FW: WILL NAMIBIAN BONES HAUNT GERMANS FOREVER?

[Akurang-Parry, Kwabena]

Fellow scholars who have been debating the pros and cons of missionary education may use the attachment as a minor footnote to illuminate the ways that the European predatory presence couched in Christian missionary interventionist meta-narratives damaged the African psyche! Did Africans need Euro-Christianity to come into their own and considering the massive weight of Christianity in Africa, have Africans come into their own? It is time to ask new questions.

Kwabena

________________________________________
From: Kwame Opoku [k.o...@sil.at]
Sent: Monday, December 30, 2013 1:02 PM
Subject: WILL NAMIBIAN BONES HAUNT GERMANS FOREVER?

I THOUGHT THE ATTACHED MIGHT INTEREST YOU, BEST WISHES,
KWAME.

[kenneth harrow]

when i read about missionaries in novels like une vie de boy or mongo
beti, le pauvre christ, etc, going back to the 1950s, they are presented
as naive dupes at best, usually not too mean, but ineffectual and out of it.
when i lived in cameroon in the 1970s, those who had been educated in
the high school run by the irish in western cameroonian believed it was
the best school in the country (anglophone). before i could pass
judgments on something like that, all i would want to know is what those
who actually had been to those schools would say.
and if i remember nwapa and mariama ba's accounts of their lives as
schoolgirls in an earlier period at missionary schools for girls, they
were extraordinarily loving in their memories of their teachers.
i wouldn't dare generalize from these few examples of novelists, but
they are rich portraitures of figures important in the lives of major
novelists, and their memoirs count in the whole picture.
let's see--the image is much worse in ngugi's the river between; more
mixed in dangarembga's nervous conditions, etc
ken

--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

[John Mbaku]

One may also note, in this discussion of the role of Christian missionaries and their institutions in Africa, that some of the Africans who were educated at French missionary schools and eventually emerged as "assimilationists," actually spearheaded, through their scholarship (which included fiction), the movement to deny Africans full independence. Their preference, like that of their French benefactors, was to make the African territories overseas departments within the French Republic. However, when these assimilationist Africans eventually had the opportunity to live in France and interact with ordinary French citizens without the strict monitoring of their French handlers, they encountered a civilization that was completely different from the one that they had idealized in their publications and discovered that they had actually been duped and that the so-called European cultural ideal to which they aspired was not built on the foundation of equality, which they had been taught at their various Christian schools. Some of them actually returned home to join and provide leadership to the independence movement. 

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JOHN MUKUM MBAKU, ESQ.
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[Akurang-Parry, Kwabena]

Oga Ken,

This topic is getting interesting. And this is why I have urged Opanyin AB Assensoh to write his memoir!

As a young teenager in a missionary-based secondary (high) school in the late 1970s, to be precise, the Presbyterian Boys' Boarding School at Legon, established in 1938, we were taught to see the world through the tinted lens of rigid Euro-Christian worldview that debased Africanity and extolled Western traditions.

Based on what you said about Mariama Ba and Nwapa's accounts, I too idealized, if not romanticized the "Christian missionary" education I had as the best in the world. Let me make clear that there were no white missionaries; in fact, African agents of Mission Christianity were in charge. Again, the type of education we had was no less secular than what "public" (non-missionary) schools experienced.
The difference was the rigidity of the Euro-Christian worldview that informed our education on the campus. But even then, by time we completed high school (advanced level) some of us had already began to ask new questions about the nature of Euro-Christianity, colonialism, the postcolonial projects of nation-building, etc., especially after devouring the works of Beti, Oyono, Ngugi, Achebe, Laye, Abrahams, Aidoo, Armah, etc.

Let me add that one book that truly re/shaped our consciousness was Richard Wright’s Black Boy, his Bildungsroman, or a story of his coming of age in America. And it was not as if our childhood mirrored that of Wright’s racist and poverty-ridden environment. Of course, one can allude to the strict religious traditions in the Wright’s household and his quest for knowledge beyond the confines of family and school as some of the influences we harvested from his Bildungsroman. And thanks to Adu Boahen’s Topics in West African History, we were able to rethink our histories even as some of our great teachers wove their Eurocentric webs.

In sum, this may be a personal journey: I think the education we had even in the 1970s was rooted in Western epistemological traditions that stressed the greatness and indispensability of the West and white institutions. Of course, others have used African "agency" to explain the ways that Africans have come to unlearn the brainwashing that underscored missionary education in Africa. But the question is how many Africans have had the chance to use that agency to discard white supremacy - the nursery rhyme of the best comes from the West? It is written all over the African psyche, indeed, what Adu Boahen cauterized as the worst effect of colonial rule.


Kwabena
________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of kenneth harrow [har...@msu.edu]
Sent: Monday, December 30, 2013 3:26 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: WILL NAMIBIAN BONES HAUNT GERMANS FOREVER?

[kenneth harrow]

hi john
i wonder who were some of these africans you are referring to, and when.
ken

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

[kenneth harrow]

thanks kwabena
this is wonderful to hear, your experiences. from the novels you cite,
it was the 1970s, post-independence period. if on the one hand we want
to imagine that no one was really able to conceptualize an
anti-hegemonic, anti=eurocentric set of understandings that early, i
have to go back to the 1930s and 40s for negritude to find that indeed
there was such thinking, in extraordinary terms, by cesaire and senghor
and late many many others--beginning first, i would say, with the
radical thinkers and creators in the caribbean whose look back was at
slavery, unlike in africa where the look back was at colonialism.
anyway, a more encompassing look back would have to go to people like
lat dior or others celebrated in resistance to european conquest. you
can tell me their names in ghana or nigeria, but surely there was an
influence on people like nkrumah from links to resistance within ghana?
i know nkrumah was also influenced by american black thought, but what
about african?
sembene likes to celebrate that notion of an african based resistance as
we see in his films like emitai and ceddo, and even where he
romanticizes, he is reaching for another thread that has to be known,
and you historians need to provide us with the details.
people like me are versed in euro-language texts, so the depth of our
historical knowledge is limited to what has been translated or mediated
to us.
(your reference to wright is also fascinating)
ken

On 12/30/13 7:22 PM, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena wrote:
> Oga Ken,
>
> This topic is getting interesting. And this is why I have urged Opanyin AB Assensoh to write his memoir!
>
> As a young teenager in a missionary-based secondary (high) school in the late 1970s, to be precise, the Presbyterian Boys' Boarding School at Legon, established in 1938, we were taught to see the world through the tinted lens of rigid Euro-Christian worldview that debased Africanity and extolled Western traditions.
>
> Based on what you said about Mariama Ba and Nwapa's accounts, I too idealized, if not romanticized the "Christian missionary" education I had as the best in the world. Let me make clear that there were no white missionaries; in fact, African agents of Mission Christianity were in charge. Again, the type of education we had was no less secular than what "public" (non-missionary) schools experienced.
> The difference was the rigidity of the Euro-Christian worldview that informed our education on the campus. But even then, by time we completed high school (advanced level) some of us had already began to ask new questions about the nature of Euro-Christianity, colonialism, the postcolonial projects of nation-building, etc., especially after devouring the works of Beti, Oyono, Ngugi, Achebe, Laye, Abrahams, Aidoo, Armah, etc.
>

> Let me add that one book that truly re/shaped our consciousness was Richard Wright�s Black Boy, his Bildungsroman, or a story of his coming of age in America. And it was not as if our childhood mirrored that of Wright�s racist and poverty-ridden environment. Of course, one can allude to the strict religious traditions in the Wright�s household and his quest for knowledge beyond the confines of family and school as some of the influences we harvested from his Bildungsroman. And thanks to Adu Boahen�s Topics in West African History, we were able to rethink our histories even as some of our great teachers wove their Eurocentric webs.

[Akurang-Parry, Kwabena]

Oga Ken:

Great points, but you moved the goal-posts: no one is imagining that anti-hegemonic worldviews began in the 1970s! I was only narrating what shaped my consciousness as a high school student in the late 1970s, not writing about the watersheds and cresting points of all the anti-hegemonic constructions and proponents in world history. Absolutely, anti-hegemonic, etc. structures go back to human beginnings, and one could go as far back as the Neolithic Era when surplus production sustained social, gender, and state formations.

Kwabena
________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of kenneth harrow [har...@msu.edu]

Sent: Monday, December 30, 2013 7:56 PM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: WILL NAMIBIAN BONES HAUNT GERMANS FOREVER?

> Let me add that one book that truly re/shaped our consciousness was Richard Wright’s Black Boy, his Bildungsroman, or a story of his coming of age in America. And it was not as if our childhood mirrored that of Wright’s racist and poverty-ridden environment. Of course, one can allude to the strict religious traditions in the Wright’s household and his quest for knowledge beyond the confines of family and school as some of the influences we harvested from his Bildungsroman. And thanks to Adu Boahen’s Topics in West African History, we were able to rethink our histories even as some of our great teachers wove their Eurocentric webs.

[kenneth harrow]

yes, kwabena, but for 99% of those who consider african-european
ideological relations, the psychology of eurocentric denigration is
usually attributed to colonial domination, and it is resistance to that
in the literature, from negritude on, that is taught.
how rare it is to find those who can appeal to something prior to
senghor! and in a location other than in europhonic literature.
that's why i evoked lat dior, someone elevated in senegal to the status
of an anti-french hero in the 19th century.
i think what you cited as shaping your consciousness was true for many
many of us, when the names fanon and cabral etc were evoked in analyzing
the literature you described. it was as though that was the starting point.
even if it was, in the sense of the anticolonial struggle for
liberation, it was just one point on a much longer continuum, as you
state. but that longer view is rarely provided.
ken

>> Let me add that one book that truly re/shaped our consciousness was Richard Wright�s Black Boy, his Bildungsroman, or a story of his coming of age in America. And it was not as if our childhood mirrored that of Wright�s racist and poverty-ridden environment. Of course, one can allude to the strict religious traditions in the Wright�s household and his quest for knowledge beyond the confines of family and school as some of the influences we harvested from his Bildungsroman. And thanks to Adu Boahen�s Topics in West African History, we were able to rethink our histories even as some of our great teachers wove their Eurocentric webs.

[Akurang-Parry, Kwabena]

Oga Ken:

I have not put chronology before causality. My simple point is that with regard to political conscientization, mine came of age in the late 1970s when I had great opportunities to read and study several works of literature in English mostly written by Africans. This does not dislodge the Negrutudian movement from the radar of anticolonialism, not its periodizing or holistic significance.
Absolutely, we may even peel back the reels of anti-colonial literature beyond the timing of Negritude. What about the works of W.E. B Du Bois, Kobina Sekyi, J. E. Casely Hayford, etc. that parodied Westernism and empowered the globalizing pan-African project? Anyone like me who had his secondary school education in West Africa and took literature in English at both the Ordinary and Advanced Levels can attest to the fact that we rigorously studied the ideas of Negritudian scholars in the works of Wole Soyinka's Poems of Black Africa and Norman Shapiro's Negritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean. Also we applied some of the earliest commentaries on Africa literature by Eustace Palmer, Adrian Roscoe, etc. that deal with such anticolonial themes framed around the efflorescence of Negritude. Our secondary education then was broader and pointed to the world of great challenges as well as possibilities of moments of excellence. This is not to say that I am a specialist in African literature, etc. In the end, I married history cum sociology, call me an academic polygamist, not to forget that literature in English was my first love affair. Certainly, I may have to defer to your conclusions regarding Negritude, etc. since it is your field. Then again, I have not put the caravan before the camels; my riddle is about when and where I joined the caravan. Thanks for these wonderful discussions, if not reminiscing, that gives me the latitude to recall my formative boyhood years.

Kwabena

________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of kenneth harrow [har...@msu.edu]

Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2013 12:15 AM

>> Let me add that one book that truly re/shaped our consciousness was Richard Wright’s Black Boy, his Bildungsroman, or a story of his coming of age in America. And it was not as if our childhood mirrored that of Wright’s racist and poverty-ridden environment. Of course, one can allude to the strict religious traditions in the Wright’s household and his quest for knowledge beyond the confines of family and school as some of the influences we harvested from his Bildungsroman. And thanks to Adu Boahen’s Topics in West African History, we were able to rethink our histories even as some of our great teachers wove their Eurocentric webs.

[kenneth harrow]

thanks again kwabena for this enjoyable travel back. you are right to
evoke the earlier black thinkers.
my question is, what about those who were not authors, did not write in
european languages, but inspired resistance? what of the memories of
such figures? where would you look, and in your earlier education was
there any content concerning them? i suppose that usman dan fodio might
be an important nigerian name. were their any included in your education
while eustace palmer and norman shapiro were giving us all the
anglophone or francophonic lits?
ken

[John Mbaku]

Brother Ken:

Cameroonian poet Louis-Marie Pouka.

[kenneth harrow]

thanks john
i had to look Pouka up. can we say he is now mostly forgotten? how rare
it is to come across assimilationists, though before the 1950s, before
the dream of independence started to become a reality, there was,
unquestionably, accommodationism, if not total assimilationism. in the
1930s and 1940s how many of the great figures to emerge, like birago
diop, not to mention senghor etc, married french women after getting
their educations in france and joining the colonial service. and yet, to
think of birago diop, one of the great figures in my mind of 20th
century letters, as an assimil� seems far too reductive.
anyway, thanks for the response
ken


On 12/31/13 11:46 AM, John Mbaku wrote:
> Louis-Marie Pouka

[John Mbaku]

Ken:

There is a critical mass of Cameroonians who were educated in Kamerun & Germany (1884-1914) and in Cameroun and France (1916-??) who actually became quite attracted to the cultures of these European countries. Whether you can call them assimilationists or not is subject to further analysis. However, many of them "preached," primarily but not exclusively, through their writings, the benefits of European civilization to their fellow Cameroonians/Kamerunians. All of these Cameroonians/Kamerunians were educated at missions schools and then sent to Europe for further education by the colonial authorities. Many of them, however, eventually became disillusioned with European civilization or the so-called "European cultural ideal" when they realized its opportunistic application in the colony. For example, Rudolph Douala Manga Bell, who took over from his father as King of the Duala in 1908 in what was then the Germany colony of Kamerun, read law in Germany and returned home to govern Duala using a similar approach as that existing then in Germany. Given his sound understanding of the German legal system, he believed that the law was on his side and that of his people when the colonial government attempted to expropriate their lands and make them available for various activities associated with occupation. In fact, the land expropriation was illegal under the terms of the annexation treaty of 1884 between Germany and the Duala peoples. Unfortunately, his legal protests to the Reichstag in Berlin were unsuccessful and he was subsequently executed by the colonial government in 1913 for treason.

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 10:30 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

thanks john
i had to look Pouka up. can we say he is now mostly forgotten? how rare it is to come across assimilationists, though before the 1950s, before the dream of independence started to become a reality, there was, unquestionably, accommodationism, if not total assimilationism. in the 1930s and 1940s how many of the great figures to emerge, like birago diop, not to mention senghor etc, married french women after getting their educations in france and joining the colonial service. and yet, to think of birago diop, one of the great figures in my mind of 20th century letters, as an assimilé seems far too reductive.

anyway, thanks for the response
ken


On 12/31/13 11:46 AM, John Mbaku wrote:

Louis-Marie Pouka

--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

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[kwame zulu shabazz]

Cameroon is a good example of why any effort to claim that colonial institutions were "ambiguous" in their outcomes is deeply flawed. To make that argument work, you have to remove missionary schools from the larger project of vicious, bloody, murderous white terrorism. The Germans and Brits slaughtered many Cameroonian leaders whilst destroying or distorting indigenous institutions. Missionaries schools were imposed--the propagandist arm of brute violence (but its important to note that violence as "disciple" was a common feature of the schools).

kzs

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[kenneth harrow]

kwame
i know a lot of cameroonians, and over 40 years. maybe what you write has some truth to it, but at the same time it seems really really out of tune and out of touch with the people i met, the students i taught, the country i came to know. it is an absolute statement, whereas the people i met never expressed themselves about their country in such terms.
there is one exception to my statement that i do remember: once i had students over, and we were talking about things like dante, which i believe i was teaching. a student expressed bitterness about how they all had been taught that their ancestors, prior to the coming of the missionaries, were supposedly all burning in hell. they asked me if i thought that was the case.
well, i didn't perhaps go as far as i might in saying that i found the idea of an afterlife ridiculous. for one thing, most people i met, including the students, were believing and practising christians, and i didn't want to insult anyone. but i did say that no one could state with any certainty what was to come after death.
they recognized the perniciousness of a teaching that presented the world in such terms.
it was almost 40 years ago. and i had read mongo beti's Main basse. but the anger beti expressed there did not seem to match the world i encountered for my 2 years in yaounde, and everything since has led me to the same conclusion. on my return
some years ago, i found some changes, but again nothing at all that would correspond to a view of "murderous white terrorism." the exception, of course, was ahidjo's attempt to eradicate the upc, which he did with the french. it was terrorism. but not a white terrorism. i'd call it postcolonial, in the sense of what the postcolonial world has come to embody. your last statement about missionary schools being a propaganda arm of brute violence, all i can say is that i would want to hear from the cameroonians who attended those schools. i had many students from the west, and they were actually proud of their schooling. perhaps the problem i see is that you are conflating time periods too much.  my students were all educated after independence; the germans left during world war II. and as for brits slaughtering cameroonian leaders, from what i know i'd say that was truer of the french than the brits.
i'd be curious to know if i am wrong, if cameroonians share your view.
ken

[kenneth harrow]

correction. meant to say germans left after world war one. no one really remembered them, and bizarrely enough, whenever folks evoked them, it was with positive tones. probably the bad was forgotten, but there were memories of the train and water systems that people evoked in positive terms. i had a colleague whose name was adolf. germans were not hated in cameroon.
but it was so long ago...

