Since we are taking about Africa and Africans, I thought we may enjoy taking a look at the work of a great African, the Ivorian, Bernard Dadié and his poem about being black. The poem is titled "Je Vous Remercie Mon Dieu" (I thank you God" or "I thank you my God.")
I thank you God, for making me black,
for making me the sum of all pains, putting the world on my head.
I took the world to the Centaur
And I have carried the world since the first morning.
White is a color of circumstance
Black if the color of every day
And I have carried the world since the first evening
I am happy with the shape of my head
shaped to carry the world
Satisfied with the shape of my nose which has to smell all the scents of the world
Happy with the shape of my legs
Ready to run all the steps of the world
I thank you God, for having created me black
for having made me the sum of all pains
....
I am still happy to carry the world,
happy with my short arms
with my long arms
with my thick lips.
I thank you God, for having created me black,
I carry the world since the beginning of time
And my laughter on the world,
at night
created the day
Je vous remercie mon Dieu
Je vous remercie mon Dieu, de m'avoir créé Noir,
d'avoir fait de moi
la somme de toutes les douleurs,
mis sur ma tête,
le Monde.
J'ai la livrée du Centaure
Et je porte le Monde depuis le premier matin.
Le blanc est une couleur de circonstance
Le noir, la couleur de tous les jours
Et je porte le Monde depuis le premier soir.
Je suis content
de la forme de ma tête
faite pour porter le Monde,
Satisfait
de la forme de mon nez
Qui doit humer tout le vent du Monde,
Heureux
de la forme de mes jambes
Prêtes à courir toutes les étapes du Monde.
Je vous remercie mon Dieu, de m'avoir créé Noir,
d'avoir fait de moi,
la somme de toutes les douleurs.
Trente-six épées ont transpercé mon coeur.
Trente-six brasiers ont brûlé mon corps.
Et mon sang sur tous les calvaires a rougi la neige,
Et mon sang à tous les levants a rougi la nature.
Je suis quand même
Content de porter le Monde,
Content de mes bras courts
de mes bras longs
de l'épaisseur de mes lèvres.
Je vous remercie mon Dieu, de m'avoir créé Noir,
Le blanc est une couleur de circonstance
Le noir, la couleur de tous les jours
Et je porte le Monde depuis l'aube des temps.
Et mon rire sur le Monde, dans la nuit, créé le Jour.
Je vous remercie mon Dieu, de m'avoir créé Noir.
Bernard Dadié
"But I will say that in your rush to make that point there is something you cannot avoid but which you forgot: Center vs. Periphery. We can forget about the West, Africa etc, and just say that in every system, however you define it in your way, ask yourself: what is the CENTER and what is the PERIPHERY? With such a model or framework of analysis, you cannot avoid the basic question that is justice oriented not literary in nature, that I am pushing. In that respect, whether Africa existed then or it did not, is not the main issue of concern methodologically. Rather, the question is: was there a system in place, whether it was political, empire or trading etc.? Then ask who were those at the center and those at the periphery. You can be in Rome and still part of the periphery. St. Augustine was in a geographical periphery of Roman Empire but in terms of his social location, he was part of the establishment way of thinking. My point here is of different interest to just literary analysis as you are doing." Samuel ZalangaNow, I get you. You weren't subscribing to the vulgar, revisionist notions of "Africa" as synonymous with contemporary ideations of Africa. You were only calling attention to Saint Augustine's position in relation to the Roman ideological power structure. That makes perfect sense.But I am not a literary analyst, nor did what I wrote even quality as literary analysis. Gloria earlier called me a linguistic determinist. LOL! Where do you all conjure up these labels from?Farooq KperogiFarooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
402 Bartow Avenue, MD 2207Social Science Building 22 Room 5092Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. WillOn Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 12:18 PM, Samuel Zalanga <szalanga@gmail.com> wrote:However you want to define him, Saint Augustine, was a scholar that really in his religious work defended the empire's position by raising the cost of what you might call heresy. That is my main point. He did not identify with periphery, and that is what I am most interested in. In any any system, there is a center and there is the periphery. You not need to waste time on nomenclature. As to where Africa started, and who was or is African, personally, while that may be of great literary interest to you, my main concern is what difference does it make to life for the ordinary human being today.Is it just a conversation about the origins of this and that and that is all? There are many examples of this type of analysis. For instance, there was a time I looked at the history of the meaning of the term Negro or Negroid. It is quite interesting. But whatever the original meaning of the term, does that past original meaning has any bearing on the existential challenges of the people of today? These are two different things. That is why I do not fine the literary part you are pushing worth investing much time and energy. But if it can be shown to me that it has serious bearing on the existential struggles of the ordinary people of today, then I will change my mind. I think there is a way that could be done instead of just keeping the analysis at just some