Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?

[Pius Adesanmi]

http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Editorial/5382478-147/LITTLE_ENDS:_A_mind_is_a.csp Who Wrote Things Fall Apart? By Pius Adesanmi My teenage cousin called me from Nigeria last week. He had a long list of things he wanted me to buy for him, all cutting-edge models of modern gadgetry popular among netizens of his generation. Somehow, our conversation swayed to his education – he is now in SS1. I told him that we called that Form Four when I was in secondary school. Then he told me he has a flair for “arts subjects” and hopes to be like me when he grows up. Perhaps it was the flattery, the sudden realization that the young boy considers me a role model or the bit about his flair for arts subjects. I felt this sudden urge to gauge his cultural capital and knowledge base. I began to ask random questions about books he ought to have read – or be reading – and basic things and concepts he should know in such subjects as history, literature, government, and economics. I drew a blank on virtually every question I asked him, from who wrote Things Fall Apart to rudimentary questions about supply and demand in economics; from who were Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe to the difference between parliamentary and presidential systems of government. My discovery was frightening. My cousin is an above-average student who attends an above-average secondary school. He is what you would ordinarily call a bright kid. Yet, outside the diction of cyber gadgetry and cell phones, he knows nothing, has read nothing! If his knowledge base is so unbelievably shallow in his privileged educational circumstances, what is the situation with the millions of Nigerian children we are preparing as “leaders of tomorrow” in such places as Okokomaiko Community Grammar School, Oranmiyan Community Secondary School, Ajegunle Community UNICEF-Assisted Primary School? All the questions I asked my cousin were based on the knowledge capital anyone in my generation would have acquired by Form Four irrespective of one’s social status and class or whether you attended private or public school. If, like my cousin, you were in the arts, you were already into Volume Two of KBC Onwubiko’s history textbooks and, also, classics by Adu Boahen and Elisabeth Isichei; in a subject like government, you were already deep into Nigeria’s constitutional history; in literature, you already finished your first Shakespeare and an array of Western literary classics. In African literature, you were half way through Donatus Nwoga’s West African Verse and other texts by Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, Femi Osofisan, and Ola Rotimi. There was even a school competition to determine who read the greatest number of titles in Heinemann’s African Writers Series each term. In the literary and debating society, you debated such topics as “British Parliamentary system is better than American Presidential System”. You had to go to the school library and research both systems! The school library subscribed to Time Magazine, Newsweek, West Africa, and major Nigerian magazines and newspapers. I still recall scouring Time and Newsweek at the school library for a debate on Ronald Reagan. Outside of formal classroom contexts, the reading culture ensured a circulation of such “lighter” texts as James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Sidney Sheldon, McMillan Pace Setters series, Mills and Boon. Break time was for endless school kids’ speculation about what Muammar Ghadaffi would do to those Americans who bombed Tripoli and Benghazi. That was the beginning of one’s resentment of the misuse and abuse of America’s power. We debated the Falklands War, hoping that Argentina would defeat the “bloody British”. The world news broadcast of the BBC (“This is London!”) and the network news of the Nigerian Television Authority were daily rituals in high school. Only cable stations that show D’Banj, TuFace, Banky W, 50 Cents, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga are in with my cousin. In essence, we were ensconced in a textual world that made reading and knowledge of the world the cornerstones of our formative years. Nigeria pays a terrible price for the escapist demission of our intellectually impecunious rulers who send their children to school abroad and are, therefore, not affected by the collapse of our educational system. And to think that my father grumbled endlessly about fallen standards when I was in secondary school! He couldn’t understand, for instance, why elementary philology and Latin had disappeared from the curriculum and he took to teaching me those two subjects at home. My cousin’s situation offers a tragic window into the contradictions of our national experience. We are destroying our future by producing generations that do not and cannot read. Since he couldn’t tell me who wrote Things Fall Apart, I didn’t take the risk of asking my cousin about Mansa Kankan Musa. I couldn’t put it beyond him to exclaim: “ah Uncle, his name is President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua o, not Kankan Musa!” We expect progress from the systematic atrophy of our country’s young minds. If, as they say, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, what does that make a country that wastes minds with reckless abandon?     Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D. Associate Professor Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL) Department of English Carleton University Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6 Tel:  +1 613 520 2600  ext. 1175 www.projectponal.com

[Chidi Anthony Opara]

Well Pius, I met a boy during the last christmas and new year holidays at my country home, his father was doing some bricklaying jobs for me and the boy was helping his father as a "labourer". I understood that he normally does this during holidays to help him raise some money for his schooling.

 

Anyway, the boy's attitude to work attracted my attention, he is a jss 3 student of community secondary school Avuvu, Ikeduru, Imo state. His name is Johnson Nwachukwu. The wonder was that this boy who also wants to be a writer had read everything Chinua Achebe and most others had written. He discusses these writers like a good undergraduate of literary studies.

 

In as much as I agree with you that the standard of education has gone down considerably, we should be mindful of the so many distractions inherent in those "good schools", one of which your cousin attends.

 

Chidi Anthony Opara

Publisher/Editor-In-Chief

chidi opara reports

http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

 

Member: (1) World Poets Society(WPS)

             (2) Association Of Nigerian Authors

 

[AREH SUNDAY]

Chidi,

You are right. Very right. The computers and other hand-held electronic devices have become status symbol for kids of the rich in Nigeria that it is not surprising that they are lacking in reading and proper education. In any educational contest without the influence of their moneybag parents, our kids from the public schools will beat the uptown kids hands down, legs up or body-sideways.

 

Sunny Areh

Asaba

[Obododimma Oha]

Chidi,

When I read Pius Adesanmi's "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?", what came to my mind immediately was Professor Femi Osofisan's joke with the same title. Osofisan's humorous narrative -- which is now decades old -- is about a secondary school boy who, suspecting that the question "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?" was an attempt at investigating who committed an offence that should be penalized, declared his innocence outright: "I'm not the one, sir! I swear." Well, Adesanmi's article was a different sort of joke, perhaps a more serious joke.

 I don't want to be seen as being "too quick" to defend Nigerian secondary school education. At my own children's school here in Ibadan, Adesanmi's story would not find any support: the children (in the primary school) are into all kinds of creative activities --- from creative writing to Adire making! They also have Reading and Writing Clubs, and are visited by well known writers/artists from time to time. These visitors deliver inspiring talks to them.  Please, when next you are in Ibadan, go to Bodija International School and Bodija International College and find out whether what I stating here is false. My nine-year old son at Bodija International School (a primary school) now has produced about five manuscripts of short story collections. I have not, for one day, sat him down to teach him anything about creative writing. Quite bad of me. The much I have been doing is to take him to bookshops on weekends (at his own request) where he makes me empty my pockets to pay for books he picks. And his reading speed amazes me! Within few hours he's through with a novel of about 150/200 pages! I was not that good in my own time, if one must be sincere. 

Reading culture is certainly on the decline everywhere, partly because of improper attention to the screen. Such a decline is not peculiar to Nigeria, neither is it one of the symptoms of the so much advertized "fall of Nigeria". 

--- Obododimma.

--
Obododimma Oha
Senior Lecturer in Stylistics & Semiotics
Dept. of English
University of Ibadan
Nigeria

&

Fellow, Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies
University of Ibadan

Phone: +234 803 333 1330;
           +234 805 350 6604.

[Shola Adenekan]

Hi Folks,

I think both Pius Adesanmi and Chidi Opara captured the dilemma facing our younger generation as well as the Nigerian education system. Dr Adesanmi's piece "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?" showed how the Nigerian middle classed have moved so far away from Nigerian culture for Western middle class values.

If you look at children of the educated class, they tend to listen to the same music, dress and talk like their Oyinbo counterparts.Whereas working class children are still rooted in Nigerian values, since their parents do not have the means to subscribe to cable television or invest in video games.

Most Nigerian middle class parents (including politicians, traders and  many on this forum) send their children to private schools, where English is the only spoken language. At home, their parents speak only English to them and the quest is to have a British or an American accent by the time they reach teenage years. Even when these kids do  the yearly 'pilgrimage' to their parents' village, people will try and speak to them in English.

Now, we have children born and raised in Nigeria who cannot even speak a single Nigerian language. I'm not making this up; I have kids like these as relatives, to my amazement their parents are very proud their kids are Westernized. How can we expect such children to know or even cherish such modern heritage as Chinua Achebe or Salawa Abeni?  And we are not even taking about the rise and fall of Oyo Empire or King Jaja of Opobo!

On other hand, children from poor homes have no choice but to attend run-down  government schools where Achebe and Soyinka are still on the syllabus. Believe you me, if those working class kids have the means they will act like those uptown kids.

Shola Adenekan, Mr.
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com

[franklyne ogbunwezeh]

Even in the West, the computer is not a replacement for the good old reading of books. Kids are now armed with the latest computer games with chilling violent thematics, while many of them cannot even read or write in the language of instruction.

Nigerian education has been sabotaged by the entire Nigerian social experience, where mediocrity is rewarded at the expense of hardwork. Why would someone go to school; what is the incentive to study, when an Andy Ubah who bought a doctorate degree could be a trillonaire?

Franklyne Ogbunwezeh


--- On Sat, 3/7/09, AREH SUNDAY <ida...@gmail.com> wrote:

> >> *
> >>
> http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Editorial/5382478-147/LITTLE_ENDS:_A_mind_is_a.csp
> >> *
> >>
> >> *Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?*

> >> every question I asked him, from who wrote *Things
> Fall Apart* to

> Donatus Nwoga’s *West
> >> African Verse* and other texts by Wole Soyinka,

> J.P. Clark, Chinua
> >> Achebe, Femi Osofisan, and Ola Rotimi. There was
> even a school competition
> >> to determine who read the greatest number of
> titles in Heinemann’s African
> >> Writers Series each term.
> >>
> >> In the literary and debating society, you debated
> such topics as “British
> >> Parliamentary system is better than American
> Presidential System”. You had
> >> to go to the school library and research both
> systems! The school library

> >> subscribed to *Time Magazine*, *Newsweek*, *West
> Africa*, and major

> >> Nigerian magazines and newspapers. I still recall

> scouring *Time* and *
> >> Newsweek* at the school library for a debate on

> >> Since he couldn’t tell me who wrote *Things Fall
> Apart*, I didn’t take

[Pius Adesanmi]

Chidi, Shola, Areh:   Thanks for teasing out the possible class dimensions of the matter. Yes, Shola, I once examined an undergraduate student who had opted for Yoruba to satisfy some African language requirement in her course. I was to test her reading, speaking, and comprehension skills. A 30-minute exam or so. She came in speaking Yoruba with a heavy Britico accent. Everything led me to assume she was born and raised in Britain. So, I was very impressed that she could read, write, and speak Yoruba - once you take out that heavy Britico accent and the hyper-refined 'fone'. At the end of the test, I asked why she left Britain for undergrad studies in the US. "Britain? I've never been to Britain O. I finished secondary school in Nigeria and my parents sent me straight to America for my undergrad studies!" I nearly had a heart attack. Fortunately, she had no idea what I think of those accent affectations by Nigerians in her class. So, you have a point. Chidi and Adeh, perhaps you're zeroing in on those instances of individual brilliance at the expense of the larger problem I'm trying to raise? Of course, I encounter such brilliance in the village - I do volunteer summer coaching/teaching -in high schools and primary schools in my village. Overall, the majority of students and pupils I encounter in such situations are those whose parents are struggling to pay school fees and keep them in school. Of five secondary schools in my village, only one has a library. It is one of those catholic missionary schools. It was run from 1962 to 1975 by European and Canadian catholic priests and teachers. My father took over a principal in 1976. Sometime in 2001 I was home with some French friends. My father took us to the school. The current principal sensed opportunity in the presence of two oyinbo men and the son of a former principal. He took us to the library. The building was solid but all the shelves were dusty and empty.  All three of us made commitments which he have kept since 2001.That is how only one of five high schools in that village has come to have a library that is worthy of that name. This is not an isolated case. Most public secondary  schools I visit in Kwara, Kogi, and Oyo states present similar scenarios of empty and dusty library buildings - where there are buildings designated "libary"at all.. I have not mentioned Ibadan because one must always make room for Obododimma's patriotic nativist mathematical formula: 10 yams + forty lies = fifty yams. There is always the possibility that he has visited numerous secondary schools in Bere and Moniya, whose libraries are superior to Harvard's. With regard to the middle class angle that Shola and Arey raised, why is it that the disparities in knowledge base weren't as pronounced back then? I went to a missionary school, Titcombe college. I had friends who went to the Federal Govt colleges, and other exclusive schools of the Corona/Kings College variety.I also had friends who went to the usual Abule Egba Grammar school variety. When we met during long vacation, only butter and pako level separated us,not knowledge base. We were all reading the same things and more or else drew from the same textual reservoir. Could the disparities you guys are talking about be due in part to the demise of the middle class as we knew it? Now we have the truly poor and those whose children speak Yoruba in all kinds of British and American accents while never ever having left Nigeria. Pius

Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D. Associate Professor Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL) Department of English Carleton University Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6 Tel:  +1 613 520 2600  ext. 1175 www.projectponal.com

--- On Sat, 7/3/09, Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall Apart? To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com Date: Saturday, 7 March, 2009, 12:52 PM

Well Pius, I met a boy during the last christmas and new year holidays at my country home, his father was doing some bricklaying jobs for me and the boy was helping his father as a "labourer". I understood that he normally does this during holidays to help him raise some money for his schooling.   Anyway, the boy's attitude to work attracted my attention, he is a jss 3 student of community secondary school Avuvu, Ikeduru, Imo state. His name is Johnson Nwachukwu. The wonder was that this boy who also wants to be a writer had read everything Chinua Achebe and most others had written. He discusses these writers like a good undergraduate of literary studies.   In as much as I agree with you that the standard of education has gone down considerably, we should be mindful of the so many distractions inherent in those "good schools", one of which your cousin attends.   Chidi Anthony Opara Publisher/Editor-In-Chief chidi opara reports http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com   Member: (1) World Poets Society(WPS)              (2) Association Of Nigerian Authors

On 3/7/09, Pius Adesanmi <piusad...@yahoo.com> wrote:

http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Editorial/5382478-147/LITTLE_ENDS:_A_mind_is_a.csp

Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?

By Pius Adesanmi

My teenage cousin called me from Nigeria last week. He had a long list of things he wanted me to buy for him, all cutting-edge models of modern gadgetry popular among netizens of his generation. Somehow, our conversation swayed to his education – he is now in SS1. I told him that we called that Form Four when I was in secondary school. Then he told me he has a flair for “arts subjects” and hopes to be like me when he grows up.

Perhaps it was the flattery, the sudden realization that the young boy considers me a role model or the bit about his flair for arts subjects. I felt this sudden urge to gauge his cultural capital and knowledge base. I began to ask random questions about books he ought to have read – or be reading – and basic things and concepts he should know in such subjects as history, literature, government, and economics. I drew a blank on virtually every question I asked him, from who wrote Things Fall Apart to rudimentary questions about supply and demand in economics; from who were Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe to the difference between parliamentary and presidential systems of government.

My discovery was frightening. My cousin is an above-average student who attends an above-average secondary school. He is what you would ordinarily call a bright kid. Yet, outside the diction of cyber gadgetry and cell phones, he knows nothing, has read nothing! If his knowledge base is so unbelievably shallow in his privileged educational circumstances, what is the situation with the millions of Nigerian children we are preparing as “leaders of tomorrow” in such places as Okokomaiko Community Grammar School, Oranmiyan Community Secondary School, Ajegunle Community UNICEF-Assisted Primary School?

All the questions I asked my cousin were based on the knowledge capital anyone in my generation would have acquired by Form Four irrespective of one’s social status and class or whether you attended private or public school. If, like my cousin, you were in the arts, you were already into Volume Two of KBC Onwubiko’s history textbooks and, also, classics by Adu Boahen and Elisabeth Isichei; in a subject like government, you were already deep into Nigeria’s constitutional history; in literature, you already finished your first Shakespeare and an array of Western literary classics. In African literature, you were half way through Donatus Nwoga’s West African Verse and other texts by Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, Femi Osofisan, and Ola Rotimi. There was even a school competition to determine who read the greatest number of titles in Heinemann’s African Writers Series each term. In the literary and debating society, you debated such topics as “British Parliamentary system is better than American Presidential System”. You had to go to the school library and research both systems! The school library subscribed to Time Magazine, Newsweek, West Africa, and major Nigerian magazines and newspapers. I still recall scouring Time and Newsweek at the school library for a debate on Ronald Reagan. Outside of formal classroom contexts, the reading culture ensured a circulation of such “lighter” texts as James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Sidney Sheldon, McMillan Pace Setters series, Mills and Boon. Break time was for endless school kids’ speculation about what Muammar Ghadaffi would do to those Americans who bombed Tripoli and Benghazi. That was the beginning of one’s resentment of the misuse and abuse of America’s power. We debated the Falklands War, hoping that Argentina would defeat the “bloody British”. The world news broadcast of the BBC (“This is London!”) and the network news of the Nigerian Television Authority were daily rituals in high school. Only cable stations that show D’Banj, TuFace, Banky W, 50 Cents, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga are in with my cousin. In essence, we were ensconced in a textual world that made reading and knowledge of the world the cornerstones of our formative years. Nigeria pays a terrible price for the escapist demission of our intellectually impecunious rulers who send their children to school abroad and are, therefore, not affected by the collapse of our educational system. And to think that my father grumbled endlessly about fallen standards when I was in secondary school! He couldn’t understand, for instance, why elementary philology and Latin had disappeared from the curriculum and he took to teaching me those two subjects at home. My cousin’s situation offers a tragic window into the contradictions of our national experience. We are destroying our future by producing generations that do not and cannot read. Since he couldn’t tell me who wrote Things Fall Apart, I didn’t take the risk of asking my cousin about Mansa Kankan Musa. I couldn’t put it beyond him to exclaim: “ah Uncle, his name is President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua o, not Kankan Musa!” We expect progress from the systematic atrophy of our country’s young minds. If, as they say, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, what does that make a country that wastes minds with reckless abandon?

[Dr. Valentine Ojo]

"Now, we have children born and raised in Nigeria who cannot even speak a single Nigerian language...I have kids like these as relatives, to my amazement their parents are very proud their kids are Westernized." - Shola Adenekan


Welcome to A Tale of Two Nigeria! One for the poor and traditional - the majority; one for the "elite" - a tiny self-delusional, confused and directionless minority.

For those who permanently complain about CROSS-POSTING, this for example are opinions (Pius Adesanmi, Chidi Opara, Shola Adenekan that MUST BE CROSS-POSTED and READ on all Nigerian Internet Forums, and in all Nigerian news media - if we are indeed a people who care to know the WHOLE TRUTH about what we the "educated and exposed" are actively doing to destroy our OWN AFRICAN CULTURES, and future generation of Nigerians that will become victims of Cultural Anomie, regardless their tribe or ethnicity, while avidly APING "Americans" and "Europeans".

Talk of cultural self-anihilation by installment! The Nigerian "Elite" must be the world champions in this unenviable cultural Olympics of Self-Annihilation!

Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD


On Sat 03/07/09 10:21 AM , Shola Adenekan sholaa...@gmail.com sent:

Hi Folks,

I think both Pius Adesanmi and Chidi Opara captured the dilemma facing our younger generation as well as the Nigerian education system. Dr Adesanmi's piece "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?" showed how the Nigerian middle classed have moved so far away from Nigerian culture for Western middle class values.

If you look at children of the educated class, they tend to listen to the same music, dress and talk like their Oyinbo counterparts.Whereas working class children are still rooted in Nigerian values, since their parents do not have the means to subscribe to cable television or invest in video games.

Most Nigerian middle class parents (including politicians, traders and  many on this forum) send their children to private schools, where English is the only spoken language. At home, their parents speak only English to them and the quest is to have a British or an American accent by the time they reach teenage years. Even when these kids do  the yearly 'pilgrimage' to their parents' village, people will try and speak to them in English.

Now, we have children born and raised in Nigeria who cannot even speak a single Nigerian language. I'm not making this up; I have kids like these as relatives, to my amazement their parents are very proud their kids are Westernized. How can we expect such children to know or even cherish such modern heritage as Chinua Achebe or Salawa Abeni?  And we are not even taking about the rise and fall of Oyo Empire or King Jaja of Opobo!

On other hand, children from poor homes have no choice but to attend run-down  government schools where Achebe and Soyinka are still on the syllabus. Believe you me, if those working class kids have the means they will act like those uptown kids.

Shola Adenekan, Mr.
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Obododimma Oha <obod...@gmail.com> wrote:

Chidi,

When I read Pius Adesanmi's "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?", what came to my mind immediately was Professor Femi Osofisan's joke with the same title. Osofisan's humorous narrative -- which is now decades old -- is about a secondary school boy who, suspecting that the question "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?" was an attempt at investigating who committed an offence that should be penalized, declared his innocence outright: "I'm not the one, sir! I swear." Well, Adesanmi's article was a different sort of joke, perhaps a more serious joke.