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Brother Ken. 

My point of view on Cameroon is informed by a radical Congolese women and a Cameroonian  I met during my graduate school days. Most of the Cameroonians I have met are radical like me, but that just means we are moving in different circles. My radical African comrades don’t typically share their views with whites. But my point wasn't about what Cameroonians think about of colonialism (what Cameroonians think on the matter is certainly important). You said that from your experience Cameroonians don’t generally hate Germans. Fine. Nevertheless, we must be clear that, although the methods varied, Europeans were uniform in their brutal oppression of African people. I must insist on that “absolute” assessment. Germans committed genocide in Namibia, but you aren’t likely to find a generalized hatred of Germans in Namibia. 

We Africans are much too forgiving and our thinking is overly influenced by the perspective of liberal whites. This is precisely the sort of thinking that Biko was challenging.  By comparison it seems to be that Jews are far less forgiving of Germans and, moreover, you certainly will not find Jews naming their children after Nazis. 

But, again, we must be clear that Euro names and languages were imposed on African people. Missionaries schools sometimes violently imposed Euro names and languages. After several centuries of slavery, apartheid, Jim Crown, lynchings, and colonialism, Eurocentric schools, and so on, Africans on the continent and abroad have come to internalized their oppressors outlook (hence the Cameroonians named “Adolf”)--even as we have consistently challenged these impositions (these instances of ambiguity as it relates to African agency are, I think, are more defensible than looking for ambiguity in Euro institutions). 

Respectfully, I must note, too, our relative subject positions. Your status as a long-time scholar of African Studies is, itself, an outcome of colonialism, ongoing white privilege, and the white control of the production of scholarly knowledge about Africa. I, on the other hand, grew up in the ghettoes of Los Angeles. For generations the vast majority of African Americans have been taught in white-controlled institutions that gross stereotypes about Africa. In other words, as Malcolm X pointed out in the 60s, African Americans have been taught to hate their heritage ( “self-hate”). Likewise, even today, many of the educational institutions in Africa are Eurocentric (My Nigerian wife studied in Nigeria and Salone through secondary school. Her ethnic group, Yotti/Bali/Chamba, straddles Nigeria and Cameroon). 

kzs

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Kwame Zulu Shabazz
Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies
Department of Social Sciences
203-A Coltrane Hall
Winston-Salem State Univ.
601 S. MLK Jr. Dr.
Winston-Salem, NC 27110
Phone:  336-750-8940
Email:  shab...@wssu.edu
==
"Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear." Paul Robeson

[John Mbaku]

KZS:

The Cameroonian that talked to you either does not know anything about Cameroon history--Kamerun (Germany); League of Nations Mandates (UK & France); UN Trust Territory of Cameroons under French administration; UN Trust Territory of Southern Cameroons & UN Trust Territory of Northern Cameroons under British administration; Republic of Cameroon (1960); Federal Republic of Cameroon (1961-1972); United Republic of Cameroon (1972-1984); Republic of Cameroon (1984-present)--or intentionally distorted it. The atrocities committed by the country's colonial governments are well-documented. None of that history, even that written by radical scholars, list any atrocities committed by the British in any of the two territories they controlled. 

Also, the history of the Christian Church in Cameroon and any part they may have played in colonialism is more complex than your informant told you. For one thing, the church joined the local people in fighting the German expropriation of lands belonging to African groups. On the other hand, Christian missions were quite instrumental in the persecution of the Bamoun King and his subsequent removal and exile to Yaounde, where he died.

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Kwame Zulu Shabazz
Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies
Department of Social Sciences
203-A Coltrane Hall
Winston-Salem State Univ.
601 S. MLK Jr. Dr.
Winston-Salem, NC 27110
Phone:  336-750-8940
Email:  shab...@wssu.edu
==
"Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear." Paul Robeson

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[kenneth harrow]

dear kwame
thanks for the thoughtful response.
i learned from it, and am reflecting on it. where we differ, where we don't. for instance, and maybe this is the essence of my disagreement, you write that "europeans were uniform in their brutal oppression of african people." really? uniform? i couldn't disagree more. i would say, colonial power was generally non-democratic, and often brutal. but there was really an enormous range of differences among europeans in their relation with africans. i am thinking, for instance, of an institution that currently exists in francophone countries, the french cultural center. depending on who is director, it can be an extraordinary institution for the support of african, not french, cultural advancement. i understand that it, like the american u.s.i.s., centers was created to serve french national interests, and could be viewed as an instrument of propaganda. but if you actually go there, live there, see who is there and what they do, you'd have a different view.
that's an example of non-uniformity. for a while the american equivalents were also functioning in wonderful ways to bring great culture, often black performers, to africa, and to support africans. nowadays that is over, i fear. (i am aware these are postcolonial institutions, but the examples prior to independence would be similar, like the schools and teachers)

it is true that jews will not name their children after nazis! what a funny idea. but the nazi names are actually german. my grandfather's name was adolf (he was born before hitler), and german names and culture marked jews too deeply to be excised as simply nazi. they perform wagner in israel, and nowadays, my children's generation is no longer marked by the holocaust. it is becoming forgotten, in fact. and i could cite examples of young jews now going to berlin, where it's at, for the art world. the world done change.

lastly, i don't agree that colonialism was the same as white privilege. i suppose that to some extent my formation as a scholar was marked by white privilege, but you probably know that people of my generation came into the world of african studies in the early 1970s, a period when folks like me considered ourselves supporters of the revolutionary struggle. initially that struggle, for me, was the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and then the anti-imperial struggles around the world. the color of my skin was not determinant in shaping my thinking or actions, and the white privilege i might have enjoyed had nothing to do with colonialism, but rather american racism.
lastly, i would have to say that if steve biko wouldn't have wanted to collaborate with me, that nelson mandela had no trouble collaborating with albie sachs, that i felt a comaraderie with many in the african literature assn world, like dennis brutus, with whom we shared in the struggle.
those words, comrade, struggle, are also gone now. but they were definitive in shaping the values of most people i know in african studies, white and black together.
lastly, having taught an entire panoply of films on malcolm x, i find it hard to imagine that his views would be terribly different than my own,� had he lived to the present.
maybe the question i have is, to what extent are we the slaves of our past? i recognize the depiction of the past that you sketch out as broadly true, if too absolute in its binary opposition for me. (it's true , it's hard to imagine good nazis, but easy to imagine good germans. and, after all, even gunter grass, whom i esteem enormously, was a nazi in his youth)
if i allowed myself to hate all germans now, i'd be shaped by the very thing i oppose. if you allow yourself to totalize all whites, even if white privilege is a factor, then you are allowing white racism to control your thinking.
i hope you won't find this aggressive of me to say this. i think we all need to move on when times have changed, and most of all to find ways to form coalitions for progressive political goals and not essentialize each other.
ken
(to speak to another of your points, whites do not control the production of knowledge about africa, certainly not in my field. it is hard to think of any journal or press in which africans or african americans are not either in charge or engaged on the level of editor or editorial board. and that is true of african and african american studies programs as well throughout academe) on the other hand, i do agree that eurocentric thinking marks much, both in the african and the western academy.hmmm.
ken

On 1/1/14 10:24 PM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brother Ken.�

My point of view on Cameroon is informed by a radical Congolese women and a Cameroonian� I met during my graduate school days. Most of the Cameroonians I have met are radical like me, but that just means we are moving in different circles. My radical African comrades don�t typically share their views with whites. But my point wasn't about what Cameroonians think about of colonialism (what Cameroonians think on the matter is certainly important).�You said that from your experience Cameroonians don�t generally hate Germans. Fine. Nevertheless, we must be clear that, although the methods varied, Europeans were uniform in their brutal oppression of African people. I must insist on that �absolute� assessment. Germans committed genocide in Namibia, but you aren�t likely to find a generalized hatred of Germans in Namibia.�

We Africans are much too forgiving and our thinking is overly influenced by the perspective of liberal whites. This is precisely the sort of thinking that Biko was challenging.� By comparison it seems to be that Jews are far less forgiving of Germans and, moreover, you certainly will not find Jews naming their children after Nazis.�

But, again, we must be clear that Euro names and languages were imposed on African people. Missionaries schools sometimes violently imposed Euro names and languages. After several centuries of slavery, apartheid, Jim Crown, lynchings, and colonialism, Eurocentric schools, and so on, Africans on the continent and abroad have come to internalized their oppressors outlook (hence the Cameroonians named �Adolf�)--even as we have consistently challenged these impositions (these instances of ambiguity as it relates to African agency are, I think, are more defensible than looking for ambiguity in Euro institutions).�

Respectfully, I must note, too, our relative subject positions. Your status as a long-time scholar of African Studies is, itself, an outcome of colonialism, ongoing white privilege, and the white control of the production of scholarly knowledge about Africa. I, on the other hand, grew up in the ghettoes of Los Angeles. For generations the vast majority of African Americans have been taught in white-controlled institutions that gross stereotypes about Africa. In other words, as Malcolm X pointed out in the 60s, African Americans have been taught to hate their heritage ( �self-hate�). Likewise, even today, many of the educational institutions in Africa are Eurocentric (My Nigerian wife studied in Nigeria and Salone through secondary school. Her ethnic group, Yotti/Bali/Chamba, straddles Nigeria and Cameroon).�

kzs

On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:25 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

correction. meant to say germans left after world war one. no one really remembered them, and bizarrely enough, whenever folks evoked them, it was with positive tones. probably the bad was forgotten, but there were memories of the train and water systems that people evoked in positive terms. i had a colleague whose name was adolf. germans were not hated in cameroon.
but it was so long ago...

On 1/1/14 4:58 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

kwame
i know a lot of cameroonians, and over 40 years. maybe what you write has some truth to it, but at the same time it seems really really out of tune and out of touch with the people i met, the students i taught, the country i came to know. it is an absolute statement, whereas the people i met never expressed themselves about their country in such terms.
there is one exception to my statement that i do remember: once i had students over, and we were talking about things like dante, which i believe i was teaching. a student expressed bitterness about how they all had been taught that their ancestors, prior to the coming of the missionaries, were supposedly all burning in hell. they asked me if i thought that was the case.
well, i didn't perhaps go as far as i might in saying that i found the idea of an afterlife ridiculous. for one thing, most people i met, including the students, were believing and practising christians, and i didn't want to insult anyone. but i did say that no one could state with any certainty what was to come after death.
they recognized the perniciousness of a teaching that presented the world in such terms.
it was almost 40 years ago. and i had read mongo beti's Main basse. but the anger beti expressed there did not seem to match the world i encountered for my 2 years in yaounde, and everything since has led me to the same conclusion. on my return

some years ago, i found some changes, but again nothing at all that would correspond to a view of "murderous white terrorism." the exception, of course, was ahidjo's attempt to eradicate the upc, which he did with the french. it was terrorism. but not a white terrorism. i'd call it postcolonial, in the sense of what the postcolonial world has come to embody. your last statement about missionary schools being a propaganda arm of brute violence, all i can say is that i would want to hear from the cameroonians who attended those schools. i had many students from the west, and they were actually proud of their schooling. perhaps the problem i see is that you are conflating time periods too much.� my students were all educated after independence; the germans left during world war II. and as for brits slaughtering cameroonian leaders, from what i know i'd say that was truer of the french than the brits.

i'd be curious to know if i am wrong, if cameroonians share your view.
ken

On 1/1/14 11:59 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Cameroon is a good example of why any effort to claim that colonial institutions were "ambiguous" in their outcomes is deeply flawed. To make that argument work, you have to remove missionary schools from the larger project of vicious, bloody, murderous white terrorism. The Germans and Brits slaughtered many Cameroonian leaders whilst destroying or distorting indigenous institutions. Missionaries schools were imposed--the propagandist arm of brute violence (but its important to note that violence as "disciple" was a common feature of the schools).

kzs

On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 3:30:05 PM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:

Ken:

There is a critical mass of Cameroonians who were educated in Kamerun & Germany (1884-1914) and in Cameroun and France (1916-??) who actually became quite attracted to the cultures of these European countries. Whether you can call them assimilationists or not is subject to further analysis. However, many of them "preached," primarily but not exclusively, through their writings, the benefits of European civilization to their fellow Cameroonians/Kamerunians. All of these Cameroonians/Kamerunians were educated at missions schools and then sent to Europe for further education by the colonial authorities. Many of them, however, eventually became disillusioned with European civilization or the so-called "European cultural ideal" when they realized its opportunistic application in the colony. For example, Rudolph Douala Manga Bell, who took over from his father as King of the Duala in 1908 in what was then the Germany colony of Kamerun, read law in Germany and returned home to govern Duala using a similar approach as that existing then in Germany. Given his sound understanding of the German legal system, he believed that the law was on his side and that of his people when the colonial government attempted to expropriate their lands and make them available for various activities associated with occupation. In fact, the land expropriation was illegal under the terms of the annexation treaty of 1884 between Germany and the Duala peoples. Unfortunately, his legal protests to the Reichstag in Berlin were unsuccessful and he was subsequently executed by the colonial government in 1913 for treason.

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 10:30 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

thanks john
i had to look Pouka up. can we say he is now mostly forgotten? how rare it is to come across assimilationists, though before the 1950s, before the dream of independence started to become a reality, there was, unquestionably, accommodationism, if not total assimilationism. in the 1930s and 1940s how many of the great figures to emerge, like birago diop, not to mention senghor etc, married french women after getting their educations in france and joining the colonial service. and yet, to think of birago diop, one of the great figures in my mind of 20th century letters, as an assimil� seems far too reductive.

anyway, thanks for the response
ken


On 12/31/13 11:46 AM, John Mbaku wrote:

Louis-Marie Pouka

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kenneth w. harrow
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professor of english
michigan state university
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room C-614 wells hall
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Kwame Zulu Shabazz
Assistant Professor of African and�African American Studies

Department of Social Sciences
203-A Coltrane Hall
Winston-Salem State Univ.
601 S. MLK Jr. Dr.
Winston-Salem, NC 27110

Phone: �336-750-8940
Email: �shab...@wssu.edu
==
"Every artist, every scientist, must�decide�now�where he stands. He has no�alternative. There is no standing above�the conflict on Olympian heights. There�are no impartial observers. Through the�destruction, in certain countries, of the�greatest of man's literary heritage,�through the propagation of false ideas of�racial and national superiority, the artist,�the scientist, the writer is challenged.�The struggle invades the formerly�cloistered halls of our universities and�other seats of learning. The battlefront is�everywhere. There is no sheltered�rear." Paul Robeson

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[kwame zulu shabazz]

Brothers John and Ken, 

Thanks for the correction on the Brits. It has been some years, about 2002, so that error is likely mine. She probably did say France and Germany. Whatever the case, the Brits weren't in Cameroon for altruistic reasons, they were in Cameroon to protect and promote their own selfish interests at the expense of local populations as was the case with any European colonial govt in Africa. And what you read as the "complexity" of missionaries is only superficially complex. Scratch the surface and you will that missionaries at all times, like all other colonial institutions, had the same racist "civilizing" mission which was itself a cover for exploiting Africa's material resources. 