entertaining literary analysis. If the analysis does not have bearing on the existential struggles of people today, then it is a fine interesting scholarly discussion that remains a privileged of a small elite who can afford to engage in such discussion without being concerned whether the discussion has immediate bearing to the challenging issues that millions face today. Just a different perspective.On another note, I am sorry to say that, on sociological grounds, no one in this forum, including you, can claim that his or her mind exactly captures the sentiments of people during the time of St. Augustine or any past generation. We are just reconstructing, and therefore gazing. We may have the facts, but our mind is not the same as theirs. We will never be able to reproduce the original context, because meaning is not derived just from the bare facts but also from the framework we impose on it, and the framework we are using today is not exactly theirs. I do not say that to you out of disrespect to you or anybody, but just a sociological warning, that no literary scholar can claim some special divine power beyond the fact that he or she is socially constructed. We are attributing meaning based on our standpoint. What you are claiming is too much as it makes me feel that you are saying others are ordinary mortals and they commit literary errors but you have this divine grace that enables you to talk about Augustine's time or the historical past ou made reference to without doing some gazing. You were there. But even if you were there, you and others were there, you could still see things differently. Will that be gazing or are always gazing but some literary scholars have transcendent view of reality that they never gaze.Our minds today have been constructed under different historical and social conditions.Although you accuse others of gazing etc, which is a kind of fine language that literary scholars make use of, but from my perspective it does not go far. Such a reasoning is poor in terms of sociological and anthropological understanding of society and the human mind. The only way the point you are making about others gazing and therefore committing a fatal error that you do not is tenable is if there is evidence that you are situated in a place or context where in your case because of your deep understanding you are not gazing at that historical past, or when you do it, your mind is clinically free from any intellectual influence of future or present generations, or if it is influenced by future generations, you have been able to clinically separate those so that the comments you are making is based on the true mindset of the time of Augustine. That is not sociologically tenable Sir. It maybe a nice literary usage, but given what we know so far in the social sciences about the social construction of reality, as a socially constructed human being, you cannot say that when you talk about St. Augustine or Africa then, you are not gazing at it. Just have some humility sir. Admitting that does not mean that you do not have wisdom to share with us.To claim otherwise, is to fail to appreciate how knowledge is socially constructed and because social contexts vary, and are historically situated, you cannot make a transcendent claim about your analysis as you seem to be suggesting.I have no quarrel about all the facts you mentioned about Africa, this or that and at what period. My main point is that intellectually, St. Augustine's theology and scholarship did not represent the periphery which was his location in terms of the geography of the Roman Empire.For more information on the social construction of knowledge and reality which influences my response to you, i share with you a classic in the sociology of knowledge by Berger and Luckman, which has implication even for the study of religion. Here is the link:http://www.sociosite.net/topics/texts/berger_luckman.phpYou made an interesting point about binary unit of analysis, which is a very valid one. I have no disagreement with you about the West and the rest of us which is binary as you have said. J. M. Blaut's "The Colonizer's Model of the World" highlights exactly the point you are making in that, there concentric circles of being Western. Anglo-Saxon claim superiority over other westerners which means that the West even if it exists is not monolithic. Wallenstein's work also discusses the uneven nature of Western development. I have always argued along that same point that you are making.But I will say that in your rush to make that point there is something you cannot avoid but which you forgot: Center vs. Periphery. We can forget about the West, Africa etc, and just say that in every system, however you define it in your way, ask yourself: what is the CENTER and what is the PERIPHERY? With such a model or framework of analysis, you cannot avoid the basic question that is justice oriented not literary in nature, that I am pushing. In that respect, whether Africa existed then or it did not, is not the main issue of concern methodologically. Rather, the question is: was there a system in place, whether it was political, empire or trading etc.? Then ask who were those at the center and those at the periphery. You can be in Rome and still part of the periphery. St. Augustine was in a geographical periphery of Roman Empire but in terms of his social location, he was part of the establishment way of thinking. My point here is of different interest to just literary analysis as you are doing.The idea of center and periphery is helpful