| 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:
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