Why are they Destroying My United States of America?
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Elon Musk was one of my embodiments of such possibilities.
Why are these people destroying my dreams?
They are making nonsense of legendary institutions and values.
The right to hold and pursue views different from that of the government.
Some of the world's greatest institutions, such as elite US universities, are being recurrently humiliated and gutted of their inspirational essence.
Freedom of universities from ideologically driven government interference.
The presence of robustly funded academic systems, free from systemic shocks.
The US Presidency as a bastion of a degree of mature statesmanship even in the midst of evil US foreign policies.
The US as a global melting pot where people go for the opportunity to reach the stars.
All these are being destroyed.
These people are destroying my dreams.
It is not fair.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Every country is a geographical construct, an economic and cultural system, an interpersonal network and an idea or network of ideas.
The sense of identification with a nation enables those identifiers to"own the nation" in an imaginative sense, a metaphorical ownership not confined to citizens of that nation or even those who live there.
It is such a sense of "ownership" that has motivated migration to the US as a place where practically anyone may more readily maximize their potential in a liberal social environment than in other places, including the cultural ancestor of the US, Western Europe.
Trump's strategies imply the destruction of this image of the US
Cornelius Hamelberg
Oluwatoyin,
What you have said here is very moving.
In this you are closer to the super-idealist dreamer John Lennon’s Imagine
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?
You invite the obvious corollary to your dream;
in the spirit of Satyagraha Mahatma Gandhi’s
“Be the change you wish to see in the world”
( be the change you want to see in others) :
follow this progression:
according to the compass
charity begins at home
so here’s the trajectory
of self-wishing fulfilment
to make Nigeria that dream
to make Nigeria greater than
ever before, by individual freedom
of choice and by not shirking the duty
of collective responsibility
to leave the option open to
reverse the brain-drain in
the service of which quest
you may even imitate your idol
Immanuel Kant who never left
Königsberg and just as Jesus
whose body walked on water
actually never left the Holy Land
(apart from a brief sojourn in Egypt)
before he returned to his father
in the heaven where he came from
hopefully so too you exploring every
corner of the cosmos in search of
the holy grail, more like Kant and less
like Chistopher Columbus you wont have
that wanderlust urge to travel all the way
to over there where they hope to find
the super real greener pastures in America
currently at position 24 in the world Happiness
index, although by the time Trump is through with
making his America great again (perhaps by
incorporating or annexing Gaza, Canada, Greenland,
the Panama Canal and the Federal Republic of Nigeria)
like Kant you will feel less of a need to travel anywhere.
At this point I wonder how that famous
Owerri motor park poet is feeling about Jesus
and Ojukwu, how he’s feeling, and if he’s capable
of expressing any poetic feelings about my late
Nigerian friends Sam Mbakwe and Mathias Offoboche
and when it comes to his visions in the field of comparative
demonology, if he is capable or incapable of entertaining
any revisionist ideas about Mr Hitler
the former president
of Bob Marley’s Zimbabwe
who in his judgement, fell from grace
and thereby became a fallen hero - ah -
“and the soldiers who are dead and gone
if only we could bring back one”
But that’s how it is,
through the mouth of Mark Antony
Mugabe’s brother, William Shakespeare said
“The evil that men do lives after them:
the good is oft interred with their bones;
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju :
Not to worry too much about America
if you look at the Islamic Calendar for Ramadan
you’ll see some joy and also much sadness too:
the history books’ Iraq - where Imam Ali was assassinated
(the faithful prefer to say where Imam Ali was martyred )
that Iraq has suffered through many cycles of violence
to be where we are today…
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Great thanks Cornelius.
When I completed my BA in Nigeria, I vowed never to study in the West, thereby contributing, in my own way to subverting the culture of extraversion of knowledge that defined scholarship in Africa, even about Africa, at the time, as I understood it.
I would achieve global resonance through working as an academic in Nigeria, I resolved.
My eventual migration to England to study after suffering frustrations in my Nigerian university opened my eyes to the fact that I had been living in the equivalent of a village compared to the metropolitan centers, or a village mosque compared to the central mosque at Mecca, great though some of my teachers had been.
Beyond issues of infrastructure within and beyond the academic system, it was clear even while I was in the system that the system suffered significant dilution from being compromised by approaches inimical to its existence, " her pot bellied watchers despoil her" in Okigbo's words from another context.
I am now back, to find that some of the most significant conditions for the development of knowledge have constricted even more than when I left even though people are working determinedly to succeed, such as the valiant new booksellers and publishers and the Internet has opened a new universe.
If not for some challenges I faced, I wonder if I would have returned.
Why would I want to leave an environment where books fall like rain and where academics are immersed in scholarship and the environment is fully enabling of a stress free life?
