and beyond. Farouk is right in dismissing his claim that only Sierra Leoneans can write the history of their country. Marx was not a US or French citizen but offered some of the best histories of the civil wars in France and the US. CLR James was not Haitian but his Magnum Opus is the best history of the revolution there. Nkrumah wrote a neglected classic on Congo; Diop was an expert on Egyptology; and the first book of Azikiwe was on the history of Liberia.
Without holding brief for the organic intellectual, IBA who knows the specificity of ethnicity formation in a colonial outpost designed as a melting pot of creolization and kriolization, I want to defend Marxism against the charge of absolute obsession with class struggles in ignorance of other types of struggles raised by both Farouk and Moses. The struggle against apartheid, for e.g., shows that comrades were aware that it was not only the class struggle that was involved and Marx also recognized race as a material condition under which people make history without choosing the conditions. There are dozens of references to race, black people, Africans, even kaffir and nigger, slaves, women, Scottish peasants, etc in Das Kapital, as I pointed out in my essay for ROAPE.
Lenin was a keen supporter of oppressed and colonized nationalities and he appointed Stalin as the first Commissar for nationalities while writing the right to secession by oppressed nationalities into the USSR constitution to allow Finland to go and later allow the republic to wither away without embarking on a civil war. Mao warned the majority in China not to become chauvinistic because the minorities occupy the majority of the land mass. And Gramsci recognized the problem of southernism in Italy where his native Sadonia was treated as a conquered colony by superiorist northern Italians who saw them as the 'born criminals' of Lombroso.
Stuart Hall synthesized all these in 'Race, and articulation, in societies structured in dominance' based on a study of Capitalism and Cheap Labor-Power in South Africa by Wolpe. Race-class-gender relations are different but not separate in experience and should not be separated in analysis. That was my thesis on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System. Those who neglect this articulation or intersectionality are dubbed crude economic determinists, or western feminists, or race men, but not Marxists. In the US, Critical Race Theory is the perspective that captures this intersectionality but the race in the title misleads conservative culture warriors into believing that it is only about race.
|
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/404565316.1586936.1627609851211%40mail.yahoo.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPq-FWuPcOMQ%3Dq7DiQpWBUbMz6BjuimTWU_3gnfWHaOeNDvdmQ%40mail.gmail.com.
Biko:
IB can defend himself, but certain things are not correct in the responses to him.
- I have known him since 1990, and I see him as a detribalized person. He has a grasp of those ethnicities.
- I am not sure he is opposed to the use of identities as organizing framework but he is opposed to “tribalism.”
- None should lecture IB on class analysis, intersectionality, etc. This is his zone.
- He has been part of the gender movement for decades. You may not know his wife, prominent feminist scholar.
I think I see two sub-texts in his piece:
- In post-war Sierra Leone, should the organization of narratives be along ethnic lines?
- Who voice is dominating the narrative?
I think he went too far in his Sierra Leone history only for Sierra Leoneans, but he will be doing us a favor by explaining why he said this.
TF
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday, July 29, 2021 at 11:12 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Nation Without Historians: Could this be the Future of the Sierra Leonean Past(s)?
This is a good start for an intellectual history of Sierra Leone, something similar should be done for every state in Africa. Comrade IBA (malaria in Igbo, is he suffering from archive fever?) should be commended for his efforts but he should be encouraged to drop the ungrammatical use of 'an' for 'an historian' and other jarring deployments of silent consonants with 'an' when 'a' would terrorize the ears less; for that was what we learned in elementary school, contrary to American colloquialism.
Moses was right in pointing out that IBA should go beyond nationalist history and class struggles to also explore the history of gender and race in the social structuration of that colony and beyond. Farouk is right in dismissing his claim that only Sierra Leoneans can write the history of their country. Marx was not a US or French citizen but offered some of the best histories of the civil wars in France and the US. CLR James was not Haitian but his Magnum Opus is the best history of the revolution there. Nkrumah wrote a neglected classic on Congo; Diop was an expert on Egyptology; and the first book of Azikiwe was on the history of Liberia.
