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

Brother Ken. 

My point of view on Cameroon is informed by a radical Congolese women and a Cameroonian  I met during my graduate school days. Most of the Cameroonians I have met are radical like me, but that just means we are moving in different circles. My radical African comrades don't typically share their views with whites. But my point wasn't about what Cameroonians think about of colonialism (what Cameroonians think on the matter is certainly important). You said that from your experience Cameroonians don't generally hate Germans. Fine. Nevertheless, we must be clear that, although the methods varied, Europeans were uniform in their brutal oppression of African people. I must insist on that "absolute" assessment. Germans committed genocide in Namibia, but you aren't likely to find a generalized hatred of Germans in Namibia. 

We Africans are much too forgiving and our thinking is overly influenced by the perspective of liberal whites. This is precisely the sort of thinking that Biko was challenging.  By comparison it seems to be that Jews are far less forgiving of Germans and, moreover, you certainly will not find Jews naming their children after Nazis. 

But, again, we must be clear that Euro names and languages were imposed on African people. Missionaries schools sometimes violently imposed Euro names and languages. After several centuries of slavery, apartheid, Jim Crown, lynchings, and colonialism, Eurocentric schools, and so on, Africans on the continent and abroad have come to internalized their oppressors outlook (hence the Cameroonians named "Adolf")--even as we have consistently challenged these impositions (these instances of ambiguity as it relates to African agency are, I think, are more defensible than looking for ambiguity in Euro institutions). 

Respectfully, I must note, too, our relative subject positions. Your status as a long-time scholar of African Studies is, itself, an outcome of colonialism, ongoing white privilege, and the white control of the production of scholarly knowledge about Africa. I, on the other hand, grew up in the ghettoes of Los Angeles. For generations the vast majority of African Americans have been taught in white-controlled institutions that gross stereotypes about Africa. In other words, as Malcolm X pointed out in the 60s, African Americans have been taught to hate their heritage ( "self-hate"). Likewise, even today, many of the educational institutions in Africa are Eurocentric (My Nigerian wife studied in Nigeria and Salone through secondary school. Her ethnic group, Yotti/Bali/Chamba, straddles Nigeria and Cameroon). 

kzs

On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:25 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

correction. meant to say germans left after world war one. no one really remembered them, and bizarrely enough, whenever folks evoked them, it was with positive tones. probably the bad was forgotten, but there were memories of the train and water systems that people evoked in positive terms. i had a colleague whose name was adolf. germans were not hated in cameroon.
but it was so long ago...

On 1/1/14 4:58 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

kwame
i know a lot of cameroonians, and over 40 years. maybe what you write has some truth to it, but at the same time it seems really really out of tune and out of touch with the people i met, the students i taught, the country i came to know. it is an absolute statement, whereas the people i met never expressed themselves about their country in such terms.
there is one exception to my statement that i do remember: once i had students over, and we were talking about things like dante, which i believe i was teaching. a student expressed bitterness about how they all had been taught that their ancestors, prior to the coming of the missionaries, were supposedly all burning in hell. they asked me if i thought that was the case.
well, i didn't perhaps go as far as i might in saying that i found the idea of an afterlife ridiculous. for one thing, most people i met, including the students, were believing and practising christians, and i didn't want to insult anyone. but i did say that no one could state with any certainty what was to come after death.
they recognized the perniciousness of a teaching that presented the world in such terms.
it was almost 40 years ago. and i had read mongo beti's Main basse. but the anger beti expressed there did not seem to match the world i encountered for my 2 years in yaounde, and everything since has led me to the same conclusion. on my return
some years ago, i found some changes, but again nothing at all that would correspond to a view of "murderous white terrorism." the exception, of course, was ahidjo's attempt to eradicate the upc, which he did with the french. it was terrorism. but not a white terrorism. i'd call it postcolonial, in the sense of what the postcolonial world has come to embody. your last statement about missionary schools being a propaganda arm of brute violence, all i can say is that i would want to hear from the cameroonians who attended those schools. i had many students from the west, and they were actually proud of their schooling. perhaps the problem i see is that you are conflating time periods too much.  my students were all educated after independence; the germans left during world war II. and as for brits slaughtering cameroonian leaders, from what i know i'd say that was truer of the french than the brits.
i'd be curious to know if i am wrong, if cameroonians share your view.
ken

On 1/1/14 11:59 AM, kwame zulu shabazz wrote:

Cameroon is a good example of why any effort to claim that colonial institutions were "ambiguous" in their outcomes is deeply flawed. To make that argument work, you have to remove missionary schools from the larger project of vicious, bloody, murderous white terrorism. The Germans and Brits slaughtered many Cameroonian leaders whilst destroying or distorting indigenous institutions. Missionaries schools were imposed--the propagandist arm of brute violence (but its important to note that violence as "disciple" was a common feature of the schools).

kzs

On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 3:30:05 PM UTC-5, John Mbaku wrote:

Ken:

There is a critical mass of Cameroonians who were educated in Kamerun & Germany (1884-1914) and in Cameroun and France (1916-??) who actually became quite attracted to the cultures of these European countries. Whether you can call them assimilationists or not is subject to further analysis. However, many of them "preached," primarily but not exclusively, through their writings, the benefits of European civilization to their fellow Cameroonians/Kamerunians. All of these Cameroonians/Kamerunians were educated at missions schools and then sent to Europe for further education by the colonial authorities. Many of them, however, eventually became disillusioned with European civilization or the so-called "European cultural ideal" when they realized its opportunistic application in the colony. For example, Rudolph Douala Manga Bell, who took over from his father as King of the Duala in 1908 in what was then the Germany colony of Kamerun, read law in Germany and returned home to govern Duala using a similar approach as that existing then in Germany. Given his sound understanding of the German legal system, he believed that the law was on his side and that of his people when the colonial government attempted to expropriate their lands and make them available for various activities associated with occupation. In fact, the land expropriation was illegal under the terms of the annexation treaty of 1884 between Germany and the Duala peoples. Unfortunately, his legal protests to the Reichstag in Berlin were unsuccessful and he was subsequently executed by the colonial government in 1913 for treason.

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 10:30 AM, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

thanks john
i had to look Pouka up. can we say he is now mostly forgotten? how rare it is to come across assimilationists, though before the 1950s, before the dream of independence started to become a reality, there was, unquestionably, accommodationism, if not total assimilationism. in the 1930s and 1940s how many of the great figures to emerge, like birago diop, not to mention senghor etc, married french women after getting their educations in france and joining the colonial service. and yet, to think of birago diop, one of the great figures in my mind of 20th century letters, as an assimilé seems far too reductive.
anyway, thanks for the response
ken


On 12/31/13 11:46 AM, John Mbaku wrote:

Louis-Marie Pouka

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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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Kwame Zulu Shabazz
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"Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear." Paul Robeson