Africans scholars are severely mistaken in looking for "complexity" and "ambiguity" in colonialism. Comparatively, I challenge you to find Jewish scholars going on and on about the gestapo "complexity." Our problem, I believe, is that our thinking has been colonized. The scholarly questions we ask are shaped by white liberal thought as opposed to African-centered thought. Unsurprising given that we are mostly educated in Eurocentric institutions (within and outside Africa). We are also shackled by western funding which shapes are inquiries and conclusions in subtle and not so subtle ways. 

kzs

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Kwame Zulu Shabazz
Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies
Department of Social Sciences
203-A Coltrane Hall
Winston-Salem State Univ.
601 S. MLK Jr. Dr.
Winston-Salem, NC 27110
Phone:  336-750-8940
Email:  shab...@wssu.edu
==
"Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear." Paul Robeson

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[kwame zulu shabazz]

Hi Ken,

Asante sana for the reply. 

My point about uniformity is that whilst the method of domination varied, the aims and outcomes were uniform in the sense that whether in Senegal or Ghana or South African or Compton or Harlem or São Paulo, many Africans have been mentally colonized.  I have, over the years, physically visited about half of West Africa and I base my conclusion on countless dialogues with Africans from every region of Africa and nearly every corner of the planet. So I say there is a uniform structure buried beneath the surface difference.

You said: the white privilege i might have enjoyed had nothing to do with colonialism, but rather american racism.

And to that I say that white racism in America was a variant of colonialism. And Euro colonialism in Africa was based upon the premise of white supremacy and black inferiority (racism). As you know, the anti-colonial movement in Africa inspired Africans in the diaspora and vice versa. White privilege, wherever its located, has as its agenda the denigration of African people. And when, say, a white American travels to Ghana or Nigeria or Benin or Kenya they often benefit from their whiteness. 

You said: but you probably know that people of my generation came into the world of african studies in the early 1970s, a period when folks like me considered ourselves supporters of the revolutionary struggle. initially that struggle, for me, was the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s

I more or less agree. But it doesn't diminish the point that whites entered those spaces in the 70s with a Eurocentric point of view. For example, revolutionary whites typically couched their support of Black resistance in ways that downplayed race. But, for the most part, white support of the ant-colonialism or anti-Apartheid or Civil Rights in the USA tended to be from the point of view of white liberalism. And, of course, while your generation was engaged with African Studies, most African Americans were saddled with the legacy of Jim Crow. 

This issue of who controls knowledge about Africa is key. I say follow the money. Funding institutions ultimately shape scholarly knowledge.  Editors are typically affiliated with academic institutions or trained in said institutions, which are themselves not controlled by Black people. Ditto for the academic presses. 

kzs

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

"..but there was really an enormous range of differences among europeans in their relation with africans. i am thinking,

or instance, of an institution that currently exists in francophone countries, the french cultural center. "

Ken you are a bit anachronistic and out of time here, unless you want to conveniently change the direction of the debate.
The above reference was to colonialism, and if I got the point right, the reference to
white privilege was not exclusively to colonialism.

You don't have to occupy a country and colonize it to build a railway and water systems. Whatever happened to trade and business
contracts and diplomacy? But colonial propaganda certainly made the colonized believe this- all part of the ideology of domination and control.

Now I am inclined to think that Albie Sachs did not see himself as a white man. Did he? Even so I have no doubt that Mandela
would have collaborated with you.

On a different note, I saw the movie 'Mandela -Long Walk to Freedom' yesterday.
I have been making some comparisons with 'Winnie Mandela,' the movie. I believe Jennifer Hudson did a better job
portraying Winnie, in the WM movie, comparatively speaking, but the experience was worthwhile.

The final clip in the Mandela movie about love (and forgiveness) was powerful - but suggested to me that Mandela, the film character, a powerful revolutionary
in the earlier days, gradually became a 'Swedish' apologist- by virtue of the Stockholm Syndrome.





Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History & African Studies
History Department
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain
CT 06050
africahistory.net
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Documentaries on Africa and the African Diaspora
________________________________________
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow [har...@msu.edu]
Sent: Thursday, January 02, 2014 10:11 AM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: WILL NAMIBIAN BONES HAUNT GERMANS FOREVER?

dear kwame
thanks for the thoughtful response.
i learned from it, and am reflecting on it. where we differ, where we don't. for instance, and maybe this is the essence of my disagreement, you write that "europeans were uniform in their brutal oppression of african people." really? uniform? i couldn't disagree more. i would say, colonial power was generally non-democratic, and often brutal. but there was really an enormous range of differences among europeans in their relation with africans. i am thinking, for instance, of an institution that currently exists in francophone countries, the french cultural center. depending on who is director, it can be an extraordinary institution for the support of african, not french, cultural advancement. i understand that it, like the american u.s.i.s., centers was created to serve french national interests, and could be viewed as an instrument of propaganda. but if you actually go there, live there, see who is there and what they do, you'd have a different view.
that's an example of non-uniformity. for a while the american equivalents were also functioning in wonderful ways to bring great culture, often black performers, to africa, and to support africans. nowadays that is over, i fear. (i am aware these are postcolonial institutions, but the examples prior to independence would be similar, like the schools and teachers)

it is true that jews will not name their children after nazis! what a funny idea. but the nazi names are actually german. my grandfather's name was adolf (he was born before hitler), and german names and culture marked jews too deeply to be excised as simply nazi. they perform wagner in israel, and nowadays, my children's generation is no longer marked by the holocaust. it is becoming forgotten, in fact. and i could cite examples of young jews now going to berlin, where it's at, for the art world. the world done change.

lastly, i don't agree that colonialism was the same as white privilege. i suppose that to some extent my formation as a scholar was marked by white privilege, but you probably know that people of my generation came into the world of african studies in the early 1970s, a period when folks like me considered ourselves supporters of the revolutionary struggle. initially that struggle, for me, was the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and then the anti-imperial struggles around the world. the color of my skin was not determinant in shaping my thinking or actions, and the white privilege i might have enjoyed had nothing to do with colonialism, but rather american racism.
lastly, i would have to say that if steve biko wouldn't have wanted to collaborate with me, that nelson mandela had no trouble collaborating with albie sachs, that i felt a comaraderie with many in the african literature assn world, like dennis brutus, with whom we shared in the struggle.
those words, comrade, struggle, are also gone now. but they were definitive in shaping the values of most people i know in african studies, white and black together.

lastly, having taught an entire panoply of films on malcolm x, i find it hard to imagine that his views would be terribly different than my own, had he lived to the present.

maybe the question i have is, to what extent are we the slaves of our past? i recognize the depiction of the past that you sketch out as broadly true, if too absolute in its binary opposition for me. (it's true , it's hard to imagine good nazis, but easy to imagine good germans. and, after all, even gunter grass, whom i esteem enormously, was a nazi in his youth)
if i allowed myself to hate all germans now, i'd be shaped by the very thing i oppose. if you allow yourself to totalize all whites, even if white privilege is a factor, then you are allowing white racism to control your thinking.
i hope you won't find this aggressive of me to say this. i think we all need to move on when times have changed, and most of all to find ways to form coalitions for progressive political goals and not essentialize each other.
ken
(to speak to another of your points, whites do not control the production of knowledge about africa, certainly not in my field. it is hard to think of any journal or press in which africans or african americans are not either in charge or engaged on the level of editor or editorial board. and that is true of african and african american studies programs as well throughout academe) on the other hand, i do agree that eurocentric thinking marks much, both in the african and the western academy.hmmm.
ken

On 1/1/14 10:24 PM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:
Brother Ken.

My point of view on Cameroon is informed by a radical Congolese women and a Cameroonian I met during my graduate school days. Most of the Cameroonians I have met are radical like me, but that just means we are moving in different circles. My radical African comrades don’t typically share their views with whites. But my point wasn't about what Cameroonians think about of colonialism (what Cameroonians think on the matter is certainly important). You said that from your experience Cameroonians don’t generally hate Germans. Fine. Nevertheless, we must be clear that, although the methods varied, Europeans were uniform in their brutal oppression of African people. I must insist on that “absolute” assessment. Germans committed genocide in Namibia, but you aren’t likely to find a generalized hatred of Germans in Namibia.

We Africans are much too forgiving and our thinking is overly influenced by the perspective of liberal whites. This is precisely the sort of thinking that Biko was challenging. By comparison it seems to be that Jews are far less forgiving of Germans and, moreover, you certainly will not find Jews naming their children after Nazis.

But, again, we must be clear that Euro names and languages were imposed on African people. Missionaries schools sometimes violently imposed Euro names and languages. After several centuries of slavery, apartheid, Jim Crown, lynchings, and colonialism, Eurocentric schools, and so on, Africans on the continent and abroad have come to internalized their oppressors outlook (hence the Cameroonians named “Adolf”)--even as we have consistently challenged these impositions (these instances of ambiguity as it relates to African agency are, I think, are more defensible than looking for ambiguity in Euro institutions).

Respectfully, I must note, too, our relative subject positions. Your status as a long-time scholar of African Studies is, itself, an outcome of colonialism, ongoing white privilege, and the white control of the production of scholarly knowledge about Africa. I, on the other hand, grew up in the ghettoes of Los Angeles. For generations the vast majority of African Americans have been taught in white-controlled institutions that gross stereotypes about Africa. In other words, as Malcolm X pointed out in the 60s, African Americans have been taught to hate their heritage ( “self-hate”). Likewise, even today, many of the educational institutions in Africa are Eurocentric (My Nigerian wife studied in Nigeria and Salone through secondary school. Her ethnic group, Yotti/Bali/Chamba, straddles Nigeria and Cameroon).

kzs
On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:25 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

correction. meant to say germans left after world war one. no one really remembered them, and bizarrely enough, whenever folks evoked them, it was with positive tones. probably the bad was forgotten, but there were memories of the train and water systems that people evoked in positive terms. i had a colleague whose name was adolf. germans were not hated in cameroon.
but it was so long ago...

On 1/1/14 4:58 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:
kwame
i know a lot of cameroonians, and over 40 years. maybe what you write has some truth to it, but at the same time it seems really really out of tune and out of touch with the people i met, the students i taught, the country i came to know. it is an absolute statement, whereas the people i met never expressed themselves about their country in such terms.
there is one exception to my statement that i do remember: once i had students over, and we were talking about things like dante, which i believe i was teaching. a student expressed bitterness about how they all had been taught that their ancestors, prior to the coming of the missionaries, were supposedly all burning in hell. they asked me if i thought that was the case.
well, i didn't perhaps go as far as i might in saying that i found the idea of an afterlife ridiculous. for one thing, most people i met, including the students, were believing and practising christians, and i didn't want to insult anyone. but i did say that no one could state with any certainty what was to come after death.
they recognized the perniciousness of a teaching that presented the world in such terms.
it was almost 40 years ago. and i had read mongo beti's Main basse. but the anger beti expressed there did not seem to match the world i encountered for my 2 years in yaounde, and everything since has led me to the same conclusion. on my return

some years ago, i found some changes, but again nothing at all that would correspond to a view of "murderous white terrorism." the exception, of course, was ahidjo's attempt to eradicate the upc, which he did with the french. it was terrorism. but not a white terrorism. i'd call it postcolonial, in the sense of what the postcolonial world has come to embody. your last statement about missionary schools being a propaganda arm of brute violence, all i can say is that i would want to hear from the cameroonians who attended those schools. i had many students from the west, and they were actually proud of their schooling. perhaps the problem i see is that you are conflating time periods too much. my students were all educated after independence; the germans left during world war II. and as for brits slaughtering cameroonian leaders, from what i know i'd say that was truer of the french than the brits.

i'd be curious to know if i am wrong, if cameroonians share your view.
ken

On 1/1/14 11:59 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:
Cameroon is a good example of why any effort to claim that colonial institutions were "ambiguous" in their outcomes is deeply flawed. To make that argument work, you have to remove missionary schools from the larger project of vicious, bloody, murderous white terrorism. The Germans and Brits slaughtered many Cameroonian leaders whilst destroying or distorting indigenous institutions. Missionaries schools were imposed--the propagandist arm of brute violence (but its important to note that violence as "disciple" was a common feature of the schools).

kzs

On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 3:30:05 PM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:
Ken:


There is a critical mass of Cameroonians who were educated in Kamerun & Germany (1884-1914) and in Cameroun and France (1916-??) who actually became quite attracted to the cultures of these European countries. Whether you can call them assimilationists or not is subject to further analysis. However, many of them "preached," primarily but not exclusively, through their writings, the benefits of European civilization to their fellow Cameroonians/Kamerunians. All of these Cameroonians/Kamerunians were educated at missions schools and then sent to Europe for further education by the colonial authorities. Many of them, however, eventually became disillusioned with European civilization or the so-called "European cultural ideal" when they realized its opportunistic application in the colony. For example, Rudolph Douala Manga Bell, who took over from his father as King of the Duala in 1908 in what was then the Germany colony of Kamerun, read law in Germany and returned home to govern Duala using a similar approach as that existing then in Germany. Given his sound understanding of the German legal system, he believed that the law was on his side and that of his people when the colonial government attempted to expropriate their lands and make them available for various activities associated with occupation. In fact, the land expropriation was illegal under the terms of the annexation treaty of 1884 between Germany and the Duala peoples. Unfortunately, his legal protests to the Reichstag in Berlin were unsuccessful and he was subsequently executed by the colonial government in 1913 for treason.

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 10:30 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu<javascript:>> wrote:
thanks john

i had to look Pouka up. can we say he is now mostly forgotten? how rare it is to come across assimilationists, though before the 1950s, before the dream of independence started to become a reality, there was, unquestionably, accommodationism, if not total assimilationism. in the 1930s and 1940s how many of the great figures to emerge, like birago diop, not to mention senghor etc, married french women after getting their educations in france and joining the colonial service. and yet, to think of birago diop, one of the great figures in my mind of 20th century letters, as an assimilé seems far too reductive.

anyway, thanks for the response
ken


On 12/31/13 11:46 AM, John Mbaku wrote:
Louis-Marie Pouka

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Kwame Zulu Shabazz

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michigan state university
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619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839

har...@msu.edu<mailto:har...@msu.edu>

[kenneth harrow]

hi gloria
i know i was anachronistic; i just figured the logic was similar. (maybe
i should say, i am anachronistic).
as for being white or black or both, i think we are both when we leave
home and take up a new life elsewhere.
it's too complicated to be simply one or the other; but when there is
oppression and war, then the complexity goes away, someone looks at your
body, your papers, and tells you, bang, you are tutsi, goodbye; bang you
are one of those, goodbye. and then postmodernity seems to be worlds away
ken

[kenneth harrow]

dear kwame
you frustrate me because as much as i want to walk the walk with you, you push a logic with which i agree past the point where it seems reasonable. i mostly agree with your first paragraph below: but there were pretty wide divergences in the churches and people in them. and the more you want to ascribe this to eurocentrism and the west, the more you are distancing yourself from the preponderance of pentacostal churches of today, and the millions of people who have turned to them.
maybe that is your place to begin. if you tell them all,� you are being brainwashed by white people, that won't make any sense to them whatsoever.
the other point where i can't go all the way is when you keep removing agency from african scholars, as if they/we can't think for ourselves, can't discern what you claim the privilege of discerning, which is who is brainwashing whom and why. i can't throw away soyinka for writing an adaptation of a greek play; mudimbe, for building so much on foucault's logic and said's approach; or let's say, achebe for writing in english, for responding to graham greene and joseph conrad.
that's where we are today.
i agree with the issue of who funds what, but it isn't just determinism. that old notion of economic determinism was denied by engels himself in the famous response after marx died.
so, let's say we agree that there are interests and forces at play in african history and affairs; that some of those have worked to the detriment of africans; that we are committed to righting the situation; that we can be humble about this, and not claim to be the owners of the truth, but rather people who struggle in what we believe is a just cause.
i just don't like telling fellow activists that i know what they don't. it works better for me if we can actually discuss the issues and try to make our case.
thanks for pushing the buttons all the same, and for your willingness to put these issues out there for discussion. i think we are much more in agreement over what really matters, even if we don't always read the situation in exactly the same manner.
ken

On 1/2/14 11:32 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brothers John and Ken,�

Thanks for the correction on the Brits. It has been some years, about 2002, so that error is likely mine. She probably did say France and Germany. Whatever the case, the Brits weren't in Cameroon for altruistic reasons, they were in Cameroon to protect and promote their own selfish interests at the expense of local populations as was the case with any European colonial govt in Africa. And what you read as the "complexity" of missionaries is only superficially complex. Scratch the surface and you will that missionaries at all times, like all other colonial institutions, had the same racist "civilizing" mission which was itself a cover for exploiting Africa's material resources.�

Africans scholars are severely mistaken in looking for "complexity" and "ambiguity" in colonialism. Comparatively, I challenge you to find Jewish scholars going on and on about the gestapo "complexity." Our problem, I believe, is that our thinking has been colonized. The scholarly questions we ask are shaped by white liberal thought as opposed to African-centered thought. Unsurprising given that we are mostly educated in Eurocentric institutions (within and outside Africa). We are also shackled by western funding which shapes are inquiries and conclusions in subtle and not so subtle ways.�

kzs

On Thursday, January 2, 2014 10:52:41 AM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:

KZS:

The Cameroonian that�talked to you either does not know anything about Cameroon history--Kamerun (Germany); League of Nations Mandates (UK & France); UN Trust Territory of Cameroons under French administration; UN Trust Territory of Southern Cameroons & UN Trust Territory of Northern Cameroons under British administration; Republic of Cameroon (1960); Federal Republic of Cameroon (1961-1972); United Republic of Cameroon (1972-1984); Republic of Cameroon (1984-present)--or intentionally distorted it. The atrocities committed by the country's colonial governments are well-documented. None of that history, even that written by radical scholars, list any atrocities committed by the British in any of the two territories they controlled.�

Also, the history of the Christian Church in Cameroon and any part they may have played in colonialism is more complex than your informant told you. For one thing, the church joined the local people in fighting the German expropriation of lands belonging to African groups. On the other hand, Christian missions were quite instrumental in the persecution of the Bamoun King and his subsequent removal and exile to Yaounde, where he died.

