Believe me, I am so delighted by this post. This is the kind of other-perspective I desire. I will take it that I have my balancing perspective to Dr Agazie's critique of the cultural economy of burials in Nigeria.
However, permit me to make one or two further clarifications on my pedagogical strategy in teaching philosophy in a Nigerian context.
1. What I exactly don't do is to burden the already confused and biased minds of the first year students of philosophy with tomes and thoughts of not only 'dead white men' but also dead black men. This is what I used to teach. Believe me, I know it is counterproductive. Students come especially to the humanities with thoughts of how the courses translate into future cash value. "'I think/i feel, therefore I exist' won't get me a job with Chevron or Glo mobile."
2. Just like I hinted earlier, most students of philosophy in Nigeria are 'accidental' students in the sense that they mostly find their ways into the philosophy dept because of inability to make it into law (especially), economics, political science and other disciplines. So, your first day in the PHILOSOPHY 101 class is usually hostile and condescending. I can't afford to complicate that further, and add to their fear of a perceived four-year misery, by teaching immanetism, empiricism, rationalism, Hegelianism, idealism, materialism, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Awoism, transcendentalism, Trigritude, racism, Zikism, Afrocentrism, and other cold and frightening stuffs like that. They would eventually meet these 'isms' in other courses. Zik and Senghor and racism, for instance, are waiting for them in Social and Political Thought in Africa. I require a strategy that would resonate with their senses of who they are in the universal, national, social and cultural scheme of things. A strategy that would give them an idea of what philosophy universally is. Some kind of theoretical mould by which they can come to front not only philosophy questions and issues in subsequent courses, but also significantly by which they can confront and cope with life and existence.
3. This is where reason and reasonableness come in. Here, my conception of reason does not at all participate in the Reason/Emotion dichotomy you insinuated. I am aware that limiting reason that way would constitute a subtle affront to nascent and grasping minds of the reluctant learners. Rather, my use of reason is broader enough to recognise that burial, for instance, is a matter that appeals to our sense of cultural beingness. Yet, reason must sift utility and cogency. Of burial and other ceremonies vis-a-vis other relevant issues in life. When you task those who are struggling to make ends meet some 350 thousand naira each as contribution to a burial coffer, you place a heavy burden on them which even the education of their children does not place on them. A postgraduate student of mind lost her dad recently and was asked by the family to donate close to 300 thousand naira as her own share of the burial expenses. I became livid with indignation! The lady is barely managing to pay her tuition! For me, reason and emotion merge into reasonableness. What I call the 'irrational' derives from the lack of moderation of the two. Even reason can be excessive!
The Yoruba say: 'Ki otun we osi, ki osi we otun, ohun ni owo fi nmo' (when the left washes the right and the right washes the left, the hand becomes clean).
Adeshina Afolayan
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
From: Biko Agozino <bikozino@yahoo.com>
Sender: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2012 15:25:07 +0000 (GMT)
To: <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
ReplyTo: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ON PHILOSOPHY AND REASONABLENESS
| Prof., Make you no mind Shina. Na so he dey teach his students? No wonder they tell him that philosophy cannot bake bread. How can he introduce philosophy in Nigeria without citing Azikiwe on Renascent Africa or Awolowo on The People's Republic and expect the students to find the rehashing of Bertrand Russel's boring tome relevant? How can the introduction to philosophy in Nigeria begin and end by quoting dead white men and expect Obasanjo not to dismiss the discipline as a yeye subject. Especially when one of the white men quoted by Shina, David Hume, was notoriously racist in his empiricist methodology that assumed that since he could not see any evidence of contributions to civilization by Africans, therefore Africans must be inferior to Europeans - a key flaw in empiricism that forced Rene Descartes to adopt the alternative methodology of rationalism on the ground that his senses might deceive him but his reason would be a more reliable guide to truth. Shina, when you cite Socrates, do you inform your students that according to Cheikh Anta Diop, Socrates and most of the Greeks studied in Africa in some cases for more than 40 years to learn the philosophy for which Socrates was condemned to death for teaching 'foreign ideas' against Greek superstitions? You implicitly recommend the rationality of Cartesianism but failed to add that Leopold Senghor critiqued that when he said that reason was Hellenic while feeling was Negroid; an alternative to 'I think, therefore I am' would be 'I feel, therefore I am' - an alternative that implicitly supports the racist assumption of white supremacists that Africans are irrational, a line of thought that forced Soyinka to dismiss Negritude with the quip: The Tiger does not profess its Tigritude, to which Senghor responded with the retort, the tiger does not profess because it does not talk; but maybe the Tiger talks all right, it might be that both Soyinka and Senghor do not understand Tigerese, as Derrida might argue. Shina, there is a grave danger in privileging rationality as the only human virtue especially when it comes to death and dying. Such a philosophy was directly implicated in the Nazi holocaust as Zygmunt Bauman demonstrated in Modernity and the Holocaust and linked to the abominable policies of 'starvation as a legitimate weapon of war' that cost more than 3 million Nigerian lives in 30 months as Achebe demonstrated in There Was A Country. There is an old Igbo saying that when they carry the corpse of someone else, it appears that they are carrying the carcass of a dog. Reason without morality, love and compassion paves the road to genocide. Given that human beings are not simply rational computers without emotions, it makes sense that the bereaved should be allowed to grieve for their beloved without being dismissed as irrational. Ancient Africans in Kemet invented the scientific method of embalming their dead to preserve them for life in eternity and even built majestic pyramids for their dead kings. We may quarrel with them about the opportunity costs of spending such fortunes to bury their dead when they could have built universities and research labs to advance knowledge but we cannot deny that the respect that they gave to their dead was a measure of the love that they had for their living nor that their funeral science has allowed us to get glimpses of classical African civilization today. When you compare the cost of burial ceremonies that are completely commercialized and out-sourced to undertakers or morticians in capitalist Europe and North America with the relatively average low-cost of funerals in Africa, it will make you wonder who is more reasonable about costs of dying which reflects the disparities in the costs of living in societies suffering from affluenza compared to the starvelings of the world. I do agree with your implicit suggestion that we must all encourage our people to invest more than they spend on funerals by, for example, asking for funeral donations to be sent to NGOs in the name of the dead rather than squander scarce resources on Aso Ebi and Owambe. Your explicit recommendation that we spend more on education than we spend on burials is in order too and maybe we already do that: just add up the total costs of educating children for twelve or more years and you will come to the conclusion that education costs indeed outstrip burial costs in most cases even though the government should step up and take more of the responsibility of paying the costs for educating our people with public funds. The practice in industrialized countries is for most people to buy insurance policies to ensure that their loved ones would not be burdened with funeral expenses while the government writes a cheque from tax funds for the education of the population in the first 12 years of education. Call it rational or emotional if you like, we need to encourage our people to invest more of their income in savings that will take care of rainy days and encourage more compliance with taxation to raise more revenue to be spent on public education. Of course kleptocracy is more of a problem for our people than the political economy of the volume of tears shed for their departed beloved. Yes, let us cut our coats according to our clothes but we must not continue to teach our students that our people are somehow less human by buying into the white-supremacist ideology that Africans are more emotional than Europeans: White people also have feelings - they feel hungry and feel angry and feel happy too. And Africans are also very rational despite our compassion for the suffering of others, a compassion that the neurotic may scoff at but would never erase because it is part of what makes us human. Biko --- On Sun, 2/12/12, ebere onwudiwe <eonwudiwe20@yahoo.com> wrote:
|
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
No comments:
Post a Comment