Bro Shina,
Thanks for sharing your pedagogy with us. I truly admire the work that you and colleagues back home are doing to train the next generation of scholars. Keep it up.
In solidarity with you, I see my critique as supportive of your work. If I may, here are a few more thoughts on your further clarifications:
1) The perception of Philosophy as unmarketable is not an exclusively Nigerian dilemma. Many departments of Philosophy in the US have closed shop because they cannot attract enough students. Given the increasingly heavy costs of higher education, students are being rational in their choices of course majors. One strategy that works to help less popular courses is to introduce Minors and double Majors that would allow a student in Management Studies or Law to Minor or double Major in Philosophy or Religion. Do you have such options in your institution?
2) I think that you should re-examine your pedagogy carefully to avoid the suggestion that Zikism, Nkrumaism and Awoism, for example, would be too esoteric for Nigerian freshmen in Philosophy and so you have to spoon-feed them the 'universal philosophy' (by which you mean Eurocentric thought) while they will have to wait for the upper levels to learn African Social Thought, apparently local rather than philosophical. That distinction between the raw and the cooked, the oral and the written, the acoustic and the digital, the bad and the good is as old as Orientalism and should no longer be sustained given our awareness of the origin of universal philosophy in classical African civilization.
3) Please show more respect to your students and do not share their confidential information with the world wide web the way you did. I doubt if there are many women majoring in Philosophy in your classes and when it comes to graduate students, the women will be even fewer. So when you told us that a female graduate student of yours told you something very personal, you basically outed her.
a) Do you think that her identity would remain protected after her class mates read your story and do you think that she would feel no embarrassment that you broadcast it on the net? She may even have shared this in a class discussion or she may be a born-again who defiantly says that you should let the dead bury their dead but you could have told us that a colleague faced such challenge without telling us that it was a she and a graduate student of yours. I sense that you feel superior to your students just as you see Europe as being morally superior to Africa but we are actually equal human beings.
b) Did you really buy the story? Maybe she was just staging you for a 419. I hope that you did not 'borrow her' the money. As you know, students invent all sorts of cock and bull stories to ask for extensions on assignments because the grandmother woke up from the dead and then died again and the funeral is next week again.
c) Assuming that it was true that a mere student was billed 300,000 for the golden casket for her father's funeral, I still think that it is not as expensive as the amount of money that the father spent training her. Assuming that it costs 5,000 a month to feed, house, clothe and educate a child (conservative estimate) it will cost 60,000 a year and in ten years, that would be 600,000. I agree that it is unfair to expect a student who is struggling to find her fees to go and do ashawo and fetch 300,000 but as you probably know, they would not kill her if she simply told them, as the Igbo do, that whoever has the money should do the funeral for their father because he was not killed by the first son or first daughter.
Finally, bro Shina, let us know areas where you challenge existing knowledge instead of simply striving to make Africans feel inferior and expecting your students to love it. For instance, when you talk about your pedagogy, do you encourage your students to critically examine that concept of pedagogy to see that it is a historically abusive and oppressive process of 'child' rearing that is completely inappropriate for the education of adults? See Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, and you will probably reconsider the use of pedagogy to describe what you do. I have since decided to use the concept of Afrogogy of the Privileged following my critique of Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Keep the fire of the love for Philomena blazing, bro. You are doing valuable work and my critique is designed to help us make it better.
