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

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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