Fwd: [New post] Colonialism: What If?

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Porter’s Pensées <commen...@wordpress.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2022, 12:50
Subject: [New post] Colonialism: What If?
To: <cornelius...@gmail.com>

bernardporter2013 posted: " Colonialism and imperialism at the present time are usually discussed in very simplistic moral terms. Are you – and the books written about them – ‘for’ or ‘against’? The fall-back position for most commentators is that imperialism was an unrelieved evil" Respond to this post by replying above this line New post on Porter’s Pensées Colonialism: What If? by bernardporter2013 Colonialism and imperialism at the present time are usually discussed in very simplistic moral terms. Are you – and the books written about them – ‘for’ or ‘against’? The fall-back position for most commentators is that imperialism was an unrelieved evil, responsible for many if not all of the evils in places like Africa today. Hence my interest in this contribution to a blogsite I subscribe to (USA Africa Dialogue), by an African scholar, Oluwatoyin Adepoju, dealing with some of the questions about it that ought to be asked. If Africans were not colonised, what would have been the implications for scribal literacy, which was low on the continent? If Africans were not colonised, what would have been the implications for the unquestioned dominance of classical African religions, as opposed to the greater pluralism, the range of choices, opened  up by the current co-existence of these religions and  Christianity? Without passing through the colonial experience, would we be using an international language, English and chatting on the Internet? All contemporary Africans are shaped by colonialism, particularly poignantly so those deeply invested in the globally dominant educational system, which has its origins in Europe and has little input in its methods  and understanding of reality from learning systems from other cultures.  Would any such person prefer a classical African education to the Western one? Under what circumstances, outside the forceful coercion of colonialism,  would an informed choice between them or to integrate them have been possible? Colonisation birthed the Universities of Ibadan and Makere, for example, pioneers in post-classical African scholarship, more critically oriented, more international in range of reference and communicative scope, than the earlier classical African systems of Ifa, among others.  Is the current challenge not  one of synergy between these systems? The creative possibilities represented by these  developments are  possible without colonisation but colonisation is the historical trajectory through which they emerged. Ursula le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels visualise encounters between a space faring Terran civilisation and non-technological cultures, in which the Terrans are scrupulous about not interfering in the local culture on the planets they find themselves. Its also true, I think, that Africans were visiting Europe before colonisation. How best could we have benefited from what Europe had to offer, without having to pass through the still reverberating agonies of colonisation? Perhaps I need to understand the colonial experience better. While not justifying the self serving so called civilising  missions of the colonisers, I think colonialism in Africa and perhaps Asia needs to be appreciated in more complex terms than that of binary good and evil. A painful journey but one whose every segment is vital, in my view. bernardporter2013 | January 12, 2022 at 11:50 am | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/p49fOM-2yq Comment    See all comments    Like Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Porter’s Pensées. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://bernardjporter.com/2022/01/12/colonialism-what-if/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

For one who has been following Porter’s Pensées since its very inception, I thought that this blog piece was a radical departure by the radical professor , he being British by nature, an expert anti-imperialist by profession, a ferocious and often controversial left-wing journalist (controversial here meaning often in the hot, if not the boiling waters of controversy and debate with fellow members of the intellectual left, not to mention the right, the privileged Old Etonian & Harrow right-wing , the ultra-right, and some other lost souls who don't know what time it is and are doomed to never get it right) an authority on the history of British Colonialism which reached its apex during the reign of Queen Victoria and her British Empire on which the sun would never set.

"1,2,3, 4, 5, 6. 7,

all good children go to Heaven "

My first reaction on sighting the contents of the piece was " Well, Bernard must be in ecstasy right now, with the storm brewing against his dear friend Boris Johnson , some members of his own Conservative Party ganging up against him and demanding his immediate resignation and maybe even his expulsion from the Conservative Party for having had such a jolly good time hosting a Merry Christmas Party at his Prime Minister's residence to which over 100 people were invited and attended in the middle of the lockdown which made it obligatory for all British citizens to avoid gatherings of more than five people, such a transgression by Britain's Prime Minister, thereby giving some people the unsavoury impression that Boris Johnson probably thinks that as Prime Minister of Britain he is above the law and to hell with rules that common citizens have to follow about "lockdown" , and to add insult to injury, as we all know, Boris is not the type of fellow who sings, " I belong to Glasgow" after a Christmas pint or two.

