Calm down. As some wives sometimes tell their husbands in the middle of a heated argument: "You know that shouting like that is not good for your heart!" You are either taking me or taking your self far too seriously. Even Jesus did not have this kind of discussion with his brothers, the Pharisees.
I'm aware that Ogbeni Kadiri can do no wrong and that is why he is for ever correcting everybody about everything. He of course is also aware that his 50-50 horizontal perceptions are not in decline and that one day, not gradually but suddenly it and he, all vanity, all pedantry, his concrete and his abstract thoughts will turn to dust and rot. I am fully aware and know that you want to argue about that too. And so will mine.
The history of the slave trade, the history of the Black man's struggle in America and African American history, politics, music, literature and the political from its beginnings up to Ta-Nehisi Coates - don't we all know it or am I going to start arguing with you or him or Malcolm Little about a petty word or two, about his mistakes, their mistakes and mine – every step of the way?
How petty-minded can you be! There you go again, chattering on like an angry old lady about some minutia of detail and waving your impotent school teacher's walking stick at me – aiming for correction and the wayward's mending of his ways. Say astagfirullah or despair! Please do not hope to get anywhere with me. In the several blips of ongoing time, the cross-fire in course of a single dinner conversation I guess ( yes I do) that you wind back the tape to review the wording of this and that take in the rapid flow of an exchanges of ideas, to edit what was wrongly said and what defied your passing grasp of Aristotelian logic and the grammarian's passion for subject-verb agreement and disagreements . That way, even small talk conversations wouldn't get anywhere "You said ", "but you said"etc. when I'm talking and thinking whole pages at 100 mph, how many times are you going to stop/ interrupt and rewind to get the hang of petty unimportant distinctions of jive-ass nigger and his rap ? How would dialogue progress or do you consider yourself an overarching, divinely appointed teacher sent to this earth to conduct Socratic dialogues or even un- Socratic ones?
Well, I was raised by a less Gradgrindian regime and have never been in the Nigerian army. I do not intend to waste a second more taking orders or trying to derive more accurate meaning and sense from you, I've even forgotten what you said last year not to mention what Chancellor Williams "Destruction" which I read about thirty years ago on the recommendation of Koro Sallah – and was not impressed by what he said and especially not by what he did not say – after Martin Bernal - so I'll stick to the Torah and to poetry.
In his room at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm –and this was in the day of his portable Olivetti typewriter ( 1979) Wole Soyinka showed me some sheaves of his manuscript in progress and I was surprised about his pen and ink alterations here and there, on top of the type. Not even Kerouac -genius at work produces an unedited spontaneous flow from typewriter to publication….
The petty-minded old pettifogger devil is more pedantic than even the sophistry of the likes of you and me and is capable of producing more than your feeble one-liners such as "mudslinger portraying self as a sound analyst". Do you think that I care about what you just said or will say if you reply to this with some more of your usual? When the old pettifogger devil reads your Holy Quran in its historical or non-chronological sequence he sees and quotes inconsistencies that only he is capable of seeing and not resolving. I thank God that that I'm not like him.
Now here's something of interest, from my point of view pertaining to an aspect of the subject matter at hand (Africa-America) – the Gullah. It was sent to me on the 21st of January this year by David Allen who used to be the vocalist of our band: A Vanishing History: Gullah Geechee Nation
Cornelius
On Thursday, 11 February 2016 15:24:36 UTC+1, ogunlakaiye wrote:
Menahem Hamelberg,
From the title of your submission below, I am not sure if you are writing to correct yourself or me. In your corrected submission, you wrote, "One thing that I have noticed about you - and I can give you several examples - is that you are fond of misquoting some people, sometimes by amputating whole sentences some of which transmit a complete meaning/thought/fact/point of view." Please, notice that I have quoted the whole sentence of yours instead of confining myself to the main subject of the sentence which is 'One thing I have noticed about you is that you are fond of misquoting some people.' Reading through your submission, however, you failed to give examples of me misquoting you or some people. Honestly, I don't see why you should draw in some people into the discussion.
