Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: WILL NAMIBIAN BONES HAUNT GERMANS FOREVER?

Brother Ken:

Cameroonian poet Louis-Marie Pouka.

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 8:06 AM, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena <KAParr@ship.edu> wrote:

Oga Ken:

I have not put chronology before causality. My simple point is that with regard to political conscientization, mine came of age in the late 1970s when I had great opportunities to read and study several works of literature in English mostly written by Africans. This does not dislodge the Negrutudian movement from the radar of anticolonialism, not its periodizing or holistic significance.
Absolutely, we may even peel back the reels of anti-colonial literature beyond the timing of Negritude. What about the works of  W.E. B Du Bois, Kobina Sekyi, J. E. Casely Hayford, etc. that parodied Westernism and empowered the globalizing  pan-African project? Anyone like me who had his secondary school education in West Africa and took literature in English at both the Ordinary and Advanced Levels can attest to the fact that we rigorously studied the ideas of Negritudian scholars in the works of Wole Soyinka's Poems of Black Africa and Norman Shapiro's Negritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean. Also we applied some of the earliest commentaries on Africa literature by Eustace Palmer, Adrian Roscoe, etc. that deal with such anticolonial themes framed around the efflorescence of Negritude. Our secondary education then was broader and pointed to the world of great challenges as well as possibilities of moments of excellence. This is not to say that I am a specialist in African literature, etc. In the end, I married history cum sociology, call me an academic polygamist, not to forget that literature in English was my first love affair. Certainly, I may have to defer to your conclusions regarding Negritude, etc. since it is your field. Then again, I have not put the caravan before the camels; my riddle is about when and where I joined the caravan. Thanks for these wonderful discussions, if not reminiscing, that gives me the latitude to recall my formative boyhood years.

Kwabena

________________________________________
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] on behalf of kenneth harrow [harrow@msu.edu]

Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2013 12:15 AM

To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: WILL NAMIBIAN BONES HAUNT GERMANS FOREVER?

yes, kwabena, but for 99% of those who consider african-european
ideological relations, the psychology of eurocentric denigration is
usually attributed to colonial domination, and it is resistance to that
in the literature, from negritude on, that is taught.
how rare it is to find those who can appeal to something prior to
senghor! and in a location other than in europhonic literature.
that's why i evoked lat dior, someone elevated in senegal to the status
of an anti-french hero in the 19th century.
i think what you cited as shaping your consciousness was true for many
many of us, when the names fanon and cabral etc were evoked in analyzing
the literature you described. it was as though that was the starting point.
even if it was, in the sense of the anticolonial struggle for
liberation, it was just one point on a much longer continuum, as you
state. but that longer view is rarely provided.
ken