On Wednesday, January 1, 2014, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brother Ken.�

My point of view on Cameroon is informed by a radical Congolese women and a Cameroonian� I met during my graduate school days. Most of the Cameroonians I have met are radical like me, but that just means we are moving in different circles. My radical African comrades don�t typically share their views with whites. But my point wasn't about what Cameroonians think about of colonialism (what Cameroonians think on the matter is certainly important).�You said that from your experience Cameroonians don�t generally hate Germans. Fine. Nevertheless, we must be clear that, although the methods varied, Europeans were uniform in their brutal oppression of African people. I must insist on that �absolute� assessment. Germans committed genocide in Namibia, but you aren�t likely to find a generalized hatred of Germans in Namibia.�

We Africans are much too forgiving and our thinking is overly influenced by the perspective of liberal whites. This is precisely the sort of thinking that Biko was challenging.� By comparison it seems to be that Jews are far less forgiving of Germans and, moreover, you certainly will not find Jews naming their children after Nazis.�

But, again, we must be clear that Euro names and languages were imposed on African people. Missionaries schools sometimes violently imposed Euro names and languages. After several centuries of slavery, apartheid, Jim Crown, lynchings, and colonialism, Eurocentric schools, and so on, Africans on the continent and abroad have come to internalized their oppressors outlook (hence the Cameroonians named �Adolf�)--even as we have consistently challenged these impositions (these instances of ambiguity as it relates to African agency are, I think, are more defensible than looking for ambiguity in Euro institutions).�

Respectfully, I must note, too, our relative subject positions. Your status as a long-time scholar of African Studies is, itself, an outcome of colonialism, ongoing white privilege, and the white control of the production of scholarly knowledge about Africa. I, on the other hand, grew up in the ghettoes of Los Angeles. For generations the vast majority of African Americans have been taught in white-controlled institutions that gross stereotypes about Africa. In other words, as Malcolm X pointed out in the 60s, African Americans have been taught to hate their heritage ( �self-hate�). Likewise, even today, many of the educational institutions in Africa are Eurocentric (My Nigerian wife studied in Nigeria and Salone through secondary school. Her ethnic group, Yotti/Bali/Chamba, straddles Nigeria and Cameroon).�

kzs

On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:25 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

correction. meant to say germans left after world war one. no one really remembered them, and bizarrely enough, whenever folks evoked them, it was with positive tones. probably the bad was forgotten, but there were memories of the train and water systems that people evoked in positive terms. i had a colleague whose name was adolf. germans were not hated in cameroon.
but it was so long ago...

On 1/1/14 4:58 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

kwame
i know a lot of cameroonians, and over 40 years. maybe what you write has some truth to it, but at the same time it seems really really out of tune and out of touch with the people i met, the students i taught, the country i came to know. it is an absolute statement, whereas the people i met never expressed themselves about their country in such terms.
there is one exception to my statement that i do remember: once i had students over, and we were talking about things like dante, which i believe i was teaching. a student expressed bitterness about how they all had been taught that their ancestors, prior to the coming of the missionaries, were supposedly all burning in hell. they asked me if i thought that was the case.
well, i didn't perhaps go as far as i might in saying that i found the idea of an afterlife ridiculous. for one thing, most people i met, including the students, were believing and practising christians, and i didn't want to insult anyone. but i did say that no one could state with any certainty what was to come after death.
they recognized the perniciousness of a teaching that presented the world in such terms.
it was almost 40 years ago. and i had read mongo beti's Main basse. but the anger beti expressed there did not seem to match the world i encountered for my 2 years in yaounde, and everything since has led me to the same conclusion. on my return

some years ago, i found some changes, but again nothing at all that would correspond to a view of "murderous white terrorism." the exception, of course, was ahidjo's attempt to eradicate the upc, which he did with the french. it was terrorism. but not a white terrorism. i'd call it postcolonial, in the sense of what the postcolonial world has come to embody. your last statement about missionary schools being a propaganda arm of brute violence, all i can say is that i would want to hear from the cameroonians who attended those schools. i had many students from the west, and they were actually proud of their schooling. perhaps the problem i see is that you are conflating time periods too much.� my students were all educated after independence; the germans left during world war II. and as for brits slaughtering cameroonian leaders, from what i know i'd say that was truer of the french than the brits.

i'd be curious to know if i am wrong, if cameroonians share your view.
ken

On 1/1/14 11:59 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Cameroon is a good example of why any effort to claim that colonial institutions were "ambiguous" in their outcomes is deeply flawed. To make that argument work, you have to remove missionary schools from the larger project of vicious, bloody, murderous white terrorism. The Germans and Brits slaughtered many Cameroonian leaders whilst destroying or distorting indigenous institutions. Missionaries schools were imposed--the propagandist arm of brute violence (but its important to note that violence as "disciple" was a common feature of the schools).

kzs

On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 3:30:05 PM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:

Ken:

There is a critical mass of Cameroonians who were educated in Kamerun & Germany (1884-1914) and in Cameroun and France (1916-??) who actually became quite attracted t

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Kwame Zulu Shabazz
Assistant Professor of African and�African American Studies

Department of Social Sciences
203-A Coltrane Hall
Winston-Salem State Univ.
601 S. MLK Jr. Dr.
Winston-Salem, NC 27110

Phone: �336-750-8940
Email: �shab...@wssu.edu
==
"Every artist, every scientist, must�decide�now�where he stands. He has no�alternative. There is no standing above�the conflict on Olympian heights. There�are no impartial observers. Through the�destruction, in certain countries, of the�greatest of man's literary heritage,�through the propagation of false ideas of�racial and national superiority, the artist,�the scientist, the writer is challenged.�The struggle invades the formerly�cloistered halls of our universities and�other seats of learning. The battlefront is�everywhere. There is no sheltered�rear." Paul Robeson

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-- 
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michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

[kenneth harrow]

good points

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Ken, I didn't say Africans were powerless. We are not. I said that African  progress, at home and abroad, has been hampered by the internalization of eurocentric thought and behavior. 

I also noted that it would be more productive to discern ambiguity within the constrained actions of African agents as opposed to colonial institutions that are only superficially "ambiguous."

Yes, African Pentecostal churches are financially independent, but their theology tends to slide toward anti-African culture and pro-western values , e.g., hyper materialism. And, yes, funds controlled by white elites don't determine what Africans think and do, but it clearly limits us in significant ways.

As it stands now progressive Africans pursue funds with a sort of trickster approach which is fine, I suppose, but it is still as sort of dependency and doesn't do much to challenge asymmetrical relations of power that date back to the colonial encounter.

kzs

On Jan 2, 2014 7:26 PM, "kenneth harrow" <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear kwame
you frustrate me because as much as i want to walk the walk with you, you push a logic with which i agree past the point where it seems reasonable. i mostly agree with your first paragraph below: but there were pretty wide divergences in the churches and people in them. and the more you want to ascribe this to eurocentrism and the west, the more you are distancing yourself from the preponderance of pentacostal churches of today, and the millions of people who have turned to them.

maybe that is your place to begin. if you tell them all,  you are being brainwashed by white people, that won't make any sense to them whatsoever.

the other point where i can't go all the way is when you keep removing agency from african scholars, as if they/we can't think for ourselves, can't discern what you claim the privilege of discerning, which is who is brainwashing whom and why. i can't throw away soyinka for writing an adaptation of a greek play; mudimbe, for building so much on foucault's logic and said's approach; or let's say, achebe for writing in english, for responding to graham greene and joseph conrad.
that's where we are today.
i agree with the issue of who funds what, but it isn't just determinism. that old notion of economic determinism was denied by engels himself in the famous response after marx died.
so, let's say we agree that there are interests and forces at play in african history and affairs; that some of those have worked to the detriment of africans; that we are committed to righting the situation; that we can be humble about this, and not claim to be the owners of the truth, but rather people who struggle in what we believe is a just cause.
i just don't like telling fellow activists that i know what they don't. it works better for me if we can actually discuss the issues and try to make our case.
thanks for pushing the buttons all the same, and for your willingness to put these issues out there for discussion. i think we are much more in agreement over what really matters, even if we don't always read the situation in exactly the same manner.
ken

On 1/2/14 11:32 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brothers John and Ken, 

Thanks for the correction on the Brits. It has been some years, about 2002, so that error is likely mine. She probably did say France and Germany. Whatever the case, the Brits weren't in Cameroon for altruistic reasons, they were in Cameroon to protect and promote their own selfish interests at the expense of local populations as was the case with any European colonial govt in Africa. And what you read as the "complexity" of missionaries is only superficially complex. Scratch the surface and you will that missionaries at all times, like all other colonial institutions, had the same racist "civilizing" mission which was itself a cover for exploiting Africa's material resources. 

Africans scholars are severely mistaken in looking for "complexity" and "ambiguity" in colonialism. Comparatively, I challenge you to find Jewish scholars going on and on about the gestapo "complexity." Our problem, I believe, is that our thinking has been colonized. The scholarly questions we ask are shaped by white liberal thought as opposed to African-centered thought. Unsurprising given that we are mostly educated in Eurocentric institutions (within and outside Africa). We are also shackled by western funding which shapes are inquiries and conclusions in subtle and not so subtle ways. 

kzs

On Thursday, January 2, 2014 10:52:41 AM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:

KZS:

The Cameroonian that talked to you either does not know anything about Cameroon history--Kamerun (Germany); League of Nations Mandates (UK & France); UN Trust Territory of Cameroons under French administration; UN Trust Territory of Southern Cameroons & UN Trust Territory of Northern Cameroons under British administration; Republic of Cameroon (1960); Federal Republic of Cameroon (1961-1972); United Republic of Cameroon (1972-1984); Republic of Cameroon (1984-present)--or intentionally distorted it. The atrocities committed by the country's colonial governments are well-documented. None of that history, even that written by radical scholars, list any atrocities committed by the British in any of the two territories they controlled. 

Also, the history of the Christian Church in Cameroon and any part they may have played in colonialism is more complex than your informant told you. For one thing, the church joined the local people in fighting the German expropriation of lands belonging to African groups. On the other hand, Christian missions were quite instrumental in the persecution of the Bamoun King and his subsequent removal and exile to Yaounde, where he died.

On Wednesday, January 1, 2014, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brother Ken. 

My point of view on Cameroon is informed by a radical Congolese women and a Cameroonian  I met during my graduate school days. Most of the Cameroonians I have met are radical like me, but that just means we are moving in different circles. My radical African comrades don’t typically share their views with whites. But my point wasn't about what Cameroonians think about of colonialism (what Cameroonians think on the matter is certainly important). You said that from your experience Cameroonians don’t generally hate Germans. Fine. Nevertheless, we must be clear that, although the methods varied, Europeans were uniform in their brutal oppression of African people. I must insist on that “absolute” assessment. Germans committed genocide in Namibia, but you aren’t likely to find a generalized hatred of Germans in Namibia. 

We Africans are much too forgiving and our thinking is overly influenced by the perspective of liberal whites. This is precisely the sort of thinking that Biko was challenging.  By comparison it seems to be that Jews are far less forgiving of Germans and, moreover, you certainly will not find Jews naming their children after Nazis. 

But, again, we must be clear that Euro names and languages were imposed on African people. Missionaries schools sometimes violently imposed Euro names and languages. After several centuries of slavery, apartheid, Jim Crown, lynchings, and colonialism, Eurocentric schools, and so on, Africans on the continent and abroad have come to internalized their oppressors outlook (hence the Cameroonians named “Adolf”)--even as we have consistently challenged these impositions (these instances of ambiguity as it relates to African agency are, I think, are more defensible than looking for ambiguity in Euro institutions). 

Respectfully, I must note, too, our relative subject positions. Your status as a long-time scholar of African Studies is, itself, an outcome of colonialism, ongoing white privilege, and the white control of the production of scholarly knowledge about Africa. I, on the other hand, grew up in the ghettoes of Los Angeles. For generations the vast majority of African Americans have been taught in white-controlled institutions that gross stereotypes about Africa. In other words, as Malcolm X pointed out in the 60s, African Americans have been taught to hate their heritage ( “self-hate”). Likewise, even today, many of the educational institutions in Africa are Eurocentric (My Nigerian wife studied in Nigeria and Salone through secondary school. Her ethnic group, Yotti/Bali/Chamba, straddles Nigeria and Cameroon). 

kzs

On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:25 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

correction. meant to say germans left after world war one. no one really remembered them, and bizarrely enough, whenever folks evoked them, it was with positive tones. probably the bad was forgotten, but there were memories of the train and water systems that people evoked in positive terms. i had a colleague whose name was adolf. germans were not hated in cameroon.
but it was so long ago...

On 1/1/14 4:58 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

kwame
i know a lot of cameroonians, and over 40 years. maybe what you write has some truth to it, but at the same time it seems really really out of tune and out of touch with the people i met, the students i taught, the country i came to know. it is an absolute statement, whereas the people i met never expressed themselves about their country in such terms.
there is one exception to my statement that i do remember: once i had students over, and we were talking about things like dante, which i believe i was teaching. a student expressed bitterness about how they all had been taught that their ancestors, prior to the coming of the missionaries, were supposedly all burning in hell. they asked me if i thought that was the case.
well, i didn't perhaps go as far as i might in saying that i found the idea of an afterlife ridiculous. for one thing, most people i met, including the students, were believing and practising christians, and i didn't want to insult anyone. but i did say that no one could state with any certainty what was to come after death.
they recognized the perniciousness of a teaching that presented the world in such terms.
it was almost 40 years ago. and i had read mongo beti's Main basse. but the anger beti expressed there did not seem to match the world i encountered for my 2 years in yaounde, and everything since has led me to the same conclusion. on my return

some years ago, i found some changes, but again nothing at all that would correspond to a view of "murderous white terrorism." the exception, of course, was ahidjo's attempt to eradicate the upc, which he did with the french. it was terrorism. but not a white terrorism. i'd call it postcolonial, in the sense of what the postcolonial world has come to embody. your last statement about missionary schools being a propaganda arm of brute violence, all i can say is that i would want to hear from the cameroonians who attended those schools. i had many students from the west, and they were actually proud of their schooling. perhaps the problem i see is that you are conflating time periods too much.  my students were all educated after independence; the germans left during world war II. and as for brits slaughtering cameroonian leaders, from what i know i'd say that was truer of the french than the brits.

i'd be curious to know if i am wrong, if cameroonians share your view.
ken

On 1/1/14 11:59 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Cameroon is a good example of why any effort to claim that colonial institutions were "ambiguous" in their outcomes is deeply flawed. To make that argument work, you have to remove missionary schools from the larger project of vicious, bloody, murderous white terrorism. The Germans and Brits slaughtered many Cameroonian leaders whilst destroying or distorting indigenous institutions. Missionaries schools were imposed--the propagandist arm of brute violence (but its important to note that violence as "disciple" was a common feature of the schools).

kzs

On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 3:30:05 PM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:

Ken:

There is a critical mass of Cameroonians who were educated in Kamerun & Germany (1884-1914) and in Cameroun and France (1916-??) who actually became quite attracted t

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Kwame Zulu Shabazz
Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies

Department of Social Sciences
203-A Coltrane Hall
Winston-Salem State Univ.
601 S. MLK Jr. Dr.
Winston-Salem, NC 27110

Phone:  336-750-8940
Email:  shab...@wssu.edu
==
"Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear." Paul Robeson

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[Pablo Idahosa]

Brother Kwame,

I realize that short statements� and responses do not make for subtlety and nuance, and I would not want you to write an essay here, no more than I intend to write one in response!� However, when you say that we ought not to find in colonialism complexity and ambiguity, I take it you mean that it is not complex� because it was imposed and often acted with brutality, even genocidally in a number of cases; imposed norms and values that were not endogenous to Africa (i.e. Eurocentric); left� pernicious political, social and, economic legacies that Africans� continue to live� and wrestle with. �� I feel that ambiguity is another matter, as here I take it you mean a standpoint about colonialism's processes and institutions and their� cultural religious cognates, like missions.

