Fw: Africa Is a Country Weekend Special, October 9th: The opacity of Fanon, Nobel notable, Pandora Papers in Kenya + more

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Harrow, Kenneth

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Oct 10, 2021, 4:51:54 PM10/10/21
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more on gurnah, from africa is a country. all worth looking at
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: Africa Is a Country <au...@africasacountry.com>
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To: Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Subject: Africa Is a Country Weekend Special, October 9th: The opacity of Fanon, Nobel notable, Pandora Papers in Kenya + more
 

Nobel wins for Africans


Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar and who has lived in England since 1968, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This is big. It is a time to celebrate, especially as Bhakti Shringarpure, co-founder of Radical Books Collective, has argued in a post on our site, Gurnah is only the 6th African to win the prize since its inception in 1901: “... he is also only the fourth Black writer to have won the prize. Unlike the Booker Prize which has historically scored well on the diversity points, the Nobel has always favored the whitest and the most European of all literature.”

The first African to win the prize was Wole Soyinka in 1986; 35 years ago. In between, the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz won in 1988, then the two white South Africans—Nadine Gordimer (1991) and J.M. Coetzee (2003). Doris Lessing, who was born in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), was the last African to win the prize in 2007.

Initial appreciations of Gurnah’s win, particularly on social media, have played up Gurnah’s identity. His Africanness and Blackness. That is fine, but Gurnah is from Zanzibar, an island nation (now in a confederation with Tanzania) that is at the crossroads of the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and Africa. And, as a Tanzanian friend reminded me, yesterday Tanzanians and Zanzibaris exchanged words online over who could claim him.

And, amid the celebrations, some hard questions also confront us.

In another post for us, Nicole Rizzuto, an Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, writes how Gurnah has rebelled throughout his writing career against being pigeonholed. That Gurnah’s “... novels offer a running commentary and a skepticism toward the cultural politics of packaging African stories for global circulation and consumption.” As for Bhakti, she asked:  “Gurnah’s win pushes us to think about the role of the LitNobel and prizes, more generally, and the way in which they construct what we think of, read, engage with, and buy as African literature today.”

One small footnote: a less widely circulated fact about Gurnah is that his working life as an academic (he is now retired and lives in Brighton on the English coast) was spent as a scholar of literature and, that among others, he has done close readings of the novels and short stories of the South African writer, Zoe Wicomb. Congratulations!

– Sean Jacobs
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Elsewhere in our country

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Colonial and post-colonial governments in Kenya have worked to separate education from access to culture and information. It is an outdated model.

The opacity of Fanon
This week on AIAC Talk, we speak with Leswin Laubscher and Derek Hook about the phenomenology of Franz Fanon and the ways he is understood throughout different eras of time.

Louder in Lagos
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Bono’s vanity
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Chambi Chachage

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Oct 11, 2021, 5:42:19 AM10/11/21
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Informative take from Sean Jacobs, but a bit inaccurate hence the importance or Gurnah’s works in illuminating contentions on Zanzibar stemming from the Revolution and the Union.

First, Zanzibar is not in confederation with Tanzania - it has been in a Union with the then Tanganyika, the two forming the United Republic of Tanzania; the result was a unitary state with two governments - the union one (whole of Tanzania, including Zanzibar) and the semi-autonomous one in Zanzibar that deals with what are regarded as non-union matters, leading to strong contentions from Zanzibari nationalists that Tanganyika is wearing - under guise - the coat/mantle/cloak of the Union (as de facto Tanzania) by constraining Zanzibar’s sovereignty i.e. by reducing non-union matters through doubling union matters from 11 to 22. 

Second, it was not really a debate between Tanzanians and Zanzibari, but a debate between pro-Tanzanian patriotism and pro-Zanzibari autonomy/nationalism, which includes Tanzanians from both sides i.e from Tanzania Mainland (then Tanganyika) and Zanzibar; so, there are both camps across.