in analyzing power relations and domination in any context, not just between units of analysis but even in "Within" unit of analysis comparison. I can remain agnostic as to the name of the unit of analysis, Western, Africa, Maghreb etc, whatever. Just tell me the unit as you you want to believe it in your analysis, and then leave the rest to me, I will delve and find out who are at the center and who are at the periphery and what are the consequences of these types of locations, both socially and geographically.So while I see the point you are making there, still it does not allow anyone to escape the question of the sociology of knowledge. Show me any political system, economic and social system in any part of the world and at any time in history, and I will show you the center and the periphery. Whether that center is the West, Lagos, Darkar, Khartoum, Beijing, Athens etc, I care less about the historical period, and the nomenclature. My scholarly interest in what you wrote transcend the specifics of your claim, which I have no problem with.Samuel--On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 9:26 AM, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:"Saint Augustine was physically an African as described by others, no about that, but when you look carefully at his work and intellectual engagements, his mind was rooted in the West and the dominant Western tradition."This analysis is guilty of what literary and historical scholars call presentism, that is, the fallacy of gazing at, and interpreting, the past through the lenses of the present. As I pointed out in my first intervention, when Augustine was born in the 4th century "Africa" meant a completely different thing from it means now. Africa was a province of the Roman Empire and was geo-politically and culturally indistinguishable from what we call the West today. The "West-versus- the-rest" binary that informed your characterization of Saint Augustine's prodigious oeuvre as some version of an "African brain drain" fails to take into account the fact that Africa, at the time, did NOT stand in contradistinction to the West; it was a part of the West.By Saint Augustine's own admission, which can distilled from his autobiographical writings, he was ethnically Phoenician (which he called "Punic") on his paternal side, and Latin was his mother tongue, although some people say his mother appeared to be descended from the Berber people. He was a Roman citizen by birth, culture, and education. He was also physically identical with other Romans.Again, "African" is not always synonymous with "Black"; it certainly wasn't during the time of the Roman Empire. So there is absolutely no contradiction between his West-centric scholarship, if one may call it that, and the fact of his being "African."I understand the sentiment that conduces to the desire for black people in so-called sub-Saharan Africa to want to identify with the "glories" of Roman Africa, which wasn't black in the sense we understand this term today, but it won't hurt to tell ourselves the truth.Saint Augustine was an African quite all right; but he was an African when Africa wasn't "black," when Africa was a province of the Roman Empire and an integral part of its cultural, linguistic, and intellectual traditions. Let's never forget that.Farooq KperogiFarooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
402 Bartow Avenue, MD 2207Social Science Building 22 Room 5092Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. WillOn Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 8:50 AM, Samuel Zalanga <szalanga@gmail.com> wrote:"as indicated in the text by Farooqkperogi, St. Augustine is an African philosopher/theologian ...."There is more to say about that statement. In the study of development economics, some scholars argue that there two types of brain drain. The first one which is most, is when educated people from a particular region leave the region to work in other parts of the world where they spend most of their productive years, knowing fully that much of their contribution will go to the community they have immigrated to and not their homeland. Some think this is not a serious problem now be an issue of what they call "brain-circulation" and the home remittances or migra-dollars that such people provide which presumably contribute to the development of their homeland. The evidence on some of this is unclear at best.Thus the most dangerous type of brain drain is among those people who live in their home country but either because of the nature of their foreign education and nature of work, the parameters and contours of their conversations and preoccupation is with their colleagues in the Western world or with the dominant western tradition. They do not identify primarily in their thinking with the masses of people that are close to them in Africa or anywhere in the Third World. So even though their physical bodies are in this case in Africa, they work in Africa and make decisions about Africa, their mind, and intellectual engagement is with the outside world i.e., the Empire. They are the worse type of brain drain because they are occupying strategic positions of leadership but orient their position to the outside world and often taking sides with the dominant forces of their time.Saint Augustine was physically an African as described by others, no about that, but when you look carefully at his work and intellectual engagements, his mind was rooted in the West and the dominant Western tradition. He was profoundly influenced by neo-platonism. And