 I don't want to be seen as being "too quick" to defend Nigerian secondary school education. At my own children's school here in Ibadan, Adesanmi's story would not find any support: the children (in the primary school) are into all kinds of creative activities --- from creative writing to Adire making! They also have Reading and Writing Clubs, and are visited by well known writers/artists from time to time. These visitors deliver inspiring talks to them.  Please, when next you are in Ibadan, go to Bodija International School and Bodija International College and find out whether what I stating here is false. My nine-year old son at Bodija International School (a primary school) now has produced about five manuscripts of short story collections. I have not, for one day, sat him down to teach him anything about creative writing. Quite bad of me. The much I have been doing is to take him to bookshops on weekends (at his own request) where he makes me empty my pockets to pay for books he picks. And his reading speed amazes me! Within few hours he's through with a novel of about 150/200 pages! I was not that good in my own time, if one must be sincere. 

Reading culture is certainly on the decline everywhere, partly because of improper attention to the screen. Such a decline is not peculiar to Nigeria, neither is it one of the symptoms of the so much advertized "fall of Nigeria". 

--- Obododimma.

[Akurang-Parry, Kwabena]

Shola,

 

The "Oyinboism" that you have described, pertaining to Nigeria, also occurs in Ghana. I visited a primary school in Ghana and asked a student, a female of about eleven years old, to direct me to the office of the headmistress. I made a mistake: I used the Ga language because I thought that the area was mostly inhabited by Gas and therefore everyone spoke Ga!  The student sized me up and said, "Sir, we don't speak Ga here; we speak English or French."  Yes, affluent Ghanaians use the English language at home, not to mention complicated Western/Christian names, such John Peter Liverpool Opoku. Adu Boahen pointed out that the worst effect of colonialism is psychological, and we are patiently waiting for Qansy Salako's magnum opus to address that topic. Then again, some of us call it globalization! Thanks for your insights.

 

Kwabena.

 

Kwabena Akurang-Parry, Ph. D.

(Assoc Prof of African History & World History)

Dept of History

Shippensburg University

Shippensburg, PA, 17257, USA

 

Phone: 717 477 1286

Fax:     717 477 4062

---

From: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [USAAfric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Shola Adenekan [sholaa...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2009 10:21 AM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?

[kenneth harrow]

i have nothing to add to pius's sad, if not entirely unexpected account. but it isn't simply a question of weak educational standards in nigeria. i'd say about 20 years ago it became impossible to expect my students at michigan state university to have any familiarity with the bible--and i seriously mean any familiarity whatsoever, starting with adam and eve. not long after, no familiarity with shakespeare, not to mention homer. i doubt many have even heard of dante. the list is more than endless; even english majors can't be expected to know any literary text whatsoever, not to know the plots of any texts whatsoever; not even to know the difference between a subject and an object.
they are very largely conversant in tv shows going back for many years; know popular music and film stars. know better than i how about how to live in a facebook universe.
 i am determined not to become gloomy about this, not to be one of those old fogies (i am, after all, 65) who lament the passing of educational standards, literacy, grammar, etc.
i am unconvinced by the notion that there is a new literacy grounded in computers; not convinced that there is a meaningful standard for visual literacy that can come without studying it as a discipline, that it isn't enough simply to watch tv or films. not entirely sure how we are to respond to these changes. i can only carry on with my own sense of what is important in what i teach, and not pretend to move into a new intellectual universe that is foreign to me. it is enough to argue that chris abani is a great nigerian writer on this list, much less that there is some good reason to have read chaucer or dante, those forgotten classics i once also learned to love.
i guess the appendix to pius's experience was my inquiries of hundreds of students in senegal whether they had seen any of sembene's films. the vast majority had not; the vast majority never even heard of his films--films i was and am still working on.
ken

At 06:49 AM 3/7/2009, Pius Adesanmi wrote:

http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Editorial/5382478-147/LITTLE_ENDS:_A_mind_is_a.csp

Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

By Pius Adesanmi

My teenage cousin called me from Nigeria last week. He had a long list of things he wanted me to buy for him, all cutting-edge models of modern gadgetry popular among netizens of his generation. Somehow, our conversation swayed to his education – he is now in SS1. I told hhim that we called that Form Four when I was in secondary school. Then he told me he has a flair for “arts subjects†and hopes to be like me when he grows up.

Perhaps it was the flattery, the sudden realization that the young boy considers me a role model or the bit about his flair for arts subjects. I felt this sudden urge to gauge his cultural capital and knowledge base. I began to ask random questions about books he ought to have read – or be reading – and basic things and concepts he should knoww in such subjects as history, literature, government, and economics. I drew a blank on virtually every question I asked him, from who wrote Things Fall Apart to rudimentary questions about supply and demand in economics; from who were Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe to the difference between parliamentary and presidential systems of government.

My discovery was frightening. My cousin is an above-average student who attends an above-average secondary school. He is what you would ordinarily call a bright kid. Yet, outside the diction of cyber gadgetry and cell phones, he knows nothing, has read nothing! If his knowledge base is so unbelievably shallow in his privileged educational circumstances, what is the situation with the millions of Nigerian children we are preparing as “leaders of tomorrow†in such places as Okokomaiko Community Grammar School, Oranmiyan Community Secondary School, Ajegunle Community UNICEF-Assisted Primary School?

All the questions I asked my cousin were based on the knowledge capital anyone in my generation would have acquired by Form Four irrespective of one’s social status and class or whether you attended private or public school. If, like my cousin, you were in the arts, you were already into Volume Two of KBC Onwubiko’s history textbooks and, also, classics by Adu Boahen and Elisabeth Isichei; in a subject like government, you were already deep into Nigeria’s constitutional history; in literature, you already finished your first Shakespeare and an array of Western literary classics. In African literature, you were half way through Donatus Nwoga’s West African Verse and other texts by Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, Femi Osofisan, and Ola Rotimi. There was even a school competition to determine who read the greatest number of titles in Heinemann’s African Writers Series each term.

In the literary and debating society, you debated such topics as “British Parliamentary system is better than American Presidential System†. You had to go to the school library and research both systems! The school library subscribed to Time Magazine, Newsweek, West Africa, and major Nigerian magazines and newspapers. I still recall scouring Time and Newsweek at the school library for a debate on Ronald Reagan. Outside of formal classroom contexts, the reading culture ensured a circulation of such “lighter†texts as James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Sidney Sheldon, McMillan Pace Setters series, Mills and Boon. Break time was for endless school kids’ speculation about what Muammar Ghadaffi would do to those Americans who bombed Tripoli and Benghazi. That was the beginning of one’s resentment of the misuse and abuse of America’s power. We debated the Falklands War, hoping that Argentina would defeat the “bloody British†. The world news broadcast of the BBC (“This is London!†) and the network news of the Nigerian Television Authority were daily rituals in high school. Only cable stations that show D’Banj, TuFace, Banky W, 50 Cents, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga are in with my cousin.

In essence, we were ensconced in a textual world that made reading and knowledge of the world the cornerstones of our formative years. Nigeria pays a terrible price for the escapist demission of our intellectually impecunious rulers who send their children to school abroad and are, therefore, not affected by the collapse of our educational system. And to think that my father grumbled endlessly about fallen standards when I was in secondary school! He couldn’t understand, for instance, why elementary philology and Latin had disappeared from the curriculum and he took to teaching me those two subjects at home. My cousin’s situation offers a tragic window into the contradictions of our national experience. We are destroying our future by producing generations that do not and cannot read. Since he couldn’t tell me who wrote Things Fall Apart, I didn’t take the risk of asking my cousin about Mansa Kankan Musa. I couldn’t put it beyond him to exclaim: “ah Uncle, his name is President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua o, not Kankan Musa!†We expect progress from the systematic atrophy of our country’s young minds. If, as they say, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, what does that make a country that wastes minds with reckless abandon?

 

 


Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL)
Department of English
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
K1S 5B6

Tel: <?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = SKYPE /> +1 613 520 2600  ext. 1175

www.projectponal.com

Kenneth W. Harrow
Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 353-7243
fax 353 3755

[Anunoby, Ogugua]

 

Who wrote "Things Fall Apart"? Why is this question important? Is the question more important than what is the "internet"?. There is perhaps another question namely: how wealthy are you and how much of this wealth is denominated in US Dollars or Euros. Every generation has its objectives, interests, challenges, and concerns. The content and meaning of the above, changes from one generation to another. Priorities change. Government always has a  critically important responsibility to help to ensure that as these changes happen they do not happen for their own sake or always as a matter of inevfitability. Change can be planned. Change can be controlled. Change can be reversed. 

Education was believed and used to be the key to a "better" life including personal economic and social success in Nigeria. It is less so now. It is therefore not suprising that some older Nigerians raised on different values, believe that the current standard of education in Nigeria's schools is not the right standard and therefore not "good" for future generations..

Education is essentially no longer a public good in Nigeria. Education has been so mindlessly and recklessly "privatized" in Nigeria that practically, all they do in the Federal and State Ministries of Education is fight for large budgets, share the money when it comes among themselves, blame teachers in government educational institutions for government failure as ministry officials waddle and lumber from one labor related crises to the other. These officials always deny that labor related crises are most oftentimes symptoms of government policies and actions' failures. It is no different in the Ministries of Health and others. How many subscribers to this medium know for sure that the Federal Government or indeed their State Government's have serious education policies? Who recalls the last time policy issues in education were seriously debated or discussed publicly? When was the last time a senior Federal or State Government Education Ministry official took or answered serious questions on education policies or state of education in Nigeria?

The Federal and State governments in Nigeria have practicaly abdicated their role in public education. Senior members of these governments have and continue to be proprietors of educational institutions. Their success as business men and women, and investors requires that government be missing in action. The less public investment and regulation (interference) in public education and educational policies therefore, the better for them.

The education of children in Nigeria is now the sole personal responsibility of parents. If as a parent a Nigerian is concerned or unhappy with the education of their child in one school, the expection of both government and sometimes society, is that the parent should pull the child out of the school and enroll the child in another school in the country or abroad. It is also the parent's choice whether or not the child attend school. Parents now have unlimited "choice" on the education of their child or children. One is tempted to say more choice than in any place else in the world.

The transfer of schools to voluntary agencies may help but it is always important that the public interest in education be concretized, and boldly and demonstably evident, in the development, continuous improvement, and mandatory implementation of the government education policies.

I remeber a discussion of this subject many years ago with some friends of mine. Our conclusion roughly stated, was that we should not be too concerned because we wiil be all be dead, they will all be poorly educated and the "smartest{" among them will be leaders. The world was however not as much a global economy then as it is today.

 

oa   

 

---

From: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [USAAfric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Shola Adenekan [sholaa...@gmail.com]

Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2009 9:21 AM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?

[Shola Adenekan]

Dear Dr Ojo,


You said: "Talk of cultural self-anihilation by installment! The Nigerian "Elite" must be the world champions in this unenviable cultural Olympics of Self-Annihilation!"

Well said, sir. A Kenyan friend recently remarked that the African middle class love to live in denial, we know it but would rather not acknowledge the fact that we are killing our heritage.

What is even worse in Nigeria is this culture of impunity, which only very few  are willing to fight against.

Not only does our government sell us lies every year in terms of what they are going to do when they deliver their budget, but they also know that we know that those projects they talk about are lies. They will never materialize.  We know, for instance, that the money they have given to various school-improvement funds over the years has not been used,  to buy computers or new instruments or new sports equipment, because we have yet to see any of these materialize. Just as we know that a lot of the money projected during budgets to build roads, schools, or hospitals will go into the pockets of politicians and civil servants.

Theft is an open secret. But was the Nigerian middle class's response? Send our children to private schools and university education abroad.

The absurd structure of impunity in Nigeria is such that, even when captured in the act of looting public fund, administering extra-judicial killings or unwarranted cruel and unusual punishment, politicians and civil servants become latter day Shaggy and sing: "it wasn't me." Or even worse: "If na you, you no go chop?"

I look at my father's generation with despair.  They were too busy trying to prove an equal to the whiteman to care about building a strong Nigeria for us their children. They were, and still are, too busy been simply Yoruba, Ijaw, Efik, Igbo, Kanuri and Hausa to ensure that the public school system works; to ensure that the judicial system work for the rich and the poor.

I'm in my 30s now, and I see the same pattern among the 20 and 30 somethings I come across day in day out.

Changing Nigeria will require more than de-fanged Commissions of Inquiry and the repeated promises to "end corruption" that form the substance of election-time promises. Just look at the Uwais Commission.

It will require a massive, collective act of imagining an altogether different culture, a slow process of learning how to build and nurture that culture.A process of preserving our heritage and ensuring that the good things in our tradition and ancestral way of life are preserved for coming generations.

This is a work of collective dreaming and action that must be embraced by all of us, for we are all part of Nigeria's intricate corrupt  system, and whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all fertile ground for corruption's multiple pleasure-giving seedings.

For the educated class has consistently failed Nigeria; we are supposed to be the agent of change but we are just part of the socio-political rot.  I look forward to contributions from those more knowledgeable than my humble self.

Shola Adenekan, Mr.
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Shola Adenekan <sholaa...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Dr Ojo,


You said: "Talk of cultural self-anihilation by installment! The Nigerian "Elite" must be the world champions in this unenviable cultural Olympics of Self-Annihilation!"

Well said, sir. A Kenyan friend recently remarked that the African middle class love to live in denial, we know it but would rather not acknowledge the fact that we are killing our heritage.

What is even worse in Nigeria is this culture of impunity, which only very few  are willing to fight against.

Not only does our government sell us lies every year in terms of what they are going to do when they deliver their budget, but they also know that we know that those projects they talk about are lies. They will never materialize.  We know, for instance, that the money they have given to various school-improvement funds over the years has not been used,  to buy computers or new instruments or new sports equipment, because we have yet to see any of these materialize. Just as we know that a lot of the money projected during budgets to build roads, schools, or hospitals will go into the pockets of politicians and civil servants.

Theft is an open secret. But was the Nigerian middle class's response? Send our children to private schools and university education abroad.

The absurd structure of impunity in Nigeria is such that, even when captured in the act of looting public fund, administering extra-judicial killings or unwarranted cruel and unusual punishment, politicians and civil servants become latter day Shaggy and sing: "it wasn't me." Or even worse: "If na you, you no go chop?"

I look at my father's generation with despair.  They were too busy trying to prove an equal to the whiteman to care about building a strong Nigeria for us their children. They were, and still are, too busy been simply Yoruba, Ijaw, Efik, Igbo, Kanuri and Hausa to ensure that the public school system works; to ensure that the judicial system work for the rich and the poor.

I'm in my 30s now, and I see the same pattern among the 20 and 30 somethings I come across day in day out.

Changing Nigeria will require more than de-fanged Commissions of Inquiry and the repeated promises to "end corruption" that form the substance of election-time promises. Just look at the Uwais Commission.

It will require a massive, collective act of imagining an altogether different culture, a slow process of learning how to build and nurture that culture.A process of preserving our heritage and ensuring that the good things in our tradition and ancestral way of life are preserved for coming generations.

This is a work of collective dreaming and action that must be embraced by all of us, for we are all part of Nigeria's intricate corrupt  system, and whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all fertile ground for corruption's multiple pleasure-giving seedings.

For the educated class has consistently failed Nigeria; we are supposed to be the agent of change but we are just part of the socio-political rot.  I look forward to contributions from those more knowledgeable than my humble self.

Shola Adenekan, Mr.
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com

[Obododimma Oha]

Pius Adesanmi,

You are back to the same old story: the decay of the Nigerian educational system that produced you. Last time it was the university system in Africa; so now why not the secondary and primary schools? My response to your article did not address the existence of libraries, unless you did not read it. I addressed the issue of literary education and creative endeavours in the primary and secondary schools where my own children are here in Ibadan. I sensed the same kind of dangerous generalization you have always traded and sought to draw attention to it. How can you simply conclude that the pupils in our primary and secondary schools have little or no knowledge of some well-known Nigerian writers, based on your interaction with your relative that wanted tech-toys from you? How could even a blockhead in a Nigerian senior secondary school not know the author of Things Fall Apart, a book on the reading list of many schools, and which exists on DVD in many video shops here? And you want us to believe that it is (enough) evidence of the imagined decay in their literary and cultural education? Christ! 

I am particularly amused to read your immodest comparison that suggests how wonderful and better you were at your own time than the pupils you are talking about. It is true that many of the libraries in some of the public primary and secondary schools in Nigeria have depreciated, but many of the schools, to my knowledge, have been rebuilding gradually, with the assistance of Parents' Teachers' Associations, NGOs, and government. Perhaps this is slow in some states, especially those that have always depended on government to build and maintain schools for them. But something commendable is happening.  

It is unfortunate that you glossed over the point I made earlier that reading culture is suffering globally, that it is not a typical Nigerian problem. It is perhaps only prejudice and tendency to read only yourself that could have prevented you from accepting that observation. 

I am very proud of the efforts made by children in our primary and secondary schools here. I attend many of their activities and do know that these children will replace fellows like Pius Adesanmi, and will certainly do better as literary scholars. Time will tell, as we say over here. I am particularly happy that some of our artists and well-known scholars (and some branches of ANA) do recognize the need to visit these schools and try to inspire the children, as I said in my earlier post. Unlike Pius Adesanmi who uses one isolated case to conclude that our primary and secondary school pupils don't know our major writers and their books, these artists and scholars try to mentor and promote creative imagination in their society. Just last week, Elvon Jarrett, a Nollywood star, visited my children's school and, after giving an inspiring talk, endowed an award for pupils that excel in dramatic literature. There are "scholars" and "writers" who want to remain the only champions in their societies and keep telling the world that the younger ones are bereft of ideas, but there are still those who want to plant more ideas to producer a greater literary/intellectual yield. I commend the latter.

By the way, Pius Adesanmi, why not acknowledge Prof. Osofisan's joke as having partially inspired you in giving a title to your article? Surely, that won't make you less a scholar!

 --- Obododimma.

[Amatoritsero Ede]

Folks,

I join this thread late. But i have personal experience of Mr. Adenekan's experience. I have cousins who have lost their nation languages - that was even as far back as the 70s when the middle class was still intact. Thier father was a VC of a premier University. These kids can hardly speak passable yoruba. They spent thier holdiays in 'jand', going for summer when in fact nigeria has eternal summer and 'jand' - London, is teary and misty most time of the year. The pedagogic vanity, which mimics western accents, foibles, habits, is simple colonial hangover. We are a conquered people afterall - and i speak in a more overarching terms here. In religious, educational, cultural terms, we have been conditioned to look up to the west. We equate speaking english to a rapid social climb. The ideal would be to speak impeccable english and still be fluent and as as good if not superior in Yoruba. I know a yoruba student in my university here, a third year undergrad, who is proud or not ashamed to announce that she cannot speak yoruba. I thought she grew up in Canada, no! She only came here after high school for higher education, and she has been in this country only 3 years! This middle class affectation/snobbery against self is sad and to be pitied. But the other issue, which is euqally worrying is the denial by our educated and elite, that there is a problem in our education in africa. Obodo, you mention your son's excellent education. But that is in a 'private secondary school. He is priviledged. How about millions of other children. What is the state of the secondary schools at Bere, Idi-Arere, Oke-Odo, Monatan? This are lower class ibadan, the interior. Do the kids there have the same privileges? 

