Ikhide! Ikhide! Ikhide! How many times have I called you? Go and write your own book about Okigbo and stop disturbing me O jare! And I like lazy, you see. I am very lazy, and I'm not complaining. But don't imagine that because I'm very lazy, that I'll not rise and call you up to defend your "gbanjo" circle of "public intellectuals" who see nothing but Africa good only for hand-me-downs and the external gaze. No, you're not in my circle. I have no circle. I have a cult, and the trustees of my cult are Zik, Padmore, Cessaire, Senghor, Nkrumah Rodney... those lazy prophets of Africa's counter-modernity and counter narrative. I am too lazy to out-Conrad conrad. That belongs to great writers like you. Besides, like my man from St. Lucia, I prefer the smell of a woman to the smell of books. But again, thank you for calling me a book-hawker. There again, you're wrong. My ambition is to hawk Akara, not books. I have long abandoned "great books" to people like you. And I will not read all those great books you've written. I'm too lazy to read books. However, I will stay up tonight on usaafricadialogue@googlegroup. com so that you too will not sleep. I am lazy, yes, but not for internet chatrooms.
Obi Nwakanma
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:10:54 -0700
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
To: rexmarinus@hotmail.com; usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
To: xokigbo@yahoo.com; usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:28 PM
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
Obi Nwakanma
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:10:54 -0700
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
To: rexmarinus@hotmail.com; usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Obi, Obi, Obi, how many times have I called your name? There is no need to be rattled. When it comes to writing, you have been lazy, extremely lazy, no two ways about it. I don't really take you seriously as a writer because you have steeped yourself in other pursuits, nothing to be embarrassed about. Your book on Christopher Okigbo is the last known attempt at serious scholarship by you and it was so awful no one dignified it with as much as a word. And expensive to boot. Apparently you now hawk books for a wretched living, so to call you a writer would be generous on my part. You are more likely a has been and not a very good one, if truth be told.
My literary works stand on their own merit as well as my other life's pursuits. I have been busy on many fronts and I am proud of my contributions in making many thoughtful people sit up and think about Africa differently from what the prolific hawkers of disease and the single story with respect to Africa have to say. And yes, I am not talking about your white man who lives freely in your head. I am talking about your coven of America is disease African writers that I have confronted with energy for the past several years. Despite your protestations, I see real changes, some of you are beginning to write real stories not the contrived stories of gore that the Abanis of the world enjoy putting out.
I do not walk in your circles; I am lucky, I can tell every one of you where to get off playing victim without having to worry about my paycheck. I can afford to speak my mind. And I do. When you grow up, maybe you will be like me. Now go and read my great works and educate yourself. Alternatively, stay here with me, I have all night, I will make mincemeat of you because you are an easy target; you are lazy and not particularly good at this ;-)
- Ikhide
Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com
Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
To: xokigbo@yahoo.com; usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:28 PM
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
Ikhide, rattle me? No - but you strike a nerve. And it is the nerve of impatience with the likes of you who continue to badger anybody willing to say "No! in Thunder!" for a much abused contient, because you think it is churlish. Thank you, goody-two-shoes! There is no special calling to "gatekeeping" for Africa, and Africa is certainly not a single thing. There is a choice between licking spittle because you eat salmon in Maryland and wearing it as a badge of honor, and between always staying alert against the perpetuation of the image of an entire continent as antinomic. It is not a task that is dated, orthodox or unorthodox. It is a historical duty. You do not stop worrying because it is out of fashion to worry and complain. You stop worrying and complaining when the gnat falls off your scrotum. Now you may like to wear the gnat as a badge of honor on your scrotum, I do not. And I do not by that mean, that gnat on the scrotum is all the problem afflicting Africa. But it is a problem, and it is central to the scribal calling to point to it.
