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Posted May 3, 2010 by Dmitri Gheorgheni
Elektra and I have just had an enjoyable read of an article from the Lagos Independent, an obviously reputable English-language newspaper in Nigeria.
I came across the article in question because I've been researching Pan-Africanism, the movement of African Americans to help Africans which began around 1900. These folks were inspiring, and did really cool stuff such as put up a great exhibit at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris. They had to counter all that nonsense from the guys with the solar topees.
In my researches, I stumbled across this article. Please read as much of it aloud as you can, preferably to a captive audience such as your dog or cat:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200904210190.html
The best sentence is the last one:
'Until this is achieved, our adaptation of foreign norms without the much desired genuine attitude to change the society can only showcase a ghost-like dilemma of swinging between real and the unreal.'
As an old ESL teacher, I can only sympathise. Reading English like this usually has that affect - brain-freeze, followed by the ghost-like dilemma of swinging between real and the unreal.
Usually accompanied by quite undignified fits of giggling.
I am not blaming anybody for this. This erudite and no doubt very dignified gentleman has a lot to say, and I agree with much of it, although I would like to point out that being in possession of the birthplace of religious thought hardly means that you have a monopoly on wisdom, or couldn't learn anything from us ignorant barbarians, at least a little tiny bit.
It's just that following the logic of this - and I can, I've read Maria Edgeworth and my late grandmother's letters, and I know what an Irish bull is - puts you in an altered state. About the time you realise you've understood what he meant by 'the fact that it would equally be wrong for the likes of Kukah to pigeonhole the likes of Awolowo within the template that willy-nilly everyone had always believed...', you've achieved that mental state of rubbing-your-tummmy-and-patting-your-head that Gertrude Stein was always so keen on. (Helen, Helen? Are you taking notes, my dear? With multi-coloured biros? Of course you are.)
It's like...it's like...
A totally legal high.
And the online paper is FREE.
(And I'm not picking on Anglophone African writers. Indian ones do it, too. And American-born sociologists. And Judith Butler. Especially Judith Butler.)
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Posted May 3, 2010 by  Hypatia
 And you read this for recreation? 
Seriously, I remember my dad praising Everett Dirksen. He told me that if I ever wanted to be a success in politics, I should use Dirksen as my model in that he could speak confidently and eruditely for hours and never actually say a blessed thing.
In this case I'm not comfortable enough with the subject matter to criticize. the man could be a genius, for all I know. What I do know is that reading very much of it would give me a headache.
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Posted May 3, 2010 by Dmitri Gheorgheni
I believe that about Everett Dirksen. He sounded great, but made about as much sense as Archie Campbell from 'Hee Haw'...
I run into all sorts of fun stuff while I'm working. Sometimes I'm just trying to find a telling detail or a good quote, or just verify some factoid or other. But prose like that is just fascinating.
Has anybody ever read the work of Amos Tutuola? He was a genius, but also a Nigerian writer, with all that entails.
If you don't have 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts' in your library, Hypatia, get it. It's rare and wonderful. Some kid will become a novelist because of that.
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Posted May 3, 2010 by Hypatia
I'll hunt up a copy.  Anything to inspire budding novelists.
Dirksen was awesome. After listening to him, no one had a clue what he'd said, but they all agreed with him!
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Posted May 3, 2010 by Dmitri Gheorgheni
 Some people just have the gift. Me, I have to make *some* kind of sense. At least, er, some of the time...
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Posted May 3, 2010 by KB
You sound almost contrite about it.
That article reminded me of a friend of mine of a political inclination. He's not so bad when he's speaking - he's just as convoluted, but he can just keep going before the howlers are really noticed by a crowd.
When he puts pen to paper, on the other hand, it's painful.
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Posted May 3, 2010 by Dmitri Gheorgheni
Some politicians should speak, and some should write?
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Posted May 3, 2010 by KB
Right. And some should be given a colouring book and a box of crayons and left to their own devices.
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Posted May 3, 2010 by Dmitri Gheorgheni
to both of you.
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Posted May 4, 2010 by Willem
Hee hee! I see this from time to time here; South Africa is not that different from Nigeria in this respect. First of all, using rather complicated expressions and a 'highbrow' vocabulary is a sign of education and deep thought. Most readers might actually not understand what is said, but will be moved to a conviction of the authority of the speaker.
It's even better to hear this in a speech. Then you can also contrast the vocabulary and the expressions used, with the accent of the speaker.
