Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Of HIStory, Hagiographies and African History
Maurice Amutabi
Prof. Maurice N. Amutabi, Ph.D
Assistant Professor of History,
Department of History,
Central Washington University,
Ellensburg WA 98926-7553
Ph: (509)-963-1854 (office)
http://www.cwu.edu/~history/amutabi-bio_cv-1059.html
http://www.cwu.edu/~cah/amutabi.html
Dr. Maurice Amutabi is the author of Amutabi is the author of 'The NGO Factor in Africa' found at >
http://www.amazon.com/NGO-Factor-Africa-Arrested-Development/dp/0415979951
http://www.cwu.edu/~africana/news.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>>> Qansy Salako 04/30/09 12:20 PM >>>
"No one is denying that forms of servitude did exist in Africa, but they were never called slaves - they were known by other names. "..Maurice Amutabi.
Dr. Amutabi,
I actually resonate with most of your views and do not believe you meant how your statement above came out. I think the words just got away from your fingers.
I do not know Ikhide from Adam (I only know he flips mac burgers)?.just wanted to add more to your consciousness on the subject of slave and slavery in pre-colonial Africa, in case there was a remote chance you actually believed your claim above.
The culture of salves, slavery and servitude was/is so rampant in Yoruba there are several words for its various forms in the Yoruba language.
Here are some examples for you:
??????????? Eru??..slave
??????????? Oko eru??slavery
??????????? Singba??to work or to give service in lieu of interest on money lent (Note, practice is on interest
??????????????????????????????????? only!) ?
??????????? Iwofa??person given free of charge either as a war booty or in lieu of a debt (any debt).
As it is common for experts to get entangled in the quiddities of their discipline and suffer some loss in veracity or impact of their ultimate message, perhaps some of you historians could incorporate a mechanism that allows information from non-historians in your analyses as a form of quality control on your theories or propositions.
I?ll share with you one scientific practice in drug clinical trials to illustrate my point.
In the regulatory process guiding research, development and commercialization of a new drug, a principal investigator (PI), usually a clinician, is required to route his clinical protocol through an investigation review board (IRB) of his institution (university, hospital, research center, etc). The role of the IRB is to review and approve the clinical protocol by which the PI intends to conduct his study in patients. The IRB review is particularly critical with patient consent and rights throughout the study. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relies on this functional role of the IRB absolutely as its hind eyes and brains and would not concur to the beginning of a clinical trial without the IRB approval from the PI?s institution. Now here is the kicker: in order for the IRB to be completely fail-safe, it is required that the IRB be composed of at least 5 members across the broad culture of the institution. Only one of the members needs be a scientist, at least one of the members must be a non-scientist, others may be geologists, mathematicians, etc.
Every discipline should probably borrow a leaf from the above practice in order for propositions and new works coming out of it to have truthful and enduring connection and application to the society/community for which they are meant.
Qansy Salako
From: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ikhide
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 9:32 AM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Of HIStory, Hagiographies and African History
"For those interested in self-flagellation, there are lots of opportunities, to be sure. We know that
African society was hierarchical and that forms of enslavement did exist but some Eurocentric
historians use the issue to excuse their own huge role in human trafficking or to imply that slavery was uniquely African. My suspicion is that they do this to avoid the huge reparations owed to continental and diasporic Africans. That?s the problem. (And, by the way, I hope that scholars are not going to be using Achebe or Falola as a club to bash our heads. That was surely not their attention. These magnificent scholars
have provided us with immense information which we are free to interpret, accordingly, in the established
scholarly tradition)"
- Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Dear Professor Emeagwali,
Many thanks for your intervention. I doubt that this playground is a hot-bed of apologists for eurocentric scholars who wish to deny us euro-repatriation dollars. Perhaps, Dr. Valentine Ojo is right, what we are witnessing is an abject failure to communicate effectively. Reasonable people may draw differing conclusions from facts. But first we must have the facts.