My English experience could not take me as far as I wanted, though , being unable to accommodate my own individualistic vision, but without that experience I wonder what my fate would have been.
It was the significantly expansive opportunities there that fully unleashed my multi-disciplinary explorations.
On returning I better understand the value of the cultural resources here and how to project them, appreciating what I could have done to help protect and project cultural treasures which have become challenging to find or have disappeared.
The Americans imported the sophistication of the then German university education to the US, adapting it to their own systems and the various influences of World War II, such as the flight of scholars from Germany, contributed to that to create the US higher education juggernaut.
So there is a place for diaspora reverse migration in developing Nigerian higher education and scholarship outside the academy but the academic systems have to be conducive.
I have resolved, however, that I do better outside academia, both from my Nigerian experience and my experience in the West, the freedom from institutional frames being vital to my creativity.
Living in Nigeria can be quite challenging on account of cost of living and infrastructural inadequacies..
My work here is assisted by privileges I enjoy, such as almost 24 hour power enabled by an expensive diesel generator, for when there is no central power, low living costs, a lifestyle of few needs and a means of earning a living that enables significant flexibility of time.
I have been offered the opportunity to study more in the West, but my current interest is in fieldwork in Nigeria, reinforced by an expansive book acquisition drive in Nigeria and beyond, fieldwork such as living for two months in the semi rural environment of Agbarha-Otor in the Niger Delta, studying Bruce Onobrakpeya's art and that of the surrounding traditional spiritual artists, and do something similar in Benin and the Southwest, later residing for a time in Cambridge to use the university's resources.
The core image there is that of a scholar without geographical boundaries rather than one fixed in a place to the exclusion of other places.
I would like to make my library a public library as I did before my educational migration but I'll need the right kind of space and security is particularly sensitive in today's Nigeria.
I shall be publishing Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language after four years of work since he got the rights back from Cambridge UP, delighted the book would be re- published in Nigeria where the research for it was done.
I look forward eagerly to the marketing and distribution opportunities and challenges that will involve, within and beyond Nigeria and Africa.
I am also gradually cultivating a publishing vision suggesting developing a global reach from within Nigeria.
My open access writings though represent significant sharing with the world.
Thanks
Toyin
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju.
May the Almighty fully assist you in accomplishing your mission.
And many thanks for your heart-rending clarifications, on the whole a testimony to the crying need for our authorities to invest in education, the way that AWO and Governor Ambrose Alli did, but on a national scale.
I daresay your exposition and your personal experience elicit a lot of sympathy and parallel the experience of many other people in Africa South of the Sahara who have a genuine inner calling to seek knowledge and to pursue it, the main problem being the interminable frustrations presented by the backwardness and lack of foresight of our sometimes despotic, utterly insipid & uninspired leaders (and here we ought not to exclude the possibility or probability that some of them are inspired alright, inspired by the chief of the miscreants, Satan, the god of this world, Satan and his cabinet of demons, implementing their agenda, structural adjustment programs that take away subsidies for education, at this rate and at this stage resulting in their producing darkness only instead of illumination, light, effulgence, and an enabling environment in which those who hunger and thirst after righteousness can assuage their thirst “where books fall like rain” etc, and realise their dreams.
Most disheartening : “I am now back, to find that some of the most significant conditions for the development of knowledge have constricted even more than when I left …”
What Ojogbon has said about Ibadan ( Ile-Ife) now Obafemi Awolowo University in the past, such institutions must surely be moving from strength to strength and God forbid, far from it, not failing and falling into academic decrepitude?
Fela : Army Arrangement ( part 2)
This Ramadan season, that’s a very striking, evocative comparison you make, that you “had been living in the equivalent of a village compared to the metropolitan centers, or a village mosque compared to the central mosque at Mecca” - the Masjid al-Haram…
On a humbler plane ( I almost wrote “planet”), waxing poetic Jesus made this other comparison:
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
About the main mosque in that location in the cosmos known as Mecca, perhaps you could make that voyage of discovery yourself and serve us another autobiography like what Leopold Weiss who became Muhammad Asad penned : ”The Road to Mecca” - a good read…
If only what you have said here could be brought to the attention of the relevant, hopefully benevolent, not malevolent Nigerian authorities, Elon Musk, President Trump, and his genocidal Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and the devil DEI , according to these guys currently fully engaged in overhauling, slaughtering, downsizing and outlawing all that has been taken for granted as sine qua non for a United States educational milieu that you have described as “a global melting pot where people go for the opportunity to reach the stars.”( Which reminds me that Amadou Diallo is one of many African students that have met an untimely death in the in that global melting pot of yours, that one such student was allegedly mistaken for a burglar - and in the jargon of the cowboy movies was told to “reach for the sky !” a command that he probably didn't understand meant “put your hands up !” and at the trial in his own defence, that’s what the gringo who shot the African explained to the judge: “I told him to reach for the stars, but he kept on coming so I had no choice but to shoot him!”
