Friday, March 24, 2017

RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Digest forusaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com - 23 updates in 7 topics

Congrats to Prof Remi. More power to your elbow, sir. Shalom. Osakue S. Omoera.
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: ‎24/‎03/‎2017 11:59 PM
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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Digest forusaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com - 23 updates in 7 topics

Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>: Mar 24 10:09PM

FINALISTS FOR THE BARBARA HARLOW PRIZE FOR EXCELLENCE IN GRADUATE STUDIES
 
It is with pleasure that I announce the finalists for the Barbara Harlow Prize for the best graduate paper at the Austin annual conference on Africa. We received an impressive number of submissions. The jury—Professors Mia Carter, Neville Hoad and Brian F. Doherty– will announce the winner on Saturday, April 1, 2017.
 
Find below the list of finalists, not arranged in any order of ranking:
 
 
Militant Mothers: Gender and Political Participation in Colonial Côte d'Ivoire
Elizabeth Jacob, Stanford University
 
Abstract
On December 24, 1949, two thousand Ivorian women marched on the prison at Grand Bassam in protest of French colonial officials' detention of militants of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Considered the first mass demonstration by West African women against French colonial rule, the march on Grand Bassam was part of a larger series of Ivorian women's protests against colonial injustice. Drawing on a mode of Baule women's resistance known as adjanou, they publicly sang, danced, and marched for the liberation of their men, all while leveling scathing sexual insults against French colonial officials. While negotiations between RDA leaders and French administrators tend to dominate the historiography of West African decolonization, Ivorian women's vibrant political activism was equally essential to the RDA's anticolonial cause. Indeed, though most histories of the RDA refer to Ivorian women's activism as "Amazonian" for its seemingly unconventional degree of aggression, this paper argues for the compatibility of militancy and motherhood in women's anticolonial action. While their maternal imperatives for caregiving and discipline had typically been reserved for the African home, the jailing of their husbands, brothers, and sons prompted the reinterpretation of their motherhood in action against the colonial state. Driven by existing logics of feminine militancy and care, Ivorian women's protests aimed to reconstitute the households that had been upset by colonial repression. Far from reckless or anti-feminine, the march on Grand Bassam constituted a logical extension of women's duties as daughters, wives, and mothers.
 
 
Migration and Exile: The Exotic Essence of Life in Bessie Head's When Rain Clouds Gather
Joshua Agbo, Anglia University, UK
 
Abstract
Under the flashing light of hope, Makhaya Maseko, the protagonist of Bessie Head's When Rain Clouds Gather, seeks exile in a world elsewhere. Exile, for him, is always about a journey and the discovery of new places through migration by the exile himself. It is about the search for home by homing away from the harsh environment of one's birth-place. It is about the search for selfhood, the shaping and reshaping of migration experience by peeling off the old self for a new self to grow. It is also about the redefinition of the exile's identity within the migratory space. To be more than one, Makhaya changes his name and identity in several circumstances. From the beginning of the narrative, he has a feeling of exile and he longs to be part of it. He represents both belonging and estrangement, desire and exile, migration and the formation of multiple identities. He sees all of these as an existential core of life; regardless of the pains and harassments involved in crossing the border to the exilic space. So, this paper will explore the threshold of migration and exile within the post-colonial context of Africa.
 
A Colonizing Agricultural Company in Somalia: The Duke of Abruzzi's Società Agricola Italo-Somala in the Italian Colonial Fascist System
Alberto Cauli, University of Auckland
 
Abstract
In the aftermath of the First World War, Somalia was Italy's most underdeveloped colony. Italian colonial policy aimed to develop Somalia through an extensive farming program, with the Shebelle River as its core. In the 1920s, Italian colonists reclaimed two huge agricultural plateaus in the Shebelle region to establish farming villages: Genale, located in the Lower Shebelle, and the Villaggio Duca degli Abruzzi (also known as Villabruzzi) in the Middle Shebelle. Genale and Villabruzzi were respectively ruled by the colonial government and by the Società Agricola Italo-Somala (SAIS), an ad hoc company established in 1920 by one of the most famous Italian explorers, Luigi Amedeo of Savoia-Aosta, Duke of Abruzzi. Despite an extensive literature focused on Italian colonialism in Somalia, there has been little investigation of the SAIS's activities. As part of a wider study focusing on the relationship between fascism and geographic explorations, this paper examines the role played by the government and the regime in supporting the Duke's experimental colonial farming program in Somalia, which the fascist propaganda later symbolized as a landmark in national colonial policy. My research in Italian archives revealed which institutions financed the SAIS and thus helps to clarify the relationship between the Duke's company and fascism.
 
 
Images of Colonialism in the Text of Two African Female Poets
 
Gabriel Bamgbose, Rutgers University
 
 
Abstract
Poetry is a significant vehicle in the framing of imaginative and discursive responses to the violence of African colonial experience. However, critical works addressing the colonial question in modern African poetry often limit their critique to the anticolonial poetic production of men excluding women's. Therefore in this paper, I address the incompleteness in the critical project on anticolonial poetics in African poetry through gender lens to question its androcentric logic. Using Romanus Egudu's canonical essay, "Images of Colonialism," as a point of departure, I ask: Why is there the erasure of women's poetic imagination in the critical representation of poetry on anticolonial struggle? What are the implications of such a denial of the female poetic knowledge? If we take another critical look at female poetic production in Africa in relation to anticolonial poetics, what view of the canon of modern African poetry as a counter-imagination to colonial imaginaries would we have? To engage these questions, I offer a rereading of the images of colonialism in order to address the gender gap in literary discourses on imaginative responses to colonialism in modern African poetry. This is significant because it challenges the patriarchal mode of consciousness in the formation of poetic discourse in Africa. Through a textual analytic, I close read ten poems of two Sao Tomean female poets, Alda do Espirito Santo and Maria Manuela Margarido, in order to lay bare the sinews of imagination running through the body of their poetry on African colonial experience within the specific context of Sao Tome and Principe. With this reading, I aim to unpack the textual/imagistic intricacies and assertive force of female poetry in the service of the African anticolonial imaginary.
 
Precolonial Imaginaries and Colonial Legacies in Mobutu's "Authentic" Zaïre
Daviel Lazure Vieira, University of Toronto
 
Abstract
In the era of decolonization, the right to self-determination necessarily entailed the reconceptualization of African societies within the boundaries (in both literal and figurative senses) of the nation-state. In the case of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko shaped the contours of his newly independent state of "Zaïre" by appealing to the doctrine of authenticité, whose aim was to reconcile ideas of the past informed by precolonial times with the exigencies of modernity. For Mobutu, authenticité was an all-encompassing "African philosophy," even though it appeared to most as the mere instrument of a particularly brutal regime. It is little surprising that current scholarship is often consistent with this approach, with social scientists treating authenticité either as a fetish, by examining the history of the Mobutist state through cultural expressions that reflected this strange "philosophical" anomaly, or as a hollow concept, a piece of propaganda—which it also partly was. This paper takes authenticité at face value in order to confront its claims, namely that it represented a departure from the ferocity of the colonial experience and provided a comprehensive value system (cultural, political, legal, and economic) to harmonize the past with the present. On both accounts authenticité failed, I argue, not least because its language was anything but "authentic"—nor truly "new" for that matter—but also because its archetypes reproduced the colonial violence it insisted on refuting. Such an encounter with authenticité, according to its own terms, may allow us to mediate these different perspectives found in Congolese/Zaïrian historiography with regards to Mobutu's legacy, and reveal patterns of subjugation that never ceased to exist.
 
 
From Gun to Guitar: The Performance of Tuareg Nationalism
Bonnie Bates, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
 
Abstract
This paper explores how contemporary Tuareg musical and video performance is a form of translation, to elaborate and communicate Tuareg nationalism on a global stage. The Tuareg have utilized their traditional oral history and culture as a form of resistance, translating the traditional into modern performance, to promote a modern political identity. The evolving methods of performance as translation have transformed Tuareg forms and stages of resistance, from the gun to the guitar and from the local to the global. Utilizing the Tuareg language of Tamasheq and drawing inspiration from their traditional oral archive, Tuareg performance is preserving and safeguarding their intangible cultural heritage as an ethical and political act in a war of liberation
 
 
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
104 Inner Campus Drive
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222 (fax)
http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/
http://www.toyinfalola.com
http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Ademola Dasylva <dasylvaus@gmail.com>: Mar 24 03:46AM +0100

Dear All, join me in congratulating ‎a dear colleague and friend in the Department of English, a Poet, literary critic, theorist and the immediate past Dean of Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, for emerging as one of the four recipients of 2017 edition of the Alumni Award.
 
This is a well deserved laurel in recognition of your profound scholarly contribution. Keep up the good work, brother.
 
*****
 
Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, a professor in the Department of English, University of Ibadan, has been announced as a winner of the Humboldt Alumni Award 2017 for Innovative Networking Initiatives.
 
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grants up to four Humboldt Alumni Awards per year to promote innovative networking initiatives of alumni of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's fellowship and award programmes. It is designed to support initiatives not covered by the Foundation's existing sponsorship and alumni programmes, and to promote academic and cultural relations between Germany and the Humboldt Alumni's own countries and strengthen their collaboration in the respective regions.
 
In a statement by Dr. Enno Aufderheide, the General Secretary of the Foundation, "This award shall give you the opportunity to implement your proposed networking initiative as well as contribute to support sustainable academic and cultural relations between Germany and your home country, and to strengthen the regional alumni network. I would like to offer my congratulations on this exceptional achievement."
 
Raji-Oyelade's award-winning project is entitled "Postproverbial Africa: Building a Corpora of Wits in Texts, Media and Performance", a trans-national initiative which brings African scholars in the humanities together with the ultimate aim of contributing to the body of modern and radical proverbs which are created mainly in urban communities almost all over the African continent.
 
The Humboldt Alumni Award ceremony will take place in June 2017 during the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's Annual Meeting in Berlin. Funding for the award is being provided by the German Foreign Office.
 
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
Adeshina Afolayan <shina73_1999@yahoo.com>: Mar 24 03:02AM

Oga mi Remraj,Another feather to the already glowing hat...congratulations! May your chest be filled with many more laurels.
 
 Adeshina Afolayan, PhD
Department of Philosophy
University of Ibadan
 
+23480-3928-8429
 
On Friday, March 24, 2017 3:54 AM, Ademola Dasylva <dasylvaus@gmail.com> wrote:

 
#yiv2652535572 body {font-family:"Calibri", "Slate Pro", sans-serif, "sans-serif";color:#262626;} Dear All, join me in congratulating ‎a dear colleague and friend in the Department of English, a Poet, literary critic, theorist and the immediate past Dean of Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, for emerging as one of the four recipients of 2017 edition of the Alumni Award. 
This is a well deserved laurel in recognition of your profound scholarly contribution. Keep up the good work, brother.
                            *****
Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, a professor in the Department of English, University of Ibadan, has been announced as a winner of the Humboldt Alumni Award 2017 for Innovative Networking Initiatives. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grants up to four Humboldt Alumni Awards per year to promote innovative networking initiatives of alumni of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's fellowship and award programmes. It is designed to support initiatives not covered by the Foundation's existing sponsorship and alumni programmes, and to promote academic and cultural relations between Germany and the Humboldt Alumni's own countries and strengthen their collaboration in the respective regions. In a statement by Dr. Enno Aufderheide, the General Secretary of the Foundation, "This award shall give you the opportunity to implement your proposed networking initiative as well as contribute to support sustainable academic and cultural relations between Germany and your home country, and to strengthen the regional alumni network. I would like to offer my congratulations on this exceptional achievement." Raji-Oyelade's award-winning project is entitled "Postproverbial Africa: Building a Corpora of Wits in Texts, Media and Performance", a trans-national initiative which brings African scholars in the humanities together with the ultimate aim of contributing to the body of modern and radical proverbs which are created mainly in urban communities almost all over the African continent. The Humboldt Alumni Award ceremony will take place in June 2017 during the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's Annual Meeting in Berlin. Funding for the award is being provided by the German Foreign Office.
 
 
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
Segun Ogungbemi <seguno2013@gmail.com>: Mar 24 02:36PM +0100

Congrats!!! Wish you more of it.
SO
 
Sent from my iPhone
 
On Mar 24, 2017, at 3:46 AM, Ademola Dasylva <dasylvaus@gmail.com> wrote:
 
Dear All, join me in congratulating ‎a dear colleague and friend in the Department of English, a Poet, literary critic, theorist and the immediate past Dean of Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, for emerging as one of the four recipients of 2017 edition of the Alumni Award.
 
This is a well deserved laurel in recognition of your profound scholarly contribution. Keep up the good work, brother.
 
*****
 
Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, a professor in the Department of English, University of Ibadan, has been announced as a winner of the Humboldt Alumni Award 2017 for Innovative Networking Initiatives.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grants up to four Humboldt Alumni Awards per year to promote innovative networking initiatives of alumni of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's fellowship and award programmes. It is designed to support initiatives not covered by the Foundation's existing sponsorship and alumni programmes, and to promote academic and cultural relations between Germany and the Humboldt Alumni's own countries and strengthen their collaboration in the respective regions.

In a statement by Dr. Enno Aufderheide, the General Secretary of the Foundation, "This award shall give you the opportunity to implement your proposed networking initiative as well as contribute to support sustainable academic and cultural relations between Germany and your home country, and to strengthen the regional alumni network. I would like to offer my congratulations on this exceptional achievement."
 

Raji-Oyelade's award-winning project is entitled "Postproverbial Africa: Building a Corpora of Wits in Texts, Media and Performance", a trans-national initiative which brings African scholars in the humanities together with the ultimate aim of contributing to the body of modern and radical proverbs which are created mainly in urban communities almost all over the African continent.

The Humboldt Alumni Award ceremony will take place in June 2017 during the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's Annual Meeting in Berlin. Funding for the award is being provided by the German Foreign Office.
 
 
 
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
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Obododimma Oha <obodooha@gmail.com>: Mar 24 09:14PM +0100

Congratulations, Rem Raj.
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DOYIN AGUORU <doyinaguoru77@gmail.com>: Mar 24 01:49PM -0700

Congratulations Sir!
On Mar 24, 2017 11:43 AM, "'Adeshina Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue
Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com>: Mar 24 09:12AM -0700

Kawesa historic - the first foreign-born leader
<https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dn.se%2Fnyheter%2Fpolitik%2Fkawesa-historisk-forsta-utlandsfodda-partiledaren%2F&edit-text=>
 
Variously reported in the Swedish media
<https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&site=&source=hp&q=Kawesa+-+historisk-+F%C3%B6rsta+&oq=Kawesa+-+historisk-+F%C3%B6rsta+&gs_l=hp.3...3656.36714.0.38298.30.30.0.0.0.0.277.3198.19j9j2.30.0....0...1c.1.64.hp..0.15.1672.0..0j0i131k1j0i3k1j0i10k1j0i30k1j0i10i30k1j0i22i30k1j0i22i10i30k1j33i160k1.o9Ydaue_1Y8>
 
 
It's a potent mixture - Victoria Kawesa <javascript:void(0)> leading the Feminist
Initiative <javascript:void(0)> Party together with Gudrun Schyman
<javascript:void(0)>
 
 
(BTW I sometimes fantasize about what a different planet this world could
have been or at least the discussions and trajectories and take-offs in
this our USA-Africa dialogue series would have been if the father of the
First Black President of the US had been (a) a Yoruba man (b) an Honourable
Hausa man (c) A Fulani (d) An Igbo man (more unimaginable chest beating
about " our man" in the White House ) and I guess that Papa, Grandpa, Chidi
etc. would have been prevailing upon him, desperately to give his
unadulterated moral support to the Biafra cause etc. etc.
Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>: Mar 24 05:14PM -0400

Did Obama even know his father? I thought he was raised by his mother and grandmother, in Hawaii.
 
ken
 

 
Kenneth Harrow
 
Dept of English and Film Studies
 
Michigan State University
 
619 Red Cedar Rd
 
East Lansing, MI 48824
 
517-803-8839
 
harrow@msu.edu
 
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
 

 
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 24 March 2017 at 12:12
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Historic : Victoria Kawesa first foreign born party leader in Sweden
 

 

Kawesa historic - the first foreign-born leader
Variously reported in the Swedish media
 

 
It's a potent mixture - Victoria Kawesa leading the Feminist Initiative Party together with Gudrun Schyman
 

 
(BTW I sometimes fantasize about what a different planet this world could have been or at least the discussions and trajectories and take-offs in this our USA-Africa dialogue series would have been if the father of the First Black President of the US had been (a) a Yoruba man (b) an Honourable Hausa man (c) A Fulani (d) An Igbo man (more unimaginable chest beating about " our man" in the White House ) and I guess that Papa, Grandpa, Chidi etc. would have been prevailing upon him, desperately to give his unadulterated moral support to the Biafra cause etc. etc.
 