Amatoritsero

2009/3/7 Dr. Valentine Ojo <val...@md.metrocast.net>

--
____________________________
SSHRC Fellow &
Doctoral Candidate
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
Editor & Managing Editor: Gboungboun Magazine and PONAL Quarterly Forum:Project on New African Literatures
www.projectponal.com
Publisher & Managin Editor: Maple Tree Literary Supplement
www.mtls.ca

[Rex Marinus]

Obodo,
I'd add to this discussion, simply by pointing out a bit of your own "generalizations." Your kids are at some privileged school in Ibadan, and not at Abadina Grammar School. So, you may have this disparity in your experience of your quite keen son. Let me narrate my own experience. From a school called Omolewa in a place called Ortitamefa in Ibadan in 1975, I spent a term of primary school in the village school primary smack in front of my house in my village on gthe insistence of my father. The kids did not have sandals or shoes, but they taught me a lesson or two. They seemed so totally far ahead of me in geography, nature study, arithmetic, and even stood their own grounds in the English language where I had what may have been a slight advantage. The rural primary school then had not much disadvantage from my own experience of this private school in Ibadan founded by Mrs Vaughan on an English model transported straight to Ibadan. The kids in my village school did not have my collection of the Ladybird series, but they had great Readers especially by Nwoga and Ahamba, KBC Onwubiko, FC Ogbalu, etc, and that first experience I daresay, provided me with the foundational education of my life. Now, if you send your child to a village primary school today, I doubt that the experience will be the same. Secondly, I went to the Givernment College Umuahia. Many years ago, it was  adelight just to enter that space. Last time I visited the school it had the shocking feel of a terrible ghetto. Now, I cannot swear that the kids have stopped reading, but it used to be that in my time, all the daily newspapers were to be found in the Stone library, and at least one in the House common rooms. It used to be quite clear, that although the house black and white TV was there, it came out only on special occassions, to watch the network news. Even then, although these were a few privileges available in a place like my old high school, it did not create any huge or fundamental difference when it came to my peers from other schools who may not have the same budget as Umuahia, but whose education were no less enriched by a cross-generational impetus. We read the same books, went to the same city libraries, bough the pacesetter series or the series by the African university press - the Adventures of Souza, One week one trouble, Eze Goes to school, Akpan and the smugglers, and such books - which we bought with our one naira pocket money in bookshops where our parents did not have to offload their monthly salaries to satify our needs for entertainment. That is a crucial difference. Besides, there is a massive chaos in public education policy in Nigeria that creates a generation, trained not as a national workforce, but as preps for schools outside Nigeria. So called wealthy parents are educating their children outside of a conscious social need - to figures of the crossroads. They prepare them for schools outside Nigeria and to live outside the realm of its national imagination and imaginary. The effect is disparity and in those most acute of situations, alienation. I think it is important to recognize it. The fact that your children are on track can be quite clearly explained: one, you are a university don, two, you have sent them to privileged private schools, the increasing norm for the privileged Nigerian, and three, they have learned osmotically, the value of reading. Not all Nigerian children have that privilege. As for the point that Chidi Opara raises: perhaps it ought to be a lesson that gadgetry is no alternative to instruction and to learning by discovery. Literacy will remain the highest stage of self-awareness, and literacy ultimately might be eroded by computers and their allied toys, and it calls for a balance, in the design of the contemporary school or instructional environment to in fact emphasize literacy through textual rather than through on-line discovery. That, for me, is the most important aspect of this debate.
Obi Nwakanma
 

 _____________________ "If I don't learn to shut my mouth I'll soon go to hell, I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell." --Christopher Okigbo

---

Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 07:56:20 -0800

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?

From: obod...@gmail.com
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com

---

What can you do with the new Windows Live? Find out

[Oluwatoyin Ade-Odutola]

[By the way, Pius Adesanmi, why not acknowledge Prof. Osofisan's joke as having partially inspired you in giving a title to your article? Surely, that won't make you less a scholar!--- Obododimma.] I need help here and I hope someone with a better sense of history will assist me here. I think Bisi Ogunbadejo (the former Guardian Cartoon editor) was the one who actually set off the humor about who wrote Shakespeare and the long saga of who to hold responsible for the ‘action.’ I cannot tell which one preceeded the other, could  Professor Femi Osofisan’s version be an adaptation of Ogunbadejo’s version which he serialized as 'who wrote Shakespeare' and then some time last Saturday at the Cater Conference at University of Florida, I heard Professor Biodun Jeyifo’s version of 'who wrote Things Fall Apart.' He used the 'joke' to illustrate the danger of giving a free rein to meaning as if nothing guides the internal logic of the text. The real meaning/message of the 'joke' in their various adaptations by Ogunbadejo, Osofisan, and Jeyifo is very different from what Professor Pius Adesanmi intends, please correct me if I am wrong. His, to me, is a direct question to his cousin, who probably suspects what ever his response may be, his Uncle may one day write about him on the pages of the newspapers as has become his practice!!! I have come to learn a good lesson and simply stated be careful who you talk to these days, you just may end up in their blog or comments online. The private and public spaces have become one. If you doubt me go read the new terror in town called Next. There writers talk endlessly about their children (Toni Kan), their spouses, (Lola Soneyin), and what ever else should be private to them!   In all these adaptations and re-adaptations where in chronological time do we place Stanley Fish’s ‘is there a text in this class’. If you ask me I will place Stanley Fish’s account ahead of Bisi Ogunbadejo’s account or that of Professor Femi Osofisan’s adaptation. On another level I would not be surprised if the three friends got the idea from the same source.   Kole

[joan.O'sa Oviawe]

Ama,

Unfortunately, this phenomenon has permeated the psyche of the poor and so called lower class.  In Benin, many people don't speak Edo neither do they speak proper English, the lingua franca is pidgin!  It is typical to see a grandma speaking pidgin to their grandkids.  These folk are linguistically occupying an in-between space that is neither here nor there.  I read and write Edo at the third grade level, ironically, if I had the same low proficiency in English, I'd be considered semi-illiterate. I am on a personal mission to re-educate myself in my mother tongue.

joan



______
Happy International Women's Day!


  ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._
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   (_Y_.)' ._    ) `._ `. ``-..-'
  _..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' .'
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Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail

[olaka...@aol.com]

Kole:

I agree with your position on this issue. The issue highlights one of
the Achille's heels in the African psyche. We take ourselves too
seriously.

Why are Africans always looking for recognition even where it neither
exists nor is warranted?

Any one writing in this medium for the sake of promoting his or her
scholarship is in eternal delusion.
I believe Prof. Adesanmi will be last on the list of those so inclined.


Why must everyone (connected with) and everything (including the
mundane) done by an African be acknowledged especially because "the
scholarship" of the one giving the acknowledgement "will not be
diminished?"

If according to Obododimma the person who first asked the question
"Who wrote Things Fall Apart" must be so acknowledged
each time the question is asked in print form, what kind of
acknowledgement should we then reserve for Chinua Achebe, the legendary
lierary genius who wrote the seminal African novel?

Bye,

Ola

-----Original Message-----
From: Oluwatoyin Ade-Odutola <ko...@yahoo.com>
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 1:19 pm
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Who actually started who Wrote
Things Fall Apart?

[By the way, Pius Adesanmi, why not acknowledge Prof. Osofisan's joke
as having partially inspired you in giving a title to your article?
Surely, that won't make you less a scholar!--- Obododimma.]

I=2
0need help here and I hope someone with a better sense of history will

assist me here. I think Bisi Ogunbadejo (the former Guardian Cartoon
editor) was the one who actually set off the humor about who wrote
Shakespeare and the long saga of who to hold responsible for the
‘action.’ I cannot tell which one preceeded the other, could  Professor
Femi Osofisan’s version be an adaptation of Ogunbadejo’s version which
he serialized as 'who wrote Shakespeare' and then some time last
Saturday at the Cater Conference at University of Florida, I heard
Professor Biodun Jeyifo’s version of 'who wrote Things Fall Apart.' He
used the 'joke' to illustrate the
danger of giving a free rein to meaning as if nothing guides the
internal logic of the text. The real meaning/message of the 'joke' in
their various adaptations by Ogunbadejo, Osofisan, and Jeyifo is very
different from what Professor Pius Adesanmi intends, please correct me
if I am wrong. His, to me, is a direct question to his cousin, who
probably suspects what ever his response may be, his Uncle may one day
write about him on the pages of the newspapers as has become his
practice!!!
I have come to learn a good lesson and simply stated be careful who you
talk to these days, you just may end up in their blog or comments
online. The private and public spaces have become one. If you doubt me

go read the new20terror in town called Next. There writers talk

[Obododimma Oha]

Good question, Ama. I have thought about these locations too. Surely, there are creative/literary activities going on in these areas, but which cannot be compared to what happens at the private primary/secondary school that my children attend. This apart, I can't quickly conclude that children in private/elite schools are better. Just last month, one of my god-children in a village secondary school in Anambra State passed all his subjects with distinction in the school certificate examination, passed excellently well in the University Matriculation Examination, and gained admission to FUTO, when some of my wards here with me in the city (who have access to better facilities, libraries, etc) have not been able to pass any of these examinations! I think the issue raised by Chidi Oparah in this regard is a genuine one indeed. That one is in a special private Nigerian or Canadian school does not necessarily make one better orientated in literary issues. Tell me, Ama are there no lecturers in North America who are still not conversant with the works of some major Canadian writers? I am glad that Kenneth Harrow's post has buttressed the point I made in my reaction to Pius Adesanmi's post, i.e. that decline in reading culture is global.

-- Obododimma.

[Obododimma Oha]

Ola & Kole,

The issue I am raising is really not about the "first" person to use that interrogative in his or her discourse. It is rather about linking up the paradigm appropriately, i.e. locating it within a previously existing framework, like that of Femi Osofisan. I was surprised when, in a previous post by Adesanmi too ("Europe, Their Europe"), he made no attempt to point his readers to J.P. Clark's America, Their America. Is such a silence deliberate? Strategic? Well, this is not pontification of any sort, but I think such orientation to intertextuality is preferred to orthodox people like me.

--- Obododimma.

[Dr. Valentine Ojo]

"... the educated class...we are supposed to be the agent of change but we are just part of the socio-political rot.  I look forward to contributions from those more knowledgeable than my humble self." - Shola Adenekan, Mr.

Sola: (I prefer this to 'Shola' with /sh/)

A minor correction  here:

We the "educated class" are NOT merely "just part of the socio-political rot" that has eaten up Nigeria, we, the presumed "educated class", are the CORE of that socio-economic, politico-cultural ROT from where it then oozed out to engulf and threaten to destroy the rest of the Nigerian society.

But before that, you observed:

"I look at my father's generation with despair.  They were too busy trying to prove an equal to the whiteman to care about building a strong Nigeria for us their children. They were, and still are, too busy being simply Yoruba, Ijaw, Efik, Igbo, Kanuri and Hausa to ensure that the public school system works; to ensure that the judicial system work for the rich and the poor."

Now do you see the inherent contradiction in those two opposing positions - though true it may be?

You cannot be "too busy trying to prove an equal to the whiteman", and at the same time "too busy being simply Yoruba, Ijaw, Efik, Igbo, Kanuri and Hausa", or whatever.

You are simply being a confused human being - which is what most of us - your father's generation - really are. We have no clear-cut direction - just like our own fathers before us (though had more and better ideas than the generation that came after them) - so we too have no clear directions to give to those coming after us either.

How can you lead anyone anywhere, when you yourself are not even sure where you are going, or even where you would like to go?

Thus the generation of your father no longer knew how to be "simply Yoruba, Ijaw, Efik, Igbo, Kanuri and Hausa", or whatever, and the same generation became a lousy clone of the whiteman, having been "too busy trying to prove an equal to the whiteman".

The "process of preserving our heritage and ensuring that the good things in our tradition and ancestral way of life are preserved for coming generations" is diametrically opposed to "trying to prove an equal to the whiteman" by being more "Christian" than him to the extent that many supposedly "educated Nigerians" are for example waiting for Jesus and miracles to take care of the  mostly self-created ills plaguing Nigeria today - and to even drive/push/propel our cars for 200 miles on empty!

All you need are more prayers and miracles will follow! That's the credo of your father's generation, the credo his generation (my generation I guess) passed on to your generation...

Which credo will your generation now pass on to the generation coming after you?

The answer is in the stars.

Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD

On Sun 03/08/09 5:38 AM , Shola Adenekan sholaa...@gmail.com sent:

Dear Dr Ojo,


You said: "Talk of cultural self-anihilation by installment! The Nigerian "Elite" must be the world champions in this unenviable cultural Olympics of Self-Annihilation!"

Well said, sir. A Kenyan friend recently remarked that the African middle class love to live in denial, we know it but would rather not acknowledge the fact that we are killing our heritage.

What is even worse in Nigeria is this culture of impunity, which only very few  are willing to fight against.

Not only does our government sell us lies every year in terms of what they are going to do when they deliver their budget, but they also know that we know that those projects they talk about are lies. They will never materialize.  We know, for instance, that the money they have given to various school-improvement funds over the years has not been used,  to buy computers or new instruments or new sports equipment, because we have yet to see any of these materialize. Just as we know that a lot of the money projected during budgets to build roads, schools, or hospitals will go into the pockets of politicians and civil servants.

Theft is an open secret. But was the Nigerian middle class's response? Send our children to private schools and university education abroad.

The absurd structure of impunity in Nigeria is such that, even when captured in the act of looting public fund, administering extra-judicial killings or unwarranted cruel and unusual punishment, politicians and civil servants become latter day Shaggy and sing: "it wasn't me." Or even worse: "If na you, you no go chop?"

I look at my father's generation with despair.  They were too busy trying to prove an equal to the whiteman to care about building a strong Nigeria for us their children. They were, and still are, too busy been simply Yoruba, Ijaw, Efik, Igbo, Kanuri and Hausa to ensure that the public school system works; to ensure that the judicial system work for the rich and the poor.

I'm in my 30s now, and I see the same pattern among the 20 and 30 somethings I come across day in day out.

Changing Nigeria will require more than de-fanged Commissions of Inquiry and the repeated promises to "end corruption" that form the substance of election-time promises. Just look at the Uwais Commission.

It will require a massive, collective act of imagining an altogether different culture, a slow process of learning how to build and nurture that culture.A process of preserving our heritage and ensuring that the good things in our tradition and ancestral way of life are preserved for coming generations.

This is a work of collective dreaming and action that must be embraced by all of us, for we are all part of Nigeria's intricate corrupt  system, and whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all fertile ground for corruption's multiple pleasure-giving seedings.

For the educated class has consistently failed Nigeria; we are supposed to be the agent of change but we are just part of the socio-political rot.  I look forward to contributions from those more knowledgeable than my humble self.

Shola Adenekan, Mr.
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Dr. Valentine Ojo <val...@md.metrocast.net> wrote:

"Now, we have children born and raised in Nigeria who cannot even speak a single Nigerian language...I have kids like these as relatives, to my amazement their parents are very proud their kids are Westernized ." - Shola Adenekan

Welcome to A Tale of Two Nigeria! One for the poor and traditional - the majority; one for the "elite" - a tiny self-delusional, confused and directionless minority.

For those who permanently complain about CROSS-POSTING, this for example are opinions (Pius Adesanmi, Chidi Opara, Shola Adenekan that MUST BE CROSS-POSTED and READ on all Nigerian Internet Forums, and in all Nigerian news media - if we are indeed a people who care to know the WHOLE TRUTH about what we the " educated and exposed" are actively doing to destroy our OWN AFRICAN CULTURES, and future generation of Nigerians that will become victims of Cultural Anomie, regardless their tribe or ethnicity, while avidly APING "Americans" and "Europeans".

Talk of cultural self-anihilation by installment! The Nigerian "Elite" must be the world champions in this unenviable cultural Olympics of Self-Annihilation!

Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD


On Sat 03/07/09 10:21 AM , Shola Adenekan sholaa...@gmail.com sent:

Hi Folks,

I think both Pius Adesanmi and Chidi Opara captured the dilemma facing our younger generation as well as the Nigerian education system. Dr Adesanmi's piece "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?" showed how the Nigerian middle classed have moved so far away from Nigerian culture for Western middle class values.

If you look at children of the educated class, they tend to listen to the same music, dress and talk like their Oyinbo counterparts.Whereas working class children are still rooted in Nigerian values, since their parents do not have the means to subscribe to cable television or invest in video games.

Most Nigerian middle class parents (including politicians, traders and  many on this forum) send their children to private schools, where English is the only spoken language. At home, their parents speak only English to them and the quest is to have a British or an American accent by the time they reach teenage years. Even when these kids do  the yearly 'pilgrimage' to their parents' village, people will try and speak to them in English .

Now, we have children born and raised in Nigeria who cannot even speak a single Nigerian language. I'm not making this up; I have kids like these as relatives, to my amazement their parents are very proud their kids are Westernized. How can we expect such children to know or even cherish such modern heritage as Chinua Achebe or Salawa Abeni?  And we are not even taking about the rise and fall of Oyo Empire or King Jaja of Opobo!

On other hand, children from poor homes have no choice but to attend run-down  government schools where Achebe and Soyinka are still on the syllabus. Believe you me, if those working class kids have the means they will act like those uptown kids.

Shola Adenekan, Mr.
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Obododimma Oha <obod...@gmail.com> wrote:

Chidi,

When I read Pius Adesanmi's "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?", what came to my mind immediately was Professor Femi Osofisan's joke with the same title. Osofisan's humorous narrative -- which is now decades old -- is about a secondary school boy who, suspecting that the question "Who Wrote T hings Fall Apart?" was an attempt at investigating who committed an offence that should be penalized, declared his innocence outright: "I'm not the one, sir! I swear." Well, Adesanmi's article was a different sort of joke, perhaps a more serious joke.

 I don't want to be seen as being "too quick" to defend Nigerian secondary school education. At my own children's school here in Ibadan, Adesanmi's story would not find any support: the children (in the primary school) are into all kinds of creative activities --- from creative writing to Adire making! They also have Reading and Writing Clubs, and are visited by well known writers/artists from time to time. These visitors deliver inspiring talks to them.  Please, when next you are in Ibadan, go to Bodija International School and Bodija International College and find out whether what I stating here is false. My nine-year old son at Bodija International School (a primary school) now has produced about five manuscripts of short story collections. I have not, for one day, sat him down to teach him anything about creative writing. Quite bad of me. The much I have been doing is to take him to bookshops on weekends (at his own request) where he makes me empty my pockets to pay for books he picks. And his reading speed amazes me! Within few hours he's through with a novel of about 150/200 pages! I was not that good in my own time, if one must be sincere. 

Reading culture is certainly on the decline everywhere, partly because of improper attention to the screen. Such a decline is not peculiar to Nigeria, neither is it one of the symptoms of the so much advertized "fall of Nigeria". 

--- Obododimma.

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 4:52 AM, Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well Pius, I met a boy during the last christmas and new year holidays at my country home, his father was doing some bricklaying jobs for me and the boy was helping his father as a "labourer". I understood that he normally does this during holidays to help him raise some money for his schooling.

 

Anyway, the boy's attitude to work attracted my attention, he is a jss 3 student of community secondary school Avuvu, Ikeduru, Imo state. His name is Johnson Nwachukwu. The wonder was that this boy who also wants to be a writer had read everything Chinua Achebe and most others had written. He discusses these writers like a good undergraduate of literary studies.

 

In as much as I agree with you that the standard of education has gone down considerably, we should be mindful of the so many distractions inherent in those "good schools", one of which your cousin attends.

 

Chidi Anthony Opara

Publisher/Editor-In-Chief

chidi opara reports

http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

 

Member: (1) World Poets Society(WPS)

             (2) Association Of Nigerian Authors

 

On 3/7/09, Pius Adesanmi <piusad...@yahoo.com> wrote:

http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Editorial/5382478-147/LITTLE_ENDS:_A_mind_is_a.csp Who Wrote Things Fall Apart? By Pius Adesanmi My teenage cousin called me from Nigeria last week. He had a long list of things he wanted me to buy for him, all cutting-edge models of modern gadgetry popular among netizens of his generation. Somehow, our conversation swayed to his education – he is now in SS1. I told him that we called that Form Four when I was in secondary school. Then he told me he has a flair for “arts subjects” and hopes to be like me when he grows up. Perhaps it was the flattery, the sudden realization that the young boy considers me a role model or the bit about his flair for arts subjects. I felt this sudden urge to gauge his cultural capital and knowledge base. I began to ask random questions about books he ought to have read – or be reading – and basic things and concepts he should know in such subjects as history, literature, government, and economics. I drew a blank on virtually every question I asked him, from who wrote Things Fall Apart to rudimentary questions about supply and demand in economics; from who were Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe to the difference between parliamentary and presidential systems of government. My discovery was frightening. My cousin is an above-average student who attends an above-average secondary school. He is what you would ordinarily call a bright kid. Yet, outside the diction of cyber gadgetry and cell phones, he knows nothing, has read nothing! If his knowledge base is so unbelievably shallow in his privileged educational circumstances, what is the situation with the millions of Nigerian children we are preparing as “leaders of tomorrow” in such places as Okokomaiko Community Grammar School, Oranmiyan Community Secondary School, Ajegunle Community UNICEF-Assisted Primary School? All the questions I asked my cousin were based on the knowledge capital anyone in my generation would have acquired by Form Four irrespective of one’s social status and class or whether you attended private or public school. If, like my cousin, you were in the arts, you were already into Volume Two of KBC Onwubiko’s history textbooks and, also, classics by Adu Boahen and Elisabeth Isichei; in a subject like government, you were already deep into Nigeria’s constitutional history; in literature, you already finished your first Shakespeare and an array of Western literary classics. In African literature, you were half way through Donatus Nwoga’s West African Verse and other texts by Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, Femi Osofisan, and Ola Rotimi. There was even a school competition to determine who read the greatest number of titles in Heinemann’s African Writers Series each term.

In the literary and debating society, you debated such topics as “British Parliamentary system is better than American Presidential System”. You had to go to the school library and research both systems! The school library subscribed to Time Magazine, Newsweek , West Africa, and major Nigerian magazines and newspapers. I still recall scouring Time and Newsweek at the school library for a debate on Ronald Reagan. Outside of formal classroom contexts, the reading culture ensured a circulation of such “lighter” texts as James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Sidney Sheldon, McMillan Pace Setters series, Mills and Boon. Break time was for endless school kids’ speculation about what Muammar Ghadaffi would do to those Americans who bombed Tripoli and Benghazi. That was the beginning of one’s resentment of the misuse and abuse of America’s power. We debated the Falklands War, hoping that Argentina would defeat the “bloody British”. The world news broadcast of the BBC (“This is London!”) and the network news of the Nigerian Television Authority were daily rituals in high school. Only cable stations that show D’Banj, TuFace, Banky W, 50 Cents, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga are in with my cousin.

