Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2018 9:33 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: It's not only the grass that suffers.
hi cornelius
how do we know this is a "fair exchange"? isn't that the bottom line. not that china is not building things, not that it is not involved in trade, but is it at the expense of those in africa with whom they are dealing?
do you have a good basis for answering that key question? i do not. but everyone would love to know.
so, without knowing, i'd have to guess that china's play for africa's resources is being calculated at terms that benefit china, and not necessarily africa.
that is very broad, and not researched or known by me, just a guess. i guess it because china plays by the rules of neoliberalism and globalization, and if there is one case i do know about, and hate, it is the despoiling of the seas by china, along with european trawlers, destroying the fishing industries in west africa, and apparently now, off the coast of somalia and elsewhere in east africa.
if that is the model, it is devastating.
is it the broad model? i don't know.
kwabena's examples in ghana do not bode well. as for the tanzan rr, well, it is history, but maybe that isn't china's fault.
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2018 7:57:23 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: It's not only the grass that suffers.
Admittedly, it's a vast subject. I don't want to disturb the continuity of the peace and tranquillity of that thread , that's why I'm posting my aside here.
Just like Pinocchio's nose, as some of the doubtful and controversial contents in this thread gets longer, it should not be inappropriate or diversionary to present some of these adjacent matters for some consideration.
Africa-China relations go back a long ways. It was while on an important mission in China that Pan-Africanism's visionary Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown by a military coup d'etat on February 24, 1966 . There's still a lot of speculation and many details about who was behind that coup...
# Who remembers and who is grateful : Cuba helped Angola
Pay back time, where is it?
Today , it beggars belief that with their people's destiny in their own hands in post-colonial Africa there's the China-bashing by none less than some of Africa's intelligentsia many of whom are from what Trump has referred to as " Shit-hole countries" albeit now comfortably or not so comfortably ensconced in Trump-land and understandably singing the melodies that Trump would like to hear, the melodies of "His Master's Voice" which is stridently anti-Mr. Trump's rival - anti-China- so some of them prefer to turn a blind eye to all the wonders and good works being performed by China all over the African continent , China busy securing Africa's infrastructure development – certainly not as works of charity or pure altruism but essentially in exchange for some of Africa's much needed raw materials. Who should be blamed for that?
We could take a look at Luanda, the capital of Angola , a modern city built by China in exchange for raw commodities, in this case oil. This scenario is being duplicated in country after country on the African continent, simultaneously supporting the incontestable thesis that " fair exchange is no robbery"
The blame game continues – not mere social psychology but political ( and economic) psychology, as if some of the intelligentsia or the leaders to whom they hand out their precious advice are in the grip of some kind of irreversible national paralysis or national psychosis varying in intensity from country to country, fully aware of the lessons to be learned from the whole pre and immediate post- colonial vistas of history. It's not as if they don't know the answer to the question posed to the leadership of these countries : Who's in charge?
The intelligentsia are liable to answer that they are in the grip of certain market forces , even when the symptoms testify to something far more vicious than any diagnosis of blind forces to which they submit as if they have no free will or lack a sense of, not conspicuous consumption but sacrifice and the often most necessary austerity. Which would-be Nigerian president would dare to talk about that dreaded word, "austerity" ?
And yet that's how China made it – laid some foundations by many years of mono and from there leaped to stereo...
One of the still unanswered question is what is Uncle Sam's AFRICOM program really all about ?
On Wednesday, 12 December 2018 22:51:40 UTC+1, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
It's not only the grass that suffers.
Re - Our moderator's cautionary note on the "Culture of abusive posting".
Although they love to boast about "African culture", through no fault of their own some of the urchins have no respect for their elders, simply because they never had any good old home training. "The rich seduce the poor and the old are seduced by the young." That's why the culture of insults (with impunity) is spreading so rapidly, mostly from the East of Nigeria to the West and from the South to the North, as can be observed in cyberspace. Only those who espouse consecrative values among us and who are brave enough to insist and to teach by example can dam the tide of invective being let loose. The national dialogue, the hysterical news and opinion headlines keep on screaming endlessly, loaded with every manner of foul invective – the main exceptions being President Buhari and his vice-president.
It's surely a sign of the times - a sign of frustration and a confirmation that we are definitely living in the end times. In the United States, they have their First Citizen Donald. J. Trump, supposedly "the leader of the free world" as the role model, trend-setter and ardent twitterer. Here he is describing Rex Tillerson, his former Secretary of State :
"Rex Tillerson, didn't have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn't get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell. "
One good turn deserves another. Citizen Trump was probably only getting even with Citizen Tillerson who is reported to have earlier on described his boss Trump as a "moron."
Not so long ago I though that such superlatives were exclusively the forte of one Dr. Kperogi , the arsenal into which he would dip every time he felt the need to verbally execute whatever political enemy had the misfortune to have offended or outraged any of his senses. Now we see that he is in good company; he is not alone.
Kierkegaard's parable of the clown illustrates this one instance in which even the clown - that oft misused term can be a saviour if properly understood as someone who is not an entertainer 24 hours a day.
"We play but we aren't not always dumb "
When the heavyweights among the literati contend in that thread " The Logic of blaming" we the little people and co-sufferers who stand aside and look , have much to learn. Some say that just as when the elephants fight so too when the heavyweight literati contend, it's the grass that suffers. But not only the grass.
'twas the Rev Bob Marley who asked the question, that I ask myself from time to time,
"How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look ?"
The religion-oriented Africanists who abide strictly by their own archaic definitions of prophets and prophecy as per the divinity schools of Abraham, Moses and Muhammad, will perhaps grudgingly admit the likes of the other Abraham, Marx, Edward Wilmot Blyden , Marcus Garvey, I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, Walter Rodney and such schools of thought into their ranks.
These points found their way home:
Professor Kenneth Harrow: "the reading of abraham's sacrifice of isaac that sees this as a repudiation of past child-sacrifice practices" And if indeed such ethics is universal then perhaps not only the repudiation of past child-sacrifice practices, but also of all vestiges of human sacrifice and for all future time, religiously providing the criteria by which we condemn the same child-sacrifice through mass starvation of children in e.g., Yemen - on the altar of winning a war, and the many instances we find of child-sacrifice through the scourge that has consumed much of Africa's future, namely the advent of child soldiers
Re- The discussion about Black man - without apology - defending himself, blaming coloniser and colonisation, the slave-trade, racism etc. In much of the post-colonial discourse there is also the very assertive Negritude Movement - philosophic and cultural self-assertion which the tigers of tigritude in the anglophone spheres should please acknowledge and not discard, even if French is its primary vehicle of its literary expression
Good song : Dylan: When the deal Goes Down
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Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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