Of course your work speaks for itself, and I hope so must the work of the rest of us who are not quite yet on the dole. I'd like you to note, I do not wish to be Achebe. Achebe is Achebe. But when we read Achebe, we do not read him as we would a civil service memo, and mark it "keep in view." We read, discuss, and invite him into our arguments because he has something to say, and because what he has to say continues to make sense, and continues to speak to the very condition for which we invoke him in any event. Because Billy Collins quotes and refers to James Joyce on the Irish condition does not mean he wishes to be Joyce. It is because the Irish condition exists. Ikhide, to move the African discourse beyond what you call its "orthodoxy" you must know and contemplate it beyond the ersatz, coffee room pontifications. You must first of all answer the question: "what is the african mind?" And indeed, how does the African mind grapple with the African condition. In fact, what is the African condition? is there such a thing as the "African situation"? Any honest and judicious interlocutor of these questions, and Teju Cole is certainly one, must see that among the more terrifying problems of Africa today, which is possibly shaping an incipient tragedy is the inverse re-imagination of Africa by a category of people who persist in inventing terror and failure as the veritable image of Africa. Why does it matter that writers engage this? because "image" - the "imago" is being consecrated. It is industry. It is market. For as long as we continue to permit the distortion of the image of Africa, so long will Africa be unproductive, uninviting, inhuman, and so long will it reproduce and be made to reproduce dis-ease and disaster in spite of our best efforts. My despair is not about Africa. My despair is that ventriloquists and chaos-mongers like you continue to make Africa the homeland of disaster and the marketplace of exotica. Every African, particulary in their various homelands is a criminal, a tyrant, corrupt and ungovernable - every African, except Ikhide and his saviors, of course, in all your writing! Nothing good can come out of Africa by Africans. The only good that arrives Africa must be from some foreign impulse and from "donors" of such charity. It is your children and mine, born in exile, who are "networking" and connecting to some hogwash abstraction who will save Africa because they have "technology" which the African is incapable of conceiving. Come off it! No, it is not I who inhabits despair - it is you, the new African Conrad, who helps to manufacture despair and the African vortex. By the way, thank you very much for being so generous as to make me a "writer." I think, Ikhide, you're full of shaving cream. Please no vex for me too. I'm also telling you to your face what others are not telling you; otherwise, I'd not be Obi Nwakanma, who nonetheless, has no need to be a 'prolific' writer.
Obi Nwakanma
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 18:01:24 -0700
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
To: rexmarinus@hotmail.com; usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
To: xokigbo@yahoo.com; usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 8:37 PM
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
Of course your work speaks for itself, and I hope so must the work of the rest of us who are not quite yet on the dole. I'd like you to note, I do not wish to be Achebe. Achebe is Achebe. But when we read Achebe, we do not read him as we would a civil service memo, and mark it "keep in view." We read, discuss, and invite him into our arguments because he has something to say, and because what he has to say continues to make sense, and continues to speak to the very condition for which we invoke him in any event. Because Billy Collins quotes and refers to James Joyce on the Irish condition does not mean he wishes to be Joyce. It is because the Irish condition exists. Ikhide, to move the African discourse beyond what you call its "orthodoxy" you must know and contemplate it beyond the ersatz, coffee room pontifications. You must first of all answer the question: "what is the african mind?" And indeed, how does the African mind grapple with the African condition. In fact, what is the African condition? is there such a thing as the "African situation"? Any honest and judicious interlocutor of these questions, and Teju Cole is certainly one, must see that among the more terrifying problems of Africa today, which is possibly shaping an incipient tragedy is the inverse re-imagination of Africa by a category of people who persist in inventing terror and failure as the veritable image of Africa. Why does it matter that writers engage this? because "image" - the "imago" is being consecrated. It is industry. It is market. For as long as we continue to permit the distortion of the image of Africa, so long will Africa be unproductive, uninviting, inhuman, and so long will it reproduce and be made to reproduce dis-ease and disaster in spite of our best efforts. My despair is not about Africa. My despair is that ventriloquists and chaos-mongers like you continue to make Africa the homeland of disaster and the marketplace of exotica. Every African, particulary in their various homelands is a criminal, a tyrant, corrupt and ungovernable - every African, except Ikhide and his saviors, of course, in all your writing! Nothing good can come out of Africa by Africans. The only good that arrives Africa must be from some foreign impulse and from "donors" of such charity. It is your children and mine, born in exile, who are "networking" and connecting to some hogwash abstraction who will save Africa because they have "technology" which the African is incapable of conceiving. Come off it! No, it is not I who inhabits despair - it is you, the new African Conrad, who helps to manufacture despair and the African vortex. By the way, thank you very much for being so generous as to make me a "writer." I think, Ikhide, you're full of shaving cream. Please no vex for me too. I'm also telling you to your face what others are not telling you; otherwise, I'd not be Obi Nwakanma, who nonetheless, has no need to be a 'prolific' writer.
