NY Times: "A Racist Turn in India"
kenneth harrow
Contributing Op-Ed Writer
By NILANJANA S. ROY
Jan 24, 2014
NEW DELHI — The Africans — Nigerians, Ghanaians, Ugandans — began
leaving my neighborhood in New Delhi around December. Each week,
more and more families exited. Some went to parts of Delhi
considered more accepting of Africans; others to areas where the
residents were thought to be less interfering in general. I have
heard that some of the Ghanaian families had gone back to Africa,
but I don’t know that for sure.
For years, they had been a part of the swirl of cultures, languages and races that makes up this part of the capital. The Nigerian women in their bright dresses out for evening strolls and the Cameroonian family with the curious-eyed baby at the ice-cream van had made a life for themselves alongside the Afghans, Tamils and Iranians.
On Oct. 31, about a month before the departures started, a Nigerian national, rumored to have been in the drug trade, was found dead in Goa. Nigerians in the coastal state protested his murder as an act of racism, while posters read: “We want peace in Goa. Say no to Nigerians. Say no to drugs.” One state minister threatened to throw out Nigerians living illegally. Another equated them with a cancer. He later apologized, adding that he hadn’t imagined there would be a “problem” with his statement.
read balance:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/opinion/roy-the-wrong-kind-of-foreigner.html?ref=international
-- kenneth w. harrow faculty excellence advocate professor of english michigan state university department of english 619 red cedar road room C-614 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824 ph. 517 803 8839 har...@msu.edu
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
In this day and age Africans are still hit with the deadly end of the rod wherever they go and found themselves even in their own countries by foreigners. In Ghana we worship Indians, Lebanese, Syrians, Chinese, and above all whites, our “Me Buroni.” If there is a job opportunity, a Ghanaian is more likely to tiptoe, look above the heads of fellow Ghanaians, and call on distant-placed light-complexioned foreigners for the job or the contract, even in building a tomb for the late President John Atta Mills. On a bus, a Ghanaian is more likely to give up his/her seat to Chinese, Lebanese, Syrians, Indians, etc. Hmm! A white person would be given the passenger seat beside the driver - we call it "front seat" or "first class!" As a graduate student of the Institute of African Studies (IAS), University of Ghana, Legon, whenever we queued for "trotro' or public transport, then behind the precincts of of the IAS, and there were white foreign students among us, we gave our positions in the queue to them. When I arrived in Canada to continue with my graduate studies at the MA level, I had several opportunities to reminisce about the differences between how foreign students in Ghana were privileged as well as integrated into the fabric of campus life by all and sundry and my dire circumstances like a leper at an Akan Odwira festival! Thus there are lived experiences overseas that conscientize us: if I were to join the queues of yesteryears, I would certainly not give up my slot in the line to any foreign student. And even teaching positions in our higher institutions are easily colonized by foreigners who own light-skin. Why oh why? Africans don suffer suffer at home and we don suffer abroad. Caveat: absolutely, these are generalities that may not speak to other people’s experiences! These and others are fictionally documented in my forthcoming “immigrant fiction” entitled “Velvet Seekers: Enslaving Africans in these Parts.”
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kenneth harrow
i would love to hear if other people have had that experience.
the last time i was in nigeria, i was treated with a great deal of deference, but i was told by friends that it was my age that accounted for it. and it surprised me a lot since i never ever experienced the kind of deference in senegal or cameroon before. we had to wait, to push even, to get onto buses and the like. no one ever made space for me on line that i remember. and my son and his friends got the opposite treatment at thiossane, youssou ndor's club.
when we had babies with us, people were particularly nice. no one gave up their seats, but they did take the babies onto their laps.
i am not exaggerating here: i can't remember this kind of deferential treatment, till this last time, and my grey hairs might have been the reason, not the color of my skin. i am wondering if this experience of mine would have been different in other countries?
ken
Cornelius Hamelberg
From the beginning, India is one of my favourites countries and Indians one of my favourite peoples. It’s far from being an idle or empty claim.