By the way,� how can you possibly say that colonialism imposed European names upon Africans?� Most Africans have African names; some chose (as did my grandfathers� on both sides of my family0;� yet, as you and your Nigerian wife knows, they continued to use their own ethnic� names; where they did, chose (or have imposed upon them a European, or, biblical names--Islam is another matter), they, or their parents, � chose names that reflected their own aspirations about� their children's future.� What happened in the diasporas, is, of course another matter to be sure.� My father, Moses, an East German trained, Marxist agronomist, loved baptist hymns, and which� we sung at his funeral. So what? It's complex, brother; real complex.

�
As to the Gestapo (if that is the appropriate analogy; I take you mean Nazism, as the Gestapo was the secret police),� I'd� like to know what you know about the "Jewish" scholarship of Nazism� to make that statement, at least about Nazism, and that it was not complex, unless you mean that� there can be no morally complex responses to it-- that it is an unmitigated evil, etc. Surely, a point is that colonialism was complex as were its legacies; altruism, or otherwise,� has nothing to do with it. That Nazism is an evil is beyond dispute; that it was complex is also not beyond dispute, but is this the point of analogy that you want to proceed with?

Finally, we can or we can choose not to be shackled by funding; it's a circular, imprisoning� argument, as everything way say or do is taken in evidence against that which we say that, to you, appears to be "western", or at least a double consciousness. What would not be Eurocentric that might be sufficient in a a discussion about the complexities of colonialism?

Best,
Pablo

� On 2014-01-02 11:32 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brothers John and Ken,�

Thanks for the correction on the Brits. It has been some years, about 2002, so that error is likely mine. She probably did say France and Germany. Whatever the case, the Brits weren't in Cameroon for altruistic reasons, they were in Cameroon to protect and promote their own selfish interests at the expense of local populations as was the case with any European colonial govt in Africa. And what you read as the "complexity" of missionaries is only superficially complex. Scratch the surface and you will that missionaries at all times, like all other colonial institutions, had the same racist "civilizing" mission which was itself a cover for exploiting Africa's material resources.�

Africans scholars are severely mistaken in looking for "complexity" and "ambiguity" in colonialism. Comparatively, I challenge you to find Jewish scholars going on and on about the gestapo "complexity." Our problem, I believe, is that our thinking has been colonized. The scholarly questions we ask are shaped by white liberal thought as opposed to African-centered thought. Unsurprising given that we are mostly educated in Eurocentric institutions (within and outside Africa). We are also shackled by western funding which shapes are inquiries and conclusions in subtle and not so subtle ways.�

kzs

On Thursday, January 2, 2014 10:52:41 AM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:

KZS:

The Cameroonian that�talked to you either does not know anything about Cameroon history--Kamerun (Germany); League of Nations Mandates (UK & France); UN Trust Territory of Cameroons under French administration; UN Trust Territory of Southern Cameroons & UN Trust Territory of Northern Cameroons under British administration; Republic of Cameroon (1960); Federal Republic of Cameroon (1961-1972); United Republic of Cameroon (1972-1984); Republic of Cameroon (1984-present)--or intentionally distorted it. The atrocities committed by the country's colonial governments are well-documented. None of that history, even that written by radical scholars, list any atrocities committed by the British in any of the two territories they controlled.�

Also, the history of the Christian Church in Cameroon and any part they may have played in colonialism is more complex than your informant told you. For one thing, the church joined the local people in fighting the German expropriation of lands belonging to African groups. On the other hand, Christian missions were quite instrumental in the persecution of the Bamoun King and his subsequent removal and exile to Yaounde, where he died.

On Wednesday, January 1, 2014, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brother Ken.�

My point of view on Cameroon is informed by a radical Congolese women and a Cameroonian� I met during my graduate school days. Most of the Cameroonians I have met are radical like me, but that just means we are moving in different circles. My radical African comrades don�t typically share their views with whites. But my point wasn't about what Cameroonians think about of colonialism (what Cameroonians think on the matter is certainly important).�You said that from your experience Cameroonians don�t generally hate Germans. Fine. Nevertheless, we must be clear that, although the methods varied, Europeans were uniform in their brutal oppression of African people. I must insist on that �absolute� assessment. Germans committed genocide in Namibia, but you aren�t likely to find a generalized hatred of Germans in Namibia.�

We Africans are much too forgiving and our thinking is overly influenced by the perspective of liberal whites. This is precisely the sort of thinking that Biko was challenging.� By comparison it seems to be that Jews are far less forgiving of Germans and, moreover, you certainly will not find Jews naming their children after Nazis.�

But, again, we must be clear that Euro names and languages were imposed on African people. Missionaries schools sometimes violently imposed Euro names and languages. After several centuries of slavery, apartheid, Jim Crown, lynchings, and colonialism, Eurocentric schools, and so on, Africans on the continent and abroad have come to internalized their oppressors outlook (hence the Cameroonians named �Adolf�)--even as we have consistently challenged these impositions (these instances of ambiguity as it relates to African agency are, I think, are more defensible than looking for ambiguity in Euro institutions).�

Respectfully, I must note, too, our relative subject positions. Your status as a long-time scholar of African Studies is, itself, an outcome of colonialism, ongoing white privilege, and the white control of the production of scholarly knowledge about Africa. I, on the other hand, grew up in the ghettoes of Los Angeles. For generations the vast majority of African Americans have been taught in white-controlled institutions that gross stereotypes about Africa. In other words, as Malcolm X pointed out in the 60s, African Americans have been taught to hate their heritage ( �self-hate�). Likewise, even today, many of the educational institutions in Africa are Eurocentric (My Nigerian wife studied in Nigeria and Salone through secondary school. Her ethnic group, Yotti/Bali/Chamba, straddles Nigeria and Cameroon).�

kzs

On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:25 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

correction. meant to say germans left after world war one. no one really remembered them, and bizarrely enough, whenever folks evoked them, it was with positive tones. probably the bad was forgotten, but there were memories of the train and water systems that people evoked in positive terms. i had a colleague whose name was adolf. germans were not hated in cameroon.
but it was so long ago...

On 1/1/14 4:58 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

kwame
i know a lot of cameroonians, and over 40 years. maybe what you write has some truth to it, but at the same time it seems really really out of tune and out of touch with the people i met, the students i taught, the country i came to know. it is an absolute statement, whereas the people i met never expressed themselves about their country in such terms.
there is one exception to my statement that i do remember: once i had students over, and we were talking about things like dante, which i believe i was teaching. a student expressed bitterness about how they all had been taught that their ancestors, prior to the coming of the missionaries, were supposedly all burning in hell. they asked me if i thought that was the case.
well, i didn't perhaps go as far as i might in saying that i found the idea of an afterlife ridiculous. for one thing, most people i met, including the students, were believing and practising christians, and i didn't want to insult anyone. but i did say that no one could state with any certainty what was to come after death.
they recognized the perniciousness of a teaching that presented the world in such terms.
it was almost 40 years ago. and i had read mongo beti's Main basse. but the anger beti expressed there did not seem to match the world i encountered for my 2 years in yaounde, and everything since has led me to the same conclusion. on my return

some years ago, i found some changes, but again nothing at all that would correspond to a view of "murderous white terrorism." the exception, of course, was ahidjo's attempt to eradicate the upc, which he did with the french. it was terrorism. but not a white terrorism. i'd call it postcolonial, in the sense of what the postcolonial world has come to embody. your last statement about missionary schools being a propaganda arm of brute violence, all i can say is that i would want to hear from the cameroonians who attended those schools. i had many students from the west, and they were actually proud of their schooling. perhaps the problem i see is that you are conflating time periods too much.� my students were all educated after independence; the germans left during world war II. and as for brits slaughtering cameroonian leaders, from what i know i'd say that was truer of the french than the brits.

i'd be curious to know if i am wrong, if cameroonians share your view.
ken

On 1/1/14 11:59 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Cameroon is a good example of why any effort to claim that colonial institutions were "ambiguous" in their outcomes is deeply flawed. To make that argument work, you have to remove missionary schools from the larger project of vicious, bloody, murderous white terrorism. The Germans and Brits slaughtered many Cameroonian leaders whilst destroying or distorting indigenous institutions. Missionaries schools were imposed--the propagandist arm of brute violence (but its important to note that violence as "disciple" was a common feature of the schools).

kzs

On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 3:30:05 PM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:

Ken:

There is a critical mass of Cameroonians who were educated in Kamerun & Germany (1884-1914) and in Cameroun and France (1916-??) who actually became quite attracted t

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Kwame Zulu Shabazz
Assistant Professor of African and�African American Studies

Department of Social Sciences
203-A Coltrane Hall
Winston-Salem State Univ.
601 S. MLK Jr. Dr.
Winston-Salem, NC 27110

Phone: �336-750-8940
Email: �shab...@wssu.edu
==
"Every artist, every scientist, must�decide�now�where he stands. He has no�alternative. There is no standing above�the conflict on Olympian heights. There�are no impartial observers. Through the�destruction, in certain countries, of the�greatest of man's literary heritage,�through the propagation of false ideas of�racial and national superiority, the artist,�the scientist, the writer is challenged.�The struggle invades the formerly�cloistered halls of our universities and�other seats of learning. The battlefront is�everywhere. There is no sheltered�rear." Paul Robeson

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[kenneth harrow]

thanks pablo for succinctly putting this into such clear terms. i do think you are capturing kwame's argument, though it is up to him to say so.
one small thing about the jewish scholarship on nazism. i think the only book i've read on the subject, some 45 years ago, was hannah arendt's origins of totalitarianism. she was a jewish scholar; and if nazism, to her, was, like racism, an unmitigated evil, it was certainly also complex complex complex like an onion whose outer skins kept being peeled back to reveal more inner forces than what we could see from its exterior.
for her genocide began w the herero; and the irrationality of german racism was anticipated in south africa's treatment of the races.
ken

[kenneth harrow]

dear kwame
what i agree wholeheartedly with, in what you say here, is the expression "asymmetrical relations." everything flows from that. but as i consider the ills of colonialism, it seems to me that it might be viewed differently from earlier forms of conquest. i've always (in past years) tried to teach the colonial enterprise to my students as one based on a fundamental deception, that is, where the europeans used as their justification for the conquest the argument that they were bringing civilization. then i'd cite all those phrases, white man's burden, kulturarbeit, la mission civilisatrice, etc, and state, actually, it was a conquest that disguised itself as a civilizing mission.
but to use your term, it was a mission in which the power was always asymmetrical.
so, to nuance the thing again, can we imagine situations in which the deployment of power was direct and brutal, lacking any pretense of civilizing, and another where schools and churches were conceived as a positive contribution.
i am thinking of the difference between the congo free state, under leopold, and the colony that followed.
in reading King Leopold's Ghost and other texts around that period i came to understand that the horrors leopold visited on the congolese were not anomalies, but were simply variants of what was practiced in the neighboring states. nonetheless, the brutalities he imposed became a reason for removing him from power and instituting a regime that saw itself as more humane.
20th century colonialism came to want to see itself as a humane endeavor more than a brutal conquest and expropriation of african gold and blood. hypocritical though the colonialists might have been, were there not changes that came, for whatever reason, that denoted a shift away from naked power and toward a more collaborative exercise of power grounded in eurocentric notions of humanism?
so the first universities, with ibadan, makerere, and later dakar; the high schools that carried enormous prestige; the entry of african politicians into the french national assembly, before wwII; the collaboration of intellectuals like sartre with negritude.
asymmetrical though all these features were, centered in european notions of universal values and higher civilization, nonetheless the blatant racism of the early century began to yield to changes. (sartre was not� a racist, and would have supported robeson, for instance)

power was handed over to flunkies like ahidjo; to collaborators like senghor; and it was wrenched by opponents like sekou toure. it was taken/received in a mutual act of transmission with nkrumah and kenyatta.
it seems to me that brutal conquest began to change fairly quickly, certainly between the wars, and it ended fairly quickly after that--only 11 years with sudan.
it is in trying to understand this picture of europeans weakening, yielding, being urged, at times compelled, but also facing opposition to brutal power at home that has to be brought into the picture. when de gaulle agreed to end the rule over algeria, there was an attempted coup by his own army.
i feel that all of this is the understanding of a non-specialist, non-historian, who is guided by impressions more than detailed study. so i am open to correction by those who have actually made the study of history theirs, and can provide a more nuanced view. i am trying to understand asymmetrical power in terms that go beyond direct force, and that change over time. and i certainly agree that despite my attempt to see a modification of the initial conquest that the asymmetry is very much still in place, while at the same time, nothing is the same as it was before.
ken
�

On 1/2/14 8:03 PM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Ken, I didn't say Africans were powerless. We are not. I said that African� progress, at home and abroad, has been hampered by the internalization of eurocentric thought and behavior.�

I also noted that it would be more productive to discern ambiguity within the constrained actions of African agents as opposed to colonial institutions that are only superficially "ambiguous."

Yes, African Pentecostal churches are financially independent, but their theology tends to slide toward anti-African culture and pro-western values , e.g., hyper materialism. And, yes, funds controlled by white elites don't determine what Africans think and do, but it clearly limits us in significant ways.