Obi Nwakanma
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 18:01:24 -0700
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
To: rexmarinus@hotmail.com; usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Obi,
I see I have rattled you, don't worry about it, you should have left me alone in the first place, I have a lot of energy and the mouth to go with it. My works stand on their own merit. I am happy to be judged by others including you on my works as a writer and an activist. I have thought about these things and I have done something about them. But I have evidently struck a nerve among those of you who deign to speak for Africa and so the insults I take as a badge of honor. I am focused on making sure that the orthodoxy of discourse on Africa does not continue to do harm to Black Africa. Many African writers and to a lesser degree you are one (you haven't really written much, if anything of substance lately, so I am being generous) have turned what Achebe roundly addressed and confronted decades ago into chic laziness. Find your own voice, you will never be Achebe. If we want to hear about Conrad, we have Achebe's essays to read ad nauseam. As for the rest of you wannabe Achebes, we are tired of it and we are letting you know it. Besides, you and your unctuous oversabi friends do not speak for Africa. Africans are speaking for themselves and leaving you behind in the dust of your contrived culture of despair. Obi, you would be nowhere today without your white saviors; it is hypocritical for you to eat from them at night and yell racists at them in the daytime. Your mouth is dripping salmon and you are protesting that the oyinbo man has not fed you lately. Yhou are better than that..
The gatekeepers of Black Africa are losing their relevance and it is a good thing. I am happy to engage in a respectful conversation about what we should be doing productively as African intellectuals in making a difference in Africa. Right now, all I hear is bullshit cobbled into pretty essays or stapled into books. I am not impressed. Obi, no one needs you or Teju Cole to tell us what your white saviors are doing to you, we all know, and the constant whining is getting tiresome. You all get off your high horses and do some work for a change. Everything else is laziness, pure and simple. Don't be angry with me; I am just telling you to your face, what others are too gentle to tell you. I wouldn't be Ikhide otherwise.
- Ikhide
Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com
Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
To: xokigbo@yahoo.com; usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 8:37 PM
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
"Now go back to feeding off the white man's trough before I descend on you some more ; -) Next?"
-Ikhide
Ikhide, how very mawkish, this talk about gouging and burping from the "white savior complex." But I do get your point: those who have their snouts in the "whiteman's" salvific trough should never talk about the white man, not to talk about railing or raging against the situation of Africa. I hear you, and I understand that your snout is buried in that trough and has been there for a while, which compels you to silence or to 'signifyin,' but not me. I'd like to tell you, in pure Clintonesque style, that I have never even inhaled anything from the whiteman's trough not to talk of tasting or smoking it. But now that I know what you're smoking, I shall be more circumspect with you on those matters:-)
But let me just note that in my view, Africa must never be about charity - particularly of the "gbanjo" variety. Those, who like you, pin the right to speak on handing second-hand Lakers T-shirts or even bootleg theories and technologies to Africa must remember as Achebe says, that Africa is ultimately about people. Africa is not unheimlich. That is where Achebe, Teju Cole and the likes of me agree, and why we must continue to speak in spite of your attempts to make monstrous any argument against Teju Cole's "whiteman's salvation complex" or whatever you call it. It may be tat we must pay more attention to the "Ikhide complex" - the constant use of the guise of the story, speechification, metaphor, tropes of discourse, to turn Africa, its world, and its history as the uncanny of modernity and postmodernity. The "whiteman's slavation complex" simply habituates the "Ikhide mind" to the idea that Africa remains the space of mindlessness and chaos - the absence of reason and civic capacity - not with the Africans in Africa. But continue to crouch in the missionary position, and blame and rail against "speakerly" Africans. Keep your snouts in the trough of charity and be silent from gouging the leftovers that make you so certain, so elated and so complacent. Me, I prefer to look the gift horse steadily on the mouth, lest it speaks like Balaam's beast.
Obi Nwakanma
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; rexmarinus@hotmail.com
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:41:33 +0000
Obi,
Many thanks for your thoughtful response. I have no doubt that Teju Cole speaks volumes for many in your generation of African writers who have been caught flat footed and winded by the powerful winds of change sweeping the world.
While, you, Teju and I are feeding off of the African Victim Industrial Complex writing pathetic scrolls about the white man's perfidy, my 12-year old son is using his smartphone to link up with millions of other kids to do something for a child. THAT, sir, is new, get used to it.
Obi, there may be hope, the children you and I and Teju have muttered about for fat pay from our white friends may get relief, wow. You sit there fed and burped by the White Industrial Savior Complex and explode in rage when they offer a drop of water to your children.
Did you and Teju just wake up to the notion of a White Savior Industrial Complex? Then you are both incredibly narcissistic - because you are all happy graduates of that generous dysfunction.
If you have never given a black child a t-shirt you have no moral right to rail against a white man for giving said child a Lakers t-shirt.
Now go back to feeding off the white man's trough before I descend on you some more ; -) Next?