To conclude, it is not black and white there.

Re: 


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Harrow, Kenneth

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Oct 11, 2021, 10:07:26 AM10/11/21
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the tensions over state formations, so often accompanied by wars and exterminations and conquest.... thinking of the american formula "manifest destiny." appropriate for today, "Columbus" day, a federal holiday in the States, now being renamed by progressives as Indigenous People's Day.
some will call zanzibar by its own name; others will call it tanzania, and unfortunately some will suffer over this fight.
it would be interesting to ask how belgium, say, fits into this paradigm or any european state back in the past--amalgams, all, of different people speaking different languages, with the dominant "iles" conquering the others. a state built on blood.

surely there are better solutions to governance than states built on blood and soil.
ken

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 Chambi Chachage <chachag...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2021 5:43 PM
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: Africa Is a Country Weekend Special, October 9th: The opacity of Fanon, Nobel notable, Pandora Papers in Kenya + more
 

Gloria Emeagwali

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Oct 11, 2021, 6:25:39 PM10/11/21
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There are those who conclude that 
since the Nobel Committee declared
Gurnah to be great enough to be 
a winner, everyone else should 
fall in line. No questions asked.

This line of thought undervalues
critical thinking and  intelligence,
and prioritizes sycophancy and
naïveté. Not only that, many of 
us in this group are multidisciplinary 
and multidimensional. For example,
before  I became a historian I was 
a student of literature and languages.

The  racist innuendo in “Paradise “
disqualifies Gurnah, in my view, but
I hope to read more of his works -
to get the whole picture.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali 







On Oct 11, 2021, at 05:42, Chambi Chachage <chachag...@gmail.com> wrote:



Harrow, Kenneth

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Oct 11, 2021, 7:20:46 PM10/11/21
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gloria, could you tell us what the racist innuendo was in paradise? i hope to read the books we were able to download (luckily)

as for the judgment of the nobel committee, i have not been convinced of its high authority for many many decades. remember borges, arguably the greatest writer of his day, or of the century....
the recent awardees seemed minor figures, to me, esp when major ones like ngugi were ignored.
and the awarding of the racist naipaul was infuriating.

in film it is the same: none of the major festivals, from academy awards to cannes, are really serious judges of global south films. berlin is a bit better. but africa doesn't count. for them, and i believe the academy awards are largely influenced by monetary considerations.

i do not know the politics of the nobel committee. i could be persuaded they are onto something when it comes to the sciences, but not in our fields.
ken
(bobby dylan wrote a lot of nice songs....)

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 Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2021 4:02 PM
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: Africa Is a Country Weekend Special, October 9th: The opacity of Fanon, Nobel notable, Pandora Papers in Kenya + more
 

Harrow, Kenneth

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Oct 11, 2021, 7:24:32 PM10/11/21
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also, i know cornelius is closest from among all of us to understanding the politics of the nobel prize committee, and its association; and i'd love to have his thoughts on it.
ken

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>
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2021 7:15 PM

Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Oct 11, 2021, 8:33:10 PM10/11/21
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They are not too bad in terms of the 
Peace Prize. They rushed to judgement 
in the case of Obama and some would 
say the same with respect to Abiy.
They cannot predict the future moves
of a recipient.   Abiy had war thrown 
at his doorstep and reacted accordingly.
This year Reesa of the Philippines got it along with a Russian journalist. Reese deserves it all.

Ken I sent page numbers related to Paradise
in a previous post.  I also attached the book.

Read pages 34, 52, 59, 60, 123 , for example.



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: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2021 7:15 PM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: Africa Is a Country Weekend Special, October 9th: The opacity of Fanon, Nobel notable, Pandora Papers in Kenya + more
 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

Chambi Chachage

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Oct 12, 2021, 4:54:08 AM10/12/21
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And who “are those” Gloria? I am just asking because you responded on top of my last email. My post was simply fact-checking Sean Jacobs. The (racial) history of Zanzibar, as you probably know more than me, is very complex.