I'm not saying this to make fun of people. This is serious stuff, it's the way things are done here, and I find it very interesting. One can analyse it of course, and criticise it too. There are quite a few ironies in that piece! For me the biggest irony is that it is in English. Is the English language not even more foreign to 'authentic' Africa than 'foreign religions' are?
This whole thing about 'Africanism' is to me a very interesting topic. I am sitting here and watching the ideas develop ... being an 'inauthentic' African I can't participate. Weeellll ... maybe I can find a way to contribute ...
I'm going to see about getting and reading 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts'. There's a good chance I might be able to get it here.
Anyways thanks for this, Dmitri!
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Posted May 4, 2010 by Willem
Prof Animal, thanks for the Crayola link, heh heh! Great fun ... I can't see a way to 'save' one's magnificant creations, though, apart from printing them out ...
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Posted May 4, 2010 by Dmitri Gheorgheni
Print and scan back into the computer. I have this horrible suspicion, Willem, that you will actually make a gorgeous picture on that program...if you do, will you show it to us, please,just to prove it can be done?
I thought you might like that article. I agree - it's full of ironies, and not in a bad way. (I found it because Naiwu Osahon wrote something that touched me, and I wanted to find out who he was, other than someone they gave the key to my native city of Memphis to.)
It's terrible that current rhetoric insists that you are an 'inauthentic' African. Because that's a racist statement. How could you not be an African? You were born there, and I suspect your family has been there for a few hundred years. Ask a European or an American if he doesn't feel authentic in the place his grandfather was born.
In fact, in the US, we call people 'Americans' who were born somewhere else, if they decided to join us. Examples: Albert Einstein, Michael J Fox, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, my dad's tailor, Mr Mukherjee, whose son has a PhD from MIT...my former students May and Paul, who moved from Taiwan so their son could become a classical pianist...
I hardly think they took anything away from my lot by coming over here. Neither do my relatives, even the ones who vote for the noisy politicians (it's primary election day here). Stonewall Jackson was a cool dude - but his great-grandparents met on a convict ship... ...both of them were convicted thieves, one from County Derry, one from London... We don't brag.
Sorry, end of rant. But I thought 'Afrikaner' meant just that. What do people want, for you to go 'back' to the Netherlands? That would be crazy.
Success is not getting the 'out' people in. Success is fixing it so nobody's 'out'.
Proven whenever both black and white Americans sing this song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyS3HPInHtI
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Posted May 5, 2010 by Malabarista - live a little! The night is young, and we have umbrellas in our drinks.
Print and scan? A screenshot should work
According to my father, there was a right-wing campaign in the Netherlands in the 1970s, with posters demanding that "Africans go back to Africa, Asians go back to Asia", and so on.
It was completely ruined by a group putting stickers over the bottom - which originally read "And leave the Netherlands to the Dutch". They changed it to "And Holland back underwater for the fish".
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Posted May 5, 2010 by Prof Animal Chaos.C.E.O..err! C.E.Idiot of H2G2 Fools Guild (Official).... A recipient of S.F.L and S.S.J.A.D.D...plus...S.N.A.F.U.
Willem, I've never used it, but on the crayon site, there is a click button for "print", but again! I don't know anything about it, as will it go to a printer connected to a pc ?
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Posted May 5, 2010 by Willem
Prof Animal, I will try it out - and the 'screenshot' idea as well.
Mala, I love that 'addition' made to those Dutch posters!
Research has shown that we are all in fact of African origin. Only *some* of us left, a hundred thousand years or so ago, to populate the rest of the world. Anyways afterwards in the rest of the world, people have been moving in and out of certain region for thousands of years. There have been major movements of peoples in Africa as well. We are either 'at home' everywhere, or nowhere.
The ancestor of the van der Merwes came to South Africa only a bit later than Jan van Riebeeck did, in about 1675. I would say the Afrikaners here are generally descendants of Dutch who came to South Africa prior to the nineteenth century. But Dutch people have also come here more recently as well ... I've known second and third-generation Dutch kids in school and church but they assimilate with the Afrikaners with great rapidity.
As a minority who's lost all political power, down here we Afrikaners will now just have to accept what we can get. Lots of 'us' have left but I am going to try to stay. Of course many of 'us' are too poor to leave anyways, and I don't want to desert my fellow 'tribesmen'. Also not my other fellow-South Africans because I think I can and will make contributions here that everyone can benefit from. There's a problem in this country that needs to be solved, namely the relations between people whose worldviews and ways of life differ so much that they find it difficult to accept each other's mere existence. This is a problem elsewhere as well. America for instance ... racial relations there, still can be improved a lot. And Europe ... there's so much conflict and intolerance there as well, and it might get worse, with continued immigration into Europe of people with cultures and ideas very hard for long-native Europeans to stomach (like those Dutch campaigners Mala mentions). How do we all manage to 'just get along'?