when he wrote, The City of God, he was making a case for the Roman Empire. Many thought Christianity was superior to Roman religion. But then it turned out that, when Rome embraced Christianity officially, then the fortune of the empire started turning negative, ultimately resulting in the defeat of the Empire by Barbarians. People then started saying that it was because the Romans abandoned their gods that was why the gods got angry with them and punished the empire by abandoning it, leading to its difficult, when hitherto the empire was described as eternal. His book was to respond to this way of thinking. This is a philosopher and theologian in the inner-sanctum of Roman Empire and Western Debates. He was not talking as someone representing the periphery.Bottom-line: There are a lot of fascinating things about St. Augustine, both in terms of his philosophy and theology, but the parameters and contours of his thinking even though he lived in Africa was in the Western mainstream. One could not say that like liberation theologians, the primary focus of his work was to root his dominant categories of thinking in an African reality. He was responding to debates in the Empire and he took sides with the Empire. If he did what liberation theologians did in Latin America with their scholarship, he would have constituted a serious threat as both the Protestants and the Vatican reacted negatively to liberation theology as it was an attempt by people in the Global South to think theologically for themselves, using their own context as primary focus.By the way the analysis in the city of God seem to be somewhat conservative with the struggle against injustice here and now as things will continue being bad because we live in the city of "man." True perfection comes in the City of God, i.e., by and by pie in the sky kind of. The world is a temporary place for us. This is just like when Billy Graham responded to Martin Luther King's I have Dream speech by saying the kind of reconciliation that Martin Luther was expecting will not happen until after Christ's return because of a particular approach in theology known as dispensationalism, which says that things would be getting worse here, and will only change fundamentally after Christ second coming. If you have that kind of belief system, it encourages you to tolerate injustice and avoid organized social action that will bring about meaningful change. This is one reason why some Christians are very conservative and opposed to social reform or organized social action.Samuel--On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 12:25 PM, Mario Fenyo <MFenyo@bowiestate.edu> wrote:as indicated in the text by Farooqkperogi, St. Augustine is an African philosopher/theologian ....
Mario
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Farooq A. Kperogi [farooqkperogi@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, February 07, 2016 10:48 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - re- A Take on Pan-Africanism and Freedom From Religious and Cultural Colonisation
"There is the fictitious, 'pan-African' Africa that includes the Mafghrib and Egypt. You and I know that this is not the 'real Africa'. I used to live in Carthage, Tunis. These people don't really regard themselves as Africans at all. They only do so when it is convenient and advantageous for that moment. They see themselves first and foremost as Arabs. How many Arab Africans, for example, are in this 'African Dialogue Forum'?"
"So, when we lump everyone as being 'African', we aren't saying very much. In Egypt, of course, some 10 percent of the people are Christian; a people under savage persecution centuries – it's a miracle they have survived."
"No, we should never speak as if Christianity is alien to Africa. In fact, it is more indigenous to Africa than it is to the West. The Desert Fathers of Egypt were the first to institute the practice of monasticism."
"The whole of North Africa was predominantly Christian. St. Augustine of Hippo lived in a village across the Algerian border. He came to study in the seminary in Carthage. Together with St. Ambrose and other Africans, they literally laid the foundation of the Latin Church. The old cathedral in Carthage, which has been turned into arts theatre by the Tunisian government, has produced no less than 3 black Popes."
Dr. Mailafia,
In the above excerpts you made several logically indefensible and historically inaccurate claims, which I will address in this rather long post. Please bear with me. Essentially, you chose to delegitimize the Africanness of north Africans only if counting them as Africans gives Muslims a numerical advantage over Christians, but embrace their Africanity (and even attribute "blackness" to them--as if Africanity and blackness are necessarily mutually inclusive), if their geo-cultural identity can be invoked to confer notions of indigeneity and deep historical roots to Christianity in Africa.
Let's start with your notion of "fictitious, 'pan-Africa that include the Mafghrib [sic] and Egypt," which is putatively not the "real Africa." Well, contrary to your claims, the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania) is actually the "real Africa." Dark-skinned people in so-called sub-Saharan Africa are actually latecomers to the appellative universe of "Africa." As I've pointed out in several of my writings, from where most of this post is drawn, the term Africa is a holdover from present-day North Africa's association with the ancient Roman Empire of which it was a province.