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Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>: Mar 12 11:40PM

I agree notionally with your drift that what is considered 'standard English' is nothing but a dialect of English even within native English discourse. It is more apposite to speak of Englishes rather than the grammatical equivalence of RP. I recognise the challenge this poses to English teachers of which I count myself as one.
 
You cant tell a Diana Ross or Beyonce for example that they are grammatically non standard or incorrect when they sing 'when you was' precisely when semiotically spoken grammar is only an aid to the grammar of music which is the construction of chords. And that is why they go on smiling to the banks with millions while the class room grammarian smiles to the banks with only a few thousands to his credit: the litmus test of communication is the consumer who understand perfectly well their imperfect grammar (I know that the typical ivory tower grammarian looks down on the communicative success of the ' drop outs ' but the world outside the ivory towers is the litmus test of reality and prescriptive grammars versus the continual evolution of language.
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com>
Date: 12/03/2017 22:53 (GMT+00:00)
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: "An advice," "a good news": Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
 
Corrected:
 
Another link from my last posting that got lost in transition : <https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=+Besserwisser&*> Besserwisser<https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=+Besserwisser&*>
 
I'm impressed by the very correct English spoken by the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Moïse Katumbi <https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Mo%C3%AFse+Katumbi+&*> .The British English besserwisser grammarians who genuflect in the direction of their qibla which is Buckingham Palace, can judge for themselves this his spoken performance<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz6t3KkXEnI> . I for one understood him perfectly and his performance, in my view, was flawless. I wish that I could speak Mandarin Chinese or French or Lingala or Nigerian English at something like that level.
 
I don't suppose that the kinds of people who subscribe to the USA-Africa Forum are in need of these kind of language columns, but of course, the English Language scholar could have chosen to be doing it as a do-good social service , a kind of Pied Piper to his English language disciples
 
It would be far too tedious and almost meaningless to take it item by item, but just this one on advice should suffice. As for the other one, you kick his ass and he says, "I don't understand"
 
According to The Devil's Dictionary : Advice <https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Devil%27s+dictionary+:+Advice&*>
 
"Many people " called his attention (Professor Farooq Kperogi's) to the tweet by Abike Daiquiri-Erewa. To be as precise as he would like everybody to be when observing the changing rules and regulations and laws of strangulation drafted by Her Majesty's Language still undergoing evolution, I should like to ask, " Exactly how many people, drew his attention to what in my personal opinion was an al- right tweet or telegram either as an official or an unofficial communiqué (and I would be prepared to put my head under the guillotine for it) :
 
[cid:autoGeneratedInlineImage1] Advice<https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Advice&*>
 
I have always assumed that the language employed by the various ministries of foreign affairs the world over is aimed at communicating with fellow citizens and diverse members of the international community and that just like the newsreaders in English in several countries that do not have English as the mother tongue, concessions are made to local accents, language usage, in fact often to accents approximating the national English accent. So in Radio Sweden this is what you hear.<https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Radio+Sweden&*>
 
However, strictly speaking, when it comes to grammar or the precise meanings embedded in legalese<https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=legalese&*> , foreign ministries had better be extra careful ! The example that comes to mind immediately is UN Resolution 242<https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=UN+Resolution+242&*> which up to today is still experiencing all kinds of twists and arrows of outrageous fortune, all based on differences in opinions about the meaning/s of "occupied territories" and "the occupied territories". Ultimately, the judges as to the implications of the legal meanings are international jurists who insist that the differences cannot be merely local, partisan understandings or interpretations of the English Language as used in international documents / agreements.
 
In the case under Prof Kperogi's magnifying glass, first and foremost everybody understands the advice that's being given.
 
Hopefully, the creative writers, poets, dramatists, songsters<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oppQC371Azg>, will regularise some of what the language police and Her Majesty's "Linguistic sanitary inspector" believe to be highly irregular as used by members of the Naija English Club - the latter a phrase that I got from cousin Kayode Robbin-Coker<https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Kayode+Robbin-Coker&*>, himself an HMS ( in Her Majesty's Service) "language sanitary inspector " and a former inspector of schools. (I was infinitely more familiar with our elder, Adeneka Lincoln Robbin-Coker, in his day, a diamond miner...)
 
This too is cultural :
 
Rogie: Advice to Schoolgirls <https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#tbm=vid&q=S+E+Rogers+:+Advice+to+Schoolgirls&*>
 
 
On Sunday, 12 March 2017 18:31:03 UTC+1, Farooq A. Kperogi wrote:
My "Politics of Grammar" column in today's Daily Trust on Sunda<http://www.farooqkperogi.com/2017/03/an-advice-good-news-errors-of.html>y:
 
 
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
 
Twitter: @farooqkperogi<https://twitter.com/farooqkperogi>
 
 
Many people called my attention to a tweet by Abike Dabiri-Erewa, President Muhammadu Buhari's Senior Special Assistant on Foreign Affairs and Diaspora, who wrote that her travel warning to Nigerians to not travel to the US was just "an advice."
 
 
That is, of course, grammatically incorrect. "Advice" is a non-count noun, which does not admit of the conventional singular and plural forms of regular nouns. In other words, there is neither "advices" nor "an advice." The singular form of "advice" is expressed as "a piece of advice" (or just "advice") and the plural form is expressed as "pieces of advice."
 
 
[https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEipThhgmL-ddFcQGhMIA0-YGMtADAgUf6wuVodBuAKj22hUMovzyLw6LSTqtu0p4SVRByZmTOx28Cyd4mu-IolYna83ANsPhcub9wlJnqyXR-A_Q6uCk6fjKFIJcowhL-O-I2vf_YmArp1XLGeUnxRvAl6xrS-9VfxAIlv-wmwY27Q4Ygtx_WYKmCn0G7wIPsPniZqsPwEbigAz8FoXXv-WGJtUhe4-CS6R2lMyHWQiw4VHrVEcM6ul8cG8DYTeooxizlJClACvFgaMx5ja1vdcaQ4=w5000-h5000]<https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcXKidpaEN4_-2LrC12kmnf_IQxKplaFN1U1wRnIF6AbbCRhQRPsEGdYTp7_bwzV1YRbMGiAvwUMmdBor4NL6LA6H5xAYyyNOqH3JO_43039AFjt-ahXKgSCZdHrNEl3Mc7iYyYCcsQFY/s1600/Abike+Dabiri-Erewa+an+advice.png>
 
 
Dabiri-Erewa, who is incidentally a graduate of English from the Obafemi Awolowo University, is not alone in the practice of unconventionally singularizing and pluralizing uncountable nouns.
 
 
In an April 14, 2010 article titled "Common Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English,"<http://www.farooqkperogi.com/2010/04/common-errors-of-pluralization-in.html> I pointed out that, "One notable feature of Nigerian English is the predilection for adding plural forms to nouns that don't normally admit of them in Standard English. This is certainly a consequence of the inability of many Nigerian speakers and writers of the English language to keep up with the quirky, illogical irregularities that are so annoyingly typical of the conventions of English grammar."
 
 
How English Plurals Are Formed
 
 
It's common knowledge that the plural form of most nouns in English is created by adding the letter "s" to the end of nouns. But sometimes it requires adding "es" to nouns that end in "ch," "x," "s," or s-like sounds, such as "inches," "axes," "lashes," etc. There are also, of course, irregular forms like "children" as the plural of "child," "oxen as the plural of "ox," etc.
 
 
Then you have uncountable—or, if you will, "non-count"— nouns, which cannot be modified or combined with the indefinite articles "a" or "an." This is precisely where Nigerians fall foul of standard usage norms.
 
 
Irregular noun plurals
 
 
Most educated Nigerians generally know that nouns like equipment, furniture, information (except in the expression "criminal informations," or "an information," which is used in the US and Canada to mean formal accusation of a crime, akin to indictments), advice, news, luggage, baggage, faithful (i.e., loyal and steadfast following, as in, "millions of Christian and Muslim faithful"), offspring, personnel, etc. remain unchanged even when they are expressed in a plural sense. But few know of many other nouns that have this characteristic.
 
 
Unconventional noun singularizations in Nigerian English
 
Although most educated Nigerians would never say "newses" or "advices" or "informations" to express the plural forms of these nouns, they tend to burden the words with singular forms that are not grammatical. For instance, they would say something like "that's a good news" or "it's just an advice" or "it's an information for you."
 
 
Well, since these nouns don't have a plural form, they also can't have a singular variant, that is, they cannot be combined with the definite articles "a" or "an." So the correct way to render the sentences above would be "that's a good piece of news" (or simply "that's good news"), "it's just a piece of advice" (or "it's just advice), and "it's information for you."
 
 
Other nouns that are habitually pluralized wrongly in Nigerian English are:
 
 
"Legislations." Nigerians inflect the word "legislation" for grammatical number by adding "s" to it. The sense of the word that denotes "law" (such as was used in this Punch headline<http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art2010040516365559>: "Nigerians need legislations that will ease their problems –Cleric") does not take an "s" even if it's used in the plural sense. In Standard English, the word's plural form is usually expressed with the phrase "pieces of," or such other "measure word" (as grammarians call such expressions).
 
 
So the headline should correctly read: "Nigerians need pieces of legislation…" or simply "Nigerians need legislation…." However, the sense of the word that means "the act of making laws" may admit of an "s," although it's rare to encounter the world "legislations" in educated speech in Britain or America.
 
 
"Rubbles." Another noun that Nigerians commonly add "s" to in error is "rubble," that is, the remains of something that has been destroyed or broken up. This word is never inflected for plural. It's customary to indicate its plural form with the measure word "piles of," as in, "piles of rubble." (Grammarians call words that are invariably singular in form "singulare tantum").
 
 
"Vermins." Similarly, the word "vermin," which means pests (e.g. cockroaches or rats) — or an irritating or obnoxious person— is invariably singular and therefore does not require an "s" or the indefinite article "a." But in Nigerian English it's common to encounter sentences like "they are vermins" or "he is a vermin."
 
 
"Footages/aircrafts." "Footage" and "aircraft" are also invariably singular. So it's nonstandard to either say or write, as many Nigerian do, "a footage" or "footages," "an aircraft" or "aircrafts." Dispense with the "s" at the end of the nouns and the indefinite articles "a" and "an" at the beginning.
 
 
"Heydays." There is nothing like "heydays" in Standard English. It remains "heyday" even if the sense of the word is plural.
 
 
"Yesteryears." Yesteryear is also invariably singular and does not change form when it expresses a plural sense. Only Nigerian English speakers and perhaps other non-native English speakers pluralize "yesteryear."
 
 
"Cutleries." Cutlery always remains "cutlery" even if you're talking of millions of eating utensils.
 
 
"An overkill." In Standard English, "overkill" is usually uninflected for number. So, where Nigerian English speakers would say "it's an overkill," people who speak standard varieties of English simply say "it's overkill."
 
 
"Slangs." Nigerian English speakers habitually pluralize slang as "slangs" and singularize it as "a slang." That's unconventional. The Standard English plural forms of "slang" can be just "slang" (as in, "he speaks a lot of slang") or "slang words," or "slang terms," or "slang expressions." The singular form is simply "slang" (as in, "that was slang").
 
 
"Invectives." The word's plural form is expressed by saying "a stream of invective," not "invectives."
 
 
"Beehive of activities." The expression "beehive of activities," which is common in Nigerian English, is nonstandard. It is usually rendered as "a beehive of activity" (also "a hive of activity). Its plural form is "beehives of activity" (or "hives of activity"). When "activity" means a "situation in which something is happening or a lot of things are being done," it is usually uncountable.
 
 
So, it should be "a lot of economic activity," not "a lot of economic activities." It should be "physical activity," not "physical activities."
 
The only sense of "activity" that is pluralized is the sense that means "a thing that you do for interest or pleasure, or in order to achieve a particular aim," such as "outdoor activities," "leisure activities," "criminal activities," etc.
 
 
"Potentials." It is usual in Nigerian English, even educated Nigerian English, to pluralize "potential" as "potentials," particularly in the expression "Nigeria has great potentials." In Standard English, however, "potential" is often uninflected for number, that is, it remains "potential" even if its sense is plural.
 
 
Why Native Speakers Don't Pluralize These Nouns
 
 
As I've observed and chewed over these admittedly vexatious English plural forms over the years, I have been struck by the fact that I've never encountered any native speaker of the English language who has flouted these rules in speech or in writing. Not even my American college students who can be lax and slipshod with their grammar.
 
 
I think this is a consequence of the force of example. When people grow up not hearing older people say "an advice," "a good news," "legislations," "vermins," etc., they unconsciously internalize and make peace with the illogical irregularities that these exceptions truly are.
 
 
Related Articles:
 
Politics of Grammar Column<http://www.farooqkperogi.com/p/politics-of-grammar-column.html>
 
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media
Social Science Building
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com<http://www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com>
Twitter: @farooqkperog<https://twitter.com/#%21/farooqkperogi>
Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global
Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>: Mar 24 07:49AM

Ken:
 
Part of what I meant by the younger generatiom being motivated to translate into other Nigerian languages is the disincentive that the monopoly of English as lingua franca has on other major Nigerian languages as economically viable medium of scholarship.
 
Your position on the prohibitive cost of translation as a limiting factor against translations into English will be counterbalanced by intra- Nigerian translations if local publishers find that there are enough readers in other Nigerian languages nation-wide to embark on the venture.
 
Yes, legislating the use of other lingua francas in the country will help in reversing this trend.
 
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Pamela Smith <pamelasmith@unomaha.edu>
Date: 23/03/2017 14:37 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
"Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers…" – Ken Harrow
 
Ken, I'm not sure this claim is accurate. Literary translation is alive and well. See below a cobbling together of a Fagunwa works short list I am aware of. Granted, Soyinka led the way, but others have continued in the same path in both ENGLISH AND FRENCH. Availability/circulation may be a different story. Also note that in the case of the publication of the Smith and Ajadi translations of Igbo Olodumare, completed in the same year, the latter beat the former to the publishers in a market that cannot sustain duplication – the situation (in the absence of a literary clearing house) in a couple of instances I am aware of.
 
 
1. Igbo Olodumare -- English translation titled The Forest of the Almighty, by Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1985 – Unpublished, but Excerpts published in numerous essays
 
1. In the forest of Olodumare, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare, Translated by Wole Soyinka (2010).
2. Forest of a Thousand Demons, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale, Translated by Wole Soyinka (1968).
3. Mystery of God, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Aditu Eledumare (translated by Olu Obafemi, 2010).
4. The Novel of D.O Fagunwa - A commentary by Ayo Bamgbose written in ENGLISH
5. The Forest of God, Annotated translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare by Gabriel A. Ajadi, a PhD dissertation (Revised edition, 2005).
6. The Expedition to the Mountain (The Third Saga) an English translation of Fagunwa's Irinkerindo, by Dapo Adeniyi, (1994).
7. ALL 5 FAGUNWA NOVELS HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED TO FRENCH by Abioye
8. I am sure there are others which further search would unearth.
Also, I know Igbo and Edo friends and former classmates, born and raised in parts of Yorubaland (Lagos and Ibadan especially) who read Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode during our Yoruba course/class reading/studies much better (more proficiently) than I did (as a poor Krio-speaking Yoruba learner).
 
 
 
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Olayinka Agbetuyi
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 6:39 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: tunde.bewaji@gmail.com; john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
 
 
Ken.
 
You stated that if Soyinka did not translate Fagunwa into English it would remain known only to Yoruba readers. Not so. There is now an army of Igbo-Yoruba offsprings who are products of inter ethnic marriages in Lagos, some of whom may become translators and produce Igbo translations given the right level of motivation.
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu<mailto:harrow@msu.edu>>
Date: 21/03/2017 13:39 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Cc: tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>, john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
Hi all
I'd like to refer to moses's fourth point, the question of translation, so that cultural production not remain local.
As I work in literature and cinema, that issue is and has been for a long time a central question in African studies. Achebe vs ngugi.
Ngugi advocated writing in African languages, so as to remain true to the cultural, epistemological values.
Why not? One of my favorite writers among contemporary African authors, boris boubacar diop, opted to begin writing in wolof, and produced a magnificent novel, doomi golo.
On the other hand, if ngugi turned to writing in kikuyu, please note he then turned around and translated it into English for wider dissemination. Are there any novels or plays by ngugi that he has not had translated and published in English?
Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers. That is no worse than having Shakespeare known only to English speakers; but when the germans translated Shakespeare into german, that gave a tremendous boost to his expansion onto the world stage. Similarly when freud was translated into French, that enabled lacanian analysis (and the training for fanon) to become disseminated widely. When Lacan became translated into English, film studies and feminist studies turned deeply toward psychoanalytical approaches. Should I go on?
In film studies, carmela garritano distinguished between local twi films made in Ghana for local audiences. Had the films all remained in twi, they would have remained confined to accra and its region. But filmmakers like Shirley frimpong-manso wanted to make films that could be distributed world-wide, she turned to English, as well as to what Ghanaians termed professional looks, to polished post-production, as we have now seen in afolayan's films
Now, folks, if afolayan's films did not have English, or if there were no sub-titles, we who don't speak the languages he employs in his films would be at a loss.
Subtitles, translations, these are how works enter into the global waves of culture. Not everyone wants to do this: but if you and I were to actually sit and talk about African literature, we have to have a text that we share in common, and that means sharing a language.
Let the author decide what language works for him or her in writing a novel. But he or she can't control what languages others know. You can write for your own community, or reach out to others. And if you make a film that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions, you'd better find a way to reach the audience. That might well entail using hausa in northern Nigerian. And if your ambition is to go further, it has to be translated, subtitled, or dubbed.
Lastly, the original almost always is better than the translation. Much is always lost in subtitling. But a great translator can create something even better than the original.
As example might be seen in the adaptation of carmen by jo ramaka, his film karmen gei. I wouldn't want to ask which is better, ramaka or bizet's version: both are wonderful.
And of course, shakespeare's own plays were based on earlier written texts as well. Texts written in other languages. Without translation there'd have been no Shakespeare either. We live by sharing across culture, and culture breathes when it can reach outside its own closely confined world.
ken
 
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
harrow@msu.edu<mailto:harrow@msu.edu>
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
 
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>> on behalf of "meochonu@gmail.com<mailto:meochonu@gmail.com>" <meochonu@gmail.com<mailto:meochonu@gmail.com>>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Date: Monday 20 March 2017 at 11:30
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Cc: "tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>" <tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>>, "john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>" <john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
It is sad to see this edifying discussion degenerate into this, but a few quick points preceded by a declaration:
 
I have been following the thread and the contributions of Farooq and Ken have captured by own position so excellently that I saw no need to contribute. After reading Oga Falola's penultimate post, however, I feel that a few submissions would be in order.
 
