100 Years of Non-Violence
Gloria Emeagwali
On Apr 10, 2026, at 07:16, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Keeping it short:
Not much unlike One Hundred Years of Solitude, Biko’s is quite a tantalizing piece, in the ideal world, a mesmerising dream with a more mundane, radical, political trinity featuring angel-saints from the Pan-African pantheon encompassing all Africa and Diaspora, same spirit, 1+1+1=3 : Patrice Lumumba ( Congo) Frantz Fanon ( Martinique) and Malcolm X ( The United States ) - a United States which cowboy angel, genocidal warmonger, sicko wannabe imperial majesty emperor Donald J Trump would like to make great “again”
If he liked, the author - Biko, himself a saint, could have added Marcus Garvey ( I never heard anything about him advocating violence) and for good measure he could have added Martin Luther King Jr. and “ I am prepared to die” Madiba Nelson Mandela to that heavenly constellation of African Martyrs presently breaking bread with the ancestors.
Baba Kadiri says that he “feels disgusted when known professional harlots in Nigeria's politics brazenly present themselves to Nigerians as virgins.” I feel a little uncomfortable with the idea that Ubuntu philosophy is at the root of some of these stalwarts' inspiration when we know full well that it’s their Bible and Quran that are regarded as their wellsprings of inspiration and the main sources of their moral guidance with regard to the use and misuse of what is believed to be divinely sanctioned violence (Joshua) and non-violence ( Jesus)
The perennial question is, how do we resist the violence of the violent ?
There’s the extreme cruelty and barbarity some of them call war. Here’s US warhorse Pete Hegseth boasting with this long list of Iran’s top echelons that his military has murdered
Last week I had the good fortune to meet an Indian military historian at a dinner party and after he delivered a brief discourse on Malcolm X - and I was only coyly praising AHIMSA - one of the most attractive aspects of Jainism and Hinduism, when he assured me that yes, the late great Mahatma Gandhi is most wisely associated with Satyagraha but that he himself said that if pushed to the wall and he had no other alternative then he would, of course, have to fight back.
Jimmy Cliff : Stand Up and Fight Back
We should always bear in mind that the Bhagavad Gita begins at the battlefield of Kurukshetra
Whatever our background, the context is always now ,the most recent and the most current reality, saturating both conscience and consciousness. Within that 100 years framework, some of us post-war children (post WW2) have been inordinately influenced by The War Poets since middle school days and developed an aversion to all kinds of violence during all of our lifetime, to date, whether it was the Algerian War of Independence heroically fought by the Algerians, or the stellar Haitian Revolution of which every African in spirit is so proud, or the bloody January 15, 1966 coup in Nigeria, or the death penalty, or the Vietnam War - which produced flower power and many a Dave Dellinger , or the Yom Kippur War of 1973 or the assassination of Olof Palme and all the wars, including liberation wars in Africa and elsewhere, since 1973….
Biko Agozino
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Biko,
You know this song , “Strange Fruit”
I’m sure that you don’t want to remind me of these lines by The Last Poets:
Niggers are players, niggers are players, are players
Niggers play football, baseball, and basketball
While the white man is cutting off their balls
In Gerontion, T.S. Eliot the poet asks,
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"
You on the other hand are distinctly appealing for that extraordinary miracle known as the impossible, already a veritable contradiction in terms : ”to forgive the unforgivable”
How do you do that? Theoretically, humanly possible?
The so-called New Testament said to be the inspired word of God testifies to one such impossibility : blaspheming the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven…
Whatever next !
Should the Holocaust survivors forgive all the perpetrators of the Holocaust?
Should the judgements passed at the Nuremberg trials be rescinded ?
Should Simon Wiesenthal’s good works have all been in vain and the Nazi villains just needed to say a few Hail Marys and toss a few dollars into the collection box for forgiveness, the caveat being that Jesus has already died for their sins?
At the very least, I was expecting some celebratory thunder and lightning from you, concerning Ghana's John Mahama getting the UN General Assembly to adopt the resolution declaring the trafficking and chattel enslavement of Africans "the gravest crime against humanity" - and demanding reparations!
We ( you and I) can’t shake hands over lumping together disparate religions such as Judaism, Christianism and Islam under the same umbrella because of an alleged common legendary ancestor and call them “Abrahamic religions”
To begin with, there are the genocidal passages in the Hebrew Bible - which to this day are not so easily abrogated, never mind this kind of saucy revisionism, and as you know, there’s a lot of holy war and Jihad in the history of al-Islam. There’s certainly these kinds of contemporary manifestations lodged in these archives dubiously dubbed “the religion of peace” ( https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/) and very little of Jesus’ pacifistic teachings about turning the other cheek and loving your enemies, in the praxis of the Nazis .