"Afri" is the ancient Latin word for the amalgam of Berber peoples that inhabited (and still inhabit) what we today call North Africa, and "ca" is the Roman suffix for "land" or "country." So "Africa" is basically Latin for "land of the Afri." In other words, it means land of the Berbers. It was never used to refer to the people of "sub-Saharan Africa" until relatively recently. After its Arab conquest in medieval times, the entire area comprising western Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and eastern Algeria was also called "Ifriqiya," which is the Arabic rendering of "Africa." Ifriqiya's capital was Qayrawan (Kairouan) in what is today central Tunisia, where you said you lived and worked. (Under Roman rule, Carthage, also in present-day Tunisia, was the capital of the Africa Province of the Roman Empire).
So, the countries and people you excluded from your notion of what constitutes "real" Africa were actually known and referred to as "Africa" and "Africans" for more than a thousand years before European colonizers decided to arbitrarily extend the name to our part of the world. So we are the "fake" Africans--going by your racialist and historically impoverished understanding of Africa.
There were no Arabs in Africa (or what we now call "North Africa") until about the 8th century. The indigenous groups there, as I said earlier, are broadly called Berbers. Romans called them Africans, ancient Greeks called them Libyans, Medieval Europeans called them Moors, and they call themselves some version of the word Imazighen. They converted to Christianity from about the 2nd century but became Muslim from about the late seventh century after the Umayyad invasion of the area. Nonetheless, it was the invasion of the Banu Hilal in the 11th century that completely Islamized and Arabized them. But there are still many Berber cultural revival efforts (collectively called Berberism) fighting to either reclaim (such as in Tunisia and Algeria) or preserve (such as in Morocco and Libya) what the people consider the lost or dying glories of their pre-Islamic past.
And, in any event, as I pointed out, Arabs have lived in the continent of Africa in large numbers since about the 8th century and have been referred to as "Africans" hundreds of years before us. We even have Nigerian Arabs, called Shuwa Arabs in Borno State, who have lived in that part of the country since at least the 12th century, that is, hundreds of years before there was a country called Nigeria. Would you, Dr. Mailafia, consider Shuwa Arabs "fake" Nigerians since, by your definition, Arabs are not "real" Africans? I would hope not. Arabism and Africanity are not mutually exclusive categories since contemporary Africanity isn't an essentially racial or ethnic category. You can be an African and be an Arab. The late Professor Ali Mazrui even invented a term for that kind of dual yet fluid identity: Afrabian.
Skin color can't be a criterion, much less the sole criterion, for "admitting" people into the "real" Africa, because the "purebred" Berbers of Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, etc. (the original or, if you will, the "real" Africans) are actually, on average, "white" if we can, for now, arbitrarily deploy blue eyes and blond hair and pale skin as markers of "whiteness." Several studies have, in fact, shown that there are more blue-eyed and blond-haired people among the Berbers of North Africa than there are among southern Europeans (that is, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, etc.). The Berbers, additionally, have more genetic proximity with Europeans than they have with black Africans.
Malcolm X had a poignant, life-changing experiential encounter with the complexity of what it means to be African when he visited Ghana in 1964. In his impassioned Black Nationalist speeches in America, Malcolm had always made glowing and approbatory references to "Algerian revolutionists" (whom he, of course, regarded as Africans) who fought the French to a standstill. "In Algeria, the northern part of Africa, a revolution took place," he said in his famous October 10, 1963 speech called Message to the Grassroots. "The Algerians were revolutionists; they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France: to hell with France. They wanted some land, not some France. And they engaged in a bloody battle."
So when he went to Ghana (his first visit to Africa), a year after this memorable speech, he sought and got audience with the Algerian ambassador to Ghana. The ambassador turned out to be what Malcolm recognized as a white man—he had blue eyes, blond hair and pale skin. But he was a Berber, a "white" African. And he was just as zealous about pan-African unity as Malcolm was. But in the course of their conversation, the Algerian pointedly asked how a person with his kind of racial and geographic origins fitted into Malcolm's exclusivist and racialist constructions of Black Nationalism. The formulations of Black Nationalism—and Africanness—that Malcolm had cherished crumbled.