In essence, we were ensconced in a textual world that made reading and knowledge of the world the cornerstones of our formative years. Nigeria pays a terrible price for the escapist demission of our intellectually impecunious rulers who send their children to school abroad and are, therefore, not affected by the collapse of our educational system. And to think that my father grumbled endlessly about fallen standards when I was in secondary school! He couldn’t understand, for instance, why elementary philology and Latin had disappeared from the curriculum and he took to teaching me those two subjects at home. My cousin’s situation offers a tragic window into the contradictions of our national experience. We are destroying our future by producing generations that do not and cannot read. Since he couldn’t tell me who wrote Things Fall Apart, I didn’t take the risk of asking my cousin about Mansa Kankan Musa. I couldn’t put it beyond him to exclaim: “ah Uncle, his name is President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua o, not Kankan Musa!” We expect progress from the systematic atrophy of our country’s young minds. If, as they say, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, what does that make a country that wastes minds with reckless abandon?     Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D. Associate Professor Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL) Department of English Carleton University Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6 Tel:  +1 613 520 2600  ext. 1175 www.projectponal.com

[Dr. Valentine Ojo]

"I know a yoruba student in my university here, a third year undergrad, who is proud or not ashamed to announce that she cannot speak yoruba. I thought she grew up in Canada, no! She only came here after high school for higher education, and she has been in this country only 3 years!" - Amatoritsero Ede


Amatoritsero:

Allow me to match that experience.

Shortly after I arrived in the US in the 90's, we had a Yoruba female student who was taking courses from both myself and another Yoruba, a senior to me, at rather small college in Southern Maryland. After a couple of weeks into the quarter, we compared notes, and noted that the young lady whose name clearly identified her as Yoruba, just like our own two names, avoided us like a plague. Other students would hang around to ask you questions or talk about their work, or even stop bye at your office, but not this Yoruba young lady.

And from the quality of her work - or lack thereof - it was obvious she could use some extra help.

So one day, the older colleague decided we should call her to his office, which we did. And we ascertained that she was indeed of Yoruba parentage, brought to the US at the age of 8, and now about 18. We asked if she understood or spoke any Yoruba, she admitted she did, but that her parents have discouraged her from speaking Yoruba, so "it would not ruin her American accent" - her own exact words in a voice laced with heavy, artificially acquired American affectation - not to be confused with 'accent'.

We looked at each other, the other egbon and myself, and we decided to drop the issue, and simply advised her that should she ever need extra assistance with her two courses, she should feel free to drop bye anytime at our offices, or stop us after a class.

She thanked us - in her American affected style - but she never took us up on the offer. And she had to drop out of the college the following year due to her poor performance.

What was that you said again:

"The pedagogic vanity, which mimics western accents, foibles, habits, is simple colonial hangover. We are a conquered people afterall - and i speak in a more overarching terms here. In religious, educational, cultural terms, we have been conditioned to look up to the west. We equate speaking english to a rapid social climb." - Amatoritsero

Amen!

Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD

On Sun 03/08/09 1:41 PM , "joan.O'sa Oviawe" joano...@gmail.com sent:

Ama,

Unfortunately, this phenomenon has permeated the psyche of the poor and so called lower class.  In Benin, many people don't speak Edo neither do they speak proper English, the lingua franca is pidgin!  It is typical to see a grandma speaking pidgin to their grandkids.  These folk are linguistically occupying an in-between space that is neither here nor there.  I read and write Edo at the third grade level, ironically, if I had the same low proficiency in English, I'd be considered semi-illiterate. I am on a personal mission to re-educate myself in my mother tongue.

joan



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On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Amatoritsero Ede <esul...@gmail.com> wrote:

Folks,

I join this thread late. But i have personal experience of Mr. Adenekan's experience. I have cousins who have lost their nation languages - that was even as far back as the 70s when the middle class was still intact. Thier father was a VC of a premier University. These kids can hardly speak passable yoruba. They spent thier holdiays in 'jand', going for summer when in fact nigeria has eternal summer and 'jand' - London, is teary and misty most time of the year. The pedagogic vanity, which mimics western accents, foibles, habits, is simple colonial hangover. We are a conquered people afterall - and i speak in a more overarching terms here. In religious, educational, cultural terms, we have been conditioned to look up to the west. We equate speaking english to a rapid social climb. The ideal would be to speak impeccable english and still be fluent and as as good if not superior in Yoruba. I know a yoruba student in my university here, a third year undergrad, who is proud or not ashamed to announce that she cannot speak yoruba. I thought she grew up in Canada, no! She only came here after high school for higher education, and she has been in this country only 3 years! This middle class affectation/snobbery against self is sad and to be pitied. But the other issue, which is euqally worrying is the denial by our educated and elite, that there is a problem in our education in africa. Obodo, you mention your son's excellent education. But that is in a 'private secondary school. He is priviledged. How about millions of other children. What is the state of the secondary schools at Bere, Idi-Arere, Oke-Odo, Monatan? This are lower class ibadan, the interior. Do the kids there have the same privileges? 

Amatoritsero

2009/3/7 Dr. Valentine Ojo <val...@md.metrocast.net>

"Now, we have children born and raised in Nigeria who cannot even speak a single Nigerian language...I have kids like these as relatives, to my amazement their parents are very proud their kids are Westernized ." - Shola Adenekan

[Shola Adenekan]

Dear Dr Ojo,

I find "Shola" a bit romantic, so I prefer it to Sola. As per contradictions in my earlier post; I was just trying to point out the failure of the educated class (from the 1960s onward) to solve our national predicaments, and how our pre-occupation with other "issues" have failed to counter the culture of impunity rampant within the political class. As a forum member said today: "We are all cowards."

Most crucially, we, as the educated class, need to acknowledge how pleasure-giving impunity has impoverished our imaginations and sapped our wills. It is easier to practice impunity, to remain soporific in its warm embrace of easy convenience. It is harder to let go of its hazy promises to turn away from the soft-lens focus it privileges to a harsher, more discordant, and yet more equitable future.

It is almost impossible to change how we dream, imagine, and function.This is our challenge, our task, our call to action.

My posts on this forum are rants, not academic essays. I sincerely welcome corrections and I have no problem whatsoever with your pointing out contradictions in my statements. So thanks for that.

To your next question:

"Which credo will your generation now pass on to the generation coming after you?"

If I promise you that we'll change things, I'll be lying. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is part of my generation, but he hasn't shown much willingness to bring about change. It's not his fault; we have too much respect for our fathers to challenge them. Age in Nigeria equals wisdom and we've been brought up to fear our elders and not challenge them.

I asked a 27-year old PhD candidate recently, what he plans to do in Nigeria after his PhD. He said he wants to get a job, run for Enugu state governor and 'chop' some money. Another 29 years old PhD wants to go back to teach and enjoy all the fringe benefits that one gets as a lecturer in Nigeria (young female undergrads etc).

But then there are many others who are more than ready to change Nigeria for the better. As I haven't got a crystal ball, I don't know which side will win. Maybe the gods of our forefathers will intervene!

Regards,
Shola
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com






As per confusion, what I was trying to point out is the

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[Dr. Valentine Ojo]

Shola:

I was NOT by any long shot criticizing you.

I was actually AGREEING with you almost a 100%, merely showing up the confusion which people of your father's generation - my generation - passed on to you. It was to show that the "confusion" your generation inherited was NOT of your own making, and you cannot and should not be blamed for that.

For continuing it, maybe.

We wanted to be Yoruba, and at the same time to be Oyinbo. "I no possible - ko seese!"

A people need to agree by consensus on a certain set of values - like when the Old Western Region, the Yoruba under Awolowo - decided: we want free education for our children, we want hospitals and dispensaries for our sick, we want better roads to be able to transport our products, we want to create jobs for our able-bodied, maternity homes for our pregnant women, we want WNBS and WNTV for news to our people about our activities and what';s going on in the world,etc.

Shola, I am actually agreeing with you, and not criticizing you.

"The Speaker of the House of Representatives is part of my generation, but he hasn't shown much willingness to bring about change. It's not his fault; we have too much respect for our fathers to challenge them."

Here you are completely wrong though. He is just a COMMON CROOK like the COMMON CROOKS that raised him and "employed" him - and not because of any "we have too much respect for our fathers to challenge them!"

"Respect for elders" does not make you steal from public coffers, or make you order a bullet-proof limo for yourself as your first act in office. Or send your wife "abroad" to Ghana to deliver your first baby...

What has all this got to do with "we have too much respect for our fathers to challenge them?"

That's an open lie.

Here you are closer to the truth though:

"I asked a 27-year old PhD candidate recently, what he plans to do in Nigeria after his PhD. He said he wants to get a job, run for Enugu state governor and 'chop' some money. Another 29 years old PhD wants to go back to teach and enjoy all the fringe benefits that one gets as a lecturer in Nigeria (young female undergrads, etc)."

Yes, and that's the KIND OF DECADENCE that has eaten up Nigeria.

Take care, and keep up the consciousness!

Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD

On Sun 03/08/09 5:09 PM , Shola Adenekan sholaa...@gmail.com sent:

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[Anunoby, Ogugua]

Who wrote "Things Fall Apart"? Why is this question important? Is the question more important than what is the "internet"? There is perhaps another question namely: how wealthy are you and how much of this wealth is denominated in US Dollars or Euros. Every generation has its objectives, interests, challenges, and concerns. The content and meaning of the above, changes from one generation to another. Priorities change. Nigeria has undergone such a sea change in the last three decades or so that she is almost unrecognizable to older Nigerians. Serious governments usually try to ensure that change that happens in their countries is imperative and progressive change. It is doubtful that governments in Nigeria know this. Change can be planned. Change can be controlled. Change can be reversed. Change should not happen as a matter of inevitability. The change in priorities that has taken place in Nigeria is therefore change that was allowed to happen. The public sector as a force for the public good is dead. It was murdered in broad daylight.  

Education was believed and used to be the key to a "better" life including personal economic and social success in Nigeria. It is less so now. It is therefore not surprising that some older Nigerians raised on different values, believe that the current standard of education in Nigeria's schools is not the right standard and therefore not "good" for future generations.

Education is essentially no longer a public good in Nigeria. Education has been so mindlessly and recklessly "privatized" in Nigeria that practically, all they do in the Federal and State Ministries of Education is fight for large budgets, share the money among themselves when it comes, blame teachers in government educational institutions for government failure, while ministry officials continue to waddle and lumber from one avoidable crises to the other. These officials incredibly, are unable to “see” that even labor related crises are the result of the failures of government policies and actions. It is no different in the Ministries of Health and others. How many subscribers to this medium know for sure that the Federal Government or indeed their State Government's have serious education policies? Who can recall the last time policy issues in education were seriously debated or discussed publicly? When was the last time a senior Federal or State Government Education Ministry official invited or answered serious questions on education policies or the state of education in Nigeria?

The Federal and State governments in Nigeria have practically abdicated their role in public education. Senior members of these governments have and continue to be proprietors of educational institutions. Their success as business men and women requires that government be missing in action. The less government schools succeed the better for them. The less government sets and enforces standards in education, the better for them. A weak and dysfunctional public education sector is good news for them.

Successful government schools are the competition. Should be acceptable that the wife of the Nigeria’s President or a State Governor is a school proprietor? Should it be acceptable for public officials to not use the education system that they volunteered to and are paid to manage in trust?  

The education of children in Nigeria is now the sole personal responsibility of parents. A Nigerian parent that is concerned or unhappy with the education of their child in one school is expected to know to pull the child out of the school and enroll the child in another school in the country or abroad. It is also the parent's choice whether or not the child attends school. Government has no role in the exercise of this choice by parents. Parents in Nigeria now have an unbounded "choice" on their children’s education that must be the envy of the rest of the world.

The transfer of schools to voluntary agencies may help but it is always important that the integrity of the public interest in education be clear, and boldly and demonstrably evident, in informed development, continuous improvement, and implementation of the sound government education policies. However low standards fall, some schools in the system will still produce a few students that can compete with their peers from other parts of the world. There will be cases of funded and unfunded, supported and abandoned schools that will produce star students. A system’s state of wellness and performance is however not measured by isolated performance or exceptions to the rule.

I remember a discussion with some friends of mine of the consequences of the decline in educational standards in Nigeria for future generations of Nigerians many years ago. Our conclusion roughly stated, was that we should not be too worried because we will be all be dead, the generations will all be poorly or not educated, and the most ruthless among them will run the country just as the present generation is now being misgoverned by criminals and crooks. The world was however not as much a global economy then as it is today.

 

oa   

---

From: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [USAAfric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Pius Adesanmi [piusad...@yahoo.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2009 5:49 AM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Cc: nidoc...@yahoogroups.com; ni...@yahoogroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?

[Kemi Seriki]

 

This is not a new phenomenon it has been in existence for a long time. Many of the so called educated elites all around the African continent denied their children the treasures and the essence of African tradition or engage their children in conversation in African language. Many Africans rather converse with their children in European languages such as French, English, Spanish etc.. Depending on which European came to colonize and enslave the mind, there is a general believe that perfecting European language equate to success and smartness. The commoner who lack European education only speaks the “local African language”. Abnormality becomes normal when it becomes a believe system that has ingrained into the fabric of our daily existence.

 

The same trend could apply to the ideology of speaking without accent, which is very common among the new generation of Nigerian. One could see this behavior among those who never set foot abroad and the new comers who is trying to blend in the main stream of American society without being detected. One could compare this shameful act to those African who rather take pride in speaking European language such as French, English, Spanish to fellow Africans whom they share the same rich traditional African language.   

 

I remember watching Giorgio Armani the famous designer on 20/20 few weeks ago. This man never spoke one word of English during the whole interview even though he make millions upon millions of dollars in profit from American people. The man conducted the interview in his native language. French or Spanish, I am not sure which language he was speaking. All I could see is that the man does not feel he is obligated to speak English. He appeared confident and proud of his native language. But for Africans, it is not so.

 

As an African woman raising two children in American, I took pride in teaching my children my rich Yoruba language and the treasure of African culture. Yearly during the Black History Month, I volunteer to tell Yoruba folk tales in their individual schools. Last year, my daughter’s class play was based on traditional Yoruba story in which both classmates and teachers participated. They said, “Charity begins at home”. I would challenge the Africans on this forum to allow the changes to begin with us.

 

Dr. DeGruy conducted research on Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome and her book is on Amazon.com. In this book, Dr. DeGruy encourages African Americans to view their attitudes, assumptions and behaviors through the lens of history and so gain a greater understanding of the impact centuries of slavery and oppressions has had on African Americans. The same lens could be used to diagnose many problems facing the Africans today. We need a research on the psychological impact of colonization of Africa people, which continue to foster itself from one generation to another, which continues to pull us back.     
 
 
Kemi Seriki 
 

 

---

To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 17:01:52 -0400
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?
From: val...@md.metrocast.net
CC: joano...@gmail.com; esul...@gmail.com; sholaa...@gmail.com

</HTML

[Gemini]

Sorry to bring up human nature again so soon, but I expect that there were some Ancient Britons who sat around fulminating against this new-fangled LATIN that some wannabe Romans were trying to speak, looking down their noses at the old Druid ways (or whatever).

 

There was probably some criticism when these oyinbo trumpets, or saxophones found their way into the middle of highlife music, or electric guitars were heard in the middle of juju music.  Well, if the furore when Bob Dylan used electric guitars in 'Like a Rolling Stone', or the ranting about Elvis and the Beatles is anything to go by.  (Sorry for these oyinbo reference points.)  But essentially the comments are not dissimilar from some that I have heard (from my own generation and rising) on the evils of hip hop.

 

The other day (well actually, these things happen on a daily basis) some fossil was lamenting the inability of today's women to - what was it, churn butter? or some such similar ancient skill.  Listeners were probably too polite to point out that today's women had decided she'd rather learn to drive a car and operate a computer, go out to work or maybe become Secretary of State ...

 

I'd recommend the book Everything Bad is Good For You to all those moaning about today's kids spending too little time reading and so much time playing computer games or whatever other evil it is that doesn't exactly mirror our own childhood learning, knowledge and experiences.  We know stuff they don't.  They know stuff we don't.  They know stuff from Japan and Jamaica, and stuff from Lagos and Las Vegas because ... well, that's how it is in the 21st century.

 

The various Nigerian cultures are not dead.  If it were to remain the same as it was 50 or even 20 years ago, then we can probably agree that it is dead - fossilized.  But because it isn't dead, it changes.  Of course it has absorbed some elements from other parts of the world.  These things happen.  Get over it.

 

As to accents and language, I suffered from the 'Ko gbo Yoruba' syndrome as a child on brief visits to Nigeria.  Yoruba are fanatically obsessive about the accent with which words are pronounced in Yoruba, and affect not to understand any (alleged) error in accent or pronunciation.  They are free to do this because Yoruba isn't a lingua franca.  You don't get the same nonsense with Hausa, which is.  English too, has had to accept a lot of different accents, and thus, remains widely spoken across the globe even if it takes a bit of time to get accustomed to the rhythms and cadences of unfamiliar accents at first.  (I can recall my father meeting my guardian in England, and being astonished when she later confessed that she found it very hard to understand my dad, whose command of English - as well as Yoruba - was impeccable as far as my ear was concerned.)  I grew up in Britain speaking English with an English accent.  In Nigeria, my accent is much more Nigerian.  After all these years, the switch into one accent from the other (depending on one's audience and where one is) is almost automatic and subconscious (also there are some things that you simply can't say in an English accent and vice versa).  Why does this happen?  Partly because one semi-mimics an accent in order to better understand it.  Mostly because one wants to be understood.  And people in Lagos have only slightly less difficulty understanding a conk English accent than ... dare I say folks in Dallas or Toronto have understanding a conk Naija one.  (Slightly less because we are more exposed to English and American accents.)  So I understand perfectly why my young friends who went to the US in their teens sound just like native born Texans when they talk, and sign off their telephone calls with "Bye y'all" (causing bafflement among listeners in Lagos - "Who is Bayo?").  They are tired of people asking them "What did you say?", "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that."  They are young.  So not only can they easily adapt, but it also makes life easier for them.  They generally have to negotiate two cultures, and often do so without even realising that that's what they are doing.  Young people arriving in the US or Canada from Nigeria to study have a LOT to absorb and to come to terms with.  Plus they have to study and pass those exams!  So they decide that accent wahala is one burden that they don't need to carry right now.  It's not a federal offence.  It's a generation thing.  It's a region thing.  But it's not the end of the world, nor is it the end of the myriad nations of Nigeria.

 

Ayo

[Akurang-Parry, Kwabena]

I think that Sister Kemi has raised a good point: "We need a research on the psychological impact of colonization of Africa people, which continue to foster itself from one generation to another, which continues to pull us back." I raised the same issue in one of my write-ups here. Anyone here willing to work on a volume dedicated to USAAfricaDialogue aka Oga Toyin Falola? Let us put talk talk and yabe yabe aside and engage in serious work!     

Kwabena.

 

Kwabena Akurang-Parry, Ph. D.

(Assoc Prof of African History & World History)

Dept of History

Shippensburg University

Shippensburg, PA, 17257, USA

 

Phone: 717 477 1286

Fax:     717 477 4062

---

From: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [USAAfric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Kemi Seriki [ajok...@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 08, 2009 10:18 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

[Qansy Salako]

Kwabby,

I was just away on a muscle-straining-bone-cracking local tennis tourney weekend and before I caught up on here, you have been accusing me of denying the reality of Africa colonization!

Yee….my splint sheen, my waist; Haa…..my elbow, my calf; Hoo…my knees….

 

Before you stretch the joke too far into accusing me of denying the holocaust, I better restate it in my characteristic authoritative voice that the transatlantic slave trade did happen for hundreds of years with unmatched brutality anytime in the history of man.

A human degradation of such magnitude would be expected to bear psychological effects on the people so enslaved that would be wide, deep and lasting.

Glad we finally cleared this important point.

Phew…wiping my eyebrow.

 

However, as you would have read from several contributors on this thread, many factors are at play regarding why today Africans are abandoning their beautiful languages for Western languages, particularly English. They include among others:

1.      Colonization

2.      Technological age – computerization

3.      Globalization factors, such as economic (trading, commerce, political, etc) and social (emigration, intermarriage, etc), etc.

 

As you can see, factors #s 1 and 3 are not necessarily synonymous, they could be independent of each other. I am sure, you would remember that my specialty in colonization debate with you and others on here is about the element of personal responsibility that mother Africa herself must share in her plight, particularly 100 years after slavery, 50 years after colonization. I am not saying that these durations are long enough to eliminate daunting repercussions of slavery/colonization. What I am saying is that since we were aware that we were an enslaved/colonized people 100 years ago, we ought to have carried that painful awareness along into our independence years with a fearful “never again” ideology in how we organized and administered ourselves, subsequently.

