edit: from "opposed." read imposed.
On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 11:23 AM, kwame zulu shabazz <kwameshabazz@gmail.com> wrote:
Brother Elias,This is the crux of the matter. The verb "provided" is passive and connotes, wrongly, in my view, the idea that it was the ambiguity within the colonial logics/systems/institutions that facilitated African agency. I have three responses to that claim. First, Africans were creating these liberartory spaces beginning with the very earliest encounters with Europeans well before missionary schools. And that process continued outside of and alongside of the schools during the colonial era. Why? Because Africans didn't need missionary schools to convince them of their humanity and their equality. Second, it was Africans themselves (not all of them elites, by the way) who opposed their will on colonial structures which led eventually to liberation. Perhaps part of the problem is that liberation is being invoked from the perspective of the outdated "Great Men" historiography that has severely critiqued and mostly abandoned by historians. Lastly, it is "colomentality," much of it derived from missionary education, that is holding Africa back.
You said:
Africans were provided a space to stand, speak, strategize, and liberate themselves, even if that was the goal of missionaries.
kzs--On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 10:50 AM, EB <ebongmba@gmail.com> wrote:
I read the article, followed the link and read Oliver Tambo's speech delivered at his inauguration as Chancellor of Fort Hare University. Both scholars cited in the piece. Richard Elphick an imminent historian of South African history and Christianity, and Olufemi Tiawo, a great African thinker, recognize the problems colonial missions created and faced. This is an old debate which early African theologians addressed in the 1960s. It was taken in a new and robost manner in Volume 1 and 2 of Of Revelation and Revolution by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff; works in which they meticulously argued that Christian missionaries failed to live their own logic of a faith which prioritized individual freedom because in the case of South Africa the project of modernity was brutally compromised by apartheid, racism, and an unbridled capitalist project, even as it promoted modernity and its institutions in a system which the missionaries found themselves at odds, but were also collaborators and shared a similar world view of modernizing Africans; hence the numerous projects the missionaries started in education and "godly medicine."--
Throughout my graduate school career, I was confronted with literature which articulated the link with colonialism and religion, and as some one studying theology and philosophy, it made me appreciate black theology and the theology of liberation. Yet I was also convinced that out of that negative praxis by missionaries, Africans were provided a space to stand, speak, strategize, and liberate themselves, even if that was the goal of missionaries. At the Parliament of World Religions in Cape Town in 1999, Nelson Mandela spoke of the work religious communities did in South Africa and pointed out that when he grew up the only schools where blacks could get an education was in the mission schools.
Recognizing the ambiguity of these institutions is not an apology for apartheid and colonialism and I do not think those discuss these issues are interested making an apology for white supremacy of slavery, ideals and practices that are be definition indefensible. These discussions offer us an opportunity to probe the past and recognize how far we have come as a continent.
Elias Bongmba
On Monday, December 30, 2013 7:18:26 AM UTC-6, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:Nonsense. Sometimes "nuance" winds up being a thinly veiled apology for white supremacy. Next, we will see a "nuanced" interpretation of slavery. This is, in fact, repackaged racism from earlier era masquerading as scholarship.kzs
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THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
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EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice!
I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937
--
THE NEUTRAL SCHOLAR IS AN IGNOBLE MAN. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy." Fredrick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered" (1854).
---
EVERY ARTIST, EVERY SCIENTIST MUST DECIDE, NOW, WHERE HE STANDS. He has no alternative. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of national and racial superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. This struggle invades the former cloistered halls of our universities and all her seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist elects to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice!
I had no alternative! - Paul Robeson, speech about the Spanish Civil War at the Albert Hall, London,on 24th June 1937
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