1. Despite the effort of the mild-mannered and polite scholar, Ken Harrow, to explain that the notion of English being the property of the British or of Euro-America is wrong, some responses have continued to proceed from that erroneous, ironically neocolonial idea. Falola challenged us to name countries that have developed by operationalizing the languages of other people, implying that English is not Nigerians' property, that it belongs to others. It is only if you believe this foundational fallacy that you'd believe that when Nigerians master English, they are embracing someone else's linguistic heritage and abandoning their own--the largely outmoded argument about about linguistic imperialism. It should be self-evident that the notion of linguistic imperialism dissolves considerably when the language in question is now democratized and domesticated in several locales and when the original possessors of that language have lost control of it while those who adopted it have shaped and reshaped it in line with their own communicative and cultural predilections. Even the canonization of standard English was not--is not--an exclusively Euro-American affair as stakeholders in the language's multiple varieties have contributed to the institution and convention we now know as standard English.
 
2. There is also, in Falola's and others' contributions, the erroneous assumption that Euro-American modernity--or modernity as a generic category--inheres in English. This is a claim made by generations of Eurocentric scholars and hegemons. It has been challenged successfully by postcolonial theorists, literary scholars, historians, and others, who have rightly sought to decenter modernity, locate it in multiple locales, practices, discourses, and linguistic communities, and to puncture the claim of haughty imperialists that they bestowed modernity on benighted subalterns through the instrumentality of the English language and English language education. Mainstream concepts such as parallel modernities, vernacular modernities, alternative modernities, etc--which we now take for granted as commonsensical givens--signal how successful the project of provincializing Europe and its modernity and of recognizing modernity's polyvalent manifestation and provenance has been. Yet some contributors here seem to be reifying this debunked claim and inadvertently rehabilitating it through their claim that modernity is coextensive with the English language. Even the British colonial variety of modernity, encoded in post-Enlightenment claims to universality, is not as Euro-American in provenance as was previously thought. You only need to read Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishness to know that colonial subalterns in non-Western locales helped constitute and reconstitute the iconic edifices of Englishness and its associated modernity.
 
3. Therefore, it is problematic to equate the mastery of English with a capitulation to a "foreign" English modernity or culture. That culture, to begin with, is hardly English in the strict Manichean way some are arguing here. Colonial culture and colonial modernity are as Nigerian as they are English. There were as many subaltern actors in making colonial modernity as there were English people. Secondly, it is condescending and even a tad insulting to Nigerians to imply as some have done here that they are incapable of separating the linguistic utilitarian benefits of English from its cultural components--that in fact when they choose to master English in order to participate in global professional and intellectual currents or to be conversant in the dominant epistemic vocabulary of our world, they are assimilating to a foreign culture. Nigerians are capable of smartly adopting the utilitarian ethos of English without uncritically embracing whatever cultural resources may be conveyed by the language. We as scholars should not arrogantly infantilize our African subjects, who are in most cases smarter and more pragmatic than we give them credit for. Nigerians do not need to be protected or shielded from what we assume to be the culturally corrosive effects of English mastery. They are capable of making a distinction between the ways of the English and the globally utilitarian language called English.
 
4. Much of the attack on English by people whose intellectual and professional trajectories have been defined by a mastery of standard English seems driven by a simplistic and self-destructive Afrocentric impulse. Self-writing is a noble endeavor, but it becomes counterproductive when it devolves into epistemic self-isolation. If indeed Africa possesses a rich intellectual and scholarly heritage that we complain is yet to be shared with or recognized by the broader global world of scholarship how can the solution be to further isolate this heritage from the global intellectual pool by enunciating it in Africa's languages, which are unintelligible to outsiders? I don't get this type of logic. It seems to me that the urgent task facing Africanists is to seek pathways into consequential global scholarly and intellectual conversations, pathways through which the insights and contributions of African vernacular and other epistemologies can enter into dialogue with epistemologies of other places and eventually take its place in the arenas where paradigms and consensuses are consecrated. If we publish and write in our languages, we are writing for for ourselves, essentially. How is such an incestuous intellectual enterprise going to enable African epistemology to enter into the global scholarly marketplace and be appreciated and engaged with? There is already a model for subaltern epistemologies entering the global English-language epistemological canon. Indian social scientific and humanistic scholars are today some of the most influential in the world, but they did not enter into global scholarly reckoning by complaining about linguistic imperialism or advocating for a return to Indic languages, modes of self-representation, and esoteric discourse, but by translating the unique insights and properties of Indic vernacular epistemologies into English and specifically into the high theoretical academic lingo of the Euro-Americn academy. Western theorists and academics took notice. They had to. They began to engage Indian scholarship on its own terms but they did so only because the language in which this scholarship came to them was relatable, familiar. There was a shared linguistic space where productive engagement was possible. Pius Adesanmi has a brilliant article that documents and analyzes this process. By all means let us create platforms for indigenous African knowledge to thrive, but let us also prioritize translation, not just in
Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>: Mar 24 03:35AM

And we are eagerly awaiting the publication of your version of Igbo Olodumare which I came across in my search for Fagunwa translations in 2001 ( while I was being dissuaded ftom ' an unviable' career in translations in certain quarters) before I adamantly embarked on the translation of Adiitu.
 
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Pamela Smith <pamelasmith@unomaha.edu>
Date: 23/03/2017 14:37 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
"Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers…" – Ken Harrow
 
Ken, I'm not sure this claim is accurate. Literary translation is alive and well. See below a cobbling together of a Fagunwa works short list I am aware of. Granted, Soyinka led the way, but others have continued in the same path in both ENGLISH AND FRENCH. Availability/circulation may be a different story. Also note that in the case of the publication of the Smith and Ajadi translations of Igbo Olodumare, completed in the same year, the latter beat the former to the publishers in a market that cannot sustain duplication – the situation (in the absence of a literary clearing house) in a couple of instances I am aware of.
 
 
1. Igbo Olodumare -- English translation titled The Forest of the Almighty, by Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1985 – Unpublished, but Excerpts published in numerous essays
 
1. In the forest of Olodumare, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare, Translated by Wole Soyinka (2010).
2. Forest of a Thousand Demons, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale, Translated by Wole Soyinka (1968).
3. Mystery of God, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Aditu Eledumare (translated by Olu Obafemi, 2010).
4. The Novel of D.O Fagunwa - A commentary by Ayo Bamgbose written in ENGLISH
5. The Forest of God, Annotated translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare by Gabriel A. Ajadi, a PhD dissertation (Revised edition, 2005).
6. The Expedition to the Mountain (The Third Saga) an English translation of Fagunwa's Irinkerindo, by Dapo Adeniyi, (1994).
7. ALL 5 FAGUNWA NOVELS HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED TO FRENCH by Abioye
8. I am sure there are others which further search would unearth.
Also, I know Igbo and Edo friends and former classmates, born and raised in parts of Yorubaland (Lagos and Ibadan especially) who read Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode during our Yoruba course/class reading/studies much better (more proficiently) than I did (as a poor Krio-speaking Yoruba learner).
 
 
 
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Olayinka Agbetuyi
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 6:39 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: tunde.bewaji@gmail.com; john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
 
 
Ken.
 
You stated that if Soyinka did not translate Fagunwa into English it would remain known only to Yoruba readers. Not so. There is now an army of Igbo-Yoruba offsprings who are products of inter ethnic marriages in Lagos, some of whom may become translators and produce Igbo translations given the right level of motivation.
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu<mailto:harrow@msu.edu>>
Date: 21/03/2017 13:39 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Cc: tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>, john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
Hi all
I'd like to refer to moses's fourth point, the question of translation, so that cultural production not remain local.
As I work in literature and cinema, that issue is and has been for a long time a central question in African studies. Achebe vs ngugi.
Ngugi advocated writing in African languages, so as to remain true to the cultural, epistemological values.
Why not? One of my favorite writers among contemporary African authors, boris boubacar diop, opted to begin writing in wolof, and produced a magnificent novel, doomi golo.
On the other hand, if ngugi turned to writing in kikuyu, please note he then turned around and translated it into English for wider dissemination. Are there any novels or plays by ngugi that he has not had translated and published in English?
Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers. That is no worse than having Shakespeare known only to English speakers; but when the germans translated Shakespeare into german, that gave a tremendous boost to his expansion onto the world stage. Similarly when freud was translated into French, that enabled lacanian analysis (and the training for fanon) to become disseminated widely. When Lacan became translated into English, film studies and feminist studies turned deeply toward psychoanalytical approaches. Should I go on?
In film studies, carmela garritano distinguished between local twi films made in Ghana for local audiences. Had the films all remained in twi, they would have remained confined to accra and its region. But filmmakers like Shirley frimpong-manso wanted to make films that could be distributed world-wide, she turned to English, as well as to what Ghanaians termed professional looks, to polished post-production, as we have now seen in afolayan's films
Now, folks, if afolayan's films did not have English, or if there were no sub-titles, we who don't speak the languages he employs in his films would be at a loss.
Subtitles, translations, these are how works enter into the global waves of culture. Not everyone wants to do this: but if you and I were to actually sit and talk about African literature, we have to have a text that we share in common, and that means sharing a language.
Let the author decide what language works for him or her in writing a novel. But he or she can't control what languages others know. You can write for your own community, or reach out to others. And if you make a film that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions, you'd better find a way to reach the audience. That might well entail using hausa in northern Nigerian. And if your ambition is to go further, it has to be translated, subtitled, or dubbed.
Lastly, the original almost always is better than the translation. Much is always lost in subtitling. But a great translator can create something even better than the original.
As example might be seen in the adaptation of carmen by jo ramaka, his film karmen gei. I wouldn't want to ask which is better, ramaka or bizet's version: both are wonderful.
And of course, shakespeare's own plays were based on earlier written texts as well. Texts written in other languages. Without translation there'd have been no Shakespeare either. We live by sharing across culture, and culture breathes when it can reach outside its own closely confined world.
ken
 
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
harrow@msu.edu<mailto:harrow@msu.edu>
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
 
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>> on behalf of "meochonu@gmail.com<mailto:meochonu@gmail.com>" <meochonu@gmail.com<mailto:meochonu@gmail.com>>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Date: Monday 20 March 2017 at 11:30
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Cc: "tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>" <tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>>, "john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>" <john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
It is sad to see this edifying discussion degenerate into this, but a few quick points preceded by a declaration:
 
I have been following the thread and the contributions of Farooq and Ken have captured by own position so excellently that I saw no need to contribute. After reading Oga Falola's penultimate post, however, I feel that a few submissions would be in order.
 
1. Despite the effort of the mild-mannered and polite scholar, Ken Harrow, to explain that the notion of English being the property of the British or of Euro-America is wrong, some responses have continued to proceed from that erroneous, ironically neocolonial idea. Falola challenged us to name countries that have developed by operationalizing the languages of other people, implying that English is not Nigerians' property, that it belongs to others. It is only if you believe this foundational fallacy that you'd believe that when Nigerians master English, they are embracing someone else's linguistic heritage and abandoning their own--the largely outmoded argument about about linguistic imperialism. It should be self-evident that the notion of linguistic imperialism dissolves considerably when the language in question is now democratized and domesticated in several locales and when the original possessors of that language have lost control of it while those who adopted it have shaped and reshaped it in line with their own communicative and cultural predilections. Even the canonization of standard English was not--is not--an exclusively Euro-American affair as stakeholders in the language's multiple varieties have contributed to the institution and convention we now know as standard English.
 
2. There is also, in Falola's and others' contributions, the erroneous assumption that Euro-American modernity--or modernity as a generic category--inheres in English. This is a claim made by generations of Eurocentric scholars and hegemons. It has been challenged successfully by postcolonial theorists, literary scholars, historians, and others, who have rightly sought to decenter modernity, locate it in multiple locales, practices, discourses, and linguistic communities, and to puncture the claim of haughty imperialists that they bestowed modernity on benighted subalterns through the instrumentality of the English language and English language education. Mainstream concepts such as parallel modernities, vernacular modernities, alternative modernities, etc--which we now take for granted as commonsensical givens--signal how successful the project of provincializing Europe and its modernity and of recognizing modernity's polyvalent manifestation and provenance has been. Yet some contributors here seem to be reifying this debunked claim and inadvertently rehabilitating it through their claim that modernity is coextensive with the English language. Even the British colonial variety of modernity, encoded in post-Enlightenment claims to universality, is not as Euro-American in provenance as was previously thought. You only need to read Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishness to know that colonial subalterns in non-Western locales helped constitute and reconstitute the iconic edifices of Englishness and its associated modernity.
 
3. Therefore, it is problematic to equate the mastery of English with a capitulation to a "foreign" English modernity or culture. That culture, to begin with, is hardly English in the strict Manichean way some are arguing here. Colonial culture and colonial modernity are as Nigerian as they are English. There were as many subaltern actors in making colonial modernity as there were English people. Secondly, it is condescending and even a tad insulting to Nigerians to imply as some have done here that they are incapable of separating the linguistic utilitarian benefits of English from its cultural components--that in fact when they choose to master English in order to participate in global professional and intellectual currents or to be conversant in the dominant epistemic vocabulary of our world, they are assimilating to a foreign culture. Nigerians are capable of smartly adopting the utilitarian ethos of English without uncritically embracing whatever cultural resources may be conveyed by the language. We as scholars should not arrogantly infantilize our African subjects, who are in most cases smarter and more pragmatic than we give them credit for. Nigerians do not need to be protected or shielded from what we assume to be the culturally corrosive effects of English mastery. They are capable of making a distinction between the ways of the English and the globally utilitarian language called English.
 
4. Much of the attack on English by people whose intellectual and professional trajectories have been defined by a mastery of standard English seems driven by a simplistic and self-destructive Afrocentric impulse. Self-writing is a noble endeavor, but it becomes counterproductive when it devolves into epistemic self-isolation. If indeed Africa possesses a rich intellectual and scholarly heritage that we complain is yet to be shared with or recognized by the broader global world of scholarship how can the solution be to further isolate this heritage from the global intellectual pool by enunciating it in Africa's languages, which are unintelligible to outsiders? I don't get this type of logic. It seems to me that the urgent task facing Africanists is to seek pathways into consequential global scholarly and intellectual conversations, pathways through which the insights and contributions of African vernacular and other epistemologies can enter into dialogue with epistemologies of other places and eventually take its place in the arenas where paradigms and consensuses are consecrated. If we publish and write in our languages, we are writing for for ourselves, essentially. How is such an incestuous intellectual enterprise going to enable African epistemology to enter into the global scholarly marketplace and be appreciated and engaged with? There is already a model for subaltern epistemologies entering the global English-language epistemological canon. Indian social scientific and humanistic scholars are today some of the most influential in the world, but they did not enter into global scholarly reckoning by complaining about linguistic imperialism or advocating for a return to Indic languages, modes of self-representation, and esoteric discourse, but by translating the unique insights and properties of Indic vernacular epistemologies into English and specifically into the high theoretical academic lingo of the Euro-Americn academy. Western theorists and academics took notice. They had to. They began to engage Indian scholarship on its own terms but they did so only because the language in which this scholarship came to them was relatable, familiar. There was a shared linguistic space where productive engagement was possible. Pius Adesanmi has a brilliant article that documents and analyzes this process. By all means let us create platforms for indigenous African knowledge to thrive, but let us also prioritize translation, not just in the mechanical or literal sense but also in the epistemic sense of transporting entire intellectual repertoires from our localized and limited languages into a language and lexicon that is intelligible to global scholarly audiences. For good or ill, that linguistic medium is English, along with its associated disciplinary jargons.
 