 

This ideology should have made inordinate looting abominable and inherently outlawed visionless leadership anywhere in Africa. This would have added a few steps to ours rate of progress as opposed how our current opposite reality is contributing to slowing us down to deadlock in many African countries.

That’s all I’ve been saying.

 

Regarding the dwindling usage of modern African languages by Africans, I think it was my brother Anunoby Ogugua who might have made my point for me rather well –control the pace of change. Due to all the factors above, gradual neglect of most world languages is unavoidable in the face of unprecedented changes in world population, military super-powerism, economics, etc. But individual peoples with responsible governments that deploy targeted preventive policies would be able to slow down these global impacts on their languages. For instance, had we maintained the requirements of at least 2 African languages in our primary/secondary school curricula (as they do in Europe) since independence, we could have slowed down the pace of erosion of our languages as we see today. Rather, English is the one that has been made compulsory continually; French was even added to the compulsory foreign language list in our secondary schools a few years back in Nigeria by Abacha. Under this environment, why would e.g. Yoruba parents find it encouraging to advise their kids to do Yoruba in WAEC, much less speak it at home?

They would rather be practicing French with English in their spare time!

 

On another note, I want to congratulate Pius for his success on his write-ups on this and other internet forums.

He has consistently generated tremendous social interests on his online literary works.

It is like whatever paper he pens his opinions (serious or frivolous) on turns to gold.

Readers just love to read and discuss Pius’ opinions and only wait on bated breath for his next posting.

I think this kind of momentum is rare and it speaks volumes to Pius’ scholarship and leadership skills as well as his temperament in managing opposition.

I suggest that Pius farm this moment (no condition is “parliament”) and cultivate it extensively to good practical use that could emerge as a popular social science (not just literary) resource on Africa.

I noticed some already alluding to something about conference/seminar on this topic.

But I am talking about something much simpler, yet bigger and more enduring.

 

Since Pius is the main salesman people want to buy from, I suggest Pius remains at the focal point of a standing group for the purpose of beating up a social issue (one at a time) into white paper/blue print distillates for Africa coconut heads of failing states.

Perhaps a book club, a working group (WG) or a research group.

It could even be a virtual conference or ad-hoc group of writers on as needed basis.

Since there is the possibility that a formal launching of such idea could kill the magic of any good momentum, perhaps all it requires is for a silent WG to simply work behind the scenes on major discussion subjects.

 

Qansy Salako

[Dr. Valentine Ojo]

"As an African woman raising two children in America, I took pride in teaching my children my rich Yoruba language and the treasure of African culture. Yearly during the Black History Month, I volunteer to tell Yoruba folk tales in their individual schools. Last year, my daughter’s class play was based on traditional Yoruba story in which both classmates and teachers participated." - Kemi Seriki

Similar to your own case, Kemi, my two younger children currently attend a Catholic private school where they elected to perform the Yoruba Christmas carol, 'Betelehemu', during the last Christmas period.

The 8th Graders among whom I have one of my children chose 'Nigeria' as one of the 8 national cultures - along with China, Mexico, Brazil, Hawaii, Germany, etc. chosen by the other grades - they portrayed in preparation for their graduation as part of their 'International Week' activities.

They had displays of Nigerian art, carvings, masks, musical instruments, farm products, and pictures of sceneries from Nigeria, and listened to various Nigerian music.

They even constructed a typical Nigerian open market where they had aso oke and adire (provided by my wife), yams, plantains, rice, pepper, tomato and onions, canned goods, etc. to sell, and learnt to haggle about prices Nigerian style!

The children were also taught a few Igbo and Yoruba words to illustrate 'tone' as employed to distinguish meaning in the tone languages of West Africa.

My wife also made adire T-shirts for all the children in the class (24 in number) which they all wore during the entire exhibition week.

I am talking of a school that's 90% white where my wife is the only Non-white member of the faculty.

'Alaso ni o ma pe aso re ni akisa' - it's the owner of the cloth who describes it as a piece of rag, and people treat it as such.

If you show that you value your own culture, others would learn to value it as well.

My children have been seen and treated as very valuable additions and assets to the rich culture and history of this 100-year old Catholic private school in a rather conservative communtiy in Southern Maryland.

We each can do a little within our own respective areas of influence to uplift our respective cultures, and teach the much we still know of them to our children. It's better than doing nothing at all.

Or we can elect to continue blindly aping our European 'mentors'.

Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD

On Sun 03/08/09 10:18 PM , Kemi Seriki ajok...@hotmail.com sent:

 

This is not a new phenomenon it has been in existence for a long time. Many of the so called educated elites all around the African continent denied their children the treasures and the essence of African tradition or engage their children in conversation in African language. Many Africans rather converse with their children in European languages such as French, English, Spanish etc.. Depending on which European came to colonize and enslave the mind, there is a general believe that perfecting European language equate to success and smartness. The commoner who lack European education only speaks the “local African language”. Abnormality becomes normal when it becomes a believe system that has ingrained into the fabric of our daily existence.

 

The same trend could apply to the ideology of speaking without accent, which is very common among the new generation of Nigerian. One could see this behavior among those who never set foot abroad and the new comers who is trying to blend in the main stream of American society without being detected. One could compare this shameful act to those African who rather take pride in speaking European language such as French, English, Spanish to fellow Africans whom they share the same rich traditional African language.    

 

I remember watching Giorgio Armani the famous designer on 20/20 few weeks ago. This man never spoke one word of English during the whole interview even though he make millions upon millions of dollars in profit from American people. The man conducted the interview in his native language. French or Spanish, I am not sure which language he was speaking. All I could see is that the man does not feel he is obligated to speak English. He appeared confident and proud of his native language. But for Africans, it is not so.

 

As an African woman raising two children in American, I took pride in teaching my children my rich Yoruba language and the treasure of African culture. Yearly during the Black History Month, I volunteer to tell Yoruba folk tales in their individual schools. Last year, my daughter’s class play was based on traditional Yoruba story in which both classmates and teachers participated. They said, “Charity begins at home”. I would challenge the Africans on this forum to allow the changes to begin with us.

 

Dr. DeGruy conducted research on Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome and her book is on Amazon.com. In this book, Dr. DeGruy encourages African Americans to view their attitudes, assumptions and behaviors through the lens of history and so gain a greater understanding of the impact centuries of slavery and oppressions has had on African Americans. The same lens could be used to diagnose many problems facing the Africans today. We need a research on the psychological impact of colonization of Africa people, which continue to foster itself from one generation to another, which continues to pull us back.      
 
 
Kemi Seriki 
 

 

---

To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 17:01:52 -0400

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?

From: val...@md.metrocast.net
CC: joano...@gmail.com; esul...@gmail.com; sholaa...@gmail.com

"I know a yoruba student in my university here, a third year undergrad, who is proud or not ashamed to announce that she cannot speak yoruba. I thought she grew up in Canada, no! She only came here after high school for higher education, and she has been in this country only 3 years!" - Amatoritsero Ede


Amatoritsero:

Allow me to match that experience.

Shortly after I arrived in the US in the 90's, we had a Yoruba female student who was taking courses from both myself and another Yoruba, a senior to me, at rather small college in Southern Maryland. After a couple of weeks into the quarter, we compared notes, and noted that the young lady whose name clearly identified her as Yoruba, just like our own two names, avoided us like a plague. Other students would hang around to ask you questions or talk about their work, or even stop bye at your office, but not this Yoruba young lady.

And from the quality of her work - or lack thereof - it was obvious she could use some extra help.

So one day, the older colleague decided we should call her to his office, which we did. And we ascertained that she was indeed of Yoruba parentage, brought to the US at the age of 8, and now about 18. We asked if she understood or spoke any Yoruba, she admitted she did, but that her parents have discouraged her from speaking Yoruba, so " it would not ruin her American accent" - her own exact words in a voice laced with heavy, artificially acquired American affectation - not to be confused with 'accent'.

We looked at each other, the other egbon and myself, and we decided to drop the issue, and simply advised her that should she ever need extra assistance with her two courses, she should feel free to drop bye anytime at our offices, or stop us after a class.

She thanked us - in her American affected style - but she never took us up on the offer. And she had to drop out of the college the following year due to her poor performance.

What was that you said again:

"The pedagogic vanity, which mimics western accents, foibles, habits, is simple colonial hangover. We are a conquered people afterall - and i speak in a more overarching terms here. In religious, educational, cultural terms, we have been conditioned to look up to the west. We equate speaking english to a rapid social climb ." - Amatoritsero

Amatoritsero

Hi Folks,

I think both Pius Adesanmi and Chidi Opara captured the dilemma facing our younger generation as well as the Nigerian education system. Dr Adesanmi's piece "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?" showed how the Nigerian middle classed have moved so far away from Nigerian culture for Western middle class values.

If you look at children of the educated class, they tend to listen to the same music, dress and talk like their Oyinbo counterparts.Whereas working class children are still rooted in Nigerian values, since their parents do not have the means to subscribe to cable television or invest in video games.

Most Nigerian middle class parents (including politicians, traders and  many on this forum) send their children to private schools, where English is the only spoken language. At home, their parents speak only English to them and the quest is to have a British or an American accent by the time they reach teenage years. Even when these kids do  the yearly 'pilgrimage' to their parents' village, people will try and speak to them in English .

Now, we have children born and raised in Nigeria who cannot even speak a single Nigerian language. I'm not making this up; I have kids like these as relatives, to my amazement their parents are very proud their kids are Westernized. How can we expect such children to know or even cherish such modern heritage as Chinua Achebe or Salawa Abeni?  And we are not even taking about the rise and fall of Oyo Empire or King Jaja of Opobo!

On other hand, children from poor homes have no choice but to attend run-down  government schools where Achebe and Soyinka are still on the syllabus. Believe you me, if those working class kids have the means they will act like those uptown kids.

Shola Adenekan, Mr.
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Obododimma Oha <obod...@gmail.com> wrote:

Chidi,

When I read Pius Adesanmi's "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?", what came to my mind immediately was Professor Femi Osofisan's joke with the same title. Osofisan's humorous narrative -- which is now decades old -- is about a secondary school boy who, suspecting that the question "Who Wrote T hings Fall Apart?" was an attempt at investigating who committed an offence that should be penalized, declared his innocence outright: "I'm not the one, sir! I swear." Well, Adesanmi's article was a different sort of joke, perhaps a more serious joke.

 I don't want to be seen as being "too quick" to defend Nigerian secondary school education. At my own children's school here in Ibadan, Adesanmi's story would not find any support: the children (in the primary school) are into all kinds of creative activities --- from creative writing to Adire making! They also have Reading and Writing Clubs, and are visited by well known writers/artists from time to time. These visitors deliver inspiring talks to them.  Please, when next you are in Ibadan, go to Bodija International School and Bodija International College and find out whether what I stating here is false. My nine-year old son at Bodija International School (a primary school) now has produced about five manuscripts of short story collections. I have not, for one day, sat him down to teach him anything about creative writing. Quite bad of me. The much I have been doing is to take him to bookshops on weekends (at his own request) where he makes me empty my pockets to pay for books he picks. And his reading speed amazes me! Within few hours he's through with a novel of about 150/200 pages! I was not that good in my own time, if one must be sincere. 

Reading culture is certainly on the decline everywhere, partly because of improper attention to the screen. Such a decline is not peculiar to Nigeria, neither is it one of the symptoms of the so much advertized "fall of Nigeria". 

--- Obododimma.

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 4:52 AM, Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well Pius, I met a boy during the last christmas and new year holidays at my country home, his father was doing some bricklaying jobs for me and the boy was helping his father as a "labourer". I understood that he normally does this during holidays to help him raise some money for his schooling.

 

Anyway, the boy's attitude to work attracted my attention, he is a jss 3 student of community secondary school Avuvu, Ikeduru, Imo state. His name is Johnson Nwachukwu. The wonder was that this boy who also wants to be a writer had read everything Chinua Achebe and most others had written. He discusses these writers like a good undergraduate of literary studies.

 

In as much as I agree with you that the standard of education has gone down considerably, we should be mindful of the so many distractions inherent in those "good schools", one of which your cousin attends.

 

Chidi Anthony Opara

Publisher/Editor-In-Chief

chidi opara reports

http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

 

Member: (1) World Poets Society(WPS)

             (2) Association Of Nigerian Authors

 

On 3/7/09, Pius Adesanmi <piusad...@yahoo.com> wrote:

http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Editorial/5382478-147/LITTLE_ENDS:_A_mind_is_a.csp Who Wrote Things Fall Apart? By Pius Adesanmi My teenage cousin called me from Nigeria last week. He had a long list of things he wanted me to buy for him, all cutting-edge models of modern gadgetry popular among netizens of his generation. Somehow, our conversation swayed to his education – he is now in SS1. I told him that we called that Form Four when I was in secondary school. Then he told me he has a flair for “arts subjects” and hopes to be like me when he grows up. Perhaps it was the flattery, the sudden realization that the young boy considers me a role model or the bit about his flair for arts subjects. I felt this sudden urge to gauge his cultural capital and knowledge base. I began to ask random questions about books he ought to have read – or be reading – and basic things and concepts he should know in such subjects as history, literature, government, and economics. I drew a blank on virtually every question I asked him, from who wrote Things Fall Apart to rudimentary questions about supply and demand in economics; from who were Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe to the difference between parliamentary and presidential systems of government. My discovery was frightening. My cousin is an above-average student who attends an above-average secondary school. He is what you would ordinarily call a bright kid. Yet, outside the diction of cyber gadgetry and cell phones, he knows nothing, has read nothing! If his knowledge base is so unbelievably shallow in his privileged educational circumstances, what is the situation with the millions of Nigerian children we are preparing as “leaders of tomorrow” in such places as Okokomaiko Community Grammar School, Oranmiyan Community Secondary School, Ajegunle Community UNICEF-Assisted Primary School? All the questions I asked my cousin were based on the knowledge capital anyone in my generation would have acquired by Form Four irrespective of one’s social status and class or whether you attended private or public school. If, like my cousin, you were in the arts, you were already into Volume Two of KBC Onwubiko’s history textbooks and, also, classics by Adu Boahen and Elisabeth Isichei; in a subject like government, you were already deep into Nigeria’s constitutional history; in literature, you already finished your first Shakespeare and an array of Western literary classics. In African literature, you were half way through Donatus Nwoga’s West African Verse and other texts by Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, Femi Osofisan, and Ola Rotimi. There was even a school competition to determine who read the greatest number of titles in Heinemann’s African Writers Series each term.

In the literary and debating society, you debated such topics as “British Parliamentary system is better than American Presidential System”. You had to go to the school library and research both systems! The school library subscribed to Time Magazine, Newsweek , West Africa , and major Nigerian magazines and newspapers. I still recall scouring Time and Newsweek at the school library for a debate on Ronald Reagan. Outside of formal classroom contexts, the reading culture ensured a circulation of such “lighter” texts as James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Sidney Sheldon, McMillan Pace Setters series, Mills and Boon. Break time was for endless school kids’ speculation about what Muammar Ghadaffi would do to those Americans who bombed Tripoli and Benghazi. That was the beginning of one’s resentment of the misuse and abuse of America’s power. We debated the Falklands War, hoping that Argentina would defeat the “bloody British”. The world news broadcast of the BBC (“This is London!”) and the network news of the Nigerian Television Authority were daily rituals in high school. Only cable stations that show D’Banj, TuFace, Banky W, 50 Cents, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga are in with my cousin.

In essence, we were ensconced in a textual world that made reading and knowledge of the world the cornerstones of our formative years. Nigeria pays a terrible price for the escapist demission of our intellectually impecunious rulers who send their children to school abroad and are, therefore, not affected by the collapse of our educational system. And to think that my father grumbled endlessly about fallen standards when I was in secondary school! He couldn’t understand, for instance, why elementary philology and Latin had disappeared from the curriculum and he took to teaching me those two subjects at home. My cousin’s situation offers a tragic window into the contradictions of our national experience. We are destroying our future by producing generations that do not and cannot read. Since he couldn’t tell me who wrote Things Fall Apart, I didn’t take the risk of asking my cousin about Mansa Kankan Musa. I couldn’t put it beyond him to exclaim: “ah Uncle, his name is President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua o, not Kankan Musa!” We expect progress from the systematic atrophy of our country’s young minds. If, as they say, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, what does that make a country that wastes minds with reckless abandon?     Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D. Associate Professor Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL) Department of English Carleton University Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6 Tel:  +1 613 520 2600  ext. 1175 www.projectponal.com

--
Obododimma Oha
Senior Lecturer in Stylistics & Semiotics
Dept. of English
University of Ibadan
Nigeria

&

Fellow, Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies
University of Ibadan

Phone: +234 803 333 1330;
           +234 805 350 6604.

[Chidi Anthony Opara]

"We are a conquered people
afterall - and i speak in a more overarching terms here".

--- Amatoritsero Ede.

Ama,
I disagree with this aspect of your post. Before the colonialists, who
came first as Missionaries entered my town, the terms of their
settlement were negotiated(my late grandfather, Oparan'aku Onyeukwu
was in the negotiating team).

Moreover, the Igbo nation I understand had an agreement(which the
British preferred to label "protectorate agreement") with Britain
before the colonial administration was instituted in Igboland. This
also seem to be the case with other nationalities in what is now known
as Nigeria.

Sorry for this digression.

Chidi Anthony Opara
Publisher/Editor-In-Chief
chidi opara reports
http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

Member: (1) Association Of Nigerian Authors(ANA)
(2) World Poets Society(WPS)

> > On Sat 03/07/09 10:21 AM , Shola Adenekan sholaadene...@gmail.com sent:

> > On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Obododimma Oha <obodo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Chidi,When I read Pius Adesanmi's "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?", what

> >> came to my mind immediately was Professor Femi Osofisan's joke with the same
> >> title. Osofisan's humorous narrative -- which is now decades old -- is about
> >> a secondary school boy who, suspecting that the question "Who Wrote Things
> >> Fall Apart?" was an attempt at investigating who committed an offence
> >> that should be penalized, declared his innocence outright: "I'm not the one,
> >> sir! I swear." Well, Adesanmi's article was a different sort of joke,
> >> perhaps a more serious joke.
>
> >>  I don't want to be seen as being "too quick" to defend Nigerian secondary
> >> school education. At my own children's school here in Ibadan, Adesanmi's
> >> story would not find any support: the children (in the primary school) are

> >> into all kinds of creative activities --- from creative writing to Adiremaking! They also have Reading and Writing Clubs, and are visited by well

> >>> On 3/7/09, Pius Adesanmi <piusadesa...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >>>>http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Editorial/5382478-1...

>
> >>>> Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?
>
> >>>> By Pius Adesanmi
>
> >>>> My teenage cousin called me from Nigeria last week. He had a long list
> >>>> of things he wanted me to buy for him, all cutting-edge models of modern
> >>>> gadgetry popular among netizens of his generation. Somehow, our conversation
> >>>> swayed to his education – he is now in SS1. I told him that we called that
> >>>> Form Four when I was in secondary school. Then he told me he has a flair for
> >>>> “arts subjects” and hopes to be like me when he grows up.
>
> >>>> Perhaps it was the flattery, the sudden realization that the young boy
> >>>> considers me a role model or the bit about his flair for arts subjects. I
> >>>> felt this sudden urge to gauge his cultural capital and knowledge base. I
> >>>> began to ask random questions about books he ought to have read – or be
> >>>> reading – and basic things and concepts he should know in such subjects as
> >>>> history, literature, government, and economics. I drew a blank on virtually
> >>>> every question I asked him, from who wrote Things Fall Apart to
> >>>> rudimentary questions about supply and demand in economics; from who were
> >>>> Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe to the difference
> >>>> between parliamentary and presidential systems of government.
>

> ...
>
> read more »

[kenneth harrow]

 Joan writes: "In Benin, many people don't speak Edo neither do they speak proper English, the lingua franca is pidgin!  It is typical to see a    grandma speaking pidgin to their grandkids.  These folk are linguistically occupying an in-between space that is neither here nor there.  I read and write Edo at the third grade level, ironically, if I had the same low proficiency in English, I'd be considered semi-illiterate. I am on a personal mission to re-educate myself in my mother tongue."

if i understand joan's point, pidgin represents an in-between tongue, in contrast with edo and proper english.
two quick thoughts on this:
1.when my grandmother was in her 90s, my father still corrected her old world russian accent: "It's pronounced W, mama, not V," for words like "what." we kids liked the grandparents' accents; their own children didn't want to be identified as immigrants. now we would mock this urge to assimilate
2. "proper English" means, i suppose,  something like correct english, what some call standard english. choose your adjective; choose your elite standard for language, be it the mother tongue or the master's tongue. all this, linguists would say, is foolishness. all tongues mutate; all are influenced by other languages, change, and one day become unrecognizable to the earlier speakers. pidgin has been spoken in w africa as long, if not longer, than english has been spoken in the u.s. until the end of the 19th c, americans wanted to identify themselves as cultured if they were anglicized in their education, speech, etc. american culture has been denigrated as low class mob mentality right through the times of freud,  in civilization and its discontents. what nonsense. the disparagement of pidgin is no different from the medieval disparagement of vernacular literatures based on latin dialects, from which came french, italian, roumanian, etc. and now french, or one of its pidginized children, english, is supposed to be the proper tongue.
do a derridean play on the word proper: "propre," "propriete," etc, and you get the idea of where power speaks. proper english, proper cambridge exams, proper literature, proper thinking, property of the proper people. it doesn't end; it isn't simply colonialism or imperialism, though those ideologies always traded on the ownership of the proper speech and culture to validate their appropriation of the properties of other peoples since it was apropos that the proper rulers assume their proper role and with it all the proper-ties.
all languages were pidgins at one time, english included; english especially. from tutuola's compromises with pidgin to bole butake's serious work in pidgin, to mbassi manga's initial dissertation work, along with that of loreta todd, on cameroonian pidgin, there has been a struggle to provide pride of place for this language as a language.
when it becomes a proper language, then will begin the work to keep it, and then to keep it frozen in its pride of place, until the next language presents itself as the newcomer on the block. and so it goes.
(na so dis life be)
ken

At 10:18 PM 3/8/2009, you wrote:

 

This is not a new phenomenon it has been in existence for a long time. Many of the so called educated elites all around the African continent denied their children the treasures and the essence of African tradition or engage their children in conversation in African language. Many Africans rather converse with their children in European languages such as French, English, Spanish etc.. Depending on which European came to colonize and enslave the mind, there is a general believe that perfecting European language equate to success and smartness. The commoner who lack European education only speaks the “local African language”. Abnormality becomes normal when it becomes a believe system that has ingrained into the fabric of our daily existence.

