NYTimes: Death Has Many Names

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Abidogun, Jamaine M

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Feb 15, 2021, 9:27:26 AM2/15/21
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Harrow, Kenneth

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Feb 15, 2021, 12:49:17 PM2/15/21
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thanks for this posting of the conversation between yancy and olupona.
on the one hand, it gives informed answers to questionns about yoruba beliefs, without the trivializing tendencies a newspaper publications usually includes. it avoid apologetics or whatever.
however, it is marred in one respect, a respect that often appears when the word or concept of tradition or traditional is applied to african thought or practice. it is described as frozen, as if it never changed, as if its adherents learn and repeat and obey, and don't change rethink revise etc.
one might imagine nothing happened ever since it was created. that the influence of outside encounters never occuered.
ken

kenneth harrow

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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - NYTimes: Death Has Many Names
 
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Abidogun, Jamaine M

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Feb 16, 2021, 10:32:09 AM2/16/21
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I agree with you observations, Ken.  Much of my research is grounded in tracing these encounters/interactions and the resulting levels or incidents of resistance, adaptation, and transformation.  Even more of a concern to me is the need to recognize Traditional belief systems’ and traditional African epistemologies’ continued roles in knowledge production and its disbursement across African societies. The issue of recognizing and supporting African indigenous knowledge systems is of critical importance to find ways to create syncretic education systems that place African epistemologies’ on equal footing within national and local areas.  While the article is about Yoruba religion, the ties between Traditional religious knowledge  and knowledge production in most fields is often a direct one, similar to Islamic knowledge systems. 

 

Cheers,

Jamaine

 

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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: NYTimes: Death Has Many Names

 

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Harrow, Kenneth

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Feb 16, 2021, 10:44:31 AM2/16/21
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good points jamaine. i'd go further, that the flow of knowledge, ideas, framings of reality, go in multiple directions. complicated to think it through. i guess that's the work of anthro?
ken

kenneth harrow

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michigan state university

517 803-8839

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Biko Agozino

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Feb 16, 2021, 12:07:24 PM2/16/21
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Anytime anyone asks you condescendingly if Africans still believe in superstitions, remind them that the word is a European one that has no equivalent in African languages and no European would walk under a ladder today if it can be helped. 

If Yoruba religion has elements of monotheism and polytheism, remind the inquisitor that it was Africans who introduced the idea of monotheism to Europeans and that Europeans still maintain beliefs in saints, witches, and gods of war. 

In a country where the life expectancy is less than 50 years from birth, the rumor that an enemy died after being chased by the ghost of the dead victim is no proof of spirituality but a consolation to the bereaved. 

Abiku or Ogbanje is not the only one who goes and comes given that Africans and Asians believe that everyone has the ability to reincarnate multiple times to fulfill unfulfilled destinies.

Biko

Harrow, Kenneth

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Feb 16, 2021, 12:47:43 PM2/16/21
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biko, if we are talking strategies to respond to european (or asian) condescending attitudes toward africa, i would probably respond  without being defensive, i.e., by saying you have your own backwardnesses, or we did this first or whatever. no matter how truthful the response, the issue for me is one of attitude. mostly i quietly respond you don't really know anything about this.
at one point a friend, australian of english extraction, blew up when i criticized british colonialism, esp in kenya. i quietly said this was really my own field of specialization and i knew what i was talking about; but it turned ugly, and i just gave up on her.
it isn't about communicating facts to the person, but rather addressing the larger mindset, the way they frame the world, see the world, construct the world.
as mudimbe said, how they invent africa.
like talking about truth to a trump supporter. is there really any point in it?
k

kenneth harrow

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dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Feb 17, 2021, 9:50:29 AM2/17/21
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I disagree with you on this, Ken.

 To  respond to European condescending 
attitudes on Africa, we have to do both.   

We would have to challenge the Eurocentric gaze, daze, and programs of deceit by dismantling the building blocks of lies, distortion, false information and eurotriumphalism block by block, case by case, incident by incident. 

We also have to dismantle the philosophy and ideology of  geographical, regional and ethnic chosenness, manifest destiny and  white supremacy in all its forms, religious or otherwise. 

Along the way we would also stem the tide of epistemological genocide and the larger mindset of which you rightly speak.



Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

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Harrow, Kenneth

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Feb 17, 2021, 10:36:18 AM2/17/21
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well i suppose it depends on circumstances. in our professional life we attempt to correct the lies or distortions, but i prefer emphasizing the realities rather than taking defensive postures, when possible.  say in a newspaper interview or in class. i am retired now, so this is simply my opinions here. when i started teaching african humanities, some decades back, i'd evoke the commonplace misconceptions and media distortions to which students had commonly been exposed, say in movies like tarzan. as time went by i decided i wanted the time wasted on the misinformation to focus on worthy material. a very good example was, in fact, religion. perhaps in passing i'd mention the missionaries and the horrors of their practices in burning statues and defining eshu as the devil, but i'd really prefer detailing the realities of african religions in readings and lectures.

we want to think we can change people's minds by giving them the truth. i don't quite agree. we can change people's attitudes by giving solid teaching. the real bigots won't believe anything, but students in class were receptive, and in avoiding defensiveness i was able better to be heard out by them.

i've had to respond to public venues over things like the rwandan genocide, in the past, and even now; there it is a question of countering real lies and propaganda, over and over, and i agree w you there, gloria, we have to call out the lies, and try to point to credible sources.
and it isn't simply a question of eurocentrism. as well all see daily on this list, put the word "fulani" in a sentence and you will get immediate arguments over the truth.
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 9:40 AM
To: Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Biko Agozino

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Feb 17, 2021, 12:39:37 PM2/17/21
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Ken, It is always more than a question of attitudes or mindsets. It is also about institutionalized racism of the sort that encourages NYT to frame Africana discourse in ways supportive of white supremacy. A German asked Soyinka a similar question more pointedly: Admit it, he said, white people are superior to Africans even though you are an exceptional African, can you show me any area where Africans are exemplary compared to Europeans? Soyinka said that he was dumbfounded and could not give an immediate response but eventually, he identified religion as the example where Africans are models of best practices because African religions have never led to religious wars. See his book, Of Africa, Yale UP, 2012, based on his lectures at Harvard.

On the Obedient Babes and Boys of the Empire, OBE, it is also more than attitudes for there are vested interests in the defense of settler colonialism and imperialism. The old lady is still handing out those knighthoods in the name of the empire, maybe, because she did not get the memo about decolonization even in her backyard where Raymond Williams wondered, Who Speaks for Wales if the Prince of Wales remains an English man?

Azikiwe also challenged Africans to go beyond superstitions and adopt the scientific methods in 1937. Awolowo opposed him and said that juju is an African scientific method for killing enemies by invoking their names remotely in 1939. Zik was saying that Africans should go beyond, not completely reject superstitions that could be comforting to the bereaved - the soul of a soulless condition, the heart of heartless situations. Yes, Europeans still cross their fingers, knock on wood, cross themselves when a black cat crosses the road, and wish that people they love should break a leg to attract fame, but they are also sending space ships to Mars with the help of a kid who was born in Africa in 1974 and they are busily seeking a vaccine to stop COVID-19 while Africans wait and point fingers at ghosts that appeared in dreams. Fanon said that we are more scared of juju than of the police and the army and so, if you dream of sleeping with your neighbors wife, you had better go and apologize and pay a fine when you wake up or the spirits will ride you. 

Obasanjo dictated that Africans should use juju to fight against apartheid and the SA freedom fighters were probably blessed by both Desmond Tutu and Sangoma priests before they went into battle just like Zimbabwe Chimurenga warriors who also matched to the gospel of Rastafari according to the great Bob Marley. Azikiwe admitted the Association of Traditional Healers as a group member of his political party and he was annointed as a Saint of the National Church of Nigeria as an alternative to the Anglican congregation just as Awolowo formed his Action Group party in collaboration with Ogboni confraternity and went on to recommend scientific ways of breathing to his followers. Soyinka launched the Pirates Fraternity on campus just as there are fraternities in American Univeresities but the Nigerian students borrowed a leaf from blood-thirsty dictators and started massacring fellow students on campus to see which secret cult get power pass others. The call of Azikiwe in Renascent Africa is to move beyond attitudes and mindsets of old and adopt testable scientific approaches that may include spiritual balance, economic determinism, social regeneration, mental emancipation, and political resurgimento.

Biko

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Feb 17, 2021, 12:40:15 PM2/17/21
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Well  the challenge is  to emphasize the realities,  on an individual basis, without inadvertently perpetuating the lies and distortions. 