5. Malami's narrative
Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>: Mar 24 12:53AM

Thanks Prof Smith for this archival and urgently needed update on the translations of Fagunwas works. I have always felt in my bones that there is something needed before my 16 year old translation goes to bed at the press (particularly the critical essay -hence the delay) . You supplied it. And who says our forum is not educative!
 
 
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Pamela Smith <pamelasmith@unomaha.edu>
Date: 23/03/2017 14:37 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
"Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers…" – Ken Harrow
 
Ken, I'm not sure this claim is accurate. Literary translation is alive and well. See below a cobbling together of a Fagunwa works short list I am aware of. Granted, Soyinka led the way, but others have continued in the same path in both ENGLISH AND FRENCH. Availability/circulation may be a different story. Also note that in the case of the publication of the Smith and Ajadi translations of Igbo Olodumare, completed in the same year, the latter beat the former to the publishers in a market that cannot sustain duplication – the situation (in the absence of a literary clearing house) in a couple of instances I am aware of.
 
 
1. Igbo Olodumare -- English translation titled The Forest of the Almighty, by Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1985 – Unpublished, but Excerpts published in numerous essays
 
1. In the forest of Olodumare, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare, Translated by Wole Soyinka (2010).
2. Forest of a Thousand Demons, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale, Translated by Wole Soyinka (1968).
3. Mystery of God, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Aditu Eledumare (translated by Olu Obafemi, 2010).
4. The Novel of D.O Fagunwa - A commentary by Ayo Bamgbose written in ENGLISH
5. The Forest of God, Annotated translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare by Gabriel A. Ajadi, a PhD dissertation (Revised edition, 2005).
6. The Expedition to the Mountain (The Third Saga) an English translation of Fagunwa's Irinkerindo, by Dapo Adeniyi, (1994).
7. ALL 5 FAGUNWA NOVELS HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED TO FRENCH by Abioye
8. I am sure there are others which further search would unearth.
Also, I know Igbo and Edo friends and former classmates, born and raised in parts of Yorubaland (Lagos and Ibadan especially) who read Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode during our Yoruba course/class reading/studies much better (more proficiently) than I did (as a poor Krio-speaking Yoruba learner).
 
 
 
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Olayinka Agbetuyi
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 6:39 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: tunde.bewaji@gmail.com; john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
 
 
Ken.
 
You stated that if Soyinka did not translate Fagunwa into English it would remain known only to Yoruba readers. Not so. There is now an army of Igbo-Yoruba offsprings who are products of inter ethnic marriages in Lagos, some of whom may become translators and produce Igbo translations given the right level of motivation.
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu<mailto:harrow@msu.edu>>
Date: 21/03/2017 13:39 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Cc: tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>, john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
Hi all
I'd like to refer to moses's fourth point, the question of translation, so that cultural production not remain local.
As I work in literature and cinema, that issue is and has been for a long time a central question in African studies. Achebe vs ngugi.
Ngugi advocated writing in African languages, so as to remain true to the cultural, epistemological values.
Why not? One of my favorite writers among contemporary African authors, boris boubacar diop, opted to begin writing in wolof, and produced a magnificent novel, doomi golo.
On the other hand, if ngugi turned to writing in kikuyu, please note he then turned around and translated it into English for wider dissemination. Are there any novels or plays by ngugi that he has not had translated and published in English?
Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers. That is no worse than having Shakespeare known only to English speakers; but when the germans translated Shakespeare into german, that gave a tremendous boost to his expansion onto the world stage. Similarly when freud was translated into French, that enabled lacanian analysis (and the training for fanon) to become disseminated widely. When Lacan became translated into English, film studies and feminist studies turned deeply toward psychoanalytical approaches. Should I go on?
In film studies, carmela garritano distinguished between local twi films made in Ghana for local audiences. Had the films all remained in twi, they would have remained confined to accra and its region. But filmmakers like Shirley frimpong-manso wanted to make films that could be distributed world-wide, she turned to English, as well as to what Ghanaians termed professional looks, to polished post-production, as we have now seen in afolayan's films
Now, folks, if afolayan's films did not have English, or if there were no sub-titles, we who don't speak the languages he employs in his films would be at a loss.
Subtitles, translations, these are how works enter into the global waves of culture. Not everyone wants to do this: but if you and I were to actually sit and talk about African literature, we have to have a text that we share in common, and that means sharing a language.
Let the author decide what language works for him or her in writing a novel. But he or she can't control what languages others know. You can write for your own community, or reach out to others. And if you make a film that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions, you'd better find a way to reach the audience. That might well entail using hausa in northern Nigerian. And if your ambition is to go further, it has to be translated, subtitled, or dubbed.
Lastly, the original almost always is better than the translation. Much is always lost in subtitling. But a great translator can create something even better than the original.
As example might be seen in the adaptation of carmen by jo ramaka, his film karmen gei. I wouldn't want to ask which is better, ramaka or bizet's version: both are wonderful.
And of course, shakespeare's own plays were based on earlier written texts as well. Texts written in other languages. Without translation there'd have been no Shakespeare either. We live by sharing across culture, and culture breathes when it can reach outside its own closely confined world.
ken
 
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
harrow@msu.edu<mailto:harrow@msu.edu>
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
 
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>> on behalf of "meochonu@gmail.com<mailto:meochonu@gmail.com>" <meochonu@gmail.com<mailto:meochonu@gmail.com>>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Date: Monday 20 March 2017 at 11:30
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Cc: "tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>" <tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>>, "john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>" <john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
It is sad to see this edifying discussion degenerate into this, but a few quick points preceded by a declaration:
 
I have been following the thread and the contributions of Farooq and Ken have captured by own position so excellently that I saw no need to contribute. After reading Oga Falola's penultimate post, however, I feel that a few submissions would be in order.
 
1. Despite the effort of the mild-mannered and polite scholar, Ken Harrow, to explain that the notion of English being the property of the British or of Euro-America is wrong, some responses have continued to proceed from that erroneous, ironically neocolonial idea. Falola challenged us to name countries that have developed by operationalizing the languages of other people, implying that English is not Nigerians' property, that it belongs to others. It is only if you believe this foundational fallacy that you'd believe that when Nigerians master English, they are embracing someone else's linguistic heritage and abandoning their own--the largely outmoded argument about about linguistic imperialism. It should be self-evident that the notion of linguistic imperialism dissolves considerably when the language in question is now democratized and domesticated in several locales and when the original possessors of that language have lost control of it while those who adopted it have shaped and reshaped it in line with their own communicative and cultural predilections. Even the canonization of standard English was not--is not--an exclusively Euro-American affair as stakeholders in the language's multiple varieties have contributed to the institution and convention we now know as standard English.
 
2. There is also, in Falola's and others' contributions, the erroneous assumption that Euro-American modernity--or modernity as a generic category--inheres in English. This is a claim made by generations of Eurocentric scholars and hegemons. It has been challenged successfully by postcolonial theorists, literary scholars, historians, and others, who have rightly sought to decenter modernity, locate it in multiple locales, practices, discourses, and linguistic communities, and to puncture the claim of haughty imperialists that they bestowed modernity on benighted subalterns through the instrumentality of the English language and English language education. Mainstream concepts such as parallel modernities, vernacular modernities, alternative modernities, etc--which we now take for granted as commonsensical givens--signal how successful the project of provincializing Europe and its modernity and of recognizing modernity's polyvalent manifestation and provenance has been. Yet some contributors here seem to be reifying this debunked claim and inadvertently rehabilitating it through their claim that modernity is coextensive with the English language. Even the British colonial variety of modernity, encoded in post-Enlightenment claims to universality, is not as Euro-American in provenance as was previously thought. You only need to read Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishness to know that colonial subalterns in non-Western locales helped constitute and reconstitute the iconic edifices of Englishness and its associated modernity.
 
3. Therefore, it is problematic to equate the mastery of English with a capitulation to a "foreign" English modernity or culture. That culture, to begin with, is hardly English in the strict Manichean way some are arguing here. Colonial culture and colonial modernity are as Nigerian as they are English. There were as many subaltern actors in making colonial modernity as there were English people. Secondly, it is condescending and even a tad insulting to Nigerians to imply as some have done here that they are incapable of separating the linguistic utilitarian benefits of English from its cultural components--that in fact when they choose to master English in order to participate in global professional and intellectual currents or to be conversant in the dominant epistemic vocabulary of our world, they are assimilating to a foreign culture. Nigerians are capable of smartly adopting the utilitarian ethos of English without uncritically embracing whatever cultural resources may be conveyed by the language. We as scholars should not arrogantly infantilize our African subjects, who are in most cases smarter and more pragmatic than we give them credit for. Nigerians do not need to be protected or shielded from what we assume to be the culturally corrosive effects of English mastery. They are capable of making a distinction between the ways of the English and the globally utilitarian language called English.
 
4. Much of the attack on English by people whose intellectual and professional trajectories have been defined by a mastery of standard English seems driven by a simplistic and self-destructive Afrocentric impulse. Self-writing is a noble endeavor, but it becomes counterproductive when it devolves into epistemic self-isolation. If indeed Africa possesses a rich intellectual and scholarly heritage that we complain is yet to be shared with or recognized by the broader global world of scholarship how can the solution be to further isolate this heritage from the global intellectual pool by enunciating it in Africa's languages, which are unintelligible to outsiders? I don't get this type of logic. It seems to me that the urgent task facing Africanists is to seek pathways into consequential global scholarly and intellectual conversations, pathways through which the insights and contributions of African vernacular and other epistemologies can enter into dialogue with epistemologies of other places and eventually take its place in the arenas where paradigms and consensuses are consecrated. If we publish and write in our languages, we are writing for for ourselves, essentially. How is such an incestuous intellectual enterprise going to enable African epistemology to enter into the global scholarly marketplace and be appreciated and engaged with? There is already a model for subaltern epistemologies entering the global English-language epistemological canon. Indian social scientific and humanistic scholars are today some of the most influential in the world, but they did not enter into global scholarly reckoning by complaining about linguistic imperialism or advocating for a return to Indic languages, modes of self-representation, and esoteric discourse, but by translating the unique insights and properties of Indic vernacular epistemologies into English and specifically into the high theoretical academic lingo of the Euro-Americn academy. Western theorists and academics took notice. They had to. They began to engage Indian scholarship on its own terms but they did so only because the language in which this scholarship came to them was relatable, familiar. There was a shared linguistic space where productive engagement was possible. Pius Adesanmi has a brilliant article that documents and analyzes this process. By all means let us create platforms for indigenous African knowledge to thrive, but let us also prioritize translation, not just in the mechanical or literal sense but also in the epistemic sense of transporting entire intellectual repertoires from our localized and limited languages into a language and lexicon that is intelligible to global scholarly audiences. For good or ill, that linguistic medium is English, along with its associated
Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>: Mar 24 09:00AM -0400

Dear olayinka
 
Your goals of expanding the readership in other languages is a fine one. I don't want to quibble too much here, but I don't think legislation can create readerships as you envision it.
 
I do agree in education in indigenous languages, up to the 2ndary levels; after that, it would be wrong to lead students away from the use of languages, and I suppose English in particular, in certain fields that communicate in that global language, just as it would be wrong to avoid indigenous languages in the arts.
 
I have railed against the confines of an English only education in my field, literature, and against the token study of foreign languages that precludes the accomplishment of sufficient literacy to be able to read literature, or study cinema, in foreign languages. I want my students armed, able to read in the original texts or films created in foreign languages.
 
The same goes for African students studying in Africa.
 
ken
 

 
Kenneth Harrow
 
Dept of English and Film Studies
 
Michigan State University
 
619 Red Cedar Rd
 
East Lansing, MI 48824
 
517-803-8839
 
harrow@msu.edu
 
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
 

 
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 24 March 2017 at 03:49
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 

 
Ken:
 

 
Part of what I meant by the younger generatiom being motivated to translate into other Nigerian languages is the disincentive that the monopoly of English as lingua franca has on other major Nigerian languages as economically viable medium of scholarship.
 

 
Your position on the prohibitive cost of translation as a limiting factor against translations into English will be counterbalanced by intra- Nigerian translations if local publishers find that there are enough readers in other Nigerian languages nation-wide to embark on the venture.
 

 
Yes, legislating the use of other lingua francas in the country will help in reversing this trend.
 

 

 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 

 

 
-------- Original message --------
 
From: Pamela Smith <pamelasmith@unomaha.edu>
 
Date: 23/03/2017 14:37 (GMT+00:00)
 
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
 
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 

 
"Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers…" – Ken Harrow
 

 
Ken, I'm not sure this claim is accurate. Literary translation is alive and well. See below a cobbling together of a Fagunwa works short list I am aware of. Granted, Soyinka led the way, but others have continued in the same path in both ENGLISH AND FRENCH. Availability/circulation may be a different story. Also note that in the case of the publication of the Smith and Ajadi translations of Igbo Olodumare, completed in the same year, the latter beat the former to the publishers in a market that cannot sustain duplication – the situation (in the absence of a literary clearing house) in a couple of instances I am aware of.
 

 
1. Igbo Olodumare -- English translation titled The Forest of the Almighty, by Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1985 – Unpublished, but Excerpts published in numerous essays
In the forest of Olodumare, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare, Translated by Wole Soyinka (2010).
Forest of a Thousand Demons, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale, Translated by Wole Soyinka (1968).
Mystery of God, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Aditu Eledumare (translated by Olu Obafemi, 2010).
The Novel of D.O Fagunwa - A commentary by Ayo Bamgbose written in ENGLISH
The Forest of God, Annotated translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare by Gabriel A. Ajadi, a PhD dissertation (Revised edition, 2005).
The Expedition to the Mountain (The Third Saga) an English translation of Fagunwa's Irinkerindo, by Dapo Adeniyi, (1994).
ALL 5 FAGUNWA NOVELS HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED TO FRENCH by Abioye
I am sure there are others which further search would unearth.
Also, I know Igbo and Edo friends and former classmates, born and raised in parts of Yorubaland (Lagos and Ibadan especially) who read Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode during our Yoruba course/class reading/studies much better (more proficiently) than I did (as a poor Krio-speaking Yoruba learner).
 

 

 

 
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Olayinka Agbetuyi
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 6:39 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: tunde.bewaji@gmail.com; john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 

 

 

 
Ken.
 

 
You stated that if Soyinka did not translate Fagunwa into English it would remain known only to Yoruba readers. Not so. There is now an army of Igbo-Yoruba offsprings who are products of inter ethnic marriages in Lagos, some of whom may become translators and produce Igbo translations given the right level of motivation.
 

 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 

 

 
-------- Original message --------
 
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
 
Date: 21/03/2017 13:39 (GMT+00:00)
 
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
 
Cc: tunde.bewaji@gmail.com, john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm
 
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 

 
Hi all
 
I'd like to refer to moses's fourth point, the question of translation, so that cultural production not remain local.
 
As I work in literature and cinema, that issue is and has been for a long time a central question in African studies. Achebe vs ngugi.
 
Ngugi advocated writing in African languages, so as to remain true to the cultural, epistemological values.
 
Why not? One of my favorite writers among contemporary African authors, boris boubacar diop, opted to begin writing in wolof, and produced a magnificent novel, doomi golo.
 
On the other hand, if ngugi turned to writing in kikuyu, please note he then turned around and translated it into English for wider dissemination. Are there any novels or plays by ngugi that he has not had translated and published in English?
 
Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers. That is no worse than having Shakespeare known only to English speakers; but when the germans translated Shakespeare into german, that gave a tremendous boost to his expansion onto the world stage. Similarly when freud was translated into French, that enabled lacanian analysis (and the training for fanon) to become disseminated widely. When Lacan became translated into English, film studies and feminist studies turned deeply toward psychoanalytical approaches. Should I go on?
 
In film studies, carmela garritano distinguished between local twi films made in Ghana for local audiences. Had the films all remained in twi, they would have remained confined to accra and its region. But filmmakers like Shirley frimpong-manso wanted to make films that could be distributed world-wide, she turned to English, as well as to what Ghanaians termed professional looks, to polished post-production, as we have now seen in afolayan's films
 
Now, folks, if afolayan's films did not have English, or if there were no sub-titles, we who don't speak the languages he employs in his films would be at a loss.
 
Subtitles, translations, these are how works enter into the global waves of culture. Not everyone wants to do this: but if you and I were to actually sit and talk about African literature, we have to have a text that we share in common, and that means sharing a language.
 
Let the author decide what language works for him or her in writing a novel. But he or she can't control what languages others know. You can write for your own community, or reach out to others. And if you make a film that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions, you'd better find a way to reach the audience. That might well entail using hausa in northern Nigerian. And if your ambition is to go further, it has to be translated, subtitled, or dubbed.
 
Lastly, the original almost always is better than the translation. Much is always lost in subtitling. But a great translator can create something even better than the original.
 