I get what Bwana Amutabi is trying to do, but in the process I worry that there are huge gaps in the scholarship. Many of us share his concerns about the distortion of Africa's past and present by Western scholars but the solution is not for us to manufacture our own njakiri and call it history. Bwana Amutabi is threatening to paint hagiographies of an imaginary Africa - a past that is just not true. The problem that I see with his version of history is that it is really his personal opinion posing as history. This is not fact. Napoleon Bonaparte once opined that history is a set of lies agreed upon. Oga Ojo may bulala me from now til eternity, I say that I don't agree with that man's wuruwuru that he calls history. Let us with one voice oppose the justification for and rationalization of gross injustices - against women, children, and minorities in Africa. The purveyors of this injustice are enabled by the hagiographies of our latter-day professional historians. A few points and I will rest my case for ever:
1. Dr. Amutabi vigorously disagrees that forms of slavery did exist in Africa, please re-read his postings. Haba. You don't need to be a professional historian to know of Africa's sordid past when it comes to slavery. No historian worth his or her salt should be saying that slavery was alien to Africa before the coming of external aggressors. To assert that there is no African term for slavery is beyond the pale in terms of butchering our history. I am actually embarrassed to be part of an argument about whether or whether not there were slaves in Africa before the coming of the white man. Pray, what does that mean? Listen to Bwana Amutabi: "No one is denying that forms of servitude did exist in Africa, but they were never called slaves - they were known by other names. " That is an unacceptable distortion of history. Again, where I come from, there is a name for slaves. I am asking our professional historians: What are we saying here? Are we saying that the Oba of Benin did not own slaves? Are we really saying that there were no slaves in the old Benin Kingdom? So, our historians are telling us that the people that were used as human sacrifice in the City of Blood (Benin City) were merely servants who were only doing their jobs by being offered to the gods? Na wa O! Should we really be teaching these things? And trust me, I doubt that a slave in Benin City would be comforted by the knowledge that one form of slavery is more dastardly than the other. It is like asking an abused spouse to stay in a marriage because, her next door neighbor is also an abused spouse.
2. Why would a scholar deride Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart as a work of fiction, not to be relied upon as a historical document? I am an amateur student of Professors Chinua Achebe and Toyin Falola and you are right, we should take them very seriously because they not only complained about the oyinbo man's representation of HIStory, they did something about it. They wrote our history. And what is fiction, if it is not applied history? Who was the genius that said there is no true fiction, there are lies? I think that was me ;-)))))
3. Don't you find delightful irony in being told, hey don't listen to oyinbos, they want to tell you what they want you to hear, but please don't come talk to me unless you have an oyinbo PhD in Professional History!? Perhaps people should take a deep breath before threatening to improve upon the silence ;-))))
4. Why would anyone claim that homosexuality does not exist in Africa? What kind of yeye history is that? And when we say these things, are we telling "eurocentrics" what they would like to hear - which is that our sexuality is not as robust as theirs? Are we now primates? Na wa O! It is one thing to say that it would be unwise to announce that you are gay in an African market, but that is not the same thing as saying gays and lesbians do not exist. Prof, I only include this to demonstrate to you the effect of allowing our opinions and prejudices to distort facts and history.
Finally, the idea of reparations as it is currently packaged is problematic for me. The idea of reparations suffers from a fatal flaw - its proponents insist on ignoring a few inconvenient truths one of which is is the huge involvement of Africans (and states like the Benin Kingdom) in the slave trade. That they are destitute today does not make them any less culpable. This is an important point because today our African leaders are selling us into physical and mental slavery. I for example believe that capitalism has been a relentless plague on us - a situation that in many instances is worse than physical slavery. This new slavery has been aided and abetted by African leaders and intellectuals. Who should pay the reparations? I ask you: Should the MNC Shell be the only one responsible for the hell-delta of Nigeria? My point is that the responsibility for reparations is being directed at the rich guilty not at the guilty guilty. Now, if you succeed in getting the reparations money from the West, make sure to pay me my share - in euros.
Have a great weekend.
- Ikhide
Pablo
Not a texts but, two very important articles, perhaps too advanced for some first and second year undergraduate students, are Joseph Inikori's wonderfully analytically astute and pedagogically valuable "Slavery in Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade”, in The African Diaspora, by Joseph E. Harris ... [et al.]; and “Ideology Versus The Tyranny Of Paradigm Historians And The Impact Of The Atlantic Slave Trade On African Societies”, African Economic History, 1994 22 37-58.)
P.
Qansy Salako
Maurice,
Don’t worry about it….feel free to lecture me to your heart’s content.
I was a former professor myself and I love to lecture too.
I am sure, you would have seen the way I relish lecturing my debaters on here.
I see what you’re saying.
However, you probably don’t intend it so, but it appears the ball of your contention is rolling fast into the meadows of polemics.
You accept the existence of those descriptive Yoruba slave words (eru, oko eru, iwofa, singba, etc), but you don’t want me to translate them into English to you.