Even here in Africa. There's talk of African Unity ... but why oh why do we Africans still fight so much among ourselves? Is it because 'Europeans' have set us at each others throats during the colonial years in the 'divide and rule' spirit? Is it because the slavers - both European and Arabian - fomented wars so they could get captives of war as slaves? Is it because of the terrible, terrible disruption of all traditional African societies and institutions, that resulted from colonisation *as well as* slavery, and even missionary activity?
Or was African society *always* characterised by a lot of violence - heretical as it might be to say so - but I've thought a lot about warfare in non-European societies and I've wondered more than once if tribal warfare might not actually be a necessary element that is to a great extent responsible for social cohesion *and* overal balance between different groups of humans, *and* between humans and the rest of Nature ... and also, a driver of human diversity? But the idea of *total war* ... I think that came to Africa with the Europeans. Just to name one example, in the early nineteenth century Shaka down here, called the 'African Napoleon' made a number of innovations where warfare was concerned, making it suddenly immensely more deadly and destructive. Before him, traditional warfare was a 'chivalrous' thing bound by rules and conventions and etiquette. Two fighters would for instance stand a certain distance from each other and then hurl spears at each other ... almost like a 'gentlemanly' duel in old Britain. Shaka suddenly threw all this out, and invented a close-up style of warfare, with the intent of 'engaging' your opponent and killing him as rapidly as possible; and massive, rapid, tactical troop movements, and simply completely exterminated and obliterated his opponents who were utterly prepared for this.
I've often wondered if Shaka really came up with his innovations for 'improving' warfare on his own, or whether certain ideas of European ways of war have reached his ears. In his day the Zulu kingdom was still very much traditional and isolated, with very little knowledge or influence from Europeans, but one thing archaeology for instance teaches us is that there have always been interactions and exchanges between even extremely widely separated peoples.
But note that for all his bloodthirstiness (and that was absolutely breathtaking) he is still seen by most Zulus (the largest ethnic group in South Africa) as a hero.
Might we be lacking a tradition of 'peacefulness' here - and if so, who would have the courage to start speaking out loud about the problem? I mean, it could so easily be taken as being insulting. But maybe we can acknowledge that there's also a lack of a peaceful tradition among the 'whites' and that in fact a lot of African wars are fought with weapons devised - and sold to Africa - by Europeans (and Americans)?
How much will it take anyways for *everybody* to admit their share of the guilt in what's going wrong?
How does the idea of ‘Africanism’ stand up to the reality that there is more genetic – and I would add to that cultural – diversity *in Africa* than out of it? There are greater differences between certain different groups of people living in Africa, than there are differences between the average African and the average European, or Asian, or American, or Australian.
I’ve also wondered another thing. What does the name ‘African American’ really signify? Would a light-skinned Algerian or Moroccan who emigrates to America and pretty much assimilates to the culture, be called an African American? If *I* emigrate to America, can *I* be called an African American?
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Posted May 5, 2010 by Willem
I meant to say Shaka's opponents were utterly UNprepared for his style of warfare! Sorry!
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Posted May 5, 2010 by Dmitri Gheorgheni
I knew what you meant.
Good points. One of the problems everybody is stuck with is that the partitioning of Africa by European powers in the late 19th Century made a mess - those are unnatural demarcations, and it takes a genius to make them work. So if you do, you guys are geniuses.
My take on the violence issue is that it's easy to get mad, and really hard to do peace studies. Peace doesn't give you any quick-fix feedback. It takes a kind of stubborn patience to learn and prattice the techniques. (Or, why I admire Jimmy Carter. Can you imagine any other US president writing this? http://www.bong-town.com/Bong_Town/Liberia/Poems/firestone.html)
Peace is just harder than picking up a rock. Always has been.
1675, eh? That's cool. That means your ancestors came to the Cape about 7 years before my first paternal ancestors went to Pennsylvania. Which sort of puts us in the position of the Dutch - if you had to go 'home', where would you go? Underwater? I have a sneaking suspicion the Brits would not want us back...they asked us to leave in the first place... ...I think they had good reasons...
I love that poster idea, Mala.
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