In your submission of 9 February 2016, you wrote, "In his The Destruction of Black Civilisation your friend Chancellor Williams is very assertive that the Black people became Arabs in exactly the same way that they became early Americans: through slavery." Do I quote you correctly? The answer is capital YES. On February 10, 2016, you wrote, "Chancellor Williams did not say that Africans became Arabs." Do I quote this simple sentence from you correctly? The answer is capital YES. The following sentence about whether your memory served you right or not is an embellishment that does not deserve my attention.
My original intervention on this thread reads, "On the whole, the Arabs became Africans through the same process that made made Europeans to become Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and Americans. The original inhabitants of what is now called Africa were dark-skinned people and not the pale-skinned people, the so called Caucasians of which Arabs are included." As anybody can see, I have never stated that Africans became Arabs or Americans. It is you who in your usual illogical association of events introduced Chancellor Williams' assertion of Africans becoming Arabs and Americans through slavery into the discussion. In spite of that, I refuse to see you as a mudslinger portraying self as a sound analyst.
S.Kadiri
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2016 16:04:16 -0800
From: cornelius...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - re- A Take on Pan-Africanism and Freedom From Religious and Cultural ColonisationCORRECTED:Ogbeni Kadiri,
One thing that I have noticed about you – and I can give you several examples - is that you are fond of misquoting some people, sometimes by amputating whole sentences some of which transmit a complete meaning / thought/ fact/ point of view. I am not saying it is dishonest, because perhaps even an honourable Yoruba man like you can be completely unaware of some of your own tendencies. And not only that. For example, I wrote and you read: "If my memory serves me right, what he actually said was that the Black man arrived in the Hijaz in the same way that he arrived in North America: through slavery" So, why do feel the need to be "astonished" and to point at my alleged "fluctuating memory" or lapse of memory about exactly what Chancellor Williams said, after I have pointed out and corrected my original mistake – more an error of interpretation of his diffuseness, than an error of fact
As you know when the children of Israel sojourned in Egypt for some 200 years or so they did not become Egyptians…
And as you know the indigenous inhabitants of the United States still have their identities of which they are proud , Apache, Blackfoot, Cherokee , Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Mohawk, Omaha, Sioux…Sitting Bull , Chief Crazy Horse…
About the particularities of being African-American, those who have arrived after the Middle Passage, especially if they come from big countries like Nigeria, are free to describe themselves as Nigerian- Americans – and if they are a large group they have their own special impact as a group. I guess (yes I do) that's why some Nigerians are not happy with Brother Buhari saying what he said in that interview with the Telegraph - precisely because it reflects on the group as a collective identity as distinct from e.g. some of the Anglo-Sierra Leoneans ( some of whom are or want to be British to the bootstraps and still make tall claims of genealogies/ lineages that go back a few hundred years…
Don't forget the Latinos…
"Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America were extensions of Europe accomplished by the extermination of the indigenous inhabitants of those territories" (Ogbeni Kadiri)
Today, one out of every four Black people in this world is of Nigerian ancestry. Who knows, we may soon have a Nigerian-American president of the USA and I guess that the last thing he would do would be to reverse the brain drain by deporting some of his Brethren back to from where they came…
News from Eritrea – maybe Nigeria should send some reinforcements?