Some brief thoughts about Hanuman’s India, not directly connected to this news item, but Hanuman - who Indian Muslims such as the late Ahmed Deedat without fail, have ridiculed in the past as “the monkey god”, plays an important role in the Hindu epic The Ramayana – taken as Divine history, whilst for others it’s merely Hindu mythology – in any case the foundational claim of Dravidian India to a piece of Sri Lanka - since in the course of events in the Ramayana drama, the scoundrel Ravana (a dark skinned fellow) , kidnaps the Lord Rama’s wife Sita and absconds with her to Sri Lanka....
First of all a correction from an earlier posting in which I said that Diana Ross rode on the Ashram elephant at Ganeshpuri in 1979 - the same year that she released “ It’s my house”. Well, I was in New York in 1979 – so it was in 1977 that Diana Ross paid a curtsey call on Baba Muktanda and rode on the aforementioned elephant. I hadn’t seen Baba for a few weeks, we were told by the Ashram admin that he was a little indisposed, had something of a cold, but when Her Highness Lady Diana Ross turned up, in no time at all she was being treated like a piece of American Royalty from the White house, after all at that time her boyfriend was an Aryan-looking gringo by the name of Werner Erhard - one of the main sponsors of Baba’s second American tour, so why shouldn’t she be treated like a high grade/ international high caste VIP, soon enough sipping tea with the suddenly well-again satguru in the privacy of what I imagined was Baba’s own personal holy of holies. I say “imagined” because in my nine months with Baba I never once entered his personal quarters, either at Ganeshpuri or in New York in 1976 and 1979, so I can still only imagine the kind of Beluchi carpets that must have graced his inner sanctuary.
At this point I must inform you that Baba visited me in Nigeria, in 1981 -a mystical night visit and the following day my neighbour Mr. Prasad from Hyderabad (a lecturer in physics) asked me if I was aware that according to the Times of India, Baba had taken MahaSamadi (had passed away) this time had left his body – ah, and it was there and then that I realised the significance of the night visitation , but I wasn’t prepared to take Mr. Prasad’s word for it , since during that my first rainy season in Nigeria he had confided in me that the choirs of croaking frogs reminded him of the Brahmin priests chanting their holy mantras . But then I read the news item myself, and it was there in black and white: Baba had become one with the universe!
With reference to what is reported about Nigerians missing home and trying to adjust to life in India, again, briefly, rule number one ought to be “When in Rome, do as the Romans” - I don’t know exactly how Nigerians & Ugandans fit into the highly structured Indian Society, but find their place they must. I guess it could begin by finding the self.....
Nilanjana S. Roy tells us that “Indians have been settling on that continent since at least the 15th century” and that is as far as she goes.
We all know about the significance of the father of Modern India, Mahatma Gandhi’s period in South Africa
Indeed Indians settled in many places in Africa.
An English-Indian couple - both Oxford graduates, Mr. & Mrs. Holden taught English at the secondary school I attended in Sierra Leone ( they did not teach any of the classes I was in ) - up till today Indians are having a much better time in Sierra Leone, than they had in Idi Amin’s Uganda. The latest I hear is that Indians in Sierra Leone run the best hospitals in that country....
What we do know is that Idi Amin Dada was quite vicious to the Indian community in Uganda – we know a lot about that, and over the years I’ve met quite a few Indians in the UK, who are part of the Indian Community which Field- Marshall Amin deported from his kingdom. I’ve told a few of them that at least it was more merciful than feeding them to his crocodiles.
India has of course changed a lot since the cynical V. S. Naipual – the man this forum loves to hate, wrote the following about his ancestral home turf:
India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)
India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)
One of these days I’m going to post an insightful essay entitled “The Naipaul in us” in which I take a good look at us - including those of us who say that once upon a time all the intellectuals of Sierra Leone supported a one-party state in that country, thus implying that some educated fools are better than some other educated fools, educated footballers, educated pastors and that at least it’s not every Professor Winterbottom that is qualified to lead. But it’s statements like “ Though Kofi Busia was more formally educated than Kwame Nkrumah, the later accomplished more in three years for Ghana than the former did in a comparable phase” – Which comparable phase?