As example might be seen in the adaptation of carmen by jo ramaka, his film karmen gei. I wouldn't want to ask which is better, ramaka or bizet's version: both are wonderful.
 
And of course, shakespeare's own plays were based on earlier written texts as well. Texts written in other languages. Without translation there'd have been no Shakespeare either. We live by sharing across culture, and culture breathes when it can reach outside its own closely confined world.
 
ken
 

 
Kenneth Harrow
 
Dept of English and Film Studies
 
Michigan State University
 
619 Red Cedar Rd
 
East Lansing, MI 48824
 
517-803-8839
 
harrow@msu.edu
 
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
 

 
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meochonu@gmail.com" <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 20 March 2017 at 11:30
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Cc: "tunde.bewaji@gmail.com" <tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>, "john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm" <john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 

 
It is sad to see this edifying discussion degenerate into this, but a few quick points preceded by a declaration:
 

 
I have been following the thread and the contributions of Farooq and Ken have captured by own position so excellently that I saw no need to contribute. After reading Oga Falola's penultimate post, however, I feel that a few submissions would be in order.
 

 
1. Despite the effort of the mild-mannered and polite scholar, Ken Harrow, to explain that the notion of English being the property of the British or of Euro-America is wrong, some responses have continued to proceed from that erroneous, ironically neocolonial idea. Falola challenged us to name countries that have developed by operationalizing the languages of other people, implying that English is not Nigerians' property, that it belongs to others. It is only if you believe this foundational fallacy that you'd believe that when Nigerians master English, they are embracing someone else's linguistic heritage and abandoning their own--the largely outmoded argument about about linguistic imperialism. It should be self-evident that the notion of linguistic imperialism dissolves considerably when the language in question is now democratized and domesticated in several locales and when the original possessors of that language have lost control of it while those who adopted it have shaped and reshaped it in line with their own communicative and cultural predilections. Even the canonization of standard English was not--is not--an exclusively Euro-American affair as stakeholders in the language's multiple varieties have contributed to the institution and convention we now know as standard English.
 

 
2. There is also, in Falola's and others' contributions, the erroneous assumption that Euro-American modernity--or modernity as a generic category--inheres in English. This is a claim made by generations of Eurocentric scholars and hegemons. It has been challenged successfully by postcolonial theorists, literary scholars, historians, and others, who have rightly sought to decenter modernity, locate it in multiple locales, practices, discourses, and linguistic communities, and to puncture the claim of haughty imperialists that they bestowed modernity on benighted subalterns through the instrumentality of the English language and English language education. Mainstream concepts such as parallel modernities, vernacular modernities, alternative modernities, etc--which we now take for granted as commonsensical givens--signal how successful the project of provincializing Europe and its modernity and of recognizing modernity's polyvalent manifestation and provenance has been. Yet some contributors here seem to be reifying this debunked claim and inadvertently rehabilitating it through their claim that modernity is coextensive with the English language. Even the British colonial variety of modernity, encoded in post-Enlightenment claims to universality, is not as Euro-American in provenance as was previously thought. You only need to read Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishness to know that colonial subalterns in non-Western locales helped constitute and reconstitute the iconic edifices of Englishness and its associated modernity.
 

 
3. Therefore, it is problematic to equate the mastery of English with a capitulation to a "foreign" English modernity or culture. That culture, to begin with, is hardly English in the strict Manichean way some are arguing here. Colonial culture and colonial modernity are as Nigerian as they are English. There were as many subaltern actors in making colonial modernity as there were English people. Secondly, it is condescending and even a tad insulting to Nigerians to imply as some have done here that they are incapable of separating the linguistic utilitarian benefits of English from its cultural components--that in fact when they choose to master English in order to participate in global professional and intellectual currents or to be conversant in the dominant epistemic vocabulary of our world, they are assimilating to a foreign culture. Nigerians are capable of smartly adopting the utilitarian ethos of English without uncritically embracing whatever cultural resources may be conveyed by the language. We as scholars should not arrogantly infantilize our African subjects, who are in most cases smarter and more pragmatic than we give them credit for. Nigerians do not need to be protected or shielded from what we assume to be the culturally corrosive effects of English mastery. They are capable of making a distinction between the ways of the English and the globally utilitarian language called English.
 

 
4. Much of the attack on English by people whose intellectual and professional trajectories have been defined by a mastery of standard English seems driven by a simplistic and self-destructive Afrocentric impulse. Self-writing is a noble endeavor, but it becomes counterproductive when it devolves into epistemic self-isolation. If indeed Africa possesses a rich intellectual and scholarly heritage that we complain is yet to be shared with or recognized by the broader global world of scholarship how can the solution be to further isolate this heritage from the global intellectual pool by enunciating it in Africa's languages, which are unintelligible to outsiders? I don't get this type of logic. It seems to me that the urgent task facing Africanists is to seek pathways into consequential global scholarly and intellectual conversations, pathways through which the insights and contributions of African vernacular and other epistemologies can enter into dialogue with epistemologies of other places and eventually take its place in the arenas where paradigms and consensuses are consecrated. If we publish and write in our languages, we are writing for for
Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>: Mar 24 03:08PM

I have absolutely no intention of leading students away from English after secondary education; on the contrary I feed from having students take English in whatever guises after secondary education and I know many will stay on.
 
My position is clear: but for OBJs legislation of English into the Nigerian educational curricula via the UPE programme in his first incarnation in government (military) many families ( particularly in the rural areas) would rather pull their wards out of the school system onto the farms where they were urgently needed (I know that happened routinely in the north). So legislation worked in that respect for English.
 
What Im arguing is what is good for the goose linguistically is also good for the gander of indigenous widely spoken languages depending on state objectives.
 
Past Nigerian governments should be ashamed of themselves for having not thought this through and any other Nigerian government that is not thinking strategically in this direction must be seen as a neo-colonial government.
 
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: 24/03/2017 13:07 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
Dear olayinka
Your goals of expanding the readership in other languages is a fine one. I don't want to quibble too much here, but I don't think legislation can create readerships as you envision it.
I do agree in education in indigenous languages, up to the 2ndary levels; after that, it would be wrong to lead students away from the use of languages, and I suppose English in particular, in certain fields that communicate in that global language, just as it would be wrong to avoid indigenous languages in the arts.
I have railed against the confines of an English only education in my field, literature, and against the token study of foreign languages that precludes the accomplishment of sufficient literacy to be able to read literature, or study cinema, in foreign languages. I want my students armed, able to read in the original texts or films created in foreign languages.
The same goes for African students studying in Africa.
ken
 
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
harrow@msu.edu<mailto:harrow@msu.edu>
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
 
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 24 March 2017 at 03:49
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
Ken:
 
Part of what I meant by the younger generatiom being motivated to translate into other Nigerian languages is the disincentive that the monopoly of English as lingua franca has on other major Nigerian languages as economically viable medium of scholarship.
 
Your position on the prohibitive cost of translation as a limiting factor against translations into English will be counterbalanced by intra- Nigerian translations if local publishers find that there are enough readers in other Nigerian languages nation-wide to embark on the venture.
 
Yes, legislating the use of other lingua francas in the country will help in reversing this trend.
 
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Pamela Smith <pamelasmith@unomaha.edu>
Date: 23/03/2017 14:37 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
"Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers…" – Ken Harrow
 
Ken, I'm not sure this claim is accurate. Literary translation is alive and well. See below a cobbling together of a Fagunwa works short list I am aware of. Granted, Soyinka led the way, but others have continued in the same path in both ENGLISH AND FRENCH. Availability/circulation may be a different story. Also note that in the case of the publication of the Smith and Ajadi translations of Igbo Olodumare, completed in the same year, the latter beat the former to the publishers in a market that cannot sustain duplication – the situation (in the absence of a literary clearing house) in a couple of instances I am aware of.
 
 
1. Igbo Olodumare -- English translation titled The Forest of the Almighty, by Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1985 – Unpublished, but Excerpts published in numerous essays
 
1. In the forest of Olodumare, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare, Translated by Wole Soyinka (2010).
2. Forest of a Thousand Demons, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale, Translated by Wole Soyinka (1968).
3. Mystery of God, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Aditu Eledumare (translated by Olu Obafemi, 2010).
4. The Novel of D.O Fagunwa - A commentary by Ayo Bamgbose written in ENGLISH
5. The Forest of God, Annotated translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare by Gabriel A. Ajadi, a PhD dissertation (Revised edition, 2005).
6. The Expedition to the Mountain (The Third Saga) an English translation of Fagunwa's Irinkerindo, by Dapo Adeniyi, (1994).
7. ALL 5 FAGUNWA NOVELS HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED TO FRENCH by Abioye
8. I am sure there are others which further search would unearth.
Also, I know Igbo and Edo friends and former classmates, born and raised in parts of Yorubaland (Lagos and Ibadan especially) who read Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode during our Yoruba course/class reading/studies much better (more proficiently) than I did (as a poor Krio-speaking Yoruba learner).
 
 
 
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Olayinka Agbetuyi
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 6:39 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: tunde.bewaji@gmail.com; john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
 
 
Ken.
 
You stated that if Soyinka did not translate Fagunwa into English it would remain known only to Yoruba readers. Not so. There is now an army of Igbo-Yoruba offsprings who are products of inter ethnic marriages in Lagos, some of whom may become translators and produce Igbo translations given the right level of motivation.
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu<mailto:harrow@msu.edu>>
Date: 21/03/2017 13:39 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Cc: tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>, john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
Hi all
I'd like to refer to moses's fourth point, the question of translation, so that cultural production not remain local.
As I work in literature and cinema, that issue is and has been for a long time a central question in African studies. Achebe vs ngugi.
Ngugi advocated writing in African languages, so as to remain true to the cultural, epistemological values.
Why not? One of my favorite writers among contemporary African authors, boris boubacar diop, opted to begin writing in wolof, and produced a magnificent novel, doomi golo.
On the other hand, if ngugi turned to writing in kikuyu, please note he then turned around and translated it into English for wider dissemination. Are there any novels or plays by ngugi that he has not had translated and published in English?
Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers. That is no worse than having Shakespeare known only to English speakers; but when the germans translated Shakespeare into german, that gave a tremendous boost to his expansion onto the world stage. Similarly when freud was translated into French, that enabled lacanian analysis (and the training for fanon) to become disseminated widely. When Lacan became translated into English, film studies and feminist studies turned deeply toward psychoanalytical approaches. Should I go on?
In film studies, carmela garritano distinguished between local twi films made in Ghana for local audiences. Had the films all remained in twi, they would have remained confined to accra and its region. But filmmakers like Shirley frimpong-manso wanted to make films that could be distributed world-wide, she turned to English, as well as to what Ghanaians termed professional looks, to polished post-production, as we have now seen in afolayan's films
Now, folks, if afolayan's films did not have English, or if there were no sub-titles, we who don't speak the languages he employs in his films would be at a loss.
Subtitles, translations, these are how works enter into the global waves of culture. Not everyone wants to do this: but if you and I were to actually sit and talk about African literature, we have to have a text that we share in common, and that means sharing a language.
Let the author decide what language works for him or her in writing a novel. But he or she can't control what languages others know. You can write for your own community, or reach out to others. And if you make a film that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions, you'd better find a way to reach the audience. That might well entail using hausa in northern Nigerian. And if your ambition is to go further, it has to be translated, subtitled, or dubbed.
Lastly, the original almost always is better than the translation. Much is always lost in subtitling. But a great translator can create something even better than the original.
As example might be seen in the adaptation of carmen by jo ramaka, his film karmen gei. I wouldn't want to ask which is better, ramaka or bizet's version: both are wonderful.
And of course, shakespeare's own plays were based on earlier written texts as well. Texts written in other languages. Without translation there'd have been no Shakespeare either. We live by sharing across culture, and culture breathes when it can reach outside its own closely confined world.
ken
 
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
harrow@msu.edu<mailto:harrow@msu.edu>
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
 
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>> on behalf of "meochonu@gmail.com<mailto:meochonu@gmail.com>" <meochonu@gmail.com<mailto:meochonu@gmail.com>>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Date: Monday 20 March 2017 at 11:30
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>>
Cc: "tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>" <tunde.bewaji@gmail.com<mailto:tunde.bewaji@gmail.com>>, "john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>" <john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm<mailto:john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm>>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
 
It is sad to see this edifying discussion degenerate into this, but a few quick points preceded by a declaration:
 
I have been following the thread and the contributions of Farooq and Ken have captured by own position so excellently that I saw no need to contribute. After reading Oga Falola's penultimate post, however, I feel that a few submissions would be in order.
 
1. Despite the effort of the mild-mannered and polite scholar, Ken Harrow, to explain that the notion of English being the property of the British or of Euro-America is wrong, some responses have continued to proceed from that erroneous, ironically neocolonial idea. Falola challenged us to name countries that have developed by operationalizing the languages of other people, implying that English is not Nigerians' property, that it belongs to others. It is only if you believe this foundational fallacy that you'd believe that when Nigerians master English, they are embracing someone else's linguistic heritage and abandoning their own--the largely outmoded argument about about linguistic imperialism. It should be self-evident that the notion of linguistic imperialism dissolves considerably when the language in question is now democratized and domesticated in several locales and when the original possessors of that language have lost control of it while those who adopted it have shaped and reshaped it in line with their own communicative and cultural predilections. Even the canonization of standard English was not--is not--an exclusively Euro-American affair as stakeholders in the language's multiple varieties have contributed to the institution and convention we now know as standard English.
 
2. There is also, in Falola's and others' contributions, the erroneous assumption that Euro-American modernity--or modernity as a generic category--inheres in English. This is a claim made by generations of Eurocentric scholars and hegemons. It has been challenged successfully by postcolonial theorists, literary scholars, historians, and others, who have rightly sought to decenter modernity, locate it in multiple locales, practices, discourses, and linguistic communities, and to puncture the claim of haughty imperialists that they bestowed modernity on benighted subalterns through the instrumentality of the English language and English language education. Mainstream concepts such as parallel modernities, vernacular modernities, alternative modernities, etc--which we now take for granted as commonsensical givens--signal how successful the project of provincializing Europe and its modernity and of recognizing modernity's polyvalent manifestation and provenance has been. Yet some contributors here seem to be reifying this debunked claim and inadvertently rehabilitating it through their claim that modernity is coextensive with the English language. Even the British colonial variety of modernity, encoded in post-Enlightenment claims to universality, is not as Euro-American in provenance as was previously thought. You only need to read Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishness to know that colonial subalterns in non-Western locales helped constitute and reconstitute the iconic edifices of Englishness and its associated modernity.
 