As it stands now progressive Africans pursue funds with a sort of trickster approach which is fine, I suppose, but it is still as sort of dependency and doesn't do much to challenge asymmetrical relations of power that date back to the colonial encounter.

kzs

On Jan 2, 2014 7:26 PM, "kenneth harrow" <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

dear kwame
you frustrate me because as much as i want to walk the walk with you, you push a logic with which i agree past the point where it seems reasonable. i mostly agree with your first paragraph below: but there were pretty wide divergences in the churches and people in them. and the more you want to ascribe this to eurocentrism and the west, the more you are distancing yourself from the preponderance of pentacostal churches of today, and the millions of people who have turned to them.

maybe that is your place to begin. if you tell them all,� you are being brainwashed by white people, that won't make any sense to them whatsoever.

the other point where i can't go all the way is when you keep removing agency from african scholars, as if they/we can't think for ourselves, can't discern what you claim the privilege of discerning, which is who is brainwashing whom and why. i can't throw away soyinka for writing an adaptation of a greek play; mudimbe, for building so much on foucault's logic and said's approach; or let's say, achebe for writing in english, for responding to graham greene and joseph conrad.
that's where we are today.
i agree with the issue of who funds what, but it isn't just determinism. that old notion of economic determinism was denied by engels himself in the famous response after marx died.
so, let's say we agree that there are interests and forces at play in african history and affairs; that some of those have worked to the detriment of africans; that we are committed to righting the situation; that we can be humble about this, and not claim to be the owners of the truth, but rather people who struggle in what we believe is a just cause.
i just don't like telling fellow activists that i know what they don't. it works better for me if we can actually discuss the issues and try to make our case.
thanks for pushing the buttons all the same, and for your willingness to put these issues out there for discussion. i think we are much more in agreement over what really matters, even if we don't always read the situation in exactly the same manner.
ken

On 1/2/14 11:32 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brothers John and Ken,�

Thanks for the correction on the Brits. It has been some years, about 2002, so that error is likely mine. She probably did say France and Germany. Whatever the case, the Brits weren't in Cameroon for altruistic reasons, they were in Cameroon to protect and promote their own selfish interests at the expense of local populations as was the case with any European colonial govt in Africa. And what you read as the "complexity" of missionaries is only superficially complex. Scratch the surface and you will that missionaries at all times, like all other colonial institutions, had the same racist "civilizing" mission which was itself a cover for exploiting Africa's material resources.�

Africans scholars are severely mistaken in looking for "complexity" and "ambiguity" in colonialism. Comparatively, I challenge you to find Jewish scholars going on and on about the gestapo "complexity." Our problem, I believe, is that our thinking has been colonized. The scholarly questions we ask are shaped by white liberal thought as opposed to African-centered thought. Unsurprising given that we are mostly educated in Eurocentric institutions (within and outside Africa). We are also shackled by western funding which shapes are inquiries and conclusions in subtle and not so subtle ways.�

kzs

On Thursday, January 2, 2014 10:52:41 AM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:

KZS:

The Cameroonian that�talked to you either does not know anything about Cameroon history--Kamerun (Germany); League of Nations Mandates (UK & France); UN Trust Territory of Cameroons under French administration; UN Trust Territory of Southern Cameroons & UN Trust Territory of Northern Cameroons under British administration; Republic of Cameroon (1960); Federal Republic of Cameroon (1961-1972); United Republic of Cameroon (1972-1984); Republic of Cameroon (1984-present)--or intentionally distorted it. The atrocities committed by the country's colonial governments are well-documented. None of that history, even that written by radical scholars, list any atrocities committed by the British in any of the two territories they controlled.�

Also, the history of the Christian Church in Cameroon and any part they may have played in colonialism is more complex than your informant told you. For one thing, the church joined the local people in fighting the German expropriation of lands belonging to African groups. On the other hand, Christian missions were quite instrumental in the persecution of the Bamoun King and his subsequent removal and exile to Yaounde, where he died.

On Wednesday, January 1, 2014, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Brother Ken.�

My point of view on Cameroon is informed by a radical Congolese women and a Cameroonian� I met during my graduate school days. Most of the Cameroonians I have met are radical like me, but that just means we are moving in different circles. My radical African comrades don�t typically share their views with whites. But my point wasn't about what Cameroonians think about of colonialism (what Cameroonians think on the matter is certainly important).�You said that from your experience Cameroonians don�t generally hate Germans. Fine. Nevertheless, we must be clear that, although the methods varied, Europeans were uniform in their brutal oppression of African people. I must insist on that �absolute� assessment. Germans committed genocide in Namibia, but you aren�t likely to find a generalized hatred of Germans in Namibia.�

We Africans are much too forgiving and our thinking is overly influenced by the perspective of liberal whites. This is precisely the sort of thinking that Biko was challenging.� By comparison it seems to be that Jews are far less forgiving of Germans and, moreover, you certainly will not find Jews naming their children after Nazis.�

But, again, we must be clear that Euro names and languages were imposed on African people. Missionaries schools sometimes violently imposed Euro names and languages. After several centuries of slavery, apartheid, Jim Crown, lynchings, and colonialism, Eurocentric schools, and so on, Africans on the continent and abroad have come to internalized their oppressors outlook (hence the Cameroonians named �Adolf�)--even as we have consistently challenged these impositions (these instances of ambiguity as it relates to African agency are, I think, are more defensible than looking for ambiguity in Euro institutions).�

Respectfully, I must note, too, our relative subject positions. Your status as a long-time scholar of African Studies is, itself, an outcome of colonialism, ongoing white privilege, and the white control of the production of scholarly knowledge about Africa. I, on the other hand, grew up in the ghettoes of Los Angeles. For generations the vast majority of African Americans have been taught in white-controlled institutions that gross stereotypes about Africa. In other words, as Malcolm X pointed out in the 60s, African Americans have been taught to hate their heritage ( �self-hate�). Likewise, even today, many of the educational institutions in Africa are Eurocentric (My Nigerian wife studied in Nigeria and Salone through secondary school. Her ethnic group, Yotti/Bali/Chamba, straddles Nigeria and Cameroon).�

kzs

On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:25 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

correction. meant to say germans left after world war one. no one really remembered them, and bizarrely enough, whenever folks evoked them, it was with positive tones. probably the bad was forgotten, but there were memories of the train and water systems that people evoked in positive terms. i had a colleague whose name was adolf. germans were not hated in cameroon.
but it was so long ago...

On 1/1/14 4:58 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

kwame
i know a lot of cameroonians, and over 40 years. maybe what you write has some truth to it, but at the same time it seems really really out of tune and out of touch with the people i met, the students i taught, the country i came to know. it is an absolute statement, whereas the people i met never expressed themselves about their country in such terms.
there is one exception to my statement that i do remember: once i had students over, and we were talking about things like dante, which i believe i was teaching. a student expressed bitterness about how they all had been taught that their ancestors, prior to the coming of the missionaries, were supposedly all burning in hell. they asked me if i thought that was the case.
well, i didn't perhaps go as far as i might in saying that i found the idea of an afterlife ridiculous. for one thing, most people i met, including the students, were believing and practising christians, and i didn't want to insult anyone. but i did say that no one could state with any certainty what was to come after death.
they recognized the perniciousness of a teaching that presented the world in such terms.
it was almost 40 years ago. and i had read mongo beti's Main basse. but the anger beti expressed there did not seem to match the world i encountered for my 2 years in yaounde, and everything since has led me to the same conclusion. on my return

some years ago, i found some changes, but again nothing at all that would correspond to a view of "murderous white terrorism." the exception, of course, was ahidjo's attempt to eradicate the upc, which he did with the french. it was terrorism. but not a white terrorism. i'd call it postcolonial, in the sense of what the postcolonial world has come to embody. your last statement about missionary schools being a propaganda arm of brute violence, all i can say is that i would want to hear from the cameroonians who attended those schools. i had many students from the west, and they were actually proud of their schooling. perhaps the problem i see is that you are conflating time periods too much.� my students were all educated after independence; the germans left during world war II. and as for brits slaughtering cameroonian leaders, from what i know i'd say that was truer of the french than the brits.

i'd be curious to know if i am wrong, if cameroonians share your view.
ken

On 1/1/14 11:59 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Cameroon is a good example of why any effort to claim that colonial institutions were "ambiguous" in their outcomes is deeply flawed. To make that argument work, you have to remove missionary schools from the larger project of vicious, bloody, murderous white terrorism. The Germans and Brits slaughtered many Cameroonian leaders whilst destroying or distorting indigenous institutions. Missionaries schools were imposed--the propagandist arm of brute violence (but its important to note that violence as "disciple" was a common feature of the schools).

kzs

On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 3:30:05 PM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:

Ken:

There is a critical mass of Cameroonians who were educated in Kamerun & Germany (1884-1914) and in Cameroun and France (1916-??) who actually became quite attracted t

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Kwame Zulu Shabazz
Assistant Professor of African and�African American Studies

Department of Social Sciences
203-A Coltrane Hall
Winston-Salem State Univ.
601 S. MLK Jr. Dr.
Winston-Salem, NC 27110

Phone: �336-750-8940
Email: �shab...@wssu.edu
==
"Every artist, every scientist, must�decide�now�where he stands. He has no�alternative. There is no standing above�the conflict on Olympian heights. There�are no impartial observers. Through the�destruction, in certain countries, of the�greatest of man's literary heritage,�through the propagation of false ideas of�racial and national superiority, the artist,�the scientist, the writer is challenged.�The struggle invades the formerly�cloistered halls of our universities and�other seats of learning. The battlefront is�everywhere. There is no sheltered�rear." Paul Robeson

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[kwame zulu shabazz]

Peace, Brother Pablo.

Yes, there are many examples of racism burnished with bogus ambiguity. The example that has always stuck in my head is Elmina Castle in the Central Region of Ghana. There is a plaque on the site which basically says that colonialism was bad, but also good because it introduced Africans to Christ, new crops, western education, and, best of all, Europeans put the brakes on African "tribalism" and, thus, thankfully for the savages, Africans were forced to stop fighting one another. Or Boston College where my wife did her first of two  advanced degrees in theology. A fellow graduate student from Central Africa (I think), insisted that she (my wife) must have a "Christian name." I also have in mind accounts of missionary schools that imposed European names and/or European languages, sometimes with physical violence. Here is an example of imposed Euro names from Long Walk to Freedom cited in:

 

Indigenous Peoples' Wisdom and Power: Affirming Our Knowledge Through Narratives (p. 234)

http://books.google.com/books?id=tyyYB-yzNlQC&pg=PA234&lpg=PA234&dq=missionaries+%22imposed+european+names%22+africa&source=bl&ots=QoM_e6fYrW&sig=NEW7zGZIK1T-qXi8M-nFHDiF2z4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jjXGUpmSDY6NkAfdy4HgBg&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

This thread, I think, was a response to an earlier post written in the NY Times by a Jewish scholar who wants to make the case that missionary schools weren't so bad because they produced anti-colonial leaders. I won't rehash my critique of that here, but I do find it offensive (and false). Now I might be wrong, but I doubt that Jewish scholars are inclined to claiming that Nazi institutions weren't all bad because, after all, Jews eventually got their own state. (Slightly aside, it seems to me that Jews aren't blamed for their oppression even though some Jews cooperated with Nazis. Africans, on the other hand, don't get the same benefit of the historiographical doubt). 

To my thinking what Europeans did to Africans in the "New World" and in Africans in Africa are impossible to disentangle. These were interconnected processes. And, yes, Islam is also problematic. I am thinking of my Fulani friend who boasts that her people have been Muslims for so long that they no longer know their indigenous names and she dismisses indigenous religion as "backwards." 

We won't agree on "complexity" on this thread (and that is ok). I doubt that the Namibians slaughtered by Germans gave much thought to complexity. In some cases, too many cases I fear, "complexity" is a scholarly conceit that obscures more than it explains or, rather, explains the surface of things whilst missing the deeper pattern of uncomplicated brutality. As far as I can tell, people who resist their oppressors don't waste much time pondering the "complexity" of their condition. What they did far more often is carefully assess the words and deeds of their oppressors, looked out for contradiction, and astutely exploit those contradictions to press the case for freedom, justice and equality. The Bostonian abolitionist David Walker's scathing critique of white slave-owning Christians comes to mind. Or the prophetess Kimpa Vita of Kongo who remixed Portuguese Christianity to create a revolutionary religion of African redemption. 

kzs

By the way, how can you possibly say that colonialism imposed European names upon Africans?  Most Africans have African names; some chose (as did my grandfathers  on both sides of my family0;  yet, as you and your Nigerian wife knows, they continued to use their own ethnic  names; where they did, chose (or have imposed upon them a European, or, biblical names--Islam is another matter), they, or their parents,   chose names that reflected their own aspirations about  their children's future.  What happened in the diasporas, is, of course another matter to be sure.  My father, Moses, an East German trained, Marxist agronomist, loved baptist hymns, and which  we sung at his funeral. So what? It's complex, brother; real complex. 

 
As to the Gestapo (if that is the appropriate analogy; I take you mean Nazism, as the Gestapo was the secret police),  I'd  like to know what you know about the "Jewish" scholarship of Nazism  to make that statement, at least about Nazism, and that it was not complex, unless you mean that  there can be no morally complex responses to it-- that it is an unmitigated evil, etc. Surely, a point is that colonialism was complex as were its legacies; altruism, or otherwise,  has nothing to do with it. That Nazism is an evil is beyond dispute; that it was complex is also not beyond dispute, but is this the point of analogy that you want to proceed with?

As for funding, it is not complicated. In so long as we are dependent on European funds to produce scholarly knowledge about Africa, we are compromised (and colonized).

kzs 

On Jan 2, 2014, at 9:19 PM, Pablo Idahosa wrote:

Brother Kwame,

I realize that short statements  and responses do not make for subtlety and nuance, and I would not want you to write an essay here, no more than I intend to write one in response!  However, when you say that we ought not to find in colonialism complexity and ambiguity, I take it you mean that it is not complex  because it was imposed and often acted with brutality, even genocidally in a number of cases; imposed norms and values that were not endogenous to Africa (i.e. Eurocentric); left  pernicious political, social and, economic legacies that Africans  continue to live  and wrestle with.    I feel that ambiguity is another matter, as here I take it you mean a standpoint about colonialism's processes and institutions and their  cultural religious cognates, like missions.

By the way,  how can you possibly say that colonialism imposed European names upon Africans?  Most Africans have African names; some chose (as did my grandfathers  on both sides of my family0;  yet, as you and your Nigerian wife knows, they continued to use their own ethnic  names; where they did, chose (or have imposed upon them a European, or, biblical names--Islam is another matter), they, or their parents,   chose names that reflected their own aspirations about  their children's future.  What happened in the diasporas, is, of course another matter to be sure.  My father, Moses, an East German trained, Marxist agronomist, loved baptist hymns, and which  we sung at his funeral. So what? It's complex, brother; real complex.

 
As to the Gestapo (if that is the appropriate analogy; I take you mean Nazism, as the Gestapo was the secret police),  I'd  like to know what you know about the "Jewish" scholarship of Nazism  to make that statement, at least about Nazism, and that it was not complex, unless you mean that  there can be no morally complex responses to it-- that it is an unmitigated evil, etc. Surely, a point is that colonialism was complex as were its legacies; altruism, or otherwise,  has nothing to do with it. That Nazism is an evil is beyond dispute; that it was complex is also not beyond dispute, but is this the point of analogy that you want to proceed with?

Finally, we can or we can choose not to be shackled by funding; it's a circular, imprisoning  argument, as everything way say or do is taken in evidence against that which we say that, to you, appears to be "western", or at least a double consciousness. What would not be Eurocentric that might be sufficient in a a discussion about the complexities of colonialism?

Best,

Kwame Zulu Shabazz
Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies

Department of Social Sciences
203-A Coltrane Hall
Winston-Salem State Univ.
601 S. MLK Jr. Dr.
Winston-Salem, NC 27110

Phone:  336-750-8940
Email:  shab...@wssu.edu
==

[kwame zulu shabazz]

The last few sentences of my reply were truncated. I said: 

As for funding, it is not complicated. In so long as we are dependent on European funds to produce scholarly knowledge about Africa, we are compromised (and colonized).

kzs

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Brother KZS,

You make some valid points but you tendentiously mar these points with hyperbole, wild generalizations, and untenable analogies. Do you really want us to take you seriously when you compare Christian missionaries in Africa to Nazis? Come on!

Where then do we place African American missionaries in colonial Kenya, colonial South Africa, and in "Leopold's" Congo, especially those who were responsible for exposing Leopold's crimes against the Congolese peoples to the world? Where they all complicit in this Christian missionary brainwashing of, and violence against, Africans?

It is great that your wife is Chamba. My forthcoming book (to be released next month by Indiana), has sections that discuss how a particular white missionary (who was understandably widely despised by the British colonial authorities, who even threatened him) consciously motivated Christian Chamba young men to take on the colonial system, especially the Anglo-Fulani system of colonial rule, which your wife may be very familiar with. Yes, said missionary probably had his own anti-Muslim agenda, but this alliance between European Christian missionaries and Christian converts in the Middle Belt fueled the anticolonial and anti-Caliphate self determination struggles of many non-Muslim peoples across the Middle Belt. It would be insulting to your wife's folks--your in-laws--to dismiss this struggle. Go to these places, including your wife's area today, and ask them how they feel about the missionaries. They'd probably tell you, even if romantically, that the missionaries saved them from the worst effects of colonial rule, helped them to challenge both colonial rule and the oppression of British-appointed Fulani imperial chiefs and agents. Where do you place this story in your Manichean, blanket denunciation of European missionary work as bad for Africans? And would it not amount to scholarly arrogance on your part to simply parse this complex story of missionary education, militant self-determination, and colonialism as yet another instance of double consciousness and brainwashing by missionaries? Sometimes as scholars we need to humble ourselves and listen to our non-elite subjects. We may come away realizing that our ossified paradigms and ideologies mean nothing to African people at the grassroots. I'd rather the faithful to how African groups interpret their colonial experiences than squeeze these experiences into some prepackaged ideological boxes. I do much of my research in Muslim Northern Nigeria and I have read things about the British written by Muslim colonial subjects that would embarrass and shock Afrocentrists, pan-Africanists, and those with similar ideologies. It is not that these people didn't see colonial oppression; they did. But they also saw other things. Some of them saw beyond colonial oppression into other realms. Any serious historian of Africa knows that colonial and postcolonial African history is not just about colonial oppression. To make such an argument is to lionize, reify, and imbue colonialism with deterministic powers that it lacked in reality. Some folks write about colonialism as though Africans did nothing else in colonial times except suffer and react to colonial oppression.

