Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: The best thread of 2021: Pondering My Life in the Darkness: Between Deprivation and Effort
Nimi Wariboko
Dear Gloria:
Since our Oga TF has named this thread as the best thread of 2021, please ask him to vote some money as prize so you and I can have good Christmas. As you know Christmas in the East is very expensive.
On a more serious note, your merchants of darkness are also the merchants of death in Nigeria. Wise man Cornelius demurred the fact that I said they were created before light came into the world. The African Origen of the third century certainly believed that some beings existed before time; before matter existed God generated some “rational beings.” He said they had “spiritual bodies.” If our brother and genius Origen could make sense of his world by positing a myth like this, why can’t I make sense of my Nigeria with some many irrational leaders in this way.
My grandmother (1905-1979) used to say to us, her grandchildren, that we were not created by God, but by angels. In her philosophy that was why were too rascally as kids. Her generation of Nigerians were directly created by God, but since God handed over the job, outsourced it to the factory of angels, children were not as good as they used to be. In this joke, was she not propounding an idea that the world, creation is gradually deteriorating?. The point is that certain behaviors are so beyond the pale that Africans struggle to explain where those that harbor such behaviors come from.
The behavior of Nigeria’s merchants of darkness so off the ordinary that they must have come from another line of creation. I did not say the Satan created them.
Blessing,
Nimi Wariboko
From: "'Emeagwali, Gloria (History)' via USA Africa Dialogue Series" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, December 10, 2021 at 11:32 AM
To: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>, "usaafric...@googlegroups.com" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: The best thread of 2021: Pondering My Life in the Darkness: Between Deprivation and Effort
“Our dear brilliant Gloria asked who are
the dealers of the generators, the merchants
of darkness? If Toyin were to answer all
her questions he would have no time to
think and truck and traffic with his muses.”
Mimi Wariboko
Thank you for the compliment,
Prof., but Cornelius the Wise hit the nail on
the head when he reminded Toyin Adepoju
that his inspirational hero, Kant, had zero
electricity when writing his masterpieces-
so we would surely get to know about the
“merchants of darkness.”🤓
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 Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2021 7:39 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The best thread of 2021: Pondering My Life in the Darkness: Between Deprivation and Effort
Please be cautious: **External Email**
All great ones:
This is the best thread of 2021, generating profound thoughts and raising serious questions. I came to the Humanities via the sciences, and the connection points are many.
To Cornelius, if you can leave Farooq alone, you may emerge as one of the most preeminent intellectuals of our time. Ken’s brilliance shines through in its first response.
Let me throw sand into the gari of all your arguments and let me remove salt and palm oil from your egusi soup: How do you bring a person like me into the picture? I don’t process obstacles. Darkness does not stop me from work—I stay still and compose a poem; I muse about the Satan and his unique contributions to our world; I seek the power to fly like a witch; I pray for the survival of the mosquitoes for the melody. Insecurity does not stop me from work—I appreciate life and seek joy in joining the departed ones. I don’t process fear. I am not bothered by conflicts. I shrug off praises. I don’t see myself as important. I don’t see fame as a blessing. I don’t appreciate the end product of work but the process of work. I don’t see what scholars do as more important than want landscapers do. I respect the struggling scholars in Africa far more than the most successful scholar in the diaspora.
Continue!
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, December 10, 2021 at 6:26 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Pondering My Life in the Darkness: Between Deprivation and Effort
Dear Nimi Woriboko,
If I got you right, your question is, What was God doing before He said “ Let Newton be” – and there was light? - and by extension all the way back to before the beginning when darkness hovered over the waters / when darkness was on the face of the deep. I suppose it’s the same rhetorical question.
The answer is , I don’t know.
Aren’t we the ones who should be asking you that sort of question?
For the Muslim Faithful , the throne Verse Ayatul-Kursi answers that question , not by telling us what God does but by defining Who and What God is.
Your mild reprimand of Dr. Agozino and your exoneration of Adepoju who you believe “must be allowed to work when his muses are wont to be around. Abeg” is slightly reminiscent of Jesus opining that “ The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath”
I don’t know what Jesus says or would have said about Adepoju the night owl’s perennial problem of electric light for his late nights not being supplied by the state actor known as the Nigerian Government, and if there are special disadvantages with that lack of night light when it comes to living a holy life. On the plus side, it could be viewed as a blessing in disguise. ( I’m thinking of the ultra-orthodox not opening their refrigerators on the Sabbath for fear that the lights would come on , thereby transgressing the law that says “ thou shalt not light a fire during the Sabbath”, electricity after all being some kind of fire, albeit a special kind of fire flowing through the electric wire...
Re - “ The current gang of Nigerian leaders were created before the utterance, “let there be light,” These are very hard words from a renowned ethicist like you. At the risk of sounding a little like Nathan Söderblom, the moralist or better still some big time Kabbalist, I daresay we should all be putting our shoulders to the wheel in the name of tikkun olam
By the way , in secondary school in Sierra Leone (The Prince of Wales School) I had a classmate by the name of Omodele Woriboko. I last ran into him briefly, all to briefly in Port Harcourt 1982 after which he disappeared into the blue. I last hear of him a couple of months ago from our mutual classmate and Facebook friend Charles Macaulay. I must also enquire from our other Nigerian classmate then, Michael W. Bassey, who is also a Facebook friend .