3. Therefore, it is problematic to equate the mastery of English with a capitulation to a "foreign" English modernity or culture. That culture, to begin with, is hardly English in the strict Manichean way some are arguing here. Colonial culture and colonial modernity are as Nigerian as they are English. There were as many subaltern actors in making colonial modernity as there were English people. Secondly, it is condescending and even a tad insulting to Nigerians to imply as some have done here that they are incapable of separating the linguistic utilitarian benefits of English from its cultural components--that in fact when they choose to master English in order to participate in global professional and intellectual currents or to be conversant in the dominant epistemic vocabulary of our world, they are assimilating to a foreign culture. Nigerians are capable of smartly adopting the utilitarian ethos of English
Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>: Mar 24 10:39AM

MOSES OCHONU: THE COMMA BEFORE THE PERIOD
 
I thought we use a comma in a sentence because we have more to say, and we detour via semicolons, colons, dashes, brackets, and other punctuations before we get to the king of them all, the period. And if you misuse one, as in failing to recognize that a semicolon is the husband of a comma, on top of it with a longer orgasm, but declimbed to become the heir to a period, do not blame me if Farooq, the friend of Moses, hammer you on the head. And please do not say that because English is a foreign language, semicolon can replace a colon. Not so, as one lives in the village and the other in the city, meeting once in a while to quickly depart.
Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, this is no more than a comma, as more words will pour in a deluge (I need not add rain or flood to a deluge!) as foretold by that Prophet, whose name I cannot remember at this time. Moses was surprised at his news, as he put it on his Facebook that one of his admirers sent to me.
Since I got into this profession, holding an endowed chair has been my ultimate goal. It is the highest institutional academic recognition and I dreamed of one day attaining that height. Glory be to God; that dream has come true. Although I aspired to it, I did not think that it would come this soon, making it even sweeter. Moses Ochonu
As an aside, I am not on Facebook, perhaps because I don't know what a face is doing in the company of a book! An Eyebook, yes, but one is yet to be created. And even when some friends created one for me, I asked it to be taken down. And my son works for Facebook in London! Thank you all for supporting his daily bread. But Moses forgot to add, even as huge achievements, that he has declined offers from Columbia and Yale! Unknown to him, whenever those searches commence, names are solicited, as universities must do, that his name, from our own end, is always there. Always there!
I predicted it would happen: for him, for Clapperton, for Ibhawoh, for Nimi, for Wale, for Chika, for Ugo, the Nwokeji Of Ugoland in Oakland country. Ibhawoh's own came at the speed of light, becoming a national figure. I have one or two other names to add, and one name to delete as I play God with the future of His own creation.
I have the unusual privilege, a few of which I share with Salah Hassan and Paul Zeleza, of compiling names for all the biggest awards. Some get it, some miss it, but I keep re-nominating, adding more lines, more evidence, more arguments. I have even spent hours without end to promote deserving people like Ama Ata Aidoo, thinking that if we failed with Ngugi we should move to another person. One missed what I once nominated him for, and I am completing a book on him just to re nominate him! This is our own Victor Ekpuk who has missed the MacArthur genius award for reasons that baffle me.
The story of Moses is about to begin; what he sees as the end, I see as the beginning. So, I can only compose a comma on his sweet achievement, my own sweeter dreams!
It is no secret that I admire Moses, and that I see him as ten times more talented than me in terms of the ability to conceptualize and complicate, not to talk of his refined use of language. I don't have his language, not even close. He is a better historian than me. Even all my graduate students in the last ten years know that I see him as my intellectual superior. I have invited him to Austin to speak to my seminar; and to Nigeria to give a Keynote. I have visited him, and I enjoyed a good meal at his place in Nashville. He once invited me to his campus to engage in a stimulating dialogue, pairing me with Mamdou Diouf. What a great conversation! I have sold him where it is possible to, recently inviting him to give a talk at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
We sometimes disagree on intellectual grounds, as I occasionally initiate debates in private email messages different from those on Dialogue where I don't want anyone to accuse me of corrupting my role as a moderator. Even my occasional intervention to ask people to stop talking is greeted with "Am I using your mouth?" All what I can do is to say "No sir!" I am an incurable Pan-Africanist, and Moses, Farooq Kperogi, Akin Ogundiran, Augustine Agwuele and a new breed of African intellectuals do not always see things my way. It is precisely because they differ, for creating alternative paradigms, that I actually worship them. A scholar who operates only in the company of those who always agree with him is a mediocre. We flourish because we have critics. Once in a while, one of them will be angry and send me a rude private message; but I will smile, saying that the future of Africa that I imagine does not leave me with the luxury of a fight. Conflict requires two people for it to work—I know of those who engage in conflicts with me, but I do not know of any human being that I engage in conflict with.
This achievement, as much as Moses would like to think of it as his, belongs to us all, the fulfilment of my own dream for Africans and Africa. And because this is a dream comes true, our register must respect the registrar of language.
Age gives me the privilege to offer a sermon, the register that I just mentioned. Here is one. It is so sweet to sleep and have sweet dreams. In some cases, the dream is so sweet that you wish you never woke up, interrupting it! Someone once wisely counselled, however, that no matter how sweet your dreams may be, if you do not wake up and pursue them vigorously, they will remain just that – dreams! – nothing concrete at all to show for the dream. Waking up years later with the taste of ashes in the mouth because time was spent dreaming, no time was spent working, no dream life to show for it.
A sermon must have its application. Our brother, colleague, and friend Moses did not make that mistake. From his days at Bayero University, Kano, where he obtained his BA History, he showed his acumen for dream-making and achievement. For the entire duration of his studies there, he held the Bayero University Scholarship for Outstanding Academic Performance, eventually also scooping up the Michael Crowder Prize for the Best Student on Modern African History and the Best Graduating Student in the Department of History of the class of 1997. His department did not hesitate to offer him an immediate graduate assistantship the same year. With such stellar early achievements, no future political detractors can ever say Moses did not graduate from the Department of History at Bayero!
An application must become motivational. Having started so well, it is no wonder that his career became studded with one starry achievement after the other. Obtaining subsequent degrees in African History from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he was appointed assistant professor at Vanderbilt in 2004, becoming associate professor in 2011 and then professor in 2015. He has published three books, with two others forthcoming, numerous articles in refereed journals and chapters in books, and is a sought after keynote speaker and guest lecturer. His research in this time received various recognitions including various grants and fellowships. Many would have rested on their laurels at this point but Moses wanted the Chair, and never relented for one day. He knew what he wanted when he stepped into the American academy: the almighty endowed Chair!
A motivation must turn into a testimony. Professor Moses Ochonu is indeed deserving of this most recent and highest recognition of his university. He has established for himself the distinguished reputation of being one of the leading scholars of northern and middle belt Nigeria today, joining the ranks of the like of Smith, Adeleye, Mahdi, Usman, to mention but a few since I am just in the comma mood. His important 2014 book, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria, the finalist for the prestigious ASA Herskovits Prize for the Best Scholarly Book in African Studies in any Discipline in 2015, subverts the accepted understandings of the mechanics of indirect rule in British colonial Africa, and especially in northern Nigeria. He argues there that it was "subcolonialism" and not indirect rule that dictated British policy because the Hausa-Fulani overlords of the non-Muslim people of the middle belt negotiated their domination of these populations by recourse to claims of superior authority conferred on them by the Jihads of the early 1800s. His fine and sophisticated analysis of these dynamics are major contribution to the corpus of Nigerian history, setting him apart and above his peers.
A testimony goes with a confessional. Moses is passionate about Nigeria, and this is evident in his continuous and numerous commentaries about Nigerian affairs. He is deeply engaged in puzzling the challenges and proposing the solutions for the country's progress. We know him here on the USA Africa Dialogue Series forum, as a voice that brings gravitas to any conversation he is engaged in, nuancing his analysis with uncommon insight, an eye for the fine points, and an attempt at objectivity on many divisive topics. On Facebook, he has already reached the limit of the number of friends that he can accept because thousands are so keen to read what he has to say on the various issues of the day! His essays have appeared in major Nigerian newspapers in print and online and his provocative article "The Shattering of the Buhari Mythology" in African Arguments was voted by readers as the 2016 Best Article of the Year. He is not a Nigerian academic that observes and comments about the country from a distance; no, he takes time out to visit, navigating pot-holed roads, locating the latest and best chicken suya spots in Abuja, and even taking time to appreciate Big Brother Nigeria on TV!
A confession ends in a blessing. This March, Moses already celebrated his birthday, and the news of his appointment to the Cornelius Vandebilt Chair must be perhaps the best birthday gift he has ever had. We celebrate with him, and wish him bigger dreams, above all.
This is a comma in the long sentences that I need to write on Moses, the intellectual messiah of our time, just one of the commas before I reach the end with a period.
 
TF
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
104 Inner Campus Drive
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222 (fax)
http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/
http://www.toyinfalola.com
http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Ochayi Okpeh <okpehookpeh@gmail.com>: Mar 24 12:16PM +0100

This indeed, is a befitting comma in the yet to be concluded long story of
this intellectual giant. Agbalagba Falola, you have said if all. We should
rejoice in this historic recognition of our brother and colleague. We are
proud of his intellectual prowess and wish him many more elevations and
recognition in the not too distant future. Thank you Sir, for this piece.
On Mar 24, 2017 11:43 AM, "Toyin Falola" <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
wrote:
 
ZALANGA SAMUEL <SZALANGA7994@msn.com>: Mar 24 12:10PM

Moses, please accept my sincere and joyous congratulations and celebration of this great accomplishment of yours.
 
 
Samuel
 
 
 
________________________________
From: Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 5:39 AM
To: dialogue; Yoruba Affairs
Cc: olubomehind@yahoo.com; ololadeololade70@gmail.com; Adeyemi_balogun@yahoo.com; charlesomotayo@yahoo.com; muffyakande@yahoo.com; badebua@yahoo.com; olupayimod@gmail.com; kayodeonipede2004@yahoo.co.uk; raliatsola@yahoo.com; bensonigboin@gmail.com; deity:; babjid74@yahoo.com; tolujudes@gmail.com; fortuneafatakpa@gmail.com; julia.binter@wolfson.ox.ac.uk; josephayodokun@gmail.com; shegunadebayo@gmail.com; ajigbadejube@gmail.com; M Insa Nolte; Olukoya Ogen (koyaogen@gmail.com); moyo.okediji@utexas.edu; Afolabi, Omoniyi; Ademola Dasylva; Aribidesi Usman; Bukola Adeyemi Oyeniyi; Micheal Afolayan; PHILIP_OGUNDEJI OGUNDEJI; akinlabi; Segun Ojewuyi; tunde_babawale@yahoo.com; Adenle, Adewale; Abayomi Ola; ogundimu; agbetuyi; Babatunde; Mosadomi, Tola; Akinloye A Ojo; Akinyemi,Akintunde; tadegbindin@yahoo.com; ogun Ogundiran; dele.jegede@miamioh.edu; mimikofemi; agwale Agwuele; arinpe adejumo; bimbola adelakun; dotunayobade@utexas.edu; Adeleke_Adeeko Adeeko; aaa adesanya; AdeěleěkeĚ AdeěeĚňkoňě; Olasope Oyelaran; kolapo.abimbola@howard.edu; Adeshina Afolayan; SamuelOloruntoba; borgu; nimi; Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso; Oyeniyi, Bukola; ab Assensoh; samson ijaola; bayo; Victor Ekpuk; Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso; Ogungbemi; obasa; adeyemi_bukola_oyeniyi oyeniyi; samadek_2017@yahoo.co.uk; REGISTRAR REGISTRAR; Bisola F; Gbenga Dasylva; Oluwole 2 Dasylva; Ropo Ewenla; kpdasylva@yahoo.com; Gbenga Akosile; orelikesdat@yahoo.com; ayo_olukotun-yahoo.com; M Buba; dele Ashiru; Akinjide OUNTOKUN; Wale Ghazal; Odugbemi Ibrahim; Ochayi Okpeh; sati Fwatshak; odey ODEY; Stephen Akintoye; Saheed Aderinto; kgifesi@austin.rr.com; Emmanuel Babatunde; Vik Bahl; Tade Akin Aina; akandeoj@yahoo.com; dele jegede; Wale Adebanwi; aka; Caroline Tushabe; fallou ngom; DOYIN AGUORU; misschristines@utexas.edu; Chukwuemeka Agbo; ZALANGA SAMUEL; adigunagbaje@yahoo.com; babaadii@yahoo.com; bteboh@umassd.edu; Oladele Balogun; Alexius Amtaika; Bode Ibironke; Ayobami Salami; Bamitale Omole; dijiaina; Ademola Araoye; Egodi Uchendu; Nasong'o_Shadrack; aborah@utexas.edu; Michael Vickers; Martin Shanguhyia; Kenneth Kalu; scot; Tunji Olaopa; Omowunmi Sadik; Nemata Blyden; kolawole adekola; Gaf Oye; Afolayan, Funso; Steiner Ifekwe; Carina Ray; Dawuni, Josephine; Tanure Ojaide; Odia Ofeimun; Uyilawa Usuanlele; Anene Ejikeme; Abimbola Asojo; Pamela Smith; Abdul Bangura; Felicia Ohwovoriole; Saine, Abdoulaye; Jimoh Oriyomi; lekan pearce; Babs Sobanjo; Mukhtar Bunza; Bessie House-Soremekun; Gloria Chuku; MOLEFI K. ASANTE; tunde jaiyeoba; Uzoma Osuala; Chap Kusimba; Philip Akpen; Admin; Abidogun, Jamaine M; Olufunke Adeboye; Chima Korieh; Femi_Osofisan Osofisan; tony agwuele; adjepong@utexas.edu; Paul T. Zeleza; Jalloh, Alusine; Adejumo, Christopher O; Ashafa Abdullahi; mario.j.azevedo; olatunji oyeshile; ebunoduwole2k2; nikeajayi_52; Abosede George; Yvette M Alex-Assensoh; bridy.4real@gmail.com; folahanolusola@gmail.com; Shennette Garrett-Scott; Vusi Gumede, Prof; Mickie Koster; Sifiso Ndlovu; Udogu; Yemisi Obilade; Yusuf Adedayo Hauwau Evelyn; Bello Maryam; Bolaji Akinyemi; kwame Essien; Osondu, Epaphras; Toyin Falola
Subject: MOSES OCHONU: THE COMMA BEFORE THE PERIOD
 
 
MOSES OCHONU: THE COMMA BEFORE THE PERIOD
 
 
I thought we use a comma in a sentence because we have more to say, and we detour via semicolons, colons, dashes, brackets, and other punctuations before we get to the king of them all, the period. And if you misuse one, as in failing to recognize that a semicolon is the husband of a comma, on top of it with a longer orgasm, but declimbed to become the heir to a period, do not blame me if Farooq, the friend of Moses, hammer you on the head. And please do not say that because English is a foreign language, semicolon can replace a colon. Not so, as one lives in the village and the other in the city, meeting once in a while to quickly depart.
 
Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, this is no more than a comma, as more words will pour in a deluge (I need not add rain or flood to a deluge!) as foretold by that Prophet, whose name I cannot remember at this time. Moses was surprised at his news, as he put it on his Facebook that one of his admirers sent to me.
 
Since I got into this profession, holding an endowed chair has been my ultimate goal. It is the highest institutional academic recognition and I dreamed of one day attaining that height. Glory be to God; that dream has come true. Although I aspired to it, I did not think that it would come this soon, making it even sweeter. Moses Ochonu
 
As an aside, I am not on Facebook, perhaps because I don't know what a face is doing in the company of a book! An Eyebook, yes, but one is yet to be created. And even when some friends created one for me, I asked it to be taken down. And my son works for Facebook in London! Thank you all for supporting his daily bread. But Moses forgot to add, even as huge achievements, that he has declined offers from Columbia and Yale! Unknown to him, whenever those searches commence, names are solicited, as universities must do, that his name, from our own end, is always there. Always there!
 
I predicted it would happen: for him, for Clapperton, for Ibhawoh, for Nimi, for Wale, for Chika, for Ugo, the Nwokeji Of Ugoland in Oakland country. Ibhawoh's own came at the speed of light, becoming a national figure. I have one or two other names to add, and one name to delete as I play God with the future of His own creation.
 
I have the unusual privilege, a few of which I share with Salah Hassan and Paul Zeleza, of compiling names for all the biggest awards. Some get it, some miss it, but I keep re-nominating, adding more lines, more evidence, more arguments. I have even spent hours without end to promote deserving people like Ama Ata Aidoo, thinking that if we failed with Ngugi we should move to another person. One missed what I once nominated him for, and I am completing a book on him just to re nominate him! This is our own Victor Ekpuk who has missed the MacArthur genius award for reasons that baffle me.
 
The story of Moses is about to begin; what he sees as the end, I see as the beginning. So, I can only compose a comma on his sweet achievement, my own sweeter dreams!
 
It is no secret that I admire Moses, and that I see him as ten times more talented than me in terms of the ability to conceptualize and complicate, not to talk of his refined use of language. I don't have his language, not even close. He is a better historian than me. Even all my graduate students in the last ten years know that I see him as my intellectual superior. I have invited him to Austin to speak to my seminar; and to Nigeria to give a Keynote. I have visited him, and I enjoyed a good meal at his place in Nashville. He once invited me to his campus to engage in a stimulating dialogue, pairing me with Mamdou Diouf. What a great conversation! I have sold him where it is possible to, recently inviting him to give a talk at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
 
We sometimes disagree on intellectual grounds, as I occasionally initiate debates in private email messages different from those on Dialogue where I don't want anyone to accuse me of corrupting my role as a moderator. Even my occasional intervention to ask people to stop talking is greeted with "Am I using your mouth?" All what I can do is to say "No sir!" I am an incurable Pan-Africanist, and Moses, Farooq Kperogi, Akin Ogundiran, Augustine Agwuele and a new breed of African intellectuals do not always see things my way. It is precisely because they differ, for creating alternative paradigms, that I actually worship them. A scholar who operates only in the company of those who always agree with him is a mediocre. We flourish because we have critics. Once in a while, one of them will be angry and send me a rude private message; but I will smile, saying that the future of Africa that I imagine does not leave me with the luxury of a fight. Conflict requires two people for it to work—I know of those who engage in conflicts with me, but I do not know of any human being that I engage in conflict with.
 
This achievement, as much as Moses would like to think of it as his, belongs to us all, the fulfilment of my own dream for Africans and Africa. And because this is a dream comes true, our register must respect the registrar of language.
 
Age gives me the privilege to offer a sermon, the register that I just mentioned. Here is one. It is so sweet to sleep and have sweet dreams. In some cases, the dream is so sweet that you wish you never woke up, interrupting it! Someone once wisely counselled, however, that no matter how sweet your dreams may be, if you do not wake up and pursue them vigorously, they will remain just that – dreams! – nothing concrete at all to show for the dream. Waking up years later with the taste of ashes in the mouth because time was spent dreaming, no time was spent working, no dream life to show for it.
 
A sermon must have its application. Our brother, colleague, and friend Moses did not make that mistake. From his days at Bayero University, Kano, where he obtained his BA History, he showed his acumen for dream-making and achievement. For the entire duration of his studies there, he held the Bayero University Scholarship for Outstanding Academic Performance, eventually also scooping up the Michael Crowder Prize for the Best Student on Modern African History and the Best Graduating Student in the Department of History of the class of 1997. His department did not hesitate to offer him an immediate graduate assistantship the same year. With such stellar early achievements, no future political detractors can ever say Moses did not graduate from the Department of History at Bayero!
 