The truth is that Africans used the tools and technologies provided by missionaries for their own ends--to secure education, which gave one a more secure economic foothold in colonial society; to acquire the accoutrements of colonial modernity; to access the limited spaces and opportunities for upward mobility open to Africans; and to participate in national and transnational anticolonial movements and solidarities.

I'm usually the first to rail against complexity for complexity's sake. In fact on this forum I have often critiqued the obsession with complexity as something that sometimes authorizes and legitimizes complicity. But much of human history is complex, and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the nuances and complexities of African colonial history. One is merely being faithful to the narratives of the Africans who experienced colonialism in MULTIPLE and DIVERSE ways. 

Colonialism was never uniform. When it came to brutality, there was a spectrum, ranging from Leopold in the Congo and the Germans in present day Namibia to Apartheid to non-Apatheid settler colonies to the Indirect Rule colonies where colonial authorities for a variety of reasons adopted a relatively hands-off attitude, leading some scholars like Jeffery Herbst to argue about the chronically limited reach of the colonial state and others like Wilson to write about the "thin white line" of colonial control, which meant that many Africans in some colonies did not even experience colonial rule in any practical quotidian sense because of the thinness of the colonial presence. When it came to "cotton colonialism" is it fair to lump the quasi slavery of the Portuguese cotton plantation system with the harsh but tamer cotton regimes of the French Soudan? Or to obscure the difference between the French Soudan cotton regime as analyzed by Allen Isaacman and the British cotton regime in Northern Nigeria, a regime that, while harsh and imposed, was no where as brutal as that in the Portuguese empire? Was the colonial exploitation, resource expropriation, and economic disenfranchisement of non-settler colonies as intense as those of settler colonies where Africans' lands were seized, master-servant labor laws passed, pass laws implemented, and Africans prohibited from growing crops deemed profitable by the settler planter oligarchy? I could go on with the examples of marked differences in colonial practices resulting in marked differences in how colonialism was experienced and responded to by Africans.

Further, when Emmanuel Ayandele and our own Toyin Falola write eloquently about the "missionary impact" on African nationalism (or African elite nationalism), is that not merely a recognition of the UNINTENDED consequences of European missionary Christianity, which manifested in two forms? The two forms being that the racism practiced in missionary organizations raised African converts racial and nationalist consciousness, leading to activism, and also that having acquired the Roman literacy dispensed by the missions, African Christian colonial subjects (Athomi, in Simon Gikandi's Kikuyu vocabulary) used this tool of literacy to transgress the intellectual boundaries erected for them, deployed some of the acquired moral and theological vocabularies of liberation, brotherhood, and equality to question colonial policies and to eventually challenge for independence. Was this strategy of inversing colonial and missionary logics and idioms to fight colonialism not a demonstration of African agency and political genius? Would this particular strategy have been available without the educational resources that missionary provided, albeit for their own purposes?

I'd like to make a point in response to the repeated emphasis on colonial violence, a point which basically repeats an argument I make in my first book. When it came to colonial violence, it had a limit--it had to have a limit. It was, had to be, finite violence, for you did not want to kill off or render incapacitated the same Africans who had to be recruited to work for you or who had to grow the raw materials you so desired. So, yes, colonial violence could not have been and was not absolute or total--not because the Europeans weren't capable of inflicting total violence or practiced moral restrain but because they were pragmatic, rational, self-interested economists who realized that colonial violence only had to perform a corrective, punitive, and deterrence function and that colonial brutality had to stop at precisely the point beyond which violence could undermine colonial economic and political goals and become counterproductive. Which is precisely why the German system in Southwest Africa (Namibia), the Leopoldian system in the Congo, and Portuguese cotton slavery in Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere, were abandoned in favor of what Fred Cooper calls "respectable colonial exploitation." The other European colonialists feigned outrage at these early genocidal colonial practices not because they were innocent but because Leopold and the Germans were giving colonialism a bad name in Europe and imperiling everyone's colonial interests, causing a PR disaster, but more importantly, destroying the very humanity and resources that were needed to sustain colonial exploitation over a long time. To preserve and renew the resources that colonial authorities were interested in, they had to move away from the Leopoldian style and colonial exploitation had to become slower, more systematic, and less destructive of that which produced the raw materials--the land and people of Africa. This was how the doctrine of Dual Mandate was born. It was half propaganda, half economic and political pragmatism. Excessive violence threatened colonial exploitation, thus violence, when used, had to be measured, targeted, and calculated to achieve a finite purpose. Achille Mbembe makes a similar argument about colonial violence, so I am not the only one who has posited this. To preserve and reproduce much needed African labor colonial authorities, after the genocides and scorched earth destructions of the early colonial years, realized that you couldn't kill off the Africans you expect to offer you their labor or to produce your raw materials, so they moved away from the German Herero/Nama system, although episodic returns to wanton brutality did occur.

So, to conclude, I don't object to complicating aspects of African history or politics that lend themselves to complexity and nuance, even though I am suspicious of efforts to use complexity to hide complicity or to muddy the waters of straightforward moral or analytical issues. Colonialism was a complex thing, as was Africans' relationship with, and experience of, it. Instead of imposing an ideologically motivated moral polemic on it, instead of homogenizing complex experiences of colonial oppression, and instead of using sharp binary oppositions to oversimplify this experience, I think it is more rewarding to understand it in all its nuances, contradictions, and complexities. Only by listening to Africans who experienced colonialism and missionary Christianity would we fully grasp the range of actions and reactions that Africans undertook to work the colonial system in their favor and for their purposes, and to make the best of an oppressive system. Reducing these experiences and the narratives that flow from them to brainwashing, double consciousness, or the Stockholm syndrome is just that--reductive.

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[kwame zulu shabazz]

Brother Moses,

I have stated several times on this thread that Africans were never merely dupes of Euro interests. For example, I cited David Walker, the African American Christian abolitionist who severely critiqued white slave-owning Christians, thus concluding that they (white Christians) weren't really Christian at all; and the Christian prophetess Kimpa Vita (Kongo) who propagated a revolutionary variant of Christianity to which the Portuguese responded by burning her at the stake. My point is that our efforts to be free and self-determining has been and continues to be limited by the internalization of European outlooks. This internalization, I believe is a primary source (but not the sole source) of Africa's generalized people poverty in the midst immense resource wealth. As for missionaries, they have frequently condoned or were complicit in the genocide of indigenous people. And, yes, the centuries-old propaganda of Christian missionaries has been far more harmful, in the long view, than the mere three decades of Nazism. 

kzs   

On Jan 3, 2014, at 3:55 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:

Brother KZS,

You make some valid points but you tendentiously mar these points with hyperbole, wild generalizations, and untenable analogies. Do you really want us to take you seriously when you compare Christian missionaries in Africa to Nazis? Come on!

Where then do we place African American missionaries in colonial Kenya, colonial South Africa, and in "Leopold's" Congo, especially those who were responsible for exposing Leopold's crimes against the Congolese peoples to the world? Where they all complicit in this Christian missionary brainwashing of, and violence against, Africans?

It is great that your wife is Chamba. My forthcoming book (to be released next month by Indiana), has sections that discuss how a particular white missionary (who was understandably widely despised by the British colonial authorities, who even threatened him) consciously motivated Christian Chamba young men to take on the colonial system, especially the Anglo-Fulani system of colonial rule, which your wife may be very familiar with. Yes, said missionary probably had his own anti-Muslim agenda, but this alliance between European Christian missionaries and Christian converts in the Middle Belt fueled the anticolonial and anti-Caliphate self determination struggles of many non-Muslim peoples across the Middle Belt. It would be insulting to your wife's folks--your in-laws--to dismiss this struggle. Go to these places, including your wife's area today, and ask them how they feel about the missionaries. They'd probably tell you, even if romantically, that the missionaries saved them from the worst effects of colonial rule, helped them to challenge both colonial rule and the oppression of British-appointed Fulani imperial chiefs and agents. Where do you place this story in your Manichean, blanket denunciation of European missionary work as bad for Africans? And would it not amount to scholarly arrogance on your part to simply parse this complex story of missionary education, militant self-determination, and colonialism as yet another instance of double consciousness and brainwashing by missionaries? Sometimes as scholars we need to humble ourselves and listen to our non-elite subjects. We may come away realizing that our ossified paradigms and ideologies mean nothing to African people at the grassroots. I'd rather the faithful to how African groups interpret their colonial experiences than squeeze these experiences into some prepackaged ideological boxes. I do much of my research in Muslim Northern Nigeria and I have read things about the British written by Muslim colonial subjects that would embarrass and shock Afrocentrists, pan-Africanists, and those with similar ideologies. It is not that these people didn't see colonial oppression; they did. But they also saw other things. Some of them saw beyond colonial oppression into other realms. Any serious historian of Africa knows that colonial and postcolonial African history is not just about colonial oppression. To make such an argument is to lionize, reify, and imbue colonialism with deterministic powers that it lacked in reality. Some folks write about colonialism as though Africans did nothing else in colonial times except suffer and react to colonial oppression.

The truth is that Africans used the tools and technologies provided by missionaries for their own ends--to secure education, which gave one a more secure economic foothold in colonial society; to acquire the accoutrements of colonial modernity; to access the limited spaces and opportunities for upward mobility open to Africans; and to participate in national and transnational anticolonial movements and solidarities.

I'm usually the first to rail against complexity for complexity's sake. In fact on this forum I have often critiqued the obsession with complexity as something that sometimes authorizes and legitimizes complicity. But much of human history is complex, and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the nuances and complexities of African colonial history. One is merely being faithful to the narratives of the Africans who experienced colonialism in MULTIPLE and DIVERSE ways. 

Colonialism was never uniform. When it came to brutality, there was a spectrum, ranging from Leopold in the Congo and the Germans in present day Namibia to Apartheid to non-Apatheid settler colonies to the Indirect Rule colonies where colonial authorities for a variety of reasons adopted a relatively hands-off attitude, leading some scholars like Jeffery Herbst to argue about the chronically limited reach of the colonial state and others like Wilson to write about the "thin white line" of colonial control, which meant that many Africans in some colonies did not even experience colonial rule in any practical quotidian sense because of the thinness of the colonial presence. When it came to "cotton colonialism" is it fair to lump the quasi slavery of the Portuguese cotton plantation system with the harsh but tamer cotton regimes of the French Soudan? Or to obscure the difference between the French Soudan cotton regime as analyzed by Allen Isaacman and the British cotton regime in Northern Nigeria, a regime that, while harsh and imposed, was no where as brutal as that in the Portuguese empire? Was the colonial exploitation, resource expropriation, and economic disenfranchisement of non-settler colonies as intense as those of settler colonies where Africans' lands were seized, master-servant labor laws passed, pass laws implemented, and Africans prohibited from growing crops deemed profitable by the settler planter oligarchy? I could go on with the examples of marked differences in colonial practices resulting in marked differences in how colonialism was experienced and responded to by Africans.

Further, when Emmanuel Ayandele and our own Toyin Falola write eloquently about the "missionary impact" on African nationalism (or African elite nationalism), is that not merely a recognition of the UNINTENDED consequences of European missionary Christianity, which manifested in two forms? The two forms being that the racism practiced in missionary organizations raised African converts racial and nationalist consciousness, leading to activism, and also that having acquired the Roman literacy dispensed by the missions, African Christian colonial subjects (Athomi, in Simon Gikandi's Kikuyu vocabulary) used this tool of literacy to transgress the intellectual boundaries erected for them, deployed some of the acquired moral and theological vocabularies of liberation, brotherhood, and equality to question colonial policies and to eventually challenge for independence. Was this strategy of inversing colonial and missionary logics and idioms to fight colonialism not a demonstration of African agency and political genius? Would this particular strategy have been available without the educational resources that missionary provided, albeit for their own purposes?

I'd like to make a point in response to the repeated emphasis on colonial violence, a point which basically repeats an argument I make in my first book. When it came to colonial violence, it had a limit--it had to have a limit. It was, had to be, finite violence, for you did not want to kill off or render incapacitated the same Africans who had to be recruited to work for you or who had to grow the raw materials you so desired. So, yes, colonial violence could not have been and was not absolute or total--not because the Europeans weren't capable of inflicting total violence or practiced moral restrain but because they were pragmatic, rational, self-interested economists who realized that colonial violence only had to perform a corrective, punitive, and deterrence function and that colonial brutality had to stop at precisely the point beyond which violence could undermine colonial economic and political goals and become counterproductive. Which is precisely why the German system in Southwest Africa (Namibia), the Leopoldian system in the Congo, and Portuguese cotton slavery in Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere, were abandoned in favor of what Fred Cooper calls "respectable colonial exploitation." The other European colonialists feigned outrage at these early genocidal colonial practices not because they were innocent but because Leopold and the Germans were giving colonialism a bad name in Europe and imperiling everyone's colonial interests, causing a PR disaster, but more importantly, destroying the very humanity and resources that were needed to sustain colonial exploitation over a long time. To preserve and renew the resources that colonial authorities were interested in, they had to move away from the Leopoldian style and colonial exploitation had to become slower, more systematic, and less destructive of that which produced the raw materials--the land and people of Africa. This was how the doctrine of Dual Mandate was born. It was half propaganda, half economic and political pragmatism. Excessive violence threatened colonial exploitation, thus violence, when used, had to be measured, targeted, and calculated to achieve a finite purpose. Achille Mbembe makes a similar argument about colonial violence, so I am not the only one who has posited this. To preserve and reproduce much needed African labor colonial authorities, after the genocides and scorched earth destructions of the early colonial years, realized that you couldn't kill off the Africans you expect to offer you their labor or to produce your raw materials, so they moved away from the German Herero/Nama system, although episodic returns to wanton brutality did occur.

So, to conclude, I don't object to complicating aspects of African history or politics that lend themselves to complexity and nuance, even though I am suspicious of efforts to use complexity to hide complicity or to muddy the waters of straightforward moral or analytical issues. Colonialism was a complex thing, as was Africans' relationship with, and experience of, it. Instead of imposing an ideologically motivated moral polemic on it, instead of homogenizing complex experiences of colonial oppression, and instead of using sharp binary oppositions to oversimplify this experience, I think it is more rewarding to understand it in all its nuances, contradictions, and complexities. Only by listening to Africans who experienced colonialism and missionary Christianity would we fully grasp the range of actions and reactions that Africans undertook to work the colonial system in their favor and for their purposes, and to make the best of an oppressive system. Reducing these experiences and the narratives that flow from them to brainwashing, double consciousness, or the Stockholm syndrome is just that--reductive.

On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 10:46 PM, kwame zulu shabazz <kwames...@gmail.com> wrote:

Peace, Brother Pablo.