Kofi Busia was Prime Minister of the 2nd Republic of Ghana, between 1 October 1969 – and 13 January 1972. I was in Ghana between January and 1970 and September 1971 and as a follower of Ghanaian politics during that period the only mistake that KB made was when he “challenged” the judiciary...
But let me reminisce a little - inspired by some of what Kwabena Akurang- Parry has said and here I’m reminiscing a little about the Kofi Busia times
My Better Half and I were graduate students and lived at the chalets in South Legon , about a mile from the Institute of African Studies which was located right at the main entrance to the University of Ghana, Legon - opposite the village of Medina - and before I purchased a 250 cc Honda motorcycle from Rudy Silas ( African- American & wife Thelma) my Better Half and I would often wait at the road a few meters from the Chalets - wait and wait hoping to thumb a ride , wait and watch many a car zooming past without stopping, making me feel like Robert Johnson , so I told Better Half, I think I’ll hide in the bush – and it worked – first time pot-bellied senior service Ghanaian wabenzi spied with his little eye a tall, long haired blonde female standing alone and trying to get a lift to the main campus he jumped on his brakes so hard, the car almost overturned, he opens the front door to let her in , sees me coming out of the bush and reaching for the handle to the rear door of his car - who are you he asks me – I’m Cornelius I tell him and climb in. Where do you come from, he asks my Better Half and when she says, “Sweden” he starts getting excited, wnats to know what she could be doing that evening – maybe he could show her around town...
But as Kwabena Akurang- Parry says, things have changed – change has come to Ghana....
A rumination on the situation of Africans in India to be continued, shortly...
And please don’t forget: Krishna is not white, Krishna’s blue
Sincerely,
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
Ken;
The key word is Ghana! Then again remember my caveat: "absolutely, these are generalities that may not speak to other people’s experiences!"
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
It is great that both of us are only reminiscing: "incidents and experiences that a person remembers!"
Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2014 5:02 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - NY Times: "A Racist Turn in India"
kenneth harrow
i did notice these things; but my experience is only "anecdotal" evidence, which is why i wondered what others' experiences were. for instance, i wondered if there were a francophone versus anglophone divide here?? and i've never been to east or southern africa, not to places like kenya or s africa that lived with large settler populations that had their enforced rules of apartheid.
well, the african lit assn meeting is in johannesburg this april, so i should come back with some greater anecdotes from that!
ken
Cornelius Hamelberg
Nana Kwabena Akurang-Parry,
The tribalism, colourism, racism and countryism are not going to cease any time soon.
Mood I’m in right now is bad and it matters because to some extent it will determine some of what I’m going to be feeling and saying the rest of the day (like the moon, I’m a mood person, crossed the path of a black cat last night and this morning I just woke up to the terrible news about the proposed ethnic cleansing of the Biblical Judea and Samaria by some wanton Palestinian chief negotiator by the name of Saeb Muhammad Salih Erekat.
Erekat: There Will be No 'Settlers' in 'Palestine'
What the fff- kkk does he want? He wants Mr. Netanyahu to utter some kind of reciprocal statement such as “There will be no Arabs in Israel” so that he can then accuse him of “Apartheid”! Just imagine if the first thing you read this morning was a headline that declares “There will be no Fantis in Ghana!” signed by one Scottish-Ewe man by the name of Jerry Rawlings. What the!!!! – New Confederacy! All the Fanti and Ashanti chiefs would be up in arms! I like Jerry (Junior Jesus – the man who came twice), just joking about how preposterous such a proposition would sound. Or if one day Jerry said - (like Kwabena Ojukwu), “As from today the Volta Region secedes and declares its independence from the rest of Ghana!”
The kinds of problems that Africans face in ahimsa’s India is nothing like what the Jewish people face in their own God-given country. At least we do not wake up any morning to read in the Times of India “There will be no Pakistani’s anywhere near the Hindu temple!” or worse still, “There shall be no Africans in India!”
About what we remember, about indelible impressions I must confess that I sometimes have a memory that is almost as good as the elephant in Ganeshpuri - he remembers that Diana Ross rode him.