 <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Kenneth W. Harrow

[kenneth harrow]

 Joan writes: "In Benin, many people don't speak Edo neither do they speak proper English, the lingua franca is pidgin!  It is typical to see a    grandma speaking pidgin to their grandkids.  These folk are linguistically occupying an in-between space that is neither here nor there.  I read and write Edo at the third grade level, ironically, if I had the same low proficiency in English, I'd be considered semi-illiterate. I am on a personal mission to re-educate myself in my mother tongue."

if i understand joan's point, pidgin represents an in-between tongue, in contrast with edo and proper english.
two quick thoughts on this:
1.when my grandmother was in her 90s, my father still corrected her old world russian accent: "It's pronounced W, mama, not V," for words like "what." we kids liked the grandparents' accents; their own children didn't want to be identified as immigrants. now we would mock this urge to assimilate
2. "proper English" means, i suppose,  something like correct english, what some call standard english. choose your adjective; choose your elite standard for language, be it the mother tongue or the master's tongue. all this, linguists would say, is foolishness. all tongues mutate; all are influenced by other languages, change, and one day become unrecognizable to the earlier speakers. pidgin has been spoken in w africa as long, if not longer, than english has been spoken in the u.s. until the end of the 19th c, americans wanted to identify themselves as cultured if they were anglicized in their education, speech, etc. american culture has been denigrated as low class mob mentality right through the times of freud,  in civilization and its discontents. what nonsense. the disparagement of pidgin is no different from the medieval disparagement of vernacular literatures based on latin dialects, from which came french, italian, roumanian, etc. and now french, or one of its pidginized children, english, is supposed to be the proper tongue.
do a derridean play on the word proper: "propre," "propriete," etc, and you get the idea of where power speaks. proper english, proper cambridge exams, proper literature, proper thinking, property of the proper people. it doesn't end; it isn't simply colonialism or imperialism, though those ideologies always traded on the ownership of the proper speech and culture to validate their appropriation of the properties of other peoples since it was apropos that the proper rulers assume their proper role and with it all the proper-ties.
all languages were pidgins at one time, english included; english especially. from tutuola's compromises with pidgin to bole butake's serious work in pidgin, to mbassi manga's initial dissertation work, along with that of loreta todd, on cameroonian pidgin, there has been a struggle to provide pride of place for this language as a language.
when it becomes a proper language, then will begin the work to keep it, and then to keep it frozen in its pride of place, until the next language presents itself as the newcomer on the block. and so it goes.
(na so dis life be)
ken



At 10:18 PM 3/8/2009, you wrote:

 

This is not a new phenomenon it has been in existence for a long time. Many of the so called educated elites all around the African continent denied their children the treasures and the essence of African tradition or engage their children in conversation in African language. Many Africans rather converse with their children in European languages such as French, English, Spanish etc.. Depending on which European came to colonize and enslave the mind, there is a general believe that perfecting European language equate to success and smartness. The commoner who lack European education only speaks the “local African language”. Abnormality becomes normal when it becomes a believe system that has ingrained into the fabric of our daily existence.

 <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Kenneth W. Harrow

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

"all languages were pidgins at one time, english included; english especially."

I doubt that linguists will agree that all languages began as pidgins. If a pidgin is a "trade" or "contact" language that is the product of the fusion of indigenous languages and a "foreign," usually a European, language; that is more often than not spoken as a second language; and that is hallmarked by a limited vocabulary, a rudimentary grammatical structure, etc, I think it is socio-linguistically, even historically, inaccurate to assert that all languages began their evolution as pidgins. It is, of course, true that some pidgins evolve to creoles, but it is not the case that all intricately rule-governed languages were once pidgins. It is traditional to label pidgins as "artificial languages" and other languages, including creoles, as "natural languages." Problematic as this taxonomy is, it does underscore the sense that pidgins don't have the same origins and forms as other languages. Farooq One Park Place South Suite 817C Atlanta, Georgia USA 30303 Cell Phone:(+1)404-573-9697 Office Tel: (+1) 404-413-5638 Home Tel: (+1) 404-501-0638 Office Fax:(+1) 404-413-5634 Blog: www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com --- On Mon, 3/9/09, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

[Dr. Valentine Ojo]

"...the Igbo nation I understand had an agreement(which the British preferred to label "protectorate agreement") with Britain before the colonial administration was instituted in Igboland. This also seem to be the case with other nationalities in what is now known as Nigeria." - Chidi Anthony Opara chidi...@gmail.com

And what part of "agreement(which the British preferred to label "protectorate agreement") with Britain before the colonial administration was instituted in Igboland," did the British Conquistadors - your Colonial Overlords - your Masters, keep?

Where are the "documents" or "memorandum of understanding" for this "agreement"?

An "agreement to be colonized"? Whoever heard of that?

And why did "Igbo Nation" have to negotiate its "independence" from an "agreement"?

African Acadas love FICTION!

Maybe you should go back and re-read Things Fall Apart. It's a whole lot closer to the truth than the tale-spinnin' you are attempting here.

Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD

On Mon 03/09/09 5:13 AM , Chidi Anthony Opara chidi...@gmail.com sent:

"We are a conquered people

afterall - and i speak in a more overarching terms here".
--- Amatoritsero Ede.

Ama,
I disagree with this aspect of your post. Before the colonialists, who
came first as Missionaries entered my town, the terms of their
settlement were negotiated(my late grandfather, Oparan'aku Onyeukwu
was in the negotiating team).

Moreover, the Igbo nation I understand had an agreement(which the
British preferred to label "protectorate agreement") with Britain
before the colonial administration was instituted in Igboland. This
also seem to be the case with other nationalities in what is now known
as Nigeria.

Sorry for this digression.

Chidi Anthony Opara
Publisher/Editor-In-Chief
chidi opara reports
http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

Member: (1) Association Of Nigerian Authors(ANA)
(2) World Poets Society(WPS)

> > amazement their parents are very proud their kids are Westernized." -

> > Shola Adenekan
>
> > Welcome to A Tale of Two Nigeria! One for the poor and traditional - the
> > majority; one for the "elite" - a tiny self-delusional, confused and
> > directionless minority.
>
> > For those who permanently complain about CROSS-POSTING, this for example
> > are opinions (Pius Adesanmi, Chidi Opara, Shola Adenekan that MUST BE
> > CROSS-POSTED and READ on all Nigerian Internet Forums, and in all Nigerian
> > news media - if we are indeed a people who care to know the WHOLE TRUTH about
> > what we the "educated and exposed" are actively doing to destroy our OWN
> > AFRICAN CULTURES, and future generation of Nigerians that will become victims
> > of Cultural Anomie, regardless their tribe or ethnicity, while avidly
> > APING "Americans" and "Europeans".
>
> > Talk of cultural self-anihilation by installment! The Nigerian "Elite" must
> > be the world champions in this unenviable cultural Olympics of
> > Self-Annihilation!
>
> > Dr. Valentine Ojo
> > Tall Timbers, MD
>

> > On Sat 03/07/09 10:21 AM , Shola Adenekan sholaadene...@gmail.com sent:

> > On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Obododimma Oha <obodo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Chidi,When I read Pius Adesanmi's "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?", what

> >> came to my mind immediately was Professor Femi Osofisan's joke with the same
> >> title. Osofisan's humorous narrative -- which is now decades old -- is about
> >> a secondary school boy who, suspecting that the question "Who Wrote Things
> >> Fall Apart?" was an attempt at investigating who committed an offence
> >> that should be penalized, declared his innocence outright: "I'm not the one,
> >> sir! I swear." Well, Adesanmi's article was a different sort of joke,
> >> perhaps a more serious joke.
>
> >>  I don't want to be seen as being "too quick" to defend Nigerian secondary
> >> school education. At my own children's school here in Ibadan, Adesanmi's
> >> story would not find any support: the children (in the primary school) are

> >> into all kinds of creative activities --- from creative writing to Adiremaking! They also have Reading and Writing Clubs, and are visited by well

> >>> On 3/7/09, Pius Adesanmi <piusadesa...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >>>>http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Editorial/5382478-1...

>
> >>>> Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?
>
> >>>> By Pius Adesanmi
>
> >>>> My teenage cousin called me from Nigeria last week. He had a long list
> >>>> of things he wanted me to buy for him, all cutting-edge models of modern
> >>>> gadgetry popular among netizens of his generation. Somehow, our conversation
> >>>> swayed to his education – he is now in SS1. I told him that we called that
> >>>> Form Four when I was in secondary school. Then he told me he has a flair for
> >>>> “arts subjects” and hopes to be like me when he grows up.
>
> >>>> Perhaps it was the flattery, the sudden realization that the young boy
> >>>> considers me a role model or the bit about his flair for arts subjects. I
> >>>> felt this sudden urge to gauge his cultural capital and knowledge base. I
> >>>> began to ask random questions about books he ought to have read – or be
> >>>> reading – and basic things and concepts he should know in such subjects as
> >>>> history, literature, government, and economics. I drew a blank on virtually
> >>>> every question I asked him, from who wrote Things Fall Apart to
> >>>> rudimentary questions about supply and demand in economics; from who were
> >>>> Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe to the difference
> >>>> between parliamentary and presidential systems of government.
>

> ...
>
> read more »

[Dr. Valentine Ojo]

And an ADDENDUM:

"...the Igbo nation I understand had..." - Chidi Anthony Opara

Another kingsize FICTION!

There was NOTHING called or known as the 'Igbo Nation' prior to the coming of the White Man, who attempted to create something out of nothing.

A 'nation' presupposes an entity with a central ruling instance, whether it consists of one tribe or people, or hundreds of races and tribes and peoples, like today's USA.

The Igbo people were never unified under one ruling isntance, not at any level, and not even at the Clan level. There were only Clan Elders who presided over relatively small, close-knit communities that rarely went beyond a handful villages or settlements.

Even there was no 'Yoruba Nation', as coherent and similar in their structures as the Yoruba kingdoms were and still are. They were independent entities, and not part of a larger 'Yoruba Nation' which never existed.

The Igbo People, yes.

An 'Igbo Nation'?

Mba! O ti o! Iro ni!

[Pius Adesanmi]

Chidi,   Chei, this your digression get as e be no be small. Abeg, was the "Igbo nation" free not to enter into those "agreements" with the British? If they didn't want any part of the treaties and agreements and whatever, could they simply just have told the British: no thanks?  Could the Igbo have exercised the choice not to be protected, pacified, and civilized by the protectors, pacifiers, and civilizers? So, the Igbo willingly entered into agreements of colonial domination? If the ghosts of the Aba women warriors begin to chase you at night, no tell them say you know me o. Na you take your mouth talk opata. And, ironically, you are talking this opata in a thread that has Things Fall Apart in its title. Ordinarily, I would have announced the items you must bring for sacrifice but this your violation is so serious that I must consult the council of elders first. We must go and baff you first in any river in Igbo land before you pay your fine.   Pius   Pius

Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D. Associate Professor Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL) Department of English Carleton University Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6 Tel:  +1 613 520 2600  ext. 1175 www.projectponal.com

--- On Mon, 9/3/09, Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com>

[kenneth harrow]

farooq
i appreciate the intervention. as a non-linguist i will bow to your differentiation. so my questions might be naive.
but still, i can't help but wonder. the real difference  being implied, in the end, is a partial command of language (limited vocabulary, limited verb tenses, grammatical structure) versus complete command.
if the measure were the ability to communicate entirely what one wanted to communicate through language, i wonder if all the nuances of vocabulary and grammar wouldn't be there in the end; i wonder if the difference between a pidgin and a creole language would not simply be the relative weight assigned to a seme in an established language to one in a less established language.
to rethink it, as i learn a foreign language, at first i am largely limited in the ways farooq indicates a pidgin limits our ability to communicate. but if i have achieved command over the language, i can turn it to my purposes and command it to speak for me as i need. i can't really believe pidgin doesn't reach that point for those whose usage arrives at the point of the native speaker.
and lastly, why would any language not have changed as it encountered other languages. why would pidgin be the exception? isn't it a question of the degree of interaction with other language speakers? anyone who knows french today, or wolof for that matter, knows how english continues to creep into the vocabulary. is that natural or artificial? when the french want us to say courrier electronique instead of email, and they wind up mostly saying mail, what is natural versus artificial in this?

sorry to burden the list with these questions. it is called pidgin, but maybe is technically a creole language in cameroon, and nigeria. even an outsider like me can tell it is not really limited as an expressive tool, as a literary tool; is not an in-between language, not an inferior language in any way these days. and yet, the fight to teach pidgin texts, to credit the language with the status of the dominant english or french, remains.
what is that all about?
ken

From: kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu>

To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com

ken

 

This is not a new phenomenon it has been in existence for a long time. Many of the so called educated elites all around the African continent denied their children the treasures and the essence of African tradition or engage their children in conversation in African language. Many Africans rather converse with their children in European languages such as French, English, Spanish etc.. Depending on which European came to colonize and enslave the mind, there is a general believe that perfecting European language equate to success and smartness. The commoner who lack European education only speaks the “local African language†. Abnormality becomes normal when it becomes a believe system that has ingrained into the fabric of our daily existence.

 <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

The same trend could apply to the ideology of speaking without accent, which is very common among the new generation of Nigerian. One could see this behavior among those who never set foot abroad and the new comers who is trying to blend in the main stream of American society without being detected. One could compare this shameful act to those African who rather take pride in speaking European language such as French, English, Spanish to fellow Africans whom they share the same rich traditional African language.   

I remember watching Giorgio Armani the famous designer on 20/20 few weeks ago. This man never spoke one word of English during the whole interview even though he make millions upon millions of dollars in profit from American people. The man conducted the interview in his native language. French or Spanish, I am not sure which language he was speaking. All I could see is that the man does not feel he is obligated to speak English. He appeared confident and proud of his native language. But for Africans, it is not so.

 

As an African woman raising two children in American, I took pride in teaching my children my rich Yoruba language and the treasure of African culture. Yearly during the Black History Month, I volunteer to tell Yoruba folk tales in their individual schools. Last year, my daughter’s class play was based on traditional Yoruba story in which both classmates and teachers participated. They said, “Charity begins at home†. I would challenge the Africans on this forum to allow the changes to begin with us.

 

 

 

Kemi Seriki

 

 

---

To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com

From: val...@md.metrocast.net

CC: joano...@gmail.com; esul...@gmail.com; sholaa...@gmail.com

Amatoritsero:

Amen!

Dr. Valentine Ojo

Tall Timbers, MD

Ama,

joan

______

 ((!.-.-'' ((!.-' ((!.-'

Folks,

Amatoritsero

Dr. Valentine Ojo

Tall Timbers, MD

Hi Folks,

Shola Adenekan, Mr.

http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com

Chidi,

--- Obododimma.

 

Chidi Anthony Opara

Publisher/Editor-In-Chief

chidi opara reports

http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

 

http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Editorial/5382478-147/LITTLE_ENDS:_A_mind_is_a.csp

By Pius Adesanmi

My teenage cousin called me from Nigeria last week. He had a long list of things he wanted me to buy for him, all cutting-edge models of modern gadgetry popular among netizens of his generation. Somehow, our conversation swayed to his education – he is now in SS1. I told himm that we called that Form Four when I was in secondary school. Then he told me he has a flair for “arts subjects†and hopes to be like me when he grows up.

Perhaps it was the flattery, the sudden realization that the young boy considers me a role model or the bit about his flair for arts subjects. I felt this sudden urge to gauge his cultural capital and knowledge base. I began to ask random questions about books he ought to have read – or be reading – and basic things and concepts hs he should know in such subjects as history, literature, government, and economics. I drew a blank on virtually every question I asked him, from who wrote Things Fall Apart to rudimentary questions about supply and demand in economics; from who were Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe to the difference between parliamentary and presidential systems of government.

My discovery was frightening. My cousin is an above-average student who attends an above-average secondary school. He is what you would ordinarily call a bright kid. Yet, outside the diction of cyber gadgetry and cell phones, he knows nothing, has read nothing! If his knowledge base is so unbelievably shallow in his privileged educational circumstances, what is the situation with the millions of Nigerian children we are preparing as “leaders of tomorrow†in such places as Okokomaiko Community Grammar School, Oranmiyan Community Secondary School, Ajegunle Community UNICEF-Assisted Primary School?

All the questions I asked my cousin were based on the knowledge capital anyone in my generation would have acquired by Form Four irrespective of one’s social status and class or whether you attended private or public school. If, like my cousin, you were in the arts, you were already into Volume Two of KBC Onwubiko’s history textbooks and, also, classics by Adu Boahen and Elisabeth Isichei; in a subject like government, you were already deep into Nigeria’s constitutional history; in literature, you already finished your first Shakespeare and an array of Western literary classics. In African literature, you were half way through Donatus Nwoga’s West African Verse and other texts by Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, Femi Osofisan, and Ola Rotimi. There was even a school competition to determine who read the greatest number of titles in Heinemann’s African Writers Series each term.

In the literary and debating society, you debated such topics as “British Parliamentary system is better than American Presidential System†. You had to go to the school library and research both systems! The school library subscribed to Time Magazine, Newsweek , West Africa, and major Nigerian magazines and newspapers. I still recall scouring Time and Newsweek at the school library for a debate on Ronald Reagan. Outside of formal classroom contexts, the reading culture ensured a circulation of such “lighter†texts as James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Sidney Sheldon, McMillan Pace Setters series, Mills and Boon. Break time was for endless school kids’ speculation about what Muammar Ghadaffi would do to those Americans who bombed Tripoli and Benghazi. That was the beginning of one’s resentment of the misuse and abuse of America’s power. We debated the Falklands War, hoping that Argentina would defeat the “bloody British†. The world news broadcast of the BBC (“This is London!†) and the network news of the Nigerian Television Authority were daily rituals in high school. Only cable stations that show D’Banj, TuFace, Banky W, 50 Cents, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga are in with my cousin.

In essence, we were ensconced in a textual world that made reading and knowledge of the world the cornerstones of our formative years. Nigeria pays a terrible price for the escapist demission of our intellectually impecunious rulers who send their children to school abroad and are, therefore, not affected by the collapse of our educational system. And to think that my father grumbled endlessly about fallen standards when I was in secondary school! He couldn’t understand, for instance, why elementary philology and Latin had disappeared from the curriculum and he took to teaching me those two subjects at home. My cousin’s situation offers a tragic window into the contradictions of our national experience. We are destroying our future by producing generations that do not and cannot read. Since he couldn’t tell me who wrote Things Fall Apart, I didn’t take the risk of asking my cousin about Mansa Kankan Musa. I couldn’t put it beyond him to exclaim: “ah Uncle, his name is President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua o, not Kankan Musa!†We expect progress from the systematic atrophy of our country’s young minds. If, as they say, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, what does that make a country that wastes minds with reckless abandon?

[Dr. Valentine Ojo]

Kenneth:

The issue at hand is more complex.

The average Nigerian child today has no proper command of any language - not a local Nigerian language, not English, not pidgin, even when he or she has some conversational knowledge of all three.

Their knowledge of any language is usually not deep enough to be creative or original in any of the three.

And you cannot learn or master a language in vacuo. It has to be context-situated.

And that further discourages the willingness to read in any language, when your command of that language is not adequate to the task at hand.