How could someone who looked exactly like the people he called "white devils" in America be an African—and a "black nationalist" at that? This was particularly epiphanous for Malcolm because, not long before this encounter, he had repulsed a conscientious white American girl who'd told him she wanted to join his Black Nationalist movement to fight white racism. He later confessed that his brusque rebuff of the white girl's sincere offer to join his movement for racial justice in America was one of the greatest regrets of his life.
So, if "whiteness" (or "non-blackness") is, in fact, original to the conception of "Africanness" why is the idea of a white or Arab African anomalous? Well, the converse can also be asked: if whiteness is original to the conception of Africanness, why is it now always necessary to modify "African" with "white" if a non-black African is being identified?
The truth is that the notion of a non-black African strikes the mind as counter-intuitive precisely because over the last centuries, the term "Africa" has undergone tremendous notional transformations. In the popular imagination, Africa now evokes the image of "blackness." The people to whom the name originally referred (whom we would call "white" by today's racial classification) have now been effectively marginalized from its contemporary ideational universe. There is perhaps no greater proof of this reality than the fact that present-day North Africans themselves concede ownership of the name Africa to black people, as you, Dr. Mailafia, testify. Our blackness, it seems, has stained the "purity" of their name. Now, they would rather be "Arabs" than "Africans." The trouble, though, is most Arabs don't recognize North Africans as Arabs, but that is a topic for another day.
A few years ago, I sat close to a Tunisian lady during a flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Malabo in Equatorial Guinea. In the course of our chit chat, she told me she was "going to Africa" for the first time. I was balled over. When I reminded her that her country, Tunisia, in fact, used to be the symbolic and administrative nucleus of "Africa" for several centuries before black people became a part of Africa, she agreed but insisted that black people have now rhetorically appropriated Africa. Well, at least, unlike Dr. Mailafia, she is not unaware that Arabized Muslim Berbers in North Africa are the "real" Africans, not "Black Africans" in so-called sub-Saharan Africa.
But the point of my intervention is not to make a case for some romantic geographic African unity or to minimize the well-documented cases of anti-black racism among Arabs about which my friend, Moses Ochonu, has written persuasively, but to call attention to the arbitrariness—-and power—-of naming. As Ali Mazrui once reminded us, even our name was named for us by Europe. "Europe chose its own name, 'Europe,' and then chose names for the Americas, Australia, Antarctica, and even Asia and Africa," he wrote in the book Collected Essays of Ali A. Mazrui. "The name 'Africa,' originating in North Africa as the name for a sub-region, was applied to Africa as a whole by European map-makers and cartographers."
And when has membership of the USA Africa Dialogue series become the litmus test for Africanness? Perhaps you would also make the case that black African nations that are not represented on this list--and they are many--have lost their claim to Africannness?
And why do you have a need to call attention to the 10 percent Coptic Christians in Egypt who are actually racially "white"? Are you suggesting that their Christianity immunizes them from your arbitrary, ahistorical de-Africanization of contemporary Arab and Muslim Egyptians?
It is interesting that the same Maghrebi people you de-Africanized a few paragraphs ago because they are Muslims are the same people whose ancient Christianity you are invoking to show that Christianity is not alien to Africa, even going so far as to make the (intentionally) false claim that the cathedral in Carthage "has produced 3 black popes." You have gone from restoring the "Africanity" of Maghrebi people (the way you seem to have done for Copts of Egypt--apparently because of their Christian faith, which you share with them) to actually attributing "blackness" to them (which you appear to think is an infrangible essence in the notion of Africanness).
Well, Pope St Victor I (the 4th pope who reigned from 186 to 198), Pope St Miltiades (the 32 pope who reigned 311 to 314), and Pope St Gelasius (the 49th pope who reigned from 492-496) weren't black; they were Berbers who were almost physically indistinguishable from Romans. They had straight hair, sharp noses, pale skin, and all other markers of "whiteness" by today's racial typologies.
Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor who reigned from 193 to 211, was also born in what is today Libya. Although many "black nationalists" like to refer to him as "black," because he was African, he wasn't black; he was just African. Blackness and Africanness are not one and the same thing.