I guess it is not what you do but how you do it.

The decolonization of knowledge necessitates new pedagogical instructional and writing skills.



Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

From: Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 10:06 AM
To: Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Harrow, Kenneth

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Feb 17, 2021, 7:03:23 PM2/17/21
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hi biko,
i am sympathetic to your point of view, but on various points i am thrown off and find i can't simply say yes.
i don't want to nitpick. but it seems at times as if you are not looking at things totally reasonably.
you begin by tasking the nyt with somehow espousing white supremacist views. i think this is ridiculously off the mark. the times, like the post, or most liberal organs of today--in fact, even the major conservative ones--bend over backwards to attack white supremacy, and to defer to the need to be seen as supportive of black culture and people. it is there every single day, with a vast apparatus regularly celebrating black artists and performers and authors; in the columns they publist, the columnists like bouie or charles blow who are extremely prominent. what are you really talking about? that they are not publishing columns that are more radical, that you might write? they are as far from white supremacists as one could imagine, in every way. look up the affair over donald mcneill to see my point.

secondly, you are undermining your argument when you take daily superstitutions, like not walking under a ladder, as equivalents to beliefs. i don't say belief systems, just beliefs. they mean nothing, and yet you put them on a par with juju.
whenn you compare a priest's blessing with a faith in juju magic, again you seem to miss how the blessing is made or accepted. it is closer to crossing your fingers, to your mother saying good luck, than faith in protection. i don't know if this is because you are too distannt from the culture here, or deliberately are exaggerating, but no one would find any equivalence in these comparisons.

it isn't really "attitudes" that i am intending to describe, but ways of putting the world together--"horizons of understanding," ways of framing reality, structures of epistemology, which depend on what becomes normalized or naturalized for one's apprehension of the world.

europeans overpowered africa, then conquered and occupied it. they thought they annd their civilization was superior, and only exceptiontally did one find a european who actually tried to understand and value what was there. that was how long ago? are you arguing that nothing has changed? when we go to ASA conferences it is as if everything has changed. if you go to the public, to their popular entertainment, to tv, to right wing ignoramuses, that is another story. but you can't conflate it all, and call it all white supremacy. there are degrees of bigrotry and bias and ignorance in the west; and the opposite. i see our job as combating the former. that's why i am responding in some detail. i agree with your call for the combat, but you weaken our argument when overstating.
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 10:51 AM

Biko Agozino

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Feb 18, 2021, 6:10:02 AM2/18/21
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Hi Ken,

Thanks for your detailed response but I am surprised that you are the one trying to absolve American institutions, including the liberal media, of the charge of white supremacy at a time that the US president is acknowledging that there is still a problem of white supremacy in every institution. 

No one is saying that nothing has changed, I do not know where you got that impression from, the 'whites only' signs have come down but there is still a New Jim Crow all right. Well, you might be right, what do I know about the media, your field of expertise. Check out this opinion from someone who may know what you are talking about: https://wearyourvoicemag.com/new-york-times-white-supremacist-publication/

Criticism of NYT does not mean that the critics disagree with everything they have published or that marginalized authors are begging to be published by them. When institutionalized racism-sexism-imperialism is being critiqued, the general opinion is that not everyone who works in the institutions is a racist-sexist-imperialist but that they serve the power structures irrespective of their attitudes and opinions. For instance, I have written about the maintenance of white-supremacist power structures in universities, including the one where I work, but I never said that everyone in the university or every publication from the university is in favor of white-supremacy. 




It is white-supremacist to say that the superstition of Europeans is better than the superstition of juju (not just different but Orientalist in its inferiority compared to keeping fingers crossed, etc.). Actually, juju is not always a superstition because it is also a style of music and it includes herbal healing practices that work. 

What I said is that I agree with Azikiwe that we should subject all our indigenous technologies to endless research and development following the methods of science. You are welcome to disagree because your field is fiction or film studies where things are made up, not science, not even social science, where hypotheses are subjected to testing.