I am now going to read the latest about the refugees and migrants in the Swedish newspapers…
Godnatt
Menahem
We Sweden
On Wednesday, 10 February 2016 22:45:19 UTC+1, ogunlakaiye wrote:Menahem Cornelius,
In your previous post of February 9, 2016, you wrote, "In his The Destruction of Black Civilisation your friend Chancellor Williams is very assertive that the BLACK PEOPLE BECAME ARABS IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY THAT THEY BECAME EARLY AMERICANS:THROUGH SLAVERY." Premised on the above written words of yours which I found credible, I responded that Chancellor Williams was stating obvious historical facts since the common denominator for the Blacks in becoming Arabs and Americans was through slavery. Within 24 hours of your submission that "Chancellor Williams is very assertive that the Black people became Arabs" you wrote below, "Chancellor Williams did not say that Africans became Arabs." Your fluctuating memory on what Chancellor Williams asserted/said within 24 hours is astonishing. You floated Irish Americans, Italian Americans and crowned it with an American whose father is from Kenya as President of the United States of America. If there are such identities as Irish, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and British Americans then there should be Sierra Leone, Kenyan, Ghanaian, Angola, Congolese and Nigerian Americans. In fact, the President of USA whose father is a Kenya should be identified as a Kenyan American President and not as an African American President. Truly yours, I have never heard of European American President and the only way to pinpoint an abnormality in electing a 50% Caucasian blood mixed with a 50% Kenyan blood is to title him, African American President.
You asked, "How did Africans (I understand you to mean the anthropological owner of Africa, the Black man) become Muslims?" Africans became Muslims in the same way they became Christians. You also wondered about my name which you wrongly gave as "Salim" Kadiri. My name is Salimonu Kadiri and Kadiri is my family name. The usual practice in Yoruba part of Nigeria is to name a child according to the religious identity of the parents (of the father actually). Those, like my father, who adopt Islam as a religion in Yoruba land give Muslim names to their children with Yoruba flavour and pronunciations. Nowadays, many Yorubas no longer believe in adopting Arabic or Hebrew/ English names in order to identify themselves with Islam or Christianity. In short, Salimonu Kadiri is a typical Yoruba spelled Muslim name.
Your second question is, "How did Africans become Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and Americans?" Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America were extensions of Europe accomplished by the extermination of the indigenous inhabitants of those territories. In his defence at Nuremberg trial of the Nazis, in 1945, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg alluded to the extension of Europe through annihilations in the above named territories which according to him was thousand times greater than what the Nazis accomplished during World War II. No matter how long a tree stays under water in the swamp, it cannot become a crocodile and it cannot become the owner of the swamp.
To your 3rd question, "You say that 'Arabs became Africans' and I guess Africans also became Arabs, right?" Why do you need to be guessing that Africans became Arabs when you should have pointed to any territory in the Middle-east where Africans annihilated the Arab inhabitants and supplanted them with indigenous Africans as Arabs have done in North Africa, Egypt and Northern Sudan?
S. Kadiri
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2016 06:00:04 -0800
From: cornelius...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - re- A Take on Pan-Africanism and Freedom From Religious and Cultural ColonisationOgbeni Kadiri,
Chancellor Williams did not say that Africans became Arabs. If my memory serves me right, what he actually said was that the Black man arrived in the Hijaz in the same way that he arrived in North America: through slavery.
The history of slavery is a very long one, sanctioned by all sorts of religions, was practised in Ancient Greece and Rome and as you have previously told us, even practised in some parts of Nigeria.
You say that "Black people did not become Arabs or Americans as a result of being taken as slaves by the Caucasian brothers, which is why you have African American but not European American citizens" But today there are Irish Americans and Italian Americans who identify as such and an American whose father is from Kenya is president of the United States of America.
I have read your post carefully and that's why my questions are simple and I want some clarity from you:
How did Africans become Muslims? (And excuse me, if I may so ask, how come your name is Salim Kadiri? Is there a difference between Qadiri and Kadiri? Are these not Arab names? You notice that I do not ask as this Oyibo imp asked Malcom "Is that your legal name?" )
How did Africans become Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and Americans?
You say that "Arabs became Africans" and I guess Africans also became Arabs, right?
I hope and trust that you will answer the questions in your usual dignified manner.