In Islam there’s also the concept of loving and hating for the sake of Allah
At the risk of not overemphasising Ubuntu, there is Wole Soyinka’s seminal, practical, down to earth, less mythically cluttered The burden of memory, the muse of forgiveness and from an earlier time , Dag Hammarskjöld and much of his written legacy, such as “To speak for the world
Biko Agozino
aoye...@comcast.net
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Professor Dele LayiwolaInstitute of African StudiesUniversity of Ibadan, Nigeria
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Professor Rebecca DixonDepartment of Languages, Literature, and PhilosophyTennessee State University, Nashville
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Professor Moses OchonuDepartment of HistoryVanderbilt University, Nashville
Dr. Oohay
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/b3b8b6e5-8a4d-4c8e-af35-bee3ec67ade6n%40googlegroups.com.
Dr. Oohay
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Cornelius Hamelberg
You and your assumptions!
This is to Professor Agozino,
and not to the author of Samson Agonistes
I have experienced this sort of thing happen exactly twice on CNN:
Once when Nixon & Kissinger’s emissary Richard C. Holbrooke seemed to be going into some unnecessary details about his achievements in “opening up” China - details which I thought were more or less bordering on classified state secrets - as a result of which ( just in time) someone jacked out some relevant cable and there was an immediate break in transmission - with due apologies of course. The other time there was a similar timely break in transmission was when “ Jesus Loves You” Bishop Desmond Tutu, intoxicated and giddy with the wine of astonishment and with his notions of unconditional love and forgiveness was more or less bending over backwards ( I almost wrote blackwards) apologising on behalf of his once oppressive Apartheid Brethren - exculpating them, telling everybody how much Jesus loves them all etc etc, and, fearful of what else the kindly Bishop was probably going to say along that love & forgiveness trajectory, somebody caused that dramatic break in transmission, to save us all from further embarrassment.
At just that moment, I was reminded of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention crooning in We're Only in It for the Money - Bishop Desmond Tutu style,
“ I'll love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street” -the Apartheid Police - all this before this song was released :
Demba Conta : Apartheid Under Arrest
Crime and Punishment
When it comes to Tutu’s moral vision, I don’t know whether or not Ubuntu philosophy supersedes Jesus who was ostensibly Tutu’s lord and saviour and who probably has the last word on forgiveness as his followers love to quote him saying “You gotta forgive seventy times seven”
Please don’t get me wrong; here is Miles blowing his horn : Tutu
Since when Derrida spoke or wrote it was not GOD speaking or writing, nor was what he said written in stone ( like the finger of God which wrote the Ten Commandments) I guess we would probably have to resurrect the irascible Derrida to ascertain his latest last word on forgiveness.
You may award titles such as ”Oga Rabbi”, but I should like to point out that when it comes to THE BANALITY OF EVIL any discussion in this thread is only part of a much wider discussion between e.g. you and our African leaders including stellar ones such as John Mahama - who, mind you was not requesting any hypocritical or posthumous apologies but is demanding REPARATIONS !
Here we have Barcuch Spinoza giving this version of his own understanding of “ The Lord's Prayer” - of relevance the part that goes “ and forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are indebted to us” - and chaps like Desmond Tutu should go all the way to the bank - to the IMF etc with just that line , appealing to them in the name of unconditional love and forgiveness, to forgive ( waive) all the debts that African nations owe them - to forgive African nations these debts by which they have African nations where they want them , up a against the way, got them by the jugular , a stranglehold - Uncle Sam himself $39 trillion dollars in debt
What says Dr Oohay?
Cornelius Hamelberg
Toyin Falola
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Sir ,
That was our own Omowale, also popularly recognised as the venerable El-Hajj Malik al-Shabazz .The quotation is from his 1963 “Message to the Grass Roots” in which he was addressing the exigencies of the situation.
Nyboma: Malcolm X
There’s the universal question,” Why is there so much suffering in the world ?”
Buddhism labels the malady “ dukka” - and as we all know, wherever there is oppression, there is suffering - not only in hell, even in Nigeria there is suffering and instead of Shuffering and Shmiling as a result of political, economic and military oppression, I’m sure that you too would have nothing against the idea of liberation, or have anything against the idea that there’s nothing in the Holy Quran that says Muslims must continue to suffer peacefully in Gaza, for instance, and in the West Bank.
Malcolm said all that he said, long before Trump's early Republican presidential predecessor Ronald Reagan (“ Re-gun”) as the then governor of California, gave the order to disarm a self-defence outfit known as The Black Panthers.
Sometimes it is the exigency of a situation that results in the formation of e.g.
Islam : To resist oppression
With regard to the kinds of insanity currently bedevilling this world, Pope Leo XIV
is the loudest voice now crying for peace