- Ikhide
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-Ikhide
Ikhide, how very mawkish, this talk about gouging and burping from the "white savior complex." But I do get your point: those who have their snouts in the "whiteman's" salvific trough should never talk about the white man, not to talk about railing or raging against the situation of Africa. I hear you, and I understand that your snout is buried in that trough and has been there for a while, which compels you to silence or to 'signifyin,' but not me. I'd like to tell you, in pure Clintonesque style, that I have never even inhaled anything from the whiteman's trough not to talk of tasting or smoking it. But now that I know what you're smoking, I shall be more circumspect with you on those matters:-)
But let me just note that in my view, Africa must never be about charity - particularly of the "gbanjo" variety. Those, who like you, pin the right to speak on handing second-hand Lakers T-shirts or even bootleg theories and technologies to Africa must remember as Achebe says, that Africa is ultimately about people. Africa is not unheimlich. That is where Achebe, Teju Cole and the likes of me agree, and why we must continue to speak in spite of your attempts to make monstrous any argument against Teju Cole's "whiteman's salvation complex" or whatever you call it. It may be tat we must pay more attention to the "Ikhide complex" - the constant use of the guise of the story, speechification, metaphor, tropes of discourse, to turn Africa, its world, and its history as the uncanny of modernity and postmodernity. The "whiteman's slavation complex" simply habituates the "Ikhide mind" to the idea that Africa remains the space of mindlessness and chaos - the absence of reason and civic capacity - not with the Africans in Africa. But continue to crouch in the missionary position, and blame and rail against "speakerly" Africans. Keep your snouts in the trough of charity and be silent from gouging the leftovers that make you so certain, so elated and so complacent. Me, I prefer to look the gift horse steadily on the mouth, lest it speaks like Balaam's beast.
Obi Nwakanma
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; rexmarinus@hotmail.com
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:41:33 +0000
Obi,
Many thanks for your thoughtful response. I have no doubt that Teju Cole speaks volumes for many in your generation of African writers who have been caught flat footed and winded by the powerful winds of change sweeping the world.
While, you, Teju and I are feeding off of the African Victim Industrial Complex writing pathetic scrolls about the white man's perfidy, my 12-year old son is using his smartphone to link up with millions of other kids to do something for a child. THAT, sir, is new, get used to it.
Obi, there may be hope, the children you and I and Teju have muttered about for fat pay from our white friends may get relief, wow. You sit there fed and burped by the White Industrial Savior Complex and explode in rage when they offer a drop of water to your children.
Did you and Teju just wake up to the notion of a White Savior Industrial Complex? Then you are both incredibly narcissistic - because you are all happy graduates of that generous dysfunction.
If you have never given a black child a t-shirt you have no moral right to rail against a white man for giving said child a Lakers t-shirt.
Now go back to feeding off the white man's trough before I descend on you some more ; -) Next?
- Ikhide
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
Sender: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:35:17 +0000
To: <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
ReplyTo: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
Ikhide, I wonder which part of the "articulated priorities" riles you. I'm also a bit nonplussed by your take on the title, quite so because, I think it does express sufficient irony and pathos apt to Teju Cole's incisive analysis. Perhaps you'd wish him, as you often do, to dismantle and cuss out Africa, blame the land and people, and maintain the cynical lie that these images retailed serially about that sad continent where the left-handed charity industry is most lucrative is indeed all of Africa, and be left without scrutiny. I think Teju speaks volumes and does speak for me in many regards. I suspect your ambivalence is driven by a need for a particular kind of tepid correctness that would serve very little to the spirit of the article. All those who take a stand for that continent must, to quote the erudite Okpewho, call it by its proper name. Teju Cole does. He does more: he takes a steady look at this phenomenom of the "white savior Industrial Complex," a more contemporary equivalent of the "whiteman's burden" and puts a name to it. His articulated priority? to point to the powerful implication of misrepresenting an entire continent by the powerful imagery created in powerful lands where Africa remains a strange alchemy off horror - terror, war, tyranny, disease, and death, and nothing else . Teju speaks for many of us in his "articulated priorities."
Obi Nwakanma
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:47:43 -0700
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; Ederi@yahoogroups.com
--
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Obi Nwakanma
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:47:43 -0700
From: xokigbo@yahoo.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Teju Cole on "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; Ederi@yahoogroups.com
"One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012, Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have done it under the banner of "making a difference." To state this obvious and well-attested truth does not make me a racist or a Mau Mau. It does give me away as an "educated middle-class African," and I plead guilty as charged. (It is also worth noting that there are other educated middle-class Africans who see this matter differently from me. That is what people, educated and otherwise, do: they assess information and sometimes disagree with each other.)"
- Teju Cole in The Atlantic Mobile, March 21, 2012
Thoughtful fairly nuanced piece; the condescending title does the burden of his essay a disservice. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it but I couldn't disagree more with the essay's articulated priorities.
- Ikhide
Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com
Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide
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