On 12/30/13 8:17 PM, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena wrote:
> Oga Ken:
>
> Great points, but you moved the goal-posts: no one is imagining that anti-hegemonic worldviews began in the 1970s! I was only narrating what shaped my consciousness as a high school student in the late 1970s, not writing about the watersheds and cresting points of all the anti-hegemonic constructions and proponents in world history. Absolutely, anti-hegemonic, etc. structures go back to human beginnings, and one could go as far back as the Neolithic Era when surplus production sustained social, gender, and state formations.
>
> Kwabena
> ________________________________________
> From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] on behalf of kenneth harrow [harrow@msu.edu]
> Sent: Monday, December 30, 2013 7:56 PM
> To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: WILL NAMIBIAN BONES HAUNT GERMANS FOREVER?
>
> thanks kwabena
> this is wonderful to hear, your experiences. from the novels you cite,
> it was the 1970s, post-independence period. if on the one hand we want
> to imagine that no one was really able to conceptualize an
> anti-hegemonic, anti=eurocentric set of understandings that early, i
> have to go back to the 1930s and 40s for negritude to find that indeed
> there was such thinking, in extraordinary terms, by cesaire and senghor
> and late many many others--beginning first, i would say, with the
> radical thinkers and creators in the caribbean whose look back was at
> slavery, unlike in africa where the look back was at colonialism.
> anyway, a more encompassing look back would have to go to people like
> lat dior or others celebrated in resistance to european conquest. you
> can tell me their names in ghana or nigeria, but surely there was an
> influence on people like nkrumah from links to resistance within ghana?
> i know nkrumah was also influenced by american black thought, but what
> about african?
> sembene likes to celebrate that notion of an african based resistance as
> we see in his films like emitai and ceddo, and even where he
> romanticizes, he is reaching for another thread that has to be known,
> and you historians need to provide us with the details.
> people like me are versed in euro-language texts, so the depth of our
> historical knowledge is limited to what has been translated or mediated
> to us.
> (your reference to wright is also fascinating)
> ken
>
> On 12/30/13 7:22 PM, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena wrote:
>> Oga Ken,
>>
>> This topic is getting interesting. And this is why I have urged Opanyin AB Assensoh to write his memoir!
>>
>> As a young teenager in a missionary-based secondary (high) school in the late 1970s, to be precise, the Presbyterian Boys' Boarding School at Legon, established in 1938, we were taught to see the world through the tinted lens of rigid Euro-Christian worldview that debased Africanity and extolled Western traditions.
>>
>> Based on what you said about Mariama Ba and Nwapa's accounts, I too idealized, if not romanticized the "Christian missionary" education I had as the best in the world. Let me make clear that there were no white missionaries; in fact, African agents of Mission Christianity were in charge. Again, the type of education we had was no less secular than what "public" (non-missionary) schools experienced.
>> The difference was the rigidity of the Euro-Christian worldview that informed our education on the campus. But even then, by time we completed high school (advanced level) some of us had already began to ask new questions about the nature of Euro-Christianity, colonialism, the postcolonial projects of nation-building, etc., especially after devouring the works of Beti, Oyono, Ngugi, Achebe, Laye, Abrahams, Aidoo, Armah, etc.
>>
>> Let me add that one book that truly re/shaped our consciousness was Richard Wright's Black Boy, his Bildungsroman, or a story of his coming of age in America. And it was not as if our childhood mirrored that of Wright's racist and poverty-ridden environment. Of course, one can allude to the strict religious traditions in the Wright's household and his quest for knowledge beyond the confines of family and school as some of the influences we harvested from his Bildungsroman. And thanks to Adu Boahen's Topics in West African History, we were able to rethink our histories even as some of our great teachers wove their Eurocentric webs.
>>
>> In sum, this may be a personal journey: I think the education we had even in the 1970s was rooted in Western epistemological traditions that stressed the greatness and indispensability of the West and white institutions. Of course, others have used African "agency" to explain the ways that Africans have come to unlearn the brainwashing that underscored missionary education in Africa. But the question is how many Africans have had the chance to use that agency to discard white supremacy - the nursery rhyme of the best comes from the West? It is written all over the African psyche, indeed, what Adu Boahen cauterized as the worst effect of colonial rule.
>>
>>
>> Kwabena
>> ________________________________________
>> From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] on behalf of kenneth harrow [harrow@msu.edu]
>> Sent: Monday, December 30, 2013 3:26 PM
>> To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
>> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: WILL NAMIBIAN BONES HAUNT GERMANS FOREVER?
>>
>> when i read about missionaries in novels like une vie de boy or mongo
>> beti, le pauvre christ, etc, going back to the 1950s, they are presented
>> as naive dupes at best, usually not too mean, but ineffectual and out of it.
>> when i lived in cameroon in the 1970s, those who had been educated in
>> the high school run by the irish in western cameroonian believed it was
>> the best school in the country (anglophone). before i could pass
>> judgments on something like that, all i would want to know is what those
>> who actually had been to those schools would say.
>> and if i remember nwapa and mariama ba's accounts of their lives as
>> schoolgirls in an earlier period at missionary schools for girls, they
>> were extraordinarily loving in their memories of their teachers.
>> i wouldn't dare generalize from these few examples of novelists, but
>> they are rich portraitures of figures important in the lives of major
>> novelists, and their memoirs count in the whole picture.
>> let's see--the image is much worse in ngugi's the river between; more
>> mixed in dangarembga's nervous conditions, etc
>> ken
>>
>> On 12/30/13 1:49 PM, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena wrote:
>>> Fellow scholars who have been debating the pros and cons of missionary education may use the attachment as a minor footnote to illuminate the ways that the European predatory presence couched in Christian missionary interventionist meta-narratives damaged the African psyche! Did Africans need Euro-Christianity to come into their own and considering the massive weight of Christianity in Africa, have Africans come into their own? It is time to ask new questions.
>>>
>>> Kwabena
>>>
>>> ________________________________________
>>> From: Kwame Opoku [k.opoku@sil.at]
>>> Sent: Monday, December 30, 2013 1:02 PM
>>> Subject: WILL NAMIBIAN BONES HAUNT GERMANS FOREVER?
>>>
>>> I THOUGHT THE ATTACHED MIGHT INTEREST YOU, BEST WISHES,
>>> KWAME.
>>>
>> --
>> kenneth w. harrow
>> faculty excellence advocate
>> professor of english
>> michigan state university
>> department of english
>> 619 red cedar road
>> room C-614 wells hall
>> east lansing, mi 48824
>> ph. 517 803 8839
>> harrow@msu.edu
>>
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> --
> kenneth w. harrow
> faculty excellence advocate
> professor of english
> michigan state university
> department of english
> 619 red cedar road
> room C-614 wells hall
> east lansing, mi 48824
> ph. 517 803 8839
> harrow@msu.edu
>
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--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu

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