Dr. Valentine Ojo
Tall Timbers, MD

On Mon 03/09/09 12:55 PM , kenneth harrow har...@msu.edu sent:

 Joan writes: "In Benin, many people don't speak Edo neither do they speak proper English, the lingua franca is pidgin!  It is typical to see a    grandma speaking pidgin to their grandkids.  These folk are linguistically occupying an in-between space that is neither here nor there.  I read and write Edo at the third grade level, ironically, if I had the same low proficiency in English, I'd be considered semi-illiterate. I am on a personal mission to re-educate myself in my mother tongue."

if i understand joan's point, pidgin represents an in-between tongue, in contrast with edo and proper english.
two quick thoughts on this:
1.when my grandmother was in her 90s, my father still corrected her old world russian accent: "It's pronounced W, mama, not V," for words like "what." we kids liked the grandparents' accents; their own children didn't want to be identified as immigrants. now we would mock this urge to assimilate
2. "proper English" means, i suppose,  something like correct english, what some call standard english. choose your adjective; choose your elite standard for language, be it the mother tongue or the master's tongue. all this, linguists would say, is foolishness. all tongues mutate; all are influenced by other languages, change, and one day become unrecognizable to the earlier speakers. pidgin has been spoken in w africa as long, if not longer, than english has been spoken in the u.s. until the end of the 19th c, americans wanted to identify themselves as cultured if they were anglicized in their education, speech, etc. american culture has been denigrated as low class mob mentality right through the times of freud,  in civilization and its discontents. what nonsense. the disparagement of pidgin is no different from the medieval disparagement of vernacular literatures based on latin dialects, from which came french, italian, roumanian, etc. and now french, or one of its pidginized children, english, is supposed to be the proper tongue.
do a derridean play on the word proper: "propre," "propriete," etc, and you get the idea of where power speaks. proper english, proper cambridge exams, proper literature, proper thinking, property of the proper people. it doesn't end; it isn't simply colonialism or imperialism, though those ideologies always traded on the ownership of the proper speech and culture to validate their appropriation of the properties of other peoples since it was apropos that the proper rulers assume their proper role and with it all the proper-ties.
all languages were pidgins at one time, english included; english especially. from tutuola's compromises with pidgin to bole butake's serious work in pidgin, to mbassi manga's initial dissertation work, along with that of loreta todd, on cameroonian pidgin, there has been a struggle to provide pride of place for this language as a language.
when it becomes a proper language, then will begin the work to keep it, and then to keep it frozen in its pride of place, until the next language presents itself as the newcomer on the block. and so it goes.
(na so dis life be)
ken



At 10:18 PM 3/8/2009, you wrote:

 

This is not a new phenomenon it has been in existence for a long time. Many of the so called educated elites all around the African continent denied their children the treasures and the essence of African tradition or engage their children in conversation in African language. Many Africans rather converse with their children in European languages such as French, English, Spanish etc.. Depending on which European came to colonize and enslave the mind, there is a general believe that perfecting European language equate to success and smartness. The commoner who lack European education only speaks the “local African language”. Abnormality becomes normal when it becomes a believe system that has ingrained into the fabric of our daily existence.

 

The same trend could apply to the ideology of speaking without accent, which is very common among the new generation of Nigerian. One could see this behavior among those who never set foot abroad and the new comers who is trying to blend in the main stream of American society without being detected. One could compare this shameful act to those African who rather take pride in speaking European language such as French, English, Spanish to fellow Africans whom they share the same rich traditional African language.   

 

I remember watching Giorgio Armani the famous designer on 20/20 few weeks ago. This man never spoke one word of English during the whole interview even though he make millions upon millions of dollars in profit from American people. The man conducted the interview in his native language. French or Spanish, I am not sure which language he was speaking. All I could see is that the man does not feel he is obligated to speak English. He appeared confident and proud of his native language. But for Africans, it is not so.

 

As an African woman raising two children in American, I took pride in teaching my children my rich Yoruba language and the treasure of African culture. Yearly during the Black History Month, I volunteer to tell Yoruba folk tales in their individual schools. Last year, my daughter’s class play was based on traditional Yoruba story in which both classmates and teachers participated. They said, “Charity begins at home”. I would challenge the Africans on this forum to allow the changes to begin with us.

My teenage cousin called me from Nigeria last week. He had a long list of things he wanted me to buy for him, all cutting-edge models of modern gadgetry popular among netizens of his generation. Somehow, our conversation swayed to his education – he is now in SS1. I told him that we called that Form Four when I was in secondary school. Then he told me he has a flair for “arts subjects” and hopes to be like me when he grows up.

Perhaps it was the flattery, the sudden realization that the young boy considers me a role model or the bit about his flair for arts subjects. I felt this sudden urge to gauge his cultural capital and knowledge base. I began to ask random questions about books he ought to have read – or be reading – and basic things and concepts he should know in such subjects as history, literature, government, and economics. I drew a blank on virtually every question I asked him, from who wrote Things Fall Apart to rudimentary questions about supply and demand in economics; from who were Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe to the difference between parliamentary and presidential systems of government.

My discovery was frightening. My cousin is an above-average student who attends an above-average secondary school. He is what you would ordinarily call a bright kid. Yet, outside the diction of cyber gadgetry and cell phones, he knows nothing, has read nothing! If his knowledge base is so unbelievably shallow in his privileged educational circumstances, what is the situation with the millions of Nigerian children we are preparing as “leaders of tomorrow” in such places as Okokomaiko Community Grammar School, Oranmiyan Community Secondary School, Ajegunle Community UNICEF-Assisted Primary School?

All the questions I asked my cousin were based on the knowledge capital anyone in my generation would have acquired by Form Four irrespective of one’s social status and class or whether you attended private or public school. If, like my cousin, you were in the arts, you were already into Volume Two of KBC Onwubiko’s history textbooks and, also, classics by Adu Boahen and Elisabeth Isichei; in a subject like government, you were already deep into Nigeria’s constitutional history; in literature, you already finished your first Shakespeare and an array of Western literary classics. In African literature, you were half way through Donatus Nwoga’s West African Verse and other texts by Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe, Femi Osofisan, and Ola Rotimi. There was even a school competition to determine who read the greatest number of titles in Heinemann’s African Writers Series each term.

In the literary and debating society, you debated such topics as “British Parliamentary system is better than American Presidential System”. You had to go to the school library and research both systems! The school library subscribed to Time Magazine, Newsweek , West Africa, and major Nigerian magazines and newspapers. I still recall scouring Time and Newsweek at the school library for a debate on Ronald Reagan. Outside of formal classroom contexts, the reading culture ensured a circulation of such “lighter” texts as James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Sidney Sheldon, McMillan Pace Setters series, Mills and Boon. Break time was for endless school kids’ speculation about what Muammar Ghadaffi would do to those Americans who bombed Tripoli and Benghazi. That was the beginning of one’s resentment of the misuse and abuse of America’s power. We debated the Falklands War, hoping that Argentina would defeat the “bloody British”. The world news broadcast of the BBC (“This is London!”) and the network news of the Nigerian Television Authority were daily rituals in high school. Only cable stations that show D’Banj, TuFace, Banky W, 50 Cents, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga are in with my cousin.

In essence, we were ensconced in a textual world that made reading and knowledge of the world the cornerstones of our formative years. Nigeria pays a terrible price for the escapist demission of our intellectually impecunious rulers who send their children to school abroad and are, therefore, not affected by the collapse of our educational system. And to think that my father grumbled endlessly about fallen standards when I was in secondary school! He couldn’t understand, for instance, why elementary philology and Latin had disappeared from the curriculum and he took to teaching me those two subjects at home. My cousin’s situation offers a tragic window into the contradictions of our national experience. We are destroying our future by producing generations that do not and cannot read. Since he couldn’t tell me who wrote Things Fall Apart, I didn’t take the risk of asking my cousin about Mansa Kankan Musa. I couldn’t put it beyond him to exclaim: “ah Uncle, his name is President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua o, not Kankan Musa!” We expect progress from the systematic atrophy of our country’s young minds. If, as they say, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, what does that make a country that wastes minds with reckless abandon?

[afrs...@aol.com]

www.africanamedia.com

WAS FORMER LAGOS STATE GOVERNOR BOLA TINUBU DETAINED AT A US AIRPORT OR NOT? THE FACTS BY TONY KABENA

African Sun Times, March 9-15, 2009

A few weeks ago, a newspaper war broke out between the Nigerian Compass and the Nation, both published in Nigeria and owned by rival politicians. The war broke out after the inauguration of President Barack Obama. I decided to investigate this case after I read in Modernghanaweb in which Tinubu was allegedly detained for 3 hours at the Dulles Internation al Airport, while an earlier report in the Nigerian Compass had him detained at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. He was supposedly detained in both reports after the United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) found incriminating records regarding a seizure of almost $2 million belonging to Tinubu arising out of what the DEA suspected had been drug money in 1988/89. However, that is not the essence of this article.

Mr. Tinubu ran and won the governorship of Lagos State, one of the states in Nigeria in 1999 under the Alliance for Democracy party, an off-shoot of the Action Group. He served for 8 years.

During the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Mr. Tinubu and his entourage visited the U.S. to participate in some of the inaugural parties. There were reports that Mr. Tinubu never attended any of the parties because of being detained for 12 hours at the JFK airport. I was assigned to investigate whether Governor Tinubu visited the US or not during the inauguration, which airport he arrived at and whether he was detained or not detained.

First, I contacted the USCIS at the JFK International Airport, and I was informed that they didn't have any records of Mr. B ola Tinubu arriving at the JFK between the 15th to 21st of January, within which the inauguration took place. Then I called the Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC, which should have been the immediate airport to arrive at if you were traveling to Washington, DC.

I hit pay-dirt....READ THE WHOLE REPORT HERE  http://theafricannewsworld.blogspot.com/

---

Access 350+ FREE radio stations anytime from anywhere on the web. Get the Radio Toolbar!

[Chidi Anthony Opara]

Pius,
The people of Avuvu(my town) and other Igbo towns willingly entered into agreements to accomodate these strangers(missonaries) on their lands(as custom demands) and even gave them the "Ajo Ohia"(Evil forest) to build their homes and places of worship. These missionaries later put a knife on the things that held us together(culture) and things fell apart. It was at this juncture that they invited their kiths and kin(The Administrators) who carried out the "pacification".

Chidi Anthony Opara
Publisher/Editor-In-Chief
chidi opara reports
http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

Member: (1) Association Of Nigerian Authors(ANA)
              (2) World Poets Society(WPS)

[Shola Adenekan]

Dear Kenneth,

This is another issue which Pius Adesanmi's "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?" has forced us to confront. The man must be a genius!

But not to digress, yes we need to ask ourselves, why can't Pidgin replace the Queen English as our official language? Why can't we have other Nigerian languages as well, as official languages. (Please I don't want to start another pointless debate about the big three Nigerian languages dominating others).

Pidgin English is far more accessible to the common man than proper Gesi (Queen English). It's malleable, adaptable and contains elements native to Nigeria and West Africa. And  it's one of the few things, alongside soccer that unite us as a nation. I love its flexibility and its humour.

I hope for the day when government bulletins will be written in Pidgin as well as in our mother tongues. It will certainly remove the monopoly on serious discussions (like this one!), which both the educated class and the political class now enjoy! But then, I'm a romantic!

Shola
www.thenewblackmagazine.com

[joan.O'sa Oviawe]

Hello Ken,

What socio-economic reality awaits a child who is neither proficient in his/her mother tongue, nor in the colonial language that represents the currency of power and economic success- in a Country where over 40 million youths are unemployed? I find that academics too often, enjoy hovering around in the space of theory, without due recourse to finding practical solutions to real life problems. 

It is the kind of ideology/theory laden discussions we most often have on this forum that brings to mind Lawino's famous lament that "their [African educated elite] testicles were smashed with large books."

Regards,
joan 



"lady" joan.O'sa
-------------------------
"Goodness is the only investment that never fails"  ~Henry David Thoreau

"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good"  ~Thomas Paine

"I am a friend of the Market Woman" ~ joan.O'sa Oviawe

"every problem has an expiration date"

"There's only one thing money won't buy, and that is poverty."

  ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._
   `o_ o  )   `-. (     ).`-.__.`)
   (_Y_.)' ._    ) `._ `. ``-..-'
  _..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' .'
 ((!.-.-'' ((!.-' ((!.-'

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Oprah Winfrey’s described on CNN as “ the Queen of Talk” and such
chilling words from you:
“the transatlantic slave trade did happen for hundreds of years with

unmatched brutality anytime in the history of man.
A human degradation of such magnitude would be expected to bear
psychological effects on the people so enslaved that would be wide,
deep and

lasting. “
More Chilling words:

“Portugal's lasting legacy for Nigeria, however, was its initiation of
the transatlantic slave trade.”

Also chilling :
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the+Aro+and+the+slave+trade


Regarding the dwindling usage of modern African languages by Africans:

At Secondary school our geography master Mr. Inyang ( Nigerian, Cross
Rivers) – popularly known as “ heng-am dae” – because he his trouser
ends used to hang about three of his mandatory inches above his
shoes, like Michael Jackson , but before Michael Jackson) and he
thus informed us : “ Pronunciations varrrrry!”

Why hate?

Concerning the questions that revolve around people’s poet Chidi
Anthony Opara, some further impetus to inspire beyond the horizon,
Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah waxes anecdotal here:

“ Not long ago, I hear Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi discuss his
ambivalent relation to the French language. Raised first by his
Zairian kin in the ( Belgian ) Congo and then sent to school in
( French ) Congo-Brazzaville, he arrived at his formal schooling
unfamiliar with its ( French ) language of instruction. He reported,
with a strange mildness, the way in which his colonial teachers
daubed him with human faeces as a punishment for his early grammatical
solecisms; and then, a moment later, went on to talk about his own
remarkable work as a novelist and playwright in French. Labou Tansi
has fashioned out of an experience with such unpromising beginnings a
use for a language he ought surely to hate – a language literally shit-
stained in his childhood – a use in the project of post-colonial
literary nationalism..”

From Chapter 3, p.84 av Going Nativist - IN MY FATHER`S HOUSE ( the
1992 Hardcover Edition)

On Mar 9, 5:54 am, "Qansy Salako" <ka...@netzero.com> wrote:
> Kwabby,
>
> I was just away on a muscle-straining-bone-cracking local tennis tourney
> weekend and before I caught up on here, you have been accusing me of denying
> the reality of Africa colonization!
>

> Yee..my splint sheen, my waist; Haa...my elbow, my calf; Hoo.my knees..

>
> Before you stretch the joke too far into accusing me of denying the
> holocaust, I better restate it in my characteristic authoritative voice that
> the transatlantic slave trade did happen for hundreds of years with
> unmatched brutality anytime in the history of man.
>
> A human degradation of such magnitude would be expected to bear
> psychological effects on the people so enslaved that would be wide, deep and
> lasting.
>
> Glad we finally cleared this important point.
>

> Phew.wiping my eyebrow.

>
> However, as you would have read from several contributors on this thread,
> many factors are at play regarding why today Africans are abandoning their
> beautiful languages for Western languages, particularly English. They
> include among others:
>
> 1.      Colonization
>

> 2.      Technological age - computerization

>
> 3.      Globalization factors, such as economic (trading, commerce,
> political, etc) and social (emigration, intermarriage, etc), etc.
>
> As you can see, factors #s 1 and 3 are not necessarily synonymous, they
> could be independent of each other. I am sure, you would remember that my
> specialty in colonization debate with you and others on here is about the
> element of personal responsibility that mother Africa herself must share in
> her plight, particularly 100 years after slavery, 50 years after
> colonization. I am not saying that these durations are long enough to
> eliminate daunting repercussions of slavery/colonization. What I am saying
> is that since we were aware that we were an enslaved/colonized people 100
> years ago, we ought to have carried that painful awareness along into our
> independence years with a fearful "never again" ideology in how we organized
> and administered ourselves, subsequently.
>
> This ideology should have made inordinate looting abominable and inherently
> outlawed visionless leadership anywhere in Africa. This would have added a
> few steps to ours rate of progress as opposed how our current opposite
> reality is contributing to slowing us down to deadlock in many African
> countries.
>
> That's all I've been saying.
>
> Regarding the dwindling usage of modern African languages by Africans, I
> think it was my brother Anunoby Ogugua who might have made my point for me

> rather well -control the pace of change. Due to all the factors above,

> Shola Adenekan, Mr.http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com

>
> On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Obododimma Oha <obodo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Chidi,
>
> When I read Pius Adesanmi's "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?", what came to my
> mind immediately was Professor Femi Osofisan's joke with the same title.
> Osofisan's humorous narrative -- which is now decades old -- is about a
> secondary school boy who, suspecting that the question "Who Wrote Things
> Fall Apart?" was an attempt at investigating who committed an offence that
> should be penalized, declared his innocence outright: "I'm not the one, sir!
> I swear." Well, Adesanmi's article was a different sort of joke, perhaps a
> more serious joke.
>
>  I don't want to be seen as being "too quick" to defend Nigerian secondary
> school education. At my own children's school here in Ibadan, Adesanmi's
> story would not find any support: the children (in the primary school) are
> into all kinds of creative activities --- from creative writing to Adire
> making! They also have Reading and Writing Clubs, and are visited by well
> known writers/artists from time to time. These visitors deliver inspiring
> talks to them.  Please, when next you are in Ibadan, go to Bodija

> International School and Bodija International College and find out whether ...
>
> read more »

[Pius Adesanmi]

Chidi:   You still haven't answered my question.  African hospitality also leaves room for the exercise of choice. There is an excellent formula for that in Nigeria: "if only you had come yesterday". My broda, I'm broke. Can you advance me 1000 naira? Ah, if only you'd asked yesterday! I had up to 10,000 on me. My broda, can I put up with you tonite? I'm stranded in town. Ah, if only you'd come yesterday when the house was empty! Ten of my relatives are visiting today. So, could the people of Avuvu had told the British: ah, if only you'd come last year! We are not really in the mood to entertain visitors this year? Are you claiming that folks had the choice of saying no to the missionaries? Well, ask the folks of Abame what happens when you say no. Your reference to the evil forest actually makes my point. That was a clever act of resistance on the part of people who recognized the asymmetries of power that underwrote the contact you are trying to pass off here as a situation between guests and hosts drinking palmwine on the basis of equality. If we are not in the position to say no to guests who have invited themselves, we can at least give them the evil forest. That is resistance, not hospitality. Chidi, those missionaries were "alejo tulasi". You had no choice in the matter. African history is replete with examples of people who thought they had that democratic choice welcome guest and exercised it. You know what happened to them.   Pius

Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D. Associate Professor Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL) Department of English Carleton University Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6 Tel: +1 613 520 2600 ext. 1175 www.projectponal.com

--- On Tue, 10/3/09, Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com>

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?

To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com Date: Tuesday, 10 March, 2009, 8:30 AM

Pius, The people of Avuvu(my town) and other Igbo towns willingly entered into agreements to accomodate these strangers(missonaries) on their lands(as custom demands) and even gave them the "Ajo Ohia"(Evil forest) to build their homes and places of worship. These missionaries later put a knife on the things that held us together(culture) and things fell apart. It was at this juncture that they invited their kiths and kin(The Administrators) who carried out the "pacification".

Chidi Anthony Opara Publisher/Editor-In-Chief chidi opara reports http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

Member: (1) Association Of Nigerian Authors(ANA)               (2) World Poets Society(WPS)

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:19 AM, Pius Adesanmi <piusad...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Chidi,   Chei, this your digression get as e be no be small. Abeg, was the "Igbo nation" free not to enter into those "agreements" with the British? If they didn't want any part of the treaties and agreements and whatever, could they simply just have told the British: no thanks?  Could the Igbo have exercised the choice not to be protected, pacified, and civilized by the protectors, pacifiers, and civilizers? So, the Igbo willingly entered into agreements of colonial domination? If the ghosts of the Aba women warriors begin to chase you at night, no tell them say you know me o. Na you take your mouth talk opata. And, ironically, you are talking this opata in a thread that has Things Fall Apart in its title. Ordinarily, I would have announced the items you must bring for sacrifice but this your violation is so serious that I must consult the council of elders first. We must go and baff you first in any river in Igbo land before you pay your fine.   Pius

Pius

Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D. Associate Professor Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL) Department of English Carleton University Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6 Tel:  +1 613 520 2600  ext. 1175 www.projectponal.com

--- On Mon, 9/3/09, Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi...@gmail.com>

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?

To: "USA Africa Dialogue Series" <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com> Date: Monday, 9 March, 2009, 9:13 AM

"We are a conquered people

afterall - and i speak in a more overarching terms here".                            --- Amatoritsero Ede. Ama, I disagree with this aspect of your post. Before the colonialists, who came first as Missionaries entered my town, the terms of their settlement were negotiated(my late grandfather, Oparan'aku Onyeukwu was in the negotiating team). Moreover, the Igbo nation I understand had an agreement(which the British preferred to label "protectorate agreement") with Britain before the colonial administration was instituted in Igboland. This also seem to be the case with other nationalities in what is now known as Nigeria. Sorry for this digression.