How else would you and I be able to communicate if we can’t talk/write in English?
Sounds like you are throwing me a red herring, don’t you see?
I am not, I do not and cannot parade myself as a historian.
Lawd, Kwabby would be rolling his eyes a thousand times behind the scenes by now at my “irritable” penchant for challenging orthodoxy of African History.
I don’t mean to come across as such.
It’s just that I know what I know and what I know is independent of external interpretation, be it from indigenous or foreign historians.
If external interpretations concur with what I know, I merely nod and mutter…”yea, I knew that.”
If external interpretations are at variance with what I know, I seek clarifications or challenge them.
That’s all.
Now, just what do I know exactly?
Nuance it as you may, I know that a slave in the African culture suffers separation and dispossession from “self” and that this loss of identity was often accompanied with misery oftentimes for life, sometimes for generations.
My personal understanding from many Yoruba traditions (words, proverbs, sayings, rites, etc), is that war was a common source of slaves, followed by indebtedness.
But old stories and tales sometimes mentioned the price on slaves, meaning that at some point in the distant past slaves might have been traded in open markets.
The slaves obtained from wars often never reconnected with their original families/cultures and their offspring are variously known as omo eru (child of slave), idile eru (family line of slave), etc.
Whichever way any one slices our yam of slavery, to be known as eru does not connote dignity or full life for a human, even for an African.
My objective here is not to compare slavery as practiced between the African and European cultures.
That would be an atrocious glorification of the trans atlantic slave trade.
My intent is simply to contend that slave/slavery existed in African (Yoruba) culture both before the advent of Europeans in Africa and after it and were called as such.
Perhaps one angle you are coming from but which continually gets lost in the mist of exchanges by others with you is that the traditional African culture of slave and slavery does not have the same meaning with the European culture of slave and slavery.
That may be true, depending of course, on who is doing the assessment.
I doubt it if a “slave” would prefer the African form of slavery to the European form.
Therein, my brother, lies the crux of the matter of this dialogue with you.
It is the reason why you probably shouldn’t have made the statement that Africa cultures have “never called” any form of servitude “slaves- they were known as other names.”
But of course, what would anyone expect?
The Zulus would name “war” in their own language, that doesn’t diminish or obliterate the material fact that the equivalent Zulu word means “war.”
I still think the words in your declarative statement got away from your fingers.
Qansy Salako
<BR
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
Some of our questions and/or perspectives, like Maurice Amutabi’s “quibbling” of African nomenclature of slavery, may contradict conventional wisdom, barbershop-yarned myths, or staple historiographies, but we should not frame our responses in dismissive and derisive ways. Rather, we should summon evidence to make our case. I don’t think that Maurice would deny that slavery existed in Africa. For this reason, let us generously say that Maurice had oiled his fingers with ogali cooking-oil, and as a result, the fingers inadvertently slipped on his keyboard and pronto: Africans had no names for slavery! Folks, don’t reload your intellectual catapults; the keyboard was just too slippery, and admittedly Maurice slipped on the precipice of his own knowledge.
Now let me re/turn to Quansy Salako, my sparring partner in the ring of colonialism. Na who knows oh! One of these days we may step into the ring of slavery because both of us have put on additional patapaa muscles and need to move on to a new weight-class: from super flyweight to super bantamweight! Commenting on slavery in Yorubaland, Quansy notes that:
“The slaves obtained from wars often never reconnected with their original families/cultures...”
This conclusion has also informed the perspectives of a number of discussants who have queried Maurice’s viewpoints. I should add that I have grappled with similar conclusions in my own work. From a historiographical standpoint, it mirrors the concept of “outsider” status or “social death” that has been imputed to slavery in Africa since the 1970s by erstwhile Marxist historians, mostly non-Africans, whose works subtly project that slavery in Africa was as harsh as the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. Simply put, both concepts mean that enslavement severed natal and communal kinship between the enslaved individual and his/her family/society, consequently, worsening the exploitation, marginality, and inferiorization of the slave.
My position, cavalierly framed here, is that the “outsider” status, which has gained unquestioned acceptance among historians of slavery in Africa, may not be wholly applicable to slaves in some African societies, indeed, the ways that it fully speaks to the conditions of enslaved Africans in the Americas. In doing this, I hope to bring evidence on the Gold Coast to the table to illuminate my query of the “outsider” status paradigm. For this reason, I leave slavery in Yorubaland, Quansy’s referent point, in the able hands of scholars of Yoruba history and society to affirm or dispute the assertion that slaves in Yorubaland were complete “outsiders” in perpetual conditions of marginality, “social death,” and who “never reconnected with their original families/cultures...”