Another thing is that environment is not only the context in which we remember, it also can have such an impact on us that it forms us - we sometimes conform to its image and likeness – and when I think back I realize that I cannot underestimate the impact of African-American consciousness on my own personal awareness and development/ education during that black power era in Ghana. Education was not confined to seminars, lectures, the library (all within four walls) or touring with a concert party – a fantastic social life it was very much meetings and discussions with many diverse people on that campus - much time at the staff common room, the cafeteria too. That’s what I remember. So I’m still amazed when a chicken wing thinks I just fell off a tree or I need a degree in Sanskrit or Arabic to read the Gita or the Quran or to be able to express an opinion or to quote Milton, Malcolm X or Shakespeare
The African- Americans were mostly in Ghana to look for their “roots”.
Legacy of Kwame Nkrumah, he had made the Institute of African studies one of the best in the world - even Chinese and Russian specialist – and of course the elites from the American hierarchies always popping in and out, especially after Nkrumah’s overthrow, trying to re-take total control and thereby getting some of us into plenty of trouble. I was not the most popular Brother among some of our African- American sisters who did not much cherish the idea that I was both aware and married to a Caucasian lily white Swede. One of our Afro sisters (reminds me of a young sister La Vonda) once got me into her room, unexpectedly gave me a slap (I couldn’t believe what was happening, it hurt real bad) told me, shouting, “When you marry a White woman, you are making a statement about all black women “, she then tore off her shirt and asked me, “What’s wrong with me?” (My Better Half who once studied at the University of Washington at Seattle, once had dinner with Nina Simone in Stockholm) was good friends with soul sister Thelma Silas there in Ghana and perhaps more so with Lacey Vasek a student from Davis in California)
It’s no surprise that Nilanjana S. Roy writes “I have heard that some of the Ghanaian families had gone back to Africa...” Ghanaians are very patient people unlike others in the ECOWAS region you have not had a civil war in recent times) but Ghanaians I’m glad to say are also proud people and unwilling to put up with too much sht. (as Fela says in I.T.T. , “Na European man teach us to carry shit”... Remember Flight Lieutenant was over to Tripoli take a loadful of his people back to Ghana by air, when the Libyans were giving Ghanaians a hard time – although the drug peddlers, akpeteshi-sellers and the pimps running prostitution rackets in Islamic Libya, only had themselves to blame. Those Africans who are similarly up to no good in India also have only themselves to blame if they have to face Agni - hotter than Madras curry, from the Indians. I wonder how my Telugu neighbour in Nigeria will be responding to this NYT article (He once drove a Nigerian policeman home. The policeman had stopped his car (I was in it) and stated the time wasting routine of going through the complete list - to get a bribe. Mr. Prasad asked the Policeman, “ Are you hungry?” The Policeman answered, “Yes, I’m hungry!” Mr. Prasad told him “hop in and let’s go home!” We drove on, Mr. Police constable rubbing his palms together in anticipation, hungry for a bribe. When we got home, Mrs. Prasad served us some delicious rice and curry. I don’t remember how the Policeman got back to his station in Port Harcourt.
That one incident about my strategic waiting in the bushes to get a lift to the Institute – is one of several variations on the same theme and some ended more happily than others – to the oft repeated question, “What are you doing in Ghana? My better half would sometimes elaborate, “Some research on the West African Youth League and the roles of I.T.A. Wallace Johnson, Zik and Kwame Nkrumah!”
But let me say this now, and it must be one of the abiding legacies of Kwame Nkrumah – the political awareness of the Ghanaian sometimes exuding so much self-confidence ( as opposed to an inferiority complex: I saw a policeman in uniform exactly once during my approximately eighteen months in Ghana ( spent the summer of 1970 in Sweden) and that was at Soul to Soul when the policeman in question jumped up on stage to chase away an enthusiastic Ghanaian fan who had also jumped up on stage , to dance with Wilson Pickett! I have never experienced or witnessed a Ghanaian being servile towards an obroni – well perhaps once , actually and that was at Labadi Pleasure Beach when one of the hut keepers warded me off from one of the huts, telling me that he was protecting it for his “ Master, a White man! “ – he told me. As For William Bangura “a proud Yoni Themne from Yonibana Chiefdom, Tonkolili District” the man who is fond of beating his chest patriotically and saying, “my people” whilst taunting me by implying I’m a hapless sycophant and so the Sierra Leone people are his people hence his “ my people” whereas for me it’s “your colonial masters”, “your House of Commons” (my people), misidentifying / conflating me with some a-them super Creoles( Anglo Sierra Leoneans who used to sit in Freetown and ask, “ Any letters from home?” by which home they went any part of Ireland, England Scotland and Wales. My Yoruba mum spoke Themne fluently, and no rest for the wicked: I’ll sure deal with Brer Willy Bangura later...