An application must become motivational. Having started so well, it is no wonder that his career became studded with one starry achievement after the other. Obtaining subsequent degrees in African History from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he was appointed assistant professor at Vanderbilt in 2004, becoming associate professor in 2011 and then professor in 2015. He has published three books, with two others forthcoming, numerous articles in refereed journals and chapters in books, and is a sought after keynote speaker and guest lecturer. His research in this time received various recognitions including various grants and fellowships. Many would have rested on their laurels at this point but Moses wanted the Chair, and never relented for one day. He knew what he wanted when he stepped into the American academy: the almighty endowed Chair!
 
A motivation must turn into a testimony. Professor Moses Ochonu is indeed deserving of this most recent and highest recognition of his university. He has established for himself the distinguished reputation of being one of the leading scholars of northern and middle belt Nigeria today, joining the ranks of the like of Smith, Adeleye, Mahdi, Usman, to mention but a few since I am just in the comma mood. His important 2014 book, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria, the finalist for the prestigious ASA Herskovits Prize for the Best Scholarly Book in African Studies in any Discipline in 2015, subverts the accepted understandings of the mechanics of indirect rule in British colonial Africa, and especially in northern Nigeria. He argues there that it was "subcolonialism" and not indirect rule that dictated British policy because the Hausa-Fulani overlords of the non-Muslim people of the middle belt negotiated their domination of these populations by recourse to claims of superior authority conferred on them by the Jihads of the early 1800s. His fine and sophisticated analysis of these dynamics are major contribution to the corpus of Nigerian history, setting him apart and above his peers.
 
A testimony goes with a confessional. Moses is passionate about Nigeria, and this is evident in his continuous and numerous commentaries about Nigerian affairs. He is deeply engaged in puzzling the challenges and proposing the solutions for the country's progress. We know him here on the USA Africa Dialogue Series forum, as a voice that brings gravitas to any conversation he is engaged in, nuancing his analysis with uncommon insight, an eye for the fine points, and an attempt at objectivity on many divisive topics. On Facebook, he has already reached the limit of the number of friends that he can accept because thousands are so keen to read what he has to say on the various issues of the day! His essays have appeared in major Nigerian newspapers in print and online and his provocative article "The Shattering of the Buhari Mythology" in African Arguments was voted by readers as the 2016 Best Article of the Year. He is not a Nigerian academic that observes and comments about the country from a distance; no, he takes time out to visit, navigating pot-holed roads, locating the latest and best chicken suya spots in Abuja, and even taking time to appreciate Big Brother Nigeria on TV!
 
A confession ends in a blessing. This March, Moses already celebrated his birthday, and the news of his appointment to the Cornelius Vandebilt Chair must be perhaps the best birthday gift he has ever had. We celebrate with him, and wish him bigger dreams, above all.
 
This is a comma in the long sentences that I need to write on Moses, the intellectual messiah of our time, just one of the commas before I reach the end with a period.
 
 
 
TF
 
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
104 Inner Campus Drive
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222 (fax)
http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/
The Yoruba Studies Review - University Blog Service<http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/>
sites.utexas.edu
The Yoruba Studies Review is a refereed biannual journal dedicated to the study of the experience of the Yoruba peoples and their descendants globally. The journal ...
 
 
http://www.toyinfalola.com
Dr Toyin Falola | UT Professor of African Studies | Home<http://www.toyinfalola.com/>
www.toyinfalola.com
dr toyin falola is the jacob and frances sanger mossiker chair profssor in the humanities and a distinguished teaching professor at the university of texas at austin.
 
 
http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>: Mar 24 11:48AM

That pesky word 'grammar' again! Ride on...
 
 
 
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
 
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Date: 24/03/2017 10:40 (GMT+00:00)
To: dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>
Cc: olubomehind@yahoo.com, ololadeololade70@gmail.com, Adeyemi_balogun@yahoo.com, charlesomotayo@yahoo.com, muffyakande@yahoo.com, badebua@yahoo.com, olupayimod@gmail.com, kayodeonipede2004@yahoo.co.uk, raliatsola@yahoo.com, bensonigboin@gmail.com, "deity:" <creativitysells@gmail.com>, babjid74@yahoo.com, tolujudes@gmail.com, fortuneafatakpa@gmail.com, julia.binter@wolfson.ox.ac.uk, josephayodokun@gmail.com, shegunadebayo@gmail.com, ajigbadejube@gmail.com, M Insa Nolte <M.I.Nolte@bham.ac.uk>, "Olukoya Ogen (koyaogen@gmail.com)" <koyaogen@gmail.com>, moyo.okediji@utexas.edu, "Afolabi, Omoniyi" <afolabi@austin.utexas.edu>, Ademola Dasylva <dasylvaus@gmail.com>, Aribidesi Usman <ARIBIDESI.USMAN@asu.edu>, Bukola Adeyemi Oyeniyi <idssorg@gmail.com>, Micheal Afolayan <mafolayan@yahoo.com>, PHILIP_OGUNDEJI OGUNDEJI <dotogundeji@yahoo.com>, akinlabi <akinlabi@rci.rutgers.edu>, Segun Ojewuyi <sojewuyi@gmail.com>, tunde_babawale@yahoo.com, "Adenle, Adewale" <adewale.adenle@ttu.edu>, Abayomi Ola 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ASANTE" <masante@temple.edu>, tunde jaiyeoba <tundejaiyeoba@yahoo.co.uk>, Uzoma Osuala <osualauzoma@gmail.com>, Chap Kusimba <kusimba@american.edu>, Philip Akpen <akpenphilip@gmail.com>, Admin <ahmadasifawa@gmail.com>, "Abidogun, Jamaine M" <JamaineAbidogun@missouristate.edu>, Olufunke Adeboye <funks29adeboye@yahoo.co.uk>, Chima Korieh <chima.korieh@unn.edu.ng>, Femi_Osofisan Osofisan <okinbalaunko@yahoo.com>, tony agwuele <tagwuele@yahoo.com>, adjepong@utexas.edu, "Paul T. Zeleza" <pzeleza@usiu.ac.ke>, "Jalloh, Alusine" <jalloh@exchange.uta.edu>, "Adejumo, Christopher O" <c.ade@austin.utexas.edu>, Ashafa Abdullahi <abashafa@gmail.com>, "mario.j.azevedo" <mario.j.azevedo@jsums.edu>, olatunji oyeshile <alabi14@yahoo.com>, ebunoduwole2k2 <ebunoduwole2k2@yahoo.com>, nikeajayi_52 <nikeajayi_52@yahoo.com>, Abosede George <ageorge@barnard.edu>, Yvette M Alex-Assensoh <yalex@uoregon.edu>, bridy.4real@gmail.com, folahanolusola@gmail.com, Shennette Garrett-Scott <smgscott@olemiss.edu>, "Vusi Gumede, Prof" <gumede.vusi@gmail.com>, Mickie Koster <mickie@mwanzia.com>, Sifiso Ndlovu <sifisondlovu@telkomsa.net>, Udogu <udoguei@appstate.edu>, Yemisi Obilade <oobilade@yahoo.com>, Yusuf Adedayo Hauwau Evelyn <eveadex@yahoo.com>, Bello Maryam <zamzambee4u@yahoo.com>, Bolaji Akinyemi <rotaben@gmail.com>, kwame Essien <kwame1essien@gmail.com>, "Osondu, Epaphras" <eosondu@providence.edu>, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Subject: MOSES OCHONU: THE COMMA BEFORE THE PERIOD
 
MOSES OCHONU: THE COMMA BEFORE THE PERIOD
 
I thought we use a comma in a sentence because we have more to say, and we detour via semicolons, colons, dashes, brackets, and other punctuations before we get to the king of them all, the period. And if you misuse one, as in failing to recognize that a semicolon is the husband of a comma, on top of it with a longer orgasm, but declimbed to become the heir to a period, do not blame me if Farooq, the friend of Moses, hammer you on the head. And please do not say that because English is a foreign language, semicolon can replace a colon. Not so, as one lives in the village and the other in the city, meeting once in a while to quickly depart.
Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, this is no more than a comma, as more words will pour in a deluge (I need not add rain or flood to a deluge!) as foretold by that Prophet, whose name I cannot remember at this time. Moses was surprised at his news, as he put it on his Facebook that one of his admirers sent to me.
Since I got into this profession, holding an endowed chair has been my ultimate goal. It is the highest institutional academic recognition and I dreamed of one day attaining that height. Glory be to God; that dream has come true. Although I aspired to it, I did not think that it would come this soon, making it even sweeter. Moses Ochonu
As an aside, I am not on Facebook, perhaps because I don't know what a face is doing in the company of a book! An Eyebook, yes, but one is yet to be created. And even when some friends created one for me, I asked it to be taken down. And my son works for Facebook in London! Thank you all for supporting his daily bread. But Moses forgot to add, even as huge achievements, that he has declined offers from Columbia and Yale! Unknown to him, whenever those searches commence, names are solicited, as universities must do, that his name, from our own end, is always there. Always there!
I predicted it would happen: for him, for Clapperton, for Ibhawoh, for Nimi, for Wale, for Chika, for Ugo, the Nwokeji Of Ugoland in Oakland country. Ibhawoh's own came at the speed of light, becoming a national figure. I have one or two other names to add, and one name to delete as I play God with the future of His own creation.
I have the unusual privilege, a few of which I share with Salah Hassan and Paul Zeleza, of compiling names for all the biggest awards. Some get it, some miss it, but I keep re-nominating, adding more lines, more evidence, more arguments. I have even spent hours without end to promote deserving people like Ama Ata Aidoo, thinking that if we failed with Ngugi we should move to another person. One missed what I once nominated him for, and I am completing a book on him just to re nominate him! This is our own Victor Ekpuk who has missed the MacArthur genius award for reasons that baffle me.
The story of Moses is about to begin; what he sees as the end, I see as the beginning. So, I can only compose a comma on his sweet achievement, my own sweeter dreams!
It is no secret that I admire Moses, and that I see him as ten times more talented than me in terms of the ability to conceptualize and complicate, not to talk of his refined use of language. I don't have his language, not even close. He is a better historian than me. Even all my graduate students in the last ten years know that I see him as my intellectual superior. I have invited him to Austin to speak to my seminar; and to Nigeria to give a Keynote. I have visited him, and I enjoyed a good meal at his place in Nashville. He once invited me to his campus to engage in a stimulating dialogue, pairing me with Mamdou Diouf. What a great conversation! I have sold him where it is possible to, recently inviting him to give a talk at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
We sometimes disagree on intellectual grounds, as I occasionally initiate debates in private email messages different from those on Dialogue where I don't want anyone to accuse me of corrupting my role as a moderator. Even my occasional intervention to ask people to stop talking is greeted with "Am I using your mouth?" All what I can do is to say "No sir!" I am an incurable Pan-Africanist, and Moses, Farooq Kperogi, Akin Ogundiran, Augustine Agwuele and a new breed of African intellectuals do not always see things my way. It is precisely because they differ, for creating alternative paradigms, that I actually worship them. A scholar who operates only in the company of those who always agree with him is a mediocre. We flourish because we have critics. Once in a while, one of them will be angry and send me a rude private message; but I will smile, saying that the future of Africa that I imagine does not leave me with the luxury of a fight. Conflict requires two people for it to work—I know of those who engage in conflicts with me, but I do not know of any human being that I engage in conflict with.
This achievement, as much as Moses would like to think of it as his, belongs to us all, the fulfilment of my own dream for Africans and Africa. And because this is a dream comes true, our register must respect the registrar of language.
Age gives me the privilege to offer a sermon, the register that I just mentioned. Here is one. It is so sweet to sleep and have sweet dreams. In some cases, the dream is so sweet that you wish you never woke up, interrupting it! Someone once wisely counselled, however, that no matter how sweet your dreams may be, if you do not wake up and pursue them vigorously, they will remain just that – dreams! – nothing concrete at all to show for the dream. Waking up years later with the taste of ashes in the mouth because time was spent dreaming, no time was spent working, no dream life to show for it.
A sermon must have its application. Our brother, colleague, and friend Moses did not make that mistake. From his days at Bayero University, Kano, where he obtained his BA History, he showed his acumen for dream-making and achievement. For the entire duration of his studies there, he held the Bayero University Scholarship for Outstanding Academic Performance, eventually also scooping up the Michael Crowder Prize for the Best Student on Modern African History and the Best Graduating Student in the Department of History of the class of 1997. His department did not hesitate to offer him an immediate graduate assistantship the same year. With such stellar early achievements, no future political detractors can ever say Moses did not graduate from the Department of History at Bayero!
An application must become motivational. Having started so well, it is no wonder that his career became studded with one starry achievement after the other. Obtaining subsequent degrees in African History from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he was appointed assistant professor at Vanderbilt in 2004, becoming associate professor in 2011 and then professor in 2015. He has published three books, with two others forthcoming, numerous articles in refereed journals and chapters in books, and is a sought after keynote speaker and guest lecturer. His research in this time received various recognitions including various grants and fellowships. Many would have rested on their laurels at this point but Moses wanted the Chair, and never relented for one day. He knew what he wanted when he stepped into the American academy: the almighty endowed Chair!
A motivation must turn into a testimony. Professor Moses Ochonu is indeed deserving of this most recent and highest recognition of his university. He has established for himself the distinguished reputation of being one of the leading scholars of northern and middle belt Nigeria today, joining the ranks of the like of Smith, Adeleye, Mahdi, Usman, to mention but a few since I am just in the comma mood. His important 2014 book, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria, the finalist for the prestigious ASA Herskovits Prize for the Best Scholarly Book in African Studies in any Discipline in 2015, subverts the accepted understandings of the mechanics of indirect rule in British colonial Africa, and especially in northern Nigeria. He argues there that it was "subcolonialism" and not indirect rule that dictated British policy because the Hausa-Fulani overlords of the non-Muslim people of the middle belt negotiated their domination of these populations by recourse to claims of superior authority conferred on them by the Jihads of the early 1800s. His fine and sophisticated analysis of these dynamics are major contribution to the corpus of Nigerian history, setting him apart and above his peers.
A testimony goes with a confessional. Moses is passionate about Nigeria, and this is evident in his continuous and numerous commentaries about Nigerian affairs. He is deeply engaged in puzzling the challenges and proposing the solutions for the country's progress. We know him here on the USA Africa Dialogue Series forum, as a voice that brings gravitas to any conversation he is engaged in, nuancing his analysis with uncommon insight, an eye
onyima blessing <nonyelin2003@yahoo.com>: Mar 24 12:36PM

Congratulations Prof. Moses.I want to be like you and Prof. Falola, when I grow up.Regards!
 Blessing Nonye ONYIMA, Ph.D.
Anthropology (University of Ibadan, Nigeria)
Lecturer/Ethnographic Researcher
Sociology & Anthropology
Nnamdi Azikiwe University
Awka Nigeria.
Fellow African Humanities Program (FAHP) @ Rhodes University Grashamtown South Africa.
bn.onyima@unizik.edu.ng
nonyelin2003@yahoo.com
+2348065014542
27710193887.