Indigenous newspapers, oral history/traditions, colonial reports, Christian missionary accounts on the Gold Coast, incontrovertibly show that large numbers of “slaves” in what is today southern Ghana were able to trace and return to their families or kinship groups. This occurred both in the precolonial and colonial periods, in fact, more so in the latter era due to the intermittent application of colonial policies of abolition. The evidence also amply illustrates that families of slaves were able to trace and rescue their enslaved relatives, mostly during the preliminary phase of abolition in the early 1870s. Equally noteworthy is the fact that colonial officials were also able to trace the relatives of mostly prepubescent females, who had been rescued, and by so doing reunited such ex-slaves with their families. Certainly, these evidential examples allow us to draw formidable conclusions: they strongly show that families knew the whereabouts of their enslaved members and slaves also did not lose sight of their homes and families. There are also documented accounts that are somewhat evanescent, such as a “slave” who sent a message to her family via a trader. Given that even implausible theories have been constructed to explain slavery and abolition in Africa, I believe that we should not hurriedly dismiss such episodic evidence. Rather such evidence, however defined, should force us to rethink slavery in Africa.
Let me quickly add that the evidence of disputation does not mitigate the marginality and chattel nature that reconfigured the lived-experiences of slaves and their descendants, nor does it exonerate slave-holding societies in Gold Coast. Certainly, what the evidence on the Gold Coast does is that it disputes the wholesale claim that in both social and economic terms slaves in Africa “never reconnected with their original families/cultures.”
It is possible that some of the “slaves” described as such in the extant sources were not slaves at all, but people in some form of servitude, for instance, debt-bondage and panyarring, whose bonds with their families had not been severed by their placement into cauldrons of servitude. Since most of the primary sources on slavery in Africa were chronicled by European agents, it would be interesting to plumb the depths of the preexisting ideological and hegemonic lenses that informed their perspectives on forms of servitude in precolonial Africa. Why is it that historians of Europe use serfdom instead of slavery to describe mobilization of unfree labor and all that we hear about Africa is slavery? This is a question that can be discussed here in the future. In problematizing this and other questions, it is well to note that historians of slavery in Africa have not been able to clearly define who was a slave, but have managed to conjure huge sizes of slave populations for some parts of precolonial Africa.
My explanations above do not apply to all slaves in the Gold Coast, let alone, Africa as a whole. Undoubtedly, slaves in the Gold Coast who originated from the Salaga slave trading axis in the northern part of Ghana and beyond, as far as Hausaland, could not have found their way “home” even if they had been set free. Equally, enslaved Africans in the Americas, who had very limited avenues to reconnect with their kinship groups, remained as “outsiders” and experienced “social death.” In both cases, Quansy would be very right because their enslavements severed the bonds of natal kinship and removed them from their autochthonous space, hence the “outsider” status made their marginalization worse within the continuum of bondage imposed on them by the host-society.
Contrary to Quansy’s viewpoint, wars in precolonial Africa were not only a means of enslavement, but also served as conduits of freedom for slaves. Historians of Africa have identified warfare as a major cause of enslavement in precolonial Africa, especially during the heyday of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Also some scholars have overemphasized the colonial conquest and its consequent wars as auspicious moments which enabled slaves in Africa to take to the pathways of freedom. Conversely, and indeed, unsurprisingly considering the Eurocentric bent of the historiography on slavery/abolition in Africa, warfare among precolonial African states as well as African wars of resistance against incipient European colonialisms, both of which contributed to slave flights and reunited deserting slaves with their families, have not garnered the attention they deserve. For example, oral history shows that in 1730-31, when the Akyem Abuakwas assisted the Akuapems to wean themselves from Akwamu imperialism, a large number of Akuapems, who had been enslaved by the Akwamus, returned to their families in Akuapem. Also in the aftermath of the Asante resistance to the nascent British imperialism in 1873-74, “slaves,” according to colonial, Christian missionary, and newspaper accounts, left their slave-holders in Greater Asante and its coterminous regions, including Bono, Adansi, and Asante-Akyem, and returned to their families and communities. Of course, not all fleeing slaves were able to return to their respective places of origin in a timely fashion, and about this, the reports describe massive “refugee” movements in the area between the Pra, Ofin, Birim, and Densu Rivers, notably encompassing parts of Akyem Abuakwa, Denkyira, Gomoa, Agona and Fante territories. Even war-scares, such as the ones which occurred between the Akuapems and the Krobos in the 19th century, also triggered slave flights and some of the fleeing slaves found their way home.