Last word: In the whole of Nigeria, there are no more hospital people than the Kalabari of Buguma, Bakana, Degema and Abonnema, with whom I lived in Nigeria for two years, and no better music than that produced by the Akaso Cultural Society in the early 1980s ( available in the LPs Igwe and Hosanna - treasured music possessions.
Long live and prosper our Kalabari people
Amen.
On Thursday, 9 December 2021 at 23:35:11 UTC+1 nimi...@msn.com wrote:
Dear Oga Cornelius:
Your intervention made me laugh out loud. There is a “wicked,” wise, and brilliant humor to it. Yet, its intellectual subtility, power of insight, and playfulness exude careful thinking. It was sheer fun reading your response.
Let me ask you, before God said “Let Newton be! and all was light” what was God doing? Martin Luther, the Reformer once said God was cutting canes with which to flog all those who would ask such a foolish question. What is your answer? Some Nigerians think God was creating the bad leaders that would be sent to Nigeria. The current gang of Nigerian leaders were created before the utterance, “let there be light,” and as such they are ever ready to unleash the powers of NEPA-darkness on Nigerians. (Toyin Adepoju, take comfort from this creation story whenever you make plans to cross the Atlantic in conformity with Cornelius’s advice. The NEPA problem predates the foundation of creation).
Perhaps, a different myth about creation might help us better tell the story of the emergence of Nigerian leaders. This is a story before the creation story of Genesis. The Lurianic Kabbalists say God first prepared a space within the Godself (tzimtzum) by a process of contracting God’s being for creation to emerge? Some Nigerians say Nigerian leaders exhibit God-like impunity in dealing with the governed because they believe they there when God was contracting Godself for the space to emerge as the Khora for creation. What can we do about them? Perhaps, we should ask like Job in the Bible, why were the terrible future leaders of Nigeria not cut off before the tzimtzum or by the darkness/chaos that preceded “Let Newton be! and all was light.' Since they do not like “cosmos” (organization of order/form out of chaos) we should deliver them to eternal chaos and disintegration, to the nothingness of formless nonbeing.
My brother Biko says Toyin should work during the day. Haba, Toyin must be allowed to work when his muses are wont to be around. Abeg, Nigeria must not be allowed to bend everything for us. Our dear brilliant Gloria asked who are the dealers of the generators, the merchants of darkness? If Toyin were to answer all her questions he would have no time to think and truck and traffic with his muses. It would take a dissertation to adequately respond to her question. And who can write a dissertation to enlighten anyone amid the darkness?
Blessings,
Nimi Wariboko
Boston University
From: <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: "usaafric...@googlegroups.com" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday, December 9, 2021 at 2:07 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Pondering My Life in the Darkness: Between Deprivation and Effort
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
Shortly, before I surrender this computer to my security man who is here and wailing to switch everything off.
Re- Your existential angst is worse off through the awareness that you are not alone in this, being but one in two million souls living involuntarily in the natural but unwanted perpetual darkness even after “God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.'
You are not alone and there’s strength in numbers. For sure, it is a shared angst, going back to the type of situation with which our primitive forefathers were familiar, the life they lived in the jungle, as hunters and farmers long before the age of the electric current. I guess this is what Patrick Wilmot meant in that 1981 Nigerian Guardian article in which he pleaded with Nigerians to start dancing mathematical rhythms, mathematics and not weak grammar rhetoric as the language of science - the surest pathway to constant electricity, always.
I quite understand and sympathise with your frustration at having to live in such primitive 21st century conditions in what is otherwise generously, altruistically, patriotically and realistically referred to as Modern Nigeria. My Better Half, our son and I, we , got used to the less than “ roar of the mechanical beast” which we kept on at night to maintain the gentle hum of the refrigerator 24 hours a day, come rain or shine, even during the daytime when it was more of a continuous hum of the mechanical beast , snoring like a percolating coffee-pot.
You are not just another helpless creature your fate predetermined by the environment in which you live when in fact you could at least to some extent change that environment for the better, or you could extricate yourself from the inordinate, involuntary suffering and stop being just another cry-baby, no matter the length and poignancy of your mantras bemoaning your situation and your trying your utmost very best to get us to start feeling sorry for you. The choice is yours. Of course, you are free to wait for another ten years for some succeeding governments to start doing something about it, or, instead of just sitting on your hands and complaining to those who are prepared to listen in the USA- Africa Dialogue Series, since it’s a two system country, you could take the bull by the horns, move to the more affluent quarters in Ikoyi or to the precincts of Aso Rock, become neighbours with the President of Nigeria, give him an occasional call, drop in for dinner when he’s in town as and when it is convenient
Your third option is also open and I intuit this as the best immediate solution to this your problem that has been lurking in the cellars of your subterranean mind for sometime now and that’s why I intuit the longing in your soul when I read these words penned by you : “ I am a person who glimpses that ocean spoken of by an inventor of calculus ..” etc.