So , from my point of view Adepoju's blip in which he seems to be looking the other way or bending over backwards to apologise over some of the sins of colonialism could have been a slight diversion from Professor Porter's main obsession, namely, his relentless ariel bombardment of Boris Johnson, and now waiting for Act 3 the denouement in which it's curtains for Mister Johnson as he is forced to say against his own will and against his better judgement, " I surrender " or " I resign " - which - hopefully , seems unlikely since unlike Amiri Baraka who said "I will not apologise, I will not resign ", Boris Johnson has done the right and decent thing: With a contrite hereat, he has apologised...

My second reaction, and it's quite a tantalizing thought even if you are British or as in Professor Porter's case , simultaneously a proud citizen of Sweden which had no colonies or Swedish Empire to boast of, a tantalizing thought nonetheless to have Adeopju, the offspring of the formerly colonised, not asking for reparations for colonialism, or for some posthumous trials for some of the miscreants, long dead and some of their descendants , the beneficiaries, for crimes against humanity, because from a purely legal point of view, some regard colonialism as a crime against humanity, but, it's interesting nonetheless that our Adepoju is asking "some of the questions about colonialism that ought to be asked."

Some of the answers to these questions can be found rehashed in the discussion " 10 reasons why reparations for slavery is a bad idea".

We've also heard about Keith B. Richburg praying, " Thank God for slavery" in his Out of America

Apart from lamenting that "When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.", I suppose that the late Bishop Tutu must have been entertaining similar questions at the back of his head..

The immaculate Gloria's last paragraph talks about the transfer of technology that would take all day at time when we could be discussing the transfer of these kinds of beneficial medicinal raw materials , and here too, sadly, I'm thinking of what Malami Buba takes up in ““Look East” and Look Back: Lessons for Africa in the Changing Global Order ", noting that by the end of the Korea War , North Korea was more developed and more technologically advanced than their people in South Korea , and that just as he ( Malami Buba) takes up the imponderable fact that " Half a century ago, Nigeria and South Korea, for example, had similar GDP and the social structure of poor nations" - so too, it's true that circa 1958, Sierra Leone and Singapore were at the same level of development. When Sierra Leone became independent in 1961, everything was working well in the country, a good, well staffed education system , a top notch judiciary ( the rule of law) , a civil service that was a meritocracy ,peace and harmony ( even if beneath the surface, some tribal friction brewing) a £ Sterling going for a fixed rate of exchange £1 = 2 leones, 24hrs a day electricity and a clean , pure, potable water supply, salaries paid on time...

What happened to account for the differences between Nigeria and South Korea, Sierra Leone and Singapore today: apart from the Confucian work ethic in the East ( said to be akin to the Protestant Work Ethic) there was that awesome " transfer of technology to South Korea and Singapore - and in the case of the latter, also a visionary, effective, transformative leader such as Lee Kuan Yew

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Correction :

Aerial , not ariel , although I could have been thinking of Ariel Sharon, fondly nicknamed " the bulldozer"

  To wit , "Professor Porter's main obsession, namely, his relentless aerial bombardment of Boris Johnson..." 

Can't put any faith in the autocorrect , any more. Autocorrect sometimes replaces today with "toady" , barely , with "barley"

This too is pretty scary

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Nearer unto You O lord I muse after listening to Pastor Kumuyi addressing a mammoth crowd this evening, some powerful preaching in powerful English. I noticed that as he spoke some of the flock were busy taking notes of the points he was making, just as we are to imagine those who listened to Jesus's Sermon the Mount live and direct must have also been taking notes and the final version is what we get in the Gospel According to Matthew, Chapters 5 to 7 . Back then, 2, 000 years ago Jesus delivered that sermon in Aramaic ,a language we have not inherited with the Bible, but we have inherited English , mostly thanks to colonialism, to the point where some colonial and ex-colonial subjects believe themselves to be better than others of their ilk who do not wield that language like their former colonial masters. Blessed are they who do not yet speak good Chinese or know mathematics, the language of technology. Just imagine the simple English that we expect Jesus will speak , when he returns...

It's a sore point that cannot be overemphasised.

I listen to Pastor Kumuyi and still I dare to rant and rave, rock , roll and rail on about " what colonialism has done to us" , and by " us" I mean all and sundry that have been directly or indirectly affected by colonial-ism.

What am I going to say next?

As we all know, one of the by-products of the aforementioned colonialism is the special specie known as "Broken English" of the type spoken by Robinson Crusoe's Man Friday. As Professor Crusoe himself puts it, better still, as Coetzee presents the whole issue in the preface to his Nobel Lecture :

He and His Man :

"But to return to my new companion. I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spoke; and he was the aptest scholar there ever was." — Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Broken English, broken verbs, broken syntax, broken hymens, one could go on forever , more or less, Everything Broken.