The Nobel Prize for Economics have convinced me even more that their focus this year is the issue of migration/immigration. That is the main thing that makes me feel Gurnah deserves it i.e. because he addresses it in relation to the ‘contentious’ Zanzibar Revolution and Union.

But that should not stop you or anyone else for that matter to be critical enough to argue that he does not deserve it because of ‘Paradise’.

I leave you with this take from someone I know personally who migrated to the UK like Gurnah:

“For Zanzibaris like me, empathic Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel literature prize is a tribute to our cosmopolitan homeland” - Ahmed Rajab,

Best Regards,

Chambi

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 12, 2021, 4:54:48 AM10/12/21
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I would not consider a writer being racist as precluding him from being given such a prize.

Would one disqualify the great chess master Bobby Fischer on account of his explicit anti-Semitism, the magnificent writer HP Lovecraft on account of his distaste for non-Anglo Saxons or the great philosopher Martin Hedidegger for his enthusiastic Nazism?

I don't think so.

A method has to be found of appreciating these stellar achievers while pointing out their limitations.

Thanks

Toyin

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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Oct 12, 2021, 10:06:34 AM10/12/21
to Oluwatoyin Adepoju, usaafricadialogue
No racist will be on my list  but 
you are free to have them on yours.
Right now statues of racists have been
 removed across the US and  honors
withdrawn. DNA pioneer Watson is
a good example of that.


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: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2021 4:51 AM
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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Oct 12, 2021, 10:06:44 AM10/12/21
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I was not referring to you Chambi.
You have not adopted that stance but
one fellow poet ally dubbed us “self appointed “
critics  etc and I was compelled to respond.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU


From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chambi Chachage <chachag...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2021 12:01 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: Africa Is a Country Weekend Special, October 9th: The opacity of Fanon, Nobel notable, Pandora Papers in Kenya + more

Please be cautious: **External Email**

And who “are those” Gloria? I am just asking because you responded on top of my last email. My post was simply fact-checking Sean Jacobs. The (racial) history of Zanzibar, as you probably know more than me, is very complex.

Cornelius Hamelberg

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Oct 12, 2021, 4:12:04 PM10/12/21
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Whenever the Nobel Laureate in Literature is French or writes in French, is African or American, I always look forward to Professor Harrow's expert assessment.

The English language is the dominant intellectual vehicle these days. Long live the English Language Empire! Two hours after Abdulrazak Gurnah was announced king of the literary universe, I rushed to the library and there was already a queue of over 250 people before me, waiting to taste some of him. The Almighty has buttered his bread, alhamdulillah, Abdulkazak, is now rolling in money, his publishers must be feeling very grateful...

Professor Harrow says that Cornelius Ignoramus “is closest from among all of us to understanding the politics of the nobel prize committee, and its association” ? Well, I'll be darned! All I almost know is that Graham Greene didn't get the Nobel Prize because he was perceived as being too anti-American. A good writer that produces a decent body of work, some of which is devoted to denouncing some of democracy's enemies/barbarism is more or less guaranteed some hope of winning the Nobel Prize

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o didn't get it but another East African did. End of story

BTW, you'd think that Toyin Adepoju should know better than opining that he “would not consider a writer being racist as precluding him from being given such a prize.”

Really; Tony Adepoju? I suppose that in other words, you would not consider a writer being manifestly Islamophobic “as precluding him or her from being given such a prize”.?

Is Adepoju remotely suggesting that it wouldn't surprise him if the Swedish Academy awards the prize to racists on a regular basis.?

And then, not unexpectedly for a Black & beautiful man like him, Adepoju turns the logic of ethics on its head again as if we're talking about considering a posthumous philosophy prize to his idol, Kant.

Take note of the reason advanced by Jean-Paul Sartre for refusing to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature which he was awarded in 1964...