Without holding brief for the organic intellectual, IBA who knows the specificity of ethnicity formation in a colonial outpost designed as a melting pot of creolization and kriolization, I want to defend Marxism against the charge of absolute obsession with class struggles in ignorance of other types of struggles raised by both Farouk and Moses. The struggle against apartheid, for e.g., shows that comrades were aware that it was not only the class struggle that was involved and Marx also recognized race as a material condition under which people make history without choosing the conditions. There are dozens of references to race, black people, Africans, even kaffir and nigger, slaves, women, Scottish peasants, etc in Das Kapital, as I pointed out in my essay for ROAPE.
Lenin was a keen supporter of oppressed and colonized nationalities and he appointed Stalin as the first Commissar for nationalities while writing the right to secession by oppressed nationalities into the USSR constitution to allow Finland to go and later allow the republic to wither away without embarking on a civil war. Mao warned the majority in China not to become chauvinistic because the minorities occupy the majority of the land mass. And Gramsci recognized the problem of southernism in Italy where his native Sadonia was treated as a conquered colony by superiorist northern Italians who saw them as the 'born criminals' of Lombroso.
Stuart Hall synthesized all these in 'Race, and articulation, in societies structured in dominance' based on a study of Capitalism and Cheap Labor-Power in South Africa by Wolpe. Race-class-gender relations are different but not separate in experience and should not be separated in analysis. That was my thesis on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System. Those who neglect this articulation or intersectionality are dubbed crude economic determinists, or western feminists, or race men, but not Marxists. In the US, Critical Race Theory is the perspective that captures this intersectionality but the race in the title misleads conservative culture warriors into believing that it is only about race.
<image002[48].png>
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/SN7PR06MB724793F1083C1C507E164E64F8EC9%40SN7PR06MB7247.namprd06.prod.outlook.com.
Moses:
IB has to defend himself. I have been reading his work since the 1980s. We have our small conflicts. IB understands ethnicities. No question about this. He has worked on them, and I must confess he has sought my advice on few occasions on words, meanings, idioms. He is not happy with some interpretations. I will be a guest of his Dept. once we agree to a date, and may be I should just focus my lecture on Ethnicities and African Studies.
TF
<image002[48].png>
Error! Filename not specified.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/94F5991B-6907-4C0D-B710-A126AC1379C8%40gmail.com.
I've just read history professor Ibrahim Abdullah's very important posting which was posted four days ago. I finished reading it about five minutes ago, in very accurate historical time, in the Stockholm time zone on 2/8 /2021 at circa 15.45 p.m. and in these days of uncertainty about our individual, our national, and our species' (all tribes, all stripes, all ethnicities) collective endangered futures, we are living in the Chinese year of the Ox alright, but I don't know if all of us are consciously living in Anno Domini ( A.D.), A.H (After the Hijra) as today is also the 24th of Av in the year 5781 according to the Hebrew Calendar. Of course, in the near future the various calendars, Gregorian and so forth could be adjusted to a new time reckoning, time which waits for no one could begin to be reckoned in terms of before and after the deadly Corona pandemic ( B.C and A.C respectively). Hopefully, AC (After the Corona) is the time-frame that will encompass, embrace and coincide with the return of Jesus Christ to this planet, after which, time will be reckoned in terms of After Christ ( A.C:) - a very nice, thrilling, spiritually uplifting and soul-fulfilling eschatological conclusion to B.C. ( Before Christ) especially for the disciples of Nietzsche who infamously declared, “Gott ist tot “ / “God is Dead”, Jesus returning long after Fukuyama's seminal “The End of History and the Last Man”, the kind of divine intervention awaited through the return of the holy third person of the Christian Godhead, the Creator of the universe in the flesh should mean total salvation ( from the raging hellfire) and the end of history as mankind has hitherto known it, as the light of Torah gets all set to radiate/ shine, illuminate (in all directions) from the Holy City of Jerusalem, the Almighty's eternal Capital here on earth, and if the pastors are right, futuristically speaking, to herald the beginning of Jesus' 1,000-year reign of peace, spirituality and prosperity, down here, on mother earth...