From the Broken to the educated improvements and there the trouble begins, far removed from the broken masses is the language known as Big English: This too is one of the "things " that colonialism has done to us. From my point of view, and as every English-man knows, one of the most unpardonable sin is deliberately or inadvertently tortuous and contorted big grammar or "Big English" as IBK calls it. Absolutely convoluted. For syntax - word order, his tail grammatically and lexically carefully woven between his legs, it's puffed up Big Grammar & Big English with a puff at the service of sounding "learned", and the way that some people like village school teacher Lakunle ( in Soyinka's " The Lion and the Jewel") believe that's how a half or a full blown professor is supposed to sound is so very utterly ridiculous that I daresay it's one of the unfortunate kinds of things what produces racism, the kind of racism exemplified in e.g. Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson

Then there's sometimes this little misunderstanding about what the British say and what they actually mean

OK, academic or not, granted all the best intentions in the world not all of us can write like Teju Cole or reminisce like Aminatta Forna, but we could at least strive to be as simple and as straightforward as Obododimma Oha?

Granted all the freedom of speech in the world, exaggerated Big English / pomposity is of course appropriate when comic effect is the intention and the effect. Think: Charles Dickens. I finally arrive at the point:

Bernard Porter : BRITISH IMPERIAL : WHAT THE EMPIRE WASN'T

" Bernard Porter writes in a clear and engaging manner and does not hesitate to take on some of the most difficult and controversial issues" ( according to Wm. Roger Louis, Kerr Professor of English History and Culture, The University of Texas at Austin )

The book itself is un-put-downable - from the very Introduction, through Hybridity and Riding the Beast ff, to the very end. No wonder his " The Lion's Share" is currently enjoying a fifth edition.

Last night, as I re-read the first 121 pages of Bernard Porter : British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn't (Bing) Bernard Porter : British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn't ( Google) an autographed copy of which my Better Half Ebba and I received from him & Kajsa ( my Better Half's first cousin) on a memorable New Years Eve 2016 which we spent together at home in Stockholm with us Hamelbergs, it was clear that this is the type of serious reading that provides sufficient background to Professor Bernard Porter's likely approach to the speculative and nonetheless intriguing but not quite revolutionary concerns raised by African Scholar Oluwatoyin Adepoju, a former colonial / post-colonial subject himself.

I have exercised some restraint in echoing some of what I believe Professor Porter himself would have said in this thread since he takes up some of these matters, but I myself feeling, how dare I misrepresent him , and so inadequately too,when the Oga himself is in the house. The use of the word "inadequately" here would mean the good intention of not regurgitating what he wrote or said, as would be the wont of some poor student merely reproducing some kind of gramophone recording entitled " His Master's Voice" - tantamount to quoting e.g. Kant and commenting on him critically when Kant himself is in the house and if moved to do so is always in a position to respond adequately.

Of course, dear Kant is not and cannot be here presently and that's why it's a free for all to misunderstand , misquote and even misuse him , without any retaliatory consequences, especially when his great disciples ( masters of that discipline, decide to keep quiet.

I was think about some of the above when I wrote this reply to my friend who was pre-emptively requesting some intervention from the UN, African Union, EU, ECOWAS etc before  the next coup occurs in Africa:  Praying for Divine Intervention could be more efficacious...

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

With all the recent discussions and debates concerning democracy/ demo-crazy, some of Africa’s elections that have been won by hook or by crook, external influences, including interference influences from members of the so-called “International Community”, justifiable and unjustifiable military coups etc., a couple of striking references to Nigeria, and the notes on one those references is also really interesting

With reference to that scoundrel Harold Smith whose name has cropped up in this series, and also in the Nigerian social media, over the years, Note 4 on that juicy chapter entitled In The Field” (pages 73-91 of British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t) reads,

“I have a file of papers sent to me in the early 1990s by Harold Smith, ex-Colonial Office, testifying to what he claimed was the fixing” of Nigeria's first democratic election, and also to widespread sexual abuse of young Nigerian boys by members of the local colonial service in the 1950s and ‘60s. He failed to arouse the interest of any of the government and media agencies he wrote to at the time. I am told that these papers were also deposited in Rhodes House, Oxford. The first scandal always seemed likely; the second appears more so in the light of similar sex scandals emerging in Britain recently”