Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Africa Trending (1)

Well, I have little to add to cornelius's parsing of this event, and in fact of me, whom he represents pretty much as I see myself.

I don't know the audience of this show, if they would be expected to have even heard of negritude or not. Literature French people still tend to know very very very very very very very very very very

And I mean very

Little about Africa, and whenever someone knows a little about Africa, the truth is it is almost always always always embarrassing to hear, painful to hear, needing kindness to cover over the grinding of one's teeth.

So maybe this audience was a bunch of dummies, who have some notion of Africa

That would amaze me, but I'd be happy to be corrected.

I like cornelius's insistence that this question—even if represented fairly, which it wasn't in the first posting—is unacceptable.

 

The last point I'd make, in this "postcolonial era" of ours, is that the relations between white and black remain fraught, almost always, outside of Africa.

 

I do not believe the same is the case on the continent, or in African milieux.

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: Sunday 4 February 2018 at 11:53
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Africa Trending (1)

 

In this case, it's not and cannot, should not be a prescriptive both yes and no - it's NO ! NO!! NO!!!

 

The body language is visibly clear and inescapably so, nowhere to hide, it's largely written on her face, from east to west we see the blush that flushes a face guilty of embarrassment as she asks the question and the blush that deepens as she reviews the questions as she reacts spontaneously to both Chimamanda's look of dismay and the audience's little Frenchy hoots of disapproval  -  the audience reaction as a collective we are to surmise is an intelligent one,  today's French literary generation and for that matter this is to be expected in a country whose' noted Académie Française / French Academy has hosted the likes of Senegal's Negritude poet Leopold Sedar Senghor and Haitian-Canadian Dany Laferrière as members, not to mention the literary output that is the corpus known as Francophone African Literature . I suppose that the interview started with the interviewer regrettably saying to Ngozi,  " Je ne comprends pas que tu ne parles pas français…" Regrettably, Ngozi did not have Professor Harrow as her translator and interpreter, in which case we would have been sure of his almost divine intervention , a polite cough and pause and a " what's going on here?"

 

I have been patiently expecting Baba Kadiri to weigh in on this example of  (opening up another can of worms) the French Caucasian's disrespect of one of Africa's most excellent writers and in support of his thesis about religion that if the Almighty had him in mind  when he sent his ambassadors then He would communicate his messages to him in his and  Daniel O. Fagunwa's mother tongue which is Yoruba and not Hebrew or Arabic, because for a surety, if Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary output had been in her mother tongue Igbo, then "Catherine brouee" would not have had the temerity to be asking if there are any bookshops in Nigeria...

 

It's another case of  "he/ she who feels it knows" and the context, the international context , the inter-cultural, intra-cultural, civilisational, inter/ intra civilisational context is post-Trump talking about "shithole countries", and so I guess after that on every occasion that Africa and the image, images of Africa or Africans take central stage, the air has to be cleared.

 

But we must understand where Professor Harrow is coming from :  as an Africanist , as  an African Literature , African cinema and Francophone Africa specialist (albeit of Oyibo stock) who has taught at universities in Cameroon and Senegal for extended periods of time, and forever in our midst in this forum,  that there is that tendency ( I do know a few) of almost speaking on behalf of Africa and on behalf of Africans in the name of the Honorary African  that some of them believe themselves to be , having consciously, maybe unconsciously assimilated and internalized  some of the " Africanity"  by direct physical and mental contacts, by osmosis so to speak…

 

Taking all of the above into consideration I should like to disagree very strongly with Ken's original attempt to exculpate or let "Catherine brouee" off the hook  - at best for wanting to titillate her audience by pandering to their deep-seated conscious and subconscious notions of what Brer Soyinka a master of the adequate word for the situation, in this case what he calls "exotica"...

 

One last but not unimportant question and there is no " clash of civilizations" intended here, mayv´bne it was clumsy yes, but has Caroline Broué apologized  for asking that question?

( The last time something like this happened, I  ( moi-même) had to apologise. I had visited a  Nigerian friend  - his Danish  wife opened the door and started talking to me in a very Nigerian English accent  ( like  Rotimi Amaechi's) - I was very surprised and  thought that she was  either trying to mock me  or was mocking her husband  -  until  I asked her why are you talking like that and  she told me that she had learned  to speak English in Port Harcourt in Nigeria , so I apologised…

 

Something more relaxing by my friend Maestro Amadeo Nicoletti (Italian)  : Samba for Belinda

 

On Saturday, 3 February 2018 16:01:05 UTC+1, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso wrote:

A French journalist this week asked Chimamanda whether there were bookstores in Nigeria. Seriously. 

 

https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/chimamanda-adichie-french-journalist-bookstores-nigeria.html

--

Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, PhD.,
Department of Political Science and Public Administration,
Babcock University,
Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State, Nigeria. 
PMB 4010, Babcock University, Nigeria.
Official Email: yacob-...@babcock.edu.ng

The Editor, Journal of International Politics and Development: ji...@babcock.edu.ng
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Intelligence Plus Character -- that is the goal of True Education - Martin Luther King, Jr.
......
Institutional Website: www.babcock.edu.ng

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