dear chielozona
one of the problems in working through the issues of agency and responsibility, for which Things Fall Apart is the paradigm, is that you return to the question of humanism. i do not wish to open the huge can of worms, but will gesture a little. "whose humanism" are we talking about. i don't mean obierika's, say, vs. the author's--achebe's, though both are "humanists" in the sense you use. but rather how is humanism understood. classically it is an Enlightenment philosophical position, and as we all know that problematizes it since the very englightenment figures who postulated humanism vs religious beliefs were themselves enmeshed in the economic order that practiced slavery, that gave rise to colonialism and the white man's burden, the gift of civilization and all that. obierika, achebe, seem to be operating out of that order when you cite their opposition to child sacrifice.
but what split the community apart wasn't simply obierika's new age humanism vs okonkwo's rigid inability to accommodate change, and embrace of the order of sacrifice, or his masculinism, all of which the humanist achebe critiques, but more important is achebe's desire to humanize "ibo" society by showing its human propensity to embody conflicting values, not to be a frozen essentialized african thing.
that's fine. not particularly challenging for the "modern" reader to accept, and to read as oppositional to old-fashioned colonial or ethnographic views of africa. i'd be more interested in understanding an order that deviates from such simple notions that children sacrifice is a backward practice, that the people who practiced it were simple, fearful villagers incapable of reflecting on their practices.
so, to link this to one thread of your response. the reading of abraham's sacrifice of isaac that sees this as a repudiation of past child-sacrifice practices, and thus as progressive, is larger discounted in contemporary jewish responses that see in abraham's willingness to obey god at all costs a reprehensible concept of faith. the struggle with the biblical text has to include struggle with many non-humanist elements that are incomprehensible to today's reader. the same is true of the practices described in TFA; if we attempt to view them purely along humanist lines, they become anondyne. it is better to hear the heavy trampling of okonkwo's footsteps if we are to allow the novel to have its own special resonance, and not simply kiss okonkwo goodbye.
that means, yes, colonizers were brutes, africans were victimized. also it means, africans were collaborators, or not so naive as to swallow the colonial discourse, but also used it to their advantage. as achebe would say, the colonized were, in fact, people with a multitude of mixed motives and interests. all of which, nevertheless, doesn't negate our obligation to enter into the fray, to follow those asking for accounting for historical crimes. that's what the last lines of the novel ask of the reader--to pass judgment.
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2018 5:02:13 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Logic of Blaming
Moses and Ken, thanks for your measured submission much of which I agree with. Of course, no one is denying that Europeans exploited much of the world, including Africa. I understand that nothing could have prevented the fall of Umuofia, for the white man's gunboat was already trained on it. But it would be a mistake to blame the structural/moral deficiency of that society on the gunboat. It actually fell apart even before the first shot was fired. There's much more to the condition than Obierika was able to understand.
True, Obierika could be seen as representative of African humanism. But what exactly is the content of that humanism? One of his shining moments was when he cautioned Okonkwo not to lay hands on Ikemefuna. This is laudable enough. His humanism fell short of organizing means to save the boy's life. Cowardly humanism? The genius of Jewish literary and humanistic tradition lay is finding a substitute when confronted with similar situations. (See the books of Genesis and Leviticus). Obierika's humanism wasn't enough to lead his community to abolish the Osu/Ohu caste system, or to help stop the killing of twins. In the abstract, Obierika was a great thinker. His thoughts, however, fall short of enhancing the lives of all.
If we take Okonkwo and his family as a synecdoche for the people of Umuofia and admit that his behavior caused a permanent rift in his own family, we come closer to the notion that the people of Umuofia fell apart not only because of the white man's meddling with the system but, indeed, primarily because they failed to hold their community together in the first place. Obierika the thinker and humanist should have been aware of this.
I am interested in how African response to that aspect of modernity has constituted a self-subverting moral attitude. Most African countries that have adopted, and in many instances, perfected the ideology of blame, have failed to create conditions that would enable human flourishing. Thus cynical consciousness is packaged as critical consciousness. We see it flourish in this forum. Very few of us are courageous enough to call out the missteps of their ethnicity. And just as we found fault in the white man, we look for the same in our African neighbors. We indulge in many forms of self-deception because we believe that somebody else, some force is responsible for the dysfunction in our societies.
My concern is that it is more important to get the full picture of why things fell (and keep falling) apart. That brings me to the important issue Moses raises about finding the proper vocabulary for the condition we have found ourselves in. We have become attached to the injury sustained in our encounter with the powerful West perhaps because it is soothing to the soul. This "wounded attachment" (Wendy Brown) has sadly morphed into a rhetorical tool and a form of power to assert oneself in the world. It is, ironically, the power to subvert oneself. Blame game might appear too simple. What about the politics of injury?
The story of Zimbabwe and Mugabe's politics of injury is too obvious to discuss here. Mobutu Sese Seko deployed it in his asinine authenticité. Paul Biya of Cameroon no longer gives a damn about other people's perception of his politics and "aesthetics of vulgarity" (Mbembe). If not for the last minute intervention by the ANC, Jacob Zuma, the champion of politics of injury, would have sold South Africa to the Guptas of India.
What on earth has the culture of blaming the colonizers achieved for our collective consciousness? Has it made me begin to appreciate the African being-in-the-world, as the philosophers among us would love to say? What exactly are my fellow Africans to me?
Seek ye answers to these questions and everything else will be added unto us.