Sincerely
Cornelius
On Wednesday, 10 February 2016 03:17:22 UTC+1, ogunlakaiye wrote:I think Chancellor Williams is correct in stating indisputable historical truth when he inferred that Arabs raided Africa to take Black people as slaves in the same way the Europeans raided Africa to cart away Black people as slaves in America. Black people did not become Arabs or Americans as a result of being taken as slaves by the Caucasian brothers, which is why you have African American but not European American citizens. On the question of if the Blacks in America are Americans, Chief Justice Taney of the Supreme Court, in a case of assault committed against a Black man, Dred Scott, by a White man, in 1857, handed down the decision that a Negro (Black man) has no rights which a White man need respect. He declared that in the meaning of the words 'people of the United States,' in the Constitution, Negroes (Black people) were not included in the people of the United States.
From historical perspective, I repeat once more that Arabs became Africans through the same means by which Europeans became Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and Americans. If I am wrong, I stand to be corrected with historical facts and not with verbal incontinences - many generalisations/ over-generalisations / simplifications.
S.Kadiri
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2016 09:47:24 -0800
From: cornelius...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - re- A Take on Pan-Africanism and Freedom From Religious and Cultural ColonisationIn his The Destruction of Black Civilisation your friend Chancellor Williams is very assertive that Black people became Arabs in exactly the same way that they became early Americans : through slavery. He is wrong of course. That is far from being the whole story, and many generalisations/ over-generalisations / simplifications should be treated with caution….
On Tuesday, 9 February 2016 18:13:10 UTC+1, ogunlakaiye wrote:On the whole, the Arabs became Africans through the same process that made Europeans to become Australians, New-Zealanders, Canadians and Americans. The original inhabitants of what is now called Africa were dark-skinned people and not pale-skinned people, the so called Caucasians of which Arabs are included.
S.Kadiri
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2016 07:33:38 -0600
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - re- A Take on Pan-Africanism and Freedom From Religious and Cultural Colonisation
From: meoc...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.comYes, Gloria, the Nubians were originally a Saharan people but moved West to modern Sudan and South Sudan during the desiccation of the Sahara, a vast lush green area which used to support agriculture and large populations. It is important to note that some Saharan populations moved South and others moved North in response to the desiccation. That's what produced the divide between North Africa and so-called Sub-Saharan Africa. It is conceivable, indeed quite plausible, that before that seminal ecological event, there was a human, demographic, and pigmentational continuum from South to North or vice versa, with no natural barrier or divider to necessitate sharp appellative and racial distinctions.On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 12:41 AM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu> wrote:An exciting discussion but the Berbers or Amazighs were not the only
inhabitants of ancient north africa.
What of the Tubu?What of the Beja and others of the Sahara and environs.
Nubians, Amharas, Tigrayans and a host of other ethnicities were adventurous
people. Some travelled west over time and space. In fact there is also the theory that some West Africans actually came from up north at one point.
Germanic Vandals invaded north Africa in the 5th century and interacted with the Amazigh
who incidentally are pigmentationally diverse.
There are lots of Amazigh (Berbers) who are ebony black
although, sadly enough, some people try to write them out of history.
GE
vimeo.com/user5946750/videos
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries onAfrica and the African Diaspora
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2016 10:09 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - re- A Take on Pan-Africanism and Freedom From Religious and Cultural Colonisationif nadine gordimer is not an african, what is she?
who decides?
face it, we are talking about race as if not talking about race. and if we do that, we can return to what about mixed race? and who is not really mixed race? we are talking about non-issues settled long ago, at the very least, by appiah in In My Father's House.
we are talking about house-cleaning, meaning ethnic cleansing, only now it is racial cleansing.
and on top of it, it is who is a real christian....
well, is this worth it, really, to expend our breath on?
ken
On 2/8/16 1:25 PM, Mario Fenyo wrote:
as indicated in the text by Farooqkperogi, St. Augustine is an African philosopher/theologian ....
Mario
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Farooq A. Kperogi [farooq...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, February 07, 2016 10:48 PM
To: usaafric...@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
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