Biko



Harrow, Kenneth

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Feb 18, 2021, 12:43:11 PM2/18/21
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dear biko
i am not trying to absolve anyone. just look squarely in the eye.
but i think the point of difference we may have turns on the phrase "white supremacy." i have always associated the term with violent racists, with out and out racists. if that is the meaning we are working with, then i don't think there is any space for agreement. if however the term has morphed in recent years to signify something closer to colonial thinking or something/anything short of black radicalism, then what you write can apply.
the new york times, and most major intellectual enterprises, are generally engaged in the struggle against racism; their hiring practices etc are often marked, as in most universities, by affirmative action of one kind or another, if nothing other than the commitment to diversity.
to deny that is silly, and freezes discussion. however, if we are to ask how institutional practices further versus combat racism, there we can agree much more often. liberalism classically has sought to protect privilege while affirming the need for change, and that's where the democratic progressives differ from the moderates.
democratic moderates might be in a struggle with aoc and the squad without being white supremacists.
as for your comment that things are the same as ever, just the superficial drinking fountains are gone, you are arguing against charles blow who has recently argued for black people to move back south and effect change there by weight of population.

i wrote earlier that the case of donald mcneill, recently fired for using the n word when speaking with students, was indicative of how far the nyt is from charges of racism. the struggles over cancel culture and identity politics are at the heart of these changes, and perhaps the term "white supremacy" has changed as well. the concept of cancelling is now close to the fight between progressives and moderates, and i would hate to see the alliances we need to fight fascism or trumpism fall apart over tests of  purity of this sort.

your argument about the power structure that underlies institutions being the true target, i agree. but the notion that that power directly controls the media or universities etc. is too deterministic to work. we need terms like relative determinism or the like when talking about the superstructure. perhaps that's the real point of our disagreement.
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 8:21 PM

Harrow, Kenneth

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Feb 18, 2021, 2:21:46 PM2/18/21
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footnote: for many years i stopped reading the times book review section since all they reviewed was american/european fare. that's probably changed for black american, but i doubt for african. african cinema and literature is still enormously ignored in the west, except for people like adichie who now are stars in the diaspora. african affairs in general are ignored. al jazeera is an exception.
i still wouldn't use the term white supremacist to describe this state of affairs; but stick in the term colonial thinking, or eurocentric, and i wouldn't so much quibble. it is in fact eurocentric.
k

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Feb 18, 2021, 2:23:57 PM2/18/21
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If I may jump in here, “white nationalists”are the 
gun toting folks sometimes with a pickup truck that they would slam into a crowd. White supremacists come in a lot of packages. In fact one generally refers to the system that has been put in place across generations.

I wonder why Charles Blow will ask people to move back south and effect change if there is no reason for it and everything is hunky dory.

We are less than a year after the suffocation of George Floyd-  and in the middle of a pandemic that is killing Black people disproportionately;   in an era that saw the entrenchment of racist Trumpism - in a country that still has a disproportionately Black prison population 
due to racist discriminatory laws; and in a place where systemic racism has been acknowledged by even the President- and you are doing a victory dance? 

But at the end of the day, Ken, as Bob expressed it “ who feels it knows it” and even more “who the cap fits let them wear it.”







Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

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dear biko

Harrow, Kenneth

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Feb 18, 2021, 5:59:12 PM2/18/21
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thanks for thiis clarification gloria, makes sense to me
nobody here is doing a victory dance. i could disagree over the nyt being a racist organ without claiming victory. anyway, blow advises black people to move south because in the north they would remain a minority, and thus lack real political power, whereas the numbers in the south invest them with real power, and the more folks move south, the more power will accrue.
this argument is interesting, and the south in places like atlanta, which he mentions particularly, might offer more opportunities for black people. i come from michigan, and our employment opportunities aint great. we've had a drain of people leaving the state for quite a while: aa millionn people moved out of state, many to texas where the economy was far better than ours. if they moved to places like charlotte s.c., their employment changes would be enhanced. i attended an ala conf in charlotte, and was struck by how much better it was, apparently, than places like nyc. i talked over this with a black man from the bronx, and he loved charlotte compared to nyc. there were many stories like them. it is the great migration in reverse: not back to cotton field, but to fields of dreams in prospering cities with large black populations. and of course the underside of this argument is that the prospects for black people up north is no longer a pull.

i would situate my own politics within the struggle along the lines of blm. not necessarily in my local area of lansing, where the leadership there is not what i think it ought to be, but in the country generally. blm gives us hope for a future based on change and struggle.
ken

kenneth harrow

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dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
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