Chidi Anthony Opara Publisher/Editor-In-Chief chidi opara reports http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

Member: (1) Association Of Nigerian Authors(ANA)               (2) World Poets Society(WPS)

> > "Now, we have children born and raised in Nigeria who cannot even speak a

> > single Nigerian language...I have kids like these as relatives, to my > > amazement their parents are very proud their kids are Westernized." -

> > Shola Adenekan > > > Welcome to A Tale of Two Nigeria! One for the poor and traditional - the > > majority; one for the "elite" - a tiny self-delusional, confused and > > directionless minority. > > > For those who permanently complain about CROSS-POSTING, this for example > > are opinions (Pius Adesanmi, Chidi Opara, Shola Adenekan that MUST BE > > CROSS-POSTED and READ on all Nigerian Internet Forums, and in all Nigerian > > news media - if we are indeed a people who care to know the WHOLE TRUTH about > > what we the "educated and exposed" are actively doing to destroy our OWN > > AFRICAN CULTURES, and future generation of Nigerians that will become victims > > of Cultural Anomie, regardless their tribe or ethnicity, while avidly > > APING "Americans" and "Europeans". > > > Talk of cultural self-anihilation by installment! The Nigerian "Elite" must > > be the world champions in this unenviable cultural Olympics of > > Self-Annihilation! > > > Dr. Valentine Ojo > > Tall Timbers, MD >

> > On Sat 03/07/09 10:21 AM , Shola Adenekan sholaadene...@gmail.com sent:

> >> Chidi,When I read Pius Adesanmi's "Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?", what

> >> came to my mind immediately was Professor Femi Osofisan's joke with the same > >> title. Osofisan's humorous narrative -- which is now decades old -- is about > >> a secondary school boy who, suspecting that the question "Who Wrote Things > >> Fall Apart?" was an attempt at investigating who committed an offence > >> that should be penalized, declared his innocence outright: "I'm not the one, > >> sir! I swear." Well, Adesanmi's article was a different sort of joke, > >> perhaps a more serious joke. > > >>  I don't want to be seen as being "too quick" to defend Nigerian secondary > >> school education. At my own children's school here in Ibadan, Adesanmi's > >> story would not find any support: the children (in the primary school) are

> >> into all kinds of creative activities --- from creative writing to Adiremaking! They also have Reading and Writing Clubs, and are visited by well

> >> known writers/artists from time to time. These visitors deliver inspiring > >> talks to them.  Please, when next you are in Ibadan, go to Bodija > >> International School and Bodija International College and find out whether

> >>> On 3/7/09, Pius Adesanmi <piusadesa...@yahoo.com> wrote: > > >>>>http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Editorial/5382478-1...

> > >>>> Who Wrote Things Fall Apart? >

> >>>> By Pius Adesanmi > > >>>> My teenage cousin called me from Nigeria last week. He had a long list > >>>> of things he wanted me to buy for him, all cutting-edge models of modern > >>>> gadgetry popular among netizens of his generation. Somehow, our conversation > >>>> swayed to his education – he is now in SS1. I told him that we called that > >>>> Form Four when I was in secondary school. Then he told me he has a flair for > >>>> “arts subjects” and hopes to be like me when he grows up. > > >>>> Perhaps it was the flattery, the sudden realization that the young boy > >>>> considers me a role model or the bit about his flair for arts subjects. I > >>>> felt this sudden urge to gauge his cultural capital and knowledge base. I > >>>> began to ask random questions about books he ought to have read – or be > >>>> reading – and basic things and concepts he should know in such subjects as > >>>> history, literature, government, and economics. I drew a blank on virtually > >>>> every question I asked him, from who wrote Things Fall Apart to > >>>> rudimentary questions about supply and demand in economics; from who were > >>>> Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe to the difference > >>>> between parliamentary and presidential systems of government. >

> ... > > read more »

[kenneth harrow]

dear shola
i feel there is only one reason why pidgin can't replace the queen's english as the official language, and it is a bad one. prestige and power are attached to languages, and are clothed in words like "standard."
if you are american and travel to much of the british isles, you will find yourself unable to understand the spoken language. much of the written language is hard to comprehend as well. there is no reason on earth why any one of those versions should take priority over the other. each of us can learn the language of the other if we had to. pidgin is the same, but its history under colonialism has produced a lingering set of priorities and prestige that indicate cultural dominance tied to larger social dominants. thus nollywood is not taken seriously by older filmmakers, people who can't accept digitally produced images, or popular, sentimental plots, and who operate on high cultural values in film. literature the same.
just as i see a cultural war in the opposition between those who "do theory" in literature and those who do not, or who insist on culturally inflected theory, so too are all aspects of popular culture, like film or literature, rated as high or low by pre-postmodernists, or those formed doing the times of modernism--i.e. in the 50s and 60s.
what interests me these days is the updating of political commitment, so that the older terms by which we attached value to national liberation movements, to the freedom of the african people, to socialism, etc., and which translated into supporting artists, writers, etc who advanced this cause, as opposed to those who were not overtly political in their work, could be reinscribed into a new age where their meanings will still be potent. the old leftist causes cannot be articulated in the same ways; the old terms of political literature, of struggles for independence, just like the older values of culture, cannot be advanced in the language of today. i want to call for a progressive politics that encompasses issues of language, like pidgin, or culture, like nollywood, and i want to believe that the fundamental values that inspired us 40 to 50 years ago in what we called the struggle could still be located in our understandings of progressive politics today
ken

[kenneth harrow]

hi joan
i don't know about the large books effect, but i do know that notions of reasonableness, normalcy, naturalness, which guide approaches to issues like language usage, culture, or social values, are generally the powerful tools of hegemonical ideology which disguises its power behind such notions.
i think i also recognize behind the large books metaphor okot p'bitek's defences against assimilationism, defences that can be easily translated into anti-intellectualist positions.
i recall ama ata aidoo's short story about the girls who turned to wigs, after her return to ghana, and how much this saddened her. i could understand where she was coming from; but i also could sympathize with girls who wanted the freedom to adopt whatever styles pleased them.
i am opposed to a notion of a socio-economic "reality" that requires the belief that only british or american versions of english are acceptable measures of a decent education. i still believe that a child learns best, in the first 6 years of education, in her or her own mother tongue; that foreign languages should come second; and that pidgin should take priority in a country in which it is widely spoken.
ken

ken

[Chidi Anthony Opara]

Pius,
You seem to be missing a point here. The missionaries came first with
"their strange faith", begging to be allowed to settle in those
communities, they were willingly allowed, because Igbo customs and
tradition forbid refusing accomodation to strangers. These
missionaries were regarded as foolish which was the main reason why
they were given the "ajo ohia" to settle. They pleaded for and got the
land. Even at the point they started converting the natives, their
activities could have been checked, but it was not, because only the
"efulefus"(worthless fellows), joined their fold. To answer your
question, yes at that point, all agreements were willingly entered
into because it was thought that with time the foolishness(religion)
of these strangers(missionaries) would collapse.

Val,
The republican nature of ndi Igbo should not be (mis)construed to mean
absence of a central authority. There was infact a central supreme
authority known as ndi Ichie, council of titled men. There was always
an Eze or Onye isi ala(chairman), at any given time, who directed
deliberations and authorized announcements of decissions of the
council. The words Eze or Onye isi ala mean King.

Decissions taken at nzuko umunna(assembly of menfolk), nzuko umunwanyi
(assembly of womenfolk), nzuko umuada(assembly of daughters), nzuko
umuokoro(assembly of youths), were subjected to rectification and
ratification by the Eze or Onye isi ala in council.

As for the existence of an Igbo nation prior to colonialism, I can
only say that the phrases "Igbo bu otu"(Igbos are united) and "Eze ndi
Eze"(King of the Kings) were in use for centuries before the first
group of whites arrived Igboland. The Ezes or Onye isi alas sometimes
come together under the chairmanship of an Eze ndi Eze to deliberate
and take decissions on issues of common interest.

Cornelius,
narrating my history does not mean hate mongering. It rather helps to
explain certain critical issues like why I have Anthony as one of my
names.

I write as an Igbo man, born and bred in Igboland, not as a scholar.
Sorry once again for another digression.

Chidi Anthony Opara
Publisher/Editor-In-Chief
chidi opara reports
http://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

Member: (1) Association Of Nigerian Authors(ANA)
(2) World Poets' Society(WPS)

On Mar 10, 9:07 pm, Pius Adesanmi <piusadesa...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Chidi:
>  
> You still haven't answered my question.  African hospitality also leaves room for the exercise of choice. There is an excellent formula for that in Nigeria: "if only you had come yesterday". My broda, I'm broke. Can you advance me 1000 naira? Ah, if only you'd asked yesterday! I had up to 10,000 on me. My broda, can I put up with you tonite? I'm stranded in town. Ah, if only you'd come yesterday when the house was empty! Ten of my relatives are visiting today. So, could the people of Avuvu had told the British: ah, if only you'd come last year! We are not really in the mood to entertain visitors this year? Are you claiming that folks had the choice of saying no to the missionaries? Well, ask the folks of Abame what happens when you say no. Your reference to the evil forest actually makes my point. That was a clever act of resistance on the part of people who recognized the asymmetries of power that underwrote the contact you are trying to pass off here
>  as a situation between guests and hosts drinking palmwine on the basis of equality. If we are not in the position to say no to guests who have invited themselves, we can at least give them the evil forest. That is resistance, not hospitality. Chidi, those missionaries were "alejo tulasi". You had no choice in the matter. African history is replete with examples of people who thought they had that democratic choice welcome guest and exercised it. You know what happened to them.
>  
> Pius
>
> Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor
> Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL)
> Department of English
> Carleton University
> Ottawa, Canada
> K1S 5B6
>
> Tel: +1 613 520 2600 ext. 1175
>
> www.projectponal.com
>

> --- On Tue, 10/3/09, Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi.op...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> From: Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi.op...@gmail.com>
> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?
> To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
> Date: Tuesday, 10 March, 2009, 8:30 AM
>
> Pius,
> The people of Avuvu(my town) and other Igbo towns willingly entered into agreements to accomodate these strangers(missonaries) on their lands(as custom demands) and even gave them the "Ajo Ohia"(Evil forest) to build their homes and places of worship. These missionaries later put a knife on the things that held us together(culture) and things fell apart. It was at this juncture that they invited their kiths and kin(The Administrators) who carried out the "pacification".
>
> Chidi Anthony Opara
> Publisher/Editor-In-Chief

> chidi opara reportshttp://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

>
> Member: (1) Association Of Nigerian Authors(ANA)
>               (2) World Poets Society(WPS)
>

> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:19 AM, Pius Adesanmi <piusadesa...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Chidi,
>  
> Chei, this your digression get as e be no be small. Abeg, was the "Igbo nation" free not to enter into those "agreements" with the British? If they didn't want any part of the treaties and agreements and whatever, could they simply just have told the British: no thanks?  Could the Igbo have exercised the choice not to be protected, pacified, and civilized by the protectors, pacifiers, and civilizers? So, the Igbo willingly entered into agreements of colonial domination? If the ghosts of the Aba women warriors begin to chase you at night, no tell them say you know me o. Na you take your mouth talk opata. And, ironically, you are talking this opata in a thread that has Things Fall Apart in its title. Ordinarily, I would have announced the items you must bring for sacrifice but this your violation is so serious that I must consult the council of elders first. We must go and baff you first in any river in Igbo land before you pay your fine.
>  
> Pius
>  
> Pius
>
> Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor
> Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL)
> Department of English
> Carleton University
> Ottawa, Canada
> K1S 5B6
>
> Tel:  +1 613 520 2600  ext. 1175
>
> www.projectponal.com
>

> --- On Mon, 9/3/09, Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi.op...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> From: Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi.op...@gmail.com>
> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall Apart?
> To: "USA Africa Dialogue Series" <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
> Date: Monday, 9 March, 2009, 9:13 AM
>
> "We are a conquered people
> afterall - and i speak in a more overarching terms here".
>                            --- Amatoritsero Ede.
>
> Ama,
> I disagree with this aspect of your post. Before the colonialists, who
> came first as Missionaries entered my town, the terms of their
> settlement were negotiated(my late grandfather, Oparan'aku Onyeukwu
> was in the negotiating team).
>
> Moreover, the Igbo nation I understand had an agreement(which the
> British preferred to label "protectorate agreement") with Britain
> before the colonial administration was instituted in Igboland. This
> also seem to be the case with other nationalities in what is now known
> as Nigeria.
>
> Sorry for this digression.
>
> Chidi Anthony Opara
> Publisher/Editor-In-Chief

> chidi opara reportshttp://www.chidioparareports.blogspot.com

> ...
>
> read more »

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Dr. Ojo,

Not all of us succeed of have succeeded with this. Ebunolorun the
mother of my daughters, herself is very limited in the Yoruba
language, and so they did not get it with mother’s milk.

You must be complimented. Those are considerable family
accomplishments and the dream of every immigrant African parent over
here, for the children to be, as it were, culturally ambidextrous, to
be both fully integrated, feel and feel at home - functionally
sociable where they are whether in Europe or Africa – at least without
the lack of mother tongue acquisition creating a language barrier –
back home in Africa. or even via the internet.

Over here in Sweden free home language ( mother/ father tongue)
instruction is given to school children, as a part of strengthening
the immigrant child’s sense of value for his cultural and language
heritage.

Acquiring a second language whether by birth and heritage or by
learning it is part of a child’s intellectual and social development….

So parental responsibility aside, a little institutional support
shouldn’t hurt the cause.

Britain, USA, same language and some of the born-and bred African in
America kids might be feeling more like modern America and happily
away from arranged marriages and all those quaint, African, tribal
taboos, an understanding of which is more easily accessed through e.g.
Yoruba.

I saw a theatre piece “ Tickets and Ties” here in Stockholm – actors
from Gambia, Sierra Leone Ghana and Nigeria. – it was about culture
conflicts across the generation gap between parents and first
generation immigrant children in settled in an English community.

For me the high point of the play was the Yoruba father, resplendent
in his agbada, collapses into the armchair in his English parlour… his
son has just told him that if he as much as touches his little
sister when she returns from the disco at four o clock in the morning,
he will “ call the f-cking police!” The father murmurs a mantra of
disbelief, unto himself, repeating it over and over again , before he
collapses into the armchair, “ Your father, such language, you will
call the f-f-ff-ff-f-cking police?” The scene could have only been
topped if upon hitting the sofa he had said, “, then die Caser!”

http://www.tiatafahodzi.com/past_projects.html#tickets


Here some guys ( not goys) are whining again, their compliant is that
Obama’s State Department has Equated Britain with Third World
Countries. ( After being exposed to this kind of continuous crap
propaganda – the stigma of third worldness, is it any wonder that some
of the Amerio-African kids don’t want to speak the language of those
who come from there ( third world) ?

http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=10694#comments



On Mar 9, 6:22 am, "Dr. Valentine Ojo" <val...@md.metrocast.net>
wrote:

>  On Sun 03/08/09 10:18 PM , Kemi Seriki ajokot...@hotmail.com sent:
>    .hmmessage P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body.hmmessage {
> font-size: 10pt; font-family:Verdana }    

> -------------------------

>  To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
>  Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 17:01:52 -0400
>  Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Who Wrote Things Fall
> Apart?
>  From: val...@md.metrocast.net

>  CC: joanovi...@gmail.com; esula...@gmail.com;
> sholaadene...@gmail.com
>   .ExternalClass {font-family:Arial, Helvetica,
> sans-serif;font-size:12px;}  "I know a yoruba student in my university

>  On Sun 03/08/09 1:41 PM , "joan.O'sa Oviawe" joanovi...@gmail.com

> sent:
>  Ama,
>  Unfortunately, this phenomenon has permeated the psyche of the poor
> and so called lower class.  In Benin, many people don't speak Edo
> neither do they speak proper English, the lingua franca is pidgin!  It
> is typical to see a grandma speaking pidgin to their grandkids.  These
> folk are linguistically occupying an in-between space that is neither
> here nor there.  I read and write Edo at the third grade level,
> ironically, if I had the same low proficiency in English, I'd be
> considered semi-illiterate. I am on a personal mission to re-educate
> myself in my mother tongue.
>  joan
>  ______
>  Happy International Women's Day!
>    ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._
>    `o_ o  )   `-. (     ).`-.__.`)
>    (_Y_.)' ._    ) `._ `. ``-..-'
>   _..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' .'
>  ((!.-.-'' ((!.-' ((!.-'
> Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail

>  On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Amatoritsero Ede  wrote:
>  Folks,
>   I join this thread late. But i have personal experience of Mr.
> Adenekan's experience. I have cousins who have lost their nation
> languages - that was even as far back as the 70s when the middle class
> was still intact. Thier father was a VC of a premier University. These
> kids can hardly speak passable yoruba. They spent thier holdiays in
> 'jand', going for summer when in fact nigeria has eternal summer and
> 'jand' - London, is teary and misty most time of the year. The
> pedagogic vanity, which mimics western accents, foibles, habits, is

> simple colonial hangover. We are a ...
>
> read more »

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Re- that ” Tickets and Ties” performance at Södra Teatern in Stockholm
( Sweden).

Tremendous actors! A community drama reflecting contemporary African
Diaspora reality ina Great Britain. Great acting by young actors and
actresses from the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria. A great
play - perhaps also great - like what is daubed “ true African
novel” of all time written by an Igbo-man in the sense in which I
understand Anthony Opara could mean it when addressing his own Igbo
people in his true mother tongue.

The “true African novel “ of course is always of some sociological
and anthropological significance, especially when it has to do with
the alleged cultural milieu in which it is situated in the motherland,
or where the characters’ drink lobes may find themselves, like Jesus
tap-dancing on the waves, in Diaspora land, miraculous, crossed the
water.

“Tickets and Ties” was/ is wholly of the same rooted sociological and
anthropological significance, right before your eyes – drama, song,
drum and incantation too and at the same time more acutely
contemporary, freezing that transition time between first generation
African in conflict with it’s tradition-bound parents who envisage no
change and think that life in contemporary Britain has to be conducted
on the same cultural terms, as life in Yoruba-land almost like the
Jews REFUSING to assimilate

“ And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.”

What was most astounding about the actors – as if no one else could
ever do it, was their masterful range of accents, a variety of British
accents from the Duke of Normandy to Her Majesty’s, and every
imaginable intonation from Yoruba slang English; from Jim Nwobodo and
Sam Mbakwe hushed whispers, conspiring, and taking oaths in Igbo to
that usually impeccable, correct and precise Hausa English diction.

So contemporarily/contemporaneously speaking, this kind of language
is a very important part of home language acquisition, no matter where
home might be, especially in the communication between parents and
their American first or second born.

“ Theses kids! They show respect in quite different ways you know,
such as not tying their shoes laces.”

WE diasporans need more experience in Youth -Parent /Parent - Youth
relations. Perhaps the more experienced will organise course or
workshops?

Dr. Ojo, the language yes, but more often than not it’s an essential
part of Yoruba culture that’s absent. It’s DISCIPLINE that’s lacking
– good home training and respect for parents has to be so instilled
that eventually it will come to them from within.

My Uncle Jeff a Diaspora Yoruba student in Britain in the 1950s was
more excellent than all that. He used to sing a lot. Today I sing
that song too.


On Mar 11, 4:00 pm, Cornelius Hamelberg <CorneliusHamelb...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> ...
>
> read more »- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Postscript:

Let me ask you – at this time, whilst we are still being spiritually
engineered according to the will of the Almighty - Dr. Ojo, it’s
certain that the ancestors spoke Yoruba, but in this communion of
spirits and the communications between man and his ancestors
(ancestors and man) in which language could a child commune with his
ancestors? A tongue which they did not speak or understand – or
will it all be in Hebrew?

(All I know about the Yoruba religion is from J. Omosade Awolalu’s “
Yoruba Beliefs & Sacrificial Rites” and of course affirmations from “
Yoruba Affairs” . That’s why I (ignorance) asks. Could be “ Let the
fool speak and the wise give no answer” ( “Fool at forty is fool
forever “Na so di booky pipul dem say. YU noh go talk to your brother
like that. Fool nah fool no matter for age… etc…

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Awolalu%E2%80%99s+Yoruba+Beliefs+%26+Sacrificial+Rites


You must admit that all in all when we consider the importance of the
Yoruba language for the well-being of the Yoruba people, these post-
death and resurrection questions will have to remain what they are,
ultimate theological questions.

You may “ wonder” why, of all people on this forum, I usually choose
to presume to address Dr. Ojo. You may accuse me of tribal bias, of
favouritism or what’s worse, of harassment.
I have my reasons and I assure you, I don’t want to cause you
embarrassment.
One of my reasons is that you usually put it straight – and don’t
obfuscate matters by the over-use of unintelligible paradoxes and
selectively vile parallelisms.

Call a spade a spade. I too do not sip that kind of goat head pepper
soup, that which we call “papa soup” in Owerri…

Another reason Dr. Ojo is, as you know : music too has its language
and your entertainment treats are spiritual balm, though some will
call it much needed therapy

Like this:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=Mike+Ejeagha+&aq=f





On Mar 12, 11:18 am, Cornelius Hamelberg