USA Africa Dialogue Series - Hereby pleading for more moderation on the Ojo case - let's tone it down a bit - please

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

I protest and I am also beginning to get angry. Perhaps I should
protest more strongly about this?

Dr. Ojo is no House Negro – we all know this. He is the resistance -
the voice of moderation against any kind of uncle-tom-foolery and I
sincerely hope that he does not ever compromise on that, ever.

We are here because we believe in freedom of speech, the freedom of
speech which Dr. Ojo has been exercising and which he has a right to
exercise without this uninterrupted, Golgotha persecution &
molestation of the man – somewhat like the house negroes who were
empowered to whip those who opposed Massa, into some kind of bloody
submission to curb the spirit of insurrection. It would seem that
some of you would like to crucify or lynch him (perhaps nothing as
drastic of Clarence Thomas’, “high tech” lynching)simply because he
has not been expressing himself with the decorum of courtly love or
the polite and effete homiletics of a sanctimonious, sermonizing
Bishop or Pope.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQe9nUKzvQ

Ebi Nabo! Nah so ah see am oh: The way things are turning out now, it
would seem that you (collectively) are making a martyr out of Dr. Ojo.
What is it that he has said and done in this instance (the
disagreements with Professor Harrow – not his alleged earlier
misdemeanours here or elsewhere) what is it that he has actually
thought that is so terribly wrong?

Let’s recapitulate the high points of his last two missives, prior to
Professor Harrow crying in pain & protest, for some help, the points
of friction that is causing this outrage – and please someone, tell me
what’s wrong at any point, with what I mention.

Dr. Ojo writes:

“Yes, languages may be like rivers that continually change. However,
the Thames and the Rhine are European rivers. The Niger and the Volta
are African rivers, and they never meet at
any point in their journeys. They can therefore not have similar
ecological systems, fauna, fishes, villages along their banks, etc.
Fill in the rest...”

(That the Mississippi is not in Africa - it is located in the American
heartland of the Delta Blues and people that inhabit that area speak a
kind of English that is different from what is spoken in e.g. the
Nigera Delta. It’s territorial and separated by history and the
Atlantic Ocean)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxnWrYuG1X4

Whereas Dr. Ojo is concrete - perhaps fundamentally so, Professor
Harrow by his literary calling/ inclination and perhaps having
fallen in love with the idea of river as metaphor, elevates that
metaphor in an extreme manner ( and he is free to do so) making his
argument a little more abstract.

He (Harrow) says: “rivers flow into oceans, oceans circulate waters
around the globe,
the waters evaporate, the clouds fly across the skies, rain and snow
on lands and oceans, and the nollywood films get sold in brixton as
well as detroit and lagos.”

And now please notice that it is Professor Harrow who then sets the
tone of the discussion, sort of putting Brother Ojo in his corner
(some corner) immediately after what I quote of him above, he launches
into this:

“ there are those who want to put europe against africa, the white man
against the black man, in all these debates. and there are those who
can talk, not simply across divides, but in between and alongside of
and diagonally joined. i'd rather not respond point by point, and when
the "dialogue" devolves into insults, i check my limits of
participation closely.“

And then some very concrete differences in examples cited:

Harrow:

the rest of his long communication, in essence that

“in 1977 edna koenig, dept of linguistics yaounde, and practically all
the other members of that dept conducted a long survey of languages in
cameroon. i was there, though just a neighbor to the members of the
dept doing languages; i was doing lit. the results showed cameroon had
around 250 languages, of which pidgin english was the most widely
spoken. i have no stake in making that claim; i just remember it. it
was surprising since most of cameroon is in the francophone zone,”

Brother Ojo:

“I am Nigerian, and Nigeria is not the Cameroon.
Can you live with that?
Your so-called "study" was back in the 70's, carried out by you and
your
European peers - in urban areas, and not in the rural areas of the
Cameroon! “

In short, and I repeat, some hard words coming from Dr. Ojo but surely
all within the ken of Professor Harrow to take such mild anti-colonial
flak from someone like Dr. Valentine Ojo.
Here’s what Dr. Ojo wrote:

http://groups.google.se/group/usaafricadialogue/browse_thread/thread/93d4c0cd51054faa/3c1118fb96a54117#3c1118fb96a54117

Now can somebody (anybody) tell me that which Dr. Ojo should not have
said? Show us where he went over the crest?

I’ve seen a Jewish Professor from Florida manhandled in the Palestine
Chronicle Forum when I was a member of that Forum. The poor Professor
had assembled an impressive but innocuous array of accurate,
historical data when he was unceremoniously kicked out of the Forum
immediately after which it was a free for all for everybody to do the
post mortem on his carcass - especially when he had no possibility of
defending himself because he had been banned - by a Greek guy, who was
the moderator. I was not allowed to post at that point. There, was
blatant injustice. For you to see, eye to eye the lesson being that
you just can’t breeze in to a Palestinian Forum – even if you are as
good hearted and seemingly as pro-Palestinian as Ken Harrow - and
there deliver some slightly controversial home truths and hope that
you will be shown some love and appreciation.

Perhaps African moral standards and forum etiquette is much higher ,
especially here – but whether we are Africans or not, as far as I am
concerned USA- Africa Dialogue series Forum is basically home turf
and if not here, where else should you except to find some core Afro-
centric ideas and ideals and attitudes?
During the Hezbollah –Israel war of 2006 I was participating in a
Gambian Forum (Bantaba) and the WHOLE of the forum with the exception
of a gentle man by the name of Karamba was against me and against
Israel - being led by a German woman ( married to an Arab) – and I
was eventually banned…..

All in all that was some mild chutzpah from Brother Ojo … quite
mild….understandable, and forgivable by the forgivers

Look at some of standard fare - the permissible language of dissent
in these two websites:

http://www.israpundit.com/2008/

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/archives.html



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