Check it out: In 2019, there was tremendous fallout when Peter Handke was awarded the prize

BTW, going by what I've read by him so far, I don't consider V.S. Naipaul racist. For a surety, he had some austere, pretty weird opinions, even about his ancestral Mother India, but racist? How? Where? Lisbeth Hejdebäck , his literary agent in Sweden ( she was also Derek Walcott's literary agent ) was a close friend of my Better Half - Lisbet was at the Nobel Banquet in 2001 when Naipaul was awarded The Prize; I mention her just to assure you that we got some personal insights into Naipaul - and Walcott, insights of the kind that you don't read in the gossip columns of the newspapers ( Walcott, of course, loved his rum...) but Naipaul a racist? How so? He was awarded the prize "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."

His brother Shiva Naipaul coined the term “ turd world” - for so-called “ third world countries.”

Professor Harrow's president was more grossly blunt: shitholes

From Walcott, these mortal lines:

“I’m just a red nigger who love the sea

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation...”

BTW, I've had a few nightmares about the prize being awarded to Salman Rushdie resulting in the current Supreme Leader of Iran renewing the fatwa and adding a new clause: in addition to his publishers, death ( God forbid) to all the members of the Swedish Academy, and that they might even blow up the Swedish Academy building...

Every year, the reading public and various its various nationalists and language chauvinists having waited with bated breath for some three hundred and sixty-five days, the moment the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is announced we're most often if not always, back to square one: Somebody's, some other people's most favourite candidate was not the one to be anointed this year, so, dry your tears, better luck next time. From 1901 to now, think of all the great writers that missed being awarded the prize.

There are those who think that the function of the Swedish Academy is to award the Literature Prize to the world's “best” literary artist, writer, poet, dramatist, entertainer. However, this is not the case because there are certain guidelines that the Swedish Academy has to follow, according to the spirit and letter of Alfred Nobel's last will and testament about the matter.

Just the other day, Chidi Anthony Opara the poet asserted that “The Nobel Prize Committee does not like to be dictated to by self-appointed gatekeepers of literature. The Committee likes to always showcase the fact that it has its own mind.” This observation could be closer to the truth than Chidi imagines.

Fact is, the Swedish Academy has been through some tough tines – first, there was the mother of all scandals that rocked the Academy and shocked a whole lot of people - some people thought that some of that was a witch-hunt, the victim, one Jean-Claude Arnault

The Academy has mostly recovered since that sorry episode, and has to some extent regained and is very cautiously set on the path of reclaiming some damaged reputation and that's why they are being extra careful about who they are awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature these days. They have decided to play it safe, to wit, there's nothing controversial about Abdulrazak Gurnah...

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Calabash

Cornelius Hamelberg

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Oct 12, 2021, 5:45:10 PM10/12/21
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PS.

It should be interesting to take a closer look at the jury who scrutinize the nominations :

The members of the Swedish Academy and their specializations

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 13, 2021, 7:24:25 AM10/13/21
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When are they going to award the prize to Falola?

He is more qualified than Winston Churchill, who got the prize, perhaps for his history writing.

Falola has historical and other scholarly writing plus poetry, plus autobiography.

Thanks

Toyin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/0e80e6b2-4b36-4cf8-b0ce-64d8e0ce8588n%40googlegroups.com.

Ibrahim Abdullah

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Oct 13, 2021, 7:48:44 AM10/13/21
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How many non-whites get to judge nominees? 

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Oct 13, 2021, 7:53:05 AM10/13/21
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Churchill's award was political. (For his political orature in shaping the course of WWII and liberating Sweden the home of the Nobel from the clutches of Hitler).  How many books did he write?
.

So a literary prize was in fact awarded in the main for oratorical mastery.  He could not be awarded the peace prize because he was among the pre-eminent war lords.  

His country folks delivered a more forthright verdict by removing him from power after the war.