Stellar :
#”the value of the cultural resources here and how to project them”
#”diaspora reverse migration in developing Nigerian higher education”
I’d just like to add that if effectively run a Nigerian equivalent of DOGE ( Department of Government Efficiency would go a long way in eliminating waste and corruption whereby we would have half of the battle won….
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
That was magnificent writing Cornelius.
Great thanks
Great thanks Cornelius but is DOGE a wholesome example for human management?
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Oluwatoyin,
InshAllah, may you always thrive with your silver tongue. Let me recommend Nahjul Balagha
After going through that your main question could cease to persist.
For now : The funny side of things, but serious,
Angry Bird asks, “Why are they Destroying My United States of America?”
Your United States. The United States of your dreams
I ask, why are they destroying Gaza?
I like your use of the possessive adjective “my” in “ My United States of America ”, as in “My Sweetie, My Sugar “, “My Woman “, “ My Pen”, “My Penis” (not somebody else's, although she can also say that, claim exclusive rights, exclusive possession) and for greatness, “My United States” although you say, “ I have never been there but I see the US as mine…”
“I have never been there” as in “ somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience”
On a raunchier level “ I have never been there, somebody else is poking her, but I still consider her to be mine, in terms of a vision of creative possibility.”
Indeed.
And as the lovers say, “for absence never makes the heart grow fonder.”
Maybe Trump is not going to like someone who doesn’t have any birth right entitlements to speak of, talking about “ My America”. At the very least, he himself will have to wait a while before talking about “My Greenland”, “My New Riviera Gaza”, “My Bay of Mexico”, “My Panama Canal “, “ My Lovely Elisabeth” , “ My poetry corner at the Motor Park in Owerri “, “ My Canada” (without facing a sea of legal challenges at the ICC)
I’m star-struck and still stuck on your metaphors , re - your migration to England opening your eyes to ” the fact that I had been living in the equivalent of a village compared to the metropolitan centers, or a village mosque compared to the central mosque at Mecca”
Since you have this marked animosity towards Fulani Herdsmen and the idea of Northern Hegemony is anathema to you, you understand that instead of “ Mosque” , you could have expressed the same thing thus-ly, “ the fact that I had been living in the equivalent of a village compared to the metropolitan centers, or a village church compared to St Paul's Cathedral or Westminster Abbey in London…”
Seriously, we have to be on our guard, when you say that sort of thing is it any wonder that Trump scoffs, that once they’ve seen the skyscrapers in New York, Nigerians don’t want to go back to their “huts” in the jungle…
In 1991, a few weeks after Ramadan, I visited the American University in Cairo - a most amazing experience, after two months in Alexandria mostly at the Sidi Morsi Abu al-Abbas Mosque, and after some time at Cairo University ( where Obama kick-started the Arab Spring) and some time spent at the Ahmad Rifai Mosque . The very first thing that struck me about the American University in Cairo , even before I entered through the main portals of that Institution of higher learning dressed in my light green Islamic gown and white turban, the first thing that really amazed me was the women, some of them driving or being driven up to the kerb in expensive looking limousines, a few, very few of them in Hijab, the vast majority of them dressed to kill, dressed as if going to the Oscars or a Hollywood party - no nudity of course, but kitsch, with much glitter (I didn’t get close enough to get a whiff of their perfume) … at around midday since it was time for the Zuhr prayer and I still had not heard the Azan , I finally approached one of them with lots of makeup on, and enquired “Where is the prayer room?” She was exceedingly angry - “This is not a mosque," she said to me sharply, “ If you want to pray you get outside of here” at this point she was shouting and pointed in the direction of the Qibla. Jesus Christ! In my Islamic garb replete with turban I must have looked like an anomaly to her, maybe a fundamentalist from the Sudan or worse still, in her morbid imagination, a member of or a sympathiser with The Muslim Brotherhood definitely against immodesty, lipstick and kitsch. What a country I thought , you get arrested for going inside a church, and this painted bourgeois something telling me “this is not a mosque!” .So I went back to Al-Azhar and the adjacent Al-Hussein Mosque
BTW, apart from the American University sprouting in Lebanon and sowing their seeds everywhere else in the Middle East, why can’t some of the fabled citadels of higher learning found in the West be transplanted or replicated to take root in e.g. Nigeria ?
Buckshot :Le Fonque : I Know Why the Caged Bird sings