Finally, you can't have your cake and eat it. You either consider North Africans as not "real Africans" (which is laughably nescient) and not use their history to lend notions of indigeneity to Christianity in Africa or regard them as Africans and accept that their addition to West African Muslims gives Muslims a numerical edge over Christians on the continent. I frankly didn't know that there were more Muslims than there are Christians in Africa until Oga Cornelius pointed it out. It really means nothing--frankly--but when an otherwise smart and well-traveled scholar like you wants to twist the facts to give comfort to your emotions, it behooves those who know to intervene.
Farooq Kperogi
--
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
402 Bartow Avenue, MD 2207Social Science Building 22 Room 5092
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 4:15 AM, Obadiah Mailafia <obmailafia@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Cornelius Magnus,
Greetings! Thanks for your commentary on Christianity, Islam and Christianity. When you say Africa's population is 53% Muslim and only 38% Christian, with the rest 'animist', I am compelled to ask, which Africa are we talking about? There is the fictitious, 'pan-African' Africa that includes the Mafghrib and Egypt. You and I know that this is not the 'real Africa'. I used to live in Carthage, Tunis. These people don't really regard themselves as Africans at all. They only do so when it is convenient and advantageous for that moment. They see themselves first and foremost as Arabs. How many Arab Africans, for example, are in this "African Dialogue Forum"?
So, when we lump everyone as being 'African', we aren't saying very much. In Egypt, of course, some 10 percent of the people are Christian; a people under savage persecution centuries – it's a miracle they have survived. I once invited to Tunis my 'father' and mentor, Rev. Dr. Johann Boer, a Dutch-Canadian missionary who served in Nigeria for 3 decades. I took them to the ruins of the ancient churches and monasteries of Carthage. He was moved to tears. People do not easily remember their history. The whole of North Africa was predominantly Christian. St. Augustine of Hippo lived in a village across the Algerian border. He came to study in the seminary in Carthage. Together with St. Ambrose and other Africans, they literally laid the foundation of the Latin Church. The old cathedral in Carthage, which has been turned into arts theatre by the Tunisian government, has produced no less than 3 black Popes.
No, we should never speak as if Christianity is alien to Africa. In fact, it is more indigenous to Africa than it is to the West. The Desert Fathers of Egypt were the first to institute the practice of monasticism. There are also the monopysite Ethiopian Copts, with their rich tradition of spirituality centred in the mysterious rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and the ancient Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, where it is believed the most sacred object in Jewish spirituality, the Ark of the Covenant, is kept.
Edward Wilmot Blyden was a remarkable man – regarded by most of us as "the father of pan-Africanism". He wrote about religion in the new Africa with great wisdom and sensitivity. But I have no evidence that he expressed a 'preference' for Islam over Christianity. He was a preacher and evangelist with a Doctor of Divinity degree. What he really said, to my understanding, is that we in Africa must evolve a modus vivendi between Mazrui's "trinity" of Christianity, Islam and Traditional Religion. I believe that Ethiopia and Eritrea (minus the dictatorship) offer a model of peaceful c0o-existence between Christianity and Islam. In Senegal, Mali and Cote d'Ivoire, Muslims and Christians live largely peacefully. They see themselves as Africans and they have no illusions regarding the bersekeries that Arabs have committed against the African people – and still do in Mauritania and Sudan.
Christianity a 'minor Jewish sect'? This must be the understatement of the millennium.
The claim of Jesus Christ is a serious, overwhelming claim that has been confronted by the greatest geniuses of all time. No book comes close to the Bible in its sheer record of publication. Christianity is the fastest growing religion in the world. The Chinese are turning to Christianity in their millions. He claims to be Lord. Ironically, each time Christians are persecuted and killed in northern Nigeria, Sudan, and Egypt and elsewhere, more converts are won. People are beginning to ask, between the killers and those who preach love and peace, who are the genuine children of God?
The writer C. S. Lewis says that claim is totalitarian and does not give room for any equivocation. He must either be a lunatic, liar or Lord. What we think of Him makes all the difference to our spiritual destiny.
There is a new movement to bring together Jews and Christians in a new oecumene that will hasten the return of Yeshua ha Mashiach. It is a movement that reached its most dramatic moment when the most revered Rabbi in Israel, Rabbi. Avadiah Yosef, Chief Rabbi of the Sephardi in Yerushalaim, revealed that he had seen the Mashiach. He revealed Him to be Yeshua. World Jewry can never be the same again.