OAA


Democratic Darwinism can lead to survival of the filthiest.  Let those who believe in majority rule vote for its practice at the centre in Nigeria come 2023.



Sent from my Galaxy

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 13, 2021, 10:07:08 AM10/13/21
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Don't know if I've sent this earlier.


Although I suspect Falola's best poetry has not been published exrcept in the USA Africa Dialogues Series.

His best poetry is commemorative of people and some of it is published in In Praise of Greatness.

Thanks

Toyin

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 13, 2021, 10:07:17 AM10/13/21
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Churchill is a notable history writer.

He has a series of volumes on the Second World War written as a frontline observer.

Before that he was a prominent journalistic writer covering current affairs from different parts of the world.

The Wikipedia essay on Churchill would list a good number of books to his credit.

I have one in my library, The Second World War:The Gathering Storm.

Satre was both a philosopher and a novelist, but better known as a philosopher.

Bergson, another literature Nobelist, was a philosopher.

I think Falola's work qualifies for the Nobel Prize for Literature on account of it's imaginative, ideational and multi-disciplinary range, as represented particularly by his commemorative  poetry  and essays, such as the majestic one on Ade Ajayi in In Praise of Greatness- the best in that powerul book, in my understanding of the book so far- other similar pieces in the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, his essay "Ritual Archives" in it's rhapsodic and structural power as it explores diversity of epistemic systems, his introductory essay to his edited book on the Yoruba deity Eshu, for it's imaginative and analytical force, in tandem with his vast multi-disciplinary mapping of knowledge about Africa and the African diaspora.

I might one day publish a book, The Best of Toyin Falola, bringing together what I understand to be his most powerful work in it's capacity to contribute to particular disciplines and transcend them.

Other powerful scholarly writers include Akinwunmi Ogundiran in The Yoruba : A New History and Nimi Wariboko, represented particularly by his poetic acknowledgements pages and his conceptually muscular and yet poetic texts.

Ogundiran is a superb history writer, magnificent in narrative flow and analysis, and deeply  stirring in his expressions of his ambitions in uniting Yoruba  history, mythology, philosophy and spirituality, even though I get the impression that the full flowering of such a synthesis might still lie in the future in his work as he more deeply assimilates the imaginative dynamics and spiritual and philosophical imperatives of Yoruba thought, the historical development of which he is commited to mapping in his book but the resonance of which is somewhat muted by the mono- dimensional, often materialistic and episodic interpretations he gives in this historical mapping, after the powerful depth of his depiction of the roots of this cosmology in his chapter on the proto-Yoruba, although his powerful chapter on the Ife synthesis of Yoruba thought and polity does demonstrate some potent sensitivities to this cosmology, as in his magnificent image of the cosmology in terms of mirrors reflecting each other as they stretch into infinity, a strikingly original development of a related Buddhist image , the Net of Indra, which also uses the picture of reflections extending into infinity, but employs jewels, instead of mirrors.

Thanks

Toyin



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Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Oct 13, 2021, 10:07:34 AM10/13/21
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Wariboko's acknowledgements pages are in a class of their own 

I am not aware of any other writer who has transformed the often dry chracter of acknowledgements pages, often perhaps of little concern to most readers,except the people and institions being thanked in those pages, a convention he has transformed into a reflection on being and becoming, on time and eternity, in the context of his own life.

John Edward Philips (Yahaya Danjuma)

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Oct 18, 2021, 9:06:44 AM10/18/21
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Sweden was not occupied by the Nazis. Norway was. A Norwegian committee gives out the Nobel Peace Prize. The others are Swedish. 


On Oct 13, 2021, at 20:50, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Churchill's award was political. (For his political orature in shaping the course of WWII and liberating Sweden the home of the Nobel from the clutches of Hitler).

John Edward Philips 
International Society, College of Humanities, Hirosaki University
"Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto." -Terentius Afer



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