Chielozona
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze
--i agree with moses, there is more than simple victim-oppressor at stake; if not, as he says, agency is lost. the point is important. it also perhaps complicates, but doesn't vitiate, "tough questions" of accountability. the tricky question is how these arguments are mobilized today so as to justify oppressive practices. again, moses pointed to it: many of us remember idi amin presenting himself as the great champion of black resistance to colonial masters.... well, if we are shocked at that gross ideas, it becomes more complicated when we substitute sekou toure for idi amin, and if we seek answers about toure from, say, camera laye, on the one hand, and manthia diawara, on the other--particularly where diawara reminds us about the way toure represented an inspiration to the youth of his generation.
and so on.
emotionally, i love to embrace the ideals of liberation. intellectually, i recognize the deep need for the complex readings on which moses insists--rightly.
last example: les tirailleurs senegalais, or the harkis. all good to render complex the simpler political readings that are all black and white, and never grey
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 9, 2018 2:10:49 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Logic of BlamingI think there is room in the literature and in the historiography for the cathartic embrace of external causation and agency by particular African subaltern groups. Not sure the right name for it is blaming or blame, which is reductive and restrictive. For sure, we need an expansive dictionary for defining and describing how Africans have interpreted or engaged with colonial exploitation, violence, and trauma. In addition to locating the source of colonial injuries and seeking restorative justice, that elastic vocabulary should semiotically account for how external alibis and narratives of victimhood have been mobilized by different African groups for various purposes. Personally, I've been fascinated by how authoritarian and oppressive African rulers have found this narrative of external colonial causation a convenient crutch when tough questions are posed to them about their failures only to adopt the crudest neo-colonial policies and politics possible when their regimes seem secure.
--On Sun, Dec 9, 2018 at 12:16 PM Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:
--This is what I classify as crass unsophisticated neo-colonial apologetics (CUNA).
What is CUNA? It is a rather simplistic explanatory model that plays into the hands of the latter day supporters of colonialism, diverting energies from movements seeking reparations for various atrocities, and current nation building restorative activities. It often tries to simplify anti-colonial discourse, presenting in the process a rather simplistic version of complex ideas.
No serious historian begins with a discourse on "the white man" as such. We deal with the issue of colonial structures and policies of various regimes including French, German, Portuguese, Belgian and British entities. We examine the repercussions of these military, paramilitary regimes and their consequences in terms of civilian casualties etc. psychological impact, economic consequences, land alienation, arrested technology and so on and make an assessment accordingly.The process of decolonization is complex and requires new theoretical tools. Even so we do not need old wine in new bottles. That is why the content and initial premises are so vital in logical architecture.
Instead of spending precious time on "the logic of blaming" it may be more rewarding to focus on the logic of post-colonial reconstruction.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
From: Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Sent: Sunday, December 9, 2018 11:25:28 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Logic of BlamingThis is what I classify as crass, unsophisticated, neo- colonial apologetics.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chielozona Eze <chieloz@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 9, 2018 6:23:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Logic of BlamingObododimma,
You are unto something profound here. Reading you reminds me of Areoye Oyebola, one of the very few African intellectuals to defy the overwhelming tendency in African thinking to always begin every discourse by accusing the West and conclude it by positing what they believe to be authentically African.
Your sharp analysis of African blame-game is similar to what I'm working on now. What you call the logic of blaming, I call the syllogism of a wounded psyche. Blaming others is a typical post-colonial phenomenon. It is borne of Africa's shock of defeat at the hands of the white man. It is a particular form of despair at the overwhelming superiority of Western mastery of reality and Africa's failure to do the same. The African resorts to what my friend Denis Ekpo calls moral posturing. Moral posturing results from accusing others, and it functions in the illusion that once the other has been shown his/her place, then the accuser is, ipso facto, clean/redeemed, absolved of all culpability.
One of the major decisive points in African syllogism of the wounded psyche can be found in Things Fall Apart, in the scene in which Obierika, humiliated by the ignominious death of Okonkwo, turns to accuse the district officer of having driven Okonkwo to kill himself. Another is yet Obierieka's judgment that the white man put a knife on the things that held Umuofia together and they fell apart.
Chinua Achebe, as the literary scholars among us here would attest, helped shape African postcolonial thought. But it is a particular brand of thought that derives its potency from accusation - J'accuse. The syllogism of that brand of postcolonial thought is simple, if not simplistic. First premise: Accuse the white man (God, there's a bunch of evil that can be traced back to him). Second premise: posit the black man's implied innocence as the victim of history (Is he innocent?). Conclusion: posit African "X" or African "Y".
I'm wondering what would have been the color of postcolonial African thought if Obierieka had acknowledged that Umuofia never really stood together and that Okonkwo was also to blame for his death.
Thanks for sharing.
Chielozona
Chielozona Eze
Professor, African Literature and Cultural Studies, Northeastern Illinois University; Extraordinary Professor, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.Fellow - Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africawww.Chielozona.com
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze
--On Sat, Dec 8, 2018 at 4:35 PM Obododimma Oha <obodooha@gmail.com> wrote:
You need a refreshing weekend. You do. Don't mind Obododimma with that
"Our Odelele Choice." Now, you need to know something more about
blaming others, especially when it has been made a family business. I
would like you to have "The Logic of Blaming" this weekend.
To read the full essay on one of my blogs, click on this URL:
https://x-pensiverrors.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-logic-of-blaming.html
Thank you.
Obododimma.
--
--
B.A.,First Class Honours (English & Literary Studies);
M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
Professor of Cultural Semiotics & Stylistics,
Department of English,
University of Ibadan.
COORDINATES:
Phone (Mobile):
+234 8033331330;
+234 9033333555;
+234 8022208008;
+234 8073270008.
Skype: obododimma.oha
Twitter: @mmanwu
Personal Blog: http://udude.wordpress.com/
--
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