History, according to the Akan ahenfie adesua, omanbu, ne adebu [royal palace aptitude, diplomacy, and etiquettes], speaks to us with several voices so practitioners of history are allowed to ask questions. I am sure those who claim that Herodotus, the Greek Historian, is the father of History would, have a similar historian’s craft.
Kwabena
From: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [USAAfric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Qansy Salako [ka...@netzero.com]
Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 5:31 PM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
kenneth harrow
serfs were not owned by their lords, and so they had to fend for themselves by growing their own crops and working for the lords maybe 3 days a week or so. the serf system was interesting in this regard: it began after the decline and fall of the roman empire, as a system of local protection afforded by military figures--the noble class-in exchange for agricultural labor by the serving classes. the military protection was necessary for survival, so the conditions imposed on the serfs were relatively harsh and exploitative. after the 11th century the conditions of security in europe shifted and serfs required less the protection of lords; they also gradually won rights, like the right to continue to exploit the lands nominally owned by the lords, but without the lords having the right to expel the serfs. it was a right of usufruct which became virtual ownership when it became somethiing that could be inherited. serfs also shifted their payment obligations to monetary form after the end of the middle ages, and with inflation and time, those monetary payments, which didn't increase, became worthless. in other words, eventually lords lost as serfs gained. the french revolution merely pushed over the edge a class of nobles who had long since lost real wealth and control.
i find that history, and the term serf, to be quite specific. it would be totally inappropriate to apply it to osu, or eru or whatever other category of low caste or servile occupation might have arisen in africa. the word slave means something in the west, in europe, in the u.s., which has also evolved over time, and it makes absolutely no sense to apply it to an african situation which might not share any of the pertinent features of slavery as commonly understood in the west.
the solution, in my opinion, is to drop the term slave when discussing "slavery" in africa, and to use a local term, defining it in such a way as is meaningful and relevant to the time and place of its occurrence. as i noted earlier, and as falola makes plain, something closer to american chattel slavery occurs late in nigeria in the 19th c as plantation style kola nut farming and cotton farming develop with large landowners.
surprise, surprise: as the capitalist economic system expanded, so did its forms of labor.
but when they were not similar systems, they generated relations between people--social and economic--for which comparable terms are not available.
the resistance to this suggestion comes when it is viewed as an attempt to sanitize the situation. but different doesn't have to mean better: servile conditions could have been better or worse, depending on where and when you are talking about. come to think of it, the same thing was true in the u.s., just as had been the case for serfs in europe.
ken
At 01:53 PM 5/4/2009, you wrote:
Some of our questions and/or perspectives, like Maurice Amutabi’s “quibbling” of African nomenclature of slavery, may contradict conventional wisdom, barbershop-yarned myths, or staple historiographies, but we should not frame our responses in dismissive and derisive ways. Rather, we should summon evidence to make our case. I don’t think that Maurice would deny that slavery existed in Africa. For this reason, let us generously say that Maurice had oiled his fingers with ogali cooking-oil, and as a result, the fingers inadvertently slipped on his keyboard and pronto: Africans had no names for slavery! Folks, don’t reload your intellectual catapults; the keyboard was just too slippery, and admittedly Maurice slipped on the precipice of his own knowledge. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Kenneth W. Harrow
Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 353-7243
fax 353 3755
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide
Except the "Abobaku" in Yoruba Oyo culture.
Many thanks.
IBK
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Celtel Tanzania
From: kenneth harrow
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 16:22:50 -0400
African society was hierarchical and that forms of enslavementdid exist but some Eurocentric
historians use the issue to excuse their own huge role in human trafficking or to imply that slavery was uniquely African. My suspicion is that they do this to avoid the huge reparations owed to continental and diasporic Africans. That?s the problem. (And, by the way, I hope that scholars are not going to be using Achebe or Falola as a club to bash our heads. That was surely not their attention. These magnificent scholars
have provided us with immense information which we are free to interpret, accordingly, in the established
scholarly tradition)"
- Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Dear Professor Emeagwali,
Many thanks for your intervention. I doubt that this playground is a hot-bed of apologists for eurocentric scholars who wish to deny us euro-repatriation dollars. Perhaps, Dr. Valentine Ojo is right, what we are witnessing is an abject failure to communicate effectively. Reasonable people may draw differing conclusions from facts. But first we must have the facts.