No Freudian slip or slips there, it is manifestly clear that you would like to cross that ocean , and you could swim, row your boat or paddle your canoe across, or fly over the Atlantic, in this early 21st century , cover the old Middle Passage by air on a first class ticket to the United States of America where Nimi Wariboko having already discovered the talent that you are , could take you under his wings – as someone took me under his wings when he asked me ( here in Stockholm) “Who do you know? “ and I told him , after which he introduced me to some very relevant people…
Adepoju, believe you me, with or without electricity, your bunny lies over the ocean
On Thursday, 9 December 2021 at 09:45:50 UTC+1 ovdepoju wrote:
It's 4:35 am. Around me is the cocoon of night. Darkness everywhere.
But it is not a fully welcome darkness. It is partly the darkness of deprivation.
A dim roar in the distance echoes in my mind the sound of the expensive generator I have just put off, in guilt at wasting precious fuel in breaks from work when I am resting.
That distant roar indicates that someone with the necessary economic resources is powering their own home throughout the night using a generator, as I too had tried to do by leaving on my family's generator from before midnight to after 4 am, in the name of completing an urgent job, having planned to run the generator throughout the night even though I hate noise, particularly when working, the roar of the mechanical beast penetrating even the closed windows of my study.
Who am I?
I am a person who glimpses that ocean spoken of by an inventor of calculus, the discover of why the planets orbit the sun, of why humans don't fall off the face of the Earth as the sphere revolves in the cosmic void, held aloft by unseen forces which his work enables us calculate precisely.
Isaac Newton.
"I do not know what I may seem to others, but to myself I am nothing but a child playing with pebbles by the seashore, and from time to time discovering one shinier than the others, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me."
The greatest scientist of all time, as his biographer Richard Westfall describes him, was not being modest.
Newton was convinced that human knowledge is limited to the appearances of phenomena, not their essential natures. Space and time are made possible by a cosmic intelligence beyond human grasp, claims he makes in the conclusion to his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.
Before time, the creator of the cosmos created knowledge, understanding and wisdom, and hurled them to Earth where they torment human beings with their incessant demands, evoking possibilities continously unfolding in an endless horizon, as Rowland Abiodun's account of a Yoruba creation myth in his Yoruba Art and Language may be rendered.
Knowledge implies a grasp of the particulars of existence, while wisdom represents knowing why things are the way they are, an understanding gained beyond silence, beyond noise, beyond the machinery of intellect, knowing dropping like a ponderous object hitting the ground, like dew descending at daybreak, making the heart miss a beat as the nakedness of being is exposed in brief insight, if I may adapt images from Abiodun's account, his verbal explanation of that story in a conversation and another majestic Yoruba creation story, "Ayajo Asuwada" translated by Akinsola Akiwowo in "Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry."
The ocean of truth referenced by Netwon is the understanding of why things are the way they are.
Newton's disciple Immanuel Kant was dismayed that in spite of all human efforts, no individual and no body of knowledge could claim knowledge of the details and structure of the world and the relationship of this complex to an originating intelligence, as he states in A Critique of Pure Reason.
That is the ocean of truth glimpsed by Newton that convinced him he was no more than a child at play with toys as reality remains unpenetrated.
The quest for that reality is my life's work but the merchants of darkness whose misssion is to dissolve the creativity of Nigerians in their acidic deprivations are conspiring against me.
How may one best weave together complex chains of thought, creating a matrix that the Infinite may shine through, like a diamond mounted in a ring, if one cannot shape those ideas in visible forms in these days where recording has replaced recollection?
How does one record if you can't see what you are recording or hear it beceause there is no electricity to power the devices that enable such information capture?
That is why the darkness in which I write this is comforting, as the low sounds of crickets animate the darkness, a symphony of fraternity between all creatures on Earth, but is also a problematic darkness beceause I cannot, at this moment, move from the pre-electrical age of civilisation to the electrical age by switching on a light, a journey of centuries traversed every time one flips a light switch.
I am compelled to remain, for now, in the pre-electrical age of centuries ago beceause the people who have run this country, Nigeria, for decades, are convinced that Nigeria does not belong fully in.the 21st century, so primitive conditions, such as regular power outages, remain a part of most Nigerian's experience.
Like a camel smelling water from a vast distance in the desert's expanse, I can smell the salt of the great ocean, hear snatches of it's awesome roar as being and becoming clash, form and reform in the life and death of galaxies and fireflies, ceaseless permutations emerging from that which is Nothing beacuse it is uitimately unknowable, as one cannot empty the waters of the ocean into a hole on the sea shore, as a child trying to achieve that was so told in a story by Augustine of Hippo.
In darkness or in light, in deprivation and enablement, the journey continues, the moth fascinated by the candle flame even as she seeks to plunge herself into it, so as to feel that utter heat in a union of body and flame even as one vanishes, consumed by the transformative fire.
We salute Farid ud din Attar for this marvellous image from his Parable of the Birds.
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