Yes, there are many examples of racism burnished with bogus ambiguity. The example that has always stuck in my head is Elmina Castle in the Central Region of Ghana. There is a plaque on the site which basically says that colonialism was bad, but also good because it introduced Africans to Christ, new crops, western education, and, best of all, Europeans put the brakes on African "tribalism" and, thus, thankfully for the savages, Africans were forced to stop fighting one another. Or Boston College where my wife did her first of two  advanced degrees in theology. A fellow graduate student from Central Africa (I think), insisted that she (my wife) must have a "Christian name." I also have in mind accounts of missionary schools that imposed European names and/or European languages, sometimes with physical violence. Here is an example of imposed Euro names from Long Walk to Freedom cited in:

 

Indigenous Peoples' Wisdom and Power: Affirming Our Knowledge Through Narratives (p. 234)

http://books.google.com/books?id=tyyYB-yzNlQC&pg=PA234&lpg=PA234&dq=missionaries+%22imposed+european+names%22+africa&source=bl&ots=QoM_e6fYrW&sig=NEW7zGZIK1T-qXi8M-nFHDiF2z4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jjXGUpmSDY6NkAfdy4HgBg&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

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[John Mbaku]

Brother KZS:

We have to be careful here: while the missionary enterprise generally may have been complicit in European colonialism in Africa, not all Christian missionaries can be categorized as having participated in and benefited from the opportunistic mercantile pact that was colonialism. In addition to the fact that the earliest Baptist missions in Cameroon were headed by freed slaves from Jamaica who fought alongside various indigenous groups to protect the latter's land from expropriation by European planters, many Christian missionaries of non-African origin also supported African groups that were faced with exploitation by European planters, traders, and colonists. A study of the history of missionary activities in southern Nigeria--particularly, in the southern region of the country, and of the Baptist Missionary Society, first in Fernando Po and then on the Cameroon River District, would be quite informative. Of special note is the Jamaican Baptist Missionary Society, Joseph Merrick & Joseph Jackson Fuller (Jamaicans) and Alfred Saker. These missionaries are well-known in Cameroon and had worked on the Cameroon River District for more than 40 years before German annexation of the territory. After the annexation of the Cameroon River District by Germany in 1884, Fuller supervised the transfer of the work of the BMS to the Basler (Basel) Missionary Society, a Swiss-based Christian organization. I am named after one of its missionaries, who spent his entire life working in Cameroon and died a poor man.

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Peace, Brother Ken.

You said:

i am trying to understand asymmetrical power in terms that go beyond direct force, and that change over time. and i certainly agree that despite my attempt to see a modification of the initial conquest that the asymmetry is very much still in place, while at the same time, nothing is the same as it was before.

I have similar questions about indirect force. I am especially interested in precisely how it compels people to do things. Much of your approach in the classroom on these questions is close to mine. I would add that I put lots of emphasis on the papal bulls which sanctioned the colonial project and provides irrefutable proof that the Portuguese and the Spaniards set sail from Europe with the aim of subjugating the planet. Its a really important point given that I frequently hear scholars claim that the earliest impulse of Europeans was to trade (not take).

kzs

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Kwame Zulu Shabazz
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"Every artist, every scientist, must�decide�now�where he stands. He has no�alternative. There is no standing above�the conflict on Olympian heights. There�are no impartial observers. Through the�destruction, in certain countries, of the�greatest of man's literary heritage,�through the propagation of false ideas of�racial and national superiority, the artist,�the scientist, the writer is challenged.�The struggle invades the formerly�cloistered halls of our universities and�other seats of learning. The battlefront is�everywhere. There is no sheltered�rear." Paul Robeson

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[kenneth harrow]

add to this jean-marie teno's film, The COlonial Misunderstanding, which generally is not kind of the german missionaries in namibia, but celebrates saker in cameroon, who has been largely forgotten. i think if the question of missionaries in africa is to be seriously studies, teno's film is a wonderful document to use.
ken

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

KZS,

 

We will have to disagree on the Nazi-missionaries analogy, although I have to say that had the Nazis realized their declared intention of turning Africa into farmland for the Aryan master race, you probably would not be invoking this flawed comparison.

 

I think I know the source of your repeated generalization. For whatever reason, presumably ideological, you are wedded to the idea of imposing realities of African American history on Africa's colonial experiences. You're also implacably committed to conflating the diverse experiences of black people across the world under slavery, colonization, and missionary activities, disregarding obvious differences such as the fact that there were different European colonizers with sometimes radically different policies; some black people were enslaved in the new world, others were not; and preexisting cultural, economic, and religious situations permitted and actuated the emergence of difference experiences with white racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.

 

For instance, in the African American experience, Christianity was more explicitly and unambiguously implicated in the system of slavery than missionaries were in colonization in Africa (I'll return to this shortly). Moreover, In antebellum America, white slave owners actively PREVENTED slaves from acquiring the instruments of literacy and Western education for obvious reasons. In Africa, the attitude of colonial regimes to Western education was more ambiguous; they wanted Africans to obtain a limited form of Western education and literacy to make them functional colonial subjects and to enable some of them perform clerical duties in the colonial bureaucracies and in colonial mercantile firms. But they didn't want them to acquire a liberal Western education for obvious reasons. The missionaries stepped in to provide both vocational and some liberal education, much to the consternation and outrage of many colonial authorities. In the United States, because of the closer relationship between Christianity and the system of slavery and also because North America already "had" Christianity, missionaries did not minister to or educate African slaves, and when they did, this was not accompanied by a conscious project of education as was the case in African mission fields.

 

How's this important? Whereas as you've been insinuating, Christianity and Christian missionaries were closely aligned to the slavery and Jim Crow system (let's forget Christian Abolitionists for now) in America, in MANY parts of Africa white missionaries had a more ambiguous and at times openly tense and antagonistic relationship with colonial authorities. To put it crudely, colonial authorities in many parts of Africa were not fond of their missionary compatriots and expressed this widely. The last chapter of my first book discusses this.

 

Also, in Northern Nigeria, the long animosity between Rev. Miller and others and the British colonial authorities is well known. Albert Ozigi and Lawrence Ocho documented the vigorous persecution of British missionary educationists across Northern Nigeria by British colonial authorities, leading, they argue, to the legacy of Northern Nigerian educational backwardness that is a staple of public discourse in Nigeria today.  Other cases across Africa have long been documented. In some cases, colonial authorities pushed to have some missionaries deported. Many missionaries educated Africans liberally, contrary to colonial regulations. Other missionaries befriended Africans and supported their struggles. Many missionaries transgressed the lines drawn by their colonizing compatriots, and missionary educators, though decidedly Eurocentric, equipped Western educated Africans with intellectual skills that proved quite useful to the Africans for decades to come. The missionaries were motivated by certain ideologies obviously, which colored their work, but they should not be blamed if Africans continued to view the world through Eurocentric lens thirty or fifty years after independence--after they've had decades to expand their horizon. 

 

Yet other missionaries betrayed their African friends when the chips were down, and practiced racism in the missions. It was complicated in Africa in ways that it probably was not in America. This is why memories and perspectives of Africans educated in missionary schools tend to be mixed. They remember enthusiastic educators who gave them the tools to secure jobs and move ahead in colonial society, the tools to read, consume ideas from far and wide, and participate in the culture of modernity. But they also remember colonial racism and oppression, some of this racism practiced in the missions through acts of condescension and denigration.

 

Mission-educated Africans who remember parlaying their education into postcolonial positions and advantages and are grateful to their missionary educators and to the religious bodies that set up those schools. This is their reality, and they would be insulted if one were to call them brainwashed. They used missionary education to their advantage and that demonstrates agency. But it also means that the legacy of Christianity is more mixed than you allow.

 

Even by acknowledging the unintended consequences of missionary Christian education in America (your story of inverted missionary grammar serving as a weapon of protest and critique) you acknowledge this complexity, although the difference is that in antebellum and Jim Crow America many literate blacks were self taught and learned to read and write in secret or as an act of subversion while in Africa they were consciously and painstakingly taught by missionaries.

 

The grammars and vocabularies and literacies that many Africans used to challenge colonization and to better themselves materially and intellectually would not have been widely available if not for the missionary schools. Many realistic Africans who lived through colonialism acknowledge this; they also acknowledge the fact that colonial authorities frowned upon many of the educational works of the missionaries because they felt perhaps rightly that they were equipping Africans to fight for equality and liberation even if they didn't intend it. Many Africans may still detest colonizers but their thinking about missionary educators are understandably more ambiguous. This is what folks have been saying to you by introducing the themes of nuance, complexity, and ambiguity into the conversation. 

 

Thus if many Africans have fond and positive memories of missionaries and missionary schools there are many tangible reasons for it. This does not mean that they do not recognize the failures and oppression of colonial society or the occasional complicities of some missionaries. To dismiss this history and experience as totally bad for Africans and Africa and to glibly dismiss these mixed memories as products of Christian brainwashing misses the point.

 

One should also point out that the positive remembering of colonial times by Africans has grown in proportion to the economic, educational, and political dysfunction in postcolonial African states. People not only have nostalgias about well run missionary schools with high standards, good infrastructure, and committed teachers; they also remember functioning railways systems, good roads, and other social goods of colonial times and juxtapose these with the absence and decay of the present.

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Brother John,

Yes, I concede that there were individual white missionaries who were more altruistic (if that is the right word) than was generally true. But even here I would suspect their racism was of a more subtle sort, e.g. cultural imperialism.

kzs

[kenneth harrow]

but kwame, you need a church historian to work this out. i recall hearing that the jesuits rebelled from the church in the early period of the conquistadores, in peru? that the church was in conflict with them? didn't they virtually secede? not my field.
the church in n africa, that is the white fathers (les peres blancs) were stopped by the french state in the early, very early 20th century, after having had permission to proselytize in n africa. the french wanted to form alliances with the muslim leadership against the militant resistance in places like algeria, so the pere blancs were completely stopped. i think the same happened in morocco, though i'm not as sure about that. in algeria, for anyone who read the biography of fatima amrouche (jean amrouche's) mother, a wonderful book called something like Histoire de ma vie, she describes having been an orphan and taken in by the peres blancs, where she  met her husband. they married, but had to leave algeria for tunisia when the french began shutting down the mission. apparently tunis was some kind of amazingly cosmopolitan city in the early 20th c.
anyway,... this is certainly not my field, but i think the church was split, even if their goal was to convert the heathen! and that's where your asymmetry returns. it's hard to think of many of the true believers, like livingston, without a certain repulsion. on the other hand, as moses said, it was not unusual for the church to function in opposition to the colonial states.
i think we can't parse this without key examples, which means, to me, that history has to begin on the local level to be comprehensible
your own question about how people are compelled to act--i'm afraid i am still very much under the sway of gramsci and althusser. remember that for gramsci it is 10% force and 90% ideology. he asked himself the same question you are asking, how come fascism won over the working class. in africa it might take the form of asking what many people don't want to face: how come africans came to accept colonialism. not just collaborated, but ideologically accepted its hegemony as their own. is that your question? if so, i don't quite see armah answering it. i'd turn, instead, to cheikh hamidou kane's Ambiguous Adventure.
if you've read it you'll remember the dream/vision of samba diallo, the hero....
best
ken

[kenneth harrow]

i really find this intervention of moses quite extraordinarily compelling.
ken

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Quoting Moses:

although I have to say that had the Nazis realized their declared intention of turning Africa into farmland for the Aryan master race, you probably would not be invoking this flawed comparison.

Nazi's were not any worse than Euro Chrisitians who emigrated to the America's, annihilated the indigenous people, and enslaved Africans on farmland (plantations). And what of the African American soldiers who were lynched in their uniforms in the USA after returning home from fighting Nazis? And what, by the way, do you suppose the aim of AFRICOM is? The Nazi agenda was not much different from the agenda of other Euro oppressors.

Your beloved missionaries were mostly white supremacist (which supports my argument that "complexity" and "ambiguity" are superficial). Likewise the white Christian abolitionists in the USA that you cite did not generally believe in social equality for African Americans. Ditto for the "Great Emancipator," Abraham Lincoln.

Yes, I certainly agree that African American experiences was not identical to the experience of Nigerians or Kenyans or Ethiopians. I said our experiences are entangled, not identical. I didn't invent the idea of entanglement. It was Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who said that the destinies of African Americans and African are forever linked even if we deny the connection. And long before Nkurmah, and several year before Garvey, Chief Alfred Sam of Gold Coast, motivated by the principle of entanglement, purchased a ship to settle African Americans in Ghana in the early 1920s.

 

Quoting Moses:

Thus if many Africans have fond and positive memories of missionaries and missionary schools there are many tangible reasons for it. This does not mean that they do not recognize the failures and oppression of colonial society or the occasional complicities of some missionaries. To dismiss this history and experience as totally bad for Africans and Africa and to glibly dismiss these mixed memories as products of Christian brainwashing misses the point.

 

One should also point out that the positive remembering of colonial times by Africans has grown in proportion to the economic, educational, and political dysfunction in postcolonial African states. People not only have nostalgias about well run missionary schools with high standards, good infrastructure, and committed teachers; they also remember functioning railways systems, good roads, and other social goods of colonial times and juxtapose these with the absence and decay of the present.

Yes, I will insist that missionaries schools were totally bad because Christianity was imposed, it was an instruments of white power, and missionaries were only viable after centuries of assaults on indigenous African institutions by Arabs and Europeans thus rendering African institutions dysfunctional. That needn't be antithetical to the idea that Africans sometimes used those very same imposed institutions to challenge colonialism.

Quoting Moses:

The missionaries were motivated by certain ideologies obviously, which colored their work, but they should not be blamed if Africans continued to view the world through Eurocentric lens thirty or fifty years after independence--after they've had decades to expand their horizon.

Note that I never use the term "brainwashing" because, again, I don't support the idea that Africans are mindless dupes. We have consistently challenged the white effort to denigrate us. But the results of our resistance has been mixed. And "certain ideologies" was/is white supremacy. Lets make it plain. It is unsurprising that internalized eurocentrism is still a drag on African progress fifty years on because that is precisely how internalization works. Once it is put in motion, you don't have to be physically present for it to manifest itself (i.e. hegemony). This is why Biko said "the best weapon in the hands of the enemy is the mind of the oppressed."

kzs

--
THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
---
EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice!
I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937

[John Mbaku]

Brother Moses: 

Excellent analysis. It is noteworthy for me to recall that until independence in 1961, 99.99 percent of the primary and secondary schools in the UN Trust Territories of Northern and Southern Cameroons under British Administration were owned and operated by Christian missions--primarily the Basel Mission, the Catholic Mission, and the Baptists. The Basel Mission College (later, the Cameroon Protestant College-- CPC) and St. Joseph's College are Anglopne Cameroon's oldest and most celebrated secondary schools. Alumni of these two mission schools have dominated and continue to dominate the professions and other parts of the country's political economy--it is rare to find a former student of either institution who does not have fun and positive memories of their experiences at these fine schools. I attended and graduated from CPC, at a time when the Principal, Vice Principal and many of the teachers (tutors) were missionaries from Switzerland. My religious studies teacher, a milddle-aged Swiss missionary woman was extremely radical and spoke convincingly of the evils of oppression, including that perpetuated by people purporting to be representing God. I still remember her lessons, as if they were delivered yesterday.

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Yes, brother Ken, there are many documented schisms within the overall system of white supremacy. And, yes, it is important to document them if, for no other reason, that, strategically, the oppressed have exploited these schisms to their advantage. But im not convinced that it gets to the more entrenched problem on which the disputants are united--namely, that Africans are somehow less human and can only be saved by accepting Euro terms of engagement.

Re: "hegemony" (i use this as a shorthand for now). Gramsci is very useful to a point. Yes, I'm interested in the question of how the oppressed come to accept their oppression--I would amend that to say that "accept" is a bit misleading. To my thinking attrition is important. Some of the very earliest stages of Euro-African encounters document African resistance to Euro imposition. I have in mind, for example, Fante/Portuguese contest that eventually leads to construction of Elmina castle in 1482. To simplify, Euros basically word down their opponents, but never totally eliminated resistance or dissent because domination is rarely, if ever, total--nor does it has to be.

This confluence is also complicated by what seems to me a greater degree of openness on the part of some African groups which put them at a disadvantage to Euros (and Muslims) who were, comparatively, less flexible on matters of culture. Last, as I'm working through rethinking "hegemony" I want to take onboard African-centered non-rational notions of agency which, in turn, points to critical questions of ontology, epistemology, the sacred, and assumptions about what it means to be human. My thinking also reflects my own informal affiliation with Vodou. 

kzs

[kwame zulu shabazz]

Bro Ken,

I forgot to thank you for the Kane reference, I will check it out. As for Armah, his response is informed by a conceptual frame that he calls "The Way," a pan-African moral-philosophical idea of fairness and social equity. He says that African complicity is basically an outcome of the distortion and destruction of African institutions coupled w/ social abandonment of moral-philosophical principles under duress. That is to say the former (distortion/destruction) leads to the latter (abandonment). He returns repeatedly to how reciprocity becomes debilitating when Africans constantly compromising with Arabs and Euros whilst not receiving much in return--which goes back to my point in my previous post about confluence of African flexibility and Arab/Euro intolerance. Incidentally, Cheikh Anta Diop misses this point, in my view, when he claims that traditional institutions in Senegambia were already in decline when they encountered Islam. Armah's explanation of distortion/destruction seems more plausible.

kzs