I get what Bwana Amutabi is trying to do, but in the process I worry that there are huge gaps in the scholarship. Many of us share his concerns about the distortion of Africa's past and present by Western scholars but the solution is not for us to manufacture our own njakiri and call it history. Bwana Amutabi is threatening to paint hagiographies of an imaginary Africa - a past that is just not true. The problem that I see with his version of history is that it is really his personal opinion posing as history. This is not fact. Napoleon Bonaparte once opined that history is a set of lies agreed upon. Oga Ojo may bulala me from now til eternity, I say that I don't agree with that man's wuruwuru that he calls history. Let us with one voice oppose the justification for and rationalization of gross injustices - against women, children, and minorities in Africa. The purveyors of this injustice are enabled by the hagiographies of our latter-day professional historians. A few points and I will rest my case for ever:
1. Dr. Amutabi vigorously disagrees that forms of slavery did exist in Africa, please re-read his postings. Haba. You don't need to be a professional historian to know of Africa's sordid past when it comes to slavery. No historian worth his or her salt should be saying that slavery was alien to Africa before the coming of external aggressors. To assert that there is no African term for slavery is beyond the pale in terms of butchering our history. I am actually embarrassed to be part of an argument about whether or whether not there were slaves in Africa before the coming of the white man. Pray, what does that mean? Listen to Bwana Amutabi: "No one is denying that forms of servitude did exist in Africa, but they were never called slaves - they were known by other names. " That is an unacceptable distortion of history. Again, where I come from, there is a name for slaves. I am asking our professional historians: What are we saying here? Are we saying that the Oba of Benin did not own slaves? Are we really saying that there were no slaves in the old Benin Kingdom? So, our historians are telling us that the people that were used as human sacrifice in the City of Blood (Benin City) were merely servants who were only doing their jobs by being offered to the gods? Na wa O! Should we really be teaching these things? And trust me, I doubt that a slave in Benin City would be comforted by the knowledge that one form of slavery is more dastardly than the other. It is like asking an abused spouse to stay in a marriage because, her next door neighbor is also an abused spouse.
2. Why would a scholar deride Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart as a work of fiction, not to be relied upon as a historical document? I am an amateur student of Professors Chinua Achebe and Toyin Falola and you are right, we should take them very seriously because they not only complained about the oyinbo man's representation of HIStory, they did something about it. They wrote our history. And what is fiction, if it is not applied history? Who was the genius that said there is no true fiction, there are lies? I think that was me ;-)))))
3. Don't you find delightful irony in being told, hey don't listen to oyinbos, they want to tell you what they want you to hear, but please don't come talk to me unless you have an oyinbo PhD in Professional History!? Perhaps people should take a deep breath before threatening to improve upon the silence ;-))))
4. Why would anyone claim that homosexuality does not exist in Africa? What kind of yeye history is that? And when we say these things, are we telling "eurocentrics" what they would like to hear - which is that our sexuality is not as robust as theirs? Are we now primates? Na wa O! It is one thing to say that it would be unwise to announce that you are gay in an African market, but that is not the same thing as saying gays and lesbians do not exist. Prof, I only include this to demonstrate to you the effect of allowing our opinions and prejudices to distort facts and history.
Finally, the idea of reparations as it is currently packaged is problematic for me. The idea of reparations suffers from a fatal flaw - its proponents insist on ignoring a few inconvenient truths one of which is is the huge involvement of Africans (and states like the Benin Kingdom) in the slave trade. That they are destitute today does not make them any less culpable. This is an important point because today our African leaders are selling us into physical and mental slavery. I for example believe that capitalism has been a relentless plague on us - a situation that in many instances is worse than physical slavery. This new slavery has been aided and abetted by African leaders and intellectuals. Who should pay the reparations? I ask you: Should the MNC Shell be the only one responsible for the hell-delta of Nigeria? My point is that the responsibility for reparations is being directed at the rich guilty not at the guilty guilty. Now, if you succeed in getting the reparations money from the West, make sure to pay me my share - in euros.
Have a great weekend.
- Ikhide
<BR
Dompere, Kofi Kissi
From: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 1:53 PM
afrs...@aol.com
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