The Christians of Africa do not buy into the redneck fanaticism which sees Christianity as being in mortal, antinomian conflict with Islam. No. Muslims are also God's children. Anyone who hates Muslims or anyone else – including lesbians and homosexuals – does not know the Lord. Of course, we know that He hates sin and everything that grieves the Holy Spirit. But He loves the sinner and He weeps for the lost. He came mainly for them and it is for them that the whole universe groans for the revelations of the children of God, to echo St. Paul.
Christianity, far from being a 'minor Jewish sect', is the most audacious spiritual message in the entire history of Humanity. It is not a religion – forget this Europe and their cupidity in turning the Light into an ideology of power, domination and racial bigotry. There is only one question: What did you do with Jesus Christ? Did you walk in His spirit or did you crucify Him once again? Christ is being re-crucified today by Fulani marauders in the Middle Belt of Nigeria, by Boko Haram, by ISIS and the lot. But then, very soon – sooner or later -- everyone will have to face Him to answer that question.
Obadiah Mailafia
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On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 5:49 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com> wrote:
--The Africa of which she speaks so powerfully is the second largest and second most populous continent in the world.Today, 53% of Africa's population is Muslim whereas Christianity in Africa can boast of 38% of the continent's population. Of course, Islam is winning the battle for converts – and this, despite its ban on the consumption of al-cohol and perhaps because of some of the reasons outlined in Edward Wilmot Blyden's Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race – in which he expresses a personal preference for Islam basically his claim being that Islam is a little closer to the natural ( fitra) and naturally closer to African cultures and the so called African way of life, to begin with.
In context, this is from her (the speaker's) preamble, on her way to "there must be a cultural revolution" and the continent coming into "revolutionary consciousness":
"The other weapon that imperialism uses which is a challenge for Pan-African Renaissance is religion. Some of us, you know, with all our rhetoric – it's shocking, we are still deeply Christian, deeply Muslim, deeply this, deeply everything but African. …" (not clear… some laughter from the crowd) "And we can't understand as long as you continue to see and to understand God and the creator through the lenses of another race you will never know freedom in your life – never! Religion is a cultural understanding of the spiritual…."etc etc. etc.
It's not as if Christianity (a little Jewish sect) was ever imposed wholesale wherever it travelled from Jerusalem – to Rome, Turkey, Ethiopia, Egypt and the rest of North Africa (before the advent of al-Islam) and what's now known as the West, its wholesale conquest of Europe, North and South America etc.….
There is this something known as contextualisation . Nowadays, the mass is celebrated in the Igbo Language because Christianity has adapted/ been adapted to its various localities in Africa South of the Sahara, although I do not know the extent to which it has been adapted in e.g. Nigeria to accommodate the exigencies of local traditional cultures (such as polygamy) that flourished before the advent of Christian mission – Christian missionary zeal attempting real-time fulfilment of the great command
This little practical item that occurs in this Sabbath's Torah portion has been acted upon in Nigeria for example with tremendous zeal, but perhaps not as Torah induced zeal?
Shemot 22: 17 in my Torah: "You shall not permit a sorceress to live"
It's Exodus 22.18 in the Christian Bible
The stone Chumash not reads: "17. A Sorceress. The court-inflicted death penalty applies equally to male and female sorcerers, but the verse uses the feminine because this activity was more common among women ( Rashi)…. By definition, sorcery is an attempt to assume control of nature through the powers of impurity and thus to deny God's mastery. "You shall not permit to live." This is a stronger expression than simply stating that she incurs the death penalty. Those who engage in sorcery are extremely dangerous to others, because of the corrosive and enticing nature of such an activity. Regarding such great dangers, the Torah exhorts the nation to root them out zealously. (Ramban) "
In Africa people identified as "witches" are being rooted out by the death penalty / summary executions without trial ( as was the historic case of Christianity's extermination of alleged witches in Europe from the Middle of the fifteenth century
On the whole, m
issionaries have tended to regard indigenous African religions as witchcraft…
What I don't know and have never investigated is whether or not the death penalty for people who are alleged to be witches in Nigeria is a pre Christian and pre-Islamic cultural tradition – and arising from that , with or without a "cultural renaissance" or revolutionary consciousness " what is to be done ? Is it high time that that these executions were brought to an end?
Only asking this one of a dozen questions,
Cornelius
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