 
On Friday, March 24, 2017 1:45 PM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

 
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info
<!--#yiv0093143885 _filtered #yiv0093143885 {font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;} _filtered #yiv0093143885 {font-family:"Book Antiqua";panose-1:2 4 6 2 5 3 5 3 3 4;}#yiv0093143885 #yiv0093143885 p.yiv0093143885MsoNormal, #yiv0093143885 li.yiv0093143885MsoNormal, #yiv0093143885 div.yiv0093143885MsoNormal {margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:10.0pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Calibri;}#yiv0093143885 span.yiv0093143885textexposedshow {}#yiv0093143885 .yiv0093143885MsoChpDefault {font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Calibri;}#yiv0093143885 .yiv0093143885MsoPapDefault {margin-bottom:10.0pt;line-height:115%;} _filtered #yiv0093143885 {margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;}#yiv0093143885 div.yiv0093143885WordSection1 {}-->MOSES OCHONU: THE COMMA BEFORE THE PERIOD
I thought we use a comma in a sentence because we have more to say, and we detour via semicolons, colons, dashes, brackets, and other punctuations before we get to the king of them all, the period. And if you misuse one, as in failing to recognize that a semicolon is the husband of a comma, on top of it with a longer orgasm, but declimbed to become the heir to a period, do not blame me if Farooq, the friend of Moses, hammer you on the head. And please do not say that because English is a foreign language, semicolon can replace a colon. Not so, as one lives in the village and the other in the city, meeting once in a while to quickly depart. Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, this is no more than a comma, as more words will pour in a deluge (I need not add rain or flood to a deluge!) as foretold by that Prophet, whose name I cannot remember at this time. Moses was surprised at his news, as he put it on his Facebook that one of his admirers sent to me.  Since I got into this profession, holding an endowed chair has been my ultimate goal. It is the highest institutional academic recognition and I dreamed of one day attaining that height. Glory be to God; that dream has come true. Although I aspired to it, I did not think that it would come this soon, making it even sweeter. Moses Ochonu As an aside, I am not on Facebook, perhaps because I don't know what a face is doing in the company of a book! An Eyebook, yes, but one is yet to be created. And even when some friends created one for me, I asked it to be taken down. And my son works for Facebook in London! Thank you all for supporting his daily bread. But Moses forgot to add, even as huge achievements, that he has declined offers from Columbia and Yale! Unknown to him, whenever those searches commence, names are solicited, as universities must do, that his name, from our own end, is always there. Always there!  I predicted it would happen: for him, for Clapperton, for Ibhawoh, for Nimi, for Wale, for Chika, for Ugo, the Nwokeji Of Ugoland in Oakland country. Ibhawoh's own came at the speed of light, becoming a national figure. I have one or two other names to add, and one name to delete as I play God with the future of His own creation.I have the unusual privilege, a few of which I share with Salah Hassan and Paul Zeleza, of compiling names for all the biggest awards. Some get it, some miss it, but I keep re-nominating, adding more lines, more evidence, more arguments. I have even spent hours without end to promote deserving people like Ama Ata Aidoo, thinking that if we failed with Ngugi we should move to another person. One missed what I once nominated him for, and I am completing a book on him just to re nominate him! This is our own Victor Ekpuk who has missed the MacArthur genius award for reasons that baffle me. The story of Moses is about to begin; what he sees as the end, I see as the beginning. So, I can only compose a comma on his sweet achievement, my own sweeter dreams! It is no secret that I admire Moses, and that I see him as ten times more talented than me in terms of the ability to conceptualize and complicate, not to talk of his refined use of language. I don't have his language, not even close. He is a better historian than me. Even all my graduate students in the last ten years know that I see him as my intellectual superior. I have invited him to Austin to speak to my seminar; and to Nigeria to give a Keynote. I have visited him, and I enjoyed a good meal at his place in Nashville. He once invited me to his campus to engage in a stimulating dialogue, pairing me with Mamdou Diouf. What a great conversation! I have sold him where it is possible to, recently inviting him to give a talk at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. We sometimes disagree on intellectual grounds, as I occasionally initiate debates in private email messages different from those on Dialogue where I don't want anyone to accuse me of corrupting my role as a moderator. Even my occasional intervention to ask people to stop talking is greeted with "Am I using your mouth?" All what I can do is to say "No sir!" I am an incurable Pan-Africanist, and Moses, Farooq Kperogi, Akin Ogundiran, Augustine Agwuele and a new breed of African intellectuals do not always see things my way. It is precisely because they differ, for creating alternative paradigms, that I actually worship them. A scholar who operates only in the company of those who always agree with him is a mediocre. We flourish because we have critics. Once in a while, one of them will be angry and send me a rude private message; but I will smile, saying that the future of Africa that I imagine does not leave me with the luxury of a fight. Conflict requires two people for it to work—I know of those who engage in conflicts with me, but I do not know of any human being that I engage in conflict with. This achievement, as much as Moses would like to think of it as his, belongs to us all, the fulfilment of my own dream for Africans and Africa. And because this is a dream comes true, our register must respect the registrar of language.Age gives me the privilege to offer a sermon, the register that I just mentioned. Here is one. It is so sweet to sleep and have sweet dreams. In some cases, the dream is so sweet that you wish you never woke up, interrupting it! Someone once wisely counselled, however, that no matter how sweet your dreams may be, if you do not wake up and pursue them vigorously, they will remain just that – dreams! – nothing concrete at all to show for the dream. Waking up years later with the taste of ashes in the mouth because time was spent dreaming, no time was spent working, no dream life to show for it. A sermon must have its application. Our brother, colleague, and friend Moses did not make that mistake. From his days at Bayero University, Kano, where he obtained his BA History, he showed his acumen for dream-making and achievement. For the entire duration of his studies there, he held the Bayero University Scholarship for Outstanding Academic Performance, eventually also scooping up the Michael Crowder Prize for the Best Student on Modern African History and the Best Graduating Student in the Department of History of the class of 1997. His department did not hesitate to offer him an immediate graduate assistantship the same year. With such stellar early achievements, no future political detractors can ever say Moses did not graduate from the Department of History at Bayero! An application must become motivational. Having started so well, it is no wonder that his career became studded with one starry achievement after the other. Obtaining subsequent degrees in African History from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he was appointed assistant professor at Vanderbilt in 2004, becoming associate professor in 2011 and then professor in 2015. He has published three books, with two others forthcoming, numerous articles in refereed journals and chapters in books, and is a sought after keynote speaker and guest lecturer. His research in this time received various recognitions including various grants and fellowships. Many would have rested on their laurels at this point but Moses wanted the Chair, and never relented for one day. He knew what he wanted when he stepped into the American academy: the almighty endowed Chair! A motivation must turn into a testimony. Professor Moses Ochonu is indeed deserving of this most recent and highest recognition of his university. He has established for himself the distinguished reputation of being one of the leading scholars of northern and middle belt Nigeria today, joining the ranks of the like of Smith, Adeleye, Mahdi, Usman, to mention but a few since I am just in the comma mood. His important 2014 book, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria, the finalist for the prestigious ASA Herskovits Prize for the Best Scholarly Book in African Studies in any Discipline in 2015, subverts the accepted understandings of the mechanics of indirect rule in British colonial Africa, and especially in northern Nigeria. He argues there that it was "subcolonialism" and not indirect rule that dictated British policy because the Hausa-Fulani overlords of the non-Muslim people of the middle belt negotiated their domination of these populations by recourse to claims of superior authority conferred on them by the Jihads of the early 1800s. His fine and sophisticated analysis of these dynamics are major contribution to the corpus of Nigerian history, setting him apart and above his peers. A testimony goes with a confessional. Moses is passionate about Nigeria, and this is evident in his continuous and numerous commentaries about Nigerian affairs. He is deeply engaged in puzzling the challenges and proposing the solutions for the country's progress. We know him here on the USA Africa Dialogue Series forum, as a voice that brings gravitas to any conversation he is engaged in, nuancing his analysis with uncommon insight, an eye for the fine points, and an attempt at objectivity on many divisive topics. On Facebook, he has already reached the limit of the number of friends that he can accept because thousands are so keen to read what he has to say on the various issues of the day! His essays have appeared in major Nigerian newspapers in print and online and his provocative article "The Shattering of the Buhari Mythology" inAfrican Arguments was voted by readers as the 2016 Best Article of the Year. He is not a Nigerian academic that observes and comments about the country from a distance; no, he takes time out to visit, navigating pot-holed roads, locating the latest and best chicken suya spots in Abuja, and even taking time to appreciate Big Brother Nigeria on TV! A confession ends in a blessing. This March, Moses already celebrated his birthday, and the news of his appointment to the Cornelius Vandebilt Chair must be perhaps the best birthday gift he has ever had. We celebrate with him, and wish him bigger dreams, above all. This is a comma in the long sentences that I need to write on Moses, the intellectual messiah of our time, just one of the commas before I reach the end with a period.    TF Toyin FalolaDepartment of HistoryThe University of Texas at Austin104 Inner Campus DriveAustin, TX 78712-0220USA512 475 7224512 475 7222 (fax)http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/http://www.toyinfalola.com http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa  http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   --
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Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>: Mar 24 09:01AM -0400

Beautiful encomium.
 
Dear moses, I hope becoming the messiah won't be too much of a burden for your human enterprises!
 
ken
 

 
Kenneth Harrow
 
Dept of English and Film Studies
 
Michigan State University
 
619 Red Cedar Rd
 
East Lansing, MI 48824
 
517-803-8839
 
harrow@msu.edu
 
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
 

 
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 24 March 2017 at 06:39
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>
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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - MOSES OCHONU: THE COMMA BEFORE THE PERIOD
 

 
MOSES OCHONU: THE COMMA BEFORE THE PERIOD
 

 
I thought we use a comma in a sentence because we have more to say, and we detour via semicolons, colons, dashes, brackets, and other punctuations before we get to the king of them all, the period. And if you misuse one, as in failing to recognize that a semicolon is the husband of a comma, on top of it with a longer orgasm, but declimbed to become the heir to a period, do not blame me if Farooq, the friend of Moses, hammer you on the head. And please do not say that because English is a foreign language, semicolon can replace a colon. Not so, as one lives in the village and the other in the city, meeting once in a while to quickly depart.
 
Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, this is no more than a comma, as more words will pour in a deluge (I need not add rain or flood to a deluge!) as foretold by that Prophet, whose name I cannot remember at this time. Moses was surprised at his news, as he put it on his Facebook that one of his admirers sent to me.
 
Since I got into this profession, holding an endowed chair has been my ultimate goal. It is the highest institutional academic recognition and I dreamed of one day attaining that height. Glory be to God; that dream has come true. Although I aspired to it, I did not think that it would come this soon, making it even sweeter. Moses Ochonu
 
As an aside, I am not on Facebook, perhaps because I don't know what a face is doing in the company of a book! An Eyebook, yes, but one is yet to be created. And even when some friends created one for me, I asked it to be taken down. And my son works for Facebook in London! Thank you all for supporting his daily bread. But Moses forgot to add, even as huge achievements, that he has declined offers from Columbia and Yale! Unknown to him, whenever those searches commence, names are solicited, as universities must do, that his name, from our own end, is always there. Always there!
 
I predicted it would happen: for him, for Clapperton, for Ibhawoh, for Nimi, for Wale, for Chika, for Ugo, the Nwokeji Of Ugoland in Oakland country. Ibhawoh's own came at the speed of light, becoming a national figure. I have one or two other names to add, and one name to delete as I play God with the future of His own creation.
 
I have the unusual privilege, a few of which I share with Salah Hassan and Paul Zeleza, of compiling names for all the biggest awards. Some get it, some miss it, but I keep re-nominating, adding more lines, more evidence, more arguments. I have even spent hours without end to promote deserving people like Ama Ata Aidoo, thinking that if we failed with Ngugi we should move to another person. One missed what I once nominated him for, and I am completing a book on him just to re nominate him! This is our own Victor Ekpuk who has missed the MacArthur genius award for reasons that baffle me.
 
The story of Moses is about to begin; what he sees as the end, I see as the beginning. So, I can only compose a comma on his sweet achievement, my own sweeter dreams!
 
It is no secret that I admire Moses, and that I see him as ten times more talented than me in terms of the ability to conceptualize and complicate, not to talk of his refined use of language. I don't have his language, not even close. He is a better historian than me. Even all my graduate students in the last ten years know that I see him as my intellectual superior. I have invited him to Austin to speak to my seminar; and to Nigeria to give a Keynote. I have visited him, and I enjoyed a good meal at his place in Nashville. He once invited me to his campus to engage in a stimulating dialogue, pairing me with Mamdou Diouf. What a great conversation! I have sold him where it is possible to, recently inviting him to give a talk at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
 
We sometimes disagree on intellectual grounds, as I occasionally initiate debates in private email messages different from those on Dialogue where I don't want anyone to accuse me of corrupting my role as a moderator. Even my occasional intervention to ask people to stop talking is greeted with "Am I using your mouth?" All what I can do is to say "No sir!" I am an incurable Pan-Africanist, and Moses, Farooq Kperogi, Akin Ogundiran, Augustine Agwuele and a new breed of African intellectuals do not always see things my way. It is precisely because they differ, for creating alternative paradigms, that I actually worship them. A scholar who operates only in the company of those who always agree with him is a mediocre. We flourish because we have critics. Once in a while, one of them will be angry and send me a rude private message; but I will smile, saying that the future of Africa that I imagine does not leave me with the luxury of a fight. Conflict requires two people for it to work—I know of those who engage in conflicts with me, but I do not know of any human being that I engage in conflict with.
 
This achievement, as much as Moses would like to think of it as his, belongs to us all, the fulfilment of my own dream for Africans and Africa. And because this is a dream comes true, our register must respect the registrar of language.
 
Age gives me the privilege to offer a sermon, the register that I just mentioned. Here is one. It is so sweet to sleep and have sweet dreams. In some cases, the dream is so sweet that you wish you never woke up, interrupting it! Someone once wisely counselled, however, that no matter how sweet your dreams may be, if you do not wake up and pursue them vigorously, they will remain just that – dreams! – nothing concrete at all to show for the dream. Waking up years later with the taste of ashes in the mouth because time was spent dreaming, no time was spent working, no dream life to show for it.
 
A sermon must have its application. Our brother, colleague, and friend Moses did not make that mistake. From his days at Bayero University, Kano, where he obtained his BA History, he showed his acumen for dream-making and achievement. For the entire duration of his studies there, he held the Bayero University Scholarship for Outstanding Academic Performance, eventually also scooping up the Michael Crowder Prize for the Best Student on Modern African History and the Best Graduating Student in the Department of History of the class of 1997. His department did not hesitate to offer him an immediate graduate assistantship the same year. With such stellar early achievements, no future political detractors can ever say Moses did not graduate from the Department of History at Bayero!
 
An application must become motivational. Having started so well, it is no wonder that his career became studded with one starry achievement after the other. Obtaining subsequent degrees in African History from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he was appointed assistant professor at Vanderbilt in 2004, becoming associate professor in 2011 and then professor in 2015. He has published three books, with two others forthcoming, numerous articles in refereed journals and chapters in books, and is a sought after keynote speaker and guest lecturer. His research in this time received various recognitions including various grants and fellowships. Many would have rested on their laurels at this point but Moses wanted the Chair, and never relented for one day. He knew what he wanted when he stepped into the American academy: the almighty endowed Chair!
 
A motivation must turn into a testimony. Professor Moses Ochonu is indeed deserving of this most recent and highest recognition of his university. He has established for himself the distinguished reputation of being one of the leading scholars of northern and middle belt
Abosede George <ageorge@barnard.edu>: Mar 24 09:29AM -0400

Congratulations to Moses. Very well deserved.
 
Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com>: Mar 23 03:47PM -0700

Chidi;
 
It's a long list :
 
Poets who committed suicide
<https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Poets+who+committed+suicide&*>
 
On Tuesday, 21 March 2017 08:42:17 UTC+1, Chidi Anthony Opara wrote:
olaniyi rasheed <rasolaniyi@yahoo.com>: Mar 24 08:46AM

Congratulations to our former Dean of Arts, Prof. Aderemi Raji-Oyelade.
 
Rasheed
 
Rasheed O. Olaniyi, PhD
Senior Lecturer
Department of History,
University of Ibadan,
Ibadan, Nigeria.
Email:rasolaniyi@yahoo.com, rasheed_olaniyi@hotmail.com
Mobile Phone:+234-8033358474
 
--------------------------------------------
On Thu, 3/23/17, Ademola Dasylva <dasylvaus@gmail.com> wrote:
 
Subject: Yoruba Affairs - Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, Humboldt Alumni 2017 Awardee.
To: "Toyin Falola" <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>, "Adeshina Afolayan" <shina73_1999@yahoo.com>, "USAAfricaDialogue" <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, "Yoruba Affairs" <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>
Cc: "Toyin Falola" <toyin.falola@mail.utexas.edu>, "Michael Afolayan" <mafolayan@yahoo.com>, "idowu olayinka" <aiolayinka@yahoo.com>
Date: Thursday, March 23, 2017, 7:46 PM

Dear
All, join me in congratulating ‎a dear colleague and
friend in the Department of English, a Poet, literary
critic, theorist and the immediate past Dean of Arts,
University of Ibadan, Nigeria, for emerging as one of the
four recipients of 2017 edition of the Alumni
Award. 
This
is a well deserved laurel in recognition of your profound
scholarly contribution. Keep up the good work,
brother.
 
               
          *****
Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, a professor in the Department
of English, University of Ibadan, has been announced as a
winner of the Humboldt Alumni Award 2017 for Innovative
Networking Initiatives. The
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grants up to four Humboldt
Alumni Awards per year to promote innovative networking
initiatives of alumni of the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation's fellowship and award programmes. It is
designed to support initiatives not covered by the
Foundation's existing sponsorship and alumni programmes,
and to promote academic and cultural relations between
Germany and the Humboldt Alumni's own countries and
strengthen their collaboration in the respective
regions. In a
statement by Dr.
Enno Aufderheide, the
General Secretary of the Foundation, "This award shall give you the opportunity
to implement your proposed networking initiative as well as
contribute to support sustainable academic and cultural
relations between Germany and your home country, and to
strengthen the regional alumni network. I would like to
offer my congratulations on this exceptional
achievement." Raji-Oyelade's award-winning project is entitled
"Postproverbial Africa: Building a Corpora of Wits in
Texts, Media and Performance", a trans-national initiative
which brings African scholars in the humanities together
with the ultimate aim of contributing to the body of modern
and radical proverbs which are created mainly in urban
communities almost all over the African
continent. The
Humboldt Alumni Award ceremony will take place in June 2017
during the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's Annual
Meeting in Berlin. Funding for the award is being provided
by the German Foreign Office.


Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.



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