Rapid Reminisce: Although I travelled quite a bit within Ghana - to the East and the West (I have relatives in Takoradi, and some first cousins from among the Tagoes who are Ga ( that is my Yoruba grandmother’s sister’s husband was Mr. Tagoe for whom she begat Tunde Tagoe ( as we say in West African parlance – a UK trained civil engineer (electricity)) whose wife begat Adebayo, Olayinka and Ronald – ) - my social mobility was mostly confined to within University of Ghana campus and its sub-cultures environment, a young friend and occasional visitor Kwatei Jones-Quartey – already a fine guitarist ( I remember a visit when we listened to Oliver Nelson’s “ The Blues and the Abstract Truth” and not surprisingly Kwatei did his PhD on Dizzy Gillespie) Prince Charles Karikari, JT – he joined the army , lots of other Ghanaian friends mostly from the dance, music and drama sections among whom Master drummer Mustapha Tetteh Addy, dancer, Thomas Annan, the caretakers at the Chalets Attah and Dollars ( Frafra guys), some of the staff at the Institute – Jean Love, Adrianne Seaward ( her husband Joe – economics professor and a profound lover of Lady day!) most radical person at the institute – not Richard Greenfield – an authority on Ethiopian History, not Jawa Apronti, or Kwame Arhin, or Abiola Irele or our very forthright Professor Victor T. Le Vine , or visitors like Jack Goody, Kenneth, Little or any of the names I choose not to mention, but Jeff Holden a lecturer in history - he turned me on to Usman Dan Fodio - unfortunately, eventually deported by the Kofi Busia government for saying that “The money of the workers and peasants was not being used in the r best interests!” And occasional visits to Achimota where Charles Nicol the son of Sierra Leone’s most famous intellectual was studying. Half of my friends were foreign students - Tony Asrilen and Terry Smutylo , Roger and Larney (Canadians,) Rolf Gerritsen and his wife Tricia (Australian) Rudy and Thelma Silas, George Crowell, Cyprian Lamar Rowe, Hendryx, Stirling Glenn, Roberta Turner(African Americans) – honourable mention George Nelson Preston ( my Better half and I were at his wedding at Twifo-Hemang) Bernard ( Haitian or Dominican, I can’t remember) Roy Watts ( Jamaican - presenter of jazz programs on Ghana radio) Julian ( Englishman ) Albert Van Dantzig (my best friend, absolutely) one of Kwabena Nketia’s successors and one of Pius Adesanmi’s immediate predecessors Irishman John Collins ( arrived in Ghana in 1952 with his father who was professor of philosophy)
I’ve got an appointment in an hour’s time and so I’m pushing the send button now.
Later,
Akurang-Parry, Kwabena
You dreamt and saw a black cat! Well, I also dreamt. I saw a golden sparrow. This means that I must locate myself on a tree top and watch other birds fly by: no chirping today. Thanks for reminiscing. I told Opanyin AB to write a memoir; I think you should too. You have a lot to say. In spite of the black cat in your dream, have a good one.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Indeed, just Opanyin AB the journalist is worth more than all the gold at Obuasi; he’s met the big guns and that’s why it’s a book that I am looking forward to.
I’m increasingly more interested in person psychology and how that too creates events. In Ghana, Nima, Major Sandy Jumu, and a day at Aburi gardens, that's about it.
It’s Holocaust Remembrance Day today....
Also today, I finally got my hands on Paul Auster’s Hand to Mouth ...
There’s
There’s
The Mighty Sparrow
And for you and me
There’s also
Lord Kitchner