Biko
--- On Sun, 2/12/12, shina73_1999@yahoo.com <shina73_1999@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: shina73_1999@yahoo.com <shina73_1999@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ON PHILOSOPHY AND REASONABLENESS
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Sunday, 2 December, 2012, 17:37
Oga Biko, 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:
From: ebere onwudiwe <eonwudiwe20@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ON PHILOSOPHY AND REASONABLENESS
To: "usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, 2 December, 2012, 4:04
Dear Adeshina, "Remember Obasanjo's (in)famous statement about useless disciplines and miseducation in Nigeria." What did OBJ actually say about useless disciplines and miseducation in Nigeria? Thanks, ebere
From: "shina73_1999@yahoo.com" <shina73_1999@yahoo.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2012 7:42 PM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ON PHILOSOPHY AND REASONABLENESS
Recently, Toyin Adepoju posted an article by one Dr Agazie titled 'Where Do We Bury You When You Die?'. When I read this wonderful essay, it moved me on many fronts. The most immediate is that I am now able to finally identify a kindred spirit in my personal and professional fight against rampant irrationality and illogicality in the Nigerian society. I am not assuming that I am the only crusader against these menace; I am simply saying that this is the first powerful article that will come to my notice on an issue I have felt uncomfortable about for so so long. Second, I now have a document I can recommend to my first year philosophy students on an indigenous, and indeed wasteful, issue that most people, even the educated ones, take for granted in the name of tradition. Permit me a pedagogical comment. I have been teaching Introduction to Philosophy for some few years now. My strategy for teaching is occasioned by the notoriety Philosophy has acquired over the years as, well, one of the 'useless disciplines' (if not the most 'useless', apart from Classics and maybe history)that has nothing to contribute to personal and national development. Remember Obasanjo's (in)famous statement about useless disciplines and miseducation in Nigeria. The manner I was taught philosophy which I inadvertently adopted only leads to further obfuscation and perplexity for the students who are already confounded on what impact philosophy will have on their life prospects. However, I got the benefit of a 'reeducation' from a beloved late Professor who understood the dynamics of instructing the students on what philosophy means and how it impacts their lives. This is what I now teach. I begin with eliciting from the students their preconceived ideas and fears about philosophy: philosophy is esoteric and abstract; philosophers are atheists and therefore will surely go to hell; philosophy does not bake bread; etc. I tell the students to hold these preconceptions at the background of their minds and compare them with what they will get to learn about philosophy. I then go on to confront the professional philosophers' fondness for the standard definition of philosophy as having no definite definition by saying that philosophy over the centuries has acquired two standard conceptions: Philosophy as worldview and Philosophy as critical thinking. Philosophy as worldview derives from the etymology of the word-philosophia-or the love of wisdom. And that wisdom translates into the comprehensive sets of ideas and beliefs about what we consider to be important about life and existence. At the first level, humans are homo philosophicus-philosophers who don't have the time to philosophise or have lost the requisite curiosity to instigate their inquiry to the humdrum of human existence. At the second level, we critically confront our ideas and beliefs which we all have as a compass to cope with and navigate life and existence but we hardly worry about their intellectual foundation. Socrates said 'an unexamined life is not worth living'. It is at this second level of conceiving philosophy that I bump into the many accepted and digested or undigested assumptions, ideas and beliefs of the students about themselves, their cultures, their relationship with others or with their society or with the state, and so on. This is the most interesting aspect of the course because I then switch my role from being a teacher to an enlightened questioner or a Socratic interlocutor, probing and interrogating. The issue of burial, marriage and other traditional issues, as well as political issues about justice and questions like 'why must I obey the state', often surface with lots of outcries! It doesn't take long for the issue about critical thinking to devolve into the idea of reason and reasonableness, and philosophy's significant role in challenging man's favourite natural and cognitive advantage. Yet, like David Hume recognised many years ago, man is more a slave to the passions than to reason! Burials, say, move us much more than driving ourselves to the limit to educate our children. Some of us are familiar with the Yoruba 'owambe' stereotype. How, for instance, does this unreasonableness interact with the supposed capacity of the informal sector of the economy which is saddled with the task of alleviating the suffering of the people in the hands of a lecherous state? You begin to see my delight with Dr Agazie's article. It can become a point of debate for the students, a perspective on reasonableness. What is missing now is the balance, a counter-perspective on, maybe, why the 'tradition' of wasteful spending on such matters is necessary and inescapable. Why most of us are beholden to such 'traditions' even in the face of overwhelming evidences. I await someone on this forum who can help me play the devil's advocate. Adeshina Afolayan Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN -- 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 -- 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
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