I was slightly taken aback by the questions Professor Abdullah takes up in his concluding paragraph, because all the issues that he raises in that last paragraph are the very same questions that I considered and then decided not to support Professor Harrow's reminder that “ laws preventing muslims from enslaving muslim slaves were irrelevant largely in the saharan slave trade” by posting a few excerpts in support of that tragic reality from John Laffin's stellar book on the subject, “The Arabs As Master Slavers”.I mused over many hear rending excerpts from that book which I may post in the relevant thread a little later...
Judge for yourself: In his concluding paragraph IB Abdullah tells us,
“It is never acceptable to have non-nationals write your history; nor is it acceptable to have them define the kinds of questions a nation should ask or confront in trying to make sense of its individual and collective identity in the committee of nations in the global arena. We are an African nation and non-Africans cannot and should not be producing knowledge(s) about us that are then appropriated by ‘others’ to define us. Let us collectively re-write our past by actively making history.”
So I ask when non-Arabs write about “Arab Slavery” how impartial can they be?
I ask after having read some Arab perspectives on the Crusades for example.
On the other hand could one ask the same question about books written by non- Jews and other victims of The Holocaust ?
Sadly, IB says, “ no Sierra Leonean historian has done work on the history of the European slave trade or social/economic history of slavery....”
Hopefully the current generation of professional historians, independent scholars, novelists, biographers autobiographers, playwrights, are working on current events, historical fiction, the ongoing political history in the making, the recent past, the Civil War, e.g. Lansana Gberie's “A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone”...
Fact is, All is vanity.
Some is just insanity
The rest could be
as in the case of crazy kp
The term “comity of nations” has its standard meaning, but what did Professor Abdullah have in mind when he wrote “the committee of nations in the global arena “? Shorthand or shorthair for the UN?
I can guess what happened. Shit happens. Just as revered Biko was adopting one of the major standard spellings of Farouk and had to apologise for his gross error committed “by spelling it by ear with no disrespect intended”, so too, I suspect, with so many committee meetings on his mind, and no disrespect intended, Professor IB Abdullah ( not Abdallah) was also playing it by ear or it was a Freudian slip of academic mind and pen when he unintentionally wrote “ committee of nations” instead of “comity of nations”.
The pronunciation of “comity” is closer to that of committee than Farouk is to Farooq, or Muhammad is to Mohamed and Mohammed.
The most extreme example of this kind of mistake happening (just like shit happens) is when I wrote to my cousin Kayode Robbin-Coker and misspelt his name - in this case, at that my moment of writing it was Christopher Robin and the then UK minister who was in hot waters Robin Cook and not Robin Hood that was on my mind and that's why I had written “ Kayode Robin-Coker with one “r” ( Robin Cook was in the news and knee-deep in deep shit (trouble) and was being accused of anti-Semitism , a charge which of course like others before and after him ( Jeremy Corbyn etc.) he denied most vigorously. Me, an antisemite? But I'm holy...
“Robbin !”, wrote back a lightly irate Kayode to me, “ My Robbin is spelt with two Bs...
During my long acquittance with my older cousin Lincoln Adeneka Robbin-Coker (diamond miner) I had never had cause to write to him, in which case he would have corrected my spelling long ago
Phonetically speaking The three Rs are, reading , 'riting and 'rithmetic...
f is for foto , G for Ghettto...
Hindi native speakers usually have difficulties with the V - Volvo becomes Wolwo, and vermin becomes “wermin” - and because the Arabic language does not have the plosive (p) - you have people like Gaddafi saying, “My bebble “ ( My people)
So, what happens when non-native speakers( people who do not have Hebrew or Arabic as their mother tongue - say their prayers to the Almighty in Lashon Hakodesh or Arabic?
Cheer up: God understand the language of the heart...